Author: Seth Roberts

Omega-3 Without Fish

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Here is a very important omega-3 paper, titled “High Omega-3 Essential Fatty Acid Status in Nigerians and Low Status in Minnesotans,” that a reader named Melissa linked to in the comments. It shows you can have much more omega-3 in your blood than Americans even if you don’t eat fish.

Rural and urban Nigerians had similar omega-3 levels. Here’s what they eat:

The major carbohydrate-rich staples are the starchy tubers such as yams, cocoa-yams and cassava, the cereals rice and maize, and minor foods such as plantains and bananas. The major protein staples include legumes such as beans and pulses, seeds, nuts, cereal proteins and leaf proteins, some of which are rich in 18:3w3. Animal protein sources such as milk and eggs are virtually nil for rural communities, and are very limited for the urban population. Meats and fish . . . are in limited supply. Crayfish and dried fish are important but cost constraints limit intake.

The effect:

Nigerians have more than twice as much essential w3 EFA in their plasma lipids as do Minnesotans.

There was a negative correlation between blood levels of omega-3 and blood levels of omega-6. Perhaps raising omega-6 levels lowers omega-3 levels, even when the amount of omega-3 in the diet is constant. The theoretical mechanism is competition for the same enzyme. I haven’t yet studied this via self-experimentation; I will.

Thanks, Melissa.

The Preposterous Files

Seth Roberts3 Comments

The BBC has a most intriguing radio show (on Radio 4) that they are curiously hiding from potential listeners. It is called “ The Preposterous Files” and is about “cases that show up Civil Service bureaucracy.” It was on their Listen Again page yesterday but was taken off yesterday. Its Listen Again button (pre-disappearance) replayed a segment about fiddling, alas.

So far there have been 5 shows. Perhaps that’s all there will ever be. (How unfortunate!) Here are their topics (taken from the show’s archives):

1. Deciding on the design, location and function of the police telephone box proved a dauntingly complex process. One difficulty was that most of the public had never used a telephone.

2. In 1900, the North of England press began to report a mysterious epidemic that was affecting thousands of beer drinkers. The medical profession declared that it was an outbreak of peripheral neuritis provoked by excessive alcohol consumption, but a sceptical chemist, working alone from a makeshift laboratory, thought otherwise.

3. In 1912, cost-conscious HM Customs replaced Falmouth’s steam launch with a former sailing boat fitted with an auxiliary motor. Unfortunately, the motor proved unable to cope with the strong currents off the Cornish coast.

4. In 1954, stevedores reported finding an unconscious young man on board a Polish ship berthed at Bermondsey Docks. Was he an asylum seeker or a stowaway?

5. The transcript of the court martial of Flying Officer DR Kenyon, who retracted his plane’s undercarriage whilst still standing on the runway prior to taking off for a bombing mission during the 1956 Suez crisis, makes extraordinary reading.

Is Nutrition a Science?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In John Tierney’s blog, Gary Taubes is very critical of nutrition researchers:

The last place you want a science to find itself is where obesity research is today, with hypotheses of causation that can explain none of the pertinent observations, but yet are believed so fervently that no one can challenge them without being ostracized or declared a quack.

Fair enough. But Taubes (and Tierney) make the usual mistake of being too critical and not enough appreciative. I figured the real wisdom would be in the comments, and I was not disappointed. Taubes thought physics functioned better than nutrition. One comment:

It’s not that the scientists [in physics and nutrition] are any more or less skeptical, or that it takes any longer for the truth to emerge, it’s that the public is more likely to be paying attention [to nutrition] in the meantime. And human beings as a group are extremely bad at reasoning under uncertainty.

Quite right. If Taubes and Tierney have trouble seeing the big picture (although Good Calories Bad Calories is a big-picture book) surely most people, and other journalists, do much worse. Another comment:

People like the old “correlation does not equal causation” slogan, but it’s not correct to translate that as “correlations are completely uninformative,”

Well put. (I blogged about this.) My favorite comment, however, was not wise:

Tierney stresses the errors and biases of nutrition science – but what of its successes? [Good start.] . . . As Tierney surely knows, there is a solid body of research that cumulatively demonstrates the positive effects of a balanced diet, lots of fresh fruit and veggies, avoidance of saturated fats, moderate consumption of calories and regular exercise. This is common sense, and science backs it up.

