Author: Seth Roberts

Easy versus Hard: Hunting, Agriculture, Etc.

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Coming across this sentence

The more intensive the agricultural system, the more work required for a unit of food.

in Charles Maisel’s The Emergence of Civilization (1990, p. 35) made me think for a while and make a list:

  1. Hunting: Easy.
  2. Agriculture: Hard. In agriculture you have to start from scratch in a way you don’t when hunting.
  3. Self-Experimentation: Easy.
  4. Ordinary Science: Hard. It is much harder to discover something useful via ordinary science than via self-experimentation.
  5. Fermentation: Easy. It is easy to make yogurt or kombucha, for example.
  6. Medical Drugs: Hard. Hard to invent, hard to make, hard to sell, hard to get, hard to afford, not to mention dangerous. It is much easier to cure/prevent problems by eating fermented foods, such as yogurt.

What’s interesting is the starkness of the differences. Hunting and agriculture are two answers to the same question. I suppose we backed into agriculture because we over-hunted. In the other two pairs, I think the basic Veblenian dynamic was/is at work: The more useless, the more high status. Scientists must be elaborately theoretical and high-techy and wasteful to be high-status. Likewise with home remedies (such as fermented food) versus medical drugs: To be high-status, doctors had to promote elaborate, obscure, hard-to-get remedies.

Yogurt Associated With Less Allergies

Seth Roberts6 Comments

From the abstract of a 2006 study done in Japan:

An epidemiological study was carried out on [134] first-year junior high school students in Wakayama Prefecture. Analyses were performed to investigate the relationships among eating habits of fermented milk or fermented soybean foods and the presence of atopic diseases. Serum levels of total IgE values, specific IgE to house dust mite and Japanese cedar pollen in these subjects were evaluated to clarify atopic status. . . . RESULTS: Serum total IgE levels were found to be significantly lower in those subjects habitually eating yogurt and/or fermented milk drinking, in comparison with those who do not habitually eat such fermented milk foods. Subjects with habitual intake of these fermented milk foods were significantly lower in having various allergy diseases compared with those without such an eating habit. However, no difference was found on the total IgE titers and having allergy diseases between subjects with or without habitual intake of Natto, a fermented soybean food.

Note the small sample size. Contrary to some experts, it’s a good sign. It means the differences were strong enough to be significant in a relatively small sample. A review article about allergies and fermented foods.

Last January (2008) I got home from Japan and started eating miso soup so often I forgot what I used to eat. This January (2009) I went to the Fancy Food Show and became so interested in fermented foods I’m having trouble remembering what I used to blog about.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

John Tukey and GPS

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In this amusing article Emily Yoffe tells about her troubles with GPS. She fails, unfortunately, to look on the bright side — to say how flawed GPS is better than no GPS. After a talk by John Tukey, the statistician, at Berkeley, I told him that I had found the tools he wrote about in Exploratory Data Analysis to be really helpful. (For example, smoothing my data led me to discover that eating breakfast made me wake up too early.) Tukey replied that if the tools are helpful half the time, that’s good. It isn’t easy to make an interesting response to a compliment!

Something is better than nothing.

The Wisdom of Young Picky Eaters

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I’m sure that what we want to eat is a good guide to what we should eat, so long as you ask what our preferences would have led us to eat 100,000 years ago — before we killed off the woolly mammoths. (Curiously, I’ve never seen this obvious idea in any nutrition text.) A vast amount of trial and error is embodied in those preferences. Because we learn to like foods, our best guide to unlearned preferences may be what children want to eat.

The great essayist George Trow doesn’t quite get it, I’m afraid:

In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do.

The Wisdom of the One-Year-Old Picky Eater. The Wisdom of the Five-Year-Old Picky Eater.

Homemade Kombucha: The Hard Part Made Easy

Seth Roberts6 Comments

The only hard part of making kombucha is getting starter culture. Here’s an easy way to do that:

Get a bottle of K.T.’s [or any non-pasteurized brand] . . . remove the cap, cover with cotton [or paper towel] and rubber band, set in warm spot [room temperature is fine] for about 3 weeks [or less] and a nice baby culture will grow on the top! Simply pour the entire contents in your . . . tea and sugar mixture.

I noticed the same thing with Rejuvenation Company kombucha stored at room temperature for a few weeks. To speed up culture growth transfer the kombucha to a container with a wide mouth, so that it gets more oxygen. Adding sugar, a few teaspoons/cup of kombucha, might help.

Modern Veblen: Kathy Griffin Tells the Truth

Seth Roberts7 Comments

From Season 3, Episode 6 of My Life on the D-List:

TV SHOW PRODUCER [preparing Kathy for the questions she’ll be asked] What do you love about handbags?

