Category: self-experimentation

What Causes Asthma? Not What the Tovars Think

Seth Roberts5 Comments

From Joyce Cohen’s The Hunt column:

For reasons unknown, Florida didn’t agree with little Noah Tovar. Since his toddler years, Noah, now 7, had suffered terribly from asthma. His parents, Jari and Selene Tovar, moved their family several times, trying to escape the mold or pollen or whatever it was that caused his breathing problems. Nothing helped much.

Noah’s parents didn’t know, I can tell, about a 1992 study of childhood asthma and allergies in Germany. Maybe childhood asthma is caused by air pollution, the researchers thought. Let’s test that idea by comparing a clean West German city (Munich) with a dirty East German one (Leipzig). Here’s one of the results:

The lifetime prevalence of asthma diagnosed by a doctor was 7.3% (72) in Leipzig and 9.3% (435) in Munich.

Less asthma in the dirty city! It wasn’t a significant difference but similar differences, such as hay fever and rhinitis (runny nose), were in the same direction and significant. Hay fever was much rarer in Leipzig.

Noah’s asthma cleared up, to his parents’ surprise, on a trip to New York. So the family moved to New York.

Even though “everyone was under the impression that New York would cause him more distress, it was just the opposite,” Mrs. Tovar said. “Not one doctor nor myself can explain what it is.”

Mrs. Tovar’s doctors are badly out of date. The hygiene hypothesis has been around since the 1990s, supported by plenty of data that, like the German study, shows that childhood allergies are better in dirtier environments. Noah is better in New York because New York air is dirtier than Florida air — that’s the obvious explanation.

In The Probiotic Revolution (2007) by Gary Huffnagle with Sarah Wernick, which I’ve mentioned earlier, Dr. Huffnagle, a professor of immunology at the University of Michigan, describes a self-experiment he did:

Could probiotics relieve something as tenacious as my lifelong allergies and asthma? I decided to take a probiotic supplement and make a few simple changes to my diet to my diet, just to see what happened. Yogurt became my new breakfast and my new bedtime snack. I also upped my intake of fruits and vegetables. Whenever possible, I substituted whole grains for processed ones. And I tried to cut back on sugar. [Why he made the non-probiotic changes is not explained. In another part of the book he says he also increased his spice intake.] No big deal.

Because I doubted this little experiment would work, I didn’t mention it to anyone, not even my wife. And I didn’t bother to record my allergy symptoms. . . My “aha” moment came after about a month: I’d spent the evening writing a grant proposal, a box of tissues at my side. After all these years, I knew to be prepared for the inevitable sneezing and runny nose caused by my mold allergies, which kicked up at night. But when I finished working and cleared the table, I realized I hadn’t touched the tissues. And as I looked back on the previous month, I could see other changes. This wasn’t my first sneeze-free evening; I hadn’t needed my asthma inhaler for several months. To my astonishment, the experiment had been a great success.

This is a great and helpful story. Only after I read it did I realize I’d had a similar experience. I’ve never had serious allergies but I used to sneeze now and then in my apartment and my nose would run a lot; I went through more than one box of Kleenex in a month. Maybe 4 in one morning. In January, I made just one change: I started to eat lots more fermented foods (yogurt, kimchi, kefir, etc.). My sneezing and Kleenex use are now almost zero.

The Tovars can live wherever they want, I’m sure, if they feed their son plenty of fermented food.

Previous post about childhood allergies and fermented food.

More After the column appeared, someone wrote to the Tovars:

Funny, same thing happened to me. I moved from England where I had chronic asthma, to New York City where I had none. Stayed in NY for twenty years asthma free, then moved back to England with my wife for the last ten years and my asthma has returned all the time I’ve been back.

Measuring My Brain Function: One-Finger Typing

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Noticing that flaxseed oil improved my balance led me to measure its effects on other tests of brain function. It also made me wonder what else in my life affected how well my brain works. Eventually I measured the mental effects of flaxseed oil with four tests, but each had problems:

  1. Balance. Time-consuming (15 minutes for one daily test), not portable.
  2. Memory search. Anticipation errors, speed-accuracy tradeoff.
  3. Arithmetic. Speed-accuracy tradeoff.
  4. Digit span. Insensitive.

