Book review: “Think and Eat Yourself Smart” by Dr Caroline Leaf

Posted on April 26, 2016 by cedwardpitt

Think and Eat Yourself Smart
Dr Caroline Leaf
328 pages, Published by Baker Books USA

My rating: 2 / 10

As a society, we are obsessed with food. With copious food blogs, celebrity chefs and reality cooking shows, food has become more about our social status and self-identity than about nourishment.

Food has always been intimately connected to our health and well-being, and the modern food obsession has taken that to extreme levels as well. Organic, paleo, sugarless, raw food, cleansing and other popular diets have morphed into ‘movements’, the polite shorthand way of describing popular obsessions that are borderline cults.

Trying to cash in on this wave of cultural orthorexia is Dr Caroline Leaf with her latest book, “Think and Eat Yourself Smart”, published in early April by Baker Books.

Dr Leaf describes the book as “an attempt to reintroduce a culture of thinking and effort back into eating, one based on diligently stewarding the body and world God entrusted to us. In the spirit of renewing the mind, it is a lifestyle book that seeks to reimagine what we eat within an integrated spirit, mind and body framework.”

And that would be fine in theory, though in practice, Dr Leaf uses the book more as a vehicle for divulging her personal food preferences and her socio-political ideology while recycling most of her dubious brain science.

But before we go any further, let me issue a disclaimer: There’ll be some who will look this review and assume I’m being critical of Dr Leaf’s book for the sake of being critical. I recognise that I’m not Dr Leaf’s number one fan, however, I want to say from the outset of this review that I have approached this as dispassionately and objectively as I can.

“Think and Eat Yourself Smart” is certainly not all bad. Dr Leaf raises some legitimate issues. For example, she’s critical of the vitamin and supplement industry and the staggering cost of supplements compared to their very limited benefits. She discusses the previous dietary advice regarding low-fat foods, and how the misguided attempt to reduce our dietary fat intake lead to a compensatory increase in starch and sugars. She also discussed the current concerns about too much sugar and refined carbohydrates, and raises the very real problem of food waste and food security. The recipes at the back of the book contain the usual over-rated hipster foodie ingredients like dandelion, kale, quinoa and chia seeds to maintain Dr Leaf’s foodie creds, although some of the recipes themselves sound alright.

Unfortunately, every truth is outweighed by a multiplex of factoids and misrepresentations. Dr Leaf clearly favours organic food, which despite her claims, have not been shown to be better tasting, more nutritious, less toxic, and better for the environment. She’s clearly against genetically modified organisms (or GMO’s), a stance which is more populist than scientific.

Dr Leaf’s underlying premises are also deeply flawed. It’s clear that she’s been heavily influenced by the work of Michael Pollan and other post-modern food gurus of the same ilk. She’s critical of modern food systems including all food processing, food transportation, and supermarkets, claiming that modern agriculture and food processing destroys all nutrients and taste. Dr Leaf claims that “Real food is food grown the way God intended: fresh and nutritious, predominantly local, seasonal, grass-fed, as wild as possible, free of synthetic chemicals, whole or minimally processed, and ecologically diverse.” (p29)

Dr Leaf’s definition of “real food” is nothing more than a romanticised post-modern social construct, and claiming it’s God’s idea doesn’t make it any less misleading. Of course we want our food to be fresh, and we also want it to be nutritious. But fresh and nutritious are not dependent on being local, seasonal, ecologically diverse (whatever that means), grass-fed and wild. In fact, how something can be grass-fed and wild seems contradictory. Processing food makes it safer, and in most cases, more nutritious that the unprocessed farm gate versions. There’s virtually no pesticide residues left on conventional produce either, so that’s a moot point.

In fact, modern food is actually easier to eat and digest, more nutritious, tastier, safer, and longer lasting than ever before in human history. Today’s canned and frozen foods are infinitely healthier than in the past, and in some cases, more nutritious than the vegetables straight off the farm (canned tomatoes, for example, because nutrients are more easily absorbed from cooked tomatoes). Dr Leaf’s idealised view of our agrarian past is false, and the notion that we should return to it is inane.

Dr Leaf also spends a great deal of time trying relate our nutritional health to our thinking. I discussed this in the pre-review of the book, here. She claims that “Research shows that 75 to 98% of current mental, physical, emotional and behavioural illnesses and issues come from our thought life; only 2 to 25% come from a combination of genetics and what enters our bodies through food, Medication, pollution, chemicals, and so on. These statistics show that the mindset behind the meal – the thinking behind the meal – plays a dominant role in the process of human food related health issues, approximately 80 percent.” (p84)

Again, this is a false premise based on bogus science. 75 to 98% of current mental, physical, emotional and behavioural illnesses and issues do not come from our thought life. What you think and how you feel makes no difference to how your body processes the nutrients you put into it.

This excessive focus on the power of thought is a segue back to her previous teaching, a justification as to why she as a self-titled cognitive neuroscientist should be writing about food. Unfortunately, the information contained in the second part of the book makes it obvious that she’s not an expert on either.

Sure, Dr Leaf discusses responsibility and choices which are important to what we put in our mouths, but there are so many other variables that are more intrinsic to our individual diets than just personal responsibility. Like, poverty, income, education, cooking skills or geographic location for example.

Dr Leaf claims that how you think changes how you eat, and how you eat changes how you think. Except the last part of that statement is mutually exclusive to her premise that the mind is separate to the brain and controls the brain. What you put in your mouth might change the function of your brain, but how can that change the way you think if the mind is separate to the brain?

This paradox is the death-knell to her books credibility and usefulness. Not that it makes any difference to Dr Leaf, who conveniently forgets this central tenet of her teaching whenever it suits her.

The advice she provides is also off-track. The answer to processed food isn’t to plant your own garden, or raise your own chickens, or join a local agro-economic food co-op. That sort of advice is impractical for the vast majority of her audience. It excludes everyone who lives in a modern city, or who, like me, has an uncanny ability to kill all but the hardiest of plants. Even her exhortation to eat “real food” is unnecessarily complicated.

