What about Dr. Pendleton’s gloomy remarks? In an email to researcher Dylan Jim Esson, a colleague of Pendleton’s, Lynn Anspaugh, said that Pendleton’s reported comments were uncharacteristic and she thought they were more likely the result of media sensationalism. According to her analysis of the fallout readings from the time and place of The Conqueror’s filming, she calculated that the crew received no more than 1 to 4 millirems of radiation, which was less than normal background levels. Pendleton himself had recorded high levels of radiation only when a fallout cloud was directly overhead the day following a test, and normal at other times. The most recent tests had been more than a year prior to the filming, so Anspaugh’s calculations are not surprising.
From all the data we have, it was perfectly safe for the film crew, and their reported cancer histories show no unusual ill effects.
So there we have it, another line of evidence that Hollywood myths are all just a part of the show. But if it were not for these romantic tales, Hollywood would not be Hollywood. Whenever you hear a story that seems too incredible to be true, don’t be skeptical if it’s from Hollywood. Instead suspend your disbelief, and enjoy the show.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Beath, W. The Death of James Dean. New York: Grove Press, 1986. 9-10.
Esson, D.J. “Did ‘Dirty Harry’ Kill John Wayne? Media Sensationalism and the Filming of ‘The Conqueror’ in the Wake of Atomic Testing.” Utah Historical Quarterly. 1 Jun. 2003, Volume 71, Issue 3: 250-265.
Freiman, R., Wallace, L. The Story of the Making of Ben-Hur. New York: Random House, 1959.
Harmetz, A. The Making of The Wizard of Oz. New York: Dell Publishing, 1989.
Jackovich, K., Sennet, M. “The Children of John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Dick Powell Fear That Fallout Killed Their Parents.” People. 10 Nov. 1980, Volume 14, Number 19: 42.
Lyon, J., Klauber, M., Gardner, J., Udall, K. “Childhood leukemias associated with fallout from nuclear testing.” New England Journal of Medicine. 22 Feb. 1979, Volume 300, Number 8: 397-402.
Meehan, P. Cinema of the Psychic Realm: A Critical Survey. Jefferson: McFarland, 2009. 98.
Mikkelson, B. “Movies.” Urban Legends Reference Pages. Snopes.com, 1 Jan. 2010. Web. 12 Dec. 2010.
Shaw, M. “Was The Movie The Conqueror Really Cursed? A Look At Radiation Paranoia.” Health News Digest. Interscan Corporation, 14 Sep. 2009. Web. 25 Dec. 2010.
Yoshino, K. “A ride to the great beyond at Disneyland.” Los Angeles Times. 14 Nov. 2007, Newspaper.
47. GLUTEN FREE DIETS
Are gluten free diets really good for your general wellness?
In this chapter, we’re going to point the skeptical eye at the promoters of gluten free diets. Gluten comes from wheat and at some level, just about any commercially available food either contains wheat or has trace contamination from wheat, so a gluten free diet is much easier said than done. It’s become one of the new fads in health food stores, and some claim that such a diet can treat autism or obesity or any of a wide variety of conditions. Is gluten really something that would be good for most people to avoid? What exactly is it, what’s it used for, and how does it affect our bodies?
The history of human culture is closely tied to the history of bread. Bread was one of our earliest portable foods, which made it possible to take long journeys. Its carbohydrate content made it a high-energy food, and combined with its light weight, bread was about the best food you could have with you. Bread made it possible for humans to migrate, for armies to march, and for history to be made.
The earliest breads made from crushed corn or plant roots were poor in quality; they were like crumbling wafers that were hard to carry or preserve. Paradoxically, it was the development of agriculture that both kept people in place and allowed them to move. Wheats and other grains began to be used for bread; and as it turned out, wheats and a few related cereals like rye and barley contain a protein called gluten. Gluten is a long, tough molecule, and it’s what gives modern bread dough its sponginess and elasticity. Bread baked from wheat flour resulted in loaves that didn’t fall apart, and could be transported great distances. Gluten built the bread that built the world.
