Month: June 2009

Bay Area Fermentation

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle had an article on fermented foods in the Bay Area: the fermentation festival, sauerkraut, kimchi, and so on. (No discussion of yogurt.) I especially liked this:

Leaving foods unrefrigerated for two weeks or more can be disturbing to those who weren’t raised with a crock of pickles in the hallway. But U.S. Department of Agriculture research service microbiologist Fred Breidt says properly fermented vegetables are actually safer than raw vegetables, which might have been exposed to pathogens like E. coli on the farm.

“With fermented products there is no safety concern. I can flat-out say that. The reason is the lactic acid bacteria that carry out the fermentation are the world’s best killers of other bacteria,” says Breidt, who works at a lab at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, where scientists have been studying fermented and other pickled foods since the 1930s.

Breidt adds that fermented vegetables, for which there are no documented cases of food-borne illness, are safer for novices to make than canned vegetables. Pressurized canning creates an anaerobic environment that increases the risk of deadly botulism, particularly with low-acid foods.

Nothing about fermented — also called aged – meat. The last taboo. I believe we like umami flavor so that we will eat more bacteria-laden protein. (Glutamate, which produces the umami flavor, is a protein breakdown product.) All meat producers, as far as I know, age their product 2-3 weeks to improve the flavor. Understandably, they don’t like to talk about it.

Thanks to Ashish Mukharji.

Homemade Kombucha: What I’ve Learned (part 1)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

From Rejuvenation Company‘s kombucha I learned how good it can be. From a Ferment Change party a few months ago I got kombucha starter. Now I have eight jars brewing kombucha. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Hard to fail. It’s hard to kill the kombucha “mother”. After weeks in an airtight bottle (see Mistake 2), after I let air in it grew fine. You make kombucha at room temperature. You don’t have to check it. You simply wait until it’s sour enough.

2. Air needed. It’s aerobic fermentation, so it needs unlimited oxygen. I learned this after I used a sealed container and nothing happened.

3. Takes weeks. It has taken weeks for my kombucha to become really sour. Maybe I can reduce this to a week under better conditions (high surface to volume ratio, start with large kombucha mother).

4. Use a wide container. The more surface to volume, the better. The kombucha culture grows on top of the tea/sugar mixture because it needs contact with air. The wider the container, the more contact it can have.

5. Cover tightly with something air-permeable. I cover each jar with a paper towel secured with a rubber band. Before I started using a rubber band to hold down the paper towel I found a fly in one of them.

I use cheap black tea (in teabags) and ordinary sugar. Maybe I should get a pH meter to learn more about the process.

Yes, Canker Sores Prevented (and Cured) by Omega-3

Seth Roberts21 Comments

Here is a comment left on my earlier canker-sore post by a reader named Ted:

I found out quite by accident WALNUTS get rid of [canker sores] quite quickly. The first sign of an ulcer I chew walnuts and leave the paste in my mouth for a little while (30 seconds or so).

The first time was by accident, my ulcers disappeared so quickly I knew it had to be something I ate. And the only thing I had eaten differently the past day was walnuts.

Flaxseed oil and walnuts differ in lots of ways but both are high in omega-3. My gums got much better around the time I started taking flaxseed oil. I neither noticed nor expected this; my dentist pointed it out. Several others have told me the same thing. Tyler Cowen’s gums got dramatically better. One reader started and stopped and restarted flaxseed oil, making it blindingly clear that the gum improvement is caused by flaxseed oil. There is plenty of reason to think the human diet was once much higher in omega-3. All this together convinces me that omega-3 can both prevent and cure canker sores. Not only that, I’m also convinced that canker sores are a sign of omega-3 deficiency. You shouldn’t just get rid of them with walnuts; you should change your diet. Omega-3 has other benefits (better brain function, less inflammation, probably others).

Let’s say I’m right about this — canker sores really are prevented and cured by omega-3. Then there are several things to notice.

1. Web facilitation. It was made possible by the internet. My initial interest in flaxseed oil came from reading the Shangri-La Diet forums. I didn’t have to read a single book about the Aquatic Ape theory; I could learn enough online. Tyler Cowen’s experience was in his blog. Eric Vlemmix contacted me by email. No special website was involved.

2. Value of self-experimentation. My flaxseed oil self-experimentation played a big part, although it had nothing to do with mouth health. These experiments showed dramatic benefits — so large and fast that something in flaxseed oil, presumably omega-3, had to be a necessary nutrient. Because of these results, I blogged about omega-3 a lot, which is why Eric emailed me about his experience.

3. Unconventional evidence. All the evidence here, not just the self-experimentation, is what advocates of evidence-based medicine and other evidence snobs criticize. Much of it is anecdotal. Yet the evidence snobs have, in this case, nothing to show for their snobbery. They missed this conclusion completely. Nor do you need a double-blind study to verify/test this conclusion. If you have canker sores, you simply drink flaxseed oil or eat walnuts and see if they go away. Maybe this omnipresent evidence snobbery is . . . completely wrong? Maybe this has something to do with the stagnation in health research?

