Category: umami hypothesis

Sickness After Starting to Eat Yogurt

Seth Roberts8 Comments

A friend writes:

As of today I’m getting over my fourth cold since I began eating lots of yogurt (maybe 1-2 cups a day, homemade), which was roughly in March of this year. So that would be a rate of about a cold every two months. On the one hand that sounds pretty terrible. On the other hand, a couple of things to think about:

1. I used to always get colds and other sicknesses as well. They just seem to be attracted to me. By my intuition, the current rate doesn’t seem particularly unusual, although I never kept track before. If anyone had a cold anywhere around me, invariably I got it. It’s been that way as long as I can remember, especially when I was traveling, as I have been during these last few months.

2. Each of the colds I have had in this last eight month period has been remarkably short. Really remarkable, so I will remark, by way of example, that this cold came out of the blue yesterday evening with a fit of sneezing. I hadn’t felt bad at all earlier in the day although in retrospect it’s possible I was a bit worn down (or maybe not: I took a half-hour swim in the late afternoon and felt pretty good). So I sneezed my way through an evening, nose dripping like a faucet. Before going to sleep I took some sort of medicine for cold symptoms (maybe something made by Bufferin maybe? Night/day something…), and in the morning I took the same thing (day version). During that whole time I was still pretty symptomatic: sneezing, nose dripping etc., but I guess the medicine might have been somewhat useful. Now here it is 2:30 in the afternoon and all of a sudden I realize my nose is dry and I haven’t sneezed for hours. I reckon this is about the end of the cold: less than 24 hours. The other three were like that as well: very quick onset, then disappearing almost before I could have time to realize I had a cold. For me this is particularly noteworthy because in years past I always seemed to get the worst of the colds, going on for days and often progressing into a hacking cough that would linger for weeks.

I suspect if my friend improved his sleep he would get see further improvement of these measures of illness. In this study, the frequency of sickness episodes went down for workers given a probiotic but their duration, when they happened, didn’t change — perhaps because it was nice to be away from work.

After I copy-and-pasted that, I got sick. It wasn’t sickness as most people know it. After an afternoon walk (1 hour) I felt tired; that was the first sign. After dinner, I felt really tired. That was an unmistakable sign. I went to bed early, slept about 8 hours (1-2 hours more than usual) and woke up rested. But an hour later I fell back asleep for 15 minutes. At that point I was sure something was wrong. I had a class that morning starting at 10 am. Should I cancel it? I got much more tired and, about two hours before class, was too tired to get out of bed to turn off the beeping yogurt maker. Okay, I’ll cancel class. I phoned the TA to cancel the class but he couldn’t — he had a bad cold. I phoned a student and she phoned the other students.

An hour later, however, I felt much better. By class time I felt well enough to go to class, although I walked rather than ride my bike. (The student did her best to uncancel the class.) In the afternoon I took a long nap (1.5 hours). The next day I was just barely more tired than usual. Today I feel completely well.

I was sick, yes, but without chills, runny nose, sneezing, sore throat — without any discomfort at all unless feeling tired counts as discomfort. And I felt distinctly more tired than usual for only about a day. I think this is what happens when your immune system works properly. You fight stuff off much faster than the five days or so many people take to get better. Before I figured out how to improve my sleep, I got the usual 4-6 colds per year. After I started to sleep much better, I never got sick in the usual runny-nose way so long as my sleep was good. The current episode is striking to me because I was more sick — that is, more tired — than usual. I do only two things to make my immune system work better: (a) improve my sleep in several ways (eat animal fat, get plenty of morning light, stand on one foot); and (b) eat plenty of fermented foods (mostly yogurt, but also miso, kimchi, natto, and kombucha).

Who is “Totally Healthy”?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I watched this 60 Minutes piece on swine flu. Of course nothing was said about boosting immunity as a defense. “The best way to reduce your chances of one of those terrible outcomes [hospitalization, death] is to be vaccinated,” said Anne Schuchat, who has a very high position at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This is just part of a bigger delusion. The story centers on a football player who gets seriously sick after a football game. Schuchat said this:

This is one of the tragic parts of this epidemic. That people who are in the prime of their life, totally healthy, can suddenly become so sick.

