Month: August 2010

More Saturated Fat, Less Stroke

Seth Roberts12 Comments

This recent study from Japan found that middle-aged men and women who ate more saturated fat had a lower risk of stroke. The rate of strokes was 30% lower in the highest intake quintile compared to the lowest quintile. There was a non-significant reduction in heart disease.

Other big differences were correlated with saturated fat intake. For example, those in the highest quintile had more college education than those in the lowest quintile and were more likely to do sports >1 hr/week. These data by themselves won’t convince anyone that saturated fats are beneficial. But they should push you in that direction. Contrary to what you’ve heard a million times.

As far as I can tell, eating lots of butter has lowered my blood pressure. High blood pressure is associated with greater risk of stroke.

Although pig fat certainly helped me (I slept better), I’ve found butter is even better. Butter has considerably more saturated fat than pig fat. The fat in butter is 60% saturated fat, whereas pig fat is 40% saturated fat. My consumption of 60 g/day of butter gives me 36 g/day saturated fat. In this study, persons in the highest quintile of intake averaged 20 g/day. The highest intake in the whole study (60,000 people) was 40 g/day. In addition to butter, I eat cheese, whole-fat yogurt, and meat, so I’m surely higher than that.

Via Whole Health Source.

The Marc Hauser Case

Seth Roberts11 Comments

It would have been harsh to title this post “Marc Hauser, RIP”. However, unless the following is shown to be in error, I’ll never believe anything he writes or has written:

According to the document that was provided to The Chronicle, the experiment in question was coded by Mr. Hauser and a research assistant in his laboratory. A second research assistant was asked by Mr. Hauser to analyze the results. When the second research assistant analyzed the first research assistant’s codes, he found that the monkeys didn’t seem to notice the change in pattern. In fact, they looked at the speaker more often when the pattern was the same. In other words, the experiment was a bust.

But Mr. Hauser’s coding showed something else entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern—and, according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his coding was right, the experiment was a big success.

The second research assistant was bothered by the discrepancy. How could two researchers watching the same videotapes arrive at such different conclusions? He suggested to Mr. Hauser that a third researcher should code the results. In an e-mail message to Mr. Hauser, a copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, the research assistant who analyzed the numbers explained his concern. “I don’t feel comfortable analyzing results/publishing data with that kind of skew until we can verify that with a third coder,” he wrote.

A graduate student agreed with the research assistant and joined him in pressing Mr. Hauser to allow the results to be checked, the document given to The Chronicle indicates. But Mr. Hauser resisted, repeatedly arguing against having a third researcher code the videotapes and writing that they should simply go with the data as he had already coded it. After several back-and-forths, it became plain that the professor was annoyed.

“i am getting a bit pissed here,” Mr. Hauser wrote in an e-mail to one research assistant. “there were no inconsistencies! let me repeat what happened. i coded everything. then [a research assistant] coded all the trials highlighted in yellow. we only had one trial that didn’t agree. i then mistakenly told [another research assistant] to look at column B when he should have looked at column D. … we need to resolve this because i am not sure why we are going in circles.”

The research assistant who analyzed the data and the graduate student decided to review the tapes themselves, without Mr. Hauser’s permission, the document says. They each coded the results independently. Their findings concurred with the conclusion that the experiment had failed: The monkeys didn’t appear to react to the change in patterns.

They then reviewed Mr. Hauser’s coding and, according to the research assistant’s statement, discovered that what he had written down bore little relation to what they had actually observed on the videotapes. He would, for instance, mark that a monkey had turned its head when the monkey didn’t so much as flinch. It wasn’t simply a case of differing interpretations, they believed: His data were just completely wrong.

As word of the problem with the experiment spread, several other lab members revealed they had had similar run-ins with Mr. Hauser, the former research assistant says. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. There was, several researchers in the lab believed, a pattern in which Mr. Hauser reported false data and then insisted that it be used.

If taken literally, this description seems to imply that Hauser was making up data — writing down results much more favorable to his career than the actual results — and not realizing it! As if someone else was marking the data sheet. Since the videotapes are being coded by more than one person the fabrication/delusion/whatever would come to light, you might think, but he does it anyway! And then gets “a bit pissed” when things don’t work out perfectly.

