Category: self-experimentation

New Heart Scan Results: Good News (lipid scores)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

My recent heart scan results were 50% lower (= better) than predicted. Apparently I am doing something right.
You might think that my lipid values would reflect that. Not quite. They were measured twice in the last two weeks, first with a Cholestech LDX machine (instant results); second, ordinary lab tests.
Here are the scores (first test, second test). Total Cholesterol: 210, 214, which is “borderline high” (borderline bad) according to the Cholestech LDX quick reference sheet. HDL = 17, 36, which is “low” (bad). TRG = 62, 75, which is “normal”. LDL = 180, 163, which is “high” (bad).

There is no hint in these numbers that I am doing the right thing! If anything, they imply the opposite, that I’m doing the wrong thing. This supports all those people, such as Uffe Ravnskov, who say the connection between cholesterol and heart disease is badly overstated.

New Heart Scan Results: Good News (explanation)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

My recent heart scan score was about 50% less than you’d expect from an earlier score. Why the improvement?

During the year between the two tests, I’d made one big change: eat much more animal fat. That’s the obvious explanation. Three things support it:

1. Mozaffarian et al., as I blogged, found a similar result.

2. The animal fat (pork fat and butter) had both produced large immediate improvements when I began to eat them. The pork fat had improved my sleep; the butter, my arithmetic scores. This sort of large immediate effect we associate with the supply of a missing necessary nutrient — giving Vitamin C to someone with scurvy, for example. My brain, at least, needed much more animal fat than I’d been eating. Different parts of the body need different nutrients, sure, but they all must work well with the same set of nutrients. If Nutrient X helps one part of the body, it is more likely to help another part.

3. My initial score put me at the 50th percentile for my age. I’d had an unusual diet for a long time. I stopped eating bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, and dessert 13 years ago. I’d started consuming lots of omega-3 and fermented foods a few years earlier. It was possible that those other changes produced improvement but if so it was a strange coincidence that, as my score got better and better over the years, I happened to measure it for the first time just when it crossed the 50th percentile.

This explanation makes a prediction: If you greatly increase your animal-fat intake, your heart scan score should improve. A commenter said what he’d read on paleo-diet forums supported this prediction: “If you hang out in the paleo/low carb forums, you see this kind of thing a lot.”

New Heart Scan Results: Good News (context)

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I posted yesterday that a recent heart scan found my arteries about 50% less calcified than a previous scan predicted. Apparently the improvement was due to eating much more animal fat (pork fat and butter).

In 2004, an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition article found something similar: heart disease progressed less in women who ate more saturated fat. “In postmenopausal women with relatively low total fat intake, a greater saturated fat intake is associated with less progression of coronary atherosclerosis,” the authors wrote. Here’s how they saw this finding:

The inverse association between saturated fat intake and atherosclerotic progression was unexpected. However, this finding should perhaps be less surprising. Ecologic and animal experimental studies showed positive relations between saturated fat intake and CHD risk (8). However, cohort studies and clinical trials in humans have been far less consistent (9 —12). Furthermore, most studies of dietary fat and CHD risk have been performed in men (15, 16). The relations in women—particularly postmenopausal women—are much less well-established, and evidence from dietary intervention trials suggests that diets low in saturated fat may have different effects on CHD risk factors in women (15, 17—22).

In their study, women with the highest intake of saturated fat did not get worse during the study period, whereas women with lower intakes did get worse.

An editorial about this study described some of the evidence that supports the “article of faith” that “saturated fat . . . accelerates coronary artery disease”:

One of the earliest and most convincing studies of the better efficacy of unsaturated than of saturated fat in reducing cholesterol and heart disease is the Finnish Mental Hospital Study conducted in the 12 y between 1959 and 1971. In this study, the usual high-saturated-fat institutional diet was compared with an equally high-fat diet in which the saturated fat in dairy products was replaced with soybean oil and soft margarine and polyunsaturated fats were used in cooking. Each diet was provided for 6 y and then the alternate diet was provided for the next 6 y. After a comparison of the effects of the 2 diets in both men and women, the incidence of coronary artery disease was lower by 50% and 65% after the consumption of polyunsaturated fat in the 2 hospitals.

My results make the results of that earlier study exceedingly puzzling. I found a large change in one direction; the Finnish study found a large effect in the opposite direction. Given the huge effect (50% or 65% reduction) observed in the Finnish study, it is hard to understand why “cohort studies and clinical trials in humans have been far less consistent”.

