Seth's Blog

Recently I listened to Robert Spector discuss his book The Mom & Pop Store: How the Unsung Heros of the American Economy are Surviving and Thriving. He had a personal connection to the subject: His father was a butcher. “As I watched him trim the meat . . . ” he said at one point. I thought: Oh-oh. To “trim” meat is to cut fat off of it.

Last spring, I bought $80 of organic grass-raised pork from a farmer near Berkeley. My order included a variety of cuts.  I cooked the ones I was familiar with, leaving one I’d never seen before: pork belly. Pork belly is used to make bacon. I’ve never seen it for sale in America. Ugh, I thought. Fat. It’s 80-90% fat. I too trim the fat off meat. It sat in my freezer for a long time. Finally I decided I shouldn’t waste it. I cut it into chunks which I put in miso soup and had for lunch.

That night I slept much longer than usual (8.3 hr) and woke up feeling unusually well-rested. Here is a graph that shows my sleep duration for that night and several preceding nights:

Sleeping 8.3 hours was less common than this graph may suggest. I’d moved back to Berkeley in January and from then until the miso soup had measured how long I slept on 130 nights. I’d slept more than 8.3 hours on 2 of them (2%). Even rarer was how energetic I felt the day after the miso soup. I couldn’t quantify it, but it was very rare — once in 10 years?

Was it a coincidence — that on the very day I ate far more animal fat than usual I also slept much longer than usual and had much more energy than usual the next day? Or was it cause and effect? Here’s why the second explanation — which implies that for best health I need much more animal fat than I usually get — is plausible:

1. As Spector said, butchers cut the fat off meat. The odds that our Stone-Age ancestors, living when food was sometimes scarce, did the same thing: Zero. Perhaps our meat is unnaturally low in fat. If for a long time in our evolutionary past we ate a lot of animal fat it makes sense that our bodies would be shaped to work best with that much fat.

2. Many video games, which boys enjoy, resemble hunting. I think this reflects an evolutionary past in which men hunted. If so, for a long time humans ate meat. That they ate a lot of meat is suggested by the fact that when big game went extinct (probably due to hunting) human health got worse.

3. American culture demonizes animal fat. The conclusion that animal fat is bad rests on epidemiology. Once something becomes heavily recommended or discouraged, a big problem for epidemiologists arises: the people who follow the advice are likely to be different (e.g., more disciplined, better off) than those that don’t (the healthy-user bias). As I blogged yesterday, an example is vaccine effectiveness: Those who get vaccinated are different than those who don’t.

4. Fat tastes good. Which implies we need it. We like whipped cream, butter on toast, milk in tea, and so on. Butter vastly improves toast even with my nose clipped. Long ago, when this fat-pleasure connection evolved, dietary fat was mostly animal fat and fish oil.

All this makes it plausible that animal fat is good for us. That’s not surprising. Based on Weston Price’s observations plus these four arguments, I already believed this. Many people believe this. The interesting idea suggested by my data is the possibility of measuring its benefits quickly, by measuring brain function. My experience suggested that animal fat improves brain function quickly. Brain function is easier to measure than the functioning of other parts of the body. By measuring my sleep, my energy, or something else controlled by the brain, maybe I can figure out the optimal amount of animal fat. This is what happened with omega-3. The idea that omega-3 is good wasn’t new; the novelty was the ability to measure its benefits quickly. (At first I measured my balance, later other things controlled by the brain.) With a fast measure I could determine the optimal amount. It’s likely that what’s optimal for the brain is optimal for the rest of the body, just as all the electric appliances in your house work best with the same house current. If you figure out the best current for one appliance, you are probably simultaneously optimizing all of them.

In his blog, Bryan Caplan makes some amusing and reasonable points about Barbara Ehrenreich’s criticism of some happiness research. My eyes widened as I read. This is so much betterthan what’s usually in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. It reminded me of Spy, except the level of thought is deeper. It’s as if blogs allow and encourage intelligent people to say what they really think about stuff. Whereas in any mainstream venue there are tremendous constraints.

An article in The Atlantic, based on research by Lisa Jackson, questions the conclusion that flu vaccines work. Here is the essence of her argument from a letter to the editor by Jackson and others in The New England Journal of Medicine:

In an 8-year study of a similar population of members of a health maintenance organization, we found risk reductions among vaccinated elderly persons during the influenza season to be essentially identical to those reported by Nichol et al. (Table 1).1 However, we also found even greater reductions before the influenza season.

Emphasis added. The lack of specificity suggests that those who get vaccinated are in better health to begin with than those that don’t. Other comparisons supported this conclusion.
Thanks to JR Minkel.

The term conspicuous consumption got more attention but Thorstein Veblen, in the same book, also coined the term conspicuous waste. The purpose of conspicuous consumption was conspicuous waste. Show how rich you are. Fine. So what do we do now, when driving a car with hood ornaments would make you look like an idiot rather than a rich person?

The creators of Paperless Post have not taken Veblen into account:

Paperless Post takes the e-invite into a civilized age, letting you design and send custom invitations and announcements expediently online. Created by siblings Alexa and James Hirschfeld, the site cleverly allows subscribers to choose among a dizzying array of card styles, fonts and design flourishes that perfectly mimic the heft and look of elegant stationary, complete with envelopes that open with a click. In addition to feeling good about your carbon footprint, you’re also easily able to monitor as recipients receive their invitations, and manage their replies.

Fancy invitations were an example of conspicuous waste. They were expensive. Everyone could see that. Here’s my suggestion: Sell these e-invites by the card and to each card add a donation to charity per card. Stated on the card. Let’s say the donation is $2. So 100 cards sent = $200 to some charity. That way the sender shows that he or she is rich.
Via Very Short List.

Dr. J. David Jentsch is a professor of psychology at UCLA; his research area is psychopharmacology. I contacted him because Aaron Blaisdell told me that he had decided to stop accepting research money from drug companies. This is unusual; I wondered why.

When one does work like I do, one wants to know that information learned is moving from the bench to the real world. That always requires a connection to a drug company – they make drugs/universities do not. That being said, I’ve always been of the opinion that having the best and most rigorous academic labs undertake these collaborations is in everyone’s best interest (the quality of the work is ensured). In my case, this was always a tiny part of what I did; therefore, the quality was good, my objectivity was unquestionable and the answers were certain.

2. How does one get drug-company money for research?

4. When did you start getting drug-company money for your research? If you’re comfortable saying how much it has been over the years (per year), that would help clarify the implications of your decision.

Because of the negative perception of these sorts of activities, it is not worth continuing to engage in them. I don’t require those funding sources. That being said, I find it a bit unfortunate. Again, it’s in everyone’s best interest if the TOP scientists did those collaborations to ensure their quality and rigor. When I don’t do them, it is possible that a less objective party does. Second, every concept I have about novel treatments that isn’t pursued because of lack of such a relationship is a potential delay in moving basic science to real use.

5. What are some examples of how the animal-rights activists publicized and complained about your use of drug-company money?

After the bombing [his car was bombed in March 2009], statements were made on the web and in the press by animal rights groups saying that people such as me used animals needlessly in a drug-company-fueled manic process of animal killing in order to get rich. As I already mentioned, this is not the case, if only because people like me often have relatively few such grants, and their size is not large (again, usually not larger than a single year of funding on an RO1 grant). Because of this, I simply decided not to take any such grants in the future.

6. The car bombing (on top of other attacks) led to the decision to stop taking drug company money?

Additionally, there is already a good deal of “negative perception” of research funded by drug companies within academic circles, and so I had already batted around the question in my mind about whether I should accept further awards. When the extremist attack on me happened in March of this year (2009), I had not had such an award in some time. That was not because I had taken a decision about the matter – simply that I hadn’t found a situation I wanted to pursue. At that point, the decision solidified.

7. Your decision to not take drug company money — what effect do you think it will have or hope it will have?

I am certain a situation will arise where I will have an idea about a novel therapeutic based upon my research that I will be unable to pursue without such a relationship to a company. What is more, the compounds in development by companies are not being evaluated by me, so they may well be evaluated by someone with a little bit less rigor and objectivity.

I believe strongly that the academic enterprise gives a crucial “objective” check on novel therapeutics when leading scientists who are not “dependent” on drug company money examine them. The alternative is that others who are more dependent, and therefore less objective, will do it.