• Website designed to measure drug side effects
• “Natural” wine. “Ambient yeast alone are capable of taking his fermentations to completion.”
• Sophisticated study of macronutrient composition in mice

Thanks to Tucker Max and Barnaby Kerbel.

by August Hurtel

I live in Shreveport, Louisiana and work in the interlibrary loans department at Shreve Memorial library. I am 39 years old.

I believe, due to experiences I will expand upon below, that excess sulfur compounds, especially sulfites, may contribute to and even cause irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). If you have IBS, you can try to verify this in a few ways.

1) Try molybdenum. I take Carlson Lab’s Moly-B 500 mcg tablets (one tablet/day).

2) Avoid foods and supplements high in sulfur.

3) If you have already purchased the services of 23&me or want to, you can look at this thread in the forums — “Reactions to food containing sulfites, sulfur dioxide, bisulfite, metabisulfite. SUOX gene” — and see if you have the same polymorphisms, though if you just do the first two, you’ll be able to guess.

The woman who started that thread at 23&me goes by the name Red Ringlets. She asked if anyone with four polymorphisms involved in sulfur processing experience reactions to sulfur compounds commonly added to foods as preservatives and/or for antibacterial purposes. I have three of these polymorphisms. I knew I was allergic to certain medicines, but I had not thought about the effect of sulfur coming from my food and supplements largely because I associated reactions to sulfur with hives and headaches.

Several years ago once the appetite suppression the Shangri-La diet kicked in, I adopted what most would consider a paleo template for my diet. This means I generally avoid grains, legumes, and dairy with caveats (like rice, now that I work out, and butter because it is animal fat and therefore good according to evolutionary thinking). Additionally a substantial amount of the meat that I buy comes from conventional sources.

Despite not being technically paleo, I enjoyed coffee, chocolate, and red wine, which are all high in sulfur. Sulfur is also added to various coconut products, shrimp, fish, dried fruit — many products a person trying to eat paleo might eat. I ate them. And I would have gastrointestinal distress that I could not explain despite getting leaner.

In the summer of 2013 after a few social functions that served grilled hamburgers, grilled shrimp, and other summer party foods a paleo dieter might think would be okay, I went to the emergency room. I had a serious pain where my appendix should be. Sometimes the pain would get worse after eating, and I would often get diarrhea. I thought I had appendicitis, but the doctors found nothing wrong. They took regular X-rays and did blood tests, and came back and said they found nothing. I got really angry about that, so they ordered a CT scan. The CT scan also showed nothing. They told me I had IBS because they had gone through a list of other things it might be and eliminated all of them.

When I went to the emergency room, I also inadvertently took with me a large amount of sulfur. I had a couple of 90% Lindt bars with me. My chocolate intake had risen during that time, too. I had stuff to do, places to go — and an excuse to treat chocolate like a food group.

I was aware, from reading on the internet, of FODMAPs, which are osmotic carbohydrates that draw water into the gut, causing gas, bloating, cramping and diarrhea. They seemed a likely culprit because these were the symptoms I experienced. Following a low FODMAP diet seemed to help, but not perfectly so.

There is some overlap between the two lists of foods to avoid (high sulfur and high FODMAP), so avoiding FODMAPs might have helped because it made me avoid sulfur. It also made it possible for me to have days where I didn’t eat any FODMAP foods but I would eat something like shrimp and then I’d have symptoms despite not eating any FODMAPs. So, looking back on it, I think of attending a wedding, eating nothing but shrimp, and drinking a little bit of red wine, and then having IBS problems and not understanding why because it doesn’t fit in well with the FODMAP story. I think FODMAPs are problematic in a gut that has already been compromised, but FODMAPs are not evolutionarily novel, and thus are unlikely to be the original cause of the problem.

