Tag Archives: cancer

Every food causes cancer, and cures it, research shows.

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Statistical analysis, misused, allows you to prove many things that are not true. This was long a feature of advertising: with our toothpaste you get 38% fewer cavities, etc. In the past such ‘studies’ were not published in respectable journals, and research supported by on such was not funded. Now it is published and it is funded, and no one much cares. For an academic, this is the only game in town. One result, well known, is the “crisis of replicability”– very few studies in medicine, psychology, or environment are replicable (see here for more).

In this post, I look at food health claims– studies that find foods cause cancer, or cure it. The analysis I present comes from two researchers, Schoenfeld and Ioannides, (read the original article here) who looked at the twenty most common ingredients in “The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book”. For each food, they used Pub-Med to look up the ten most recent medical articles that included the phrase, “risk factors”, the word “cancer”, and the name of the food in the title or abstract. For studies finding effect in the range of 10x risk factors to 1/10 risk factors, the results are plotted below for each of the 20 foods. Some studies showed factors beyond the end of the chart, but the chart gives a sense. It seems that most every food causes or cures cancer, often to a fairly extreme extent.

Effect estimates by ingredient. From Schoenfeld and Ioannides. Is everything we eat associated with cancer? Am J. Clin. Nutrition 97 (2013) 127-34. (I was alerted to this by Dr. Jeremy Brown, here)

A risk factor of 2 indicates that you double your chance of getting cancer if you eat this food. Buy contrast, as risk factor of 0.5 suggests that you halve your cancer risk. Some foods, like onion seem to reduce your chance of cancer to 1/10, though another study say 1/100th. This food is essentially a cancer cure, assuming you believe the study (I do not).

Only 19% of the studies found no statistically significant cancer effect of the particular food. The other 81% found that the food was significantly cancer-causing, or cancer preventing, generally of p=0.05 to 0.05. Between the many studies done, most foods did both. Some of these were meta studies (studies that combine other studies). These studies found slightly smaller average risk factors, but claimed more statistical significance in saying that the food caused or cured cancer.

0.1 0.2. 0.5 1. 2 5 10
Relative risk

The most common type of cancer caused is Gastrointestinal. The most common cancer cured is breast. Other cancers feature prominently, though: head, neck, genetilia-urinary, lung. The more cancers a researcher considers the higher the chance of showing significant effects from eating the food. If you look at ten cancers, each at the standard of one-tailed significance, you have a high chance of finding that one of these is cured or caused to the standard of p=0.05.

In each case the comparison was between a high-dose cohort and a low-dose cohort, but there was no consistency in determining the cut-offs for the cohort. Sometimes it was the top and bottom quartile, in others the quintile, in yet others the top 1/3 vs the bottom 1/3. Dose might be times eaten per week, or grams of food total. Having this flexibility increases a researcher’s chance of finding something. All of this is illegitimate, IMHO. I like to see a complete dose-response curve that shows an R2 factor pf 90+% or so. To be believable, you need to combine this R2 with a low p value, and demonstrate the same behaviors in men and woman. I showed this when looking at the curative properties of coffee. None of the food studies above did this.

From Yang, Youyou and Uzzi, 2020. Studies that failed replication are cited as often as those that passed replication. Folks don’t care.

Of course, better statistics will not protect you from outright lying, as with the decades long, faked work on the cause of Alzheimers. But the most remarkable part is how few people seem to care.

People want to see their favorite food or molecule as a poison or cure and will cite anything that says so. Irreplicable studies are cited at the same rate as replicated studies, as shown in this 2020 study by Yang Yang, Wu Youyou, and Brian Uzzi. We don’t stop prescribing bad heart medicines, or praising irreplaceable studies on foods. Does pomegranate juice really help? red wine? there was a study, but I doubt it replicated. We’ve repeatedly shown that aspirin helps your heart, but it isn’t prescribed much. Generally, we prefer more expensive blood thinners that may not help. Concerning the pandemic. It seems our lockdowns made things worse. We knew this two years ago, but kept doing it.

As Schoenfeld and Ioannides state: “Thousands of nutritional epidemiology studies are conducted and published annually in the quest to identify dietary factors that affect major health outcomes, including cancer risk. These studies influence dietary guidelines and at times public health policy… [However] Randomized trials have repeatedly failed to find treatment effects for nutrients in which observational studies had previously proposed strong associations.” My translation: take all these food studies with a grain of salt.

Robert Buxbaum, April 4, 2023

Social science is irreproducible, drug tests nonreplicable, and stoves studies ignore confounders.

