Tag: psychology

Ghrelin: The Hunger and Lung Development Games

Writing about hormones is hard because anything I say will be incomplete by necessity.  I can only do so much research,  and will undoubtedly miss something.  More worryingly, there’s a lot nobody knows about our endocrine system, and all available overviews tend to overstate our level of certainty.  I will be ecstatic if in 10 years this entry turns out to be 60% true.  But we go to war with the facts we have, so:

Ghrelin is best known as… well if you’re me it’s “proof calories in/calories out is bullshit“, but it’s more commonly known as “the hunger hormone”.  The simple story is that cells in your stomach produce ghrelin in response to perceived space in the stomach (which may be one way gastic bypass surgery leads to decrease in food consumption: your stomach reports fullness almost immediately).  Your hypothalamus detects this and informs the brain, which interprets it as hunger, which should lead you to get food.

But nothing in the human body does just one thing.  For one, ghrelin is produced in other areas of the body.  Pancreas, intestines (sure, they have information about current digestion status), placenta (okay, the fetus needs a way to direct you to eat more), gonads, adrenal cortex, pituitary gland (well those are pretty general hormone production factories), kidneys (for…water…consumption?), and lungs (the hell)?

Ghrelin encourages storage of calories as fat, which could mean that eating more (to suppress ghrelin production)  would help you avoid fat gain or even allow fat loss.  But (one form of) ghrelin also triggers production of human growth hormone (in fact, that’s where the name comes from: Growth Hormone RELease INducing factor), which encourages burning fat and building muscle.  The important lesson here is that if someone every tells you “Do X lose weight because hormone Y does Z”, you should laugh at them, even if Y and Z are correct, because Y does 4 million other things, some of which are the opposite of Z.  Ghrelin’s presence in the lungs might be a mechanism to trigger HGH to trigger fetal lung development.  Or maybe not.  We don’t know.

Still in the realm of possibility, high ghrelin levels delay puberty and discourages ovulation.   This is a reasonable second job for the hunger hormone to have because transforming a zygote into a baby is an epic amount of work and you want to be well fed.   I seriously wonder about the effects on ghrelin on libido: given that humans have sex for both reproduction and social bonding,** I could see the effect going either way.

Ghrelin appears to have some mood effects.  When I first read this I assumed high ghrelin -> stress and depression, which would be a convenient way of explaining why I was so jumpy before my hypochlorhydria was treated.  Turns out, nope, ghrelin is an anti-depressant* , which may be one mechanism reinforcing anorexia.  But ghrelin also makes pleasant activities (eating, but also drugs, and it’s at least in the same brain neighborhood as sex) more rewarding.  It also has a bunch of effects on learning and memory and stress-based learning, mostly apparently positive.  This is the opposite of what I would have predicted, given how I and people I know act when hungry.

I'm sorry for what I said when I was hungry

Lastly, ghrelin inhibits inflammation. To the point it may be useful as a treatment for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.   This concerns and confuses me, possibly even more than growth hormone effects. Hunger and long term calorie deficits are associated with increased susceptibility to disease (as your body prioritizes short term goals over long term health), so maybe this is a happy accident?  But no, ghrelin promotes development of at least one kind of white blood cell.  The anti-inflammatory effect may explain why people often don’t want to eat while injured- your body lowers ghrelin levels to allow healing to occur, and the loss of appetite is a side effect.  But that’s highly speculative, the truth is we just don’t know.

For all that, ghrelin is one of the simplest hormones I’ve studied.  It has one obvious primary job, and several of its lessen effects seem at least related to that job.  We know where it is produced and a good chunk of how it achieves its (known) effects.  More fundamental hormones like progesterone, testosterone, or oxytocin are infinitely more complicated.  So this post is a little bit about the science of hunger, and a lot about how the human body is complicated and people with simple answers are liars.

*Should you be laughing at me right now?  Maybe.  The study in question shows actual behavior change, not a potential mechanism of behavior change (that’s this paper), but it is just one study.  Perhaps compromise on chuckling.