Ultimately, Dr Leaf’s advice isn’t dangerous, but just old and confusing. Most of the useful information she gives is obscured by the plethora of unnecessary and irrelevant opinions and factoids. It’s also nothing new. There have been countless books and blogs written by real nutritionists and dieticians that say the same essential things in much simpler ways. Even John Oliver did a better job of explaining problems associated with sugar and our modern food systems (* Warning * – Strong language and adult themes). He’s an agnostic satirical comedian who doesn’t pretend to be a scientific expert, and he still get’s the message across more effectively than Dr Leaf.

To conclude, if you want sound nutritional advice, I’d suggest you head for books by actual dieticians. Professor Rosemary Stanton is one author I would recommend. She’s a Professor of Nutritional Science and Visiting Fellow of the School of Medicinal Sciences at the University of New South Wales. She’s published hundreds of academic and consumer articles including 33 books on good nutrition. She’s been lecturing and writing about good food for longer than I’ve been alive.

In contrast, Dr Leaf’s book “Think and Eat Yourself Smart” is a repackaging of stale opinion and dubious science by an author who isn’t a nutritionist, or even a cognitive neuroscientist for that matter. There might be some helpful advice in there, but it would be difficult for an average reader to pick out what’s beneficial and what’s bogus.

To that end, “Think and Eat Yourself Smart” is a lot like a frozen microwave dinner. It looks good on the packaging, but what you get on the inside isn’t the same. There’s a few nutritional morsels, to be sure, but most of it is just offal and gristle that’s been homogenised to an unrecognisable mush and then reassembled.

If you’re a Dr Leaf devotee, or you’re interested in her socio-political views, then by all means, buy this book. If you want sound nutritional advice, look elsewhere.

“Think and Eat Yourself Smart”: a pre-review

Posted on March 31, 2016 by cedwardpitt

Update: Read my full review of “Think and Eat Yourself Smart” here.

They say, “Never judge a book by its cover.” What about judging it by its marketing?

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. She’s also a wannabe nutritionist. Her latest book is “Think and Eat Yourself Smart”, due for official release at the end of April.

I haven’t read her book yet so I’m not really sure what she’s going to say. It might be a well reasoned and soundly researched discussion about healthy eating, except there are some conflicting ideas that are appearing in Dr Leaf’s own marketing of the book, so I’m not holding out much promise.

For example, yesterday Dr Leaf suggested that “the mindset behind the meal – the thinking behind the meal – plays a dominant role in the process of human food related health issues, approximately 80 percent.”

This is bogus science. It doesn’t matter if I’m convinced that eating a half gallon tub of ice cream is nutritious or not, it’s going to have the same nutritional effect on my body (namely, none). It’s not 80 percent healthy because I believe it’s healthy.

Dr Leaf has made this assertion based on other bogus science – “How does thinking affect eating, and how does eating affect thinking? Research shows that 75 to 98% of current mental, physical, emotional and behavioural illnesses and issues come from our thought life; only 2 to 25% come from a combination of genetics and what enters our bodies through food, Medication, pollution, chemicals, and so on.”

Dr Leaf’s assertion that “75 to 98% of current mental, physical, emotional and behavioural illnesses and issues come from our thought life” is a favourite factoid of hers that forms the basis of most of her teaching. Except that it’s wrong. It has no basis in fact. I’ve discussed this at length in several blogs and in my book (see here for a more detailed explanation of Dr Leaf’s 98% myth).

It’s unclear just how much of her book Dr Leaf has based on this false assumption, but the fact that it’s there in the first place sets a bad precedent for the rest of the book.

Only time will tell, of course. I’d like to be proven wrong, but unfortunately, Dr Leafs latest book seems to be plagued with the same poor science as her other tomes.

Watch this space …

Dr Caroline Leaf – Increasing the stigma of mental illness again

Posted on March 19, 2016 by cedwardpitt

Let me tell you a story.

A couple of years ago, one of my patients was an elderly gentleman in his late seventies. He was living in a nursing home at the time, but because of his history of psychosis, he remained on a treatment order – a requirement by law that if he was to remain outside of a mental facility, he had to have regular anti-psychotic medication every few weeks.

This man was on a treatment order because his disease caused him to have delusions. He misinterpreted what was going on around him, and would not consider that he could be wrong. In his particular case, he was convinced that his next-door neighbour was a paedophile, and he was planning to ambush his neighbour and castrate him. Luckily the police had taken my patient into custody before he got the opportunity. With treatment, my patient had clear thoughts, although needed close supervision. Without his medication, he became confused and violent.

According to a post on the blog Mad in America and promoted by Dr Caroline Leaf, my patient’s diagnosis was spurious, and he was denied his basic human rights by being forced to take medications.

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. She is also a self-declared expert in mental health, despite not having any professional training in medicine, psychiatry, psychology or even cognitive neuroscience for that matter.

Indeed, if she had any experience or expertise in mental health, she would have recognised the basic factual errors and logical fallacies that riddled the post she quoted from.

Take the quote that Dr Leaf posted on social media. The full quote from the Mad in America post is:

“Despite the fact that no one in history, not even the omnipotent American Psychiatric Association – which produces and profits mightily from the ‘Bible’ of mental disorders — has come up with a halfway good definition of “mental illness,” and despite the fact that the process of creating and applying the labels of mental illness is unscientific, any of those labels can be used to deprive the person so labeled of their human rights. This is terrifying. It ought to terrify those who are so labeled and those who are not, because deprivation of human rights on totally arbitrary grounds is inhumane and immoral.”

