Butter, Margarine and Heart Disease

Shortly after World War II, margarine replaced butter in the U.S. food supply. Margarine consumption exceeded butter in the 1950s. By 1975, we were eating one-fourth the amount of butter eaten in 1900 and ten times the amount of margarine. Margarine was made primarily of hydrogenated vegetable oils, as many still are today. This makes it one of our primary sources of trans fat. The consumption of trans fats from other sources also likely tracked closely with margarine intake.


Coronary heart disease (CHD) resulting in a loss of blood flow to the heart (heart attack), was first described in detail in 1912 by Dr. James B. Herrick. Sudden cardiac death due to CHD was considered rare in the 19th century, although other forms of heart disease were diagnosed regularly by symptoms and autopsies. They remain rare in many non-industrial cultures today. This could not have resulted from massive underdiagnosis because heart attacks have characteristic symptoms, such as chest pain that extends along the arm or neck. Physicians up to that time were regularly diagnosing heart conditions other than CHD. The following graph is of total heart disease mortality in the U.S. from 1900 to 2005. It represents all types of heart disease mortality, including 'heart failure', which are non-CHD disorders like arrhythmia and myocarditis.

The graph above is not age-adjusted, meaning it doesn't reflect the fact that lifespan has increased since 1900. I couldn't compile the raw data myself without a lot of effort, but the age-adjusted graph is here. It looks similar to the one above, just a bit less pronounced. I think it's interesting to note the close similarity between the graph of margarine intake and the graph of heart disease deaths. The butter intake graph is also essentially the inverse of the heart disease graph.

Here's where it gets really interesting. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has also been tracking CHD deaths specifically since 1900. Again, it would be a lot of work for me to compile the raw data, but it can be found here and a graph is in Anthony Colpo's book The Great Cholesterol Con. Here's the jist of it: there was essentially no CHD mortality until 1925, at which point it skyrocketed until about 1970, becoming the leading cause of death. After that, it began to fall due to improved medical care. There are some discontinuities in the data due to changes in diagnostic criteria, but even subtracting those, the pattern is crystal clear.

The age-adjusted heart disease death rate (all forms of heart disease) has been falling since the 1950s, largely due to improved medical treatment. Heart disease incidence has not declined substantially, according to the Framingham Heart study. We're better at keeping people alive in the 21st century, but we haven't successfully addressed the root cause of heart disease.

Was the shift from butter to margarine involved in the CHD epidemic? We can't make any firm conclusions from these data, because they're purely correlations. But there are nevertheless mechanisms that support a protective role for butter, and a detrimental one for margarine. Butter from pastured cows is one of the richest known sources of vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 plays a central role in protecting against arterial calcification, which is an integral part of arterial plaque and the best single predictor of cardiovascular death risk. In the early 20th century, butter was typically from pastured cows.

Margarine is a major source of trans fat. Trans fat is typically found in vegetable oil that has been hydrogenated, rendering it solid at room temperature. Hydrogenation is a chemical reaction that is truly disgusting. It involves heat, oil, hydrogen gas and a metal catalyst. I hope you give a wide berth to any food that says "hydrogenated" anywhere in the ingredients. Some modern margarine is supposedly free of trans fats, but in the U.S., less than 0.5 grams per serving can be rounded down so the nutrition label is not a reliable guide. Only by looking at the ingredients can you be sure that the oils haven't been hydrogenated. Even if they aren't, I still don't recommend margarine, which is an industrially processed pseudo-food.

One of the strongest explanations of CHD is the oxidized LDL hypothesis. The idea is that LDL lipoprotein particles ("LDL cholesterol") become oxidized and stick to the vessel walls, creating an inflammatory cascade that results in plaque formation. Chris Masterjohn wrote a nice explanation of the theory here. Several things influence the amount of oxidized LDL in the blood, including the total amount of LDL in the blood, the antioxidant content of the particle, the polyunsaturated fat content of LDL (more PUFA = more oxidation), and the size of the LDL particles. Small LDL is considered more easily oxidized than large LDL. Small LDL is also associated with elevated CHD mortality. Trans fat shrinks your LDL compared to butter.

In my opinion, it's likely that both the decrease in butter consumption and the increase in trans fat consumption contributed to the massive incidence of CHD seen in the U.S. and other industrial nations today. I think it's worth noting that France has the highest per-capita dairy fat consumption of any industrial nation, along with a comparatively low intake of hydrogenated fat, and also has the second-lowest rate of CHD, behind Japan.

The Fundamentals

I heard an interview of Michael Pollan yesterday on Talk of the Nation. He made some important points about nutrition that bear repeating. He's fond of saying "don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food". That doesn't mean your grandmother specifically, but anyone's grandmother, whether she was Japanese, American or African. The point is that commercial food processing has taken us away from the foods, and traditional food preparation methods, on which our bodies evolved to thrive. At this point, we don't know enough about health to design a healthy synthetic diet. Diet and health are too complex for reductionism at our current level of understanding. For that reason, any departure from natural foods and traditional food processing techniques is suspect.

