Month: December 2011

Ten Interesting Things I Learned From Adventures in Nutritional Therapy

Seth Roberts13 Comments

A blog called Adventures in Nutritional Therapy (started March 2011) is about what the author learned while trying to solve her health problems via nutrition and a few other things. She usually assumed her health problems were due to too much or too little of some nutrient. She puts it like this: “using mostly non-prescription, over-the-counter (OTC) supplements and treatments to address depression, brain fog, insomnia, migraines, hypothyroidism, restless legs, carpal tunnel syndrome, and a bunch of other annoyances.” In contrast to what “the American medical establishment” advises. Mostly it is nutritional self-experimentation about a wide range of health problems.

Interesting things I learned from the archives:

1. Question: Did Lance Armstrong take performance-enhancing drugs? I learned that LiveStrong (Armstrong’s site) is a content farm. Now answer that question again.

2. “If you return repeatedly to a conventional doctor with a problem they can’t solve, they will eventually suggest you need antidepressants.”

3. “When I mentioned [to Dr. CFS] the mild success I’d had with zinc, he said it was in my mind: I wanted it to work and it did. When I pointed out that 70% of the things I tried didn’t work, he changed the subject. Dr. CFS’ lack of basic reasoning skills did nothing to rebuild my confidence in the health care system.” Quite right. I have had the same experience. Most things I tried failed. When something finally worked, it could hardly be a placebo effect. This line of reasoning has been difficult for some supposedly smart people to grasp.

4. A list of things that helped her with depression. “Quit gluten” is number one.

5. Pepsi caused her to get acne. Same here.

6. 100 mg/day of iron caused terrible acne that persisted for weeks after she stopped taking the iron.

7. “ In September 2008 I started a journey that serves as a good example of the limits of the American health care system, where you can go through three months, 15 doctor visits, $7,000 in medical tests, three prescriptions and five over-the-counter medications trying to treat your abdominal pain, and after you lose ten pounds due to said pain, you are asked by the “specialists” if you have an eating disorder.” I agree. Also an example of the inability of people within the American health care system to see those limits. If they recognized that people outside their belief system might have something valuable to contribute, apparently something awful would happen.

8. Acupuncture relieved her sciatica, but not for long. “By the time I left [the acupuncturist’s office] the pain was gone, but it crept back during my 30-minute drive home.”

9. Pointing out many wrongs does not equal a right. She praises a talk by Robert Lustig about evil fructose. I am quite sure that fructose (by itself) did not cause the obesity epidemic. For one thing, I lost a lot of weight by drinking it. (Here is an advanced discussion.) In other words, being a good critic of other people’s work (as Lustig may be) doesn’t get you very far. I think it is hard for non-scientists (and even some scientists) to understand that all scientific work has dozens of “flaws”. Pointing out the flaws in this or that is little help, unless those flaws haven’t been noticed. What usually helps isn’t seeing flaws, it is seeing what can be learned.

10. A list of what caused headaches and migraines. One was MSG. Another was Vitamin D3, because it made her Vitamin B1 level too low.

She is a good writer. Mostly I found support for my beliefs: 1. Of the two aspects of self-experimentation (measure, change), change is more powerful. She does little or no self-tracking (= keeping records) as far as I could tell, yet has made a lot of progress. She has done a huge amount of trying different things. 2. Nutritional deficiencies cause a lot of problems. 3. Fermented food is overlooked. She never tries it, in spite of major digestive problems. She does try probiotics. 4. American health care is exceedingly messed-up. As she puts it, “the American medical establishment has no interest in this approach [which often helped her] and, when they do deign to discuss it, don’t know what the #%@! they’re talking about.” 5. “Over the years I’ve found accounts of personal experiences to be very helpful.” I agree. Her blog and mine are full of them.

Thanks to Alexandra Carmichael.

More Her latest post mentions me (“The fella after my own heart is Seth Roberts, who after ten years of experimenting . . . “). I was unaware of that when I wrote the above.

Acne Cured By Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts13 Comments

In November, at Quantified Self Europe, Martha Rotter, who lives in Ireland, gave a talk about how she cured her acne by self-experimentation. She summarizes her talk like this (slides here):

When I moved to Ire­land [from Seattle] in 2007, I began to have skin prob­lems. It began gradu­ally and I attrib­uted it to the move, to stress, to late nights drink­ing with developers and cli­ents, to travel, to whatever excuses I could think of. The stress was mul­ti­plied by the anxi­ety of being embar­rassed about how my face looked, but also because my new job in Ire­land involved me being on stage in front of large audi­ences con­stantly, often sev­eral times a week. A year later my skin was per­petu­ally inflamed, red, full of sores and very pain­ful. When one spot would go away, two more would spring up in its place. It was a tough time. I cried a lot.

