The curse of the goitre in Switzerland(lrb.co.uk) |
The curse of the goitre in Switzerland(lrb.co.uk) |
Does anyone have an idea of how much potassium iodide they might have, if any?
And after reading it whole I must say. Fuck you Bircher.
For many, the meaning has been lost, and it became a generic term to designate an idiot. Despite having heard and even used the expression many times, I think the popular character "Captain Haddock" and his expletives from the "Tintin" comics made it popular. Yet, I only came to the true meaning very recently.
I'm always impressed with all these doctors that would question the approach, try new protocols, and end up by finding a cure
I suspect that one of the issues was that most/all food used to be sourced locally, especially eggs and milk, which are good sources of iodine, with seafood probably mostly absent from the Swiss diet.
Edit: apparently nowadays, and taking animal feed into account, Switzerland imports about 50% of its food.
"Iodine-131 (usually as iodide) is a component of nuclear fallout, and is particularly dangerous owing to the thyroid gland's propensity to concentrate ingested iodine and retain it for periods longer than this isotope's radiological half-life of eight days. For this reason, people at risk of exposure to environmental radioactive iodine (iodine-131) in fallout may be instructed to take non-radioactive potassium iodide tablets... Ingestion of [a] large dose of non-radioactive iodine minimises the uptake of radioactive iodine by the thyroid gland."
https://www.klartext-nahrungsergaenzung.de/wissen/lebensmitt...
There is no scientifically sound reason against it.
My main issue with normal salt is the anti-caking ingredient needed to not have it stick together, in general not needed with sea salt and a real grinder.
We just don’t think about it because we’ve defeated it completely by putting iodine in the most popular spice, and also people in the past were afflicted by all sorts of horrible illnesses. It doesn’t stand out from the noise of the past being generally a mess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodized_salt#In_public_health_...
> Worldwide, iodine deficiency affects two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual and developmental disabilities.[1][2] According to public health experts, iodisation of salt may be the world's simplest and most cost-effective measure available to improve health, only costing US$0.05 per person per year
"The interests of people in the thyroid gland have always been immense because of the widespread prevalence of its diseases. Therefore the earliest references to the gland date back to 1st century AD. The Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, Greek and Byzantine medicines are especially rich in their knowledge on the subject."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_iodine_deficiency...
The article makes reference to the Madonna on the Albrecht Dürer’s Dresden Altarpiece having an obvious goiter. That was produced in the late 15th to early 16th century. That’s evidence from the article that the problem was so common then that it was depicted in sacred art.
Maps with goiter prevalence can be found on the WHO's website: https://www.who.int/teams/nutrition-and-food-safety/database...
With all our popular narratives about the inevitability of scientific progress, it's always refreshing (from a historical point of view) and important (from a personal, ethical perspective) to remember that there's no guarantee that chronologically later developments will necessarily be improvements on earlier conclusions.
It brings to mind our current replication crises in science.
And even if in this case the initial solution was correct, it was still observing a correlation, as they had no clue why lemons do the job.
My conclusion based on the article is that just experimenting is not enough, you also need to develop and test a complex understanding of the system. We probably don't cherish enough as a society, that some of us (as in: trained researchers, etc.) have a mindset that expects both replication and understanding, even if being humans we don't always reach this ideal.
Basically, it's easy to think we understand something when we have a solution to it, but the two should not be automatically conflated.
I’ve always wondered if the iodine in the air is part of the allure of the seaside.
Coastal areas of course have produced a huge number of successful countries. Most of that must be the trade and logistics advantages. I wonder if getting the iodine right out of the air was another hidden major advantage though.
Iodine deficiency is ONE cause of goiter, but not the only one.
https://www.healthline.com/health/hypothryroidism/hashimotos...
Since the article from OP is relatively short on images, the following are links to more images from the german article, with captions translated into english. Warning: images contain depictions of the medical condition discussed in the article. YMMV, but i don't consider them 'gross' or NSFW.
Image 1: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/EzdPT4pM4HAAzsQiwi_L2d.jpg Caption: Woman with goitre in Frienisberg, 1921.
Image 2: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/5PhByWEba4W8L0W1EnHXiE.jpg Caption: Woman with cretinism, 1928. (Today the word has a derogatory connotation, but primarily describes an illness of great cruelty).
Image 3: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/Bu0SX8WY4gK8jMZgebpyss.jpg Caption: Six women with cretinism, ca. 1920.
