The Fable of the Pensioner's TV

Consider the following tale:

The manager, a Basil Fawlty-like character, resolutely refuses to even consider buying a new TV for the residents of the old-folks home. But they won't be bullied by this upstart, so they agree to raise the funds themselves. The TV might be old, but every night they enjoy a good squabble about what to watch after dinner. After much argument, Basil reluctantly agrees to hold the money for safekeeping. Eventually, he is even persuaded to purchase the new TV. And for a few weeks the residents enjoy the benefits - taking squabbling to a whole new level. One day, however, the TV suddenly disappears. Worried about its whereabouts, the residents ask the manager where it has gone. Looking a bit embarrassed  he reluctantly admits to selling the TV at a low price to one of the residents – Mrs Rich - who has moved the set into her rooms for private viewing. Mrs Rich is happy to allow residents to view the TV, but in future they will have to pay a small fee to help cover her costs.   

The pensioners are confused and angry, how could he do that, he had no right, the TV was bought and paid for with their money. But Basil dismisses their complaints; they had given him the money for safekeeping; and the TV was purchased in the name of the home not its residents. And anyway, why are they worrying when the money from Mrs Rich will be used to lower the fees of some of the wealthier residents who've been complaining that they pay too much for the extra resources they use. And in future only those who actually watch TV will have to pay – what could possibly be fairer than that?

But, apart from a few of the wealthier ones, the residents are not happy, they demand that the manager immediately recover the TV from Mrs Rich. After a long, awkward silence, he admits he can't do it. The truth is that he's entered into a long-term contract with her and if he breaches the contract he will have to pay her compensation, with money he doesn't have - although the residents can raise the funds if they like. The residents are even more outraged - they remind him that they already raised the funds once to buy the TV in the first place. Then old Mrs Jeffries comes up with a good idea: recover the old TV from the cellar where it has been gathering dust over the last few weeks. But Basil says he can't do that either. The contract with Mrs Rich contains 'non-competition guarantees' which allow her to claim compensation in the event that, for whatever reason, her revenues are reduced by any alternative entertainment. The contract prevents him from introducing any changes - even the introduction of a new radio, or a card table or in fact any form of change that might detract from contractually agreed TV viewing levels.            

Now make the following parallel connections 

Manager	Government
Residents	Citizens
Mrs Rich	Corporations
TV	Public assets
Resident’s fees	Income Tax

And you have a good analogy for privatisation.

Governments sell public assets – the assets of the commoners - to private corporations at knockdown prices. Assets once owned in common are now owned in private by corporations. Citizens must now pay for access. The revenue from the sales is used to lower income taxes on the wealthy because, according to the standard argument, the poor spend all of their income, but the rich invest almost all of theirs and this creates economic growth and higher incomes, some of which will eventually 'trickle down' to the poor. So in the end everybody wins. This 'neoliberal' story is, of course, a complete fairy tale. The surplus funds of the wealthy are rarely invested in productive assets; instead they are withdrawn from circulation leading to a collapse in effective demand and higher unemployment; or alternatively they are used to feed speculative asset bubbles such as the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe; or they are invested offshore which reduces our capacity to compete overseas. The truth is that we can have very little confidence that the wealthy will use their assets for productive investment.           

Of course, corporations don't deprive the commoners of the asset altogether, their aim is to derive a permanent income stream by charging consumers for its use. So, instead, they introduce ‘user pays’ tolling systems that give citizens restricted access which, at the same time, yield a perpetual revenue stream to the corporation. These privatization deals, shrouded in secrecy, contain extraordinary 'no-competition' clauses which guarantee the corporation's earnings either by restricting anything that potentially threatens their revenues or by financially compensating them if it actually costs them money. This sleight of hand completely masks the fact that the people have already bought and paid for the asset with their taxes.

And this entire system of misdirection, this clever pea and thimble trick is contradicted by fatalities on the privatised London transport system stemming from reduced maintenance standards, the debacle on the privatised Sydney Cross-City Tunnel, and by expert report after report showing deteriorating service standards and safety performance on privatised projects. When like is compared with like, when proper cost-benefit analyses are undertaken, when the full range of social costs and externalities are taken into account, government is far more efficient and far less costly than the capitalist corporation. We should give the TV back to the pensioners, after all they bought it and they own it. Capitalist corporations cannot and should not manage the public interest.

Monocropping is like the Vietnam War

 

The analogy is not perfect but it’s close; and while we know how the Vietnam War turned out, it remains to be seen how monocropping will turn out.

 

Monocropping	Is like the Vietnam War
Global Corporations   Big Agriculture ·         Cargill ·         Archer Daniels Midland ·         Monsanto	Global Corporations   Military-Industrial ·         Lockheed-Martin ·         BAE Systems ·         Boeing
Big promises   Feed the world	Big promises   Save the world from communism
Problem of obdurate local opposition   Entrenched local ecologies	Problem of obdurate local opposition   Entrenched guerrillas: Viet Cong
Adopt policy of high-tech destruction   Deforestation, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides	Adopt policy of high-tech destruction   Bombing, defoliation, Agent-Orange
High-tech support for cash crops   extensive irrigation, energy intensive fertilizers	High-tech support for corrupt Diem   Materiel, logistics, ordnance, personnel
War of attrition   Drawn-out battle against resilient local ecology, nature never defeated, always growing back, always regaining lost ground	War of attrition   Drawn-out battle against guerrillas, never defeated, always coming back, always regaining lost ground
Casualties   Civilians (see effects of diet), the environment from chemical run-off, the land from rising water tables and salination, flora and fauna from destruction of local ecologies	Casualties   Military personnel (both sides), civilians, flora and fauna from destruction of local ecologies
Ultimate defeat?	Ultimate defeat   Ever escalating costs and unsustainable methods eventually defeated the US government and military corporations in Vietnam

