Joseph Biederman is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. It makes a certain sense. According to Wikipedia, in 2007 he was

the second highest producer of high-impact papers in psychiatry overall throughout the world with 235 papers cited a total of 7048 times over the past 10 years as determined by the Institute for Scientific Information.

And he has won several awards:

Biederman was the recipient of the 1998 NAMI Exemplary Psychiatrist award. He was also selected by the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society Awards committee as the recipient of the 2007 Outstanding Psychiatrist Award for Research. In 2007, Biederman received the Excellence in Research Award from the New England Council of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He was also awarded the Mentorship Award from the Department of Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

But there’s also this:

Biederman had pioneered the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children and adolescents, a disorder previously thought to affect only adults. One of the world’s most influential child psychiatrists, Biederman’s work led to a 40-fold increase in pediatric bipolar disorder diagnoses and an accompanying expansion in the use of antipsychotic drugs – developed to treat schizophrenia and not originally approved for use in children – to treat the condition. However, Biederman and his colleagues Spencer and Wilens failed to accurately disclose the large consultancy fees they were receiving from pharmaceutical companies that make antipsychotics whilst conducting this research.

For which Biederman received a slap on the wrist from Harvard.

And there’s this:

Dr. Biederman pushed [Johnson & Johnson] to finance a research center at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, with a goal to “move forward the commercial goals of J.& J” [said Biederman in an email]

In other words, he felt no shame in admitting that he considered the commercial goals of Johnson & Johnson more important than the health of children with severe problems. One of the few people who can really help these children — by doing good research — he preferred to help Johnson & Johnson.

This story by investment blogger Mish Shedlock about a prostate cancer diagnosis illustrates the bias of doctors toward dangerous expensive treatments:

The biopsy showed I had cancer. My “Gleason Score” was 6. The surgeon who performed the biopsy strongly recommended surgery. He gave me a cost of $20,000.

Bad recommendation. Shedlock got rid of his cancer, as measured by PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) tests, without surgery or any other expensive or dangerous treatment.

The surgeon said something else also highly misleading. He told Shedlock he was “10% cancerous”. When Shedlock repeated this to his oncologist,

The oncologist replied “That’s not correct. Of the 12 samples, only one had cancer and one was questionable. The cancerous sample was 10% cancerous.” Now that is a hell of a lot different than being 10% overall cancerous.

His oncologist seemed unfamiliar with data:

I informed the oncologist that I was going to have a PSA test every month. He commented something along the lines of “Why do you want to do that? Every six months is sufficient. The tests are not that reliable.” . . . [I thought:] The more unreliable a test is, the more tests one should take to weed out erroneous outlier results.

This reminds me of the dermatologist I had in graduate school. After I tested the two medicines he had prescribed for my acne, and found that one of them didn’t work, and told him this, he said, “Why did you do that?” Haha.

The oncologist predicted that the cocktail that cured Shedlock “would not do [him] any good”.

I am sorry Shedlock does not name the doctors involved, as I did in a similar situation. I too avoided recommended surgery and my surgeon made highly misleading statements. Shedlock wrote about bad health care more generally here.

Thanks to Steve Hansen.

Six years ago I started using a reaction-time (RT) test (a test where you press a key in response to something as fast as possible) to track my brain function. I took the test daily. It must use only a small part of the brain but I assumed that something that made me faster would probably improve overall brain function. Behind this belief, which I call better RT, better brain, were countless studies of brain anatomy and physiology, which had shown that neurons and glial cells all over the brain share many features. Cells in different parts of the brain are much more alike than different. More support for this assumption was that certain doses of flaxseed oil improved both RT and other measures of brain function, such as balance.

I also assumed that changes that improved RT would probably improve overall health — what I call the better RT, better body assumption. It was less plausible than the better RT, better brain assumption because the cells in different organs of the body differ so much. They have many similarities but also many differences. I believed it for two reasons. (a) Flaxseed oil not only improved several measures of brain function, it improved my gums, no doubt because it reduced inflammation. It had been far from obvious that improving gums was so easy or that flaxseed oil (in the right dosage) would do so. The assumption better RT, better body had made a surprising prediction, you could say, that turned out to be true. (b) The brain gets much the same blood as the rest of the body. (Not exactly the same, because of the blood-brain barrier.) In the same way, all plug-in electrical appliances use the same house current. Just as all appliances have been designed to work well with that current, all our organs should have been shaped by evolution to work well with same mix of nutrients. You can’t feed your brain differently than your heart.

