Danger of Low-Carb Diet: Not Enough Vitamin C

Seth Roberts37 Comments

I eat a low-carb diet for reasons that have nothing to do with weight loss: To keep my blood sugar down. I am sure high blood sugar is bad. A few months ago, I noticed that my lips were chapped, which was unusual. I suspected it was due to lack of Vitamin C. About two months before that, I had stopped doing two things that I usually did: taking a multi-vitamin pill (which had Vitamin C) and eating fruit. I don’t know if the Vitamin C in the pill is absorbed but I’m sure the Vitamin C in fruit is. I started eating kumquats — the skins of four kumquats/day. (One kumquat contains about 15% of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin C). My lips returned to normal.

Paul Jaminet, author of Perfect Health Diet, had a similar experience, which I knew nothing about when I noticed my chapped lips. While eating “a lot of vegetables but no starches and hardly any fruit,” he developed outright scurvy, including wounds that wouldn’t heal. This happened while he was taking a multi-vitamin pill with 90 mg Vitamin C (my four kumquats contain only 35 mg Vitamin C). “Four grams a day of vitamin C for two months cured all the scurvy symptoms,” he found.

Why do we like sweet foods? The usual answer (so that we will eat more calories) is nonsense (except for children). The striking thing about our liking for sweetness is that it disappears when we are really hungry, which is the opposite of what the calorie-seeking explanation predicts. Desserts are served at the end of a meal because they taste much better then. But our liking for sweetness (when we’re not hungry) is so strong and obvious it must mean something important. I think it is pushing us to eat more fruit so that we will get enough Vitamin C. Fruits are much sweeter than other food groups and they are much higher in Vitamin C. We don’t like sweet things when we are hungry because a high-fruit diet is terrible (it is low in omega-3, other necessary fats, several minerals, and microbes, for example). But a small amount of fruit may be a big help. Paul and my experiences suggest it may be hard to get enough Vitamin C in other ways.

More Paul has a different idea about why we like sweetness.

Effect of One-Legged Standing on Sleep

Seth Roberts22 Comments

In 1996, I accidentally discovered that if I stood a lot I slept better. If I stood 9 hours or more, I woke up feeling incredibly rested. Yet to get any improvement I had to stand at least 8 hours. That wasn’t easy, and after about 9 hours of standing my feet would start to hurt. I stopped standing that much. It was fascinating but not practical.

In 2008, I accidentally discovered that one-legged standing could produce the same effect. If I stood on one leg “to exhaustion” — until it hurt too much to continue — a few times, I woke up feeling more rested, just as had happened when I stood eight hours or more. At first I stood with my leg straight but after a while my legs got so strong it took too long. When I started standing on one bent leg, I could get exhausted in a reasonable length of time (say, 8 minutes), even after many days of doing it.

This was practical. I’ve been doing it ever since I discovered it. A few months ago I decided to try to learn more about the details. I was doing it every day — why not vary what I did and learn more?

One thing I wanted to learn was: how much was best? I would usually do two (one left leg, one right leg) or four (two left leg, two right leg). Was four better than two? What about three?

I decided to do something relatively sophisticated (for me): a randomized experiment. Every morning I would do two stands (one left, one right). In the evening I would randomly choose between zero, one, and two additional one-legged stands. Sometimes I forgot to choose. Here are the results for three sets of days: (a) “baseline” days (baseline(2), baseline(3), baseline(4)) before the randomized experiment and during the experiment when I forgot and (b) the “random” days (random 2, random 3, random 4) when I randomly choose and (c) a later set of days (“baseline 4″) when I did four one-legged stands every day.

Each morning, when I woke up I rated how rested I felt on a scale where 0 = not rested at all (as tired as when I went to sleep), and 100 = completely rested, not tired at all.

 This shows means and standard errors. The number of days in each condition are on the right.

The main results are that three was better than two and four was better than three. The three/four difference was large enough compared to the two/four difference to suggest that five might be better than four. The similarity between random 4 and baseline 4 means that the amount of one-legged standing on previous days doesn’t matter much. For example, on Monday night it doesn’t matter how much I stood on Sunday.

These differences were not reflected in how long I slept. Below are the results for “first” sleep duration, meaning the time from when I went to sleep to when I woke up for the first time — which is when I measured how rested I was (the graph above). On a small fraction of days, I went back to sleep a few hours later.

