Month: May 2010

More About Treadmills and Learning

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In Beijing, a friend and I were talking about how to improve high-school teaching. I said two things would help: more personalization, and more movement. Movement really helps learning, I said. I read something about that recently, my friend said. She meant this post of mine (treadmill walking made it pleasant to study Chinese)!

Paul Sas has drawn my attention to a man with a remarkable memory:

JB is an active, articulate septuagenarian who began memorizing Paradise Lost at the age of 58 in 1993 as a form of mental activity to accompany his physical exercise at the gym. Although he had memorized various poems in earlier years, he never attempted anything of this magnitude. JB stated that he wanted to do something special to commemorate the then-upcoming millennium. “Why not something really challenging like, oh, ‘Paradise Lost’?” he said. He began by walking on a treadmill one day while trying to memorize the opening lines of the poem.

He eventually memorized the whole poem, about 11,000 lines. Apparently the scientists who studied him ignored the treadmill.

A learning psychologist might say that walking provides mental activation, we learn better when we’re stimulated. (For example, we learn better when we’re scared.) My point is treadmill walking produced an hedonic change: I found learning more enjoyable when I was walking.

One Million Chinese in Mexico

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Contradicting the notion that you can find anything on the Internet, I cannot find any info about what I was told in a Beijing Starbucks: A few years, a city was started in Mexico where a million Chinese workers will manufacture stuff. Because of NAFTA, the stuff they make will have tariff-free access to the American market. And shipping from Mexico will be cheaper than shipping from China. The Chinese workers will come over for a limited time, such as one year.

What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs

Seth Roberts1 Comment

What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, a collection of essays, has just been published by New Village Press (who sent me a copy). Several of the essays are very good, such as those by Pierre Desrochers, Janette Sadik-Khan (in charge of improving New York City’s streets), Daniel Kemmis, Robert Sirman, and Mary Rowe, but my favorite was the one by Janine Benyus. Benyus came in contact with Jacobs when Jacobs phoned her to ask her to speak at the 1997 Toronto conference Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter. Benyus was thrilled to be speaking to the person whose writing she’d studied to learn how to write. Benyus wrote about increasing appreciation of the value of biomimicry, learning how nature has solved this or that problem to help us solve the same problem.

[On the Galapagos Islands] I watched a quiet engineer named Paul stand motionless before a mangrove as if in deep conversation. He finally called me over and pointed: “This mangrove needs fresh water but its roots are in saltwater, which means it somehow desalinates using only the sun’s energy. No fossil fuels, no pumps. Do you know how we do it? We force water through a membrane at 900 pounds of pressure per square inch, trapping salt on one side. When it clogs, we apply more pressure, more energy.”

Then Paul asked the question I’ve been working to solve ever since: “How is it that I, as a desalination engineer with a five-year degree and twenty-year experience, never once learned how nature strips salt from water?”

Brent Pottenger Comments

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I asked Brent if he had any comments on his experience (after he adopted an ancestral diet, his migraines and sinus infections stopped). He wrote:

The quality of my life (mental + physical health) improved even further when I started eating slices of butter throughout the day awhile back. For awhile, I was using spoonfuls of coconut butter/coconut oil and/or Greek yogurt for this satiation role, but once I added butter slices to the mix, I beefed up my nutritional ‘bag of tricks’ quite a bit. Of course, I had cooked in butter for a few years, but I never made the link to simply eat it in slices, despite enjoying its taste so much. And, a little bit goes a long way. I eat cultured butter from a few different brands and a few different locations of the world (hoping this diversification may carry extra beneficial side-effects: different strains of micro-organisms, etc.). I try to find brands that are pastured too (more naturally-occurring Omega-3′s, evidently). I usually suck on/chew on the butter slowly because I’ve found this has improved my oral health too: animal lipids (plus coconut oil) are good for epithelial tissue health (that’s why I rub coconut oil on my face and skin and rub butter, coconut oil, and yogurt on my hands). Pairing butter and coffee (I eat the butter; I don’t put it in my coffee; I drink my coffee black) has become a nice start to my day (Dave Lull even found a study speculating on the benefits of coupling hyperlipidity and anti-oxidants together in this way; I think it’s also a useful approach to detoxifying the liver), particularly when I know I am going to workout that morning–this little hyperlipidity kick seems to help in the gym too (when I am not fasting). Using butter slices in this manner is a nice compliment to fasting intermittently–these two practices allow me to enjoy low-caloric intake periods pleasantly. They set up my “feasts” nicely. Whenever I have a “grumbling” stomach, or I feel a “biting” sensation in my stomach, I eat a small piece of butter, and my mood and body tend to stabilize. And, like bacon and yogurt and eggs, it’s cheap. Butter has certainly been an excellent ‘cheap health option’ for me.

