Author: Seth Roberts

More Benefits of Fermented Foods?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

At a regular dental checkout a few days ago, I was told my gums were in excellent shape — better than the previous checkup. The only difference between the two checkups I can think of is that now, but not then, I’ve been eating lots of fermented foods. My gums clearly got a lot better after I started drinking flaxseed oil (went from reddish to pinkish). Now apparently they have improved again.

After the checkup I went to Whole Foods to buy kombucha. The person behind me in the checkout line was also buying kombucha. She had learned about it from friends. “You drink it because your friends drink it?” I asked. No, she likes how it makes her feel. It gives her more energy. “Does any other drink do that?” I asked. She pointed to the coffee she was also buying: Coffee has the same effect, she said. Since kombucha is made from tea, it certainly contains caffeine. On the other hand, I noticed an increase in energy after I started eating more fermented foods that contained no caffeine, such as stinky cheese, wine, yogurt, and kimchi.

“I Started Eating More Fermented Food…” (continued)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Previously: Tucker Max found that drinking two bottles per day of kombucha for a a week had several easy-to-notice unexpected benefits.

I have some comments:

1. The best thing about these observations is how simple the change is: two bottles/day of a readily available kombucha brand. Very easy to duplicate — let’s not worry about matching Tucker’s weight, etc.

2. The speed with which the changes were noticed (within a week) makes the whole thing even easier to try to duplicate.

3. Kombucha was not one of the fermented foods from which I drew my conclusions about fermented foods. Bacteria are so varied that the notion that all fermentation bacteria have somehow the same effect isn’t easy to believe. But since the prediction about fermented foods (they are highly beneficial) turned out to be true maybe there is something to this.

4. My idea that we like umami tastes, sour tastes, and complex flavors so that we will eat more bacteria-laden food (which nowadays would be fermented food) is saying that we need plenty of these foods. Why else would evolution have tried so hard to make us eat them? The implication is they should be part of every diet, like Vitamin C. When someone deficient in any vitamin begins eating that vitamin, the deficiency symptoms go away very quickly, within a few weeks, usually. The changes are easy to notice. So the details of what Tucker observed – the speed and size of the improvements — support my general idea that there is a widespread deficiency here that can be easily fixed.

5. I used to make kombucha. I’m going to start again.

Why Self-Experimentation?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

One reason for self-experimentation is very simple: To learn about the effects of a drug you are taking. Is it helping? The medical literature is unlikely to be unbiassed. Someone heavily involved in producing that literature wrote anonymously in the BMJ:

I also do a lot of ghost writing. Sometimes I report good quality studies to which I am proud to contribute, albeit anonymously. Yet, too often, I write so called reviews, amounting to mere panegyrics of the discussed drugs, or I report poorly designed and implemented “epidemiologic” studies, bearing gross biases. Many of the (paid) signing authors of these papers do not read the manuscript, let alone provide feedback. I am surprised at how easily such papers are accepted by some journals and how rarely their flaws are challenged.

Given the financial interests at stake, I do not see what recommendations or regulations will put an end to such long debated [meaning long-criticized] practices.

My first self-experimentation to have unexpected results involved an acne drug. I discovered it was ineffective — might have even been making things worse. Yet it was a standard treatment for acne. My dermatologist was surprised I had bothered to collect the data. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

To do useful self-experimentation here isn’t complicated. The main thing you would do would be to measure the problem before and while you take the drug. Before you take the drug, you’d want to measure the problem long enough so that you had some idea of what would happen if you didn’t take the drug.

If you’ve done this, I’d like to hear about it.

Another Benefit of Fermentation: Better Extraction of Nutrients

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Whole Health Source says:

Healthy grain-based African cultures typically soaked, ground and fermented their grains before cooking, creating a sour porridge that’s nutritionally superior to unfermented grains. . . .These traditional food processing techniques [soaking and fermentation] have a very important effect on grains and legumes that brings them closer in line with the “paleolithic” foods our bodies are designed to digest. They reduce or eliminate toxins such as lectins and tannins, greatly reduce anti-nutrients such as phytic acid and protease inhibitors, and improve vitamin content and amino acid profile. Fermentation is particularly effective in this regard.

For me the key word is sour (“sour porridge”) — another example of how our enjoyment of umami- sour- and complex-flavored foods drew us toward fermented food.

A paper showing that some types of fermentation increase iron and zinc digestion.

Thanks to Justin Owings and Tom.

