Author: Seth Roberts

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Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.

Acne: Reality is Not a Morality Tale

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Someone named Red Fury made an interesting comment on my Boing Boing article about acne:

I had acne on/off for years. . . . In my mid-thirties, I tried the Retin-A at night, antibiotic gel for day regimen for about 2 years – no effect. . . . Then, I was talking to a co-worker whose daughter was taking ‘modeling classes’ to become a teen model. She casually mentioned her acned daughter had to give up rice, potato chips, and bread, all of which are high-glycemic index foods. My quack-radar went off, and I looked around for something scientific behind that advice. https://www.ajcn.org/content/86…

Huh. I guess those nutrition-bashing dermatologists actually did a study and published the scientific results in a peer-reviewed journal. . . . My acne disappeared completely as soon as I eliminated rice and potatoes.

He finds a study that supports the casual advice, he follows the advice, his acne disappears. By convincing him to follow the advice, the scientific study helped him get rid of his acne. Which is impressive.

The interesting twist is that the study was published twice, clearly breaking the rules. Bad scientists! Who did something really good.

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Thanks to Alex Blackwood and Bryan Castañeda.

“How We Stopped SOPA”: Talk by Aaron Swartz in New York

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Aaron Swartz was a key figure in the successful fight against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). On Thursday (August 16) he will tell how a tiny number of online activists managed to defeat a bill pushed by the entertainment industry, which had spent hundreds of millions of dollars per year trying to get it passed and believed its survival was threatened if it wasn’t passed. Aaron will speak at 7 pm at ThoughtWorks, 99 Madison Avenue, 15th floor, New York NY.

Eliminating Nocturnal Urination

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A male reader who wishes to be anonymous writes:

I am 53. When I was in my late 40s I started having to wake up to urinate in the middle of the night. Sometimes more than once. I complained to the physician. He said, “That’s BPH [= benign prostatic hyperplasia = enlarged prostate]. It’s what happens in middle age. Live with it.”

A couple years later on an airplane, I read an article about pygeum [a herbal remedy] as a cure for BPH. I started taking some. It helped, but not a lot. Reading about pygeum I stumbled across saw palmetto. I started taking a supplement that contained both of them. Now I was much improved, but there was still room for improvement.

A friend told me about magnesium supplementation. I started taking magnesium in addition, and I was cured. It’s like I’m in my 30s again. I only have to urinate in the middle of the night if I drink a lot of fluid right before bed.

Sleep is so important, this is really important. At a talk Thursday at the Ancestral Health Symposium, Robb Wolf quoted someone as saying, “If someone sleeps well, you can’t kill them; if they sleep badly, you can’t keep them alive.”

Edward Jay Epstein Reviewed Movies For Vladimir Nabokov

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Edward Jay Epstein attended college at Cornell. When he was a freshman, he took Vladimir Nabokov’s lecture course about European and Russian literature. Nabokov told his students that a great writer creates pictures in readers’ heads. One of the exam questions, about Anna Karenina, was Describe the train station where Anna met Vronsky.

Epstein hadn’t read the book. However, he had seen the movie, so he described in great detail the train station in the movie. After the exam, Nabokov asked to meet him. Epstein told him he hadn’t read the book. Nabokov said it didn’t matter, and gave him an A. He offered Epstein a job. Ithaca had four movie theaters. Movies were released on Wednesday, so every Wednesday each theater would have a new movie. Nabokov loved movies. He went on Friday. He wanted to know which movie to choose. Epstein’s job, for which he was paid, was to watch all four movies and report back.

Epstein did this conscientiously but in retrospect, he said, one of his comments was a mistake. The Queen of Spades (from Pushkin’s story) was one of the movies. Epstein told Nabokov it reminded him of Dead Souls. (They were reading Dead Souls in class.) This interested Nabokov. He looked at Vera, his wife, who was sitting at his desk facing him. He asked Epstein why The Queen of Spades reminded him of Dead Souls.

“They’re both Russian,” said Epstein.

More: Epstein tells the story himself.