He later added:

Now I am working intently on Meta-Rules. Meta-Rules are simply ‘rules for making rules’ to live by. Three dynamics concern me deeply: (1) The problem of induction; (2) biochemical individuality; and, (3) factoring for the unseen. For instance, one of my nutritional Meta-Rules is: “Don’t consume anything that causes a negative physiological reaction.” From this Meta-Rule, I have deduced the following rule to live by (as one example): “Don’t consume high-fructose corn syrup.” A marker for monitoring this rule could be facial inflammation and ‘puffiness’ post-consumption, as one possibility. That’s an example of a higher-level precept empowering an individual to deduce for him or herself how that concept applies (or does not apply) in his/her own specific case (I like the term: Patient of One). Over time, I suspect that something like William Baines’ Biomedical Mutual Organization (BMO) could emerge if enough people were self-experimenting with Meta-Rules and interacting about their experiences and results. Amongst this cohort of parallel n=1 clinical trials, some convergence of Meta-Rules may occur, indicating ways that our bodies are the same, and also showing how our bodies differ individually when it comes to things like diet, exercise, and lifestyle design.

To explain why headaches can be due to inflammation, he pointed me to this.

Positive Side Effects

Seth Roberts5 Comments

What happened to Brent Pottenger — when he improved his diet along ancestral lines, a serious health problem unexpectedly went away — also happened to Aaron Blaisdell. He improved his diet along ancestral lines and his sun sensitivity went away. A non-nutritional version happened to me: By adopting elements of Stone-Age life, I slept much better. And, at the same time, I stopped getting colds. Another example involves flaxseed oil. My discovery that flaxseed oil made my brain work much better implied that prehistoric diets contained more omega-3. A dosage that produced brain improvement also greatly improved gum health and recovery from injury.

This is the opposite of conventional medicine. As far as I know, every major drug has serious bad side effects. The drugs often help the problem for which they are prescribed, but your health has a good chance of becoming worse — sometimes much worse — in other ways. Against Medical Advice (2008) by James Patterson and Hal Friedman is the true story of a boy (Friedman’s son) with severe Tourette’s. (Recommended by Alexandra Carmichael.) In an epilogue, Friedman says, “Our family is convinced that his most extreme symptoms were caused by medicines prescribed but with unhappy results, almost without exception.” The cure was worse than the disease.

The phenomenon of positive side effects isn’t mysterious. Our bodies need certain inputs to work well. The whole body evolved with the same inputs. When something crucial is missing, several things break down. And when the missing thing is supplied, several things get better. We write all our words using the same 26 letters. If one letter is missing, many words will be misspelled. When the missing letter is supplied, many words will be spelled correctly. Fixing one word fixes many words. For example, suppose you lack “k”. Blink will be spelled “blin”, mark will be spelled “mar”, and so on. When you realize you need “k” to spell blink, at the same time you will improve the spelling of many other words.
The implication of positive side effects is profound. Finding the right inputs isn’t a new wrinkle on current health care, it’s a whole new way of being healthy. Public health officials haven’t had much luck selling prevention but maybe that was because their ideas about prevention have been poor — telling people to eat according to the Food Pyramid, for example. And if you are sick (as Brent was), you are highly motivated to do something about it. The old saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure should be revised: a ounce of the right cure is worth a pound of prevention. The dietary improvements that cured Brent’s migraines will prevent many other problems. Going from the old saying to the new saying is like going from thinking the sun revolves around the earth to realizing the earth revolves around the sun.

A great change is coming.

The Ancestral Health Symposium.

Better Thinking By Standing

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Dan Wich, a faithful reader of this blog, told me that my work had helped him. I asked for details. He wrote:

I have a desk job and began to experience back pain that was aggravated while sitting. So I bought a desk designed for both sitting and standing, and spent most of my time standing.

