Eating a half-stick of butter (60 g) every day apparently improved how fast I can do simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 7-5, 3+1). I improved about 5% — from 630 to 600 msec per problem. My scores had been at 630 msec for months. They suddenly dropped.
A reporter said to me that a 5% improvement isn’t much. You couldn’t notice it. Why did this matter?
I did not reply “ what good is a newborn baby?” I said it mattered for three reasons:
1. You cannot easily produce such an improvement. I was already doing very well. For example, I had already lowered my scores a lot via omega-3. Imagine the world record for the 100 meter dash suddenly dropping 5% due to eating something you can find in a supermarket.
2. A 5% improvement is just the beginning. There is room for optimization — better dosage, better timing of taking the butter, and so on.
3. The brain is a mirror of the rest of the body. Learning the best diet for the brain, at least in terms of fat, will help us learn the best diet for the rest of the body, just as learning what house current is best for one electrical appliance is a guide to what other electrical appliances are designed for. They’re all designed to work with the same house current.
Alas, this is not just a poor answer, it’s what I actually said. I give myself a C+. Reason 1 is almost gibberish. Reason 2 is technocratic. A good answer is more emotional. Reason 3 is okay, if not very clear.
At Berkeley I knew a student who had transferred from a junior college. He is/was black. He had probably gotten into Berkeley because Berkeley administrators wanted to admit more black students. He complained one day that he got C’s on his essays even though “all the words were spelled correctly.” It was frustrating, he said. I am in a similar situation here. My answer is poor but I cannot easily do better.
An alternative:
It will come to matter to the degree it reveals more about the wider workings and maintenance of the human body. Whether it will indeed help to usher in a new and useful dietary paradigm of ‘lipidity’ etc remains to be seen.
Your thinking speed is actually increasing by significantly more than 5%, when you consider that some fraction of those 630ms represent irrelevant things like the time the signal takes to travel from your brain to your hand and for your fingers to move. Possibly a large fraction, though I don’t know how much exactly.
Though, come to think of it – could the butter affecting your muscle twitch speed, rather than your thinking speed? If so, the benefit might be illusory. You could find out with a simple reaction speed test, where you react to a stimulus without any mental calculation first. Perhaps this should be added to that study Mark Frauenfelder is doing.
One only needs to look at the state of things in the US to realize as a whole we don’t eat enough butter.
What is more important than having your brain function well?
Mr Roberts –
I’m a big fan of your writings and your work.
However, I do find it mildly disturbing that your anecdote about your student pointed out that he is black and you thought he got in via affirmative action.
I’m sure, regardless of how rigorous the standards are at UCB, that often times there are students there that are not top notch. Making your story about a black student who you assumed (perhaps incorrectly) was an affirmative action pick helps perpetuate stereotypes and places an unfortunate burden on all minority students.
Just my point of view.
David
It seems butter is not so good:
> And minimize or avoid butter use, if we are to believe the data that suggest that it contains the highest exogenous AGE content of any known food.
https://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/anti-ageing-diet.html
David, thank you for your comment. I think diversity among college students — among Berkeley students, for example — benefits students. They can learn from those who are different. But lack of diversity also benefits students, as my story implies. They can be taught at an appropriate （non-frustrating) level. I think it is important to weigh both costs and benefits. The benefits are mentioned often, the costs practically never. It’s worth emphasizing the costs because administrators benefit from diversity (“look how diverse we are!”) but pay none of the costs. The costs, which can be great, are paid only by the students, such as the student I mentioned. Eventually he dropped out.
Willy, it isn’t clear what happened in the study that produced the result you describe (high AGEs in butter). I can’t tell if the butter was heated (e.g., broiled, boiled) after purchase. I am trying to find out. The butter I eat is not heated after purchase.
Have you considered that marginal returns on common actions often induce massive gains? For example, a small improvement in the computation speed of basic arithmetic operations in computing would yield an significant reduction in algorithm run times. This could also open up opportunities to new algorithms which were previously too slow.
