Month: January 2010

Homemade Kombucha Tips

Seth Roberts10 Comments

1. You don’t need a starter culture (often called a scoby). You can make one from store-bought kombucha. I let a cup of Rejuvenation kombucha sit in a wide-mouth jar at room temperature, covered with a paper towel. After two weeks, a thin film had formed on the surface, easily transfered to a tea-sugar mixture. More This didn’t work! The culture grew poorly. It might have worked to just pour the Rejuvenation kombucha into the tea-sugar mixture.

2. My friend Carl Willat has used empty Synergy kombucha bottles to bottle kombucha he makes himself. By bottling your kombucha, and leaving it at room temperature for a few days, you get carbonation.

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A few years ago, Gawande wrote two articles in The New Yorker about medical innovation: The Score (about Apgar scores) and The Checklist. Since then, he has done actual research promoting the use of checklists and this book (which I got free from the publisher) is mostly the story of his contribution, with sidebars about the origin of checklists in aviation and their use in building construction. The word checklist suggests that it is all about making sure certain things get done but Gawande takes pains to say that is only half of it. The other half is helping people who don’t know each other work together — by having them introduce themselves and by making sure everyone is heard.

Use of checklists, judging by the results, is a big advance and for that reason alone this would be a solid book — the story of one person’s part in an important innovation. I am sorry he didn’t tell parts of the story that reflect badly on others — such as the Office of Human Research Protections decision that Johns Hopkins research must be stopped immediately because introducing checklists and tracking their effectiveness was dangerous. (Doctors might be embarassed by the results!) I wouldn’t expect a Harvard Med School prof to get nauseous with rage, the way Richard Harris, an earlier New Yorker writer, appropriately did in A Sacred Trust (how the AMA tried to block Medicare), but every story needs a villain. And there are plenty of villains in American medicine.

The book’s website, including Steve Levitt’s review.

Green Metropolis by David Owen

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I liked David Owen’s new book, Green Metropolis (free copy from publisher), as much as I thought I would. Owen critidizes a large fraction of the environmental movement for missing the point that big cities like New York are the greenest communities in America. To make a community green you need two things: high density and great public transportation. They go together: high density makes great public transportation possible. In large chunks of New York, unlike most big American cities, it’s easy to not have a car.

The book has plenty of villains. Bill McKibben has written many books: one about global warming, one about cutting back on consumerism, one about having only one child (to save the earth from overpopulation), one called Hope, Human and Wild about environmentalism — yet he lives in a small town in upstate New York, which requires him to use a lot of energy for heating and travel that he wouldn’t have to use if he lived in New York City. (McKibben is my example, not Owen’s.) A great many environmentalists, Owen says, have causes or goals that have little to do with reducing energy use. They tend to see themselves as preserving the past rather than shaping the future — an excellent point. That’s something Jane Jacobs might have said and if the book has a hero, it’s her. “Jacobs’s focus was on the vibrancy of city life but the same urban qualities she identified as enhancing human interaction also greatly reduce energy consumption and waste,” Owen writes.

Owen sees himself almost as deluded as the average environmentalist. He and his family moved from Manhattan to rural New England when their daughter was one year old. How she will love the country, thought Owen. She didn’t. Walking through the country bored her far more than walking through the city. “And it [a country walk] usually has the same effect on me, although I hate to admit it,” he writes.

Why did my self-experimentation discover a lot? Because a lot remained to be discovered. The discoveries I made weren’t made by the experts who should have made them (e.g., sleep experts)Â because they were too busy doing research whose main goal was to impress other people. Rather than do science that worked, they did science that looked good. It’s the same with environmentalists. Rather than do projects that work (save energy), they do projects that feel good. “Sitting indoors playing video games is easier on the environment than any number of (formerly) popular outdoor recreational activities, including most of the ones that the most committed environmentalists tend to favor for themselves,” says Owen, neatly summing up the problem.

Why We Travel

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Jonah Lehrer writes:

We travel . . . because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed.

He’s wrong about animal fat (“the taste for saturated fat, one of those instincts we should have left behind in the Pleistocene epoch”) but he’s right about that. A trip to Amsterdam is why I have a scooter. It’s so much better than a bike or a car. Only after visiting Amsterdam did I figure this out. The Shangri-La Diet came out of a trip to Paris. Living in Beijing half the year is somewhere between emigration and travel but whatever you call it it has opened up a whole new world. (Whether this will make me more scientifically creative remains to be seen. It certainly makes blogging easier.) My study of the faces/mood effect showed that travel changes something in the brain in a bad way: The light-sensitive oscillator involved takes about three weeks to fully recover from a big change in time zones. The effect takes three weeks to regain full strength, which is longer than it takes sleep to appear normal.

Beijing Hot Pot

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Beijing has far more hot pot restaurants than you’d ever guess from Chinese restaurants in America. There are about ten restaurants on the Tsinghua campus; one of them is a hot pot restaurant. Judging from this passage in an article about Beijing hot pot restaurants, some aspects of restaurant reviews (“don’t forget”, semi-humorous derogatory comparisons) are universal:

And don’t forget the wan or spheres of hashed protein, often how fish and seafood find their way to the table.Wise up in cheaper establishments and be warned that some meatballs [i.e., fishballs] can have a texture as if they bounced off the courts of Wimbledon, so avoid them unless you’re in a reputable safe house.

