Month: March 2013

The Rise of Personal Science: One Example, About Acne

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Looking around for evidence connecting glutathione level and acne (it has been proposed that low glutathione causes acne), I found this at acne.org, from a 20-year-old woman:

As a personal choice research and viewing other people’s experiences with supplements is safer than taking my doctor’s advice. My doctor insisted I go on the pill, insisted I get on antibiotics [a common prescription for acne], insisted nothing was wrong with me and even did a hormonal test…said I was “healthy and normal” and to leave the office because my hormones were normal as well as everything from the liver onwards. I stared at him and told him he was wrong: 1. hormone tests will lie if I’m on the pill and 2. I have acne, never had it before in my life and it came about too fast … If acne is a symptom then something is wrong. I personally don’t trust doctors because they generalize [too much] and from personal experiences [where] I’ve been laughed at and dismissed and even told “leaky gut doesn’t exist”. Personal research goes a long way and it’s so great to have communities like this where everyone can help each other out.

This is personal science in the sense of trying to learn from other people’s data. What’s interesting is that she says this. Nobody forced her to. She isn’t try to sell something or look good. Her discovery of the power of “research and viewing other people’s experiences” — better than trusting a doctor — (a) interests her and (b) she thinks will interest acne.org readers. Her own experience certainly supports what she says.

Long ago, it was discovered that the Earth is round. Before the discovery, nobody said that. After the discovery, people discussed it for a while (“Have you heard? The Earth is round.”), maybe a few hundred years. When knowledge of the Earth’s roundness became part of everyone’s belief system, people stopped discussing it.

In other words, this comment suggests that a new truth is coming into being. Her experience is the same as mine with regard to acne: Can’t trust what a doctor says. My dermatologist prescribed two medicines. Studying myself showed that only one of them worked, a possibility my dermatologist seemed to have never considered.

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Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.

Posit Science: Does It Work? (Continued)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In an earlier post I asked 15 questions about Zelinski et al. (2011) (“Improvement in memory with plasticity-based adaptive cognitive training: results of the 3-month follow-up”), a study done to measure the efficacy of the brain training sold by Posit Science. The study asked if the effects of training were detectable three months after it stopped. Henry Mahncke, the head of Posit Science, recently sent me answers to a few of my questions.

Most of my questions he declined to answer. He didn’t answer them, he said, because they contained “innuendo”. My questions were ordinary tough (or “critical”) questions. Their negative slant was not at all hidden (in contrast to innuendo). For the questions he didn’t answer, he substituted less critical questions. I give a few examples below. Unwillingness to answer tough questions about a study raises doubts about it.

His answers raised more doubts. From his answer to Question 7, I learned that although the investigators gave their subjects the whole RBANS, (a) they failed to report the results from the visual subtests and (b) these unreported results did not support their conclusions. Mahncke says this result was not reported “due to lack of publication space.” The original paper did not say that some results were omitted due to lack of space. I assume all favorable results were reported. To report all favorable results but omit some unfavorable results is misleading.

To further explain the omission, Mahncke says

We used the auditory measures as the primary outcome measure because we hypothesized that cognitive domains [by “cognitive domains” he means the cognitive gains due to training — Seth] would be restricted to the trained sensory domain, in this case the auditory system. [emphasis added]

He doesn’t say he believed the gains would be greater with auditory stimuli, he says he believed they would be restricted to auditory stimuli. The Posit Science website says their training increases “memory”, “intelligence”, “focus” and “thinking speed”. None of these are restricted to the auditory system — far from it. Unless I am misunderstanding something, the head of Posit Science doesn’t believe the main claims of the Posit Science website.

Why Mahncke fails to see a difference between methods (Question 13) and results (Question 14), fails to see a difference between methods (Question 11) and discussion (Question 15), and gives a one-word answer (“yes”) to Question 12, I cannot say. In each case, however, he errs on the side of not answering.

My overall conclusion is that this study does not support Posit Science claims. The main measure (RBANS auditory subtests) didn’t show significant retention. A closely related set of measures (RBANS visual subtests) didn’t show significant retention. A third set of measures (“secondary composite measure”) did show retention, but the p value was not corrected for multiple tests. When the p value is corrected for multiple tests, the secondary composite measure may not show significant retention. Because of the large number of subjects (more than 500), repeated failure to find significant retention under presumably near-optimal conditions (e.g., 1 hour/day of training) suggests that the training effect, after three months without training, is small or zero.