Image 4: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/8qBQEgsuqq-BMdsEAPN63U.jpg Caption: Found the solution to Switzerland's original curse: Heinrich Hunziker from Adliswil ZH, drawn by Marianne Zumbrunn in 1977.
Image 5: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/7tdlChuPq-3AIeFiSvh5U1.jpg Caption: Experiments with the snow shovel: the Valais country doctor Otto Bayard, 1937.
Image 6: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/5JGFFaXN48BA4xOsHXf0Zu.jpg Caption: Sun-tanned outdoorsman: the Herisau general practitioner and later chief physician Hans Eggenberger, undated.
[1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wie-drei-heldenhafte-aerzte-die... or https://archive.is/rHzSV
edit: formatting, removed german caption texts
They work with politicians and industry in a very targetted way to increase the use of iodised salt in food production where it is most needed in the world. They don't directly fund any of the activities, but create the relationships, conditions and understanding for it to happen - meaning they are an extremely effective charity, creating population scale change with very modest funding.
They also do lots of work to try to map the global picture of iodine intake from the very varied data available. Some of the results might surprise you - https://ign.org/scorecard/
Changing the ratio of T3/T4 does cause a change in TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) but that's IMHO simply a signal that the iodine is getting used, so please send us more.
There are other tissues in the body that need iodine, as evidenced by the sodium-iodine symporter present on those cells, so to set the recommended daily iodine intake based solely on what the thyroid can use is IMHO a huge mistake.
Some things with interesting iodine research: skin cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, asthma, polycystic ovaries, fibrocystic breast disease, other cancers. But yeah, it cures goiter...
I never really got it until reading this article. But I've always made sure to have some iodized salt as I cook just to make sure we don't end up deficient, understanding that there was some easily avoided consequences at basically no cost.
'But as much as the country is agreeable in its wildness, as much are the inhabitants savage, and deformed, and monstrous in their appearance. Very many of them have ugly swelled throats; idiots and deaf people swarm in every village; and the general aspect of the people is the most shocking I ever saw.' [1]
That's why some traditional costumes in that region include a so called "Kropfband" (goitre bound). [2]
It's fascinating how much one's place of birth used to influence a life and medical biography and in many countries still does.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42843/42843-h/42843-h.htm
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/way-to-g...
https://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/jgrice/psyc5314/Freed...
Actual science looks nothing like the shoddy paper churning that we see in much of econ and social science using questionable and assumption-heavy casual inference methods.
The article is about how people with a fear of iodine overdose resisted the idea of adding it to salt on first place.
I spent my childhood in Brazil, a country where there are a good amount of natural iodine. Yet the government decided to ignore the risks, seemly well known for more than a century, and jack up the iodine in the salt to levels beyond what any international standard recommend or tested. And now I hypothyroidism caused by iodine overdose.
Peddling nonsense against better knowledge that causes this amount of suffering deserves ridicule in posterity. We shouldn't just celebrate those who do great things for humanity, but also "anti-celebrate" those who do great harm.
https://www.mpi.govt.nz/food-safety-home/nutrients-added-foo...
It's a shame because the remaining 98% could get a lot of benefit and (setting aside the above) iodine is supposed to be the least toxic pure element. In the past Lugol's iodine was used as an antiseptic to put on cuts so I guess a fair amount got absorbed that way.
> in 1921, in the city of Bern, 94 per cent of schoolchildren had some swelling of the neck and almost 70 per cent had a goitre.
Gosh - it's surprising that years after discovering relativity and the like they were still figuring that out. (Einstein lived in Bern from 1903 to 1905 and developed his Theory of Relativity there).
As is usually the case with numbers like this from the past, this is a mean value, not a median value, that is massively skewed downwards by having upwards of 50% child mortality by age 4.
A typical Swiss person in 1875 who had already turned 30 could be expected to live to be 70.
Here's an article talking about this phenomenon [0]. They term it "adult modal age at death", i.e. at what age do people tend to die once they have survived childhood? In Sweden, in 1875 an adult woman could be expected to live to be 72, and an adult man to be 69. But the average life expectancy in Sweden in 1875 was only 44.
Per the same article, the modal age at death for adults in Switzerland in 1875 was 70 for both men and women.
[0] https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1204_0683--the-mos...
As well as in the lowlands, far enough away from the sea to not have easy access to produces or sea salt through trade. It used to be common in the english midlands and the US midwest (as well as the appalachia and rockies).