When I discovered that butter improved RT, the better RT, better body assumption made a second even more surprising prediction: Eating more butter improved my health. This contradicted the claims of all mainstream health experts, who say saturated fats cause heart disease. I stuck with my assumption — I still eat a lot of butter. The data I’ve seen since then has supported my conclusion. For example, my Agatston score got better, not worse, after a year of eating lots of butter. The Agatston score is currently the best predictor of heart disease.

I recently found more support for the better RT, better body assumption. Several studies have found that RT is a good predictor of health (better RT, better health). Even more impressive, it is a better predictor than many of the predictors we already know of. The RT test used in these studies is close to the test I now use, which I developed independently. The RT test in these studies involves showing a digit (0-4), after which the subject presses one of five keys (labelled 0-4) as fast as possible. My current RT test is very similar but uses 7 digits instead of 5.

A 2005 study looked at the oft-reported correlation between higher IQ and lower mortality. The IQs and RTs of about 900 persons were measured in 1988. Deaths until 2002 were noted. RT was associated with lower mortality, even after taking out associations with smoking, education and social class. RT and IQ are correlated (better RT, higher IQ). When the RT-death association was removed, IQ no longer predicted death. So RT does a good job of capturing whatever it is about IQ that predicts mortality.

A 2009 study compared RT to more conventional health predictors (“risk factors”). About 7,000 subjects were followed from 1984 to 2005. RT in 1984 was a good predictor of all-cause mortality compared to classic risk factors. Smoking was by far the best predictor, followed by RT. RT was a better predictor than physical activity, blood pressure, a questionnaire measuring “psychological distress”, resting heart rate, waist/hip ratio, alcohol intake, and body mass index.

A third study, based on the same subjects as the 2009 study, found that amount of decline (slowing) in RT (from one test to a second test seven years later) predicted death. People with more decline were more likely to die.

All this supports studying how your RT is controlled by your environment, especially what you eat. You have to choose wisely what to study. The point is not to be as fast as possible regardless of everything else. Lots of drugs (stimulants, such as caffeine) decrease RT for short periods of time. I doubt they improve health. (If they harm sleep, they probably worsen health.) What makes sense is to look for two things: 1. Poisons. Things that slow you down. I discovered that tofu did so. I gave several reasons for thinking that tofu affects many people this way, not just me. Billions of people eat tofu, unaware of this possibility. 2. Deficiencies. Study things that are missing from your life now but were likely to be present when we evolved. It is quite plausible that our ancient ancestors ate more omega-3 (in fish, but also in flaxseed) and more animal fat (from big animals, but also in butter) than we do now. My data suggest omega-3 and animal fat are nutrients necessary for health whose importance mainstream nutrition researchers have not fully appreciated.

My RT data have shown me there’s a lot I didn’t/don’t know about how my food affects me. Maybe everyone can say that. Unlike almost anyone else, however, I can reduce my ignorance myself. I don’t need to rely on experts.

Via a website, I asked about the flavonoid content of Dove dark chocolate. In China, a package of Dove dark chocolate has a picture of a heart — meaning the food is “heart-healthy”. The heart benefits are believed to come from flavonoids. Mars has been exploring this idea in various ways, such as this special process and these special chocolates.

An email from Mars said I should call a hotline. The woman who answered did not know what flavonoids are. “Do you want to know the cocoa content?” she asked more than once. No, the flavonoid content, I said. She looked. “We don’t have that information,” she said. Haha!

I said the flavonoids in chocolate are believed to be responsible for the health benefits of chocolate. (That’s true, but I might have said flavanols — a type of flavonoid — instead of the much broader term flavonoid.) “We don’t make health claims for our chocolates,” the Mars representative said. (As if a picture of a heart on a package is not a health claim. No doubt there is an important difference between US and Chinese law.) I can see why she would say that. Our brilliant government, protecting us from crazy ideas such as chocolate and yogurt are healthy, but not from the exaggerations of doctors and drug companies. Which is more dangerous, (a) eating chocolate or yogurt or (b) being cut open?

