Category: nutrition

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.

 

 

 

An Unbiassed View of What We Should Eat . . . From a Rat

Seth Roberts20 Comments

In nature animals must choose a healthy diet based on what tastes good. This doesn’t work for modern humans — lots of people eat poor diets — but why it fails is a mystery. There are many possible reasons. Are the wrong (“unnatural”) foods available (e.g., too much sugar, too little omega-3, not enough fermented food)? Is something besides food causing trouble (e.g., too little exercise, too little attention to food)? Are bad cultural beliefs too powerful (e.g., “low-fat”, desire for thinness)? Is advertising too powerful? Is convenience too powerful? Lab animals are intermediate between animals in nature and modern humans. They are not affected by cultural beliefs, advertising, and convenience (the foods they are offered are equally convenient). Their choice of food may be better than ours.

Nutrition researchers understand the value of studying what lab animals choose to eat. In 1915, the first research paper about “dietary self-selection” was published, followed by hundreds more. The general finding is that in laboratory or research settings, animals choose a relatively healthy diet. There are two variations:

[1.] Cafeteria experiments with chemically defined [= synthesized] diets showed that some of these animals, when offered the separate, purified nutrient components of their usual diet, eat the nutrients in a balance that more or less resynthesizes the original diet and that is often superior to it. [2.] Other animals eat two or more natural foods in proportions that yield a more favorable balance of nutrients than will any one of these foods alone.

Both findings imply that housing an animal in a lab does not destroy the mechanism that tells it what to eat.

Which is why I was fascinated to recently learn what Mr. T (pictured above), the pet rat of Alexandra Harney, the author of The China Price, and her husband, liked to eat. It wasn’t obvious. “We tried so many foods with him and always thought it made a powerful statement that even a wild rat turned his nose up at potato chips,” says Alexandra. “He hated most processed food. He also hated carrots, though.” Here are his top three foods:

  1. pate
  2. salmon sashimi
  3. scrambled eggs

Pate = protein, animal fat, complex flavors (which in nature would have been supplied by microbe-rich, i.e., fermented, food). Salmon sashimi = protein, omega=3. Scrambled eggs = ??

He liked beer in moderation, but not yogurt. “Owners of domestic rats say they love yogurt,” says Alexandra, “but Mr T only liked it briefly and then hated it, even lunging to bite a friend who brought him some. [Curious.] He loved cheese, stored bread for future consumption (but almost never ate it). Loved pesto sauce and coconut.” Note the absence of fruits and vegetables. Alexandra and her husband have no nutritional theories that I am aware of. They did not shape this list to make some point.

For me the message is: Why scrambled eggs? I too like eggs and eat them regularly and cannot explain why.

More Alex Tabarrok’s Thanksgiving post shows the connection between libertarian ideas (economies work better when more choice is allowed) and dietary self-selection.

Vitamin D: More Reason to Take at Sunrise

Seth Roberts23 Comments

I blogged earlier about what I called a “stunning discovery”: Primal Girl found her sleep got much better when she started taking Vitamin D first thing in the morning (= soon after she got up) rather than mid-afternoon. This suggested that Vitamin D acts on your circadian system similar to a blast of sunlight. (More evidence and discussion here.) In his blog, Joseph Buchignani reports another experience that supports the idea that you should take Vitamin D first thing in the morning:

I picked up a bottle of Vit-D and Calcium. Dosage of Vit-D per pill was 1.6ud. Per the instructions, I took 1 at morning and 1 at night. I began this regimin on the night of the 24th of November. It’s now the night of the 25th of November, and my circadian rhythm is completely fucked. . . . I’m fully awake now (12:30 AM), and I probably took the last dose of Vit-D around 7-8 PM. . . . I woke up with dark eye rings on the morning of the 25th. My energy level did not rise as it should have, but sort of meandered in the middle, before finally tailing off. Stress levels and depression were both elevated. I got little productive done.

Yesterday I started taking Vitamin D first thing in the morning. I took 2000 IU of Vitamin D3 at 8 am. In the afternoon I felt more energetic than usual. The next morning (this morning) I woke up feeling more rested than usual. This also supports Primal Girl’s experience.

