I am one of the presenters — that is, interviewees — at PaleoCon, which began a few days ago. The presenters were interviewed by John Durant. Among the presenters are Paul Jaminet and Chris Kresser.

In a review of biographies of Charles Dickens I found this:

In 1849 he showed a short account of his early years to his close friend John Forster, revealing a story he never told his own family: the shame-inducing months he spent, while his father was in a debtor’s prison, as a 12-year-old “laboring hind” in a factory that bottled shoe-blacking.

Suddenly I understood why he wrote Oliver Twist and why it is so good. Budding writers are told write what you know. They should be told write what you feel bad about.

The work of James Pennebaker has shown the benefits of even small amounts of self-disclosure. No doubt this is why all sorts of psychotherapy, supposedly based on enormously different theories, help roughly the same amount: All involve self-disclosure. I see this effect as something built into us by evolution to increase self-disclosure. Talking about bad experiences helps your listeners avoid what happened to you. To motivate such disclosures, evolution has built into us something that causes us to feel better after we talk this way.

Scientists are not told study what you know and they are especially not told study what you feel bad about. Scientists are mostly men, of course, and that sort of thing makes men uncomfortable. My personal science, however, suggests the correctness of this idea.

Because of cold weather in America, Longform (the website) linked to a 1995 article about the death by freezing of Teresa McGovern, daughter of George McGovern. She was drunk and fell down. Her alcoholism was intractable. She went for treatment dozens of times. I have a theory about what causes alcoholism and other addictions and why they resist treatment.

Let me start with the fairly obvious part. People go to their addiction (alcohol, gambling, smoking, whatever) to escape pain. The addictive activity provides a hit of pleasure that eliminates the pain for a while. It is difficult to endure pain and after a while, if you can escape, it is impossible — your “willpower” runs out. An addict keeps feeling pain, keeps doing the addictive activity to get rid of the pain. Pain triggers the addiction. Addictive activities, such as drinking, often produce cravings, which are an additional source of pain. This makes the problem worse — makes the total pain even harder to endure — but it is not the whole problem. The addiction started when there were no cravings. This is why abstinence alone — which does get rid of the cravings — is not a good solution. It does not get rid of the sources of pain that were/are the ultimate cause of the problem.

The McGovern article illustrates the pain-reduction aspect of addiction:

I can numb the pain, says a voice. “It doesn’t sound like an evil voice. It sounds like a friend, telling you the truth.” Teresa’s younger brother, Steven McGovern, is describing the voice of alcohol, as it whispers to you when you are feeling tense or dissatisfied or empty: Here’s your old pal, I can get you through this. ”I have experience with this,” he explains. Like Teresa, Steven has struggled for years with addiction.

At the end of Double Down, a great memoir by Frederick and Steven Barthelme, about loss of a large inheritance due to gambling addiction, the authors say something similar, that their addiction derived from depression. I haven’t talked with addiction specialists but I doubt any of these ideas would surprise them.

The less obvious part of this comes from my discovery that seeing faces in the morning caused a large oscillation in mood: happy during the day, unhappy at night (while asleep). The effect of being happy during the day was that small amounts of badness (e.g., bad news) made me less happy but did not push me all the way to feeling bad (= painful). I had a buffer. If I feel very happy and then something bad makes me feel less happy — only slightly happy — this has no effect on my behavior. I don’t go out of my way to increase my happiness. Only when the border between happy and unhappy is crossed, and I start to feel bad (pain), not merely less happy, do I feel any desire to reduce the pain.

Life is full of pain-causing stuff. Everyone should have a buffer of happiness provided by morning faces but almost no one does. For almost everyone, as far as I can tell, most of the time they are in a neutral state, neither happy nor unhappy. When something bad happens, lowering their mood, they don’t go from very happy to slightly happy, they go from neutral to unhappy (= painful). And when in pain they seek ways to escape it. This makes all sorts of pleasure-causing activities, including drinking alcohol and eating “comfort food” (= food with a strong flavor-calorie association – the stronger the flavor-calorie association, the more pleasant a food tastes), more attractive.

