Author: Seth Roberts

Learning To Read Chinese

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I have tried a dozen-odd ways of learning Chinese. Few of them have worked very well . . . except one: the book Learning Chinese Characters (2007) by Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews. The subtitle is “a revolutionary new way to learn and remember the 800 most basic Chinese characters” and I agree, if revolutionary means “a lot better than other methods”. The method is simple:

  1. Break combination characters — almost all Chinese characters are combinations of a few hundred simpler characters — into components.
  2. The simplest components, not divisible into others, are associated with a picture that conveys the meaning. Someone pitching a baseball, for example, when outlined makes the character for nine.
  3. Devise a brief story, a little picture, to help you remember that the components together mean what they mean. For example, the characters for white and ladle put together in one character mean of. The story is something like: “Look at that white ladle. It’s the special ladle of Chef Thomas. The book is full of drawings to help visualize the stories.

I enjoy reading it. Partly for the feeling of accomplishment — I can tell I am actually learning the characters much faster than before — and partly because the combinations are intriguing.

The book I have says “Volume One” so I eagerly await later volumes to read more of what these two writers, who are not identified, have to say. I never saw it in Beijing; I came across it in a Barnes & Noble or Borders.

Yogurt Popularizer Dies: Note How Old He Was

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Daniel Carasso, who popularized yogurt worldwide via the Dannon brand, died on Sunday. He was 103. From the obituary in the NY Times:

In 1916 his father took the family back to Spain, where he [the father] became disturbed by the high incidence of intestinal disorders, especially among children. Isaac Carasso [Daniel’s father] began studying the work of Elie Metchnikoff, the Russian microbiologist who believed that human life could be extended by introducing lactic-acid bacilli, found in yogurt and sour milk, into the digestive system. Using cultures developed at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Isaac began producing Danone. . . in 1941 the arrival of the Nazis forced [Daniel Carasso] to flee to the United States. There he formed a partnership with two family friends, Joe Metzger, a Swiss-born Spanish businessman, and his son Juan, whose flair for marketing would make Dannon a household name in the United States. . .The little company operated at a loss until 1947, when, in a concession to the American sweet tooth, strawberry jam was added to the yogurt. Sales took off, new flavors were added to the product line, and Dannon yogurt made the leap from specialty product to snack food and dessert.

Thanks to Marian Lizzi.

What Causes Asthma? Not What the Tovars Think

Seth Roberts5 Comments

From Joyce Cohen’s The Hunt column:

For reasons unknown, Florida didn’t agree with little Noah Tovar. Since his toddler years, Noah, now 7, had suffered terribly from asthma. His parents, Jari and Selene Tovar, moved their family several times, trying to escape the mold or pollen or whatever it was that caused his breathing problems. Nothing helped much.

Noah’s parents didn’t know, I can tell, about a 1992 study of childhood asthma and allergies in Germany. Maybe childhood asthma is caused by air pollution, the researchers thought. Let’s test that idea by comparing a clean West German city (Munich) with a dirty East German one (Leipzig). Here’s one of the results:

The lifetime prevalence of asthma diagnosed by a doctor was 7.3% (72) in Leipzig and 9.3% (435) in Munich.

Less asthma in the dirty city! It wasn’t a significant difference but similar differences, such as hay fever and rhinitis (runny nose), were in the same direction and significant. Hay fever was much rarer in Leipzig.

Noah’s asthma cleared up, to his parents’ surprise, on a trip to New York. So the family moved to New York.

Even though “everyone was under the impression that New York would cause him more distress, it was just the opposite,” Mrs. Tovar said. “Not one doctor nor myself can explain what it is.”

Mrs. Tovar’s doctors are badly out of date. The hygiene hypothesis has been around since the 1990s, supported by plenty of data that, like the German study, shows that childhood allergies are better in dirtier environments. Noah is better in New York because New York air is dirtier than Florida air — that’s the obvious explanation.

In The Probiotic Revolution (2007) by Gary Huffnagle with Sarah Wernick, which I’ve mentioned earlier, Dr. Huffnagle, a professor of immunology at the University of Michigan, describes a self-experiment he did:

Could probiotics relieve something as tenacious as my lifelong allergies and asthma? I decided to take a probiotic supplement and make a few simple changes to my diet to my diet, just to see what happened. Yogurt became my new breakfast and my new bedtime snack. I also upped my intake of fruits and vegetables. Whenever possible, I substituted whole grains for processed ones. And I tried to cut back on sugar. [Why he made the non-probiotic changes is not explained. In another part of the book he says he also increased his spice intake.] No big deal.

