Month: October 2009

Instant Willpower

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From a review of The Shangri-La Diet:

Seth Roberts, the diet founder and book author, attempts to explain the science behind how this works, but I won’t even begin to try to explain it here. I will admit that it is both counterintuitive and at times seems contradictory, but since there was little risk involved I was willing to give it a try.

I was nervous to add the calories into my diet (approximately 120 per tablespoon of olive oil), when all my life experience told me that I should be cutting fat and calories. However, I have only been following the plan for about a week and am amazed at the results. After just one day it was like having instant willpower.

Yogurt-Making Results

Seth Roberts18 Comments

I’ve been steadily using my new yogurt maker. It’s like a microscope: I can see things I never saw before. I started with the recommended fermentation time: 12 hours. Then I did batches at 16, 20, 24, and 28 hours. The yogurt grew steadily more sour. The increase was remarkably clear. I am unable to find this crucial info anywhere on the web — that 28 hours produces more sour yogurt than 24 hours, etc. By making my yogurt much more sour than commercial yogurt I’m getting a lot more of the crucial ingredient (bacteria).

The results are so clear, I think, because I’m starting with a hyper-pasteurized product (which can be stored at room temperature) and the yogurt maker holds the fermentation temperature very constant. Constancy of temperature means constancy of selection means greater population. (The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet says the main reason for the obesity epidemic is that we’re eating food with exactly the same flavor from one instance to the next — from one can of Coke to the next, for example.) If the temperature is 120 there is selection for bacteria that grow best at 120; if the temperature goes down to 110 many of those bacteria die and are replaced by bacteria that grow best at 110. If the temperature goes back up to 120, those bacteria die . . . and so on. More temperature variation means more diversity of bacteria but less number of bacteria. I’ll get my diversity of bacteria elsewhere — from kombucha, say.

I suspect that commercial yogurt makers are time-limited. If they fermented twice as long they could only make half as much. The average yogurt buyer has no idea that more sour = more healthy, so they couldn’t charge more.

Although the yogurt maker’s box shows the machine set to 32 hours, the actual maximum time is 24 hours. To get 28 hours I reset it during the process.

The official website of the National Yogurt Association, aboutyogurt.com, contains nothing about how to make yogurt.

The Salton Yogurt Maker might be the best yogurt maker available in America. I can’t tell if you have to preheat the milk — the worst part.

More Does more sour = more healthy? I agree with the two commenters who suggest that the number of live bacteria probably goes down after a certain point as the mixture becomes more acidic. The number of live+dead bacteria, however, probably continues to increase. My guess is that the total live+dead is maximized when the yogurt is most sour; the number of live bacteria is maximum around the tme that the acidity is most quickly increasing, somewhere in the middle. I think the digestive benefits come only from live bacteria but that the immunostimulatory benefits come from both live and dead bacteria. I find it hard to believe that the immune system can tell whether bacteria it encounters are alive or dead.

Probiotic Health Claims Dismissed

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From BBC News:

General health claims for “probiotic” drinks and yogurts have been dismissed by a team of experts from the European Union.

Their opinions will now be voted on by an EU Committee which is drawing up a list of permitted health claims.

Scientists at the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) looked at 180 health claims for the supplements.

They rejected 10 claims and said a further 170 had not provided enough evidence of their effects.

The manufacturers of best-selling yogurt drinks Actimel and Yakult have submitted claims that will be considered at a later stage.

The difference between “rejecting” a claim and saying “not enough evidence” isn’t clear.

Slaves of California

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A famous short story by Tama Janowitz, called “ The Slaves in New York” (a short-story collection called “Slaves of New York” was made into a movie), was about New York City renters who couldn’t afford to move because rents were so high. Whatever their relationship with their roommate, they were stuck.

[Eleanor] lives with her boyfriend Stash in the Village. Stash is a graffiti artist who complains a lot, while Eleanor makes him elaborate meals. One night she goes to a party and meets Mikell, a handsome South African writer. They make a date and meet at the White Horse Tavern. It turns out that Mikell lives with a woman named Millie, who owns a co-op. Millie and Mikell fight as much as Eleanor and Stash do but, because neither can afford their own apartment, they are trapped.

