Month: June 2013

Alternate-Day Fasting Improved My Fasting Blood Sugar

Seth Roberts12 Comments

A few days ago, I gave a talk at a Quantified Self Meetup in San Francisco titled “Why is my blood sugar high?” (PowerPoint here and here). My main point was that alternate-day fasting (eating much less than usual every other day) quickly brought my fasting blood sugar level from the mid-90s to the low 80s, which is where I wanted it. I was unsure how to do this and had tried several things that hadn’t worked.

Not in the talk is an explanation of my results in terms of setpoint (blood sugar setpoint, not body fat setpoint). Your body tries to maintain a certain blood sugar level — that’s obvious. Not obvious at all is what controls the setpoint. This question is usually ignored — for example, in Wikipedia’s blood sugar regulation entry. Maybe Type 2 diabetes occurs because the blood sugar setpoint is too high. If we can find out what environmental events control the setpoint, we will be in a much better position to prevent and reverse Type 2 diabetes (as with obesity).

A few years ago, I discovered that walking an hour per day improved my fasting blood sugar. Does walking lower the setpoint? I didn’t ask this question, a curious omission from the author of The Shangri-La Diet. If walking lowered the setpoint, walking every other day might have the same effect as walking every day.

I was pushed toward this line of thought because alternate-day fasting seems to lower the blood-sugar setpoint. After I started alternate-day fasting, it took about three days for my fasting blood sugar to reach a new lower level. After that, it was low every day, not just after fast days. My experience suggests that the blood-sugar setpoint depends on what your blood sugar is. When your blood sugar is high, the setpoint becomes higher; when your blood sugar is low, the setpoint becomes lower. Tim Lundeen had told me something similar to this.

If you tried to lower your fasting blood sugar and succeeded, I hope you will say in the comments how you did this. I tried three things that didn’t work: darker bedroom, Vitamin B supplement, and cinnamon. Eating low carb raises fasting blood sugar, according to Paul Jaminet.

Mental Effects of Butter: “My Video-Gaming is Better”

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Based partly on my research, a friend of mine started eating the same amount of butter I do: 4 tablespoons (about 60 g) per day. He described what happened:

I’m noticably smarter since I started butter. Immediately.

Faster insights, faster foreign language processing, increased creativity, faster at math-in-my-head. My video-gaming ability is better, which partly is a measure of my reaction time. Since I log my creativity similarly to my workouts I can view the increased production.

Started butter properly 3 days ago. Haven’t been sleeping well due to workload and digestive issues…yet still my performance keeps [improving]. I suspect it will be yet markedly better again once I get some proper rest.

I am experiencing creativity effects [similar to those] that resulted when I was mindhacking with various racetams along with sublutiamine and centrophenoxine. I have not been taking that brain-stack for a month because it was causing digestive problems. Suddenly with butter all the mind-hacking benefits have returned.

Heart Disease Epidemic and Latitude Effect: Reconciliation

Seth Roberts9 Comments

For the last half century, heart disease has been the most common cause of death in rich countries — more common than cancer, for example. I recently discussed the observation of David Grimes, a British gastroenterologist, that heart disease has followed an infectious-disease epidemic-like pattern: sharp rise, sharp fall. From 1920 to 1970, heart disease in England increased by a factor of maybe 100; from a very low level to 500 deaths per 100,000 people per year. From 1970 to 2010, it has decreased by a factor of 10. This pattern cannot be explained by any popular idea about heart disease. For example, dietary or exercise or activity changes cannot explain it. They haven’t changed the right way (way up, way down) at the right time (peaking in 1970). In spite of this ignorance, I have never heard a health expert express doubt about what causes heart disease. This fits with what I learned when I studied myself. What I learned had little correlation with what experts said.