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Efforts to replicate the results of the most prominent studies in health and social science have found them largely irreproducible with the worst replicability appearing in cancer drug research. The figure below, from “The Reproducibility Project in Cancer Biology, Errington et al. 2021, compares the reported effects in 50 cancer drug experiments from 23 papers with the results from repeated versions of the same experiments, looking at a total of 158 effects.

Graph comparing the original, published effect of a cancer drug with the replication effect. The units are whatever units were used in the original study, percent, or risk ratio, etc. From “Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology,”
Timothy M Errington et al. Center for Open Science, United States; Stanford University, Dec 7, 2021, https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601.

It’s seen that virtually none of the drugs are found to work the same as originally reported. Those below the dotted, horizontal line behaved the opposite in the replication studies. About half, those shown in pink, showed no significant effect. Of those that showed positive behavior as originally published, mostly they show about half the activity with two drugs that now appear to be far more active. A favorite web-site of mine, retraction watch, is filled with retractions of articles on these drugs.

The general lack of replicability has been called a crisis. It was first seen in the social sciences, e.g. the figure below from this article in Science, 2015. Psychology research is bad enough such that Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, came to disown most of the conclusions in his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow“. The experiments that underly his major sections don’t replicate. Take, for example, social printing. Classic studies had claimed that, if you take a group of students and have them fill out surveys with words about the aged or the flag, they will then walk slower from the survey room or stand longer near a flag. All efforts to reproduce these studies have failed. We now think they are not true. The problem here is that much of education and social engineering is based on such studies. Public policy too. The lack of replicability throws doubt on much of what modern society thinks and does. We like to have experts we can trust; we now have experts we can’t.

From “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science” Science, 2015. Social science replication is better than dance drug replication, about 35% of the classic social science studies replicate to some, reasonable extent.

Are gas stoves dangerous? This 2022 environmental study said they are, claiming with 95% confidence that they are responsible for 12.7% of childhood asthma. I doubt the study will be reproducible for reasons I’ll detail below, but for now it’s science, and it may soon be law.

Part of the replication problem is that researchers have been found to lie. They fudge data or eliminate undesirable results, some more some less, and a few are honest, but the journals don’t bother checking. Some researchers convince themselves that they are doing the world a favor, but many seem money-motivated. A foundational study on Alzheimers was faked outright. The authors doctored photos using photoshop, and used the fake results to justify approval of non-working, expensive drugs. The researchers got $1B in NIH funding too. I’d want to see the researchers jailed, long term: it’s grand larceny and a serious violation of trust.

Another cause of this replication crisis — one that particularly hurt Daniel Kahneman’s book — is that many social science researchers do statistically illegitimate studies on populations that are vastly too small to give reliable results. Then, they only publish the results they like. The graph of z-values shown below suggest this is common, at least in some journals, including “Personality and social psychology Bulletin”. The vast fraction of results at ≥95% confidence suggest that researchers don’t publish the 90-95% of their work that doesn’t fit the desired hypothesis. While there has been no detailed analysis of all the social science research, it’s clear that this method was used to show that GMO grains caused cancer. The researcher did many small studies, and only published the one study where GMOs appeared to cause cancer. I review the GMO study here.

From Ulrich Schimmack, ReplicationIndex.com, January, 2023, https://replicationindex.com/2023/01/08/which-social-psychologists-can-you-trust/. If you really want to get into this he is a great resource.

The chart at left shows Z-scores, were Z = ∆X √n/σ. A Z score above 1.93 generally indicates significance, p < .05. Notice that almost all the studies have Z scores just over 1.93 that is almost all the studies proved their hypothesis at 95% confidence. That makes it seem that the researchers were very lucky, near prescient. But it’s clear from the distribution that there were a lot of studies that done but never shown to the public. That is a lot of data that was thrown out, either by the researchers or by the publishers. If all data was published, you’d expect to see a bell curve. Instead the Z values are of a tiny bit of a bell curve, just the tail end. The implication is that these studies with Z= >1.93 suggest far less than 95% confidence. This then shows up in the results being only 25% reproducible. It’s been suggested that you should not throw out all the results in the journal, just look for Z-scores of 3.6 or more. That leaves you with the top 23%, and these should have a good chance of being reproducible. The top graph somewhat supports this, but it’s not that simple.

Another classic way to cook the books, as it were, and make irreproducible studies provide the results you seek is to ignore “confounders.” This leads to association – causation errors. As an example, it’s observed that people taking aspirin have more heart attacks than those who do not, but the confounder is that aspirin is prescribed to those with heart problems; the aspirin actually helps, but appears to hurt. In the case of stoves, it seems likely that poorer, sicker people own gas, and that they live in older, moldy homes, and cook more at home, frying onions, etc. These are confounders that the study to my reading ignores. They could easily be the reason that gas stove owners get more asthma toxins than the rich folks who own electric, induction stoves. If you confuse association, you seem to find that owning the wrong stove causes you to be poor and sick with a moldy home. I suspect that the stove study will not replicate if they correct for the confounders.

