Category: Shangri-La Diet

Is Drinking Olive Oil Healthy?

Seth Roberts46 Comments

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs wrote about an isolated North Carolina hamlet that her aunt visited in 1923:

One of my aunt’s tasks there was to see to construction of a church. . . One of the farmers donated, as a site, a beautiful knoll beside the river and my aunt suggested the building be made of fine large stones which were already quarried, as it were, needing little dressing, there for the taking in the creek and river beds. No, said the community elders, it was a pretty idea but not possible. . . . Entire walls and buildings of stone would not be safe.

These people came of a parent culture that had not only reared stone parish churches from time immemorial, but great cathedrals.

Likewise, nutritional wisdom is forgotten. Drinking olive oil now seems absurd to some people. But it was practiced in at least one place in the not-so-distant past:

In a mountain village in Crete, [Ancel] Keys saw old farmers working in the field who drank only a glass of olive oil for breakfast; he later verified that one of them was 106 years old.

From Todd Tucker, The Great Starvation Experiment, p. 204. There is a whole organization (Oldways) devoted to preserving ancient foodways and using them for nutritional guidance. The best practitioner of this approach has been Dr. Weston Price, a dentist, whose work is nicely summarized here. Dr. Price traveled the world looking for economically-primitive societies (“native peoples”) with ancient eating habits and excellent health. Their diets, especially the common elements, would suggest what a healthy diet must have.

Two of Dr. Price’s conclusions are relevant to the Shangri-La Diet:

1. “All native peoples studied made great efforts to obtain seafood.” This supports my comments about the importance of omega-3 fats, found much more in seafood than in other foods.

2. “The last major feature of native diets that Price found was that they were rich in fat, especially animal fat.” The animal fat in native diets would be high in omega-3 because the animals were eating grasses and other plants, not corn.

When I wrote my long paper on self-experimentation I divided it into two parts: one titled “Stone-Age Life Suits Us” (the common thread of the five examples), the other about weight control (the research behind SLD). The two parts struck me as quite different. Drinking sugar water to lose weight was definitely not a return to a Stone-Age lifestyle. But the big improvements in SLD since I wrote that paper — from sugar water to ELOO, and from ELOO to oils high in omega-3 — brought SLD much closer to the Stone-Age-Life-Suits-Us theme, I now see.

Going Flavorless

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Gary Skaleski, the Wisconsin counselor who came up with nose-clipping (= eating food with your nose closed, especially with a swimmer’s nose clip), has tried eating all his food that way:

The last time I wrote to you I had started gaining again and not following the SLD as I should have been (off and on). However, since then I have been eating everything, all day long, without tasting anything (even coffee, diet soda)-avoiding [flavor] completely, but eating well. After a couple of days, the appetite suppression came back with a vengeance and am losing again.

What was the most interesting was the difficulty I had starting this, and the sense of loss/regret and avoidance I had to doing it, and not being able to [smell] anything. While I recommended this procedure for others, I avoided it myself. But now I am on day 3 of [flavorlessness] and am doing well. . . . Interesting new needs come up-need for something crunchy, something smooth tasting, etc. . . . does help one focus on the feeling of different foods while eating, as well as becoming more sensitive to real hunger feelings (amazed at how much taste runs one’s eating).

He believes, as do I, that this may be useful in extreme cases. Let’s compare gastric bypass surgery (GSB) and eating like this (NC, for nose-clipping) on several dimensions. Dangerous? GSB: very. NC: no. Reversible? GSB: no. NC: yes. Adjustable? GSB: no. NC: very. You can do it every other day, for example. You can nose-clip some foods but not others. Cost? GSB: $20,000 or more. NC: $5 (swimmer’s nose clips).

Why I Like Self-Experimentation

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Self-experimentation, like blogs, Wikipedia, and open-source software (and before them, books) gives outsiders far more power. This took me a long time to figure out. For years, I liked self-experimentation for five reasons:

1. It worked. It reduced my acne, improved my sleep, and enabled me to lose plenty of weight. This surprised me. I am a professional scientist. My professional experiments, about animal learning, generally worked, but never had practical value.

