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US Gained a Decade of Flynn-Effect IQ Points After Adding Iodine To Salt
cold fjord writes "I wish it was always this easy. Business Insider reports, 'Iodized salt is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it. Few people know why it even exists. Iodine deficiency remains the world's leading cause of preventable mental retardation. According to a new study (abstract), its introduction in America in 1924 had an effect so profound that it raised the country's IQ. A new NBER working paper from James Feyrer, Dimitra Politi, and David N. Weil finds that the population in iodine-deficient areas saw IQs rise by a full standard deviation, which is 15 points, after iodized salt was introduced.... The mental impacts were unknown, the program was started to fight goiter, so these effects were an extremely fortunate, unintended side effect.'"
What is the Flynn Effect?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
But I um... thought... um.. it was good for.me to um..... have a what's the.word Jenny? A diet low is salt. I may not be smart, but I know what high blood pressure is...
Silence is a state of mime.
Great!
Any way we can distribute extra iodine to /. trolls and flamers?
As much as possible, please!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
But with fluoride added to the water supply, we can reverse those gains..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/fluoride_b_2479833.html
And now we've got people in the US trying to avoid "iodized salt" because it's a "processed food" and they want "natural mineral salts". Of course they don't even know why salt is iodized -- they think it's a "preservative" (you know, cause salt goes bad) or somesuch -- and while they might be getting enough iodine elsewhere they certainly aren't regulating their intake to ensure as much. It's almost as bad as the folks who want "pectin-free" jam.
I know I'd much rather get a high score on a test than do anything useful.
>> saw IQs rise by a full standard deviation
George W. Bush moved from D.C. back to Texas and the same thing happened in both places.
Still a long way to go america, add some more iodine maybe.
Simply meeting the basic needs of the general public brings huge gains.
There used to be a stereotype that all southerners were lazy and terrible workers. Turns out they were really just riddled with parasites (That train your energy and make you tired) Basic sanitation (Even things a simple as proper outhouses dug deep enough) solved that problem amazingly well. Many poor nations struggle with this problem today, however.
The Army started school lunch programs because malnourished children were growing up stunted and short (among other health problems), and made for awful soldiers.
then immediately lost it back with fluoride in the water.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
How can you raise the IQ of a whole population?
IQ is based on a population, and the average is 100. If everyone gets more intelligent, the IQ stays the same...
The only way to raise the IQ of the group is by adding new stupid members, or taking away clever ones.
I try to avoid salt when possible because so much food is overloaded with it, so I'm a little over the daily recommended value instead of double of it.
Salt isn't just a preservative but a way to make lesser-quality food taste better, so the market gives a financial incentive to salt up everything.
Germany was at the forefront of endocrinology during their 2nd industrial revolution that preceded similar industrialization in america.
Their endocrinologists knew that Hyperthyroidism could be treated with a bath with a very dilute amount of Hydrofluoric acid added. They eventually synthesised 3-Fluorotyrosine which was even more vectored to the thyroid gland. The reason this works is normal thyroid hormone is made from conjugated tyrosine with Iodine located at the meta potitions of both rings, no special enzyme positions the Iodine here it is simple thermodynamically favourable for halogens. Once at the target tissue the halogen is removed by the Deiodinase enzymes, Type II is the most important, it requires selenomethionine unlike the Type I and III, and selectively turns T4 into T3. Inside the target cell the Iodine is liberated where it performs an essential role in the nucleus. If Fluorine is located on the tyrosyl it poisons the Type II deiodinase and you result in a form of subtle hypothyroidism where your body loses the ability to move through the normal dynamic range of high and low energy states. To compensate for the inability to convent T4 to the more potent T3 you produce more T4 all the time. You end up unable to relax. An effect also produced by the ability of Fluoride to very selectively target Acetylcholineesterases, required for termination of muscle nerve signals, leading to increased agitation and an inability to properly wind down and relax. Finally Fluoride is potent against Aconitase modifying the Citric-Acid-Cycle in unfavourable ways.
Clearly these are all long evolved stress responses to the ubiquitous toxin that is Fluorine. Henry Mousian was the 10th person who tried to isolate it an succeeded, all the others died. He died a premature death. chlorine and bromine are not nearly so deadly.
