Author: Seth Roberts

Self-Tracking: What I’ve Learned

Seth Roberts10 Comments

I want to measure, day by day, how well my brain is working. After I saw big fast effects of flaxseed oil, I realized how well my brain works (a) depends on what I eat and (b) can change quickly. Maybe other things besides dietary omega-3 matter. Maybe large amounts of omega-6 make my brain work worse, for example. Another reason for this project is that I’m interested in how to generate ideas, a neglected part of scientific methodology. Maybe this sort of long-term monitoring can generate new ideas about what affects our brains.

So I needed a brain task that I’ll do daily. When I set out to devise a good task, here’s what I already knew:

1. Many numbers, not one. A task that provides many numbers per test (e.g., many latencies) is better than a task that provides only one number (e.g., percent correct). Gathering many numbers per test allows me to look at their distribution and choose an efficient method of combining (i.e., averaging) them into one number. (E.g., harmonic mean, geometric mean, trimmed mean.) Gathering many numbers also allows me to calculate a standard error, which helps identify unusual scores.

2. Graded, not binary. Graded measures (e.g., latencies) are better than binary ones (e.g., right/wrong).

Every experimental psychologist knows this. What none of them know is how to make the task fun. If I’m going to do something every day, it matters a great deal whether I enjoy it or not. It might be the difference between possible and impossible. People enjoy video games, which is a kind of existence proof. Video games have dozens of elements; which matter? Here’s what I figured out by trial and error:

3. Hand-eye coordination. Making difficult movements that involve hand-eye coordination is fun. My bilboquet taught me this. Presumably this tendency originated during the tool-making hobbyist stage of human evolution; it caused people to become better and better at making tools. Ordinary typing involves skilled movement but not hand-eye coordination. This idea has worked. I led me to try one-finger typing (where I look at the keyboard while I type) instead of regular typing. And, indeed, I enjoy the one-finger typing task, whereas I didn’t enjoy the ordinary typing tasks I’ve tried.

4. Detailed problem-by-problem feedback. Right/wrong is the crudest form of feedback; it doesn’t do much. What I find is much more motivating is more graded feedback based on performance on the same problem.

5. Less than 5 minutes. The longer the task the more data, sure, but also the more reluctant I am to do it. Three minutes seems close to ideal: long enough for the task to be a pleasant break but not so long that it seems like a burden.

Experimental psychology is a hundred years old. Small daily tests is an unexplored ecology that might have practical benefits.

Extreme Medical Tourism

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In this post Jasper Lawrence describes a trip to Cameroon to infect himself with hookworms. Here’s how it begins:

As my asthma got worse I became increasingly reliant on inhalers, pills and antihistamines as well as upon the oral steroid prednisone to stay out of hospital. I tried all the drugs and therapies available. As it was by the time I was in my late 30s I was a frequent visitor to the emergency room. As anyone who has experienced a severe asthma attack can tell you they are terrifying.

My use of prednisone increased, and as you may know the side affects of prednisone are quite horrible, particularly with long-term use. I started to suffer from some of these side affects, particularly obesity, and despite all this these drugs were only marginally effective in controlling my asthma.

Soon I was denied health insurance and so now I had the added burden of paying for all my medical care.

On a trip in the summer of 2004 to visit relatives in England I learned of a BBC documentary about the connection between a variety of intestinal parasites and various autoimmune diseases.

In Cameroon:

Cameroon has no tourism infrastructure, its people being so poor (your pocket change represents two or three months wages) and the insane corruption make for a very challenging environment for a western traveler, particularly a conspicuous white one. You are a walking pile of cash, a visitor from another, much wealthier, planet. One feels very vulnerable and exposed. It can be very wearing and the danger of being robbed is constant. . . . With the driver’s help (I told everyone of my quest) I was able to visit a variety of villages and with practice learned to identify where the locals would defecate.

Worm therapy.

