Category: personal science

Value of Self-Experimentation With Chronic Conditions

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A reader with an autistic son sent me a link to a story in the New York Times Magazine by Susannah Meadows about a boy with arthritis who was cured by dietary changes, including omega-3 and probiotics. Conventional doctors and the boy’s father had resisted trying the dietary solution; Meadows is the boy’s mother. An expert in the boy’s problem, Dr. Lisa Imundo, director of pediatric rheumatology at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told Meadows that “she [Imundo] had treated thousands of kids with arthritis . . . and diet changes did not work.” It took only six weeks of the dietary change to discover it did work. Eventually the boy’s arthritis was completely gone. It may have been caused by antibiotics he’d been given for pneumonia. The antibiotics may have killed his gut flora making his intestines too permeable.

Had Meadows accepted what mainstream doctors told her, her son would have taken medicine for the rest of his life — medicine that wasn’t working well. Dr. Imundo wanted to double the dose.

The reader with an autistic son explained how it related to this blog:

It particularly supports the value of self-experimentation in these chronic conditions, especially when there is heterogeneity. The heterogeneity of autism was obvious to me from early on, although I’ve come to realize it’s not obvious to everyone else. Autisms of known genetic causes have different tracks (Fragile X is the best-studied). Broad studies of autism start with a huge disadvantage: they are studying different disorders of similar presentation, and what helps in one case may harm in another. After the steady drip drip of your talking about n=1 experiments, it dawned on me that this applied to our situation. You didn’t need to do a massive, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of acne medication any more than I needed to enroll a thousand families in a study of diet and autism. I could start with dinner.

The reader found dietary n=1 experimentation with her son to be very helpful.

Update. After I wrote this, Michelle Francl, a chemist who writes for for Slate’s Medical Examiner column, complained about the “alternative medicine” in Meadow’s piece. Francl fails to mention that dietary changes completely cured the problem, thus avoiding the need for dangerous drugs that weren’t working. Francl says that Meadows has “an irrational fear of chemicals”.

Personal Science = Insourcing Your Health

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I recently blogged about undisclosed risks of medical treatments. For example, sleeping pills are associated with a big increase in death rate. Patients are rarely (never?) told this. One reason risks are undisclosed is ignorance: Your doctor doesn’t know about them. Another likely reason is that you and your doctor have different goals. If a treatment harms you, your doctor is not harmed, in all but a few cases. If you refuse a treatment (such as a surgery), your doctor may make less money. This pushes doctors to overstate benefits and understate costs.

This is the simplest case for personal science: You care more about your health than any expert ever will. The experts have advantages, too (such as more experience with your problem) so it is not obvious that personal science will be better than expert advice — you have to try it and find out. When I started to study my acne, I was stunned how easy it was to improve on what my dermatologist had told me.

A recent article in The Atlantic (“The Insourcing Boom”) describes a similar revelation at General Electric. GE executives wondered if they could build a certain water heater (the Geospring) just as profitably in America as in China. They looked at it carefully:

The GeoSpring in particular, Nolan says, has “a lot of copper tubing in the top.” Assembly-line workers “have to route the tubes, and they have to braze them—weld them—to seal the joints. How that tubing is designed really affects how hard or easy it is to solder the joints. And how hard or easy it is to do the soldering affects the quality, of course. And the quality of those welds is literally the quality of the hot-water heater.” Although the GeoSpring had been conceived, designed, marketed, and managed from Louisville, it was made in China, and, Nolan says, “We really had zero communications into the assembly line there.”

To get ready to make the GeoSpring at Appliance Park, in January 2010 GE set up a space on the factory floor of Building 2 to design the new assembly line. No products had been manufactured in Building 2 since 1998. . . .

“We got the water heater into the room, and the first thing [the group] said to us was ‘This is just a mess,’ ” Nolan recalls. . . . “In terms of manufacturability, it was terrible.” . . . It was so hard to assemble that no one in the big room wanted to make it. Instead they redesigned it. The team eliminated 1 out of every 5 parts. It cut the cost of the materials by 25 percent. It eliminated the tangle of tubing that couldn’t be easily welded. By considering the workers who would have to put the water heater together—in fact, by having those workers right at the table, looking at the design as it was drawn—the team cut the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville.

