Then scurvy would break out—as it has recently in a mental hospital in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and at a clinic for diabetics in Sydney—with typical lesions on the skin and mucous tissue, aching joints, and various kinds of vascular damage. Once this happens, vitamin C (ascorbate) has to be ingested immediately to prevent sustained damage to the bones, the blood vessels, the network of nerves, and the brain. Teeth fall out, cartilage disappears, and internal bleeding begins. The heart is under pressure, and the brain can start to hemorrhage. At the same time, scurvy sufferers experience either stupor or powerful dreams and hallucinations. Untreated, scurvy will kill you.

The story of our mutated gene bears strong similarities to the Biblical account of the fall of man, with one important difference. Fruit then was the cause of original sin and our mortality, and fruit (lemons and oranges) now is what infallibly will cure scurvy. But in both scenarios choice of food is a life and death issue.

“Govern well thy appetite, lest sin/ Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death,” Raphael warms Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost, first published in 1667.

Around the same time, Robert Hooke, an eminent member of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, remembered the warning when anticipating the great improvements to life and health that experimental science was about to deliver: “And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way … by tasting too those fruits of Natural Knowledge, that were never yet forbidden.”

Hooke’s optimism about human ingenuity didn’t blind him to the fact that we all carry in our bodies the seed of mortality, of which that mutated gene is the physical specimen and scurvy, the specific proof. From Hooke’s era to ours, the biological defect we share with guinea pigs and fruit bats has been a constant in our lives, and for much of that time we have been ignorant of what we need to make us whole. We are none of us perfect, being unable to extract from otherwise nourishing food the vital principle without which we shall die: fat, protein, carbohydrate, and sugar don’t contain it, neither do preserved fruits or boiled vegetables.

Like goiter and rickets, scurvy is a nutritional disease. You don’t catch it, like Ebola or bubonic plague. It waits for an interruption in the ingestion of fresh food, and then—if the interruption is long enough—makes its fatal appearance. On hearing that she had scurvy last year, a patient in the Sydney clinic for diabetics, with a scorbutic ulcer on her leg cried out, “I didn’t realize you could be obese and malnourished at the same time.” A lot of people don’t realize this, which explains why scurvy will always be with us.

A survey of college students in North America found 14 percent with ascorbate below the level for good health. In the Sydney clinic where the outbreak of scurvy occurred, 60 percent of the target group was in a more dire state of depletion. Amnesia about our peculiar gene isn’t limited to people who choose to eat badly. According to The Guardian, since the onset of austerity economics in Britain five years ago, “the number of bed days accounted for by someone with a primary or secondary diagnosis of malnutrition,” including many elderly people, has risen 44 percent.

There is however another reason why alertness or indifference to the dangers of scurvy is part of our history. The difference between neo-Platonic and empirical beliefs about the perfection of the human entity was exhibited when Hooke started inventing machines designed to supplement the deficiencies of the senses. He designed microscopes for the eye, hygrometers (to measure moisture) for the nose, a sort of telegraph for the ear.

John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher, was incredulous: Why be dazzled, suffocated, and deafened by impressions our nature was never intended to feel?

Hooke thought we needed the supplement of machines if we were ever to feel things as they truly are, and shed our sin and mortality. Locke, on the other hand, was an empiricist to the extent he believed that all we know comes to us via the senses, but like Descartes and Plato he believed we needed no additional help in order for our perceptions to be perfect—or as perfect as was consistent with God’s will. His empiricism was flexible enough to accommodate Plato’s and Descartes’ belief that truly good and wise humans are never in a state of becoming, but already complete in their faculties unless seduced and enslaved by false representations. Margaret Cavendish, the 17th century English aristocrat and scientist, was of the same opinion and, later, so was Locke’s pupil, the elegant philosopher-earl Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury.

Hooke thought we needed all the prostheses we could lay our hands on if we were to regain what we lost in Paradise; so he ably abetted his friend, Robert Boyle, in the management of an air-pump, a sort of artificial lung, in his efforts to discover the vital principle of air.

