New Dad Depression 3 - NEW INTERVIEW!

 

I’m having deja vu here.  First, I wrote about the study connecting a father’s post partum depression to behavioral problems in their children, then I interviewed Dr. Ramchandani about that study, and now I’m back again to give you more depression news and a new interview…

James Paulson of the Eastern Virginia Medical School did a study on 5,000 families that revealed some startling information about children of depressed fathers.  The results of their study showed that children with sad Dads were able to speak on average 1.5 words less than the standard average, and that those same Dads were less likely to read to their children for the average length of time. 

My first reaction to the research was that the results did not show a wide enough statistical gap to be alarming.  There was only a 1.5 word difference.  The image of a child only knowing half a word is amusing me now, even though I know it’s an average.

My second reaction was that any vocabulary gap (especially one that small) is essentially insignificant because toddler word knowledge does not indicate present or future intelligence - my Mom, an early intervention specialist, agreed with me.  I realize this argument is a sort of straw man, but it’s a valid point if for only to remind parents who might misinterpret the emphasis on word knowledge in the study. 

My final reaction was that the connection between word knowledge and depression was not noticed in the mothers in this study and other studies, and that the explanation for this difference (mothers push through their depression better) seemed apologetic and sexist.

Here to answer my questions and to explain this study is Dr. James F. Paulson, assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Eastern Virginia Medical School.  The following are his unedited responses to my interview:

Can you tell me more about the New Father Program you are developing?  What are your goals with the project?  Is this in the early stages or can the public expect something soon?

My group is currently in the process of developing a program for expecting and new fathers that is tentatively designated “Dads Matter.”  This program is aimed at fathers who might otherwise be referred directly into a standard childbirth/early parenting preparation course, the sort that is widely available and often coordinated via hospital birthing centers. It is not ready for the public yet, as we’re making our best effort at building it carefully to be engaging and attractive to fathers (both in the way it’s presented and its content) and this process requires pilot work with fathers going through the parenthood transition. Ideally, it will stand as a complement to traditionally mother-center parenting preparation and education programming.

Are you familiar with the recent Children of the 90s study that showed a correlation between behavior problems in children and post-partum depression in their fathers?  Will you be looking at this possible connection in the future to replicate Dr. Ramchandani’s research?  Have you had a chance to compare your data with that project?

Dr. Ramchandani’s research is well-known to our group and it is excellent work that’s moved us quickly forward in understanding that paternal depression (the father’s involvement more generally) can clearly impact child health and development. Our current ongoing research should lead to a partial replication of Dr. Ramchandani’s work and may provide new information.

Do you feel that vocabulary knowledge at age 2 matters in the eventual intelligence of the children?

This is an excellent question that can’t be answered simply. we study phenomena like expressive vocabulary at the group level (averaging across many children) the knowledge gained speaks more powerfully to how a given phenomenon operates at a broader level.  It doesn’t necessarily speak to any particular individual.  This, perhaps, is the biggest source of confusion that people experience in digesting the findings of social, behavioral, and population-based research. That said, it’s fair to say that children’s vocabulary at age two matters, but it may be no more than a modest factor in school readiness and long-term academic achievement.  It may be an indicator of intelligence that is measured later, but age two is a bit early to place much confidence in that link.  What is particularly interesting about expressive vocabulary to us is that its disruption may serve as an signal of other developmental or family problems.

Did your study factor in any data regarding single fathers or at-home fathers?

Unfortunately, no.  Little research has been done with either of these groups, although it is clearly needed.

How were the 50 words tested?  Did the parents volunteer the information or were the children specifically quizzed with flashcards?

Inventory was used to assess expressive vocabulary.  This instrument relied on the child’s primary caregiver to endorse which words the child was using at age two.

Did participation in daycare or pre-school programs make a difference in word knowledge?  Did you find or look for a link in social skills in the children and depression in their parents?

We haven’t looked at this yet, but it is on the agenda for future research.

It seems like there is a link between reading less and word knowledge.  Did your study find this to be true as a general rule?

This study does support the notion that there is a link between parent-to-child reading and the child’s word knowledge.  It is important to note, however, that parents support their children’s development (language and otherwise) through a wide range of interactions.  Speaking with the child, narrating activities to the child, play, storytelling, singing, and other activities certainly go a long way to help the child learn language, social skills, and self-regulation. By looking narrowly at reading to the child, we are able to capture a measurable parenting interaction that parents can easily follow up with.

