Seth's Blog

Eating a half-stick of butter (60 g) every day apparently improved how fast I can do simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 7-5, 3+1). I improved about 5% — from 630 to 600 msec per problem. My scores had been at 630 msec for months. They suddenly dropped.

A reporter said to me that a 5% improvement isn’t much. You couldn’t notice it. Why did this matter?

I did not reply “what good is a newborn baby?” I said it mattered for three reasons:

1. You cannot easily produce such an improvement. I was already doing very well. For example, I had already lowered my scores a lot via omega-3. Imagine the world record for the 100 meter dash suddenly dropping 5% due to eating something you can find in a supermarket.

2. A 5% improvement is just the beginning. There is room for optimization — better dosage, better timing of taking the butter, and so on.

3. The brain is a mirror of the rest of the body. Learning the best diet for the brain, at least in terms of fat, will help us learn the best diet for the rest of the body, just as learning what house current is best for one electrical appliance is a guide to what other electrical appliances are designed for. They’re all designed to work with the same house current.

Alas, this is not just a poor answer, it’s what I actually said. I give myself a C+. Reason 1 is almost gibberish. Reason 2 is technocratic. A good answer is more emotional. Reason 3 is okay, if not very clear.

At Berkeley I knew a student who had transferred from a junior college. He is/was black. He had probably gotten into Berkeley because Berkeley administrators wanted to admit more black students. He complained one day that he got C’s on his essays even though “all the words were spelled correctly.” It was frustrating, he said. I am in a similar situation here. My answer is poor but I cannot easily do better.

I have 80 Chinese characters (flashcards for children) taped to a wall of my Beijing apartment. I add about five per day. I wrote about this earlier, before starting. So far it’s working. With almost no effort, no discipline, I know what almost all of them mean. I test myself a little whenever I’m in that room. This is a vast improvement over several previous attempts to learn the characters, such as studying flashcards the usual way or using Anki, a flashcard program.

I ruefully realize this is an application of something I thought of many years ago: the forces we can turn on and off are much weaker than pre-existing forces we can only take advantage of. Burning coal is a force we can turn on and off. Solar power is a pre-existing force we can take advantage of (and which almost everyone in Beijing uses to dry clothes). The sun shines no matter what we do. Deliberate studying we can turn on and off. We can study or not. In contrast, I am inevitably going to be in that room. Taping characters to the wall takes advantage of that.

A reader of this blog named Laura Fisher left a comment about “doctors as bureaucrats” — meaning they care more what their employer thinks of them than what their patients do. A scary and plausible idea. I asked for details. She replied:

I live [and practice psychiatry] in a small [Utah] college town that is 80% Mormon. Almost all the docs in town are employed by an outfit called Intermountain Healthcare which owns most of the hospital beds in this and a few surrounding states. Once you get the doctors on the payroll, they really must take instruction from the employer–and they sure as hell do. The doctors who refuse to take instruction that is ethically or morally conflicted or repugnant are typically subjected to “peer review” as a means of punishment, either by hospital medical staffs or by state licensing boards. If you want  details on the abuses of “peer review”, you should find plenty of information on the website of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

The typical patient I see has been jollied along for years [by IHC doctors], sometimes decades, without any of his physicians taking the time to review his/her medications effectively. There isn’t a billing code for actually taking the time required to deliver good care, so the patients do not get good care. Some of them get good surgeries. Some get bad surgeries. Often a patient has had a surgery or procedure that he or she did not need. Often the surgery creates new needs for expensive pharmaceuticals. Most often he or she is on a pharmaceutical which is causing psychiatric effects. Either no one has thought of this, including psychiatrists, or no one other than the patient has thought of this and the patient is afraid to discontinue medications for fear of alienating the doctors he needs to stay on good terms with and for fear of unanticipated withdrawal syndromes. The docs who are seeing these salt of the earth working-class patients are young physicians who are not familiar with the old-fashioned notion of the doctor-patient alliance as being somewhat sacred, private and full to the brim of ethical obligations on the part of the physician. These docs check out at quitting time. I have seen them fail to save a sick person at risk of death when one of their colleagues is responsible for putting the patient in that predicament. They refuse to answer questions from patients about whether or not a given treatment change would help that patient, apparently because that doctors employers’ treatment guidelines don’t include answering such questions or choosing different treatment and because that doctor’s professional society leaders are reading from the same page where treatment is conveniently canned such that even nurses can dole it out pretty successfully.

I have seen depressed patients whose depression completely resolved when he or she stopped taking the statin they were on. I have also been interested in the statin users apparently having a higher risk for infections and therefore cancers. Duayne Graveline wrote a very short book (Lipitor, Thief of Memory) on his personal experience with transient global amnesia. This short book is great introduction into the statin subject. The best book I have found on the statins is Fat and Cholesterol are Good For You by Uffe Ravnskov. There is an International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics and their website is marvelous. If you look at this material you are going to learn that it is a poor idea to interfere with cholesterol because we have to have it for brain function.

Don’t forget to read The Trouble With Medical Journals by Richard Smith and The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch.

Statins and memory loss. Thanks to JR Minkel.

I stopped eating breakfast when I discovered it made me wake up too early. My Tsinghua students are reading the paper in which I describe my breakfast research. One of them, a freshman, wrote:

When we [entered] Tsinghua University, the first task we should finish was the military training. [New students have a few weeks of military training.] We were asked to be gathered at 8 o’clock, and then we would do a lot of trainings. As the training was hard and tiring, we all had to eat breakfast in the morning. And I remembered in those days, we all slept well and were early-awakening. When the trainings were over, we began our classes. The time was also 8 o’clock, but many times we didn’t have breakfast in order to save time. Gradually, our awakening time become later and later. Even we set an alarm clock, we felt really reluctant to get up. For a long time, we wondered about that but no idea appeared. Now I got the answer, it has something to do with the breakfast. When I told my roommates, they were indeed surprise. Everyone was curious about why, and I was also interested in that. Maybe if the last day you had breakfast, the next morning your body will still have the motivation to call you up to eat breakfast.

Yes, if you eat at a certain time of day, you will tend to be awake that time of day. The effect has been heavily studied in animals, where it is called anticipatory activity.

From an NY Times article about the high price of kimchi (in Korea):

Michel Troisgros, the renowned French chef from Roanne, listened to a Korean official hold forth on the wonders of fermentation and an ambitious project to export Korean foods like kimchi.

“I think you have to stop talking about fermentation,” Mr. Troisgros told the man. “It’s not sexy.”

Via Marginal Revolution. I love that remark (“not sexy”). Good epigraph for book or article about fermented foods.

I considered making kimchi until I was in a Korean market buying some. The Korean woman next to me thought it was too hard.