The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7243 p486
5 April 2003

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The path to disaster [more]
Fat of the land [more]
The right attitude [more]

The path to disaster

The concept that humanity has a penchant for trying to take more out of the environment than it puts in is not new. What is new is the growing fear that if we go on demanding more and more luxuries from our homeland we shall find that we are in crisis.

The prospect is not only that of competition for dwindling resources increasing with the growth in population, and so encouraging violence and warfare on the part of those who feel they are being cheated of their rights. Thoughtful people see that the relationship of the human race itself to the material world is unsatisfactory and dangerously unbalanced.

In Nature for 27 February William Rees of the University of British Columbia remarks that people are now so alienated psychologically from raw nature that "they rarely think of themselves as biological entities, let alone as dependent components of the world's ecosystems". He reminds us that in 1992 the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that we need to make a great change in our stewardship of the earth to avoid vast human misery and irretrievable mutilation of our planet. The environmental crisis to which arrogant politicians and economists turn a blind eye is the result of gross human ecological dysfunction or, put another way, humanity's spectacular but irresponsible evolutionary success.

Economists argue that any concept of the "carrying capacity" of a piece of the earth's surface is irrelevant to society. Carrying capacity is defined as the population of a given species that a specified habitat can support indefinitely. Economists have argued that increased trade and productivity can raise the carrying capacity of a region indefinitely, but we are seeing that this idea is far from true. Instead of asking how many people a given area might support, we should ask what area is necessary to support a given population.

Rees has coined the term "ecological footprinting" to counter the argument of the economists about carrying capacity. The world's average human eco-footprint is roughly 2.3 hectares, while earth offers only 1.9 hectares of productive land and water per person. This situation is potentially catastrophic, says Rees.

We are consuming the ecosphere's wealth faster than it can renew itself, because our species "is behaviourally predisposed to expand into all available ecological space and to consume to the level allowed by contemporary technology". The relentless advance of technology and the self-delusional nature of humans have promoted a cultural myth of unlimited economic expansion fuelled by markets and trade. The challenge in the 21st century is to engineer "the means by which human beings can live peaceful, comfortable and satisfying lives ... while taking into account the needs of other species. The alternative is resource wars and descent into geopolitical chaos". The warning is plain enough. The important thing is, will it be heeded.

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Fat of the land

According to the World Health Organization, obesity is now among the top 10 health problems affecting the globe. And it remains one of the most intractable, because it has so many roots, many of them hidden and some of them deliberately covered up lest they be attacked.

The 7 February issue of Science included a series of papers dealing with aspects of the obesity epidemic. An editorial by Marion Nesle, a professor in the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University, comments that it is a great irony of 21st-century global public health that, while hundreds of millions of people world-wide lack adequate food because of economic inequities, many hundreds of millions are overweight to the extent of being at risk from attendant chronic diseases. Obesity is of worldwide distribution and affects children as well as adults, diverting scarce funds to cope with preventable heart disease and diabetes.

Fundamentally, excess body weight arises from consuming more food energy than an individual expends in physical activity. This follows improved prosperity, when people use their extra income to buy more food and avoid being active. The tendency is encouraged by organisations seeking to market food high in energy but low in nutritional value, and to sell more cars, television sets and computers, all of which encourage sedentary behaviour. Thus, obesity is good for business, however harmful it may be to health. Moreover, many countries overproduce foodstuffs, so that companies compete for sales through advertising, much of it directed at children.

It follows that if campaigns to promote healthier eating habits do not serve the vested interests of industry, governments will fight shy of taking a realistic stand to overcome unhealthy eating and lack of exercise. Different government agencies find themselves in conflict over the issue, which becomes essentially political and not medical. There is need for a government department that is independent of industry and will take responsibility for regulating food, nutrition and health.

Meanwhile, 30 per cent of adults in the United States are classed as obese, and another 35 per cent as overweight. And a similar picture occurs elsewhere.

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The right attitude

A fascinating hypothesis put forward in Nature for 13 February by a German biopsychologist throws some light upon the question of righthandedness in humans and other animals. Onur Güntürkün remarks that a preference in humans for turning the head to the right rather than to the left during the final weeks of gestation and the first six months after birth is one of the earliest examples of behavioural asymmetry, affecting the subsequent perception of visual challenges.

He observed kissing couples in public places in the United States, Germany and Turkey and found that nearly twice as many adults align their heads to the right as to the left in kissing. He considers that this bias may be linked to other phenomena concerned with using the foot, ear or eye in adults. The subjects' ages ranged from 13 to 70 years and, of 124 pairs, 80 turned their heads to the right and 44 to the left. The preferential use of the right foot, ear or eye also was in a two to one ratio. However, the incidence of right-handedness in general is roughly eight to one, so that other factors must be involved in making the choice.

In birds, a preference for turning the head to the right before hatching induces motor, visual and cognitive asymmetries, writes Güntürkün, and if a similar effect occurs in humans, the head-turning bias of the newborn would have to overlap with the establishment of asymmetries in adulthood. The finding that adults prefer turning their head to the right suggests that the turning seen in the newborn induces or enhances the subsequent right-handed asymmetries characteristic of sensory perception and muscular action.

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