After I’d been taking bedtime honey for 3-4 weeks, I began to notice changes in addition to better sleep and more strength. One was a sense of increased well-being throughout the day. Not better mood, not more energy, just somehow better. Another was better motivation. It was easier to do everything — pushups, putting stuff away, and so on. My life was not perfectly constant, however, so I could not be sure these changes were due to the honey.

I asked Jason DeFillippo of Grumpy Old Geeks about this. Bedtime honey really helped him. He replied:

I have noticed that during the day I can concentrate for much longer stretches but I was chalking that up to the sleep. I think the motivation you’re talking about is definitely starting to manifest itself quite a bit more as well. I’m putting more effort into my business than I have since I started it 2 years ago and haven’t really thought about it being a side effect of the honey but it’s possible. Amazing things happen when you haven’t slept properly for 20 years and can now sleep through the entire night.

After he mentioned concentration, I realized I had noticed the same thing: I could do work that required concentration for longer periods of time. In contrast to Jason, I had slept well for many years before starting the honey — or so I’d thought.

Some people find that bedtime honey does not work, at least initially. One reader wrote:

I tried it out for several days now [1 tablespoon of honey], and it produces in me a similar effect as when I go to sleep when I have drunk several beers before. I wake up several times during the night, vivid dreams, and feel less rested in the morning rather than more.

I suggested a smaller dose — 1 teaspoon, which may be effective. He tried it:

I have taken a teaspoon of honey now for three days and my experience so far is that it is better than a tablespoon of honey. I vaguely remember that I dreamed but do not remember about what. Today I also noticed that reading in the train was easier than before, despite waking up earlier, I felt I understood and retained more of what I was reading. What I find most surprising over these three days is that I don’t use my glasses as often as before.

So if a tablespoon causes you to wake up in the middle of the night, try a smaller dose. I haven’t yet tried a range of doses.

Cliff Styles, a 66-year-old man living in Huntington Beach, commented that his sleep got much better after he stopped eating wheat. I asked him why he gave up wheat. He replied:

I had a morning cough that was very nasty, I didn’t smoke, but had read a fair amount about food allergies and that reading suggested an allergic reaction as the cause. I tried several things, over a period of years, including eliminating alcohol for several months of the year (modest help to allergies and depression), reducing sugar consumption (big help to mood swings), with some success. I had been reluctant to eliminate wheat because it seemed benign and I loved all the wheat products, but at one point in reading about food allergies I came across the idea that we develop allergic addictions to foods we eat regularly — and I was probably eating wheat more than three times a day, seven days a week. I made no connection to the sleep apnea and snoring in the allergy research, in fact I took the sleep apnea and snoring for granted, and thought the nightmares were the product of psychological problems.

I decided to experiment with eliminating wheat. Well, it was like I imagine going off of heroin might be like — chills, body aches, flu-like symptoms for four or five days, then all the symptoms cleared up — and the cough went away. My wife was skeptical, so after a few weeks, I went back to eating wheat, the cough promptly came back, she was convinced, I was more certain, went off wheat permanently. I will once in a while indulge, but the quick return of the cough gets me back to the wheat-free diet. The wheat reaction is so pronounced that many friends have noticed my reaction, since I tend to indulge at social occasions.

The sleep benefit happened quite unexpectedly. After quitting wheat, my snoring eased a bit, and the sleep apnea went away, though now I do not remember how quickly, but I think it was pretty fast. Another side benefit is that I lost about 15 pounds of belly fat, and it stayed off for years. My wife notices that when I indulge in wheat now, my snoring gets worse that night, whereas I won’t necessarily notice this myself.

So what was the impetus and chain of causation? A symptom (a nasty cough, you’d think I was a pack a day smoker, especially in the morning), reading about food allergies, self-testing and seeing a result on the cough, and only then getting the benefit to sleep. At no time did I undertake the test of eliminating wheat in order to cure a sleep problem, that was just a very, very fortunate side effect.

How much sleep apnea is due to food allergy? Sleep doctors do not consider this possibility. Here is an example where the food allergy was dairy. Here is another example. Here someone claims “The commonest causes of obstruction sleep apnoea are allergy . . . and being overweight.”

