Swami Nigamanand's death and CNN-IBN's lies

Swami Nigamanand's death has made news because it contrasts so clearly with Baba Ramdev's recently concluded fast. Nigamanand fasted for weeks, outside the media spotlight, against illegal mining along the Ganga. Ramdev, protesting corruption in general and dominating prime time while doing so, wasn't able to keep his fast going for long.
Now CNN IBN is claiming Nigamanand was poisoned. "Swami Nigamanand's pathology report says that he he (sic) died of insecticide which was administered to him during the duration of his stay at the government hospital", the news item on CNN IBN's website says. IBN is running it as one of their top stories on both their Hindi and English news channels.
Now, what would a responsible news organisation do, having got hold of a pathology report? I suggest it would contact a doctor to interpret it. No chance of CNN IBN doing that. They're speaking to a District Magistrate and Nigamanand's colleagues, but haven't aired any expert opinions about the report. And it's easy to see why. Here are two grabs of the document from the TV screen. The frame, typically, is never still. Instead we get a series of quick pans and zooms so we can't really read much aside from what the channel chooses to highlight.



From what I can tell, the report suggests the toxicity in Nigamanand's blood sample could arise from any one of four causes:
Organophosphate poisoning
Liver disease such as Hepatitis or cirrhosis
Liver cancer
Malnutrition

Given that the man had gone without food for months, what would you conclude from this? That the swami died from malnutrition (option 4); or that somebody administered him instecticide in the hospital (option 1)? CNN IBN has chosen Option 1, and is carrying it as its top new story. Great way to make a living, Rajdeep Sardesai and company.

The controversy about the pathology report has overshadowed what, to me, seems a more justifiable line of inquiry, namely, why did the Swami die at all? Even comatose patients are kept alive in hospitals for years, so there really doesn't seem any good reason why the man should have died. The post-morten states he suffered from septicaemia. Again, why would he get septicaemia in a hospital? It seems to indicate laxity in his treatment, but I'm not qualified to make a solid judgement. My doctor friend DS is away in Switzerland, but I hope some other physician will weigh in on the issue.

Rolling back the communist conspiracy

Now that Republicans have regained control of the US Congress, they have begun to roll back President Obama's socialist agenda. It's no coincidence that federal health officials have recommended a lowering of the fluoride content in water. As General Buck Turgodson pointed out in Stanley Kubrick's Dr.Strangelove, fluoridation was part of a communist conspiracy to corrupt Americans' precious bodily fluids. No doubt he would read today's news as a vindication.

Down the Drain

My Yahoo! column this fortnight is gutter journalism. Well, it's about drains and sewage and suchlike. Read it here.

A Recipe for Famine

My Yahoo! column on free enterprise and food security can be read here.

The image is of a 1944 drawing from Chittaprosad's Famine series. The work was featured in Saffronart's December 2001 auction, and is reproduced without permission.

Superbugged

My Yahoo! India column for the fortnight can be read here.

Which is witch?

My Yahoo! column from yesterday.