How many of the children with lower use of vocabulary had both parents depressed?  This seems like it might be significant because I would think that the non-depressed parent would pick up the slack with reading.

While there were a number of families where both parents experienced significant depression, we didn’t find a multiplicative effect for this on child vocabulary.  In fact, we found that while depression in the father did have a negative impact on his reading to the child and the child’s expressive vocabulary, mother’s did not.  This is certainly not to say that mother’s depression and behavior is unimportant, but rather that the mothers in this study did not substantially alter their reading behavior when depressed.  We didn’t find a “picking up the slack” effect, but this sort of compensatory change in the family is something that is of interest where parental depression is concerned.

Why did you specifically look at depression at 9 months?

We looked at depression at 9 months both because it mirrors much of the research that has been done on postnatal depression (generally regarded as depression occurring up to a year after childbirth) and because we were interested if early parental depression had a substantial impact on parenting and child functioning later on.

A 1.5 word deficit doesn’t seem like a lot.  Is there really reason to be concerned based on what seems to be a small variation?

You’re right.  Even if we express this as a ratio (1.5 words of the 50 words tested), we’re only talking about a 3% reduction in vocabulary associated with depression. As I mentioned above, we’re interested in this reduction because it captures one component of child development and may signal other problems. At the very least, this small effect should raise eyebrows regarding potential child outcomes as a consequence of paternal depression and spark more research on this topic.

Thanks to Dr. James Paulson, and best of luck to him on his future work with his project “Dads Matter”. We here at Skeptic Dad obviously agree with the notion that Dads matter. It’s nice to see that science is being applied to the world of fathering.

Beverly Fears- Cincinnati’s Vile Monster

 

Beverly Fears of Cincinnati is perhaps the most despicable human in America.  I would say that she was the the most repugnant human on planet Earth, but then I wouldn’t be giving credit to the even more abhorrent Austrian asshat Josef Fritzl, who raped his own child and fathered his grandchildren in a secret dungeon below his house.

Beverly didn’t do anything that bad.  She was arrested a year ago for locking her 5 year old son in a closet and leaving her 20 month old in a playpen while she worked the nightshift.  The neighbors heard the older boy screaming, “Why does she keep doing this to me” and pounding at the floor.  The police found the malnourished five year old surrounded by his own feces and urine with laceration marks on his wrist where he had been repeatedly tied up.  He had attempted to pry up the floorboards in desperation.  The toddler was found in a pack n’ play with nothing but a ballpark frank and some ketchup.  His diaper rash was so severe that the skin was falling off his ass. 

This wasn’t the first time Beverly exhibited signs of bad mothering.  Someone from social services might have taken notice when she tried to teach her first son a lesson on thumbsucking by wrapping his thumbs so tight that they had to be amputated.  Nobody thought to take this crazy bitch’s children away?  Now that she’s pleaded guilty to three counts of child endangerment and one count of kidnapping, we can finally protect her children, including the one she had while incarcerated the past year.

Cincinnati failed these kids, just like they failed to save Marcus Fiesel, the foster child with autism who was taped up and stuffed in a hot closet for a weekend.  When will this city wake up and do something to protect children from abusive parents? 

All I know is that I want to give my kids a few extra kisses and hugs after writing this post.  I urge anyone with strong morals and good family values to consider being a foster parent.  There are too many horrible parents out there taking the money and abusing the children. 

SCIENCE FOR THE KIDS!

 

This is a new segment on the Skeptic Dad blog.  Every few weeks I’ll post about scientific things in the news that you can apply to your own family.  Hopefully, you’ll be able to make science education fun by developing your child’s curiousity and enthusiasm for scientific exploration.

The first item I want to bring to your attention is the new World Wide Telescope.  Those parents who have installed Google Sky onto their desktop will not want to miss Microsoft’s sleek and stylish answer to their cyber-counterparts at Google.  World Wide Telescope is accessible, free to download, and the functions are easy to use.  It’s the perfect complement to an actual telescope.

