Month: December 2007

Hard Times and the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Life in Cuba:

In 1991, Mr. Castro declared a “special period” of drastic reductions in food and other rations. Average daily caloric intake fell by 40%. . . . When friends got together during those times, Ms. Sánchez recalls, a single topic dominated conversation: food. To stave off hunger pangs, Ms. Sánchez gobbled spoonfuls of sugar.

If there were several cheap foods to chose from this suggests that sugar reduced hunger more than other foods. From an excellent WSJ article about a Cuban blogger.

Thanks to Santosh Anagol.

Waterboarding, Self-Experimentation, and Human Evolution

Seth Roberts15 Comments

Someone named Scylla waterboarded himself and provided a detailed account of what happened. “Old” self-experimentation, you could say, was doctors doing dangerous things to themselves for a short time to prove some idea that they already believed (e.g., a dentist using laughing gas as an anesthetic); “new” self-experimentation is me doing something perfectly safe for a long time to solve a problem that I have no clue how to solve. What Scylla did is between the two. Short duration, not completely safe, done to find out if waterboarding is torture or not. Scylla had no strong opinion about this when he started.

Before he got to using saran wrap it wasn’t particularly bad. Here’s what happened with saran wrap:

The idea is that you wrap saran wrap around the mouth in several layers, and poke a hole in the mouth area, and then waterboard away. . . . So far I would categorize waterboarding as simply unpleasant rather than torture, but I’ve come this far so I might as well go on. . . It took me ten minutes to recover my senses once I tried this. I was shuddering in a corner, convinced I narrowly escaped killing myself.

Here’s what happened:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vacuum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You [b]know[/b] you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye. . .
I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger. And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex.

This shows something non-obvious: We are hard-wired to avoid drowning and like all good safety systems, the system kicks in well before damage occurs.

For such a system to evolve, humans must have spent a lot of time in water deep enough to drown in. We don’t now, of course. The sheer fact of Scylla’s post — the fact that waterboarding is torture isn’t obvious — shows this.

All this — Scylla’s initial ignorance, what he experienced and concluded — is consistent with the aquatic ape theory of human evolution and inconsistent with alternatives to that theory (e.g., the savannah theory), which assume no long aquatic phase. Belief that the aquatic ape theory was probably true was one reason I started omega-3 self-experimentation, which led to the discovery of very clear experimental effects.

This interests me not only because of what it says about human evolution — to me, it’s substantial new evidence for the aquatic ape theory — but also for what it says about science. Scylla has no scientific credentials (I assume). His report wasn’t peer-reviewed. It wasn’t quantitative. It wasn’t long. It was closer to an anecdote than a conventional experiment (where you compare two conditions). He wasn’t trying to test any theory. Yet it provided helpful new info on a major scientific question (human evolution), which is very hard to do.

Science in Action: Procrastination (evidence or anti-evidence?)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Evidence is the raw fuel of science: We collect data, it pushes forward our understanding. But there is also anti-evidence: observations that have the effect of holding back our understanding. The clearest example I know comes from experiments that supposedly “tested” mathematical learning theories in the 1950s and later. The observation was that the theory could fit the data. Theorists wrote papers to report this observation. In fact, the theory was so flexible it could fit any plausible results. The papers, which were taken seriously, retarded the study of learning because they wasted everyone’s time. They gave the illusion of progress. Hal Pashler and I wrote about this.

Another example of anti-evidence, I think, is the sort of data that linguistic theorists have been fond of: Observations that this or that sentence or sentence fragment strikes the theorist as grammatical, i.e., possible. Not studies of how people actually talk; the observation that a speaker of English or whatever could say this or that. The theorist’s judgment based on introspection. I’m not saying that this isn’t actual data of some sort; I just suspect that the value of these sorts of observations has been overrated and the net effect has been to keep linguists from collecting data that would push theorizing forward.

Months ago I blogged about how I found that when I made playing a game contingent upon clearing off my kitchen table, I was able to clear off the table. Which had been messy for quite a while. My question: is this evidence or anti-evidence? If I think about this, and try to understand it, will I be deluding myself, as the mathematical learning theorists and the linguistic theorists deluded themselves? On its face, it seems like a very ordinary, very narrow observation, much like the observation that “George played with the game Dave brought over” is a possible English sentence. On the other hand, it is something unusual and helpful that actually happened, unlike an observation that this or that is a possible English sentence.

When someone says “the plural of anecdote is not data,” you can be sure their grasp of scientific method is weak; lots of important discoveries have begun with accidental single observations. But those productive single observations are always surprising. My table-clearing observation was slightly surprising…

More Natto, Please

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Natto. This is on the list because, for one, it’s one of the few foods I’ve eaten that I truly don’t like. But mainly, it’s here because we’ve really messed up the way we eat soy. Natto is fermented soybeans and very popular in Japan, which is where I had it. It’s becoming more popular here and this is most likely due to its health benefits. Nearly all the soy options we’re offered in the U.S. are non-fermented. The list of health benefits of fermented soy is a mile long. It’s associated with reducing the risk of cancer, minimizing the likelihood of blood clotting, aiding digestion, increasing blood circulation, an improved immune system, improving bone density, lessening the likelihood of heart attacks, more vibrant skin, and reducing the chance of balding. And it also has strong antibiotic properties, among other things. So you might want to ditch the soy crisps, soy ice cream, and your iced soy mochas and add some natto to your diet.

From 10 Foods You Should Eat. It’s a very reasonable list.