And since then, gluten has been used in a good many other foods as well. It’s handy as a protein supplement, and as an all-natural way to add elasticity to foods. Such products as ketchup and ice cream are commonly thickened with gluten. Some pet foods use gluten as a way to boost the protein content without adding meat. Almost all imitation meats and cheeses prized by vegetarians are based on wheat gluten. And gluten is not just limited to food. Its long, tough molecules make it a key ingredient in some new bio-plastic materials as an alternative to petrochemicals. Gluten is even commonly used in cosmetics such as lipstick to help firm it up.
Wheat
But there’s been a growing trend in recent years to view gluten in a negative light. It is true that a small number of people are born with gluten sensitivities that reduce their ability to tolerate it to varying degrees. Something of a non-sequitur line of reasoning has followed, that if some people can’t tolerate it, it therefore must be generally bad for everyone. Gluten’s increasingly ubiquitous application in a growing number of food products has triggered suspicion of the food industry’s motives. As a result, some promoters of fad diets and various health schemes are now advocating gluten free diets.
Gluten free diets actually are necessary for some people, and advisable for others. Without going into too much detail, the gluten protein consists of two other proteins, a prolamin and a glutelin. The principal prolamins and glutelins in wheat are gliadin and glutenin. Generally, when we discuss gluten sensitivities, gliadin and glutenin are the specific culprits. So let’s take a quick look at the three basic types of gluten sensitivity. These are all legitimate medical conditions. They’re quite rare, but they are real and patients need to be aware.
The first is celiac disease (CD), or gluten-sensitive enteropathy. This is an autoimmune disease of the small intestine that occurs in people with a genetic predisposition. It’s not caused by gluten and you can’t develop it by eating gluten, but if you’re one of the unlucky few born with the gene, and you develop CD (which not everyone does), eating gluten will cause an adverse reaction. The immune system inside the bowel tissue improperly reacts to the gliadin protein, which causes inflammation of the bowel tissue, and interferes with your body’s ability to absorb nutrients from food. There’s no cure for CD, and the only way to live with it is to adopt a gluten free diet for the rest of your life. Somewhere between one and eight tenths of one percent of Americans have this (1-8 in 1,000), give or take; the number is not well known.
A wheat allergy is very different, and can be harder to track down since there are many different components of wheats and other grains that it’s possible to be allergic to. A wheat allergy is not a single condition; it is any of a great number of possible allergies. The symptoms are similar to what we expect from most allergies: hay fever type symptoms, hives, asthma, and swelling. More serious effects in the worst cases can include anaphylaxis, palpitations, swollen throat, diarrhea, even arthritis. Unlike CD patients, sufferers of wheat allergies need not necessarily avoid all wheat products. The allergy is usually pretty specific and only some foods may need to be avoided. Standard allergy treatment with any of a variety of drugs such as histamine blockers or leukotriene antagonists may prove effective enough to allow the patient to live with a normal diet. You need not eat wheat to have an allergic reaction; many workers who contact wheat can experience allergies as well. It’s very difficult to attach a number to how many people have some level of allergy to some type of wheat related protein, but it’s probably somewhere in the single digit percentage points.
There’s also a third type of gluten sensitivity, and that’s gluten sensitive idiopathic neuropathy. Idiopathic means the exact cause is not known, and a neuropathy is a disease
of the nerves. Symptoms can include numbness or tingling in the extremities, or problems with muscular coordination often evidenced when walking, or even spasticity resembling epilepsy. Diagnosing this neuropathy has been really problematic. First, a common blood test for anti-gliadin antibodies frequently produces false positives, since many people have this antibody. And sometimes, sufferers may actually have a subclinical celiac disease instead. (Subclinical means it doesn’t yet show up on tests or symptomatically.) Good numbers are not known on how many people may have a gluten sensitivity neuropathy, but it’s probably in the range of a small fraction of 1%.