Fluorine is very ubiquitous in the earth crust, generally over 200ppm it is more common in the earths crust than carbon! So this enemy has existed for all time, harvard has recently found RNA riboswitches in bacteria that have been shown to specifically sense fluorine to activate defences. Humans do not have these, instead we have G-protein coupled receptors, through which all our hormone and many neurotransmitters function. These are also very sensitive to compounds that form from Fluorine and another ubiquitous element, Aluminium. AlF3 actives g-protein coupled receptors and modulate our sensitivity to our own hormones. there is a theory that the GPCR evolved to sense Fluoride !
Although the role of iodine in the thyroid was to continue to be understood upto WWII as together with Niacin it was one of the two most significant factors that determined mortality from Nuclear weapons.
Didnt even go from dumber to dumb then just shifted the bell curve to the right.
But the kind of powdered salt used here is known more commonly as "table salt" to distinguish it from "sea salt" or "rock salt". If you buy table salt, even in traditionally we-dont-need-no-artificial-iodine here countries (like India) you need to buy iodized version usually.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A lot of people in the US live in the so-called Goiter Belt, which is a band of the northernmost state (or two) of the US. Roughly speaking, the other states were once a vast inland ocean swamp, so the soil become infused with Iodine form the ocean. This gets into the water supply, with the result that Northern residents have far less Iodine in their diet than southern states.
Another source of Iodine used to be bread - Iodine was used as a dough conditioner in bread, so a little bit got into the food chain that way. Some of the effect we're seeing might also be due to the rise of manufactured bread in the US.
More recently, however, bread makers have started using Bromine instead of Iodine. Bromine binds to Iodine receptors so not only are we no longer getting Iodine from bread, we're less able to process the Iodine we do get.
There's also the question of how much Iodine we need to be healthy. There's good evidence for the minimum amount to prevent disease, but that may (and for those of you in the medical community, note that I'm saying "may") be lower than the optimum amount.
Note that doctors will tell you that 150ug is the maximum Iodine you should ever take (more would be toxic!) and yet occasionally use Iodine to enhance contrast in radiological studies, which puts as much as 20 mg in the blood stream. The RDA value is 100x less than used by doctors in some studies studies to treat disease.
There's also disagreement as to what the minimum daily intake should be.
We really should be studying these things. Unfortunately, a supplement that anyone could buy which will clear a patient's symptoms is incompatible with an expensive FDA-tested drug that requires office visits to administer. The medical community won't make money on supplements, so they aren't studied very well. There's enormous economic pressure against research into health (as opposed to research into disease).
'Cretinism', the sufficiently-severe-to-be-clinically-obvious manifestation of iodine deficiency has been known for a considerable length of time, in places without sufficient soil iodine. I would imagine that smaller gains would only be a surprise if you thought that everybody not obviously diseased was fully healthy, rather than frequently mildly subnormal.
quote: ... in 1924 ... raised the country's IQ
Iodized salt
One wonders how on earth they determined this cause/effect relationship.
It's been offset by the introduction of fluoride in the water supply, which is simply Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and an international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Hence, Dancing with the Stars.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I'm unconvinced.
The enemy of my enemy is quite possibly also my enemy. I've made a lot of enemies.
And yet American politicians have an cumulative IQ that is lower than the world's average. They must have been hooked to an iodine extractor at birth.
Back in the day people's impressions of coffee were formed from an occasional cup of Maxwell House or Folger's while waiting to get their car fixed.
Then a wave of indy coffeehouses burst onto the scene in the '80s (most of them since taken over by Starbucks, but hey...) and now even McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts are providing pretty decent cups. Science and engineering were saved.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CNS-letter.jpg
probably.
We could do the same thing by wiping out everyone south of the Mason Dixon line.
You are welcome on my lawn.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CNS-letter.jpg
The evidence really is overwhelming. I dare you to read just the first article here. It is published in a very prestigious journal. Educate yourself please. We are trying to help you. The industries and corporations which have captured america's government do not love you. The toothpaste is a lie. Colgate will not make you sexy. See the brainwashing for what it really is, breakout of the master-slave paradigm.
