Thanks to Justine Roberts.
“Childhood obesity is one of the biggest problems we have.” Tomorrow I’m giving a talk at Tsinghua University (Beijing) called “The Secret History of the Shangri-La Diet.” Childhood obesity is becoming a serious problem in China.
Amory Lovins
Chairman and Chief Scientist
Rocky Mountain Institute
Natural Capitalism:
The Next Industrial Revolution
Tuesday, October 28, 2008 – 4:10 p.m.
Lipman Room, Barrows Hall 8th Floor, UC Berkeley Campus
From this discussion. The speaker is Noriel Roubini, the NYU economics professor:
In U.S. the total consumption’s about $9.5 trillion. Take the entire consumption of 1 billion Chinese, it’s about $1 trillion.
The average American thinks: We’re rich, they’re poor. It’s more complicated than that. The Chinese, in hundreds of ways, do more with less. They pay less for the same quality of life. Here are some examples:
1. The lights on the stairs to my Beijing apartment are sound-activated. Works well, saves electricity. In Berkeley I pay $4/month to light the stairs to my apartment and why should my landlady install sound- or motion-activated lighting?
2. The water-heating system in my apartment is flash heating, that is, just-in-time heating. It works just as well as an American-style water heaters and there’s no heat loss when you aren’t using it.
3. My washing machine doesn’t use heated water. Incoming water is heated to room temperature by a set of baffles.
4. The doors to campus cafeterias are a set of hanging plastic strips. It gets cold in Beijing in the winter. When someone enters there is much less heat loss than when a door is opened.
5. Bicycles are everywhere (in my part of town, the university district, at least) and are easy and safe. They are also very cheap. I could have bought a used one for $15 but instead a friend gave me hers — she takes the bus to work. While bicycles are basically transportation for people who live close to work, as students do, electric bicycles — in which China leads the world — are far more powerful and could probably replace a lot of cars if downtowns were safer for them.
6. The better you cook, the cheaper ingredients you can use and achieve the same result. The Chinese, who are great cooks, use lots of vegetables, which are cheaper than meat and of course easier on the environment.
Michael Solberg, who works at the State Department, has had migraine headaches for about 10 years. He recently wrote me about how he discovered a new way to prevent them.
They’d been slowly getting worse and worse as I got older. [He’s in his early thirties.] About 4 years ago, I was getting about 3 or 4 a week. Fortunately, I had abortive medication, so when I get a migraine, the medication (Zomig) makes them go away in 1-2 hours.
Doctors tried to put me on all kinds of preventive medication – Amitriptaline (sp), Atenolol, Propanolol, and finally Neurontin (which gave me severe chest pain). Finally, I called it quits with the medication and decided to go at it on my own. I knew what my triggers are (lack of sleep, dehydration, low blood sugar, neck and/or eye strain mostly).
Quite independently, while I was living in Jakarta, Indonesia from Aug 2005 to July 2008, I took up rock climbing. There’s not a lot to do in Jakarta, and rock climbing — on a rock climbing wall at a mall in Jakarta — was a way to be active. It was essentially a trainer-led workout. Wall climbing in Jakarta isn’t like anywhere else I’ve ever been — the instructors do all the belaying, and if you go in the evenings, they’ll run you through drills and exercises to build strength. A couple of times, I had to do 15 consecutive climbs in 10 or 15 minutes — hence the fatigued muscles and intense sweating (it was all outdoors).
After climbing for 2 or 3 months, I noticed that I wasn’t getting migraines any more. It was weird — I was getting a stockpile of my medication because I wasn’t using it nearly as often. I went from getting migraines 3 times a week to less than 3 times a month, and the ones I did get were very weak. I began to figure out that for about 7 to 10 days after I did a hard rock climbing training session, I would be migraine free! I’d only get them if I traveled somewhere and stopped the training for a week.
At first, I narrowed it down to three possible causes:
1. When rock climbing, I would sweat profusely, so maybe I was sweating out toxins from the body.
2. When rock climbing, I was building all kinds of muscle (and, in fact, I lost about 30 pounds when doing this, and I was already pretty skinny).
