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.

• Girl brain-dead after tonsillectomy. No doubt her parents were not told (a) your tonsils are part of your immune system, an essential part of your body, and (b) tonsil removal is associated with a 50% higher death rate. As I said here, an “evidence-based” evaluation of whether tonsillectomies are good or bad failed to mention both of these things, along with a ton of other negative evidence.
• Reverse graffiti. I think of this blog as reverse graffiti.
• Interview with Peter Higgs. “Believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.”
• UC Berkeley Psychology Department fires staff employee (in his 24th year), apparently for union activities. “Francis Katsuura created a Cal Agenda account to track all time that Paul Haller attended bargaining [sessions]. No other department has created such an account.”

Thanks to Matt Cassell.

Here are some especially notable results (most notable first).

Other People’s

1. Bedtime honey greatly improved sleep. Stuart King found this after many other things had failed to help him. He got the idea from Dave Asprey, who got it from The Honey Revolution (2009) by Ron Kessenden and Mike McInnes, but Stuart made by far the best case that the effect was important and determined some boundary conditions (e.g., don’t eat a lot of sugar during the day). The improvement is so big and easy (honey tastes good) that it’s quite possible this is why evolution shaped us to enjoy sweets after dinner — to improve sleep. In the future, I believe, it will be understood that sugars (at the right times in the right amounts) are a necessary nutrient — exactly the opposite of what all nutrition experts, including paleo ones and Weston Price, say. When this stunning reversal will happen I don’t know — but no one will have foretold it more than Stuart.

2. Avoidance of glutamate cured autism. “Cure” is not too strong. Katherine Reid, who has a Ph.D. in protein chemistry, realized that many many foods, including ultrapasteurized milk, contain glutamate. When all glutamate was removed from her daughter’s diet, her daughter, who had been autistic, became completely normal. The generality of this solution is unclear but to cure even one case of autism is more than anyone else has done.

3. Xylitol eliminated lichen planus. Evelyn M. found that if she swished xylitol around in her mouth several times/day, her lichen planus and overall gum health greatly improved. This effect is well-known in Scandinavia but barely known elsewhere. American dentists don’t know it, for example. I didn’t know it.

4. Caffeine reduced reaction time. Alex Chernavsky wrote his own version of my brain tracking reaction-time test and found, in a well-designed experiment, that caffeine made him faster, at least for a few hours. What’s important here is the method, not the result: Alex’s success with a test that costs nothing and takes only a few minutes/day. His success brings closer the day that many people can do these tests. When non-experts realize they can study their own health in good experiments, the world will change.

Mine

1. Bedtime honey greatly increased my strength. (More here .) This convinced me that bedtime honey was something special, more than another way to improve sleep. (I also improved my sleep by darkening my bedroom — much less important.) Bedtime honey also seemed to improve mood and motivation. I have been trying to improve my sleep my whole adult life — this, I now see, is the secret. My discovery in the1990s that lots of standing improves my sleep led to the daily one-legged standing that made the strength increase so clear.

2. A banana a few hours before bedtime (in addition to bedtime honey) improved my sleep even m ore. The Honey Prescription says it’s been known for thousands of years that bedtime honey improves sleep, but no one seems to have noticed this, in spite of the importance of sleep. As Robb Wolf has said, “If someone sleeps well, you can’t kill them. If they sleep badly, you can’t keep them alive.”

3. Tofu made me stupid. One 20 g piece of fermented tofu slowed me down for two days on a reaction-time test. Other evidence has suggested that tofu is bad for the brain, but I find this the most persuasive. It addition to what it says about tofu, it suggests the power of brain tracking to reveal important things few people know. (An earlier example involved butter.) Billions of people eat tofu often.

4. Percentile feedback helped me work. The version of percentile feedback I use now (an R program that tracks my work and compares how well I am doing today to the last 100 days) is an improvement, I like to think, over an earlier version. The biggest difference is the addition of weighting: doing a hard task for one hour counts more than doing an easy task for an hour (e.g., a factor of 1.5, so that 60 minutes counts as 90 minutes). I kept track of how much I worked for a whole year, the first time I’ve managed to do that. Here’s what happened.