I want to summarize what I’ve learned about how to sleep well. I’ve found about a dozen changes that helped. Taken together they suggest the importance of four dimensions:

1. Healthy brain. My sleep greatly improved when I ate a lot of pork fat. (As far as I can tell, butter produced the same effect.) I wasn’t getting enough animal fat. My sleep also improved when I started eating honey at bedtime. I assume honey raised blood sugar to better levels during sleep, improving brain performance. The great importance of this, I believe, is why we evolved preferences that push us to eat strongly sweet foods, such as fruit, separately and later, i.e., dessert. Bedtime honey also caused my muscles to grow more in response to exercise — a sign of better sleep, since muscles grow during sleep. I have never measured the effect of flaxseed/flaxseed oil on my sleep but the brain benefit was so clear in other ways I’d be surprised if it didn’t improve sleep.

2. Strong oscillation. Sleep is controlled by three oscillators. The larger the amplitude of their summed output, the deeper sleep.

One oscillator — the well-known one — is sensitive to the light/dark cycle (especially blue light). It makes us active and awake during the day, inactive and asleep at night. Its amplitude depends on the amplitude of the light/dark cycle, which can be increased by sunlight or daylight fluorescent light in the morning, a darker bedroom, and less blue light in the evening. Vitamin D3 in the morning seems to have the same effect as sunlight, and is much more convenient.

A second oscillator is sensitive to when we eat. To ensure we’re active when food is available, it wakes us up about three hours earlier. If you usually eat at noon, for example, it will wake you up at 9 am. I realized the practical importance of this oscillator, which is well known to circadian-rhythm researchers, when I found that not eating breakfast reduced how often I woke up too early.

The third oscillator is controlled by the sight of faces — what you see during a conversation. It also controls mood, making us happy, eager, and serene during the day and unhappy, reluctant, and irritable at night . If things are working properly, most of the bad mood will happen while we are asleep. During a critical period in the morning, faces “push” this oscillator much as you push a swing. It evolved to synchronize the sleep and mood of a community so that everyone is awake, happy and eager to work at the same time. Two people cannot work together if one of them is asleep.

3. “Poison” avoidance. Alcohol and caffeine can make my sleep worse, no surprise there.

4. Muscle growth. Exercise that causes muscle growth deepens sleep, whereas aerobic exercise does not. (Aerobic exercise may make you fall asleep faster, which has never been a problem of mine.) Standing more than 8 hours during the day produced better sleep; less standing (such as 6 hours) did not. This was too hard to be practical. Later I found that standing on one leg to exhaustion had similar effects. That was practical — I still do it.

The biggest advances, compared to what was already known, are morning faces and bedtime honey (brought to my attention by Stuart King), with Vitamin D (discovered by Tara Grant) honorable mention.

A recent editorial in the New York Times described mainstream thinking:

The brief course of sleep therapy teaches patients to establish a regular wake-up time; get out of bed during waking periods; avoid reading, watching TV or other activities in bed; and eliminate daytime napping, among other tactics. It is distinct from standard sleep advice, like avoiding coffee and strenuous exercise too close to bedtime.

I imagine the health experts of 1950 gave similar advice.

Chris Masterjohn’s comments about sleep (thanks to Stuart King for the link) illustrate what a very smart very well-informed person figured out. Like me, he stresses animal fat and the light/dark cycle (morning sunlight and dark bedroom). Unlike me, he thinks a cool room helps. I have varied room temperature and didn’t notice a difference. He mentions Vitamin B6 but I eat enough meat that I am unlikely to be deficient. He says carbs help but doesn’t narrow it down to honey at bedtime. He doesn’t mention morning faces or morning Vitamin D. Neither Chris nor I emphasize magnesium, which some people praise highly.

I’ve been testing my brain function daily for the last six years. I use a reaction-time test (see digit, type digit as fast as possible) that takes about five minutes. I have gradually improved the test over the years — this is about version 8. One reason for this testing is that I might observe a sudden change. That could suggest a new factor that affects brain function — whatever was unusual before the change (e.g., a new food). This is how I discovered the effect of butter. My score suddenly improved, I investigated. Another sudden change (improvement) happened soon after I switched from Chinese flaxseed oil to American flaxseed oil. I hadn’t realized that something was wrong with the Chinese flaxseed oil. I started brain tracking after I noticed a sudden improvement in balance the morning after I swallowed about five flaxseed oil capsules. Millions of people had taken flaxseed oil capsules, but no one, it seemed, had noticed the balance improvement. Maybe other big changes in brain function go unnoticed, I thought.