“Speed-accuracy tradeoff” means it was easy to go faster and make more errors. It wasn’t easy to keep the error rate constant. If I got faster, there were two possible explanations: (a) brain working better or (b) shift on the speed-accuracy tradeoff function. The balance and digit span tests had other weaknesses. Only the balance test was enjoyable.

I’m still doing the arithmetic test, which has been highly informative. However, I want to regularly do at least two tests to provide a check on each other and to allow test comparison (which is more sensitive?). I tried a test that involved typing random strings of letters several times but as I got faster I started to make many mistakes.

I have recently started doing a test that consists of one-fingered typing of a five-letter string. There are 30 possible five-letter strings. Each trial I see one of them and type it as fast as possible. 15 trials = one test. Takes three minutes.

I am doing one-finger rather than regular typing because I hope one-finger typing will be more accurate, very close to 100%. With the error rate always near zero, I won’t have to worry about speed-accuracy tradeoff. Another reason is the need for skilled movement and hand-eye coordination. Doing this sort of task can be enjoyable. One-finger typing (unlike regular typing) is skilled movement with hand-eye coordination; maybe it will be fun.

I restricted the number of possible letter strings to 30 to make learning easier. Yet 30 is too large to cause the anticipation errors I might make if there were only a few strings.

Here are early results.

So far so good. Accuracy is high. On any trial, it isn’t easy to go faster, so speed-accuracy tradeoff is less of a problem. Even better, it’s vaguely enjoyable. Doing the task is a little like having a cup of tea. A pleasant break. There’s no need to do the test four times/day; I just want to.

Antibiotics Associated with Later Infection

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A 2005 study by David Margolis, a dermatology professor at Penn, and others, found that acne patients given long-term antibiotic treatment, which often lasts more than 6 months, were more than twice as likely to have an upper respiratory tract infection during the year after treatment began than acne patients not given antibiotics.

Does this correlation reflect causality? Two additional analyses suggest it does:

1. Perhaps acne patients who get antibiotics are more likely to see a doctor than those who don’t. However, a study of patients diagnosed with high blood pressure, which also requires relatively frequent doctor visits, had the same risk of upper respiratory tract infections as acne patients not given antibiotics.

2. A later study found that the contacts of acne patients (such as their family) are more likely to have upper respiratory tract infections if the acne patient has such an infection — as you’d expect from contagion. But it makes no difference to these contacts if the acne patient was given antibiotics or not. This means that acne patients given antibiotics do not live in more infection-prone surroundings than acne patients not given antibiotics.

Bottom line: Support for the idea that the bacteria in our body help us stay healthy.

The Experts Speak: Nutrition

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I have nothing against a paleolithic diet, but I think its advocates, like many experts, are overconfident. It’s not easy to know which features of a diet that varies in 20 ways from modern diets are the crucial ones. I came across this while reading about paleolithic diets:

The general gist of eating like a caveman—namely, focusing on foods in their whole, natural state, is not going to get much argument. “It comes down to the advice your mother gave you,” says Leonard [William Leonard, chair of the anthropology department at Northwestern University]. “Eat a balanced diet and a diversity of foods.”

I beg to differ.

1. Whole, natural state. I find flaxseed oil very helpful. It supplies omega-3 missing from my diet, but presumably present in diets that contained lots of seafood or vegetation-fed meat. Flaxseed oil is not food in a whole and natural state.

2. Whole, natural state . I find fermented food very helpful. Bacteria break down food, making it less whole. Modern food of all sorts is unnaturally low in bacteria (due to refrigeration, food safety laws, shelf-life requirements, etc.), just as modern meat is unnaturally low in omega-3. Fermented food is unnaturally high in bacteria, correcting the deficit.

