Tucker Max on Paleo: “I Started Feeling So Much Better”

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In this interview, Tucker Max talks about eating paleo.

Once I started doing this, I started feeling so much better. My brain felt like it worked better. Everything about me improved. So I kinda went down the rabbit hole, and I started reading up on diet and nutrition from alternate sources. Art De Vany, Robb Wolf, and Loren Cordain, they didn’t invent it but they kinda popularized the concept of paleo eating. I realized that if you’re just a normal person, and you have the normal ideas about diet and nutrition, everything you know is wrong.

If you ask me, Tucker’s enthusiasm/support for paleo is huge. Max Planck said progress happens funeral by funeral. I say it happens keg party by keg party — college students, more than anyone else, have open minds. A friend told me that when she was a freshman in college, her sociology professor criticized the textbook. Whoa! she thought. Textbooks can be criticized!? She had thought they were beyond criticism. As far as I can tell, American college students respect Tucker more than they respect anyone else. (My Tsinghua students may favor Nassim Taleb.) For example, this recent tweet: “ TuckerMax is my idol. and he’s on this paleodiet…so i think im going to do it too.” I found no tweets about the dietary influence of Michelle Obama (“ coolest First Lady ever“).

In spite of what the interview was shortened to say, Tucker got the idea of eating flaxseed oil from this blog, especially Tyler Cowen’s experience. He wrote to me about it at the time. I posted his comments about dental health (here and here) and sports injuries (here, here and here) under the name Anonymous.

I am pleased to announce that Tucker will be talking at the upcoming Ancestral Health Symposium at UCLA. The title of his talk is::

From Cave to Cage: Mixed Martial Arts in Ancestral Health

Sorry Tucker Max fans, symposium tickets are sold out. But after the conference you will be able to see the talk on the website.

Tucker’s latest book is Assholes Finish First.


Insider/Outsiders, Chinese History, and the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Darwin was an insider/outsider; so was Mendel. Insider/outsiders are close enough to their subject to have a good understanding and skills yet far enough away to have freedom. In the case of Chinese history, a journalist named Yang Jisheng has filled that role. He wrote a book called Tombstone (Mubei) about the Great Famine (1958-61). He was able to write what professional historians could not:

Why are you the first Chinese historian to tackle this subject seriously?

Traditional historians [i.e., college professors] face restrictions. First of all, they censor themselves. Their thoughts limit them. They don’t even dare to write the facts, don’t dare to speak up about it, don’t dare to touch it. And even if they wrote it, they can’t publish it. And if they publish, they will face censure. So mainstream scholars face those restrictions.

But there are many unofficial historians like me. Many people are writing their own memoirs about being labeled “Rightists” or “counter-revolutionaries.” There is an author in Anhui province who has described how his family starved to death. There are many authors who have written about how their families starved.

“If they publish, they will face censure.” With respect to weight control, I am an insider/outsider. When I published The Shangri-La Diet, I did not expect censure. My colleagues (other psychology department faculty) wouldn’t care what I wrote about a different subject. To my surprise, I was censured — maybe a better word is denounced — by a nutrition education lecturer in the UC Berkeley Nutrition Department. The woman who denounced me had not seen my book. Based on what a reporter told her, she expressed her opinion of it in an email she sent to twenty people in her department and the chairman of my department. It said, in part:

I did give the SF Chronicle reporter my opinion of the diet making these points:
– one cannot possibly meet nutrient needs on 1200 kcals per day
– sugar and oils are not nutrient dense; they are calorically dense and thus dilute the nutrient density of the total kcal intake.
– 1200 kcals per day is less than the semi-starvation diet used in the only published formal study ever conducted in this country on human starvation (Ancel Keys, 1950)
– human semi-starvation is not a path to health whether one is discussing physical, psychological, or social well-being
– the results of single subject research are applicable only to that subject; they cannot be generalized to others.
– I cannot recommend this diet, in fact, I recommend against it.

In other words: Ridiculous. Her many misconceptions (e.g., she is unaware of many examples of path-breaking self-experimentation in the field of nutrition) aren’t terribly interesting. What’s fascinating is her decision to trash a book she hasn’t read to a large number of her colleagues.

