Category: self-experimentation

Fermented Food and Athlete’s Foot

Seth Roberts9 Comments

A few weeks ago I went away for a 3-day weekend. It was my first trip away from home since I became enamored of fermented food. I did not plan well and took along only 2 cups of yogurt.

When I got home — and resumed my usual high fermented-food intake — I seemed to have a very mild cold. That was unusual; I almost never get detectable colds. Even more unusual was that I had a small case of athlete’s foot. Uh-oh. I planned to but some anti-fungal cream. I forgot, however. The next day, to my surprise, my athlete’s foot was almost gone. The following days it cleared up completely.

I had not had athlete’s foot for a long time. In the past, however, it did not go away by itself. I had had to use antifungal cream. Now, apparently, my immune system was working much better.

My interpretation is that during that weekend away, my immune function took a sudden dip. Perhaps part of the reason was that I did not sleep as well as usual but I suspect most of the reason was the decrease in my fermented-food intake.

Whatever the reason I got athlete’s foot that weekend, the fact that it went away without any special treatment suggests that all that anti-fungal cream in the drugstore implies that many Americans have suboptimal immune function. The Wikipedia entry for athlete’s foot says nothing about good immune function as a means of prevention. As if the hundred-odd people who wrote the article had no idea that what happened to me — it went away on its own — could happen. We are in the pre-John-Snow era here. The most basic practical point about athlete’s foot — you won’t get it if your immune system is working well — isn’t widely understood.

If you read Example 5 of my long self-experimentation paper, you will see that I used to get ordinary colds at an ordinary rate but after I started sleeping much better they stopped. Which points to the same conclusion as the incident I described here: A large fraction of Americans have suboptimal immune function. Some people will say: “Of course!” But they will go on to say, “The average American eats so much junk!” And I think that’s wrong. I think the problem is 1. Poor sleep. 2. Too little fermented food. The self-confident nutritionista will never mention either one.

How Things Begin (I Got Uggs! update)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A year ago I wrote how the website I Got Uggs! began. Since then it has done well. I interviewed the proprietor recently.

Since our previous conversation about I Got Uggs! (April 2008), what’s happened with the site?

A lot more page views. On average, approximately 6,000 more. I’ve also increased revenue greatly by adding some revenue producing advertising. When we last spoke I was only using Google Adsense, but now I’m using three more sources.

How did you increase page views?

The first thing I did was change some keywords in my heading. For example, I added the words “Buy UGG Boots on Sale”. By doing that alone I got an increase of almost 2,000 hits overnight. The second thing I did was join three affiliate programs: Amazon Associates, Chitika, and ShareaSale. When someone buys a pair of UGG boots from the site, I get between 7 and 10% commission. Furthermore, I get money from other websites that want to place an advertisement on the site, and I charge them a monthly fee based on the number of page views using a formula I found on the ‘net. Now since, I changed the keywords, if you type “uggs” or “ugg boots” into Google, I Got UGGs! is on the first page or number 1.

What were page views before the increases?

I was getting an average of 1,800 page views per day in September and early October. That number went to close to 4,000 page views per day on October 4, and then to averaging 6,000 page views per day beginning October 5.

You get significant income from both I Got Uggs! and I Got Converse!?

I’m getting more from I Got Uggs, but it’s going down as the weather gets warmer, but I Got Converse is going up everyday. I Got Uggs is showing some seasonal changes in terms of the income stream, but I’m praying that I Got Converse will eventually pick up the full slack.

You hired an assistant so you would have time to write a book. What does your assistant do? What do you pay him/her? How did you hire him/her?

She currently scans pictures, looks for pictures in the tabloids, and proofreads for me, in addition to other things like going to the post office and make 99 cent latte runs to the Dunkin’ Donuts on 8th avenue. More importantly, I’m training her to do the postings for both sites.

I pay her $10 per hour and she works about ten hours per week. She’s actually a Landmark [High School] student [where he teaches]. Despite being a straight A student, she wrote a paper on wanting to be a personal assistant as a career goal. Another teacher told me about her, so I offered her the opportunity to try it out. Thank God, she’s awesome and she loves it! She’s actually my 5th assistant. The others didn’t work out for various reasons.

You still have your teaching job, right?

Yes, I’m still teaching, but I’m looking to do the blogs and writing full-time after this school year ends. At the most, I plan on teaching part-time at a college, but not full-time anymore.