Long ago, people had this buffer of happiness during the day which made it possible for them to forage together in spite of problems, such as hunger and thirst and yesterday’s disappointments. In the evening, the buffer disappeared as your mood went down. The problems indicated by pain became more urgent and were dealt with. If you were thirsty, for example, you would drink something. Modern life has reduced or eliminated many sources of pain but it has also (a) eliminated the buffer, our natural protection, and (b) provided many short-term sources of pleasure (such as drinking) harmful in large doses. Because we live in a world that is inevitably painful now and then — no treatment can change that — the combination of (a) and (b) causes addiction. Treatments for addiction, at best, push people away from one short-term source of pleasure. They never restore the buffer, the natural protection.

When The Shangri-La Diet was published, many SLD dieters said it had become easier for them to stop smoking. My explanation is that because their hunger (one source of pain/discomfort) went down, they had more willpower left over to deal with another source of pain/discomfort, craving a cigarette. As my sleep has improved in recent months, due to bedtime honey and related changes, I have found it easier to do everything. My explanation is essentially the same. No longer having to use willpower to overcome tiredness — I am less tired — leaves more of it to do everything else.

• Benefits of yacon syrup
• MIT & Aaron Swartz
• A job search in the English Department at UC Riverside
• Watch out for iron overload. You may be eating too much iron.
• Scoliosis successfully treated without surgery. “Surgery was recommended as the only option to help her recover.”

Several people have said that bedtime honey made them wake up too early. For example:

No effect for me, worse for my wife (hours of wakefulness in the middle of the night after a few hours of sleep)

The commenter said this meant it wasn’t working.

My view is different. To me, this experience suggests that there is something safe, cheap and practical (honey) that has a powerful and non-intuitive effect on sleep. Finding something like that is extremely hard. (Drug companies have spent billions of dollars trying to do this, with far worse results.) It isn’t easy or obvious or trivial to learn how to use that powerful force to produce improvement rather than harm (“hours of wakefulness in the middle of the night”), but I am sure it is possible.

My first important use of self-experimentation was in graduate school. I discovered that one of the medicines my dermatologist had prescribed for my acne wasn’t working. The notion that a prescribed medicine didn’t work is useful, but not shocking. This success was enough to launch me into self-experimentation to improve my sleep — specifically, to reduce early awakening. This turned out to be very hard.

After ten years of trial and error (all error), I discovered something that made my early awakening reliably worse. I was thrilled. After ten years, something finally made a difference, albeit in the wrong direction. It was a turning point. I did many experiments and finally figured out that any breakfast made my sleep worse. This was far more progress than finding out that a prescribed medicine didn’t work. It was progress because (a) nutrition experts usually said that breakfast was “the most important meal of the day”. My discovery flatly contradicted that. I became a lot more skeptical of experts, a view that has served me well. (b) Eliminating breakfast greatly reduced early awakening, and (c) the discovery showed that self-experimentation could do better than expert advice in surprising ways. My interesting self-experimentation began with the discovery of something that made my sleep worse.

I too have found that although I am sleeping much better, bedtime honey and other evening sugars have also made me wake up too early more often. I too need to learn how to better use this new knowledge.

“Your writing has dramatically improved my health in a number of ways,” a reader said. I asked for details. He replied:

I’ve tried most of your health interventions. The first was SLD. Overall, I lost about 90 lbs. Roughly half of this was from a more traditional diet of eating whole foods esp. vegetables and exercise. I had plateaued until I discovered SLD and lost the rest. I added flax oil, butter and homemade kefir to my taste free meal over time. The butter helped me lose more weight. At the same calories, the saturated fat was somehow more filling. Initially the butter made me happier but that wore off after a few months. My HDLs and triglyceride levels are better than when I was training for a marathon and not eating this stuff. The flax oil has improved my gum health. I can’t really see a direct result from the kefir. I’m more eating it on faith. I skinned my knees quite badly a while ago. My wife commented on how quickly I healed. So maybe the kefir and other items are helping me heal faster.