Mainstream nutrition science has repeatedly contradicted itself and led us down the wrong path. This means that traditional cultures still have something to teach us about health. Hunter-gatherers and certain other non-industrial cultures are still the healthiest people on Earth, from the perspective of non-communicable disease. Pollan used the example of butter. First we thought it was healthy, then we were told it contains too much saturated fat and should be replaced with hydrogenated vegetable margarine. Now we learn that trans fats are unhealthy, so we're making new margarines that are low in trans fats, but are still industrially processed pseudo-foods. How long will it take to show these new fats are harmful? What will be the next industrial fat to replace them? This game can be played forever as the latest unproven processed food replaces the previous one, and it will never result in something as healthy as real butter.

The last point of Pollan's I'll mention is that the world contains (or contained) a diversity of different cultures, living in dramatically different ways, many of which do not suffer from degenerative disease. These range from carnivores like the Inuit, to plant-heavy agriculturalists like the Kitavans, to pastoralists like the Masai. The human body is adapted to a wide variety of foodways, but the one it doesn't seem to like is the modern Western diet.

Pollan's new book is In Defense of Food. I haven't read it, but I think it would be a good introduction to the health, ethical and environmental issues that surround food choices. He's a clear and accessible writer.

Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and happy holidays to everyone!

Sejarah Dasi

Dasi, menurut Asosiasi Aksesori Leher Amerika, punya sejarah panjang yang melilit perkembangannya. Sejak zaman batu pun aksesori di leher dan dada sudah ada, khususnya untuk memberi ciri pada kelompok pria dari strata tinggi.

Malah, pada masa Romawi kuno sudah dipakai kain untuk melindungi leher dan tenggorokan, khususnya oleh para jurubicara. Pada perkembangannya prajurit militer Romawi pun memakainya. Bukti dipakainya aksesori kain leher tampak pada patung batu di makam kuno, Xian, Tiongkok.

Aksesori leher terkenal lainnya muncul di masa Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), yakni "ruff". Kerah kaku dari kain putih itu bentuknya serupa piringan besar yang melingkari leher. Untuk mempertahankan bentuk, ruff sering dikanji. Lambat laun orang merasa ruff yang bertumpuk-tumpuk hingga mencapai ketebalan beberapa sentimeter mengakibatkan iritasi.

Lahirlah "cravat" pada masa pemerintahan Louis XIV tahun 1660-an. Namun, Kroasia lebih tepat disebut sebagai tanah asal dasi. Bahkan konon kata ini berasal dari nama negara Kroasia dalam bahasa setempat Hrvatska.

Ini sesuai penuturan Francoise Chaile dalam buku La Grande Historie de la Cravate (Flamarion, Paris, 1994). "... Sekitar tahun 1635, sekitar enam ribu prajurit dan ksatria datang ke Paris, yang disewa oleh Louis XIII dan Richelieu. Pakaian tradisional mereka amat menarik. Sehelai sapu tangan diikatkan di leher dengan cara khusus. Sapu tangan itu terbuat dari berbagai kain, dari yang serupa seragam, katun halus, hingga sutera. Gaya unik ini segera 'menaklukkan Perancis'. Apalagi cara ini lebih praktis ketimbang kerah kaku. Sapu tangan itu cuma diikat, dengan ujung-ujungnya dibiarkan lepas."

Maka disebutlah sapu tangan itu cravat, artinya "penduduk dari Kroasia".

Sebagaimana aksesori leher di zaman batu, keindahan cravat dan cara mengikatnya menunjukkan kelas si pemakai. Konon Beau Brummell (1778 - 1840), yang banyak mempengaruhi perkembangan mode, perlu waktu berjam-jam untuk mengikat cravat-nya.

Banyak buku teknik mengikat cravat diterbitkan. Salah satunya menampilkan 32 cara, meski kenyataannya ada lebih dari 100 cara yang resmi dikenal saat itu. Begitupun, ada saja orang yang ingin mengekspresikan kepribadian mereka dengan kreasi sendiri.

Selanjutnya muncul adab mengenakan cravat. Seseorang pantang menyentuh cravat orang lain. Kalau sampai terjadi, tindakan itu bisa berakibat fatal, yakni duel.

Bahkan takhayul pun berkembang di seputaran cravat. Konon saat Napoleon Bonaparte mengenakan cravat hitam yang dililitkan dua kali memutari leher, ia selalu menang perang. Celakanya, saat terjun di Waterloo ia memakai cravat putih. Akibatnya? Ia pun "jatuh".

Tahun 1860-an cravat dengan ujung yang panjang mulai menyerupai aksesori leher modern alias dasi. Ketika muncul mode kemeja berkerah, dasi disimpulkan di bawah dagu, ujung panjangnya terjuntai di depan kemeja. Sementara dasi berbentuk kupu-kupu baru populer tahun 1890-an.

