I’ve spent quite some time and effort on calculating the space requirements of wind power installations during my time at the Canadian Nuclear Association. The fruits of my labor can be found on pages 13 and 24 of the Canadian Nuclear Factbook (the numbers are actually not quite correct, they greatly favor wind by assuming a pretty unrealistic utilization rate of 25%).
However, calculating wind is easy. Turbine manufacturers are more than happy to post the capacity of their machines online, and there’s also a lot of data available on the productivity of various wind farms, both in the EU and North America. The rest is simply geometry.
Solar power installations are trickier. There are far more variables in terms of the technologies used and the local geography. Also, solar power manufacturers seem far more coy about the generating capacity of their products, at least as far as their websites are concerned. I think the reason is that the technology simply isn’t that straightforward.
However, there are the occasional nuggets of good data that can be used to extrapolate some of the data I am interested in. For example, in this recent post by the US DOE, we find the following data:
Mesquite Solar 1 taps into 300 days of sunshine each year to generate 150 MW of clean electricity — enough to power about 30,000 homes.
If this facility can provide power for 30,000 households, it must generate at least 330,000,000kw/h annually.
Since the anticipated output of Mesquite Solar 1 is to be about 330,000,000 kw/h, this means that even in an ideal location like the Arizona desert, a solar power facility can be expected to operate with at about 25% utilization.
I think I have made up my mind about Tree of Life – it’s a good movie. I’m not sure yet that it is a Great Movie, but it certainly is a Good Movie. It’s visually beautiful. And from what I have read, that beauty was accomplished with almost no CGI, except for one scene involving dinosaurs, and even that somehow managed not to be stupid (I can’t think of a movie with dinosaurs that wasn’t laughable).
There is almost no dialogue. Some of the best scenes don’t involve any words at all. The torrent of mixed emotions and confusing thoughts running through the head of a young boy as he seriously contemplates murdering his own father is conveyed by nothing more than effective framing and to the point facial expressions. The traumatizing breach of trust between two brothers is beautifully foreshadowed and then realized without a single word being spoken.
The visual metaphors are clear, but not heavy-handed. Malick is not beyond using conventional movie tools, but in his hands they do not feel cheap and manipulative. The soft light of the scenes set in the protagonists memories make sense, conveying not so much the wistful adulation of the past, as they are meant to underline the uncertain reliability of childhood memories.
Flashbacks are too often an easy cheat for mediocre storytellers who cannot think of a better way to flesh out the inner life of the protagonist. But Malick doesn’t use flashbacks to explain the actions of his protagonist in the present. Jack’s adult self (Sean Penn), whose childhood is at the narrative heart of what little there is of a story, doesn’t do much more than ride up and down an elevator, walk into a meeting, talk on his cellphone, and look at a tree between towering high-rises.
None of which matters much, accomplishes anything, conveys any tension or expectation, and all of which could be done just as plausibly by somebody whose childhood was free of any worry, and whose relationship with his father was cozy and warm. (If Malick has anything to say about our childhoods , it is probably that as long as we weren’t beaten to a pulp on a regular basis, sexually abused, or caught up in a warzone, we’re probably going to be alright and turn into normal functioning adults.)
The banality of the present day in The Tree of Life is probably not accidental – all the drama, tension, and even beauty seems to be part of our past, and rather than being a precise recollection is more the result of personal myth-making. It is unlikely that Mrs. Obrien (Jack’s mother, played very beautifully by Jessica Chastain) was as quiet or demure as Jack remembers. At least one of his memories show that she was quite capable of standing up to Jack’s father (Brad Pitt), though Jack can’t hear what they are saying to each other, and seems not too interested in finding out. As if children ever really care why their parents are fighting – it’s not what matters to them.
The most curious scene of all comes towards the end, and here Malick is far less clear as to where reality ends and imagination begins. Are we witnessing Malick’s personal vision of life after death? Is Jack simply allowing his thoughts to drift into the weird fantasy world where everything that’s bad is washed away, and while hardly a plausible paradise, it nonetheless provides some kind of wistful comfort?
