SLOW Movement

WSJ: Chinese Medicine Goes Under the Microscope

IN THE LAB
April 2, 2012, 6:56 p.m. ET

Chinese Medicine Goes Under the Microscope

By SHIRLEY S. WANG

There's growing acceptance that herbal medicines could be effective for medical conditions, but the scientific evidence to vault such a treatment into an approved drug is often lacking. As Shirley Wang explains on Lunch Break, researchers are making progress on a cancer treatment based on a common herbal combination in Chinese medicine.

Scientists studying a four-herb combination discovered some 1,800 years ago by Chinese herbalists have found that the substance enhances the effectiveness of chemotherapy in patients with colon cancer.

Photo Researchers Inc.

Early studies show a traditional four-herb combination has cancer-treatment benefits. The herbs are Chinese peony (pictured), Chinese jujube, Chinese licorice and baikal skullcap.

The mixture, known in China as huang qin tang, has been shown in early trials to be effective at reducing some side effects of chemotherapy, including diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. The herbs also seem to bolster colon-cancer treatment: Tests on animals with tumors have shown that administering the herbs along with chemotherapy drugs restored intestinal cells faster than when chemo was used alone.

The herb combination, dubbed PHY906 by scientists, is a rare example of a plant-based product used in traditional folk medicine that could potentially jump the hurdle into mainstream American therapy. A scientific team led by Yung-Chi Cheng, an oncology researcher at Yale University, and funded in part by the National Cancer Institute, is planning to begin Phase II clinical trials to study PHY906's effectiveness in people with colon cancer.

Photo Researchers Inc.

Chinese jujube

Many conventional medications are derived from individual chemical agents originally found in plants. In the case of huang qin tang, however, scientists so far have identified 62 active chemicals in the four-herb combination that apparently need to work together to be effective.

"What Dr. Cheng is doing is keeping [the herbal combination] as a complex entity and using that as an agent," says Josephine Briggs, head of the federal National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which is helping fund some of the PHY906 research. "It's polypharmacy," or the equivalent of several drugs being administered at once.

Dr. Cheng began his research on huang qin tang about a dozen years ago when he sought a better way of dealing with the chemotherapy's side effects. A variety of medications are currently used to treat these symptoms, but with varying success. A more effective technique could improve patients' quality of life and possibly allow them to tolerate a larger dose of chemo, which might speed up their course of treatment, he says.

Dr. Cheng, who grew up in Taiwan, turned to Chinese traditional medicine, which often touts holistic treatments and multiple health claims for a single herb. In herbal literature he found mention of huang qin tang, a herbal combination traditionally used in China for gastrointestinal problems, and decided to test whether it could help cancer patients without compromising the effectiveness of the chemotherapy.

San Diego Botanic Garden

Chinese licorice

The research team began by giving mice with colon cancer high doses of irinotecan, a chemotherapy drug. Some of the mice also received varying doses of PHY906, the herbal combination. After four days, the animals that got the herbs seemed to experience fewer side effects. The herbs also appeared to improve the efficacy of the chemo, restoring damaged intestinal cells faster than with chemo alone and allowing the mice to tolerate doses of the drug that otherwise might have been lethal.

They followed with another experiment treating animals in four groups. One group received just the chemotherapy drug, another received just PHY906, a third group got both and the last group got nothing. The herb and drug combination worked the best at reducing side effects. As the researchers expected, PHY906 had no impact on the cancer when used by itself.

Further testing showed that PHY906's effectiveness was diminished if any of the four herbs was eliminated, indicating that there is an apparent synergistic effect between them. This finding "got me serious about [PHY906]," says Dr. Cheng. The work was published in the journal Science and Translational Medicine in 2010. By submitting PHY906 to the scientific rigor of clinical trials, Dr. Cheng aims to win regulatory approval for the compound's use in cancer treatment.

One challenge with using herbal medicines is that the ratio of the chemicals they contain isn't consistent when plants are grown under different conditions. After testing various suppliers, Dr. Cheng ended up creating a biotechnology company sponsored by Yale called PhytoCeutica to carefully monitor growing conditions to ensure plants from different batches were pharmacologically consistent and to continue clinical development of the compound.

University of British Columbia Botanical Garden

Baikal skullcap

Why PHY906 works isn't entirely clear, Dr. Cheng says. The herbal combination appears to have an anti-inflammatory effect on the gastrointestinal tract, according to work the group published in the journal BMC Medical Genomics last year. Dr. Cheng says he believes PHY906 works in at least three different ways in the body to control the side effects of chemotherapy, whereas conventional treatments work in just a single way.

So far, research data seem to support Dr. Cheng's hunch about traditional medicine. "If it's still in use after a thousand years there must be something right," he says.

Write to Shirley S. Wang at shirley.wang@wsj.com

Bucking the Mainstream to Focus on Healing Herbs

Yale University

Cancer researcher Dr. Yung-Chi Cheng

When cancer researcher Yung-Chi Cheng set out some 12 years ago to study a traditional Chinese medicine, the initial reaction from colleagues and other experts in the field was "pretty bad," he says.

Colleagues worried that Yale University's Dr. Cheng, a mainstream, respected professor of pharmacology, was taking a professional risk by delving into possible herbal treatments for cancer. It wasn't possible to get separate batches of herbs containing chemical compounds that were consistent, they told him. And there wasn't evidence to support the claim that the herbs had any benefit. "It was rejectionist and narrow-minded," Dr. Cheng says.

Nature's Drugs

Some herbs and plants with possible cancer-treatment benefits.

Boswellia serrata (frankincense) Reduces inflammation

What it is being studied for: To reduce tumor growth and brain swelling in patients with gliomas

Nerium oleander (rose laurel)

Reduces inflammation and modulates the immune system

What it is being studied for: To use with chemotherapy drugs to treat advanced non-small-cell lung cancer

Valeriana officinalis (garden heliotrope)

Has sedating effects

What it is being studied for: To improve sleep in cancer patients undergoing treatment

Hypericum perforatum (St. John's wort)

Has analgesic, sedative and anti-depressant effects

What it is being studied for: To reduce hot flashes in postmenopausal women with breast cancer

Source: National Cancer Institute

Born in Britain and raised in Taiwan, the 67-year-old Dr. Cheng mainly works at developing better cancer and antivirus compounds. He says he decided to move forward with the work on Chinese herbs on a part-time basis because he felt that whether the medical claims were true or not, they needed to be evaluated closely.

Over the years, the field's view of this type of work has changed, says Dr. Cheng. With clinical evidence and data showing that the herbal product can be made to be consistent, he has experienced more acceptance from colleagues in the U.S. and internationally. In 2003, he started a global consortium of researchers and pharmaceutical companies studying traditional Chinese medicine.

Dr. Cheng, who earned his doctorate in biochemical pharmacology from Brown University in Rhode Island, has also found it easier over time to get published and to receive funding for the work with herbs, including as a potential treatment for the side effects induced by cancer chemotherapy.

Anticipating the skepticism he might face in developing a plant-based drug, Dr. Cheng didn't publish his work in a journal until two years ago when he had consistent, clinical evidence and some understanding of the mechanism. "I might as well wait until the whole comprehensive story develops," says Dr. Cheng. "Now I feel it's about time."

—Shirley S. Wang

Corrections & Amplifications 
The common name of the plant Hypericum perforatum is St. John's wort. In an earlier version of this article, a listing of herbs and plants with possible cancer-treatment benefits misspelled the name as St. John's sort.

A version of this article appeared April 3, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Chinese Medicine Goes Under the Microscope.

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: When Stress Is Good for You

WORK & FAMILY
JANUARY 24, 2012

When Stress Is Good for You

It's Disparaged as Dangerous, but Healthy Levels of Stress Can Pump Up Both Mind and Body

By SUE SHELLENBARGER

Stress: It can propel you into "the zone," spurring peak performance and well-being. Too much of it, though, strains your heart, robs you of memory and mental clarity and raises your risk of chronic disease.

A little stress is helpful for peak performance, but too much can literally shut down the brain. Sue Shellenbarger on Lunch Break looks at how you stay in the good stress zone and tell if you're tipping into bad.

How do you get the benefits—and avoid the harmful effects?

By learning to identify and manage individual reactions to stress, people can develop healthier outlooks as well as improve performance on cognitive tests, at work and in athletics, researchers and psychologists say.

The body has a standard reaction when it faces a task where performance really matters to goals or well-being: The sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal glands pump stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, into the bloodstream. Heartbeat and breathing speed up, and muscles tense.

What happens next is what divides healthy stress from harmful stress. People experiencing beneficial or "adaptive" stress feel pumped. The blood vessels dilate, increasing blood flow to help the brain, muscles and limbs meet a challenge, similar to the effects of aerobic exercise, according to research by Wendy Mendes, an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and others.

The body tends to respond differently under harmful or threatening stress. The blood vessels constrict, and "you may feel a little dizzy as your blood pressure rises," says Christopher Edwards, director of the behavioral chronic pain management program at Duke University Medical Center. Symptoms are often like those you feel in a fit of anger. You may speak more loudly or experience lapses in judgment or logic, he says. Hands and feet may grow cold as blood rushes to the body's core. Research shows the heart often beats erratically, spiking again and again like a seismograph during an earthquake.

Another hallmark: "Can you turn it off? Or are you a prisoner of your mind?" says Martin Rossman, an author on healing and stress and a clinical instructor at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School. People under harmful stress lose the ability to re-engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which drives the body's day-to-day natural functions, including digestion and sleep. While individuals vary in how long they can tolerate chronic stress, research shows it sharply increases the risk of insomnia, chronic disease and early death.

Home builder Carl Weissensee used to be "addicted to stress," he says. Managing thousands of details and multiple risks for each of the multimillion-dollar houses he builds, he spent years rushing around with "one foot off the ground 20 hours a day, running the same scenarios through my mind time and time again, and being unable to put it aside," says Mr. Weissensee, 58, of Mill Valley, Calif.

In an important marker of harmful stress levels, his agitation disrupted his life. "I would sleep four to six hours a night, and even that wasn't good sleep." His wife complained, and his young daughter painted a small rock for him with the words, "You work too much."

A heart attack, followed by problems with cardiac arrhythmia, forced him to find the line between good stress and bad. "I don't believe it's possible to do a good job without a certain amount of stress. It's necessary to get things done," he says.

He has brought it down to a healthy level by using relaxation techniques, including deep breathing and guided imagery—lying still and imagining stressful tasks turning out well. After seeing Dr. Rossman, reading his book and doing one of his relaxation CDs daily, Mr. Weissensee learned to acknowledge his worries instead of recycling them in his head, then practice "skipping over" them and telling himself that "everything works out in the end," he says. He has managed to stabilize his heart condition without large doses of medication.

Falling Levels

People who say their stress level is an 8, 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale, where 1 is 'little or no stress' and 10 is 'a great deal of stress.'

2007	32%
2008	30
2009	24
2010	24
2011	22

Source: American Psychological Association and Harris Interactive

"By practicing over and over, I seem to be changing the path my thoughts take from, 'I'm doomed,' to, 'Things will be OK,' " he says. "My goal is to worry just enough to do my job well."

That kind of positive attitude tends to produce good stress, based on research by Dr. Mendes and others. In a study of 50 college students, some were coached to believe that feeling nervous or excited before a presentation could improve performance. A control group didn't receive the coaching. When the students were asked to make a speech about themselves while receiving critical feedback, those who received the coaching showed a healthier physiological response, leading to increased dilation of the arteries and smaller rises in blood pressure than the control group.

In a similar study, students who received the same coaching before taking graduate-school entrance exams posted higher scores on a mock test in the lab and also on the actual exam three months later, compared with controls, according to a study co-authored by Dr. Mendes and published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They also posted higher levels of salivary amylase, a protein marker for adrenaline that is linked to episodes of beneficial stress.

People react differently to everyday stress. At-home or mobile biofeedback devices can detect spikes in the heart rate. Hand-held thermometers also can be used to note when the temperature of one's hands falls below 95 degrees, says Kenneth Pelletier, a clinical professor of medicine at both the University of Arizona School of Medicine and the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco.

Illustration by Mike Right

Toronto psychologist Kate Hays tells patients to imagine a stress scale "ranging from 1, where you're practically asleep, to 10, where you're climbing off the ceiling." Then, she asks them to recall a past peak performance and figure out where their stress at that moment would have ranked. Many people say 4 to 6, but responses range from 2 to 8, says Dr. Hays, who specializes in sports and performance psychology. That becomes their personal stress-management target.

For most people, hitting that target requires new skills. With practice, though, they can learn to relax completely in a few seconds, says Dr. Pelletier.

In addition to thinking positively about stressors, deep abdominal breathing and training in meditation and mindfulness, or regulating one's own mental and physical states, help moderate stress.

All have been shown in research to help heal such chronic problems as heart disease, according to a 2010 research review co-authored by Bonnie Horrigan, director of public education for the Bravewell Collaborative, Minneapolis, a nonprofit that advocates integrating health and medical care. When Ford Motor Co. tested various ways of helping employees with chronic back pain several years ago, corporate medical director Walter Talamonti says, training in reducing harmful stress to healthy levels was linked to reductions in employees' pain and medication use.

Dr. Edwards is seeing 15% to 20% annual increases in patients at his pain clinic seeking biofeedback and other help with stress and stress-related ailments. As many as 35% of them actually want to generate more good stress; many are referred by counselors, parents or coaches.

Many workplace wellness programs have also begun coaching people to hit "the optimal performance zone"—with enough stress "to be stimulating, to focus you, to challenge you" without taking a physical toll, says Dr. Pelletier.

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: A Sleep Battle of the Sexes

BUSINESS
AUGUST 23, 2011

A Sleep Battle of the Sexes

Women Sleep More but Men Complain Less; Who Copes Better When Exhausted?

By ANDREA PETERSEN

He sleeps. She sleeps. They sleep differently.

Women tend to have more deep sleep and awaken fewer times during the night than men do. They also weather some of the effects of a lack of sleep better than men, according to recent studies. Still, men overall say they are more satisfied with the amount and quality of their shut-eye than are women.

Getting enough sleep is an important factor in maintaining overall health. Scientists are increasingly focusing on gender differences in sleep, seeking clues about why women are more likely to suffer insomnia, for instance. Some researchers suggest that differences in sleep patterns could help explain why women live longer than men.

Andrea Petersen explains on Lunch Break why men and women sleep differently and whether it may partly explain why women generally have better health and live longer.

"Women on average have longer sleep than men; women on average are healthier than men. It could be that those are related," says Daniel J. Buysse, a professor of psychiatry and clinical and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh. Sleep difficulties have been linked in many studies with chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Most people regularly sleep with a partner, and some research has shown that people wake up more and have less deep sleep when they sleep with another person. Still, people generally say they are more satisfied with their sleep when they are with a loved one. "There are objective costs to the physical presence of someone else in the bed," says Wendy M. Troxel, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a leading researcher on relationships and sleep. But "the safety and security we derive from our social relationships trumps the cost," she says.

Men and women have different body clocks. Men's average "circadian period" was 24 hours, 11 minutes—six minutes longer than for women, according to a study presented at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's annual meeting in June in Minneapolis. Although six minutes doesn't seem like a big deal, the effects can compound day after day. Researchers determined circadian period by measuring core body temperature and levels of the hormone melatonin.

View Interactive

During the study, which involved 157 healthy people, more men had circadian periods longer than 24 hours and therefore were predisposed to want to go to bed later and get up later each day—classic behavior of so-called night owls. By contrast, twice as many women as men had body clocks shorter than 24 hours and therefore wanted to go to bed earlier and get up earlier. "That may make it more difficult to stay asleep at the end of the night," contributing to insomnia in women, says Jeanne F. Duffy, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston and the lead author of the study.

For both sexes, a circadian period that is out of sync with the 24-hour clock can result in sleep deprivation as the week goes on. People with short biological clocks may want to increase exposure to light at night and eliminate it in the morning. Night owls should reduce light exposure before bedtime and get bright light in the morning. Trying to catch up on sleep on the weekends can just push one's biological clock further out of whack.

