Category: Shangri-La Diet

Interview about Self-Experimentation (part 2 of 2)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

8. How do you verify your results?

Repetition — first by me, later by others.

9. It seems your whole life is nothing but a self-experiment – how can your friends handle this?

Well, I spend a few hours in the morning differently than anyone else. I go to sleep earlier and wake up earlier than most people around me. And I eat less than most people. I like to think I make up for it by being in a better mood.

10. How do your colleagues react to your self-experiments?

Most of them think self-experimentation is a mistake, a waste of time. A few think it is creative and important.

11. Your most recent research is dealing with the effects of omega-3 on dental health. What is this research exactly about?

It’s not about dental health – that effect (omega-3 improved my gums) was an accident. It’s about the effects of omega-3 on my brain. I am varying the omega-3 in my diet in various ways and measuring how well my brain works in various ways. I began this research when I discovered that swallowing flaxseed oil capsules improved my balance. I was surprised but the effect makes sense: balance is controlled by the brain and the brain is more than half fat. Maybe you need the right fats in your diet if you want your brain to work as well as possible.

12. How did you get the idea of searching for the relation between omega-3 and dental health?

See answer to previous question.

13. How did you get the idea of taking oil to lose weight?

It was a three-step process. Step 1: I came up with a new theory of weight control. Step 2: I accidentally lost my appetite during a trip to Paris. I guessed that the cause was the unfamiliar sugar-sweetened soft drinks I’d been drinking because of the heat. This led me to discover that drinking small amounts of sugar water cause a lot of weight loss. Step 3: A friend pointed out that my theory predicted that flavorless oil should be just as effective as sugar water.

14. Are you going to search for a medical explanation for the effects of omega-3 fats?

No. Just convincing most people that there are effects is hard enough. It will also take a long time to learn how to maximize the effects. For example, what oils are best? How much oil is best? Other people are in a better position than me to try to explain the effects. But I don’t think it is terribly mysterious or surprising that dietary omega-3 should improve brain function: the brain is more than half fat. Surely the type of fat matters. My discovery is how big and fast the effect is. That’s not obvious.

15. When you consider your work as a whole, what is the most important result of your scientific research via self-experimentation?

Discovery of the effect of morning faces on mood. I believe depression is a deficiency disease, caused by too little exposure to morning faces. (See this paper for details.) No doubt that sounds very odd — even odder than the Shangri-La Diet — but consider this. In a wonderful book called The Good Women of China, the author, a Chinese radio host named Xinran Xue, wrote about her travels all over China to learn how different women lived. The last chapter is about visiting an extremely poor and backward community called Shouting Hill where an egg is a luxury and each women has multiple husbands because two or three girls are traded for a wife. She comes back to the radio station and tells her colleagues what she has seen. One of them asks, “Are they happy?” Another says, “Don’t be ridiculous, how could they be happy?” Because they were so poor — very poor even by Chinese standards. Xue answered:

I said to Mengxing that, out of the hundreds of Chinese women I had spoken to over nearly ten years of broadcasting and journalism, the women of Shouting Hill were the only ones to tell me they were happy.

It is pretty clear they saw plenty of faces in the morning.

Durian and SLD

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The obvious connection between durian, the big smelly spiky Asian fruit, and the Shangri-La Diet is that both rely on flavor-calorie learning. We come to like the initially unpleasant smell and flavor of durian because we learn to associate it with the calories in the fruit. Here’s what happens:

“To anyone who doesn’t like durian it smells like a bunch of dead cats,” said Bob Halliday, a food writer in based Bangkok. “But as you get to appreciate durian, the smell is not offensive at all. It’s attractive.

From an article in today’s NY Times. The theory that led me to the SLD centers on flavor-calorie learning.

A less obvious connection is a principle that helped me discover that drinking sugar water causes weight loss. I was in Paris and lost my appetite — a rare event. The principle is that rare events are usually due to rare events. So I wondered what else unusual had happened. Well, there was something: I had been drinking several sugar-sweetened unfamiliar soft drinks per day. When I got back to Berkeley I started to test the possibility that sugar-sweetened water can cause weight loss and SLD was born.