Since Malicks timing is so spot-on throughout the film, the overlong, overly repetitive structure of that scene cannot have been a slip of judgement. I’m not entirely sure what it was meant to convey, but maybe that will reveal itself on a second viewing.
The end of the film neatly closes the visual circle, with glorious imagery and beautiful sounds. Life will end, eventually. Our species will pass away somehow – just like the dinosaurs before us. Strangely enough, it does not feel depressing at all, at least not to me, and I generally resent this particular aspect of reality. Instead, it feels alright. Just the way it should be, and not because humanity is damned and deserves no better, but simply because that’s the way it is.
What’s also quite surprising about the Tree of Life is the music. Music is normally the bane of movies. Too often, it points out the obvious. Weeping strings when one should be sad, pounding bass when one should be tense, shrill disharmonies when one should be afraid. Most directors seem not to have enough faith in either their directing abilities or the intelligence of their audience to let the logic of the story and what is on the screen determine the emotional response. Yes, music is necessary to set the mood – that’s just how our emotions seem to work – but like soy sauce on sushi, there is a point at which it becomes too much and assaults our senses, rather than stimulate them.
The music in Tree of Life is big. It’s powerful, it’s dramatic, it’s emotional. But oddly enough, it never feels too much. It works with the images on the screen, and even thought it is often very loud, it always feels just right. And in a few brilliant scenes, the music tells the story in harmony with the images and actions of the people we observe. I can’t think of many directors who have been able to work with music as effectively as Malick does in Tree of Life. Maybe Leone or Kubrick, but to compare Malick’s use of music in Tree of Life to either of them does injustice to all.
And as for commentators who compare Malick’s cinematography and narrative ambition to Kubrick, they are right at a technical level, but it should be pointed out that there is none of Kubrick’s vicious sneer and contempt towards humanity to be found in Tree of Life. If anything, Tree of Life may be an inadvertent rebuke to the philosophy of Kubrick: yes, life is short and cosmically futile, but it does not necessarily have to be empty and obscene.
Strangely enough, I stumbled on Bitcoin only a few days ago while checking up on one of the stranger blogs I read from time to time. If you are not familiar with Bitcoin, now it’s about time to become familiar with it.
Funnily enough, it took me only about 10 minutes to be sold on it – simply because I have spent the last three years thinking about the question of how one could create a currency with a fixed base so as to completely eliminate inflation – as well as deflation.
I think I had come up with a rather decent solution, given that I don’t know much about coding, cryptology, networks, or anything else that would actually be required to implement it. Please take the time to read it – not because I want to propose it as an alternative to Bitcoin, but simply because it will make it easier for you to understand why I am so damn impressed by Bitcoin. I thought my system was pretty clever – but it doesn’t hold a candle to Bitcoin.
Here’s my idea:
The basic idea of my system was to have somebody who produces useful products issue a limited number of digital tokens along with their products (similar to Canadian Tire money, but with the difference that after issuing x number of tokens, the issuance would stop).
People would be free to use these tokens to redeem for the company’s products, as well as freely trade them among each other. Every transaction of tokens would go through the company’s central computer, and the company could – and probably would – deduct a tiny fraction of of every transaction as a fee.
My expectation was that the tokens would eventually used by people to buy products other than those manufactured/sold by the issuing company, and thereby broaden the range of goods that can be purchased for it. While still ‘backed’ by the issuing company’s goods/services, the currency would increasingly be ‘backed’ by the goods/services of everybody else who is using the currency to buy goods/services.
The issuing company would take a cut of every transaction, and since the currency would become good for the purchase of goods/services other than those produced by the issuing company, it would be able to use the currency as a profit generator in its own rights.
Eventually, an entire ecosystem of monetary relationships would build around this currency, and it wouldn’t even be necessary for the issuing company to produce goods and services anymore – if enough people are ‘backing’ the currency with their own goods and services, it would make no difference if the original ‘backing’ disappeared. In fact, the original issuing company would be much better off to no longer bother with the nonsense of providing goods and services, but simply focus on continuously improving technical accessibility of its money system, making sure that people can use it with as little effort as possible.
