Years ago I was interviewing a scientist who was part of the team trying to crack the human genome, the so-called ‘blue print’ of our body. He talked about the small amount of the genome that coded for proteins that help determine our genetic profile. He then dismissed the other more than 90% as ‘junk DNA”. I asked him why he called it junk and he said because it doesn’t do anything. I asked if maybe it does actually have a role but we just haven’t figured it out yet. He looked at me as if I were an idiot.

Now, I may well be an idiot but in this case I wasn’t wrong. Today scientists acknowledge that non-coding DNA does seem to have some biological role or function – even if we haven’t figured it all out. So, much like antiques, what was considered junk yesterday is today seen to have value.

Bad reputation

Saints and sinners

The same may well be true of the much-maligned LDL, or so-called ‘bad cholesterol”.

A new study says bad cholesterol may not be all bad at all, and that in fact it may play an important role in our bodies, helping warn us when things are going wrong.

LDL got its name because it tends to build up in the walls of our arteries and slowly, over time, clog them up, increasing our risk of a heart attack. HDL – its blue-eyed, blond haired cousin – is known as ‘good cholesterol’ because it helps remove LDL from our ateries and clean up the mess that LDL left behind.

But now, a study in the Journal of Gerontology, says that LDL may have had a bad rap and that it might be needed to help us build stronger muscles and develop muscle mass, and that a lack of LDL – while seemingly good from a heart-protective perspective – might be bad for our overall health. In fact, in the news release accompanying the study the lead researcher – Steve Riechman of Texas A&M University – says “You simply can’t remove all the “bad” cholesterol from your body without serious problems occurring. It acts as a warning sign that something is wrong and it signals the body to these warning signs.”

Building up a strong argument

Riechman and his colleagues worked with more than 5o adults between the age of 60 and 69. These folks were in reasonable health but had not been physically active and none of them worked out regularly. The researchers put them through a series of fairly tough workouts and then measured their muscle mass and compared it to what it was before the workouts. They found that the folks who gained the most muscle mass also happened to have the highest levels of LDL.

Having strong muscles, particularly as you age, is important because without that you tend to be more vulnerable to falling, to breaking a bone, or just to being stuck indoors, unable to do anything fun. LDL seems to play a role in helping us develop those muscles, so while we need to make sure we keep our LDL under control to keep our hearts healthy, we shouldn’t go so overboard that it interferes with its ability to help our bodies in other ways.

Riechman says that people often say they want to get rid of the bad cholesterol “But the fact is, if you did so, you would die.”

Maybe bad isn’t so bad after all.

Just like our genome, maybe it’s not the DNA that’s junk, maybe it’s the science – or even the scientists.

Every once in a while I like to take a look at some of the more pointless pieces of medical research, studies that tell you something you could have guessed without devoting years of research and lots of money to it. Sadly, there’s never a shortage of people with PhD’s willing to tell you the obvious.

An unlucky break

Here’s one I came across just this week. Adolescent girls who take part in high impact sports such as soccer, gymnastics or even cheerleading are at greater risk of having a stress fracture than girls who don’t take part in those activities.

Really! You mean if I do things where I’m flinging my body around I’m more likely to hurt it than if I’m just sitting at home reading a book or playing video games. Amazing.

Remarkably that came from folks that you think would know better, researchers at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. And it was published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, a really well-respected journal.

I guess everyone screws up once in a while.

Twist and shout – ouch!

On a similar vein a study from the Center for Injury Research and Policy found that gymnastics is more dangerous than chess, and in fact has an injury rate comparable to ice hockey.

Incredible. I would have thought it was more than ice hockey to be honest because hockey players don’t have so far to fall, and are wearing lots of padding. Gymnasts have flimsy outfits on and are hurling themselves around beams, bars and vaulting horses. That’s one of the reasons I dropped gymnastics at school and took up a much safer sport; rugby!

I drink therefore I am

But it’s not just sports that are the focus of pointless pondering. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine found – gasp horror shock! – that the heavier a drinker a young person was the more likely they were to have multiple sex partners.

They could have found that out by simply propping themselves on a bar stool in any bar in town and watched the action around them. Probably saved themselves a lot of time and money too.

