Month: August 2009

National Fisheries Institute: Stop Misleading Us

Seth Roberts6 Comments

After Jeremy Piven won a legal decision saying yes, he may have had mercury poisoning from sushi, the National Fisheries Institute, a seafood industry group, issued a statement. Its crux was this:

Despite the fact that the arbitrator ruled in Piven’s favor, NFI cautions reporters and editors to continue to treat Piven’s statements with skepticism. It is important to note that no peer reviewed medical journal has ever published any evidence of a case of methylmercury poisoning caused by the normal consumption of commercial seafood in the U.S.

Excuse me? Surely they know about Jane Hightower’s work. I suspect this is why they used the term medical journal. Hightower’s work on mercury poisoning was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, which is peer-reviewed. Hightower is a doctor. So what if EHP isn’t a medical journal? This statement, although literally true, is completely misleading. Hightower’s article is here. It supports exactly what Piven claims.

Here’s a quote from Hightower:

I think I provided a missing piece of the puzzle: That this [excessive mercury] exposure is coming from fish that we purchase at the grocery stores and restaurants. . . . Some people are eating so much of the commercial, high-mercury fish that they are over the mark for tolerable allowances set by the Environmental Protection Agency, the FDA, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the World Health Organization.

Beijing Air: Not Dirty Enough

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I’ve been back in Beijing a week. I’ve been eating lots of fermented food, which is easy to get, including fermented eggs (10 for $1.50) sold at a stand in a shopping mall. There is a bigger yogurt selection here than in Berkeley. Tsinghua University sells its own perfectly good yogurt (20 cents a serving). Every supermarket has a big pickle selection.

In Berkeley, as I blogged earlier, a few months ago I noticed that my nose was no longer runny. My Kleenex consumption, which had been about one box of Kleenex every month or so, was reduced to almost zero. (A reader of this blog had a similar experience.) No doubt this was due to eating much more fermented food. The runny-nose-absence has continued in Beijing.

Last year in Beijing, I had a runny nose. I used about one tissue packet per day. I ate almost no fermented food. So far so good. The interesting twist is that dirty city air has been linked to less runny nose. Air pollution, in other words, can have the same effect as fermented food. Last year, apparently, Beijing air wasn’t dirty enough to get rid of my runny nose.

I’m not joking. After I realized this, I felt a lot better about Beijing’s air, which I have long said is the worst thing about living here. Someday I will blog about the health benefits of smoking, which suggest the same conclusion.

Student Power

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Ah, the rest of the world is catching up with me. This long article in the NY Times describes a middle-school English teacher who lets her students read what they want instead of having every student read the same thing. I started doing something similar six years ago. There was always an assigned reading, but students always had a choice: They could do the assigned reading or they could find something else on the topic (e.g., bipolar disorder) that they preferred. About three-quarters of the students did the assigned reading.

My criticism of American higher education is two-fold: 1. Students in a class are treated all alike. They’re not. All hear the same lecture, read the same texts, do the same homework assignments, take the same tests. I came to realize that my students differed greatly in their talents and career goals. I can’t remember meeting a Berkeley prof who seemed to be aware of this. When a professor would describe a student to me, it was almost always on one dimension: more or less smart, which meant more or less good at doing the sort of tasks professors are good at. I think the diversity of talent and career interests I saw in my students is no accident or exception (which is supported by the fact that a middle-school English teacher saw the same thing); I think it’s at the core of human nature and it’s at the center of my theory of human evolution. 2. Professors teach how to be professors. Most students don’t want to be professors. Every Berkeley prof I ever met was extremely good at research; a few were extremely good lecturers. And every one of them sounded like an idiot the moment they started talking about how they taught “critical thinking” or whatever grand-sounding term they had for it. “Teaching students to think” was a common way to describe teaching students how to be professors. To say such a thing to a psychology professor is like saying to a chemistry professor that the world consists of four elements (earth, air, fire, water). “Are you aware how stupid you sound?” I felt like saying. But instead I would say that there are many kinds of thinking.

Giving students more power over what they learn solves, or at least reduces, both problems.

Hormesis Revisited

Seth Roberts3 Comments

There are several ways to realize the vast implausibility of — and thus the vast amount of information conveyed by — radiation hormesis. If you are not an experimental scientist, you may not realize how incredibly hard it is to find a treatment that substantially improves something complex. Think how hard it would be to make your laptop work a lot better. Not by redesigning and building a different laptop — but by doing something to the carefully-designed laptop you have now. Has such a thing ever happened in the whole history of engineering? Probably not. Or consider the possibility that shooting a bullet at your laptop (or any other complex machine) will make it work a lot better. Absurd. Couldn’t possibly happen.

