Cochran's Great Insight
Could my Orthorexia be being Caused by Something in the Food?
Greg Cochran, famous controversialist lunatic genius, once had the following obvious thought:
If something that reduces inclusive fitness is under genetic control it will evolve out.
Which strikes me as true by definition. A tautology. The best kind of truth.
Now Cochran was hardly the first man to have this thought, but he followed it with a second thought:
If you see a common disease, that's weird. It can't just be caused by your 'having bad genes'. Such genes would never spread, and if they were widespread to start with they would quickly evolve out.
If you were living in the world that your ancestors evolved to live in, your systems would function well.
If you see a common disease that would have made your ancestors have fewer descendants, then you need to explain it somehow. It should not exist.
This thought seems to me a very good thought indeed. Almost a mathematical truth.
It seems to have been largely lost on medical "science".
The first type of explanation is that there's a pathogen involved. Defences are indeed evolving, but the pathogen is evolving too!
A straightforward example is rheumatoid arthritis. Common and crippling. Probably caused by a pathogen. Even though we have no idea what that pathogen is, we can be pretty sure there is one.
Probably that pathogen came to Europe in the Colombian Exchange. Montezuma's Real Revenge.
We don't know what that pathogen is, and we're not looking for it. Because we're crap.
A less straightforward example, but a classic and actually well-understood by some miracle, is sickle-cell anaemia. That's most definitely a common genetic disease, and those shouldn't happen.
In Africa, it's a side effect of a defence against falciparum malaria. It's recently evolved, it's a literal life-saver, it spread like wildfire in malarial regions, but unfortunately it also occasionally causes a really horrible disease that kills your children.
In America, where there's no malaria, it's just a disease that occasionally occurs amongst people of African descent.
A disease where the responsible pathogen is now extinct. And indeed, it seems to have been evolving out! Getting less common, because it killed so many children.
Pathogens are things like bacteria, viruses, prions, protozoa, amoebae, fungi, and probably some other things we don't know about, and they've been the traditional curse of humanity for all our history. We know about an awful lot of them, and we pretty much know how to fix all the ones we know about, which is why our time, alone in all of time and space, is largely free of obvious infectious diseases.
If a common disease was directly caused by a pathogen, or is a defence against a pathogen that's now largely disappeared, it should be getting less common over time.
Rapidly less common, if it causes you to have noticeably fewer descendants.
The only other explanations worth considering, he thought, are recent changes in the environment:
A straightforward example might be milk sickness, a mysterious complaint of 19th century Americans which was caused by milk cows eating something called white snakeroot.
Another might be alcoholism.
There's a lot of alcohol around these days, and some people are very badly affected by it. For them it's an addictive poison. Deadly and ubiquitous. Its effects on people who are descended from non-farming populations are legendarily bad.
But alcohol is generally fine for most people in the West, all descendants of farmers who made alcohol from their crops.
We make special enzymes to detoxify alcohol and prevent most of its effects. They're the same enzymes that other great apes make to detoxify rotting fruit, but we make them in bucketloads.
For rats, ethanol and methanol are about equally toxic. Not for Europeans! It doesn't take much methanol to completely fuck you up, whereas ethanol is a pleasant drug that does no harm to most people who take it regularly.
We British drink an awful lot of alcohol, it’s built into our culture. Most people do fine.
I think alcoholism must have been rapidly evolving out in Europeans for a long time.
But at the same time, we also got better and better at making stronger and stronger drinks.
When things like gin were first invented and produced widely and cheaply, they caused a total catastrophe.
The backlash against that catastrophe was famous as the Temperance Movement, which actually managed to get alcohol banned in the United States but was a powerful force in most countries.
All that seems a bit silly these days. Killjoys. What on earth were they so worried about?
Well, I think strong liquor must have been a lot worse for them than it was for us.
But the people who were most susceptible to it, the derelict alcoholic addicts, didn't leave many descendants.
And the people who made far too much alcohol dehydrogenase left loads.
And that's why I can drink whisky regularly and for fun, with no ill effects whatsoever. Not many people who couldn't were ancestors of mine.
If there's a widespread disease which is caused by an environmental contaminant, it should be getting less common at a noticeable rate of knots. Unless the contamination is getting worse.
Which brings me to the 'diseases of modernity'.
Heart disease, cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes, depression, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, allergies, anxiety disorders, the list goes on and on.
These diseases 'share a high degree of co-morbidity and behavioural risk factor, and have been associated with a similar physiological profile of metabolic and inflammatory dysregulation'.
Which is to say, they're all the same damned disease.
A general horror, a general failure of the metabolism that appears to affect all the systems of the affected people. Which of your systems fails soonest and most obviously determines what label you get.