This is the same tired, emotionally laden and misleading rhetoric that’s so often barked in fervent paroxysms through the foaming lips of those opposed to modern psychiatric practice:

There is no good definition of ‘mental illness’
The American Psychiatric Association is just a profit-driven cabal
The DSM5 (which the author alludes to as the ‘Bible’ of mental disorders) is unscientific
Psychiatric diagnoses are unscientific
Any psychiatric diagnosis can be used as a trigger to force people into unwanted treatments or incarceration
Therefore psychiatric diagnosis and treatment is against basic humans rights and is inhumane and immoral.

Inhumane and immoral hey? Tell that to my patients neighbour who almost became a eunuch except for that “inhumane and immoral treatment” of my former patient.

Caplan claims just don’t stand up to any rational scrutiny.

There are lots of good definitions of mental illness … modern psychiatry critics just don’t like them. But take the definition used by the CDC, “Mental illness is defined as … ‘health conditions that are characterized by alterations in thinking, mood, or behavior (or some combination thereof) associated with distress and/or impaired functioning.’” There’s nothing wrong with this definition. It describes mental illness and helps differentiate mental illness from variations of mood, thought and behaviour that are part of the everyday human experience.

The American Psychiatric Association isn’t the only group to have created a classification of psychiatric illnesses. The World Health Organisation publishes the International Classification of Diseases, or the ICD, which is also used for psychiatric diagnosis. Is the WHO an evil profit-driven junta too?

The DSM, the ICD, and any other system of diagnosis, are simply different classification systems. Over the last century, clinicians have noted clusters of symptoms and have tried to classify them into common groups. How is that unscientific? It’s no different to scientists looking at the different characteristics of various animals and creating a taxonomy, to provide a common system and language for clinicians and researchers across disciplines and across countries.The DSM system isn’t perfect, but what system ever is? As knowledge of neuroscience grows, the classifications are reviewed and tightened in an ongoing process of improvement. If those who oppose the DSM want to come up with something better, they’re welcome to put something forward.

The old saying goes that medicine is an art and a science. Human beings, as nuanced as we are, often don’t fit into diagnostic criteria as easily as we would like. That doesn’t invalidate the diagnostic criteria or make the process unscientific as critics of modern psychiatry would have us believe, just like an unusual and hard-to-classify form of cancer doesn’t invalidate the other cancer classifications that are well defined. Psychiatry, by it’s nature, relies on verbal report from patients rather than a clean-cut blood test or piece of tissue under a microscope, so at this stage in history, it seems imprecise. That doesn’t make it any less scientific.

The allegation that any psychiatric diagnosis can any be used to deprive the person so labeled of their human rights is utter nonsense. It’s a giant scarecrow – it seems really scary, but on closer inspection, it’s just a tarted-up mound of straw.People are never forced into treatments unless they really are “dangerous to themselves and/or others”. This rule can’t be invoked willy-nilly. There are multiple checks and balances, and a whole school of civil rights lawyers expectantly circling, ready for the whiff of blood in the water (http://www.mhrt.qld.gov.au/?page_id=2 is an example of the process in my home state, but each jurisdiction has their own version).

Caplan rightly pointed out that those with mental illness were less likely to be the perpetrators of violence and more likely to be the victims, but that doesn’t negate the need for protection of the community from those with mental illness who have shown violent intent and no capacity to control their behaviour.

If you want to find a group that really are suffering from inhumane and immoral deprivations of their human rights, then that would be Christians. Around the globe, millions of Christians are oppressed, imprisoned, tortured, raped, and murdered every year.

Time and space preclude a full analysis of Caplan’s post, but what’s really important is that both the American Psychiatric Association and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Civil Rights, an independent ombudsman, dismissed formal appeals by Caplan relating to her hysterical claims of inhumane forced psychiatric treatment. Dr Leaf conveniently left that out of her social media post.

Instead, Dr Leaf chose to publish one of the most alarming quotes from an article heavy on scaremongering, from a disaffected author on an extremist blog. If Dr Leaf was a real expert on mental health instead of being a self-declared one, she would have easily seen how nonsensical Caplan’s post was.

By posting this quote on social media today, it’s highly likely that Dr Leaf has caused harm to thousands of vulnerable Christians by unnecessarily increasing the stigma and fear of a mental health diagnosis. This, in turn, is likely to lead to these same vulnerable Christians missing out on (drug and non-drug) treatment which would help them rise to their true potential in God and in life, leaving them trapped and suffering in their mental destitution.

Dr Leaf has a track record of misinformation when it comes to mental health. Christians suffering mental illness need more support, not more stigma. It’s time Dr Leaf stepped aside, and stopped making things worse.

Dr Caroline Leaf – Rogue Notion

Posted on February 12, 2016 by cedwardpitt

According to a new study by Rutgers University, “Learning new cognitive skills can help reduce overwhelming negative thoughts”. So said Dr Caroline Leaf, communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. She also advised that “Intentionally bringing those rogue thoughts under control is essential to mind health! And learn something new every day – develop your mind!”

So … negative thoughts are what, like an evil spy organisation, running around causing wanton destruction, overwhelming your capacity to function?

If that’s the case, then new cognitive skills must be like Tom Cruise, running, jumping, shooting and kicking their way through the negative thoughts, saving the world and getting the girl.

It’s a popular concept. As I discussed in my previous post, the power of positive thinking is culturally sanctioned Western folk psychology. We implicitly accept the idea that we have to harness positive thoughts and stop negative thoughts if we’re to overcome life’s obstacles.

However, the only rogue notions here are Dr Leaf’s.

Dr Leaf’s post sounds authoritative and sciency, but is nothing else. It’s vague, and with a bit of deeper palpation, it’s actually wrong.

Dr Leaf has gone back to her bad habit of obfuscating her references, maybe because she’s getting lost in her own hubris, or more likely, it’s much easier for her audience to see that she’s just cut-and-pasted the opening by-line of a press release again if she actually disclosed her source.