For a fruit, durian has three rare properties:

    1. very strong, unpleasant smell
    2. very big
    3. hard to handle (because spiky)

Following the Rare-Causes-Rare principle, these should have a common explanation. Lightning does not strike thrice in one place for different reasons. According to Wikipedia,

The thorny armored covering of the fruit may have evolved because it discourages smaller animals, since larger animals are more likely to transport the seeds far from the parent tree.

That’s a good explanation of #3 and it explains the other two rare features (#1 and #2) as well. The reason for the strong smell (#1) is so that the signal will be broadcast a long distance: Large animals are less dense than small animals. We think of the smell of ripe durian as very unpleasant but perhaps almost all unfamiliar smells are unpleasant; so any random strong smell will seem very unpleasant. Big fruit (#2) means big tree and big tree means that seeds must be carried far away so as to be placed in soil where they will not compete with the mother tree. Coconuts are big and hard to eat. Pineapples are big and spiky.

The Rare-Causes-Rare principle also helped me discover the effect of morning faces on my mood and the effect of omega-3 on my balance.

Will It Last?

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The graph below shows the daily number of hits to the Shangri-La Diet forums since they began. “Adjusted for weekday” means I estimated the effects of day of the week (e.g., 10% more hits on Tuesday) and then subtracted those estimates. This makes other effects easier to see.

Forum hits vs day

Each point is a different day. The two sharp increases (May and October) were caused by publicity — the first (May) by an interview on the Dennis Prager Show, the second (October) by a Woman’s World article.

The latest (current) increase looks different. It is much slower and not caused by any specific publicity. Apparently it is due to word of mouth.

Will it continue? Well, what’s

infinity TIMES 1/infinity?

The number of potential users of an easy and effective method of weight loss is very large. That’s the first infinity. However, the Shangri-La Diet sounds more than a little crazy. Many successful users don’t want to tell anyone they’re doing it. That’s the 1/infinity (the probability of transmission). Theory aside, the very mild increase last July did not continue. The current increase, however, looks much stronger than the July increase.

37signals and SLD

Seth Roberts4 Comments

37signals is a Chicago software company that specializes in quick development and has been very successful. According to Business Week, “the lesson [of their success]: Create a simple product as fast as you can, then get feedback from customers and make it better.”

Hey, that was my philosophy with the Shangri-La Diet! One of the first managing editors of The New Yorker had a slogan: “Don’t get it right, get it written”. My philosophy with regard to SLD was similar: “don’t get it exactly right, get it written, and get feedback.”

Here are some ways the Shangri-La Diet has been improved by feedback (almost all from the SLD forums):

1. It is much clearer what rate of weight loss to expect.

2. The idea of nose-clipping. Which makes any food a weight-loss food.

3. With nose-clipping, you can use flaxseed oil to lose weight. The benefits of omega-3 have become much clearer.

4. Putting the oil in water makes it much easier to drink.

Omega-3 and Dental Health (part 1 of 2)

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Today I had my teeth cleaned and was told my gums were in excellent shape, better than ever before. They were less inflamed than usual. “What causes inflammation?” I asked. “Tartar,” I was told. I haven’t changed my cleaning habits. The only thing I have deliberately changed since my last cleaning is how much flaxseed oil I drink. At the time of my previous cleaning I was drinking about 1 tablespoon/day; now I drink 4 tablespoons/day. The person who commented about my gums doesn’t know about my omega-3 intake.

Omega-3 is believed to be anti-inflammatory, so it is quite plausible that the change in my omega-3 intake is what improved my gums. There have been a few studies of omega-3 and gum inflammation but none found impressive results. Weston Price emphasized that dental health and overall health go together. Lots of research connects gum disease and heart disease. The importance of omega-3s was first realized because of their effect on heart disease.

This research means better gums is very good news — for which I thank SLD-forum posters, who sparked my interest in omega-3.

The Most Valuable Truths

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Paul Graham on start-ups:

For a while it annoyed me to hear myself described as some kind of irresponsible pied piper, leading impressionable young hackers down the road to ruin [via Y-Combinator, which helps young hackers start companies]. But now I realize this kind of controversy is a sign of a good idea.