There are a variety of summer camps, some of them religious and others secular, but there is only one Camp Quest, the first summer camp for children of secular freethinkers, humanists, and atheists.  The camp is meant to foster a rational and logical worldview, and to focus on the natural world over the supernatural.  You can find a Camp Quest in Ohio, Minnesota, Smokey Mountains, California, Michigan, and Ontario.  I don’t blame people for being a little concerned about brainwashing, but the whole point of this camp is to avoid dogma by encouraging the campers to think for themselves.  My own parents were concerned when I brought up the subject of this camp, but they forgot that I was sent to a christian camp as a child.  Why not send your kids to a humanist freethought camp?

Expelled Exposed has been doing a lovely job of squashing the arguments in Ben Stein’s despicable Expelled “documentary”.  One video on the site challenges the intelligent design argument of the complexity of the eye.  Check it out…

 

Breastfeeding Raises IQ?

 

Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me… the insufferable NPR news quiz asked this week’s player whether breastfeeding raises IQ.  Before the quiz they always say that they aren’t responsible for getting the facts correct, and that anyone who wants to complain should have their own quiz show… or blog. 

Now that Mother’s Day is over, I want to take a closer look at this statement of fact made by the folks at NPR.  Is it really true that breastfeeding RAISES the I.Q. of children?  Are we to think that formula-fed babies are at an intelligence disadvantage?

A team of scientists from King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA that breastmilk may increase I.Q. depending on whether the child has a certain gene that affects how fatty acids are processed.  The  FADS2 gene seemed to be common in those breastfed babies with higher I.Q.s, which were, on average, six to seven points higher than those of nonnursed kids with similar genetics.  A total population of 3000 children from both England and New Zealand were tested.  Formula companies haver reacted to this study by adding fatty acids to their formula, which may nullify the claim that breastmilk is naturally better than formula.

Canada’s McGill University did a study on 14,000 children and found similar data that breastfeeding correlates to a higher I.Q.  These researchers pointed out that children who were fed exclusively breastmilk for at least the first three months had (at the age of six) I.Q. scores on average 5.9 points higher than those who didn’t breastfeed as children.  These researchers are quick to point out that these results only show a link, and not the causal factors of the link.  It may be fatty acids or it may be mother-child bonding during feeding sessions.  Or, it may be something else entirely.  Michael S. Kramer, the biologist heading up the McGill study, went so far as to actually say, “Prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding makes kids smarter”.

I don’t know what to think of the data showing a correlation between breastfeeding and intelligence.  It seems like parents who feed their children naturally are possibly more inclined to parent differently.  There seems to be other factors involved than just fatty acids and their receptors, but if that is the sole factor, then it can’t be said that breastfeeding actually MAKES your children smarter- as has been claimed by various publications and quiz shows.  In any case, we as parents are constantly being challenged that our way is not good enough, or that we need to make our kids better, smarter, and more creative.  And, in an effort to keep up with the Jones’, we are over-committing our children and hyper-obsessing over studies such as the one’s mentioned here. 

Soy formulas are just one of the many ways that parents overcompensate for their children.  I’ve heard more than one parent of a baby with colic who switched to soy formulas in fear that their children are lactose intolerant.  This is a form of self-diagnosis, where parents try to link any possible cause to the constant crying in their children.  It’s easy to point to breastmilk as the causal factor to colic because that’s the only thing that baby’s eat, but there is no evidence that switching to soy will prevent colic or make the symptoms any easier for those babies who suffer from it.  Very few children are actually lactose intolerant, and yet pediatricians recommend the switch to soy to satisfy worried parents.

I am interested to hear what many of you think about the correlations between breastfeeding and intelligence.  Is it malarky?  Or have the scientists actually found something significant here?

My First Skeptic’s Circle

 

I’m proud to say that I’m no longer a Skeptic’s Circle virgin.  Every few weeks, the nomadic blog carnival of the best skeptic blogs is hosted at a new location.  This week I volunteered my Jesus in the sonogram post that my friend Meredith helped me interpret. 

It’s nice to be included in the community of skeptics.  Thanks to Karen at Skepbitch and to all the skeptics who are stopping by here to view my articles.  I’m admittedly an amateur (and not a scientist), so feel free to comment on anything that I may have misinterpreted or misunderstood.  I welcome friendly and accurate corrections. 

