Month: April 2009

Parasites and Allergies

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In 1973, a NIH parasitologist named Eric Ottesen discovered a high rate of worm infection on the tiny island of Mauke. He gave the islanders an anti-parasite drug. Nineteen years later, he did another survey of worm infection.

Compared with 19 years ago, Ottesen found, there was much less filarial infection on Mauke. Only 16 percent of the population harbored the microscopic worms, as opposed to 35 percent on his first visit. The reduction resulted primarily from treating the islanders with the antiparasite drug diethylcarbamazine, which Ottesen had initiated during his earlier visit. And what about allergies? There’s no question that there was a heck of a lot more allergy out there this time, says Ottesen. Nineteen years ago barely 3 percent of the people had allergies. This time it was at least 15 percent. The complaints ranged from eczema to hay fever and asthma to food allergies. What’s more, the dominant problem was one nobody had even heard of 19 years earlier: octopus allergy. It’s the number one offender, says Ottesen. People are breaking out in rashes, hives, swelling of the throat. Yet octopus is nothing new to them–they were eating it when we were there before.

Ottesen believes there is something specific to parasites that makes them protective. I suspect this is another example of the protective effects of bacteria and bacteria-like chemicals, which I believe may come from both food and parasites. Another possibility is that the antiparasite drug killed bacteria. Nothing is said about obesity; I wonder how their diet changed over the 19 years. A switch from homemade (nonsterile) food to factory (sterile) food may be part of the problem.

Eczema, Nighttime Cough, Antibiotics, and Fermented Food

Seth Roberts8 Comments

When Alex Comb’s son was an infant, he had pretty bad eczema. (Eczema is a reddish dry skin rash.) He also had a nighttime cough, a dry cough that started and stopped throughout the night. The cough lasted months. It turned out he was allergic to carragenen. The cough was mostly, but not entirely, eliminated by avoiding carragenen. Sometimes there were flareups.

When the son was 2 years old, he had a mild case of eczema. Doctors wanted to give him steroids. Alex started researching the causes of eczema and how to alleviate it. He came across research on the hygiene hypothesis. In a forum, he read that some people had tried probiotics for eczema with some success. Research on the subject had had mixed results but it seemed worth a try.

So Alex and his wife gave his son DanActive (a probiotic dairy drink) every day for over a year. After a week or so, he noticed improvement. The nighttime cough completely went away. The eczema went away 95%. This isn’t a use of DanActive I could find on their website.

When his son was 3 yrs old, Alex and his wife stopped the DanActive. They assumed his immune system was better. He had gotten tired of drinking it all the time. He drank it less. His diet got broader too; he started eating yogurt. He never really stopped drinking it, he just drank it less.

A few months ago, the son started a 10-day course of antibiotics for a nasal discharge. A few days later, the nighttime coughing mysteriously resumed. It lasted at least 5 nights, and ended around the same time the antibiotics did. It was an asthmatic cough rather than a respiratory infection cough. An asthmatic cough is much drier and shorter.

A few weeks ago, the son was put on antibiotics for an abscessed tooth. Two or three days after antibiotics started, the asthmatic cough started again. Was it the antibiotics? He had not been drinking the DanActive so Alex and his wife started giving it to him again. They gave him the antibiotics earlier in the day and the DanActive before he went to bed. The very first night they did this the cough went away. They kept doing that and the cough stayed away. He has had no cough since then.

What’s telling is the clarity of the correlations. They support the idea that we have a large need for bacteria-laden foods.

Omega-3 and Prostate Cancer

Seth Roberts7 Comments

From a new study:

Men who eat salmon and other fish high in omega-3 fatty acids on a regular basis have a decreased risk for developing advanced prostate cancer, new research suggests.

The association was most pronounced among men believed to have a genetic predisposition for developing aggressive prostate cancer.

Men in the study who ate one or more servings of fatty fish a week were found to have a 63% lower risk for developing aggressive prostate cancer than men who reported never eating fish, study co-researcher John S. Witte, PhD, tells WebMD.