Before the epidemic paper, Grimes wrote a book about heart disease. It stressed the importance of latitude: heart disease is more common at more extreme latitudes. For example, it is more common in Scotland than the south of England. The same correlation can be seen in many data sets and with other diseases, including influenza, variant Creuztfeldt-Jacob disease, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease and other digestive diseases. More extreme latitudes get less sun. Grimes took the importance of latitude to suggest the importance of Vitamin D. Better sleep with more sun is another possible explanation.

The amount of sunlight has changed very little over the last hundred years so it cannot explain the epidemic-like rise and fall of heart disease. I asked Grimes how he reconciled the two sets of findings. He replied:

It took twenty years for me to realize the importance of the sun. I always felt that diet was grossly exaggerated and that victim-blaming was politically and medically convenient – disease was due to the sufferers and it was really up to them to correct their delinquent life-styles. I was brought up and work in the north-west of England, close to Manchester. The population has the shortest life-expectancy in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland even worse. It must be a climate effect. And so on to sunlight. So many parallels from a variety of diseases.

When I wrote my book I was aware of the unexplained decline of CHD deaths and I suggested that the UK Clean Air Act of 1953 might have been the turning point, the effect being after 1970. Cleaning of the air did increase sun exposure but the decline of CHD deaths since 1970 has been so great that there must be more to it than clean air and more sun. At that time I was unaware of the rise of CHD deaths after 1924 and so I was unaware of the obvious epidemic. I now realize that CHD must have been due to an environmental factor, probably biological, and unidentified micro-organism. This is the cause, but the sun, through immune-enhancement, controls the distribution, geographical, social and ethnic. The same applies to many cancers, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease (my main area of clinical activity), and several others. I think this reconciles the sun and a biological epidemic.

He has written three related ebooks: Vitamin D: Evolution and Action, Vitamin D: What It Can Do For Your Baby, and You Will Not Die of a Heart Attack.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment
  • Kombucha beer (which may not taste like beer)
  • A growing taste for sour. “I saw bottles of [kombucha] in rural Virginia gas stations . . . kimchi, fermented cabbage, has spread from Korean kitchens to Los Angeles taco trucks.”
  • Exercise and weight loss. Only the extremes of exercise — very intense exercise (very brief) and very long lasting exercise (walking) — reduce weight or keep weight low. The middling exercise Americans actually choose (aerobics) has little effect. This post, by my friend Phil Price, gets the high-intensity part right but the low-intensity part wrong.
  • Weight loss fails to prevent heart attacks. “The study followed 5,200 patients and lasted 11 years.” Surely cost tens of millions of dollars. More evidence of mainstream ignorance about heart disease.
  • A kickback by any other name . . . “At least 17 of the top 20 Bystolic prescribers in Medicare’s prescription drug program in 2010 have been paid by Forest [which makes Bystolic] to deliver promotional talks. In 2012, they together received $284,700 for speeches and more than $20,000 in meals.”

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda and Hal Pashler.

Magic Dots: User Experience (Person 4)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Previous posts about the magic dots method of getting work done are here. Recently, Patrick Dwyer, a solo-practitioner lawyer in Chicago, started using them. He explained how they help:

When I use the magic dots for brief writing it helps me in a few ways. First, it is much less intimidating to set a goal to write for 15 minutes than for 50 hours. Second, it also does not seem so bad to work for just a few more minutes when I am bored or out of ideas rather than wait for that elusive “flow.” Third, it gives me an ability to keep a precise account of my time and what I was doing so that I can show the client a specific task when I send the bill. Fourth, after I have made several boxes at the end of a day, it gives me a sense of accomplishment. All these things help me not to procrastinate. There is also something pleasing about drawing the boxes which seems to be more satisfying than merely writing non-graphic sentences or notes about my time.

I agree with all this, but would add that the method was suggested to me by pigeon research in which none of these factors could have mattered (e.g., pigeons do not bill clients). If the pigeon research and the magic dots method really involve the same mechanism — which seems to be true — then that mechanism is remarkably old. According to this, the common ancestor of birds and humans lived 300 million years ago. Maybe it is hard to notice the mechanism because it is buried so deep in our brains.