“Homoeopathy is witchcraft”. Those words, spoken by Tom Dolphin of the British Medical Association, garnered a few headlines in the UK, and many more in India. We rarely favour ‘less is more’ ideas, but make an exception for homoeopathy which, though born in Germany two centuries ago, has been conferred a kind of honorary Indian citizenship,.
Reactions to Tom Dolphin’s statement were predictably apoplectic. The Delhi Board of Homoeopathic System of Medicine discerned a "sinister design to malign homoeopathy". Thankfully, apoplexy is treatable through preparations of opium, mercury and belladonna.
Dolphin’s denunciation had come at a conference of junior doctors, which concluded with the resolution:
"This Meeting believes that, given the complete lack of valid scientific evidence of benefit:
(i) homoeopathy should no longer be funded by the NHS; and
(ii) no UK training post should include a placement in homoeopathy."
The Press Trust of India gave it a different spin: “Describing homoeopathy as "witchcraft", BMA, a body of junior doctors in Britain early this week voted overwhelmingly to seek a blanket ban on the practice of the alternative medicine.” (the link was here, but has been taken down for some reason).
Blanket ban on the practice? Where did the writer get that from? All the BMA had demanded was that homoeopathic treatment cease being funded by taxpayers’ money. Private treatment was left entirely outside the resolution’s ambit. Moreover, BMA is not an association of junior doctors and said nothing, as an organisation, about witchcraft. In PTI’s defence, it describes itself as ‘India’s premier news agency’, not ‘India’s most accurate news agency’. The Times of India, criticising the ‘ban’, also picked up on the witchcraft theme: “Now, these medical practitioners are certainly entitled to their views. But their associating homeopathy with "witchcraft" is rather unfortunate. That's not the kind of language expected of men of science. More so, since it amounts to insulting the intelligence of countless people who opt for homeopathic treatment.” It might be argued, using the same logic, that the Times of India has insulted the intelligence of countless people who opt for witchcraft. But that is apparently allowable.
Such controversies relating to homoeopathy aren’t new. In 2005, The Lancet published results of a meta-analysis (a study of studies) which found no strong evidence of homoeopathic treatment being more effective than a placebo. India’s then Health Minister, Anbumani Ramadoss expressed dismay at the findings. “This is a serious issue”, he said, “because India is the largest user of homeopathy. We will counter this with scientific data.” Five years later, there’s no sign of any such data emerging from government research institutes.
Unlike Dr. Ramadoss, there are those who feel homoeopathy requires no scientific validation at all. Pratik Kanjilal, in a Hindustan Times column, argues that the discipline’s nature leaves it impervious to analysis: “Homoeopathy’s benefits are unproven because they can’t be tested by the method of science. Even the most diligently designed double-blind experiment must fail on one significant count. Science requires a valid experiment to be replicable. If Aconite 30 cures the sinusitis of Andy West of Tintagel, it must identically cure Judy North of Inverness. However, homoeopaths go by clusters of symptoms rather than the names of diseases. And, rejecting the egalitarianism of mainstream medicine, they believe that Andy and Judy are different people and should be treated differently. How do you design an experiment to accommodate that difference?”
Kanjilal’s proposition is, I’m afraid, misguided. A double-blind trial is perfectly capable of accommodating individualised treatment. All the trial does is create two groups of people, one that receives medication, and another that is given a ‘placebo’, a formulation that looks exactly like the medication, but has no effect besides the psychological. Neither doctors nor subjects know who is getting the treatment and who the placebo. That key is held by a third party. At the end of the trial, the progress of the two groups is compared. While the framework of such experiments must be replicable, there’s no need for details to be identical across trials, or across patients within each trial.
Kanjilal’s second mistake is to confuse scientific skepticism with philosophical skepticism. Upholding the word ‘maybe’ as an antidote to dogma, Kanjilal writes, “… witch-hunts against unexplained phenomena like homoeopathy look positively medieval. I look forward to the day when a healthy agnosticism replaces our scientific fundamentalisms.” Science, though, is not about agnosticism. It is not satisfied with ‘maybe’. Science comes tied with the idea that there is a definable difference between rationality and irrationality; that there exist universally applicable laws; that certain things are truer than others; that, while we may not have a standard for absolute truth, there are statements which are demonstrably false. “The sun revolves around the earth”, is one such statement. Scientific skepticism resides in the desire to investigate unexplained phenomena in order to find natural elucidations through rigorous observation, deduction and experiment.
Philosophical skepticism, on the other hand, questions the grounds for the validity of all knowledge, including scientific knowledge. For many philosophical skeptics, the sentence, ‘A solar eclipse is caused by the moon partially or fully covering the sun’, possesses no greater truth value than the sentence, ‘A solar eclipse is caused by Rahu swallowing the sun.’ By mixing up scientific and philosophical skepticism, those holding positions contravening scientific consensus often portray themselves as fighters against an entrenched, dogmatic establishment. Science takes the place of the Church, and science deniers adopt the role of Galileo. I’ve found this tendency common in debates over issues like evolution and global warming, where large sections of the public disagree with the conclusions of scientists.
Returning to the narrower subject of this column, namely the issue of homoeopathy, I use for myself a term Pratik Kanjilal would applaud: agnostic. Like most Indians, I have family members who regularly take homoeopathic medication, and I’ve consulted homoeopaths myself. In my experience, the system sometimes appears to have an effect, particularly with respect to allergies. It’s certainly preferrable to witchcraft: no homoeopath has recommended the sacrifice of a first-born or anything along those lines. It’s just been sweet pills and powders, hopefully non-steroidal. But I also know of people who’ve suffered by choosing homoeopathy (usually because it is painless and cheap), though conventional medicine offered a cure. A horrible example of this was the case of an Indian couple convicted of manslaughter in Australia for failing properly to treat their baby daughter’s eczema. The father, a homoeopath himself, handled the case while the daughter’s skin began to crack and ooze. When he felt he couldn’t do any more, he flew her to India for further homoeopathic evaluation. After she died in great pain, he told police: "Conventional medicine would have prolonged her life ... with more misery. It's not going to cure her and that's what I strongly believe."
That is what true dogma sounds like.

