Seth's Blog

If you read Good Calories Bad Calories you may remember that the Arctic anthropologist Vilhjamur Steffanson spent a year on an all-meat diet, with no ill effects. (In an earlier post about Steffanson, I stressed the fermented food that the Eskimos ate.) You may not know that animal fat was crucial for his health during that year, which began with a brief attempt to eat lean meat (meaning meat without fat):

On February 26, 1968, [Stefansson] was admitted to the ward and on February 28, started on the meat diet. At our request he began eating lean meat only, although he had previously noted, in the North, that very lean meat sometimes produced digestive disturbances. On the 3rd day nausea and diarrhea developed. When fat meat was added to the diet, a full recovery was made in 2 days.

During the year, he got about 80% of his calories from fat.

Via Inhuman Experiment.

Never let it be said that med-school professors are afraid of appearing foolish:

The articles come in with doctors’ names on them and we often find some of them have little or no idea about what they have written, [the BMJ editor] said.

It’s nauseating that John Yoo (a Berkeley law professor) is getting off with a slap on the wrist. The superficial and childish response to 9/11 was they killed us, let’s kill them. The supposedly adult response was we need to make sure this never happens again — by getting rid of terrorists. The real lesson I’ve never heard or read: here’s something inside all of us that is stronger than we realized. We must try even harder to suppress it. 9/11 meant that laws against torture should be strengthened.

The opposite happened — thanks in part to John Yoo. Now it’s clear there was a lot of torture at Guantanamo. It happened at a place called Camp No (as in “I have no idea what you’re talking about”). As I read this excellent article about the torture, I wondered how such journalism will survive as newspapers disappear. I was glad to see that the author, Scott Horton, is a lawyer, not a professional journalist. Just as my self-experimentation was essentially a hobby that I did in addition to my regular job (a Berkeley professor).

A new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry, summarized in the Wall Street Journal:

Researchers in the new study identified 81 people, ages 13 to 25, with warning signs of psychosis, including sleeping much more or less than usual, growing suspicious of others, believing someone is putting thoughts in their head or believing they have magical powers. Forty-one were randomly assigned to take four fish oil pills a day for three months. The other patients took dummy pills.

After a year of monitoring, 2 of the 41 patients in the fish oil group, or about 5%, had become psychotic, or completely out of touch with reality. In the placebo group, 11 of 40 became psychotic, about 28%.

The study is impressive not only because it uses ordinary food (fish oil) rather than  dangerous drugs (such as Prozac) but also because it studies prevention. Just as the ketogenic diet suggests a widespread animal-fat deficiency, so this study suggests a widespread omega-3 deficiency, which won’t surprise any reader of this blog. Completing the picture — I believe most Americans eat far too little animal fat, omega-3, and fermented food — baker’s yeast is being studied as a cure for cancer.

Thanks to Oskar Pearson and Chris.

Today I got an email inviting me to contribute to a journal called SRX Neuroscience. The journal is “peer-reviewed open-access”.  The email continued: “There are many reasons to submit your work to SRX Neuroscience, including an efficient online submission process, no page limits or restrictions on large data sets, immediate publication upon acceptance, and free accessibility of articles without any barriers to access, which increases their visibility.”

I’d never heard of it. Its web page didn’t open. The website for SRX (short for Scholarly Research Exchange) was extremely vague: no names, no location. And no sign of how it was funded.

Finally I learned that SRX is run by Hindawi Publishing, in Egypt. From this excellent overview I learned its money comes from author fees, $500 or more per article. They are trying a new kind of editorship: 30 editors or more per journal. Each editor handles only two articles a year and receives a 50% discount when they themselves submit an article. (I wonder what referees get.) Meanwhile, BioMed Central, a better-known open-access publisher, is having trouble: They have been forced to raise their charges to libraries so high that Yale decided to cancel.

It seems very low-rent. But, as Clayton Christensen told in The Innovator’s Dilemma, this is often how important new things begin. In the beginning hydraulic shovels were only good for digging a ditch in your backyard. The makers of cable-powered shovels, whose products made the giant holes for skyscrapers, turned up their noses at such a low-prestige task. But the hydraulic shovels got better and better. Companies that made cable-powered shovels eventually went bankrupt.