Category: Shangri-La Diet

Not the Same Study Section: How the Truth Comes Out

Seth Roberts9 Comments

In the latest Vanity Fair is a brilliant piece of journalism, Goodbye to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum. In a fun, easy-to-read format, it tells some basic truths I had never read before. Here are two examples:

Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: When Abu Ghraib happened, I was like, We’ve got to fire Rumsfeld. Like if we’re the “accountability president,” we haven’t really done this. We don’t veto any bills. We don’t fire anybody. I was like, Well, this is a disaster, and we’re going to hold some National Guard colonel responsible? This guy’s got to get fired.

For an M.B.A. president, he got the M.B.A. 101 stuff down, which is, you know, you don’t have to do everything. Let other people do it. But M.B.A. 201 is: Hold people accountable.

David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: There’s this idea that the Bush White House was dominated by religious conservatives and catered to the needs of religious conservatives. But what people miss is that religious conservatives and the Republican Party have always had a very uneasy relationship. The reality in the White House is if you look at the most senior staff you’re seeing people who aren’t personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders. Now, at the end of the day, that’s easy to understand, because most of the people who are religious-right leaders are not easy to like. It’s that old Gandhi thing, right? I might actually be a Christian myself, except for the action of Christians.

And so in the political-affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at everyone from Rich Cizik, who is one of the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals, to James Dobson, to basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated.

This is related to the Shangri-La Diet. In these two excerpts, the speakers were (a) close to the events they describe but (b) not so close they are in any danger from the people they tell the truth about.

In science the same thing happens. Saul Sternberg and I could tell the truth about Ranjit Chandra’s research not only because (a) we were fairly close to that research (which involved psychology, even though Chandra was a nutritionist) but also because (b) not being nutrition professors, Chandra couldn’t harm us. Those closer to Chandra, professional nutritionists, had plenty of doubts as far as I could tell but were afraid to say them. Hal Pashler and I could criticize a widely-accepted practice among cognitive modelers because (a) we were in the same general field, cognitive psychology, but (b) far enough away so that the people we criticized would never review our grants or our papers. (Except the critique itself, which they hated. After the first round of reviews, Hal and I requested new reviewers, saying it was inevitable that the people we criticized wouldn’t like what we said.) Likewise, in the case of voodoo correlations, Hal is (a) close enough to social neuroscience to understand the details of the research but (b) far enough away to criticize it without fear.

In the case of the Shangri-La Diet, I was (a) close enough to the field of nutrition that I could understand the research but (b) far enough away so that I could say what I thought without fear of reprisal. Nassim Taleb is in the same relation to the field he criticizes. Just as Saul Sternberg and I knew a lot about the outcome measure (psychological tests) but were not nutritionists, Weston Price, a dentist, knew a lot about his outcome measure (dental health) but was not a nutritionist.

It’s curious how rarely this need for insider/outsiders (inside in terms of knowledge, outside in terms of career) is pointed out. It’s a big part of how science progresses, in small ways and large. Mendel and Darwin were well-educated amateurs, for example. Thorstein Veblen wrote about it but I haven’t read it anywhere else.

The Shangri-La Diet Hedonic Shift

Seth Roberts5 Comments

On the SLD forums, Bennetta wrote:

I never noticed this before, but I used to eat as a way to thwart boredom. Nothing to do? Make some food! The odd thing here is finding myself doing a ton of other things when I would have otherwise been cooking or eating just to entertain myself. Now, instead of heading to the fridge when there’s nothing to do, I clean, write letters to friends, or do whatever.

This change in behavior shows that the Shangri-La Diet makes food less pleasant. When we don’t feel good (such as are bored), we look around for activities that will make us feel better. Eating is no longer one of those activities. This shift in the hedonic value of food — which happens because our set point becomes lower than our weight — painlessly keeps us from eating. Or if we do eat, we stop sooner.

Michel Cabanac, a professor of physiology at Laval University, Quebec City, has studied how hedonic shifts control behavior in several areas, including thermoregulation and body weight regulation.

