IS bigger, better? I don't think so . . . Enjoy !
The New Age
So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You
Richard Perry/The New York Times
The 21st-century Keller family. Craig and Sandy are seated at center, with their daughters Kristy Harden, left, and Rachel. In the rear from left are Kim Werk, Craig’s sister; Dennis, his brother; and Priscilla Keller Reynolds, his mother.
By GINA KOLATA
Published: July 30, 2006
Valentin Keller enlisted in an all-German unit of the Union Army in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1862. He was 26, a small, slender man, 5 feet 4 inches tall, who had just become a naturalized citizen. He listed his occupation as tailor.
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The New AgeOlder and Better
This is the first article in a series looking at the science of aging. Other articles will explore the genetics of aging, body image and frailty, and who ages well and why.
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Living Large and Healthy, but How Long Can It Go On? (July 30, 2006)
The New York Times
A year later, Keller was honorably discharged, sick and broken. He had a lung ailment and was so crippled from arthritis in his hips that he could barely walk.
His pension record tells of his suffering. “His rheumatism is so that he is unable to walk without the aid of crutches and then only with great pain,” it says. His lungs and his joints never got better, and Keller never worked again.
He died at age 41 of “dropsy,” which probably meant that he had congestive heart failure, a condition not associated with his time in the Army. His 39-year-old wife, Otilia, died a month before him of what her death certificate said was “exhaustion.”
People of Valentin Keller’s era, like those before and after them, expected to develop chronic diseases by their 40’s or 50’s. Keller’s descendants had lung problems, they had heart problems, they had liver problems. They died in their 50’s or 60’s.
Now, though, life has changed. The family’s baby boomers are reaching middle age and beyond and are doing fine.
“I feel good,” says Keller’s great-great-great-grandson Craig Keller. At 45, Mr. Keller says he has no health problems, nor does his 45-year-old wife, Sandy.
The Keller family illustrates what may prove to be one of the most striking shifts in human existence — a change from small, relatively weak and sickly people to humans who are so big and robust that their ancestors seem almost unrecognizable.
New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”
The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.
The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.
Even the human mind seems improved. The average I.Q. has been increasing for decades, and at least one study found that a person’s chances of having dementia in old age appeared to have fallen in recent years.
The proposed reasons are as unexpected as the changes themselves. Improved medical care is only part of the explanation; studies suggest that the effects seem to have been set in motion by events early in life, even in the womb, that show up in middle and old age.
“What happens before the age of 2 has a permanent, lasting effect on your health, and that includes aging,” said Dr. David J. P. Barker, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southampton in England.
Each event can touch off others. Less cardiovascular disease, for example, can mean less dementia in old age. The reason is that cardiovascular disease can precipitate mini-strokes, which can cause dementia. Cardiovascular disease is also a suspected risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
The effects are not just in the United States. Large and careful studies from Finland, Britain, France, Sweden and the Netherlands all confirm that the same things have happened there; they are also beginning to show up in the underdeveloped world.
Of course, there were people in previous generations who lived long and healthy lives, and there are people today whose lives are cut short by disease or who suffer for years with chronic ailments. But on average, the changes, researchers say, are huge.
Even more obvious differences surprise scientists by the extent of the change.
In 1900, 13 percent of people who were 65 could expect to see 85. Now, nearly half of 65-year-olds can expect to live that long.
People even look different today. American men, for example, are nearly 3 inches taller than they were 100 years ago and about 50 pounds heavier.
“We’ve been transformed,” Dr. Fogel said.
What next? scientists ask. Today’s middle-aged people are the first generation to grow up with childhood vaccines and with antibiotics. Early life for them was much better than it was for their parents, whose early life, in turn, was much better than it was for their parents.
And if good health and nutrition early in life are major factors in determining health in middle and old age, that bodes well for middle-aged people today. Investigators predict that they may live longer and with less pain and misery than any previous generation.
“Will old age for today’s baby boomers be anything like the old age we think we know?” Dr. Barker asked. “The answer is no.”
Trying to Change a Pattern
Craig Keller does not know what to expect of his old age. But he is optimistic by nature, and he knows he has already lived past the life span of his beleaguered ancestor Valentin. He is 5-foot-9, 200 pounds and exuberantly healthy.
He grew up in Hamilton, the same town on the Kentucky border where Valentin lived, worshiped and was buried. And he still lives there, working as a court bailiff, married to Sandy, whom he met when they were in second grade. Now, married 25 years, the Kellers have two grown daughters, a lively black dog and no complaints.
Craig and Sandy Keller had all the advantages of middle-class Americans of their age: childhood vaccines, plenty of food, antibiotics when they fell ill. Now, wanting to stay healthy, they walk in the evenings, try to eat well and rely on their strong faith, which, they say, makes a big difference to their health. And they enjoy life.
Mr. Keller pulls his wife’s tan Chevy Malibu into the driveway of his small, immaculate house on a sidewalk-lined street. It is the same house that he grew up in; he and Mrs. Keller bought it from Mr. Keller’s parents 22 years ago. While Mrs. Keller brings out a snack of a homemade cheese ball, crackers, sandwiches, fruit salad and brownies, Mr. Keller settles in to marvel at the contrast between his comfortable life and the lives of his ancestors.
For him, the idea of falling ill in his late 20’s and never working again is unimaginable. He knows, though, that he is nearing the age when many of his ancestors died. His father, Carl D. Keller, a lifelong smoker, developed prostate cancer, then emphysema, and then lung cancer, which killed him at age 65. His father’s father, Carl W. Keller, also a smoker, died of cancer of the esophagus just after he turned 69. His grandfather on his mother’s side died of cirrhosis of the liver at 55; his grandmother died at 56 of breast cancer.
“They never got out of their 50’s and 60’s,” Mr. Keller said. “So that’s kind of in the back of your mind.” He worries about his lungs, given his family history. He had pneumonia once and has had bronchitis.
But, Mr. Keller reasons, he is so physically different from his ancestors — he has never smoked and is so much healthier, so much better fed — that he really thinks he will break the spell.
And if exercise is good for health, the Kellers certainly have exercised. Mr. Keller displays a bookcase in their basement, crammed with athletic trophies. Mrs. Keller’s are from baton twirling, Mr. Keller’s are from baseball, basketball, softball and soccer. Their daughters, 19-year-old Rachel and 22-year-old Kristy, got theirs cheerleading.
Mrs. Keller said that when she was her daughters’ age, “I didn’t think about my health very much.”
“But later in my 30’s and toward my 40’s,” she said, “I started to think about it. You try to eat right, you try to exercise. And you do see your parents with illnesses. And you wonder about yourself. My mom had a quadruple bypass when she was 75, and she had to have a pacemaker after that. She’s now in her 80’s, but you do wonder.”
Was it genetic destiny or health habits that caused her mother’s heart disease? Mrs. Keller asks herself. Her mother smoked for more than a decade, finally quitting with great difficulty before Mrs. Keller was born. “She said the Lord helped her,” Mrs. Keller said.
Mrs. Keller has never smoked. Concerned about heart disease, she had her cholesterol level tested a few years ago and now takes medication to lower it. She walks at lunch with the women in her office and after dinner with her husband.
Her daughter Rachel, petite and quiet with a quick smile, is already thinking about her family’s medical history. She worries about heart disease, worries about lung disease. She has already had her cholesterol level measured — it was normal. And she is shocked when people her age start smoking.