Women, on the whole, get more sleep and fall asleep faster than men. About 30% of women said they sleep eight hours or more on weekdays, compared with 22% of men, according to the National Sleep Foundation's 2005 Sleep in America Poll, which surveyed 1,506 people. A small study looking at the sleep of healthy young adults found that women slept an average of 7 hours, 43 minutes in a night, or 19 minutes more than men. And women took 9.3 minutes on average to fall asleep, whereas men took 23.2 minutes. The study, published in the journal Chronobiology International in 2005, followed 16 men and 15 women—a small but not uncommon number for sleep studies—over three nights in a sleep laboratory.

Given this, researchers say it isn't clear why in numerous studies women tend to complain more about their sleep, saying they don't get enough shut-eye and find it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep. Sleep studies might not be picking up the whole story, some researchers say, adding that more investigation is needed.

While mothers of young children often feel like they get no sleep, Dr. Buysee says the research doesn't bear that out. "This isn't going to be popular, but some studies show that mothers get more sleep than fathers," he says. Women likely feel worse because their sleep is so interrupted. "If the woman's sleep is more fragmented, she's going to suffer more consequences," he says.

Multiple studies have shown that women generally have more slow-wave sleep, which is the deepest sleep. It tends to happen in the first part of the night and is critical to memory formation.

Women may be better able to cope with sleep deprivation than are men, probably because they get more deep sleep, recent research suggests. A small study, presented at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's annual meeting, aimed to mimic the common practice of people not getting enough sleep during the work week and then trying to make up for it on the weekends. Both men's and women's performance on a 10-minute computer task that measured reaction time and speed, among other variables, deteriorated after five nights of only six hours of sleep.

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Men and women have different body clocks, according to a study presented at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's annual meeting.

But women's scores slipped less then men's, and recovered to a greater degree after two nights of extended sleep, of eight hours. "I think what our data show is that women can deal with sleep loss better than men," says Alexandros Vgontzas, professor of psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pa., and a co-author of the study, which involved 16 men and 18 women.

Sleep can help reinforce learning in both men and women, such as college students readying for an exam. But to absorb certain kinds of knowledge, known as perceptual learning, men needed a nap whereas women didn't, according to another study presented at the sleep medicine academy's meeting.

In the study, 126 subjects completed a task that required them to identify differences in the movement of dots on a screen. The subjects then underwent some training in the task and were tested again to see how much they had learned. Men only learned after a nap. Women learned whether they napped or not. "It may be the case that women are better suited for tasks requiring sustained perception, jobs like air-traffic controllers or radiologists who are reading MRIs," says Elizabeth McDevitt, a study coordinator at the University of California, San Diego and the lead author of the study.

Life changes, including pregnancy and menopause, can wreak havoc on women's sleep. Overall, however, men wake up more often during the night, partly because of their greater risk for obstructive sleep apnea, researchers say.

Some researchers say some women may not feel they're getting a good night's sleep because sleep studies may not be seeing the whole picture when it comes to insomnia. New studies using PET scans have shown that in patients with insomnia, glucose metabolism is elevated in some parts of the brain. So even when they're asleep "their brain isn't completely shut off," says Dr. Buysse. Women are about 50% more likely to have insomnia than men. Other researchers say women, more than men, tend to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders, which can lead to insomnia.

Write to Andrea Petersen at andrea.petersen@wsj.com

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: The Sleepless Elite

HEALTH JOURNAL
APRIL 5, 2011

The Sleepless Elite

Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done

By MELINDA BECK

Melinda Beck explains why for a small number of people getting a full night of sleep is a waste of time and the reasons behind it.

For a small group of people—perhaps just 1% to 3% of the population—sleep is a waste of time.

Natural "short sleepers," as they're officially known, are night owls and early birds simultaneously. They typically turn in well after midnight, then get up just a few hours later and barrel through the day without needing to take naps or load up on caffeine.

They are also energetic, outgoing, optimistic and ambitious, according to the few researchers who have studied them. The pattern sometimes starts in childhood and often runs in families.

While it's unclear if all short sleepers are high achievers, they do have more time in the day to do things, and keep finding more interesting things to do than sleep, often doing several things at once.

Nobody knows how many natural short sleepers are out there. "There aren't nearly as many as there are people who think they're short sleepers," says Daniel J. Buysse, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional group.

Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To date, only a handful of small studies have looked at short sleepers—in part because they're hard to find. They rarely go to sleep clinics and don't think they have a disorder.

A few studies have suggested that some short sleepers may have hypomania, a mild form of mania with racing thoughts and few inhibitions. "These people talk fast. They never stop. They're always on the up side of life," says Dr. Buysse. He was one of the authors of a 2001 study that had 12 confirmed short sleepers and 12 control subjects keep diaries and complete numerous questionnaires about their work, sleep and living habits.One survey dubbed "Attitude for Life" that was actually a test for hypomania. The natural short sleepers scored twice as high as the controls.

There is currently no way people can teach themselves to be short sleepers. Still, scientists hope that by studying short sleepers, they can better understand how the body regulates sleep and why sleep needs vary so much in humans.

Normal Sleeper

Most adults have normal sleep needs, functioning best with 7 to 9 hours of sleep, and about two-thirds of Americans regularly get it. Children fare better with 8 to 12 hours, and elderly people may need only 6 to 7.

Wannabe Short Sleeper

One-third of Americans are sleep-deprived, regularly getting less than 7 hours a night, which puts them at higher risk of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and other health problems.

Short Sleeper

Short sleepers, about 1% to 3% of the population, function well on less than 6 hours of sleep without being tired during the day. They tend to be unusually energetic and outgoing. Geneticists who spotted a gene variation in short sleepers were able to replicate it in mice—which needed less sleep than usual, too.

"My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health," says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco. "Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies."

Dr. Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4 a.m. but also went to bed past midnight.

Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual, too.

News of their finding spurred other people to write the team, saying they were natural short sleepers and volunteering to be studied. The researchers are recruiting more candidates and hope to find more gene variations they have in common.

Potential candidates for the gene study are sent multiple questionnaires and undergo a long structured phone interview. Those who make the initial screening wear monitors to track their sleep patterns at home. Christopher Jones, a University of Utah neurologist and sleep scientist who oversees the recruiting, says there is one question that is more revealing than anything else: When people do have a chance to sleep longer, on weekends or vacation, do they still sleep only five or six hours a night? People who sleep more when they can are not true short sleepers, he says.

That All-Nighter Feels Good—Temporarily

Sleep deprivation makes most people grumpy. It's sometimes used as a form of torture. Oddly enough, it can also bring on temporary euphoria, according to a study in the journal Neuroscience last month.

Researchers had 14 healthy young adults stay up all night and all the next day and then compared their reactions with 13 subjects who had slept normally. In one test, sleepless subjects asked to rate a series of images uniformly saw them as more pleasant or positive. "We saw this strange lopsided shift," says lead author Matthew Walker, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California-Berkeley.

Brain scans also showed that the subjects who had pulled all-nighters had heightened activity in the mesolimbic pathway, a brain circuit driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter that typically regulates feelings of pleasure, addiction and cravings.

The boost of dopamine after an all-nighter may help explain why sleep deprivation can alleviate major depression in about 60% of patients, although the effect is only temporary. "As soon as they get recovery sleep, all that mood elevation is lost," says Dr. Walker.

Could the sleep-deprived brain be somehow compensating for the lack of downtime with a surge of dopamine to keep on going? Scientists don't yet know.

Earlier studies have also shown that sleep deprivation amplifies activity in the amygdala, the primitive emotional center of the brain, and reduces it the prefrontal cortex, where higher, more rational thought occurs. It may be that the brain reverts to a more basic mode of operating when it is sleep deprived, Dr. Walker speculates. Alternatively, he says, "we know that different parts of the brain are more sensitive than others to sleep deprivation. It may be that the prefrontal cortex just goes down first."

Although the feelings of euphoria sound great, Dr. Walker warns that operating more on emotion than reason can be very risky. "You are all gas pedal and no brake," he says. That can be dangerous, indeed, if you are in a job that requires both long hours and difficult decision making

To date, Dr. Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers, and he says they share some fascinating characteristics. Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they're thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks.

"They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again," Dr. Jones says.

Some short sleepers say their sleep patterns go back to childhood and some see the same patterns starting in their own kids, such as giving up naps by age 2. As adults, they gravitate to different fields, but whatever they do, they do full bore, Dr. Jones says.

"Typically, at the end of a long, structured phone interview, they will admit that they've been texting and surfing the Internet and doing the crossword puzzle at the same time, all on less than six hours of sleep," says Dr. Jones. "There is some sort of psychological and physiological energy to them that we don't understand."

Drs. Jones and Fu stress that there is no genetic test for short sleeping. Ultimately, they expect to find that many different genes play a role, which may in turn reveal more about the complex systems that regulate sleep in humans.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Leonardo da Vinci were too busy to sleep much, according to historical accounts. Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison came close but they were also fond of taking naps, which may disqualify them as true short sleepers.

Nowadays, some short sleepers gravitate to fields like blogging, videogame design and social media, where their sleep habits come in handy. "If I could find a way to do it, I'd never sleep," says Dave Hatter, a software developer in Fort Wright, Ky. He typically sleeps just four to five hours a night, up from two to three hours a few years ago.

"It's crazy, but it works for me," says Eleanor Hoffman, an overnight administrator at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York who would rather spend afternoons playing mahjong with friends than sleep anymore than four hours. Sometimes she calls her cousin, Linda Cohen, in Pittsburgh about 4 a.m., since she knows she'll be wide awake as well—just like they were as kids.

"I come to life about 11 at night," says Mrs. Cohen, who owns a chain of toy stores with her husband and gets up early in the morning with ease. "If I went to bed earlier, I'd feel like half my life was missing."

Are you a short sleeper? For more information on the genetic study, contact Dr. Jones at chris.jones@hsc.utah.edu

Write to Melinda Beck at HealthJournal@wsj.com

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: Building a More Resilient Brain

IN THE LAB

OCTOBER 12, 2010

Building a More Resilient Brain

• By SHIRLEY S. WANG

A lifetime of speaking two or more languages appears to pay off in old age, with recent research showing the symptoms of dementia can be delayed by an average of four years in bilingual people.

Multilingualism doesn't delay the onset of dementia—the brains of people who speak multiple languages still show physical signs of deterioration—but the process of speaking two or more languages appears to enable people to develop skills to better cope with the early symptoms of memory-robbing diseases, including Alzheimer's.

Scientists for years studied children and found that fluently speaking more than one language takes a lot of mental work. Compared with people who speak only one language, bilingual children and young adults have slightly smaller vocabularies and are slower performing certain verbal tasks, such as naming lists of animals or fruits.

But over time, regularly speaking more than one language appears to strengthen skills that boost the brain's so-called cognitive reserve, a capacity to work even when stressed or damaged. This build-up of cognitive reserve appears to help bilingual people as they age.

"Speaking two languages isn't going to do anything to dodge the bullet" of getting Alzheimer's disease or dementia, says Ellen Bialystok, a bilingualism researcher at York University in Toronto. But greater cognitive reserve means the "same as the reserve tank in a car: Once the brain runs out of fuel, it can go a little farther," she says.

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Specifically, the advantages of bilingualism are thought to be related to a brain function known as inhibitory or cognitive control: the ability to stop paying attention to one thing and focus on something else, says Dr. Bialystok. Fluent speakers of more than one language have to use this skill continually to silence one language in their minds while communicating in another.

The idea of building up cognitive reserve has led to the popular advice that doing crossword puzzles or brain teasers, anything to remain mentally active, helps stave off dementia symptoms. A panel convened by the National Institutes of Health in July cautioned, however, that there isn't enough evidence to conclude that such activities prevent Alzheimer's disease or related dementias.

Researchers don't know whether it is beneficial for people to learn more than one language if one doesn't speak them fluently or nearly every day. The age at which the second language needs to be acquired to yield the protective effect is also unknown.

 

 

Tamar Gollan, a researcher on bilingualism at the University of California San Diego and at the university's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, says people can, of course, learn a new language if they want to, regardless of age. "But there's no magic point," Dr. Gollan cautions.

Dr. Bialystok began her decades-long research by studying how children learn a second language.

In 2004, she and her colleague Fergus Craik shifted to conduct three studies looking at the cognitive effects in some 150 monolingual and bilingual people between 30 and 80 years old. They found that in both middle and old age, the bilingual subjects were better able to block out distracting information than the single-language speakers in a series of computerized tests. The advantage was even more pronounced in the older subjects.

Dr. Bialystok says other research also shows better performance from bilingual people on tests requiring cognitive control, such as when they are instructed to determine whether a sentence is grammatically correct, even if the content doesn't make sense. For example, in distinguishing, "apples grow on trees" from "apple trees on grow" and "apples grow on noses," the third sentence requires people to focus on the structure and suppress paying attention to the meaning of the words.

The findings from the 2004 study led Dr. Bialystok to wonder whether these benefits might help older people compensate for age-related losses in learning.

She and her colleagues examined the medical records of 228 memory-clinic patients who had been diagnosed with different kinds of dementia, two-thirds with Alzheimer's disease. The results, published in the journal Neuropsychologia in 2007, suggested that bilingual patients exhibit problematic memory problems later than those who only spoke one language.

Bilingual patients were, on average, four years older than single-language speakers when their families first noticed memory problems, or when the patient first came to the clinic seeking treatment.

Moreover, bilingual patients' memories were no worse than those of single-language speakers by the time they arrived at the clinic, and there was no difference in the length of time between the detection of symptoms and when the patients were first checked in.

In a subsequent study, Dr. Bialystok and her colleagues looked at brain images of monolingual and bilingual Alzheimer's patients at the same age and stage of disease. They found that the brains of the bilingual people appeared to be in worse physical condition. This suggests that bilingualism doesn't delay the disease process itself, but rather helps bilingual individuals better handle memory deficits, Dr. Bialystok says.

Their group has confirmed the finding in a further study that will be published later this year, says Dr. Craik, a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto.

Other research, however, complicates the picture of the potential benefits of multilingualism. A recent review of the medical records of some 600 people at a Montreal memory clinic showed a protective benefit for people who were fluent in more than two languages and for bilingual people who learned French before they learned English.

English-only speakers, however, fared just as well as multilingual people who learned English first. This anomaly might be explained by the English-speakers' particular genetics, nutrition, stress levels and environmental exposure, says Howard Chertkow, a cognitive neurologist at Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and a professor at McGill University, one of the authors on the study.

Researchers in Europe, such as Wouter Duyck, a professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium, are also working on similar studies to replicate the effect in other bilingual populations.

Write to Shirley S. Wang at shirley.wang@wsj.com

 

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: Lunch with the FT - Susie Orbach

Lunch with the FT: Susie Orbach

By William Leith

Published: January 1 2010 19:46 | Last updated: January 1 2010 19:46

The writer and psychotherapist Susie Orbach, best known as an authority on eating disorders, wants a quick lunch. She has chosen Bradleys, a smallish restaurant near where she lives in Belsize Park, north London. It is sparse, with modern-looking pictures on the walls, and carries a powerful whiff of the 1980s – possibly the sort of place where the chef arranges the food into neat little towers.

She is sitting in a booth at the back, and when I get in, it’s a tight squeeze. Perhaps people were thinner then. Or perhaps I am fatter than I think. Orbach is gamine and petite. She is 63 but looks much younger, partly because she is so slender. She looks very good. Her black silk top by Ghost hangs off her small frame.

I have met Orbach a couple of times before. In fact, when I had a problem with overeating, she recommended a therapist, who was very good. Now she tells me she won’t have wine: “I don’t do wine at lunchtime.” Also, she has slight misgivings about being interviewed. “You know us shrinks – we’re really circumspect.”

Actually, she isn’t – she’s extremely bright and talkative. She still sees lots of patients. Her most famous patient, of course, was Princess Diana. But she feels she can’t talk about that. Still, Diana was her patient for two years and it’s been said that, without Orbach’s influence, she wouldn’t have been so open in her famous BBC Panorama interview in November 1995, in which she talked about her post-natal depression, self-harming and bulimia.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Lunch with the FT - Jun-12

Right now Orbach, who is a visiting professor in sociology at the London School of Economics, is working on a paper for an academic journal about how parents transmit their body shapes to their kids. I tell her I’ve been looking at the effects of economic growth – one of which is that it makes people fat.

