Seth's Blog

At Cancer Decisions RWM has written two posts called “Kombucha Reconsidered”. After drinking kombucha for a while, he decided to stop. One reason was lack of evidence of benefit:

When I began investigated the actual medicinal properties of Kombucha tea, I thought I would be overwhelmed with information. Not so. For something that has been around for so long, there are only 38 scientific articles in PubMed on the topic of kombucha. Most of these are technical studies on the nature of the bacteria and yeast in the brew. Only a few of these are clinical.

In particular, no evidence of benefit for cancer:

But I am unaware of any credible data linking kombucha consumption to the prevention of either recurrences or metastases. (PubMed yields just two articles on the topic of kombucha and cancer, both of them negative.) This is a poor basis on which to make health decisions.

He also found two case reports, one from 1995, the other from 2009, where kombucha might have caused illness. In the 1995 the evidence is weak; in the 2009 report the connection is more plausible — but the sick person had HIV. The authors nevertheless generalize to everyone: “Consumption of this tea should be discouraged.”

This is a reason self-experimentation is important: So you can ignore inane statements in research articles. After I found that flaxseed oil improved my balance, I could ignore research that supposedly showed poor conversion of short-change omega-3 (in flaxseed oil) to long-chain omega-3 (used by the brain). Had RWM managed to measure the effect of kombucha on himself, he would have a vastly better basis for deciding whether or not it helped him.

This is also a reason that theory is important. John Tukey, the statistician, spoke of “gathering strength” when analyzing data. It is rare that a single body of data tells you how to analyze it, he said. (For example, what transformation to use.) You should use similar data sets to help decide. Scientific theory has the same effect. Before I started drinking kombucha, I didn’t have obvious digestive problems (unlike a friend) and my immune system seemed to work well. So it wasn’t easy to measure its effect. Yet I drink it and am untroubled by the evidence that worries RVM because I have a theory: the umami hypothesis (that we need a steady intake of bacteria to be healthy). This allows me to assess the effect of kombucha — whether it is likely to be good or bad — with the help of evidence from other bacteria-rich food (yogurt, natto, etc.) and much different data (the effect of bee stings on arthritis, hormesis, epidemiology, the effects of turmeric, etc.). Because the umami hypothesis appears to be true, apparently bacteria intake is beneficial — and kombucha has lots of bacteria.

Thanks to Tom George.

. . . you should have your thyroid level checked. There’s a strong correlation:

Nineteen patients (73%; 31 hands [68%]) displayed symptoms of CTS; of these, 16 patients (25 hands) had clinical examinations consistent with CTS. Only 6 of the 16 patients with clinical CTS (7 of 25 hands) had electrical studies that supported a diagnosis of CTS. All these symptomatic patients were biochemically euthyroid. All control subjects had normal electrical study results and normal sensibility testing. Two [control] subjects had positive clinical [CTS] examinations, giving a [CTS] false-positive rate of 4%.

Apparently treatment of the thyroid condition can make CTS — often treated with surgery — go away, speaking of misguided operations.

Hypothyroidism is so common I suspect an environmental cause, just as the fact that acne is common suggests an environmental cause. One kind of evidence for such a thing would be finding a group of people living unusual lives (e.g., New Guinea highlanders) with unusually low or unusually high rates.

Via Natural News.

Your appendix — a kind of cul-de-sac off your large intestine — can be dangerous. A British man was recently rushed to the hospital with a burst appendix three weeks after he’d had an operation to remove it. Surgeons have routinely removed it — seemingly without  problems. Is the appendix an evolutionary vestige, as Darwin believed, or does it do something beneficial?

In the last few years, two articles — one in Journal of Theoretical Biology, the other in Journal of Evolutionary Biology — by William Parker, a professor of surgery at Duke, and others have argued that the function of the appendix is to harbor bacteria. If diarrhea washes out your intestines, bacteria safely hiddne in the appendix can repopulate them. (A theory supported by the position of the appendix — roughly in the middle of your intestines.) That makes perfect sense.

The connection with my umami hypothesis is that both assume that the foreign bacteria within us are precious and endangered. (My umami hypothesis says we need to consume plenty of bacteria to be healthy and that our food preferences help us do so.) The precious part is widely accepted; it’s the endangered part that’s new. If we need bacteria so much, why should they be endangered? We need our eyes; they aren’t endangered. My answer is that to protect bacteria carries a cost: The most hospitable the digestive system becomes to bacteria, the less effective it will become at everything else, including digestion. And bacteria were/are cheap. Rather than protect them, the system has been shaped to require them. Just as gas-guzzling cars evolved when gas was cheap. Making cars more gas-efficient will make them less efficient at other functions, such as signaling status.

Thanks to Kathy Tucker, James Andrewartha, and James Lucoff.

I’ve been in about 15 subway systems. Only in the Tokyo system have I seen these helpful features:

1. Walking distances. The signs within a station that show where to go to get to Line X (the platform where you catch Line X trains) include distances (in meters). How far you have to walk to get there. A nearby platform might be 100 m; a distant one 250 m.
2. Station-to-station distances in minutes. In several places you are told how many minutes (on the train) it takes to get to each station. Most stations are about 2 minutes apart. The nearest station is 2 minutes away, the next is 4 minutes, etc.
3. Letter-number names for each station. In addition to the usual names for each station (e.g., Ginza) each station has a letter-number name. The letter is the line; the number is the position on the line (1, 2, 3, etc.). For a north-south line, for example, the southmost station is 1, the station just north of it is 2, and so on. On the Akususa Line, for example, the stations are named A1, A2, A3, etc., in addition to the usual names. This makes it easy to figure out how far you are from your destination. If you’re going to Station A15 and you’re now at Station A12, you have 3 stops to go.

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