Homeopathy: Much ado about nothing

I visited a doctor a little while ago and he suggested three different treatments for me. The first was expensive and not covered by insurance. The second was a strong drug that could be hard on the liver, and given my medical history he said it was not a good idea for me. The third was what he called a "homeopathic" remedy. The description did not sound remotely homeopathic, so I questioned him on it. He admitted it was actually a naturopathic remedy, and that he didn't know the difference between "naturopathic" and "homeopathic". I informed him.

For what it's worth, I chose the natural remedy and it is working nicely, thank you.

Homeopathy is one of the most hilariously silly alternative medicine systems. I decided to write this article because it seems that many people don't know what homeopathy is, and confuse it with herbal remedies or naturopathic medicine in general (as the doctor did). Herbal remedies and homeopathic remedies are quite different. While some herbal remedies are pseudoscientific, having no evidence of their efficacy, many others really do work and many of the drugs and medicines we all use are based on herbal remedies. Homeopathy, on the other hand, is based on outdated knowledge, bad science, and magic.

What is homeopathy?

A homeopathic remedy is one in which you take something that may cause an illness and make a strongly diluted solution of it in order to cure the illness. The idea is termed "like cures like", meaning that the thing that makes you sick can also cure you. This is not the outrageous part – that's (kind of) the idea that vaccines are based on. The outrageous part is the dilution.

It's very easy to make a homeopathic solution. Take 1 mL of whatever the original substance is and mix it in 100 mL of water. In an actual homeopathic remedy, you'd need to shake or bang the container a few times after each dilution. Then take 1 mL of the resulting solution (not all of it, just 1 mL – you can throw the rest away) and mix it in a different 100 mL of water. Then take 1 mL of that  solution and mix it in a different 100 mL of water. We've now diluted the original substance in a ratio of 1:100 three times. This is the same as 1:100³, or 1:1,000,000, termed 3C. It should be obvious that there isn't much of the original substance in the resulting mixture.

Now repeat that procedure twenty-seven more times. This is now 30C, which is what's typically used in homeopathic remedies. (Note that some homeopathic remedies use a dilution of up to 200C.) The odds of there being a single molecule of the original substance in the final mixture are infinitesimal. Here's a frequently-used comparison. If the entire Atlantic Ocean was fresh water and you added a pinch of salt and mixed it up, the resulting solution would be about 12C. Each number you go up (i.e. from 12C to 13C) results in a solution 100 times weaker than the previous one. You have to do this 18 times to get from 12C to 30C, so the solution is 100¹⁸ times weaker. A standard homeopathic solution is a billion billion billion billion billion billion times weaker than that pinch of salt in the ocean. When you pay $10 for a little vial of a homeopathic remedy, that's what you're spending your money on. Pure water. Homeopaths will confirm this.

(Note that sometimes it's not a liquid solution that you're buying, it's sometimes a sugar pill that has been treated with the 30C solution. Homeopaths will also confirm that the pill itself does nothing, it's just a delivery mechanism for the solution.)

One other rule of homeopathy: the more the substance is diluted, the stronger it is. You want an extra-strength version? Mix it in more water. This leads to all kinds of homeopathy jokes:

I accidentally overdosed on my homeopathic medicine the other day. I didn't take it.

Why would anyone ever buy a homeopathic remedy twice? When you're about to run out, just dilute it some more.

There's even a homeopathic webcomic.

So if the stuff you're buying doesn't have any of the original substance left in it, how do homeopaths claim it works? This is where it gets really silly. The water remembers. Homeopathy posits that you can dilute the solution to the point that there isn't any of the original substance left and the water contains some memory of the substance and that is what cures the disease. Actually it's not – that's what triggers your body's "vital life force" to cure the disease. Note that this "life force" is the same one that chiropractors claim to influence when they make spinal adjustments, and it's the same one acupuncturists claim to influence when they insert their needles. There is no evidence that such a force exists.

Not only is water memory implausible, scientific tests have shown that any artificial ordering of water molecules (i.e. what might pass for "memory") breaks down after roughly 50 femtoseconds, which is 50 millionths of a nanosecond. And I'm not talking about a nanosecond meaning "a very small amount of time", I'm talking about an actual nanosecond, i.e. a billionth of a second.

None of this matters

Having said all that, none of it matters. When it's all said and done, who cares how something works as long as it works? There are lots of different types of medicines out there, and I have no idea how most of them work. There are even some that modern medical science can't fully explain. But that doesn't mean they don't work.

Homeopaths will argue that "you can't say homeopathy doesn't work just because you think it's silly." They're absolutely right. They'll say "you can't say homeopathy doesn't work just because you don't know how it could work" and they're right again. The reason we know it doesn't work is from the thousands of studies and trials that have been done over the past hundred years that show it doesn't work. There's no need to explain why it doesn't work, and there's no need to come up with an explanation of how it could work if it did. The studies prove that it just doesn't.

Full disclosure: while researching this article, I ran across lots of published studies that concluded that homeopathic remedies worked better than placebo. Some of them didn't have proper blinding or randomization or things like that, and so they can be dismissed out of hand. But many cannot. I am not a scientist so I cannot look at a study and determine whether it was done properly or whether the data supports the conclusions, so I must read other people's interpretations and decide if I trust them. Scientists and skeptics believe the data is clear – homeopathy doesn't work. Homeopaths believe the data is clear – homeopathy works. I could simply trust the skeptics because I'm a skeptic, but that could be looked at as a personal bias. But I do trust the skeptics, and here's why.

Homeopaths point to certain trials that show homeopathy's effectiveness as proof that it works. But they also say "It has been established beyond doubt and accepted by many researchers, that the placebo-controlled randomised controlled trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy." So they use the studies that show their results as proof, and dismiss the ones that show different results as "these types of tests aren't appropriate". Note that they're not claiming that there was a problem with the studies themselves, it's the entire concept of the randomized trial that they disagree with. There are two logical fallacies here: cherry picking (picking only data that agrees with you) and special pleading (saying that it's impossible to test this claim but not saying why). There's also no reasoning for why the generally accepted science of a randomized trial is not "fitting".