“In high school, none of my friends smoked,” she said. “They came back from their first year in college, and all of them did.”
“It’s hard to think about getting old when you’re young,” Rachel added. “But when you see your family members — my grandpa died of lung cancer, my grandparents on both sides had cancer. So it’s on my mind a lot of times.”
But still, the future is so distant it is almost unfathomable to her. “I wonder what we’re going to be like when we’re old,” she mused.
Lives Plagued by Illness
Scientists used to say that the reason people are living so long these days is that medicine is keeping them alive, though debilitated. But studies like one Dr. Fogel directs, using records of of Union Army veterans, have led many to rethink that notion.
The study involves a random sample of about 50,000 Union Army veterans. Dr. Fogel compared those men, the first generation to reach age 65 in the 20th century, with people born more recently.
The researchers focused on common diseases that are diagnosed in pretty much the same way now as they were in the last century. So they looked at ailments like arthritis, back pain and various kinds of heart disease that can be detected by listening to the heart.
The first surprise was just how sick people were, and for how long.
Instead of inferring health from causes of death on death certificates, Dr. Fogel and his colleagues looked at health throughout life. They used the daily military history of each regiment in which each veteran served, which showed who was sick and for how long; census manuscripts; public health records; pension records; doctors’ certificates showing the results of periodic examinations of the pensioners; and death certificates.
They discovered that almost everyone of the Civil War generation was plagued by life-sapping illnesses, suffering for decades. And these were not some unusual subset of American men — 65 percent of the male population ages 18 to 25 signed up to serve in the Union Army. “They presumably thought they were fit enough to serve,” Dr. Fogel said.
Even teenagers were ill. Eighty percent of the male population ages 16 to 19 tried to sign up for the Union Army in 1861, but one out of six was rejected because he was deemed disabled.
And the Union Army was not very picky. “Incontinence of urine alone is not grounds for dismissal,” said Dora Costa, an M.I.T. economist who works with Dr. Fogel, quoting from the regulations. A man who was blind in his right eye was disqualified from serving because that was his musket eye. But, Dr. Costa said, “blindness in the left eye was O.K.”
After the war ended, as the veterans entered middle age, they were rarely spared chronic ailments.
“In the pension records there were descriptions of hernias as big as grapefruits,” Dr. Costa said. “They were held in by a truss. These guys were continuing to work although they clearly were in a lot of pain. They just had to cope.”
Eighty percent had heart disease by the time they were 60, compared with less than 50 percent today. By ages 65 to 74, 55 percent of the Union Army veterans had back problems. The comparable figure today is 35 percent.
The steadily improving health of recent generations shows up in population after population and country after country. But these findings raise a fundamental question, Dr. Costa said.
“The question is, O.K., there are these differences, and yes, they are big. But why?” she said.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at Harvard. “Maybe it’s the trillion-dollar question. And there is not a received answer that everybody agrees with.”
Outgrowing the Past
Don Hotchkiss, a civil engineer in Las Vegas and a descendant of Civil War veterans, is an avid Civil War re-enactor. Early on, he and his brother tried to sleep in an exact replica of one of the old tents.
It was too small, Mr. Hotchkiss said. He is six feet tall and stocky. His brother, a police officer in Phoenix, is thinner, but 6-foot-2. The tents were made for men who were average size then. “In the past 145 years, we’ve ballooned up,” Mr. Hotchkiss said.
At a recent meeting of a Las Vegas chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, eight burly men crowded into a library meeting room. All had experienced the equivalent of the Civil War tent problem.
“At the re-enactments, all the directors, all the costume directors say the re-enactors are just too darn big,” said George McClendon, a hefty 67-year-old retired airline pilot.
Mr. McClendon is right. Men living in the Civil War era had an average height of 5-foot-7 and weighed an average of 147 pounds. That translates into a body mass index of 23, well within the range deemed “normal.” Today, men average 5-foot-9½ and weigh an average of 191 pounds, giving them an average body mass index of 28.2, overweight and edging toward obesity.
Those changes, along with the great improvements in general health and life expectancy in recent years, intrigued Dr. Costa. Common chronic diseases — respiratory problems, valvular heart disease, arteriosclerosis, and joint and back problems — have been declining by about 0.7 percent a year since the turn of the 20th century. And when they do occur, they emerge at older ages and are less severe.
The reasons, she and others are finding, seem to have a lot to do with conditions early in life. Poor nutrition in early years is associated with short stature and lifelong ill health, and until recently, food was expensive in the United States and Europe.
Dr. Fogel and Dr. Costa looked at data on height and body mass index among Union Army veterans who were 65 and older in 1910 and veterans of World War II who were that age in the 1980’s. Their data relating size to health led them to a prediction: the World War II veterans should have had 35 percent less chronic disease than the Union Army veterans. That, they said, is exactly what happened.
They also found that diseases early in life left people predisposed to chronic illnesses when they grew older.
“Suppose you were a survivor of typhoid or tuberculosis,” Dr. Fogel said. “What would that do to aging?” It turned out, he said, that the number of chronic illnesses at age 50 was much higher in that group. “Something is being undermined,” he said. “Even the cancer rates were higher. Ye gods. We never would have suspected that.”
Men who had respiratory infections or measles tended to develop chronic lung disease decades later. Malaria often led to arthritis. Men who survived rheumatic fever later developed diseased heart valves.
And stressful occupations added to the burden on the body.
People would work until they died or were so disabled that they could not continue, Dr. Fogel said. “In 1890, nearly everyone died on the job, and if they lived long enough not to die on the job, the average age of retirement was 85,” he said. Now the average age is 62.
A century ago, most people were farmers, laborers or artisans who were exposed constantly to dust and fumes, Dr. Costa said. “I think there is just this long-term scarring.”
Searching for Answers
Dr. Barker of Oregon Health and Science University is intrigued by the puzzle of who gets what illness, and when.
“Why do some people get heart disease and strokes and others don’t?” he said. “It’s very clear that current ideas about adult lifestyles go only a small way toward explaining this. You can say that it’s genes if you want to cease thinking about it. Or you can say, When do people become vulnerable during development? Once you have that thought, it opens up a whole new world.”
It is a world that obsesses Dr. Barker. Animal studies and data that he and others have been gathering have convinced him that health in middle age can be determined in fetal life and in the first two years after birth.
His work has been controversial. Some say that other factors, like poverty, may really be responsible. But Dr. Barker has also won over many scientists.
In one study, he examined health records of 8,760 people born in Helsinki from 1933 to 1944. Those whose birth weight was below about six and a half pounds and who were thin for the first two years of life, with a body mass index of 17 or less, had more heart disease as adults.
Another study, of 15,000 Swedish men and women born from 1915 to 1929, found the same thing. So did a study of babies born to women who were pregnant during the Dutch famine, known as the Hunger Winter, in World War II.
That famine lasted from November 1944 until May 1945. Women were eating as little as 400 to 800 calories a day, and a sixth of their babies died before birth or shortly afterward. But those who survived seemed fine, says Tessa J. Roseboom, an epidemiologist at the University of Amsterdam, who studied 2,254 people born at one Dutch hospital before, during and after the famine. Even their birth weights were normal.
But now those babies are reaching late middle age, and they are starting to get chronic diseases at a much higher rate than normal, Dr. Roseboom is finding. Their heart disease rate is almost triple that of people born before or after the famine. They have more diabetes. They have more kidney disease.