The entire system would probably be based exclusively on electronic transactions, though it is conceivable that somebody would in fact issue bank notes denominated in this money. In case you haven’t noticed, the ‘tokens’ have more in common with physical gold or silver than what we currently think of as money.
All currently existing money systems have a built-in bias towards inflation, since the only way for the issuing body to make a decent profit is a) seigniorage b) old fashioned banking services, and c) inflation – and more often than not, all three at once. Governments generally engage in a) and c), with the predictable result that eventually, the currency will collapse into worthlessness.
The ‘genius’ – if I may be so immodest – of my system is that it creates a money system where the issuing body has an incentive NOT to inflate the money stock, since it makes a profit on every transaction. Inflating the currency would, in the short run, create additional profits, but – why kill the goose that lays the golden egg? In fact, as the currency grows in usage, and the value of each unit increases accordingly, inflating the currency would cut profits.
A company issuing such money would likely develop a way of proving that it is not inflating the currency, which would not be too hard, since it has a very close tap on the total amount of base money floating around: every transaction goes through its central server, and it knows exactly who has how much of the stuff.
[Yes, privacy folks are going to flip out at this point. However,the goal of my system is not to satisfy privacy needs, but the need for having a monetary system that avoids blowing up the economy every few decades (if you’re lucky), and going out of style every century or so (if you’re lucky).
There are simple ways for people to add privacy functions to the system – such as private bank note issuance based on this money – but accepting those bank notes would be economically risky for the same reason that accepting bank notes denominated in gold or silver is risky: the issuing body has every incentive to inflate the currency. That risk could be mitigated by those banks continuously publishing their verifiable holdings in the base currency (which is tracked by the base issuer in any case) as well as the total amount of issued bank notes. I’m not going to belabour this point anymore – anybody with a basic understanding of how markets work can figure out the rest.]
What most excited me about my idea was that it creates a monetary systems governments would be interested in running themselves: the prospect of getting a definite cut of every transaction in the economy should make every finance minister drool: imagine 1% of every monetary transaction goes straight to the coffers of government. Every time anybody buys a candy, a computer, a car, a house, stocks, life insurance, or what have you, the government gets 1%.
Rather than having our money at a bank, we all would have an account on the government’s central server, and a debit card to go with it. We could, of course, have bank account for investment purposes, too. But we wouldn’t need to. And saving money would be easy – all you have to do is not spend it, and as the money grows in value (which it would without inflation), you have more wealth.
The system would also get around the stupidest argument in favour of inflation ever since the first gold smith figured out fractional banking: matching the amount of money to the growing economy. In my system, it would be easy to ‘split’ the money every once in a while to avoid a world in which you need to pay 1/1,000,000 of a money unit to buy a chewing gum. All the issuing authority has to do is multiply all holdings by the desired factor, and – abracadabra, you are back to dealing with sensible amounts. This would probably happen once in a generation, assuming a steady 2-3% growth in productivity.
Some funny things would happen to how we do certain things. For example, when you borrow money, you might find terms of “10 years”, or “5 years”, rather than %. Rather than paying the lender principal plus interest, you simply promise not to pay it back earlier than 10 (or 5) years from now. If you do pay it back earlier, you’ll have to pay a penalty, of course. But, money system build on a fixed base would create a daily vivid illustration of time preference even for the dimmest consumer.
There would also be no need to legally separate deposit banking from investment banking: all banks would be investment banks, because why bother with a debit account at a bank when the government provides it basically for free (except for that transaction fee, of course).
Banks would find themselves in the ugly world of free market competition (a place they haven’t been to for a long time now). Risk would be fully internalized, because they wouldn’t have the deposits of unwitting customers to play with at no risk. Instead, banks would have to compete for people to entrust them with their money for risky investments, while the cash of more cautious folk would be safely tucked away in the central server.
Since money no longer uses value through inflation, there wouldn’t even be much need for ‘investing’ to protect against inflation (which is pretty much the best people can hope for these days – profits are a mere mirage for all but the well-connected or lucky ones).
