Month: January 2009

The Inuit Paradox

Seth Roberts21 Comments

The Inuit Paradox is that the Inuit eat lots of fat and hardly any vegetables or fruit yet are much healthier than groups who follow conventional dietary guidelines. In particular,

In the Nunavik villages in northern Quebec, adults over 40 get almost half their calories from native foods, says Dewailly, and they don’t die of heart attacks at nearly the same rates as other Canadians or Americans. Their cardiac death rate is about half of ours, he says.

Likewise, the fact that Greenland Eskimos had very low rates of heart disease led to the discovery of the importance of omega-3 fatty acids. If you read anything on this subject you will come across the concept of “healthy fats”. Sure, some fats are good for you, no doubt about it. Weston Price was the first of many to make this point. But is it the whole story? Attempts to reduce heart disease by giving people fish oil have had disappointing results. Perhaps they got the dose wrong. Or perhaps they missed something crucial. Here is what the Inuit eat:

Our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold water and have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking and as a dipping sauce for food. We had moose, caribou, and reindeer. We hunted ducks, geese, and little land birds like quail, called ptarmigan. We caught crab and lots of fish—salmon, whitefish, tomcod, pike, and char. Our fish were cooked, dried, smoked, or frozen. We ate frozen raw whitefish, sliced thin. The elders liked stinkfish, fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment. And fermented seal flipper, they liked that too.” [emphasis added]

In the rest of the article and in all discussions of the subject I have seen you won’t find a word about fermented food. Yet I believe that was crucial. The fermented food had lots of harmless bacteria that caused the immune system to stay awake; heart disease is caused by infection too slowly fought off. Why do the French have low rates of heart disease? It’s not only the wine, it’s also the stinky cheese they eat. Why do the Japanese have low rates of heart disease? It’s not only the fish, it’s also the miso and natto. I’ll be blogging more about this — stay tuned.

A surprising effect of yogurt.

A Brilliant Business: Selling Soap Nuts Online

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I came across Laundry Tree while trying to figure out what soap nuts are. Soap nuts grow on trees and contain a soap. You can use them in place of laundry detergent. Something I read linked to the Laundry Tree site because it had a good picture.

I clicked around the site and was very impressed.

  • Attractive web design. Easy to navigate.
  • Neither hard nor soft sell. It’s plainly an e-tail site but it doesn’t hit you over the head with that nor does it hide it.
  • Signs of life. Unlike, say, www.sethroberts.net, you can see that the home page has been updated recently.
  • A friendly tone of voice.
  • An interesting way to get visitors involved — a blogger’s contest (which this post will not enter me in).
  • Persuasive.

And that’s just the website. None of the elements are rare yet the website itself stood way out from the zillions of websites I visit. I admire the whole business. It solves a real problem. It’s unusual. It’s very small. The owner puts little at risk, pays almost zero rent, and feels she’s making the world a better place in her own almost-unique way. Very few businesses manage to hit all of these marks.

I’m sure I would admire Laundry Tree no matter what I did with my life. Being a professor is very far from being a small business owner. But the self-experimentation I have done has a lot in common with Laundry Tree.

First, it began with trying to solve my own problems. I wanted to reduce acne, sleep better, lose weight. Laundry Tree began when the owner wanted a better way of doing laundry — no dyes, no harsh chemicals, not sudsy, and not expensive.

Second, it blends male and female tendencies. The data-analytic statistical-software number-crunching rigid-experiment side of self-experimentation is obviously male. The talk-about-my-problems side is obviously female. Likewise, Laundry Tree centers on a problem — choosing a good laundry detergent — that concerns women more than men. Yet constructing and maintaining a website is a kind of technical work that men seem to enjoy more than women. (Nowadays, I admit, it isn’t very technical.)

A journalist friend of mine was given an assignment to write about self-experimentation but eventually turned it down when he couldn’t find enough examples. I think the need to blend male and female tendencies is the main reason it is so rare. (At least publicly.) To get somewhere you really do have to make numerical measurements, enter the data, plot the data, and so on — stuff that, historically, men do far more than women. Yet to talk about your results you really do have to admit to everyone you have (or at least had) a problem, which men find much harder to do than women.

The Quantified Self Meetup group is having a meeting this Tuesday (Jan 27) — two days from now — at the UC Berkeley School of Information, 6 pm. The dozen or so projects I’ve heard about related to this group always invove quantification but rarely experimentation. In my experience quantification without experimentation doesn’t get very far but perhaps they will eventually learn this (or perhaps I’m wrong). Experimentation and quantification is more difficult than quantification alone but only a little more difficult. Perhaps the reason for lack of experimentation is that with quantification alone you stay safely on the male side of things but to add experimentation (to solve a personal problem) and talk about it you have to cross over to the female side.