**What about pleasure, you ask?  Irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint.  We feel pleasure because there is some actual useful purpose served.

Harm mitigation vs. cure

Scott Alexander has a very good post up about semantics and gender, which you should read in its entirety even though it is very long.  I have nothing to add to his main thesis, but there is a cute little anecdote about a woman with OCD whose life was nearly ruined by her fear she’d left the hair dryer plugged in, no matter how many times she checked it or how far she was from her house.  She was on the verge of living on SSDI for life despite trying every therapy and medication in the book.

Finally, a psychiatrist suggested she keep the hair dryer with her.  This transformed “checking if the hair dryer is unplugged” from a 40 minute task (to drive home and back) to a 2 second one.   The psychiatrists at the hospital were divided on this.  Scott doesn’t specify, but I assume the argument against was that you have to rip the problem out by its roots.  OCD is anxiety in search of a cause and if you assuage this one she’ll just find something new to worry about, and if you keep treating the symptoms she’ll end up loading her car with every appliance she owns every day.

This strain of thought is not baseless, and I think it’s important to keep in mind when developing population-level guidelines for treatment.  I also think that any doctor that argues that hairdryer therapy for this particular woman should be sent to a reeducation camp, because

  1. it worked, so shut up
  2. root-cause psychiatry and psychology had their shot.  They had in fact emptied an entire clip into the problem and had no more bullets.  At that point, unless something is actively and immediately harmful, they need to gracefully exit the field.

There’s also the matter that the problem was not just “she felt bad”, but also “she’s about to lose her job.”  Jobs are important.  They provide the money and health insurance that let you go to fancy psychiatrists that don’t believe in hair dryers.  Even if you’re independently wealthy, jobs are important psychologically and socially.  SSDI is oriented around the problems of factory workers who lost limbs, and really does not work well with people with high-variance mental disabilities, who can do some work some of the time but cannot function at the level society demands.   If hair dryer therapy does nothing more than buy you six more months before she experiences a negative shock from which it is very difficult to recover, that’s actually pretty good.

Even more than that, I think the psychiatrists are underestimating palliative care.  I absolutely do not think overcoming mental disorders is a matter of will power or wanting it enough, but I do believe that human brain and body are very good at repairing themselves, and that this implies that any non-traumatic disorder that persists must be in a self-reinforcing loop.  Chronic pain lowers your pain tolerance, worry that something will trigger a panic attack makes you anxious.  Pain and depression are mutually reinforcing.  Mental Illness saps your energy and cope and time, which makes it difficult to seek and follow through on treatment.  “Palliative” care like pain killers and anti-depressants give people energy they can use to heal, which is why oncologists sometimes prescribe them. For big scary things we don’t know how to cure, freeing up the patient’s own resources may be the most helpful thing we can do.

Meanwhile, my EA group is debating this article on charitable giving, which articulates something I’ve been trying to say for a long time, and not just about charities.  American capitalism is set up to encourage shooting the moon.  We’ve carried that over to charity, trying to find The One Simple Trick To End Poverty.  That is toxic on many levels: it doesn’t exist, we can’t measure finely enough to detect it, the most effective thing now is not going to be most effective thing after we’ve done it to death, finding things that work is a massive expense in its own right, and oh, poverty is a system of many millions of moving parts.  Waiting for the silver bullet is doomed and immoral, and perhaps a bit like refusing to let this patient adopt a hair dryer as her constant companion.  Yes, treating the root cause would be better, but it’s not on the table.

But that doesn’t mean we can stop doing RCTs and start firehosing money again.  It is tragically easy for aid to make things worse.  This is what the anti-hair dryerists were afraid of: that putting a salve on the symptoms will make the root problem, and thus eventually the symptoms, worse.  Possibly much worse.  Most people who gave food aid did it with the best of intentions: even the American agricorp executives who benefited probably convinced themselves this was a way of giving back .

