On Oct 7, 3:02 pm, Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In article . com,





Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans, expecially
the
hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well endowed as they are now.

Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier because
of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people will
try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Joe Gwinn- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

You have a good point Joe.

I have read studies that indicate that puberty is occurring MUCH
younger in girls..the onset of the first period. The same may be
occurring to boys but there is no good marker to follow.

The "why" it is occurring is still up for grabs...but the diet is the
major suspect.

TMT

On Oct 7, 3:52 pm, Larry Jaques wrote:
On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 10:56:13 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, F.
George McDuffee quickly quoth:

On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 05:36:08 -0700, Larry Jaques
wrote:
snip
Too Many Trolls sure is sucking in lots of responders on this
particular troll, isn't he?
snip
Yes, however everone eats, so they do have a "dog in the fight."

Big question is what can/will we do about it?

The best answer is to not follow his trolls, isn't it, Unk?

If the answer is nothing, then lets all go out in the shop and
make some chips [metal, not potato or taco].

I've been doing household tasks today. 3 loads of wash while I stored
the hoses and other outside goodies in the pump house, swept the back
patio and walk, and did a leaf burn.

I also 320-sanded and put a coat of Behlen's Rockhard Table Top
Varnish on the kitchen table and am now 320-prepping the chairs for
wax.

Metalwise, I'm too cheap to buy a real masonry hoe. What's the best
way (type of holesaw?) to put a pair of 2 or 2-1/2" holes in the
blade?http://tinyurl.com/32mo86 I'd play with a plasma cutter if I
had one.

--
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire
is that which he exercises over himself.
-- Elie Wiesel

Some hoes are tempered...hell on hole saws.

TMT

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them
alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans,
expecially
the
hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well endowed as they
are
now.


Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier
because
of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before
modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people
will
try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls
that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow
them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Actually, fat tissue is easy to distinguish from glandular tissue. And
that's not the only premature (or "precocious") sexual development that's
been tied to estradiol levels in meat.

Telling tissue types apart is easy for sure, but that was not the issue.

And "been tied to" is a statement of correlation; causation is not
proven, and that is the difficult thing.

It almost never is in new medical research, Joe. It's something that's hard
to get used to when you write and edit medical documents, but they're
fastidious about it. Eventually you gain a sense of when correlation is all
you're going to get, yet medicine marches ahead with many successes based
upon correlations. If they can't trace the intermediate biochemical pathways
(viciously hard in endocrine functions, like this one), they don't say
"caused by."

In fact, the phrase that shows up endlessly in the medical literature is "is
associated with." It makes my skin crawl, but we know what they're doing.


The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should forbid
the sale of ice cream?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and it has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.



It's pretty well established.

What is pretty well established? The problem here is that we have
confounding variables, integrated calories versus a whole slew of
additives, all of which increased at more or less the same time, making
it hard to disentangle correlation from cause from effect.

No, we don't. If we're medical researchers -- which you and I are not --
we're damned good at controlling for variables. If we don't, we never get
through peer review.

I've become much more cautious in my claims of causation after spending a
few years in the medical writing field. "Pretty well established" is
accurate. It's not a case of having no clue. It's a case of knowing what the
professional limits are to proof in that field of science.


There was a good article in the NY Times Magazine of a few Sundays ago
on these same kinds of methodological problems, but with respect to the
health effects or non-effects of hormone replacement therapy.

I think it's this one: "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?", By
GARY TAUBES, Published: September 16, 2007, but don't have electronic
access to check.

I read around five pages of that story a couple of weeks ago, and I would
have finished it if I was still editing articles on homone replacement
therapy. I did read the entire W.H.I. report when I was working in the field
because I was working on a estrogen/progesterone drug at the time.

Taubes tells the story well, but keep in mind this is a story about the
efficacy of *treatments* with complex relationships of hormones over time,
at different periods in a woman's life. What you and I are talking about is
a simple correlation between eating hormone-laden beef and the early onset
of sexual characteristics. It's been well documented, particularly in some
extreme cases in Italy and Puerto Rico.

There's a lot that isn't known about it, obviously, but the fact that masses
of kids eating the same things develop these characteristics, while other
kids don't, tells researchers that there's smoke here. You don't wait until
you have all the causative paths nailed down or you're likely to wind up
with a lot of cancer and other complications. It's clear that they have an
endocrine malfunction that would be best explained by injesting
inappropriate hormones. That's how it works. That's why it's so frustrating
for people oriented toward physical science rather than life sciences,
particularly matters of human health.

BTW, you don't need a subscription anymore to get into the NYT archives.
It's all free again, as of a few weeks ago.

--
Ed Huntress

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them
alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans,
expecially the hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well
endowed as they are now.


Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier
because of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people
will try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Actually, fat tissue is easy to distinguish from glandular tissue. And
that's not the only premature (or "precocious") sexual development that's
been tied to estradiol levels in meat.

Telling tissue types apart is easy for sure, but that was not the issue.

Actually, it appears that fat tissue is also an endocrine tissue, and
makes hormones like estrogen. I don't know that anybody yet really
knows why.

It is known that women who have too little fat will stop menstruating,
and will thus become temporarily sterile. This often happens to female
atheletes, especially rabid runners.

This response is thought to be normal, an evolutionary reaction to the
fact that it takes a lot of energy to make a baby, and if a woman tries
without sufficient stored plus available energy (plus material), child
and woman may well die in the attempt.

So, during famines, it's best to suspend operations and wait for a
better day. So, this may be one reason why fat tissue is involved in
the endrocrine system. And the converse, surfeit, may be one cause of
early sexual maturation in girls.


And "been tied to" is a statement of correlation; causation is not
proven, and that is the difficult thing.

It almost never is in new medical research, Joe. It's something that's hard
to get used to when you write and edit medical documents, but they're
fastidious about it. Eventually you gain a sense of when correlation is all
you're going to get, yet medicine marches ahead with many successes based
upon correlations. If they can't trace the intermediate biochemical pathways
(viciously hard in endocrine functions, like this one), they don't say
"caused by."

In fact, the phrase that shows up endlessly in the medical literature is "is
associated with." It makes my skin crawl, but we know what they're doing.

All true. But it reinforces my point that one should be very cautious.


The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should forbid
the sale of ice cream?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and it has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.

I have read many of them. I've subscribed to the New England Journal of
Medicine for many years, and I designed instruments for pharmacological
research in the 1970s.


It's pretty well established.

What is pretty well established? The problem here is that we have
confounding variables, integrated calories versus a whole slew of
additives, all of which increased at more or less the same time, making
it hard to disentangle correlation from cause from effect.

No, we don't. If we're medical researchers -- which you and I are not --
we're damned good at controlling for variables. If we don't, we never get
through peer review.

I've become much more cautious in my claims of causation after spending a
few years in the medical writing field. "Pretty well established" is
accurate. It's not a case of having no clue. It's a case of knowing what the
professional limits are to proof in that field of science.

What is "pretty well established" is most often a correlation, in many
cases the correlation being a showing of the efficacy or comparative
efficacy of a treatment. Very often nobody has the slightest idea what
causes what, but if a treatment works, one just uses it. Years later
someone gets lucky, and the root cause becomes known.

The classic example is ulcers. You remember all those exhortations
about how stress causes ulcers, complete with various long-winded
rationales? Turned out to be complete nonsense, with ulcers being
caused by a bacterial infection of the stomach.


There was a good article in the NY Times Magazine of a few Sundays ago
on these same kinds of methodological problems, but with respect to the
health effects or non-effects of hormone replacement therapy.

I think it's this one: "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?", By
GARY TAUBES, Published: September 16, 2007, but don't have electronic
access to check.

I read around five pages of that story a couple of weeks ago, and I would
have finished it if I was still editing articles on homone replacement
therapy. I did read the entire W.H.I. report when I was working in the field
because I was working on a estrogen/progesterone drug at the time.

If I recall, the WHI report was discussed, and did not turn out to be
the final answer either.


Taubes tells the story well, but keep in mind this is a story about the
efficacy of *treatments* with complex relationships of hormones over time,
at different periods in a woman's life. What you and I are talking about is
a simple correlation between eating hormone-laden beef and the early onset
of sexual characteristics. It's been well documented, particularly in some
extreme cases in Italy and Puerto Rico.

One reason to finish reading the article is to understand why caution is
advised. Even what looks like a "simple correlation" may be nothing of
the kind. We are forever discovering unsuspected complexities and
unsuspected confounding correlations.


There's a lot that isn't known about it, obviously, but the fact that masses
of kids eating the same things develop these characteristics, while other
kids don't, tells researchers that there's smoke here. You don't wait until
you have all the causative paths nailed down or you're likely to wind up
with a lot of cancer and other complications. It's clear that they have an
endocrine malfunction that would be best explained by ingesting
inappropriate hormones. That's how it works.

Not so fast there. It is not at all proven that we have found the
correct correlation, never mind causal chain, so it's far too soon to be
coming to a hard conclusion. For one thing, tracking exactly what
people eat is notoriously difficult - they don't remember or misremember
what they ate. Especially if they are overweight and dieting.

The converse is the various experiments on rats and other animals that
show that a little starvation increases life-span. There are many
theories on why this is so, and the research community is very much on
the case.

This is thought to be true in humans as well, although it's hard to come
by people willing to starve themselves to 80% of free-feeding weight,
and one would need to keep them under observation for 100 years, so this
study will never be done.

My favorite theory is that aging is caused by damage by substances
leaking away from the oxygen metabolism that powers us, and the more
food one has the faster one wears things out.

But what is quite clear is that diet matters a lot, in some very complex
ways.


That's why it's so frustrating
for people oriented toward physical science rather than life sciences,
particularly matters of human health.

Yes. Biological systems are far more complex than physical systems.

What is also clear is that genetics matters a lot, and differences
between people are always confounding us as well. At least all
electrons are identical.


BTW, you don't need a subscription anymore to get into the NYT archives.
It's all free again, as of a few weeks ago.

Oh? It wasn't obvious when I checked an hour ago. Oh. I see. They
want you to register, but it's free (perhaps aside from the spam).

Joe Gwinn

Ed Huntress wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them
alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans,
expecially
the
hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well endowed as they
are
now.


Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier
because
of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before
modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people
will
try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls
that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow
them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Actually, fat tissue is easy to distinguish from glandular tissue. And
that's not the only premature (or "precocious") sexual development that's
been tied to estradiol levels in meat.

Telling tissue types apart is easy for sure, but that was not the issue.

And "been tied to" is a statement of correlation; causation is not
proven, and that is the difficult thing.

It almost never is in new medical research, Joe. It's something that's hard
to get used to when you write and edit medical documents, but they're
fastidious about it. Eventually you gain a sense of when correlation is all
you're going to get, yet medicine marches ahead with many successes based
upon correlations. If they can't trace the intermediate biochemical pathways
(viciously hard in endocrine functions, like this one), they don't say
"caused by."

In fact, the phrase that shows up endlessly in the medical literature is "is
associated with." It makes my skin crawl, but we know what they're doing.


The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should forbid
the sale of ice cream?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and it has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.



It's pretty well established.

