What Do You Do With The Bodies?

Every day there's a new tragedy...

"Radiation fears have prevented authorities from collecting the bodies of as many as 1,000 people living in the evacuation zone who died in the 11 March earthquake and tsunami."

Left as they were, the bodies could pose a health threat to relatives identifying them at morgues, the agency said. Cremating them could create radioactive smoke, while burying them could contaminate soil."
- Japan Under Pressure To Widen Nuclear Evacuation Zone, The Guardian, 31 March 2011

What do you do with the bodies? It reminds me of our nuclear waste dilemma. Where are we going to put it? Yucca Mountain is out:

"Funding for development of Yucca Mountain waste site was terminated in 2010 and the NRC license application was withdrawn in March 2011.

This leaves the United States without any long term storage site for its high level radioactive waste, currently stored on-site at various nuclear facilities around the country."
- Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, Wikipedia

________Yucca Mountain tunnel boring machine from Atlas Obscura

Radiation In Food Increases As You Ascend Food Chain

I feel vindicated:

"Yet amounts of the cesium-137 isotope -- which, by comparison, has a 30-year "half life" -- have also soared, with a Wednesday afternoon sample showing levels 527 times the standard.

"That's the one I am worried about," said Michael Friedlander, a U.S.-based nuclear engineer, explaining cesium might linger much longer in the ecosystem. "Plankton absorbs the cesium, the fish eat the plankton, the bigger fish eat smaller fish -- so every step you go up the food chain, the concentration of cesium gets higher." "
- Radiation Levels In Seawater Off Japan Plant Spike To All-time Highs, CNN, 31 March 2011

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US Radiation Monitoring Maps

Click the maps to go to their sites.

Government Run Map: EPA's RadNet Air Monitoring Data (Updated "continuously.") This EPA map seems to be experiencing difficulties. Could be:
EPA Press Release from Sunday, March 27, 2011:

"As a result of the incident with the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several EPA air monitors have detected very low levels of radioactive material in the United States.

There have been reports received that the states of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have seen elevated levels of radiation in recent precipitation events. EPA is reviewing this data – however, in both cases these are levels above the normal background levels historically reported in these areas."

Did they mean to say "below" background levels?



Privately Run Map: Radiation Network, a "nationwide grass roots effort to monitor the radiation in our environment." Run by Mineralab who sells the geiger counters if you want to take part. (Updated every minute.)


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Are Alaska Fisheries At Risk?

A few days ago I posted two maps, one showing a proposed plume of radioactive vapor emanating from the damaged nuclear power plant at Fukushima, Japan. The other showed salmon migration routes in the north Pacific Ocean. The overlap of the two, I thought, was foreboding. (Salmon Migration Routes and Japan's Radiation Plume)

This morning I read that Alaska fisheries could indeed be at risk:

"In a worst-case scenario, said Paul Falkowski, a professor of marine sciences and geology at Rutgers University, a major ocean current that travels up the coast of Japan, across the Pacific and into the Gulf of Alaska could carry radiation to Alaska fisheries months from now. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency should monitor such movements, although he and other experts considered it highly unlikely that the current would take the radiation to Alaska unless the leak became far worse."
- Radiation, Once Free, Can Follow Tricky Path, New York Times, 21 March 2011

At risk, that is, if "the leak became far worse." It looks like the leak became far worse:

"Levels of radioactive iodine in seawater just offshore of the embattled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant spiked to more than 1,250 times higher than normal, Japan's nuclear and industrial safety agency said Saturday.
(Update Sunday: "Japan's nuclear agency said that levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the plant had risen to 1,850 times the usual level.")
...
Samples taken Friday morning from a monitoring station 330 meters off the coast were significantly higher than results from the previous morning, when the level was 104 times above normal."
- Radiation In Seawater Off Nuclear Plant Spikes To 1,250 Times Normal, CNN, 26 March 2011

Radioactive Particles Ascend The Food Chain

While salmon and other Alaska catch are miles from the nuclear fallout, the fish they consume, and the seafood and sea plants those fish in turn consume, may not be. Also from that NYTs article:

"[Radioactive] Cesium is dangerous because it is long-lived and travels easily through the food chain, continuing to emit particles for centuries once it is released.

