How to handle a dog attack

For most people, dog attacks are not very common. But they happen occasionally, and the experience can be traumatic. Incidentally, they are also a good reason why I am not a big fan of barefoot walking or running. Broken glass pieces and nails can be a problem if you are barefoot; so can dog attacks.

The photo below, from Dreamstime.com, shows a charging dog. It reminds me of an incident many years ago where a dog attacked my two oldest sons, who were very young at the time. They were unsuspectingly playing at a park in Southern New Jersey, when I saw a dog running in their direction across the park. Part of what I will say in this post is based on experiences like that.

I should also say that I grew up around dogs. My grandfather had a farm that was managed by my uncle, and dogs were critically important in managing the farm. One problem we had was that domesticated pigs would often become feral, or would mate with wild boars, in some cases leading to a particularly vicious breed of large feral pigs. I was once attacked by one of these feral pigs while hunting. One of the farm dogs came to my rescue and probably saved my life.



If you are like most people, when you go walking outdoors, you do not carry a walking stick or a cane. Maybe you should. But if you don’t, thick-soled sneakers can be used in a reasonably effective defense in a dog attack situation.

Dogs attacks’ main targets: The faces of children

Dogs tend to be loyal friends, but they must be monitored for signs of aggression, and can be particularly dangerous to children. A significant proportion of dog attack victims are children 5 years of age or younger, who more often than not sustain injuries to the face, with secondary target areas being the hands and feet ().

At the time of this writing the web sites Documentingreality.com and Arbtalk.co.uk had some grisly photos of dog attack victims (, ). They show evidence that the face is often targeted, and some possible consequences of real dog attacks.

Artificial selection: Dogs and Moby-Dick

Modern dogs are descendants of wolves who came into contact with humans about 12,000 year ago. (This general date is often cited, but is the subject of intense debate, with DNA studies suggesting much earlier contact.) Wolves are apex predators; this was true also for wolves that lived around the time they first came into contact with humans. They hunt and live in packs, and rely on fairly complex body language, a variety of sounds, and a keen sense of smell to communicate.

Even being apex predators, wolves were no match for humans. Therefore, as humans and groups of wolves co-evolved, dogs emerged. Dogs evolved instincts that made them sociable toward and submissive to humans, particularly those humans who fed them and also asserted authority over them – those become their “owners”.

Humans, in turn, came to rely heavily on dogs for protection and hunting, and probably evolved instincts that are still largely unexplored today. For example, there is strong evidence suggesting that having pet animals, many of which are dogs, is generally health-promoting (, ).

The evolution of sociability and submissiveness traits is an example of what is often referred to as “artificial selection”, where animals and plants evolve traits almost exclusively in response to the selection pressure applied by humans. In the case of dogs, this was later taken to new heights through selective breeding; leading to the emergence of a variety of dog breeds, some for utilitarian purposes and others for pure vanity, each with very distinctive characteristics.

Interestingly, artificial selection applied by humans does not always produce more sociable and submissive animals. The opposite happened around the mid 1800s due to excessive hunting of sperm whales. The least aggressive were easier to kill, so they were overhunted. Over generations, this placed selection pressure in favor of the evolution of aggressiveness toward humans. The attack on the Essex by a large bull sperm whale, which served as inspiration for Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, was one of the first incidents that resulted from this selection pressure (). Whaling increased, and, predictably, attacks started becoming more and more frequent.

When a dog attacks, stand your ground in a non-threatening way

Dogs, like wolves, are territorial animals. Many dog attacks are likely motivated by humans invading what a dog perceives as its territory at a given point in time. I mentioned earlier in this post that a dog once attacked two of my children. They were playing at a park during the winter. Nobody else was there. I saw this large black dog running from a distance in their direction, and I immediately knew that it was trouble. The dog probably saw us as invading its territory.

Having grown up surrounded by dogs, I pretty much knew what to do. I walked toward my children and placed myself between them and the charging dog. I told the children not to move at all, just freeze. The dog came running until it realized that we were not running. It was a “fake charge”, like most are. It stopped close to me, and barked very aggressively, coming closer. I was wearing boots. I raised one of my boots toward the dog’s snout, and when it bit it, I pushed the boot against its snout.

Here is where I think most people would tend to make a key mistake. They would probably try to hurt the dog to scare it off, by, say, kicking the dog as they would kick a soccer ball. The problem is that, because the dog is a lot faster than they are, if they do that they may end up missing the dog entirely and worse - they may end up losing their balance and falling to the ground. This is when dogs can do the most damage, since they would go for the face of the fallen person.

As a side note, often you hear that dogs attack the throat of their human victims, but that is not what the statistics show. Most victims of dog attacks display injuries on the face and extremities. The "myth" that dogs target the throat is probably based on the notion that dogs attack humans because they see them as prey. However, with exception of feral dogs such as Australian dingos, evidence of dogs preying on humans is very rare. I've reviewed many dog attack photos for this post, and could not find one with evidence that the throat was targeted.