What is pretty well established? The problem here is that we have
confounding variables, integrated calories versus a whole slew of
additives, all of which increased at more or less the same time, making
it hard to disentangle correlation from cause from effect.

No, we don't. If we're medical researchers -- which you and I are not --
we're damned good at controlling for variables. If we don't, we never get
through peer review.

I've become much more cautious in my claims of causation after spending a
few years in the medical writing field. "Pretty well established" is
accurate. It's not a case of having no clue. It's a case of knowing what the
professional limits are to proof in that field of science.


There was a good article in the NY Times Magazine of a few Sundays ago
on these same kinds of methodological problems, but with respect to the
health effects or non-effects of hormone replacement therapy.

I think it's this one: "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?", By
GARY TAUBES, Published: September 16, 2007, but don't have electronic
access to check.

I read around five pages of that story a couple of weeks ago, and I would
have finished it if I was still editing articles on homone replacement
therapy. I did read the entire W.H.I. report when I was working in the field
because I was working on a estrogen/progesterone drug at the time.

Taubes tells the story well, but keep in mind this is a story about the
efficacy of *treatments* with complex relationships of hormones over time,
at different periods in a woman's life. What you and I are talking about is
a simple correlation between eating hormone-laden beef and the early onset
of sexual characteristics. It's been well documented, particularly in some
extreme cases in Italy and Puerto Rico.

There's a lot that isn't known about it, obviously, but the fact that masses
of kids eating the same things develop these characteristics, while other
kids don't, tells researchers that there's smoke here. You don't wait until
you have all the causative paths nailed down or you're likely to wind up
with a lot of cancer and other complications. It's clear that they have an
endocrine malfunction that would be best explained by injesting
inappropriate hormones. That's how it works. That's why it's so frustrating
for people oriented toward physical science rather than life sciences,
particularly matters of human health.

BTW, you don't need a subscription anymore to get into the NYT archives.
It's all free again, as of a few weeks ago.

--
Ed Huntress

And now they found that estrogen treatment in women has a correlation
wiht breast cancer. In the last 10 years or so the use of estrogen has
decreased as well as the cases of brest cancer in women.

John

wrote in message
...
On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 01:25:16 -0500, Don Foreman
wrote:

On Sat, 06 Oct 2007 06:16:42 GMT, "Tom Gardner"
wrote:


"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
roups.com...
Today it is beef....tomorrow toys...the next day...well something
else...fasteners, tires, tools?

It would seem that lack of quality control has just cost this company
its existence and its employees their livelihoods.

Should a company be responsible for its own quality control or is it a
responsibility of government to protect us?

I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks

TMT


Any business is like a barn with nothing but doors instead of walls.
It's
hard to make sure they are all closed. Yes, quality needs to be primary
and
take full focus. But, something can ALWAYS go wrong, even with the best
efforts of management. It just happens! I KNOW this first hand. Maybe
there should be an insurance available to prevent the demise of a
company.

Would you accept this attitude from your heart surgeon or your grocer?
"**** happens" is not an acceptable position for management to take.
It's a copout. Injuring customers is bad bidness. Management must
focus on profit, bidness is bidness, but if focus on profit superceds
responsibility and competence with consequent injury to customers then
management has failed and it's in the public interest for the biz to
be sucked dry and perish. Pick yer pony, take yer ride.

Actually your heart surgeon takes exactly that attitude. Next time you
visit your doctor ask him what the survival rate is for several types
of operations or sickness. You will find that doctors quite willing to
tell you what the percentage of fatality is for various procedures and
none of them are 100% survival.

Of course any doctor does everything he can to cure his patients but
as you so deftly put it, "**** happens".


Bruce in Bangkok
(brucepaigeATgmailDOTcom)

Wouldn't it be great to hold your doctor to the same standards as you hold
your car mechanic?

Tom Gardner wrote:

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
snip
I guess one real issue is should the consumer expect a product that
doesn't contain sh*t as an ingredient.

I mean consumers can be such a demanding lot.

And while examining the product deciding as to whether to purchase it,
how do they determine if it contains the percentage of sh*t that they
are willing to accept.


Gee, the next thing you're going to demand is no insect parts or rodent
feces in your flour! Good luck on that!

The answer is to allow Gamma-irradiated food!

The last batch of flour didnt have the max recommended amount of insect
parts. I was robbed.... I got to get my protien somewhere else.


John

On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 16:02:39 -0400, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

In article . com,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans, expecially
the
hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well endowed as they are now.


Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier because
of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people will
try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Joe Gwinn


We simply need only to look at the post war Japanese, and the asian
refugees who came to America after 1975

One of my clients is nearly 6' tall. Both parents ethnic Vietnamese.

Gunner

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them
alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans,
expecially the hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well
endowed as they are now.


Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been
detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier
because of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before
modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than
they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard
to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people
will try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls
that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow
them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Actually, fat tissue is easy to distinguish from glandular tissue. And
that's not the only premature (or "precocious") sexual development
that's
been tied to estradiol levels in meat.

Telling tissue types apart is easy for sure, but that was not the
issue.

Actually, it appears that fat tissue is also an endocrine tissue, and
makes hormones like estrogen. I don't know that anybody yet really
knows why.

Uh, have you been reading the articles or literature about rimonabant? We
could talk about that one at length, which is something I never expected
would present itself here, and I'll avoid at all costs now. g

Yes, I'm acquainted with the supposed endocrine functions of adipose tissue.
I'm not aware, though, that there's any indication that it makes estrogen.
Most of the research on endocrine functions of fat tissue has been on the
negative functions that relate to cardiometabolic risk: triglycerides,
cholesterol, and so on. I wrote a four-page leave-behind for physicians on
this very subject. But I'm about six months behind and we had dozens of
articles on the subject, running around 12 - 15 pages each, and I easily
could have missed something more recent.

Sanofi-Aventis, our client, was paying for all of the big studies. They have
a multi-billion dollar interest in the results.


It is known that women who have too little fat will stop menstruating,
and will thus become temporarily sterile. This often happens to female
atheletes, especially rabid runners.

This response is thought to be normal, an evolutionary reaction to the
fact that it takes a lot of energy to make a baby, and if a woman tries
without sufficient stored plus available energy (plus material), child
and woman may well die in the attempt.

So, during famines, it's best to suspend operations and wait for a
better day. So, this may be one reason why fat tissue is involved in
the endrocrine system. And the converse, surfeit, may be one cause of
early sexual maturation in girls.

The endocrine function of adipose tissue is just as marked in men, though.
And it's focused on intra-abdominal adipose tissue, rather than subcutaneous
fat. Young girls usually have mostly subcutaneous fat unless they're really
obese. Please don't ask me how I know this. d8-)



And "been tied to" is a statement of correlation; causation is not
proven, and that is the difficult thing.

It almost never is in new medical research, Joe. It's something that's
hard
to get used to when you write and edit medical documents, but they're
fastidious about it. Eventually you gain a sense of when correlation is
all
you're going to get, yet medicine marches ahead with many successes based
upon correlations. If they can't trace the intermediate biochemical
pathways
(viciously hard in endocrine functions, like this one), they don't say
"caused by."

In fact, the phrase that shows up endlessly in the medical literature is
"is
associated with." It makes my skin crawl, but we know what they're doing.

All true. But it reinforces my point that one should be very cautious.

Well, which reaction is the cautious one? The one that recognizes a marked
correlation and discourages the use of hormones in beef, or the one that
worries we may be overreacting, and that encourages waiting until we can
prove the causative pattern before doing anything? Medicine, out of
necessity, considers the first reaction to be the conservative reaction. The
second one is conservative only if the business interests involved are your
primary concern.



The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should forbid
the sale of ice cream?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and it
has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.

I have read many of them. I've subscribed to the New England Journal of
Medicine for many years, and I designed instruments for pharmacological
research in the 1970s.

Well, then, you know how rare it is, in endocrinology or other fields that
involve complexes of phenomena, to see any sure claim of causation. In your
reading about adipose tissue and endocrine functions, how often do you see
anything that says "and this causes this"? Not often, I'm sure.



It's pretty well established.

What is pretty well established? The problem here is that we have
confounding variables, integrated calories versus a whole slew of
additives, all of which increased at more or less the same time, making
it hard to disentangle correlation from cause from effect.

No, we don't. If we're medical researchers -- which you and I are not --
we're damned good at controlling for variables. If we don't, we never get
through peer review.

I've become much more cautious in my claims of causation after spending a
few years in the medical writing field. "Pretty well established" is
accurate. It's not a case of having no clue. It's a case of knowing what
the
professional limits are to proof in that field of science.

What is "pretty well established" is most often a correlation, in many
cases the correlation being a showing of the efficacy or comparative
efficacy of a treatment. Very often nobody has the slightest idea what
causes what, but if a treatment works, one just uses it. Years later
someone gets lucky, and the root cause becomes known.

True enough. But we aren't talking about a treatment. There is no treatment.
There is no efficacy. All there is at this point is a correlation between
consumption of meat that's been treated with hormones or estrogen-generating
nonsteroids and the precocious appearance of secondary sexual
characteristics in young girls, and secondary female characteristics in
young boys. Yes, the boys are developing a lot of breast tissue, and it
ain't baby fat.


The classic example is ulcers. You remember all those exhortations
about how stress causes ulcers, complete with various long-winded
rationales? Turned out to be complete nonsense, with ulcers being
caused by a bacterial infection of the stomach.


There was a good article in the NY Times Magazine of a few Sundays ago
on these same kinds of methodological problems, but with respect to the
health effects or non-effects of hormone replacement therapy.

I think it's this one: "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?", By
GARY TAUBES, Published: September 16, 2007, but don't have electronic
access to check.

I read around five pages of that story a couple of weeks ago, and I would
have finished it if I was still editing articles on homone replacement
therapy. I did read the entire W.H.I. report when I was working in the
field
because I was working on a estrogen/progesterone drug at the time.

If I recall, the WHI report was discussed, and did not turn out to be
the final answer either.

What the WHI report is about is the most extensive and thorough research
that's been done on the subject. It was a huge study. The data is still
being digested, and the complexities of single-hormone and dual-hormone
therapy (which is what I was writing about) still need more research. The
questions relate to what happens before, during, and after menopause, and
the up-and-down pattern of risks for cancer and other dangers. As I'm sure
you're aware, it's a very big subject, Joe.



Taubes tells the story well, but keep in mind this is a story about the
efficacy of *treatments* with complex relationships of hormones over
time,
at different periods in a woman's life. What you and I are talking about
is
a simple correlation between eating hormone-laden beef and the early
onset
of sexual characteristics. It's been well documented, particularly in
some
extreme cases in Italy and Puerto Rico.

One reason to finish reading the article is to understand why caution is
advised. Even what looks like a "simple correlation" may be nothing of
the kind. We are forever discovering unsuspected complexities and
unsuspected confounding correlations.

Again, we seem to have a different idea about what "caution" means in this
case. I don't care about the financial margins in the beef business. I do
care a lot about young kids who may be getting their bodies screwed up
because we didn't know enough about supplemental hormones in beef. We know
so much about the risks from hormones in general that I find it hard to
believe we allow so much of it in beef production.