A month ago, my score suddenly got worse (= I became slower). There was one unusual thing that day, before the test: I had eaten a piece of bai fu ru, a kind of fermented tofu popular in China. To make it, “cubes of tofu are first fermented, then soaked in brines that contain a number of ingredients: rice wine, vinegar, chili peppers, cinnamon, star anise, and red yeast rice, the last which imparts the deep red hue that you’ll see in certain varieties.” Here is a discussion of fermented tofu in Los Angeles. It’s popular in China. Most people use it as a condiment, but I ate small amounts (one cube) alone.

To find out if the bai fu ru caused the worsening, I did a test. I deliberately ate one 20 g cube at 11 am. I do the brain tests in the afternoon, usually 4-5 pm. What happen to my brain score that day? Here are the results.

Each point is a different test. I conclude that the tofu slowed me down by about 20 ms and the effect lasted two days. I didn’t notice the change in other ways — I didn’t feel tired or slow, for example. Presumably that is why this has gone unnoticed.

I think these results reflect cause and effect for several reasons:

1. Clarity. A t value would be very large.

2. Surprising prediction. A surprising prediction turned out to be true. Sharp drops like this are rare. Perhaps they happen once every 3-6 months.

3. Repetition. A research assistant found similar results, although not as clear. She is Chinese — quite different genetically.

4. Other evidence that tofu is bad for the brain. After I found these results, I remembered an old study. It found an association between midlife tofu consumption and late life cognitive decline among Japanese-American men in Hawaii (more tofu, more decline). A related study of the same men found a correlation between cognitive decline and miso consumption. A later study of Indonesian men and women also found a correlation between tofu consumption and cognitive decline (more tofu, more decline). The same study also found a beneficial weak correlation between tempeh consumption and cognitive decline (more tempeh, less decline). A weak epidemiological association found only once means little — epidemiologists, in my experience, do not adjust for the number of tests done and usually ignore the problem. More recently, an experiment using a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease found that a high-soy diet made brain function worse.

Because of the other evidence, I conclude that all tofu (and other soybean foods, such as soy milk) probably impair brain function, not just this version, which contains slightly more than tofu. The other evidence involves lots of non-fermented tofu. Because of the other evidence and my assistant’s results, I believe these results will be true for other people.

I can’t explain the effect. Tofu is high in omega-6, but the amount of omega-6 in 20 g of tofu is small. Others think that tofu impair brain function due to its isoflavones.

Most nutrition experts say tofu is good for you. Catherine Newman, in O Magazine, raves about it. “In addition to being wonderfully inexpensive, tofu is high in protein, low in fat, and very low in saturated fat. . . . One daily four-ounce [= 120 g] serving is an excellent addition to a healthy diet.” The Mind Health Report (October 2012) says tofu is good for the brain. “For vegetarians, good choices are tofu, beans and eggs.”

Better informed experts criticize soy but say fermented soy is good. Joseph Mercola wrote,”For centuries, Asian people have been consuming fermented soy products such as natto, tempeh, and soy sauce, and enjoying the health benefits.” The Weston Price Foundation website says a lot about the badness of soy but claims fermented soy is healthy. In an article about why unfermented soy is bad, the Healthy Home Economist says, “Please note that fermented soy in small, condimental amounts as practiced in traditional Asian cultures is fine for those who have healthy thyroid function [as I do — Seth].” My 20 g dose was a small, condimental amount. John Robbins, author of The Food Revolution (2001), dismissed the association of tofu and dementia. He argued:

That’s not all we know. We know, for example, that dementia rates are lower in Asian countries (where soy intake is high) than in western countries. We know that the Japanese lifestyle (with its high soy intake) has long been associated with longer life span and better cognition in old age. And we know that Seventh Day Adventists, many of whom consume soyfoods their whole lives, have less dementia in old age than the general population. . . . A number of clinical studies have shown that soy and isoflavones from soy are actually beneficial for cognition. . . . . Having studied the literature, soy researchers Mark and Virginia Messina conclude that “there is no reason to believe that eating soyfoods is harmful to brain aging.” [Robbins failed to mention that Mark and Virginia Messina own a “nutrition consulting company specializing in soyfoods nutrition” — Seth]

I don’t know when the Messinas said this. Maybe there was once “no reason” to think soyfoods bad for the brain, but there is now. The new evidence, epidemiology, and mouse evidence make a good case.

