From a parent’s account of her autistic son in Recovering Autistic Children (2006) edited by Stephen Edelson and Bernard Rimland, p. 79:
James took matters into his own hands at about the time of his first birthday, and started refusing milk except in the form of yogurt or cheese.
The Spring 2009 issue of Wise Traditions, a quarterly sent by the Weston A Price Foundation to its members, has an article by Katherine Czapp about traditional Scottish food. They too ate fermented food (pp. 56-7):
Farmers who grew their own oats but sent them to the local mill . . . received in return a bag of “sids” — the inner husks of the oats . . . From these sids, an ancient Celtic dish called “sowans” (or sowens) was made.
The sids were soaked in water for approximately one week (or even more) until they were well-soured.
Sowans takes more than week to make. Presumably the ancient Celts discovered this method of souring by accident and kept doing it because the result tasted good. It’s an example of how, in the right situation, what tastes good guides us to a good diet.
A new study in PLoS Pathogen has found that mosquitoes benefit from bacteria-laden food. The bacteria stimulate their immune system and protect them against the malaria parasite. From the abstract:
Malaria-transmitting mosquitoes are continuously exposed to microbes . . . Global transcription profiling of septic and [microbe-free] aseptic mosquitoes [made aseptic with antibiotics] identified a significant subset of immune genes that were mostly up-regulated by the mosquito’s microbial flora . . . Microbe-free aseptic mosquitoes displayed an increased susceptibility to Plasmodium infection while co-feeding mosquitoes with bacteria and P. falciparum gametocytes resulted in lower than normal infection levels. Infection analyses suggest the bacteria-mediated anti-Plasmodium effect is mediated by the mosquitoes’ antimicrobial immune responses, plausibly through activation of basal immunity.
Another view of this study is that it is more evidence of the dangers of antibiotics: They weakened the immune system. As you may know, and as I was told recently by a pediatrician, doctors “hand out antibiotics like candy.”
Thanks to Janet Rosenbaum.
Thanks to Joyce Cohen and Marian Lizzi.
Brent Pottenger writes:
In place of mayonnaise, my brother started using plain yogurt to make tuna salad. In the process, he learned, “For some reason, the tuna tastes better after sitting in the refrigerator for a day or two.” Tuna salad made with yogurt is tolerable when freshly made, but it definitely gets much better as it ages.
Now, when I make smoothies, I blend the fruit and the yogurt, then I let the smoothie sit for some hours, minimally, before I drink it.
From Fresh: A Perishable History (2009) by Susanne Freidberg, p. 3:
Of all the qualities we seek in food, freshness best satisfies all these modern appetites. It offers both proof of our progress and an antidotes to the ills that progress brings.
Oops. A better title would have been Fresh: History of a Delusion.
Before cooking some hamburgers, I mixed spices into the meat. I have done this countless times. For the first time, I thought: I need to add spices because the meat isn’t rotten enough. Properly rotted meat would need salt but not other flavoring.
Two weeks ago I was in New York City. I have been there many times. For the first time, I was unexcited by the prospect of eating in the city’s fascinating restaurants. I think it’s all the fermented food I eat (at least two servings per day). All of it has complex flavors; all the New York restaurant food I liked had complex flavors. I am no longer complex-flavor-deprived.
During my last dental exam, a month ago, I was told my gums were in excellent shape. Clearly better than my previous visit. The obvious difference between the two visits is that I now eat lots of fermented food. At the previous visit, my gums were in better shape than a few years ago. They suddenly improved when I started drinking a few tablespoons of flaxseed oil every day. Tyler Cowen is the poster child for that effect. After a lifetime of being told to brush and floss more — which I did, and which helped a little but not a lot — it now turns out, at least for me, that the secret of healthy gums is: 1. Eat fermented foods. 2. Consume omega-3. These two guidelines are not only a lot easier than frequent brushing and flossing but have a lot of other benefits, unlike brushing and flossing.
Dentistry is ancient and there are millions of dentists, but apparently the profession has never figured this out. This isn’t surprising — how could they figure it out? — but it is an example of a general truth about how things get better. (Or why they don’t get better — if only dentists and dental-school professors are allowed to do dental research.) In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs makes this point. For a long time, Jacobs says, farming was a low-yield profession. Then crop rotation schemes, tractors, cheap fertilizer, high-yield seeds, and dozens of other labor-saving yield-increasing inventions came along. Farmers didn’t invent tractors. They didn’t invent any of the improvements. They were busy farming. Just as dentists are busy doing dentistry and dental-school professors are busy studying conventional ways of improving gum health.
Jacobs also writes about the sterility of large organizations — their inability to come up with new goods and services. On the face of it, large organizations, such as large companies, are powerful. Yes, they can be efficient but they can’t be creative, due to what Jacobs calls “the infertility of captive divisions of labor.” In a large organization, you get paid for doing X. You can’t start doing X+Y, where Y is helpful to another part of the company, because you don’t get paid for doing Y. A nutrition professor might become aware of the anti-inflammatory effects of flaxseed oil but wouldn’t study its effects on gum health. That’s not what nutrition professors do. So neither dentists nor dental-school professors nor nutrition professors could discover the effects I discovered. They were trapped by organizational lines, by divisions of labor, that I was free of.
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Hire a San Diego orthodontist for advanced dental procedures.
In 1973, a NIH parasitologist named Eric Ottesen discovered a high rate of worm infection on the tiny island of Mauke. He gave the islanders an anti-parasite drug. Nineteen years later, he did another survey of worm infection.
Compared with 19 years ago, Ottesen found, there was much less filarial infection on Mauke. Only 16 percent of the population harbored the microscopic worms, as opposed to 35 percent on his first visit. The reduction resulted primarily from treating the islanders with the antiparasite drug diethylcarbamazine, which Ottesen had initiated during his earlier visit. And what about allergies? There’s no question that there was a heck of a lot more allergy out there this time, says Ottesen. Nineteen years ago barely 3 percent of the people had allergies. This time it was at least 15 percent. The complaints ranged from eczema to hay fever and asthma to food allergies. What’s more, the dominant problem was one nobody had even heard of 19 years earlier: octopus allergy. It’s the number one offender, says Ottesen. People are breaking out in rashes, hives, swelling of the throat. Yet octopus is nothing new to them–they were eating it when we were there before.
Ottesen believes there is something specific to parasites that makes them protective. I suspect this is another example of the protective effects of bacteria and bacteria-like chemicals, which I believe may come from both food and parasites. Another possibility is that the antiparasite drug killed bacteria. Nothing is said about obesity; I wonder how their diet changed over the 19 years. A switch from homemade (nonsterile) food to factory (sterile) food may be part of the problem.