Now, with more science!
Jan. 22nd, 2009 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Skin Deep: Flush Those Toxins! Eh, Not So Fast
By ABBY ELLIN, The New York Times, January 22, 2009
DIOXINS. PCBs. Phthalates. Those are the reasons Randall Hansen and his wife, Katharine, embark on an annual detoxification program.
The Hansens, who live in DeLand, Fla., have made a ritual of doing the “Fat Flush Plan” at least once a year “to cleanse our bodies and help break some bad habits,” said Mr. Hansen, 48, president of Quintessential Careers, a career guidance Web site.
The regimen, made famous by the nutritionist Ann Louise Gittleman in a 2001 book, mostly targets the liver, which Ms. Gittleman believes is less able to metabolize fat because of toxins absorbed orally or through the skin. Her plan includes a low-carbohydrate, high-protein menu of about 1,200 calories a day, with no alcohol, caffeine, sugar, grains, bread, starchy vegetables, dairy products, fats or oils (save flaxseed oil). She also recommends a “Long Life Cocktail” of diluted cranberry juice and ground flaxseeds, or a teaspoon of psyllium husks, in the morning and evening; and a mixture of cranberry juice and water throughout the day. Ms. Gittleman sells a Fat Flush kit for $112.50 with herbs and nutrients like dandelion root, milk thistle and Oregon grape root.
“It’s horrible when I’m on it — I feel very deprived,” said Mr. Hansen, who credits the program with helping him lose more than 70 pounds. “But I always feel better after, and I end up dropping about 10 pounds in the two weeks — an added bonus on top of the detox.”
The Hansens are among the thousands of Americans who regularly “detox” in an effort to rid the gastrointestinal system of unsavory substances that proponents believe build up and can cause allergies, exhaustion and certain cancers.
But many Western doctors question the legitimacy of the regimens and their claims of promoting good health, believing detoxification does little to no good, and is possibly harmful.
“It is the opinion of mainstream and state-of-the-art medicine and physiology that these claims are not only ludicrous but tantamount to fraud,” said Dr. Peter Pressman, an internist with the Naval Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., and a critic of detoxification. “The contents of what ends up being consumed during a ‘detox’ are essentially stimulants, laxatives and diuretics.”
Such opinions have done little to deter the growing interest in the practice. Detoxification is enormously popular, according to SPINS, a market research and consulting firm based in Schaumburg, Ill., that caters to the natural and organic products industry. Sales of herbal formulas for cleansing, detoxification and organ support among natural food retailers were more than $27 million from Dec. 2, 2007, to Nov. 29, 2008. A survey by Mintel International, a Chicago-based research firm, found that 54 food and drink products were launched in 2008 with the word “detox” in their descriptions — up from 15 in 2003.
The thinking goes that by avoiding certain foods, adding nutritional and herbal supplements and cleansing your innards, you can cure the body of all sorts of evils.
“Western medicine is treating the symptoms instead of addressing the root cause,” said Edward F. Group III, a Houston-based naturopath with theholisticoption.com, an online resource for the alternative wellness community. “We basically have a world that’s constipated. It’s like if you change your oil in your car but never change the oil filter. Ultimately it gets so full of sludge the engine’s going to break down.”
The goal of detoxification is to remove that sludge. Indeed, most regimens — whose benefits have been espoused by celebrities like Beyoncé Knowles, who claimed to have lost 20 pounds before the movie “Dreamgirls” on the Master Cleanse, a concoction of lemon juice, cayenne pepper, maple syrup and water — typically involve fasting, food restriction, nutritional supplements or a combination thereof.
Most regimens eliminate caffeine, alcohol and nicotine; some limit meat and solid foods and rely on unusual juice blends (cayenne pepper and lemon, for instance), all in an effort to rid the gastrointestinal system of pesticides, dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and food additives — in other words, just about anything you have eaten, drunk, smelled, inhaled or looked at that isn’t organic.
Because many holistic doctors believe that one’s bowels should be irrigated as much as four times a day, some detoxers rely on colonics, enemas and herbal laxatives to move things along. Others rely on liquid fasts, herbal supplements, colonics and formulas like those sold by David Kirsch, a fitness trainer in New York. His products include “LemonAid 48 Hour Detox Diet,” which consists of lemon, purified water, maple syrup and cayenne pepper, and is designed to “turbo-charge your metabolism, increase energy and kick-start weight loss.” (A 32-ounce bottle of his “one of a kind supplement” costs $24.99 on his Web site.)