How Martha Rotter Cured Her Acne By Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Several months ago I posted about how Martha Rotter figured out that her acne was caused by cow dairy products. Now a longer version of her story (by me) is on Boing Boing. There is a ton of useful information in the comments. Some examples:

“ Dairy is what caused my acne.” Someone replied: “Same here, specifically milk. I switched to soy milk in high school and my moderately-bad acne went away very suddenly. . . . If I eat a lot of cheese at once, like having pizza more than a couple days a week, my backne gets worse and I get acne inside my ears.” Someone else misunderstands genetics: “I do have tumor-forming disease (fortunately stable, and partially corrected with surgery) so I do have some sympathy when it comes to this sort of thing, but my condition is so well established as genetic I never even saw hope in trying to control it with diet.” Aaron Blaisdell had a well-established genetic condition (porphyria) that went away when he changed his diet.

Someone else found that dairy mattered:

I had terrible acne as a teenager and I drank almost a carton of milk every day. . . . When I moved out on my own, I no longer had milk delivered at the door and I fell out of the habit of drinking it altogether, switching to tea and water instead. My face cleared within weeks. . . . Whenever I indulged in cheese, the break-outs returned.

Someone else discovered multiple causes:

I have had strikingly similar experiences with a very particular form of acne, for years. Multiple doctors with no results until I got frustrated with it. I heard that the four most common causes of skin reactions can be wheat, milk, peanut butter and eggs – so I took all of them out *and* meat.

And watched my skin slowly return to normal.

After playing with my food by putting one thing in, seeing what happened, and then taking that out and trying something else, I found that wheat in particular is the trigger for me with dairy as a close second.

Someone else: “I took wheat from my diet, and my skin cleared up. If I allow wheat back in for one day, the next day I have acne.”

Not all solutions were dietary:

My wife and I found the only thing that worked reliably–even including a couple of different kinds of antibiotics–was “the regimen” as described on acne.org. Basically you use a low-strength (2.5%) benzoyl peroxide every day and moisturise like mad afterwards.

These are just examples. There are many more helpful comments.

Tyler Cowen’s Unusual Final Exam

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In a discussion of college education — I believe there should be more allowance for human diversity — sparked by this post, Alex Tabarrok told the following story:

Tyler [Cowen] once walked into class the day of the final exam and said, “Here is the exam. Write your own questions. Write your own answers. Harder questions and better answers get more points.” Then he walked out. The funniest thing was when a student came in late and I had to explain to him what the exam was and he didn’t believe me!

I was impressed. This approach, unlike most exams but like actual economies, rewards rather than punishes specialization. I asked Tyler what happened. He replied:

I would say that the variance of the test scores probably increased!

I don’t recall if I ever did that again for a whole exam but most of my exams do that for at least one question. It’s the question where you learn the most about the student.

How Patrick Vlaskovits Discovered His Migraines Were Due to Wheat

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My personal science taught me that (a) there are useful things health experts don’t know (b) that the rest of us can discover. I am curious how these discoveries are made. When Patrick Vlaskovits commented

I suffered migraines my whole life until my 30s. I am prescribed meds to help me manage the pain. These meds are better than nothing. Then I quit eating grain-based products, no migraines ever.

I asked him how he discovered the connection. He replied:

This was in years pre-Paleo — I played with Atkins and one day my wife said to me: “You haven’t had a migraine for at least a month now.” And it hit me, holy shit, I hadn’t.

Until then, my whole life even as a small child, I would get insane mind-melting-migraines seemingly at random —- and when they hit, my face would twitch and aside from the pain, I would experience hyper-light-and-sound-sensitivity. My response would be to sit the shower in the dark for hours on end and then crawl into bed to fall asleep and hopefully wake up sans headache. This was from grade-school through post-grad-school.

What no one had seen until then was the lag time between my digesting some wheat product and onset of migraine — usually about a day. Nowadays, I tend to eat wheat-free (and disallow it from my toddler’s diet) but I will indulge in a NYC pizza or something similar if traveling — I reckon that about 10% of those cheat instances I am hit with an earthshattering migraine.

BTW I mentioned this a few years ago to Ryan Holiday, and he mentioned it to his girlfriend — a few weeks ago I saw both of them in NYC, and she has a virtually identical story. Crazy.

He added later:

[After avoiding wheat] my nighttime tooth grinding also stopped as did my insomnia [“being tired but unable to fall asleep, would go to bed at 11pm, my mind would race for hours on end in a state of neither sleep nor being awake, I would finally fall asleep around 5 am, and have to get up at 730 am to go work, and be exhausted all day —- this went on for years”] — generally, I feel 1000x better not eating wheat –

I have been tested with a skin-prick test and was told that that my results came back normal, not sensitive to anything.

