The Curative Power of the Pineapple...or Not

What normally happens in my day-to-day life is I check facebook, I get annoyed at some pesudoscience and I end up writing about it. Today is no exception. Circling around is a lot of memes about pineapples and the curative effects of ‘bromelain’. The claim said that pineapple was effective in treatments of colds as it reduces inflammation and combats infections eradicating bacteria. It says it is more effective at helping you stop coughing than cough syrup. I actually saw this posted on a wall and the person tried it and said that it worked. I confronted this person, who wouldn’t accept that the cold couldn’t have gone one its own, because when she gave her sick grandson the pineapple juice, he stopped coughing. Maybe I should go and purchase some of this magical healing juice, or, I could stop and actually critically think about it.

Origins and studies(?!)

This may not shock you when you look at the picture and see David ‘dickhead’ Wolfe’s (I’ve strayed away from ‘freudocado’, i’ll use both here) name attached to this pseudoscientific nonsense. Even if you don’t know much about biochemistry, at this point, serious red flags should be raised. David ‘freudocado’ Wolfe is not a scientific authority on anything. A little searching on this yields a website with an article Pineapple Juice is 5 Times More Effective Than Cough Syrup,  which is just seriously rife with uneducated misinformation. Typical of a site with the name like ‘Prevent Disease’, it is full of propaganda trying to sell your average natural bullshit. In there we have mentions of doctors and studies, shockingly without any links *eye roll*. Luckily, due to my inquisitive nature (they didn’t count on that now, did they?) I have tracked down the study they were ‘discussing’. It was a non-study looking at how using herbal remedies decrease mucus with associated tuberculosisosis (TB). In the study, they mention pineapple once and concluded, get this:

"Pineapple pepper and a dash of salt and honey can be administered to patients once everyday. This is found to be extremely helpful in dissolving mucus of the lungs in tuberculosis.”

How the hell they have come to that conclusion is phenomenal. Like, genuinely phenomenal. If this is what passes for scientific study these days, my PhD is going to the easiest four years of my entire life. There not one shred of evidence of its effectiveness, meaning that it being ‘5 times’ as better as cough syrup, as the article claims, is just a blatant lie. There is also questioning, and has been for years, around the use of cough syrups, as they have no active ingredients for curative effects (as you will notice, most of them are holistic extracts, thats why nothing comes of them). So saying something works 5 times better than nothing is redundant (5 x 0 = 0):

"We conclude from the limited evidence available that OTC cough medicines do not appear to be more effective than placebo in acute cough caused by URTI and should not be recommended as a first line treatment for the resolution of acute cough"

The article is also littered with the deadly word ‘toxin’ so if you didn’t think it was pseudoscience before, then you should be thinking it now. The reason being that people who claim to know everything about science and nutrition, actually don’t. They will then cover this up via the use of fearmongering to get you to believe them. To do this, they just use the highly un-definitive word: toxin. Which I am pretty sure at this point just means ‘I’m a pseudoscientist”. Now there is more work in pineapple juice being studied in people with colds. 98 subjects had some pineapples and were cured after 4 days. Colds tend to last 3-5 days on average. Making this study a little like the logical fallacy at the start, which kicked this whole thing off. They gave them pineapple and the cold eventually went away, therefore the bromelain in the pineapple cured the cold. In this time, they also inhaled oxygen, drank water, probably ate and if the symptoms were bad enough, taken medication. Why can we not say that the oxygen got rid of the cold? The food? No, must be the thing we are looking at. Please, use logic.

What is bromelain?

Bromelain is an proteolytic enzyme, which means it breaks down proteins. Most commonly the proteins found in collagen (holds muscle together). There have been two studies with looked into bromelain as anti-inflammatory in review (here and here) for treatment of osteoarthritis. These studies aren't  very conclusive and aren’t enough to say anything even slightly authoritative, as defined in one of the conclusions:

“The currently available data do indicates the potential of bromelain in treating osteoarthritis. However, further studies are needed before a definitive conclusion can be drawn. Specifically, there is a need for trials to establish efficacy, and dose ranging studies to identify the optimum dosage (with adequate prospective adverse event monitoring). Finally, future work should focus on the dose–response parameters and efficacy of long-term bromelain use in chronic conditions such as osteoarthritis.”

