Seth's Blog

Right now I am tracking 6 things:

1. Sleep. I use a stopwatch and Zeo.
2. Weight. I use three expensive scales.
3. Blood glucose (fasting). I use Abbott’s Freestyle Lite system. I get the blood by pricking my forearm; it’s painless.
4. Brain function. I use an arithmetic test.
5. Morning energy. I rate my energy on a 0-100 scale at 8 am and 9 am.
6. Productivity. I use the percentile feedback system I’ve described.

I keep crude measures of my workouts (on scraps of paper). Two more things I want to track:

1. Inflammation. I would like to measure the redness of my gums. This is possible (take photo, measure redness), but hard.
2. The effects of fermented foods, especially their effect on my immune system. I believe fermented foods differ greatly in potency but I am unable to do any quantification.

At the recent Quantified Self Meetup in Mountain View, Fenn Lipkowitz told me that he had started taking a long list of supplements and now felt much better. At last week’s QS Silicon Valley Meetup, he gave a talk about it. The graph above shows “wellness” ratings before and after the change. (more…)

A diagnosis of stomach cancer and the need for radical surgery led a writer named Anna Stoessinger to plan a series of meals before surgery.  She and her husband care enormously about food:

My husband and I have been known to spend our rent money on the tasting menu at Jean Georges, our savings on caviar or wagyu tartare. We plan our vacations around food — the province of China known for its chicken feet, the village in Turkey that grows the sweetest figs, the town in northwest France with the very best raclette.

Yet in her two-page article she doesn’t mention fermented food even once. (Leaving aside a mention of cheese.) Here are some foods she does mention:

• roast duck, crostini and rich fish stews
• roast chicken with leeks
• roadside cheeseburgers, bonito with ginger sauce, hazelnut gelato
• peanut butter and jelly doughnuts, ginger ice cream, sashimi, grilled porterhouse, wild blueberries
• candy
• foie gras and fig torchon
• butter-poached smoked lobster
• passion fruit coulis
• butter-seared scallops
• wild boar terrine and Guinness vegetable soup with rosemary whipped cream
• apple and cinnamon tarte tartin

Of the thousands of fermented foods, eaten daily by people all over the world from time immemorial, nothing. To me, it’s like she’s had a stroke and has spatial neglect. She is unaware of half the visual field but doesn’t notice anything wrong. The absence of fermented foods from her article reflects the larger near-total absence of fermented foods in American restaurants (both high and low), supermarkets, cookbooks, newspapers, and health advice.

I no longer use cookbooks. I rarely use spices. I make the food I cook taste good by adding fermented foods — for example, miso or yogurt or stinky tofu or fermented bean paste. The result is much tastier than almost anything I can get in restaurants (if I say so myself) and no doubt much healthier.

Ms. Stoessinger’s article reads like a series of boasts: look how much I know and care about food. I think that’s part of the problem: You can’t boast about fermented food. It doesn’t require expensive skilled preparation to taste delicious. You can’t impress guests with fermented food, you just serve it. A bowl of miso soup: big deal. The bacteria made it delicious, not you. So fermented food can’t be a high-end product. Nor can it be a low-end mass-produced product because it takes too long to make, is hard to standardize, and is “objectionable” (e.g., stinky tofu). The growth of our modern food economy has pushed it to the margins, with very bad consequences for our health.

Deborah Estrin is a computer science professor at UCLA. Commenting on my recent post Top and Bottom versus Middle: Schools, China, Health? she said “amen to that”.

I asked her why she agreed. Because she sees the same thing a lot, she said. In particular, performance metrics are often devised by people in the middle, and those metrics tend to serve their interests — and not the interests of everyone else. She gave three examples: 1. Fee for service. Doctors are paid per office visit and per surgery, for example. The bad effects of this are obvious. For example, surgeons are pushed to recommend ill-advised surgeries. 2. Financial instruments, such as derivatives. They were sold to outsiders as ways to reduce risk but we all now know they had the opposite effect. As Michael Lewis puts it, “extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets.” 3. Publications. Professors are rated and promoted and to some extent paid based on how many publications they produce. This pushes them toward “safe” projects that are likely to produce a publication within a reasonable time and away from harder, more important problems.

When you measure yourself you can use whatever metric you want — and thereby a metric that serves your interests.

A reader of this blog started taking flaxseed oil, half a stick of butter daily, and yogurt. “This works wonders,” he wrote me. “It feels like lubricant to the mind.”