So: you can’t tell people it’s cure or nothing, but you also have to be really careful with palliative care.  It’s even harder for charity, because you have to consider the externalities, not just the affect on the recipients.  This is one good argument for donating local, even if distant recipients are dramatically worse off: you will naturally get and give more feedback on a local charity’s effectiveness.  It’s also a very good argument for restricting yourself to charities that measure their effectiveness, almost independent of what the measurement says.  When we don’t know what to do, gathering new data is a good in and of itself.  And small pareto improvements may eventually free up the resources for societies to heal themselves.

HAES pre-check

I’ve been meaning to do a “science of fat and health and food” series for a while now, but have never quite gotten it together. There’s too much stuff I remember reading in some blog years ago but can no longer find.  The library has finally delivered Health at Every Size to me (just in time for Thanksgiving), and I’m hoping to use that as both a serious source and a jumping off point for other research I want to do.  In the spirit of inquiry, here are my basic beliefs, as cobbled together from an undergrad biology degree, personal experience, things people said on the internet, and scientific studies I read the abstracts of.  When possible I’ve included a citation but mostly this is just stuff from my brain.

  1. Some diets are lead to a better functioning body than others.
    1. The healthiest diets supply all necessary trace nutrients, including ones we haven’t identified as necessary yet.
    2. Protein, fat (of multiple kinds) and carbohydrates are all necessary for proper functioning.  Right now a lot of people are pretty sure that you should minimize carbs and especially sugars, but 20 years ago they were equally sure fat was evil, so I’m unconvinced even though their numbers look very shiny.
  2. Exercise is super good for you right up until the point it is super damaging.
  3. Despite our astonishing lack of genetic diversity, humans have a pretty wide range of how they react to identical food and exercise inputs.  Additionally, the same person can react differently to things over time.
    1. For example, people’s beliefs about the deliciousness of the milkshake they are about to receive affects ghrelin production, which definitely affects satiety and probably affects nutrient and calorie absorption.
    2. Medication can do the same.  Cortisol makes you gain weight. Several psychiatric medications lead to severe weight gain.  Hormonal birth control definitely used to make you gain weight. Many scientists claim the newer drugs haven’t been shown to do so, but my feeling is that “baby chemicals lead to weight gain” is the default assumption and the burden on them is to prove it doesn’t.
    3. Past deprivation, including in utero, can decrease basal metabolic level, or make it more likely to decrease in the face of further calorie deficits.
  4. At the same time, people are remarkably resilient to environmental changes.  A given person can eat a wide range of calories and stay at the same weight.  No one understands why.
  5. So while calories in/calories out is literally true, in the sense that everyone is taking in and using calories, it’s not useful, because so many things affect intake and output.
  6. It is possible to have an excellent diet and exercise routine and still be fat.
  7. But any given person will probably be fatter the worse their diet and exercise.
  8. When you tease these out, fat is mostly a symptom of things that lead to bad health, not a cause of bad health.  Extreme amounts of fat are hard on the joints and heart.  But all evidence says (good diet, good exercise, 40% body fat) > (bad diet, no exercise, 20% body fat)
  9. Nonetheless, the general and medical public alike seem extremely fixated on fat, and this is hurting fat people.
  10. Shame around fat seems to contribute to both fat and the negative health outcomes associated with being fat.  Shaming fat people for the health is right up there with rescuing prostitutes by arresting them.
  11. To the extent fat itself affects health, the ideal body fat % from a health perspective is much higher than the ideal body fat % from an American aesthetic perspective.
  12. Lab animals are fatter than they were a generation ago despite provably identical conditions.  This has got to mean something about our food, and it’s probably not good.
  13. It is possible to be both fat and undernourished.  Most poor Americans are.
  14. Your body needs calories to run.  Faced with a calorie deficit, your body may choose to cut programs (like the immune system, or thinking) rather than dip into savings (stored fat).  This means that maintaining even an “unhealthy” weight may be the healthiest choice a person can make.

Antibiotics: is there anything they can’t do?

Until fairly recently, gastric ulcers were a disease of stress and spicy food.  Those things probably did make it worse, but it turned out ulcers were almost always caused by overuse of NSAIDS or an H. pylori infection.