That pretty much sums this up. There isn’t enough evidence and they haven't looked at dose-response and looked at studies with efficacy. No formal conclusions can be drawn and even in the study the implications seem to be wildly concluded. Again, it should be taken into consideration here, the papers that are discussed in the review are small sample sized and are not of the best design quality (not double blinded, randomly controlled studies).

Conclusions

Calling bromelain a natural anti-biotic to reduce inflammation is not correct. There have been a few studies that indicate it could possibly kill bacteria of certain strains, but there are no solidly designed human clinical trials. Results in a test tube (in vitro experimentation) can and do differ wildly from studies in the human body (in vivo experimentation. This is why we don’t extrapolate data from a petri dish and say that a certain thing will kill a disease/virus without first giving it a go in humans. This then leads to more studies and more studies and then we may have some clearer answers. Don’t be fooled by a picture of a pineapple, an anecdote and David ‘dickhead’ Wolfe.

So to conclude: Pineapple juice doesn’t cure anything other than dehydration and maybe think twice before buying that cough medicine.

Terrible Science or Terrible Articles?

Is Second Hand Smoke Harmful?

I’ll start off by saying the only good thing that appears to have come out of Donald Trump becoming president of the US is that since he labels everything as ‘Fake News’, if it diminishes his character in any way, the issue of actual fake news is being addressed. This is something that has been around for quite some time. My belief is that the biggest use of fake news is to ‘prove’ pseudoscience and parade it as though it is fact, such as Trumps take on climate change. Scientific communication plays one of the biggest roles in fake news today.

An article I come across in the Slate titled: ‘We Used Terrible Science to Justify Smoking Bans’. Now, When I hear the phrase ‘Terrible Science’ my mind goes straight towards homeopathy, anti-GMOs and general pseudoscience. It doesn't tend to lean towards rigorously peer reviewed scientific literature. In 2007 in the UK the smoking ban came into place, prohibiting people from smoking in any enclosed public area and the workplace. Jacob Grier, the author of the article, states that the research used to come to the conclusion allowing the ban is ‘flawed’. He argues that more recent research shows that there is no health benefits of people inhaling second hand smoke.

Scientifically speaking, not just using the one study he has used to determine this ironic conclusion, is that there is a scientific consensus; second hand smoke does have a negative impact on health. As seen in a review by the CDC and many meta-analyses. Granted, all in all, statistically the effect of adverse health upon exposure to second hand smoke is overall, small. However, the list of negative effects are serious, including strokes and heart attacks as well as cancer. When I say ‘statistically small’, if you have read the CDC link posted, you will see that that CDC approximates that 2,500,000 non-smokers have died due to exposure to second hand smoke since 1964. In terms of overall population levels, over that period of time, the effects are statistically small. Still, that is 2,500,000 people who could have possibly survived. Grier focuses his biased review of the literature on basically playing down the effects of second hand smoke exposure, saying the health benefits since the ban are exaggerated and suggesting that some of the data is made up. He also uses non-scientific articles to back up saying there is no link between lung cancer and second hand smoke and other articles that prove his point.

"A decade later, comprehensive smoking bans have proliferated globally. And now that the evidence has had time to accumulate, it’s also become clear that the extravagant promises made by anti-smoking groups—that implementing bans would bring about extraordinary improvements in cardiac health—never materialized."

I’d like to point out here that these studies do materialise if you search for them correctly. The studies he uses are aimed at specific incidences, such as acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in a study using ‘about’ 4 million inhabitants. We are looking at the whole picture here, he is, in effect, asking two questions: 'was the smoking ban based on flawed science'? and 'has the smoking ban had a positive effect on overall health'? Sadly for him, even this study he quotes doesn’t prove his case, as the authors conclude:

“Our study, based on a population of about 4 million inhabitants, suggests that smoke-free policies may result in a short-term reduction in admissions for AMI.”

Where are the reviews?

