Assorted Links

May 5, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts1 Comment

Washington Post covers evidence for the hygiene hypothesis
Renata Adler answers audience questions (video)
Mother Jones criticizes probiotics
Rating prisons on Yelp. Quantified Institutions.

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.

Acquired Butterphilia

May 4, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts19 Comments

Because of my finding that butter improved my mental speed, in 2012, Dustin Lee, a programmer in Bozeman, Montana, decided to try eating lots of butter. He thought he’d do it for a month.

He ate a half-stick (2 ounces = 57 grams) every day. Nothing fancy: Kirkland Salted Sweet Cream Butter. At first it was repulsive. He had trouble eating it. He ate it with other foods, such as soup or pancakes. Or he would take lots of tiny slices (without other foods). It felt like more butter than he wanted.

After about two weeks of this, however, he decided this is pretty good. He was enjoying it. He began looking forward to the slices. He made them larger. He prefers the butter hard, straight out of the fridge. He now enjoys eating the fat on meat. He stopped limiting how much animal fat he eats. (His wife still cuts it off meat.) Now he gets lots of fat from lots of sources. Butter is the easiest source.

His children (7 and 9 years old) don’t eat butter directly, but he allows them to eat as much as they want. They eat a lot more butter than other children. At other people’s houses, he jokes about it. Incidentally, he tried taking Vitamin D3 in the morning (around 7 am) but it made him so sleepy in the evening he stopped.

This impressed me. I’d been eating a half-stick of butter per day for a few years (half as much was less effective), but I always ate it with a little bit of meat, e.g., sliced roast beef (Berkeley) or roast pork (Beijing). That was less than ideal because I kept running out of the meat. I started eating it Dustin’s way (straight) and found it’s fine. It’s like dessert, halfway between ice cream and cheese.

Acne Club: A New Way to Fight Acne

May 1, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts11 Comments

Recently I posted that my work resembles the work of the artist Hong Yi. Her work shows that profitable beautiful art can be made from the cheapest materials; my work shows that non-trivial useful science can be done by anyone. A reader named David commented:

Your work and discoveries, just like Hong’s, are very inspirational. . . . They send a message that every individual has the potential to contribute something to society even with no or limited budget.

This hadn’t occurred to me. It should have. I could have made this point in talks, for example. Beyond the obvious point, David was saying that the more your personal science could help others, the more likely you would be to do it. The prospect of helping yourself and others will surely be stronger motivation than the prospect of helping only yourself.

How can one person’s personal science help others? This doesn’t happen automatically, it has to be arranged. My Journal of Personal Science and the Make Yourself Healthy Meetup group are two ways of facilitating this. What about other ways?

David’s comment made me think of another way: Acne Club, that is, a high school club for people with acne. The purpose of the club is to promote personal science about acne. Members of the club try to find the causes of their acne, partly by self-experimentation. They meet to share results and ideas (e.g., treatments to try, how to measure acne) and encourage each other. The discovery of two groups of “primitive” people who have no acne suggests that all acne has environmental causes. If a high school group could identify even one environmental cause, it would be a huge contribution to human well-being — especially the well-being of high-school students. I think this is quite possible.

I had acne as a teenager. If you start such a club, I would be happy to help you however I can. For example, I could give advice about measurement and experimental design and could publicize what you learn.

Assorted Links

April 30, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts4 Comments

Nigerian fermented foods
I point out that certain results in the BMJ are impossible
Big increase in ADHD diagnoses
Preface and Chapter 1 (Abraham Lincoln) of Edward Jay Epstein’s new book, Annals of Unsolved Crime
How to taste umami (very good)
No mortality difference between vegetarians and non-vegetarians (2009 study). This is evidence against the new TMAO theory of heart disease (carnitine in meat is converted by bacteria to TMAO, which causes heart disease).

News You Can Use: Tonsillectomies Are a Bad Idea

April 29, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts2 Comments

A reader named Nicole, who lives in Washington D.C., writes:

I have been an avid follower of Seth’s blog since Boingboing.net first posted something about or by him. And when I heard that my brother was planning to get my niece’s tonsils removed, I remembered the Boingboing article Seth wrote about tonsils and their important, if not completely understood, role as part of our immune system. So I sent that article along. My brother responded quickly with: “Wow, thanks. I won’t be getting her tonsils out any time soon.”