Conclusion

Homeopathy was invented in the early 1800's, during a time when almost everything known about healthcare and the human body was wrong. Medical science has changed almost entirely in that time, with innumerable advances and breakthroughs over the decades. And yet homeopaths have clung to the same concepts despite there being no non-anecdotal evidence that it works and no theoretical way that it could. There have been no advancements in homeopathy in 200 years – all of the original theories are still in use today. Homeopaths have had 200 years to prove to everyone that it's effective and they've utterly failed. If it was truly effective, there'd be no need to convince anyone of anything and it wouldn't be alternative medicine, it would just be medicine.

But what if it did work? What if water actually did retain a memory of a substance diluted in it, and could be used to cure some illness caused by that substance? How would the water know which substance to remember – the one you just diluted beyond existence, or other substances the water has been in contact with? As I read on one site, "One wonders in vain how water remembers only the molecules the homeopath has introduced at some point in the water's history and forgets all those trips down the toilet".

If water truly had memory, there would be no need to mix anything. All the water on Earth would have some memory of all the substances it's been in contact with over however many millions of years, and since it's been diluted many thousands of times, it'd be pretty potent. All the water on Earth would be a homeopathic remedy for everything. Every time you drink water, you'd be triggering your body's immune reaction against every disease, even if you didn't have it. Everyone would be healthy all the time.

And we'd all be drinking dinosaur pee.

Wi-fi, fear-mongering, and pickles

Once again, I have to respond to a fallacious letter to the editor in my local paper, the Flamborough Review. And once again, it's by the same guy. This is the third of his letters I've responded to; the first was about teachers and the second was about vaccination. Here is the letter in its entirety:

The  idea of  “learning commons” in children’s libraries is a noble idea, although I am not an advocate of this kind of technology in primary schools.

We are distancing our children so far from the fundamentals that they will no longer have a foundation to build on.

Reading, writing, arithmetic and spelling has gone the way of the dodo. As a parent I am concerned, as are many others, that technology is beginning to replace the fundamentals. I can see it in the work my daughter brings home, and the work she doesn’t bring home.

Another concern is the use of Wi-Fi in primary schools. Our children’s exposure to electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) is a cause for worry. According to Dr. David Carpenter, director of the Institute of Health and Environment at the University of Albany, there is a great body of work that shows continued exposure to EMF effects changes in the ability to learn and remember. Last fall, the World Health Organization could no longer afford to ignore the research and deemed EMF to be a Class 2 carcinogen. The list of Class 2 materials also includes items such as asbestos, lead and diesel fumes. I am certain I would not send my child to a room full of diesel fumes, so how can I consciously send her to a room full of harmful radiation?

In 2011, biologist Andrew Goldsworthy gave a witness statement to a standing committee on health regarding the dangers of EMF. One of the most horrific statements from his speech was, “it was first shown by Bawin et. al in the ‘70s that weak amplitude radio waves can remove calcium from brain cell membranes. This destabilizes them, making them more likely to leak. This is important in the brain because the normal function of brain cells depends on the controlled passage of specific ions through the membranes. When they leak, ions flow uncontrollably…When this occurs in a fetus or young child, it retards brain development…Wi-Fi should be considered an impediment rather than an aid to learning and should be avoided, especially by pregnant teachers.”

The very governments and agencies mandated to protect us allow this kind of harmful technology to exist. We need to reduce or eliminate our exposure to as many toxins as we can, for our own health, and that of our children.

There is a parents’ group in Collingwood trying to get Wi-Fi out of their schools, yet officials are siding with Health Canada, which is ignoring its own scientific data. Please go to safe school.ca and read up on this issue. Some of the evidenced side effects include nausea, headaches, dizziness, attention and focusing problems, low blood counts, disturbance of the immune system and heart palpitations and racing heartbeats.

I will be asking the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board for the results of their testing to see what levels my child is being exposed to.

Kevin Inglehart, Lynden

My only comment on the opening bit about education is that my sons are in grades 9 and 6, all in the Hamilton public system, and they are certainly learning the fundamentals as well as technology. They certainly learn things differently than I did thirty years ago, but that's to be expected. Perhaps this is a problem with the particular school or his daughter's teacher. It could also be a problem with his expectations and not with the school board at all.

But onto the other issue he raises, that of wi-fi routers causing health problems. This time, I'm not going to write a letter to the editor in rebuttal of this. I'm going to write my rebuttal here rather than submitting it to the Review. Submitting it would require making it fit for general consumption, and so I'd have to refrain from the sarcasm and ridicule that I really feel like using. I'd also have to shorten it since I'll probably write a lot here and the Review won't print it if it's too long. Quite honestly, I just can't be bothered to clean it up and make it short. Writing concisely is much more difficult than just spouting off; in the words of Blaise Pascal, "I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

So, to business. First off, the EM radiation given off by a wi-fi router is called "non-ionizing" radiation, which means that it's not strong enough to remove electrons from atoms. This also means that it does not cause damage to cells. This is in contrast to ionizing forms of radiation, such as X-rays and UV rays, which do cause cell damage. Some forms of non-ionizing radiation (like microwaves) can heat things up and the heat can cause damage, but wi-fi signals are just not strong enough even for that.

It's true that electromagnetic radiation is considered a class 2B carcinogen by the World Health Organization (WHO). All that means is that it's on a list of things that have not been shown to be carcinogenic but require further study. Ken Foster, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, says:

Saying that something is a 'possible carcinogen' is a bit like saying someone is a 'possible shoplifter' because he was in the store when the watch was stolen. [reference]

Here are some other things that are on the same "Class 2B carcinogen" list (the entire list is here):

• coffee
• asphalt
• nickel
• pickled vegetables
• carpentry and joinery
• chroloprene (also known as Neoprene, a synthetic rubber used in hundreds of products including clothing)
• aloe vera
• gingko biloba extract
• talc-based body powder

Presumably Mr. Inglehart will be petitioning the school board to move the local Tim Horton's further away from the schools, to remove wood shop entirely, and to ban pickles from student lunches.

Asbestos and diesel exhaust, which Mr. Inglehart claims are on the type 2 list, are actually type 1. (Diesel fuel is 2B.) Lead is on the 2B list, but lead is known for being a neurotoxin, not a carcinogen.

I did visit the web site Mr. Inglehart suggested, and found many anecdotes describing how people became sick when they installed wifi routers in their home or school. But as we all know (don't we?), such anecdotes are scientifically meaningless. (One famous skeptical quote is "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.") There were also some studies that showed a possible association between cancer and cell phone towers – note that this is "possible association" not "proven causality", and a cell phone tower is not the same thing as a wifi router.