And Hooke’s colleagues Thomas Willis and Walter Charleton, two great 17th century specialists on scurvy, came as close as any scientists, before the isolation of vitamin C in 1933, to the secret of the vital principle of food. They called it a nitrous salt, a latex, a nutritive sap which, they showed, directly affected the efficiency of the nerves as well as the scaffolding of the body. They knew it added nothing to body mass, but that without it even the most robust constitution would fail.

Almost a hundred years after their hypotheses were confirmed by bio-chemical proofs, a significant fraction of the population remains at risk of diseases that supervene when ascorbate levels are low—a risk that can in many cases be minimized with a healthy dose of vitamin C. It has recently been discovered that large intravenous injections of vitamin C will reduce deaths from sepsis by three-quarters. Current research at Vanderbilt University indicates that seizures are much more likely when the body is carrying insufficient ascorbate. A colleague assured me that five years of his life were lost to chronic fatigue syndrome until he started intensive doses of vitamin C.

It is not for nothing that the first outbreak of scurvy in Australia in almost 200 years occurred at a clinic for diabetics. Type 2 diabetes is largely caused by a poor diet cooperating with oxidative stress, a major factor in depleting reserves of ascorbate.

Is it because we thought we were perfect that scorbutic imperfection dogs us? Or is it that artificial perfection is too tedious to attain, and we would rather dally with our sin?

The post Why Scurvy Is Still a Snake in Our Nutritional Lost Paradise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My options are limited: salads, nachos, cheese pizza, or grilled cheese. The salads are dry, the nachos are stale, the pizzas are cold and thin, and the grilled cheese is precooked and wrapped in plastic. I hate to sound like a spoiled teenage brat, but the truth is, they are sad excuses for vegetarian food.

And the rest of what’s served isn’t any better.

So you can see why I stopped eating school lunches after I became vegetarian. When I manage to drag myself out of bed early, I prepare and bring my own lunch. If I’ve hit the snooze button too hard, I get by on a granola bar.

I hardly feel left out. Many of my fellow students—even those who aren’t vegetarian—also have abandoned the idea of eating at school. Why waste a third of your lunch period waiting in line when you could be hanging out with your friends? Why eat pizza that tastes like cardboard if you know it’s going to make you feel sick later?

There are less healthy questions, too. Like: Why wake up early to get to school for breakfast when you could possibly lose some weight by skipping breakfast? I’ve watched female friends tell themselves it’s OK, even good, to lay off lunch. But then it becomes another lunch, and maybe breakfast and dinner, too. Eating disorders are a slippery slope.

And another question: Why bother bringing your own lunch to school when you could sleep for an extra 10 minutes because you’re so exhausted from yesterday’s homework load? In exchange for the promise of future success, my close friends and I have given up our free time, sleep, and often even our lunches. With turning in papers to the office, meeting with our counselors, and stashing sports equipment in our lockers, we are constantly zig-zagging all over campus, frantically trying to get everything done in the 35 minutes our school allots for lunch. Seniors are allowed to leave campus, but they barely have time to get out of the parking lot, find a fast food place, order during the lunch rush, and get back to school.

On top of all this, many of my friends and I are also members of clubs that meet only at lunch. At the busiest times of the school year, I might spend four of my five lunch periods at a club meeting. So when can I possibly eat lunch—much less use the restroom? For a lot of us, our best option is fifth period, the class right after lunch, but some teachers don’t allow eating in their rooms because they are afraid of the mess it might make or the distraction it might cause.

The best solution really is to bring lunch from home. But that means carrying your lunch around all day and finding a place to heat it up (or refrigerate it) if you can. (Thankfully, I am blessed to be a lab assistant for a teacher who has a microwave, refrigerator, toaster oven, and sink.)

All these realities create incentives to skip lunch entirely. I often see students go the whole day with just half a protein bar and an apple slice. Sometimes, students don’t even realize they have skipped meals because they are so busy with assignments and meetings. Other times, it is obvious that their focus level has dropped and they feel exhausted. And for some friends of mine, skipping lunch at school leads to binging at home late at night.

I’m not asking for a five-star caterer to deliver freshly cooked gourmet food to my school every morning. (Though I wouldn’t object to that.) But the way the school handles meals isn’t healthy for students. I also think fighting obesity would be a lot easier if cafeteria options weren’t limited to microwavable, re-heated food.

