More Neglect of the Immune System: Bioterrorism Fear

Seth Roberts13 Comments

At UC Berkeley several years ago, I learned about an introductory epidemiology class. I knew the professor. I phoned him. “Are you going to discuss factors that make the immune system work better or worse?” I asked. “No,” he said. I wasn’t surprised. In my experience, epidemiologists completely ignore this question. As if the immune system had never been discovered. It sounds absurd, but there it is.

Epidemiologists aren’t the only ones. All well-publicized attempts to “battle” or “combat” or “defeat” or “beat” viruses, such as cold or flu viruses, neglect this possibility, in my experience. Whole books on the subject do not mention the immune system. The latest example of the blindness is an article by Michael Specter at the New Yorker website about fear caused by discovery of how to make a bird flu virus spread more easily. Maybe the knowledge could be used by terrorists. Specter writes as if the immune system doesn’t exist. He doesn’t mention it and ignores the possibility of defending against new viruses by improving immune function. For example, he writes:

Instead of focussing so heavily on human terrorists, we ought to take this opportunity to defeat a natural pathogen—one we can now recognize and manipulate with all the sophistication of molecular biology.

You don’t need molecular biology to study immune function. He also writes:

There are three conditions necessary for a flu outbreak to become a deadly pandemic, like the one in in 1918 that killed between fifty and a hundred million people. Those conditions rarely converge. First, a new virus—one that has never before infected humans and to which nobody would have protective antibodies—must emerge from the animal reservoirs where they originate. That virus has to make people sick. (The vast majority do not.) Finally, it must be able to spread rapidly and efficiently—through a cough, a handshake, or a kiss.

He writes as if whether a virus makes people sick and spreads rapidly depends solely on the virus. This is false: How well your immune system is working makes a big difference. If a virus is fought off quickly, you won’t notice — you won’t “get sick”. Because you are infected more briefly, you will spread it less. (Possibly much much less. If a virus doubles in number in 4 hours, then two fewer days of infection equals a huge reduction in the number of virus particles inside you while you are contagious.)

In this blindness, I’m sure Specter reflects the blindness of the scientists he talks to. They simply talk and think about what they do, which is molecular biology.

I became aware of the power of improving the immune system when I improved my sleep and stopped getting colds. More recently, I have become sure that eating fermented foods improves immune function. I suspect that a lot of traditional medicine, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, is effective because it improves immune function. (For example, the use of bee venom to treat arthritis.) Everyone knows at an answer-test-question level that the immune system exists. A lot has been learned about how it works. But the vast majority of doctors and other health experts (and journalists) ignore this knowledge in practice.

 

Two Years on the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Alex Chernavsky, who often comments here, has updated his Shangri-La Diet (SLD) page. It now shows his weight over four years: two years before he started SLD and two years that he has been doing it.

Before he started SLD he was slowly gaining weight. After he started SLD, he went from 220 pounds (BMI = 32) to 193 pounds. He slowly gained a few pounds. Then (on my advice) he added a tablespoon of nose-clipped coconut butter and the steady climb stopped. Ffor about nine months has been steady at 195 pounds (BMI = 28). In other words, there is no sign that he is regaining the lost weight.

Because Alex has added a lot of omega-3 to his diet (via flaxseed oil), I’m sure his health has improved in other ways. Because he is a vegan, he had no interest in a conventional (Atkins) low-carb diet.

Alex reminded me that a doctor named Quigley left the following comment:

I’ve tried to find data that your diet works for SUSTAINED weight reduction in a study that would be applicable to a generalizable population. As you know, temporary weight loss is relatively easy. Sustained weight loss (wt loss > 2 yrs), is hard. If your diet can do it, I’d prescribe it every day.

