Assorted Links

April 30, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts4 Comments

Nigerian fermented foods
I point out that certain results in the BMJ are impossible
Big increase in ADHD diagnoses
Preface and Chapter 1 (Abraham Lincoln) of Edward Jay Epstein’s new book, Annals of Unsolved Crime
How to taste umami (very good)
No mortality difference between vegetarians and non-vegetarians (2009 study). This is evidence against the new TMAO theory of heart disease (carnitine in meat is converted by bacteria to TMAO, which causes heart disease).

News You Can Use: Tonsillectomies Are a Bad Idea

April 29, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts2 Comments

A reader named Nicole, who lives in Washington D.C., writes:

I have been an avid follower of Seth’s blog since Boingboing.net first posted something about or by him. And when I heard that my brother was planning to get my niece’s tonsils removed, I remembered the Boingboing article Seth wrote about tonsils and their important, if not completely understood, role as part of our immune system. So I sent that article along. My brother responded quickly with: “Wow, thanks. I won’t be getting her tonsils out any time soon.”

Nice to hear!

Standing Improves IBS Symptoms

April 27, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts2 Comments

At least in one case. A 23-year-old woman, who lives in Manchester UK and works as a typist, wrote me:

I’ve recently been trying out a standing desk, partly due to reading the posts you made about them. For the past few weeks, I have been tending to stand instead of sit when at my laptop, normally for more than 3 hours a day. I sit down when I get bored of standing and I walk around lots.

I was looking out for mental clarity effects but I’ve not seen a clear effect in that direction. What I did find surprising, though, is that my chronic but mild IBS symptoms have abated. I get heartburn/acid reflux regularly, and gut cramping, but since standing more these have all but stopped. I think it’s because standing up puts less pressure on my stomach and gut and leaves them more opened up.

I asked how long she’d had the symptoms (heartburn/acid reflux, etc.):

I think the last 3-4 years, but it’s hard to say when. I think my IBS probably started happening when I started having problems with anxiety but I wasn’t keeping track back then. I’ve suffered from recurring depression for 10 years now, but severe anxiety for me is relatively new. I think it would make sense if it coincided with the anxiety – I’ve heard of Citalopram (an anti-anxiety medicine) also being prescribed in a low dose for IBS, and some of my friends who have taken Citalopram + who have had IBS have had it go away. I never actually got a diagnosis for IBS, but it seems a fair description. The symptoms are heartburn, gut cramping (sometimes very painful) and my stool being quite variable in solidity.

I asked how long had she been standing more than usual:

4 weeks, when I’ve been able to. At work I have to sit, often with bad posture, but the last two weeks I have been on holiday. When I stand, I notice an improvement on the same day that I’ve been standing more. Part of what motivated me to stand with using my computer was when I recently spent a day walking around Manchester (where I live). I noticed that my energy levels were much smoother even though I hadn’t eaten very much and that my gut and stomach felt more OK than usual.

I asked what other remedies she’d tried:

About a year after I started regularly getting heartburn, a friend told me about antacids, so I started taking them when I needed them, but they weren’t always effective and they don’t help with gut cramping. Peppermint tea worked to some extent but would give me strange headaches and made me feel bloated. Peppermint oil capsules were an improvement – no bloating but still giving me headaches. I’ve also tried various dietary changes. I find that dry carbs (like toast or potato crisps) tend to bring on or make worse heartburn and cramping so I sometimes avoid those. Also when I’m hungry I get heartburn quite badly, so I’ve tried to eat things that level out my blood sugar over time more (e.g. eating more fat and protein, fewer sugars and carbs). I tried probiotic soy yoghurt (I’m vegan) to see if that would help but it doesn’t agree with my stomach. I also have tried probiotic supplement but I’m not sure that I’ve seen improvement from that either.

She added, “I haven’t had IBS symptoms on days that I have been standing yet!” So it is perfectly clear that this is cause and effect — standing reduces IBS symptoms.

More Wrinkles = Too Little Vitamin K2?