2. It had unexpected benefits. I discovered accidentally that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood the next day. Better sleep (from self-experimentation) improved my health.

3. It was easy. What I did never involved more than small changes in my life. Even standing 8 hours per day wasn’t hard, after a few days.

4. My conclusions fit what others had found — usually, facts that didn’t fit mainstream views. For example, the fact that depression is often worst in the morning and gets better throughout the day doesn’t fit the conventional view that depression is a biochemical disorder but does fit my idea that depression is often due to a malfunctioning circadian oscillator. Self-experimentation seemed to be pointing me in correct directions.

5. My conclusions were surprising. That breakfast is bad (for sleep), the effect of faces on mood, and the Shangri-La Diet are examples.

Recently, though, the rise of blogging, Wikipedia, and open-source software, showed me the power of a kind of multiplicative force: (pleasure of hobbies) multiplied by (professional skills). Blogging, for example: (people enjoy writing) multiplied by (professional expertise, which gives them something interesting and unusual to say). In other words, expertise and job skills used in a hobby-like way. My self-experimentation, I realized, was another example: I used my professional (scientific) skills to solve everyday problems. My self-experimentation was like a hobby in that I did it year after year without financial reward or recognition. It was its own reward. The hobby aspect — persistence, freedom to try anything, no need for recognition or payment — made it powerful. I could go in depth where professionals couldn’t go at all.

But I was still missing something — something obvious to many others. The power of blogging isn’t

(hobby) x (job skills).

That’s just one person. The total power of blogging is

(hobby) x (job skills) x (anyone can do it)

Which is very powerful. Finally I saw there was a sixth reason to like self-experimentation:

6. Anyone can do it.

As Aaron Swartz Read more “Why I Like Self-Experimentation”

Web Trials

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Rey Arbolay, at the Shangri-La Diet forums, the eternal question “will this help?” is being answered in a new way. The specific question is “will the Shangri-La Diet help me lose weight?” The new way of answering it is that people are posting their results with the diet in the Post Your Tracking Data Here section of the forums. What they post is standardized and numerical enough that ordinary statistical methods can be used to learn from them. I’ll call this sort of thing a web trial.

It’s a lot better than nothing or a series of individual cases studied separately. I learned a lot from my most recent analysis — for example, that people lose at a rate of about 1 pound per week after Week 5. I couldn’t have done a good job of predicting where any of the fitted lines on the scatterplots would be or the size of the male/female difference. Nor could I have done a good job predicting the variability — the scatter around the lines.

It’s a lot worse than perfection. It would be much better if a comparison treatment (in the case of SLD, a different way of losing weight) was being tested in the same way. Then results from the two treatments could be compared and you would be closer to answering the practical question “what should I do?” (That modern clinical trials — very difficult and expensive — still use placebo control groups although placebos are not serious treatment options is a sign of . . . something not good.)

I can imagine a future in which people with a health problem (acne, insomnia, etc.) go to a website and enroll in a web trial. They told about several plausible treatments: A, B, C, etc., all readily available. They are given a choice of (a) choosing among them or (b) being randomly assigned. They post their results in a standardized format for a few weeks or months. Then someone with data analysis skills analyzes the data and posts the results. As for the participants, if the problem hasn’t been solved they could enroll again. This would be a way that anyone with a problem could help everyone with that problem, including themselves. The people who set up the trials and analyze the results would be like the book industry or Wikipedia insiders — people with special skills who help everyone learn from everyone.

Jimmy Berenson on the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts2 Comments

When Catherine Johnson, co-author of Animals In Translation, saw The Shangri-La Diet in a bookstore, she remembered the Freakonomics column about me. Her 19-year-old son Jimmy Berenson is autistic. Because of his autism, he takes a drug that causes weight gain. Over the last few years, it made him obese. In July 2006, Catherine started him on SLD (first 1, then 2 tablespoons of ELOO/day). Here is what happened:

Jimmy Berenson on the Shangri-La Diet

Seeing is believing: One of Catherine’s neighbors was skeptical about SLD, even when told of Jimmy’s results. Only when she saw Jimmy’s results, as graphed by Catherine, did she decide to try it. There is more information at Catherine’s blog.