Although the blog Mr. Heisenbug (“Respect the microbiota”) is quite new, I have learned a lot from it, especially about the importance of fiber. I interviewed the blogger:

A reader named Sam, an engineer in Irving, Texas, writes:

I am a long time reader of your blog. Based upon your writings, I have taken Vitamin D in the morning and Magnesium Glycinate powder at night for over a year. Both have helped. So I do not have any sleep issues that needed to be addressed. I took the honey only to see if it would make any further difference. I was a bit wary to begin with as I do not usually consume honey. I have had a mild allergy to eating honey until at least several years ago. Even a teaspoon of honey would within an hour give me abdominal cramps that would last for an hour or more.

I started a Primal/Paleo/PHD way of eating 3 years ago. No processed foods, no wheat, only fermented dairy (kefir/cheese/cultured butter/ghee), occasional alcohol and occasional desserts (generally fresh fruit or some ice cream) and regular use of home fermented food like sauerkraut, beet kvass and lemonade.

So the honey experiment was also to test whether the changed diet had fixed the allergy.

I tried regular store bought honey (Kroger) first. I took a tablespoon approximately 10 minutes before going to bed. It could be a bit more than a tablespoon as I would dip a regular tablespoon in the jar and eat it as soon as the stringing ended. The first day there was anxiety in expectation of an allergic reaction. No cramps but there was some mild abdominal pain, I would just call it discomfort. I thought this could be psychological. So I tried it for 3 more days. Still the same discomfort within the hour. But I would fall asleep at some point and wake up feeling the same as I used to earlier.

I almost quit after this – when my wife reminded me that we had some Manuka honey in the pantry that we got as a gift and that could be worth trying. So I did. This is a honey produced in New Zealand and has some number on it – that claims to have medicinal properties. This honey was thicker, so easier to measure. About one tablespoon each night, same time as before. Same discomfort – no change in overall sleep quality or post waking up energy. I tried this for 4 days.

It may seem that the obvious course of action would be to quit the experiment at this stage. However, around this time, I read a comment on one of the blogs I follow, describing the process of refining honey for bottling. Apparently it is heated and filtered as a minimum and maybe more processing in most cases. I know a friend who cured his allergy to homogenized milk (skin redness after consumption) by shifting to raw milk which he pasteurizes himself at a low temperature. So I looked for raw unprocessed honey and stumbled upon a source – which curiously had regular raw honey and fermented raw honey. I ordered a jar of each.

Initially I tried the raw honey, in the morning, in white tea just to test for the abdominal discomfort. Surprisingly, there was none. So I decided to take it at night and continue to see if there are any benefits. One tablespoon as before. I usually fall asleep within a few minutes of turning off the lights. This time, I noticed that I would toss around a bit longer before getting to sleep. However, I did notice that I would wake up more energetic. As I said it is subjective – hard to describe. But I would get ready faster and finish up a few chores that I would be lazy about on other days.

After a week I reduced the dosage to one teaspoon. The only observable change was that the tossing in bed now ceased and I would fall asleep quickly. So I stayed with this dose as a smaller dose is difficult to measure accurately.

After a total of 10 days on regular raw honey, I decided to try the fermented raw honey – only because I had ordered it and had it with me. I stayed with the one teaspoon dose just before bed and immediately noticed one remarkable change besides the increased energy in the morning. Normally, I wake up once at night, around 2AM, to go to the bathroom. The very first night, I slept through till the morning. Subsequently, I have noticed that occasionally I wake up at 5AM but most nights I just sleep through.

It is has definitely increased my sense of well being and post wake up energy.

His main conclusions are:

1. Raw honey works better than ordinary (cooked) honey. Manuka honey is no better than ordinary honey. Fermented raw honey is even better than ordinary raw honey.

2. One teaspoon is better than 1 tablespoon — fell asleep faster.

3. The benefits include less waking up at night, more energy in the morning, an increased sense of well being, and better motivation (e.g., to do chores).

I fall asleep quickly whether or not I take honey at bedtime. But it is curious that fermented honey works better than non-fermented. Fermented honey has less sugar; maybe that’s the reason for the difference.