There would be a significant slowdown of high-risk investment, parasitical investment, and the fraudulent shenanigans that so disrupted the economy in recent years, because financial risk – as I mentioned already – would finally be internalized by those engaging in it.
That’s bad news for the wizards of finance, and the first-in-line profiteers of central bank inflation policies, but its good news for for consumers, and honest folks in general.
And even more beautifully, the system would benefit governments:
- tax evasion would become really difficult (all transactions go through the central server, remember?), nor really necessary (the government is making so much money on the whole transaction business, it can probably slash a lot of taxes and still grow at a steady pace).
- Money laundering would be really, really hard to do for the same reasons. (Governments may continue to issue some cash tokens for practical reasons, thereby reducing these advantages somewhat but – given the increasing spread of handheld digital devices, there really is not much need for that.)
The system could be implemented with relative ease (economically), by converting all current assets and liabilities denominated in a country’s currency, and transferring them to the central server. Yes, this is very vague in terms of defining money, and care would have to be taken to avoid converting derivatives into assets/liabilities. Derivatives should remain derivatives, and let the banks deal with the fall-out. I’m not enough of a finance specialist to sort this all out, but – there is no reason to assume it would not be possible. In the short run, it would leave all the illegitimate advantages gained from the current system in place, but I’m fine with that. It’s not supposed to be a tabula rasa proposal. It’s more about long-term viability.
Yes, this is a nightmare scenario for civil libertarians and privacy folks, and Christian millennialists will have a field-day, but again: this is a proposal for a sustainable monetary system, not a general utopia. It’s no good ranting about ending the FED and such things if you don’t provide the entrenched interests with a practical alternative that provides the same benefits, with less downside.
The ones most opposed to my scheme would be the oligopolistic banks, of course, and their half-witted helpful idiots in and outside of academia (the acolytes of brilliant fools like Keynes, Samuelson, Galbraith, which today include the likes of Mankiw, Krugman, and pretty much the whole lot of public economists, with few notable exceptions – almost none of whom go anywhere near monetary theory).
In any case, what does this have to do with Bitcoin? Well, a number of things: most importantly, Bitcoin shares with my system the most important economic feature: a fixed base for money. One significant problem – not fatal, just inconvenient – is that it does not seem to provide for ‘splitting’: in the long run, a solution will have to be found to deal with the problem of paying 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000 BTC for a box of matches. This could be achieved through the development of currencies that are based on BTC, but provide more granular units.
The differences, however, are most striking and make me believe that in the long run, BTC is probably the way things should, and will, go: there is no central authority at all. Nobody can muck around with the money supply (provided the code and structure for BTC is practically invulnerable to attack). It’s not just that there is no incentive to inflate, it’s not possible.
In the long-term, transaction costs will go down to the absolute technical minimum (verification providers will find themselves in a very, very competitive market – this alone may become one of the most powerful forces driving the development of ever cheaper processing technology, with chip developers trying to get a cut of the transaction market). Rather than have government change the costs to accommodate foolish fiscal policies, the costs will be determined solely by the cost of providing the service.
It is entirely possible to develop a banking system around BTC: think of BTC as having more in common with gold rather than commodity-based currencies or fiat money, and consider the insecurity of storing ‘wallets’ on your own hard-drive.
A minor draw-back of BTC is that it canand will deflate – there is no possibility to prevent the loss of BTC units over time. The total amount will slowly erode due to accidental or intentional deletions of stored BTC units. This in turn will make the need for effective ‘decimal point management’ more pressing over time. I’m sure there is a technical solution to this, but I’m not sure the originator has thought of this. Maybe I missed it when reading the concept. Again, this is not a fatal flaw, just an inconvenience.
The biggest challenge will be for BTC to reach a critical mass of participants to have a sufficiently broad base of goods and services that can be purchased for it to create sufficient backing to have the currency sustain itself indefinitely. I am not sure this has been achieved so far. If it is true that drug dealers are beginning to use BTC at a significant scale for this purpose, then this problem would be solved rather quickly. Illegal drugs are pretty desirable, and if it is possible to get illegal drugs with BTC, one will be able to trade them for other goods as well (‘backing’ in illegal drugs should be taken seriously from an economic point of view). Besides, drug dealers would only sell drugs for it if they can get other goods and services. In short, the accusation BTC is currently used by drug dealers means that BTC is, in fact, a viable currency already.