April 26, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts18 Comments

This post (“The vitamin deficiency that’s written all over your face”) by Sarah Pope at Healthy Home Economist is very good. It takes various pieces of data and puts them together to suggest that people who don’t get enough Vitamin K2 will get facial wrinkles sooner. The most interesting data is the difference between women in Shanghai, Bangkok and Tokyo — the Tokyo women had the fewest wrinkles. They eat the most natto, of course, and natto is notoriously high in Vitamin K2. Pope should have added that Tokyo women probably also eat a lot more of other fermented foods than Shanghai and Bangkok women — for example, more pickles and miso.

Another example of the same sort of reasoning:

Further research which bolsters the notion that getting plenty of K2 in the diet makes for smoother facial features is found in the research of Korean scientists and was published in the journal Nephrology in 2008. The rate at which the kidneys are able to filter the blood is an important measure of overall kidney function. Researchers found that reduced renal filtration rate was associated with increased facial wrinkling. What does decreased kidney filtration rate predict? You guessed it – Vitamin K2 deficiency, according to American research published the year after the Korean study.

I wonder what other nutritional deficiencies poor kidney function is associated with. These associations are far from convincing but it is a new (to me) and testable idea. And Vitamin K2 is quite safe.

Make Yourself Healthy Meetup Group: Report of First Meeting

April 25, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts4 Comments

The first meeting of the Make Yourself Healthy Meetup group happened last night in Berkeley. It went great. About 15 people attended. We heard four fascinating talks — five, if you count mine. About 10 people wanted to talk so there was far more material than time (the meeting lasted about 2 hours).

Here are brief recaps of the talks.

Me. I explained why I started the group. I described how I came to believe that non-experts can discover important things about health that health experts, such as doctors, don’t know. These non-expert discoveries deserve more attention than they would get on a online forum (e.g., a MedHelp forum about acne). They can help people with other problems and can encourage people with other problems.

Katie Reid. After her youngest child was diagnosed with autism, she tried many things that didn’t work. She tried removing gluten from her daughter’s diet — a common treatment — and that made things somewhat better. The partial success encouraged her to look further at food. On someone’s blog, she came across the idea that MSG (monosodium glutamate) can cause autism symptoms. To her surprise, she learned that MSG is in many things, including toothpaste and juice, without explicit statement on the label. When she removed all MSG from her daughter’s diet, her daughter greatly improved and now, three years later, attends class with normal children. All of her autistic symptoms are gone. Katie herself felt much better when she stopped eating any MSG. She lost weight and a low-grade headache disappeared. She has a website and a video about this. Here is a video about this by someone else.

Anonymous. He is 29 years old and has struggled with depression, anxiety and lack of motivation. No long term progress in therapy. Yoga has helped. He found some benefits from meditation, but to get the benefits requires consistency and consistency requires hope, which I don’t always have. He started thinking critically about what he eats. Read Eat to Live by Furman and Disease-proof Your Child. Eating whole foods plant-based lowered his blood pressure to 90/60, His weight went from 170 to 155 and is now in low 160s. (It was 160 when he was 19.) He has food addiction and technology addictions, demons that he is battling. Other attendees suggested six things he might try, such as eating more animal fat.

Kylene Miller. She spoke about the value of anti-oxidants. She became a Type 1 diabetic at age 5 and has been sick a lot in her life. She met Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, who told her to eat a lot of anti-oxidants. She started eating large amounts of Vitamins E and C. Then she started trying get her antioxidants from food. She discovered healthy chocolate — cold-pressed so that the anti-oxidants aren’t destroyed — made by the Xocai company. It has a huge ORAC (oxygen radical absorbance capacity) score. She had gastric paresis. Four years of throwing up first thing in the morning. She had stopped taking lots of antioxidants. After she started taking them again, her gastric paresis disappeared. She is a distributor for the chocolate. She passed out samples of the chocolate.

