Author: Seth Roberts

Microwaves and Microbes

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Here is an interesting article about the danger of microwaved food:

Comparing the blood chemistry of people after eating food cooked in conventional and microwave ovens, a dismayed Hertel explained that “blood cholesterol levels are less influenced by cholesterol content of the food than by stress factors.” . . .

So was the blood chemistry of consumers. These abrupt measurable changes included a decrease in high-density lipoprotein (good cholesterol) and a sharp rise in low-density lipoprotein (bad cholesterol) levels following the consumption of microwaved food.

The two researchers also discovered marked declines in the number of red blood cells that carry oxygen to the tissues and collect carbon dioxide, as well as in white blood cells that fight infections.

The researchers say these bad effects happen because microwave heating makes cells “easy prey for viruses, fungi and other micro-organisms.” The author adds, “bad bugs are everywhere.”

Whereas I believe the opposite: The problem with microwaved food, when there is one, is that it is too sterile. The article later reports an experiment in which E. coli. grew much faster on microwaved milk than conventionally heated milk. I interpret that to mean the microwaved milk was more sterile: less competition for the E. coli.

Note I don’t mean to say don’t use your microwave. I use mine all the time to heat water and defrost stuff. It’s the experimental data and their interpretation that interested me

The Opposite of Naysayers

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In library school, future librarians are taught the saying “every book a reader, every reader a book.” They are not taught — by example or otherwise — to point out the flaws in books. Nor are they taught to impose their own preferences on those who come to them for help. Professors — who are in the same business, the spread of knowledge — could learn something from this. John Taylor Gatto has pointed out that the same teenagers who are disruptive in class are well-behaved in libraries.

The Naysayers.

Can Probiotics Prevent Asthma?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

From a UCSF press release:

In the first effort of its kind in the United States, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have launched a study to determine whether giving active probiotic supplements to infants can delay or prevent asthma in children.

The intervention is a novel method for the primary prevention of asthma with enormous potential to have a public health impact, said Michael Cabana, MD, chief of the Department of General Pediatrics at UCSF Children’s Hospital and principal investigator for the study. There currently are no known ways to prevent asthma, he said.

“It would be a great thing to be able to prevent asthma,” Cabana said. “We believe that using probiotics is a safe and effective way to do that.”

The press release is from May 2006; the three-year study should be almost finished.

Thanks to Steve Hansen.

How the Truth Comes Out (continued)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In a previous post I wrote about the need for independence — safety from retaliation — to tell the truth. Here is Jane Jacobs’s brush with this fact of life, from a 2006 interview in Urban Design magazine:

I got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation [to write her first book]; well, apparently, rumor quickly reached Harvard and MIT that I had this grant, and they had started something called the “joint urban design center,” something like that. So, I was invited up there to have lunch at Harvard by, I think it was Martin Meier at the time, and I forget who the MIT one was, but the three of us had lunch, so they had worked out what I had to spend my time on. (I had no connection with them, they just heard somebody had a grant, and they would try to recommend . . . ) What I was to do was to make out a question [a survey], and spend my time on questioning people who lived in middle income housing projects, to see what they liked about them and what they didn’t like, and that was to be my book on the city!

Well, I was so glad that I was not a graduate student there, I felt so sorry for anybody who was caught in that trap and had to do that kind of junk, and so I thanked them very much for their interest and left them. Oh my god! I was out of there, because I could hardly wait to leave this behind: disgusting, absolutely disgusting! And that’s what their interest in cities was, just junk like that….and different people trying to further their own career by roping in other people. And it was not to really find out things.

If the Harvard and MIT profs had said to Jacobs, “can we help you?” that would have been one thing. Under the guise of being helpful they said the opposite: Here’s how you can help us.

The Naysayers

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Jane Jacobs called them squelchers: People in powerful positions who say no to new ideas. The effect of such people is that problems remain unsolved.

What about scientists? On the face of it, research is about discovering new ideas. If you’re a non-scientist, you might even think that is the whole point of research. Certainly that is why it is supported with tax dollars — taxpayers hope research will improve health, for example. But quite a few researchers don’t see it that way.

In London, a group called Business in the Community is creating “ toolkits” to help companies improve employee health. One toolkit is about emotional resilience. An early draft of that toolkit contained this passage:

Heart attacks and other ischemic cardiovascular diseases can be created by stressful office dynamics that come from the top. Even one year of working under a manager with poor leadership skills can raise the risk of acute myocardial infarction, unstable angina, cardiac death, or ischemic heart disease death by a significant 24%, while four years under the same stressful conditions produces a 39% elevated risk of ischemic heart disease events.

