Month: July 2007

Science in Action: Sunlight and Sleep (more background)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

An early section of Wide Awake (2006), Alan Berliner’s documentary about his life-long insomnia — he can’t fall asleep until 3 or 4 am — lists common folk remedies:

BERLINER Over the years I’ve tried to cry myself to sleep, to drink myself to sleep, aroma therapy, changing mattresses, changing pillows, lavender beads, massage therapy, white noise, meditation, counting sheep, melatonin, Valerian root, acupuncture, acupressure, chamomile tea, warm milk, hypnosis even, yoga, homeopathic medicines, marijuana, lots of sex, hot baths, herbal teas, biofeedback.
SISTER Okay, nothing worked.

Conspicuously absent: sunlight. At the end of the movie, however:

DOCTOR We have to reset your [internal] clock. Since you’re such a night owl, I’d like to move your sleep cycle earlier by having you get light exposure in the morning. When you wake up, throw on some clothes and go outdoors for an hour. I really want light to get into your eyes ’cause that’s what going to move your rhythm so you can fall asleep earlier.
ANOTHER DOCTOR Light is one of the most powerful cues for your internal clock to know what time it is. You see light and it tells you: be active during the day, sleep at night.

But the treatment they settle on is sleep deprivation: “I’d like you to spend just 6.5 hours in bed,” says a doctor. “Give you less time in bed than you want. . . . 2:30 to 9:00 am would be a reasonable way to go.” “You are going to be dysfunctional,” Berliner is warned. The film ends: “Now that I know what I have to do, the question is: Can I do it?”

This is a good summary of what people believe about how to cure insomnia. Sunshine is absent from the folk remedies you are likely hear. When doctors mention it, they emphasize early-morning sunlight.

Until recently, I too thought that sunlight exposure was important in the morning, but not during the rest of the day. Every morning I exercised on a treadmill with sunlight-spectrum light shining on me for an hour; I thought that was enough. Now I am adding to that sunlight later in the day — in the afternoon, for instance — and finding that it helps.

Omega-3 and Dental Health: Surgery Commuted

Seth Roberts21 Comments

I started writing a follow-up to this Marginal Revolution post by Tyler Cowen before I knew of its existence:

January [2007] entodontist [= gum specialist]: “You’ll need surgery either right now, or within a few months. We cut open the gum, clean out the inflammation, and sew your mouth right back up. Only sometimes do we have to eliminate the tooth.”

July 5 [2007] entodontic surgeon, 10:31 a.m.: “We can cancel this morning’s surgery, it seems OK for now, just keep an eye on it.”

In June, Tyler posted about the benefits he derived from flaxseed oil (2 Tablespoons/day): “Very good for my heart, my brain, and my gums.” I asked him what was better. “Much better gums, for sure,” he replied. “The rest is harder to measure.” On July 4 I got around to asking for details. Tyler said that he had had bad gums for most of his life and that he noticed they were much better within a week or two of starting the flaxseed oil. He added

I have crooked wisdom teeth, never wore braces, and my mouth naturally produces lots of plaque. Put all together that means a significant problem with gum disease. I get cleanings every three months or so but still my gums have been much worse than average.

I too have crooked teeth and more plaque than average and I too found that flaxseed oil improved my gums; my dentist was the first to notice.

A recent experiment about omega-3 and dental health. A 1997 experiment. An amazing bowling video.

Why is Sicko So Good?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In What is Art? Tolstoy argued that the goal of art is to evoke emotion. According to a Blue Cross vice president, “You would have to be dead to be unaffected by [Sicko].”

Why is Sicko so good?

I have a theory: the Internet. At his website, Moore asked for health-insurance horror stories. He got 25 thousand submissions, I have read. With that much to work with, you can select some extremely moving stories. Not only that. In an article I wrote for Spy, my editor crossed out some comment I had made. “Sometimes the material is so good it speaks for itself,” she said. Moore’s material was so good it spoke for itself. Because Moore said less the diversity of voices was increased, a big artistic plus.

There is a connection with self-experimentation. I was surprised how effective my self-experimentation turned out to be — effective scientifically. Far more than my other research (just as Sicko is far better than Moore’s other movies). I came to believe that there was a large plodding element in effective science — to find new cause-effect relationships, you needed to be able to try lots of things. Self-experimentation worked so well because it made it easy to plod, to try lots of things. Sicko is so good because his website made it easy for Moore to gather lots of good stories.

Moore and Jane Jacobs.

The Shangri-La Diet: What Went Wrong?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Andrew Gelman astutely noted that the three researchers (Michel Cabanac, Anthony Sclafani, and Israel Ramirez) whose work I used the most to come up with the Shangri-La Diet were not at Harvard or Yale or Rockefeller University. Isn’t that where breakthrough research is supposed to come from? This wasn’t the only way that development of the Shangri-La Diet was not quite “right”:

1. The research of Cabanac et al. got little recognition. The set point idea arose in the 1950s, or even earlier. In the 1970s, Cabanac saw very clearly that your set point depends on what you eat. With Rabe, he did an excellent experiment supporting this view. Not one weight-control researcher took note. No other lab built on this work.

2. I was not a weight-control researcher. In graduate school, I studied animal learning. Weight control is not just a different field of psychology; it is usually studied in a different department (nutrition or physiology).

3. The research I did was not funded. Given my lack of credentials and previous experience, it is not obvious it could ever be funded.