Frus­trated, I went to see my homet­own der­ma­to­lo­gist while I was home for hol­i­days. He told me that a) this was com­pletely nor­mal and b) there was noth­ing I could do but go on anti­bi­ot­ics for a year (in addi­tion to spend­ing a for­tune on creams and pills). I didn’t believe either of those things.

I was not inter­ested in being on an anti­bi­otic for a year, nor was I inter­ested in Accu­tane (my best friend has had it mul­tiple times and it hasn’t had long term res­ults, plus it can be risky). What I was inter­ested in was fig­ur­ing out why this was hap­pen­ing and chan­ging my life to make it stop. I refused to accept my dermatologist’s insist­ence that what you put in your body has no effect on how you look and feel.

I began sys­tem­at­ic­ally cut­ting things out of my diet to see how I reacted. First chicken and soy, based on a recom­mend­a­tion from a food aller­gist. Over the course of a year I cut out sugar, glu­ten, carbs, starches, caf­feine, meat, fish until finally the magical month of Decem­ber 2010 when I cut out dairy. My skin was my own again by New Year’s day this year.

It took a year to fig­ure it out. It was com­pletely worth it. There’s noth­ing wrong with Irish dairy, it just doesn’t work for me. I drink Amer­icanos instead of lattes now, I don’t eat cer­eal; none of that is a huge deal. For what it’s worth, I can drink goat’s milk.

A great example of the power of self-experimentation compared to trusting doctors. One quibble: I’ll be more sure “there’s nothing wrong with Irish dairy” if she finds that American dairy also causes skin problems. The evidence so far (she didn’t have skin problems until she moved to Ireland) suggests that at least for her American dairy (i.e., dairy where she lived in America) is better than Irish dairy. I have heard Irish dairy praised. They sell Irish butter at Beijing stores near me. I won’t be buying it.

At the end of her post she makes a very important point:

Quan­ti­fied Self isn’t for every­one, but every­one should feel they have the power to change things in their body and their life for the better.

I agree. By learning about examples of people who have done just that — such as Martha — we will come closer to having that power. Right now, as far as I can tell, most people feel helpless. They do what doctors or other experts tell them to do, even if it doesn’t work very well.

Long ago, hardly anyone could read. This left them in the grip of those who could. But eventually came mass literacy, when the benefits of reading finally exceeded the costs (e.g., because more books were available at lower prices). Reading is primitive science: if you read about things that happened, it is information gathering. It resembles doing a survey. Nowadays, almost everyone (in rich countries) reads, but almost no one does experimental science. This leaves them in the grip of those who can do experimental science (e.g., drug companies). I think my work and Martha’s work suggest we are close to another turning point, where, for nonscientists, the benefits of doing experiments exceed the costs.

Thanks to Gary Wolf.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Thanks to Hal Pashler, Dave Lull and Mike Bowerman.

The Legacy of Steve Jobs

Seth Roberts16 Comments

Sue Halpern has written the first interesting assessment of Steve Jobs I’ve seen, in the form of a book review of Isaacson’s biography. It happens to be very negative. She says little about his now-well-known bad treatment of coworkers, friends and family (“a bully, a dissembler, a cheapskate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator”) and focusses on the effects of Apple Computer, which are obviously much greater.

She makes one very bad point. He should not call himself an artist, she argues:

There is no doubt that the products Steve Jobs brilliantly conceived of and oversaw at Apple were elegant and beautiful, but they were, in the end, products. Artists, typically, aim to put something of enduring beauty into the world; consumer electronics companies aim to sell a lot of gadgets, manufacturing desire for this year’s model in the hope that people will discard last year’s.

“In the end, products”? “Gadgets”? Are books gadgets? I cannot imagine a future without books. Nor one without cellphones and laptops. If they are lovely and work well, so much the better for all of us. Moreover, cellphones and laptops, much more than other necessities (food, clothes, housing, transportation, medicine) help us express ourselves — our hidden inner selves — in so many ways. (Like art and books, but better.) Mark Fraunfelder made a similar point (obliquely).

“Products” and “gadgets” is Halpern’s conventional anti-consumerism. She goes on to make two equally conventional but much better points:

According to a study reported by Bloomberg News last January, Apple ranked at the very bottom of twenty-nine global tech firms “in terms of responsiveness and transparency to health and environmental concerns in China.” Yet walking into the Foxconn factory, where people routinely work six days a week, from early in the morning till late at night standing in enforced silence, Steve Jobs might have entered his biggest reality distortion field of all. “You go into this place and it’s a factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools,” he said after being queried by reporters about working conditions there shortly after a spate of suicides. “For a factory, it’s pretty nice.”