More than 15 years after the Chernobyl accident in what is now Ukraine, studies found that cesium 137 was still detectable in wild boar in Croatia and reindeer in Norway, with the levels high enough in some areas to pose a potential danger to people who consume a great deal of the meat."

________Photo of Alaska salmon spawning by Brian Healy. Available for purchase from his site.

Iodine and Radiation Emergencies

I was in Whole Foods over the weekend and I overheard the gentleman who runs the dietary supplement section say there had been a run on iodine because of the radiation release in Japan. They didn't have any left and did not expect to get any in the near future.

There's a big difference between iodine dietary supplements and the potassium iodide tablets distributed during a radiation emergency:

• The Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) for iodine* for men and women over the age of 14 is 150 micrograms per day.¹ This is the amount in many nutritional supplements, such as the Carlson product shown.
  
• The recommended dose of potassium iodide (KI) in the case of radiation exposure is 130 milligrams.² About 3/4s of that is iodine, about 96mg. This is the amount the FDA deems necessary to effectively block the thyroid from taking up radioactive iodine.

There are 1000 micrograms in one milligram. If you are taking a dietary supplement in the hopes of staving off harmful effects of radioactive iodine, you'd have to take 96,000 micrograms of iodine. If you purchased a bottle of dietary supplements containing the DRI for iodine of 150 micrograms each, you'd have to take 640 of those pills at once to get the amount of iodine in one KI tablet used to protect the thyroid in the case of high radiation exposure.

Also:

"The protective effect of KI lasts approximately 24 hours. For optimal prophylaxis, KI should therefore be dosed daily, until a risk of significant exposure to radioiodines by either inhalation or ingestion no longer exists."²

So, you'd have to take 640 of those supplement pills each day until the radiation threat subsides. Of course, you can take less. How effective that would be as a thyroid blocker is debatable and contingent on exposure.

Children are at particular risk:

"The Chernobyl data provide the most reliable information available to date on the relationship between internal thyroid radioactive dose and cancer risk. They suggest that the risk of thyroid cancer is inversely related to age, and that, especially in young children, it may accrue at very low levels of radioiodine exposure."²

Taking too much iodine, consistently, can, curiously enough, lead to a type of goiter called "iodine goiter" and to hypothyroidism, with all the low-metabolism side effects that brings. (High levels of iodine can reduce the required oxidation of iodide in the thyroid gland and its subsequent use in the manufacture of thyroid hormone.) I say that's curious because taking too little iodine can lead to the same thing.

Taking stable iodine protects the thyroid from radioactive iodine. It does not protect other organs from other radioactive materials that are also released in an accident. I'm not sure how taking "a little bit more just to be safe" is beneficial in this case. It may in fact lead to a state of reduced health, making it harder for the body to stand up to other assaults an accident of this kind presents. Just an opinion.
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* Iodine is not a mineral, although many refer to it as such. Nor is it a metal, even though it is a shiny solid at room temperature. Iodine is a halogen like chlorine and bromine. Iodine is often found in nature combined with a metal, though, such as potassium. This combined form, e.g. potassium iodide (KI), is called a salt. (The sodium chloride we sprinkle on food is also a salt, made up of 11 parts sodium and 17 parts chlorine.) The combined form, KI, may be called a mineral, when "mineral" is defined as a compound containing a metal.
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¹ USDA DRI Tables
² FDA Guidance: Potassium Iodide as a Thyroid Blocking Agent (pdf)

Study The Fox

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Salmon Migration Routes and Japan's Radiation Plume

Below is from a New York Times interactive map (which is pretty cool) showing how weather patterns might disperse radiation from Fukushima, Japan. It was a forecast from March 16, not actual readings. It does not include additional radiation that was released earlier this week from explosions, fires, and controlled releases.



