Seth's Blog

You may have seen the lovely Disney movie based on the story of Mulan, the girl who dresses as a boy to take her father’s place in the army. Even better is the original story, which is only 300-odd ancient Chinese characters. It begins like this:

Mulan was weaving. She was having trouble concentrating on her work. The previous night she had learned that her elderly father had been called to military service.

What a great beginning! Instantly you care. You could read every short story The New Yorker has published and not find a beginning as great as that. The essence of how a story should begin is so strong it reminds me of something that happened when I was a grad student. My roommates had cooked something with a lot of ginger. So that’s what ginger tastes like, I thought. I understood for the first time why ginger ale was called ginger ale.

I’m sure we need to ingest plenty of bacteria for our digestion and immune systems to work properly. What about the brain? When I started eating lots of fermented foods, I didn’t notice any brain-related changes, such as changes in mood or sleep. Suggesting that fermented foods have little effect on the brain. But a new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests I reexamine the question. The researchers followed 160,000 high-school students in Taiwan for eleven years.

The incidence rate of suicide mortality in participants with current asthma at [the start of the study] was more than twice that of those without asthma (11.0 compared with 4.3 per 100,000 person-years), but there was no significant difference in the incidence of natural deaths.

Linking immune-system dysfunction (asthma) with brain dysfunction (suicide). I believe fermented foods will substantially reduce asthma. This finding makes it more plausible they’d also improve brain function.

When the Climategate emails came out, people like Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert were in enormously difficult positions. McKibben, an extremely talented writer, had centered his entire professional life around stopping climate change. Kolbert, also a very talented writer, hadn’t become an activist, like McKibben, but she had made the dangers of climate change her journalistic specialty. She wrote a book about it, for example. For them to say that the Climategate emails revealed something important — namely, that the case for man-made climate change is much weaker than the public realizes — would have been like the Pope saying God might not exist. It wasn’t going to happen. And it hasn’t happened.

But other journalists are not so committed to one side. They are free to react honestly and intelligently. One sign of what an honest and intelligent reaction would be came during a New Yorker podcast about Climategate. On one side was Kolbert, on the other — saying that Climategate mattered — was Peter Boyer. Kolbert came off as nervous and defensive; Boyer came off as reasonable.

Another sign of what an honest and intelligent reaction would be is this column by Clive Crook, an Atlantic editor.  Crook ridicules the inquiries that followed for reasoning such as this:

Had Dr. [Michael "Hockey Stick"] Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions . . .

Crook is right to ridicule this. Ranjit Chandra, a nutrition professor, received the Order of Canada, an extremely prestigious award, yet some of his research appears fabricated.

In a comment on an old post — in which I described how a friend’s acid reflux was greatly alleviated by kombucha — Dave Schulz says he had a similar experience:

My heartburn occurs daily unless a) I stick to a strict diet with no carbs, dairy, or greasy/fatty food, like the Paleo Diet or b) I drink kombucha daily. It’s not always possible to do a), so kombucha has literally been a life saver for me.

Daily kombucha eliminates his heartburn for long periods of time, not just for a few hours after drinking it. Due to the current ban he can no longer get it and his heartburn came back. He got the idea from a friend. Before kombucha, he’d tried many remedies that didn’t work. The three doctors he saw were no help.

On the Mayo Clinic website a doctor says that “until definitive studies quantify the risks and benefits of Kombucha tea, it’s prudent to avoid it.” This is what the Protestant Reformation was about: Speaking directly to God rather than waiting for “definitive studies” by experts that “quantify the risks and benefits”.

Because his wife had multiple sclerosis (MS), the Italian surgeon Paolo Zamboni discovered that a simple surgical procedure helped a large fraction of patients with MS. The Canadian MS society and some Canadian neurologists have not reacted well to this discovery:

In November 2009, an elated Jamie Chalmers went to his neurologist and handed him a stack of print-outs on the new findings. Without so much as a glance, the neurologist tossed the papers in the garbage. He told Chalmers it was nothing but junk science.

In fact, cause and effect are utterly clear:

The vein-opening procedure involves snaking a balloon through the groin up to the neck and then inflating it where the veins are believed to be narrow. It didn’t hurt, says Stock. “I could feel it . . . it was like plugging your nose and blowing.”

Almost immediately afterward, says Stock, he felt a change: his compromised sense of balance had improved. By the time he touched down in Canada [the operation was in India], he was convinced he had done the right thing. Before the procedure, he couldn’t read a full paragraph. Now, he is reading whole chapters again. Before, he couldn’t stand without support for long and was always hunched over his cane. Now, he can stand and walk for as long as an hour.

Doctors have believed that MS is an autoimmune disease. For example, the Mayo Clinic’s website says:

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a potentially debilitating disease in which your body’s immune system eats away at the protective sheath that covers your nerves.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.