Author: Seth Roberts

The Effects of Institutionalization on Children

Seth Roberts6 Comments

From the latest issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry:

Young children living in institutions in Bucharest were enrolled when they were between 6 and 30 months of age. Following baseline assessment, 136 children were randomly assigned to care as usual (continued institutional care) or to removal and placement in foster care that was created as part of the study. Psychiatric disorders, symptoms, and comorbidity were examined by structured psychiatric interviews of caregivers of 52 children receiving care as usual and 59 children in foster care when the children were 54 months of age. Both groups were compared to 59 typically developing, never-institutionalized Romanian children recruited from pediatric clinics in Bucharest. Foster care was created and supported by social workers in Bucharest who received regular consultation from U.S. clinicians. Results: Children with any history of institutional rearing had more psychiatric disorders than children without such a history (53.2% versus 22.0%). Children removed from institutions and placed in foster families were less likely to have internalizing disorders than children who continued with care as usual (22.0% versus 44.2%). Boys were more symptomatic than girls regardless of their caregiving environment and, unlike girls, had no reduction in total psychiatric symptoms following foster placement.

Note the phrase “internalizing disorders” — it means that other types of disorders were not decreased by the expensive treatment. Moreover, the 22.0% “control” value is probably higher than what you’d find if all kids of that age were surveyed; I assume the kids found at pediatric clinics are less healthy than average. Although the experiment is trying to show a (negative) effect of institutionalization, it doesn’t even manage to do that very well, because of the cherry-picking aspect of the results. All in all, a horrible situation.

Micromeasures of development — something you can measure every week, for example — might help so that many little things could be tried with individual children rather than doing these difficult large-scale experiments.

The whole thing has the feel of the 1800s when to be institutionalized was to be at high risk for some sort of vitamin deficiency, such as pellagra or beriberi.

More Benefits of Fermented Foods

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A study published last year in Oncology Reports found that fermented noni (an Asian fruit) juice fights cancer in rats.

Noni (Morinda citrifolia) has been used in traditional Polynesian folk medicine for more than 2,000 years. Recently, researchers have discovered that Noni juice has the ability to destroy cancerous tumors. . . .

The researchers evaluated Noni’s ability to both prevent and treat cancer. In the prevention study, female mice were injected with one of three substances: fNE, a phosphate-balanced solution (PBS, which is similar to saline solution), or lipopolysaccharides (LPS, a natural toxin found in bacteria and in fermented Noni juice) for three days. Then the researchers injected the mice with lung cancer and sarcoma cells. In the treatment study, the mice were first injected with the cancer cells, and then treated with three doses of fNE [fermented noni exudate], LPS [lipopolysaccharides], or PBS [phosphate balance solution].

A fter the mice were injected with fNE, they developed greater numbers of immune cells such as granulocytes (a type of white blood cell) and natural killer (NK) cells, indicating that fNE had stimulated their immune system. A month after receiving fNE for sarcoma treatment or prevention, more than 85 percent of the mice were not only alive, but also cancer-free. fNE also was effective against lung cancer tumor cells, although the tumor prevention rate was slightly lower (62 percent). Meanwhile, all of the mice that received PBS or LPS died.

Emphasis added. It is telling that they used fermented noni juice rather than plain noni juice; apparently plain noni juice is less effective. Fermented juice has many more bacteria than plain juice; it makes a lot of sense that the fermented bacteria stimulate the immune system.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

A Book About the Value of Fermented Foods

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Handbook of fermented functional foods, second edition, 2008.

Presenting new findings and interpretations that point even more clearly to the important role fermented foods play in our diet and overall health, this second edition demonstrates the current knowledge of fermented food production and reflects the growing credibility of probiotics in health maintenance.

You can read a lot of it online.

The Nutritional Wisdom of Young Chicks

Seth Roberts1 Comment

After I wrote that young children may be picky eaters because they are offered unhealthy food, some readers disagreed. But here is another example:

I myself have been amazed to see hungry young chicks refuse to touch a purified diet until we added thiamin, which we discovered to have been accidentally omitted from a published formula.