Here are two interesting things. 1. A very popular food is dangerous, maybe harmful. 2. Nutrition experts had claimed the opposite: the food is good for you. Even the better ones (Mercola, Weston Price Foundation) got it wrong, ignoring evidence (the epidemiology). It is a good example of experts overstating their understanding. The Shangri-La Diet is another example (every expert said sugar was fattening, I found it caused me to lose weight).

Even more interesting is the methodological implication. Anyone can do what I did, with any food. It’s easy, safe, cheap, and takes little time. The bad effects were large enough, and the method sensitive enough, that the bad effects were well above noise. And this is a non-trivial case. Tofu is popular.

We eat thousands of foods. We have millions of genotypes. We eat our food in millions of environments. Your genotype and environment affect how a food will affect you. So a good understanding of how foods affect us would seem to require thousands times millions times millions of tests. It is absurd to assume that anyone else (government, academia, industry) will do the necessary tests. They can’t begin to do the tests. In contrast to people doing a job (for example, people in government responsible for food safety) you have a much simpler problem: Is my food safe for me? You only care about one genotype (yours) and one context (yours) and you eat far fewer than thousands of foods. You can do good tests. You can test exactly what you eat in exactly the context you eat it. Compared to the present, where we extrapolate from epidemiology, animal tests, and the rare human experiment, the reduction in uncertainty and increase in generalizability is immense.

If you want to do experiments like this — test foods one by one — with my software (which requires Windows), please contact me. The tests require a training period of 1-2 months so that the scores during an experiment are roughly constant.

At Free The Animal, Richard Nikoley blogged about the value of potato starch and other examples of resistant starch (RS) which is slowly-digested starch. As a reader of this blog named Xav points out, three commenters say it has improved their sleep:

1. On week three of 3 TBS of Potato Starch per evening. Any explanation on the exceptional, uninterrupted deep sleep? No complaints mind you. Have never slept so well. Never. [Richard did explain the deep sleep — Seth]

2. After a few days of a few Tbsp RS in the evening, here are my observations . . .

• sleep has been better the last 2 nights without any particular change of lifestyle.
• dreams are vivid, I remember them much more

3. I took 4 tbsp of PS last night. . . .I had an incredible sleep (but no vivid dreaming, however). I mean, I did not wake up even once. I was sound asleep from the beginning to the end and it was such the most sweet and tranquil sleep I ever had in a long time!

Emphasis added. Someone else said, “Have been doing this for about a week now. 2T in am and 2 T after dinner. Sleep may be better.” No one reported better sleep after resistant starch at other times. Richard said nothing about the time of day to eat it. Several people say it raised their blood sugar.

Readers of this blog know there is abundant evidence that bedtime honey improves sleep. Honey is not a resistant starch, although fructose (honey is half glucose, half fructose) is digested relatively slowly. Potato starch and honey differ in many ways. That both, eaten near bedtime, produce better sleep, suggests that the better sleep is due to something they share. One thing they share is both increase blood glucose throughout the night. Honey does so because it contains a quickly-digested sugar (glucose) and a slowly-digesting one (fructose). Potato starch does so because its carbohydrate is slowly converted to blood glucose.

The potato starch stories support what I’ve said (here and here) about why bedtime honey improves sleep, namely: You need a certain amount of blood sugar to sleep well. Many people have too little (e.g., due to a low-carb diet). Honey, a banana, or resistant starch near bedtime are three ways to ensure enough. When this becomes well-known, the improvement in well-being will be great.

Hayek, Keynes, Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson disagreed about many things but shared one important belief: Their ignorance about innovation didn’t matter. Countless economics textbooks, which say nothing of interest about innovation, agree with them: ignorance about innovation doesn’t matter. This belief freed Hayek et al. and textbook writers to make sweeping policy statements. Had they realized that innovation matters, not just productivity — and, especially, that innovation and productivity are sometimes at odds — it would have been far less clear what policies are best.

If you ask how will this affect innovation? about any economic proposal everything changes, especially your certainty that it is right or wrong. I will give just one example. Libertarians — I hope I am describing Tyler Cowen’s “smart” libertarians — believe that government interference by and large makes things worse. People function best when given freedom, and so on. A smart libertarian recognizes the value of speed limits, and so on. An example of smart libertarianism, I assume, is Tyler’s recent view that a local increase of the minimum wage is “expressive voting at the expense of good economic policy.”