I’d like to recommend a book, hardly mathematical, “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff ($8.99 on Amazon). I read it in high school. It gives you a sense of what to look out for. I should also mention Dr. Anthony Fauci. He has been going around to campuses saying we should have zero tolerance for those who deny science, particularly health science. Given that so much of health science research is nonreplicable, I’d recommend questioning all of it. Here is a classic clip from the 1973 movie, ‘Sleeper’, where a health food expert wakes up in 2173 to discover that health science has changed.

Robert Buxbaum , February 7, 2023.

Virus and cancer treatment by your immune system

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There are two standard treatments for a disease. One is through a chemical, pill or shot, often using a patented antibiotic or antiviral molecule, sometimes a radioactive chemical or anti-inflammatory. There have been quite a lot of success with these molecules especially against bacterial disease. E.g. penicillin, a molecule found in cheese, was quite effective against infection, syphilis, and even the viral disease, rabies. Still, in surprisingly many cases, a molecule that you’d expect should cure a disease does not. For this reason, recent research has looked into the other approach to a cure — use your own immune system.

In the most basic version of this approach, that of Paracelcius, is to give the patient nothing beyond sunshine, a clean dressing, and good food. In surprisingly many cases, this is enough to allow the patient’s own immune system will fight the disease successfully. Currently, this seems like our best option to fight COVID-19, the new Wuhan coronavirus.; antivirals seem to have no particular effect on COVID-19, as with rabies, but patients do get better on their own with time, and there is some indication that sunlight helps too, at least in fighting the disease spread, and perhaps in effecting a cure.

Your immune system is remarkably flexible. When it is up to the task, as in the video below white blood cells multiply enormously around the invader and attack. The white cells do not harm your body cells nor those of friendly bacteria, but rally to kill nearly any invader, even one the cells have never seen before. There is a minimum of side effects (fever, tiredness) but these go away after the invader is gone. The immune system then keeps the memory of the invader alive via “Memory T cells” so that it can attack more quickly if the same invader is seen again. This is what we call immunity, and it’s a type of protection that you generally don’t get from pills.

View post on imgur.com

Unfortunately, not every disease is fought well by the immune system alone. Measles, for example, or smallpox. For several of these diseases we’ve found we can activate the patient’s immune system with a vaccination, even after the patient contacts the disease. An injection of a weaker form of the disease seems to help kick-start the patients own immune system. Vaccination tends to have bad side-effects, but for many diseases, e.g. measles, the bad is outweighed by the good. Interestingly we’ve begun to use this approach on some cancers, too, and it seems to work. Immune therapy, it’s called.

Immune therapy is not generally the first line approach to cancer, but it might be the best for slow cancers, like prostate. Generally, in the fight against cancer, the preferred method is to removes as much of cancer cells as possible, and treat any missed cells using a mix of radiation and chemicals. This works but there are a lot of side-effects. Immune therapy is sort of similar, in a way. Instead of irradiating the bad cells inside the body, one takes the cancer cells outside of the body (or the virus molecules) and uses radiation and chemicals to knock off bits. These bits, a weakened form of the cancer or of the virus, are then cultured and re-injected into the body. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. For melanoma, skin cancer, immune therapy is found to works about 1/4 of the time. Why not more? It seems that sometimes the immune system gets “exhausted” fighting a foe that’s to much for it. And sometimes the activated immune system starts attacking the host body. This is an auto-immune response.

Dr. Robert E. Buxbaum, February 21, 2020

Vitamin A and E, killer supplements; B, C, and D are meh.

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It’s often assumed that vitamins and minerals are good for you, so good for you that people buy all sorts of supplements providing more than the normal does in hopes of curing disease. Extra doses are a mistake unless you really have a mis-balanced diet. I know of no material that is good in small does that is not toxic in large doses. This has been shown to be so for water, exercise, weight loss, and it’s true for vitamins, too. That’s why there is an RDA (a Recommended Daily Allowance). 

Lets begin with Vitamin A. That’s beta carotene and its relatives, a vitamin found in green and orange fruits and vegetables. In small doses it’s good. It prevents night blindness, and is an anti-oxidant. It was hoped that Vitamin A would turn out to cure cancer too. It didn’t. In fact, it seems to make cancer worse. A study was preformed with 1029 men and women chosen random from a pool that was considered high risk for cancer: smokers, former smokers, and people exposed to asbestos. They were given either15 mg of beta carotene and 25,000 IU of vitamin A (5 times the RDA) or a placebo. Those taking the placebo did better than those taking the vitamin A. The results were presented in the New England Journal of Medicine, read it here, with some key findings summarized in the graph below.

