Author: Seth Roberts

Webware For Self-Tracking

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Zume Life will help you keep a record of many things:

The Zume Life personal health management system is now open for public beta, on the Web and via an optional iPhone application. Zume Life allows you to record, monitor and understand all aspects of your health activities. No matter what illness(es) you are managing, for yourself or a family member, or what lifestyle changes you are attempting, Zume Life can help you. Use the Zume Life solution to track:

  • Medications. Any and all, from Rx to supplements to chamomile tea
  • Food. Keep a food journal, and track calories, carbs, and/or points
  • Exercise. Keep an exercise journal, and track exercise type and duration (e.g. run 20 min)
  • Symptoms. Anything from anxiety and mood, to sleep disturbance and wheezing
  • Biometrics. All common measures such as weight, glucose, etc.
  • Life journal. To jot down anything else (“saw my dietician today”, “just had a great day”, etc.)

Monitor your progress through charts and journals. Use the system directly on the Web, or with an optional “Zuri” iPhone application. Sign up at www.zumelife.com.

Butter: Bad or Good?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

At the Fancy Food Show, I heard someone say that the better a food tastes the worse it is for you. “What’s an example?” I asked. “Butter,” he said. “It goes straight to your arteries.”

What a choice. I have three pounds of very expensive butter in my freezer, purchased from an Amish farmer who raises grass-fed cows. I eat it as often as possible. I believe butter may have fat-soluble nutrients we need to be healthy, nutrients that are found in high concentration in growing plants (such as grass) but not in ordinary animal feed. In the Swiss Alps, in the 1930s, Weston Price found small communities that produced almost all the food they ate. Because of the altitude, they couldn’t produce much. They did have grass-fed cows and prized the butter from those cows. They were in much better health, especially dental health, than their neighbors who ate mostly industrial food.

There was a time, long ago, when exactly the opposite of the overheard statement was true: The better a food tasted the better it was for you. Now it is complicated.

The Wisdom of the Rest of Us

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On Christmas Eve I wrote there was a lot to be learned from the web comments on newspaper articles and the like that anyone can post. My point was how wonderful this was. Now the New York Times has added a feature that allows the most popular comments to rise to the top (you “show” Readers’ Recommendations) as I hoped. For example. Way to go!

You can also find comments that the “editors” (the sub-sub editors?) recommend (show Editors’ Selections). They tend to be long and querulous. I don’t think I’ll be using that feature much but it is good to have it for when I want long and querulous.

Still no comments allowed on The New Yorker website.

How Bad is LDL Cholesterol? (continued)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

If LDL cholesterol level predicts heart disease then persons with low LDL should be better off than persons with high LDL. Here is what some Norwegian doctors did:

They simply selected sequential patients with LDL cholesterol scores below 2.7mmol/l. . . . They ignored all people with LDL concentrations from 2.7 to 4.5mmol/l but did enroll all people with an LDL >4.5mmol . . . So they then had two groups of people, those at catastrophic risk of LDL-blocked-arteries and those with [very] little LDL . . . They did the scheduled angiography and checked how many patients had >70% blockage of at least two coronary arteries in each group.

Guess what: LDL cholesterol doesn’t matter. They recruited 47 patients with low LDL-C, of whom 21 had significant CAD. They got 46 high LDL-C patients, of whom 24 turned out to have CAD.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

How bad is LDL cholesterol?

Probiotics and Your Immune System

Seth Roberts10 Comments

At the Fancy Food Show, five or six booths sold probiotic foods, usually yogurt. At each booth I asked what they could tell me about the health effects of probiotics. Mostly the question seemed to annoy them — especially the employees hired for the event.

But at the Oixos booth — Oixos is a Greek yogurt made by Stonyfield Farm, an organic dairy in New Hampshire — Amy Plourde, a graphic designer at Stonyfield, told me that for a long time she was “always sick” with sinus infections, colds, and even mononucleosis. During that time, she ate yogurt once/week. When she started working at Stonyfield she began to eat yogurt once/day (6 oz. at breakfast) and her health got much better. Stonyfield yogurt has relatively high amounts of live bacteria. Their website has a list of scientific papers about yogurt and the immune system.

