Category: umami hypothesis

Autism and Digestive Problems

Seth Roberts6 Comments

The latest issue of Pediatrics has a study that asks whether autism is associated with digestive problems. The authors compared the medical records of about 100 autistics with about 200 matched controls. The controls came from an area in Minnesota, near the Mayo Clinic, in which almost everyone has a health record on file that the researchers could look at. So the controls are a good sample of the non-autistic population.

The New York Times described the results like this:

The scientists found no differences [should be difference, singular] in the overall frequency of gastrointestinal problems reported by the two groups.

This isn’t quite right. The study found that the proportions of persons in each group to have had at least one digestive problem by age 20 weren’t reliably different. For the autistic kids, the proportion was 77%; for the controls, 72%.

The study design seems fine but the data analysis has a lot of room for improvement. You have an idea you want to test, good; try to test it with one test. The authors boiled down all their data into “at least one problem by age 20″ — that’s just what epidemiologists are told to do — but this was a poor choice. First, there is a ceiling problem. If both groups had percentages in the 90′s, this would be obvious. Better to avoid the ceiling problem. Second. to combine different symptoms with the “at least one” rule is likely to be less sensitive to differences than a combination rule that takes amount into account. The analysis in the article treats someone with 1 problem as equal to someone with 50 problems. No justification is given. Third, it isn’t obvious that it makes sense to combine symptoms this way. What if Symptom 1 and Symptom 2 are uncorrelated? In other words, what if whether you have Symptom 1 doesn’t affect your chances of having Symptom 2? Then to combine them (as the authors do) makes no sense. Factor analysis is how you condense several correlated measures into a few uncorrelated measures.

The study separated digestive problems into five categories (constipation, diarrhea, and three others). In each of the five categories, persons in the autistic group were more likely to report the problem than persons in the control group; in four of the five categories, the difference was significant (with one-tailed p values; the authors misleadingly use two-tailed p values — without making that clear). In one of the five categories the difference isn’t anywhere close to significant — which supports the idea that that there are at least two dimensions here: one on which the two groups differ, and one on which they don’t.

In the discussion, the authors, not realizing that four out of five of their problem categories differed significantly in the predicted direction, try to explain away the two differences that were significant with two-tailed p values: in constipation and picky eating. They note that autistic children get more medication that normal children. “Many children with autism are treated with resperidone, and this may result in increased appetite and weight gain,” they write. Why a drug that causes weight gain would cause picky eating isn’t explained and, without explanation, doesn’t make sense. Weight gain — they mean too much weight gain — involves eating too much; picky eating involves eating too little. Nor do the authors explain why their results differed from many previous studies. My take on the paper is that their results confirm previous studies, so that would have been interesting to read.

More About Turmeric

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From the Shangri-La Diet forums:

I’ve begun taking turmeric and it’s been a miracle. I used to be really into rock climbing and this really messed up the big toe in my right foot. (Wearing shoes 2.5 sizes too small and bearing all my body weight on my toe joints will do that, apparently.) The podiatrist said it was arthritic in nature and that the only thing that would stop it was to stop climbing. So I did. One year later, the pain had lessened, but it still hurt, and I couldn’t start running again.

Last week, on a humbug, I tried turmeric. I made some vile anti-inflammatory spice concoction and managed to get a few tablespoons of it down. It probably would have ended there because it was so freaking disgusting, but I noticed later that day that my toe pain had diminished to a dim sensation that was barely uncomfortable. Desperate to come up with a non-disgusting means of taking my new “medicine,” I settled on mixing turmeric, cayenne, and yellow mustard into a paste. It tastes like grainy, spicy mustard and I take about a tablespoon in the morning and a tablespoon at night. I’m also trying to take some fenugreek, cinnamon, and cardamom. I mix the fenugreek with my green tea, allow it to steep and expand between brewings, and then eat the seeds once they get soft. The cinnamon and cardamom are pleasant enough, so I just chew on them. (I use mexican cinnamon, probably 1/3 to 1/2 stick per day.

Vile Spice Mixture = VSM. James Lind tried a VSM in his famous scurvy experiment; it had no effect.

The Wonders of Turmeric.

Thanks to Heidi.

Acid Reflux Cured by Kombucha?

Seth Roberts15 Comments

A friend of mine had acid reflux. When he ate certain foods — tea, chocolate, foods high in sugar or fat — and when he ate too much, he got a pain in his stomach. “Maybe I’ve got an ulcer,” he thought. He first noticed it after eating brussels sprouts, about a year or so ago. At the time it was only uncomfortable. He was taking Alleve for back pain around that time — that might have messed up his stomach. He was also worrying a lot at the time.

