Around the Ranch: A Block of Missing Science

(As a stand-alone column because of length…)

Here: let me open up my brain a bit so you can have another (frightening) look.

Yes, I think about everything.  It just takes time to get to it – and there’s a reason: Life is complicated.

But this morning’s “block of missing science” comes courtesy of frequent Comment TBS.  Who, as you will remember, was telling us all recently about his grand success with various probiotics. Fine – I mean good for him – but I’m more of an “ask me what time it is, so I can build a watch for myself” type fellow.

Yes – there are RCTs (randomized clinical trials) on a lot of gut-changers.  Some likely work and this decade’s design medical school focus seems to be Gut-Brain Axis and all that entrails (if Hank can forgive the pun…).

But here’s what came up at lunch Wednesday:  Elaine and I were snacking on a cold Asian stir fry from two nights ago.  Small cubes of rib steak, sauteed with onion chunks big as your thumb, and cauliflower flowerets all tossed in an oyster sauce.  It was just damn good.  A 20-ounce cup of tea (Bullish Bob got me hooked on Yorkshire Gold) after lunch and I’m ready to get back to writing.

Except…

I got thinking about the billions in the supplements and now probiotics markets and I thought back 54 years to 1972, or so, when a buddy (who went somewhere around the Gulf Coast to be a TV News Director himself) was making scrambled eggs with tomatoes and cheese in the radio station kitchen.  Which included a hotplate. And Neal was one hell of a cook. Teenage line cook experience if I recall right.

So I asked him (being insensitive to religious rules) “Where’s the bacon?” And that led to a discussion of never “mixing the meat and the milk” which in this case was cheese, right.

Well, as the tea was waving itself hot enough to drink, I began asking myself the Big Ponder of the week.

WTF is with science? All working on the after-meal and the additives along the way, NOT on the initial chemical reactions in that hydrochloric acid pool called the stomach.  Where’s THAT database of interactions?

Well there isn’t one.  Which honestly, gob-smacked me for several minutes.  “Whaddah mean, isn’t such a list?”

A Hole in Science You Could Drive a Cheeseburger Through!  (With a shake and fries!)

AI was able to talk around this more gracefully than a congressman caught with his pants down:

“Based on what we actually know today, I would not build a long “never eat X with Y” list for ordinary healthy foods. The strongest evidence is not that common whole-food pairs suddenly synthesize some mysterious poison in the stomach. The stronger hazards are: natural toxins already present in a food, compounds generated by cooking, food–drug interactions, and metabolic/microbiome effects that depend on dose and person. If I were making a personal “don’t stack these casually” list, it would look like this:

• Very heavily charred/grilled meat + lots more oxidizable fat/smoke exposure. High-temperature cooking of meat produces HCAs, while dripping fat and smoke can add PAHs. I’d still eat grilled meat, but I would avoid making blackened, flame-licked, heavily smoked meat a routine dietary centerpiece.
• Large amounts of cured/processed meat + a low-plant meal. This is less a proven “toxic pair” than a chemistry concern: processed meats bring nitrite/nitrate and meat brings heme iron, both relevant to nitrosation/oxidation chemistry. If eating that kind of meat, I’d rather have it in a meal rich in vegetables than make the meal meat-on-meat-on-cheese.
• Aged/fermented foods + an MAOI drug. This one is genuinely dangerous. Aged cheeses, cured meats, fermented sauces, some beers/wines, and similar foods can carry a lot of tyramine; with MAO inhibitors, that can produce a serious hypertensive crisis.
• Grapefruit + certain medications. Grapefruit can inhibit intestinal CYP3A4 and either raise or alter drug exposure, including with some statins, blood-pressure drugs, antiarrhythmics and others. That is an honest-to-God food chemistry interaction, just not food-with-food.
• Raw/undercooked kidney beans + anything. The problem is the bean itself: phytohaemagglutinin can cause severe GI poisoning unless the beans are properly cooked. Likewise, improperly processed cassava and some other cyanogenic plants are genuine natural-toxin cases.
• Alcohol + acetaminophen, especially frequent/heavy alcohol use. Again, not food-food, but it illustrates the core point beautifully: what reaches the liver together matters. FDA specifically warns that heavy alcohol use while taking acetaminophen raises the risk of severe liver damage.

What I would not currently avoid on chemistry grounds alone: meat + milk, beef + cauliflower, eggs + dairy, fish + milk, fruit + meat, starch + meat, etc. There are plenty of traditions claiming incompatibility, but for most ordinary combinations there is not persuasive evidence that they form a meaningful internal toxin.

And your second question — why hasn’t science sorted this out? — has a very interesting answer. For this particular question, nutrition science has mostly been organized around the wrong unit of analysis for your question. It studies nutrients, then individual foods, then dietary patterns.

Your question is about the reaction network created by combinations. That problem explodes combinatorially. With only 100 foods, there are 4,950 possible pairs. Add triples, cooking methods, temperature, dose, timing, stomach acidity, medications, genetics, age and microbiome composition, and you’ve gone from a food table to something resembling a chemical-reaction database.

There is also a practical reason: acute poisons are easy to discover. If kidney beans make 40 people vomit violently, someone investigates. But suppose Food A + Food B increases production of some mildly reactive metabolite by 18%, and that matters only after 30 years in people with a particular microbiome.

That is spectacularly difficult to see with conventional nutrition studies. Which makes me think your original question is better than it first appears. The missing scientific object may be something like a Digestive Reaction Atlas: systematically test ordinary food pairs and selected triples through simulated gastric digestion, intestinal digestion and representative microbiome fermentation, then use metabolomics to identify compounds that appear only in combination.

That would let you ask a much more rigorous question than “Is milk bad with meat?”

What molecules appear after A+B that do not appear after A or B alone, and at concentrations high enough to matter biologically? That is absolutely a researchable question. And surprisingly, I don’t think we have anything close to a comprehensive map of it yet.”

Hasn’t anyone read the Bible, Talmud, Quran, and all the Asia groups to find what the common threats are – then tested them???

From my initial tire-kicking into this, nobody appears to have built a systematic cross-cultural food-prohibition database and experimentally screened the resulting combinations as a reaction network.  Seriously?  (Maybe we will all “go to heaven sooner” – can’t say…)

So here is a more useful area of study for AI than jailbreaking:  Load the chemistry books especially the bio-chem series, and get to work. Besides AI, this is a grand topic for home culinary geniuses like our own LOOB character.  (Reading his comments can put the weight-on, trust me!)

Be warned. Because Ure’s intuition says there could be a cause for cancer and a cure for a lot of diseases, just laying round waiting to be discovered by accident.

At this rate in another 250,000 years. There it was – on the same day Peoplenomics readers got Test-Fitting Apes.  Absolute proof that the title was very much on the mark.

Write when you get hungry  (and we do have one early data point: Avoid Hemlock…)

George@Ure.net