According to Deedee:
Once you experience AS [appetite suppression], it’s almost like a drug. You’re not craving foods. Food is in the background – your other life is in the forefront.
I’m off tomorrow for a conference in Vancouver, BC and the first thing I packed is my coconut oil.
That is so well put.
Track stuff you care about, such as your weight, here. They call it “personal analytics”.
Thanks to Alex Tabarrok.
Here is a nice review of the hygiene hypothesis, proposed in 1989 by David Strachan. The hygiene hypothesis is that the increases in childhood allergies and asthma in rich countries were due to decreases in “infection in early childhood, transmitted by contact with unhygenic older siblings or acquired prenatally.” It was inspired by the observation that allergies and asthma were less common in larger families.
In the original, it was infections that were the crucial thing you got from older siblings. This idea ran into trouble when actual measurements of number infections did not show the expected inverse correlation:
When a composite index of exposure was generated by combining histories of illness due to measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, and pertussis, the tendency was for a slightly higher risk of allergic disease in children with multiple infections.
Also bad for the infection idea is that vaccination for measles didn’t protect against hay fever or eczema.
It looks to my perhaps-biassed eyes that it is dirt (= harmless foreign proteins and bacteria) exposure that matters, not exposure to human infectious agents. Living on a farm helps. Plainly you get dirty living on a farm and exposed to animal viruses and bacteria — but that you get human infectious agents from pigs and cows is unlikely. (In technical terms, they aren’t vectors.) Older brothers are more protective than older sisters. Boys are dirtier than girls; it isn’t obvious they are more infectious. Dogs are more protective than cats. Again, dogs are obviously dirtier than cats but the notion that they are more infectious — few infectious agents cross the species barrier — is less obvious.
An emphasis on dirt rather than human-infectious agents is more compatible with my belief in the vast importance of ingesting bacteria-laden food.
Continuing the theme that wiping out bacteria — as antibiotics do — might be a bad thing, here is a mysterious development:
The new study arose from a mysterious affliction of pregnant cats. A company testing the effects on growth and development in cats using diets that had been irradiated reported that some cats developed severe neurological dysfunction, including movement disorders, vision loss and paralysis. Taken off the diet, the cats recovered slowly, but eventually all lost functions were restored.
“After being on the diet for three to four months, the pregnant cats started to develop progressive neurological disease,” says Duncan, a professor of medical sciences at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine and an authority on demyelinating diseases. “Cats put back on a normal diet recovered. It’s a very puzzling demyelinating disease.”
Do Americans have bacteriophobia? I believe we need to eat plenty of bacteria-rich food for best health (the umami hypothesis). If so, then irradiating food is like taking all the vitamins out of it. Of course, food irradiation is big business. From a list of FAQs:
4. Does eating irradiated food present long-term health risks?
No. Federal government and other scientists reviewed several hundred studies on the effects of food irradiation before reaching conclusions about the general safety of the treatment. In order to make recommendations specifically about poultry irradiation, U.S. Food and Drug Administration scientists reviewed findings from additional relevant studies.
Independent scientific committees in Denmark, Sweden, United Kingdom and Canada also have reaffirmed the safety of food irradiation. In addition, food irradiation has received official international endorsement from the World Health Organizations and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The International Atomic Energy Agency. It’s an interesting methodological question: Is Diet X (irradiated food) “safe” because it is no worse than Diet Y (ordinary food)? What if Diet Y isn’t safe?
Duncan, the researcher quoted above, said this:
“We think it is extremely unlikely that [irradiated food] could become a human health problem,” Duncan explains. ”We think [what happened to the cats] is species specific.”
Hmm. If you don’t understand what causes the effect, how can you make strong claims about it? I think food with too-few bacteria is already a human health problem.
Thanks to Peter Spero.
Karina Smirnoff, a world-champion dancer on Dancing With the Stars, told Us Weekly that she controls her weight by “taking a tablespoon of olive oil on an empty stomach,” which is her mom’s advice. “On an empty stomach” — I wish I’d thought of that way of putting the between-meal requirement. Good Morning America mentions it here — quick, go to the “keeping bodies ballroom ready” segment, which will only be available for a few days.
SLD hasn’t been translated into Russian. A case of independent discovery?
Thanks to Joyce Cohen.
If our bodies need a constant supply of bacteria-rich food to be healthy, as I have argued here many times, antibiotics — which kill the bacteria we already have — should be bad for us. Maybe so:
A team of researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School gave mice allergies by pretreating the animals with an antibiotic. The experiment provides support to studies hinting at a connection between antibiotic use and asthma. These epidemiological studies show increased rates of asthma wherever antibiotic use is common.
Asthma cases in the United States climbed 75 percent from 1980 to 1994.
So ignored are fermented foods (the easy way to get bacteria-rich foods), that an author of the study does not mention them:
To avoid the role that antibiotics may play in allergy and asthma, Mr. Huffnagle suggests people watch what they eat in the weeks following a course of antibiotics.
Avoid junk food, he said. Earlier studies on rats showed that animals fed a kind of junk-food diet had far different gut flora than animals fed well-balanced meals of rat chow. [This doesn’t make his point, since it isn’t clear that different = worse.]
He suggests the Mediterranean diet — with lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, beans, seeds, and olive oil, and low to moderate amounts of wine — may be protective of your gut flora. Countries where this heart-healthy diet is consumed also have lower levels of asthma and allergies, he said.
The Mediterranean-diet advice makes more sense than the junk-food advice. But again, we should ask: Have we properly described “the Mediterranean diet”? That is, what people in “countries where this heart-healthy diet is consumed” actually eat? As with the Inuit Paradox, I suspect the fermented foods they eat, such as yogurt, are ignored. If high consumption of fermented foods does reduce asthma and allergies then asthma and allergies should be low in Japan because of miso and natto.
Thanks to Oskar Pearson.
A year ago, in a Berkeley Starbucks, I met a linguistics professor in town for a conference. I asked him how he thought language began. He dismissed the question: We will never know, he said. Speculations on the question are pseudo-science. Johanna Nichols and I taught a graduate seminar about the evolution of language and I will admit that none of the papers we read were impressive.
All were by linguists and all looked at language and nothing else. If you look more widely at how humans differ from our closest ancestors the question of how language evolved becomes easier. It’s one of many changes that pulled in the same direction: the rise of occupational specialization and trading. Language began because it made trading much easier. Language — single words — made it much easier for the two sides of a trade to find each other.
Single words are still used this way. In any business district, you will see single words on signs that advertise what a business has for sale (e.g., “doughnuts”). Long ago, of course, there were no signs: People just said words in the hope of finding someone who wanted what they had or had what they wanted.
This theory implies that possession (who has what?) was the very first topic of conversation. This theory is supported by the fact that the verb to have plays a remarkably central role in English: I have written, I had a good time, I had had a fair amount, I have to reach. You might think to be would be more important, but it isn’t. This pattern suggests that to have was one of the very first verbs, maybe the first.
Chinese has no tense markers (I go yesterday, I go today, I go tomorrow) but again possession appears to have been present close to the beginning of the language. Here is how you negate a verb in Chinese:
to have and other “state” verbs : with mei
all other verbs: with bu
The more irregular a verb, the older it is likely to be. (Thanks to Navanit Arakeri for the link.)
Wherein the Nobel Prize is given for discoveries that are misleading. From a New Scientist article about medical self-experimentation:
Junior doctor Barry Marshall was sure the medical establishment was wrong about the cause of stomach ulcers. The received wisdom was that they were caused primarily by lifestyle factors, but Marshall and pathologist Robin Warren were sure that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori was to blame.
It turned out that Helicobacter pylori was present in half the stomachs in the world — only a tiny fraction of which developed ulcers. So much for causation. Marshall and Warren did not consider that lifestyle factors might cause immune efficiency to go down, leading to increased growth of the bacterium. In a famous example of self-experimentation, Marshall ingested a giant amount of the supposedly dangerous bacterium — but, uh-oh, didn’t get an ulcer.
Thanks to JR Minkel.
A few weeks ago I went away for a 3-day weekend. It was my first trip away from home since I became enamored of fermented food. I did not plan well and took along only 2 cups of yogurt.
When I got home — and resumed my usual high fermented-food intake — I seemed to have a very mild cold. That was unusual; I almost never get detectable colds. Even more unusual was that I had a small case of athlete’s foot. Uh-oh. I planned to but some anti-fungal cream. I forgot, however. The next day, to my surprise, my athlete’s foot was almost gone. The following days it cleared up completely.
I had not had athlete’s foot for a long time. In the past, however, it did not go away by itself. I had had to use antifungal cream. Now, apparently, my immune system was working much better.
My interpretation is that during that weekend away, my immune function took a sudden dip. Perhaps part of the reason was that I did not sleep as well as usual but I suspect most of the reason was the decrease in my fermented-food intake.
Whatever the reason I got athlete’s foot that weekend, the fact that it went away without any special treatment suggests that all that anti-fungal cream in the drugstore implies that many Americans have suboptimal immune function. The Wikipedia entry for athlete’s foot says nothing about good immune function as a means of prevention. As if the hundred-odd people who wrote the article had no idea that what happened to me — it went away on its own — could happen. We are in the pre-John-Snow era here. The most basic practical point about athlete’s foot — you won’t get it if your immune system is working well — isn’t widely understood.
If you read Example 5 of my long self-experimentation paper, you will see that I used to get ordinary colds at an ordinary rate but after I started sleeping much better they stopped. Which points to the same conclusion as the incident I described here: A large fraction of Americans have suboptimal immune function. Some people will say: “Of course!” But they will go on to say, “The average American eats so much junk!” And I think that’s wrong. I think the problem is 1. Poor sleep. 2. Too little fermented food. The self-confident nutritionista will never mention either one.