Class, Health and Universe 25

In the USA, and in many other developed nations, diet quality used to follow a socioeconomic gradient. Those at the top table ate a more diverse and generally healthier diet with more whole grains, lean meats, fish, low-fat dairy products, and more fresh vegetables and fruit (1, 2). 

Those who sat below the salt ate foods containing more salt. Their diet also had a higher energy density, a lower nutrient density, and was crammed with more refined carbohydrates and more fats. In other words, it contained more ultra-processed foods (UPFs) (1, 2).

This is one reason why obesity is more prevalent in lower socioeconomic groups (3, 4), and why health also shows a clear socioeconomic gradient (5-7), with effects that pass beyond pregnancy and childbirth (8, 9) and reach far into the declining health prospects of the next generation (10, 11); undermining their sexuality (12, 13) and, in middle and older age, their faltering central nervous systems (14, 15).

The food landscape has changed. Thanks to the vigorous marketing of UPF’s and their universal presence, convenience and hyper-palatability, they have latterly invaded the upper socioeconomic strata (16). And as our cultural and metabolic sea walls continue to erode under this nutritional onslaught, we will see waves of disease crash higher up on the beach.

This blog fixes myopically on nutrition, but the long-term harms listed above are not solely due to diet. The perception of lower socioeconomic status is harmful in itself (17, 18), likely because it correlates with the overlapping constructs of powerlessness, loss of autonomy and social defeat (189.

These constructs are overwhelming ever more of us, as evidenced by spiralling rates of emotional distress (20, 21). The tailored boorishness of our elites, the fast-approaching singularity and the slow culling of white-collar workers with their imprecise sense of collective security are all, I believe, driving this imperfect storm.

As the storm gathers, quantity starts to acquire a quality all of its own. There is emerging evidence that as more of us succumb to the madness, it becomes harder to remain unaffected. This alarming hypothesis (22) comes out of the Department of Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh, one of many US cities tacking into a financial crisis (23) which is part of the polycrisis of our time.

The toxic modern exposome creates neuroinflammatory stress, particularly in those who eat the worst diet (24), and this increases the likelihood of irrationally aggressive behaviours (25). According to the Pittsburgh model, when the level of these behaviours reaches a critical mass among the population, the resulting social tensions spread psychological and therefore neuroinflammatory stress (26) among the bystanders, and drag increasing numbers of us into the maelstrom.

The food industry may have been the moon that started this tidal relay (ie 27), but the baton is now in other hands. Over-urbanisation, collapsing economies, mass social defeat and subsequent epigenetic mal-programming are all in the race toward a drowned world (28).

According to David Crepaz-Keay, head of research and applied learning at the UK’s Mental Health Foundation (29), “The reduction in spaces available for a ‘flight’ response increases the likelihood of a ‘fight’ response; and the stabilizing forces that tend us to equilibrium are slower than the mechanisms that translate perceived threat into elevated stress”.

Lead author of the Pittsburgh paper Professor Yoram Vodovotz adds a turn to the screw when he points out that modern technology such as the internet has broken down all the bulkheads that in an earlier age allowed escape. At NYU, Jonathan Haidt makes a broadly similar and, I think persuasive, case (30), with electronically-induced re-wiring being imposed on our children’s already nutritionally compromised brains.

Madness is thus likely contagious and certainly spreading, and we appear to be entering a pandemic phase that must eventually lead, if unchecked, to social breakdown. Welcome to Universe 26.

Universe 25 is a famous behavioral study of captive mice conducted by American ethologist John B. Calhoun, which ran between 1968 and 1970 (31). The purpose-built environment provided unlimited access to food and water, and enough space to accommodate up to 3,800 animals. After completion, 4 breeding pairs of mice were injected into this murine universe.

On the 7th day Dr Calhoun rested, and on the 8th day he took out his clipboard. 

The mouse population never reached 3800. It peaked at 2,200 and, roughly 18 months in, started a slow and irreversible collapse with the colony becoming extinct at around 4 years. The experiment’s results were consistent with Calhoun’s previous findings: overpopulation leads to explosive violence and hypersexual activity, followed by asexuality, self-destruction, reproductive failure and extinction. 

Calhoun was an ethologist, not a neurochemist, and I can’t help but wonder whether a significant amount of neuroinflammatory stress was involved on the way down. I’d bet good research funds on it … and I’m fairly confident that if the mice had been fed a cafeteria (pro-inflammatory) diet, the collapse would have started sooner and fallen faster.

In the spring of ‘73 my mother gave me a copy of Calhoun’s then-new JRSM paper, and we spent hours discussing the possible relevance of mice to men. In the end, we felt that this darkly fascinating future was one we would be unlikely to experience; the future was brighter in Britain’s past than it is at present. Today’s news, however, or what passes for news from the degraded MSM, increasingly seems to reinforce Calhoun’s dystopian findings.

And it fits other medical trends. The robust and continuing increase in cancer (32), for example, can be linked not only to our diet but also to increased levels of social stress, which facilitate the growth and spread of tumors (33). This stress also contributes to neurotoxicity, depression, anxiety and increasing levels of sub-clinical and clinically overt brain damage (14, 34).

Oh – and the world’s human population is on track to collapse (35).

Better nutrition cannot be the answer to all of this, but a change as small as partly replacing refined carbohydrates with fermentable ones could, even now, set us on a slightly better course, and reduce the burdens of cancer, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease (36-38). This is currently being considered by a major food player, and I hope to report on this next year.

In the meantime, before you take your disease to the doctor, look it up on the internet by all means – but then try reducing your internet time. Cut the cord, even if only for a day or two. Get healthier and less inflamed by taking a step back, if you can, from our simultaneously fevered and drowning world.

Next week: From Lupus to Lexus: the sound of one car crashing.

References

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