April nutrition news: The sequel
What we learned about allergies, early onset dementia, beef dripping, and food fraud
Nutrition research has suddenly blossomed like flowers in spring. There’s new research everywhere you look. Some of it is welcome and brings hope and some of it is as welcome as Japanese knotweed.
But let’s start with some good news. Ten years ago, Chris Brookes-Smith most likely would have died had he eaten just a trace of peanut. Now he eats several nuts a day, just because he can.
The 28-year-old no long lives in fear of death by peanut. He was part of a clinical trial in London that involved 21 adults with a severe allergy to the nut (technically a legume). The aim of the trial was to calm down the over-reactive immune system and train the body to build up tolerance to the allergen.
Starting with just a fraction of a milligram of peanut powder mixed with yogurt, the amount eaten every day by the participants gradually increased over the months, until a whole nut was consumed. By the end of the 9-month trial period, 14 of the 21 patients could eat five peanuts daily without experiencing any reaction.
This desensitisation process is called oral immunotherapy. It has been used successfully in the past in children, but this was the first time it had been used in adults, whose allergies are harder to shift.
Needless to say, this trial was undertaken under very close medical supervision in a clinical setting, and is definitely not one to be tried any other way. Nobody knew what might happen, so immediate emergency assistance was on standby.
Chris now eats four peanuts daily with breakfast to keep his allergy at bay. The irony is that he doesn’t even like them.
Allergies, in particular allergy to peanuts, are becoming ever more common. In the US, between 1997 and 2008 the number of children with peanut allergy more than tripled. In the UK, the number of people affected has risen five-fold over the last 20 years.
Why are allergies rising so dramatically? Obviously the truth lies in diet and the immune system, and all sorts of theories have been proposed, but a definitive explanation remains elusive.
Allergy desensitisation highlights the importance of putting health matters right as early as possible. Easier said than done, I know, but healthcare ideally is about caring about health, rather than managing disease.
Nothing exemplifies this better than metabolic syndrome.
Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of symptoms that put you at risk of various chronic diseases, including diabetes type 2, cardiovascular disease and stroke. Those symptoms include abdominal fat accumulation, a large waistline, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar and blood fats.
A recent large-scale South Korean study has found that metabolic syndrome in midlife is associated with much greater risk of developing young-onset dementia later on, but before the age of 65.
This study involved nearly two million people, of whom nearly 25% had metabolic syndrome. That’s a lot of people at risk of developing early dementia. Women and those in their 40s were found to be the most vulnerable.
The term ‘dementia tsunami’ is used with ever greater frequency to describe escalating dementia figures and future predictions, not just in Korea but around the world. No wonder: in 2021 dementia was the leading cause of death in the UK, higher even than Covid deaths. In January, an analysis of 15,000 middle-aged US adults found that the lifetime risk of developing dementia after the age of 55 was 42%.
What’s more, the number of US adults who develop dementia is expected to double by 2060. That’s as grim as it gets.
But here’s a glimmer of hope! Sales of beef dripping (aka tallow) are soaring. Brits are following in the footsteps of Americans and ditching vegetable cooking oils in favour of this traditional fat. Beef tallow is becoming popular in US restaurants, partly because it makes food taste better and partly because people are learning about the health hazards of seed oils.
In the UK, this return to tradition has been attributed to American Tik Toks, social media influencers and politicians.
Actually, we are capable of doing our own research, thank you very much.
Certain ‘experts’ say there is no scientific evidence that seed oils are unhealthy, but perhaps they’ve never looked for any. I’ve found quite a lot over the years. Here’s an article I wrote a couple of years ago about seed oils and cancer, with links to just a fraction of the research.
It’s the same old: a food industry is created that decrees that what we’ve eaten for hundreds of thousands of years is all wrong, and their new products are all right. Then they set about cosying up to governments and getting themselves on advisory boards, to hammer home their message.
By coincidence, and possibly not unrelated, vegetable seed oil prices have been rising steadily and production is down around 23%, compared to the last four years. This has been ascribed to tariff chaos and climate change, including extreme wet weather. Don’t ask me. I’m just happy that for once diet trends are going in the right direction.
The downside of rising cooking oil prices is the parallel increase in cases of food fraud. Fraud has risen ten-fold over the past four years, across global markets. It takes many forms: adulteration with inferior ingredients, mislabelling, substituting with lower quality ingredients, counterfeiting and general tampering.
Olive oil is the best-known example. One study found that 69% of olive oil imported into the US was not quite what it said it was, having been adulterated with cheaper oils.
Olive oil is mainly monounsaturated, which means it should go semi-solid and cloudy in the cold. You can put your bottle in the fridge to test it. I once put a bottle of a well-known brand in the fridge (that had been reduced in the supermarket – that’ll teach me) and in the morning it was clear as daylight. I took that to mean that it wasn’t just cut with an unknown knock-off - there was no olive oil whatsoever present in my bottle.
Honey is another common victim of fraud – as much as 76% of honey on shelves is some cheap syrup, like corn or beet. Maple syrup sometimes turns out to be cane sugar syrup. Nearly 12% of spices in 2015 imported into the US were contaminated with ‘non-spice material’. That includes lead chromate added to turmeric to enhance the colour.
Some fakes that operate in plain sight. Artificial low-calorie sweeteners fit that bill. Sugar is a crime in itself, but so too are these sweeteners, but in a different way. The latest in a string of artificial sweeteners to be outed is erythritol, commonly found in many sugar-free products, including protein bars.
Erythritol is known to increase oxidative stress in brain blood vessels. Research suggests that it it may impair blood vessel health by disrupting the brain’s production of nitric oxide.
Nitric oxide is needed for blood vessel dilation and blood flow, so it keeps blood pressure within normal limits.
When the choice is between sugar and artificial sweeteners, the obvious choice is neither. Choose health, not knotweed.
Costco has offered grass-fed ghee for several years. On our last visit I was surprised and pleased to see beef tallow on the shelf as well. Progress!
I'm allergic to bee stings. I wish there were some way to slowly desensitize me so I wouldn't have to pack an EpiPen with me all summer.
I've tested several olive oils in the fridge, because I like to make my own salad dressing and have had leftovers to keep. Each time, the oil solidified and went cloudy.