Author: Seth Roberts

David Lawrence: Down 100 Pounds!

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I met David Lawrence when I appeared on his radio show a year ago. Since then, he has lost more than 100 pounds. He started at 355 (BMI 50); now he’s at 246 (BMI 34). Very impressive. How did he do it?

I’m not really doing anything special other than portion control (very easy, just eat a little not everything), and being more active. Occasionally I’ll remember to drink a Mexican Coke [he lives in Los Angeles] an hour or so before a big meal, and that cuts it down to size, but I can’t really claim that I’m following the SLD regimen. More like, I park in the first spot I come to in the parking lot, and walk to the buildings. Feels great.

There seem to be three changes here: 1. Eating less. 2. More walking. 3. Mexican Coke before some meals. I am skeptical that trying to eat less can have massive long-term effects, so I discount that factor completely. More walking can certainly be potent if pre-walking you are very sedentary, as perhaps David was. I’ve never heard of anyone losing 100 pounds by walking more, however. And the additional walking doesn’t sound like much.

So perhaps the Mexican Coke before big meals is actually doing something. This is fascinating because in general soft drinks are fattening. (They are the perfect ditto food: strong constant flavor, quickly-digested calories.) Yet it is possible that with this particular timing the calories in the Coke don’t get associated with the flavor of either the Coke or the following meal. If so they would function as SLD calories and that could indeed cause substantial weight loss (or at least make it much easier to do portion control).

There isn’t any precedent in the study of learning for “associative strength” (generated by the calories) to get lost, as it were, but then no one would ever look for such a thing. Normally the flavor of the Coke would hang around in the brain waiting for the calorie signal generated by the sugar but when the meal comes along the flavor signal gets muddled. Perhaps combining the Coke flavor memory with a wide range of other flavor memories creates a jumbled mess that is so inconsistent that the Coke goes from ditto food to the opposite, completely-new-flavor food.

David will appear in two episodes of Heroes in October.

Fannie Mae and The Black Swan

Seth Roberts15 Comments

In response to the trouble at Fannie Mae — its stock plunged — we have this:

“There is a sort of a panic going on and that’s not what ought to be,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who heads the Senate banking committee. “The facts don’t warrant that reaction, in my view.”

Mr. Dodd said that he was persuaded by conversations with Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke that the two companies “are fundamentally sound and strong.”

Nassim Taleb begs to differ — a year ago:

The government-sponsored institution Fanny Mae, when I look at their risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely.”

A footnote on p. 226 of The Black Swan, published April 2007. Asked to comment on the Fannie Mae situation, Taleb replied, “I discuss events before, not after. I despise postdicters.”

GrownChildCam: New Treatment For Depression?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Jacob Nelik, the friend of a friend, is a businessman/engineer in Los Angeles whose business, ISS Corporation, makes high-tech solutions from off-the-shelf components. Their projects include video camera systems for luxury yachts and retail stores, and technical and marketing support to Israel Aerospace Industries for their wiring design software. His mom, who is 85, lives in Israel in an old-age home. She has short-term memory problems. Jacob wrote me:

I try to visit her 3-4 times a year but at this age the feeling of loneliness and emptiness, compounded with the feeling (and fact) that because of distance, I can’t come and visit her whenever she (or I) would like to, brought her to a stage where she felt she didn’t have a reason to live (“living for what?” as she said). I felt that with my knowledge, experience and the internet, I can make it easier for her. So I utilized a TV set she already owned to create a live picture of me in my office. Whenever I am in the office, she can see me (live). It is on 24 hours a day just like a picture but with live image. I felt that this would bring her closer to me and she would feel (on a daily basis) that I am there with her.
I utilized video parts that my company uses. I took an old home camcorder and connected it to one of the parts we use for our video projects, called a video server or video encoder. It takes the Analog video/picture that the camcorder provides, digitizes it, compresses it, and converts it to IP (Internet Protocol). There are many like this in the market; the one I used allows me to control many parameters including picture compression algorithm, so I can maintain a large physical picture (to fill up the TV screen on my mom’s end without being grainy or fuzzy) with high quality, high frame rate, very short delay (under 2 seconds) and very low bandwidth so I can use the cheapest internet service available. On my mom’s end, I used the same type of circuit to perform the reverse function (Taking the IP video stream, decompress it and convert it back to an Analog video to be fed into the TV set to the same connector where a VCR is connected). I am skipping some technical details but the net result is high quality video from end to end (when each end can be located at different place in the world).

What happened?

From the moment the system started operating (about a year ago) I could see tremendous positive effects on my mom. She no longer says “why do I need to live, what for?” I can detect a smile in her face just by listening to her. Just yesterday she told me that she saw me eating ice cream at my desk. She mentioned a new shirt I was wearing. It gives her many new conversational topics. She tells me that she enters the room and starts talking to me as if I am there with her. She became much more relaxed and as a result, even her blood pressure is better controlled. It fills a void in her life. It affected me positively as well, because I see how much better she is.

