Seth's Blog

• more health, less profit?
• Long interesting review of Michael Mann’s new book. “The controversy is actually very simple. Mann’s papers give undue focus to a small amount of data.”
• excellent article in The Smithsonian about fermentation. “We’re trying to see if there’s a way to get more of that umami richness and less fishiness.”
• Flaxseed in Human Nutrition (1995 book).
• Spy magazine highlights.

Thanks to Tom George and Mark Griffith.

• White rice associated with Type 2 diabetes.
• Whistleblower says drug company failed to report bad side effects. “She also claims that the company failed to report 28 of 100 cases of bladder cancers to the FDA, which she called a “serious discrepancy,” and that Takeda told her to change her notation that the cancers were “related” to “unrelated.” The suit says that she was fired after she complained to her supervisors about the company’s failure to report all serious adverse events.”
• Natto speed eating contest. Why do some foods (hot dogs, natto) get a speed-eating contest, but not others?
• Drinking olive oil with your nose held shut (short video).
• Is self-experimentation n=1? or is that misleading?

• The high value of free food. “About 1 in 4 doctors take cash directly from drug companies or medical device makers and 2 out of 3 take free food  . . . Those who [do so] are more willing to prescribe drugs in unapproved or potentially risky ways.”
• Beware the North Carolina Board of Dieticians.
• Tonsils make T-cells. One more reason cutting off part of your immune system (your tonsils) is a terrible idea.
• Long-term Shangri-La Diet success. “I’ve been doing the Shangri-La “Diet” for over 5 years now (see here, here, and here). My weight went down right away, and it’s stayed down.”

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

• Kombucha news: new scientific studies. Plus an expert says: ““When diets are fads, they never seem to last long.”
• University of Pennsylvania clears medical school professors of ghost-writing. “‘It’s important to note,” [said the Penn report,]  ‘that the results of the study were negative to the sponsor’s product [and] were so characterized in the publication’ . . . But Lisa Lehmann, the director of the Center for Bioethics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, notes that the study’s findings were not unequivocally negative. ‘Penn noted that the study was negative and seems to imply that diminishes concerns about bias, but this is not entirely true. There is a segment of the population, those with low serum lithium levels, for whom the study recommends the medication.’ “
• Jeffrey Sachs apparently believes in AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming). He also believes, according to Felix Salmon, “that development is easy, we know how to do it, and that given enough money, it’s relatively trivial to spend that money in an effective way to reduce poverty around the world.” Results from the Millennium Project do not support his beliefs.
• 5 years of success with the Shangri-La Diet

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

• Older eyes block blue light more than young eyes, which may cause sleep problems.
• Caroline Rodgers makes a case (29 slides) that autism is often caused by prenatal ultrasound. This link is from the comments on my previous post about the danger of prenatal ultrasound.
• Why did Deep Throat leak the secrets that brought down President Nixon?
• Do bitters make a difference? A taste test. A better test would have been simpler: to ask, many times in paired comparisons, which is better: Drink X with bitters or drink X without bitters?

Thanks to David Cramer, Jahed Momand and Nancy Evans.

• In praise of Rush Limbaugh.
• Shangri-La Diet experience (“Bottom line: I lost three pounds in a week and a half”) of an artist named Elizabeth Periale.
• Long interview with Tucker Max. “His fridge . . . is in one way very different: where you’d expect the six-pack of cold ones waiting for the game, instead you’ll find rows and rows of kombucha, the fermented health beverage.”
• End of college campuses. Megan McArdle imagines a world in which college is replaced by distance learning. “95% of tenure-track jobs will be eliminated.” Jane Jacobs, in Systems of Survival, divided jobs into taking and trading. Teaching is trading if the student really wants to learn the subject. Teaching is taking if the student is forced to take (and pay for) the class. Scary thought: Every college student is asked about every class: would you take this class if you didn’t need to (and didn’t need to take other classes)?

• The advantages of raquetball self-education
• Nassim Taleb on British economic governance. I like the idea of a list of firms that will be bailed out.
• Lactofermented mayonnaise. “[Without fermentation this] will only last for about a week in the refrigerator. On the other hand, [if fermented (7-12 hours at room temperature), it] will last about 6-8 weeks or longer.”
• Cosmic rays and cloud formation. Does cosmic ray variation cause global temperature variation?
• Man the opportunist by Melissa McEwen
• WSJ anti-AGW letter writers respond to critics.

Thanks to Ryan Holiday, Matt Cassel, Tom George and Dave Lull.

• new kind of magnesium supplementation. I look forward to trying it. With ordinary magnesium supplements, I notice no difference.
• Tracking replication attempts in psychology. One person behind this is Hal Pashler, a co-author of mine.
• Truth in olive oil.
• Online patient communities, including some I’ hadn’t heard of.
• The fat in women’s thighs is higher in DHA than fat elsewhere. “Writers can quote studies that show foragers are healthy in one breath, and demonize foods that make up most of their diet in another.”
• Media about David Owen’s new book The Conundrum (“declaration against massive greenwashing campaigns”).

Thanks to Peter Spero and Allan Jackson.

• Big Pharma versus Parkinson’s disease — perfectly good non-Big-Pharma treatments (ECT, nicotine, caffeine) are neglected in favor of a much worse Big-Pharma treatment (L-dopa).
• Substances high in Essential Fatty Acids, such as evening primrose oil, used to treat  allergy-associated problems (case reports). From the 1980s. Other articles from the Foundation for Integrated Medicine.
• Artisanal sake survives the tsunami and makes an accidental discovery.
• Food tour of Tokyo by Jeffrey Steingarten.
• Should England’s Royal Society be taken seriously? Judging by their leaders’ certainty about global warming . . .
• 60 Minutes covers the Anil Potti scandal at Duke University.

Thanks to Allen Carl Jackson, Phil Alexander and Navanit Arakeri.

• Treasure trove of faces.
• Is the Quantified Self movement a fad? “Does this numerical “self knowledge” make [Gary] Wolf healthier, happier or more effective?”
• Interview with me about personal science by Doc Fermento.
• Junk food in schools not obviously fattening.
• A chemical in miso (genustein) strengthens bones better than bone drugs.

Thanks to Jim McGuire, Dave Lull and Peter Spero.