Month: April 2013

Shangri-La Diet Success, Including Better Sleep

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Greg Pomerantz writes:

Over the Thanksgiving [2012] holiday, I suggested to a relative, Richard, that he try the Shangri-la Diet. At the time I had heard about it but did not know anyone who had tried it. I did not have any particular reason to think it would work, but since Rich had tried a number of other diets (including low carb, which he is still following for the most part) I thought it would be worth a shot.

He started the diet over the Thanksgiving holiday and has kept it up since then with a few breaks. He lost 13 pounds in the first month and another 6 pounds over the next two weeks. Altogether he lost a total of 32 pounds over the 16 weeks following Thanksgiving, an average of 2 pounds per week. During this period, he traveled a fair amount and was not able to maintain the diet every day. However, he reported that one of his favorite things about the Shangri-la Diet is how easy it is to restart after a lapse. He began using extra light olive oil but has switched to walnut oil.

There were two surprising results other than the weight loss (which I think is exceptional in its own right). First, his blood sugar control has improved, even compared to the low carbohydrate diet he was (and still is) consuming. Second, he has been sleeping better at night due to a reduction in his nighttime appetite. I believe the two may be related — one of his medications for type 2 diabetes greatly increases his appetite and causes weight gain. He has been using much less of that medication because of his improved blood sugar on the Shangri-la Diet. Therefore, reduced appetite from the diet plus a reduction in an appetite-increasing medication results in lower nighttime appetite and therefore better sleep.

Is Red Meat Dangerous?

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A recent paper from the Cleveland Clinic reports more than a dozen studies that add up, say the authors, to the conclusion that red meat and other meats cause heart disease at least partly by increasing trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO), which is made from carnitine by intestinal bacteria. Meat, especially red meat, is high in carnitine.

The results were reported all over the world, including the New York Times. There are several reasons to question the conclusion:

1. The association between meat and heart disease is weak. An epidemiological paper from the Harvard Nurses Study found estimated reductions in heart disease on the order of 10-20% when a “healthy” food was substituted for meat. Conclusions about causality (eating Food X causes Disease Y) based on the Harvard Nurses Study have predicted wrongly over and over when tested in experiments, so even this weak association is questionable. A 2010 meta-analysis found no association between red meat consumption and heart disease. The absence of any correlation is surprising because red meat is widely believed to be unhealthy. People who eat more red meat would presumably do more other “unhealthy” things. (Perhaps the error rate of the underlying epidemiology is high. Errors push associations toward zero.)

2. Within the Cleveland paper, the associations between carnitine and TMAO and heart disease are weak. For example, people with the greatest sign of heart disease (“triple” angiographic evidence of heart disease) had only slightly more carnitine in their blood (about 15% more) than people with the least sign of heart disease. (Maybe it is peak levels of carnitine rather than average levels that matter.)

3. A 1996 epidemiological study (via Chris Kresser) that looked at the correlates of various “healthy” habits among people especially interested in health (e.g., they shop at health food stores) found no detectable effect of being a vegetarian. For example, vegetarians had the same all-cause mortality as non-vegetarians. Other factors were associated with reduced mortality, including eating wholemeal bread daily and eating fruit daily. This study looked at a large number of people (about 11,000) for a long time (17 years), so I consider the lack of difference (vegetarians versus non-vegetarians) strong evidence against the idea that modest amounts of meat are harmful. (And I am going to start eating wholemeal bread in small amounts.)

I don’t dismiss the paper. Among people who eat more than modest amounts of meat, there may be something to it. Now and then epidemiology turns up a powerful risk factor — something associated with a risk increase by a factor of 4 or more (people at a high level of the risk factor get the disease at least four times more often than people at a low level of the factor). History shows that such correlations are likely to tell us something about causality. With weaker correlations (such as the correlation between red meat and heart disease), it is much more a guessing game.

To me, the important clue about heart disease is that it is very low in both Japan and France, much lower than in countries with high rates of heart disease. The two countries that have little in common besides the fact that in both people eat a lot more fermented food than in most places. In France, they drink wine, eat stinky cheese and yogurt. In Japan, they eat miso, pickles, and natto. Maybe fermented food protects against heart disease.

