Wasabi linked to "substantial" boost in memory, Japanese study finds | Hacker News Reader

Wasabi linked to "substantial" boost in memory, Japanese study finds

cbsnews.com

56 pointselorant55 comments

> A wasabi company, Kinjirushi Co., provided funding, though the researchers say the company had no role in the study itself.

I'm sure.

Also relevant:

- "In 2018, Buckley and the other nine senior members of the editorial board resigned, claiming that MDPI "pressured them to accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrients_(journal)

https://www.science.org/content/article/open-access-editors-...

(This is the journal that accepted the OP study).

Even before reading this I definitely got vibes of "Wine makers find drinking red wine has benefits" or "Starbucks finds that coffee is the ultimate health drink" etc.

"1-2 glasses of wine a few days a week associated with better health outcomes" was true, but it leaves out "1-2 glasses of wine a few days a week associated with wealth". There's some correlations there, but neither statement is pointing the finger at the causation.

Also teetotalers, as a group, includes people who don't drink because an undiagnosed underlying health issue makes them feel ill when they imbibe. Maybe a latent hepatitis-b infection.

Funding of the study is a role in the study itself, since it is the study itself that requires the actual money.

Some how I was able to guess this was the case without having any prior knowledge of this study.

This is obnoxious. You cannot disprove a scientific study by pointing at who funded it, and a properly constructed one won't be able to hide bad results since it'd be preregistered.

He doesn't have the burden of disproving it, the study has the burden of proving its claims. I consider studies funded by an interested party as weak evidence at best - perhaps enough to encourage an independent party to conduct another study.

All medicines in the US are approved using studies funded by the company that submitted them. There's a simple reason for that - nobody else would care enough to do it.

If you can't read a study well enough to tell if the methods it uses are good, that's your problem.

Even a study that never took place could specify methods that look great on paper.

You pretty much have to repeat the study yourself to see whether you get the same results.

All studies like this are "believe us when we say that we did this, and observed that".

If you're paid by X, and the result is favorable to X, then I don't believe you as much.

Proving or disproving a claim is the purpose of a study. At this point, it's out of the researchers hands and up to other research teams to replicate the research and confirm or deny the results.

> perhaps enough to encourage an independent party to conduct another study.

Is that an option that’s on the table? Or do we have to take the information we’re able to get and just interpret it critically?

I think people do crowdfunding for studies sometimes, but doing it just for a replication sounds like a waste.

No, you cant disprove a study by the source of funding;Truth doesnt care who funds it.

But its also not obnoxious not to be helplessly naive that you don't scrutinize sources using effective heuristics.

It's not an effective heuristic. Overly online cynical people are just obsessed with the idea that everything is a conspiracy that can be undone by "following the money".

Bad science reporting is common, but it's more common for the reporters to just misread what a study says.

Besides, this is nutrition science, where what's actually happening is scientists are conspiring against big ice cream by refusing to tell you that it's good for you. (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...)

> No, you cant disprove a study by the source of funding;Truth doesnt care who funds it.

But the lie does care.

Yes you can. Identification of a conflict-of-interest bias is different from argumentum ad hominem.

Don’t confuse the wasabi that we get in the States for actual wasabi. Nicer restaurants will have it, but you’ll probably have to ask for it.

The article mentions that it's "usually white horseradish, dyed green", and that the real thing "can cost more per pound than even the choice tuna it sits on."

Would be interesting to verifiably taste real wasabi. Who knows, maybe I've never actually even tasted the real thing?

I've had it, in Tokyo.

They give you a root, and a grater. Tastes milder than what we get, here.

I have heard that it is impossible to domesticate (has to be harvested wild, on certain mountains). However, I watched a program, where a guy in Hawai'i said he'd figured out how to domesticate it.

Haven't heard much about that, though.

It's a difficult plant to grow as it requires specific conditions. Though there are farms in the pacific northwest that have been able to cultivate it successfully.

Here is a decent paper that discusses the challenges[PDF]:

https://www.skagitmg.org/wp-content/uploads/Public-Pages/Foo...

There is a company in the UK too https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/plants/11638355/The-UK...

Tasmania also cultivates some.

It's still very hard to grow with high failure rates, but you can definitely find plants for affordable prices -- a bit less than 10$, but then you need to manage to keep it alive for 3 years if you want to enjoy it propagate it. There are a number of good YT videos on how to cultivate it, and some documentaries on professional plantations.