Yet those whose business is the sale of gluten free products would often have us believe that many more of us should buy them. GlutenFree.com and GlutenFreeMall.com claim their products help people with autism or ADHD, which is completely untrue according to all the science we have. The autism claim in particular is broadly repeated across the autism activist community. The treatment of autism with a gluten free diet has been studied a number of times with varying results, but so far no well designed studies have shown any plausible benefit. A 2006 double-blinded study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders tested children with and without autism, on gluten-free and placebo controlled diets, and found no significant differences in any group.
Do an Internet search for “gluten free” and you’ll find the term being misused by sellers of organic foods and other products, even vegan products and things sold as “cruelty free”. Gluten is a purely vegetable, vegan substance that is, in every way, organic and all natural. So in many of these cases, the marketing boast “gluten free” exactly contradicts the vendor’s claim of being vegan friendly. If you’re a vegan, products containing gluten should be at the top of your list. It’s an all-natural wheat protein.
Many naturopaths routinely list gluten as a potential cause of disease in general. This is a medically bizarre claim. Proteins are essential for nutrition, and there is no evidence that incidence of disease increased worldwide once wheat grain became a staple. It’s true that bread itself is a rich source of carbohydrates, which are not essential and can be safely minimized in the diet, but this is true of gluten-free breads as well. By no logic should the strategy of avoiding carbohydrates be misconstrued as avoiding gluten.
So even if gluten is not the cause of any specific disease, at least for the vast majority of us who were not born with a gluten sensitivity, might it not be wise to still leave it out of our diets anyway, better safe than sorry? Keep in mind that a gluten free diet is no trivial matter. Every meal needs to be rethought, and many ingredients you always considered basic kitchen necessities will have to be thrown out. Forget most restaurant meals. Forget most alcoholic beverages, and even many products labeled gluten-free, as many of these continue to be found to be contaminated with gluten-containing cereals.
The belief that a gluten-free diet is a good idea anyway has also been studied, and so far the only groups we’ve found that it may actually be somewhat helpful for are patients with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and a few other conditions. As far as general wellness goes, there’s neither a sound theory nor any evidence. The vast majority of people currently avoiding gluten for presumed health benefits are doing so for no nutritionally plausible reason. Gluten is not a fat or a carbohydrate that you might reasonably want to avoid; it’s a protein that your body uses.
So think of gluten sensitivities in the same way you’d think of bee stings or peanut allergies: of great and very real concern to a small number of people, of some concern for a few more, and of no concern to the rest of us. Don’t let anyone tell you that gluten is harming you in some way that’s so far not supported by any science, or that you should avoid it for the purpose of general wellness. For most of us, gluten is our friend; but never forget that it is also, like many compounds, definitely harmful to some.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Berne, A. “The Accidental Vegetarian: Chefs have no beef with mock meat.” San Francisco Chronicle. 19 Sep. 2007, Newspaper.
Elder, J.H., Shankar, M., Shuster, J., Theriaque, D., Burns, S., Sherrill, L. “The gluten-free, casein-free diet in autism: results of a preliminary double blind clinical trial.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 1 Mar. 2006, Volume 36, Number 3: 413-420.
Herbert, J., Sharp, I., Gaudiano, B. “Separating Fact from Fiction in the Etiology and Treatment of Autism: A Scientific Review of the Evidence.” Quackwatch. Stephen Barrett, M.D., 13 Jun. 2003. Web. 31 Dec. 2010.
IWGA. “Wheat Gluten Applications.” International Wheat Gluten Association. International Wheat Gluten Association, 16 Jul. 2004. Web. 31 Dec. 2010.
Layton, L. “3 years after deadline, FDA still hasn’t defined ‘gluten-free’.” Washington Post. 28 Apr. 2011, Newspaper.
Rewers, M. “Epidemiology of Celiac Disease: What Are the Prevalence, Incidence, and Progression of Celiac Disease?” Gastroenterology. 1 Jan. 2005, Volume 128, Number 4, Supplement 1: 47-51.
48. MYSTERY SPOTS
Are the various “mystery spots” around the world actually gravitational anomalies, or might the explanation lie elsewhere?