Salt started being iodized only around 15 or so years back, IIRC.
https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/2017-03-27/ty-art...
https://ijhpr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13584-020-...
although the rock salts of the world don't seem to be iodized iirc.
Captain Haddock, from Tin Tin used to call people 'crétin des Alpes'.
probably has more to do with 1515 (Marignano) and 1815 (Congress of Vienna, which secured Switzerland as an independent state, while enforcing neutrality).
Apparently Michigan helped normalize the ionization of salt in the US: https://www.michiganradio.org/show/stateside/2022-05-12/once...
You now have people that refuse to vaccinate their children against measles, COVID vaccine hesitancy is a widespread phenomenon with some people resorting to heresay remedies like horse dewormers instead, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is running for US president and polling with double digit numbers.
Health-related insights are particularly susceptible to targeted misinformation. And in an era of social media, this can quickly become a majority opinion.
They aren’t the anti science luddites your comment paints them as. They are (rightly) skeptical of “the science” which often isn’t very scientific at all.
As we’ve seen, the medical science community is heavily motivated by profit and prestige, but unfortunately not always truth.
New discoveries in that field are often revealed to be bullshit. They deserve skepticism, not blind compliance.
Mass vaccination started in the late 50s and especially early 60s (with Sabin’s oral vaccine).
Millennials start in 1981, so they would / could well have known affected adults.
It is hard to understand for me how people can intentionally increase risks of deadly diseases for their children.
I had some elderly neighbors with this condition and I think they lived long enough (1990 maybe?) that my two next younger brothers might have visited them too. (Why I don't know: they were not relatives or anything, my mom and aunt just used to visit them to be nice to them, so I suspect when I started school they might have taken my place.)
There are also inland health resorts where they build huge salt evaporation walls so that people don't have to drive all the way to the sea to breath sea air- for example in Ciechocinek. And it's not modern technology - they have been built in early 19th century already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciechocinek_graduation_towers
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciechocinek#/media/Plik:Teznie...
That's exactly where it afflicted people in europe as well, mountainous regions tend to be inlands, and from their remoteness don't have the opportunity for incidental iodine through trade, so they worsen the odds, but historically distance from the sea (and thus lack of sea products) has absolutely been the primary issue. CIDS was also endemic to the english midlands for instance.
> I’ve always wondered if the iodine in the air is part of the allure of the seaside.
No, intake from air is considered insignificant.
But, intake from air is how the soil & plants get it, over long time scales…
It’s always possible that a simple indirect selection is at play, e.g. people who simply love the sea breeze (for no particular reason) are more successful because they get enough iodine. Then, the next generation is more likely to love the sea breeze.
A fascinating story overall and a reminder of just one of a number of everyday sicknesses we (as a society) have been able to overcome through science and understanding, despite the occasional step backwards.
Supplementation with T3 yields a rapid correction in bradycardia and hypothermia caused by hypothyroidism. We treat with T4 because it has a longer physiological halflife and thus yields more consistent serum levels; but the evidence is incredibly clear that it's T3 which is having an effect, not T4.
When I search for breast cancer and iodine, I find links that suggest iodine may help prevent that disease - and Japan’s low rate of the condition is potentially related to high consumption of iodine.
Are you saying that all those conditions are due to excess iodine?
Otherwise polio, measles and the like are still as dangerous as they ever were and are ready to make their big return if vaccination rates drop too much. I'm certain even small pox is lurking somewhere out there.
It seems like, unfortunately, humanities book of learned lessons gets reprinted in pain and suffering once in a while.
Very unfair that this is still happening on a site with so many smart people on it.
Oh, and here in Germany it's on place 6?! Wouldn't have guessed!
Here's more about the mechanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduation_tower
Apparently the first such towers were built in 1600s.
Injecting code that causes all of your cells to mass produce spike protines to train your body to fight the spike proteins that your cells are producing just seems really questionable and the VAERS db seems to support my skepticism.
When I started reading the details of how this vaccine worked from the pro-mrna sites, my engineer side started ringing alarm bells and noped right out of it.
When google and others started silencing alternative viewpoints and major govt related employers mandated it, I dusted off my tinfoil hat.
They should have just let the information be free (bad or good) and not pushed so hard. Now they have created distrust.