Chemico-Biological Interactions 188 (2010) 319–333
Molecular mechanisms of fluoride toxicity
Unfortunately this copy is missing colour and some excellent diagrams. Google for a better copy.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iYgtU-HidMIJ:www.researchgate.net/publication/45281342_Molecular_mechanisms_of_fluoride_toxicity/file/79e415101a1cc46320.pdf+Chemico-Biological+Interactions+188+(2010)+319%E2%80%93333+Molecular+mechanisms+of+fluoride+toxicity&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk
DOI: 10.1097/MNM.0b013e32834c187e
Association of vascular fluoride uptake with vascular
calcification and coronary artery disease
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ghbGfaMZNBMJ:intraspec.ca/Association_of_vascular_fluoride_uptake_with.3.pdf+DOI:+10.1097/MNM.0b013e32834c187e+Association+of+vascular+fluoride+uptake+with+vascular+calcification+and+coronary+artery+disease&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk
Crit Rev Oral Biol Med
14(2):100-114 (2003)
THE BIOCHEMISTRY AND PHYSIOLOGY
OF METALLIC FLUORIDE: ACTION,
MECHANISM, AND IMPLICATIONS
Liang Li
cro.sagepub.com/content/14/2/100.full.pdf
REVERSAL OF CLINICAL
AND DENTAL FLUOROSIS
Gupta ET AL.
INDIAN PEDIATRICS
Vol 31- APRIL 1994
Jeez, most everybody knows that it was lead from gasoline that lowered the quality of the IQ test and thus raised the IQ test results.
I use a potassium / sodium / iodine blend, like Morton Lite Salt, in everything I cook or bake, and one of those sea salt grinders at the table. This keeps everyone at the table happy, and heathly.
Can anyone explain why my Morton's Popcorn Salt isn't iodized?
Technically lack of iodine cause mental retardation, or a lowering of IQ, so using iodized salt in a population wouldn't actually increase IQ the IQ of the population, it would simply protect against the degredation caused by iodine insufficiency.
Are you kidding me? That first letter is dealing with the toxicity of uranium hexafluoride, not fluoridated drinking water or salt!
The concern there is almost certainly due to industrial exposure of workers trying to purify uranium on the Manhattan Project.
I think that is as far as I need to look. You're following a quack, and in danger of becoming a crank. "Wakey Wakey"
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I think it is interesting that the generation affected by the iodized salt brain boost would have just been coming of age when WW2 struck. The US would have entered the war with quite a few soldiers that would have been noticeably more intelligent than their fathers in WW1. I expect it must have helped given the increasing technical sophistication of warfare at the time. Smarter soldiers also tend to do better on the battlefield in general.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Could someone come out with a Tron-related joke please ?
and we took the lead out, and yet it seems in the US, people on the whole are stupider then ever. There must be some sort of reverse Flynn effect compensating for all this. I'd like to blame reality TV, but that's likely just a system.
Did you see what they were wearing back then? I'm not surprised we're superior to those knuckle draggers, lol. Plus, they practically ate lead paint chips and drank water from lead pipes.
You can overcome your programming. Wake up from the matrix.
Superman is an allegory. Krypton = Fluorine
Both are halogens but at opposite ends of their column (after all he is from an alien planet)
Fluorine antagonises Iodine. It is the most electronegative element and forms bonds with carbon that are particularly persistent and disrupt enzymes expecting a hydrogen. The truth is simple. It is poison. There is no biological role, in human beings. The only known biological role in any organism is in plants that have developed the ability to produce Fluroacetate as an exceptionally effective defense against herbivores. There is no known ability for an organism to have developed a complete resistance or even a significant tolerance. It is also a remarkably good rat poison, as is NaF for which no tolerance has even been demonstrated to develop.
F is an accumulative element. We only excrete around half of what we intake every day of our lives. It builds throughout life and eventually the accumulated dose is equal to the clearly toxic acute dose. Tell me, how can you explain a justification for the amounts forced against consent on the most vulnerable. Lets say only 1mg accumulates each day (a gross underestimate in todays america), ~3.6 grams a decade, after a couple of decades the levels neatly coincide with those that demonstrably cause muscular skeletal diseases, curiously similar to arthritis. Yes there is degeneration with aging that is unavoidable but F at any level clearly accelerates damage to collagen and skeletal joints.
