- more evidence that chocolate is healthy. “The highest levels of chocolate consumption were associated with a 37% reduction in cardiovascular disease and a 29% reduction in stroke.” This is good news.
- The great bank robbery by Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel. “For the American economy . . . the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years.. . . That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees. Such transfers represent as cunning a tax on everyone else as one can imagine.” This is a new variation of “behind every great fortune is a great crime”.
- Nutritionist, heal thyself. Fat is obviously good for the skin. Which suggests it is good for the whole body, just less obviously.
- The Taleb/Spitznagel point is supported by this article (via Marginal Revolution), which concludes: “Who has been the first to lose confidence in the European banking system? . . . The European banking system itself.” As they say: Don’t con a conner.
Workplace of the Future: The Chair
Standing desks are becoming popular. From a WSJ article:
A growing number of workers at Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and other employers are trading in their sit-down desks for standing ones, saying they feel more comfortable and energized. They also are motivated by medical reports saying that sitting for too long leads to increased health risks.
I started standing while working fifteen years ago, after I found that I slept better if I stood a lot. I got a standing desk. (Parts at Ikea $100.) I made what was apparently the first treadmill desk. But since then I learned a lot and my preferences changed. I never went back to a conventional desk, but I found that a standing desk wasn’t optimal. Here’s what I learned:
1. Standing a lot is not all good. Standing in one place for a long time is psychologically difficult. If I stood for more than 8 hours or so, my feet started to hurt. Yet I needed at least 8 hours of standing to get the sleep benefits. I also found epidemiology that suggested that if you stand a lot, your blood puddles in your legs, with bad effects. Above all, standing in one place is distracting, probably because it is inherently unpleasant. I find it much easier to write in the lounge-like position I describe below.
2. Walking a lot is bad. I work perhaps 8 hours per day. No way would I walk that much. The main use of my treadmill desk was standing, not walking. There was also a noise problem. Occupants of adjacent office complained.
3. Walking a little is good. If I walk about 20 minutes per hour, I found I can work really long periods of time–without stimulants. I have also found that walking makes my brain work better. The measure I used to detect this improvement was arithmetic speed but I’m sure it applies to all sorts of thinking.
4. One-legged standing can produce the sleep benefits of normal standing. The benefits of better sleep are huge. After I started sleeping better, mainly because of standing a lot, I stopped getting obvious colds. I also felt more energetic during the day.
When you put these together it is easy to grasp that the best workplace will not involve, as its main component, a standing desk.
Nowadays I mix lounge-like sitting (there is no one word for it) and walking. By “lounge-like sitting” I mean I sit in such a way that I lean back somewhat (so that some of my weight is on my back) and my knees are both bent and supported. The chair pictured above is the closest piece of furniture I could find designed for this. The goal of such a piece of furniture is to make the surface area (i.e., skin) supporting you as wide as possible so that the maximum pressure is minimized. A normal chair does a terrible job of this, but even the chair in the picture is not ideal: (a) It should have armrests. (b) It should have adjustable weights so that the angle at which it reclines can be set to the best position. How much walking I do depends on the time of day. During the day, when I feel restless, I might walk on a treadmill 20 minutes per hour. In the early morning and evening I don’t walk at all.
It’s fascinating there’s no word for an action I spend many hours every day performing and that perhaps a billion people would do many hours per day if they could. (At least a billion people have jobs where they must sit in ordinary chairs.) What I do is roughly a billion times more comfortable. Given the size of the market and the size of the benefit, it is equally fascinating that you cannot buy anywhere the proper furniture for doing this. The company that made the chair in the picture seems to have stopped making it. This should give pause to anyone who thinks that any or all of (a) free markets, (b) governments, or (c) academic/pure research can produce all the products we need to live a healthy happy life.
Assorted Links
- Western Governors University: An innovative online university focused on students.
- Tucker Max’s talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium about the paleo movement’s neglect of fighting
- Van Gogh is Bipolar, a restaurant in Quezon City, the Philippines.
- “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” The Rockefellers by Edward Jay Epstein.