According to Lynne McNees, president of the International Spa Association, almost all of the roughly 15,000 day and destination spas nationwide offer some kind of detoxifying treatment. For instance, Le Jardin Day Spa near Philadelphia has a 30-minute “foot detox,” which involves placing feet in a saltwater bath; it can, the spa claims, energize red blood cells and circulation, aid kidney and liver function and boost the immune system.
In February, the Beljanski Wellness Center, a detoxification center offering wraps, facials, colonics and medical consultations, is set to open in New York. The center is based on research by the late Mirko Beljanski, a biologist and biochemist who studied the relationship between environmental toxins and cellular DNA damage.
As the number of products and treatments grows, critics like Dr. Pressman continue to emphasize what they say is a lack of scientific evidence that detoxification actually works.
“There is absolutely no scientific basis for the assertion that the regimens popularly defined as ‘detox’ will augment the body’s own capacity for identifying and eliminating your own metabolic wastes or doing the same for environmental toxins,” Dr. Pressman said. “I advise patients that these detox programs amount to a large quantity of excrement, both literally and figuratively.”
Dr. Frank Lipman, a specialist in integrative medicine in New York and the author of the book “Spent,” puts it a little more delicately: “People are selling a product. There’s a difference between selling a product and practicing good medicine.”
While Dr. Lipman says footbaths are “nonsense” and calls skin scrubs “third-level detox,” he does think there is a place for chelation therapy (a way of removing heavy metals from the body, either intravenously or through oral supplements) and colonics (a manner of irrigating the bowels), mainly for patients with chronic digestive problems. He says he is also concerned about exposure to toxins, adding that a typical home has more than 1,000 of them, including cleaning chemicals, formaldehydes and paint.
There is reason for his concern. In its ongoing National Biomonitoring Program, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tests for select environmental chemicals in the urine and blood samples of United States residents. In its 2003-04 study, for example, it found concentrations of chemicals like the sunscreen agent benzophenone-3 and triclosan, a synthetic chemical in personal-care items and other products, in significant percentages of the more than 2,500 people tested.
Epidemiological studies have shown that exposure to high levels of PCBs and dioxins absorbed through food, water and air may contribute to cancers and reproductive damage in animals, but human clinical studies are limited, said Roger A. Clemens, a professor at the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy.
In 2002 the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, both components of the National Institutes of Health, began a large-scale study to find out if the detoxification treatment EDTA chelation therapy is safe and effective for people age 50 and over with coronary heart disease, a condition for which chelation is often used. The study is expected to be completed in 2010.
Meanwhile, critics say that although detoxification regimens claim to eliminate toxins, most people’s bodies are capable of doing that on their own. Dr. Clemens said that consuming copious amounts of fluids might help eliminate water-soluble chemicals like, say, arsenic, but it does nothing for fat-soluble chemicals, meaning those stored in fat. Colonics and laxatives, so-called purifying agents, can lead to fainting, muscle cramps and dehydration. What’s more, high-volume consumption of liquids can cause hyponatremia, or low sodium in the blood, said Dr. Clemens.
Dr. Ronald Stram, medical director and founder of the Center for Integrative Health and Healing in Delmar, N.Y., believes that eating whole foods always trumps fasting or juice diets — and that education overrules everything. “People are getting their info from the massage therapist or the clerk at the health food store who may not know the potential risks,” he said.
Still, many people swear by these programs. Denise Whitney, 37, a registered nurse and mother of three in Traverse City, Mich., did the Master Cleanse over a seven-day period, plus six days of pre and post cleanse, which included consuming copious amounts of organic juice, fruit and vegetables. “With all the fast food, preservatives, chemicals in our food, it seems impossible that our bodies are not loaded with toxins,” Ms. Whitney said, adding that she plans to repeat it in the next few months. “I had more energy during this cleanse than I can ever remember having.”
In Texas, a Line in the Curriculum Revives Evolution Debate
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr., The New York Times, January 22, 2009
AUSTIN, Tex. — The latest round in a long-running battle over how evolution should be taught in Texas schools began in earnest Wednesday as the State Board of Education heard impassioned testimony from scientists and social conservatives on revising the science curriculum.
The debate here has far-reaching consequences; Texas is one of the nation’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are reluctant to produce different versions of the same material.
Many biologists and teachers said they feared that the board would force textbook publishers to include what skeptics see as weaknesses in Darwin’s theory to sow doubt about science and support the Biblical version of creation.
“These weaknesses that they bring forward are decades old, and they have been refuted many, many times over,” Kevin Fisher, a past president of the Science Teachers Association of Texas, said after testifying. “It’s an attempt to bring false weaknesses into the classroom in an attempt to get students to reject evolution.”