It got worse. Periodically he would have pain in his stomach in the middle of the night and during the day. In particular, after eating Oreo cookies. Mint tea, which he thought would help, made it worse. Friends suggested he try Prilosec OTC. A 14-day course seemed to clear it up. A month after the Prilosec ended, however, he went to a big party. He ate a lot of food, a lot of different things. He woke up in the middle of the night with the worst pain yet. So then he went to a doctor. The doctor said it was probably acid reflux; try Asiphex ($60 for two weeks), he said. It was less effective than the Prilosec. Then I suggested that some sort of fermented product might help. So he bought Activa yogurt. It wasn’t clear if it had any effect; maybe a small one.

Recently he was in Rainbow Grocery, in San Francisco. They sell kombucha. He bought some because I had spoken particularly highly of it. After four days of drinking it, he felt much better even though he’d only finished 3/4s of the bottle. His stomach doesn’t hurt any more. That improves his mood. His back feels a lot better — but that comes and goes. That might be a placebo effect, he says — “even though I don’t believe in kombucha, I think it’s bunk, but I have to admit that it works,” he says.

He’d heard of kombucha from his colleagues about three years ago. They raved about it but it seemed faddish to him. He’d tried it, but just to taste it. He doesn’t eat any fermented foods besides vinegar; he doesn’t drink wine or beer. Hadn’t been eating yogurt. He had gone on a vegan diet for a few months before the Prilosec. He’d thought the vegan diet would protect him from stomach problems, but he was wrong.

He has continued to drink small amounts of kombucha and the improvement has persisted, although recently something mint at a party caused a problem.

The Wonders of Turmeric

Seth Roberts11 Comments

From Time:

When he first started coming to me, I gave him the usual anti-inflammatory medications we use for arthritis pain. He had no side effects, but he wasn’t helped much either, so he stopped the pills and lived with the pain. Then he found turmeric. Soon enough, there was no pain at all. [Note that this couldn’t be a placebo effect.] And his lower back and hands, which ached before, were also now pain-free.

Is this another example of foreign substances reducing arthritis? (Not to mention other immune disorders.) Or something different? I don’t know but it’s really interesting.

Thanks to Chuck Remes.

Antibiotics and Debt: Sources of Weakness

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Alexander Fleming, the Scottish bacteriologist who discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, served in the military during World War I. According to Happy Accidents (2007) by Morton Meyers, soldiers in that war often died from infections in relatively minor wounds. Rather than conclude that something was wrong with their immune systems, and wonder why, Fleming — unsurprisingly for a bacteriologist — began to think we needed more substances that killed bacteria. A hundred years later, the blind spot still exists. A few years ago I noticed that a wide-ranging course on epidemiology was being taught in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. I knew the professor. I asked him, “Will the course cover what makes the immune system weak or strong?” “No,” he said. You will look in vain for that topic in any epidemiology text. To call it a blind spot is being nice. Half the subject — the more important half — is being ignored. And Schools of Public Health favor prevention. Medical schools are worse.

In an editorial in today’s Financial Times, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel point out that debt is inherently destabilizing because it creates less room for error. Financial professionals and economists, including those at the very top, don’t realize this:

Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman, tried playing with the business cycle to iron out bubbles, but it eventually got completely out of control. Bubbles and fads are part of cultural life. We need to do the opposite to what Mr Greenspan did: make the economy’s structure more robust to bubbles.

Taleb and Spitznagel note that the dotcom bubble, when it burst, had only minor consequences. That’s because it was an equity bubble rather than a debt bubble. The stimulus package is just more debt: public rather than private. It doesn’t reduce the source of the problem: A too-fragile system. A great point — fascinating how rarely I hear it.

Just as Greenspan failed to understand the problem and chose the wrong lever to pull, so did Fleming and a million doctors and medical/drug researchers. They have tried to deal with a too-fragile system by killing bacteria. Bacteria, like financial bubbles and fads, are part of life. We need to make our bodies more robust to them. Fermented foods do that. By killing off bacteria inside our bodies, antibiotics do the opposite: Make us even more fragile.

Yogurt Associated With Less Allergies

Seth Roberts6 Comments

From the abstract of a 2006 study done in Japan:

An epidemiological study was carried out on [134] first-year junior high school students in Wakayama Prefecture. Analyses were performed to investigate the relationships among eating habits of fermented milk or fermented soybean foods and the presence of atopic diseases. Serum levels of total IgE values, specific IgE to house dust mite and Japanese cedar pollen in these subjects were evaluated to clarify atopic status. . . . RESULTS: Serum total IgE levels were found to be significantly lower in those subjects habitually eating yogurt and/or fermented milk drinking, in comparison with those who do not habitually eat such fermented milk foods. Subjects with habitual intake of these fermented milk foods were significantly lower in having various allergy diseases compared with those without such an eating habit. However, no difference was found on the total IgE titers and having allergy diseases between subjects with or without habitual intake of Natto, a fermented soybean food.