This is a map of wild salmon migration routes in the middle and north Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Alaska.



And a bit of data this morning from Toyota Electic Power Company which runs the nuclear power plant:

"Tokyo Electric said radioactive iodine about 127 times normal levels and radioactive cesium about 25 times above the norm were detected in seawater 100 meters (yards) off the Fukushima nuclear plant."
- Power Lines Up In Progress At Japan Nuclear Plant, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 21, 2011

There are a lot of variables here, things I don't understand like water currents, weather patterns, migration seasons. And certainly a lot of other sea creatures and plants will be affected. I thought of salmon because I read recently that the industry is what keeps many Alaska natives from sinking below the poverty line (from Four Fish by Paul Greenberg). It does appear, from this circumstantial and elemental data, that the industry could be affected.

Update, March 26, 2011: Are Alaska Fisheries At Risk? Radiation in seawater spikes to 1,250 times normal.
Update, March 31, 2011: CNN, Radiation in seawater spikes to 4,385 times regulatory limit.
Update, April 5, 2011: LATimes, Japan's ocean radiation hits 7.5 million times legal limit.
________Map of salmon migration from GoldSeal.
"The confirmed death toll from the earthquake and tsunami has risen to 9,408, and more than 14,700 people are listed as missing. An estimated half a million people have been made homeless." Also, radiation has affected Tokyo's water supply and is "unfit for babies to drink." -BBC, March 23

Cornfields Vs. Oilfields

I received an email this morning guiding me to this infographic <-- you can see it a little larger there.



A few thoughts:

• Not shown is energy needed to produce corn - in the form of fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, irrigation, the running of farm equipment, and the management of runoff.
  
• Energy is needed to refine corn to produce ethanol, but I guess you'd need to refine oil to produce gasoline too.
  
• The corn would probably be genetically engineered, with negative effects to the environment and positive effects to Monsanto.
  
• In my mind, Distillers Dried Grains With Solubles (DDGS) should not be fed to livestock.
  
• The growing of corn depletes a rapidly dwindling and valuable resource: water.
  
• The land upon which the corn grows could be used to feed people, yes. But continuing to burn gasoline spews greenhouse gases which also reduces land to grow food since it contributes to global warming which increases drought and desertification.
  
• Why corn? I read that sugarcane is more efficient at producing ethanol than corn. But sugarcane doesn't grow well in the US. And using sugarcane as an ethanol source would just transfer our dependence from oil-producing regions to sugarcane-producing regions. (So is ethanol from corn really about going green? or about protectionism?)

What do you think? Is ethanol from corn a viable alternative to gasoline?
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Pecans' Antioxidants Make It To The Bloodstream

I'm not posting this as a reason to go hogwild with nuts, but to show that the antioxidants we know are in them do make it into our bloodstream:

Pecans Acutely Increase Plasma Postprandial Antioxidant Capacity and Catechins and Decrease LDL Oxidation in Humans, The Journal of Nutrition, January, 2011

The nut in question in this study was the pecan. Eating 3 ounces (about 57 halves, which I think is a lot):

• Caused blood levels of a type of vitamin E (gamma-tocopherol) to double (after 8 hours).
  
• Decreased oxidation of LDL in blood by up to 33% (after 3 hours).

Dr. Ella Haddad, associate professor at Loma Linda University's School of Public Health, Department of Nutrition:

"Our study shows these antioxidants are indeed absorbed in the body and provide a protective effect against diseases."

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Radioactive Spinach and Milk In Japan

Initial testing of produce and milk from farms near Japan's damaged reactors reveal high levels of radioactivity:

"The milk that contained higher levels of radioactive material was tested at farms about 19 miles from the hobbled nuclear plants in Fukushima Prefecture. The spinach was found in Ibaraki Prefecture, at farms 60 to 90 miles south of the plants.