It comes down to this: unless you are a biophysicist specializing in this kind of research, you have to read what others have done and then trust someone. I haven't done the research myself, and I probably couldn't understand the details of the studies if you put them in front of me. But I do trust the World Health Organization, who says (emphasis mine):

In the area of biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years. … Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields. [reference]

The Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion says

After a decade of additional research, there is still no conclusive evidence of adverse effects on health at exposure levels below current Canadian guidelines.

and

…there is no plausible evidence that would indicate current public exposures to Wi-Fi are causing adverse effects on health. [reference]

Just like a lot of other conspiracy theories, this one is based on bad data, bad assumptions, and mistrust of the scientific community. Then you wrap it all up with scary words like "carcinogen" and stories about people getting sick, and give it to parents while implying that if they don't do anything about it, they obviously don't care about their children's health. If you do that, you might be able to convince parents that this is a real problem. That's why we have school boards considering getting rid of wi-fi, not because it's actually a problem.

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I've seen a number of other letters to the Review from this same person. The majority of them are filled with fear-mongering and conspiracies like the "dangers" of vaccines and water fluoridation and that "banks and large corporations own and control the media". Most of them are just opinions and have no references, but some of them, like this one, have references to one or two articles or scientists who happen to disagree with just about every other scientist in the world. It's possible that he accidentally stumbled upon an article that describes the exact opposite of the scientific consensus and believed it wholeheartedly. But it seems unlikely that he's done this several times, so I am forced to assume that he simply mistrusts science and government, and believes in any conspiracy theory he hears.

I find it partially amusing but mostly irritating that these conspiracy believers (and many alt-medicine believers too) are all "mainstream science is wrong" and "mainstream science is covering up the truth" until they find a scientist who supports them, and then they're all "this person believes us and he's a scientist so he knows what he's talking about and you can trust him! And not all those other scientists! Just this one!" Sorry, folks, you can't have it both ways. Either you trust the scientists (or more accurately, the science) or you don't.

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Update: I did end up writing a letter to the editor. Here it is:

I feel compelled to respond to Mr. Inglehart's letter, which contains half-truths and misleading statements, so that other parents don't concern themselves with a problem that does not exist. Wi-fi routers in our schools are not a cause for concern. There are certainly people who believe that they are, including a few scientists, but the vast majority of studies that have been done have shown no negative effects on health at all.

It's true that electromagnetic radiation is considered a class 2B carcinogen by the World Health Organization (WHO). What that actually means is that it's on a list of things that have not been shown to be carcinogenic but require further study. Other items on this list include coffee, asphalt, pickled vegetables, carpentry and joinery, aloe vera, and talc-based body powder. I don't hear anyone leading the charge against wood shop or pickles in school lunches.

But if you're going to believe the WHO's "possible carcinogen" list, you should really believe the WHO when they say "In the area of biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years. ... Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields."

More locally, the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion says "After a decade of additional research, there is still no conclusive evidence of adverse effects on health at exposure levels below current Canadian guidelines. ...there is no plausible evidence that would indicate current public exposures to Wi-Fi are causing adverse effects on health."

There is no point is spending more taxpayer money looking at something that has been studied this much when the overwhelming majority of the studies show the same thing - that there are no negative health effects caused by wi-fi signals.

Graeme Perrow
Waterdown

Toxic thinking

I've been seeing more and more articles and blog postings like this one recently, all about "detoxifying" your home or your life or your body. They all talk about these vague "toxins" generally but never say what toxins. Then they talk about some of the dangers to society and how to either avoid or fix them but most of the time, the "dangers" aren't actually dangerous and the "solutions" are either non-existent, ineffective because they don't work, or ineffective because there's no problem to solve in the first place.

The author of this story has a son who was diagnosed with autism and says that our "toxic" environment is the cause for her son's illness. (Somewhat surprisingly, she makes no mention of vaccines.) She then describes ways to "de-toxify" your life. She certainly makes some good points in the article – drink water instead of other stuff, eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, avoid processed snacks, eat rice crackers or veggie chips, go to farmers markets, these are all great suggestions. But here are some of the points she makes that directly contradict modern science and medicine:

The world in which our children are currently growing up, is significantly more toxic than the one in which we did as children, exponentially more so than our parents.

Really? How do you figure? We and our parents lived through lead (in the pipes, paint, toys, etc.), asbestos, DDT, Thalidomide, and other actual toxins, all of which are now known to cause no end of health problems. Specifically what toxins are you talking about that are significantly or exponentially worse than those?

We know organic is best. Food dyes and colors make our kids wild. GMOs are terrifying. Gluten, soy, corn, and dairy are the high allergens and can cause all sorts of issues. Juice is unnecessary sugar and calories.

Nope, probably not, nope, nope (provisionally), OK. Organic food is no healthier or safer than non-organic (See references 1, 2). I did read about a study that food dyes may cause hyperactivity in children, but the FDA in the US has thus far declared that "a causal relationship between exposure to color additives and hyperactivity in children in the general population has not been established" (3). GMO food is no less healthy or safe than non-GMO (4). If you have Celiac disease, gluten is certainly something you want to avoid. But if you don't, it's harmless (5). Soy, corn, and dairy are indeed allergens and can cause all kinds of problems if you are allergic. But I could find no articles indicating that they're a problem if you are not allergic. (6). The juice one I'd agree with.

Allopathic medicine is a term coined by Samuel Hahnemann, the father of Homeopathy, in reference to ‘mainstream Western medicine’. In simple terms, it refers to our constant need to address and suppress every symptom our body sends us of illness.

"Western medicine just treats the symptoms" is a common misconception in the alternative medicine community. If that were true, doctors wouldn't prescribe antibiotics for pneumonia, they'd just give you a cough suppressant. If you have pain because of appendicitis, do they treat the pain? No, they remove the appendix – that's treating the cause, not the symptom. I recently heard Dr. Steven Novella (a neurologist and prof at the Yale School of Medicine) talking about this, and he said that other than managing the pain of terminal patients to make them comfortable, so-called "Western" medicine is entirely about treating the cause of health problems and not just the symptoms. So is alternative medicine, but the two just disagree on how to determine the causes. Western medicine uses science, alternative medicine uses magic.

