Dr Samuel Furse » 2015 » May

 The Politics of Protest Monday, May 11 2015 


There were some political protests this week.  One in London and one in Cardiff. They were campaigning against the Conservative policy of austerity.  The damnedest thing of all was that the poor sods were a day too late.  A little glitch in their event management meant they did it they day after the election instead of the day before.  It could happen to anyone.

I am being facetious, obviously.  It was of course a response to the result of the general election, rather than a way of drumming up voters to back their cause. It has happened a few times before, after Conservative governments have been elected. There is therefore a history, or perhaps a tradition, of British left-wing activists doing that.  Oddly, right wing ones have not adopted the same tactics.  Conservative election wins are invariably met with scorn protest where Labour ones are not.

Perhaps the answer to this is that the governments are elected for different reasons.  There is the feeling that Labour governments are elected mainly because Conservative ones are unpopular, rather than because the Labour prospect is itself popular.  Labour have a dedicated following of course, which is probably smaller than the tory one, at least if the number of years of conservative government since WW2 is compared to that of Labour.  It is about twice as much.

I was surprised when I first heard that statistic.  Perhaps it is all the more surprising when we consider that voting conservative is largely socially unacceptable.  Or, at least tories are shy, according to Lewis Barber in the Independent.  This shiness might also be why so many of the pollsters got it wrong and why the BBC’s poll that predicted the conservative party would be the largest was published so nervously on election night.

It would be easy for right-wingers to blame a left-biased media for this sort of thing.   Realistically, they had no direct role, and I think we can ignore evidenceless media conspiracies as the mechanism behind voting practices.  The same applies to the protests: they were not media-generated.  By far the most likely explanation for those was that a group of lefties did not get what they felt entitled to at a general election, and rocked up in a couple of big cities (and not even the most Labourite ones) to say so.

This analysis has them as childish, and worse still, undemocratic.  It suggests they should vote for what they want and then move on whether or not they get it, at least in the short term after the election.  That is probably what Conservative voters do, but as we know they have different behavioural response to electoral disappointment.  The only Conservative-type protest in Britain that I can think of is the countryside march.  That was in the middle of a parliament, partly a response to the Hunting Bill. Despite being huge and non-violent, it was not listened by the government of the day any more than any of the others were, so was probably as just as ineffectual. Still, we retain the view and practice that people having their voice non-violently is part of democracy and no one in the UK is about to stop it.

No one needs to tell the Scottish nationalists this.  They did not get what they wanted in the referendum on Scottish Independence, but there was no crying or stamping of feet. They worked out what to do and then did it.  Now, 56/59 Scottish seats in the house of commons are held by the SNP, who got something like 50% of the vote in that Kingdom, overturning several considerable Labour majorities in the process. They now have a strong ‘Scottish voice’ and probably the political will and power to get their way.  Their respect for democracy has been exemplary throughout.

The SNP has also been campaigning for independence for 80 years. In context, that’s about twenty years longer than the National Health Service, an important socialist achievement, has been in existence. We still have a National Health Service, and have even added to its remit the task of being something for everyone to complain about. We also have the Hunting Act and the Union remains intact.  So, who has got the best political tactics?

 

 Banting Thin Friday, May 1 2015 


The broadest definition of lipids includes fats and cholesterol as well as biological amphiphiles. This means that the study of obesity is often regarded as part of the study of lipids. In fact, the study of obesity is a good broad definition of the clinical discipline of lipidology. The principal stuff of obesity is of course fat, referred to formally as triglycerides.

The structure of triglycerides give very little of their peripheral importance away: the social, emotional and even political meaning these molecules have is not at all evident from the molecules as we see them on the page. In fact, despite considerable research into human metabolism over the last hundred or more years, there has been very little impact on obesity. If anything, Europeans and North Americans are fatter now than they were a century and a half ago. This is despite the increase in our understanding of fats and the dangers they pose. This ‘obesity crisis’, if a crisis can happen as slowly as someone over-eating, also correlates with the popularisation of dieting.