“Growth,” she says. “In growth, we don’t count the cost of repairing all the excesses, right?” She often says “right?” at the end of a sentence. Sometimes this makes you want to say “right” as well.

I order half a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. She orders mineral water. We haven’t even looked at the menu, and we’re already into a conversation about greed in the modern world and the problems it’s causing. We agree that greed causes pollution. “All those chemical compounds!” Orbach says. “Obviously human beings can accommodate a certain amount of chemicals. But we don’t know that we’re excreting all this ... stuff into our water system, and double-ingesting it. And there are very strange effects.”

We both glance at the menu for a few seconds but get sidetracked into a conversation about thinness and fatness. Orbach’s first book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, published 31 years ago, was groundbreaking. In it, she tried to answer a simple question. Why do women get fat? Her research led to some fascinating conclusions. Some women get fat, she found, not because they were greedy, but because being fat made them feel safe.

Orbach realised that, for many women, being slim could get you the wrong kind of attention – not just from men, but from other women too. Slim women can be magnets for men and also attract envy, she writes in the book. This means that lots of women have an unconscious drive towards being fat, even if they think, in their conscious minds, that they want to be slim. That’s why people can find it so hard to lose weight – because they secretly want to be fat, and they don’t even know it.

But why are women so desperate to be thin? Not just slim but really, really thin. Why is being skinny such a powerful draw?

“We have a constructed aesthetic which we’re all inside of now,” she says. “It’s a visual aesthetic. Thinness is the desired object now. Whereas 40 or 50 years ago, there were Wate-on tablets at the chemist, right?”

I nod.

“That’s because, in those days, the desired object was Marilyn Monroe, or Sophia Loren. So there was no desire to be thin.”

When did women start wanting to be thin? Orbach thinks that the change came during the 1960s. Before then, if you were thin, you looked poor, because lots of poor people couldn’t afford to eat. In 1966, Twiggy did not look poor, or pinched, or like she might be suffering from rickets. She looked new and challenging.

“This was a new culture,” Orbach says. “We were no longer thin from poverty. Finally there was excess in our society. We didn’t need to have our forms of plenty represented by bigness. Then there was a whole generation who grew up with that. Then they reproduced. And they have that aesthetic inside them.”

I tell her my theory that I think women like to be thin because it enables them to wear sexier clothes – and fashion designers are making women’s clothes skimpier and more revealing all the time.

“No, I think that’s nonsense. Here’s where you and I might disagree. Don’t you think Marilyn Monroe was sexy?”

I do, I tell her.

“But I don’t think she’s sexy per se. I think she’s sexy because of all those images. It’s the fault of the fashion designers, and the critics. But they are rethinking this, under pressure, thank goodness. It’s also the failure of art directors, I think. Because you can make anything look spectacular if you’re an art director, right?”

Right.

“Take Rankin. He’s a fantastic photographer. He’s shot women of different sizes, and they look spectacular. They have glamour, they have pizzazz, they have that sense of, ‘Oh, that’s me!’ He’s taken pictures of people who were paraplegic who were very very stylish. So art directors are geniuses. And something happens in the visual cortex. What these art directors do affects us, and goes into us.”

Something is happening in my visual cortex. It is the waiter. We need to order, and quickly. Time is rushing by. Orbach orders a soup of Jerusalem artichokes to start – and another starter, a plate of scallops. No main course. She also orders a green salad. I go for Dorset crab, followed by halibut on a bed of vegetables, and a side order of dauphinoise potatoes.

Orbach’s latest book is Bodies, in which she tells us what has happened to our bodies in the three decades since she wrote about fat being a feminist issue. “The problems I sought to describe have mushroomed,” she writes. The contemporary body is a battleground. In fact, people have never felt worse about their bodies than they do now. Makers of face cream are telling us we are too wrinkly; owners of gyms are telling us we’re too flabby; plastic surgeons are telling us our faces are all wrong. We are constantly being told that we look unattractive – and the terrible thing is that we believe it.

In the book, she talks about “the merchants of body hatred”. Her point is that, if people are anxious and needy, they make better consumers; if they are anxious about something as fundamental as their bodies, they are easy prey for marketers. And things are getting worse. “In my mum’s day”, she says, “you needed to be beautiful for a very short time to catch your man. It didn’t start at six and go on until you’re 75, right?”

Our food arrives. Orbach’s soup looks bland but she says it tastes fine. “I like Jerusalem artichokes”, she says, “but I don’t like the way you have to clean them out – all that scraping.” My Dorset crab is arranged in a tower, as I had suspected it would be. It looks jellified. I demolish it with a couple of deft jabs of the fork. It crumbles and lies in pieces on my plate. When I try it, it’s rather salty.

Orbach tells me she grew up in nearby Chalk Farm. Her father, Maurice Orbach, was a Labour MP until he lost his seat around the time of the Suez crisis. She remembers it from a young girl’s point of view: “There was a canal. Lots of double-crossing. My father was seen to be pro-Nasser [Egypt’s then leader].” Later her father was elected as the member of parliament for Stockport.

Her father’s parents came to Britain from Poland in 1899 to escape the pogroms, she says. She doesn’t know where in Poland. They were heading for America but got off the boat in Cardiff and stayed. Maurice was one of eight children. He started life as a chorister but, as a young man, became interested in the labour movement. He met Orbach’s mother on a speaking tour of America. She was “on the rebound”. He was, Orbach imagines, giving a “rabble-rousing talk”. He took her across the Atlantic and they married in England in 1936. They had a son, Laurence, who went on to run the publishing house Quarto, and, in 1946, Susie was born.

THE SHAPE WE’RE IN

Our bodies have been changing over the past few decades – on average, we have become taller and heavier.

● There have been just two national surveys of British body sizes. The first, in 1951 was done manually (only measuring women). In 2001-2002, a more detailed UK Sizing Survey by Size UK was carried out on 11,000 adults. In 1951, the average woman was 5ft 3in. Fifty years later, she had grown an inch and a half. In the same period, she had gained several inches around the waist, going from 27.5in to 34in.

● Men are also getting taller and heavier, having grown a couple of inches on average in the past half century. A 2002 American study for the Centers for Disease Control found that, between 1962 and 2002, the average male weight jumped from 11 stone 6lb to 13 stone 6lb. In the same period, the female average went from 10 stone to 11 stone 7lb.

● As well as getting heavier, women’s shape is changing too. The Size UK survey revealed that only 8 per cent of women had the classic Sophia Loren-style “hourglass shape”, which has given way to a more rectangular look. Busts and hips are bigger than they were in the 1950s.

● Mintel research published in 2008 showed that the UK men’s plus-size market had grown by 40 per cent in the previous five years (the women’s market grew by 26 per cent over the same period). The average UK woman is a size 16, and some 4.6m women are a size 18 or over – although Mintel points out that retailers have made clothing sizes more generous so that fewer women have to go up to a “plus sized” 18.

● But if the real shape of women is growing, the fantasy shape is shrinking. As the feminist writer Naomi Wolf pointed out in The Beauty Myth (1990), a generation earlier the average model had been 8 per cent lighter than the average woman. But by 1990, models were 23 per cent lighter. A recent survey by Wired magazine demonstrated that, between the 1960s and today, the body mass index of Playboy Playmates has, on average, declined from 19.2 to 17.6, while that of real women has risen from 22.2 to 26.8.

As a young girl, Orbach says, she was influenced by her mother’s fastidiousness around food. “She was very careful. And also, three times a year, she’d go on the Mayo Clinic diet [low in carbohydrates and high in fat]. So I think I grew up thinking that the grown-up thing to do is diet. I copied my mum. And there’s nothing like a diet to institute longings for food.”

The waiter collects our plates. The restaurant is, slightly surprisingly, one of those places where the waiter takes the wine away from the table and pours you some when your glass is empty. He pours me some wine.

Orbach says: “I had what now would be such a mild version of what I call bingeing, which bears no relation to what people are doing now. And also restricting – which also bears no relation to what people are doing now. It would mean not having supper.”

But the Orbachs didn’t have much fattening food in the house. “My dad kept his sweets in the car and my mum had her chocolates at the top of a cupboard and ate them in the middle of the night.”

Our main courses arrive. For Orbach, a smallish plate of scallops. For me, a chunk of halibut placed on top of some vegetables, with a layer of olive paste on top. It is the shape of a car park – several levels in an oblong shape. Orbach eats her scallops. She doesn’t strike me as a great foodie. Food is just something she eats, in relatively small quantities. She eats fish and chicken. She says she cooks pasta nearly every day, and if she had a favourite cuisine, it would be Italian.

She has two children – a son of 25, who lives in London, and a daughter of 20, who lives in New York. For years Orbach lived with their father, Joseph Schwartz, a writer and psychotherapist, but she has, according to newspaper reports, recently started a relationship with the writer Jeanette Winterson. I ask her if this is true.

“Yes,” she says, suddenly beaming with happiness.

She won’t have a pudding. Nor will I. Somehow, my two turrets of seafood feel slightly bulky in my stomach. We order coffee and get on to the subject of addiction. I tell her my theory about why smoking is so hard to quit – because it gives you something to worry about. When you stop, your other worries come flooding back. She agrees. She says she’s seen a German cigarette advertisement that worries her. “Be smart – wait until you are 18. Well, hey, is that an invitation to a 15-year-old?”

Orbach was, as you’d expect, very bright as a child. She got a scholarship to North London Collegiate, an academic private school, although she was expelled at the age of 15. She went on to read women’s history at the school of Slavonic studies at London University, and then went to New York to do a PhD in psychoanalysis at the City University of New York, the college her mother had attended. That’s where she got the idea of running therapeutic workshops for women. And that’s where she picked up her very slight mid-Atlantic accent.

Our coffee arrives. I wonder if the nature of her job as a psychotherapist has changed over the years. Do people have different problems? “No. You get more men not knowing how to make relationships than you did before. Let me revise my answer. It’s not a no. It’s a yes. I particularly get, from North America, a certain kind of referral – women who will come and say, ‘I’ve been to the best universities, I’ve got the best job, I’ve got the great body ... I’ve even got the boyfriend.”

But these women still feel empty. Why?

“It’s something about the whole notion of success and performance, and creating a whole notion of yourself that you can adore and admire.”

We finish our coffee – mine with sugar, hers without. And now it’s time to go. The lunch has lasted exactly one hour. “It was perfectly pleasing,” she says. “My scallops were juicy. They were perfectly cooked. I don’t agree with olives in the salad myself. Or green beans. But that’s just my opinion. I would just have green salad, like lettuce and rugola. And I would have liked to have drunk wine, but I’m going back to work.”

And with that, she walks away smartly.

‘Bodies’ (Profile) is published in paperback on January 7, £8.99

...........................

Bradleys
25 Winchester Road
London NW3

Artichoke soup £6.00
Crab £9.50
Scallops £9.50
Halibut £19.00
Dauphinoise potatoes £3.00
Salad £5.00
Single espresso £2.50
Double espresso £5.00
Large sparkling water £3.50
Half bottle Sauvignon Blanc £11.50

Total (including service) £81.28

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Economist: Exercise and company - Fitter with friends

Exercise and company

Fitter with friends

Sep 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Exercising in a group can be more effective by making things easier

Getty Images

All together now

THE enduring image of Sylvester Stallone’s legendary pugilist Rocky Balboa is that of a solitary athlete, braving the elements (and his own demons) to prepare for a fight. Yet according to a new study he might have done better by having a bit of company on his long workouts.

Research by Emma Cohen, an anthropologist at Oxford University, suggests that a better model is provided by Hicham El Guerrouj, a Moroccan middle-distance runner who is the current holder of the world 1,500-metres and one-mile records. Before retiring in 2006 Mr El Guerrouj was known for the throngs of training partners that followed him everywhere in Morocco. This was a good strategy because, as Dr Cohen reports in a forthcoming issue of Biology Letters, training in a synchronised group may heighten tolerance for pain. That, in turn, could allow athletes like Mr El Guerrouj to train longer and harder.

The reason is almost certainly the effects of endogenous opioids, better known as endorphins. When these are released in the brain they make a person feel good. What causes their release is more complex. Biologists think it is part of an evolved mechanism which rewards behaviour that may not be immediately pleasant but is ultimately useful to the species.

Endorphins show up nearly everywhere. Hunting an animal may be tiresome but necessary, so endorphins are secreted during exertion to numb the discomfort induced by lactic acid production in the muscles. Collaboration makes it easier to kill animals while others set traps.

Dr Cohen wanted to see if combining exercise and collaboration would heighten the effect. One of the study’s co-authors, Robin Ejsmond-Frey, rowed for Oxford and thought it would be a good activity to study. For one thing, it is easy to spot a crew that is not well synchronised. Secondly, ergometers (machines on which rowers train) provide data on the power exerted on each stroke. And it can be rather painful so the endorphins should be out in droves.

The researchers got 12 members of Oxford’s heavyweight squad to row on machines in four 45-minute sessions over two weeks. In two sessions they rowed in complete isolation and in the others in groups of six, perfectly synchronised. Immediately following each session their endorphin levels were tested. Because endorphin levels can only be measured directly through an invasive lumbar puncture—unfeasible, even for notoriously pain-hungry oarsmen—the researchers used a readily accepted proxy: they deduced pain tolerance, and hence endorphin levels, by gradually tightening a cuff around each rower’s arm. When he said “now” they stopped squeezing and noted the pressure.

As expected, the rowers’ pain thresholds were significantly higher following the group sessions. This was despite nearly identical power outputs in all four tests and efforts to control for possible confounding variables, such as the time of day.

The athletes may be rewarding themselves for their collaboration. Whether heightened tolerance is due specifically to rowing synchronously remains unclear. Data from other studies suggest that co-ordinated physical exercise can heighten social bonds (as in military training). The reverse may also be true. As the rowers had been teammates for nearly a year it is possible that the mere presence of friends explains the observed effect. The researchers are keen to replicate the study to test for such things. Meanwhile, solitary joggers might want to take along a friend or two.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: The man who invented exercise

The man who invented exercise

By Simon Kuper

Published: September 11 2009 16:24 | Last updated: September 12 2009 03:43

In the early years after the second world war, health researchers in Britain noticed a curious epidemic: people had begun dying of heart attacks in unprecedented numbers. Nobody knew why, and so a scientist in London named Jerry Morris set up a vast study to examine the heart-attack rates in people of different occupations – schoolteachers, postmen, transport workers and more.

Morris is today a neat, bird-like man who uses a cane to get around. He turns 100 next May but still regularly makes his way to his poky little office at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It is here that he describes the day he saw the data that changed medicine. “The very first results we got were from the London busmen,” says Morris, in ­Glaswegian tones undimmed by seven-odd decades in London. “And there was a striking difference in the heart-attack rate. The drivers of these double-decker buses had substantially more, age for age, than the conductors.”

The data were so telling because drivers and conductors were men of much the same social class. There was only one obvious difference between them. “The drivers were prototypically sedentary,” explains Morris, “and the conductors were unavoidably active. We spent many hours sitting on the buses watching the number of stairs they climbed.” The conductors ascended and descended 500 to 750 steps per working day. And they were half as likely as the drivers to drop dead of a sudden heart attack.

Morris found that bus conductors had fewer heart attacks than sedentary drivers

Today, almost everyone understands that physical exercise can help prevent heart disease, as well as cancer, diabetes, depression and much else besides. But on that day in 1949 when Morris looked at the bus data, he was the first person to see the link. He had inadvertently – “mainly luck!” – stumbled on a great truth about health: exercise helps you live longer.

That’s a truth even more relevant in 2009 than it was in 1949, because so few of us now perform vigorous physical tasks as part of daily life. If present generations are going to live longer, we must exercise. But if that depends on us getting on rowing machines in our spare time, it won’t happen.

Morris is not simply a man with a mission – he is a man with several missions. But since reading those numbers about busmen, he has wanted to help everyone exercise more. Then we might live lives something like his.