Libertarians and other economists neglect the possibility that government serves as a useful irritant. Government regulations are truly an impediment. No doubt about it. No doubt they make life harder for people with some power. The usual argument is they protect the weak from the powerful. Without them, the powerful would exploit the weak. Sure. They would. But that’s not all. What goes unsaid and apparently unnoticed is irritating the powerful makes them think. Pain produces thought — about how to avoid the pain. And thought increases innovation.

As a professor at Berkeley, I hated the government-mandated institutional review boards — the human subjects approval committee and the animal research approval committee. They didn’t just make research far more difficult due to paperwork requirements, they did horrible things to people based on misunderstandings and mistakes. And there was no appeal. How awful, right? Well, it was certainly painful. That pain is one thing that pushed me toward personal science, where I could be free of them. Pain pushed me to try new things — such as long-term non-trivial self-experimentation. The less I could do professional research (my Ph.D. is in animal learning), the more time I had for personal science. And I brought to my personal science the skill set of a professional scientist (an understanding of experimental design and data analysis, subject-matter knowledge, and so on). Innovation always comes from exploration. The more exploration, the more innovation. Pushing powerful people (such as a Berkeley professor) to explore is a seriously good thing.

Planet Money recently did a series on T-shirts. Planet Money reporters travelled the world — the Planet Money men’s T-shirt is made in Bangladesh — and encountered several things not in economics textbooks. One was the story of how clothing factories came to Bangladesh. That you could put a clothing factory in such places and make a profit was a discovery with great consequences, especially for Bangladesh. In the 1970s, American clothing companies felt endangered by imported clothes — from South Korea, for example. They pressed government for trade protection. This led to the passage of the Multi Fibre Arrangement (MFA) which regulated clothing imports. The agreement, however, said nothing about Bangladesh, which at the time did not make clothes. When South Korea reached its limit under the MFA, a Bangladeshi businessman approached Daewoo, a giant South Korean clothing maker, suggesting that they duplicate their factory in Bangladesh. The head of Daewoo — a powerful man pained by government regulations — was open to their suggestion. Daewoo helped open the first clothing factory in Bangladesh. There are now more than 4000.

When it comes to productivity, there is one set of rules, which economists have worked on since Adam Smith. Innovation has a different set of rules. Most economists seem barely aware that the two sets of rules often clash — what is good for productivity is bad for innovation. Let me sketch a few of the innovation rules. Innovation needs freedom, of course, and the ability to profit from your invention, which I’ll call benefit. It is also called self-interest. The importance of benefit/self-interest for innovation is the main point of Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson. Innovation is also increased by resources, such as skills, knowledge, space, and equipment. After discussing this with Bryan Caplan, I believe many economists are well aware these three factors (freedom, benefit, resources) affect innovation. All three also increase productivity — for example, more resources, more productivity. Far fewer economists realize that two other things, which act against productivity, are also very helpful for innovation:

1. Pain. Not a lot — not debilitating or all-consuming pain — but enough to make you think hard. Necessity is the mother of invention is the aphorism, which isn’t quite right. Pain, not necessity. Government is useful here, as I said. So is war. Many innovations came from wars. A famous example is the greenback, which came from the Civil War.

2. Stability. To innovate, you need free time, which is different from freedom (ask any prisoner). Free time allows painless failure, very helpful for innovation. To have free time, you need a secure job. Government is useful here, too. So is tenure. Pain plus stability = peacetime military spending. The internet came from peacetime military spending. Professors were the first users. Stability also promotes innovation because it makes it easier to detect small improvements. The quieter it is, the better you can detect soft sounds.

My personal science had a good amount of all five factors. 1. Freedom. Studying myself, I could do whatever I wanted. 2. Benefit. At first, I benefited because my discoveries were very practical. If I discovered how to sleep better, I would sleep better. If I discovered how to lose weight, I would lose weight. Later I also benefited because others were interested (I like attention) and my discoveries helped others. 3. Resources. I knew a great deal about the relevant subjects (e.g., circadian rhythms, weight regulation) and how to do research. I could get whatever articles I wanted from the UC Berkeley libraries. And so on. 4. Pain. In addition to the pain caused by Berkeley IRBs, I wanted to sleep better and lose weight. My sleep was not awful nor was I especially fat — it was not intense pain. But it pushed me. I tried to improve my sleep for ten years before I started making progress. 5. Stability. My life was very stable. I rarely took long trips, for example. Failure in my personal science — a treatment that I hoped would improve my sleep didn’t work, for example — cost very little. Failure to publish cost nothing.