In the past, the conservatives on the education board have lacked the votes to change textbooks. This year, both sides say, the final vote, in March, is likely to be close.
Even as federal courts have banned the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in biology courses, social conservatives have gained 7 of 15 seats on the Texas board in recent years, and they enjoy the strong support of Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.
The chairman of the board, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist, pushed in 2003 for a more skeptical version of evolution to be presented in the state’s textbooks, but could not get a majority to vote with him. Dr. McLeroy has said he does not believe in Darwin’s theory and thinks that Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event, thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion as scientists contend.
On the surface, the debate centers on a passage in the state’s curriculum that requires students to critique all scientific theories, exploring “the strengths and weaknesses” of each. Texas has stuck to that same standard for 20 years, having originally passed it to please religious conservatives. In practice, teachers rarely pay attention to it.
This year, however, a panel of teachers assigned to revise the curriculum proposed dropping those words, urging students instead to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations using empirical evidence.”
Scientists and advocates for religious freedom say the battle over the curriculum is the tip of a spear. Social conservatives, the critics argue, have tried to use the “strengths and weaknesses” standard to justify exposing students to religious objections in the guise of scientific discourse.
“The phrase ‘strengths and weaknesses’ has been spread nationally as a slogan to bring creationism in through the back door,” said Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science in Education, a California group that opposes watering down evolution in biology classes.
Already, legislators in six states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina — have considered legislation requiring classrooms to be open to “views about the scientific strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory,” according to a petition from the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based strategic center of the intelligent-design movement.
Stephen C. Meyer, an expert on the history of science and a director at the Discovery Institute, denied that the group advocated a Biblical version of creation. Rather, Mr. Meyer said, it is fighting for academic freedom and against what it sees as a fanatical loyalty to Darwin among biologists, akin to a secular religion.
Testifying before the board, he asserted, for instance, that evolution had trouble explaining the Cambrian Explosion, a period of rapid diversification that evidence suggests began about 550 million years ago and gave rise to most groups of complex organisms and animal forms.
Of the Texas curriculum standards, Mr. Meyer said, “This kind of language is really important for protecting teachers who want to address this subject with integrity in the sense of allowing students to hear about dissenting opinions.”
But several biologists who appeared in the hearing room said the objections raised by Mr. Meyer and some board members were baseless. The majority of evidence collected over the last 150 years supports Darwin, and few dissenting opinions have survived a review by scientists.
“Every single thing they are representing as a weakness is a misrepresentation of science,” said David M. Hillis, a professor of biology at the University of Texas. “These are science skeptics. These are people with religious and political agendas.”
Many of the dozens of people who crowded into the hearing room, however, seemed unimpressed with the body of scientific evidence supporting evolution.
“Textbooks today treat it as more than a theory, even though its evidence has been found to be stained with half-truths, deception and hoaxes,” said Paul Berry Lively, 42, a mechanical engineer from Houston who brought along his teenage son. “Darwinian evolution is not a proven fact.”
Other conservative parents told board members that their children had been intimidated and ridiculed by biology teachers when they questioned evolution. Some asserted that they knew biology teachers who were afraid to bring up theories about holes in Darwin’s theory.
Business leaders, meanwhile, said Texas would have trouble attracting highly educated workers and their families if the state’s science programs were seen as a laughingstock among biologists.
“The political games we are playing right now are going to burn us all,” said Eric Hennenhoefer, who owns Obsidian Software.
Instead of Glory, the Finder of a Rare Dinosaur Fossil Faces Charges of Theft
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, January 22, 2009
MALTA, Mont. — In October 2006, a respected amateur paleontologist, Nathan L. Murphy, took a large rock containing the well-preserved bones of a new species of dinosaur to be X-rayed at the Dinosaur Field Station here.
He called the fossil, a raptor the size of a wild turkey, Sid Vicious. The find was a coup, bringing Mr. Murphy prestige and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars from the rights to cast the fossil for sale to museums and collectors.
Mr. Murphy was no stranger to fossil hunting success. He was part of the team that found Roberta and Elvis, two beautifully articulated duckbill fossils, and, in 2000, a team he led found a priceless fossil of a 77-million-year-old duckbill that has come to be known as Leonardo. The fossil is the only herbivore found with eaten meals intact.
But Montana law enforcement officials now say that the fossil Mr. Murphy took to the field station in 2006 had actually been found four years earlier on a private ranch and therefore belongs to someone else.
