Author: Seth Roberts

Calorie Learning: Materials

Seth Roberts2 Comments

These are the supplies I used in my calorie-learning experiments:

1. Wonder bread. I wanted bread with as little flavor as possible

2. Unsalted butter. Unsalted because the spice blends have salt.

3. Eleven Penzeys Spices spice blends. In particular, Baking Spice, Cake Spice, Chicken Taco Seasoning, Jerk Pork Seasoning, Poultry Seasoning, Mural of Flavor, Sate Seasoning, Southwest Seasoning, Sweet Curry (regular), Tuscan Sunset, Venison Sausage Seasoning. Each has 5-15 different spices. For example, Jerk Pork Seasoning contains paprika, allspice, ginger, cayenne pepper, sugar, nutmeg, black pepper, garlic, thyme, lemon grass, cinnamon, star anise, cloves, and mace. Baking Spice is a mixture of two kinds of cinnamon, anise seed, allspice, mace, and cardamom. Combining a few of them should produce a flavor unlikely to resemble any familiar flavor.

Lewis Carroll on Mercury and Autism

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From an article in Rolling Stone about mercury and autism:

The CDC “wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe,” Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the [Institute of Medicine’s] Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. “We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect” of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee’s chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation” between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result “Walt wants” — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

From Chapter 12 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

`No, no!’ said the Queen. `Sentence first–verdict afterwards.’

`Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!’

`Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.

Eerily prophetic, no?

My Theory of Human Evolution (gift card edition)

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The Sharper Image has gone bankrupt and will no longer honor gift cards. In the comments section of the Consumerist post about this, several people apparently fail to understand why gift cards exist:

Another reason why cash is a better gift than gift cards.

This is just a good example why you should never buy a gift card.

Did anyone ever NOT know that gift cards are stupid?

The real lesson here, as Consumerists know, is don’t buy gift cards. They are a bad deal even if the issuer doesn’t go bankrupt.

This is the low-rent version of the deadweight cost of Christmas idea, which I discussed earlier. At the risk of stating the obvious, the perfect gift shows you know a lot about the recipient; cash shows you know nothing. A gift card shows you know a little — where the person likes to shop. They are less wasteful but less gift-like than ordinary gifts, more wasteful and more gift-like than cash. Gifts are supposed to be wasteful. This is why they are nicely wrapped. (Curiously no commenter called gifts stupid, a scam, etc.) In evolutionary terms, gift-giving traditions evolved because they increased demand for seemingly “useless” stuff. Gifts that went unused and expensive wrappings weren’t actually useless; they helped artists and artisans make a living. They were research grants for material science.

Calorie Learning: Background

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The discovery of flavor-calorie learning (in rats) was no surprise. It was another example of flavor-consequence learning, which was well established. In the 1950s, John Garcia had found that if you make a rat sick after exposing it to a new flavor, it will avoid that flavor. Flavor-consequence learning belongs to the larger category of Pavlovian learning (also called classical conditioning), the sort of learning where an animal learns that an unimportant event (such as a bell) predicts an important event (such as food). Pavlovian learning belongs to the larger category of associative learning, which also includes action-event learning, such as a rat learning that bar presses produce food pellets. The action is pressing the bar; the event is getting a food pellet.

My Ph.D. was in the field of animal learning. Almost all animal learning research is about associative learning. When I taught introductory psychology, however, I found it hard to take advantage of my expertise because most of the research had little real-world relevance. The big exception was Shepard Siegel’ s work on drug tolerance and craving. Tolerance and craving are due to Pavlovian learning, Siegel argued. Flavor-calorie learning, happening at every meal, might have been another exception had anything interesting been known about it — but nothing was.

The usual terminology is to say that in a Pavlovian-learning experiment, the animal learns to associate the CS (conditioned stimulus, such as a bell) with the US (unconditioned stimulus, such as food). In flavor-calorie learning experiments, the flavor source is the CS, the calorie source the US.

Assorted Links

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1. Gary Taubes speaks at Stevens Institute of Technology. This page curiously links to itself.

2. Ticket cameras increase crashes. The opposite of what was promised. They have just been installed in downtown Berkeley.

3. Humor and the boss-employee relationship. Not exactly self-experimentation, but close.

4. Sherwin Nuland on being treated for severe depression. His doctors recommended that Nuland receive a prefrontal lobotomy. A resident said: Let’s try ECT.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Flaxseed Oil: Beware of Lignans

Seth Roberts5 Comments

When I buy flaxseed oil, I have a choice: with or without lignans. I almost always choose without. Apparently that’s the right choice, witness this from the SLD forums:

I’ve been trying to figure out what besides overeating might cause these flare ups with my gallbladder. It seems clear from the last few days that one of the things that can set it off is Flax Seed Oil with lignans. When I consume 2-3 tablespoons a day of FSO without lignans, I don’t notice any problems. The FSO goes down easy and I don’t feel nausea or pain. But with the lignans I often do. To be sure, I decided to switch from FSO to ground up flax seeds mixed into my oatmeal. And today, the first time I tried that, an hour later the familiar nausea is back.

Want to Self-Experiment? A Special Offer

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I’d like to increase the ability of self-experimenters to tell others what they’ve done and get feedback. Blog software can be used to do this.

