Month: July 2008

More about Unreported Side Effects of Powerful Drugs

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A few days ago I blogged about how Tim Lundeen, via careful and repeated measurement — let’s call it self-experimentation — uncovered a serious and previously-unreported side effect of a drug he was taking. Tim’s example illustrates an important use of self-experimentation: discovering unreported side effects, which I believe are common.

By coincidence today I came across a talk about the very subject of unmentioned side effects: Alison Bass speaking about her new book, Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial. Near the end, Bass said,

It’s not the just the antidepressants, it’s not just the antipsychotics. This is happening with a lot of other drugs. With Vioxx, with Vytorin, an anti-cholesterol drug, with Propries [?] and Marimet [?], anti-anemia drugs. Where again and again the drug companies know that there are more severe side effects and they’re not letting the public know about that. It just keeps happening, unfortunately.

Just as it would be foolish to think the problem is limited to mental-health drugs, it would be foolish to think the problem is limited to side effects, that drug company researchers do everything right except fail to report side effects. Tim’s example shows how hard it is to learn about unreported side effects — so it is only realistic to think that there are other big problems with drug company research we don’t know about. Bass mentioned one I didn’t know about. A company did a clinical trial of Paxil. The goal was to see if the drug helped with Measures of Depression A and B. Turns out it didn’t: no effect. So the company changed the measures! They shifted to reporting different measures that the drug did seem to improve. Creating the hypothesis to be tested after the data supposedly supporting that hypothesis had already been collected. Without making this clear. (Which I presciently mentioned here, in response to an interesting comment by Andrew Gelman.) And if you think that drug companies do research like this — in ways that seriously damage people’s lives — but everyone else, such as academia, is really good, that is as realistic as thinking the problem with drug company research is restricted to side effects. Self-experimentation has all sorts of limitations, yes, but (a) you know what they are and (b) it is cheap enough so that you can gather more data to deal with the problems. Drug company research and lots of other research is too expensive to fail — or even be honest about shortcomings.

This is an aspect of scientific method that scientists rarely discuss: the effect of cost on honesty. Is there an economic term (a Veblen good, perhaps?) for things whose quality goes down as their cost goes up?

Interview with Bruce Gray, Web-Savvy Sculptor (part 3)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

ROBERTS What mistakes have you made with regard to the web?

GRAY I remember years ago I went to a company that was one of those web search enhancement companies and you were supposed to pay them a monthly fee and they would beef up your meta tags and stuff like this, and give you some advice on how to do the stuff, just tweaking out your website to make it more optimized. I was looking at some of the stuff they do, and one of the things was putting in these pages, your background pages, all kinds of meta tags, like keywords in white on a white background–that was kind of technique–a lot of people still use that, but it’s very highly frowned upon in the search engine world and if they catch people doing that kind of thing, they can definitely drop you down on your rankings status there and when I read that, I was like, ’Wow, this is the company I’m paying to do this for me and they’re doing something that the search engines don’t like you to do,’ so I dropped them. I want to be legitimate. I don’t want anybody to have any reason to take away any of my rankings status there.

ROBERTS Are there other artists who have gone into the web more than you? You’re by far the farthest in of anyone I’ve met.

GRAY I don’t know anybody else who has remotely the kind of website detail and depth that I do. I just try to put up, literally, almost every piece I’ve made that I can at least get a photo of. My website is way more in-depth and detailed than any other artist I know, by far.

ROBERTS Yes, that was my impression.

GRAY That helps, obviously.

ROBERTS Yes. Has anyone from the art world come and interviewed you about your web strategy?

GRAY I’ve definitely been asked about it quite a few times, actually. There was a book that came out years ago about selling art without galleries–I got interviewed about that kind of thing. Actually, almost anytime that I get asked about my sales, I start talking about the web and everybody gets very interested in how I’m doing it.

ROBERTS Has there been articles focused on that particular topic–you and the web?

GRAY No.

ROBERTS What else have you learned besides don’t go with that optimization company?

GRAY That you basically just have to keep up with it, keep it fresh, don’t make it too complex. I can’t tell you how many times, you know, I’m pretty web savvy, and I go to websites all the time that you get on to them and they’re so slow loading and when they do finally load, it’s like playing that game Myst to even try to find the buttons to go to anything. It’s almost more of a showcase for the web designer more than it is for the company that they’re trying to represent and I think that’s a huge mistake, because people just get too lost in that, and I think that’s a mistake that’s extremely commonplace.

ROBERTS You mean to have some kind of Flash animation, or something?

GRAY Yes, they have just too much crap. It’s too complex–you can’t even find the buttons, the navigation’s almost impossible. To even find how to make contact, or even get to the next page, you have to mouse all over the images and try to find what is the button, and these are gigantic companies and stuff. I’m just always amazed that they do things like that. And the other reality is that you’ve go to think who is looking at your website and who’s your market. In my world–in the art market world–my clientele tend to be older and very wealthy, 50s to 80s, mostly retired or with very hefty bank accounts, and the one thing that they don’t know is computers. Most of these people are not that computer savvy and if they get to your webpage and they can’t navigate around, or if they get to your webpage and it says, ’You’re going to have to download the latest version of Flash,’ and this, that, and the other thing, they’re going to be like, ’Oh, well the hell with that. What the hell is a download? What’s Flash?’ Seriously, I mean I have very smart people that just don’t have any reason to be that web or even computer savvy. They completed most of their career before everybody really go into computers that heavily, so they just don’t know them that well. So you have to make it–at least make the navigation–pretty simple, and no major drama to at least get to the home page. The fancy Flash opening thing in my opinion is just only a showcase for the Flash or the web designer.

ROBERTS I would imagine artists like yourself don’t have a lot of Flash on their pages.

GRAY Well, a lot of them do.

ROBERTS Really?

GRAY I’m all for doing that kind of thing, too, but if I wanted to do that, I would have it as the secondary page. Have the home page where you can have the two buttons, because that’s what a lot of people do. Go to the HTML version or go to the Flash version. At least if you separate it off on your home page, then people at least have the option before they get stuck in this window of a ten minute download.