New Heart Scan Results: Good News

Seth Roberts18 Comments

One and a half years ago, in February 2009, I got a heart scan. It’s an X-ray measurement of how calcified your arteries are. Persons with high scores are much more likely to have a heart attack than persons with low scores. Scores in the hundreds are dangerous. Tim Russert, who died at age 58 of a heart attack, had a score of about 200 ten years before his death. Above age 40, the scores typically increase about 25% per year. That puts Russert’s score when he died at around 2000.

A few weeks ago I got another scan, at the same place with the same machine. Here are my scores. February 2009: 38 (about 50th percentile for my age). August 2010: 29 (between 25th & 50th percentile). In other words: 47% lower than expected. The earlier scan detected 3 “lesions”; the recent scan detected 2. The woman who runs the scanning center — HeartScan, in Walnut Creek, California — told me that decreases in this score are very rare. About 1 in 100, she said.

The only big lifestyle change I made between the two scans is to eat much more animal fat. After I found that pork fat improved my sleep, I started to eat a large serving of pork belly (with 80-100 g of fat) almost every day. Later I switched to 60 g of butter every day. The usual view, of course, is that to eat so much animal fat is v v bad and will “clog” my arteries. In fact, the reverse happened. Judging from this, the change was v v good.

Asthma and Probiotics

Seth Roberts15 Comments

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.

More Saturated Fat, Less Stroke

Seth Roberts12 Comments

This recent study from Japan found that middle-aged men and women who ate more saturated fat had a lower risk of stroke. The rate of strokes was 30% lower in the highest intake quintile compared to the lowest quintile. There was a non-significant reduction in heart disease.

Other big differences were correlated with saturated fat intake. For example, those in the highest quintile had more college education than those in the lowest quintile and were more likely to do sports >1 hr/week. These data by themselves won’t convince anyone that saturated fats are beneficial. But they should push you in that direction. Contrary to what you’ve heard a million times.

As far as I can tell, eating lots of butter has lowered my blood pressure. High blood pressure is associated with greater risk of stroke.

Although pig fat certainly helped me (I slept better), I’ve found butter is even better. Butter has considerably more saturated fat than pig fat. The fat in butter is 60% saturated fat, whereas pig fat is 40% saturated fat. My consumption of 60 g/day of butter gives me 36 g/day saturated fat. In this study, persons in the highest quintile of intake averaged 20 g/day. The highest intake in the whole study (60,000 people) was 40 g/day. In addition to butter, I eat cheese, whole-fat yogurt, and meat, so I’m surely higher than that.

Via Whole Health Source.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • 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.

Beijing Students at Berkeley

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In downtown Berkeley I met a group of Chinese students from Beijing. They were entering freshmen at UC Berkeley.

They said there were 40 students like them — from Beijing, entering UC Berkeley. (At Tsinghua, there will be 400 entering freshmen from Beijing.) In all of China, 13 students were admitted to Harvard, about the same number to Yale and Princeton. One of them said she’d wanted to go to Northwestern but hadn’t gotten in. Had she gone to college in China, she might have gone to Renmin University, perhaps the #3 university in China.

Surely their parents were wealthy, yes. But they preferred an American college to a Chinese one for two main reasons: 1. They can choose whatever major they want. At Chinese universities students are often forced into a major they don’t want if their scores are high enough to get into a prestigious university but not high enough to get into the major they want at that university. 2. They believe that if they graduate from an American university they will have more opportunities. Where did they get the idea of coming to Berkeley? I asked. Online, they said. Their English was really good.

The “more opportunities” may not be as simple as they think. In Beijing I know a Chinese businesswoman who hired a recent college graduate. She’d gone to college in England, indicating that her parents were wealthy. The new worker turned out to be irresponsible and had to be fired. Perhaps her parents had spoiled her. In this businesswoman’s eyes, an overseas education may now be a negative.

The Irony of What Works

Seth Roberts5 Comments

After posting about Doug Lemov, I ordered Teach Like a Champion. It arrived yesterday. Leafing through it, I came across a section titled “The Irony of What Works,” which begins:

One of the biggest ironies I hope you will take away from reading this book is that many of the tools likely to yield the strongest classroom results remain essentially beneath the notice of our theories and theorists of education.

Lemov continues with an example: Teaching students how to distribute classroom materials, such as handouts. This can save a lot of time. Then he adds:

Unfortunately this dizzyingly efficient technique — so efficient it is all but a moral imperative for teachers to use it — remains beneath the notice of our avatars of educational theory. There isn’t a school of education that would stoop to teach its aspiring teachers how to train their students to pass out papers.

The last chapter of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class is about just this — the importance that professors (like everyone else) place on status display and how this interferes with their effectiveness. The connection with self-experimentation is that no matter how effective it is, no psychology department would stoop to teach it. Or, at least, that’s the current state of affairs.

The book’s index doesn’t include Veblen, although it does include Richard Thaler.