In fact, the article is about a study from Rutgers which studied two behavioural interventions (not cognitive ones), a form of mindfulness meditation and aerobic exercise. The original publication is in the journal Translational Psychiatry [1], if you want to check it out for yourself. This article isn’t about learning cognitive skills at all. Exercise and mindfulness meditation are tried and true behavioural methods of improving mood disorders like depression, which the authors combined to assess the benefit or otherwise. Neither intervention involved challenging or fighting thoughts, or suppressing ‘negative’ thoughts, or “intentionally bringing those rogue thoughts under control”.

Indeed, the mindfulness meditation used involves “the practice of attending to the present moment and allowing thoughts and emotions to pass without judgment.” [1] Mindfulness doesn’t try to control anything. Rather than supporting Dr Leaf’s declaration that intentionally bringing thoughts under control is essential to mind health, this study contradicts it.

Cutting and pasting doesn’t make you an expert. It’s easy to take a sciency-sounding tag line and put it in a pretty little graphic. Everyone does it. 90% of Instagram and Facebook posts these days are faux-authoritative pseudo-science memes that aren’t worth the bytes they’re made of.

Junk science is like junk food. If that’s all you consume, then you eventually become an intellectual blob of lard, stuffed full of mistruths and logical fallacies, and incapable of understanding scientific truth for yourself. Dr Leaf’s audience deserves better than junk science and it’s about time that Dr Leaf stopped pretending to be an expert, and started acting like one.

Reference

[1] Alderman BL, Olson RL, Brush CJ, Shors TJ. MAP training: combining meditation and aerobic exercise reduces depression and rumination while enhancing synchronized brain activity. Transl Psychiatry 2016;6:e726.

Dr Caroline Leaf and the nonsense of ‘negative’ thinking.

Posted on February 9, 2016 by cedwardpitt

The power of positive thinking. It’s like rust on our collective consciousness, an idea that’s seems virtually impossible to eradicate, slowly eating away at our collective psyche. The idea has become so ingrained in our culture that it’s part of our folklore and our idiom, and it continues to be deliberately perpetuated by success coaches, business leaders and others who make a very tidy living by peddling baseless optimism. It’s been repeated so often that the ‘power of positive thinking’ has become an Availability Cascade (a self-reinforcing process by which an idea gains plausibility through repetition).

Herbert and Forman summarise it nicely, “The ideas that thoughts and beliefs lead directly to feelings and behavior, and that to change one’s maladaptive behavior and subjective sense of well-being one must first change one’s cognitions, are central themes of Western folk psychology. We encourage friends to ‘look on the bright side’ of difficult situations in order to improve their distress. We seek to cultivate “positive attitudes” in our children in the belief that this will lead to better academic or athletic performance. Traditional cognitively-oriented models of CBT (e.g., CT, stress inoculation training, and rational emotive behavior therapy) build on these culturally sanctioned ideas by describing causal effects of cognitions on affect and behavior, and by interventions targeting distorted, dysfunctional, or otherwise maladaptive cognitions.” [1]

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and a self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. She is one of the many that continue to perpetuate the myth of positive and negative thinking.

Today’s social media meme was yet another promotion of this misguided idea, and to top it off, she misquoted scripture again in an attempt to reinforce it.

“If you randomly allow any negative thought into your mind damage can ensue on a mental & physical level. ‘We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.’ 2 Corinthians 10:5 NLT”

Lets quickly break meme down to see exactly why Dr Leaf is, yet again, misleading her audience.

1. The mind does not control the brain

Dr Leaf’s meme implies that negative thought damages us mentally and physically. The problem with that is that the mind doesn’t control our brain or our body, so negative thought can’t damage us mentally or physically.

Instead, it’s our brain that gives rise to, and controls our thoughts and feelings. We don’t see what goes on ‘under the hood’ so to speak, we only experience our thoughts and feelings, so we assume that regulate each other. But it’s our brain and a number of other processes that are responsible for generating both our thoughts and feelings (CAP blog).

‘Negative’ thoughts can sometimes be the result of damage to our brain, but ‘negative’ thoughts don’t damage the brain.

In fact, often the so-called ‘negative’ thoughts are actually good for us.

2. Negative thinking is normal and healthy

Dr Leaf’s meme also implies that we control the content of our thoughts by suggesting that we ‘allow’ negative thoughts into our minds. But negative thoughts are meant to be there, which is why we have them. ‘Negative’ thoughts have a positive function. We need them to survive.

For example, we have a fear response to prevent us from continually putting ourselves in danger. We have an anger response to motivate us through difficult obstacles. We have feelings of embarrassment to help maintain social cohesion. As Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck state, “adaptive coping does not rely exclusively on positive emotions nor on constant dampening of emotional reactions. In fact, emotions like anger have important adaptive functions, such as readying a person to sweep away an obstacle, as well communicating these intentions to others. Adaptive coping profits from flexible access to a range of genuine emotions as well as the ongoing cooperation of emotions with other components of the action system.” [2]

Dr Leaf isn’t helping anyone with her meme today. She’s simply promoting an outdated and unscientific notion, encouraging her audience to suppress normal, helpful adaptive functions for fear of harm that’s not scientifically possible.

Then as if to add insult to injury, she follows up her misleading meme with an equally misleading misrepresentation of 2 Corinthians 10:5.

3. Taking every thought captive?

2 Corinthians 10:5 is Pauls famous scripture about taking every thought captive, a concept which seems to support Dr Leaf’s ideas, except that Paul isn’t speaking generally to us, but specifically about the Corinthian church. Look at the verse in context:

“By the humility and gentleness of Christ, I appeal to you – I, Paul, who am ‘timid’ when face to face with you, but ‘bold’ towards you when away! I beg you that when I come I may not have to be as bold as I expect to be towards some people who think that we live by the standards of this world. For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete.
You are judging by appearances. If anyone is confident that they belong to Christ, they should consider again that we belong to Christ just as much as they do. So even if I boast somewhat freely about the authority the Lord gave us for building you up rather than tearing you down, I will not be ashamed of it. I do not want to seem to be trying to frighten you with my letters. For some say, ‘His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing.’ Such people should realise that what we are in our letters when we are absent, we will be in our actions when we are present.” (NIV UK, 2 Corinthians 10:1-11)

This chapter is a specific rebuke to some of the Christians within the church at Corinth, and also a defence against some of the murmurings and accusations that some in that church were levelling at Paul. For example, in verse 2, “I beg you that when I come I may not have to be as bold as I expect to be towards some people who think that we live by the standards of this world.”