That is no surprise, Dr. Barker says. Much of the body is complete before birth, he explains, so a baby born to a pregnant woman who is starved or ill may start life with a predisposition to diseases that do not emerge until middle age.
The middle-aged people born during the famine also say they just do not feel well. Twice as many rated their health as poor, 10 percent compared with 5 percent of those born before or after the famine.
“We asked them whether they felt healthy,” Dr. Roseboom said. “The answer to that tends to be highly predictive of future mortality.”
But not everyone was convinced by what has come to be known as the Barker hypothesis, the idea that events very early in life affect health and well-being in middle and old age. One who looked askance was Douglas V. Almond, an economist at Columbia University.
Dr. Almond had a problem with the studies. They were not of randomly selected populations, he said, making it hard to know if other factors had contributed to the health effects. He wanted to see a rigorous test — a sickness or a deprivation that affected everyone, rich and poor, educated and not, and then went away. Then he realized there had been such an event: the 1918 flu.
The flu pandemic arrived in the United States in October 1918 and was gone by January 1919, afflicting a third of the pregnant women in the United States. What happened to their children? Dr. Almond asked.
He compared two populations: those whose mothers were pregnant during the flu epidemic and those whose mothers were pregnant shortly before or shortly after the epidemic.
To his astonishment, Dr. Almond found that the children of women who were pregnant during the influenza epidemic had more illness, especially diabetes, for which the incidence was 20 percent higher by age 61. They also got less education — they were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school. The men’s incomes were 5 percent to 7 percent lower, and the families were more likely to receive public assistance.
The effects, Dr. Almond said, occurred in whites and nonwhites, in rich and poor, in men and women. He convinced himself, he said, that there was something to the Barker hypothesis.
Craig Keller hopes it is true. He looks back at the hard life of his ancestors, even those of his great-grandfather and his grandfather, working as painters, exposed to fumes. And, of course, there was poor Valentin Keller, his Civil War ancestor, his health ruined by the time he was 30.
Today, Mr. Keller says, he is big and healthy, almost despite himself. He would like to think it is because he tries to live well, but he is not so sure, especially when he hears about what Dr. Barker and Dr. Fogel and the others have found. Maybe it was his good fortune to have been born to a healthy mother and to be well fed and vaccinated.
“I don’t know if we have as much control as we think we do,” he said.
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Saturday, July 29, 2006
Emma Watson New Pics Video
| All families should have such a lovely video of sons and daughters as they grow up. Enjoy. | |
Friday, July 28, 2006
Shared Yoga Mats spread yukkies !!!
Holy smoly !!! Be forewarded !!!
Communal Yoga Mats: Beware of Germs
GREG E. COHEN, a podiatrist at Long Island College Hospital, hears the same story a lot: women complaining about a flaky red bump or a persistent itchy patch on a foot. By the time he sees them, they’re embarrassed and horrified. A few years ago, Dr. Cohen, who also has a private practice in Brooklyn Heights, didn’t know what to make of it, but these days he doesn’t blink an eye.
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TREAD CAREFULLY Health clubs and gyms vary widely on the practice of cleaning yoga mats.
“The first thing I ask is, ‘Do you do yoga?’ ” he said. As often as not, the answer is a resounding “yes.”
In the last two years, Dr. Cohen said, he has seen a 50 percent spike in patients with athlete’s foot and plantar warts. The likely culprit? Unclean exercise mats, he said.
Gyms have long been hothouses for unwanted viruses, fungi and bacteria, a result of shared equipment, excessive sweat and moisture in locker rooms. Many facilities provide disinfectant so clients can wipe down machinery, but they are often less diligent when it comes to exercise mats. It’s common to see staff members clean a stationary bike. It’s rare to see them disinfect a mat.
This is starting to worry many yoga practitioners who go barefoot on high-traffic mats. Half a dozen kinds of yoga-mat wipes are now sold nationwide, and new products like hand and foot mitts, to protect serial mat borrowers, have hit the market.
Because yoga is more popular than ever, it could well be a coincidence that health-care professionals like Dr. Cohen are seeing more infections. In 2005, 16.5 million people practiced yoga nationwide, up 43 percent from 2002, according to Yoga Journal.
Research has not confirmed the link between unclean yoga mats and fungal, bacterial and viral infections better known as jock itch, plantar warts and staph infections. Nor can dermatologists and podiatrists conclusively trace these ailments to dirty yoga mats.
Still, some are making unofficial connections. A handful of dermatologists and podiatrists say that in the last two years or so they have noticed a rise in the number of skin infections in their patients who practice yoga and use public mats.
“Most people know to wear flip-flops in the shower and locker rooms but they don’t think about it on a yoga mat,” said Noreen Oswell, the chairwoman of podiatric surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In the last two years, Dr. Oswell said there has been an uptick of fungal infections among her patients who use mats that aren’t properly cleaned.
Dr. Ellen Marmur, who runs the division of dermatologic surgery at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, said she has seen more bacterial infections in the last year and a half in “young women who mentioned they did yoga and Pilates,’’ and for whom she had ruled out other risk factors for dermatitis or dry, itchy skin. Dirty exercise mats were most likely to blame, Dr. Marmur said.
Washing dozens of mats regularly can be laborious and costly, which is why Jen Lobo, an owner of Bikram Yoga NYC, raised her rental price to $5 a mat from $2.
“Every night we clean the mats with an antibacterial yoga spray” and hang them to dry, Ms. Lobo said. “Weekends, we put them in the washing machines with Dr. Bronner’s Soap. It’s a lot of manual labor.”
Many facilities encourage practitioners to buy their own mat or put the onus on members to clean them. For instance, Sports Club/LA gyms provide wipes outside classrooms for patrons. Most Gold’s Gyms offer antiseptic solutions for yogis.
Representatives at most of the 10 gyms and studios that a reporter called nationwide said that they aim to clean mats thoroughly once a week.
Some chains like Crunch Fitness had more ambitious policies, but little oversight. “The goal is to wash mats once a day,” said Amy Strathern, a spokeswoman. Does that happen? “I don’t know,” she admitted. “It’s up to the general manager of each gym to make sure it’s done properly.”
Among chains, compliance sometimes varies from club to club. Carol Espel, the national director of group fitness for Equinox Fitness, said that mats are wiped with a citrus-based disinfectant every other day and machine-washed twice a month.
But a group fitness manager at a branch of Equinox Fitness in Manhattan, who was granted anonymity because he feared losing his job, said that mats were machine-washed only “every two months” and wiped down in between. On the other hand, George Smith, maintenance manager at the Greenwich Avenue outpost, followed Equinox’s policy more closely. Mr. Smith said mats were disinfected in a machine weekly and wiped down three times a week.
Critics warn that hygiene isn’t always a priority at some gyms and studios. Heather Stephenson, a Brooklyn yoga teacher who has worked for two gyms and has worked out in more than 25 worldwide, said: “In my experience it is not an incredibly regular practice to clean them.” Ms. Stephenson, who is a founder of Idealbite.com, an eco-living Web site, added that blankets, which are used for headstands, “aren’t often cleaned, either.”
