In 1995, hoping to improve my sleep, I decided to watch TV early in the morning, for reasons explained here. One Monday morning I watched tapes of Jay Leno and David Letterman that I’d made. Nothing happened. On Tuesday, however, I woke up and felt great: cheerful, eager and yet somehow calm. I had never felt so good so early in the morning. Monday had been a normal day, I had slept a normal length of time. The good feeling was puzzling. Then I remembered the TV I had watched. It had seemed so innocuous. The notion that 20 minutes of ordinary TV Monday morning could make me feel better Tuesday but not Monday seemed preposterous. Absurd. Couldn’t possibly be true.

Except for one thing. I had done something to improve my sleep. Plenty of research connected sleep and depression. That research made it more plausible that something done to improve sleep would improve mood. I went on to confirm the morning faces/mood linkage in many ways. The research connecting sleep and depression had been the first signs of a hidden mechanism (we need to see morning faces for our mood regulatory system to work properly) I consider very important.

Two new studies further connect sleep and depression. One of them found that people who sleep normal amounts of time are less influenced by genes associated with depression than those who sleep longer or shorter lengths of time. The other found that teenagers who sleep less than usual are at greater risk of depression.

The theories that psychiatrists have used to justify anti-depressants (e.g., “chemical imbalance”) do not explain the many connections between sleep and depression. Depression is associated with lots of bad things, unsurprisingly, but the association with bad sleep is especially strong. It is not easily explained away. You might think that if you are depressed you are more tired than usual and therefore sleep more/better than usual. The opposite is true. All this might have generated, among psychiatric researchers, a search for a better theory — an explanation of depression that can explain the sleep/depression connections — but it hasn’t.

 

“We need only one Santa” is a line from a video by Icelandic’s Best Party, which won enough support that its leader, Jon Gnarr, became mayor.

“We need only one Santa” would have been a good response to any big health promise in the last 20 years. Not one has come true, just as there is no Santa Claus. “Beating cancer now is a realistic ambition because, at long last, we largely know its true genetic and chemical characteristics,” wrote James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, in 2009. We need only one Santa, Dr. Watson.

At the NIH, “one of our biggest projects is the BRAIN initiative . . . We are bringing together the best and the brightest people from a variety of disciplines to figure out, over the next 10 years, exactly how the brain works,” said Francis Collins, head of the NIH, a few days ago. We need only one Santa, Dr. Collins.

When friends complain about evil government (e.g., NSA surveillance), I tell them “never underestimate the stupidity of government employees” — by which I mean their stupidity outweighs their self-interest. The Obamacare website fiasco is a good illustration. Everyone has heard “power corrupts” but closer to the truth is power makes you stupid.

The Obama website fiasco had many precursors. One was in the 1950s — in the details of the introduction of the polio vaccine.

Rather than staging a long series of careful field trials with appropriate scientific evaluation, Salk darted ahead on his own in the remainder of 1953 and 1954. The trials were successful. The foundation released the results to the press, and such were the nation’s expectations that from that point there was no turning back. In August 1954 the foundation ordered five drug companies to begin producing mass lots of vaccine, on the basis of a formula for inactivating the virus with formaldehyde, according to a procedure Salk himself had devised. . . . James Shannon remembered very well what happened next. At this point he had become the associate director of the NIH. “I was working over the weekend and I got a telephone call from Los Angeles, and this is eight or nine o’clock on Friday night. It was the Health officer of the City of Los Angeles and he said they just had two reports of polio in some children who had been vaccinated nine days earlier. He wanted to know what should be done about it?”

One of the companies that contracted to make the vaccine, the Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, had released several lots of vaccine that had been improperly inactivated. Live polio virus was being injected into children. The gratitude of the public turned to horror, as the cutter vaccine gave polio to almost 80 recipients; these children in turn went on to spread the disease to another 120 playmates and relatives; three quarters of the victims were paralysed and 11 died. . . . NIH’s Laboratory of Biologics Control, which had certified the Salk vaccine, had received advance warning of problems. . . .