Let me repeat: first thing in morning. If you wake up before sunrise, take at sunrise (say, 7 am). Sunlight has a considerably different effect on your circadian system at 7 am than 10 am. (Look up circadian phase-response curve and especially the work of Patricia DeCoursey if you want to understand why three hours makes a big difference.) I have two bottles of Vitamin D. Neither mentions time of day. Both say take with meals.

Can Vitamin D Replace Sunlight? A Stunning Discovery

Seth Roberts44 Comments

Primal Girl is a stay-at-home mom. I met her at the Ancestral Health Symposium. Her sleep was bad. I made recommendations. One of them was to get an hour of sunlight soon after you wake up. She can’t do that — too busy being a mom. So she decided to take Vitamin D early in the morning. After all, sunlight exposure produces Vitamin D. Here’s what happened:

One day as I was taking my supplements, I was thinking about how many units of Vitamin D your skin produces in 30 minutes of sun (20,000 I believe). I looked aghast at the 10,000 units of Vitamin D I was taking. It was 7 o’clock at night! I was essentially giving my body 15 minutes worth of bright sunlight energy. No wonder I was waking up in the middle of the night! I was telling my body that it wasn’t really time for bed, it was still the middle of the day. I wondered what would happen if I only took my Vitamin D first thing in the morning. It wouldn’t be an hour naked in the sun, but 15 minutes is better than nothing. That night I slept like shit. Worse than normal.

I usually took my supplements mid-afternoon. I vowed to take them first thing every morning. If I forgot, I would not take the Vitamin D at all that day. I tried it the next day and that night I slept like a rock. And the next night. And the next. Days I forgot and skipped the D3, I still slept great. That was the only change I made to my lifestyle and my sleep issues completely resolved. [emphasis added]

OMG! Double OMG! Like Primal Girl, I have never heard anything like this. Even I am stunned that such a simple safe easy change could have such a positive effect. (Taking Vitamin D at sunrise is a lot easier than standing on one leg four times!) I’ve read lots about circadian rhythms. Many studies showed that a drug would be much more powerful at certain times of day. Most of these studies were with rats. It never occurred to me that the time you take a vitamin could matter so much.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to Brent Pottenger, Phil Alexander, dearime, and Casey Manion.

Brain Surprise! Why Did I Do So Well?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

For the last four years or so I have daily measured how well my brain is working by means of balance measurements and mental tests. For three years I have used a test of simple arithmetic (e.g, 7 * 8, 2 + 5). I try to answer as fast as possible. I take faster answers to indicate a better-functioning brain.

Yesterday my score was much better than usual. This shows what happened.

My usual average is about 550 msec or more; my score yesterday was 525 msec. An unexplained improvement of 25 msec.

What caused the improvement? I came up with a list of ways that yesterday was much different than usual, that is, was an outlier in other ways. These are possible causes. From more to less plausible:

1. I had 33 g extra flaxseed last night. (By mistake. I’m not sure about this.)

2. The test came at the perfect time after I had my afternoon yogurt with 33 g flaxseed. When I took flaxseed oil (now I eat ground flaxseed), it was clear that there was a short-term improvement for a few hours.

3. Many afternoons I eat 33 g ground flaxseed with yogurt. Yesterday I ground the afternoon flaxseed an unusually long time, making made the omega-3 more digestible.

4. I did kettlebells swings and a kettlebell walk about 2 hours before the test. These exercises are not new but usually I do them on different days. Yesterday was the first time I’ve done them on the same day. I’m sure ordinary walking improves performance for perhaps 30 minutes after I stop walking.

5. I had duck and miso soup a half-hour before the test. Almost never eat this.

6. I had a fermented egg (“thousand-year-old egg”) at noon. I rarely eat them.

7. I had peanuts with my yogurt and ground flaxseed. Peanuts alone seem to have no effect. Perhaps something in the peanuts improves digestion of the omega-3 in the flaxseed.

8. I started watching faces at 7 am that morning instead of 6:30 am or earlier.

Here are eight ideas to test. Perhaps one or two will turn out to be important. Perhaps none will.

