The Shangri-La-Diet Effect
A friend wrote:
Took 3 tbsp of flaxseed oil this morning and held my nose and drank the oil w/water. Â It worked! Â I had brought food for work, I didn’t eat hardly any of it. Â And I didn’t think about losing weight all day, first time in all my life….
As far as I’m concerned, it never gets old.
What’s the “Natural” Pattern of Sleep?
According to this influential article by the historian A. Roger Ekirch,
Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.
This is called segmented sleep. Supposedly this is “natural”:
In a natural state, humans do not sleep a long consecutive bout throughout the night. The natural condition is bimodal – two bouts of sleep interrupted by a short episode of waking in the middle of the night.
And if you don’t like sleeping this way you are ignorant:
The modern assumption that consolidated sleep with no awakenings is the normal and correct way for human adults to sleep leads many to approach their doctors with complaints of maintenance i nsomnia or other sleep disorders. Their concerns might best be addressed by assurance that their sleep conforms to historically natural sleep patterns.
An amusing therapeutic approach. Whatever the problem, simply say “your problem conforms to historically natural patterns”.
I found that if I ate more animal fat I slept better. It is entirely possible that if all those Western Europeans walking up in the middle of the night had eaten more animal fat — as their ancestors may have several hundred thousand years ago before big fat-laden game animals were hunted to extinction — they would have slept through the night.
I found several ways to improve my sleep. After my sleep got a lot better — in particular, I stopped waking up in the middle of the night — I stopped getting colds, surely because my immune system was working better. The connection between sleep and immune function is obvious. Given a choice between (a) my immune system had returned to ancient levels of efficacy or (b) my immune system was working better than ever before in the history of the species, I’d bet on (a). Those Western Europeans with segmented sleep were in poor health, I’m sure. Perhaps their sleep was one sign of this.
Fasting Blood Sugar Reduced by Walking (cont.)
In an earlier post I described how I discovered that walking normalized my fasting blood sugar. In a comment on that post, Phil wrote:
You could also have consulted a doctor, or a diabetes website, and probably found out about the benefits of walking for controlling blood glucose a lot sooner.
My initial reaction was that this was wrong–that a search on the web would find hundreds of suggestions for managing diabetes and walking would be just one of them. Diabetes, after all, is a huge problem. A doctor would probably prescribe something. But what if Phil were right?
What would I find if I looked? I didn’t actually know. So I looked. Under “diabetes”, the Mayo Clinic website has two sections about treatment. Under “ treatment and drugs” are six suggestions, such as “healthy eating”. The suggestion called “physical exercise” recommends aerobic exercise. “Get your doctor’s OK to exercise,” it says. “Aim for at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise most days of the week,” it continues. My walking was not aerobic. Obviously one does not need a doctor’s approval to walk at a normal pace. In a second section called “ lifestyle and home remedies” were ten suggestions, such as “make a commitment to manage your diabetes”. No mention of walking.
What about the American Diabetes Association website? Their “ Treatment & Care” page says nothing about exercise. It mentions drugs and transplants (e.g., kidney transplants). There’s also a “ Food & Fitness” page. There are dozens of comments about what foods to eat. The “Fitness” section begins like this:
Exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle for everyone, and it’s especially important for people with diabetes. But exercise doesn’t necessarily mean running a marathon or bench-pressing 300 pounds. The goal is to get active and stay active by doing things you enjoy, from gardening to playing tennis to walking with friends. Here are some ideas for getting moving and making exercise part of your daily life.
The fitness section goes on and on about such topics as “What is Exercise?” and “Top 10 Benefits of Being Active”. Surely the ADA hired some hack to write it. It’s useless.
I conclude that if you already know that walking helps you can find evidence to support this. But searching the web will not lead you to try walking any time soon. You will be too busy changing your diet and trying all possible aerobic exercises. (And I did aerobic exercise several times a week and still had too-high blood sugar.) My initial reaction was wrong, it turned out: I found a large number of suggestions and my actual activity (walking 30-60 min/day) wasn’t one of them. No way could I “walk with friends” every day. (I’ve tried and failed miserably.) The next time I see my doctor I will find out what he would have recommended.
Interview for a Press Release
A writer for UC Berkeley media relations wanted to interview me for this press release about the Tsinghua Psychology department. I said I’d blogged a lot about Tsinghua but she said she wanted “fresh quotes”. So I wrote this:
Why did you decide to take this opportunity [become a professor at Tsinghua]?