The hard-core defender of the system would say: SLD is rubbish. Just another fad diet. The open-minded defender would say: What do you want? You were a tenured professor at Berkeley. You published your work in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It is well-recognized that really new ideas often take a while to be appreciated. The open-minded critic would say: All three points are correct. In addition, why isn’t Israel Ramirez still a scientist? After all that brilliant research. What a loss. The hard-core critic would say: SLD reached the public as a self-help book. Why give the system any credit? Lots of non-scientists have published influential self-help books.

The hard-core views ignore reality. The SLD forums make it clear SLD is not rubbish. The notion that the system should get no credit at all ignores the fact that I made a living as a scientist at a well-respected place and published my work in a well-respected journal. The open-minded views, however, are both reasonable.

Advances in Retailing: Penny-Free Store

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Alko Office Supply, a small Berkeley store, is penny free: If you pay cash, prices are rounded down to the nearest nickel. I have never seen this anywhere else nor had the store clerk I asked. They thought of it themselves, she said. Farmer’s market prices are always rounded down to the nickel or dime, in my experience. Here and there I have made small credit card purchases (< $20) with no signature required.

Addendum: Wikipedia entry on penny elimination. A penny protester.

Science in Action: Omega-3 (what the results mean)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

How do I interpret the results so far of my omega-3 self-experimentation? I’m going to skip the obvious implications (I should do more experiments, I should take omega-3, . . . ) and jump to the less obvious ones:

1. Omega-6 may make things worse. The difference between flaxseed oil and olive oil was larger than the difference between flaxseed oil and nothing, implying that olive oil is worse than nothing. Perhaps this is because olive oil is relatively high in omega-6, which displaces omega-3. The Israeli Paradox points in the same anti-omega-6 direction as do lab experiments that suggest omega-6 fats are pro-inflammatory.

2. I should study other fats. My experiments don’t just imply that omega-3 fats have a big effect on brain function, they imply that fats in general have big effects — and that these effects can be easily measured (which is the interesting part).

3. Health providers should pay far more attention to brain function — to “brain health.” Improvements in balance led me to treatments that improved my performance on memory tests. Not surprising, since the whole brain is made of the same stuff (neurons, glial cells, etc.), but it implies that with easy to administer tests you could catch a wide range of brain problems long before they cause serious difficulties, such as dementia, Alzheimer’s, and injury-causing falls. Note that no doctor ever orders tests similar to those I have used. Yet my tests eventually revealed that I was suffering from what might be called omega-3 deficiency. One well-accepted test of mental function is the Mini-Mental State Exam. It consists of such questions as “What month of the year is this?”. By the standards of experimental psychology, it is incredibly crude. Experimental psychologists have a lot to teach the health community about how to measure brain function.

Omega-3 and Cancer

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A just-published article in the American Journal of Epidemiology reports a very clear negative correlation between colorectal cancer and omega-3 consumption. It describes the results of a case-control study done in Scotland from 1999 to 2006. The investigators hoped to recruit all cases of colorectal cancer coming for surgery in Scotland; they managed to recruit about half of them and ended up with about 1500 “cases.” Each case was paired with a healthy control matched for age, sex, and residence. Then they compared the diets of the two groups. This is the approach that first linked smoking and lung cancer. Lung-cancer patients were more likely to smoke than other types of patients.

In the Scotland study, there was no correlation between cancer and overall fat consumption, but there was a very clear correlation with omega-3 fat consumption: more omega-3, less cancer. There was no correlation with omega-6 fat consumption. The conclusions remained the same after they combined their results with four previous similar studies.

Science in Action: Omega-3 (data from my mom)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

My mother tried drinking flaxseed oil. She measured her balance by standing on one leg; the measure was how long she could do that. She did ten of these measurements per day.

Here is what happened:

effect of flaxseed oil on balance

When she started taking the flaxseed oil, her balance suddenly started to improve.

Are injury-causing falls “the new scurvy,” I wondered — that is, caused by an easily-preventable nutrient deficiency? These results support that idea. However, I can’t explain the decline in balance during the pre-flaxseed baseline period. Perhaps she had eaten food high in omega-3 and the effects were wearing off.

Here are precautions about flaxseed oil. If you are 70 years old or older and would like to find out if flaxseed oil improves your balance, please contact me.

Directory of my omega-3 research.

Creepy Assertions

Seth Roberts1 Comment

The ability of patients to try experimental drugs outside of clinical trials has a lot in common with self-experimentation. The former empowers the patient; the latter empowers the amateur scientist. Another form of health-related empowerment is to allow people to buy and sell organs. Of course, some people are against this:

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a Berkeley anthropologist — now in residence at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute — has documented how wealthy organ brokers exploit the impoverished in places like Moldova and South Africa. She cites a moral parable . . . A starving man adrift with others on a raft does not have the right to eat his fellow passengers. [Huh?] Scheper-Hughes suggests there is something of the same “predatory” aspect to organ sales — a creepy assertion “that I have the right to the body of another person, to live.”

From the Boston Globe. To me, the creepy assertion is “I, Professor Scheper-Hughes, know better than other people what they should do with their own bodies.” Alas, this sort of professorial arrogance is common. I encountered it with the UC Berkeley Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects: I must have a certain control group in my experiment, they said. As if they knew how to do my research better than I did. I once heard an NPR commentator, describing her IRB participation, boast about this: “Sometimes a control was missing, or we felt the study was misguided.” A website about IRB abuses has many similar stories.