- Berkshire Encyclopedia of China. Interview with the publisher.
- Self-experimentation and panic attacks
- Simon Singh sued by National Chiropractic Association
- Nassim Taleb testifies to Congress. Interview with Taleb.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Author: Seth Roberts
Advances in Cooking: Chocolate Chip Cookies
Toni Rivard, a Dallas dessert caterer, makes one of the best chocolate-chip cookies in America, according to Forbes Traveller. She ages her cookie dough about three days. She says it improves the texture. I wonder if it improves the flavor, too:
Rivard’s secret? “I like to age my cookie dough and feel that it makes for a better texture in cookies. As a result, the aptly-named OMG! [which is what customers have actually said when they taste one] chocolate chip cookies at Creme de la Cookie are soft and chewy with a deep rich flavor.
Fermenting cookie dough should certainly improve the flavor, although chocolate already supplies a lot of complexity. My experience has been that cooking delicious stuff became a lot easier when I started using fermentation to help (e.g., miso soup instead of soups flavored without fermented ingredients).
Thanks to David Archer.
Are We Running Out of Omega-3?
Apparently. The obvious source is fish but we are running out of fish:
In 2006, aquaculture production was 51.7 million metric tons, and about 20 million metric tons of wild fish were harvested for the production of fishmeal. “It can take up to 5 pounds of wild fish to produce 1 pound of salmon, and we eat a lot of salmon,” said Naylor, the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. [via Future Pundit]
This is why Jared Diamond’s Collapse is so unfortunate. Diamond is a good writer and the question he tried to answer in that book is extremely important. But he whiffed. Suppose I write a book about obesity. I give a list of ten reasons people are fat: 1. Too much Food X. 2. Too much Food Y. And so on. (Just as Diamond gave a list of eight-odd reasons societies collapse.) Such a book would be far less helpful than a book with a correct theory about obesity, a theory that explains why Foods X, Y, etc. cause obesity. The theory could be used to find new, better, flexible ways of avoiding obesity. The list of foods to avoid cannot. In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs (whom Diamond doesn’t mention) said that collapse happens for one overarching reason: The society is too resistant to new ways of doing things. The crucial struggle in any society, said Jacobs, isn’t between the rich and the poor or between owners and labor; it’s between those who benefit from the status quo and those who benefit from change.
Thanks to Peter Spero.
More about the Effects of Flaxseed Oil
Commenting on an earlier post, Jack Rusher reports:
Like Anonymous, I’m an MMA [Mixed Martial Arts] enthusiast. My experience with 3 T/day of flaxseed oil have been more or less identical to his. Before: high doses of NSAIDs [non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs] just to survive training, constant soreness and fatigue, etc. After: no joint pain at all, complete discontinuation of NSAIDs, lower frequency and severity of injury.
Dental results: my hygienist made strong comments regarding the improvement of my gums on my first post-flax visit, attributing it to changes in my oral care behavior . . . of which there were none.
Perverse Incentives in Medicine
In the comments, Timothy Beneke wrote:
My experience with a friend who had unexplained stomach pain was instructive. She saw 6 “experts,” 3 who worked for fixed salaries at institutions (Kaiser, Stanford, etc.) and 3 who were in the marketplace getting paid based on what they brought in each year. The three who were on fixed salaries were professionally cordial, and openly admitted that they could not say with confidence what was causing her pain. The three who were not on fixed salaries were very touchy-feely and charming and spoke with complete confidence about the cause.
Wow. This reminds me of my surgeon, Eileen Consorti, telling me that the operation she recommended would help me, that there was evidence for this, and then — when I couldn’t find any evidence — telling me she would find it and never doing so. She would have gotten thousands of dollars for that operation. It also reminds me of my dermatologist prescribing a medicine that didn’t work and, until I did an experiment that showed it didn’t work, having no idea it didn’t work. He got paid in any case.
More Med School Profs Behaving Badly: Professor Lila Nachtigall
New York University professor of obstetrics and gynecology Lila Nachtigall, whom I mentioned recently, said nice things about estrogen replacement therapy to a Newsday reporter. The story fails to say that she gets money and ghostwriting from Wyeth, which makes the pill used in that therapy.
More Schoolgirl Science
Two New Zealand teenagers humbled GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s biggest food companies:
Their school science experiment found that [GlaxoSmithKline’s] ready-to-drink Ribena contained almost no trace of vitamin C.
Students Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo tested the blackcurrant cordial against rival brands to test their hypothesis that cheaper brands were less healthy.