Instead of posting again and again, as in the usual blog, you just post a few times then edit those posts as you collect new information. Instead of post = diary entry, the concept is post = section of scientific paper. You might have posts corresponding to Introduction, Equipment, Procedure, Raw Data, Data Summary, Interpretation, Strengths, Weaknesses, and Comparison to Other Work. You start by writing the Introduction. As the raw data comes in, you add it to the Raw Data post. After you finish collecting the raw data, you write the Data Summary post. And so on.

Here is the start of an example.

The special offer is that if you want to do a self-experiment and are willing to communicate your results in this form, I will — time permitting — help you do it and write it up and will link to the blog you create. To take advantage of this offer, write me at twoutopias at gmail dot com. Tell me what you want to do and your relevant background. Deadline: Sunday, February 24.

Calorie Learning: Introduction

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In a series of posts, each titled Calorie Learning: [something], I’m going to use a blog to communicate self-experimentation. To see the whole series, look in the category Calorie Learning (under Self-Experimentation).

This research will be about how we (or at least I) learn to associate flavors with calories — more precisely, smells with calories. This learning is at the heart of the Shangri-La Diet, which derives from a theory that says the flavors of your food increase your set point if they are associated with calories. The stronger the association, the bigger the increase.

Why study this? 1. Maybe I can improve the diet. 2. It matters. It happens with every bit of food you eat. It controls what you eat and your appearance (assuming my theory is right). 3. Little is known about it. As I wrote in the appendix to The Shangri-La Diet, Anthony Sclafani has studied this learning extensively in rats. No one has studied it extensively in people. 4. The experiments can be simple and easy — or at least that’s what I think now.

A few weeks ago, a friend told me how much she liked those cellophane-wrapped white-bread sandwiches sold in delis and bodegas. Egg salad sandwiches, for example. They were addictive, she said. That sounded about right: White bread (and bread in general) is digested very fast, witness its very high glycemic index. Fast digestion means the calorie signal it generates in the brain overlaps a great deal with the flavor signal it generates in the brain. The more overlap of the two signals, the stronger the association created. The stronger a flavor’s association with calories, the more you like it.

Her comment gave me an idea: I can create a random new flavor by randomly combining many spices, mixing them into butter, and spreading the butter on white bread. The spices supply the flavor, which I can reproduce as often as I want by making a big enough batch of spicy butter when I start. Spice mixtures are cheap. I can easily and cheaply make a huge number of flavors that should taste entirely new. This means I can start fresh — which is where you want to start when doing a learning experiment — as often as I want. White bread is cheap, easily available, has little flavor, and provides a strong signal per calorie. If I want to increase the time between the flavor and the calories, maybe I can spread the butter on crackers, which have few calories, and eat the bread later.

Will it work? Stay tuned.

The Greatness of Behind The Approval Matrix

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What I like most about magazines is their ability to open new worlds to me. Books — unless by Jane Jacobs — rarely do this. Music, TV, and movies almost never do this. Paintings and other visual arts never do this (to me). Magazines do this regularly. Entertainment Weekly — the best magazine with a dull name — tries to do this (and succeeds). I am now reading The Golden Compass because of EW. An issue of Colors made me visit Iceland. Spy made New York fascinating. (E.g., an NYC map of smells.) It’s the best kind of teaching: you open a door and make what’s inside seem so interesting and wonderful that the student voluntarily decides to enter and explore.

Which is why it isn’t completely surprising that Abu Ayyub Ibrahim, who writes Behind the Approval Matrix, is a teacher. New York magazine’s Approval Matrix has a wonderful way of introducing new things: with humor, poetry (if well-written short captions = poetry), a dash of outrage (calling stuff “despicable”), and an attractive layout. When it calls something Brilliant, I’m instantly curious — thus fulfilling the best function of magazines with remarkable ease. The problem for me, and I assume many others, is that the captions are often obscure. Behind the Approval Matrix — which might have been called The Annotated Approval Matrix — explains each item.

The creators of The Approval Matrix had a great idea and didn’t quite pull it off. It’s often too hard to figure out what they’re talking about. Ibrahim has supplied what is missing.

It’s a bit like my self-experimentation. Previous (conventional) research, for various reasons, couldn’t quite reach practical applications (e.g., omega-3 research couldn’t figure out the best dose); my self-experimentation, building on that research, was able to cover the final mile.

Blog Power (continued)

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What Jonathan Schwarz calls “the Lost Kristol Tapes” is a taped debate between William Kristol (the new NY Times columnist) and Daniel Ellsberg about the invasion of Iraq. The debate was on C-Span’s Washington Journal, of which I have fond memories; I watched it for years to get morning faces for my self-experimentation. Schwarz called Kristol’s comments “a double album of smarm, horrifying ignorance, and bald-faced deceit.”

The debate has been watched about 5000 times. Three days ago, just before Schwarz’s piece, it had been watched four times, three by Schwarz himself. My long self-experimentation article would have been read by almost no one had not Andrew Gelman blogged about it. Now it’s been downloaded thousands of times.

More blog power: here and here.

Addendum. Funny coincidence: The day after I posted this, the formerly-obscure Wikileaks hit the news for a super-charged version of the same thing. Wikileaks exposed Cayman Island tax shelters.