A question for commenters that has nothing to do with this post.
I have considered offering a paid option for my posts. It would provide nothing not available with the free option, just a way for people to pay me if they feel like it. I don't need the money, would probably pass it on to the Institute for Justice, the one charity I routinely support.
My reason to do it is largely my memory of my relation with SSC, which for some time was a majority of my time online. I arranged to pay money to Scott's Patreon because I was getting a large benefit from his work and felt I owed him payment. I'm not sure if enough people would feel that way about my posts to make it worth offering the option, or whether there might be negative effects.
Opinions? I'll probably put this in the comment thread of my next post as well.
No opinion one way or the other, except that the Institute of Justice is a good cause that I should maybe start supporting. If you're interested in writing more about why they're the one charity you support, I'd definitely be interested in reading it.
They litigate against things I am against, they sometimes win, and it looks as though how much they do is constrained by how much money they have, litigation being expensive. And they seem to do a pretty good job of selecting cases that not only can, with luck, be won but provide good stories for the media.
> in the next few days the three other members of my family tested positive as well
If you all don’t get too sick that’s the best thing to happen. For me I had to isolate in a room for 8 days, including Christmas, because of a faint red line on a plastic device, long after I had no symptoms. 5 days before I could leave the room I had no cough, or sore throat or anything.
It is a known fact that taste buds are like muscles. You can deaden them by bombarding them with too much salt, spice, or sweet. They get weak if they don't have to work to taste something delicate because you've overloaded them with strong flavors. People like me who avoid sugar find that things that used to taste a bit sour, like an imperfect strawberry, now taste delightfully sweet. And many experiments have shown that people who go on a low-sodium diet lose their taste for high-sodium meals. Too much salt now tastes dreadful to them and to me. People who brag about being able to stand really hot chili peppers are just bragging that they've successfully deadened their ability to taste. I was doing that for a while, with excess amounts of spices, but now I'm retraining myself, so that I can fully taste the amazing flavors of plain food.
But you write an interesting column on igniting your taste buds!
I avoid ice cream for two reasons beyond the taste bud argument: The calories involved could go toward life-giving and health-giving foods, instead of foods that harm the body and lead to heart disease, cancer and dementia in old age, to name just three. Also, the cow that gave up the milk that would have gone to its calf has been known to search for that calf for miles, or mourn it with loud bellows. As Milton Friedman told the Whole Foods founder John Mackey, he could find no justification for consuming animal products after listening to Mackey's argument. See Mackey's book: "The Whole Foods Diet." Your mom said that in his 90s, he was too old to become a vegan. I hope he did it anyway.
Find me a person whose vegan for non-religious and you'll find a first. Sorry I'm just tired of people that use vegan as a synonym for vegetarian. Have yet to find a vegan who ensures live saving medicine because of its testing on animals, in fact must vegans I know are medicinephiles whereas Christian Scientists, certain Hindi, etc will just die.
Sorry. Nix the word "vegan." I like the answer I got when I asked a meat-skipping man at a party: "Are you vegetarian?" "I'm an opportunist," he said. I'm a non-religious "Nutritarian," which offers leeway for meat lovers but focuses on the healthiest foods on the planet, including leafy greens, beans, other veggies and fruits and whole grains. I eat perhaps two ounces of animal product a couple of times a year. I'm all for animal testing and I didn't give away my leather wallet when I started eating mostly plants. I'm not bothered by others eating meat, only by pressure to change my ways. By using the "v" word, I was going by the definition found in a book "Becoming Vegan," which counts non-strict vegans who focus on the most nutritious of plant foods. But since vegans can also be junk food eaters, I prefer "Nutritarian," a term coined by Joel Fuhrman, M.D. He points out that vegans who don't supplement with Omega 3s are liable to get dementia and Parkinson's disease. In the early vegan community, he met leaders who had both these ailments. Of course, he points out, vegans need B12, K2 and zinc too. But many non vegans are short on these things as well, especially Omega 3s, even if they eat fish weekly. It's a good idea to be tested. By choosing Nutritarianism, I lowered my cholesterol from a dangerous 297 to 189 without statins and stopped getting anything worse than a cold, and even that less than once a year. I was already lean but lost 10 pounds. From Wikipedia's entry on "veganism:"
1. Plant-based diets can provide all essential nutrients for optimal health.
2. Animal agriculture is a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions.
3 Vegan diets have been linked to lower risks of heart disease and certain cancers.
4. Livestock farming requires vast amounts of land, water, and resources.
5. A vegan diet can reduce water usage by up to 55% compared to a meat-based diet.
Some years ago I looked into the flow of food energy. Of the Earth's food supply, about five-sixths comes from crops, and one-sixth from meat and dairy (fisheries apparently contribute a negligible fraction). However, the crops are grown on one-fourth of the agricultural land; the other three-fourths supports livestock. So on one hand, the extra trophic level in producing animal tissue results in much less food per hectare. But on the other, that three-fourths of the land area really is not suited to raising crops; if we stopped raising livestock on it we wouldn't gain grains, vegetables, and fruit—we'd simply reduce the global food supply by 17%. I can't see that as an optimal choice.