After I made this list, I read student papers. The assignment was to comment on a research article. One of the articles was about the effect of holding a warm versus cold coffee cup. Holding a warm coffee cup makes you act “warmer,” said the article. Commenting on this, a student said she thought it was ridiculous until she remembered going to the barber. She sees the person who washes her hair (in warm water) as friendly, the barber as cold. Maybe this is due to the warm water used to wash her hair, she noted. This made me realize another unusual feature of yesterday: I had washed my hair in warm water longer than usual. I think I did it at least 30 minutes before the arithmetic test but I’m not sure. In any case, here is another idea to test. I found earlier that cold showers slowed down my arithmetic speed.

This illustrates a big advantage of personal science (science done for personal gain) over professional science (science done because it’s your job): The random variation in my life may suggest plausible new ideas. As far as I can tell, professional scientists have learned almost nothing about practical ways to make your brain work better. You can find many lists of “brain food” on the internet. Inevitably the evidence is weak. I’d be surprised if any of them helped more than a tiny amount (in my test, a few msec). The real brain foods, in my experience, are butter and omega-3. Perhaps my tests will merely confirm the value of omega-3 (Explanations 1-3). But perhaps not (Explanations 4-8 and head heating).

Many Supplements Taken Together Reduce Depression/Dysthymia

Seth Roberts6 Comments

At the recent Quantified Self Meetup in Mountain View, Fenn Lipkowitz told me that he had started taking a long list of supplements and now felt much better. At last week’s QS Silicon Valley Meetup, he gave a talk about it. The graph above shows “wellness” ratings before and after the change. Here’s what the scale numbers mean:

3 = “i’m hurting, i just want to crawl under my blanket and suffer for a few hours.”
4 = “today sucks, i think i’ll hide and eat some chocolate and read manga.”
5 = “well, i’m here and dont have any excuses, so i guess i’ll go do something.”
6 = “bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to go do some work”
7 = “why am i writing in my log, i should be out dancing!”
8 = “holy shit, tearing it up, backflipping over ninjas and juggling fire”

He describes the improvement like this:

Things seem really easy now that were serious barriers before. I now sleep 4-6 hours a night instead of 12, and bounce out of bed. I no longer have high dance inertia, I can just start dancing on demand. I can type 143 works per minute vs my maximum of 92 wpm a month ago.

Every morning he takes:

  • vinpocetine 10mg
  • vitamin-d 125ug
  • fish-oil 1g
  • piracetam 1600mg
  • alpha-gpc 300mg
  • choline-bitartrate 500mg
  • dmae 260mg
  • boswellia 300mg
  • curcumin 300mg
  • cordyceps-extract 1.2g
  • aloha-cordyceps 525mg
  • coq10 30mg
  • ginkgo-extract 60mg
  • tryptophan 500mg
  • Flintstones multivitamin B-complex

Here are his explanations for some of these:

vinpocetine – vasodilator derived from periwinkle plant. enhances focus, seems to improve long range vision, seems to cause your eyes to fixate more steadily on what you’re looking at, less saccades.

piracetam – increases communication between two halves of brain; the effects of this vary by person depending on which half of their brain is in control. for me it makes interpersonal relations become more clear, easier to cooperate and understand the motivations and intentions of others. also uses up choline at a faster rate, which is why i also take

alpha-gpc – a high bioavailability form of choline precursor, which is in the form that cells usually generate when they’re self-scavenging in choline-depletion state. it doesn’t go into rebuilding the cell walls, but is used for synthesis of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter involved in memory and muscle control.

choline-bitartrate – choline is transformed into phosphatidyl choline in order to (re)build cell membranes. this is low oral availability (doesn’t cross blood/brain barrier easily?) but super cheap and tastes good. i have a theory that alzheimers is caused mostly by long-term choline deficiency.

dmae – another choline precursor? aka “deanol” and has been shown to increase the life-span of mice by 50%, possibly through the mechanism of clearing out lipofuscin deposits. cheap, tastes good.

boswellia – no idea, it’s in the cucurmin pills; somewhat aromatic and pungent, like tea tree oil or piperazine.

curcumin – this is straight up turmeric extract. antioxidant and various other bodily health effects.