Van Gogh Defense Project: Rationale
A colleague I’ll call John has decided to start tracking his mood for a long period of time (years). He explains why:
A few years ago, after a severe manic attack, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The attack was preceded by an intense period of stress, then two weeks of elevated mood, increased social activity (hanging out and meeting people), and racing thoughts (hypomania). Then I skipped a few nights of sleep, wandered down roads in the middle of the night, and eventually became psychotic, in that I could no longer distinguish between reality and imagination. I was chased by cops on several occasions, and was involuntarily committed to the mental health wing of a hospital for a month. It put a massive dent in my life.
Family, medicine, and time helped me recover. Being out of control like that was fun only for the first two weeks. Having my life turned upside down was not fun either. As I recovered I became increasingly interested in finding ways to prevent a relapse. One doctor said: You have a vulnerability. You need to protect yourself. I agreed.
Looking back on the experience, I realized there was a rise in odd behaviors two weeks before I started to skip nights of sleep and fell into psychosis. There was an even longer buildup of stress, anxiety, and fear in the months before the mania hit. During the last two weeks before the mania, my behavior was different from what is normal for me. I felt elated and had a sense of general “breakthrough”. I suddenly felt no fear and anxiety. I felt on top of the world. I was constantly taking notes because ideas and thoughts were running through my head. I scheduled meetings and social activities almost constantly throughout these two weeks and shared my experiences as my new self. As I started to sleep less and skip nights of sleep, others later told me I seemed agitated and down.
Maybe it is possible to catch these early warning signs and take counter measures before they worsen into mania or depression. This is why I have started to track my behavior starting with mood and sleep. If I can get a baseline of my behavior and know what is ‘normal’ for me, it will be easier to notice when I am outside my normal range. I can alert myself or be alerted by others around me who are monitoring me. Long-term records of mood will also help me experiment to see which things influence my mood. This may give me more control over my mood.
Mood tracking might be a good idea for anyone to do, but it may be especially helpful for people with a bipolar diagnosis. Everyone has mood variation. For bipolars, however, mood swings can be more extreme (in both directions, up and down) , have far worse consequences (psychosis on one end and suicide on the other), change more rapidly, and be more vulnerable to environmental triggers like stress. The good news is that the first changes in mood can happen hours or days before more extreme changes. This gives people a chance to take countermeasures to prevent more extreme states.
The project name refers to the fact that Van Gogh had bipolar disorder.
The Continued Existence of Acne Reveals the Perverse Incentives of Modern Medicine
Yesterday I wrote how Alexandra Carmichael’s headache story illustrated a large and awful truth about modern healthcare: It happily provides expensive relief of symptoms while ignoring investigation of underlying causes. If we understood underlying causes (e.g., causes of migraines), prevention would be easy. Let people get sick so that we can make money from them. There should be a name for this scam. In law enforcement, it’s called entrapment.
Sensible prevention research would start small. Not by trying to prevent breast cancer, or heart disease, or something like that: They take many years to develop and therefore are hard to study. Sensible prevention research would focus on things that are easy to measure and happen soon after their causative agents. One example is migraines. Migraines happen hours after exposure. The fact that Chemical X causes migraines means it is likely that Chemical X is bad for us, even if it doesn’t cause migraines in everyone. This is the canary-in-a-coal-mine idea. Migraines are the canary.
Acne is another canary. Acne is easy to measure. Figuring out how to prevent it would be a good way to begin prevention research. To prevent acne would be to take the first steps toward preventing many more diseases. A high-school student could do ground-breaking research — research that would improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people — about how to prevent acne but somehow this never happens. In spite of this possibility, grand-prize-winning high-school science projects, from the most brilliant students in the whole country, are always about trivia.
A just-published review in The Lancet reveals once again the unfortunate perspective of medical school professors. The abstract ends with this:
New research is needed into the therapeutic comparative effectiveness and safety of the many products available, and to better understand the natural history, subtypes, and triggers of acne.
Actually, finding out what causes acne is all that’s needed.
To figure out what causes acne (and thereby how to prevent it) three things are necessary: (a) study of environmental causes, such as diet, (b) starting with n=1, and (c) willingness to test many ideas that might be wrong (because it’s far from obvious how to prevent acne). All three of these things are exactly what the current healthcare research system opposes. It opposes prevention research because drug companies don’t fund it. It opposes n=1 studies because they are small and cheap, which is low-status. To do such a study would be like driving a Corolla. It opposes studies that could take indefinitely long because such studies are bad for a researcher’s career. Researchers need a steady stream of publications.