The most valuable truths are the ones most people don’t believe. They’re like undervalued stocks. If you start with them, you’ll have the whole field to yourself. So when you find an idea you know is good but most people disagree with, you should not merely ignore their objections, but push aggressively in that direction.

This applies to the Shangri-La Diet, of course: It proposes a way to lose weight that strikes most people as crazy. There’s a lesson for me here. I have disliked being called a “ snake-oil salesman” and SLD being called “ absurd” and a “ fad diet“. But now I realize Graham is right: These are good signs.

For the Skeptics

Seth Roberts1 Comment

From the Shangri-La Diet forums:

This is week 5 for me, and I have lost 7 pounds so far.

I am a 37 year old mother of two — 5′6″ and started at 191 — the heaviest I have ever been in my non-pregnant life, with a BMI that fell in the “obese” category. I heard about Shangri-La from another woman, whom I dislike. I thought the whole thing sounded ridiculous, so I set out to prove her wrong. I replaced the two sodas I used to drink each day with two cups of sugar water, each 12 oz and 140 calories, exactly the same as the soda. This meant I was not changing my diet at all (other than removing the caffeine, sodium, colors and flavoring in the soda). I didn’t purposely reduce my calorie intake, and I didn’t change my exercise habits.

I’m amazed at the results. I’m much less hungry. I don’t crave sweets or soda (the way I have my entire life) — in fact, I haven’t had a soda in weeks now and I don’t miss it. I’m eating a reasonable portion size at meals and it’s easy.

It is an experimenter’s dream, by the way, to produce a big effect with tiny change, and a theorist’s dream to have a counter-intuitive prediction confirmed.

Is Sugar Fattening?

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In 1987, Dr. Israel Ramirez, a researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Institute, whose research led to the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet, questioned the prevailing assumption that sugar causes obesity in humans. Rat experiments did not support such a simple idea, he pointed out.

The most recent issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has a review article that agrees with Ramirez (but, alas, does not cite him). Now there is clinical evidence that Ramirez was right. From the abstract:

Numerous clinical studies have shown that sugar-containing liquids, when consumed in place of usual meals, can lead to a significant and sustained weight loss

Maybe the Shangri-La Diet isn’t so crazy.

How Good is the Atkins Diet?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A new study, just published in JAMA, compares several popular diets: Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and LEARN (a conventional-wisdom-type diet based on “national guidelines,” according to the paper). The Atkins diet did much better than the other three. The results were quite a bit more positive for Atkins than an earlier comparative study where compliance was poor, weight loss was minimal, and no diet was clearly better than the rest. The Atkins Company, not surprisingly, is pleased with the new study; they have put it in their research library.

Here is what the researchers concluded from their data: “A low-carbohydrate, high-protein, high-fat diet may be considered a feasible alternative recommendation for weight loss” (from the abstract — the meaning of “alternative” is not explained).

However, a graph in the paper (Figure 2 for those of you with access) makes a very important point that the researchers don’t mention: Persons on the Atkins diet weighed more after 12 months on the diet than after 6 months. After 6 months, in other words, the lost weight was coming back. The regain is not small: From Month 6 to Month 12 the Atkins dieters regained about one-quarter of the weight they had lost. At the end of the study (Month 12), they had lost about 10 pounds.

My interpretation is that the Atkins Diet works for two reasons: 1. The food is new. The flavors of the new food are not yet associated with calories. The novelty wears off, of course. This is why some of the lost weight was regained. 2. High-glycemic-index foods (such as bread and potatoes) are eliminated. This produces permanent weight loss, but not a lot. When I started to eat low-glycemic-index foods I lost 6 pounds, which I never regained. A 6-pound loss is not terribly different from the 10 pounds (average) lost by study participants.

In a newspaper article, the study’s lead author mentioned the regain:

As the study progressed, [Christopher Gardner, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center] said, some dieters put back on some of the weight they had lost early in the year.

That’s misleading. It wasn’t “some dieters” — it was a trend shown by the whole group. But at least he (kinda) mentioned it.