Totally healthy. This is the bigger delusion: That the average American who appears healthy is healthy. I believe that practically all Americans have grossly-impaired immunity. Their immune systems work much worse than they could. The poor performance is due to suboptimal sleep and far too little bacteria in their diet. The football player was near death because he had two out-of-control infections. That’s how poorly his immune system was working. And a top CDC official called him “totally healthy”! Apparently she has no idea that people’s immune systems can vary in how well they work. This is even worse than the UCLA medical school prof specializing in infectious disease who also failed to understand this. Schuchat is one of the top public health officials in America! Public health is about prevention. According to Wikipedia, Schuchat “has emphasized prevention of infectious diseases in children.”

Reduced Diversity of Fecal Bacteria Correlated with Diaper Rash

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In a 2008 study, researchers took fecal samples from 35 babies when they were one week old. They measured the diversity of bacteria in those samples. When the babies were 18 months old, they were divided into two groups: with (n = 15) and without (n = 20) atopic dermatitis, commonly called a rash. Atopic dermatitis is a sign of an oversensitive immune system. Children with this problem are more likely to have allergy problems when they are older. The 2008 study found that the babies with atopic dermatitis had less diverse fecal bacteria.

This is more evidence connecting lack of bacteria with immune problems.

Winter Swimming

Seth Roberts8 Comments

In Jilin Province, where it gets very cold in the winter, the older residents engage in winter swimming. It’s good for their health, they say. Everyone knows this, a friend of mine who grew up there told me. On TV, she once saw an old woman say that she was having heart problems, but once she started winter swimming they got better.

When he was a grad student at Harvard, a friend of mine raised rats to be in learning experiments. He found that if he handled the rats — stressing them, essentially — they grew larger and healthier than unstressed rats.

The cosmic ray effect I mentioned earlier — that trees grow more when there is more cosmic radiation — occurred with older trees but not younger trees.

If you’ve ever designed an experiment, you know that both the treatment and the measurement need to be neither too high nor too low. With the treatment, that’s obvious. I suspect all three of these phenomena are examples of positioning the measurement appropriately. They suggest that everyone needs some sort of stress to be in the best health, but only in certain situations is it easy to see this.

Use of Probiotics in Hospitals

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A Canadian company named Bio-K+ makes lactobacilli-based probiotics — mainly a fermented milk drink, like Yakult but with different bacteria — that hospitals can use to reduce antibiotic-related diarrhea (a common side effect of antibiotics) and C. difficile infection, a less common but far more serious side effect. In this 2007 study, the probiotics reduced the rate of diarrhea by half and reduced the rate of C. difficile infection by a factor of 7 (from 7 cases to 1 case).

How the company started. Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Cosmic Radiation Makes Trees Grow Faster

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Trees grow faster during periods of greater cosmic radiation from the sun:

During a number of years, the trees’ growth also particularly slowed. These years correlated with periods when a relatively low level of cosmic rays reached the Earth’s surface. When the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the Earth’s surface was higher, the rate of tree growth was faster. . .

Cosmic rays are actually energetic particles, mainly protons, as well as electrons and the nuclei of helium atoms, that stream through space before hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. The levels of cosmic rays reaching the Earth go up and down according to the activity of the Sun, which follows an 11-year cycle.

As someone pointed out, this may be another example of radiation hormesis. Although some examples of hormesis may be due to immune-system stimulation, you can also see hormesis with single cells, which don’t have an immune system, of course. They do have repair mechanisms.

From my point of view this is interesting because it helps to show what a big effect hormesis is. I’m sure we need daily stimulation of our repair systems to be our healthiest but this isn’t a part of standard teaching about health. It goes against what people are usually taught (e.g., all germs are bad, all air pollution is bad, keep from getting sick by avoiding contagion) roughly as much as does the Shangri-La Diet. The scientists who discovered the tree effect appear to not know about hormesis (“As for the mechanism, we are puzzled”).