Uncharitable

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential by Dan Pallotta is more a howl than a book. I enjoyed opening it at random, reading a few pages, agreeing with the author that the current situation is idiotic, and then going back to whatever I was doing. It is too repetitive to read sequentially but read in bits it makes a lot of sense. His big point is that nonprofits are forced to operate under weird moralistic constraints that do no one any good — and I’m sure he’s right. The main benefit of those moralistic constraints — no one must profit from charity! for example — is that the moralizers feel good. The charities are badly damaged. And the charities are self-destructive, too. After Pallotta’s company ran highly successful 3-day Breast Cancer walks for several years, the Avon Products Foundation, which benefited from these walks, decided they could do better themselves. After a year (2002) in which Pallott’s company raised $140 million, Avon themselves ran a similar event for four years (2003-2006) during which they raised about $60 million/year.

Ode to Trader Joe’s: Update

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A month ago, as I blogged, my friend Carl Willat posted on YouTube a video he’d made titled “ If I Made A Commercial For Trader Joe’s“. It has now received several hundred thousand views. I asked Carl for an update. He replied:

This video has received a better reaction than anything I’ve done in quite a long time. Â Of course part of this is just YouTube, where suddenly you can know what people think of your commercial, through the comments they leave and how many views you get. Â In the past commercials were just sent out into the ether and you never really heard any firsthand audience reaction. Â But some of my old commercials are on YouTube and none of them has this many hits. Â Even Christmas Kisses, which people really seem to like, has maybe 28,000 views in two years. And people aren’t posting it to their blogs or Facebook pages, as far as I know. Â So something is different about this one. Â To a large extent I’m trading on the goodwill people already have for Trader Joe’s. Â People just love that store. Â And the spot is subversive, which makes it more fun. Â But I think the main difference is the fact that it’s heartfelt, in that it reflects my actual feelings about Trader Joe’s, both positive and negative, and a lot of people can relate to those feelings. Â You can’t do that in a real ad because there’s an agency and a client that only want to say positive things about the product, and it has to be part of their overall strategy and so forth, which is fine, and I’ve certainly done my share of ads like that. But it’s hard to get genuine human feeling into traditional advertising, which is a shame, human feeling being the only thing people really care about.

The viewing history:

The spike happened after mention on Boing Boing.

I think Carl’s commercial is very important as a glimpse of the future. Long ago, only the powerful could speak to a mass audience — and they couldn’t tell the truth, for fear of losing their power. Then cheap books came along. Instantly a much larger group of people could speak to a mass audience — and, having little to lose, they could tell the truth. The truth, being rare, was an advantage. When science was young and many scientists were amateurs — Darwin, Mendel — they could tell the truth. As science became a job, a source of income and status that you could lose, scientists lost the ability to say what they really thought. For example, David Healy lost a job because he told the truth about anti-depressants. Self-experimentation is a way around this problem because, as I’ve said, no matter how crazy my conclusions I can keep doing it. I don’t need a grant so I don’t need to worry about offending grant givers.

Because TV commercials are a source of money and status (for ad agencies and marketing execs), they too have great difficulty being truthful. After watching Carl’s commercial I watched a Coke commercial that used the same music. The Coke commercial now struck me as horrible — flat and insincere. (Yet expensive.) Given the choice between an official statement — namely, the commercials you see on TV — and a personal one — a commercial like Carl’s — everyone will not only prefer to watch the personal statement but will also be more persuaded by it. Win-win. So it is in the self-interest of any company that makes a product that somebody loves to stop making the usual insincere stuff and start finding people who love their products and help them express it.

Where Does Umami Come From?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

As previously blogged, the evolutionary reason we like umami taste may be so that we’ll eat more bacteria-laden food. This makes sense only if bacteria-laden food would have been the main source of umami. Nowadays, you can get umami from MSG. What about before MSG?

The Umami Information Center sent me a free booklet called Umami The World — a better title than Umami: An Introduction. Umami taste is mainly supplied by glutamic acid, a protein building block. My assumption was that glutamic acid is usually a protein breakdown product. Bacteria feed on protein, leaving a pile of bricks — glutamic acid among them. Was this correct? Or could you get umami taste without bacteria?