Verses 3-6 are a specific and authoritative rebuttal against the accusations levelled at Paul, paraphrased as, “You may speak against us and the church, but we have weapons that smash strongholds, and we’re coming to take down those pretensions of yours and take every thought of yours captive to make it obedient to Christ, and punish every act of disobedience …”

The specific nature of the verse is also supported by some Bible commentary: “But how does St. Paul meet the charge of being carnally minded in his high office? “Though we walk in the flesh [live a corporeal life], we do not war after the flesh,” or “according to the flesh,” the contrast being in the words “in” and “according.” And forthwith he proceeds to show the difference between walking in the flesh and warring according to the flesh. A warrior he is, an open and avowed warrior – a warrior who was to cast down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; a warrior too who would punish these Judaizers if they continued their disorganizing work; but a prudent and considerate warrior, deferring the avenging blow till “I am assured of your submission” (Stanley) “that I may not confound the innocent with the guilty, the dupes with the deceivers.” What kind of a preacher he was he had shown long before; what kind of an apostle he was among apostles as to independence, self-support, and resignation of official rights in earthly matters, he had also shown; further yet, what kind of a sufferer and martyr he was had been portrayed.” (C. Lipscomb – http://biblehub.com/commentaries/homiletics/2_corinthians/10.htm)

Similarly, the translation from the original text is more specific than general. The verb used for “bringing into captivity” is aichmalōtízō, “to make captive: – lead away captive, bring into captivity” which is in the Present Active Participle form of the verb. The present tense represents a simple statement of fact or reality viewed as occurring in actual time. The active voice represents the subject as the doer or performer of the action. The Greek participle corresponds for the most part to the English participle, reflecting “-ing” or “-ed” being suffixed to the basic verb form. Actions completed but ongoing or commands are different verb tenses (see https://www.blueletterbible.org/help/greekverbs.cfm for a better explanation). So Paul wasn’t making a general statement, but a specific statement about what he would do in his present time, not the future.

So, Paul isn’t telling us to “bring every thought captive into obedience to Christ”. Dr Leaf is perpetuating a common scriptural misunderstanding.

A verse which better clarifies what God wants for our thought life is Paul’s exhortation to the Philippian church in Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.” Both the context, and the form of the verb, suggest that this is an ongoing command. And it makes better sense too. If we spend all of our time trying to fight against every thought that comes into our head, we’d become exhausted, but we can divert attention to those things that are worthy of our attention. And in many ways, what Paul is encouraging is what would be considered now as simple meditation, which is more scientific than the power of positive thinking.

The moral of this story … ‘negative’ thoughts and feelings don’t do us damage, but trying to unnecessarily suppress them does.

References

[1] Herbert, J.D. and Forman, E.M., The Evolution of Cognitive Behavior Therapy: The Rise of Psychological Acceptance and Mindfulness, in Acceptance and Mindfulness in Cognitive Behavior Therapy. 2011, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p. 1-25.
[2] Skinner EA, Zimmer-Gembeck MJ. The development of coping. Annual review of psychology 2007;58:119-44.

Christian male modelling

Posted on January 28, 2016 by cedwardpitt

Some love him. Some hate him. It doesn’t change the fact that he was still “ridiculously good looking”.

Zoolander was one of those cult movies that polarised people into “absolutely love it” or “absolutely loathe it” camps. I admit, I’m one of the former. (“Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty” … It still cracks me up!)

For those who aren’t familiar with the story, Derek Zoolander was a top male model who was famous for his different looks: “Blue Steel”, “Ferrari”, “Le Tigre” and the famous “Magnum”. They were all the same pose, of course, but everyone thought they were different. Except for evil fashion designer, Mugatu, who in a burst of rage at the climax of the movie, yells, “Who cares about Derek Zoolander anyway? The man has only one look … Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigra? They’re the same face! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

There are times when I read Dr Leaf’s social media posts, and I feel the same as Mugatu.

“Dr Leaf isn’t a scientific expert … ‘When we think, we learn because we are changing our genes and creating new ones’ … That’s not scientifically possible! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and a self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. If Dr Leaf was a legitimate scientist, she would know that our genes do not change when we process new information. Our genes are stable. They do not change unless there’s a mutation, which occurs in one out of every 30 million or so genes. We do not make new genes at will. Last year, scientists at MIT were reported to have shown that DNA breaks when new things are learnt, but in a normal nerve cell, these breaks are quickly repaired. That’s certainly interesting, but that’s not changing the DNA or making new genes. Making claims that we make new genes to hold new information is like saying that pigs fly.

Dr Leaf’s supporters would likely make a counter-argument that she probably didn’t mean that genes really change, or we make new genes, she’s just not worded her meme properly. Well, there are two responses to that, neither of which are any better for Dr Leaf. Because scientists who really are experts don’t make errors so large that you can spelunk through them. And, this isn’t the first time that Dr Leaf has made claims about how our genes fluctuate. She made a similar claim back in September 2014. Saying the same thing several times isn’t a mistake, it shows she really believes that we change our DNA code by the power of our thoughts.

Whether someone thinks DNA is changeable isn’t likely to cause any great harm to that person, but what is concerning is that Dr Leaf has been given her own show on the Christian cable TV network TBN to discuss mental health. She’s already proven that her knowledge of psychiatric medications is dangerously flawed. If Dr Leaf doesn’t know the basics of DNA, then giving her a platform to preach something that can effect whether a person might live or die is particularly perilous.