There is also the issue of optimal nutrition going beyond calories. It's very difficult to get complete protein from a plant diet; my wife eats a moderate-carbohydrate diet, and she tells me that to get complete protein she would have to increase her carb intake by a substantial factor. Then there is cyanocobalamin, which occurs naturally in animal tissues but not in plants. We are started to see evidence of health risks from a purely vegan diet that weigh against the asserted health benefits.
Animal protein increases the body’s production of a hormone called IGF-1, which is associated with aging and an increased risk of several different cancers. One interesting study followed over 85,000 women and 44,000 men for more than 20 years, (26 years in women and 20 years in men) recording over 12,500 deaths. This research team found animal protein-rich diets were associated with a 43% increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer, compared to diets low in animal protein. In addition to animal protein, a diet high in animal products delivers additional harmful, pro-inflammatory, or pro-oxidant substances. Animal foods are higher in arachidonic acid, saturated fat, carnitine and choline, heme iron, substances linked to inflammation, premature aging and other diseases.
How much protein?
The number of grams of protein humans need in a day has been estimated at 0.8 g/kg/day (about 36 grams of protein per 100 pounds of body weight). However, it is not important to count the number of grams of protein in the food you eat to make sure you reach this number. If you are eating a variety of foods, it is almost impossible to consume too little protein. For a typical day, a Nutritarian menu of 1700-1800 calories provides approximately 60-70 grams of protein. Green vegetables, seeds, nuts and beans are all relatively rich in protein. The point is that when you eat an anti-cancer diet to promote longevity, you strive to consume more of these low glycemic colorful plants, which contain plenty of protein, to secure adequate amounts even with the increased needs of aging. It is rare that a person needs to eat animal products to get sufficient protein when eating a Nutritarian diet, but even those individuals that require that, can do so with only a small amount, avoiding the dangers of too much animal products. It is these features that lead to the dramatic disease-protective lifespan benefits. Eat Nutritarian, and forget about protein, you will automatically get the right amount; not too much and not too little.
Joel Fuhrman, M.D. is a board-certified family physician, seven-time New York Times bestselling author and internationally recognized expert on nutrition and natural healing, who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional methods. Dr. Fuhrman coined the term “Nutritarian” to describe his longevity-promoting, nutrient dense, plant-rich eating style.
As for the effect on the environment, consider this from The Vegan Society:
The vast amount of grain feed required for meat production is a significant contributor to deforestation, habitat loss and species extinction. In Brazil alone, the equivalent of 5.6 million acres of land is used to grow soya beans for animals in Europe. This land contributes to developing world malnutrition by driving impoverished populations to grow cash crops for animal feed, rather than food for themselves. On the other hand, considerably lower quantities of crops and water are required to sustain a vegan diet, making the switch to veganism one of the easiest, most enjoyable and most effective ways to reduce our impact on the environment.
My experience with Covid was similar to yours, aside from enhanced sense of taste. I have never before heard anyone say they had enhanced taste.
Fully recovering for me took something like 60 days. I tested positive for Covid with the quick test about a year later, but it could have been a false positive, because this illness was tamer than most illnesses I have called simply a "cold."
If you make paid subscription a voluntary option with no cost in foregone value, who could object? I am new to Substack. I am pleased to have discovered your Substack so early in the game. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.
I am an economist and a fellow libertarian. My affinity for your Substack is therefore understandable. I have for perhaps 25 years believed and told my students that your father is the GOAT of economics. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to tell you, even if only virtually, that opinion and continue reading what you write. 😊
Technically, at least part of what you're experiencing doesn't sound like a failure of taste (or smell, another component of flavor). The effect of chili peppers is due to capsaicin, which involves chemical stimulation of the pain receptors in the mouth. I hadn't heard that Covid had an effect on those, though I suppose it might have. There are other substances that affect other "tactile" receptors; for example, mints stimulate the cold receptors. That might be an interesting comparison test, if you ever eat mints.
I am pretty sure I got COVID in Mar 2020 (no test at the time) as I caught something that gave me a fever and put me down on the couch for 3 days of sleeping. No normal long term effects, but it did seem to reset my internal thermostat. Typically I was fine around 65 degrees, usually wearing short sleeve polos to work in the winter (maybe a long sleeve button down in MN winters). After getting sick though I have had to buy sweat shirts and sweaters to wear inside. Nearly four years later and it still hasn't gotten back to the previous 40 years' norm.