In 1954 the rush was on. [Eddy’s] lab had gotten samples of the inactivated polio vaccine to certify on a “due-yesterday” basis. “This was a product that had never been made before and they were going to use it right away,” she recalled. She and her staff worked around the clock. “We had eighteen monkeys. We inoculated these eighteen monkeys with each vaccine that came in. And we started getting paralyzed monkeys.” She reported to her superiors that the lots were Cutter’s, and sent pictures of the paralyzed monkeys along as well. “They were going to be injecting this thing into children. . . .They went ahead and released the vaccine anyway, a lot of it. The monkeys they just disregarded.”

Shannon called the Surgeon General Satur­day morning. Additional cases of paralysis continued to occur. “It seemed obvious that we had a crisis on our hands, the magnitude of which was unknown.” Late Saturday afternoon a working group of senior virus specialists, whose advice the polio foundation had started to ignore a year earlier, began meeting in Shannon’s office. Note that Shannon had completely taken charge of the crisis. “Sebrell was not the man to manage this,” DeWitt Stetten recalled. ‘James Shannon was a man of quite different character.”

Shannon had brought in the Surgeon General, who called polio chief Basil O’Connor in New York. On Monday evening O’Connor and his advisers came down to Bethesda. Shannon wanted to withdraw the vaccine, “It was a very stormy meeting,” he said. “O’Connor and the polio group in general disallowed any possibility of induced infections [as a result of the vaccine]. … So Basil O’Connor stormed out with dire warning of what he was going to do to the NIH and the Public Health Service. Further vaccination was stopped. I had many sleepless nights.”

The basic problem had really not been the carelessness of the Cutter company, which rightly or wrongly was exonerated in a later report. It was the difficulty in jumping from Salk’s lab experiments with killing (formalinizing) the virus to large-scale industrial production.

. . . Ruth Kirschstein, the director today of an important NIH institute, added, “The Cutter incident resulted in everybody up the line who had anything to do with it—very few people know this story—being dismissed because of it.” All went out: the director of the microbiology institute lost his post, as did the equivalent of the assistant secretary for health. Oveta Culp Hobby, the secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (or Oveta “Culpable” Hobby, as she was known), stepped down. Dr. Sebrell, the director of the NIH, resigned.

Whereas I think the “basic problem” was overestimating the competence of powerful people, especially powerful experts.

A few days ago I read about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s response to a shareholder complaint about sustainability programs:

At a shareholders meeting on Friday, CEO Tim Cook angrily defended Apple’s environmentally-friendly practices against a request from the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) to drop those practices if they ever became unprofitable.

I support the practices Cook defended. But the incident was summarized by a headline writer like this: “Tim Cook tells off climate change deniers.” I am a climate change denier in the sense that I don’t believe that there is persuasive evidence that humans are dangerously warming the planet.

The headline — not what actually happened — reminded me of something surprising and puzzling I noticed soon after I became an assistant professor at Berkeley. I attended several colloquium talks — hour-long talks about research, usually by a visitor, a professor from somewhere else — every week. Now and then the speaker would omit essential information. Such as what the y axis was. Or what the points were. The missing information made it impossible to understand what the speaker was saying.

I didn’t expect graduate students to interrupt to ask for the missing info but surely, I thought, one of the five or eight professors in the room would. We all need to know this, I thought. Yet none of them spoke up. I cannot think of a single example of a professor speaking up when this happened (except me). Even now I am unsure why this happened (and no doubt still happens). Maybe it reflects insecurity.

I mention climate change on this blog because it is interesting that so many intelligent supposedly independent-thinking people actually believe, or claim to believe, that humans are dangerously warming the planet. The evidence for the supposedly undeniable claim (“97% of scientists agree!”) is indistinguishable from zero. Of course journalists, such as Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker and Bill McKibben (a former journalist), are often English majors and intimidated by scientists. I don’t expect them to question what scientists say, although questioning authority is half their job. Of course actual climate scientists do not dissent, for fear of career damage. It is when smart people who are not journalists or climate scientists take this stuff seriously that I am impressed. Just as I was impressed by Berkeley professors who did nothing when they didn’t understand what they were being told.

