Category: fermented food

Beyond the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts2 Comments

On the Shangri-La Diet forums is a very interesting discussion:

It’s a way of life when SLD is working, that is… And, to be honest, over the past few months it’s not been working as much as it once did. Or, rather, it’s has been working, but I only lose weight when SLD is strong. It was strong to start with and it’s strong right now, but it’s been 50% or less in between.

My breakthrough came a week or two ago when I started to control my IBS with Colpermin tablets. That helped enormously because it stopped my stomach churning and grumbling so much. But the hot sugar water I was drinking didn’t work 100%. I could manage a few days of decent SLD, but then the hunger fell on me like a heavy weight and I would binge. They were small binges, because SLD was still working and I just couldn’t eat a lot. But the total calorie intake was enough to stop me losing weight.

So, a few days ago I went back to basics. For me, that means back to those nose-clipped cans of Coke Smile And strong SLD is back. To be brutally frank, I feel humiliated that Coke is the only thing that seems to produce conclusive results for me. Even Pepsi doesn’t seem to work as well, or the various clones of Coke that (frankly) cost less Rolling Eyes I wish oil worked, or sugar water, I really do.

But there’s something weird about Coke… We’ve speculated about it’s stomach calming effects in other threads.

However, the fact is that I’m back in what I might call the SLD zone. It’s a lovely place to be, but it’s so terribly hard to describe. Today I ate one meal. And I’m fine. Tomorrow I go out for lunch, and I’m looking forward to it—a chance of have some nice food. But… that’s the difference between strong SLD, and normality. I can wait for that nice food. It’s just less important. I absolutely LOVE feeling this way. My life is my own.

Nose-clipped Coke worked much better than sugar water. Fascinating. When I did SLD — when I lost about 3 pounds/week drinking fructose water — I also started craving flavor. I started drinking tea and haven’t stopped. I started chewing gum and haven’t stopped. I became far more interested in supermarket samples, which are always flavorful. A later comment in that thread:

I once read a newspaper report about a woman who was going slowly blind through an eye disease. She heard about the raw food diet and tried for a few weeks, thinking it might help her. Her eyesight did marginally improve, but she decided she’d rather go blind than face any more raw foods.

Raw food has flavor, but it doesn’t have complex flavors — that’s why people ferment it, even when they don’t need to preserve it. Compare cabbage with kimchi, for example. Cooking food usually increases complexity of flavor. Coke has a very complex flavor. Sugar water has no flavor.

Why do we like unami-tasting foods? Why do we like sour-tasting foods? Why do we like complexity of flavor, including unfamiliar complexity? I think the answer is these likes were built into us to because they caused us to eat more bacteria-laden food, which kept our immune system functioning well. Just as a taste for salt causes us to eat more salt, which we need.

This story suggests that the desire for certain tastes (supplied by nose-clipped Coke but not sugar water) can be strong enough to interfere with weight loss. Future versions of SLD should take account of this

Rotten Fish are Everywhere

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Somebody anonymous with an amusingly-named blog became a vegan while working in a Thai restaurant:

Now here’s something surprising: my bosses were interested in helping me be a vegan. “Oh, that silly white boy and his eating experiments,” they’d say. Vang, the chef, learned to create delicious curry without fish sauce–learning how to dump plenty of salt and sugar into the coconut milk to compensate for the rotten fish. Plus, they introduced me the power of hot sauce, namely Sriracha Sauce–a love affair that continues to this very day. . . .

One of my uncles, who is possibly a little retarded and probably a little mentally ill, says that hot sauce kills all the germs in your body (yes, he claims all of them), thus making it impossible to get sick.

No, it’s the rotten fish that does that.

What to Do about Beijing Air

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Beijing’s dirty air is easily the worst thing about living there. You might think what to do about it is obvious. Many people do, including this man who wants to sell the expensive air filter he bought:

I remember the day IQair Sales Rep Justin Shuttleworth came to my place [in Beijing] to give me a demo. This guy has the easiest job in the world. All he does is come with his little air quality measuring device, show you how bad the air you are breathing is in your apartment (indoor air is sometimes worse than outdoor air for those who don`t know), and as the minutes go by, you literally see the amount of particles in the air go down, until it’s basically nil. This was the first time that I could actually smell the difference.