The history of nutrition teaches the opposite. The most helpful findings have not been “common sense”. Folate supplementation greatly reduced birth defects. Not common sense. Eat oranges to cure scurvy: Not common sense. Pellagra due to nutrition rather than infection: Not common sense. The whole notion of vitamins: Not common sense (deficiency diseases were attributed to poisons). “Common sense” approaches to losing weight, such as “moderate calorie intake”: Failed miserably.

It’s true that traditional foodways often turn out to be very healthy, but they can’t be called “common sense” because they vary so much from one place to another.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Tim Beneke.

Mark Todd, the Cheese Dude, on Gourmet Food Business

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Mark Todd (thecheesedude at aol dot com) is a cheese expert who lives near the Russian River. Today he was in a local store demoing a cheese (Chiantino) that he and his business partner import from Germany. We had a long and utterly fascinating conversation. He has met most of the chefs who appear on the Food Network. His favs:

The best cook: Jacques Pepin “hands down”.

The most knowledgeable food expert: Alton Brown. “He knows ten times more than all the rest of them put together.”

How did he become a cheese expert, I asked. “Persistence,” he said.

The details of that persistence were not what I expected. When he was 30, his dad, who was 58, died of a massive heart attack. At the time, he was a lawyer. He hated it. What do I really want to do? he wondered. Something with food. He and his wife moved from crowded Palo Alto to near the Russian River. At a food event in the months that followed, he met someone who was paid to carve cheese. Wow, you can get paid for that, he thought. He asked the guy if he needed help. No, he didn’t. He and his wife hung out with the guy and his girlfriend. Several months later, the guy told him he needed help at an upcoming event in Monterey. He went down and helped and was paid $500/day in addition to free hotel for him and his wife and conference admission (usually $750). After the conference, he contacted the guy’s boss. “I want to do this,” he said. “What do you know about cheese?” he was asked. “Nothing,” he said. “Well, then you’re no use to us,” he was told. Two weeks later he called the boss again. “I’ve read four books about cheese,” he said. “Do you have any work for me?” No, he was told. “I really want to do this,” he said. He called the next day. And the next day. And the next day. And the next day. And the next day. Finally the boss said, “I get it. You really want to do this.” And he was hired for six figures a year to go here and there and talk about cheese. Now he works for many cheese organizations. Next week he’s going to China to teach them about California cheeses.

I told him I was interested in how people come to appreciate “fine” food. Exposure, he said. “Are some exposures more powerful than others?” I asked. “Peer exposure,” he said. When he was a sophomore in college (at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo), he didn’t like beer. He decided he wanted to learn about wine. One of his roommates had been to Napa and come back with notes. Teach me about wine, he said to his roommate. It takes time, his roommate said. They decided that Wednesday would be Wine Night. Every Wednesday for the next two years, he, his roommate, and another guy went to Safeway and bought three versions of the same varietal — e.g., three Chardonnays. Then they did blind tastings. His palate became better than most of the guys in the wine business, he said. Side-by-side tastings are crucial, he said. If you taste 500 cheeses on 500 different days, you won’t know much. But if you taste those cheeses side by side, you’ll learn a lot.

As wallpaper patterns, store displays, and millions of graphic designs reveal, we like to see similar things side by side. I have blogged here, here, and here about side-by-side comparisons and human evolution.

Why I Don’t Hire College Graduates

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A 1924 magazine article called “ Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men” contains this:

Every year I picked up a half-dozen live young fellows who seemed to have a capacity for hard work, and shoved them in at the bottom of the pile, letting them make their way up to the better air and sunlight at the top — if they had it in them to do it. For a time I tried picking these youngsters out of the colleges. But my experience with college men was not fortunate. If I selected good students, I found too often that their leadership had been won by doing very well what their teachers had laid out for them. They had developed a fine capacity for taking orders, but not much initiative.

The notion of not hiring college grads now seems absurd, perhaps because the fraction of people who go to college has gone way up. But it’s hard to believe that the selection pressures operating within colleges have changed. College professors are still a tiny fraction of the population.

I came across this magazine article randomly browsing but this quote is another way of saying what two of my recent posts — my student’s term project about overcoming stage fright, and about jobbook.org – were about. If most people must spend four years in a place (college) where those in charge (professors) value only a small fraction of their abilities, a lot is lost.

