Month: August 2011

My Self-Tracking Wish List

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Right now I am tracking 6 things:

  1. Sleep. I use a stopwatch and Zeo.
  2. Weight. I use three expensive scales.
  3. Blood glucose (fasting). I use Abbott’s Freestyle Lite system. I get the blood by pricking my forearm; it’s painless.
  4. Brain function. I use an arithmetic test.
  5. Morning energy. I rate my energy on a 0-100 scale at 8 am and 9 am.
  6. Productivity. I use the percentile feedback system I’ve described.

I keep crude measures of my workouts (on scraps of paper). Two more things I want to track:

  1. Inflammation. I would like to measure the redness of my gums. This is possible (take photo, measure redness), but hard.
  2. The effects of fermented foods, especially their effect on my immune system. I believe fermented foods differ greatly in potency but I am unable to do any quantification.

 

Many Supplements Taken Together Reduce Depression/Dysthymia

Seth Roberts6 Comments

At the recent Quantified Self Meetup in Mountain View, Fenn Lipkowitz told me that he had started taking a long list of supplements and now felt much better. At last week’s QS Silicon Valley Meetup, he gave a talk about it. The graph above shows “wellness” ratings before and after the change. Here’s what the scale numbers mean:

3 = “i’m hurting, i just want to crawl under my blanket and suffer for a few hours.”
4 = “today sucks, i think i’ll hide and eat some chocolate and read manga.”
5 = “well, i’m here and dont have any excuses, so i guess i’ll go do something.”
6 = “bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to go do some work”
7 = “why am i writing in my log, i should be out dancing!”
8 = “holy shit, tearing it up, backflipping over ninjas and juggling fire”

He describes the improvement like this:

Things seem really easy now that were serious barriers before. I now sleep 4-6 hours a night instead of 12, and bounce out of bed. I no longer have high dance inertia, I can just start dancing on demand. I can type 143 works per minute vs my maximum of 92 wpm a month ago.

Every morning he takes:

  • vinpocetine 10mg
  • vitamin-d 125ug
  • fish-oil 1g
  • piracetam 1600mg
  • alpha-gpc 300mg
  • choline-bitartrate 500mg
  • dmae 260mg
  • boswellia 300mg
  • curcumin 300mg
  • cordyceps-extract 1.2g
  • aloha-cordyceps 525mg
  • coq10 30mg
  • ginkgo-extract 60mg
  • tryptophan 500mg
  • Flintstones multivitamin B-complex

Here are his explanations for some of these:

vinpocetine – vasodilator derived from periwinkle plant. enhances focus, seems to improve long range vision, seems to cause your eyes to fixate more steadily on what you’re looking at, less saccades.

piracetam – increases communication between two halves of brain; the effects of this vary by person depending on which half of their brain is in control. for me it makes interpersonal relations become more clear, easier to cooperate and understand the motivations and intentions of others. also uses up choline at a faster rate, which is why i also take

alpha-gpc – a high bioavailability form of choline precursor, which is in the form that cells usually generate when they’re self-scavenging in choline-depletion state. it doesn’t go into rebuilding the cell walls, but is used for synthesis of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter involved in memory and muscle control.

choline-bitartrate – choline is transformed into phosphatidyl choline in order to (re)build cell membranes. this is low oral availability (doesn’t cross blood/brain barrier easily?) but super cheap and tastes good. i have a theory that alzheimers is caused mostly by long-term choline deficiency.

dmae – another choline precursor? aka “deanol” and has been shown to increase the life-span of mice by 50%, possibly through the mechanism of clearing out lipofuscin deposits. cheap, tastes good.

boswellia – no idea, it’s in the cucurmin pills; somewhat aromatic and pungent, like tea tree oil or piperazine.

curcumin – this is straight up turmeric extract. antioxidant and various other bodily health effects.

cordyceps extract – zombie ant brain fungus. look up images of it online, it’s sick. it makes you want to climb up to the top leaf in a tree, clamp your mandibles, and explode spores everywhere. well, not really. but it improves oxygenation, energy, and will kill a viral infection in one day. the extract is prepared by rapidly growing a lot of cordyceps mycelia in a warm fermenter and spray drying the liquid that comes off. this is highly unnatural environment

aloha cordyceps – aloha pharmaceuticals saw the explosion in “farmed” cordyceps and decided it wasn’t natural enough or something, so they recreated the mushroom’s natural environment of tibetan steppes. they grow it up fast and then let it sit for months in the dark in refrigerators with low oxygen. they claim that their process increases the number of good chemicals (cordycepin, uracil, based on HPLC analysis) and reduces the gross things. i can confirm it tastes/smells much better than swanson brand cordyceps extract. i started taking regular cordyceps extract first and can confirm it works as advertised, but maybe aloha is better, so i take that too. i have a friend taking only aloha cordyceps so we’ll see what happens.

