One indication of the severity of the epidemic of allergy and similar disorders is the existence of a magazine called Living Without. Judging by volume numbers, it is 11 years old. Supporting the idea that autism may be caused by digestive problems, two of the six events on their event list involve autism.
Author: Seth Roberts
Poorly Made in China
The subtitle of Paul Midler’s book is “An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind China’s Production Game.” Midler is an American who helps American and European companies get stuff made in China. The book is about how, in a dozen ways, Chinese manufacturers manage to make manufacturing deals more profitable to them at the expense of their customer — and, often, the ultimate consumer. Most of the book is about what happens to an unnamed American company that imports “telephone numbers” of beauty products. One problem is “quality fade.” The product slowly gets worse until the importer objects. For example, at one point the fragrance put in liquid soap was changed. Instead of different fragrances for products with different labels, almond was used in every case. So a product labeled Aloe Vera smelled of almond. (I discovered I couldn’t trust flaxseed oil made in China.)
A friend of mine became a vegetarian after working at Burger King. Midler had a similar conversion:
I found myself losing faith in all sorts of products manufactured in China. I was soon careful to purchase health and beauty products that were not made by local [i.e., Chinese] companies, but by large, multinational corporations — but then I realized the body wash I had been using, while it was made by a reputable global company, was actually manufactured in a plant located in South China. . . . I knew these production managers well. . . . They believed that what a customer didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
I found myself using less body wash, eventually relying on only hot water for my showers. When no one seemed to notice the difference, I stopped using the wash altogether. And then I stopped using soap, as well. . . . Why take any chances?
The attitude of cheat your customer as much as possible isn’t a great long-term strategy, as Chinese manufacturers are learning — the situation used to be even worse. A friend of mine analyzes the situation like this: For a long time Chinese were taught Confucianism. When the Communists took over, that changed to The state is God. Now that system of morality is gone, but nothing’s replaced it. In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs wrote about two systems of morality, a “guardian syndrome” and a “commercial syndrome.” The commercial syndrome, appropriate for trading, placed great weight on honesty. (The guardian syndrome, in contrast, placed great weight on loyalty.) Behind Jacobs’s classification was the implication that these syndromes had evolved because they worked better than other possibilities.
Poorly Made in China was easy to read. It has those two essential elements: it’s a series of stories, long and short; and the author feels strongly about his topic.
One Crazy Diet
The Shangri-La Diet has made a list of Top 10 Craziest Diets Ever. Part of the description:
The principle behind this diet is that the body has a set point (the weight that it wants to sustain) and appetite is moderated by the body to ensure that you stay at your set point.
That’s exactly right. The idea that this is “crazy” amuses me.
Margaret Meklin Wins Russian Prize
A friend of mine named Margaret Meklin recently won the Russian Prize — awarded for the best work in Russian by a writer living abroad — in the short-story category. From her amusing essay about going to the prize ceremony in Moscow:
I chose to participate in this contest out of desperation: Working at a U.S. company in the customer service department, I was somewhat tired of clients who didn’t hide their annoyance at my Slavic accent.. . . I was hoping that upon winning this prize, I would acquire an inner strength protecting me from [their] impatience.
. . .
After the ceremony, I stumbled upon the main juror, the one who had ironically called me a “genius,” and the phrase he greeted me with was, “Are you surprised that you got it? You haven’t read the other nominees . . . they were even worse than you!”
The Wonders of Turmeric
From Time:
When he first started coming to me, I gave him the usual anti-inflammatory medications we use for arthritis pain. He had no side effects, but he wasn’t helped much either, so he stopped the pills and lived with the pain. Then he found turmeric. Soon enough, there was no pain at all. [Note that this couldn’t be a placebo effect.] And his lower back and hands, which ached before, were also now pain-free.
Is this another example of foreign substances reducing arthritis? (Not to mention other immune disorders.) Or something different? I don’t know but it’s really interesting.
Thanks to Chuck Remes.
Genes Or Environment . . . Or Environment?
Forty or fifty years ago, psychologists and other scientists talked about “genes” determining this or that. (James Watson still talks this way.) A certain percentage of the variation of this or that (e.g., intelligence) was attributed to “genes”. Hardly anyone outside genetics or behavior genetics knew what this meant, but many people thought they did. In reaction to the huge misunderstanding (e.g., those who said intelligence was “80% genetic” but did not know what this meant), psychologists began to talk about gene-environment interaction. “Is the area of a rectangle determined by its height or its width?” they like to say.
But notice how fact-free this view is. A tiny number of studies have observed gene-environment interactions but they are very difficult. I think this has made it hard to realize something basic and important. Years ago, I heard a talk about squirrel circadian rhythms by Patricia DeCoursey, the scientist who introduced the concept of phase-response curves. At her talk, she showed results from about 15 squirrels. She tested each one — with an emphasis on individual results that resembles self-experimentation — to determine how much light it needed to become entrained to a 24-hour light/dark cycle. One squirrel needed much stronger light than the others.