In the end, says Nolan, not one part was the same.

So a funny thing happened to the GeoSpring on the way from the cheap Chinese factory to the expensive Kentucky factory: The material cost went down. The labor required to make it went down. The quality went up. Even the energy efficiency went up. . . . The China-made GeoSpring retailed for $1,599. The Louisville-made GeoSpring retails for $1,299.

That’s what happened when designers and manufacturers were no longer so far apart. As far as I can tell, the designers at GE had no idea such big improvements were possible, just as I was shocked how easy it was to do better than my dermatologist.

There are dozens of ways to bring the incentives of doctor and patient closer together but that would be like trying to bring the Chinese workers and GE designers closer together. Personal science is much easier. No one besides you needs to change. It corresponds to insourcing: insourcing responsibility for your health.

Elements of Personal Science

Seth Roberts4 Comments

To do personal science well, what should you learn?

Professional scientists learn how to do science mostly in graduate school, mostly by imitation, although they might take a statistics class. Personal scientists rarely have anyone to imitate, so have more need to understand basic principles. There are five skills/dimensions that matter. Here are a few comments about each one:

1. Motivation. In conventional science, the scientist does it as part of a job and subjects are paid. Neither works here: It isn’t a job and you can’t pay yourself. My original motivation was wanting to learn how to do experiments (for my job — experimental psychologist). After I discovered how useful it could be, I started doing personal science to solve actual problems, including early awakening and overweight. On these two subjects (sleep and weight control) conventional scientists seemed to have made and be making little progress, with a few exceptions (such as Sclafani, Cabanac, and Ramirez) in the area of weight control. Here my motivation was lack of plausible alternatives. Now I now see personal science like playing the lottery, except it costs almost nothing. Most of the time nothing happens, once in a long while there is a big payoff. An example of the lottery-like payoff is that for ten years I measured my sleep, trying to figure out what was causing my early awakening. One day it suddenly got worse (when I changed my breakfast). That led me to realize many things. Another example is I measured my brain function with an arithmetic test for several years. One day it suddenly improved (due to butter).

2. Measurement. Conventional scientists almost always use already-established measures because they improve communication. In contrast, a personal scientist wants a measure that is especially sensitive to the problem (e.g., insomnia) to be solved or the question to be answered (e.g., did flaxseed oil improve my balance?). Communication is much less important. Psychologists use Likert scales (rating scales with 5 or 7 possible answers) to measure internal states but they almost always use inexperienced and unmotivated subjects. When I’ve measured internal states (e.g., mood), I have a lot of motivation and eventually have a lot of experience and find I can make much finer distinctions. Unlike conventional research, I care enormously about the convenience of the measurement. For example, it should be brief.

3. Treatment choice. You don’t want to do a lot of experiments that don’t find any effect, so you need to choose wisely the treatments you test. Scanning the internet (what has cured insomnia?) and reading scientific papers (what are standard treatments for insomnia?) hasn’t worked for me, although it’s better to try anything than to try nothing. One thing that’s worked is to test large surprising effects I hear about. An example is Tara Grant’s discovery that restricting her Vitamin D to the morning improved her sleep. Also successful is measuring the problem for a long time, in search of outliers. When the problem suddenly gets better or worse, I test whatever unusual happened just before that. For example, when I switched from oatmeal breakfast to fruit breakfast, my early awakening suddenly got worse. I started testing various breakfasts. A third successful strategy is to combine the first two strategies with evolutionary thinking, giving bonus points if the treatment I’m thinking of testing provides something present in Stone Age life but absent now. For example, this is one reason I decided to test the effect of standing a lot. Stone Age people must have been on their feet more than most of us.

4. Experimental design. The hard part is knowing how fast the treatment effect rises and falls. If it rises and falls quickly, your experiment should be very different than if it rises and falls slowly. In most cases, what I study rises and falls slowly and the best design is some variation of ABA. Do A for several days, do B for several days, do A for several days. It is much easier to do a condition for too few days than too many so I try to err on the side of too many days. The hardest lesson to learn was to realize how little I know and avoid complex designs with untested assumptions.