Back pain is the prototypical malingerer’s disease.  The medical establishment isn’t saying you’re faking it, but given that back pain is positively correlated with low job satisfaction, to the point that job tenure and unemployment are considered when predicting someone’s recovery time.  The most charitable explanation is that the pain is real, but working through it is ultimately more beneficial than rest, so people who love their job or hobby enough push themselves through it, and people who hate their job don’t have the incentive.  The uncharitable explanation is that they’re faking it because they are lazy.

Or maybe they have a severe bacterial infection.  There’s new evidence that people who fail to recover after a herniated disk are suffering from a bacterial infection that can be treated with prolonged antibiotics.  Patients treated with antibiotics continued to improve after the antibiotics were discontinued, suggesting they got to the root of the problem.

And then there’s a bunch of non-specific symptoms that may or may not be associated with chronic Lyme disease, which may or may not be cured by antitbiotics.  And even though Toxoplasmosis is not a bacteria, the treatments are commonly used antibiotics.  Part of me wants to recommend everyone take a broad spectrum antibiotic holiday every few years, just to sweep up all the low level things that must exist but we don’t know to look for.

But you still can’t have them for the flu.  That’s just stupid.

…and the Wisdom to Tell the Difference

I haven’t gotten too much into my own dental stuff because I spend enough time thinking about it as is, but the current count is:

  • 3 completed surgeries
  • 2-5 more planned, depending on what you count as a surgery
  • painful nerve damage on the lower right
  • a hole in my lower left gum.  You can see a good chunk of bone if you look in my mouth.

After the last surgery (wow, two months ago now), my pain level actually dropped significantly.  We took out a major part of the problem, which not only helped on its own merits, but meant I stopped clenching/grinding, which made the nerve damage on the other side stop hurting continuously.  It was still touch sensitive, but I can handle that.  My ability to focus skyrocketed, limited only by my exhaustion.  I dropped CBD in favor of naproxen, and then didn’t need anything at all. I read a book a day for a month.  You can roughly see this increase in focus in my blogging, although the signal on your end is a little messy because publish can come long after writing, unless wordpress screws up, which it usually does.  I went on forays to the library to practice thinking around other people.  I even started to program a little bit.*

Then the surgery site started to hurt.  And my upper right (which needs surgery but hasn’t had it yet) began to ache from the sudden chewing burden.  I saw myself faced with two possible paths: a life where the pain just kept increasing and no amount of treatment could keep up with it, and I was never able to accomplish anything because it rendered me stupid, or a life where I was never in pain and I went on to be Brene Brown’s more medical second coming.   Obviously future #2 is better than future #1, and in future #2 I don’t take pain medicine, so I needed to just keep not taking pain medication and everything would be fine.

Causality does not work that way

If you’d tracked self reported pain it probably wouldn’t have gone up that much, because I have a lot of practice pushing dental pain out of conscious awareness.  But my reading rate plummeted, and I stopped going to the library.  Blogging which had felt like a thing I needed to do to clear my head a week before now felt like a chore.

I had just started to give in and take more CBD when I had a follow up appointment with my dentist, who explained that there was a hole in my gum where the jaw was growing in order to push out an infection.  I started crying the minute he said it.  I went home and took real pain meds.  A few days later, when I didn’t have to drive anywhere, I took twrugs o days and took way more pain medication than I consciously thought I needed.  Since then I’ve continued taking more-than-forebrain-thinks-is-necessary at night, but NSAIDs only during the day.  My reading and writing productivity has picked up significantly, talking barely hurts anymore, and I feel safe being in touch with my pain level again.

This is what I call the “nuke if from orbit” pain medication option, and it really seems to work.  Catching the pain before it “settles in”, or sending a surge against it, moves the baseline pain level back significantly, and lets you use less drugs over all.  The reluctance or inability to do this is another casualty of our awful attitude towards pain, where medication is essentially viewed as a failure of the individual to tough it out.