Dr Leaf’s rise is also a worrying symptom of a Christian church that is intellectually imploding. In a 2013 blog for the Huffington Post, Charles Reid wrote,

“Christians must provide effective witness against both extremes. But before Christianity can engage atheism it must first address the scientific illiteracy in its own house. For the greatest danger Christianity confronts at the present moment is not incipient persecution, but increasing marginalization and irrelevance. If Christians cannot engage reasonably and responsibly with science, there will be no place for them in the public life of advanced societies.”

Reid was paying particular attention to Ken Ham in this blog, but the principle remains the same. Scientifically illiterate Christians quickly lose credibility with people. We can’t meaningfully engage with a person who has a rudimentary understanding of biology by proudly tell them that we create new genes with the power of thought. That makes us sound like a male model.

For the sake of other Christians health and well-being, and for the sake of our credibility and our witness, we need to critically assess Dr Leaf’s work, not promote it as another gospel.

Does helping others help you?

Posted on January 16, 2016 by cedwardpitt

John Holmes wrote “There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.”

We all know that exercise is good for us, but is the exercise of the heart, “reaching down and lifting people up” just as good for us?

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. Her meme of the day today was a claim that “Helping others can increase your lifespan.” She explained that “Researchers found a link between serving others, improved health and decreased mortality! See more at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780662/pdf/AJPH.2012.300876.pdf”.

The journal she referenced was a 2013 article by Poulin et al in the American Journal of Public Health [1]. Poulin and his colleagues examined data from nearly 850 people in the Detroit area. At the start of their study, they asked their participants about stressful life events in the last year and whether they provided tangible assistance to friends or family members. They then followed their participants for five years and analysed the characteristics of who died in that time.

According to the study by Poulin, those who helped others were younger, healthier, more likely to be White, of higher socioeconomic status, and higher in social support and social contact than those who didn’t help, all factors that have been shown to influence mortality. They also noted that 70% of their cohort didn’t experience any stressful life events. While they adjusted for these variables, their statistics would still be affected by them. As it turns out, while their results were significant, their numbers had broad confidence intervals, so the effect they found is very weak.

What about other studies looking at the same question but in a different way? Well, there are mixed findings. Roth and colleagues published a study in 2013 in the American Journal of Epidemiology which also showed that care-givers had better life expectancy than matched controls [1] but then a number of other studies show the opposite. The Caregiver Health Effects Study found that those who were providing care to a disabled spouse and who reported some strain associated with that care had a 63% elevated risk of death compared with non-caregiving spouses [2]. Other studies suggest that caregivers have poorer mental and physical health status than non-caregivers [3], and caregiving has been widely portrayed as a serious public health problem in the professional literature [4, 5].

So while Poulin found a loose association between helping others and decreased mortality, Dr Leaf has taken that a step too far:

> Firstly, correlation does not equal causation. Just because a study found those who helped others had a decreased mortality doesn’t mean that the reverse, helping others increases your lifespan, necessarily holds. There may be other explanations.
> Secondly, other studies show conflicting results, so Poulin’s study may be a statistical hiccough.

It’s not clear that helping others is actually good for our health. That doesn’t mean to say we shouldn’t help others. I think we should, if for no other reason than the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But we can’t definitively say that helping others will help us directly by making us live longer. That’s scientifically still up in the air.

References

[1]        Poulin MJ, Brown SL, Dillard AJ, Smith DM. Giving to others and the association between stress and mortality. Am J Public Health 2013 Sep;103(9):1649-55.
[2]        Schulz R, Beach SR. Caregiving as a risk factor for mortality: the Caregiver Health Effects Study. JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association 1999 Dec 15;282(23):2215-9.
[3]        Pinquart M, Sorensen S. Differences between caregivers and noncaregivers in psychological health and physical health: a meta-analysis. Psychol Aging 2003 Jun;18(2):250-67.
[4]        Talley RC, Crews JE. Framing the public health of caregiving. Am J Public Health 2007 Feb;97(2):224-8.
[5]        Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Caregiving, A Public Health Priority. 2010, 7 Dec 2010 [cited 2016 Jan 16]; Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/aging/caregiving/index.htm

Mobile phone mothering – one more thing for mums to feel unnecessarily guilty about

Posted on January 9, 2016 by cedwardpitt

Mothers. They are probably the single most important group of people in the world.

It’s not that I’m belittling the role of fatherhood, or demeaning the amazing work that fathers do for their children, but simply put, we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the tireless patience and sacrifice of our mums. Nine months of nausea, sore breasts, swollen appendages and having your organs used as punching bags. Then there’s the trauma of birth itself, which is rewarded with the full-time care of a screaming, incessantly ravenous alimentary canal which has taken the form of a baby. Over the years, the screaming and the pooping become slightly more manageable, but most mothers remain the head chef, playmate, laundromat, ironing lady, teacher, taxi-driver, nurse and drill sergeant for their offspring.

Despite these daily feats of amazement, most mothers are haunted by this nagging sense of not being good enough – Mother Guilt. As author Mia Redrick wrote,

“Mother’s guilt is real. Nearly all of us experience it. We are racked with guilt, feeling that our best isn’t good enough. We struggle when work commitments prevent us from attending school events and we are crushed by the looks of disappointment on our children’s faces. We wonder if choices we have made, such as what school to send our kids to, have not had far-reaching negative consequences, if a different path would have resulted in happier, more well-adjusted kids. We moms might feel guilty when we can’t afford something for our kids or are nagged by the feeling that we simply don’t spend enough time with them.”

Mothers seems to feel guilty about anything, and everything, for the whole day …

“The kids are in the bed again. I was sure I shushed them back to their beds at 2am, they must have snuck in during the wee hours. Tonight I will make sure they sleep all night in their own beds. How will they ever learn to sleep if I keep letting them come in to my bed?”
“Whose children get only eight hours of sleep a night? I am sure at this age they are meant to be getting 12 – 14 hours sleep. I am going to damage then for life. Maybe I should let them sleep in my bed so they get more sleep?”
“Oh so much sugar in EVERYTHING. Don’t you read the articles? Don’t you hear the “experts”? Don’t you see those diagrams with spoonful upon spoonful of the deadly substance displayed, a visual representation of poison imprinted on your mind each and every time you take the bran flakes from the cupboard?”

