Seth's Blog

This post (“The vitamin deficiency that’s written all over your face”)  by Sarah Pope at Healthy Home Economist is very good. It takes various pieces of data and puts them together to suggest that people who don’t get enough Vitamin K2 will get facial wrinkles sooner. The most interesting data is the difference between women in Shanghai, Bangkok and Tokyo — the Tokyo women had the fewest wrinkles. They eat the most natto, of course, and natto is notoriously high in Vitamin K2. Pope should have added that Tokyo women probably also eat a lot more of other fermented foods than Shanghai and Bangkok women — for example, more pickles and miso.

Another example of the same sort of reasoning:

Further research which bolsters the notion that getting plenty of K2 in the diet makes for smoother facial features is found in the research of Korean scientists and was published in the journal Nephrology in 2008. The rate at which the kidneys are able to filter the blood is an important measure of overall kidney function.  Researchers found that reduced renal filtration rate was associated with increased facial wrinkling. What does decreased kidney filtration rate predict? You guessed it – Vitamin K2 deficiency, according to American research published the year after the Korean study.

I wonder what other nutritional deficiencies poor kidney function is associated with. These associations are far from convincing but it is a new (to me) and testable idea. And Vitamin K2 is quite safe.

• The state of self-tracking by Ernesto Ramirez and Gary Wolf
• Schizophrenia (the negative symptoms) improved by folate and B12 supplementation but only in patients with impaired folate metabolism
• Why more Type 1 diabetes in Finland than neighboring Russia?
• A scientist tries to cure his own cancer
• Resveratrol disappointment
• Where do allergies come from? ”Foreign-born children residing in the United States had half the risk of developing allergies than those who were born here.”

Thanks to Peter McLeod, John Batzel and Joseph Sinatra.

A reader of this blog named PSB, who lives in New Jersey, told me the following:

I’m 52.  I happen to like walnuts and was snacking on them and noticed the pain from canker sores was lessened.  I kept eating [walnuts] the next couple days and found the sores healed quickly, painlessly and were gone within a few days. They usually take quite a while to go away. The walnut thing was accidental and just from observation noticing the change in the sores. The sores are still gone and although I haven’t been eating lots of walnuts, I usually grab them here and there.

Her daughter “has suffered from canker sores for years . . . [and] gets multiple at a time and they are usually very painful.” Her daughter is resistant to eating walnuts. I asked why. “Doesn’t listen to her mother, knows it all and I sometimes thinks she prefers to complain. Other than that, no real reason, hahaha,” said PSB.

I’ve blogged before (here and here) about canker sores cured by omega-3. Walnuts are high in omega-3, supporting what I said. The Mayo Clinic lists eight possible causes of canker sores, including “A diet lacking in Vitamin B-12, zinc, folate (folic acid) or iron”. Nothing about omega-3.

In a review of Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss, a new book about the food industry, David Kamp writes:

The term “bliss point” . . . is used in the soft-drink business to denote the optimal level of sugar at which the beverage is most pleasing to the consumer. . . .

The “Fat” section of “Salt Sugar Fat” is the most disquieting, for, as Moss learns from Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist who runs the Center for Obesity Research at the University of Washington, there is no known bliss point for fat — his test subjects, plied with a drinkable concoction of milk, cream and sugar, kept on chugging ever fattier samples without crying uncle. This realization has had huge implications in the food industry. For example, Moss reports, the big companies have come to understand that “cheese could be added to other food products without any worries that people would walk away.”

By “fat” Moss means animal fat (the fat in cheese, for example). I haven’t seen the book but I’m sure Moss doesn’t consider the possibility that “there is no known bliss point for fat” because people should be eating much more animal fat. In other words, it is hard to detect the bliss point when people are suffering from severe fat deprivation.

My view of how much animal fat I should eat changed abruptly when I found that large amounts of pork fat made me sleep better. One day I ate a lot of pork belly (very high fat) to avoid throwing it away. That night I slept much better than usual. I confirmed the effect experimentally. Later, I found that butter (instead of pork fat) made me faster at a mental test. This strengthened my belief that I should eat much more animal fat than countless nutrition experts have said. (Supporting data.)

My sleep and mental test evidence was clear and strong (in the sense of large t value). The evidence that animal fat is bad (based on epidemiology) is neither. That is one reason I trust what I found rather than what I have been told.

Another reason I trust what I found the fact that people like the taste of fat. That evolution has shaped us to like the taste of something we shouldn’t eat makes no sense. (Surely I don’t have to explain why this doesn’t mean that sugar — not available to prehistoric man — is good for us.) In contrast, it is entirely possible that nutrition experts have gotten things backwards. Epidemiology is a fledgling science and epidemiologists often make mistakes. Their conclusions point in the wrong direction. Here is an example, about the effect of beta-carotene on heart disease:

Epidemiology repeatedly found that people who consumed more beta-carotene had less heart disease. When the idea that beta-carotene reduces heart disease was tested in experiments, the results suggested the opposite: beta-carotene increases heart disease.

“Fat will become the new diet food” (via Hyperlipid).