5. Data analysis. Statistics books and classes emphasize statistical tests, whereas in practice what matters are simple graphs (e.g., what you measure versus time). I make one or more new graphs every time I collect new data (e.g., I make a plot of my weight versus time every time I weigh myself) but rarely do t tests and the like. I’ve learned to make several graphs at different time scales (e.g., last week, last month, etc.), not just one graph.

I believe these factors combine in a multiplicative way to determine how much you learn. If any is poor, you will learn little. They provide a way of asking yourself what you’ve learned after you’ve done some personal science. For example, where did I get the idea for the treatment? Presumably, with experience, you slowly get better at each of them.

Thanks to Brian Toomey for encouraging me to write this.

Is Jimmy Moore’s Ketosis Diet the Shangri-La Diet in Disguise?

Seth Roberts17 Comments

I have recently encountered three examples that suggest low-carb diets don’t work well long-term:

1. Alex Chernavsky tried a low-carb diet in 2002. Starting at 270 pounds, he lost 70 pounds. A year later, he started to rapidly regain the lost weight. He stopped the diet.

2. A “medical professional” started at about 260 pounds (she’s 5’3″). After reading Wheat Belly, she gave up wheat. “After several months of being wheat free I lost 10 lbs. But that’s where it stopped.” Then she did full low-carb. “From May to July I did what basically was Atkins induction. I lost 20 lbs but then the weight loss stopped.”

3. Jimmy Moore lost a lot of weight eating low-carb. Starting in 2004 at 410 pounds, he lost 180 pounds. Then he gained half of it back, ending up near 300 pounds in early 2012.

The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet (SLD) says unfamiliar food will cause weight loss because its smell is not (yet) associated with calories. As the food becomes familiar, its smell becomes associated with calories. Weight loss due to unfamiliarity will disappear. Going low-carb usually involves eating unfamiliar foods. They become familiar. This explains low-carb weight regain. The theory explains partial low-carb success (e.g., Jimmy Moore didn’t regain all the lost weight) by assuming that the high-carb foods (e.g., soft drinks) given up produced stronger smell-calorie associations than the low-carb foods (e.g., steak) that replaced them.

Recently Jimmy Moore has been losing weight again. Starting at 306 pounds, over 7 months he has lost 60 pounds. He believes that to lose weight with a low-carb diet, there must be sufficient ketones in your blood — you must be at the optimal level of ketosis. “In order to be fully keto-adapted and to start burning stored body fat for fuel, ketone levels must be between 0.5 to 3.0 millimolar,” he wrote. To be fully keto-adapted, he began measuring his ketone level regularly. His first test showed that his ketone level was 0.3. “Holy cow, that could be one of the reasons why I’m not seeing my weight go down!” he wrote. He began adjusting his diet to put his ketone level between 0.5 and 3.0 millimolar, which involved changing protein intake as well as carb intake.

He changed his diet in various ways (mainly protein reduction) and started losing weight. In what I’ve read, he does not describe his current diet or earlier diet in detail, but does say this:

I will tell you that I’ve drank liberal amounts of water and 2 Tbs Carlson’s liquid fish oil daily along with my regular daily vitamins during this experiment.

Which sounds exactly like the Shangri-La Diet. Alex Chernavsky lost considerable weight and has kept it off doing almost the same thing with flaxseed oil.

My guess is that he is losing weight because of the fish oil. The theory behind SLD makes two predictions: 1. If Jimmy stops the fish oil and continues the ketone level adjustment, he will stop losing weight. 2. If Jimmy stops the ketone level adjustment but continues the fish oil, he will continue losing weight.

I asked Jimmy for comment. Here’s what he said:

It’s an interesting theory, but not one I want to particularly test out since I’m still doing so well at accomplishing what I am aiming for right now–fat loss, mental acuity and great overall health [all due to the fish oil, I believe — Seth]. Perhaps once this period of testing NK [nutritional ketosis] is over in May, I can add in your suggestion as another testing point.

The theory behind low-carb dieting has never made any correct predictions, as far as I know. It does not explain why the lost weight is often regained. If it turns out Jimmy Moore’s weight loss is due to his ketone adjustment, that will be the first correct prediction of the theory.

In contrast, the theory behind SLD led me to five new ways to lose weight (eating bland food, eating slowly-digested food, drinking unflavored sugar water, drinking oil with no smell, eating food nose-clipped). That’s roughly the same as five correct predictions, two of them (drinking sugar water, drinking oil with no smell) counter-intuitive.