4. Lack of credentials. No one involved with this conclusion is a nutrition professor or dentist or medical doctor, as far as I know. Apparently you don’t need proper credentials to figure out important things about health. Of course, we’ve been here before: Jane Jacobs, Elaine Morgan.

5. Failure of “trusted” health websites. Health websites you might think you could trust missed this completely. The Mayo Clinic website lists 15 possible causes — none of them involving omega-3. (Some of them, we can now see, are correlates of canker sores, also caused by lack of omega-3.) If canker sores can be cured with walnuts, the Mayo list of treatments reads like a list of scurvy cures from the Middle Ages. The Harvard Medical School health website is even worse. “Keep in mind that up to half of all adults have experienced canker sores at least once,” it says. This is supposed to reassure you. Surely something this common couldn’t be a serious problem.

6. Failure of the healthcare establishment. Even worse, the entire healthcare establishment, with its vast resources, hasn’t managed to figure this out. Canker sores are not considered a major health problem, no, but, if I’m right, that too is a mistake. They are certainly common. If they indicate an important nutritional deficiency (too little omega-3), they become very important and their high prevalence is a major health problem.

What Does Profound Stagnation Look Like?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Economic stagnation = no development of new goods and services. Stagnation in the field of health has been so long-lasting and widespread that it is hard to see. I have never read a good description of it. Michael Moore thought the state of our insurance coverage was scandalous, and made Sicko; but much more harmful is the stagnation.

Here is what it looks like. Americans have many health problems. Obesity. Diabetes, closely connected to obesity. Mental illness, especially depression. Drug and alcohol addiction, a kind of self-medication. Allergies and autoimmune disorders, such as arthritis. Economic progress, lack of stagnation, would be coming up with and disseminating effective solutions to these problems.

When a helpful innovation arises, what happens? As Jane Jacobs pointed out in The Economy of Cities (1969), stagnation is in the interests of the powerful. As long as things remain the same, they remain powerful. Power also generates complacency; although the most powerful have the most resources, they are unlikely to find or develop the solutions. (Example: General Motors.) Within the health industry, Harvard Medical School professors are powerful. Here’s what happened when Dr. Erika Schwartz gave a lecture there:

When I gave my lecture on bioidentical hormones at Harvard on February 2, 2009, . . . I asked the chairman of the department of ob-gyn, Isaac Schiff, MD and the rest of the physicians in the audience, “ How come Suzanne Somers and Oprah are the ones to teach the public about bioidentical hormones? What has the medical profession done with the information of the Women’s Health Initiative study? Nine years later and women are still suffering and the medical establishment has not stepped up to the plate to help women find safe solutions to menopausal symptoms. Why are bioidentical hormones still controversial?” They had no answers.

That’s what stagnation looks like. It’s unsurprising that Oprah would publicize the innovation; her power is not in the health industry. She has nothing to lose. That Newsweek runs a cover story complaining about Oprah’s publicity for “risky advice” shows that top editors at Newsweek fail to see the stagnation in health. Innovations are always called “risky” by someone in power. Stagnation in health is probably the most important news story of our time. The health problems that have stacked up unsolved — obesity, mental illness, and so on — affect everyone every day.

Here’s another example of what stagnation looks like. The current Business Week cover story is about innovation, and the lack thereof. One of its examples involves health. What’s revealing is how minor the innovation is.

To see both the reality of the innovation shortfall and its potentially happy ending, look at Organogenesis, a small company in Canton, Mass. Back in 1998, Organogenesis received approval from the Food & Drug Administration to sell the world’s first living skin substitute. The product, Apligraf, was a thin, stretchy substance that could be grown in quantity and applied to speed the healing of diabetic leg ulcers and other wounds that had stayed open for years. . . But there were several big problems, recalls Geoff MacKay, the company’s current CEO . . . By 2002 the early enthusiasm for Apligraf had vanished, along with the money. . . . Shortly after, MacKay took over at Organogenesis with a clear mandate to straighten out the company’s manufacturing, logistics, and sales, and turn this tarnished product into a moneymaker.

And that’s what he did. . . . Organogenesis is fulfilling the promise of 1998—a decade later.

A product that helps diabetic leg ulcers heal — without curing diabetes. In a cover story about innovation, a trivial innovation is the big example of successful innovation. This is another way stagnation is visible: Low standards for what is important innovation.

Canker Sores Prevented by Omega-3?

Seth Roberts15 Comments

Eric Vlemmix writes:

I’ve had these oral sores [canker sores, also called Aphthous ulcers] since childhood [he’s 33], but since taking flax/fish oil I have had hardly any ulcers! The times I had an ulcer it was small, less painful than usual, and would disappear in a few days. The doctors never knew what the cause of these ulcers was, and Wikipedia states: cause unknown.

I asked about his fish oil and flaxseed oil intake:

Something like 15 ml [= 1 tablespoon] of flaxseed oil daily. Most days I also take a Minami morEPA plus capsule which has 635 mg EPA, and 195 mg DHA.

