Month: October 2013

Association of Sleep and Chronic Illness

Seth Roberts15 Comments

A recent PatientsLikeMe survey found a strong correlation between chronic illness and poor sleep. Here are the most interesting results:

PatientsLikeMe survey respondents in the U.S. (n=3,284) . . . are almost nine times more likely to [have] insomnia than the general adult population. . . . PatientsLikeMe members with health conditions experience [each] of the four symptoms of insomnia [= trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, early awakening, and waking up not rested] at twice the rate of the general adult population.

This supports my view that bad sleep causes illness. The correlations could have plausibly been the other way (better sleep among survey respondents). People sleep more when sick. Whatever makes sick people sleep more might also make them fall asleep faster and wake up less often.

If I slept poorly, I would move heaven and earth to sleep better. (But would never take sleeping pills.) I sleep well, actually, but I still track my sleep and do various experiments to see if I can improve it. For example, recently I was puzzled why I was sleeping less well in Berkeley than in Beijing. One possibility was that my Beijing bedroom was darker than my Berkeley bedroom, even though my Berkeley bedroom was quite dark (e.g., no light from a street lamp). I made my Berkeley bedroom even darker and found my sleep improved. It really was cause and effect. When I made my Berkeley bedroom lighter, my sleep got worse.

My enormous concern with sleep — nothing matters more for health — seems to put me in a tiny minority. Even sleep researchers don’t say bad sleep causes sickness. However, Robb Wolf agrees with me. He has said, “If someone sleeps poorly it is hard to keep them alive. If someone sleeps well, it is hard to kill them” — a good way of putting it. At the recent Ancestral Health Symposium in Atlanta, I asked him where he got this. He said it was based on his experience, meaning his experience working with other people.

My view is heavily based on my experience of my own health. Exactly when I greatly improved my sleep, I greatly improved my health. I stopped getting obvious colds. The people around me continued to get them. I hadn’t expected this. In the research literature I found plenty of support for the idea that better sleep causes better health. An example is that poorer health during the winter seems to be due to less light, not the cold. I am sure morning sunlight improves sleep. Vitamin D has been associated with dozens of measures of health (more Vitamin D, better health). This too may reflect the underlying causality better sleep –> better health because sunlight increases Vitamin D and improves sleep. That morning Vitamin D improves sleep (Tara Grant’s great discovery) be important here. Epidemiologists should always measure sleep the way they always measure smoking. Now they almost never do.

Thanks to Richard Sprague.

More “Even sleep researchers don’t say that bad sleep causes illness” — that’s wrong. Here’s an example:

Yet there’s strong evidence that lost sleep is a serious matter. The Sleep in America polls and several large studies have linked sleep deficits with poor work performance, driving accidents, relationship problems, and mood problems like anger and depression. A growing list of health risks has been documented in recent studies, too. Heart disease, diabetes, and obesity have all been linked with chronic sleep loss. ”People just don’t realize how important sleep is, and what the health consequences are of not getting a good night’s sleep on a regular basis,” Hunt tells WebMD. “Sleep is just as important for overall health as diet and exercise.”

I should have said sleep researchers don’t connect good sleep with good immune function, which this quote illustrates.

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Does Chicken Extract Improve Brain Function?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

An article in the latest Nutrition Journal says that a “proprietary” extract of chicken meat, called CMI-168, improved brain function. From the abstract:

Normal, healthy subjects were supplemented with either placebo or CMI-168 for 6 weeks. The subjects were given a series of cognitive tests to examine their levels of cognitive functioning at the beginning and end of supplementation, as well as two weeks after termination of supplementation. The combination of these tests, namely Digit Span Backwards, Letter-Number Sequencing, and the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT), was used to assess the subjects’ attention and working memory. . . . Subjects supplemented with CMI-168 showed significantly (p < 0.01) better performance in all cognitive tests after 6 weeks’ supplementation compared to [placebo] and [their] superior performance was maintained even 2 weeks after termination of supplementation.

This is the first time I’ve heard that something in chicken improves brain function. The abstract understates the strength of the evidence; p < 0.001 (not 0.01) in almost all relevant comparisons.

However, several details make me question the claim.

1. Two of the five authors work for the company that sells the chicken extract.

2. The subject recruitment makes no sense. “A total of 46 healthy male and female subjects aged between 35 and 65 years were recruited either as walk-in or referred from their general practitioners for counseling for life-style related issues.” Walk-in? “Life-style related issues”? “Counseling”? I have never heard of such things in this context. Nothing is said about payment or the fraction of people who declined to participate.

3. Vague statistics. I cannot tell if pre-treatment scores were used to make the treatment scores more sensitive. Someone who does better than average before treatment is likely to do better than average after treatment — you want to adjust for that.