These results mean that one-legged standing increased how deeply I slept, what you could call sleep “efficiency”.

I also computed “total” sleep duration, which included first sleep duration, second sleep duration, and nap time the previous day (e.g., nap time on Monday plus sleep Monday night). If I took a long nap, I slept less that evening. Here are the results for total sleep duration.

The results also support the idea that one-legged standing made me sleep more deeply.

The randomized experiment had pluses and minuses compared to a simpler design (such as an ABA design, where you do each treatment for several days in a row). The two big pluses were that the conditions being compared were more equal and you could simply continue until the answer was clear. The two big minuses were that I often forgot to do the randomization and lack of realism. If I decided that four was the best choice, I’d do four every day, not in midst of two’s and three’s.

Overall, it was clear beyond any doubt that four was better than two, and clear enough that four was better than three (one-tailed p = 0.02). The results suggest trying larger doses, such as five and six. I’ve only done six once: before a flight from Beijing to San Francisco. It was one of the few long flights where I slept most of the way.

If you try this and you do more than one right and one left, leave plenty of time (two hours?) before the second pair, to allow the signaling molecules to be regenerated.

Growth of Quantified Self (more)

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At the Quantified Self blog, Alexandra Carmichael has posted several graphs showing how much the Quantified Self movement has grown during the past year. The number of QS meetup members has grown by a factor of 3; the number of groups has grown by a factor of 6.

Measuring yourself is a step toward controlling yourself — especially, controlling your health and well-being. Almost everyone wants more control of these things. I believe that the idea, which the Quantified Self movement encourages, that ordinary people can do useful science is a shift with implications on the order of the shift from religion (the Sun revolves around the Earth) to science (the Earth revolves around the Sun). When ordinary people begin to do science, I predict we will learn a lot more about how to control our bodies.

Before science became powerful, people knew lots of correct useful stuff (e.g., metallurgy). But there were limits on what could be learned (e.g., Galileo was imprisoned). Now religion is much less powerful but most people believe that science can only be done by certain people (e.g., professors). This too places serious limits on what can be learned. For control of the outside world (e.g., material science, physics), I don’t think these limits matter (although the case of Starlight suggests that even here amateurs can make important discoveries). But for control of the inner world (our bodies), the message of my work is that these limits matter a lot. By studying myself I managed to learn a bunch of useful things that professional scientists could learn only with great difficulty. For example, I could learn from accidents how to sleep better; I could easily test ideas about how to sleep better. Few if any professional sleep researchers measure sleep night after night for long periods of time; nor do they do cheap fast experiments.

My Talk at EG

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Last year I gave a 20-minute talk at EG (EG is short for Entertainment Gathering) titled “You Had Me at Bacon” about my self-experimentation. I described some of the things I’ve discovered by self-experimentation. Then I tried to say why it had been successful — why I had managed to discover such useful stuff. My conclusion is that my success came from the combination of four things: 1. Self-experimentation. Much faster, more flexible than ordinary research. 2. The Stone Age = good idea. I used the idea that our bodies were shaped to work well under Stone-Age conditions to choose what experiments to do. 3. Subject-matter knowledge. My knowledge of psychology, experimental design, and data analysis helped a lot. My weight-control theory, for example, was based on ideas from animal learning. 4. Freedom. I could do and say what I wanted. Most scientists cannot. They fear career damage. The combination of these four things is why my work was effective.

After my talk, a few people asked: Were you serious? No doubt you’ve heard Arthur Clarke’s maxim that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Let me propose a related idea: Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from a joke.

Miso Bar

Seth Roberts6 Comments

At a hotel buffet restaurant near Tsinghua I had fermented food in a form new to me: a miso-soup “bar”. You serve yourself from a tureen of miso soup and have a wide choice of add-ons: carrot, turnip, tofu, pickled ginger, green onion, Japanese pickle. Adding color, visual diversity, crunch, and DIY to the soup makes it taste much better — and it already tastes really good.

If I made a scatterplot of all the foods I can make, with difficulty on one axis and deliciousness on the other, this would be a bivariate outlier: very easy and very delicious.

