In The New Yorker (25 January 2010), David Owen wrote about his father’s mother:
Gaga lived to be ninety-two, despite never having had much conventional health care. . . . She made foul-smelling yogurt . . .
New Heart Scan Results: Good News (context)
I posted yesterday that a recent heart scan found my arteries about 50% less calcified than a previous scan predicted. Apparently the improvement was due to eating much more animal fat (pork fat and butter).
In 2004, an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition article found something similar: heart disease progressed less in women who ate more saturated fat. “In postmenopausal women with relatively low total fat intake, a greater saturated fat intake is associated with less progression of coronary atherosclerosis,” the authors wrote. Here’s how they saw this finding:
The inverse association between saturated fat intake and atherosclerotic progression was unexpected. However, this finding should perhaps be less surprising. Ecologic and animal experimental studies showed positive relations between saturated fat intake and CHD risk (8). However, cohort studies and clinical trials in humans have been far less consistent (9 —12). Furthermore, most studies of dietary fat and CHD risk have been performed in men (15, 16). The relations in women—particularly postmenopausal women—are much less well-established, and evidence from dietary intervention trials suggests that diets low in saturated fat may have different effects on CHD risk factors in women (15, 17—22).
In their study, women with the highest intake of saturated fat did not get worse during the study period, whereas women with lower intakes did get worse.
An editorial about this study described some of the evidence that supports the “article of faith” that “saturated fat . . . accelerates coronary artery disease”:
One of the earliest and most convincing studies of the better efficacy of unsaturated than of saturated fat in reducing cholesterol and heart disease is the Finnish Mental Hospital Study conducted in the 12 y between 1959 and 1971. In this study, the usual high-saturated-fat institutional diet was compared with an equally high-fat diet in which the saturated fat in dairy products was replaced with soybean oil and soft margarine and polyunsaturated fats were used in cooking. Each diet was provided for 6 y and then the alternate diet was provided for the next 6 y. After a comparison of the effects of the 2 diets in both men and women, the incidence of coronary artery disease was lower by 50% and 65% after the consumption of polyunsaturated fat in the 2 hospitals.
My results make the results of that earlier study exceedingly puzzling. I found a large change in one direction; the Finnish study found a large effect in the opposite direction. Given the huge effect (50% or 65% reduction) observed in the Finnish study, it is hard to understand why “cohort studies and clinical trials in humans have been far less consistent”.
New Heart Scan Results: Good News
One and a half years ago, in February 2009, I got a heart scan. It’s an X-ray measurement of how calcified your arteries are. Persons with high scores are much more likely to have a heart attack than persons with low scores. Scores in the hundreds are dangerous. Tim Russert, who died at age 58 of a heart attack, had a score of about 200 ten years before his death. Above age 40, the scores typically increase about 25% per year. That puts Russert’s score when he died at around 2000.
A few weeks ago I got another scan, at the same place with the same machine. Here are my scores. February 2009: 38 (about 50th percentile for my age). August 2010: 29 (between 25th & 50th percentile). In other words: 47% lower than expected. The earlier scan detected 3 “lesions”; the recent scan detected 2. The woman who runs the scanning center — HeartScan, in Walnut Creek, California — told me that decreases in this score are very rare. About 1 in 100, she said.
The only big lifestyle change I made between the two scans is to eat much more animal fat. After I found that pork fat improved my sleep, I started to eat a large serving of pork belly (with 80-100 g of fat) almost every day. Later I switched to 60 g of butter every day. The usual view, of course, is that to eat so much animal fat is v v bad and will “clog” my arteries. In fact, the reverse happened. Judging from this, the change was v v good.
Assorted Links
- papers about the efficacy of Vitamin C in treating a wide range of illnesses
- the so-called Medical Revolution — stem cells, etc. Good description of how the hype — this or that “revolution” — has been misleading time after time.
- how to make prosciutto. Prosciutto is high in umami. The umami flavor gets stronger over time as the protein breaks down.
Asthma and Probiotics
In a long comment on an earlier post, JohnG tells how he failed and succeeded to get rid of disabling exercise-induced asthma. Lots of things didn’t work:
I tried Vitamin D; it didn’t work, but it did help my nasal allergies somewhat. I tried low carb dieting, and just like Dr. Lutz of “Life Without Bread” said, it made asthma worse while it practically cured my nasal allergies. I also tried the Dr. Sears approach of taking as much as 7.5g of EPA/DHA a day; no change at all in the exercise induced asthma.