I think the lesson is that with the right push, I can slowly improve.

In my first post about the use of bedtime honey to improve sleep, I included a graph that showed my legs suddenly got much stronger when I started the honey. I measured how long I could stand on one leg (bent). I had been doing this four times per day (left leg twice, right leg twice) for a long time to sleep better.

A reader of this blog named Nile McAdams found bedtime honey caused him to get stronger, too. He measured arm strength.

Soon after my legs got much stronger I reduced my one-leg standing from four/day to two/day to save time. The improvement stopped, but the gains persisted:

Note the logarithmic y axis. Each point is a different day, an average of the first left leg stand and the first right leg stand of that day.

The graph shows I am much stronger with half as much effort. As I said, the strength improvement has also been easy to notice in everyday activities, including walking, stair climbing (I live on the top floor of a six-floor walkup) and bike riding.

I have been unable to find research that shows a similar effect. Judging by a 2010 textbook, exercise physiologists don’t know about it.

People who believe in “evidence-based medicine” say that double-blind clinical trials are the best form of evidence. Generally this is said by people who know very little about double-blind clinical trials. One reason they are not always the best form of evidence is that data may be missing. Nowadays more data is missing than in the past:

By [missing data] he [Thomas Marciniak] means participants who withdrew their consent to continue participating in the trial or went “missing” from the dataset and were not followed up to see what happened to them. Marciniak says that this has been getting worse in his 13 years as an FDA drug reviewer and is something that he has repeatedly clashed with his bosses about.

“They [his bosses] appear to believe that they can ignore missing and bad data, not mention them in the labels, and interpret the results just as if there was no missing or bad data,” he says, adding: “I have repeatedly asked them how much missing or bad data would lead them to distrust the results and they have consistently refused to answer that question.”

In one FDA presentation, he charted an increase in missing data in trials set up to measure cardiovascular outcomes.

“I actually plotted out what the missing data rates were in the various trials from 2001 on,” he adds. “It’s virtually an exponential curve.”

Another sort of missing data involves what is measured. In one study of whether a certain drug (losartan) increased cancer, lung cancer wasn’t counted as cancer. In another case, involving Avandia, a diabetes drug, “serious heart problems . . . were not counted in the study’s tally of adverse events.”

Here is a presentation by Marciniak. At one point, he asks the audience, Why should you believe me rather than the drug company (GSK)? His answer: “Neither my job nor (for me) $100,000,000’s are riding on the results.” It’s horrible, but true: Our health care system is almost entirely run by people who make more money (or make the same amount of money for less work) if they exaggerate its value — if they ignore missing data and bad side effects, for example. Why the rest of us put up with this in the face of overwhelming evidence of exaggeration (for example, tonsillectomies) is an interesting question.

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

• Jared Diamond wrong about Easter Island
• Why are the Kuna Indians (in Panama) so healthy? Answer: low-processed cocoa. See this study for details.
• Asthma associated with depression
• Sufficient conversion of ALA to DHA in rats. “ This work indicates that DHA [long-chain omega-3] synthesis from ALA [short-chain omega-3] may be sufficient to supply the brain.” Many people have complained that I use flaxseed or flaxseed oil to get better brain function. Don’t you know conversion from short-chain omega-3 to long-chain omega-3 is poor? I tell them it works — but somehow I must be wrong. This study shows the issue is more complicated than they realize and it is quite possible that ALA is a good source of DHA. Good news for anyone who can’t eat seafood.
• National Sleep Foundation gives terrible advice. “Finish eating at least 2-3 hours before bedtime,” they say. Whereas I believe the single best thing you can do for your sleep is eat a source of glucose and fructose, such as honey or fruit, at bedtime.
• Sleep apnea associated with cancer. It is unlikely that cancer causes sleep apnea, but quite plausible that bad sleep — including sleep apnea — increases cancer.