With journalists like this, I notice a pattern. Everything that doesn’t fit his view is either biased by the researchers or flat out made up. They tend to focus on the little picture, picking up studies here and there and criticising the wrong things in them. I say this in almost every blog, in science we absolutely love systematic-reviews. Imagine a systematic review as a building, such as an ‘information architecture’ of evidence based science, you start out with one or two studies (or blocks) and that gives you a direction in which way your building will go (negative or positive). More scientists add research blocks, and these collate together. After years of work you have a beautiful architecture with different wings, some studies will show positive results, some will show negative. Now, you can pick a building block to prove your point, such as saying “there are no adverse effects to health from second hand smoke exposure” - that one study will prove your point, and there are probably others. To bring this together, at the top of your architecture you want something grand. Something someone will look at, think of this as your systematic review. This is collating all your data from your overall structure to answer a very important question, is the building stable, or do we need to add more?

That is exactly what Cochrane do. You will have seen me talk about Cochrane before and how they are the ‘gold standard’ of systematic reviews. They love criticism, even more than myself. They even run a Silverman Prize targeted at rewarding people who do a good critique at pointing out what they have done wrong. So, it wasn’t surprising that a Cochrane review published in 2016 looked into the evidence behind second hand smoking was absent from Griers ‘review of evidence’. This is the second review carried out by them with the same title, this re-relaese is an update of the data including 77 more studies. They concluded that:

“Since the first version of this review was published, the current evidence provides more robust support for the previous conclusions that the introduction of a legislative smoking ban does lead to improved health outcomes through reduction in SHS for countries and their populations. The clearest evidence is observed in reduced admissions for acute coronary syndrome. There is evidence of reduced mortality from smoking-related illnesses at a national level. There is inconsistent evidence of an impact on respiratory and perinatal health outcomes, and on smoking prevalence and tobacco consumption.”

There are also reviews here, here and here. Again, each one conveniently missed off the cherry-picked data in the article. We need to consider the reductions in negative health outcomes based on population, the systematic reviews conclude that there is definitely negative outcomes from second hand smoke exposure. Given the weight of these reviews and the CDC estimation of the amount of deaths from exposure to second hand smoke, there is substantial evidence to back this banning of smoking. I can not see where this ‘flawed data’ is residing.

Conclusion

If you are going to read up on an subject, read up on both sides. Don’t read one study and go on a witch-hunt looking for only studies that confirm that study and so-forth. More so, don’t give reporters like this the power to mislead you. Read up on both sides, that is exactly what I have done for this blogpost for the last week. I didn’t just read the reviews and say ‘well, he's wrong’. I read the other side to see why they may be issues and if there are issues, what are they? The truth is in this article, the author claims that the effects on health since the ban are exaggerated and wrote a biased article looking only at the few published works that went against the grain.

Trump's War on Science

Will Trump Lose The War On Science?

Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee - I'm in Los Angeles and it's freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2013

Ever since the announcement of the new President of the United States, I knew science would be under threat. After all, we live in a society where the most powerful office in the world uses the term "alternative facts" as opposed to addressing idiotic behaviour. I didn't realise how fast science would be under threat in terms of global warming. For those of you who somehow don't know; a few days after becoming POTUS Donald Trump removed any mention of climate change from the white house website and correspondence and tried to do the same to the Environmental Protection Agency. Furthermore, EPA was forced to freeze grants and cease on contracts issued to study environmental problems. Sadly, many people lost their PhD’s, jobs, research and livelihoods to this ridiculous act. They went even further with this and said any studies to come out of the EPA would have to be cleared by white house officials before being released to the public. The Department of Agriculture also got similar screening treatment with their press releases. Effectively censoring scientific information. This insufferable man has officially gone to war with science – he is trying to deny and silence well established science – simply because he cannot change it and this is why he will lose.

"It's a Scam and a Hoax"

I've personally been told this, when asked I never got a response. I suppose I know why, because it is an easy outlet when you don't understand anything, just say the first thing that pops into your head and have no defence when questioned about it. Let me tell you who's scamming you. No one. Every major science organisation, including independent research scholars have all scamming us? Scientists have run independent tests and manipulated the data to come to the same conclusions? That's pretty strange, almost statistically impossible, to be quite frank. But you give an overhwelming argument and you have converted me. Oh wait, no. No you haven't. You lack two fundamental things for this pseudoscientific bullshit; evidence and critical reasoning.