So I pushed my boot against the dog’s snout a few times, firmly but not with the goal of hurting the dog, and did not do anything threatening toward the dog otherwise. This calmed the dog down a bit, but it was still acting aggressively and would not go away. Sometimes firm commands to "seat", "stop", "go away" make the dog react submissively. I tried them but they didn't work; instead they probably made the dog more excited. Then I did what probably is the one thing that most land animals instinctively fear from humans …

Sapiens the thrower

I picked up a few pieces of ice from the ground and threw at the dog. One piece of ice hit the dog on the side of its body; a couple of others were glancing blows. As a result the dog became visibly confused and submissive (telltale sign: tail between the legs), and ran away. Here is where another big mistake may happen. People may try to hurt the dog and become too excited when throwing objects at it. In doing so, they may end up not only missing the dog with the flying objects that they are throwing, but they may also excite the dog, and face another attack.

The best approach here is to focus on having whatever you are throwing at the dog land on top of or as close to the dog as possible; explicitly without trying to hurt it, in part because this improves your aim. Having flying objects coming from you toward the dog is enough to trigger the dog’s instinct to get out of the way of “Sapiens the thrower”. Moreover, if you don’t try to hurt you’ll be relatively calm, displaying the type body language that will trigger submissiveness.

I’ve long suspected that throwing has been a key component of Sapiens’ climb to the top of the food chain, to the point that all land animals have an instinctive fear of humans – even large predators, and much bigger animals such as elephants (as long as they are not “in musth”). One short video has been circulating on YouTube for years; it has various hunting scenes where primitive spears are used (). Many find this video cruel. It clearly shows the enormous evolutionary advantage of humans being able to throw pointy things at other animals. If humans happened to live when Tyrannosaurus rex was around, there is no doubt in my mind that the latter would be the prey.

Keep your face away and your hands closed

Typically you’ll avoid a full-blown dog attack by only standing your ground for a while and not acting aggressively toward the dog. After a short standoff period, you’ll just walk away unharmed. Unfortunately this may not happen if you are facing a dog that has been trained to attack. In this case, having a stick or something like it will help a lot. (In circus acts lions are “pushed around” by trainers holding objects like sticks and wooden chairs; sometimes that doesn't end well - .) If you don’t have one it would be useful to be wearing shoes that can withstand several bites. If not, you can use a piece of clothing, such as a bundled jacket, as a shield.

If you have a stick, or something like a stick, you should not try to hit the dog with it. You should place it near the snout, and push the stick against it each time the dog bites. If you do this calmly and firmly, without trying to hurt the dog (remember, the dog is a lot faster than you are), you will probably discourage biting after a while, turning the attack into a standoff.

What if you don’t have anything with which to defend yourself at first, and a dog attacks you? Keep your hands closed into fists, to avoid having fingers bitten off, and do your best to keep the dog away from your face. As desperate as these situations may be, try to be calm and look for objects that you can use to push the dog away, that you can throw at the dog, or that can be used to wrap around your arms. Frequently there will be objects around that can be of use – e.g., sharp stones, glass bottles, pieces of canvas, loose pieces of a fence, a hose, a tree’s branch. If you fall, try to stand up right away. Very likely you'll sustain injuries to your arms, and possibly legs.

Military and law enforcement personnel are often trained on fighting techniques to handle dog attacks barehanded, such as neck cranks, sharp blows to the throat of the animal, and blinding techniques. I am not sure whether these would be really useful to the average person. In any case, this post is not aimed at military and law enforcement personnel who deal with dog attacks on a regular basis.

Eat beef liver

Beef liver is nature’s super-multivitamin. (Beef heart is just as nutritious.) Dogs, like wolves, have an exquisite sense of smell. If you have seen one of the documentaries about the groundbreaking research by Shaun Ellis (a.k.a., “The Wolfman”), you probably know that wild wolves tend to strongly associate consumption of organ meats with very high status in a pack, to the point that they will instinctively act submissively toward humans that consume organ meats. It is quite possible that dogs do that too. So if you eat beef liver, maybe a dog will “think twice” before attacking you.

Offer the dog a cigarette and a beer

Most dogs can become aggressive from time to time, but not dogs that know how to chill. Therefore, you may consider carrying special dog cigarettes and beer around - only some brands work! Okay, a clarification: the "eat beef liver" advice is not a joke, nor are the others above it.



Notes and acknowledgements

The “charging dog” photo is from Dreamstime.com. The “drunken dog” montage was created with photos from the blog Agrestemundica.

Cesar Millan's site has a number of good suggestions on how to handle dog attacks (). However, I personally think that the way he handles dogs (e.g., often with open hands) is dangerous if copied by an inexperienced person. There is a great deal of "hidden" information that is conveyed to dogs by nuances of Cesar's body language. Those nuances are difficult to copy by an inexperienced person.