ROBERTS What are your hopes–do you have other things you’re hoping for out of your webpage, your web presence, that you haven’t gotten yet? Or is it working pretty well?

GRAY Well, it’s been working pretty well. I just basically want it to continue to grow and get better. And it gradually is. Every year I do some new things and it adds a little bit more–new museums and things linking in–the more of that kind of stuff, the better.

ROBERTS When you say you do new things, you mean you add links or you add whole concepts or categories?

GRAY I mean I add the links any time that I’m on television or any books, magazines, weblogs or anything–all of that stuff. I link to them and they link to me, and it’s just another notch in the credibility factor.

ROBERTS I see, so it’s an ongoing process of trying to increase linkage and so forth.

GRAY Right. But that is the most important credibility factor in the web search engine world these days–good qualified links coming in to your site. Links that go out don’t mean anything; you can have six million of them and they don’t care.

ROBERTS Yes, I see what you mean. Is there anything about you and the web we haven’t asked about?

GRAY The one other thing that I think I should mention is that there is other ways of enhancing your web experience aside from just your own webpage and that’s things that are free, like My Space or LinkedIn for instance, are classic examples. They are very searchable in Google and they rank the information on these sites quite highly, so it’s good to have supplemental ways of people seeing your work other than just your own website. One of the reasons for that, and one of the reasons I kind of got into trying to go around and hook up with these other art websites is because of things like: Years ago, Yahoo! decided that they weren’t going to even list my home page anymore unless I paid them, so when they start doing things like that, you know, my website wouldn’t even be listed but all the other websites that mention me or link to me, those are all listed. I still get the listing on Yahoo! but not directly. I think that my website is listed now, but it’s down on the third page or so of listings for ’Bruce Gray sculptor.’

ROBERTS So if I search Yahoo! for ’Bruce Gray sculptor,’ I get your home page on the third page of listings–is that what you’re saying?

GRAY Something like that, yes. You’ll see a whole bunch of other stuff first, let’s put it that way. And that’s not that way on Google. That’s why everybody uses Google now. If the other search engine’s going to make a lot of the cool stuff have to pay to be on there, then obviously they’re not going to have anywhere near the level of listings that Google does, so what’s the point of even bothering with it?

ROBERTS Yes, I see what you mean.

GRAY That’s why they’re not doing so well.

ROBERTS Yes, the act of desperation. I think that covers it well. Thank you very much for your time.

The whole interview.

Benfotiamine and Self-Experimentation: Surprising Results

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Tim Lundeen, whose fish oil/arithmetic results impressed me, recently tried taking benfotiamine (a fat-soluble version of thiamine) to reduce damage caused by high blood sugar. Things did not go as he expected:

I bought 100mg capsules from Life Extension Foundation, and starting taking 1 per day in the morning with breakfast. Over the course of 3-4 weeks, the two small dead spots on the bottoms of my big toes started to feel normal, and I didn’t notice them anymore when I went walking. My energy and general mood were good, and my fasting blood sugar readings were basically unchanged, staying in the 85-95 range. Scores on my daily math speed test were good, possibly slightly better than before.

Unfortunately, I started to gain weight, gaining about 10 pounds over the 10 weeks I took benfotiamine, without any other major changes to my regimen.

Weight gain was not a known side effect. For example, a 2005 study in which 20 patients received the drug for three weeks reported: “No side effects attributable to benfotiamine were observed.” This is on a web page that is trying to sell benfotiamine but there’s nothing unusual about the situation. Studies of drug efficacy are almost always done by drug companies that want to sell the tested drug. What is the term for such a side-effects reporting system? The fox guarding the hen house, perhaps?

It isn’t easy to measure side effects in conventional studies of treatment vs placebo. If you measure the rates of 100 possible side effects, and use a 5% level of significance, one or two true positives will go unnoticed against a background of five or so false positives. So a drug company can paradoxically assure that they will find nothing by casting a very wide net. And there is a larger and more subtle problem that statistics such as the mean do not work well for detecting a large change among a small fraction of the sample. If soft drinks cause 2% of children to become hyperactive and leave the other 98% unchanged, looking at mean hyperactivity scores is a poor way to detect this. A good way to detect such changes is to make many measurements per child. Many did-a-drug-harm-my-chlld? cases come down to parents versus experts. The experts are armed with a a study showing no damage. But this study will inevitably have the weaknesses I’ve just mentioned — especially, use of means and few measurements per subject. The parents, on the other hand, will have used, informally, the more sensitive measurement method.

For these reasons, I suspect drug side effects are woefully underreported. Here is the story of a child with a neurodegenerative disease that might have been caused by “the Gardasil vaccine (or perhaps some other vaccine with key similarities, such as an aluminum adjuvant).” Her parents are trying to find other children with similar symptoms.

Interview with Bruce Gray, Web-Savvy Sculptor (part 2)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Bruce Gray is a Los Angeles sculptor with an impressive website.

ROBERTS Do you know how art galleries have been affected by the web?

GRAY They definitely don’t like it.

ROBERTS How can you tell?

GRAY I’ve heard them complain about it. They have complained about it a lot. Some galleries won’t even represent you if you have a website. Â They also don’t like you to list your prices, because they will usually be asking for twice the money.

ROBERTS Yeah.

GRAY But that’s up to the individual gallery, and it depends how bad they want you. The ones that have the very tight rules on that are usually the galleries that are really hard to get into anyway. But let’s face it, if it’s Gagosian or someone who could triple my prices and turn me into an overnight sensation, then hey, I’ll take the freaking website down, but until that happens, I need something to keep the bills paid and the web is definitely doing it. Like I’ve told all my artist friends, every single artist in the world should have a website.

ROBERTS Yeah, and what will the world be like?

GRAY Another great thing is that it’s a portfolio that you have with you wherever you go. It’s very easy to show people my work at their homes, or even through my iPhone. I keep 300 dpi images up there too on a hidden page. So say I’m out of town, and I get a call that someone needs a large image for a magazine article, I can just give them that link and I don’t even have to send them anything.

ROBERTS Does this mean that people will be able to buy art at lower prices because the middle man is cut out?

GRAY It does, absolutely.