When I took flaxseed oil capsules for reasons connected with the Shangri-La Diet, I noticed, to my surprise, that my balance improved. The next time I saw my dentist, he told me that my gums were much better. A reader of this blog named Chuck Currie has noticed the same things.

I ran across a reference to your book again which led me to your website. And, like I said, from there to Mark Sisson and all the rest.

I had already ran across information about flax oil and cholesterol and heart health. So I started taking two tablespoons a day [of flaxseed oil] – morning and night. I noticed my balance improvement while doing yoga, but thought it was due to practice. After reading several paleo blogs, I switched to fish oil – one table spoon a day in the morning. Then after reading some other studies regarding possible negative effects of over-consumption of fish oil, I stopped that also.

During this time I really became a strict paleo/primal eater and exerciser. No carbs other than leafy greens and non-starchy vegs. No more chronic cardio. Stopped swimming due to shoulder issues. Started using kettlebells and body weight tabata exercise. Went back and forth on supplementation. My weight dropped to below 120. [He's 5 feet 8 inches tall.]

I was getting totally confused on what was legit and what was BS. Sure I lost weight, but I must have looked sick because people were asking if I was all right. I think they thought I had cancer or AIDS. I felt great though. No more 2 o’clock naps and I slept great. Then I read Kurt Harris’s 2.0 blog and that set me straight – and straight back to your blog.

It made me think, OK what works on the individual level, not the hypothesis level. I had also noticed that my balance had deteriorated (I thought it was because I stopped doing yoga) and my gums were bleeding again – I had forgotten that they had stopped bleeding. [After he switched from flaxseed oil to fish oil, his balance slowly got worse.] Sort of back to basics. Sun, lots of it, or D3 – 10,000 units (I am sitting in the sun as I type this on my iPhone). Omega 3 – your posts about flax oil made sense – [sudden release of short-chain omega-3 causes] slow release [of long-chain omega-3] – and is more sustainable than cold water fish and fish oil. Magnesium at night for better sleep and muscle cramps. (when I first went full paleo, I suffered from terrible leg cramps during the night until I found magnesium). And extra butter – beyond cooking with it.

I tested the flax/balance question by continuing to not practice yoga or any other balancing exercises and [measure my balance] just using my ability to wash my feet in the shower without leaning against the wall – which had been my normal habit before my first improvement and then again when it went away. After about a week – perfect balance – both washing and drying my feet. Also, no gum bleeding. So as some would say, “the shit works”.

[He added later:] I can definitely say, with a high degree of confidence, that my balance is not as good when taking fish oil as it is when taking flax oil. Fish oil does provide a small improvement over not supplementing any omega-3. But the big improvement comes with flax oil.

You have diverticulitis when “diverticula in your digestive tract become inflamed or infected. Diverticula are small, bulging pouches.” A man in his forties named Tuck had a serious case:

In my twenties I got really sick; lying in bed for 5 days, bleeding from the lower part of my digestive tract: not pretty. . . Delirious days later and ten pounds lighter and I was recovered, except for one problem: I had diarrhea for the subsequent 14 years. . . . Two years ago [2008] I passed out on the toilet on a ski weekend. The emergency room at Bennington Hospital [Vermont] told me it was a stomach flu.

Four weeks later I got cramps at work. I had to lie on the floor until it passed. Then I drove to my doctor’s office, and he told me that I had diverticulitis, and I had to go to the emergency room. I drove myself, and barely made it. I was in agony; I nearly passed out again while they were interviewing me to see if it was “serious”. . . . I had a perforated colon. . . . I spent the next four days in the pre-operative ward, so if it got worse they could cut me open immediately. I lost 10 pounds. Then I started bleeding, and I realized these were all the same symptoms that I had had 14 years before. My blood pressure got so low that the automated blood-pressure machine wouldn’t work . . .

I mentioned to all three of the doctors I saw that I had had constant diarrhea for the last 14 years, since the first attack, and they shrugged. They told me to eat more fiber, and whole wheat, even though that was what I had been eating for the last 20 years. So I avoided surgery, started eating salad with salad dressing (containing industrial seed oils) and lots of whole wheat. . . . But the more salad and whole wheat I ate, the worse it got. I couldn’t understand why. Finally had to have eight inches of my colon removed. The diarrhea continued, so obviously the cause remained.

Then something happened that, before blogging, wasn’t possible: (more…)

For a long time, nutrition experts have told us to replace saturated fats (solid at room temperature) with polyunsaturated fats (liquid at room temperature). One polyunsaturated fat is omega-6. Omega-6 is found in large amounts in corn oil, soybean oil, and most other vegetable oils (flaxseed oil is the big exception). According to Eat Drink and Be Healthy (2001) by Walter Willett (and “co-developed with the Harvard School of Public Health”), “replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats is a safe, proven, and delicious way to cut the rates of heart disease” (p. 71). “Plenty of proof for the benefits of unsaturated fats” says a paragraph heading (p. 71). Willett failed to distinguish between omega-3 and omega-6.