Food safety inspectors said the amount of iodine-131 found in the tested milk was five times higher than levels deemed safe. They said the iodine found in the spinach was more than seven times higher. The spinach also contained slightly higher amounts of cesium-137."
- Japan Finds Contaminated Food Up to 90 Miles From Nuclear Sites, New York Times, March 19

The produce from Fukushima and surrounding areas is still being sold. Japan imports a lot of food except for produce; almost 80% is homegrown. They'll be testing their beef soon. If milk is contaminated, I don't know how other parts of the cow wouldn't be.

Unfortunately, the potassium iodide tablets the Japanese government is advising its citizens to take will do nothing for the cesium-137 contamination:

"Potassium iodide helps safeguard against only one type of radiation product, and it only protects the thyroid. More dangerous is radioactive cesium, a chemical element that is absorbed throughout the body and can remain in organs and tissues much longer.

Radioactive cesium can also accumulate in some types of vegetation that domestic animals eat; if so, it can contaminate milk and meat."
- Dr. Weil: Protection Against Radiation, March 17, 2011

The fallout from this earthquake gets bigger every day.

Update, March 23: Since I wrote this, the government has halted shipment of spinach, parsley, milk, and several other vegetables from affected areas and told people in Fukushima not to eat them.
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Chilies

I'm not at all comfortable cooking with chilies, so this is an experiment for me. These didn't seem too hot:



I wanted something I could use in a pinch. So I cut one open, discarded the ribs and seeds, and whizzed the rest in my coffee/spice grinder:



Here I took about a quarter teaspoon and reconstituted it with a little water. I added this to a soup. It was a little hot by itself but the heat dissipated in the soup and it left a smoky, earthy flavor. I could get used to this.


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Why Is There No Looting In Japan?

Why Is There No Looting In Japan?, CNN, Jack Cafferty

"Journalist and social commentator Ed West wrote in the UK Telegraph yesterday how struck he was by the Japanese culture throughout this ordeal. He observed how supermarkets cut their prices in the days following the quake and how vending machine owners were giving out free drinks as "people work together to survive." And West was most surprised by the fact that there was no looting."

Why Is There No Looting In Japan?, UK Telegraph, Ed West

"This is quite unusual among human cultures, and it’s unlikely it would be the case in Britain. During the 2007 floods in the West Country abandoned cars were broken into and free packs of bottled water were stolen. There was looting in Chile after the earthquake last year – so much so that troops were sent in; in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina saw looting on a shocking scale.

Why do some cultures react to disaster by reverting to everyone for himself, but others – especially the Japanese – display altruism even in adversity?"

There are over 3300 comments under West's post, all since yesterday. ________

Split Pea Duds

I've had several batches of split peas, purchased locally and online, fail to cook up into anything more than pebbles in water. The peas remained as hard and intact as you see in this photo. I tried soaking (once for 24 hours), boiling for up to 7 hours, using/not using salt, using different water sources (hard water, as I've read, can slow bean softening). I even tried to salvage a pot of cooked peas by whizzing them with an immersion blender. It produced hard flakes in water ... still not very edible.

Harold McGee says:¹

"Old seeds take longer to cook. If stored in hot and humid conditions, they develop the "hard-to-cook defect" and become impossible to soften.
...
Sometimes dried legumes never fully soften no matter how they're cooked. This hard-to-cook defect develops when they've been grown in unusually hot and dry conditions, or stored for months in warm and humid conditions. There's no remedy except to find a more reliable brand."

It's frustrating. I can't tell until after I cook them that they have "hard-to-cook defect." It's only happened with split peas (and a couple bags of black beans), and not all the time.