And they're getting more and more common.
Why?
Well, it's something to do with modernity.......
It even seems to be dose-dependent. Americans like the Amish, who have as little to do with modernity as possible, don't seem to suffer nearly as badly from these things.
The more ‘modern’ you are, the more likely you are to suffer from one or several of these catastrophes.
There's a lot of half-witted fluff about 'the stresses of modernity'. People work long hours, etc. Some people are so poor that they can't afford the correct sneakers, or even to replace their mobile phones in a timely manner.
That's not fucking stress. Half my father's family died in the trenches of the first war. Four years of getting blown up and machine-gunned and shot for cowardice if you try to get out. That’s stress.
Those that survived died of infectious diseases. Or watched their children die of them. Or died in the second war.
My maternal grandfather was nearly killed by pneumonia. An incurable, fatal disease. The “nearly” is important there. If he'd been killed by it, he wouldn't have been my grandfather.
People worked insanely long hours in horrible dangerous factories, surrounded by diseases and poisons.
That same maternal grandfather survived being sprayed with droplets of molten steel that burnt off most of his skin. It was touch and go, but luckily for him by that time there were antibiotics and he rather miraculously lived.
And the reason that people worked insanely long hours in horrible dangerous factories is because that was better than the unending horror of living in rural farming communities, that has been the lot of man ever since the unfortunate invention of farming. People flocked to the cities, because that was where the horrible dangerous factory jobs were.
And even before farming, which made the lives of ordinary people profoundly worse through overpopulation and malnutrition and backbreaking work, things weren't so great.
Ancient peoples were always fighting, and losing a fight meant you died or got raped. And raped meant you got pregnant, and you can't support your baby, and it dies.
Women routinely died in childbirth, men died in the endless warfare and infighting. Life in a state of nature is not solitary, but it is nasty and it is brutish and it is often fairly short.
Think about what secondary school would have been like but with everyone armed to the teeth and no teachers and no police. The Lord of the Flies only with lots of rival gangs that hate each other with the sort of passion that you only feel for other sports teams or the political party that you don’t support.
That's stress for you.
And yet the 'diseases of modernity' were vanishingly rare amongst our ancestors, it seems, and yet are becoming common amongst us.
So we need an explanation for that. And it's not 'stress'. Any more than stomach ulcers were caused by 'stress'.
If you hear doctors blaming 'stress', that means 'we have no idea, let's say some meaningless words to cover that up'.
Doctors apparently hated the thought of contagious disease up until the twentieth century because it minimised the role of poverty and stress in disease.
Beyond contempt.
So what is it? Pathogen or Poison?
Well it's not a pathogen. The patterns aren't right.
This stuff follows our lifestyle, it isn't communicated by mere contact like a pathogen would be.
And that leaves Poison.
What could that poisonous recent change in our environment be?
Well, we're filling the water and the air with novel chemicals, all of which have been extensively tested for short-term toxicity in rats, and almost none of which have been tested for long-term toxicity in humans. How would you even do that?
You have heard of things like asbestos and tobacco, dioxins, lead, arsenic, pesticides, biphenyls, methyl mercury, methyl isocyanate.
And those are just some of the recent environmental poisons, dumped into the air or the water or into the food, that we know are deadly, because we've caught them in the act of killing people.
There will be hundreds more, with more subtle long-term effects, that we haven't caught yet.
It could be any of these things, lithium, flouride, volatile organic compounds, on and on and on this list goes.
But I actually think we might know, if it was this sort of thing. Poisonings from such things go in clusters, like infectious diseases. They attract attention. And maybe they are bad for rats. We catch such things, eventually.
I don't want to rule out any of these things, there might be hundreds of compounds that are really really bad for you at low levels long-term. Slow cumulative poisons all around us in modern life.
The ones you've heard of are actually the least likely to be the cause.
Because people are suspicious of them, and so they've looked, and not found.
We're looking for something with really subtle, long-term effects. It can't be detected by trying it on rats in proper randomized trials, or at least it hasn't been.
It might be something that's bad for humans but harmless to rats and other common experimental animals.
And everyone thinks its safe. We probably have lots of studies that show that it's safe. Short term. In rats.
And it seems to me that it might be something in the food.
Everyone seems to agree that processed food is bad.
But what is it about the processing that makes it bad?
I don't make an apple poisonous by cutting it in half.
Again, processed foods contain a vast list of chemicals that are known to be perfectly safe for human consumption because they don't kill rats in short trials.
Don't eat that stuff. It's probably not good for you.
If its got ingredients in it that weren't common foods in the 19th century, avoid it like the plague. Because there is a plague, and something is causing it.