It seems to me that the smarter you are the more easily you can see that climate change fear-mongering is nonsense. There must be some other important human quality (conformity? religiosity? diffidence? status-seeking? fear of failure?) that interferes with intelligence in non-trivial ways. To try to figure out what the quality is, I ask: who is the smartest person you know who believes global warming fear-mongering? Does that person do other extreme or unusual things? These might shed light on what the intelligence-opposing personality trait is.

People talk about intelligence quite often (“you’re so smart!” “she’s very bright”). Many people, including me, think it matters. There are tests for it. But this other trait, which can negate intelligence and therefore is just as important…not so much. In my experience, not at all. My fellow Berkeley professors were very smart. But they were also something else, much less apparent.

• more about cheating at Caltech
• omega-3 supplementation reduces acne. Impressive results. Will dermatologists stop saying food doesn’t cause acne?
• Is it possible that vaccines are not perfect?. More about vaccines.
• Excerpt of The Question of Separatism by Jane Jacobs. Interesting critique.
• Why did non-polio paralysis increase from 2,000 cases to 60,000 cases? See Minute 6 of this video.

After I discovered the Shangri-La Diet (2000), I started drinking lots of tea. Tea has smell without calories, which complemented the calories without smell of the diet. Mostly I drink black tea — more complexity than green or oolong tea. Until recently, I made it the usual (Western) way. 1. Add hot water to tea. 2. Wait 3-4 minutes. 3. Add cream and sweetener. 4. Drink. 5. Throw away tea.

Now I do this: 1. Rinse tea with hot water, discard rinse water. 2. Add hot water. 3. Wait short time (e.g., 30 seconds). 4. Taste the results in a certain way. 5. Drink. 6. Reinfuse tea for longer time (e.g., 45 seconds). And so on. From 2.5 g of tea leaves I make 3 cups of tea (200 ml each), with infusion times of 35, 55 and 90 seconds. I drink the first two cups straight (no additions), then add sweetener (xylitol), salt and cream to the third cup. It’s like three different sorts of tea. The first cup is a little sweet, the second cup is slightly bitter with more complexity, the third cup has bitterness, complexity, fat (cream) and sweetness. I use a Polder timer that, at the end of the interval, resets to the length of the interval. For example, if you time 30 seconds, it ends up reset to 30 seconds. This makes it easy to remember the length of the last infusion.

What interests me is Step #4: “Taste the results in a certain way.” After brewing the tea, I pour a little of it into a small glass. I have four of them. I pour the tea from #1 to #2 to #3 to #4. This greatly cools it, making it much easier to assess the taste. If you drink the tea before cooling, the heat is distracting. As soon as I started doing this, it was easy to see that short infusion times (e.g., 30 seconds) gave better results than long infusion times (e.g., 3 minutes) and that the tea could be used several times. I could easily distinguish between a brewing time of 30 seconds and 40 seconds.

Without Step #4, you (or at least me) are in very bad shape. Soon after brewing, the tea is too hot to taste clearly. The heat is distracting. Within a few sips, however, taste adaptation is so strong you cannot taste it clearly either. This is why I drank tea for 13 years without understanding what is going on.

With the particular black tea I am drinking now, the first 30 seconds or so of infusion releases a slightly-sweet tasting chemical. If I cold-brew tea, this is what it will taste like. After that comes more complexity but also more bitterness. All in all, I like more bitterness (not too much) and complexity, so I reduced the amount of tea from 2.5 g to 2.0 g and increased the first infusion time to 60 seconds. That produced better results.

For many years, in other words, (a) I brewed it wrong then added cream and sweetener to fix my mistake and (b) due to poor feedback I had no idea what I was doing. Does that remind you of anything?

This graph shows recent results from the test I used to track my brain function. The test is a choice reaction task done on my laptop: see a digit (e.g.,”2″), press the corresponding key as fast as possible. The x axis shows the time of the test. The ticks (“Sat”, etc.) mark the beginning of the associated days. The y axis shows the average percentile of the reaction times. Higher percentile = faster. (Let me explain what “percentile” means: Each reaction time is compared to earlier reaction times with the same stimulus, and its percentile is computed. For example, a percentile of 60 means that 60% of previous responses were slower.) An average of 60 is quite good and 40 is quite bad. I usually do two tests per day, one right after the other, in the late afternoon (e.g., 4:30 pm).