The study is not the first to find that men who eat fatty fish have a lower risk for the most deadly forms of prostate cancer. But Witte says clinical trials are needed to show that eating foods high in omega-3 fatty acids actually lower risk of aggressive prostate cancer.

“Needed”? Or is this like a Grammy winner thanking God in his acceptance speech? That is, ritualistic. I prefer this way of making the point:

Roswell Park Cancer Institute President and professor of oncology Donald Trump, MD, tells WebMD that there is enough evidence suggesting a protective role for omega-3 against prostate cancer to justify a large trial studying whether eating a diet rich in omega-3s — or even taking omega-3 supplements — can actually lower risk of prostate cancer.

Someday an astute person will write a paper called “How accurate are clinical trials?”

The protective power of fish oil is supported by the very low rate of prostate cancer in Japan — 15 times lower than in America, according to this.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

Jane Jacobs and Collapse (continued)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A year ago I speculated why Jane Jacobs didn’t like Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Now, rereading The Economy of Cities, I have a better idea. Here’s what Jacobs says on p. 118:

Once a society has developed its economy appreciably, any serious stagnation [of economic development] becomes appallingly destructive to the environment. Common sequels in the past have been deforestation, complete destruction of wild life, loss of soil fertility and lowering of water tables. In the United States, lack of progress in dealing with wastes, and overdependence on automobiles — both evidence of arrested development — are becoming very destructive of water, air, and land.

In other words, Jacobs says that the ecological disasters described in Collapse were due to economic stagnation. In a stagnant economy, problems pile up without being solved. A common problem is too much reliance on one thing. In a healthy economy, new goods and services are constantly produced, often to solve problems created by old goods and services. In a stagnant economy, this doesn’t happen. A rich economy can be just as stagnant as a poor one.

Diamond understood none of this. Not even close. Instead he proposed twelve reasons for the collapses he studied. They included “overhunting,” “overfishing,” and “population growth”; the complete list is here.

Jacobs’s point applies very broadly. Why do Americans pay so much for relatively poor health care? Because the healthcare industry has been stagnant. There is too much reliance on drugs but nothing is being done about it. Non-drug solutions are not being slowly developed. (Alternative medicine, with its religious and dogmatic overtones, is no solution.) The healthcare industry is too resistant to change. Why is the American car industry collapsing? It was stagnant — too resistant to new ways of doing things. The statistician W. Edwards Deming tried to interest American manufacturers in higher-quality ways of making cars, but failed. Then he went to Japan, where he succeeded. The newspaper industry is collapsing because it too has been stagnant. Its current problems started several years before the internet. Instead of trying to solve them, newspaper publishers continued to rake in high profits. Nothing lasts forever, Jacobs was fond of saying.

Would You Rather Have Lice or Eat Yogurt?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Research on mice shows that those carrying the most lice had calmer immune systems than uninfested rodents, and they [the researchers, not the mice!] said their finding may have implications for studying the causes of asthma and allergies in people.

From Reuters. The research paper. The data analysis is much better than usual. Among its strengths are: 1. Graphs of main points. 2. Transformation of variables. 3. Principal components analysis.

This study is more evidence that a high level of foreign substances in our body to which the immune system responds is beneficial. The researchers say nothing about fermented foods, which are an easy and easy-to-control way to ingest such substances. It’s hard to vary your dose of lice but easy to vary how much yogurt you eat.

Thanks to Oskar Pearson.

The Yogurt Prize: Who Gets It Most Wrong?

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A vast scientific literature shows the positive effects of probiotic foods such as yogurt and natto. What book most completely ignores that literature?

Practically all popular nutrition books ignore it, but some more egregiously than others. (Just as in Animal Farm, some animals were more equal than others.) I’ve decided to give the Yogurt Prize to the worst offender.

The first winner of the prize, I am pleased to announce, to be held until an even worse example comes along, is The Wellness Encyclopedia of Food & Nutrition: How to Buy, Store, and Prepare Every Variety of Fresh Food (1992) by Sheldon Margen and the editors of the University of California Berkeley Wellness Letter. The Wellness Letter has an advisory board of Berkeley professors. The book has the UC Berkeley stamp of approval. Although it has five pages on yogurt — contradicting the title — the book treats yogurt as the nutritional equivalent of milk, which is so clearly false.