In September, after a yearlong investigation by state and federal authorities, Mr. Murphy was charged with felony theft. Federal agents have also questioned his associates about his other fossil discoveries. The investigations have caused consternation in this small town in the middle of some of the world’s richest dinosaur fields.
“We are a Cretaceous sandbox,” Sue Frary, director of programs and exhibits at the Great Plains Museum, a new facility that replaced the field station, said as she stood over a table of bones and tools. “A huge amount of our land is from the time period the dinosaurs lived in, and we have an abundance of fossils.”
Though he has no advance degree, Mr. Murphy was well regarded as an amateur paleontologist and a player in the sandbox. He was also the volunteer curator at the field station, where the world-class finds from nearby were taken for cleaning and preparation. And he ran a for-profit “paleo-outfitting” business, the Judith River Dinosaur Institute, which allows enthusiasts who pay $1,600 a week to dig for fossils.
It was on one such outing in 2002 that the bones of the raptor were discovered. An Australian geologist, Mark Thompson, found the specimen and named it Julieraptor, after his sister. Mr. Thompson told investigators that Mr. Murphy told him not to tell Joann and Howard Hammond, about the fossil; the Hammonds had agreed to let Mr. Murphy excavate their land and had a profit-sharing arrangement with him.
In this case, though Mr. Murphy says he did not know it, that agreement was void because the Hammonds did not own the land where the fossil was found; they leased it from another man, Bruce Bruckner.
Mr. Thompson did not tell the Hammonds, but he had taken photographs of the raptor and held on to a few small bones from the dig. Soon after, he showed the bones and the photograph to Robert Bakker, a paleontologist from Colorado and a consultant to the museum. Dr. Bakker recognized them as significant and wondered what had happened to the rest of the fossil.
Nothing else was heard about the raptor until 2006, when Mr. Murphy took the chunk of rock with the raptor bones to the field station (which is now part of the museum). Shortly after, he told colleagues that he had recently found the fossil near Saco, Mont., some 25 miles away.
Calling the fossil Sid Vicious, not Julieraptor, Mr. Murphy sent it for casting to the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, S.D. In an agreement with the institute, Mr. Murphy said “the nickname of the specimen and acknowledgements that the original skeleton is owned by JRDI must accompany sales of all casts,” a reference to the Judith River Dinosaur Institute.
In the spring of 2007, though, the story came apart as Mr. Thompson contacted the Hammonds and told them that Sid Vicious had been found on the land they leased, according to court documents and interviews. The Hammonds told Mr. Bruckner, who filed a complaint.
In an interview, Mr. Murphy refused to talk about some specifics of the case. But he admitted to finding the fossil on Mr. Bruckner’s land, and now says that he made a mistake by assuming he was on land that he had an agreement to excavate.
“I didn’t know the Bruckners owned that piece of land,” Mr. Murphy said. “The Hammonds never told me.”
He says he has no choice but to plead guilty to the theft charge. A trial is set for March, but it would be moot if Mr. Murphy pleads before then.
Mr. Murphy says that he did not realize he even had the fossil because it was buried beneath a large turtle fossil he had unearthed in 2006. He cast the turtle in plaster, Mr. Murphy said, “and four months later, we opened the plaster jacket and the raptor was under the turtle.”
Dr. Bakker estimates the value of what he jokingly refers to as the “kleptoraptor” at $150,000 to $400,000.
Ms. Frary called Mr. Murphy’s downfall “a tragedy of Greek proportion.” He was a friend with “a real passion for paleontology,” she said, one of 14 founding members of the museum and good at finding dinosaur fossils.
Dr. Bakker and other researchers are furious that Mr. Murphy lied about the specimen’s provenance. “That’s a sin” because so much information is lost, Dr. Bakker said.
Ms. Frary said she was worried that the scandal would affect the respect and popularity of the museum, which moved to a new, larger building last June and has cut its ties with Mr. Murphy.
Federal officials would not comment on their investigation. Dr. Bakker said that like some other fossil excavators, Mr. Murphy was unable to separate the nonprofit museum world from the for-profit world of a collector.
“That’s wrong,” Dr. Bakker said. “You need a Chinese wall between them.”
By ABBY ELLIN, The New York Times, January 22, 2009
DIOXINS. PCBs. Phthalates. Those are the reasons Randall Hansen and his wife, Katharine, embark on an annual detoxification program.
The Hansens, who live in DeLand, Fla., have made a ritual of doing the “Fat Flush Plan” at least once a year “to cleanse our bodies and help break some bad habits,” said Mr. Hansen, 48, president of Quintessential Careers, a career guidance Web site.