Nose-Clipping Works

Seth Roberts1 Comment

From Igor Carron’s blog, which is usually about compressive sensing:

Since mid-December, I have lost about nineteen pounds (8.5 kg) by following some of the results of the self-experimentation of Seth Roberts, a professor at Berkeley . . . What did it take to do this ? For me, just one thing: a $4 nose clip that I put on my nose every time I eat. That’s it. No exercise. I eat what I usually eat although now in a rather lower amount (not because I am starving myself but because I feel full earlier). The weight loss was pretty steep at the beginning. Putting a nose clip has some social cost though and when I eat out with friends or through the Christmas food, I lose it. . . . I can now see abs that I had not seen for the past twenty years.

What One Economist Has Learned From the Financial Crisis

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Three things, he said:

  1. Finance professors have all been working for hedge funds. Their research has been about how to price derivatives and options. In other areas of economics, the research topics are much broader and include policy questions.
  2. Macroeconomics hasn’t made progress since the 1930s.
  3. Recommendations what to do about the crisis, even from economics professors, are based on very little they learned in graduate school. They hardly differ from opinions. Listening to his colleagues’ recommendations, he thought they would be backed up by something solid. They weren’t.

Will Like vs. Might Love vs. Might Hate

Seth Roberts2 Comments

What to watch? Entertainment Weekly has a feature called Critical Mass: Ratings of 7 critics are averaged. Those averages are the critical response that most interests me. Rotten Tomatoes also computes averages over critics. It uses a 0-100 scale. In recent months, my favorite movie was Gran Torino, which rated 80 at Rotten Tomatoes (quite good). Slumdog Millionaire, which I also liked, got a 94 (very high).

Is an average the best way to summarize several reviews? People vary a lot in their likes and dislikes — what if I’m looking for a movie I might like a lot? Then the maximum (best) review might be a better summary measure; if the maximum is high, it means that someone liked the movie a lot. A score of 94 means that almost every critic liked Slumdog Millionaire, but the more common score of 80 is ambiguous: Were most critics a bit lukewarm or was wild enthusiasm mixed with dislike? Given that we have an enormous choice of movies — especially on Rotten Tomatoes – I might want to find five movies that someone was wildly enthusiastic about and read their reviews. Movies that everyone likes (e.g., 94 rating) are rare.

Another possibility is that I’m going to the movies with several friends and I just want to make sure no one is going to hate the chosen movie. Then I’d probably want to see the minimum ratings, not the average ratings.

So: different questions, wildly different “averages”. I have never heard a statistician or textbook make this point except trivially (if you want the “middle” number choose the median, a textbook might say). The possibility of “averages” wildly different from the mean or median is important because averaging is at the heart of how medical and other health treatments are evaluated. The standard evaluation method in this domain is to compare the mean of two groups — one treated, one untreated (or perhaps the two groups get two different treatments).

If there is time to administer only one treatment, then we probably do want the treatment most likely to help. But if there are many treatments available and there is time to administer more than one treatment — if the first one fails, try another, and so on — then it is not nearly so obvious that we want the treatment with the best mean score. Given big differences from person to person, we might want to know what treatments worked really well with someone. Conversely, if we are studying side effects, we might want to know which of two treatments was more likely to have extremely bad outcomes. We would certainly prefer a summary like the minimum (worst) to a summary like the median or mean.

Outside of emergency rooms, there is usually both a wide range of treatment choice and plenty of time to try more than one. For example, you want to lower your blood pressure. This is why medical experts who deride “anecdotal evidence” are like people trying to speak a language they don’t know — and don’t realize they don’t know. (Their cluelessness is enshrined in a saying: the plural of anecdote is not data.) In such situations, extreme outcomes, even if rare, become far more important than averages. You want to avoid the extremely bad (even if rare) outcomes, such as antidepressants that cause suicide. And if a small fraction of people respond extremely well to a treatment that leaves most people unchanged, you want to know that, too. Non-experts grasp this, I think. This is why they are legitimately interested in anecdotal evidence, which does a better job than means or medians of highlighting extremes. It is the medical experts, who have read the textbooks but fail to understand their limitations, whose understanding has considerable room for improvement.

Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 15)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

ROBERTSÂ How is it possible that Cal Tech’s basketball team was considered better than UCLA’s basketball team in the 1950s? That was the part I was amazed at.