cordyceps extract – zombie ant brain fungus. look up images of it online, it’s sick. it makes you want to climb up to the top leaf in a tree, clamp your mandibles, and explode spores everywhere. well, not really. but it improves oxygenation, energy, and will kill a viral infection in one day. the extract is prepared by rapidly growing a lot of cordyceps mycelia in a warm fermenter and spray drying the liquid that comes off. this is highly unnatural environment

aloha cordyceps – aloha pharmaceuticals saw the explosion in “farmed” cordyceps and decided it wasn’t natural enough or something, so they recreated the mushroom’s natural environment of tibetan steppes. they grow it up fast and then let it sit for months in the dark in refrigerators with low oxygen. they claim that their process increases the number of good chemicals (cordycepin, uracil, based on HPLC analysis) and reduces the gross things. i can confirm it tastes/smells much better than swanson brand cordyceps extract. i started taking regular cordyceps extract first and can confirm it works as advertised, but maybe aloha is better, so i take that too. i have a friend taking only aloha cordyceps so we’ll see what happens.

More here.

 

 

The Evolution of Lactose Tolerance and My Butter Discoveries

Seth Roberts30 Comments

From a BBC documentary called Are We Still Evolving? I learned that after the development of farming there was intense selection in Europe for “lactose tolerance” — meaning the ability to digest lactose as an adult, which requires the enzyme lactase. (The technical name is lactase persistence.) The necessary gene spread rapidly. Now most Europeans have the gene. In Ireland almost everyone has the gene. Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist interviewed on the show, who does research on lactose tolerance, said this:

It’s probably the most advantageous characteristic that Europeans have evolved in the last 30,000 years.. . . The advantage that’s been measured is just incredible, absolutely incredible, how big an advantage it was for these early farmers in Europe.

“Why would drinking milk into adulthood be so strongly selected for?” asked Alice Roberts, the presenter. Thomas replied,

Milk has got lots of energy in it, it’s very nutrient dense, it’s got lots of other goodies, like various vitamins, calcium, and so on. Also, it’s a relatively clean fluid, so it’s much better than drinking stream water or river water or well water or something like that. Another advantage is if you’re growing crops you have a boom and bust in terms of the food supply.

Not a word about butterfat — “lots of energy” is true of all fats. The rapid spread, the “incredible” advantage, suggests that milk supplied something resembling a necessary nutrient. As if everyone had been suffering from scurvy and the new gene allowed them to eat citrus — something like that. Such a gene would spread rapidly.

Does milk supply a necessary nutrient? My results suggest that butter — half a stick (60 g)/day — provides two clear benefits: 1. Better brain function. 2. Less risk of heart disease (probably). As far as I can tell, roughly everyone in America would get these benefits because their diets now lack enough of whatever it is. Both benefits reflect invisible problems. Like everyone else, I had no idea my brain function could be substantially improved and had no idea of my rate of progression (narrowing of arteries) toward atherosclerosis. Only because of unusual tests (the arithmetic test and a “heart scan”) did I notice sudden large improvements when I started eating lots of butter — what you’d expected from addition of a missing necessary nutrient. This explains why Thomas and almost everyone else is unaware of these benefits.

Keep in mind that before I started eating butter, I already ate a high-fat low-carbohydrate diet. Yet I wasn’t getting enough of something in butter. I already ate lots of pork fat. Perhaps the saturated fat in butter is better digested than the saturated fat in pork. Or perhaps the fat profile is better.

If lactose tolerance is so helpful, why are most Asians lactose intolerant? My work suggests two answers: 1. Yogurt. Long ago, Asians ate lots of yogurt. I know the Mongols did. There are present-day indications of this. The Chinese appreciate the value of yogurt more than Americans. Yogurt is more common in Chinese supermarkets than American ones. Yogurt makers are better and more common in China than Europe and America. Lots of Chinese make their own yogurt; as far as I can tell, home yogurt making is more popular in China than America. You can buy a cheap good yogurt maker many places in Beijing, unlike San Francisco. Yogurt provided butterfat. 2. Pork. The Chinese, of course, eat far more pork than Europeans. Unlike cows, pigs supply a cut with a large amount of fat: pork belly. I found it easy to get plenty of pork belly in China and eat it as the main course. Difficulty getting pork belly in the Bay Area is what pushed me to eat butter. This view predicts that European farmers raised more cows than pigs.

