Month: April 2018

For the 3 million people in America (myself included) with celiac disease — an autoimmune disorder triggered by the ingestion of gluten — culinary life is a series of intricate leaps, accommodations and back-steps. We peer at labels, know the difference between “gluten-free” and “certified-gluten free” and keep a dedicated set of dishes and pots at home to avoid contamination by flour dust, crumbs of bread, and bits of pasta indulged in by family members or roommates.

Even so, there are regular mishaps — like the gluten free Cheerios that weren’t, or the news this past February that Chobani had recalled almost 85,000 cases of Flip Key Lime Crumble yogurt because they contained gluten, even though the containers were labeled gluten free.

But now, two worrying new studies suggest that accidental gluten exposure, even among celiacs following a gluten-free diet, may be far greater than we ever realized. A February study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at gluten exposure detected by two new tests, one for urine and the other for stool. The tests detect peptides of gluten that make it through the digestive tract intact in all of us. (Nobody completely digests gluten, but most individuals don’t have an adverse reaction to the undigested molecules).

Amounts of daily gluten in a regular diet can soar as high as 7,500 mg on average for women, and 10,000 mg on average for men. For celiacs, the recommended limit for safe consumption of gluten is a mere 10 mg a day — any more than that tiny amount can trigger symptoms and if exposure is ongoing, intestinal damage. That’s because in celiac disease, gluten triggers an autoimmune response that damages the intestinal lining and impairs absorption of nutrients. The study, which examined data on individuals from two different clinical programs, found the average amount of gluten consumed on a gluten-free diet was 244 mg (by stool analysis) or 363 mg (by urine analysis).

“This study reflects what many celiacs experience in real life,” explains analytical chemist Jennifer Sealey-Voyksner, one of the study’s authors. “I was diagnosed with celiac in the early 2000s and even on a gluten-free diet, I was still getting sick. I began to actually analyze my own food using mass spectrometry techniques, and I found out that some of the gluten-free pastas I was eating, and even a body wash I was using, contained gluten.”

In another study last year, the urine test for gluten exposure found that an astonishing 45 percent of children and 48 percent of adults on a long-term gluten-free diet were nonetheless being exposed to measurable amounts of gluten.

The results go a long way toward explaining the decades of reports showing that somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of patients with celiac disease and on a gluten-free diet still have damaged intestines that have not fully recovered — even in the absence of obvious symptoms. That raises their risk of numerous health problems including infertility, osteoporosis and bone fracture and even lymphoma.

“This analysis rocked me to the core,” says dietitian Tricia Thompson, who founded Gluten Free Watchdog, a site that offers education, gluten-free food testing, and sometimes wrangles with the FDA or corporations to press for stricter oversight.

“If the gluten levels reported in this analysis are reasonably accurate and can be corroborated by additional studies,” says Thompson, “this raises so many questions — such as, how good is our counseling of celiac sufferers, and how often are they being exposed through cross-contact?”

Cross contact can start at the farm, where gluten-free crops might be grown adjacent to, or rotated with, gluten-containing crops. It can also occur anywhere down the line in processing, packaging and shipping. When Thompson reported the study on her Facebook page, which has over 17,000 followers, worried comments spooled out, ranging from concerns about airborne gluten from the bakery section of supermarkets, to cross contact from wheat-eating family members, to a report from one woman with a gluten-detection dog able to reportedly detect down to 1 part per million (the dog alerted her to gluten on her shopping cart). A lament from one person with celiac disease seemed to sum it up: “There is no safe place in this world for a celiac. It breaks my heart.”

If individuals with celiac disease want to know whether their diets are compliant, the bowel and urine tests are now available for home testing from a company called Glutenostics, without a prescription. It is recommended that a patient work with his or her doctor and a dietitian to interpret results and get subsequent counseling. The urine test, says Glutenostic’s managing partner, organic chemist David Winternheimer, is probably not sensitive enough to detect inadvertent exposure to gluten.

“You have to eat 500 mg of gluten, or about two bites of bread, for the urine test to be positive,” says Winternheimer, “and most people on a gluten-free diet don’t get that much.” Instead, the urine test is recommended primarily for caregivers and parents who want to be sure their children are adhering to the diet, especially when away from home.

The stool test, in contrast, requires only 50 mg of gluten (roughly the amount present in a dime-sized bundle of bread crumbs) and can measure intake accumulating over several days. The stool test is unlikely to catch a low-level, one-off cross contact event, but could be useful for detecting highly contaminated food or ongoing consumption of low levels of hidden gluten. “If you are concerned that you have been regularly exposed to cross contact from gluten over a period of days,” says Thompson, “you may find the stool test useful.”

Winternheimer confirms: “Patients who are symptomatic and not sure if the cause is gluten, or patients whose blood work still tests positive for gluten exposure, may want to utilize this test.”

If the stool test is positive, an audit of possible sources of exposure is in order — from other household members to foods or medicines that may contain hidden sources of gluten. “A dietitian may choose to have patients keep detailed food records,” says Thompson, “that can be used alongside the results of stool testing to help determine possible sources of exposure.”