Jimmy Moore’s weight loss may eventually show you can lose weight via SLD even when you don’t realize you’re doing SLD.

More Sitting, More Diabetes: New Meta-Analysis

Seth Roberts9 Comments

The first evidence linking exercise and health was a study of London bus workers in the 1950s. The drivers, who sat all day, had more heart attacks than the ticket takers on the same buses, who were on their feet all day. It was a huge advance — evidence, as opposed to speculation. The results were taken countless times to imply that exercise reduces heart attacks but epidemiologists understood there were dozens of differences between the two jobs. For example, driving is more stressful than ticket taking. Maybe stress causes heart attacks.

The first time I learned about this study, I focussed on two differences. The ticket takers were more exposed to morning sunlight (on the top deck of double-decker buses) and they were on their feet much more. Maybe both of those things — morning sunlight exposure and standing a lot — improve sleep. Maybe better sleep reduces heart attacks. The London data were not consistent with the claims of aerobic exercise advocates because the ticket takers did nothing resembling aerobic exercise.

Later I discovered that walking an hour/day normalized my fasting blood sugar levels — another effect of “exercise” (but not aerobic exercise). I had data from only one person (myself), but it was experimental data. The treatment difference between the two sets of data being compared (no walking versus walking) was much sharper, in contrast to most epidemiology. I am sure the correlation reflects cause and effect: Walking roughly an hour/day normalized my blood sugar. This wasn’t obvious. The first thing I tried to lower my fasting blood sugar levels was a low-carb diet, which didn’t work. I discovered the effect of long walks by accident.

A recent meta-analysis combined several surveys that measured the correlation of how much you sit with other health measures. The clearest correlation was with diabetes: People who sit more are more likely to get diabetes. Comparing the two extremes (most sitting with most standing), there was a doubling of risk. Because people who stand more walk more, this supports my self-experimental findings.

I found pure standing (no walking), or leisurely (on-off) walking, did not lower fasting blood sugar (which I measured in the morning). After I noticed that walking an hour lowered blood sugar, I tried slacking off: wandering through a store or a mall for an hour. This did not lower fasting blood sugar. I concluded it had to be close-to-nonstop walking. Someday epidemiologists will measure activity more precisely — with Fitbits, for example. I predict the potent part of standing will turn out to be continuous walking. Long before that, you can see for yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Physical Spacing Effect: New Way to Learn Chinese Works Shockingly Well

Seth Roberts17 Comments

Two years ago I taped a bunch of Chinese flash cards (Chinese character on one side, English meaning on the other) to my living room wall (shown above). I’ll study them in off moments, I thought. I didn’t. It was embarrassing when guests pointed to a card and said, “What’s that?” But not embarrassing enough.

A few weeks ago, I can’t remember why, I decided to test myself: how many do I know? About 20%. I’ll try to learn more, I thought. I was astonished how fast I learned the rest. It took little time and almost no effort. I didn’t need “study sessions”. I glanced at the array now and then, looked for cards I didn’t know yet, and flipped them to find out the answer. After a few days I knew all of them.

I had been using conventional methods (flash cards studied in ordinary ways, Anki, Skritter) and an unconventional method (treadmill study) to learn this material for years. In spite of spending more than a hundred hours on each method, I had never gotten very far. I might get to 500 characters and backslide due to lack of study. Treadmill walking while studying made studying much more pleasant, but I found I would still prefer to watch TV rather than study Chinese. Maybe part of the problem was too many days skipped. After you skip four days, for example, you have a discouragingly large number of cards to review. Plainly these methods work for others. They didn’t work for me.

After my success with the two-year-old cards, I put up another array (8 x 13). I already knew about 40% of them. I learned the rest in a day or so. Then I put up a 10 x 12 array. I tested myself on them one morning. I knew 30 of them. I studied them during the day for maybe 30 minutes in little pieces throughout the day. The next morning I tested myself again (about 12 hours from the last time I had studied them). Now I knew 105 — I had learned 75 in one day, almost effortlessly. That day I studied for a few minutes. The next morning I tested myself again. Now I knew all but one of them.