Janet. When she was 19 (she is now 22) she suddenly felt very tired most of the time, even though she was sleeping 12 hours per night. She decided what tests she wanted, but her doctor would not order them. After her doctor gave her the blood-test-order form to bring to the testing center, she checked the boxes for the tests she wanted. Three supplements have been especially helpful, including isocort and progesterone (both OTC, over the counter). You can listen to her talk here (thanks to Jane Cho).

I had worried that too few people would have stories to tell, but one attendee lived one block away She had high blood pressure and had lowered it without medicine. I wanted to videotape the talks but during the second one the camera battery died — and, anyway, I was doing it wrong, someone told me. I asked whether the next meeting should be in one month or two months and everyone voted for one month. We need a venue that permits longer meetings.

QS Contest: What Would You Do With a Body Media Armband?

April 25, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth RobertsLeave a comment

A la Google Glass, Gary Wolf announces a Quantified Self contest/give-away:

In conjunction with our upcoming QS Europe Conference in Amsterdam on May 11/12, our friends at BodyMedia have agreed to donate a complete personal SenseWear System (retail price $2,500), a state-of-the-art wearable sensor that allows raw data output. That’s going to be our prize. So if you have good questions, we can supply you with a way to collect the data.

The best answer wins the sensor.

Cheap Good Science

April 24, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts7 Comments

Last weekend I attended EG, a TED-like conference in Monterey. One of the speakers, a woman named Hong Yi, made representational art from cheap materials – a portrait from coffee-stained napkins, for example. The most stirring talks were by Matt Harding (dancing video) and Jo Montgomery and Chuck Johnson (circus school) but she, more than anyone else, seemed to have done something with big implications. Her art was attractive, profitable, very cheap, and diverse (many materials, many representational styles). If anyone else has ever done this, I don’t know about it. She is an architect in Shanghai and her art began because she was in China. At a wholesale supply store, she came across very cheap candles. She realized she could buy enough of them to make a picture with one candle = one pixel. I imagine people will be watching Harding’s video a hundred years from now and the underlying point of Montgomery and Johnson’s circus school will be valid forever, but both were enormous expensive unique efforts. Hong’s work was much easier and cost almost nothing. The benefit/cost ratio was very high and millions of people could do something like what she did.

I realized that my work resembled hers. She had discovered how to make cheap good art — not just once but many times, using a wide range of materials (e.g., different foods) and representational styles. I had figured out how to do cheap good science, answering not just one question (e.g., how to sleep better) but many questions (how to sleep better, how to lose weight, how to be in a better mood, etc.). My science cost almost nothing, so I could do a lot of it (do thousands of experiments) and managed to discover many things. In both Hong Yi’s case and mine, the Internet was not needed to do the work but was essential for publicizing it. It didn’t fit the usual channels.

For a long time, I called my work self-experimentation. It’s true, but misleading, because almost all self-experimentation you’ve heard of isn’t like mine. The book Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine is full of self-experimentation quite different than mine. Most of it is by doctors, designed to show that a new treatment is safe. The scientist tries the treatment himself to protect others. The self-experimentation in Who Goes First? is closer to demonstration than experiment. In contrast, the treatments I’ve studied (e.g., butter, morning faces, standing a lot) are perfectly safe. My work is about finding new ideas. It is about changing my own beliefs, not trying to convince other people of what I believe.

More recently, I might describe my work by saying it’s an example of the Quantified Self (QS) movement. Again, this is true, but also somewhat misleading. My work does involve self-quantification and self-tracking. Like many QSers, I do hope to become healthier as a result. What’s misleading is that the tracking is only part of the effort, I don’t measure many things, and my tracking isn’t high-tech. I’m trying to discover new cause-effect relationships (e.g., new ways to improve sleep). This is not a large part of the QS conversation.

If I describe my work as cheap science, on the other hand, what you automatically think of is pretty accurate. Scientists look for cause-effect relationships (it is central to science); I look for cause-effect relationships. Scientists do many experiments; so do I. Scientists pay great attention to the scientific literature (what has already been done, what is already known); so do I. When something becomes much cheaper (e.g., photography or computing becomes much cheaper), everyone understands that the activity can be done by many more people. That is inherent in my work. I am doing science that many people can do — many more people than can do professional science. The terms self-experimentation and quantified self do not convey this.

