Seth's Blog

Dennis Murrell calls himself a “natural beekeeper”. This is one reason he sprayed kombucha on his bees:

In the early spring, I grade my hives strong, average, below average, weak. This year, I sprayed the below average hives with a slightly diluted, about 30%, solution of overly ripe kombucha. It was probably about 3 weeks old. The spraying was done incidentally, without any planning, etc., just to watch the first reaction of the bees. After spraying, the below average hives were left alone, without any more manipulation or observations. . . . Ten weeks later, I popped the covers off the below average hives and found they had a full super of honey, while all the others, even those with larger bee populations had none. I was quite surprised to say the least! And I’d had forgotten about the incidental kombucha spraying until looking at my notes a week later.

Wow. Does this presage a honey surplus? As other beekeepers follow his example? He sprayed kombucha on his bees partly because he himself had found it so beneficial:

I began drinking about a cup a day. . . . I’d been afflicted with a skin aliment since my youth [psoriasis?]. There’s no known cure. Modern medicine can relieve the symptoms. But the drugs used have more long term side effects that are worse than any benefits. Well, within 24 hours [of drinking kombucha], the itching associated with the irritated skin disappeared. Within three days, the slight swelling associated with the irritated skin also disappeared. Within a month, 99% of the irritated areas disappeared. During that time, I lost joint pain that had plagued me for a decade, commercial beekeeping is rough on the back and joints. I regained full movement in my right shoulder. And a sense of wellness replaced whatever biologically stressed out condition I thought was normal. Once you’re over 50, some of the things lost along the way become more apparent. Hair texture, intestinal fortitude, urinary function, energy level, and sexual prowess all decrease. And weight increases. Using kombucha, a probiotic, has reversed my losses to that of a man 10 to 15 years younger. And I’ve lost some weight. Before using it, I felt old. After using it, I feel alive. . . . My wife, a nurse, was more than skeptical, she thought I’d poison myself with that ugly looking concoction. But when she saw my results, she tried it. Within a month, her joint pain completely disappeared, allowing her to get up off her knees without help or pain. And her hair has returned to the luster and thickness it had when she was in her 30′s.

I gained a few pounds when I moved from Berkeley to Beijing in August. Until I read this, it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be due to kombucha deprivation. (It took three weeks to brew kombucha in Beijing. I have not seen it for sale in Beijing even in Western-style health food stores!) To me, the most interesting change he describes is better hair texture. Perhaps it reflects better digestion. I can’t see why better immune function would improve your hair.

Thanks to Steve Hansen.

From the movie Gladiator:

Slave Trader 1 These slaves are rotten.

Slave Trader 2 It all adds to the flavor.

A big reason I believe we need to eat fermented foods to be healthy is that they taste so good.

Recently the Guardian ran an article by David Colquhoun, a professor of pharmacology at University College London, complaining about peer review. His complaints were innocuous; what was interesting was his example. How bad is peer review? he said. Look what gets published! He pointed to a study of the efficacy of acupuncture and included graphs of the results. “It’s obvious at a glance that acupuncture has at best a tiny and erratic effect on any of the outcomes that were measured,” he wrote.

Except it wasn’t. There were four graphs. Each had two lines — one labelled “acupuncture,” the other labelled “control”. You might think to assess the effect of acupuncture you compare the two lines. That wasn’t true. The labels were misleading. The “acupuncture” group got acupuncture early in the experiment; the “control” group got acupuncture late in the experiment. Better names would have been early treatment and late treatment. You could not allow for this “at a glance”. It was too complicated. With this design, if acupuncture were effective the difference between the two lines should be “erratic”.

The paper’s data analysis is poor. To judge the efficacy of acupuncture, their main comparison used only the data from the first 26 weeks. They could have used data from all 52 weeks. That is, they ignored half of their data when trying to answer their main question. Colquhoun could have criticized that, but he didn’t.

Colquhoun’s criticism was so harsh and shallow, apparently he is biased against acupuncture. But there are two big things few pharmacology professors appear to know. One is how to stimulate the immune system. This should be central in pharmacology, but it isn’t. Half of why I think fermented foods are so important is that I think they stimulate the immune system. (The other half is they improve digestion.) There are plenty of less common ways to do this. The phenomenon of hormesis suggests that small doses of all sorts of poisons, including radiation, stimulate repair systems. The evidence behind the hygiene hypothesis suggests that dirt improves the immune systems of children. Bee stings have been used to treat arthritis. And so on. In this context, sticking needles into someone, which puts a small amount of bacteria into their blood, is not absurd. Acupuncture also allowed patients to share their symptoms, the value of which Jon Cousins has emphasized.

The other big thing Colquhoun doesn’t seem to know is the absurdity of the chemical imbalance theory of depression. Speaking of ridiculous, that’s ridiculous. Which plays a larger role in modern medicine — antidepressants or acupuncture? If you want criticize peer review, criticize the chemical imbalance theory. It is as if peer reviewers have been saying, yes, the earth really is flat for fifty years. Perhaps this is ending. During a talk that Robert Whitaker gave at the Massachusetts General Hospital in January, he was told by doctors there that the chemical-imbalance theory was an “outdated model”.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Gary Wolf.

A diagnosis of stomach cancer and the need for radical surgery led a writer named Anna Stoessinger to plan a series of meals before surgery.  She and her husband care enormously about food:

My husband and I have been known to spend our rent money on the tasting menu at Jean Georges, our savings on caviar or wagyu tartare. We plan our vacations around food — the province of China known for its chicken feet, the village in Turkey that grows the sweetest figs, the town in northwest France with the very best raclette.