Chocolate is Good For You

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I put cocoa powder in my black tea. I like the complexity it adds and believe it’s good for you. More evidence of its health benefits has just been published:

Design: Randomized, placebo-controlled, single-blind crossover trial of 45 healthy adults [mean age: 53 y; mean body mass index (in kg/m2): 30]. In phase 1, subjects were randomly assigned to consume a solid dark chocolate bar (containing 22 g cocoa powder) or a cocoa-free placebo bar (containing 0 g cocoa powder). In phase 2, subjects were randomly assigned to consume sugar-free cocoa (containing 22 g cocoa powder), sugared cocoa (containing 22 g cocoa powder), or a placebo (containing 0 g cocoa powder).

Results: Solid dark chocolate and liquid cocoa ingestion improved endothelial function (measured as flow-mediated dilatation) compared with placebo (dark chocolate: 4.3 ± 3.4% compared with —1.8 ± 3.3%; p < 0.001; sugar-free and sugared cocoa: 5.7 ± 2.6% and 2.0 ± 1.8% compared with —1.5 ± 2.8%; p < 0.001). Blood pressure decreased after the ingestion of dark chocolate and sugar-free cocoa compared with placebo (dark chocolate: systolic, —3.2 ± 5.8 mm Hg compared with 2.7 ± 6.6 mm Hg; p < 0.001; and diastolic, —1.4 ± 3.9 mm Hg compared with 2.7 ± 6.4 mm Hg; p = 0.01; sugar-free cocoa: systolic, —2.1 ± 7.0 mm Hg compared with 3.2 ± 5.6 mm Hg; p < 0.001; and diastolic: —1.2 ± 8.7 mm Hg compared with 2.8 ± 5.6 mm Hg; p = 0.014). Endothelial function improved significantly more with sugar-free than with regular cocoa (5.7 ± 2.6% compared with 2.0 ± 1.8%; p < 0.001).

Conclusions: The acute ingestion of both solid dark chocolate and liquid cocoa improved endothelial function and lowered blood pressure in overweight adults.

22 g cocoa powder = 2.5 tablespoons. If you live near Berkeley, you might want to attend the Charles Chocolates annual open house, which is this Saturday (July 12) at 2 pm. They are located in Emeryville at 6259 Hollis.

Short Story of the Year

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“ The Headstrong Historian” by Chimamanda Adiche is the best short story I have read in The New Yorker in years, and in the book I am writing now — on self-experimentation — I will quote from it:

How she had puzzled over words like “wallpaper” and “dandelions” in her textbooks, unable to picture them.

No wonder the author won the Orange Prize last year for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun.

An essay by Adichie about being called “sister” contains the following:

The word “racist” should be banned. It is like a sweater wrung completely out of shape; it has lost its usefulness. It makes honest debate impossible, whether about small realities such as little boys who won’t say hello to black babysitters or large realities such as who is more likely to get the death penalty.

In college I wrote an essay saying essentially the same thing about the word scientific — that it was too vague and pompous to be helpful.

A Chimamanda Adiche website.

My Theory of Human Evolution (Fourth of July)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Why do holidays exist? For the same reason as festivals, ceremonies, and souvenirs: To increase demand for hard-to-make stuff. This helps artisans at the cutting edge make a living. They are the innovators. Helping them advances technology. Our celebration of Independence Day, for example, creates demand for fireworks, firecrackers, and American flags.

The case of Christmas.

SLD: “A Lazy Person’s Diet”

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I wish I could embed YouTube videos here but it messes up the layout. Especially I would like to embed this charming video from Kevin Mullaney, whom you may remember from an earlier video about the Shangri-La Diet. In the newer video, he calls SLD “a lazy person’s diet”. I like that!

Kevin’s ticker indicates he has lost about 60 pounds. The last 10 were from SLD plus a low-carb diet.

Thanks to Buxi.

Is Childhood Obesity Due to Not Enough Exercise?

Seth Roberts10 Comments

As any reader of The Shangri-La Diet knows, I attribute the obesity epidemic to ditto foods — foods that taste exactly the same each time, such as factory food and fast food. We eat a lot more of these foods today than 50 years ago or even 20 years ago.

An alternative explanation of the obesity epidemic that many people believe is too little exercise. People who deal with childhood obesity, in particular, often say the problem is too much TV, too little playground.

If kids are fat due to lack of exercise, more exercise should be a good solution. A new study shows it isn’t. It turns out that giving kids more P.E. doesn’t cause weight loss:

In studies involving nearly 10,000 children, primarily in elementary schools, none demonstrated a reduction in BMI with those who were assigned to the most phys-ed time, compared to those who didn’t have as much.

Via Calorie Lab.