After making yogurt a hundred times, and reading a lot about it, I finally realized there are two types. The mild sort (incubated maybe 12 hours) is good by itself, with fruit or nuts for texture and flavor. The strong sort (incubated maybe 24 hours) is a good condiment. Mild yogurt is a poor condiment, strong yogurt is poor by itself.
Month: December 2009
Interview with Seth Roberts
Justin Wehr asked me some interview questions and decided not to publish my answers. I thought they were good questions. Here they are, reworded slightly, and my answers.
QUESTION Of the experimental treatments you have studied, which ones have the most positive effect on your life?
ANSWER From more to less effect:
- Effect of morning faces on mood
- Effect of fermented food on health
- (tie) Effect of animal fat on health
- (tie) Effect of omega-3 on health
- Weight-control experiments.
QUESTION What about everyone else?
ANSWERÂ It depends on how far in the future you look. The morning faces stuff is the most important, I’m sure, but it’s also the hardest to implement. The fermented food stuff is easy to implement. It’s easy to eat more yogurt. So I believe that in the short term, the fermented foods stuff will have the most effect on others, in the long term, the faces stuff.
QUESTION Much of your research is related to the idea that we get sick because we live differently now than long ago. Can you explain this? Are there exceptions?
ANSWER Our genes were shaped to work well in one environment. Now our environment is quite different. All sorts of things go wrong — we don’t eat an optimal diet, for example — and our bodies malfunction in all sorts of ways. The exception is that once we know what an optimal diet (or environment) is we can assure it. For example, we can make sure we get the optimal amount of Vitamin C. The health problems caused by progress can be fixed, in other words, and we can emerge in better shape than ever before.
QUESTION How much time a day do you spend on self-experimentation?
ANSWER About ten minutes. Measuring various things, such as blood pressure and brain function.
QUESTION Why do few people self-experiment?
ANSWER Millions of people self-experiment. For example, millions of fat people try many different ways to lose weight. Professional scientists (e.g., med-school professors) do not self-experiment, at least publicly, because it is low-status, because it is frowned upon (by their colleagues), because it might be hard to publish the results, and because it won’t help them get grants.
QUESTION How do you determine an appropriate dosage for treatments that might have a good effect on what you measure but a bad effect on other things? For example, maybe animal fat is good for sleep but bad for other things.
ANSWER I don’t worry about it. Just as all electric appliances are designed to use the same house current, I’m sure all parts of our body are designed to work best with the same diet.
QUESTION Could advances in medical technologies (such as regenerative medicine) replace the need to live healthily? For example, if we could easily replace livers, maybe people could drink more.
ANSWER Not likely. Except that the more we know about nutrition the more we can replace our ancestors’ diet with a diet made up of the necessary nutrients. For example, I drink flaxseed oil to get omega-3. I’m sure our long-ago ancestors got omega-3 in other ways. So I no longer need to be like them. Basic nutrition isn’t medical technology, but it is a way in which it is easier to be healthy.
QUESTION What don’t you know, but wish you did?
ANSWER How to make book-writing as addictive as Wii Tennis.
Not Being Your Own Doctor Can Be Dangerous
A friend of mine had a kidney stone. He got rid of it via Chinese herbs and yoga. After the kidney stone passed, a prostate infection went away. Here’s what he saved himself from by solving the problem himself:
1) A CAT scan. This particular scan would have been the equivalent of 18 years worth of (background) radiation (according to the FDA web site), all in 45 min or an hour.  Also, I would have had to take an iodine contract material.  This latter is (a) at least mildly nephrotoxic in healthy people (and I was already having kidney problems) and (b) accumulates in the thyroid and, being radio-opaque, causes deposition of larger amounts of x-radiation energy into the thyroid.  This latter is being blamed in the medical literature for the explosion in thyroid cancer rates over the last few years.  (Apparently they have had this problem before, prior to the advent of CT’s, when iodine was used as contrast, and then multiple x-rays were taken.)  I also learned that in Europe, there are controls with regard to how much x-ray a person can be exposed to. This means that they do not do these extensive CT’s, but employ MRI’s instead. The latter are not just less dangerous, but also much better diagnostic tools; but they are more expensive. As a result the US health insurance companies refuse to pay for them.
