Author: Seth Roberts

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment
  • grading and identifying cocoa beans
  • benefits of Vitamin K2 (short)
  • In 1971, Babette Rosmond, a journalist, failed to take her doctor’s advice. “When the tumor turned out to be cancerous, [the surgeon] told her she needed an urgent radical mastectomy. Ms. Rosmond demurred, asking for three weeks to consider her options. The surgeon, who had never before encountered such resistance, called her a “very silly and stubborn woman.” Then he played his trump card. “In three weeks,” he said, “you may be dead.” “
  • blood passports

Thanks to John Shonder and Alex Blackwood.

Is Crohn’s Disease Really “Incurable”?

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I recently came across two different people who, diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, repeated the standard line that it “has no known cure”. Really? Never? The people who said this were just repeating what they had been told. Unlike twenty or thirty years ago, however, it is easy to do one’s own research. The people who said this gave no indication they had done any research. Because Crohn’s is so unpleasant, their passivity was curious.

I knew that calling Crohn’s disease “incurable” was an overstatement because I had written about Reid Kimball, who had found a way to eliminate via diet essentially all the symptoms. For practical purposes, he was cured. (Reid objects to the word “cure”.) I knew he was hardly the only one. But what if I started from ignorance? How hard would it be to challenge the conventional “incurable” line?

Not hard at all. I googled “Crohn’s success” (without quotation marks in the search query). The top search result (titled “Crohn’s Disease: Success with Diet and Probiotics”) included this:

I learned of a pediatric gastroenterologist, Dr. J. Rainer Poley, who had conducted extensive studies on the effect of certain sugars and starches on people with intestinal diseases. My husband and I decided to take our daughter to see this doctor for another opinion. When we asked him if there was any other treatment she could try besides medications, he explained that at a recent medical conference in Europe, he had learned of success medical doctors were having with probiotics. He instructed our daughter to eat plain yogurt every day and to take a specific probiotic capsule called Culturelle® containing Lactobacillus GG [Gorbach and Goldin] twice daily. Based on Dr. Poley’s research, he wanted her to limit the consumption of concentrated sugars (specifically table sugar, technically known as sucrose). The intent of the sucrose-restricted diet was to starve the harmful bacteria by taking away their major food source. The yogurt and Lactobacillus GG would help replenish the “good” bacteria. Since it has been well documented that an overgrowth of bacteria is prevalently seen in people with Crohn’s disease, this treatment sounded like a plausible solution.

Our daughter, feeling drained from the effects of Crohn’s disease, felt motivated to try the doctor’s recommendations. . . . After about two weeks, she began to feel better in general. At the follow-up doctor’s appointment three months later, she had gained six pounds and her lab work was ALL NORMAL! . . . She continues to remain well [over 7 years later] with normal lab work and without clinical symptoms.

I asked Ms. Kalichman how others had fared with this treatment. She replied:

Periodically, I hear from others who have tried the treatment that my daughter does, and it seems that many have been helped a lot. Unfortunately they don’t always continue to keep in touch, so I don’t have any idea how many are totally well. Our daughter continues to be well as she has been for almost 9 years now…no meds and no clinical symptoms.

That took about 5 minutes, including emailing Kalichman. She referred me to a video about it.

More About Pork Fat and Sleep

Seth Roberts22 Comments

One day in 2009, I ate a large amount of pork belly (very high in fat — pork belly is the cut used to make bacon). That night I slept an unusually long time. The next day I had more energy than usual. This led me to do an experiment in which I ate a pork belly meal (with lots of pork belly, about 250 g) on some days but not others. I compared my sleep after the two sorts of days. I kept constant the number of one-legged stands I did each day because that has an effect. During the first half of the experiment I kept this constant at 4; during the second half, at 2. I originally posted the results only from the first half.

Now I’ve analyzed the results from both halves. Here are ratings of how rested I felt when I woke up, on a scale where 0 = 0% = not rested at all and 100 = 100% = completely rested.

The two halves were essentially the same: pork belly produced a big improvement. Here are the results for sleep duration.

No clear effect of pork belly in either half of the experiment.

The main thing I learned was that pork fat really helps. The effect is remarkably clear. With micronutrients, such as Vitamin C, the body has considerable storage. It may take months without the nutrient to become noticeably deficient. With omega-3, which is between a micronutrient and a macronutrient, my experiments found that it takes about two days to start to see deficiency. With pork fat there seems to be no storage at all. I needed to eat lots of pork fat every day to get the best sleep. That repletion and depletion are fast made this experiment easy. How curious we are so often told animal fat is bad when an easy experiment shows it is good, at least for me.