For Jennifer Sealey-Voyksner, these results point to the fact that a gluten-free diet may just be inadequate as a solitary treatment option for many individuals.

“I just got “glutened” yesterday at a restaurant,” she says. When she ordered a sandwich on gluten-free bread at her regular deli, a new person in the kitchen mistakenly used regular bread. Several bites in, she started to experience symptoms – “brain fog and some cramps,” as well as other gastrointestinal distress, she says, knocking her out of commission for another day.

“I’m one of the more sensitive folks,” she says. “It doesn’t take very much gluten for me to show symptoms. There is a great need for more accurate tests to measure gluten in foods, as well as therapeutic drugs, either to work alone or in concert with a gluten-free diet.”

As the U.S. and China ratchet up a tit-for-tat tariff dispute, it has been said often in the last few weeks: “No one wins a trade war.”

Nevertheless, staying out of a war is often the best way to win, or at least not to lose.

Take Australia, for example. In the 1990s, as the Asian economic miracle was taking shape, Australian politicians worked hard to overcome the country’s geographic and cultural distance from that region to position it on the economic front lines. And while the U.S. has pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, Australia is still part of the pact. Canberra has also forged a series of bilateral deals with its regional neighbors, including a China-Australia Free Trade Agreement.

China is now Australia’s largest trading partner. What’s more, it produces many of the things that China also sources from the U.S. — exports that appear on Beijing’s list of 128 U.S. goods that will see tariffs of 15 to 25 percent in retaliation for the Trump administration’s decision to impose similar tariffs on aluminum and steel from China.

To be sure, there is plenty of hand wringing in Sydney, Perth and Canberra over the looming cross-Pacific trade war. See here and here.

Even so, individual sectors in Australia stand to gain, by increasing production and/or prices of some basic commodities to feed China’s enormous appetite.

Wine

A record-breaking 2017 for Australian wine exports saw an overall increase of 15 percent from the previous year to $2.56 billion. Exports to mainland China — Australia’s single-largest wine export region — were up a whopping 63 percent, with a total value of $848 million, nearly twice as large as the U.S., which lands in the No. 2 spot.

The Wine Spectator reports that while the U.S. exported around $80 million worth of wine to China last year, that was dwarfed by France, Australia and Chile, the latter two having free-trade agreements with Beijing “which put them at a significant advantage.”

“Current Chinese customs duties for U.S. wines are 14 percent — the new tariffs increase that to 29 percent. Wines from Australia and Chile are charged customs duties of 0 percent. According to [the Wine Institute’s Asia Director Christopher] Beros, these countries “have relied heavily on exports for many years for their entire industries [and] have been aggressively marketing in China,” the Wine Spectator writes.

“If U.S. wines are subjected to higher tariffs when imported into China, that would have a direct benefit to other suppliers into that rapidly growing market, especially France and Australia — the two largest suppliers of premium wines to China,” Kym Anderson, a professor of economics at the University of Adelaide in Australia and also executive director of the university’s Wine Economics Research Center tells CNBC.

Robert Koch, the CEO of the Wine Institute, is more direct: “This new increased tariff will have a chilling effect on U.S. wine exports to one of the world’s most important markets,” Koch tells CNBC. “U.S. producers were already at a disadvantage to many foreign competitors, and this will only exacerbate that problem. We urge a swift resolution to this crisis before long-term damage is done to the U.S. wine industry.”

Fruits and Nuts

Joel Nelsen, the president of the trade group California Citrus Mutual is quoted by member station KVPR as saying “The market share that we’ve been trying to develop over the past several years becomes expendable and there’s an opportunity for others to steal it.”

One of the thieves, so to speak, might be – you guessed it – Australia, which is the biggest competitor to the U.S. fruit exports to China. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says 40 percent of the country’s fruit already gets shipped off to China and Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported last year:

“Tree nuts are Australia’s largest and most valuable horticultural export, accounting for 45 per cent of horticultural goods sold overseas, and tipped to reach around $1 billion in net worth this financial year, according to industry projections.

Australian tree nut exports to China have grown from $6 million in 2010-11 to $63 million in 2015-16, according to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences.”

While sounding an otherwise negative note on the Sino-U.S. trade dispute, CMC Markets’ chief market strategist Michael McCarthy told ABC that Australia (and New Zealand) “have a reputation for pure foods.”

“An opportunity in global markets to insert those products into other markets could be an opportunity for Australian farmers,” he said.

Scrap Aluminum

Among the U.S. exports that China has targeted is scrap aluminum (think recycled aluminum drink cans) which is melted and reformed in Chinese furnaces. Beijing slapped a steep 25 percent tariff on U.S. exports.

Australia, however, has seen its exports of such waste materials, including aluminum, rise sharply since the 1990s.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, “In 2011-12 Australia’s major trading partner for exported waste products was China which received 32% of the total value of Australia’s waste exports.

Australia’s main waste export to China was waste metal ($602 million or 592,000 tonnes) which accounted for 31% of the value of all exported waste metals.”