I had severe acute pancreatitis a few years ago and spent two months in the hospital. One of my biggest symptoms was intense pain, caused by my pancreas effectively choking on a gallstone. Did the doctors treat my pain? Of course they did. They also performed major abdominal surgery, an MRI, several X-rays and ultrasounds, countless CT scans and a number of other procedures to deal with the cause of this condition, not just the pain. Three years later, except for being a type 2 diabetic I am fully back to normal, and I owe my life to those doctors and nurses. How would an acupuncturist deal with pancreatitis? They wouldn't – they'd either (a) send you to a hospital because they know they can do nothing, or (b) ironically attempt to treat the pain and not the cause, thereby killing you.

The author says that fever is our body's natural reaction to an infection (true) and that we shouldn't attempt to reduce the fever because of that. But then a couple of paragraphs later, she says we should use "good old fashioned 'grandmas recipes'… like placing the soles of the feet in water for a fever". Didn't she just say we should not try to reduce fever?

Look to Homeopathy. … Or find a local homeopath to work with, Queen Elizabeth does!

Not only has homeopathy never been proven effective, it's actually harmful to those who would use it instead of seeing a real doctor and getting real medication (7). In fact, there is no known mechanism by which it could be effective.  It's nothing but water or a sugar pill – the very definition of placebo. The fact that Queen Elizabeth has been duped into using homeopathy means nothing.

And finally EMF. Electromagnetic Fields. We live in a world of wireless. There are frequencies from our cell phones, internet connections, microwaves, smart TVs, etc, all around us and our cells are not accustomed to that. The damage is not yet fully known.

Electromagnetic sensitivity has repeatedly been shown to be nonexistent. People who claim that they are negatively affected by electromagnetic fields consistently show symptoms until proper blinding is added. When they don't already know whether they are being exposed or not, they can't tell. (8, 9)

The article then links to a couple of web sites that sell products that are supposed to help people with EMF sensitivity. Since EMF sensitivity doesn't exist, these products can't work, and some of the claims they make are ridiculous. But that doesn't stop these people from charging $89 for something that "protects you from cell phone radiation",  between $310 and $380 for a plate that "clears EMF pollution and geopathic stress", and even $160 for the ultimate in irony: a USB thingy that uses your wifi router to somehow broadcast EMF protection.

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These kind of articles frustrate me to no end, because the more articles like this there are, the more likely people are to read them and believe them. Science and modern "Western" medicine has given us the world we live in today – people are healthier now than ever before, life spans are longer, fewer people are dying of hunger, and so on. We haven't solved all the problems – people do still die of hunger and there are still many diseases that science has not yet found answers for – but the human average lifespan has more than doubled since 1900 and that's due to science, not to people harmonizing their life energy field with that of the earth.

The entire goal of science is and has always been to advance human knowledge. So why is it that so many people are now rejecting science and getting their health information from whoever on the internet? They ignore just about every doctor in the world and listen to Jenny McCarthy when it comes to vaccines. They believe that anything "all-natural" must be healthier than anything that's not (as I've said before, e. coli and salmonella are all-natural, while Tylenol is not). They read Natural News and believe the guy who tries to convince the world (without evidence) that the entire healthcare and pharmaceutical industries worldwide are global conspiracies and that millions of people wouldn't die of cancer every year if they just listened to him.

The worst part is that it's not just the cranks and tinfoil-hat people who believe this stuff – the general public seems to think that GMO food will kill us all and that obviously organic food is healthier than non-organic. What happens if some company uses genetic modification to create a type of wheat or rice or corn or whatever that is resistant to diseases and has extra nutrients and can be stored for longer without going bad and allows farms to increase their yield tenfold? Note that this is not outside the realm of possibility – these kinds of things are why we do genetic manipulation in the first place. Crops like this could solve much of the world's hunger problems (and yes I know that's a little simplistic) but if enough people are scared of GMO food, it may not matter because the research will get shut down before we get there. That's really sad.

I can only hope that sometime in the not-too-distant future, people start embracing science once again and abandoning things like medicine based on magic or remedies that are popular only because they were used in China a few thousand years ago or fear of things just because they are not well understood. Let's start moving human knowledge forwards again, not pushing it backwards.

References

Unlike the original article, I am including references for all the claims I've made here.

1. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
2. The Annals of Internal Medicine, produced by the American College of Physicians
3. An FDA quote from CBS Chicago
4. The World Health Organization. You may disagree with the business practices and policies of GMO companies like Monsanto, but that's a problem with the companies, not the GMO food itself.
5. The Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
6. No references here, because I couldn't find any from reliable science-based medicine sites talking about corn or soy problems or dairy problems that weren't related to lactose-intolerance. But bullshit sites like Natural News were filled with articles saying dairy is universally harmful, which implies to me that it's not.
7. The Journal of Medical Ethics
8. Psychosomatic Medicine, from the Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine
9. The World Health Organization

Anti-vaccination messages are the real danger

There was a letter to the editor in the Flamborough Review this past week about how harmful vaccinations are. I felt compelled to respond, not only because I'm a skeptic and get angry when I read crap like this, but because this is in my local paper, and if people read this misinformation and decide not to get vaccinated, that could directly affect me and my family.

Interestingly, the letter was written by the same guy who wrote another letter to the editor, that one about teachers, that I responded to a little over a year ago.

Here's the text of his letter, reproduced here in case the link above vanishes sometime in the future.

I wanted to voice my opinion, backed by evidence, that vaccines, of any sort, are dangerous.

The first vaccine was developed in the late 1700s in England when cowpox pus was inserted under the skin of an eight-year-old in the belief that it would make people immune to smallpox. What happened over the next century was an epidemic of small pox incidents, to 95 per cent of the population.

A 2012 study by Dr. Witt, an infectious disease specialist in California, found  whooping cough is more prevalent in vaccinated children that those who are not vaccinated. In 2010, a mumps outbreak occurred in New Jersey in more than 1,000 children, over 80 per cent of whom had been vaccinated with the MMR shot. A study in New Zealand found that children born after 1977, who were vaccinated, were 25 per cent more likely to contract asthma. Finally, in June of this year, a couple in Italy won their court case when it was conclusively established that the MMR vaccine had triggered autism in their child. The MMR shot in Italy contains the same “ingredients” as in North America.

There are web links to dozens of cases that have proven vaccines trigger all sorts of diseases in children. Allopathic medicine is not interested in curing. It only treats symptoms and pushes invasive procedures of surgery and medicine that create more complications. Also, Health Canada does not perform any independent studies of any drug. They simply review the data supplied to them by the companies seeking approval.