The column can be found here on Yahoo!

The new diet enemy

As kids we heard that the Coca Cola company produced the world's most popular fizzy beverage using a secret formula that was locked in a Swiss vault and known to only a handful of top executives. The drink had, at the time we heard this story, been banished from India. After its return in the 1990s, a friend complained we weren't getting the real thing. The Coke he'd drunk on his recent US trip had a superior kick and flavour. To get the real Coke one still had to go to the USA, he insisted.
Around that time, I learned that, even if the story about the secret formula had once been true, Coca Cola in the USA certainly no longer followed that recipe. That was because it used high-fructose corn syrup instead of sucrose, or normal sugar. It had switched to HFCS, as had most other fizzy drink producers in the US, because subsidies provided by that country's government to corn growers made HFCS cheap, while tariffs imposed on sugar imports made that commodity relatively expensive.
Today, the average American consumes a little over 17 kg of HFCS per year, compared to a little over 21 kg of sucrose, a startlingly close race considering HFCS is an industrial product never used for cooking on a small scale. Since US obesity rates began to spike at around the same time as consumption of HFCS, conspiracy theorists have pointed to it as the cause. All they have to go on, however, is correlation without any established causal link. More recently fructose has begun to be identified as a villain, because it puts a greater burden on the liver than glucose. This scare-mongering article by Dr. Joseph Mercola connects fructose, HFCS and the ills that plague America's diet. The connection doesn't seem far-fetched at first glance; after all, a commodity referred to as 'high fructose' must be high in fructose, right? Not quite. Normal sugar, like HFCS, is composed of a combination of fructose and glucose. While the most commonly used HFCS variety has a fructose to glucose ratio of 55 : 45, sugar contains the two in a 50 : 50 balance. There's little daylight between the two in terms of fructose levels, something Dr.Mercola conveniently downplays.
Now, a new Princeton University study has suggested that HFCS causes significantly greater weight gain than the same calories ingested in the form of sucrose. It isn't the fructose level to blame, apparently, but the way the body breaks down HFCS as opposed to sugar. Expect immediate pushback from the HFCS lobby led by the likes of Archer Daniels Midland, the company at the centre of Stephen Soderbergh's amusing film The Informant. The movie starred Matt Damon as Marc Whitacre, the man whose co-operation with a US Justice Department price-fixing investigation cost ADM at least $500 million.

Climate of Opinion

A piece that was to appear in a newspaper this morning, but was spiked.


