Category: umami hypothesis

The Dose-Response Revolution and Fermented Food

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Edward Calabrese, a toxicology professor at the University of Massachusetts, has pointed to the existence of U-shaped dose-response functions in a great many cases. Chemicals harmful at high doses are helpful at low dose, a phenomenon called hormesis. He reviews the evidence here and here. I didn’t know that a low dose of dioxin reduces tumors. Nor did I know that a low dose of saccharine likewise reduces tumors.

The theory behind hormesis is that a damage-repair system is stimulated by the toxin. This isn’t far from my idea that the average American’s immune system is woefully understimulated, with many bad consequences (allergies, cancer, etc.), due to too-sterile food. If the rats or whatever used in the hormesis studies — probably fed sterile lab chow — were given immune system stimulation (e.g., from fermented food), the hormesis effect might disappear.

Thanks to JR Minkel.

Antibiotics Associated with Later Infection

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A 2005 study by David Margolis, a dermatology professor at Penn, and others, found that acne patients given long-term antibiotic treatment, which often lasts more than 6 months, were more than twice as likely to have an upper respiratory tract infection during the year after treatment began than acne patients not given antibiotics.

Does this correlation reflect causality? Two additional analyses suggest it does:

1. Perhaps acne patients who get antibiotics are more likely to see a doctor than those who don’t. However, a study of patients diagnosed with high blood pressure, which also requires relatively frequent doctor visits, had the same risk of upper respiratory tract infections as acne patients not given antibiotics.

2. A later study found that the contacts of acne patients (such as their family) are more likely to have upper respiratory tract infections if the acne patient has such an infection — as you’d expect from contagion. But it makes no difference to these contacts if the acne patient was given antibiotics or not. This means that acne patients given antibiotics do not live in more infection-prone surroundings than acne patients not given antibiotics.

Bottom line: Support for the idea that the bacteria in our body help us stay healthy.

The Good Scots Diet

Seth Roberts3 Comments

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.

Mosquitoes Praise Fermented Food

Seth Roberts5 Comments

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.

Less of a Foodie

Seth Roberts3 Comments

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.

Parasites and Allergies

Seth Roberts5 Comments

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.

Eczema, Nighttime Cough, Antibiotics, and Fermented Food

Seth Roberts8 Comments

When Alex Comb’s son was an infant, he had pretty bad eczema. (Eczema is a reddish dry skin rash.) He also had a nighttime cough, a dry cough that started and stopped throughout the night. The cough lasted months. It turned out he was allergic to carragenen. The cough was mostly, but not entirely, eliminated by avoiding carragenen. Sometimes there were flareups.

When the son was 2 years old, he had a mild case of eczema. Doctors wanted to give him steroids. Alex started researching the causes of eczema and how to alleviate it. He came across research on the hygiene hypothesis. In a forum, he read that some people had tried probiotics for eczema with some success. Research on the subject had had mixed results but it seemed worth a try.

So Alex and his wife gave his son DanActive (a probiotic dairy drink) every day for over a year. After a week or so, he noticed improvement. The nighttime cough completely went away. The eczema went away 95%. This isn’t a use of DanActive I could find on their website.

When his son was 3 yrs old, Alex and his wife stopped the DanActive. They assumed his immune system was better. He had gotten tired of drinking it all the time. He drank it less. His diet got broader too; he started eating yogurt. He never really stopped drinking it, he just drank it less.

A few months ago, the son started a 10-day course of antibiotics for a nasal discharge. A few days later, the nighttime coughing mysteriously resumed. It lasted at least 5 nights, and ended around the same time the antibiotics did. It was an asthmatic cough rather than a respiratory infection cough. An asthmatic cough is much drier and shorter.

A few weeks ago, the son was put on antibiotics for an abscessed tooth. Two or three days after antibiotics started, the asthmatic cough started again. Was it the antibiotics? He had not been drinking the DanActive so Alex and his wife started giving it to him again. They gave him the antibiotics earlier in the day and the DanActive before he went to bed. The very first night they did this the cough went away. They kept doing that and the cough stayed away. He has had no cough since then.

What’s telling is the clarity of the correlations. They support the idea that we have a large need for bacteria-laden foods.

Would You Rather Have Lice or Eat Yogurt?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Research on mice shows that those carrying the most lice had calmer immune systems than uninfested rodents, and they [the researchers, not the mice!] said their finding may have implications for studying the causes of asthma and allergies in people.

From Reuters. The research paper. The data analysis is much better than usual. Among its strengths are: 1. Graphs of main points. 2. Transformation of variables. 3. Principal components analysis.

This study is more evidence that a high level of foreign substances in our body to which the immune system responds is beneficial. The researchers say nothing about fermented foods, which are an easy and easy-to-control way to ingest such substances. It’s hard to vary your dose of lice but easy to vary how much yogurt you eat.

Thanks to Oskar Pearson.

Live Food at Google? Nope

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I ate lunch in the cafeteria of Google New York. Being monomanical, I was struck by the absence of fermented food. No kombucha, kefir, kimchi, pickles, wine, beer, natto, strong cheese, sauerkraut. Not even yogurt! (Of course there was vinegar at the salad bar and perhaps the meat was aged.) The absence was especially glaring given so much conventionally-healthy food: raw food, twenty kinds of vegetables, fruit, fish, diet sodas, gazpacho, sugar-free jello . . . I am sorry to predict those talented Googlers will be sicker than necessary.

Previous visit.

The Wisdom of the Five-Year-Old Picky Eater

Seth Roberts16 Comments

Children are notoriously picky eaters. Could they be trying to tell us (adults) something? Such as how bad our diet is?

Alex Combs, a stay-at-home dad and equity trader who lives near Philadelphia, has a five-year-old son whom Alex describes as “a picky eater.”

His son will not eat rice, potatoes, and pasta. He will eat small amounts of meat.

Yet his son will eat pickles, balsamic vinegar, and old/stinky cheese (but not regular cheese).

This is a fair description of what I eat! No simple carbs, some meat, plenty of fermented foods. While lots of people advocate low-carb diets, only a few, including me, advocate large amounts of fermented food. His son’s counter-intuitive liking for such gourmet “adult” foods as pickles, balsamic vinegar, and old cheeses, all high in bacteria, puts the picky eating of children in a whole new light. They’re not picky — they’re smart.