Yet in her two-page article she doesn’t mention fermented food even once. (Leaving aside a mention of cheese.) Here are some foods she does mention:

• roast duck, crostini and rich fish stews
• roast chicken with leeks
• roadside cheeseburgers, bonito with ginger sauce, hazelnut gelato
• peanut butter and jelly doughnuts, ginger ice cream, sashimi, grilled porterhouse, wild blueberries
• candy
• foie gras and fig torchon
• butter-poached smoked lobster
• passion fruit coulis
• butter-seared scallops
• wild boar terrine and Guinness vegetable soup with rosemary whipped cream
• apple and cinnamon tarte tartin

Of the thousands of fermented foods, eaten daily by people all over the world from time immemorial, nothing. To me, it’s like she’s had a stroke and has spatial neglect. She is unaware of half the visual field but doesn’t notice anything wrong. The absence of fermented foods from her article reflects the larger near-total absence of fermented foods in American restaurants (both high and low), supermarkets, cookbooks, newspapers, and health advice.

I no longer use cookbooks. I rarely use spices. I make the food I cook taste good by adding fermented foods — for example, miso or yogurt or stinky tofu or fermented bean paste. The result is much tastier than almost anything I can get in restaurants (if I say so myself) and no doubt much healthier.

Ms. Stoessinger’s article reads like a series of boasts: look how much I know and care about food. I think that’s part of the problem: You can’t boast about fermented food. It doesn’t require expensive skilled preparation to taste delicious. You can’t impress guests with fermented food, you just serve it. A bowl of miso soup: big deal. The bacteria made it delicious, not you. So fermented food can’t be a high-end product. Nor can it be a low-end mass-produced product because it takes too long to make, is hard to standardize, and is “objectionable” (e.g., stinky tofu). The growth of our modern food economy has pushed it to the margins, with very bad consequences for our health.

In a brief Atlantic article about the paleo diet, Alesh Houdek writes:

There is no question that we should eat more fresh and unprocessed foods. . . . The Paleo diet’s dictum to eat as fresh as possible is shared universally with all modern sane eating guidelines.

As regular readers of this blog know, I disagree that “fresh is better”. Fermented is not just better but necessary. To work best, I think our bodies need substantial daily doses of fermented food or their microbial equivalent. Evolution has shaped us to like sour, umami-flavored, and complex-flavored food so that we will eat more microbe-laden food. More about this in these posts. Pass the umeboshi.

• Dennis Mangan makes great progress against chronic fatigue syndrome
• More Dennis Mangan: statin dangers.
• Statins fail to save lives. “Statin therapy for an average period of 3.7 years had no benefit on all-cause mortality in a high-risk primary prevention population.” About 60,000 subjects were involved.
• Probiotic tested with cyclists. The men benefited (less sickness), the women did not.

• Low-level radon exposure appears to reduce lung cancer
• Dubious science of climate crusaders. “The committee included members whose careers depended on global warming alarmism, and the predictable result was that not one word was changed.”
• Graduate school in the humanities is for the already-privileged. What’s especially interesting about this column is that it appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which you might expect to be pro-establishment.
• Rediscovery and opposition to the ketogenic diet for childhood epilepsy. “One of the reasons that the ketogenic diet is not popular at this point is because there’s not a big drug company behind it, selling it to doctors.”

• More about radiation hormesis. Introductory.
• Fungus improves violin tone. Combines fermented foods and global warming.
• The New Yorker ran a cartoon that the editors didn’t understand. Added later: Now that I know where the cartoon came from (see comments), I’m afraid this is the most tasteless cartoon I have ever seen in the magazine.
• How modern medicine killed my brother. “I turned to her and asked, “Well, do you tell your patients to avoid glutamate?” She looked puzzled and said, “No one told us to.”"

Thanks to Paul Sas and Gary Wolf.

• Shangri-La Diet story. “The day before last I had an in n out burger, fries and cream pie. It was my B-day!”
• radiation hormesis and Japan
• speaking of Japan, beauty nose:  lose weight and make your nose more attractive
• Andrew Gelman illustrates how to plot data. Incidentally, time-use data like what Andrew plots led me to discover that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood the next day.
• California State proposed bill to restrict nutritional advice. Registered Dieticians want to put people with ideas different from theirs out of business.
• Bill McKibben calls the science of climate change “the easy part. . . . The scientific method has worked splendidly to outline our dilemma”.
• Steve McIntyre on Climategate
• fermented food in Beijing

Thanks to Peter Spero and VeganKitten.

For a long time it’s been clear that living on a farm protects children against asthma (compared to city life). A new study, done in Germany, tried to go a little further than that: to ask if it was microbial exposure that made the difference. Non-American scientists have been far more interested in the environmental causes of disease than American scientists.

They measured microbial exposure by studying mattress dust. One branch of the study used DNA techniques to measure microbial diversity of the dust; the other branch measured microbial diversity by seeing how many microbes could be cultured from the dust.

They found the usual farm/city difference in asthma: The city kids had roughly twice as much. They found the expected farm/city difference in microbial diversity of mattress dust: For a given species of bacteria or fungi, there was roughly twice as much chance of finding it in the farm dust.

Did the microbial difference explain the asthma difference? To find out they corrected for the farm difference. I think this means they looked within the farm kids to see if in this restricted group there was a microbial diversity/asthma risk correlation. In one branch of the study, there was a significant correlation. In the other branch, the correlation was nearly significant.

In all, the results support the idea that differences in microbial exposure explain the farm/city asthma difference. The biggest strength of this study is that they gathered useful evidence related to a major problem (asthma). The biggest weakness is how difficult it was. It involved about 15,000 kids and probably cost more than a million dollars.

Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell.