Month: May 2009

Antibiotics Associated with Later Infection

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A 2005 study by David Margolis, a dermatology professor at Penn, and others, found that acne patients given long-term antibiotic treatment, which often lasts more than 6 months, were more than twice as likely to have an upper respiratory tract infection during the year after treatment began than acne patients not given antibiotics.

Does this correlation reflect causality? Two additional analyses suggest it does:

1. Perhaps acne patients who get antibiotics are more likely to see a doctor than those who don’t. However, a study of patients diagnosed with high blood pressure, which also requires relatively frequent doctor visits, had the same risk of upper respiratory tract infections as acne patients not given antibiotics.

2. A later study found that the contacts of acne patients (such as their family) are more likely to have upper respiratory tract infections if the acne patient has such an infection — as you’d expect from contagion. But it makes no difference to these contacts if the acne patient was given antibiotics or not. This means that acne patients given antibiotics do not live in more infection-prone surroundings than acne patients not given antibiotics.

Bottom line: Support for the idea that the bacteria in our body help us stay healthy.

Mosquitoes Praise Fermented Food

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A new study in PLoS Pathogen has found that mosquitoes benefit from bacteria-laden food. The bacteria stimulate their immune system and protect them against the malaria parasite. From the abstract:

Malaria-transmitting mosquitoes are continuously exposed to microbes . . . Global transcription profiling of septic and [microbe-free] aseptic mosquitoes [made aseptic with antibiotics] identified a significant subset of immune genes that were mostly up-regulated by the mosquito’s microbial flora . . . Microbe-free aseptic mosquitoes displayed an increased susceptibility to Plasmodium infection while co-feeding mosquitoes with bacteria and P. falciparum gametocytes resulted in lower than normal infection levels. Infection analyses suggest the bacteria-mediated anti-Plasmodium effect is mediated by the mosquitoes’ antimicrobial immune responses, plausibly through activation of basal immunity.

Another view of this study is that it is more evidence of the dangers of antibiotics: They weakened the immune system. As you may know, and as I was told recently by a pediatrician, doctors “hand out antibiotics like candy.”

Thanks to Janet Rosenbaum.

Academic Horror Story (Reed College)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Reed College, my alma mater, gets some very bad publicity. An extremely smart student named Chris Langan chose Reed over the University of Chicago, which thirty years later he calls “a huge mistake.” While he was at Reed, his mom failed to fill out a form to renew his scholarship. Here’s what Langan told Gladwell:

At some point, it came to my attention that my scholarship had not been renewed. So I went to the office to ask why, and they told me, Well, no one sent us the financial statement, and we allocated all the scholarship money and it’s all gone, so I’m afraid you don’t have a scholarship anymore. That was the style of the place. They simply didn’t care. They didn’t give a shit about their students. There was no counseling, mo mentoring, nothing.

Losing his scholarship did Langan enormous damage. He never finished college. According to Gladwell, Langan is wrong.

Langan talks about dealing with Reed . . . as if [it] were some kind of vast and unyielding government bureaucracy. But colleges, particularly small liberal arts colleges like Reed, tend not to be rigid bureaucracies. [No examples given.] . . . Would [the physicist Robert] Oppenheimer [supposedly more persuasive than Langan] have lost his scholarship at Reed? . . . Of course not.

That is the myth of the small liberal arts college, yes. But how true is the myth — at least in the case of Reed?

About seven years ago, I returned to Reed to give a talk. I had some spare time so I decided to visit Reed’s best-known course, a survey of Western Civilization that is required of all freshman and sophomores. I hadn’t had to take it because I entered Reed as a junior. I wondered what it was about. I found it. The large lecture hall was almost empty. Maybe there were 15 students; the enrollment must have been about 400. A young professor was giving a staggeringly boring lecture about some Greek classic.

Later I asked a Reed student why attendance was so low. She said that in the very beginning, fall semester (it was now spring semester), attendance was high but the students quickly realized the lectures weren’t helpful and stopped coming. The lecturer, I realized, didn’t care about the students. He didn’t have tenure and was trying to impress an older professor I’d seen in the audience who might influence whether he got tenure.

I’ve told Reed professors this story. They did not explain why a required course, really the required course, supposedly the centerpiece of a Reed education, was/is so poorly taught.