Nice to hear!

Standing Improves IBS Symptoms

April 27, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts2 Comments

At least in one case. A 23-year-old woman, who lives in Manchester UK and works as a typist, wrote me:

I’ve recently been trying out a standing desk, partly due to reading the posts you made about them. For the past few weeks, I have been tending to stand instead of sit when at my laptop, normally for more than 3 hours a day. I sit down when I get bored of standing and I walk around lots.

I was looking out for mental clarity effects but I’ve not seen a clear effect in that direction. What I did find surprising, though, is that my chronic but mild IBS symptoms have abated. I get heartburn/acid reflux regularly, and gut cramping, but since standing more these have all but stopped. I think it’s because standing up puts less pressure on my stomach and gut and leaves them more opened up.

I asked how long she’d had the symptoms (heartburn/acid reflux, etc.):

I think the last 3-4 years, but it’s hard to say when. I think my IBS probably started happening when I started having problems with anxiety but I wasn’t keeping track back then. I’ve suffered from recurring depression for 10 years now, but severe anxiety for me is relatively new. I think it would make sense if it coincided with the anxiety – I’ve heard of Citalopram (an anti-anxiety medicine) also being prescribed in a low dose for IBS, and some of my friends who have taken Citalopram + who have had IBS have had it go away. I never actually got a diagnosis for IBS, but it seems a fair description. The symptoms are heartburn, gut cramping (sometimes very painful) and my stool being quite variable in solidity.

I asked how long had she been standing more than usual:

4 weeks, when I’ve been able to. At work I have to sit, often with bad posture, but the last two weeks I have been on holiday. When I stand, I notice an improvement on the same day that I’ve been standing more. Part of what motivated me to stand with using my computer was when I recently spent a day walking around Manchester (where I live). I noticed that my energy levels were much smoother even though I hadn’t eaten very much and that my gut and stomach felt more OK than usual.

I asked what other remedies she’d tried:

About a year after I started regularly getting heartburn, a friend told me about antacids, so I started taking them when I needed them, but they weren’t always effective and they don’t help with gut cramping. Peppermint tea worked to some extent but would give me strange headaches and made me feel bloated. Peppermint oil capsules were an improvement – no bloating but still giving me headaches. I’ve also tried various dietary changes. I find that dry carbs (like toast or potato crisps) tend to bring on or make worse heartburn and cramping so I sometimes avoid those. Also when I’m hungry I get heartburn quite badly, so I’ve tried to eat things that level out my blood sugar over time more (e.g. eating more fat and protein, fewer sugars and carbs). I tried probiotic soy yoghurt (I’m vegan) to see if that would help but it doesn’t agree with my stomach. I also have tried probiotic supplement but I’m not sure that I’ve seen improvement from that either.

She added, “I haven’t had IBS symptoms on days that I have been standing yet!” So it is perfectly clear that this is cause and effect — standing reduces IBS symptoms.

More Wrinkles = Too Little Vitamin K2?

April 26, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts18 Comments

This post (“The vitamin deficiency that’s written all over your face”) by Sarah Pope at Healthy Home Economist is very good. It takes various pieces of data and puts them together to suggest that people who don’t get enough Vitamin K2 will get facial wrinkles sooner. The most interesting data is the difference between women in Shanghai, Bangkok and Tokyo — the Tokyo women had the fewest wrinkles. They eat the most natto, of course, and natto is notoriously high in Vitamin K2. Pope should have added that Tokyo women probably also eat a lot more of other fermented foods than Shanghai and Bangkok women — for example, more pickles and miso.

Another example of the same sort of reasoning:

Further research which bolsters the notion that getting plenty of K2 in the diet makes for smoother facial features is found in the research of Korean scientists and was published in the journal Nephrology in 2008. The rate at which the kidneys are able to filter the blood is an important measure of overall kidney function. Researchers found that reduced renal filtration rate was associated with increased facial wrinkling. What does decreased kidney filtration rate predict? You guessed it – Vitamin K2 deficiency, according to American research published the year after the Korean study.