3. The advice your mother gave you. Traditional diets, yes, what your mom thinks, no. When I was growing up we ate margarine instead of butter — poor choice. We had skim milk, not whole milk — poor choice. The absence of butter and whole milk is, if Weston Price is right, why my teeth are slightly crooked. We ate almost no fermented food — very poor choice. (Which I suspect is why I had mild allergies.) We rarely ate fish — poor choice. And yet we didn’t have a TV — very good, very unusual choice. Even my mom, who thought for herself far more than most moms, had serious misconceptions about nutrition. Given the epidemic of childhood obesity, not to mention less visible increases in autism, allergies, and ADHD, I am very skeptical that the average kid’s mom knows what to eat.

4. Eat a balanced diet. Plenty of communities in excellent health eat diets that American experts would describe as not balanced at all — no fruit for example, or too much dairy. Eskimos and the Swiss in isolated villages studied by Weston Price are two examples. Price found that a wide range of diets, most violating one or more popular nutritional precepts, produced excellent health.

5. A diversity of foods. Several healthy communities studied by Price did not eat a wide range of foods. The human diet became a lot more diverse around the time of the “ broad-spectrum revolution” — broad-spectrum meaning wider range of food. Around that time human height decreased. Apparently the new, more diverse diet was less healthy than the old diet. An anthropology professor might know this.

The title of this post comes from the book The Experts Speak which is full of examples of how experts were wildly wrong.

How Could They Know? The Case of Healthy Gums

Seth Roberts12 Comments

During my last dental exam, a month ago, I was told my gums were in excellent shape. Clearly better than my previous visit. The obvious difference between the two visits is that I now eat lots of fermented food. At the previous visit, my gums were in better shape than a few years ago. They suddenly improved when I started drinking a few tablespoons of flaxseed oil every day. Tyler Cowen is the poster child for that effect. After a lifetime of being told to brush and floss more — which I did, and which helped a little but not a lot — it now turns out, at least for me, that the secret of healthy gums is: 1. Eat fermented foods. 2. Consume omega-3. These two guidelines are not only a lot easier than frequent brushing and flossing but have a lot of other benefits, unlike brushing and flossing.

Dentistry is ancient and there are millions of dentists, but apparently the profession has never figured this out. This isn’t surprising — how could they figure it out? — but it is an example of a general truth about how things get better. (Or why they don’t get better — if only dentists and dental-school professors are allowed to do dental research.) In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs makes this point. For a long time, Jacobs says, farming was a low-yield profession. Then crop rotation schemes, tractors, cheap fertilizer, high-yield seeds, and dozens of other labor-saving yield-increasing inventions came along. Farmers didn’t invent tractors. They didn’t invent any of the improvements. They were busy farming. Just as dentists are busy doing dentistry and dental-school professors are busy studying conventional ways of improving gum health.

Jacobs also writes about the sterility of large organizations — their inability to come up with new goods and services. On the face of it, large organizations, such as large companies, are powerful. Yes, they can be efficient but they can’t be creative, due to what Jacobs calls “the infertility of captive divisions of labor.” In a large organization, you get paid for doing X. You can’t start doing X+Y, where Y is helpful to another part of the company, because you don’t get paid for doing Y. A nutrition professor might become aware of the anti-inflammatory effects of flaxseed oil but wouldn’t study its effects on gum health. That’s not what nutrition professors do. So neither dentists nor dental-school professors nor nutrition professors could discover the effects I discovered. They were trapped by organizational lines, by divisions of labor, that I was free of.

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Hire a San Diego orthodontist for advanced dental procedures.

Too-Effective Way to Lose Weight?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at Penn, found that people are reluctant to drink from a glass that contained a plastic cockroach. What would happen if people ate from a plate with a drawing of an insect?

Piatti sporchi = dirty plates. From a 2008 food design competition in Turin. (English description here.) The plates have pictures of a fly, a hair, a beetle, and a lipstick smudge. In a mass-market version, you could have a choice of insect sizes to control the amount of repulsion.

The competition was open to anyone. Most of the 50-odd entries were from students; a few were from professionals. This entry was from Sayonara Rush Design.

Thanks to Francesca Zampollo.