Morris grew up in the lost world of the Southside of ­Glasgow “in a two-bedroom-and-kitchen house, father, mother and three boys”, he recalls. “We were next door to a slum street. I still remember the screaming women on Friday night and Saturday night, when they were beaten by their drunk husbands. As you can imagine, I have a contact with social inequalities and with poverty that most of my colleagues know from the literature.”

He began exercising in early childhood. “My father used to take me on a four-mile walk from Glasgow once a week, when I was a schoolboy. We used to aim to do the four miles in an hour. If we did that OK, I got an ice-cream. If we did it in even a minute less, I got a choc-ice.

“Many years later, when I became interested in these things, I challenged him, and he had no idea where he got this four miles an hour from. I was eager for a quote, you see. And he couldn’t produce it. Except, ‘It’s always been a habit.’”

Morris warbles a line from a song: “‘What comes naturally…’ This is from one of my favourite musicals. ‘Na-tu-rally.’ It’s probably from Guys and Dolls.”

In Morris’s own words, he always was a “do-gooder”. He once went to his local Labour MP to volunteer for campaign work, but was rejected on the grounds of being 12 years old. He joined Labour aged 16 in 1926, and remains a due-paying member, despite breaking with the party over the Iraq war. “I remember writing to Blair: ‘How many of your cabinet have even seen the Blitz?’ None, is the answer. I was in London during the Blitz. Since 2003, I have voted Green.”

But he remains obsessed with the old Labour issue of inequality in health. From the neat paper trays that cover his office, he ferrets out one of his recent reports: “Minimum income for healthy living: Older people.” Morris’s office features none of the awards or pictures of handshakes that you see in many old men’s playrooms. Other than some obit­uaries of dear colleagues on his noticeboard, this is a working ­person’s office. He has even organised our lunch himself: a cheese-and-tomato sandwich, a slice of cake and an orange juice await me.

When Morris went into medicine, he took a novel approach: he wanted to know why different kinds of people got different diseases. Epidemiology, as this science is now called, barely existed then. In the 1930s, he became obsessed with juvenile rheumatism. His boss, a fashionable Harley Street doctor who also worked at Eton College, remarked that he never saw a case at Eton. Morris dryly calls this “a good clinical observation”. Only the poor got juvenile rheumatism.

He spent most of the war as a military doctor in India. “We ran a first-class hospital in the swamps of Assam in the middle of the summer, where you got boiled alive the moment you woke up.” Demobbed afterwards in London, he landed in a golden age of British medical research. During the war, researchers in Oxford had helped develop penicillin. After it, Morris’s political hero, Nye Bevan, created the National Health Service, the world’s first completely free healthcare system. And what epidemiology there was in the world was led by Britain. In 1950, another London health researcher, Richard Doll, published a study showing that smoking – and not ­Tarmac or car fumes, as many had suspected – was causing the new epidemic of lung cancer.

Only occasionally in conversation do you get a hint that Morris is a man from a bygone age. Usually it’s when he uses extinct language, such as “refectory” for restaurant, or “pumping ship” for going to the toilet. Otherwise, he keeps up so well that he could probably win current-affairs quizzes. Yet he says: “I feel like a displaced person, in many ways. On the one hand, I’m a 2009 person. On the other hand I’m a 1940s person.”

. . .

“The 1940s was the generation that said ‘Yes we can.’ You need a national health service? You go out and do it. Eating fruit and vegetables – in the 1940s, they would have got the best brains in nutrition, in retail, in agriculture, and said: ‘Go away to the Hebrides and don’t come back until you’ve got us a national programme that’s easy for everybody every day.’”

Morris’s own mission of the late 1940s was heart disease. He spent “interminable hours” reading the wonderful postmortem folios of the London Hospital in the East End for 1907 to 1949. But he still couldn’t understand why heart attacks were increasing.

“We were in the fortunate situation,” he says, “that very ­little research had been done on it. It might be hard for you to imagine a time when heart attack wasn’t a major preoccupation of everybody.” Today, heart disease is the most common cause of death in western countries.

“The only hunch I had was that this might be related to occupation. It was commoner in men than women, it was commoner as middle age advanced, and there were some hints in the national statistics of mortality that it might be connected in some way to occupation.” The busmen’s data were fascinating, and the sample size was thousands of men. But Morris didn’t treat it as proof of anything. In what he has called “one of the tensest moments of my professional life”, he had to wait for data to arrive for other occupations. Finally, he got the figures for postal workers. “It was strikingly similar!” he says. The postmen who delivered the mail by bike or on foot had fewer heart attacks than sedentary men who served behind counters or as telephonists and clerks. It was true: exercise prevented heart disease.

And yet Morris sat on his data for years. If there were flaws in his theory, he was determined to find them before anyone else could. “We set about destroying this observation,” he says. “We brought in outside people with no blood in their veins, no interest, to destroy it.” But they couldn’t. His paper (“Coronary heart-disease and physical activity of work”) finally appeared in The Lancet in 1953. His hypothesis, as he still called it, was greeted with general disbelief. What could exercise possibly have to do with heart attacks? True, there had always been a vague belief that exercise was good for the soul. Mens sana in corpore sano (“a healthy mind in a healthy body”), the Roman poet Juvenal had written nearly two millennia before Morris, possibly with satirical intent, and the Victorians fetishised team spirit and muddy playing fields. But before Morris, nobody knew that exercise stopped people dying.

A 1950s office worker smoking at work

Even he had no idea how exactly the mechanism worked. Only after his paper appeared did the physiologist Henry Taylor sit him down for a solid day in a Washington hotel room and, in Morris’s words, “schoolboy-taught me the physiology of exercise”. Morris thinks the essential story is simple: “Exercise normalises the workings of the body.” Humans were meant to keep active.

With hindsight, his London bus drivers inhabited one of the first societies on earth where exercise was ceasing to be part of daily life. Technology was letting people grow slothful. Even in the 1950s, Morris foresaw that when poor countries developed, they would have the same problems. He remembers warning then: “Their time will come to develop these diseases, and not to make the mistakes that we made, eg a lack of exercise, eg smoking, eg our lousy diets. Of course, nobody paid any attention.” Today, India has the world’s worst diabetes epidemic, and in parts of rural Kenya, the prevalence of angina has reached levels found in inner-city Glasgow.

. . .

Clearly, if modern humans were going to exercise, it would have to be in their spare time. But would they? After his initial studies of occupations and heart attacks, Morris embarked on a large-scale study of British civil servants, to find out whether they did.

This was in the days before computers. Morris remembers: “I think of a room in this school, with the floor consisting of piles of documents. Men of this age, men of that age, men doing this kind of exercise or that. Going through all of these documents to extract the cyclists, then going through all the cyclists to extract those who cycle to work. Three very respectable ladies would spend days and days, and another lady would check they were not cutting corners. Changing a hypothesis now, in the computer age, is a matter of a twiddle on the knobs. Changing a hypothesis when we were doing important work was a major enterprise.”

Because the civil servants in his study were middle-class British males, 91 per cent were gardeners. “It’s what keeps us sane,” they repeatedly told Morris’s team. Morris had thought gardening would protect them from heart disease. It turned out not to. Only vigorous exercise, such as swimming or playing football, was enough.

These findings were made in an era when many British adults got no exercise beyond lighting cigarettes. Morris, however, applied all the new epidemiological findings to himself. Long a “stress smoker”, he read Doll’s studies and quit cigarettes even before Iain Macleod, the health minister, held the famous press conference in which he confirmed Doll’s findings while chain-smoking throughout. Morris also began to jog. “I was the first person to run on Hampstead Heath, in the 1960s. Every Sunday morning, if the weather was at all possible, I took off my coat, and my little boy carried my coat, I took off my jacket and my little girl carried my jacket, and I ran for 20 minutes. People thought I was bananas.”

Morris has been a habitual exerciser for many decades. “It’s the only way in which I feel entitled, as an old buffer, to give advice to people. I’m constantly being asked: ‘Your long life, what would you advise?’ and so forth. To start telling other people what to do – I’m very reluctant. Except on exercise, where to a large extent I feel it’s what I’ve done myself that’s contributed to longevity. For decades I had a pulse-rate of 52.” Even today, Morris is often to be found shuffling up and down stairs at the London School.

Since he discovered exercise, medical researchers have established that it is good not just for the heart but for almost everything. “Exercise is a universal for health,” Morris likes to say. By now, most people have got the message. Some of them even exercise. Did Morris improve the world by encouraging the habit? “That’s a very generous qualification.”

Surely he got people to exercise more?

“I suppose so. And failed in many respects with my own friends.”

Morris: ’I’m a work addict. It’s an obsession, a compulsion. Now, that’s a happy way of getting into old age’

Morris is not a man who likes to waste time celebrating himself. When friends planned a great academic party for his 90th, he was very anxious that it should be a proper scientific conference, and not just a bunch of people in smart clothes standing up and saying what a good chap he was. But when he discusses the limited take-up of exercise he is being frank, not humble. It frustrates him hugely. The key issue is not individual will, he insists. “It’s got to be a joint effort between the government and yourself.”

He uses his own example: until his mid-90s, he was a habitual swimmer (he stopped in part because he was embarrassed by people rushing over to help him out of the pool). And, “well, swimming means there must be pools”. Governments need to build pools and bike paths, and pedestrianise city centres. In 1994, Morris wrote a paper arguing that “physical activity could be today’s ‘best buy’ in public health for the west.” Hardly anybody listened. Now western countries spend growing fortunes curing their obese and inactive citizens. Already 10 per cent of the NHS’s budget goes towards diabetes.

“For the first time in history,” says Morris, “the mass of the population has deliberately got to take exercise. It’s a new phenomenon, which is not appreciated.” For decades he has tried to persuade governments to make exercise easier. He was involved in the pioneering English National Fitness Survey of 1990, which found that half of women aged 55 to 64 could not comfortably walk a mile. These people were in effect disabled. The government ignored the report. Since then, British exercise levels haven’t changed much. His voice becomes high-pitched with outrage: “Just imagine, what historians in the future are going to say about the way we’ve allowed this epidemic of childhood obesity. ‘Disgrace’ is a sort of mild word.”

He’s not about to stop pushing governments now. “Unfortunately,” he tries to look sorrowful, “I’m a work addict. It’s an obsession, a compulsion. I don’t think it’s a disease. Now, that’s a happy way of getting into old age. It’s better than an alcohol addict or – are there womanising addicts in old age? They must have a tough time.”

He has two big ambitions for government: “On the one hand, for the first time, to have a serious programme on health inequalities. Not a large programme, or a complicated programme or an ambitious programme, I mean the word ‘serious’.” Second, he wants government to help the new, giant cohort of old people to exercise.

To Morris, none of this is utopian. All you need to achieve it is the spirit of the 1940s. He’s not sure any politician has it now, though – perhaps not even his new hero, Barack Obama. “This phrase, ‘Yes we can’, comes up much less nowadays, doesn’t it?” he grumbles.

He ushers me out. A car – his family won’t allow him to use public transport any more – is arriving to take him home. There is work to be done, experts to call, e-mails to send, an exercise bike to ride, books to order, pupils to mentor (he micromanaged my eating of my sandwich), governments to push, novels to read.

In a short memoir published this year, Morris quotes Philip Roth’s Everyman: “Old age is not a battle but a massacre.” The line was widely received as a beautiful restatement of an ancient truth. But Morris writes: “Is he not plain wrong?”

Simon Kuper is an FT writer based in Paris

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans

September 9, 2009

Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans

By SAMANTHA STOREY

ARMED with kittens of molded rice and sweet potato flowers, Sheri Chen took aim at her 2-year-old daughter, Lucy — a picky eater.

“I have to make her food look like something she recognizes,” said Ms. Chen, 42, a stay-at-home mother in San Leandro, Calif. “If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she’ll eat it.”

With cookie cutters Ms. Chen makes her daughter star-shaped vegetables; and with decorative skewers, a plastic top hat and pieces of nori (dried seaweed), cherry tomatoes become smiley faced, mustachioed creatures.

Her ruse includes assembling each meal in her version of a bento box, a Japanese lunch box, decorated with cute cartoon characters.

It might seem like silly kids’ stuff, but that sense of fun has helped make bento boxes — obentos as the Japanese call them — increasingly popular with grownups in the United States, too.

For dieters, they are an eye-popping form of portion control. Artistic preparation of ingredients can act as a pleasant distraction for health-conscious parents. For others, bentos are a way to make lunch pretty or indulge their love of things Japanese.

In Japan, compact, compartmented bento boxes are traditionally filled with rice, pickled vegetables and fish or meat. Japanese mothers take pride in their obentos and hope they outshine those of other mothers, said the Japanese cookbook author Hiroko Shimbo.

“Obento making is a kind of cult,” she said.

It’s approaching cult status in the United States. On Saturday in Central Park, as part of its Crossing the Line festival, the French Institute Alliance Française will be handing out bento boxes with components made by some top French and American chefs — including Inaki Aizpitarte, Pascal Barbot, Alexandre Gauthier, Michel Bras, David Chang and Wylie Dufresne.

On a more plebian level, Amazon.com said sales of the boxes and accessories like egg molds, rice shapers, plastic skewers shaped like animals or flowers have been growing.

But toothache-inducing cuteness is not the only appeal.

Jordan Smith, 20, a junior majoring in East Asian studies and political science at Yale University, started making bento boxes in high school in Port Orange, Fla.

“I was on the football team,” Mr. Smith said, “so I tried to have a balanced diet and eat healthy as much as possible.” He would group protein, rice and vegetables. “I would usually use snap peas, tomatoes, carrots; basically things that were relatively colorful and not too bland tasting.”

He endured a bit of ridicule — “like, look at that white person pretending to be Japanese” — but that didn’t stop him.

“Japanese culture here is getting more popular by the day,” he said.

He’s still making bento boxes, but now they’re mainly a way to save money by making his own lunch.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, a quality-assurance engineer from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day.

So in June she started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

“If I had to price out all my ingredients,” Ms. Littlejohn said, “each box would probably cost $2.”

She likes to find artistic ways to present the food.

One of her recent boxes included a multihued medley of halved figs, curried eggplant, green leaf lettuce and sliced purple carrots.

“I don’t have time to break out the art supplies in my drawer,” Ms. Littlejohn said. “Every evening when I pack our lunches, I get this creative outlet. And if I don’t do something artistic, I might implode.”

Creativity matters as much as taste and nutrition to Jason Miller, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of South Florida.

“It doesn’t hurt to add a funny element as well,” Mr. Miller, 28, said. He recently made onigiri, triangles of sticky rice with various fillings. “Instead of leaving them plain, I cut nori — seaweed — in strips and made the onigiri into sumo wrestlers.” Artistry is what differentiates a bento box from a plastic container of leftovers, said Makiko Itoh, 46, who lives outside Zurich and runs the blog justbento.com, filled with how-to’s, recipes and discussion forums.

“Food presented attractively looks more appetizing, since we eat with our eyes as much as our taste buds and stomachs,” said Ms. Itoh, who was born in Japan but lived for a while in New York. “That’s emphasized more in Japanese cuisine and culture perhaps than in other cuisines.”

She said bentos often reflect the Japanese belief that each meal should have five colors — a version of the food pyramid. It helps people remember to vary their food, especially since the most colorful foods are usually fruits and vegetables.

“You can apply that to any lunch combination,” she said. “For example, sliced bread (let’s call that white, even if you use whole wheat) with peanut butter or cold cuts (brown), a green salad (green) with red peppers and cherry tomatoes (red) and a banana (yellow).”

A balance of flavors, textures and cooking methods also matters, she said.

Sheri Lindquist saw bentos as a healthy choice for her five sons and her husband after he had triple-bypass surgery. “I don’t make them bento lunches all the time,” said Ms. Lindquist, 48, who lives in Denair, Calif. “But if there is something especially yucky or healthy or new I do try to present it in a more fun format.” Like breaded spinach balls with carrot ears and faces.

Acquiring accessories like plastic giraffe picks or star-shaped nori punches, however, proved challenging for Ms. Lindquist, as most of the boxes and tools were sold only in Japan. So in March 2008 she began iloveobento.com, an online bento box store.