Thanks to Steve Hansen.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Demand Pricing and the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts24 Comments

Demand pricing (also called dynamic pricing) is adjusting the price according to demand. More demand, higher price. It is being considered for movie tickets:

If a movie is hot, the price could rise to whatever the market will bear. For example, I’d have paid $20 per ticket to see “Avatar” in 3-D when it first opened; maybe others would have been willing to pay even more. As demand becomes clear through lower ticket sales, prices would drop. So “Avatar” might cost $15 a few weeks after opening, gradually making its way to $10.

The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet says that body fat is adjusted in a similar way. When food is abundant, the set point (which controls how much fat you have) goes up (= you store more fat). When food is scarce, the set point goes down. This is how many storage systems work, of course; they increase the amount stored when the price is low and decrease the amount stored when the price is high.

Perhaps one day weight control will be explained to children by telling them it is like the price of airplane tickets: “When more people want to go to Los Angeles, the price goes up. When more food is available, your set point goes up . . . “

Percentile Feedback and Productivity

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Warning: This post, written for the Quantified Self blog, has more repetition than usual of material in earlier posts.

In January, after talking with Matthew Cornell, I decided to measure my work habits. I typically work for a while (10-100 minutes), take a break (10-100 minutes), resume work, take another break, and so on. The breaks had many functions: lunch, dinner, walk, exercise, nap. I wanted to do experiments related to quasi-reinforcement.

I wrote R programs to record when I worked. They provided simple feedback, including how much I had worked that day (e.g., “121 minutes worked so far”) and how long the current bout of work had lasted (e.g., “20 minutes of email” — meaning the current bout of work, which was answering email , had so far lasted 20 minutes).

I collected data for two months before I wrote programs to graph the data. The first display I made (example above) showed efficiency (time spent working/time available to work) as a function of time of day. Available time started when I woke up. If I woke up at 5 am, and by 10 am had worked 3 hours, the efficiency at 10 am would be 60%. The display showed the current day as a line and previous days as points. During the day the line got longer and longer.

The blue and red points are from before the display started; the green and black points are from after the display started. The red and black points are the final points of their days — they sum up the days. A week or so after I made the display I added the big number in the upper-right corner (in the example, 65). It gives the percentile of the current efficiency compared to all the efficiency measurements within one hour of the time of day (e.g., if it is 2 p.m., the current efficiency is compared to efficiency measurements between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on previous days).

I started looking at the progress display often. To my great surprise, it helped a lot. It made me more efficient. You can see this in the example above because most of the green points (after the display started) are above most of the blue points (before the display). You can also see the improvement in the graph below, which shows the final efficiency of each day.

My efficiency jumped up when the display started.

Why did the display help? I call it percentile feedback because that name sums up a big reason I think it helped. The number in the corner makes the percentile explicit but simply seeing where the end of the line falls relative to the points gives an indication of the percentile. I think the graphical display helped for four reasons:

1. All improvement rewarded, no matter how small or from what level. Whenever I worked, the line went up and the percentile score improved. Many feedback schemes reward only a small range of changes of behavior. For example, suppose the feedback scheme is A+, A, A-, etc. If you go from low B- to high B-, your grade won’t change. A score of 100 was nearly impossible, so there was almost always room for improvement.

2. Overall performance judged. I could compare my percentile score to my score earlier in the day (e.g., 1 pm versus 10 am) but the score itself was a comparison to all previous days, in the sense that a score above 50 meant I was doing better than average. Thus there were two sources of reward: (a) doing better than a few hours ago and (b) doing better than previous days.

3. Attractive. I liked looking at the graphs, partly due to graphic design.

4. Likeable. You pay more attention to someone you like than someone you don’t like. The displays were curiously likable. They usually praised me, in the sense that the percentile score was usually well above 50. Except early in morning, they were calm, in the sense that they did not change quickly. If the score was 80 and I took a 2-hour break, the score might go down to 70 — still good. And, as I said earlier, every improvement was noticed and rewarded — and every non-improvement was also gently noted. It was as if the display cared.

Now that I’ve seen how helpful and pleasant feedback can be, I miss similar feedback in other areas of life. When I’m walking/running on my treadmill, I want percentile feedback comparing this workout to previous ones. When I’m studying Chinese, I want some sort of gentle comparison to the past.

 

 

 

 

 

Scientific Illiteracy at The New Yorker

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A week ago, this passage appeared in an article about timing and the brain:

If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.

