Last night at dinner I met a Beijing high school student. He wants to finish high school in America. “Was that your idea or your parents?” I asked.
“Both,” he said.
“What’s the reason?” I said
“Chinese high school is too stressful,” he said. “The test [tests?] is too hard.”
He left the dinner early to study for the TOEFL.
This is from Confessions of a Nicotine Addict:
Smoked like a chimney this weekend.
But on Tuesday I started the “Shangri La Diet,” as outlined in the book of the same name by Seth Roberts. It’s a strangely easy plan and I may be too obtuse to understand how it works, but my appetite was noticeably down all day. (Ok, I had a headache & nasty nausea — but not hungry!)
And I had very few urges to smoke. In fact, I went almost the whole day without nico fit. The thought of smoking was utterly distasteful. Really gross. Now, for the past couple months I’ve been working on all kinds of visualizations & relaxation techniques, but I really think this weird-ass diet had something to do with it. I ended up giving in at the end of the day, but I only smoked a couple. Yesterday was about the same; today, too.
Maybe the Shangri La Diet curbs all kinds of appetites?
So well put!
Maybe it does. Here are two possible explanations: 1. The mental effort it took to fight off the urge to eat is no longer necessary, leaving it available to fight off the urge to smoke. This story contradicts this explanation — the urge to smoke went down. 2. Addictions are self-medication. You feel bad, the addicting substance provides relief. If you feel less bad — less hungry, say — then you need less relief. This story doesn’t support this explanation either; nothing is said about relief from overwhelming and unpleasant urges to eat. There is certainly some truth to this basic idea, however — witness the term addictive personality.
However, in this case I’d put my money on Explanation #3: Addictions are heavily linked to the environment. The environment triggers a craving. It’s Pavlovian learning. Shepard Siegel, a psychology professor at McMaster University, originated this explanation and has collected a lot of supporting data. You take Drug A in Environment B. After a while experience B triggers a desire for A. (Obviously it makes sense that we learn to become hungry when food is available. That’s how appetizers work.) In this case SLD changed her environment. She felt different.
T. R. Reid has just published a new book called The Healing of America that compares American health care to health care in other countries. One comparison is with Japan:
The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.
Life expectancy is better. Even though the Japanese smoke more than Americans. Is it all those MRI scans? (Which in Japan cost a small fraction of what they cost in America?) Or all those trips to the doctor (where, by American standards, nothing appears to happens — that is, expensive drugs are rarely prescribed — judging by overall costs)?
I believe that that Japanese do so much better because of a factor that Reid probably doesn’t consider: They eat tons more fermented food than Americans do. In a Tokyo restaurant, the woman sitting next to me, a nurse, said she believes that regular consumption of fermented foods is important for health. Does everyone in Japan think this? I asked. A large minority, she said.
The eating habits of the Japanese, as far as I could tell, bear this out. On a Japanese food blog, the writer described a breakfast that had five fermented foods: pickles, miso, yogurt, natto, and kimchi. The Japanese eat miso at every meal, more or less. They also eat lots of pickles. Natto is popular in some parts of the country but not others. They eat lots of yogurt; they are the country that gave us Yakult. They drink vinegar drinks. (Whereas in America only health nuts drink apple cider vinegar.) In other words, their diet is loaded with fermented foods. If I’m right about this, Japanese rates of autoimmune diseases should be much lower than American rates.
When people get sick much less, health care costs go way down.
In the latest BMJ, a group of epidemiologists reports that SSRI’s (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a commonly-prescribed type of anti-depressant) are associated with a certain type of birth defect when the mom takes the drug early in pregnancy:
There is an increased prevalence of septal heart defects among children whose mothers were prescribed an SSRI in early pregnancy,
We have a health care system built on dangerous drugs — and those drugs are poorly tested for safety. It isn’t in the drug companies’ interest to do so, of course. In this particular case, I wonder if the drugs were safety-tested on pregnant rats and if so what happened.
I am teaching a seminar-like class called something like New Topics in Psychology. Most of the students are freshmen because this is the first year the psychology department has accepted undergraduates. Some unusual things happened on the first day of class:
Nine months ago, the New York Times reported that Lila Nachtigall, a New York University professor of obstetrics and gynecology, put her name on an article ghost-written for her by a drug company. The article, when published, failed to disclose the ghost-writing. In response, New York University officials have done nothing, as far as I can tell.