But nuke it from orbit doesn’t always work either.  Right now I’m in a tiny bit of pain.  It would take a lot of drugs to get that to zero, possibly an infinite number.  I faced a stronger version of this problem right before the last surgery, where the nerve damage side just kept upping the pain level to keep up with whatever amount of drugs I took.  In that case, I was better off simply accepting that pain was the state of being I was in right now.  The most helpful thing to do was meditate, except that while meditation often helps by relaxing the jaw, meditation for the goal of pain relief doesn’t.  Since most of the emotional impact of the pain was frustration and fear over my ability to think (read/write/plan) while in pain, practicing thinking while hurting would definitely lead me to look back more fondly on the experience, although it probably would have led to more distress at the time.

The first lesson here is to treat for the pain level you have, not the pain level you wish you had.  The second is to aggressively counteract pain at the first peep of its head.  The third is to learn to live with pain instead of fighting it.  I guess this is one of those “wisdom to tell the difference” situations.

*Fine, I started to set up a dev environment and that took two weeks because I was still very sleepy and android development studio is stupid.

Costly Signalling and the Scheherazade Effect

One of my great frustrations in life is how evolutionary psychology, a fascinating scholarly subgenre that provides unique and valuable insights into many problems across the disciplines of biology and psychology, became evopsych.  Click bait before there was click bait, evopsych is justifies whatever the author believes by using the (white, middle class, suburban families of the) 1950s as the evolutionary relevant time period.  So now I can’t talk about cool things like costly signalling without a disclaimer that it’s not one of those evopsych articles.

Costly signalling is the act of doing something stupid to prove your genes are so good you can afford to do so.  The most popular example is the peacock’s tail: it is energetically expensive and makes you attractive to predators.  Surely if you have it you must posses many great genes that I, a female peacock, would like to secure for my offspring.  The tail is also a canvas for parasites, so if it looks good, you must not have many.  That is good for me and implies good genes for our future offspring.  Let the peacock sex commence.  Costly signalling doesn’t have to be about mating.  Certain ugulates will signal a predator that they see them and are not worth chasing by stotting (jumping in a uniquely pointless way).

The key here is that the signals are very expensive.  A weak peacock who attempts to grow a beautiful tail will be eaten.  A weak ugulate will have an unimpressive stot.  Males of a bird species whose name I can no longer remember get more female attention when their breast is redder, but are also challenged more by other males.  Males artificially reddened by experimenters temporarily attract more females, but they also attract more fights from other males, and are ultimately worse off.  That cost is what makes the signal work.

My second favorite theory hypothesis speculation about humans and costly signalling is that it, and not utility, led to male upper body strength.  If the hypothesis that humans broke out from the other hominids via endurance hunting is correct, upper body strength is mostly dead weight.  Useful in some circumstances, but a cost during hunting.  I want to be really really clear that this is basically me making something up after reading a book that wasn’t even that scientific, but you have to admit it would be super interesting if it were true.

My favorite speculation about humans and costly signalling is the Scheherazade effect, which I learned at school rather than making up but is only slightly proven.  The Scheherazade effect can refer to two related but distinct things.  The first is that individual humans can signal how much energy they have to spare (implying they are good hunters or have efficient energy usage elsewhere) with pointless feats from our most energy intensive organ: the brain.  Humor?  Art?  Chess?  All attempts to impress the opposite sex.  This + the fact that male reproduction is tournament-style and female reproduction is roughly linear with respect to fitness may explain why men are more likely to pursue truly stupid wasteful hobbies.*

The second Scheherazade effect is the cumulative effect of the first.  After tens of thousands of generations, individual attempts to impress one another via kick ass drumming actually humans better at drumming.  Or juggling.  Or story telling.  Or joke telling.  Or that it may even be the origin of language itself.

The Scheherazade effect is unfortunately untestable, so it’s only real use is to parallel “he’s so hot” when telling your friends about someone who became impressive to you via feats of intellect.   But if you travel in the right circles, that is pretty useful.

*Although it is impossible to separate this effect from that of socialization.