I assume that Posit Science sponsored this study because they believed it was unrealistic for subjects to spend 1 hour/day for the rest of their life doing their training. One hour/day was realistic for a while, yes, but not forever. So subjects will stop. Will the gains last? was the question. Apparently the answer is no.

If Mahncke has any response to this, I will post it.

This is another illustration of why personal science (science done for your own benefit, rather than as a job) is important. Professional scientists are under pressure to get certain results. This study is an example. Mahncke was a co-author. Someone employed by Posit Science is under pressure to get results that benefit Posit Science. (I am not saying Mahncke was affected by this pressure.) A personal scientist is not under pressure to get certain results. For example, if I study the effect of tetracycline (an antibiotic) on my acne, I simply want to know if it helps. Both possible answers (yes and no) are equally acceptable. We may need personal scientists to get unbiased answers.

Here are my original questions along with Mahncke’s answer or lack of answer.

1. Isn’t it correct that after three months there was no longer reliable improvement due to training according to the main measure that was chosen by you (the investigators) in advance? If so, shouldn’t that have been the main conclusion (e.g., in the abstract and final paragraph)?

Not answered.

[Seth: Here is Mahncke’s substitute question: “Why do you conclude that “Training effects were maintained but waned over the 3-month no-contact period” given that the “previously significant improvements became non-significant at the 3-month follow-up for the primary outcome”?”]

2. The training is barely described. The entire description is this: “a brain plasticity-based computer program designed to improve the speed and accuracy of auditory information processing and to engage neuromodulatory systems.” To learn more, readers are referred to a paper that is not easily available — in particular, I could not find it on the Posit Science website. Because the training is so briefly described, I was unable to judge how much the outcome tests differ from the training tasks. This made it impossible for me to judge how much the training generalizes to other tasks — which is the whole point. Why wasn’t the training better described?

Not answered.

[Seth: Here is Mahncke’s substitute question: “Could you describe the training program in more depth, to help judge the similarity between the training exercises and the cognitive outcome measures?”]

3. What was the “ET [experimental treatment] processing speed exercise”?

The processing speed exercise is a time order judgment task in which two brief auditory frequency modulated sweeps are presented, either of which may sweep up or down in frequency. The subject must identify each sweep in the correct order (i.e., up/up, down/down, up/down, down/up). The inter-stimulus interval is adaptively manipulated to determine a threshold for reliable task performance. Note that this is not a reaction time task. The characteristics of the sweeps are chosen to match the frequency modulated sweeps common in stop consonant sounds (like /ba/ or /da/). Older listeners generally show strong correlations between processing speed, speech reception accuracy, and memory; which led us to the hypothesis that improving core processing speed in this way would contribute to improving memory. This approach is discussed extensively in “Brain plasticity and functional losses in the aged: scientific bases for a novel intervention” available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17046669

3. [continue] It sounds like a reaction-time task. People will get faster at any reaction-time task if given extensive practice on that task. How is such improvement relevant to daily life? If it is irrelevant, why is it given considerable attention (one of the paper’s four graphs)?

Not answered.

4. According to Table 2, the CSRQ (Cognitive Self-Report Questionnaire) questions showed no significant improvement in trainees’ perceptions of their own daily cognitive functioning, although the p value was close to 0.05. Given the large sample size (~500), this failure to find significant improvement suggests the self-report improvements were small or zero. Why wasn’t this discussed? Is the amount of improvement suggested by Posit Science’s marketing consistent with these results?

Not answered.

5. Is it possible that the improvement subjects experienced was due to the acquisition of strategies for dealing with rapidly presented auditory material, and especially for focusing on the literal words (rather than on their meaning, as may be the usual approach taken in daily life)? If so, is it possible that the skills being improved have little value in daily life, explaining the lack of effect on the CSRQ?

Not answered.

6. In the Methods section, you write “In the a priori data analysis plan for the IMPACT Study, it was hypothesized that the tests constituting the secondary outcome measure would be more sensitive than the RBANS given their larger raw score ranges and sensitivity to cognitive aging effects.” Do the initial post-training tests (measurements of the training effect soon after training ended) support this hypothesis? Why aren’t the initial post-training results described so that readers can see for themselves if this hypothesis is plausible? If you thought the “secondary outcome measure would be more sensitive than the RBANS” why wasn’t the secondary outcome measure the primary measure?

