- A Bayesian view of the Shangri-La Diet. “I’m slightly annoyed to have found evidence for something so silly on my first attempt to run an experiment on myself, and I strongly suspect that I’ve done something wrong, but I can’t figure out what. . . [The diet is] clearly ridiculous. . . . Originally I was interested in checking out a hoax that appears to have convinced many people despite a complete lack of rigorous evidence.”
- The Desire Project. What do women want? A documentary series.
- It took doctors three years to figure out that a child has a Lego piece in his nose.
- Problems with One Laptop Per Child. More about the history of the project at its Wikipedia page.
- Less sleep associated with less vaccine response. One more reason to think better sleep = better immune function.
- It isn’t easy to sell homemade sauerkraut. “All proceeds go to the Sandy Boyce Vacation Fund.”
Thanks to Alex Blackwood and Bryan Castañeda.
Here’s another article that I found to be interesting:
A very modern trauma
It’s a blog post about some new studies about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The studies suggest that this is a modern disease (soldiers from the American Civil War didn’t seem to get it, for example).
Seth, can’t imagine how you found my little blog. Sorry if you took any diss from it. You must admit your diet sounds like a (genius) hoax from a standing start!
But the combination of actually feeling it working and reading your clear explanations and justifications of the theory have brought me round as far as ‘A good idea, not proven’.
I’d seriously like it to be true though. Not just for me (I’m usually slightly overweight) but for all the poor fat people in the world who are made extra miserable by idiots telling them it’s their fault.
The weak spot in the theory to me looks like ‘set point adjusting to lack of flavours’. I can’t imagine why it would work that way.
I can imagine some poor caveman starving to death because last Tuesday he couldn’t finish his plate of mammoth and now it’s gone off! Surely he’d be well advised to eat everything he can get his hands on in mid-winter.
Evolution does seem to come up with some spectacularly crap mechanisms, but control of appetite must be very ancient, and you’d think it properly debugged by now.
Also, I get the impression that your diet just doesn’t work for some people, so there must be some pieces of the puzzle still to put in, even if the theory’s basically right.
Why the hell has there not been any large-scale independent controlled experiment on this? The effect seems obvious, large, testable and Nobel-prize worthy.
Seth: “The weak spot in the theory to me looks like ‘set point adjusting to lack of flavours’. I can’t imagine why it would work that way”. My explanation: The weight control system uses the strength of smell-calorie associations to judge the abundance of food. When food is abundant, we eat food that tastes better (= stronger smell-calorie association) than when food is scarce. Zero smell-calorie association is treated as close to weak smell-calorie association. When food is scarce is when your set point should go down, just as when you are unemployed is when you should spend money in your bank account.
Actually our caveman might get more benefit from sharing the spare food. Prediction: This only works in social species.
Sauerkraut: I will never ever cease to be amazed how some countries treat some foods like WMDs (or worse). This reminds me to go to our local market where a local sells home-made sauerkraut from a vat almost the way it was sold for hundreds of years https://static.etrend.sk/uploads/tx_media/2007/01/22_Rac03.jpg. And then stop by a farmer to grab a bottle of raw milk to have a healthy sip!
Jan
Seth, second month of this didn’t go so well, details here:
https://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/shangri-la-diet-fail-but-interestingly.html
I think I’m using the wrong types of oil. Do you have any specific recommendations for a particular brand that I’d be able to get hold of in England? I’d be quite happy to order it from America if necessary. This is interesting.
Any other advice/tips also much appreciated.