Thanks to Heather Demetra, Oskar Pearson, James Lucoff, and Eric Wilhelm.
A friend of mine, who lives in Shanghai, has a 3-year-old son. She gets all her parenting advice from the Internet. This would be uninteresting except that her mother lives with her. (So does her husband’s mother.) On a daily basis, in other words, whatever her mom thinks about how kids should be raised is being ignored. My guess is that her mom actually likes the situation because it removes a source of conflict. But I didn’t dare ask.
Alexander Fleming, the Scottish bacteriologist who discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, served in the military during World War I. According to Happy Accidents (2007) by Morton Meyers, soldiers in that war often died from infections in relatively minor wounds. Rather than conclude that something was wrong with their immune systems, and wonder why, Fleming — unsurprisingly for a bacteriologist — began to think we needed more substances that killed bacteria. A hundred years later, the blind spot still exists. A few years ago I noticed that a wide-ranging course on epidemiology was being taught in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. I knew the professor. I asked him, “Will the course cover what makes the immune system weak or strong?” “No,” he said. You will look in vain for that topic in any epidemiology text. To call it a blind spot is being nice. Half the subject — the more important half — is being ignored. And Schools of Public Health favor prevention. Medical schools are worse.
In an editorial in today’s Financial Times, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel point out that debt is inherently destabilizing because it creates less room for error. Financial professionals and economists, including those at the very top, don’t realize this:
Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman, tried playing with the business cycle to iron out bubbles, but it eventually got completely out of control. Bubbles and fads are part of cultural life. We need to do the opposite to what Mr Greenspan did: make the economy’s structure more robust to bubbles.
Taleb and Spitznagel note that the dotcom bubble, when it burst, had only minor consequences. That’s because it was an equity bubble rather than a debt bubble. The stimulus package is just more debt: public rather than private. It doesn’t reduce the source of the problem: A too-fragile system. A great point — fascinating how rarely I hear it.
Just as Greenspan failed to understand the problem and chose the wrong lever to pull, so did Fleming and a million doctors and medical/drug researchers. They have tried to deal with a too-fragile system by killing bacteria. Bacteria, like financial bubbles and fads, are part of life. We need to make our bodies more robust to them. Fermented foods do that. By killing off bacteria inside our bodies, antibiotics do the opposite: Make us even more fragile.
From Daffodil-11:
The other great benefit I’ve seen, the thing that makes it worth chugging my mix of oil and water twice a day in and of itself, is the change I’ve felt in my attitude toward myself. I no longer feel disordered and tortured and ashamed. I no longer feel that I’m daily failing at something that so many people seem to find so easy and effortless. Now this thing I’ve fought with my whole life has become so much easier, so very nearly effortless for me as well. It turns out it wasn’t a fundamental failure of my essential being after all. Who’d have guessed?
Coming across this sentence
The more intensive the agricultural system, the more work required for a unit of food.
in Charles Maisel’s The Emergence of Civilization (1990, p. 35) made me think for a while and make a list:
What’s interesting is the starkness of the differences. Hunting and agriculture are two answers to the same question. I suppose we backed into agriculture because we over-hunted. In the other two pairs, I think the basic Veblenian dynamic was/is at work: The more useless, the more high status. Scientists must be elaborately theoretical and high-techy and wasteful to be high-status. Likewise with home remedies (such as fermented food) versus medical drugs: To be high-status, doctors had to promote elaborate, obscure, hard-to-get remedies.
From the abstract of a 2006 study done in Japan:
An epidemiological study was carried out on [134] first-year junior high school students in Wakayama Prefecture. Analyses were performed to investigate the relationships among eating habits of fermented milk or fermented soybean foods and the presence of atopic diseases. Serum levels of total IgE values, specific IgE to house dust mite and Japanese cedar pollen in these subjects were evaluated to clarify atopic status. . . . RESULTS: Serum total IgE levels were found to be significantly lower in those subjects habitually eating yogurt and/or fermented milk drinking, in comparison with those who do not habitually eat such fermented milk foods. Subjects with habitual intake of these fermented milk foods were significantly lower in having various allergy diseases compared with those without such an eating habit. However, no difference was found on the total IgE titers and having allergy diseases between subjects with or without habitual intake of Natto, a fermented soybean food.
Note the small sample size. Contrary to some experts, it’s a good sign. It means the differences were strong enough to be significant in a relatively small sample. A review article about allergies and fermented foods.
Last January (2008) I got home from Japan and started eating miso soup so often I forgot what I used to eat. This January (2009) I went to the Fancy Food Show and became so interested in fermented foods I’m having trouble remembering what I used to blog about.
Thanks to Peter Spero.
In this amusing article Emily Yoffe tells about her troubles with GPS. She fails, unfortunately, to look on the bright side — to say how flawed GPS is better than no GPS. After a talk by John Tukey, the statistician, at Berkeley, I told him that I had found the tools he wrote about in Exploratory Data Analysis to be really helpful. (For example, smoothing my data led me to discover that eating breakfast made me wake up too early.) Tukey replied that if the tools are helpful half the time, that’s good. It isn’t easy to make an interesting response to a compliment!
I’m sure that what we want to eat is a good guide to what we should eat, so long as you ask what our preferences would have led us to eat 100,000 years ago — before we killed off the woolly mammoths. (Curiously, I’ve never seen this obvious idea in any nutrition text.) A vast amount of trial and error is embodied in those preferences. Because we learn to like foods, our best guide to unlearned preferences may be what children want to eat.
The great essayist George Trow doesn’t quite get it, I’m afraid:
In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do.
The Wisdom of the One-Year-Old Picky Eater. The Wisdom of the Five-Year-Old Picky Eater.
The only hard part of making kombucha is getting starter culture. Here’s an easy way to do that:
Get a bottle of K.T.’s [or any non-pasteurized brand] . . . remove the cap, cover with cotton [or paper towel] and rubber band, set in warm spot [room temperature is fine] for about 3 weeks [or less] and a nice baby culture will grow on the top! Simply pour the entire contents in your . . . tea and sugar mixture.
I noticed the same thing with Rejuvenation Company kombucha stored at room temperature for a few weeks. To speed up culture growth transfer the kombucha to a container with a wide mouth, so that it gets more oxygen. Adding sugar, a few teaspoons/cup of kombucha, might help.
From Season 3, Episode 6 of My Life on the D-List:
TV SHOW PRODUCER [preparing Kathy for the questions she’ll be asked] What do you love about handbags?
KATHY GRIFFIN That they are a statement that I’m rich.
This reminds me of Albert Einstein saying his two favorite thinkers were Thorstein Veblen and Sigmund Freud. We really are smarter now, just as James Flynn says. Einstein, surely the best physicist of his generation, was unable to see that Freud was bogus, and, although he was right about Veblen, talented comedians now say exactly what Veblen said.
More Kathy Griffin in this week’s EW: “I have not read a book since last week’s Us Weekly.” That makes two of us, Kathy.