This graph from Andreas Eenfeldt (via Mark’s Daily Apple) shows heart attacks (left axis) and butter consumption (right axis) in Sweden over the last quarter-century. Heart attacks have been going down, at least in men. What interests me is that when butter consumption suddenly increased, starting in 2006, heart attacks went down more quickly. If you fit a straight line to the heart attack rates for 1988-2005, you will see that the remaining rates (2006-2012) are below the extrapolation of the line, both for men and women. The Swedes made other dietary changes when they started eating more butter (the butter replaced other foods, for example). Nevertheless, these data make it more plausible that if butter has any effect on heart attacks, it reduces them, the opposite of what we’ve been told.

I eat a half stick (60 g) of butter daily. It improves my brain speed. After I gave a talk about this, a cardiologist in the audience said I was killing myself. I said I thought my experimental data was more persuasive than epidemiology, with its many questionable assumptions. The new data suggests I was right — butter does not increase heart attacks. It also supports my belief that by learning what makes my brain work best, I will improve my health in other ways (such as reduce heart attack risk).

No doubt a low-carb high-fat diet is better than what many people eat, but I believe the never-eat-sugar part of such a diet is a mistake. There are plenty of reasons to think sugars eaten at the right time of day improve sleep. Whatever you think about nutrition, don’t get too comfortable.

Gatekeeper syndrome afflicts many many healthcare professionals. People with gatekeeper syndrome dismiss or ignore any solution that does not involve them (or someone like them) being a gatekeeper and charging “toll”, i.e., making money. When I was a teenager, I had acne. None of the dermatologists I saw showed any interest in what caused it or even seemed to understand it was possible to learn the cause. All of them prescribed drugs (antibiotics) so powerful I had to see them again and again to get the prescription refilled. That’s garden-variety gatekeeper syndrome.

A recent New York Times article about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) illustrates gatekeeper syndrome among professionals from whom you might expect better. The article describes ADHD experts at various universities wringing their hands: Did we overemphasize drugs at the expense of “skills training”?

Some authors of the [1999] study — widely considered the most influential study ever on A.D.H.D. — worry that the results oversold the benefits of drugs, discouraging important home- and school-focused therapy and ultimately distorting the debate over the most effective (and cost-effective) treatments.

What about finding the cause(s) of ADHD? And getting rid of it/them? Maybe that would be a good idea? None of the experts quoted in the article even seems aware this is possible.

When an ordinary psychotherapist or doctor has gatekeeper syndrome, I think they’re just a foot soldier. The experts in the Times article are not foot soldiers. They’re generals. They are professors at world-famous universities, such as UC Berkeley and McGill, with enormous influence. (One is a former colleague of mine, Stephen Hinshaw.) They don’t need to see patients and dispense treatments to make a living. They have assured income (tenure) and prestige. They enjoy freedom of thought.

Too bad they don’t use their freedom and prestige to better help the children they study and the tens of millions of children who will be diagnosed with ADHD until someone (not them, apparently) figures out what causes it. Instead, they study who should get the revenue stream that each new diagnosis provides.

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

One reason personal science is a good idea is it is simple and immediate (in the sense of near). You study one person, you do experiments (easier to interpret than surveys), you can easily repeat the experiment (so you are not confused by secular trends — big changes over time — and implausible statistical assumptions), you are aware of unusual events during the experiment (so you are less confused by anomalous results and outliers), you are close to the data collection (so you understand the limits and error rates of the measurements). These elements make good interpretation of your data much easier. Professional science generally lacks some of these elements. For example, the person who writes the paper may not have collected the data. This makes it harder to understand what the data mean.

I hear criticism of (professional) science more now than ten years ago. Lack of replicability, for example. What I rarely hear — actually, never — is how often science critics make big blunders. As far as I can tell, as often as those they criticize. This is not to say they are wrong — who knows. Just overstated.
An example is a critique of salt and blood pressure studies I read recently. Many people say salt raises blood pressure. The critique, by Michael Alderman, a professor of epidemiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said, not so fast. The title is: “Salt, blood pressure and health: a cautionary tale.” It’s a good review, with lots of interesting data, but the reviewer, at the same time he is criticizing others, makes a major blunder.

He describes a study in which people were placed on a low-salt diet. Their blood pressure was measured twice, before the diet (Time 1) and after they had been on the diet for quite a while (Time 2). Comparison of the two readings showed a wide range of changes. Some people’s blood pressure went up, some people’s blood pressure stayed the same, and some people’s blood pressure went down. Alderman called this result “enormous variation between individuals on the effect of salt on pressure”. Oh no! He assumes that if your blood pressure is different at Time 2 than Time 1, it was because of the change in dietary salt. There are dozens of possible reasons a person’s blood pressure might differ at the two times (leaving aside measurement error, another possibility). Dozens of things that affect blood pressure were not kept constant.

