Seth's Blog

The following comment was left a few days ago:

I was doing SLD using flax seed oil for two weeks before my last dental appointment.  My pockets that were 4′s and 5″s magically changed to 2′s and 3″s.  I had my dentist print both the reports because I was so grateful that they stopped talking about some really painful sounding root work.  My brushing and flossing were totally unchanged.  I was expecting the result because of what I’ve read on the blog, but nothing this good.  I am convinced that taking flax=reduction in gum inflammation, at the very least. [emphasis added]

Take that, “decline effect” (big experimental effects, when the experiment is repeated, get smaller)!

The  commenter sent me the records of the two cleanings. At the pre-flaxseed-oil cleaning (April 28, 2011), he had 24 sites (13 teeth) with pockets of depth 4 or 5. At the cleaning after he started flaxseed oil (July 28, 2011), he had no sites with pockets of depth 4 or 5.

You can find many similar reports here.

Epidemiology has lots of critics. In this article, for example, it is called “lying on a grand scale.” Every critique I have read has ignored history. Epidemiologists have been right about two major issues: 1. Heavy smoking causes lung cancer. 2. Folate deficiency causes birth defects. In both cases, the first evidence was epidemiological. Another example is John Snow’s conclusion about the value of clean water. In my experience, epidemiologists often overstate the strength of their evidence (as do most of us) but overstatement is quite different from having nothing worth saying.

Let’s look at an example. Many people think osteoporosis is due to lack of calcium. Bones are made of calcium, right? The epidemiology of hip fractures is clear. In spite of the conventional idea, the rate of hip fracture has been highest in places where people eat a lot of calcium, such as Sweden, and lowest in places where they eat little, such as Hong Kong. (For example.) In other words, the epidemiology flatly contradicted the conventional idea. This was apparently ignored by nutrition experts (everyone knows correlation does not equal causation) who advised millions of people, especially women, to take calcium supplements  to avoid osteoporosis. Millions of people followed (and follow) that advice.

Thanks to a recent meta-analysis we now know that experiments and better data firmly support the earlier epidemiology, which suggested that calcium supplements are dangerous. Here are its main conclusions:

In meta-analyses of placebo controlled trials of calcium or calcium and vitamin D, complete trial-level data were available for 28,072 participants from eight trials of calcium supplements and the WHI CaD participants not taking personal calcium supplements. . . .Calcium or calcium and vitamin D increased the risk of myocardial infarction (relative risk 1.24 (1.07 to 1.45), P = 0.004) and the composite of myocardial infarction or stroke (1.15 (1.03 to 1.27), P = 0.009). . . . A reassessment of the role of calcium supplements in osteoporosis management is warranted.

If the epidemiology had been taken more seriously, many heart attacks might have been avoided.

Is this an “anecdote” — a single example — proving nothing? Here’s how you can check. Randomly select a meta-analysis of epidemiological studies. Thousands have been done. Then ask if the results summarized in the meta-analysis appear random. Better yet, randomly pick two meta-analyses. Suppose the first summarizes 5 studies and the second summarizes 6. If the 11 results were shuffled together, how well could you assign them correctly?

• More evidence that the SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet) diet really helps people with Crohn’s Disease. “Since starting this diet, I have had no pain. Some might attribute this to surgery, but I am convinced the diet has so much to do with it. My blood work is normal, and it hasn’t been in 8 years. The sed rate level in the blood is normal instead of elevated outrageously.”
• How to improve on lectures when teaching physics.
• More selenium, less risk of cancer. Contrary to what the researcher quoted in this article says, there is already substantial evidence that selenium reduces cancer risk. For example, in a county-by-county map of USA cancer rates, there is a clear rift in the north east. On one side of the rift rates are clearly higher than on the other side of the rift. The rift corresponds to geological fault line. On the low-cancer side of the rift, there is more selenium in the soil. There are also rat experiments. You certainly should take selenium supplements.
• American health care plays a surprisingly large role in an excellent story by Peter Hessler in The New Yorker about the Japanese yakuza (mafia). 1. From 2000 to 2004, four yakuza members got liver transplants at UCLA at a time when liver transplants were hard to get. A few months later they made large donations to UCLA. The money went into a general fund at the surgery department. According to a UCLA spokesperson, there was no connection between the transplants and the donations. According to a UCLA press release, “No money or donation was offered or paid to anyone at UCLA as a quid pro quo for getting a transplant or moving up on the list.” Because a general fund is not a person, this is literally true. 2. In the early 1990s, at a Columbia, Missouri hospital, a nurse was suspected of killing patients. Hospital administrators covered it up. “Everyone took part in the coverup was promoted, everybody who tried to expose it was punished,” said someone who tried to expose it.

