Author: Seth Roberts

Jane Jacobs Roundup

Seth Roberts2 Comments

1. About her work, on YouTube (3 minutes).

2. Podcast of her first Massey lecture, about Quebec separatism (34 minutes).

3. To the extent I could figure out her intellectual likes and dislikes, I always agreed, with one glaring exception: She liked Stephen Jay Gould’s work, whereas I thought it was awful. This informative post reminded me of this disagreement; I learned that people in Gould’s field (evolutionary biology) agree with me. One reason I didn’t like Gould’s work was his dismissal of evolutionary explanations as “ just-so stories“.

Jobbook Diary

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I asked my mom, a retired librarian, if she could find some good librarian blogs to add to jobbook.org. She found four, but she wanted me to add them to the home page. She didn’t know how to edit wikis and she didn’t want to learn.

If you have trouble, I said, something is wrong. (My mom is more computer-literate than I am. She was using email before 99.9% of the rest of us — before me, for example. Her mom told her in the 1950s that computers were going to be a big thing.)

She reluctantly agreed to try. She clicked on edit on the home page, which brought up an edit box. To add her line, she erased everything in the box. You don’t want to do that, I said. Hit the delete key, I said. To demonstrate — this was over the phone — I hit the delete key on my screen. Oops, the whole page was gone!

I couldn’t figure out how to restore it. Which shows how much I know about wikis. I emailed Aaron and he fixed it. You restore a page, it turns out, by going to the history page, clicking the edit link for the version you want, and Save-ing it.

Page restored, my mom tried again. She successfully added a line for librarian with a blog link. However, she had found four blogs she liked, so it seemed like a good idea to add more links, if only to make the point that there could be more than one link per line. Since there were no pre-existing examples of multiple links per line, it wasn’t obvious how to do this. I think you do it like this, I said:

librarian: [blog] (address) [blog] (address)

Correct, it turned out. Now the issue is how to separate links. They now appear on the page separated by one space, which isn’t enough, my mom thinks. I don’t know how to increase the spacing but maybe Aaron does.

Women’s Health Initiative

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Here’s a nice essay about the Women’s Health Initiative, a nine-year mega-million-dollar experiment to measure the effect of “healthy eating” especially a low-fat diet.

48,835 postmenopausal women . . . were randomly assigned . . . to either their regular unrestricted diet or to a “healthy” diet that was low-fat (20% fat) and high fiber, with at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables, and 6 servings of grains a day. The “healthy” eaters endured an “intense behavioral modification program by specially trained and certified professionals” to keep them on their diets. While they backslide a little, they did surprisingly well in sticking to the diet — as good as dietary prescripts will ever get and money can buy — at a cost of $8,498 spent per person!

Oops, no effect. “The results of this huge study, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money spent on it, were quietly buried.”

I conclude two things: 1. People in charge of spending vast sums on nutrition research don’t know very much about what constitutes a healthy diet. 2. The same people know very little about how to do experiments. The most basic lesson is to do the smallest experiment possible.

Sandy Szwarc, the author of this essay, concludes:

When we enjoy a variety of foods from all of the food groups — as most everyone naturally does when they’re not trying to control their eating — and trust our bodies, we’ll get the nutrients we need to prevent deficiencies. And that is the only thing that nutritional science can credibly support.

There is some truth to this, both (a) we instinctively eat to avoid certain deficiencies and (b) nutrition science has found conclusive evidence that we need certain chemicals. But she is quite wrong in the sense that most Americans appear to suffer from huge omega-3 deficiencies (my posts about this). Many of them, probably most of them “enjoy a variety of foods from all of the food groups.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Google vs Yahoo: Scientific Implications

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Google vs Yahoo over several years. A fable for scientists. Yahoo is worth countless billions of dollars less than Google, in spite of a big head start. The moral: methodological complications, always seen as “improvements”, have a price. The benefit of a more complex experiment is easy to see, while the increase in cost (difficulty) usually goes unremarked.

My usual comment on proposed research is that an easier experiment — often smaller, often less “well-controlled” — would be better. I seem to be the only person who says this, yet I say it all the time.

Omega-3 and Sports Injuries

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A reader who wishes to be anonymous wrote:

I compete in MMA (mixed martial arts/ultimate fighting)–amateur of course, but I train with professionals. As you can imagine, full contact fighting leads to all kinds of sprains, strains, dislocations, etc. Ever since I started taking flaxseed oil–in caplet form, equivalent of 2 tablespoons a day–I have noticed a serious reduction in the number of small, inflammation-type injuries, and a reduction in recovery time for those injuries.

