I will always remember the day (today) my work appeared in a graphic-design magazine.
Category: personal science
Meat-Only Diet: Crave Carbs. Meat + Egg: No Craving
Joseph Buchignani, a businessman in Shenzhen, has suffered from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) since he was a teenager. He is now in his 20s. By trial and error, he discovered that a meat-only diet eliminated his IBS. However, it also caused craving for carbs. Because carbs caused IBS, he couldn’t simply eat carbs. He tried many ways of getting rid of the craving for carbs: eating more animal fat, eating less animal fat, eating oil, eating lard, and eating different kinds of animals and cuts of meat. He varied how he cooked the meat, eating especially fresh meat, and eating fresh whole fish. All of these attempts failed. He did not try taking a multivitamin pill.
Finally he tried adding egg to the meat. That eliminated his craving for carbs. It made his diet much more sustainable.
This is fascinating for four reasons.
1. Sure, some cravings reflect nutrient deficiencies. (Not all cravings: An alcoholic craves alcohol.) But in the cases I know about, there is an obvious or semi-obvious connection between the craving and the deficiency. For example, people who chew too much ice (pagophagia) crave ice to chew. They are iron-deficient. Eating iron eliminates the pagophagia. Long ago, a craving to eat something crunchy would have led you to eat bones. Bone marrow is high in iron. So the craving makes sense. In contrast, there is no obvious or semi-obvious connection between carbs and eggs.
2. It suggests that a paleo diet is a good place to start looking for the ideal diet. Paleo ideas suggest a high-meat diet. But no matter how long you study what Stone-Age people ate, you will not figure out that eggs will eliminate carb cravings.
3. Like many people, especially those doing paleo, I eat mostly meat and vegetables (a conventional low-carb diet). Unlike most low-carbers, I also eat lots of fermented foods. I don’t crave carbs, perhaps because of the lactose in yogurt or the sucrose in kombucha. It hadn’t occurred to me to start eating eggs regularly but Joseph’s discovery suggests I should try it.
4. Joseph’s personal science led him to discover something highly useful and completely non-obvious.
Assorted Links
- the work of Uffe Ravnskov, author of Ignore the Awkward! How Cholesterol Myths are Kept Alive
- Megaprojects and Risk, a book about how giant construction projects, such as bridges, tunnels, and rail lines, almost always involve great overprediction of benefits (e.g., ridership) and underprediction of costs.
- Scientists who believe as I do about climate change write to Congress
- Due to a father’s persistence, intestinal worms cure his son’s autism
Asthma and Probiotics
In a long comment on an earlier post, JohnG tells how he failed and succeeded to get rid of disabling exercise-induced asthma. Lots of things didn’t work:
I tried Vitamin D; it didn’t work, but it did help my nasal allergies somewhat. I tried low carb dieting, and just like Dr. Lutz of “Life Without Bread” said, it made asthma worse while it practically cured my nasal allergies. I also tried the Dr. Sears approach of taking as much as 7.5g of EPA/DHA a day; no change at all in the exercise induced asthma.
The idea that asthma is due to lack of microbes made sense to him and he started trying fermented foods and probiotics. At first, nothing:
I re-reviewed the probiotic slant and found the Helminth story and all the trials that were going on in PubMed for them. With that logic in hand, I set about to find a probiotic that worked. I tried yogurt, kefir, fermented cabbage, and buttermilk to no avail. I then tried store bought probiotics one by one. I tried The Maker’s Diet probiotic and it didn’t help; but I do think it helped make a 20 year long wart go away. I also tried all forms of probiotics on the market; even LGG. Nothing.
Finally, success:
I bought this super high dose probiotic and took it along with a L. Sporogenes/bacillus coagulans. Voila, three days later I could really feel the difference during exercise. I continued that for 10 days. By the 10th day, I didn’t have to hit my inhaler at all during exercise. Wow!
First, I had to decide which probiotic did the trick. I didn’t want to spend a ton on that high dose probiotic, so I stuck with the Bacillus Coagulans and it continued working normally. So, I found my probiotic. Now, I needed to verify it wasn’t placebo. A close cousin to exercise induced asthma is the phenomenon of waking up sneezing and then promptly getting an asthma attack/or closure after that.
I went off my bacillus coagulans that I had been on for 14 days. By the second day, I noticed a little difference. By the third day, I had to hit my inhaler during the workout. By the 10th day (bacillus coagulans supposedly lives in your intestines 7 days), I was full-blown back to having to use 4 inhaler puffs and it wasn’t doing the trick. This was test phase one.
I then went back on the bacillus coagulans for 10 days. The same process repeated itself. The nightly asthma attacks abated after about 4 days and the same no-puff needed during exercise continued as well.
I then went back off the bacillus coagulans for 10 days. I got the asthma back at day 3.
I’ve now been back on 5 billion CFU’s of bacillus coagulans (duraflora) for 18 days. I don’t have to use my inhaler for exercise. I can feel the asthma come on very slightly and then go away.
Very impressive. Shows what can happen if (a) you think for yourself, (b) persist, and (c) have access to a lot of helpful information. I think he needed all three.
Assorted Links
- A new paper debunks Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick global temperature graph. “Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy-based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models.” Very well written.
- “Obscure, contemporary ethics books . . . were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books.” Paper. The study was done entirely online and covered 32 large university libraries.
- Gladys Reid, Australian discoverer of benefits of feeding zinc to farm animals. “Reid was reluctant to make direct dose recommendations after claiming the Director General of Agriculture had told her she would be taken to court for misleading practices if she did. However she won followers from farming wives in particular. Many would call asking for zinc advice after tiring of seeing suffering livestock and husbands on the brink of suicide from crippling stock and production losses.”
