Seth's Blog

A recent Cochrane Review summarizes several experiments that measured the effect of Vitamin D on mortality. Here is a summary:

This systematic review analysed the influence of different forms of vitamin D on mortality. In the 50 trials that provided data for our analyses a total of 94,148 participants were randomly assigned to either vitamin D or no treatment or a placebo. All trials came from high-income countries. The mean age of participants was 74 years. The mean proportion of women was 79%. The median duration of vitamin D administration was two years. Our analyses suggested that vitamin D₃ reduces mortality by about 6%,

Vitamin D3 helped; Vitamin D2 and other forms of Vitamin D did not. The doses of Vitamin D3 were usually low: less than 800 IU/day.

Stimulated by Primal Girl’s discovery, I have been taking Vitamin D3 at about 7 am in the morning, slowly increasing the dose to see if there are any clear effects on my sleep (or anything else). I am up to 4000 IU/day.

All cultures, as far as I know, have festivals and special celebratory days. At least they are extremely widespread — harvest festivals, for example. I believe they have a genetic basis. The underlying genes evolved because they increased sales of high-end “useless” stuff. This helped skilled artisans — a big source of technological innovation — make a living. Economists speak of the “deadweight loss” of Christmas because people buy stuff that would otherwise not be bought.

China retail giant Taobao (like Ebay, except better) has shown a shrewd understanding of the festival/shopping link. On Chinese campuses since the 1970s there has been a joke holiday called Singles Day (11-11). For people who are not in a relationship. In 2010 Taobao started having a sitewide sale on that day. This year total sales were $500 million. One retailer, one day. (For comparison, all US online retail sales for the 2010 holiday season were $33 billion.) No crowds, no difficulty parking, no long lines. Still stressful, yes, but in a good way: “This is so exciting – a war and a carnival at the same time,” said one shopper.

To many dieticians and much of the general public, the similarity between butter and eggs is that both are bad for you. Butter: Fattening! Clogs arteries! Eggs: High in cholesterol! To me, it’s the opposite: both seem to be unusually good for us. Butter seems to make my brain work better and may have reduced my risk of heart attack. Eggs — at least, scrambled eggs — are especially well-liked by Mr. T, a rat. There are many similarities between rats and humans. Humans also like eggs. The foods we like are a guide (imperfect) to what foods are good for us.

Here’s another similarity between butter and eggs: Both must be complete — contain all necessary nutrients — much more than any other food. Butter is large part of milk. When mammalian offspring are very young, mother’s milk is their only food. Eggs, of course, must contain everything needed to become a baby chick (as a commenter named Rashad pointed out). No other foods — not fruits, not vegetables, not whatever other foods your great grandmother or other ancestors ate — have been under this sort of evolutionary pressure.

The evolution of lactose tolerance and my butter discoveries.

• Top ten excuses for climate scientists behaving badly. For example, “the emails are old” and “the timing is suspicious”.
• Scientific retractions are increasing. My guess is that retractions are increasing because scientific work has become easier to check. Tools are cheaper, for example.
• More Dutch scientific misconduct. “Professor Poldermans published more than 600 scientific papers in a wide range of journals, including JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine.”
• The next time someone praises “evidence-based medicine”, ask them: What about Accutane? It illustrates how evidence-based medicine encourages dangerous drugs. You can’t make lots of money from cheap, time-tested things that we know to be safe (such as dietary changes) so the drug industry revolves around things that are not time-tested and therefore dangerous  — far more dangerous than dietary changes. Evidence-based medicine, which says that certain tests (expensive) are much better than other tests (cheap), provides cover for this. Because the required tests are so expensive, they are allowed to be short.

Thanks to Allan Jackson.

Two months ago I wrote that camelina oil might be a good source of omega-3. A few days ago, a reader named Evelyn Majidi commented as follows:

Based on this suggestion, I ordered camelina oil from the good farmers in Saskatchewan and began taking it using the same dose (3T/day) that I had been taking of flaxseed oil for relief of psoriasis and lichen planus. Unfortunately, the slow but sure improvement I had been experiencing over the past year with flaxseed oil stopped immediately and after a week my skin and mouth began to deteriorate. After using about 1/4 of a bottle of the new oil I went back to flaxseed and am delighted to report that I am [again] having good results with it. Since both of my conditions wax and wane without any reason identified by medical science I cannot state that it was simply the flaxseed oil that has led to this success. Based on my experience, however, I intend to continue taking the oil regularly and I recommend that others with psoriasis or lichen planus try it. For me, two tablespoons a day were not enough, I needed three tablespoons of the oil to see a change. I don’t think it advisable to take capsules, you’d need to take too many to equal 3T of oil.[emphasis added]

Psoriasis is a skin disease that usually involves “thick, red skin with flaky, silver-white patches called scales”. Lichen planus is “an itchy rash on the skin or in the mouth”. To give some idea of how common they are, psoriasis has 36 million Google hits; lichen planus 1-2 million. (“Heart disease” has 64 million.)

Eveyln’s experience provides four pieces of evidence that suggest flaxseed oil (FSO) improved her psoriasis and lichen planus:

1. When she started taking FSO at 3 T/day, they started improving. They did not improve with 2 T/day.
2. Over the first year of FSO, she saw steady improvement in both in place of the usual up and down.
3. When she replaced FSO with another oil, which she hoped would be better, the results were the opposite of what she wanted: The improvement stopped and the two conditions got worse.
4. When she switched back to FSO, the improvement resumed.

I can think of no plausible alternative to the conclusion that FSO helped. There is plenty of other evidence that supports this conclusion: the evidence that omega-3 is anti-inflammatory, FSO is high in omega-3, most of us don’t get enough omega-3, and so on, including my own experience. You could write a book about the evidence that supports it. (Evelyn tried flaxseed oil because of reports on this blog that it improved/cured bad gums.)

In any case, the conclusion that FSO reduces psoriasis and lichen planus is new, in the sense that FSO (or another source of omega-3) is not a popular treatment for either condition. Here are about 16 treatments for psoriasis, including topical corticosteroids. None includes omega-3. Here are eight “lifestyle and home remedies” for psoriasis, including “take daily baths” (seriously, Mayo Clinic Staff?). None includes omega-3. After going through about forty-odd treatments, I found a reference to fish oil: “Other research has suggested that taking oral fish oil supplements containing 1.8 to 3.6 grams of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) a day may bring improvement.”

Same thing for lichen planus. FSO is not a popular treatment.

If you take flaxseed oil or other omega-3 source to treat psoriasis or lichen planus, I hope you will let me know what happens.