Category: self-experimentation

Acidophilus Pearls versus Fermented Food

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I hear a voice: “Okay, you’ve convinced me, I need to eat more bacteria. How should I do it?” Well, Tim Beneke writes:

I want to revise my comments of a few months ago on probiotics and breathing through my nose. The probiotic pills by themselves do not enable me to breath better though my nose, even if I take 2x the dose they recommend. However, if I eat a lot of miso, yogurt, tempeh etc., I can breathe better through my nose within a day or 2. Previously, when I ate a lot of yogurt etc. for a couple of weeks, and then just went on the probiotic pills, it seemed as if the pills were enough, but after a week or so of just doing the probiotic pills, the stuffed nose came back. Then just doing yogurt and miso, my stuffed nose went away.

The probiotic pills are called Acidophilus Pearls, said to have one billion CFU [colony-forming units] of lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidobacterium longum per capsule; I got zero noticeable effect taking 2 of them a day while eating virtually no probiotic food.

Doing 16 oz of yogurt/day plus one 480 ml bottle/day of kombucha, while consuming none of the Pearls enabled me to breathe much better through my nose within a day or 2.

Associative Memory Studied by Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Joel Voss, a postdoc at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, studied himself to measure the capacity of associative memory:

No previous experiments on humans have investigated the capacity of associative memory. I describe the first relevant data, which I obtained by systematically probing my own capacity during 58,560 memory trials for picture—response associations (approximately 1 year of testing). Estimated capacity was on the order of several thousand associations.

A few thousand is the number of characters a well-educated Chinese person knows.

A Clue About How To Sleep Better

Seth Roberts15 Comments

A few nights ago I slept surprisingly well: I woke up feeling more rested than usual. Each morning I judge how rested I feel on a scale from 0 to 100 where 0 = as if I hadn’t slept and 100 = completely drained of tiredness. I got scores of 100 after standing 9 or 10 hours during the day. That showed what was possible but that much standing was unsustainable. Without extreme standing, 99 has seemed to be the maximum.

A few nights ago, I did better. The ratings for that night and the preceding four nights were: 98.9, 98.8, 99, 98.8, 99.2. Doesn’t look like much, but actually the improvement was so clearly unusual I didn’t need records to notice it. If I gave the scores for the preceding 100 nights you’d see it was rare to score above 99. Moreover, I was keeping the amount of animal fat I ate constant, unlike previous nights with scores above 99. The difference between 98.8 and 99.2 is easy to notice. Think of the difference between 12 and 8.

What had improved my sleep? I could think of four unusual things about the preceding day:

1. Several cloves of garlic in the pork-belly soup I ate for lunch. I’d never before added any garlic.

2. I began using f.lux, which reduced the color temperature of my computer screen after sunsight.

3. I’d played Dance Dance Revolution (on the Wii) for 10 minutes at 8 pm. Usually I do it in the morning (much longer, 30-50 minutes).

4. More bike riding than usual (including two long stretches that added up to 66 minutes).

All four seemed unlikely. 1. Who’d heard of garlic improving sleep? Not me. 2. Laptop screens are quite dim compared to sunlight. 3. The amount of exercise was small. I’d played Wii Tennis for longer periods in the evening without noticing any change. DDR in the morning hadn’t made an obvious difference. 4. I’d ridden my bike for 50-odd minutes at a stretch without noticing better sleep. This was only slightly more.

Now I am testing these possibilities. If you have any idea which it is — perhaps it is none of them — please comment.

Senator Grassley Asks Med Schools Their Policies On Ghostwriting

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Medical ghostwriting is plagiarism with a bullet: not only do med-school profs get the benefits of a published article they didn’t write, that published article — written by a drug-company hack — is inevitably misleading, causing doctors to prescribe a drug that is worse than they think. (Which is the whole point.) Patients who take the drug are the big losers.

This sort of thing is so patently awful — especially the harm done to millions of sick innocent people — that you’d think everyone finds it repulsive. Quite the opposite. Living breathing med school professors, such as New York University professor Lila Nachtigall, have trouble seeing what’s so bad about it. The practice appears so common that Senator Grassley asked the ten top medical schools, such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and UCSF, to say their policies about it. He’s asking them: Do you consider plagiarism wrong? Except it’s much worse than plagiarism. Although several say on their websites that it’s wrong, Duke University says that “Severe and/or repeated offenses will result in formal disciplinary action”– in other words, non-severe examples are okay! At least the first time. “Formal disciplinary action” can be as mild as a letter. At Duke, at least, they have trouble grasping how awful it is.

