Even in decidedly "wealthy" countries, human health is not always guaranteed. In fact, studies show that the best indicator of a country's health is not its overall wealth, but how that wealth is distributed. Time Magazine's Maia Szalavitz reports:

Imagine there was one changeable factor that affected virtually every measure of a country's health- including life expectancy, crime rates, addiction, obesity, infant mortality, stroke, academic achievement, happiness and even overall prosperity. Indeed, this factor actually exists.

It's called economic inequality. A growing body of research suggests that such inequality - more so than income or absolute wealth alone — has a profound influence on a population's health, in every socioeconomic group from rich to middle class to poor.

Economic inequality is measured by looking at the distribution of wealth and income in a society, not the general wealth of a country. At a basic level, a country's overall economic success does predict its people's well-being, but the healthiest and happiest countries in the world are not the richest. Rather, they are countries where wealth is shared widely and more equally.

One of the most obvious ways that economic equality may improve a country's overall health is by improving access to health care for all of its citizens, but Szalavitz writes that poor overall health manages to persist, "even in countries with national health services." So from where, exactly, does the negative correlation between economic inequality and public health stem?

"The roots of the problem," write Szalavitz,"appear to reach deeper than [access to public health care]. Indeed, they may go back to the dominance hierarchies of our primate ancestors."

Read the rest of Szalavitz's excellent piece over at TIME.
Top image via

Despite numerous studies indicating that cell phones pose no health risk to their users, a few studies have been released that suggest prolonged use might contribute to brain cancer. For the World Health Organization, that was enough to declare the phones "possibly carcinogenic" and to call for further studies on the link.

At least one of these studies was already in the works. Some specific features of how Denmark tracks its citizens have made that nation a convenient laboratory for long-term population studies. Now, one study has looked at almost the entire Danish adult population and found that having a cell phone doesn't seem to be associated with any additional risk of brain cancers.

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Earlier today, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann (pictured left and center, respectively) "for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity;" and to Ralph M. Steinman "for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity."

Steinman, who passed away on Friday after an extended bout with pancreatic cancer, becomes the first person to ever be awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine posthumously.

It bears mentioning that Steinman — who, like Beutler & Hoffman, was recognized for his contributions to the field of immunology — was actually diagnosed with pancreatic cancer years ago, but extended his life by using a dendritic-cell based immunotherapy (you know, that thing he was considered Nobel-worthy for in the first place) of his own design.

The announcement was first issued early this morning by the Nobel Foundation, which was, at the time, unaware of Steinman's recent passing. Since 1974, the statutes of the Nobel Foundation have indicated that "work produced by a person since deceased shall not be considered for an award. If, however, a prizewinner dies before he has received the prize, then the prize may be presented."

The thing is, the Nobel Assembly decided to honor Steinman with a Nobel Prize after he passed away; they just weren't aware of it at the time. This put the Assembly in a situation that they have since described as "unprecedented in the history of the Nobel Prize." Discussions over whether or not to award the prize to Steinman posthumously were held just a few hours ago.

Fortunately, the Assembly had the good sense to stick with this morning's announcement, and have since issued a statement confirming that their initial decision will remain unchanged.

Top images via Nobelprize.org

We blame sugar for adding extra calories to almost anything we purchase in the grocery store, and call sugary snacks "junk food." But is sugar really junk? Let's take a look at some common myths about sugar, and find out why there are good reasons for you to keep natural sugars as a part of your diet.

Myth: All sugars are the same.

Fact: Different sugars have different properties and degrees of sweetness.

Sugar comes in many forms. Common table sugar is sucrose, a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, each of which have different properties. Fructose is often called a "fruit sugar" as it is found in honey, berries, and vegetables. Glucose and galactose also accompany fructose as a naturally occurring sugar, however, these naturally occurring sugars are often forsaken for artificial sweeteners, which lack the caloric and other bodily advantages of naturally occurring sugars.