I have no idea why that would be the case, however. Even stranger though is that I was living in MN at the time, and you don't spend a lot of time walking around outside there in the winter without getting used to the cold. I went from "Wow, it's almost 30 outside, I don't need to button my coat" to "How is it this cold in my office? Where's my scarf?" in a week.
I'm not vaccinated and I'm well into my middle ages but caught COVID a year ago and TBH, was in my experience less bad than the flu which I was vaccinated against. Really the only noticable, and lingering, affect on me involved taste as you said. Everything that contained wheat as well as carbonated water became both sour and sweet and persisted for about eight months; not even full recovered now on it though maybe 95% there.
Sorry about the illness. The taste effect is interesting; I’d never heard of it before. (Though I’m reminded of Fred Cassidy’s experience in “Doorways in the Sand”.) I haven’t had COVID myself, although my young-adult son has—fortunately with very mild symptoms.
You’re more careful about your weight than most people are. I weigh about 170 lb (though I have to translate from kg) and I think I’m officially on the borderline between normal and overweight; I’d be happy to lose a little weight, but I don’t bother to do anything about it.
I'm overweight by the BMI definition — I'm 5'3" — but I don't take that definition very seriously since it ignores width and I'm very stocky, what I think of as a proper dwarvish build, shoe widths EEE. I'm not overweight by my definition, was when I was thirty or forty pounds heavier.
I'm a bit puzzled by the description of the taste problems. I had the classic anosmia and discovered it first through the fact that food and drink tasted terrible, i.e. oversalted or bitter, for instance. So I tested my sense of smell and it was gone. Once the anosmia receded, food and drink tasted normal again. I wonder if you had something else going on and how to explain it. - I was in Albania in September when I had COVID, one of the countries that lacked access to vaccination earlier in the pandemic. A friend of the family, my age and without any known health problems, died from COVID. An N of 1 but always on my mind when I read anti-vaxxer commentary somewhere.
I had COVID for the first time a few months ago. It was like the flu; but the cough lingered a week or two after I was feeling fine otherwise, and my sense of taste was dulled for a month or so.
You mentioned how the prescribed steroids modified your taste in such a way that ordinary flavors became delightful; cottage cheese turned into ice-cream, for example.
Although you may not have had the entrepreneurial ambition to reproduce this effect, others have!
A product known as "Miracle Berries", per my own experimentation, function in just the way your medication did: they turn bitter to sweet! Chew on one of the berries, and lemons turn to candy-- or better still, vodka to juice...
You noticed a marketable value in the field of taste enhancement. And, just as we predict markets would behave, entrepreneurs found ways to capture that value.
I'd love to hear a review of how those work for you. Between three little kids and my own sweet tooth that needs ignoring, those could be really handy.
Last time I had covid (summer 2023), it was a "mild" case, with an intermittent fever over 36 hours that left me weak for a few days, but no other symptoms. But I was taking paxlovid at the time, and the paxlovid definitely affected my sense of taste. Not only was there a strange aftertaste in my mouth for 8(?) hours after taking some, but the taste of food was affected, too. But that went away within a day of stopping the paxlovid.
I've heard one explanation for the recovery time from "shortness of breath" and "loss of taste/smell" is that the surface cells in the membranes were killed, and the body slowly regrows them. But the timeline doesn't sound like what's going on here, unless it's the equivalent of taking a pumice stone to your taste buds or olfactory receptors, removing the insensitive outer layer and exposing the shiny fresh ones underneath. But I don't even know if the relevant cells work in layers like that, although a bit of Wikipedia reading about the olfactory epithelium suggests that it might be possible.
Out of sheer curiosity, does this new sensitivity apply to both taste and smell? Did it enhance your tastes of sweet/sour/salty/savory/bitter? Are you more aware of scents from cooking, or flowers, or perfumes, or other things, or does it only apply when eating food? (You don't have to answer, of course.)
And, uh, one more thing, and I hope this doesn't disturb you unnecessarily. There was a guy I met via the Internet who had claimed that when he got covid-19, it changed his personality, cured his anxiety, and made him bisexual. Less than a month after I met him, he died. The current theory, shared by his family, is that it was probably a brain tumor or stroke that coincidentally started affecting him at about the same time that he got covid-19. And now I become worried when people report unusual covid symptoms, and, well, you did mention the tumor. So I figure I should raise the possibility.
:-) I suppose I could have merely said "please don't discount the hypothesis that the effect is from an unrelated condition", but this way is a bit more memorable.