On Friday and Saturday, my scores were close to normal. On Sunday afternoon, however, my scores were much worse than usual; the average score was about 15. A score that low might happen once per year. The next day (Monday) I tested more often than usual — both morning and afternoon — and my scores gradually returned to normal. On Tuesday I also tested both morning and afternoon. My scores were ordinary the whole time. This showed that the improvement Monday morning was not normal.

What happened Sunday? I am pretty sure the problem is my lunch at a middle-cost noodle restaurant whose English name is Flying Noodle. It is close to the Tsinghua campus but I’d only been there once before (and eaten almost nothing that time). On Sunday I had a small pickled vegetable dish and an ordinary-sized plate of fried eggs and tomatoes. I suspect the problem is the oil used to cook the egg and tomato. It might have been soybean, corn, sunflower or peanut oil, all high in omega-6. (There are also complaints about reuse of cooking oil.) As I entered the restaurant, I worried about the oil, but also thought who really knows? By the time of my brain test, I had forgotten my concern.

A friend was with me. She ate different dishes. She found that her scores on a iPhone game she often plays, which requires fast reactions, were suddenly and mysteriously worse after the lunch. Then, in about a day, they recovered.

This interests me in several ways:

1. New phenomenology. In this example and my earlier tofu results (a piece of fermented tofu reduced my brain score for two days), I noticed something never noticed before: Sharp changes (bad) in brain function. Fortunately I quickly recovered. Nobody knew this happened. It’s like looking through a microscope or telescope for the first time, but with much more relevance to everyday concerns.

2. Comparison with Super Size Me, a 2004 documentary by Morgan Spurlock, which argued that McDonald’s food was unhealthy. Spurlock ate only McDonald’s food for 30 days. Realism: Spurlock ate far more McDonald’s food than anyone would normally eat; I ate one meal. Information value: Spurlock’s test was so unrealistic and his diet so plainly unhealthy that I doubt the results — Spurlock’s health got worse, he gained weight — have any implications for the rest of us. In contrast, I find my results horrifying. Bias: Spurlock was obviously biased against McDonald’s before he started. I thought favorably of the Flying Noodle — that’s why I went there. Cost: My data cost essentially nothing, Spurlock’s movie cost $65,000, not to mention the damage to Spurlock’s health. Recovery time: Spurlock took 14 months to lose the weight he gained. I recovered in a day. Repeatability: My test is easy to repeat, Spurlock’s very difficult.

3. Public health disaster? China has a very high rate of diabetes, for unknown reasons. Chinese teenagers and college students have much worse (inflamed) skin than I see in other countries. Old people in China look much worse than old people in Japan. Could heavy use of high-omega-6 cooking oil be a big reason?

4. Where were authorities? We expect our government — in combination with academia — to protect us against dangerous chemicals in our environment. If I’m right about the cause of my low score, that didn’t happen here. Cooking oil is the opposite of a rare food. If ordinary amounts of a common cooking oil did cause these results, it suggests something is seriously wrong with the regulatory system. A big argument for personal science — and brain tracking in particular — is that you monitor exactly the environment to which you are exposed in exactly the genetic context you care about (yours).

• “We never asked: Based on what?“ A father wishes he had been less trusting of his son’s doctors.
• Does Paxil increase breast cancer? In Marin County, California, where I grew up, there is more breast cancer than expected. Could this be due to Paxil?
• Answer to criticisms of mammography study that found no benefit.
• gut bugs and brain function
• fake Nobel Laureates

When I was a graduate student, I had acne. Via self-experiment, I discovered that the antibiotic my dermatologist had prescribed didn’t work. He appeared unaware of this possibility, although antibiotics were (and are) very commonly prescribed for acne. “Why did you do that?” he said when I told him my results. As I’ve said before, I was stunned that in a few months I could figure out something important that he, the expert, didn’t know. He had years of training, practice, and so on. I had no experience at all. Eventually I gathered additional and more impressive examples — cases where I, an outsider with no medical training, managed to make a big contribution with tiny resources. The underlying message seemed to be that professional medicine rested on weak foundations, in the sense that big conclusions could be overturned with little effort.

