Mummified Inuits living in Greenland 500 years ago suffered from clogged-up arteries despite feasting on a diet of fish rich in omega-3

Another blow to the great fish-oil myth

Scans of mummified Inuits from 16th-century Greenland revealed that the ancient hunters suffered from clogged-up arteries despite a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids.

Atherosclerosis — the build-up of plaques of fat, cholesterol and calcium in one's arteries — is a leading cause of death today in the world's wealthier countries.

While often seen as a product of modern lifestyles, evidence of the condition has been found in human remains dating back as far as around 4,000 BC.

However, none of these examples enjoyed a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which has been suggested can help protect against plaque build-up.

Researchers turned to four incredibly well-preserved Inuits, who would have eaten a marine-based, omega 3-rich diet, to see if the fatty acid improved arterial health.

The findings suggest that diets rich in omega-3 may not guarantee against plaque buildup — however, the researchers caution that it is unclear what other factors were at play.

Cardiologist L. Samuel Wann of Ascension Healthcare in Milwaukee and colleagues studied four Inuit mummies taken from the collections of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge.

Preserved largely by the cold, the mummified individuals were found on the island of Uunartaq, off of the coast of Greenland, in 1929.

Based on their clothing and surrounding grave goods, archaeologists have concluded that the mummies were buried in the 1500s.

During their lives, the group would have lived in huts made from stone, whale bone and seal skin and would have hunted from kayaks with spears, bows and arrows.

Their prey would have included fish, birds, marine mammals and caribou — with this marine-based diet likely to have been rich in omega-3 fatty acids.

Based on their skeletal and dental features, the experts determined that the mummies included two men and two women between the ages of 18–30.

The researchers used a CT scanner to take detailed images of the mummies' insides, which were then analysed by Dr Wann and his team of four other cardiologists and two radiologists with experience interpreting scans of mummified remains.

Three of the mummies were found to have so-called 'calcified atheroma' — an accumulation of plaques of fatty material in the arteries which appeared as high-density regions in the CT scans.

The buildups were seen to be similar to those in living humans with atherosclerosis — although in the mummy's case, it was unclear if this condition led to their demise.

'This [study] presents evidence for the presence of calcified plaques in the mummified remains of 3 young Inuit individuals living 500 years ago,' the researchers wrote in their paper.

This, they added, suggests 'the presence of atherosclerosis despite [the mummies'] vigorous lifestyle and marine-based diet.'

However, the researchers cautioned that the complex nature of atherosclerosis makes it difficult to determining the exact impact of particular factors, such as the preventative effect of an omega-3-rich diet.

Other factors — like environmental smoke produced by the use of indoor fires — could have helped produce atherosclerosis in this ancient Inuit population.

The full findings of the study were published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

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UK: Woke class hatred

The loathing of ordinary people is now plain for all to see.

This is a hard article to write, for legal rather than emotional reasons. You see, the main hook for this – an allegation from former Labour MP Caroline Flint that shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry told an MP in a Labour Leave seat she was ‘glad my constituents aren’t as stupid as yours’ – has now become the subject of a legal battle. (Thornberry strongly rejects the allegation and is suing Flint, who she has accused of ‘making up shit’ about her.) I leave readers to make up their own minds.

Luckily, as we’re talking about Labourites’ and Remainers’ brewing disdain for the masses, you don’t have to look far for other examples of it. Not least from Emily Thornberry herself. In 2014, after all, she had to resign from the front bench after tweeting a picture of a house in Rochester and Strood, draped in St George’s flags with a white van outside. It was widely interpreted as sneering. More recently, she was videoed bursting out laughing as Dawn Butler MP declared ‘I think if anyone doesn’t hate Brexit, even if you voted for it, there’s something wrong with you’.

Following last week’s remarkable election result, in which scores of working-class, Leave-backing Labour seats went Tory for the first time ever, anti-working-class bile was spewing from various prominent Labour supporters in the media. Labour activist and journalist Paul Mason wrote in the New Statesman that ‘at no point did Labour “desert” the working class. But a section of it deserted us last night, and I am not going to flinch from stating that in the places it did so there is now a toxic narrative of nativism and xenophobia’.

We would expect nothing less from Paul. As we would from pop star and Labour supporter Lily Allen, who has said Boris Johnson won the election due to ‘this country’s deep rooted racism and misogyny’. She has now quit Twitter because she says it ‘gives a voice to the far right’. In a similar vein, Scottish actor John Hannah – the one from Four Weddings and a Funeral – has said ‘we’re a country of racists and Brexit/EU scepticism is the cover’.