 

    

Psychology

Introduction

We all like to think that we are in control of our lives, not the big things like government policies of course or earthquakes or tsunamis or even thunderstorms, but the little things like what’s for dinner, what shall I wear, what shall I watch on TV, understanding the family situation, continuously scanning the immediate micro environment, predicting the way things will turn out, interacting with friends and neighbours, having an overall perspective on the things around us. But to what extent are we in control? If someone asks us how we came to make this or that decision, we’ll always have an answer; and if someone asks us to explain this or that piece of our behaviour we’ll never be short of a convincing story, a story listing the reasons for our actions in our perfectly rational and ordered lives. But what if it’s really not like that, what if our free will is mostly an illusion, what if most of our actions are not the perfectly rational responses we think they are, instead being completely automatic responses to information unconsciously absorbed from our environment, information that predisposes us to behave in certain ways, behaviour primed, set and acted out within milliseconds, behaviour which our ancient unconscious behavioural guidance systems believe will best protect us and keep us safe?

Unconscious Behavioural Guidance System

Consciousness is self-awareness which develops in humans aged between eighteen months and two years old. Of all the animals, only humans, chimpanzees and orang-utans possess self-awareness, a faculty which formed very late in our evolutionary development, and one depending critically on the cerebral cortex – the highest level of brain development. Throughout most of our evolutionary history, the species that ultimately evolved into modern humans were not conscious of themselves. But they did survive and prosper in their natural environments - we're the proof. To do this, they needed a mechanism to keep them safe, a capacity that could continuously scan their environment, quickly identify threats and opportunities, formulate goals and plans and then take appropriate action, all within milliseconds. In this pre-self-aware state the link between environmental input and behavioural output was automatic. Consequently, much of the human brain evolved and functioned as an unconscious behavioural guidance system. The same is true today. Consciousness is really an overlay that creates the semblance of rationality in human decision making. The pre-conscious brain is doing what it has always done – continuously and automatically scanning the immediate environment.  

Priming

The pre-conscious brain has several components i) an evaluative mechanism, ii) a perceptual mechanism, and iii) a motivational mechanism. Psychological research over the last thirty years shows that each of these mechanisms exists and is automatically and continuously active in the human brain. Moreover each of the components interacts with all of the others. What this means, for example, is that environmental stimuli will be perceived by the brain, unconsciously, and within milliseconds it will be automatically evaluated as good or bad, and a set of goals and behaviours designed to achieve those goals will be automatically initiated – all within milliseconds and all below the threshold of consciousness. Priming is simply the continuous stream of sensory data picked up automatically by the unconscious scanning brain, data which predisposes us to act in certain ways in subsequent moments.   

John A. Bargh

As consciousness evolved, it built on the ancient pre-conscious apparatus. This means that humans can experience, evaluate, plan and take action automatically – all below the threshold of consciousness. For example, John Bargh’s experiments show that young students unconsciously primed with the idea of ‘old age’ were observed to walk more slowly away from the experiment than they did on arrival. Moreover their memories were significantly degraded – slowness and memory loss being integral elements of the old age stereotype. A second experiment unconsciously primed students with either ‘rudeness’ or ‘politeness’ and the subsequent set-up kept them waiting to hand in the results of their tests. The students primed with ‘politeness’ waited patiently for up to ten minutes until the end of the experiment. The students primed with ‘rudeness’ interrupted almost immediately.

Unconscious Behavioural Guidance Systems

Derren Brown

Even more striking instances of priming occurred in programs featuring Derren Brown the well-known British magician and psychological entertainer. In one program, Derren invited two senior advertising executives to develop a publicity campaign for a (fictitious) business he was about to set up. He gave them half an hour to come up with a rough sketch, leaving a sealed envelope on the table in the room were the executives were working. At the end of the period, they showed Derren the results of their activity and gave their reasons for the approach they had taken. Derren then opened the envelope which, to everyone’s surprise, showed a sketch virtually identical to the one the executives had come up with themselves. Derren explained that the executives had been unconsciously primed by the sights and sounds they had taken in during a very carefully orchestrated taxi ride to the studio. It was interesting to note that the reasons the executives gave, ever so seriously, for their design decisions had absolutely nothing to do with the real reasons.

Priming the Primers

In a more sinister application of priming, Derren Brown within the space of a few days unconsciously primed several ordinary people with good jobs in settled careers to become petty thieves robbing the local store, to become participants in a re-run of the infamous Milgram experiment which showed how participants would electrocute to death fellow participants if instructed to do so by white-coated officials, and finally to become armed bank robbers – literally forcing security guards at gun point to give up the 100,000 pounds in cash. That program was really spooky – had the situation been real it would have almost certainly ended in a bloodbath.

The Heist

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, shows many instances of the unconscious behavioural guidance system at work. Stereotyping is a feature of the system, and sometimes it can go badly wrong as when New York police officers mistakenly shot to death a young black man. Three instantaneous mistakes were made i) they were suspicious and thought the youth was behaving suspiciously, ii) they were terrified and thought the youth was terrifying and iii) the youth was reaching for his wallet to identify himself and they thought he was reaching for a gun. He was shot more than forty two times. The entire incident was over in seven seconds.

Less lethally, in an experiment involving teacher evaluations, the evaluations didn’t change significantly whether the evaluation period was ten seconds or ten months; and in a speed-dating experiment, people’s actual choices bore no relationship at all to the preferences they had stated beforehand. Gladwell’s point is that the unconscious system is much larger than its conscious counterpart, it is permanently active and constantly scanning and it operates in parallel via a spreading activation model. Compared to the conscious brain which must work in series, it really is a super computer. It is often more accurate; but, unfortunately, it can be easily tricked and manipulated which is why magic tricks, advertising, and political spin are so effective.