Parasites and Allergies

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In 1973, a NIH parasitologist named Eric Ottesen discovered a high rate of worm infection on the tiny island of Mauke. He gave the islanders an anti-parasite drug. Nineteen years later, he did another survey of worm infection.

Compared with 19 years ago, Ottesen found, there was much less filarial infection on Mauke. Only 16 percent of the population harbored the microscopic worms, as opposed to 35 percent on his first visit. The reduction resulted primarily from treating the islanders with the antiparasite drug diethylcarbamazine, which Ottesen had initiated during his earlier visit. And what about allergies? There’s no question that there was a heck of a lot more allergy out there this time, says Ottesen. Nineteen years ago barely 3 percent of the people had allergies. This time it was at least 15 percent. The complaints ranged from eczema to hay fever and asthma to food allergies. What’s more, the dominant problem was one nobody had even heard of 19 years earlier: octopus allergy. It’s the number one offender, says Ottesen. People are breaking out in rashes, hives, swelling of the throat. Yet octopus is nothing new to them–they were eating it when we were there before.

Ottesen believes there is something specific to parasites that makes them protective. I suspect this is another example of the protective effects of bacteria and bacteria-like chemicals, which I believe may come from both food and parasites. Another possibility is that the antiparasite drug killed bacteria. Nothing is said about obesity; I wonder how their diet changed over the 19 years. A switch from homemade (nonsterile) food to factory (sterile) food may be part of the problem.

Trouble in Mouse Animal-Model Land

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Most drugs are first tested on animals, often on “animal models” of the human disease at which the drug is aimed. This 2008 Nature article reveals that in at least one case, the animal model is flawed in a way no one really understands:

In the case of ALS, close to a dozen different drugs have been reported to prolong lifespan in the SOD1 mouse, yet have subsequently failed to show benefit in ALS patients. In the most recent and spectacular of these failures, the antibiotic minocycline, which had seemed modestly effective in four separate ALS mouse studies since 2002, was found last year to have worsened symptoms in a clinical trial of more than 400 patients.

I think that “close to a dozen” means about 12 in a row, rather than 12 out of 500. The article is vague about this. A defender of the mouse model said this:

As for the failed clinical trial of minocycline, Friedlander suggests that the drug may have been given to patients at too high a dose — and a lower dose might well have been effective. “In my mind, that was a flawed study,” he says.

Not much of a defense.

That realization is spreading: some researchers are coming to believe that tests in mouse models of other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s may have been performed with less than optimal rigor. The problem could in principle apply “to any mouse model study, for any disease”, says Karen Duff of Columbia University in New York, who developed a popular Alzheimer’s mouse model.

“Less than optimal rigor”? Oh no. Many scientists seem to believe that every problem is due to failure to follow some rules they read in a book somewhere. They have no actual experience testing this belief (which I’m sure is false — the world is a lot more complicated than as described in their textbooks); they just feel good criticizing someone else’s work like that. In this case, the complaints include “small sample sizes, no randomization of treatment and control groups, and [no] blinded evaluations of outcomes.” Very conventional criticisms.

Here’s a possibility no one quoted in the article seems to realize: The studies were too rigorous, in the sense that the two groups (treatment and control) were too similar prior to getting the treatment. These studies always try to reduce noise. A big source of noise, for example, is genetic variability. The less variability in your study, however, the less likely your finding will generalize, that is, be true in other situations. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of experimental design. Not in any textbook I’ve seen.

In the 1920s and 30s, a professor in the UC Berkeley psychology department named Robert Tryon tried to breed rats for intelligence. His measure of intelligence was how fast they learned a maze. After several generations of selective breeding he derived two strains of rats, Maze Bright and Maze Dull, which differed considerably in how fast they learned the maze. But the maze-learning differences between these two groups didn’t generalize to other learning tasks; whatever they were bred for appeared to be highly specific to maze learning. The measure of intelligence lacked enough variation. It was too rigorous.

When an animal model fails, self-experimentation looks better. With self-experimentation you hope to generalize from one human to other humans, rather from one genetically-narrow group of mice to humans.

Thanks to Gary Wolf.