Fructose is considerably sweeter than other naturally-occurring sugars, with fructose being over 1.5 times as sweet as sucrose, over twice as sweet as glucose, and six times sweeter than galactose. Fructose also has a reasonably low manufacturing cost, leading it to be one of the main natural sweeteners used in manufacturing processes.

Myth: Sugar is bad and not a useful part of your diet.

Fact: You need glucose.

Glucose is used as an energy source by almost every organism. Glucose is used by your body's cells as a very efficient energy source. For example, via the the Krebs Cycle, a single molecule of glucose yields a net gain of two molecules of ATP through anaerobic respiration, and 34 molecules of ATP through aerobic respiration.

Glucose is also a valuable precursor for several types of biological molecules; including lipids, amino acids, and cellulose, providing a valuable building block that can be readily used by almost any molecule. The synthesis of glucose was not able to be reproduced in vitro until the late 1800s, with Emil Fischer winning the 1902 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to the synthesis of glucose and other naturally occurring sugars.

Myth: Sugar has little impact on humans other than acting as a sweetener.

Fact: Your brain runs on sugar.

You brain's main supply of energy is the monosaccharide glucose. While your brain only weighs between 3 to 5 pounds, it makes use of approximately 15-20% of your body's daily caloric needs. It has been long thought that the glucose was consumed as a function of cognitive experience, and research on rats shows that when a more cognitively challenging task is placed before them, more glucose is depleted. This phenomenon also appears to extend to humans.

In the journal article Glucose, memory, and aging, published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers observed that elderly patients who were given lemonade sweetened with glucose experienced a nearly two fold increase in short term memory when asked to recall a prose passage compared to those who drank lemonade sweetened with the artificial sweetener saccharin (also known by the brand name of "Sweet'N Low"). Additionally, saccharin has no calories.

Glucose has also been shown to have a large impact on self-control and behavior, with limited supplies causing a quick falloff in behavioral stability at times. I like to call this phenomenon "hanger", hungry-anger, when observed in friends and loved ones.

In Sum, Sugar is your Friend

So, sugar isn't all that bad, and honestly, if you want to perform a series of cognitively difficult tasks, you'll be depleting your resources quickly. Individuals with pre-existing conditions like diabetes need to watch their sugar intake, but for the individuals without such ailments, sugar is your friend, not your enemy.

Top photo by Liv friis-larsen via Shutterstock.

A virulent strain of antibiotic-resistant E.coli has left 18 dead in Europe, left over 1,800 sick, and touched off a continent-wide scare against all produce, suspected to be the source of the infection.

Europeans are so anti-salad right now because those who became sick were "significantly more frequent consumers of raw tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce," according to a study conducted in Hamburg, the apparent epicenter of the outbreak. This has lead some countries to ban imported produce, and consumers to become fearful of all produce. Initially the Germans blamed organic Spanish cucumbers, but that was later retracted.

"It's a big conversation issue among my friends," one German student told the New York Times. "Some are no longer eating salads. Others are ignoring the medical recommendations. As for myself, frankly, people have died. For me, that's the bottom line. I no longer eat salads. But then again, this E. coli strain could be in milk, meat, whatever. It is very worrying. I have no idea what to eat anymore."

Germ sleuths might also trace back the source of the outbreak to a specific herd of cattle or even a single heffer, a so-called "smoking cow" in whose bowels the e.coli festered and mutated. The cow's manure could have also tainted irrigation waters, which could have then lead to produce becoming contaminated with the bacteria.

Then there's the worries that such an outbreak could occur in the US. The FDA has increased its monitoring of produce imported from Europe, although not very much is brought over. But the bigger concern is that right now we only test the food supply for a single strain of E.coli that up until now was thought the most dangerous. There's a multitude of other kinds of E.colis out there that we don't test for, and that's where a stateside "super-toxic" E.coli could erupt from.

"There are no regulations in place today that would prevent this kind of outbreak from occurring," in America, the Center for Science in the Public Interest told NPR.

47% of supermarket meat tested around the country in a recent survey had evidence of being tainted by Staphylococcus aureus, which causes most staph infections in humans, including food poisoning and skin infections.