Air quality in any coastal city in Poland is much much better than in Warsaw/Krakow/Wrocław which are quite far away from the Baltic sea.
https://www.thyroidmanager.org/chapter/cellular-action-of-th...
T3 hormone binds to thyroid hormone receptors in the cell's nucleus, which regulates gene expression. These TH receptors are present all over the place; thyroid hormone has wide ranging effects on the body.
I certainly find more on positive effects of iodine so I think I’ve misunderstood OP.
This is different than iodine added to salt, or iodine in liquid form for wounds. I believe it is potassium iodine.
It is only taken when the nice person on the radio tells you to do so (you know to tune in from the blaring emergency sirens, tested semiannually). Rather interestingly, the emergency instructions for evacuation state that parents should not go to schools to get their kids, because they'll already be gone: in an emergency, municipal transit buses head to the schools, then take loads of kids to designated areas well upwind of the plant.
All of this info and more is available in a rather well-produced section of the local phone books. Since phone books tend to end up unopened in recycling bins these days, I suspect most newer residents have little idea of what I'm talking about.
[edit]: This one, for the curious, although I get it from Vitamin Shoppe, not direct
https://www.lifeextension.com/vitamins-supplements/item02040...
Plants get it from the soil, onto which the iodine gets deposited. There is no breathing apparatus involved.
> It’s always possible that a simple indirect selection is at play, e.g. people who simply love the sea breeze (for no particular reason) are more successful because they get enough iodine.
What part of “intake from air is considered insignificant“ did you fail to understand? You don’t breathe in iodine, it’s been observed to not be a thing.
2) plants near the coast have iodine because iodine has been blowing in from the ocean and depositing on the soil for eons
3) you eat those plant
4) you don’t have an iodine deficiency because your ancestors moved to live by the sea
> A number of words written with œ were borrowed from French and from Latin into English, where the œ is now rarely written. Modern American English spelling usually substitutes e, so diarrhœa has become diarrhea, although there are some exceptions, such as _phoenix_. In modern British English, the spellings generally keep the o but remove the ligature (e.g. diarrhoea).
In the case of _Hors d'oeuvre_, it seems like the english wikipedia keeps the _o_. [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%92 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hors_d%27oeuvre
So if Switzerland imports a lot of those, raw, or in prepared/processed food, or even the animal feed for its hens and cows the Swiss today probably already get much more iodine in their diet than 100 years ago.
0. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Iodine-HealthProfessional/
But the point is that Switzerland's environment is especially poor in iodine hence the specific health problems it used to have, and which were much less serious in neighbouring countries.
[edit] fair enough, I need to qualify that. You pretty much cannot get too much iodine with something that looks like a normal diet, and in any case iodised salt is not what push iodine levels over the top. And in a normal diets, iodine deficiency is much, much more likely than iodine overload.
Based on what reasoning?
You may wish to research the Wolff-Chaikoff effect.
The article just read like there were some unusual strange things going on around 1900 in Switzerland.
Iodine had not been seen as a successful cure before because excess iodine causes a horrible condition. The key difference here was that Hunziker proposed regular use in minute quantities, and then Bayard tested the hypothesis with careful measurements and convincing evidence.
Other places in the world had different geology and this different levels of natural iodine.
I really hope we find a way out of this before to long.
In the end (polio) vaccines work and praying/magic doesn't, so I'm positive we will be able to learn the same lessons our ancestors did.
Are you assuming everyone who was not interested in the COVID vaccine just plain doesn’t believe in vaccines?
I think it is important to make that distinction.
Also used as a coating in welding among other things. And like other commentor said, a nephew of cyanide.
Now Im sure most of us will be fine, but I prefer not to eat that a few times a day. If you think that makes me foolish, be my guest.
It's also not needed, there are plenty of other sources of Iodine, and sea salt from the grinder is perfectly fine.
Cyanide is so toxic because it has a high affinity for iron ions, so it deactivates iron-containing enzymes that are crucial for respiration. But in ferrocyanide it is _already_ combined with iron.
Ferrocyanide compounds like Prussian blue are even sometimes used as an antidotes for heavy metal poisoning.
Also, not sure what the relevance to iodine is?
Incidentally, iodine isn't easily sourced in some countries, due to soils that contain very little of it. My country (NZ) used to have a very real goitre problem until the introduction of iodised salt in the 1920s.
> Only 74% of children under five in London have received both doses of the MMR vaccine – 9.1 points lower than in 2013–14.