I'm glad you're keeping your weight down. I suspect I had Covid in December (I wasn't tested). I was sick in bed for 2 weeks. I had a sore throat and lost my voice. I didn't notice any difference in the taste of food. But I completely lost my appetite. At first I didn't eat any food in over 24 hours. Then for 4 days I consumed about as many total calories as I usually consume in 1 day. My calorie consumption is still lower than it was before. I lost about 10 pounds, going from about 5 pounds more than my doctor said I should weigh to about 5 pounds less. It's an effective but unpleasant diet.
I didn't have any effects on my taste either time I had COVID. My main symptoms both times were tiredness and some of the most runny noses of my life. Glad you at least escaped the runny nose!
Also, having been at one of your meetups, I need to clarify your "being a male Friedman, he likes to talk" - at least one of the female Friedmans does too!
I am in my upper 60s, and instead of vaccinating, we contacted the America's Frontline Doctors and used prophylactic ivermectin as well as various supplements to improve our immune system. When in the summer of 2022 we (three of us) did finally catch CoVid, we increased the ivermectin to a therapeutic dosing schedule. Only I experienced the lowering of the o2 stat, and so I also went on prednisone, which took care of that very well.
Our main symptoms were fever and fatigue. I coughed a lot, but I always do with every viral infection. The fatigue was extreme in my case. I was the only one who experienced any taste symptom, but I didn't have a lack of taste. To me, everything tasted horribly metallic. That lasted for weeks.
Recently our daughter was sick and tested positive for CoVid. She had fever for one day and general malaise for about five days. We tested negative, but also had some slight symptoms, but really very minor. We all stayed in the house, since everybody we knew was also sick, some with CoVid. It was easy. I believe our previous cases a year and a half ago helped prepare us to fight it off this time.
Scott Alexander had an extensive post on Ivermectin. His conclusion was that the evidence that it helps against Covid was due to its effect against parasites, observed in places where parasites were a serious problem but not elsewhere. You might find his analysis of the evidence interesting: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted
There was a rebuttal by Alexandros and a rerebuttal by Scott with a link to the rebuttal:
Yes, I've read Scott and many others over the years. But at some point, you still have to make a choice and go with it. We decided that the evidence against "safe and effective" was strong enough for us to avoid the vaccine, and the evidence of the safety of ivermectin convinced us that it wouldn't hurt. We got through our CoVid cases with no lasting negative effects. I know it doesn't prove anything, but you asked for our experiences, so I spoke up.
There is now an alternative to Paxlovid said to be about equally effective although less convenient, Remdesivir. It isn't a pill but something that has to be mixed into your bloodstream with an IV. I think the process is supposed to take an hour and a half the first day, an hour each for the next two. I considered it because of concern with interaction between Paxlovid and something else I was taking, but decided on the Paxlovid. You probably already know about it, but if you get Covid again the information might be useful.
The problem with drawing any conclusion from individual experience is it is a very noisy signal, since some people do nothing and have a very mild case, others do lots of recommended things and don't.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll keep it in mind, but I do think that what we're doing has been working, and I don't expect to need a change.
I know I can't prove anything by our own little study of n=3, though that along with the experiences of many others who we know who also made similar choices, at least, convinces me. Also, my own within-subject study, where I've been always prone to everything going around, and I've always been sicker than everybody else around me (just ask my siblings) tells me that much of what I've done for my immune system has worked generally, and not just for CoVid. I don't reject modern medicine, and I have an internist who respects me and a "CoVid doctor" who advises me who I trust to be up on the research.
On another topic, Greg just realized that your book Machinery of Freedom has now been out for fifty years, and he wanted to congratulate you for that anniversary.
If I do another book it will probably be based on my posts here and on my blog, which add up to a very large number of pages at this point. Probably starting with the climate posts, possibly including one or two of the other categories.
But given that they are all available online already I'm not sure that packaging a bunch of them as a book accomplishes much.
One big advantage of physical books is that they sit well on a shelf instead of disappearing after the server fee stops being paid. People can then discover them long after.
Not to mention that people who don't know where to look, or aren't allowed on the internet, can lift a book off the shelf while saying "Huh, what's this?" and away they go.
Pulling it together and organizing it as a book could make it all more coherent. Otherwise, there are a couple of different sites where your writing is kept, and your topics jump around. But, I suspect people don't read books like they used to, and many of your readers are pretty savvy about navigating your online presence, so maybe it isn't necessary.
A question for commenters that has nothing to do with this post.
I have considered offering a paid option for my posts. It would provide nothing not available with the free option, just a way for people to pay me if they feel like it. I don't need the money, would probably pass it on to the Institute for Justice, the one charity I routinely support.
My reason to do it is largely my memory of my relation with SSC, which for some time was a majority of my time online. I arranged to pay money to Scott's Patreon because I was getting a large benefit from his work and felt I owed him payment. I'm not sure if enough people would feel that way about my posts to make it worth offering the option, or whether there might be negative effects.