“I Hate Dreamhost!” Beware, Potential Dreamhost Customers

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I recently got the following email:

I googled “dreamhost sucks” and found your blog. I really hate this company. I have a small business and they somehow managed to create a second account for my company in spite of the fact that we never requested one. Then they emailed us that we owed more money on our account and shut off our access and emails due to the amount overdue. After months of various DH staffers replying to my emails (we hadn’t ever selected phone support so they would only correspond via email) the problems were finally passed to a “supervisor”. The supervisor promptly cancelled the duplicate account and reset our live and fully paid account so that we could use it again. This took months of frustration and provision of the same information to the different DH staffers. There is obviously no communications within their staff there. Very frustrating.
Today, they sent an email to me requesting an additional albeit minor sum of $9.95 for a temporary account that was created when nobody at my company could access our account. They insist we created it and pay for it or they’ll suspend our live account. I complained and asked for the same supervisor that resolved DH’s past errors, and the staffer, Jay H, promptly cancelled our fully paid, live account, and told me we still had to pay for this temporary account created by a DH staffer when we didn’t even have access to our site and emails due to DH’s original errors!!
So frustrating. I’m now looking for a new domain and web host company, with excellent customer service and professionalism. DH doesn’t take responsibility for their own errors and seems to dream up ways to charge clients extra money for stuff they never requested. Outside of the online world, this would be called extortion.
Feel free to post. I hate Dreamhost!
As do I. I wish I had left the second I discovered they hadn’t backed up my site, after saying they had. (They had backed up only a small fraction of it.) After that, my sites kept getting hacked. First, we moved this blog and www.sethroberts.net off Dreamhost. They stopped getting hacked. Then the Shangri-La Diet forums got hacked. We moved them off Dreamhost. No more hacking. The cost of even one incident of hacking is far more than you will ever save from their low rates.
Dreamhost hacked — and see the comments.

American Dietetics Association Tries to Outlaw Competition: More

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Michael Ellsberg has written another fascinating article about how the American Dietetics Association is trying to make it illegal to compete with their members — that is, make it illegal to give nutritional advice without board certification. (His earlier article.) State boards have threatened several bloggers with jail if they continue to provide nutritional advice.

Thanks to Dr. B G.

Prize Fight: The Race and Rivalry to be First in Science by Morton Meyers

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Prize Fight: The Race and Rivalry to be First in Science (2012) by Morton Meyers (copy sent me by publisher) is about battles/disagreements over credit, often within a lab. Jocelyn Bell noticed the first quasar — how much credit does she deserve relative to her advisor, Anthony Hewish, who built the structure within which she worked? (Not much, said Bell. “I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were given to research students.”) The structure and subtitle of the book make little sense — there is a chapter about how science resembles art and a chapter about data fabrication, for instance, and nothing about races or being first. The core of the book is two stories about credit: for the discovery of streptomycin, the first drug effective against tuberculosis, and for the invention of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). Meyers is a radiology professor and a colleague of one of the inventors of MRI.

I liked both stories. I find it hard to learn anything unless there is emotion involved. Both stories are emotional — people got angry — which made it easy to learn the science. Streptomycin was found by screening dirt. It was already known that dirt kills microbes. The graduate student who made the discovery was indeed a cog in a machine but later he was mistreated and got angry and sued. The first MRI-like machine was built by a doctor named Raymond Damadian, who was not one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize given out for its invention. He had good cause to be furious. The otherwise good science writer Horace Freeland Judson wrote an op-ed piece about it (“No Nobel Prize for Whining”) that ended “His behavior stands in stark and elegant contrast to the noisy complaining of Raymond Damadian”. To name-call (“whining”, “noisy”) in a New York Times op-ed is to suggest your case is weak.

I have had a related experience. When I was a graduate student, at Brown University, I did experiments about cross-model use of an internal clock. Do rats use the same clock to measure the duration of sound and the duration of light? (Yes.) I got the idea from human experiments about cross-modal transfer. By the time my paper (“Cross-Modal Use of an Internal Clock”) appeared, I was an assistant professor. A few months after it was published, I went back to Brown to visit my advisor, Russell Church. On the day of my visit, he had just received a new issue of the main journal in our field (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes — where my article appeared). It was in a brown wrapper on his desk. I opened it. The second article was “Abstraction of Temporal Attributes” by Warren Meck and Russell Church. (Meck was a graduate student with Church.) I didn’t know about it. It was based on my work. The first experiment was the same (except for trivial details) as the first experiment of my article. The introduction did not mention me. I leafed through it. Buried in the middle it said “This result replicates previous reports from our laboratory (Meck & Church, in press; Roberts, 1982).”

