If you google “easiest way to lose weight” the first entry is this. The people have spoken.
Thanks to Buttercup.
Author: Seth Roberts
“Baffling” Link Between Autism and Vinyl Floors
From Scientific American:
Children who live in homes with vinyl floors, which can emit chemicals called phthalates, are more likely to have autism, according to research by Swedish and U.S. scientists published Monday.
The study of Swedish children is among the first to find an apparent connection between an environmental chemical and autism.
The scientists were surprised by their finding, calling it “far from conclusive.” Because their research was not designed to focus on autism, they recommend further study of larger numbers of children to see whether the link can be confirmed. . . .
The researchers found four environmental factors associated with autism: vinyl flooring, the mother’s smoking, family economic problems and condensation on windows, which indicates poor ventilation.
Here, in a nutshell, are several of the weaknesses with the way epidemiology is currently practiced. I doubt there is anything to this, but who knows? It deserves further investigation. Here’s what could have been better:
1. The researchers did dozens of statistical tests but did not correct for the number of tests. This means there will be a high rate of false positives. The researchers appear to not quite understand this. They don’t need “further study of larger numbers” of subjects — they simply need studies of different populations. The sample size isn’t the problem; the statistical test corrects for that. It is the researchers’ failure to correct for number of tests that makes this evidence so weak.
2. They did their dozens of tests on highly correlated variables. This is like buying two of something you only need one of. A big waste. That they measured something as specific as vinyl flooring implies they gave a long questionnaire to their subjects. Perhaps there were 100 questions. Answers to those questions are likely to be highly correlated. Expensive homes tend to be different in several ways from cheaper homes. The presence/absence of vinyl flooring is likely to be correlated with family economic conditions and condensation on windows (more expensive = better ventilation). The researchers could have used factor analysis or principal components analysis to boil down their long questionnaire into a small number of factors — like 4. So instead of doing 100 tests, they could have done 4 much stronger tests. Then, if there was an unexpected correlation, there would be a good reason to take it seriously.
Someone quoted later in the article gets it completely wrong:
Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician who is director of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, called the results “intriguing, but in my mind preliminary because they are based on very small numbers.”
Nope. Statistical tests correct for sample size. This is like an astronomer saying the sun revolves around the earth. In this article this happens twice.
Coconut Oil and Alzheimer’s Disease
I recently blogged about the discovery of Dr. Mary Newport, a Florida doctor, that her husband’s Alzheimer’s got better when he ate coconut oil. Dr. Newport now has a website devoted to the subject.
China and Electric Cars
According to the New York Times,
Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and making it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that.
Since I live in Beijing, I am glad to hear this. The story omits an important detail. Every day in Beijing, dozens of electric bikes zoom by me as I ride my non-electric bike. There are 30 or 40 models available, average price about $300. This means when battery makers make car batteries, they will build on a wealth of experience derived from making millions of bike batteries. This isn’t China with cheap labor, as Americans usually imagine the situation; this is China with more experienced labor. It isn’t obvious that American car makers can ever catch up.
The article continues:
Electric vehicles may do little to clear [China’s] smog-darkened sky . . . . China gets three-fourths of its electricity from coal, which produces more soot and more greenhouse gases than other fuels. A report by McKinsey & Company last autumn estimated that replacing a gasoline-powered car with a similar-size electric car in China would reduce greenhouse emissions by only 19 percent. It would reduce urban pollution, however, by shifting the source of smog from car exhaust pipes to power plants, which are often located outside cities.
Please. It is far easier to clean the output of a few hundred power plants than a few hundred million cars.
The United States Department of Energy has its own $25 billion program to develop electric-powered cars and improve battery technology, and will receive another $2 billion for battery development as part of the economic stimulus program enacted by Congress.
I think it’s too late. If the $25 billion were used for rebates to encourage electric car buying, as the Chinese government is doing, that might work, but there aren’t any decent American-made electric cars to be bought.
In related news, Tsinghua University (above all an engineering school) undergraduates who come to America for graduate school now account for more American-trained Ph.D.’s than any American school. In case you think that American engineers are better trained than Chinese ones.