From Kenneth Carpenter’s excellent Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B (2000), p. 193. If young chicks can better judge the nutritional quality of food than nutrition professors, perhaps young children can, in some situations, better judge the nutritional quality of food than their parents. And rightly decide that food their parents think is healthy isn’t so healthy.

The wisdom of the one-year-old picky eater.

Strip Clubs and Research Universities

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In the 1990s, there was a high-end “men’s club” (strip club) in New York named Scores. Upstairs at Scores was a special lounge where you paid $500 (or so) to get in and $180 (or so) for a bottle of champagne. A friend of mine, who told me about this, knew a woman who worked there. The men who went upstairs expected to get a blowjob. But this wasn’t in the job description of the women who worked there. They didn’t want to give blowjobs — and they didn’t. She didn’t mind stripping but working in the upstairs lounge was really uncomfortable because of the differing expectations.

The same thing happens at UC Berkeley (and no doubt other research universities). When I was a grad student, and went to Berkeley to give a job talk, I met with grad students there. One of them asked: Which do you like better, research or teaching? Research, I said. The grad students were amused. The proper answer to that question is “I like both equally” — but, as all faculty and grad students knew, about 95% of Berkeley professors like research more than teaching. You just weren’t supposed to say so.

Why? Just as it was in the interests of Scores management to conceal the fact that you were not going to get a blowjob upstairs, so it is in the interests of those who promote UC Berkeley to the outside world to conceal the fact that the vast majority of Berkeley professors care little about teaching. UC Berkeley undergraduates, who have paid far more than $500, often realize this basic fact only when it is too late — after they have come. Just as at Scores, the difference in expectations makes both sides uncomfortable. It bothers the average undergraduate that the average professor doesn’t seem to care very much and doesn’t try harder. “Isn’t it part of their job to teach us?” the students say. The average professor dislikes that the average undergraduate doesn’t “care about learning” — a fancy way of saying that they want to be entertained. What goes unspoken among Berkeley professors — just as I imagine it did among Scores employees — is that what the students want is seen by professors as demeaning. It would be demeaning to try hard to give the students what they want; it would be like being their servant.

Yogurt Power

Seth Roberts12 Comments

My interest in fermented food started in January, at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, where I had a theoretical idea: The pleasure we get from sour, umami, and complex flavors had the effect, when it evolved, of increasing bacteria intake. This suggests we need to consume plenty of bacteria to be healthy. Three things happened at that convention that supported these ideas: (a) Someone trying to make a high-end non-alcoholic drink said he found it impossible to get enough complexity without fermentation. (b) I remembered that after a trip to Japan, I had started eating lots of miso soup. Miso (fermented soy beans) is an unusually effective flavoring agent. (c) A Stonyfield Farms employee told me that her health improved a lot when she started eating yogurt every day two years ago. (Stonyfield Farms makes yogurt.)

Recently I learned more about the health improvement. She started eating more yogurt about two years ago because she changed jobs — from an architecture firm in Boston to Stonyfield, in New Hampshire, where the employee kitchen has a refrigerator full of free yogurt. In Boston, she ate yogurt about once/week; at Stonyfield, she eats it once/day (for breakfast).

When she moved to New Hampshire, she also changed her diet in other ways. She now eats more foods that are “natural and organic” and less fast food. She doesn’t eat anything with aspartame any more; she also avoids caffeine. She eats more fruits and vegetables. Maybe the biggest change is that she eats three good meals every day instead of one meal on the run. Other changes in her life include less stress, a different atmosphere, and more exposure to nature.

In Boston, she had lots of colds and sinus infections, maybe 3-4/year. When she got sick it took a long time — 2 weeks — to get better. She also felt sick to her stomach a lot. In Boston she got mononucleosis; it took six months to completely recover. In New Hampshire, she’s had only 1 cold in the past year and it only lasted 3-4 days. No other illnesses. Another change she’s happy about is that she gained weight. In Boston she weighed about 90 pounds; now she weighs about 110. (She’s 5′ 4″ and 30 years old.)

She’s noticed that Stonyfield employees are healthier than other places she’s worked (as this study suggests). Fewer people are sick and when they’re sick they aren’t sick as long. Everyone eats the free yogurt, except the lactose-intolerant. Stonyfield yogurt contains less than half the lactose of milk; for some lactose-intolerant people that’s low enough, for others it isn’t low enough. (Stonyfield makes a soy yogurt without lactose.)