MLODINOW At least the early part of the decade. That was harder to understand than the Girl Named Florida Problem. I think in those days basketball was nothing–imagine saying that the Cal Tech curling team is better than the UCLA curling team. Since nobody really cares about curling it’s just a quaint fact that someone at Cal Tech, probably in the faculty, would care about curling well enough to organize a team. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, but in the 50s I think it was a much different sport and a much different sports world. Not to belittle their team; I think they had some really good players from the looks of it and maybe Cal Tech cared more about recruiting players for sports than they do today. Maybe our world in general is a little looser about things and you could invest the time to play sports more even if you were at a high-powered place like Cal Tech; not to be as pressured–to just study. I guess it was just a different world in some ways–a nice world–back then that could happen. Now college basketball is just a huge and money generating industry that no one would allow a school like Cal Tech–by allow it I don’t mean that there’s some individual disallowing it but the world will not allow, it’s not loose enough to allow, a school that’s not completely focused on that sport to have a good team in that sport. Everything is too high-powered today.

ROBERTS Yes. Of all the things in your book, that was the most staggering.

MLODINOW You should see the movie Quantum Hoops; it’s a documentary about the Cal Tech basketball team. I recommend it.

ROBERTS I didn’t know there was such a movie.

MLODINOW It’s on DVD; I’m thinking it must be available from NetFlix.

ROBERTS Yes, I’ll get it.

MLODINOW It’s very amusing–it is for me because of my connection to Cal Tech–but I think for the general public, it’s a very amusing film.

ROBERTS We were talking about unexpected things. If you looked at the Cal Tech basketball team, if you just looked at basketball in the 1950s, you would think, ’Well, Cal Tech–that’s as it should be.’ But then all of the sudden, 20 years later, it’s so very different.

MLODINOW I think in those days it was more like a club, like a sport, like what you think of as a kids’ fun activity and now the athletes for basketball are heavily recruited and bribed in one way or another, and the huge amounts of money at stake for the school for them. It’s a totally different calculus and it’s sad in a way, isn’t it? I think everything is like that today.

ROBERTS I guess what I’m saying is that there was something–you’re in the 1950s, it’s 1956–very few people saw that there was something hidden in basketball that could lead to what it became.

MLODINOW And if you were the superstar of that time you also didn’t get the rewards of what became today and it’s a little bit late for you now, right? I know in the bathroom in the Cal Tech cafeteria there was a framed article about him, I can’t remember his name, one of the superstars of the 50s who was one of the best basketball players to ever live–I think they claim that even today–who basically probably never even made a living from it, or not a good living.

ROBERTS Yes, that kind of brings us back to the very beginning. I feel like somehow the times have changed and people are smarter. Now you can make a living from what you’re doing. You’re writing this very entertaining intellectual history; finally there’s a market for it. Finally people are smart enough to be at your level so that you can write a book that you respect but you can get a wide enough audience.

MLODINOW Are you saying that in the 50s that couldn’t have been done? I don’t know.

ROBERTS Well, nobody did it; let’s put it that way.

MLODINOW No, nobody did it. I don’t know why.

ROBERTS As I said before we started recording, you’re the first person to ever do this. Will you be the last? I don’t know but you’re the first. You’re the first person to write intellectual histories that actually are popular and that people want to read, that they’re not forced to read by their teachers. It’s not just a tiny group of people reading them. Professors of course write them but they’re not well written and it’s just their job to write them; they get a salary from the government to write those books. You’re not getting any salary. You’re an entrepreneur and it’s just so different. Your books have to be popular or your job goes away. It’s just a different level of competence; your books are just infinitely more accessible, infinitely better than a professor would normally write. A professor is subsidized and that’s what is basically comes down to. Practically everybody who writes about science is subsidized but you’re not.

When the TV show The Simpson came along I would talk about IQ scores in my class and I talk about the fact that they had been rising and so forth. And I say, ’Well you know there is evidence that people are getting smarter and one example is The Simpsons; this is at a higher level than other TV shows that came before it.’ Now maybe that’s not so important, how intelligent is an animated show, but I think what you’re doing is very important and I think it may be a sign of increased intelligence. There’s enough of a market now for what you’re doing. There wasn’t before.

MLODINOW I’m certainly glad that there is and that people appreciate the way I put things.

ROBERTS I’m glad because that means you can do so much more of it.

MLODINOW Yes, and I look forward to that. It’s a great privilege to be able to do that.

ROBERTS When I was a freshman at Cal Tech I was always looking for books like yours but they just didn’t exist. So I ended up reading The New Yorker for my intellectual history. That was very narrow; they never did a good job of covering science. They never talked about geometry or DeMoivre, Laplace, or Gauss. They didn’t cover those people. But those people are important. But you do; finally we have someone. It’s great.

Interview directory.