Now, Leave voters have been accused of racism and stupidity time and again since 2016. But up to now, Remainers would at least pretend, some of the time, that they were talking about middle-class Leavers in the Tory shires. But the defection of working-class Leavers to the Tories has brought to the surface the clear class-hatred element of all this. Months of left-Remainers spuriously suggesting that working-class people didn’t really back Brexit, or did so somewhat reticently, has now been blown out of the water. And Labourites’ and Remainers’ loathing of ordinary people is now on full show.

Most troubling in all this is the way in which anti-working-class bigotry is now laundered through apparent anti-racism. Despite the clear decline in racism in recent decades, the cultural and political elites have carved out a narrative that it is worse than ever before, particularly among Those People who drive white vans, support Brexit and dislike Jeremy Corbyn. In doing so, alleged left-wingers have made class hatred respectable and anti-racist politics look cut-off and vaguely ridiculous. Which is bad news for both class politics and anti-racist politics.

That the left needs to learn lessons from this historic defeat is obvious. What I’m wondering is if they are even capable of doing so. Many Labourites and liberals don’t only misunderstand working-class people — they genuinely despise them. It’s less that they don’t know how to win over the people of Blyth Valley or Wrexham, and more that they kind of don’t want to. That is at least part of the reason why Labour prioritised the votes of middle-class Remainers over working-class Leavers, and why so many of its prominent supporters have doubled down on the prole-bashing in the wake of the result.

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RSPCA calls for South Australian rodeo to be cancelled

Nonsense.  Rodeos have never been for powder puffs.  Many RSPCA branches have been infiltrated by animal rights warriors and this looks like another instance of that

Heatwaves are a hallmark of an Australian summer. But they're getting hotter, becoming more frequent, and lasting longer.
The RSPCA wants one of the biggest night rodeos in South Australia to be postponed due to heat but organisers say it’s going ahead.

The leading animal welfare organisation is shocked Carrieton Rodeo won’t reschedule its Saturday night event as the day’s top temperature soars to 40C before dipping to 36C for a 6.30pm start.

“In the forecast conditions, it’s likely some animals will suffer heat stress but it will be difficult to verify how many have suffered or to what extent,” RSPCA’s Rebekah Eyers said.

“To demonstrate that animal welfare is a priority, we had hoped Australian Professional Rodeo Association and event organisers would follow the lead of other organisations using animals for entertainment, and cancel or reschedule the event.”

Club president Daniel Williams said the 67th annual rodeo was “absolutely going ahead” with up to 3000 people to attend and pump money into the drought-stricken town.

“It is an absolutely beautiful day. We have a water sprayer on hand if necessary and have the option of delaying if the heat is extreme,” Mr Williams told AAP. “They (the horses) are kept in excellent conditions, treated like royalty, get to run around.

“The RSPCA is an activist group that no one actually cares about these days ... their stated objective is to shut down rodeos.” The temperature in the far north South Australian town is due to hit 36C when the rodeo kicks-off, before quickly cooling down, the Bureau of Meteorology said.

“36C is quite reasonable for that time of day, but it will cool down pretty quickly so by midnight a temperature of 24C is expected,” a spokeswoman said. “Once the sun goes down it’ll be OK and they will get help from the sea breeze.”

There is no legally enforceable top temperature to prevent the animals from performing in rodeos across the state, and rodeos are legal events.

Even if the temperature drops, the RSPCA still has concerns about the transport and handling of animals to and from the event, risk of heat stress and other physical stress.

SOURCE  





Why do women feel horrible about feminism?

How did this movement that has achieved so much for women become so absurd and so vicious?

By CAROLINE OVERINGTON

I am woman. Wax my balls.

Oh, I’m sorry to start so horribly, but horrible is how so many women feel about 21st-century feminism. How did this movement that has achieved so much for women become so vicious, and absurd?

What is a woman? Is your feminism sufficiently intersectional? How woke is your answer?

OK, fair enough, feminists have never agreed on anything. The women’s movement — remember that phrase? — has always had its cliques. You can’t be a feminist if you get married, if you wear heels, if you like porn … the list goes on, and that has always been fine ­because we were thinking and talking and, anyway, we had right on our side, and we knew it, and therefore made progress but now, as we come roaring into the 20s?

We’re eating our own. In the process, we’ve cancelled ourselves.

Let’s go back: during the past decade Australian women have celebrated several significant milestones. In June 2010, for ­example, Julia Gillard became the nation’s first female prime minister. No, you don’t have to like her. You don’t even have to admire her. You do have to acknowledge the achievement.