Thanks to Eugenia Loli.

Yesterday I posted Kristen Marcum’s list of general rules she’d learned from this blog. (For example, “be skeptical of experts.”) Behind her list, I think there is one idea, slightly hidden from view:

non-experts can discover important things about health

By non-experts I mean people who are not health professionals. People who do not make a living from health research. By discover I mean learn from data for the first time, actually discover — in contrast to learn from an expert. By important I mean stuff that matters to many people. (It’s obvious that studying yourself you can help yourself.) I haven’t heard anyone else say this, although it isn’t far from the Quantified Self movement.

The first example of this rule was the work of Richard Bernstein, an engineer with diabetes. In the 1960s, he pioneered home blood glucose testing, now enormously important. Another example, I hope, is my work. I used self-tracking and self-experimentation to find important new cause-effect relationships in several areas — new ways to sleep better or lose weight, for example. I believe my conclusions will turn out be true for many people, not just me, because they fit well with research done with other people and animals. I’m a professional scientist, which obviously helped, but not a health researcher.

Why is this rule true? I found it hard to explain even my discoveries. The first time I tried, I didn’t do well. I did better the second time.

I came to see that discoveries require several things — more precisely, rate of discovery is a product of several factors. Everyone sees that experts have several advantages over non-experts:

1. more training (graduate school)
2. more resources (equipment, grants, space, assistants, journals, specialized libraries, and so on)
3. more hours per day (all working day)
4. more experience (their entire working life)

What I’ve never seen pointed out is that non-experts have several advantages over experts:

1. more time overall (with no pressure to publish, a non-expert can easily spend many years on one question)
2. more freedom (no pressure to follow a party line, obey your boss or be popular)
3. more motivation (non-experts want to improve their own health, or a loved one’s health; for health researchers it’s a job)
4. ability to self-track and self-experiment (this is too humble for experts)

Because of my job, I was only slightly behind health experts in terms of their four advantages, and I was far ahead of them in terms of the four non-expert advantages. This explains why I discovered many things that experts had not managed to discover.

Once I had a reasonable understanding of what had happened, I saw there was no reason I should be the only one. As a professor, I had excellent library access, much better than most, but now, with the Internet, many people have comparable access to research. Supporting my prediction that I am not the only non-expert who can do this, I have found other non-experts who have made important discoveries. Tara Grant figured out that the time of day she takes Vitamin D made a big difference. Professional researchers have not yet figured this out. Katie Reid found that her autistic daughter completely recovered — autism symptoms completely gone — when all glutamate was removed from her diet. Professional autism researchers haven’t managed to cure even one case of autism, as far as I know. Stuart King figured out that a tablespoon of honey at bedtime greatly improved his sleep. No sleep or nutrition researcher has realized this.

In the 1940s, my mother’s mother sent my mother newspaper clippings about computers, of which, at the time, there were only a few. This is going to be important, she said. Let me continue the tradition by telling you this is going to be important.

When even a tiny fraction of non-experts become “health knowledge generators” (for lack of a better term) the world will change. Some of the reasons:

1. The IQ advantage. There are far more non-experts than health researchers. A factor of 100,000? Let’s say health researchers have an average IQ of 130. If you take 100,000 non-experts (mean IQ = 100, standard deviation = 15) the top IQ among them will be about 165.

2. Trust and generalizability. When a health expert advises you to do Treatment X (e.g., surgery), what should you think? Can you (a) trust him and (b) is what he says true for you? Any reader of this blog knows that health experts routinely overstate benefits and understate costs of the treatment they are promoting. Even if they are telling the whole truth, their advice is based, at best, on several studies. Is what those studies found — studying animals, or at best, other humans — true for you? When you study yourself – for example, carefully measuring the effect of a drug — error due to distortions and differences from the study population go to zero.

