Category: self-experimentation

“No One’s Going to Care About You Like You Do”

Seth Roberts2 Comments

At the end of a BookTV interview of Harry Markopolos, the guy who discovered Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, Markopolos says

No one’s going to care about you like [= as much as] you do.

He meant this as financial advice: Make up your own mind about how to invest your money. Don’t assume someone else has done the necessary thinking.

My self-experimentation led me to the same conclusion, as I wrote here. My self-experimentation uncovered helpful treatments (e.g., how to sleep better) that the experts (in this case, sleep researchers) had missed. I theorized that this was partly because I cared more than they did about the quality of my sleep. I had “the motivation of a person with the problem”; they didn’t.

Learning From “Pseudoscience”

Seth Roberts10 Comments

The second episode of BBC’s The Story of Science is about chemistry. It shows unusual sophistication by emphasizing that early chemists built on the alchemists. The alchemists invented techniques and equipment later used by “real” chemists such as Joseph Priestly — the ones who reached conclusions we still believe. Not everyone understands that some “pseudoscience”, such as alchemy, is valuable.

A few years after I became an assistant professor, I realized the key thing a scientist needs is an excuse. Not a prediction. Not a theory. Not a concept. Not a hunch. Not a method. Just an excuse — an excuse to do something, which in my case meant an excuse to do a rat experiment. If you do something, you are likely to learn something, even if your reason for action was silly. The alchemists wanted gold so they did something. Fine. Gold was their excuse. Their activities produced useful knowledge, even though those activities were motivated by beliefs we now think silly. I’d like to think none of my self-experimentation was based on silly ideas but, silly or not, it often paid off in unexpected ways. At one point I tested the idea that standing more would cause weight loss. Even as I was doing it I thought the premise highly unlikely. Yet this led me to discover that standing a lot improved my sleep.

Richard Feynman, in his famous “cargo-cult science” speech, failed to understand that “real” science can build on “pseudoscience”:

Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress–lots of theory, but no progress–in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals. Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience.

Absence of obvious progress (such as no decrease in crime) doesn’t mean something is worthless. Bizarre ideas or unsupported ideas (“lots of theory but no progress”) doesn’t mean something is worthless. What’s worthless, in terms of science, is not paying attention to reality. Not caring about how the world actually is. The cargo cults Feynman mentioned weren’t worthless. They tested their beliefs. They found out the planes didn’t land. Fine. It wasn’t pseudoscience, it was just early science, where the reasons for doing stuff now appear ridiculous. Of course the alchemists had beliefs we now think ridiculous. How could they not have?

Science is fundamentally on the side of the weak, since it offers hope of improvement. The powerful not only can afford to ignore reality they would like to, because it might be inconvenient. So they do so as much as possible. When I’ve heard “the debate is over” (= it’s now time to ignore reality) it’s always turned out that the person saying this (e.g., Al Gore, mainstream journalists) was powerful or credulous.

It’s not bad that some people ignore reality. We need people like that. I think of the body: parts of it (e.g., sensory systems) are very sensitive to reality, parts of it (e.g., bones) are not. We need both. When leaders ignore reality is when trouble begins.

What’s “Natural” Sleep? (more)

Seth Roberts14 Comments

This morning I woke up feeling very refreshed and in a good mood. I’d slept about six hours. I’d fallen asleep within seconds of turning off my bedside light. This is what usually happens. I almost always sleep this well. Yet I don’t avoid caffeine during the day (I drink a lot of tea) nor artificial light at night (I do avoid fluorescent light at night). For a large chunk of my life my sleep was much worse. I never woke up feeling well-rested. I often woke up quite tired but unable to fall back asleep. A few hours later I’d fall back asleep and sleep a few more hours, much like the biphasic sleep called segmented sleep. Which is more natural — my current sleep or segmented sleep? As I blogged, several scientists have said that segmented sleep is more natural.

I’m returning to this topic and sort of repeating myself because sleep is so important, “ almost everyone I [a NY Times writer] know complains about sleep,” and the common cold so common. (When I improved my sleep I stopped getting colds.) Here, in chronological order of discovery, is what I’ve learned improves my sleep:

1. Aerobic exercise. When I started swimming, I noticed that I fell asleep much faster — within a minute rather than within several minutes. Aerobic exercise didn’t solve the bigger problem of waking up tired, however.