3. When rock climbing, you are exposed to a lot of magnesium in the form of the chalk climbers use keep their hands dry. I’d read a lot about how some migraine suffers were shown to have magnesium deficiencies in their blood stream. A lot of us take magnesium supplements along with multivitamins.
Towards the end of my time in Jakarta, I had less time for rock climbing, so I began a training program at home. I’ve pretty much convinced myself that it was the muscle-building component of the training that made the difference.
I’m not sure when I finally decided that hypotheses 1 and 3 were wrong, but I noticed that if I do a simple workout in the gym focusing on arms, upper back, and chest, the effect is the same — migraine free for 5-7 days. When I work out in the gym, I don’t sweat nearly as much as I did when I climbed. Because I got the effect by working out in the gym, I decided that muscle building exercises was the likely culprit.
When I was at home in Arkansas a few weeks ago, I spoke to a friend of mine who’s an holistic healer. He said that when you build strength in the shoulders, upper back, and arms, you stimulate the liver to rid the body of the toxins that can build up and trigger migraines.
But no holistic healer has come up with this prevention strategy as far as I know — if you know otherwise, please let me know.
I don’t know if that’s the case, but even now when I’m not rock climbing, I go to the gym once or twice a week to work on my shoulders, chest, and arms, and I’m more or less pain-free (about 1 or 2 per month).
Incidentally, I wrote to the National Headache Foundation, but they never wrote back. I also posted on a migraine message board, but got absolutely no response. I suppose it sounds too good to be true — free therapy for migraines — but I’m not selling anything and have nothing to gain or lose if people try this or not. It’s worked for me and has kept me pain-free. When climbing, I lost all kinds of weight, and probably paid out the same amount of money per month [for climbing] that I paid for all the drugs and vitamins.
If you try this to prevent migraines, please let me know what happens.
In China, you get a cell phone number by buying a SIM card (a small plastic chip) that you put in your phone. Yesterday I bought one. I was shown a page of 12 possible numbers. At the top of the page it said 168 yuan ($25). But one of the numbers was cheaper: only 120 yuan ($18). Why the difference? I asked. The cheap number was “hard to remember,” I was told. I studied the 12 numbers; they looked equally hard to remember. So I got the cheap one.
Hard to remember was a euphemism, I learned later. Some digits (8, 6) are considered lucky, others (4, 7) unlucky. My number: 1170784.
This is related to self-experimentation. I suppose few scientists believe in lucky and unlucky phone numbers but many believe in “good” and “bad” ways of doing science. One example is a belief that self-experimentation is bad, another is a belief that Bayesian tools are “ irrelevant to the business of science“; a third is the blue-ribbon panel that would only use data from double-blind experiments when deciding nutritional requirements. Scientists (and the rest of us) pay more than 48 yuan ($7) for such beliefs, which pervade science. Their effect is that scientists fail to use tools that would help them with their research; the rest of us suffer from the lack of progress that could have been made (e.g., discovery of better ways to treat depression). At the end of a paper about my self-experimentation I made this point:
Belief that something is bad makes it hard to learn what it is good for.
I’ve blogged several times about environmental causes of acne, especially diet. Cynthia Graber, a science journalist, wrote a whole article about diet and acne, a link that dermatologists deny much more strongly than the evidence warranted. Why do they act so sure? I asked Graber. Because, low on the medical totem pole, they want to appear more scientific, she said. Genetics and drugs — that’s science. Diet — that isn’t science.
Here is more data on the subject, from two widely-different sources. The first is a comment on Dennis Mangan’s blog:
I had some acne when I was a teen. I was considered a very “pretty” teenager, but was painfully shy whenever my face “broke out”. I remember going to a dermatologist who put me on a sulfur cream and antibiotics for it. He emphasized over and over that diet “had absolutely nothing” to do with it, and that I should eat whatever I wanted and that “only by eating huge amounts of fish” could I actually aggravate it.
I still had some breakouts even until my twenties every so often. Because I was basically bodybuilding as a “hobby”, I switched to diet colas and started eating a great deal of tuna and canned chicken around this time. Guess what? The acne completely went away at about 21 and didn’t come back until about 26. At 26 I had some hard bumps under my chin like boils. The dermatologist said they were folliculitis and told me to make sure my razors were dry and my sink was super clean. But I noted that I had drifted back to a fast food diet and was drinking regular colas again–and kind of power-lifting a couple of days a week but not hitting it hard.
