Seth's Blog

I am in Los Angeles for the Ancestral Health Symposium. I am giving a talk called “What Foods Make My Brain Work Best?” Readers of this blog won’t be surprised: I will talk about flaxseed oil, pork fat, and butter. On Thursday, there was a party at Aaron Blaisdell’s house for presenters and volunteers. It was kind of magical to see at the same party Mark Cohen, Gary Taubes, Denise Minger, Mark Sisson, Jimmy Moore, Boyd Eaton, Loren Cordain, Chris Masterjohn, and Tucker Max. Plus others, such as Staffan Lindeberg, whom I didn’t manage to meet. More like an historical tableau in a mural or tapestry than an actual event.

There was more meat than any other party I’ve ever been to. Grilled outside. Mostly steak but also boar and salmon. It was delicious. I wish I knew the name of the grillmaster so I could thank him.

From a BBC documentary called Are We Still Evolving? I learned that after the development of farming there was intense selection in Europe for “lactose tolerance” — meaning the ability to digest lactose as an adult, which requires the enzyme lactase. (The technical name is lactase persistence.) The necessary gene spread rapidly. Now most Europeans have the gene. In Ireland almost everyone has the gene. Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist interviewed on the show, who does research on lactose tolerance, said this:

It’s probably the most advantageous characteristic that Europeans have evolved in the last 30,000 years.. . . The advantage that’s been measured is just incredible, absolutely incredible, how big an advantage it was for these early farmers in Europe.

“Why would drinking milk into adulthood be so strongly selected for?” asked Alice Roberts, the presenter. Thomas replied,

Milk has got lots of energy in it, it’s very nutrient dense, it’s got lots of other goodies, like various vitamins, calcium, and so on. Also, it’s a relatively clean fluid, so it’s much better than drinking stream water or river water or well water or something like that. Another advantage is if you’re growing crops you have a boom and bust in terms of the food supply.

Not a word about butterfat — “lots of energy” is true of all fats. The rapid spread, the “incredible” advantage, suggests that milk supplied something resembling a necessary nutrient. As if everyone had been suffering from scurvy and the new gene allowed them to eat citrus — something like that. Such a gene would spread rapidly.

Does milk supply a necessary nutrient? My results suggest that butter — half a stick (60 g)/day — provides two clear benefits: 1. Better brain function. 2. Less risk of heart disease (probably). As far as I can tell, roughly everyone in America would get these benefits because their diets now lack enough of whatever it is. Both benefits reflect invisible problems. Like everyone else, I had no idea my brain function could be substantially improved and had no idea of my rate of progression (narrowing of arteries) toward atherosclerosis. Only because of unusual tests (the arithmetic test and a “heart scan”) did I notice sudden large improvements when I started eating lots of butter — what you’d expected from addition of a missing necessary nutrient. This explains why Thomas and almost everyone else is unaware of these benefits.

Keep in mind that before I started eating butter, I already ate a high-fat low-carbohydrate diet. Yet I wasn’t getting enough of something in butter. I already ate lots of pork fat. Perhaps the saturated fat in butter is better digested than the saturated fat in pork. Or perhaps the fat profile is better.

If lactose tolerance is so helpful, why are most Asians lactose intolerant? My work suggests two answers: 1. Yogurt. Long ago, Asians ate lots of yogurt. I know the Mongols did. There are present-day indications of this. The Chinese appreciate the value of yogurt more than Americans. Yogurt is more common in Chinese supermarkets than American ones. Yogurt makers are better and more common in China than Europe and America. Lots of Chinese make their own yogurt; as far as I can tell, home yogurt making is more popular in China than America. You can buy a cheap good yogurt maker many places in Beijing, unlike San Francisco. Yogurt provided butterfat. 2. Pork. The Chinese, of course, eat far more pork than Europeans. Unlike cows, pigs supply a cut with a large amount of fat: pork belly. I found it easy to get plenty of pork belly in China and eat it as the main course. Difficulty getting pork belly in the Bay Area is what pushed me to eat butter. This view predicts that European farmers raised more cows than pigs.