This might seem to have nothing in common with self-experimentation. Self-experimentation can be done by anyone, costs nothing, and is a way to figure out helpful truths; whereas almost no one can get a drug company to write a paper for them (you need to be at a top medical school), drugs are a hundred-billion-dollar/year business, and this sort of ghost-writing is done to hide helpful truths. In a better world, they really would be worlds apart. But you are reading this not because I did self-experimentation but because I did self-experimentation that found out something useful and surprising — the Shangri-La Diet and new ideas about sleep and mood. A big reason it did so was that the experts in those fields — such as the relevant med school professors — were utterly and completely asleep, so to speak. They were incapable of making significant progress. Extreme careerism — putting one’s career ahead of everything else — is no doubt one reason. They could have done what I did. Fat weight-control profs could have tested different diets on themselves, for example. But doing good research would be harmful to their career (e.g., not enough publications), so they don’t do it. Medical ghostwriting helps their career, so they take advantage of it. So what if millions of sick people are harmed by these decisions.

My surprisingly-productive self-experimentation and the staggeringly careerist decisions of med school profs are two sides of one coin: the profound stagnation in health care. The complete inability of those in charge to innovate effectively. Drug companies are businesses that make drugs. They are not going to explore non-drug low-cost solutions, such as those I explored. Nothing, however, prevents med school profs from doing so — at least, nothing except their extreme careerism. My self-experimentation shows what could have been done. It shows that the health questions we face (e.g., how to lose weight) have solutions much better than a new drug. The widespread practice of medical ghostwriting is one indication why those solutions haven’t been found. Failure to find new solutions means problems have stacked up unsolved, getting worse and worse (the obesity epidemic, the allergy epidemic, etc.). It’s usually called a healthcare crisis — but it’s really a health crisis.

A Disease of Wealth in Squirrels

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Most people look at my research and see self-experimentation. I see a new way to understand diseases of wealth (often called diseases of civilization). We get sick because we live differently than our long-ago ancestors. Self-experimentation is powerful enough to sort through the thousands of differences between modern life and long-ago life to find those that matter.

In an experiment about the value of circadian rhythms to chipmunks, Patricia DeCoursey, a professor of biology at the University of South Carolina, found that their value was revealed by stress created by wealth:

In one experiment she discovered that chipmunks without an internal circadian clock appear quite normal at first. They can survive in optimal conditions; during the first year after their internal clocks were disabled, “predation by weasels was minimal,” she says. But then the chipmunk population increased strikingly due to two successive years of abundant acorn crops in the forest. The weasel population also increased, following the growth of the chipmunk population. Under these more crowded conditions, the restless nighttime movements of the arrhythmic chipmunks in their burrows clued the weasels in to their locations, and predation increased dramatically. The weasels killed all but four of the 100 chipmunks in this population.

Splenda Reduces Gut Bacteria in Rats

Seth Roberts16 Comments

This 2008 study done at Duke University found that small amounts of Splenda — similar to what a person might consume — reduced “beneficial bacteria” in the guts of rats. The effect was very large (reduction by about 50% in 12 weeks) and occurred even at the lowest dose, which was lower than what the FDA allows. Most ominous of all, the effect had not levelled off after 12 weeks. The number of bacteria was still going down.

Within a day two different people told me (in the comments to this blog) about this study, which was published a year ago. A press release about the study. The research was funded by the Sugar Association. Someone recently told me that the only way doctors learn about bad side effects of this or that drug is when drug reps selling competing drugs tell them. While reading about this I came across this chilling comment:

Excitotoxins are implicated in Parkinson’s as well… makes you wonder about Michael J. Fox – his time as Diet Pepsi’s spokesperson and his admitted addiction to the stuff for decades. I remember seeing an interview with him. His head was shaking from the Parkinson’s and his Diet Pepsi was right next to him.

One of the authors of the Duke study is a professor of psychiatry, Susan Schiffman. An earlier study of hers had pro-Splenda results.

More The makers of Splenda issued a press release that could not be less convincing. The study, it says, has “major deficiencies” that include “a lack of appropriate control groups necessary for understanding results.” No statement of what those control groups are. The press release also claims that because the investigators did not measure food and water intake, the results are meaningless! The idiotic press release is made even more curious by the statement quoted in the comments below, that “Drs. Abou-Donia and Schiffman admitted that some of the results recorded in their report submitted to the court were not actually observed or were based on experiments that had not been conducted.” But these, too, are not described. Which means to me that the details are not on Splenda’s side, or they would have been presented. It sounds like really bad news for Splenda.

Depression and Insomnia Linked at CureTogether

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Fourteen years ago I woke up one morning and felt really really good: cheerful, eager, and yet somehow serene. I was stunned: There was no obvious cause. I hadn’t slept particularly well. Nothing wonderful had happened the day before. But there was one thing . . . the previous day I’d watched a tape of Jay Leno right after waking up. I’d thought it might improve my sleep. Now — a day later — my mood was better. Could there be a connection? Two very rare events: A (TV early in the morning) and B (very good mood upon awakening). Did A cause B? Such causality would be far different than anything we’re familiar with. Yet it made some sense: From teaching introductory psychology, I knew that depression and insomnia are related. If you have one you are more likely to have the other. I had done something to improve my sleep; had it improved my mood? The already-known depression-insomnia linkage made the new idea, the cause-effect relation, far more plausible. Subsequent experiments led me to a whole new theory of mood and depression.