Since the design of the currency makes it very, very difficult to shut down usage (Would those dealing with illegal drugs really care they violate some kind of sanction on the use of virtual currency? Would a ban in the US be meaningful in South America, Central and South-East Asia, and Africa?), it is hard to see how BTC could be stopped from gaining a serious foothold in the global economy.
Unless a major flaw in the technical design and operation of BTC leads to a major loss of faith in BTC as a monetary base, BTC is here to stay in a very big way.
And for those who know their economic history, and how state-control over the production of money has shaped the current world order, it should be easy to see how political implications of Bitcoin could be downright revolutionary. Running a modern State without monopoly control over money could become a little tricky.
I think I just convinced myself to actually go and buy some BTC. Can’t hurt.
By the way, here’s a good video on the topic from the folks at Reason:
Bitcoin & The End of State-Controlled Money: Q&A with Jerry Brito
PostScript 1 – June 19, 2011: As Charles pointed out, the deflation issue really is just a matter of aesthetics. As long as decimal point management is done properly, it won’t even be noticed by anybody but the most attentive.
Also, news coverage of attacks on MtGox, such as this one, fail to appreciate that this has nothing to do with BitCoin itself. Calling the attack on MtGox an attack on Bitcoin makes about as much sense as calling a bank robbery an attack on the dollar.
An attack on Bitcoin would have to involve compromising the integrity of the verification protocol. As long as that does not happen, Bitcoin itself is fine. MtGox may be toast, though.
A few weeks ago there was some minor media storm over a study claiming that High Fructose Corn Syrup is some kind of super food for cancer cells. A group of researchers in the US had taken cancerous pancreatic cells and fed them both fructose and glucose to see which one of these two types of sugar was a more effective nutrient for the cancer cells. The results were somewhat interesting in that pancreatic cancer cells seemed to grow and – more importantly perhaps – multiply faster on a fructose than on a glucose diet. In fact, some metabolic processes took place 120 – 150 percent faster when the cells were provided pure fructose rather than pure glucose. Those who have a sufficiently strong technical bent can read the study themselves.
So far, so what? This is where it’s getting interesting. Studies on cancer cell metabolism are a dime a dozen and you rarely read about them in the media – unless the authors go out of their way to make the story interesting for the media. In this case, the hook for the media was in the last paragraph:
Therefore, fructose is a particularly significant dietary sugar component with important implications for patients with cancer, particularly given the significant dietary change that has occurred in human fructose consumption since the mid- 20th century. Our findings provide important insights into recent epidemiologic studies that have identified refined fructose as an independent risk factor for pancreatic cancer, and identify fructose-mediated actions as a novel therapeutic cancer target.
What they are getting at is this: since the middle of the 20th century, so-called high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has become one of the most important industrial sugars in the United States (less so elsewhere, mostly because the use of HFCS in lieu of other sugars is a particular artefact of American agricultural policy). And for quite some time, food activists and nutritionists of varying credibility have claimed that HFCS is a particular horrid type of sugar that’s responsible for pretty much every human health problem under the sun (except those caused by meat, of course).
But so far, there has been very little proof that HFCS is indeed particularly bad for humans health – for all we know so far, HFCS is nutritionally pretty much indistinguishable from honey or maple syrup, and humans have been eating these for quite a long time. While HFCS may indeed be bad for our health, there is no reason to believe that is worse than honey, maple syrup, or the sugar contained in fruits (which is mostly fructose, by the way).