Diet and Acne

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Two years ago I guest-blogged at the Freakonomics blog about diet and acne. I wrote that the claim of dermatologists that there is no link between diet and acne was absurd, not only because I had seen for myself such a link but also because it was an impossibly broad generalization.

In an article in the Boston Globe, Cynthia Graber, a science journalist, describes quite a bit of evidence that yes, diet affects acne. The research on which the no-link claim was based tested only two foods (chocolate and sugar)! From which committees of dermatologists generalized to all foods.

SO WHY HAVE DOCTORS been taught for so long that there’s no link? The anti-diet hypothesis . . . arose solely from two studies from the late 1960s and early 1970s. . . . One compares real chocolate bars with fake ones and was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine with funding from the Chocolate Manufacturers Association. . . . The other study examines sugar in the diet of a small group.

It’s like that scene in the Wizard of Oz where the Great Oz is revealed to be an ordinary man behind a curtain. All those knowledgeable-sounding claims by dermatologists, based on nothing more than this.

Conventional research on the subject is difficult, both because of funding problems — drug companies won’t fund such research; and dairy farmers won’t fund experiments to find out if dairy causes acne — and because it’s clear that many different foods are involved. On the other hand, determining the effect of Food X or Y on your own acne is easy. I wonder why someone doesn’t build a website to gather information from such self-experiments. If I had superpowers, I would.

More about diet and acne.

Lowell’s Listings

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At the reception before Ken Carpenter’s talk (”When Nutritionists Go Wrong” — meaning make mistakes) at the UC Berkeley Nutrition Department, I met Lowell Moorcraft, who maintains a calendar of events called Lowell’s Listings. It is a listing of events at or near the UC Berkeley campus that are free or almost free. He compiles it from about 300 sources, he told me. Scanning recent weeks, I was very sorry to see I missed a talk by Reed Hundt. There should be an emoticon for kicks oneself in the head. He spoke at Google last year. To make up for missing the Berkeley talk, I’ll watch it again.

More localese: The Berkeley Public Library posts a shockingly good video.

A New Kind of Outreach

Seth Roberts1 Comment

My phone rang at 6 am. Who would call so early? “Hello?” I said. No answer. “Hello?” No answer. I heard people talking. A Christmas song was playing.

I kept listening. Now and then someone speed-dials me by mistake — while their cell phone is in their pocket, for example. By listening it becomes clear who it is. I heard people talking but they didn’t sound like anyone I knew. It was too early. They must be in a different time zone.

I made out bits of conversation. Something about religion. Then a voice became clearer. A woman was teaching religion. “The Constitution is based on the Law of Moses,” she said. My phone said Conference Call, I saw.

It was no accident. My phone number had been chosen at random. It was religious outreach, like Mormons knocking on doors.

A new kind of advertising.

Ulcerative Colitis and Flaxseed Oil (continued)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Tom commented on my earlier post on this topic:

I imagine that the lady you met must have been newly diagnosed. I have had ulcerative colitis since 1996. Most of the people that I know with u.c. take omega-3, though perhaps more commonly as fish oil. All of my gastroenterologists have agreed that it can be a useful adjunct to other therapies. In fact, one of the drug companies is developing a supplement drink that combines omega-3’s with the soft fiber found in bananas, vitamin D and some other foods that are very beneficial to u.c., but hard to get in the right propotions. In general though, doctors seem reluctant to recommend diet-only solutions. I have a relatively mild case, but have had two bad flare ups. Consequently I take two of the drugs listed in addition to fish oil. I am hopeful that one day I will get off the other meds, but for now I just take a very low dose of the drugs thanks largely, based on my self-experimentation, to the omega-3s.

The lady I met (who had ulcerative colitis) had had the problem for 14 years. She had not previously heard of using flaxseed oil. “This is your lucky day,” I told her, not because I told her to try flaxseed oil but because I could tell her a good dose (at least 2 T/day). How much is crucial information.

It is very difficult to do experiments, even self-experiments, that measure the effect of different doses of flaxseed oil on ulcerative colitis. I’m sure they haven’t been done. It was her lucky day because I’m pretty sure I was the only person in the world who could have told her with confidence what dose to take. (Which I could do because of the optimize brain –> optimize body principle.) The gastroenterologists who recommend omega-3 as useful additions — they couldn’t say what the best dose is. The drug company making a supplement drink can’t say what the best dose is.

Until you know the best dose of a drug or nutrient — the one that delivers the largest possible effect — you are very likely to underestimate its effectiveness. If Tom starts using a large-enough dose of flaxseed oil he may no longer need other medications.

Fighting Cancer Via Self-Experimentation — With Success

Seth Roberts3 Comments

About 10 years ago, a UCSD psychology professor named Ben Williams, who is in my area of psychology (animal learning), managed to successfully cure his own terminal cancer by self-experimentation. He wrote a book about it called Surviving Terminal Cancer. As this WSJ story shows, his approach — which can be summed up think for yourself — is spreading.

Just as my dermatologist was irritated by my acne self-experimentation (”Why did you do that?” he asked), Ben’s oncologist, a University of Washington med school prof named Marc Chamberlain, was against what Ben did. Chamberlain now tells the WSJ that Ben’s self-treatment “probably contributed” to saving Ben’s life. Which is like a math professor saying 2 + 2 “probably equals” 4.

A long essay by Williams about his experience.

Addendum: Williams’s book, which had an amazon rank of about 1,000,000 when the WSJ article appeared (Dec 15), is now (morning of the 18th) ranked about 29,000.