An interesting source of information on how to handle dog attacks is the web site Fightingarts.com (, ).

Sudden cholesterol increase? It may be psychological

There are many published studies with evidence that cholesterol levels are positively associated with heart disease. In multivariate analyses the effects are usually small, but they are still there. On the other hand, there is also plenty of evidence that cholesterol is beneficial in terms of health. Here of course I am referring to the health of humans, not of the many parasites that benefit from disease.

For example, there is evidence () that cholesterol levels are negatively associated with mortality (i.e., higher cholesterol leading to lower mortality), and are positively associated with vitamin D production from skin exposure to sunlight ().

Most of the debris accumulated in atheromas are made up of macrophages, which are specialized cells that “eat” cell debris (ironically) and some pathogens. The drug market is still hot for cholesterol-lowering drugs, often presented in TV and Internet ads as effective tools to prevent formation of atheromas.

But what about macrophages? What about calcium, another big component of atheromas? If drugs were to target macrophages for atheroma prevention, drug users may experience major muscle wasting and problems with adaptive immunity, as macrophages play a key role in muscle repair and antibody formation. If drugs were to target calcium, users may experience osteoporosis.

So cholesterol is the target, because there is a “link” between cholesterol and atheroma formation. There is also a link between the number of house fires in a city and the amount of firefighting activity in the city, but we don’t see mayors announcing initiatives to reduce the number of firefighters in their cities to prevent house fires.

When we talk about variations in cholesterol, we usually mean variations in cholesterol carried by LDL particles. That is because LDL cholesterol seems to be very “sensitive” to a number of factors, including diet and disease, presenting quite a lot of sudden variation in response to changes in those factors.

LDL particles seem to be intimately involved with disease, but do not be so quick to conclude that they cause disease. Something so widespread and with so many functions in the human body could not be primarily an agent of disease that needs to be countered with statins. That makes no sense.

Looking at the totally of evidence linking cholesterol with health, it seems that cholesterol is extremely important for the human body, particularly when it is under attack. So the increases in LDL cholesterol associated with various diseases, notably heart disease, may not be because cholesterol is causing disease, but rather because cholesterol is being used to cope with disease.

LDL particles, and their content (including cholesterol), may be used by the body to cope with conditions that themselves cause heart disease, and end up being blamed in the process. The lipid hypothesis may be a classic case of reverse causation. A case in point is that of cholesterol responses to stress, particularly mental stress.

Grundy and Griffin () studied the effects of academic final examinations on serum cholesterol levels in 2 groups of medical students in the winter and spring semesters (see table below). During control periods, average cholesterol levels in the two groups were approximately 213 and 216 mg/dl. During the final examination periods, average cholesterol levels were 248 and 240 mg/dl. These measures were for winter and spring, respectively.



One could say that even the bigger increase from 213 to 248 is not that impressive in percentage terms, approximately 16 percent. However, HDL cholesterol does not go up significantly in response to sustained (e.g., multi-day) stress, it actually goes down, so the increases reported can be safely assumed to be chiefly due to LDL cholesterol. For most people, LDL particles are the main carriers of cholesterol in the human body. Thus, in percentage terms, the increases in LDL cholesterol are about twice those reported for total cholesterol.

A 32-percent increase (16 x 2) in LDL cholesterol would not go unnoticed today. If one’s LDL cholesterol were to be normally 140 mg/dl, it would jump to 185 mg/dl with a 32-percent increase. It looks like the standard deviations were more than 30 in the study. (This is based on the standard errors reported, and assuming that the standard deviation equals the standard error multiplied by the square root of the sample size.) So we can guess that several people might go from 140 to 215 or more (this is LDL cholesterol, in mg/dl) in response to the stress from exams.

And the effects above were observed with young medical students, in response to the stress from exams. What about a middle-aged man or woman trying to cope with chronic mental stress for months or years, due to losing his or her job, while still having to provide for a family? Or someone who has just been promoted, and finds himself or herself overwhelmed with the new responsibilities?

Keep in mind that sustained dieting can be a major stressor for some people, particular when one gets to that point in the dieting process where he or she gets regularly into negative nitrogen balance (muscle loss). So you may have heard from people saying that, after months or years of successful dieting, their cholesterol levels are inexplicably going up. Well, this post provides one of many possible explanations for that.

The finding that cholesterol goes up with stress has been replicated many times. It has been known for a long time, with studies dating back to the 1950s. Wertlake and colleagues () observed an increase in average cholesterol levels from 214 to 238 (in mg/dl); also among medical students, in response to the mental and emotional stress of an examination week. A similar study to the one above.