To have it the spiciest you should wait a good ten minutes or more, the spiciness is activated by the process: "The chemical in wasabi that provides for its initial pungency is the volatile compound allyl isothiocyanate, which is produced by hydrolysis of allyl glucosinolate [...]; the hydrolysis reaction is catalyzed by myrosinase and occurs when the enzyme is released on cell rupture caused by grating" (adapted from wikipedia)

It can be grown in the PNW, in America. There are a few farms, e.g. https://www.thewasabistore.com/the-farm-1

It is difficult to grow but there are multiple producers in the US, and I've occasionally seen it for sale in grocery stores. Some sushi places use it. It is more expensive than the green horseradish/mustard powder, but not prohibitively so.

You can taste the difference but in most contexts it is pretty substitutable with the fake wasabi, hence the ubiquity of the latter.

I'm curious as to why its not possible to grow locally given the growing number of startups growing food in cities in fully controlled environments? for ex: https://youtu.be/VxRNoSSkLkE?t=191

It has been grown in Iceland: https://www.nordicwasabi.com/

It's cultivated in Brazil too, although in a very small scale: (in portuguese) https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/comida/2022/02/wasabi-verdadei...

In addition to the previously mentioned places, it is grown in Tasmania, Australia too (https://shimawasabi.com.au/pages/about).

I’ve found real wasabi to actually be a bit milder than some of the horseradish imitators. I suppose I always assumed it’d be even stronger, but that hasn’t been the case in my experience.

If you don't see the sushi chef grinding a little green root fresh on a wasabi grinder and adding a little bit to your rice, it's safe to assume it's not Japanese wasabi.

If you have a Japanese food market near you they might have it. Some specialty grocers can carry it too. If you happen to be in the bay area iirc there's a Wasabi farm in half moon bay.

Real wasabi powder runs vaguely $5 an ounce. Wasabi is a different species than horseradish. The taste is quite different.

Scratch the price remark as I just caught up to the "99% is fake" data. Sigh.

Bought a small tube of that a few days ago. Contains 0.7% Wasabi :-)

Even then, it's often not fresh. Real wasabi should be generally consumed within 30 minutes of being ground/grated, before it loses its flavor.

You can absolutely buy some wasabi powder that is made with up to 50% real wasabi on Amazon fairly cheaply, but what you're tasting is still going to be the horseradish. They're basically just selling you the discarded remains of wasabi that isn't actually any good anymore. Still safe to consume, but stale, essentially.

It's the same in Japan, actually.

You usually don't get real wasabi in Japan either. Probably too difficult to grow at sufficient scale to meet demand.

Even in Japan almost nowhere has real wasabi.

Left unexamined is: what other substances are linked to boosts in memory?

You'd assume that, of the 1000's of substances we eat, by randomness about half have a positive or no effect, and the other half have a negative effect. How about ketchup? Jalapeños? Oyster sauce? Curry powder? Probably some foods have an even larger positive effect.

I'd imagine no one's tested those.

Eating would probably cause a lot of bias thus destroying the randomness. Starting with our taste buds which causes avoidance, the digestion system that will break things down so many substances will end up similar despite their differences before hand, and the blood brain barrier which many things can't get past. Then there is dosage, substances can have wildly different effects or none at all depending on how much you give and how long they are given.

Dosage would probably be among the bigger issues, if oyster sauce contained a substance that got past those barriers just how much would you have to imbibe to get a positive or negative effect, and would the other ingredients at that level start causing side effects, interference, or otherwise mask the substance.

They weren't serving it with food. It was a capsule by itself, at bedtime.

don't fixate on oyster sauce; I just picked something at random. However, the larger point remains: this "study" is garbage. There are probably people who'll start buying "wasabi" and feel all healthy & virtuous, so there's your placebo effect right there.

If the effects is true, I don’t think it is necessarily due to any particular substance in the wasabi. If the simple smelling of pleasant fragrances can boost the memory performance by 260% [1], I believe other pungent substances can have a similar effect, too! :D

[1] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/how-simple-fragr...

If you eat something really pungent, your brain should indeed have mechanisms to prevent you from eating it again. It could be poisonous.

The paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/21/4608

Last time this was discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38132218

Is this only wasabi or does it cover the horseradish based green stuff we get in the US?

Horseradish only contains trace amounts :-(

@dang this is a dupe - I submitted this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38553735

via a chemical apparently not in regular horseradish aka western wasabi aka most wasabi

It's true, after I ate some, I felt like I was no longer playing ketchup.

Eat wasabi blob, enjoy memorable life event. Great success.

It's true, you never forget that time you put too much wasabi on... /s

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