- Using a treadmill while working
- The Potti Scandal continues
- How loud are Sunchips?
Thanks to Don Sheridan and Melissa Francis.
The Power of Hobbyists and the Impotence of Professionals
One theme of this blog (I hope) is that it’s insider/outsiders — people with the knowledge of insiders but the freedom of outsiders — who can produce real progress. Ordinary insiders have the necessary knowledge but not the necessary freedom; ordinary outsiders have the freedom but not the knowledge. This article of mine makes this point in detail.
A similar point was made in a comment on a blog post by George Packer, the New Yorker writer. Packer had written an article about the U.S. Senate and his post was about how he’d written it. Someone commented:
I think Packer covered Washington with the refreshing take of a short-timer, one who didn’t have to make his living or sustain his career there. The disservice inherent in careerism connects with the Senate’s paralysis a la Tom Harkin’s quote about senators spending more than half their time fund-raising, one of the most troubling realities of the story. (Years ago, Bill Clinton said the House was ineffective because the members were “sleep deprived” from having to attend fundraisers every night. If a six-year term requires half-time fund-raising, imagine what a two-year term requires.)
I think the subtext is that journalistic long-timers, unlike short-timers like Packer, must spend a lot of time nurturing relationships, and this makes it harder to write unpleasant and unflattering truths.
Professional scientists spend a lot of time fund-raising, which in their case means applying for grants. A typical grant lasts three years. During those three years, because they need another grant when the current one runs out, they must publish several papers, recruit several grad students or post-docs (to do the heavy lifting), and avoid pissing off anyone in their field (because they might review your papers or grant proposals). Just as members of the House of Representatives never ever want to talk about how the constant need for money cripples them — it would make their job seem irrelevant and them appear impotent — neither do professional scientists.
Premier of Canadian Province Gets Involved in MS Research
I n a striking departure from his political counterparts across the country, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall says his government will finance clinical trials of liberation therapy, a contentious experimental procedure for multiple sclerosis patients.
Of course, the heads of provinces don’t usually get involved in research at this level of detail. However, “Saskatchewan has the highest rate of MS in the country,” says the article.
In Part 5 of The Story of Science (BBC), Michael Mosley, the presenter, said that for hundreds of years medical students were shown a human liver and told it had three lobes. They were told that because that’s what Galen had said. However, human livers do not have three lobes. As the students could see. Mosely is a doctor. “When I was a medical student,” said Mosley, “there was tremendous pressure to conform.” MS researchers have said for a long time that MS is an autoimmune disease. Could this have been as misleading as Galen’s description of the liver?
Thanks to Anne Weiss.
Kombucha Eliminated Heartburn
In a comment on an old post — in which I described how a friend’s acid reflux was greatly alleviated by kombucha — Dave Schulz says he had a similar experience:
My heartburn occurs daily unless a) I stick to a strict diet with no carbs, dairy, or greasy/fatty food, like the Paleo Diet or b) I drink kombucha daily. It’s not always possible to do a), so kombucha has literally been a life saver for me.
Daily kombucha eliminates his heartburn for long periods of time, not just for a few hours after drinking it. Due to the current ban he can no longer get it and his heartburn came back. He got the idea from a friend. Before kombucha, he’d tried many remedies that didn’t work. The three doctors he saw were no help.
On the Mayo Clinic website a doctor says that “until definitive studies quantify the risks and benefits of Kombucha tea, it’s prudent to avoid it.” This is what the Protestant Reformation was about: Speaking directly to God rather than waiting for “definitive studies” by experts that “quantify the risks and benefits”.
The Zamboni MS Procedure in Canada
Because his wife had multiple sclerosis (MS), the Italian surgeon Paolo Zamboni discovered that a simple surgical procedure helped a large fraction of patients with MS. The Canadian MS society and some Canadian neurologists have not reacted well to this discovery:
In November 2009, an elated Jamie Chalmers went to his neurologist and handed him a stack of print-outs on the new findings. Without so much as a glance, the neurologist tossed the papers in the garbage. He told Chalmers it was nothing but junk science.
In fact, cause and effect are utterly clear:
The vein-opening procedure involves snaking a balloon through the groin up to the neck and then inflating it where the veins are believed to be narrow. It didn’t hurt, says Stock. “I could feel it . . . it was like plugging your nose and blowing.”
Almost immediately afterward, says Stock, he felt a change: his compromised sense of balance had improved. By the time he touched down in Canada [the operation was in India], he was convinced he had done the right thing. Before the procedure, he couldn’t read a full paragraph. Now, he is reading whole chapters again. Before, he couldn’t stand without support for long and was always hunched over his cane. Now, he can stand and walk for as long as an hour.
Doctors have believed that MS is an autoimmune disease. For example, the Mayo Clinic’s website says:
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a potentially debilitating disease in which your body’s immune system eats away at the protective sheath that covers your nerves.
Thanks to Anne Weiss.
Restless Legs Syndrome, Niacin, and Web Search
Gary Wolf and I have a post on Boing Boing today about how Dennis Mangan cured his mom’s Restless Legs Syndrome. I mentioned this accomplishment earlier. Mangan’s story is an example of what I call personal science — doing science yourself about something you care about.
More One comment on Boing Boing is that niacin is also known as Vitamin B3 and if we searched “restless legs syndrome AND Vitamin B3″ we’d get lots of hits. I tried that search and got zero hits.