Seth's Blog

A new restaurant with the excellent name Umami Burger has just opened in Los Angeles. According to The Foodinista, the food is as good as the name:

An attractive space with an attractive clientele. The tightly edited menu consists of 10 burgers, and a few sides including fries and a market salad. But, we’re told at 12:45 pm on a Tuesday afternoon, they’ve run out of buns. . . . amazing homemade ketchup . . . The beef patties on all of the above, really flavorful and just plain GOOD. I don’t know how they can make such a great burger and charge so little. . . . I’m telling you, the burgers are great.

Review by Jonathan Gold.
Thanks to Tucker Max.

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.

In his Entertainment Weekly TV Watch synopsis of Tuesday’s American Idol, Michael Slezak wrote:

Can we all raise our lighters in unison for the most convincing rocker chick to ever grace the Idol stage? Yes, it’s Allison Iraheta, who took ”Give in to Me,” a completely obscure album track from Jackson’s Dangerous album and delivered it with such passion and confidence, I felt like I should call Ticketmaster and let them retroactively charge my credit card a couple hundred bucks just for the privilege of hearing her.

That’s a critique. Which I agree with. I can’t imagine reading something like this in print — it’s too heartfelt about something too small — but online, it is possible.

Just as there are probiotic foods — that encourage digestive bacteria — perhaps there are antibiotic foods that kill them off. Stacy Ashworth writes:

The flip side of the good-bacteria-stimulates-the-immune-system theory must be that bacteria-killing-foods-weaken-the-immune-system theory. Could this be why I come down with a cold within a day or so of indulging junk food cravings, food that is chock full of bacteria-killing preservatives? . . . I’m also looking at food preservatives in a new light: if they are added to food to kill bacteria to keep the food fresher, then I suppose it stands to reason that they are also going to kill off some of the immune-system enhancing bacteria in my body.

Do some popular foods kill a significant amount of internal bacteria? I don’t know.

I’m sure you need to eat lots of bacteria to stimulate your immune system; the ones already in your body are not recognized as new. New bacteria must come from outside. Then the problem with preservatives is not that they kill bacteria in our bodies but that they have made the preserved food unusually low in bacteria.

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.