ROBERTS Are there any signs of this actually happening? You’re bringing people in to the art market because the prices are lower.

GRAY Of the artists I know, that’s basically what people have been telling me. Obviously when you’re going directly to an artist’s studio, it’s kind of the same thing as buying through the internet. You’re cutting out any gallery or dealers in most cases, unless people have signed on for one of those deals where you’re supposed to give your dealer a percentage even if you make your own direct sales, which I just don’t understand why anybody would sign on for that, but I do know people who have that, and they generally get some kind of stipend or something, but I don’t know. It doesn’t look like a good deal to me.

ROBERTS It sounds like there should be new customers in the art world, and I wonder if there are any signs of that.

GRAY The thing about galleries that you can’t escape is they are going to promote you, at least locally, better than you can yourself. And they give you a certain credibility factor. Obviously someone who’s been around as long as I have, I have enough credits on my biography where people know that I’m legitimate, so I don’t really need to go out there and beg to get in a bunch of shows just to beef up on the lines on my biography. To get in a cool or interesting show, that’s still a good thing to do for anybody and I still do that when I get asked, but I just don’t have to do it as much.

ROBERTS How is the traffic to your website changed over the years?

GRAY It’s pretty damned good. It varies a bit, but it gets a lot of traffic–thousands and thousands of people looking at it every day.

ROBERTSÂ Thousands of distinct visitors per day?

GRAY Yeah. It has been for a long time. Not everybody buys stuff, but a lot of times people, when they purchase art, it’s a decision that can take years to make. They may see something and like it, but it actually takes them several years to commit to buying it. I’ve had that happen a whole bunch of times. People say, ’I really want that, and I’m getting that some day,’ and you’re like, ’Oh yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that,’ and five years later they come back and say, ’Hey, I’m getting that!’ It does happen.

ROBERTS Have you measured a visitors per dollar or hits per dollar–have you ever computed that index? If you make $10,000 and it requires a million hits?

GRAY I’ve never really figured that out.

ROBERTS I wonder how that ratio would change over the years.

GRAYÂ Well, I take all the web statistics with a grain of salt because I don’t think any of them are super accurate. If you go to the several different groups that watch that kind of stuff, they’re all going to give you a different statistic–whether it’s how many sites link into your site, or anything else. If I look online for that kind of information, how many people link to my site, every different page that will give you any of that kind of reference will have a completely different number. You have to just use it like a scale, you just kind of go, ’Okay well it’s going up at least.’

ROBERTS And it might be going up because of robots.

GRAY Robots just basically spider your information and go and update new stuff; that doesn’t really represent hits the way that an individual coming in will.

ROBERTS How does the number of visitors to your site compare now to a year ago?

GRAY I figured it’s just gradually getting better and better. Every year I have a lot more information on there, which attracts new people in, say, maybe a TV show that I had something on–that might attract in a little bit, or like I had some stuff on this Gene Simmons show a couple of years ago and I just noticed recently that they’re using one of my photos from the stills from that on this Gene Simmons site, so all of a sudden I’m getting a bunch of hits in now from that. Each little thing that you add, each little accomplishment, or book appearance or gallery show–all that stuff adds in another layer of keywords and things that people may be searching for. That’s all kind of a weird world how that works, too, because for example–Gene Simmons again–he’s obviously a very famous rock star guy and if you look up his name, I’m not going to get a gazillion hits because I have Gene Simmons’ name on my website, because when you’re talking about someone who is super-famous, if their name is on your site–as a collector for whatever reason–there’s so much other material about them already, that you are so way down in the bottom of the relevancy that if you get one or two hits a week because of their name, that would be about average. Trying to kind of beef up your website by putting in a lot of names like that wouldn’t really do anything.

Part 1.

Slow Weed

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Guthrie said that the quasi-legal status of smaller growing arrangements, combined with consumers’ preference for potent, high-maintenance weed, has shifted the balance of the pot business away from large-scale farms. “There’s a lot more people doing little scenes,” he said. The welter of laws pertaining to medical marijuana in California has offered careful operators like Guthrie the best of both worlds: prosecution for growing and selling has become much less likely, while federal busts and seizures keep prices high.

Too bad David Samuels, the author of this well-reported article, doesn’t use the term artisanal marijuana. Artisanal cheesemakers, etc., might learn something helpful from this. For example, maybe it helps that raw milk is slightly illegal. After he wrote Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser wrote about underground economies. Maybe he’ll eventually write Slow Food Nation.

A friend of mine spent a year growing pot in her California basement in response to the economic trends described in Samuel’s article. She stopped when her business partner became too unreliable.

City of Berkeley Economics: The Value of Snobbery

Seth Roberts8 Comments

The City of Berkeley, which Jane Jacobs called a “pretentious suburb,” isn’t doing well economically. There was a Barnes & Noble downtown, a kind of anchor store. It closed. There was a Ross downtown. It closed. Chain stores don’t do well in Berkeley. One downtown corner has gone through several renters, including Gateway Computers, Cody’s Books, and L.L. Bean, in just a few years. The main reason I go to downtown Berkeley is to take BART to San Francisco.

My neighborhood, North Berkeley, is doing much better, although there are two empty storefronts and the Starbucks will close. Elephant Pharmacy, a New-Agey kind of pharmacy (“the drugstore that prescribes yoga”), has been successful and has started opening branches in nearby cities. (It’s a good place to shop, too. Yesterday I bought some whole nutmeg there.) The Cheese Board, a worker’s cooperative, with a great selection of cheese, has done a good job adding pizza sales to cheese sales.

The overall economic record of the neighborhood is staggering, since it includes the original Peet’s, the inspiration for Starbucks, and Chez Panisse, the most influential restaurant in the world. It also includes the first Papyrus store. I don’t drink coffee, and didn’t start drinking tea until the Shangri-La Diet, so I never shopped at Peet’s until recently. A friend, however, has been going there almost its entire history. He says that when Mr. Peet died, the workers became a lot friendlier. Before that they had a snobbish attitude. Some workers from Peet’s started a similar business in Seattle, which they called Starbucks. It was very successful and they sold out to Howard Schulz, who greatly expanded it.