Lose Smell, Lose Weight: Evidence For the Theory Behind the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A friend of this blog writes:

What prompted me to try SLD: When I first went paleo I dropped 30 pounds with no exercise or food restriction, but my weight has been stable for about a year. In January and February [2013] I went through a bad allergy spell, with my nose congested all the time. I dropped six pounds in that time. When the seasonal allergy went away, the weight came right back. Calories without smell suddenly look like a big factor.

Here is a paper about the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet.

The Jenijoy La Belle Tenure Case at Caltech

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Jenijoy La Belle is a Professor of English at Caltech. Her tenure case, which started in the 1970s, is the main topic of this interview. Because of one person — Robert Huttenback — she was at first denied tenure. Amazingly, she managed to get tenure anyway. In the middle of the fight, which promised to become very embarrassing to Caltech, Huttenback became Chancellor of UC Santa Barbara.

Here is a related story from another interview:

One day on a Saturday or Sunday, I was in Baxter [Baxter Hall of Social Sciences and] picking up my mail upstairs. There was nobody else there but Huttenback and a young Turk— a young professor of economics, I guess, who is now of course a famous full professor somewhere, perhaps even retired. They were in the office that Jenijoy was going to have and next to it was the men’s toilet. And they were talking about playing a joke. The goal was to make the situation as uncomfortable—more than uncomfortable, offensive—for Jenijoy as possible. And I will not—I remember exactly what they were doing, but it is so crude that I will not tell you.

Here is one of La Belle’s comments:

In 1982, someone sent me a clipping from the Santa Barbara News and Review, from a column that sounded more like gossip than news. But it simply began: “Even in UCSB circles familiar with Chancellor Robert Huttenback’s perquisites of power, the situation has caused comment. Why do university cars and drivers transport Freda Huttenback, his better half, on personal business? Campus employees, from maintenance to clerical workers, tell us of receiving a Xeroxed map to the Huttenbacks’ home and directions to chauffeur her wherever she asks. These trips have reportedly included visits to a Ventura chiropractor. “Huttenback defends the practice by calling his wife a consultant to the university on interior design matters, saying that she occasionally needs a university car and driver for decorating business. Huttenback first denied he or his wife ever used the car for personal errands: ‘Whoever told you that must be someone I fired,’ was his reply.”

Huttenback was eventually convicted of fraud. He defends himself here.

New University of California: A Good Idea

Seth Roberts13 Comments

A California assemblyman named Scott Wilk has proposed a “New University of California” whose only purpose would be to provide certification tests — tests that show you have learned the material of this or that college class. Here is what his bill says:

(1) The New University of California shall provide no instruction, but shall issue college credit and baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing examinations.

(2) The New University of California is authorized to contract with qualified entities for the formulation of peer-reviewed course examinations the passage of which would demonstrate that the student has the knowledge and skill necessary to receive college credit for that course.

This is not online education. You can learn the material however you want — for example, by reading a book.

An unsigned New York Times editorial called the idea “ particularly ludicrous” but did not say why. I think it’s a good idea. It gives students much more power: They can choose the learning methods and materials and times that fit them best (listening to lectures at work, for example), in contrast to the one-class-fits-all approach at almost all colleges. The cost in time and money will be much less than attending a typical university. The proposal helps employers because passage of these tests reflects a skill useful in many jobs: ability to learn on one’s own.

Compared to an ordinary college degree (say, from Berkeley), a degree or certification from the New University of California fails to show that you did well enough in high school to get admitted to Berkeley. This could be remedied by showing your prospective employer a letter of admittance to Berkeley.

Make Yourself Healthy Meetup: Underlying Ideas

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

As I blogged earlier, I’ve started a Meetup group called Make Yourself Healthy. It is about doing better than expert advice. Doing better than taking prescription drugs for a problem, for example. The first meeting is Wednesday, April 24, 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm, in the meeting room of the North Branch of the Berkeley Public Library (1170 The Alameda).