I tried morning faces twice over about a week without success. My job exposes me to a lot of evening fluorescent lights. I picked periods when I wouldn’t be exposed, but even if it worked, I couldn’t have maintained it over a long period.

Insomnia has been a long-time problem for me. One legged standing didn’t have a noticeable impact. Shifting my vitamin D3 to the morning seemed to help a bit. Bedtime honey has led to a big improvement. It’s uneven, but more often than not I’m sleeping much better. Even when I don’t sleep as well, I don’t feel as tired as I did without using honey. My mood has also improved. I’m calmer and happier. The honey seems to reinforce my circadian rhythm. I have more energy in the morning and am tired in the evening. I’m currently tracking what else I’m consuming and when to see if I can figure out how to get the benefits on the honey more consistently. My wife and friend have tried honey at bedtime and both report improvements.

My view is that of the cause-effect relations I have emphasized, the most useful will be (a) the effect of morning faces on mood (hard to use at first), (b) the effects of sweets on sleep (easy), and (c) the effects of foods on brain function b. Bedtime honey is just the first of the sweets effects and flaxseed oil and butter are just the first of the brain effects. Full understanding and use of the morning faces discovery lies many years in the future. Of the various methods I’ve developed, I think the most useful will be the use of reaction time measurements to improve brain function (and, probably, overall health). At the level of what might be called “meta-methods” (the usual name is big ideas), I think the most useful will be that people who aren’t health experts can discover important things about health.

by Nathanael Nerode

I have an inhalation allergy to polyester and acrylic dust that caused no end of trouble, especially nasal congestion. It took 20 years to figure out.

I live in Ithaca, NY. My nasal congestion started after a multi-month trip to China in 6th grade, in 1988. The air in Beijing was truly awful, and literally everyone had nasal congestion while there. But my congestion didn’t go away when I came back.

To figure out why it hadn’t gone away, a doctor (allergist) back in roughly 8th grade did prick tests. The “dust” test was said to use actual dust collected from houses. In retrospect, it presumably included polyester dust. It was the only prick test, other than the control histamine injection, to show an allergic response. The idiot doctor proceeded to claim that I had a dust mite allergy even though the “dust mite” prick test was negative. I told him no, I didn’t, and he should learn to read his test results. I asked what was in household dust other than skin, hair and mites. He somehow did not manage to come up with “fabric”. If I’d been bright enough to think of that then, I might have been able to figure this out much sooner.

In some ways my nasal congestion was quite bad. I got secondary sinus infections repeatedly, due to the airways never, ever clearing out. I carried Kleenex with me everywhere, and bought it by the case. I had to mop my nose a few times every hour. When I caught a cold, the frequency would increase to every couple of minutes.

The congestion lasted continuously through multiple living quarters at college and back in Ithaca — of course, at all those locations I had brought a full set of clothes, and had a typical polyester bed, and most had carpeting. It mysteriously cleared up once — during a trip to North Carolina. Only in retrospect did I realize that on the trip I was sleeping on a futon in a house with no carpeting, with nothing but cotton clothes.

The allergies were definitely triggered more indoors than outdoors and were worse in fall than spring. I quickly eliminated the possibility of detergents by repeated changes of detergent with no result. I was then stuck with no further ideas for 20 years.

After 20 years, I moved into a new house while bringing very little with me (only a couple of sets of clothes). Suddenly my allergies went away. I realized the cause was something in the old house but not the new house.

I could keep stuff at the old house, and I moved in really slowly, so I was able to do challenge-response experiments, with a multi-week test time for each.

I had had work done on the new house. I first eliminated wood dust, tile dust, drywall dust, and grout dust as possibilities, because they were all over the place while I was there. Then I moved in huge piles of books. Still no allergies.

Then I moved in my clothes. (Still no bed, latex futon.) My allergies came back instantly. I moved the clothes back out, sorted them by fabric, and waited four weeks for my symptoms to clear.