Was Mr. Peet’s snobbery “bad”? Well, it — plus the corresponding attitudes of Berkeley residents — allowed him to develop a unique business. After that business was developed, that attitude could be shed and the whole thing could be moved to a place (Seattle) where its business potential could be revealed. The shift of ownership allowed the idea to become separated from the “big business is bad” notion (which was helpful at first) and launch a thousand Starbucks. (An excellent company, by the way, that not only provides me a place to work but also produced How Starbucks Saved My Life, a very good and persuasive book.) This is yet another tiny illustration of my theory of human evolution, how it all started with hobbies which eventually became businesses. Peet’s wasn’t a hobby, but it was hobby-like in its expression of the owner’s attitudes. It was far more a labor of love than most businesses. There are other examples. Survivor is to The Real World as Starbucks is to Peet’s. The Omnivore’s Dilemma is to Slow Food as Starbucks is to Peet’s.

Errors in The Queen of Fats

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Susan Allport’s The Queen of Fats is the best introduction to omega-3 fatty acids and their importance that I know of. I learned a lot from it (and interviewed the author). This is why its errors are interesting; they shed light on the big nutritional misconceptions of our time (as Weston Price, the subject of yesterday’s post, did in a different way). Joel Kauffman, a chemist, made a list:

1. On p1 low-carb bread and beer are ridiculed despite evidence (see Nielsen JV, Joensson EA, Low-carbohydrate diet in type 2 diabetes. Stable improvement of body weight and glycaemic control during 22 months follow-up, Nutrition & Metabolism 2006;3(22) doi:10.1186/1743-7075-3-22) to the contrary. There are at least 10 studies supporting Nielsen. Low-carb means low insulin demand. Insulin converts carb to fat. Allport’s claim that the world’s leanest peoples mostly eat carbs neglects to mention that they are malnourished.

3. On p2 and later Allport calls saturated fatty acid chains “straight,” then still later by the correct term “zigzag,” but never by the chemist’s term “unbranched.” She is not aware that a saturated fatty acid chain of 22 carbons has many more conformations than the 22-carbon DHA with 6 carbon-carbon double bonds, or that double bonds keep 4-carbon groups rigid. If DHA “is constantly on the move” there must be some other reason.

5. On p10 canola oil, which is not rapeseed oil, is not usually promoted for its linolenic acid content, but for its low saturated content, lower than olive oil. This is not a real advantage, according to all the books (except Sears’) I have listed above.

6. The conundrum of eating fish for its omega-3s despite the mercury content was not resolved on p11 or elsewhere. There are two long-term studies showing that there is not a big problem: The Chicago Western Electric Study followed the effects of fish consumption in 2,107 men aged 40-55, and followed for 30 years. Those who ate an average of *35 g daily (about 1 big fish dinner every 5 days) had only 9/10 of the all-cause mortality rate of men who ate no fish. The Nurses’ Health Study on 84,688 women aged 34-59 years and followed for 16 years for outcomes vs. fish and omega-3 fatty acid intake, had the following findings: women consuming fish five times weekly had only 7/10 the all-cause mortality rate of those eating fish once a month. Pregnant women have been cautioned to restrict their intake of fish (https://www.cbc.ca/storyview/CBC/2002/10/21/Consumers/mercuryfish_021021) despite evidence that children receive most of their mercury from vaccines. Hepatitis b vaccine carries 12.5 micrograms per dose; influenza and other common vaccines carry 25 micrograms per shot, over 830 times the amount in a can of tuna. It has been reported that vaccines said not to contain the mercury compound, thimerosal, still might have it. The long duration of the diet studies makes it very clear that the mercury content of fish, in general, is not shortening life.

7. On p14 eating fat in general was used as a straw man and implied to be the major cause of heart disease. Not so; see below (section titled More at bottom of post).

8. On p15 the Framingham Study was claimed to have shown a positive link between serum cholesterol and risk of heart disease. This was disproven by 1937 by experiments on cadavers. See The Cholesterol Myths and either Great Cholesterol Con [there are two books with this title]. See above for evidence that the Seven Countries Study was a fraud. A more recent study on free-living elderly in Manhattan showed the opposite — those with the highest cholesterol and LDL0C levels lived the longest. See Schupf N, Costa R, Luchsinger J, et al. (2005). Relationship Between Plasma Lipids and All-Cause Mortality in Nondemented Elderly. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 53:219-226.

10. On p20 the excessive bleeding in Eskimos is said to be unimportant vs. lower heart attack rates than those of Danes, but external bleeding, as with aspirin, probably indicates internal bleeding.

11. On p21 it was written that polyunsaturated fats held down cholesterol levels. Actually HDL levels were held down and there was no drop in mortality: Rose GA, Thomson WB, Williams RT (1965). Corn Oil in Treatment of Ischaemic Heart Disease. British Medical Journal 12 Jun:1531-1533.

12. On p22 gas-liquid chromatography was said to have been developed in the 1950s by oil companies. A Google search showed its invention in the 1940s to separate fatty acids: see James A T & Martin A J P. Gas-liquid partition chromatography: the separation and microestimation of volatile fatty acids from formic acid to dodecanoic acid. Biochem. J. 50:679-90, 1952. [National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London, England]

13. On p22-3, 25 it is implied that the increase in heart disease in Eskimos who adopted aspects of a Western diet is solely due to differences in omega-x fat intake. No attention was paid to the effect of carbs on a very carb-sensitive population.

14. On p25 Allport insults Spam for being “highly saturated.” This is nonsense, since lard is only 40% saturated. See Know Your Fats by Mary G. Enig, 2000.

17. On p49 the “pure cholesterol” fed to rabbits has been shown to be oxycholesterol, which is not healthful.

18. On p51 Ancel Keys, MD, was said to link serum cholesterol to heart disease, but this link had already been shown to be false in 1937 by work on cadavers.

19. On p54 Allport wrote that EPA was responsible for low cholesterol in Eskimo blood on traditional diets, but linoleic acid based fats do this also, and human fat is 10% linoleic (lard 6%).
20. On p57 was written that pork and dairy fats are very saturated. Actually, the former is about 40% saturated and the latter 62%. See Know Your Fats.