My take is that our immune systems need a steady stream of foreign pathogens (e.g., bacteria) and pieces of pathogens (e.g., bacterial cell walls) to stay “awake”. When your immune system is working properly you fight off all sorts of bacteria and viruses without noticing. When your immune system isn’t working properly it overreacts (allergies) and takes too long to react (infectious diseases). Weston Price found twelve communities eating traditional diets whose health was excellent. Their diets varied tremendously but one thing they had in common was daily consumption of fermented foods, including cheese, kefir, sauerkraut, and fermented fish. This supports Amy’s story right down to the dosage. If you don’t eat fermented foods, you might use hookworms, which excrete a steady stream of foreign substances into the blood. (Thanks, Tom.) Hookworms definitely reduce allergy symptoms; I don’t think anyone has asked if they reduce colds and other infections.

The hygiene hypothesis.

Powdered Ice Cream

Seth Roberts1 Comment

At the Fancy Food Show, Kriss Harvey, a pastry chef and frozen dessert solutions specialist, served me a spoonful of powdered chocolate ice cream, his invention. It looked like chocolate ice cream but it tasted unlike any ice cream (or any food) I’ve ever had. It was there and not there. It was in my mouth and then it was gone. It was the most ethereal food I’ve ever had.

We had been talking about El Bulli, the Spanish restaurant of experimental food. Two friends of Mr. Harvey’s had worked there one summer and had come back complaining about the food (rabbit ears) and the workload. Just because people will pay a lot for your unusual food doesn’t mean you are advancing things, said Mr. Harvey. Maybe your food doesn’t taste very good. He pointed to a certain now-forgotten fad among New York dessert chefs a few years ago. That’s fashion, I said; it has a perfectly good purpose (to support experimentation). Then Mr. Harvey served me his powdered ice cream. Which was more memorable and impressive than anything I had at Alinea, an American version of El Bulli.

How I Will Judge the Inauguration Speech

Seth Roberts20 Comments

By this: Did he tell good stories? Did he tell stories that actually supported his points? This is hard to fake. It was easy for Dr. Eileen Consorti to tell me that studies existed to support her surgery recommendation but — the hard part — she never supplied those studies, probably because they don’t exist. Pronouncements are easy, stories hard. It’s easy to say X and Y (“we will . . . this is a time of . . . “) but if X and Y are just wishful thinking it won’t be easy to come up with a decent story — or any story — that supports them. If Obama understands how the world works, he should be able to tell stories that support his views.

Lyndon Johnson was a great politician and an excellent storyteller. Presidents since Johnson have been worse politicians and worse storytellers. Obama’s current popularity may reflect something in us rather than something in him. Right after 9/11 George W. Bush enjoyed enormous popularity. His speeches at that time, at least those I heard, contained no stories, which I think revealed that he understood little or nothing about the situation. (I would have told stories about overreaction.) The dismal outcome was foreshadowed. His popularity at the time was due to something in us, not something in him.

More The speech contained about one-quarter of a story. My expectations are hereby lowered.

Lack of stories at a high school graduation.

Beijing Shopping (stuff easy to get in Beijing but not Berkeley)

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Jane Jacobs said that one measure of a healthy economy is the choice it provides. A healthy economy provides abundantly at affordable prices; an unhealthy economy does not. Another sign of economic health, she said, is innovation: A healthy economy includes a constant stream of new products — nothing lasts forever. People in Norway are far richer than people in China right now, but what will Norwegians do when the oil runs out?

In contrast, my Beijing shopping revealed that Chinese entrepreneurs have been able to develop products that the rest of the world will want to buy.

1. Electric bikes. They’re everywhere in Beijing. They cost $200-$400 and a few cents per mile, far cheaper than gas. I would have brought one back to Berkeley but inability to fix it stopped me.

2. Keyboard covers for laptops. Transparent silicone plastic. Easy to clean. How did I live without one? These are a new product in Beijing, actually, but they are very cheap, about $1. I can find them for sale on the internet for about $15.

3. Cordless floor sweepers. They use a rotating brush to clean the floor instead of a air pump, as a vacuum cleaner does. That they are cordless makes them very easy to use. In Beijing they are obvious and attractive; I bought two and brought one back to Berkeley. In America I’d never seen them for sale but after I knew they existed I managed to find an unattractive one in Berkeley hidden deep in a hardware store. The price (about $50) was roughly the same in Beijing and Berkeley, except the Beijing models are much nicer.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three products are “environmental” broadly conceived. Beijing air is dirtier than Berkeley air; my keyboard cover and my floors get dirty a lot faster in Beijing than in Berkeley. I think they are a sign of hugely-important things to come — China inventing and selling the products we need for a cleaner world. It’s been called the next industrial revolution; a better name would be the second half of the industrial revolution in which we clean up the mess left by the first half. As Jane Jacobs often said, the problem is not too many people, the problem is the undone work.