Month: September 2009

The SLD Effect

Seth Roberts2 Comments

After three days of the Shangri-La Diet, kitty-cat did a little experiment:

I tried something last night Very Happy I really tried to eat much of sweets and chips and stuff like this … I couldn’t!!! I had a little bit and then quit because I felt … I don’t know … full – more than

As far as I know, the Shangri-La Diet is the first weight-loss method to produce this effect quickly. Most diets, such as the Atkins Diet, ban “sweets and chips and stuff like this”; early in the diet you would have no trouble eating them. After a long time on the diet you won’t want to eat them but only because they’re no longer familiar.

Long before SLD, Michel Cabanac did experiments about a related laboratory phenomenon. As you eat, Cabanac found, food becomes less and less pleasant. That’s why you stop eating. You say “I feel full” to explain why you stop eating but your stomach isn’t actually full. Cabanac also found that this effect depended on your set point. If your set point was high, the decrease in pleasure slowed down. It took longer to reach zero (= no pleasure) so it took longer to stop eating.

It follows from Cabanac’s work that if your set point is unusually low — lowered by SLD, for example — then you will stop eating unusually soon, as happened here. The paradox is that you can feel “more than full” from a tiny amount of attractive food.

Why Do Cats Lick Themselves?

Seth Roberts12 Comments

The usual answer, of course, is: To clean themselves. There are other answers:

Some people think it is used as a way to control their temperature – it keeps their fur smooth, which in the winter traps heat. In the summer, it spreads saliva on the fur and cools them down and can also loosen fur so that they shed more easily. Others think it is a natural way of reducing parasites like fleas or ticks.

Perhaps cats lick themselves to ingest more foreign bacteria and dirt, which they need to be healthy. Test of this proposal: Feed a cat more fermented food, it should lick itself less. (Just as I became less of a foodie when I ate more fermented food.)

The value of evolutionary explanations.

Infectious Disease Specialist Ignores the Immune System

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A new book called Rising Plague by Brad Spellberg, a UCLA professor of medicine specializing in infectious disease, at County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, is about the increase in drug-resistant bacteria. From an article about the not-yet-published book:

In the United States, more than 300,000 people die each year from infectious diseases such as influenza and pneumonia, often caused by drug-resistant bacteria.

“The scary thing is that many of these were healthy, young individuals,” said Robert Guidos, vice president of public policy and government relations for the Infectious Disease Society of America. “There are very few drugs, if any, to treat these bacteria, and there are almost none in the pipeline.”

I believe it is very likely that these “healthy” young people weren’t eating enough fermented food and thus had poorly-functioning immune systems. The article continues:

[Spellberg], however, argues in his book that drug companies are not solely responsible. Blame for the decline in antibiotics should also not be aimed at physicians for over-prescribing these drugs, nor hospitals for lacking sufficient standards in cleanliness or drug distribution.

“This problem is complex enough that it is not accurate and not helpful to blame any one group,” Spellberg said. “What we need to do is focus on solutions.”

Public awareness will go far in spurring change, he argues. Ultimately, legislators, drug companies, hospitals and doctors will have to devise a way to spur more production of new antibiotics, which become obsolete as bacteria change to survive.

“ Will have to“. As if there is no other alternative. The possibility of strengthening the immune system is not considered. Just as UC Berkeley epidemiology professors (along with the rest of their profession) ignore the immune system, here is a doctor ignoring it. Here is a longer statement by Spellberg that ignores the immune system. He’s a specialist in infectious disease. He’s repeating the conventional wisdom of his profession. UCLA is a top-ranked medical school. This is mental blindness on a massive scale with awful consequences.

Revenge is Sweet

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In 2006, Julie Powell, the blogger now on screen in Julie & Julia, reviewed The Shangri-La Diet in the Washington Post

I’m almost 95 percent sure that Seth Roberts . . . is a snake-oil salesman. [Later true. Snake oil is high in omega-3] . . . He brings a whole lot of pseudo-science to the table, as diet-book-writing PhDs tend to do.

Now, from a review of Julie & Julia by Laura Shapiro, author of a book about Julia Child:

There’s no question that Powell had a great idea for a blog. What she didn’t have was anything interesting to say about cooking her way through Mastering. Her writing is hollow, narcissistic, and unforgivably lazy—qualities so foreign to Julia that it’s not at all surprising that she once said she couldn’t abide Powell’s work.

Curious that revenge (“sweet”, “a dish best served cold”) is associated with food.