The success of the Shangri-La Diet teaches that the obesity epidemic is due to eating too much food that has exactly the same flavor (smell) each time — from one can of Coke to the next, for example. In practice, this too-constant food is food from a package (food made in a factory) and food from a restaurant. My umami hypothesis says that the epidemic of autoimmune diseases has the same source. Food in a package is more sterile than other food because bacteria reduce shelf life so preservatives are added and/or manufacturing steps (e.g., pasteurization) kill bacteria. Food from a restaurant has usually been freshly cooked (killing bacteria) and all sorts of precautions (“food safety”) are taken to make sure it remains low in bacteria.

Thanks to David Cramer.

Yogurt and Seasonal Allergies

Seth Roberts3 Comments

This comment on a previous post deserves emphasis:

For the past 3 years or so, a co-worker and I would suffer spring allergies together. We seemed to be allergic to the same thing, because we’d start and stop at the same times. This year, we both got whacked hard late April. Desperate, I started eating yogurt (Breyers mostly, some Danactive and Stonyfield) every day, sometimes twice, after reading your blog and doing some research. About 8 – 10 days later, I noticed I had no symptoms. My friend had light symptoms, so I thought maybe it was just a lull. Then about 2 weeks later, my friend got pummeled by allergies again, very badly; he could hardly work. I had NO symptoms. I didn’t even realize it was a bad day for allergies until he showed up to work. I haven’t had any allergies since.

Probiotic Health Claims Dismissed

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

From BBC News:

General health claims for “probiotic” drinks and yogurts have been dismissed by a team of experts from the European Union.

Their opinions will now be voted on by an EU Committee which is drawing up a list of permitted health claims.

Scientists at the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) looked at 180 health claims for the supplements.

They rejected 10 claims and said a further 170 had not provided enough evidence of their effects.

The manufacturers of best-selling yogurt drinks Actimel and Yakult have submitted claims that will be considered at a later stage.

The difference between “rejecting” a claim and saying “not enough evidence” isn’t clear.

Effects of Probiotics on Kids

Seth Roberts4 Comments

As I previously blogged, a recent study in Shanghai found that schoolchildren given milk with added bacteria had fewer colds than children given milk without added bacteria. The study was funded by Danisco, a Wisconsin company that makes bacteria-containing (“probiotic”) capsules. Obviously they want to sell more of their product. But ordinary yogurt probably produces the same result. Aaron Blaisdell told me this:

Since introducing yogurt into my daughter Maggie’s diet on a daily basis about 5 months ago, she’s gotten far fewer colds, and those she did get were milder.

I asked him for details.

Maggie is 4 years old. She eats a bowl of Traderspoint Creamery whole milk yogurt (from grassfed cows) each day. She started day care since 4-months old and now goes to a pre-school. She used to get a cold about every other month (6-8 per year), but since we introduced yogurt daily to her diet about 6 months ago, she’s only had one cold as far as I can remember and it was very mild. Even the cough which used to last a month or two after she recovered lasted only about a week or two.

How much yogurt was she eating before that?

I think she had yogurt once or twice a week for the six months prior to introducing it daily. Before that it was even rarer. We introduced it a few times between the ages of 2 and 3 years old, and after initially liking it for a day or two she would then reject it thereafter. The reason she eats it every day now is because I put Ovaltine in it (about a teaspoon).

Did he make other changes at the same time?

I also try to sneak fermented high-vitamin cod liver oil into the yogurt, but I can only do this if I make it while she isn’t looking. I also put 2-4k vitamin D3 (Carlson’s drops) into it if she isn’t looking when I make it. Also starting at the beginning of this year I switched from organic pasteurized milk to raw milk. I can’t think of any other significant changes in diet, except that I continue to try to cut down on the amount of cereal and crackers she eats and increase the amount of eggs and cheese instead.

Let’s hope she doesn’t read this!