A just-published study compared the effects of dark chocolate (flavonol-rich) and white chocolate (no flavonols) on 19 persons with high blood pressure and impaired glucose tolerance. The dark chocolate reduced blood pressure by 4 points (both systolic and diastolic) and improved insulin sensitivity.
I really should test this myself. There is plenty of similar evidence.
Earlier post.
On the SLD forums Heidi 555 posted this:
I’ve been standing on one foot on an inexpensive balance board or inflatable balance disc. . . . I’ve been using the balance board while doing dishes and brushing my teeth. . . .
I feel good immediately afterwards. I feel slightly better physically and emotionally. . . . I’m use to feeling better after I exercise, but typically it takes more intensive sustained exercise to get this effect.
I sleep well 60-70% of the time. . . . For the past 3 days that I’ve done the one-footed standing I’ve had excellent sleep. Last night it was especially surprising because I went to bed emotionally distraught and stayed up slightly later than I intended.
I have been sleeping much better than usual. Sharp easy-to-notice improvement. After the first time this happened I made a list of 9 possible reasons (lifestyle changes that might have been responsible). I later added one I’d overlooked: standing on one foot to exhaustion a few times.
Yesterday I stood on one foot to exhaustion four times, twice in the morning and twice in the evening. It took about three minutes each time (12 minutes total). Didn’t make any of the nine other candidate changes. And I slept much better than usual. So it is beginning to look like just that one factor is responsible. The one I almost forgot but also the one that seemed most plausible after i remembered it.
Browsing through the many cell-phone-music videos on YouTube I came across this demonstration of an IPhone piano program. The demonstrator first shows the range of the instrument, then plays Chopsticks, then plays . . . what? A piece I’ve heard many times but can’t place.
What impresses me so much about the mystery piece is how urgent it sounds. Somehow the composer has figured out what makes something sound urgent. It reminds me of a note Robert Caro, the biographer, has posted above the desk where he writes: “Is there desperation on the page?”
More. It’s Clocks by Coldplay. Thanks so much, Sam and Jeff! Only now do I manage to see that the song is identified in the comment section of the video.
Gary Wolf, a writer for Wired, and Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired, have formed a San Francisco Bay Area Meetup group called The Quantified Self.
This is a monthly show and tell for people taking advantage of various kinds of personal tracking – geotracking, life-logging, DNA sequencing, etc. – to gain more knowledge about themselves. Come whare what you are doing, and learn from others. Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Chemical Body
- Load Counts
- Personal Genome Sequencing
- Lifelogging
- Self Experimentation
- Risks/Legal Rights/DutiesBehavior monitoring
- Location tracking
- Non-invasive Probes
- Digitizing Body Info
- Sharing Health Records
- Psychological Self-Assesments
- Medical Self-Diagnostics
The first meeting, which I will eagerly attend, will be on September 10 (Wed) evening in Pacifica. Sign up for details.
Vitamin D supplementation raises HDL enormously, says William Davis:
Add vitamin D to achieve our target serum level . . . HDL jumps to 50, 60, 70, even 90 mg/dl.
The first few times this occurred, I thought it was an error or fluke. But now that I’ve witnessed this effect many dozens of time, I am convinced that it is real. Just today, I saw a 40-year old man whose starting HDL was 25 mg/dl increase to 87 mg/dl.
Responses like this are supposed to be impossible. Before vitamin D, I had never witnessed increases of this magnitude.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
The phrase everyone gets wrong. Outside experimental psychology, where the term originated, I have never seen a correct usage. Learning curves show performance (e.g., percent correct) as a function of amount of training (e.g., number of trials). A steep learning curve means the organization, person, or animal quickly went from low to high performance — in other words, learning was fast.
The phrase is always used to mean the opposite (slow learning). An example from Economic Principals:
But experience has shown that high fixed costs, steep learning curves, access to delivery systems and expensively-maintained reputations are powerful deterrents to ambitious start-ups.
I repeated the two things that remained on my list as possibilities for why I slept so well a few nights ago: 1. Looked at my face in a mirror a half-hour earlier than usual with a better sound source. 2. Stood on one foot until exhaustion (6 times). Lo and behold, I slept great. Now I’m pretty sure one of these two, or their combination, is responsible.
An unexpected twist is that I only slept 5 hours. Usually I’d still feel tired after that little sleep. But I feel like I slept 7 or 8.
I suspect the standing, not the faces, is the cause. Which would be ironic. Of the treatments I’ve studied by self-experimentation and found helpful, standing 9 or 10 hours, which greatly improved my sleep, was the most difficult. I loved what it did to my sleep. I still remember how wonderful it felt to be so well-rested the next morning. Even so I stopped doing it. As an experimental treatment, it was hard to measure how long I stood. As a lifestyle change, it was really hard to arrange so much standing. Whereas standing on one foot to exhaustion six times might be the easiest effective treatment I’ve studied (if it’s effective). Easy to measure, nothing to buy, no logistical problems.
I may try to repeat the earlier observation a few more times — as a kind of gift to myself — but now the main thing I want to do is separate the effects of the two factors, i.e., test one without the other.
Yesterday I did two of the 10 or so possible things that might have caused me to sleep really well recently: (a) looked at my face in a mirror earlier than usual with voices behind the mirror (Factor A) and (b) stood on one foot until exhaustion (twice) (Factor B). And last night I slept better than usual — not quite as great as the first time but still really well. This seems to narrow down the possibilities to:
I have doubts about Factor A. After I figured out that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood, I tried for months to find the right “dose” (right time, right length) to improve my sleep. I didn’t find it. Whereas Factor B is merely a new version of something that has improved my sleep countless times, so much that I’ve noticed its effects when not looking for them. The effect might have been less clear last night than the first time because I only stood on one foot to exhaustion twice. The first time — I wasn’t paying attention, of course — I think I did it three or four times.
So today I did it six times. It was curiously exhausting. After I felt recovered (about an hour later), the rest of the day I felt really good, cheerful and energetic — better than after yoga. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. If I do something that makes me sleep better, shouldn’t it make me more tired?