Seth's Blog

This sidebar appeared in an article about self-tracking (only for subscribers) by James Kennedy, who works at The Future Laboratory in London. The top photo is at a market near my apartment. Below that are photos of my sleep records, my morning-faces setup, my butter, and my kombucha brewing jars. Back then I was comparing three amounts of sugar (each jar a different amount). Now I’m comparing green tea/black tea ratios.

• Benefits of fermented wheat germ extract
• Why Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is unlikely. A list of AGW-associated “miracles”. Some of my favorites: “Unique among all sciences, climatology develops yet finds no surprises whatsoever, apart from when it’s worse than we thought” and “AGW is a grave threat to humanity, yet it can take the backseat when AGWers have to score their petty points (such as not sharing their data with the “wrong” people)” and “Having won an Oscar, a Nobel Prize and innumerable awards, having occupied more or less every audio or video broadcast for years, having had the run of more or less every newspaper for the same length of time, suddenly AGW leaders declare they’re not “great communicators” and blame this for the generally high levels of skepticism.”
• Denmark has started to tax butter. “To discourage poor eating habits and raise revenue.”
• Life-saving personal science: Mom figures out cause of daughter’s problems. “One spring night in 2002, she stumbled upon an old photocopy of a 1991 Los Angeles Times article that described a young girl whose condition had uncanny parallels with [her daughter’s].”

Thanks to David Cramer.

• Lard chic. ““I might have a cold,” she says. “Eat this, then,” I say, proffering a piece of hot toast with a thin, transparent slice of cured pork fat.”
• Skeptical Science is a blog devoted to rebutting every argument offered by AGW skeptics like me. Bishop Hill points out that after two comments were critical of a post about Antarctic ice,  the post was rewritten. Rather than point out the rewriting, replies were added to the critical comments saying that the commenters hadn’t read the post (“read and reread the post above”).
• Nobel Laureates Behaving Badly. “In his Nobel Prize Lecture of December 12, 1946, Hermann J. Muller argued that the dose–response for radiation-induced germ cell mutations was linear and that there was ‘‘no escape from the conclusion that there is no  threshold [below which radiation is harmless]“. However, assessment of correspondence between Muller and Curt Stern 1 month prior to his Nobel Prize Lecture reveals that Muller knew the results and implications of a recently completed study at the University of Rochester under the direction of Stern, which directly contradicted his Nobel Prize Lecture.” This is related to radiation hormesis — the observation that low doses of radiation are beneficial. Airport screening may be making people healthier.
• Harvard’s “Healthy Eating Plate”. No fermented food, nothing about omega-3 (beyond the recommendation of fish). “Limit butter”.  “Stay active” but nothing about sleep.
• Dangers of compact fluorescent lighting.

Thanks to Steve Hansen and Anne Weiss.

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.”

Yesterday I was telling a relative about the Ancestral Health Symposium and I mentioned the emphasis on meat eating — for example, two vendors gave out samples of beef jerky. To most people, I think paleo means eating lots of meat. I told my relative I disagreed with this. I find nothing wonderful about meat protein; I would happily get my protein from plants.  I eat meat almost only for the associated fat. Which I can get from butter. A lot of meat I am served, such as in fancy restaurants, strikes me as too low in fat. Yesterday I requested butter at a sushi restaurant. The waitress was unsure if they had some.

Today I see Melissa McEwen said the same thing much better:

It was interesting to observe that [at the Ancestral Health Symposium] among the low-carbers, there seemed to be an epidemic of puffy red skin, particularly in older men. I’m sure the pictures, when they are posted, will make obvious who these people are.  The ones who had healthy complexions like the Eades and Nora are those espousing a high-fat diet. It goes very well with some of the anthropological stuff I’ve been working on showing that almost all cultures that eat meaty diets are doing so because they have access to high-fat game.

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.

Last night I slept unusually well, waking up more rested and with more energy than usual.  I slept longer than usual: 7.0 hours versus my usual 5.1 hours (median of the previous 20 days).  My rating of how rested I felt was 99.2% (that is, 99.2% of fully rested); the median of the previous 20 days is 98.8%. Because the maximum is 100%, this is really a comparison of 0.8% (this morning) with 1.2% (previous mornings); and the comparison is not adjusted for the number of times I stood on one leg to exhaustion, which improves this rating. During the previous 20 days I often stood on one leg to exhaustion six times; yesterday I only did it four times. Above all, I felt more energy in the morning. This was obvious. I have just started to measure this.  At 8 am and 9 am, I rate my energy on a 0-100 scale where 50 = neither sluggish nor energetic/energized, 60 = slightly energetic/energized, 70 = somewhat energetic/energized, and 75 = energetic/energized. My ratings this morning were 73 (8 am) and 74 (9 am). The median of my 9 previous ratings is 62. The energy improvement (73/74 vs 62) is why I am curious. I would like to feel this way every morning.

What caused it? I had not exercised the previous day. My room was no darker than usual. My flaxseed oil intake was no different than usual. I had not eaten more pork fat than usual. However, four things had been different than usual:

1. 2 tablespoons of butter at lunch. In addition to my usual 4 tablespoons per day.

2. 0.5-1 tablespoons of butter at bedtime. Again, in addition the usual 4.

3. 1 tablespoon (15 g) coconut butter at bedtime. Part of a longer study of the effect of coconut butter. Gary Taubes suggested this. I had eaten 1 T coconut butter at bedtime 13 previous days. On the first of those 13 days, I had felt a lot more energetic than usual in the morning. On the remaining days, however, the improvement was less clear. I started measuring how energetic I felt in the morning to study this further. Last night was Friday night. On the previous two nights (Wednesday and Thursday) I had not eaten the coconut butter. Maybe absence of coconut butter followed by resumption of coconut butter is the cause.

4. Fresh air and ambient noise. Following a friend’s suggestion, I opened one of my bedroom windows.

My first question is whether the improvement is repeatable. If so, I will start to vary these four factors.

• Top uses of natto
• I found Three Cups of Tea (about establishing schools in Pakistan) unreadable. Whereas I want to learn more about Pratham schools.
• Stagnation in claims about climate-change skeptics (such as me)
• “A 51-year-old physician colleague who looked the picture of health—no cardiovascular risks, a marathon runner who had exercised vigorously each day for 30 years—had just flunked a calcium screening scan of his heart” (link). After I started doing the “wrong” thing (eat half a stick of butter per day) my calcium screening score substantially improved.
• more about scientific fraud at Duke University

In Ayurvedic medicine (Indian traditional medicine), ghee, a type of clarified butter, is believed to improve brain function. For example, “Vedic medicine extols the virtues of ghee and dairy for the brain.” I found that butter improved how fast I could do arithmetic.