 

The Politics of Reduced Class Size

 

Reducing class size seems to be a no-brainer.  The smaller the student to teacher ratio, the more time there is for quality instruction and teacher-student interaction.  But, the issue is quite complex, and suffers from bias from both sides of the debate.  Schools don’t want to be forced into increasing their budgets to hire more teachers.  Teachers, of course, don’t want to be saddled with heavy class loads.  No matter what your bias may be, the answer may be complicated enough that either side could argue their point based on the available evidence, which I will examine in this very post.

The most prominent and widely quoted study on class size belongs to Project STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio), a Tennessee longitudinal study of 11,000 elementary students.  The STAR program showed a positive increase in test scores (most notably in early elementary).  It recommended certain conditions to achieving the benefits of smaller classes:  adequate supply of new teachers, sufficient classroom space, a representative student mix in each class, and teacher access to materials and services.

What is not typically mentioned is that the STAR study was not done blind.  All the teachers knew that their classroom progress was being analyzed and recorded.  These teachers had a clear bias to adjust their teaching effort to pad the data; teachers overwhelmingly prefer smaller classes for obvious reasons.   These educators knew that the whole world would be watching and that if the results weren’t positive, the legislature would not fund the smaller classes. 

The STAR study said that a student graduating from high school after attending smaller-sized classes would gain an average of 1.7 quality-adjusted life-years and generate a net $168,431 in lifetime revenue.  This type of statistical estimate is really counter-productive and wildly irresponsible.  This shows an interperative bias that is meant to change opinion and engage people politically, not reflect fact.  Closer scrutiny of the STAR program data shows that benefits were statistically modest- two one hundreths of a standard deviation with a 10% decrease in class size.  Any benefit that the children showed in earlier grades did not carry on as they got older.

Spyros Konstantopoulos of Northwestern University recently examined the STAR study with more scrutiny and found that smaller classes failed to negate the gap between high achievers and slackers.  His results, published in Elementary School Journal, indicated that smaller classes seemed to increase the divide between those students who are naturally more engaged in schoolwork and those who are less motivated.  But, his analysis didn’t contradict the study’s core assessment that small classes benefit academic progress.

The STAR study also revealed that free-lunch students performed poorly compared to wealthier students across the board, regardless of class size or grade.   This indicates that smaller classes didn’t improve the significant difference between the scores of rich and poor.  However, inner-city (predominantly minority) students in small classes always outscored inner-city students in larger classes, an indication that small classes may be better for minorities.

London University’s Institute of Education  did a small-class-size study of more than 10,000 children in more than 300 state schools that suggests that smaller classes may aggrevate social relationships and peer groups, but will indeed improve academic scores.  This study is important because, unlike the STAR program from decades ago, these results are more current and, as a result, more relevant.  Unfortunately, the fact that the study is based in Europe means that the results are less useful when applied to the U.S. school system.

A recent international study presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association proved that the benefits of small class size are not restricted to U.S. schools.  It didn’t matter whether the students were in the U.S., Switzerland, Hong Kong, or England, the results showed a benefit to smaller classes.  Analysis of the data revealed that the progress was due to the students’ perceptions of a difference and not to actual changes in the way teacher’s handled a smaller class.  It seems that the teachers had a hard time adjusting to fewer students, and that everyone would benefit if the teachers would only adapt their teaching styles to reflect the reduced class size.

Tommy Tomlinson and Erik Hanushek have both been vocal opponents to the reduction of class sizes.  Their arguments are that reducing class size does not benefit the kids enough to justify the increase in expenses (A 10 percent reduction in class size typically costs about $850 per year per student) and that actual pupil-teacher rate reduction has not shown a correlating increase in test scores.  Tomlinson points to a time between 1965 and 1975 when both class sizes and test scores dropped significantly, showing that class size does not always correlate to better scores.  He also points to evidence from comparisons to larger classes in academically prosperous Japan that class size is not a determining factor for achievement in the classroom.  However, he may be too dismissive of significant cultural differences between Japan and the U.S.

Japan seems to have the largest class size of all; the maximum number of students in one classroom can be up to 50 children.  Japanese pre-school teachers indicate that large classes are a benefit because they encourage “pampered” children to become responsible members of a larger unit.  Japanese students, as they get older, aren’t so keen on being in large classes, but their high test scores disprove theories that smaller classes lead to smarter kids.