Some specialists also worry that the cleaning solutions are not as effective as they could be. In order for a mat wipe to work, the liquid needs to have alcohol or quat-based disinfectants that are commonly used in detergents, said Dr. Philip Tierno, the director of clinical microbiology at N.Y.U. Medical Center. The wipe also needs to be moist enough to wet the entire surface. Soap and water won’t kill bacteria, but chlorine will, added Dr. Tierno, the author of the book “The Secret Life of Germs.”
Longtime devotees of yoga tend to buy their own mats and don’t lend them to anyone because they consider them an intimate part of their practice. It’s what Robert Butera, editor in chief of Yoga Living magazine, calls yoga hygiene. Cleaning one’s mat is about “being self-reliant and improving your health any way you can,” he said.
Drop-ins and relative newcomers who use communal mats take the biggest risks. Robin Parkinson, a marketing executive in Los Angeles, began doing yoga at Equinox in Westwood about six months ago. She used the mats provided because she never saw a need to buy her own. “I don’t have a horse, either, and I ride,” Ms. Parkinson said.
One day she noticed a scaly red patch of skin on her right arm. It began to itch. And when her left leg and inner thighs also started itching, she went to four doctors because no one seemed to know what was wrong. At last, one gave her cortisone cream and told her to stop borrowing yoga mats. “I haven’t gone onto a public mat since,” she said.
For two years, Darby Friedlis used loaner mats from Bikram Yoga East in Midtown Manhattan, where she practiced hot yoga. Then she got a nasty surprise when she went for her monthly pedicure. “The manicurist took one look at my foot, which was itchy and a little flaky, and cried, ‘You have athlete’s foot!’ ” said Ms. Friedlis, a 25-year-old publicist in Manhattan. Her father, a doctor who specializes in pain treatment in Fairfax, Va., was the one to suggest that unclean yoga mats might be the source of her problem.
While a wart or fungus between their toes may dismay yogis, such ailments won’t kill them. “Athlete’s foot is not exactly a life-threatening disease,” said Dr. Timothy McCall, the medical editor for Yoga Journal. “And plantar warts and athlete’s foot are so common. You could make yourself crazy with this stuff.”
That hasn’t stopped entrepreneurial yogis from rolling out products to combat the hygiene problem. Judy Alley from Scottsdale, Ariz., created hand and foot mitts called Yoga Grip Gloves, after an especially unpleasant class four years ago. “The first time I got down on the mat I was disgusted,” Ms. Alley said. “I wanted to wear my shoes but they said ‘No.’ ”
Before starting a cleaning-products line six months ago, Selena Stirlen visited 20 yoga studios nationwide and asked about cleaning practices. Their response disgusted her. “A lot of studios can’t afford a cleansing product, and they only do a major wash in the machine twice a year,” said Ms. Stirlen, who now sells wipes for on-the-go hygiene as well as a spray and machine detergent.
Not everyone is impressed. Heather Schlegel, who has practiced Bikram yoga for three years, once bought a Jo-Sha Wipe, another moist towelette made for mat cleaning. “I tried wiping down my mat, but the unfolded square was too small and kept getting scrunched up as I rubbed it across,” she said of the 75-cent wipe. “It didn’t look particularly cleaner when I was finished.”
As for Ms. Friedlis, she stopped yoga after curing her athlete’s foot with an over-the-counter cream. “Now I do the elliptical or the treadmill,” she said. “Things where I have shoes on.”
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
I'm screamin' for ...
This concoction has long been the Holy Grail for makers of confections: the fat-free yet creamy and yummy ice cream ! Can't wait to try this product. Enjoy.
Creamy, Healthier Ice Cream? What’s the Catch?
IN its quest to create ice cream as voluptuous as butter and as virtuous as broccoli, the ice cream industry has probed the depths of the Arctic Ocean, studied the intimate structures of algae and foisted numerous failures on the American public.
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
SCOOP OF SCIENCE Companies are using new methods to make ice cream a guiltless pleasure.
Readers’ Opinions
“I have tried them all as they came down the pike: dairy-free, fat-free, sugar-free; with tofu, yogurt, rice, whatever,” said Linda Calhoun, a teacher who lives near Flagstaff, Ariz., cataloguing the disappointments she has tasted over the years. “They always make me sad.”
For Americans who spend each summer wrestling with temptation, there is fresh hope in the freezer case. New industrial processes, including one that involves a protein cloned from the blood of an Arctic Ocean fish, have allowed manufacturers to produce very creamy, dense, reduced-fat ice creams with fewer additives. The new products appeal to those who have acquired a taste for superpremium high-fat ice cream but cannot stomach its fat content.
Edy’s (branded as Dreyer’s west of the Rockies) has tripled sales in its reduced-fat line since replacing its Grand Light with Slow Churned in 2004. Breyers introduced Double Churned flavors last year and has nearly doubled its product line. More than just marketing-speak, slow-churned and double-churned each refers to a process called low-temperature extrusion, which significantly reduces the size of the fat globules and ice crystals in ice cream.
Banking on the creamy mouth-feel of these new formulations, even Häagen-Dazs launched a line of Light ice creams last year to complement its butterfat-rich line. “We waited years and years for this technology,” said Gulbin Hoeberechts, a marketing manager for the company. “Before, our only choices would have been adding air, water or ingredients that don’t belong in ice cream.”
Almost all commercial ice creams contain industrial ingredients that mimic the luxurious effects of butterfat and egg yolks: some are natural, like carrageenan, extracted from algae plentiful in the Irish Sea; others are synthetic, like mono- and diglycerides.
But using new technologies can be risky for manufacturers. The other new method for making supercreamy ice cream was caught up last month in the global debate over genetically modified foods. In June, Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate, applied to Britain’s Food Standards Agency for permission to use a new ingredient in its frozen desserts — a protein cloned from the blood of an eel-like Arctic Ocean fish, the ocean pout.
Instead of extracting the protein from the fish, which Unilever describes as “not sustainable or economically feasible” in its application, the company developed a process for making it, by altering the genetic structure of a strain of baker’s yeast so that it produces the protein during fermentation.
This ingredient, called an ice-structuring protein, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is used by Unilever to make some products in the United States, like some Popsicles and a new line of Breyers Light Double Churned ice cream bars.
“Ice-structuring proteins protect the fish, which would otherwise die in freezing temperatures,” said H. Douglas Goff, professor of dairy sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario. “They also make ice cream creamier, by preventing ice crystals from growing.”
In Britain, where Unilever’s Cornetto cone is as iconic as the Fudgsicle is in the United States, the news media have leapt in with headlines about “vaneela” ice cream. Britain, like the rest of the European Union, requires labeling for any food that has contact with genetically altered material, even if that substance is not present in the finished product. In its application Unilever stressed that no DNA or other “material from fish” is used in the process. But genetically modified foods have yet to gain wide acceptance from the European public, and Unilever has found itself the unwilling center of attention.
“It’s unfortunate that this happened to come out during our so-called summer when people are interested in ice cream,” said Trevor Gorin, head of media relations for Unilever in the United Kingdom. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain that no, the Cornetto will not taste fishy.”
The United States has no regulations requiring the labeling of genetically modified food, which has become increasingly common at every point in the food chain. Until recently, its practical applications were mostly in developing strains of crops, like soybeans and corn, that are more resistant to stresses like disease, weather and insects.
But research by people like Professor Goff is beginning to bear fruit for the processed-food industry: proteins like the ones found in the ocean pout are an example.
For consumers, the benefit is that ice-structuring proteins and low-temperature extrusion have raised the “creaminess” bar for the ice cream industry.
