Author: Seth Roberts

Xylitol Research

Seth Roberts7 Comments

After learning about the dramatic effects of xylitol on lichen planus, I looked around for a good summary of xylitol research and found this:

Xylitol and other natural sweeteners were tested extensively in Finland as potential replacements for sugar during the early 1970’s. A series of over 20 research reports (edited by Professors Arje Scheinin and Kauko Makinen) was published together in Acta Odontologica Scandinavica, Supplement 70, in 1975. These investigations became known collectively as the “Turku Sugar Studies.”

Sweeteners were tested for their effects on dental and general health. The main trials involved the long-term substitution of either fructose or xylitol for sucrose (ordinary table sugar). This involved a huge cooperative effort between scientists and food producers. Separate fructose and xylitol versions of common food items were provided for the volunteers.

These trials (including blood and urine tests) established the safety of relatively large amounts of xylitol (often 70 grams per day or more) consumed regularly over a period of years. The xylitol group reported that xylitol-sweetened foods were comparable to the familiar sugar flavors.

The control group who consumed normal amounts of sugar continued to experience tooth decay, as would be expected. The fructose group also continued to have tooth decay, although progression appeared to be somewhat slower.

The results of a xylitol diet on oral health were dramatic. New tooth decay was practically eliminated. A therapeutic remineralizing effect was noted where the decay process was reversed. A parallel study achieved similar 90% reduction in tooth decay simply by adding a small amount of xylitol, delivered in chewing gum after meals) to a normal (regular sugar) diet.

Here are some of the major findings of the Turku Sugar Studies:

  • Xylitol can be incorporated into a wide variety of food items to directly replace sugar. More than 100 different products were made with xylitol.
  • The taste and overall quality of the xylitol products was comparable, and in some cases superior, to regular sugar items.
  • Substantial amounts of xylitol can be consumed regularly with no adverse health effects.
  • No potentially damaging bacterial adaptations to xylitol occurred.

Especially early on, there were some instances of gastrointestinal discomfort and even osmotic diarrhea in the xylitol group. After a short period of adaptation (few weeks), these symptoms diminished and became no more frequent than in the other groups. A few individuals were more sensitive than the rest of the group. Even exceptionally high intakes of xylitol of over 200 grams in a day did not necessarily cause any problems. Discomfort was more likely to occur with liquid ingestion on an empty stomach.

It is not necessary to eliminate sugar to dramatically reduce tooth decay. Similar results can be obtained simply by adding a small amount of xylitol to a “normal” diet. Xylitol can provide a natural “antidote” for the damaging dental effects of ordinary sugar. A little more than a teaspoon of xylitol per day can provide amazing protection against tooth decay, when used in chewing gum after meals and snacks.

The last point is especially interesting. Xylitol doesn’t work because you eat less sugar. It works, apparently, because it stops/prevents something that sugar starts, perhaps adhesion of certain bacteria to teeth and gums.

Here (video) is coverage of xylitol research in American mainstream media (in this case, ABC News). The useful information (about a xylitol study) is diluted by unhelpful information about xylitol in fruit and brushing and flossing.

Journal of Personal Science: Xylitol Cures Lichen Planus and Geographic Tongue

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Xylitol Improves Lichen Planus and Geographic Tongue

by Evelyn M., Westchester County, NY

Background

In my forties — I am now 75 — my gums started to bother me. Newly-returned to the United States from Iran, I searched for a good dentist. The first one told me to get a cap on a tooth with a small chip. That was no help. A colleague recommended a specialist in gum problems. The specialist advised “scaling,” which didn’t help. Then he said I was not cleaning my teeth well enough. He put a substance on my teeth to reveal incomplete cleaning and was flummoxed when he could find no evidence of bad brushing or flossing. I gave up trying to solve my gum problem.

When I was about 50, a “crisis tooth” (a molar on the upper right) forced me to see a dentist. I found a very good dentist, sensible and conservative in approach. After the problem tooth was removed, he turned to the overall condition of my mouth. I told him about the gum treatments I’d had. Then he showed me an x-ray that revealed an abscess under the root of a tooth on the lower right hand side. That tooth didn’t hurt, and looked OK, but was leaking pus into the gum, inflaming the entire lower right hand side of my gums. The gum specialist had missed it completely. After that tooth was removed, and the surrounding area healed, my gums were fine for many years.