There's a lot that isn't known about it, obviously, but the fact that
masses
of kids eating the same things develop these characteristics, while other
kids don't, tells researchers that there's smoke here. You don't wait
until
you have all the causative paths nailed down or you're likely to wind up
with a lot of cancer and other complications. It's clear that they have
an
endocrine malfunction that would be best explained by ingesting
inappropriate hormones. That's how it works.

Not so fast there. It is not at all proven that we have found the
correct correlation, never mind causal chain, so it's far too soon to be
coming to a hard conclusion. For one thing, tracking exactly what
people eat is notoriously difficult - they don't remember or misremember
what they ate. Especially if they are overweight and dieting.

The converse is the various experiments on rats and other animals that
show that a little starvation increases life-span. There are many
theories on why this is so, and the research community is very much on
the case.

This is thought to be true in humans as well, although it's hard to come
by people willing to starve themselves to 80% of free-feeding weight,
and one would need to keep them under observation for 100 years, so this
study will never be done.

My favorite theory is that aging is caused by damage by substances
leaking away from the oxygen metabolism that powers us, and the more
food one has the faster one wears things out.

But what is quite clear is that diet matters a lot, in some very complex
ways.


That's why it's so frustrating
for people oriented toward physical science rather than life sciences,
particularly matters of human health.

Yes. Biological systems are far more complex than physical systems.

What is also clear is that genetics matters a lot, and differences
between people are always confounding us as well. At least all
electrons are identical.

To bring this back to earth, I don't know of any research that indicates
obesity or leanness haven't been controlled in the studies that have drawn
correlations between eating hormone-laden beef and the early appearance of
secondary sexual characteristics. That's precisely the kind of thing that
would be controlled for in a study.

If you want to see the state of the research, there are a number of articles
on PubMed. There are other problems with hormones in beef, besides the
precocious sexual development.



BTW, you don't need a subscription anymore to get into the NYT archives.
It's all free again, as of a few weeks ago.

Oh? It wasn't obvious when I checked an hour ago. Oh. I see. They
want you to register, but it's free (perhaps aside from the spam).

I don't get any spam from the NYT, but you have to tell them what you want
to get. I get the previews of the weekend sections. And I'm glad I don't
have to pay for them anymore; $90/year for The Economist is quite enough.

--
Ed Huntress

"Gunner Asch" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 16:02:39 -0400, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

In article . com,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans,
expecially
the
hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well endowed as they are
now.


Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier because
of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people will
try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Joe Gwinn


We simply need only to look at the post war Japanese, and the asian
refugees who came to America after 1975

One of my clients is nearly 6' tall. Both parents ethnic Vietnamese.

Except that has nothing to do with premature sexual traits correlated to
ingesting hormone-laden beef, or anything else. That's simply about having
adequate nutrition to grow.

--
Ed Huntress

On Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:45:09 GMT, "Tom Gardner"
wrote:


Wouldn't it be great to hold your doctor to the same standards as you hold
your car mechanic?

When working as a mechanic/service manager I had both a doctor and a
teacher complain about the labour cost for fixing their expensive
cars, and being asked to bring the car back for a quick checkup (free
of charge) a few days after major repairs. I asked them both what they
did for a living. When the teacher told me he was a teacher I asked
what kind of guarantee he gave on his work. No answer. Not so much
complaints.
With the doctor, when he said he was a doctor I just told him I did
not have the luxury of burying my mistakes - I had to fix them - at my
expense.

Then a plumber friend of mine tells of how a customer complained that
his DOCTOR didn't charge as much as he did - Ed's reply? "Nor did I
when I was a doctor"!!!

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
snip
I guess one real issue is should the consumer expect a product that
doesn't contain sh*t as an ingredient.

I mean consumers can be such a demanding lot.

And while examining the product deciding as to whether to purchase it,
how do they determine if it contains the percentage of sh*t that they
are willing to accept.


Gee, the next thing you're going to demand is no insect parts or rodent
feces in your flour! Good luck on that!

The answer is to allow Gamma-irradiated food!

Ed Huntress wrote:

To bring this back to earth, I don't know of any research that indicates
obesity or leanness haven't been controlled in the studies that have drawn
correlations between eating hormone-laden beef and the early appearance of
secondary sexual characteristics. That's precisely the kind of thing that
would be controlled for in a study.

If you want to see the state of the research, there are a number of articles
on PubMed. There are other problems with hormones in beef, besides the
precocious sexual development.





I would think a good place to do research is in a closed community like
the Amish that live off their own beef they raise.


John

"John" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

To bring this back to earth, I don't know of any research that indicates
obesity or leanness haven't been controlled in the studies that have
drawn
correlations between eating hormone-laden beef and the early appearance
of
secondary sexual characteristics. That's precisely the kind of thing that
would be controlled for in a study.

If you want to see the state of the research, there are a number of
articles
on PubMed. There are other problems with hormones in beef, besides the
precocious sexual development.





I would think a good place to do research is in a closed community like
the Amish that live off their own beef they raise.

Yeah, maybe. But they also have a lot of genetic factors to account for,
because they've been a pretty closed gene pool for a very long time.

It's not difficult to select for non-obese subjects who eat certain
quantities of commercially produced beef, or to keep separate data for that
and many other factors. It's a big enough issue that it should be worth a
study with a very large cohort. But there are no pharma interests that I
know of that would stand to make a buck off of it. That means a government
study. We won't see that for a while, if ever.

--
Ed Huntress

On Oct 7, 10:36 pm, clare at snyder.on.ca wrote:
On Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:45:09 GMT, "Tom Gardner"

wrote:

Wouldn't it be great to hold your doctor to the same standards as you hold
your car mechanic?

When working as a mechanic/service manager I had both a doctor and a
teacher complain about the labour cost for fixing their expensive
cars, and being asked to bring the car back for a quick checkup (free
of charge) a few days after major repairs. I asked them both what they
did for a living. When the teacher told me he was a teacher I asked
what kind of guarantee he gave on his work. No answer. Not so much
complaints.
With the doctor, when he said he was a doctor I just told him I did
not have the luxury of burying my mistakes - I had to fix them - at my
expense.

Then a plumber friend of mine tells of how a customer complained that
his DOCTOR didn't charge as much as he did - Ed's reply? "Nor did I
when I was a doctor"!!!

--
Posted via a free Usenet account fromhttp://www.teranews.com

In my experience, many highly paid professionals have a problem with
those who fix their car, plumbing, house, etc. charging a fair rate.

They have no problem with their pay rates of course.

The world is full of fools with money.

TMT

On Oct 7, 8:59 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message

...





In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them
alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans,
expecially the hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well
endowed as they are now.

Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been
detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier
because of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before
modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than
they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard
to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people
will try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls
that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow
them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Actually, fat tissue is easy to distinguish from glandular tissue. And
that's not the only premature (or "precocious") sexual development
that's
been tied to estradiol levels in meat.

Telling tissue types apart is easy for sure, but that was not the
issue.

Actually, it appears that fat tissue is also an endocrine tissue, and
makes hormones like estrogen. I don't know that anybody yet really
knows why.

Uh, have you been reading the articles or literature about rimonabant? We
could talk about that one at length, which is something I never expected
would present itself here, and I'll avoid at all costs now. g

Yes, I'm acquainted with the supposed endocrine functions of adipose tissue.
I'm not aware, though, that there's any indication that it makes estrogen.
Most of the research on endocrine functions of fat tissue has been on the
negative functions that relate to cardiometabolic risk: triglycerides,
cholesterol, and so on. I wrote a four-page leave-behind for physicians on
this very subject. But I'm about six months behind and we had dozens of
articles on the subject, running around 12 - 15 pages each, and I easily
could have missed something more recent.

Sanofi-Aventis, our client, was paying for all of the big studies. They have
a multi-billion dollar interest in the results.



It is known that women who have too little fat will stop menstruating,
and will thus become temporarily sterile. This often happens to female
atheletes, especially rabid runners.

This response is thought to be normal, an evolutionary reaction to the
fact that it takes a lot of energy to make a baby, and if a woman tries
without sufficient stored plus available energy (plus material), child
and woman may well die in the attempt.

So, during famines, it's best to suspend operations and wait for a
better day. So, this may be one reason why fat tissue is involved in
the endrocrine system. And the converse, surfeit, may be one cause of
early sexual maturation in girls.

The endocrine function of adipose tissue is just as marked in men, though.
And it's focused on intra-abdominal adipose tissue, rather than subcutaneous
fat. Young girls usually have mostly subcutaneous fat unless they're really
obese. Please don't ask me how I know this. d8-)







And "been tied to" is a statement of correlation; causation is not
proven, and that is the difficult thing.

It almost never is in new medical research, Joe. It's something that's
hard
to get used to when you write and edit medical documents, but they're
fastidious about it. Eventually you gain a sense of when correlation is
all
you're going to get, yet medicine marches ahead with many successes based
upon correlations. If they can't trace the intermediate biochemical
pathways
(viciously hard in endocrine functions, like this one), they don't say
"caused by."

In fact, the phrase that shows up endlessly in the medical literature is
"is
associated with." It makes my skin crawl, but we know what they're doing.

All true. But it reinforces my point that one should be very cautious.

Well, which reaction is the cautious one? The one that recognizes a marked
correlation and discourages the use of hormones in beef, or the one that
worries we may be overreacting, and that encourages waiting until we can
prove the causative pattern before doing anything? Medicine, out of
necessity, considers the first reaction to be the conservative reaction. The
second one is conservative only if the business interests involved are your
primary concern.



The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should forbid
the sale of ice cream?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and it
has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.

I have read many of them. I've subscribed to the New England Journal of
Medicine for many years, and I designed instruments for pharmacological
research in the 1970s.

Well, then, you know how rare it is, in endocrinology or other fields that
involve complexes of phenomena, to see any sure claim of causation. In your
reading about adipose tissue and endocrine functions, how often do you see
anything that says "and this causes this"? Not often, I'm sure.







It's pretty well established.

What is pretty well established? The problem here is that we have
confounding variables, integrated calories versus a whole slew of
additives, all of which increased at more or less the same time, making
it hard to disentangle correlation from cause from effect.

No, we don't. If we're medical researchers -- which you and I are not --
we're damned good at controlling for variables. If we don't, we never get
through peer review.

I've become much more cautious in my claims of causation after spending a
few years in the medical writing field. "Pretty well established" is
accurate. It's not a case of having no clue. It's a case of knowing what
the
professional limits are to proof in that field of science.

What is "pretty well established" is most often a correlation, in many
cases the correlation being a showing of the efficacy or comparative
efficacy of a treatment. Very often nobody has the slightest idea what
causes what, but if a treatment works, one just uses it. Years later
someone gets lucky, and the root cause becomes known.

True enough. But we aren't talking about a treatment. There is no treatment.

On Oct 7, 8:59 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message

...





In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them
alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans,
expecially the hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well
endowed as they are now.

Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been
detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier
because of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before
modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than
they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard
to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people
will try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls
that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow
them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Actually, fat tissue is easy to distinguish from glandular tissue. And
that's not the only premature (or "precocious") sexual development
that's
been tied to estradiol levels in meat.