Human Sonar and Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts2 Comments

This fascinating article by Daniel Kish, a blind psychologist, describes how he navigates via tongue clicks. The echos tell him about his surroundings. I was struck by the similarities with self-experimentation:

  1. Don’t wait for experts. A blind person could wait for a sighted person (“At the time I went to school, blind kids either waited for people to take us around or we taught ourselves to strike out on our own”). Just as I could have waited for a sleep expert to figure out why I was waking up too early. But I didn’t: I struck out on my own via self-experimentation.
  2. Many little probes. Kish guided himself by clicking his tongue many times. Likewise, effective self-experimentation, in my experience, involves many little experiments.
  3. Free. Kish can go where he wants when he wants. It costs nothing. Likewise, my self-experimentation needs no grant, and allows me to study whatever I want and reach any conclusion.
  4. Learning by doing. An experiment, like sonar, involves doing something, getting feedback, and moving forward based on interpretation of the feedback.
  5. Active better than passive. “Passive sonar that relies on incidental noises such as footsteps produces relatively vague images. Active sonar, in which a noise such as a tongue click is produced specifically to generate echoes, is much more precise,” writes Kish. Likewise, I’ve learned more from active experimentation than from measuring something day after day, which relies on natural variation.
  6. Ancient. “The readiness with which people learn sonar suggests to me it may be an inbuilt skill,” writes Kish. Self-experimentation is a form of trial and error, which predates humans.
  7. Verification in other ways. “Ultimately, students verify what they hear by touching,” writes Kish. The solutions I come up with via self-experimentation I verify by using them. Do they work? Another kind of verification is with experiments involving others.

The broad similarity is that self-experimentation, at least mine, is a way of navigating a world with plenty of important cause-effect relationships I don’t know about (e.g., what makes my sleep better or worse). Rather than continually bumping into them.

The American Health Paradox: What Causes It?

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Americans spend more on health care than people in 29 other rich countries but our health is near the bottom of the list. Shouldn’t more money buy better health? This is the American health paradox. What causes it?

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Atul Gawande, in an excellent article, tries to find out how the money is wasted. He visits a small Texas town where he finds an entrepreneurial attitude among doctors — a tendency to order more tests and do more procedures because doing so will generate more revenue. (A weakness that my own surgeon may have succumbed to.) Gawande does his best to figure out how things could be better but comes up short. He finds better systems of care — but they seem to be losing rather than winning. I think Gawande is too close to the problem he is writing about to see the really large forces at work.

In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs pointed out that Marx got it wrong: The fundamental conflict in society isn’t between owners and workers, it’s between those who benefit from the status quo and those who benefit from change. There are plenty of owners and workers on both sides. The balance — or rather imbalance — of power determines what happens. The more powerful the status quo, the less change. Lack of change means lack of innovation; lack of innovation means that problems build up unsolved.

If the status quo is powerful enough, the problems get worse and worse, remaining unsolved — until the whole thing collapses. (This is what Jared Diamond failed to understand in Collapse.)Â A city economy relies heavily on a single product; the resources to make that product run out (Jacobs often pointed out that nothing lasts forever), often suddenly; and the whole city dies. Manchester (cloth) and Detroit (cars) are modern examples. Was the current financial crisis due to reckless lending? Not really. That was an opportunistic infection. It was due to a problem building up unsolved: lack of affordable housing, which was due to lack of innovation in the housing industry. Lack of real solutions made room for a phony solution that, funny coincidence, benefited the powerful: rip off poor people by lending them too much money. (A new form of predatory lending that took advantage of the human tendency toward speculative bubbles.) Just like resource depletion, the phony solution worked and worked and worked, until, all of a sudden, it stopped working and the whole giant structure fell down, hurting the poor and powerful alike.