I would love to hear Hauser’s side of this story, and see the videotapes being coded. So far Hauser has said nothing to make me doubt the straightforward interpretation: He made up data. After Saul Sternberg and I published a paper implying that Ranjit Chandra had made up data, Chandra retired.

Derek Bickerton says Hauser “fell victim to a soon-to-be-outdated view of evolution”. I am more interested in what this says about Harvard and Hauser’s co-authors. In particular, I wonder what Noam Chomsky, one of Hauser’s co-authors, will say. The incident makes Chomsky look bad. Hauser appears to be a person who pushes aside the truth of things. That Chomsky wrote a major paper with him suggests that Chomsky failed to notice this.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Language Log.

Open-Access Publication Fees at the BMJ

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Open-access is why you’re reading this. Because my long self-experimentation paper was in an open-access journal, many people could easily read it. I’m sure this is why I managed to get a contract to write The Shangri-La Diet.

The BMJ is experimenting with a way to support open access: Ask for publication fees from authors with grants that include the appropriate support.

We are introducing this policy as the next step in our efforts to ensure the sustainability of open access publication of research in the BMJ, and we are doing so in the spirit of experimentation. Many research funding organisations, sponsors, and universities now provide grants that cover journals’ fees for open access publication.

Wise. While I was writing The Shangri-La Diet, I visited Alice Water’s Edible Schoolyard. I learned that it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, provided by foundations. As far as I could tell, the people in charge were doing nothing to reduce the subsidy required. Yet they wanted the idea to spread.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • A new paper debunks Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick global temperature graph. “Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy-based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models.” Very well written.
  • “Obscure, contemporary ethics books . . . were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books.” Paper. The study was done entirely online and covered 32 large university libraries.
  • Gladys Reid, Australian discoverer of benefits of feeding zinc to farm animals. “Reid was reluctant to make direct dose recommendations after claiming the Director General of Agriculture had told her she would be taken to court for misleading practices if she did. However she won followers from farming wives in particular. Many would call asking for zinc advice after tiring of seeing suffering livestock and husbands on the brink of suicide from crippling stock and production losses.”
  • Using a treadmill while working
  • The Potti Scandal continues
  • How loud are Sunchips?

Thanks to Don Sheridan and Melissa Francis.

The Irony of What Works

Seth Roberts5 Comments

After posting about Doug Lemov, I ordered Teach Like a Champion. It arrived yesterday. Leafing through it, I came across a section titled “The Irony of What Works,” which begins:

One of the biggest ironies I hope you will take away from reading this book is that many of the tools likely to yield the strongest classroom results remain essentially beneath the notice of our theories and theorists of education.

Lemov continues with an example: Teaching students how to distribute classroom materials, such as handouts. This can save a lot of time. Then he adds:

Unfortunately this dizzyingly efficient technique — so efficient it is all but a moral imperative for teachers to use it — remains beneath the notice of our avatars of educational theory. There isn’t a school of education that would stoop to teach its aspiring teachers how to train their students to pass out papers.

The last chapter of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class is about just this — the importance that professors (like everyone else) place on status display and how this interferes with their effectiveness. The connection with self-experimentation is that no matter how effective it is, no psychology department would stoop to teach it. Or, at least, that’s the current state of affairs.

The book’s index doesn’t include Veblen, although it does include Richard Thaler.

Beijing Students at Berkeley

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In downtown Berkeley I met a group of Chinese students from Beijing. They were entering freshmen at UC Berkeley.

They said there were 40 students like them — from Beijing, entering UC Berkeley. (At Tsinghua, there will be 400 entering freshmen from Beijing.) In all of China, 13 students were admitted to Harvard, about the same number to Yale and Princeton. One of them said she’d wanted to go to Northwestern but hadn’t gotten in. Had she gone to college in China, she might have gone to Renmin University, perhaps the #3 university in China.

Surely their parents were wealthy, yes. But they preferred an American college to a Chinese one for two main reasons: 1. They can choose whatever major they want. At Chinese universities students are often forced into a major they don’t want if their scores are high enough to get into a prestigious university but not high enough to get into the major they want at that university. 2. They believe that if they graduate from an American university they will have more opportunities. Where did they get the idea of coming to Berkeley? I asked. Online, they said. Their English was really good.