Natto Shopping (continued)
I found some natto not made in Japan. It is from Japanese Traditional Foods, in Sebastopol, California. It comes in one-serving containers with tiny shoyu and mustard packets, just like frozen natto. It costs more – 50% more — than the frozen stuff, to my surprise. Since Japanese Traditional Foods was founded in 2006, and the Japanese natto makers are huge, I suppose it makes sense. It tastes almost the same as frozen natto, although I plan to do side by side comparisons just for fun.
The package had a curious statement:
Natto is a fermented food product, so it is best to consume it as soon as possible.
Huh? I think this is basically false: the fermented bacteria prevent other bacteria from growing. Sure, you can overferment but that won’t happen soon. Just as you can leave cheese at room temperature for quite a while, nothing bad will happen.
The Nutrition Lesson Hidden in a Bowl of Miso Soup
Tyler Cowen is the only person I know who talks about the great value of travel. Schools should teach it, he says. I agree. If you’ve read The Shangri-La Diet, you may remember the turning point was a visit to Paris when I inexplicably lost my appetite. You don’t know that my belief in fermented food — to be healthy, we need to eat lots of fermented food — also began with foreign travel: A trip to Japan.
When I got back to Berkeley from Beijing a few months ago, I looked around my kitchen: What should I make? I came up blank. Huh? I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t think of anything. (In Beijing I had never cooked.) The first few days back in Berkeley I made grilled fish. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. Then I went to the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. At a Japanese food booth, including miso soup packets, I suddenly remembered: For my last nine months in Berkeley, after a trip to Japan in January 2008, I’d been eating a lot of miso soup. Every day. Which I’d never done before. Nine months was long enough to block out what I’d cooked before January 2008 yet short enough to be forgotten after three months in China.
Why did I start eating so much miso soup? In a Tokyo supermarket I had noticed they sold a lot of miso paste. Maybe there were ten types for sale. When I got home from Japan, that experience inspired me to buy a tub of miso paste. I’d add one or two tablespoons to a few cups of water, along with vegetables and thinly-sliced meat (plus vinegar and hot sauce). It was so delicious and easy that I started making miso soup every day. I went through five or six tubs of miso.
The miracle was how easy it was — that one ingredient (miso) should so easily produce such a delicious result. No one spice will do that. Garlic alone won’t do that. Ginger alone won’t do that. One ingredient was so compelling, pulled me so far from my previous cooking that I completely forgot about it after a three-month absence. During those nine months, while I was eating all that miso soup, I didn’t wonder why miso made such a difference. But when I finally thought of the umami hypothesis — we like umami, sour, and complex flavors so that we will eat more bacteria-laden food; bacteria tend to produce those flavors — all of sudden it made sense. Miso was so tasty because it was fermented. It was so tasty because it was so missing.
Natto Shopping
After re-reading this post, written before my current fermented-food craze, I decided to see if I could buy natto (fermented soybeans) in Berkeley. At Whole Foods, they didn’t know what it was. Nor did they sell it. At Berkeley Bowl, which Saveur magazine recently seemed to say was the best food market in America, they told me it was in Aisle 3. I looked and looked and couldn’t find it. Okay, frozen natto is in Aisle 7, I was told. There was a surprisingly large selection, maybe 10 choices. Frozen natto comes in one-serving plastic containers bundled into packages of two or three that look like this:
That’s a two-container bundle. One serving is about $1.
Introduction to natto.
Do They Eat Dogs?
From a post about life in Taiwan:
Don’t they eat dogs and other odd stuff like snakes?
No. They don’t eat dogs.
I think a small fraction of restaurants in Beijing serve dog, but I never encountered one and I never saw dog meat for sale. In Seoul, however, they obviously eat dogs. I saw dog meat for sale in a traditional market. The dogs were alive (as many animals are in Asian “wet markets”). I later saw a booklet aimed at visitors to Korea that dismissed dog-eating as some sort of urban legend.
How Things Begin (I Got Uggs! update)
A year ago I wrote how the website I Got Uggs! began. Since then it has done well. I interviewed the proprietor recently.
Since our previous conversation about I Got Uggs! (April 2008), what’s happened with the site?
A lot more page views. On average, approximately 6,000 more. I’ve also increased revenue greatly by adding some revenue producing advertising. When we last spoke I was only using Google Adsense, but now I’m using three more sources.
How did you increase page views?
