Seth's Blog

It says a lot about the Nobel Prize in Medicine that Ernst Wynder, co-discoverer that smoking causes cancer, never got one. Wynder was also one of the founders of modern epidemiology. Here’s what he believed about the Nurses’ Health Study:

He had a strong skepticism about methods of dietary assessment, and always felt that the failure of analytic studies such as the Nurses’ Health Study to report associations between cancer and diet were due to a combination of random misclassification related to the imprecision of food frequency questionnaires and the narrow range of nutrient intake within a given population. I feel certain that he would have criticized the recent negative findings from the Women’s Health Study on dietary fat and breast and colon cancer on similar grounds. This was one area where he felt that international comparisons at the ecological [country-by-country] level provided better etiologic support than [more] analytic studies, and he published many studies over a period of decades to make just that point.

For example,

He developed a friendship with Kunio Aoki at the Aichi Cancer Research Institute in Nagoya, Japan, which resulted in our study which found that Japanese men with smoking habits similar to American men had considerably lower lung cancer risks.

I didn’t know that. It suggests that either Americans eat something that promotes cancer or the Japanese eat something that protects against it. I suspect it’s the latter — specifically, the big consumption of fermented food in Japan and not in America. I’m sure the food-frequency questionnaires Wynder criticizes, written by Americans, are tone-deaf to fermented food. I doubt they ask about kimchi or kefir or miso consumption, or distinguish between pickles aged for a day and pickles aged for a year. In Japan, people eat fermented food in many forms: vinegar drinks, yogurt, other fermented milk drinks, and alcoholic beverages. Above all, they eat miso and long-fermented pickles daily. They also have the longest life expectancy in the world.

• “Playing in the dirt could make you smarter,” study says. Playing in the dirt could make you happier, another study says.
• Why does Steve Ballmer still have a job? especially this comment.
• Less tooth-brushing, more heart disease. Those who brushed their teeth less than daily — a small fraction of the sample — had more heart disease. Less-than-daily tooth-brushing may reflect depression or isolation, neither of which was controlled for. The data is openly available.
• Black-and-white thinking strikes again.
• OMG, “polar bear population very very healthy“!

Thanks to Mark Griffiths.

Foxconn, located on the coast of China, is the largest electronics manufacturer in the world. They make iPhones, Wiis, and many other famous products. You may have read about the epidemic of suicide that has broken out among its employees. There were two in the last few days, for example. The count now stands at something like a dozen suicides in about a month. The factory complex involved is gigantic, with perhaps 300,000 workers, but no question this is a terrible thing. The victims are all or mostly men in their early twenties. The median length of employment at Foxconn might be about a year.

Foxconn has appealed to my university (Tsinghua) and in particular my department (Psychology) for help. I’m told their assembly line was designed at Tsinghua. In any case, several people from my department (faculty and graduate students) have gone to the factory and tried to do something.

At a department meeting we discussed our department’s involvement. I said it’s really hard to make progress on such problems for reasons that might not be obvious. When I had trouble waking up too early, I started to study the problem via self-experimentation. All I cared about was solving the problem. Any answer was acceptable. I would spend as long as it took to find it. It took me 10 years to make visible progress. The first thing I figured out was that the problem was partly due to eating breakfast — which sleep researchers had failed to discover.
Consider the Foxconn suicides. It would be incredibly helpful to figure out what’s causing them. But few professors want to study a problem that they have no idea if they can solve nor how long it will take. They don’t want to wait ten years to write a paper. By then their funding will have run out. If funding is assured regardless of progress, then how does the funder ensure they are actually doing something? And few professors have total academic freedom. Their graduate school advisor, their academic friends, the people who control their career have certain beliefs. About which theories are good and which are bad. About which methods are “correct”. If their results contradict these beliefs, if they use a “wrong” method, they will suffer, just as all heretics suffer. So there is pressure to come up with an acceptable answer using proper methods. This gets in the way of coming up with the actual answer.

This doesn’t mean academic research is useless, but it does mean that professors work in shackles that outsiders are, in my experience, unaware of. I wrote about this in my Medical Hypotheses paper. It is a big reason my self-experimentation found new and surprising answers to old questions: I had total freedom. All I cared about was finding the answer. I didn’t care about publications. I didn’t worry about funding. I had as much time as it took.

A good way to have new ideas, it’s said, is to talk about the ideas you already have. After I posted about advantages of self-experimentation, Bruce Charlton, the editor of Medical Hypotheses, invited me to write an editorial about it. Wondering what I thought gave me some new ideas and the editorial turned into a full-length article called “The unreasonable effectiveness of my self-experimentation.” For 20 years I’d been mystified by this. I’m not exaggerating, I had no idea what I was doing right. I wanted to know — so I could do more of, or at least continue to do, whatever it was — but I just couldn’t figure it out.

Long ago Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor, wrote The Population Bomb. Yet you probably know about the demographic transition: A sharp decrease in family size when countries reach a certain level of wealth. Which implies a big problem with Ehrlich’s forecasts. You probably don’t know about three related transitions:

1. Forests. For a long time humans destroyed forests and forest area decreased. More recently, however, forests have been regrowing as people leave rural areas for cities.

2. Obesity. In poor countries, rich people are fatter than poor people. In rich countries, the opposite is true: the poor are fatter than the rich, presumably because the rich eat less factory food.

3. Fast food. On a recent visit to Tokyo, I was told that the number of fast food restaurants in Tokyo is declining.