The “more opportunities” may not be as simple as they think. In Beijing I know a Chinese businesswoman who hired a recent college graduate. She’d gone to college in England, indicating that her parents were wealthy. The new worker turned out to be irresponsible and had to be fired. Perhaps her parents had spoiled her. In this businesswoman’s eyes, an overseas education may now be a negative.

“That’s Why You’re So Easy to Hate”

Seth Roberts6 Comments

This is what one bloggingheads commentator said to the other. Was the speaker-listener combo (a) man to man, (b) man to woman, (c) woman to man, or (d) woman to woman?

As you can guess, woman to woman. After I wrote this post, I listened to the rest of the dialog. The phrase was repeated several times.

It’s a standard compliment, yes. Sure, women compliment each other like this and men don’t. But I think it is an example of another underlying rule that I can’t figure out.

More I hadn’t noticed that the title of the conversation is “We’re All So Easy to Hate”.

Drug Company Corruption

Seth Roberts9 Comments

This Al Jazeera documentary, called “Drug Money”, emphasizes three things.

1. Doctors get vast amounts of money from drug companies, which influences which drugs they prescribe. One influential doctor, Tom Stossel of Harvard, who has received “millions” from drug companies, sees no problem with that!

2. Drug companies encourage the prescription of drugs for unapproved uses. For this and other crimes, more than half of the major drug companies have been found guilty and fined billions of dollars. Several of the not-yet-guilty ones are under investigation. The problem is industry-wide, not due to a “bad apple”.

3. The harm done by deceptive practices isn’t trivial. One example is Risperdal. It isn’t approved to treat ADHD in children, but it is prescribed for that. Given to boys, it can cause them to grow breasts, which is extremely embarrassing. When the boys were given the drugs, their parents were unaware of this possibility. Joseph Biederman, another Harvard professor who has received millions from drug companies and an advocate of giving Risperdal to children, told a Congressional committee he had no idea that a large fraction of all Risperdal is given to children (“I have no idea how much Risperdal is used in children”).

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Pork Belly News

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I am a big fan of pork belly. Whenever I see it on a menu I order it. The mayor of Chongqing (population 32 million) recently made headlines with a speech whose main point was

改善民生ä¸åªæ˜¯åƒçº¢çƒ§è‚‰ç©¿æ¼‚亮衣æœ

Which means: Better living standards is not just eating hong shao rou wearing beautiful clothes. Hong shao rou is pork belly braised in a red sauce. Maybe my favorite Chinese dish. Supposedly Chairman Mao’s favorite dish. I’m glad he said “not just” rather than “not”.

Arithmetic and Butter (continued)

Seth Roberts12 Comments

At my Quantified Self talk I described data that suggested butter improved my mental function. During the question period, a cardiologist in the audience said something about me killing myself — butter is unhealthy. The usual view.

I said I thought the evidence for the usual view was weak. He said, “The Framingham studies.” That was epidemiology, I said. It is notoriously hard to understand. My data was from something like an experiment. Much easier to understand. (And the Framingham study is a terrible example of the supposed evidence. To quote from it: “In the period between the taking of the diet interviews and the end of the 16-year follow-up, 47 cases of de novo CHD developed in the Diet Study group. The means for all the diet variables measured were practically the same for these cases as for the original cohort at risk.”) He replied that the reduction in heart disease in recent years was more support for the usual view. I said the recent decline in heart disease could have many explanations other than a reduction in animal fat intake. Many things have changed over the last 20 years.

There is epidemiological evidence that saturated fat is bad, yes, but it is not the Framingham study nor the recent decline in heart disease. And it really is difficult to interpret. The butter-is-bad interpretation could easily be wrong. The obvious problem is that, after people are told butter is bad, people who try hard to be healthy avoid butter. And they do a lot of other things, too, to be healthy. So butter consumption ends up confounded with a dozen other variables believed to affect your health. When I was growing up, my parents avoided butter because margarine was much cheaper. So butter consumption is confounded with income, another problem.

My tiny experiment, whatever its problems, was much easier to interpret.