Category: self-experimentation

Hormesis Revisited

Seth Roberts3 Comments

There are several ways to realize the vast implausibility of — and thus the vast amount of information conveyed by — radiation hormesis. If you are not an experimental scientist, you may not realize how incredibly hard it is to find a treatment that substantially improves something complex. Think how hard it would be to make your laptop work a lot better. Not by redesigning and building a different laptop — but by doing something to the carefully-designed laptop you have now. Has such a thing ever happened in the whole history of engineering? Probably not. Or consider the possibility that shooting a bullet at your laptop (or any other complex machine) will make it work a lot better. Absurd. Couldn’t possibly happen.

Yet that is exactly what happens in radiation hormesis: Small amounts of radiation improve health. This review article gives a wide range of examples. Experimental:

Bhattarcharjee in 1996 showed that when the mice preirradiated with just adapting doses of 1 cGy/day for 5 days (without a challenge dose), thymic lymphoma was induced in 16% of the animals (Bhattarcharjee 1996). Interestingly, when preirradiated mice were exposed to a 2 Gy challenge dose, thymic lymphoma was induced again in 16% of the animals. However, the challenge dose alone, induced thymic lymphoma in 46% of the mice.

Epidemiological:

Cancer frequency among [United Kingdom] nuclear power plant workers was lower than the national average (Kendal et al. 1992).

(I’ve never heard anyone complain there wasn’t enough radioactive radon in their basement, but in some cases that’s true.) Thomas Luckey, the discoverer of the effect, wrote a book about it, reflecting the vast number of examples.

What does it mean? Obviously it supports my umami hypothesis. Life evolved in a world of junk and damage; that junk and damage was used to make things work better. Think of a police force. They function best spread over a city, travelling here and there. When there’s a crime, someone will already be close and get there quickly; many crimes will be stopped in progress. A low crime rate is better than a very low crime rate because it gets the police out of the police station and allows them to practice their skills. With too little crime, the police spend most of their time in the police station. When a crime occurs it takes longer to reach the scene (so small problems become big ones) but also, having nothing else to do, they overreact: treat small problems as big ones. That our body’s defense mechanisms are slow to react means infections and cancers become bigger than necessary (and sometimes lethal); that they overreact means we get autoimmune diseases.

Earlier post about hormesis.

“Kombucha Reconsidered”

Seth Roberts4 Comments

At Cancer Decisions RWM has written two posts called “Kombucha Reconsidered”. After drinking kombucha for a while, he decided to stop. One reason was lack of evidence of benefit:

When I began investigated the actual medicinal properties of Kombucha tea, I thought I would be overwhelmed with information. Not so. For something that has been around for so long, there are only 38 scientific articles in PubMed on the topic of kombucha. Most of these are technical studies on the nature of the bacteria and yeast in the brew. Only a few of these are clinical.

In particular, no evidence of benefit for cancer:

But I am unaware of any credible data linking kombucha consumption to the prevention of either recurrences or metastases. (PubMed yields just two articles on the topic of kombucha and cancer, both of them negative.) This is a poor basis on which to make health decisions.

He also found two case reports, one from 1995, the other from 2009, where kombucha might have caused illness. In the 1995 the evidence is weak; in the 2009 report the connection is more plausible — but the sick person had HIV. The authors nevertheless generalize to everyone: “Consumption of this tea should be discouraged.”

This is a reason self-experimentation is important: So you can ignore inane statements in research articles. After I found that flaxseed oil improved my balance, I could ignore research that supposedly showed poor conversion of short-change omega-3 (in flaxseed oil) to long-chain omega-3 (used by the brain). Had RWM managed to measure the effect of kombucha on himself, he would have a vastly better basis for deciding whether or not it helped him.

This is also a reason that theory is important. John Tukey, the statistician, spoke of “gathering strength” when analyzing data. It is rare that a single body of data tells you how to analyze it, he said. (For example, what transformation to use.) You should use similar data sets to help decide. Scientific theory has the same effect. Before I started drinking kombucha, I didn’t have obvious digestive problems (unlike a friend) and my immune system seemed to work well. So it wasn’t easy to measure its effect. Yet I drink it and am untroubled by the evidence that worries RVM because I have a theory: the umami hypothesis (that we need a steady intake of bacteria to be healthy). This allows me to assess the effect of kombucha — whether it is likely to be good or bad — with the help of evidence from other bacteria-rich food (yogurt, natto, etc.) and much different data (the effect of bee stings on arthritis, hormesis, epidemiology, the effects of turmeric, etc.). Because the umami hypothesis appears to be true, apparently bacteria intake is beneficial — and kombucha has lots of bacteria.

