Colony Collapse Disorder and My Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts9 Comments

At the risk of being extremely self-centered, my self-experimentation is related to this depressing news:

The decline of [America’s] estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter.

The bees vanish from the hives. What has surely happened is that their navigational systems have malfunctioned. Bees have dozens of things that must work for them to live, all of which need a certain environment. The bees live in a degraded environment. Which system will fail first? A neural system turns out to be the most sensitive to environmental degradation.

No one predicted this, nor did I predict that my self-experimentation would find many ways in which our environment, like the bees’s environment, has come to lack crucial stuff. But one reason for the two outcomes (colony collapse disorder, discoveries of my self-experimentation) is the same: The nervous system is especially sensitive to the environment. I’ve studied stuff controlled by the brain: sleep, weight, mood, arithmetic. Just as bee brains are the first part of bees to be crippled by a bad environment, our brains are the first part of us to improve when given a better environment.

Life Imitates Art: Climate-Change Edition

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In a previous post I wrote about one of the silliest letters ever signed by a group of very smart people. At the end of my comment, I wrote:

If a letter from 100 United States Senators was full of spelling and grammar errors, would you trust it?

The letter was written by Peter Gleick, a MacArthur Prize winner. In a follow-up essay in the Huffington Post, he twice called ice floes “ice flows” (“there really are polar bears on ice flows”). Who says life doesn’t imitate art?

Distinguished Scienists Fail to Think for Themselves

Seth Roberts35 Comments

A long list of National Academy of Science members, including several Nobel Prize winners, have published a letter in Science supporting the idea that humans have caused/will cause serious global warming. The letter is striking in several ways — how preachy it is, how it overstates its case, how it fails to provide evidence, and how it ignores the main arguments of skeptics (at least, intelligent skeptics).

It begins:

All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action.

“Citizens”, huh? This might interest third-graders; if they think that the brighter skeptics or most readers of Science don’t know these “basic scientific facts” they are mistaken.

The letter goes on to claim that the idea that humans are seriously warming the planet is as well established — at least, in the same category of firmly-established theories — as the conclusion that “today’s organisms evolved from ones living in the past”. That is an overstatement.

And the letter ends with hand-waving. In place of evidence that supports what they claim, they simply repeat the claims in detail (e.g., “Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth’s climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes”).

The letter is unintentionally revealing. Here’s what I would consider reasonable evidence for serious human-generated global warming:

  1. Temperature higher now than in the past.
  2. Temperature increasing at a higher rate now than in the past.
  3. Good (= verified) model shows serious human-generated warming.

No. 1 isn’t clearly true; the Medieval Warm Period appears to be as warm as now. (Mann et al. understood this point; they tried to diminish the Medieval Warm Period.) No. 2 isn’t clearly true. For example, the 1930s may have been as warm as recent decades. No. 3 isn’t true. Models such as Hansen’s haven’t been shown to predict correctly. There’s no reason to take them seriously.

So No. 3 is off the table (current models are untrustworthy). That leaves Nos. 1 and 2, the failure of which to be clearly true points in the direction of no serious human-generated warming. If a theory makes two predictions, both of which appear wrong, it would be wise to start doubting the theory rather than lecture the rest of us on “basic scientific facts”.

This line of reasoning (ask whether the humans-have-caused-serious-warming idea makes correct predictions) isn’t complicated or obscure but does require you think for yourself rather than accept what you’re told. Apparently no one in this long list of distinguished scientists has done so.

If a letter from 100 United States Senators was full of spelling and grammar errors, would you trust it? Well, no . . . and you might wonder about a world with such a poorly-educated ruling class.

More About Treadmills and Learning

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In Beijing, a friend and I were talking about how to improve high-school teaching. I said two things would help: more personalization, and more movement. Movement really helps learning, I said. I read something about that recently, my friend said. She meant this post of mine (treadmill walking made it pleasant to study Chinese)!

Paul Sas has drawn my attention to a man with a remarkable memory:

JB is an active, articulate septuagenarian who began memorizing Paradise Lost at the age of 58 in 1993 as a form of mental activity to accompany his physical exercise at the gym. Although he had memorized various poems in earlier years, he never attempted anything of this magnitude. JB stated that he wanted to do something special to commemorate the then-upcoming millennium. “Why not something really challenging like, oh, ‘Paradise Lost’?” he said. He began by walking on a treadmill one day while trying to memorize the opening lines of the poem.

He eventually memorized the whole poem, about 11,000 lines. Apparently the scientists who studied him ignored the treadmill.