I wonder what other nutritional deficiencies poor kidney function is associated with. These associations are far from convincing but it is a new (to me) and testable idea. And Vitamin K2 is quite safe.

Make Yourself Healthy Meetup Group: Report of First Meeting

April 25, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts4 Comments

The first meeting of the Make Yourself Healthy Meetup group happened last night in Berkeley. It went great. About 15 people attended. We heard four fascinating talks — five, if you count mine. About 10 people wanted to talk so there was far more material than time (the meeting lasted about 2 hours).

Here are brief recaps of the talks.

Me. I explained why I started the group. I described how I came to believe that non-experts can discover important things about health that health experts, such as doctors, don’t know. These non-expert discoveries deserve more attention than they would get on a online forum (e.g., a MedHelp forum about acne). They can help people with other problems and can encourage people with other problems.

Katie Reid. After her youngest child was diagnosed with autism, she tried many things that didn’t work. She tried removing gluten from her daughter’s diet — a common treatment — and that made things somewhat better. The partial success encouraged her to look further at food. On someone’s blog, she came across the idea that MSG (monosodium glutamate) can cause autism symptoms. To her surprise, she learned that MSG is in many things, including toothpaste and juice, without explicit statement on the label. When she removed all MSG from her daughter’s diet, her daughter greatly improved and now, three years later, attends class with normal children. All of her autistic symptoms are gone. Katie herself felt much better when she stopped eating any MSG. She lost weight and a low-grade headache disappeared. She has a website and a video about this. Here is a video about this by someone else.

Anonymous. He is 29 years old and has struggled with depression, anxiety and lack of motivation. No long term progress in therapy. Yoga has helped. He found some benefits from meditation, but to get the benefits requires consistency and consistency requires hope, which I don’t always have. He started thinking critically about what he eats. Read Eat to Live by Furman and Disease-proof Your Child. Eating whole foods plant-based lowered his blood pressure to 90/60, His weight went from 170 to 155 and is now in low 160s. (It was 160 when he was 19.) He has food addiction and technology addictions, demons that he is battling. Other attendees suggested six things he might try, such as eating more animal fat.

Kylene Miller. She spoke about the value of anti-oxidants. She became a Type 1 diabetic at age 5 and has been sick a lot in her life. She met Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, who told her to eat a lot of anti-oxidants. She started eating large amounts of Vitamins E and C. Then she started trying get her antioxidants from food. She discovered healthy chocolate — cold-pressed so that the anti-oxidants aren’t destroyed — made by the Xocai company. It has a huge ORAC (oxygen radical absorbance capacity) score. She had gastric paresis. Four years of throwing up first thing in the morning. She had stopped taking lots of antioxidants. After she started taking them again, her gastric paresis disappeared. She is a distributor for the chocolate. She passed out samples of the chocolate.

Janet. When she was 19 (she is now 22) she suddenly felt very tired most of the time, even though she was sleeping 12 hours per night. She decided what tests she wanted, but her doctor would not order them. After her doctor gave her the blood-test-order form to bring to the testing center, she checked the boxes for the tests she wanted. Three supplements have been especially helpful, including isocort and progesterone (both OTC, over the counter). You can listen to her talk here (thanks to Jane Cho).

I had worried that too few people would have stories to tell, but one attendee lived one block away She had high blood pressure and had lowered it without medicine. I wanted to videotape the talks but during the second one the camera battery died — and, anyway, I was doing it wrong, someone told me. I asked whether the next meeting should be in one month or two months and everyone voted for one month. We need a venue that permits longer meetings.

QS Contest: What Would You Do With a Body Media Armband?

April 25, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth RobertsLeave a comment

A la Google Glass, Gary Wolf announces a Quantified Self contest/give-away:

In conjunction with our upcoming QS Europe Conference in Amsterdam on May 11/12, our friends at BodyMedia have agreed to donate a complete personal SenseWear System (retail price $2,500), a state-of-the-art wearable sensor that allows raw data output. That’s going to be our prize. So if you have good questions, we can supply you with a way to collect the data.