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments
  • Harvard professors behaving badly: Alan Dershowitz. “In a phone interview Dershowitz denied writing to the Governor [of California], declaring, “My letter to the Governor doesn’t exist.” But when pressed on the issue, he said, “It was not a letter. It was a polite note.”” Dershowitz wrote the Governor of California to try to keep the University of California Press from publishing Beyond Chutzpah by Norman Finkelstein, which calls The Case for Israel by Dershowitz “among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict”. Finkelstein’s book says nothing about whether Dershowitz actually wrote it. According to a statement from the UC Press, “[Finkelstein] wondered why Alan Dershowitz, in recorded appearances after [The Case For Israel] was published, seemed to know so little about the contents of his own book.”
  • Umami Burger takes Manhattan.
  • The trouble with measuring students on only one dimension: South Korea
  • Why do twins differ? Both twins have autism spectrum disorder, but one has the disorder much more than the other. Guess which one was “given powerful drugs to battle an infection”?

Sleep, Mood, Restless Legs and ADHD Improved By Internet Research

Seth Roberts7 Comments

At the SLD forums, Anima describes using several safe cheap treatments to improve his mood and sleep. First, he tried wearing blue blocker (amber) glasses in the evening. They made him fall asleep more easily and reduced or eliminated hypomania. However, he was still depressed. Second, he tried getting twenty minutes of sunlight early in the morning. His mood improved. But he still had trouble synchronizing his sleep/wake cycle with the sun — that is, being awake during the day and asleep at night. He would stay up an hour later every night and wake up an hour later every day, meaning that half the time he was asleep during the day and awake at night. Finally, he tried adjusting when he ate:

I recently found the missing key to this: meal timing. I saw a talk that Seth gave where he talked about curing his problem with waking too early by skipping breakfast. My problem was difficulty waking. I read an article that suggested that our circadian rhythms are not just tied to light, but to food times as well. I used to eat late at night and never eat breakfast. I started eating breakfast immediately upon waking (ick) and stopping all food at least 12 hours before I wanted to wake. Basically, I did what Seth did only opposite. It worked. . . . I was even able to adjust my cat’s circadian rhythm — he used to wake me up too early for his breakfast — by gradually moving his supper time.

In another post he describes using B vitamins to treat his restless legs syndrome and ADHD:

I have been taking a supplement with all the B vitamins in amounts much higher than typically recommended. I have also been taking Epsom salt baths for magnesium. I have not experienced restless legs AT ALL since starting. This is quite remarkable to me, because it was such a problem. My ADHD is also much improved.

The idea of treating restless legs syndrome with niacin (a B vitamin) came from Dennis Mangan. Anima had noticed that ADHD and restless legs syndrome often occur together.

He makes some reasonable comments about psychiatrists:

Why are psychiatrists still acting like neurological problems exist in isolation, when clearly they are all related? [In the sense that you can use what is known about how to cure Problem X to help you cure Problem Y, if X and Y often occur together.] I used to take Lamictal, Depakote, Adderall and Ambien every day. That doesn’t include all the meds I tried that didn’t work. I’m currently wearing amber glasses at night and taking a B complex, flax oil (SLD-style) and bathing in epsom salts three times a week. My mood is more stable than it was on medication, and my ADHD is controlled about the same. My sleep is much better. My psychiatrist told me that I would be on medication for the rest of my life. When I told him that I was using dark therapy and light therapy and had stopped taking my medication, he told me that I was “playing with fire,” and that I would end up in a mental institution or commit suicide if I didn’t resume my medication, despite the fact that I had stopped taking it for longer than it would be effective. I asked him if he had read the research on dark therapy. He hadn’t, but he assured me that it is pseudoscience. I guess the definition of “pseudoscience” is any treatment that doesn’t make him money. I puckishly asked him if I seemed manic or depressed, and he was forced to admit that I did not.

The ability of this psychiatrist to ignore contradictory evidence in front of him resembles what happened to Reid Kimball. He told a UCSF gastroenterologist that he was successfully managing his Crohn’s with diet. In my experience, Crohn’s can’t be managed with diet, the doctor said at the end of the appointment.