(2) Taking Cipro, which is what I had been given after the first round of antibiotics failed to work (leaving me a second positive urine test).  Cipro was the antibiotic given to the postal workers as a prophylaxis, when the scare about anthrax in the mail was going on. Were it not for the fact that they were all given the same thing, all started having the same symptoms, and then all started talking to each other, we would probably have never had the massive class-action law suits that forced the FDA to put a “black box” warning on this drug.  How bad could an antibiotic be? Well, it seems that some people are having their tendons release from the bone, often the Achilles tendon, sometimes within 24 hours of starting the drug.  And that is only what the FDA is now admitting to. On the web, you find that the really serious problems are neurological. Lots of what were very high functioning people are reporting on the web very similar effects.
Will Sea Levels Rise?
This is from The London Telegraph several months ago:
If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.
Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water.
But someone who actually measures sea levels thinks otherwise:
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world”.
When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.
Haha!
Physicists Disagree about Climate Change
Here is a statement from Hal Lewis, a physics professor at UC Santa Barbara, in answer to a question from CBS News:
I know of nobody who denies that the Earth has been warming for thousands of years without our help (and specifically since the Little Ice Age a few hundred years ago), and is most likely to continue to do so in its own sweet time. The important question is how much warming does the future hold, is it good or bad, and if bad is it too much for normal adaptation to handle. The real answer to the first is that no one knows, the real answer to the second is more likely good than bad (people and plants die from cold, not warmth), and the answer to the third is almost certainly not. And nobody doubts that CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing for the better part of a century, but the disobedient temperature seems not to care very much. And nobody denies that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, along with other gases like water vapor, but despite the claims of those who are profiting by this craze, no one knows whether the temperature affects the CO2 or vice versa. The weight of the evidence [suggests] the former.
That’s reasonable. Here is a statement from another physicist, a friend of mine and Andrew Gelman’s:
Like a lot of scientists — I’m a physicist — I assumed the “Climategate” flap would cause a minor stir but would not prompt any doubt about the threat of global warming, at least among educated, intelligent people. The evidence for anthropogenic (that is, human-caused) global warming is strong, comes from many sources, and has been subject to much scientific scrutiny. Plenty of data are freely available. The basic principles can be understood by just about anyone, and first- and second-order calculations can be performed by any physics grad student. Given these facts, questioning the occurrence of anthropogenic global warming seems crazy. (Predicting the details is much, much more complicated). [He seems to miss the point here. The usual claim is that man-made warming is large relative to other global temperature changes. That’s not predictable “by any physics grad student” and to call it a “detail” is misleading. — Seth] And yet, I have seen discussions, articles, and blog posts from smart, educated people who seem to think that anthropogenic climate change is somehow called into question by the facts that (1) some scientists really, deeply believe that global warming skeptics are wrong in their analyses and should be shut out of the scientific discussion of global warming, and (2) one scientist may have fiddled with some of the numbers in making one of his plots. This is enough to make you skeptical of the whole scientific basis of global warming? Really?
At risk of sounding v smug, my views have changed only a little. I already thought the consensus was more fragile than it appeared. That’s just a general truth about modern science. I was already skeptical of climate models because I knew how easily modelers fool themselves. I began to believe the consensus was not just fragile but wrong when I heard the story of the Yamal tree ring data — the long refusal to supply the raw data and, when the researcher’s hand was forced and the data finally supplied, the way it contradicted the claims that had been made. Climategate didn’t vastly change what I thought; it provided more evidence for ideas I already had.
Another friend of mine used to be a math professor. He has views similar to the views of my physicist friend. “Look,” I said to him, “if you want to argue that humans are causing major global warming you should at least show it’s warmer now than in the past. Even that isn’t true. The Medieval Warm Period.” “That was only in Europe,” he replied. Actually, there is evidence of the same thing in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Most Promising Solutions to the Allergy Epidemic
At a charity dinner in New York City to benefit the Food Allergy Institute, the president of the Institute told the guests that
Several promising treatments [were] in the works, including a Chinese herbal therapy being developed by the prominent allergist Dr. Hugh Sampson of Mt. Sinai (ready as soon as 2011) and a parasite “similar to those found in the stomachs of most citizens in developing countries,” which could someday be introduced into imperiled Upper East Side intestines, the theory being that “in the developed world, we live in too clean of an environment, so our immune system has nothing familiar to attack.”
Gatekeeper syndrome. How dare they not read this blog!
Acidophilus Pearls versus Fermented Food
I hear a voice: “Okay, you’ve convinced me, I need to eat more bacteria. How should I do it?” Well, Tim Beneke writes:
I want to revise my comments of a few months ago on probiotics and breathing through my nose. The probiotic pills by themselves do not enable me to breath better though my nose, even if I take 2x the dose they recommend. However, if I eat a lot of miso, yogurt, tempeh etc., I can breathe better through my nose within a day or 2. Previously, when I ate a lot of yogurt etc. for a couple of weeks, and then just went on the probiotic pills, it seemed as if the pills were enough, but after a week or so of just doing the probiotic pills, the stuffed nose came back. Then just doing yogurt and miso, my stuffed nose went away.
