Author: Seth Roberts

A Better Way to Do SLD?

Seth Roberts7 Comments

The most interesting recent posts on the Shangri-La Diet forums have been from Roger Garrett (id Fastneasy), who has come up with what seems to be an especially potent version of the diet: He has a three-hour food window every day that starts when he eats his first meal; the rest of the day, he drinks sugar water and doesn’t eat anything else. He takes weekends off.

He’s 36 years old. Starting weight: 269 pounds. After about a month, he writes, “I’ve lost 24 pounds so far. This has been incredibly easy! No hunger, no struggle, and tons of energy.” He did almost the same thing eight years ago with one difference: no sugar water.

The difference between then and now is [now] I’m shedding the fat at three times the speed and with no anguish and fatigue that’s associated with the fasting. I’m not hungry, my stomach doesn’t growl. I have tons of energy and feel great in the morning. Also the funny thing, after waking in the morning after fasting for 21 hours, I’m not starving. I remember with the fast before I would wake in the night stomach growling and ready to eat. When I would wake up, I could kill to eat.

The David Lawrence Effect

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Two days ago I was on the David Lawrence Show, which Mr. Lawrence produces in his own apartment, in Burbank. This was the second time; the first was in June. The show lasts three hours and consists of three interviews. Between my first and second appearances on his show, Mr. Lawrence stopped doing regular shows to concentrate on acting. He now does new shows now and then.

During my second appearance, he told me that radio was going downhill even faster than network television. That may be, I said, but your show had a much bigger impact on interest in my diet than almost any other interview I’d done, TV or radio — and I’d done about 50. He was surprised. Really, I said, I’ll make a graph and send you a copy. Later he asked me to compare his show to the other radio shows I’d been on — what was the percentage difference between the impact of my show and the other shows, he wondered. “2000%” I said. “20 times?” he said. Yeah, I said, maybe even 50 times. He looked surprised.

Here is the data.

graph showing the David Lawrence effect

This shows the maximum number of people reading the Shangri-La Diet forums at any one time for each day. (This is an easy-to-compute proxy for the number of distinct visitors.) The first media to have a big effect was a 35-minute interview on the Dennis Prager Show, which was replayed twice. The next was a Woman’s World article. The third was the first David Lawrence Show interview.

It is stunning that the David Lawrence Effect was of the same order of magnitude the effect of the Woman’s World article. Woman’s World, of course,is a huge operation, with millions of copies sold each week.

After the David Lawrence effect wore off, the function continued its steady climb at roughly the level you would extrapolate from before the DL effect started. My interpretation is this: As persuasive as that show turned out to be, and as large its audience — its effect was small compared to the total effect of word of mouth, which is what is pushing interest up.

Omega-3: What Happens When You Stop?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Anonymous wrote again, with new data:

I started taking two tablespoons of flax seed oil about a month after reading this post by you [about Tyler Cowen’s dental experience] (sometime around the beginning of August, I think). I decided to try it because I have had bleeding gums for about as long as I can remember. This has always confused me, because I don’t have any cavities and have otherwise good dental health. I would always ask my dentists about this, and they would always tell me I didn’t floss enough, but even when I would floss regularly, the bleeding wouldn’t totally stop. After about a week or so of two tablespoons of flax seed oil a day, I had virtually no gum bleeding. I didn’t change anything else.

Then, about two weeks ago, my girlfriend pointed something out to me: I was not taking pain relievers anymore. I train in amateur mixed martial arts (MMA), which is a very intense, full contact combat sport that combines boxing, muay thai, brazilian jiu-jitsu, and wrestling. For as long as I’ve been training in it, I have had to deal with muscle soreness and pain in my joints, and to deal with it, I would take 4-6 ibuprofen before training. But, for about the past three months, I wasn’t in enough pain to need it. I didn’t really think about it at first, just chalking it up to getting tougher. But that doesn’t make sense–I’ve been training in MMA for well over a year, and the only thing I have done differently in the past three months is start taking flax seed oil. I wasn’t 100% sure that the flax seed oil was making the difference, but considering the effect it has on inflammation–which is what ibuprofen is for–it made sense.

That was when I sent you the emails you posted. One of your commenters accused me of falling victim to the placebo effect, so I decided to test it. I stopped taking flaxseed oil on November 5th. At the time, my gums were not bleeding, I had no joint pain or soreness of any significance, and I felt great overall.

As I write this it’s November 15th. My gums have bled heavily when I brushed this week, especially the past few days, and I have intense pain in both shoulders, soreness in my left elbow, and my knees are throbbing. I had intended to go two weeks without taking any flaxseed oil, but I am stopping the experiment now because this is all the proof I need.

One more interesting fact: I took four tablespoons a few hours ago, instead of the regular two, thinking that maybe I could load up and it might help me get back to normal quickly. The pain is pretty much the same, and I just brushed and my gums bled, so obviously the flaxseed oil takes more than a few hours to affect those problems. But–and I haven’t measured this with reaction tests like you do–I feel considerably more mentally alert right now. I don’t know if I felt like this before, and maybe I didn’t notice it because it came on slowly, or maybe I need four tablespoons at once to see a difference, but I really do feel the difference.