Telling tissue types apart is easy for sure, but that was not the
issue.

Actually, it appears that fat tissue is also an endocrine tissue, and
makes hormones like estrogen. I don't know that anybody yet really
knows why.

Uh, have you been reading the articles or literature about rimonabant? We
could talk about that one at length, which is something I never expected
would present itself here, and I'll avoid at all costs now. g

Yes, I'm acquainted with the supposed endocrine functions of adipose tissue.
I'm not aware, though, that there's any indication that it makes estrogen.
Most of the research on endocrine functions of fat tissue has been on the
negative functions that relate to cardiometabolic risk: triglycerides,
cholesterol, and so on. I wrote a four-page leave-behind for physicians on
this very subject. But I'm about six months behind and we had dozens of
articles on the subject, running around 12 - 15 pages each, and I easily
could have missed something more recent.

Sanofi-Aventis, our client, was paying for all of the big studies. They have
a multi-billion dollar interest in the results.



It is known that women who have too little fat will stop menstruating,
and will thus become temporarily sterile. This often happens to female
atheletes, especially rabid runners.

This response is thought to be normal, an evolutionary reaction to the
fact that it takes a lot of energy to make a baby, and if a woman tries
without sufficient stored plus available energy (plus material), child
and woman may well die in the attempt.

So, during famines, it's best to suspend operations and wait for a
better day. So, this may be one reason why fat tissue is involved in
the endrocrine system. And the converse, surfeit, may be one cause of
early sexual maturation in girls.

The endocrine function of adipose tissue is just as marked in men, though.
And it's focused on intra-abdominal adipose tissue, rather than subcutaneous
fat. Young girls usually have mostly subcutaneous fat unless they're really
obese. Please don't ask me how I know this. d8-)







And "been tied to" is a statement of correlation; causation is not
proven, and that is the difficult thing.

It almost never is in new medical research, Joe. It's something that's
hard
to get used to when you write and edit medical documents, but they're
fastidious about it. Eventually you gain a sense of when correlation is
all
you're going to get, yet medicine marches ahead with many successes based
upon correlations. If they can't trace the intermediate biochemical
pathways
(viciously hard in endocrine functions, like this one), they don't say
"caused by."

In fact, the phrase that shows up endlessly in the medical literature is
"is
associated with." It makes my skin crawl, but we know what they're doing.

All true. But it reinforces my point that one should be very cautious.

Well, which reaction is the cautious one? The one that recognizes a marked
correlation and discourages the use of hormones in beef, or the one that
worries we may be overreacting, and that encourages waiting until we can
prove the causative pattern before doing anything? Medicine, out of
necessity, considers the first reaction to be the conservative reaction. The
second one is conservative only if the business interests involved are your
primary concern.



The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should forbid
the sale of ice cream?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and it
has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.

I have read many of them. I've subscribed to the New England Journal of
Medicine for many years, and I designed instruments for pharmacological
research in the 1970s.

Well, then, you know how rare it is, in endocrinology or other fields that
involve complexes of phenomena, to see any sure claim of causation. In your
reading about adipose tissue and endocrine functions, how often do you see
anything that says "and this causes this"? Not often, I'm sure.







It's pretty well established.

What is pretty well established? The problem here is that we have
confounding variables, integrated calories versus a whole slew of
additives, all of which increased at more or less the same time, making
it hard to disentangle correlation from cause from effect.

No, we don't. If we're medical researchers -- which you and I are not --
we're damned good at controlling for variables. If we don't, we never get
through peer review.

I've become much more cautious in my claims of causation after spending a
few years in the medical writing field. "Pretty well established" is
accurate. It's not a case of having no clue. It's a case of knowing what
the
professional limits are to proof in that field of science.

What is "pretty well established" is most often a correlation, in many
cases the correlation being a showing of the efficacy or comparative
efficacy of a treatment. Very often nobody has the slightest idea what
causes what, but if a treatment works, one just uses it. Years later
someone gets lucky, and the root cause becomes known.

True enough. But we aren't talking about a treatment. There is no treatment.

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
ups.com...

snip

My and my family's approach is to eat as little meat as possible.

Better safe than sorry.

Probably a good idea, at least for the adults. As for the children, probably
not a good idea, unless you're very knowledgeable about nutrition.

--
Ed Huntress

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
s.com...
On Oct 7, 8:59 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimonabant

On 15 June 2007 the BBC News reported [6] that a committee advising
the US FDA has voted not to recommend the drug's approval because of
concerns over suicidality, depression and other related side effects
associated with use of the drug.

And on June 30th, half of my company, including me, got laid off because of
it. d8-) I spent more than eight months working on that drug. Imagine our
suprise when it didn't get approved.

Sounds fun...no thanks.

Ah, the FDA has no sense of humor.

--
Ed Huntress

On Mon, 8 Oct 2007 00:55:22 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
oups.com...

snip

My and my family's approach is to eat as little meat as possible.

Better safe than sorry.

Probably a good idea, at least for the adults. As for the children, probably
not a good idea, unless you're very knowledgeable about nutrition.


Another option is to buy locally raised beef from a farmer you know -
who you know does not "force" his beef.

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Larry Jaques wrote:

Metalwise, I'm too cheap to buy a real masonry hoe. What's the best
way (type of holesaw?) to put a pair of 2 or 2-1/2" holes in the
blade? http://tinyurl.com/32mo86 I'd play with a plasma cutter if I
had one.

Hole saw in your drill press, keep the speed down, and lots of oil.

Wes

Ed Huntress wrote:

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
ups.com...

On Oct 7, 11:58 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message

oups.com...
On Oct 7, 8:59 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimonabant


On 15 June 2007 the BBC News reported [6] that a committee advising
the US FDA has voted not to recommend the drug's approval because of
concerns over suicidality, depression and other related side effects
associated with use of the drug.

And on June 30th, half of my company, including me, got laid off because
of
it. d8-) I spent more than eight months working on that drug. Imagine our
suprise when it didn't get approved.


Sounds fun...no thanks.

Ah, the FDA has no sense of humor.

--
Ed Huntress

Sorry to hear of the layoff.


I'm not. I was ready to terminate my 3-1/2 year venture into medical
writing, anyway. It pays well but it's really boring to a backyard mechanic
like me.


I have seen first hand similar side effects in people who take
medications...not very fun when you bury a person.


Rimonabant (generic name: brand name is Acomplia in Europe, will be Zimulti
in the US) probably will be approved, with restrictions, in just under three
years from now. It's a long story but it's a very, very good drug that
already has copycats. It was approved in Germany and a few other countries
several years ago.

The FDA is nervous because the mechanism of action is new, and they can't
yet identify who's at risk for the extremely rare depressive effects.
They're super gun shy after the Vioxx fiasco. The drug works by blocking the
endocannabinoid receptors, which are the ones that give you the munchies
when you smoke marijuana, and through some direct endocrine interventions
that are related to what Joe was talking about. Really cool and interesting,
and all new science that's still shaking out.

I've had six openings from headhunters and several unsolicited job offers.
I'm not suffering.

--
Ed Huntress


I guess the machining industry is not an option.


John

"john" wrote in message
...


Ed Huntress wrote:

snip


I've had six openings from headhunters and several unsolicited job
offers. I'm not suffering.

--
Ed Huntress

I guess the machining industry is not an option.

Not any more. I'm not getting involved again in the industry itself.
However, I am doing some writing on the subject of medical device
manufacturing.

--
Ed Huntress

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them
alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans,
expecially the hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well
endowed as they are now.

Speak for yourself there. I've also noticed that their legs get longer
by the year.


Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been
detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier
because of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before
modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than
they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard
to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people
will try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls
that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow
them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Actually, fat tissue is easy to distinguish from glandular tissue. And
that's not the only premature (or "precocious") sexual development
that's
been tied to estradiol levels in meat.

Telling tissue types apart is easy for sure, but that was not the
issue.

Actually, it appears that fat tissue is also an endocrine tissue, and
makes hormones like estrogen. I don't know that anybody yet really
knows why.

Uh, have you been reading the articles or literature about rimonabant? We
could talk about that one at length, which is something I never expected
would present itself here, and I'll avoid at all costs now. g

Can't say I've had the pleasure.


Yes, I'm acquainted with the supposed endocrine functions of adipose tissue.
I'm not aware, though, that there's any indication that it makes estrogen.
Most of the research on endocrine functions of fat tissue has been on the
negative functions that relate to cardiometabolic risk: triglycerides,
cholesterol, and so on. I wrote a four-page leave-behind for physicians on
this very subject. But I'm about six months behind and we had dozens of
articles on the subject, running around 12 - 15 pages each, and I easily
could have missed something more recent.

Sanofi-Aventis, our client, was paying for all of the big studies. They have
a multi-billion dollar interest in the results.

Estrogen production in fat is well established it seems. Google is your
friend. Here is one article:
http://www.cancerportfolio.org/abstract.jsp?SID=159653&ProjectID=312260
..


It is known that women who have too little fat will stop menstruating,
and will thus become temporarily sterile. This often happens to female
atheletes, especially rabid runners.

This response is thought to be normal, an evolutionary reaction to the
fact that it takes a lot of energy to make a baby, and if a woman tries
without sufficient stored plus available energy (plus material), child
and woman may well die in the attempt.

So, during famines, it's best to suspend operations and wait for a
better day. So, this may be one reason why fat tissue is involved in
the endrocrine system. And the converse, surfeit, may be one cause of
early sexual maturation in girls.

The endocrine function of adipose tissue is just as marked in men, though.
And it's focused on intra-abdominal adipose tissue, rather than subcutaneous
fat. Young girls usually have mostly subcutaneous fat unless they're really
obese. Please don't ask me how I know this. d8-)

Hmm. I know what you want us to think, but really is it that you were
doing autopsies on them? How else could you know the amount of visceral
fat?


And "been tied to" is a statement of correlation; causation is not
proven, and that is the difficult thing.

It almost never is in new medical research, Joe. It's something that's
hard
to get used to when you write and edit medical documents, but they're
fastidious about it. Eventually you gain a sense of when correlation is
all
you're going to get, yet medicine marches ahead with many successes based
upon correlations. If they can't trace the intermediate biochemical
pathways
(viciously hard in endocrine functions, like this one), they don't say
"caused by."

In fact, the phrase that shows up endlessly in the medical literature is
"is
associated with." It makes my skin crawl, but we know what they're doing.

All true. But it reinforces my point that one should be very cautious.

Well, which reaction is the cautious one? The one that recognizes a marked
correlation and discourages the use of hormones in beef, or the one that
worries we may be overreacting, and that encourages waiting until we can
prove the causative pattern before doing anything? Medicine, out of
necessity, considers the first reaction to be the conservative reaction. The
second one is conservative only if the business interests involved are your
primary concern.

The caution is about jumping to conclusions. Aside from accusations of
evil motive, there is lots of experience that would make one hold back,
waiting for the smoke to clear.


The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should forbid
the sale of ice cream?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and it
has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.

I have read many of them. I've subscribed to the New England Journal of
Medicine for many years, and I designed instruments for pharmacological
research in the 1970s.