Who knows, with all that research going on around them they might even have got lucky and taken their “work” home with them.

Shirley and I went for a walk the other day. It was a lovely cool, sunny day and we had gone out for a cup of coffee early in the morning and we just kept going. We ended up walking from San Francisco over the Golden Gate bridge to Sausalito. It was a beautiful walk, probably ten miles in all, and even though we didn’t carry anything with us other than a purse and a couple of magazines, somehow, we didn’t die of dehydration!

A miracle.

Wet idea

Well, it felt like it because all the way along the way we saw teeming hoardes of runners passing us and most of them seemed to be carrying bottles or water or had several smaller bottles of water on belts around their waist.

Now, it wasn’t a hot day and most of these runners weren’t setting what you might call a fast pace, yet they all seemed to feel the need for regular hydration.

The best Shirley and I managed was to stop at a cafe along the way and get another cup of coffee. Yet new research shows this may have been all we really needed.

A most refreshing beverage

The research, published in the journal Food Technology, says that when it comes to recovering from a tough workout or ensuring you are properly hydrated you can skip the fancy sports drinks and enhanced waters that are now all the rage, instead all you need are some old school beverages, tea and coffee!

That’s right. Tea and coffee. They’ve been around for hundreds of years and are probably the most widely studied drinks in the world and most of that research points to them both having big health benefits.

Tea is packed with anti-oxidants and other compounds that can have a beneficial impact on the immune system. Studies have shown that regular tea drinking can reduce your risk of diabetes and cancer.

Coffee has a similar pedigree, helping reduce your cholesterol and risk of gall stones and may even be able to help reduce the risk of you developing Parkinson’s disease.

The cup that cheers

Nice cup of tea

Of course, there’s no giant marketing campaign to position a nice cuppa tea as the best way to bounce back from a punishing game of tennis, or a coffee as a restorative beverage after a vigorous yoga workout, so I’m sure people will continue to spend billions of dollars every year on vitamin-water or some other new gimmicky drink and ignore the fact that the healthiest of drinks have been around for hundreds (in the case of tea for thousands) of years.

But it’s given me an idea for a whole new line of sports drinks. Instead of  having a belt with water bottles attached I want to create one that has a pot of tea on one side, a cup, milk and sugar on the other so that you can stop and make yourself a nice cuppa along the way. It may not improve your speed but it will certainly help you look more elegant as you sip while you jog.

I love getting the New York Times on Sundays and devouring it, curled up in my favorite chair sipping a cup of coffee!  It’s a luxury to me to be able to “really” read the paper and absorb the stories rather than just race through and grab information from the newspaper while getting ready to go to work.   Sundays, I use the time to discover “new” ideas, different opinions, cultural trends and business practices.  This Sunday, while reading one of my favorite features, “Corner Office” I discovered an important message.

NYTimes reporter, Adam Bryant interviewed Cristobal Conde, the president of SunGard (a software technology company) Mr. Conde is an IT kind of guy and his company is built on how to make technology available to financial, higher education, and government agencies.  Now you would think Mr. Conde is a techie freak but he isn’t.  In fact, the lessons he learned as CEO of his company it all about relationships and thinking.  Mr. Conde says he tries to take 1 1/2 hours everyday just to close his office door and think.  My first thought when reading that was, “Wow, an hour and a half? Where does he find the time?”  Think about it, or do you have the time?

Mr. Conde “makes” the time.  He believes it is so important for his company’s future that he takes time to consider, contemplate, goof off in his mind.  It doesn’t matter what he thinks about but it is important to take the time.  Mr. Conde says, “Sometimes it gets cut short.  But many topics or issues can only be dealt with in an uninterrupted format.  I worry about our entry-level people- they’re bombarded with information, and they never get to think”.

Well friends, guess what, there is a study out about that!   Yes, Stanford researchers have found that people who are multitaskers, and by that I mean even folks who are instant messaging, writing a report, and listening to music or taking phone calls do not pay attention, control their memory, and are easily distracted from any focus on the array of tasks before them.  The study was published in the Aug 24 edition  of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Their findings show that multitasking actually impairs the organizing mechanisms in your brain.