Does anyone know a good source for organic split peas?
________¹ Keys To Good Cooking, Harold McGee, 2010
Photo: Me

Earthquake Relocates Island Of Japan, Shifts Earth's Axis

Japan's earthquake moved its main island 8 feet and shifted Earth's axis by 4 inches:

" "At this point, we know that one GPS station moved (8 feet), and we have seen a map from GSI (Geospatial Information Authority) in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass," said Kenneth Hudnut, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Reports from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy estimated the 8.9-magnitude quake shifted the planet on its axis by nearly 4 inches."
- Quake Moved Japan Cast 8 Feet, Shifted Earth's Axis, CNN

Images released by NASA show Japan's northeast coast before, left, and after flooding from the quake-induced tsunami.
So, this is more than the lost of coast from flooding? The whole island moved? It all makes you feel like a very small and fragile speck in the universe.
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Why It's Still A Good Idea To Eat Nuts, Even Though They're High In Fat (and Omega-6)

RB had me thinking about reasons for including nuts and seeds in the diet. While they're typically high in fat, and relatively high in omega-6 (a polyunsaturated fat), they contain other beneficial compounds - fiber, protein, an array of vitamins and minerals, and a good dose of antioxidants - that I think make them worth eating. Oils used on salads and in cooking deliver the fat/omega-6 punch without all the associated nutrients.

Regarding antioxidants, Wu et al. measured the total antioxidant capacity of 28 foods.¹ I put together a chart (click to enlarge):

ORAC: Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity - a measure of a food's antioxidant strength.
Nuts rank fairly high. And Wu found the water-soluble components in nuts had greater radical-fighting ability (42 times greater for pecans) than nuts' fat-soluble components. So if we're just eating the oil, we're missing out.

Here's another comparison (click to enlarge) - a table of the 50 most antioxidant-rich foods (from this analysis of 1113 food samples):²



Again, walnuts and pecans score high, higher even than blueberries (per serving).

What surprised me in this analysis was that coffee (a mere 8 ounces, brewed) scored higher than a cup of raspberries or blueberries. Coffee is a bean, and beans are notably high in antioxidants. Also, when you cook foods, as this study described, you often increase antioxidant capacity.
________¹ Development Of A Database For Total Antioxidant Capacity In Foods: A Preliminary Study (pdf), Journal of Food Consumption and Analysis, 2004
² Content Of Redox-Active Compounds (i.e. Antioxidants) In Foods Consumed In The United States, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, July 2006

The Placebo Effect: What's Your Placebo?

Shaun mentioned this video about the placebo effect. Just fascinating:



I think that diets, and particular foods, also have a placebo effect (as well as a nocebo effect - if we believe they are doing us harm, they will). People who swear by a daily bowl of blueberries, salmon three times a week, only raw dairy products ... or raw diets, low-carb diets, vegan diets ... are benefiting, in part, by the strength of their belief. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it would be great if we could tap into this innate healing ability at will.

What's your food placebo? One of mine is kabocha squash. In lieu of that, sweet potatoes. Sweet potato withdraw is nasty. I think I know what Ronald's is.
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Pregnancy Hormone For Weight Loss

Women, and some men, are injecting a pregnancy hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), to lose weight. (Derived from the urine of pregnant women.) They're combining it with a 500-calorie-a-day diet. The hormone is supposed to encourage fat loss "in all the right places," and to discourage fatigue and hunger from the dearth of calories:

Diet Plan With Hormone Has Fans And Skeptics, New York Times, March 7, 2011

The FDA says it doesn't work. People spending upwards of $1000/month think it does, or will. Major League Baseball outfielder Manny Ramirez took it. I'm not sure - there's a very strong placebo effect in paying lots of money, injecting yourself with a difficult-to-obtain substance, and keeping regular meetings with attentive healthcare professionals, better yet, high-profile Manhattan doctors.

If money was no object, would you inject it to lose weight?

Cochrane Researchers Weigh In On Getting A Flu Shot

From:
Vaccines For Preventing Influenza In Healthy Adults, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews July, 2010

• There are over 200 viruses and agents that cause influenza. The flu vaccine covers up to 15% of those.
  
• "4% of unvaccinated people versus 1% of vaccinated people developed influenza symptoms." (So, 96% of people who didn't get a flu shot avoided getting the flu on their own, when exposed.)
  