Here was an interesting finding that another scientist might have missed. What did it mean? Because the squirrels lived under very similar conditions (e.g., identical diets), it was almost surely a genetic difference. Let’s assume it was. In nature, sunlight is plenty strong. The lab light was weaker. In nature, the genetic difference wouldn’t make an observable difference. Only under artificial conditions did it become visible. It only became visible when the artificial conditions didn’t supply enough of something important (sunlight). In other words, the newly-visible genetic difference implied there was something lacking in the artificial conditions. The genetic difference implied the environment mattered. The opposite of the usual interpretation.
I don’t know any reason to think this is an unusual case. Aaron Blaisdell told me a story that shows its relevance to human health. Aaron is unusually sensitive to sunlight. Until recently, he could only spend 5 or 10 minutes in the sun before it became unpleasant. The condition is genetic. His mother has it; her father had it. It’s called Erythropoietic Protoporphyria. It is autosomal-dominant. Scientists even know where the gene is. That’s where the understanding of most scientists stops. A genetic condition. Recently, however, Aaron drastically changed his diet with great results, as noted earlier. At the same time as the dietary changes, his sun sensitivity got much better. He can now stay in the sun for an hour or more without discomfort. This is a gene-environment interaction, of course, but of a particular sort: The genetic effect showed there was something wrong with the environment, just as it did in DeCoursey’s experiment.
Sure, there’s always genetic variation — it’s just usually hard to see. The wrong environment makes it much easier to see. It reveals a range of genotypes, all of which would be harmless in the right environment. So when you come across a “genetic disorder” such as Erythropoetic Protoporphyria, it is likely to imply an environmental problem. No one had ever told Aaron or his mother or her father that their condition suggested that environmental changes would help them.
Assorted Links
- Oatgurt being made. Oatgurt recipe. I’ve made it once, it turned out well.
- a caustic review of The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain
- how to make many fermented foods
- hookworm therapy covered by New Scientist
- dirt and depression
Thanks to Heather Demetra, Oskar Pearson, James Lucoff, and Eric Wilhelm.
The Twilight of Expertise (mothers)
A friend of mine, who lives in Shanghai, has a 3-year-old son. She gets all her parenting advice from the Internet. This would be uninteresting except that her mother lives with her. (So does her husband’s mother.) On a daily basis, in other words, whatever her mom thinks about how kids should be raised is being ignored. My guess is that her mom actually likes the situation because it removes a source of conflict. But I didn’t dare ask.
Antibiotics and Debt: Sources of Weakness
Alexander Fleming, the Scottish bacteriologist who discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, served in the military during World War I. According to Happy Accidents (2007) by Morton Meyers, soldiers in that war often died from infections in relatively minor wounds. Rather than conclude that something was wrong with their immune systems, and wonder why, Fleming — unsurprisingly for a bacteriologist — began to think we needed more substances that killed bacteria. A hundred years later, the blind spot still exists. A few years ago I noticed that a wide-ranging course on epidemiology was being taught in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. I knew the professor. I asked him, “Will the course cover what makes the immune system weak or strong?” “No,” he said. You will look in vain for that topic in any epidemiology text. To call it a blind spot is being nice. Half the subject — the more important half — is being ignored. And Schools of Public Health favor prevention. Medical schools are worse.
In an editorial in today’s Financial Times, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel point out that debt is inherently destabilizing because it creates less room for error. Financial professionals and economists, including those at the very top, don’t realize this:
Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman, tried playing with the business cycle to iron out bubbles, but it eventually got completely out of control. Bubbles and fads are part of cultural life. We need to do the opposite to what Mr Greenspan did: make the economy’s structure more robust to bubbles.
Taleb and Spitznagel note that the dotcom bubble, when it burst, had only minor consequences. That’s because it was an equity bubble rather than a debt bubble. The stimulus package is just more debt: public rather than private. It doesn’t reduce the source of the problem: A too-fragile system. A great point — fascinating how rarely I hear it.
Just as Greenspan failed to understand the problem and chose the wrong lever to pull, so did Fleming and a million doctors and medical/drug researchers. They have tried to deal with a too-fragile system by killing bacteria. Bacteria, like financial bubbles and fads, are part of life. We need to make our bodies more robust to them. Fermented foods do that. By killing off bacteria inside our bodies, antibiotics do the opposite: Make us even more fragile.
Shangri-La Diet Quote of the Day
From Daffodil-11:
The other great benefit I’ve seen, the thing that makes it worth chugging my mix of oil and water twice a day in and of itself, is the change I’ve felt in my attitude toward myself. I no longer feel disordered and tortured and ashamed. I no longer feel that I’m daily failing at something that so many people seem to find so easy and effortless. Now this thing I’ve fought with my whole life has become so much easier, so very nearly effortless for me as well. It turns out it wasn’t a fundamental failure of my essential being after all. Who’d have guessed?