Yvan Guillemette of the Howe Institute in Canada is also firmly against the emphasis on reduced class size, pointing to a lack of supporting evidence from Canadian research on the subject.  He thinks that the reason smaller classes may not benefit the students is that it forces the schools to hire more teachers and lower their standards for quality educators.

Caroline Minter Hoxby of Harvard University did research on class size in Connecticut over a 20 year period and found that there was ”no effect of class size on achievement at all, even when children were in small classes for all six years of elementary school”.

I’ve only scratched the surface of this debate.  My time parenting prevents me from digging deeper into this controversy, but my final thought is that this argument has little to do with academics and more to do with convenience and school district politics.  If opinion is being swayed by the STAR program from the 1980s, people need to be aware that this program has been exxagerated and over-emphasized.  On the other hand, if school systems are judging their decision on the skeptics, they should take a closer look at the recent positive study in the UK.  I think once all the facts are examined carefully without agenda or bias, a decision for class size can be made in the interest of the children… not politics.

New Dad Depression 2- INTERVIEW

 

A little while ago, I did a post about a longitudinal study called Children of the 90s that showed a relationship between post-partum depression in Dads and possibly related psychological issues in their children.  The head researcher on this study, Paul Ramchandani has been busy, but he’s now written me back to answer some of my concerns in the previous post.  I report his answers here unedited…

How positive are you that there is a clear link between post-natal depression in fathers and their children’s behavioral problems?

What we have shown in this study is an association between depression in fathers, and later behavioural problems in their children. We have controlled carefully for a number of potentially important confounding factors, so I think we can be reasonably confident that the association or link is real. There is a lot of accumulating research evidence showing that involvement of fathers in their children’s lives has substantial benefits for their children’s development in most cases. So it does make some sense that if a father’s ability to be involved in their children’s care is affected through serious illness (whether that be depression, severe asthma, heart disease etc) then there may be some impact upon their families and their children. However I think it is important to stress that we have shown a link at the population level, so it is not the case that depression in a father necessarily affects their children. Most of the children whose fathers were depressed in our study had no behavioural problems.

Do you think that this link is genetic or comes from poor nurturing?

Please see answer to the next question.

Is it possible that babies with colic and volatile tempers grow up to have behavioral problems, and that the depression in fathers stem from having a fussy baby? That perhaps babies prone to behavior problems are the cause of the depression and not the other way around?

I have taken these two questions together because I think that they both address the issue of whether this link is really causal and, if it is, what might the mechanisms be by which depression in fathers may affect their children. It is possible that having a difficult to look after baby might lead to greater risk of depression in fathers. We tried to minimise this by measuring depression early on (8 weeks after the birth of the child), and measuring the children’s behaviour problems much later (at age 6 and 7 years). If we accept that the main effect is likely to be from fathers to children (rather than the other way around) then the question of how this might happen is really important. Our particular study hasn’t yet been able to disentangle this, although we are currently working on these questions. Other research on depression suggests that the genetic effects may account for about 50% of the risk, but in my view there is still a lot of work to be done here too before we have anything like definitive answers.

Is it possible that the depression in fathers stem from a poor marriage, and that having a weak parental unit creates the behavior problems?

It is possible, and there is other research showing a strong link between depression (in mothers or fathers) and marital difficulties. Marital difficulties themselves are linked to an increased risk of behavioural problems in children.

Are the results only isolated to postnatal depression or do they also include those men who are constantly depressed?

We focussed particularly on depression in the postnatal period. However, research in mothers suggests that chronic depression may have greater effects on familiies and children than a single episode of depression. I’m not aware of any similar research on fathers, although I may have missed it.

Did you find a similar link between postnatal depression in mothers and their children?

Yes, the relationships are somewhat stronger for maternal depression, and there is much larger body of research investigating depression in mothers.

How did you decide whether the father was depressed? Was it voluntary information or did they have to be diagnosed as depressed?

The assessment was done by fathers completing a questionnaire, so this is not quite the same as being diagnosed as depressed, although it is quite a good estimate of depression.

BPA FREE

 

This is just a quick post to say that our family has switched from Dr. Brown’s Bisphenol-A bottles to the estrogen-less alternatives Born Free and Sigg.  Be careful choosing your bottles.  A report by blogger Z Recommends exposed Amazon for adding BPA bottles to their BPA-free store; Amazon has since taken down the products. 