Because I doubted this little experiment would work, I didn’t mention it to anyone, not even my wife. And I didn’t bother to record my allergy symptoms. . . My “aha” moment came after about a month: I’d spent the evening writing a grant proposal, a box of tissues at my side. After all these years, I knew to be prepared for the inevitable sneezing and runny nose caused by my mold allergies, which kicked up at night. But when I finished working and cleared the table, I realized I hadn’t touched the tissues. And as I looked back on the previous month, I could see other changes. This wasn’t my first sneeze-free evening; I hadn’t needed my asthma inhaler for several months. To my astonishment, the experiment had been a great success.

This is a great and helpful story. Only after I read it did I realize I’d had a similar experience. I’ve never had serious allergies but I used to sneeze now and then in my apartment and my nose would run a lot; I went through more than one box of Kleenex in a month. Maybe 4 in one morning. In January, I made just one change: I started to eat lots more fermented foods (yogurt, kimchi, kefir, etc.). My sneezing and Kleenex use are now almost zero.

The Tovars can live wherever they want, I’m sure, if they feed their son plenty of fermented food.

Previous post about childhood allergies and fermented food.

More After the column appeared, someone wrote to the Tovars:

Funny, same thing happened to me. I moved from England where I had chronic asthma, to New York City where I had none. Stayed in NY for twenty years asthma free, then moved back to England with my wife for the last ten years and my asthma has returned all the time I’ve been back.

When Did the New York Times Start Asking Abusive Questions?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

“Increasingly, the biggest companies,” writes New York Times reporter Michael Moss, “that supply Americans with processed food cannot guarantee the safety of their ingredients.” To Moss, safe means sterile. I believe the opposite but the whole article leaves something to be desired. It focuses on Banquet frozen pot pies, made by ConAgra. A ConAgra spokesperson is asked a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife question:

Pressed to say whether the meals are safe to eat if consumers disregard the instructions or make an error, Stephanie Childs, a company spokeswoman, said, “Our goal is to provide the consumer with as safe a product as possible, and we are doing everything within our ability to provide a safe product to them.”

Pressed to answer an unanswerable but fear-inducing question . . .

Probiotics Reduce Postpartum Obesity

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From Science Daily:

“The results of our study, the first to demonstrate the impact of probiotics-supplemented dietary counselling on adiposity, were encouraging,” said Kirsi Laitinen, a nutritionist and senior lecturer at the University of Turku in Finland who presented her findings on May 7 at the European Congress on Obesity. “The women who got the probiotics [during pregnancy and until the women stopped breast feeding] fared best. One year after childbirth, they had the lowest levels of central obesity as well as the lowest body fat percentage.”

That’s a unusual way to look at the data. Most studies of weight control look at weight change so as to adjust for individual differences. Maybe pre-pregnancy weights were not avaiable.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

How Fast Do We Rot?

Seth Roberts21 Comments

Not as fast as we used to. A friend of mine, who went to college at MIT around 1980, had a classmate who was the son of an undertaker. His dad had told him that when he (the dad) had entered the business, you had to work fast. Bodies would start to smell quickly. But now — around 1980 — that was no longer necessary. You could wait a lot longer before they smelled bad.

Which I take to mean that around 1980 the average old person, where this classmate came from, had a lot less bacteria in their body than around 1960. All that concern about “the safety of the food supply” — preservatives, yes, but also sterilization, freezing, sell-by dates, food handling rules, food safety officers, and microwave food — seems to have had an effect. From 1960 to 1980 there was a big shift from homemade food to factory-made and restaurant-made food. The uniformity of the new food caused the obesity epidemic, I believe; its sterility caused a great increase in allergies and asthma, not to mention a bunch of other disorders.
Speaking of sell-by dates, at a Japanese grocery store recently I wanted to buy some Yakult. At check-out, it was pointed out to me that it was one day past its sell-by date. Half price. I bought two.

Measuring My Brain Function: One-Finger Typing

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Noticing that flaxseed oil improved my balance led me to measure its effects on other tests of brain function. It also made me wonder what else in my life affected how well my brain works. Eventually I measured the mental effects of flaxseed oil with four tests, but each had problems:

  1. Balance. Time-consuming (15 minutes for one daily test), not portable.
  2. Memory search. Anticipation errors, speed-accuracy tradeoff.
  3. Arithmetic. Speed-accuracy tradeoff.
  4. Digit span. Insensitive.

“Speed-accuracy tradeoff” means it was easy to go faster and make more errors. It wasn’t easy to keep the error rate constant. If I got faster, there were two possible explanations: (a) brain working better or (b) shift on the speed-accuracy tradeoff function. The balance and digit span tests had other weaknesses. Only the balance test was enjoyable.