I am unsure of what it is in wheat that I react to – an obvious culprit could be gluten in modern wheat, could also be mycotoxins (per Dave Asprey’s thinking), could perhaps be pesticide residue; I simply don’t know. — however, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. A simple risk less change resulted in orders of magnitude change for the better.

Last thing, another family friend has a 10 year old who has migraines, I recounted my story to them and early evidence looks like health improvement via avoidance of wheat.

How well-known is this connection? A few articles mention it: this one, for example. Here is a whole paper — in 1979 — about how food causes migraines:

The commonest foods causing [migraines] were wheat (78%), orange (65%), eggs (45%), tea and coffee (40% each), chocolate and milk (37%) each), beef (35%), and corn, cane sugar, and yeast (33% each).

Thirty years later, this extremely useful information has yet to reach most migraine doctors, apparently. An even older article (1976) said:

The 10 chief offenders among food allergens are cow’s milk, chocolate and cola (the kola nut family), corn, eggs, the pea family (chiefly peanut, which is not a nut), citrus fruits, tomato, wheat and other small grains, cinnamon and artificial food colors. Food allergy results in a remarkable variety of clinical syndromes.

The Mayo Clinic website says that migraines are sometimes caused by food but fails to say that if you suffer from migraines you should try an elimination diet to look for possible causes.

The Cost of Hope by Amanda Bennett

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I came away from The Cost of Hope by Amanda Bennett (copy sent me by publisher) full of admiration for two people the book barely mentions: Bennett’s parents. How did they raise her to be such a competent and resourceful person? The book isn’t about her. It is mainly about her husband’s fatal illness and their marriage. She never brags, but glimpses of staggering competence slip through. In 2006,

I am the only editor of a major newspaper in the United States [the Philadelphia Inquirer] to run the Danish cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb on his head instead of a turban–the cartoon that causes riots in Europe. By the following Monday, protesters are in front of our building carrying signs with my face and the face of Hitler. Joe Natoli, my publisher, and I plunge into the crowd, shaking hands, talking to families, listening to their stories. The crowd turns friendly. I emerge with several copies of the Koran.

She tells this story because her husband is proud of her, which means a lot to her:

The pride I see on Terence’s face . . . keeps me going, even when I am scared.

However, she was courageous before she met him. In 1983, she took a job in Beijing as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, which is where she met her husband. Their first encounters, she says, were a series of fights.

Most of the book is about what happened when her husband came down with a rare form of kidney cancer — especially how much the treatments cost. For $600,000 — paid mostly by insurance — they bought a few more years of life together. It was worth it, says Bennett, adding but did it have to cost so much? Her best insight comes when she notices the wildly different prices paid for exactly the same treatment (CAT scans) — exactly the same treatment, same machine, same operator. The “retail” rate is, let’s say, $20,000. One insurer pays $5,000, another pays $1,000. She wonders why. Her moment of insight comes when she is back in Beijing at a fakes market with her 10-year-old daughter. At such markets, tourists are told prices wildly above what the seller will accept. In one case a fake Chanel purse is offered for 2000 yuan ($300). A woman who pays 200 yuan walks away happy. “I got it for 200!” she tells her friends. Bennett’s (adopted Chinese) daughter pays 20 yuan. (Apparently Bennett has her parents’s parenting skills.) Wildly inflated retail prices for health care — so much more than what sellers will accept that they are almost meaningless — exist to take advantage of poor negotiators, Bennett realizes.

The Cost of Hope was a pleasure to read and, as I’ve said, Bennett is an astonishing person, but it omits an important point. Bennett, like most people who write about the high cost of American health care, fails to point out its central tenet: First, let them get sick. Bennett’s husband died young (early 60s). He was significantly overweight, how much we aren’t told. Apparently he had diabetes — again, few details are given. Obesity and diabetes are preventable. One of the first treatments her husband receives for his cancer is IL-2, meant to boost the immune system. What about boosting his immune system before he got sick? For example, by improving his sleep. This neglected approach might have prevented or delayed her husband’s cancer and extended his life much more cheaply and painlessly than what happened. The biggest flaw of her book is her failure to ask — literally ask, such as ask the head of the National Institutes of Health — why prevention, especially cheap prevention, is ignored.