3. Good and bad chemicals. We encounter thousands of chemicals, many of recent origin. How we react to them — do they help or hurt? — is determined by our genome (billions of possibilities) and environmental history (countless possibilities). Any sort of expert testing will be woefully incomplete. The danger in assuming that a chemical safe for most people is safe for you is illustrated by a woman who found her almost constant migraines were caused by household cleaning products and Katie Reid’s discovery that her daughter was very sensitive to glutamate (found in a large fraction of supermarket foods). That things claimed to be safe may be dangerous is illustrated by the Berkeley graduate student who became poisoned by mercury when he started grinding his teeth and my discovery that fermented tofu made me stupid for a few days. My experience with tofu and butter shows how a non-expert can do better than simply accept what experts say. My brain tracking, which anyone could do, detected previously-unknown or -unclear costs and benefits.

Our economy runs on specialization. We buy cars from car specialists, for example. Long ago, professionals had a monopoly on knowledge. To learn math, you had to pay a math teacher. Then came cheap printing and mass literacy and mathematics books and libraries. The same knowledge became not just free but widely available. Then came the Internet and Wikipedia and Google — even more available. But all this time, the source of the knowledge, its creation, was restricted to professionals. Only professionals (or rich amateurs, like Darwin) could “make” (or “mine”) the knowledge. Now that will change.

Kirsten Marcum told me she had “put a number of [my] findings to use in [her] own life.” I asked how. She replied:

I’ve put a few of your specific recommendations to work (SLD, standing on one leg each day, omega-3s, more animal fat/pork fat, butter tea, fermented foods)…but in thinking about this, I realized I’ve gotten even more use out of general principles I’ve drawn from your blog over the years:

1. Trust your results. I’m thinking of your own (and other people’s) experiments with what caused acne (dairy, etc.) or migraines (soy) and helped restless leg syndrome (b6) or sleep, etc. You and others tried solutions, and the solutions either worked or they didn’t, and you/they looked to correct root causes, and those corrections either worked or they didn’t. If you still have acne, the acne treatment didn’t work–even if it should have, and even if an expert recommended it…and you probably shouldn’t just keep doing the treatment just because it’s supposed to work. And if you cleared your acne, then the intervention worked–regardless of whether it “should” have. If your brain performance improves in a measurable way after eating butter, trust that result–and be skeptical about the people who tell you butter is damaging your health. If treating a leaky gut improves your thyroid labs, trust that–not the doctor who says your leaky gut diet is too restrictive and is going to damage your health.

2. Many unpleasant circumstances are reversible. It’s often possible to find positive interventions that ameliorate, reduce, or remove things that are bothering you–many of which are cheap or free and not hard to implement. It’s possible to fix health issues, productivity problems, make learning more fun or effective, etc. It’s amazing to me how many people don’t think this is true–that you’re stuck with extra weight, or acne, or creaky joints, or back pain, or migraines, or the inability to motivate yourself to work–and there’s nothing you can do.

3. Most things that are beneficial are also pleasurable, and vice versa. When something is good for us, we usually find it pleasurable (animal fat, salt, sugar at night, umami flavors, learning while moving, faces in the morning). Otherwise, how would we have evolved to do it?

I extend this to say: If something’s not pleasurable but supposed to be beneficial, it’s either bunk or you’re doing it wrong (i.e., in a way that removes the pleasure and possibly the benefit.) So look for the pleasure–because then you’re more likely to do it and to see a benefit.

And: If something is pleasurable but not beneficial, your body probably wants something very similar and it’s confused–junk food umami vs. fermented foods. In which case, find a pleasurable AND beneficial substitute, and it will be easy to stop doing the thing that is not beneficial.

4. Be skeptical of experts. Most experts have incentives that have nothing to do with the reasons you’re consulting them. Understand this, look for their motivations/weaknesses/blind spots, and always check what they’re telling you against what your body (or other results) are telling you. Also look for non-experts with interesting ideas.

5. What’s good for the brain is good for the body. I would add to this: Many things that we think of as personality or mental/emotional issues actually have a physiological basis–and optimizing your health will likely have a positive effect.

They sound elementary, but they’re counter to the way nearly everyone I know thinks.

