Seth's Blog

In a previous post I wrote about the need for independence — safety from retaliation — to tell the truth. Here is Jane Jacobs’s brush with this fact of life, from a 2006 interview in Urban Design magazine:

I got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation [to write her first book]; well, apparently, rumor quickly reached Harvard and MIT that I had this grant, and they had started something called the “joint urban design center,” something like that. So, I was invited up there to have lunch at Harvard by, I think it was Martin Meier at the time, and I forget who the MIT one was, but the three of us had lunch, so they had worked out what I had to spend my time on. (I had no connection with them, they just heard somebody had a grant, and they would try to recommend . . . ) What I was to do was to make out a question [a survey], and spend my time on questioning people who lived in middle income housing projects, to see what they liked about them and what they didn’t like, and that was to be my book on the city!

Well, I was so glad that I was not a graduate student there, I felt so sorry for anybody who was caught in that trap and had to do that kind of junk, and so I thanked them very much for their interest and left them. Oh my god! I was out of there, because I could hardly wait to leave this behind: disgusting, absolutely disgusting! And that’s what their interest in cities was, just junk like that….and different people trying to further their own career by roping in other people. And it was not to really find out things.

If the Harvard and MIT profs had said to Jacobs, “can we help you?” that would have been one thing. Under the guise of being helpful they said the opposite: Here’s how you can help us.

At the Fancy Food Show in January, I told Stephanie Stober, the owner of Flax USA, about my omega-3 research (which used flaxseed oil). In return she gave me some of her products, including a package of roasted lightly-salted flax seeds. It stayed in my refrigerator until yesterday when I tried some it for the first time. My god, so good! (And so healthy.) I could barely keep from finishing the (2 oz.) package. I finished it today.

The last scene of the movie Clean and Sober shows a smoke-filled AA meeting. Recovering alcoholics smoke a lot. Likewise, alcoholism is a big problem among those who’ve gotten gastric bypass surgery. Just as alcohol addiction can become cigarette addiction, food addiction can become alcohol addiction:

According to psychologist Melodie Moorehead . . . at least thirty percent of gastric bypass patients will transfer addictions from overeating to another compulsive behavior. . . . The same problems and life challenges are there [but] overeating is no longer a viable coping mechanism. [Addictions to] gambling, shopping and sex have begun to surface in these patients but most alarming is the addiction to alcoholism.

Source. While writing The Shangri-La Diet, I spoke to William Jacobs, an addiction researcher at the University of Florida. No one becomes addicted to sugar water, he said. Only flavored sugar water, such as Pepsi. More generally, only foods that taste exactly the same time. Which strongly implicates flavor-calorie learning in food addiction. I think I understand that; what I don’t understand is why some people doing the Shangri-La Diet said the diet made it easier for them to stop smoking or drinking coffee.

Via CalorieLab.

From a Korean father’s recent email to his daughter:

It is reported that the [swine] flu is spreading in Queens area, except for the Korean-American concentrated area.  The reason is that kimchi bacteria kills swine flu bacteria. Kimchi is now very popular in China. Please have [Grandchild 1] and [Grandchild 2] eat kimchi.

Can anyone reading this tell me if swine flu is less of a problem in the Korean part of Queens than in other parts?

I hope so. I eat kimchi every meal and use the big glass bottles it comes in to make kombucha. Kimchi is indeed popular in my section of Beijing but I thought it was because of the Korean students. There are so many the neighborhood is called Koreatown. There is even a North Korean restaurant! Beijing is close to Korea — which is good, because I love Korean food.

Thanks to Paul Sas.

One reason I believe we are vastly bacteria-deprived (and thus greatly benefit from fermented foods) is the efficacy of hookworm therapy: Hookworm parasites can reduce autoimmune diseases. Hookworms, like fermented foods, stimulate the immune system in a chronic, harmless, low-level way. Here is a good introduction to the subject:

Musician Scott Richards and artist Debora Wade are two Bay Area patients on the hookworm treatment. Richards and Wade both suffer from an inflammatory bowel disease called Crohn’s. When faced with using a parasite as therapy, both patients felt they had nothing to lose. . . . Both Richards and Wade say they didn’t have to wait long to feel relief. Richards [described] waking up and the pain suddenly gone. For Wade, she needed to be reinfected, but today said she can eat foods that patients with Crohn’s could never eat: pizza & Thai food for example.

Related story.