That’s why this study made such an impact. For the first time, there was a serious academic paper that showed that fructose in particular was likely to have a more negative impact on human health than glucose. And to make sure that the media got the message on this one, the corresponding author – a certain Anthony P. Heaney – told reporters
"I think this paper has a lot of public health implications. Hopefully, at the federal level there will be some effort to step back on the amount of high fructose corn syrup in our diets"
And because Ms. Fox – the Reuters in-house health and science reporter who wrote the story – has been following the HFCS debate as any decent health and science reporter should, she included plenty of background information on the issue, including the superficially frightening statistic that
U.S. consumption of high fructose corn syrup went up 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990, researchers reported in 2004 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Never mind that this is already 20-year-old data – lets assume that consumption of HFCS has at the very least stayed at that level since then (and for all I know, it may have increased) – if fructose is a particular risk factor for cancer, shouldn’t a 1,000 percent (ten-fold) increase in its consumption have resulted in a pretty good up-tick of overall cancer rates in the US? Well, at least in the case of pancreatic cancer, this seems not to be the case. According to the National Cancer Institute, pancreatic cancer incidents per 100,000 people haven’t changed much since at least 1986
Yes, it’s only one particular type of cancer – but it’s precisely the type of cancer the group has been studying, and considering how radically different various types of cancer are in their metabolism and pathology, it’s not really good science to assume that just because something happens in the case of pancreatic cancer cells that it would also happen in the case of, say, endometrial cancer. So – if Heaney’s team is right that fructose is a particularly potent food for pancreatic cancer cells, and if the consumption of fructose has really gone up by an entire order of magnitude over the last forty years, then it stands to reason that pancreatic cancer rates should have gone up significantly.
But maybe fructose doesn’t cause pancreatic cancer, only makes it worse? If by worse we mean more deadly, then the data does not bear that out, either:
And if the graphics are not clear enough, let’s quote the National Cancer Institute verbatim:
Unfortunately, overall pancreatic cancer incidence and mortality rates have changed very little throughout the past three decades.
Since I’m not really a scientist (though I can at times give the impression), I am hesitant to speculate too much about what this data might mean for the hypothesis of Heaney and Co. So far, however, I’m not convinced. It would be one thing if we had an unexplained epidemiological riddle, such as: why have pancreatic cancer rates gone up over the last few decades? Or – why have mortality rates for pancreatic cancer rates increased so much since about the 1970s? In that case these findings would be really interesting: ah – maybe the increased cancer/mortality rates can be linked to the way glucose and fructose are metabolized differently by cancerous cells…
Yet, there is no such epidemiological riddle. There is in fact nothing really interesting going on in the epidemiology of pancreatic cancer (other than the fact that African American males have more of it than White males).
However, Heaney et. al. claimed in their introduction that
Increased obesity due to increased total energy consumption and reduced activity now contributes to 15% of U.S. cancer deaths. […] In addition to higher fat intake, a large increase in refined carbohydrate intake has occurred, which itself has been hypothesized to be a risk factor for several cancers.
To support their claim, the authors cite two studies in particular:
Calle EE, Thun MJ. Obesity and cancer. Oncogene 2004;23: 6365–78.
and
Kaaks R, Lukanova A. Effects of weight control and physical activity Kaaks R, Lukanova A. Effects of weight control and physical activity. Ann N Y Acad Sci 2002;963:268–81.
My curiosity tweaked, I read the studies myself – and found something rather very odd: neither study as much as mentions carbohydrates, never mind refined carbohydrates. I kid you not: not a single mention of carbohydrates, refined or otherwise, in either the Calle and Thun, or the Kaaks and Lukanova paper. Not even the word sugar or starch is mentioned in either. Both papers discuss in great detail how overweight has been found to contribute significantly to various forms of cancer. Neither discusses in any significant detail the role of different nutrients.
In this case it’s really not necessary to have an advanced degree in science to recognize that it is not good science to claim that some studies have drawn a link between carbohydrates and cancer when these studies do not even discuss carbohydrates in passing. Not good science at all.
At this point, I couldn’t help myself but dig even more deeply into the references. I was now particularly interested in the claim that
Increased refined fructose consumption, in particular, has been highlighted as conferring greater pancreatic cancer risk than other sugars in several recent large epidemiologic studies
This was based on the following two studies:
Michaud DS, Liu S, Giovannucci E, et al. Dietary sugar, glycemic load, and pancreatic cancer risk in a prospective study. J Natl Cancer Inst 2002;94:1293–300
and Larsson SC, Bergkvist L, Wolk A. Consumption of sugar and sugarsweetened foods and the risk of pancreatic cancer in a prospective study. Am J Clin Nutr 2006;84:1171–6.
