Fermented Dairy Intake Negatively Associated with Diabetes

Seth Roberts8 Comments

A new epidemiological study followed about 16,000 people in Europe for about 12 years and focused on their dairy intake. Did the ones who came down with diabetes eat differently from those who didn’t?

The paper begins:

Current dietary guidelines for prevention of diabetes aim at substituting SFAs [saturated fatty acids] with unsaturated fatty acids. However, conventionally held notions that all SFAs, including those from dairy products, are detrimental to health have recently been challenged.

The shift of evidence (dairy less bad than previously believed) supports my view that what’s good for the brain (I found butter was good for my brain) is likely to be good for the rest of the body. The paper’s main conclusion is the possible protective value of cheese and yogurt:

This large prospective study found no association between total dairy product intake and diabetes risk. An inverse association of cheese intake and combined fermented dairy product [= cheese, yogurt, and “thick fermented milk”] intake with diabetes is suggested.

The combined fermented dairy association was not large in size (a risk reduction of 12%) but was significant (barely). When your main finding is barely significant you have no hope of using your data to explain it so the new information essentially stops there. The results support my view that fermented foods are unusually healthy.

In response to these findings, the director of research at Diabetes UK said, “This study gives us no reason to believe that people should change their dairy intake in an attempt to avoid [diabetes].” Wow. It is as if a prominent physicist said the earth was flat.

Thanks to Elizabeth Molin.

You Don’t Need a “Mother” to Make Kombucha

Seth Roberts10 Comments

You make kombucha by brewing tea, adding sugar, and adding a starter of some sort. Usually the starter is part of the “mother” (SCOBY) from a previous batch of kombucha but I have just found that adding a little bit of store-bought kombucha also works. I added two tablespoons of GT’s kombucha and two tablespoons of Revive kombucha to sugared tea. Two weeks later there was a perfectly good mother on top of the tea. This is useful to know even if you have a mother if you want to make kombucha slowly. In The Art of Fermentation, Sandor Katz advocates adding a bottle of kombucha into your sugared tea if you don’t have a mother.

 

 

What to Do in Beijing: My Suggestions

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Because Tyler Cowen is going to Beijing, I made a list of suggestions:

1. Don’t go to the Great Wall. It’s a long drive. I preferred to see it on the Today Show. The only interesting bit was a guy who sat in a chair on the path to the wall and charged 30 cents to go further. We paid the 30 cents but in retrospect I wish we hadn’t.

2. Visit some of the many “markets” that consist of a building full of tiny booths. There are markets devoted to cameras, jewelry, clothes, electronics, furniture, etc. There can be more choice of furniture in one building (say, 100 manufacturers) than exists in the entire Bay Area. Along similar lines there is a whole neighborhood full of tea sellers — if you like tea.

3. Peking duck is a good dish but I cannot tell the difference between the better restaurants serving it. So don’t go out of your way to go to an especially good place. I usually go to Quanjude which has a branch very near my school (Tsinghua).

4. Middle 8 is a very good restaurant (in Haidian and Chao Yang).

5. Din Tai Fung is a very good dumpling restaurant. It is a big international Taiwanese chain. So it isn’t even mainland Chinese food exactly.

6. There are grilled chicken wing restaurants near the west gates of both Peking University and Tsinghua University. I don’t know their names but they are very good. Popular with students.

7. I have never found a nice place in Beijing to walk. Even in parks there is a lack of shade.

8. In my neighborhood (Wudaokou) there are excellent Korean restaurants.

Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment

 

Thanks to Ken Feinstein.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Thanks to Hal Pashler and Robin Barooah.

Fear of Food: “The Hubris of Experts”

Seth Roberts5 Comments

At the end of Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat by Harvey Levenstein (2012), an historian at McMaster University, the author summarizes what he has learned:

During the course of writing this book, I have often been asked what lessons I personally draw from it. . . . The hubris of experts confidently telling us what to eat has often been well-nigh extraordinary. In 1921, for example, the consensus among the nation’s nutritional scientists was that they knew 90% of what there was to know about food and health.

Yeah. Two questions for an expert giving advice, especially apocalyptic advice (“You’ll die if you don’t . . . “): 1. What fraction of what there is to be known on your subject do you know? 2. May I quote you?

When I was a freshman in college, I went to hear a talk (off campus) about the chance of life elsewhere in the universe (or was it the galaxy?). The speaker multiplied a bunch of numbers together and came up with an estimate. “What’s the error in that estimate?” I asked. The speaker had no answer. He didn’t know. It’s essentially the same thing.

The Non-Obvious Value of Self-Tracking

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A New York doctor named Jay Parkinson is skeptical about the appeal of self-measurement:

There is a very, very small subset of people who want to document their life according to their health— the quantified selfers. But this group is tiny because it’s just data geeks who are obsessed with data. They are people who truly believe data changes behavior.

As caricatures go, this is fair. The audience and speakers at Quantified Self meetups do appear to be “data geeks who are obsessed with data” and, yes, this is a tiny subset of people. I don’t put myself in that category. I have zero interest in “documenting” my life. I record a tiny amount of stuff and only stuff I think will make a difference. For example, I stopped measuring my blood pressure after it became clear it was low enough.

Parkinson continues:

Data gets old after a while. After about a month, for those who are not obsessed, it becomes meaningless. That is, unless you have an obsession with data. . . . Good luck trying to build a viable business around that group.