Apple had (and has) the power to improve working conditions at Foxconn. I completely agree: this was (and is) an enormous missed opportunity, for which Steve Jobs is completely responsible. No doubt he said that Apple products empower individuals (and they do) — well, how about empowering Foxconn workers?

Halpern’s final point is about recycling:

Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’s art.

Yeah. Apple could (and can) lead the world in making their products easy to recycle. They haven’t. Entirely Steve Jobs’ fault. As Halpern says, this really matters.

Steve Jobs spent his working life (a) exploiting the commercial potential of new products (home computer, etc.) in large part by (b) caring obsessively, much more than others in his rarefied position, such as Bill Gates, about how they made him feel. Apple made products that Steve Jobs enjoyed. Fine. The problem is what Steve Jobs enjoyed. My take on him is a lot can be explained by (a) he cared little what others thought of him and (b) he lived in a tiny, uncomplicated intellectual world — as illustrated by his remarks about Foxconn and his Stanford graduation speech. Nabokov might say he had the emotional development of a child and the curiosity of an adult.

He left behind a company that reflects the shallowness of what he cared about. Those who take over Apple Computer are likely to be less shallow than he was — most people are. I predict the company will begin to care more about working conditions, ease of recycling, and other things beyond immediate user experience.

Carl Willat on the Democratization of Magic

Seth Roberts3 Comments

My friend Carl Willat (of the Willat Effect) is an amateur magician. I sent him this link (“Is the Internet Destroying — or Transforming — the Magic of Magic?”). He replied:

I hadn’t seen that article, but I follow this debate and read both sides of it almost daily. He raises some good points and others I disagree with, but in the end it doesn’t matter because the trend of revealing magic secrets is unstoppable, regardless of what I think. But calling it a good thing doesn’t really make sense. Steinmeyer says people overestimate the value of secrets in magic by a factor of ten, and this is true in the sense that the secret is not the effect. I can enjoy magic performances even if I know the secret, but if I’m fooled I enjoy it more by a factor of ten, let’s say. The engine isn’t the only important thing in my car but it won’t go without it.

I don’t think it makes sense to compare a few people copying Vernon’s $20 manuscript with people giving away secrets on YouTube, because the distribution is so much bigger and it takes almost no effort or even serious interest to learn the secrets. The author also lost me by coming down on one side of the books vs. videos debate. They’re each good for different reasons. A book can’t always illustrate what something is supposed to look like in action. A video can never have all the detail you can get out of a good book. If all you want is to perform a trick exactly like someone else does, videos are particularly good. I actually think the main value of videos is to see a trick performed so you can see if you want to learn it or not. As time goes on I feel more and more reluctant to perform someone else’s material, and when I do I change it around and add my own variations. Otherwise I don’t feel like I’m contributing anything. One of the reasons Lennart Green’s stuff knocked me out was that his material is mostly fairly original and not obviously related to standard techniques, so his whole performance seems magical.
It would have been interesting in this article to have included information about Armando Lucero, a magician who not only doesn’t have any teaching books or videos, but tries to keep even his performances off the internet. I took a fairly expensive workshop from him, and we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement promising not to reveal any of his techniques. This seems to have worked, as his secrets haven’t really leaked out, and there is still a kind of mystique around him and his magic. In my opinion that’s what magic is supposed to be like. I’ve obviously benefited by the general availability of DVDs and books about magic, but I didn’t just want to learn secrets, I wanted to perform. I think as soon as you have to put out some kind of effort to learn you’re already separated from the merely curious, whether it be by getting a magic book out of the library or shelling out some money for a video at the magic store. It shows you want to perform, not just learn the secrets. But I think for most people looking at these internet videos it’s just a break from Facebook and pornography.
Is there a relationship between your interest in the democratization of magic and your philosophy of self-experimentation? Because I can see how you might feel we should get out from under the tyranny of Big Magic and its oppressive secrets. (this is where I would put in a smiling emoticon if I knew how to make them)
This trend in magic seems related to the diminishing “specialness” in everything. For example everyone has cameras on their cell phones now and takes pictures all the time, so to be a “photographer” is nothing. My film students at the Academy refuse to think of film as art. Everybody makes films, there are a billion of them on YouTube, so why should we put any special effort into them? Their films all feature their roommates in the dorms. On YouTube everyone can be a magician. Ironically, a recorded video is about the worst way to experience a magic performance.
I replied:

Yeah, I agree, the democratization of science and the democratization of magic (not to mention photography and film-making) are related. Perhaps I should have a blanket opinion about this stuff but you are the first person to raise the issue.