Not the Same Study Section: How the Truth Comes Out

Seth Roberts9 Comments

In the latest Vanity Fair is a brilliant piece of journalism, Goodbye to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum. In a fun, easy-to-read format, it tells some basic truths I had never read before. Here are two examples:

Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: When Abu Ghraib happened, I was like, We’ve got to fire Rumsfeld. Like if we’re the “accountability president,” we haven’t really done this. We don’t veto any bills. We don’t fire anybody. I was like, Well, this is a disaster, and we’re going to hold some National Guard colonel responsible? This guy’s got to get fired.

For an M.B.A. president, he got the M.B.A. 101 stuff down, which is, you know, you don’t have to do everything. Let other people do it. But M.B.A. 201 is: Hold people accountable.

David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: There’s this idea that the Bush White House was dominated by religious conservatives and catered to the needs of religious conservatives. But what people miss is that religious conservatives and the Republican Party have always had a very uneasy relationship. The reality in the White House is if you look at the most senior staff you’re seeing people who aren’t personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders. Now, at the end of the day, that’s easy to understand, because most of the people who are religious-right leaders are not easy to like. It’s that old Gandhi thing, right? I might actually be a Christian myself, except for the action of Christians.

And so in the political-affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at everyone from Rich Cizik, who is one of the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals, to James Dobson, to basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated.

This is related to the Shangri-La Diet. In these two excerpts, the speakers were (a) close to the events they describe but (b) not so close they are in any danger from the people they tell the truth about.

In science the same thing happens. Saul Sternberg and I could tell the truth about Ranjit Chandra’s research not only because (a) we were fairly close to that research (which involved psychology, even though Chandra was a nutritionist) but also because (b) not being nutrition professors, Chandra couldn’t harm us. Those closer to Chandra, professional nutritionists, had plenty of doubts as far as I could tell but were afraid to say them. Hal Pashler and I could criticize a widely-accepted practice among cognitive modelers because (a) we were in the same general field, cognitive psychology, but (b) far enough away so that the people we criticized would never review our grants or our papers. (Except the critique itself, which they hated. After the first round of reviews, Hal and I requested new reviewers, saying it was inevitable that the people we criticized wouldn’t like what we said.) Likewise, in the case of voodoo correlations, Hal is (a) close enough to social neuroscience to understand the details of the research but (b) far enough away to criticize it without fear.

In the case of the Shangri-La Diet, I was (a) close enough to the field of nutrition that I could understand the research but (b) far enough away so that I could say what I thought without fear of reprisal. Nassim Taleb is in the same relation to the field he criticizes. Just as Saul Sternberg and I knew a lot about the outcome measure (psychological tests) but were not nutritionists, Weston Price, a dentist, knew a lot about his outcome measure (dental health) but was not a nutritionist.

It’s curious how rarely this need for insider/outsiders (inside in terms of knowledge, outside in terms of career) is pointed out. It’s a big part of how science progresses, in small ways and large. Mendel and Darwin were well-educated amateurs, for example. Thorstein Veblen wrote about it but I haven’t read it anywhere else.

Webware For Self-Tracking

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Zume Life will help you keep a record of many things:

The Zume Life personal health management system is now open for public beta, on the Web and via an optional iPhone application. Zume Life allows you to record, monitor and understand all aspects of your health activities. No matter what illness(es) you are managing, for yourself or a family member, or what lifestyle changes you are attempting, Zume Life can help you. Use the Zume Life solution to track:

  • Medications. Any and all, from Rx to supplements to chamomile tea
  • Food. Keep a food journal, and track calories, carbs, and/or points
  • Exercise. Keep an exercise journal, and track exercise type and duration (e.g. run 20 min)
  • Symptoms. Anything from anxiety and mood, to sleep disturbance and wheezing
  • Biometrics. All common measures such as weight, glucose, etc.
  • Life journal. To jot down anything else (“saw my dietician today”, “just had a great day”, etc.)

Monitor your progress through charts and journals. Use the system directly on the Web, or with an optional “Zuri” iPhone application. Sign up at www.zumelife.com.

Butter: Bad or Good?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

At the Fancy Food Show, I heard someone say that the better a food tastes the worse it is for you. “What’s an example?” I asked. “Butter,” he said. “It goes straight to your arteries.”

