Author: Seth Roberts

MSG and Nightmares

Seth Roberts11 Comments

At a dinner for foreign teachers at Tsinghua, I met a Canadian woman who teaches English literature. Soon after she moved to China, she started having nightmares every night. For dreams, they were unusually linear and realistic. They were nightmares in the sense that they felt “sinister”. This hadn’t happened to her before. It was especially puzzling because she was having a good time.

On a forum for foreigners in Beijing, she asked what might be causing the problem. MSG, she was told. All Chinese restaurants use MSG. She started cooking her own food. The problem went away. Whenever she ate a restaurant meal, the problem returned. The time between meal and sleep made a difference. The dreams would be more vivid if she slept soon after the meal.

Here is a discussion of the MSG/nightmare link with many stories about it. I believe we like the taste of MSG because glutamate is created when proteins are digested by bacteria. We like glutamate because we need to eat bacteria to be healthy. Bacteria are too big and varied to detect directly; it’s much easier to evolve a glutamate detector. The problem is that now you can have glutamate in your food without bacteria. Apparently cooked tomatoes and garlic are other sources.

With PubMed I found two relevant articles. One reported an experiment where hyperactive boys got better when additives, including MSG, were removed from their food. The other is a review article about the effects of MSG that mentions sleep.

I’m sure from the personal stories that MSG causes nightmares — and therefore probably also causes other problems. (That glutamate is a neurotransmitter makes the MSG-nightmare link even more likely.) Here are researchers from the Scripps Clinic in San Diego saying MSG is safe:

Since the first description of the ‘Monosodium glutamate symptom complex’, originally described in 1968 as the ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’, a number of anecdotal reports and small clinical studies of variable quality have attributed a variety of symptoms to the dietary ingestion of MSG. . . . Despite concerns raised by early reports, decades of research [this review was published in 2009] have failed to demonstrate a clear and consistent relationship between MSG ingestion and the development of these conditions..

What the woman I met did in a week or so (establish that MSG has bad effects), medical researchers — at least, judging by this review — have failed to do in 41 years (“decades of research”). Just as dermatologists have been unable to figure out that acne is caused by diet.

More about the dangers of MSG.

The Wisdom of Tsinghua Freshmen

Seth Roberts3 Comments

This semester at Tsinghua University — the most selective college in China — I taught a freshman seminar about recent psychology research. Three weeks ago I gave my students a choice of five articles from Psychological Science, all published in 2008. They were to read one of them and comment.

Mostly I try to teach appreciation but three weeks ago we focused on how articles could be improved. I have never tried to teach this, yet the students made some very good points. Here are some of their comments:

1. This article said that we believe women make better leaders when there is within-group conflict and that men make better leaders when there is between-group conflict. One student pointed out that Rwanda was a good example. After the genocide (within-group conflict), far more women were elected to office.

2. This article studied the effect of cleanliness on moral judgments. One experiment compared two groups: subjects in one group had recently washed their hands, subjects in the other group had not. Before the time when the handwashing happened, both groups saw unpleasant scenes from a movie. Students pointed out an important confounding not mentioned in the article: The two groups differed not only in handwashing but also in the time from movie to test (because handwashing took time). Perhaps subjects who washed their hands remembered the movie less well.

3. The name-letter effect is a tendency to favor outcomes (broadly defined) that involve the first letter of your name. This study involved Belgium workers. The authors found that workers were more likely to be employed by a company whose first letter matched the first letter of their name. The correlation was small but reliable. Two students pointed out that this might reflect the company’s choice of whom to hire rather than the employee’s choice of where to work. One student pointed out that the correlation might be due to name-place correlations across Belgium. Perhaps certain regions favor certain names for both people and companies. As you move closer to the French border, perhaps French names become more common among both people and companies.

In all of these cases, had I been the editor, I would have required the authors to change their article appropriately.

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds described cases where averages of estimates made by non-experts did very well, sometimes out-performing experts. These three examples don’t involve numerical judgments nor averaging, but they do show non-experts (freshmen) doing better than experts (journal editors and reviewers) in certain ways. Each paper was read by about eight students.

More It isn’t easy to convey how impressed I was. The comments about Rwanda and about name localization certainly deserve a letter to the editor (if Psychological Science published them). Both of them are sophisticated methodological comments. The Rwandan one says that after you write an experimental article, try to find out if real-world events support your findings. That may be a helpful lesson in many cases. The name localization one suggests that psychologists who use survey data should be learning more about how to analyze survey data. Several other times my students surprised me with how good their comments were. One was during a discussion of possible reasons for the Holocaust, another was about why women in ancient China bound their feet, a third involved proposals for Mindless-Eating-type experiments.

Review of Other Diets

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This comment by goblyn on the Shangri-La Diet forums made me laugh:

When you’re on Atkins it gets harder when you start wanting to sell your first born for a piece of bread. On Weight Watchers you’d kill for a pizza. On South Beach you’d sleep with Donald Trump for an order of buffalo wings. On the cabbage soup diet, you’d willingly chop off your hands if you could eat something…anything…other than cabbage soup. On SLD it gets harder when you are suddenly only losing 1 lb a week rather than 4.

So well written! The comment continues, in very gratifying way:

It’s harder when you effortlessly eat 1400 calories a day and don’t feel deprived. It’s harder when you have to buy a whole new wardrobe. It’s harder when you’re out with friends and they all think you’re anorexic because you get stuffed from the bread they served before the meal… But there’s rarely a moment when it’s actually HARD. SLD is easy. Yes the weight loss slows down, yes the AS [appetite suppression] gets less noticeable, but at no point does it stop working. You won’t suddenly find your weight skyrocketing from eating a piece of celery.

The New Yorker Reading List

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For the first time, the New Yorker website contains comments by all of their contributors about the best books they read last year. It’s a great idea. I’ll be studying it for a long time. I was most immediately persuaded to read The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (recommended by Margaret Talbot) and The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser (recommended by Jeffrey Toobin). I’m interested in anything Lauren Collins has to say because she is a very talented writer. Her list was unusually long. Tad Friend misspelled the title of his own book.

Some of the writers didn’t write very well. Paul Muldoon, the poetry editor, used the royal we:

We’re very pleased to report that the title-poem first appeared here in The New Yorker.

It should be called “the pompous we“. He also wrote:

Among the poetry books that particularly recommended themselves this past year

Richard Brody wrote this:

The laser-like clarity and probity with which Lanzmann brings

I think he means “the laser-pointer-like clarity . . . “.

How I Write Letters of Recommendation

Seth Roberts5 Comments

As all professors know, it is letter-of-recommendation-writing season. I write them differently than anyone else I know. I meet with the student and write the letter during our meeting. I ask questions, type, ask questions, type, etc. The student inevitably remembers details of the class and how well they did better than I do. I ask questions that try to elicit the strengths of their case — about relevant experience, for example. Anything I find convincing I put in the letter. Sure, maybe they described the same stuff in their statement of purpose but I’m sure I can do a better job — professor to professor — than they can. (Statements of purpose are usually badly written.) I speak professorese, they don’t.

I like to think it’s win-win-win. It’s good for me because the letter is written quickly, easily, on time, and with good content. It’s the strongest possible truthful letter I could write — so I feel I’m doing my job. It’s good for the student because I make their case in the best possible way. It’s good for whoever reads the letter because it’s factual and well-argued. I don’t just say the student is this or that; I give examples. Most letters of recommendation do not give examples. Without examples, I ignore them.

Interview with Seth Roberts

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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

Seth Roberts11 Comments

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?

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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

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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.