In Bombay in the 1970s, the rains would fade at the end of September and return only in June, at least that’s how I remember it. The pattern’s been disturbed in recent years. Heavy showers surprise the city in odd months, as they did a few weeks ago. That downpour barely inconvenienced office-workers, but had serious consequences in rural Maharashtra, where tomato farmers saw their year’s profit washed away in hours. Across the globe, people in traditional occupations, from watermelon growers in the Mekong delta to reindeer herders in Finland, their livelihoods threatened by unseasonal rains, are finding the old certainties no longer apply. Anecdotal evidence is insufficient ground for concluding a significant change is upon us, but in this case it is aligned with data which most experts consider unequivocal, and which suggests that higher temperatures recorded in recent decades cannot be ascribed to normal climatic fluctuations.
We know for certain that atmospheric carbon dioxide traps heat. Considering that human activity has led to an almost 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 within a short span of time, it stands to reason that this has played a role in warming the globe. Yet, even as the science of climate change has gained an ever firmer footing, public belief in the hypothesis has slipped significantly. Only 36% of Americans now agree carbon emissions are making the earth warmer, down from 47% a decade ago. A similar downtrend is visible in Europe and Australia. In India, only one in three adults has even heard of climate change.
The figures are bad news for leaders who've gathered in Copenhagen to settle on a plan to spew less CO2. They have to sell a prescription of higher taxation and stricter regulation to increasingly skeptical electorates. Their cause has not been helped by the release of hacked emails from a few climate scientists that imply data was being fudged to fit a preconceived conclusion.
I’m not surprised that wariness about the climate change hypothesis has grown as nations move to implement potential solutions. The shift to political action brings science into an arena where it is judged primarily on ideological grounds rather than on its own terms. Right-wingers in the United States, who dislike big government and multilateral agencies, find it easy to say, “The science is shoddy, misleading, incomplete”, rather than, “Our actions are altering the climate and will hurt hundreds of millions of vulnerable people, but that’s no reason to pay more for emitting CO2”. The Wall Street Journal and Fox News, both right-wing media outlets controlled by Rupert Murdoch, have led the attack on the science of climate change.


In 1859, John Tyndall demonstrated that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation and thus helps keep the earth warm and habitable. That same year, Charles Darwin published his monumental On The Origin of Species. In the hundred and fifty years since, the ideas of Darwin and his followers have become the basis of all biological science. We now possess mountains of evidence that humans descended from other animals. Despite this, acceptance of the theory has dropped in the US in the past two decades. A recent survey concluded that a mere 14% of American adults agree evolution is ‘definitely true’, while a third say it is certainly false. The number who are unsure has jumped three times since 1985, to 21%, thanks to attacks on evolution by conservative Christians.
Like any scientific advance, evolution has attracted its share of hoaxes, from Piltdown Man to Archaeoraptor. These are seized upon by ‘creation scientists’ to discredit the entire discipline, just as the hacked emails have been gleefully publicised by climate change deniers as proof that the whole notion of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is fake.
Those questioning the broad consensus on AGW see themselves as underdogs, champions of free thinking battling an entrenched establishment. They remind me of people who, in the 1990s, rejected the relationship of HIV to AIDS. The HIV virus was isolated in 1983 and understanding of AIDS progressed rapidly enough for the first antiretroviral drug to be produced by 1987. In 1988 the Institute of Medicine of the US Academy of Sciences stated, “The evidence that HIV causes AIDS is scientifically conclusive”. Even as the disease was brought under control in the developed world, it exploded in poorer countries, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.


One of the most prominent leaders of the region, South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, was drawn into the orbit of AIDS deniers. He grew convinced that the disease afflicting Africa was not the same as the one the West was battling. Antiretroviral treatment, he claimed, was toxic, and the whole notion of an African AIDS epidemic a conspiracy hatched by racist whites and multinational pharmaceutical companies. He obstructed the sale of drugs that could counter HIV and prevent its spread from mothers to infants. The result, according to a Harvard School of Public Health report, which compared South African infection rates with those of neighbouring countries that put in place antiretroviral treatment programmes, was that at least 330,000 more deaths occurred thanks to Mbeki’s embrace of unconventional ideas.
Climate change deniers are entitled to express their views freely, but South Africa's AIDS tragedy demonstrates there can be a dreadful cost attached to rejecting the scientific consensus. If misrepresentations by the Wall Street Journal and Fox News impact public opinion enough to wreck attempts at reversing global warming, Rupert Murdoch will have blood on his hands as surely as does Thabo Mbeki.