I’m still doing the arithmetic test, which has been highly informative. However, I want to regularly do at least two tests to provide a check on each other and to allow test comparison (which is more sensitive?). I tried a test that involved typing random strings of letters several times but as I got faster I started to make many mistakes.

I have recently started doing a test that consists of one-fingered typing of a five-letter string. There are 30 possible five-letter strings. Each trial I see one of them and type it as fast as possible. 15 trials = one test. Takes three minutes.

I am doing one-finger rather than regular typing because I hope one-finger typing will be more accurate, very close to 100%. With the error rate always near zero, I won’t have to worry about speed-accuracy tradeoff. Another reason is the need for skilled movement and hand-eye coordination. Doing this sort of task can be enjoyable. One-finger typing (unlike regular typing) is skilled movement with hand-eye coordination; maybe it will be fun.

I restricted the number of possible letter strings to 30 to make learning easier. Yet 30 is too large to cause the anticipation errors I might make if there were only a few strings.

Here are early results.

So far so good. Accuracy is high. On any trial, it isn’t easy to go faster, so speed-accuracy tradeoff is less of a problem. Even better, it’s vaguely enjoyable. Doing the task is a little like having a cup of tea. A pleasant break. There’s no need to do the test four times/day; I just want to.

Probiotics and Resistance to Illness

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A 2005 study compared workers who did and did not consume a daily straw of probiotic liquid. During the 3-month study, workers who got the probiotics were sick half as often as those who didn’t. Here are details:

262 employees at TetraPak in Sweden (day-workers and three-shift-workers) that were healthy at study start were randomised in a double-blind fashion to receive either a daily dose of 100,000,000 Colony Forming Units of L. reuteri or placebo for 80 days. The study products were administered with a drinking straw. 181 subjects complied with the study protocol, 94 were randomised to receive L. reuteri and 87 received placebo. In the placebo group 26.4% reported sick-leave for the defined causes during the study as compared with 10.6% in the L. reuteri group (p < 0.01). The frequency of sick-days was 0.9% in the placebo group and 0.4% in the L. reuteri group (p < 0.01). Among the 53 shift-workers, 33% in the placebo group reported sick during the study period as compared with none in the L. reuteri group(p < 0.005).

The paper gives no reason to think the probiotic dose was optimal. (How the dose was chosen isn’t explained.) A larger dose might have had a bigger effect.

When science writers tell about the “miracle” of antibiotics, they tell stories like this one, from The Probiotics Revolution (2007) by Gary Huffnagle with Sarah Wernick:

When my daughter was five, she pricked her left hand on a rosebud thorn in our garden. . . . The next day she ran a fever. . . . Doctors diagnosed an acute bacterial infection. Half a century ago, a child might have died from such an infection. But my daughter received antibiotics. After a day of intravenous treatment, she was better. . . . Antibiotics are true miracle drugs.

What goes unnoticed in these “miracle” accounts is the possibility that the person got so sick because their immune system wasn’t working well. (It wasn’t working well, I propose, because the infected person didn’t get enough bacteria in their food.) A child gets sick from an ordinary plant scratch? That child’s immune system has a lot of room for improvement. Huffnagle and Werrick say nothing about this.

Dr. Huffnagle is a professor of internal medicine, microbiology, and immunology at the University of Michigan. If the child of such a parent — well-off, well-educated, health-conscious, specializing in immunology — has a weak immune system, and the parent doesn’t realize this is possible, there is enormous room for improvement.

The Probiotics Revolution is 90% filler but the 10% substance makes it worth skimming.

The Twilight of Expertise (psoriasis treatment)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

From BBC News:

A specialist light treatment for psoriasis is just as effective and safe when given at home as in hospital, say Dutch researchers. Phototherapy using UVB light is rarely used in the UK because of limited availability and the number of hospital visits required. But a study of 200 patients found the same results with home treatment. . . .

One reason that the treatment is usually done in hospital is because most dermatologists believe that home phototherapy is inferior and that it carries more risks.In the latest study, patients with psoriasis from 14 hospital dermatology departments were randomly assigned to receive either home UVB phototherapy or hospital-based treatment. Home treatment was equivalent to hospital therapy both in terms of safety and the effectiveness of clearing the condition. And those treated at home reported a significantly lower burden of treatment and were more satisfied.

There was a time when blood-glucose testing (for diabetes) was only done in laboratories, with blood drawn in doctors’ offices or hospitals.