I got back into it at the gym, and wanted a six-pack again. I went back to diet cola and started dieting again. The result? The acne completely went away. This time I made a connection.
I have sworn up and down to some of my friends that I think our diets might lead to acne when we’re teens. One of my pals, Myron, took his kids (both teens) off cokes and instant soups and started cooking for them and making them drink orange juice and apple juice and tea. Their faces completely cleared up (they were 14 and 16) in about two months. No trips to the doctor, no anti-bacterial soaps, nothing. Just diet. They have had lovely clear skin ever since.
I have another friend at work whose teenage daughter “got off” colas and he started cooking for her (single parent). Her face cleared up. He mentioned it. She was a pretty girl but used to break out fairly badly. According to him, she’s on top of the world now that her skin is cleared up and is confident (and she should be because she really is a cutie).
I read a little bit about the study doctors cite about acne and diet. They fed a big chocolate bar to one group and fed another a CANDY bar that didn’t contain chocolate to another group. Since both groups had acne at the same levels, they declared that diet had nothing to do with acne. WHAT HOGWASH!!!!! If they were both drinking sodas, both eating tons of refined white flour, white pasta, and both eating a big candy bar (so what if one was toffee and one was chocolate) every day, they still were eating a “western diet”.
Anyway, I’ve read about the severe uptick in acne in newly “Westernized” populations. I’ve read about the rate of prostate difficulties of Asian-Americans versus rural Asians. Diets do INDEED affect much more about ourselves than we’d like to admit. I can guarantee you, because I’ve seen it on my own face and have friends who I trust who have seen it on the faces of their children, that diet does indeed influence acne and that high glycemic index foods and colas and sugars certainly worsen it at the least.
The thing that REALLY got me thinking this was a few years ago, I saw a couple of very Indian-looking Mexican teenagers. They didn’t look like they had a drop of European blood in them. They had BAD acne on their cheeks. Hell, I thought those people never broke out, yet there they were at a convenience store buying two colas and potato chips–looking like Oxy poster-children.
The second source is Arbor Clinical Nutrition Updates, an excellent Australian publication aimed at nutrition professionals. The latest update, which I cannot link to, is about acne and diet. From its conclusions:
For many years the conventional wisdom dispensed by physicians on the relationship between diet and acne vulgaris has been that there is none. In a recent study, the fact that nearly a half of a group of final year medical students believed that diet was an important factor in acne was held to be an unfortunate misconception “likely to perpetuate misinformation in the community.”
The “expert view” from doctors is in stark contrast to what their patients think. Many studies have shown that the average person is under the distinct impression that diet can indeed affect acne, particularly fatty foods and chocolate.
A careful look into this question reveals something rather fascinating — that although medical textbooks used to strongly support the idea of “acne diets”, in the last 50 years this has completely reversed. Yet experts’ current confidence that there is nothing to the diet-acne story is itself based on almost no evidence.
The update describes two studies. One found that a low-glycemic-index diet reduced acne. The other found that, in teenage boys, greater milk consumption was associated with slightly more acne.
More Maybe Graber was too kind. Confidence that diet had nothing to do with acne allowed dermatologists to prescribe dangerous and expensive drugs. I wish I could be sure no payola was involved, but — given a horrifying story in today’s NY Times about several psychiatrists’ total and dishonest disregard of conflict-of-interest rules — I can’t. From the article:
From 2000 through 2006, Dr. [Charles] Nemeroff [of Emory University] earned more than $960,000 from GlaxoSmithKline but listed earnings of less than $35,000 for the period on his university disclosure forms, according to Congressional documents. Sarah Alspach, a GlaxoSmithKline spokeswoman, stated in an e-mail message that “Dr. Nemeroff is a recognized world leader in the field of psychiatry.”
What does that say about psychiatry?
Shannon Brownlee on the subject. A blog on the subject. A letter from Senator Charles Grassley to James Wagner, the president of Emory, describing Nemeroff’s behavior and asking for more information.
