Science Summarized: Original Research on Food Allergies

In a past life, before science communications, I was a scientist who did actual experiments in a lab. While doing said science at MIT, I had the privilege of being able to design and run my own study on a topic that’s important to me and millions of other people — food allergies. The final paper was presented today by my friend and colleague Hillary Abraham at the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting. You can read it in full here.

As a food allergy sufferer myself, I’m happy that in recent years, food allergies have been getting more attention and legitimate support from the medical and scientific community. And it’s a huge group to pay attention to -- 15 million Americans have food allergies that result in over 30,000 annual hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths following accidental consumption of an allergen.

One reason for this is because in the US, there are limited federal standards for companies to follow when labeling allergens in food products (the FDA's food labeling guide is particularly long and convoluted). Products need to list the common name of the allergen in the ingredients, but most font types, colors, and additional warnings are up to the manufacturer. That means some products might have no explicit warning, or have additional warnings that a product “contains” an allergen. Furthermore a food company might voluntarily choose to warn consumers that the product might have been cross-contaminated, but they aren’t mandated by law to do so.

This lack of a standard labeling practice results in extremely varied food labels, some of which are easier to read than others, and makes grocery shopping a serious pain in the butt for those of us with allergies. One study found that among 98 food products with cross-contamination warnings, there were 25 different phrases! The only advice for allergy sufferers is to read “every label, every time” according to the Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE). Unfortunately there has been little to no research on if the advice from FARE is faster, easier or more effective with certain kinds of labels -- until now.

Our study specifically focused on nut allergies, with the original question being: Do certain typographic styles affect people’s ability to correctly identify allergens in food? But after I spent a dozen hours in grocery stores choosing products to include in the experimental design, I realized that there was no way to control for the variability across each manufacturer’s different choices on label typography. Some products had a big red allergen section while others only included them in the small black ingredients list — a list that sometimes felt longer than this article as I was reading every label on every product in aisle 12 of the Cambridge Stop & Shop.

The study ultimately evolved into an analysis of how much time it would take a potentially nut-allergic consumer to correctly determine if a product is safe for consumption or not by analyzing the food label. Participants (who had no known food allergies) were asked to imagine as if they were grocery shopping for someone with a nut allergy. They were video recorded as they randomly selected products, and gave a verbal yes/no in regard to whether or not the food was safe to eat.

The results showed that participants had difficulty and took a longer amount of time to correctly identify allergens if the packaging only listed the allergen in the ingredients list or had a confusing cross-contamination statement. If a product had a clearly defined and obviously labeled allergen statement, participants tended to answer more rapidly and correctly. However, safe products without a “nut-free” label took the longest to identify as safe, and were most often classified inaccurately - better safe than sorry! In a post-experiment questionnaire, participants self-reported that aesthetic challenges of the packaging made it difficult to read ingredients, such as glossy packaging, low contrast, small font, and inconsistent labelling practices. They reported feeling empathetic towards allergy sufferers who had to read “every label, every time.” Given these results, it’s safe to say we need more research on how additional typographic factors affect accurate classification.

Ultimately with this study, I hoped to draw attention to the lack of standardization in US allergen warning labels and how high of a burden it creates for allergy sufferers. Adding symbols that let shoppers know a product is free from allergens could dramatically reduce shopping time and energy spent looking for an allergen that isn’t in the product. More importantly, a consistent warning label scheme might reduce the risk of accidental exposure to allergens, potentially leading to fewer related emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths. Better labels could save lives, while saving the healthcare system money -- seems like a win for everyone involved.

Magic Mushrooms For Your Mental Health

When you think of psychedelic drugs, what comes to mind? If the first images your mind conjures up are hippies lying on the floor listening to Pink Floyd, you might be interested to know that psychedelic compounds have actually been used in a medical setting for a great part of human history. “Magic mushrooms” are one example — over 100 natural types of mushrooms contain the active (and hallucinogenic) compound psilocybin, which has shown strong potential in scientific trials as an effective therapy for numerous mental health problems, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), depression, anxiety and alcohol addiction.

