Author: Seth Roberts

The Need for Animal Fat

Seth Roberts6 Comments

If you read Good Calories Bad Calories you may remember that the Arctic anthropologist Vilhjamur Steffanson spent a year on an all-meat diet, with no ill effects. (In an earlier post about Steffanson, I stressed the fermented food that the Eskimos ate.) You may not know that animal fat was crucial for his health during that year, which began with a brief attempt to eat lean meat (meaning meat without fat):

On February 26, 1968, [Stefansson] was admitted to the ward and on February 28, started on the meat diet. At our request he began eating lean meat only, although he had previously noted, in the North, that very lean meat sometimes produced digestive disturbances. On the 3rd day nausea and diarrhea developed. When fat meat was added to the diet, a full recovery was made in 2 days.

During the year, he got about 80% of his calories from fat.

Via Inhuman Experiment.

Assorted Links

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Thanks to Oskar Pearson and Dave Lull.

Camp No

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It’s nauseating that John Yoo (a Berkeley law professor) is getting off with a slap on the wrist. The superficial and childish response to 9/11 was they killed us, let’s kill them. The supposedly adult response was we need to make sure this never happens again — by getting rid of terrorists. The real lesson I’ve never heard or read: here’s something inside all of us that is stronger than we realized. We must try even harder to suppress it. 9/11 meant that laws against torture should be strengthened.

The opposite happened — thanks in part to John Yoo. Now it’s clear there was a lot of torture at Guantanamo. It happened at a place called Camp No (as in “I have no idea what you’re talking about”). As I read this excellent article about the torture, I wondered how such journalism will survive as newspapers disappear. I was glad to see that the author, Scott Horton, is a lawyer, not a professional journalist. Just as my self-experimentation was essentially a hobby that I did in addition to my regular job (a Berkeley professor).

Scholarly Research Exchange

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Today I got an email inviting me to contribute to a journal called SRX Neuroscience. The journal is “peer-reviewed open-access”. The email continued: “There are many reasons to submit your work to SRX Neuroscience, including an efficient online submission process, no page limits or restrictions on large data sets, immediate publication upon acceptance, and free accessibility of articles without any barriers to access, which increases their visibility.”

I’d never heard of it. Its web page didn’t open. The website for SRX (short for Scholarly Research Exchange) was extremely vague: no names, no location. And no sign of how it was funded.

Finally I learned that SRX is run by Hindawi Publishing, in Egypt. From this excellent overview I learned its money comes from author fees, $500 or more per article. They are trying a new kind of editorship: 30 editors or more per journal. Each editor handles only two articles a year and receives a 50% discount when they themselves submit an article. (I wonder what referees get.) Meanwhile, BioMed Central, a better-known open-access publisher, is having trouble: They have been forced to raise their charges to libraries so high that Yale decided to cancel.

It seems very low-rent. But, as Clayton Christensen told in The Innovator’s Dilemma, this is often how important new things begin. In the beginning hydraulic shovels were only good for digging a ditch in your backyard. The makers of cable-powered shovels, whose products made the giant holes for skyscrapers, turned up their noses at such a low-prestige task. But the hydraulic shovels got better and better. Companies that made cable-powered shovels eventually went bankrupt.

Schizophrenia Prevented By Fish Oil

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A new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry, summarized in the Wall Street Journal:

Researchers in the new study identified 81 people, ages 13 to 25, with warning signs of psychosis, including sleeping much more or less than usual, growing suspicious of others, believing someone is putting thoughts in their head or believing they have magical powers. Forty-one were randomly assigned to take four fish oil pills a day for three months. The other patients took dummy pills.

After a year of monitoring, 2 of the 41 patients in the fish oil group, or about 5%, had become psychotic, or completely out of touch with reality. In the placebo group, 11 of 40 became psychotic, about 28%.

The study is impressive not only because it uses ordinary food (fish oil) rather than dangerous drugs (such as Prozac) but also because it studies prevention. Just as the ketogenic diet suggests a widespread animal-fat deficiency, so this study suggests a widespread omega-3 deficiency, which won’t surprise any reader of this blog. Completing the picture — I believe most Americans eat far too little animal fat, omega-3, and fermented food — baker’s yeast is being studied as a cure for cancer.

Thanks to Oskar Pearson and Chris.

A Call From Dr. Eileen Consorti’s Office

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Yesterday I was contacted by Dr. Eileen Consorti’s office. (Dr. Consorti is a surgeon to whom I was referred a few years ago, after my primary-care doctor noticed I had a tiny hernia — so small I hadn’t noticed it.)

“Can I ask a favor of you?” her assistant began. The favor was to remove her name from my blog. Why? I asked. Because when someone googles her, he said, what you have written comes up, and it isn’t favorable. (When I googled her name yesterday this was the first result. When I googled the same thing today, it was the seventh result.) He said nothing about any inaccuracy. I said if she has anything to add, I would be happy to amend what I wrote. He asked if I had any “further” questions for Dr. Consorti. No, I said. The conversation ended.