You can, but in most cases you don’t. In Japanese cooking, a potent source of umami is konbu, a type of seaweed. Perhaps because konbu produces so much umami and so little else that umami was discovered by a Japanese scientist. Umami flavorings are used in many other cuisines but the source is usually fermented food. In many Asian countries, umami comes from fermented fish sauce and fermented bean products (e.g., miso, soy sauce). In Chinese cooking, umami comes from a condiment called jiang, which is made from fermented grain, meat, or fish. In Western cuisines, cured pork is often used as a flavoring agent. “The curing process liberates more of the glutamic acid content of the meat.” Curing takes place at room temperature, which means bacteria grow. “Much of the food of ancient Rome was routinely seasoned with a sauce [that] was made from salted fish, fermented and strained. . . The polar Eskimo people traditionally fermented a small portion of their harvest of fish.” Tomatoes and shitake mushrooms are non-fermented sources of umami.

A telling comment in the book is that umami usually comes from sauces (e.g., fish sauce) or liquids (e.g., dashi, bouillion). Cooks use sauces and liquids to add what is missing. The presence of umami in so many sauces — as if sauces have been devised or selected to be high in umami — suggests that ordinary foods don’t have much umami. A table of glutamate concentration says that parmesan cheese has 1700 mg/100 g whereas several vegetables — tomatoes (246 mg/100 g), green pea (106), onion (51), spinach (48), potato (10) — and meats — beef (10), chicken (22), pork (9) — have much less.

The breakdown process I imagined is spelled out: “During the ripening of cheese, proteins are broken down progressively into smaller polypeptides and individual amino acids. Large increases in free amino acid content also occur during the curing of ham.” Surely the same will be true during room temperature aging of any protein source. Beef is routinely aged at room temperature for about a week to give it a “meaty” flavor (not from the umami book but from here).

Oral Health, Heart Disease, and Fermented Foods

Seth Roberts6 Comments

From the abstract of a 2007 paper about oral health and heart disease:

The high prevalence of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and infections of the mouth has led to the hypothesis that these disease entities [are] connected. Oral biofilms contain numerous micro-organisms with more than 700 identified species. . . . These micro-organisms cause dental caries and periodontal disease of which the majority of humans suffer during their life. Oral bacteria are presumed to gain access to the blood circulation and are postulated to trigger systemic reactions by up-regulating a variety of cytokines and inflammatory mediators. Infection and inflammation play a role also in atherogenesis. Furthermore, traces of oral micro-organisms, such as the gram-negative anaerobic bacterium Porphyromonas gingivalis, have been detected in atheroma plaques. This bacterium seems to be potentially atherogenic in animal models. Epidemiologic data have shown a statistical association between periodontal disease and coronary heart disease and stroke. In a meta-analysis, the odds ratio increase for CVD in persons with periodontal disease was almost 20%. Poor oral health also seems to be associated with all-cause mortality.

Emphasis added. As I blogged earlier, during my last trip to the dentist I was told my gums were in great shape, better than the previous visit — and the only intentional change since the previous visit was a huge increase (a factor of 50?) in how much fermented food I eat. So perhaps fermented foods improve oral health. A reason to suspect that fermented foods reduce heart disease is that Eskimos, with very low rates of heart disease, eat lots of fermented food. If both these ideas are true — fermented foods improve gum health and reduce heart disease — it would explain the observed correlation between gum disease and heart disease.

A vast number of people believe that sugar and refined flour are bad for us. In large amounts, sure, because they cause so much dysregulation (e.g., high blood sugar) and in ditto foods cause obesity. But what about average amounts? Here I’m not so sure. The shift to a diet high in sugar and refined flours has usually happened at the same time as a shift away from traditional diets. In other words, the increase in sugar and flour wasn’t the only change. I suspect there was usually a great reduction in fermented foods at the same time. Maybe the reduction in fermented foods caused the trouble rather than the increase in sugar and flour. The reduction in fermented foods is almost always ignored – for example, by Weston Price and John Yudkin (author of Sweet and Dangerous).

Probiotics and oral health. An experiment about probiotics and oral health.

Hey, What Happened to My Brain? (part 3)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

The data I posted that showed a sudden improvement in my arithmetic ability is among the most interesting data I’ve ever collected. Not because it revealed something wildly new — I was already sure flaxseed oil helped — but because it revealed something intriguing and new (the time course of the improvement is puzzling).

I collected the data in an unusual way — watchful waiting. I didn’t do an experiment, the way experimental psychology data is usually collected. I didn’t do a survey, the way epidemiological data is collected. In the emphasis on one person it resembles a case report in medical journals — but I didn’t have a problem to be solved and the data is far more numerical and systematic than the data in a case report.