Now, due to the huge decline in house prices, many Californians face a similar slavery. As a friend of mine put it,

Anyone like my parents, who paid cash for their houses, are kinda stuck living where they are, or they’ll take a giant financial hit.

China and Tibet: The Other Side

Seth Roberts16 Comments

In my experience, most Americans know little about Tibet but that doesn’t prevent some of them from having strong opinions about the Chinese takeover. (A crime against humanity, they say.) At a dinner in Berkeley, I made this point to some friends. One of them asked politely, “What is the other side?” She had no idea what it was.

Yes, Chinese students are brainwashed about this. (When I googled “Tibet slavery” and tried to follow the links, all of sudden nothing worked.) But the smartest among them know more about it than smart American students who have been brainwashed the other way. Here’s what one of them told me about the Chinese side of the argument:

1. Before China took over, Tibet was ruled by a religious elite. It is this elite, personified by the Dalai Lama, that now has influential Americans (e.g., Richard Gere, Robert Thurman) on their side. While the elite are incredibly pissed off by the Chinese takeover — just as rich Cubans were by Castro — the rest of the country, having been oppressed by this elite, doesn’t agree.

2. Before China took over, there was widespread slavery in Tibet. You could incur a debt that basically made you a slave, it took so long to pay off. Of course this makes a mockery of the Dalai Lama’s books. Here are some details:

Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.”

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.”

Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” In fact. it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.

Runaway serfs. I find these paragraphs vastly more believable than anything I’ve heard Richard Gere or the Dalai Lama say about the situation. Here’s how one Free-Tibeter answers these facts:

The old Tibet was backward in its technological and social systems. Nobody denies this. If, however, you look at the faces of those Tibetans who were born and grew up in that society, you can easily notice their genuine smile. When compared with other communities, the Tibetans were generally quite peaceful and warm-hearted. If they were really as cruel as the Chinese claim, then I think the people who were born and grew up under those circumstances would be different. The people living at the time were happier and calmer than the people in this new generation. At that time, unfortunately, there were people who were used by the landlords. Now the whole nation has become a slave.

3. Tsinghua students sometimes volunteer to work in Tibet as teachers for a year. They teach primary school. The education system in Tibet is very poor; there is a shortage of good teachers.

I don’t have an opinion about this. It is the invisibility of gaps in knowledge that interests me here, the way smart Americans don’t realize they’ve been brainwashed.

Hidden Bonus of the L Prize: Better Sleep, Better Mood

Seth Roberts6 Comments

The Department of Energy has a prize, called the L Prize, for a new light bulb that gives off same light as a 60-watt incandescent bulb but uses much less energy. Philips has submitted what it believes will be the winning entry. For the last decade, I’ve tried to avoid fluorescent lights at night. Ordinary fluorescent lamps emit light with far more blue than incandescent lamps and mess up my circadian-timing system. That systems appears insensitive to incandescent light. Squirrels are like me, a study suggests.

Fluorescent lights are close enough to sunlight to affect our circadian system; incandescent lights, being much cooler than the sun, are invisible to it. The timing of exposure matters if it varies from day to day; exposure to fluorescent lights at varying times is like travelling back and forth across time zones. Everybody grasps that travelling across time zones makes it hard to sleep at the right time; what is less understood is that time-zone-crossing travel affects the depth of sleep because it reduces the amplitude of the circadian oscillation. If you are exposed to fluorescent lights at night now and then, you will sleep less deeply. So I try hard to avoid fluorescent lights at night. I avoid supermarkets and subways, for example.

I discovered all this when I discovered the effects of morning faces on my mood. After I travelled back and forth across time zones, the effect took three weeks to fully return. Nothing else had changed. I conclude that it took three weeks in the same place for my circadian oscillator to return to maximum amplitude. And one evening in which I was exposed to an hour of fluorescent light was enough to get rid of the faces effect for a few weeks. The ubiquity of fluorescent lighting has made it hard to study this effect in other people.

