Month: October 2011

Grandmother Knows Best About Crohn’s Disease

Seth Roberts24 Comments

On Boing Boing a post by me tell about a man who cured himself of Crohn’s Disease mainly by following what is called The Specific Carbohydrate Diet. He got the idea from his grandmother, who heard about it on the radio. The diet is about eighty years old. The version he used appeared in a book published in 1994 — 17 years ago. Still no clinical trial.

As I’ve said, if you have managed to cure yourself of a serious medical condition please let me know. I would like to learn from your experience and help others learn from it.

Let Them Get Sick (running)

Seth Roberts14 Comments

I wrote recently about how our health care system resembles a protection racket. In a protection racket, you or someone else threatens people so that you can make money protecting them. Modern health care, especially in America, ignores prevention. It says let them get sick. Let the general public get sick so that we (health care providers) can make money treating them.

The profitability of let them get sick is illustrated by some numbers in Run Barefoot Run Healthy, a new book by Ashish Mukharji (who gave me a copy). Ashish has run several marathons. Before he started running barefoot, running caused all sorts of problems. To deal with them was costly:

  • Two or three pairs of orthotics (a type of insole): $200-$300 each.
  • One MRI, for what turned out to be ITBS (Iliotibial Band Syndrome, a thigh injury): around $1,000.
  • Twenty or more deep-tissue massage treatments for ITBS: around $80 each.
  • Corns removed (twice): $500 per treatment.
  • Twenty or more sessions of physical therapy for ITBS and Achilles tendonitis: $100-$250 per session.
  • Several visits to orthopedists and podiatrists: $150 per visit.
  • Cortisone injection for plantar fasciitis: $200.

Since he started barefoot running (3 years and 2 marathons ago), he has incurred no (zero) running-injury expenses. Interviews with other barefoot runners convince him this is typical. Long ago a runner friend of mine told me everyone who runs eventually hurts themselves. The truth of this was confirmed many times by runners I met after she said this. Now it appears she was right because all the runners she and I knew wore shoes.

I started barefoot running/walking on my treadmill a year ago. I have never had running injuries (probably because I walk — uphill fast — much more than run). Going barefoot saved time. During the first few months, I got four or five cuts (actually, splits) on the sides of my feet. The skin was split by downward pressure. The cuts made ordinary walking (in shoes) a little unpleasant. I did nothing about them. They healed and have not recurred.

A better health care system would have discovered the damage caused by running shoes long ago. We are lucky to live when personal scientists such as Ashish can figure out the truth themselves and tell others.

New Source of Omega-3?

Seth Roberts18 Comments

I used to get my omega-3 from flaxseed oil. Then I encountered problems with the flaxseed oil going bad, in the sense of losing potency. (It did not smell bad.) I switched to flax seeds, which I grind and eat with yogurt. This is more difficult than drinking flaxseed oil.

From Peter Spero I have learned of a possible new source of omega-3: camelina oil. Camelina oil, unlike flaxseed oil, contains high levels of anti-oxidants, which protect it from going bad. Camelina is cheap to grow and can be grown where other crops cannot.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments
  • The Shangri-La Diet: still too good to be true. It was my dream — and maybe every scientist’s dream — to discover something (a) useful and (b) counter-intuitive, the more surprising the better. It did not occur to me that (a) and (b) conflict. I think that more surprising discoveries are eventually more useful (as logic suggests), but it takes much longer.
  • Marisa Tomei wants to play Jane Jacobs. “I love that she saved Greenwich Village.” When she does, perhaps Robert Caro will post the unpublished Jane Jacobs chapter of The Power Broker.
  • Symposium on The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
  • Did you know that Mindy Kaling’s amusing article in this week’s New Yorker is an excerpt from a forthcoming book? Neither did I. Likewise, the recent Murakami story Town of Cats was from a forthcoming book. The New Yorker, unlike other magazines, never identifies book excerpts. This is unfortunate because doing so would help both writers (sell books) and readers (find books to read). For more criticism of The New Yorker, see the great book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker by Renata Adler.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Appetite Suppression from the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts19 Comments