Those enamored with the idea of standing up the whole day, thinking that this will make them healthy, should know that performing cognitively demanding tasks while standing up is a known stressor. It is often used in research where stress must be induced to create an experimental condition. Muldoon and colleagues () found that people performing a mental task while standing experienced an increase in serum cholesterol of approximately 22 points (in mg/dl).

What we are not adapted for is sitting down for long hours in very comfortable furniture (, ). But our anatomy clearly suggests adaptations for sitting down, particularly when engaging in activities that resemble tool-making, a hallmark of the human species. Among modern hunter-gatherers, tool-making is part of daily life, and typically it is much easier to accomplish sitting down than standing up.

Modern urbanites could be seen as engaging in activities that resemble tool-making when they produce things at work for internal or external customers, whether those things are tangible or intangible.

So, stress is associated with cholesterol levels, and particularly with LDL cholesterol levels. Diehard lipid hypothesis proponents may argue that this is how stress is associated with heart disease: stress increases cholesterol which increases heart disease. Others may argue that one of the reasons why LDL cholesterol levels are sometimes found to be associated with heart disease-related conditions, such as chronic stress, and other health conditions is that the body is using LDL cholesterol to cope with those conditions.

Specifically regarding mental stress, a third argument has been put forth by Patterson and colleagues, who claimed that stress-mediated variations in blood lipid concentrations are a secondary result of decreased plasma volume. The cause, in their interpretation, was unspecified – “vascular fluid shifts”. However, when you look at the numbers reported in their study, you still see a marked increase in LDL cholesterol, even controlling for plasma volume. And this is all in response to “10 minutes of mental arithmetic with harassment” ().

I tend to think that the view that cholesterol increases with stress because cholesterol is used by the body to cope with stress is the closest to the truth. Among other things, stress increases the body’s overall protein demand, and cholesterol is used in the synthesis of many proteins. This includes proteins used for signaling, also known as hormones.

Cholesterol also seems to be a diet marker, tending to go up in high fat diets. This is easier to explain. High fat diets increase the demand for bile production, as bile is used in the digestion of fat. Most of the cholesterol produced by the human body is used to make bile.

Could the low testosterone problem be a mirage?

Low testosterone (a.k.a. “low T”) is caused by worn out glands no longer able to secrete enough T, right? At least this seems to be the most prevalent theory today, a theory that reminds me a lot of the “tired pancreas” theory () of diabetes. I should note that this low T problem, as it is currently presented, is one that affects almost exclusively men, particularly middle-aged men, not women. This is so even though T plays an important role in women’s health.

There are many studies that show associations between T levels and all kinds of diseases in men. But here is a problem with hormones: often several hormones vary together and in a highly correlated fashion. If you rely on statistics to reach conclusions, you must use techniques that allow you to rule out confounders; otherwise you may easily reach wrong conclusions. Examples are multivariate techniques that are sensitive to Simpson’s paradox and nonlinear algorithms; both of which are employed, by the way, by modern software tools such as WarpPLS (). Unfortunately, these are rarely, if ever, used in health-related studies.

Many low T cases may actually be caused by something other than tired T-secretion glands, perhaps a hormone (or set of hormones) that suppress T production; a T “antagonist”. What would be a good candidate? The figure below shows two graphs. It is from a study by Starks and colleagues, published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition in 2008 (). The study itself is not directly related to the main point that this post tries to make, but the figure is.



Look at the two graphs carefully. The one on the left is of blood cortisol levels. The one on the right is of blood testosterone levels. Ignore the variation within each graph. Just compare the two graphs and you will see one interesting thing – cortisol and testosterone levels are inversely related. This is a general pattern in connection with stress-induced cortisol elevations, repeating itself over and over again, whether the source of stress is mental (e.g., negative thoughts) or physical (e.g., intense exercise).

And the relationship between cortisol and testosterone is strong. Roughly speaking, an increase in cortisol levels, from about 20 to 40 μg/dl, appears to bring testosterone levels down from about 8 to 5 ηg/ml. A level of 8 ηg/ml (the same as 800 ηg/dl) is what is normally found in young men living in urban environments. A level of 5 ηg/ml is what is normally found in older men living in urban environments.

So, testosterone levels are practically brought down to almost half of what they were before by that variation in cortisol.

Chronic stress can easily bring your cortisol levels up to 40 μg/dl and keep them there. More serious pathological conditions, such as Cushing’s disease, can lead to sustained cortisol levels that are twice as high. There are many other things that can lead to chronically elevated cortisol levels. For instance, sustained calorie restriction raises cortisol levels, with a corresponding reduction in testosterone levels. As the authors of a study () of markers of semistarvation in healthy lean men note, grimly:

“…testosterone (T) approached castrate levels …”

The study highlights a few important phenomena that occur under stress conditions: (a) cortisol levels go up, and testosterone levels go down, in a highly correlated fashion (as mentioned earlier); and (b) it is very difficult to suppress cortisol levels without addressing the source of the stress. Even with testosterone administration, cortisol levels tend to be elevated.