Another bento blogger, Jennifer McCann, began veganlunchbox.blogspot.com on her son’s first day of school in 2005.

She made him sushi for lunch in a bento box from laptoplunches.com, which sells Americanized bento boxes with lidded compartments for items like yogurt or dips like ketchup. She took a picture of it and posted it.

“I thought it might give a lot of vegan moms inspiration for other lunches besides PB and J, “ said Ms. McCann, 38, who lives in Kennewick, Wash.

Within months she was getting thousands of page views a day of the boxes she was making, she said. She’s since published “Vegan Lunch Box” (Da Capo Press, 2008) and “Vegan Lunch Box Around the World” (Da Capo, 2009), which includes recipes for a Japanese tiger bento, Caribbean plantain wraps and Indonesian tempeh.

Her son, James, now 11, has outgrown the boxes and no longer takes the bentos to school. “He wants his lunch to be totally normal now, like everyone else,” she said.

Making lunches look cute for children is an art called kyaraben in Japan.

But some bento-ists think cute takes too much time.

Deborah Hamilton, 40, who writes the blog lunchinabox.net, makes boxes for her husband and 4-year-old son of, for instance, tamales, broccoli florets, cherry tomatoes and a strawberry. “You can make these as intricate or fancy as you like,” she said, “or you can make them plain and simple. You don’t have to get all kinds of Martha with it. My regular bento takes 10 to 15 minutes, maximum.”

Ms. Itoh, the author of justbento.com, said the boxes, about the size of a fat turkey sandwich, let her control her portions and helped her lose 30 pounds.

“Generally speaking, for a tightly packed Japanese-style bento, the number of milliliters that a box can hold corresponds roughly to the number of calories it holds,” she wrote on her blog.

Crystal Watanabe, 30, an administrative assistant in Honolulu, used bento portion control when she began a Weight Watchers program in 2007. She lost 22 pounds and wrote about her experience on her blog, aibento.net (Adventures in Bentomaking).

The blog got her involved in the bento community on the photo-sharing site Flickr.com.

“We post pictures and people take ideas from each other,” Ms. Watanabe said. “It’s really a very creative community and fun. Everyone is so supportive.”

Ms. Chen, in San Leandro, one of the more prolific contributors to the photo pools, can be a little wilder when making bentos for Lucy’s brother, Koa, 6, who, unlike his sister, is not finicky.

“He even eats the lettuce I put in his boxes as garnish,” she said.

A recent lunch box for him included teriyaki salmon with peapods, two kinds of sweet potato and golden beet “maple leaves.” On the side: skewered purple carrot discs and a tomato made to look like a frog man. For dessert: a strawberry, champagne grapes, blackberries and a litchi.

“I am not a gourmet cook,” Ms. Chen said, “but when you put anything in a bento box it looks nice.”

Where to Get Boxes and Supplies

BENTO & CO Bentoandco.com (French language site, ships from Japan).

BENTO CRAZY Bentocrazy.ecrater.com.

FROM JAPAN WITH LOVE From-japan-with-love.com (ships from Japan).

I LOVE OBENTO Iloveobento.com.

JAPAN CENTRE Japancentre.com (ships from England).

J BOX Jbox.com (ships from Japan).

KINOKUNIYA 1073 Sixth Avenue (41st Street), (212) 869-1700.

LAPTOP LUNCHES Laptoplunches.com.

BOOKS: “501 Bento Box Lunches: 501 Unique Recipes for Brilliant Bento” (Graffito Books, 2009) and “Vegan Lunch Box Around the World” by Jennifer McCann (Da Capo, 2009).

Sheri Chen, 42, of San Leandro, Calif., fills her version of bento boxes for her children, assembling each meal in a Japanese lunch box decorated with cute cartoon characters. That sense of fun has helped make bento boxes increasingly popular with grownups in the United States, too.

"I have to make her food look like something she recognizes," said Ms. Chen, referring to her daughter, Lucy. "If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she'll eat it."

Ms. Chen's children, Lucy and Koa.

 

Deborah Hamilton, 40, who writes the blog lunchinabox.net, makes boxes like this one for her husband and 4-year-old son.

 

Another one of Ms. Hamilton's creations. "You can make these as intricate or fancy as you like," she said, "or you can make them plain and simple."

Creativity matters as much as taste and nutrition to Jason Miller, 28, a graduate student at the University of South Florida. The bento he created at far left includes onigiri, triangles of sticky rice with various fillings.

Aster Sentiati goes by the name "bentomom" on the photo-sharing site Flickr.com, where she posts photographs of the bentos she makes for her children, like this one at left.

Another one of Ms. Setiati's bentos. 

A balance of flavors, textures and cooking methods matters in assembling a bento, said Makiko Itoh, who runs the informational blog justbento.com. At left, a bento by Ms. Setiati.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day. She started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day. She started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: Wiggling Their Toes at the Shoe Giants

August 30, 2009

Wiggling Their Toes at the Shoe Giants

By AMY CORTESE

TODD BYERS was among more than 20,000 people running the San Francisco Marathon last month. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he might have blended in with the other runners, except for one glaring difference: he was barefoot.

Even in anything-goes San Francisco, his lack of footwear prompted curious stares. His photo was snapped, and he heard one runner grumble, “I just don’t want the guy without shoes to beat me.”

Mr. Byers, 46, a running coach and event manager from Long Beach, Calif., who clocked in at 4 hours 48 minutes, has run 75 marathons since 2004 in bare feet. “People are kind of weird about it,” he shrugs.

Maybe they shouldn’t be. Recent research suggests that for all their high-tech features, modern running shoes may not actually do much to improve a runner’s performance or prevent injuries. Some runners are convinced that they are better off with shoes that are little more than thin gloves for the feet — or with no shoes at all.

Plenty of medical experts disagree with this notion. The result has been a raging debate in running circles, pitting a quirky band of barefoot runners and researchers against the running-shoe and sports-medicine establishments.

Vibram, with its FiveFingers line, is challenging the traditional idea of a running shoe.

It has also inspired some innovative footwear. Upstart companies like Vibram, Feelmax and Terra Plana are challenging the running-shoe status quo with thin-sole designs meant to combine the benefits of going barefoot with a layer of protection. This move toward minimalism could have a significant impact on not only running shoes but also on the broader $17 billion sports shoe market.

The shoe industry giants defend their products, saying they help athletes perform better and protect feet from stress and strain — not to mention the modern world’s concrete and broken glass.

But for all the technological advances promoted by the industry — the roll bars, the computer chips and the memory foam — experts say the injury rate among runners is virtually unchanged since the 1970s, when the modern running shoe was introduced. Some ailments, like those involving the knee and Achilles’ tendon, have increased.

“There’s not a lot of evidence that running shoes have made people better off,” said Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, who has researched the role of running in human evolution.

Makers of athletic shoes have grown and prospered by selling a steady stream of new and improved models designed to cushion, coddle and correct the feet.

In October, for example, the Japanese athletic-shoe maker Asics will introduce the latest version of its Gel-Kinsei, a $180 marvel of engineering that boasts its “Impact Guidance System” and a heel unit with multiple shock absorbers. Already offered by Adidas is the Porsche Design Sport Bounce:S running shoe, with metallic springs inspired by a car’s suspension system. It costs as much as $500.

Some question the benefit of all that technology. Dr. Craig Richards, a researcher at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Newcastle in Australia — and, it should be noted, a designer of minimalist shoes — surveyed the published literature and could not find a single clinical study showing that cushioned or corrective running shoes prevented injury or improved performance. His findings were published last year in The British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Other experts say that there is little research showing that the minimalist approach is any better, and some say it can be flat-out dangerous.

“In 95 percent of the population or higher, running barefoot will land you in my office,” said Dr. Lewis G. Maharam, medical director for the New York Road Runners, the group that organizes the New York City Marathon. “A very small number of people are biomechanically perfect,” he said, so most need some sort of supportive or corrective footwear.

Nevertheless, a growing number of people now believe in running as nature intended — and if not barefoot, then as close to it as possible. They remain a tiny segment of the population — some would say fringe. But popular training methods like ChiRunning and the Pose Method that promote a more “natural” gait, as well as “Born to Run,” a best-selling new book about long-distance running by Christopher McDougall, have helped spur interest.

Proponents of this approach contend that naked feet are perfectly capable of running long distances, and that encasing them in the fortress of modern footwear weakens foot muscles and ligaments and blocks vital sensory input about terrain.

“The shoe arguably got in the way of evolution,” said Galahad Clark, a seventh-generation shoemaker and chief executive of the shoemaker Terra Plana, based in London. “They’re like little foot coffins that stopped the foot from working the way it’s supposed to work.”

The big shoe companies are clearly paying attention to the trend. Nike was first to market with the Nike Free, a flexible shoe for “barefootlike running” with less padding than the company’s typical offerings. It was introduced in 2005 after Nike representatives discovered that a prominent track coach to whom they supplied shoes had his team train barefoot.

But some in the industry are critical of the barefoot push. Simon Bartold, an international research consultant for Asics, said advocates of barefoot running “are propagating a campaign of misinformation.”

SPEND some time in Concord, Mass., and you might catch a glimpse of a fit 51-year-old man in a pair of funny-looking socks running down the bucolic streets.

 

Tony Post, chief of Vibram North America, in the company's thin rubber running shoes. He says the industry is due for a shake-up.

That would be Tony Post, the president and C.E.O. of Vibram USA, on a lunchtime run. And those socks? They’re actually thin rubber “shoes” with individual toe pockets. Called Vibram FiveFingers, they’ve been selling briskly to runners and athletes looking to strengthen their feet and sharpen their game.

When Vibram, an Italian company known for its rugged rubber soles, designed the FiveFingers a few years ago, company officials figured that they would appeal to boaters, kayakers and yogis. Instead, the shoes, which sell for $75 to $85, caught on with runners, fitness buffs and even professional athletes: David Diehl, the New York Giants tackle, trains in them.

Mr. Post, a shoe industry veteran, said he believed that the business was poised for a shakeup. “It used to be all about adding more,” he said. “Now, we’re trying to strip a lot of that away.”

Strange as they look, the FiveFingers shoes hark back to a simpler time. Humans have long run barefoot or in flat soles. Professor Lieberman’s research suggests that two million years ago, our ancestors’ ability to run long distances helped them outlast their prey, providing a steady diet of protein long before spears and arrows. More recently, at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Abebe Bikila, an Ethiopian runner, caused a stir when he ran the marathon barefoot and won.

Things changed in the early 1970s, when Bill Bowerman, a track coach turned entrepreneur, created a cushioned running shoe that allowed runners to take longer strides and land on their heels, rather than a more natural mid- or forefoot strike. Mr. Bowerman and his business partner, Phil Knight, marketed the new shoes under the Nike brand, and the rest is history.

At the same time, millions of Americans began taking up running as a pastime. Those twin trends ushered in a golden age of biomechanics research. “There was a lot of concern about injuries because of the boom,” said Trampas TenBroek, manager of sports research at New Balance. The logic, he said, was that “if you build a heel lift and make it thicker, you take stress off the Achilles’ tendon.”

Walk into a sports store today and you’ll see the results: shoes with inch-thick heels and orthotics designed to correct overpronation, supination and a host of other ills.

Mr. McDougall, the “Born to Run” author, ” said manufacturers, doctors and retailers were doing runners a disservice by pushing such shoes. “People are buying it thinking it’s going to do something for them, and it’s not,” he said.

Mr. McDougall’s book is centered on the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, known for epic 100-mile runs with nothing on their feet but strips of rubber. The book has become something of a manifesto for barefoot runners.

After suffering chronic foot pain and being advised by sports medicine doctors to give up running, Mr. McDougall tried thin-soled shoes. Now, he said, he runs long distances without shoes — or pain.

THAT seems to be a common experience among barefoot converts. “When people get it, it’s almost biblical,” said Mr. Clark at Terra Plana. His initial line of minimal shoes, the Vivo Barefoot, is intended for walking; a performance model, the $150 Evo, is due at year-end.

Sales of minimalist shoes, while still tiny, are growing at a rapid clip. Mr. Clark figures that he will sell 70,000 pairs of minimal shoes this year, double last year’s volume. The shoes have sold mostly online and through 10 Terra Plana stores worldwide.

Vibram says sales of its FiveFingers have tripled every year since they were introduced in 2006, and Mr. Post said he expects revenue of $10 million this year in North America alone.

Many professionals agree that while barefoot running may have some benefits, those who are tempted to try running barefoot — or nearly so — should proceed slowly, as they should with any other significant change to their running habits. They also say that more research is needed.

Sean Murphy, engineering manager for advanced products at New Balance, says that there have been many studies suggesting “that shoes can correct biomechanical abnormalities and risk factors, therefore minimizing the likelihood of injury.”

When asked for an example, Mr. Murphy pointed to a 2006 study by three doctoral students that found that wearing the appropriate type of running shoe for one’s foot could reduce the shock of impact or unwanted rotation of leg bones. The study did not address injury rates.

AMID all the controversy, barefoot running and natural gaits are the subject of intensive research across the shoe industry. Companies don’t want to miss out if it turns out to be more than just a fad.

At New Balance’s sports research lab in Lawrence, Mass., Mr. TenBroek and Mr. Murphy are studying the biomechanics of running barefoot and in soles of varying thickness, while designing a “lower profile” shoe.

Asics, too, sees promise in this area. “As technology improves, we will definitely go to a more minimal style,” Mr. Bartold said.

Those big companies could end up profiting from the movement — or they could have trouble getting on board.

Danny Dreyer, the founder of ChiRunning, which uses the tai chi principles of harnessing energy and core muscles to promote a more effortless way of running, said he had worked with a few shoe companies to help design minimalist shoes. In each case, he said, marketing and profit concerns trumped design: “Their profit and direction is based on ‘More shoe is better,’ ” said Mr. Dreyer, who is also a long-distance runner.

Mr. Bartold of Asics, which has not worked with Mr. Dreyer, said the industry had runners’ best interests in mind. “It’s all about trying to protect the athlete,” he said.

Nike describes the Free, its minimalist shoe, as a “training tool.” It offers models with varying degrees of cushioning; they are priced at $55 to $110.

“The key is to offer a range of options, because every runner has different needs,” said Derek Kent, a Nike spokesman. “If you want that sensation of barefoot running, there is the Free, but if you want a product with a little more cushioning and support, we have that, too.”

While Nike would not disclose detailed sales information, Mr. Kent said sales of the Free were growing at double-digit rates, with sales in Japan and China especially strong.

Curt Munson, co-owner of Playmakers, a running shop in Okemos, Mich., said that in his conversations with major shoe companies lately, “they see that they need to address this” but “they’re just not sure how much.” But, he said, they must be thinking, “If we say this is the best, then are we saying that what we’ve done before is not good?”

The back-to-basics movement is more than a fad, said Mr. Munson, who runs in FiveFingers. “Most people are not ready to run barefoot,” he said, “but I do think they are ready to go back to ‘less is more.’ ”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: Finally, the Spleen Gets Some Respect

August 4, 2009

Basics

Finally, the Spleen Gets Some Respect

By NATALIE ANGIER

As a confirmed crab apple who has often been compared to the splenetic Lucy Van Pelt character from Peanuts, I am gratified to learn that should my real spleen ever decide to vent in earnest, the outburst may just help save my life.

Scientists have discovered that the spleen, long consigned to the B-list of abdominal organs and known as much for its metaphoric as its physiological value, plays a more important role in the body’s defense system than anyone suspected.

Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School describe studies showing that the spleen is a reservoir for huge numbers of immune cells called monocytes, and that in the event of a serious trauma to the body like a heart attack, gashing wound or microbial invasion, the spleen will disgorge those monocyte multitudes into the bloodstream to tackle the crisis.

“The parallel in military terms is a standing army,” said Matthias Nahrendorf, an author of the report. “You don’t want to have to recruit an entire fighting force from the ground up every time you need it.”

That researchers are only now discovering a major feature of a rather large organ they have been studying for at least 2,000 years demonstrates yet again that there is nothing so foreign as the place we call home.