I was on the lookout for improved sleep patterns because of your experiments, and I noticed similar results. But the biggest benefits I observed were unexpected. First, my ability to focus and prioritize improved while standing; sitting for long periods made me more likely to avoid challenging tasks. Second, I felt more creative while standing, avoiding the problem-solving tunnel vision I’d often get after sitting for a while.

Being able to switch between standing and sitting without changing anything else has led me to dismiss other causes for those mental benefits. And I wasn’t expecting to receive them, making me doubt the placebo effect is at work. So, I think I can corroborate your results of improved mental function while standing.

Brent Pottenger and the Benefits of an Ancestral Diet

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I read somewhere that Brent Pottenger (blog here) had benefited from adopting an ancestral diet. (Brent, Aaron Blaisdell and I are organizing the Ancestral Health Symposium.) I asked him for details. His answer:

I had debilitating migraines and chronic sinus infections for years, despite being a top-performing multi-sport athlete and following Conventional Wisdom (Food Pyramid, etc.) nutritional recommendations diligently. I’ve always been interested in living as healthy as possible, so I had made sure to do things like eat lots of whole grains. Essentially, components of my diet were causing chronic inflammation, but I did not know it. As a result, I had to take antibiotics (Z packs, erythromycin, amoxicillin, etc.) repeatedly for many years (a scary thing in light of the importance of gut flora), usually about 5 to 10 times per year for infections. My migraines got so bad that I had to go to the emergency room four times during a 1.5 year span to get pain medications because my prescription migraine drugs and painkillers (like Vicodin) did not work. The migraines were so painful that I would shut down and could not even take a nap to let them pass.

I talked about it in part at BIL:PIL:

I did not set out to cure myself, but that’s what happened. I started down what turned out to be the right health path because I read Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan. In that book, Nassim referenced Art DeVany. I read Art’s work on Evolutionary Fitness. Nassim and Art dovetail nicely, and the idea that evolution could inform health decisions made sense to me. That nudged me to cut grains (and other things) out of my diet. Art also tipped me to Mark Sisson, and I related really well to Mark’s personal story as an athlete with a passion for health, and I enjoyed the logic behind his Primal Blueprint framework. From there, I got actively involved in what I call the Ancestral Health epistemocracy that has emerged in the blogosphere–Mark, Art, Robb Wolf, Matt Metzgar, Tim Penn, and I actually co-authored an unpublished book together in 2007. At this point, though, I still did not know that I had resolved my health problems for good; I just knew that these ideas were working–I gained lean muscle mass, had more energy, felt great, etc.–as I tested them on my own body. Through this involvement as both an e-patient and a hobbyist blogger/essayist, I realized that a few years had passed and I had not experienced a migraine or a sinus infection. Now, after over three years without a migraine and having only been ill one time, I realize that I cured myself nutritionally, as a side-effect of tinkering with the aforementioned ideas. During this process, I also found out about your work from Nassim. For lots of reasons, your work on self-experimentation seemed really valuable to me. For example, my neurologist examined me and prescribed some drugs that were, looking back, quite dangerous to take for a problem that was caused by things like grains, legumes, processed vegetable oils, and Conventional Wisdom nutritional guidelines. My self-experimentation was, ironically, much safer and ultimately more sophisticated from a philosophy of science perspective because I could react to local feedback that my neurologist did not have access to: my own body. From there, I realized that we are all experts in our own body and that physicians must partner with us respectfully if they want to act as agents who help us find cures for health problems. I’ve written about my experiences in bits and pieces elsewhere, but this is a brief synopsis that captures most of the highlights in one place.

Basically, thanks to an inquiring mind and persistence that I owe to my mom’s mentorship, I transformed my physiology remarkably thanks to trial-and-error solution searching with things I learned from Nassim, Art, Mark, and you. From there, I’ve added more “maps” into my portfolio of health practices from Doug McGuff, Keith Norris, Kurt Harris, and many others (many are listed on the Symposium presenter list). As a result, I no longer consume health-care resources and these resources can go to treat real medical problems. How remarkable were the improvements? One way to capture that besides the disappearance of my health problems is to look at my weight changes: at the same waist size, I’ve gone from 135 lbs. in 2002 to ~145 lbs. in 2004 to ~170 in 2010. That says something.

