National Institute of Nutrition and Food Health
Establishment of the National Institute of Nutrition and Food Health (NINFH) is envisioned, with a mission to seek fundamental knowledge about food and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability. This mission would be distinct from other public institutions that serve various food system functions.
One way to establish the NINFH is within the National Institutes of Health (FY 2017 budget $33.1 billion) as the 28th institute and center. Another way to establish the NINFH is as an independent institution—similar to the founding of the National Cancer Institute (FY 2017 budget $5.4 billion) through the National Cancer Act of 1937—that requests budget directly from the United States Department of Health and Human Services (FY 2017 budget $1.1 trillion).
Rationale:
- Connection between Food, Illness, and Health
- Funding Gap
- Separation of Duty to Agriculture and Duty to Public Health
- Trusted Authority for Public
High-Alignment Food
The single most important thing that has changed about your food is the alignment of interest. Until modern times, your food was provided by kin with a vested interest in your well-being. Today, food is provided by counterparties (food companies, restaurants, etc.) who profit from your consumption. They compete among themselves to bait you with food coloring and salty, sweet, and fatty flavors while using chemicals, antibiotics, preservatives, pesticides, substitutes, and additives that increase profits, irrespective of their long-term effects on your body. There is a never-ending food fight in society about what constitutes healthy food as counterparties game every healthy food trend to their advantage. The future of food will be about managing counterparty risk, understanding food chain provenance, and restoring alignment between you and your food provider.
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Food Allergy, Asthma, Anaphylaxis, and Autonomic Dysfunction
Written with Charles Cho
Food allergies are a rapidly growing medical and public health problem. Recent studies estimate an incidence of 5% in children younger than 5 years old and 4% in adults. In severe cases, subjects can experience anaphylaxis and even death if exposed to a food to which they are sensitive. There is no known cure. Rather, doctors recommend that the sufferer avoid exposure to the allergen. The mechanism of disease is thought to be immunologic.
A number of drugs can be used during an acute food allergy attack, but only one — intramuscular injection of epinephrine — immediately resolves all of the symptoms associated with the episode. Tellingly, epinephrine is a neurotransmitter/hormone of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) that augments sympathetic function. Emerging data in the literature supports a neuro-immune connection, particularly in light of how the ANS innervates and regulates lymphoid tissues and other constituents of the immune system. It is possible that food allergy syndrome (and perhaps all cases of anaphylaxis) may require both an allergic sensitivity and an underlying inability to generate an adequate sympathetic response (or an underlying parasympathetic/ vagal dominance).1
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Therapeutics as the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Darwinian Medicine
Evolutionary medicine (also referred to as Darwinian medicine) is the application of evolutionary theory to the understanding of human ailments.1 2 3 It explores evolutionary mechanisms of disease, offering a complementary framework to the proximate mechanistic explanations that prevail in medicine today. In this paper, we consider the application of evolutionary theory to the treatment of ailments.
A major contribution of evolutionary medicine is the framing of human diseases as maladaptations of our prehistoric factory settings. Our physiologic processes were shaped during prehistoric evolution to meet the needs of the era, but those same processes may behave maladaptively in the modern environment and produce disease. We take that notion one step further and propose an overarching therapeutic paradigm for human ailments based on evolutionary theory—the induction of adaptations in the body as a way to treat disease. It is the idea of creating somatic traits in the body that evolution might otherwise need to create over many generations through the sheer force of variation and natural selection. In the same way, that evolution has endowed us with traits that shield against biotic and abiotic stress to maintain homeostasis, we propose treating patients by endowing the body with buffers against ailments.
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Ethylene: The Most Important Molecule You’ve Never Heard Of?
Ethylene is a gaseous hydrocarbon with the molecular structure C2H4. It is commonly produced when hydrocarbons are exposed to oxidative stress, such as that found during lightning, volcanic eruptions, forest fires, and photochemical reactions on the ocean surface. Plants coopted ethylene biosynthesis during evolution to manage their response to oxidative stress from biotic and abiotic sources. Further exaptations of ethylene include modulation of plant life history events such as development, transformation, senescence, and death.