One could infer that if these quicker arithmetic operations generalize to other thought processes, you ought to be compounding your gains which would lead to a larger than 5% improvement in overall capacity. Also, I agree with jimrandomh’s suggestions as additional things to consider when interpreting your 5% figure.
Zach, what’s an example of “marginal [improvements in] return on common actions [causing] massive gains”? I’m not saying they don’t exist, I just can’t think of any.
Arthur Jensen found a correlation between IQ and reaction time. In his measurements, I’d guess that a 30-msec decrease in reaction time corresponds to 10-15 IQ points. (I haven’t looked at his data recently.)
regarding the post noted about the AGE content of butter:
https://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/anti-ageing-diet.html
consider the comments section in that blog post to find out details of the study and the lack of consideration for how AGE’s pass through the digestive tract, most are altered or fail to make their way far enough to cause damage. the effects of AGE’s were determined by feeding mass amounts extracted from foods to see their effects, there is no indication that consumption of butter sets off a chain reaction of damage in the body, a good grass fed cow’s milk and pastured butter is healthy.
i wonder how much of an effect removing vegetable oils and excess omega 6 fats from your diet affects your brain rates, was it the addition of butter or the exchange of omega 6 fats for better saturated fats that was key. i guess if you added butter on top of your usual meals then we could conclusively state that butter affects brain function in that way.
Seth,
I’m not sure reason 1 is gibberish. With your test, I would measure the improvement as a % of the difference between your previous best and the limits of human performance. If an optimally functioning person can do the test in, say, 530 msec, your butter intervention brought you 30% closer to optimal.
Personally, I have been eating 1/2 stick of butter per day for the past several months. If you include the heavy whipping cream in my coffee, which I believe has a similar fatty acid profile, I’m close to the equivalent of 3/4 stick per day. My energy level is much higher during the day, and I’m quicker mentally. No afternoon lulls either. Part of the reason may be an improvement in sleep. It’s actually a little bizarre. I’ll be wide awake one moment, then out cold the next minute. I’ll sleep 9 hours without waking, then open my eyes in the morning wide awake and ready to go. A couple weeks ago, I had my best report ever at the dentist, by a long shot. I could go on all day.
Chris, I’m glad to hear about those change. Perhaps I should try 3/4 stick of butter.
Jeff, you ask whether it was the increase in butter or the decrease in bad fats that caused the improvement. When I started eating a lot of butter I stopped eating a lot of pork fat. There isn’t much omega-6 or vegetable fats in pork fat.
“there isn’t much omega-6 or vegetable fats in pork fat.’
It depends whether you your lard is factory or pasture raised, if it’s factory ( 99% ) then it’s grains feed, is your butter pastured?
Also see the current practice of feeding NZ dairy cows palm :- https://paleozonenutrition.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/new-zealand-cows-fed-palm-kernel-expeller-producing-a-new-type-of-trans-fat-is-it-safe/
Seth,
thx for the comment, your lard consumption decreased while butter increased. both fats have a great lipid profile, i would be suspect of any attempts to implicate pork fat in cognitive decline, perhaps butter helps while lard is neutral and omega 6 laden veg oils are negative.
in addition to this i would want to consider if your total fat intake increased, especially if we are considering amounts as small as %5, i eat a fat heavy diet and can attest to the ways 200 extra calories a day can slip in from a few extra spoons of heavy cream in my coffee, which likely doesnt produce an equivalent drop in consumption the rest of the day.
so many factors, so little time!
jimrandomh,
I think this is not the case. Butter improves my ability to play guitar, but it does it by speeding up the rate at which I can play songs that I’m not comfortable with while leaving my maximum speed the same. ‘racetams speed up both.
Guitar is actually a pretty good test, because performance is sensitive to brain performance in a few different ways, and since its something I do for reasons other than brain testing, there’s less placebo effect to worry about. Don’t do it with a test on your mind, just play until you start doing surprisingly well, then think back and see what you could have changed.