“Often, if you come across something in the body that seems like a big deal, you think, ‘Why didn’t anybody check this before?’ ” Dr. Nahrendorf said. “But the more you learn, the more you realize that we’re just scratching on the surface of life. We don’t know the whole story about anything.”

Dr. Nahrendorf, with Filip K. Swirski, Mikael J. Pittet and a dozen other colleagues, performed the initial studies using mice, but the scientists suspect the results will apply to humans as well.

Ulrich H. von Andrian, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved with the research, agreed that the findings were a surprise. “If one had to guess the source of these cells, one would have thought it likely that they were mobilized from the bone marrow rather than from the spleen,” he said. “The discovery adds another layer of complexity not previously associated with that organ.”

The latest work also sounds a cautionary note against underestimating a body part or dismissing it as vestigial, expendable or past its prime. In an accompanying essay, Ting Jia and Eric G. Pamer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center admit that “the spleen lacks the gravitas of neighboring organs” like the liver or the stomach “because we can survive without it.”

Spleens can rupture during contact sports, say, or in a motorcycle accident, at which point surgeons have no choice.

“It’s such a vascularized organ, and the risk of big-time hemorrhaging is so great, that if the spleen ruptures, it’s a surgical emergency,” said James N. George, a hematologist with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. “You have to remove it.”

The new findings in no way counter the necessity of excising a ruptured spleen, the researchers said, but they do suggest that the loss of the organ is more than a mere “inconvenience,” as it has often been depicted, and could help explain previous reports showing an enhanced risk of early death among people who have undergone splenectomies.

In one study that appeared in The Lancet in 1977, for example, researchers compared a group of 740 American veterans of World War II who had had their spleens removed as a result of battle injuries with a similar size sample of veterans who had suffered other war injuries but had kept their spleens. The splenectomized men, the researchers found, were twice as likely to die of cardiovascular disease as were the veterans in the control group. All of which means that despleening should be diligently guarded against, particularly among our little sports warriors, perhaps through the wearing of appropriate protective gear.

Researchers cite other cases in which organs were presumed to be so dispensable that they could be removed “prophylactically” — often with unfortunate outcomes. In recent years, for example, many older women undergoing hysterectomies have been advised to have their healthy ovaries removed at the same time, the rationale being: if you are past your childbearing years, why hang on to reproductive organs that might turn cancerous and kill you? Yet follow-up surveys have shown that women who underwent elective ovariectomy had a heightened risk of dying during a given study period, were more susceptible to heart disease and lung cancer and were twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease compared with women who had kept their ovaries. “Evolution has an edge on us,” Dr. Nahrendorf said. “I would be very careful about saying, ‘You don’t need this organ, get rid of it.’ ”

Another reason to esteem the spleen — a purplish, fist-size, five-ounce organ in the upper left quadrant of the abdominal cavity, just behind the stomach and under the diaphragm — is its illustrious medical and poetic history. Galen considered the spleen to be a source of one of the four bodily humors, specifically the black bile associated with irritable, melancholic cranks. In his poem, “Spleen,” Charles Baudelaire describes a young narrator so weary and despondent, unresponsive even to beautiful women and jesting men, that it is as if the “green waters of Lethe” fills his veins.

More recently, researchers determined that the spleen is like an elaborate wetlands, a Mississippi bayou for filtering and freshening the blood. In other organs, blood flows through an interconnected mesh of increasingly narrow arteries, veins and capillaries. The spleen, by contrast, has a so-called noncapillary circulatory system: as the blood flows in, it is dumped into puddle-like sinusoids, and to get back out it must squeeze between cells. That dumping and squeezing help filter out blood-borne parasites, aging blood cells too brittle for compression and the little oxidized pellets, the BB’s, with which red blood cells are often pocked. The spleen has often been called a graveyard for red blood cells, but it is more of a recycling center, for the iron and other components are plucked out of the cells and used to stock new hemoglobin cages.

Filtration, cannibalization, and now — serious monocyte cultivation. In the new study, the researchers began by looking at monocytes, the largest of the body’s white blood cells. “It was recognized that these cells are the major repair workers after a heart attack,” Dr. Nahrendorf said. “They remove dead muscle cells, they start rebuilding stable scar tissue, they stimulate the generation of new blood vessels.”

The cells make haste to cut and paste. “Within 24 hours after a myocardial infarction,” Dr. Nahrendorf said, “there are millions of monocytes” congregating around the broken heart. All of which would seem sensible, desirable, an excellent display of emergency preparedness, except that Dr. Nahrendorf and his principal colleagues were puzzled by one big unknown: Where did the rapid response team come from? The numbers circulating in the blood were simply too low. The researchers searched one organ after another, until they checked the spleen and found the monocytic mother lode. “The numbers there were huge, 10 times higher than what was in the bloodstream,” Dr. Nahrendorf said.

By the researchers’ reckoning, monocytes, like all blood cells, are born in the bone marrow and at some point migrate to the spleen, lured by cues yet to be identified. They sit and wait, a sessile bunch, but when aroused by such chemical signatures of damage as angiotensin, the cells surge forth without hesitation, a reaction the researchers hope someday to understand well enough to recapitulate at will. Hail to the chief, hail to the queen and hail to the monocytes residing in my spleen.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: Divorce, It Seems, Can Make You Ill

August 4, 2009

Well

Divorce, It Seems, Can Make You Ill

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Married people tend to be healthier than single people. But what happens when a marriage ends?

New research shows that when married people become single again, whether by divorce or a spouse’s death, they experience much more than an emotional loss. Often they suffer a decline in physical health from which they never fully recover, even if they remarry.

And in terms of health, it’s not better to have married and lost than never to have married at all. Middle-age people who never married have fewer chronic health problems than those who were divorced or widowed.

The findings, from a national study of 8,652 men and women in their 50s and early 60s, suggest that the physical stress of marital loss continues long after the emotional wounds have healed. While this does not mean that people should stay married at all costs, it does show that marital history is an important indicator of health, and that the newly single need to be especially vigilant about stress management and exercise, even if they remarry.

“When your spouse is getting sick and about to die or your marriage is getting bad and about to die, your stress levels go up,” said Linda Waite, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago and an author of the study, which appears in the September issue of The Journal of Health and Social Behavior. “You’re not sleeping well, your diet gets worse, you can’t exercise, you can’t see your friends. It’s a whole package of awful events.”

The health benefits of marriage, documented by a wealth of research, appear to stem from several factors. Married people tend to be better off financially and can share in a spouse’s employer health benefits. And wives, in particular, act as gatekeepers for a husband’s health, scheduling appointments and noticing changes that may signal a health problem. Spouses can offer logistical support, like taking care of children while a partner exercises or shuttling a partner to and from the doctor’s office.

But in the latest study, researchers sought to gauge the health effects of divorce, widowhood and remarriage in a large cohort of people over time.

Among the 8,652 people studied, more than half were still married to their first spouse. About 40 percent had been divorced or widowed; about half of that group were remarried by the time of the study. About 4 percent had never married.

Over all, men and women who had experienced divorce or the death of a spouse reported about 20 percent more chronic health problems like heart disease, diabetes and cancer, compared with those who had been continuously married. Previously married people were also more likely to have mobility problems, like difficulty climbing stairs or walking a meaningful distance.

While remarrying led to some improvement in health, the study showed that most married people who became single never fully recovered from the physical declines associated with marital loss. Compared with those who had been continuously married, people in second marriages had 12 percent more chronic health problems and 19 percent more mobility problems. A second marriage did appear to heal emotional wounds: remarried people had only slightly more depressive symptoms than those continuously married.

The study does not prove that the loss of a marriage causes health problems, only that the two are associated. It may be that people who don’t exercise, eat poorly and can’t manage stress are also more likely to divorce. Still, researchers note that because the effect is seen in both divorced and widowed people, the data strongly suggest a causal relationship.

One reason may be changes at the cellular level during times of high stress. In an Ohio State University study, scientists analyzed blood samples of people undergoing the stress of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease. The research focused on telomeres, which insulate and protect the ends of chromosomes; with aging, telomeres shorten and the activity of a related enzyme also declines.

Compared with a control group, the Alzheimer’s caregivers showed telomere patterns associated with a four- to eight-year shortening of life span. Dr. Waite said the stress of divorce or widowhood might take a similar toll, leading to chronic health and mobility problems.

None of this suggests that spouses should stay in a bad marriage for the sake of health. Marital troubles can lead to physical ones, too.

In a series of experiments, scientists at Ohio State studied the relationship between marital strife and immune response, as measured by the time it takes for a wound to heal. The researchers recruited married couples who submitted to a small suction device that left eight tiny blisters on the arm. The couples then engaged in different types of discussions — sometimes positive and supportive, at other times focused on a topic of conflict.

After a marital conflict, the wounds took a full day longer to heal. Among couples who exhibited high levels of hostility, the wound healing took two days longer than with those who showed less animosity.

“I would argue that if you can’t fix a marriage you’re better off out of it,” said Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, an Ohio State scientist who is an author of much of the research. “With a divorce you’re disrupting your life, but a long-term acrimonious marriage also is very bad.”

well@nytimes.com

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: An 11-minute workout programme

A simple set of exercises made in the 1950s has created a worldwide fitness phenomenon.

===

An 11-minute workout programme

By Angus Watson

Published: July 18 2009 01:36 | Last updated: July 18 2009 01:36

In the late 1950s a man named Bill Orban created a worldwide fitness phenomenon. He had been asked to build a workout programme for members of the Royal Canadian Air Force, for whom space and kit was limited. His solution was 5BX, or Five Basic Exercises, which required just 11 minutes of exercise every day (12 minutes for the female programme, XBX). If followed correctly, Orban claimed, 5BX could help anyone attain a decent fitness level in six to 10 months, then maintain it.

Though it was designed for pilots, 5BX found far wider favour, particularly among office workers. The 5BX handbook, Physical Fitness, sold 23 million copies in 13 languages. Today it is out of print, but a loyal band still swears by the 5BX ethos.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Pursuits - Nov-24

I discovered Royal Canadian Air Force exercises last year, while interviewing people about their health regimes. Two very different people – 66-year-old Geoffrey Kent, chief executive of the luxury travel group Abercrombie & Kent, and 33-year-old singer Emily Maguire – both cited the RCAF regime as an easy way to keep fit. I was intrigued. Could an 11-minute workout from the 1950s really get you into shape and keep you there?

“Travelling 150 to 200 days a year, I need to exercise in tents and hotel rooms. So I do Canadian Air Force Exercises every morning,” says Kent. He learnt them in 1974, after hurting his back in a polo accident. “Somebody taught me the RCAF rudiments, and said that if I kept the exercises up, I’d never have a bad back again. They were right.” Not only has his back improved, but he hasn’t had a day off work ever since.

As a child, Maguire used to copy her grandparents’ RCAF exercises, much to their amusement. Years later, after a long illness, she took the drills up again: “They were easy and short enough to do while I was recuperating. Little and often is much better than going to the gym twice a week and pushing yourself for an hour.”

Pilots in the RCAF also kept 5BX going after they quit the flying life. Jim Freeman, a Leading Aircraftman in the RCAF from 1957 to 1962, told me he found “much more use for the exercises after I got out. They’re great for sedentary people tied to desks.”

The Five Basic Exercises are five minutes of stretches, sit-ups, back arches and press-ups, followed by a six-minute aerobic workout. There are 72 increasingly difficult levels, spread over the six charts into which the programme is split. The frequency of each exercise increases with each level, and exercises become harder with each chart. In chart one, for example, the “sit-up” is raising your head from a prone position. For chart two, you have to sit all the way up.

Speed of progress, and how far up the charts you go, depends on age. A 36-year-old man like me spends four days on each level until he reaches level B, chart three, where he stays.

I’ve now been doing the exercises every morning for a month. I started at the simplest, but it was too easy. Instead I leapt to the top of chart one (level A+), moving on to chart two four days later, where I’ve progressed by one level every four days. Chart two is taxing. The press-ups (14 this morning) are particularly demanding, but I have persevered, and went up a level today.

It’s been easy to accommodate and stick to the 11 minutes. I live in a small flat, but if you have enough space to lie down, you have room for 5BX. They could equally be done in a hotel room or office; they’re taxing enough to give you a little endorphin boost, but they don’t make you sweat.

Very quickly, 5BX has become another unexciting but beneficial chore in my routine, like brushing my teeth. Kent treats the exercises as a business meeting that’s in his diary every day – “And I never miss a meeting.”

But are the exercises doing any good? Lucy Wyndham-Read is an ex-Army personal trainer, specialising in personalised workouts in confined spaces: “This routine is fabulous. Each exercise targets so many muscle groups. It will definitely get you fit. It will be fantastic for whole-upper-body strength, good for bone strength to prevent osteoporosis, and will energise you every day.”

She has two caveats: first, you need to be careful with sit-ups which, done incorrectly, can hurt your back. Replace them with a basic crunch: lie on your back, knees up, and lift your head toward your knees without straining. And for exercises that call for you to lie on your stomach and lift your legs and torso, she recommends leaving your legs on the ground.

Does the Canadian military still use 5BX and XBX? The RCAF was dismissive: “This programme was long ago superseded by other fitness programmes, and all the individuals involved with it or who used it have long ago retired.”

The RAF, meanwhile, has no official equivalent. However, all members of staff have to complete a physical fitness test every six months. For a man of my age this would entail some running, 18 press-ups and 29 sit-ups. At top level of 5BX for a 36-year-old you do 19 “advanced” press-ups and 27 sit-ups. So 5BX would suit the modern RAF man very well.

For the rest of us, 11 minutes of exercise every morning will certainly leave us trimmer and healthier. However, as Geoffrey Kent points out: “You cannot think 5BX is a panacea for keeping fit. You’ve got to eat less too.”

pursuits@ft.com

“Physical Fitness” is available on the internet for around £18, or download it at www.gettingfitagain.com/5bx.php

Exercise 1 Stand with feet apart, arms up. Bend forward to touch the floor then stretch up and bend backward. Do not strain to keep knees straight.

Exercise 2 Lie on your back with feet 6in apart, arms at sides. Sit up just far enough to see your heels. Keep your legs straight. Your head and shoulders must clear the floor.

Exercise 3 Lie on your front, palms placed under your thighs. Raise your head and one leg, and repeat using alternate legs. Keep leg straight at the knee. Thighs must clear palms.

Exercise 4 Lie on your front, hands under shoulders, palms flat on floor. Straighten arms and lift upper body, keeping knees on the floor. Bend arms to lower body. Keep body straight from the knees, arms fully extended. Chest must touch floor to complete one movement.

Exercise 5 Stationary run. Lift feet approximately 4in off floor. Every 75 steps do 10 “scissor jumps”: stand with right leg and left arm extended backward. Jump up, and change position of arms and legs before landing. Arms reach shoulder eight.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Washington Post: The Next Course

The Next Course
Why Children Are Key Players in Michelle Obama's Food Policy Moves

By Jane Black
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 15, 2009

It was the ultimate photo op. Thirty-six smiling fifth-graders eating a healthful meal they'd cooked themselves at a picnic table in the First Lady's Garden. The story line was as simple as it was seductive: They came. They planted. They harvested. In three short months, Michelle Obama had accomplished what other food advocates could only dream about. Good food was no longer just virtuous. It was cool.

That was easy. Now what?

That's the question Obama's food policy team is working on this summer. The garden was always intended "as a jumping-off point for getting to what sometimes can be a complicated conversation about how we eat [and] the food choices we make," Obama policy director Jocelyn Frye said in an interview. But as it moves beyond the symbolic to those meatier matters, the White House is grappling with the very issues that have challenged the so-called good food movement for decades: How do you simplify and sell a new way of eating?

That isn't so easy. Food -- unlike, say, the space program -- is a fundamental and intimate part of everyone's life. It's culturally, politically and economically complicated. And there's a fine line between government involvement and paternalism: It's one thing to educate people about the importance of a healthful diet and quite another to tell them what to eat and where to buy it. The garden has been an unqualified success; on the first family's trip to Moscow last week, Russians were far more interested in Obama's garden than in her fashion sense. The challenge now is to craft a strategy to capitalize on Obama's newfound clout to improve school lunches and access to fresh fruits and vegetables and to make how we eat an integral part of the national health-care debate.