Asthma and Farm Life

Seth Roberts2 Comments

For a long time it’s been clear that living on a farm protects children against asthma (compared to city life). A new study, done in Germany, tried to go a little further than that: to ask if it was microbial exposure that made the difference. Non-American scientists have been far more interested in the environmental causes of disease than American scientists.

They measured microbial exposure by studying mattress dust. One branch of the study used DNA techniques to measure microbial diversity of the dust; the other branch measured microbial diversity by seeing how many microbes could be cultured from the dust.

They found the usual farm/city difference in asthma: The city kids had roughly twice as much. They found the expected farm/city difference in microbial diversity of mattress dust: For a given species of bacteria or fungi, there was roughly twice as much chance of finding it in the farm dust.

Did the microbial difference explain the asthma difference? To find out they corrected for the farm difference. I think this means they looked within the farm kids to see if in this restricted group there was a microbial diversity/asthma risk correlation. In one branch of the study, there was a significant correlation. In the other branch, the correlation was nearly significant.

In all, the results support the idea that differences in microbial exposure explain the farm/city asthma difference. The biggest strength of this study is that they gathered useful evidence related to a major problem (asthma). The biggest weakness is how difficult it was. It involved about 15,000 kids and probably cost more than a million dollars.

Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell.

Is Medical Research a Veblen Good?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Felix Salomon argues that fancy restaurants often manage to make their food a Veblen good — something that becomes more desirable when the price goes up. Restaurant food is a way to show off your wealth, in other words.

Veblen and I differ on the long-term value of Veblen goods. Veblen saw them as sort of ridiculous — which is why he coined the amusing term conspicuous waste. Whereas I see them as a way of promoting innovation: Long ago, desire for luxury goods, goods with “wasteful” features, helped the most skilled artisans make a living. These artisans were the best source of innovation within a society.

Unfortunately everyone likes to show off, not just fancy-restaurant-goers. Throughout the medical research community, there is an obvious preference for expensive research over cheaper research. (I’m not saying experimental psychologists such as me are any better: We’re not.) Few medical researchers understand that expensive studies are a last resort and the larger your sample size, the less you understand what you are studying. (Experimental psychologists do understand this.) When people doing research related to health are too concerned with showing off (e.g., doing studies that require expensive equipment) to do effective research, the benefit-cost ratio of Veblenian behavior goes below one. Desire to show off gets in the way of solving health problems. This is why personal science — using science to solve your own problems — is so important: The personal scientist will do whatever works, regardless of how impressive it is.

Terrific Essay by Cory Doctorow

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I highly recommend this editorial by Cory Doctorow about the dangers of allowing a small number of people — such as big companies — to control how everyone’s computer, smart phone, etc., operates. I especially like his conclusion, modeled on Isaac Asimov’s T hree Laws of Robotics:

But we’ll only arrive at those solutions once we stop reflexively demanding limits on the general functionality of a PC and a network — and the sooner we do, the sooner we’ll legitimize a technology world whose first rule is “Obey your owner” and whose second rule is “Protect your owner’s interests”.

In case it isn’t obvious, self-experimentation and personal science increase your control of your body, just as Doctorow wants each person to control the technology they own. Without self-experimentation and personal science — and their ability to solve health problems in a way best for you — you give control over your body to doctors, drug companies, medical school professors, nutritionists, alternative-medicine advocates, and many others whose interests differ from yours. Often the difference is large — drug companies prefer expensive dangerous solutions to cheap safe ones.

PFCs, Ultrasound, and Autism

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Robert Delaney is a geologist who does environmental cleanup in Michigan. While cleaning up an abandoned military base, he found remarkably high contamination by a chemical called PFOS. He had been wondering what causes autism. He came across a rodent study that found that the combination of PFOS and ultrasound was much more damaging to the nervous system than either alone. (See also this study.) He remembered that study when he read my posts about ultrasound and autism. He wrote to me:

You will know the chemical PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfunate) from spray-on fabric treatments that protect clothes from stains and water. IÂ want to tell you about the possible connection between PFCs (perfluoroalkyl chemicals, especially long chain PFCs) and autism. Â I learned that mice and rats contaminated with PFOS, a PFC, when exposed to ultrasound convulsed and died. Â I was reminded of that finding when I read your blog about Caroline Rodger’s idea that prenatal ultrasound causes autism. Â I have thought that PFCs were causing autism for some time. I wondered if lower levels of PFOS would cause some type of brain injury, short of convulsions and death, when the mice were exposed to ultrasound.