Rededication

When I started this blog, it was intended essentially as prep for a career as a psychiatric NP.  But let’s go further back.  When I was 12 a search for air conditioning at the national zoo led me to dedicate myself to become a behavioral biologist. I worked on the academia-research track for 10 years, until I realized academia was terrible (and also I didn’t get in to grad school).  I’d picked up a CS degree to facilitate the biology, and for lack of something better to do I jumped onto the programming track.  I found parts of it I loved to succeed at, but was never happy long term.*  After another company failed to make me happy, I decided the problem was me and started looking for a new track to jump to, which is how I got to psychiatry.

It’s only 10 months since I started the blog but almost exactly a year since I made that decision.  I spent five of those months not working, recovering from/prepping for dental surgery (and there are a few more months to come).  This was painful and I would have rather never had these problems, but the enforced break did give me some distance and some time to think.  Combined with my volunteer work and reading, this is what I’ve figured out:

  1. I really, really want to improve adolescent mental health.
  2. Psychiatrist, or any other mental health job, or any job at all, has its downsides.
  3. Programming is a rare and valuable skill it would be silly to just throw away.  Plus it really is fun when it works.
  4. I have gotten used to finding programming jobs by throwing a rock and waiting.  There’s a lot of them and I interview well.  But there is no plug and play position that uses my skills to accomplish the things I want to accomplish.
  5. So I will need to make my own.
  6. Beyond mental health, my goals are helping people take care of themselves.  I don’t want to detail a particular vitamin, I want to teach people how to research their own vitamins.  I definitely can’t do individual doctor recommendations, but I can help people evaluate their own doctors.

In parallel to this, I joined the local Effective Altruism discussion group back in April, and within six months rose to power/got conned into doing 1/3 of the organizational work.  I don’t know where I’m going with EA, which as a philosophy applies to anything but as a movement seems to have almost no overlap with the goals I’ve listed above.  EA’s big pushes have been in third world poverty (which I care about, but the only useful thing I have to give them is money), animal suffering (which our meeting made me care about enough to give up factory farmed animal products, but still doesn’t fit as a calling), and existential threats like meteors and malicious AI (which intellectually I think are important but I cannot bring myself to have an emotional response about).   EA is expanding, which is wonderful, but by design they work on a very large scale, and in some ways what I want to do is very small.  And yet, I think it is really important I keep doing it.  Even if it all it provides is a social group that thinks saving the world is a good and achievable, that is really valuable.  And I think it might be more than that.

So my plan for now is to see what I can do with the resources I have.  My primary job is having dental surgery, and that limits my moonlighting options.  But I can read, I write this, I can go to and organize EA events (even if I have to leave my own event early from pain and exhaustion).  I’ve done some work at crisis chat, and there was a brief window in which I was even able to program.*  I’m talking to a local charity that works at the intersection of childhood poverty and education about their best practices, and I’m hoping to turn that into a lesson about how to give when GiveWell doesn’t have the answer.  I have an idea for an Android app that looks pretty achievable but doesn’t exist yet, which I’m excited about.

Long term, I want to find a programming job on a project I care about, and I want to be in a position to design, not just implement.   Between that, EA, and my own projects I’m hopeful something awesome will emerge.  My thinking here is highly influenced by The Economy of Cities, which describes that new industries arise from small incremental changes and combinations in old ones.  I think that can work on a personal scale too.

The main implications for the blog are that video game posts will now be considered on topic, and I will stop feeling vaguely guilty for the low number of hard core medical posts.

*This window opened because my pain level was so much lower after the surgery.  It closed when the surgical incision in my gums failed to heal/my jaw bone started growing out through my gums, which is intensely painful.  But we had a good thing going for a week.