Mobiles and Tamiflu

Since November 1, prepaid connections have been discontinued in Jammu and Kashmir. The Home Ministry ordered the prohibition because it felt vendors were issuing connections without vetting applicants properly, creating a security threat in the troubled state. J&K's chief minister, Omar Abdullah, is protesting the move, but the Centre rejects the idea that the entire population is being punished. Just get postpaid connections, says the Home Minister, they're equally cheap.
The principle, though, is plain unfair. If the Home Ministry found, during random checks, that connections were being given to customers without proper verification, it should have penalised service operators and vendors. But governments in India, whether state or federal, are perfectly happy to prohibit a range of services because of fear of their possible misuse.
A great example of this is the ban on the sale of Tamiflu across the country. No chemist is allowed to stock the potentially life saving drug, though a generic version is manufactured in vast quantities within India. A few hospitals in each state hand out the tablets, after tests confirm a patient has swine flu. Now I'm no doctor (those readers who are, please verify the accuracy of what I'm saying about Tamiflu), but I've heard that Tamiflu should be taken within 12 to 48 hours of the onset of flu symptoms. The first stop for most people when they have fever is their GP. He prescribes the usual medication, and only elevates the case if the fever does not abate. By the time a patient gets to a hospital, is diagnosed, and tested for swine flu, the 48 hour mark is long gone, and Tamiflu is virtually useless.
So why aren't doctors allowed to prescribe Tamiflu, and chemists to sell it? For fear of misuse, which might lead to resistant varieties of the virus emerging. Dozens of Indians have doubtless died already because Tamiflu was not presribed in time.
It is true that, once the drug is available at the local chemist's, all and sundry will walk in and buy it, with or without prescription. Nothing will be done to address this laxity. I recall seeing the Gus Van Sant film Drugstore Cowboy, in which Matt Dillon and his fellow addicts break into chemists' shops to get their hands on prescription drugs. My reaction was: just come to India, you can buy all the prescription drugs you want, no matter how lethal, over the counter.
Even if the authorities clamped down on the sale of scheduled drugs without prescription, it would be easy enough to get one from most family physicians. When I first travelled to England as a student, I was asked to fill out a form listing ailments I'd suffered from, and get it signed by my GP. There was nothing serious in there apart from a bout of Hepatitis I'd suffered a few months previously. My doctor looked at what I'd written and said in a troubled voice, "Why did you put in the jaundice? They may not give you a visa." I told him I didn't think the visa would be a problem, but since I'd heard some kinds of Hepatitis were chronic, it was best to provide the information just in case I had a relapse.
This grew into an argument, with him insisting I should lie in the form, and me telling him it was my concern, not his, whether or not I got to England. Astonishingly, he refused to sign the document, and I had to get a signature from another doctor, who knew nothing about my medical history, and was not concerned about my prospects.

Egon Schiele and the Flu

Vienna is the Aishwarya Rai of cities, extraordinarily beautiful but cold and rather boring. It is redeemed somewhat by the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. The latter's been on my mind because my friend Chetna, who visited Vienna last week, came away a fan of the man; and Sotheby's recently organised a lecture about the nude in modern art in which the Austrian artist's drawings and paintings featured prominently.
Jabeen and I had expected to be impressed by Klimt on our Vienna visit, but Schiele came as a surprise. That's because Klimt is among artists whose works communicate well through photographs. Schiele's paintings do not, which is why I had not been overly impressed by them before walking through the Leopold and Belvedere museums. You might look at the image above and like it, but will get little sense of how moving the original is.
Part of the reason it touches us is biographical. The infant in the frame replaced a bunch of flowers in the original composition after Schiele learned that his wife Edith was expecting. She died in her sixth month of pregnancy, and he three days later, aged 28. Both succumbed to the influenza pandemic of 1918.
The outbreak of the so-called Spanish flu at the end of the first world war claimed more lives than the war itself had done: fifty million in all. About a third of the world's population is thought to have caught the infection. The country which lost more people than any other was India (then undivided). Between 15 and 17 million Indians died of the flu in those months, from a citizenry of 300 million. The equivalent in today's terms would be 50 million deaths, the entire population of all our major metropolises put together.
Despite the collosal damage it caused, the flu of 1918 and 1919 hardly figures in the nation's imagination. We hear about the plagues of the late 19th and early 20th century that, well, plagued Bombay and Poona, but influenza finds no place in our history books or folk tales. We read stories about cholera, small pox, leprosy and dozens of other ailments, but never ever about the worst wave of death ever to wash over the sub-continent.
I thought of these things as I travelled back from town this evening, passing people wearing masks, handkerchiefs, scarves, anything to keep out the H1N1 germ. The Spanish flu, too, was an H1N1 strain, but far more lethal. What if something that infectious and dangerous were to return? Our response to swine flu has proved that our defenses are too paltry to withstand an assault like that. We would be able to keep the death count down below 20 million, but considering the kind of panic a dozen deaths have caused, it is clear the entire nation would go berserk with fear. Something that doesn't appear to have happened eighty years ago.