Comparison of cumulative mortality and cardiovascular disease between those receiving Vitamin A (5 times RDA) and those receiving a placebo. From Omenn et. al, Clearly, this much vitamin A does more harm than good.

The main causes of death were, as typical, cardiovascular disease and cancer. As the graph shows, the rates of death were higher among people getting the Vitamin A than among those getting nothing, the placebo. Why that is so is not totally clear, but I have a theory that I presented in a paper at Michigan state. The theory is that your body uses oxidation to fight cancer. The theory might be right, or wrong, but what is always noticed is that too much of a good thing is never a good thing. The excess deaths from vitamin A were so significant that the study had to be cancelled after 5 1/2 years. There was no responsible way to continue. 

Vitamin E is another popular vitamin, an anti-oxidant, proposed to cure cancer. As with the vitamin A study, a large number of people who were at high risk  were selected and given either a large dose  of vitamin or a placebo. In this case, 35,000 men over 50 years old were given either vitamin E (400 to 660 IU, about 20 times the RDA) and/or selenium or a placebo. Selenium was added to the test because, while it isn’t an antioxidant, it is associated with elevated levels of an anti-oxidant enzyme. The hope was that these supplements would prevent cancer and perhaps ward off Alzheimer’s too. The full results are presented here, and the key data is summarized in the figure below. As with vitamin A, it turns out that high doses of vitamin E did more harm than good. It dramatically increased the rate of cancer and promoted some other problems too, including diabetes.  This study had to be cut short, to only 7 years, because  of the health damage observed. The long term effects were tracked for another two years; the negative effects are seen to level out, but there is still significant excess mortality among the vitamin takers. 

Cumulative incidence of prostate cancer with supplements of selenium and/or vitamin E compared to placebo.

Cumulative incidence of prostate cancer with supplements of selenium and/or vitamin E compared to placebo.

Selenium did not show any harmful or particularly beneficial effects in these tests, by the way, and it may have reduced the deadliness of the Vitamin A.. 

My theory, that the body fights cancer and other disease by oxidation, by rusting it away, would explain why too much antioxidant will kill you. It laves you defenseless against disease As for why selenium didn’t cause excess deaths, perhaps there are other mechanisms in play when the body sees excess selenium when already pumped with other anti oxidant. We studied antioxidant health foods (on rats) at Michigan State and found the same negative effects. The above studies are among the few done with humans. Meanwhile, as I’ve noted, small doses of radiation seem to do some good, as do small doses of chocolate, alcohol, and caffeine. The key words here are “small doses.” Alcoholics do die young. Exercise helps too, but only in moderation, and since bicycle helmets discourage bicycling, the net result of bicycle helmet laws may be to decrease life-span. 

What about vitamins B, C, and D? In normal doses, they’re OK, but as with vitamin A and E you start to see medical problems as soon as you start taking more– about  12 times the RDA. Large does of vitamin B are sometimes recommended by ‘health experts’ for headaches and sleeplessness. Instead they are known to produce skin problems, headaches and memory problems; fatigue, numbness, bowel problems, sensitivity to light, and in yet-larger doses, twitching nerves. That’s not as bad as cancer, but it’s enough that you might want to take something else for headaches and sleeplessness. Large does of Vitamin C and D are not known to provide any health benefits, but result in depression, stomach problems, bowel problems, frequent urination, and kidney stones. Vitamin C degrades to uric acid and oxalic acid, key components of kidney stones. Vitamin D produces kidney stones too, in this case by increasing calcium uptake and excretion. A recent report on vitamin D from the Mayo clinic is titled: Vitamin D, not as toxic as first thought. (see it here). The danger level is 12 times of the RDA, but many pills contain that much, or more. And some put the mega does in a form, like gummy vitamins” that is just asking to be abused by a child. The pills positively scream, “Take too many of me and be super healthy.”

It strikes me that the stomach, bowel, and skin problems that result from excess vitamins are just the problems that supplement sellers claim to cure: headaches, tiredness, problems of the nerves, stomach, and skin.  I’d suggest not taking vitamins in excess of the RDA — especially if you have skin, stomach or nerve problems. For stomach problems; try some peniiiain cheese. If you have a headache, try an aspirin or an advil. 