Note the small sample size. Contrary to some experts, it’s a good sign. It means the differences were strong enough to be significant in a relatively small sample. A review article about allergies and fermented foods.

Last January (2008) I got home from Japan and started eating miso soup so often I forgot what I used to eat. This January (2009) I went to the Fancy Food Show and became so interested in fermented foods I’m having trouble remembering what I used to blog about.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

The Wisdom of Young Picky Eaters

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I’m sure that what we want to eat is a good guide to what we should eat, so long as you ask what our preferences would have led us to eat 100,000 years ago — before we killed off the woolly mammoths. (Curiously, I’ve never seen this obvious idea in any nutrition text.) A vast amount of trial and error is embodied in those preferences. Because we learn to like foods, our best guide to unlearned preferences may be what children want to eat.

The great essayist George Trow doesn’t quite get it, I’m afraid:

In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do.

The Wisdom of the One-Year-Old Picky Eater. The Wisdom of the Five-Year-Old Picky Eater.

Refrigerator Parents

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Two epidemiological case-control surveys have linked the age at which, growing up, your home got a refrigerator with your chances of getting Crohn’s Disease later in life. The controls (without Crohn’s) got refrigerators later than the cases (with Crohn’s). This is not one of those data-mining correlations. It was (a) predicted and (b) found in two independent studies.

Crohn’s Disease is much more common in rich countries than poor ones so it was reasonable to examine aspects of lifestyle that distinguish rich and poor countries. In rich countries, the likelihood of having Crohn’s seems to be increasing over time, which is more reason to look for environmental explanations. One of the studies was done in Tehran, where a significant fraction of the population didn’t have a refrigerator when they were born. The control group was patients with irritable bowel syndrome, a curious choice. (The differences might have been larger had they chosen a non-inflammatory digestive problem.) The other study was done in England and used a control group of patients with a non-inflammatory disease.

Refrigerators, of course, retard the growth of bacteria, which I believe everyone needs to eat plenty of (the umami hypothesis). Long ago, “ refrigerator mothers” — mothers who treated their children with insufficient warmth — were blamed for autism and schizophrenia in their children. Now that it is clear that autism is connected with digestive problems there may be ironic truth in the old claim.

Thanks to Dennis Mangan.

Refrigerator poetry.

Scorpion Stings, Bee Stings, and the Umami Hypothesis

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Someone who lives in the southwestern US posted this on a helmenthic therapy forum:

One [scorpion keeper] reported how a pain in his leg from a motorcycle accident that had been with him for years spontaneously resolved after getting stung by some fairly nasty [scorpion] . . . . It’s fairly well-known that beekeepers don’t face the same risk from arthritis as the general public.

I haven’t managed to find support for this “fairly well-known” idea. But it’s quite plausible because bee stings are used to treat arthritis and multiple sclerosis. In this video, an Indonesian therapist says that 85 out of 100 sufferers are “cured” by the treatment.

“A therapy most of us would find taboo,” says the narrator of this video. I wonder. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

There is no known cure for [multiple sclerosis]. . . MS medications can have adverse effects or be poorly tolerated, and many patients pursue alternative treatments, despite the lack of supporting scientific study.

Multiple sclerosis and some forms of arthritis are autoimmune disorders. My “ umami hypothesis” says that autoimmune disorders and other immune disorders, such as allergies, are deficiency diseases. They are caused by not enough immune-system stimulation — stimulation that long ago we got from bacteria-laden food. This suggests a new interpretation of what’s going on with bee-sting therapy. Their healing properties have been attributed, at least in these videos, to special properties of the venom. The umami hypothesis suggests that the foreign proteins in venom calm the immune system and that quite different foreign substances would do just as well. I don’t know of anyone treating arthritis or MS with fermented food — but before the Shangri-La Diet, I didn’t know of anyone drinking sugar water to lose weight. The fact that such hugely different agents as hookworms, bee stings, and fermented foods have similar effects is considerable support for the hypothesis. Without the hypothesis, no one would have grouped them together.

Now I wonder about acupuncture: Could it work, at least some of the time, because it injects foreign substances? Surely acupuncture needles put plenty of bacteria into the body. This line of thought explains why stabbing a knee with a scapel apparently helps arthritis (and involves a lot less hand-waving than calling that result a placebo effect). Keep in mind that this is the hallmark of deficiency diseases: They get a lot better, almost miraculously and without side effects, if you supply even a little of what’s missing. The cure rate can be very high.