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

• omega-3 blood levels correlated with better mental performance in the elderly. “The team found that people who had higher blood levels of vitamins B, C, D and E and omega-3 fatty acids scored higher on the mental-function tests, including attention tasks and visual and spatial skills, than those with lower levels of these nutrients.”
• “Inflammation, atherosclerosis, and coronary artery disease.” An influential New England Journal of Medicine article from 2005. The next time someone tells you that heart disease is due to high cholesterol, refer them to this article.
• Weak evidence that bacteria in food stimulate the immune system. Indian women who ate yogurt to which a probiotic had been added had more of an immune-related molecule in their feces than before and after that ingestion.
• Speaking of India, do medical students who gain admission by fraud become dangerous doctors? India has a problem.

Thanks to Tim Beneke.

A blog called Adventures in Nutritional Therapy (started March 2011) is about what the author learned while trying to solve her health problems via nutrition and a few other things. She usually assumed her health problems were due to too much or too little of some nutrient. She puts it like this: “using mostly non-prescription, over-the-counter (OTC) supplements and treatments to address depression, brain fog, insomnia, migraines, hypothyroidism, restless legs, carpal tunnel syndrome, and a bunch of other annoyances.” In contrast to what “the American medical establishment” advises. Mostly it is nutritional self-experimentation about a wide range of health problems.

Interesting things I learned from the archives:

1. Question: Did Lance Armstrong take performance-enhancing drugs? I learned that LiveStrong (Armstrong’s site) is a content farm. Now answer that question again.

2. “If you return repeatedly to a conventional doctor with a problem they can’t solve, they will eventually suggest you need antidepressants.”

3.  “When I mentioned [to Dr. CFS] the mild success I’d had with zinc, he said it was in my mind: I wanted it to work and it did. When I pointed out that 70% of the things I tried didn’t work, he changed the subject. Dr. CFS’ lack of basic reasoning skills did nothing to rebuild my confidence in the health care system.” Quite right. I have had the same experience. Most things I tried failed. When something finally worked, it could hardly be a placebo effect. This line of reasoning has been difficult for some supposedly smart people to grasp.

4. A list of things that helped her with depression. “Quit gluten” is number one.

5. Pepsi caused her to get acne. Same here.

6. 100 mg/day of iron caused terrible acne that persisted for weeks after she stopped taking the iron.

7. “In September 2008 I started a journey that serves as a good example of the limits of the American health care system, where you can go through three months, 15 doctor visits, $7,000 in medical tests, three prescriptions and five over-the-counter medications trying to treat your abdominal pain, and after you lose ten pounds due to said pain, you are asked by the “specialists” if you have an eating disorder.” I agree. Also an example of the inability of people within the American health care system to see those limits.  If they recognized that people outside their belief system might have something valuable to contribute, apparently something awful would happen.

8. Acupuncture relieved her sciatica, but not for long. “By the time I left [the acupuncturist's office] the pain was gone, but it crept back during my 30-minute drive home.”

9. Pointing out many wrongs does not equal a right. She praises a talk by Robert Lustig about evil fructose. I am quite sure that fructose (by itself) did not cause the obesity epidemic. For one thing, I lost a lot of weight by drinking it. (Here is an advanced discussion.) In other words, being a good critic of other people’s work (as Lustig may be) doesn’t get you very far. I think it is hard for non-scientists (and even some scientists) to understand that all scientific work has dozens of “flaws”. Pointing out the flaws in this or that is little help, unless those flaws haven’t been noticed. What usually helps isn’t seeing flaws, it is seeing what can be learned.

10. A list of what caused headaches and migraines. One was MSG. Another was Vitamin D3, because it made her Vitamin B1 level too low.

She is a good writer. Mostly I found support for my beliefs: 1. Of the two aspects of self-experimentation (measure, change),  change is more powerful. She does little or no self-tracking  (= keeping records) as far as I could tell, yet has made a lot of progress. She has done a huge amount of trying different things. 2. Nutritional deficiencies cause a lot of problems. 3. Fermented food is overlooked. She never tries it, in spite of major digestive problems. She does try probiotics. 4. American health care is exceedingly messed-up. As she puts it, “the American medical establishment has no interest in this approach [which often helped her] and, when they do deign to discuss it, don’t know what the #%@! they’re talking about.” 5. “Over the years I’ve found accounts of personal experiences to be very helpful.” I agree. Her blog and mine are full of them.

Thanks to Alexandra Carmichael.

More Her latest post mentions me (“The fella after my own heart is Seth Roberts, who after ten years of experimenting . . . “). I was unaware of that when I wrote the above.