I’ve found ways to improve on expert advice. I’ve found new ways to lose weight, sleep better, and so on. More to the point, many other people have done this. I wrote about some of them for Boing Boing. The specific things they learned about how to be healthy — for example, Dennis Mangan’s discovery (or confirmation of someone else’s discovery) that megadoses of niacin eliminated Restless Leg Syndrome — are not just important in isolation but also as part of a pattern: showing that such a thing is possible. Their solutions were vastly better than what their doctors recommended. This is counter-intuitive. We don’t see this in other areas of life. We don’t see amateurs building better cars than professionals, for example. But it’s happening.

I believe two things about this:

1. The solutions will generalize. What Person X discoveres improves her health turn out to help with other problems. I started drinking flaxseed oil because it improved my balance. It turned out to improve my brain function measured in other ways. And it turned out to improve my gums. I don’t have lichen planus or geographic tongue, which xylitol can cure, but I am taking xylitol because I believe (backed up by research) it reduces plaque.

2. The methods will generalize — what you do that finds a solution to Problem X is worth trying with other problems. With me, self-experimentation is an example. When studying my acne, self-experimentation showed how to better than my dermatologist’s advice. Later, it helped me improve my health on other dimensions (weight, mood, sleep, etc.).

The Make Yourself Healthy Meetup group can spread the solutions, the methods, and the knowledge that such a thing is possible. It can encourage people to try to improve on expert advice and help them do so.

How Things Begin: LightSail Energy

Seth Roberts2 Comments

LightSail Energy is a Berkeley company that makes compressed-air energy storage devices. It was started in 2008 by Danielle Fong and Steve Crane. A year later, they got significant funding. When I think of energy storage, I think of batteries or flywheels or pumping water uphill. Use of a quite different technology intrigued me. Compressed-air energy storage is sometimes disparaged (“ a lousy way of storing energy“).

Fong went to college (Dalhousie) when she was 12. She studied physics, computer science, math, economics, and philosophy. When it came time to apply to graduate school, she decided she wanted to work on something important. Energy was important. She had read and admired The Limits to Growth (1972). We are running out of convenient fossil fuels, she thought. We are running out of other things, too, such as arable land and aquifers, but solving these problems would require energy.

She decided to go to Princeton and study plasma physics, hoping to improve fusion technology. It was not what she expected. Her professors were brilliant, working on exciting things, such as compact magnetic confinement devices. In the background, however, “everyone’s jumping through hoops,” she says. Her professors were constantly writing grants. Their grant proposals were hard to understand. They went to “dark and foreboding” federal organizations, where they were misunderstood. Funding was cut “randomly and mercilessly” by forces outside the professors’ control. Among the graduate students, she found “a cadre” of interesting people but most of them, she thought, were overly concerned with finding something that had not been done before that meshed with a professor’s interest, in contrast to doing something important that they themselves found interesting. She also thought the other graduate students were not concerned enough with foundational questions. There were “too many good soldiers.”

Why rely on political whims I can’t control when I can create my own fortune and fund whatever research I want, she thought. If you were a mediocre physicist at any top graduate school, you could go to Wall Street and become a quant or go to Silicon Valley and build stuff. In 2007, she talked to Wall Street quants. “I was studying their derivative and option pricing theories,” says Danielle. “They assumed that price was given by an infinite series of small independent factors.” The independence assumption struck her as unlikely because much of the market relied on the same pricing theory. “This foundational assumption was poorly founded,” she says. It works, the quants said. The market collapsed three months later. Before it did, she decided to leave Princeton (after two years) and go to Silicon Valley.

