Month: August 2009

This Blog Reduces Sinus Congestion

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A reader writes:

I’m now 30 years old. For the past ten years or so, I’ve had constant post-nasal drip and stuffed sinuses, frequently coughing out phlegm. In addition, I’ve had fairly intense fatigue, moderate but consistent depression, and occasional but intense tendinitis (from typing). I tried nasal pharma sprays and many alternative therapies, feeling most intellectually compelled by neti pot style nasal washes with solutions that mimic salt balances of the body. However, none of my efforts did much good. So I reluctantly agreed to have sinus surgery, even though it seemed to be a blunt force approach to a sensitive tissue. I have since become convinced that treating the sinuses as anything other than an expression of overall health is preposterous. The surgery, with full anesthesia, improved things very slightly while being somewhat traumatic and certainly not worth the ordeal.

About 5 years ago, when I was 25, I discovered that I have a very under-active thyroid. Taking thyroid replacement was the biggest health change I’ve had in the past ten years, giving me much more energy, improving my overall health, and significantly reducing (but not eliminating) my sinus condition.

I didn’t start reading your blog regularly until a few months ago. Your writing on bacteria and flax oils led me to start taking probiotic pills every day (Trader Joes brand and then kyodophilus), eat more yogurt and kimchee, and take flax seed oil pills and try to incorporate flax oil into foods. Within a month of starting this, my sinus congestion was reduced by about 90%. I don’t need to constantly have tissues on hand and I can breathe easier every day. Thank you! I’m hoping to finally start making my own kombucha this week.

I suspect it was the bacteria rather than the flaxseed oil that helped his nose. Like him, I used to need to carry a handkerchief at all times and I went through a whole box of Kleenex in a few months. This didn’t stop when I started drinking lots of flaxseed oil. After I started drinking lots of fermented foods, however, my nose became a lot clearer and my Kleenex consumption went way down.

Why Do Children Pick Their Nose?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In a clever series called 10 Mysteries of You: Ten things we don’t understand about humans in New Scientist, Australian science writer Emma Young includes some obvious ones (blushing, altruism, dreams, art) but ends her list with a surprise: nose-picking. This had not occurred to me:

It is possible that ingesting nasal detritus might help build a healthy immune response – after all, researchers investigating the hygiene hypothesis have built a large body of evidence indicating that lack of exposure to infectious agents can increase one’s susceptibility to allergic diseases.

This seems to be Young’s idea rather than that of the scientist she spoke to. She has her hygiene hypothesis stuff wrong. The original hygiene hypothesis was indeed that lack of exposure to infectious agents can increase allergies — but the data later collected did not support this. More infections in childhood did not correlate with less allergy. What did seem to help was exposure to dirt. Apparently the dirt was helpful whether or not it was infectious (= contained something that could make you sick). The nose-picking data (kids pick their nose a lot and sometimes eat the stuff) does make sense given my umami hypothesis, which says that exposure to bacteria is good for us. You couldn’t get sick from eating what comes out of your nose but as it leaves your nose foreign bacteria grow on it; so eating your snot is a way to introduce foreign bacteria into your digestive system. Which the umami hypothesis says is needed for health.

Do kids who eat more fermented food eat less snot? As I posted earlier, since I started eating lots of fermented food, my desire for fancy restaurant food has gone way down.

Thanks to JR Minkel.

HeartScan

Seth Roberts10 Comments

A few months ago, because of this blog, I got a free heart scan from HeartScan in Walnut Creek. It’s a multi-level X-ray of your heart and is scored to indicate your heart disease risk. In spite of the fermented food I’ve been eating recently, and the flaxseed oil I’ve been drinking for about two years, my score was right in the middle. What’s impressive about these scans is three-fold:

1. The derived scores are strongly correlated with risk of heart disease death. This isn’t surprising because they are actually looking at your circulatory system. Here is an example of the predictive power. About 1000 subjects were followed for about four years. About 40 of them had something go seriously wrong with their circulatory systems (e.g., heart attack):

The mean coronary artery calcium score was 764 ± 935 [mean ± standard deviation] among subjects with events as compared with 135 ± 432 among those without events (p < 0.0001). [Minimum score is 0.]

The standard deviations are more than the means because the distribution is very asymmetric. (Like most researchers, they should have transformed their data.)

2. You can improve the score. Via lifestyle changes.

3. The scans provided by HeartScan are low enough in radiation that they can be repeated every year, which is crucial if you want to measure improvement. In contrast, a higher-tech type of scan (64 slice) is so high in radiation that it can’t be safely repeated. The higher-tech type of scan, offered by other heart-scan centers, is more profitable for the manufacturer of the equipment (General Electric), which may be why it has become increasingly common.