The research was published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

You can kill most of these little buggers by cooking food thoroughly and at high heat. However if you don't take proper kitchen precautions you risk contamination from handling the meat and there is also the danger of cross-contamination, like if you use the same knife and cutting surface to chop a salad as you did raw meat.

Multidrug-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus in US Meat and Poultry [Clinical Infectious Diseases]
1 In 4 Supermarket Meat Samples Tainted With Drug-Resistant Bacteria [NPR]

Proving the words of countless mothers across countless nations, new research shows that spending all day staring at computers and TVs actually is bad for kids, giving them heart problems later in life.

Scientists say that kids who spend many hours in front of screens have narrower arteries in the back of their eyes, and link this to future heart problems.

The study looked at almost 1,500 Australian children, and the results took into account age, sex, ethnicity, iris color, length of the eyeball, BMI, birth weight and blood pressure. The children averaged 1.9 hours of screen time every day, and 36 minutes of physical activity. Every hour of time in front of a monitor equated to a retinal artery 1.53 microns narrower, and associated with a blood pressure increase of 10 mmHg.

The measure of the micro-vessels in your retina is an indicator for cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure in adulthood.

It might not turn your eyes square, but sitting in front of a screen all day definitely isn't good for your health.

Illustration by Andrea Danti/Shutterstock

If you're one of the many who wear prescription eyeglasses with bifocal or progressive lenses, your life could soon become much simpler thanks to a company called PixelOptics.

In June, the Roanoke, Va., company will start selling its emPower eyeglasses, electronic eye-ware that lets wearers switch between differing prescriptions--one for close-up reading and one for distance viewing.

The glasses use a thin layer of liquid crystals sandwiched between two plastic layers. Electric current from a built-in rechargeable battery alters the focal power of the lens sandwich in the blink of an eye. (And a six to eight hour charge can run the emPower for more than three days.)

PixelOptic's emPower line of glasses will be rolled out to professional eyecare specialists one region at a time, starting with Virginia and North Carolina in June. But PixelOptics envisions they could be nationwide by the end of the year.

The high-tech specs won't be cheap--about $1,000 to $1,200 per pair of emPowers. Still, pricey electronic eyeglasses can be a convenient alternative for those with qualms over corrective surgery with lasers.

Bye bifocals! New specs change focus [CNN]

Yesterday, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced and, as always, we were most fascinated by the highly contested nonfiction category, which is as much a measure of good writing as it is a reflection of the era’s cultural concerns. This year’s winner was The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Columbia professor of medicine Siddhartha Mukherjee — a thorough, eloquent and eye-opening medical and sociocultural history of the ubiquitous disease, from its origin to the first recorded cases to modern medicine’s ongoing struggle to find effective treatment.

When I started writing this book, I thought of cancer as a disease. But as I wrote more and more about it, it seemed as though it was not just a disease but something that envelops our lives so fully that it was writing about someone. It was like writing about an alter personality, an illness that had a psyche, a behavior, a pattern of existing.” ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The book begins with the stories of pathologist Sidney Farber and philanthropist Mary Lasker, who is credited with launching the war on cancer by urging scientists and the government to race for a cure of the little-understood killer.

The second half of the narrative shifts from the cultural to the scientific context of humanity’s battle with the disease, focusing on the incremental yet gamechanging discoveries of a various brilliant scientists over the past half-century as the scientific community raced to understand how cell become cancerous in order to better address prevention and treatment.

So fascinating is the book that one dedicated fan used its narrative to extract a visual timeline of cancer from 1950 to the present:

With its blend of cultural anthropology, rigorous research and genuine empathy, The Emperor of All Maladies is, as the Pulitzer unequivocally implies, a pinnacle of fine nonfiction that oscillates between the profound cultural distress of a presently incurable disease and the relentless scientific exhilaration embedded in the very possibility of unraveling this great and all-consuming mystery.