Here is the current climate model released by NAS (National Academy of Sciences) you can disagree with it all you want, but you're wrong- as it is evident there is a clear overall trend as years progress. This is pooled data from independent researchers, peer reviewed, critically scientifically analysed and published for scientific scrutiny - of which it has received little scrutiny from actual scientists. Again, there's a completely overwhelming amount of data on the NASA website from global mapping temperatures. Also you can view all the raw data and graphs here.

I could literally be here all day listing papers, cohorts, reviews and data sets I guess my point is that the Trump administration know dick about science or scientific processes to come to the conclusion that you are being 'scammed' without presenting any valid evidence (because there isn't any). Climate change is real, the fact they choose not to believe that in the face of overwhelming evidence makes them a conspiracy theorist. I and if you are reading this and you believe in Donald Trump and what he "stands for" in this regard, I sincerely doubt you will click any of those links to actually look at the data because it completely disagrees with your preconceived view that all scientists/media/liberals are [insert whatever you like here] must be lying to "scam" you. 

You can literally see in the above graph the actual figures here - if you cannot get that the temperatures are rapidly rising from that then you are an abolute moron.

2016 hottest year

Officially, 2016 has been the hottest year on record since the tracking of global temperatures in 1880, meaning that for the third year, the global temperatures have continued to rise to be the highest on record. It is dumbfoundly, crucially undeniable that the earth is getting hotter and hotter. Scientists work extremely hard to calculate all this data, it’s not as though there is just a thermometer plugged into the ground and hey presto, we have another degree Celsius on the scale. No, it is much, much more complicated than that and with that complication comes a lot of peer review and data assessment – independently. This means that the data is independently, rigorously tested by different scientists, in different locations – not just sat in the same office looking at the same numbers whilst rubbing their hands together and thinking how much money they can make from fearmongering. You, like Mr Trump, could deny the fact that the data is accurately obtained and calculated, you would be wrong, but you could. Then there comes the question of why? Is it man made? The world’s scientific consensus is that the upward trend in the temperature is due to the man-made release of CO2 gas. You can then, as trump does, point to the few ‘scientists’ who disagree with this view.

Any other areas where fingers have been pointed have been debunked by scientific studies. You could just wave your hands around and say things like ‘Climate change is a hoax from china’ and dismiss all the actual evidence – and researchers are just perpetrating this to get funding, because all that funding goes in their pocket *eye roll*. There are a myriad of environmental scientists, the plausibility of them all being bought off is beyond ridiculous. Think about it. Really, think.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

 Dickhead.

What’s Next?

In the face of everything covered by Trumps administration in the last week it is clear that science is under threat. But is trump picking a fight he will lose? Science doesn’t care. It doesn’t read, it doesn’t give a damn about what you think or what you do. Sea levels will continue to rise, vaccines will continue to work and he will continue to be a complete dickhead. The science is correct, whether it is censored or not – having the scientifically illiterate censor the media that comes out of the EPA and climate change research just holds back the progression of mankind – which is pretty much a fitting tribute to this whole trump presidency. Scientists are fighting back and winning and I can only hope that our own prime minister and other officials will stand up against this absolute ridiculous man’s ideology. That however remains to be seen with any of the disgusting acts he has carried out during his campaign and his actual presidency. Vaccines will be under attack by this uneducated moron soon enough.

President Trump can just get in the fucking bin.

Should science fall to start anew?

How colonialistic is science?

This week I was pointed into the direction of a Youtube video entitled ‘science must fall’. Here we go I thought, Anti-vax, Anti-GMO and probably anti-thinking. I will warn you, If you want to watch the video, it will take 4 minutes of your time (more if you have to pause it to put your head in your hands so as not to scream, much like myself. There is also the two hour video. Your choice). Alas, it wasn’t anti GMO or anti vaccination or anti-climate change it was just plain anti-science. ‘Fallists’ met to give a talk on how we should ‘decolonise science’. No, this is not satire please keep reading. 

