Seth's Blog

Which is the real IQAir China?

Here or here?

And which won’t be around to honor the “5 years warranty”?

My (unfortunately negative) comments about IQAir filters are here.

From the Shangri-La Diet Forums:

I chanced upon the book on sale at Barnes and Noble for $4.98. I pored over the book with a slice of stratta, one chocolate lava cake, and a large Green Tea Frappuccino. I was smirking as I read it, in disbelief — it sounded ridiculous!!  . . . I’ve been on different diets since 2003. I weighed 137.5 lbs at my heaviest in 2006. The lowest I’ve been was 126 lb in 4/2004. For New Year 2008 I resolved to take a break from caring about my wt. I wanted to see how big would I actually get if I do nothing – I canceled the GYM (saved $100/month) and ate all the food I wanted anytime.  I was happy as a lark and actually shed some weight without even trying.  My weight settled between 128-130 lb. New Year 2009 came and a coworker asked what diet I was planning to be on. She also informed me of the company’s drive, inviting employees to a health challenge:  For every pound you lose, Pound For Pound will donate 10¢ to Feeding America . . . A sucker for “causes”, I committed to lose 7 lb. I have been procrastinating ever since – it’s not that easy to get back on track and start working-out again. I couldn’t give up Belgian Chocolates or Nutella Crepes.  The first thing I do when I wake up is pop a truffle or 4 in my mouth. (isn’t that gross?)  I do the same at night, before eating my lunch or dinner etc. There’s nothing quite like it – the texture of different truffles, the smell, etc., especially after having no food for at least 2 hours. I eat my dessert before my meal. When I read this book, I thought – this can’t be true. Lose your appetite without even trying? Let’s see… 3/18/2009 I cleaned up my dusty Tanita scale, replaced the batteries & weighed myself. It registered 128.5 lb . . . 3/26/2009 It’s not really time to weigh in or measure but yesterday my belt had to be re-adjusted down a notch. Results WT= 123.5 lb Body Measurement of parts with losses (inches): Waist = -.5; Abs = -.5; Hips -.5 ; Under Bra -.5 Total lost = 2 inches. I guess it works. I only have 2 lb more to go for the Pound for Pound Challenge. Have I changed my eating habits? I’d say I’m eating a lot less chocolates (by far). I’m so motivated to lose more wt. I have already shared the news at work, of course. This is by far the easiest diet I’ve ever been on with the quickest results.

It’s like a weight-loss ad come to humorous life.

In the comments, Patrik links to a fascinating post about “hanging game birds” — that is, hanging them at low temperatures (such as 50 degrees) for several days to improve their flavor. I especially liked this quote from Brillat-Savarin:

The peak is reached when the pheasant begins to decompose; its aroma develops, and mixes with an oil which in order to form must undergo a certain amount of fermentation.

Yet another example of more bacteria, better flavor. I can’t find my copy of Brillat-Savarin but in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking I found this (p. 144):

Despite the contribution that aging can make to meat quality, the modern meat industry generally avoids it, since it means tying up its assets in cold storage and losing about 20% of the meat’s weight to evaporation and laborious trimming of the dried, rancid, sometimes moldy surface.

Okay, I am taking those short ribs I bought today out of the freezer. If people knew that well-aged beef is healthier, as I believe, this meat-industry practice might change. There should be a recommended daily allowance of bacteria. A few billion, perhaps? Bacteria count would be included in the nutrition label. Because the numbers would be so large, everyone would learn scientific notation.

• salt, Nature’s anti-depressant?
• fish oil and speech delay
• caffeine self-experimentation with placebo baseline

Thanks to Marian Lizzi and Saul Sternberg.

In the early 1900s, the anthropologist/explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, after living with Eskimos for a long time, returned to tell Americans what he had learned about nutrition. Eskimos ate meat almost exclusively, he said, which contradicted the usual emphasis, then as now, on diversity and fruits and vegetables. Yet Eskimos were healthy. Eskimo diet became even more fascinating when it was realized they had very low rates of heart disease — much lower than Danes, for example. In the 1970s, two Danish doctors, Bang and Dyerberg, found that Eskimos had large amounts of omega-3 fats in their blood, much more than Danes; that was the beginning of the current interest in omega-3 and the idea that fish and fish oil are “heart-healthy”.

As I pointed out earlier, discussions of the Eskimo diet have ignored the fermented food they ate. Here’s what Stefansson said in 1935:

I like fermented (therefore slightly acid) whale oil with my fish as well as ever I liked mixed vinegar and olive oil with a salad. . . .

There were several grades of decayed fish. The August catch had been protected by longs from animals but not from heat and was outright rotten. The September catch was mildly decayed. The October and later catches had been frozen immediately and were fresh. There was less of the August fish than of any other and, for that reason among the rest, it was a delicacy – eaten sometimes as a snack between meals, sometimes as a kind of dessert and always frozen, raw. . . .

[At first, Stefansson didn't want to eat decayed fish.] While it is good form [in America] to eat decayed milk products and decayed game [well, well], it is very bad form to eat decayed fish. . . . If it is almost a mark of social distinction to be able to eat strong cheeses with a straight face and smelly birds with relish, why is it necessarily a low taste to be fond of decaying fish? On that basis of philosophy, though with several qualms, I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory serves, liked it better than my first taste of Camembert. During the next weeks I became fond of rotten fish.

So Eskimos ate fermented whale oil and a lot of rotten fish. (“A lot” because if they didn’t eat a lot of it, Steffanson wouldn’t have felt pressure to eat it.) I had no idea that Americans used to eat decayed game.