I did not notice any facilitation of learning when I studied flash cards while walking around. In that case, unlike this one, (a) they were in roughly the same position relative to my body and (b) had no consistent physical location. I noticed the same facilitation of learning during a Chinese lesson in a cafe. I was having trouble remembering three Chinese words (e.g., the Chinese word that means graduate). I wrote each of them on a piece of paper with the English on one side and the Chinese on the other. I put the three pieces of paper at widely-separated places on the table. I studied them briefly, a few seconds each. That was enough. Five days later I still remember them (having used them a few times since then). This happened in a place (a cafe) with which I wasn’t familiar, unlike my living room. Maybe the general principle will be it is much easier to learn an association if it is in a new place.

It’s very early in my use of this method, but I doubt it’s a fluke. It connects with several things we (= psychology professors) already know. 1. The mnemonic device called the method of loci. You put things you want to learn in different places in a well-remembered landscape (e.g. different places in a building you know well). Usually the method is used to learn lists, such as the digits of pi or the order of cards in a deck. You place different items in the list in different places in the imagined place. Then you “walk” (in your imagination) through the imagined place. The method dates back to ancient Rome. 2. The power of interference. Thousands of experiments have shown that learning X makes it harder to learn similar Y. X and Y might be two lists, for example. The greater the similarity, the bigger the effect. What you learn on Monday makes it harder to learn stuff on Tuesday (proactive interference); what you learn on Tuesday makes it harder to remember what you learned on Monday (retroactive interference). To anyone familiar with these experiments, my discovery has a simple “explanation”: spatial interference. 3. Evolutionary plausibility. The study of printed materials (e.g., books) is so recent it is hard to imagine our brain has evolved to make it easy. In contrast, thousands and millions of years ago we had to learn about things in different places. Learning about food and danger in different places was especially important. When language arrived, the necessary learning (at first, attaching names to objects) is quite similar to my learning because the named objects were in different places. The study of vitamins and to some extent my work (especially the power of morning faces) show how hard it can be to figure out what we need for our brains and bodies to work well. How non-intuitive the answers may be.

These results suggest a new mnemonic device: Stand in front of an empty wall and imagine on the wall the associations you want to learn, each association in a different place like flashcards. This is a fast way of putting each association in a different place.

 

 

 

Measuring Yourself to Improve Your Health? Want to Guest-Blog?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

What surprised me most about my self-experimental discoveries was that they were outside my area of expertise (animal learning). I discovered how to sleep better but I’m not a sleep researcher. I discovered how to improve my mood but I’m not a mood researcher. I discovered that flaxseed oil improved brain function but I’m not a nutrition researcher. And so on. This is not supposed to happen. Chemistry professors are not supposed to advance physics. Long ago, this rule was broken. Mendel was not a biologist, Wegener (continental drift) was not a geologist. It hasn’t been broken in the last 100 years. As knowledge increases, the “gains due to specialization” — the advantage of specialists over everyone else within their area of expertise — is supposed to increase. The advantage, and its growth, seem inevitable. It occurs, say economists, because specialized knowledge (e.g., what physicists know that the rest of us, including chemists, don’t know) increases. My theory of human evolution centers on the idea that humans have evolved to specialize and trade. In my life I use thousands of things made by specialists that I couldn’t begin to make myself.

Here we have two things. 1. A general rule (specialists have a big advantage, within their specialty, over the rest of us) that is overwhelmingly true. 2. An exception (my work). How can this be explained? What can we learn from it? I’ve tried to answer these questions but I can add to what I said in that paper. The power of specialization is clearly enormous. Adam Smith, who called specialization “division of labor”, was right. The existence of an exception to the general rule suggests there are forces pushing in the opposite direction (toward specialists being worse than the rest of us in their area of expertise) that can be more powerful than the power of specialization. Given the power of specialization, the countervailing forces must be remarkably strong. Can we learn more about them? Can we harness them? Can we increase them? The power of specialization has been increasing for thousands of years. How strong the countervailing forces may become is unclear.

The more you’ve read this blog, the more you know what I think the countervailing forces are. Some of them weaken specialists: 1. Professors prefer to be useless rather than useful (Veblen). 2. A large fraction (99%?) of health care workers have no interest in remedies that do not allow them to make money. 3. Medical school professors are terrible scientists. 4. Restrictions on research. Some of them strengthen the rest of us: 1. Data storage and analysis have become very cheap. 2. It is easier for non-scientists to read the scientific literature. 3. No one cares more about your health than you. These are examples. The list could be much longer. What’s interesting is not the critique of health care, which is pretty obvious, but the apparent power of these forces, which isn’t obvious at all.