Had there been a second group that did not change their diet and was also measured at Time 1 and Time 2 — and had the subjects given the low-salt diet showed a larger spread of Time 2/Time 1 difference scores than the no-change group, then you could reasonably conclude that there was variation in the response to the low-salt diet. To conclude “enormous variation” you’d want to see an enormous increase in difference-score variability. But there was no second group.

This is not some small detail. Alderman actually believes there is great variation in response to salt reduction. It is the main point of his article. Spy magazine had a great column called Review of Reviewers. Such as book and movie reviewers. Unfortunately there is no such thing in science.

Mike McInnes is a retired Scottish pharmacist and the author of The Honey Diet, published today. This book interests me because it advocates eating honey at bedtime.

Could you summarize the book?

It’s based on two ideas — that modern obesity is driven by two main factors. First, overconsumption of carbohydrates and sugars. Second, poor quality sleep. The medical profession has been saying that the cause of obesity is fat. We’ve known since the 19th century that it is carbohydrates, not fat. Poor quality sleep drives up stress hormones and appetite hormones.

In the West we have an early evening meal. We go to bed with a depleted liver. There is not enough fuel in the liver to supply the brain overnight. The way to resolve that is to forward-provision the brain, via the liver. The best food for that is honey. Honey is liver-specific. It is metabolized differently from other sugars. Honey restocks the liver prior to sleep. No other food can do this in the same way that honey can do this. Fruits are unlike honey because honey contains an army of nutrients, bioflavonoids, organic acids and others that ensure honey is not metabolized in the same way as refined sugars, which have none of these nutrients. Indeed it is fair to describe honey as the most potent anti-diabetic food known to man.

What’s the background, the history, of these ideas?

I’m a pharmacist. Sold my pharmacy. Went into sport nutrition in the late 1990s. I rapidly discovered that athletes have no concept of brain metabolism or liver store during exercise and recovery. The most critical organ of sport is the liver. I looked for a food that would provide sufficient liver supply during exercise and during recovery. When an athlete collapses, it’s not enough fuel left in the liver. Same at night, you go to sleep without sufficient fuel in the liver, after an early evening meal – and then you cannot recover physiologically – the brain is forced to activate stress and this in turn upgrades the orexigenic (appetite) hormones.

I knew from my physiological background that fructose was a key sugar to replenish the liver, fructose is liver specific – it only goes to the liver, where it is converted to glucose and stored as liver glycogen. It also brings glucose into the liver – it liberates the glucose enzyme – glucokinase and optimizes the liver (cerebral) energy reserve. Fructose is critical to replenishing the liver. At the time the usual line was the fructose goes only to muscle, and therefore had no role to play is exercise and fueling in sport.

Birmingham University did studies on fructose with success. Now every sports drink in the world contains fructose. They missed the nocturnal physiology. You have to replenish your liver before sleep. If you have a six or seven o’clock meal, you don’t have enough in the liver to see the brain through the nocturnal fast. Having discovered that honey was the key fuel to refuel the liver before sleep, I then developed the theory of replenishing the liver before sleep. Honey is the gold standard food for doing that – no other food that I know of can do this as can honey, and without digestive burden.

Have you tested other foods?

You will find thousands of studies on the Mediterranean Diet. I only know of one scientist who has written about the key question of timing. With this diet you have healthy meal that contains fruits and vegetables at 11 pm. The key principle is the timing. That would allow significant liver replenishment of the liver via the fruits and vegetables. That meant the brain had a good liver supply for sleep. The brain could activate the recovery system via the pituitary gland. That meant you were reducing the risk of all the degenerative diseases – diabetes, dementia, obesity and heart disease.

They’ve now stopped that. They now do as we do in Europe and America, they have an early evening meal. The fastest growing rate of these diseases is in the southern Mediterranean.

I just looked at the nutrient content of other foods.

I wrote a book in 1995 based on utilizing honey at night. We got feedback from all around the world. What the effect of the honey was on nocturnal physiology. It’s not difficult to work out what’s going on, it’s quite simple. The response from readers was that honey at bedtime, in addition to better sleep, produced changes like “fitter/stronger/healthier/improved mental acuity/less nausea and morning sickness” — all of which can be attributed to reduced adrenaline/cortisol and glucagon, to nocturnal energy homeostasis, and improved anabolic profile.