Then I moved the clothes back in one fabric at a time, with a two-week testing period to see whether symptoms developed for each. Luckily I was not allergic to the first thing I tried, which was cotton.

After finding the polyester allergy and moving the polyester out, I waited four weeks for symptoms to clear up before moving the next set in. Eventually I found the acrylic allergy too.

I also had to stop testing for a month or so at least three times when I caught colds, as determined by additional symptoms or by family and friends developing the same symptoms.

This took a long time — about a year — and is not a straightforward option for most people. I haven’t tested every fabric yet. I stopped after I got through all the common ones.

After I was “detoxed”, I started having a noticeable mild contact allergy to polyester and acrylic, which confirmed the conclusions. I think this wasn’t noticeable before due to constant exposure creating suppression of the response.

So I solved the problem from a combination of luck (moving into the new house showed that it wasn’t generic “dust”) and pure grinding testing, much like most science.

I’m not sure many people would have the opportunity to test the way I did. I modeled what I did on the hardcore “challenge” protocol used for food allergies where you start with a very limited diet and “challenge” it with one thing at a time. How many people can do that with fabrics? You need a place to store the rest of your clothes. You may need to buy all-cotton socks or underwear or shirts or pants if you didn’t own any (luckily I did) — and you need to have no carpet and remove your BED from the house (which I had done anyway coincidentally).

• Hermann Goering and Jane Jacobs (also this)
• Dietary fiber may prevent asthma — very important finding because the two seem unrelated
• cheap convenient lab tests. Unfortunately you still need a doctor to order them.
• intermittent fasting on the Diane Rehm Show
• pollutants and brain damage

Thanks to Gerry Mandel, Casey Manion and Jeff Winkler.

This graph shows my brain test reaction times over roughly one year. Each point is a different test; I usually do two tests per day back to back. I assume faster = better. In February 2013 I returned to Berkeley from Beijing. In August 2013 I went back to Beijing. When I returned to Berkeley, my scores got worse (slower). I was shocked. Surely Berkeley is healthier than Beijing. At first I thought it was jet lag, but the scores stayed worse long after that made sense. Then I thought it might be some difference in diet, even though I eat similar food in the two places. I tried to make my Berkeley diet closer to my Beijing diet. This might have helped. I noticed accidentally that chocolate improved my score and started eating chocolate frequently. This artificially reduced the difference since in Beijing I had not been eating chocolate. In Berkeley I started doing two things I hadn’t done in Beijing: alternate-day fasting and whole-body vibration. I don’t know if they made a difference. When I returned to Beijing in September, my scores got better, even though I was not eating chocolate. Eventually I improved my sleep in Beijing but that seemed to make little difference. The comparison is far from perfect — many things varied — but by and large my scores got worse when I went from Beijing to Berkeley and improved when I went from Berkeley to Beijing.

What might have caused this? There are a hundred possibilities but one stands out. In both places, I brew and drink several cups of tea every day. In Beijing, everyone, including me, drinks water from big plastic bottles that are delivered to your house. You can choose pure water or “mineral” water, which has added magnesium and potassium. In Berkeley I use tap water (Brita filtered). I don’t think potassium affects brain function — for example, eating bananas makes no difference — but there is plenty of evidence that magnesium improves brain function. In Beijing I had tested a magnesium supplement and found no effect, consistent with the idea that I was already getting enough. Magnesium is also believed to improve sleep. In Beijing I seemed to sleep better than in Berkeley. Again, this is consistent with a difference in magnesium levels (more in Beijing). If ordinary magnesium-enriched water improves brain function, it would be significant because it is so easy, in contrast to other ways of increasing magnesium levels.

Stephen Hsu mentioned the documentary At Berkeley. In response, someone who had graduated from Berkeley long ago and recently returned commented:

One thing hasn’t changed much though, most professors still hate, and with studied contempt, having anything to do with undergraduates.