The point of the discussion that was clearly been put across by the speaker is that science is a western thing, created and pushed onto African people. Effectively, science is a religion that has been shoved down their throats. Now, there are people here in the western civilisations who claim this to be true, we call them ‘morons’. This woman said (or something to this effect):

‘Wipe away science and start with a blank slate. We can make our own knowledge’

They bang on about ‘black magic’ and how they can get lightening to strike down their enemies. Newton’s apple made him write ‘some equations’ and then that was forced upon the world. You can hear some heckles and much relieving laughter from the audience. Although when someone claimed the lightening summoning wasn’t true, the moderator said he had ‘violated their ‘safe’ space and made him apologise. Nothing like standing up for what you believe in, eh? He shouldn’t go outside when there is a thunderstorm, he’s clearly not safe. 

No, Science isn’t imposed

Science, as much as they deny this, is a fundamental truth. Gravity, as discovered by Newton, didn’t just appear in the western civilization circa 1687 and then get forced onto the rest of the world. That is insane on the face of it. To make that even more absurd, they want to sustain a culture whereby science is totally eradicated and principle foundations are ignored in order to come up with their own truths about the universe. The objective of science is to seek out the truth, no matter who you are, weather you’re a king, African, British, Russian, or a plague ridden peasant, the fundamentals of science are true.

A transcultural atmosphere around science is imperative to its function. We make hypotheses, test them, publish the results – that’s not really science. We replicate the studies, other labs use them, and other countries replicate and reproduce. Then we have science, we have communication, confirmation (or not) that something is on the right track. Science, for all intended purposes, needs to be freely administered to other countries in order for it to be effective. 

However, with that said, it isn’t perfect. Science is undermined constantly, for example, in that video. Science is undermined when it is twisted in order to factualise religion or pseudoscience. But enrolling science out to other countries is not colonialism.

How to science wrong

As I said, she stated that Sir Isaac Newton published a paper and that was it. What was once free-floating around in Africa suddenly came crashing down. As science moves on in decades, we see that the theory of gravity has been questioned, tested and was challenged by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

“Newton saw that apple falling and then out of nowhere gravity existed”

 But that doesn’t matter, because gravity is real whether or not you think it is. This is then moved on to by arguing that science ‘does not belong to humanity’ claiming that scientists in Africa would have come up with a different answer. That, is science. Things are looked at in multiple ways, take medicine for example. We have antibiotics and some doctors not wanting to prescribe them for resistance reasons and some doctors prescribing them for anything. We have new drugs being developed and doctors choosing to use them for things other than their intended use because the side effects may be a benefit to the patient. The only way doctors know of these is through the knowledge passed through the scientific community. People come up with different answers all the time, yeah, some are wrong. But what these scientific communities are doing is building upon the knowledge that took years to get, to further the scientific advancements in the world. They are not sat around discussing if gravity is real or not. It is very clear here that what they want is science to back up and give substance to cultural beliefs – ignorance that cannot and should not be tolerated in this day and age.

The speaker, before stating that ‘gravity existed out of nowhere’ states that she had a scientific education. This hugely remains to be seen. I have no idea where she got thus ‘education’ but I would seriously like to chat with her tutors. 

‘If you disagree with this thinking, then you need to go back and decolonise your mind’

As a scientist and a science enthusiast when I was growing up I spent my time reading science books, watching science videos, learning science and ultimately studying science at degree level. Not too shockingly, that means I have read about Newton’s laws of gravity and the Theory of Relativity. As a skeptic, I have read the studies, challenges and disputes that has come along with those theories and have decided for myself, as with other scientists, that these are fundamental truths of the universe. That is not colonialism. That’s information and critical thinking. I encourage her to have a crack at it.

Conclusion

Science is science. It doesn’t care on your directionality. West or eastern, gravity is fundamentally true because it has been studied, not just because somebody said it is true. Science is about transparency, what on earth would starting out new and wiping the slate clean do? Rejecting science and using it to fit what you believe is detrimental to systems; governments, healthcare and education.

 

If science doesn’t fit your worldview, you don’t just simply ignore it, or in this case; try to literally wipe it from eastern civilisation. Tad extreme.