Omega-3 and Dementia

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A new study has found that older people with less omega-3 in their blood are more likely to suffer from dementia. The study involved about 1000 persons 65 or older randomly sampled from two Italian towns. They were given mental tests and divided into three groups: no cognitive impairment; cognitive impairment but not demented; and demented. In addition, their blood was measured. Worse mental function was more strongly associated with total omega-3 fatty acids (p = .01) than any of the other fatty acid measures.

One more reason to think that consuming more omega-3 might improve your brain function.

jobbook.org: up and running

Seth Roberts3 Comments

jobbook.org, a website to help students choose careers, is up. Aaron Swartz and I have been working on it for several months. We hope that it will eventually contain lots of first-hand information about jobs so that students (and anyone else) can learn what the jobs they are interested in are really like. Aaron has called it an “encyclopedia of jobs.”

To decide what to do, Aaron and I visited several schools around the Bay Area. At San Francisco State, a nursing student said, “I’m a nursing major, but I barely know what nurses do.” When I was in school, I could have said the same thing: By deciding to go to graduate school in experimental psychology I was choosing to become a “professor major” but I knew little about what professors did. Even as a graduate student I barely knew what they did. This reflects a truth about modern life: It is hard to learn what jobs are like. You can do an internship, but schools like UC Berkeley don’t make that easy. And internships take a lot of time. The goal of jobbook.org is to provide the same information much more easily.

jobbook.org is a wiki — a Wikipedia-llke website than anyone can edit. We hope that people on both sides — people with job knowledge and people who want job knowledge — will contribute.

If you have a job (any job!), we hope that you will offer to be interviewed about it. (To make that offer, just add your job, location, and contact info to the home page.) You don’t need to wait to be interviewed: You can simply describe an actual day of your job and add that description to the site.

If you are interested in learning about any job, we hope that you will request an interview. (To make that request, just add the job and your contact info to the home page.)

We hope that these offers and requests will produce interview transcripts that will be added to the site. If you know of a helpful link (such as a book or magazine article), we hope you will add it.

Last night, there was a meeting for interested students in the Channing-Bowditch (a Cal dorm) lounge. I expected no one to show up. Four people did. Next meeting: next Monday (Nov 5), same place, see home page for details.

Sabine Alam, Khoi Lam, and Michelle Nguyen are the Advisory Board who have been giving Aaron and me sage advice. Thanks to them.

My Theory of Human Evolution (early value system)

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From a review of The Surgeons: Life and Death in a Top Heart Center by Charles Morris:

For better or for worse, the quality of health care is driven by what Morris calls an “artisanal” value system, one that has little to do with institutional allegiances or administrative management objectives, but rather with “internalized systems of ethics and the expectations of other professionals.”

My theory of human evolution says it started with hobbies. Hobbyists became artisans. It hadn’t occurred to me that an “artisanal” value system exists but what Morris says makes sense. Such a value system should be powerful, easy to spread, and hard to eliminate.

Autism Linked to Mood Disorders

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Mood disorders appear to be much more common among the relatives of autistic children than among the relatives of other children. A survey article about this appeared in 2004. Here is a bit of the data:

In North Carolina, between 1988 and 1990, we studied 40 autistic individuals (20 attributable to known neurological disease and 20 idiopathic). Family histories, using the family history method, without knowledge of the neurological status, showed a low incidence of major mood disorder in the neurological patients (only two had family members with major depression, none with bipolar disorder). In the idiopathic autistic patients, by contrast, major depression was found in 14 and bipolar disorder in 8 of twenty families.

Between 1995 and 2002, we acquired another series of patients included in our study of fluoxetine treatment for young autistic spectrum children. We determined family history data as before and sought information about family members with special intellectual abilities or attainments, inspired by observing such individuals in many of the families. The abilities most often were scientific, mathematical, or computational but included others (e.g., professor of philosophy, professional musician). Analysis revealed a strong correlation among three groups: autistic probands responding to fluoxetine, family members with major mood disorder (especially bipolar disorder), and family members with special intellectual abilities. In this study, history of major mood disorder (in first- and second-degree parental relatives) was assessed in 151 families. One hundred and eleven families (74%) had a history of major depression (in 102) and/or bipolar disorder (in 52).

In other words, mood disorders were more common among the relatives of autistic children who responded to fluoxetine (Prozac) than among the relatives of autistic children who did not respond to fluoxetine. I have wondered why autism seems to be increasing. This linkage suggests it may have something to do with the long-term increase in depression.

Thanks to A Room of One’s Own.