Seth's Blog

I eat a low-carb diet for reasons that have nothing to do with weight loss: To keep my blood sugar down. I am sure high blood sugar is bad. A few months ago, I noticed that my lips were chapped, which was unusual. I suspected it was due to lack of Vitamin C. About two months before that, I had stopped doing two things that I usually did: taking a multi-vitamin pill (which had Vitamin C) and eating fruit. I don’t know if the Vitamin C in the pill is absorbed but I’m sure the Vitamin C in fruit is. I started eating kumquats — the skins of four kumquats/day. (One kumquat contains about 15% of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin C). My lips returned to normal.

Paul Jaminet, author of Perfect Health Diet, had a similar experience, which I knew nothing about when I noticed my chapped lips. While eating “a lot of vegetables but no starches and hardly any fruit,” he developed outright scurvy, including wounds that wouldn’t heal.  This happened while he was taking a multi-vitamin pill with 90 mg Vitamin C (my four kumquats contain only 35 mg Vitamin C). “Four grams a day of vitamin C for two months cured all the scurvy symptoms,” he found.

Why do we like sweet foods? The usual answer (so that we will eat more calories) is nonsense (except for children). The striking thing about our liking for sweetness is that it disappears when we are really hungry, which is the opposite of what the calorie-seeking explanation predicts. Desserts are served at the end of a meal because they taste much better then. But our liking for sweetness (when we’re not hungry) is so strong and obvious it must mean something important. I think it is pushing us to eat more fruit so that we will get enough Vitamin C. Fruits are much sweeter than other food groups and they are much higher in Vitamin C. We don’t like sweet things when we are hungry because a high-fruit diet is terrible (it is low in omega-3, other necessary fats, several minerals, and microbes, for example). But a small amount of fruit may be a big help. Paul and my experiences suggest it may be hard to get enough Vitamin C in other ways.

More Paul has a different idea about why we like sweetness.

In 1996, I accidentally discovered that if I stood a lot I slept better. If I stood 9 hours or more, I woke up feeling incredibly rested. Yet to get any improvement I had to stand at least 8 hours. That wasn’t easy, and after about 9 hours of standing my feet would start to hurt. I stopped standing that much. It was fascinating but not practical. (more…)

At the Quantified Self blog, Alexandra Carmichael has posted several graphs showing how much the Quantified Self movement has grown during the past year. The number of QS meetup members has grown by a factor of 3; the number of groups has grown by a factor of 6.

Measuring yourself is a step toward controlling yourself — especially, controlling your health and well-being. Almost everyone wants more control of these things. I believe that the idea, which the Quantified Self movement encourages, that ordinary people can do useful science is a shift with implications on the order of the shift from religion (the Sun revolves around the Earth) to science (the Earth revolves around the Sun). When ordinary people begin to do science, I predict we will learn a lot more about how to control our bodies.

Before science became powerful, people knew lots of correct useful stuff (e.g., metallurgy). But there were limits on what could be learned (e.g., Galileo was imprisoned). Now religion is much less powerful but most people believe that science can only be done by certain people (e.g., professors). This too places serious limits on what can be learned. For control of the outside world (e.g., material science, physics), I don’t think these limits matter (although the case of Starlight suggests that even here amateurs can make important discoveries). But for control of the inner world (our bodies), the message of my work is that these limits matter a lot. By studying myself I managed to learn a bunch of useful things that professional scientists could learn only with great difficulty. For example, I could learn from accidents how to sleep better; I could easily test ideas about how to sleep better. Few if any professional sleep researchers measure sleep night after night for long periods of time; nor do they do cheap fast experiments.

Last year I gave a 20-minute talk at EG (EG is short for Entertainment Gathering) titled “You Had Me at Bacon” about my self-experimentation. I described some of the things I’ve discovered by self-experimentation. Then I tried to say why it had been successful — why I had managed to discover such useful stuff. My conclusion is that my success came from the combination of four things: 1. Self-experimentation. Much faster, more flexible than ordinary research. 2. The Stone Age = good idea. I used the idea that our bodies were shaped to work well under Stone-Age conditions to choose what experiments to do. 3. Subject-matter knowledge. My knowledge of psychology, experimental design, and data analysis helped a lot. My weight-control theory, for example, was based on ideas from animal learning. 4. Freedom. I could do and say what I wanted. Most scientists cannot. They fear career damage. The combination of these four things is why my work was effective.

After my talk, a few people asked: Were you serious? No doubt you’ve heard Arthur Clarke’s maxim that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Let me propose a related idea: Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from a joke.

At a hotel buffet restaurant near Tsinghua I had fermented food in a form new to me: a miso-soup “bar”. You serve yourself from a tureen of miso soup and have a wide choice of add-ons: carrot, turnip, tofu, pickled ginger, green onion, Japanese pickle. Adding color, visual diversity, crunch, and DIY to the soup makes it taste much better — and it already tastes really good.

If I made a scatterplot of all the foods I can make, with difficulty on one axis and deliciousness on the other, this would be a bivariate outlier: very easy and very delicious.