Justification For Self-Experimentation and My Belief that N=1 Results Will Generalize

Seth Roberts7 Comments

At the Quantified Self blog, in response to a video of me talking about QS and the Ancestral Health Symposium (paleo), someone named Colin made the following comment:

Very interesting talk. I am just curious how someone can claim a study conducted with a sample size of one is “100 times better” than someone else’s study. I do not know anything about the other study mentioned, but I do know that a study based on n=1 cannot be considered scientific proof. And sure, he hears from people who have lost weight drinking the sugar water he prescribed, but it is quite possible there are 100 times as many people who didn’t email him because they didn’t see any positive results and decided to try something else. I think the QS stuff is very interesting and helpful on a personal level, but it seems like a stretch to generalize your results to others.

I responded:

I have two responses.

1. Sample size isn’t everything. Sure, a study with n=1 isn’t “scientific proof”. Nor is any other study, in my experience. “Scientific proof” has always required many studies. New scientific ideas have very often started with n = 1 experiments or observations. Later, larger experiments or observations were done. Both — the initial n=1 observation and the later n = many observations — were necessary for the new idea to be discovered and confirmed.

2. The history of biology teaches there are few exceptions to general rules. See any biology textbook. For example, a textbook might say “lymphocytes fight germs”. This means no serious exceptions have ever been found to that rule. So, as matter of biological history, the person who managed to figure out what one particular lymphocyte does turned out to have figured out what they all do. Biology textbooks have thousands of statements like “lymphocytes fight infection” meaning that this sequence of events (you can generalize from one to all, or nearly all) has happened thousands of times. There is no shadow hidden history of biology that teaches otherwise.

Gelman and Fung versus Levitt and Dubner: How “Wrong” is Freakonomics?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In the latest issue of American Scientist, Andrew Gelman (an old friend) and Kaiser Fung criticize Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics by Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner (who wrote about my work). Although the article is titled “Freakonomics: What Went Wrong?” none of the supposed errors are in Freakonomics. You can get an idea of the conclusions from the title and this sentence: “How could an experienced journalist and a widely respected researcher slip up in so many ways?”

Gelman and Fung examine a series (“so many ways”) of what they consider mistakes. I will comment on each of them.

1. The case of the missing girls. I agree with Gelman and Fung: Levitt and Dubner accepted Emily Oster’s research too uncritically.

2. The risk of driving a car. I think Gelman and Fung miss the point. Yes, the claim (driving drunk is safer than walking drunk) was not well-supported by the evidence provided because the comparison was so confounded. However, I read the whole example differently. I didn’t think that Levitt and Dubner thought drunk people should drive. I thought their point was more subtle — that comparisons are difficult (“look how we can reach a crazy conclusion”).

3. Stars are made not born. I think Gelman and Fung fail to see the big picture. The birth-month effect in professional sports, which Gelman and Fung dismiss as “very small,” is of great interest to many people, if not to Gelman and Fung. It suggests what Levitt and Dubner and Gladwell and others say: Early success matters. That’s not obvious at all. There are lots of similar associations in epidemiology. They have been the first evidence for many important conclusions, such as smoking causes lung cancer. Are professional sports important? Maybe. But epidemiology and epidemiological methods are surely important. By learning about this effect, we learn about them. Lots of smart people fail to take epidemiology seriously enough (e.g., “correlation does not equal causation”).

4. Making the majors and hitting a curve ball. Gelman and Fung point out that one sentence is misleading. One sentence. This is called praising with faint damn.

5. Predicting terrorists. Gelman and Fung say that the terrorist prediction algorithm of a man named Ian Horsley, which Levitt and Dubner seem to take seriously, is not practical. But their review fails to convince me it was presented as practical. Since there are no data about how well the algorithm works, and Levitt and Dubner are all about data….