Blink

Pernicious Advertising

Everyone is influenced by advertising but everyone massively underestimates by how much. The reason is simple. Advertising doesn’t much impact our conscious brain; but it significantly influences our unconscious behavioural guidance system. For example, in one of John Bargh’s experiments three groups were exposed to one TV program containing food advertising and one without – the groups were toddlers, teenagers and middle aged adults. The experimenters made available crackers and drinks for the duration of the program but the participants were not instructed to eat or drink. In the case where the participants were primed by the food advertising, the participants consumed 45% more crackers than in the case of no food advertising. The increase in consumption occurred irrespective of whether healthy or junk food was being advertised.

Bargh concludes that the function of the advertising is not brand familiarity which advertisers often claim, rather it is ‘consume more now, and buy more tomorrow’. This is the real function of advertising, the real reason for the multi-billion dollar annual advertising budgets. And whilst we might worry about the fact that some sections of the population are more vulnerable than others – e.g. kids, the truth is we are all equally susceptible via our unconscious guidance systems.

Sick People, Sick Planet

Agribusiness and Agrichemicals

The thesis of our upcoming book is simple; there are forces at work in the global economy making both the people and the planet sick. The forces consist of 1) capitalist agribusiness, including commodity trading, factory farming and monocrop agricultural corporations such as Cargill, Bunge, and Syngenta, 2) a second group of forces, equally powerful, consisting of capitalist agrichemical corporations such as Monsanto and Bayer which, together with the first group, include some of the world's largest multinational corporations, and 3) yet a third group of forces comprising the corporate-friendly governments of the US, Europe and elsewhere responsible for the global system of trade policies, tariffs and subsidies which underpin the global capitalist agribusiness and agrichemical corporations.

Sick Planet

Globally, these corporations are specialised in agribusinesses such as wheat, rice, and soya, with supporting agrichemical industries and corporations such as Monsanto and Bayer producing and marketing chemicals such as organophosphates, sodium fluoride and nerve gas, agribusiness corporations with operations covering huge land areas and producing nothing but single crops - monocrops. These corporations make the land sick, continually razing native flora and fauna, continually losing topsoil via erosion, continually polluting rivers, streams and estuaries with chemical run-off, repeatedly keeping the land bare by annual dosing with millions of tonnes of agrichemicals, hormone disrupting, xenoestrogen-based agrichemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, subsequently fertilising with energy intensive, nitrogen-based chemicals because nothing will grow in the lifeless, bare soil they've created.

Sick People

And the substances grown by these corporations are making the people sick. The sugars and phytochemicals found in the main carbohydrate products of capitalist agribusiness and agrichemicals are implicated in a wide range of non-infectious diseases, major killers such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. For example, High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), a large component chemical (50%) of common table sugar and a central ingredient in many soft drinks is now widely implicated in the current obesity epidemic. Unfortunately, it is still not widely known that soya contains phytoestrogens, chemicals responsible for significant numbers of infant deaths from soya infant formula, early onset puberty in girls, sometimes with five-year old youngsters growing breasts, and gender bending genital malformations in young boys. Yet soya is still marketed as a wonder health food. While these substances are often referred to as ‘food’, they are in fact quite unnatural for humans whose physiology evolved over millions of years in a completely different direction.

Ecosystem Farming Hypothesis

The ALP's Identity Crisis

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has an identity crisis. Historically, the Party represented disadvantaged workers and their trade unions, organisations continually involved in low-level conflict with capitalism – fighting for improved wages and conditions, job security, and defending worker’s rights.  Unions soon found that they needed to lock-in their hard won gains by legislation, so the Party’s historic task came to be seen as drafting and implementing worker and union-friendly legislation.

To understand how estranged the party has become from this historic role, we need to see the bigger picture. Around the world, after the Great Depression, a raft of stringent banking regulations was put in place. The aim of these reforms was to ensure that the kind of speculative greed that had caused the global collapse in 1929 couldn’t happen again. The reforms worked well for forty years producing unprecedented economic growth and improvements in living standards around the world. But in the mid-1970s the OPEC cartel, upset by the West’s defence of Israel, unilaterally increased oil prices and sent inflation through the roof. Economic growth faltered and inflation skyrocketed producing the infamous period of stagflation – inflation combined with unemployment, Keynesian theory said it couldn’t happen. For a time, in Britain, in the late 1970s something approximating a post Keynesian solution was tried – the Social Contract, a prices and incomes policy, trying to regulate the key variables by a kind of corporatist consensus. It failed, and in 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected. The Keynesian paradigm was unceremoniously replaced by the monetarist one.

In the 1980s, under Reagan, Thatcher and, in Australia, Hawke and Keating, a massive shift towards the so-called free market occurred. Fixed exchange rates were abolished, floating currencies introduced, and responsibility for interest rates was devolved to newly independent central banks. The three pillars of modern capitalism – deregulation, privatisation and globalisation - frequently referred to as the Washington Consensus were pursued vigorously. Historically the ‘free market’ might have been on tap, but now it was unquestionably on top.

By 1983, when the Hawke Labor Government was elected, monetarism was dominant in both Britain and the US. The Hawke government tried to square the circle, introducing the Prices and Incomes Accord which, on the face of it, was similar to the British Social Contract, a system of central corporatist economic planning, but with an economic agenda ‘free market’ to its core.   