Yet that is exactly what happens in radiation hormesis: Small amounts of radiation improve health. This review article gives a wide range of examples. Experimental:

Bhattarcharjee in 1996 showed that when the mice preirradiated with just adapting doses of 1 cGy/day for 5 days (without a challenge dose), thymic lymphoma was induced in 16% of the animals (Bhattarcharjee 1996). Interestingly, when preirradiated mice were exposed to a 2 Gy challenge dose, thymic lymphoma was induced again in 16% of the animals. However, the challenge dose alone, induced thymic lymphoma in 46% of the mice.

Epidemiological:

Cancer frequency among [United Kingdom] nuclear power plant workers was lower than the national average (Kendal et al. 1992).

(I’ve never heard anyone complain there wasn’t enough radioactive radon in their basement, but in some cases that’s true.) Thomas Luckey, the discoverer of the effect, wrote a book about it, reflecting the vast number of examples.

What does it mean? Obviously it supports my umami hypothesis. Life evolved in a world of junk and damage; that junk and damage was used to make things work better. Think of a police force. They function best spread over a city, travelling here and there. When there’s a crime, someone will already be close and get there quickly; many crimes will be stopped in progress. A low crime rate is better than a very low crime rate because it gets the police out of the police station and allows them to practice their skills. With too little crime, the police spend most of their time in the police station. When a crime occurs it takes longer to reach the scene (so small problems become big ones) but also, having nothing else to do, they overreact: treat small problems as big ones. That our body’s defense mechanisms are slow to react means infections and cancers become bigger than necessary (and sometimes lethal); that they overreact means we get autoimmune diseases.

Earlier post about hormesis.

“Kombucha Reconsidered”

Seth Roberts4 Comments

At Cancer Decisions RWM has written two posts called “Kombucha Reconsidered”. After drinking kombucha for a while, he decided to stop. One reason was lack of evidence of benefit:

When I began investigated the actual medicinal properties of Kombucha tea, I thought I would be overwhelmed with information. Not so. For something that has been around for so long, there are only 38 scientific articles in PubMed on the topic of kombucha. Most of these are technical studies on the nature of the bacteria and yeast in the brew. Only a few of these are clinical.

In particular, no evidence of benefit for cancer:

But I am unaware of any credible data linking kombucha consumption to the prevention of either recurrences or metastases. (PubMed yields just two articles on the topic of kombucha and cancer, both of them negative.) This is a poor basis on which to make health decisions.

He also found two case reports, one from 1995, the other from 2009, where kombucha might have caused illness. In the 1995 the evidence is weak; in the 2009 report the connection is more plausible — but the sick person had HIV. The authors nevertheless generalize to everyone: “Consumption of this tea should be discouraged.”

This is a reason self-experimentation is important: So you can ignore inane statements in research articles. After I found that flaxseed oil improved my balance, I could ignore research that supposedly showed poor conversion of short-change omega-3 (in flaxseed oil) to long-chain omega-3 (used by the brain). Had RWM managed to measure the effect of kombucha on himself, he would have a vastly better basis for deciding whether or not it helped him.

This is also a reason that theory is important. John Tukey, the statistician, spoke of “gathering strength” when analyzing data. It is rare that a single body of data tells you how to analyze it, he said. (For example, what transformation to use.) You should use similar data sets to help decide. Scientific theory has the same effect. Before I started drinking kombucha, I didn’t have obvious digestive problems (unlike a friend) and my immune system seemed to work well. So it wasn’t easy to measure its effect. Yet I drink it and am untroubled by the evidence that worries RVM because I have a theory: the umami hypothesis (that we need a steady intake of bacteria to be healthy). This allows me to assess the effect of kombucha — whether it is likely to be good or bad — with the help of evidence from other bacteria-rich food (yogurt, natto, etc.) and much different data (the effect of bee stings on arthritis, hormesis, epidemiology, the effects of turmeric, etc.). Because the umami hypothesis appears to be true, apparently bacteria intake is beneficial — and kombucha has lots of bacteria.

Thanks to Tom George.