Animal learning researchers have always said that by studying animals (such as rats and pigeons) we will learn about humans. This example supports that claim. (As does the Shangri-La Diet.) The pigeon research, which had a very counter-intuitive result, led me to try the magic dots method, which seems like it can’t possibly work, but did. Yet when this actually happened it was hard to notice. I talked about the pigeon results, which I thought were astonishing, for many years before I realized they might help me.

Magic Dots: User Experience (Person 3)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Based on research by Neuringer and Chung, I started marking my work progress by making a mark (such as a dot) every six minutes of work. I did it for difficult tasks, such as writing. Neuringer and Chung found that markers of progress made pigeons peck twice as much. The dots seemed to enable me to work twice as much — e.g., twice as long.

I think a friend came up with the name magic dots. It did seem magic that such a tiny thing — making a dot on a piece of paper — could be so useful. A recent post about procrastination software led a reader named Joan to start using it. I’ve already described her experience (“the magic dots have been magic”) and someone else’s experience here.

Two more people have told me about their experience. I’ll describe what one of them said today and what the other one said tomorrow. Alex Chernavsky wrote:

I tried the Magic Dots system yesterday, and I liked it a lot. I ended up with two-and-a-half completed squares. I was more productive than usual. (By the way, have you heard of the Pomodoro technique? It’s similar.) I didn’t use a stopwatch. I download an iPhone app called Interval Timer, by Delta Works. It’s free, but it shows small, unobtrusive ads. I set it to do continuously-repeating six-minute countdowns. The end of each cycle is marked by a short vibration. The iPhone screen stays lit-up the whole time that the application is running, so you can easily check the remaining time. If I remember to glance at the screen, I will make a mark if the application shows a remaining time of less than three minutes. If I forget to check, I make a mark when I hear the vibration. I was home alone most of the day, and I was able to get a lot of work done. I didn’t use the technique when I was doing menial chores, like washing dishes. I only used it when I was working at my desk.

Alex also asked several questions:

What happens if you end up getting distracted by a non-productive, time-wasting activity, like checking Facebook? Should you reset the six-minute countdown cycle back to the beginning, or…?

I would just stop the stopwatch, not reset the timer. I would hate to lose the 2 minutes or whatever.

What’s the best way to account for unplanned, unintentional changes in focus from one productive activity (e.g., balancing your checkbook) to a different productive activity (e.g., replying to important email messages)?

I don’t change anything, as long as I am being productive I keep racking up the dots.

What happens if you need to take a bathroom break or other short break? Should you pause the timer?

No, I count anything necessary, including bathroom breaks and making tea. This is one reason I like the method: getting credit for making tea.

Scrivener for Windows Review

Seth Roberts11 Comments

After hearing several people, including James Fallows (“ the single best bargain ever offered in the software world”), praise Scrivener, a software program for writing, I tried it again. I had tried it a year ago, but there were so many bugs I quickly stopped. There were fewer bugs this time, but my experience was not good.

The free-trial copy says you can use it for “30 non-consecutive days”. I didn’t know what that meant. I was told it means “30 separate days before the trial expires — the trial is measured in “days of use”, rather than elapsed time since installation”. Someone thought that would be clear? I suggest “30 not-necessarily-consecutive days” plus an explanation of what that means.

When I imported material from Microsoft Word — the most common possible import — links were lost. I filed a bug report. I got an answer: “Unfortunately that’s the reality of importing: some information can be lost when you move from one file format to another.” Well, yes, but how about fixing the bug? I asked. In reply, I was told that Scrivener for Windows was the work of one person and that the import software was third-party. “We are constantly striving to find new [import software], and to make improvements on our own, where we can,” said the spokesperson for Scrivener.