Since it was summer and I just gotten through that ER experience, I stopped eating a lot of fruits, chocolate, wine, etc. One of the things that figures largely for me as a source of sulfur during this time though is shrimp. I kept thinking it was a safe food to eat, and didn’t realize until later it was a source of sulfur. Additionally, I was taking several supplements that contained sulfur: gelatin, biotin, glutathione, NAC, ALA, MSM. I had gotten into the habit of trying different supplements since 2010 because of a neuralgia that neither doctors nor dentists could explain. Though I was not taking all of them at once, I did supplement enough to assume I kept my sulfur level high throughout this time period.

I noticed the thread Red Ringlets posted at 23&me in August of 2013. In October I asked whether or not sulfur could cause a dehydrating effect. I asked this because I’ve noticed wine can take more water out of me than other drinks containing alcohol do. I didn’t get an answer to that question, but I began to explore some of the links people had put into the thread. I read through this site: www.learningtarget.com. I found the following page particularly helpful because it mentioned that molybdenum is a vital part of the sulfite oxidase enzyme: Vitamins and Supplements for Sulfite Problems.

I still had not made a connection between sulfur and irritable bowel syndrome, but I decided to supplement with fucoidan, which is a sulfated polysaccharide found in some seaweeds. I thought it would help my gut, but it caused diarrhea. It was as if I had decided to supplement with cholera. The effect was large and obvious enough for me to realize it was probably the supplement I had just taken. Once I accepted that, I put together what I had learned from the 23&me thread.

Now, in retrospect, I think fucoidan may have caused diarrhea for completely different reasons. I learned in my 23&me health report that I am norovirus resistant, and I have subsequently read that this has something to do with my ability (or inability) to make fucose. I can’t remember where I read this, but it made me think fucoidan could have destabilized my gut flora for reasons unrelated to its sulfur content.

Whatever the reason for the extreme reaction to fucoidan, I decided the beneficial reaction to molybdenum meant that I had a genetically limited capacity to deal with all the extra sulfur in my food and supplements. I threw out my high sulfur supplements and tried to stick to low sulfur foods. Within about two weeks I started having normal bowel movements. This was better than what I was achieving before the entire fucoidan fiasco. I had migrated to a diet of rice and fish which helped me approximate normalcy, but any time I tried to have any variety in my diet, I would run into problems. By avoiding sulfur, I was able to eat a larger variety of foods without incident.

Eventually I found if I was very careful, I could eat small amounts of high sulfur foods, but this is hit or miss because I can’t reliably gauge what the potential dose is, nor is it always clear whether a food has sulfur in it. I still supplement with molybdenum but I think the long term strategy here is both molybdenum and at least avoiding high sulfite foods because my genetics suggest it is doubtful I am going to be able to process as many sulfites as other people do regardless of how much molybdenum I have.

As I mentioned before, I think once the gut is compromised, many things become irritants. Removing excess sulfur has increased my health a lot, but I suspect I need to improve gut flora, and possibly heal some tissue damage. The doctors may not be able to see it, but I still have residual pain in the region where my appendix is.

• Oncology researchers make too much of very little.
• deadly delays in newborn blood testing. Do hospital employees = government employees?
• University of Western Australia refuses request for data because requester “made inflammatory statements on [his] weblog . . . including attacks on the character and professionalism of University staff.”
• Benefits of fermented food. “Once all the grains in her diet were fermented, she began to feel normal — for the first time in years.”

I haven’t been interested in the work of John Ioannidis because it seems unrelated to discovery. Ioannidis says too many papers are “wrong”. I don’t know how the fraction of “wrong” papers is related to the rate of discovery. For example, what percentage of “wrong” papers produces the most discovery? Ioannidis doesn’t seem to think about this. Yet that is the goal of science — better understanding. Not “right” papers.

Almost all important health discoveries are discoveries of new cause-effect relationships. If you do X, Y happens. My view of the problem with modern health science is nothing like what Ioannidis and other critics (such as the “couldn’t replicate Finding X” critics) say. It is lack of progress on major health questions (e.g., what causes depression?), emphasized every year by awarding of the Nobel Prize in Medicine to research of little or no practical value. Almost every year, the Nobel Prize press office says the honored research will be useful in the future. The lack of progress shows no sign of ending.