High school students, who aren’t worried about status or number of publications, could make a real contribution here. You don’t need fancy equipment to measure acne.
Thanks to Michael Constans.
Alexandra Carmichael Almost Eliminates Headaches
In this post, Alexandra Carmichael describes how she recently figured out what caused most of her headaches. She had suffered from frequent headaches for twenty years. One source was dairy. She confirmed this source when eating 1/4 stick of butter gave her a splitting headache. Another source was gluten. She got the idea that gluten might matter from the CureTogether list of migraine treatments. A final source turned out to be Febreze, as I mentioned in an earlier post.
You might marvel that conventional healthcare (e.g., doctors, the Mayo Clinic website, and so on) was no help. Or you might not. In the case of the woman I wrote about for Boing Boing, her conventional doctors actively got in the way of helping her find the source of her migraines. Alexandra takes ibuprofen for her headaches. So conventional healthcare (in this case, the makers of ibuprofen) has managed to profit from every one of her headaches but hasn’t done one useful thing to prevent them. A nasty state of affairs (provide expensive relief of symptoms, ignore prevention and underlying causes, thus ensuring that people continue to get sick and need relief) that is repeated a thousand places in our healthcare system (e.g., in depression, cancer, etc.).
At the First QS Conference, I gave a talk that included the following equation:
progress = resources*knowledge*time*freedom*motivation
I used this equation to explain why mainstream medicine was stagnating, but personal science was not. Personal scientists (individuals trying to improve their own health) seem tiny and insignificant compared to medical school professors with million-dollar grants and large labs. But the visible superiority of medical school professors — they have far more resources and knowledge than personal scientists, not to mention more prestige — masks an enormous hidden inferiority: Personal scientists have far more time, freedom, and motivation than medical school professors. And personal scientists are rapidly gaining more resources and knowledge. This is why, in terms of progress, they are catching up to and surpassing mainstream healthcare.
Alexandra’s story illustrates the pattern. In this case, personal science made progress (it eliminated most of her headaches), mainstream healthcare did not (it eliminated none of them). And the success of personal science depended on increases in resources and increases in knowledge. A new resource that helped Alexandra was a DailyBurn iPhone app that helped her track what she ate. From those records she noticed a curious pattern: that changes in how much dairy she ate caused trouble. Two new sources of knowledge also helped her. The accumulation of knowledge at CureTogether led to her to suspect gluten was one of her triggers. And my story in Boing Boing led to her to suspect that Febreze and other cleaning products were triggers.
Assorted Links
- interview with Daniel Lieberman, who studies barefoot running. “People are looking to evolution to find out how our bodies adapted and what might be healthier for us.” I walk and run barefoot on my treadmill. During the first few months, my feet got several cuts but now they’re fine.
- “ One [Ancestral Health Symposium] presentation was quick and easy to follow” (mine).
- Science reviewers find bad modelling acceptable.
Thanks to Anne Weiss.
The Rules of the Tunnel by Ned Zeman
I loved Ned Zeman’s new book The Rules of the Tunnel, which I read during a long plane flight. Not only does it combine three of my favorite subjects — high-end magazines, bipolar disorder, and the crappiness of modern psychiatry — but it’s very well-written and revealing. I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in a long time.
Zeman once wrote for Spy, as did I. Long ago, I met him at a Spy party. I suppose I could have gotten a free copy of his book but I bought it. I wanted something great to read on the plane.
Morning Faces Therapy Page
If you want to find out about using morning faces to improve your mood, go to this page, to which I will be slowly adding links. If you have suggestions about what to include, please leave a comment or email me. The page is meant to be an easy way to learn more.
Sulfites in Wine May Cause Bad Dreams
Eric Stroud, a web and marketing consultant, thought it would be nice to have a glass of wine an hour before bedtime. Wine is healthy, right?
But after seven or so nights of this, he began to have unpleasant dreams of a sort he’d never had before. They became more and more visceral, nightmarish, and anxiety-drenched. This continued four or five nights. Then he stopped drinking the wine. The bad dreams went away in one or two days. Something similar happened to one of his cousins.
He believes the bad dreams were due to the sulfites in wine. When he drank sulfite-free wine, he felt fine.