Interview about Self-Experimentation (part 2 of 2)

8. How do you verify your results?

Repetition — first by me, later by others.

9. It seems your whole life is nothing but a self-experiment – how can your friends handle this?

Well, I spend a few hours in the morning differently than anyone else. I go to sleep earlier and wake up earlier than most people around me. And I eat less than most people. I like to think I make up for it by being in a better mood.

10. How do your colleagues react to your self-experiments?

Most of them think self-experimentation is a mistake, a waste of time. A few think it is creative and important.

11. Your most recent research is dealing with the effects of omega-3 on dental health. What is this research exactly about?

It’s not about dental health – that effect (omega-3 improved my gums) was an accident. It’s about the effects of omega-3 on my brain. I am varying the omega-3 in my diet in various ways and measuring how well my brain works in various ways. I began this research when I discovered that swallowing flaxseed oil capsules improved my balance. I was surprised but the effect makes sense: balance is controlled by the brain and the brain is more than half fat. Maybe you need the right fats in your diet if you want your brain to work as well as possible.

12. How did you get the idea of searching for the relation between omega-3 and dental health?

See answer to previous question.

13. How did you get the idea of taking oil to lose weight?

It was a three-step process. Step 1: I came up with a new theory of weight control. Step 2: I accidentally lost my appetite during a trip to Paris. I guessed that the cause was the unfamiliar sugar-sweetened soft drinks I’d been drinking because of the heat. This led me to discover that drinking small amounts of sugar water cause a lot of weight loss. Step 3: A friend pointed out that my theory predicted that flavorless oil should be just as effective as sugar water.

14. Are you going to search for a medical explanation for the effects of omega-3 fats?

No. Just convincing most people that there are effects is hard enough. It will also take a long time to learn how to maximize the effects. For example, what oils are best? How much oil is best? Other people are in a better position than me to try to explain the effects. But I don’t think it is terribly mysterious or surprising that dietary omega-3 should improve brain function: the brain is more than half fat. Surely the type of fat matters. My discovery is how big and fast the effect is. That’s not obvious.

15. When you consider your work as a whole, what is the most important result of your scientific research via self-experimentation?

Discovery of the effect of morning faces on mood. I believe depression is a deficiency disease, caused by too little exposure to morning faces. (See this paper for details.) No doubt that sounds very odd — even odder than the Shangri-La Diet — but consider this. In a wonderful book called The Good Women of China, the author, a Chinese radio host named Xinran Xue, wrote about her travels all over China to learn how different women lived. The last chapter is about visiting an extremely poor and backward community called Shouting Hill where an egg is a luxury and each women has multiple husbands because two or three girls are traded for a wife. She comes back to the radio station and tells her colleagues what she has seen. One of them asks, “Are they happy?” Another says, “Don’t be ridiculous, how could they be happy?” Because they were so poor — very poor even by Chinese standards. Xue answered:

I said to Mengxing that, out of the hundreds of Chinese women I had spoken to over nearly ten years of broadcasting and journalism, the women of Shouting Hill were the only ones to tell me they were happy.

It is pretty clear they saw plenty of faces in the morning.