I asked what he meant by “inflammation-type injuries”.

That would be any injury where inflammation is the key component of the damage, for example:

-sprain
-strain
-bruise

This is opposed to injuries where the key component of damage is
something more significant, for example:

-break
-dislocation
-tear

Another way to put it would be that I don’t seem to get as many small injuries, and when I get them, they seem to heal quicker. I used to have to take like four Advil every day before I went to class, simply because I was so sore from the things we had done the previous days . Now, I don’t take any–and I haven’t changed anything else other than the flaxseed caplets.

Tissue inflammation is a huge part of most sports injuries. You ever watch Sportscenter, and see the post game interviews in the locker rooms? Notice how the athletes–especially pitchers–always have ice wrapped on their arms or knees or whatever? That is to reduce the tissue inflammation that occurs with high stress use. The general acronym for treating a minor sports injury is RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation). Each of those are primarily designed to reduce tissue inflammation in the damaged areas, because once that is reduced, the body can heal itself much faster (I am simplifying this, but you get the point).

If high levels of omega-3’s really do reduce this sort of sports injury inflammation, it would be a HUGE discovery in sports medicine.

It makes sense. Injuries heal faster when the body’s “natural response” is reduced? Apparently the “natural response” is excessive.

New Evidence for the Aquatic Ape Theory

Seth Roberts3 Comments

When I watched Planet Earth, I was impressed that the most successful aquatic animals were mammals (whales and dolphins). Fish had had a huge head start. Mammals such as whales and dolphins had moved back into the water after long evolution on land. Something promoted by terrestrial evolution allowed them to dominate their new world. That “something” is probably learning ability, although research on whale learning has yet to be done.

This is one reason the aquatic ape theory of human evolution makes sense. Judging from whales and dolphins, a little brain power can go a long way. Early humans had not only brains but hands. The combination made sea creatures extremely vulnerable. The threat was so flexible and different than previous threats they couldn’t tweak a few genes and escape. To take advantage of this new food source, humans had to wade into the water — the presumed initial reason (by those who believe in the aquatic ape theory) for bipedality.

Anthropologists at Arizona State recently reported evidence that early humans did indeed live on coastlines, with ready access to fish and shellfish. Other researchers had found evidence of this as early as 120,000 years ago; the new evidence pushes the date of earliest coastline habitation even earlier, to about 160,000 years ago.

“We also found what archaeologists call bladelets – little blades less than 10 millimeters in width, about the size of your little finger,” [one of the anthropologists] says. “These could be attached to the end of a stick to form a point for a spear, or lined up like barbs on a dart – which shows they were already using complex compound tools.”

If you have watched Survivor, you will remember tools much like that being used to catch fish.

Thanks to Michael Vassar.

Improving SLD

Seth Roberts9 Comments

John Tukey once said that a good way to have new ideas is to tell others the ones you have already. This was part of why I wrote The Shangri-La Diet: It would be much easier to get better ideas about weight loss if I told people the ones I already had. Call it open source weight control.

I think it’s working. In the SLD forums, Sean Curley, who tried SLD before the book (thanks, Levitt & Dubner!), made this brilliant post:

Two years ago (before the book came out), I lost about 27 lbs on SLD, using fructose water. In hindsight, I probably lost too much weight going from 183 lbs to 155 lbs (I’m male, 6′ 1″). I stopped doing what had worked, and got sloppy about SLD in general, and put most — but not all — of it back on over the course of a year or so. So, now I’m doing it again, but having read about how hepatoxic and lipogenic fructose is, started doing oil instead — ELOO, Walnut Oil and Canola, usually mixed in equal parts, and usually not breathing through my nose when I drink it to avoid any flavor at all.

My MO, historically, and what worked well for me, was doing — don’t gasp — 750 calories/day of SW (previously) and then oil (more recently). Both worked well, although truth be told, I think SW worked even better. Because of my concerns about fructose, and sugar in general, that’s not really an option for me anymore. My one concern about SLD has always been, am I replacing too many regular, “nutritious” calories with calories that aren’t? (Although I am aware of the healthy benefits of the oils.) I have tried various protein powders — whey, rice, and some soy — with noseclips followed by a mouth rinse, but haven’t had good AS with that (maybe negative AS, actually). Not sure if it’s too much residual flavor, too “simple” in its form, but for whatever reason, they just didn’t work well for me. Also tried Tim Beneke’s flavorless mush balls, but too much of a hassle, and just a little awkward for me.