Narrative Dessert Doesn’t Spoil Dinner

Spoilers in media have never bothered me.  I put this down to a preference for Shakespearean tragedies, where knowing the outcome makes it worse, and therefor better.  I also find anxiety about the outcome of a story distracting- the worst of this was when I watched Serenity, and genuinely believed they might all die, mission unaccomplished.  In one sense that was a triumph of story telling, but I found my own anxiety blocked me from empathizing with the characters’ emotions, which is what I actually watch movies for.  Now my pattern is start movie-read plot on wikipedia-finish movie.  One of the funner parts of comic book movies is I can simultaneously read a lot of deep background (from the comic book universe) without knowing exactly what is going to happen with the actual story in front of me.

Apparently I’m not alone.  Mythcreants has a great post pointing to research about how knowing the ending affects enjoyment of a story.   They studied three genres- ironic twist stories (e.g. anything O. Henry ever wrote), mysteries, and grown up literature stories.  On a 10 point scale, subjects reported enjoying the spoiled stories about half a point more, across all three genres.

The problem with this and most psychology studies is that it was done primarily on undergrads at a fairly competitive university, many of whom are taking psychology classes.  Aside from the usual demographics issues, this is also the population cliff notes was invented for.  More generously, college students are reading difficult texts for comprehension all the time, and that particular brain-muscle may be tired.  It seems entirely possible that a factory worker who spends their work day on rote might have more reserves to enjoy the challenge of interpreting text without knowing where the story is going.

Revealed preference evidence is mixed.  TV is full of formulaic sitcoms and reality TV, but the long tail of rich, complex, ambiguous shows grows fatter every year.  What was once a freak thing HBO did to create an artistic backdrop for nipples is now fairly common.  Although “gritty morally ambiguous middle aged white guy” has become its own trope.  I guess the take home message here is that if you think you enjoy spoilers, you are probably right.

*Meanwhile my greatest regret about GRRM not finishing the 6th book is that it means I can no longer google where the TV show is going.

I Swallowed A Bug

Here are the arguments in favor of bug eating:
  1. Relative to traditional meats (chicken, cow, pig, sheep), bugs require many fewer resources. (This and all future comparisons will be done on a per unit edible protein basis, rather than per unit animal weight)
  2. Bugs have more trace nutrients and less fat.
  3. We care less about bug suffering than chordate suffering.  Possibly we don’t care at all.
Here are the arguments against bug eating:
  1. Bugs are gross.
Here is where 28 years of being unable to digest food becomes a super power.  Most food and essentially all protein sources strike me as gross.  So bugs aren’t that much worse than any other source, and I have a lot of practice overcoming disgust in order to eat.
My friend Brian held a bug eating night.  He explains the rationale and practicalities pretty well, so I’ll restrict myself to talking about my personal experience, which can be summed up as “a million times better than I thought it would be.”
For background: I’m trying to train myself to eat meat.  This quarter I’ve taken to cutting off slivers of salmon (for the omega-3s) and more recently duck (which is a wonderful combination of delicious when dead and malicious towards conspecifics while alive, which makes it feel a little more moral) and sauteing them until they’re charred through.  When I say slivers, I mean slivers.  I’ve been working on duck for a week and I eat at most two fingernail-clipping sized bits, prepared and eaten separately.  For salmon I might do as much as 1/2 the volume of my pinky. I have small hands.
I pre-committed to eating at least one cricket, but that was all.  The other bug was supposed to be waxworms, and waxworms are squishy.  I don’t do squishy even when it’s not bugs.  And I was going to be extremely proud of myself for just that one cricket.  Eating a new anything is a big deal for me, and it takes time to adjust.
When the moment came I ate several (along with some HCl pills), and walked away, supremely satisfied in myself for trying a new thing and not freaking out about it.  And then I started getting that itch to eat more, that means the thing in front of me has some trace nutrient I’m short on.    So I did.  And I asked for some to take home.
I got off easy on the waxworms because they were burnt so badly they ended up not serving them.  But there were mealworms.  Mealworms were served as taco fillings, but as it turns out I’d rather eat a bug than a taco (the variation in textures freaks me out).  Mealworms were wetter and more fibrous, so you had to chew them more (although don’t skimp on chewing crickets, catching a leg in your throat feels gross).  The had their own taste, which I didn’t care for at first but could probably grow to be okay with.  I think I like it better than chicken (aka bad tofu) and beef, but not as much as duck or pork, and by pork I mean bacon.
At the end of the night I had a slight stomach ache.  I’d brought HCl but no digestive enzymes, and my stomach was clearly struggling to keep up.  But I get that with all new foods and any significant amount of protein, so I don’t hold it against the bugs.
Some of ease of eating was undoubtedly the environment.  Brian, John, and their blogless roommates have a pre-existing tradition of communal meals that I love, and that makes eating easier.  it was also supremely gratifying to have other people share my attitude that the food in front of us was gross but we were going to eat it anyway.  Constantly being the only one that thinks that gets really lonely.  I flinched a little bit when I went to eat the cricket leftovers this morning.  But then I ate them, and it was fine.  Definitely better than duck, and duck is delicious.
Honestly, the biggest down side is that for all that bugs take many fewer resources than chordate meat, they are currently much more expensive.  One pound of edible cricket is ~$13/pound, which is as much as the grass fed free range humanely cuddled duck I get at the fancy grocery store.  I could probably grow them at home at essentially no cost, since they can live on food waste I would otherwise toss, but I’m not yet committed enough to deal with the noise.  But even at this price I plan on eating more bugs.