The best answer wins the sensor.

Cheap Good Science

April 24, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts7 Comments

Last weekend I attended EG, a TED-like conference in Monterey. One of the speakers, a woman named Hong Yi, made representational art from cheap materials – a portrait from coffee-stained napkins, for example. The most stirring talks were by Matt Harding (dancing video) and Jo Montgomery and Chuck Johnson (circus school) but she, more than anyone else, seemed to have done something with big implications. Her art was attractive, profitable, very cheap, and diverse (many materials, many representational styles). If anyone else has ever done this, I don’t know about it. She is an architect in Shanghai and her art began because she was in China. At a wholesale supply store, she came across very cheap candles. She realized she could buy enough of them to make a picture with one candle = one pixel. I imagine people will be watching Harding’s video a hundred years from now and the underlying point of Montgomery and Johnson’s circus school will be valid forever, but both were enormous expensive unique efforts. Hong’s work was much easier and cost almost nothing. The benefit/cost ratio was very high and millions of people could do something like what she did.

I realized that my work resembled hers. She had discovered how to make cheap good art — not just once but many times, using a wide range of materials (e.g., different foods) and representational styles. I had figured out how to do cheap good science, answering not just one question (e.g., how to sleep better) but many questions (how to sleep better, how to lose weight, how to be in a better mood, etc.). My science cost almost nothing, so I could do a lot of it (do thousands of experiments) and managed to discover many things. In both Hong Yi’s case and mine, the Internet was not needed to do the work but was essential for publicizing it. It didn’t fit the usual channels.

For a long time, I called my work self-experimentation. It’s true, but misleading, because almost all self-experimentation you’ve heard of isn’t like mine. The book Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine is full of self-experimentation quite different than mine. Most of it is by doctors, designed to show that a new treatment is safe. The scientist tries the treatment himself to protect others. The self-experimentation in Who Goes First? is closer to demonstration than experiment. In contrast, the treatments I’ve studied (e.g., butter, morning faces, standing a lot) are perfectly safe. My work is about finding new ideas. It is about changing my own beliefs, not trying to convince other people of what I believe.

More recently, I might describe my work by saying it’s an example of the Quantified Self (QS) movement. Again, this is true, but also somewhat misleading. My work does involve self-quantification and self-tracking. Like many QSers, I do hope to become healthier as a result. What’s misleading is that the tracking is only part of the effort, I don’t measure many things, and my tracking isn’t high-tech. I’m trying to discover new cause-effect relationships (e.g., new ways to improve sleep). This is not a large part of the QS conversation.

If I describe my work as cheap science, on the other hand, what you automatically think of is pretty accurate. Scientists look for cause-effect relationships (it is central to science); I look for cause-effect relationships. Scientists do many experiments; so do I. Scientists pay great attention to the scientific literature (what has already been done, what is already known); so do I. When something becomes much cheaper (e.g., photography or computing becomes much cheaper), everyone understands that the activity can be done by many more people. That is inherent in my work. I am doing science that many people can do — many more people than can do professional science. The terms self-experimentation and quantified self do not convey this.

Like the term cheap travel, the term cheap science suggests freedom. That too is a big part of what I do. I have vastly more freedom than professional scientists. I can test treatments they can’t. I can entertain ideas (“crazy”) they can’t. I can spend longer on one project than they can. So if I describe what I do as cheap science, the rest of what I say (“I’ve discovered new ways to sleep better, lose weight, etc.”) makes more sense. And maybe the whole activity sounds more accessible, whereas self-experimentation and quantified self seem like the sort of activities that caused the word geek to be invented.

Seth Robert's Blog Mirror

Personal Science, Self-Experimentation, Scientific Method

Assorted Links

Acquired Butterphilia

Acne Club: A New Way to Fight Acne

Assorted Links

News You Can Use: Tonsillectomies Are a Bad Idea

Standing Improves IBS Symptoms

More Wrinkles = Too Little Vitamin K2?

Make Yourself Healthy Meetup Group: Report of First Meeting

QS Contest: What Would You Do With a Body Media Armband?

Cheap Good Science