31. On p66 a crack was made about an unbalanced diet. Since some populations have survived for centuries on all animal diets, a balanced diet turns out to be a fantasy designed to raise carb consumption despite a lack of evidence that there is any requirement for carb at all in the human diet. See the Ottoboni’s book. Also, there is vitamin C in fresh meat, so worrying about scurvy was not justified.

32. On p68 the claim that fats and carbs make up over 80% of the calories in every diet consumed by humankind is absurd, based on traditional Eskimo and Masai diets, among others.

33. On p 69: “so fat gives foods their distinctive aromas and tastes.” What about the odor of fresh bread, hot marshmallow, citral and neral in fruit, licorice, mint, wine, beer, etc.? These are not fats.
34. On p71 the statement that the increased energy in fats compared with carbs or proteins comes from their dense packing. The no-nonsense explanation is that carbs and proteins are partially oxidized because they contain oxygen and nitrogen, so oxidizing them the rest of the way to CO2 and water gives less energy than the all-hydrcarbon parts of fats.

35. Also on p71 is the fantasy that unsaturated fats contain less energy than than saturated because a double bond contains 10% less energy than a single bond. My old physical organic chemistry text has 80 kcal/mole for the C—C single bond, and 142 kcal for the C=C double bond, a far cry from Allport’s fantasy. And the energy available on digestion is given above — much less from mostly saturated fatty acids.

36. On p74 the slow melting of butter is not due to the melting points of the fatty acids in its triglycerides (fats), but the different melting points of the fats themselves.

37. On p78 and elsewhere Allport wrote of the high concentration of arachidonic acid and DHA in brain and nerve tissue. Her conflicted position on cholesterol is shown by her refusal to mention that the highest concentration of choleserol in the body is in the brain. But on p148 she writes that cholesterol is a necessary component of brain function

39. On p88 the fantasy begun by Ancel Keys that overconsumption of fats was the major health problem in the West was reiterated without any of the evidence from the books cited above that this was false.

40. On p89 domestic cow fat is said to be only 2% unsaturated. Know Your Fats says it is 42% unsaturated, and the CRC Handbook of 1983-4 says 52% unsaturated.
43. On p100: “In men, it [aspirin] cuts mortality from heart disease by more than half.” This is one of the most flagrant misquotations of the aspirin findings I have yet seen. Actually Bufferin cuts the number of non-fatal heart attacks by half with no change in mortality, and plain aspirin maybe by 1/3, also with no change in mortality.

44. On p104 a common omission characteristic of drug ads is found: “…mortality from heart disease goes up linearly with the increase in omega-6s…” does not include the crucial all-cause mortality, without which no amount of lowered mortality from some single cause has any meaning for action.

46. On p107 Allport implies that the incidence of heart disease in the US has not changed from 1909-1985. In Heart Frauds by Charles T. McGee (2001), p59, heart disease death rate was shown to have changed from 15/100,000 in 1910 to a peak of 331/100,000 in 1968, then falling to 194/100,000 by 1990. McGee shows that this drop corresponded well with an increase in vitamin C intake.

47. On p109 there is a disconnect between Allport’s generalization that seeds contain mostly omega-6s and leaves mostly omega-3s. Both canola and linseed oils are high in omega-3s which are in their seeds.

49. On p114 it was written that certain Nigerians with high omega-3 levels, presumably in blood, ate “a lot of greens” and most fat was palm oil, high in saturated fats, meaning that sat fats (and the other half of palm oil, the monounsaturated oleic acid 18:1*9) do not interfere with the transformation of linolenic acid from those greens into DHA and EPA. OK, then, why did she not relent on her anti-sat fat position?

50. On p118, Allport actually said that “…small amounts of saturated fats are better than large amounts of omega-6s.” This shows her conflict: such small amounts would require much less total fat consumption, and the value of this move has no positive evidence.

51. Also on p118 and 142, Allport minimized the dangers of trans fats, being totally unaware that controlled tests in human subjects showed serious adverse effects. Risérus U, Abner P, Brismar K, Vessby B (2002a). Treatment with Dietary trans10cis12 Conjugated Linoleic Acid Causes Isomer-Specific Insulin Resistance in Obese Men with the Metabolic Syndrome. Diabetes Care 25(9):1516-1521; Risérus U, Basu S, Jovinge S, Fredrikson GN, Årnlov J, Vessby B (2002b). Supplementation with Conjugated Linoleic Acid Causes Isomer-Dependent Oxidative Stress and Elevated C-Reactive Protein. A Potential Link to Fatty Acid-Induced Insulin Resistance. Circulation 106:1825-1929.

52. On p126 in an otherwise good discussion of bad aspects of leaky membranes, a bad simile was used: “…we all know what happens to engines when they run constantly…” Do we? It was found by the 1960s that most car engine wear occurred immediately after startup from cold, while there was no measurable wear during constant running at moderate rpms.

54. On p129 Allport notes that there was not a single known case of diabetes (no type given) in Eskimos of the Umanak district in 1971 on their traditional diet. The implication is that omega-3s did the job, but no airtime was ever given to the zero-carb diets.

55. On p134, again, diabetes (type not given) and obesity were equated to caloric intake, not, as so often demonstrated, carb intake.

56. On p135 one of the classic objections to the Atkins low-carb diet is given — that it causes kidney and liver failure due to higher protein consumption. This was twice false, since no such damage was seen by Atkins in his patients who did raise protein intake; but more important, the missing carbs are ideally to be replaced by fat, which has no glycemic index, unlike protein with a GI of 20 or so.

58. On p139 the blanket recommendations to eat “… lots (and lots) of fruits…” is very destructive to diabetics (both types) and pre-diabetics. Many kinds of fruit are high in sugars. Barry Groves, PhD, Nutrition, Richard K. Bernstein, MD, and William Cambell Douglass, Jr., MD, have avoided fruit for decades and are all in their seventies in good health.

59. Also on p139 the advice to avoid any high omega-6 oil is OK, but the advice to minimize butter is not. Not only is there no danger in butter, but its medium-chain fatty acids have antimicrobial properties. See Know Your Fats, above.