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Here's a trick question: How much sodium does Campbell's "25% less sodium" tomato soup contain compared to regular Campbell's tomato soup? Would you believe that both contain 480 mg? And that the first one costs more? Four NJ housewives couldn't, and a federal judge has ruled that their lawsuit against Campbell's over what they call misleading labels can proceed.

Campbell's reply is that the "25% less sodium" claim is as compared to the average of "all varieties" of condensed soup, not tomato. "Campbell has complete confidence in the accuracy of our labels and our marketing communications and that they meet regulatory and other legal requirements," the company told Reuters.

Below the big yellow "25%" and big white "LESS SODIUM" on the front of the can in smaller yellow text it says "than regular condensed soup."

They may be right about meeting statutory requirements, but that doesn't mean a reasonable consumer can't still be mislead by the label on the front of the can. The lawsuit seeks class action status.

M'm! M'm! Salty? [Reuters]

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Zero Nutritional Difference Between Campbell's "Healthy" Tomato Soups And Regular, Just Higher Price

A new study claims that not only does half the meat sold in groceries harbor a nasty little bacteria called Staphylococcus aureus, but a full quarter of the beef, chicken, pork and turkey carries a drug-resistant strain of the bug.

The study, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, checked out 80 brands of meat from 26 grocery stores in five U.S. cities -- L.A., Chicago, Ft. Lauderdale, Flagstaff and Washington, D.C. -- and found that 47% of the meats tested positive for S. aureus, which can cause skin infections, pneumonia, sepsis or endocarditis. And 52%percent of those positive tests were for a strain of the bacteria that is resistant to at least three types of antibiotics.

"For the first time, we know how much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Staph, and it is substantial," said the senior author of the study. "The fact that drug-resistant S. aureus was so prevalent, and likely came from the food animals themselves, is troubling, and demands attention to how antibiotics are used in food-animal production today."

The bacteria can be killed in most cases by just cooking the meat, but that won't prevent it from infecting people and surfaces touched by the meat before it is cooked.

Since the bacteria was found in the meat instead of on its outer surface, the researchers believe the infection likely results from "densely-stocked industrial farms, where food animals are steadily fed low doses of antibiotics... ideal breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria that move from animals to humans."

Study: 25% of meat has drug-resistant bacteria [Chicago Breaking News]

I worked without gloves. It was hard to see. The mirror helps, but it also hinders -- after all, it's showing things backwards. I work mainly by touch. The bleeding is quite heavy, but I take my time -- I try to work surely. Opening the peritoneum, I injured the blind gut and had to sew it up. Suddenly it flashed through my mind: there are more injuries here and I didn't notice them ... I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every 4-5 minutes I rest for 20-25 seconds. Finally, here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst and ...

At the worst moment of removing the appendix I flagged: my heart seized up and noticeably slowed; my hands felt like rubber. Well, I thought, it's going to end badly. And all that was left was removing the appendix ... And then I realised that, basically, I was already saved.

Today, clocks throughout the United States jump forward an hour to mark the beginning of Daylight Saving Time. The economic and energy benefits of DST have been hotly debated for nearly a century, but does it pose a health risk?

All our American readers (except those in Hawaii, Arizona, and various territories) skipped the hour between 2 and 3 A.M. this morning, creating the much dreaded 23 hour day, which somehow the promise of a 25 hour day in November never quite makes up for. The practice was first instituted in the United States back in 1918 to help the war effort, as adding more daylight to the afternoon was thought to conserve fuel and improve efficiency.

The practice was unpopular, and it was abolished shortly after the war. President Franklin Roosevelt restored the practice in 1942 as a year-round practice known as "War Time", and this lasted until September 1945. By that time, the concept of Daylight Saving Time had caught on, and it became national policy by the mid-sixties.

The actual benefits of Daylight Saving Time remain controversial. People's livelihoods can be dramatically affected by DST, both positively and negatively - retail and sports events both benefit from extra daylight, while farming and forms of evening entertainment that need night to help set the mood are more adversely affected, not to mention things that rely on precise synchronized timekeeping, which can include everything from business meetings to travel and medical devices. The impact of DST on energy consumption is very difficult to figure out based on the available data, which tends to be either woefully incomplete or entirely contradictory.