I want to learn more about this. I want learn how to use these opposing forces and, if possible, increase them. One way to do this is find more exceptions to the general rule, that is, find more people who have improved their health beyond expert advice. I have found some examples. To find more, to learn more about them, and to encourage this sort of thing (DIY Health), I offer the opportunity to guest-blog here.

I think the fundamental reason you can improve on what health experts tell you is that you can gather data. Health experts have weakened their position by ignoring vast amounts of data. Three kinds of data are helpful: (a) other people’s experiences, (b) scientific papers and (c) self-measurement (combined with self-experimentation). No doubt (c) is the hardest to collect and the most powerful. I would like to offer one or more people the opportunity to guest-blog here about what happens when they try to do (c). In plain English, I am looking for people who are measuring a health problem and trying to improve on expert advice. For example, trying to lower blood pressure without taking blood pressure medicine. Or counting pimples to figure out what’s causing your acne. Or measuring your mood to test alternatives to anti-depressants. I don’t care what’s measured, so long as it is health-related. (Exception: no weight-loss stories) and you approach these measurements with an open mind (e.g., not trying to promote some product or theory). I am not trying to collect success stories. I am trying to find out what happens when people take this approach.

Guest-blogging may increase your motivation, push you to think more (“ I blog, therefore I think“) and give you access to the collective wisdom of readers of this blog (in the comments). If guest-blogging about your experiences and progress (or lack of it) might interest you, contact me with details of what you are doing or plan to do.

Want to Sleep Better? Through Personal Science?

Seth Roberts8 Comments

If someone sleeps well, it’s tough to kill them. If someone does not sleep well, it’s tough to keep them alive. Robb Wolf quoted someone to this effect at the last Ancestral Health Symposium. One reason it’s plausible is better sleep improves immune function. For example, why are colds are more common in winter? Well, flu bouts peak during the light minimum (December) rather than the temperature minimum (February). Less light makes sleep worse, so this supports the idea that colds are more common in winter due to worse sleep. Likewise, heart attacks are more common in the winter, suggesting that better sleep would reduce heart attacks. I stopped getting obvious colds when my sleep got much better. Vaccinations are much less effective if the person vaccinated is kept awake the following night.

I’ve found new ways to improve my sleep: avoid breakfast, standing a lot, morning light exposure, one-legged standing, and eating more animal fat. I’ve confirmed Tara Grant’s discovery of the value of Vitamin D3 in the morning. I’ve made these improvements via low-tech tracking, good experimental design and data analysis, and wise choice of treatment.

I want to find out if my method and findings can help others. I am looking for people who would like my (paid) help improving their own sleep. In my search for people to try brain tracking, I judged interest and motivation partly by willingness to pay and it worked well.. If you are interested, please submit an application (see below).

At least at first, I’ll only pick one or two people. I’ll do whatever I can to help the chosen applicants measure their sleep, choose wisely what to test, do useful experiments, and analyze the data. They can have as much contact with me as they want.

There are four ways you might benefit from this: (a) Sleep better. (b) Learn how to use personal science to improve your health in other ways. (c) Help everyone learn if the treatments you try have value. (I will try to publicize the results, whatever they are.) (d) Help everyone learn the value of personal science to being healthy.

If this might interest you, please email sleep.where@gmail.com with your answers to the following questions:

1. Name, age, sex, job, location.

2. Phone number (good times to call), skype id (if any).

3. What’s wrong with your sleep? For how long have you had this problem or problems?

4. How have you tried to improve your sleep? What happened?

5. How many colds do you get in a typical year? How long does a typical cold last?

6. How much would you pay for the first month (after a free consultation)?

7. How much would you pay per month after the first month?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acne Caused By Pasteurized Dairy: How One Person Figured It Out

Seth Roberts9 Comments

A reader of this blog named Tony Mach explains how he figured out that his acne was caused by pasteurized dairy products:

In summer 2010 my health problems got noticeably worse (unrefreshing sleep, strange pains, strange sensations in the skin and other stuff I don’t want to share here :-P ), and I had to do something. Furthermore I was gaining weight, so I was suspecting something along the lines of diabetes or other metabolic problem.