The gains kept coming. In 2011 the federal parliament introduced paid parental leave. In 2016 Linda Burney became the first indigenous woman to be elected into the House of Representatives. In 2017 Susan Kiefel became the first ­female chief justice of the High Court of Australia.

This year we learned that Australia’s highest paid chief executive would be a woman (Mac­quarie Group’s Shemara Wikramanayake) and so would Australia’s best performing chief executive based on shareholder returns (well done to Fortescue Metals’ ­Elizabeth Gaines).

At the time of writing, half of Australia’s 76 senators are women. Not all are white. Not all are straight, either.

There have been gains for women internationally, too.

In Iran we have seen the blossoming of the White Wednesday movement that sees women ­removing their hijabs and defying men to arrest them.

This past decade Saudi women gained permission to drive; women the world over are becoming more educated; they are more likely to own land; less likely to die in childbirth; more likely to be able to read; less likely to be ­circumcised.

This month Time magazine named a 16-year-old girl as its Person of the Year. Again, you don’t have to like her. You may think her misguided. But Greta Thunberg is captain of a movement that seeks to change the whole world. She did not, as many expected, receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but Malala Yousafzai did in 2014 for standing up for girls’ education; and Nadia Murad did last year for her campaign against sexual violence.

Some of these achievements come down to the attributes of the individual women and girls, to their courage and ability; to their showmanship, too, yet this decade won’t be remembered for any of that.

It will be remembered for the Reckoning. For the movement known as #MeToo. For the ­grassroots campaign to end workplace harassment that for one brief and shining moment held women ­together in a third wave of feminism.

Look back and try to find that movement now. You can’t. It’s gone, a victim of the woke wars or else this decade’s obsession with identity politics.

Divide and conquer? We’ve done that to ourselves.

Some history: we used to be a bit embarrassed, as women, by what happened to us in the workplace. The touching, the bottom-pinching, the put-downs. We endured being demeaned and ­assaulted. We ignored it or suppressed our feelings about it, even laughed along with it.

We thought it was personal. It was — has always been — political, and then came the Reckoning. #MeToo.

American writer, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit described the movement as “an attempt to ­address something old, and very deep and very destructive”. Jia ­Tolentino, in The New Yorker, went further: it was “jagged, brutal, contentious” recognition of the extent to which men have tended to abuse their power at work.

It began, lest we forget, with the election of Donald Trump. He took office in January 2017.

A women’s march was organised for Washington, DC, to protest the vulgarity of his remarks about women (“Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”).

More than a half-million women, and some men, took to the streets to call out Trump’s misogyny. There were sister marches in Oslo, Berlin, Toronto and Sydney. Pink pussy hats were knitted and worn.

And then something else happened.

A door opened, and emboldened women began to run through it with their own stories of being abused by powerful men; and ­especially of being crushed, while their abusers continued to ascend, and soon we had #MeToo.

There was a hint as to the size of the problem in that hashtag: most women have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace and, oh, the ways in which they are over it. American writer-at-large for New York magazine Rebecca Traister put it this way: “I’m so tired. Tired of getting grabbed or pinched or demeaned, tired of having had to laugh. I’m tired of feeling paralysed, unable to confront friends and colleagues about what they just said or did.”

The movement gathered momentum and big names soon came tumbling down. Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein, once a fixture on the red carpet, now wears an ankle bracelet. Bill Cosby was arrested and ­imprisoned. Roger Ailes was fired from Fox News, and Matt Lauer from the Today show. Kevin Spacey was replaced as US president in House of Cards by his on-screen wife, Robin Wright. US gymnastics team coach Larry Nasser went to jail, and on it goes.

In Australia, the avuncular Don Burke was exposed as having made the lives of many women miserable with his crudity, and then what happened?

No, not the backlash, not yet anyway. There were some misfires.

“I’m not at all concerned about innocent men losing their jobs over false sexual assault/harassment allegations,” Emily Linden, from Teen Vogue, said in a now-notorious tweet.

“Sorry. If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.”

That can’t be right. That must be wrong. No one deserves to be unfairly accused, any more than they deserve to be belittled or ­assaulted.

Next came the decision by the website Babe to publish a young woman’s account of an evening with popular American comedian Aziz Ansari. It was meant to be explosive, an example of the horrors young women bear as they play the dating game.

It read like bad sex. Or as Caitlin Flanagan put it in The Atlantic: “She couldn’t call a cab?”

Now another door was open, and this time it was the #MeToo critics who came streaming through.

One hundred French women, among them film star Catherine Deneuve, signed an open letter published in Le Monde, offering an alternative view of the movement.