“The ice creams produced with the new methods are simply better than any ice creams have ever been,” Professor Goff said. “Quite definitely better in texture, and much better tasting.”
A tasting by the staff of the Dining section found the Breyers Light Double Churned chocolate ice cream bar with the ice-structuring protein very creamy, even dense. It was the favorite of five ice cream bars tasted. The Häagen-Dazs Light and the Breyers Light chocolate ice cream, using low-temperature extrusion, were also very creamy and did not seem to be low-fat. But tasters found that the new ice creams still lagged behind full-fat versions in flavor.
“The quest has always been for the taste and texture of full-fat ice cream,” said Tyler Johnston of Edy’s. “Since the 1980’s it’s been about adding ingredients,” he said, referring to the gels and gums that commercial producers churn into reduced-fat ice cream to improve and stabilize its texture. “Now we have a complicated process, but the recipe can be simplified,” he added, referring to the industrial freezers that reduce the ice cream from minus 5 to minus 25 degrees Celsius for low-temperature extrusion.
The public seems persuaded. Shelf space for Dreyer’s/Edy’s Slow Churned, Breyers Light Double Churned and Häagen-Dazs Light has consistently expanded since they appeared. The category to which they belong, reduced fat, is the only part of the ice cream market that has been increasing in sales. As defined by the F.D.A., light or reduced-fat products can contain up to half the fat grams and two-thirds the calories of the original. (For a product like Häagen-Dazs dulce de leche ice cream, this means a reduction from 18 fat grams to 7 in the Light line; a low-fat product can have no more than three fat grams per serving.)
While full-fat ice cream still makes up more than 65 percent of the total market, the International Dairy Foods Association says that sales in the category have been flat for three years and that sales of low-fat and nonfat ice cream have gone down in the same period.
Professor Goff said that outside the United States the significance of the new technologies would be noted not on the palate but on the pallet. “American companies are getting ready to export ice cream to China, India, the Philippines,” he said. “These are places that have very real cold-chain issues,” he said, referring to the challenge of keeping ice cream consistently frozen throughout the shipping process.
Products produced with the new technologies are less affected by partial thawing than traditional ice creams, which become dry, sticky and hard in fluctuating temperatures. (This is why letting a container of ice cream thaw on the counter before scooping it is a bad idea.)
“Ice crystals are everyone’s enemy in ice cream,” said Arnold Carbone, the head of the Ben and Jerry’s research lab in South Burlington, Vt. (Ben and Jerry’s, now also owned by Unilever, does not use either new process.) “Ice cream is an emulsion of air, fat and water, and emulsions are always fragile because the elements want to separate.”
Every time ice cream thaws slightly, the emulsion is compromised and the ice crystals combine into larger, jagged crystals that destroy the ice cream’s texture. “This is the drama of the cold chain,” he said. “Every minute that ice cream sits on a loading dock, it suffers incredible abuse.”
Professor Goff, whose lab is working on a process of extracting ice structuring proteins from winter wheat, has a low-tech solution for those trying to avoid crystallization. “It’s simple,” he said. “Never leave a container of ice cream unfinished.”
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Chemically-determined life
For years now, I have read article after article about how much of our lives is determined by our personal body chemistry. I am more convinced now more than ever that much of what we think or feel is choice is really chemically-determined - like our sexual orientation, our adaptation to society (criminality), and even our choice of mates ("there's 'chemistry' between us!") ! Enjoy.
Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe It’s All in the Genes
Jan-Peter Boening for The New York Times
Studying the genetics of domestication, Dmitri K. Belyaev developed colonies of silver foxes, river otters and minks, as well as rats, starting in 1959.
On an animal-breeding farm in Siberia are cages housing two colonies of rats. In one colony, the rats have been bred for tameness in the hope of mimicking the mysterious process by which Neolithic farmers first domesticated an animal still kept today. When a visitor enters the room where the tame rats are kept, they poke their snouts through the bars to be petted.
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Nicholas Wade will answer select reader questions about this article. E-mail your questions to askscience@nytimes.com. Answers will be posted on nytimes.com/science on Friday.
Raul Arias
Jan-Peter Boening for The New York Times
Frank Albert, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, is studying two colonies of tame and hyperaggressive Siberian rats to determine the genetics behind their differences. A handful of genes could be responsible.
The rats used in Mr. Albert's research come from an experiment started in the former Soviet Union by Belyaev, shown above.
The other colony of rats has been bred from exactly the same stock, but for aggressiveness instead. These animals are ferocious. When a visitor appears, the rats hurl themselves screaming toward their bars.
“Imagine the most evil supervillain and the nicest, sweetest cartoon animal, and that’s what these two strains of rat are like,” said Tecumseh Fitch, an animal behavior expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who several years ago visited the rats at the farm, about six miles from Akademgorodok, near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. Frank Albert, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, is working with both the tame and the hyperaggressive Siberian strains in the hope of understanding the genetic basis of their behavioral differences.
“The ferocious rats cannot be handled,” Mr. Albert said. “They will not tolerate it. They go totally crazy if you try to pick them up.”
When the aggressive rats have to be moved, Mr. Albert places two cages side by side with the doors open and lets the rats change cages by themselves. He is taking care that they do not escape to the sewers of Leipzig, he said.
The two strains of rat are part of a remarkable experiment started in the former Soviet Union in 1959 by Dmitri K. Belyaev. Belyaev and his brother were geneticists who believed in Mendelian theory despite the domination of Soviet science by Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Mendelian genetics.
Belyaev’s brother was exiled to a concentration camp, where he died, but Belyaev was able to move to Siberia in 1958 and became director of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk. There he was able to study genetics in relative freedom, according to a report prepared by Dr. Fitch after a visit to the institute in 2002.
Belyaev decided to study the genetics of domestication, a problem to which Darwin gave deep attention. Domesticated animals differ in many ways from their wild counterparts, and it has never been clear just which qualities were selected for by the Neolithic farmers who developed most major farm species some 10,000 years ago.
Belyaev’s hypothesis was that all domesticated species had been selected for a single criterion: tameness. This quality, in his view, had dragged along with it most of the other features that distinguish domestic animals from their wild forebears, like droopy ears, patches of white in the fur and changes in skull shape.
Belyaev chose to test his theory on the silver fox, a variant of the common red fox, because it is a social animal and is related to the dog. Though fur farmers had kept silver foxes for about 50 years, the foxes remained quite wild. Belyaev began his experiment in 1959 with 130 farm-bred silver foxes, using their tolerance of human contact as the sole criterion for choosing the parents of the next generation.
“The audacity of this experiment is difficult to overestimate,” Dr. Fitch has written. “The selection process on dogs, horses, cattle or other species had occurred, mostly unconsciously, over thousands of years, and the idea that Belyaev’s experiment might succeed in a human lifetime must have seemed bold indeed.”
In fact, after only eight generations, foxes that would tolerate human presence became common in Belyaev’s stock. Belyaev died in 1985, but his experiment was continued by his successor, Lyudmila N. Trut. The experiment did not become widely known outside Russia until 1999, when Dr. Trut published an article in American Scientist. She reported that after 40 years of the experiment, and the breeding of 45,000 foxes, a group of animals had emerged that were as tame and as eager to please as a dog.