She moved to the Bay Area and started couch surfing. During her first year there, she worked on several different projects with different cofounders and consulted for a variety of startups. Her “theory” was that she would learn how things work and find the right thing to do. She met Paul Graham and consulted for Y Combinator companies. She realized her “limiting factor” – what she needed the most – was a good co-founder. “Innovation is social,” she says. David McIntosh, a co-founder of Redux Games, “read [her] blog” and put her in touch with Max Crane. Max Crane is Steve Crane’s son. Steve was helping someone else start a video game company in Petaluma that needed a part-time programmer. Danielle was living in San Francisco at the time. Steve offered her the job and offered to drive her to Petaluma. “Every time we would drive up we would talk about different ideas,” said Danielle. “I had 50 different ideas for startups.” The one she kept coming back to, kept thinking about, was making a compressed-air-powered vehicle.

A friend, Nick Pilon, had asked her, “How far can you drive with the [solar] energy you could collect on a garage roof in a day? Is it enough to handle the average American commute?” To answer this, she had to provide a solution to the problem of making a practical, efficient vehicle. Batteries were a serious problem. They are expensive, heavy, and degrade relatively fast. Better energy storage would make a solar-powered vehicle more plausible. Several years earlier, her dad had sent her a link about a car that ran on compressed air. In that case, the CEO had been arrested for fraud. The car didn’t exist. However, MDI International in France had made some progress. (Well before Peugeot.) She suggested this possibility to Steve. It could be very inexpensive and fast to refill. They could make a scooter. Steve got really excited. “I’d love to help you get this funded,” he told Danielle. Eventually he put in $100,000 and joined Danielle as a co-founder. He left his other jobs to work with her.

The thermodynamics of air compression were discouraging. (So much so that in 2009 Berkeley researchers published a paper arguing that a compressed-air vehicle would not be viable any time soon. “The BEV [battery electric vehicle] outperforms the compressed-air car [CAC] in every category. Uncertainty in technology specifications is considerably higher for CACs than for BEVs, adding a risk premium.”) When air is compressed, it gets hot — and heat may leak away. When air expands, it cools — and cold air provides little pressure. Danielle realized that you could solve both problems by adding heat capacity to the air. This could be done by adding water (mist) during compression to absorb heat and using the stored heat to warm the air during expansion. If you could continuously supply the expanding air with heat, efficiency would increase from the low 20s to 70-85%. Such an engine – driven by compressed air – would be cheaper, lighter, and more powerful.

They spoke to Ed Berlin (whom Steve called “the most brilliant inventor I know”). Coincidentally, Ed had been working on a compressed-air hybrid vehicle. They joined forces. Ed introduced them to Keith McCurdy, who advised them about financing. At a party, Keith told Vinod Kholsa, the venture capitalist, about the idea. This led to a meeting with Ford Tamer, one of Kholsa’s partners, who specialized in two-wheeled vehicles. He was more excited about what they could do for the power grid (by storing excess power during times of low demand). They had a whole PowerPoint presentation about vehicles. They scrapped it and made another one.

Steve and Ed built the first prototype. Danielle measured its performance. “Ed had a machine shop in his garage and knew how to use it,” says Danielle.

An especially important early hire (Employee Number 6) was Kevin Walter, who became Vice President of Development (developing the engine that compresses the air). He had previously worked for one of the top racing car teams in the world and had developed many race-car engines. “We knew how to build engines in theory,” says Danielle, “but he had actually built them.” He knew, for example, where to drill holes so that oil would get to the right places. He also contributed a great deal of (psychic) energy, focus, and perseverance.

Being located in the Bay Area really helped. The Bay Area has many people (in the “low thousands”) who are good at making things. One LightSail employee (Liam McNamara) made a steam-powered automobile from scratch for Burning Man and won Junkyard Wars. Another (Keith Johnson) built electric cupcake cars and an electric pumpkin carriage. The Bay Area has “an atmosphere of possibility,” says Danielle. “The idea that when you have a great idea that is doable, you should do it. No one else is going to do it. Burning Man is a condensation of this. After people come, they feel they really can do something. And once they start, the deadline helps make sure they get it done.”