60. On p140 and 142 the advice to eat a wide variety of fish does not account for differences in EPA and DHA content, or differences in mercury content. Benefits of supplements of EPA and DHA have been shown in controlled trials.

61. On p143 saturated fats come in for another absurd hit, this time with the epithet “solid.” Phew! Of course lard and tallow are not solid at body temperature! And they do not cause heart disease: Ravnskov U (1998). The Questionable Role of Saturated and Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids in Cardiovascular Disease. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 51:443-60.

62. On p144 Allport reverses herself from her position on p138 and gives amounts of EPA and DHA supplements to take daily. She wisely cautions against supplements containing omega-6s since we get too much of them anyway. But she says that strict vegetarians need more linolenic acid as though they are not getting it from eating massive amounts of leafy vegetables.

65. On p149 a study within the Physicians’ Health Study (the one with the misquoted and misinterpreted info on aspirin) there was a finding that 94 of 15,000 of them who experienced sudden cardiac death were 90% less likely to do so if they had the highest omega-3 levels in their blood. First, in the absence of all-cause mortality, you cannot tell whether high omega-3 levels did any overall good. Next only 0.6% of the total or 1 in 170 had this cause of death, so the benefit is pretty small. Dietary intake of omega-3s was not even given.

66. On p151 it is not clear whether all omega-3s in blood are measured by the commercially available tests, or whether the individual ones are assayed and reported. If EPA and DHA levels are not reported, there will be little if any value in the tests.

67.On p192 Allport wrote that rapeseed oil “…has a high alpha linolenic acid content.” My CRC Handbook of 1983-4 lists 1%!! Such is the result of confusing rapeseed and canola.

You can see from the numbering I’ve omitted some of them; for the full list, contact Dr. Kauffman at kauffman at bee dot net. For more on health misconceptions, read his book Malignant Medical Myths, Infinity Publ., West Conshohocken, PA, 2006. ISBN 0-7414-2909-8 326 pp. $24.95.

Science, especially health science, is so important yet it is remarkably hard to learn about. Part of the problem seems to be that those who can write well (such as journalists) don’t understand the science and those who understand the science (such as scientists) can’t write well. (Another part of the problem, as Veblen pointed out, is that among academics to write clearly is low status, to write mumbo-jumbo is high status.) This is why I like Leonard Mlodinow‘s work so much; he writes well and understands the science.

But don’t misunderstand this post. The Queen of Fats is an excellent book. The most impressive and hopeful thing about it is that it was written by a non-scientist — in other words, that a non-scientist was able to figure out that the common neglect of omega-3 fats was seriously wrong. (Omega-3 fats receive almost no attention in Eat Drink and Be Healthy by Walter Willett et al. for example. There is no RDA for them.) I like to think it’s some sort of turning point that non-scientists have become able to grasp how wrong the health establishment can be; another example is Taubes’s Good Calories, Bad Calories.

More. The list of errors unfortunately omitted some general comments:

The Seven-Country Study by Ancel Keys that was so influential (cholesterol and saturated fat being “bad”) was not presented as the fraud it was. For a great description, see The Great Cholesterol Con (GCC), by Anthony Colpo (2007). For an honest Fourteen Country Study see another GCC of 2007, this one by Malcolm Kendrick, in which Kendrick showed that the 7 countries with the lowest saturated fat consumption had the highest mortality from heart disease (450/100,000 per year), while the 7 countries with the highest saturated fat intake had the lowest mortality from heart disease (170/100,000). See also The Cholesterol Myths by Uffe Ravnskov, 2000. Low-carb high-fat diets were ridiculed from start to finish as destructive and a fad, despite overwhelming evidence that they are not. See Nielsen JV, Joensson EA, Low-carbohydrate diet in type 2 diabetes. Stable improvement of bodyweight and glycaemic control during 22 months follow-up, Nutrition & Metabolism 2006;3(22) doi:10.1186/1743-7075-3-22. While Allport may be correct in claiming that omega-3s will prevent or reverse diabetes (and she is not always clear on which type), the evidence is clear that type-1 is much more easily controlled with a low-carb high-fat diet, and type-2 may be controlled so well on a low-carb diet that no medication is needed. See Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution, rev. ed. by Richard K. Bernstein, MD, Boston, MA:Little, Brown, 2003. So Allport’s recommendation to eat large amounts of fruit (p139) could be a disaster for diabetics. Eskimos are often obese albeit healthy, so omega-3s for weight loss seems too much to claim. And she seems unaware of the prevalence of grain allergies. See Natural Health & Weight Loss, Barry Groves, 2007; Know Your Fats by Mary G. Enig, 2000. Also Allport seems to equate eating linolenic acid as the equivalent of eating EPA and DHA in fish, and does not recommend supplements of the latter two. Neither idea had any supporting evidence presented. Nor was the ideal range of omega-3 intake given. A study of the conversion of radioisotopically-labeled linolenic acid to EPA in humans showed poor conversion, and even poorer conversion to DHA. Adequate intakes of pre-formed DHA are needed for good health. See Burdge G, alpha-Linolenic acid metabolism in men and women: nutritional and biological implications, Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care 2004;7:137-144.

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Weston Price’s masterpiece, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects (1939), is online here. The chapters I like are the ones where he visits eleven groups of people around the world and compares those eating traditional diets with those eating modern ones. Those eating traditional diets had very few cavities, even though they didn’t brush their teeth. They also had very little “dental malocculsion” — crooked teeth caused by a too-small jaw. This was presumably because they got enough of certain growth factors in childhood. (The NIH health encyclopedia says dental malocclusion “is most often hereditary”–a mistake that speaks volumes.) The main thing I learned from this book was the importance of fat (to supply fat-soluble micronutrients) including animal fat. (There’s an evolutionary reason we like the taste of fat.) Swiss in isolated areas had to grow almost all of their food in spite of living in the mountains. They ate lots of dairy products, especially butter; apparently they were in good health because their dairy animals ate lots of fresh green grass, high in all sorts of necessary micronutrients including ones that may not yet have been identified. The isolated Swiss also ate lots of whole grain bread. To walk around any supermarket and see all these labels saying “low-fat” as if it were a good thing makes me think of the Middle Ages when people had all sorts of strange ideas about what caused disease — such as too much excitement.