Spectacle Practice

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Late last night, on my way home, I came across a huge crowd of Tsinghua students next to the campus stadium. More than a thousand. There was no event at the stadium. All of them were dressed in a casual uniform, in varying colors. “What’s this about?” I asked one of them. “It’s a secret,” she said. Another one told me they were practicing for the upcoming National Day (October 1), which is China’s Fourth of July. This particular National Day will be the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the current system so there will be an especially big celebration. The uniforms said “60″ on the shirt. There were going to be at least 9 practices. This particular night was the first night they would practice in Tiananmen Square, where the event would take place. Every one of them had a square with different colors on the two sides; like a giant LED display they would make different displays. “It lasts all night,” the student told me. “It ends at 6 am. We don’t sleep.”

And, indeed, at 5:30 am the next morning, a police-escorted convoy of 45 buses, each with about 60 students, came through the campus gate near my apartment. An article about the Tiananmen practice says it involves about 200,000 people. That’s a lot of buses.

If You Have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome…

Seth Roberts5 Comments

. . . you should have your thyroid level checked. There’s a strong correlation:

Nineteen patients (73%; 31 hands [68%]) displayed symptoms of CTS; of these, 16 patients (25 hands) had clinical examinations consistent with CTS. Only 6 of the 16 patients with clinical CTS (7 of 25 hands) had electrical studies that supported a diagnosis of CTS. All these symptomatic patients were biochemically euthyroid. All control subjects had normal electrical study results and normal sensibility testing. Two [control] subjects had positive clinical [CTS] examinations, giving a [CTS] false-positive rate of 4%.

Apparently treatment of the thyroid condition can make CTS — often treated with surgery — go away, speaking of misguided operations.

Hypothyroidism is so common I suspect an environmental cause, just as the fact that acne is common suggests an environmental cause. One kind of evidence for such a thing would be finding a group of people living unusual lives (e.g., New Guinea highlanders) with unusually low or unusually high rates.

Via Natural News.

The Appendix and the Umami Hypothesis

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Your appendix — a kind of cul-de-sac off your large intestine — can be dangerous. A British man was recently rushed to the hospital with a burst appendix three weeks after he’d had an operation to remove it. Surgeons have routinely removed it — seemingly without problems. Is the appendix an evolutionary vestige, as Darwin believed, or does it do something beneficial?

In the last few years, two articles — one in Journal of Theoretical Biology, the other in Journal of Evolutionary Biology — by William Parker, a professor of surgery at Duke, and others have argued that the function of the appendix is to harbor bacteria. If diarrhea washes out your intestines, bacteria safely hiddne in the appendix can repopulate them. (A theory supported by the position of the appendix — roughly in the middle of your intestines.) That makes perfect sense.

The connection with my umami hypothesis is that both assume that the foreign bacteria within us are precious and endangered. (My umami hypothesis says we need to consume plenty of bacteria to be healthy and that our food preferences help us do so.) The precious part is widely accepted; it’s the endangered part that’s new. If we need bacteria so much, why should they be endangered? We need our eyes; they aren’t endangered. My answer is that to protect bacteria carries a cost: The most hospitable the digestive system becomes to bacteria, the less effective it will become at everything else, including digestion. And bacteria were/are cheap. Rather than protect them, the system has been shaped to require them. Just as gas-guzzling cars evolved when gas was cheap. Making cars more gas-efficient will make them less efficient at other functions, such as signaling status.

Thanks to Kathy Tucker, James Andrewartha, and James Lucoff.

Signage Features of the Toyko Subway System Inexplicably Missing Elsewhere

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I’ve been in about 15 subway systems. Only in the Tokyo system have I seen these helpful features:

  1. Walking distances. The signs within a station that show where to go to get to Line X (the platform where you catch Line X trains) include distances (in meters). How far you have to walk to get there. A nearby platform might be 100 m; a distant one 250 m.
  2. Station-to-station distances in minutes. In several places you are told how many minutes (on the train) it takes to get to each station. Most stations are about 2 minutes apart. The nearest station is 2 minutes away, the next is 4 minutes, etc.
  3. Letter-number names for each station. In addition to the usual names for each station (e.g., Ginza) each station has a letter-number name. The letter is the line; the number is the position on the line (1, 2, 3, etc.). For a north-south line, for example, the southmost station is 1, the station just north of it is 2, and so on. On the Akususa Line, for example, the stations are named A1, A2, A3, etc., in addition to the usual names. This makes it easy to figure out how far you are from your destination. If you’re going to Station A15 and you’re now at Station A12, you have 3 stops to go.