The regimen, made famous by the nutritionist Ann Louise Gittleman in a 2001 book, mostly targets the liver, which Ms. Gittleman believes is less able to metabolize fat because of toxins absorbed orally or through the skin. Her plan includes a low-carbohydrate, high-protein menu of about 1,200 calories a day, with no alcohol, caffeine, sugar, grains, bread, starchy vegetables, dairy products, fats or oils (save flaxseed oil). She also recommends a “Long Life Cocktail” of diluted cranberry juice and ground flaxseeds, or a teaspoon of psyllium husks, in the morning and evening; and a mixture of cranberry juice and water throughout the day. Ms. Gittleman sells a Fat Flush kit for $112.50 with herbs and nutrients like dandelion root, milk thistle and Oregon grape root.
“It’s horrible when I’m on it — I feel very deprived,” said Mr. Hansen, who credits the program with helping him lose more than 70 pounds. “But I always feel better after, and I end up dropping about 10 pounds in the two weeks — an added bonus on top of the detox.”
The Hansens are among the thousands of Americans who regularly “detox” in an effort to rid the gastrointestinal system of unsavory substances that proponents believe build up and can cause allergies, exhaustion and certain cancers.
But many Western doctors question the legitimacy of the regimens and their claims of promoting good health, believing detoxification does little to no good, and is possibly harmful.
“It is the opinion of mainstream and state-of-the-art medicine and physiology that these claims are not only ludicrous but tantamount to fraud,” said Dr. Peter Pressman, an internist with the Naval Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., and a critic of detoxification. “The contents of what ends up being consumed during a ‘detox’ are essentially stimulants, laxatives and diuretics.”
Such opinions have done little to deter the growing interest in the practice. Detoxification is enormously popular, according to SPINS, a market research and consulting firm based in Schaumburg, Ill., that caters to the natural and organic products industry. Sales of herbal formulas for cleansing, detoxification and organ support among natural food retailers were more than $27 million from Dec. 2, 2007, to Nov. 29, 2008. A survey by Mintel International, a Chicago-based research firm, found that 54 food and drink products were launched in 2008 with the word “detox” in their descriptions — up from 15 in 2003.
The thinking goes that by avoiding certain foods, adding nutritional and herbal supplements and cleansing your innards, you can cure the body of all sorts of evils.
“Western medicine is treating the symptoms instead of addressing the root cause,” said Edward F. Group III, a Houston-based naturopath with theholisticoption.com, an online resource for the alternative wellness community. “We basically have a world that’s constipated. It’s like if you change your oil in your car but never change the oil filter. Ultimately it gets so full of sludge the engine’s going to break down.”
The goal of detoxification is to remove that sludge. Indeed, most regimens — whose benefits have been espoused by celebrities like Beyoncé Knowles, who claimed to have lost 20 pounds before the movie “Dreamgirls” on the Master Cleanse, a concoction of lemon juice, cayenne pepper, maple syrup and water — typically involve fasting, food restriction, nutritional supplements or a combination thereof.
Most regimens eliminate caffeine, alcohol and nicotine; some limit meat and solid foods and rely on unusual juice blends (cayenne pepper and lemon, for instance), all in an effort to rid the gastrointestinal system of pesticides, dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and food additives — in other words, just about anything you have eaten, drunk, smelled, inhaled or looked at that isn’t organic.
Because many holistic doctors believe that one’s bowels should be irrigated as much as four times a day, some detoxers rely on colonics, enemas and herbal laxatives to move things along. Others rely on liquid fasts, herbal supplements, colonics and formulas like those sold by David Kirsch, a fitness trainer in New York. His products include “LemonAid 48 Hour Detox Diet,” which consists of lemon, purified water, maple syrup and cayenne pepper, and is designed to “turbo-charge your metabolism, increase energy and kick-start weight loss.” (A 32-ounce bottle of his “one of a kind supplement” costs $24.99 on his Web site.)
According to Lynne McNees, president of the International Spa Association, almost all of the roughly 15,000 day and destination spas nationwide offer some kind of detoxifying treatment. For instance, Le Jardin Day Spa near Philadelphia has a 30-minute “foot detox,” which involves placing feet in a saltwater bath; it can, the spa claims, energize red blood cells and circulation, aid kidney and liver function and boost the immune system.
In February, the Beljanski Wellness Center, a detoxification center offering wraps, facials, colonics and medical consultations, is set to open in New York. The center is based on research by the late Mirko Beljanski, a biologist and biochemist who studied the relationship between environmental toxins and cellular DNA damage.
