Five Bullet Wednesday: Viruses, Kids and Wasting Resources

Hey everyone, sorry I didn't get this one done in time, I'm in a crunch trying to finish up my newest video at the moment.

Virus I've been into---
Apparently there are more cases of coronavirus than there were of SARS cases. First case not linked to Wuhan travel was reported in Japan. I bought this book about viruses (in JPN) a couple weeks back. Had interesting information about the difference between viruses and the classic definition of life and how viruses replicate in the first 30 pages but I haven't gotten around to reading further.
Something more relevant I came across on viruses is "The Viral Selenoprotein Theory." Essentially it says that HIV and other viruses have selenoproteins that sequester selenium in order to deprive the host of it and suppress immunity.

Quote from that article: "Selenium deficiency can cause wasting and lowering of immunity and, most likely, the other classical symptoms of AIDS. Since selenium mainly functions as an antioxidant, the virus uses it to combat the cellular immunological responses like oxidative bursts. The viral selenoproteins may also be regulatory in nature and control HIV transcription. Preliminary studies indicate that HIV infection significantly lowers the selenoprotein level in T cells. Even though this hypothesis put forward by Will Taylor was initially for HIV, recent evidence seems to indicate that it could hold true for other retroviruses and also for other viruses..."

Editor of Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine, Damien Downing has said: “Swine flu, bird flu, and SARS, all developed in selenium-deficient China. When patients were given selenium, viral mutation rates dropped and immunity improved.” I was a little skeptical of that

Then, here's a quote from Springer's Handbook on Immunosenescence: Basic Understanding and Clinical Applications 

"...it is also of interest for the role played by selenium deficiency in viral infections the following points: (i) the emergence during these last 4 years (from 2003) of a newly recognized human disease agent (coronavirus) that causes SARS from Guangdong Province of China (Lashley 2006) as well as from Northern Vietnam (Reynolds et al. 2006), where significant areas of overt selenium deficiency exist (Xia et al. 2005); ii)the increased risk of enhanced virulence of influenza virus in elderly (Ellis et al. 2003) associated with a possible selenium deficiency (Seiler 2001). Therefore, the selenium deficiency may be considered as a relevant risk factor for the appearance of age-related diseases (cancer, cardiovascular diseases and infections by viruses, which may become more virulent or mutated)."

So... eat a Brazil nut?

Video I enjoyed---
Living with the Coronavirus

Class I've Been Watching---
I did two posts about Malcolm Gladwell already. Since then I've moved onto Dan Brown. He gives a really good breakdown of what makes a Thriller a thriller - what keeps you turning the page. It's very easy to follow - he has a lot of good insights that are simple yet clever to where I found myself thinking "Why didn't I think of that!" a couple times.
One point I liked was:
■You need to ask a lot of questions as soon as possible to get the reader engaged.
"Bill found himself in precisely the situation he told himself he would not be in 5 years ago. He wearily rubbed the caked wasabi soy-sauce sludge off of his brow and made a path out of the mound of empty crunky wrappers on his king sized bed so he could make his way to the bathroom. This wasn't the issue. He enjoyed his dassai-fueled binges. The issue was separating himself from the device handcuffed to his arm. The 20cm by 20cm cube weighed so much, his wrist had developed a reddish blue bruise where the handcuff was over the past three days. Three very uneventful days except this one seemed like it would be different. The surface that had been completely obsidian black suddenly flashed four numbers on it. "00:01." Bill, still sitting on the edge of the bed stared at it. "...Either I'm dead in a minute or something just started," he thought."

...Not the best story... but so far we've set up two questions:
-What is the cube?
-How did he know enough to tell himself not to let this happen beforehand?

At the very start of the Masterclass, he says "At the end of this class, I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone on the planet before. Also, I'm going to show you an artifact that no one else has seen. That's your first lesson in suspense."

Children and Being Cute---
My friend sent me this post by investor Paul Graham the other day. I had never heard of him before, but I liked the theme and the article. He's talking about "What you can't say" - things that have become taboo. Easy example is Galileo and his heretical ideas.
One of the examples Graham gives is why don't we let children say "fuck" or "shit?" He says that it's because we would prefer that children seem innocent.  
He follows up with Santa Claus:
"One of the most obvious examples is Santa Claus. We think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. I myself think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. But one wonders, do we tell them this stuff for their sake, or for ours?"
But isn't it in the benefit of the child to be taught how to act in a way that adults prefer?
Older people, for the most part, are going to be an asset to most anyone their whole lives. Most older people have better connections, are wiser, can open more doors for you, can make red tape disappear if they want, can let you be employed if they want.
This reminded me of what Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules for Life."His Rule #5 is "Do Not Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them" I don't have kids, but it sounds like a good rule.
Peterson was saying that our job is to teach our children by the age of 4, how to get adults to like them. Be polite, be courteous, don't say "fuck" or "shit," because adults don't like it when kids say fuck or shit (even though they say it themselves.)

Though, there must be a big difference between a child who has enough sense to not piss off adults vs. a child who is simply scared of adults.

Why make nutrients yourself?---
A question I've been trying to come up with an answer to is: "Does ingesting dietary heme reduce the spending of substrates used for heme synthesis?"
Maybe you've heard of heme iron. It's the type of iron in meat (from the hemoglobin and myoglobin in meat/fish) that is supposed to be bad, as opposed to the "good" non-heme iron in plants. Heme iron is absorbed much more efficiently, but some believe that it causes colon cancer.
But set the cancer accusation aside for a moment  and consider this: Our bodies are making heme all the time - we need it for a lot of things like oxygen transport, detoxification (cytochrome p450 enzymes) and generation of energy in the mitochondria.  However, it's an  expensive process.  You need Glycine, Succinyl-CoA, Zinc, Vitamin B6 and Iron, and 9 enzymes (including pyridoxal phosphate) to make heme.
So, why not just eat heme and spare all those substrates?
Even though I'm working with a researcher on this, I still haven't found a paper that explains the fate of dietary/exogenous heme specifically or one that shows something like exogenous heme being incorporated into hemoglobins in vivo. (There was one paper that showed this to happen in cell cultures though. "Exogenous hemin enhanced hemoglobin synthesis when present with inducer and was detected in the haemoglobin produced by the cells")
 
If anyone's interested in this, here's a good place to start: Heme, an essential nutrient from dietary proteins, critically impacts diverse physiological and pathological processes.