I am a big fan of pork belly. Whenever I see it on a menu I order it. The mayor of Chongqing (population 32 million) recently made headlines with a speech whose main point was
改善民生ä¸åªæ˜¯åƒçº¢çƒ§è‚‰ç©¿æ¼‚亮衣æœ
Which means: Better living standards is not just eating hong shao rou wearing beautiful clothes. Hong shao rou is pork belly braised in a red sauce. Maybe my favorite Chinese dish. Supposedly Chairman Mao’s favorite dish. I’m glad he said “not just” rather than “not”.
At my Quantified Self talk I described data that suggested butter improved my mental function. During the question period, a cardiologist in the audience said something about me killing myself — butter is unhealthy. The usual view.
I said I thought the evidence for the usual view was weak. He said, “The Framingham studies.” That was epidemiology, I said. It is notoriously hard to understand. My data was from something like an experiment. Much easier to understand. (And the Framingham study is a terrible example of the supposed evidence. To quote from it: “In the period between the taking of the diet interviews and the end of the 16-year follow-up, 47 cases of de novo CHD developed in the Diet Study group. The means for all the diet variables measured were practically the same for these cases as for the original cohort at risk.”) He replied that the reduction in heart disease in recent years was more support for the usual view. I said the recent decline in heart disease could have many explanations other than a reduction in animal fat intake. Many things have changed over the last 20 years.
There is epidemiological evidence that saturated fat is bad, yes, but it is not the Framingham study nor the recent decline in heart disease. And it really is difficult to interpret. The butter-is-bad interpretation could easily be wrong. The obvious problem is that, after people are told butter is bad, people who try hard to be healthy avoid butter. And they do a lot of other things, too, to be healthy. So butter consumption ends up confounded with a dozen other variables believed to affect your health. When I was growing up, my parents avoided butter because margarine was much cheaper. So butter consumption is confounded with income, another problem.
My tiny experiment, whatever its problems, was much easier to interpret.
On Tuesday I gave a talk called “Arithmetic and Butter” at the Quantified Self meeting in Sunnyvale. I had about 10 slides but this one mattered most:
It shows how fast I did simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 2*0, 9-6, 7*9) before and after I started eating 1/2 stick (60 g) of butter every day. The x axis covers about a year. The butter produced a long-lasting improvement of about 30 msec.
I think the hill shape of the butter function is due to running out of omega-3 in Beijing — my several-months-old flaxseed oil had gone bad, even though it had been frozen. When I returned to Berkeley and got fresh flaxseed oil, my scores improved.
This isn’t animal fat versus no animal fat. Before I was eating lots of butter, I was eating lots of pork fat. It’s one type of animal fat versus another type. Nor is it another example of modern processing = unhealthy. Compared to pork fat, butter is recent.
Most scientists think philosophy of science is irrelevant. Yet this line of research (measuring my arithmetic speed day after day, in hopes of accidental discovery) derived from a philosophy of science, which has two parts. First, scientific progress has a power-law distribution. Each time we collect data, we sample from a power-law-like distribution. Almost all samples produce tiny progress; a very tiny fraction produce great progress. Each time you collect data, in other words, it’s like buying a lottery ticket. I realized that a short easy brain-function test allowed me to buy a large number of lottery tickets at low cost. Second, we underestimate the likelihood of extreme events. Nassim Taleb has argued this about the likelihood of extreme negative events (which presumably have a power-law distribution); I’m assuming the same thing about extreme positive events (with a power-law distribution). We undervalue these lottery tickets, in other words. Perhaps all scientists hope for accidental discoveries. I seem to be the first to use a research strategy that relies on accidental discoveries.
In the graph, note that one point (actually, two) is down at 560 msec. This suggests there’s room for improvement.