In The Black Swan (2006), Nassim Taleb wrote:
Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought.
To me, this sounds Jacobian. Jane Jacobs disliked calls for reduced family size (e.g., Bill McKibben) not merely because she was a third child but because she disliked reducing the diversity of family ecology. In public health, it’s called the dangers of monoculture. The Irish potato famine (which “dwells in my memory as one long night of sorrow” — William Butler) is a dietary example of Taleb’s point. When one (potato) crop failed, they all failed.
Self-experimentation is a more positive example of the broad point. Self-experimentation derives its power from two things: 1. Motivation. You are more motivated to solve your own problems than other people’s problems. 2. Diversity. The self-experimenter can do anything — change anything, measure anything. Other scientists cannot. For people with serious problems, such as depression, reduced diversity of the associated science (e.g., the science of what causes depression) is a long slow catastrophe when the associated science, because of its restricted nature, cannot find the best solutions (as I believe is the case with depression).
My animal-learning research also centers on this point. It is about what controls variation in behavior. Dave Stahlman (UCLA), Aaron Blaisdell (UCLA), and I will soon finish a paper about this. With too little variation, catastrophe is too likely, as Taleb says. So mechanisms to produce diversity have evolved. Just as the importance of diversity has been neglected by financiers, it has been neglected by research psychologists.
1. Talk about self-experimentation by Lawrence Altman
2. A new book celebrates fat.
3. The Kitava Study. Cardiovascular risk factors on Kitava.
4. A scary Google Talk by Nena Baker, author of The Body Toxic, about food and plastic.
Thanks to Pietr Hitzig and Dave Lull.
A few days ago I spoke on the phone to someone who’d written me that one-legged standing improved his sleep. I mentioned this replication earlier but the new details are interesting.
He is a 35-year-old man with an office job. He now works in the Washington, D.C. area. Until about a year ago, his sleep was fine. He would sleep 7-7.5 hours no matter when he went to bed.
About a year ago he went through a tough time with a lot of stress and anxiety. After that he started waking up after only 6 hours of sleep. He’d wake up early in the morning, 3 or 4 am, still tired but unable to fall back asleep. This is exactly the problem I had when I started to self-experiment to try to sleep better.
He went to a doctor for help. (I considered seeing a doctor.)Â The doctor prescribed:
1. Ambien. It worked for 1 or 2 nights.
2. Lunesta. Like Ambien, it worked for only the first few nights.
After using these two drugs, the problem got worse. Now he awoke after only 4 hours of sleep. He tried non-prescription drugs:
3. Melatonin. It made him foggy during the day.
4. Tylenol PM. It worked okay, but he would still wake up after 6 hours.
Then he decided he didn’t want to take pills of any sort — even if they worked, he’d have to take them for the rest of his life. (This is why I didn’t go to a doctor and never tried pills.) He tried conventional alternative treatments:
5. Changed his attitude about the problem. Although he was waking up very early, he wasn’t tired during the day. He had four extra hours. After this change in attitude, he began to fall back asleep a few hours after waking up. Gradually the amount of time he was awake in the middle of the night got shorter.
6. He has cold feet. He can’t fall asleep when his feet are cold. He read somewhere that if you imagine your feet are warm, they will warm up. This gave him an idea. What if he imagined going into an MRI-like machine that induces sleep? He started doing this. When he’d wake up at 2 a.m., he’d imagine himself going into this machine. This enabled him to fall back asleep with a short latency.
In August he read my posts about this and started one-legged standing, often while watching TV. He does it without stretching the other foot: puts one foot on top of the other or behind the other. He might or might not balance. Usually stands on a pillow. He does it until it hurts, twice for each leg. In the beginning it took only 5-10 minutes but now it has gotten much longer and he has started doing other things, such as wearing a backpack with books, to shorten the time.
From my point of view the main points are these: 1. He had tried several other treatments. Some were awful, some were okay, but none sustainably solved the problem. Not only did one-legged standing help, it apparently helped more than six other plausible treatments, including two powerful and expensive drugs. 2. What he did differed from what I did — verbal descriptions are always inexact and omit a lot — but still worked well right away.