Category: butter

More Dairy Fat, Less Heart Disease

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I found that butter made me faster at arithmetic. This contradicted the usual view that butter is unhealthy. However, there is plenty of evidence that the usual view is wrong. The latest issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition contains another example. An epidemiological article titled “Dietary intake of saturated fat by food source and incident cardiovascular disease: the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis” found a negative correlation between dairy fat and heart disease:

Although dietary recommendations have focused on restricting saturated fat (SF) consumption to reduce cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, evidence from prospective studies has not supported a strong link between total SF intake and CVD events. . . . After adjustment for demographics, lifestyle, and dietary confounders, a higher intake of dairy SF was associated with lower CVD risk [HR (95% CI) for +5 g/d and +5% of energy from dairy SF: 0.79 (0.68, 0.92) and 0.62 (0.47, 0.82), respectively].

However, saturated fat from meat was associated with more heart disease:

In contrast, a higher intake of meat SF was associated with greater CVD risk [HR (95% CI) for +5 g/d and a +5% of energy from meat SF: 1.26 (1.02, 1.54) and 1.48 (0.98, 2.23), respectively].

It isn’t obvious how to explain the interaction (the direction of association of saturated fat depends on whether it is in dairy or meat). The authors conclude:

Associations of SF with health may depend on food-specific fatty acids or other nutrient constituents in foods that contain SF, in addition to SF

This recent article also questions the idea that dairy fat causes heart disease. One more reason to question conventional nutritional advice.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to David Cramer.

Surprising Predictions From Self-Measurement

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Patrick Tucker, an editor at The Futurist, posted a request on the Quantified Self Forums for “astounding” predictions based on self-quantification. He is writing a book about using data to make predictions.

Here are examples from my self-measurement:

1. Drinking sugar water causes weight loss. The self-quantification was measuring my weight. It began when I found a new way to lose weight, which pushed me to try to explain why it worked. The explanation I came up with — a new theory of weight control — made two predictions that via self-experimentation I found to be true. That gave me faith in the theory. Then the theory suggested a really surprising conclusion, that loss of appetite during a trip to Paris was due to the sugar-sweetened soft drinks I had been drinking. If so, drinking sugar water should cause weight loss. (The nearly-universal belief is that sugar causes weight gain, of course.) I tested this prediction and it was true. More.

2. Seeing faces in the morning improves mood the next day (but not the same day). This is so surprising I’ll spell it out: Seeing faces Monday morning improves my mood on Tuesday but not Monday. For years I measured my sleep trying to reduce early awakening. Finally I figured out that not eating breakfast helped. There was no breakfast during the Stone Age; this led me to take seriously the idea that other non-Stone-Age aspects of my life were also hurting my sleep. That was one reason I decided to watch to watch a certain TV show one morning. It had no immediate effect. However, the next morning I woke up feeling great. Via self-measurement of mood, I determined it was the faces on TV that produced the effect, confirmed the effect many times, and learned what details of the situation (e.g., face size) controlled the effect. More.

3. One-legged standing improves sleep. Via self-measurement I determined that how much I stood during a day controlled how well I slept. If I stood a long time, I slept better. Ten years later I woke one day after having slept much better than usual. The previous day had been unusual in many ways. One of them was so tiny that at first I overlooked it: I had stood on one leg a few times. Just for a few minutes. Yet it turned out that it was the one-legged standing that had improved my sleep. Without the previous work on ordinary standing I would have ignored the one-legged standing — it seemed trivial.

4. Butter is healthy. I found that butter improved how fast I can do arithmetic problems. No doubt it improves brain function measured in other ways. Because the optimum nutrition for the brain will be close to the optimum nutrition for the rest of the body — at least, this is what I believe — I predict that butter will turn out to be healthy for my whole body, not just my brain.

5. Mainstream Vitamin D research is all messed up. Via self-measurement I confirmed Tara Grant’s conclusion that taking Vitamin D3 in the morning (rather than later) improved her sleep. It improved my sleep, too. When I had taken it at other times of day I had noticed nothing. Apparently the timing of Vitamin D — the time of day that you take it — matters enormously. Take it at the right time in the morning: obvious good effect. Take it late in the evening: obvious bad effect. Vitamin D researchers haven’t realized this. They have neither controlled when Vitamin D is taken (in experiments) nor measured when it is taken (in surveys). Because timing matters so much it is as if they have done their research failing to control or measure dose. If you fail to control/measure dose, whatever conclusion you reach (good/no effect/bad) depends entirely on what dose your subjects happened to take. And you have no idea what dose that is.