I started SLD in June 2008, and I think I switched from olive oil to flax the same month. Since then I haven’t had a real serious case of ulcers. Some small issues sometimes, but not the real big and extremely painful ones that I had before. Sometimes a small mini zit-like thing.

According to Family Doctor, “Doctors don’t know of anything that prevents canker sores from forming.” The Mayo Clinic website is equally unhelpful. To prevent canker sores, EMedicineHealth advises, “Do not talk while chewing.” According to KidsHealth, “About 1 in 5 people regularly gets bothersome canker sores.”

Any canker-sore sufferer want to start taking flaxseed oil and fish oil (in the amounts Eric uses) and tell me what happens?

Gum surgery averted

The Effects of Institutionalization on Children

Seth Roberts6 Comments

From the latest issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry:

Young children living in institutions in Bucharest were enrolled when they were between 6 and 30 months of age. Following baseline assessment, 136 children were randomly assigned to care as usual (continued institutional care) or to removal and placement in foster care that was created as part of the study. Psychiatric disorders, symptoms, and comorbidity were examined by structured psychiatric interviews of caregivers of 52 children receiving care as usual and 59 children in foster care when the children were 54 months of age. Both groups were compared to 59 typically developing, never-institutionalized Romanian children recruited from pediatric clinics in Bucharest. Foster care was created and supported by social workers in Bucharest who received regular consultation from U.S. clinicians. Results: Children with any history of institutional rearing had more psychiatric disorders than children without such a history (53.2% versus 22.0%). Children removed from institutions and placed in foster families were less likely to have internalizing disorders than children who continued with care as usual (22.0% versus 44.2%). Boys were more symptomatic than girls regardless of their caregiving environment and, unlike girls, had no reduction in total psychiatric symptoms following foster placement.

Note the phrase “internalizing disorders” — it means that other types of disorders were not decreased by the expensive treatment. Moreover, the 22.0% “control” value is probably higher than what you’d find if all kids of that age were surveyed; I assume the kids found at pediatric clinics are less healthy than average. Although the experiment is trying to show a (negative) effect of institutionalization, it doesn’t even manage to do that very well, because of the cherry-picking aspect of the results. All in all, a horrible situation.

Micromeasures of development — something you can measure every week, for example — might help so that many little things could be tried with individual children rather than doing these difficult large-scale experiments.

The whole thing has the feel of the 1800s when to be institutionalized was to be at high risk for some sort of vitamin deficiency, such as pellagra or beriberi.

More Benefits of Fermented Foods

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A study published last year in Oncology Reports found that fermented noni (an Asian fruit) juice fights cancer in rats.

Noni (Morinda citrifolia) has been used in traditional Polynesian folk medicine for more than 2,000 years. Recently, researchers have discovered that Noni juice has the ability to destroy cancerous tumors. . . .

The researchers evaluated Noni’s ability to both prevent and treat cancer. In the prevention study, female mice were injected with one of three substances: fNE, a phosphate-balanced solution (PBS, which is similar to saline solution), or lipopolysaccharides (LPS, a natural toxin found in bacteria and in fermented Noni juice) for three days. Then the researchers injected the mice with lung cancer and sarcoma cells. In the treatment study, the mice were first injected with the cancer cells, and then treated with three doses of fNE [fermented noni exudate], LPS [lipopolysaccharides], or PBS [phosphate balance solution].

A fter the mice were injected with fNE, they developed greater numbers of immune cells such as granulocytes (a type of white blood cell) and natural killer (NK) cells, indicating that fNE had stimulated their immune system. A month after receiving fNE for sarcoma treatment or prevention, more than 85 percent of the mice were not only alive, but also cancer-free. fNE also was effective against lung cancer tumor cells, although the tumor prevention rate was slightly lower (62 percent). Meanwhile, all of the mice that received PBS or LPS died.

Emphasis added. It is telling that they used fermented noni juice rather than plain noni juice; apparently plain noni juice is less effective. Fermented juice has many more bacteria than plain juice; it makes a lot of sense that the fermented bacteria stimulate the immune system.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

A Book About the Value of Fermented Foods

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Handbook of fermented functional foods, second edition, 2008.

Presenting new findings and interpretations that point even more clearly to the important role fermented foods play in our diet and overall health, this second edition demonstrates the current knowledge of fermented food production and reflects the growing credibility of probiotics in health maintenance.

You can read a lot of it online.

The Nutritional Wisdom of Young Chicks

Seth Roberts1 Comment

After I wrote that young children may be picky eaters because they are offered unhealthy food, some readers disagreed. But here is another example:

I myself have been amazed to see hungry young chicks refuse to touch a purified diet until we added thiamin, which we discovered to have been accidentally omitted from a published formula.

From Kenneth Carpenter’s excellent Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B (2000), p. 193. If young chicks can better judge the nutritional quality of food than nutrition professors, perhaps young children can, in some situations, better judge the nutritional quality of food than their parents. And rightly decide that food their parents think is healthy isn’t so healthy.

The wisdom of the one-year-old picky eater.