The idea that asthma is due to lack of microbes made sense to him and he started trying fermented foods and probiotics. At first, nothing:
I re-reviewed the probiotic slant and found the Helminth story and all the trials that were going on in PubMed for them. With that logic in hand, I set about to find a probiotic that worked. I tried yogurt, kefir, fermented cabbage, and buttermilk to no avail. I then tried store bought probiotics one by one. I tried The Maker’s Diet probiotic and it didn’t help; but I do think it helped make a 20 year long wart go away. I also tried all forms of probiotics on the market; even LGG. Nothing.
Finally, success:
I bought this super high dose probiotic and took it along with a L. Sporogenes/bacillus coagulans. Voila, three days later I could really feel the difference during exercise. I continued that for 10 days. By the 10th day, I didn’t have to hit my inhaler at all during exercise. Wow!
First, I had to decide which probiotic did the trick. I didn’t want to spend a ton on that high dose probiotic, so I stuck with the Bacillus Coagulans and it continued working normally. So, I found my probiotic. Now, I needed to verify it wasn’t placebo. A close cousin to exercise induced asthma is the phenomenon of waking up sneezing and then promptly getting an asthma attack/or closure after that.
I went off my bacillus coagulans that I had been on for 14 days. By the second day, I noticed a little difference. By the third day, I had to hit my inhaler during the workout. By the 10th day (bacillus coagulans supposedly lives in your intestines 7 days), I was full-blown back to having to use 4 inhaler puffs and it wasn’t doing the trick. This was test phase one.
I then went back on the bacillus coagulans for 10 days. The same process repeated itself. The nightly asthma attacks abated after about 4 days and the same no-puff needed during exercise continued as well.
I then went back off the bacillus coagulans for 10 days. I got the asthma back at day 3.
I’ve now been back on 5 billion CFU’s of bacillus coagulans (duraflora) for 18 days. I don’t have to use my inhaler for exercise. I can feel the asthma come on very slightly and then go away.
Very impressive. Shows what can happen if (a) you think for yourself, (b) persist, and (c) have access to a lot of helpful information. I think he needed all three.
Web Alternative to Peer Review
Mixing traditional and new methods, the journal [“the prestigious Shakespeare Quarterly”] posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts . . . were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.
The NY Times article never says how many of the four posted essays were published. If all of them made the cut, then perhaps the web stuff was just for show. And if any of them didn’t make the cut, the public embarrassment would be great. Perhaps too great. I suspect that all of them made the cut and the whole thing was closer to a publicity stunt than something that you could plausibly do again and again. If the probability of acceptance given that your essay is posted is 100%, what matters is getting posted. Peer review wasn’t replaced by web review; it was replaced by behind-closed-doors review.
Another instance of academics outwitting this particular journalist:
To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”
Haha! Poor poor professors! Caught in the middle! I was under the impression that professors = expert scholarship. Anything to distract attention from the real change: The more education you can get from the Web, the less you need to get from professors. The more evaluation you can get from the Web (e.g., by reading someone’s blog), the less you need to get from professors. The less professors are needed, the fewer of them there will be.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
More Saturated Fat, Less Stroke
This recent study from Japan found that middle-aged men and women who ate more saturated fat had a lower risk of stroke. The rate of strokes was 30% lower in the highest intake quintile compared to the lowest quintile. There was a non-significant reduction in heart disease.
Other big differences were correlated with saturated fat intake. For example, those in the highest quintile had more college education than those in the lowest quintile and were more likely to do sports >1 hr/week. These data by themselves won’t convince anyone that saturated fats are beneficial. But they should push you in that direction. Contrary to what you’ve heard a million times.
As far as I can tell, eating lots of butter has lowered my blood pressure. High blood pressure is associated with greater risk of stroke.
Although pig fat certainly helped me (I slept better), I’ve found butter is even better. Butter has considerably more saturated fat than pig fat. The fat in butter is 60% saturated fat, whereas pig fat is 40% saturated fat. My consumption of 60 g/day of butter gives me 36 g/day saturated fat. In this study, persons in the highest quintile of intake averaged 20 g/day. The highest intake in the whole study (60,000 people) was 40 g/day. In addition to butter, I eat cheese, whole-fat yogurt, and meat, so I’m surely higher than that.
Via Whole Health Source.
The Marc Hauser Case
It would have been harsh to title this post “Marc Hauser, RIP”. However, unless the following is shown to be in error, I’ll never believe anything he writes or has written:
According to the document that was provided to The Chronicle, the experiment in question was coded by Mr. Hauser and a research assistant in his laboratory. A second research assistant was asked by Mr. Hauser to analyze the results. When the second research assistant analyzed the first research assistant’s codes, he found that the monkeys didn’t seem to notice the change in pattern. In fact, they looked at the speaker more often when the pattern was the same. In other words, the experiment was a bust.