Two recent posts (here and here) on this blog argue that eczema, which afflicts about 10% of Americans, can be cured and prevented with fermented foods. This observation makes perfect sense because of two pre-existing ideas: 1. Eczema is due to an overactive immune system. 2. Fermented foods “cool down” that system (a variant of the hygiene hypothesis). Professors of dermatology failed to put them together, but people outside medicine were able to.

After I learned that eczema could be cured easily and safely, statements by medical professionals about eczema became horrifying. A dermatologist recently wrote about eczema on Reddit:

Eczema is a chronic condition, which includes hand eczema. It’s a condition of dry and sensitive skin. Topical steroids are a useful adjunct in getting your skin clear, and – in certain cases – keeping your skin clear. I tell my patients that the most important thing in management of eczema is the skin care regimen. This means avoidance of irritating factors and restoration of the skin barrier.

The National Eczema Association:

The exact causes of eczema are unknown. You might have inherited a tendency for eczema.. . . Many doctors think eczema causes are linked to allergic disease, such as hay fever or asthma. Doctors call this the atopic triad. Many children with eczema (up to 80%) will develop hay fever and/or asthma.

The Mayo Clinic website: “The cause of atopic dermatitis is unknown, but it may result from a combination of inherited tendencies for sensitive skin and malfunction in the body’s immune system.” The various remedies listed have nothing to do with the immune system.

What else don’t they know? Doctors have great power over our well-being. Imagine learning that the driver of the car you are in is nearly blind.

After reading Shant Mesrobian’s story of how he eliminated his eczema with fermented foods and a probiotic supplement, Todd Fletcher left a comment:

My eczema and other skin problems of 15 years disappeared completely from regular kefir and yogurt, which I did because of this blog.

I asked for details.

Who are you?

I live in Mesa Arizona, 49 years old, software developer.

When did it start?

I had lots of allergy problems as a child; had to have soy milk as a baby, had allergy shots for 5 years until I was 22 or so, I was allergic to trees and grass. The allergies pretty much went away after I came to Arizona and now have had no problems at all with it for many years.

I am pretty sure my eczema started in Maryland before I moved to AZ, that would put it before 1992. It started on the outside of my right shin. I can’t recall and never had any notion of any change that brought it on. It continued up until I started the kefir, though it would go dormant from time to time, often after which it would reappear elsewhere. It progressed from my shin to the back of my right knee, my right inner thigh, then my back, then my hands. It was always most prominent on my right side; I am right-handed.

Before fermented foods, what did you do to get rid of it?

I tried vitamin E both orally and topically very early. It did seem to soothe it but I hated the smell and mess. Otherwise I used cortisone when it was really bad, but tried to minimize that. Mostly I just put up with it.

What were the fermented foods?

I liked Nancy’s Peach best for kefir; it was the most sour, and the other flavors of that brand had berry seeds that I didn’t like. Otherwise I got Lifeway Pomegranate [kefir], second most sour. Yogurt was mostly Strauss Farms or Brown Cow, though occasionally I’ll get Fage if the others aren’t there. I would have probably 3 containers of kefir and one or two of yogurt a week. For the yogurt I would get unflavored and add some bananas or maybe a little honey.

After you started eating kefir and yogurt, how long until you noticed improvement?

Less than a week. I went on and off many times, both intentionally and inadvertently, and the pattern was repeated every time. Now I can go off of either one without it returning; I don’t think I have seen any eczema in more than a year even though I might go a week or two without it. I have slowed down in the kefir because most of them have sugars and stuff, I mostly go for the plain yogurt these days.

Did you expect the improvement?

Not at all. I was trying to recover from a bad stomach bug that left me with digestive distress. I only tried the kefir because I read it had more cultures than yogurt. It solved the digestive problems but I only noticed the effect on eczema when I stopped it and the eczema returned. I hadn’t noticed it had stopped since it sometimes went dormant for a few weeks at a time.

What were the other skin problems?

I had splitting of my fingertips, really painful and right on the tip making it hard to use. I assumed this was just the eczema presenting itself here, but it might have been something else. I also had generally dry itchy skin no matter how much lotion I used, which is not a problem now.