The cause of the American health paradox is American inequality. America is more unequal than other countries. Everywhere, in every country, the powerful prefer the status quo but in America the rich and elite are especially powerful relative to the poor, so the status quo is especially entrenched and innovation especially well-squelched. America has a lot of health problems building up unsolved. Perhaps the most obvious is obesity, which affects the poor far more than the rich. The further the rich from the poor — that is, the more inequality — the more the rich can ignore it. And they have: The healthcare establishment’s record on prevention and treatment of obesity is terrible. Staggeringly bad. In one tiny example, when I proposed a rat experiment to test an idea behind the Shangri-La Diet, I was denied permission by the UC Berkeley Animal Care and Use Committee: My idea couldn’t possibly be true, I was told. Had there been plenty of poor people on the committee, instead of none, I think the outcome would have been different. Problems such as depression, allergies, autoimmune disorders, and autism are likewise building up with no real progress being made. An example of a real solution is home glucose monitoring for diabetes. This came from outside the healthcare establishment — from Richard Bernstein, an engineer with diabetes.

Although The Economy of Cities was published in 1969, it has not received the attention it deserves. Lots of well-read people dislike inequality, and the connection between inequality and poor health has been documented many times, especially by Richard Wilkinson, but the Jacobian point that more inequality means less innovation means problems stacking up unsolved is not widely appreciated. In a whole book about the badness of inequality (Inequality Matters, 2005), I didn’t see this point made even once. In his New Yorker article, Gawande fails to understand Jacobs’s point that farmers didn’t invent tractors; the big improvements to American (and world) health are not going to come from doctors or anyone now powerful in healthcare. They are too wedded to the status quo. (Notice that this recent innovation in affordable housing, the nano home, comes from a car company — an Indian one.) Gawande, being a doctor, surrounded by the powerful at Harvard (where he teaches), is in a poor position to figure this out. Where will the big improvements in health actually arise? From people who benefit from change. A reasonable healthcare policy would try to empower them.

The Death of Advertising? No Way

Seth Roberts6 Comments

James Fallows wonders if the decline of newspapers is one effect of a much larger trend: the decline of advertising. He quotes a reader:

The real problem is, advertising is dying. It’s just pulling down newspapers along the way. Next up: TV, radio, and Google.

Advertising isn’t cost-effective, the reader says. This is becoming increasingly clear. Companies can no longer justify the expense.

I would bet a lot of money this is wrong. Advertising isn’t dying; it is moving to a more differentiated personalized form, as has happened in dozens of industries. Jane Jacobs wrote about this in The Economy of Cities: the historical flow is from artisanal production to mass production to differentiated production. An example is software. Long ago, programs were written by individuals: artisanal production. Then came software produced by large companies, such as Microsoft: mass production. Now we are entering the age of highly individualized software. The usual term is open source but open source software is enormously customizable. For example, some Tsinghua students made a version of Firefox specifically for Tsinghua students. Internet Explorer will never be as easily customized as Firefox. Which means, according to history, IE is doomed.

Fallows’s reader is wrong for another reason: The central role of advertising in human evolution. Language was the first advertising. Single words served to say (a) you had something to trade and (b) you wanted something. This is how and why language began — it facilitated trade. Language was so successful as advertising that lots of other uses evolved on top of that use, just as newspapers and magazines do a lot besides carry advertisements. Human evolution, in my view, is the story of how we became occupational specialists; by increasing trade, advertising was central to that. In the form of language, it’s been a huge force pushing evolution for the last 100,000-odd years. Given that longevity, the probability it will disappear in the next 100 years is very low.

The language evolution theory makes a prediction. Words can easily be used (a) to announce you have something (“toothpaste!”) and (b) to ask for something (“toothpaste?”). The first is push advertising; the second is pull advertising. We don’t hear much about pull advertising. But the current imbalance — huge amounts spent on one, almost nothing on the other — doesn’t make sense. Historically, both work. We use language both ways, including a lot of pull advertising. Surely most people say what they want (“I’m hungry”) more often than they say what they have to trade for it. (In China, some peddlers, such as the father of a friend of mine, do spend their day saying what they are selling.)

Based on history, I predict the imbalance will be corrected; pull advertising will become much more important. Not a brilliant prediction because it is already happening. Searching online for something you want, e.g. via Google, is a form of pull advertising. Guru.com, where you post a job you want done and wait for bids, is another example. An example that doesn’t yet exist is a free concierge-by-phone service. You call them, they help you buy something.