Author: Seth Roberts

Do They Eat Dogs? (Continued)

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In answer to the question “Don’t they eat dogs?” a blogger living in Taiwan stated flatly: “No. They don’t eat dogs.” Now, from a Beijing University student named Xiong Lilin, here is a definitive answer about Mainland China:

Yes, we do. But not every Chinese person eats dog and never for everyday meals. In some provinces, there are restaurants that serve dog meat in the winter. A few people will have one or two meals every year during the coldest days. Eating dog meat can make people warm and prevent colds. Although these kind of restaurants exist, they are disappearing. In fact, mutton has the same function as dog meat. In my home town, Chengdu, many people eat mutton on DONGZHI, the day winter begins according to the Chinese traditional calendar.

More In this New Yorker article, published today, Michael Savage, the radio host, contemplates eating dog. Xiong Lilin later wrote: “Yesterday, my roommate asked me what kind of dog we eat. She seems to think that we eat pet dogs. In fact, we do not eat pet dogs, the dogs we eat are raised specially for eating and belong to different kinds from the pet ones.”

More About Turmeric

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From the Shangri-La Diet forums:

I’ve begun taking turmeric and it’s been a miracle. I used to be really into rock climbing and this really messed up the big toe in my right foot. (Wearing shoes 2.5 sizes too small and bearing all my body weight on my toe joints will do that, apparently.) The podiatrist said it was arthritic in nature and that the only thing that would stop it was to stop climbing. So I did. One year later, the pain had lessened, but it still hurt, and I couldn’t start running again.

Last week, on a humbug, I tried turmeric. I made some vile anti-inflammatory spice concoction and managed to get a few tablespoons of it down. It probably would have ended there because it was so freaking disgusting, but I noticed later that day that my toe pain had diminished to a dim sensation that was barely uncomfortable. Desperate to come up with a non-disgusting means of taking my new “medicine,” I settled on mixing turmeric, cayenne, and yellow mustard into a paste. It tastes like grainy, spicy mustard and I take about a tablespoon in the morning and a tablespoon at night. I’m also trying to take some fenugreek, cinnamon, and cardamom. I mix the fenugreek with my green tea, allow it to steep and expand between brewings, and then eat the seeds once they get soft. The cinnamon and cardamom are pleasant enough, so I just chew on them. (I use mexican cinnamon, probably 1/3 to 1/2 stick per day.

Vile Spice Mixture = VSM. James Lind tried a VSM in his famous scurvy experiment; it had no effect.

The Wonders of Turmeric.

Thanks to Heidi.

Academic Horror Story (Stanford University)

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From the Washington Post:

At the open house, a STEP [Stanford Teacher Education Program] instructor asked [Michelle Kerr] if she planned to accept the offer of admission [to Stanford’s School of Education]. Anyone else would have said yes. But Kerr, who calls herself “fatally truthful,” said the tuition would be difficult to afford and admitted she was philosophically out of sync with the program. . . .

[Professor of Education Rachel Lotan, the director of STEP,] called Kerr in for a 45-minute session on her doubts about the STEP policy orientation. Wouldn’t she be more comfortable elsewhere? Even when university ombudsman David Arnot Rasch assured Kerr the offer of admission was binding, Lotan couldn’t let it go. According to Kerr, Lotan looked for legal grounds to keep Kerr out, something Kerr said she discovered when another official mistakenly sent her an email that was meant just for Lotan.

“I really can’t believe this response,” the official said of Kerr’s decision to accept admission and decline another meeting with Lotan. “Are you forwarding her response to the lawyer?”

Kerr called Lotan “a ruthless political animal who believes she was protecting her program from enemy infiltration.” During a second meeting with Kerr, Lotan said that she asked a lawyer about the possibility of rescinding Kerr’s admission. The lawyer had told her that was untenable. “Unfortunately,” said Lotan.

After Kerr became a student at Stanford, Lotan tried to get her in trouble at her internship school. In an official letter to Kerr, Lotan complained “you raised your voice.”

More about this.

Tsinghua Dumplings

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Jennifer Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, has a nice post about dumplings, including this:

I once made 888 dumplings for a party, my personal record. . . . You might have crudites, warm cheese, stale hummus, left over at the end of the party. You will never have leftover dumplings — unless you burned them.

This reminds me how much I liked the dumplings a the Tsinghua student cafeterias. I think they were served at every meal but I associate them with breakfast, maybe because there was less choice at breakfast. Fresh and homemade and chewy and well-spiced and incredibly cheap (like all the cafeteria food). Maybe 6 for 25 cents. There was an optional vinegar-like sauce (speaking of fermented foods). There were two types (pork & ??) but I didn’t understand the Chinese names.

I tried to avoid them. They were too easy and familiar. But it takes a certain amount of stamina to eat strange food so if I was tired, I’d have dumplings.