I don’t know anything about Michaud and his colleagues, but I happen to know that Larsson and her team are pretty good when it comes to epidemiological cancer research. Based on their bibliography, they seem to enjoy nothing more than running countless correlation analyses of various Swedish Cohort Studies, looking for the most amazing connections between various substances and different cancers. In this particular case they were looking at findings which indicate that
hyperglycemia and hyperinsulinemia may be implicated in the development of pancreatic cancer
because
Frequent consumption of sugar and high-sugar foods may increase the risk of pancreatic cancer by inducing frequent postprandial hyperglycemia, increasing insulin demand, and decreasing insulin sensitivity.
Very interesting indeed, and they promptly find exactly such a link. But – what does this have to do with the different metabolization of glucose and fructose by pancreatic cancer cells?
Notice also the fact that Larsson et. al. talk about sugar and high-sugar foods in general. They do not discuss fructose, or high-fructose corn syrup. In fact, in reference to a US study on pancreatic cancer risk and sugar intake they state explicitly that
Results of this US prospective study may not be directly comparable with the results in the current study, however, because sucrose is the sugar added as a caloric sweetener to soft drinks in Sweden, whereas high-fructose corn syrup is the major source of caloric sweeteners in soft drinks in the United States.
Sucrose. Not fructose. Never mind that sucrose is eventually broken down into fructose and glucose in the body before it is delivered as food to the various cells, carcinogenic or otherwise. The point here is that Healey et. al. are trying to show that high-fructose corn syrup is a contributing factor to pancreatic cancer based on a study that explicitly points out that it does not deal with high-fructose corn syrup, but sucrose. Very different.
At this point I did not expect too much from looking at the Michaud study. But it turned out to be a little better than the others: Michaud et. al. did indeed find a link between fructose intake and elevated risk of pancreatic cancer – among overweight women, particularly those who engaged in little physical activity. The link was not found among lean women who were physically active. The study did not include men (not because Michaud et. al. are sexist, but because the 1976 Nurses’ Health Study did not include men).
So, while the Michaud study does in fact find a link between fructose intake and cancer risk among some women, it is a far cry from what Heaney et. al. are claiming. Even more interesting, Michaud et. al. explicitly stress that
Although fructose intake may itself play an important role in the risk of pancreatic cancer, it may also be a marker of a high-sugar diet. More studies are needed to elucidate the precise role of fructose in pancreatic carcinogenesis
Have there been such studies since 2002? Possibly, but nothing decisive – at least not based on the citations included by Heaney et. al. There is plenty of discussion on the way cancer cells metabolise fructose, but the critical question of how fructose contributes to carcinogenesis is not addressed.
But if we do not know whether or not fructose is is a more important factor in carcinogenesis than other types of sugar, there is little point in discussing whether or not the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup should be reduced. Besides, there’s plenty of fructose in foods not made with HFCS. Even removing fructose from all foods would not make a difference since sucrose is broken down into fructose and glucose in the body, since our cells do not use sucrose.
As far as I’m concerned, the findings by Heaney et. al. have interesting implications for the treatment of pancreatic cancer – but in terms of epidemiology, they are likely meaningless. That’s not really a shocker, though, since in-vitro studies on pretty much anything are rarely of great epidemiological significance. They can be – but they rarely are.
The real shocker, however, is the absolutely dismal level of scientific integrity in this paper. It is hard to swallow that a paper that misrepresents its sources to such a degree made it through the peer review process at a major international cancer research journal. And it is completely beyond the pale that the authors of this paper had the audacity to go to the media with grandiose claims about the dangers of high-fructose corn syrup to the general population when there’s almost nothing in their paper to actually support this claim. What are these people thinking, and what exactly is it they are trying to achieve? Because if their goal is good science, then they have clearly failed.
![image[26]](http://dietwald.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/image26.png "image[26]")