Historically, the ALP had existed uneasily with ‘free markets’ preferring the so-called mixed economy – a balance of public as well as private enterprise. But now Keating vigorously supported the three capitalist pillars on the untested promise that this would produce higher economic growth and better living standards for all. The Labor Government’s planning system put all of its efforts into structural adjustment policies – palliatives such as industry assistance schemes and redundant worker retraining schemes designed to mask union complicity and to ease the pain of transition to the new deregulated, dynamic economy, until such time as the new system could deliver.

Keating was responsible for two major privatisations – The Commonwealth Bank and Qantas – as well as financial deregulation, welcoming foreign investment banks to Australia with disastrous consequences, floating exchange rates, reductions in tariffs and quotas, and the shift from centralised wage bargaining to enterprise agreements. Keating foreshadowed the independence of the Reserve Bank (RBA), but it was left to Costello to formally confirm in a Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy issued in 1996. The independence of the RBA was reiterated and strengthened in a subsequent statement issued by Swan in 2010 on behalf of the Labor Government. The RBA is obliged primarily to adopt policies designed to stabilise the currency and secondarily to achieve full employment. Stabilising the currency has invariably been interpreted to mean controlling inflation, and this goal has without exception taken precedence over the employment objective.

Apparently unaware of the global mobility of multinational capital, Keating subscribed strongly to the idea of comparative advantage as a basis for international trade. He saw Australia as the quarry of Asia. In his Brave New World, there was no place for a manufacturing industry which had been the focus of much of Australia’s post-war growth strategy. Ironically, the Asian Tigers – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, not to mention Japan – which were driving Australia’s minerals and energy export growth at the time, had all but collapsed by the early 1990s. Had China not stepped into the breach, Keating’s economic strategy would have been in tatters, as would Australia. Keating also suggested a consumption tax well before the Liberals, one of the rare occasions Keating was voted down by his cabinet colleagues.   

The global financial crisis has almost taken us back to the 1930s. The Washington Consensus is dead. Wall Street is again under fierce pressure to reform. Capitalism like the leopard really doesn’t change its spots. There is an almost universal acknowledgement that markets – especially financial ones – must be regulated.  Yet ‘regulation’ remains a dirty word in Australian political economy. The changing international mood finds no reflection in the forums of the Labor Party.

So, what does the Labor Party stand for? The promises given by Hawke and Keating in the 1980s have spectacularly failed to materialise, but in the intervening period we have lost control of interest rates and exchange rates, we have structurally weakened our economy – especially manufacturing, we have lost many of our skilled workers, we have casualised our workforce, and our unions are materially weaker, household debt has replaced real wages as the primary source of consumers expenditure, we have privatised whilst also enviting capitalist corporations into partnerships with government, forgetting that governments are accountable to the poeple, capitalist corporations aren't, members are deserting the Labor Party in droves, and Party thinking continually bounces from one weird proposal to the next.       

The Whitlam Dimension

One of the weirdest – a system of primaries designed to give ordinary people a say in party affairs – is interesting in light of Labor history. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Gough Whitlam fought and won a protracted battle against the unions and the left for control of the ALP. For years there had been tension between party officers and parliamentarians, especially in Victoria. Party officers and affiliated unions were concerned to ensure that party programs were implemented by the parliamentary wing irrespective of their popularity, the parliamentary wing instead concerned about their standing in the opinion polls.

The media were fond of describing party and union officials as faceless men, bolstering Whitlam’s campaign to break the power of the Party. Whitlam was successful. But the party officials were anything but faceless men, democratically elected by a then vigorously involved branch membership at various party conferences, controlling party resources, recruiting staff, conducting major research programs, organising pre-selections, and controlling renegade MPs who felt constrained by party discipline. After the Whitlam victory this system was completely dismantled. The job of the party officials, henceforth, was fund raising, public opinion polling and focus groups.

The party was set adrift, its anchor chain snapped. No longer would the party membership and executive exercise policy control and discipline over its parliamentarians. Now MPs were free to do whatever the parliamentary caucus and the cabinet decided. Whereas before the change, caucus factions hadn’t mattered very much since all were subject to external party discipline, now they came sharply to the fore. And ministers from the dominant factions were all powerful – almost warlords. Keating was just such a minister and he frequently road roughshod over party policy. It was more than ironic that just prior to the 1983 election, the party renewed its commitment to socialism.

Whitlam might have thought that he was fighting to free the party from rigid control by doctrinaire left wingers not interested in electoral success. In fact he paved the way for Hawke and Keating’s absolute control, and by a fairly linear progression, the woes of the current Gillard government. So now we have a party caught twice in its own trap 1) the major Keating ‘free market’ agenda of the 1980s has failed catastrophically and the parliamentary leadership can’t find a way out because 2) the party has no centre of gravity outside of parliament since the membership and party officials can’t, don’t, and won’t be allowed to do anything except raise funds and hand out how-to-vote cards on election day.

Anti-Aging

Calorie restriction

In the 1930s, biologists conducted calorie restriction (CR) experiments on mice, reducing their food intake by 30%, but leaving the nutrient composition unchanged. The experimental mice were much healthier, living 50% longer on average, increasing lifespan from two to three years, and showing no signs of the diseases that normally plague old mice.

There were other differences, CR mice were smaller than their control counterparts, with fewer offspring, and possibly distressed by their constant hunger. Puzzled by this mysterious increase in longevity, scientists tried but failed to reach any definite conclusions until the advent of a theory of aging that could properly account for it and the advent of gene technology that could confirm it.

In 1977, Tom Kirkwood published his disposable soma theory of species lifespan, an evolutionary theory of longevity, positing that species lifespan is crafted by natural selection, with lifespan depending centrally on the link between soma and germ-line. Soma is the physical body of the organism, configured in turn by its genes - its germ-line. According to Kirkwood, any organism has two primary biological tasks: ensuring the survival of the soma by consuming energy from its environment, and ensuring the survival of the germ-line by reproduction. The survival of the germ-line is dependent on the survival of the soma, but once the germ-line has been passed on via offspring the soma is disposable, the organism is redundant and can be allowed to die.