This person has been doing the Shangri-La Diet (SLD) for two weeks:

The appetite suppression is now strong. Yesterday I went to dinner at one of my favorite Mexican restaurants. Ordered my favorite meal there. I could only eat about 1/3 of my favorite dish and a few chips and salsa. . . .. That is nothing short of amazing. The best part is: it satisfied me. I would normally eat the whole meal and not be satisfied, I would be able to eat more. I wouldn’t normally eat more, but I could eat more. Not this time. Didn’t want more.

He eats about 700 calories/day nose-clipped — that’s his version of the diet. Before he started the diet he was gaining 10 pounds every year. When he started SLD, he weighed 250 pounds at 5 feet 10 inches tall (BMI = 36).

If I were to write The Shangri-La Diet all over again I would emphasize nose-clipping. You can easily eat lots of smell-free yet healthy calories nose-clipped and get great appetite suppression, as in this case. That’s one reason the book is short. I wanted to get the idea out in the world soon, so other people could help improve it. That’s what happened. Nose-clipping was someone else’s idea (Gary Skaleski, 2006), not mine. It was a better application of my theory and early findings (e.g., sugar water causes weight loss) than I was capable of. Now, thanks to the Internet, I can find out what happens when people do the new improved version.

 

Morning Faces Therapy: Personal Account

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Five years ago I heard from someone that he had been successfully using my discovery that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood the next day. Recently I asked him to write about his experiences with it. Here’s what he wrote:

I’m a male professional in my 30s and have had mild to moderate depression since my early teens. I am a considerable rationalist and skeptic, so when I read about Seth’s morning faces therapy in a New York Times article about 5 years ago, my first thought was to doubt its effectiveness. But it was so easy and simple to try, with nothing to lose, that I gave it a shot. To my surprise, it really worked, and the change was quite noticeable.

I do 30-40 minutes of faces therapy every morning, starting around 7:00, 7:15, but the timing moves around a bit based on my schedule or sometimes for experimentation purposes. My first few years I used videos of actual faces (some of the recommendations that I found on Seth’s blog and others that I found on my own). Over time it’s become harder to find quality videos of sufficient length and compelling interest, and I now more often use a mirror. The effect, for me, usually lags by a day or two. So if I haven’t been doing faces for a while and I’m depressed then it takes a couple of day or so to get back to where I should be, and similarly when I stop the faces therapy it takes a few days or so for the depression to return.

While the therapy itself is simple, getting up on time and doing it every single morning has proven more difficult than expected. Even when I do it for several weeks in a row with no break, at some point the tiredness and weariness inevitably kicks in, whether because I was up late several nights in a row and am too tired to get up early, or because I’m traveling, or for other reasons.

Proof the therapy works is that I’m still carrying on five years after discovering it! When I stop for more than a few days, the resultant drop in mood inevitably brings me back.

As an aside, I sometimes spend time in the evening or morning doing other depression exercises, such as writing a gratitude list (google “count your blessings exercise”) or doing meditation/self-hypnosis. In the spirit of self-experimentation, I am currently seeing whether I can get the equivalent effect I get from the faces, by doing these other therapies in morning sunlight at the same early hour as I do the faces therapy. Full results are not yet in.
More about morning faces therapy.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • Benefits of fermented wheat germ extract
  • Why Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is unlikely. A list of AGW-associated “miracles”. Some of my favorites: “Unique among all sciences, climatology develops yet finds no surprises whatsoever, apart from when it’s worse than we thought” and “AGW is a grave threat to humanity, yet it can take the backseat when AGWers have to score their petty points (such as not sharing their data with the “wrong” people)” and “Having won an Oscar, a Nobel Prize and innumerable awards, having occupied more or less every audio or video broadcast for years, having had the run of more or less every newspaper for the same length of time, suddenly AGW leaders declare they’re not “great communicators” and blame this for the generally high levels of skepticism.”
  • Denmark has started to tax butter. “To discourage poor eating habits and raise revenue.”
  • Life-saving personal science: Mom figures out cause of daughter’s problems. “One spring night in 2002, she stumbled upon an old photocopy of a 1991 Los Angeles Times article that described a young girl whose condition had uncanny parallels with [her daughter’s].”

