Target of Influence

A recent post described how in 2019, The New York Times reporter Andrew Jacobs exposed some of the doings of the International Life Sciences Institute, otherwise known as ILSI. During that year, the director-general of the World Health Organization was Dr. Margaret Chan, and ILSI founder Alex Malaspina aimed to discover how to influence her thinking, and bend it away from any impulse to critique his organization.

“This threat to our business is serious,” he said, which puzzled some listeners because ILSI was allegedly a legitimate nonprofit organization whose only mission was to help. Jacobs wrote,

In addition to its far-flung offices, ILSI runs a research foundation and an institute focused on health and environmental issues that is largely funded by the chemical industry. It also publishes the academic journal Nutrition Reviews and organizes scores of scientific conferences around the world.

But more was going on than met the eye. Monsanto and other less-than-ethical companies donated boatloads of money to ILSI, whose whole funding system looked kind of shady. In countries where it established a presence, its behavior was neither straightforward nor impartial. In India, for instance, it infiltrated government bodies that were supposed to prevent too many additives in processed foods. The processed food industry was rumored to be more powerful than even the tobacco industry, and that is a pretty serious indictment.

Meanwhile, with all kinds of shady maneuvers going on, India saw alarming increases in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. In 2012, reacting to a Public Interest Litigation suit that had been filed by concerned citizens, the Delhi High Court directed that guidelines be drawn up to ensure that school children had access to wholesome, nutritious, safe, and hygienic foods.

Action taken

A rule was made for the whole country that edible items high in fat, salt, and sugar could not be sold within 50 meters of any school. Other guidelines were established, and officials charged with carrying out the new orders were pleased to find that some schools had already acted on their own to keep a stricter eye on what the students were being fed.

By 2015, almost one-third of the country’s teenagers were in the obese category. Still, rural areas were less affected than the cities — which strongly hinted that readily available highly processed foods laced with additives probably had something to do with the disparity. It was estimated that the urban areas alone held more than 15 million obese children, helping to make India the third most obese country on the planet.

In the same year, officials added up the operations performed to excise fat, and the news said,

The number of bariatric surgeries performed in the country has increased almost ten times over the last decade, with over 10,000 such surgeries performed in the previous year.

Medical conference attendees emphasized the importance of teaching parents that a chubby child is not necessarily a healthy one. The worst culprits were seen to be “shortcut” meals and, you guessed it, highly processed foods. Around the same time a study confirmed that India’s affluent class was plagued by obesity, but the same societal and environmental factors impacted folks of all kinds, which implied that unless corrective action was taken, future conditions would be “serious.” Some authorities claimed that other authorities underestimated the childhood obesity rate, and that the upper classes were still in worse shape than was previously admitted.

One philosophy held that obesity was caused by the environment, rather than by socio-economic conditions; although it could be argued that the environment itself is a socio-economic condition, and vice versa. Not surprisingly, obesity also correlated with a lack of playgrounds. The fact that schools where unhealthful snacks were served had more obese students was an observable reality.

The epigenetic theory was popular, suggesting that the ability to retain fat is a useful survival trait bestowed by the “thrifty phenotype” widely shared by natives of the subcontinent. In 2016, when India’s first obesity clinic for adolescents opened, the situation was dire:

[A] a recent survey in Pune and Mumbai found that 18 per cent of the school-going children suffer from obesity, 32 per cent are over-weight and 52 per cent of the students are potential diabetics.

In 2017, the government slapped sugar-sweetened soda with a 40% tax.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “A Shadowy Industry Group Shapes Food Policy Around the World,” NYTimes.com, 09/16/19
Source: “Obesity among Indian teens swells,” IndiaTimes.com, 07/04/14
Source: “India sees 10 time increase in bariatric surgeries in last decade: OSSI,” IndiaTimes.com/ 07/17/15
Source: “India’s quiet tide of childhood obesity,” Scroll.in, 05/07/16
Source: “First obesity clinic for adolescents in India opens in Mumbai,” TheHealthSite.com, 10/09/16
Image by Waldemar_RU/Pixabay

Eggs on our Minds

To mention that eggs have been in the news lately would be a laughable understatement. For approximately the past three months they have been on everybody’s mind, and even that is far from being the whole picture. For EatThis.com, Sarah Garone and Olivia Tarantino wrote:

If there’s any food fraught with a tug-of-war over its healthfulness, it’s eggs. Over the years, eggs have been viewed as everything from an example of the perfect whole food to a dreaded harbinger of heart disease.

Too many eggs can bring on an undesirable effect: too much cholesterol. The authors note that nutritional guidelines no longer mention a specific cholesterol limit, but recommend that consumption of it be “as low as possible.” On the other hand, a spectacularly large study (half a million adult Chinese subjects) revealed that “up to one egg per day actually decreased the chances of developing cardiovascular disease.”

But with more, the benefits drop off precipitously. The people of China are known for their per-capita egg consumption, and collectively they account for around 400 billion eggs per year.

A recent article from ScienceDirect.com delved into the effect on obesity of the various nutrients found in eggs. Some of them actually play a role in regulating lipid metabolism in ways that prevent obesity. Apparently, it is not even certain that the consumption of egg cholesterol increases human blood cholesterol. When it comes to diabetes risk, the jury is still out.

As for weight gain, eggs seem to suffer from a certain amount of guilt by association. People like to eat them with bacon, sausage, hash-brown potatoes, and other unwise choices. Some helpful suggestions in this area include studying up on heart-healthy cooking fats, and combining eggs with vegetables.

What is going on, anyway?

A review published at around the same time in the journal Poultry Science looked at a meta-study that had reviewed two decades of nutritional literature and found that most of the nutrients in eggs are not obesogenic but surprisingly appear to “reduce the probability of obesity via lipid metabolism regulation.”