100 Students in the study were put though a series of three tests,  half were self confessed heavy multitaskers and the others were low multitaskers.  After the tests the researcher found that the high taskers were constantly distracted by irrelevant information because they just couldn’t ignore it.  Follow up studies showed that high multitaskers had a low performance in  memory  and organizing information.  They just couldn’t filter out the irrelevant information. Plus, they didn’t take in enough information to contemplate with any depth of knowledge.

So there you have it, take it from a high tech guy like Cristobal Conde, if you really want to get ahead, take time to think, one thought at a time.  Still, how the heck does he find an hour and a half?  Maybe he’s lifting weights, or would that be multitasking?  How many tasks makes multi.  Hmmm, I’ll have to think about that.

A scientist was doing an incredibly complicated experiment involving lots of different liquid chemicals, some of them very toxic. He had been struggling with the experiment for years and couldn’t quite make it work. Then he fell into the vat and became part of the solution.

Scientists have discovered that ancient humans crossing over from Russia to North America on the ice bridge got lost a lot of the time. Apparently they couldn’t keep their Bering Straight.

I used to work with a doctor who did a stint in the local county hospital, San Francisco General. It’s an amazing place filled with extraordinary doctors, nurses and other staff. And they need to be, they see some of the toughest cases, the worst injuries and the most difficult of patients – some of whom have drug problems, some alcohol problems, some mental health problems, and some all three combined.

My friend told me that one of the most effective medications they had for treating some of the hardest cases, where no other drugs had worked, was a thing called Obecalp. He says it was almost something of a miracle drug, helping people battling multiple issues.

Unfortunately after a while the ethics committee at the hospital told them they couldn’t prescribe Obecalp anymore because it was unethical. You see, Obecalp is just placebo spelled backwards, so what they were really giving these patients was a sugar pill of sorts.

Now, the fact that it worked where others didn’t was in itself amazing. The fact that there was nothing in the pill but the power of the patient’s imagination and belief that it would work is even more incredible.

I often think of that when I read studies that say vitamin C doesn’t work for preventing colds, or that taking a multivitamin won’t reduce your risk of cancer or heart disease or even death from any cause.

Despite the scientific evidence to the contrary millions of Americans take vitamins every day, in fact a growing number of people are turning to supplements for their health, often because they have lost their job or don’t have health care coverage and they consider a daily multivitamin supplement a lot more affordable form of health insurance than supplementary insurance.

Many people swear that since they started taking vitamins they feel healthier, look better, have more energy. Science may say “nuh uh” but that doesn’t seem to make any difference. And while these may just be a series of individuals talking about their own health, what science calls anecdotal evidence, taken collectively it’s hard to dismiss what they have experienced.

Science has to ask the big questions such as ‘does this work’ or ‘is it safe’ or ‘how does it work and for who’. But perhaps the more important question, at least from the individual’s perspective, is ‘does it matter’. Maybe as long as something is safe then the individual’s experience is more relevant in helping them decide whether to take a supplement or not.

Whether it works because of some internal biochemical mechanism we haven’t yet figured out, or whether it works because of the placebo effect, doesn’t really matter. Just as long as it works.

It all reminds me of the line from a song in the musical Mary Poppins “Just a spoonful of sugar  helps the medicine go down”. In this case the spoonful of sugar is the medicine. Good health never tasted so sweet!

Every so often you come upon a study that leaves you asking “and they managed to get money to do that research?” It’s not that the findings are so shocking and provocative, more that they are so bloody obvious that you didn’t really need to do a study to find it out – such as if you drink more alcohol you are more likely to end up drunk than if you don’t drink at all.

Sounds silly I know but here are real life examples that shows just how absurd some of these studies are.

Such as the latest research from those fine folks at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. They came to the groundbreaking conclusion that homeowners who are in foreclosure are more likely to suffer from a major depression than homeowners who are not in foreclosure. Really! You mean if the house you bought and loved and cared for is about to be sold from underneath you and your family you are more likely to be miffed about it than if you are not about to lose your home. Wow, that’s some pretty rigorous scientific inquiry.