In case you should want to know what I do for myself, every other day or so, I take 1/2 of a multivitamin, a “One-A-Day Men’s Health Formula.” This 1/2 pill provides 35% of the RDA of Vitamin A, 37% of the RDA of Vitamin E, and 78% of the RDA of selenium, etc. I figure these are good amounts and that I’ll get the rest of my vitamins and minerals from food. I don’t take any other herbs, oils, or spices, either, but do take a baby aspirin daily for my heart. 

Robert Buxbaum, May 23, 2019. I was responsible for the statistics on several health studies while at MichiganState University (the test subjects were rats), and I did work on nerves, and on hydrogen in metals, and nuclear stuff.  I’ve written about statistics too, like here, talking about abnormal distributions. They’re common in health studies. If you don’t do this analysis, it will mess up the validity of your ANOVA tests. That said,  here’s how you do an anova test. 

Penicillin, cheese allergy, and stomach cancer

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penecillin molecule

The penicillin molecule is a product of the penicillin mold

Many people believe they are allergic to penicillin — it’s the most common perceived drug allergy — but several studies have shown that most folks who think they are allergic are not. Perhaps they once were, but when people who thought they were allergic were tested, virtually none showed allergic reaction. In a test of 146, presumably allergic patients at McMaster University, only two had their penicillin allergy confirmed; 98.6% of the patients tested negative. A similar study at the Mayo Clinic tested 384 pre-surgical patients with a history of penicillin allergy; 94% tested negative. They were given clearance to receive penicillin antibiotics before, during, and after surgery. Read a summary here.

08

Orange showing three different strains of the penicillin mold; some of these are toxic.

This is very good news. Penicillin is a low-cost, low side-effect antibiotic, effective against many diseases including salmonella, botulism, gonorrhea, and scarlet fever. The penicillin molecule is a common product of nature, produced by a variety of molds, e.g. on the orange at right, and in cheese. It is thus something people have been exposed to, whether they realize it or not.

Penicillin allergy is a deadly danger for the few who really are allergic, and it’s worthwhile to find out if that means you. The good news: that penicillin is found in common cheeses suggests, to me, a simple test for penicillin allergy. Anyone who suspects penicillin allergy and does not have a general dairy allergy can try eating appropriate cheese: brie, blue, camembert, or Stilton. That is any of the cheeses made with penicillin molds. If you don’t break out in a rash or suffer stomach cramps, you’re very likely not allergic to penicillin.

There is some difference between cheeses, so if you have problems with Roquefort, but not brie or camembert, there’s still a good chance you’re not allergic to penicillin. Brie and camembert have a white fuzzy mold coat of Penicillium camemberti. This mold exudes penicillin — not in enough quantity to cure gonorrhea, but enough to give taste and avoid spoilage, and enough to test for allergy. Danish blue and Roquefort, shown below, have a different look and a sharper flavor . They’re made with blue-green, Penicillium roqueforti. This mold produces penicillin, but also a small amount of neurotoxin, roquefortine C. It’s not enough to harm most people, but it could cause an allergic reaction to folks who are not allergic to penicillin. Don’t eat a moldy orange, by the way; some forms of the mold produce a lot of neurotoxin.

For people who are not allergic, a thought I had is that one could, perhaps treat heartburn or ulcers with cheese; perhaps even cancer? H-Pylori, the bacteria associated with heartburn, is effectively treated by amoxicillin, a penicillin variant. If a penicillin variant kills the bacteria, it seems plausible that penicillin cheese might too. And since amoxicillin, is found to reduce the risk of gastric cancer, it’s reasonable to expect that penicillin or penicillin cheese might be cancer-protective. To my knowledge, this has never been studied, but it seems worth considering. The other, standard treatment for heartburn, pantoprazole / Protonix, is known to cause osteoporosis, and increase the risk of cancer, and it doesn’t taste as good as cheese.

A culture of Penicillium roqueforti. Most people are not allergic to it.

The blue in blue cheese is Penicillium roqueforti. Most people are not allergic.

Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming, who noticed that a single spore of the mold killed the bacteria near it on a Petrie dish. He tried to produce significant quantities of the drug from the mold with limited success, but was able to halt disease in patients, and was able to interest others who had more skill in large-scale fungus growing. Kids looking for a good science fair project, might consider penicillin growing, penicillin allergy, treatment of stomach ailments using cheese, or anything else related to the drug. Three Swedish journals declared that penicillin was the most important discovery of the last 1000 years. It would be cool if the dilute form, the one available in your supermarket, could be shown to treat heartburn and/or cancer. Another drug you could study is Lysozyme, a chemical found in tears, in saliva, and in human milk (but not in cow milk). Alexander Fleming found that tears killed bacteria, as did penicillin. Lysozyme, the active ingredient, is currently used to treat animals, but not humans.