I eat a lot of butter because I believe it makes my brain work better. A new paper says it may help me in other ways. From the abstract:
Compared with those with the lowest intake of full-fat dairy [= “whole milk, cream, ice cream, yogurt, full-fat cheese and custard”], participants with the highest intake (median intake 339 g/day) had reduced death due to CVD (HR: 0.31; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.12—0.79; P for trend = 0.04) after adjustment for calcium intake and other confounders.
70% reduction is huge — so large it makes the idea of direct causation (butterfat lowers CVD risk) more plausible. (However, there is a lot of uncertainty in the estimate.) The alternative is that butterfat intake is correlated with the true cause — a behavior difference, say. But that correlation would have to be very high, which isn’t terribly plausible. Measured differences between the high-fat group and the low-fat group were small.
Stephan Guyenet reviews other evidence that supports the idea that this reduction is no fluke. Other studies have found similar effects.
Thanks to Paul Sas.
Ever since I found that pork fat improved my sleep, I’ve tried to eat a substantial amount every day. A few months ago, I knew I couldn’t eat any that day so I had a lot of butter at lunch (about 30 g). About 1-2 hours later, I felt in an unusually good mood — in particular, unusually calm. I hadn’t noticed such an effect with pork fat, perhaps because it is digested more slowly. (It’s easy to see that pork fat melts more slowly than butter.)
Now a friend has reported a similar effect:
My mood is better with the Straus butter, but I am concerned about my cholesterol, so maybe I’ll just use it when I feel depressed. But it does work.
I’d guess that Straus Family Creamery butter, which is from grass-fed cows, has more omega-3 than other butter but I haven’t noticed mood elevation from flaxseed oil, so I doubt that’s involved. Moreover, I’ve always been drinking plenty of flaxseed oil so I doubt I’m omega-3 deficient.
Maybe this has something to do with why certain food is “comfort food”.
A new study found that consumption of unprocessed meat was not associated with more risk of heart disease but that consumption of processed meat (such as bacon) was associated with greater risk of heart disease. The whole American fear of animal fat (including butter) may be due to an unrecognized confounding: those who ate more animal fat also ate more bacon.
A recent study in Finland found that cheese with added lactic acid bacteria (sold commercially) stimulated the immune systems of elderly subjects. Earlier studies had found similar effects when the bacteria were put in milk or yogurt. To me, the most interesting result was that the cheese alone (Gouda, a fermented cheese) had no detectable effect. I take that to mean that some fermented foods contain too little bacteria to make a difference. I’m going to have to stop using my umami hypothesis as an excuse to eat cheese — although cheese may also be good for the fat it contains.
Thanks to Anne Weiss.
I asked Brent if he had any comments on his experience (after he adopted an ancestral diet, his migraines and sinus infections stopped). He wrote:
The quality of my life (mental + physical health) improved even further when I started eating slices of butter throughout the day awhile back. For awhile, I was using spoonfuls of coconut butter/coconut oil and/or Greek yogurt for this satiation role, but once I added butter slices to the mix, I beefed up my nutritional ‘bag of tricks’ quite a bit. Of course, I had cooked in butter for a few years, but I never made the link to simply eat it in slices, despite enjoying its taste so much. And, a little bit goes a long way. I eat cultured butter from a few different brands and a few different locations of the world (hoping this diversification may carry extra beneficial side-effects: different strains of micro-organisms, etc.). I try to find brands that are pastured too (more naturally-occurring Omega-3′s, evidently). I usually suck on/chew on the butter slowly because I’ve found this has improved my oral health too: animal lipids (plus coconut oil) are good for epithelial tissue health (that’s why I rub coconut oil on my face and skin and rub butter, coconut oil, and yogurt on my hands). Pairing butter and coffee (I eat the butter; I don’t put it in my coffee; I drink my coffee black) has become a nice start to my day (Dave Lull even found a study speculating on the benefits of coupling hyperlipidity and anti-oxidants together in this way; I think it’s also a useful approach to detoxifying the liver), particularly when I know I am going to workout that morning–this little hyperlipidity kick seems to help in the gym too (when I am not fasting). Using butter slices in this manner is a nice compliment to fasting intermittently–these two practices allow me to enjoy low-caloric intake periods pleasantly. They set up my “feasts” nicely. Whenever I have a “grumbling” stomach, or I feel a “biting” sensation in my stomach, I eat a small piece of butter, and my mood and body tend to stabilize. And, like bacon and yogurt and eggs, it’s cheap. Butter has certainly been an excellent ‘cheap health option’ for me.