But does DST actually affect people's health? Can losing one hour in March and gaining one back in November really matter to a person's general wellness? According to Yale researcher Dr. Xiaoyong Yang, the answer is actually yes, under certain circumstances:

"Most people don't have much of a problem - they can adjust their body clock quickly. Eventually, after a couple of days, they already can adapt to the new schedule. But for some groups of people - people who have depression or a heart problem - there's some research that suggests that [they] have a higher risk of suicide and heart attack."

There's some evidence to back up that assertion. A 2008 Australian study found that men are more likely to commit suicide in the first few weeks after Daylight Saving Time begins than any other time in the year, and in the same year Swedish researchers found that serious heart attacks jump 6% to 10% during the first three workdays after DST. It's a subtle effect, but even this slight disruption to people's normal body clocks can have serious effects on those who are already dealing with serious medical conditions.

Dr. Yang suspects the shifts in biological rhythms brought on by DST can actually trigger inflammatory or metabolic reactions in the body's cells. For most people, these events are of little consequence, but individuals with depression or serious heart problems are at more of a risk.

This might not be enough to simply do away with Daylight Saving Time, but it's certainly a reminder of just how finely-tuned our biological rhythms are and how important a good night's sleep really can be. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to completely disregard that lesson and stay up until 4:00 in the morning...or is it 3:00?

Via Time. Image via National Geographic.

I attended the Clarion science fiction writing workshop at Michigan State University in 1992, and we were privileged to tour the university's Cyclotron. Of course, the first thing we asked was, "How do you kill someone with one of these?" (we'd been working on plotting). The scientist's answer was very disappointing -- he insisted that it was all very safe, with too many checks and balances to be a useful murder weapon. As I recall, he suggested that you could pry loose a brick from the wall and hit someone in the head with it.

As you can see from the picture, the beam entered the back of Bugorski's head and came out around his nose. Shortly after this happened, Bugorski's left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition. He was taken to the hospital and studied as this was something that had never been seen before and so they closely monitored him thereafter, fully expecting him to die within a few days at most.

Although the skin on the part of his face and back of his head where the beam hit eventually peeled off over the next few days, Bugorski did not die as they thought he would. The beam also burned through his skull and brain tissue along with the afore mentioned skin. However, ultimately he came through it all surprisingly well.

Despite the beam going through his brain, his intellectual capacity remained the same as before. The few negative health drawbacks he did experience were not life threatening either. He lost the hearing in his left ear and experienced a constant unpleasant noise in that ear from then on. The left half of his face slowly became paralyzed over the course of the next two years. He also gets significantly more fatigued with mental work, though he did go on to get his PhD after this incident. The remaining side effects were occasional absence seizures and later tonic-clonic seizures, though these didn't show up right away.

What might "terminator" seeds, access to medicines, free software, and free culture have to do with one another? Do the global attempts to push back against more intrusive intellectual property laws have a common perspective and theory? This book addresses that question, introducing readers to the emerging politics and ideas of "a2k," and the revolutionary expansion of "intellectual property" that preceded it. The book also is a critical engagement with the ideas and possibilities of A2K, with contributions by some of the leading thinkers in the field (Benkler, Liang, Aigrain, Love, and many others).

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property

I came down with a nasty cold before the holidays – so bad that I briefly thought I had the flu, and was cursing myself for having waited so long to get the flu shot, which I’d received just before the symptoms began.

Amidst all the sniffling and groaning and self-pitying, it occurred to me that, while we’ve spent a lot of time this season talking about influenza, we haven’t much covered the common cold.  There are reasons for that of course.  Though sometimes as unpleasant as influenza, colds rarely kill.  There’s also no organized movement attempting to subvert public health initiatives related to the common cold, as there is with the flu.  So the stakes are certainly lower.