Thanks to Andrew Gelman for his comments on this graph.

Varieties of Shangri-La Diet Experience

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The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet suggests several new ways of losing weight. As far as I can tell, they all work at least some of the time. To get an overview of the new methods, I asked users to rate them on power and ease of use. (Thanks to Brian Wansink for this suggestion.) Here are the average ratings (so far):

Power and Ease of Use of Different Ways of Doing the Shangri-La Diet

The two scales were defined as follows:

Power
5 = very powerful
4 = quite powerful
3 = somewhat powerful
2 = slightly powerful
1= not powerful at all

Ease of Use
5 = very easy/convenient
4 = quite easy/convenient
3 = easy enough
2 = quite difficult
1 = too difficult to ever do

The cluster in the top corner consists of “flavorless oil” and “nose-clipped oil”.

I like to think this little diagram predicts the future of SLD: lots of people drinking flavorless oil, lots of people drinking nose-clipped oil, fewer people drinking sugar water, etc. A friend of mine showed me a photo of her when she was 2 years old. Another 2-year-old was in the picture but I could tell which one was my friend.

I collected the data by Web. Maybe I should have used www.surveymonkey.com (as my students have) but it was incredibly easy compared to other data-collection methods.

American Haiku

Seth Roberts2 Comments

The American version of haiku, I submit, is a Priceless ad. My contributions:

The Shangri-La Diet: $15 (including shipping)
bottle of grapeseed oil: $6
additional groceries each month: -$200
not worrying where your next Yodel is coming from: priceless

Note to SLD dieters: The reference to grapeseed oil dates this. I now drink refined walnut oil and flaxseed oil (nose-clipped).

smaller pants: $60
blush I use as excuse for better-looking skin: $8
blood test for improved lipids: $80
migraine-free TOM: priceless

Short blog posts are a little like haiku.

Update (7 Dec 06): funny coincidence.

The Invisible Made Visible

Seth Roberts1 Comment

An artist, UC Santa Cruz professor of art history Mary Holmes would say, is someone who makes the invisible visible. Does that make the Internet an artist? These examples of the invisible made visible impress me:

1. Security footage of a man stealing two chairs. (Thanks to HuntGrunt.)

2. Tracking data at the Shangri-La Diet forums reveal what weight loss is like for other people.

I think the other extreme — the very visible made extremely visible — is also art. Here is an example: David Caruso one-liners. Too funny not to be art.

The Truth Is Out There

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I was very pleased to read this on the Shangri-La Diet forums:

Hi everyone! My name is Cindy. I’d learned of this in quite the ironic way. Killing time on YOUTHINK.com, I came across the question, “Would you ever try the Shangri-La Diet?” Having never heard of it before, I decided to google it. 5 hours later, I was sold. The recurring thing I kept reading in blogs, reviews, etc, was amazement that this actually worked.

That is a limitation of the statistics I posted today: They don’t express amazement.

More Weight-Loss Data from the Shangri-La Diet Forums

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Here are more graphs of the data in the Post Your Tracking Data Here section of the Shangri-La Diet forums. An overall summary of that data is:

Persons posting data for at least 1 week: 92
Total weeks of data: 930
Persons posting data for at least 4 weeks: 57
Persons posting data for at least 12 weeks: 31
Total weight change (ld): -985
Average rate of change (ld/week): -1.1

The graphs below show analyses similar to those I have done previously now divided by sex.

Weight loss slows down during the first five weeks of the diet. After that it is about one pound per week. In the beginning men lose weight more quickly than women but this difference disappears after five weeks or so.

During the first week of the diet, weight loss depends on how much you weigh: The more you weigh the more you lose, at least if you weigh more than 200 pounds. This graph compares men and women equating for weight — and when that is done there is no clear difference. The male/female difference seen in the first graph may be entirely due to weight differences: Men weigh more than women.

After Week 5 there is little difference between the sexes and little difference between people of different weights.

For easy comparison with earlier analyses see my Flickr page

The results support the popular idea that men lose weight more easily than women but also argue that this may be because men weigh more than women.