Seth's Blog

In an earlier post I described how I discovered that walking normalized my fasting blood sugar. In a comment on that post, Phil wrote:

You could also have consulted a doctor, or a diabetes website, and probably found out about the benefits of walking for controlling blood glucose a lot sooner.

My initial reaction was that this was wrong–that a search on the web would find hundreds of suggestions for managing diabetes and walking would be just one of them. Diabetes, after all, is a huge problem. A doctor would probably prescribe something. But what if Phil were right? (more…)

Some of my Tsinghua students are in Berkeley. I took three of them to Great China, the closest Chinese restaurant. They didn’t like the Kung Pao Chicken. The sauce was wrong. It’s supposed to be a little bit sour and a little bit sweet but wasn’t. They liked an eggplant dish but complained the eggplant wasn’t infused with the flavor of the sauce.

A writer for UC Berkeley media relations wanted to interview me for this press release about the Tsinghua Psychology department. I said I’d blogged a lot about Tsinghua but she said she wanted “fresh quotes”. So I wrote this:

Why did you decide to take this opportunity [become a professor at Tsinghua]?

Partly because I wanted to write more books — in addition to The Shangri-La Diet — and this job would let me, because I only teach one semester per year. Partly because I thought the undergraduates would be brilliant. Partly because I thought living in Beijing would be fascinating.

What have you learned/discovered?

How talented the students are. To get into Tsinghua as an undergraduate, you have to score extremely well on a nationwide test. Oh, so they’re bookish? Not quite. A month ago I went to a talent show put on by biomedical-engineering majors. One act was five girls dancing. After a few minutes someone told me that three of the girls were boys. I hadn’t noticed. It was really hard to tell.

Influenced by Mulan, perhaps.

Richard Bernstein, an engineer with diabetes, invented home blood glucose monitoring. To learn more about this invention, about two years ago I started doing it myself. Mostly I measured my fasting blood sugar level — the level you measure in the morning before eating anything. My numbers were okay — averaging about 90 mg/dL. Optimal is 84, readings above 100 are considered pre-diabetic. I stopped for a while. Then I resumed, and was shocked to see that the numbers were considerably worse — the average was in the high 90s.

I tried to lower them. The obvious thing to do was to eat less carbs, but I already ate few carbs. I cut my carb intake still further but the problem didn’t go away. The graph below shows a solution I found by accident: to walk 30-60 minutes/day (closer to 60 than 30).

After months of trying this and that, and nothing working, one morning the reading was good. I realized I’d done something unusual the previous evening: Taken a 30-minute walk home in the evening rather than ride my bike. After that I deliberately walked 50-60 minutes almost every day and found that my readings were much better, as the graph shows. It wasn’t always walking steadily for 60 minutes — stopping now & then was okay. However, wandering through stores for 60 minutes (or any length of time) didn’t seem to work. My walks were in the afternoon or evening.

I have not read elsewhere that non-diabetics should do this sort of monitoring, but it helped me. I have seen “exercise” recommended as a way to improve blood sugar control but what I found is much more specific. This article recommends walking about 3 miles/day, which is what I did. This research found big effects of substantial aerobic exercise. My walking was just ordinary continuous walking. But the details of my exercise aren’t the point: The point is you can find out for yourself what works.

This sort of thing looks even better when you learn that GlaxoSmithKline, the giant drug company, hid evidence that its diabetes drug caused heart attacks. The drug has generated billions in revenue for the company.

• Edward Jay Epstein’s blog (curiously called “web log”)
• Immoderation in all things, says Nassim Taleb
• Evidence that the autism-income correlation (rich parents have more autistic children than poor parents) is not entirely due to diagnostic differences

Thanks to JR Minkel and Dave Lull.