In a large-scale clinical trial such as IMPACT, it is considered best practice to pick as the primary outcome measure a measure that has been employed in earlier studies. We had used the RBANS in two previous studies (references 8 and 17 in the paper). While we had seen significant results in both studies, it was also clear from those studies that the RBANS had ceiling effects in cognitively intact populations that would limit the statistical sensitivity of the measure. For example, the RBANS list recall measure had 10 words, and a reasonable portion of participants get all 10 correct at baseline, leaving no room for improvement regardless of the efficacy of the intervention. Given that observation, we added measures to the IMPACT study that we hypothesized would be more sensitive. For example, the RAVLT has 15 words, leaving more room for improvement and fewer ceiling effects. [It is unclear that more words = more sensitivity. It depends on the words — Seth] However, since we had not used those measures in previous studies, we decided to define these new measures as secondary outcome measures in the data analysis plan. This issue is discussed in depth in the methods section of the main training effect paper (reference 6), and of course that’s where all of the initial post-training results you mention are described. This improved sensitivity of the secondary outcome measures was quite evident in the post-training data; however for reasons of publication length we did not discuss it in that paper. The comparative data would make an interesting publication, and one that might be helpful to other researchers in this field.

7. The primary outcome measure was some of the RBANS (Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status). Did subjects take the whole RBANS or only part of it? If they took the whole RBANS, what were the results with the rest of the RBANS (the subtests not included in the primary outcome measure)?

Participants took the entire RBANS. We used the auditory measures as the primary outcome measure because we hypothesized that cognitive domains [by “domains” he means “gains” — Seth] would be restricted to the trained sensory domain, in this case the auditory system. Interestingly, there was a significant effect on the overall RBANS measure, however there was no significant effect on a composite of the RBANS visual measures. This interesting result was not included in our papers for reasons of publication length.

[Seth: As I said earlier, a surprising answer.]

8. The data analysis refers to a “secondary composite measure”. Why that particular composite and not any of the many other possible composite measures? Were other secondary composite measures considered? If so, were p values corrected for this?

The measures used were the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test total score (sum of trials 1–5) and word list delayed recall, Rivermead Behavioral Memory Test immediate and delayed recall, and Wechsler Memory Scale letter-number sequencing and digit span backwards tests. These measures were chosen a priori as more sensitive than their RBANS cognate measures, and a priori we conservatively chose to integrate all 6 into a single composite measure. Individual test scores are all shown in table 2. This issue is discussed in depth in the methods section of the main training effect paper (reference 6). It’s straightforward to evaluate what the effects shown on other potential composites would be simply from inspecting the individual test data in table 2. In the methods section of the main training effect paper (reference 6), we discuss our approach to multiple comparisons, where we state “A single primary outcome measure (RBANS Memory/ Attention) was predefined to conserve an overall alpha level of 0.05. No corrections for multiple comparisons were made on the secondary measures.” I can see that it would have been helpful to re-iterate that statement in the 2011 paper, and my apologies for the oversight.

[Seth: He doesn’t answer my question “were other secondary measures considered?”]

9. If Test A resembles training more closely than Test B, Test A should show more effect of training (at any retention interval) than Test B. In this case Test A = the RBANS auditory subtests and Test B = the secondary composite measure. In contrast to this prediction, you found that Test B showed a clearer training effect (in terms of p value) than Test A. Why wasn’t this anomaly discussed (beyond what was said in the Methods section)?

Not answered.

10. Were any tests given the subjects not described in this report? If there were other tests, why were their results not described?

All outcome measures performed in the study are reported in the publication.

[Seth: I have no idea how this answer is consistent with (a) the subjects took the visual subtests of the RBANS and (b) the paper fails to report the results of those tests (see answer to Question 7). The paper does not say that the subjects took the visual subtests of the RBANS.]

11. The secondary composite measure is composed of several memory tests and called “Overall Memory”. The Posit Science website says their training will not only help you “remember more” but also “think faster” and “focus better”. Why weren’t tests of thinking speed (different from the training tasks) and focus included in the assessment?

Not answered.

12. Do the results support the idea that the training causes trainees to “focus better”?

Yes.

[Seth: That’s his whole answer.]