The data are from Nyberg A, et al., “Managerial leadership and ischaemic heart disease among employees: the Swedish WOLF study” Occup Environ Med 2008. At a meeting to discuss this toolkit, attended by representatives of large companies and a few academics, the academics objected to this passage. The study was methodologically flawed, they said. “But what if it’s true?” the non-academics said. The passage was removed.

On The Larry King Show a few years ago I heard a prominent woman psychiatrist (Nancy Andreassen or Kay Jamison) say that it was a good time, if there ever was one, to have a mental illness because it was a golden age of psychiatric research. Researchers, she said, were making one breakthrough after another. Nobody asked her, why, if that was so, was bipolar disorder still being treated with lithium? That’s 50 years old. Why hasn’t research come up with something better? Two psychiatric researchers believe it is because research proposals to test new treatments are turned down due to what the critics call inadequate methodological purity. For example, you’re supposed to do such studies with patients who have only bipolar disorder, although comorbidity is common.

This is the behavior produced by what academics (admiringly!) call “critical thinking”: ignoring what is valuable or promising in a rush to point out what is imperfect.

Something is better than nothing.

Kimchi Power?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

From a Korean father’s recent email to his daughter:

It is reported that the [swine] flu is spreading in Queens area, except for the Korean-American concentrated area. The reason is that kimchi bacteria kills swine flu bacteria. Kimchi is now very popular in China. Please have [Grandchild 1] and [Grandchild 2] eat kimchi.

Can anyone reading this tell me if swine flu is less of a problem in the Korean part of Queens than in other parts?

I hope so. I eat kimchi every meal and use the big glass bottles it comes in to make kombucha. Kimchi is indeed popular in my section of Beijing but I thought it was because of the Korean students. There are so many the neighborhood is called Koreatown. There is even a North Korean restaurant! Beijing is close to Korea — which is good, because I love Korean food.

Thanks to Paul Sas.

Addiction Transfer: Food to Alcohol

Seth Roberts3 Comments

The last scene of the movie Clean and Sober shows a smoke-filled AA meeting. Recovering alcoholics smoke a lot. Likewise, alcoholism is a big problem among those who’ve gotten gastric bypass surgery. Just as alcohol addiction can become cigarette addiction, food addiction can become alcohol addiction:

According to psychologist Melodie Moorehead . . . at least thirty percent of gastric bypass patients will transfer addictions from overeating to another compulsive behavior. . . . The same problems and life challenges are there [but] overeating is no longer a viable coping mechanism. [Addictions to] gambling, shopping and sex have begun to surface in these patients but most alarming is the addiction to alcoholism.

Source. While writing The Shangri-La Diet, I spoke to William Jacobs, an addiction researcher at the University of Florida. No one becomes addicted to sugar water, he said. Only flavored sugar water, such as Pepsi. More generally, only foods that taste exactly the same time. Which strongly implicates flavor-calorie learning in food addiction. I think I understand that; what I don’t understand is why some people doing the Shangri-La Diet said the diet made it easier for them to stop smoking or drinking coffee.

Via CalorieLab.

Delicious: Roasted Salted Flax Seeds

Seth Roberts3 Comments

At the Fancy Food Show in January, I told Stephanie Stober, the owner of Flax USA, about my omega-3 research (which used flaxseed oil). In return she gave me some of her products, including a package of roasted lightly-salted flax seeds. It stayed in my refrigerator until yesterday when I tried some it for the first time. My god, so good! (And so healthy.) I could barely keep from finishing the (2 oz.) package. I finished it today.

Worm Therapy

Seth Roberts5 Comments

One reason I believe we are vastly bacteria-deprived (and thus greatly benefit from fermented foods) is the efficacy of hookworm therapy: Hookworm parasites can reduce autoimmune diseases. Hookworms, like fermented foods, stimulate the immune system in a chronic, harmless, low-level way. Here is a good introduction to the subject:

Musician Scott Richards and artist Debora Wade are two Bay Area patients on the hookworm treatment. Richards and Wade both suffer from an inflammatory bowel disease called Crohn’s. When faced with using a parasite as therapy, both patients felt they had nothing to lose. . . . Both Richards and Wade say they didn’t have to wait long to feel relief. Richards [described] waking up and the pain suddenly gone. For Wade, she needed to be reinfected, but today said she can eat foods that patients with Crohn’s could never eat: pizza & Thai food for example.

Related story.