Opinions? I'll probably put this in the comment thread of my next post as well.
No opinion one way or the other, except that the Institute of Justice is a good cause that I should maybe start supporting. If you're interested in writing more about why they're the one charity you support, I'd definitely be interested in reading it.
I discuss IJ a little in:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/the-kings-friends-909
They litigate against things I am against, they sometimes win, and it looks as though how much they do is constrained by how much money they have, litigation being expensive. And they seem to do a pretty good job of selecting cases that not only can, with luck, be won but provide good stories for the media.
> in the next few days the three other members of my family tested positive as well
If you all don’t get too sick that’s the best thing to happen. For me I had to isolate in a room for 8 days, including Christmas, because of a faint red line on a plastic device, long after I had no symptoms. 5 days before I could leave the room I had no cough, or sore throat or anything.
Covid is less lethal than the flu now.
It is a known fact that taste buds are like muscles. You can deaden them by bombarding them with too much salt, spice, or sweet. They get weak if they don't have to work to taste something delicate because you've overloaded them with strong flavors. People like me who avoid sugar find that things that used to taste a bit sour, like an imperfect strawberry, now taste delightfully sweet. And many experiments have shown that people who go on a low-sodium diet lose their taste for high-sodium meals. Too much salt now tastes dreadful to them and to me. People who brag about being able to stand really hot chili peppers are just bragging that they've successfully deadened their ability to taste. I was doing that for a while, with excess amounts of spices, but now I'm retraining myself, so that I can fully taste the amazing flavors of plain food.
But you write an interesting column on igniting your taste buds!
I avoid ice cream for two reasons beyond the taste bud argument: The calories involved could go toward life-giving and health-giving foods, instead of foods that harm the body and lead to heart disease, cancer and dementia in old age, to name just three. Also, the cow that gave up the milk that would have gone to its calf has been known to search for that calf for miles, or mourn it with loud bellows. As Milton Friedman told the Whole Foods founder John Mackey, he could find no justification for consuming animal products after listening to Mackey's argument. See Mackey's book: "The Whole Foods Diet." Your mom said that in his 90s, he was too old to become a vegan. I hope he did it anyway.
Find me a person whose vegan for non-religious and you'll find a first. Sorry I'm just tired of people that use vegan as a synonym for vegetarian. Have yet to find a vegan who ensures live saving medicine because of its testing on animals, in fact must vegans I know are medicinephiles whereas Christian Scientists, certain Hindi, etc will just die.
Sorry. Nix the word "vegan." I like the answer I got when I asked a meat-skipping man at a party: "Are you vegetarian?" "I'm an opportunist," he said. I'm a non-religious "Nutritarian," which offers leeway for meat lovers but focuses on the healthiest foods on the planet, including leafy greens, beans, other veggies and fruits and whole grains. I eat perhaps two ounces of animal product a couple of times a year. I'm all for animal testing and I didn't give away my leather wallet when I started eating mostly plants. I'm not bothered by others eating meat, only by pressure to change my ways. By using the "v" word, I was going by the definition found in a book "Becoming Vegan," which counts non-strict vegans who focus on the most nutritious of plant foods. But since vegans can also be junk food eaters, I prefer "Nutritarian," a term coined by Joel Fuhrman, M.D. He points out that vegans who don't supplement with Omega 3s are liable to get dementia and Parkinson's disease. In the early vegan community, he met leaders who had both these ailments. Of course, he points out, vegans need B12, K2 and zinc too. But many non vegans are short on these things as well, especially Omega 3s, even if they eat fish weekly. It's a good idea to be tested. By choosing Nutritarianism, I lowered my cholesterol from a dangerous 297 to 189 without statins and stopped getting anything worse than a cold, and even that less than once a year. I was already lean but lost 10 pounds. From Wikipedia's entry on "veganism:"
1. Plant-based diets can provide all essential nutrients for optimal health.
2. Animal agriculture is a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions.
3 Vegan diets have been linked to lower risks of heart disease and certain cancers.
4. Livestock farming requires vast amounts of land, water, and resources.
5. A vegan diet can reduce water usage by up to 55% compared to a meat-based diet.
Some years ago I looked into the flow of food energy. Of the Earth's food supply, about five-sixths comes from crops, and one-sixth from meat and dairy (fisheries apparently contribute a negligible fraction). However, the crops are grown on one-fourth of the agricultural land; the other three-fourths supports livestock. So on one hand, the extra trophic level in producing animal tissue results in much less food per hectare. But on the other, that three-fourths of the land area really is not suited to raising crops; if we stopped raising livestock on it we wouldn't gain grains, vegetables, and fruit—we'd simply reduce the global food supply by 17%. I can't see that as an optimal choice.