However, there seems to be an exception among “high responders,” or individuals who are particularly prone to significant changes in their cholesterol levels because they metabolize it either more or less effectively. The body of course needs the stuff, but normally our own livers produce enough of it. There seems to be a feeling that more research in this area would be welcome.

Leaving that aside, “[E]ggs are one of the healthiest sources of protein, essential amino acids, and micronutrients beneficial to human health.” Not surprisingly, the cooking method makes a noticeable difference, with soft-boiled eggs being the safest bet.

In “9 Steps to Perfect Health,” Chris Kesser has noted that nutrients in animal products like fish, meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs are highly bioavailable, meaning that we can absorb them easily. Pasture-raised animals are known for their nutrient-dense meat, while pasture-raised hens make eggs that contain as much as 10 times more omega-3 than factory hen eggs, as well as being noticeably higher in B12, folate, vitamin A, protein, and fat-soluble antioxidants like vitamin E.

Can we agree to disagree?

The consensus seems to be that eggs are great for just about everyone, except people troubled by diabetes or cardiovascular disease. But even for folks who do not have to deal with those conditions, there is still such a thing as too many. Agreement seems to have settled on the notion that an average of one egg per day is reasonable, although they can be distributed throughout the week as multiple eggs on some days, and none on others.

Some authorities are even okay with healthy folks eating 10 eggs per week, although cholesterol-sensitive individuals need to tone it down. For those who forego the yolks, two egg whites count as the equivalent of one whole egg.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “ 5 Dangerous Side Effects of Eating Too Many Eggs, According to Science,” EatThis.com, 09/01/24
Source: “Association between egg consumption and risk of obesity: A comprehensive review: Egg Consumption and Obesity,” ScienceDirect.com, February 2025
Source: “Eggs are back on the menu: Study finds no link to obesity with moderate intake,” News-Medical.net, 12/19/24
Source: “9 Steps to Perfect Health,” Chris Kresser, undated
Image by stevepb/Pixabay

The 7th of the 9 Truths

This is Truth #7 in a series that encompasses all nine of them, as proposed several years ago by the Academy for Eating Disorders. By this point, a reader might begin to suspect that not much more is known today, than was back when “Nine Truths about Eating Disorders” first appeared.

Many of the conclusions demonstrate unchanging precepts — like the fact that two things can be true at the same time. In the words of #7’s subtitle, both genes and environment “play important roles in the development of eating disorders.”

Anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder all run in families. Which exact genes are responsible, is still a mystery. One current source says, “There is a known phenotypic link between AN, growth, and sexual maturation, yet the genetic overlap between these phenotypes remains enigmatic.” So, there we have it.

On the other hand, generalizations apply, and there is one thing we do know. Science did not need to wait for the telescope or the microscope to discover that eating disorders run in families, or to notice that the cultural environment has a lot to do with how individuals (and nations) feel about human bodies and food customs. Still, psychological pressure does not seem to cause as much distress as it would, if not affected by other factors.

Can we ever know anything?

It is interesting that most people who, according to the signs, “should” develop eating disorders, do not. To discover the reasons behind this and so many other mysteries, the authors warned, would require scientists to inspect “very large sample sizes (in the tens of thousands).” But of course, volume is only one facet of discovery. Life, as always, is multifactorial. As the 2017 authors phrased it,

Eating disorders are “complex traits,” meaning that multiple genetic and environmental factors — each of small to moderate effect — act together to increase risk. Genetic and environmental factors may not only act in an additive manner, but may co-act in other ways.

Additionally, little as was known about AN at the time, even less was known about BN and BED. Moving on to Truth #8, we will not even go into why eating disorders do not follow Mendelian transmission patterns. And besides, in many cases, a family with an afflicted child will be at a loss to identify any relative who suffered from one of the conditions. Of course, war, adoption, and other socially unstabilizing vicissitudes can break connections which might have aided logical causation assumptions.

Too much togetherness presents another research problem, called confounding. In a family, there are a lot of shared genes and a lot of shared environmental factors, and how are scientific observers supposed to separate the effects of each influence? For this and many related reasons, “Rigorous studies of gene-environment interaction in eating disorders are sparse.” But basically, Truth #8 goes like this: “Genes alone do not predict who will develop eating disorders”:

[H]undreds (or perhaps thousands) of genes act in concert and are influenced by environmental factors. An individual’s risk is a composite of the cumulative number of genetic and environmental risk and protective factors to which they are exposed.

And then, there is the whole field of epigenetics, with DNA methylation, and the modification of things we never imagined could be modified, and the need to differentiate between epigenetic changes seen in the blood and what might happen in the brain; and how to figure out prevention, which is so much preferable to spending years and billions on cures.

One more, for the road

Truth #9 is short and sweet: “Full recovery from an eating disorder is possible. Early detection and intervention are important.” The authors define physical recovery as “the resumption and maintenance of a healthy body weight and a normalization of all physical parameters affected by the eating disorder”:

[B]ehavioral recovery means the absence of eating-disorder related behaviors such as food restriction, binge eating, and purging. Psychological recovery, including the attainment of normal attitudes toward food and the body, is important yet often overlooked.

Then, it gets complicated again due, for starters, to a “lack of consensus on the exact definition”:

It has been proposed that full recovery is achieved only when patients are indistinguishable from healthy controls on all eating disorder related measures, including psychological aspects.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Science Behind the Academy for Eating Disorders’ Nine Truths About Eating Disorders,” NIH.gov, October 2017
Source: “An evolutionary perspective on the genetics of anorexia nervosa,” Nature.com, 02/19/25
Image by Prawny/Pixabay