My Theory of Human Evolution (Make edition)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

The path to human nature, I propose, began with capable hands. No surprise there. In our brains formed a desire for hobbies, to take advantage of what our hands allowed. Hobbies were the first step toward occupational specialization, which led to the full flowering of human nature (trading, language, procrastination, art, holidays, rituals, fine wine, fashion, Veblen’s Instinct of Workmanship, etc.).

The Hobbyist Within Us is especially clear in the pages of Make, a young magazine devoted to higher-tech DIY. Turn your old scanner into a camera. Make a Joule thief. It started as a website, which was so successful that a print version was launched. More recently, Maker Faires have started.

Thanks to Niall Kennedy, who has written for Make.

My Theory of Human Evolution (the Henry Rosenthal Pennant Collection)

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Henry Rosenthal, the San-Francisco-based producer of the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston (the best movie ever made about mental illness), has a large collection of pennants. No sports teams, no schools, only North America — those are the rules. Hundreds of pennants. Most are for places (Mexico, the Grand Canyon, San Francisco). A few are for events (a Chicago trade show). “I’ve been collecting since early childhood,” Henry told me. “I made two pennants myself years ago, one for Joseph Albers and the other for Robert Rauschenberg.”

For years I wondered why people collect. By collect, I mean collect gift-like objects, such as frog figurines or erasers with pictures or stamps or refrigerator magnets or pennants. I understood it was enjoyable — you derive pleasure from your collection. It was the evolutionary reason I couldn’t figure out. When I eventually thought of my theory of human evolution — it is all about the growth and encouragement of occupational specialization — I realized this was one of the puzzles it solved.

Will Henry pay more than the average person for new and well-made pennants? Very likely. Will he appreciate an especially well-made pennant more than the rest of us? Undoubtedly. Like most collectors, Henry has placed the items of his collection side by side, making it easy to compare them and, I believe, promoting connoisseurship. Studying his collection — covering the walls and hanging from the ceiling of a large room — made me a connoisseur of pennants.

Collections increase the demand for finely-made things, helping their makers make a living and advance the state of their art, whatever it might be. that people collect all sorts of finely-made things encourages the growth of a wide range of technologies.

Incidentally, Henry is currently working on a movie about Tiny Tim. If you can’t wait for the movie, you can read a book it will be based on.

Who Reads Blogs?

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An article in the current issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology is about participants in a large health survey. It compares people who turned in the questionnaire via the Web with those who answered via mail.

Over 50% of 77,047 participants chose to enroll in the study via the Web . . . The authors compared the demographic and health characteristics of Web responders with those of paper responders. Web responders were slightly more likely to be male, to be younger, to have a high school diploma or college degree, and to work in information technology or another technical occupation. Web responders were more likely to be obese and to smoke more cigarettes and were less likely to be problem alcohol drinkers and to report occupational exposures.

The study began in 2001.

In Japanese

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If you read Japanese you can read about the Shangri-La Diet here:

https://www.suda.tv/archives/2007/03/post_580.php
https://ameblo.jp/pb-038434/entry-10044923240.html
https://groundhogday.seesaa.net/article/7497773.html

And even if you don’t read Japanese you can appreciate the excellent illustration here:

https://dietxdiet.ojaru.jp/Shangri-la/

and the great blog name (my nonsequitur) and banner here:

https://www.owl-tottori.jp/diet/jijou-bn/shangriradiet.html

Thanks to Pearl Alexander.

Omega-3 and Cognitive Function in the Elderly: The Opposite Result

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Peter Spero has sent me the following abstract from a paper published in 2003 in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease:

It has been suggested that the dietary intake of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids could be inversely related to the risk of dementia and cognitive decline. This analysis examined the association between plasma concentration of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids and prevalence and incidence of cognitive impairment and dementia. Data are reported on subjects 65 years or older who had a complete clinical evaluation at the first two waves (1991-1992 and 1996-1997) of the Canadian Study of Health and Aging. Main outcome measures were cognitive impairment and dementia by mean relative plasma concentrations of fatty acids in the phospholipid fraction at baseline. Results were adjusted for age, sex, education, smoking, alcohol intake, body mass index, history of cardiovascular disease, and apolipoprotein E e4 genotype. In the cross-sectional analysis, no significant difference in omega-3
polyunsaturated fatty acid concentrations was observed between controls and both prevalent cases of cognitive impairment and dementia. In the prospective analysis, a higher eicosapentaenoic acid (p < 0.01) concentration was found in cognitively impaired cases compared to controls while higher docosahexaenoic acid (p < 0.07), omega-3 (p < 0.04) and total polyunsaturated fatty acid (p < 0.03) concentrations were found in dementia cases. These findings do not support the hypothesis that omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids play a protective role in cognitive function and dementia.

The people with worse-functioning brains had more omega-3 in their blood than everyone else. Which is opposite to one of the two studies I described yesterday.

I’d love to have seen what reviewers made of this.