Anyway, to summarize, the great advantage conferred by lactose tolerance suggests the great value of something in milk if you eat a European-farmer-like diet. My work supports this; it suggests the crucial ingredient is butterfat. Which many Americans carefully avoid!

Note: The danger posed by the high level of AGEs (advanced glycation endproducts) in butter I don’t know about — but of course this danger has nothing to do with why lactose tolerance was so beneficial. My experience so far (the heart-scan improvement) suggests that that ordinary butter is not “artery-constricting”. Presumably AGEs are formed when milk is pasteurized so I would prefer to eat unpasteurized butter.

In 2009, I had a heart scan — a three-dimensional X-ray. The scan was used to calculate an Agatston score, a measure of arterial plaque. Higher scores mean a higher risk of heart attack. A few months after that, I discovered that butter improves how fast I do arithmetic.

Because butter was good for my brain, I started eating half a stick of butter (66 g) every day. Surely the butter was improving overall brain function. The effect of butter on the rest of my body I didn’t know. However, I thought it was highly unlikely that a food that greatly improves brain function is going to damage the rest of the body. The food you eat, after digestion, goes to the whole body (leaving aside the blood-brain barrier). Every part of the body must have been optimized to work well with the same food.

As I have posted earlier, I had a second heart scan, producing a second Agatston score, about a year after the first one. Amazingly, the second score was better (lower) than the first score. The woman in charge of the testing center said this was very rare — about 1 time in 100. The usual annual increase is about 20 percent.

Now I have gotten more information about the annual rate of change in Agatston scores. The graph above (thanks to Harry Rood) shows data from 40 people who listed their scores at the Track Your Plaque site. It is based on pairs of consecutive scores: it plots change versus level (average?). Because some people provided more than two scores, the data allowed 77 points to be plotted. My two scores were 38 (log 38 = 1.58) and 29 (log 29 = 1.46). So the decrease in log units was 0.12. If you look at the graph, you can see what an outlier this is — as I was told, it really is about 1 in 100.

Here we have the conjunction of two unusual things: 1. Eating half a stick of butter per day. Almost no one eats so much butter. 2. An extremely rare drop in the Agatston score over the same period. A principle of reasoning called Reichenbach’s Common Cause Principle says if two rare events might reflect cause and effect, they probably do. You can think of it like this: Lighting doesn’t strike twice in one place for two different reasons. Indeed, there is other evidence that high levels of saturated fat cause heart-scan improvement (even though this contradicts everything you’ve been told). Mozzafarian et al. (2004) found that in postmenopausal women, “a greater saturated fat intake is associated with less progression of coronary atherosclerosis.” So it is quite plausible that my butter intake improved my Agatston score.

Currently I eat 33 grams (= 45 ml = 3 tablespoons) of flax seed in yogurt twice a day. That’s 66 g/day (which contains about 2 tablespoons of flaxseed oil). I grind it for 30 seconds before adding it to the yogurt. I like yogurt with ground flax seed better than yogurt without it, leaving aside the health benefits.

Unlike flaxseed oil, which must be kept cool, flax seed can be stored at room temperature, which makes a huge difference. I discovered that Chinese flaxseed oil was worthless, presumably because it hadn’t been kept cool. To bring American flaxseed oil to China was a nightmare — lugging it, trying to keep it cool. Chinese flax seed is fine, and not hard to get in Beijing.

Personal science isn’t just self-measurement. In Japan:

Kiyoko Okoshi had a simple goal when she spent about $625 for a dosimeter [that measured radioactivity]: she missed her daughter and grandsons and wanted them to come home. Local officials kept telling her that their remote village was safe, even though it was less than 20 miles from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But her daughter remained dubious, especially since no one from the government had taken radiation readings near their home. (more…)