Science in Action: Unexplained Changes in Brain Speed

Seth Roberts6 Comments

This is me a few days ago. I did a choice reaction time task many times. Each dot is a session with enough trials to supply 32 correct answers.The y axis is in “percentile” units, meaning speed relative to recent performance. If my speed was at the average of recent performance, the percentile would be 50, for example. Higher percentiles = better performance = faster (shorter reaction time). Each point is a mean; the vertical bars are standard errors. The dotted line is the median of the means.

The graph shows that Friday afternoon I was suddenly unusually slow. After dinner, I returned to normal. A change from 60%ile to 20%ile to 60%ile resembles an IQ change from 105 to 87 to 105 (an 18-point change).

At the same time accuracy was roughly constant:

Because accuracy was roughly constant, the change in speed was not due to a shift on a speed-accuracy tradeoff function.

There are two puzzles here. 1. Why were my scores low Friday afternoon? 2. Why did they recover after dinner? On Friday I didn’t feel well. As a result, I didn’t eat much. Maybe my blood sugar was lower than usual. I usually eat 30 g butter twice/day. On Friday I didn’t have any. At dinner I did have moderate amounts of pork fat (but not butter) and sugar (in lemon citron tea). Friday 6 pm I had a cup of black tea. Although I haven’t noticed effects of tea on these scores, there’s a first time for everything.

Here is a clue to what makes my brain work well (= fast), I conclude. Butter causes sudden improvement, I have found; which makes it plausible that lack of butter (and other animal fat) could cause sudden degradation. Another possibility was that my blood sugar was low Friday afternoon. (I didn’t think of this at the time, and didn’t measure it.) I’m surprised that something as important as brain function would be as fragile as these results imply. When various nutrient deficiencies are studied with conventional measures, it generally takes weeks or months without the nutrient for the bad effects to become apparent. It takes many weeks without Vitamin C to get scurvy, for example.

These results raise the intriguing possibility that everyone has sudden ups and downs in brain function and that these ups and downs can be detected at high signal/noise ratios. If so, we can use these ups and downs to learn how to make our brains work well. These results also imply — because my choice reaction time test required only a laptop — that anyone can detect them, study them, and learn what causes them. No experts needed. What a change that would be.

 

Does Kerrygold Butter Improve HDL and LDL?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

More: Greg used Kerrygold butter in the results given below. I now see that he omitted data from other butters that did not agree with his conclusions. This makes his results considerably more doubtful and his whole post (in which Kerrygold butter is called “butter”) misleading. I have changed the title of this post to reflect this.

A New York lawyer named Greg reports remarkably clear evidence about the effect of butter on blood lipid levels: It improved them. For a few years he measured his HDL and LDL regularly with a home cholesterol device. For unrelated reasons, he started eating more butter. He ate a half stick (about 60 g)/day, like me. Here’s what happened.

The first five measurements are from lab tests. The rest are from his home machine.

I asked Greg for details.

I’m 36. I bought the cholesterol meter last July after my doctor said he couldn’t figure out why my numbers were a bit high. We both agreed it was not something to worry too much about and that there was no point charging my insurance company for a VAP test every 6 months. We both also agreed that going on a statin was a bad idea. I picked up the meter out of curiosity. I had previously been monitoring my blood sugar (since 2009) and found it to be very interesting, so I thought I could have some fun with the numbers. The result is all the more surprising because I did not expect it. I was tracking my numbers around the time of the experiment [with butter] to make sure they did not go the wrong way like everyone says they should.

The machine is a CardioChek PA [about $600], which is designed for use in doctors offices, not for the consumer market. The device is “CLIA-waived”, which means that the FDA considers it so simple that the user does not need any special training in clinical chemistry (home glucometers fall into the same category). The machine gives significantly different numbers for different people, suggesting it is measuring something real and not spitting out random numbers.