Thanks to Tom George.

The Financial System and the Immune System

Seth Roberts22 Comments

In this interview, Nassim Taleb says, as he has often said, that booms and busts are a fact of financial life, what we should do is make the financial system robust against them. He put it like this:

Capitalism will always produce shocks and crashes. I want a society that has a buffer against shocks.

Likewise, I say bacteria are a fact of life. To be healthy we need to make our bodies resistant to them — which means having a well-functioning immune system.

These are not subtle or difficult points. What interests me is the difficulty that experts have appreciating them. To repeat a story I’ve told before on this blog, a few years ago I noticed that the UC Berkeley School of Public Health had a wide-ranging epidemiology course taught by someone I knew. I phoned him. “Will the course cover what makes us more or less susceptible to infection?” I asked. “No,” he said. I wasn’t exactly surprised — I have never seen this topic covered in any epidemiology textbook or even any epidemiology research paper — but still it is an amazing omission. They know we have an immune system, they just don’t think it matters! There’s an elephant in the room, and they’re ignoring it.

The parallel point about the financial system is that there is no study of what makes a financial system robust against shocks. Somehow finance professors, like epidemiology professors, haven’t grasped that something is missing.

Here are two more vast areas of ignorance:

1. Scientists know a lot about how to test ideas. They know almost nothing about how to come up with ideas worth testing. When a good way to generate ideas comes along — such as self-experimentation — they are dismissive. This is truly crippling: In an experimental science, for example, interesting new experimental effects aren’t discovered. Experimental psychology suffers from this problem. Experimental psychologists could self-experiment, but they don’t.

2. Economists know very little about how to generate new businesses — what makes the rate of new-business generation high or low. I came across a 500-page introductory economics textbook that had three empty paragraphs on the topic. Without new businesses to solve the problems created by old businesses (such as pollution), your society is in real trouble. The problems will pile up unsolved. This is what Jane Jacobs saw so clearly in The Economy of Cities and Jared Diamond completely missed in Collapse.

This Blog Reduces Sinus Congestion

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A reader writes:

I’m now 30 years old. For the past ten years or so, I’ve had constant post-nasal drip and stuffed sinuses, frequently coughing out phlegm. In addition, I’ve had fairly intense fatigue, moderate but consistent depression, and occasional but intense tendinitis (from typing). I tried nasal pharma sprays and many alternative therapies, feeling most intellectually compelled by neti pot style nasal washes with solutions that mimic salt balances of the body. However, none of my efforts did much good. So I reluctantly agreed to have sinus surgery, even though it seemed to be a blunt force approach to a sensitive tissue. I have since become convinced that treating the sinuses as anything other than an expression of overall health is preposterous. The surgery, with full anesthesia, improved things very slightly while being somewhat traumatic and certainly not worth the ordeal.

About 5 years ago, when I was 25, I discovered that I have a very under-active thyroid. Taking thyroid replacement was the biggest health change I’ve had in the past ten years, giving me much more energy, improving my overall health, and significantly reducing (but not eliminating) my sinus condition.

I didn’t start reading your blog regularly until a few months ago. Your writing on bacteria and flax oils led me to start taking probiotic pills every day (Trader Joes brand and then kyodophilus), eat more yogurt and kimchee, and take flax seed oil pills and try to incorporate flax oil into foods. Within a month of starting this, my sinus congestion was reduced by about 90%. I don’t need to constantly have tissues on hand and I can breathe easier every day. Thank you! I’m hoping to finally start making my own kombucha this week.

I suspect it was the bacteria rather than the flaxseed oil that helped his nose. Like him, I used to need to carry a handkerchief at all times and I went through a whole box of Kleenex in a few months. This didn’t stop when I started drinking lots of flaxseed oil. After I started drinking lots of fermented foods, however, my nose became a lot clearer and my Kleenex consumption went way down.

HeartScan

Seth Roberts10 Comments

A few months ago, because of this blog, I got a free heart scan from HeartScan in Walnut Creek. It’s a multi-level X-ray of your heart and is scored to indicate your heart disease risk. In spite of the fermented food I’ve been eating recently, and the flaxseed oil I’ve been drinking for about two years, my score was right in the middle. What’s impressive about these scans is three-fold:

1. The derived scores are strongly correlated with risk of heart disease death. This isn’t surprising because they are actually looking at your circulatory system. Here is an example of the predictive power. About 1000 subjects were followed for about four years. About 40 of them had something go seriously wrong with their circulatory systems (e.g., heart attack):

The mean coronary artery calcium score was 764 ± 935 [mean ± standard deviation] among subjects with events as compared with 135 ± 432 among those without events (p < 0.0001). [Minimum score is 0.]