There is also the issue of optimal nutrition going beyond calories. It's very difficult to get complete protein from a plant diet; my wife eats a moderate-carbohydrate diet, and she tells me that to get complete protein she would have to increase her carb intake by a substantial factor. Then there is cyanocobalamin, which occurs naturally in animal tissues but not in plants. We are started to see evidence of health risks from a purely vegan diet that weigh against the asserted health benefits.
This is from Joel Furhman, M.D.
Animal protein increases the body’s production of a hormone called IGF-1, which is associated with aging and an increased risk of several different cancers. One interesting study followed over 85,000 women and 44,000 men for more than 20 years, (26 years in women and 20 years in men) recording over 12,500 deaths. This research team found animal protein-rich diets were associated with a 43% increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer, compared to diets low in animal protein. In addition to animal protein, a diet high in animal products delivers additional harmful, pro-inflammatory, or pro-oxidant substances. Animal foods are higher in arachidonic acid, saturated fat, carnitine and choline, heme iron, substances linked to inflammation, premature aging and other diseases.
How much protein?
The number of grams of protein humans need in a day has been estimated at 0.8 g/kg/day (about 36 grams of protein per 100 pounds of body weight). However, it is not important to count the number of grams of protein in the food you eat to make sure you reach this number. If you are eating a variety of foods, it is almost impossible to consume too little protein. For a typical day, a Nutritarian menu of 1700-1800 calories provides approximately 60-70 grams of protein. Green vegetables, seeds, nuts and beans are all relatively rich in protein. The point is that when you eat an anti-cancer diet to promote longevity, you strive to consume more of these low glycemic colorful plants, which contain plenty of protein, to secure adequate amounts even with the increased needs of aging. It is rare that a person needs to eat animal products to get sufficient protein when eating a Nutritarian diet, but even those individuals that require that, can do so with only a small amount, avoiding the dangers of too much animal products. It is these features that lead to the dramatic disease-protective lifespan benefits. Eat Nutritarian, and forget about protein, you will automatically get the right amount; not too much and not too little.
Joel Fuhrman, M.D. is a board-certified family physician, seven-time New York Times bestselling author and internationally recognized expert on nutrition and natural healing, who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional methods. Dr. Fuhrman coined the term “Nutritarian” to describe his longevity-promoting, nutrient dense, plant-rich eating style.
As for the effect on the environment, consider this from The Vegan Society:
The vast amount of grain feed required for meat production is a significant contributor to deforestation, habitat loss and species extinction. In Brazil alone, the equivalent of 5.6 million acres of land is used to grow soya beans for animals in Europe. This land contributes to developing world malnutrition by driving impoverished populations to grow cash crops for animal feed, rather than food for themselves. On the other hand, considerably lower quantities of crops and water are required to sustain a vegan diet, making the switch to veganism one of the easiest, most enjoyable and most effective ways to reduce our impact on the environment.
> frequent violent sneezing
On reading that I immediately went to https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html to check my memory that sneezing was *not* on the list of symptoms. It's still not. The list is not exhaustive and there are other caveats.
My experience with Covid was similar to yours, aside from enhanced sense of taste. I have never before heard anyone say they had enhanced taste.
Fully recovering for me took something like 60 days. I tested positive for Covid with the quick test about a year later, but it could have been a false positive, because this illness was tamer than most illnesses I have called simply a "cold."
If you make paid subscription a voluntary option with no cost in foregone value, who could object? I am new to Substack. I am pleased to have discovered your Substack so early in the game. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.
I am an economist and a fellow libertarian. My affinity for your Substack is therefore understandable. I have for perhaps 25 years believed and told my students that your father is the GOAT of economics. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to tell you, even if only virtually, that opinion and continue reading what you write. 😊
Technically, at least part of what you're experiencing doesn't sound like a failure of taste (or smell, another component of flavor). The effect of chili peppers is due to capsaicin, which involves chemical stimulation of the pain receptors in the mouth. I hadn't heard that Covid had an effect on those, though I suppose it might have. There are other substances that affect other "tactile" receptors; for example, mints stimulate the cold receptors. That might be an interesting comparison test, if you ever eat mints.
I am pretty sure I got COVID in Mar 2020 (no test at the time) as I caught something that gave me a fever and put me down on the couch for 3 days of sleeping. No normal long term effects, but it did seem to reset my internal thermostat. Typically I was fine around 65 degrees, usually wearing short sleeve polos to work in the winter (maybe a long sleeve button down in MN winters). After getting sick though I have had to buy sweat shirts and sweaters to wear inside. Nearly four years later and it still hasn't gotten back to the previous 40 years' norm.
I have no idea why that would be the case, however. Even stranger though is that I was living in MN at the time, and you don't spend a lot of time walking around outside there in the winter without getting used to the cold. I went from "Wow, it's almost 30 outside, I don't need to button my coat" to "How is it this cold in my office? Where's my scarf?" in a week.