And this rarely-used scientific method paid off. Hmm. I think the scientific methods currently taught have a big weakness: They focus almost entirely on idea testing, whereas idea generation is just as important. Tools that work well for idea testing work poorly for idea generation. The effect of this imbalance — a kind of nutritional deficiency in intellectual diet — is that scientists don’t do a good job of coming up with new ideas.

What should scientists be doing? I would like to find out. My watchful-waiting data collection is/was part of trying to find out. That it paid off pretty quickly is a good sign. It’s the third step in a long process. Step 1. When I was a grad student, my acne self-experimentat led me to realize that one of my prescribed medicines didn’t work — a surprising and useful new idea. Step 2: Later self-experiments had the same effect: Generated surprising and useful ideas. At a much higher rate than my conventional experiments. Why? Perhaps because it involves cheap frequent tests of something important. Step 3: Arrange such a situation — cheap frequent tests of something important — and see what happens.

Hey, What Happened to My Brain? (part 2)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

As I blogged earlier, my arithmetic performance suddenly improved about a month ago (close-up above). How fast the change: On February 2 at 8 am I took the test; my scores were roughly the same as they had been the past month. At 2 pm the same day, I took the test again and was about 50 msec faster. (In reaction-time experiments, a surprising 50-msec effect is huge.) I remained faster for at least several weeks. Comparing the last 30 sessions before the shift to the first 30 sessions after the shift, t (38) = 11, p = extremely small. In an experiment, comparing treatment and baseline, t> 3 is very good and t > 4 is extremely good.

What might have caused this?

I moved to Beijing in October. Eventually I ran out of the Spectrum Organic flaxseed oil I’d brought with me and started drinking a Beijing brand called Joyful Organic. When I returned to Berkeley I brought a few bottles of it with me and continued to drink it. In late January I ran out; the evening of January 29 I started drinking Spectrum Organic again. Four days later my arithmetic scores sharply improved.

It’s really plausible that the improvement was due to the change in flaxseed oils. Flaxseed oil had made a difference (versus nothing) with a very similar task. A few weeks before the shift, a friend had asked how I knew if my Chinese flaxseed oil was good; I’d said I’d find out when I switched back to Spectrum Organic.

But why was the improvement delayed four days? I started studying flaxseed oil because one evening I took several capsules and the next morning noticed my balance was better. And if the improvement is going to take that long, why would it happen so sharply after the delay? I can’t even begin to answer these questions.

Language and Netbooks

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I believe language evolved because it facilitated trade. If you wanted X, being able to say “X?” made it a thousand times easier to find someone with excess X. This efficiency required prior language learning, of course. Language learning happened in the background, so to speak, then paid off in the foreground by making one of human life’s biggest tasks (trading) much easier.

After reading this excellent article about netbooks, I realized they’re like language. All sorts of tasks become much easier for your computer if the heavy lifting is done by a server. You no longer need Word or Photoshop, for example. Just as using language to trade required prior language learning, using netbooks this way requires prior software development.

Hey, What Happened to My Brain? (part 1)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

For a few months, I’ve been measuring how well my brain is working using arithmetic problems. Each test session includes 100 simple problems (3+4, 7-0, 4*8) divided into 5 blocks of 20. I type the last digit of the answer as quickly as possible. I got the idea from Tim Lundeen, who got better on a similar task when he increased his DHA intake. My performance on an earlier version of this task was improved by flaxseed oil.

I’ve blogged about this. The virtues of this test include: 1. Fast. Takes only a few minutes. 2. Portable. Requires only a laptop. 3. Many possible answers (1, 2, 3, etc.). This reduces anticipation errors. 4. Many numbers (reaction times) per test. This allows me to get a measure of variability for each session and can correct for the difficulty of the problem. Aspects with room for improvement include: 1. Speed/accuracy tradeoff. Accuracy isn’t fixed. Depending on how accurate I want to be, I’ll go faster or slower. (I aim for 95% correct.) 2. No complex actions. The most enjoyable games have a motor-skill aspect that this task does not.

Here’s the data so far.

The big gap happened because I moved from Beijing to Berkeley. The most fascinating result, of course, is the sudden drop on February 2. Here is a close-up.

The drop was easy to notice. All of a sudden I was faster (and only slightly less accurate). The first test with better performance took place while my landlady, who lives upstairs, was practicing piano. Usually it’s quiet when I test myself. My first thought was that the music had caused the improvement. But it persisted so long after the music had stopped that the music couldn’t be the cause.

Part 2: I think I know what caused it. But there is a big problem with my explanation.