Two years ago, I developed a condition called lichen planus. The entire inside of my mouth was inflamed and swollen — gums, tongue, the inside of my cheeks, all of it. I could not brush my teeth or eat anything except the blandest of foods. I also had a metallic taste in my mouth. It was torture.

After diagnosing the condition (“you have lichen planus”), my dentist sent me to an oral pathologist. The pathologist said there was no cure that he could guarantee and gave me two prescription drugs — one to treat problems caused by fungi, the other to deal with bacteria. Neither helped. I confirmed on the web what the dentist and the oral pathologist had said.

Concluding that medical science couldn’t help, I starting searching the web for other suggestions. I found Seth Roberts’s blog, which suggested taking flaxseed oil to improve gums. I tried it. My psoriasis improved but the lichen planus remained.

Source of Idea

In November 2011, the Drudge Report led me to an announcement that UCLA scientists were working on a mouthwash to prevent cavities. A comment said: “Xylitol is a plant sugar that kills s[treptococcus] mutans, and has been around for years as a toothpaste, mouthwash and gum. This is not new at all. Regular use of xylitol does all this, is cheap, and is NOT patentable. So, UCLA, this is nonsense.”

I found a wealth of data on the web about xylitol, mainly research from Finland. The evidence showed that it killed bacteria that cause tooth decay and helped re-mineralize decayed teeth. The reports often mentioned that general oral health had improved in patients using xylitol. I decided to try it.

Method

Most xylitol research has been done using gum that children chew after meals three or four times a day. I do not like to chew gum. I found other studies showing that taking a quarter to a half a teaspoon of the sugar (made from birch bark) four times a day is equally effective. I put the xylitol in my mouth, it melts, I swish it around my mouth until the saliva that it produces is quite extensive (60-90 seconds) and swallow it.

Results

I started taking xylitol more than a year ago. After six weeks, the metallic taste was gone and my inner cheeks were noticeably less inflamed. After three months it was clear that my tongue was improving. Now I am sure that the lichen planus is in remission.

My most recent dentist visit was six months ago [October 2012], after I’d been using xylitol for ten months. My dentist and hygienist were astounded. They had been expecting the lichen planus to look the same as when they had seen it before (one year earlier). By then, however, my mouth had healed substantially.

That wasn’t the only improvement. I’d always had what dentists call geographic tongue– deep fissures that make a pattern on the surface of the tongue. It never bothered me. I never noticed it until a dental hygienist pointed it out to me (in horror!). I went from having a tongue full of fissures and “ruffled” around the edges to a tongue that was completely healed and looked better than it had in many years. My dentist could still find some of the lace-like effects that lichen planus produces on the inside of my cheeks. The geographic tongue is now [March 2013] completely gone, as is all the plaque on my teeth, the redness of my gums, and the soreness and inflammation I had experienced from the lichen planus on the inside of my cheeks, my hard and soft palate, and uvula.

Discussion

When I told my dentist I was using xylitol, he knew what it was and was happy to see the improvement, but it had never occurred to him to suggest I use it. It is not a regular dental technique. I continue to use it, keeping jars of xylitol next to the kitchen stove and the computer screen (my two favorite haunts!) so that it is always at hand.

At the turn of the year (2012 to 2013) I emailed friends and family encouraging them to try xylitol. One friend started using xylitol by the end of January and in March told me about her progress. She has already noticed a great improvement in her gums. She said that she hadn’t been perfect in dosing herself, sometimes forgetting a day, often only using it three times a day instead of four or five, but since she now had evidence that it actually helps, she was determined to take it more religiously. She bought xylitol gum for her children, putting xylitol mints in their lunch boxes.

More Information

Controversies around xylitol.

Role of Xylitol in Oral Health (video)

Xylitol and dental caries

Sugar alcohols, caries incidence and remineralization of caries lesions: A literature review

Summary of xylitol research

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Thanks to Greg Pomerantz and Casey Manion.

