Seth's Blog

• Ancestral Health Symposium Awards
• Taurine cures eczema
• Surprises from celiac disease. “This is a perfect example of why healthcare is so expensive,” says one comment. I agree. Not because of the conspiracy theory espoused in the same comment but because of the way expensive ineffective solutions are promulgated when a much better cheaper one exists.
• One problem with a low-carb high-meat diet: bad metabolites. This is why it is a good idea to find out what causes obesity rather than simply lose weight with something that works (such as a low-carb diet).
• Could spoiled food be safe to eat?
• reform the IRBs!
• conning the Kindle

Thanks to Tucker Max, Melissa McEwen, Peter Couvares, Edward Jay Epstein, and Alexandra Carmichael.

At Thursday’s Quantified Self Silicon Valley Meetup (where I gave a talk called QS + Paleo = ?), Alexandra Carmichael introduced herself with the three words “no”, “headache”, and “today”. About five days earlier, she had started having migraine headaches every day. Before that, she hadn’t had a migraine headache in a year. After the headaches began, her husband, having read my Boing Boing story (about a woman whose migraines were mostly from cleaning products), suggested that her headaches might be caused by the Febreze they had just started using. They stopped using it. Because it can linger in carpets, etc., they cleaned their whole apartment with vinegar and baking soda, to get rid of all traces. That’s when Alexandra’s headaches stopped. (more…)

• Edward Jay Epstein on Kindle publishing
• review of The Beekeeper’s Lament, a book about the fragility of bees. “Colony Collapse Disorder [CCD] is a problem. But it isn’t the problem. Instead, it’s just a great big insult piled on top of an already rising injury rate. Saving the honeybee isn’t just about figuring out CCD. Bees were already in trouble before that came along.”
• Vanity Fair provides a public service by providing full access to the final installment of Michael Lewis’s great series of Financial Disaster Travel Writing. Earlier installments were about Iceland, Ireland, and Greece. This installment is about Germany.

Lots of people think it’s obvious: vegetarians are healthier than omnivores in Study X. Therefore vegetarianism is healthy. This is such a common line of argument that I draw your attention to Denise Minger’s slides for her talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium, which I have already blogged about. The slides make clearer than I did what she said. It’s all excellent but the best part is at the beginning where she points out the many confounds in the studies of Dean Ornish, Neal Barnard, Caldwell Esselstyn, and John McDougall. They change many things but — as Denise put it — What caused the benefits?  It must be the vegetarianism! Paleo humor.

There are lots of other interesting things in Denise’s talk, as you will see, such as the health of religious vegetarians.

Patrick McGovern is a professor of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania who studies fermented beverages. His work reveals their long history. Just like modern nutritionists, modern archaeologists overlook this:

Many of McGovern’s most startling finds stem from other archaeologists’ spadework; he brings a fresh perspective to forgotten digs, and his “excavations” are sometimes no more taxing than walking up or down a flight of stairs in his own museum to retrieve a sherd or two. Residues extracted from the drinking set of King Midas—who ruled over Phrygia, an ancient district of Turkey—had languished in storage for 40 years before McGovern found them and went to work. The artifacts contained more than four pounds of organic materials, a treasure—to a biomolecular archaeologist—far more precious than the king’s fabled gold.

Beer figures more in his work than wine. I’m not surprised. I’m a beer snob. The best beers at a recent beer tasting were far better than the best wines at similar wine tastings. The upper-class preference for wine over beer may have the same explanation as earlier upper-class preferences for white rice over  brown rice (rich Japanese got beriberi more than poor Japanese) and white bread over dark bread. Or it may also have something to do with the fact that cheap beer in America is terrible.

Thanks to Melissa McEwen.