For decades, people have said sleep is a low energy system. That’s wrong. Sleep is a high-energy system. Is the brain optimally fueled from the liver in advance of sleep? That’s the critical question. The brain has about 30 seconds worth of glucose. About 5 grams in the blood. The blood glucose would last 5 minutes. The only store that matters to the brain is how much reserve fuel is in the liver. Your liver has about 65-75 g of glucose in capacity. It releases 10 g every hour into the circulation – around 6-6 and a half grams to the brain. Do the math, you see the brain is in trouble at any tome is the 24 hour cycle if the liver reserve is low – especially in advance of the night fast. The brain cannot use fats for that purpose. The body cannot convert fat to glucose. Never. What it can do is during starvation it can convert fat to ketones and use the ketones for energy. But you have to be starving for that to happen. The brain must be fully provisioned prior to sleep. The gold standard food for that is honey.

What about eating a banana or apple in place of honey?

A tablespoon of honey is equivalent to a small or medium apple. However the apple doesn’t have the huge number of nutrients that affect honey’s ability to metabolize optimally in the liver and to stabilize blood glucose concentration. Honey has 200 non-nutrients that make a difference. If you took fruit at night, you would get significant liver replenishment but not as much as honey.

Of course a perfectly good case may be made for fruits and indeed vegetables before sleep since they both have an appr. 1:1 ratio of fructose to glucose, as does honey. However there are many additional nutrients in honey that improve insulin signalling, and partition and disposal of the sugars that are not in these foods – hence honey is a potent anti-diabetic food – it improves the action of two of our most widely used anti-diabetic medications – metformin and glibenclamide – I am not aware of any other sugar or sugar containing food that can do that. In the fullness of time we may find other foods/fuels that are as good as, or better than, honey, but the present knowledge is that honey is the Gold Standard. Nothing wrong with some added fiber – but not required at night, and adds digestive burden.

When is the best time to take the honey?

The honey should be taken as close to bedtime as possible.

Why that timing?

You have to do the mathematics of liver capacity and liver release. We’ve done several local studies on it. One German scientist is interested in this – Christian Benedict at Lubeck University. I wrote an earlier book on this subject that got a huge amount of responses from around the world. People saying how it transformed their sleep patterns. We found there was a significant improvement. It’s not a complicated issue.

Why call it a diet?

The only time you burn body fat exclusively is when you are sleeping. During exercise you burn both glucose and fat. You also burn muscle fat. Let’s take a 90-minute moderate intensity work out. A BBC study was done. The subject burned 19 g of fat. Overnight when the physiologist measured it he had burned 49 g of fat. What he did not understand during the exercise that although the total fat was 19 g, half of that was body fat, half was muscle fat. His attempt to explain why he burned more fat overnight was nonsense. The reason is very simple. Recovery physiology is highly expensive and exclusively ues body fat as the fuel from the circulation. If you burn 19 g during the workout then the half which is the body fat portion is 9.5 g. Now you can understand the relationship between exercise physiology and nocturnal physiology with respect to body fat used – it was 5 times as much during the night as during the workout. The key to recovery physiology is how much fuel is in liver. The study that reached that conclusion was done in 1950 and was and is ignored by the scientific establishment. It was a study on mitosis in mice. It traced the mitosis (cell division), an index to recovery. The main point was the recovery depends on the level of glycogen in the liver. This study also noted that recovery utilizes fat – again missed by the scientific establishment to this day.

Most of the stuff that I do is already there in the literature, you just need to know where to look. There’s only one scientist that I know of who has developed the same idea about sleep. Christian Benedict at Lubeck in northern Germany. The brain’s stress system is activated during the night because of the brain’s requirement for fuel. He looked at nocturnal physiology. He looked at the stress system overnight. He didn’t measure the effect of honey. It’s likely that once the book is published, there’s an important group at Lubeck called the Selfish Brain Group who are interested in the relation between cerebral energy deprivation and obesity. They are focusing on the concept that obesity is driven by chronic cerebral glucose deprivation. Basically the same as my theory. Some differences.