2. Skipping breakfast. This reduced early awakening. If you have any doubts about this, read about anticipatory activity in lab animals.

3. Seeing faces in the morning. Perhaps this deepens my sleep. It certainly makes it easier to go to bed in the evening (I stop wanting to do anything) and makes me wake up optimistic and looking forward to the day. The difference in how I feel when I wake up is like the difference between black and white and color. These days I watch about an hour of bloggingheads on a 22″ monitor starting around 6 am.

4. Standing. I stand on one bent leg to exhaustion at least twice. Before that I got a similar effect by standing 8 hours or more, which was too hard to do every day.

5. Morning light. Every morning I go outside about 8 am. I try to stay outside at least 1 hour and ideally more.

6. Animal fat. I eat half a stick of butter (60 g) per day.

Maybe the 3 tablespoons of flaxseed oil I drink every day also helps.

Each one of these six factors probably reproduces Stone Age life, when people got a lot more exercise, didn’t eat breakfast, chatted with their neighbors in the morning, etc. Were all six factors set at Stone Age levels for the Western Europeans that Ekirch writes about or Thomas Wehr’s subjects (both of whom had segmented sleep)? Of course not. Had all six been at Stone Age levels, the segmented sleep seen by Ekirch and Wehr might have disappeared. As my segmented sleep disappeared.

My sleep still has room for improvement. When I stood for 9 or 10 hours I woke up astonishingly well-rested. I felt scrubbed free of tiredness. In the middle of the day, eight hours later, I would marvel how rested I felt. The problem with standing more now is that if I stand on one bent leg more than twice per day my legs get stronger and stronger and it starts to take a long time (e.g., 20 minutes) to reach exhaustion. I’m also unsure about the best amount of animal fat. More might be better.

Comments that the night is long and sleep is short ignore that we can see by moonlight and starlight and that people chat after dark. In contrast to this experiment with no artificial light, by J. D. Moyer, the things I do to improve my sleep produce no bad effects. And I sleep only six hours per night, which Moyer found isn’t nearly enough.

Thanks to Heidi for the Moyer and NY Times links.

The Shangri-La-Diet Effect

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A friend wrote:

Took 3 tbsp of flaxseed oil this morning and held my nose and drank the oil w/water. Â It worked! Â I had brought food for work, I didn’t eat hardly any of it. Â And I didn’t think about losing weight all day, first time in all my life….

As far as I’m concerned, it never gets old.

Alex Chernavsky: Eight months on the Shangri-La Diet.

What’s the “Natural” Pattern of Sleep?

Seth Roberts16 Comments

According to this influential article by the historian A. Roger Ekirch,

Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.

This is called segmented sleep. Supposedly this is “natural”:

In a natural state, humans do not sleep a long consecutive bout throughout the night. The natural condition is bimodal – two bouts of sleep interrupted by a short episode of waking in the middle of the night.

And if you don’t like sleeping this way you are ignorant:

The modern assumption that consolidated sleep with no awakenings is the normal and correct way for human adults to sleep leads many to approach their doctors with complaints of maintenance i nsomnia or other sleep disorders. Their concerns might best be addressed by assurance that their sleep conforms to historically natural sleep patterns.

An amusing therapeutic approach. Whatever the problem, simply say “your problem conforms to historically natural patterns”.

I found that if I ate more animal fat I slept better. It is entirely possible that if all those Western Europeans walking up in the middle of the night had eaten more animal fat — as their ancestors may have several hundred thousand years ago before big fat-laden game animals were hunted to extinction — they would have slept through the night.

I found several ways to improve my sleep. After my sleep got a lot better — in particular, I stopped waking up in the middle of the night — I stopped getting colds, surely because my immune system was working better. The connection between sleep and immune function is obvious. Given a choice between (a) my immune system had returned to ancient levels of efficacy or (b) my immune system was working better than ever before in the history of the species, I’d bet on (a). Those Western Europeans with segmented sleep were in poor health, I’m sure. Perhaps their sleep was one sign of this.

Fasting Blood Sugar Reduced by Walking (cont.)