Do your due diligence, become enlightened and educated about what is going in you and your children. Hopefully you will realize you are being deceived and much of the information you need to know is being suppressed.

Kevin Inglehart
Lynden

Here's my response. I wasn't able to include my references in the letter to the editor, but I've included them here.

After reading Kevin Inglehart's rant against vaccinations, I had to respond in order to provide a counterpoint in the hope that local people will not be convinced by this misleading information to skip their flu shots.

In Mr. Inglehart's letter, he cites a study by a Dr. Witt that found that "whooping cough is more prevalent in vaccinated children than those who are not vaccinated." If you look more closely at the study, Dr. Witt's actual conclusion was that the whooping cough vaccine IS effective, but its effectiveness doesn't last as long as originally thought. The number of whooping cough cases increased as the vaccine's effectiveness diminished, and then decreased as children received their booster shot at age 12. The original claim, that most of the cases were in vaccinated children, is true but only because vaccinated children were the majority (78% on average in North America) in the first place. This is like saying that the number of right-handed children who get whooping cough is higher than the number of left-handed children who get it. Absolutely true, but it does not mean that left-handers are less likely to get sick. In general, unvaccinated children are eight times as likely to get whooping cough as vaccinated children.

Ironically, right in the middle of the front page of Dr. Witt's clinic's web site, there is a notice urging people to get their flu shots. If Mr. Inglehart is looking for a doctor to agree with his anti-vaccination position, he will have to look elsewhere.

Yes, outbreaks can still occur among vaccinated children, as evidenced by the mumps epidemic mentioned by Mr. Inglehart. However, such outbreaks are far smaller and the symptoms far less dangerous than if the majority of children were not vaccinated. The facts speak for themselves: The mumps vaccine was first used in 1967 and since then, the number of reported cases has decreased in the US from 186,000 per year to less than 500 per year.

Thousands of children have died and hundreds of thousands have become sick from diseases for which there are effective vaccines. On the other hand, the number of cases of autism that have been conclusively and scientifically proven to have been caused by vaccines is zero.  The Autism Science Foundation itself states "The studies are very clear; there is no relationship in the data between vaccines and autism." In the court case in Italy, the autism-vaccination link was "conclusively established" by the judge, not by scientists. Actual scientists are outraged with the finding since it, and most anti-vaccination arguments, stem from a single study in England from the late 1990's that was later proven to be not only false but also fraudulent.

If you believe that the entire health care industry (including millions of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, scientists, and other health care professionals around the world) is a global conspiracy to keep people sick, then nothing I write here will change your mind. For the rest of us, vaccinations are a safe and effective defense against many diseases including the flu. For the record, I am not a member of the health care industry, just someone who has done exactly what Mr. Inglehart has suggested - my own research.

References for all the claims I have made above are available at http://bit.ly/SafeVaccines.

Graeme Perrow
Waterdown

Update: My letter was not printed, but they did print another similar one from a professor at the University of Guelph. While it would have been cool if they had printed mine, I'm very glad they printed something, and something from a professor might carry more weight with people than from a regular guy like me. If there's anyone who read the first letter and was considering not getting a flu shot because of it, hopefully this one will convince them otherwise.

Live long and prosper

I saw a posting on facebook recently about Lonesome George, the giant tortoise who passed away last week. He was the last of his species, and some comments lamented the loss of another species from the planet and talked about how humans are destroying the habitats of many animal species, which I cannot disagree with. But then I saw this comment (emphasis mine):

I'm not much into doomsday prophecies, but I do think that if we don't reduce our number VERY soon, nature will do it for us. Perhaps a world-wide epidemic, or mass-psychosis causing war. This is not the right time to make people live longer and treat infertility. Too stupid for words.

As someone whose mother (in her 70's) is currently fighting cancer and whose sister recently had a baby via a surrogate because of infertility (also due to cancer treatment), I think making people live longer and treating infertility is not only a good idea, it's our duty as human beings.

Firstly, I thought it funny that this person says they're "not much into doomsday prophesies" and then proceeds to make one. The infertility thing I disagree with, but I suppose I can understand the logic. There are lots of unwanted children born around the world, and infertile people usually have the option of adopting one of them, rather than making a whole new one. But this is a very personal choice and who are you to decide that someone else should not have a child who is biologically theirs just because they have to jump through a few more medical hoops to do it than the average person?

But the other comment is mind-boggling. How do we as a species not try our hardest to make people live longer? What does this person suggest we do? Abandon medical research? Deny the elderly medical care? Don't bother curing childhood diseases that we can cure like polio and smallpox because that reduces the number of people who survive to adulthood (and therefore the number that will procreate)? A girl we know survived life-saving transplant surgery when she was six months old; she is now fifteen. Should they have just let her die as a baby? Hell, I had my own life-saving surgery two years ago – should they not have bothered?

Too stupid for words indeed.

Legalized magic

There is a piece of legislation in Ontario whose mere existence has me baffled. Essentially, it allows people who perform acts of magic to give themselves a title and makes it illegal to give yourself that particular title without being licensed to do so. This is like my having the ability to call myself a frobshmirtzer because I can talk to invisible aliens from the planet Frob, but if you try to call yourself a frobshmirtzer, you will get fined. I don't have to prove or even demonstrate that I can talk to such aliens, or even that they exist. I can just say that modern science doesn't have the right tools to be able to detect these aliens but trust me, I can. The government has decided that someone calling themself a frobshmirtzer without having this ability is somehow against the public good, so they have outlawed it. Only in this case, the word isn't frobshmirtzer, it's "acupuncturist".

I did a fair bit of research for this article. I look around for studies that examined the effectiveness of acupuncture, and found many that showed that it was completely ineffective, or at least no more effective than placebo. There are special tools that can be used to simulate the needles without actually inserting them into the skin (amusingly called "sham acupuncture"), and there are studies that show that sham acupuncture is just as effective as "real" acupuncture. There are studies that show that inserting the needles into random places on the body, rather than the magic acupuncture points, is also just as effective. I did find a number of studies that showed it to be very effective in certain cases, but those studies were either done by or funded by agencies that were associated with holistic medicine and therefore had a vested interest in positive results. I'm afraid that a study showing how effective acupuncture is does not carry much weight with me if it was done by the Department of Holistic Wellness at a Chinese university.