News items that sounded like April Fool's jokes, but weren't

My last Fool's Day related post. Three stories from April 1 or thereabouts which could have passed for jokes.
Story 1: A researcher from Tabriz, Iran, has published a paper titled, 'Ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males'. Sina Zarrintan suggests in the publication Medical Hypotheses that, since breathing problems during hayfever attacks are caused by inflamation of blood vessels in the nose, this might be countered by ejaculating, which leads to a constriction of blood vessels across the body. The neurologist has not studied his hypothesis on live subjects, but is convinced his treatment is preferable to prescribed decongestants, which, “if used for more than two or three days, can actually make congestion worse".
The dosage is adjustable, according to Zarrintan: "It can be done time-to-time to alleviate the congestion and the patient can adjust the number of intercourses or masturbations depending on the severity of the symptoms".

Story 2: A bank called up Bombay's Naresh Goomer to check if he had booked air tickets worth Rs.75,000 online in the recent past. When Goomer said he hadn't, the bank provided him with the name, mobile number and booking address of the passengers who had bought Bombay to Jaipur and Jaipur to Lucknow flights on Goomer's wife's credit card. Goomer took the information to the Juhu police, telling them they could intercept the culprits once they checked in at the airport. Instead, the police called the suspect's mobile number from the station's landline. Nobody answered. When the landline rang a few minutes later, the officer picked up the phone and said, "Juhu police station", at which point the caller hung up without saying a word. On being asked for his version of the story, Juhu senior police inspector Deepak Katkade said: "Investigations are going on and I cannot reveal the progress at this point of time. But we will definitely crack the case.''

Story 3: Sanjay Dutt has been made National General Secretary of the Samajwadi Party.