Steel

The opening salvo of President Trump’s trade dispute with China came in the form of steel tariffs.

In 2016, Australia was the world’s leading exporter of coal, while the U.S. ranked fourth.

Both countries are also top exporters of metallurgical — or met — coal, which is used in blast furnaces to produce steel. China uses all the met coal it can produce and still imports substantial amounts from abroad.

With the U.S. imposing a 25 percent tariff on steel imports from China, Beijing might well decide to source more of its met coal from somewhere else.

Australia seems most likely to gain.

Dozens of cameras meet visitors to the Beijing headquarters of SenseTime, China’s largest artificial intelligence company. One of them determines whether the door will open for you; another tracks your movements.

The one that marketing assistant Katherine Xue is gazing into, in the company’s showroom, broadcasts an image of my face with white lines emanating from my eyes, nose and corners of my mouth. It estimates I am a 37-year-old male (I’m 44) with an attractiveness score of 98.

“Is that a high or low score?” I ask Xue, whose digitized face shows that she is a 23-year-old female with an attractiveness score of 99.

“That’s a very high score!” she exclaims.

Later Xue whispers to me that everyone receives high scores. This is one of SenseTime’s many products, a marketing application that flatters you so that you’ll buy merchandise selected for you based on data gleaned from your face. (The machine determines that a cheap brand of Chinese grain alcohol is something I’d likely buy).

This is just one application of SenseTime’s facial recognition technology, which is now being used by a growing number of local governments across China. Another is a camera in the corner of the company’s fifth-story showroom, pointed at the street.

SenseTime artificial intelligence researcher Qian Chen shows me real-time video of the traffic below. Onscreen squares surround each moving object, identifying and classifying them: A car’s make, model, color and license plate number pop up on the screen, as does information about each person walking through the frame: their sex, color of clothing, whether they’re an adult or child. Their identification isn’t displayed, but, says Qian, if their data is stored inside SenseTime’s system, it could be.

It is for employees at SenseTime. Their biometric data is stored here, and a map of Beijing uses camera data to track where employees have been throughout a typical day.

SenseTime’s chief marketing officer, June Jin, says the company sells these applications to Chinese police. “We have been working with 40 public security bureaus,” Jin says. “They’ve been working on this, leveling up the city security level.”

Surveillance makes up a third of SenseTime’s business, says Jin – their clients are local governments throughout China. SenseTime’s clients also include private security firms – it supplies the core technology to seven of China’s 10 largest security firms — plus financial services companies, banks, mobile operators and the smartphone industry.

This has helped catapult SenseTime, founded in 2014, to become China’s largest unicorn – defined as a startup worth $1 billion or more – with a valuation of more than $3 billion.

At Megvii, China’s second largest AI company, vice president Xie Yinnan says China’s government – with its massive demand for facial recognition technologies – has helped the company quickly innovate its technology.

“The government is pushing the need for this technology from the top, so companies don’t have big obstacles in making it happen,” Xie says. “In America, people are too busy discussing how they should use it.”

China’s State Council, its central government, has laid out goals to build an artificial intelligence industry worth nearly $150 billion within the next two years, much of it to enhance domestic security.

Both Megvii and SenseTime have sold their technology to public security bureaus throughout China as part of China’s “Sharp Eyes” program, a plan to integrate existing security cameras throughout China into one nationwide surveillance and data-sharing program.

The technology of both companies is also being used in China’s “Smart City” program, a plan that will, among other things, use facial recognition and other personal data to “help cities run more efficiently,” according to a government description of the program.

When I question how Chinese police will use Megvii’s technology, Xie concedes that much of the technology has serious limitations.

“We just provide the government the technology, and they do their job with it,” Xie says. “Cameras in China are set at 2.8 meters [9 feet] above the ground. That means they won’t be able to capture human faces. That’s a rule. Chinese citizens know that, so they don’t think about it too much.”

But Chinese citizen Ji Feng thinks about it all the time. He’s a poet and activist who police routinely escort out of Beijing on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre or on World Human Rights Day. He says after a fellow activist visited his home recently, the police used facial recognition cameras to identify him, inform his landlord — and then, he says, his landlord threatened to kick him out of his apartment.

“The government’s using this technology to catch people who are considered threats to social stability,” says Ji. “Are they using it to catch thieves? Yes. But it’s mostly used to maintain stability.”

Megvii’s Xie insists China is using its technology to keep cities safe, stopping street crime and protecting residents from pickpockets and those who plan to harm others. When I ask him what he’d think if foreign governments used his technology to crack down on their citizens, he quotes Google’s founders.

“Our founders also think ‘don’t be evil’ is the No. 1 principle,” he says. “If a government is using it to control locals, we’d think twice about doing business with them. Our principle is to empower humans, not to control them.”

Plus, Xie says, the idea that facial recognition is an all-seeing eye doesn’t hold up to the facts: The algorithm capacity of the fastest servers isn’t enough to support the data of thousands of cameras capturing hundreds of millions of people at any given time, he says.

But it can give you a score on your attractiveness.