In 1862, the undertaker by Royal appointment to the House of Hannover, a William Banting, published a ‘Letter on Corpulence: Addressed to the Public’. The document is still widely available, and makes interesting reading for social historians as well as lipidologists, and probably those interested in the psychology surrounding losing or gaining weight. It is about what became known as Banting, a form of dieting.

A look beyond the Victorian verbosity and veneration brings out familiar themes. He describes the perceived difficulties of corpulence—of being unfit, of having an awkward bodily shape, of lacking energy. He also fashions a superficially believable excuse for not increasing his calorific expenditure (taking more exercise), and hints at many of the ignorances of the time, including that fatness is age-related and that gout and obesity are linked.

Two particular things about this Letter stood out for me. First, that this appears to be an example of the belief that weight loss can, or should, or should only be attempted purely through dietary change. Second, that this is the first low carbohydrate diet, and forms the basis for all those that have been constructed in that vain since.

The idea that losing weight can be achieved through changes to diet alone is not necessarily wrong—no one who understood anything about human metabolism would tell you that it were—but equally there is no doubt that it is not the full story. The mass of triglycerides (amount of fat) in our adipose tissue can regarded rather like the amount of money in a bank account. If we spend more (take more exercise), the balance falls (we get thinner). If we earn more than we spend (eat more calories that are used), the balance goes up (our adipose tissue stores more fat). So, rather like running a current account, the balance between what is spent and what is earned is the key to changing the size of fat reserves. It is not just about what is earned.

Banting’s unwitting begattation of the ‘low carbohydrate diet’ is a bit harder to analyse. Certainly, he consumes fewer calories from starchy foods on his weight loss diet, to a level that he eats fewer than he needs and thus uses up his reserves. However, the diet also represents a considerable reduction in the intake of fat, and not necessarily as low a carbohydrate intake as one might imagine. He avoided pastry and fattier meats but also drank far more alcohol than is recommended today. The emergence of ‘low carb’ diets from this one is therefore a bit of a mystery. It was probably not widely understood in the 1860s was that fat contains more than twice as many calories as either protein or carbohydrate, gramme-for-gramme. Could it be that this is still poorly understood today?

Food is a complicated mixture of molecular species, and indeed the composition of foods is too complicated even to be at the centre of food science. Biochemical studies mean we now know that our omnivorous digestive systems and evolved metabolic machinery are well able to deal with a variety of molecular species. This means that we can tolerate a great variety in our diet. Our bodies can make fats out of both carbohydrate and protein, but cannot make either protein or carbohydrate out of fats. We can convert some protein monomers (amino acids) into others, and thus make up for a certain deficiency of amino acids in our diet, but by no means all—there are at least eight amino acids we must have in our dietary intake, the best sources of which are meats.

Human bodies are not really able to make carbohydrates at all–at least not ones for storing energy. Though we can get energy from fats, we rely upon carbohydrate absolutely. In fact, the basis of all terrestrial metabolism is the oxidation of glucose to carbon dioxide. Thus any organism that respites requires a supply of glucose. This means that although there is scope for a good deal of variety, the evidence is clear: there are some things we cannot expect to change.

However, the fact remains: no matter how clear the data, how good the science, or how thoroughly the fad diets and the bullshit of phrases like ‘low carbs’ are debunked, obesity remains. The science is not enough on its own, to stop the crisis. This suggests to me that the study of obesity is the study of the problem, more than the solution. Where the solution will come from is harder to say—but a hundred and fifty years of Banting has not yet given the answer.

References and Further Reading

Letter on Corpulence: Addressed to the Public, William Banting. (A simple google search will bring this up though links here, here and here work at the time of writing)

The Fats of Life, Caroline M. Pond. A dry and now somewhat dated but easy read on fats. More recent research includes evidence that illuminates our understanding of the genes involved in the metabolism of fats, see here.