In the 16th century or thereabouts, mathematicians had contests about solving equations. It wasn’t known how to solve a 3rd degree equation (e.g., x^3 – x = 5). Finally one guy figured it out. It gave him a huge advantage. Of course he kept it a secret. When mathematical knowledge became better known, because of books, they stopped having those contests. Mathematicians could no longer make money and impress women by winning them. Math stopped being a kind of sideshow similar to magic and eventually became the foundation of engineering and science. This couldn’t have happened if it was still a bunch of secrets.

It is early in the democratization of magic, but I think a similar story is plausible — not likely, just plausible. One possibility is that democratization “cheapens” everything or at least makes it harder to make a living at magic. The whole enterprise withers and dies. Another possibility is that, as the Masked Magician said, the revelation of techniques pushes people to invent new ones. They can no longer keep doing the old ones. I think he is perfectly correct. I think the reason that fashion evolved (a feature of our brains) is to push artisans to keep inventing. You really do need to give people a push, otherwise they will stagnate. A third possibility is that the democratization of magic will push the ideas out into a much wider range of people and these people will see the ideas in a new way. They won’t merely invent new tricks; they will begin to grasp how the underlying ideas can be applied in other places.

As a professor of psychology I think I can say this: academic psychologists such as myself have almost no interest in using the ideas we discover and study to help people. (That I used them to lose weight is unprecedented.) It is all about publishing papers, getting tenure, getting promoted, perhaps even winning prizes. That’s neither bad nor good, it’s human nature. The magic you do, on the other hand, is applied psychology. It is entirely useful. So magicians have (a) figured out psychology that works and (b) use it all the time to get something they want (attention, money). That is no small achievement. But they have zero interest in systematizing it (asking: what are the general principles?) and applying those principles in other domains. Other people, however, could easily want to do this. The ideas have to reach those other people for the systematization and application to happen. Nowadays the ideas behind magic tricks are reaching a wider audience so this is becoming more likely to happen.

So I’m like someone in the 15th century who tells the mathematician who has discovered how to solve cubic equations: hey, tell other people your secrets, it will be great! It would sound crazy. But if you want my overall opinion, I think that magic has stagnated, like many other areas of life. I think the democratization has been a powerful force for innovation, just as the Masked Magician claimed, although you would know better than me. I also think, unlike anything the Masked Magician said, that the ideas behind magic are far more important than what present-day professional magicians are using them for. Professional magicians are too busy doing what they have done for the last 20 years and too busy trying to make a living to take advantage of this (which will have zero monetary payoff, at first). But other younger people are more flexible.

Christmas: An Evolutionary Explanation (repost)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I wrote this five years ago. Perhaps it is a holiday tradition to repost old posts about the deadweight loss of gifts.

In a kitchenware store a few years ago I came across the Rotary Nutcracker, a futuristic-looking device that cracks nuts in a new way. The girl at the cash register gave me a few walnuts to test it. It didn’t crack any of them. This was a curious product, I thought. Who would buy it? The salesperson told me that they’d stocked it for less than a year. I was the first person to test it. It had sold well during holiday season. Now I understood: people didn’t buy it for themselves, they bought it as a gift. As a gift, it mattered much less how well it worked — “it’s the thought that counts.” No wonder I was the first to test it.

Here, I saw, was my theory of human evolution in . . . well, a nutshell. Part of it. Humans are the only animals with occupational specialization — we specialize, and trade. It started with hobbies. Hobbies became part-time jobs. Part-time jobs became full-time jobs. To support full-time jobs — to generate enough demand for the products of this or that specialization — there has to be enough expertise, which builds up slowly. To build up expertise, our brains changed so as to cause creation of special events like Christmas, Japanese New Year, Spring Festival (in China), and a thousand other examples around the world. Such events increase the demand for high-end craftsmanship, thus helping the most skilled craftsmen — the ones most likely to advance the state of their art — make a living. Christmas increases the demand for Christmas cards (fine printing) and Christmas-tree ornaments, for example. Traditional gift-giving has the same effect: It increases demand for “the better things in life.” Most gifts, if you follow the usual norms, are (a) not something you would buy for yourself and (b) not something the recipient would buy. (As Alex Tabarrok has noticed.) They are harder to make — and thus reward skilled craftsmen more — than the stuff we buy for ourselves, just as Christmas ornaments are harder to make than common household objects and Christmas-card printing is more difficult than most printing. Weddings, with the gifts, finery, invitations, etc., are another example. The Rotary Nutcracker didn’t work in my tests but it almost worked. If enough people bought it as a gift, that would finance the research needed to improve it.