He later added:
Now I am working intently on Meta-Rules. Meta-Rules are simply ‘rules for making rules’ to live by. Three dynamics concern me deeply: (1) The problem of induction; (2) biochemical individuality; and, (3) factoring for the unseen. For instance, one of my nutritional Meta-Rules is: “Don’t consume anything that causes a negative physiological reaction.” From this Meta-Rule, I have deduced the following rule to live by (as one example): “Don’t consume high-fructose corn syrup.” A marker for monitoring this rule could be facial inflammation and ‘puffiness’ post-consumption, as one possibility. That’s an example of a higher-level precept empowering an individual to deduce for him or herself how that concept applies (or does not apply) in his/her own specific case (I like the term: Patient of One). Over time, I suspect that something like William Baines’ Biomedical Mutual Organization (BMO) could emerge if enough people were self-experimenting with Meta-Rules and interacting about their experiences and results. Amongst this cohort of parallel n=1 clinical trials, some convergence of Meta-Rules may occur, indicating ways that our bodies are the same, and also showing how our bodies differ individually when it comes to things like diet, exercise, and lifestyle design.
To explain why headaches can be due to inflammation, he pointed me to this.
When Marion Jones, the Olympic athlete, was in prison, “ several inmates befriended her and showed her . . . how to hide sticks of butter.” Just as others carry water bottles so they can drink throughout the day, I carry butter in my backpack in a jar so I can eat small amounts throughout the day. As far as I know, no one else does this. I value butter so much because it makes my brain work better. If anyone reading this knows why inmates value butter so much, please let me know.
Previously on Seth’s Blog: A few weeks ago, during a brief test, I did simple arithmetic (e.g., 3+8, 4*0) substantially faster than usual. The next day, under the same conditions, it happened again. I thought of four possible reasons for the improvement:
I guessed it was the walking.
Since then I’ve been gathering data to choose between these possibilities. I’ve been eating butter regularly to see if there’s a chronic speed-up. And I’ve been doing pairs of tests 20 minutes apart. The first test provides a baseline against which to judge the results of the second test. To measure the effects of the cobblestone mat I stood on the mat between the tests. To measure the effect of walking, I walked during the time between the tests. To measure the effect of standing, I stood during the second test but not the first.
The results so far suggest, to my surprise, that two of the four factors helped: butter and standing. How wrong I was!
At Berkeley, one of my students did a self-experiment that compared different ways of studying. She measured how long she stayed awake while studying foreign vocabulary. Worst turned out to be the conventional way: sitting at her desk in silence. Best was lying on her bed listening to hard rock. My new results are sort of a bigger version of the same thing: conventionally we avoid butter and sit while doing intellectual work.
Hoping to learn why Chairman Mao, like me, considered pork belly “brain food”, I found just this:
The local government in Hunan [where Mao was from] has sought to standardize the cooking of the dish [Mao’s favorite pork belly dish], in order to stem the tide of imitations that crowd Chinese restaurants.
According to stringent instructions from the government’s food quality supervision and testing institute, true hong shao rou [red braised pork] can only be made with the meat of rare pigs from Ningxiang county. Officials have designated the pig, which has been bred for nearly 1,000 years, as an “agricultural treasure”.
I tried pork belly from different sorts of pigs (e.g., black pigs) but never noticed a difference.
Hunan Province is also the location of West Lake restaurant, one of the largest restaurants in the world. I’ve been watching “The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World,” a wonderful BBC documentary about it. The owner attributes her success to her first husband, who made her furious.