• "Vaccination had no effect on hospital admissions or complication rates."
  
• "We found no evidence that vaccinations prevent viral transmissions."
  
• "Inactivated vaccines caused local harms and an estimated 1.6 additional cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (a form of progressive paralysis) per million vaccinations."
  
• "Industry funded studies were published in more prestigious journals and cited more than other studies independently from methodological quality and size."
  
• "Studies funded from public sources were significantly less likely to report conclusions favorable to the vaccines."

This Cochrane Review included one of the largest collections of randomized evidence on influenza. It consisted of 36 trials, 15 of which were conducted by industry and, given the above, were likely biased. It still found no evidence of benefit for hospital admissions, flu complications, or transmission rates, and only a weak benefit for symptom reduction. I've been noncommittal about the flu vaccine thinking it doesn't hurt and might help. It's difficult to remain noncommital when an independent, international, evidence-based group of researchers says:

"The results of this review seem to discourage the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure."

Here's Tom Jefferson from the Cochrane Vaccines Field describing the findings:



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Over 200 Years Ago, Soldiers Were Advised To Eat Mostly Vegetables

From:
Chocolate Milk at Every Meal: Unhealthy military mess halls are hurting our armed forces, Kristen Hinman, Slate, February 28, 2011

This stood out:

"Two years into the Revolutionary War, a surgeon general in the Continental Army issued a pamphlet on nutrition. "The diet of soldiers should consist chiefly of vegetables," Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote in Directions for Preserving the Health of Soldiers. "The nature of their duty, as well as their former habits of life, require it."
...
It was routine, in Rush's time, for soldiers to consume a "pound or two of flesh in a day."

So, in 1777, over 230 years ago, soldiers were eating a "pound or two of flesh." I'll assume that doesn't include eggs or dairy products. That's a lot of animal food. I wonder what chronic diseases those soldiers suffered later in life, if they enjoyed a retirement at all.

The UK Department of Health recently advised their adult population to consume something closer to 2.5 ounces:

"Red and processed meat probably increases the risk of bowel cancer and people who eat around 90g or more should consider cutting down to reduce their risk."
- UK Department of Health, February 25, 2011

They say cutting back to 70 g/day (2.5 ounces) could help reduce cancer risk without impacting "the proportion of the adult population with low iron intakes."

How much is 2.5 ounces? About the size of a large egg.
________The photo is from Shorpy Historic Photo Archive. It's dated 1915, about 138 years after the time of Dr. Rush. I love cooking photos.
Thanks for the article to BL who always sends good links.

Blog: "Where Do Gorillas get Their Protein?"

I stumbled across a great blog, Where Do Gorillas Get Their Protein? by Laurie Endicott Thomas. She writes well and makes very good points.

She describes herself:

"I am a technical editor who has worked on medical textbooks and journals and so on for more than 20 years. As a result, I know how to search the medical literature, and I understand what I read. ... I have waited all that time for the information in the nutrition books I edited early in my career to become common knowledge. My patience finally ran out, so I bought a gorilla mask and set up this Web site."

Her recent post discusses body weight and cholesterol levels:
Weight and Cholesterol: When Average Is Abnormal:

"In the late 1990s, the China-Cornell-Oxford Project found that the average total cholesterol level in rural Chinese people was 127 mg/dL. As a result, heart attacks were rare in China. Overall, American men were 17 times as likely as Chinese men to get a heart attack. American women were about 6 times as likely as Chinese women to get heart attacks."

Thomas credits the Chinese' low cholesterol and low incidence of heart attack to diet:

"Overall, the Chinese were eating only about a tenth as much animal protein and three times as much fiber as Americans were eating. The less animal protein people ate, the lower their cholesterol values were, and the less likely they were to die of heart disease and various cancers."

There's a lot of good reading on her blog. And it doesn't appear she has any commercial motive.
________Photo from Thomas' blog. I couldn't resist.