This theory runs counter to the popular view, with many believing that we inevitably age and die to make room for the next generation, to avoid being a burden, to avoid competition for resources, or possibly to avoid new forms of music. Not so, says Tom Kirkwood, we age and die because our lifespans have evolved that way, in evolutionary terms there is nothing inevitable about aging and death.

According to Kirkwood, indefinite healthy longevity can be achieved – some animals such as the hydra for example are biologically immortal. But longevity is very expensive, demanding continuous error free, protein replication, consuming significant amounts of energy. Therefore, it makes no sense to invest in potential longevity when it’s not needed, if it involves producing expensive potential lifespans that cannot be realised in the wild because of accidents or predators. An organism faces many challenges to its mortality – disease, accidents, predators and famines, very few organisms die of old age in the wild. Consequently an organism’s longevity will be governed by the time needed to reach maturity and the period needed for reproduction; beyond that it’s not expected to survive natural predation and deprivation in any event. So repairs and maintenance are set just to cover the expected lifespan, and the balance of the resources and energy are reallocated to reproduction.           

Firstly, ageing is likely to happen because genes treat organisms as disposable: they invest enough in maintenance to enable the organism to get through its natural expectation of life in the wild environment in good shape, but more than this is a waste. Secondly, there may be design constraints that favour the interests of the organism in its youth at the expense of its long term durability. Finally, natural selection in the wild is not much concerned with late-acting mutations, which may accumulate unchecked in the genome (Kirkwood, T. ‘The Time of Our Lives’, Phoenix 1999, page 79).

Eventually, scientists discovered why their half-starved mice lived longer: semi-starvation switches off the growth and reproduction genes of the mice, but switches on the repair and maintenance genes. Biologists concluded that semi-starvation – the laboratory equivalent of hard times – causes the animal to postpone growth and reproduction, concentrating instead on repairs and maintenance, on keeping itself alive and well until times improve, until there is more food available to support itself and a larger family.

This ability to switch between biological modes depending on environmental circumstances seems to be common across many species – mice, nematode worms, yeast, fruit flies, monkeys, and possibly humans, although none of these informal, long-lived human experiments are yet completed, and nor will they be for many years.

Hence, we seem to face a difficult choice, semi-starving ourselves and living a long healthy, but miserable, half-starved life; or eating, being merry, and having lots of kids but degrading rapidly and dying young. But, possibly not, maybe we can trick our biological system into believing we are living in hard times, allowing us to reap all the benefits of higher repairs and maintenance, enjoying longer healthier lives, while experiencing all of the joys of eating, merriment and procreation along the way. The key to this intriguing possibility is insulin.

Insulin is the metabolic index of feast or famine, high insulin levels signalling feast, low insulin signalling famine. Feast, in turn, signalling growth and reproduction, and famine signalling repairs and maintenance. This biological signalling system evolved over millions of years and is common across many species. As for humans, our paleolithic ancestors evolved over this period eating mostly fatty meats and fruit and edible vegetable matter when available, and insulin is sensitive to the glucogenic proteins in meat and to the carbs in fruit and veg. That’s how we evolved, our metabolic signalling system centred on insulin, hard wired into us.  

However, the idea that aging itself can be regulated by targeting insulin is very recent. Cynthia Kenyon, a US biologist, has made some interesting discoveries:

Inhibiting insulin/IGF-1 signaling extends lifespan and delays age-related disease in species throughout the animal kingdom. This life-extension pathway, the first to be defined, was discovered through genetic studies in the small roundworm C. elegans.

In spite of the fascinating qualities of the aging process, such as its remarkably different pace in different species, until the last few decades aging was not thought to be subject to any active regulation. Now we know that the rate of aging is indeed subject to regulation, by classical signaling pathways. These pathways link the aging rate to environmental and physiological cues, and may even underlie its diversification during evolution. At the heart of these pathways are stress and metabolic sensors such as insulin and IGF-1 hormones, TOR kinase and AMP kinase, whose up- or down-regulation can trigger a variety of cell-protective mechanisms that extend lifespan.

Cynthia Kenyon: The Science Behind Anti-Aging

So there it is: humans and many other organisms have an intrinsic ability to switch between biological modes from growth and reproduction to repairs and maintenance, from disease and short life span to health and long life span using nothing more than a simple signalling system based on insulin ostensibly linked to the organism’s circumstances of feast or famine. And here's the trick: insulin only responds to glucose and other sugars in the diet, so not all foods produce insulin. Carbohydrates, especially refined carbs, produce the most, proteins except leucine and iso-leucine can be metabolised into glucose but rarely are, and fat produces no insulin at all. So the insulin signalling system can be tricked into believing it's in the middle of a famine by consuming a low carb, high fat diet - the ketogenic diet.      

The ketogenic diet

The parallels between CR and the ketogenic diet have been noted and researched:

Both calorie restriction and the ketogenic diet possess broad therapeutic potential in various clinical settings and in various animal models of neurological disease. Following calorie restriction or consumption of a ketogenic diet, there is notable improvement in mitochondrial function, a decrease in the expression of apoptotic and inflammatory mediators and an increase in the activity of neurotrophic factors.

Maalouf, M. ‘The neuroprotective properties of calorie restriction, ketogenic diet and ketone bodies.’ Brain Research 2008.

The effects are summarised in the following table

Maalouf, ibid.  