Weight watching

The infant, brought out screaming, is placed on weighing scales. The reading is 5.5 pounds. Birth weight has not gone metric in India. Calls are made to relatives and friends across the city, the country, the world. The message goes out: she's healthy, 6.5 pounds, almost 7. Back in the delivery room, the new mother is told nothing till she recovers from the strain of giving birth. Eventually, the sex of her new born is revealed. If the woman is lucky, it is her first child, and she has a few more attempts left at a male heir.
That's the way thousands of lives begin each day in India. With silence about gender and lies about birth weight. The two are more intimately connected than one might suppose. Today's Times of India carries a large feature about malnutrition in India. The writer, Kounteya Sinha, has published similar articles more than once in the past. The news remains the same. Despite concentrated efforts by this government, and by all the administrations that preceded it, levels of malnourishment in Indian children exceed those in sub-Saharan Africa. How can this be, one wonders. Sure, the bureaucracy is corrupt, sure most of the rations meant for the poor never reach the people targetted, but even so, how can all that outlay, all that effort undertaken by a nation experiencing unprecendented economic growth fail to raise nutrition levels above those of states bereft of even rudimentary governmental oversight, states whose economies are sustained largely by foreign aid. India's population has a higher per capita income, better access to sanitation and substantially better literacy rates than that of sub-saharan Africa, yet one in every three Indian children is born underweight compared with only one in every six in that part of Africa.
It's a huge puzzle, and the Times article provides no answers, just more gruesome figures. Half the child deaths in India are caused by malnutrition; 27% of the world's undernourished children live in India; 43% of children under 5 are underweight, and more than 70% are anaemic. High food prices are making the problem worse.
A few years ago, researchers isolated the cause of India's failure to improve nutrition levels among children. It lies in the extremely low position of Indian women in society. Their status is so low that the nation has an abysmal female to male ratio; so low that a girl's birth is greeted with sombre silence as often as joyous celebration. Women cook for their husbands, but eat after their men are done. They consume whatever little is left, and it is often very little indeed because the husbands have been brought up to consider only their own stomachs, and women trained to think of other people before themselves. The ideal Indian woman is defined by her self-sacrifice. All this is well-known, so it should be no surprise that over 80% of India's women are anaemic.
In Africa, they say, the social mores are different. It is shameful for men not to ensure their wives are well fed. Whatever little there is to eat is shared more equitably between the sexes.
As it happens, the nutrition levels of women are crucial to the birth weight of their babies. An undernourished female will, likelier than not, produce underweight babies, and birth weight is, in turn, a crucial determinant of future health.
The point, then, is not just to provide more food to the poor, but to ensure it is distributed more equally within households. But prejudice is bound to be a massive stumbling block in any educational campaign. The solution, in my opinion, is to fight prejudice by pandering to it. Men ought to be taught that, should they want healthy male children, they need to keep their wives well fed, and not just once a pregnancy is discovered. Women, similarly, must learn that their sacrifices are often counterproductive. By denying themselves, they are denying their children.
We may not be able to break through the disappointed silence that greets the birth of girls, but we might do better when it comes to the weighing scales.

Sunita Narain Hoodwinks the Media and Public Again

The Centre for Science and Environment periodically comes up with sensationalist 'studies' that are lapped up by the media, create confusion and panic among consumers, and garner loads of publicity for the organisation's head, Sunita Narain. I put the word 'studies' in quotes because the CSE's aim is not to produce useful information, but rather to attack multinationals and further its anti-globalisation agenda.
A previous scare they manufactured related to pesticides in carbonated beverages. At the end of this post, I've written about the duplicity involved in that report. For the moment, let's focus on the current kerfuffle. It concerns trans fats, and features prominently in the dailies this morning. The front page of the Hindustan Times asks: "How edible is your cooking oil?" The article, written by Chetan Chauhan and Sanchita Sharma, begins with the line, "You may be better off using butter than cooking oil, suggests a new study". The Hindu's headline reads: "Most edible oil contains harmful trans fat, study shows". The paper quotes Sunita Narain as saying, "The study found that if all oils are compared against Denmark standard, then no edible oil in the market could claim to be healthy".
That is NOT what the actual study found. On page 28, section 13.2, titled Trans Fatty Acids, the CSE's report states: "In 21 refined edible oil samples analysed for trans fats; trans fat content was in the range of 0.08 to 3.3%. Most of the samples were within the trans fat limit of Denmark of 2%... except Saffola Gold... and Shalimar's Classic Basmati."
Sunita Narain says no edible oil meets Danish trans fat standards; her own organisation's study says that 19 of 21 refined edible oils DO meet that standard, and 2 have trans fat levels slightly above the allowable limit. What's going on?
CSE has created the confusion by fudging two different categories of product: refined edible oils on the one hand, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils on the other.

A QUESTION OF CATEGORIES
The first of these categories consists of any oil you can buy in shops: sunflower, peanut, coconut, mustard, olive and so on. These oils have been used in cooking for millennia. The second category, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (PHVOs), refers to margarine, shortening and, in the case of India, vanaspati. PHVOs are created through an industrial process that was invented a little over a century ago. It involves taking liquid vegetable oil and modifying its chemistry so it turns solid. The higher melting point of PHVOs makes them easy to use in baking, and because they don't get rock hard in the fridge, they are convenient breakfast spreads.
PHVOs grew popular because they mimicked animal fats like butter while being much cheaper to produce. In India, Unilever marketed a PHVO which mimicked ghee, the country's favourite animal fat based cooking medium. Such ghee-mimicking PHVOs were given the wholesome sounding name vanaspati. Unilever's vanaspati brand, Dalda, became the cheap ghee-substitute of choice in most Indian homes, particularly in the north.
Until the mid 1990s, PHVOs were actually considered healthier than their animal fat counterparts. Margarine was supposedly better for you than butter, and Dalda preferrable to ghee. That's because, at the time, the main division health professionals made was between 'bad' saturated fats with large amounts of cholesterol and 'good' low-cholesterol unsaturated fats. PHVOs had lower levels of saturated fat than butter and ghee, and contained no cholesterol, and were therefore marketed as healthy substitutes for animal fat based mediums.