The foods we eat overload the circulation with energy. It means that if the glucose in that system went into the brain the brain would fry to death. The cerebral glucose pump, which is called the iPump, is suppressed. This is my theory. Consequently the glucose that you are consuming when you eat a high carb meal does not transfer into the brain. That means the brain is now deprived of energy so you are forced to go back and eat more and you repeat the cycle.

The time we burn body fat is when we are sleeping. For that to happen you have to activate the recovery system. For that to happen the brain has to have reserve fuel in the liver. If the brain does not have enough fuel in the liver it cannot activate recovery, it has to activate stress. The highest consumption of energy during the night is REM sleep and that’s when you learn. There’s another fundamental question that we need to address. The scientific and health professions will tell you if you are diabetic, you increase your risk of dementia dramatically. They’ve got that completely the wrong way around because suppressing the cerebral glucose pump is incipient dementia. It means that your brain is already deprived of energy – it’s already starving. The first thing that happens is we overload the systemic system with glucose. The second is that we overproduce insulin. Both hyperglycemia and hyperinsulin suppress the cerebellar glucose pump (iPump). That is incipient dementia. Then the excess glucose in the circulation is converted to fat via insulin. Now you’re becoming obese. Eventually your ability to keep your glucose stable by storing it as fat breaks down – you become insulin resistant – and then you become diabetic. The first system of energy impairment is in the brain. Then in the body – the sequence is first incipient dementia and chronic cerebral glucose deprivation (hunger) – then the excess circulating energy is converted to fat – then this protective mechanism breaks down – you become insulin resistant – that is diabetic.

I’m a retired pharmacist. I don’t have access to university science and study facilities. I just use the existing literature – however this is changing and a number of academics are now interested. There’s nothing that I’ve said that is not based on the literature.

If people take honey at bedtime they will lose weight?

This has been confirmed over and over again. Anecdotally, of course. Talking to athletes. Hundreds of people. After the first book, we got feedback from all around the world. Small to massive weight loss. Many people lost several stone. The new book has more science and is based on new science as well that is emerging almost daily. They’re realizing that Alzheimer’s and diabetes are basically the same disease. They still think that diabetes causes Alzheimer’s, whereas it’s the other way around. Chronic cerebellar glucose deprivation – that is incipient dementia causes obesity and diabetes. Any high energy system which is overloaded will short circuit. That’s what sugars are doing to the brain. The mechanism is very simple, sugars and insulin short-circuit the brain by suppressing the cerebral glucose pump – the iPump. If your blood sugar is too high it reduces the blood sugar/energy in the brain. That means if you have a high carb meal, less glucose enters the brain. Within 15 minutes, you’re hungry again. This is why carbohydrates make you hungry sooner. The explanation is stunningly simple.

You see people on TV who are gigantic. That’s the reason. These people are suffering from chronic cerebral hunger. The more they eat, the worse it gets.

I lost weight when I drank sugar water. Can you explain that?

I saw that. The fructose would replenish the liver. If the liver is replenished, the brain thinks that’s fine. There’s research by a guy named Maricio Russeck in Mexico. He discovered glucose receptors in the liver. He advocated the notion, which was correct, that the liver is critical in appetite control. That’s now being confirmed by recent science.

How is The Honey Diet different from the earlier book?

That book was based on restocking the liver before sleep. There’s much more science in this book. The scientific world has moved on in two ways. It’s now looking at honey in a serious way. Also, the question of low carbohydrate versus low fat diets is now becoming a major issue.

How would you sum this up?

The critical measure for the brain in all feeding and appetite regulation is based not on what’s in the blood but what’s in the liver. Russeck was spot on, 5 decades ahead of his time. These are absolutely critical questions. Let’s focus on dementia. There’s 35 million demented people in the world. That doubles every 20 years. One hundred years from now, one billion people are demented. The human brain is now shrinking, it’s not growing. That’s because one percent of those demented people is genetically driven. What is causing the other 99% of dementia, which has happened in the last 40-50 years? The answer is sugar. Refined carbohydrates. Processed foods. Honey is metabolized differently than refined sugars.

If I drink fructose and glucose in water at bedtime, it would have a different effect?

Yes, because they don’t contain the nutrients that are in honey that enable it to be metabolized differently. In America, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) drives obesity. It overloads the liver with fructose and it’s then converted to fat.

HFCS at bedtime would have quite a different effect than honey?

Yes, for sure.