As Kenyon indicates the actual CR mechanism operates through an evolutionarily conserved signalling mechanism involving a reduction in insulin and related insulin-induced hormones such as Insulin-like growth factors (IGF-1) brought about by a reduction of carbs and protein as a part of the overall reduction in food. As insulin levels fall a whole array of stress genes are increasingly expressed whose function is to conduct repairs and maintenance on the organism, to conserve the organism until better times.

Kenyon quickly became a convert when she found that putting sugar in her experimental worm food shortened the worm’s lifespan. The following is an extract from a New Scientist interview with Kenyon in 2003:

But for now, caloric restriction seems the one proven way to extend lifespan.

Is that why you've virtually given up carbohydrates?

That's not necessarily why I do it. I do it because it makes me feel great and keeps me slender. And I don't feel really tired after a meal. But I think if I wanted to eat in a way that extended lifespan this is how I would do it. In fact, I stopped eating carbohydrates the day we found that putting sugar on the worms' food shortened their lifespans.

How does it work?

I eat a diet that keeps my insulin levels low. So, for example, at breakfast I have bacon and eggs with tomatoes and avocados. It's bit like the Atkins diet. I don't actually know if I eat fewer calories, but I feel great and I weigh what I did in high school. I certainly wouldn't want to be hungry all the time, but I'm not, I'm never hungry. I tried caloric restriction just for two days but I couldn't stand it, being hungry all the time.

Kingsland, J. ‘I Want to Live Forever’ Interview with Cynthia Kenyon, New Scientist, 2003.

Of course, it would be nice if humans could take advantage of this calorie restriction mechanism, living beyond 150 years healthily would be commonplace, but as the Kenyon quote illustrates, the struggle against semi-starvation is just too much for most people – they are beaten almost every time by the agony of hunger.

But CR seems to be an unnecessarily painful way to go about limiting insulin when it is not calories as such that promote insulin, but carbohydrate calories (and, to a lesser extent, protein calories). Hence if you want to increase your healthy lifespan possibly by as much as 50% then move onto the ketogenic diet and lifestyle.

The ketogenic diet dramatically lowers insulin, automatically turning off the hunger switch, allowing individuals to consume their own fat, and often producing a mild state of euphoria, a far from unpleasant experience.

The Ketogenic Diet

Introduction

It is self-evident that biological energy is essential for life, yet very few have a clear idea of what biological energy actually is. This post outlines the concept of human energy, focusing on the central biological energy molecule – ATP, showing how ATP couples with other molecules to produce chemical reactions that would not otherwise occur, showing how these coupled reactions drive human metabolism, and just about everything else.

This post outlines the significance of the ketogenic diet for human health and energy, showing how it removes three roadblocks to healthy weight management – fat retention, triglycerides and hunger, explaining the role of ketones as a clean superfuel which metabolises 30% more efficiently than other nutrients with far less free radical damage, finally showing the diet's role in combating several major diseases from epilepsy and Alzheimer’s to diabetes and cancer.

We show how ketosis is hard-wired into human biology, evolving over millions of years, shaping human physiology in response to scarcity and uncertainty. We then look at some compelling evidence of the value of the ketogenic diet, evidence from a recent controlled trial resulting in significantly improved biological markers for weight, BMI, cholesterol, triglycerides and blood glucose. Lastly, we look at my personal experience on the diet from December 2011 to May 2012.

Human energy

Most chemical reactions occur at very high temperatures – hundreds if not thousands of degrees. Human biology, however, constrains reaction temperatures to remain within the normal range of human body temperature (35–36 degrees Centigrade). At these temperatures, most biological reactions  simply will not occur fast enough to be useful. Biological reactions therefore require catalysts to make them react faster. One key catalyst is localised heat - kinetic energy. Human biochemistry uses localised heat to accelerate chemical reactions via coupled reactions where one part of the couple is the reaction we want to occur and the second part is a reaction that generates heat to help the first couple overcome the reaction resistance.

The second component of the couple consists of water and adenosine triphosphate or ATP. The textbooks tell us that ATP is the energy currency of human chemistry – indeed of most plant and animal life on Earth. They will also tell us that the ATP–water reaction is exothermic; a bit of jargon which simply means that when ATP and water react they give off heat. So, coupling water and ATP with slow-reacting molecules provides the heat to make them react much faster. It’s that simple. And it’s that big; the average human body turns over its own body weight in ATP every day.

So there is no mystery about where human energy comes from. It’s simply a molecule – ATP – which when reacted with water gives off heat. But where does ATP come from? There’s not much of a mystery here either, although the details can be complex. Obviously, it somehow comes from the food we eat.

It’s quite striking to see the place that food occupies in human culture: the ceremony, the significance and so on. And where would TV be today without celebrity chef? But at the end of the day, every bit of food consumed assists in producing ATP.

The Krebs Cycle and the Electron Transport Chain

Mitochondria produce ATP. There are hundreds of mitochondria in virtually every human cell. Each mitochondria consists of two microscopic capsule-like containers, one inside the other. On the walls of the inner container are hundreds of tiny processing plants called electron transport chains (ETC) which sit alongside ATP Synthase machines. Inside the inner container, a chemical process called the Kreb's Cycle (after Hans Krebs who discovered it) reduces food molecules to hydrogen atoms for transport to the electron transport chains. Hydrogen atoms each have one electron and one proton and both have a function in the ETC. Electrons power the ETC which pumps protons into the space between the two containers thereby increasing proton volume and pressure in the inter-container space. This pressure, in turn, forces protons back into the inner container via the ATP synthase machines. These are turbine like devices forced to rotate by proton pressure which, in the process, reconstitute ATP from ADP (previously spent ATP). At the end of this sequence, we have ATP and some leftovers: water and carbon dioxide; all that is left of the original food molecules.