In contrast, professional scientists, who have plenty of resources, are generally low or at least lower on the other four factors (freedom, benefit, pain, stability). They lack freedom. They are constrained in many ways, which they don’t like to talk about. They lack benefit. A few papers that hardly anyone reads — the result of most research — provides little benefit. Almost all research has no practical use. Few scientists study problems that they themselves suffer from. A cancer researcher does not himself have cancer, for example. They lack pain. I cannot think of a single instance where professional research was motivated by the researcher’s pain or discomfort. If they don’t need a grant for their research and have tenure, they have stability; but if they do need a grant or don’t have tenure, they have less stability than I did. Most research grants are only three years long and renewal is rarely easy or assured.

I wrote about the same question — why was my personal science “unreasonably effective”? — here.

What does this say about economics and how to increase innovation? The importance of benefit and resources is already clear. But the remaining three factors — freedom, pain, and stability — are complicated. By and large they are corners of a triangle. The more freedom, the less pain and stability. The more pain, the less freedom and stability. The more stability, the less pain and freedom. You need all three — a point in the middle of the triangle — and where that point should be and how to put it there are exceedingly non-obvious. Once you realize this, your certainty about how to organize society, how run a government, and the best size of government should decrease. A problem with increasing inequality, which I have never seen pointed out (e.g., in a speech about why inequality is bad, Obama didn’t mention it), is that it makes the powerful (those at the top) more comfortable. When you make the powerful more comfortable, you reduce innovation.

A reader named Niles McAdams, who told me about his strength increase from bedtime honey, also wrote about his experience with magic dots (a way to mark progress):

I have become a HUGE fan of your Magic Dots idea for many reasons. I started using them to increase the time I spent at my standing desk but since then I’ve used them to keep my writing and programming projects on track.

Here are some of the advantages of Magic Dots:

They can be customized to the individual. Instead of using 10 points and lines to make a box with an X in it, I use six points and lines (10 min. increments) to make a triangle. I would imagine for almost any time increment that a person wished to use, a shape could be found. I used 10 minute increments but one wouldn’t have to — imagine, for example, a grade school child studying a spelling test. The parent could ask the child to study for one triangle or ½ hour where each dot or line represents a 5 minute increment. There are many many shape and increment possibilities – enough for any person or task.

They are mostly an intellectual tool not a physical tool. One doesn’t need a laptop, tablet, smart phone, Fitbit or any other modern technology to use Magic Dots. One could scratch them out in the dirt with a stick if need be (and in fact, I may do just that when it comes time to weed my garden next spring). Of course you need some way of telling time so a watch is handy but if the sun is shining you don’t even need that – a vertical stick in the ground and a few scratches in the ground could record the passage of time well enough. It goes without saying they don’t need electricity — pencil, paper and watch or clock and you are in business.

They can be used to show work history. For a while, I would mark my Magic Dots horizontally, side by side, on a piece of paper. Each new day I would start a new line. This allowed me to see at a glance how much standing I had done during the week.

They can be used to show work by category. A few times I have drawn vertical lines on the paper to represent different work categories, e.g., writing versus programming. I combined this with the line per day technique above. At a glance I could see “on Tuesday I had 3 triangles standing, 2 triangles writing, and 1 triangle programming.

A reader of this blog named Nile McAdams, who lives in Minnesota, wrote:

When I read your first blog post about honey I was gobsmacked. Not so much by the improved sleep — the idea of a bedtime snack improving sleep has been around a long time — but by the fact that a tablespoon of honey could double the time you were able to stand on one leg. [One bent leg. After being roughly constant for a year, the time doubled in two weeks. — Seth] Impossible!! Not that I thought you were lying — I didn’t — it is just that a lot can go wrong between collecting the data and interpreting the data. So I had to try it for myself.

A little back story. In June I began lifting lifting some 40-pound dumbbells I had laying around. I would hold one in each hand and then, alternating arms, lift them over my head for a total of 10 lifts — 5 for each arm (right arm, left arm, right arm, and so on). For me, the dumbbells were very heavy. I had trouble keeping them stable especially with my left, weaker, arm. Every time I lifted I had a little anxiety that I would lose control and the dumbbell would come crashing down and break stuff. The last straw was that I wasn’t really getting better or not getting better fast enough. I lifted almost every day for a month or so but then gradually drifted away. Here is the point of the back story: I had very minor improvement, if any, over the course of that month. I felt a little stronger and I may have been able to do 12 lifts but I was too unsure of how steady I would be on lifts 11 and 12 so I never tried it.