Robert Buxbaum, November 9, 2017. Since starting work on this essay I’ve been eating blue cheese. It tastes good and seems to cure heartburn. As a personal note: my first science fair project (4th grade) involved growing molds on moistened bread. For an incubator, I used the underside of our home radiator. The location kept my mom from finding the experiment and throwing it out.

Genetically modified food not found to cause cancer.

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It’s always nice when a study is retracted, especially so if the study alerts the world to a danger that is found to not exist. Retractions don’t happen often enough, I think, given that false positives should occur in at least 5% of all biological studies. Biological studies typically use 95% confidence limits, a confidence limit that indicates there will be false positives 5% of the time for the best-run versions (or 10% if both 5% tails are taken to be significant). These false positives will appear in 5-10% of all papers as an expected result of statistics, no matter how carefully the study is done, or how many rats used. Still, one hopes that researchers will check for confirmation from other researchers and other groups within the study. Neither check was not done in a well publicized, recent paper claiming genetically modified foods cause cancer. Worse yet, the experiment design was such that false positives were almost guaranteed.

Séralini published this book, “We are all Guinea Pigs,” simultaneously with the paper.

As reported in Nature, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology retracted a 2012 paper by Gilles-Eric Séralini claiming that eating genetically modified (GM) maize causes cancerous tumors in rats despite “no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation.” I would not exactly say no evidence. For one, the choice of rats and length of the study was such that a 30% of the rats would be expected to get cancer and die even under the best of circumstances. Also, Séralini failed to mention that earlier studies had come to the opposite conclusion about GM foods. Even the same journal had published a review of 12 long-term studies, between 90 days and two years, that showed no harm from GM corn or other GM crops. Those reports didn’t get much press because it is hard to get excited at good news, still you’d have hoped the journal editors would demand their review, at least, would be referenced in a paper stating the contrary.

A wonderful book on understanding the correct and incorrect uses of statistics.

A wonderful book on understanding the correct and incorrect uses of statistics.

The main problem I found is that the study was organized to virtually guarantee false positives. Séralini took 200 rats and divided them into 20 groups of 10. Taking two groups of ten (one male, one female) as a control, he fed the other 18 groups of ten various doses of genetically modified grain, either alone of mixed with roundup, a pesticide often used with GM foods. Based on pure statistics, and 95% confidence, you should expect that, out of the 18 groups fed GM grain there is a 1- .9518 chance (60%) that at least one group will show cancer increase, and a similar 60% chance that at least one group will show cancer decrease at the 95% confidence level. Séralini’s study found both these results: One group, the female rats fed with 10% GM grain and no roundup, showed cancer increase; another group, the female rats fed 33% GM grain and no roundup, showed cancer decrease — both at the 95% confidence level. Séralini then dismissed the observation of cancer decrease, and published the inflammatory article and a companion book (“We are all Guinea Pigs,” pictured above) proclaiming that GM grain causes cancer. Better editors would have forced Séralini to acknowledge the observation of cancer decrease, or demanded he analyze the data by linear regression. If he had, Séralini would have found no net cancer effect. Instead he got to publish his bad statistics, and (since non of the counter studies were mentioned) unleashed a firestorm of GM grain products pulled from store shelves.

Did Séralini knowingly design a research method aimed to produce false positives? In a sense, I’d hope so; the alternative is pure ignorance. Séralini is a long-time, anti GM-activist. He claims he used few rats because he was not expecting to find any cancer — no previous tests on GM foods had suggested a cancer risk!? But this is mis-direction; no matter how many rats in each group, if you use 20 groups this way, there is a 60% chance you’ll find at least one group with cancer at the 95% confidence limit. (This is Poisson-type statistics see here). My suspicion is that Séralini knowingly gamed the experiments in an effort to save the world from something he was sure was bad. That he was a do-gooder twisting science for the greater good.

The most common reason for retraction is that the article has appeared elsewhere, either as a substantial repeat from the authors, or from other authors by plagiarism or coincidence. (BC Comics, by Johnny Hart, 11/25/10).

It’s important to cite previous work and aspects of the current work that may undermine the story you’d like to tell; BC Comics, Johnny Hart.

This was not the only major  retraction of the month, by the way. The Harrisburg Patriot & Union retracted its 1863 review of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a speech the editors originally panned as “silly remarks”, deserving “a veil of oblivion….” In a sense, it’s nice that they reconsidered, and “…have come to a different conclusion…” My guess is that the editors were originally motivated by do-gooder instinct; they hoped to shorten the war by panning the speech.

