Seth's Blog

I’ve been back in Beijing a week. I’ve been eating lots of fermented food, which is easy to get, including fermented eggs (10 for $1.50) sold at a stand in a shopping mall. There is a bigger yogurt selection here than in Berkeley. Tsinghua University sells its own perfectly good yogurt (20 cents a serving). Every supermarket has a big pickle selection.

In Berkeley, as I blogged earlier, a few months ago I noticed that my nose was no longer runny. My Kleenex consumption, which had been about one box of Kleenex every month or so, was reduced to almost zero.  (A reader of this blog had a similar experience.) No doubt this was due to eating much more fermented food. The runny-nose-absence has continued in Beijing.

Last year in Beijing, I had a runny nose. I used about one tissue packet per day. I ate almost no fermented food. So far so good. The interesting twist is that dirty city air has been linked to less runny nose. Air pollution, in other words, can have the same effect as fermented food. Last year, apparently, Beijing air wasn’t dirty enough to get rid of my runny nose.

I’m not joking. After I realized this, I felt a lot better about Beijing’s air, which I have long said is the worst thing about living here. Someday I will blog about the health benefits of smoking, which suggest the same conclusion.

After Jeremy Piven won a legal decision saying yes, he may have had mercury poisoning from sushi, the National Fisheries Institute, a seafood industry group, issued a statement. Its crux was this:

Despite the fact that the arbitrator ruled in Piven’s favor, NFI cautions reporters and editors to continue to treat Piven’s statements with skepticism. It is important to note that no peer reviewed medical journal has ever published any evidence of a case of methylmercury poisoning caused by the normal consumption of commercial seafood in the U.S.

Excuse me? Surely they know about Jane Hightower’s work. I suspect this is why they used the term medical journal. Hightower’s work on mercury poisoning was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, which is peer-reviewed. Hightower is a doctor. So what if EHP isn’t a medical journal? This statement, although literally true, is completely misleading. Hightower’s article is here. It supports exactly what Piven claims.

Here’s a quote from Hightower:

I think I provided a missing piece of the puzzle: That this [excessive mercury] exposure is coming from fish that we purchase at the grocery stores and restaurants. . . . Some people are eating so much of the commercial, high-mercury fish that they are over the mark for tolerable allowances set by the Environmental Protection Agency, the FDA, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the World Health Organization.

Ah, the rest of the world is catching up with me. This long article in the NY Times describes a middle-school English teacher who lets her students read what they want instead of having every student read the same thing. I started doing something similar six years ago. There was always an assigned reading, but students always had a choice: They could do the assigned reading or they could find something else on the topic (e.g., bipolar disorder) that they preferred. About three-quarters of the students did the assigned reading.

My criticism of American higher education is two-fold: 1. Students in a class are treated all alike. They’re not. All hear the same lecture, read the same texts, do the same homework assignments, take the same tests. I came to realize that my students differed greatly in their talents and career goals. I can’t remember meeting a Berkeley prof who seemed to be aware of this. When a professor would describe a student to me, it was almost always on one dimension: more or less smart, which meant more or less good at doing the sort of tasks professors are good at. I think the diversity of talent and career interests I saw in my students is no accident or exception (which is supported by the fact that a middle-school English teacher saw the same thing); I think it’s at the core of human nature and it’s at the center of my theory of human evolution. 2. Professors teach how to be professors. Most students don’t want to be professors. Every Berkeley prof I ever met was extremely good at research; a few were extremely good lecturers. And every one of them sounded like an idiot the moment they started talking about how they taught “critical thinking” or whatever grand-sounding term they had for it. “Teaching students to think” was a common way to describe teaching students how to be professors. To say such a thing to a psychology professor is like saying to a chemistry professor that the world consists of four elements (earth, air, fire, water). “Are you aware how stupid you sound?” I felt like saying. But instead I would say that there are many kinds of thinking.

Giving students more power over what they learn solves, or at least reduces, both problems.

There are several ways to realize the vast implausibility of — and thus the vast amount of information conveyed by — radiation hormesis. If you are not an experimental scientist, you may not realize how incredibly hard it is to find a treatment that substantially improves something complex. Think how hard it would be to make your laptop work a lot better. Not by redesigning and building a different laptop — but by doing something to the carefully-designed laptop you have now. Has such a thing ever happened in the whole history of engineering? Probably not. Or consider the possibility that shooting a bullet at your laptop (or any other complex machine) will make it work a lot better.  Absurd. Couldn’t possibly happen.

Yet that is exactly what happens in radiation hormesis: Small amounts of radiation improve health. This review article gives a wide range of examples. Experimental:

Bhattarcharjee in 1996 showed that when the mice preirradiated with just adapting doses of 1 cGy/day for 5 days (without a challenge dose), thymic lymphoma was induced in 16% of the animals (Bhattarcharjee 1996). Interestingly, when preirradiated mice were exposed to a 2 Gy challenge dose, thymic lymphoma was induced again in 16% of the animals. However, the challenge dose alone, induced thymic lymphoma in 46% of the mice.

Epidemiological:

Cancer frequency among [United Kingdom] nuclear power plant workers was lower than the national average (Kendal et al. 1992).

(I’ve never heard anyone complain there wasn’t enough radioactive radon in their basement, but in some cases that’s true.) Thomas Luckey, the discoverer of the effect, wrote a book about it, reflecting the vast number of examples.

What does it mean? Obviously it supports my umami hypothesis. Life evolved in a world of junk and damage; that junk and damage was used to make things work better. Think of a police force. They function best spread over a city, travelling here and there. When there’s a crime, someone will already be close and get there quickly; many crimes will be stopped in progress. A low crime rate is better than a very low crime rate because it gets the police out of the police station and allows them to practice their skills. With too little crime, the police spend most of their time in the police station. When a crime occurs it takes longer to reach the scene (so small problems become big ones) but also, having nothing else to do, they overreact: treat small problems as big ones. That our body’s defense mechanisms are slow to react means infections and cancers become bigger than necessary (and sometimes lethal); that they overreact means we get autoimmune diseases.

Earlier post about hormesis.

Late last night, on my way home, I came across a huge crowd of Tsinghua students next to the campus stadium. More than a thousand. There was no event at the stadium. All of them were dressed in a casual uniform, in varying colors. “What’s this about?” I asked one of them. “It’s a secret,” she said. Another one told me they were practicing for the upcoming National Day (October 1), which is China’s Fourth of July. This particular National Day will be the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the current system so there will be an especially big celebration. The uniforms said “60″ on the shirt. There were going to be at least 9 practices. This particular night was the first night they would practice in Tiananmen Square, where the event would take place. Every one of them had a square with different colors on the two sides; like a giant LED display they would make different displays. “It lasts all night,” the student told me. “It ends at 6 am. We don’t sleep.”

And, indeed, at 5:30 am the next morning, a police-escorted convoy of 45 buses, each with about 60 students, came through the campus gate near my apartment. An article about the Tiananmen practice says it involves about 200,000 people. That’s a lot of buses.