And so it goes on.

Today, Dr Leaf added one more thing for mothers to feel guilty about – smartphones.

“Mothers, put down your smartphones when caring for your babies! That’s the message from researchers, who have found that fragmented and chaotic maternal care can disrupt proper brain development, which can lead to emotional disorders later in life.”

She then exhorted her followers, “Lets get some real eye-to-eye contact going – dads included!”

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. Credit where credit’s due – in the past, Dr Leaf has pathologically avoided citing her references, but today, she cited the article itself and the news story that promoted it.

But again, like the meme she posted a couple of days ago about sadness making people sick, Dr Leaf has posted the opening paragraph of a promotional PR puff piece and made it sound like a scientific pronouncement. When you actually read the journal article that the news story is promoting, it has nothing to do with smartphones. Or indeed, human beings.

The research was performed entirely on rats.

The research itself, by Molet and colleagues [1], seemed entirely legitimate. The rat pups raised in a more chaotic way appeared to have higher levels of anhedonia, because they didn’t engage as much in the things that rats normally find pleasurable, namely, drinking sugar water or playing with their rat buddies.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen a mother rat on a smartphone. I certainly haven’t, which means that news article Dr Leaf took her meme from, the one published on Science Direct, made some pretty tenuous assumptions:

Chaotic mothering to rat pups is the cause of rat anhedonia
Rat mothering and human mothering have similar outcomes
Smartphone use causes fragmented and chaotic maternal care
Not using smartphones would improve outcomes.

There’s no evidence from this study, or any work that I know of, that definitively proves any one of these things. There are a number of alternative explanations as to why those rat pups weren’t as happy as the control group, but even if the chaotic nurturing of the rat babies was THE cause of their unhappiness, human beings are completely different to rats in cages. And there are many things, other than smartphones, that can strain the mother-baby relationship. Excessive mother guilt for one.

Dr Leaf’s meme is a good example of just how misinformation can spread quickly through the internet. The PR department of a university writes a puff piece on the article to promote the university and its research. But no one wants to read about depressed rats – they need a better hook. There’s a love-hate relationship with smartphones in our culture, and lots of Mommy-guilt, so they use a sentence about smartphones and mothering to grab people’s attention, even though the journal article had nothing to do with either.

Science Direct then simply republished the press release from the university without filtering it, where it’s then picked up by wannabe scientists and self-titled experts like Dr Leaf, who pass on the misinformation to hundreds of thousands of their followers. Pretty soon, mothers everywhere are feeling guilty about looking at their phone instead of their children’s eyes, when it probably doesn’t make a blime bit of difference.

The take home messages:

Unless you’re a rat, there’s no evidence that using your smartphone makes you a bad mother.
Be wary of social media memes, and what you read on the internet.
Dr Leaf is hurting her own credibility by reposting the opening paragraphs of sciencey promotional PR articles instead of reading the actual article first. We need experts to reduce the amount of misinformation clogging the internet, not increase it.

References

[1] Molet J, Heins K, Zhuo X, et al. Fragmentation and high entropy of neonatal experience predict adolescent emotional outcome. Translational psychiatry 2016;6:e702.

Does sadness make you sick?

Posted on January 7, 2016 by cedwardpitt

We’ve all heard of being “homesick”, or “heartsick”, or “lovesick”. Sometimes when we’re extremely sad, we feel the knot in our stomachs, the pressure in our chests, or the confusion and distraction in our minds as the waves of sadness wash over and discombobulate us.

But can being sad really make you physically ill as well as emotionally distraught?

Dr Caroline Leaf declared today on her social media platforms that “Feeling sad can alter levels of stress-related opioids in the brain and increase levels of inflammatory proteins in the blood that are linked to increased risk of comorbid diseases including heart disease, stroke and metabolic syndrome.”

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and a self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. She believes that our cognitive stream of thought determines our physical and mental health, and can even influence physical matter through the power of our minds.

She also added some further interpretation to her meme: “So this is more evidence that our thoughts do count: they have major epigenetic effects on the brain and body! We need to apply the principles in the Bible and listen to the Holy Spirit – no excuses this year!”

With all due respect to Dr Leaf, the study she quotes doesn’t prove anything of the sort.

Dr Leaf’s meme is a copy and paste of the opening paragraph of a news report published by the university’s PR people to promote their faculty. This isn’t a scientific summary, it’s a hook to draw attention to an article which amounts to a PR puff piece. If Dr Leaf had read further into the article, I don’t think she would have been quite so bold in claiming what she did.

The article discussed a study by Prossin and colleagues, published in Molecular Psychiatry [1]. You can read the original study here. The study specifically measured the change in the level of the activity of the opioid neurotransmitter system and the amount of a pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-18 across two experimental mood states, and in two different groups of volunteers, people with depression, and those without.

For a start, it’s important to note that the study isn’t referring to normal day-to-day sadness. This was an experimentally induced condition in which a sad memory was rehearsed so that the same feeling could be reproduced in a scanner, and the study was looking at the effect of this sad “mood” on people who were pathologically sad, that is, people diagnosed with major depression.

It’s well known that people with depression are at a higher risk of major illnesses, such as heart attacks, strokes and diabetes [2] The current study by Prossin et al looked experimentally at one possible link in the chain, a link between a neurotransmitter system that’s thought to change with emotional states, and one of the chemical mediators of inflammation.