Well, then, you know how rare it is, in endocrinology or other fields that
involve complexes of phenomena, to see any sure claim of causation. In your
reading about adipose tissue and endocrine functions, how often do you see
anything that says "and this causes this"? Not often, I'm sure.

Right. But the point is that this is *very* complex and ill-understood,
so it's unlikely that we really have the slightest idea what's really
going on. It *will* be sorted out, because there is a billion-dollar
business awaiting the evil company that figures it out. And likely a
Nobel Prize or two.


It's pretty well established.

What is pretty well established? The problem here is that we have
confounding variables, integrated calories versus a whole slew of
additives, all of which increased at more or less the same time, making
it hard to disentangle correlation from cause from effect.

No, we don't. If we're medical researchers -- which you and I are not --
we're damned good at controlling for variables. If we don't, we never get
through peer review.

I've become much more cautious in my claims of causation after spending a
few years in the medical writing field. "Pretty well established" is
accurate. It's not a case of having no clue. It's a case of knowing what
the
professional limits are to proof in that field of science.

What is "pretty well established" is most often a correlation, in many
cases the correlation being a showing of the efficacy or comparative
efficacy of a treatment. Very often nobody has the slightest idea what
causes what, but if a treatment works, one just uses it. Years later
someone gets lucky, and the root cause becomes known.

True enough. But we aren't talking about a treatment. There is no treatment.
There is no efficacy. All there is at this point is a correlation between
consumption of meat that's been treated with hormones or estrogen-generating
nonsteroids and the precocious appearance of secondary sexual
characteristics in young girls, and secondary female characteristics in
young boys. Yes, the boys are developing a lot of breast tissue, and it
ain't baby fat.

Sure. Treatments were the example. And if you buy the theory that
substance X in the food supply causes bad thing Y, the obvious policy
"treatment" is to forbid substance X. It's called "reasoning by
analogy".


The classic example is ulcers. You remember all those exhortations
about how stress causes ulcers, complete with various long-winded
rationales? Turned out to be complete nonsense, with ulcers being
caused by a bacterial infection of the stomach.


There was a good article in the NY Times Magazine of a few Sundays ago
on these same kinds of methodological problems, but with respect to the
health effects or non-effects of hormone replacement therapy.

I think it's this one: "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?", By
GARY TAUBES, Published: September 16, 2007, but don't have electronic
access to check.

I read around five pages of that story a couple of weeks ago, and I would
have finished it if I was still editing articles on homone replacement
therapy. I did read the entire W.H.I. report when I was working in the
field
because I was working on a estrogen/progesterone drug at the time.

If I recall, the WHI report was discussed, and did not turn out to be
the final answer either.

What the WHI report is about is the most extensive and thorough research
that's been done on the subject. It was a huge study. The data is still
being digested, and the complexities of single-hormone and dual-hormone
therapy (which is what I was writing about) still need more research. The
questions relate to what happens before, during, and after menopause, and
the up-and-down pattern of risks for cancer and other dangers. As I'm sure
you're aware, it's a very big subject, Joe.

Big, and ill-understood.


Taubes tells the story well, but keep in mind this is a story about the
efficacy of *treatments* with complex relationships of hormones over
time,
at different periods in a woman's life. What you and I are talking about
is
a simple correlation between eating hormone-laden beef and the early
onset
of sexual characteristics. It's been well documented, particularly in
some
extreme cases in Italy and Puerto Rico.

One reason to finish reading the article is to understand why caution is
advised. Even what looks like a "simple correlation" may be nothing of
the kind. We are forever discovering unsuspected complexities and
unsuspected confounding correlations.

Again, we seem to have a different idea about what "caution" means in this
case. I don't care about the financial margins in the beef business. I do
care a lot about young kids who may be getting their bodies screwed up
because we didn't know enough about supplemental hormones in beef. We know
so much about the risks from hormones in general that I find it hard to
believe we allow so much of it in beef production.

We seem to be sliding towards the European "precautionary principle"
here, a form of better-safe-that-sorry. The problem is that the effects
of a new technology cannot be known in advance, and if anything like the
precautionary principle had been enforced in Europe and the US over the
last 300 years, most of the modern world would have been smothered at
birth.

The stronger form is to read the futurist predictions of the past - as a
rule, they got exactly nothing right, both positive and negative.
People just aren't very good at telling the future.


There's a lot that isn't known about it, obviously, but the fact that
masses
of kids eating the same things develop these characteristics, while other
kids don't, tells researchers that there's smoke here. You don't wait
until
you have all the causative paths nailed down or you're likely to wind up
with a lot of cancer and other complications. It's clear that they have
an
endocrine malfunction that would be best explained by ingesting
inappropriate hormones. That's how it works.

Not so fast there. It is not at all proven that we have found the
correct correlation, never mind causal chain, so it's far too soon to be
coming to a hard conclusion. For one thing, tracking exactly what
people eat is notoriously difficult - they don't remember or misremember
what they ate. Especially if they are overweight and dieting.

The converse is the various experiments on rats and other animals that
show that a little starvation increases life-span. There are many
theories on why this is so, and the research community is very much on
the case.

This is thought to be true in humans as well, although it's hard to come
by people willing to starve themselves to 80% of free-feeding weight,
and one would need to keep them under observation for 100 years, so this
study will never be done.

My favorite theory is that aging is caused by damage by substances
leaking away from the oxygen metabolism that powers us, and the more
food one has the faster one wears things out.

But what is quite clear is that diet matters a lot, in some very complex
ways.


That's why it's so frustrating
for people oriented toward physical science rather than life sciences,
particularly matters of human health.

Yes. Biological systems are far more complex than physical systems.

What is also clear is that genetics matters a lot, and differences
between people are always confounding us as well. At least all
electrons are identical.

To bring this back to earth, I don't know of any research that indicates
obesity or leanness haven't been controlled in the studies that have drawn
correlations between eating hormone-laden beef and the early appearance of
secondary sexual characteristics. That's precisely the kind of thing that
would be controlled for in a study.

Well, they try I'm sure. But it's very complex, and good feeding early
in life doesn't necessarily lead to obesity, so current weight isn't a
very useful proxy for general nutrition.

A classic example is immigrants and their children, who tower above
their parents. Or 50-year-old Chinese immigrants who grow a few inches
after arriving in the US and eating the far richer diet. But their kids
still tower over them.

Another thing that nags at me is that hormones in meat are not new.
People have been eating the meat of male and female animals forever, and
this meat of necessity had male and female hormones in it, hormones made
by the critter that grew the meat. It isn't obvious that the addition
of a little more hormone (if indeed there is any left by the time of
slaughter) has any material effect compared to what is already naturally
there.


If you want to see the state of the research, there are a number of articles
on PubMed. There are other problems with hormones in beef, besides the
precocious sexual development.

No doubt. But I'll tell you my hobby horse with respect to drugs and
animal husbandry -- the use of antibiotics by the ton in animal feed.
My feeling is that this is a major cause of the development of multiple
drug resistant bacteria. If I were King, use of antibiotics in animal
feed would be forbidden outright.


BTW, you don't need a subscription anymore to get into the NYT archives.
It's all free again, as of a few weeks ago.

Oh? It wasn't obvious when I checked an hour ago. Oh. I see. They
want you to register, but it's free (perhaps aside from the spam).

I don't get any spam from the NYT, but you have to tell them what you want
to get. I get the previews of the weekend sections. And I'm glad I don't
have to pay for them anymore; $90/year for The Economist is quite enough.

OK. Thanks for the pointer.

Joe Gwinn

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...

snip


Estrogen production in fat is well established it seems. Google is your
friend. Here is one article:
http://www.cancerportfolio.org/abstract.jsp?SID=159653&ProjectID=312260

That's about post-menopausal women, Joe. As far as I've ever heard, estrogen
in girls and young women is produced by the ovaries. And we're talking here
about precocious development of sexual characteristics in girls.

But there are a lot of endocrine functions associated with adipose tissue,
and I'm sure there's more to it than I had to study. I was studying
metabolic syndrome. Among the complex of endocrine functions that go on
within adipose tissue, the studies I've worked with focus on their mediating
functions in the production of hormones secreted in other glands (insulin in
the pancreas; estrogen in the ovaries; etc.).


The endocrine function of adipose tissue is just as marked in men,
though.
And it's focused on intra-abdominal adipose tissue, rather than
subcutaneous
fat. Young girls usually have mostly subcutaneous fat unless they're
really
obese. Please don't ask me how I know this. d8-)

Hmm. I know what you want us to think, but really is it that you were
doing autopsies on them? How else could you know the amount of visceral
fat?

CT scans. I've had to look at dozens of them, which is a little
disconcerting as you're looking at a computer image of what amounts to a
human steak, well-marbled. d8-(

The visceral, or intra-abdominal fat shows up as fat accumulations between
the internal organs, rather than under the skin, as with subcutaneous fat.


Well, which reaction is the cautious one? The one that recognizes a
marked
correlation and discourages the use of hormones in beef, or the one that
worries we may be overreacting, and that encourages waiting until we can
prove the causative pattern before doing anything? Medicine, out of
necessity, considers the first reaction to be the conservative reaction.
The
second one is conservative only if the business interests involved are
your
primary concern.

The caution is about jumping to conclusions. Aside from accusations of
evil motive, there is lots of experience that would make one hold back,
waiting for the smoke to clear.

Hormone use in beef cattle and other meat animals has been studied for 50
years or more, and it has been a political football for at least that long.
Our chances of sorting out the facts at this point are pretty slim, beyond
the fact that the types of research conducted in the past relate to fairly
controlled use of hormones and to relatively insensitive measures of the
effects in humans. The levels of proof demanded by the FDA today for drugs
for human use, for example, tend to pay more attention to outliers and to
potential misuse, such as a feedlot operator who gets a little too frisky in
the use of steroids in cattle.

But I'm less interested in the scientific argument, which we can't settle
here, than in what you're implying about the burden of proof. Are you
suggesting that when the data is inconclusive, we should allow the use of a
drug or food additive until the mechanism of action can be proven to have
harmful effects?

Regarding "evil motive," the issue is marketing and the inescapable
structure of incentives in business, and their inappropriateness to
something like pharmaceuticals, not evil intent. Marketing drugs is what I
did, and I often was given explicit instructions about what to emphasize and
what to soft-pedal. That's the way the pharmaceutical industry works. It's a
business, not a philanthropy, and the object is to sell as many drugs as you
can at the highest price you can get. The ethical conflict that often leads
to is rampant in both food and drug production and sales.

The story about rimonabant is a good example. I wrote literature about that
drug that was intended to educate doctors, public health officials, and
corporate benefits managers about the health benefits of the drug, which are
quite real. What I didn't know, because the research on it was not yet
published and was known primarily by the manufacturer -- they didn't even
tell us about it -- is that there have been incidences of depression and
even suicide among some users of the drug. It could be argued that the data
is inconclusive, which I believe is true. But the way it was handled kept
any mention of that problem out of the marketing literature. Fortunately the
FDA regulations on reporting required that they inform the FDA about it. The
FDA denied approval of the drug pending further studies, which will take
roughly three years to complete.