The first thing I did was change some keywords in my heading. For example, I added the words “Buy UGG Boots on Sale”. By doing that alone I got an increase of almost 2,000 hits overnight. The second thing I did was join three affiliate programs: Amazon Associates, Chitika, and ShareaSale. When someone buys a pair of UGG boots from the site, I get between 7 and 10% commission. Furthermore, I get money from other websites that want to place an advertisement on the site, and I charge them a monthly fee based on the number of page views using a formula I found on the ‘net. Now since, I changed the keywords, if you type “uggs” or “ugg boots” into Google, I Got UGGs! is on the first page or number 1.
What were page views before the increases?
I was getting an average of 1,800 page views per day in September and early October. That number went to close to 4,000 page views per day on October 4, and then to averaging 6,000 page views per day beginning October 5.
You get significant income from both I Got Uggs! and I Got Converse!?
I’m getting more from I Got Uggs, but it’s going down as the weather gets warmer, but I Got Converse is going up everyday. I Got Uggs is showing some seasonal changes in terms of the income stream, but I’m praying that I Got Converse will eventually pick up the full slack.
You hired an assistant so you would have time to write a book. What does your assistant do? What do you pay him/her? How did you hire him/her?
She currently scans pictures, looks for pictures in the tabloids, and proofreads for me, in addition to other things like going to the post office and make 99 cent latte runs to the Dunkin’ Donuts on 8th avenue. More importantly, I’m training her to do the postings for both sites.
I pay her $10 per hour and she works about ten hours per week. She’s actually a Landmark [High School] student [where he teaches]. Despite being a straight A student, she wrote a paper on wanting to be a personal assistant as a career goal. Another teacher told me about her, so I offered her the opportunity to try it out. Thank God, she’s awesome and she loves it! She’s actually my 5th assistant. The others didn’t work out for various reasons.
You still have your teaching job, right?
Yes, I’m still teaching, but I’m looking to do the blogs and writing full-time after this school year ends. At the most, I plan on teaching part-time at a college, but not full-time anymore.
A Shangri-La Diet Skeptic’s Log
From the Shangri-La Diet Forums:
I chanced upon the book on sale at Barnes and Noble for $4.98. I pored over the book with a slice of stratta, one chocolate lava cake, and a large Green Tea Frappuccino. I was smirking as I read it, in disbelief — it sounded ridiculous!! . . . I’ve been on different diets since 2003. I weighed 137.5 lbs at my heaviest in 2006. The lowest I’ve been was 126 lb in 4/2004. For New Year 2008 I resolved to take a break from caring about my wt. I wanted to see how big would I actually get if I do nothing – I canceled the GYM (saved $100/month) and ate all the food I wanted anytime. I was happy as a lark and actually shed some weight without even trying. My weight settled between 128-130 lb. New Year 2009 came and a coworker asked what diet I was planning to be on. She also informed me of the company’s drive, inviting employees to a health challenge: For every pound you lose, Pound For Pound will donate 10¢ to Feeding America . . . A sucker for “causes”, I committed to lose 7 lb. I have been procrastinating ever since – it’s not that easy to get back on track and start working-out again. I couldn’t give up Belgian Chocolates or Nutella Crepes. The first thing I do when I wake up is pop a truffle or 4 in my mouth. (isn’t that gross?) I do the same at night, before eating my lunch or dinner etc. There’s nothing quite like it – the texture of different truffles, the smell, etc., especially after having no food for at least 2 hours. I eat my dessert before my meal. When I read this book, I thought – this can’t be true. Lose your appetite without even trying? Let’s see… 3/18/2009 I cleaned up my dusty Tanita scale, replaced the batteries & weighed myself. It registered 128.5 lb . . . 3/26/2009 It’s not really time to weigh in or measure but yesterday my belt had to be re-adjusted down a notch. Results WT= 123.5 lb Body Measurement of parts with losses (inches): Waist = -.5; Abs = -.5; Hips -.5 ; Under Bra -.5 Total lost = 2 inches. I guess it works. I only have 2 lb more to go for the Pound for Pound Challenge. Have I changed my eating habits? I’d say I’m eating a lot less chocolates (by far). I’m so motivated to lose more wt. I have already shared the news at work, of course. This is by far the easiest diet I’ve ever been on with the quickest results.
It’s like a weight-loss ad come to humorous life.