A learning psychologist might say that walking provides mental activation, we learn better when we’re stimulated. (For example, we learn better when we’re scared.) My point is treadmill walking produced an hedonic change: I found learning more enjoyable when I was walking.

One Million Chinese in Mexico

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Contradicting the notion that you can find anything on the Internet, I cannot find any info about what I was told in a Beijing Starbucks: A few years, a city was started in Mexico where a million Chinese workers will manufacture stuff. Because of NAFTA, the stuff they make will have tariff-free access to the American market. And shipping from Mexico will be cheaper than shipping from China. The Chinese workers will come over for a limited time, such as one year.

What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs

Seth Roberts1 Comment

What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, a collection of essays, has just been published by New Village Press (who sent me a copy). Several of the essays are very good, such as those by Pierre Desrochers, Janette Sadik-Khan (in charge of improving New York City’s streets), Daniel Kemmis, Robert Sirman, and Mary Rowe, but my favorite was the one by Janine Benyus. Benyus came in contact with Jacobs when Jacobs phoned her to ask her to speak at the 1997 Toronto conference Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter. Benyus was thrilled to be speaking to the person whose writing she’d studied to learn how to write. Benyus wrote about increasing appreciation of the value of biomimicry, learning how nature has solved this or that problem to help us solve the same problem.

[On the Galapagos Islands] I watched a quiet engineer named Paul stand motionless before a mangrove as if in deep conversation. He finally called me over and pointed: “This mangrove needs fresh water but its roots are in saltwater, which means it somehow desalinates using only the sun’s energy. No fossil fuels, no pumps. Do you know how we do it? We force water through a membrane at 900 pounds of pressure per square inch, trapping salt on one side. When it clogs, we apply more pressure, more energy.”

Then Paul asked the question I’ve been working to solve ever since: “How is it that I, as a desalination engineer with a five-year degree and twenty-year experience, never once learned how nature strips salt from water?”

Brent Pottenger Comments

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I asked Brent if he had any comments on his experience (after he adopted an ancestral diet, his migraines and sinus infections stopped). He wrote:

The quality of my life (mental + physical health) improved even further when I started eating slices of butter throughout the day awhile back. For awhile, I was using spoonfuls of coconut butter/coconut oil and/or Greek yogurt for this satiation role, but once I added butter slices to the mix, I beefed up my nutritional ‘bag of tricks’ quite a bit. Of course, I had cooked in butter for a few years, but I never made the link to simply eat it in slices, despite enjoying its taste so much. And, a little bit goes a long way. I eat cultured butter from a few different brands and a few different locations of the world (hoping this diversification may carry extra beneficial side-effects: different strains of micro-organisms, etc.). I try to find brands that are pastured too (more naturally-occurring Omega-3′s, evidently). I usually suck on/chew on the butter slowly because I’ve found this has improved my oral health too: animal lipids (plus coconut oil) are good for epithelial tissue health (that’s why I rub coconut oil on my face and skin and rub butter, coconut oil, and yogurt on my hands). Pairing butter and coffee (I eat the butter; I don’t put it in my coffee; I drink my coffee black) has become a nice start to my day (Dave Lull even found a study speculating on the benefits of coupling hyperlipidity and anti-oxidants together in this way; I think it’s also a useful approach to detoxifying the liver), particularly when I know I am going to workout that morning–this little hyperlipidity kick seems to help in the gym too (when I am not fasting). Using butter slices in this manner is a nice compliment to fasting intermittently–these two practices allow me to enjoy low-caloric intake periods pleasantly. They set up my “feasts” nicely. Whenever I have a “grumbling” stomach, or I feel a “biting” sensation in my stomach, I eat a small piece of butter, and my mood and body tend to stabilize. And, like bacon and yogurt and eggs, it’s cheap. Butter has certainly been an excellent ‘cheap health option’ for me.

He later added:

Now I am working intently on Meta-Rules. Meta-Rules are simply ‘rules for making rules’ to live by. Three dynamics concern me deeply: (1) The problem of induction; (2) biochemical individuality; and, (3) factoring for the unseen. For instance, one of my nutritional Meta-Rules is: “Don’t consume anything that causes a negative physiological reaction.” From this Meta-Rule, I have deduced the following rule to live by (as one example): “Don’t consume high-fructose corn syrup.” A marker for monitoring this rule could be facial inflammation and ‘puffiness’ post-consumption, as one possibility. That’s an example of a higher-level precept empowering an individual to deduce for him or herself how that concept applies (or does not apply) in his/her own specific case (I like the term: Patient of One). Over time, I suspect that something like William Baines’ Biomedical Mutual Organization (BMO) could emerge if enough people were self-experimenting with Meta-Rules and interacting about their experiences and results. Amongst this cohort of parallel n=1 clinical trials, some convergence of Meta-Rules may occur, indicating ways that our bodies are the same, and also showing how our bodies differ individually when it comes to things like diet, exercise, and lifestyle design.