Marginal Revolution and James Surowiecki have recently written about the “deadweight loss of Christmas” — about how gifts tend to be worth less than their cost. I think they see this as bad thing but I see it as a good thing — at least, in our evolutionary past it was a good thing. Deadweight loss = research grant. Likewise, the denizens of The Devil Wears Prada appear slightly defensive about the social value of fashion. They seem to believe that fashion is less useful than “curing cancer” (by which they mean doing research to learn how to cure cancer). Actually, high fashion, with its hard-to-make skirts, belts, and accessories, is the same as curing cancer — they’re two ways of increasing the human skill set. Art is the old Science.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Robin Barooah and Mike Bowerman.

More Neglect of the Immune System: Bioterrorism Fear

Seth Roberts13 Comments

At UC Berkeley several years ago, I learned about an introductory epidemiology class. I knew the professor. I phoned him. “Are you going to discuss factors that make the immune system work better or worse?” I asked. “No,” he said. I wasn’t surprised. In my experience, epidemiologists completely ignore this question. As if the immune system had never been discovered. It sounds absurd, but there it is.

Epidemiologists aren’t the only ones. All well-publicized attempts to “battle” or “combat” or “defeat” or “beat” viruses, such as cold or flu viruses, neglect this possibility, in my experience. Whole books on the subject do not mention the immune system. The latest example of the blindness is an article by Michael Specter at the New Yorker website about fear caused by discovery of how to make a bird flu virus spread more easily. Maybe the knowledge could be used by terrorists. Specter writes as if the immune system doesn’t exist. He doesn’t mention it and ignores the possibility of defending against new viruses by improving immune function. For example, he writes:

Instead of focussing so heavily on human terrorists, we ought to take this opportunity to defeat a natural pathogen—one we can now recognize and manipulate with all the sophistication of molecular biology.

You don’t need molecular biology to study immune function. He also writes:

There are three conditions necessary for a flu outbreak to become a deadly pandemic, like the one in in 1918 that killed between fifty and a hundred million people. Those conditions rarely converge. First, a new virus—one that has never before infected humans and to which nobody would have protective antibodies—must emerge from the animal reservoirs where they originate. That virus has to make people sick. (The vast majority do not.) Finally, it must be able to spread rapidly and efficiently—through a cough, a handshake, or a kiss.

He writes as if whether a virus makes people sick and spreads rapidly depends solely on the virus. This is false: How well your immune system is working makes a big difference. If a virus is fought off quickly, you won’t notice — you won’t “get sick”. Because you are infected more briefly, you will spread it less. (Possibly much much less. If a virus doubles in number in 4 hours, then two fewer days of infection equals a huge reduction in the number of virus particles inside you while you are contagious.)

In this blindness, I’m sure Specter reflects the blindness of the scientists he talks to. They simply talk and think about what they do, which is molecular biology.

I became aware of the power of improving the immune system when I improved my sleep and stopped getting colds. More recently, I have become sure that eating fermented foods improves immune function. I suspect that a lot of traditional medicine, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, is effective because it improves immune function. (For example, the use of bee venom to treat arthritis.) Everyone knows at an answer-test-question level that the immune system exists. A lot has been learned about how it works. But the vast majority of doctors and other health experts (and journalists) ignore this knowledge in practice.

 

Two Years on the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Alex Chernavsky, who often comments here, has updated his Shangri-La Diet (SLD) page. It now shows his weight over four years: two years before he started SLD and two years that he has been doing it.

Before he started SLD he was slowly gaining weight. After he started SLD, he went from 220 pounds (BMI = 32) to 193 pounds. He slowly gained a few pounds. Then (on my advice) he added a tablespoon of nose-clipped coconut butter and the steady climb stopped. Ffor about nine months has been steady at 195 pounds (BMI = 28). In other words, there is no sign that he is regaining the lost weight.

Because Alex has added a lot of omega-3 to his diet (via flaxseed oil), I’m sure his health has improved in other ways. Because he is a vegan, he had no interest in a conventional (Atkins) low-carb diet.

Alex reminded me that a doctor named Quigley left the following comment:

I’ve tried to find data that your diet works for SUSTAINED weight reduction in a study that would be applicable to a generalizable population. As you know, temporary weight loss is relatively easy. Sustained weight loss (wt loss > 2 yrs), is hard. If your diet can do it, I’d prescribe it every day.