Seth's Blog

According to BBC News, recent research supports the hygiene hypothesis:

Normal bacteria living on the skin trigger a pathway that helps prevent inflammation when we get hurt, the US team discovered. The bugs dampen down overactive immune responses that can cause cuts and grazes to swell, they say.

And other recent research says it’s wrong:

The decades-old “hygiene hypothesis” holds that early exposure to microbes somehow challenges the immune system and strengthens it against allergies. Studies have shown children exposed to bugs by older siblings or attending nursery cut their future allergy risk.

But new work published by the American Thoracic Society casts doubt on this.

The study by Dutch investigators at the Erasmus University found although children in day care got more colds and other infections, they were just as likely as other children to go on to develop asthma or another allergy by the age of eight. The children who went to nursery and who had older siblings had more than quadruple the risk of frequent chest infections and double the risk of wheezing in early life, with no obvious pay off in terms of later protection from allergy.

The original hygiene hypothesis said that exposure to harmful germs (e.g., that cause colds) cuts down on allergy risk. But it’s now clear it’s the exposure to harmless germs (e.g., in dirt) that’s helpful.

Allergies in the UK have tripled in the last 10 years. I believe this is due to greater consumption of food that is germ-free, such as factory food and restaurant food. Shelf-life considerations and food-safety laws, in other words.

Advice given by Allergy UK:

The best advice we can currently give to parents is not to smoke around their children and make sure they have a balanced diet and get plenty of exercise.

Not even close to what I think. My advice is: Feed your kids plenty of fermented food, such as yogurt. I’d bet a lot of money that my advice is better.
Thanks to Mark Griffith.

A few nights ago I slept surprisingly well: I woke up feeling more rested than usual. Each morning I judge how rested I feel on a scale from 0 to 100 where 0 = as if I hadn’t slept and 100 = completely drained of tiredness. I got scores of 100 after standing 9 or 10 hours during the day. That showed what was possible but that much standing was unsustainable. Without extreme standing, 99 has seemed to be the maximum.

A few nights ago, I did better. The ratings for that night and the preceding four nights were: 98.9, 98.8, 99, 98.8, 99.2. Doesn’t look like much, but actually the improvement was so clearly unusual I didn’t need records to notice it. If I gave the scores for the preceding 100 nights you’d see it was rare to score above 99. Moreover, I was keeping the amount of animal fat I ate constant, unlike previous nights with scores above 99. The difference between 98.8 and 99.2 is easy to notice. Think of the difference between 12 and 8.

What had improved my sleep? I could think of four unusual things about the preceding day:

1. Several cloves of garlic in the pork-belly soup I ate for lunch. I’d never before added any garlic.

2. I began using f.lux, which reduced the color temperature of my computer screen after sunsight.

3. I’d played Dance Dance Revolution (on the Wii) for 10 minutes at 8 pm. Usually I do it in the morning (much longer, 30-50 minutes).

4. More bike riding than usual (including two long stretches that added up to 66 minutes).

All four seemed unlikely. 1. Who’d heard of garlic improving sleep? Not me. 2. Laptop screens are quite dim compared to sunlight. 3. The amount of exercise was small. I’d played Wii Tennis for longer periods in the evening without noticing any change. DDR in the morning hadn’t made an obvious difference. 4. I’d ridden my bike for 50-odd minutes at a stretch without noticing better sleep. This was only slightly more.

Now I am testing these possibilities. If you have any idea which it is — perhaps it is none of them — please comment.

Trichloroethylene (TCE) is a common industrial solvent for many years used as an anesthetic. It appears to cause liver damage. A recent experiment with rats asked if kombucha could protect against TCE damage. For at least two measures, it did. TCE raised free radicals in the blood by a factor of 6; kombucha reduced the increase to a factor of 2. TCE also increased gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT) activity, a mark of liver damage; kombucha reduced GGT activity to normal levels.

The paper’s bibliography includes a reference to a survey of kombucha’s health effects:

Dufresne C, Farnworth E: Tea, kombucha health: a review. Food Res Int 2000, 336:409-421.

The researcher brewed the kombucha that was used (for about ten days). Weirdly the source of the kombucha is given under “Competing Interests” at the end of the paper.
This article will appear in the journal Chinese Medicine — but I have not found kombucha for sale in Beijing.

Andrew Rivkin writes about climate change for the New York Times. One of the stolen emails says:

At 17:07 27/10/2009, Michael Mann wrote:

Hi Phil,
…
p.s. be a bit careful about what information you send to Andy and what emails you copy him in on. He’s not as predictable as we’d like

In other words: Most reporters are predictable. Meaning they repeat what they are told instead of thinking for themselves. Otherwise there would be no need to say this.

Think about it. Michael Mann, a respected climate scientist, thinks that whatever line he and Phil Jones, another respected climate scientist, are pushing is so poorly supported by the evidence that they worry about a New York Times reporter finding holes in it! Independent thinking, even by someone without technical training, worries them! Really, it’s hard to avoid concluding that these guys are clowns, propped up by all sorts of people (journalists, Al Gore, many others) who benefit from a false certainty about this stuff.

Please, someone tell me: Why should I believe climate models? Have their predictions (not their fits) been compared to what actually happened?

This application lowers the color temperature of your computer screen after sundown. Lower temperature = less blue.

I try to avoid fluorescent lights at night. This is along those lines.

Thanks to Peter McLeod.