Yet there are an awful lot of cold products on the market, and as is often the case when symptoms are inherently self-limiting, many of these treatments are highly questionable.  That goes for pharmaceutical products as well as alternative ones, as the following roundup of popular remedies illustrates:

• Vitamin C – the grand-daddy of all cold treatments, taking mega-doses of Vitamin C to fight the cold was popularized by Nobel prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling in the 60’s, proving Ben Goldacre’s maxim that having a PhD is just a risk factor for being correct.  Subsequent research over the last 50 years has failed to show any effect – a fact that has been widely covered yet has done only minor damage to the treatment’s appeal.
• Echinacea (Flu Shield, etc.) – popular when I was still wearing Eddie Bauer plaid, Echinacea has very much lost its lustre of late.   The evidence was never great, but the recent (and thankfully, widely reported) study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine seems to put the nail in the coffin.
• Cold-FX – this ginseng-based product promises to strengthen the immune system to “stop colds & flu in their tracks”.   Scott does a detailed review over at Science-Based Pharmacy, noting that the clinical evidence is mixed, and all of the studies have methodological problems, so it’s hard to separate the data from the noise.  However, even on the most charitable read of the evidence, most people won’t get much benefit out of the product for the $400 worth of pills it takes to prevent a single cold.
• Oscillococcinum – the new “it” remedy promises cough, cold and flu relief for children with “no known side-effects, no risk of overdose, no contra-indications”.  No wonder –  it’s a 200C homeopathic dilution of duck heart and liver – that’s one part in ten thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.  As Scott points out while taking Health Canada to task for approving this product, “It is mathematically impossible that there is any of the original fermented goo in the final product.”
• OTC Remedies for Children – Oscillococcinum’s new children’s version is largely the result of recent evidence showing that OTC pharmaceutical remedies (expectorants, cough suppressants, decongestants, and first generation antihistamines) provide no benefit in children.  Children’s doses of these medicines have now been pulled from pharmacy shelves, leaving a void in the market that Oscillococcinum has been all too happy to fill with lactose.  (And they say we skeptics only question natural remedies.  I guess my cheque for being a Big Pharma shill won’t arrive this month.)

Of course, people are free to spend their money on unsubstantiated treatments if they like.  There’s little risk in any of these treatments (with the exception of the children’s OTC products), and I’m the first to admit that cold symptoms are precisely the type that the placebo effect works best on.  In some ways ignorance may indeed be bliss, and my intent today is not simply to write a consumer protection piece.  Rather, what I’m hoping to explore is the incorrect assumption at the heart of these treatments – an assumption that’s repeated widely and without question both in the media and in the individual discussions we all have about health and illness.

Immune to Evidence

With the exception of the now-removed children’s OTC products, all of the above remedies have one thing in common: they claim to work by boosting the immune system, making it better able to fight off viruses before they can cause unpleasant symptoms.  This seems like an inherently reasonable proposition – we have a natural defense system, so why not help it do its job better?

And in fact, that’s exactly what we do when we vaccinate.  By injecting dead or critically weakened viruses into our body, our immune system does indeed learn how to fight that virus when it later sees it live and full strength.  Of course vaccination isn’t feasible for the common cold – between the healthcare costs and the known risks (however rare), it’s hard to make a case for public health intervention to avoid a benign, if unpleasant, illness.

But immune boosting in common parlance (and in cold product marketing materials) is different from vaccination in a very critical way.  Vaccination teaches the body how to respond to a specific threat, whereas these cold products claim to boost the immune system’s general ability to respond to any threat.  And that’s where the marketing disconnects from the science.

I was first made aware of this disconnect by the inimitable Mark Crislip, an infectious disease specialist who writes over at Science Based Medicine, in a post from last September.  (Skeptoid later took up the topic, but relied primarily on Mark’s original).  While I have immense respect for Mark, and am inclined to trust his opinions within his field of expertise, I have to admit I was reticent to accept his assertions because they fly so directly in the face of the “received wisdom” on the subject.  So I made a mental note to look more closely at the data at some point…which I then promptly forgot.  (Maybe I should have taken my Ginko biloba).