A Little Knowledge about Obesity is a Dangerous Thing

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Rajiv Mehta of Zume Life, a company that helps patients follow treatment regimes, told me that he’s been doing the Shangri-La Diet with some success — he’s lost 3 pounds in a month. Now and then he tells others about the diet. There are two types of reactions. Those who are outside the field of obesity prevention/research are interested. Those inside the field, obesity professionals (e.g., a Stanford professor), uniformly reject it: “Impossible,” they say. Can’t possibly be true.

How Safe are Vaccines?

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Or, at least, how safe do the people who prescribe and give them think they are? Jock Doubleday has an interesting way of finding out: Offer money to drink the ingredients, adjusted for body weight. The offer, which began in 2001, is currently $200,000 to “an M.D. or pharmaceutical company CEO, or any of the relevant members of the ACIP [the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] now including liaison representatives, ex officio members, chairman, and executive secretary” who will do this.

More The person who accepts this offer needs to fulfill a contract posted here. However, it isn’t clear what the “Agreement-in-Full” mentioned in the contract consists of. So it isn’t clear if the person can know what he or she is getting into before putting $5,000 at risk. If the Agreement-in-Full cannot be examined now, this is a meaningless — too vague to be understood — offer. I have written to Jock Doubleday to find the Agreement-in-Full.

And more Mr. Doubleday says he has the Agreement-in-Full but he would not show it to me nor apparently to anyone else not on the list of those eligible for the offer. So the whole thing is a tribute to the magic of web pages.

Bay Area Fermentation

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle had an article on fermented foods in the Bay Area: the fermentation festival, sauerkraut, kimchi, and so on. (No discussion of yogurt.) I especially liked this:

Leaving foods unrefrigerated for two weeks or more can be disturbing to those who weren’t raised with a crock of pickles in the hallway. But U.S. Department of Agriculture research service microbiologist Fred Breidt says properly fermented vegetables are actually safer than raw vegetables, which might have been exposed to pathogens like E. coli on the farm.

“With fermented products there is no safety concern. I can flat-out say that. The reason is the lactic acid bacteria that carry out the fermentation are the world’s best killers of other bacteria,” says Breidt, who works at a lab at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, where scientists have been studying fermented and other pickled foods since the 1930s.

Breidt adds that fermented vegetables, for which there are no documented cases of food-borne illness, are safer for novices to make than canned vegetables. Pressurized canning creates an anaerobic environment that increases the risk of deadly botulism, particularly with low-acid foods.

Nothing about fermented — also called aged – meat. The last taboo. I believe we like umami flavor so that we will eat more bacteria-laden protein. (Glutamate, which produces the umami flavor, is a protein breakdown product.) All meat producers, as far as I know, age their product 2-3 weeks to improve the flavor. Understandably, they don’t like to talk about it.

Thanks to Ashish Mukharji.

Homemade Kombucha: What I’ve Learned (part 1)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

From Rejuvenation Company‘s kombucha I learned how good it can be. From a Ferment Change party a few months ago I got kombucha starter. Now I have eight jars brewing kombucha. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Hard to fail. It’s hard to kill the kombucha “mother”. After weeks in an airtight bottle (see Mistake 2), after I let air in it grew fine. You make kombucha at room temperature. You don’t have to check it. You simply wait until it’s sour enough.

2. Air needed. It’s aerobic fermentation, so it needs unlimited oxygen. I learned this after I used a sealed container and nothing happened.

3. Takes weeks. It has taken weeks for my kombucha to become really sour. Maybe I can reduce this to a week under better conditions (high surface to volume ratio, start with large kombucha mother).

4. Use a wide container. The more surface to volume, the better. The kombucha culture grows on top of the tea/sugar mixture because it needs contact with air. The wider the container, the more contact it can have.

5. Cover tightly with something air-permeable. I cover each jar with a paper towel secured with a rubber band. Before I started using a rubber band to hold down the paper towel I found a fly in one of them.

I use cheap black tea (in teabags) and ordinary sugar. Maybe I should get a pH meter to learn more about the process.