I was angry. Why did you do this? I asked Church. “To make it seem more important,” he said. I consoled myself by thinking how bad it looked (on Church’s record). I never visited him, and almost never spoke to him, again. Years later I was asked to speak at a conference session honoring him. I declined. What he did amounted to rich (well-established) stealing from poor (not established) and jeopardized my career. When my article appeared, I didn’t have tenure. It was far from certain I would get it. I hadn’t written many papers. If you read both papers (Meck and Church, and mine), you could easily be confused: Who copied who? This confusion reduced the credit I got for my work and reduced my chance of getting tenure. Church surely knew this. Failure to get tenure could have ended my career.

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Thanks to Adam Clemens, Melissa McEwen, and Navanit Arakeri.

Notes on Navanit Arakeri’s Morning Faces Experience

Seth Roberts7 Comments

My last post described how Navanit Arakeri found that looking at faces on his iPad in the morning improved his mood. Three things struck me about his experience.

1. Small faces worked (“much smaller than life-sized”). I found that life-size faces produced the biggest effect. I never studied the effect of face size in detail (trying many different sizes). I first experienced the effect after watching Jay Leno do his monologue on a 20-inch TV — much smaller than a life-size face. Obviously we recognize faces when they are much smaller than life-size. For example, we recognize faces in newspaper photos. And we recognize people at a wide range of distances, meaning that the retinal image of a face can vary greatly in size without preventing recognition. Both facts suggest that the size of the face may not matter a lot for this effect.

2. He watched right after he got up. There is surely a window of effectiveness — a time period outside of which the faces do nothing — but when? And how long? I don’t know. It surely depends on your exposure to sunlight, which is incredibly hard to measure. Navanit found a simple rule that worked (“watch right after you get up”). When I first experienced the effect I did the same thing that works for him — I watched TV a few minutes after I woke up.

3. He became less irritable (“much more emotionally resilient to irritants and bad news”). I noticed the same thing. A paradox of depression is that people become more irritable. Depression is a disease of passivity — you don’t want to do anything — but irritability is over-reaction. I’ve heard it claimed that depression may be caused by not eating enough fruits and vegetables. Okay, lack of a vital nutrient might cause people to have less energy, but why would it make them more irritable? Not obvious. The fact that the morning-faces effect includes this component is part of why I think it sheds light on what causes depression. Perhaps anything that raises your mood will make you less irritable but I can only say it didn’t feel that way — it felt like something special. Like everyone else I have my mood raised by ordinary events (e.g., good news, a joke) and these do not seem to produce a big increase in serenity.

Morning Faces Therapy: More Good Results

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Navanit Arakeri, who is 31 and lives in Bangalore, sent me the following email about the effect of looking at faces in the morning:

Thank you, it’s the most extraordinary thing. It’s taken my average daily mood from 6/10 to about 8/10 [on a 1-10 scale where 1 = very, very bad mood, 5 = neutral, and 10 = amazingly good mood. 6/10 = just better than neutral and 8/10 = very good. Note: if 5 = neutral, then a 1-9 or 0-10 scale will work better than a 1-10 scale] It has made me officially “happy”. And much more emotionally resilient to irritants and bad news.

I do it on waking at around 8:00 AM every day. I play “morning news” videos on mute on my iPad with no zoom (so it’s much smaller than life-sized). Example video

I do it for only 20-40 minutes, usually around 25 minutes. I’ve been doing it for about 45 days now.

I’m seeing a few interesting differences compared to your experience:

1. I don’t get the evening irritability at all. In fact, sometimes I get a Big Mood Improvement (see #2) in the evening (around 8:00 PM). The evening effect doesn’t happen every day, while the morning improvement is much more consistent.

2. Sometimes the mood improvement is so strong that I have an involuntary smile on my face. I can sit and stare into space feeling very happy. . . .

Sleep quality has been good throughout.

What led him to try it? “I wanted a simple self-experiment to test my lifelogging iPhone app and this fit nicely. I had read your original self-experimentation paper several years back, but never got around to trying it,” he said.

How long before he could tell it was working? “It was very clear by the 3rd morning,” he said.

He recorded the “involuntary smile” states, which lasted 30-60 minutes, on his iPhone. This graph shows how often they happened versus time of day over a 33-day period:

A value of 8, for example, means that there was roughly a one-quarter chance that during that time period he would be in the “involuntary smile” state. Before this the likelihood of involuntary smiles was zero.