Xylitol Research

Seth Roberts7 Comments

After learning about the dramatic effects of xylitol on lichen planus, I looked around for a good summary of xylitol research and found this:

Xylitol and other natural sweeteners were tested extensively in Finland as potential replacements for sugar during the early 1970’s. A series of over 20 research reports (edited by Professors Arje Scheinin and Kauko Makinen) was published together in Acta Odontologica Scandinavica, Supplement 70, in 1975. These investigations became known collectively as the “Turku Sugar Studies.”

Sweeteners were tested for their effects on dental and general health. The main trials involved the long-term substitution of either fructose or xylitol for sucrose (ordinary table sugar). This involved a huge cooperative effort between scientists and food producers. Separate fructose and xylitol versions of common food items were provided for the volunteers.

These trials (including blood and urine tests) established the safety of relatively large amounts of xylitol (often 70 grams per day or more) consumed regularly over a period of years. The xylitol group reported that xylitol-sweetened foods were comparable to the familiar sugar flavors.

The control group who consumed normal amounts of sugar continued to experience tooth decay, as would be expected. The fructose group also continued to have tooth decay, although progression appeared to be somewhat slower.

The results of a xylitol diet on oral health were dramatic. New tooth decay was practically eliminated. A therapeutic remineralizing effect was noted where the decay process was reversed. A parallel study achieved similar 90% reduction in tooth decay simply by adding a small amount of xylitol, delivered in chewing gum after meals) to a normal (regular sugar) diet.

Here are some of the major findings of the Turku Sugar Studies:

  • Xylitol can be incorporated into a wide variety of food items to directly replace sugar. More than 100 different products were made with xylitol.
  • The taste and overall quality of the xylitol products was comparable, and in some cases superior, to regular sugar items.
  • Substantial amounts of xylitol can be consumed regularly with no adverse health effects.
  • No potentially damaging bacterial adaptations to xylitol occurred.

Especially early on, there were some instances of gastrointestinal discomfort and even osmotic diarrhea in the xylitol group. After a short period of adaptation (few weeks), these symptoms diminished and became no more frequent than in the other groups. A few individuals were more sensitive than the rest of the group. Even exceptionally high intakes of xylitol of over 200 grams in a day did not necessarily cause any problems. Discomfort was more likely to occur with liquid ingestion on an empty stomach.

It is not necessary to eliminate sugar to dramatically reduce tooth decay. Similar results can be obtained simply by adding a small amount of xylitol to a “normal” diet. Xylitol can provide a natural “antidote” for the damaging dental effects of ordinary sugar. A little more than a teaspoon of xylitol per day can provide amazing protection against tooth decay, when used in chewing gum after meals and snacks.

The last point is especially interesting. Xylitol doesn’t work because you eat less sugar. It works, apparently, because it stops/prevents something that sugar starts, perhaps adhesion of certain bacteria to teeth and gums.

Here (video) is coverage of xylitol research in American mainstream media (in this case, ABC News). The useful information (about a xylitol study) is diluted by unhelpful information about xylitol in fruit and brushing and flossing.

Journal of Personal Science: Xylitol Cures Lichen Planus and Geographic Tongue

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Xylitol Improves Lichen Planus and Geographic Tongue

by Evelyn M., Westchester County, NY

Background

In my forties — I am now 75 — my gums started to bother me. Newly-returned to the United States from Iran, I searched for a good dentist. The first one told me to get a cap on a tooth with a small chip. That was no help. A colleague recommended a specialist in gum problems. The specialist advised “scaling,” which didn’t help. Then he said I was not cleaning my teeth well enough. He put a substance on my teeth to reveal incomplete cleaning and was flummoxed when he could find no evidence of bad brushing or flossing. I gave up trying to solve my gum problem.

When I was about 50, a “crisis tooth” (a molar on the upper right) forced me to see a dentist. I found a very good dentist, sensible and conservative in approach. After the problem tooth was removed, he turned to the overall condition of my mouth. I told him about the gum treatments I’d had. Then he showed me an x-ray that revealed an abscess under the root of a tooth on the lower right hand side. That tooth didn’t hurt, and looked OK, but was leaking pus into the gum, inflaming the entire lower right hand side of my gums. The gum specialist had missed it completely. After that tooth was removed, and the surrounding area healed, my gums were fine for many years.

