Rats and Jaggery will save your lungs....maybe

In my previous blog, I wrote about the polluted air in India and specifically the bigger cities, and how running in that toxic air is akin to doing deep meditation in a smoking lounge at the airport. I may be being a tad melodramatic with that example but maybe not!

In US Military there are three levels of bad situations and they have their own deserving acronyms:

1. SNAFU- Situation Normal: All Fucked Up

2. TARFU- Things Are Really Fucked Up or Totally And Royally Fucked Up

3. FUBAR- Fucked Up Beyond All Repair or Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition

As per the data that I have seen at (1) http://newdelhi.usembassy.gov/airqualitydataemb.html; (2) http://www.cpcb.gov.in/CAAQM/mapPage/frmdelhi.aspx?stateID=6; and (3) http://aqicn.org/map/india/), in Delhi and other major cities, the air quality is hovering somewhere between TARFU and FUBAR. China's air is definitely winning the race to FUBAR.

                     Meanwhile in China. Awww....the pre-slow death selfie. Panda masks make suicide pleasant

If you need more information or a glimpse into our future, then give these short articles about China, a read.

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/dec/16/beijing-airpocalypse-city-almost-uninhabitable-pollution-china

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/10/china-pollution-levels-hit-20-times-safe-levels

                    Nothing to look here...move on people....just a few more years and you can play Superhero Nurse in Delhi too

Ok, now that I've yet again ruined your mood, allow me to help you clean your lungs (hopefully).

I have been told many stories, in my younger years, by my parents about how jaggery is consumed regularly in Haryana by men and women since they are using a choolah, working in the fields, dealing with crop produce, working with hay or sieving wheat grain. 

They supplemented these tales by stories of jaggery being doled out as rations to workers in factories and how the workers' lung functions were not compromised to a grave extent by consuming jaggery. I have heard from DTC bus drivers about jaggery consumption and believe me, those angry Haryanvis know their science. Science is all that they think about when they're waiting for hours in Delhi traffic.

While researching on the internet about jaggery and its benefits on lungs, I found this research article on the website of National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. Guess who wrote this? Two Indians (Anand Sahu and Ashok Saxena). Good men! Our Saviours (fingers crossed!).

But first, some condolences. My heart goes out to the rats (albino rats to be specific. No, I'm not racist. Sahu and Saxena chose the vanilla rats!). These rat heroes, were first injected with coal and silica dust and jaggery, and were later killed on the 30th, 60th and 90th day of the experiments and then their lungs were taken out and meticulously studied and then the dead rats were sold to a Chinese person...sorry, digressing, the article does not comment on the consumption of the rats but, yes, rats are a delicacy in China.

To save you from the trouble of reading the entire article, the synopsis is the following:

"Because industrial workers in dusty or smoky environments seemed to experience no discomfort if they consumed the sugar cane product jaggery, experimental studies were undertaken to observe the effects of jaggery on dust-exposed rats. Rats with and without a single intratracheal instillation of coal dust (50 mg/rat) were orally gavaged with jaggery (0.5 g/rat, 5 days/week for 90 days). The enhanced translocation of coal particles from lungs to tracheobronchial lymph nodes was observed in jaggery-treated rats. Moreover, the jaggery reduced the coal-induced histological lesions and hydroxyproline contents of lungs. The lesions induced in omental tissue and regional lymph nodes by a single intraperitoneal injection of 50 mg each of coal and silica dust were modified by jaggery (0.5 g/rat, 5 days/week for 30 days). These findings along with the preventive action of jaggery on smoke-induced lung lesions suggest the potential of jaggery as protective agent for workers in dusty and smoky environments. - Environ Health Perspect 102(Suppl 5):21 1-214 (1994)"

Another interesting line from the article is, "Enhanced translocation of dust particles from lungs and peritoneal cavity to TLN (tracheobronchial lymph nodes) was observed. However, the TLN are the site of immune-cell proliferation, and the enhanced translocation of particles following jaggery treatment may be due to the induction of some immune response"

If you do read the article (link at the bottom) then it is, obviously, all mumbo jumbo science like, but my two inputs for runners are the following:

1. The article talks about coal and silica dust. The rats were injected with coal and silica dust by Anand and Sahu. To connect the coal and silica dust to the air that we breathe while running and living (pun-ny), I compared the size of the coal and silica dust in the experiments to the PM 2.5 size and they were comparable. To recap the previous blog, PM2.5 level determines whether the air that you breathe is SNAFU, FUBAR or TARFU. What this means is that, we can apply the outcome of the experiment to humans without allowing Anand and Sahu to play their science games on you. You do realise what they would do to you on the 30th, 60th and 90th day, respectively.

2. You must be wondering how much jaggery to consume to become like the rats who passed with flying colours in the experiment? The rats in the experiment were given 50mg jaggery per rat and these rats were really small (140-150gms each). So .50gm per 150gm lab rat means that jaggery equivalent to about .33% of your body weight has to be consumed. So a 65kg human has to consume about 22gms of jaggery per day. So let us aim for these small doses of jaggery and hope for the best!

If I'm here, then I will update this blog in 15 years (fingers crossed yet again and I hope the fingers don't drop off by that time due to the toxins inside me).

Article link- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1567304/