I work on cleaning up military sites and attend a lot of related conferences and meetings.  I am working on a focus group with the Association of State and Territorial Waste Managers Organization that is looking at emerging contaminants (contaminants that are not regulated or so recently regulated they are still a problem). Because of that, I was recently made aware of the PFCs because the military had identified these contaminants in firefighting foams.  I was doing a cleanup at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan.  I decided we should check for PFOS and PFOA at the site. There were high levels of both PFOS and PFOA even though it was 20 years since the based had been used. When we checked groundwater, we found it in every well at every depth.  In my 25 years in the environmental business I have never seen anything like it.

I started researching the chemicals as it was apparent that I would have to deal with them. Â I discovered that at least 98% of Americans have them in their blood. That isn’t surprising because they are in everyday products such as food wrappers and popcorn bags, shampoos, cleaning supplies, carpeting, furniture materials, clothing, and dental floss. They are used in firefighting foams, pesticides, automotive parts, computers, electronics, and lubricants. Â They have ended up in our food supply and drinking water.

I had been researching the occurrence of autism for other reasons.  It had occurred to me that whatever was causing the dramatic rise in autism around much of the world, it had to be ubiquitous in the environment, of recent origin, with increasing use, and found in at least the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia where the autism rates were exploding.

PFCs fit these characteristics. Â They are found around the world in mammals, birds, fish, shellfish, etc. Â In fact, the Canadian government reported that the blood levels of PFCs in polar bear above the Arctic Circle were higher than the levels of any pesticides they had ever measured.

Research in the Great Lakes Region is showing high levels of PFOS in the lakes. In some places in the Lakes the contamination exceeds preliminary drinking water standards. Because these are huge bodies of water, to have so much contamination is amazing. High concentrations have been found in mink, fish, gull eggs, eagles, etc. around the Great Lakes. Fish and drinking water in Minnesota have been impacted over large areas. Europe has now banned PFCs for most applications.

What got me wondering about autism and PFCs was that in lab animals and in test tube experiments with human brain cells they are developmental neurotoxins. Many chemicals are neurotoxins, such as chlorinated pesticides and other chlorinated compounds (such as PCBs), organic mercury, and lead. Â However, we in the western world have been aware of these facts and for the last thirty years have been reducing use and exposure to these chemicals. Â But while we have been reducing our exposure to mercury, lead, and so on, neurologic diseases have been on the rise. Â No one suspected PFCs were harmful to humans. Their use has continued to increase.

The half life of the chemicals in our body is around 5 years, so in 5 years, if you have not gotten any more exposure to PFCs, half of them would still be in your body.

There are a lot of reasons to think PFCs may cause autism. Here are a few. First, the company that invented PFCs (3M) is located in Minnesota. There is widespread PFC contamination in Minnesota. As I was preparing a talk last week, I googled…”autism state rates.”  The first site to pop up listed Minnesota as having the highest levels of autism of any state. New Jersey has unusually high PFO contamination of drinking water; they also have a very high level of autism. The military, which has used a great deal of fire-fighting foam, has double the rate of autism of the general U.S. population.

In laboratory experiments PFCs influence brain wiring. The impact of PFCs in some mammals is sex-dependent with males being more affected; autism is 4 times more common in boys than in girls. PFCs are associated with repressed immune systems in animals which has been associated with autism as well. Deranged behavior/ADHD behavior has been reported in PFOS-exposed mice. Â ADHD in children has been associated with prenatal exposure to PFCs.

Unfortunately, the EPA did not include PFCs in their list of chemicals that might be causing autism. My colleague and I have put together a web page if people want more information: https://www.autism-pfos.net/

Yes, why does Minnesota have such high autism rates? It is not an industrial state. It is not a rich state. Yet it is where PFCs were invented and manufactured in large amounts (e.g., ScotchGuard). I can’t think of a plausible alternative explanation. The lab results (ultrasound plus PFOS far more damaging than either alone) makes perfect sense: If there is a bad molecule in neural tissue, it is going to do a lot more damage if you start shaking it, which is what ultrasound does.