I’m sure we need to ingest plenty of bacteria for our digestion and immune systems to work properly. What about the brain? When I started eating lots of fermented foods, I didn’t notice any brain-related changes, such as changes in mood or sleep. Suggesting that fermented foods have little effect on the brain. But a new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests I reexamine the question. The researchers followed 160,000 high-school students in Taiwan for eleven years.
The incidence rate of suicide mortality in participants with current asthma at [the start of the study] was more than twice that of those without asthma (11.0 compared with 4.3 per 100,000 person-years), but there was no significant difference in the incidence of natural deaths.
Linking immune-system dysfunction (asthma) with brain dysfunction (suicide). I believe fermented foods will substantially reduce asthma . This finding makes it more plausible they’d also improve brain function.
July 14, 2010
When the Climategate emails came out, people like Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert were in enormously difficult positions. McKibben, an extremely talented writer, had centered his entire professional life around stopping climate change. Kolbert, also a very talented writer, hadn’t become an activist, like McKibben, but she had made the dangers of climate change her journalistic specialty. She wrote a book about it, for example. For them to say that the Climategate emails revealed something important namely, that the case for man-made climate change is much weaker than the public realizes would have been like the Pope saying God might not exist. It wasn’t going to happen. And it hasn’t happened.
But other journalists are not so committed to one side. They are free to react honestly and intelligently. One sign of what an honest and intelligent reaction would be came during a New Yorker podcast about Climategate . On one side was Kolbert, on the other saying that Climategate mattered was Peter Boyer. Kolbert came off as nervous and defensive; Boyer came off as reasonable.
Another sign of what an honest and intelligent reaction would be is this column by Clive Crook , an Atlantic editor. Crook ridicules the inquiries that followed for reasoning such as this:
Had Dr. [Michael “Hockey Stick”] Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions . . .
Crook is right to ridicule this. Ranjit Chandra , a nutrition professor, received the Order of Canada, an extremely prestigious award, yet some of his research appears fabricated.
I’m sure we need to ingest plenty of bacteria for our digestion and immune systems to work properly. What about the brain? When I started eating lots of fermented foods, I didn’t notice any brain-related changes, such as changes in mood or sleep. Suggesting that fermented foods have little effect on the brain. But a new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests I reexamine the question. The researchers followed 160,000 high-school students in Taiwan for eleven years.
Linking immune-system dysfunction (asthma) with brain dysfunction (suicide). I believe fermented foods will substantially reduce asthma . This finding makes it more plausible they’d also improve brain function.