The citation reads: “For putting its ignorance not only in the text but in the title of the book; for reflecting the ignorance of not just one person but a whole team of writers; for being created under an advisory board of distinguished professors; and for carrying the stamp of a world-renowned research university.”

Live Food at Google? Nope

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I ate lunch in the cafeteria of Google New York. Being monomanical, I was struck by the absence of fermented food. No kombucha, kefir, kimchi, pickles, wine, beer, natto, strong cheese, sauerkraut. Not even yogurt! (Of course there was vinegar at the salad bar and perhaps the meat was aged.) The absence was especially glaring given so much conventionally-healthy food: raw food, twenty kinds of vegetables, fruit, fish, diet sodas, gazpacho, sugar-free jello . . . I am sorry to predict those talented Googlers will be sicker than necessary.

Previous visit.

Trouble in Mouse Animal-Model Land

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Most drugs are first tested on animals, often on “animal models” of the human disease at which the drug is aimed. This 2008 Nature article reveals that in at least one case, the animal model is flawed in a way no one really understands:

In the case of ALS, close to a dozen different drugs have been reported to prolong lifespan in the SOD1 mouse, yet have subsequently failed to show benefit in ALS patients. In the most recent and spectacular of these failures, the antibiotic minocycline, which had seemed modestly effective in four separate ALS mouse studies since 2002, was found last year to have worsened symptoms in a clinical trial of more than 400 patients.

I think that “close to a dozen” means about 12 in a row, rather than 12 out of 500. The article is vague about this. A defender of the mouse model said this:

As for the failed clinical trial of minocycline, Friedlander suggests that the drug may have been given to patients at too high a dose — and a lower dose might well have been effective. “In my mind, that was a flawed study,” he says.

Not much of a defense.

That realization is spreading: some researchers are coming to believe that tests in mouse models of other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s may have been performed with less than optimal rigor. The problem could in principle apply “to any mouse model study, for any disease”, says Karen Duff of Columbia University in New York, who developed a popular Alzheimer’s mouse model.

“Less than optimal rigor”? Oh no. Many scientists seem to believe that every problem is due to failure to follow some rules they read in a book somewhere. They have no actual experience testing this belief (which I’m sure is false — the world is a lot more complicated than as described in their textbooks); they just feel good criticizing someone else’s work like that. In this case, the complaints include “small sample sizes, no randomization of treatment and control groups, and [no] blinded evaluations of outcomes.” Very conventional criticisms.

Here’s a possibility no one quoted in the article seems to realize: The studies were too rigorous, in the sense that the two groups (treatment and control) were too similar prior to getting the treatment. These studies always try to reduce noise. A big source of noise, for example, is genetic variability. The less variability in your study, however, the less likely your finding will generalize, that is, be true in other situations. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of experimental design. Not in any textbook I’ve seen.

In the 1920s and 30s, a professor in the UC Berkeley psychology department named Robert Tryon tried to breed rats for intelligence. His measure of intelligence was how fast they learned a maze. After several generations of selective breeding he derived two strains of rats, Maze Bright and Maze Dull, which differed considerably in how fast they learned the maze. But the maze-learning differences between these two groups didn’t generalize to other learning tasks; whatever they were bred for appeared to be highly specific to maze learning. The measure of intelligence lacked enough variation. It was too rigorous.

When an animal model fails, self-experimentation looks better. With self-experimentation you hope to generalize from one human to other humans, rather from one genetically-narrow group of mice to humans.

Thanks to Gary Wolf.

Trying to Buy Expired Food

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I couldn’t resist. Shopping for kefir, I found a bottle two weeks past its sell-by date. Being the only person in the world who believes expired food is better than non-expired food, I thought it would be fun to see if I could get a discount. After all, it’s going to be thrown away.

Nope. “I’d rather not sell it to you,” said the store manager. “We can get a refund for these.” He apologized, took it, and I had to buy a non-expired bottle.