As the number of products and treatments grows, critics like Dr. Pressman continue to emphasize what they say is a lack of scientific evidence that detoxification actually works.
“There is absolutely no scientific basis for the assertion that the regimens popularly defined as ‘detox’ will augment the body’s own capacity for identifying and eliminating your own metabolic wastes or doing the same for environmental toxins,” Dr. Pressman said. “I advise patients that these detox programs amount to a large quantity of excrement, both literally and figuratively.”
Dr. Frank Lipman, a specialist in integrative medicine in New York and the author of the book “Spent,” puts it a little more delicately: “People are selling a product. There’s a difference between selling a product and practicing good medicine.”
While Dr. Lipman says footbaths are “nonsense” and calls skin scrubs “third-level detox,” he does think there is a place for chelation therapy (a way of removing heavy metals from the body, either intravenously or through oral supplements) and colonics (a manner of irrigating the bowels), mainly for patients with chronic digestive problems. He says he is also concerned about exposure to toxins, adding that a typical home has more than 1,000 of them, including cleaning chemicals, formaldehydes and paint.
There is reason for his concern. In its ongoing National Biomonitoring Program, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tests for select environmental chemicals in the urine and blood samples of United States residents. In its 2003-04 study, for example, it found concentrations of chemicals like the sunscreen agent benzophenone-3 and triclosan, a synthetic chemical in personal-care items and other products, in significant percentages of the more than 2,500 people tested.
Epidemiological studies have shown that exposure to high levels of PCBs and dioxins absorbed through food, water and air may contribute to cancers and reproductive damage in animals, but human clinical studies are limited, said Roger A. Clemens, a professor at the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy.
In 2002 the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, both components of the National Institutes of Health, began a large-scale study to find out if the detoxification treatment EDTA chelation therapy is safe and effective for people age 50 and over with coronary heart disease, a condition for which chelation is often used. The study is expected to be completed in 2010.
Meanwhile, critics say that although detoxification regimens claim to eliminate toxins, most people’s bodies are capable of doing that on their own. Dr. Clemens said that consuming copious amounts of fluids might help eliminate water-soluble chemicals like, say, arsenic, but it does nothing for fat-soluble chemicals, meaning those stored in fat. Colonics and laxatives, so-called purifying agents, can lead to fainting, muscle cramps and dehydration. What’s more, high-volume consumption of liquids can cause hyponatremia, or low sodium in the blood, said Dr. Clemens.
Dr. Ronald Stram, medical director and founder of the Center for Integrative Health and Healing in Delmar, N.Y., believes that eating whole foods always trumps fasting or juice diets — and that education overrules everything. “People are getting their info from the massage therapist or the clerk at the health food store who may not know the potential risks,” he said.
Still, many people swear by these programs. Denise Whitney, 37, a registered nurse and mother of three in Traverse City, Mich., did the Master Cleanse over a seven-day period, plus six days of pre and post cleanse, which included consuming copious amounts of organic juice, fruit and vegetables. “With all the fast food, preservatives, chemicals in our food, it seems impossible that our bodies are not loaded with toxins,” Ms. Whitney said, adding that she plans to repeat it in the next few months. “I had more energy during this cleanse than I can ever remember having.”
In Texas, a Line in the Curriculum Revives Evolution Debate
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr., The New York Times, January 22, 2009
AUSTIN, Tex. — The latest round in a long-running battle over how evolution should be taught in Texas schools began in earnest Wednesday as the State Board of Education heard impassioned testimony from scientists and social conservatives on revising the science curriculum.
The debate here has far-reaching consequences; Texas is one of the nation’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are reluctant to produce different versions of the same material.
Many biologists and teachers said they feared that the board would force textbook publishers to include what skeptics see as weaknesses in Darwin’s theory to sow doubt about science and support the Biblical version of creation.
“These weaknesses that they bring forward are decades old, and they have been refuted many, many times over,” Kevin Fisher, a past president of the Science Teachers Association of Texas, said after testifying. “It’s an attempt to bring false weaknesses into the classroom in an attempt to get students to reject evolution.”
In the past, the conservatives on the education board have lacked the votes to change textbooks. This year, both sides say, the final vote, in March, is likely to be close.
Even as federal courts have banned the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in biology courses, social conservatives have gained 7 of 15 seats on the Texas board in recent years, and they enjoy the strong support of Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.
The chairman of the board, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist, pushed in 2003 for a more skeptical version of evolution to be presented in the state’s textbooks, but could not get a majority to vote with him. Dr. McLeroy has said he does not believe in Darwin’s theory and thinks that Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event, thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion as scientists contend.