CureTogether has found another example of the familiar depression-insomnia correlation. Persons with depression are twice as likely to have insomnia as persons without depression. CureTogether gathered this data much more cheaply than previous studies. Unlike previous researchers, they were under no pressure to publish. (Professional researchers must publish regularly to keep their grants and their job.) Unlike previous researchers, they were under no pressure to follow a party line.

On the face of it depression makes you less active. Yet insomnia is a case of being too active. So the depression-insomnia link is far from obvious. Lots of other facts connect depression and circadian rhythms; they all suggest that the intellectual basis of anti-depressants, all that stuff about serotonin and neuro-transmitters and re-uptake, is wrong. If depression is due to messed-up circadian rhythms, taking a drug at random times of day is unlikely to fix the underlying problem.

Leonard Mlodinow on Wine Experts

Seth Roberts4 Comments

They’re just like us!

In France, a decade ago a wine researcher named Fréderic Brochet served 57 French wine experts two identical midrange Bordeaux wines, one in an expensive Grand Cru bottle, the other accommodated in the bottle of a cheap table wine. The gurus showed a significant preference for the Grand Cru bottle, employing adjectives like “excellent” more often for the Grand Cru, and “unbalanced,” and “flat” more often for the table wine.

Whether a wine wins a medal in a competition appears to be pure chance:

Mr. Hodgson restricted his attention to wines entering a certain number of competitions, say five. Then he made a bar graph of the number of wines winning 0, 1, 2, etc. gold medals in those competitions. The graph was nearly identical to the one you’d get if you simply made five flips of a coin weighted to land on heads with a probability of 9%. The distribution of medals, he wrote, “mirrors what might be expected should a gold medal be awarded by chance alone.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

More Animal Fat, Better Sleep

Seth Roberts7 Comments

After I wrote about eating a lot of pork fat and sleeping better, David Shackelford commented that he had had a similar experience: After he started eating much more animal fat and meat, he too slept better. (He posted about this before he read my post.) I asked him for details. He answered:

About three weeks ago, I started a carnivorous diet. I did this primarily for its supposed benefit to insulin sensitivity, energy levels, and general health, and also because I wanted to see if it was really possible to thrive on nothing but meat.

Immediately after starting, I noticed that I was sleeping easier, longer, and deeper, and having more vivid dreams than usual. I’ve had a hard time falling asleep for my entire life, usually taking 45 minutes to two hours after going to bed, and occasionally not being able to sleep at all, so this was a very pleasant surprise.

At first I thought that this was due to standing on one foot, which I had started a few days prior, but I stopped one-foot-standing and the effect persisted. The all-meat diet has been pretty great all around-food is delicious, I’ve got a ton of energy, and I’m rarely hungry-but the sleep has been the best part.

Me
21 years old (senior in college)
130-ish lbs
5’4″
12-15% body fat
Moderately active, fairly good shape.

My diet
-Breakfast of 3-4 egg omelette, with 1-2 oz cheese and occasionally bacon.
-Lunch: chicken breast, sausage, or eggs.
-Dinner: 1lb+ steak.
-Snacks: nuts and/or cheese.

Approximate macronutrient composition
Before: 50% carbohydrate / 30% protein / 20% fat (at least half unsaturated olive oil)
After: 60-70% fat (all animal fat), 30-40% protein;10% carbohydrates (nuts and the occasional glass of wine, plus trace amounts in sauces and cheeses). Unsure of my caloric intake; I think it varies between 1500 and 2000 a day.

Other
-I cook chicken, beef, and eggs in butter.
-I drink coffee 1-2 times a day, and tea about once a day.
-I take a multivitamin (I don’t know why), 5,000 IU Vitamin D (I live in Oregon, which gets very little sunlight), and 2.5g fish oil (the grain-fed beef I eat has low 3:6 ratios; if I could afford grass-fed, I probably wouldn’t need the fish oil).
-I let the diet go on weekends, for the sake of social life. I probably have 3-5 drinks on Friday and Saturday night, as well as some junk food (pizza/chips/fries). I feel like I don’t sleep quite as well on these days, but there are so many confounding variables (alcohol, staying up later than usual, seeing faces later into the night, sex) that isolating a cause of the difference is tough.

Exercise
-I lift weights for about 30 minutes, twice a week.
-I go out social dancing for about four hours, once to twice a week.
-Sleep does not seem to vary with whether I exercise or not.

He blogs about this at meatsaur.us. His story is more evidence that the animal fat/sleep connection is cause and effect (animal fat –> better sleep), and suggests that the effect is not limited to me.

My self-experiment about this.

FDA Hid Research Showing that Aspartame is Dangerous

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Here is a lot of information about this. The commercial name for aspartame is Nutrasweet. Because of worries about its neurotoxicity I switched to Splenda long ago. But if the FDA approval process is so deeply flawed they approved Nutrasweet, how safe is Splenda? In China, I’ve managed to pretty much avoid artificial sweeteners.