New Flaw Found In Animal Studies

Randall is quite good in his reasoning. I have always questioned science, even as a Science major in college. Almost every experiment or study is done with "single" minded focus not the synergistic focus that is required to find some semblance of reality.


From -

http://www.hundredyearlie.com/fitzgeraldreport/2006/08/new_flaw_found_in_anim...

New Flaw Found In Animal Studies

What if everything that medical Science thought it knew based on lab tests turned out to be wrong?

For those of you who have read The Hundred Year Lie, you already know that I take issue with laboratory animal testing for being a fundamentally flawed approach in trying to gauge the impact of chemicals on human health. My reasons were twofold-- lab animals metabolize chemicals differently than humans, and lab tests using one chemical at a time cannot duplicate a real world environment in which humans are subjected to hundreds of chemicals simultaneously every day.

Now add a third reason for doubting all of the animal tests done on chemicals over the past 70 years. The hidden element affecting the outcomes of millions of experiments has been the standard food fed to rodents, food which contains high levels of hormones.

Mice and rats used in lab experiments have traditionally been fed a diet that contains soy as a key source of protein. Since at least 1931 it has been known that soy contains estrogen-like chemicals called phytoestrogens. But until now scientists have not considered the extent to which these estrogens can skew test results. The chemicals disrupt natural hormone levels in animals much as they do in humans, and can disrupt normal growth and metabolism development, all of which can render invalid any studies that investigatie the effects of synthetic chemicals on hormones or even disease differences between males and females.

Dr. Julius Thigpen, a microbiologist at the National institute of Environmental Health Sciences, was one of the first to sound the alarm this year after fellow scientists were unable to repeat some experiments and produce the same results. He investigated and found the lab animal diet was causing the variations. He reported his findings to a scientific journal and was rejected "because they didn't think it was important," he relates.

Other scientists tested the rodent food and came up with similar results and soon a revolution in thinking was underway. "This is a major problem," confessed a biologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. At the University of Colorado, Leslie Leinwand, a molecular biologist, bemoans how "we can't go back and do 20 years of experiments all over again."

It is truly remarkable how modern medical Science has traditionally disparaged the effects of diet on all aspects of human health, and now scientists must confront the prospect that their entire careers have been based on faulty assumptions and invalid test results due to having overlooked the impact of diet on lab animals.

So is there anyone left who doubts that we are all guinea pigs in a vast chemical experiment in which not science nor government nor manufacturers really know what is safe? Tweet