Thanks to David Cramer.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Medicine

Seth Roberts3 Comments

To rehabilitate his reputation, Alfred Nobel, in his will, established the Nobel Prizes, the crucial element of which was that they honor the most useful research. Nobel wanted to be associated with good works. This has become a considerable problem for the committee that awards the Physiology and Medicine prize because, if you haven’t noticed, the most prestigious research — the stuff done at great expense in gleaming new laboratories — isn’t useful. The uselessness of high-prestige academic research was emphasized by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Unfortunately Nobel died shortly before it was published.

For a long time, the Nobel prize-winning research in Medicine hasn’t provided significant help with major health problems (depression, obesity, diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart disease, etc.). Sometimes it has been a tiny bit helpful. Most often the prize-winning research has been, at the time of the award, no clear help at all. This is one of those years. The press release announcing the 2011 prize tries to hide this important truth. Here is the “what use is it?” section of this year’s press release:

From fundamental research to medical use

The discoveries that are awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize have provided novel insights into the activation and regulation of our immune system. They have made possible the development of new methods for preventing and treating disease, for instance with improved vaccines against infections and in attempts to stimulate the immune system to attack tumors. These discoveries also help us understand why the immune system can attack our own tissues, thus providing clues for novel treatment of inflammatory diseases.

“They have made possible the development of new methods for preventing and treating disease.” False (and, uh, just a wee bit grandiose). Such development was already possible. Note what isn’t said: “They led to new methods for preventing and treating disease.”

“Improved vaccines against infections.” I have heard nothing about this, in spite of the plural (vaccines rather than vaccine). In any case, this is faint praise because the improvement might be a small percentage. If you know whether this claim is true, please leave a comment. Again note what isn’t said: “New vaccines”. According to this article, the work led to a vaccine against prostate cancer. (With no noticeable benefit so far.) Does the press release writer think prostate cancer is infectious?

“Attempts to stimulate the immune system to attack tumors.” Attempts? As in failed attempts? Apparently.

The final sentence (“These discoveries also help us understand . . . “) is out of place. The section is about actually helping people (“medical use”) not ivory-tower stuff like “providing clues”. Whoever wrote this is like a student with not enough to say trying to meet a teacher’s minimum word count.

There you have it. The practical value of the research awarded the most prestigious prize in the world — a prize that Alfred Nobel’s will said should be given to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.”

To make your immune system work better, I am sure there are two simple, practical and powerful ways of doing so: deepen your sleep and eat fermented foods.

Flaxseed in Various Units.

Seth Roberts10 Comments

I eat 66 grams of flaxseed per day. (I eat it with yogurt in two batches. For each batch, I weigh out 33 g of whole flaxseeds then grind them.) Not everyone has a scale, so I found that 100 ml of whole flaxseed weighs about 64 grams. Assuming 1 tablespoon = 15 ml, that’s 6.9 tablespoons/day whole flaxseed. If you are interested in weight/volume conversion, that’s 9.5 g of whole flaxseed = 1 tablespoon. I checked this using two different volume spoons and a scale that matches another scale.

This website says there are 15.02 g of whole flaxseed in a tablespoon. I am measuring brown flaxseeds. Perhaps their golden flaxseeds are smaller and therefore more dense. The overprecision suggests this shouldn’t be trusted.

This website says there 14.17 g of “dry” flaxseed in a tablespoon. Again with the overprecision.

According to this website, there are 7.5 g of whole flaxseed in a tablespoon.