Do Fermented Foods Shorten Colds?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Alex Chernavsky writes:

I had an interesting experience recently. On Thursday afternoon, I started feeling a little run-down. Then I began to sneeze a lot, and my nose really started to run. I thought I was coming down with a cold. I took an antihistamine and felt a little better. I woke up Friday morning with a mild sore throat (the sneezing/runny nose had stopped). Within a couple of hours, my throat wasn’t sore anymore — and I haven’t felt sick since then. In summary, I believe I had a cold that lasted less than 24 hours. This almost never happens to me. Typically, my colds last at least a week, and usually more (and I usually get two or three colds per year). There is only one other time in my adult life [he’s in his forties] when I can remember having a very short-duration cold.

Maybe it’s the fermented foods I’m eating. After I started reading your blog, I began to brew my own kombucha, and I drink it every day. I also sometimes eat kim chee, fermented dilly beans, fermented salsa, umeboshi plums, and coconut kefir.

This was the first cold he’s gotten since he started eating lots of fermented foods in June. I believe the correlation reflects causation — the fermented foods improve his immune function. The microbes in the food keep the immune system “awake”. I also believe that Alex’s colds would become even less noticeable if he improved his sleep.

Another Mysterious Mental Improvement

Seth Roberts13 Comments

This graph shows results from a test of simple arithmetic (e.g., 7-3, 4*8) that I did once or twice most days. Starting in August, I improved about 9% (from 600 to 550 msec/problem).

I don’t know why I got faster. In early September I moved from Berkeley to Beijing. After the move there was an especially sharp decrease. The increase in October was due to an experiment in which I reduced flaxseed oil/day.

I noticed the decrease after I got to China. At first, I thought it was due to a dietary change — perhaps more walnuts. I stopped eating walnuts and the improvement didn’t go away. So it’s not walnuts. It’s not butter; for the first few months in China, I ate the same butter as in Berkeley.

I can’t think of any plausible conventional explanation (e.g., blueberries). Here are the most plausible explanations I can think of:

1. Less aerobic exercise. In China I get much less aerobic exercise than in Berkeley.

2. Less vitamins. In China I consume less vitamins than in Berkeley.

3. Warmer. My Beijing apartment is warmer than my Berkeley apartment. Showers in Beijing are warmer than baths in Berkeley.

In each case the change (e.g., less exercise) could have started in Berkeley. The last one (warmer) is not just the strangest, it’s also the most plausible. Unlike the other two, evidence supports it. Fact 1: When I started heavy-duty cold showers my scores started to get worse. Fact 2: When I stopped cold showers, the scores returned to their pre-cold-shower level. Fact 3: When I moved to China it was very hot, which would explain the sharp decline at that time.

My Theory of Human Evolution (Caganers)

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A nativity scene in Barcelona:

He is known in Catalan as the caganer. That translates most politely as ‘the defecator’ – and there he is, squatting under a tree with his trousers down.

At the nearby Christmas market amid the sprigs of holly and Santa hats rows of miniature, crouching country boys are lined up for sale.

Innocuous-looking from the front, their buttocks are bare and each one has a small, brown deposit beneath.

“It’s typical of Catalonia. Each house buys one for Christmas,” explains Natxo with a smile and a shrug as he shops. “I don’t know why (we do it), it’s just a tradition.”

Without Christmas, there would be much less demand for these intricate items. I believe the evolutionary reason for festivals and ceremonies is that they create demand for hard-to-make goods. This helps the most skilled artisans (good sources of innovation) make a living and hone their skills.

Via Marginal Revolution. Christmas: an evolutionary explanation.

Rich and Poor Students: How to Distinguish

Seth Roberts2 Comments

At Tsinghua University, there is a great range of wealth among students. Some are from very rich families, some from very poor. I asked a friend how to distinguish rich students and poor ones.

“At the student store, rich students buy things that cost more than 15 yuan [2 dollars],” she said.

I asked another student the same question.

“By their shoes,” he said, “especially sports shoes.” Poor students wear Chinese brands you’ve never heard of. Rich students wear American brands.

Like my friend’s answer, this surprised me. At the Beijing Zoo, I paid $10 for Nike shoes that cost $100 in America. Yet when visiting America, Chinese people I know have bought Nike shoes, because genuine Nike cost less in America than in China. So the American shoes of the rich students are probably genuine (> $100) and the Chinese-brand shoes of the poor students cost less than $10 ($5?).

Unexpected Christmas Presents

Seth Roberts2 Comments

This year I got two:

1. I taught a class about R and data analysis. On Christmas, one of my students wrote, “Thanks for what you taught us on the class. I love your class. I learnt a lot!” I hadn’t taught it before. A few weeks ago I had been abashed to discover a midterm exam from Phil Spector’s R class at Berkeley. I know Phil and like and respect him. His students had learned a lot more than mine, it seemed. I had consoled myself by thinking that I couldn’t answer some of the questions.

