Month: May 2010

Foot Fungus Revisited

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I described earlier my theory about foot fungus — that mine, at least, has been caused by socks. It recently got worse. Consistent with my theory, I had just gotten a dozen new pairs of socks of a new material. My theory suggested I buy new socks of a different material (I did), change socks more often (I did), and go sockless more often (I did). As soon as I made these changes, the fungus went away. More support for the theory. A few other people (see the comments to my earlier post) and a friend have had experiences that also support the theory.

My Berkeley doctor didn’t know this theory. He looked at my foot fungus and repeatedly suggested certain non-prescription medicines. I haven’t seen this point made elsewhere, although you can find a list of 20 things to do that includes “change your socks often”.

Sometimes doctors (and medical schools) are criticized for lack of emphasis on nutrition. Sometimes they are criticized for lack of emphasis on prevention. This was neither: it was cure and non-nutritional. Curing infection is one of the main things doctors try to do, which is why antibiotics are heavily-prescribed.

Suppose you bring a task to Programmer A. He has done a long education in programming followed by a long internship, and then passed a difficult screening test to become “board-certified”. To maintain his certification he takes “continuing education” classes. He returns with a 100-line program that fails to work. (The medicines my doctor recommended failed to work. He thought the failure was due to my not following the directions closely enough.) Then a 10-year-old boy gives you a 3-line program that works perfectly. You would realize your society is fond of make-believe — in particular, making believe that those who teach programmers understand their subject.

Dangerous Fish Oil

Seth Roberts13 Comments

Many people take fish oil to get omega-3. (I get mine from flaxseed oil.) Fish contain PCBs, therefore fish oil does. How much? More than we’re told. A lawsuit has been filed about this:

Mateel Justice Foundation, in conjunction with two individual plaintiffs, brought a lawsuit against six fish oil manufacturers and two retailers for labeling violations of the California Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, also known as Proposition 65. Filed March 2 in Superior Court of San Francisco, the suit alleges several fish oil products sold in California failed to include label warnings for levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl compounds) found in the products by testing initiated by the plaintiffs . . . Named as defendants in the suit were two retailers—CVS Pharmacy Inc. and Rite Aid Corp.””and six manufacturers—General Nutrition Corp. (GNC); NOW Health Group Inc.; Omega Protein Inc.; Pharmavite LLC (Nature Made brand); Solgar Inc.; and Twinlab Corp. . . . The plaintiffs conducted testing on 10 products produced or sold by the defendants, looking at all 209 known PCB compounds . . . Many fish oil companies test for as few as seven such compounds. [emphasis added]

The plaintiffs plan to post testing results here (I have been unable to reach this site).

Butter: New Antidepressant?

Seth Roberts19 Comments

Ever since I found that pork fat improved my sleep, I’ve tried to eat a substantial amount every day. A few months ago, I knew I couldn’t eat any that day so I had a lot of butter at lunch (about 30 g). About 1-2 hours later, I felt in an unusually good mood — in particular, unusually calm. I hadn’t noticed such an effect with pork fat, perhaps because it is digested more slowly. (It’s easy to see that pork fat melts more slowly than butter.)

Now a friend has reported a similar effect:

My mood is better with the Straus butter, but I am concerned about my cholesterol, so maybe I’ll just use it when I feel depressed. But it does work.

I’d guess that Straus Family Creamery butter, which is from grass-fed cows, has more omega-3 than other butter but I haven’t noticed mood elevation from flaxseed oil, so I doubt that’s involved. Moreover, I’ve always been drinking plenty of flaxseed oil so I doubt I’m omega-3 deficient.

Maybe this has something to do with why certain food is “comfort food”.

A new study found that consumption of unprocessed meat was not associated with more risk of heart disease but that consumption of processed meat (such as bacon) was associated with greater risk of heart disease. The whole American fear of animal fat (including butter) may be due to an unrecognized confounding: those who ate more animal fat also ate more bacon.

College in Other Countries

Seth Roberts2 Comments

At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, students have real power over teachers because of the importance of teaching evaluations. If your teaching ratings are low, you can be fired.

A friend of mine works there. Recently he taught a two-hour class. One student tended to be extremely late, often arriving only 10 minutes before the end of class. One day,

MY FRIEND (friendly) You come so late, why do you bother to come at all?

STUDENT I have another class after this one.

She was serious.

Losing Weight By Eating New Food

Seth Roberts4 Comments

The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet predicts that new food is less fattening than familiar food. At the center of the theory is the idea that smell-calorie associations raise the set point. New food is less fattening because its smell is less associated with calories. This prediction explained why I often lost weight after visiting foreign countries, but not after visiting other places in America.