In the time since my last post about Bisphenol-A, the hard plastic that seems to mess with estrogen genes, there have been a few updates to post: Wal-Mart has decided to phase out BPA bottles, Canada is considering dropping them all together, and the National Childbirth Trust in the UK has demanded warning labels on baby bottles.  This is all despite the lack of conclusive evidence and only “some” official concern on the hard plastic.

Just so I’m clear, my family decided to switch to BPA-free to be absolutely sure that our children are safe.  It was a personal decision… not based on the totality of scientific evidence, but on the alarming preliminary data.

Brainless Marijuana Myths

 

My father is a proponent of legalizing certain drugs. He believes that the war on drugs has failed, that marijuana is relatively safe compared to legalized liquor and cigarettes, and that the medical benefits of THC far outweigh the dangers. My Dad mentioned his opinions to a colleague, who pointed out that marijuana kills 2000 brain cells with every puff. I don’t know where she got this information, or why it’s even considered relevant, but he asked me to investigate her statement… and so I have.

My first argument to this “fact” is that it doesn’t matter. People should be able to do whatever they want to their own body. Drinking whiskey in excess kills your liver, smoking several daily packs of Camels may give you lung cancer, and both are legal to purchase, sell, and own. There is no good reason for making pot illegal; it’s an unfair double standard. My second argument is that a lot of things kill human cells. Oxygen itself, while being a vital fuel for the human body, destroys cells every time we inhale. That’s why antioxidants are so popular- they help defend against the damage of free radicals created by the presence of oxygen.  Maybe we should outlaw oxygen???

I would also like to direct anyone who cares to the facts on the myth of today’s THC being much stronger than 20 years ago.  I don’t have time to take on that subject right now.  And the truth behind the pot slang term 420 is not the police code for drugs; it was a specific time some stoners in California met to get high- somehow it caught on in pop culture.

Back to the point, there are MANY studies on the effects of marijuana. I’ve chosen several that I feel represent both sides of the claim that weed kills brain cells…

• Dr. Robert G. Heath was the first to study the loss of brain cells from smoking marijuana.  His studies on monkeys seemed to indicate that there was brain damage after the test subjects were exposed to massive exposure to cannibis.
• William Slicker of the National Center for Toxicological Research replicated Heath’s study using better controls and a larger sample.  He was unable to find any brain damage or deterioration after a full year of the monkey’s in his study smoking skunk every day.   Charles Rebert and Gordon Pryor of SRI International also replicated the original study and concluded the same thing, that the monkeys had no brain damage after daily exposure to cannibis for a year.  Human studies of heavy users in Jamaica and Costa Rica found no evidence of abnormalities in brain physiology
• Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon found that the administration of synthetic cannabinoids in rats stimulated the proliferation of newborn neurons (nerve cells) in the hippocampus region of the brain and significantly reduced measures of anxiety and depression-like behavior.  Did you catch that?  In this study marijuana stimulated brain cell growth.
• Harvard Medical School did a study on 22 long-time pot smokers and failed to find any brain damage when compared to the non-potheads.  “When compared to control subjects, smokers displayed no significant adjusted differences in volumes of gray matter, white matter, cerebrospinal fluid, or left and right hippocampus. Moreover, hippocampal volume in cannabis users was not associated with age of onset of use nor total lifetime episodes of use. These findings are consistent with recent literature suggesting that cannabis use is not associated with structural changes within the brain as a whole or the hippocampus in particular.”

On the other side of the coin, there are some studies that are not as favorable toward the effects of cannibis.

• A study confirmed the original research that marijuana doesn’t kill brain cells, but it discovered a new wrinkle in the data.  THC alone does not create neurodegeneration, but combine it with ethanol and you start seeing a brain cell funeral march. 
• Cannabis use may cause schizophrenia, but the results are inconclusive.  Cat poop may also cause schizophrenia, and it isn’t outlawed… much to humanity’s dismay.
• A study by Dr. Lambros Messinis in the journal Neurology showed that long time pot smokers have impaired memory and mental processing speed.  Now what was I saying?

I couldn’t find any research that showed where my Dad’s colleague got the idea that pot kills 2000 brain cells with every puff.  Certainly scientists would never be able to measure with that kind of accuracy anyway.  Specific numbers aside, there isn’t any evidence that pot smoking alone degenerates the brain.  I know that there are a lot of biased sources on this matter out there in the internets, so I would be happy to accept any comments that may correct my conclusions.

