Seth's Blog

Justin Wehr asked me some interview questions and decided not to publish my answers. I thought they were good questions. Here they are, reworded slightly, and my answers.

QUESTION Of the experimental treatments you have studied, which ones have the most positive effect on your life?

ANSWER From more to less effect:

• Effect of morning faces on mood
• Effect of fermented food on health
• (tie) Effect of animal fat on health
• (tie) Effect of omega-3 on health
• Weight-control experiments.

QUESTION What about everyone else?

ANSWER  It depends on how far in the future you look. The morning faces stuff is the most important, I’m sure, but it’s also the hardest to implement. The fermented food stuff is easy to implement. It’s easy to eat more yogurt. So I believe that in the short term, the fermented foods stuff will have the most effect on others, in the long term, the faces stuff.

QUESTION Much of your research is related to the idea that we get sick because we live differently now than long ago. Can you explain this? Are there exceptions?

ANSWER Our genes were shaped to work well in one environment. Now our environment is quite different. All sorts of things go wrong — we don’t eat an optimal diet, for example — and our bodies malfunction in all sorts of ways. The exception is that once we know what an optimal diet (or environment) is we can assure it. For example, we can make sure we get the optimal amount of Vitamin C. The health problems caused by progress can be fixed, in other words, and we can emerge in better shape than ever before.

QUESTION How much time a day do you spend on self-experimentation?

ANSWER About ten minutes. Measuring various things, such as blood pressure and brain function.

QUESTION Why do few people self-experiment?

ANSWER Millions of people self-experiment. For example, millions of fat people try many different ways to lose weight. Professional scientists (e.g., med-school professors) do not self-experiment, at least publicly, because it is low-status, because it is frowned upon (by their colleagues), because it might be hard to publish the results, and because it won’t help them get grants.

QUESTION How do you determine an appropriate dosage for treatments that might have a good effect on what you measure but a bad effect on other things? For example, maybe animal fat is good for sleep but bad for other things.

ANSWER I don’t worry about it. Just as all electric appliances are designed to use the same house current, I’m sure all parts of our body are designed to work best with the same diet.

QUESTION Could advances in medical technologies (such as regenerative medicine) replace the need to live healthily? For example, if we could easily replace livers, maybe people could drink more.

ANSWER Not likely. Except that the more we know about nutrition the more we can replace our ancestors’ diet with a diet made up of the necessary nutrients. For example, I drink flaxseed oil to get omega-3. I’m sure our long-ago ancestors got omega-3 in other ways. So I no longer need to be like them. Basic nutrition isn’t medical technology, but it is a way in which it is easier to be healthy.

QUESTION What don’t you know, but wish you did?

ANSWER How to make book-writing as addictive as Wii Tennis.

After making yogurt a hundred times, and reading a lot about it, I finally realized there are two types. The mild sort (incubated maybe 12 hours) is good by itself, with fruit or nuts for texture and flavor. The strong sort (incubated maybe 24 hours) is a good condiment. Mild yogurt is a poor condiment, strong yogurt is poor by itself.

A friend of mine had a kidney stone. He got rid of it via Chinese herbs and yoga. After the kidney stone passed, a prostate infection went away. Here’s what he saved himself from by solving the problem himself:

1) A CAT scan. This particular scan would have been the equivalent of 18 years worth of (background) radiation (according to the FDA web site), all in 45 min or an hour.  Also, I would have had to take an iodine contract material.  This latter is (a) at least mildly nephrotoxic in healthy people (and I was already having kidney problems) and (b) accumulates in the thyroid and, being radio-opaque, causes deposition of larger amounts of x-radiation energy into the thyroid.  This latter is being blamed in the medical literature for the explosion in thyroid cancer rates over the last few years.  (Apparently they have had this problem before, prior to the advent of CT’s, when iodine was used as contrast, and then multiple x-rays were taken.)  I also learned that in Europe, there are controls with regard to how much x-ray a person can be exposed to. This means that they do not do these extensive CT’s, but employ MRI’s instead.  The latter are not just less dangerous, but also much better diagnostic tools; but they are more expensive. As a result the US health insurance companies refuse to pay for them.

(2) Taking Cipro, which is what I had been given after the first round of antibiotics failed to work (leaving me a second positive urine  test).  Cipro was the antibiotic given to the postal workers as a prophylaxis, when the scare about anthrax in the mail was going on.  Were it not for the fact that they were all given the same thing, all started having the same symptoms, and then all started talking to each other, we would probably have never had the massive class-action law suits that forced the FDA to put a “black box” warning on this drug.  How bad could an antibiotic be? Well, it seems that some people are having their tendons release from the bone, often the Achilles tendon, sometimes within 24 hours of starting the drug.  And that is only what the FDA is now admitting to.  On the web, you find that the really serious problems are neurological. Lots of what were very high functioning people are reporting on the web very similar effects.

This is from The London Telegraph several months ago:

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water.

But someone who actually measures sea levels thinks otherwise:

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world”.

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Haha!

I hear a voice: “Okay, you’ve convinced me, I need to eat more bacteria. How should I do it?” Well, Tim Beneke writes:

I want to revise my comments of a few months ago on probiotics and breathing through my nose. The probiotic pills by themselves do not enable me to breath better though my nose, even if I take 2x the dose they recommend. However, if I eat a lot of miso, yogurt, tempeh etc., I can breathe better through my nose within a day or 2. Previously, when I ate a lot of yogurt etc. for a couple of weeks, and then just went on the probiotic pills, it seemed as if the pills were enough, but after a week or so of just doing the probiotic pills, the stuffed nose came back. Then just doing yogurt and miso, my stuffed nose went away.

The probiotic pills are called Acidophilus Pearls, said to have one billion CFU [colony-forming units] of lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidobacterium longum per capsule; I got zero noticeable effect taking 2 of them a day while eating virtually no probiotic food.

Doing 16 oz of yogurt/day plus one 480 ml bottle/day of kombucha, while consuming none of the Pearls enabled me to breathe much better through my nose within a day or 2.