He later added:

Things I did to relieve my migraines that didn’t work:

– prescription glasses (theory = eye strain)
– cutting out caffeine (theory = ? stress)
– napping more (theory = better sleep)

None of those experiments cured my health challenges. Only nutrition worked. Very few environmental factors have fluctuated much over the past ten years: I’ve lived in the same hours, slept in the same bed, been a student, played the same sports in the same places around town, etc.

His old diet and his new diet:

Pre-Ancestral Health diet: I followed the Food Pyramid and associated concepts closely, so I consumed lots of whole grains (breads, pastas, granola, bagels, etc.), fruits (whole and juiced), vegetables, non-fat milk, non-fat yogurt, some meat (all kinds), coffee, tea, beans (black, pinto, others), and some cheese (pasteurized) and nuts. I ate things like Cliff Bars, drank Odwalla smoothies, etc.

Ancestral Health diet: I follow a very carnivorous paradigm, so I consume lots of meats (from pork bellies to raw Ahi tuna) and eggs, lots of cultured butter, coconut butter & oil, full-lipid Greek Yogurt (highest saturated fat content of any yogurt on the market), some vegetables (onions, avocados, greens) and mushrooms (sauteed in butter with onions and meats), essentially no fruit (I’m in a ‘Fructose Detox’ self-experiment), a little raw cheese, coffee, tea, essentially no alcohol. I also supplement with some Vitamin D, which is anabolic I think as well. I take fish oil when I have not had fish for awhile. I’ve eaten fish my entire life, though.

I attribute my health improvements directly (and completely) to diet. As my diet evolved, I also altered how I train, transitioning a bit from ‘some long-distance running and sports playing’ to ‘mainly high-intensity, short-duration training (more weights and sprinting) and still sports playing as my exercise approaches. This energy expenditure evolution has, in my opinion, contributed to my stark body composition changes (lean muscle mass gain), but I think that my health improvements are due to diet and that my body composition would be much worse off if my diet had not changed like it has.

I will comment on this in my next post.

Why Do Inmates Hide Butter?

Seth Roberts11 Comments

When Marion Jones, the Olympic athlete, was in prison, “ several inmates befriended her and showed her . . . how to hide sticks of butter.” Just as others carry water bottles so they can drink throughout the day, I carry butter in my backpack in a jar so I can eat small amounts throughout the day. As far as I know, no one else does this. I value butter so much because it makes my brain work better. If anyone reading this knows why inmates value butter so much, please let me know.

New Way to Quit Smoking?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A woman named Melissa Francis recently thanked me for helping her quit smoking. I was surprised. She said she had applied the ideas behind the Shangri-La Diet to smoking. At the center of SLD is the idea that we learn to associate the flavors (smells) of foods with the calories they contain. If you reduce your exposure to those associations, you lose weight.

Francis took this to suggest that the reason people smoke has a lot to do with the association between the flavors (smells) of smoking and nicotine. If she could reduce her exposure to those associations, it should be much easier to quit. So she did two things: 1. Smoked nicotine-free cigarettes (brand name Quest). 2. Used a nicotine patch. The second thing corresponds to ingestion of smell-free calories, such as sugar water or extra-light olive oil or any food nose-clipped (classic SLD). The first corresponds to exposing yourself to the flavors of foods without swallowing them, an experience whose effects you can read about on the SLD forums here and here. Learning researchers know that uncorrelating the CS (e.g., smell) and US (e.g., nicotine), as Francis did, is a great way to reduce the association between them.

Francis had previously tried to quit using nicotine-free cigarettes alone. She had failed. She had previously tried to quit using nicotine patches alone. She had failed. With the combination (Quest 3 and 21 mg patch), however, she was successful. “I stopped smoking the cigarettes pretty much altogether within a week or so. From that point, I just stepped down on the patch over the course of five or six weeks,” she wrote. How easy that sounds! My college advisor told me that quitting smoking was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Francis had been smoking twenty years and smoked about a pack a day. She’d quite for two years about fifteen years ago.

Francis had the idea herself and hadn’t heard of anyone else doing this. The closest precedent seems to be the work of a Duke researcher named Jed Rose, for example this study.