6. The climate change dust-up. I agree with Gelman and Fung that Nathan Myrvold’s geoengineering ideas are unimportant. (My view of Myrvold’s patent trolling.) But in this case, I’d say both sides — Gelman and Fung and Levitt and Dubner — miss what’s really important, namely that the usual claims that humans are dangerously warming the planet are held far too strongly. The advocates of this view are far too sure of themselves. I have blogged about this many times. In a nutshell, the climate models that we are supposed to trust have never been shown to persuasively predict the climate ten or twenty years from now (or even one year from now). There is no good reason to believe them. That Levitt and Dubner seem to take that stuff seriously is the only big criticism I have of their work . At least in that geoengineering stuff Levitt and Dubner were dissenting from conventional wisdom. Gelman and Fung do not. They fail to realize that something we’ve been told thousands of times is nonsense (in the sense of being wildly overstated). It was Levitt and Dubner’s comments about this that led me to look closely at all that climate-change scare stuff. I was surprised how poor the evidence was.

The biggest problem with Gelman and Fung’s critique is that they say nothing about the great contribution of Steve Levitt to economics. They fail to grasp that he has made economics considerably more of a science, if by science you mean a data-driven enterprise as opposed to an ideologically-driven or prestige-driven one (mathematics is prestigious, the more difficult, the more prestigious). He did so by pioneering a new way to use data to learn interesting things. His method is essentially epidemiological, except his methods are considerably better (better matching, less formulaic) and his topics much more diverse (e.g., sumo wrestling) than mainstream epidemiology. A large fraction of prestige economics is math, divorced from empirical tests. This stuff wins Nobel Prizes, but, in my and many other people’s opinion, contributes very little to understanding. (Psychology has had the same too much math, too little data problem — minus the Nobel Prizes, of course.) To persuade a big chunk of an entire discipline to pay more attention to data is a huge accomplishment.

Levitt’s methodological innovation makes Freakonomics far from what Gelman and Fung call “pop statistics”. It is actually an amusing and well-written record of something close to a revolution. In the 1980s, a friend of mine at UC Berkeley took an introductory economics class. She told me a little of what the teacher said in class. All theory. What about data? I said. It’s a strange science that doesn’t care about data. My friend went to office hours. She asked the instructor (a Berkeley economics professor): What about data? Don’t worry about data, he replied. Gelman and Fung fail to appreciate what economics used to be like. The ratio of strongly-asserted ideas to persuasive data used to be very large. Now it is less.

Thanks to Ashish Mukharji.

Vitamin D3 and Sleep Update

Seth Roberts28 Comments

A month ago I blogged about a “stunning discovery”: Primal Girl’s sleep got much better when she took Vitamin D3 in the early morning instead of much later (afternoon or evening). Others pointed out a similar observation: Taking Vitamin D3 in the evening caused insomnia. These observations suggest that Vitamin D3 resembles sunlight in its effect on sleep: morning exposure good, evening exposure bad. Sunlight, of course, is hard to control and sometimes hard to get (which is why Primal Girl tried Vitamin D3). Sunlight is also time-consuming: it takes an hour to get one hour of sunlight. The timing and dosage of Vitamin D3 is much easier to control.

Now I’ve tried it. This isn’t the first time. I’ve taken Vitamin D3 on and off several times through the years. Each time I didn’t notice any change so I stopped. But then I’d hear an interesting argument (never anything as clear as what Primal Girl found), and try again. And stop again. This time I took the Vitamin D3 around 8 am. (In previous attempts, I never controlled the timing and never took it early in the orning.) I started with 2000 IU/day. I did that for nine days. No clear effect. Then I increased the dose to 4000 IU/day. The change was unmistakeable: I started to wake up feeling somewhat more rested and, for the first time, with a pleasant warm feeling. So far it’s been eight days. Something is different and better.