But I have to be honest here. I also found a few studies that showed it to be effective without any obvious bias in the study or flaws in how it was done. Now, I'm not a trained scientist, so I can't always look at a study and see what was done wrong; it's possible that these studies had biases (obvious, unintentional, or well-hidden) in them or other problems that discount or completely invalidate the results. I don't know for sure, so I have to take them at face value. But whenever I hear about such a study on one of the several skeptical podcasts I listen to, the podcasters (who are trained scientists) point out the flaws in the study. Long story short: if there have been peer-reviewed clinical trials showing the effectiveness of acupuncture whose results have been analyzed and repeated by other researchers (none of whom have any conflicts of interest), mainstream science hasn't seen them.

Can I say with absolute certainty that acupuncture never works better than placebo? No, of course not. What I can say with absolute certainty is that nobody has ever given a scientifically plausible explanation of how it works that is consistent with what we know about the human body and doesn't resort to special pleadings about undetectable energy fields. At best it is an unproven and controversial practice. To me, it is appalling that there is an Ontario law that gives it credence and treats it like a perfectly valid and accepted form of medical treatment.

The legislation in question is called the Traditional Chinese Medicine Act, 2006. It's a fairly short act that essentially does the following:

• defines "traditional Chinese medicine" as "the assessment of body system disorders through traditional Chinese medicine techniques and treatment using traditional Chinese medicine therapies to promote, maintain or restore health."
• establishes a body called the "College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists of Ontario"
• authorizes members of the College to perform acupuncture and to give "a traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis identifying a body system disorder as the cause of a person’s symptoms using traditional Chinese medicine techniques"
• states that only members of the College can call themselves "acupuncturist" or "traditional Chinese medicine practitioner" and lists the penalties

This act seems to be a work in progress – five years later, the College has not yet been created. The government has created The Transitional Council of the College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists of Ontario, whose goal is to "develop regulations and establish the College". One thing I found amusing on their web site was that one of the standards they plan to create is to define "what are considered acts of professional misconduct". How do you define professional misconduct in an industry that is entirely based on fallacy?

I do not believe that all acupuncturists are charlatans, liars or cheats. I'm sure many of them, likely even the majority, honestly believe that what they are doing is effective. The placebo effect is very powerful, and confirmation bias is very difficult to see through. You likely know people, or perhaps you're one yourself, who have gone to a psychic and come away saying "wow, she really nailed it!" Then they can tell you ten facts the psychic said about that person that were exactly right. Did they mention, or do they even remember, the other thirty facts that she got wrong? "I'm hearing a name, a woman's name. Marcie? Marge? Margaret? Mary?"  "Yes, I have an Aunt Mary who died two years ago! Wow, it's amazing how she knew that!" She only got 25% of her guesses right and you think she did a great job. That's confirmation bias. It's highly possible that an acupuncturist will unintentionally take credit for those patients who seem to be positively affected by acupuncture, and dismiss those for whom acupuncture does not work as the anomalies, saying "well, it doesn't work for everyone".

I am angered by the fact that our government has wasted time and money discussing the "issue" of non-registered acupuncturists and coming up with a plan to register them. Acupuncturists make their living inserting needles into people's bodies and telling them it will heal them, when everything we know about medicine tells us that it can't work, and countless studies show that it doesn't. This practice, according to the Ontario government, is OK. But calling yourself an acupuncturist when you're not licenced to do so is illegal and you will be subject to a fine of up to $25,000 for a first offense. This is so ass-backwards that it makes my head spin.

I'm sorry. It's not you. It's me.

I'm really sorry, my occasional companion of several years, but I think it's over. It's just not fun for me anymore. The first couple of years were great, and I looked forward to all the good times we'd have in the future. And then last year I got really sick and had to leave you for a while. Now I'm better but it's just not the same between us, so I think I'm going to have to move on. I tried, I really did – this past summer I kept persevering despite my lack of enjoyment. I kept hoping I'd get that old feeling back, but I never did. It's no use fighting it anymore.

I've decided to quit running.

We first met in October of 2008, when I "accidentally" ran a 5k. I meant to walk it, but decided at the last second to start off running and just never stopped. I hurt for days, but it kind of felt good at the same time, and we started our relationship. I started running regularly the next spring, and by September I was running 10-15km per week and loving it. I'd be approaching home after having run 3 or 4 km, my legs sore, sweating and breathing hard but feeling good, and think "do I still have enough in the tank to circle the block once more? Or go around this crescent, just to add an extra half-kilometre?" Sometimes I would go the extra bit, sometimes not, but the thought was always there. I looked forward to my runs and was disappointed when I got up and it was raining and I had to run on the treadmill instead. Each week or two I'd go a little bit longer until one day I ran from home along Dundas to Hollybush to Parkside to Hamilton and back along Dundas home (which I know means squat to those of you who don't live in Waterdown), a distance of about 5.8 km. I remember the feeling I had coming home from that particular run. It was my longest ever and I still felt great. I started to think that by the next summer, running a 10k wasn't out of the realm of possibility.

I bought special running shoes and clothes. I ran outside during the winter as long as it wasn't too cold and the ground was mostly clear. My sister and parents bought me an iPod Nano with Nike+ for my 40th birthday, and I started "broadcasting" my runs on Facebook and Twitter. I subscribed to a running magazine. I brought my running stuff on vacation with me. I was a runner. Me and you, baby, we were going hot and heavy.

And then I got sick. February 5, 2010. Severe acute necrotizing pancreatitis. I've written about it before so I won't go into the details here, but in a nutshell, it was a nightmare. I spent two months in hospital, ate no solid food the whole time, had major abdominal surgery, and was off work for another 3 months after coming home. In the hospital, my exercise consisted of taking my IV pole for a walk around the floor – two laps if I was exceptionally energetic. Once I got home, it was walking up and down a flight of stairs four or five times, and then lying down on the couch because I was wiped out. I got home from the hospital at the beginning of April, and in mid-May, I started walking around the block (less than 1km). By the end of the summer I could walk several kilometres without being exhausted, but it wasn't until November that I started actually running again. But, my dear, things were different between us.