Lipid Values after 2 Years on the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Stephen Marsh has been doing the Shangri-La Diet for 2 years, taking about 6 tablespoons of ELOO (extra light olive oil) per day. He recently got an expanded set of blood tests done. Here are the results. (10-90%ile mean 10% and 90% percentiles in the general population):

  • LDL IIIa+b (%). 10-90%ile 13.6 — 43.0; Alert Value >20; SM = 17
  • LDL IVb. 10-90%ile 1.7-9.8; Alert Value >10; SM = .9
  • HDL2b (%). 10-90%ile 7-30; Alert Value <10; SM = 29
  • Apo B. 10-90%ile 60-140; Alert Value >120; SM = 48
  • Lp(a). 10-90%ile 0-30; Alert Value >30; SM = 10
  • Lp_PLA2. 10-90%ile 155-419; Alert Value >223; SM = 197
  • Insulin. 10-90%ile 3-25; Alert Value 12; SM = 9
  • NT-proBNP. 10-90%ile 5-125; Alert Value 450; SM = 14
  • Cholesterol       134
  • Triglycerides     51
  • HDLÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 67
  • LDLÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 57
  • Glucose           86

Stephen added:

Two years after the weight loss, taking in what so many of these “experts” say is a dangerous level of fat as a dietary supplement, my bloodwork, especially the important markers, is very good. Bottom line is a low level of small LDL particles and a miniscule level of the dense, dangerous ones (below the reference range). On the HDL (the “bad” cholesterol) the particles are about half of the largest or non-dangerous kind.

Gary Taubes Answers Questions

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Michael Eades has posted Gary Taubes’s answers to questions sent in by readers. The first one, curiously enough, concerns China: “How do Asians and others living a seemingly high-carb existence manage to escape the consequences?” Taubes’s answer:

There are several variables we have to consider with any diet/health interaction. Not just the fat content and carb content, but the refinement of the carbs, the fructose content (in HFCS and sucrose primarily) and how long they’ve had to adapt to the refined carbs and sugars in the diet. In the case of Japan, for instance, the bulk of the population consumed brown rice rather than white until only recently, say the last 50 years. White rice is labor intensive and if you’re poor, you’re eating the unrefined rice, at least until machine refining became widely available. The more important issue, though, is the fructose. China, Japan, Korea, until very recently consumed exceedingly little sugar (sucrose). In the 1960s, when Keys was doing the Seven Countries Study and blaming the absence of heart disease in the Japanese on low-fat diets, their sugar consumption, on average, was around 40 pounds a year, or what the Americans and British were eating a century earlier. In the China Study, which is often evoked as refutation of the carb/insulin hypothesis, the Chinese ate virtually no sugar. In fact, sugar consumption wasn’t even measured in the study because it was so low. The full report of the study runs to 800 pages and there are only a couple of mentions of sugar. If I remember correctly (I don’t have my files with me at the moment) it was a few pounds per year. The point is that when researchers look at traditional populations eating their traditional diets — whether in rural China, Japan, the Kitava study in the South Pacific, Africa, etc — and find relatively low levels of heart disease, obesity and diabetes compared to urban/westernized societies, they’re inevitably looking at populations that eat relatively little or no refined carbs and sugar compared to populations that eat a lot. Some of these traditional populations ate high-fat diets (the Inuit, plains Indians, pastoralists like the Masai, the Tokelauans); some ate relatively low-fat diets (agriculturalists like the Hunza, the Japanese, etc.), but the common denominator was the relative absence of sugar and/or refined carbs. So the simplest possible hypothesis to explain the health of these populations is that they don’t eat these particularly poor quality carbohydrates, not that they did or did not eat high fat diets. Now the fact that some of these populations do have relatively high carb diets suggests that it’s the sugar that is the fundamental problem.