Two years ago, I developed a condition called lichen planus. The entire inside of my mouth was inflamed and swollen — gums, tongue, the inside of my cheeks, all of it. I could not brush my teeth or eat anything except the blandest of foods. I also had a metallic taste in my mouth. It was torture.

After diagnosing the condition (“you have lichen planus”), my dentist sent me to an oral pathologist. The pathologist said there was no cure that he could guarantee and gave me two prescription drugs — one to treat problems caused by fungi, the other to deal with bacteria. Neither helped. I confirmed on the web what the dentist and the oral pathologist had said.

Concluding that medical science couldn’t help, I starting searching the web for other suggestions. I found Seth Roberts’s blog, which suggested taking flaxseed oil to improve gums. I tried it. My psoriasis improved but the lichen planus remained.

Source of Idea

In November 2011, the Drudge Report led me to an announcement that UCLA scientists were working on a mouthwash to prevent cavities. A comment said: “Xylitol is a plant sugar that kills s[treptococcus] mutans, and has been around for years as a toothpaste, mouthwash and gum. This is not new at all. Regular use of xylitol does all this, is cheap, and is NOT patentable. So, UCLA, this is nonsense.”

I found a wealth of data on the web about xylitol, mainly research from Finland. The evidence showed that it killed bacteria that cause tooth decay and helped re-mineralize decayed teeth. The reports often mentioned that general oral health had improved in patients using xylitol. I decided to try it.

Method

Most xylitol research has been done using gum that children chew after meals three or four times a day. I do not like to chew gum. I found other studies showing that taking a quarter to a half a teaspoon of the sugar (made from birch bark) four times a day is equally effective. I put the xylitol in my mouth, it melts, I swish it around my mouth until the saliva that it produces is quite extensive (60-90 seconds) and swallow it.

Results

I started taking xylitol more than a year ago. After six weeks, the metallic taste was gone and my inner cheeks were noticeably less inflamed. After three months it was clear that my tongue was improving. Now I am sure that the lichen planus is in remission.

My most recent dentist visit was six months ago [October 2012], after I’d been using xylitol for ten months. My dentist and hygienist were astounded. They had been expecting the lichen planus to look the same as when they had seen it before (one year earlier). By then, however, my mouth had healed substantially.

That wasn’t the only improvement. I’d always had what dentists call geographic tongue– deep fissures that make a pattern on the surface of the tongue. It never bothered me. I never noticed it until a dental hygienist pointed it out to me (in horror!). I went from having a tongue full of fissures and “ruffled” around the edges to a tongue that was completely healed and looked better than it had in many years. My dentist could still find some of the lace-like effects that lichen planus produces on the inside of my cheeks. The geographic tongue is now [March 2013] completely gone, as is all the plaque on my teeth, the redness of my gums, and the soreness and inflammation I had experienced from the lichen planus on the inside of my cheeks, my hard and soft palate, and uvula.

Discussion

When I told my dentist I was using xylitol, he knew what it was and was happy to see the improvement, but it had never occurred to him to suggest I use it. It is not a regular dental technique. I continue to use it, keeping jars of xylitol next to the kitchen stove and the computer screen (my two favorite haunts!) so that it is always at hand.

At the turn of the year (2012 to 2013) I emailed friends and family encouraging them to try xylitol. One friend started using xylitol by the end of January and in March told me about her progress. She has already noticed a great improvement in her gums. She said that she hadn’t been perfect in dosing herself, sometimes forgetting a day, often only using it three times a day instead of four or five, but since she now had evidence that it actually helps, she was determined to take it more religiously. She bought xylitol gum for her children, putting xylitol mints in their lunch boxes.

More Information

Controversies around xylitol.

Role of Xylitol in Oral Health (video)

Xylitol and dental caries

Sugar alcohols, caries incidence and remineralization of caries lesions: A literature review

Summary of xylitol research

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Thanks to Greg Pomerantz and Casey Manion.