The Fallacy of Raw Milk

 

Some people are worried that the vitamins and nutrients found in the standard gallon of grocery store milk are not enough. They say we need our milk straight from the udder, before it has a chance to be stripped of it’s healthy qualities and super bacteria.  These people are raw milk advocates, and they want to take us back several centuries to a time when modern medicine and science didn’t muddy up the purity of their bovine beverages. But what are they talking about? Is there any merit in their argument? Does it really make that much of a difference? I hope to explore the answers to those questions in this very post.

Briefly, French microbiologist Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard developed pasteurization, warming milk to a pre-boil, in 1862 to prevent germs such as tuberculosis, brucellosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and Q-fever from contaminating milk. Before Pasteur, these diseases were commonly found in milk, but people didn’t even know it since germ theory was in it’s infancy. Today’s raw milk may contain all kinds of unhealthy passengers such as: salmonella, Lysteria monocytogenes, yersinia enterocolitica, and e.coli bacteria. 

Raw milk advocates ignore the benefits of pasteurized milk and even go so far as to claim that drinking unmolested milk will boost your immune system and prevent disease. One of the leading advocates quacking about raw milk is Dr. Mercola, an osteopath, who has said “I have seen so many of my patients recover their health with raw milk that I perceive this as one of the most profoundly healthy foods you can consume,”.  Dr. Mercola has uttered all kinds of crazy things.  His web site says that he believes “This higher intelligence, which we call the ‘Health’ is conscious, precognitive, omnipresent and is a direct reflection of the Divine.”  Deep thoughts by Dr. Mercola.

Time magazine’s recent article on the topic quoted Susan Mueller’s “success” introducing raw milk to the diet of her two daughters. 

“the previous year, she had bronchitis, an ear infection, a urinary-tract infection and three or four colds. This year she missed two days of school all winter.”

This is a prime example of Correlation Does Not Imply Causation.  Just because her daughter was sick one year and not sick as much the next, doesn’t mean that raw milk boosted her child’s immune system.  One would have to point to double blind controlled studies to prove a link between raw milk and immunity.  One would also have to have some kind of known mechanism for how something like raw milk could prevent ear and urinary tract infections.  On the face, the idea is absurd.

Raw-milk-facts.com lists all kinds of fallacious arguments for raw milk.  I’ll list them here, and respond to each one.

• Raw Milk was used as a medicine centuries ago.  Was this before or after doctors were bleeding sick patients with leeches?  Was this before or after scientists understood germ theory?  This argument is an Appeal to Antiquity.  Just because an idea is older, doesn’t make it more correct.
• Raw milk is the “stem cell” of food.  Stem cells basically have the potential to be any other kind of cell.  They’re like an uncommited superdelegate, if you catch my metaphor.  But I digress, what is he talking about here?  This seems to be a crude Ambiguos Assertion and Argument by Slogan- a fancy saying that means nothing, but seems intelligent, and ultimately not a quality argument.
• You could live on it exclusively if you had to. Indeed, published accounts exist of people who have done just that.   This is a hard one for me, but I think it may be a combination of Argument of Generalization and Appeal to Anonymous Authority.  Just because some people have been known to diet exclusively on raw milk (babies?) doesn’t mean that it’s better for you than pasteurized.  The source of this fact is not cited because it is probably an equivocation.

The FDA claims that pasteurization does not diminish any of the milk’s essential proteins, vitamins, or any other nutrients, much to the consternation of the raw advocates.  They also list a number of examples of raw milk causing widespread sickness, including a case in my home state of Ohio.  Most of the “benefits” of raw milk are the same as pasteurized, but the comparison of benefits between the two are often ignored by the believers.  They insist that just because something is “natural” it must be better.  But, such a belief is a slippery slope- I doubt they would extend that belief to eating uncooked meat.

Pasteurized milk can hardly be called a threat to society.  Even the pure dairy fanatics will tell you that there is nothing harmful or dangerous about distributing heat to milk for the purpose of killing bacteria.  It disturbs me that people would take that risk of exposing their children to disease so that they can get a few extra bacteria and a creamier tasting milk.  I say go with a cup of Activa and a glass of soy milk and you’re good to go.  The idea of drinking the contents of a dumb mammal’s teat has become less and less appealing the older I get.