Seth’s blog

Sure, you know that in Japan, New Year’s is the big winter holiday. But did you know that osechi, a kind of fancy bento box, is a holiday tradition? Here are some examples:

The cost, even to an American living in the Bay Area, is . . . surprising:

Just about every major department store and supermarket in Japan now stocks osechi ryori cuisine in December. Most stores offer osechi either as individual dishes or as sets, and many pass out elaborate catalogs to make the selection as easy as pulling out your wallet, which better be stuffed if you plan on ordering osechi as a set. . . . Price is determined by contents and the reputation of the wholesaler or restaurant which put it together. For example, a relatively unknown shop may whip up three 20 square centimeter boxes for ¥22,000 [= $200], whereas Kicho, a famous restaurant in Kyoto offers three circles of the same size for a hefty ¥196,000 [= $1800]. The rest of the sets, ranging anywhere from one to four tiers cost between ¥30,000 to ¥50,000 on average and most Isetan customers buy their ready-made osechi in this price range.

Osechi is another example of how holidays create a market for expensive difficult-to-make things. The Stone-Age predecessors of holidays helped support skilled artists, artisans, and craftsmen, the technological pioneers of the time.

Addendum: Bento boxes inspired the design of the IBM Thinkpad.

Dr. Jorn Dyerberg was one of two Danish doctors who discovered that Eskimos in Greenland, with low rates of heart disease, have much more omega-3 in their blood than Danes in Greenland, with normal rates of heart disease. This was the beginning of the great interest in omega-3s. Here is an interview with Dr. Dyberg. Among his comments:

As for ALA, an omega-3 from plants that is converted in the body to EPA and subsequently DHA, he was unconvinced. In terms of biological effects of DHA and EPA, Dr. Dyerberg said there are many. “We don’t know of any specific biological effects of ALA,” he said.

“Tissue experiments give you an ALA concentration of zero. This omega-3 is either burnt or converted,” he said. “And the conversion is low.”

“If we want the benefits of omega-3, we have to eat them as long chain,” he said, referring to EPA and DHA.

My research — revealing very clear benefits of flaxseed oil, no doubt because of its ALA — shows this is quite wrong.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet was inspired by research of Israel Ramirez, which I describe in an appendix (”The Science Behind the Theory Behind the Diet”) to the book. I recently asked Ramirez what he thought of Gary Taubes’ idea in Good Calories, Bad Calories that we are fat because carbohydrate consumption pushes our insulin levels too high. He is especially well-qualified to judge because he has done experiments in which insulin injections induced obesity in rats. His reply:

As I understand Gary Taubes, he has resurrected Atkins’ idea that carbohydrates stimulate insulin which lowers blood glucose and thereby induces more eating. The evidence for this is not very compelling. You can induce overeating with insulin in lab rats but you have to give so much insulin that the animal is in danger of dying. I am not aware of any experiments of this sort in people but diabetics don’t often report being hungry after accidentally giving themselves too much insulin. There are exceptions to this pattern; for people and lab rats, glucose levels tend to fall shortly before eating.

There are clinical trials in people and lab rats showing that high protein, low carbohydrate, diets suppress intake. For people, the effects are modest in the long term, amounting to a few pounds greater loss than for people given a low fat diet at the end of a one year trial. There is some evidence that this weight loss might not be maintained after the first year. Trials showing weight loss on low carbohydrate diets required eating less carbohydrate than that consumed by 99% of lean people.

Cross national and historic data don’t strongly support Taubes. People in countries where traditional high carbohydrate diets are still consumed are often lean, i.e. Japan and China. In recent times, as people in these countries have shifted away from traditional starch diets, frequency of obesity has increased. Intake of soft drinks, on the other hand, does roughly parallel incidence of obesity. I interpret the beverage correlation as a psychological phenomenon but it is also consistent with Taubes.

Even if Taubes were entirely correct about carbohydrates, it would not contradict the idea that learning influences the amount of food you eat. Nor would it mean that extremely low carbohydrate diets are best or easiest way to lose weight; Seth Roberts’ method may still be easier for many people.

I was surprised to see a chapter in Fish, Omega-3 and Human Health devoted to hypertension. Isn’t high blood pressure caused by too much salt and too much weight? Well, yes, but a special strain of rats used as an animal model of hypertension turned out to have a defect in their immune system. Perhaps high blood pressure is also caused by immune-system over-reaction.

A 1993 meta-analysis of studies of the effect of fish oil on blood pressure concluded:

Diet supplementation with a relatively high dose of omega-3 PUFA, generally more than 3 g/d, can lead to clinically relevant BP reductions in individuals with untreated hypertension.

The sizes of the blood pressure changes:

Weighted, pooled estimates of SBP [systolic blood pressure] and DBP [diastolic blood pressure] change (mm Hg) with 95% confidence intervals were -1.0 (-2.0 to 0.0) and -0.5 (-1.2 to +0.2) in the trials of normotensives, and -5.5 (-8.1 to -2.9) and -3.5 (-5.0 to -2.1) in the trials of untreated hypertensives.

A different meta-analysis reached essentially the same conclusion.

Note the use of fish oil. Fish oil has long-chain omega-3 fats, while flaxseed oil — which I have used in my self-experimentation — has only the short-chain omega-3 fat, which is converted to long-chain omega-3 after you eat it. Fish oil is often considered better because the omega-3s don’t need to be converted. But this way of thinking misses something. Because the omega-3s in flaxseed oil are converted to long-chain omega-3s by enzymes, the amount of long-chain omega-3 in the body rises more slowly (and thus lasts longer) than if you take fish oil supplying the same amount of long-chain omega-3. Flaxseed oil supplies a kind of time-release long-chain omega-3. A long low dose could easily be more potent than a short high dose.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

This doesn’t look like an ad, but it is:

It points to a website where the product — a Samsung mobile phone — is more obvious. Watching the video a second time I can see something is fake about it — it’s too generic — but that wasn’t obvious the first time I watched.