But Mr. Hauser’s coding showed something else entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern—and, according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his coding was right, the experiment was a big success.
The second research assistant was bothered by the discrepancy. How could two researchers watching the same videotapes arrive at such different conclusions? He suggested to Mr. Hauser that a third researcher should code the results. In an e-mail message to Mr. Hauser, a copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, the research assistant who analyzed the numbers explained his concern. “I don’t feel comfortable analyzing results/publishing data with that kind of skew until we can verify that with a third coder,” he wrote.
A graduate student agreed with the research assistant and joined him in pressing Mr. Hauser to allow the results to be checked, the document given to The Chronicle indicates. But Mr. Hauser resisted, repeatedly arguing against having a third researcher code the videotapes and writing that they should simply go with the data as he had already coded it. After several back-and-forths, it became plain that the professor was annoyed.
“i am getting a bit pissed here,” Mr. Hauser wrote in an e-mail to one research assistant. “there were no inconsistencies! let me repeat what happened. i coded everything. then [a research assistant] coded all the trials highlighted in yellow. we only had one trial that didn’t agree. i then mistakenly told [another research assistant] to look at column B when he should have looked at column D. … we need to resolve this because i am not sure why we are going in circles.”
The research assistant who analyzed the data and the graduate student decided to review the tapes themselves, without Mr. Hauser’s permission, the document says. They each coded the results independently. Their findings concurred with the conclusion that the experiment had failed: The monkeys didn’t appear to react to the change in patterns.
They then reviewed Mr. Hauser’s coding and, according to the research assistant’s statement, discovered that what he had written down bore little relation to what they had actually observed on the videotapes. He would, for instance, mark that a monkey had turned its head when the monkey didn’t so much as flinch. It wasn’t simply a case of differing interpretations, they believed: His data were just completely wrong.
As word of the problem with the experiment spread, several other lab members revealed they had had similar run-ins with Mr. Hauser, the former research assistant says. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. There was, several researchers in the lab believed, a pattern in which Mr. Hauser reported false data and then insisted that it be used.
If taken literally, this description seems to imply that Hauser was making up data — writing down results much more favorable to his career than the actual results — and not realizing it! As if someone else was marking the data sheet. Since the videotapes are being coded by more than one person the fabrication/delusion/whatever would come to light, you might think, but he does it anyway! And then gets “a bit pissed” when things don’t work out perfectly.
I would love to hear Hauser’s side of this story, and see the videotapes being coded. So far Hauser has said nothing to make me doubt the straightforward interpretation: He made up data. After Saul Sternberg and I published a paper implying that Ranjit Chandra had made up data, Chandra retired.
Derek Bickerton says Hauser “fell victim to a soon-to-be-outdated view of evolution”. I am more interested in what this says about Harvard and Hauser’s co-authors. In particular, I wonder what Noam Chomsky, one of Hauser’s co-authors, will say. The incident makes Chomsky look bad. Hauser appears to be a person who pushes aside the truth of things. That Chomsky wrote a major paper with him suggests that Chomsky failed to notice this.
Thanks to Dave Lull and Language Log.
Open-Access Publication Fees at the BMJ
Open-access is why you’re reading this. Because my long self-experimentation paper was in an open-access journal, many people could easily read it. I’m sure this is why I managed to get a contract to write The Shangri-La Diet.
The BMJ is experimenting with a way to support open access: Ask for publication fees from authors with grants that include the appropriate support.
We are introducing this policy as the next step in our efforts to ensure the sustainability of open access publication of research in the BMJ, and we are doing so in the spirit of experimentation. Many research funding organisations, sponsors, and universities now provide grants that cover journals’ fees for open access publication.
Wise. While I was writing The Shangri-La Diet, I visited Alice Water’s Edible Schoolyard. I learned that it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, provided by foundations. As far as I could tell, the people in charge were doing nothing to reduce the subsidy required. Yet they wanted the idea to spread.
Assorted Links
- A new paper debunks Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick global temperature graph. “Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy-based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models.” Very well written.
- “Obscure, contemporary ethics books . . . were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books.” Paper. The study was done entirely online and covered 32 large university libraries.
- Gladys Reid, Australian discoverer of benefits of feeding zinc to farm animals. “Reid was reluctant to make direct dose recommendations after claiming the Director General of Agriculture had told her she would be taken to court for misleading practices if she did. However she won followers from farming wives in particular. Many would call asking for zinc advice after tiring of seeing suffering livestock and husbands on the brink of suicide from crippling stock and production losses.”
- Using a treadmill while working
- The Potti Scandal continues
- How loud are Sunchips?
Thanks to Don Sheridan and Melissa Francis.