The main architects of the plan, along with Obama herself, are Frye and Sam Kass, an assistant chef who also serves as the White House food initiative coordinator.

Frye, 45, a Washington native, attended Harvard Law School with Obama. Kass worked as a personal chef for the Obama family in Chicago before joining the family in Washington. The 29-year-old oversees the garden and is often photographed in his chef's whites working with students. But Kass spends a significant amount of time in a suit in the East Wing and out and about in Washington. Last week, he sat in the front row alongside members of Congress as Vice President Biden announced the administration's new food safety proposals.

Given the success of the garden, it's no surprise that part of the East Wing strategy is to keep doing what they're doing: make fresh, healthful food seem accessible, even normal. In interviews and at public events, Obama makes a point of telling her own story. As a working mother, she often took her daughters out to eat several times a week or ordered a pizza for dinner. When the girls began to gain weight, she says, her pediatrician suggested she rethink how the family was eating. By making a "small change in our family's diet and adding more fresh produce for my family, Barack, the girls, me, we all started to notice over a very short period of time that we felt much better," Obama said at the harvest event.

To create that down-to-earth feeling, Obama has invited local schoolchildren, not celebrity chefs, to the garden. (Chez Panisse's Alice Waters, who lobbied for a White House garden for more than a decade, hasn't been asked to any of the official garden events, for example.) Obama also has made a point of appearing at soup kitchens and community health centers to talk about the importance of a healthful diet. And produce from the garden is donated to Miriam's Kitchen, which serves healthful meals to the homeless in Washington. "Accessibility and affordability has always been part of the message," Frye said. "It's why we partner with elementary school kids. You pierce through all the constituencies and say, 'It's about kids.' "

That might not sound like tactical brilliance. But Waters and other pioneers of the local-food movement have long struggled with perceptions of elitism. Critics mocked their breathless praise of farmstead cheeses or the ultimate roast chicken, painting them as out-of-touch, arugula-loving yuppies. "Michelle has used her position in a way that has made people realize this is a very simple, very American impulse," said Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA, which promotes small farmers and artisan producers. "What they're doing is normalizing something that should be normal."

"She has enormous influence," added Tony Geraci, director of food service at the Baltimore City Public Schools. Where funders used to ask for feasibility studies, he said, they now are looking to invest, even in the midst of an economic downturn. "In the last months, there has been a national awareness that these food issues are real."

Most appraisals of Obama's efforts have been positive. But she hasn't escaped criticism. In a May 31 Op-Ed in the New York Times, food writer Amanda Hesser chided the first lady for implying that cooking is a chore when she breezily admitted that she was happy to leave the cooking to White House chefs. "Terrific local ingredients aren't much use if people are cooking less and less," Hesser wrote. "Cooking is to gardening what parenting is to childbirth."

Frye and Kass counter that inspiring families to cook is part of the White House plan. Earlier this month, for example, Obama invited graduates of the Brainfood program, a nonprofit organization in Washington that teaches life skills through cooking, to help prepare for a White House luau and the Fourth of July celebration. Over the course of a week, 19 students shucked corn, washed lettuce and made strawberry tiramisu.

"The garden showed the step-by-step process of how food gets to the table, but the major event culminated in cooking and eating," Kass said. "We're really trying to highlight that it all leads to the table."

Kass also is working on a series of White House seasonal recipes, though it hasn't been decided how they will be distributed. A White House cookbook? A special Web site? The series "is going to be a bigger part of what we do," Kass said. "We are exploring new avenues to get real, practical recipes into the hands of mothers and fathers."

What the White House isn't doing is as significant as what it is. For example, though many advocates might wish it, the first lady has not championed local food. She has used the word -- "What I've learned is that if it's fresh and grown locally, it's probably going to taste better," she told local fifth-graders at the June harvest day -- but on the whole, Obama focuses on freshness and seasonality.

"Despite the fact that there's a huge local food movement, they haven't made it an issue," said Sam Fromartz, author of "Organic, Inc." "By keeping it vague, it becomes much more inclusive."

Nor will Obama stump for farm-to-school programs. It's a pet project of many sustainable-food activists who see them as a win-win because they create new markets for small farmers and increase the amount of fresh produce in schools. It is, Kass said, one small piece of the larger puzzle, but it is not a priority.

Indeed, a key part of the White House strategy is to stay focused. Food reformers are working to change agricultural subsidies, environmental regulations, nutrition standards and food labeling. The White House, Kass said, recognizes that all are important and interconnected. But to succeed, Obama is trying to highlight the issues that most directly affect children: "We're focusing on kids, even though food and health are issues we all face," Kass said. "We want to look at the process from how and what is grown to how it gets to our plates without going in a million directions."

Obama is taking off the month of August. But she will relaunch her efforts in earnest in September. That is back-to-school time and when the debate will heat up in Congress over funding for child nutrition programs including school breakfast and lunch. No specific events have yet been scheduled, but staffers say Obama will continue to try to link the personal to the political by gardening, cooking and eating with students.

"The more they can tell the story of what they're doing, the better it will be," said Slow Food's Viertel. "If they can let people see a family meal, if people see that the busiest man in the world takes time to sit down with his kids for dinner, that could have an incredible impact."

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

NY Times: Urban Farming, a Bit Closer to the Sun

June 17, 2009

Urban Farming, a Bit Closer to the Sun

By MARIAN BURROS

THIS summer, Tony Tomelden hopes to be making bloody marys at the Pug in Washington, D.C., with tomatoes and chilies grown above the bar, thanks to the city’s incentives for green roofs.

Mr. Tomelden, the Pug’s principal owner, says he’s planting a garden to take advantage of tax subsidies the city offers in his neighborhood if he covers his roof with plants.

“If I can do something in my corner for the environment, that seemed a reasonable thing to do,” he said. “Plus I can save money on the tomatoes.”

There won’t be bloody marys at P.S. 6 on New York’s Upper East Side, but one-third of its roof will be planted with vegetables and herbs next spring for the cafeteria. The school is using about $950,000 in city funds that it has put aside, and parents and alumni are providing almost a half-million dollars more.

“For the children, it’s exciting when you grow something edible,” said the school’s principal, Lauren Fontana.

Aeries are cropping up on America’s skylines, filled with the promise of juicy tomatoes, tiny Alpine strawberries and the heady perfume of basil and lavender. High above the noise and grime of urban streets, gardeners are raising fruits and vegetables. Some are simply finding the joys of backyard gardens several stories up, others are doing it for the environment and some because they know local food sells well.

City dwellers have long cultivated pots of tomatoes on top of their buildings. But farming in the sky is a fairly recent development in the green roof movement, in which owners have been encouraged to replace blacktop with plants, often just carpets of succulents, to cut down on storm runoff, insulate buildings and moderate urban heat.

A survey by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, which represents companies that create green roofs, found the number of projects its members had worked on in the United States grew by more than 35 percent last year. In total, the green roofs installed last year cover 6 million to 10 million square feet, the group said.

Steven Peck, its president, said he had no figures for how many of the projects involved fruits and vegetables, but interest is growing. “When we had a session on urban agriculture,” he said of a meeting of the group in Atlanta last month, “it was standing room only.” Mr. Peck said the association is forming a committee on rooftop agriculture.

Tax incentives have accelerated the plantings of green roofs, particularly in Chicago, which has encouraged green roofs for almost a decade. The Chicago chef Rick Bayless uses tomatoes and chilies he grows atop his restaurant Frontera Grill to make Rooftop Salsa.

New York State has subsidies both for roofs with succulents spread out over a thin layer of soil and for edible plants covering a smaller area. A proposed amendment to New York City’s tax abatement for some roof projects would include green roofs. Most roof gardeners aren’t in it for the money, though.

After her Lower East Side co-op refurbished the 1,000-square-foot roof of its six-floor walk-up, Paula Crossfield persuaded fellow board members to spend $3,000 to put a 400-square-foot garden on it. They built planters and paved part of the roof so people can walk easily among the plantings.

Ms. Crossfield, managing editor of the Civil Eats blog, about sustainable agriculture, is paying for the seeds and will do the harvesting, sharing the bounty with her neighbors. (She and her husband live on the top floor.)

In the process, she estimates she carried up 500 of the 1,500 pounds of soil they bought and put in planters.

“My decision to start a garden is an extension of my work,” Ms. Crossfield said. “Growing my own food helps me understand better what I write about: how food gets to our table, the difficulties it entails.” It’s not all about agricultural policy, she added.

“The bottom line,” she said, “is that I harbor a secret desire to be a farmer, and my way of doing that is to use what I have, which is a roof.”

Two weeks ago Ms. Crossfield transplanted seedlings from her apartment onto the roof: golden zucchini, oakleaf lettuce, brussels sprouts, butternut squash, watermelon, rainbow chard, cucumbers, nasturtiums, calendula, sunflowers, amaranth greens, tomatoes and herbs.

In San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, Maya Donelson has filled planter boxes with vegetables on a 900-square-foot patch of roof at the Glide Memorial Church. For the past year she has managed the Graze the Roof Project at the church’s Glide Center, a neighborhood social service provider.

The food goes to the center’s volunteers and children in the neighborhood who work in the garden one day a week and learn to cook what they grow.

“I’ve never had one kid who hasn’t wanted to get his hands dirty,” said Ms. Donelson, who studied architecture and environmental design. “They are willing to try anything if they see it growing and pull it out of the ground. We juiced the purple carrots and the kids drank that.”

Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit environmental organization, said it will help Alfred E. Smith High School plant a roof garden and has helped a company in Hunts Point put strawberry plants on its roof. (The owner likes strawberries, an official of the group said.)

One of the more ambitious projects is a 6,000-square-foot roof farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which will grow food for local restaurants and shops.

Ben Flanner, a transplanted Wisconsinite who’s running it, said he became fascinated with organic agriculture and was set to take an internship on a rural farm but then had a change of heart.

“I wanted to farm but I didn’t want to leave the city,” he said.

Mr. Flanner was lucky to find an environmentally aware company — Broadway Stages, a stage and lighting company — that wanted a green roof on one of its buildings. It paid to prepare the roof for planting and agreed to let him grow food on it. Mr. Flanner and his partner, Annie Novak, did the planting and will be able to keep all the profits from their organic vegetables.

“People are knocking on my door to buy the stuff,” he said. Andrew Tarlow, a partner in four nearby restaurants, including Marlow & Sons, has agreed to buy anything Mr. Flanner grows.

The roof cost $6,000 to prepare, according to Lisa Goode, who with her husband, Chris, owns Goode Green, a company that designs edible roof gardens. There are at least 1,000 seedlings planted in 16 beds, each about 60 feet long.

“A smaller roof would cost more per square foot,” she said. Mr. Flanner’s costs for the garden itself were less than $2,000, but Ms. Goode said it will take more than one roof for him to make a living.

“This is sort of a pilot to see if it can become a viable business model because he isn’t going to make any money from this,” she said. “If we can get the owner to do more roofs, he can then make a profit.”

Not long ago, edible rooftop gardeners were less likely to be thinking about sustainable food systems or the environment.

Lee Utterbach wanted to recapture summers on his grandmother’s farm. But there was no land around his house in the Mission district of San Francisco. So when he bought the building where he lives and runs a photo equipment rental shop, he turned the roof into a vegetable and flower garden. Since the roof slopes, all the planting was done along its perimeter. Some of it, like the rosemary, is so well established, it hangs over the front of the building.

Reaching the roof means a trip through the kitchen window, then up an incline. A small ladder takes visitors to his wife’s greenhouse and a hot tub, a deck , a composting toilet and the future guest room. In one area that his wife, Aly, describes as his “man cave,” Mr. Utterbach watches his 17-inch TV screen from a comfortable chair.

“I was probably eight or nine years ahead of the curve when I built this,” he said. “I just enjoy watering plants and digging in the soil.”

Peter Bergold, a neuroscientist who teaches at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, was also inspired by the past. Memories of the first asparagus and carrots he ate from a garden years before led him to start growing produce on the roof of his landmarked brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, six or seven years ago.

“That was my epiphany,” he said of the sweetness he was trying to recapture. “I assumed asparagus grew with a rubber band around them.”

Environmental awareness came slowly. “One of the things that got me interested,” he said, “was that between global warming and the thermal bubble of cities you can start things much earlier so you have a much longer growing season.”

Another benefit gardeners get from planting well above the ground is that they face fewer pests.

But roof gardeners also have to think about winds that can knock over tender vines. And while concentrated heat on top of city buildings can help tomatoes ripen, it also means more frequent watering, even if irrigation requires lugging watering cans up stairs.

Though rooftop gardens go back at least to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the modern green roof movement has made its way here from Europe, where for years government policies have encouraged or required green roofs.

The government benefits take into account the fact that gardening on the roof requires much more preparation than gardening on terra firma.

First, it must be determined whether the roof can support the weight of the soil, the plants and the water. It may need to be retrofitted. Barring that, gardeners can place planters around the perimeter, which is generally its strongest part.

The containers can be almost anything: ready-made planters; boxes made of reclaimed wood, old milk cartons, children’s wading pools. A screen at the bottom holds in a lightweight substance, like packing peanuts for bulk, topped with a barrier fabric so the soil can’t go through. Potting soil, mixed with ingredients to lighten it, is put on top.

When gardens are planted directly on the roof, a waterproof membrane is laid down first, followed by insulation and a root barrier. (A guide to roof gardening is available at baylocalize.org.)

All this work can be off-putting for landlords. Five years ago, Ms. Crossfield said, the owner of an apartment building on Sixth Avenue in the West Village told one of his tenants to get rid of a garden she had planted.

“He told the woman to take it off the roof,” she said, “because he didn’t see any benefit in it.”

That’s not so likely these days.

“Several years ago you might have seen a certain amount of resistance,” said Miquela Craytor, executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, “but now people are coming to us saying they want one.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Carrots are the new caviar

Excerpt: In recent years, however, some forward-thinking chefs, who believe that personal expression and creativity are more important than slavish devotion to symbolic luxury goods, have abandoned this antiquated approach. These chefs are seeking out the highest-quality ingredients, usually from their area, without regard to their place in the traditional fine dining canon. Combined with a deeply held belief in the transformative power of the cooking process, they are setting an example that, if it catches on, could change what we grow and eat, both in restaurants and at home.

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Carrots are the new caviar

By Daniel Patterson

Published: June 13 2009 01:47 | Last updated: June 13 2009 01:47

Chef David Patterson

Buried deep in the website of El Bulli, Ferran Adrià’s legendary restaurant in Spain, is a revolutionary declaration: “All products have the same gastronomic value, regardless of their price.”

What makes this statement groundbreaking is obvious to those who follow haute cuisine, a style of cooking traditionally based on a few select ingredients. Blame it on the pioneer of fine French restaurant cooking, Auguste Escoffier, or perhaps on our recently ended era of faux prosperity, but over the past several decades the menus of almost every expensive restaurant in the western world have become an endless parade of caviar, foie gras, truffles, lobster and filet mignon, often flown in from around the globe. These ingredients have become the Birkin bags of the culinary world, more important as cultural signifiers than as actual experiences.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Food & Drink - Nov-24

In recent years, however, some forward-thinking chefs, who believe that personal expression and creativity are more important than slavish devotion to symbolic luxury goods, have abandoned this antiquated approach. These chefs are seeking out the highest-quality ingredients, usually from their area, without regard to their place in the traditional fine dining canon. Combined with a deeply held belief in the transformative power of the cooking process, they are setting an example that, if it catches on, could change what we grow and eat, both in restaurants and at home.

In 2001, with the mad cow scare sweeping across Europe, chef Alain Passard decided to remove meat from the menu at L’Arpège, his vaunted Parisian restaurant. Drawing on produce grown on his own farms, he jettisoned foie gras in favour of carrots. It was an unprecedented decision for a top restaurant. At the time it was widely regarded as professional suicide. Instead, L’Arpège has thrived.

. . .