Isn't possible that cortisol levels go up because testosterone levels go down - reverse causality? Possible, but unlikely. Evidence that testosterone administration may reduce cortisol levels, when it is found, tends to be rather weak or inconclusive. A good example is a study by Rubinow and colleagues (). Not only were their findings based on bivariate (or unadjusted) correlations, but also on a chance probability threshold that is twice the level usually employed in statistical analyses; the level usually employed is 5 percent.

Let us now briefly shift our attention to dieting. Dieting is the main source of calorie restriction in modern urban societies; an unnatural one, I should say, because it involves going hungry in the presence of food. Different people have different responses to dieting. Some responses are more extreme, others more mild. One main factor is how much body fat you want to lose (weight loss, as a main target, is a mistake); another is how low you expect body fat to get. Many men dream about six-pack abs, which usually require single-digit body fat percentages.

The type of transformation involving going from obese to lean is not “cost-free”, as your body doesn’t know that you are dieting. The body “sees” starvation, and responds accordingly.

Your body is a little bit like a computer. It does exactly what you “tell” it to do, but often not what you want it to do. In other words, it responds in relatively predictable ways to various diet and lifestyle changes, but not in the way that most of us want. This is what I call compensatory adaptation at work (). Our body often doesn’t respond in the way we expect either, because we don’t actually know how it adapts; this is especially true for long-term adaptations.

What initially feels like a burst of energy soon turns into something a bit more unpleasant. At first the unpleasantness takes the form of psychological phenomena, which were probably the “cheapest” for our bodies to employ in our evolutionary past. Feeling irritated is not as “expensive” a response as feeling physically weak, seriously distracted, nauseated etc. if you live in an environment where you don’t have the option of going to the grocery store to find fuel, and where there are many beings around that can easily kill you.

Soon the responses take the form of more nasty body sensations. Nearly all of those who go from obese to lean will experience some form of nasty response over time. The responses may be amplified by nutrient deficiencies. Obesity would have probably only been rarely, if ever, experienced by our Paleolithic ancestors. They would have never gotten obese in the first place. Going from obese to lean is as much a Neolithic novelty as becoming obese in the first place, although much less common.

And it seems that those who have a tendency toward mental disorders (e.g., generalized anxiety, manic-depression), even if at a subclinical level under non-dieting conditions, are the ones that suffer the most when calorie restriction is sustained over long periods of time. Most reports of serious starvation experiments (e.g., Roy Walford’s Biosphere 2 experiment) suggest the surfacing of mental disorders and even some cases of psychosis.

Emily Deans has a nice post () on starvation and mental health.

But you may ask: What if my low T problem is caused by aging; you just said that older males tend to have lower T? To which I would reply: Isn’t possible that the lower T levels normally associated with aging are in many cases a byproduct of higher stress hormone levels? Take a look at the figure below, from a study of age-related cortisol secretion by Zhao and colleagues ().



As you can see in the figure, cortisol levels tend to go up with age. And, interestingly, the range of variation seems very close to that in the earlier figure in this post, although I may be making a mistake in the conversion from nmol/l to ηg/ml. As cortisol levels go up, T levels should go down in response. There are outliers. Note the male outlier at the middle-bottom part, in his early seventies. He is represented by a filled circle, which refers to a disease-free male.

Dr. Arthur De Vany claims to have high T levels in his 70s. It is possible that he is like that outlier. If you check out De Vany’s writings, you’ll see his emphasis on leading a peaceful, stress-free, life (). If money, status, material things, health issues etc. are very important for you when you are young (most of us, a trend that seems to be increasing), chances are they are going to be a major source of stress as you age.

Think about individual property accumulation, as it is practiced in modern urban environments, and how unnatural and potentially stressful it is. Many people subconsciously view their property (e.g., a nice car, a bunch of shares in a publicly-traded company) as their extended phenotype. If that property is damaged or loses value, the subconscious mental state evoked is somewhat like that in response to a piece of their body being removed. This is potentially very stressful; a stress source that doesn’t go away easily. What we have here is very different from the types of stress that our Paleolithic ancestors faced.

So, what will happen if you take testosterone supplementation to solve your low T problem? If your problem is due to high levels of cortisol and other stress hormones (including some yet to be discovered), induced by stress, and your low T treatment is long-term, your body will adapt in a compensatory way. It will “sense” that T is now high, together with high levels of stress.

Whatever form long-term compensatory adaptation may take in this scenario, somehow the combination of high T and high stress doesn’t conjure up a very nice image. What comes to mind is a borderline insane person, possibly with good body composition, and with a lot of self-confidence – someone like the protagonist of the film American Psycho.