The standard deviations are more than the means because the distribution is very asymmetric. (Like most researchers, they should have transformed their data.)

2. You can improve the score. Via lifestyle changes.

3. The scans provided by HeartScan are low enough in radiation that they can be repeated every year, which is crucial if you want to measure improvement. In contrast, a higher-tech type of scan (64 slice) is so high in radiation that it can’t be safely repeated. The higher-tech type of scan, offered by other heart-scan centers, is more profitable for the manufacturer of the equipment (General Electric), which may be why it has become increasingly common.

Heart scans, like the sort of self-experimentation I’ve done, is a way to wrest control of your health away from the medical establishment. No matter what your doctor says, no matter what anyone says, you can do whatever you want to try to improve your score. And if what you do works, it works; if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work — regardless of what anyone says. My self-experimentation started with something similar to a heart scan: I counted the number of pimples I had. The lowest possible tech, sure, but when I did that, and varied the prescribed medicine, I could actually see what worked and what didn’t.

Not All Probiotics are Wonderful

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From a mailing list I’m on:

Right before I left the U.S. I purchased Complete Probiotics from Dr. Mercola (online health guru). . . . I did not have the time needed to give these probiotics a good try before I left the States so I went ahead and purchased quite a bit. After arriving here in Beijing I began taking them just to find out they were not working well for me. I still think it is a good product, just not right for me.

I have 7 bottles total. 5 bottles expiration date: May 2011. 2 bottles expiration date: Dec. 2010

This batch I have has [in each capsule] 2 billion CFU [colony-forming units] and 500 mg of FOS [Fructooligosaccharides]. There are 90 V-caps per bottle. They are all completely sealed with shrink bands

Dr. Mercola’s sale price is $30 U.S.D. for a single bottle and about $25 U.S.D./each for a 3-pack. [the 3-pack costs $75]

She doesn’t say why they’re not right for her. I make kombucha for pennies per day. Homemade yogurt costs a few dimes per day. Also, they’re delicious, the kombucha is thirst-quenching, and the yogurt, as a condiment, improves many other dishes (salmon, soup, hamburger). So they’re easy to eat, whereas the vitamin pills I take I have to force myself to swallow. Because I am close to the making of the kombucha and yogurt — I sample them during brewing — I am sure that they have plenty of bacteria. With pills made in a factory, hard to be sure. And hard to know what those expiration dates mean.

Where Do Foodies Come From?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Yes, to the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. But until someone comes up with a better explanation of why we like umami, sour, and complex flavors, I will continue to believe my explanation: We need to consume plenty of bacteria every day. If you fail to give such large and important systems as the digestive and immune system something they need a lot of, obviously many things will go wrong.

In the current New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni writes about a childhood in which he ate too much. He was chubby, but not because of ditto food (which I think is the main cause of the obesity epidemic). There was much less ditto food when he was young. Bruni seems to have gotten abnormal pleasure from non-ditto food. One sign of this is how clearly he remembers certain favorite foods:

I remember almost everything about my childhood in terms of food — in terms of favorite foods, to be more accurate, or even favorite parts of favorite foods. . . .

Age 7: I discovered quiche. Quiche Lorraine.

Age 8: lamb chops.

No mention of fermented food among the foods of his childhood. His family apparently ate a lot of frozen meat. If refrigerated food is dangerous, frozen food is probably worse. I suspect recently defrosted meat has less bacteria than meat that’s been in a refrigerator for several days.

I wonder if Bruni was (and is) like the squirrel who needed stronger-than-average light to entrain properly. All squirrels need light; a few need stronger light. Under healthy conditions (sunlight) the genetic diversity has no consequences. I think the pleasure we get from complex flavors and the like can vary because of these experiences:

1. On a visit to New York, as I blogged, I noticed I was far less interested in fancy restaurants than in the past. The only change in my diet is that I now eat far more fermented food.

2. It isn’t just New York. In Berkeley I notice the same thing has happened. My interest in complex food has gone way down. Fancy restaurants, apart from the social aspect, are less interesting. My back issues of Saveur are less interesting. I read food sections of newspapers less.

3. Brain injury can cause something called the gourmand syndrome, where the person becomes obsessed with food with complex flavors. In one case the person became a restaurant critic (like Bruni).