Yes, Canker Sores Prevented (and Cured) by Omega-3

Seth Roberts21 Comments

Here is a comment left on my earlier canker-sore post by a reader named Ted:

I found out quite by accident WALNUTS get rid of [canker sores] quite quickly. The first sign of an ulcer I chew walnuts and leave the paste in my mouth for a little while (30 seconds or so).

The first time was by accident, my ulcers disappeared so quickly I knew it had to be something I ate. And the only thing I had eaten differently the past day was walnuts.

Flaxseed oil and walnuts differ in lots of ways but both are high in omega-3. My gums got much better around the time I started taking flaxseed oil. I neither noticed nor expected this; my dentist pointed it out. Several others have told me the same thing. Tyler Cowen’s gums got dramatically better. One reader started and stopped and restarted flaxseed oil, making it blindingly clear that the gum improvement is caused by flaxseed oil. There is plenty of reason to think the human diet was once much higher in omega-3. All this together convinces me that omega-3 can both prevent and cure canker sores. Not only that, I’m also convinced that canker sores are a sign of omega-3 deficiency. You shouldn’t just get rid of them with walnuts; you should change your diet. Omega-3 has other benefits (better brain function, less inflammation, probably others).

Let’s say I’m right about this — canker sores really are prevented and cured by omega-3. Then there are several things to notice.

1. Web facilitation. It was made possible by the internet. My initial interest in flaxseed oil came from reading the Shangri-La Diet forums. I didn’t have to read a single book about the Aquatic Ape theory; I could learn enough online. Tyler Cowen’s experience was in his blog. Eric Vlemmix contacted me by email. No special website was involved.

2. Value of self-experimentation. My flaxseed oil self-experimentation played a big part, although it had nothing to do with mouth health. These experiments showed dramatic benefits — so large and fast that something in flaxseed oil, presumably omega-3, had to be a necessary nutrient. Because of these results, I blogged about omega-3 a lot, which is why Eric emailed me about his experience.

3. Unconventional evidence. All the evidence here, not just the self-experimentation, is what advocates of evidence-based medicine and other evidence snobs criticize. Much of it is anecdotal. Yet the evidence snobs have, in this case, nothing to show for their snobbery. They missed this conclusion completely. Nor do you need a double-blind study to verify/test this conclusion. If you have canker sores, you simply drink flaxseed oil or eat walnuts and see if they go away. Maybe this omnipresent evidence snobbery is . . . completely wrong? Maybe this has something to do with the stagnation in health research?

4. Lack of credentials. No one involved with this conclusion is a nutrition professor or dentist or medical doctor, as far as I know. Apparently you don’t need proper credentials to figure out important things about health. Of course, we’ve been here before: Jane Jacobs, Elaine Morgan.

5. Failure of “trusted” health websites. Health websites you might think you could trust missed this completely. The Mayo Clinic website lists 15 possible causes — none of them involving omega-3. (Some of them, we can now see, are correlates of canker sores, also caused by lack of omega-3.) If canker sores can be cured with walnuts, the Mayo list of treatments reads like a list of scurvy cures from the Middle Ages. The Harvard Medical School health website is even worse. “Keep in mind that up to half of all adults have experienced canker sores at least once,” it says. This is supposed to reassure you. Surely something this common couldn’t be a serious problem.

6. Failure of the healthcare establishment. Even worse, the entire healthcare establishment, with its vast resources, hasn’t managed to figure this out. Canker sores are not considered a major health problem, no, but, if I’m right, that too is a mistake. They are certainly common. If they indicate an important nutritional deficiency (too little omega-3), they become very important and their high prevalence is a major health problem.

What Does Profound Stagnation Look Like?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Economic stagnation = no development of new goods and services. Stagnation in the field of health has been so long-lasting and widespread that it is hard to see. I have never read a good description of it. Michael Moore thought the state of our insurance coverage was scandalous, and made Sicko; but much more harmful is the stagnation.

Here is what it looks like. Americans have many health problems. Obesity. Diabetes, closely connected to obesity. Mental illness, especially depression. Drug and alcohol addiction, a kind of self-medication. Allergies and autoimmune disorders, such as arthritis. Economic progress, lack of stagnation, would be coming up with and disseminating effective solutions to these problems.