Miso Shopping in Beijing

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In Beijing I have no kitchen, just a microwave oven. Which is enough to make miso soup. Which I can eat happily day after day.

But I need miso. In Tokyo I bought miso far better than what I used in Berkeley and now cheap miso isn’t good enough for me. Finding high-quality miso in Beijing is turning out to be hard, even though there are many Japanese students in my neighborhood. Today I went to a Japanese-owned department store with a food market. They had hundreds of Japanese foods, including plum wine, natto, Japanese pickles, sushi ingredients, seaweed crackers, and black milk (whatever that is). But they didn’t have miso. I have no explanation; the local hypermarket (Carrefour) had low-quality miso.

If you know where to get good miso in Beijing, please let me know.

Gatekeeper Drugs: Drugs that Require Gatekeepers

Seth Roberts8 Comments

A friend of mine suffered from depression. Like so many depressed persons, he went to sleep very late — maybe 3 am. I told him that was a very bad sign, no one should go to sleep that late. He starting going to sleep earlier and waking up earlier and felt better. He wondered why none of the many psychologists and psychiatrists he’d seen about his problem had told him what I said. The first time he asked I think my answer was that I cared more than they did about the relation of depression and sleep.

Recently he asked again: Why didn’t they tell him something so simple and helpful? Maybe I learned something in the intervening years because my answer was different. I said all health care professionals — not just doctors, all therapists/healers, mainstream, alternative, Western, non-Western — have no interest in treatments that they are not needed to administer. If all you need to do is to get up earlier in the morning, you don’t need a psychiatrist. Therefore a psychiatrist won’t tell you to do that. The only advice they are likely to give is advice they are needed to administer.

I could give dozens of examples. Does the Chinese herbalist tell my friend with an infection to eat fermented foods to boost his immune system? No, because that wouldn’t involve the herbalist. Instead he prescribes herbs that probably do the same thing. Does a dermatologist tell a teenager that his acne is caused by diet? No, dermatologists make the absurd claim that diet isn’t involved. Because if it were you wouldn’t need them. You’d just figure out what foods are causing your acne, and avoid those foods. Why do medical schools fail to teach nutrition? Because you don’t need a doctor to eat better. Why is prevention almost completely ignored? Because prevention doesn’t require any gatekeepers.

The economic term is rent seeking: health care professionals act in ways that require you to pay them. The usual economic examples of rent-seeking cause a kind of overhead you have to pay but the rent-seeking engaged in by the entire health care industry shortens our lives. Simple cheap safe solutions are ignored in favor of expensive and dangerous ones that don’t work as well. Our entire health system centers on gatekeeper drugs: drugs that require gatekeepers. The usual name is prescription drugs; their danger is part of their appeal to the doctors that prescribe them. Because it makes the doctor necessary.

Rent Seeking and Our Health-Care System

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Does our health-care system (including researchers) engage in rent-seeking when they ignore simple cheap remedies, including prevention?

Here’s a simple example of rent-seeking. Some friends and I went to visit the Great Wall. On the path up to the wall was a man sitting in a chair. He demanded 30 cents to let us pass. There was no gate. He wasn’t a government official — just a man and a chair. There was a path to a goal. It was blocked unless we paid.

In the case of health there are many paths to the goal. Many ways to become healthier — many ways to relieve depression, for example. Prevention is one way, cure another. There are cheap cures and expensive cures. By ignoring prevention and cheap cures, the profession of psychiatry is blocking those paths (by failing to clear them) and thereby forcing us to take their expensive path (dangerous drugs), usage of which they control. It’s more subtle than the man with the chair but it amounts to the same thing.

Rent-seeking is annoying. I was annoyed by the man in the chair. The rent-seeking of our health-care system is disguised, not easy to make out. This makes it less of problem for health-care professionals, such as doctors; I think few people are aware of it. (For example, most people with acne don’t realize it is probably caused by their food.) But my friend with depression was annoyed, deeply annoyed, when he learned of a simple cheap (partial) solution to his problem.