To explain why headaches can be due to inflammation, he pointed me to this.

Positive Side Effects

Seth Roberts5 Comments

What happened to Brent Pottenger — when he improved his diet along ancestral lines, a serious health problem unexpectedly went away — also happened to Aaron Blaisdell. He improved his diet along ancestral lines and his sun sensitivity went away. A non-nutritional version happened to me: By adopting elements of Stone-Age life, I slept much better. And, at the same time, I stopped getting colds. Another example involves flaxseed oil. My discovery that flaxseed oil made my brain work much better implied that prehistoric diets contained more omega-3. A dosage that produced brain improvement also greatly improved gum health and recovery from injury.

This is the opposite of conventional medicine. As far as I know, every major drug has serious bad side effects. The drugs often help the problem for which they are prescribed, but your health has a good chance of becoming worse — sometimes much worse — in other ways. Against Medical Advice (2008) by James Patterson and Hal Friedman is the true story of a boy (Friedman’s son) with severe Tourette’s. (Recommended by Alexandra Carmichael.) In an epilogue, Friedman says, “Our family is convinced that his most extreme symptoms were caused by medicines prescribed but with unhappy results, almost without exception.” The cure was worse than the disease.

The phenomenon of positive side effects isn’t mysterious. Our bodies need certain inputs to work well. The whole body evolved with the same inputs. When something crucial is missing, several things break down. And when the missing thing is supplied, several things get better. We write all our words using the same 26 letters. If one letter is missing, many words will be misspelled. When the missing letter is supplied, many words will be spelled correctly. Fixing one word fixes many words. For example, suppose you lack “k”. Blink will be spelled “blin”, mark will be spelled “mar”, and so on. When you realize you need “k” to spell blink, at the same time you will improve the spelling of many other words.
The implication of positive side effects is profound. Finding the right inputs isn’t a new wrinkle on current health care, it’s a whole new way of being healthy. Public health officials haven’t had much luck selling prevention but maybe that was because their ideas about prevention have been poor — telling people to eat according to the Food Pyramid, for example. And if you are sick (as Brent was), you are highly motivated to do something about it. The old saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure should be revised: a ounce of the right cure is worth a pound of prevention. The dietary improvements that cured Brent’s migraines will prevent many other problems. Going from the old saying to the new saying is like going from thinking the sun revolves around the earth to realizing the earth revolves around the sun.

A great change is coming.

The Ancestral Health Symposium.

Better Thinking By Standing

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Dan Wich, a faithful reader of this blog, told me that my work had helped him. I asked for details. He wrote:

I have a desk job and began to experience back pain that was aggravated while sitting. So I bought a desk designed for both sitting and standing, and spent most of my time standing.

I was on the lookout for improved sleep patterns because of your experiments, and I noticed similar results. But the biggest benefits I observed were unexpected. First, my ability to focus and prioritize improved while standing; sitting for long periods made me more likely to avoid challenging tasks. Second, I felt more creative while standing, avoiding the problem-solving tunnel vision I’d often get after sitting for a while.

Being able to switch between standing and sitting without changing anything else has led me to dismiss other causes for those mental benefits. And I wasn’t expecting to receive them, making me doubt the placebo effect is at work. So, I think I can corroborate your results of improved mental function while standing.

Brent Pottenger and the Benefits of an Ancestral Diet

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I read somewhere that Brent Pottenger (blog here) had benefited from adopting an ancestral diet. (Brent, Aaron Blaisdell and I are organizing the Ancestral Health Symposium.) I asked him for details. His answer:

I had debilitating migraines and chronic sinus infections for years, despite being a top-performing multi-sport athlete and following Conventional Wisdom (Food Pyramid, etc.) nutritional recommendations diligently. I’ve always been interested in living as healthy as possible, so I had made sure to do things like eat lots of whole grains. Essentially, components of my diet were causing chronic inflammation, but I did not know it. As a result, I had to take antibiotics (Z packs, erythromycin, amoxicillin, etc.) repeatedly for many years (a scary thing in light of the importance of gut flora), usually about 5 to 10 times per year for infections. My migraines got so bad that I had to go to the emergency room four times during a 1.5 year span to get pain medications because my prescription migraine drugs and painkillers (like Vicodin) did not work. The migraines were so painful that I would shut down and could not even take a nap to let them pass.