As Belyaev had predicted, other changes appeared along with the tameness, even though they had not been selected for. The tame silver foxes had begun to show white patches on their fur, floppy ears, rolled tails and smaller skulls.
The tame foxes, Dr. Fitch reported, were also “incredibly endearing.” They were clean and quiet and made excellent house pets, though — being highly active — they preferred a house with a yard to an apartment. They did not like leashes, though they tolerated them.
American researchers have suggested that the foxes be made available as pets, partly to ensure their survival should the Novosibirsk colony be wiped out by disease.
“There was a time when Soviet science was in a desperate state and Belyaev’s foxes were endangered,” said Ray Coppinger, a dog biologist at Hampshire College in Massachusetts who tried to obtain some of the foxes to help preserve them. But the animals seem to have left Russia only once, for Finland, in a colony that no longer survives.
There was far more to Belyaev’s experiment than the production of tame foxes. He developed a parallel colony of vicious foxes, and he started domesticating other animals, like river otters and mink. Realizing that genetics can be better studied in smaller animals, Belyaev also started a study of rats, beginning with wild rats caught locally. His rat experiment was continued after his death by Irina Plyusnina. Siberian gray rats caught in the wild, bred separately for tameness and for ferocity, have developed these entirely different behaviors in only 60 or so generations.
The collection of species bred by Belyaev and his successors form an unparalleled resource for studying the process and genetics of domestication. In a recent visit to Novosibirsk, Dr. Brian Hare of the Planck Institute used the silver foxes to probe the unusual ability of dogs to understand human gestures.
If a person hides food and then points to the location with a steady gaze, dogs will instantly pick up on the cue, while animals like chimpanzees, with considerably larger brains, will not. Dr. Hare wanted to know if dogs’ powerful rapport with humans was a quality that the original domesticators of the dog had selected for, or whether it had just come along with the tameness, as implied by Belyaev’s hypothesis.
He found that the fox kits from Belyaev’s domesticated stock did just as well as puppies in picking up cues from people about hidden food, even though they had almost no previous experience with humans. The tame kits performed much better at this task than the wild kits did. When dogs were developed from wolves, selection against fear and aggression “may have been sufficient to produce the unusual ability of dogs to use human communicative gestures,” Dr. Hare wrote last year in the journal Current Biology.
Dr. Hare believes that wolves probably have the same cognitive powers as dogs, but their ability to solve social problems, like picking up human cues to hidden food, is masked by their fear. Dogs, after their fear is removed by domestication, see humans as potential social partners, not as predators, and are ready to interact with them. But though selection for tameness was probably the first step in domesticating dogs, Dr. Hare said, they may well have adapted to human societies in other ways, with the smarter dogs leaving more progeny.
Although most of the tame foxes have stayed in Novosibirsk, Svante Paabo, also of the Planck Institute, recently managed to persuade the Russian researchers to let him have some of both breeds of the rats, after visiting Novosibirsk several times.
“It looked as if it would not work for a long time, but in the end we managed to build enough trust,” Dr. Paabo said. He and his student, Mr. Albert, work closely with Dr. Plyusnina. Mr. Albert hopes to identify which of the rats’ genes were selected for by the domestication process.
His strategy is to cross the tame rats with the ferocious rats and then score the progeny for how much of each trait they inherit. He hopes to identify 200 sites along the genome at which the tame and ferocious rats differ. If one or more of the sites correlate with tameness or fierceness in the progeny, they will probably lie near important genes that underlie one of the two traits.
The genes, if Mr. Albert finds them, would be of great interest because they are presumably the same in all species of domesticated mammal. That may even include humans. Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard, has proposed that people are a domesticated form of ape, the domestication having been self-administered as human societies penalized or ostracized individuals who were too aggressive.
Dr. Paabo said that if Mr. Albert identified the genes responsible for domestication in rats, “we would also look at those genes in humans and apes to see if they might be involved in human evolution.”
Human self-domestication, if it occurred, would probably not have exactly the same genetic basis as tameness in animals. But Mr. Albert said that if he could pinpoint the genetic difference between the tame and ferocious rats, he would compare the chimp genome and the human genome to see if they showed a similar difference.
One possibility is that a handful of genes — perhaps even just one — underlie all the changes seen in domestication. A structure in the embryo of all vertebrates, known as the neural crest, is the source of cells that constitute much of the face, skull and pigment cells, and many parts of the peripheral nervous system and endocrine system. If the genes in the neural crest cells were delayed just a little in coming into action, a whole range of tissues could be affected, including the maturation of the adrenal glands that underlies the first fear response of young animals, Dr. Fitch has written.
Could a single gene that affects the timing of neural crest cell development underlie the whole phenomenon of animal and human domestication? “There would be one happy science Ph.D. student if that were true,” Mr. Albert said.
Monday, July 24, 2006
Making Money
Counterfeiting has fascinated me since I was a child who tried it out myself: a neighbor rascal and I drew up ridiculously obvious counterfeit money in order to play a game, and even at that level, there was an undeniable thrill when we would finish each bill. Enjoy.
No Ordinary Counterfeit
On Oct. 2, 2004, the container ship Ever Unique, sailing under a Panamanian flag from Yantai,
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Tony Law for The New York Times
Trying to find the flaws, if any, in an enlargement of a "supernote."
Tony Law for The New York Times
A counterfeit-bill detector.
The counterfeits were nearly flawless. They featured the same high-tech color-shifting ink as genuine American bills and were printed on paper with the same precise composition of fibers. The engraved images were, if anything, finer than those produced by the
Counterfeits of this superior sort — known as supernotes — had been detected by law-enforcement officials before, elsewhere in the world, but the
In the weeks and months that followed, federal investigators rounded up a handful of counterfeiting suspects in a series of operations code-named Royal Charm and
The arrests also prompted a more momentous accusation. After the indictments were released, U.S. government and law-enforcement officials began to say in public something that they had long said in private: the counterfeits were being manufactured not by small-time crooks or even sophisticated criminal cartels but by the government of
Last September, the Treasury Department took action to signal its displeasure. The department announced that it was designating Banco Delta Asia, a bank in
The counterfeiting of American currency by North Korea might seem, to some, to be a minor provocation by that country’s standards. North Korea, after all, has exported missile technology in blatant disregard of international norms; engaged in a decades-long campaign of kidnapping citizens of other countries; abandoned pledges not to pursue nuclear weapons; and most recently, on July 4, launched ballistic missiles in defiance of warnings from several countries, including the United States.
But several current and former Bush administration officials whom I spoke with several months ago maintain that the counterfeiting is in important ways a comparable outrage. Michael Green, a former point man for Asia on the
Whether counterfeiting constitutes an economic threat, the issue of North Korean counterfeiting is aggravating diplomatic relations between the two countries. According to some analysts, the freezing of North Korea’s bank accounts helps explain the regime’s decision to launch its missiles on July 4.
How much of a concern should the counterfeiting be? Is it worth adding the issue to an already volatile diplomatic situation? The current South Korean government, which has made détente with North Korea a centerpiece of its foreign policy, has shied away from an open confrontation with the regime over the issue. Even many American law-enforcement officials who are upset that North Korea is counterfeiting nonetheless question the view that the counterfeiting poses an urgent threat. In Congressional testimony delivered in April, Michael Merritt, deputy assistant director of investigations for the Secret Service, which is responsible for protecting the nation’s currency from counterfeiters, said that the supernote was “unlikely to adversely impact the U.S. economy based on the comparatively low volume of notes passed.”