I’ve always wondered if “real” protein in some flavorless, non-processed form wouldn’t be even more effective, but for some reason, I never got around to trying it until three weeks ago. I thought that eating full-fatted cottage cheese, which is very high in protein, and pretty bland, with noseclips on, might be worth a try. And, wow, did it work! My approach to SLD has always been to have the first 750 cals of my day as flavorless, going to dinner time on nothing but flavorless calories — as needed, in 50 calorie “doses” (oil or SW), and then allowing myself to eat whatever I wanted after that. But, it usually took 750 calories to get me there, sometimes a little less, but not usually. So, 750 flavorless calories was my “benchmark.”

The first day I tried the nose-clipped cottage cheese, It took only 420 calories to get to dinner time, with a MUCH greater feeling of fullness and AS than I had ever experienced on SLD. That effect has held consistent for the last two or three weeks, sometimes needing as few as 360 cals to dinner, but never more the 560, although usually 425 is the number. That’s a substantial reduction (43%) in the number of flavorless calories required to get the same (probably better, actually) AS effect. Then, two days ago, I thought: I wonder how bland, plain chicken breast meet would work? (again with noseclips). The answer, after two days, appears to be even more effective –more on the order of 360 calories required to get the same effect.

In both cases, I use nose clips, and typically eat about 60 cals at a time, as needed for hunger, AND I rinse my mouth out two or three times before I take the noseclips off to wash out any residual flavor.

For me the effect of going from oil to flavorless “real” protein has been as remarkable as the effect I got from going from pre-SLD to SLD originally.

As I posted there, the theory behind SLD is all about regulation of energy storage. You want to store neither too little nor too much — and you want to store more when food is cheap. But food is more than energy. It is also building blocks. Which means protein, mostly. So it is quite plausible that there is a whole regulatory system designed to get the right amount of protein. Sean’s observations suggest exactly that.

Besides the conceptual plausibility the details of the new method are excellent:

1. The raw materials (cottage cheese and chicken meat) are readily available and easy to eat.

2. The notion of eating the first calories of the day flavorless and then anything for dinner matches what’s clear about self-control: We have a lot more earlier in the day. This method uses self-control when it is plentiful and not when it is scarce.

I’m not going to stop drinking flaxseed oil (nose-clipped). But I am going to try adding chicken meat (nose-clipped).

Omega-3 and Snake Oil

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Julia Powell, the inspired Julia/Julia blogger (the first blog to be made into a movie), wrote in the Washington Post she was “almost 95 percent sure that Seth Roberts, author of THE SHANGRI-LA DIET: The No Hunger, Eat Anything Weight-Loss Plan (Putnam, $19.95), is a snake-oil salesman.” Almost 95%?

How about 100%? Snake oil, it turns out, is high in omega-3.

Recently in Japan, a group of scientists at the Japanese National Food Research Institute led by Nobuya Shirai turned their attention to snake oil . . . Shirai and his team evaluated the effects of Erabu sea-snake oil on a number of outcomes in mice, including maze-learning ability and swimming endurance. In both cases, snake oil significantly improved the ability of the mice in comparison with those fed lard. . . .The original Chinese purveyors of snake oil offered something that probably did exactly what they claimed it would do: help fellow workers relieve the pain of their labors.

Thanks to Tucker Max.

Better Nutrition, Better Behavior

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Here is an abstract of an enormously interesting and already famous 2002 study of the effect of better nutrition on the behavior of prison inmates. The supplements included omega-3 fats.

The study was very innovative and no doubt extremely difficult. About as far from studying lab rats or college students as you can get. Here are the key results:

Those who received the active capsules committed on average 11.8 infringements per 1000 person-days, a reduction of 26.3% (95% CI 8.3-44.3%) compared to those who received placebos. This difference between groups was statistically significant at P<0.03 (two-tailed).

In spite of a huge effect — huge at least in practical terms — the statistical significance was marginal. There isn’t anything wrong with that, it indicates that we need a way of studying these very important issues that isn’t incredibly hard. Of course the “easy” method will be “deficient” (according to overly critical critics) in a dozen ways; that’s the price you pay. The authors of this article don’t entirely understand this point. “Further investigations should include assessments of nutritional status from blood before and during supplementation,” they write. Uh, no, you don’t always follow a very difficult thing by trying to do an even more difficult thing.

Nothing is said about the difficulty of the study, which is extremely important, in this report. The difficulty of a scientific study is always important but almost always goes unmentioned in scientific articles. If you (the reader) have done similar studies you can guess okay but with an innovative study like this few readers could have any clear idea.

Thanks to Dev Rana.