Passard, 52, has since retreated to a more conventional format (foie gras is back on his menu, along with caviar and turbot), but his move towards a vegetable-based cuisine had lasting effects. His influence can be seen in places as far-flung as Manresa in Los Gatos, California, where David Kinch’s inventive and delicious dishes are based mostly on vegetables grown on a farm connected to the restaurant. Jeremy Fox, who trained with Kinch, went on to become chef at Ubuntu in Napa Valley, a vegetarian restaurant attached to a garden that has become one of the most talked about eating establishments in the US.

“Plants grown from seeds adapted to their place, that’s the new caviar, the new luxury,” says Dan Barber, chef-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York. Barber was recently named America’s best chef by the James Beard Foundation, which promotes the culinary arts. Barber grows much of his own produce and raises his own meat on a farm next to the restaurant. He also stresses the importance of good cooking, including some of the techniques invented at El Bulli, to transform those impeccable ingredients into a cuisine informed by both the land and his personal point of view.

This close connection between what Barber grows and how he cooks can be seen in a recent dish that featured Crispino lettuce, an old, non-hybridised relative of iceberg. It’s a bright green, flavourful lettuce that grows slowly, so that the leaves form a tight, dense head. The texture reminded Barber of meat so he roasted it and served it as he would a steak, centred on the plate and surrounded with pickled vegetables, herbs and a broth of lettuce greens. It was a brilliant sleight of hand that referenced the familiar while delivering something new. This combination of compelling ingredients, cooking skill and new ideas is what makes his $125 (£75) tasting menu, comprised mostly of vegetables, utterly captivating and well worth the price.

The eye-wateringly versatile onion

Consider the humble onion, the most versatile and important vegetable in the kitchen. They provide sweetness and a subtle savoury quality. Even when they remain in the background, they quietly improve almost every preparation. Here are a just a few ideas:

Sweated: Cook sliced onions with a little butter or olive oil and salt over low heat, covered, stirring occasionally, until very tender, and then ...
● Add seasoned and browned meat, some sort of herb, a little water and perhaps some wine, and cook covered in a low oven until the meat is tender.
● Cook the onions over medium heat until any liquid is boiled off and purée in a blender with more butter or olive oil and a little vinegar. The softened fibres of the onions will break down into a silky smooth purée, making a sauce that goes with almost anything.

Grilled: Slice onions half an inch thick, season with olive oil, salt and pepper and cook until just tender, either in a pan or on a grill, and then ...
● Cook slowly and purée into an intensely flavourful sauce – sherry vinegar works well as a seasoning.
● Chop and mix with oil and vinegar to make a vinaigrette. Herbs, lemon, spices: almost anything works as a seasoning.

Pickled: heat one part vinegar to two parts water, season with salt and sugar to taste, bring to a boil and pour over thinly sliced onions. Let cool. This is great as an accompaniment to meats and fish or tossed in salads.

Restaurants such as L’Arpège and Blue Hill occupy the tiniest sector of food consumption but also the most visible. By creating associative value in certain ingredients, such as vegetables or unusual cuts of meat, the decisions they make can have a trickle-down effect on the market by stimulating demand. Monkfish and short ribs are examples of ingredients that were very inexpensive in the US until top chefs started putting them on their menus en masse. Pork belly, once thought of as peasant food, is now at home on the most elaborate tasting menus. The price of these products has increased dramatically and they are now commonly found in upscale retail markets as well.

If it seems a stretch to think that modern chefs, cooking for a few people in rarefied dining rooms, can have an effect on mainstream cooking, consider the story of René Redzepi. When his restaurant, Noma, opened in Copenhagen in 2003, the food in Denmark’s fine dining restaurants, like the products in its supermarkets, was based on expensive ingredients imported from other parts of Europe. The message to diners was that local ingredients weren’t as good. Redzepi, who trained at El Bulli and the French Laundry in California, rejected this thinking, fashioning native products such as musk ox, wood sorrel and wild juniper into an exhilarating, highly personal cuisine.

For those who suggest that it’s impossible to avoid using imported products in places such as New York or London, with their harsh, cold winters, Noma in northern Europe could serve as a counter argument. Redzepi and his team search the region for the best ingredients they can find, creating supply lines for many indigenous products that had never before been commercially available. Even during the darkest months they forage for wild herbs and mushrooms. They use local seafood, meat, dairy and root vegetables, and accompany the dishes with foods that they pickle, smoke and dry during the growing season. One dish, called “the potato field”, is comprised of small mead-glazed potatoes scattered across potato purée and dusted with malt “soil”, a triumph of imagination over a depleted winter larder.

Noma, which has two Michelin stars and was recently voted the number three restaurant in the world (after El Bulli and Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, in Berkshire) by Restaurant magazine, has influenced other chefs to reconsider their approach to cooking. Many Danish restaurants, some opened by chefs who trained at Noma, are now serving what has been dubbed the new Nordic cuisine, based on regional ingredients and characterised by lightness and pure flavours. The Danish government, inspired by Redzepi’s work, has created a project called New Nordic Food to help entrepreneurs develop local products such as birch beer, which can now be found in supermarkets there. From his tiny kitchen, Redzepi has helped to spark a resurgent native cuisine.

. . .

Revaluing ingredients – starting with the assumption that a potato or a carrot can taste as exciting as foie gras – is difficult in a high end kitchen. It requires more labour, more imagination, and more carefully sourced ingredients – mediocre foie gras will always seem more “worth it” than a mediocre carrot. It’s riskier as well, going against diners’ deeply ingrained expectations. But as many modern restaurants, such as Noma, have shown, the rewards can be considerable, providing more vibrant, compelling food and a closer emotional connection with their customers.

For the home cook, revaluing ingredients can lead not only to better food but, equally important in these difficult economic times, to a less costly way of eating. A few weeks ago, inspired by a friend’s wrong-headed claim that good food is always expensive, I made two meals for my wife and I for $12, using only local and organic ingredients. I bought a modest amount of beef back ribs, the least expensive meat I could find, from my favourite rancher and cooked it in a crock pot with heirloom beans, onion, carrot and dried chillies. I added sautéed mustard greens at the end and served it over brown rice. The meals were not only inexpensive, they were delicious, and they proved that quality versus affordability is a false debate. The choice is really between meat- or vegetable-centric meals, between ribeye and ribs. Knowing how to cook means it is possible to eat both well and inexpensively.

Cooking matters, because the worth of an ingredient is intimately tied to our ability to turn it into food. In the US and the UK, our collective inability to do little more than open a package or throw a steak on a grill skews our perception of the worth of an ingredient – ease of preparation determines value. This limits the kinds of ingredients we grow and cook with, making our food more wasteful, more expensive and less tasty.

Over and over I have heard from friends and colleagues that haute cuisine has no relevance to the real world. I disagree. At a time when environmental, health and economic concerns demand a widespread re-examination of how we feed ourselves, chefs should show by example that responsibility and pleasure are not at odds. The kind of cooking that happens in elite kitchens will never be practical at home, but modern chefs’ evolving attitude towards the value of ingredients and the importance of good cooking is. The same well-grown carrot that I turn into a complex interaction of temperatures and textures at my restaurant is just as delicious at home, where I cook it simply with a little water, salt and olive oil, something that any home cook can do well. All it takes is a few basic cooking techniques – and a willingness to reconsider what’s worth eating.

Daniel Patterson is the chef and owner of Coi restaurant in San Francisco

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Rowley Leigh on revolutionary cuisine

This is not the first food revolution. Many of us remember the re-evaluation of ingredients in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when chefs in France, rooted in a classical cuisine built on the traditional luxury signifiers (foie gras and truffles, lobster and crayfish, beef fillet and sole, all in a tsunami of cream and heavily reduced stock), decided to change focus – stripping away the trappings of the old gastronomy and marrying the luxury signifiers with more humble ingredients. This came to be known as nouvelle cuisine. Lobster was matched with chickpeas, foie gras with turnips and truffles with leeks.

That revolution did not last long. Chefs became incapable of featuring any ingredient without matching it with at least two more disparate ingredients. As chefs became increasingly competitive in a market craving novelty, the old luxury goods were thrown into the mix with reckless abandon. And as the trend trickled downwards, nouvelle cuisine was caricatured by the incompetent into a byword for small portions of rather silly food on rather large plates.

Little had changed until recently but now the game is up. With a worldwide recession forcing prices down and the increasing unsustainability of many luxury foods, chefs are having to get smarter. With any luck, they might get more realistic and start to realise that more does not mean better and that to produce three or four different dishes on one plate is just as much a symptom of excess as stuffing everything that moves with foie gras and truffles. Sooner or later, chefs will have to respect the ingredients they have and make the most of them. There is plenty of evidence to demonstrate the will to change. Chefs are increasingly sourcing their ingredients directly from producers and showing an increasing awareness of seasonality in their menus.

So Daniel Patterson’s mission comes at the right time and he makes strong points. Changing expectations of our cuisine – especially when we eat out in expensive restaurants – is a difficult path. The attempt to escape from a menu centred on meat and fish confounds diners and has most of the traditional pitfalls of old-fashioned vegetarianism. Alain Passard’s apostasy (having declared himself practically vegetarian, his current menu features lobster, foie gras, sweetbreads, lamb and chicken) is testament to the difficulty of the task and the reluctance of Parisian diners to fork out €300 on a menu that gives pride of place to carrots and beetroot.

Writing from London, I would suggest that the second part of the mission, to root a cuisine in its locality, is also problematic. Whereas it is eminently successful in California (as it should be in Cornwall, Provence or Sicily), I still wonder how those of us in the great metropolitan centres can produce a cuisine that does not gain strength from its access to international markets. Patterson gives us the heroic example of René Redzepi at Noma but one shudders at the thought of “the potato field” in the hands of lesser exponents.

I am tempted to follow George Orwell and suggest that all ingredients may be equal but, even in the current frugal climate, some may be more equal than others.

Rowley Leigh writes a weekly column on cookery

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

ST: A loaf affair

Sep 28, 2008

A loaf affair

Mr Oliver Lim, the manager of a human resource consultancy firm, started baking bread so he could feed his family nourishing food

By Huang Lijie

Cooking is a labour of love, especially for Mr Oliver Lim. Growing up, the owner of a human resource consultancy firm never had to get his hands dirty in the kitchen to enjoy a meal. The 41-year-old says: 'My housewife mother was a great cook. Her fried beancurd with fermented bean paste and cuttlefish porridge are family favourites.' So it was not until he started dating his then girlfriend, Glenda, who is now his wife, that he stepped into the kitchen. The impetus, he says, was not so much finding a way to her heart through her tummy. Rather, it was prompted by his frustration at having to queue for more than 30 minutes for sushi at Cold Storage in Ngee Ann City whenever she craved it. The father of a 12-year-old son and nine- year-old daughter says: 'There was a craze for the 50-cent sushi when it was first sold in a supermarket in the early 1990s. Previously, one could eat sushi only in restaurants. 'But I thought: How tough can it be to make sushi? It's just a piece of fish over a ball of rice. I can do it for her.' He had to eat his words later when he realised that there is more to sushi making than just slapping a piece of fish over sticky rice. He says: 'I bought seven cookbooks and pored over them for six months to figure out what was the right temperature to add vinegar to the cooked rice, and the correct technique of mixing it into the rice.' His persistence paid off and he became so good at making sushi that friends began asking him to teach them. As for other cuisines, he says he can master simple Chinese stir-fry dishes, although the cooking of family meals is usually left to his mother - who lives with them - or Glenda, 41, who is a housewife. Yet it is his passion for feeding his loved ones nourishing food that prompted him to get into baking bread. His interest started when his daughter was diagnosed with childhood nephrotic syndrome five years ago. The syndrome, which results in the swelling of limbs due to water retention, is the first sign of a disease that damages the blood-filtering units in the kidneys. To keep her condition in check, she had to take steriods. Determined to help ease her condition by making sure she ate right, Mr Lim enrolled in a nutrition certificate course at Singapore Polytechnic. It was there that he learnt that bread sold over the shelf might contain chemicals such as mould inhibitors and bread improvers to keep it fresh for longer and to help speed up the making process. He says: 'I didn't like the thought of my daughter consuming more chemicals than she needed to, and since bread is such a staple in my family's breakfast diet, I decided to bake my own bread.' Turning again to cookbooks, he began by baking loaves out of the only cooking equipment he had - stainless steel pots. However, the loaves always had a weird taste. So he bought a bread-making machine for $160 and used it regularly until it broke down after a year. While the machine was an efficient way to make bread, the loaves turned hard and chewy very quickly after baking. So instead of buying a replacement, he borrowed his mother's Kenwood mixer and invested in a $300 table-top oven before installing a $700 convection oven when he moved from his flat in Bukit Panjang to a three-room condominium in Choa Chu Kang in 2006. The baking enthusiast, who owns 15 bread baking cookbooks, is so serious about baking that he extracts his own yeast from the skin of organic blueberries. He also has a separate refrigerator to store his yeast cultures and fermenting dough for breads such as sourdough. While he loves baking bread, he does not make pastries or cakes. He says: 'I cannot bring myself to use all the egg, butter and sugar that cake recipes call for. It's unhealthy.' He bakes every fortnight, churning out four types of bread and 12 loaves such as rye, wholemeal, baguette (French bread stick) and focaccia (Italian flat bread). The breads are frozen after baking and last for two weeks. He sometimes takes the bread to the office to share with colleagues. Their warm reception gave him the idea of making bread baskets as gifts to his clients instead of sending the usual corporate ones. Last Christmas, he baked for one week to churn out 22 baskets, each filled with about eight loaves of rye, baguette, focaccia and scones. He has also conducted classes at home for friends and colleagues occasionally. While his children did have some problems getting used to the crusty breads initially, they have since grown accustomed to the taste. Nonetheless, their favourite remains focaccia, which is softer to the bite than most artisan breads. He shares a recipe for focaccia below, which he has modified to suit his taste preference. He says: 'Traditional focaccia is dripping in oil and uses a lot more herbs. I've cut down the oil to make it healthier and used less herbs so the taste isn't too overpowering.' lijie@sph.com.sg Make it yourself: Focaccia (Makes two loaves) INGREDIENTS 520g bread flour 10g fine sea salt 11/2 tsp instant yeast 320ml water (room temperature) 140ml extra virgin olive oil 1/4 tsp garlic salt, available in supermarkets 1/2 stalk fresh rosemary leaves 3 pitted olives, sliced METHOD 1. Put bread flour, fine sea salt and instant yeast in a large steel bowl.   2. Make a well in the flour mixture and pour in 50ml olive oil and 320ml water. Stir the mixture evenly with a large spoon for three minutes until it forms a sticky ball. 3. Coat your hand with flour and knead the dough for three minutes, folding the edges of the dough into the centre. Stop when it does not stick to your hand. 4. Leave the dough in the bowl and cover with cellophane wrap. Place the bowl in a cool corner of the kitchen for two hours. 5. After two hours, the dough should have risen by 21/2 times its original size. Remove the dough from the bowl and place it on a smooth, flour-covered work surface. 6. Knead the dough for five minutes using the same motion. It should feel smooth and elastic. 7. Separate the dough into two portions and roll each portion into the shape of a ball. Pour about 30ml of extra virgin olive oil into each of the two baking pans (31cm x 22cm x 3cm) and place a ball of dough in each pan. 8. Roll the balls of dough in the olive oil to prevent them from drying up. Place the baking pans in a cool corner of the kitchen and allow the dough to rise for another 20 minutes. 9. Pour 15ml of olive oil over each ball of dough before flattening it with fingertips until it is 5mm thick and fills the base of the pan. 10. Sprinkle garlic salt, rosemary leaves and olive slices on the dough and leave it to rise for another hour. 11. Preheat the oven to 200 deg C for 30 minutes. 12. Bake the dough in the oven for 20 minutes at 200 deg C. If you have a small oven that goes up only to 180 deg C, bake it at this maximum temperature for 25 minutes. Cover the top of the dough with aluminium foil if the surface browns too much. 13. Remove the bread from the oven and place it on a cooling rack for 30 minutes before serving. It can be sealed and frozen for consumption later and lasts up to three weeks when frozen.

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