Month: December 2012

Is Jimmy Moore’s Ketosis Diet the Shangri-La Diet in Disguise?

Seth Roberts17 Comments

I have recently encountered three examples that suggest low-carb diets don’t work well long-term:

1. Alex Chernavsky tried a low-carb diet in 2002. Starting at 270 pounds, he lost 70 pounds. A year later, he started to rapidly regain the lost weight. He stopped the diet.

2. A “medical professional” started at about 260 pounds (she’s 5’3″). After reading Wheat Belly, she gave up wheat. “After several months of being wheat free I lost 10 lbs. But that’s where it stopped.” Then she did full low-carb. “From May to July I did what basically was Atkins induction. I lost 20 lbs but then the weight loss stopped.”

3. Jimmy Moore lost a lot of weight eating low-carb. Starting in 2004 at 410 pounds, he lost 180 pounds. Then he gained half of it back, ending up near 300 pounds in early 2012.

The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet (SLD) says unfamiliar food will cause weight loss because its smell is not (yet) associated with calories. As the food becomes familiar, its smell becomes associated with calories. Weight loss due to unfamiliarity will disappear. Going low-carb usually involves eating unfamiliar foods. They become familiar. This explains low-carb weight regain. The theory explains partial low-carb success (e.g., Jimmy Moore didn’t regain all the lost weight) by assuming that the high-carb foods (e.g., soft drinks) given up produced stronger smell-calorie associations than the low-carb foods (e.g., steak) that replaced them.

Recently Jimmy Moore has been losing weight again. Starting at 306 pounds, over 7 months he has lost 60 pounds. He believes that to lose weight with a low-carb diet, there must be sufficient ketones in your blood — you must be at the optimal level of ketosis. “In order to be fully keto-adapted and to start burning stored body fat for fuel, ketone levels must be between 0.5 to 3.0 millimolar,” he wrote. To be fully keto-adapted, he began measuring his ketone level regularly. His first test showed that his ketone level was 0.3. “Holy cow, that could be one of the reasons why I’m not seeing my weight go down!” he wrote. He began adjusting his diet to put his ketone level between 0.5 and 3.0 millimolar, which involved changing protein intake as well as carb intake.

He changed his diet in various ways (mainly protein reduction) and started losing weight. In what I’ve read, he does not describe his current diet or earlier diet in detail, but does say this:

I will tell you that I’ve drank liberal amounts of water and 2 Tbs Carlson’s liquid fish oil daily along with my regular daily vitamins during this experiment.

Which sounds exactly like the Shangri-La Diet. Alex Chernavsky lost considerable weight and has kept it off doing almost the same thing with flaxseed oil.

My guess is that he is losing weight because of the fish oil. The theory behind SLD makes two predictions: 1. If Jimmy stops the fish oil and continues the ketone level adjustment, he will stop losing weight. 2. If Jimmy stops the ketone level adjustment but continues the fish oil, he will continue losing weight.

I asked Jimmy for comment. Here’s what he said:

It’s an interesting theory, but not one I want to particularly test out since I’m still doing so well at accomplishing what I am aiming for right now–fat loss, mental acuity and great overall health [all due to the fish oil, I believe — Seth]. Perhaps once this period of testing NK [nutritional ketosis] is over in May, I can add in your suggestion as another testing point.

The theory behind low-carb dieting has never made any correct predictions, as far as I know. It does not explain why the lost weight is often regained. If it turns out Jimmy Moore’s weight loss is due to his ketone adjustment, that will be the first correct prediction of the theory.

In contrast, the theory behind SLD led me to five new ways to lose weight (eating bland food, eating slowly-digested food, drinking unflavored sugar water, drinking oil with no smell, eating food nose-clipped). That’s roughly the same as five correct predictions, two of them (drinking sugar water, drinking oil with no smell) counter-intuitive.

Jimmy Moore’s weight loss may eventually show you can lose weight via SLD even when you don’t realize you’re doing SLD.

Shangri-La Diet Tip: How to Drink Flaxseed Oil

Seth Roberts10 Comments

A good way to do the Shangri-La Diet is to drink flaxseed oil between meals. It pushes down your setpoint and also supplies omega-3. Alex Chernavsky, for example, has had success with this. You will probably want to make the flaxseed oil smell-less. Here’s how:

I read something on Amazon by one of the people who reviewed your book and it’s worked for me. I take a small sip of water and keep it in my mouth and then take the tablespoon [of flaxseed oil] with my nose closed with the water in still in my mouth and swallow. Then I take a another drink of water and then I swish my mouth out with water and after all of it is done I have no residue of flax oil taste. It sounds like a lot to do but it really isn’t.

Lately I’ve been doing the Shangri-La Diet by eating a daily bowl of yogurt, ground flaxseed (50 g), honey and fruit with my nose clipped shut. It tastes great because it is creamy, sour and sweet and has a variety of textures. It has a fair amount of calories (400?) so it’s good for weight loss. I have to push myself to drink flaxseed oil but I have no trouble eating this.