"Jumping to conclusions" is what the FDA and other regulatory bodies around
the world do every day. That's their job and their responsibility. That's
exactly what we *want* them to do. They have to be both suspicious and
cautious. Protecting the public's health requires caution in the use of
agents, whether they're drugs in humans or chemicals in food, based on
correlations that usually are uncertain at the time when an appearance of
risk appears in preliminary studies. The burden of proof is, and must be, on
the sellers of those agents to prove they're safe, not the other way around.
And when medical science advances and makes more sensitive proofs available,
those drugs and food additives may have to prove themselves once again.
There should be no grandfather clauses for food or drugs.



The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive
and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile
accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should
forbid
the sale of ice cream?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most
medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and
it
has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.

I have read many of them. I've subscribed to the New England Journal
of
Medicine for many years, and I designed instruments for pharmacological
research in the 1970s.

Well, then, you know how rare it is, in endocrinology or other fields
that
involve complexes of phenomena, to see any sure claim of causation. In
your
reading about adipose tissue and endocrine functions, how often do you
see
anything that says "and this causes this"? Not often, I'm sure.

Right. But the point is that this is *very* complex and ill-understood,
so it's unlikely that we really have the slightest idea what's really
going on.

It is complex. Studying the mediative pathways in endocrine functions is one
of the bleeding edges of medical research. You and I are unlikely to be able
to sort them out, although, as with global warming, the preponderance of
historical studies fall on one side -- the side that says hormones in beef
are OK, in this case.

I remain suspicious because I've seen the effects of business incentives,
which are normal and healthy in non-health-related cases, as they operate in
the food and drug industries. They don't work in the favor of consumers,
IMO. And specific studies continue to raise a red flag here and there.

It *will* be sorted out, because there is a billion-dollar
business awaiting the evil company that figures it out. And likely a
Nobel Prize or two.

When you figure out how it would be in the financial interest of a company
to show that hormones in beef are bad for our health, let us know. The
opposite is true in the extreme. And that's the way the whole pharma
industry operates: there is no incentive and no money for studies that show
a drug is bad for you. The incentive is almost exclusively to try to show
that they're good.

Excuse me for trimming the rest of this message off, but I think we're
repeating ourselves. And we probably don't disagree very much, anyway. I
recognize what you're saying about the people who keep warning that the sky
is falling, on this as well as many other issues. I just happen to apply a
different standard of proof to matters of the things we put in our bodies.

I hope we didn't make too many people fall asleep here. g

--
Ed Huntress

On Tue, 9 Oct 2007 10:13:32 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
snip
Our chances of sorting out the facts at this point are pretty slim, beyond
the fact that the types of research conducted in the past relate to fairly
controlled use of hormones and to relatively insensitive measures of the
effects in humans.
snip
The same types of historical epidemiological/demographic studies
that first indicated a connection between lung cancer and
asbestos and tobacco can still [and should be] be run.

Of major concern is the proliferation of steroid/hormone *LIKE*
compounds in the environment produced in many chemical reactions,
for example in the production of plastics. Many of these have
never been tested or indeed even seen before in nature, and their
activity/actions are totally unknown.

One area of concern should be the continual fall in sperm count
from at least 1900 to present in all species checked, including
humans. There appears to be a plateau affect in that there is an
abrupt fall in fertility to near zero as the sperm count
decreases, and that the human sperm count is rapidly nearing this
point in many urban areas.

Another area of concern is the rapid rise in hermaphrodite fish
and reptiles in the watersheds and rivers downstream from large
urban areas, which frequently include other large urban areas.

There may well be a drastic drop in human caused global warming,
just not from what the "green community" had planned.


Unka' George [George McDuffee]
============
Merchants have no country.
The mere spot they stand on
does not constitute so strong an attachment
as that from which they draw their gains.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826),
U.S. president. Letter, 17 March 1814.

"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
...

snip


Another area of concern is the rapid rise in hermaphrodite fish
and reptiles in the watersheds and rivers downstream from large
urban areas, which frequently include other large urban areas.

There may well be a drastic drop in human caused global warming,
just not from what the "green community" had planned.

Gee, what an optimist. I'll bet you read Malthus for fun, George. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress

Too_Many_Tools wrote:

In my experience, many highly paid professionals have a problem with
those who fix their car, plumbing, house, etc. charging a fair rate.

That same sentiment goes for plant managers that think the maintenance
tech's that troubleshoot and repair their CNC's and assembly automation are
dime a dozen knuckle draggers.

I know the person that properly repairs my automobile is a real technician,
I've picked the repair shop that I use with a bit of care. However, I'm
pretty good at fixing my car myself. My hourly rate at work doesn't match
his hourly rate + shop overhead + reasonable profit so I don't farm out
much. Besides, an automotive break down is often a cost justifiable reason
to buy yet another tool. Buying the factory service manuals when you buy
the car pays off really well if you are a high mileage type like me. I
figure a decent vehicle, properly maintained should do 250,000 miles.

Wes

On Fri, 05 Oct 2007 20:05:04 -0700, Too_Many_Tools wrote:

Today it is beef....tomorrow toys...the next day...well something
else...fasteners, tires, tools?

It would seem that lack of quality control has just cost this company its
existence and its employees their livelihoods.

Should a company be responsible for its own quality control or is it a
responsibility of government to protect us?


Taking responsibility for one's own quality control is about the only
effective way to make government controls unnecessary.

Depending on government to protect you is just stupid.

Thanks,
Rich

"Richard The Dreaded Libertarian" wrote in message
news
On Fri, 05 Oct 2007 20:05:04 -0700, Too_Many_Tools wrote:

Today it is beef....tomorrow toys...the next day...well something
else...fasteners, tires, tools?

It would seem that lack of quality control has just cost this company its
existence and its employees their livelihoods.

Should a company be responsible for its own quality control or is it a
responsibility of government to protect us?


Taking responsibility for one's own quality control is about the only
effective way to make government controls unnecessary.

Depending on government to protect you is just stupid.

And how do you know what's safe, Rich? Do you have a full set of
chromatography equipment at home, for analysis? Or do you eat nothing but
things you grow yourself?

--
Ed Huntress

Ed Huntress wrote:

"john" wrote in message
...


Ed Huntress wrote:


snip

I've had six openings from headhunters and several unsolicited job
offers. I'm not suffering.

--
Ed Huntress

I guess the machining industry is not an option.


Not any more. I'm not getting involved again in the industry itself.
However, I am doing some writing on the subject of medical device
manufacturing.

--
Ed Huntress




Do you get to go into any machine shops making medical devices? I
bet they take a real hard look at you when they find out a medical
writer knows more than they do about machining.

John

"john" wrote in message
...


Ed Huntress wrote:

"john" wrote in message
...


Ed Huntress wrote:


snip

I've had six openings from headhunters and several unsolicited job
offers. I'm not suffering.

--
Ed Huntress

I guess the machining industry is not an option.


Not any more. I'm not getting involved again in the industry itself.
However, I am doing some writing on the subject of medical device
manufacturing.

--
Ed Huntress




Do you get to go into any machine shops making medical devices?

Not yet, but I will soon.

I bet they take a real hard look at you when they find out a medical
writer knows more than they do about machining.

Ha! Well, I'm not much of a machinist. I just studied and wrote about it for
30 years, and I was an operator, not a machinist, in a machine shop I had
once invested in.

I think it's more of a surprise when I talk to medical device manufacturers
and they find out I know something about the medical part.

--
Ed Huntress

On Tue, 9 Oct 2007 14:58:34 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
snip
There may well be a drastic drop in human caused global warming,
just not from what the "green community" had planned.

Gee, what an optimist. I'll bet you read Malthus for fun, George. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress
========
Just a variation of the traditional mother's advice

Be careful what you wish for --
You just might get it!

For a similar follow-up for all the people that think Americans'
drive too much and have too many/owerful/nice cars and need a
lesson click on
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071009...p/qataropecoil

With friends like these ...
Unka' George [George McDuffee]
============
Merchants have no country.
The mere spot they stand on
does not constitute so strong an attachment
as that from which they draw their gains.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826),
U.S. president. Letter, 17 March 1814.

"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 9 Oct 2007 14:58:34 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
snip
There may well be a drastic drop in human caused global warming,
just not from what the "green community" had planned.

Gee, what an optimist. I'll bet you read Malthus for fun, George. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress
========
Just a variation of the traditional mother's advice

Be careful what you wish for --
You just might get it!

For a similar follow-up for all the people that think Americans'
drive too much and have too many/owerful/nice cars and need a
lesson click on
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071009...p/qataropecoil

With friends like these ...
Unka' George [George McDuffee]

Think about their situation. They're rich as Croesus, but only as long as
they can suck that nice black goo out from under their stinking desert.
Qatar may actually have a snowball's chance in hell of prospering even after
the oil goes away, but I doubt it very much.

So, what do you do? Get all you can for it while it lasts. It's the American
way.

Let's just hope that the new American way includes getting out from under
their thumb before things get dicey.

--
Ed Huntress

On Oct 9, 9:13 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message

...

snip



Estrogen production in fat is well established it seems. Google is your
friend. Here is one article:
http://www.cancerportfolio.org/abstract.jsp?SID=159653&ProjectID=312260

That's about post-menopausal women, Joe. As far as I've ever heard, estrogen
in girls and young women is produced by the ovaries. And we're talking here
about precocious development of sexual characteristics in girls.

But there are a lot of endocrine functions associated with adipose tissue,
and I'm sure there's more to it than I had to study. I was studying
metabolic syndrome. Among the complex of endocrine functions that go on
within adipose tissue, the studies I've worked with focus on their mediating
functions in the production of hormones secreted in other glands (insulin in
the pancreas; estrogen in the ovaries; etc.).



The endocrine function of adipose tissue is just as marked in men,
though.
And it's focused on intra-abdominal adipose tissue, rather than
subcutaneous
fat. Young girls usually have mostly subcutaneous fat unless they're
really
obese. Please don't ask me how I know this. d8-)

Hmm. I know what you want us to think, but really is it that you were
doing autopsies on them? How else could you know the amount of visceral
fat?

CT scans. I've had to look at dozens of them, which is a little
disconcerting as you're looking at a computer image of what amounts to a
human steak, well-marbled. d8-(

The visceral, or intra-abdominal fat shows up as fat accumulations between
the internal organs, rather than under the skin, as with subcutaneous fat.



Well, which reaction is the cautious one? The one that recognizes a
marked
correlation and discourages the use of hormones in beef, or the one that
worries we may be overreacting, and that encourages waiting until we can
prove the causative pattern before doing anything? Medicine, out of
necessity, considers the first reaction to be the conservative reaction.
The
second one is conservative only if the business interests involved are
your
primary concern.

The caution is about jumping to conclusions. Aside from accusations of
evil motive, there is lots of experience that would make one hold back,
waiting for the smoke to clear.

Hormone use in beef cattle and other meat animals has been studied for 50
years or more, and it has been a political football for at least that long.
Our chances of sorting out the facts at this point are pretty slim, beyond
the fact that the types of research conducted in the past relate to fairly
controlled use of hormones and to relatively insensitive measures of the
effects in humans. The levels of proof demanded by the FDA today for drugs
for human use, for example, tend to pay more attention to outliers and to
potential misuse, such as a feedlot operator who gets a little too frisky in
the use of steroids in cattle.