I asked what the reaction to this data has been.

Most people I’ve spoken to have been receptive to the idea [that butter improves blood lipids], but I got no sense that they would be willing to try it for themselves. Most people I know seem to be quite willing to accept the fact that the old stories about cholesterol are not true. In contrast, one conservative cardiologist said I must have “unique genetics”.

Tucker Max on How to Eat an Egg

Seth Roberts22 Comments

A few months ago I blogged that a rat had persuaded me to eat more eggs. This particular rat liked scrambled eggs. Rats are omnivores, like humans. Unlike humans, they ignore advertising, nutrition fads and disinformation. Related to this, Tucker Max emailed me:

Have you thought about eating your egg raw? It sounded weird to me at first, but after looking extensively into it, there was a lot of good evidence that cooking an egg destroys a lot of the beneficial nutrients/enzymes in it. Once I started doing this, I noticed a HUGE increase in energy from the egg. It was like I almost eating a different food. In fact, the very first time I did it was at night, like 9pm, and I couldn’t get to sleep until 3am I had such a huge burst of energy. It’s not quite like that anymore, but I take it about an hour or two before I work out, and its like taking a red bull (I may be a bit vitamin B12 deficient, which would explain this).

As to how I do it, I just crack the egg into a coffee cup, and swallow it whole. It has pretty much no flavor. I also only do it with organic pasture-raised eggs. I don’t think I’d do this with normal, crappy store bought eggs.

I replied:

On my blog I said that butter and egg were in that way different from other foods — butter or at least milk must be a complete nutrient since it is the only food the baby gets. Other foods are under no such evolutionary pressure.

Tucker replied:

Which is why its SO important to get raw milk/butter from grassfed cows. Almost a completely different food than normal grocery store milk.

Yeah. When I get back to California I will compare raw and cooked eggs. In Beijing I eat mainly fermented eggs.

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.

Butter and Eggs: What They Share

Seth Roberts24 Comments

To many dieticians and much of the general public, the similarity between butter and eggs is that both are bad for you. Butter: Fattening! Clogs arteries! Eggs: High in cholesterol! To me, it’s the opposite: both seem to be unusually good for us. Butter seems to make my brain work better and may have reduced my risk of heart attack. Eggs — at least, scrambled eggs — are especially well-liked by Mr. T, a rat. There are many similarities between rats and humans. Humans also like eggs. The foods we like are a guide (imperfect) to what foods are good for us.

Here’s another similarity between butter and eggs: Both must be complete — contain all necessary nutrients — much more than any other food. Butter is large part of milk. When mammalian offspring are very young, mother’s milk is their only food. Eggs, of course, must contain everything needed to become a baby chick (as a commenter named Rashad pointed out). No other foods — not fruits, not vegetables, not whatever other foods your great grandmother or other ancestors ate — have been under this sort of evolutionary pressure.

The evolution of lactose tolerance and my butter discoveries.

 

 

 

Butter and Arithmetic: How Much Butter?

Seth Roberts25 Comments

I measure my arithmetic speed (how fast I do simple arithmetic problems, such as 3+ 4) daily. I assume it reflects overall brain function. I assume something that improves brain function will make me faster at arithmetic.

Two years ago I discovered that butter — more precisely, substitution of butter for pork fat — made me faster. This raised the question: how much is best? For a long time I ate 60 g of butter (= 4 tablespoons = half a stick) per day. Was that optimal? I couldn’t easily eat more but I could easily eat less.

To find out, I did an experiment. At first I continued my usual intake (60 g /day). Then I ate 30 g/day for several days. Finally I returned to 60 g/day. Here are the main results:

The graph shows that when I switched to 30 g/day, I became slower. When I resumed 60 g/day, I became faster. Comparing the 30 g/day results with the combination of earlier and later 60 g/day results, t = 6, p = 0.000001.

The amount of butter also affected my error rate. Less butter, less errors:

Comparing the 30 g/day results with the combination of earlier and later 60 g/day results, t = 3, p = 0.006.

The change in error rates raised the possibility that the speed changes were due to movement along a speed-accuracy tradeoff function (rather than to genuine improvement, which would correspond to a shift in the function). To assess this idea, I plotted speed versus accuracy (each point a different day).