Again, will the high T levels, obtained through supplementation, suppress cortisol? It doesn’t seem to work that way, at least not in the long term. In fact, stress hormones seem to affect other hormones a lot more than other hormones affect them. The reason is probably that stress responses were very important in our evolutionary past, which would make any mechanism that could override them nonadaptive.

Today, stress hormones, while necessary for a number of metabolic processes (e.g., in intense exercise), often work against us. For example, serious conflict in our modern world is often solved via extensive writing (through legal avenues). Violence is regulated and/or institutionalized – e.g., military, law enforcement, some combat sports. Without these, society would break down, and many of us would join the afterlife sooner and more violently than we would like (see Pinker’s take on this topic: ).

Sir, the solution to your low T problem may actually be found elsewhere, namely in stress reduction. But careful, you run the risk of becoming a nice guy.

The War of the End of the World: The health puzzle posed by its survivors

The War of Canudos took place in Brazil in 1896 and 1897. Canudos was a settlement of several thousand deeply religious Christians, led by a man known as Antonio Conselheiro. They opposed the recent establishment of the Republic of Brazil, particularly the institution of income taxes and civil marriage; the former was considered government-sponsored theft and the latter a sacrilege. The republic had been declared in 1889 following a military coup that deposed Dom Pedro II, an emperor beloved by the common people and under whose rule slavery had recently been abolished.

Canudos was located in the Brazilian sertão, an inhospitable semi-arid region in the northeastern part of the country. The inhabitants of Canudos were the sertanejos. The term jagunço was used to refer to the males, especially the outlaws. Many of the sertanejos lived in semi-starvation, in poor sanitary conditions, and with very limited (if any) access to healthcare. Infant mortality was very high at the time. Those who reached adulthood were typically of small stature, and very thin; not lean, thin – often described as “skin and bones”.

Below is what a typical young jagunço would look like at the time of the War of Canudos. (Some authors differentiate between jagunços and cangaceiros based on small differences in cultural and dress traditions; e.g., the hat in the photo is typical of cangaceiros.) The jagunços tended to be the best fed among the sertanejos. They were also known as cold-blooded killers. The photo is a cropped version of the original one; the grizzly original is at the top of a recent blog post by Juan Pablo Dabove (). The blog post discusses Vargas Llosa’s historical fiction book based on the War of Canudos, the masterpiece titled “The War of the End of the World” ().

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian-Spanish writer and politician, was the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature; “The War of the End of the World” is considered one of his greatest literary achievements. Euclides da Cunha wrote the most famous non-fictional account on the War of Canudos, another masterpiece that has been called “Brazil’s greatest book”, titled “Rebellion in the Backlands” (). The Portughese title is “Os Sertões”. Vargas Llosa’s book is based on da Cunha’s.

Sergio Rezende’s movie, “Guerra de Canudos” (), is a superb dramatization of the War of Canudos. I watched this movie after reading Vargas Llosa’s and da Cunha’s books, and was struck by two things: (a) the outstanding performances, especially by José Wilker, Cláudia Abreu, Marieta Severo, and Paulo Betti; and (b) the striking resemblance of the latter (Betti) to Royce Gracie (), a very nice man whom I interviewed () for my book on compensatory adaptation (), and who is no stranger to Ultimate Fighting Championship and mixed martial arts fans ().

In a nutshell, the War of Canudos went more or less like this. There were four military campaigns against the settlement. The third was a major one, led by one of Brazil’s most accomplished military leaders at the time, Colonel Antônio Moreira César. The jagunços, resorting to guerrilla warfare, fought off the government troops in the first three. The fourth, led by General Arthur Oscar de Andrade Guimarães, saw the jagunços defeated in a war of attrition primarily due to lack of access to food and water, after heavy losses among government troops. At the end, nearly all of the surviving jagunços were executed, by knife – to their absolute horror, and the perverse pleasure of the executioners bent on revenge, as the victims believed that they would not go to heaven if their lives were ended by knife, even against their will.

Ned, what is your point regarding health!?

After going through numerous sources, paper-based and online, academic and non-academic, I am convinced that a significant number of the survivors of the Canudos War lived to their 90s and beyond. This conclusion is based chiefly on comparisons of various dates, especially of interviews with survivors. No single source dedicated to this particular health-related aspect of the War of Canudos seems to exist. There is a video clip that shows some of the survivors (), speaking in Portuguese, with their ages shown in subtitles (“years”, in Portuguese, is “anos”). One of them, a man, is listed as being a supercentenarian.

In modern USA those who live to the age of 90 and beyond are outliers. Less than 2 percent of the population reach the age of 90 (). Most of them are women. My impression is that among the survivors of the War of Canudos, the 90+ percentage was at least 5 times higher; even with access to sanitation and healthcare in modern USA being much better at any age.

If my impression is correct, how can it be explained?