Acid Reflux Cured by Kombucha?

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A friend of mine had acid reflux. When he ate certain foods — tea, chocolate, foods high in sugar or fat — and when he ate too much, he got a pain in his stomach. “Maybe I’ve got an ulcer,” he thought. He first noticed it after eating brussels sprouts, about a year or so ago. At the time it was only uncomfortable. He was taking Alleve for back pain around that time — that might have messed up his stomach. He was also worrying a lot at the time.

It got worse. Periodically he would have pain in his stomach in the middle of the night and during the day. In particular, after eating Oreo cookies. Mint tea, which he thought would help, made it worse. Friends suggested he try Prilosec OTC. A 14-day course seemed to clear it up. A month after the Prilosec ended, however, he went to a big party. He ate a lot of food, a lot of different things. He woke up in the middle of the night with the worst pain yet. So then he went to a doctor. The doctor said it was probably acid reflux; try Asiphex ($60 for two weeks), he said. It was less effective than the Prilosec. Then I suggested that some sort of fermented product might help. So he bought Activa yogurt. It wasn’t clear if it had any effect; maybe a small one.

Recently he was in Rainbow Grocery, in San Francisco. They sell kombucha. He bought some because I had spoken particularly highly of it. After four days of drinking it, he felt much better even though he’d only finished 3/4s of the bottle. His stomach doesn’t hurt any more. That improves his mood. His back feels a lot better — but that comes and goes. That might be a placebo effect, he says — “even though I don’t believe in kombucha, I think it’s bunk, but I have to admit that it works,” he says.

He’d heard of kombucha from his colleagues about three years ago. They raved about it but it seemed faddish to him. He’d tried it, but just to taste it. He doesn’t eat any fermented foods besides vinegar; he doesn’t drink wine or beer. Hadn’t been eating yogurt. He had gone on a vegan diet for a few months before the Prilosec. He’d thought the vegan diet would protect him from stomach problems, but he was wrong.

He has continued to drink small amounts of kombucha and the improvement has persisted, although recently something mint at a party caused a problem.

JAMA Editors Continue to Display Staggeringly Poor Judgment

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In an earlier post I called a certain JAMA editorial “the most self-righteous editorial I have ever read.” Perhaps the authors reluctantly agreed; the editorial, which used to be here, is gone. Since I quoted from it, you can still see what I was talking about. The BMJ has an article about the disappearance, which includes this:

The BMJ sent emails to JAMA‘s editor, Catherine DeAngelis, and the journal’s media relations office asking about the disappearance of the March editorial. The BMJ also asked whether Dr DeAngelis could explain why the new July editorial had toned down the policy outlined in the March editorial.

The response from a JAMA spokeswoman was “no comment.”

Correct: It is indefensible. What I said earlier still holds: The whole incident — self-righteous editorial, trash-talking by DeAngelis to a WSJ blogger, deletion of the editorial, failure to explain the deletion — “sheds a hugely unflattering light on the very powerful doctors who run JAMA — and thus an hugely unflattering light on a culture in which such people, like Nemeroff, gain great power.”

Acne.com versus Acne.org

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Acne.com, a website paid for by the drug company behind Proactiv, a common acne medicine, has the following:

Acne Myths & Claims: Certain foods cause acne. No, those french fries you had yesterday didn’t give you new zits today. In fact, scientists have been unable to find ANY substantial connection between diet and acne. So all the foods you’ve been afraid of — pizza, french fries, chocolate — are fine. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should binge on your favorites whenever you want — a healthy diet will help your body have the strength to help you in your fight against acne. So use your common sense, but don’t be afraid to indulge now and then.

“All the foods you’ve been afraid of are fine”? This is much too certain-sounding. T he studies that failed to find a diet/acne connection were poor. Other research suggests that acne may well have a dietary cause. The false certainty is self-serving. Because foods don’t cause acne don’t bother trying to figure out which ones; just take our medicine! It resembles my surgeon claiming there was evidence that the surgery she recommended and would profit from was a good idea when there wasn’t any such evidence.

In contrast, acne.org has this:

Myth: Diet and acne are related. Reality: The bottom line is we need more research. We do know that people in some indigenous societies do not experience [any] acne whatsoever across the entire population. This is in stark contrast to the widespread presence of acne throughout all modern society. It leaves us to ponder the question of whether the indigenous people’s diet contributes to their acne-free skin. Discovering a dietary way of preventing acne may be a future reality, however, we may live so differently from our hunter/gatherer ancestors that it has become close to impossible to replicate our ancestral diet. But let’s see if we can work together to come to some consensus from our own experiences. If you feel that you have cleared your acne using a particular diet, or if you are planning on attempting a diet of some kind, please post your method on the Nutrition & Holistic health message board.