Like the term cheap travel, the term cheap science suggests freedom. That too is a big part of what I do. I have vastly more freedom than professional scientists. I can test treatments they can’t. I can entertain ideas (“crazy”) they can’t. I can spend longer on one project than they can. So if I describe what I do as cheap science, the rest of what I say (“I’ve discovered new ways to sleep better, lose weight, etc.”) makes more sense. And maybe the whole activity sounds more accessible, whereas self-experimentation and quantified self seem like the sort of activities that caused the word geek to be invented.

Cuban Data Refute Mainstream Health Beliefs

April 23, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts30 Comments

A new BMJ paper looks at Cuban health before and after the economic crisis of 1991-1995, when the Cuban economy nose-dived. There wasn’t enough gasoline for cars. so bike riding greatly increased. In addition, people ate less. What effect did these changes (more exercise, less eating) have on health?

You know what is supposed to happen: Better health. Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist, wrote a commentary about the study that concluded “The current findings add powerful evidence that a reduction in overweight and obesity would have major population-wide [health] benefits.” In other words, Willett said that what happened supports conventional beliefs.

But it didn’t. In several ways, what happened contradicts conventional beliefs.

1. A popular belief is that exercise causes weight loss. However, the percentage of “physically active individuals” doubled from 1985 to 2010 (from about 30% to 60%). In spite of this, the prevalence of obesity considerably increased (from about 13% to 18%) at the same time. Apparently exercise is considerably less important than something else. I have never heard a public health advocate say this.

2. A graph showing rates of heart disease, cancer, and stroke (the three main killers) over the period showed no change in rates of cancer and stroke. In spite of big changes in both exercise and obesity. The rate of heart disease stayed constant during the period when obesity went down. It steadily dropped during the period of time when obesity went up. Apparently the factors that control obesity and the factors that control heart disease are quite different (contradicting the usual view that exercise reduces both).

3. There is no simple connection between diabetes and obesity. During the economic crisis, when the prevalence of obesity went down by half (from 15% to 7%) and exercise greatly increased, the prevalence of diabetes slightly increased . Only after the crisis did the usual correlation (more obesity, more diabetes) emerge.

4. The only lifestyle factor to have its conventional effect: smoking. When you stop smoking, you gain weight is the usual belief (which I also believe). The data definitely support this connection. A huge reduction in the fraction of people who smoke (from 30% to 10%) did not reduce cancer but did coincide with a great increase in obesity.

5. Cubans are doing something right, as shown by the considerable decrease in heart disease and diabetes deaths. Apparently they are also more health-conscious, as shown by much higher rates of exercise and much lower rates of smoking. (Assuming that cigarettes did not become too expensive.) They are getting fatter, too, but apparently that is less damaging than we are told.

Willett and the authors of the study look at subsets of the data and use theories about “time-lag” to draw reassuring conclusions. In fact, large portions of the data are not easily explained by conventional ideas, as I’ve shown. You can look at the data many ways, but to me the study makes two main points. 1. During a period when everyone was forced to do what doctors recommend (exercise more, eat less), health did not improve. 2. During a period (post-crisis) when obesity got steadily worse, health improved (heart disease rates went down, cancer stayed the same, diabetes mortality went down). Cuba is too poor for the improvement to be due to better high-tech modern medicine. Taken together, these findings suggest we should be more skeptical of what we are told by doctors and health experts such as Willett.

Oral Rehydration Therapy For Diarrhea

April 22, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts9 Comments

Oral rehydration therapy (ORT) is given to people (usually children) suffering from diarrhea, which before ORT was often fatal. It is very simple: The sufferer drinks water with sugar and salt ad libitum (as much as they want). You probably haven’t heard of ORT — at least, I hadn’t. Everyone has heard of antibiotics. Yet “ in 10 years [ORT] saved more lives than penicillin had in 40.” Infant diarrhea was once (and may still be) the main cause of death in poor countries.