When a helpful innovation arises, what happens? As Jane Jacobs pointed out in The Economy of Cities (1969), stagnation is in the interests of the powerful. As long as things remain the same, they remain powerful. Power also generates complacency; although the most powerful have the most resources, they are unlikely to find or develop the solutions. (Example: General Motors.) Within the health industry, Harvard Medical School professors are powerful. Here’s what happened when Dr. Erika Schwartz gave a lecture there:

When I gave my lecture on bioidentical hormones at Harvard on February 2, 2009, . . . I asked the chairman of the department of ob-gyn, Isaac Schiff, MD and the rest of the physicians in the audience, “ How come Suzanne Somers and Oprah are the ones to teach the public about bioidentical hormones? What has the medical profession done with the information of the Women’s Health Initiative study? Nine years later and women are still suffering and the medical establishment has not stepped up to the plate to help women find safe solutions to menopausal symptoms. Why are bioidentical hormones still controversial?” They had no answers.

That’s what stagnation looks like. It’s unsurprising that Oprah would publicize the innovation; her power is not in the health industry. She has nothing to lose. That Newsweek runs a cover story complaining about Oprah’s publicity for “risky advice” shows that top editors at Newsweek fail to see the stagnation in health. Innovations are always called “risky” by someone in power. Stagnation in health is probably the most important news story of our time. The health problems that have stacked up unsolved — obesity, mental illness, and so on — affect everyone every day.

Here’s another example of what stagnation looks like. The current Business Week cover story is about innovation, and the lack thereof. One of its examples involves health. What’s revealing is how minor the innovation is.

To see both the reality of the innovation shortfall and its potentially happy ending, look at Organogenesis, a small company in Canton, Mass. Back in 1998, Organogenesis received approval from the Food & Drug Administration to sell the world’s first living skin substitute. The product, Apligraf, was a thin, stretchy substance that could be grown in quantity and applied to speed the healing of diabetic leg ulcers and other wounds that had stayed open for years. . . But there were several big problems, recalls Geoff MacKay, the company’s current CEO . . . By 2002 the early enthusiasm for Apligraf had vanished, along with the money. . . . Shortly after, MacKay took over at Organogenesis with a clear mandate to straighten out the company’s manufacturing, logistics, and sales, and turn this tarnished product into a moneymaker.

And that’s what he did. . . . Organogenesis is fulfilling the promise of 1998—a decade later.

A product that helps diabetic leg ulcers heal — without curing diabetes. In a cover story about innovation, a trivial innovation is the big example of successful innovation. This is another way stagnation is visible: Low standards for what is important innovation.

Canker Sores Prevented by Omega-3?

Seth Roberts15 Comments

Eric Vlemmix writes:

I’ve had these oral sores [canker sores, also called Aphthous ulcers] since childhood [he’s 33], but since taking flax/fish oil I have had hardly any ulcers! The times I had an ulcer it was small, less painful than usual, and would disappear in a few days. The doctors never knew what the cause of these ulcers was, and Wikipedia states: cause unknown.

I asked about his fish oil and flaxseed oil intake:

Something like 15 ml [= 1 tablespoon] of flaxseed oil daily. Most days I also take a Minami morEPA plus capsule which has 635 mg EPA, and 195 mg DHA.

I started SLD in June 2008, and I think I switched from olive oil to flax the same month. Since then I haven’t had a real serious case of ulcers. Some small issues sometimes, but not the real big and extremely painful ones that I had before. Sometimes a small mini zit-like thing.

According to Family Doctor, “Doctors don’t know of anything that prevents canker sores from forming.” The Mayo Clinic website is equally unhelpful. To prevent canker sores, EMedicineHealth advises, “Do not talk while chewing.” According to KidsHealth, “About 1 in 5 people regularly gets bothersome canker sores.”

Any canker-sore sufferer want to start taking flaxseed oil and fish oil (in the amounts Eric uses) and tell me what happens?

Gum surgery averted