As I was looking into dietary changes, I stumbled over Wolfgang Lutz’s and Robert Atkins’ work. Being an engineer by training, I figured that if blood sugar might be the problem (which, as it turned out, wasn’t the case for me), then reducing carbs might be a solution (stop fueling the problematic sub-system) – so both Lutz and Atkins appealed to me. I thought let’s give it a try. I was a bit frightened about such an radical change of diet – you read all kind of BS – but hey, I felt like I was going to die anyway.

Before the change, I ate a lots of white bread, some milk chocolate and drank lots of milk. First I reduced carbs – like Lutz suggested, I tried to aim for 6 bread units – but within days I noticed that some problems (like the strange pain and skin sensations) diminished right away. The acne cleared up noticeably. So I thought why bother with low-carb, let’s go full no-carb (like Atkins suggests for some month).

And voila, with no-carb everything got better. I started to feel healthy for the first time in my life. I lost over 30 pounds, all health problems either went away or were almost gone, and life started to become enjoyable. This was a period of about two months over with most problems went away, some fast, some slower.

So for over half a year I was focused on the carbs=evil scheme, started eating cheese again (hey, no carbs!), when slowly some of the health problems returned and my weight started to rise again.

At that point I panicked a bit and made a huge mistake: I thought I can figure this one out too, I have to do something right away. So I trusted what some doctors had written about a pathogen (which I tested for with borderline results), how to cure it (with over the counter medications like Vitamin D and NAC and other stuff) and I thought let’s try this too! The things I took made me worse, but as it was supposed to be a “die off”/”herx” reaction, I wasn’t too alarmed. Turned out that experiment cost me almost an year until I got better again. So for about a year I was not in the mood for big experiments and personal stuff like moving to another city kept me busy.

But slowly I introduced “safe starches” into my diet (like plantains), because I kept reading one should not go too much low-carb. I tried out self-made sourdough rye bread (makes me enormously hungry, so I stopped again) and at one point I thought: What the heck, I’m going to eat ice cream today. Three hours later I got slightly noticeable pimples and local inflammation (I think they are called nodules) and after another roughly 3 hours the acne was prominent.

After that, my suspicion was that milk might be bad for me, but maybe some properly “ripe” cheese like hard cheese (properly digested by bacteria) might be OK. So I waited for the acne inflammation to go away and tried again with a Parmesan cheese. Bingo, acne again, and again in the 3 to 6 hour time frame.

So I didn’t touch milk or dairy again, but now I looked for raw milk cheese, as I read something about it being possibly better. After a while I found raw-milk-cheese, tried it – and got no acne. Tried again, after some time, with another brand – again no acne. Tried cheese from pasteurized milk – acne.

As I still have health problems, I am still in the process of figuring out things. Next up for me is trying to get rid of beef for a week or two, to see if that might be a problem for me.

In summary:
– I was not very systematic in my experiments, and had some lucky moments.
– All the macro-nutrient ratio paradigms are IMHO BS and not applicable for the majority (might make sense if someone has real/major metabolic problems like T1DM, etc.)
– Having said that, in my view some carb foods come with baggage: e.g. cereal grains and (pasteurized) milk
– A quickly reacting, non-dangerous, clearly visible (objective) surrogate health marker (in my case acne) is worth its weight in gold [I agree, canary in coal mine. In this case it isn’t clear what else besides no acne was gained by avoiding pasteurized dairy. — Seth]– With such a marker, one should completely eliminate suspicious foods (in my case *ALL* dairy) and then introduce it again (two or three challenges)
– For me, pasteurized dairy = acne, raw dairy = no acne
– Milk chocolate is dairy [A friend’s mother said, “If I’m ever in jail, bring me some chocolate.” She’ll break out.– Seth]– Some surrogate health markers (e.g. weight) reacted “funky” for me: I changed my diet to no-carb, my weight went down, and without any big changes [in diet or exercise] my weight started to climb again. [Same thing happened to Alex Chernavsky. — Seth]– For most of the health problems that went away, I don’t know exactly what food (Cereal grains? Dairy? Vegetable oils? etc.) caused what problem
– As I felt like I was going to die on my old diet, I am not particular keen on going back full scale to my old diet to see if after one or two month all my old symptoms return, to determine which food caused which symptom… [Better to test the old foods one at a time. — Seth]– Medical science and several MDs helped me diddly squat
– Paleo blogs were much more helpful than the medical community

I can only guess why raw milk and cheese are less harmful than pasteurized milk and cheese. Maybe milk and cheese contain acne-causing chemicals that leak into the blood. Maybe raw milk, which contains bigger entities than pasteurized milk, does a better job of plugging the holes from digestive system to blood.