The probiotic pills are called Acidophilus Pearls, said to have one billion CFU [colony-forming units] of lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidobacterium longum per capsule; I got zero noticeable effect taking 2 of them a day while eating virtually no probiotic food.
Doing 16 oz of yogurt/day plus one 480 ml bottle/day of kombucha, while consuming none of the Pearls enabled me to breathe much better through my nose within a day or 2.
How the National Multiple Sclerosis Society Harms MS Patients
I blogged earlier about how Paulo Zamboni, an Italian surgeon, discovered that almost all MS patients have impaired blood flow from the brain. Surgery to improve the blood flow usually reduced MS symptoms. A very important discovery.
At the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, in Denver, they are unconvinced. They want more studies. Yes, Zamboni’s single study shouldn’t be the final word but here is the astonishing part: They say patients shouldn’t get tested to see if they have impaired blood flow. Impaired blood flow is very rare. When an MS patient gets tested, this tests Zamboni’s theory. His theory predicts they are likely to have impaired blood flow. At the National MS Society, they are against gathering data that would help decide if Zamboni is right. And against individuals finding out if something is wrong with their blood flow. This isn’t conservative, it’s stupid. And harmful — if anyone listens to them.
I wrote them to ask about their astonishing recommendation. Here’s the answer (from Kris Graham):
Our greatest concern at this point is the risk involved with the possible treatment, and we would like to see more clinical testing done before making a recommendation to the general public.
I wrote again to say it was the recommendation against testing (not treatment) that I was asking about. I got this reply:
We are not recommending that people get tested because there is not yet a treatment that has undergone comprehensive clinical testing. In other words, we do not encourage people to go through testing that can not — yet — lead to treatment. If clinical trials show that treatments, such as Dr. Zamboni‘s, are clinically safe and effective, we will of course change our recommendations. Until we know from controlled trials that there is a treatment to offer, spending the money to get tested doesn’t seem very reasonable.
What nonsense. Dr. Zamboni did a clinical trial. Spending money to get tested is money spent in a way that helps every MS patient — not to mention yourself. It’s gatekeeper syndrome — they can’t fathom why a MS patient would want to gather useful health-care info without waiting for “controlled trials,” whatever those are. I wrote back to ask what “controlled trials” meant. No reply. Thank god for self-experimentation, PatientsLikeMe, and CureTogether.
Lightsinshop.Com Scam
This website is a scam. Search “scam” in this blog for lots and lots of evidence about why it is a scam. It used to have other names, such as gamesingate.com. Notice how new the website is — how recently it was registered.
My Theory of Japanese Aesthetics
Japanese packages are beautiful. One after another. Old-fashioned Japanese buildings, Japanese posters, and so on, are also gorgeous. Even the Japanese flag is better-looking than other flags. The look of the IBM Thinkpad came from bento boxes. Why is Japanese visual design so great?
The usual answer is that Japan is an island, with scarce resources, therefore the Japanese learned to do much with little. This might explain a certain minimalism but there are plenty of island countries with undistinguished visual aesthetics.
My answer is different. It starts with the fact that Japan has a very large coastline/area ratio. It isn’t just an island, it’s a skinny island. That’s why the Japanese eat so much seafood. Seafood has a mild flavor. To preserve variety, you cannot spice it much otherwise everything ends up tasting like the spice. The differences between different fish are lost. This is why Japanese cuisine is weakly-flavored.
This created a problem for cooks. If the main food is weakly-flavored, everything else must also be. You want to show you care but you cannot do it with time-consuming complex sauces (such as harisa or mole, which takes a whole afternoon to make) or complex spice mixtures (such as curries) or complex cooking methods (French, Chinese). You are basically serving raw or lightly-cooked food with almost no spices. The solution — the way to show you cared — was presentation. The emotional energy of Japanese cooks went into making their food beautiful. Japanese food isn’t just the least-flavored of all major cuisines, it is also by quite a bit the best-looking. That’s how it started. Japanese cooks figured out how to make food beautiful. The lessons they learned and taught (at every meal!) spread to other design. When you grow up surrounded by beautiful things, as Japanese designers do, it helps you make beautiful things.
A friend of mine is a Chinese design student. She has met Japanese design students. How do they explain it? I asked her. They didn’t talk about it, she said. “We communicated in English. Their English is even worse than mine.”