John Tierney has an interesting column in the NY Times today about how many Americans — including the Surgeon General and the McGovern Commission — came to mistakenly believe that low-fat diets were better than diets with more fat.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
In 2003, Saul Sternberg and I published an article that claimed that some work by Ranjit Chandra, an Order-of-Canada-winning scientist, was unbelievable. You can learn more about the Chandra story here. In February, someone named Peter S. Morris made a long list of additions to the Ranjit Chandra entry in Wikipedia. The additions make Memorial University of Newfoundland, Chandra’s employer, look better. They include:
The vice-presidents [investigating a charge that Chandra had fabricated data] were unable to secure the data, and, as a consequence, were unable to verify research fraud conclusively.
What a statement. Not being able to “secure the data” is what you would expect if data were fabricated. Either the vice presidents were mentally retarded or this is false. The whistle blower who reported Chandra to Memorial, a nurse named Marilyn Harvey who had worked for Chandra, did so at considerable risk. That Memorial did a travesty of an investigation and failed to protect her is horrible — and now someone is lying about it.
A Peter Morris is Director of Public Affairs in the Division of Marketing and Communications at Memorial University.
My earlier post with this heading.
The Secret, of course, is the huge best seller that makes a claim that on its face sounds delusional: You can get what you want by thinking about it. Years ago I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast room rented by a woman whose refrigerator had a collage with pictures and words showing money and prosperity. Clearly she believed that imagining these things would help achieve them.
Previously I described a cable-TV experiment that shows there is something to this. Here, in addition, is some self-experimentation:
Back in the 80′s when I first started work as a nurse, I decided to spend one week using only superlatives & compliments when dealing with my co-workers and patients. I 1st wanted to see if they would ‘call’ me on it & just tell me to stop the silliness. Then I wanted to see if it made a difference in my life, &/or theirs. . . . I freely complimented the docs, nurses, ancillary help, etc. At the end of the week, I had people telling me, ‘I don’t know what it is about you, but I just love spending time around you.’
My mom tells a similar story. In seventh grade she went to a new school where she didn’t know anyone. It was very bad year in terms of making friends. The night before the first day of eighth grade she had a dream. In the dream she was at school and it was just as terrible as seventh grade. She woke up and thought, “No, I can’t go through that again, it was too awful.” She wondered what she could possibly do to change things. Well, she thought, I could smile at everyone “like a damn fool” — whether she felt like smiling or not. In fact, this worked. Not much later a girl she admired said to her, “People say you’re a lot more friendly this year.” Eighth grade turned out a lot better than seventh grade.
Uffe Ravnskov, a Swedish doctor, wrote a paper titled “Is atherosclerosis caused by high cholesterol?” (An admirably clear title.) His answer was no. He submitted it to a medical journal. One of his empirical points was that there was no relationship between cholesterol level and atherosclerosis growth. One reviewer commented:
Lack of relationship can be explained by more factors that only absence of it: small numbers, incorrect or indirect measurements of variables of interest, imprecision in measurement, confounding factors, etc.
To which Ravnskov replied:
If it is impossible to find exposure-response between changes of blood cholesterol and atherosclerosis growth in 22 studies including almost 2500 individuals a relationship between the two, if any, must be trivial.
Which sounds reasonable. But an even larger number of clinical trials failed to find clear evidence that omega-3 supplementation reduces heart disease. Yet I am sure that, with a large enough dose, it does.
Most people believe clinical trials, which are usually double-blind when possible and placebo-controlled. “The gold standard,” they are called. Science writer Gary Taubes, for example, believes them: When the results of a clinical trial contradicted a survey result, he believed the clinical trial. His recent NY Times magazine article was based on the assumption that clinical trials are trustworthy. This is such an article of faith that he gave no evidence for it.
That the heart disease clinical trials failed to clearly show benefits of omega-3 supplementation had large and unfortunate consequences. Not only because heart disease is the leading cause of death in many places, including America, but also because I am sure proper omega-3 supplementation would reduce many other problems, including falls, memory loss, gum disease, and other diseases of too much inflammation.
I don’t know why the big clinical trials failed to point clearly in the right direction. I can think of several possibilities:
1. Too large. Hard to control quality — verify data, for example. People near the bottom doing the work have little stake in accuracy of the outcome.