First Make Yourself Healthy Meetup April 24 (Wed)

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Encouraged by the success of the Quantified Self Meetup group, I have started a Meetup group called Make Yourself Healthy. It is about how non-experts — the rest of us — can improve on expert advice about health. The first meeting will be April 24 (Wed.) in the meeting room of the North Branch of the Berkeley Public Library, 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm.

The group is about solving your health problems yourself, before or after mainstream medicine fails to help or provides inferior solutions. Access to health information via the Internet makes this more and more possible; so does new technology, which make it easier to measure health problems.

The first important practitioner of Make Yourself Healthy was Richard Bernstein, a New York engineer with diabetes, who in the 1960s bought a new machine that could measure blood sugar with only a single drop of blood. Bernstein used it to measure his own blood sugar many times per day — in contrast to getting it measured once a month at a lab. What he learned from frequent measurements allowed him to stabilize his blood sugar level, which doctors’ advice had never managed to. His health greatly improved. His promotion of what he had done led to the glucometers you can find in any drugstore. Nowadays diabetics take self-measurement for granted.

I have managed to improve my health in many non-standard ways. Acne, sleep, mood, weight, and brain function, especially. On the face of it, you might think: He did a lot of self-experimentation and discovered cool stuff. At first, that’s how it looked to me. I wrote a paper called “ Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas“. But that’s misleading. Self-experimentation wasn’t new, it was ancient. Yet my discoveries were quite new — quite different from what people already believed. What really led to my successes was: 1. Better information. Before the Internet, I spent thousands of dollars on a UC Berkeley library service called BAKER, which photocopied journal articles that I requested by phone and delivered the copies to my campus mailbox. Xerox machines made this possible. 2. The prison of professional science. There are so many things that professional scientists (such as medical school professors) cannot do. There are so many ideas they cannot test. They have left a lot to be discovered and it turns out that non-scientists (such as me — I was not a sleep researcher, a mood researcher, etc.) can discover at least some of it. In other words, I wasn’t successful just because I did self-experimentation, I was successful because I did wise self-experimentation. I chose wisely what to do.

Behind this Meetup group is my belief that anyone who does this — tries to do better than expert advice — probably can teach and learn from other people trying to do the same thing, even if their health issue is different from yours.

If you are coming to this Meetup and have experience (successful or unsuccessful) trying to improve on expert health advice, and are willing to share your experience, please contact me.

 

 

Why Fujoshi? Experiment by Tsinghua Freshmen

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In January I blogged about teaching a class in a new way. The obvious novelty was that I did no grading, but I was also pleased by the high quality of the student work.

The class, at Tsinghua University, is called Foundations of Psychology. It’s required of psychology majors and is taken by freshmen. Last time there were about 25 students. The biggest assignment was a final project where I allowed students to work on their own interests. They could do almost anything they wanted related to psychology and they could work alone or with others. I “graded” their work via a checklist: X points for doing this, Y points for doing that, and so on, with the possible points adding up to an A. The checklist was different for every project. They had about five weeks.

Here is a summary of one project, by Vista Zeng:

In the Frontiers of Psychology class this term, we, a group of three freshmen (Vista Zeng, Joy Wu and Michael Wu) conducted an experiment on Fujoshi. Fujoshi is a subculture that started in Japan and spread in East Asia. It has influenced many of our classmates and friends. When recruiting participants, we found 14 Fujoshis out of about 720 female students in Tsinghua University.

According to Wikipedia, fujoshi is synonymous with yaoi fandom:

Yaoi fandom refers to readers of yaoi (also called Boys’ Love, BL), a genre of male-male romance narratives aimed at a female audience, and more specifically those who participate in communal activities organized around yaoi, such as attending conventions, maintaining or posting to fansites, creating fanfiction or fanart, etc. Most fans are teenage girls or young women. . . . In Japan, female fans are called fujoshi.

It’s easy to raise questions like “why don’t those girls enjoy heterosexual romance narratives?”, “why is boys becoming fans of female-female romance narratives and creating another sub-culture (yuri) not so big an issue?”, or “why did this phenomena first occur in Eastern society?”. Vista Zeng believed that the main reason may be the traditional ethics in Eastern world (China and Japan, to be specific) on women. Traditional Chinese moral principles assume that women are not supposed to appear in these sexual scenes, so the girls turn to male homosexual products to satisfy themselves, and to avoid the condemnation from our society.