The Bush administration, though, is taking a hard line. In response to a question after a speech in
Funny Money
In December 1989, while counting a stack of $100 bills, an experienced money handler in the
As the mystery note underwent the usual scrutiny, it became apparent that this was no ordinary counterfeit. For starters, it was printed on paper made with the appropriate mix of three-quarters cotton and one-quarter linen of real U.S. currency. Making secure paper with this mix requires a special paper-making machine rarely seen outside the United States.
In addition, the note was manufactured using an intaglio press, the most advanced form of currency-printing technology available. These intaglio presses are far more expensive than ordinary offset, typographic or lithograhic presses, which yield inferior counterfeits. An intaglio press coats the printing plates with ink, and then wipes the surface clean, leaving behind ink in the recesses of the engraving. The press then brings paper and plate together under pressure, so that the ink is forced out of the recessed lines and deposited on the paper in relief. While counterfeits made using the intaglio process had been seen on rare occasions before, this note surpassed all of them in the quality of the engraving.
As with other new species of counterfeits arriving in the offices of the Secret Service, the bill was given its own flat-file drawer and christened with a sequential number: C-14342. In time, its remarkable quality earned it its more informal honorific: the supernote. But as soon became clear, the supernote was merely one member of a family of counterfeit notes. Technicians at the Secret Service soon linked it to another intaglio note detected around the same time, C-14403. This counterfeit had a few defects that the note from the Philippines did not, suggesting it was manufactured before C-14342. Nonetheless, C-14342 was soon known by the name Parent Note 14342, or PN-14342.
The Secret Service has drawn up what looks like a genealogical chart of these and related bills, which agents showed me during a visit to their Washington offices this spring. The chart displays the many members of the supernote clan: C-21555, for example, the first “big head” $100 (so-called because of the design of the most recent U.S. bills), which was initially identified in
Thanks to sophisticated tools, including mass spectroscopy and near-infra-red analysis, along with old-fashioned visual inspection, the labs of the Secret Service have established genetic links between the family members. These links are not a matter of resemblance so much as they are an indication of a common ancestry: the notes in the PN-14342 family have been created by an individual or an organization using the same equipment and the same materials, and most likely operating from a single location.
As the number of supernotes multiplied, the question arose: who created them? In theory, only governments can buy intaglio printing presses used for making money, and only a handful of companies sell them. Those facts alone pointed toward government involvement, but for some time there was no consensus as to which nation was behind the counterfeiting. Many of the supernotes surfaced in the
The Secret Service, however, distanced itself from this accusation. In a letter written in 1995 in response to a Government Accounting Office report on counterfeiting overseas, the Secret Service called the task force’s allegations “unsubstantiated” and characterized its conclusions as being based on “rumor and innuendo.” In reality, evidence was pointing elsewhere.
A Picture Emerges
With a country as closed and secretive as North Korea, information about government activities is hard to come by. But in the late 1990’s, a new source of information arrived in the form of defectors. Starvation, corruption and desperation had prompted thousands of North Koreans, many of them government officials, to flee the country. In 1997, two high-ranking bureaucrats — Hwang Jang Yop, a former secretary of the North Korean Workers’ Party, and Kim Duk Hong, head of a government trading company — sought political asylum at the South Korean Embassy in
In the international intelligence community, vetting accounts from defectors about activities in North Korea soon became a specialty — as well as a necessity, for the accounts were not always reliable. Raphael Perl, an analyst at the Congressional Research Service who has written extensively on North Korea’s counterfeiting operations, told me that “a lot of defectors or refugees give us information, but they tell us anything we want to know. You have to question the reliability of what they say.”
Nonetheless, the most trustworthy of these accounts, when combined with more traditional intelligence sources, permitted a best guess of what might be happening in North Korea. And as far as counterfeiting was concerned, the picture that emerged suggested that moneymaking had long been a passion for the country’s dictatorial ruler, Kim Jong Il, dating back to the 1970’s, years before he took over the reins of power from his father, the country’s founder and first president, Kim Il Sung.
Today, on Changgwang Street in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, there is a barricaded compound of government buildings. Judging from satellite photos, these are unremarkable, rectangular structures that suggest no special purpose. Yet according to a North Korean specialist based in
While the operatives of Office 39 may well direct legitimate enterprises, including the export of exotic mushrooms, ginseng and seaweed, a substantial portion of the office’s revenue comes from its involvement in illicit activities: drug manufacturing and trafficking, sales of missile technology, counterfeit cigarettes and counterfeit $50 and $100 bills. According to Ken Gause, director of the Foreign Leadership Studies Program at the CNA Corporation, a policy group in
All three divisions employ the same narrow coterie of elites, and all answer directly to Kim Jong Il, who lives in a villa less than a mile away. The history of the operations of Offices 39, 38 and 35, Gause told me, closely follows Kim Jong Il’s own rise to power through the party apparatus. In the early 70’s, after helping his father purge the ranks of the Korean Workers’ Party of competing factions, Kim Jong Il assumed control of North Korea’s covert operations, mostly involving South Korean targets.
In the mid-70’s, according to defector accounts related to me by the North Korean specialist, Kim Jong Il issued a directive to members of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers’ Party instructing that expenses for covert operations against South Korea be paid for by producing and using counterfeit dollars. Officials in charge of the operation supposedly brought back $1 bills from abroad, bleached the ink and then used the blank paper to print fairly sophisticated counterfeit $100 bills — though nothing close in quality to a supernote. Many of these notes were later used by North Korean agents implicated in attacks on South Korean targets, like the operatives arrested for the bombings of a South Korean government delegation in Rangoon in 1983 and a Korean Airlines jet in 1987.
According to the same defector accounts, Kim Jong Il endorsed counterfeiting not only as a way of paying for covert operations but also as a means of waging economic warfare against the United States, “a way to fight America, and screw up the American economic system,” as the North Korean specialist paraphrased it to me.
In a similar vein, according to Sheena Chestnut, a specialist on North Korea’s illicit activities who has also interviewed several key defectors, counterfeiting was seen as an expression of the guiding idea of the regime: the concept of juche. Often loosely translated as “self-reliance” or “sovereignty,” the idea of juche entails an aggressive repudiation of other nations’ sovereignty — a reaction to the many centuries in which Korea capitulated to its larger, more powerful neighbors. “It appears that counterfeiting actually contributed to the domestic legitimacy of the North Korean regime,” Chestnut told me. “It could be justified under the juche ideology and allowed the regime to advertise its anticapitalist, anti-American credentials.”
By 1984, as North Korea’s planned economy began to fall apart, Kim Jong Il, who by that time was effectively running much of the government, issued another directive, according to the North Korean specialist, who told me he has obtained a copy of the document. It explained that “producing and using counterfeit U.S. dollars” was a means, in part, for “overcoming economic crisis.” The economic crisis was twofold: not only the worsening conditions among the general population but also a growing financial discontent among the regime’s elite, who had come to expect certain perquisites of power. Counterfeiting offered the promise of raising hard currency to buy the elite the luxury items that they had come to expect: foreign-made cars, trips for their children, fine wine and cognac.