Perhaps Bruni’s forthcoming book will shed more light on this. Everyone knows about the obesity epidemic and the allergy epidemic; less mentioned is the vast rise in interest in fancy food over the last 30 years. The word foodie was coined in 1981, close to when the sharp rise in American obesity began. Many newspapers, including the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, had until recently much bigger food sections than they had 30 years ago.

The Epistemology of Academia

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A professor complains about ivorytowerism:

In the epistemology of academia, no knowledge truly is knowledge if it is not vetted and approved through the channels it has established over time. Those channels are esoteric, made up of the “few, though worthy” who are the elect in the kingdom of knowledge. The epistemology of academia proceeds on the basis that the public has nothing to do with real knowledge. It doesn’t make any sense intellectually, of course, but it makes perfect sense if the primary goal is not really the development of knowledge but the preservation of a well-designed, internally self-confirming authority economy.

Some professors go further than this: The public shouldn’t know about academic research. Several years ago, a colleague of mine in the Berkeley psychology department was approached by a journalist. He was writing an article for The Atlantic about her area of research. She wouldn’t talk to him. She felt his article would somehow be wrong or unseemly.

Open access is changing this, of course. I’m a big beneficiary. Because my long self-experimentation paper was open access, it could be read by people outside of psychology. As a friend put it, “It cost Steve Levitt nothing to say he liked your paper.” Whereas inside psychology departments, you’d pay a price.

The Twilight of Expertise (mothers)

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A friend of mine, who lives in Shanghai, has a 3-year-old son. She gets all her parenting advice from the Internet. This would be uninteresting except that her mother lives with her. (So does her husband’s mother.) On a daily basis, in other words, whatever her mom thinks about how kids should be raised is being ignored. My guess is that her mom actually likes the situation because it removes a source of conflict. But I didn’t dare ask.

Genes Or Environment . . . Or Environment?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Forty or fifty years ago, psychologists and other scientists talked about “genes” determining this or that. (James Watson still talks this way.) A certain percentage of the variation of this or that (e.g., intelligence) was attributed to “genes”. Hardly anyone outside genetics or behavior genetics knew what this meant, but many people thought they did. In reaction to the huge misunderstanding (e.g., those who said intelligence was “80% genetic” but did not know what this meant), psychologists began to talk about gene-environment interaction. “Is the area of a rectangle determined by its height or its width?” they like to say.

But notice how fact-free this view is. A tiny number of studies have observed gene-environment interactions but they are very difficult. I think this has made it hard to realize something basic and important. Years ago, I heard a talk about squirrel circadian rhythms by Patricia DeCoursey, the scientist who introduced the concept of phase-response curves. At her talk, she showed results from about 15 squirrels. She tested each one — with an emphasis on individual results that resembles self-experimentation — to determine how much light it needed to become entrained to a 24-hour light/dark cycle. One squirrel needed much stronger light than the others.

Here was an interesting finding that another scientist might have missed. What did it mean? Because the squirrels lived under very similar conditions (e.g., identical diets), it was almost surely a genetic difference. Let’s assume it was. In nature, sunlight is plenty strong. The lab light was weaker. In nature, the genetic difference wouldn’t make an observable difference. Only under artificial conditions did it become visible. It only became visible when the artificial conditions didn’t supply enough of something important (sunlight). In other words, the newly-visible genetic difference implied there was something lacking in the artificial conditions. The genetic difference implied the environment mattered. The opposite of the usual interpretation.

I don’t know any reason to think this is an unusual case. Aaron Blaisdell told me a story that shows its relevance to human health. Aaron is unusually sensitive to sunlight. Until recently, he could only spend 5 or 10 minutes in the sun before it became unpleasant. The condition is genetic. His mother has it; her father had it. It’s called Erythropoietic Protoporphyria. It is autosomal-dominant. Scientists even know where the gene is. That’s where the understanding of most scientists stops. A genetic condition. Recently, however, Aaron drastically changed his diet with great results, as noted earlier. At the same time as the dietary changes, his sun sensitivity got much better. He can now stay in the sun for an hour or more without discomfort. This is a gene-environment interaction, of course, but of a particular sort: The genetic effect showed there was something wrong with the environment, just as it did in DeCoursey’s experiment.

Sure, there’s always genetic variation — it’s just usually hard to see. The wrong environment makes it much easier to see. It reveals a range of genotypes, all of which would be harmless in the right environment. So when you come across a “genetic disorder” such as Erythropoetic Protoporphyria, it is likely to imply an environmental problem. No one had ever told Aaron or his mother or her father that their condition suggested that environmental changes would help them.