THE EVIL TRANS FAT
Over the past decade and a bit, a more complex view of fat and cholesterol has come to dominate dietary thinking. We now speak of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, good (HDL) cholesterol and bad (LDL) cholesterol, essential fatty acids and so on. At the same time, the health industry has found a new super-villain in the form of trans fat. Trans fat occurs naturally in small quantities, but it is mainly created in the process of hydrogenating vegetable oil. PHVOs are chock-full of trans fat, and therefore, far from being healthier than animal fats, they're considerably worse for your heart. They are also, apparently, carcinogenic.

CSE's OBFUSCATION
The CSE study repeatedly confuses edible oils / cooking oils with vanaspati / PHVO. Section 6.2 is titled: Major Players of Edible Oil, but lists a number of vanaspati brands. In its conclusions in Section 14, however, the study makes a distinction between edible oils, which, as remarked upon earlier, contain very low levels of trans fats, and vanaspati brands, which have high levels of the same.

TAUTOLOGY
The central conclusion of the CSE report, then, is that vanaspati has unhealthy levels of trans fat. But that is true BY DEFINITION. Trans fats are created in the process of hydrogenating vegetable oil, and vanaspati is made by hydrogenating vegetable oil. To tout this as an unusual finding is a bit like printing a front page headline screaming, "Large Scale Tree Felling Can Deplete Forests", or, "The Oil You Cook With Contains Fat". My guess is that CSE began its investigations hoping to find high trans fat levels in refined cooking oil. Having failed to do so, and recognising that a report about high trans fat in vanaspati would get little attention, they decided to mix up the two categories, so a bewildered media would spread the word that refined cooking oil was dangerous.

THE COLA CONTROVERSY
A few years ago, Narain cooked data in similar fashion to 'prove' that fizzy drinks contained dangerous amounts of pesticides. The actual amount of deadly chemicals the study found in Coke and Pepsi was vanishingly small, so tiny that no lab could have detected it ten years ago. But that was still acceptabe science. Bad methodology was introduced when CSE compared the pesticide levels in these fizzy drinks with European Union norms for WATER. Water standards are particularly strict because people drink a lot of it. If Pepsi and Coke had been compared with, say, EU norms for pesticide levels in vegetables, they'd have fallen well within allowable limits. So problem one was that the study involved a false comparison.
Since Pepsi and Coke are made from water and sugar, and no pesticides are introduced during the manufacturing process, it stands to reason that at least the same concentration of pesticides resides in our water or sugar. And since every Indian drinks water in far greater quantities than Coke or Pepsi, and ingests sugar in many different forms, it's clear that, if there is a health issue here, it relates not to fizzy drinks but to our water and sugar. But this fact was entirely ignored during the weeks of discussion that followed the release of the CSE's cola 'study'. This was problem two. Indian consumers were given no comparative data regarding pesticides in water, vegetables and other substances, and therefore could not make up their minds about how relatively safe or dangerous the targetted beverages were.
The public relations departments of Coca Cola and Pepsi did a horrible job of conveying their own viewpoint. After weeks, they framed a coherent response, pointing out that dozens of products like apples and cauliflowers contained pesticides in much higher concentrations than what the CSE found in colas. The CSE's reply? " You can't take pesticides out of apples, but you can clean up colas".
This, of course, is entirely false. Pesticides do not occur naturally in apples, and can therefore certainly be removed from the production process. But that is a fight CSE doesn't want to take up, because it involves farmers rather than multinationals.