A few days ago, I got an email from a 40-year-old man who has taken this a step further:

I’ve developed a variant of your diet which works really well for me, and which I haven’t read about so much on your blog, so I thought you might be interested. Â I live in NYC, and I’m obsessed about different foods. Â I’m constantly on the hunt for new restaurants, novel ethnic cuisines I’ve never had, etc, and NYC is a great place to indulge this hobby. Â A couple of years ago I was about 210 lbs, which on my 6’0 frame is at least 30 lbs overweight. Â I read your book, and tried the oil, etc, and it worked well for me, but it felt like a lot of trouble, and I was actually dropping weight faster than would normally be considered healthy. Â So I changed the strategy, and simply made up a rule, never to eat the same thing twice.

If I want to lose weight, I follow the rule religiously. Â I go to different restaurants, order radically different things off the menu, choose unfamiliar beers, wines, cocktails etc when I’m out at bars and clubs. Â If I follow the rule 100% of the time, I drop about 1 lb per week consistently. Â If I “cheat” one or two meals a week, I maintain my weight. Any more than that and I slowly gain weight. Â I’m currently 179 lbs, and have been between 175 and 185 for about two years. Â Although I’m active, I’m no gym rat, and this “system” is the only nod towards a healthy lifestyle I’ve made during that time. Apart from never repeating a meal, I eat and drink whatever I feel like.

The dose-response relationship (the more he does it, the bigger the effect) makes other explanations less plausible. He later added:

One thing I forgot, which is important, is I absolutely don’t eat when I’m not hungry, and I’ve never had a problem walking away from food if I’m full. Â Some people might have problems with that, I guess. Also it requires more discipline than I made it sound. Especially when you’re busy, it’s very tempting to hit the same lunch spot every day.

Resveratrol Revisited: The Plural of Data is Not Data

Seth Roberts11 Comments

In 2007 I got an email from Preston Estep, a gerontologist and former Chief Scientific Officer of Longenity, Inc., offering me a place in an informal trial of the benefits of resveratrol that he was organizing. Recently I wrote him to find out what happened. Here’s his reply:

We got a few people to volunteer but not enough for an organized trial to be worth the effort, partly because initial reported benefits evaporated under scrutiny and we couldn’t decide what variables/bio-markers to test. There are a couple of efforts that have taken off since then to try to collect data on therapeutic modalities, including resveratrol. The largest-scale effort I know of is CureTogether but it isn’t very useful because the vast majority of reports appear to be subjective and unreliable (e.g. “I feel that resveratrol has slowed my aging …” and so forth). Such a web-based approach would be much more useful if objective tests like those you have done could be implemented but I’m skeptical you could get many people to produce and report data in an unbiased fashion. I have found that the desire to believe whatever you’re doing is good is incredibly strong and can be rationalized ad infinitum.

Interestingly, it looks like professional scientists and even big pharma might have gotten caught up in that mindset. Many of the reported benefits of resveratrol have been controversial from the beginning and recent reports suggest that neither scientists nor pharma can reproduce key results. Matt Kaeberlen, one of the first discoverers that sirtuin overexpression extends lifespan and co-founder of a biotech company with me in the early 2000s, returned to academia and has raised some red flags about the resveratrol research. He showed that the key assay used to discover resveratrol in a drug screen seems to depend on a biochemical artifact. Sirtris, a biotech company specializing in sirtuin research and that was bought by Glaxo for $720M, developed some resveratrol analogs that were reported to have multiple benefits, including control of type 2 diabetes. But recently Pfizer and Amgen have published studies saying they cannot reproduce Sirtris’s results. You can read many reports of this mess on the web but here are good, recent accounts of the controversy:

https://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2010/05/17/cambridge_biotechs_work_on_resveratrol_cuts_to_basics_of_biology/
https://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v28/n3/full/nbt0310-185.html
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18396-stay-young-on-red-wine-drugs-think-again.html
https://seekingalpha.com/article/182123-what-did-glaxosmithkline-get-in-return-for-buying-sirtris
https://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/03/09/a_gsksirtris_wrapup.php
In a recent New Yorker article about cancer chemotherapy Malcolm Gladwell told a similar story: High hopes for a cancer drug disappeared when more data came in. I am more positive than Estrup about the CureTogether study of resveratrol. If the collected data suggest benefits, it supports more work; if the data do not suggest benefits, it argues against more work. Above all, the CureTogether data will others decide whether to try resveratrol.