There is an entire blog devoted to retractions, by the way:  http://retractionwatch.com. A good friend, Richard Fezza alerted me to it. I went to high school with him, then through under-grad at Cooper Union, and to grad school at Princeton, where we both earned PhDs. We’ll probably end up in the same old-age home. Cooper Union tried to foster a skeptical attitude against group-think.

Robert Buxbaum, Dec 23, 2013. Here is a short essay on the correct way to do science, and how to organize experiments (randomly) to make biassed analysis less likely. I’ve also written on nearly normal statistics, and near poisson statistics. Plus on other random stuff in the science and art world: Time travel, anti-matter, the size of the universe, Surrealism, Architecture, Music.

Ozone hole shrinks to near minimum recorded size

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The hole in the ozone layer, prominently displayed in Al Gore’s 2006 movie, an inconvenient truth has been oscillating in size and generally shrinking since 1996. It’s currently reached its second lowest size on record.

South pole ozone hole shrinks to 2nd smallest size on record. Credit: BIRA/IASB

South pole ozone hole (blue circle in photo), shrinks to its 2nd smallest size on record. Note outline of antarctica plus end of south america and africa. Photo Credit: BIRA/IASB

The reason for the oscillation is unknown. The ozone hole is small this year, was large for the last few years, and was slightly smaller in 2002. My guess is that it will be big again in 2013. Ozone is an alternate form of oxygen containing three oxygen atoms instead of the usual two. It is an unstable compound formed by ions in the upper atmosphere acting on regular oxygen. Though the ozone concentration in the atmosphere is low, ozone is important because it helps shield people from UV radiation — radiation that could otherwise cause cancer (it also has some positive effects on bones, etc.).

An atmospheric model of ozone chemistry implicated chlorofluorocarbons (freons) as a cause of observed ozone depletion. In the 1980s, this led to countries restricting the use of freon refrigerants. Perhaps these laws are related to the shrinkage of the ozone hole, perhaps not. There has been no net decrease in the amount of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere, and the models that led to banning them did not predicted the ozone oscillations we now see are common — a fault also found with models of global warming and of stock market behavior. Our best computer models do not do well with oscillatory behaviors. As Alan Greenspan quipped, our best models successfully predicted eight of the last five recessions. Whatever the cause, the good news is that the ozone hole has closed, at least temporarily. Here’s why the sky is blue, and some thoughts on sunlight, radiation and health.

by Dr. Robert E. Buxbaum, dedicated to bringing good news to the perpetually glum.

Slowing Cancer with Fish and Unhealth Food

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Some 25 years ago, while still a chemical engineering professor at Michigan State University, I did some statistical work for a group in the Physiology department on the relationship between diet and cancer. The research involved giving cancer to groups of rats and feeding them different diets of the same calorie intake to see which promoted or slowed the disease. It had been determined that low-calorie diets slowed cancer growth, and were good for longevity in general, while overweight rats died young (true in humans too, by the way, though there’s a limit and starvation will kill you).

The group found that fish oil was generally good for you, but they found that there were several unhealthy foods that slowed cancer growth in rats. The statistics were clouded by the fact that cancer growth rates are not normally distributed, and I was brought in to help untangle the observations.

With help from probability paper (a favorite trick of mine), I confirmed that healthy rats fared better on healthily diets, but cancerous rats did better with some unhealth food. Sick or well, all rats did best with fish oil, and all rats did pretty well with olive oil, but the cancerous rats did better with lard or palm oil (normally an unhealthy diet) and very poorly with corn oil or canola, oils that are normally healthful. The results are published in several articles in the journals “Cancer” and “Cancer Research.”

Among vitamins, they found something similar (it was before I joined the group). Several anti-oxidizing vitamins, A, D and E made things worse for carcinogenic rats while being good for healthy rats (and for people in moderation). Moderation is key; too much of a good thing isn’t good, and a diet with too much fish oil promotes cancer.

What seems to be happening is that the cancer cells grow at the same rate with all of the equi-caloric diets, but that there was a difference the rate of natural cancer cell death. More cancer cells died when the rat was fed junk food oils than those fed a diet of corn oil and canola. Similarly, the reason anti-oxidizing vitamins hurt cancerous rats was that fewer cancer cells died when the rats were fed these vitamins. A working hypothesis is that the junk oils (and the fish oil) produced free radicals that did more damage to the cancer than to the rats. In healthy rats (and people), these free radicals are bad, promoting cell mutation, cell degradation, and sometimes cancer. But perhaps our body use these same free radicals to fight disease.

Larger amounts of vitamins A, D, and E hurt cancerous-rats by removing the free radicals they normally use fight the disease, or so our model went. Bad oils and fish-oil in moderation, with calorie intake held constant, helped slow the cancer, by a presumed mechanism of adding a few more free radicals. Fish oil, it can be assumed, killed some healthy cells in the healthy rats too, but not enough to cause problems when taken in moderation. Even healthy people are often benefitted by poisons like sunlight, coffee, alcohol and radiation.