I think Langan’s story and the Western Civ story are two examples of how most colleges, including small liberal arts colleges, are not run for the benefit of students. I imagine the Reed professors I spoke to understood this; but it was unspeakable. I think the result is a power-law distribution of damage: A large fraction of students suffer small bad things (such as a lecture that’s a waste of time and tuition) and a small fraction of students (such as Langan) suffer nightmarishly-bad treatment.

For Whom Do Colleges Exist?

The !Golden Rule and Reed College.

The Good Scots Diet

Seth Roberts3 Comments

The Spring 2009 issue of Wise Traditions, a quarterly sent by the Weston A Price Foundation to its members, has an article by Katherine Czapp about traditional Scottish food. They too ate fermented food (pp. 56-7):

Farmers who grew their own oats but sent them to the local mill . . . received in return a bag of “sids” — the inner husks of the oats . . . From these sids, an ancient Celtic dish called “sowans” (or sowens) was made.

The sids were soaked in water for approximately one week (or even more) until they were well-soured.

Sowans takes more than week to make. Presumably the ancient Celts discovered this method of souring by accident and kept doing it because the result tasted good. It’s an example of how, in the right situation, what tastes good guides us to a good diet.

The Experts Speak: Nutrition

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I have nothing against a paleolithic diet, but I think its advocates, like many experts, are overconfident. It’s not easy to know which features of a diet that varies in 20 ways from modern diets are the crucial ones. I came across this while reading about paleolithic diets:

The general gist of eating like a caveman—namely, focusing on foods in their whole, natural state, is not going to get much argument. “It comes down to the advice your mother gave you,” says Leonard [William Leonard, chair of the anthropology department at Northwestern University]. “Eat a balanced diet and a diversity of foods.”

I beg to differ.

1. Whole, natural state. I find flaxseed oil very helpful. It supplies omega-3 missing from my diet, but presumably present in diets that contained lots of seafood or vegetation-fed meat. Flaxseed oil is not food in a whole and natural state.

2. Whole, natural state . I find fermented food very helpful. Bacteria break down food, making it less whole. Modern food of all sorts is unnaturally low in bacteria (due to refrigeration, food safety laws, shelf-life requirements, etc.), just as modern meat is unnaturally low in omega-3. Fermented food is unnaturally high in bacteria, correcting the deficit.

3. The advice your mother gave you. Traditional diets, yes, what your mom thinks, no. When I was growing up we ate margarine instead of butter — poor choice. We had skim milk, not whole milk — poor choice. The absence of butter and whole milk is, if Weston Price is right, why my teeth are slightly crooked. We ate almost no fermented food — very poor choice. (Which I suspect is why I had mild allergies.) We rarely ate fish — poor choice. And yet we didn’t have a TV — very good, very unusual choice. Even my mom, who thought for herself far more than most moms, had serious misconceptions about nutrition. Given the epidemic of childhood obesity, not to mention less visible increases in autism, allergies, and ADHD, I am very skeptical that the average kid’s mom knows what to eat.

4. Eat a balanced diet. Plenty of communities in excellent health eat diets that American experts would describe as not balanced at all — no fruit for example, or too much dairy. Eskimos and the Swiss in isolated villages studied by Weston Price are two examples. Price found that a wide range of diets, most violating one or more popular nutritional precepts, produced excellent health.

5. A diversity of foods. Several healthy communities studied by Price did not eat a wide range of foods. The human diet became a lot more diverse around the time of the “ broad-spectrum revolution” — broad-spectrum meaning wider range of food. Around that time human height decreased. Apparently the new, more diverse diet was less healthy than the old diet. An anthropology professor might know this.

The title of this post comes from the book The Experts Speak which is full of examples of how experts were wildly wrong.

Fermentation Basics: Using Yogurt

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Brent Pottenger writes:

In place of mayonnaise, my brother started using plain yogurt to make tuna salad. In the process, he learned, “For some reason, the tuna tastes better after sitting in the refrigerator for a day or two.” Tuna salad made with yogurt is tolerable when freshly made, but it definitely gets much better as it ages.

Now, when I make smoothies, I blend the fruit and the yogurt, then I let the smoothie sit for some hours, minimally, before I drink it.