But I'm less interested in the scientific argument, which we can't settle
here, than in what you're implying about the burden of proof. Are you
suggesting that when the data is inconclusive, we should allow the use of a
drug or food additive until the mechanism of action can be proven to have
harmful effects?

Regarding "evil motive," the issue is marketing and the inescapable
structure of incentives in business, and their inappropriateness to
something like pharmaceuticals, not evil intent. Marketing drugs is what I
did, and I often was given explicit instructions about what to emphasize and
what to soft-pedal. That's the way the pharmaceutical industry works. It's a
business, not a philanthropy, and the object is to sell as many drugs as you
can at the highest price you can get. The ethical conflict that often leads
to is rampant in both food and drug production and sales.

The story about rimonabant is a good example. I wrote literature about that
drug that was intended to educate doctors, public health officials, and
corporate benefits managers about the health benefits of the drug, which are
quite real. What I didn't know, because the research on it was not yet
published and was known primarily by the manufacturer -- they didn't even
tell us about it -- is that there have been incidences of depression and
even suicide among some users of the drug. It could be argued that the data
is inconclusive, which I believe is true. But the way it was handled kept
any mention of that problem out of the marketing literature. Fortunately the
FDA regulations on reporting required that they inform the FDA about it. The
FDA denied approval of the drug pending further studies, which will take
roughly three years to complete.

"Jumping to conclusions" is what the FDA and other regulatory bodies around
the world do every day. That's their job and their responsibility. That's
exactly what we *want* them to do. They have to be both suspicious and
cautious. Protecting the public's health requires caution in the use of
agents, whether they're drugs in humans or chemicals in food, based on
correlations that usually are uncertain at the time when an appearance of
risk appears in preliminary studies. The burden of proof is, and must be, on
the sellers of those agents to prove they're safe, not the other way around.
And when medical science advances and makes more sensitive proofs available,
those drugs and food additives may have to prove themselves once again.
There should be no grandfather clauses for food or drugs.







The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive
and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile
accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should
forbid
the sale of ice cream?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most
medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and
it
has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.

I have read many of them. I've subscribed to the New England Journal
of
Medicine for many years, and I designed instruments for pharmacological
research in the 1970s.

Well, then, you know how rare it is, in endocrinology or other fields
that
involve complexes of phenomena, to see any sure claim of causation. In
your
reading about adipose tissue and endocrine functions, how often do you
see
anything that says "and this causes this"? Not often, I'm sure.

Right. But the point is that this is *very* complex and ill-understood,
so it's unlikely that we really have the slightest idea what's really
going on.

It is complex. Studying the mediative pathways in endocrine functions is one
of the bleeding edges of medical research. You and I are unlikely to be able
to sort them out, although, as with global warming, the preponderance of
historical studies fall on one side -- the side that says hormones in beef
are OK, in this case.

I remain suspicious because I've seen the effects of business incentives,
which are normal and healthy in non-health-related cases, as they operate in
the food and drug industries. They don't work in the favor of consumers,
IMO. And specific studies continue to raise a red flag here and there.

It *will* be sorted out, because there is a billion-dollar
business awaiting the evil company that figures it out. And likely a
Nobel Prize or two.

When you figure out how it would be in the financial interest of a company
to show that hormones in beef are bad for our health, let us know. The
opposite is true in the extreme. And that's the way the whole pharma
industry operates: there is no incentive and no money for studies that show
a drug is bad for you. The incentive is almost exclusively to try to show
that they're good.

Excuse me for trimming the rest of this message off, but I think we're
repeating ourselves. And we probably don't disagree very much, anyway. I
recognize what you're saying about the people who keep warning that the sky
is falling, on this as well as many other issues. I just happen to apply a
different standard of proof to matters of the things we put in our bodies.

I hope we didn't make too many people fall asleep here. g

--
Ed Huntress- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

No Ed...I find it very interesting.

And I find it very interesting that the number of drugs being approved
have dropped significantly once the spotlight was shone on the FDA/
industry relationships of late.

I suspect the good old days for drug companies have ended.

TMT

On Oct 9, 2:33 pm, Wes wrote:
Too_Many_Tools wrote:
In my experience, many highly paid professionals have a problem with
those who fix their car, plumbing, house, etc. charging a fair rate.

That same sentiment goes for plant managers that think the maintenance
tech's that troubleshoot and repair their CNC's and assembly automation are
dime a dozen knuckle draggers.

I know the person that properly repairs my automobile is a real technician,
I've picked the repair shop that I use with a bit of care. However, I'm
pretty good at fixing my car myself. My hourly rate at work doesn't match
his hourly rate + shop overhead + reasonable profit so I don't farm out
much. Besides, an automotive break down is often a cost justifiable reason
to buy yet another tool. Buying the factory service manuals when you buy
the car pays off really well if you are a high mileage type like me. I
figure a decent vehicle, properly maintained should do 250,000 miles.

Wes

I have seen this behavior also.

When I see anyone using this behavior to downgrade someone else....my
opinion plumments.

Any occupation takes skill and intelligence...any occupation.

TMT

On Oct 9, 7:40 pm, F. George McDuffee gmcduf...@mcduffee-
associates.us wrote:
On Tue, 9 Oct 2007 14:58:34 -0400, "Ed wrote:

snip There may well be a drastic drop in human caused global warming,
just not from what the "green community" had planned.

Gee, what an optimist. I'll bet you read Malthus for fun, George. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress

========
Just a variation of the traditional mother's advice

Be careful what you wish for --
You just might get it!

For a similar follow-up for all the people that think Americans'
drive too much and have too many/owerful/nice cars and need a
lesson click onhttp://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071009/wl_mideast_afp/qataropecoil

With friends like these ...
Unka' George [George McDuffee]
============
Merchants have no country.
The mere spot they stand on
does not constitute so strong an attachment
as that from which they draw their gains.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826),
U.S. president. Letter, 17 March 1814.

If we want real action in weaning the United States off foreign oil,
the price of crude needs to be MUCH higher.

I really think it should be well over $100/barrel.

The past 30+ years of inaction proves that no action will occur till
it does happen.

TMT

However, just over 20 years ago as the beef industry was going down the tubes
due to cost and after the FDA reduced for the second time the quality of beef
the industry went to a female growth hormone to put on meat at a faster rate.
The French went nuts and dumped our exports. We said so what. They went
to Argentina who eventually went that way themselves.

This is not the same hormone used in beef 50 years ago.

I believe it is the source of lower birth rate, larger and earlier
young women maturing much earlier. A massive business developed for
the younger and younger impotent male population.

Hum... big money at its worse.

Martin
Martin H. Eastburn
@ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net
TSRA, Life; NRA LOH & Patron Member, Golden Eagle, Patriot's Medal.
NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder
IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member.
http://lufkinced.com/


Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...

snip

Estrogen production in fat is well established it seems. Google is your
friend. Here is one article:
http://www.cancerportfolio.org/abstract.jsp?SID=159653&ProjectID=312260

That's about post-menopausal women, Joe. As far as I've ever heard, estrogen
in girls and young women is produced by the ovaries. And we're talking here
about precocious development of sexual characteristics in girls.

But there are a lot of endocrine functions associated with adipose tissue,
and I'm sure there's more to it than I had to study. I was studying
metabolic syndrome. Among the complex of endocrine functions that go on
within adipose tissue, the studies I've worked with focus on their mediating
functions in the production of hormones secreted in other glands (insulin in
the pancreas; estrogen in the ovaries; etc.).

The endocrine function of adipose tissue is just as marked in men,
though.
And it's focused on intra-abdominal adipose tissue, rather than
subcutaneous
fat. Young girls usually have mostly subcutaneous fat unless they're
really
obese. Please don't ask me how I know this. d8-)
Hmm. I know what you want us to think, but really is it that you were
doing autopsies on them? How else could you know the amount of visceral
fat?

CT scans. I've had to look at dozens of them, which is a little
disconcerting as you're looking at a computer image of what amounts to a
human steak, well-marbled. d8-(

The visceral, or intra-abdominal fat shows up as fat accumulations between
the internal organs, rather than under the skin, as with subcutaneous fat.

Well, which reaction is the cautious one? The one that recognizes a
marked
correlation and discourages the use of hormones in beef, or the one that
worries we may be overreacting, and that encourages waiting until we can
prove the causative pattern before doing anything? Medicine, out of
necessity, considers the first reaction to be the conservative reaction.
The
second one is conservative only if the business interests involved are
your
primary concern.
The caution is about jumping to conclusions. Aside from accusations of
evil motive, there is lots of experience that would make one hold back,
waiting for the smoke to clear.

Hormone use in beef cattle and other meat animals has been studied for 50
years or more, and it has been a political football for at least that long.
Our chances of sorting out the facts at this point are pretty slim, beyond
the fact that the types of research conducted in the past relate to fairly
controlled use of hormones and to relatively insensitive measures of the
effects in humans. The levels of proof demanded by the FDA today for drugs
for human use, for example, tend to pay more attention to outliers and to
potential misuse, such as a feedlot operator who gets a little too frisky in
the use of steroids in cattle.

But I'm less interested in the scientific argument, which we can't settle
here, than in what you're implying about the burden of proof. Are you
suggesting that when the data is inconclusive, we should allow the use of a
drug or food additive until the mechanism of action can be proven to have
harmful effects?

Regarding "evil motive," the issue is marketing and the inescapable
structure of incentives in business, and their inappropriateness to
something like pharmaceuticals, not evil intent. Marketing drugs is what I
did, and I often was given explicit instructions about what to emphasize and
what to soft-pedal. That's the way the pharmaceutical industry works. It's a
business, not a philanthropy, and the object is to sell as many drugs as you
can at the highest price you can get. The ethical conflict that often leads
to is rampant in both food and drug production and sales.

The story about rimonabant is a good example. I wrote literature about that
drug that was intended to educate doctors, public health officials, and
corporate benefits managers about the health benefits of the drug, which are
quite real. What I didn't know, because the research on it was not yet
published and was known primarily by the manufacturer -- they didn't even
tell us about it -- is that there have been incidences of depression and
even suicide among some users of the drug. It could be argued that the data
is inconclusive, which I believe is true. But the way it was handled kept
any mention of that problem out of the marketing literature. Fortunately the
FDA regulations on reporting required that they inform the FDA about it. The
FDA denied approval of the drug pending further studies, which will take
roughly three years to complete.

"Jumping to conclusions" is what the FDA and other regulatory bodies around
the world do every day. That's their job and their responsibility. That's
exactly what we *want* them to do. They have to be both suspicious and
cautious. Protecting the public's health requires caution in the use of
agents, whether they're drugs in humans or chemicals in food, based on
correlations that usually are uncertain at the time when an appearance of
risk appears in preliminary studies. The burden of proof is, and must be, on
the sellers of those agents to prove they're safe, not the other way around.
And when medical science advances and makes more sensitive proofs available,
those drugs and food additives may have to prove themselves once again.
There should be no grandfather clauses for food or drugs.


