Seth's Blog

• Anti-cancer effect of ginger in mice experiment.
• Food safety in China.
• An egregious error in the New York Times. The correction issued by the Times is funny. It says a certain survey, whose results were used, “was not based on a representative sample”. If that is the standard, then no number in the NY Times should be there. They are never based on representative samples. GNP, heights, distances, etc. Plus journalists select what to report — and not in a representative way. Perhaps the paper should consist entirely of blank pages, ads and what are called “thumbsuckers” (fact-free opinion pieces)? I wrote something for Spy that included a representative description. My editor changed it to be funnier.

Thanks to Song Chen and Edward Epstein.

Parkinson’s disease often runs in families and some of the genes responsible have been identified. One is called PINK1. A new fruit fly model uses fruit flies with a similar genetic defect.

Patrik Verstreken and his team used fruitflies with a genetic defect in PINK1 or Parkin that is similar to the one associated with Parkinson’s. They found that the flies with a PINK1 or Parkin mutation lost their ability to fly.

Upon closer examination, they discovered that the mitochondria in these flies were defective, just as in Parkinson’s patients.  Because of this they generated less intracellular energy – energy the insects needed to fly. When the flies were given vitamin K2, the energy production in their mitochondria was restored and the insects’ ability to fly improved. The researchers were also able to determine that the energy production was restored because the vitamin K2 had improved electron transport in the mitochondria.  This in turn led to improved energy production.

The obvious conclusion is that some Parkinson’s patients may benefit from eating more Vitamin K2. Less obvious and less certain is that our diets contained more K2 in the past (so that the various genes that now cause Parkinson’s were rendered harmless).  Warren Buffet famously said about risk exposure: “”It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked”. Likewise, changes in diet (such as reduction in K2 intake) expose disease-causing genes. I have made this point several times. It is counter-intuitive that disease-gene linkages suggest bad environmental changes.

Thanks to Melissa McEwen.

• EMDR discovered by self-experimentation
• Citations about nutritional supplements
• Data support Jane Jacobs’s view that diverse cities do better than specialized ones. Ed Glaeser: “To innovate, in Jacobs’s view, you often need to borrow the insights of another occupation—and since diverse cities contain many occupations, they should encourage more leaps of insight. . . . About 20 years ago, three coauthors and I examined industrial clusters within cities to test the Marshall-Arrow-Romer hypothesis against the rival Jacobs view. The data supported Jacobs. High levels of industrial concentration within the clusters in the mid-1950s were associated with less subsequent growth between 1956 and 1987.” Via Marginal Revolution.
• North Carolina Board of Dietetics threatens nutrition blogger. “Jan. 12 [2012], Cooksey attended a nutrition seminar at a church in Charlotte. The speaker was the director of diabetes services for a local hospital. “She was giving all the wrong information, just like everyone always does — carbs are OK to eat, we must eat carbs to live, promoting low-fat, etc.,” Cooksey said. “So I spoke up.” After the meeting he handed out a couple of business cards pointing people to his website. Three days later, he got a call from the director of the nutrition board. “Basically, she told me I could not give out nutritional advice without a license,” Cooksey said.”
• A petition asking the FDA to survey the ultrasound machines used to scan pregnant women. What fraction are defective? Did you know you can buy them on Ebay?

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

• ALS patients test home-brewed drug themselves
• Vitamin K in American foods. I was surprised there is a lot more Vitamin K in chicken than other meats.
• Value of early exposure to microbes.
• 40+ years of mislabelled cell lines in cancer research. “Nearly 40 years later, Dr. Masters, in a study of scientific papers published between 2000 and 2004, found nearly 1,000 citations of the same contaminated cancer lines revealed in Dr. Gartler’s 1966 findings, which have since been replicated many times using more advanced techniques. “They are either crooks or stupid,” said Dr. Masters.”

Thanks to Peter Spero and Hal Pashler.

Michael Ellsberg has an excellent article about the American Dietetic Association’s attempts to make it illegal for anyone they haven’t approved to give nutritional advice. In this document, they are frank that this is their goal. After Ellsberg drew attention to it, it was taken down. I look forward to learning why it was taken down.

The Washington State chapter of the ADA, now called the Washington State Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, is responsible for taking down the document. The organization has this mission statement:

Empowering the people of Washington to improve health with safe, effective and reliable food and nutrition information.

Our Vision:  Optimize the health and well being of Washington State individuals through food & nutrition.

Our Mission:  Empower members to be Washington State’s food and nutrition leaders.

Long ago, in the civil rights or suffrage movements, for example, empowerment meant removal of barriers. This organization preaches empowerment by creation of barriers. Their empowerment is someone else’s disempowerment.

• A “safe starch” lowers HDL.
• DIY clinical trials
• omega-3 content versus mercury content of fish: a handy guide.
• Predictions of climate models versus reality. I have only seen careful prediction-vs-reality comparisons made by AGW skeptics. Those who believe humans are dangerously warming the planet appear to be silent on this subject.
• UNESCO’s list of “intangible cultural heritage”. I like to think the items on the list are clues to human nature.

Thanks to David Cramer and Nadalal.

• 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.

A few months ago I blogged that a rat had persuaded me to eat more eggs.  This particular rat liked scrambled eggs. Rats are omnivores, like humans. Unlike humans, they ignore advertising, nutrition fads and disinformation. Related to this, Tucker Max emailed me:

Have you thought about eating your egg raw? It sounded weird to me at first, but after looking extensively into it, there was a lot of good evidence that cooking an egg destroys a lot of the beneficial nutrients/enzymes in it. Once I started doing this, I noticed a HUGE increase in energy from the egg. It was like I almost eating a different food. In fact, the very first time I did it was at night, like 9pm, and I couldn’t get to sleep until 3am I had such a huge burst of energy. It’s not quite like that anymore, but I take it about an hour or two before I work out, and its like taking a red bull (I may be a bit vitamin B12 deficient, which would explain this).

As to how I do it, I just crack the egg into a coffee cup, and swallow it whole. It has pretty much no flavor. I also only do it with organic pasture-raised eggs. I don’t think I’d do this with normal, crappy store bought eggs.

I replied:

On my blog I said that butter and egg were in that way different from other foods — butter or at least milk must be a complete nutrient since it is the only food the baby gets. Other foods are under no such evolutionary pressure.

Tucker replied:

Which is why its SO important to get raw milk/butter from grassfed cows. Almost a completely different food than normal grocery store milk.

Yeah. When I get back to California I will compare raw and cooked eggs. In Beijing I eat mainly fermented eggs.

The following comment was left a few days ago:

I was doing SLD using flax seed oil for two weeks before my last dental appointment.  My pockets that were 4′s and 5″s magically changed to 2′s and 3″s.  I had my dentist print both the reports because I was so grateful that they stopped talking about some really painful sounding root work.  My brushing and flossing were totally unchanged.  I was expecting the result because of what I’ve read on the blog, but nothing this good.  I am convinced that taking flax=reduction in gum inflammation, at the very least. [emphasis added]

Take that, “decline effect” (big experimental effects, when the experiment is repeated, get smaller)!

The  commenter sent me the records of the two cleanings. At the pre-flaxseed-oil cleaning (April 28, 2011), he had 24 sites (13 teeth) with pockets of depth 4 or 5. At the cleaning after he started flaxseed oil (July 28, 2011), he had no sites with pockets of depth 4 or 5.

You can find many similar reports here.