Since there are very few researches on this topic, and all of them use research methods like interviewing, Vista decided to conduct an experiment to test her explanation. Joy and Wu joined the project.

The study included 30 Fujoshis and 30 non-Fujoshis in Tsinghua University. [The students recruited about half of their Fujoshi subjects going door to door in the dormitories, the other half by making announcements in classes.] The subjects were asked to read several paragraphs including erotic scene, and the only difference between them was the gender of the two characters. The first story includes two male characters, the second one a man and a woman (“he” and “she”), the third one a man and the reader herself (“he” and “me”). (The idea was inspired by the study about judgments of intentionality by Joshua Knobe, which the class introduced.) What’s more, a neutral paragraph was put between two paragraphs. The subjects were asked to estimate her emotional feelings (we mainly focused on embarrassment and the sense of guilt) on a scale before and after reading each paragraph aloud in front of 3 strangers, and the 3 observers would also estimate the subject’s extent of embarrassment.

The answer to our assumption was yes. The most important finding was that the Fujoshis felt less guilty than non-Fujoshis when reading the male-homosexual paragraph, but far more guilty when reading the heterosexual one, showing that they agree with the idea that women are not supposed to appear in these sexual scenes. We also found that women are prone to put themselves into the sexual scene in which women are constantly involved, and they are therefore embarrassed and guilt about their own feelings.

We think our study found an example about how the traditional ethics from thousands of years ago still influence the teenagers nowadays in China, and implied a lack of sense of equality and self-esteem of Chinese women – they don’t see their natural desire and rights legitimate. However, the Fujoshis are also the ones who dare to show their demands of sexual narratives (generally, we found Fujoshis more open to sexual topics than Non-Fujoshis), which can be seen as a progress in Chinese society. We are glad that we conducted the first experiment on Fujoshi (as far as we know) and got such findings which are worth thinking about.

 

Cod Liver Oil in Morning Improves Sleep

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Kim Øyhus, a programmer who lives in Norway, writes:

Each midwinter and summer I tend to lose my feeling of when it is day or night, especially if I am in the northern parts of Norway, or if the weather is dark clouds for a long time, which often happens. So sorry, no statistics, just my sense of being unhinged from the diurnal cycle.

Taking 1-2 spoons [= 7-14 ml] of cod liver oil in the morning [7-9 am] got me back to this rhythm in about 3-5 hours. It even works for fixing my diurnal rhythm after partying to sunrise, but only after a days rest.

Is this due to Vitamin D3? (I have collected many examples of Vitamin D3 in the morning improving sleep.) Quite possibly. Cod liver oil contains Vitamin D3. When taking a Vitamin D3 supplement, the minimum dose needed to see the effect, based on the examples I’ve collected, seems to be about 1000 IU. I didn’t notice anything when I took 2000 IU. The effect first appeared at a dose of 4000 IU and was a bit larger at 6000 IU. Kim is taking 600-1100 IU of Vitamin D3, so that is consistent with the Vitamin D3 in the cod liver oil being the source of the effect.

“Brain Games are Bogus”: More Trouble for Posit Science

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A post on the New Yorker website called “Brain Games are Bogus” provides considerable evidence for that conclusion. The evidence is about the use of brain games to raise the IQ of children and young adults, whereas Posit Science’s training program — which I raised questions about — is aimed at older people. However, it would be surprising if brain games have no effect until you reach a certain age. More plausible is that they never provide substantial benefits — at least, benefits broad enough and strong enough and long-lasting enough to be worth the training time (one hour/day for many weeks).

I read a Posit Science paper, with older subjects, that seemed to me to show that its training had little lasting benefit. The stated conclusions of the paper were more positive. Too bad the head of Posit Science didn’t answer most of my questions.

