Seth's Blog

A reader writes:

I’m now 30 years old.  For the past ten years or so, I’ve had constant post-nasal drip and stuffed sinuses, frequently coughing out phlegm.  In addition, I’ve had fairly intense fatigue, moderate but consistent depression, and occasional but intense tendinitis (from typing). I tried nasal pharma sprays and many alternative therapies, feeling most intellectually compelled by neti pot style nasal washes with solutions that mimic salt balances of the body.  However, none of my efforts did much good.  So I reluctantly agreed to have sinus surgery, even though it seemed to be a blunt force approach to a sensitive tissue.  I have since become convinced that treating the sinuses as anything other than an expression of overall health is preposterous.  The surgery, with full anesthesia, improved things very slightly while being somewhat traumatic and certainly not worth the ordeal.

About 5 years ago, when I was 25, I discovered that I have a very under-active thyroid. Taking thyroid replacement was  the biggest health change I’ve had in the past ten years, giving me much more energy, improving my overall health, and significantly reducing (but not eliminating) my sinus condition.

I didn’t start reading your blog regularly until a few months ago.  Your writing on bacteria and flax oils led me to start taking probiotic pills every day (Trader Joes brand and then kyodophilus), eat more yogurt and kimchee, and take flax seed oil pills and try to incorporate flax oil into foods.  Within a month of starting this, my sinus congestion was reduced by about 90%.  I don’t need to constantly have tissues on hand and I can breathe easier every day. Thank you! I’m hoping to finally start making my own kombucha this week.

I suspect it was the bacteria rather than the flaxseed oil that helped his nose. Like him, I used to need to carry a handkerchief at all times and I went through a whole box of Kleenex in a few months. This didn’t stop when I started drinking lots of flaxseed oil. After I started drinking lots of fermented foods, however, my nose became a lot clearer and my Kleenex consumption went way down.

A few months ago, because of this blog, I got a free heart scan from HeartScan in Walnut Creek. It’s a multi-level X-ray of your heart and is scored to indicate your heart disease risk. In spite of the fermented food I’ve been eating recently, and the flaxseed oil I’ve been drinking for about two years, my score was right in the middle. What’s impressive about these scans is three-fold:

1. The derived scores are strongly correlated with risk of heart disease death. This isn’t surprising because they are actually looking at your circulatory system. Here is an example of the predictive power. About 1000 subjects were followed for about four years. About 40 of them had something go seriously wrong with their circulatory systems (e.g., heart attack):

The mean coronary artery calcium score was 764 ± 935 [mean ± standard deviation] among subjects with events as compared with 135 ± 432 among those without events (p < 0.0001). [Minimum score is 0.]

The standard deviations are more than the means because the distribution is very asymmetric. (Like most researchers, they should have transformed their data.)

2. You can improve the score. Via lifestyle changes.

3. The scans provided by HeartScan are low enough in radiation that they can be repeated every year, which is crucial if you want to measure improvement. In contrast, a higher-tech type of scan (64 slice) is so high in radiation that it can’t be safely repeated. The higher-tech type of scan, offered by other heart-scan centers, is more profitable for the manufacturer of the equipment (General Electric), which may be why it has become increasingly common.

Heart scans, like the sort of self-experimentation I’ve done, is a way to wrest control of your health away from the medical establishment. No matter what your doctor says, no matter what anyone says, you can do whatever you want to try to improve your score. And if what you do works, it works; if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work — regardless of what anyone says. My self-experimentation started with something similar to a heart scan: I counted the number of pimples I had. The lowest possible tech, sure, but when I did that, and varied the prescribed medicine, I could actually see what worked and what didn’t.

In a clever series called 10 Mysteries of You: Ten things we don’t  understand about humans in New Scientist, Australian science writer Emma Young includes some obvious ones (blushing, altruism, dreams, art) but ends her list with a surprise: nose-picking. This had not occurred to me:

It is possible that ingesting nasal detritus might help build a healthy immune response – after all, researchers investigating the hygiene hypothesis have built a large body of evidence indicating that lack of exposure to infectious agents can increase one’s susceptibility to allergic diseases.

This seems to be Young’s idea rather than that of the scientist she spoke to. She has her hygiene hypothesis stuff wrong. The original hygiene hypothesis was indeed that lack of exposure to infectious agents can increase allergies — but the data later collected did not support this. More infections in childhood did not correlate with less allergy. What did seem to help was exposure to dirt. Apparently the dirt was helpful whether or not it was infectious (= contained something that could make you sick). The nose-picking data (kids pick their nose a lot and sometimes eat the stuff) does make sense given my umami hypothesis, which says that exposure to bacteria is good for us. You couldn’t get sick from eating what comes out of your nose but as it leaves your nose foreign bacteria grow on it; so eating your snot is a way to introduce foreign bacteria into your digestive system. Which the umami hypothesis says is needed for health.

Do kids who eat more fermented food eat less snot? As I posted earlier, since I started eating lots of fermented food, my desire for fancy restaurant food has gone way down.

Thanks to JR Minkel.

• microbes and mental illness
• probiotics may help after gastric bypass
• Prevention article about omega-3
  
• book about kombucha

Thanks to Kathy Tucker.

A reader writes:

I recently had a bottle of pills that became virtually inactive (i can tell from my bowel movements) after a few weeks, probably because they weren’t refrigerated . . . I probably wouldn’t have been able to get a lot of bacteria into my diet without pills, especially since I travel frequently for work.  In addition, since I take thyroid pills every day, adding another pill is easy.  I think pills are also clearly crucial to research efforts.

Good points. On recent trips (in America) I’ve found kombucha, yogurt, and kefir in the new locations, but it’s been time-consuming. Pills would have been easier.