Any straw that doesn’t break your back must be weightless.

Toxoplasma gondii is a single-cell parasite usually associated with cat feces, although undercooked meat is the more common form of infection.  For years, everyone knew that T. gondii was totally harmless unless a pregnant woman caught it at a very particular stage in the pregnancy, at which point it caused miscarriage or devastating birth defects.  I probably learned about this younger than most because this was my parents official reason for not letting me have a cat while they were trying to conceive.  But eventually I got my cat and never thought about it again*, because I was not a pregnant woman.  While the concept was gross, 20% of the US and 30-60% of the world has it, so clearly it’s harmless.

Then science began to poke around a bit more.  Toxoplasmosis causes pretty drastic behavior changes in rat, as demonstrated by this adorable video of rats attempting to cuddle a cat…

…which is actually a video of a paramecium attempting to get this cat to eat the rats so it can sexually reproduce in the stomach.  Enjoy that mental image.  If it can have such a strong effect in rats, might it have some measurable effect in humans as well?

Yup.

First, T. gondii was always considered dangerous in immunocompromised individuals (e.g. AIDS patients). But it gets worse. Research revealed associations between T. gondii and lower IQ in children (which may reverse with treatment), suicide attempts, decreased novelty seeking, car accidents,  lower IQ  in men, greater friendliness and sexuality in women , and perhaps 20% of all schizophrenia.**

Here is what I think is going on.  The human body is incredibly robust.  It can take a number of hits and show only a very minor decrease in function.  But if you already have enough hits against you (HIV, age, genetic predisposition to schizophrenia), it can have a big effect.  Or maybe it will do nothing, but it uses up one of your hits, so when the next blow comes, you don’t have the energy to fight it.    This is why the phrase “only dangerous in immunocompromised individuals” bugs me so much.  First, everyone who doesn’t die of trauma lives at the mercy of their immune system.  Second, immune function is not bimodal.  There’s lots of people that don’t have AIDS, but do have, I don’t know, multiple chronic complex infections in their jaw requiring extensive surgery to remove.  Or they’re poor and have substandard housing and nutrition.  Or they pick up a second parasite while camping.

Telling these people- who don’t have AIDS or leukemia, but aren’t functioning at optimal either- that T. gondii, or any other aggravator, can’t affect them is like telling a working-poor person that ATM fees can’t hurt her because she’s not homeless.  It’s great that the fees are a rounding error to you, but don’t discount the cost they impose on others

*Which turned out to be totally justified.  Owning a cat is not a risk factor for toxoplasmosis, and I happen to have been tested as part of a larger parasite screen last year and am certifiably toxoplasmosis free.

**A lot of these studies are associational, which I usually frown upon.  I find it more valid in this case because causational studies in animals show similar effects.