I started off with the path I used to take when you and I were first starting out. About 3 km, and I'd run until I got tired and then walk for a while, then run again. It wasn't as much fun as I remembered, but I'd gone through a lot and in some respects I was still recovering, so I figured I'd give it some time. I didn't go out much during the winter, and I tried to run on the treadmill now and again but you know how it is, dear, I never liked running on that thing. Then spring came and I could run outside again. It still wasn't great, and it took a long time before I could even run the 3k path without stopping to walk in the middle. I ran a lot in July, then fell off the wagon in August, got back on in September and have been doing OK since then. But I'll be honest, it really hasn't been fun for a long time.

I have yet to get back to 5k – my longest this year was 4.12km. Only a couple of times did I finish a run without stopping to walk for a couple of minutes. My stamina seemed to plateau quickly, and I got frustrated with my lack of progress. Not once did I think about running just a little longer like I used to – it was always "how long until I can stop?" Getting up early to run was a chore and I had to force myself to do it. A few times I convinced myself I heard rain so I went back to bed – only to find the ground completely dry when I did get up. Sometimes while running I decided to cut the run short because it was colder than I had expected or my legs were exceptionally sore or whatever, it was one excuse after another. But the root problem was always there – it just wasn't fun anymore.

So my dear, I'm afraid this is the end for us.  It was fun while it lasted, and I'll never forget some of the great times we had together, but I've changed and it's just not working between us anymore. It's an old cliché but it's really true – it's not you, it's me. I still want to stay in shape, so I'm going to try and hit the weight bench a couple of times a week over the winter. I hope you're not jealous. Maybe next spring when the weather gets nice again I might give you another try, but I can't promise anything. Take care, sweetheart.

The Healthiest Fast-Food Burger

Recently I did some analysis of the nutritional content of McDonald's burgers compared with those from various other "roadhouse"-type restaurants. I found that a Big Mac and large fries at McDonald's is lower in calories, fat, carbs, and sodium than any of the other restaurants I looked at. Now, let's look at just the fast food restaurants.

Here is the nutritional information that I used:

• McDonald's
• Burger King
• Harvey's
• Wendy's
• A & W

Note to Facebook readers: Facebook sometimes screws up the formatting of tables when it imports my articles. You may want to click the "View Original Post" button at the bottom of the article.

Here are the results:

Burgers

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	Big Mac	540	29	10	44	1020
McDonalds	Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese	530	28	13	41	1110
Burger King	Whopper w/ Cheese	760	47	16	49	1320
Harvey's	Original Cheeseburger	460	35	11	39	1130
Wendy's	1/4 pound single	470	22	7	70	870
A & W	Teen burger	500	26	11	41	1220

I don't go to A&W often enough to know which burger to choose (Teen, Mama, Papa, Grandpa), so I chose the Teen Burger because the numbers seemed similar to the others. The BK Whopper was dead last in every category. Harvey's had the least calories but lots of fat and sodium. Wendy's only had 10 more calories than Harvey's, had way less fat and sodium, but way more carbs.

Chicken Sandwich

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	McChicken	470	27	4.5	46	790
McDonalds	Grilled Chicken Classic	390	11	1.5	46	810
Burger King	Tendergrill	370	16	2.5	37	910
Harvey's	Grilled chicken	290	5	1.5	28	810
Wendy's	Ultimate chicken grill	360	7	1.5	42	1090
A & W	Chicken Grill Deluxe	320	9	1.5	37	1040

Harvey's is the best in each category except saturated fat, but all the grilled sandwiches are relatively similar in all categories. The McChicken (which is fried) is last in every category except sodium where it's the best. McChicken has more than five times the fat of the Harvey's grilled sandwich – this should not surprise anyone.

Fries

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	Large	560	27	3.5	74	430
Burger King	Large	440	22	4.5	57	1000
Harvey's	Large	410	16	1	61	1190
Wendy's	Large	500	24	4.5	54	610
A & W	Large	520	22	1.5	76	920

McDonald's is last in calories and fat, and up near the top in carbs, but is way ahead in sodium. I found this strange considering the reason I like McD's fries is that they seem especially salty. Harvey's, on the other hand, is first in calories and fat, but last in sodium.

Overall Results

You can "have it your way" at Burger King if "your way" includes more calories, fat, and sodium than anywhere else. There's no clear winner here, but Harvey's and Wendy's are the lowest in most categories. If I had to pick one winner, it'd have to be Wendy's – it's a little higher than Harvey's in calories and carbs, a little lower in fat, but 36% lower in sodium.

Notable stats for the burger and fries combo:

• Lowest calories: Harvey's. Second: Wendy's. Highest: Burger King.
• Lowest fat: Wendy's. Second: A&W. Highest: Burger King.
• Lowest saturated fat: Wendy's. Second: Harvey's. Highest: Burger King.
• Lowest carbs: Harvey's. Second: Burger King. Highest: Wendy's.
• Lowest sodium: Big Mac. Second: Wendy's. Highest: Burger King / Harvey's.

The shocking conclusion: Having a grilled chicken sandwich instead of a burger and skipping the fries results in a healthier meal. But if you simply must have a fast food burger, opting for Wendy's or Harvey's is a little healthier than McDonald's or A & W, and a lot better than Burger King.

Is McDonalds healthier than other restaurants?

Eating at McDonald's is far less healthy than eating at other restaurants, right? Of course it is. Everyone knows that. Well, everyone is wrong.

I used the nutrition calculator from the McDonald's Canada website (http://www.mcdonalds.ca/en/index.aspx) and compared the nutritional information of several of their items with those from a few other restaurants. The restaurants were:

• The Keg
• Kelsey's
• Montana's
• Jack Astor's

The reason I chose these restaurants is that they are popular and ubiquitous (in Canada anyway, no idea about anywhere else), and because I have never heard anyone say that they never eat at one of these places because the food is so bad for you. I have heard that about McDonald's (and other fast food places) on numerous occasions, which is the reason for this article. In a future article, I will look at just fast food restaurants (McDonald's, Burger King, Harvey's, Wendy's, etc.) to see how they compare, but for this one it's McDonald's vs. the roadhouses.

I looked at burgers primarily, since that's what I suspect the vast majority of McDonald's customers eat, but I looked at chicken sandwiches and fries as well. For McDonald's, I chose the Big Mac and Quarter Pounder with Cheese (called the Royale with Cheese in Paris!), and for the rest I chose the closest thing to a "standard" burger that I could find (i.e. no bacon or mushrooms or extra stuff). For the chicken sandwich, I tried the most basic one available, again without cheese or bacon or whatever if possible.