Even though the studies (linked above) supporting these claims are small, they showed incredibly powerful and similar results — following one dose of psilocybin, almost all patients had an immediate reduction of their symptoms that continued to last for months. For some mental health conditions such as OCD, no other types of treatments have demonstrated such strong signals of efficacy. So how does it work? Scientists don’t understand exactly, but it could have to do with how psychedelics temporarily disrupt negative thought cycles during a trip by interrupting how the brain talks to the “self”; those thought cycles can then effectively be “restarted”, which might break the cycle that’s causing the condition by creating an openness to new thoughts.

The field of psychedelic research isn’t new. The US government had already supported and funded over 140 medical studies on psychedelic drugs before the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which labeled psychedelics as highly dangerous with no potential medical purpose. This has made it difficult to carry out controlled studies on the compounds. However, inspired scientists are finding ways to conduct innovative research, such as a new method of “microdosing” psilocybin — where someone takes a very small dose, far below recreational, in order to improve creative thinking abilities (here’s a link to new data on the topic).

Unfortunately there’s still very limited research from this century on the compound being used as a therapeutic. That’s why last month marked a milestone in psychedelic research -- the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) greenlighted a new clinical trial for the use of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression (TMD). London-based Compass Pathways received permission to move forward with their Phase 2b study of psilocybin therapy for TMD in North America and Europe — the first study of its kind in the US.

The story of how Compass began doing this type of research is a personal one. It’s run by a husband and wife who watched their son develop depression that was resistant to every treatment. The couple (who had backgrounds in public health and psychology) began doing their own research. They continued to encounter literature and anecdotes claiming that psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin, could help treat mental health conditions, including depression. Even though they weren’t personally experienced in taking mushrooms, the couple believed in the power of the data.

They started Compass and developed “psilocybin therapy”, wherein a hallucinogenic dose of pharmaceutical-grade psilocybin is administered alongside tailored psychological counseling for the patient during the “trip”. The preliminary results are promising, with all of the study participants experiencing immediate improvement in their depression, and more than half of them continuing to improve three months after therapy. None of them had any significant adverse events — something rarely seen in pharmacological trials of more traditional antidepressants. It’s worth noting that the study didn’t have a control group, which does leave open the possibility that it wasn’t the psilocybin that improved patients’ depression symptoms, but the expectation that it could.

High-profile investors like Peter Thiel add excitement to Compass’s research, because with enough support, a Phase 3 trial could potentially change the public conversation about psychedelics and begin to emphasize their helpful medical uses. And it’s not just psilocybin. Other recreationally-used drugs are also demonstrating clinical applications; Ketamine and MDMA are being explored as breakthrough treatments for TMD and post-traumatic stress disorder (I might go into detail on these in different posts).

Depression and other mental health conditions are already difficult to treat with traditional pharmaceuticals and methods. There is mounting scientific evidence for using non-traditional drugs to treat these conditions in a controlled therapeutic setting. More positive data might lead to a perception shift by the public and a loosening of restrictions by the government, which would enable scientists to conduct more rigorous studies to add value to the pioneering work that has already begun.

Water On Mars, But Still No Water Martians

You probably heard the news that scientists found liquid water on Mars. This is the first major discovery in an ongoing hunt to find more bodies of water and determine if the Red Planet has ever harbored water-based life forms.

A paper published in Science showed radar-based evidence to suggest that there is a massive saltwater lake submersed below one of Mars’s polar ice caps. At a balmy -68ºC (-90ºF), researchers believe it’s still liquid because of how salty it is, and because it’s being protected from evaporation by the ice cap covering it. On Earth, we have similar lakes underneath ice caps in Antarctica and Canada.

And the point is? A couple of things.