In response to the same fact about one of their professors, McGill University opened an investigation. The same document that revealed what Nachtigall had done showed that Barbara Sherwin, a professor of psychology, obstetrics and gynecology, had done the same thing. Supporting my idea that medical school professors have different ethical standards than the rest of us, an article about the McGill case by Montreal Gazette reporter Peggy Curran used the word plagiarism. One comment was “plagiarism, pure and simple.” Does NYU president John Sexton find plagiarism completely acceptable? Apparently.
Thanks to Anne Weiss
In the Shangri-La Diet forums, Maychi has posted about a new way of nose-clipping (eliminating the smell of food) that is socially-acceptable: Putting tiny pieces of pantyhose in your nose. They are invisible. Her husband and son wouldn’t eat with when she wore noseclips.
I started this on 1st August. After about five days I got AS [appetite suppression] I had never managed to achieve with sugar or oil or anything else.
She eats about 95% of her calories this way. It doesn’t entirely block smells but perhaps it changes them enough so that they aren’t recognized or are less recognized. Maychi started losing weight and so did someone else who tried it.
One little problem: You have to be careful what you say.
It’s not possible to produce certain sounds. So in order to not sound like you have a horribly blocked nose, you have to say “delicious!” instead of “yummm!” and and “super!” instead of “Nice!”
They are closely related. I’ve been reading James Stewart’s excellent blow-by-blow of the early days of the crisis. As Nassim Taleb has emphasized, the crisis happened because the people running the financial system didn’t understand how it works. They vastly overrated their understanding — their ability to predict. (As Taleb has also emphasized, they still fail to grasp their ignorance.)
Surely it isn’t just the financial system. Surely we don’t overrate our knowledge just here. Much more likely, we overrate our knowledge about everything. This creates a great opportunity. It goes like this: 1. We overrate our knowledge about a large thing (the financial system). 2. We probably overrate our knowledge about everything. 3. We probably overrate our knowledge about small things. 4. There is more to be learned from studying small things than we realize. 5. Small things can be studied experimentally — an especially effective learning method.
Self-experimentation is an example of studying small things experimentally. These experiments taught me far more than I ever expected. Because I knew less than I thought. (Without realizing this fact.) Here are three examples:
1. Acne. I discovered that my beliefs about the two medicines my dermatologist has prescribed were exactly wrong. The one I thought worked, didn’t work; the one I thought didn’t work, did work.
2. Sleep. My self-experimentation led to new ideas about the control of sleep that no one had thought of. I didn’t know experimentation could do that so often. (I thought that such discoveries were very rare.)
3. Mood. My conclusions about mood are really different than what researchers usually say. I never expected to learn anything so radical.
These examples cover three dimensions. In the acne example, I learned I was completely wrong very quickly — that’s speed of learning. The sleep example is about number of discoveries; the mood example is about the “size” of one discovery.
A friend asked me how to strike up conversations with strangers. I told her what I’ve said many times. Three things make it easier:
1. Recognition. If you recognize someone (and presumably they recognize you) it will be easier to start a conversation.
2. Real question. If you have a real question — a question to which you really want the answer — it will be easier to start a conversation.
3. Shared suffering. If the two of you (you and the person you wish to speak to) have suffered together — bad weather, stuck in a long line — it will be easier to start a conversation. Living in Beijing and not speaking Chinese is another example of what I mean by “suffering”; another name for this factor could be shared predicament.
Those are the main factors that matter. In everyday life, they vary a lot. Another factor is minor:
4. Forced proximity. If you are forced to be near each other — in an elevator, say — it will be easier to start a conversation.
If none of these factors are true, it will be very hard to start a conversation. If one is true, it will be somewhat hard. If two are true it will be easy. If three are true it will be inevitable.
In my experience, local culture makes a small difference, somewhere between zero to one on this scale. Most places are zero. A place where people are really friendly would be worth one.
In an earlier post I wrote, “Hypothyroidism is so common I suspect an environmental cause.” In fact, I suspect that all common diseases are caused (= made much more likely by) differences between modern life and Stone-Age life. Since then, thanks to comments and email, I have learned more about hypothyroidism. According to Dennis Mangan, it has become a lot more common during the last 100 years, which implies an environmental cause. The most common type of hypothroidism is called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. It is an autoimmune disorder where the immune system attacks the thyroid, damaging it. A reader with hypothyroidism wrote me:
When I was first tested for thyroid levels, part of the test (which I think is standard protocol) was to test the level of antibodies to thyroid. My levels were off the charts.
This supports what I said. I’m sure that autoimmune diseases are caused by one particular difference from Stone Age life: lack of bacteria in our food. The immune stimulation the harmless bacteria provided can be provided in other ways — bee stings, for example. But I don’t think Stone-Age people got a lot more bee stings than we do.