ATP production could have been designed by Rube Goldberg; nevertheless it's effective and extensive; it is found in almost all plant and animal life on Earth, and almost half the contents of each human cell, with one or two exceptions, consists of mitochondria, and as noted, the human body will turn over amounts of ATP equivalent to its own body weight in a single day.

The actual process is much more complex than this, but despite the complexity, the essential model is correct. We now have enough to understand the significance of the ketogenic diet. But before that, two other factors need to be discussed. The first has to do with a weak spot in the electron transport chain – oxidant leakage. The ETC is made up of several stages and the earlier stages tend to leak oxidants. Oxidants are unbalanced atoms or molecules which aggressively strip electrons from nearby molecules thereby damaging them – a bit like how rust degrades (or oxidises) iron. Oxidants, unless checked, will eventually degrade mitochondria so badly that they will cease to function.

The second has to do with the relative efficiency of different types of food in generating ATP. Broadly, there are three types of food: carbohydrates (sugars from plants), proteins (amino acids from plants and animals), and fats (again from plants and animals). By the time the food has been through the digestive process, all that remains are sugars (glucose), amino acids and fats (lipids). These three nutrients comprise the food molecules referred to above. Amino acids and glucose generate, respectively, 4 calories per gram, whilst lipids generate 9 calories per gram. Lipids carry more than twice the energy of the two other nutrient types.

The differential in terms of ATPs is even higher; the numbers are: protein 15 ATPs, glucose 36 ATPs and lipids 130 ATPs. Lipids are by far the most efficient way to store energy. However, the lipid molecule is very much bigger so the comparison is not really fair.

The Ketogenic diet (KD)

The KD is often referred to as low carb, but this is ambiguous. Low carb might mean high protein or high fat, and various versions of the low carb diet do involve high protein. The KD, however, is high fat and low or zero carbs.  

The high fat character of the diet has three key characteristics:

·         Ketones are a byproduct of fat metabolism;

       ·         High fat means low fat retention;

·         High fat means absence of hunger;

We will deal with the function of ketones in a later section. High fat diets with low or zero carbs cause low fat-retention. Why? Because high fat diets significantly lower insulin and glycerol. Insulin, produced in response to carbohydrates, forces fatty acids into fat cells and keeps them there. Low insulin, on the other hand, allows fatty acids to circulate in and out of cells freely. Glycerol molecules, also derived from carbohydrates, bind themselves each to three fatty acids, forming triglycerides. Low glycerol entails low triglycerides. This is important because triglycerides are the reason why fat cells get fatter. Triglycerides once formed inside the fat cell from circulating glycerol and fatty acids are too big to escape – they are locked in. Low fat-retention therefore removes two key road blocks to healthy weight loss: insulin and glycerol.

High fat diets also involve an absence of hunger. Experiments have shown that high fat diets produce a hormone: cholecystokinin (CCK) which triggers the satiety centres of the brain. This effect is particularly pronounced with foods rich in oleic and linoleic acids such lamb and pork. Traditional dieting is predicated on the idea of ‘semi-starvation’ and most people simply cannot cope for any length of time with overwhelming hunger pangs. The absence of hunger therefore removes a third important road block.

The role of ketones

Ketones are a byproduct of fat metabolism. The liver produces ketones all the time, but on a standard diet they are almost always completely consumed. On the other hand, on a high fat diet, fat is metabolized everywhere in the body and the level of circulating ketones rises accordingly. Ketones can function anywhere in the body including the brain, and are especially preferred by the heart and the brain.   

Ketones have several important characteristics which make them extremely valuable as a source of nutrition. Firstly they are very efficient. Some estimates suggest that they have an energy advantage of almost 30% over alternative fuels. They have been referred to as superfuels:  

Recent  studies have  shown  that n-{3-hydroxybutyrate,  the  principal "ketone",  is  not just a fuel, but a "superfuel" more efficiently producing ATP energy than glucose  or  fatty acid. In a perfused rat heart preparation, it increased contractility and decreased oxygen consumption.

Ketoacids? Good Medicine? Cahill, G. F. and Veech, R. L. 2003

Given the removal of carbohydrate roadblocks , and the super efficiency of ketones as a fuel it is easy to reduce ones food intake by as much as a third without any corresponding loss of energy or hunger pangs - without, in fact, even noticing it.

But ketones are not only a more efficient fuel; they are also a cleaner one as well. In experiments conducted by Veech it was shown that not only did ATP output increase significantly, but oxygen consumption also fell sharply. Cahill and Veech go on to say:

It should also be pointed out that the altered ratio of NAD+ to NADH should reduce free radical [oxidant] formation, and, 3OHB has been shown to increase viability in neuronal cells in tissue culture exposed to the toxins associated with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases (ibid, pg 157).

You will recall from above, oxidants play a key role in the creation and evolution, over time, of metabolic damage. Indeed they have been strongly implicated as some of the key players in the aging process itself.

Good Medicine?

Ketogenic diets have been successfully used to treat refractory epilepsy for nearly one hundred years. It is still today the only alternative to brain surgery in really serious cases and its success rate is better. Indeed it seems that ketogenic diets can be useful wherever there may be conditions caused by lack of oxygen (hypoxia) or by inappropriate nervous excitation of one form or another as in epilepsy or Parkinson’s. Ketogenic diets are also showing some considerable success in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. The areas where research and experimentation have shown significant potential for ketones include:

·         Epilepsy

·         Alzheimer’s disease

·         Parkinson’s disease

·         Cognitive disorders

·         Anti-cancer

The implications for cancer research are exciting:

Our results suggest that experimental brain cancer is manageable through principles of metabolic control where plasma glucose levels are reduced and ketone body levels are elevated. Dietary energy restriction reduces tumour growth through effects on angiogenesis, apoptosis, and inflammation. Moreover, this dietary therapy may be effective for brain cancer management in humans and can be designed according to established standards (Nebeling and Lerner, 1995; Freeman et al, 2000).