Instead, their tests found that the Ribena contained a tiny amount of vitamin C, while another brand’s orange juice drink contained almost four times more. . . .
GSK said the girls had tested the wrong product, and it was concentrated syrup which had four times the vitamin C of oranges. But when the commerce commission investigated, it found that although blackcurrants have more vitamin C than oranges, the same was not true of Ribena. It also said ready-to-drink Ribena contained no detectable level of vitamin C.
The students used iodine titration to determine Vitamin C levels. Why had the students managed to see something important that the food giant overlooked? My guess is that an unusual processing step (e.g., high storage temperature) destroyed the Vitamin C and those who knew about the anomaly didn’t want to consider the possibility that it had done damage. The possibility that someone outside the company might notice didn’t occur to them. Just as those who mislabel fish in New York restaurants and markets never realized that two students could uncover their deception. I found that the omega-3 in a Chinese brand of flaxseed oil was probably destroyed before it got to me.
Does H. Pylori Cause Stomach Ulcers?
In a previous post I said that the Nobel Prize to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren — for supposedly showing that H. pylori causes stomach ulcers — was a mistake. Because half the world has the bug in their stomach, and only a tiny fraction of them get ulcers, the true cause of those ulcers lies elsewhere, probably with an impaired immune system. Marshall famously drank a flask full of H. pylori and didn’t get an ulcer, yet took this to support his theory. A classic example of self-deception.
Recently Lam Shiu-kum, a former dean of medicine at the University of Hong Kong, was convicted of a giant fraud. He siphoning millions of dollars of medical fees into his own pocket:
Dr Lam, 66, brought a 39 year association with the university, his alma mater, to an abrupt end in March 2007 when the investigation into billing irregularities began. He is a distinguished gastroenterologist who conducted pioneering research into chemoprevention of stomach cancer through the eradication of Helicobacter pylori. His team also conducted the first double blind, controlled study into curing peptic ulcers by H pylori eradication.
I suppose this supports my case. As far as I know, almost all doctors and med school professors believe H. pylori causes stomach ulcers; I have never heard dissent about this.
More. What goes unsaid, and maybe unnoticed, in the debate about health care, is that it is hard to have decent health care (that is, decent health) when those in charge don’t know what they’re doing. The stomach-ulcer-etiology problem is a small example of a big thing. In case I’m not being blunt enough, let me be even more blunt: This example illustrates that the average doctor, the average med school professor, and at least two Nobel-Prize-winning med school professors (not to mention those who award Nobel Prizes) have a lot of room for improvement in their interpretation of simple facts. My previous example of the infectious-disease expert (a med school professor) who overlooked the immune system is another example of vast room for improvement. It’s hard to get good health care from people whose understanding of health is terribly incomplete yet don’t realize this.
Myshoppingsun.com Scam
This site (myshoppingsun, myshoppingsun.com) is a scam. See here for details. If you want to make this harder for them, simply click on one of their Google ads (which you can find with a Google search). Each click costs them.
Med School Profs As Drug Company Lackeys
What a cesspool. I mean the dirty work medical school professors do for drug companies. The profs make the drugs appear better than they are. Let me count the ways:
1. I blogged earlier about Duke professor Charles “Disgraced” Nemeroff taking huge amounts of money — which he then failed to disclose — to encourage doctors to give dangerous poorly-tested drugs to children. Nemeroff is (or at least was) considered a top psychiatry professor!
2. When the practice of drug companies ghostwriting articles for professors was revealed, New York University professor of obstetrics and gynecology Lila Nachtigall, the nominal author of a ghostwritten article, told a reporter (contrary to evidence supplied by Wyeth) that she had written all of her 1000 articles and 3 books. And she said this:
If they [Wyeth] came up with the idea or gave me an outline or something, I don’t remember that at all. It kind of makes me laugh that with what goes on in the Senate, the senator’s worried that something’s ghostwritten. I mean, give me a break.
It made her laugh. Yes, why should anyone care about the dishonesty of med school professors? What cave has Nachtigall been living in?
3. About half of published clinical trials were not properly registered, a new study showed (abstract here). A large fraction of these studies were drug-company-funded, I’m sure. (More than half were “industry” funded.) And the authors were often med school professors. Failure to register your study means you can distort the results to make them closer to the outcome you prefer by changing the “endpoint” (the dimension you use to measure whether the drug worked). Even among the registered studies, one-third used a different endpoint than the registration said. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of misleading results — making drugs look better than they really are — are being published. The level of cheating appears to be incredibly high — perhaps more than half of published papers.