A history of its discovery supports several things I’ve said on this blog. One is Thorstein Veblen’s point about the disdain among professional scientists for useful research:

ORT might also have been developed long before 1968 but for the attitudes of the dominant medical establishment toward practical experimentation, which the Cholera Research Laboratory and the National Institutes for Health shared. Nalin believes that “the people at the lab … got kudos for the extent to which [their] work was not practical. As soon as it became practical it was discarded like a soiled towel–it was too common, too hands-on… so the prestige went to people who measured trans-intestinal fluxes or electrical currents”.

No one who has attended an elite law school, medical school, or graduate program in education will be surprised by this.

Another is the great resistance among the medical establishment to cheap and effective solutions:

The formidable and persistent ignorance of the Western medical establishment, which continues over twenty-five years after the discovery of ORT, is phenomenal. While its refusal to advocate ORT may be due in part to the notion that ORT is only necessary for people in the developing world, its actions appear to be driven also by financial considerations. Most hospitals do not train physicians in the use of ORT since they have no financial reason to do so. [I think “since” overstates what is known — Seth] The use of intravenous therapy, which often involves keeping a dehydrated child overnight, assures [greater] insurance reimbursement. Sending children home with ORT would [reduce] profits. Furthermore, recent studies show that diarrhoeal illness among the elderly may incur even greater health care costs that could also be reduced by the use of ORT. At a time of heated discussion about cost-containment in health care, it seems all the more ironic and egregious that a superior, cheap, and proven therapy [fails to replace] a far more expensive one. Estimates based on the cost of hospitalizations and physician visits suggest that ORT could save billions of dollars annually.

As an example of the resistance of American doctors to a better therapy, an ORT researcher, who had used it on Apache reservations in America, told this story:

I had an anthropologist friend who adopted an Apache child from the [Arizona] reservation where we were working. He used to be the anthropologist on the reservation. And then he [left the reservation and] went to Arkansas to teach and the Apache child came down with severe diarrhea and he called me up and he said desperately, “Look, my son’s in the hospital and they’re giving him all sorts of intravenous fluids. The diarrhea’s not stopping, he’s losing weight, they’re not feeding him. I know that you did this work in Arizona [on the reservation] and it didn’t look like that. . . . Would you call this professor of pediatrics and just collegiately talk to him?” So I called up the professor and told him that in our experience with Apache children this is what we found and here’s the publication and so on. And he said to me, “Doctor, doctor, our [Arkansas] children are not the same as your [reservation] children”. He was treating an Apache child from the same reservation.

Shades of Downton Abbey (where Lady Sybil died because a London doctor was listened to instead of a rural doctor).

Assorted Links

April 21, 2013March 14, 2024 Seth Roberts2 Comments

World Health Organization opposes effective herbal malaria remedy
Increasing potassium intake reduces blood pressure and risk of stroke (experimental evidence)
How to clearly distinguish thermometer and proxy temperature records.
Conversation with Edward Jay Epstein about his new book Annals of Unsolved Crime.
The flavors of fermentation (WSJ). “Recreating naturally occurring fermented flavors in a lab isn’t easy, experts say. “What I marvel the most about is the complexity, especially with something like kimchi,” says Paul Ricciardi, an IFF flavorist.” I believe we like complex flavors so that we will eat more fermented food.
Ada by Vladimir Nabokov, annotated
Patient-powered health (BMJ)

Thanks to Dave Lull and Ashish Mukharji.

Seth's Blog Mirror

Personal Science, Self-Experimentation, Scientific Method

Month: April 2013

Assorted Links

News You Can Use: Tonsillectomies Are a Bad Idea

Standing Improves IBS Symptoms

More Wrinkles = Too Little Vitamin K2?

Make Yourself Healthy Meetup Group: Report of First Meeting

QS Contest: What Would You Do With a Body Media Armband?

Cheap Good Science

Cuban Data Refute Mainstream Health Beliefs

Oral Rehydration Therapy For Diarrhea

Assorted Links