More here.

 

 

Absence of Fermented Food From the Thoughts of a Foodie

Seth Roberts11 Comments

A diagnosis of stomach cancer and the need for radical surgery led a writer named Anna Stoessinger to plan a series of meals before surgery. She and her husband care enormously about food:

My husband and I have been known to spend our rent money on the tasting menu at Jean Georges, our savings on caviar or wagyu tartare. We plan our vacations around food — the province of China known for its chicken feet, the village in Turkey that grows the sweetest figs, the town in northwest France with the very best raclette.

Yet in her two-page article she doesn’t mention fermented food even once. (Leaving aside a mention of cheese.) Here are some foods she does mention:

  • roast duck, crostini and rich fish stews
  • roast chicken with leeks
  • roadside cheeseburgers, bonito with ginger sauce, hazelnut gelato
  • peanut butter and jelly doughnuts, ginger ice cream, sashimi, grilled porterhouse, wild blueberries
  • candy
  • foie gras and fig torchon
  • butter-poached smoked lobster
  • passion fruit coulis
  • butter-seared scallops
  • wild boar terrine and Guinness vegetable soup with rosemary whipped cream
  • apple and cinnamon tarte tartin

Of the thousands of fermented foods, eaten daily by people all over the world from time immemorial, nothing. To me, it’s like she’s had a stroke and has spatial neglect. She is unaware of half the visual field but doesn’t notice anything wrong. The absence of fermented foods from her article reflects the larger near-total absence of fermented foods in American restaurants (both high and low), supermarkets, cookbooks, newspapers, and health advice.

I no longer use cookbooks. I rarely use spices. I make the food I cook taste good by adding fermented foods — for example, miso or yogurt or stinky tofu or fermented bean paste. The result is much tastier than almost anything I can get in restaurants (if I say so myself) and no doubt much healthier.

Ms. Stoessinger’s article reads like a series of boasts: look how much I know and care about food. I think that’s part of the problem: You can’t boast about fermented food. It doesn’t require expensive skilled preparation to taste delicious. You can’t impress guests with fermented food, you just serve it. A bowl of miso soup: big deal. The bacteria made it delicious, not you. So fermented food can’t be a high-end product. Nor can it be a low-end mass-produced product because it takes too long to make, is hard to standardize, and is “objectionable” (e.g., stinky tofu). The growth of our modern food economy has pushed it to the margins, with very bad consequences for our health.

Deborah Estrin on Top and Bottom versus Middle

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Deborah Estrin is a computer science professor at UCLA. Commenting on my recent post Top and Bottom versus Middle: Schools, China, Health? she said “amen to that”.

I asked her why she agreed. Because she sees the same thing a lot, she said. In particular, performance metrics are often devised by people in the middle, and those metrics tend to serve their interests — and not the interests of everyone else. She gave three examples: 1. Fee for service. Doctors are paid per office visit and per surgery, for example. The bad effects of this are obvious. For example, surgeons are pushed to recommend ill-advised surgeries. 2. Financial instruments, such as derivatives. They were sold to outsiders as ways to reduce risk but we all now know they had the opposite effect. As Michael Lewis puts it, “extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets.” 3. Publications. Professors are rated and promoted and to some extent paid based on how many publications they produce. This pushes them toward “safe” projects that are likely to produce a publication within a reasonable time and away from harder, more important problems.

When you measure yourself you can use whatever metric you want — and thereby a metric that serves your interests.

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Thanks to Tucker Max, Melissa McEwen, Peter Couvares, Edward Jay Epstein, and Alexandra Carmichael.

More Migraine Headaches Caused by Cleaning Products: From N=1 to N=2

Seth Roberts12 Comments

At Thursday’s Quantified Self Silicon Valley Meetup (where I gave a talk called QS + Paleo = ?), Alexandra Carmichael introduced herself with the three words “no”, “headache”, and “today”. About five days earlier, she had started having migraine headaches every day. Before that, she hadn’t had a migraine headache in a year. After the headaches began, her husband, having read my Boing Boing story (about a woman whose migraines were mostly from cleaning products), suggested that her headaches might be caused by the Febreze they had just started using. They stopped using it. Because it can linger in carpets, etc., they cleaned their whole apartment with vinegar and baking soda, to get rid of all traces. That’s when Alexandra’s headaches stopped. When they started using Febreze, one of their daughters became very cranky. After they stopped using it and cleaned their apartment, she returned to her usual self.

