A recent article in ‘Nature’ magazine indicates that we may already have passed 1.5 degrees of warming in around 2012. Using a unique sponge that grows in the sheltered waters of the Caribbean. Researchers have calibrated its growth over the past 300 years. Using the analysis of isotopes of calcium and strontium that the coral-like sponge lays down at slightly different sea temperatures. The article suggests that we have been underestimating the actual degree of global warming by half a degree, and that we are actually approaching close to 2oC in warming.

Its a short but really interesting article.https://www.nature.com/articles

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Another really interesting article this week was in The London Review of Books;

A National Evil – the curse of goitre in Switzerland. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45

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Apparently there is/was a really serious lack of iodine in the soils of Switzerland, which over centuries had caused severe goitre in the population. The Swiss used to have the highest level of Cretinism in the world because of this missing trace element in their soils. Most of the country was scraped clean of its top soil during the great ice age. The only part of the country that didn’t suffer this debilitating disorder was in the low lying areas, where the soils hadn’t been so depleted.

All sorts of explanations were put forward. 

“landscape, elevation, atmospheric electricity, snow melt, sunlight (too much and too little), ‘miasma’, bad beer, stagnant air, incest and ‘moral failure’. They collected information on the minutiae of life in affected areas, then cross-referenced their reports, following the contemporary medical wisdom which held that all diseases had multiple causes. Did groundwater interact with sunlight to produce goitre? Might a certain combination of air pressure and elevation create a cretin? In 1876, a list of the most promising theories was published; it featured forty different hypotheses.”

All wrong. It wasn’t until 1915, that a local doctor proposed that it was caused by a lack of iodine, and was shouted down. However, Eventually another doctor in an isolated area did a few unauthorised experiments in his remote local area, adding very small amounts of iodine to salt and distributing it in his local area, and miraculously, the goitres disappeared and no more cretin children were born. It seems amazing that it was just 109 years ago that this breakthrough occurred. 

There is a very sad film made in 1933 by Luis Bunuel, called ‘Land without bread’ about a very remote area, high in the basque country of Spain. In part, it mentions the terrible effects of goitre, where the same problem as afflicted the Swiss also occurred. Isolation and subsistence farming being the principal reasons.

Australia has very ancient soils that are largely depleted of iodine, goitre was a problem here for some people in the early days of development here, Those who were living away from the coast, and didn’t eat fish. During the last century iodine deficiency almost disappeared here because during the time of glass bottle milk deliveries, all the bottles were recycled and sterilised using iodine, so infinitesimal amounts of iodine were left as a residue in the bottle after cleaning and refilling. This was just the right amount to keep us all in good shape. 

When glass bottles were phased out in the mid 70’s in favour of single use plastic, Thyroidism and goitre were reported to be on the increase again. So in the decades since, doctors have been recommending that industry, and people in their homes, use iodised salt to correct the deficiency. It has worked. 

I don’t buy commercial bread, I bake my own – sans salt, nor do I buy any mass produced/baked food items, or ready-made/junk food, so my embedded salt intake is low. I buy iodised salt. However, because I don’t use much table salt with my meals and I don’t usually cook with it. I have to make sure that I do get that very small trace of iodine in my diet. Fish is our main source of protein, so that helps, but I also buy kelp powder to use at the table. This seems to keep my blood pressure is on the low side. At my last test it was 101 over 62, which is on the lower side of normal, and I have just enough iodine. It seems to work.

Life is a big experiment and there are no certainties, except death and taxes. Our income is so low that we don’t have to pay high taxes, but that still leaves death as a possibility?

Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts forever.