The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive
and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile
accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should
forbid
the sale of ice cream?
You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most
medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and
it
has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.
I have read many of them. I've subscribed to the New England Journal
of
Medicine for many years, and I designed instruments for pharmacological
research in the 1970s.
Well, then, you know how rare it is, in endocrinology or other fields
that
involve complexes of phenomena, to see any sure claim of causation. In
your
reading about adipose tissue and endocrine functions, how often do you
see
anything that says "and this causes this"? Not often, I'm sure.
Right. But the point is that this is *very* complex and ill-understood,
so it's unlikely that we really have the slightest idea what's really
going on.

It is complex. Studying the mediative pathways in endocrine functions is one
of the bleeding edges of medical research. You and I are unlikely to be able
to sort them out, although, as with global warming, the preponderance of
historical studies fall on one side -- the side that says hormones in beef
are OK, in this case.

I remain suspicious because I've seen the effects of business incentives,
which are normal and healthy in non-health-related cases, as they operate in
the food and drug industries. They don't work in the favor of consumers,
IMO. And specific studies continue to raise a red flag here and there.

It *will* be sorted out, because there is a billion-dollar
business awaiting the evil company that figures it out. And likely a
Nobel Prize or two.

When you figure out how it would be in the financial interest of a company
to show that hormones in beef are bad for our health, let us know. The
opposite is true in the extreme. And that's the way the whole pharma
industry operates: there is no incentive and no money for studies that show
a drug is bad for you. The incentive is almost exclusively to try to show
that they're good.

Excuse me for trimming the rest of this message off, but I think we're
repeating ourselves. And we probably don't disagree very much, anyway. I
recognize what you're saying about the people who keep warning that the sky
is falling, on this as well as many other issues. I just happen to apply a
different standard of proof to matters of the things we put in our bodies.

I hope we didn't make too many people fall asleep here. g

--
Ed Huntress



----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups
----= East and West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =----

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Oct 9, 9:13 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:

snip


I hope we didn't make too many people fall asleep here. g

--
Ed Huntress- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

No Ed...I find it very interesting.

And I find it very interesting that the number of drugs being approved
have dropped significantly once the spotlight was shone on the FDA/
industry relationships of late.

I suspect the good old days for drug companies have ended.

They may have, but it's not because of anything the FDA is doing. By far the
biggest problem they face now is the shortage of new drugs (traditional,
"small molecule" drugs) in the testing/approval pipeline. The easy ones have
been taken. And patents are running out on some blockbusters.

Now it will start to get complicated, as the industry turns to drugs called
biologicals ("big molecule" drugs). Most of these are discovered by small
companies, so Big Pharma is on the prowl for buyouts.

Big Pharma is being squeezed from several directions. But the FDA and the
approval process, which were streamlined back in the '90s, is not their big
problem.

--
Ed Huntress

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...

snip


Estrogen production in fat is well established it seems. Google is your
friend. Here is one article:
http://www.cancerportfolio.org/abstract.jsp?SID=159653&ProjectID=312260

That's about post-menopausal women, Joe. As far as I've ever heard, estrogen
in girls and young women is produced by the ovaries. And we're talking here
about precocious development of sexual characteristics in girls.

Umm. Yes, but I have to believe that estrogen production in fat didn't
just start at age 50. I imagine a little more research would buttress
the point.


But there are a lot of endocrine functions associated with adipose tissue,
and I'm sure there's more to it than I had to study. I was studying
metabolic syndrome. Among the complex of endocrine functions that go on
within adipose tissue, the studies I've worked with focus on their mediating
functions in the production of hormones secreted in other glands (insulin in
the pancreas; estrogen in the ovaries; etc.).

Another layer of complexity emerges.


The endocrine function of adipose tissue is just as marked in men,
though.
And it's focused on intra-abdominal adipose tissue, rather than
subcutaneous
fat. Young girls usually have mostly subcutaneous fat unless they're
really
obese. Please don't ask me how I know this. d8-)

Hmm. I know what you want us to think, but really is it that you were
doing autopsies on them? How else could you know the amount of visceral
fat?

CT scans. I've had to look at dozens of them, which is a little
disconcerting as you're looking at a computer image of what amounts to a
human steak, well-marbled. d8-(

The visceral, or intra-abdominal fat shows up as fat accumulations between
the internal organs, rather than under the skin, as with subcutaneous fat.

Does not sound like fun at all.


Well, which reaction is the cautious one? The one that recognizes a
marked
correlation and discourages the use of hormones in beef, or the one that
worries we may be overreacting, and that encourages waiting until we can
prove the causative pattern before doing anything? Medicine, out of
necessity, considers the first reaction to be the conservative reaction.
The
second one is conservative only if the business interests involved are
your
primary concern.

The caution is about jumping to conclusions. Aside from accusations of
evil motive, there is lots of experience that would make one hold back,
waiting for the smoke to clear.

Hormone use in beef cattle and other meat animals has been studied for 50
years or more, and it has been a political football for at least that long.
Our chances of sorting out the facts at this point are pretty slim, beyond
the fact that the types of research conducted in the past relate to fairly
controlled use of hormones and to relatively insensitive measures of the
effects in humans. The levels of proof demanded by the FDA today for drugs
for human use, for example, tend to pay more attention to outliers and to
potential misuse, such as a feedlot operator who gets a little too frisky in
the use of steroids in cattle.

Yep.


But I'm less interested in the scientific argument, which we can't settle
here, than in what you're implying about the burden of proof. Are you
suggesting that when the data is inconclusive, we should allow the use of a
drug or food additive until the mechanism of action can be proven to have
harmful effects?

Almost. Given the large uncertainties, it has to take real proof of
harm (even if the exact mechanism isn't known) before we forbid
something. And inconclusive data is just that - inconclusive.


Regarding "evil motive," the issue is marketing and the inescapable
structure of incentives in business, and their inappropriateness to
something like pharmaceuticals, not evil intent. Marketing drugs is what I
did, and I often was given explicit instructions about what to emphasize and
what to soft-pedal. That's the way the pharmaceutical industry works. It's a
business, not a philanthropy, and the object is to sell as many drugs as you
can at the highest price you can get. The ethical conflict that often leads
to is rampant in both food and drug production and sales.

Sure. But we know that. This is why proof is needed, but it cuts both
ways.


The story about rimonabant is a good example. I wrote literature about that
drug that was intended to educate doctors, public health officials, and
corporate benefits managers about the health benefits of the drug, which are
quite real. What I didn't know, because the research on it was not yet
published and was known primarily by the manufacturer -- they didn't even
tell us about it -- is that there have been incidences of depression and
even suicide among some users of the drug. It could be argued that the data
is inconclusive, which I believe is true. But the way it was handled kept
any mention of that problem out of the marketing literature. Fortunately the
FDA regulations on reporting required that they inform the FDA about it. The
FDA denied approval of the drug pending further studies, which will take
roughly three years to complete.

"Jumping to conclusions" is what the FDA and other regulatory bodies around
the world do every day. That's their job and their responsibility. That's
exactly what we *want* them to do. They have to be both suspicious and
cautious. Protecting the public's health requires caution in the use of
agents, whether they're drugs in humans or chemicals in food, based on
correlations that usually are uncertain at the time when an appearance of
risk appears in preliminary studies. The burden of proof is, and must be, on
the sellers of those agents to prove they're safe, not the other way around.
And when medical science advances and makes more sensitive proofs available,
those drugs and food additives may have to prove themselves once again.

This is a whole other thread. The FDA is trying to find drugs that are
at once are effective, are totally safe, and have zero side effects.
Impossible, but Congress keeps trying.


There should be no grandfather clauses for food or drugs.

Be careful what you pray for. Do you think garlic and jalapeños could
ever be approved today? Fortunately, they have been around for
centuries to millennia, so they are grandfathered, if only because any
regulator that tried to outlaw them would be laughed off the planet.

A good example is the FDA trying to deal with German beer (unpasturized)
and especially French raw-milk cheese (ditto). The fact that ~120
million people are none the worse for it doesn't seem to matter.

Which reminds me of a war story. In the 1970s I worked with an ex-Army
guy who had been stationed in West Germany. The US Army warned their
soldiers against eating the local German food, and my coworker followed
this advice until one day he was driving and went by a line of young
German boys walking to school, each with a lunchbox and a bottle of
beer. And these boys looked rosy-cheeked *healthy*. What can the Army
be thinking? Coworker stopped listening to the Army, and went native.


The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive
and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile
accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should
forbid
the sale of ice cream?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most
medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and
it
has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.

I have read many of them. I've subscribed to the New England Journal
of
Medicine for many years, and I designed instruments for pharmacological
research in the 1970s.

Well, then, you know how rare it is, in endocrinology or other fields
that
involve complexes of phenomena, to see any sure claim of causation. In
your
reading about adipose tissue and endocrine functions, how often do you
see
anything that says "and this causes this"? Not often, I'm sure.

Right. But the point is that this is *very* complex and ill-understood,
so it's unlikely that we really have the slightest idea what's really
going on.

It is complex. Studying the mediative pathways in endocrine functions is one
of the bleeding edges of medical research. You and I are unlikely to be able
to sort them out, although, as with global warming, the preponderance of
historical studies fall on one side -- the side that says hormones in beef
are OK, in this case.

Right. If it were really that dangerous, we would have the piles of
dead bodies to prove it.


I remain suspicious because I've seen the effects of business incentives,
which are normal and healthy in non-health-related cases, as they operate in
the food and drug industries. They don't work in the favor of consumers,
IMO. And specific studies continue to raise a red flag here and there.

Yes, companies are biased towards their economic interests. That's why
they have to be made to prove their case. But again, it cuts both ways,
and long-term successful use is a very powerful argument, and very much
puts the burden of proof on the latecomer claiming heretofor unknown
great danger.

More generally, we always have conflicting agendas, and one can always
accuse the proponents of the sides of bias and conflict-of-interest and
general evil. It may even be true. But this will never change, so we
have to deal with it.


It *will* be sorted out, because there is a billion-dollar
business awaiting the evil company that figures it out. And likely a
Nobel Prize or two.

When you figure out how it would be in the financial interest of a company
to show that hormones in beef are bad for our health, let us know. The
opposite is true in the extreme. And that's the way the whole pharma
industry operates: there is no incentive and no money for studies that show
a drug is bad for you. The incentive is almost exclusively to try to show
that they're good.

No, I was talking about the whole endrocrine system involving weight
control, diabetes, estrogen, et al. There is a fortune to be made here,
and someone will crack that nut. The motive is there.

And one perhaps unintended consequence is that we would find out for
sure if extra hormones in beef mattered, and why. And how.


Excuse me for trimming the rest of this message off, but I think we're
repeating ourselves. And we probably don't disagree very much, anyway. I
recognize what you're saying about the people who keep warning that the sky
is falling, on this as well as many other issues. I just happen to apply a
different standard of proof to matters of the things we put in our bodies.

OK. Why would bodies be different? It's the same scare tactics.


I hope we didn't make too many people fall asleep here. g

It *is* an occupational hazard.


But I have to ask: Why is ice cream sales correlated with highway
accident rate? It is true; the question is why.

Joe Gwinn