I'm not vaccinated and I'm well into my middle ages but caught COVID a year ago and TBH, was in my experience less bad than the flu which I was vaccinated against. Really the only noticable, and lingering, affect on me involved taste as you said. Everything that contained wheat as well as carbonated water became both sour and sweet and persisted for about eight months; not even full recovered now on it though maybe 95% there.
Sorry about the illness. The taste effect is interesting; I’d never heard of it before. (Though I’m reminded of Fred Cassidy’s experience in “Doorways in the Sand”.) I haven’t had COVID myself, although my young-adult son has—fortunately with very mild symptoms.
You’re more careful about your weight than most people are. I weigh about 170 lb (though I have to translate from kg) and I think I’m officially on the borderline between normal and overweight; I’d be happy to lose a little weight, but I don’t bother to do anything about it.
I'm overweight by the BMI definition — I'm 5'3" — but I don't take that definition very seriously since it ignores width and I'm very stocky, what I think of as a proper dwarvish build, shoe widths EEE. I'm not overweight by my definition, was when I was thirty or forty pounds heavier.
I'm a bit puzzled by the description of the taste problems. I had the classic anosmia and discovered it first through the fact that food and drink tasted terrible, i.e. oversalted or bitter, for instance. So I tested my sense of smell and it was gone. Once the anosmia receded, food and drink tasted normal again. I wonder if you had something else going on and how to explain it. - I was in Albania in September when I had COVID, one of the countries that lacked access to vaccination earlier in the pandemic. A friend of the family, my age and without any known health problems, died from COVID. An N of 1 but always on my mind when I read anti-vaxxer commentary somewhere.
I had COVID for the first time a few months ago. It was like the flu; but the cough lingered a week or two after I was feeling fine otherwise, and my sense of taste was dulled for a month or so.
Hello Dr. Friedman!
You mentioned how the prescribed steroids modified your taste in such a way that ordinary flavors became delightful; cottage cheese turned into ice-cream, for example.
Although you may not have had the entrepreneurial ambition to reproduce this effect, others have!
A product known as "Miracle Berries", per my own experimentation, function in just the way your medication did: they turn bitter to sweet! Chew on one of the berries, and lemons turn to candy-- or better still, vodka to juice...
You noticed a marketable value in the field of taste enhancement. And, just as we predict markets would behave, entrepreneurs found ways to capture that value.
Suffice to say, I recommend you try them out!
I have ordered some.
I'd love to hear a review of how those work for you. Between three little kids and my own sweet tooth that needs ignoring, those could be really handy.
I've read about that too. I wonder why it just got one big publicity blast but we don't see it in stores, or read about it any more.
Does it do anything for broccoli and cabbage?
Not sure. I would imagine it may make both marginally sweeter.
Last time I had covid (summer 2023), it was a "mild" case, with an intermittent fever over 36 hours that left me weak for a few days, but no other symptoms. But I was taking paxlovid at the time, and the paxlovid definitely affected my sense of taste. Not only was there a strange aftertaste in my mouth for 8(?) hours after taking some, but the taste of food was affected, too. But that went away within a day of stopping the paxlovid.
I stopped Paxlovid about a week ago and its taste effect seems to be gone.
Ah, then it's nothing to do with that. :-)
I've heard one explanation for the recovery time from "shortness of breath" and "loss of taste/smell" is that the surface cells in the membranes were killed, and the body slowly regrows them. But the timeline doesn't sound like what's going on here, unless it's the equivalent of taking a pumice stone to your taste buds or olfactory receptors, removing the insensitive outer layer and exposing the shiny fresh ones underneath. But I don't even know if the relevant cells work in layers like that, although a bit of Wikipedia reading about the olfactory epithelium suggests that it might be possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_epithelium
Out of sheer curiosity, does this new sensitivity apply to both taste and smell? Did it enhance your tastes of sweet/sour/salty/savory/bitter? Are you more aware of scents from cooking, or flowers, or perfumes, or other things, or does it only apply when eating food? (You don't have to answer, of course.)
And, uh, one more thing, and I hope this doesn't disturb you unnecessarily. There was a guy I met via the Internet who had claimed that when he got covid-19, it changed his personality, cured his anxiety, and made him bisexual. Less than a month after I met him, he died. The current theory, shared by his family, is that it was probably a brain tumor or stroke that coincidentally started affecting him at about the same time that he got covid-19. And now I become worried when people report unusual covid symptoms, and, well, you did mention the tumor. So I figure I should raise the possibility.
I haven't noticed increased sensitivity to scent. Two specific tastes that are affected are saltiness and hot spicy, but there may be others.