“As women, we do not recognise ourselves in this feminism,” the letter said. “It goes beyond ­denouncing the abuse of power, toward a hatred of men and of sexuality.”

Feminism had a split-second in which to respond. Workplace harassment was the issue that had galvanised women; it had widespread support, including from men. ­Fathers do not wish to see their daughters groped behind the ­cooler in the restaurant kitchen. Husbands do not want their wives coming home in tears.

We’re all agreed! But no, ­because women decided to embark instead on an argument with and about themselves, ­attacking, belittling, suing, deriding and cancelling each other over who can speak, and what we are.

In the process? We have lost the crowd.

If you’ve been wondering about the intro to this essay, it refers to transgender activist Jessica Yaniv, who this year filed a case with a Canadian human rights tribunal, complaining that she couldn’t get her testicles waxed.

Yaniv is a transgender woman who hasn’t had surgery. She quite deliberately tried to make her ­appointments with women of colour, many of them modest, hijab-wearers, who had set themselves up in small business while choosing not to work outside the home.

Yaniv sought an order that would have forced them to address her hairy genitalia, in their spare bedrooms, against their will.

It sounds like performance art. I keep thinking it must be satire. Yaniv insists that she is serious.

She lost the battle on a technicality. The tribunal ruled that many wax artists simply weren’t trained to deal with a cock and balls and, therefore, Yaniv had to find a suitably qualified professional. She is not daunted, having since launched a human rights campaign against gynaecologists for refusing to accept her as a ­patient.

“Are they allowed to do that, ­legally?” she asked, on Twitter.

Comedian Ricky Gervais took Yaniv on, saying: “It’s disgusting that a qualified gynaecologist can refuse to check a lady’s c..k for ovarian cancer. What if her bollocks are pregnant? She could lose the baby. I’m outraged.”

I was going to dress up as something weird and creepy for my Halloween party, but I’m bucking the trend this year and I’m going as brave female activist Jessica Yaniv. This also means I don’t have to wax my big old hairy balls — Ricky Gervais

He can mock her. No one else dares. This is the debate we are now in. What is a woman? Who is a feminist?

In Britain this year, Maya Forstater lost her job as a visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development for tweeting: “It is unfair and unsafe for trans women to compete in women’s sport.”

You may or may not agree, but woe betide those who are sceptical of the new gender ideology that now infects the movement. Just repeating: she lost her job.

JK Rowling — a writer, mother and philanthropist — stepped up to support Forstater, saying: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and ­security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?”

JK has now been “cancelled” — meaning her views on human rights and feminism and women and work will not be taken seri­ously by those who think they have the floor. She’s big enough to handle it, and she has her ­supporters.

“If we’re cancelling JK Rowling for saying biological sex is real, then WTF even is feminism?” one woman asked on Twitter.

And that’s quite right: we refuse now to acknowledge sex as a biological reality, we cancel same-sex attraction, and there goes lesbianism and all its grand literature, and philosophies.

Transgender women deserve respect and protection in law, no question, but do we honestly ­accept, as we all must now do in Victoria, that a woman is anyone who self-identifies as such?

That there is no special, indeed sacred, conversation to be had about the insecurity and leakage and glory and fear that comes with being born female?

That there are some things — pregnancy, birth and nursing — known only to adult human ­females?

There’s a satirist on Twitter, ­Titania McGrath, who takes this stuff on, and what’s amusing is how many people don’t get the joke.

“All men literally begin their lives inside the body of a woman without her consent.

“(Footpaths) were designed in order to enable men to invade the personal space of female strangers without their consent.”

The accelerated oscillation of my vertebra cervicalis signifies a ratification of my ideological concordance with this intersectional critique of white male hegemony and a simultaneous negation of the potentiality of its repudiation.

In other words, I’m nodding because I agree — Titania McGrath

Is this real? Is it satire? Who’s to say any more?

In real life, we’ve seen Germaine Greer ostracised for saying that her rape did not destroy her. She simply got on with things. Her own rape. You’d think she’d know. But that’s unacceptable, ­apparently.

The problem with the way women have rounded on each other is that it has made 21st-century feminism unpalatable, and we simply can’t afford that outcome.

There is still so much work to do.

Workplace harassment was never a problem on the scale of, say, forced female circumcision but it was something for Western women to get behind, as is the gendered workforce (female teachers and male principals; female nurses and male surgeons; female reporters and male editors); as is violence against women, especi­ally in their own homes.

Maybe we disagree now, as women, about the way forward, but do we really? Forward is the way forward. It has ­always been that way.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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