The best that can be said about recent critics of science, such as Ioannidis and Danny Kahneman, my former colleague, is they see there’s a problem. The worst that can be said about them is they fail to understand the cause of the problem. This is why their proposed solutions could easily make the problem worse.

Whenever you do an experiment — psychology and the health sciences are almost all experimental — you “use up” the effect you are studying (X causes Y). You can do an experiment to learn if X causes Y only so many times. After that, you know the answer and a new experiment is pointless. Professional scientists are only able to test ideas (cause-effect statements) that are fairly plausible. With such ideas, a publishable outcome is likely enough to be worth the cost of testing. They are unable to test implausible ideas, because such experiments are not likely enough to produce a publishable outcome. With limited resources, they must generate a certain number of published papers per year, at least if they want a career.

To have a viable system, you need to generate new plausible ideas at at least the same rate you are using them up. Otherwise you will run out. You must design your experiments so that they accomplish this. Not necessarily every experiment, but your experiments in aggregate. It isn’t easy to find new plausible ideas. If you think I’ll just get on with my career, generating papers as fast as possible and leave it to someone else to come up with new ideas worth testing, then your field will run downhill as plausible ideas are used up and not replaced. This is what has happened in several fields, including mine (animal learning). In psychology much greater concern about both fraud and lack of replicability have started at about the same time. I believe both (more fraud, more lack of replicability) stem from the increasing difficulty of honest (or more honest) research.

A friend who is a psychology professor agreed with me that psychologists — at least him — didn’t know how to generate new ideas worth testing. “Do you?” he asked. I said I did:

1. They [= psychologists] should modify their data collection. In my experience, new ideas almost always come from carefully collected data. They don’t come from introspection, talking to friends, reading the newspaper, watching TV, going to talks, etc.

2. Finding new ideas worth testing means finding new ideas that are plausible enough to be worth the cost of testing. To find new ideas with sufficient plausibility to test you need to test implausible ideas. A small fraction will pass the test, gaining plausibility. They will become sufficiently plausible to be worth testing.

3. To test implausible ideas in a career-consistent manner, you need to be able to test them very cheaply. Few if any psychologists have thought about this. They don’t realize how important it is.

 

When you have very cheap tests, you can test far more ideas than you can if you only have expensive tests. You need a “test set”: very cheap tests, cheap tests, almost-cheap tests, and so on. Ideas that pass a very cheap test become worth testing with a cheap test, those that pass a cheap test become worth testing with an almost cheap test, and so on. With current methods (all tests are expensive), perhaps social psychology professors who want to publish have a set of 50 ideas that are plausible enough to be worth the cost of testing. Those ideas get tested over and over, using them up. Were cheap tests available, perhaps the same professors could choose from a set of 1000 ideas those they want to test. Of those 1000 ideas, 950 were too implausible to test with expensive tests. Among those 950, I believe, would be some ideas that when tested seemed to be true.

I came to these beliefs trying to understand why my self-experimentation did a good job of finding new ideas worth testing. I concluded that the secret was this: I was able to test implausible ideas very cheaply — thousands of times more cheaply than professional scientists. Self-tracking — keeping track of my sleep, for example, and looking for outliers — was a very cheap way of getting new ideas about what controls sleep. Self-experimentation was a slightly more expensive (but still very cheap) way to test ideas that self-tracking came up with.

Many people have complained about a lack of replicability problem in psychology, including my friend and co-author Hal Pashler. An obvious solution is to raise the bar for publication: require better (= stronger) evidence. Sure, this will improve the quality of testing, but how will it affect the rate of production of plausible new ideas? My cost-of-test proposal suggests it will reduce that rate of production. I am saying that cheap tests are all important. Raising the publication bar will make the only test you have more expensive. What if the replication problem is a response to lack of plausible new ideas? Then this solution to the problem would make the problem worse.