I used Scrivener for about two weeks. Then, trying to put a quotation block in my text, I found that particular formatting is not available. It has been a long time since I came across writing software that did not include quotation blocks. The final straw. I went back to Microsoft Word.

In a way, it’s a miracle I lasted two weeks, given the difference in resources invested in Microsoft Word and Scrivener for Windows.

 

 

 

 

Magic Dots: User Experience (Person 2)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In 2012 I posted about using “magic dots” to get work done. You make a mark on a piece of paper every six minutes you work. The idea derives from the quasi-reinforcement effect of Neuringer and Chung. They found that giving pigeons markers of progress toward food, such as a blackout, doubled how much the pigeons pecked for food — that is, doubled how much they worked.

I found magic dots very helpful. The future will be different from the past was my reaction. (In the future I will get more work done.) So did a reader named Joan. Now a reader named David Johnston tells his experience:

I’m an engineer designing cryptographic digital circuits in microprocessors, which is intellectually challenging but also involves a lot of coding and debugging which requires concentration and attention to detail but is certainly not intellectually challenging. My specialization is random numbers, which even by computer science standards is a very narrow and deep field to specialize in. I don’t know of anyone else who does what I do. My work environment is saturated with sources of interruption which very much gets in the way of getting work done. If you think my employer is getting something wrong in creating an effective workplace for engineers, you would be correct. Procrastination is a big issue for me and I’ve tried various approaches to focus better without great success except for the Japanese music thing described below.

So after reading your article I gave it a try, I set up a timer on my computer (Orzeszek Timer) to beep every six minutes and filled out the dots on each beep.

On my first pass I lasted 2.5 hours before I had a meeting to go to and completed a detailed technical diagram of a circuit I was proposing. The next day I did 5 hours (with a lunch break in between) and was coding up the circuit. I stopped due to a meeting and could have continued. The third day I did not get a chance to focus on code or design, so I managed 0 hours. Then the weekend happened.

This is very much not normal for me. I might do 30 minutes to 1 hour before feeling the need to do something else besides concentrating, like dealing with email or getting a coffee. Getting back to it is not an efficient process since you are typically juggling multiple facts (aka the ‘working set’) pertinent to the problem and getting back in that frame of mind takes time. This is well a well documented aspect of computer programming, where there is a warm up time before the programmer becomes productive and then the productive period is fragile and easily set back to the start by interruptions.

I intend to keep trying this method and I hope it proves to be effective over longer periods because succeeding at my job is a lot less stressful than not succeeding. Obviously the vanishingly small investment required to try it is a big factor in making it easy to choose to try it.

So my initial reaction is that it works. My sense is that there is something important about mentally breaking up progress into chunks. I certainly do that on long tasks, e.g. a long drive ( I might envision it as passing the 10%, 20% etc points as we progress) or recently a game (Ingress – a game you play with a smartphone that requires you get out and walk a lot) where the space between levels doubles. To get to the final level 8 from 7 requires 600,000 points to reach 1.2 million total. Logic would suggest you should just head out and get all the points you can as fast as possible, but that is disheartening because any one day doesn’t make a big dent. By setting a goal of 10,000 per day, that gave me a mental and physical framework that was effective. I knew when to keep going (less than 10,000 points achieved) and I knew when to stop (at 10,000 points and probably 2 miles walking). Roughly 60 days later I got to the highest level.

While working on design, the beep in my ear and reaching to draw a dot or line on graph paper was not enough to knock off my concentration, but the continuing for the next six minutes felt like an achievable goal, much like 10,000 points in Ingress felt like an achievable goal each day, whereas choosing to sit and concentrate for five hours is a non starter, much as trying to battle through 600,000 points in Ingress is a non starter.