Self-Experimentation and Journalism

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Journalism and science are both ways of finding out about the world, so maybe changes in journalism presage changes in science. In a lecture about the future of journalism, Alan Rusbridge, editor of the Guardian, concluded:

There is an irreversible trend in society today . . . It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organize themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about an ability to hear previously unheard voices; about respecting, including and harnessing the views of others.

My self-experimentation had/has some of these elements. The fact that I reached useful conclusions about sleep, mood, and weight without being an expert in any of these fields changed my ideas about authorities (that is, experts). Self-experimentation is very much — perhaps above all — a “releasing of individual creativity” in the sense that I could try to understand sleep, mood, and weight. If I had an idea, I could test it. The problem was mine to solve. Self-experimentation releases scientific creativity just as any artistic tool releases artistic creativity. In the areas of sleep, mood, and weight, I was a “previously unheard voice”. This blog connects my ideas with “the views of others”.

If the parallels between science and journalism hold up, we should eventually see a big restructuring of science — especially health science — that resembles the changes in journalism now happening. Dennis Mangan, who works at a blood bank, has shown that Restless Leg Syndrome can be due to niacin deficiency. No one ever found two causes of scurvy so it is likely that all cases of RLS are due to not enough niacin. So long, expensive drugs for RLS! The poor health of Americans pays for a lot of not-very-useful health science. When that health improves, that pool of money will shrink. Just as when people became better informed (by the Web), the pool of money available to pay journalists began to shrink.

Bacteria and Mood

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Carl Willat pointed me to this press release about some remarkable research:

Treatment of mice with a ‘friendly’ bacteria, normally found in the soil, altered their behavior in a way similar to that produced by antidepressant drugs, reports research published in the latest issue of Neuroscience. . . .Â

Interest in the project arose after human cancer patients being treated with the bacteria Mycobacterium vaccae unexpectedly reported increases in their quality of life.

I believe we need a substantial daily intake of microbes (in our food) to be healthy. The obvious microbe-produced improvements are in immune function and digestion. But this study and the research on which it’s based suggest we also need microbes to make our nervous systems work properly.

When I started eating lots of fermented food I did notice an improvement in mood. Not dramatic, but clear. On a trip to Boston last year, I thought: I’ll go without fermented foods to see what it’s like. But after a day or so without them, I felt so bad I stopped the experiment. A friend of mine says something similar, that kombucha improves his mood in a way that doesn’t seem to be due to caffeine.

I asked Carl how he learned about a three-year-old press release. (The research article — gated version here — appeared in 2007.) “Neil Gaiman tweeted about it,” he said.

Impressive Versus Effective

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A profile of James Patterson, the hyperprolific novelist, says this:

“I don’t believe in showing off,†Patterson says of his writing. “Showing off can get in the way of a good story.â€

A few days ago, just before this profile appeared, I gave a talk about self-experimentation at EG (= Entertainment Gathering), a TED-like conference in Monterey. One reason my self-experimentation was effective, I said, was that I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. Whereas professional scientists doing professional science care a lot about impressing other people. I planned to say it like this but didn’t have enough time:

Years ago, I went to a dance concert put on by students at Berkeley High School. I really enjoyed it. I thought to myself: I like dance concerts. So I went to a dance concert by UC Berkeley students – college students. I enjoyed it, but not as much as the high school concert. Then I went to a dance concert by a famous dance company that all of you have heard of. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Why were the professionals much less enjoyable than the high school students? Because the professionals cared a whole lot about being impressive. That got in the way of being enjoyable. Scientists want to be impressive. They want to impress lots of people – granting agencies, journal editors, reviewers, their colleagues, and prospective graduate students. All this desire to be impressive gets in the way of finding things out.

In particular, it makes self-experimentation impossible:

They can’t do self-experimentation because it isn’t impressive. Self-experimentation is free. Anyone can do it. It’s easy; it doesn’t require any rare or difficult skills. If you want to impress someone with your fancy car, self-experimentation is like riding a bike.

Because my self-experimentation was private, I was free to do whatever worked.

My broader point was that my self-experimentation was effective partly because I was an insider/outsider. I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, but the freedom of an outsider.

Animal Fat, Sleep, and the Ketogenic Diet

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Kathy Tucker draws my attention to a recent article about the ketogenic diet, which is essentially a very-high-animal-fat diet, used to treat childhood epilepsy. I’ve blogged about the ketogenic diet (here, here, and here) but that was before I was on a similar diet. Kids on the diet didn’t develop high cholesterol (“very few children actually end up with cholesterol or lipid problems on the diet”). I slept better when I ate more animal fat, which suggests that animal fat makes the brain work better overall. The success of the ketogenic diet supports that idea. My results suggest that it is the animal fat, not the other fat, that makes the diet effective.

That many kids with epilepsy get better when put on the ketogenic diet can be seen as a canary-in-the-coal-mine phenomenon. Canaries are more sensitive to bad air than miners; children with ketogenic-responsive epilepsy are more sensitive to lack of animal fat than the rest of us. That lesson was lost on me when I first learned about the diet and its success. The broader lesson is that almost any disease has something to teach us about what the best environment is.