This book seems to be emerging from obscurity due to mentions by Michael Pollan in In Defense of Food (2008) and Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007).

Interview with Bruce Gray, Web-Savvy Sculptor (part 1)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Wandering around the Brewery Art Colony in Los Angeles with Len Mlodinow, we met Bruce Gray, a sculptor who works there. I was amazed how much the Web helps him sell his work. Later I interviewed him about it.

ROBERTS What were you doing before you were a sculptor?

GRAY I was living in Boston and I was working in advertising as a graphic designer and I also worked as a photographer.

ROBERTS When did you make the transition?

GRAY January 1989. I moved out to Los Angeles and I pretty much jumped right in with both feet. I got a studio and just started making stuff. It just took off from there.

ROBERTS What gave you the confidence to do that?

GRAY Probably lack of planning and thinking things out. I don’t know if it was actually the smartest move to try to do something like that. It’s certainly been a bit of a struggle. But it’s the kind of thing that when you have a dream of something that you want to do bad enough, you just have to make it happen. Â I think that’s kind of half the battle and there was nothing that I wanted more than to try to be able to make my own art creations and make a living off that.

ROBERTS Had you gone to art school?

GRAY I went to school for design and photography and of course I took all kinds of art classes as well–design and illustration and sculpture, photography.

ROBERTS Where did you go to art school?

GRAY University of Massachusetts.

ROBERTS When you were doing the photography and graphic design, you took other people’s ideas and executed them.

GRAY Right. And that’s what I kind of got tired of, actually. I really do like doing graphic design–things like logos and stuff. The interesting jobs were few and far between and I wanted to do something that I had more control over, and also something a bit more permanent. I just wanted to make my own legacy, I guess.

ROBERTS How did you manage to sell your first sculptures?

GRAY Well, it wasn’t easy. I really didn’t even know L.A. hardly at all, so I went around to galleries; I went around to a lot of the high end furniture stores were really my first big clients, near the Pacific Design Center. There’s a lot of high end furniture stores down there and a lot of those guys became clients pretty quickly and it got to the point within, oh, just a year or so, they were ordering quite a few of my early pieces at a time and that’s been keeping me quite busy.

ROBERTS So they would place your pieces next to their high end furniture and their customers would buy some of them. Is that how it worked?

GRAY Right. Also, a lot of what I was making at that time was more furniture–a line of unique art furniture, like my red, angry dog table and my s-shaped aluminum form table. Things like that were very popular. I think I sold probably fifty of those form tables, mostly all back in that time. But people have a very different view about furniture than they do about sculpture. It’s way easier to get money for sculpture, comparatively to furniture, and a good is example of that is: I had one furniture store, and I had a very interesting table that I had made, all these intersecting shapes and aluminum and it was kind of expensive and they were having a hard time selling it. They decided that it just looked so cool that they would put it up on the wall and see how people reacted and it sold within just a few days of doing that.

ROBERTS You mean they took it off the floor and they put it on the wall and it sold quickly?

GRAY Exactly. And that’s just the difference in perception. People think, ’oh well, for that many thousands of dollars, how much can I get at IKEA,’ or whatever. I don’t know how they think about it, but they certainly have a much harder time spending the comparable money for furniture over sculpture.

ROBERTS Wow! I would have thought that it was the opposite. You can use the furniture.

GRAY Right.

ROBERTS When did you learn that lesson?

GRAY It was quite a long time ago.

ROBERTS Within the first year of selling the stuff?

GRAY Within the first three years, probably. But then I’ve gotten more into doing the sculpture stuff instead. I still like to do the furniture pieces, but I’m also not going to kill myself to make pieces that I have to sell for less than I think they’re worth just because that’s the way the market works.

ROBERTS So you’re saying that with sculpture it’s easier to get the price you think it’s worth.

GRAY Exactly.

ROBERTS So you shifted from the furniture-like stuff to the sculpture-like stuff. Is that a fair description of what you’ve been doing since then?

GRAY Yes, but I still do some of the furniture stuff, just not that much and mostly by commission. If someone sees something that I’ve done that they like or they like my work and they want something custom done, then I’ll do that, but they’re going to be paying my sculpture prices for that stuff.

ROBERTS When did you get interested in the internet?

GRAY Pretty early on. For someone like me that can end up needing to do some research on a fairly regular basis . . . there’s a lot of times I may just need an image of a certain kind of insect or something like that, and the internet is just a ridiculous amount of searchable information. You can spend the rest of your life just looking up insect pictures.

ROBERTS So true.

GRAY As many images as I want, the videos; it’s like the encyclopedia on steroids. Anything is there that I need for research. Initially I had wimpy websites, through AOL or Earthlink, those things are really kind of half-assed; they don’t really do much of anything. But I quickly realized that the internet is worldwide and it’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No one else is pushing my work like that. And I get contacts with people from others states and other countries–there’s just no way I would have had these kind of distant contacts without the internet.

ROBERTS Before the internet, how did you usually sell your stuff?

GRAY Mostly through the local high-end furniture stores, the art galleries, direct mail–I do a lot of postcards that I mail out. That’s actually worked out to be a pretty good thing too.

ROBERTS You mailed out postcards?

GRAY Yes. The first postcards I ever mailed out, I ended up getting one of my long-term collectors off of that mailing–they ended up buying three or four pieces for their company, and then they bought another eight pieces or more over the years for their home, and that’s all from one postcard.

ROBERTS Where did you get the mailing list for that mailing?

GRAY I just looked around and came up with it myself, basically looking through interesting businesses that can relate to modern art, the film industry people, things of that nature, the Academy of Motion Pictures was actually the one that ended up buying a bunch of stuff.

ROBERTS Oh my god, you didn’t buy someone else’s mailing list? You made the mailing list yourself?

GRAY Right.

ROBERTS Wow! When did you do that?

GRAY When I first started, pretty much.

ROBERTS 1990?

GRAY Right.