4. No apparent learning effect. Subjects in the placebo group did not clearly improve from test to test. There is usually a big learning effect with such tests. Nothing is said about learning effects.

5. Vague supporting evidence. “Anecdotal evidence has long associated EOC [essence of chicken] with improving cognitive performance, especially related to learning and memory, as well as executive function,” says the paper. It provides no documentation of this evidence.

6. Uniformly positive results. The paper emphasizes results from nine different tests of brain function. All showed significant improvement at the same p value (p < 0.001). When I used four different tests to measure the brain effects of flaxseed oil, different tests had widely different sensitivities.

I haven’t been able to find anything supporting the idea that chicken meat (or extract) improves memory other than what this company says. I asked a Chinese friend about this; she too had never heard this claim. The company behind this (Brand’s) is more than a hundred years old, and essence of chicken has been their main product. In spite of my doubts, however, I would still like to test the product to see what effect it has on my reaction-time measure of brain function.

Strangely enough, after writing this post weeks ago, I noticed by accident that duck seemed to improve my brain function. I was stunned — as I said, I had never heard such a thing. I’ll describe the data later.

The Emperor’s New Clothes and the New York Times Paywall

Seth Roberts9 Comments

A few years ago I blogged about three books I called The Emperor’s New Clothes trilogy. Each book described a situation in which, from a certain point of view, powerful people — our supposed leaders — “walked around naked”, that is, did things absurd to the naked eye, like the Emperor in the story. As in the story, many people, including experts, said nothing.

After reading about the fate of the Washington Post, I thought of the New York Times paywall, which can be avoided (i.e., defeated) by using what Chrome calls “incognito mode”. (Firefox has a similar mode.) I didn’t know this until recently; some of my friends didn’t know it. One of them carefully rationed the Times articles she read. I wonder how the long the ignorance will last. The Times is an extremely important institution. In the many long discussions at the Times about the paywall, no one mentioned this?

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Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell and Peter Lewis.

Signaling and Higher Education: Email With Bryan Caplan

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I recently emailed back and forth with Bryan Caplan about a signaling view of higher education, which Bryan elaborates in these slides. I wrote to him:

Having looked at your slides, I would say we pretty much agree. I think employers have little control over the content of college education and, as you say, use quality of college because it works better than IQ tests and the like — as you say.

Perhaps we also agree that just as British aristocrats have a lot less power now than they did 200 years ago — the message of Downton Abbey — so are American college professors slowly losing power. MOOCs are one example, blogs are another. Parents and professors are quite happy with the current system, students and employers are not, and they are gaining power. That is my theory, anyway.
I think a signaling explanation does a very good job of explaining why sense of humor matters so much, especially in mate choice. Sense of humor = Nature’s IQ test. Sense of humor signals problem solving ability, which really matters but is hard to measure directly. I used to think that we have two basic tasks in life, manipulating things and manipulating other people (long ago nobody was depressed, etc.) and they were really different.

TV Shows I Like

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Something compels me to tell you the TV shows I really like. In no special order:

  1. The Fall. Gillian Anderson is an out-of-town detective called in to solve a string of murders. On Netflix.
  2. Mom. Humor with a sad undercurrent (this show) is much better than less-layered humor (The Big Bang Theory, by the same people).
  3. Nashville. As good as Thelma and Louise (by the same person), but longer.
  4. Downton Abbey. No show portrays kindness better.
  5. Survivor. Current season (Blood versus Water), in which returning players playing against their loved ones, might be the best ever.
  6. The Mindy Project. The wittiest TV show. (Hello Ladies is good.)
  7. Masters of Sex. About Masters and Johnson. Early personal science — sex mystified Masters.
  8. Homeland. The first episode makes me think this season will be even better than the first.
  9. Peaky Blinders. About a Birmingham crime family post World War I.
  10. Mad Men (between seasons).
  11. Episodes (between seasons). Matt LeBlanc plays Matt LeBlanc. Very funny.
  12. Separated at Birth (between seasons).
  13. The Fosters (between seasons). About a foster family.
  14. Veep (between seasons). My favorite show — well, either this or Downton Abbey or Nashville.

The “Disgusting” Foods I Eat

Seth Roberts22 Comments

In a review of Anna Reid’s new book, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, I learned that one of the calorie sources that starving Leningraders came to eat was:

‘macaroni’ made from flax seed for cattle

To which I say: Damn. The implication is that, before the famine, “flax seed for cattle”, which is roughly the same as flax seed, was considered unfit for human consumption. Only when starving did Leningraders stoop to eat it. I can buy flax seed in Beijing. But not easily.