13. The Posit Science homepage suggests that their training increases “intelligence”. Was intelligence measured in this study?

At the time we designed IMPACT, we were focused on establishing the effect of the training on memory, as the most common complaint of people with general cognitive difficulties. As IMPACT was in progress, Jaeggi et. al published their very interesting paper on the effect of N-back training on measures of intelligence, where they stated that improving working memory was likely to improve measures of intelligence. It would be quite interesting to repeat the IMPACT study with those or other measures of intelligence, given the improvements in working memory documented in IMPACT. The statement on the Posit Science web page relates to the Jaeggi et. al. paper, given that the Posit training program (BrainHQ) includes N-back training.

13 (continued). If not, why not?

Not answered.

[Seth: In Question 12, Mahncke failed to explain his answer about focus (“yes”) apparently because I left out “if yes, please explain how”. In this question, he dislikes my inclusion of “if not, why not?”]

14. Do the results support the idea that the training causes trainees to become more intelligent?

This question appears to be redundant with 13.

[Seth: Question 13 asked: Was intelligence measured? (A methods question.) This question asked: What about the results? Do they support claims about intelligence? (A results question.)]

15. The only test of thinking speed included in the assessment appears to be a reaction-time task that was part of the training. Are you saying that getting faster on one reaction-time task after lots of practice with that task shows that your training causes trainees to “think faster”?

This question appears to be redundant with 11.

[Seth: Question 11 was a methods question. This is a question about what the results mean — a discussion question. I still have no idea why Posit Science says their training causes trainees to “think faster” or why I should care that their subjects get faster on a laboratory task after lots of practice.]

Great Side Effects of the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In a recent post on the Shangri-La Diet forums, Morex, who lives in Mexico, describes several great side effects of the Shangri-La Diet:

1. At peace with food. “I am in control of what I eat. If I want I have a piece of chocolate or some peanuts, but food is no longer in command. Food is no longer an obstacle or an excuse. This is FANTASTIC! For 40 years I had a horrible relationship with food. It commanded my every activity in the day. I was always on the look for better flavors and foods that would quench my never fading hunger. This is no longer an issue.”

2. No more junk food. “Thanks to SLD, I quit junk food. I no longer crave it and when I have tasted it, it’s horrible! Too salty and greasy. Or too sweet. That means no soda, pizza, chips, donuts, candy or anything like that. When I want something sweet in the afternoon, I’d have a teaspoon of honey and that’s it.”

3. More money. ”We eat so little that we are saving extra cash. Who knows, maybe we could soon afford a nice vacation on the beach! (Vacations for Mexicans in Mexico are VERY expensive.)”

4. More time. Much more time. “Since we have been doing SLD, our days are longer! Because of the fact that we eat so very little portions, we are barely cooking. And when we do, it lasts for about 4 days! Before SLD we spent about an hour a meal. 30 mins. cooking, and 30 mins. eating. Some days it was longer, depending on what we cooked. That means that we spent about 3 or 4 hours a day cooking and eating. Now we prepare meals in about 10 minutes and eat in about 5!!! That’s right. For breakfast I have half a bran cookie, some cereal or some fruit. For lunch I just heat up in the microwave something we cooked. For dinner we have a little oatmeal or cereal. And that’s it! My days are longer for 3 hours! We have been reading our books (we’re book worms here), watching movies we didn’t have the time to watch and going out for walks!! FREAKING AWESOME!”

I didn’t have the first two problems (loss of control and junk food) but I too distinctly noticed saving money and (especially) time. Just like he says. It’s been a long time since I wrote The Shangri-La Diet but I think I failed to mention how much time and money I saved. (If I’m wrong, please correct me.)

What about his weight? He doesn’t have a scale but says this: “Before SLD I was size 44. Today [after 2 months of SLD] I am 38, which I haven’t been able to wear since I was in the University (19 years old).” He wants to get to size 36. He also posts several pictures, before and after.

Thanks, Morex.

 

Tea and News: Rinse First

Seth Roberts5 Comments

While living in China, I discovered that it was a good idea to rinse tea with hot water before brewing it. The rinse removes a certain rough taste — easy to notice in side-by-side comparisons. A Chinese college student made an interesting analogy:

Entertainment news is like drinking tea, first time is like washing tea leafs, no one really cares. Maybe 2nd or 3rd time it will have the sweet taste, but in the end it gets weaker and weaker.