A recent study in the BMJ shows how wrong Willett (and thousands like him) were. This study began with the assumption that omega-3 and omega-6 might have different effects, so it was a good idea to try to measure the effect of omega-6 separately.

They reanalyzed data from a study done in Sydney Australia from 1966 to 1973.The study had two groups: (a) a group of men not told to change their diet and (b) a group of men told to eat more omega-6 by eating more safflower oil (and reducing saturated fat intake, keeping overall fat intake roughly constant). The hope was that the change would reduce heart disease, as everyone said.

As these studies go, it was relatively small, only about 500 subjects. The main results:

Compared with the control group, the intervention group had an increased risk of all cause mortality (17.6% v 11.8% [emphasis added]; hazard ratio 1.62 (95% confidence interval 1.00 to 2.64); P=0.051), cardiovascular mortality (17.2% v 11.0%; 1.70 (1.03 to 2.80); P=0.037), and mortality from coronary heart disease (16.3% v 10.1%; 1.74 (1.04 to 2.92); P=0.036).

A 50% increase in death rate! The safflower oil was so damaging that even this small study yielded significant differences.

The authors go on to show that this result (omega-6 is bad for you) is supported by other studies. Walter Willett and countless other experts were quite wrong on the biggest health issue of our time (how to reduce heart disease, the #1 cause of death).

In the 1960s, Edmund Wilson reviewed Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Wilson barely knew Russian and his review was a travesty. Everything was wrong. Nabokov wondered if it had been written that way to make sense when reflected in a mirror.

I thought of this when I read recent remarks by “celiac experts” in the New York Times. The article, about gluten sensitivity, includes an example of a woman who tried a gluten-free diet:

Kristen Golden Testa could be one of the gluten-sensitive. Although she does not have celiac, she adopted a gluten-free diet last year. She says she has lost weight and her allergies have gone away. “It’s just so marked,” said Ms. Golden Testa, who is health program director in California for the Children’s Partnership, a national nonprofit advocacy group. She did not consult a doctor before making the change, and she also does not know [= is unsure] whether avoiding gluten has helped at all. “This is my speculation,” she said. She also gave up sugar at the same time and made an effort to eat more vegetables and nuts.

Fine. The article goes on to quote several “celiac experts” (all medical doctors) who say deeply bizarre things.

“[A gluten-free diet] is not a healthier diet for those who don’t need it,” Dr. Guandalini [medical director of the University of Chicago’s Celiac Disease Center] said. These people “are following a fad, essentially.” He added, “And that’s my biased opinion.”

Where Testa provides a concrete example of health improvement and refrains from making too much of it, Dr. Guandalini does the opposite (provides no examples, makes extreme claims).

Later, the article says this:

Celiac experts urge people to not do what Ms. Golden Testa did — self-diagnose. Should they actually have celiac, tests to diagnose it become unreliable if one is not eating gluten. They also recommend visiting a doctor before starting on a gluten-free diet.

As someone put it in an email to me, “Don’t follow the example of the person who improved her health without expensive, invasive, inconclusive testing. If you think gluten may be a problem in your diet, you should keep eating it and pay someone to test your blood for unreliable markers and scope your gut for evidence of damage. It’s a much better idea than tracking your symptoms and trying a month without gluten, a month back on, then another month without to see if your health improves.”

Are the celiac experts trying to send a message to Edmund Wilson, who died many years ago?

• Interview with Royce White, the basketball player. I agree with him that addictions should be considered mental disorders. I think they are usually self-medication for a mood disorder, such as depression. His view that more than half of Americans have a mental disorder is consistent with my view that you need to see faces in the morning to have your mood control system work properly. Hardly anyone sees enough faces in the morning.
• Racial quotas at Harvard by Ron Unz. “Top officials at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton today strenuously deny the existence of Asian-American quotas, but their predecessors had similarly denied the existence of Jewish quotas in the 1920s, now universally acknowledged to have existed.”
• Traditional Filipino fermented foods (scientific paper)
• Omega-6 supplementation (with concurrent decrease in saturated fat) increases heart disease
• How not to globalize Korean food. For one thing, don’t assume all foreigners are alike.

Thanks to dearime.

A link from dearieme led me to a recent study that found low-carb high-protein diets — presumably used to lose weight — associated with heart disease. The heart disease increase was substantial — as much as 60% in those with the most extreme diets. (A critic of the study, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, called the increase in risk “incredibly small“.) Four other studies of the same question have produced results consistent with this association. No study — at least, no study mentioned in the report — has produced results in the opposite direction (low-carb high-protein diets associated with a decrease in heart disease).

I find this interesting for several reasons.

1. I learned about the study from a Guardian article titled “What doctors won’t do”. A doctor named Tom Smith said, “I would never go on a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet like Atkins, Dukan or Cambridge.” Fine. He didn’t say what he would do to lose weight. The psychological costs of obesity are huge. The popularity of low-carb diets probably has a lot — or everything — to do with the failure of researchers to find something better. I have never seen people who criticize low-carb diets appear aware of this. I disagree with a lot of Good Calories Bad Calories but I completely agree with its criticism of researchers. (more…)