An article in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology – what do you mean you stopped your subscription! – had some helpful research for people wishing to avoid smog and dirt in the air. After extensive study they advised people to wear a face mask. Gasp! The researchers thoughtfully went into some detail as to why this would be helpful, explaining how covering your nose and mouth can reduce the amount of particles that get in there. Thanks lads, don’t know what we would do without you.

Cheating on college tests is apparently becoming increasingly common, with students smuggling all manner of electronic devices into exams to help them ace the test. But which students are most likely to cheat? Well, a study from Ohio State University found that dishonest students are more likely to cheat than honest ones. No, honestly they are. The researchers gave students a questionnaire and those who registered lower on measures of honesty were more likely to cheat than those who registered higher. Now we know we can just administer an honesty test before the real test to weed out the bad boys and girls. But what if they cheat on that one too! Hmmmm.

And here’s a good use of research dollars. A study of some 1,341 European clubgoers (what, couldn’t they find any in the U.S.?) found that one third of men between the ages of 16 and 35, and one quarter of women in the same age group, drink alcohol and smoke marijuana to increase their chances of having sex. Apparently drinking and smoking reduced their sense of inhibition so they were more likely to pursue the object of their lust. And presumably if the object of their lust was also drinking and smoking they were more likely to be receptive to those advances. What wonders will science reveal to us next, that better looking people get more sexual interest from the opposite sex than ugly folks!

And finally, a word of warning to all those boys and men who have been hitting the bottle before hitting the bars – those girls that are smiling at you are probably just being friendly, they don’t necessarily want to leap beneath the sheets with you. But don’t take my word for that, thanks to an article in the journal Psychological Science, researchers are able to explain that men sometimes mistake a friendly gesture – such as a smile or making eye contact – with a sexual come on. Apparently boys in heat don’t read body language very well and mistake anything short of a slap in the face as a sign that “she really likes me”.

With research like that out there it’s no wonder that this year’s class at the University of Duh is once again over subscribed.

Growing up in Ireland and England tea was a constant part of our daily life, the kettle was always full and ready to be fired up to make another pot of tea – just in case someone stopped by to visit or something terrible happened.

We didn’t think anything of it – tea was just something we drank all the time. And I do mean all the time.

But now I’m finding out that all that tea drinking may have been helping protect me against all manner of cancers and other nasty things.

Now we just drank the black stuff – no, not Guinness, at least not that young – I’m talking about black tea. Back then when it came to drinking tea you had two choices, black tea or no tea.

Since then all sorts of weird and wonderful teas have sprung up – including that most unnatural of creations, fruity teas, who in god’s name came up with that! – but the most popular seems to be green tea.

Since my youth lots of studies have shown that black tea is chock full of anti-oxidants and other cancer-fighting properties, but now the real focus of science seems to be on green tea; and that research is showing some pretty impressive findings.

The most recent came in a study published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research. It was done by the folks at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center.

Now, they cheated a little, instead of giving a group of men with prostate cancer green tea to drink they gave them pills packed with green tea extract. That’s probably not a bad thing when you consider they gave them the equivalent of 12 cups of tea a day – that’s a lot of tea, and it would be hard to carry out tests on a group of people shuttling between the kettle and the bathroom.

The researchers found that three key measures of tumor growth fell in the men taking the green tea pills, compared to a similar group not taking the pills – if you want the full details of the reduction in HGF, VEGf and PSA you’ll have to go to the researchers website)

The extract didn’t cure the cancer but it certainly slowed it down, and that’s no mean achievement.

Now, the study was only done in 26 men, which is too small a group to make any kind of generalizations, plus they used concentrated extract in pills and I don’t know that you can get those in stores. But still, it’s pretty impressive stuff.

And if it works in prostate cancer maybe it will work in other cancers too.

I know, that’s lots of “ifs” and “what ifs” and “maybes” and not enough science to support any of them. So at this point all we can say is fall back on that old research cliche, “more study is needed”.

And in my house that means “I’ll go and put the kettle on”

If you ever have questions about science ask Dave Barry. He has answers. Not necessarily good ones, but they’re answers nonetheless. Such as these!

“It is a scientific fact that your body will not absorb cholesterol if you take it from another person’s plate.”

“It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells… to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.”

“Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators.”