KATHY GRIFFIN That they are a statement that I’m rich.

This reminds me of Albert Einstein saying his two favorite thinkers were Thorstein Veblen and Sigmund Freud. We really are smarter now, just as James Flynn says. Einstein, surely the best physicist of his generation, was unable to see that Freud was bogus, and, although he was right about Veblen, talented comedians now say exactly what Veblen said.

More Kathy Griffin in this week’s EW: “I have not read a book since last week’s Us Weekly.” That makes two of us, Kathy.

Refrigerator Parents

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Two epidemiological case-control surveys have linked the age at which, growing up, your home got a refrigerator with your chances of getting Crohn’s Disease later in life. The controls (without Crohn’s) got refrigerators later than the cases (with Crohn’s). This is not one of those data-mining correlations. It was (a) predicted and (b) found in two independent studies.

Crohn’s Disease is much more common in rich countries than poor ones so it was reasonable to examine aspects of lifestyle that distinguish rich and poor countries. In rich countries, the likelihood of having Crohn’s seems to be increasing over time, which is more reason to look for environmental explanations. One of the studies was done in Tehran, where a significant fraction of the population didn’t have a refrigerator when they were born. The control group was patients with irritable bowel syndrome, a curious choice. (The differences might have been larger had they chosen a non-inflammatory digestive problem.) The other study was done in England and used a control group of patients with a non-inflammatory disease.

Refrigerators, of course, retard the growth of bacteria, which I believe everyone needs to eat plenty of (the umami hypothesis). Long ago, “ refrigerator mothers” — mothers who treated their children with insufficient warmth — were blamed for autism and schizophrenia in their children. Now that it is clear that autism is connected with digestive problems there may be ironic truth in the old claim.

Thanks to Dennis Mangan.

Refrigerator poetry.

Progress Announced in Scurvy Research

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From here:

“Cure just around the corner”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists from the National Scurvy Institute (NSI) recently convened a 5-day conference to assess progress in the War on Scurvy. . . .
A cure is just around the corner, announced a spokesman at the conference. Over the past 30 years NSI, NIH (National Institute of Health) and ASS (American Scurvy Society) have spent over $30 billion on scurvy research. Pharmaceutical companies have over 80 new drugs in development to combat scurvy according to the FDA.

The 5-year survival rate after diagnosis of scurvy is over 50% up from 30% just 20 years ago although 500,000 Americans continue to die of the disease each year. . . .
Risk factors for scurvy include cigarette smoking, diets high in saturated fat, and long ocean voyages. Sailors are particularly at risk for the disease. A researcher at the University of Washington has speculated that there may be a substance in sea water that triggers the disease. . . .
Researchers at the University of Maryland, working on the Human Genome Project, have identified a “Scurvy gene.” From this it may be possible to develop a test to identify individuals at risk for the disease.

Scurvy doctors have long emphasized the importance of frequent screenings for scurvy in at-risk individuals. The disease can be effectively treated if detected early enough. Men and women over 40 should get regular checkups.

Conventional treatments for scurvy include frequent gum cleanings to combat the bleeding associated with the disease, surgical amputation of atrophied limbs that have been ravaged by the disease, and stimulants to combat the lassitude characteristic of the disease.

A pilot research program has been proposed to NSI that would study a possible connection between Vitamin C and scurvy. A study conducted on 20,000 Americans at the University of Florida showed a substantially higher rate of scurvy in people who don’t eat fruits and vegetables. Dr. Henry Jacobson, assistant director of NSI, was quick to point out that no such connection has ever been scientifically proven. Vitamin C as a treatment for scurvy remains on NSI’s “unproven remedies” list. Clinical trials conducted in the 70′s showed no effect of Vitamin C on scurvy, added an NSI spokesman.

In related news, officials at the American Pellagra Society (APS) have designated the month of May as “Pellagra Awareness Month”…

Tucker Max on Law School

Seth Roberts8 Comments

When Tucker Max was in law school (at Duke, a top-rated law school), he made a bet with his friends. He claimed he could sign up for a class, attend none of the classes, do none of the reading, never study, and — armed only with class notes from a friend (who attended the class) that he brings to the final without previously studying — get a 2.5 or better on the final, thus passing the course. (Highest possible grade is 4.0.) And he would let them choose the class.

A friend chose Federal Tax. A really tough class, it was said. The final lasted two hours. It consisted of several hypothetical situations to which you write an essay-like answer. Tucker finished 20 minutes early. He got a 2.7, which wasn’t the lowest score in the class (of about 60 students).

More trouble with the basics at Duke. For whom do law schools exist?