I was reminded again when a co-worker, commenting on my aforementioned cold, began to espouse the wonders of Oil of Oregano — which, he assured me, was the best immune booster on the market.  He always takes it at the first sign of cold, and he never gets sick.   I knew from the detailed review Scott did over at Science Based Pharmacy that Oil of Oregano was “all anecdotes, no science”, so I smiled politely, thanked him for his advice, and finally finished what I’d intended to do when I read the Crislip article.

Turns out the fact-checking on this wasn’t all that hard – I had to look no further than Harvard Medical School’s 2010 publication, The Truth About Your Immune System: What You Need to Know, from which the title quote is taken.  Concise and readable without shying away from the technical details, the report provides a comprehensive overview for the layperson of what the evidence says — and doesn’t say — about how the immune system works and what you can do to improve its function.

Enticing, But Elusive

The report is unequivocal about the current state of the science: simply put, there is no known way to boost one’s immune system other than vaccination.  While admitting that there is indeed tantalizing research positing a connection between immune function and various aspects of diet and lifestyle, all of it is preliminary and researchers don’t yet know enough about “the intricacies and interconnectedness of the immune response” to recommend anything more than general healthy-living strategies.  Taking aim specifically at marketers that claim otherwise, the report states:

Many products on store shelves claim to boost or support immunity.  But the concept of boosting immunity actually makes little sense scientifically.  In fact, boosting your immune response is not necessarily a good thing.  A hyperactive immune response underlies a number of major diseases, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus.  It is also responsible for allergic reactions to ordinary nontoxic substances.

Even if it were a good thing, attempting to boost the cells of the immune system is especially complicated because there are so many different kinds of cells in the immune system that respond to so many different microbes in so many ways.  Which cells should you boost, and to what number?  So far, scientists don’t’ know the answer.

The report then goes on to take a close look at the evidence on a wide array of putative immune boosters.  Here’s what it has to say:

• On Vitamins: “So far, there is no evidence that taking extra amounts of any vitamin will boost the immune response or protect against infection in any way.”
• On Diet: “There are still relatively few studies of the effects of nutrition on the immune system of humans, and even fewer studies that tie the effects of nutrition directly to the ability to fight off infectious disease.”
• On Exercise: “a direct beneficial link hasn’t been established”
• On Probiotics & Prebiotics: “a direct connection between taking these products and improving immune function has not yet been made scientifically.  In fact, changing the balance of bacteria already long established in the human gut may not even be possible.”
• On Herbs & Supplements: “Although a few preparations have been found to alter some components of the immune function, thus far there is no evidence that they actually bolster immunity to the point where they protect against infection and disease….Scientists don’t know, for example, whether an herb that seems to raise the levels of antibodies in the blood is actually doing anything beneficial for the overall immunity.”    Similar conclusions are made for the supplements they cover specifically in the report — Astragalus, Echinacea, Ginseng, Licorice Root, and Umckaloabo.

So what’s a body to do?  With the claims of marketers (and newscasters) in tatters, the report lists six steps you can take to help your immune system.  It’s instructive that five of them – good hygiene, food safety, clean water, insect repellent, and safe sex – are about avoiding pathogens entering your body in the first place, rather than improving your body’s response.  The sixth of course is vaccination, still the only known way to make your immune system work better.

Which leaves the cold sufferer reduced to the old standbys – rest, liquids, and the comforting knowledge that it will all be over soon.  For as an Egyptian physician I once knew told me, “In my country, they say that without treatment a cold will last for seven days.  With treatment — a week.”

Photo courtesy of William Brawley under Creative Commons.

Related posts:

1. Canadian Flu Update 2010
2. Young woman’s death a wake up call.
3. Mass Homeopathic Overdose Kills No One: Victory Declared
4. A Homeopathic Dose of Consumer Protection
5. Appealing to our "Basic" Instincts