Due to a number of factors described below, humans may be subject to increasing ethylene exposure. The potential health consequences of ethylene exposure are not part of the public consciousness and warrant further exploration.
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Compound Thinking
Abstract
Children are trained to count linearly: one, two, three, four, five, etc. Long before mathematics was invented, however, a subjective process of estimation was used to quantify and make decisions. If the ability to appreciate quantities in linear terms confers fitness advantage, that edge appears to have eluded Darwinian selection. Studies of the Amazonian Mundurucu indigenous tribe and preschool American children all suggest that humans are innately wired to use a compressed scale to understand magnitude – not unlike those depicted by logarithmic, exponential, or power-law functions. A compressed scale is biased toward achieving higher resolution at the lower end of the spectrum where smaller numbers reside, where discriminating subtleties in degrees of scarcity can provide the greatest benefit. Psychophysical studies assessing the magnitude of subjective estimation of sensory inputs such as light intensity and sound intensity also reveal innate mapping of signals on compressed scales. From an adaptive perspective, a compressed scale of subjective estimation enables a wider dynamic range of sensory processing which is valuable in environmental signal interpretation. The hypothesis that selective pressures favored the cognitive adoption of a compressed scale for subjective estimation is consistent with the reality that natural phenomena generally unfold through iteration, yielding patterns of development that are best understood through the prism of compounding rather than the lens of linearity. Like an intellectual slide rule, modern mathematics reprograms children. It obligates them to abandon their natural cognitive tendencies, which rely on compressed scales and estimation and coerces them into adopting linear scales that provide uniform resolution along the entire scale. It resigns them to participate in a wholesale exercise of indiscriminate precision with respect to all things. This force-fed mental framework may help individuals thrive in the artificiality of our modern socio-cultural-economic landscape, replete with man-made straight lines and standardized tests. However, we believe that the conflict between our innate instinct to estimate on a compressed scale and our learned ability to quantify on a linear scale is a source of profound decision dysfunction in the modern world, particularly impairing the ability to assess the possibilities of outlier outcomes.
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A Balanced Diet
The concept of the importance of eating a balanced diet took on major cultural significance in this country when the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its first Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 1980 — a response to an increase in heart disease amongst Americans in the 1960’s. The Guidelines are updated every five years to incorporate the latest advances in medical and scientific research, based on the recommendations of the 11-member Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a group of widely recognized nutrition and medical experts. The U.S. government directly or indirectly feeds approximately 54 million people daily according to these guidelines — including over 25 million school children. These numbers are not lost on those in the food, agriculture, and diet industries, who are all busy promoting their particular points of view. They work to install members to the committee whose support they can count on, ostensibly in order to ensure that the committee itself has a ‘balanced’ view of diet and nutrition. In such a politically charged environment, what do we end up with? A ‘balanced’ diet indeed, with a little something on everyone’s plate.
While the experts disagree on what constitutes a diet balanced for optimal health, most presume the need for ‘balance’, and the importance of consuming a wide variety of different foods. The guidelines have changed over time, with the recent addition of an emphasis on physical activity to offset caloric consumption. The debate remains largely centered, however, over which foods reside at the top and which languish at the bottom of the food pyramid, rather than the validity of the approach itself.
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Not-So-Dire Diagnosis
Warren Buffett once famously stated that “Berkshire [Hathaway] buys when the lemmings are headed the other way,” conjuring up visions of rodents blindly following one another off a cliff. But the idea that lemmings participate in mass suicide is a myth, propagated by a Disney documentary. The widespread misuse of the lemming metaphor by investors to illustrate herd behavior itself reveals the herdlike behavior of investors and the scarcity of original insight.
Original insight is also uncommon among doctors. Physicians are trained through rote memorization, and independent views are often ridiculed by peers and prosecuted by malpractice attorneys. The hiring of physicians as consultants by investment firms seeking unique perspectives has instead led to a greater tendency toward consensus thinking.
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