Seth's Blog

• Shangri-La Diet story. “The day before last I had an in n out burger, fries and cream pie. It was my B-day!”
• radiation hormesis and Japan
• speaking of Japan, beauty nose:  lose weight and make your nose more attractive
• Andrew Gelman illustrates how to plot data. Incidentally, time-use data like what Andrew plots led me to discover that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood the next day.
• California State proposed bill to restrict nutritional advice. Registered Dieticians want to put people with ideas different from theirs out of business.
• Bill McKibben calls the science of climate change “the easy part. . . . The scientific method has worked splendidly to outline our dilemma”.
• Steve McIntyre on Climategate
• fermented food in Beijing

Thanks to Peter Spero and VeganKitten.

In an article about Tamiflu, an anti-flu drug developed by Roche, Helen Epstein writes:

[Non-Roche researchers] noticed yet more discrepancies between the articles that had appeared in scientific journals and Roche’s internal documents, many concerning the drug’s safety. According to published articles, no potentially drug-related serious side effects—or “serious adverse events” as they are called—were reported in the papers describing two Roche-sponsored clinical trials in which 908 people took Tamiflu; but according to Roche’s unpublished documents, three “serious adverse events” that were possibly related to Tamiflu occurred in these trials.

In 2008, an article in the journal Drug Safety, signed by a group of Roche authors, claimed that rats and mice, both given a very high dose of Tamiflu, showed no ill effect. But according to documents submitted to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare by Chugai, the Japanese Roche subsidiary, the exact same dose of Tamiflu killed more than half of the animals. As they died, the rats exhibited many of the same central nervous system symptoms that Hama had described in his case series on the Japanese children.

That’s deceptive. Here’s evasive:

“Do the ‘full study reports’” containing all five modules exist?” I asked my correspondent at Roche. “A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer will do.” In reply, she did not say “yes” or “no,” but repeated her claim that the Cochrane group had all the information it needed to analyze the Tamika studies.

This sort of thing is why I don’t trust drug companies. They’re dishonest again and again, with trivial consequences. Epstein’s article would have been even better had she given the names of the Roche employees she criticizes (the authors of the deceptive studies, the evasive correspondent).

Here is a website devoted to a new way to cure Lyme disease: ingesting large amounts of Vitamin C and salt. The website is vague about who made it but it certainly isn’t a for-profit enterprise. It begins:

After 13 years of suffering with Lyme disease, a possible cure has been stumbled upon. A cumulative effect of much research has produced the possibility that salt and vitamin C may be all that is needed to beat this elusive illness. Without going into a lot of detail, our theory is that Lyme is not just a bacterial disease, but also an infestation of microfilarial worms. . . From experimenting with the treatment of salt and vitamin C, we settled on a dosage of 3 grams of salt and 3,000 mg of vitamin C, each dose taken 4 times per day. . . . The Treatment can be grueling; taking it with food may aid in digestion. The results [= the improvement] should be almost instantaneous.

Unsurprisingly, people a naive person might think would be interested turned out to be not be interested:

We have tried on three occasions to get help [= interest in our findings] through the CDC to no avail. The responses were things such as: thanks, we’ll forward to a lyme researcher; or, we don’t accept contributions or downloads from individuals; or, these pictures are obviously fakes. . . . We tried the university routine. A public health researcher put us onto a microbiology chair, who sent us to a CDC parasitologist, who said he wasn’t a clinician and suggested a pathologist. . . . We tried the most noted lyme sites on the web. We were disappointed that most of them seem more concerned with fundraising than disease.

Which sounds like “we” is one person — a man. In any case, I hope “they” will allow outsiders to contribute experiences, perhaps by adding forums to the site. This is terrific work.

Notice the glasses, fingerless gloves, and detached sleeves. According to this website,

Japanese idols are beautiful female Japanese celebrities. Normally singers, actresses and models.

Alex Chernavsky, whose Shangri-La Diet experience I described recently, has recorded his weight for almost ten years, with the results shown in this graph. During that period, he’s changed his diet and exercise several times.

The first change was to a low-carb diet (Atkins-like, with lots of meat and fat). He made this change after reading Gary Taubes’s New York Times article “What If It’s Been A Big Fat Lie?”. As advertised, the low-carb diet caused him to lose a lot of weight but — not as advertised — after about a year he started to regain the lost weight. For other reasons, he changed to a vegetarian and later a vegan diet. They slowed down the weight regain but did not stop it. In 2005 and 2006 he managed by walking a lot — in 2006, 90 minutes/day or more 5 or 6 days every week — to lose almost 30 pounds, but then his weight resumed creeping upward. Then he lost about 30 pounds due to the Shangri-La Diet. He did the diet by drinking 3.5 tablespoons of flaxseed oil instead of lunch. He drank a glass of water afterwards to get rid of the flavor.

I have never seen a weight record this long. It suggests several interesting points:

1. A low-carb diet, as advertised, quickly produces substantial weight loss.

2. Not as advertised, the weight loss is followed by regain after a year or so. This implies that studies of low-carb diets and weight loss need to last several years to give a clear picture of how much weight loss to expect.

3. Low-intensity long-duration exercise (walking for 90 minutes almost daily) causes substantial weight loss. This isn’t surprising.

4. … but it is surprising the effects of the exercise appeared to last at least a few years after the exercise was stopped. I have never seen this reported.

5. The Shangri-La Diet worked well. Alex did the diet somewhat differently than other people so it was not obvious this would be true.

6. After he stopped losing weight on SLD, his rate of weight gain was roughly the same as his rate of gain before he started the diet.