They found that:

> Depressed people were much sadder to start with, and remained so throughout the different conditions. The depressed people stayed sadder in the ‘neutral’ phase, and the healthy cohort couldn’t catch them in the ‘sad’ phase.
> Depressed people had a much higher level of the inflammatory marker to start with, and interestingly, this level dropped significantly with the induction of the neutral phase and the sad phase. What was also interesting was that the level of the inflammatory marker was about the same in the baseline and the sad phase for the healthy volunteers.
> A completely different pattern of neurotransmitter release was seen in the two different groups. People with depression had an increase in the neurotransmitter release over a large number of areas of the brain, whereas in the healthy controls with normal mood, the sad state actually resulted in a decreased amount of neurotransmitter release, and in a much smaller area within the brain. This suggests that the opioid neurotransmitter system in the brains of depressed people is dysfunctional.

Affect/Sadness Scores – Prossin et al Molecular psychiatry 2015 Aug 18.

IL18 v Mood state/diagnosis – Prossin et al Molecular psychiatry 2015 Aug 18.

Effectively, the results of the study reflect what’s already known – the emotional dysregulation seen in people with depression is because of an underlying problem with the brain, not the other way around. And, sadness in normal people is not associated with a significant change in the evil pro-inflammatory cytokine.

So, according to Prossin’s article,

normal sadness in normal people is not associated with physical illnesses.
sadness is abnormally processed in people who are depressed, which maybe related to an abnormal inflammatory response, which might explain the known link between depression and increased risk of illness

The article is not “more evidence that our thoughts do count.” If anything, it shows that underlying biological processes are responsible for our thoughts and emotions and their downstream effects, not the thoughts and emotions themselves.

And unfortunately, it appears that Dr Leaf hasn’t got past the opening paragraph of a puff piece article before jumping to a conclusion which only fits her worldview, not the actual science.

References

[1] Prossin AR, Koch AE, Campbell PL, Barichello T, Zalcman SS, Zubieta JK. Acute experimental changes in mood state regulate immune function in relation to central opioid neurotransmission: a model of human CNS-peripheral inflammatory interaction. Molecular psychiatry 2015 Aug 18.
[2] Clarke DM, Currie KC. Depression, anxiety and their relationship with chronic diseases: a review of the epidemiology, risk and treatment evidence. Med J Aust 2009 Apr 6;190(7 Suppl):S54-60.

Dr Caroline Leaf’s war on drugs

Posted on December 12, 2015 by cedwardpitt

Today, Dr Leaf posted this on her social media feeds. It’s clearly meant to shock and enrage her followers.

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and a self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. She’s also cast herself as an expert on mental health.

To the detriment of her followers, and sadly, to the rest of the Christian church, most people believe her.

Her most recent book, and her social media memes for the last couple of months, have made it clear that Dr Leaf is pursuing her own personal war on drugs … but prescription psychiatric drugs not the illicit kind.

Unfortunately, her attacks on prescription psychiatric drugs have amounted to nothing more than a hysterically illogical smear campaign under the guise of her concern for public safety.

Today’s offering follows the same pattern of narrow-minded hysteria.

Her main quote from was from Robert Whitaker, “Twenty years ago, our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a ‘serious mental illness’.”

Whitaker, like Dr Leaf, is an outspoken critic of modern psychiatric treatment with a poor understanding of how psychiatric medications actually work. The statement that Dr Leaf quotes is remarkable for it’s poor logic. The quote implies that the rise in childhood mental health is because of the rise in psychotropic medication use in children. But correlation does not equal causation. Even if one in fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a ‘serious mental illness’, and twenty years ago our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, there’s no evidence that the psychiatric medications are actually causing the psychiatric problems.

Then there’s Dr Leaf’s emotionally charged statement that “They are even prescribing these psychoactive substances to infants!”

The New York Times article that she linked to discusses the case of Andrew Rios, a child suffering from severe epilepsy, having his first seizure at 5 months. Though it’s clearly more complicated than just “simple” epilepsy – he’s pictured wearing a helmet which suggests that he has myoclonic epilepsy which is clearly uncontrolled. It’s also clear from the article that the child was having mood swings and violent behaviour before the anti-psychotic was given. The history of early seizures with ongoing poor control and violent behavior means that this unfortunate young boy likely has a severe and complicated neurological syndrome, quite possibly because of an underlying abnormality of his brain. And the symptoms he had which the mother claimed were from the antipsychotic were just as likely to have been night terrors, a common problem in two year olds.

In the end, who really knows? But there’s certainly not enough in this article to clearly convict antipsychotics of being toxic or evil.

Neither is the use of antipsychotics for infants widespread. 20,000 prescriptions for antipsychotic medications sounds like a travesty, but according to the article, the real numbers are probably much less, or about 10,000, since not every prescription is filled. Even 10,000 sounds like a lot, but that represents 0.0002% of all prescriptions in the US, and most of those scripts are not actually being taken by the child, but by their uninsured parent(s).

Indeed, as the article itself said, “In interviews, a dozen experts in child psychiatry and neurology said that they had never heard of a child younger than 3 receiving such medication, and struggled to explain it.”

So the prescribing of antipsychotics to infants is extremely rare, almost unheard of, and is only likely to be done in extreme cases where all other options have been exhausted.

That’s certainly not the impression you get from Dr Leaf’s post, which is just another misinformed smear against anti-psychotic medications.

Dr Leaf’s war against psychiatric medications is reckless. When people who need psychiatric medications don’t take them, suffering increases, as do suicides.

It’s time Dr Leaf stopped spreading needless fear about these medications. They help more people than they harm, people who already suffer from the stigma of having a severe mental illness. They don’t need any more suffering stemming from Dr Leaf’s so-called “expertise”.

Dr C. Edward Pitt

Faith, Hope, Love, Science.

Category Archives: Caroline Leaf

Book review: “Think and Eat Yourself Smart” by Dr Caroline Leaf

“Think and Eat Yourself Smart”: a pre-review

Dr Caroline Leaf – Increasing the stigma of mental illness again

Dr Caroline Leaf – Rogue Notion

Dr Caroline Leaf and the nonsense of ‘negative’ thinking.

Christian male modelling

Does sadness make you sick?

Dr Caroline Leaf’s war on drugs