Laundering, Wholesaling and Redesigning
Earlier this year, I visited David Asher, a former senior adviser for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the State Department and an outspoken critic of the North Korean regime. In late 2001, he explained to me, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly asked him to study why the North Korean regime had not collapsed, given that the country’s economy had declined even further over the previous decade, with industrial output alone falling by as much as three-quarters. Former Communist countries had ended their subsidies, Kim Il Sung had died, the country was stricken by floods and famine and the food-distribution system had collapsed. (Party slogans betrayed more than a hint of desperation: “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day” was one of the era’s more uplifting exhortations.) Yet Kim Jong Il, defying all expectations, managed to cling to power.
“How this was happening was perplexing, given the huge trade gap, even with adjustments for aid flowing into the country,” Asher recalled. “Something just didn’t add up. It didn’t account for why Kim was driving around in brand new Mercedes-Benzes or handing out Rolexes at parties and purchasing truly large quantities of cognac.”
As Asher and his colleagues began amassing intelligence, evidence of an array of illicit activities began surfacing — everything from ivory smuggling to the production of high-grade methamphetamine. And counterfeiting was at the core. “The more we found out about this counterfeiting of dollars, the more we thought it was outrageous,” Asher told me. These activities provided what Asher calls “an alternative framework for existence” and “the palace economy of Kim Jong Il.”
In the spring of 2003, the State Department established the Illicit Activities Initiative, an interagency effort designed to investigate and counter North Korea’s criminal activities, and appointed Asher coordinator. The department began to systematically collect a variety of forensic and other evidence gathered by its own investigators, the Secret Service and elements of the intelligence community linking North Korea to the supernotes. (Asher declined to comment on the nature of the evidence, most of which remains classified.)
In addition, the department put together circumstantial evidence of North Korean counterfeiting that had been accumulating for more than a decade. In 1994, for example, authorities in
Thwarted, the regime seems to have changed tactics, harnessing new distribution networks and wholesaling the counterfeits to third parties who would funnel them to criminal gangs. In the late 1990’s, for instance, British detectives began tracking Sean Garland, the leader of the Official
Details of the actual manufacture of counterfeit notes also began filtering into the State Department, much of the information derived from defector accounts. According to similar accounts compiled by Sheena Chestnut and the North Korean specialist in Seoul whom I spoke with, the regime obtained Swiss-made intaglio printing presses and installed them in a building called Printing House 62, part of the national-mint complex in Pyongsong, a city outside Pyongyang, where a separate team of workers manufactures the supernotes.
In 1996, frustrated by the high-quality imitations of its currency in worldwide circulation, the United States government redesigned the money for the first time since 1928. Out went the old-fashioned symmetrical designs, replaced by the big-head notes. Almost everything about the new design was aimed at frustrating potential counterfeiters, including a security thread embedded in the paper, a watermark featuring a shadow portrait of the figure on the bill and new “microprinting,” tiny lettering that is hard to imitate. The most significant addition was the use of optically variable ink, better known as O.V.I. Look at the bills in circulation today: all 10’s, 20’s, 50’s and 100’s now feature this counterfeiting deterrent in the denomination number on the lower-right-hand corner. Turn the bill one way, and it looks bronze-green; turn it the other way, and it looks black. O.V.I. is very expensive, costing many times more than conventional bank-note ink.
A Swiss company named SICPA is the major manufacturer of O.V.I., and the United States purchased the exclusive rights to green-to-black color-shifting ink in 1996. Other countries followed, purchasing color-shifting inks of different colors for their own currency. One of the first countries to do so, interestingly enough, was North Korea, whose currency, the won, counterfeiters ignore. North Korea purchased O.V.I. from SICPA that shifts from green to magenta. For the purposes of counterfeiting American currency, it would be a smart choice: magenta is the closest color on the spectrum to black. “The green-to-magenta ink can be manipulated to look very close to green-to-black ink,” Daniel Glaser of the Treasury Department told me. “They took this stuff the same year we went to O.V.I.” According to Glaser, the North Koreans managed to fiddle with the new ink, obtaining an approximation of the O.V.I. on the bills.
Though there is some dispute on the timing, the first counterfeit big-head supernotes might have arrived on the market as early as 1998. Like the earlier generation of supernotes, the big-head imitations show an ever-growing attention to detail. “They would certainly fool me,” said Glaser, who points out that the “defects” of the supernote are arguably improvements. He recalled looking at the back of a $100 supernote under a magnifying glass and noticing that the hands on the clock tower of Independence Hall were sharper on the counterfeit than on the genuine.
From all accounts, superb quality is a feature of much North Korean contraband: methamphetamine of extraordinarily high purity; counterfeit Viagra rumored to exceed the bona fide product in its potency; supernotes. It’s an impressive product line for a regime that can barely feed its people. When I discussed this with Asher, he let out a sigh. “I always say that if North Korea only produced conventional goods for export to the degree of quality and precision that they produce counterfeit United States currency, they would be a powerhouse like South Korea, not an industrial basket case.”
The Threat
How many supernotes are in circulation, and what sort of provocation do they represent?
Most government officials interviewed for this story declined to give an estimate, but several, including Michael Merritt of the Secret Service, noted that his agency has removed $50 million worth of supernotes from circulation. That is a far cry from the “billions” predicted by Representative Bill McCollum’s task force in the early 1990’s, and while it may still sound like a lot, it is insignificant relative to the $12 trillion dollar American G.D.P.
When supernotes are discovered in a smaller foreign economy that makes use of American currency, they can cause a local crisis of confidence in the dollar (this has happened in
This conflation may also be deliberate. According to Kenneth Quinones, who was the North Korea country director in the State Department in the 1990’s, hawks in the current administration may be trying to use the counterfeiting issue to impede negotiations with the regime over its nuclear program. Critics of this approach note that the freezing of the North Korean bank accounts took place in the same month that participants in the six-party talks, the multination negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program, hammered out an agreement that the regime would abandon its nuclear-weapons program. North Korea soon reneged on its promise to abandon its nuclear program and has since refused to rejoin the talks until the United States lifts the designation on Banco Delta Asia. The hawks, Quinones told me, “are attempting to use these sanctions” to help “bring down the regime.”
The senior administration official interviewed for this article dismissed that claim. “The notion that there was a grand conspiracy by hard-liners is just wrong,” he told me. “It’s not accurate. This was done as a law-enforcement action by appropriate U.S. government agencies based on the facts of the case.”
Even if the counterfeiting is not worthy of being a diplomatic issue unto itself, the fact that North Korea is counterfeiting may still serve as a grim reminder of the difficulty of good-faith negotiations with North Korea. Just consider that the supernotes that were seized by law-enforcement officials in New Jersey and California arrived in the United States while the six-party talks were going on. Asher, for one, was stunned by the audacity of the regime. “If they’re going to counterfeit our currency the entire time they’re engaged in diplomatic negotiations, what does that say about their sincerity?” he asked me. “How can they want normalization with a country whose currency they’re counterfeiting? How can they expect it?”
However the diplomatic standoff is resolved, Asher said that he believes North Korea won’t continue to counterfeit much longer. Next year, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is issuing an updated version of the $100 bills. The notes will be expensive to manufacture, requiring the purchase of a new set of presses at a cost that Asher estimated in the “hundreds of millions” of dollars. The Treasury Department characterizes the next generation of notes as part of a routine redesign that it will undertake on a regular schedule every decade. But Asher has no illusions as to the timing. “It might be a routine update,” he said, “but it’s a routine update that’s being instigated by one country: North Korea.”
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