Convince yourself, think that say the 50yr accumulative dose = 18grams F at only 1mg a day accumulating which is very conservative, tell me you believe it could not possibly have any connection to arthritis! you cannot! first you would need to be informed to even have a valid basis for any opinion. Most of the authority figures you have relied upon for 'education' are entirely captured by industry.
The most trivial mathematical consideration suggests that we should have a very large concern and should exercise caution. A fraction of one tooth surface amongst the over a hundred surfaces in a childs mouth is supposed to outway accelerated aging and debilitation! You do the math 1mg x 365 x 50 = 18grams conservative est of bioaccumulation.
Do a thought experiment, speed up the administration, at some sped up rate the same amount will cause noticable then severe accute effects, finally sudden death of a heart attack due to mitochondrial damage.
what are the separate effects that occur which distinguish the rapid administration from the prolonged, there are none, the body just has more time to repair the damage. This errosion is most harmful to the malnourished this is why severe fluorosis is so much more apparent with well water drinking chinese, indians, and africans. But even with a good diet, inducing damage and consequent (continually impaired) repair is never as healthful as simply avoiding this unnecessary burden.
Kidneys! Dialysis patients must have virtually fluoride free water because if you put 1ppm into the blood it KILLS YOU. If you are not in end stage kidney disease Fluoride impaires the ability of the kidney to concentrate urine, you actually piss on average twice as much (F group has twice the mean renal clearance at 1ppm vs ~0.2 ppm), this is from very significant studies. If i find it conveniently i will include it later. What is the economic value of having to wake up twice as often in the night, 4 times instead of 2, twice instead of once. No matter how health your kidneys the effect on your quality of like, and direct economic cost is MASSIVE.
Go to a nursing home, then look in the mirror, think!
Yes we have many layers of defenses and feedback mechanisms to compensate for exposure to this universal element. It is very prevalent in the earths crust, after all. More prevalent than many elements essential for life, so life has always had pressure to evolve increasingly sophisticated defenses.
To go from this to immediately claiming we should provoke these defenses, without peoples consent, in a manner that the most poor and vulnerable cannt afford to avoid is perverse.
The way I heard it was that it was the use of untreated fertilizer in the fields and gardens that was the primary cause of the infections.
I suppose, sitting barefoot in an outhouse with no floor, that the hookworms working their way up from the pit could be a contributive factor.
But, shoes, yes. One of the reasons for the tradition of wooden geta in Japan was the general use of untreated (human) fertilizer in the rice paddies. The tradition of taking the shoes off on entering the house was also in no small part derived from the problems with the dirt.
And most parasites have a debilitating effect on the host, which is going to effect IQ and behavior in general.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Now downmod me, faggots. You're the same ones that say infected Windows PCs should be disconnected from the internet while screaming about net neutrality. Idiots.
Apparently my boss has had an iodine deficiency for some time...
... the consumption of leaded gasoline skyrocketed, dropping the average IQ by another 20 points and causing more people to become violent criminals.
I always thought the first cause of mental retardation was religion.
Iodine in salt, like fluoride in water, is simply a convenient, low cost method of disposing of an industrial waste product! We are being deliberately poisoned!
The Dopamine receptor, at least the Ionophoric ones, conduct Na+ ions into the cell, they may either be balanced with a
Cl- or run in a mode where two Na+ ions are transported into the cell. In this mode a net accumulation of charge builds in the cell and this may contribute to a depolarisation wave. Interestingly NMDA glutamate receptors conduct Ca+, and because of the potential difference between a standard cell of Na/K being 0.7 vs Na/Ca being 0.5 so Ca added decreases the depolarisation threshold for the neuron making it more likely to fire. Interestingly Mg brings it up to 0.8 and so decreases the likelyhood for a neuron to fire.
What does this have to do with salt? well Na is transported by Dopamine transporters. So salt tolerance, requirement, and desire are all be directly connected with the concentration and distribution of DA transporters, after all this is exactly how behaviour is reinforeced, and Da release becomes identifying an idea related to an object and so intimately involved with the associated behaviour of seeking salt, and salty foods.
Enjoy your popcorn.
..that too much salt is bad for you.
For taking performance enhancing drugs?