Quantified Self Utopia: What Would It Look Like?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

On the QS forums, Christian Kleineidam asked:

While doing Quantified Self public relations I lately meet the challenge of explaining how our lives are going to change if everything in QS goes the way we want. A lot of what I do in quantified self is about boring details. . . . Let’s imagine a day 20 years in the future and QS is successful. How will that day be different than [now]?

Self-measurement has helped me two ways. One is simple and clear. It has helped me be healthy. Via QS, I have found new ways to sleep better, lose weight, be in a better mood, have fewer colds (due to better immune function), reduce inflammation in my body, have better balance, have a better-functioning brain, have better blood sugar, and so on. I am not an expert in any of these areas — I am not a professional sleep researcher, for example. I believe that this will be a large part of the long-term importance of QS: it will help non-experts make useful discoveries about health and it will help spread those discoveries. Non-experts have important advantages over professional researchers. The non-experts (the personal scientists) are only concerned with helping themselves, not with pleasing their colleagues or winning grants, promotions, or prizes; they can take as long as necessary; and they can test “crazy” ideas. In a QS-successful world, many non-experts would make such discoveries and what they learned would reach a wide audience. Lots of people would know about them and take them seriously. As a result, people would be a lot healthier.

Self-measurement has also helped me in a more subtle way. It made me believe I have more power over my health than I thought. This change began when I studied my acne. I did not begin with any agenda, any point I wanted to make, I just wanted to practice experimentation. I counted my pimples (the QS part) and did little experiments. My results showed that one of the drugs my dermatologist had prescribed (tetracycline, an antibiotic) didn’t work. My dermatologist hadn’t said this was possible. Either he had done nothing to learn if worked or he had reached the wrong answer. What stunned me was how easy it had been to find out something important a well-trained experienced expert didn’t know. My dermatologist was not an original thinker. He did what he was told to do by med school professors (antibiotics are a very common treatment for acne). It was the fact that I could improve on their advice that stunned me. I didn’t have a lab. I didn’t have a million-dollar grant. Yet I had learned something important about acne that dermatology professors with labs and grants had failed to learn (antibiotics may not work, be sure to check).

Skepticism about mainstream medicine is helpful, yes, but only a little bit. More useful is finding a better way. For example, it’s useful to point out that antidepressants don’t work well. It’s more useful to find new ways to combat depression. Two years ago, the psychiatrist Daniel Carlat came out with a book called Unhinged that criticized modern psychiatry: too much reliance on pills. No kidding. Carlat recommended more talk therapy, as if that worked so well. As far as I could tell, Carlat had no idea that you need better research to find better solutions and had no idea what better research might be. This is where QS comes in. By encouraging people to study themselves, it encourages study of a vast number of possible depression treatments that will never (or not any time soon) be studied by mainstream researchers. By providing a way to publicize what people learn by doing this, it helps spread encouraging results. In the case of depression, I found that seeing faces in the morning produced an oscillation in my mood (high during the day, low at night). This has obvious consequences for treating depression. This sort of thing will not be studied by mainstream researchers any time soon but it can easily be studied by someone tracking their mood.

In a QS-successful world, many people would have grasped the power that they have to improve their own health. (You can’t just measure yourself, you have to do experiments and choose your treatments wisely, but measuring yourself is a good start.) They would have also grasped the power they have to improve other people’s health because (a) they can test “crazy” solutions mainstream researchers will never test, (b) they can run more realistic tests than mainstream researchers, (c) they can run longer tests than mainstream researchers, and (d) no matter what the results, they can publicize them. In a QS-successful world, there will be a whole ecosystem that supports that sort of thing. Such an ecosystem is beginning to grow, no doubt about it.