More Migraine Headaches Caused by Cleaning Products: From N=1 to N=2

Seth Roberts12 Comments

At Thursday’s Quantified Self Silicon Valley Meetup (where I gave a talk called QS + Paleo = ?), Alexandra Carmichael introduced herself with the three words “no”, “headache”, and “today”. About five days earlier, she had started having migraine headaches every day. Before that, she hadn’t had a migraine headache in a year. After the headaches began, her husband, having read my Boing Boing story (about a woman whose migraines were mostly from cleaning products), suggested that her headaches might be caused by the Febreze they had just started using. They stopped using it. Because it can linger in carpets, etc., they cleaned their whole apartment with vinegar and baking soda, to get rid of all traces. That’s when Alexandra’s headaches stopped. When they started using Febreze, one of their daughters became very cranky. After they stopped using it and cleaned their apartment, she returned to her usual self.

Other people have found that Febreze gives them migraines. For example, R. Haeckler:

[Febreze] gives me terrible migraines. . . . Whenever I go to someone’s house who uses it I get a headache almost immediately that lasts the rest of the night.

And this woman (“No Febreze EVER. Gives me a headache and makes me dizzy”).

This is a good example of why n=1 experimentation is so important. The woman I wrote about for Boing Boing (Sarah) figured out, beyond any doubt, that certain cleaning products caused migraines. Yes, Sarah’s results were unusual. They “don’t generalize” to most people in the sense that most people don’t get migraines from cleaning products. But, as Alexandra’s story shows, they were still helpful — they helped Alexandra avoid migraines.

My writing about n=1 experimentation has emphasized learning widely-applicable truths — how to lose weight, sleep better, and so on. But this other use — learn stuff that is true only for you and perhaps a small subset of people (1%?) — is also important. Sarah’s n=1 experimentation doesn’t fit in the standard healthcare system. It was not suggested or encouraged by her doctors. No professor or researcher could write a paper about it — it’s too small. But it made a difference — first, to herself, now, to Alexandra. The results of n=1 experiments can be spread, however, in the new patient communities, such as the ones at PatientsLikeMe, MedHelp, and CureTogether (started by Alexandra and her husband).

When I submitted for publication my long self-experimentation paper, one of the referees decided he would find out if fructose water would help him lose weight (one of my examples). He discovered that fructose water made his fingers ache — he had a sensitivity to fructose he hadn’t known about. In his review, he said that these sorts of individual differences were not an argument against my method but actually favored it: We need n=1 experiments to fully understand human variation in health.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

 

  • Edward Jay Epstein on Kindle publishing
  • review of The Beekeeper’s Lament, a book about the fragility of bees. “Colony Collapse Disorder [CCD] is a problem. But it isn’t the problem. Instead, it’s just a great big insult piled on top of an already rising injury rate. Saving the honeybee isn’t just about figuring out CCD. Bees were already in trouble before that came along.”
  • Vanity Fair provides a public service by providing full access to the final installment of Michael Lewis’s great series of Financial Disaster Travel Writing. Earlier installments were about Iceland, Ireland, and Greece. This installment is about Germany.

The Beer Archaeologist

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Patrick McGovern is a professor of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania who studies fermented beverages. His work reveals their long history. Just like modern nutritionists, modern archaeologists overlook this:

Many of McGovern’s most startling finds stem from other archaeologists’ spadework; he brings a fresh perspective to forgotten digs, and his “excavations” are sometimes no more taxing than walking up or down a flight of stairs in his own museum to retrieve a sherd or two. Residues extracted from the drinking set of King Midas—who ruled over Phrygia, an ancient district of Turkey—had languished in storage for 40 years before McGovern found them and went to work. The artifacts contained more than four pounds of organic materials, a treasure—to a biomolecular archaeologist—far more precious than the king’s fabled gold.

Beer figures more in his work than wine. I’m not surprised. I’m a beer snob. The best beers at a recent beer tasting were far better than the best wines at similar wine tastings. The upper-class preference for wine over beer may have the same explanation as earlier upper-class preferences for white rice over brown rice (rich Japanese got beriberi more than poor Japanese) and white bread over dark bread. Or it may also have something to do with the fact that cheap beer in America is terrible.

Thanks to Melissa McEwen.

What We Learn From the Better Health of Vegetarians

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Lots of people think it’s obvious: vegetarians are healthier than omnivores in Study X. Therefore vegetarianism is healthy. This is such a common line of argument that I draw your attention to Denise Minger’s slides for her talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium, which I have already blogged about. The slides make clearer than I did what she said. It’s all excellent but the best part is at the beginning where she points out the many confounds in the studies of Dean Ornish, Neal Barnard, Caldwell Esselstyn, and John McDougall. They change many things but — as Denise put it — What caused the benefits? It must be the vegetarianism! Paleo humor.

There are lots of other interesting things in Denise’s talk, as you will see, such as the health of religious vegetarians.


 

 

Ancestral Health Symposium: Meat versus Fat

Seth Roberts12 Comments

Yesterday I was telling a relative about the Ancestral Health Symposium and I mentioned the emphasis on meat eating — for example, two vendors gave out samples of beef jerky. To most people, I think paleo means eating lots of meat. I told my relative I disagreed with this. I find nothing wonderful about meat protein; I would happily get my protein from plants. I eat meat almost only for the associated fat. Which I can get from butter. A lot of meat I am served, such as in fancy restaurants, strikes me as too low in fat. Yesterday I requested butter at a sushi restaurant. The waitress was unsure if they had some.