Halogens all have an affinity for the symporter in the thyroid. They do have an order of affinity though, and so the levels can compete. Because each of the two tyrosine groups (tyrosyl) conjugated to form thyroid hormone attract halogens, which are made thermally dynamically favoured at the meta positions on both rings, in this way a different balance of everything from T3 to T4 and reverse T3 etc, are produced when Thyroglobulin is iodinated, of course there is some competitive tendency for other halogens to locate at these thermodynamically favoured meta positions.
Because the thyroid is a reservoir of halogens, so store iodine when we cant eat it, so we can have sporadic intake, it also accumulates Fluorine. 3-Fluorotyrosine is a potent inhibitor of thyroid function, although it is not reliable and inhibits action in the target tissue and even poisons the TypeII deiodinase that is required for selective T4-T3, unlike the TypeI and III which can produce reverseT3. So typeII is particularly important in high energy demand tissues such as the brain and the diaphram and heart. These all need to function virtually without rest and are strongly and continually active.
Its fascinating that our understanding of just thyroid hormone is still rapidly expanding. It turns out there are TAAM1 thyroamines that may be involved in hibernation, causing a large drop in body temperature and vascular change associated with hibernation which may have therapeutic effects but appear to trigger these changes in eg. siberian hamsters. TAAM1 has only been measured reliably in the last 5years, post 2005. It may also be involved in dopamine regulation.
"Fluoride's suppressive effect on the thyroid is more severe when iodine is deficient, and fluoride is associated with lower levels of iodine.[22] Thyroid effects in humans were associated with fluoride levels 0.05–0.13 mg/kg/day when iodine intake was adequate and 0.01–0.03 mg/kg/day when iodine intake was inadequate.[17]:263 Its mechanisms and effects on the endocrine system remain unclear"
straight from wikipedia. i'll let you google the references.
Clearly if you can interpret this, Iodine and Fluorine antagonise each other, at least in their effects on the thyroid and so really on the endocrine system at the very least via thyroid feedback/interaction.
Also these studies show sensitivity to fluoride can vary by as much as 13 times depending on Iodine status. This is clearly too large a range for precise dosing, considering individual sensitivity, variation of dose with amount drunk which can vary by at least twice its amount, and clearance which if impaired as with kidney patients can result in increase in the bioaccumulation and serum levels. So as far as the passive ability of water to carry fluoride outwith it, simply due to the high affinity F- has for H+OH, H+, OH- species, being H+F,H+,F-, where masses and radii are similar as are some chemical properties the efficiency of this process is inversely proportional to the difference between the concentrations of solute F-, in the solvent H2O. If the intake concentration is above the serum level it will be deposited directly in our skeleton which is our largest reservoir for storing fluorine throughout our life. If the amount leaving the system is higher than the amount entering, we will be in negative balance and the basal level of erosion to collagen and enzymes by F- will reduce rather than grow with age as the capacity for the reservoir to hold and buffer input F- is reduced and subsequent levels of erosion increase. Yes there _are_ many regulatory systems to repair and rebuild the systems eroded but, the erosion occurs constantly, even during production, the repaired collagen will not be even as good as an originally undamaged form of collagen resulting from lower quantities of F- ion. In otherwords increased growth and breakdown has to more than offset the amount damage stimulating metabolism.
Lets run some simple numbers as an exploration of the boundary of our system.
Lets
Yeah, some of us lost our first accounts you know.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Put out salt blocks....at the next "Occupy" protest. They are cattle, they will probably like it.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Salt makes you smart? Why, that should mean we Americans are the smartest-er than everybody else!
What if adding iodine to salt to cure one problem had *lowered* the average IQ? How would we know? Was anyone keeping track of *anything*?
What if some other "generally recognized as safe" food/packaging/thing has been lowering the average IQ? Or raising the rates of autism? Or doing some other harm? In the name of making a food package a fraction of a penny cheaper, have we been poisoning ourselves and our children? Again, how would we know?
We regularly perform random experiments on major segments of our own population with NO tracking, NO experimental protocols, and NO analysis. If someone were doing this to animals, there would be an uproar; if aliens were doing it to us, we'd attempt to revolt; but we allow the "invisible hand of the market" to do it to OURSELVES without a thought.