Then I realized I did have a question. During my discussion with her of whether or not I should have surgery, I had said that surgery is dangerous. Dr. Consorti had replied that no one had died during any of her surgeries. She had said nothing about the likelihood of other bad outcomes. That struck me as incomplete. My question was: Why no mention of other bad outcomes? I phoned Dr. Consorti’s office, reached the person I’d spoken to earlier, and told him my question. He tried to answer it. I said I wanted to know Dr. Consorti’s answer. Wait a moment, he said. He came back to the phone. He had spoken to “the doctor”, he said. She wasn’t interested in “further dialog”. She would contact a lawyer, he told me.

Dr. Consorti, if you are reading this, I am happy to publish verbatim anything you have to say about this.

Thanks to Tucker Max.

More On November 18, 2011, soon after I posted this, Dr. Consorti asked me to post the following:

Dr. Fitzgibbons from Creighton published a prospective study comparing repair of inguinal hernias versus watchful waiting in men with asymptomatic inguinal hernias. At five years twenty percent of the patients in the observation group crossed over to have surgical repair. By the way, I only get reimbursed $300.00 dollars to repair a hernia not thousands of dollars. I hope you asymptomatic always, thanks.

Even after all this, Dr. Consorti has described the Fitzgibbons study in a way that makes her recommendation seem more reasonable than it was. As I said, the results of that study do not support her recommendation. Its abstract says: “Watchful waiting is an acceptable option for men with minimally symptomatic inguinal hernias. Delaying surgical repair until symptoms increase is safe.”

Four Quantified-Self Talks

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At the recent Quantified Self Meetup in San Francisco, four talks especially interested me.

The first was by a woman who has been making scrapbooks about her life for a long time. She now has nineteen volumes. They contain the usual scrapbook stuff (photos, ticket stubs, drawings — she’s a designer — newspaper clippings, receipts, and so on) plus her design work and her medical records. They help her remember her life. “I look at them so I won’t make the same mistakes in relationships,” she said. “How’s that working?” someone asked. It’s a lot of work and she’s now three months behind. Her talk was about what sort of computer tool would make the whole thing easier. It made me wonder why woman scrapbook so much more than men. My earlier post about scrapbooking didn’t answer that question. The whole thing reminded me of Jill Price:

At the age of 10, Price began to keep almost daily diaries, which she then saved — thousands of pages filled with her impossibly tiny handwriting.

The curious thing about Price’s diaries is that her memory is so astonishingly good that she can remember her past in great detail without them. Apparently she kept such detailed diaries because of her great memory or both have some common cause.

The second was by a man who had recorded his daily activities in detail for five years. A graph showed that he had a free-running sleep cycle: He went to sleep slightly later each day. At certain times he’d be awake at night and asleep during the day. He started keeping these records because he was washing his roommates’ dishes a lot and wanted to see how much time it was taking. (Much less than he thought, it turned out.) I asked what he’d learned from his records. The sleep pattern, he said. Someone told me he must have meant the regularity of the pattern. His records had no obvious value so again I wondered: What’s the evolutionary reason? He enjoys keeping these records. Why? In some ways it’s a male version of scrapbooking: You can’t easily show it to someone (in line with male lack of communicativeness), but, like a scrapbook, it’s a long-term record of random stuff that helps you remember what happened.

The third was about a startup called Skimble. Maria Ly and her partner have created a web app to keep track of your outdoor activities, such as climbing and kayaking. She does a lot of climbing and the app started as a way for her to keep track of it. She used to be an engineer at Google. This seems promising because she was trying to solve her own problem, not someone else’s. Apps to help other people self-experiment don’t get very far, in my experience.

The fourth was a kind of combination of the first three. Robin Barooah wanted to meditate more. His bouts of meditation last a half-hour or more, so it wasn’t easy. After a retreat, he started meditating more but the effect wore off within a month or so. His talk was about an iphone app for tracking his meditation. After he started using it, about a month ago, he’s been achieving his goal of regular daily meditation better than ever before. It reminds me of a University of Colorado engineering professor who stopped binging on ice cream as soon as he forced himself to keep track of what he ate.

Homemade Kombucha Tips

Seth Roberts10 Comments

1. You don’t need a starter culture (often called a scoby). You can make one from store-bought kombucha. I let a cup of Rejuvenation kombucha sit in a wide-mouth jar at room temperature, covered with a paper towel. After two weeks, a thin film had formed on the surface, easily transfered to a tea-sugar mixture. More This didn’t work! The culture grew poorly. It might have worked to just pour the Rejuvenation kombucha into the tea-sugar mixture.

2. My friend Carl Willat has used empty Synergy kombucha bottles to bottle kombucha he makes himself. By bottling your kombucha, and leaving it at room temperature for a few days, you get carbonation.