Dengan kemajuan teknologi, kini dasi jadi makin beragam warna, desain, dan teksturnya. Alhasil, lebih dari 100 juta dasi menyerbu berbagai gerai dasi setiap tahun.

Pada tahun 2002 penyanyi asal Kanada, Avril Lavigne mempopulerkan pemakaian dasi secara casual bagi para remaja wanita.

Outlook Web Access Log Analysis

Hello Reader,
In this entry I’d like to discuss log analysis on Outlook Web Access servers. I’ve successfully used OWA log analysis in the past to quickly determine who has been reading mailboxes other than their own. Two pieces of information in the logs that exist by default in the OWA creation process allow this to occur. The first is that OWA uses NTLM authentication for web mail users who log in and the domain and username authenticated is stored in the logs in the cs-username field with format “domain\username”, remember this field will only be populated if the user successfully authenticated otherwise it will be filled with “-“. The second is that the mailbox accessed is stored in the cs-uri-query field in the logs and will look something like “isnewwindow=0&mailbox=username”. By comparing the authenticated NTLM username to the username of the mailbox requested we can write some pretty easy code to determine who has been accessing the mailboxes of other users, or attempting to.

First things first, we need the OWA logs themselves. They should be located in the “%systemroot%\system32\logfiles” directory usually in W3SVC1 if it’s the first default web created. Once we have them we need to either copy or export the log files in that directory from the image. Our first bit of code reads the content of the directory:


opendir(IMD, $dirtoget) die("Cannot open directory");
@thefiles=
readdir(IMD);
closedir(IMD);

foreach $file
(@thefiles)
{

print "my file: $file\n";
open(FILE, "$file");
}


Next we need to do something with these files. We want to parse each line looking for people accessing mailboxes:

while(FILEHANDLE)
{

if ($_ =~ m/^([0-9\-]+
[0-9:]+) ([0-9.]+) ([^ ]+) [^ ]+ [^ ]+ [0-9.]+
[0-9]+ (GETPOST) ([^ ]+)
isnewwindow=0&mailbox=([^ ]+) ([1-3][0-9][0-9]) [0-9] [0-9]+ [0-9]+
[0-
9]+ HTTP.+ [^ ]+ ([^ ]+) ([^ ]+) (.+)$/i)

{
my ($access, $ip, $username, $method, $url, $query,
$status,
$useragent, $cookie, $referer) = ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7, $8,
$9,
$10);
}

Next we want to see if the username they have authenticated with matches the username of the mailbox they have requested. If it does, move on and print a . to the screen so we can see some activity. If it does not print a ! to the screen and write the resulting access to a separate file.

if ($username !~ m/$query/i )

{

print OUTFILE "$access, $ip, $username, $query,
$status\n";

print "!";

}

else

{



print
".";

}

We can also store a unique list of these users in a hash so we can get a list of offenders to review. Additionally you could store all of this in a database table in larger cases so you can begin to run queries in time periods, users affected and start breaking out what messages, attachments, tasks and calendar items have been accessed.

I have posted the raw perl code and the windows compiled executable for this. For the windows executable I made it just search the same directory the executable is in, so just copy it into the directory with the logs and run it. Load up the report.csv file and find out who your suspects are.

Raw Code

Windows Executable

YACFB - Yet another computer forensics blog

Hello readers,
after recently searching for new tools and techniques I found Harlan Carvey's blog and this blog. I had no idea outside of the Encase support forums, smart support forums, and local HTCIA groups that there was a discussion of new findings. I am one of the co-authors of Hacking Exposed: Computer Forensics (second edition is being written as we speak) and a partner at G-C Partners, LLC where I perform computer forensics services in civil litigation. I've been doing computer forensics for civil litigation since 1999 and I have built a repository of information and tools over the years that I hope will help others in the community to solve and document their own investigations.

I am a Dallas, Texas based Perl programmer, I have your books Harlan, a computer forensics examiner and a testifying expert of many years. I plan to fill this blog with tools, information, and case studies on closed litigation (I've been told discussing active litigation is frowned upon). I hope you find something useful and feel free to comment if you have questions.

My first real investigation in 1999 started when I was still primarily doing network security at Enstar Networking (now closed), and it involved a rogue ex-CTO who decided to install key loggers across the other executives systems to make sure his agenda got pushed forward. The investigation was not difficult as he did not expect anyone to seize his system and being well organized had folders made not only for the decrypted key logs that were being emailed to him but also for the receipts that included the key logger he purchased. What was interesting was the key logging itself was not a terminable offense, rather the letter to his parole officer in new york state was. Why? because he never disclosed that he had a class b felony to his employer nor did he disclose that he believed he overpaid his restitution as he wrote to his parole officer.

From this investigation I was introduced and asked to speak at our local high tech crime investigation association chapter and got introduced to the computer forensics community I didn't know existed.