I am writing about this now because the results are already interesting. My experience so far “proves” nothing, of course. Let me make clear the limitations: 1. You might consider the effect small. I was already sleeping well. I fell asleep quickly, did not wake up during the night, and woke up feeling rested. Now I wake up feeling more rested. 2. Eight days isn’t much. Maybe the effect will go away. 3. Maybe the effect doesn’t depend on time of day. I haven’t yet tried taking Vitamin D3 at other times of day.

Why do I think this is so important?

1. Sleep is central to health. You fight off infection while you are asleep. When I improved my sleep, I stopped getting noticeable colds. I’m sure if people slept better, they would get sick less often. Heart attacks are more common in the winter. People sleep worse in winter.

2. Sleep is a huge problem. As far as I can tell, most adult Americans complain about their sleep.

3. No one expected this. Nutrition researchers, dieticians, and so on obviously didn’t expect it. Nor did circadian rhythm researchers. They (or we) think that everyone, including plants, has one or more internal circadian clocks that is/are synchronized (= set) by the environment. The general public thinks that sunlight affects the clock. Lots of research supports this, but circadian-rhythm researchers know something the public does not: that those rhythms are also affected by the time of food and social contact. All three (sunlight, food, social contact) are part of the environment. Their power over our sleep makes sense (e.g., we should be awake when food is available.) Vitamin D3 is not part of the environment. Its power doesn’t make sense. No one in the paleo community expected this. Stone-Agers got a lot of sunshine, yes. They did not take Vitamin D3 pills. Sure, many in the paleo community praise Vitamin D3 but I have never heard anyone say you should take it in the morning.

4. Vitamin D3 is safe, cheap, and widely available. It probably has many benefits, not just better sleep.

5. Taking pills is easy. There presently are no safe sleeping pills. Nor are there any cheap sleeping pills. Nor will drug companies ever invent them, if the past is any guide.

Worldwide Butter Shortage?

Seth Roberts21 Comments

The first sentence of this article is:

The soaring popularity of a fat-rich fad diet has depleted stocks of butter in Norway creating a looming Christmas culinary crisis.

Except it’s not a fad diet. It’s not going to go away, I predict. I eat lots of butter because I discovered it made my brain work better than a similar amount of pork fat. Pork fat made me sleep better. Desire for better sleep and a better-working brain are not desires that come and go. I haven’t even mentioned the conventional benefits (e.g., weight loss). The article continues:

Norwegians have eaten up the country’s entire stockpile of butter, partly as the result of a “low-carb” diet sweeping the Nordic nation which emphasizes a higher intake of fats.

“Sales all of a sudden just soared, 20 percent in October then 30 percent in November,” said Lars Galtung, the head of communications at TINE, the country’s biggest farmer-owned cooperative. . . .

Butter is now selling on Norway’s top auction website, with a 250-gram piece starting at around $13 (8.28 pounds), roughly four times its normal price.

At the Beijing store closest to me that sells butter, I seem to buy more butter than all other customers combined. Chairman Mao noticed the value of pork fat. What happens when the Chinese realize the value of butter?

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts10 Comments
  • A brash high-school student discovers — maybe by accident — how much famous writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, and John Updike, don’t want to write. Any excuse to avoid writing will do.
  • A pretty good talk by John Cochrane, a University of Chicago professor of economics, called “Restoring Robust Economic Growth in America”. What’s most interesting is what’s missing. At one point he asks: “Why are we stagnating? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows, really. That’s why we’re here at this fascinating conference.” In spite of this topic, his talk contains nothing about what controls the rate of innovation. Not only does he not know anything about this (judging by this talk), he doesn’t even realize the gap in his knowledge (judging by this talk). Shades of Thomas Sargent. It’s as if a Harvard Medical School professor spoke about how to fight disease without mentioning the immune system, without even appearing to know that the immune system exists. (Which happens.)
  • Garum, a fermented fish sauce. It was the “supreme condiment” of ancient Rome.

Thanks to Allan Jackson and Peter Couvares.