2. Poor compliance. If you are taking the placebo, why bother? And the odds are fifty-fifty you are. Lots of people have trouble following SLD, which obviously works.
3. Degradation. My belief that omega-3 is powerful comes from experiments (mine) and examples involving flaxseed oil. Flax grows at room temperature. The heart disease studies used fish oil; fish live in cold water. The omega-3 fats in fish oil may degrade at room temperature. The omega-3 fat in flaxseed oil may be far more stable at room temperature.
4. Wrong dose. Self-experimentation made it easy for me to figure out the correct dosage. People studying heart disease had no similar data to guide them. They could not realistically expect people to consume as much fish oil as the Eskimos whose rate of heart disease was so low.
5. Too sure. Self-experimentation encourages skepticism about one’s results because new experiments are easy to do. If I can think of reasons to doubt my results so far, that’s a good excuse for a new experiment. The more experiments the better. Each one is easy; I just need a good story line, a good reason for each one. Whereas if you are doing an experiment that cannot be repeated, any skepticism about it — e.g., about accuracy of measurements — is discouraged: It would cast doubt on the whole enterprise.
Fuzzy logic, which started with a 1965 paper by Lotfi Zadeh, a professor of computer science, is an advanced form of engineering; self-experimentation is a kind of primitive science. They seem to be at opposite ends of a continuum. As science advances — as knowledge becomes wider and more accurate — it becomes more and more useful, gradually becoming engineering. Fuzzy logic is an especially useful form of engineering.
A few years ago I attended a talk by Zadeh in the Berkeley Physics Department colloquium series. He showed a little movie of a platform moving back and forth to balance three linked poles. It was staggering that this was possible. It is a classic problem in control theory. Here is an example with two linked poles:
Fuzzy logic has proved especially useful in building control systems. An early example was furnace control; one of the first real-life examples was a Japanese subway system. Many consumer electronic products, especially those from Japan, use fuzzy logic. One of my Omron blood pressure meters uses fuzzy logic, says the box. (Omron now uses the term IntelliSense instead.)
When an engineer builds a control system, he doesn’t start from scratch, choosing from among all possibilities. Rather, he tries to embody in a computer program what a person would do. The program embodies a series of rules. Fuzzy logic provided a new and better language for describing those rules. It “bring[s] the reasoning used by computers closer to that used by people,” Zadeh has said. People use “vague” rules: If you are near a corner, slow down. Now it was easy to add such rules to control systems.
Chris Matthews’ latest book is Life’s A Campaign. “A recipe for sadness,” Jon Stewart called it in an interview that Matthews called the worst of his life:
In Systems of Survival (1992), Jane Jacobs described two ethical systems: guardian (= government) and commercial. Each system consists of rules of conduct (e.g., “be honest” is a commercial value but not a guardian one). Matthews’s book says you should use guardian principles in everyday life; Stewart said that’s a mistake — commercial principles work better. Jacobs said there is a tendency to think that the principles that work well in your system work everywhere. Maybe this is why Matthews seemed stunned by Stewart’s objections.
To Jacobs’ two systems, Chris Phoenix, a nanotechnology expert, has added a third: the “ information system“. It is about appropriate behavior — what is seen as appropriate behavior — in the world of open source software and similar goods. Phoenix argues persuasively that a different set of values applies. This is why I asked Aaron Swartz what’s wrong with Wikipedia: It’s not so obvious what the appropriate values are.
Long before open source software there were books: books share expertise. Long before books — at the dawn of humanity, I believe — there were hobbies: hobbyists share their expertise. The ethical system that Phoenix describes is much older and more important than he says. Phoenix acted within that system when he posted his essay on the Web; Jacobs did, too, when she wrote a book. Just as I do by blogging.
A few months ago, Joyce Cohen, who writes The Hunt column for the NY Times Real Estate section, started drinking 2 tablespoons of flaxseed oil every day. She began after talking with me and because of stuff posted here. Yesterday she went to the dentist for the first time since she started drinking it.
“Jane the hygienist said my gums were in great shape — better than ever,” she wrote me. Meaning the best they’d ever been.