What a choice. I have three pounds of very expensive butter in my freezer, purchased from an Amish farmer who raises grass-fed cows. I eat it as often as possible. I believe butter may have fat-soluble nutrients we need to be healthy, nutrients that are found in high concentration in growing plants (such as grass) but not in ordinary animal feed. In the Swiss Alps, in the 1930s, Weston Price found small communities that produced almost all the food they ate. Because of the altitude, they couldn’t produce much. They did have grass-fed cows and prized the butter from those cows. They were in much better health, especially dental health, than their neighbors who ate mostly industrial food.

There was a time, long ago, when exactly the opposite of the overheard statement was true: The better a food tasted the better it was for you. Now it is complicated.

The Wisdom of the Rest of Us

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

On Christmas Eve I wrote there was a lot to be learned from the web comments on newspaper articles and the like that anyone can post. My point was how wonderful this was. Now the New York Times has added a feature that allows the most popular comments to rise to the top (you “show” Readers’ Recommendations) as I hoped. For example. Way to go!

You can also find comments that the “editors” (the sub-sub editors?) recommend (show Editors’ Selections). They tend to be long and querulous. I don’t think I’ll be using that feature much but it is good to have it for when I want long and querulous.

Still no comments allowed on The New Yorker website.

How Bad is LDL Cholesterol? (continued)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

If LDL cholesterol level predicts heart disease then persons with low LDL should be better off than persons with high LDL. Here is what some Norwegian doctors did:

They simply selected sequential patients with LDL cholesterol scores below 2.7mmol/l. . . . They ignored all people with LDL concentrations from 2.7 to 4.5mmol/l but did enroll all people with an LDL >4.5mmol . . . So they then had two groups of people, those at catastrophic risk of LDL-blocked-arteries and those with [very] little LDL . . . They did the scheduled angiography and checked how many patients had >70% blockage of at least two coronary arteries in each group.

Guess what: LDL cholesterol doesn’t matter. They recruited 47 patients with low LDL-C, of whom 21 had significant CAD. They got 46 high LDL-C patients, of whom 24 turned out to have CAD.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

How bad is LDL cholesterol?

Probiotics and Your Immune System

Seth Roberts10 Comments

At the Fancy Food Show, five or six booths sold probiotic foods, usually yogurt. At each booth I asked what they could tell me about the health effects of probiotics. Mostly the question seemed to annoy them — especially the employees hired for the event.

But at the Oixos booth — Oixos is a Greek yogurt made by Stonyfield Farm, an organic dairy in New Hampshire — Amy Plourde, a graphic designer at Stonyfield, told me that for a long time she was “always sick” with sinus infections, colds, and even mononucleosis. During that time, she ate yogurt once/week. When she started working at Stonyfield she began to eat yogurt once/day (6 oz. at breakfast) and her health got much better. Stonyfield yogurt has relatively high amounts of live bacteria. Their website has a list of scientific papers about yogurt and the immune system.

My take is that our immune systems need a steady stream of foreign pathogens (e.g., bacteria) and pieces of pathogens (e.g., bacterial cell walls) to stay “awake”. When your immune system is working properly you fight off all sorts of bacteria and viruses without noticing. When your immune system isn’t working properly it overreacts (allergies) and takes too long to react (infectious diseases). Weston Price found twelve communities eating traditional diets whose health was excellent. Their diets varied tremendously but one thing they had in common was daily consumption of fermented foods, including cheese, kefir, sauerkraut, and fermented fish. This supports Amy’s story right down to the dosage. If you don’t eat fermented foods, you might use hookworms, which excrete a steady stream of foreign substances into the blood. (Thanks, Tom.) Hookworms definitely reduce allergy symptoms; I don’t think anyone has asked if they reduce colds and other infections.

The hygiene hypothesis.

Powdered Ice Cream

Seth Roberts1 Comment

At the Fancy Food Show, Kriss Harvey, a pastry chef and frozen dessert solutions specialist, served me a spoonful of powdered chocolate ice cream, his invention. It looked like chocolate ice cream but it tasted unlike any ice cream (or any food) I’ve ever had. It was there and not there. It was in my mouth and then it was gone. It was the most ethereal food I’ve ever had.

We had been talking about El Bulli, the Spanish restaurant of experimental food. Two friends of Mr. Harvey’s had worked there one summer and had come back complaining about the food (rabbit ears) and the workload. Just because people will pay a lot for your unusual food doesn’t mean you are advancing things, said Mr. Harvey. Maybe your food doesn’t taste very good. He pointed to a certain now-forgotten fad among New York dessert chefs a few years ago. That’s fashion, I said; it has a perfectly good purpose (to support experimentation). Then Mr. Harvey served me his powdered ice cream. Which was more memorable and impressive than anything I had at Alinea, an American version of El Bulli.