Tsinghua students are almost all thin, although they eat a lot of white rice (a refined carb). My explanation is that they eat a diet with great variation in flavor. Almost everything they eat is made by hand from scratch — including noodles! — and the choice is staggering (hundreds of dishes easily available at lunch and dinner). They don’t eat a lot of sweets, as Taubes says, but because you can lose weight by drinking sugar water, sugar alone cannot cause obesity.

The Filipino graduate student I mentioned in a recent post told me she lost a lot of weight (too much!) when she came here; I attribute it to the novelty and variety of the food. This may be the only time a young woman has told me she lost too much weight without trying. Because Beijing is the capital of China it has lots and lots of Chinese regional food (and the Tsinghua cafeterias do as well). The variety of cheap food available here may be unmatched anywhere else in the world.
Thanks to Dave Lull.

Advances in the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A friend writes:

[My girlfriend, who is 5′ 5″ and started the diet at 174 pounds] has lost 12 pounds [over 2 months], no longer feels constantly hungry since starting the diet. We’ve been putting the flaxseed oil on toasted sourdough rolls (from Trader Joe’s) because the oil doesn’t seep through as easily. I like the way flaxseed oil tastes on toast but in this circumstance we’re nose-clipping so we don’t taste it. The toast makes us feel less queasy afterwards than taking the oil straight. We do two tablespoons/day instead of three because we’re including the calories in the toast which we also don’t taste.  The TJ’s honey whole wheat bread is denser and holds the oil a little better than the sourdough stuff she likes. Either way there’s usually oil left on the plate that  came through the holes in the bread. I said, since you can’t taste it why not use the whole wheat? The texture, she says, but I think it’s really because her mother made her eat whole wheat bread growing up which she never liked and still doesn’t even though under these circumstances she can’t taste it. Bad associations, maybe? Good old Pavlov, it’s like he’s still around. The effect on my back pain [it made his back pain go away] has become even more noticeable. If I skip the oil for a couple of days I start feeling it again. [emphasis added]. I haven’t been consistent enough with it to lose weight, and now that [my girlfriend] has gotten a little skinnier she’s starting to make comments to me about how I might want to lose a few pounds.

I have tried flaxseed oil on toast, eaten nose-clipped, and it is my favorite way to consume the flaxseed oil. It tastes like hot buttered toast. It’s not so easy here in China where I don’t have a toaster. You can’t do it with untoasted bread — the water repells the oil, so it doesn’t soak in.

The Morning Banana Diet

Seth Roberts30 Comments

I just googled “ morning banana diet” and got only a thousand hits. Surely that will change. It is the most popular diet in Japan right now, so popular, Mark Schrimsher of CalorieLab told me, that “You can’t buy bananas in Japan now. It’s crazy. We found some little green ones and some really expensive ones, but the rest are sold out.” Fytte, a woman’s health magazine, has covered it three months in a row. Three books have been written about it.

Like the Shangri-La Diet, it derives from (a) self-experimentation by (b) someone who was not a weight-control expert and (c) was spread by the Internet.

A cartoon.

I Love This

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In late July, JemSparkles posted this to the SLD forums:

Ok so I have tried many diets. Here’s the list Jenny Craig (10 lbs lost but gained back), Atkins (3 months of phase 1 and nothing lost), Curves (1 year and 10 lbs lost), Herbal Magic, a multitude of diet pills, the Zone, and then simply working out non stop. The weight doesn’t want to come off. So here I am with the last attempt that sounds crazy enough to work! I bought the book and this is day two. I am going to start tracking my data and see if I get any results.

Here’s to hoping!!!

Ok so I weighed myself for the first time this morning and my starting weight will be 260lbs.

Two weeks later she posted this:

Ok so I haven’t seen the fast results that some have seen but I am seeing results which is what matters. And compared to any diet this has been super easy to keep up with.

Today she posted this:

254!!! Yes I am finally down a total of 6 pounds and starting to feel much better. I have been working really hard on this and am not giving up. This diet has been the most effective I have been on to date.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled blogging.