At this point, a warning is in-order: Don’t rely on fish oil and lard as home remedies if you’ve got cancer. Rats are not people, and your calorie intake is not held artificially constant with no other treatments given. Get treated by a real doctor — he or she will use radiation and/ or real drugs, and those will form the right amount of free radicals, targeted to the right places. Our rats were given massive amounts of cancer and had no other treatment besides diet. Excess vitamin A has been shown to be bad for humans under treatment for lung cancer, and that’s perhaps because of the mechanism we imagine, or perhaps everything works by some other mechanism. However it works, a little fish in your diet is probably a good idea whether you are sick or well.

A simpler health trick is that it couldn’t hurt most Americans is a lower calorie diet, especially if combined with exercise. Dr. Mites, a colleague of mine in the department (now deceased at 90+) liked to say that, if exercise could be put into a pill, it would be the most prescribed drug in America. There are few things that would benefit most Americans more than (moderate) exercise. There was a sign in the physiology office, perhaps his doing, “If it’s physical, it’s therapy.”

Anyway these are some useful things I learned as an associate professor in the physiology department at Michigan State. I ended up writing 30-35 physiology papers, e.g. on how cells crawl and cell regulation through architecture; and I met a lot of cool people. Perhaps I’ll blog more about health, biology, the body, or about non-normal statistics and probability paper. Please tell me what you’re interested in, or give me some keen insights of your own.

Dr. Robert Buxbaum is a Chemical Engineer who mostly works in hydrogen I’ve published some 75 technical papers, including two each in Science and Nature: fancy magazines that you’d normally have to pay for, but this blog is free. August 14, 2013

Chernobyl radiation appears to cure cancer

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In a recent post about nuclear power, I mentioned that the health risks of nuclear power are low compared to the main alternatives: coal and natural gas. Even with scrubbing, the fumes from coal burning power plants are deadly once the cumulative effect on health over 1000 square miles is considered. And natural gas plants and pipes have fairly common explosions.

With this post I’d like to discuss a statistical fluke (or observation), that even with the worst type of nuclear accident, the broad area increased cancer incidence is generally too small to measure. The worst nuclear disaster we are ever likely to encounter was the explosion at Chernobyl. It occurred 27 years ago during a test of the safety shutdown system and sent a massive plume of radioactive core into the atmosphere. If any accident should increase the cancer rate of those around it, this should. Still, by fluke or not, the rate of thyroid cancer is higher in the US than in Belarus, close to the Chernobyl plant in the prime path of the wind. Thyroid cancer is likely the most excited cancer, enhanced by radio-iodine, and Chernobyl had the largest radio-iodine release to date. Thus, it’s easy to wonder why the rates of Thyroid cancer seem to suggest that the radiation cures cancer rather than causes it.

Thyroid Cancer Rates for Belarus and US; the effect of Chernobyl is less-than clear.

Thyroid Cancer Rates for Belarus and US; the effect of Chernobyl is less-than clear.

The chart above raises more questions than it answers. Note that the rate of thyroid cancer has doubled over the past few years, both in the US and in Belarus. Also note that the rate of cancer is 2 1/2 times as high in Pennsylvania as in Arkansas. One thought is test bias: perhaps we are  better at spotting cancer in the US than in Belarus, and perhaps better at spotting it in Pennsylvania than elsewhere. Perhaps. Another thought is coal. Areas that use a lot of coal tend to become sicker; Europe keeps getting sicker from its non-nuclear energy sources, Perhaps Pennsylvania (a coal state) uses more coal that Belarus (maybe).

Fukushima was a much less damaging accident, and much more recent. So far there has been no observed difference in cancer rate. As the reference below says: “there is no statistical evidence of a difference in thyroid cancer caused by the disaster.” This is not to say that explosions are OK. My company, REB Research, makes are high pressure, low temperature hydrogen-extracting membranes used to reduce the likelihood of hydrogen explosions in nuclear reactors; so far all the explosions have been hydrogen explosions.

Sources: for Belarus: Cancer consequences of the Chernobyl accident: 20 years on. For the US: GEOGRAPHIC VARIATION IN U.S. THYROID CANCER INCIDENCE, AND A CLUSTER NEAR NUCLEAR REACTORS IN NEW JERSEY, NEW YORK, AND PENNSYLVANIA.

R. E. Buxbaum, April 19, 2013; Here are some further, updated thoughts: radiation hormesis (and other hormesis)