How Meritocratic is Chinese Higher Education?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A friend of mine taught at Harvard for a few years. Her husband needed a job, so he taught a writing class. He said his students were so bad it appeared to be an experiment: How stupid can you be and succeed at Harvard? They had not been admitted based on SAT scores or grades, that was clear. In a recent article called “The Myth of American Meritocracy”, Ron Unz described considerable evidence of exactly what my friend’s husband noticed: Harvard admission not based on the usual “meritocratic” measures, such as SAT scores and grades. For example, he found evidence of an Asian quota. If Asians weren’t penalized for being Asian, far more would be admitted.

In a follow-up article, Unz wrote:

Near the beginning of my article [about meritocracy] I had noted that although complaints about official corruption of every sort are a leading topic on the Chinese Internet and also in Western media coverage, I had never once heard such a claim about admissions to elite Chinese universities. This led me to conclude that the process was entirely meritocratic, and a couple of individuals with good knowledge of China confirmed this. However, during one of my recent Yale Law events, a student from China stated that he and his friends were firmly convinced that any of China’s 350 Central Committee members could easily obtain an admissions slot for his friends or relatives, so my claim was incorrect. This conflicting evidence may be reconciled if the number of such corrupt admissions each year is so tiny—perhaps a few hundred out of over eight million—that it is completely invisible to the general public. I should note that the New York Times just ran another major story on colleges in China, emphasizing every possible unfair aspect of the system, but nonetheless indicating that admissions were entirely meritocratic and objective.

Here is one reason that there is zero discussion of corruption in admission to elite Chinese universities (such as Tsinghua, where I teach): Rich Chinese universally want their children to go to college outside China, especially America. The more money you have, the easier this is. I’d guess all children of Central Committee members attend college outside China. None of them attend Tsinghua, as far as I know. At least among my students, this is utterly obvious — that education outside China is superior and anyone who can go outside China will. The brake on this is purely cost. One of my students said she didn’t want to burden her parents with the cost.

The test that Chinese high school students take to get into college is the gaokao. One of my students got the highest gaokao score in Beijing. An astonishing achievement. He didn’t get in to any American university. The Chinese public was shocked. Many newspaper articles were written about it. The rest of my students knew about it. His family is not well-off. This is why he failed where thousands of Chinese students from rich families — who didn’t bother to take the gaokao, but surely would have had a lower score – succeeded. Although he went to Tsinghua as a freshman, he too wanted to escape Chinese higher education. First he transferred to the University of Hong Kong. Then he transferred to MIT.

Why is Chinese higher education so bad that everyone who can avoids it? One of my students (a psychology major) said that as the economy quickly improved, the government quickly expanded the college education system. There weren’t enough good teachers to fill the slots. That’s one reason. Another reason is a certain ethos. I asked a friend of mine, a Tsinghua student not majoring in psychology, “In what fraction of your classes do the professors lecture by reading from the textbook?” 80%, she said. That’s at Tsinghua. Below Tsinghua it’s worse. Of course students go to college outside China for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. The most obvious is prestige: It is prestigious to go elsewhere.

Lack of higher education meritocracy in China has a more subtle aspect. It is much easier to get into elite universities, such as Tsinghua, if you live in Beijing or Shanghai than if you live elsewhere, especially poor provinces. Is this unfair? It isn’t easy to say because the gaokao is different in different places. I don’t know the official reason for this (different textbooks?), but the difference in tests makes it easier to have lower admissions cutoff scores for students from Beijing and Shanghai. A Beijing student at Tsinghua will usually have a lower gaokao score than a student at Tsinghua from a poor province. Of course it is much more expensive to live in Beijing and Shanghai than elsewhere. Moreover, a big chunk of the gaokao is about English proficiency. A student’s English proficiency depends heavily on amount and quality of English education, which depends heavily on family income. The richer you are, the better your children’s English.

All this makes political sense. Richer people — whose children have better English — have more political power than the less rich. Those who live in Beijing and Shanghai have more political power than people in poor provinces. Allowing their children get into Tsinghua with lower gaokao scores (Beijing and Shanghai residents) or writing the gaokao so that their children have an advantage (English proficiency) is one way to keep them happy.

