Category: self-experimentation

Saturated Fat and Heart Attacks

Seth Roberts26 Comments

After I discovered that butter made me faster at arithmetic, I started eating half a stick (66 g) of butter per day. After a talk about it, a cardiologist in the audience said I was killing myself. I said that the evidence that butter improved my brain function was much clearer than the evidence that butter causes heart disease. The cardiologist couldn’t debate this; he seemed to have no idea of the evidence.

Shortly before I discovered the butter/arithmetic connection, I had a heart scan (a tomographic x-ray) from which is computed an Agaston score, a measure of calcification of your blood vessels. The Agaston score is a good predictor of whether you will have a heart attack. The higher your score, the greater the probability. My score put me close to the median for my age. A year later — after eating lots of butter every day during that year — I got a second scan. Most people get about 25% worse each year. My second scan showed regression (= improvement). It was 40% better (less) than expected (a 25% increase). A big increase in butter consumption was the only aspect of my diet that I consciously changed between Scan 1 and Scan 2.

The improvement I observed, however surprising, was consistent with a 2004 study that measured narrowing of the arteries as a function of diet. About 200 women were studied for three years. There were three main findings. 1. The more saturated fat, the less narrowing. Women in the highest quartile of saturated fat intake didn’t have, on average, any narrowing. 2. The more polyunsaturated fat, the more narrowing. 3. The more carbohydrate, the more narrowing. Of all the nutrients examined, only saturated fat clearly reduced narrowing. Exactly the opposite of what we’ve been told.

As this article explains, the original idea that fat causes heart disease came from Ancel Keys, who omitted most of the available data from his data set. When all the data were considered, there was no connection between fat intake and heart disease. There has never been convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease, but somehow this hasn’t stopped the vast majority of doctors and nutrition experts from repeating what they’ve been told.

Our Need for Morning Faces: Does Isolation Cause Delusions?

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In 1995, I discovered that seeing faces in the morning raised my mood the next day. For example, seeing faces Monday morning improved my mood on Tuesday (but not Monday). Study of the effect suggested we have a face-sensitive oscillator that controls mood and sleep. The oscillator needs morning-face exposure to work properly — faces “push” the oscillator as you would push a swing. Long ago, this oscillator synchronized the mood and sleep of people who lived together. The synchronization helped them cooperate. It is much easier to work with a happy person than an unhappy person and, of course, much easier to work with someone awake than someone asleep.

My results suggested you need to see morning faces on the order of 30 minutes to get a big effect. The faces need to be similar to what you’d see in a conversation. Looking at people on the subway doesn’t count. Nowadays, as far as I can tell, hardly anyone gets the right input. In extreme cases, this causes depression, poor sleep, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorders. What else might it cause?

A friend, whom I’ll call Ben, recently told me something that sheds light on this. Three years ago he was a graduate student at Columbia. He lived in a basement apartment, with no sunlight. It was between semesters. He had no regular contact with anyone. He was depressed. Then things got worse: He became delusional. He started thinking that every conversation he heard was about him. “Everything I heard or saw was directed at me,” he said. There was a boiler in the room next to his apartment. He believed it was a nuclear reactor.

Although Ben was isolated in terms of seeing other people, he had non-visual contact with people online. He told them about his strange thoughts. Some thought he had a problem, some didn’t. Some thought he sounded mystical. He felt physical discomfort — a “pulling inside”. His heart seemed to be beating differently. He called his parents. They were so alarmed that they contacted someone they knew in New York. Eventually an ambulance arrived at Ben’s apartment and took him to a mental hospital. At the hospital, he told them he thought he was dead. After a day or so at the hospital, on a locked ward, he felt much better. However, he wasn’t allowed to leave for two weeks because the doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him.

After leaving the hospital he took a break from graduate school and went to stay with his parents. He saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed Risperdal (an antipsychotic) and Depakote (for mania).

The pattern is okay during semester (when he sees others on campus), sick between semesters (when he doesn’t see others), okay in locked ward (when he sees others). Bipolar disorder sometimes includes delusions during mania, so the association of disordered internal rhythms and delusions is not new. But why should disordered internal rhythms cause delusions — in this case, paranoid ones? One possibility is that it is beneficial to be paranoid in the middle of the night. If someone wakes you up, you will wake up thinking they tried to wake you up, which will make you especially mad. The madder you are, the less likely they will do it again. I argued that the irritability associated with depression is beneficial in the middle of the night for just this reason: It protects sleep. If someone wakes you up you will get mad at them. This explanation predicts a circadian rhythm in paranoia, increasing in the evening. However, I’m not sure this explains why he thought a boiler in the next room was a nuclear reactor.