2. Cleaning a cupboard, also on Christmas, I found a “gift” derived from buying a water heater in March. (Buy the water heater, get the “gift”.) It looked like an ordinary glass teapot, which is why I had put it in semi-storage. When I opened the box I discovered it wasn’t. It has a basket where you put the tea and hot water; when the tea is ready you press a button that releases the water into the bottom of the teapot, stopping the brewing. I drink a lot of tea. A month ago I barely knew these things existed. Then I bought one and thought it was wonderful — but small. The uncovered one is the perfect size.

Chinese Economics Joke

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Person A to Person B: “See that piece of shit? If you eat it I’ll give you 100 million yuan.”

Person B eats the shit.

But Person A doesn’t want to give him 100 million yuan. He says to Person B: “How about I eat shit too? Then we’ll be even.”

Person B agrees.

Person A eats some shit. “Now we’re even,” he says.

They have just increased GDP by 200 million yuan.

Three Observations About Walking and Learning

Seth Roberts5 Comments

1. Studying Chinese-character flashcards while walking on a treadmill is as pleasant as drinking something when thirsty. Unlike actual thirst and drinking, the pleasure lasts a long time and the desire is under your control (to turn it on, you start walking; to turn it off, you stop).

2. What is the opposite of betrayal? There is no antonym. The opposite is so rare it isn’t even obvious what it is. Betrayal is when your friend becomes your enemy; the opposite is when your enemy becomes your friend. Living in China and not knowing Chinese was not exactly my enemy but it was certainly negative. This treadmill discovery turns it into a positive: Chinese becomes an inexhaustible source of dry knowledge that I can enjoy learning.

3. Learning is the central theme of experimental psychology and perhaps all academic psychology. Psychology professors have done more experiments about learning than anything else. Practically all of those experiments have been about efficiency of learning: The amount of learning (e.g., percent correct) in Condition A is compared with the amount of learning in Condition B, where A and B “cost” about the same. As a result, we know a great deal about what controls efficiency of learning, at least in laboratory tasks. I think many psychologists are surprised and disappointed that this research has had little effect outside academia. I have never heard a good answer to the question of why. If you’d asked me a month ago I would have said it’s because they haven’t discovered large non-obvious effects. That’s true, but says nothing about how to discover them.

My treadmill experience suggests a more helpful answer: Hedonics matter. Learning exactly the same material can be more or less pleasant. When Learning X is pleasant, it is learned easily; when Learning X is unpleasant, it is learned with difficulty or not at all. In the real world, hedonic differences matter more than efficiency differences. If they want to improve real-world learning, psychologists have been measuring the wrong thing. It is a hundred times easier and ten times more “objective” (= “scientific”) to study how much has been learned than to study how pleasant was the experience. But that doesn’t mean it is better to study.

Michel Cabanac, a physiologist, strikes me as someone on the right path. Cabanac has studied how the pleasantness of this or that experience goes up or down to help us properly self-regulate. A simple example is that cold water feels more pleasant when we feel hot than when we feel cold. A common example is that exactly the same food becomes less pleasant during a meal. The food doesn’t change; we change.

Cold Shower Report (2)

Seth Roberts20 Comments

After learning that cold showers can raise mood, I started taking cold showers. The mood improvement was hard to notice but it was easy to notice that I became more comfortable in the cold. My apartment seemed warmer.

To increase the effect, I increased the water flow (by unplugging shower-head holes that were clogged) and lowered the water temperature (running the water several minutes before starting the shower). The water was obviously colder and its effects larger. Now the showers did raise my mood, for maybe an hour. It was curious how they were unpleasant for only a second.

After a week or so of the colder showers, it became clear, alas, that my weight was increasing. I gained about 2 pounds. There was no obvious explanation for this other than the cold showers. I hadn’t changed my diet in a big way. I hadn’t changed my activities. And there is plenty of evidence that skin temperature controls body fat. For example, a study of three types of exercise (stationary bike, walking, and swimming) in women found that the women who biked and walked lost weight but the women who swam did not, in spite of equal fitness improvement. So I have stopped the cold showers.

Self-Experimentation as Legal Gambling

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Listening to Freakonomics Radio on lottery-like savings accounts reminded me of a big reason I self-experiment: it resembles buying a lottery ticket. Whenever you collect data I believe there is a power-law distribution of benefit: large chance of little benefit, small chance of large benefit. (Your sophistication and other things affect the slope.) Almost all data confirms what you already knew — small benefit. A very small fraction of data gives you a new idea — large benefit. Because self-experimentation is about oneself, new ideas can have tangible benefits, just as winning the lottery provides tangible benefit (money)

Basically I hope for outliers — a sudden jump up or down in something I’m tracking, such as arithmetic speed or sleep duration. This may give me a new idea about what controls that measure. Self-experiments are also valuable because something I’m not deliberately measuring may change. When I started watching faces on TV in the morning to see if it would affect my sleep, my mood, which I wasn’t deliberately measuring, suddenly improved.

It really does feel like playing the lottery for free. To not make a measurement I could easily make feels like walking by a perfectly good lottery ticket lying in the street. Loss aversion sets in.