Seth's Blog

In the Afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that in his books he tried to create an alternate universe “where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” Fermented foods are now a big part of my food world and I remain amazed how different they are from ordinary foods. They are in another universe:

Temperature. To make ordinary food requires high temperatures. You need always be careful that you don’t hurt yourself. Fermented food requires no higher temperature than a hot day.

Deliciousness versus health. With ordinary food there is the tradeoff we are endlessly familiar with: If it tastes good (ice cream, chocolate, cookies) it’s bad for you. If it’s good for you — spinach, carrots, cabbage, brown rice, soy products — it doesn’t taste so great. Anyone who thinks raw food tastes better than cooked food is ignoring history. Whereas fermented food tastes great and is incredibly healthy. (This point has been missed at any number of otherwise great American restaurants, such as Chez Panisse.)

Price. In Berkeley, heirloom tomatoes cost a lot more than ordinary tomatoes. They taste a lot better, too. Perhaps, being organic, they are healthier. The general rule is that better food costs more. An apple costs more than a Coke, etc. Whereas fermented food is often dirt cheap. Kombucha is practically free. For 5 teabags and a cup of sugar, you can make a lot of kombucha. Ordinary milk is cheap but to me at least nutritionally worthless. Whereas yogurt is gold. They cost the same.

Time. Ordinary food takes minutes or no more than an hour or two to make. Fermented food takes somewhere between a day (yogurt) to a month (kombucha) to longer (wine, cheese).

Difficulty. In my experience, it isn’t so easy to prepare a delicious meal if you’re not using fermented food. With fermented food it becomes so much easier. And the result is far healthier, I’m sure.

Need for refrigeration. Fermented food goes bad very slowly at room temperature. Not so ordinary food. I once visited a New York pickle store/factory. No electricity.

You can read a great novel again and again, yes, but not every day. After I read Lolita four or five times, it lost its power over me. But I can happily eat fermented food at every meal, day after day and — judging by other food cultures — year after year.

In the comments, Bruce Charlton writes:

The failure to fund trials is combined with a suffocating dominance of the perspective of self-styled ‘evidence-based medicine’ (EBM) – including the groundless notion that only mega-trails should be taken seriously. . . Since the vast majority of randomized trials are industry funded, EBM has meant that industry has a de facto monopoly on ‘reputable’ therapeutic knowledge.

Delivering us into the hands of Big Pharma was not – of course – intended by the socialistic founders of EBM, but it has happened nonetheless.

This reminds me of something one of my students said. We were discussing male/female differences — in particular, the observation that women are more religious than men. One student said that in her experience, guys were either not religious at all or very religious.

I agree with her. I think this is why EBM has the form it does. Its male founders — not understanding the tendency that my student pointed out — went from one extreme (medical orthodoxy, unrelated to evidence) to another (evidence-based medicine). Reliance on evidence is a good idea, yes, but the founders of EBM couldn’t help making it resemble a religion. You might think that relying on evidence is the opposite of religion but they made the whole thing as religious as possible. EBM became just another way — just another excuse, really — to sneer at people.

In Jilin Province, where it gets very cold in the winter, the older residents engage in winter swimming. It’s good for their health, they say. Everyone knows this, a friend of mine who grew up there told me. On TV, she once saw an old woman say that she was having heart problems, but once she started winter swimming they got better.

When he was a grad student at Harvard, a friend of mine raised rats to be in learning experiments. He found that if he handled the rats — stressing them, essentially — they grew larger and healthier than unstressed rats.

The cosmic ray effect I mentioned earlier — that trees grow more when there is more cosmic radiation — occurred with older trees but not younger trees.

If you’ve ever designed an experiment, you know that both the treatment and the measurement need to be neither too high nor too low. With the treatment, that’s obvious. I suspect all three of these phenomena are examples of positioning the measurement appropriately. They suggest that everyone needs some sort of stress to be in the best health, but only in certain situations is it easy to see this.

A Canadian company named Bio-K+ makes lactobacilli-based probiotics — mainly a fermented milk drink, like Yakult but with different bacteria — that hospitals can use to reduce antibiotic-related diarrhea (a common side effect of antibiotics) and C. difficile infection, a less common but far more serious side effect. In this 2007 study, the probiotics reduced the rate of diarrhea by half and reduced the rate of C. difficile infection by a factor of 7 (from 7 cases to 1 case).

How the company started. Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Dennis Mangan writes here about the campaign to destroy the journal Medical Hypotheses because its editor dared to publish an article by Peter Duesberg and others questioning that HIV causes AIDS.

The campaign is associated with AIDSTruth.org, which says it is about “the scientific evidence for HIV/AIDS.” A dead giveaway. When I was a senior in college, I wrote a paper called “The Scientific _______” in which I said that use of the term scientific is a sign that the writer or writers don’t know what they’re talking about. Calling this or that “scientific” amounts to calling something else “unscientific” — which isn’t an argument, it’s abuse. The term scientific is often just a way to sneer at other people. Like the word nigger and many other derogatory names and adjectives.

Animal Farm put it well: You become what you are supposedly against. Holocaust denial is strange, yes, but then there are the people who get really really upset by it. Who would have guessed that the solution to intolerance (German intolerance of Jews) is . . . more intolerance? And that is what the campaign against Medical Hypotheses is in favor of: more intolerance.