Heart scans, like the sort of self-experimentation I’ve done, is a way to wrest control of your health away from the medical establishment. No matter what your doctor says, no matter what anyone says, you can do whatever you want to try to improve your score. And if what you do works, it works; if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work — regardless of what anyone says. My self-experimentation started with something similar to a heart scan: I counted the number of pimples I had. The lowest possible tech, sure, but when I did that, and varied the prescribed medicine, I could actually see what worked and what didn’t.

Probiotic Pills: Minus and Plus

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A reader writes:

I recently had a bottle of pills that became virtually inactive (i can tell from my bowel movements) after a few weeks, probably because they weren’t refrigerated . . . I probably wouldn’t have been able to get a lot of bacteria into my diet without pills, especially since I travel frequently for work. Â In addition, since I take thyroid pills every day, adding another pill is easy. Â I think pills are also clearly crucial to research efforts.

Good points. On recent trips (in America) I’ve found kombucha, yogurt, and kefir in the new locations, but it’s been time-consuming. Pills would have been easier.

Shaved Head, Good Coffee, and the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts2 Comments

How are they similar? Kenneth Anderson at The Volokh Conspiracy writes:

I have shaved my head completely, as I have discovered from long experience that even if it doesn’t help me discover my spiritual side, it weirdly helps me concentrate. I highly recommend it. I have much coffee, good stuff from Antigua Guatemala. Yerba mate from Paraguay. I have my extralight olive oil re the Seth Roberts diet – to which, although I realize I’m just bragging here – I sincerely credit the loss of 25 pounds [emphasis added] and a wholly unmedicated cholesterol score last week of 128 total and 66 good (!).

All three help you concentrate. (SLD helps you not be distracted by hunger.)

Acne Treatment Statistics

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Cure Together has acne treatment statistics: Comparisons of the effectiveness of about a dozen treatments. Only two treatments rate high for effectiveness and both have only a few raters. Neither of the high-rated treatments (Roaccutane and Dr. Hauschka Skin Care) was part of Stone-Age life. Because of the absence of acne in at least a few groups of people living more Stone-Age-like (stoneagesque?) lives, it is likely that something about modern life causes acne. When whatever that is is figured out, it should be possible to eliminate acne cheaply and safely.

Regardless of the future, this table is a big step forward in dealing with the problem. It is the first unbiassed look at the effectiveness of different treatments I have seen and it tests a lot of everyday treatments (e.g., face-washing). Academic papers on the subject usually study prescription drugs and the authors usually favor one of the treatments being studied.

Acid Reflux Cured by Kombucha? Yes

Seth Roberts13 Comments

My friend with acid reflux — who used to have acid reflux — contacted me today:

My stomach is so much better [since I started drinking kombucha]. I rarely have problems. Every once in a while I might be a little uncomfortable. Then I drink a little kombucha, it gets better within an hour. I got up in the middle of the night the other night and I felt the usual kind of pain, took some sips of the kombucha, felt better, and fell back asleep. Hardly ever have pain now. The kombucha is much more effective than the Asiphax medicine I took. That was $60 for a 10-day course. It might even be more effective than Prilosec. (Which cleared up the problem but then it came back.)Â I’ve been drinking kombucha for about three weeks. I really like the grape, guava, and strawberry flavors of the Synergy brand. The grape flavor is like sangria that’s just started to go bad. A couple of people I’ve tried to turn on to it but they just can’t stand the taste. My levels of stress haven’t decreased. I’m drinking less than half a bottle a day. Now the problem is that I forget I’m supposed to have stomach trouble so I forget to drink it.

If you know of anything (data, anecdotes, whatever), positive or negative, that sheds light on whether kombucha cures acid reflux, please let me know.

The Umami Hypothesis and the Meaning of Co-Morbidity

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In an article in Slate about restrictive diets, Daniel Engber noted that

Celiac patients have almost twice the normal risk of cancer, and one-third of them suffer from another autoimmune disease, like Type 1 diabetes, lupus, or multiple sclerosis.

Does celiac disease cause cancer, Type 1 diabetes, lupus, and multiple sclerosis? Not very plausible. Does cancer cause celiac disease? Does lupus cause celiac disease? Not very plausible. Much more plausible is that all five have a common cause. I believe that common cause is a malfunctioning immune system due to not enough bacteria in the diet (the umami hypothesis).

More (May 2012). I now think that all these diseases are due to wheat molecules leaking into the blood and setting off an immune reaction that attacks parts of the body (because the wheat molecule resembles those molecules). The leaky gut that allows wheat molecules to enter the blood is caused by lack of bacteria in the diet.