Note to Facebook readers: Facebook sometimes screws up the formatting of tables when it imports my articles. You may want to click the "View Original Post" button at the bottom of the article.

Here are the results:

Burgers

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	Big Mac	540	29	10	44	1020
McDonalds	Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese	530	28	13	41	1110
The Keg	Classic Burger	1182.2	63.9	20.2	130.5	2982.9
Kelsey's	Classic Burger	690	41	12	47	960
Montana's	Sirloin Burger	770	45	20	46	1230
Jack Astor's	Classic Burger	918	46.5	12	42	865

McDonalds burgers have the fewest calories and by far the least fat. The Big Mac has the least saturated fat and the Quarter Pounder is comparable to Kelsey's and Jack Astor's, though a higher percentage of the fat is saturated. Other than the Keg's monster burger (by far the worst in every category), the carbs and sodium are comparable among all of them.

 

Chicken Sandwich

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	McChicken	470	27	4.5	46	790
McDonalds	Grilled Chicken Classic	390	11	1.5	46	810
The Keg	Chipotle Chicken Sandwich	1565	90.6	11.64	152.3	2925
Kelsey's	Buffalo Chicken Sandwich	720	36	7	60	1450
Montana's	Chipotle Buffalo Chicken Sandwich	590	19	3	59	1640
Jack Astor's	Chicken Club Sandwich	863	53	5.7	67	1422

I couldn't find a standard chicken sandwich at most of these places. It's highly possible that the chipotle / buffalo sauce on some of the sandwiches is to blame for the extra calories and fat, though the McChicken has a tartar-like sauce on it as well. Jack Astor's didn't say anything about the sauce, but the "club" implies that it has bacon, which none of the others have.

As a result of the sandwich differences, the comparisons here may be less meaningful, but the McDonalds sandwiches have the least calories, carbs, and sodium. Other than the Montana's sandwich, they also have the least fat and saturated fat. Once again, The Keg's sandwich is far and away the worst.

Fries

Restaurant	Item	Calories	Total fat (g)	Saturated Fat (g)	Carbs (g)	Sodium (mg)
McDonalds	Large	560	27	3.5	74	430
The Keg	Keg Fries	312.9	10.9	2.7	47	684.2
Kelsey's	Sweet Potato Fries	710	38	4.5	86	630
Montana's	Fries	400	22	2	47	1060
Jack Astor's	Fries (10 oz)	680	40	6	78	1278

Finally a category where the Keg doesn't come in last. McDonalds fries sit smack in the middle in terms of calories, fat, and carbs, though they are surprisingly low in sodium. I couldn't find standard fries on the Kelsey's list.

Overall Results

Though it's one of my favourite restaurants, The Keg comes up as the big loser here. A burger at the Keg is roughly equivalent to two Big Macs in terms of calories and fat, and three Big Macs in terms of carbs and sodium. Notable stats for the burger and fries combo:

• Lowest calories: Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Second: Big Mac.
• Lowest fat: Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Second: Big Mac.
• Lowest saturated fat: Big Mac. Second: Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
• Lowest carbs: Montana's Sirloin burger. Second: Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
• Lowest sodium: Big Mac. Second: Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

Now, there will be people who read this who think I'm saying that McDonalds makes the healthiest burger available. To those people I say read it again. I never said anything of the sort. All I said is that the McDonalds burgers are the healthiest of the ones I looked at. This is like saying compared to a Lamborghini and a Ferrari, a $100,000 Corvette is really cheap.

The take-home message from all of this is that portion sizes matter. A Quarter Pounder contains (I'm making an assumption here) a quarter pound of beef, or 4 ounces. A Big Mac has two smaller patties that add up to about the same. Is the Keg Classic Burger more than 4 oz? Almost certainly. But you don't go to McDonalds and order two Big Macs for dinner to make sure you're getting the same amount of food as you'd get at The Keg. At either restaurant, you generally order one burger, one order of fries, and a drink. The drinks are likely to be exactly the same so I ignored those. Also remember the bread you eat while waiting for your meal at the Keg, and the fact that you are more likely to order an appetizer and dessert at the Keg than McDonalds. So the issue is less about how healthy the food is vs. how much of it there is. I have certainly walked out of the Keg feeling completely stuffed after a meal more often than I have at McDonald's.

There is also the possibility that because McDonald's portion sizes are smaller, you are more likely to snack later on after eating at McDonalds than you are at the Keg. This may be true, but if you're comparing the burger-and-fries meals we talked about before, you can eat at McDonald's and then have a 395 calorie snack later on and still be below what your Keg meal would have been. Even if your snack is another Big Mac, you are only 145 calories and 10 grams of fat worse off, and and you're still 15 grams of carbs and 1200 mg of sodium lower than the Keg meal.

While researching this, I was asked if I had seen the documentary film Super Size Me, in which a healthy guy eats every meal at McDonald's for 30 days and ends up gaining a lot of weight and being generally less healthy. I have not seen it, but I know that the filmmaker (don't call him a "scientist", this was hardly a scientific experiment) forced himself to eat every bite of every meal, super-sized whenever the option was offered, and ate an average of 5,000 calories a day. Eating 5,000 calories a day is unhealthy and will cause weight gain regardless of what it is you're eating, or where. A nutritionist did a similar experiment with university students (and made a film himself, called "Portion Size Me") but didn't force them to overeat and after 30 days on fast food, they all lost weight and their cholesterol levels dropped.

You need to take this information for what it is. I am not saying that McDonalds is an overall healthy choice. If you're going out for dinner and are interested in a truly healthy meal, McDonalds is not where you want to go. But if you skip McDonalds because "it's so unhealthy" and get a burger at the Keg instead, you're misleading yourself.

Another hiatus – this one less fun

I've gone on blogging hiatus a couple of times over the last couple of years – once for our trip to France, another for our trip to the UK. You may have noticed that I haven't posted anything in a couple of weeks, so I'm on another hiatus, but this one was more forced. And a lot less fun.

On February 5, I was taken to Grand River hospital in Kitchener with acute pancreatitis, which basically means that my pancreas had a complete mental breakdown and started trying to dissolve itself. I have been in the hospital ever since, and likely will be for at least another couple of weeks. I will write more about the details later, but suffice it to say that blogging will be light if not nonexistent for the next little while.

I shall return!