One Reason for French Longevity: Molded Cheese

Seth Roberts9 Comments

A new article emphasizes the benefits of cheese, especially “molded” cheese, such as Roquefort and Gorganzola. Fermentation, if that is the right word, is essential:

The advantageous properties of cheese appear dynamically during the ripening process. Cheese which has been ripened for longer has been shown to be more effective in restoration of glucose tolerance, prevention of steatosis [fat deposition inside a cell] and adipose tissue oxidative stress than short-ripened specimens. This data suggests that organic substances responsible for the health benefits of cheese emerge not merely due to mixing the ingredients required for cheese production, but rather as a result of a complex time-dependent enzymatic transformation of the cheese core controlled by probiota, temperature, humidity and possibly other factors.

Only in South Korea and Japan do people have less heart disease than in France, says the article. Readers of this blog will quickly see what South Korea, Japan, and France have in common. All of them eat much more fermented food than most people in rich countries. South Korea: kimchi. Japan: miso and pickles. France: cheese and wine.

Thanks to Peter MacLeod.

False Confidence About What Caused the Newtown Massacre

Seth Roberts3 Comments

New York magazine commenters are usually smart and well-informed. Which is why this comment, on an article about “the forgotten victim”, Nancy Lanza, the shooter’s mother, stands out:

They say money cannot buy happiness [Adam’s father is apparently rich], but when dealing with someone with a mental illness, it can go a long way toward paying to fix unhappiness — it can pay for good doctors, proper medication [emphasis added], care-givers/guardians, all the tools required to secure a property and keep the “patient” safe, AND giving the mentally ill person his ideal living situation, limiting the snits and tantrums that can lead to real anger, which, in turn can lead to acting out.

No doubt this particular commenter is smart and well-informed. Which makes the fact that he or she is perfectly sure that “proper medication” exists so scary, at least if this person had any control over me or anyone who mattered to me. It reminds me of people who think that if you’re fat all you have to do is eat less.

Twenty Dead Schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.

Seth Roberts14 Comments

Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, was taking medication, according to a neighbor. Here’s what someone said in 2008: “Every young, male shooter [who] has gone on a killing spree in the United States also has a history of treatment with psychotropic drugs — typically SSRI antidepressants. These shootings have three things in common: 1) The shooters are young males. 2) The shooters exhibit a mind-numbed disconnect with reality. 3) The shooters have a history of taking psychiatric medications.”

Lanza was considered by his mom to have Asperger’s. No doubt that, and the associated isolation, had something to do with the medication. As I point out every year at Nobel Prize time, the research methods favored by the healthcare establishment have done little to reduce major diseases, such as depression. With few exceptions, year after year little progress is made on figuring out the environmental cause of anything, including Asperger’s and autism. The result of this lack of progress is that almost every serious health problem, including mental health problems, gets treated with drugs or surgery rather than prevented or treated safely with necessary nutrients (as scurvy is treated with lime juice). The little progress that is made in finding environmental causes is undervalued. The researchers who figured out that smoking causes lung cancer didn’t even get a Nobel Prize. The effect of failing year after year to find environmental causes is that people take more and more drugs with little-known or unknown side effects, which are almost always bad. The association of SSRI antidepressants and violence is still unknown to many people, for example. The problem has been made worse by drug companies hiding data. As Ben Goldacre says in Bad Pharma, one of the worst cases involved an antidepressant called paroxetine, whose manufacturer (GlaxoSmithKline) withheld data about its tendency to cause suicide. My work has suggested that a lot of depression may be due to lack of exposure to faces in the morning, an idea utterly different than the neurochemical theories of depression favored by psychiatrists. I am sure that seeing faces in the morning is safer than taking psychiatric drugs.

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Best Books of 2012

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In order of quality (best first):

1. The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (published 2011) by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. The best book about political science I have read. A leader always needs supporters. The essential difference between dictatorships and democracies is how many. Full of data and examples that this view — the whole theory is a bit more complicated — explains. Econtalk interviews.

2. Antifragile: Things that Gain From Disorder by Nassim Taleb (copy sent me by author). Full of original ideas. It may be unprecedented that a serious thinker so anti-establishment has so loud a voice. Much of the book is about a generalization of hormesis, the observation that a small amount of Treatment X can be beneficial even though a large amount of Treatment X is deadly. For example, a small amount of smoking is probably good for you. Taleb goes beyond this to say that in some things, the hormetic benefit (the benefit from small amounts) is much larger than in other similar things. You can fulfill the same function (governance, banking, science) with a system where the entities benefit a lot from small shocks (which Taleb calls “anti-fragile”) or a system where the entities benefit not at all from small shocks. Systems where small shocks cause benefits tend to suffer less when exposed to large shocks. In my personal science, I have benefited a lot from day-to-day changes in my life (e.g., it led me to discover that butter improves my brain function and flaxseed oil improves my balance). In large science, day-to-day variation is only harmful. The core idea is that hormesis-like dose-response functions exist outside of the drug/poison/mice/rat/health experiments in which they were discovered.

3. Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: How Microlending Lost Its Way and Betrayed the Poor by Hugh Sinclair (copy sent me by publisher). By “microfinance” he means microcredit. Sinclair convinced me that the belief that microcredit is a wonderful thing for poor people is one of the big delusions of our time. It is a wonderful thing only for the institutions that give it out (at exorbitant interest rates, usually). Sinclair sums it up like this (pp. 217-8): “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Give a woman a microcredit loan to buy a fishing boat, and the CEOs of the MFI [microfinance institute] and the microfinance funds will eat for a lifetime.” Sinclair continues: “There is too much at stake [for the CEO’s] to allow any genuine scrutiny.”

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts10 Comments
  • “Light” Ph.D. — a less expensive research degree
  • Umami Burger expands
  • A diuretic reduces autism symptoms. Does water balance influence brain function in people without autism?
  • This Amazon reviewer is almost always disappointed and his one-star reviews are fun to read. I suggest that ratings (book ratings, product ratings, etc.) compare the rating to other ratings given by the rater. A 5-star rating is more impressive if a rater’s average rating is 2 than if it is 5. I suggest percentiles. For example, rating = 5 (90%ile) is more impressive than rating = 5 (50%ile). I’d also like to know the average percentile across raters.
  • Lack of variation in heart rate predicts infection in neonates. The writer (Mike Loukides) is too surprised (“astonishing connection”). Many studies have found associations between too-little variation in heart rate and serious health problems.

Thanks to Adam Clemens and Patrick Vlaskovits.

Radical Thought at Johns Hopkins Medical School

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Brent Pottenger, who is a medical student at John Hopkins, writes:

Today, as a required activity for our Hopkins Med endocrinology course, we watched excerpts Supersize Me and Tom Naughton’s Fat Head. Our professor then engaged us in a discussion comparing the two films. Our professor told our class that the lipid hypothesis is incorrect, said that the USDA Food Pyramid is the product of corn and wheat subsidies (and lobbies), and definitely stirred up some uneasy responses from my classmates.

I asked Brent what had made them uneasy.

What the professor said contradicted what they believe. Every professor before this has demonized saturated fat, meats, etc., so this was the first time someone questioned that belief.

How did they express their unease?

They expressed unease by getting up and leaving the lecture hall, by whispering in disgust to their neighbors, etc. — you could see it on their faces. Then, some of the more curious classmates who are always inquisitive followed up with genuine questions, wanting to know more about the validity to the statements made in Tom’s movie about Ancel Keys, the McGovern Report, the USDA, the science of the lipid hypothesis, etc.

Why Quantified Self Matters

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Why Quantified Self Matters is the title of a talk I gave yesterday at a Quantified Self conference in Beijing. I gave six examples of things I’d discovered via self-tracking and self-experiment (self-centered moi?), such as how to lose weight (the Shangri-La Diet) and be in a better mood. I said that the Quantified Self movement matters because it supports that sort of thing, i.e., personal science, which has several advantages over professional science. The Quantified Self movement supports learning from data, in contrast to trusting experts.

If I’d had more time, I would have said that personal science and professional science have different strengths. Personal science is good at both the beginning of research (when a new idea has not yet been discovered) and the end of research (when a new idea, after having been confirmed, is applied in everyday life). It is a good way to come up with plausible new ideas and a good way to develop them (assess their plausibility when they are still not very plausible, figure out the best dose, the best treatment details). That’s the beginning of research. Personal science is also a good way to take accepted ideas and apply them in everyday life (e.g., a medical treatment, an idea about deficiency disease) because it fully allows for human diversity (e.g., a medicine that works for most people doesn’t work for you, you have an allergy, whatever). That’s the end of research.

Professional science works well, better than personal science, when an idea is in a middle range of plausibility — quite plausible but not yet fully accepted. At that point it fits a professional scientist’s budget. Their research must be expensive (Veblen might have coined the term conspicuous research, in addition to “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure”) and only quite plausible ideas are worth expensive tests. It also fits their other needs, such as avoidance of “crazy” ideas and a steady stream of publishable results (because ideas that are quite plausible are likely to produce usable results when tested). Professional science is also better than personal science for studying all sorts of “useless” topics. They aren’t actually useless but the value is too obscure and perhaps the research too expensive for people to study them on their own (e.g., I did research on how rats measure time).

In other words, the Quantified Self movement matters because it gives all of us a new scientific tool. A way to easily see where the scientific tools we already have cannot easily see.