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

 

Speech Pathology Confidential

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Bryan Castañeda told me the following:

I was talking to a good friend of mine who’s a speech pathologist. He works for a woman who runs a private practice in Connecticut. Says that a third of his patients require the amount of treatment his boss recommends, a third require treatment but less than she recommends, and a third require no treatment at all. But his boss is skilled at preying on parents’ insecurities (and their clientele has a lot of money), so she makes a killing. He agreed with your advice that people should be more skeptical of the claims of medical professionals and do their own research to evaluate to those claims.

The woman who runs the practice has a Master’s in speech pathology, same as Bryan’s friend. I asked about the treatments. Bryan’s friend replied:

It depends on the diagnosis. If it’s a speech disorder, we do articulation therapy. Articulation therapy usually consists of drills, correcting erred sounds by shaping the articulators appropriately and then having the client produce the sound in isolation, at the word, phrase, and sentence levels, and then in reading aloud and in conversation until they’ve reached 100% or close to 100% accuracy.

If it’s a language disorder, we do language therapy. Language therapy is a little more complicated. We target specific language areas based on the results of previous testing. It can vary a lot, but some of the more common things I do is read passages and have the client answer questions about it, teach grammar, work on formulating sentences appropriately, teach vocabulary, and word classification activities. A lot of worksheets and games too — materials that my boss writes off at tax time. We bill by the hour, so more hours certainly equals more pay for her,” he says. “We are all salaried, so the tighter she crams our schedules the more she gets to keep at the end of the day.

At least the unhelpful treatments are harmless, in contrast to a large fraction of mainstream medicine, where children have their tonsils removed, and so on.

Practical Use of Our Liking For Complex Flavors

Seth Roberts4 Comments

People like complex flavors. I suppose this is why I prefer black tea to green tea. My evolutionary explanation is that this preference caused our ancestors to eat more bacteria-laden food. Bacteria make food taste more complex and bacteria-laden food are healthier than bacteria-free food.

Phil Alexander sent me a story from this book that illustrates this preference:

We entered the saloon. Not a customer was there — a very surprising fact, considering that it was New Year’s Eve. The only person in sight was the bartender who paced back and forth in front of the bar like a caged beast.

“Well, whatta you want?” he asked savagely.

“Why, we just want a little New Year’s drink,” I returned. Winterbill was too surprised to say anything.

“Mix ‘em yourself,” the bartender replied. “I’m through with the saloon business.”

“If you feel that way about it,” I said, “why don’t you sell out?”

“Well, the first guy who offers me $300 can have the works.”

Somewhat amused and thinking he must be joking, I retorted, “I’ll give you $300 — provided it includes all your stock, the cash register, and other equipment.”

“Mister, you’ve bought yourself a saloon!” he snapped. “I’ll not only include all the stock and equipment — I’ll throw in a full barrel of whiskey I’ve got in the basement.”

Winterbill now joined in the fun and began to take an inventory.

The owner took off his apron and handed it to me. “Gimme the three hundred bucks.”

I gave him the money, still believing it was a joke. He put the money into his pocket, got his hat and coat and departed. To our complete bewilderment, we found ourselves in the saloon business.

A few minutes later, our first customer came in. He evidently had not made our place his first stop. I hurriedly put the apron over my evening clothes and asked for his order.

“Martini,” he said in a thick voice.

“Martini,” I repeated to Winterbill.

“Stall him!” Winterbill whispered.

“Coming right up,” I told the customer. He didn’t mind waiting. He was at the stage where he wanted to talk and so proceeded to do.

Meanwhile Winterbill racked his brain, for he had only the vaguest idea how to mix a Martini. He finally settled upon a recipe. He put a dash of everything from the numerous bottles behind the bar into one drink. I stirred it up and handed it to the customer. We watched anxiously while he drank it down.

“That was good!” he exclaimed. “Best Martini I ever tasted. Mix me another.”

Again Winterbill started to mix.

“How do you feel?” I inquired, none too sure of the consequences.

“Me?” asked the customer. “Fine. Never felt better in my life.”

He didn’t show any bad results after the second drink, and we both were relieved. As time went on more customers came in. They ordered whiskey sours, Manhattans, and Martinis. Winterbill had just one formula and that’s what he gave them all. Nobody complained.

. . . By the time we closed that night we had taken in more than the whole outfit cost us!

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Peter McLeod, John Batzel and Joseph Sinatra.