Anyway, to summarize, the great advantage conferred by lactose tolerance suggests the great value of something in milk if you eat a European-farmer-like diet. My work supports this; it suggests the crucial ingredient is butterfat. Which many Americans carefully avoid!

Note: The danger posed by the high level of AGEs (advanced glycation endproducts) in butter I don’t know about — but of course this danger has nothing to do with why lactose tolerance was so beneficial. My experience so far (the heart-scan improvement) suggests that that ordinary butter is not “artery-constricting”. Presumably AGEs are formed when milk is pasteurized so I would prefer to eat unpasteurized butter.

Salt is Good, Says New Study

Seth Roberts21 Comments

A new study in JAMA found higher salt consumption strongly associated with less death from heart disease. The association with total mortality (more salt, less death) was almost significant. To grasp the strength of the evidence, see this. Yes, it’s a correlation, but I don’t know of any examples of such a strong correlation reversing (so that more salt is now correlated with more death) when now-unknown confounders are taken into account. In 1998, Gary Taubes argued that the benefits of salt reduction were greatly overstated. The new study did find more salt correlated with higher systolic blood pressure but in the big picture (mortality) that didn’t matter. If all those warnings about salt had any effect, the new study suggests their effect was negative.

Perhaps people who eat less salt are more credulous (they believed the experts) — and this damages them in other ways? Perhaps they rely on doctors more, for example. It is hard to interpret this finding in a way that makes mainstream health care look good. A New York Times article about the study points out that “the new study is not the only one to find adverse effects of low-sodium diets.” And it reports what someone at the Centers for Disease Control said:

Dr. Peter Briss, a medical director at the centers, said that the study was small; that its subjects were relatively young, with an average age of 40 at the start; and that with few cardiovascular events, it was hard to draw conclusions.

Dr. Briss fails to understand statistics. Ordinary statistical calculations take sample size and number of events into consideration when indicating the strength of the evidence. That’s the one of the main purposes of those calculations. As for “relatively young,” I know of nothing to suggest that the effects of sodium reverse with age — so it is irrelevant that the subjects were relatively young. That someone at the CDC is so clueless is remarkable.

Meat Consumption and Weight Gain: Health Journalism Done Right

Seth Roberts15 Comments

This article by Eoin O’Connell reports a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (the top nutrition journal) that found a correlation between meat consumption and weight gain: The more meat you ate, the more weight you gained over five years. Meat is fattening! reported several newspapers.

Mr. O’Connell did something unusual for a health journalist: He thought for himself. I don’t mean he applied a formulaic criticism (e.g., “correlation does not equal causation”). That’s not thinking, that’s knee-jerking. Mr. O’Connell read the paper. And he noticed an interaction: The correlation between meat consumption and weight gain depended on activity level. The study involved about 400,000 people. The researchers put each person in one of four activity levels: inactive, moderately inactive, moderately active, and active. There was a correlation between red-meat consumption and weight only for the two most active groups (moderately active and active). The original article reported that this interaction was significant:

The relation between red meat and weight gain was also stronger in physically active subjects compared with moderately inactive or inactive subjects (P values for interaction = 0.02)

The obvious implication of this interaction, as Mr. O’Connell says, is that meat caused muscle gain. Weight differences between more-meat and less-meat eaters were due to differences in muscle mass. This puts an entirely different spin on the results. The alternative explanation is quite plausible. I once had a grad student who was a vegetarian. When he was an undergrad, he told me, he and his roommate would go to the weight room and do similar sets. His roommate, who ate meat, rapidly gained muscle; he did not. Of course, meat = animal muscle.

Mr. O’Connell continued to the really interesting part of his article:

Perhaps not so surprisingly, the consideration that muscle is a form of weight gain does not appear in the newspaper articles but much more surprising is the fact that it does not appear in the original journal article either.

The AJCN article has fifty authors. Not one of them, apparently, noticed this all-important point! Nor did the reviewers for this prestigious journal. The article concludes: “Our results are therefore in favor of the public health recommendation to decrease meat consumption for health improvement.” No, they’re not, if the more meat, more muscle explanation is correct.

Most prestigious journal. Fifty authors. Huge expense. Total F-up in the sense that the final conclusion is probably wrong. (To be fair, the paper has plenty of value in other ways.) Congratulations, Mr. O’Connell, for noticing.