The triangle is complete. I have now learned that the main things I care about in my diet, which I go to great lengths to eat every day, are all considered “disgusting” by a large number of people:

1. Flax seed. It is the best source of omega-3 I have found. I eat ground flax seeds every day. Flaxseed oil goes bad too easily.

2. Butter. Perhaps the most reviled food in America, at least by nutritionists. A cardiologist once told me, “You’re killing yourself” by eating it.

3. Fermented foods. Many fermented foods are considered disgusting — after all, they are little different than spoiled foods.

JFK Assassination Diary by Edward Jay Epstein

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Edward Jay Epstein has just published a new book called The JFK Assassination Diary based on the diary he kept when he wrote Inquest. It is available on Kindle, Nook and as an Itunes ebook. It will soon be available in paperback.

He wrote me about it:

As you know I was the only person to interview the Warren Commission as well as its staff and liaisons with the intelligence services. I did these interviews as an undergraduate at Cornell with no credentials as a journalist, scholar, or author. My interviews also produced a revelation that shook the journalistic establishment, which had been blithely reporting until the publication of my book Inquest that the Commission had left no stone unturned in an exhaustive investigation. In fact, as I showed, it was a brief, sporadic, and incomplete investigation. Indeed one in which the senior staff lawyer in charge of the crime scene investigation quit after two days, and the young lawyer who took his place, Arlen Specter, was never able to view the single most crucial piece of evidence — the autopsy photographs. The Commission was never able to obtain them, nor other pieces of evidence, because Robert Kennedy blocked it. For the same reason, the Commission was not provided with any information about a parallel plot to kill Castro in 1963. The Commission could not connect dots to which it was denied access.

I had no problem getting this information. Many of the young lawyers on the staff were furious with the way the investigation had been handled and the time pressure imposed on them. So they gave me FBI reports, payroll records and their memos, without me even asking. This raises a question. As these lawyers and Commission members were not bound by any secrecy agreement, as amazing as that might seem nowadays, why had not journalists from major news organizations sought the same information from them? After all, in 1963, the Kennedy assassination was the crime of the century. Fifty years later, I still cannot answer this question.

A very good question. Why weren’t journalists from major news organizations more . . . enterprising? It is another variation on The Emperor’s New Clothes, where a Cornell undergraduate manages to see what many much more experienced and credentialed experts failed to see, or avoided seeing. I would answer Epstein’s question like this: The experts were disinterested in gathering evidence that might contradict their world view. That world view included a belief in the competence of exceedingly important government commissions. They didn’t want to gather evidence that might make them uncomfortable. I see this every year at Nobel Prize time. No journalist ever questions the claims in the press releases that accompany the prizes.

The Willat Effect With Gin

Seth Roberts4 Comments

The Willat Effect — named for Carl Willat, whose limoncello comparison tasting made me notice it — may happen when you experience two similar versions of one thing close together. (For example, sip one limoncello and then sip another.) The differences between them become clearer, of course. The Willat Effect is the less obvious hedonic change: suddenly the differences matter. Suddenly one version is more pleasant, the other less pleasant. The hedonic changes are large enough to change how I spend money (I buy the better version more, the worse version less). I believe this effect turns people into connoisseurs.

I recently noticed the Willat Effect with gin. As part of a project to buy every type of not-too-expensive alcohol in a nearby liquor store, I bought a bottle of Bombay Sapphire London Dry Gin. I neither like nor dislike gin, it was just something they sold I hadn’t tried. It was medium-priced (about $20). I liked it okay.

I returned to the liquor store. This time I bought two brands of London dry gin: Tanqueray (about $20) and Greenall’s Special (about $15). At home I tasted them side by side. The Tanqueray was much better, I noticed right away. It was softer, more rounded, and had floral overtones absent from the Greenall’s. Where was the Bombay Sapphire gin on these dimensions? Did it have floral overtones? I had no idea. Now I was curious. One close comparison shifted my buying habits in two ways: (a) I want to make more of these comparisons. I want to try every brand of gin in the liquor store to see if the cheaper brands tasted worse. (b) Apart from these comparisons, I will never buy inferior gin again.

The Willat Effect happens only if the two things being compared are neither too similar nor too dissimilar. Perhaps differently-priced versions of London dry gin are roughly the right distance apart and are a convenient way to demonstrate the effect. It’s easy to get different versions of London dry gin.

The effect interests me because it is (a) practical (a source of enjoyment), (b) a subtle comment on intellectuals (who complain about our “consumerist” society) and economics (I look forward to an economist’s explanation of connoisseurship), and (c) it supports my theory of human evolution, which says connoisseurs came to exist because they promote technological innovation. Connoisseurs make it easier for the most skilled craftsmen — the ones most likely to innovate — to make a living.