The tumor was more than a decade ago and I have not observed any tendency since to find males sexually attractive.
:-) I suppose I could have merely said "please don't discount the hypothesis that the effect is from an unrelated condition", but this way is a bit more memorable.
I'm glad you're keeping your weight down. I suspect I had Covid in December (I wasn't tested). I was sick in bed for 2 weeks. I had a sore throat and lost my voice. I didn't notice any difference in the taste of food. But I completely lost my appetite. At first I didn't eat any food in over 24 hours. Then for 4 days I consumed about as many total calories as I usually consume in 1 day. My calorie consumption is still lower than it was before. I lost about 10 pounds, going from about 5 pounds more than my doctor said I should weigh to about 5 pounds less. It's an effective but unpleasant diet.
Very glad that you're feeling better!
I didn't have any effects on my taste either time I had COVID. My main symptoms both times were tiredness and some of the most runny noses of my life. Glad you at least escaped the runny nose!
Also, having been at one of your meetups, I need to clarify your "being a male Friedman, he likes to talk" - at least one of the female Friedmans does too!
I had a runny nose as well, but nothing extreme.
I am in my upper 60s, and instead of vaccinating, we contacted the America's Frontline Doctors and used prophylactic ivermectin as well as various supplements to improve our immune system. When in the summer of 2022 we (three of us) did finally catch CoVid, we increased the ivermectin to a therapeutic dosing schedule. Only I experienced the lowering of the o2 stat, and so I also went on prednisone, which took care of that very well.
Our main symptoms were fever and fatigue. I coughed a lot, but I always do with every viral infection. The fatigue was extreme in my case. I was the only one who experienced any taste symptom, but I didn't have a lack of taste. To me, everything tasted horribly metallic. That lasted for weeks.
Recently our daughter was sick and tested positive for CoVid. She had fever for one day and general malaise for about five days. We tested negative, but also had some slight symptoms, but really very minor. We all stayed in the house, since everybody we knew was also sick, some with CoVid. It was easy. I believe our previous cases a year and a half ago helped prepare us to fight it off this time.
Scott Alexander had an extensive post on Ivermectin. His conclusion was that the evidence that it helps against Covid was due to its effect against parasites, observed in places where parasites were a serious problem but not elsewhere. You might find his analysis of the evidence interesting: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted
There was a rebuttal by Alexandros and a rerebuttal by Scott with a link to the rebuttal:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-alexandros-contra-me
Yes, I've read Scott and many others over the years. But at some point, you still have to make a choice and go with it. We decided that the evidence against "safe and effective" was strong enough for us to avoid the vaccine, and the evidence of the safety of ivermectin convinced us that it wouldn't hurt. We got through our CoVid cases with no lasting negative effects. I know it doesn't prove anything, but you asked for our experiences, so I spoke up.
Thank you.
There is now an alternative to Paxlovid said to be about equally effective although less convenient, Remdesivir. It isn't a pill but something that has to be mixed into your bloodstream with an IV. I think the process is supposed to take an hour and a half the first day, an hour each for the next two. I considered it because of concern with interaction between Paxlovid and something else I was taking, but decided on the Paxlovid. You probably already know about it, but if you get Covid again the information might be useful.
The problem with drawing any conclusion from individual experience is it is a very noisy signal, since some people do nothing and have a very mild case, others do lots of recommended things and don't.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll keep it in mind, but I do think that what we're doing has been working, and I don't expect to need a change.
I know I can't prove anything by our own little study of n=3, though that along with the experiences of many others who we know who also made similar choices, at least, convinces me. Also, my own within-subject study, where I've been always prone to everything going around, and I've always been sicker than everybody else around me (just ask my siblings) tells me that much of what I've done for my immune system has worked generally, and not just for CoVid. I don't reject modern medicine, and I have an internist who respects me and a "CoVid doctor" who advises me who I trust to be up on the research.
On another topic, Greg just realized that your book Machinery of Freedom has now been out for fifty years, and he wanted to congratulate you for that anniversary.
If I do another book it will probably be based on my posts here and on my blog, which add up to a very large number of pages at this point. Probably starting with the climate posts, possibly including one or two of the other categories.
But given that they are all available online already I'm not sure that packaging a bunch of them as a book accomplishes much.
One big advantage of physical books is that they sit well on a shelf instead of disappearing after the server fee stops being paid. People can then discover them long after.
Not to mention that people who don't know where to look, or aren't allowed on the internet, can lift a book off the shelf while saying "Huh, what's this?" and away they go.
Pulling it together and organizing it as a book could make it all more coherent. Otherwise, there are a couple of different sites where your writing is kept, and your topics jump around. But, I suspect people don't read books like they used to, and many of your readers are pretty savvy about navigating your online presence, so maybe it isn't necessary.