Other people have found that Febreze gives them migraines. For example, R. Haeckler:

[Febreze] gives me terrible migraines. . . . Whenever I go to someone’s house who uses it I get a headache almost immediately that lasts the rest of the night.

And this woman (“No Febreze EVER. Gives me a headache and makes me dizzy”).

This is a good example of why n=1 experimentation is so important. The woman I wrote about for Boing Boing (Sarah) figured out, beyond any doubt, that certain cleaning products caused migraines. Yes, Sarah’s results were unusual. They “don’t generalize” to most people in the sense that most people don’t get migraines from cleaning products. But, as Alexandra’s story shows, they were still helpful — they helped Alexandra avoid migraines.

My writing about n=1 experimentation has emphasized learning widely-applicable truths — how to lose weight, sleep better, and so on. But this other use — learn stuff that is true only for you and perhaps a small subset of people (1%?) — is also important. Sarah’s n=1 experimentation doesn’t fit in the standard healthcare system. It was not suggested or encouraged by her doctors. No professor or researcher could write a paper about it — it’s too small. But it made a difference — first, to herself, now, to Alexandra. The results of n=1 experiments can be spread, however, in the new patient communities, such as the ones at PatientsLikeMe, MedHelp, and CureTogether (started by Alexandra and her husband).

When I submitted for publication my long self-experimentation paper, one of the referees decided he would find out if fructose water would help him lose weight (one of my examples). He discovered that fructose water made his fingers ache — he had a sensitivity to fructose he hadn’t known about. In his review, he said that these sorts of individual differences were not an argument against my method but actually favored it: We need n=1 experiments to fully understand human variation in health.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

 

  • Edward Jay Epstein on Kindle publishing
  • review of The Beekeeper’s Lament, a book about the fragility of bees. “Colony Collapse Disorder [CCD] is a problem. But it isn’t the problem. Instead, it’s just a great big insult piled on top of an already rising injury rate. Saving the honeybee isn’t just about figuring out CCD. Bees were already in trouble before that came along.”
  • Vanity Fair provides a public service by providing full access to the final installment of Michael Lewis’s great series of Financial Disaster Travel Writing. Earlier installments were about Iceland, Ireland, and Greece. This installment is about Germany.

The Beer Archaeologist

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Patrick McGovern is a professor of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania who studies fermented beverages. His work reveals their long history. Just like modern nutritionists, modern archaeologists overlook this:

Many of McGovern’s most startling finds stem from other archaeologists’ spadework; he brings a fresh perspective to forgotten digs, and his “excavations” are sometimes no more taxing than walking up or down a flight of stairs in his own museum to retrieve a sherd or two. Residues extracted from the drinking set of King Midas—who ruled over Phrygia, an ancient district of Turkey—had languished in storage for 40 years before McGovern found them and went to work. The artifacts contained more than four pounds of organic materials, a treasure—to a biomolecular archaeologist—far more precious than the king’s fabled gold.

Beer figures more in his work than wine. I’m not surprised. I’m a beer snob. The best beers at a recent beer tasting were far better than the best wines at similar wine tastings. The upper-class preference for wine over beer may have the same explanation as earlier upper-class preferences for white rice over brown rice (rich Japanese got beriberi more than poor Japanese) and white bread over dark bread. Or it may also have something to do with the fact that cheap beer in America is terrible.

Thanks to Melissa McEwen.

What We Learn From the Better Health of Vegetarians

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Lots of people think it’s obvious: vegetarians are healthier than omnivores in Study X. Therefore vegetarianism is healthy. This is such a common line of argument that I draw your attention to Denise Minger’s slides for her talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium, which I have already blogged about. The slides make clearer than I did what she said. It’s all excellent but the best part is at the beginning where she points out the many confounds in the studies of Dean Ornish, Neal Barnard, Caldwell Esselstyn, and John McDougall. They change many things but — as Denise put it — What caused the benefits? It must be the vegetarianism! Paleo humor.

There are lots of other interesting things in Denise’s talk, as you will see, such as the health of religious vegetarians.