My mom was an undergraduate at Berkeley. I asked her what she thought of this comment. She didn’t agree, but she didn’t exactly disagree:

I got absolutely no sense of “studied contempt” or dislike from profs. Some were dull, one went on my forever hate list because he humiliated a student in public, some were difficult, one was very conservative but provoked me into doing good work. More or less enjoyed my economics courses, including one on “labor” taught by Clark Kerr. Maybe the sociology professors were like that. I’d declared it as my major, but didn’t like a single sociology prof I had, and barely escaped thru to graduation with them.

As I’ve said, Ken Jowitt, a political science professor at Berkeley, humiliated students who came in late. At one point he was Dean of Undergraduate Studies.

When I got a job at Berkeley, I remembered my mom’s comment that she’d had only three good professors (Kerr, Robert Nisbet, and David Mandelbaum, an anthropology professor). I wondered if I would be her idea of a good professor. It turned out that quite a few professors treated undergraduates badly, as Hsu’s commenter says. One professor told me that when a student came to him with a grading complaint, he made the student put the complaint in writing — just like in post-Soviet Russia, where paperwork obstacles were placed in front of those who wanted to start a political party. Another professor, I was told, did not look at students who came to see him during office hours. He sat with his back towards them. A third professor, when I asked when the assigned reading would be available (I was auditing his class), wouldn’t say. “Sometime,” he said.

With few exceptions, the profs I knew avoided students, as Hsu’s commenter says. One of them, when a student asked to see him, told the student, “I’ll be around.” It was easy to see why they avoided students (students bored them, wanted stuff, were full of complaints, “wasted” their time, and had nothing to do with what they really cared about, their research) but it said a lot about the situation, such as how much the professors learned from the students — not much, apparently.

Yet I learned an enormous amount from my undergraduate students, especially two of them. One student, in response to an open-ended term project assignment, chose to give a talk to a high school class about depression. Yet she had stage fright! It was extremely difficult for her to give that talk. But she did. Based on more conventional assignments, she had seemed a mediocre student. After I read her paper about what she’d done, I saw how much I had underestimated her. And it wasn’t just her. I suddenly saw how much the whole system — which judges undergraduates by how much they resemble professors — grossly underestimates almost all of them. What a tragedy. This is the fundamental thing to realize about undergraduate education, that students are judged by how closely they resemble professors. Excellence in other ways is ignored. It is an incredibly wasteful system. It is like “evidence-based medicine” reviews that ignore 1000 papers on a topic to focus on 4 papers that meet their restrictive criteria. And then claim to have summarized the subject.

She wasn’t even the most extreme case. I taught introductory psychology for a few years. One of my lectures was on weight control. I showed a graph of how I had lost weight when I had started eating less processed food — oranges instead of orange juice, for example. At the same time as the weight loss, I had started to sleep less (40 minutes less per day). One of my students came to my office hour. He said he knew another way to lose weight and need less sleep: eat food high in water content. He showed me a thick book that promoted this. The book looked bad — no data, just words. But he said it had helped him.

So I tried it. At first I ate four pieces of fruit per day. Nothing happened.

I ran into the student. Hey, I’m eating four piece of fruit every day, nothing’s happened, I said. He said, “I eat six pieces of fruit a day.”

So I went from four to six. I was already eating so much fruit that to eat two more pieces meant I had to change my breakfast. I changed it from oatmeal to two pieces of fruit. Exactly then my sleep started getting worse. I had been waking up early about half the time; I started waking up early all the time. Eventually I discovered that any breakfast caused early awakening. Oatmeal was simply better than fruit.

This experience was the turning point in my whole scientific life. It made me begin to realize that personal science — or self-experimentation, as I called it then — was a powerful tool.

My views about both teaching and research, in other words, were greatly shaped by contact with undergraduate students. The influence wasn’t passive — I did a lot more than simply listen to them — or simple. I did my part: gave unusual assignments, gave students much more freedom, tried student suggestions. In both cases, I ended up with a point of view very different than my colleagues and very different from the point of view I started with. I think professors can learn a lot from undergraduates because some of them are so different than professors. They are challenging and inspiring in ways graduate students are not.