“What’s funny is you can’t FEEL good gums from inside your mouth, but I take her word for it.” The hygienist said that although she was scraping and scraping, there was no bleeding.
Joyce started with Spectrum Organic flaxseed oil without lignans but later switched to the oil with lignans. She despises the taste but finds it is most palatable mixed with yogurt.
College students are often bored by lectures. With their laptops open in front of them, and WiFi, they can express this boredom in a new way. Professors are unhappy. I got an email about this problem from someone who tries to improve teaching at UC Berkeley. It included what he called “excellent suggestions”:
“Will not be able to agree on a renegade web site” — from an ancient Chinese book of maxims, I suppose. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education shows that the problem is widespread.
Addendum: In response to this email, a professor replied:
Today one of my GSIs informed me that several students were looking at internet porn during lecture. This not only proved a distraction but made several people uncomfortable. The GSI warned the student to close the site immediately and tried to get the names of the students. Of course, the students declined to give their names and one even just simply left class rather than be reprimanded further. Now I am left with the unpleasant, but necessary, task of trying to track down these students.
On the latest episode of the excellent TV show Mad Men, which takes place in 1960, a man who has just had a heart attack says, “Did everything they told me. Drank the cream. Ate the butter.” A humorous comment on how ideas change. Now, of course, many people — possibly including the screenwriter — think eating cream and butter causes heart attacks. After a year studying omega-3s, I’m sure it wasn’t the amount of fat that caused the high-fat diet/heart attack correlation, it was the type of fat (low in omega-3). Cream and butter would have been fine if the cows’ food contained plenty of omega-3.
For decades we’ve been told that cream and butter and other animal fats “clog your arteries”. It’s like a well-known experiment with split-brain patients. The patient chooses a card based on what he sees on a screen. The two hemispheres see different things. In one particular trial, the right hemisphere saw a picture of snow on the screen and picked out a card with a picture of a shovel. The left hemisphere saw a chicken claw. The left hemisphere controls speech. When the patient was asked to explain the choice, he said, “You need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop.” This happened again and again: The left hemisphere did not know why a card had been chosen but rather than saying “I don’t know” it confidently made up an explanation. Keep this in mind the next time you hear an explanation.
Studies to see if omega-3 supplementation reduces heart attacks have had ambiguous results, as Marion Nestle said. Why am I so sure that lack of omega-3 is the problem? (So sure that I no longer worry about my cholesterol.) 1. There is lots of evidence that heart attacks are due to inflammation. 2. There is lots of evidence that omega-3 fats are anti-inflammatory. 3. Eskimos had very low rates of heart disease and ate a diet high in omega-3 fats. 4. Many studies have correlated heart attack risk with gum disease. 5. My self-experimentation showed beyond any doubt that omega-3 supplementation makes the brain work better. It also showed what effective dosages are. 6. When Tyler Cowen took an effective dose, his gum disease quickly disappeared. Everyone — everyone who thinks about this stuff — knows #1-#4. It is #5 and #6 that are new and complete the chain of reasoning. I believe #6 is as meaningful as the observation that scurvy is quickly cured by lime juice.
In the 1930s, a dentist named Weston Price went all over the world looking at people’s gums. He wanted to compare modern diets with traditional diets. When his subjects ate a modern diet, he found gum disease. When they ate a traditional diet, their gums were fine even when they never brushed their teeth. In a few cases, such as an isolated group of Swiss mountain people, the traditional diets contained lots of butter and cream — from grass-fed cows. My gums vastly improved after I started taking good amounts of omega-3 (via flaxseed oil). After I reread Weston Price recently, I stopped being so careful about flossing and brushing. It hasn’t made a difference. In the past, my gums would bleed when I flossed unless I flossed daily. Now I floss rarely but they don’t bleed. I’m sure my whole circulatory system is in better shape.
It’s been almost two weeks since I started The Shangri-La Diet. I am down about ten pounds total. . . I’m all of a sudden some sort of health guru to the ladies at my office. As of this morning, there are six co-workers that are participating in the SLD in one way or another.
All they heard me say was, “I lost weight by drinking oil” and they all ran out and bought a bottle of oil to start losing weight.
I should’ve told them that I was drinking my own urine.
From Tayster’s World. After one week.