 

 

Modern Food Reduced Diversity of Oral Bacteria

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A new paper in Nature Genetics describes research into the bacteria in ancient teeth plaque. When modern food came along, the bacteria became less diverse. One of the researchers said:

The composition of oral bacteria changed markedly with the introduction of farming, and again around 150 years ago. With the introduction of processed sugar and flour in the Industrial Revolution, we can see a dramatically decreased diversity in our oral bacteria, allowing domination by caries-causing strains.

Whether the decrease in diversity was due to (a) more sugar and flour or (b) less bacteria-laden foods is hard to say.

Again, data suggest we need bacteria to protect us against bacteria. You’d never know this from food safety laws or how freely pediatricians prescribe antibiotics. Again, it is hard to know without more research what caused this or that historical change in health (e.g., more tooth decay when sugar and flour became popular). The obvious answer (e.g., sugar causes tooth decay) might be wrong. If you believe that cavities are caused by too much sugar, the solution is to eat less sugar. What if cavities are caused by not enough bacterial diversity? Then other solutions might work better, such as eating more fermented food.

Thanks to Vic Sarjoo.

A Revolution in Growing Rice

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Surely you have heard of Norman Borlaug, “Father of the Green Revolution”. He won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for

the introduction of these high-yielding [wheat] varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India.

He had a Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics. He learned how to develop better strains in graduate school. He worked as an agricultural researcher in Mexico.

You have probably not heard of Henri de Laulanié, a French Jesuit priest who worked in Madagascar starting in the 1960s. He tried to help local farmers grow more rice. He had only an undergraduate degree in agriculture. In contrast to Borlaug, he tested simple variations that any farmer could afford. He found that four changes in traditional practices had a big effect:

• Instead of planting seedlings 30-60 days old, tiny seedlings less than 15 days old were planted.
• Instead of planting 3-5 or more seedlings in clumps, single seedlings were planted.
• Instead of close, dense planting, with seed [densities] of 50-100 kg/ha, plants were set out carefully and gently in a square pattern, 25 x 25 cm or wider if the soil was very good; the seed [density] was reduced by 80-90% . . .
• Instead of keeping rice paddies continuously flooded, only a minimum of water was applied daily to keep the soil moist, not always saturated; fields were allowed to dry out several times to the cracking point during the growing period, with much less total use of water.

The effect of these changes was considerably more than Borlaug’s doubling of yield:

The farmers around Ranomafana who used [these methods] in 1994-95 averaged over 8 t/ha, more than four times their previous yield, and some farmers reached 12 t/ha and one even got 14 t/ha. The next year and the following year, the average remained over 8 t/ha, and a few farmers even reached
16 t/ha.

The possibility of such enormous improvements had been overlooked by both farmers and researchers. They were achieved without damaging the environment with heavy fertilizer use, unlike Borlaug’s methods.

Henri de Laulanié was not a personal scientist but he resembled one. Like a personal scientist, he cared about only one thing (improving yield). Professional scientists have many goals (publication, promotion, respect of colleagues, grants, prizes, and so on) in addition to making the world a better place. Like a personal scientist, de Laulanié did small cheap experiments. Professional scientists rarely do small cheap experiments. (Many of them worship at the altar of large randomized trials.) Like a personal scientist, de Laulanié tested treatments available to everyone (e.g., butter). Professional scientists rarely do this. Like a personal scientist, he tried to find the optimal environment. In the area of health, professional scientists almost never do this, unless they are in a nutrition department or school of public health. Almost all research funding goes to the study of other things, such as molecular mechanisms and drugs.

Personal science matters because personal scientists can do things professional scientists can’t or won’t do. de Laulanié’s work shows what a big difference this can make.

A recent newspaper article. The results are so good they have been questioned by mainstream researchers.

Thanks to Steve Hansen.

Butter = Antidepressant?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

On the Shangri-La Diet forums, babyhopes wrote:

At 10 am, I NCd [nose-clipped] a cup of milk, coffee and 2 small spoons of butter (I really like the anti-depressant effects of butter so I am making it part of my breakfast every day)

I noticed something similar the first time I ate a lot of butter (about 60 g). It was at lunch. A few hours later I felt a pleasant warm feeling in my head. The butter was the only unusual thing I had eaten.

When I googled “butter antidepressant” the first result was this blog — I wrote about this three years ago. Well, here is new evidence.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.