Possibly unrelated, but maybe not – I have found that I work well listening to Japanese music on headphones (e.g. Happy End or Tokyo Jihen). I haven’t a clue what the words are and so it seems to not interrupt my coding state of mind in the same way that English language music does. The cadence (3-6 minutes per song) is not that far off the quasi-reinforcement time of 6 minutes that was suggested on your website. Also it blocks out the blathering of people near me in the office. I presume it being Japanese has nothing to do with its efficacy. It is just a language that hits zero of my language processing neurons. Any language would do if the music was good.

If you find the magic dots don’t work for you, I am just as happy to hear about it.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • natural acne remedies
  • A mainstream climate scientist has doubts. “We’re facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem.” What would Bill McKibben say?
  • Personal Experiments, a research site where you can sign up for experiments.
  • Trouble at GSK Shanghai. The defenses of the accused strike me as plausible.
  • Sleep disturbance in a hospital. “Between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., I did not go more than an hour without some kind of interruption.” As ridiculous as cutting off part of the immune system because of too many infections (tonsillectomies) and the view that acne has nothing to do with diet.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Tisano Chocolate Tea and Combining Complex Flavors

Seth Roberts2 Comments

After I interviewed Patrick Pineda about how Tisano Tea began, he gave me several tins of chocolate tea, their main product. Since then, I’ve had dozens of cups of chocolate tea. It’s a good caffeine-free drink, especially with cream.

My main use of chocolate tea, however, has been to improve black tea. Black tea + chocolate tea = great drink, better than any black tea alone or chocolate tea alone. So much better that I have stopped drinking black tea the usual way (without chocolate tea). Even cheap black tea (e.g., Lipton’s) plus chocolate tea tastes better than expensive black tea. I think I know why. Black tea (fermented) has a complex flavor, like most fermented foods. Expensive black tea is more complex than cheap black tea, but only a little more. Likewise, chocolate tea has a complex flavor (like chocolate). Combining two sources of substantial complexity produces tea with great complexity — much more than you can get by tweaking one source of complexity (e.g., varying black tea).

Here’s a recipe:

1. To 2.0 g of black tea and 0.9 g of chocolate tea add 8 oz of boiling water. Brew 4 minutes.

2. Add cream and sugar to taste.

Peet’s tea designers may have reached a similar conclusion. Peet’s sells limited-edition teas that are available for only a few months, one at a time. Several months ago the limited-edition tea was Red Cloud Cacao, which combined black tea, chocolate tea, and rooibos. The chocolate tea was from Tisano. I loved it. It sold surprisingly well, I’m told. Their next limited-edition tea, still available, is Anniversary Breakfast Blend. Here’s what the tin says:

We seek out small lot teas with unique characters and intriguing flavors . . . Then . . . we set out to make great teas even better . . . We artfully marry the elements of distinctive black teas until we have achieved a well-balanced, extraordinarily aromatic, and flavorful cup.

I told a Peet’s customer service person how much I liked the combination of black and chocolate tea. That’s funny, she said, the Anniversary Breakfast Blend is made by adding a chocolate mist to black tea. The blended teas are misted with chocolate. The website and the container say nothing about this. My guess is that the tea designers came to the same conclusion as me. Chocolate was so potent they couldn’t bear to omit it. But they couldn’t simply add chocolate tea to the blend, because that would repeat Red Cloud Cacao, appear formulaic, and spoil the story of “seek[ing] out small lot teas”. It would also be obvious: You could look at the tea and see the chocolate. So they used chocolate mist and didn’t tell customers. What the tin says is doughnut truth: The whole truth, nothing but the truth, with a hole in the truth.

Complexity is much different than other sources of pleasure in food (salty, sweet, chewy, etc.). My explorations suggest we can detect a lot more complexity that you can get from a single fermented food. But I have yet to encounter a single recipe that combines fermented foods. Most professional recipes produce complexity via many spices, which is labor-intensive (you need to add and adjust all those spices, and worry about their age) and, in my experience, produces no better results than adding one fermented flavoring, such as miso.

Salting tea also seems to improve it.

Health benefits of cocoa, a new study.