On the surface, the debate centers on a passage in the state’s curriculum that requires students to critique all scientific theories, exploring “the strengths and weaknesses” of each. Texas has stuck to that same standard for 20 years, having originally passed it to please religious conservatives. In practice, teachers rarely pay attention to it.
This year, however, a panel of teachers assigned to revise the curriculum proposed dropping those words, urging students instead to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations using empirical evidence.”
Scientists and advocates for religious freedom say the battle over the curriculum is the tip of a spear. Social conservatives, the critics argue, have tried to use the “strengths and weaknesses” standard to justify exposing students to religious objections in the guise of scientific discourse.
“The phrase ‘strengths and weaknesses’ has been spread nationally as a slogan to bring creationism in through the back door,” said Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science in Education, a California group that opposes watering down evolution in biology classes.
Already, legislators in six states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina — have considered legislation requiring classrooms to be open to “views about the scientific strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory,” according to a petition from the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based strategic center of the intelligent-design movement.
Stephen C. Meyer, an expert on the history of science and a director at the Discovery Institute, denied that the group advocated a Biblical version of creation. Rather, Mr. Meyer said, it is fighting for academic freedom and against what it sees as a fanatical loyalty to Darwin among biologists, akin to a secular religion.
Testifying before the board, he asserted, for instance, that evolution had trouble explaining the Cambrian Explosion, a period of rapid diversification that evidence suggests began about 550 million years ago and gave rise to most groups of complex organisms and animal forms.
Of the Texas curriculum standards, Mr. Meyer said, “This kind of language is really important for protecting teachers who want to address this subject with integrity in the sense of allowing students to hear about dissenting opinions.”
But several biologists who appeared in the hearing room said the objections raised by Mr. Meyer and some board members were baseless. The majority of evidence collected over the last 150 years supports Darwin, and few dissenting opinions have survived a review by scientists.
“Every single thing they are representing as a weakness is a misrepresentation of science,” said David M. Hillis, a professor of biology at the University of Texas. “These are science skeptics. These are people with religious and political agendas.”
Many of the dozens of people who crowded into the hearing room, however, seemed unimpressed with the body of scientific evidence supporting evolution.
“Textbooks today treat it as more than a theory, even though its evidence has been found to be stained with half-truths, deception and hoaxes,” said Paul Berry Lively, 42, a mechanical engineer from Houston who brought along his teenage son. “Darwinian evolution is not a proven fact.”
Other conservative parents told board members that their children had been intimidated and ridiculed by biology teachers when they questioned evolution. Some asserted that they knew biology teachers who were afraid to bring up theories about holes in Darwin’s theory.
Business leaders, meanwhile, said Texas would have trouble attracting highly educated workers and their families if the state’s science programs were seen as a laughingstock among biologists.
“The political games we are playing right now are going to burn us all,” said Eric Hennenhoefer, who owns Obsidian Software.
Instead of Glory, the Finder of a Rare Dinosaur Fossil Faces Charges of Theft
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, January 22, 2009
MALTA, Mont. — In October 2006, a respected amateur paleontologist, Nathan L. Murphy, took a large rock containing the well-preserved bones of a new species of dinosaur to be X-rayed at the Dinosaur Field Station here.
He called the fossil, a raptor the size of a wild turkey, Sid Vicious. The find was a coup, bringing Mr. Murphy prestige and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars from the rights to cast the fossil for sale to museums and collectors.
Mr. Murphy was no stranger to fossil hunting success. He was part of the team that found Roberta and Elvis, two beautifully articulated duckbill fossils, and, in 2000, a team he led found a priceless fossil of a 77-million-year-old duckbill that has come to be known as Leonardo. The fossil is the only herbivore found with eaten meals intact.
But Montana law enforcement officials now say that the fossil Mr. Murphy took to the field station in 2006 had actually been found four years earlier on a private ranch and therefore belongs to someone else.
In September, after a yearlong investigation by state and federal authorities, Mr. Murphy was charged with felony theft. Federal agents have also questioned his associates about his other fossil discoveries. The investigations have caused consternation in this small town in the middle of some of the world’s richest dinosaur fields.
“We are a Cretaceous sandbox,” Sue Frary, director of programs and exhibits at the Great Plains Museum, a new facility that replaced the field station, said as she stood over a table of bones and tools. “A huge amount of our land is from the time period the dinosaurs lived in, and we have an abundance of fossils.”