First, this is the largest amount of water ever found on Mars. Scientists had found some water before, but never this much. It is a large lake at 20km in diameter (~12.5mi), which makes researchers wonder if it’s connected to other subterranean lakes with deeper water tables, ones that might be more hospitable to life.  

Second, a lake made of liquid water is typically where life flourishes on Earth, so we could hypothesize that the same might be true for lakes on Mars. This particular lake, however, is probably too salinated to harbor life (Science Magazine explains why this is the case along with the methods used in finding the lake).

Let’s be real here: we’re talking microbial life, if any, living in these newly discovered lakes. No sea dragons are hiding on Mars, and if we do end up finding Martian sea dragons 100 years from now, I’ll be the first to issue a correction.

We have evidence to support the notion that Mars once had, and still has, flowing water. We know that it was warmer and wetter in the distant past (its hypothesized to have been dry for about 3.8 billion years). Mars has also showed evidence of river deltas and other ecological characteristics of a water-prominent planet. So the big question -- are there Martians in the water? -- will remain unanswered for now. But Mars clearly has more secrets waiting to be revealed to scientists who are dedicated to studying the frozen fourth planet.

(Pictured above: Mars. Photo from NASA)

The Loneliness Epidemic Might Be Partially Genetic

You probably know that your genetic code controls physical attributes like your eye color. You might not know that you also have genes that are in charge of how you feel and behave, and that disruptions in those genes can lead to disease. Although there are thousands of connections between genes, emotions and illness (most are unexplored), this post focuses on the feeling of loneliness, which is known to be related to higher mortality rates, bad heart health, and cognitive decline. Experts claim there is a “loneliness epidemic” in America -- as of May 2018, nearly half of US adults identify as lonely.

Understanding why people feel lonely is the first step in combating this growing public health problem. Researchers at the University of Cambridge published a new study in Nature Communications showing that loneliness (and other related traits) could be influenced by parts of our genome. They analyzed over 450,000 pieces of genetic data from the UK BioBank alongside self-reported responses to three mental well-being questions related to perceived loneliness, frequency of social interactions, and ability to confide in someone. These measures were used to determine whether someone is struggling with mental or physical health problems that could be linked to loneliness.

The study showed that propensity for loneliness could be traced to 15 distinct gene regions that expressed a different type of DNA if the person felt socially isolated and/or lonely. Interestingly, the same genetic regions could also predict if people were more likely to be obese, neurotic or depressed -- connections that the researchers think could be causally related (but it’s not super clear how all those factors play into each other). This raises a nearly unanswerable question - can loneliness specifically be related to genes, or is it a result of an intermingling of other traits and genes? We know for sure that we can’t conclude there is a single “loneliness gene,” because complex social traits involve both genetic and non-genetic factors.

However this isn’t the first time scientists have studied loneliness as a genetic risk factor for illness. A 2017 paper in The Lancet analyzed the same UK BioBank dataset and also found that obesity and a lower mental well-being could contribute to mortality among lonely people. In 2010 AARP conducted a huge "Loneliness Study" of older adults that identified loneliness as a predictor for poor health, and in 2011 research published in Science showed that chronically lonely people’s genes can cause high levels of inflammation, which leads to heart disease, increased susceptibility to viruses, and a host of other issues.

Overall, these genetic clues could explain why some of us feel lonelier than others, and more research on the topic might allow us to be able predict when people are at risk for loneliness. Such predictions could potentially lead to lower rates of loneliness-related disease by enabling doctors to identify and treat related mental health (depression) / physical health (obesity) issues more effectively.

Here’s what you might want to do as a result of this information. If you feel lonely, know that it's partially genetic, but there’s a lot you can do to take control: exercise, spending meaningful time with friends and family, and getting more sleep can all help combat the feelings of loneliness.

Note from Lauren: This is the first in a “Research Review” series, where I’ll be reviewing new research that comes out, summarizing it, and providing more context.