Partly because I wanted to write more books — in addition to The Shangri-La Diet — and this job would let me, because I only teach one semester per year. Partly because I thought the undergraduates would be brilliant. Partly because I thought living in Beijing would be fascinating.
What have you learned/discovered?
How talented the students are. To get into Tsinghua as an undergraduate, you have to score extremely well on a nationwide test. Oh, so they’re bookish? Not quite. A month ago I went to a talent show put on by biomedical-engineering majors. One act was five girls dancing. After a few minutes someone told me that three of the girls were boys. I hadn’t noticed. It was really hard to tell.
Influenced by Mulan, perhaps.
Chinese View of Chinese Restaurant
Some of my Tsinghua students are in Berkeley. I took three of them to Great China, the closest Chinese restaurant. They didn’t like the Kung Pao Chicken. The sauce was wrong. It’s supposed to be a little bit sour and a little bit sweet but wasn’t. They liked an eggplant dish but complained the eggplant wasn’t infused with the flavor of the sauce.
Assorted Links
- Edward Jay Epstein’s blog (curiously called “web log”)
- Immoderation in all things, says Nassim Taleb
- Evidence that the autism-income correlation (rich parents have more autistic children than poor parents) is not entirely due to diagnostic differences
Thanks to JR Minkel and Dave Lull.
Fasting Blood Sugar Reduced by Walking
Richard Bernstein, an engineer with diabetes, invented home blood glucose monitoring. To learn more about this invention, about two years ago I started doing it myself. Mostly I measured my fasting blood sugar level — the level you measure in the morning before eating anything. My numbers were okay — averaging about 90 mg/dL. Optimal is 84, readings above 100 are considered pre-diabetic. I stopped for a while. Then I resumed, and was shocked to see that the numbers were considerably worse — the average was in the high 90s.
I tried to lower them. The obvious thing to do was to eat less carbs, but I already ate few carbs. I cut my carb intake still further but the problem didn’t go away. The graph below shows a solution I found by accident: to walk 30-60 minutes/day (closer to 60 than 30).
After months of trying this and that, and nothing working, one morning the reading was good. I realized I’d done something unusual the previous evening: Taken a 30-minute walk home in the evening rather than ride my bike. After that I deliberately walked 50-60 minutes almost every day and found that my readings were much better, as the graph shows. It wasn’t always walking steadily for 60 minutes — stopping now & then was okay. However, wandering through stores for 60 minutes (or any length of time) didn’t seem to work. My walks were in the afternoon or evening.
I have not read elsewhere that non-diabetics should do this sort of monitoring, but it helped me. I have seen “exercise” recommended as a way to improve blood sugar control but what I found is much more specific. This article recommends walking about 3 miles/day, which is what I did. This research found big effects of substantial aerobic exercise. My walking was just ordinary continuous walking. But the details of my exercise aren’t the point: The point is you can find out for yourself what works.
This sort of thing looks even better when you learn that GlaxoSmithKline, the giant drug company, hid evidence that its diabetes drug caused heart attacks. The drug has generated billions in revenue for the company.
Learning From Mulan
You may have seen the lovely Disney movie based on the story of Mulan, the girl who dresses as a boy to take her father’s place in the army. Even better is the original story, which is only 300-odd ancient Chinese characters. It begins like this:
Mulan was weaving. She was having trouble concentrating on her work. The previous night she had learned that her elderly father had been called to military service.
What a great beginning! Instantly you care. You could read every short story The New Yorker has published and not find a beginning as great as that. The essence of how a story should begin is so strong it reminds me of something that happened when I was a grad student. My roommates had cooked something with a lot of ginger. So that’s what ginger tastes like, I thought. I understood for the first time why ginger ale was called ginger ale.
Do Fermented Foods Improve Brain Function?
I’m sure we need to ingest plenty of bacteria for our digestion and immune systems to work properly. What about the brain? When I started eating lots of fermented foods, I didn’t notice any brain-related changes, such as changes in mood or sleep. Suggesting that fermented foods have little effect on the brain. But a new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests I reexamine the question. The researchers followed 160,000 high-school students in Taiwan for eleven years.
The incidence rate of suicide mortality in participants with current asthma at [the start of the study] was more than twice that of those without asthma (11.0 compared with 4.3 per 100,000 person-years), but there was no significant difference in the incidence of natural deaths.
Linking immune-system dysfunction (asthma) with brain dysfunction (suicide). I believe fermented foods will substantially reduce asthma. This finding makes it more plausible they’d also improve brain function.