That’s reasonable and helpful. The website that couldn’t hire expensive experts had better information.

Reviews of Proactiv on acne.org.

What Else Causes Acne?

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Previous posts have implicated Western Civilization and face-washing with soap in the etiology of acne. What else might be involved? A reader writes:

My girlfriend suffered from acne for years. She went to a dermatologist, tried every fancy soap and skin cleansing system, but nothing worked. She was also a Diet Coke fanatic. Every morning while she was getting ready for work, like a coffee drinker, she’d have one. It was her daily jolt of caffeine.

When I read about your diet modification, part of which included giving up soda, and your subsequent acne disappearance [I found that Diet Pepsi caused acne], I of course told her about it. “No, it has nothing to do with my diet, it’s hormones and bacteria.” She was not about to give up her beloved Diet Coke! How else could she function in the morning? In the meantime, she would periodically get upset at what she called the “open sores” on her face.

About 9 months ago, she decided to go on a detox diet — not with the aim of treating her acne, but just to lose a couple pounds. It required her to eliminate as many artificial chemicals and preservatives from her diet as possible. Out went the Diet Coke. Within days, her skin cleared up. She hasn’t had a major breakout since.

Yet more evidence that acne is due to lifestyle factors and can be completely cured by lifestyle changes, often dietary. There should be a list somewhere, ordered from most to least likely, of lifestyle causes of acne. If you have acne you just go down the list eliminating each one in turn until you find the culprit.

Where Do Foodies Come From?

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Yes, to the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. But until someone comes up with a better explanation of why we like umami, sour, and complex flavors, I will continue to believe my explanation: We need to consume plenty of bacteria every day. If you fail to give such large and important systems as the digestive and immune system something they need a lot of, obviously many things will go wrong.

In the current New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni writes about a childhood in which he ate too much. He was chubby, but not because of ditto food (which I think is the main cause of the obesity epidemic). There was much less ditto food when he was young. Bruni seems to have gotten abnormal pleasure from non-ditto food. One sign of this is how clearly he remembers certain favorite foods:

I remember almost everything about my childhood in terms of food — in terms of favorite foods, to be more accurate, or even favorite parts of favorite foods. . . .

Age 7: I discovered quiche. Quiche Lorraine.

Age 8: lamb chops.

No mention of fermented food among the foods of his childhood. His family apparently ate a lot of frozen meat. If refrigerated food is dangerous, frozen food is probably worse. I suspect recently defrosted meat has less bacteria than meat that’s been in a refrigerator for several days.

I wonder if Bruni was (and is) like the squirrel who needed stronger-than-average light to entrain properly. All squirrels need light; a few need stronger light. Under healthy conditions (sunlight) the genetic diversity has no consequences. I think the pleasure we get from complex flavors and the like can vary because of these experiences:

1. On a visit to New York, as I blogged, I noticed I was far less interested in fancy restaurants than in the past. The only change in my diet is that I now eat far more fermented food.

2. It isn’t just New York. In Berkeley I notice the same thing has happened. My interest in complex food has gone way down. Fancy restaurants, apart from the social aspect, are less interesting. My back issues of Saveur are less interesting. I read food sections of newspapers less.

3. Brain injury can cause something called the gourmand syndrome, where the person becomes obsessed with food with complex flavors. In one case the person became a restaurant critic (like Bruni).

Perhaps Bruni’s forthcoming book will shed more light on this. Everyone knows about the obesity epidemic and the allergy epidemic; less mentioned is the vast rise in interest in fancy food over the last 30 years. The word foodie was coined in 1981, close to when the sharp rise in American obesity began. Many newspapers, including the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, had until recently much bigger food sections than they had 30 years ago.

The Epistemology of Academia

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A professor complains about ivorytowerism:

In the epistemology of academia, no knowledge truly is knowledge if it is not vetted and approved through the channels it has established over time. Those channels are esoteric, made up of the “few, though worthy” who are the elect in the kingdom of knowledge. The epistemology of academia proceeds on the basis that the public has nothing to do with real knowledge. It doesn’t make any sense intellectually, of course, but it makes perfect sense if the primary goal is not really the development of knowledge but the preservation of a well-designed, internally self-confirming authority economy.

Some professors go further than this: The public shouldn’t know about academic research. Several years ago, a colleague of mine in the Berkeley psychology department was approached by a journalist. He was writing an article for The Atlantic about her area of research. She wouldn’t talk to him. She felt his article would somehow be wrong or unseemly.

Open access is changing this, of course. I’m a big beneficiary. Because my long self-experimentation paper was open access, it could be read by people outside of psychology. As a friend put it, “It cost Steve Levitt nothing to say he liked your paper.” Whereas inside psychology departments, you’d pay a price.