If differences between conditions were due to differences in speed-accuracy tradeoff, then the points for different days should lie along a single downward-sloping line. They don’t. They don’t lie along a single line. Within conditions, there was no sign of a speed-accuracy tradeoff (the fitted lines do not slope downward). If this is confusing, look at the points with accuracy values in the middle. Even when equated for accuracy, there are differences between the 30 g/day phase and the 60 g/day phases.

What did I learn?

1. How much butter is best. Before these results, I had no reason to think 60 g/day was better than 30 g/day. Now I do.

2. Speed of change. Environmental changes may take months or years to have their full effect. Something that makes your bones stronger may take months or years to be fully effective. Here, however, changes in butter intake seemed to have their full effect within a day. I noticed the same speed of change with pork fat and sleep: How much pork fat I ate during a single day affected my sleep that night (and only that night). With omega-3, the changes were somewhat slower. A day without it made little difference. You can go weeks without Vitamin C before you get scurvy. Because of the speed of the butter change, in the future I can do better balanced experiments that change conditions more often.

3. Better experimental design. An experiment that compares 60 g/day and 0 g/day probably varies many things besides butter consumption (e.g., preparing the butter to eat it). An experiment that compares 60 g/day and 30 g/day is less confounded. When I ate less butter, I ate more of other food. Compared to a 60 g/0 g experiment, this experiment (60 g/30 g) has less variation in other food. Another sort of experiment, neither better nor worse, would vary type of fat rather than amount. For example, replace 30 g of butter with 30 g of olive oil. Because the effect of eliminating 30 g/day of butter was clear, replacement experiments become more interesting — 30 g/day olive oil is more plausible as a sustainable and healthy amount than 60 g/day.

4. Generality. This experiment used cheaper butter and took place in a different context than the original discovery. I discovered the effect of butter using Straus Family Creamery butter. “One of the top premium butters in America, ” says its website, quoting Food & Wine magazine This experiment used a cheaper less-lauded butter (Land O’Lakes). Likewise, I discovered the effect in Berkeley. I did this experiment in Beijing. My Beijing life differs in a thousand ways from my Berkeley life.

The results suggest the value of self-experimentation, of course. Self-experimentation made this study much easier. But other things also mattered.

First, reaction-time methodology. In the 1960s my friend and co-author Saul Sternberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, introduced better-designed reaction-time experiments to study cognition. They turned out to be far more sensitive than the usual methods, which involved measuring percent correct. (Saul’s methodological advice about these experiments.)

Second, personal science (science done to help yourself). I benefited from the results. Normal science is part of a job. The self-experimentation described in books was mostly (or entirely) done as part of a job. Before I collected this data, I put considerable work into these measurements. I discovered the effect of butter in an unusual way (measuring myself day after day), I tried a variety of tasks (I started by measuring balance), I refined the data analysis, and so on. Because I benefited personally, this was easy.

Third, technological advances. Twenty years ago this experiment would have been more difficult. I collected this data outside of a lab using cheap equipment (a Thinkpad laptop running Windows XP). I collected and analyzed the data with R (free). A smart high school student could do what I did.

There is more to learn. The outlier in the speed data (one day was unusually fast) means there can be considerable improvement for a reason I don’t understand.

The Genomera Buttermind Experiment.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments
  • Doctoring to the test. Megan McArdle describes the medical equivalent of “teaching to the test”. Although she had the usual symptoms of too-little thyroid hormone, her doctor would not give her more synthetic hormone because her Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) level was within “normal range”.
  • The Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War for Europe’s Money by Bernard Connolly is out of print, but you can buy a used copy ($600) or download it (free).
  • More evidence that butter is good for you.
  • The trouble with lab mice. Nobel Prizes in Medicine, I’ve said, show the continuing failure of researchers to make significant progress on all major diseases. This article is a closer look at the problem. “We’ve had thousands of mouse studies of tuberculosis, yet not one of them has ever been used to pick a new drug regimen that succeeded in clinical trials. ‘This isn’t just true for TB; it’s true for virtually every disease,’ he tells me.”

Thanks to Ivy Hsieh and Allan Jackson.