A toast to Victorian Britain

 
Bruce Anderson

The other evening, stimulated by a few decent bottles, someone raised a hoary question. If we could have been born in an earlier century — pre-20th — which would we have chosen? What epoch was worthy to compare with the Antonines and those Good Emperors, as praised by Gibbon?

The consensus was that, assuming a strong constitution and plenty of money, the long 19th century in Britain, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to 1914, would have been as good as any. Of course, we must restrain the roseate glow of retrospect. History is written backwards but lived forwards. At various stages, there were outbreaks of disorder which we tend to dismiss because we know that they never came to much, but which did alarm contemporaries who lacked foreknowledge. Even so, to steal Jack Plumb’s title for his book on 1675-1725, from 1815 onwards there was a growth of political stability in Britain. Disraeli may have sneered at Tory men and Whig measures, but in practice, that was not a bad form of government. Nor was it one which Dizzy himself significantly disrupted when he came to power.

All in all, we can surely agree that for a healthy member of the upperish classes, Victorian Britain was a pleasant place to live. It may have lacked the full douceur de vivre which pre-revolutionary French aristocrats enjoyed, but look how that ended.

So: it would not have been a bad fate to be born around 1815, and participate in the intellectual and cultural excitements of the age as well as in the successes of public life, including the growth of Empire: ‘wider still and wider’. Kipling, albeit the laureate of Empire, might have anticipated Britain’s decline, fearing the day when the fleets would have melted away while ‘All the pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre’. To the chap we are describing, the Royal Navy would have been an eternal verity; Nineveh and Tyre, less a warning of future decline, more a theme for an excursion to the British Museum.

The paradox of Kipling: a man who seemed effortlessly able to reach his fellow countrymen’s hearts and yet was wholly free from that stolid complacency, made possible by the Channel, which is so often an English characteristic. As Oliver Edwards, a college contemporary, told Dr Johnson: ‘I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.’

He also spoke for many of his countrymen, including the fellow from the 1815 vintage, who would have remained cheerful until his decline in 1914. By midsummer, no longer taking an interest in the press, he would have been unaware that in Sarajevo, a man called Princip had murdered an Austrian prince and set in motion events which would threaten a new Dark Age. In consequence, within a few months some of the great-grandsons who carried his coffin to the graveside would have found their own graves, in Flanders. But Victorian England was good while it lasted.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/02/vintage-years/

Study: Red and processed meats don't raise risk for death, recurrence in colon cancer

 
People who have been diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer are not at increased risk for disease recurrence or death if they eat red or processed meat, a study published Tuesday by JAMA Network Open found.

Among more than 1,000 stage 3 colon cancer patients followed for up to eight years, 305 cases were reported in which the disease returned and resulted in death, the data showed.

In addition, 81 patients saw their cancer return, but did not die as a result, the researchers said.

However, patients' risk for disease recurrence or death from colon cancer was not affected by their eating red or processed meats, according to the researchers.

Those who consumed up to 15 servings per week of red meat and up to 30 of processed meats had essentially the same risk for colon cancer recurrence or death, the data showed.

"Colorectal cancer patients and survivors should focus on eating a low glycemic diet rich in whole grains and vegetables," study co-author Erin L. Van Blarigan told UPI in an email.

"This diet may or may not include meat, depending on patient preference," said Van Blarigan, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California-San Francisco.

High consumption of red meat, as well as other foods and alcohol, had been linked with an increased risk for colon cancer in earlier studies.

Scientists believe these foods adversely affect the health of the gut microbiome, the bacteria in the digestive tract that assist metabolism, compromising the ability to prevent tumor growth, research suggests.

Based on these findings, the American Cancer Society recommends that cancer survivors limit their intake of red meat, or beef, and processed meats, even though evidence linking consumption of these foods with a return of the disease is limited.

Processed meats include those that have been modified through salting, curing, fermenting or other methods to either improve taste or extend shelf life, according to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Texas.

For this study, the researchers followed 1,011 patients diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer between 1999 and 2001 for a period of up to eight years.

Those who reported consuming, on average, seven servings of red meat per week had a 16% lower risk for cancer recurrence or death than patients who consumed an average of less than two servings per week, the data showed.

Colon cancer patients who said they consumed, on average, five servings of processed meats per week had a 5% higher risk for disease recurrence or death, compared with those who took in an average of less than one serving per week, the researchers said.

"​Our data suggest that red and processed meat do not affect risk of colorectal cancer recurrence," Van Blarigan said.

"Previous studies have consistently observed associations between these foods and an increased risk of being diagnosed with colon or rectal cancer but growing data, including our study, suggest that intake after diagnosis does not change the patient's prognosis," she said.

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2022/02/22/colon-cancer-red-meat-risk-study/1021645540931/

Brains do not slow down until after age of 60, study finds

It is widely accepted as one of life’s bleak but unavoidable facts: as we get older, our brains get slower. But now a study, based on data from more than 1 million people, suggests that mental processing speed remains almost constant until the age of 60.

The analysis puts perceived reductions in speed down to people becoming more cautious as they get older. This could account for the large body of research that has concluded that mental processing speed peaks at about the age of 20 and undergoes a steady decline from that point onwards.

“Our finding is encouraging, as our results show that average levels in mental speed in contexts demanding fast and forced decisions do not decline until relatively late in the lifespan,” said Dr Mischa von Krause, of Heidelberg University and first author of the work.

The study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, used data from 1,185,882 participants, aged 10 to 80 years, in Harvard’s Project Implicit, an online tool that has been used to collect data and educate people about biases they hold on gender, race and other characteristics.

Participants are required to sort words into positive and negative categories, while also assigning image to racial categories. The test is primarily designed to measure the strength of a person’s associations between race (in this case black or white people) and evaluations (represented by positive or negative words), but the latest analysis simply used the age of the participants, their response times and accuracy.

The data showed, as previous studies have done, that average time to give a correct response peaked at about 20 years. However, the researchers argue that this metric also captures how cautious a person is in delivering their answer and also their basic motor reaction speeds.

By using machine learning, the researchers aimed to extract more information about these two hidden factors from patterns in the data. For instance, if someone consistently responded more slowly, regardless of the difficulty of a given question, the model might be more likely to attribute this to slow motor responses.

The analysis suggested that 20-year-olds were quickest because they were the most willing to trade accuracy for speed. The researchers concluded that the purely mechanical part of the response (how fast a person sees the question and taps the keyboard) was quickest in those aged 14-16. Mental processing speed appeared to peak about age 30, and declined only very slightly between 30 and 60. Participants also made fewer mistakes as they became older, at least until the age of about 60.

Dr Joshua Hartshorne, a psychologist at Boston College who was not involved in the latest work, said the machine learning method used was impressive and would prompt psychologists to reconsider some earlier findings based simply on response times. “This joins a body of work suggesting that the way mental abilities change throughout life is complicated and we don’t really know what’s going on,” he said. “But whatever’s going on, it’s definitely not that we peak at 20 and go downhill from there.”

Von Krause said the work raised the suggestion that people may excel at different tasks depending on their age. “Obviously, there are real-life tasks where it is crucial to avoid mistakes, such as in a medical diagnosis, while in other tasks, such as avoiding an obstacle on the road, speed is more important,” he said. However, he added that, within certain limits, people were likely to be able to adapt their decision-making style to suit the demands of a situation.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/feb/17/brains-do-not-slow-down-until-after-age-of-60-study-finds