Seth Roberts15 Comments

In an earlier post I described how I discovered that walking normalized my fasting blood sugar. In a comment on that post, Phil wrote:

You could also have consulted a doctor, or a diabetes website, and probably found out about the benefits of walking for controlling blood glucose a lot sooner.

My initial reaction was that this was wrong–that a search on the web would find hundreds of suggestions for managing diabetes and walking would be just one of them. Diabetes, after all, is a huge problem. A doctor would probably prescribe something. But what if Phil were right?

What would I find if I looked? I didn’t actually know. So I looked. Under “diabetes”, the Mayo Clinic website has two sections about treatment. Under “ treatment and drugs” are six suggestions, such as “healthy eating”. The suggestion called “physical exercise” recommends aerobic exercise. “Get your doctor’s OK to exercise,” it says. “Aim for at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise most days of the week,” it continues. My walking was not aerobic. Obviously one does not need a doctor’s approval to walk at a normal pace. In a second section called “ lifestyle and home remedies” were ten suggestions, such as “make a commitment to manage your diabetes”. No mention of walking.

What about the American Diabetes Association website? Their “ Treatment & Care” page says nothing about exercise. It mentions drugs and transplants (e.g., kidney transplants). There’s also a “ Food & Fitness” page. There are dozens of comments about what foods to eat. The “Fitness” section begins like this:

Exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle for everyone, and it’s especially important for people with diabetes. But exercise doesn’t necessarily mean running a marathon or bench-pressing 300 pounds. The goal is to get active and stay active by doing things you enjoy, from gardening to playing tennis to walking with friends. Here are some ideas for getting moving and making exercise part of your daily life.

The fitness section goes on and on about such topics as “What is Exercise?” and “Top 10 Benefits of Being Active”. Surely the ADA hired some hack to write it. It’s useless.

I conclude that if you already know that walking helps you can find evidence to support this. But searching the web will not lead you to try walking any time soon. You will be too busy changing your diet and trying all possible aerobic exercises. (And I did aerobic exercise several times a week and still had too-high blood sugar.) My initial reaction was wrong, it turned out: I found a large number of suggestions and my actual activity (walking 30-60 min/day) wasn’t one of them. No way could I “walk with friends” every day. (I’ve tried and failed miserably.) The next time I see my doctor I will find out what he would have recommended.

Fasting Blood Sugar Reduced by Walking

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Richard Bernstein, an engineer with diabetes, invented home blood glucose monitoring. To learn more about this invention, about two years ago I started doing it myself. Mostly I measured my fasting blood sugar level — the level you measure in the morning before eating anything. My numbers were okay — averaging about 90 mg/dL. Optimal is 84, readings above 100 are considered pre-diabetic. I stopped for a while. Then I resumed, and was shocked to see that the numbers were considerably worse — the average was in the high 90s.

I tried to lower them. The obvious thing to do was to eat less carbs, but I already ate few carbs. I cut my carb intake still further but the problem didn’t go away. The graph below shows a solution I found by accident: to walk 30-60 minutes/day (closer to 60 than 30).

After months of trying this and that, and nothing working, one morning the reading was good. I realized I’d done something unusual the previous evening: Taken a 30-minute walk home in the evening rather than ride my bike. After that I deliberately walked 50-60 minutes almost every day and found that my readings were much better, as the graph shows. It wasn’t always walking steadily for 60 minutes — stopping now & then was okay. However, wandering through stores for 60 minutes (or any length of time) didn’t seem to work. My walks were in the afternoon or evening.

I have not read elsewhere that non-diabetics should do this sort of monitoring, but it helped me. I have seen “exercise” recommended as a way to improve blood sugar control but what I found is much more specific. This article recommends walking about 3 miles/day, which is what I did. This research found big effects of substantial aerobic exercise. My walking was just ordinary continuous walking. But the details of my exercise aren’t the point: The point is you can find out for yourself what works.

This sort of thing looks even better when you learn that GlaxoSmithKline, the giant drug company, hid evidence that its diabetes drug caused heart attacks. The drug has generated billions in revenue for the company.

Kombucha Eliminated Heartburn

Seth Roberts10 Comments

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”.