When I decided to try the experiment with honey I thought that these dumbbells would be a good test of strength. I am 70 years old and quite obese — 6’ and 300 lbs. I take 2 or 2 ½ tablespoons of honey right before I go to bed — my thinking is that my body mass could be almost double yours or other people taking honey so I should adjust the dose a little bit.

I started lifting on the same day I took the honey or perhaps the day after I took the honey. Here are my dumbbell lifts by day.

10,10,10,10,10,10,12,10,[three day gap]

I went to Chicago for a long weekend so I did not lift that Friday, Saturday or Sunday. I also did not take any honey. I didn’t think much of the day I had lifted 12 times, even though it is a 20% improvement. I felt it was similar to when I was lifting back in June — random variation. Here are my lifts since I came back from Chicago after missing 3 days.

16,14,16,20,14,20,18, 22,16,[1 day gap],22,24

These lifts are outside the bounds of any random variation as far as I’m concerned. In 15 days I doubled my lift with weights I had prior experience with!! This is incredible! The effect is real, at least for me.

A prediction of something that sounds impossible (bedtime honey quickly doubles a measure of strength) is confirmed — how often does that happen? I agree with the underlying idea. Lots of things improve sleep. It isn’t astonishing that X or Y improves sleep. The strength improvement, however, astonished me.

When I was standing on one bent leg to improve my sleep, I knew that if I did the exercise every other day instead of every day, my legs would get stronger — much stronger. I didn’t want that. I wanted to sleep well every night (that was the reason for the exercise) and I didn’t want the exercise to take too long. (To improve sleep, I am pretty sure the exercise must be done to exhaustion.) When he started lifting in June, apparently Nile did not realize that he would get better results — become stronger faster — if he lifted weights every other day instead of every day. The strength increase, it appears, happens whether you want it (Nile) or not (me).

Niles added later:

I am now certain that it is easier for me to go up and down stairs. When I first started lifting these weights, both in June and when I started again in November, I had a lot of “popping” and “cracking” in my shoulder and elbow joints. That has all but disappeared. I have definitely added muscle. My lifts show it and I have gained 3 or 4 pounds.

It took me awhile to feel the effects of the honey both in lifts and in sleep. I didn’t notice any differences in lifts until about 11 days and I didn’t notice any difference in sleep until 2 weeks or more. About half the nights my sleep is heavier or deeper [than before honey]. I’m not sure of the correct adjective but when it happens it seems clear. On those nights I have deep sleep I don’t take a nap the next day. I don’t wake up feeling “refreshed” as others have reported but I am not a morning person and it takes me awhile to wake up and get going. I am more productive the day after one of these deep sleeps.

I am on an Ancestral Health Society (AHS) steering committee. After the first symposium, some members of the committee wanted to make recommendations about how to eat. I argued against this, saying it was too early to be sure. No paleo theorist, as far as I know, has said that sweets have value, but at the same time, the honey effect supports the practical value of evolutionary thinking, the rationale for AHS. A big reason I believed the effect of honey on sleep was very important is that it provided an evolutionary explanation of dessert. Another big reason was my sudden strength improvement. Repetition of the sudden improvement suggests that evolutionary thinking pushed me in the right direction.

So bedtime honey doesn’t just improve sleep, it also increases muscle growth — a lot. I wonder how to test its effect on memory. Jason DeFillippio of Grumpy Old Geeks said, “My memory has really improved”. A reader named Crystal made the astute comment that the impact of a sugar-containing food (honey) on growth would explain why children like sweets so much, something that has never been well explained.

Nile’s experience impresses me not just because of the strength increase but also because the effect of the honey increased over a few weeks (“It took me awhile to feel the effects of the honey both in lifts and in sleep”). Maybe the honey caused healing. Some healing processes take years. Maybe bedtime honey speeds them up. The long-term benefits may be more than sleep and strength.

Other posts about bedtime honey and sleep.

• Easily-understood explanation of Michael Mann’s “hide the decline”
• long funny story based on the Climategate emails
• The Tim Ferriss Experiment (TV show)
• The superhobbyist in Vermeer’s studio. A superhobbyist combines professional resources with hobbyist freedom.

Thanks to Carl Willat.