My original introduction to the skeptic community came through an unlikely channel. One day my friend John and I were exploring an old abandoned mine in the Mojave Desert called the Gunsight Mine. While deep inside at one point, eating our lunch in a gallery filled with square-set timber bracing, we were struck by the impulse to make an impromptu video. I dropped a handful of gravel and it fell up to the ceiling. I called it a “gravitational anomaly” and put it up on YouTube. Now, it was an obvious joke, and neither John nor I had any inkling that anybody might take it seriously or think it was real. But take it seriously they did. Smart people began emailing me and asking if there was some magnetic phenomenon or a strong wind in the mine. Someone sent it to Dr. Phil Plait and he posted it on his popular Bad Astronomy blog, and that’s how I originally met Phil. Most people immediately see the gimmick and probably get a kick out of it, some have their minds blown by the apparent phenomenon, and judging by the comments, some derisively think it was a deliberate attempt to deceive. But everyone has some reaction to it: wonder, anger, or a good laugh.
Without knowing it, I had stumbled upon the reason for the success of the many so-called “mystery spots” around the world. Some of these apparent gravitational anomalies occur naturally, and some of them are purpose-built as attractions, but everyone either loves them or hates them. Let’s point the skeptical eye at what mystery spots are, how they work, and most importantly, why they work. What is it about our brains that wants to interpret things wrong?
Typically, commercial mystery spot attractions cobble together a fictional account of how their location was “discovered”. The Saint Ignace Mystery Spot in Michigan says:
In the early 1950’s, 3 surveyors... stumbled across an area of land where their surveying equipment didn’t seem to work properly. No matter how many times they tried to level their tripod, the plum-bob would always be drawn far to the east, even as the level was reading level.
The Oregon Vortex claims:
The Oregon Vortex, goes way back to the time of the Native Americans. Their horses would not come into the affected area, so they wouldn’t. The Native Americans called the area the “Forbidden Ground”, a place to be shunned.
The Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, California says:
...We noted the compass to vary a small amount on the transit... There was no barbed wire fence near where we were at the time, and as far as we knew, no excessive mineral in this ground... We felt very light headed or top heavy, felt like something trying to force us right off the hill.
Like many similar attractions around the world, these mystery spots consist of crazily built wooden cabins built on sharp angles; the range of 18 to 25 degrees off of level is common. Within these structures, any number of conventional
optical illusions are constructed and can be performed. A person appears taller who stands under the low end of a tilted beam than a person who stands under the high end. Balls will seem to roll and water will seem to flow uphill. A person can sit in a chair halfway up the wall supported only by its back legs.
It’s worth pointing out that there is no such thing as an actual gravity spot, a place where gravity seems to work sideways or otherwise unexpectedly; at least, not that a person would ever be able to detect. The whole Earth is, however, scattered with gravity anomalies. Gravity maps show the Earth’s surface in color, where the various colors represent the difference between the measured gravity and the gravity predicted from a theoretical reference geoid. We can make these measurements from space using satellites such as ESA’s Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), and they can also be made on the ground using accelerometers that are essentially very sensitive scales. The reason the Earth’s gravity is not constant is that the density of the Earth’s interior varies with different minerals. We use gravity maps for a great variety of applications: Looking for oil, salt deposits, potential volcanic activity, even mapping ocean currents.
We measure gravity in Gals. A Gal, named for Galileo Galilei, is a unit of acceleration used in gravimetry, and is equivalent to 1 centimeter per second squared (1cm/s2). Worldwide, standard gravity at sea level averages out to about 980 Gals. This means that the force you feel pulling you into the ground is equivalent to what you’d feel in space if your spaceship was accelerating at 980 centimeters per second per second. If you go higher, further from the Earth’s mass, gravity decreases; and gravity at the top of Mt. Everest is about 2 Gals less. So what about these variations that we measure? Their maximum range is a few hundred milligals and usually a lot less, way less than normal topographical variance. So if a person is unable to feel the difference in gravity between the ski lodge at the base and the top of a ski lift, you’re certainly unable to detect the much more subtle variations that the Earth’s maximum natural fluctuations can throw at you.
Skeptoid 4: Astronauts, Aliens, and Ape-Men Page 31