I think that some of the readers of this blog will be tempted to explain the high longevity based on calorie restriction. But the empirical evidence suggests that poor nutrition, in terms of micronutrients and macronutrients, is associated with increased mortality, not the other way around (, , ). Mortality due to poor nutrition is frequently from infectious diseases, in the young and the old. Degenerative diseases are widespread among the overnourished, not the well nourished, and kill mostly at later ages. It is not uncommon for infectious diseases to “mask” as degenerative diseases – e.g., viral diabetes ().

Often people point at hunter-gatherer populations and argue that they are healthy because of their low calorie intake. But mortality from infectious diseases among hunter-gatherers is very high, particularly in children. Others point to the absence of industrial foods engineered for overconsumption, which I think is definitely a factor in terms of degenerative diseases. Some say that a main factor is retention of lean body mass as one ages, referring mostly to muscle tissue, a hypothesis to which the case of the sertanejos poses a problem – what lean body mass!? And, on top of all of their problems, the sertanejos regularly faced long droughts, which may be why they typically had a “dry” look.

Yet others point to low stress. It is reasonable to think that stress is a mediating factor in the development of many modern diseases. Still, the sertanejos living in Canudos have had to endure quite a lot of stress, before and after the War of Canudos. In fact, the depictions of their lives at around the time of the War of Canudos suggest very stressful, miserable lives, prior to the conflict; which in part explains the early success of a religious settlement where life was marginally better.

By the way, the traditional Okinawans have also endured plenty of stress (), and they have had the highest longevity rates in recorded history. Food scarcity has frequently been combined with stress in their case, as with many other long-living groups. Causality is complex here, probably changing direction in different subsets of the data, but I have long suspected that the combination of stress and overnourishment is a particular unnatural one, to which humans are badly maladapted.

A main factor is almost always forgotten: the effective immune systems of those who have been subjected to starvation, poor sanitation, lack of healthcare, and other challenges – especially in childhood – and survived to adulthood. And here some counterintuitive things can happen. For example, someone may be very sickly early in life and barely survive childhood, and then become very resistant to infectious diseases later, thus appearing to be very healthy, to the surprise of relatives and friends who remember “that sickly child”. Immunocompetence is something that the body builds up in response to exposure.

As they say in northeastern Brazil, in characteristic drawl: “Ol’ sihtaneju ain’t die easy”.

Maknig to mayn tipos? Myabe ur teh boz

Undoubtedly one of the big differences between life today and in our Paleolithic past is the level of stress that modern humans face on a daily basis. Much stress happens at work, which is very different from what our Paleolithic ancestors would call work. Modern office work, in particular, would probably be seen as a form of slavery by our Paleolithic ancestors.

Some recent research suggests that organizational power distance is a big factor in work-related stress. Power distance is essentially the degree to which bosses and subordinates accept wide differences in organizational power between them (Hofstede, 2001).

(Source: talentedapps.wordpress.com)

I have been studying the topic of information overload for a while. It is a fascinating topic. People who experience it have the impression that they have more information to process than they can handle. They also experience significant stress as a result of it, and both the quality of their work and their productivity goes down.

Recently some colleagues and I conducted a study that included employees from companies in New Zealand, Spain, and the USA (Kock, Del Aguila-Obra & Padilla-Meléndez, 2009). These are countries whose organizations typically display significant differences in power distance. We found something unexpected. Information overload was much more strongly associated with power distance than with the actual amount of information employees had to process on a daily basis.

While looking for explanations to this paradoxical finding, I recalled an interview I gave way back in 2001 to the Philadelphia Inquirer, commenting on research by Dr. David A. Owens. His research uncovered an interesting phenomenon. The higher up in the organizational pecking order one was, the less the person was concerned about typos on emails to subordinates.

There is also some cool research by Carlson & Davis (1998) suggesting that bosses tend to pick the communication media that are the most convenient for them, and don’t care much about convenience for the subordinates. One example would be calling a subordinate on the phone to assign a task, and then demanding a detailed follow-up report by email.

As a side note, writing a reasonably sized email takes a lot longer than conveying the same ideas over the phone or face-to-face (Kock, 2005). To be more precise, it takes about 10 times longer when the word count is over 250 and the ideas being conveyed are somewhat complex. For very short messages, a written medium like email is fairly convenient, and the amount of time to convey ideas may be even shorter than by using the phone or doing it face-to-face.

So a picture started to emerge. Bosses choose the communication media that are convenient for them when dealing with subordinates. If the media are written, they don’t care about typos at all. The subordinates use the media that are imposed on them, and if the media are written they certainly don’t want something with typos coming from them to reach their bosses. It would make them look bad.

The final result is this. Subordinates experience significant information overload, particularly in high power distance organizations. They also experience significant stress. Work quality and productivity goes down, and they get even more stressed. They get fat, or sickly thin. Their health deteriorates. Eventually they get fired, which doesn’t help a bit.

