Seth's Blog

On the Shangri-La Diet forums, David, who is 6′ 4″ and about 340 pounds, wrote about his recent experience with the diet. He wants to lose about 120 pounds. Sugar water and oil didn’t work very well. Low carb didn’t work. Then he tried nose-clipping:

Last Friday, August 14th, I tried nose clipping.  The relief was immediate.  The hunger subsided and I even lost a couple of pounds.  On Saturday I decided to try clipping every time I ate anything.  By evening I could not eat my entire dinner.  When I tried, I got nauseous.  I actually thought I was going to vomit for awhile.

I am very curious what happens next.

In this interview, Nassim Taleb says, as he has often said, that booms and busts are a fact of financial life, what we should do is make the financial system robust against them. He put it like this:

Capitalism will always produce shocks and crashes. I want a society that has a buffer against shocks.

Likewise, I say bacteria are a fact of life. To be healthy we need to make our bodies resistant to them — which means having a well-functioning immune system.

These are not subtle or difficult points. What interests me is the difficulty that experts have appreciating them. To repeat a story I’ve told before on this blog, a few years ago I noticed that the UC Berkeley School of Public Health had a wide-ranging epidemiology course taught by someone I knew. I phoned him. “Will the course cover what makes us more or less susceptible to infection?” I asked. “No,” he said. I wasn’t exactly surprised — I have never seen this topic covered in any epidemiology textbook or even any epidemiology research paper — but still it is an amazing omission. They know we have an immune system, they just don’t think it matters! There’s an elephant in the room, and they’re ignoring it.

The parallel point about the financial system is that there is no study of what makes a financial system robust against shocks. Somehow finance professors, like epidemiology professors, haven’t grasped that something is missing.

Here are two more vast areas of ignorance:

1. Scientists know a lot about how to test ideas. They know almost nothing about how to come up with ideas worth testing. When a good way to generate ideas comes along — such as self-experimentation — they are dismissive. This is truly crippling: In an experimental science, for example, interesting new experimental effects aren’t discovered. Experimental psychology suffers from this problem. Experimental psychologists could self-experiment, but they don’t.

2. Economists know very little about how to generate new businesses — what makes the rate of new-business generation high or low. I came across a 500-page introductory economics textbook that had three empty paragraphs on the topic. Without new businesses to solve the problems created by old businesses (such as pollution), your society is in real trouble. The problems will pile up unsolved. This is what Jane Jacobs saw so clearly in The Economy of Cities and Jared Diamond completely missed in Collapse.

Did you know that a certain math proof runs 15,000 pages? It’s about the classification of finite simple groups. A shorter version should be about 5,000 pages. It began when someone proved that the number of simple groups was finite. Such a proof is more like a railroad network than a book. No one verfies the whole thing, just as no one rides the entire railroad network.

A book called Survival of the Cleanest (2005) by Jacob I. T. Van Der Merwe is about how to avoid infection. As far as I could tell from Google Books, it says nothing about how to boost your immune function. It is all about avoiding public bathrooms, frequent handwashing, and pointing out the many ways in which we can get infected (e.g., touching shopping carts). It is heartfelt but I didn’t find it persuasive. There was almost no data about the efficacy of the book’s thousands of suggestions.

Here is something I couldn’t find in the book. A few months ago, I noticed that my eyes itched. Apparently I had some sort of infection. My eyes almost never itch and this happened to coincide with something else very rare: I hadn’t changed the pillowcases on my bed in a few weeks. So I started changing my pillowcases more often. The itching went away and hasn’t returned. My explanation: The pillowcases were acting as staging areas for the bacteria. Ordinarily my immune system would fight them off but on the pillowcases they were safe. The pillowcases shifted the balance of power.

Survival of the Cleanest does say “correctly laundering clothes kills germs and drastically reduces the risk of infection” but since this particular bit of vague advice (what’s “correctly”?) is mixed with a thousand other bits of advice, such as avoiding doorknobs, it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. For what it’s worth, when I do laundry I do a second cycle without soap, in order to get a really good rinse. I’m less interested in killing germs than I am in washing them off.

In the 1920s and 30s, a Chicago pediatrician named Clara Davis did a remarkable experiment/demonstration: Letting young children choose their own food. About eleven children chose from a list of 30 little-processed foods — including sour milk, the only bacteria-rich food on the list — and could eat as much of each one as they wished. The choices included peaches, beef, carrots, beets, barley, bone marrow, pineapple, cabbage, lettuce, potatoes, and sweet breads. Many of the foods were supplied both raw and cooked. The experiment lasted about 6 years.

The main result was that the children were very healthy:

There were no failures of infants to manage their own diets; all had hearty appetites; all thrived. Constipation was unknown among them and laxatives were never used or needed. Except in the presence of parenteral infection, there was no vomiting or diarrhea. Colds were usually of the mild three-day type without complications of any kind. There were a few case of tonsillitis but no serious illness among the children in the six years.

Some of them were malnourished at the start of the experiment; all recovered. One had rickets and was offered cod liver oil. He drank a little bit of it while sick but after he recovered never drank it again.

Davis’s observations support the idea that we have inborn desires that help us choose what to eat. Davis emphasized that there was great variation from one child to another in what they ate — as Weston Price noted a great variation from one healthy community to the next in what they ate. She didn’t give details, however. The notion that our desires, given Stone-Age surroundings, help us choose a healthy diet is what led me to the umami hypothesis. It started with the idea that in the Stone Age our liking for complex, sour, and umami flavors caused us to eat food with more bacteria than fresh food. High-bacteria food tasted better than low-bacteria food; it was more sour, more umami, and had a more complex flavor. Suggesting that we need to eat bacteria to be healthy.