 

 

 

Alternate-Day Fasting Improved My Fasting Blood Sugar

Seth Roberts12 Comments

A few days ago, I gave a talk at a Quantified Self Meetup in San Francisco titled “Why is my blood sugar high?” (PowerPoint here and here). My main point was that alternate-day fasting (eating much less than usual every other day) quickly brought my fasting blood sugar level from the mid-90s to the low 80s, which is where I wanted it. I was unsure how to do this and had tried several things that hadn’t worked.

Not in the talk is an explanation of my results in terms of setpoint (blood sugar setpoint, not body fat setpoint). Your body tries to maintain a certain blood sugar level — that’s obvious. Not obvious at all is what controls the setpoint. This question is usually ignored — for example, in Wikipedia’s blood sugar regulation entry. Maybe Type 2 diabetes occurs because the blood sugar setpoint is too high. If we can find out what environmental events control the setpoint, we will be in a much better position to prevent and reverse Type 2 diabetes (as with obesity).

A few years ago, I discovered that walking an hour per day improved my fasting blood sugar. Does walking lower the setpoint? I didn’t ask this question, a curious omission from the author of The Shangri-La Diet. If walking lowered the setpoint, walking every other day might have the same effect as walking every day.

I was pushed toward this line of thought because alternate-day fasting seems to lower the blood-sugar setpoint. After I started alternate-day fasting, it took about three days for my fasting blood sugar to reach a new lower level. After that, it was low every day, not just after fast days. My experience suggests that the blood-sugar setpoint depends on what your blood sugar is. When your blood sugar is high, the setpoint becomes higher; when your blood sugar is low, the setpoint becomes lower. Tim Lundeen had told me something similar to this.

If you tried to lower your fasting blood sugar and succeeded, I hope you will say in the comments how you did this. I tried three things that didn’t work: darker bedroom, Vitamin B supplement, and cinnamon. Eating low carb raises fasting blood sugar, according to Paul Jaminet.

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Thanks to Phil Alexander and Casey Manion.

Cheap Good Science

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Last weekend I attended EG, a TED-like conference in Monterey. One of the speakers, a woman named Hong Yi, made representational art from cheap materials – a portrait from coffee-stained napkins, for example. The most stirring talks were by Matt Harding (dancing video) and Jo Montgomery and Chuck Johnson (circus school) but she, more than anyone else, seemed to have done something with big implications. Her art was attractive, profitable, very cheap, and diverse (many materials, many representational styles). If anyone else has ever done this, I don’t know about it. She is an architect in Shanghai and her art began because she was in China. At a wholesale supply store, she came across very cheap candles. She realized she could buy enough of them to make a picture with one candle = one pixel. I imagine people will be watching Harding’s video a hundred years from now and the underlying point of Montgomery and Johnson’s circus school will be valid forever, but both were enormous expensive unique efforts. Hong’s work was much easier and cost almost nothing. The benefit/cost ratio was very high and millions of people could do something like what she did.

I realized that my work resembled hers. She had discovered how to make cheap good art — not just once but many times, using a wide range of materials (e.g., different foods) and representational styles. I had figured out how to do cheap good science, answering not just one question (e.g., how to sleep better) but many questions (how to sleep better, how to lose weight, how to be in a better mood, etc.). My science cost almost nothing, so I could do a lot of it (do thousands of experiments) and managed to discover many things. In both Hong Yi’s case and mine, the Internet was not needed to do the work but was essential for publicizing it. It didn’t fit the usual channels.

For a long time, I called my work self-experimentation. It’s true, but misleading, because almost all self-experimentation you’ve heard of isn’t like mine. The book Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine is full of self-experimentation quite different than mine. Most of it is by doctors, designed to show that a new treatment is safe. The scientist tries the treatment himself to protect others. The self-experimentation in Who Goes First? is closer to demonstration than experiment. In contrast, the treatments I’ve studied (e.g., butter, morning faces, standing a lot) are perfectly safe. My work is about finding new ideas. It is about changing my own beliefs, not trying to convince other people of what I believe.

More recently, I might describe my work by saying it’s an example of the Quantified Self (QS) movement. Again, this is true, but also somewhat misleading. My work does involve self-quantification and self-tracking. Like many QSers, I do hope to become healthier as a result. What’s misleading is that the tracking is only part of the effort, I don’t measure many things, and my tracking isn’t high-tech. I’m trying to discover new cause-effect relationships (e.g., new ways to improve sleep). This is not a large part of the QS conversation.

If I describe my work as cheap science, on the other hand, what you automatically think of is pretty accurate. Scientists look for cause-effect relationships (it is central to science); I look for cause-effect relationships. Scientists do many experiments; so do I. Scientists pay great attention to the scientific literature (what has already been done, what is already known); so do I. When something becomes much cheaper (e.g., photography or computing becomes much cheaper), everyone understands that the activity can be done by many more people. That is inherent in my work. I am doing science that many people can do — many more people than can do professional science. The terms self-experimentation and quantified self do not convey this.