Though he has no advance degree, Mr. Murphy was well regarded as an amateur paleontologist and a player in the sandbox. He was also the volunteer curator at the field station, where the world-class finds from nearby were taken for cleaning and preparation. And he ran a for-profit “paleo-outfitting” business, the Judith River Dinosaur Institute, which allows enthusiasts who pay $1,600 a week to dig for fossils.
It was on one such outing in 2002 that the bones of the raptor were discovered. An Australian geologist, Mark Thompson, found the specimen and named it Julieraptor, after his sister. Mr. Thompson told investigators that Mr. Murphy told him not to tell Joann and Howard Hammond, about the fossil; the Hammonds had agreed to let Mr. Murphy excavate their land and had a profit-sharing arrangement with him.
In this case, though Mr. Murphy says he did not know it, that agreement was void because the Hammonds did not own the land where the fossil was found; they leased it from another man, Bruce Bruckner.
Mr. Thompson did not tell the Hammonds, but he had taken photographs of the raptor and held on to a few small bones from the dig. Soon after, he showed the bones and the photograph to Robert Bakker, a paleontologist from Colorado and a consultant to the museum. Dr. Bakker recognized them as significant and wondered what had happened to the rest of the fossil.
Nothing else was heard about the raptor until 2006, when Mr. Murphy took the chunk of rock with the raptor bones to the field station (which is now part of the museum). Shortly after, he told colleagues that he had recently found the fossil near Saco, Mont., some 25 miles away.
Calling the fossil Sid Vicious, not Julieraptor, Mr. Murphy sent it for casting to the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, S.D. In an agreement with the institute, Mr. Murphy said “the nickname of the specimen and acknowledgements that the original skeleton is owned by JRDI must accompany sales of all casts,” a reference to the Judith River Dinosaur Institute.
In the spring of 2007, though, the story came apart as Mr. Thompson contacted the Hammonds and told them that Sid Vicious had been found on the land they leased, according to court documents and interviews. The Hammonds told Mr. Bruckner, who filed a complaint.
In an interview, Mr. Murphy refused to talk about some specifics of the case. But he admitted to finding the fossil on Mr. Bruckner’s land, and now says that he made a mistake by assuming he was on land that he had an agreement to excavate.
“I didn’t know the Bruckners owned that piece of land,” Mr. Murphy said. “The Hammonds never told me.”
He says he has no choice but to plead guilty to the theft charge. A trial is set for March, but it would be moot if Mr. Murphy pleads before then.
Mr. Murphy says that he did not realize he even had the fossil because it was buried beneath a large turtle fossil he had unearthed in 2006. He cast the turtle in plaster, Mr. Murphy said, “and four months later, we opened the plaster jacket and the raptor was under the turtle.”
Dr. Bakker estimates the value of what he jokingly refers to as the “kleptoraptor” at $150,000 to $400,000.
Ms. Frary called Mr. Murphy’s downfall “a tragedy of Greek proportion.” He was a friend with “a real passion for paleontology,” she said, one of 14 founding members of the museum and good at finding dinosaur fossils.
Dr. Bakker and other researchers are furious that Mr. Murphy lied about the specimen’s provenance. “That’s a sin” because so much information is lost, Dr. Bakker said.
Ms. Frary said she was worried that the scandal would affect the respect and popularity of the museum, which moved to a new, larger building last June and has cut its ties with Mr. Murphy.
Federal officials would not comment on their investigation. Dr. Bakker said that like some other fossil excavators, Mr. Murphy was unable to separate the nonprofit museum world from the for-profit world of a collector.
“That’s wrong,” Dr. Bakker said. “You need a Chinese wall between them.”
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Detoxing
Date: 2009-01-22 05:39 pm (UTC)I lost weight from my detox only because I was eating healthier (no processed food, no snacking, all organic, limited meats, limited caloric intake in general), not because my body was being "flushed out." And I didn't feel deprived. I actually felt great throughout the majority of the process.
Post-cleanse, my fibro is so much easier to manage! I think that this was one of the best things that I've ever done for myself. But when I tell people about my experience, they go off on me about how detoxing is BAD and I'm stupid for having spent the money, assuming that I did some fad diet or something. They don't bother to ask me about my experience. It can be very frustrating.
I'm glad to see that the article talks about the importance of consuming whole foods - that's something that more people should be aware of. I just wish that there weren't so many doctors on board with the whole mentality that all detox programs are a waste of time and money, and overall are an unhealthy experience.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-22 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-22 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-22 11:06 pm (UTC)Also, all the inbreeding will make for a great study on genetic diversity!
no subject
Date: 2009-01-23 04:01 am (UTC)