As if people had three ears. “Triangulating between the three points” is gibberish. The between-ear time-of-arrival comparison gives you a direction, not a location (which is what triangulation does). Perhaps it was added by a copy editor. If you delete it, the passage makes sense.

Wouldn’t that make a nice newsbreak (one of The New Yorker’s column-ending “Funny Usage Mistakes Made by Other Publications”)? I tried to submit it but couldn’t. So I wrote a Letter to the Editor about it.

In this week’s issue, Hendrik Hertzberg, the magazine’s main editorial writer, calls the idea that “global warming is a hoax” a “denial of reality”. He lumps it with birtherism and the ideas that “evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.” In case you are reading this blog for the first time, I’ll say it again: Claims that humans have dangerously warmed the planet are based on climate models that are far from fully verified. That these models manage to fit past temperatures means little because the models have many adjustable parameters. Alas, this was no over-zealous editing mistake.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments
  • This study suggests calcium supplements are dangerous. They can raise your risk of heart attacks. There are probably better ways to reduce osteoporosis.
  • Conventional clinical trials overstate the value of drugs, says this paper. One reason is that they compare drug to placebo. In clinical practice, the choice is never drug or placebo; it is drug or other treatment (usually a different drug). “We need to put an end to this kind of gaming of the system” — a system in which standards of evidence grossly favor drug companies at the expense of everyone else.
  • Doctors use patient’s need for help to remove bad reviews. “The doctors simply make their patients sign a contract handing over the copyright of any review they might publish online afterwards. So, if the patients post any bad review, the company is able to send a DMCA notice demanding that the content be removed immediately.”
  • The end of mercury amalgam in dentistry.
  • paleolithicdiet.com, a new site from the founder of Paleohacks

10 Years of Weight Measurements: What Was Learned

Seth Roberts3 Comments

For ten years Alex Chernavsky has measured and recorded his weight (above). I asked what he learned from this. Here’s what he said:

I started the tracking because I thought that the very act of measuring (and recording) my weight every day would inspire me to lose weight. I don’t think it really worked that way, though. In order to lose weight, I had to take active measures.

What did I learn? I learned that low-carb diets work well in the short-run (as you said), and I also learned that eating low-carb is far, far easier than eating a calorie-restricted diet (which I’ve tried in the past, before I began recording my weight daily). I learned that regular exercise does lead to weight loss, although I can’t rule out a possible confounding factor: I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that I changed my eating habits at the same time that I started an exercise regime. That’s probably what Gary Taubes would claim.

I also learned that the Shangr-La diet works well for me. I think that the current upward trend is caused (at least in part) by the fact that I’m eating breakfast more and more often. I didn’t start eating breakfast until sometime last autumn. I will try eliminating breakfast again to see if it reverses the trend. I must say, though, that it’s a little difficult to watch my wife eating some scrumptious morning meal while I just drink coffee. The temptation is hard to resist.

I also learned that my weight fluctuates for no apparent reason at all. If you look at the period of roughly April 20, 2008 through mid-July 2008, you’ll see a drop of about ten pounds. I remember being surprised and puzzled during this time, because I could not think of any plausible reason why this weight loss would occur. I still don’t know. In any case, it was short-lived.

I also learned that I should have kept much better notes about what was going on during those ten years. I’m kicking myself now. I plan on continuing to collect data, and I will try to annotate the data better in the future.

My comments here.

The Kennedys (TV mini-series)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

This reviewer hated it, this reviewer panned it (“trivializes history”), but I loved it. Never has “behind every great fortune lies a great crime” (here, a great criminal, Joe Kennedy) been so well dramatized. Yet I came away from this series executive-produced by a Republican with a higher opinion of JFK and Bobby.

When I was in sixth grade, I did a survey in which I phoned random strangers and asked them history questions. To my chagrin, one of my “correct” answers (to the question “what year was the Bay of Pigs?”) was wrong. Until I watched this series, I didn’t really know what the Bay of Pigs was. Until I watched this series, I didn’t know important details of several other big events of the time, such as the struggle to admit James Meredith to the University of Mississippi. Supposedly JFK threatened the Governor of Mississippi with loss of all future NCAA Bowl invitations. “You can’t do that!” said the Governor. Surely fictional, but a nice touch.