ROBERTS Okay, so you were selling stuff that way, and then the internet comes along, and you have a wimpy home page, and then what happened next?

GRAY Then I decided that having a web page is the only way to fly. I just knew that this was the thing to do and I’ve always felt that I was pretty savvy with computer programs, at least things like Photoshop, but putting the web stuff together, I really didn’t know how to do it, so initially I had a friend of a friend doing some of the stuff for me. He never had time, it was expensive, it would take me weeks to get any update done and I’m thinking to myself, well this is ridiculous. I’m going to be using this website for the rest of my life, Â so I might as well just bite the bullet here and buy the program and take a class or whatever I have to do. So I bought Dreamweaver and ended up paying a guy to give me private lessons for about eight to ten hours or so, and a few weeks later that guy’s calling me up to ask questions.

I picked it up pretty quickly and it’s been the greatest thing I ever did. Like today alone, I just took a picture of my latest wall sculpture and boom, it’s already up there. I photographed it digitally and put it right up. There’s no middleman, there’s no problems, no delays. It’s a very workable system not only for the artist but basically for any entrepreneur or sole proprietor who’s running their own business.

ROBERTS When did you figure out that this was the way to go? Why did you think, in the very early stages, that this was going to be so great?

GRAY Because it just seemed that was nothing else really like it in the world, where you could connect with people, distant people. One of my best friends has always told me that if you really want to succeed in the art world, the biggest mistake you can make is trying to rely on your home market alone. Even a city like L.A. If you try to just sell your work here, you’ll probably never have your bills caught up, so you have to get your work in front of people from other cities and other countries and the web is the way to do it for free, you know?

ROBERTS Yes. Well, you’re in a building with 30 or 40 other artists, right?

GRAY Well, I’m in a complex with somewhere over 300-something studios and well over four hundred artists. It’s supposed to be the biggest art complex in the world, they say.

ROBERTS Do they all agree with you? Do they all have their own web site?

GRAY I would say that just about everybody does at this point. A lot of them have taken my word for it and I had to talk them into it.

ROBERTS You were the first person.

GRAY I was definitely one of the first. To be honest, though, a lot of my artist friends who have done websites have told me that they’ve never sold anything from it. Even a very well-known successful artist who’s a good friend of mine–he’s told me that he’s never sold a single piece. A lot of it is what you put into it–you can’t just throw some images up on a website and expect that to be changing your world for you. I spend several hours every week, minimum, adding new stuff and trying to get additional links and things into the site. Right now, the parameters for what ranks you highly keep changing on quite a regular basis, but the thing that is very important right now is good qualified links into your site, especially from things like publications, universities, museums, things like that. A link in from your sister’s cat website is not going to rank that highly, but valid press links weigh very heavily.

ROBERTS How do you go about getting those links?

GRAY Most of them come naturally from people who’ve done articles on me and stuff like that, and other times I go around to all the websites that are art-related and see what’s going on with those. I tend to try to stick with the ones that are free to list with.

ROBERTS You list yourself where you can.

GRAY Right, and then people who have done articles, if they don’t have a link, I ask them for one, and that sort of thing.

ROBERTS Do you think that there’s something about your work that is especially web-friendly?

GRAY I think, partially, my success is due to the fact that I am quite diverse. I have a lot of different types of work that I do, so I have a little bit of an advantage as far as that goes.

ROBERTS When we visited you, you said you made about 90% of your money from the web?

GRAY Yes, definitely. It’s probably going to get even higher than that. It’s been slow. We have an open house here twice a year and several thousand people come through that, and I’ve been doing that for sixteen years, but the past five years, I don’t think I’ve sold a piece during that art walk. I think that people have a hard time spending several thousand dollars on the fly like that. It’s something that they need to consider a bit more. The one thing I’m amazed at with the web is that people will see an image of one of my sculptures and then just, without even calling me up, or any letter, they’ll send me an email, ask if it’s available, and next thing I know I get a check in the mail. No phone call or no discussion about it or no question about how is this going to look in person, or that kind of thing. It’s always kind of surprising to me that people will make these large purchases–$10,000 or so–over the net with just seeing one small image.

ROBERTS What fraction of the people who buy from you live in the United States?

GRAY Most of them do.

ROBERTS What fraction of them speak English?

GRAY Just about everybody. I get emails sometimes that take a bit of translation; I get some overseas calls once in a while. It gets a little tricky to deal with that kind of situation sometimes if there’s a bit of a communication problem. I do recall one time that I kind of thought I was being scammed because it really didn’t sound like it was a legitimate thing and it turned out to be very legitimate.

ROBERTS Where was it from?

GRAYÂ Korea. It was actually a museum there. They ended up commissioning two large sculptures for their permanent collection.

ROBERTS Wow! How had they heard of you? What led them to you?

GRAY Through the web. They just Googled “rolling ball machine,” or something and my work popped up and they sent me a few emails and just made it happen.

ROBERTS When was that?

GRAY It was last year.

ROBERTS After you started having a nice website, or a conscientious website, how long did it take before you realized that it was going to be a big success?

GRAY I knew fairly close to the beginning that it was working. I don’t get sales from it every week, or even every month. You just never know in my world. I can get five major sales in a week, and then literally nothing at all for five months; it’s very, very hard to predict and plan, but I will say that the sales that are coming in are definitely from the web. The last four pieces I’m working on or that I have just finished up right now–those are all through the web. I’m trying to remember the last time I got something that wasn’t.

ROBERTS These are commissions, you mean?

GRAY Yes, all through the web. This one I’m just finishing right now is going to New Jersey. Even if I had a ton of stuff in galleries over in Santa Monica, I wouldn’t be doing these sales to the East Coast or to Korea.

ROBERTS I hear there’s a lot of tourism involved in art galleries.

GRAY There is. But it’s still hard to make that sale if they just see it temporarily, especially if it’s over a couple of thousand dollars.

ROBERTS Do you still have shows? Do you still have your stuff in galleries now?

GRAY I do shows from time to time, when I get asked to, but I don’t really push it as much as I used to, partially because it’s just so much of a better deal to not split the money with anybody. That’s another huge benefit of the internet. There’s no one taking a cut.