I talked about it in part at BIL:PIL:

I did not set out to cure myself, but that’s what happened. I started down what turned out to be the right health path because I read Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan. In that book, Nassim referenced Art DeVany. I read Art’s work on Evolutionary Fitness. Nassim and Art dovetail nicely, and the idea that evolution could inform health decisions made sense to me. That nudged me to cut grains (and other things) out of my diet. Art also tipped me to Mark Sisson, and I related really well to Mark’s personal story as an athlete with a passion for health, and I enjoyed the logic behind his Primal Blueprint framework. From there, I got actively involved in what I call the Ancestral Health epistemocracy that has emerged in the blogosphere–Mark, Art, Robb Wolf, Matt Metzgar, Tim Penn, and I actually co-authored an unpublished book together in 2007. At this point, though, I still did not know that I had resolved my health problems for good; I just knew that these ideas were working–I gained lean muscle mass, had more energy, felt great, etc.–as I tested them on my own body. Through this involvement as both an e-patient and a hobbyist blogger/essayist, I realized that a few years had passed and I had not experienced a migraine or a sinus infection. Now, after over three years without a migraine and having only been ill one time, I realize that I cured myself nutritionally, as a side-effect of tinkering with the aforementioned ideas. During this process, I also found out about your work from Nassim. For lots of reasons, your work on self-experimentation seemed really valuable to me. For example, my neurologist examined me and prescribed some drugs that were, looking back, quite dangerous to take for a problem that was caused by things like grains, legumes, processed vegetable oils, and Conventional Wisdom nutritional guidelines. My self-experimentation was, ironically, much safer and ultimately more sophisticated from a philosophy of science perspective because I could react to local feedback that my neurologist did not have access to: my own body. From there, I realized that we are all experts in our own body and that physicians must partner with us respectfully if they want to act as agents who help us find cures for health problems. I’ve written about my experiences in bits and pieces elsewhere, but this is a brief synopsis that captures most of the highlights in one place.

Basically, thanks to an inquiring mind and persistence that I owe to my mom’s mentorship, I transformed my physiology remarkably thanks to trial-and-error solution searching with things I learned from Nassim, Art, Mark, and you. From there, I’ve added more “maps” into my portfolio of health practices from Doug McGuff, Keith Norris, Kurt Harris, and many others (many are listed on the Symposium presenter list). As a result, I no longer consume health-care resources and these resources can go to treat real medical problems. How remarkable were the improvements? One way to capture that besides the disappearance of my health problems is to look at my weight changes: at the same waist size, I’ve gone from 135 lbs. in 2002 to ~145 lbs. in 2004 to ~170 in 2010. That says something.

He later added:

Things I did to relieve my migraines that didn’t work:

– prescription glasses (theory = eye strain)
– cutting out caffeine (theory = ? stress)
– napping more (theory = better sleep)

None of those experiments cured my health challenges. Only nutrition worked. Very few environmental factors have fluctuated much over the past ten years: I’ve lived in the same hours, slept in the same bed, been a student, played the same sports in the same places around town, etc.

His old diet and his new diet:

Pre-Ancestral Health diet: I followed the Food Pyramid and associated concepts closely, so I consumed lots of whole grains (breads, pastas, granola, bagels, etc.), fruits (whole and juiced), vegetables, non-fat milk, non-fat yogurt, some meat (all kinds), coffee, tea, beans (black, pinto, others), and some cheese (pasteurized) and nuts. I ate things like Cliff Bars, drank Odwalla smoothies, etc.

Ancestral Health diet: I follow a very carnivorous paradigm, so I consume lots of meats (from pork bellies to raw Ahi tuna) and eggs, lots of cultured butter, coconut butter & oil, full-lipid Greek Yogurt (highest saturated fat content of any yogurt on the market), some vegetables (onions, avocados, greens) and mushrooms (sauteed in butter with onions and meats), essentially no fruit (I’m in a ‘Fructose Detox’ self-experiment), a little raw cheese, coffee, tea, essentially no alcohol. I also supplement with some Vitamin D, which is anabolic I think as well. I take fish oil when I have not had fish for awhile. I’ve eaten fish my entire life, though.

I attribute my health improvements directly (and completely) to diet. As my diet evolved, I also altered how I train, transitioning a bit from ‘some long-distance running and sports playing’ to ‘mainly high-intensity, short-duration training (more weights and sprinting) and still sports playing as my exercise approaches. This energy expenditure evolution has, in my opinion, contributed to my stark body composition changes (lean muscle mass gain), but I think that my health improvements are due to diet and that my body composition would be much worse off if my diet had not changed like it has.

I will comment on this in my next post.