What should you do, if you are not the boss? Here are some suggestions:

- Try to tactfully avoid letting communication media being imposed on you all the time by your boss (and others). Explicitly state, in a polite way, the media that would be most convenient for you in various circusmtances, both as a receiver and sender. Generally, media that support oral speech are better for discussing complex ideas. Written media are better for short exchanges. Want an evolutionary reason for that? As you wish: Kock (2004).

- Discuss the ideas in this post with your boss; assuming that the person cares. Perhaps there is something that can be done to reduce power distance, for example. Making the work environment more democratic seems to help in some cases.

- And ... dot’n wrory soo mach aobut tipos ... which could be extrapolated to: don’t sweat the small stuff. Most bosses really care about results, and will gladly take an email with some typos telling them that a new customer signed a contract. They will not be as happy with an email telling them the opposite, no matter how well written it is.

Otherwise, your organizational demise may come sooner than you think.

References

Carlson, P.J., & Davis, G.B. (1998). An investigation of media selection among directors and managers: From "self" to "other" orientation. MIS Quarterly, 22(3), 335-362.

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kock, N. (2004). The psychobiological model: Towards a new theory of computer-mediated communication based on Darwinian evolution. Organization Science, 15(3), 327-348.

Kock, N. (2005). Business process improvement through e-collaboration: Knowledge sharing through the use of virtual groups. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing.

Kock, N., Del Aguila-Obra, A.R., & Padilla-Meléndez, A. (2009). The information overload paradox: A structural equation modeling analysis of data from New Zealand, Spain and the U.S.A. Journal of Global Information Management, 17(3), 1-17.

What is a reasonable vitamin D level?

The figure and table below are from Vieth (1999); one of the most widely cited articles on vitamin D. The figure shows the gradual increase in blood concentrations of 25-Hydroxyvitamin, or 25(OH)D, following the start of daily vitamin D3 supplementation of 10,000 IU/day. The table shows the average levels for people living and/or working in sun-rich environments; vitamin D3 is produced by the skin based on sun exposure.

25(OH)D is also referred to as calcidiol. It is a pre-hormone that is produced by the liver based on vitamin D3. To convert from nmol/L to ng/mL, divide by 2.496. The figure suggests that levels start to plateau at around 1 month after the beginning of supplementation, reaching a point of saturation after 2-3 months. Without supplementation or sunlight exposure, levels should go down at a comparable rate. The maximum average level shown on the table is 163 nmol/L (65 ng/mL), and refers to a sample of lifeguards.

From the figure we can infer that people on average will plateau at approximately 130 nmol/L, after months of 10,000 IU/d supplementation. That is 52 ng/mL. Assuming a normal distribution with a standard deviation of about 20 percent of the range of average levels, we can expect about 68 percent of those taking that level of supplementation to be in the 42 to 63 ng/mL range.

This might be the range most of us should expect to be in at an intake of 10,000 IU/d. This is the equivalent to the body’s own natural production through sun exposure.

Approximately 32 percent of the population can be expected to be outside this range. A person who is two standard deviations (SDs) above the mean (i.e., average) would be at around 73 ng/mL. Three SDs above the mean would be 83 ng/mL. Two SDs below the mean would be 31 ng/mL.

There are other factors that may affect levels. For example, being overweight tends to reduce them. Excess cortisol production, from stress, may also reduce them.

Supplementing beyond 10,000 IU/d to reach levels much higher than those in the range of 42 to 63 ng/mL may not be optimal. Interestingly, one cannot overdose through sun exposure, and the idea that people do not produce vitamin D3 after 40 years of age is a myth.

One would be taking in about 14,000 IU/d of vitamin D3 by combining sun exposure with a supplemental dose of 4,000 IU/d. Clear signs of toxicity may not occur until one reaches 50,000 IU/d. Still, one may develop other complications, such as kidney stones, at levels significantly above 10,000 IU/d.

See this post by Chris Masterjohn, which makes a different argument, but with somewhat similar conclusions. Chris points out that there is a point of saturation above which the liver is unable to properly hydroxylate vitamin D3 to produce 25(OH)D.

How likely it is that a person will develop complications like kidney stones at levels above 10,000 IU/d, and what the danger threshold level could be, are hard to guess. Kidney stone incidence is a sensitive measure of possible problems; but it is, by itself, an unreliable measure. The reason is that it is caused by factors that are correlated with high levels of vitamin D, where those levels may not be the problem.

There is some evidence that kidney stones are associated with living in sunny regions. This is not, in my view, due to high levels of vitamin D3 production from sunlight. Kidney stones are also associated with chronic dehydration, and populations living in sunny regions may be at a higher than average risk of chronic dehydration. This is particularly true for sunny regions that are also very hot and/or dry.

Reference

Vieth, R. (1999). Vitamin D supplementation, 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations, and safety. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 69(5), 842-856.