Today I see Melissa McEwen said the same thing much better:

It was interesting to observe that [at the Ancestral Health Symposium] among the low-carbers, there seemed to be an epidemic of puffy red skin, particularly in older men. I’m sure the pictures, when they are posted, will make obvious who these people are. The ones who had healthy complexions like the Eades and Nora are those espousing a high-fat diet. It goes very well with some of the anthropological stuff I’ve been working on showing that almost all cultures that eat meaty diets are doing so because they have access to high-fat game.

 

Top and Bottom Versus Middle: China, Schools, Health?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

My explanation of the Ten Commandments is that someone at the top (Moses) was trying to convince people at the bottom to join him. People at the bottom were being preyed upon. “Thou shalt not steal” meant, to Moses’s audience, “no one will steal from you — or at least we, your leaders, will discourage it.” At the very beginning of the Code of Hammarabi, another ancient set of rules, it says one purpose of the rules is “so that the strong will not harm the weak”.

I keep seeing this pattern — people at or near the top of the hierarchy making common cause with people on the bottom against people in the middle. I was reminded of it by this story:

One anecdote described a Hu Yaobang [top Chinese leader] visit that Mr. Wen arranged with Guizhou Province villagers — secretly, he wrote, because Hu Yaobang did not trust local leaders to let them speak freely.

In the 1960s, the U.S. civil rights movement gained considerable force and accomplishment when the very top of the government (first, President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, later President Johnson) weighed in on the side of the protesters (bottom) against the various state governments (middle).

The practical value of this alignment of forces is illustrated by How to Walk to School, a book about school reform (which I reviewed here). Two mothers of young children, Jacqueline Edelberg and another woman, wanted to improve their neighborhood schools before it was too late for their own children to benefit. On the face of it, this was impossible. But they found common cause with the principal of a local school (Susan Kurland). It goes unmentioned in the book but my impression, reading between the lines, is that the main thing that happened is that the worst teachers were shamed into leaving, above all by parents sitting in their classrooms. The principal alone could do nothing about terrible teachers; the parents alone could do nothing; together they did a lot. I spoke to Edelberg about this and she agreed with me.

I point out this pattern because it works. Judaism (Moses) still exists; people still read the Old Testament. Even more powerfully, all governments have lists of laws (Hammurabi). Jacqueline Edelberg’s neighborhood school is much better. The next big revolution in human affairs, I believe, will be health care. The current system, in which people pay vast amounts for drugs that barely work, have awful side effects, and leave intact the root cause (e.g., too little dietary omega-3), will be replaced by a much better system. The much better system will be some version of paleo. As Woody Allen predicted, people will come to believe that butter is health food.

How will it happen? I suspect this pattern will be the driving force. People at the top and people at the bottom will put pressure on people in the middle. Self-experimentation, self-quantification, and personal science (which overlap greatly) are tools of people at the bottom. They cost nothing, they are available to all. When you track (quantify and record) your health problem, and show your doctor, via numbers and graphs, that the drug he prescribed didn’t work, that puts pressure on him. When you bring your doctor numbers and graphs that show a paleo solution did work, that puts even more pressure on him. The point, if it isn’t obvious, is that numbers and graphs, based on carefully collected day-after-day data, amplify what one person can do. Not just what they can learn, not just how healthy they can be, but how much they can influence others. And this amplification of influence, which I never discuss, may ultimately be the most important.

The Curious Popularity of “How To Win an Argument With a Meat-Eater”

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Denise Minger started her presentation at the Ancestral Health Symposium (titled “How to win an argument with a vegetarian”) with a comparison of number of Google hits:

“how to win an argument with a meat-eater”: 53,700 hits

“how to win an argument with a vegetarian”: 7 hits

Why all this concern with winning arguments? Sure, vegetarians are outnumbered, but shouldn’t the results speak for themselves?

Denise went on to make the excellent point that some of the most popular proponents of less meat and low-fat diets, such as Dean Ornish, base their claims on experiments with complex treatments. Group A (no meat, low fat) turns out to be more healthy than Group B (baseline) but the two groups differ in twenty other ways. Group A eats less sugar, gets more exercise, eats less processed food, and so on. But, as Denise said, it must be the vegetarianism.

 

Andreas Eenfeldt on the Ancestral Health Symposium

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I’m beginning to think Andreas Eenfeldt, a Swedish doctor, gave the very best talk at the just-finished Ancestral Health Symposium. (Which was full of excellent talks.) And I missed it. Well, that’s what the Internet is for. His talk was about the spread of paleo ideas in Sweden. Apparently not all establishments are hostile to all new ideas. Someone told me that sales of butter in Sweden have recently increased 40%.

Eenfeldt has written a great series of posts about the Symposium.

 

At the Ancestral Health Symposium

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I am in Los Angeles for the Ancestral Health Symposium. I am giving a talk called “What Foods Make My Brain Work Best?” Readers of this blog won’t be surprised: I will talk about flaxseed oil, pork fat, and butter. On Thursday, there was a party at Aaron Blaisdell’s house for presenters and volunteers. It was kind of magical to see at the same party Mark Cohen, Gary Taubes, Denise Minger, Mark Sisson, Jimmy Moore, Boyd Eaton, Loren Cordain, Chris Masterjohn, and Tucker Max. Plus others, such as Staffan Lindeberg, whom I didn’t manage to meet. More like an historical tableau in a mural or tapestry than an actual event.

There was more meat than any other party I’ve ever been to. Grilled outside. Mostly steak but also boar and salmon. It was delicious. I wish I knew the name of the grillmaster so I could thank him.