This is from an email list I’m on.

I got the same demo. But it had the opposite effect: It made me not want to buy the IQair filter.

The air coming out of the IQair filter was very clean, yes. But there was only so much it could do. More dirty air was always coming into my apartment and no matter how high (= noisy) they ran the machine the overall level of dirt was no more than cut by 2/3rds. I already had an air filter. The air it produced wasn’t quite as clean as air from the IQair filter but it was still much much cleaner than the intake air. The IQair machine cost about 11,000 RMB. My filter had cost about 1,000 RMB. For 1,500 RMB I could buy a bigger version of what I already had, an air filter that cleaned twice as much air per minute as the IQair machine while producing roughly the same amount of noise. Its output was slightly dirtier than the output of the IQair machine but the overall cleaning effect — the reduction in dirt — was much greater. I ended up getting two of the 1,500 RMB filters.

I think of this demo when I hear someone talk about how this or that traditional diets is better than our modern diet. They make a simple point: People who eat the traditional diet are healthy, people who eat the modern diet are unhealthy. Just as the IQair demo guy has “the easiest job in the world.” They inevitably conclude: Eat the traditional diet or at least closer to it. Just as the conclusion of the demo is supposed to be: Buy an IQair filter. It seems so simple.

But it isn’t so simple. Eating the traditional diet isn’t easy, just as the IQair filter isn’t cheap. Maybe their abstraction — their description — of the traditional diet leaves out something important. Just as the IQair people do not measure cleaning power per decibel, which turns out to be what matters. (I traded air pollution for noise pollution. I wanted the best deal possible.)

If you read Good Calories Bad Calories you may remember the Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson who spent many months with Eskimos eating what they ate. He came back and told the world “you can eat only meat.” In his conclusions and subsequent field experiment, he ignored the fact that the Eskimos ate a lot of fermented meat.

The Inuit Paradox

Seth Roberts21 Comments

The Inuit Paradox is that the Inuit eat lots of fat and hardly any vegetables or fruit yet are much healthier than groups who follow conventional dietary guidelines. In particular,

In the Nunavik villages in northern Quebec, adults over 40 get almost half their calories from native foods, says Dewailly, and they don’t die of heart attacks at nearly the same rates as other Canadians or Americans. Their cardiac death rate is about half of ours, he says.

Likewise, the fact that Greenland Eskimos had very low rates of heart disease led to the discovery of the importance of omega-3 fatty acids. If you read anything on this subject you will come across the concept of “healthy fats”. Sure, some fats are good for you, no doubt about it. Weston Price was the first of many to make this point. But is it the whole story? Attempts to reduce heart disease by giving people fish oil have had disappointing results. Perhaps they got the dose wrong. Or perhaps they missed something crucial. Here is what the Inuit eat:

Our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold water and have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking and as a dipping sauce for food. We had moose, caribou, and reindeer. We hunted ducks, geese, and little land birds like quail, called ptarmigan. We caught crab and lots of fish—salmon, whitefish, tomcod, pike, and char. Our fish were cooked, dried, smoked, or frozen. We ate frozen raw whitefish, sliced thin. The elders liked stinkfish, fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment. And fermented seal flipper, they liked that too.” [emphasis added]

In the rest of the article and in all discussions of the subject I have seen you won’t find a word about fermented food. Yet I believe that was crucial. The fermented food had lots of harmless bacteria that caused the immune system to stay awake; heart disease is caused by infection too slowly fought off. Why do the French have low rates of heart disease? It’s not only the wine, it’s also the stinky cheese they eat. Why do the Japanese have low rates of heart disease? It’s not only the fish, it’s also the miso and natto. I’ll be blogging more about this — stay tuned.

A surprising effect of yogurt.

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.