I dislike weighing myself. But the recent Fancy Food Show left me with a fabulous collection of beautiful rare chocolates and I have gained weight. This essay by Bill McKibben about the value of knowing your gas mileage and this great piece by Atul Gawande on the value of a birth-outcome score (the Apgar score) have made me realize:
1. Weighing yourself is an act of courage.
2. Weighing yourself is always beneficial. No matter what the scale says.
A reader named Shawn made an interesting comment on Michael Pollan vs. Processed Food:
I’d like to point out that your example of fortifying flour (white flour, actually) is not really that great, since in this case they are simply adding back some (but not all) of the nutrients that were destroyed in processing. Whole wheat flour does not have to be fortified because it has those nutrients to begin with — which actually supports Pollan’s arguments against food processing.
That’s true, it does support Pollan’s argument against food processing. More detail will help make my underlying logic clearer. Flour is milled for several reasons, the details of which don’t matter; let me just say that white flour is more profitable than whole wheat flour, thus can be sold at a lower price. In terms of price, milling is win-win: the supplier makes more profit and the customer gets cheaper flour. But when you consider nutrition — milled flour less nutritious than unmilled — it is not clear at all that milling is win-win. B vitamin supplementation, by cheaply replacing what the milling took out, moves us back to win-win. Not milling is not win-win: It is nothing-nothing.
When you process food based on a correct theory — an accurate understanding of how our bodies work — the result is often win-win. When you process food based on a wrong theory, it is much harder to reach that result. This is what Pollan didn’t understand. As usual, Jane Jacobs said it best. In response to people who said that Problem X or Problem Y was due to overpopulation — just as Pollan is anti-food-processing — Jacobs said the problem is not too many people, the problem is the undone work. In the case of food, the problem is not too much processing, the problem is the undone work — the undone work of coming up with good theories to guide the processing.
I have just finished correcting the proofs of the paperback edition of The Shangri-La Diet, due out in May. The paperback edition has much less about drinking sugar water, and more about omega-3s, nose-clipping, and lessons learned from the SLD forums. The first three interludes (case studies) are different.
All of the changes are due to user feedback. In This Film is Not Yet Rated, Fred Von Lohmann, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says
Everyone always forgets . . . that Sony thought the VCR would be primarily used for time-shifting. We all know that’s not what it’s good for; it’s good for going to Blockbuster and renting movies, right? It took some time in the hands of consumers for that device to sort of find its highest and best use.
Perhaps someday everyone will forget that SLD was originally based on drinking sugar water.
You try, if you can, to get people to look at the specific thing that is happening and not try to generalize it as an ideology. Ideologies, no matter what kind, are one of the greatest afflictions, because they blind us to seeing what is going on, or to what is being done.
From this interview.
At the Shangri-La Diet forums, SLDers — more than a hundred of them — have been posting their weight for many months, thanks to Rey Arbolay. No similar data is available for any other weight-loss method, as far as I know.
The main weakness of the SLD data is lack of comparison. This led me to propose web trials — a hybrid of the SLD data collection and a clinical trial, where there is always a comparison (at least two treatments, or treatment and control). After I interviewed Robin Hanson about them, a British student programmer named Andrew Sidwell contacted me and offered to set up a website to allow web trials to be done.
How exciting! A website that does web trials will allow cheap, easy, testing of many solutions to many problems. Although clinical trials usually involve medical problems, web trials can be used to study anything, as Robin pointed out. Andrew and I plan to start with procrastination.
I realized (in both senses) several ways to improve my omega-3 self-experimentation:
1. Simpler treatment. I had been drinking both walnut oil and flaxseed oil. For the sake of simplicity, I stopped the walnut oil. I continued to drink 2 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil. I will vary the amount of flaxseed oil.
2. More controlled measurement. Instead of balancing on any part of my right foot, I started balancing on only the balls of my right foot.
3. More measurement. I measure my balance once/day. During that one session I had been measuring my balance 20 times (measuring how long I could stand on a platform before falling off — 20 durations). The first 5 durations were warm-up, leaving 15 durations that counted. I increased the total number of trials to 30. It was still easy; the whole thing takes about 10 minutes.
4. A new measure. Anything that affects balance is likely to affect other mental abilities, I believe. To test this belief, I will start measuring my brain in a new way: a pencil-and-paper version of Saul Sternberg’s memory-scanning task. It will take about 5 minutes.
I started #1-3 about a week ago and will start #4 today.
To deal with the threat posed by open-access journals (which I praise and have published in), a group of scientific publishers including Elsevier has hired Washington public relations consultant Eric Dezenhall to help them. According to this article, Mr. Dezenhall has
encouraged his clients to “develop simple messages,” such as “public access equals government censorship”
Orwell’s 1984 includes long excerpts from a fictional book with chapter titles such as “War is Peace.” The book explains the term doublethink like this:
Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.
You’ve heard of the French Paradox (140K Google hits), the fact that the French have little heart disease in spite of a diet high in saturated fats (the supposedly bad fats). You haven’t heard of the Israeli Paradox (<1K Google hits), which may be more important. (The French Paradox may be an historical accident.) The Israeli Paradox is the fact that Jewish Israelis have very high rates of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer in spite of a diet low in total fat, high in polyunsaturated fats (the supposedly good fats), and low in saturated fats.
The best guess is that the Israeli Paradox is due to a high intake of omega-6 fats (from soybean oil). Non-Jewish Israeli citizens have rates of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer roughly half the Jewish rate. The non-Jews consume lots of olive oil (low in omega-6) rather than soybean oil. This is not an omega-3 effect; olive oil is low in both omega-3.
“Replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats [such as omega-6] is a safe, proven, and delicious way to cut the rates of heart disease,” wrote Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist, in Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy (2001, p. 71). The Israeli Paradox shows that this way of reducing heart disease is anything but safe and proven.
A few days ago I ate a handful of peanuts. Uh-oh, I thought, will this make my brain work worse? Peanuts are high in omega-6. As regular readers of this blog know, when I increased my omega-3 intake several months ago, my balance got better. More recently, when I replaced high omega-3/low omega-6 oils with a low omega-3/high omega-6 oil, my balance got worse; when I returned to the high omega-3/low omega-6 oils, my balance went back up. (Details here.)
To measure the effect of different fats on my brain I have been measuring my balance every morning. The morning after I ate the peanuts, my balance score was within normal limits. Meaning my brain was working no worse than usual. This was reassuring — an unexpected benefit of self-experimentation.
In ten years, will there will be websites that people regularly visit to take a few mental tests? The tests would be a quick and easy measure of brain function. The sites would remember all your scores and would graphically compare your current score with your previous scores. One more way to procrastinate — but it would be good procrastination.