Yes, and “there is a world market for about five computers”, as the president of IBM supposedly said in the 1940s. I have measured myself for so long (decades) not because I am obsessed with data but because I reaped huge benefits. In the beginning, self-measurement showed me how to reduce my acne considerably more than my dermatologist’s advice alone. Later it led to all sorts of improvements: better sleep, better mood, lower weight, fewer colds, healthier gums, better balance, better brain function. Life-changing benefits. The fraction of adults who would like to sleep better, be in a better mood, lose weight, get fewer colds, and so on is very large — perhaps 99%. Is Starbucks a “viable business”? It is built around people needing stimulants (caffeine). An enormous number of products and services are about losing weight. One of the world’s most “viable business” is illicit drugs. I believe a large fraction of illicit drug use is self-medication for depression. (More: The day I posted this, I came across this: “She said heroin helped her fight depression.”)

There is nothing obvious about how I managed to improve my sleep, mood, weight and so on. The solutions I discovered via self-measurement were exceedingly surprising, at least to me. So there is nothing obvious about how to use self-measurement to improve one’s sleep, etc. Self-measurement is needed, yes, but it’s not the only thing that’s needed. I needed: 1. Wise choice of what to measure (e.g., measure the problem, not the solution — I don’t have a FitBit for example.) 2. Wise choice of what to change. (To improve my sleep, for example, I needed a good understanding of sleep research. “Common sense” was not enough.) 3. Experimental design skill. 4. Data analysis skill. To say data is boring (to most people) is like saying tires are boring (to most people). By themselves, tires have little use, just as data alone has little use. But they are part of something very useful.

Consider literacy. For a long time, the notion that “everyone would benefit from literacy” seemed ridiculous. Books were too expensive! There were so few of them. Only a tiny fraction of people (e.g., monks) knew how to read. It was hard to learn to read. Good luck basing a business on literacy! But eventually everything changed. Right now, few quantified selfers, as far as I can tell, seem to know how to learn something useful from their measurements. (When I had been doing it for a short time, I didn’t know either.) For example, Stephen Wolfram appears to have learned nothing of use from a huge amount of self-measurement. New measurement devices, like FitBit and so on, are like books — it is as if few people know how to read. But that can change.

Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday

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When Clinton was President, Ryan Holiday writes in Trust Me I’m Lying (copy sent me by publisher, Ryan is a friend),

[Matt] Drudge accused prominent journalist and Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenhthal of a shocking history of spousal abuse — and one covered up by the White House, no less. Except that none of it was true. . . . An anonymous Republican source had whispered into Drudge’s ear to settle a political score against Blumenthal. . . . [Drudge] refused to apologize for the pain caused by his recklessness.

In spite of knowing this, I still read Matt Drudge. I don’t have to. There are a zillion other things to read. That may or may not make me a horrible person but it illustrates the depth of the problem that Ryan writes about: Spreading lies pays.

A more mundane example is press releases. Bloggers love press releases, Ryan says (speaking from experience working at American Apparel). All the work is done for them. So what if press releases are profoundly dishonest in the way they present a half truth (positive stuff about the product) as if it is a whole truth? It’s an easy way to get a few thousand clicks. “I recall sending e-mails to Gawker and Jezebel on several occasions over matters of factual errors and not receiving a response,” writes Ryan. “My anonymous tips seem to arrive in their inboxes just fine — it’s the signed corrections that run into issues.” A car site published a rumor that turned out to be false. A friend of Ryan’s complained that the headline wasn’t fixed:

[Ryan’s friend:] Why keep the headline up since we now know it’s not true?
[Car site:] You guys are so funny.

Taking the headline down would generate fewer clicks than leaving it up. Shameless.

“That way lies madness,” I told a friend who worried about how much traffic his blog attracted. Bloggers who will do anything for a click do so, of course, because their salary depends on it, whereas my friend did not get significant income from his blog. Sure, paying bloggers by the click pushes them to write stuff that people want to read — which sounds good, aren’t snobs bad? — except what if people don’t care that much about the truth?

I think of science. Who do professional scientists more closely resemble? 1. Bloggers who will do anything for a click. 2. Disinterested seekers of truth. Well, it’s a job, not a hobby. Science and job are not a good fit (as I’ve written), just as factory food and health are not a good fit. We can see the consequences of the bad fit between factory food and health in the obesity epidemic (which I believe is caused by eating calorie-dense quickly-digested food that tastes exactly the same each time — factory food is much more standardized than food you make yourself) and the epidemic of digestive problems (caused by too-sterile food — factory food is more sterile than food you make yourself). We can see the consequences of the bad fit between science and job in the failure to find solutions to one growing problem after another (obesity, Crohn’s disease, autism, depression, poor sleep, etc.). Trust Me I’m Lying is about the consequences of the poor fit between being paid by the click and caring about the truth of what you write.

 

 

Is Crohn’s Disease Really “Incurable”? (continued)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

The official line on Crohn’s disease is that there is “no known cure.” In my previous post I described how easily I found contrary evidence — in that case, a girl who with the help of her mom made dietary changes that got rid of her Crohn’s symptoms in weeks. She has been symptom-free for more than seven years. An existence proof.

There are many other examples. I asked Reid Kimball for links. Here they are:

A website that collects success stories: https://scdlifestyle.com/category/specific-carbohydrate-diet-success-stories/page/4/

Facebook groups: SCD – https://www.facebook.com/groups/2215406763/ GAPS – https://www.facebook.com/groups/thegapsdiet/

Reid’s website https://crohnsend.com, Jay “CrohnsBoy” Baluk https://crohnsboy.com/ and Jini Patel Thompson https://listentoyourgut.com/ are more examples.

The official website of the SCD has a testimonials section: https://btvc.webfactional.com/book-reviews/listing/