Over the years, thinking like this has improved my life in multiple ways:

– I 100% cured my back pain (after 3 rough years) with Esther Gokhale’s 8 Steps to a Pain Free back–which cost $17 and provided more practical and helpful advice than the two doctors, physical therapist, and personal trainer I consulted.

– After a bunch of looking, I found a doctor who, when presented with new ideas, says: “That’s interesting. Where did you find out about it, and what have you tried?” More than once, she has looked into the subject, found the new recommendation convincing, and has started to share the information with similar patients–which means I also benefit from what she learns from others.

– I fixed my complexion, have nearly fixed my weight issues, and reversed dozens of nagging health issues (peeling fingernails, bad breath, rosacea flushing, random bad stomachaches, food sensitivities, mood swings, lack of motivation and focus etc.) through a whole-body thyroid/adrenal/gut repair approach that’s considered bunk by most mainstream endocrinologists. Parts of this approach happen to incorporate things you’ve found beneficial–increased amounts of animal fat, fermented foods, focus on optimal sleep, focus on aligning with circadian rhythms. (Interestingly, one of leading proponents of this approach started out focusing on thyroid health and has found even better results by broadening his focus to brain health….very much like your “what’s good for the brain is good for the body.”)

FWIW, I tend to use topics you’ve investigated as a check on other people’s recommendations–you’re not an “expert” in the field of thyroid repair, or gut health, etc., so you have no incentives to adhere or not adhere to a particular line of thinking. So if both you and a thyroid doctor find a particular approach beneficial, that seems very convincing to me.

Those are good lessons. Tomorrow I will explain why I think they all come from one somewhat hidden underlying lesson.

During the last week I have looked into the possibility that my sleep can be further improved — in addition to the bedtime honey improvement – by eating a similar amount of sugar (fructose and glucose) a few hours before bedtime. After I accidentally slept better than usual (or even better than usual), I tried to determine why. Several things had been unusual the day before. Two tests (here and here) pointed to the sugar (honey or banana) a few hours before bedtime.

Last night (Christmas Eve) I tried again. I ate a banana (132 g, peeled) about 3 hours (7 pm) before I fell asleep (10 pm). I fell asleep within a minute and woke up, after an apparently dreamless night, feeling perfectly rested. On my 0-100 percentage scale (100% = completely rested, no detectable tiredness), which I have been using for about 8 years, it was the first ever 100%. I had slept about 6 hours, a good amount of time.

To celebrate, I had a cup of black tea. I didn’t need it to wake up but I like the taste. I reflected that countless people had drunk tea or coffee to wake up. I had found a better way.

Discovery that an hours-before-bedtime sweet improves sleep (in addition to bedtime honey — that’s what’s interesting) is significant not just for the obvious practical reason (better sleep) but also because it is the confirmation of a prediction. After I slept unusually well, I thought of six possible reasons. The notion that sugar improves sleep pointed to one of them. The results of every test I’ve done (three nights) have agreed with that prediction. I believe the only real test of a theory (such as an explanation) is whether it makes correct predictions — especially, whether it leads to the discovery of new cause-effect relationships. Many things people say haven’t passed that test. An example is weight control. That low-carb diets cause weight loss has been known since the 1800s. Many explanations have been proposed; not one has made correct predictions, as far as I know. In contrast, my theory of weight control led me to three new ways to lose weight (sushi, low-glycemic foods, and fructose water).

I doubt it’s a placebo effect because the sleep improvement has happened whether I expect it or not. A commenter named Paolo Paiva, after reading my posts about this, realized something similar had happened to him:

Today I told my wife how deep I had slept and connected it to the 1 tbspoon of honey and 1 tbspoon of apple cider vinegar mixed with half a cup of water before bed (it tastes really good). Then I saw this post and remembered that yesterday I had had banana flour pancakes topped with honey 3 hours before bedtime!

Thanks, Paolo. May you continue to sleep well. May the rest of you sleep equally well.

Merry Christmas!