Link to an academic article discussing how the USA is now in the dangerzone of iodine deficiency.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-018-1606-5#....
And there are loads of examples through history up till current day that show that blindly trusting authorities is naive. Heck, even in the article, some doctors were poisoning their patients with iodine. It is not far fetched that some people in these areas were informed of these problems. So a tiny amount kills us... and so you are saying any even tinier amount will save us. I'd be pretty skeptical too.
It seems that when presented well and with personally verifiable evidence, people were willing to accept.
I am really flabbergasted when people blindly accept in mass what authorities tell us.
I don't question the initiative.
The article just read like it was some strange illness that affected Switzers around a certain time.
I think, that Switzerland, and especially those remote mountain regions, stayed more isolated than similar regions in France or Austria well into the early 20th century, making the issue stand out more in comparison.
Austria I don't know. Many Austrian had the reverse problem with too much iodin and basedov eyes.
I think it comes from a generalised distrust of governments/big institutions. Which comes from hearing (often heavily distorted) stories about things like Tuskegee Syphilis, MKULTRA, CIA vaccinators in Afghanistan and Thalidomide.
e.g. manufacturing error such that a dangerous amount of iodine is accidentally added.
No it doesn't. You're ignoring the context.
You can't have too much iodine when it's obtained from iodized salt.
...because you can't handle that much salt.
From the article: 10x'ing the concentration of iodine in salt had no adverse effects. You'd have to eat salt by the pound daily to reach levels where iodine is harmful, but at that point, that'll be the least of your worries.
We simply don't know, and haven't research the longterm effect of small dosis on a daily intake. Especially combined with other conservatives & chemical additives in small dosis.
You can't deny there are some major diseases in the modern world on a rise and we have no idea why.
Yet here everyone always so sure that everything we're doing with food additives, pesticides and chemical processing is super safe.
There's just no need to eat these things, just eat normal food.
For cyanide? We actually do. Cassava roots contain quite a bit of it, and they are used as a staple in some places in Africa. You can indeed can get chronic poisoning, but it requires A LOT of cyanide.
Now that does seem like a bit of a concern, doesn’t it?
Probably not in swiss salt tho (it's usually mountain salt, not sea salt).
Surely people test before claiming such things?
“Unicef, concerned about the sensitivity of children to odd flavours, commissioned a study in which rice was prepared with salt iodised at ten times the maximum recommended concentration. In double-blind taste tests, the iodine was undetectable.”
> Whatever chefs might claim, this fact is well established: in 1995, Unicef, concerned about the sensitivity of children to odd flavours, commissioned a study in which rice was prepared with salt iodised at ten times the maximum recommended concentration. In double-blind taste tests, the iodine was undetectable.
It's probably reasonable for 999 999 people to benefit in exchange for 1 person being very unlucky, but that's a different argument that needs to be made.
And nobody, in this post at least, has made that argument, nor has anyone even linked to such.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3956646/
> Public health approaches for global dental caries reduction that do not involve systemic ingestion of fluoride are urgently needed.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/fluor...
That’s a meaningless comparison. The whole point is that people aren’t doing topical application.
A similar debate to this is the adding folate to flour or bread.
Most of Western Europe bans fluoridation. It can make your bones a little less elastic and a little more brittle, and there are a few other known or potential negative effects.
There are also just better ways to prevent cavities.
But people only just getting electricity in the early 1900s easily benefited more than were harmed by such things. Poor dental health gets scary quick.
I guess the question becomes how low do you lower the bar for those who would willingly devoid themselves of sane things to include in their lives. How much freedom does one man have to harm his self, though he thinks as a self, costs to him are more often than not also costs incurred to society (and usually a society that'd prefer to not see people do self harmful things)
At least in the US though, it seems that popular opposition to fluoridation started with cold war era conservative conspiracies (precious bodily fluids). So, you know.
Iodized salt with nothing else should be available in most supermarkets.
[EDIT: as pointed out in a child comment, the taste actually comes from chlorine, not fluoride.]
Either way I actually do assume water filter companies lobby to keep public water as subpar an option as possible, there's certainly no incentive not to.
Most of the taste problem that’s in our water “on purpose” is chlorine and it’s not added out of spite, it’s added for sanitary reasons.
(b/c it is chlorinated)
I haven't done a lot of research on how to clean water, but e.g. in Germany, tap water isn't chlorinated and thus has a much more neutral taste. And it's very much regulated to a high standard.