Role of glucose and ketone bodies in the metabolic control of experimental brain cancer. Seyfried et al 2003.

The ketogenic diet is similar to the calorie restricted diet which is already known to have neuroprotective properties: 

Both calorie restriction and the ketogenic diet possess broad therapeutic potential in various clinical settings and in various animal models of neurological disease. Following calorie restriction or consumption of a ketogenic diet, there is notable improvement in mitochondrial function, a decrease in the expression of apoptotic and inflammatory mediators and an increase in the activity of neurotrophic factors.

The Neuroprotective properties of calorie restriction, the ketogenic diet and ketone bodies. Maalouf, et al, 2008. 

Nor are these properties only recently discovered.

Ketones and Evolution

Current scientific thinking suggests ketosis evolved in humans because it confers a significant survival advantage. Hunter gatherers must be able to last several days without food. And then, after a big kill, they must be able to store excess food as fat to tide them through the ‘lean’ times. Clearly, this human capacity to cope with severe food uncertainty conferred significant survival value on our Palaeolithic ancestors. Ketosis has thus become hard-wired into human physiology. Under conditions of acute food shortages, without ketosis, humans would have to sacrifice lean body mass in order to survive. Such sacrifices would quickly threaten vital organs, and death would follow in a few days – hardly long enough to find the next meal. But, fortunately, human metabolism lets us save fat whenever we can and release it whenever we need. However, even under starvation conditions, we don’t consume body fat directly. More efficiently, we consume ketones instead. Scientists estimate that ketosis increases male survival time from ten up to sixty days; Female survival time up to ninety days, and an obese person could survive for up to a year.

Historically, it also conferred extremely good health. Social groups were small, so the risks of serious infections were correspondingly low, and non-infectious diseases were either very low or non-existent. This is corroborated by all the evidence we have about hunter-gatherer societies prior to their incorporation into modern ways of life. Beginning from situations where obesity, cancer, and heart disease are unknown, after a gap of about twenty years, the incidence of such diseases in hunter-gatherer societies rises to match those of their more ‘modern’ counterparts.        

The lessons for today’s society seem obvious, but the implications are enormous. All our official nutritional advice is not only wrong, but dangerously so; all of our major food and agricultural corporations have billions invested in low-fat food products and their self-interest will blinker them to any alternatives, as it did with smoking. Our academic community is unthinkingly committed to the low-fat paradigm despite there being not a shred of evidence to support their case. Our pharmaceutical industry is committed to the current low-fat way of doing things because it brings them a steadily increasing revenue stream from patients needing lifetime medical support. It is no accident that statins – the cholesterol lowering medication that started life as a rat poison – is the biggest money spinner ever for Big Pharma. And it can only grow.

The (fatty) Acid Test

In 2004 the results were published of a twenty four week study into the long-term effects of the ketogenic diet: Long-term effects of a ketogenic diet in obese patients, Dashti, HN et al, 2004. Eighty three obese patients (39M , 44F)  with a body mass index greater than 35, and high cholesterol and glucose were selected. The diet consisted of 30g carbohydrate, 1g/kg body weight of protein, and 20% saturated fat,  80% poly and monounsaturated fat.  The study found that both the weight and body mass index of the subjects decreased significantly. Additionally, total cholesterol decreased significantly with major shifts in composition from LDL to HDL - the so-called 'good' cholesterol. Furthermore, say the authors, the diet decreased the level of triglycerides and blood glucose. The charts below show the results of the study:

Weight

Body Mass Index

Cholesterol

Triglycerides

Blood Glucose

The authors conclude:

The data presented in the present study showed that a ketogenic diet acted as a natural therapy for weight reduction in obese patients. This is a unique study monitoring the effect of a ketogenic diet for 24 weeks. There was a significant decrease in the level of triglycerides, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and glucose, and a significant increase in the level of HDL cholesterol in the patients. The side effects of drugs commonly used for the reduction of body weight in such patients were not observed in patients who were on the ketogenic diet. Therefore, these results indicate that the administration of a ketogenic diet for a relatively long period of time is safe. Further studies elucidating the molecular mechanisms of a ketogenic diet are in progress in our laboratory. These studies will open new avenues into the potential therapeutic uses of a ketogenic diet and ketone bodies.

(ibid, Dashti, et al 2004)

It is quite extraordinary how mainstream nutritionists still insist that, in spite of all the evidence which shows that the ketogenic diet improves every vital sign, it is still somehow bad for you. This is analogous to the old joke: the operation was completely successful but the patient died. Here all the evidence about ketogenic diets is telling us the operation was successful, but mainstream nutritionists are telling us the patient died.

Well, that's how the diet performs over nearly six months on obese patients, but how about on non-obese individuals?

Personal Experience

It is not really surprising that, given my conceptual commitment to the ketogenic diet, I would have tried it to see how it performs in practice. The charts below are self-explanatory and show my results over a period of four months since December 2011. My initial BMI was 24, it's now just above 22.

The first chart speaks for itself. The second chart shows how the ketogenic diet preserves lean body mass. The fat proportion is declining sharply; but the lean body mass, muscle component is increasing. There was no change in my (low) exercise regime during this period. The diet involved a constant range of between 1500 to 1800 calories per day, mainly from fatty meats such as lamb and pork; thinly sliced cold chicken served with healthy dollops of Thomy mayonnaise is also a favorite. As is common with such diets I have felt no hunger, and indeed have often felt a mild sense of euphoria. My energy levels are high and my work output has never been higher or of better quality.