Like the term cheap travel, the term cheap science suggests freedom. That too is a big part of what I do. I have vastly more freedom than professional scientists. I can test treatments they can’t. I can entertain ideas (“crazy”) they can’t. I can spend longer on one project than they can. So if I describe what I do as cheap science, the rest of what I say (“I’ve discovered new ways to sleep better, lose weight, etc.”) makes more sense. And maybe the whole activity sounds more accessible, whereas self-experimentation and quantified self seem like the sort of activities that caused the word geek to be invented.

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Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

Assorted Links

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  • An Epidemic of Absence (book about allergies and autism)
  • Professor of medicine who studies medical error loses a leg due to medical error. “Despite calls to action by patient advocates and the adoption of safety programs, there is no sign that the numbers of errors, injuries and deaths [due to errors] have improved.” Nothing about consequences for the person who made the error that caused him to lose a leg.
  • Doubts about spending a huge amount of research money on a single project (brain mapping). Which has yet to produce even one useful result.
  • Cancer diagnosis innovation by somebody without a job (a 15-year-old)
  • Someone named Rob Rhinehart has greatly reduced the time and money he spends on food by drinking something he thinks contains all essential nutrients. Someone pointed out to him that he needs bacteria, which he doesn’t have. (No doubt several types of bacteria are best.) He doesn’t realize that Vitamin K has several forms. I suspect he’s getting too little omega-3. This reminds me of a man who greatly reduced how much he slept by sleeping 15 minutes every 3 hours. It didn’t work out well for him (his creativity vanished and he became bored and unhappy). In Rhinehart’s case, I can’t predict what will happen so it’s fascinating. When something goes wrong, however, I’ll be surprised if he can figure out what caused the problem.

Thanks to Amish Mukharji.

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”.

No Stagnation in My Kitchen

Seth Roberts12 Comments

Stagnation of innovation is often illustrated with kitchens. In 1996, Paul Krugman wrote, “I live in a house with a late-50s-vintage kitchen, never remodeled. The non-self-defrosting refrigerator, and the gas range with its open pilot lights . . . it is still a pretty functional kitchen.” (Illustrating, at least, his lack of change.) Tyler Cowen said “if he were to introduce his grandmother to a modern American kitchen, it wouldn’t be all that earth-shattering for her.” David Brooks mentioned lack of innovation in many things, including “appliances”. Last week, the Economist said:

Take kitchens. In 1900 kitchens in even the poshest of households were primitive things. . . . Fast forward to 1970 and middle-class kitchens in America and Europe feature gas and electric hobs [= burners] and ovens, fridges, food processors, microwaves and dishwashers. Move forward another 40 years, though, and things scarcely change.

For a long time I wanted to go to the giant kitchen and housewares trade show in Chicago every summer, until this article convinced it would be the same old stuff with tiny variations.

In contrast, my kitchen has changed greatly in the last ten years. Here’s how:

1. Tea-brewing equipment. Soon after I started practicing the Shangri-La Diet (calories without smell), I started drinking lots of tea (smell without calories).

2. Electric tea kettle (heats water for tea better than microwave).

3. Kitchen scale (for tea and flaxseed). I discovered that flaxseed oil and, later, ground flaxseed improved my brain function and gums.

4. Noseclips. For the Shangri-La Diet.

5. Yogurt maker. I believe that fermented foods are essential for health.

6. Kombucha brewing tools (e.g., glass jars).

7. Spice grinder (for flax seed).

8. Soup cooker (for pork belly and miso soup). Eating lots of pork belly improved my sleep.

I would like to make more fermented foods. I hear that in South Korea I can get a machine that makes both natto and yogurt.

My kitchen changed because my ideas about health changed. My ideas about health changed because of my research. I found a new way to lose weight. I had a new explanation of why we like foods with complex, sour, and unami flavors (so that we will eat more fermented food). Self-experimentation convinced me that I was seriously omega-3-deficient, thus the flaxseeds. I discovered that if I eat a lot of animal fat, I sleep better.

I believe kitchen stagnation reflects stagnation in our thinking about health. Every October, I point out that the Nobel Prize in Medicine has again been given to research that is so far useless. “Molecular medicine has come nowhere close to matching the effects of improved sanitation,” says the Economist. Could mainstream health researchers be trapped by their desires to show off (no cheap equipment), to be respected (no “crazy ideas”), and to produce a steady stream of publications (no time to test implausible ideas)? Could having goals other than the truth (such as respectability) make it harder to find the truth? People who have written about stagnation in innovation do not seem to have considered these possibilities.