It pains me to see my fellow students eating unhealthily because they don’t have the time or the ability to do any better.

More money for better lunch options at schools would be money well spent. But at the same time, I think my school should consider creating policies that encourage students to make lunch and healthy eating a priority. I’d also like the administrators and chefs who make the menus to consider students with dietary restrictions. Because even carnivores can agree that nobody should have to eat stale nachos.

The post I Want to Eat Healthy–Why Does My High School Make That Hard? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Moderator David H. Freedman, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, asked the panelists if they could name the single most important, effective action we can take to get the word out when it comes to public health.

UCLA health economist Frederick J. Zimmerman said that when we talk about incentives and laws that affect our dietary behavior, we often talk about the government interfering with our freedom and about personal responsibility. We need to rethink the terms, he said, and ask some fundamental questions: “What does freedom mean, what does power mean, what does personal responsibility mean?”

University of Minnesota social psychologist Traci Mann said we need to attack public health issues on multiple levels: those of individuals, couples, families, schools, and communities.

“Policy is not a dirty word,” said Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Jonathan Fielding. For 20 years, we tried to convince people to wear seatbelts through public service announcements; nothing worked. Once seatbelt wearing became part of the law, however, behaviors changed and lives were saved. “Public health works by successive redefinition of the unacceptable,” he said.

So what would a really smart, government-sponsored health propaganda campaign look like today?

Zimmerman said that the best campaigns, like California’s anti-smoking ads, tie into people’s sense of autonomy: “Send a clear signal that you are being manipulated when you see a food ad.”

We have to talk about the food industry, added Fielding—about how it’s trying to maximize consumers’ value, not health or community benefit. And we have to work with industry leaders, too, to persuade them to help change our palates—by cutting salt in their products, for example. Media, he said, only works in synergy with policies and incentives.

Mann has studied how people make decisions and exercise self-control, and her single overarching finding is that most people don’t have much self-control. To the extent that they do have self-control, it varies in response to their environment. If we want to change behavior, she said, we must change the environment.

When, asked Freedman, does something like a soda tax work?

Zimmerman said you can’t simply consider the economic impact of a tax; a small increase on soda price doesn’t affect demand. But if you tell consumers they’re paying a “sin tax” on their soda, the tax will have a much greater impact on their behavior. “No one,” he said, “wants to pay for something twice.”

There are a lot of different ways to affect people’s decision-making, said Fielding. You can cross-subsidize as well—decrease the price of a salad while increasing the price of everything else on a cafeteria menu. Or, a store can put healthier food at the front, closer to eye level.

“I’m a huge fan of nudges,” said Mann—very tiny efforts that yield huge results. She’s seen something as simple as a larger spoon in the vegetables at a school cafeteria increase kids’ vegetable consumption.

Big box stores, said Fielding, can be much more helpful in prompting people to make healthy choices: “We need to get them on our side—on the side of the consumers’ health.”

In the question-and-answer session, audience members asked about the New York City move to outlaw supersized sodas and about getting people to take a longer-term view of their health when it comes to decision-making.

Fielding called the soda ban “small but useful”; people can still drink as much soda as they want, but they have to fill up three or four times to get to a liter as opposed to once.

Even tiny obstacles like this, said Mann, can be enough to stop people—and they don’t get in the way of our cherished freedom. Making behaviors a tiny bit harder can be surprisingly effective.

How do we get people to consider the long-term effects of their behavior on their health?

The panelists agreed that this is impossible; if people were thinking about the future they’d make different choices.  “You have to start with where people are,” said Fielding. “You can’t start with where we would like them to be.”

Zimmerman called the economists’ idea that people carefully weigh the pros and cons of every decision they make “a bunch of BS.” He added, “That’s not how people make decisions, even really big decisions.”

In sum, we’re tremendously influenced by our peers, our families, our histories—and by our environment. We’re not as rational as we think, and the best health propaganda recognizes and works with that.

The post We’re Going To Attack Your Donut Eating On All Fronts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.