Seth's Blog

A new study has found that persons with Laron Syndrome (a kind of dwarfism) get almost no acne. Persons with this syndrome, because of a mutation, are insensitive to growth hormone. As a result, they produce much less IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor) than normal. When given synthetic IGF, they may develop acne; when the dose is reduced, the acne goes away. The authors say: “The findings suggest that an interaction between IGF-1 and androgens is necessary for the development of acne.” This is great progress because people with Laron Syndrome are different from everyone else in just one tiny way (albeit a tiny way with many consequences).

The first important step in understanding the cause of acne was finding two (“primitive”) groups of people with no acne. This suggested that acne has an environmental cause. There were thousands of differences between the lifestyle of those people and “modern” people, so this was just a start. It was hard to know which differences mattered. The Laron Syndrome finding is consistent with the earlier result (no acne in two groups of “primitive” people) because a “Western diet with [its] high intake of hyperglycemic carbohydrates and insulinotropic dairy over-stimulates IIS” (insulin-like/insulin signaling).

This view predicts that if you replace hyperglycemic foods with foods lower in glycemic index acne should be reduced. This study did that and, indeed, acne decreased (compared to a control group) after ten weeks. The study ended after ten weeks. The patient who reduced his/her glycemic index the most saw the greatest decrease in acne. A second study found the same thing: a low-glycemic-index diet reduced acne. It lasted twelve weeks. With longer follow-up, there might have been even more improvement.

Thanks to Paul Nash.

• Trying to crowd-source a cure for brain cancer.
• Interview with Aaron Blaisdell about Ancestral Health Symposiums
• Plagiarism Today, a website.
• Plagiarism averted
• Better late than never. By having him do a Fiction Podcast, the editors of The New Yorker finally acknowledge that David Sedaris is a fabulist. Treating his stories as if they actually happened (putting them under Personal History, not Fiction) was a curious editorial decision for a magazine that fact-checks poetry. Step 2 toward more New Yorker editorial honesty:  Book excerpts are labelled as such.
• self-experimentation workshop in Silicon Valley

Thanks to Dave Lull.

• Five quantified-self stories
• False Alzheimer’s diagnosis. “Alzheimer’s symptoms such as confusion, memory loss and personality changes also can be side effects from medication—even commonly used drugs. For example, the entire class of anticholinergic drugs, which includes many antihistamines, antianxiety drugs, muscle relaxants and sleeping pills . . . Cholesterol-reducing statins have also been linked to brain fog in some people. In many cases, the cognitive symptoms vanish when medication is stopped. “I have had people referred to me with a clear history of dementia and when I started to peel back the medications, they were much better,” says Gary Kennedy, chief of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y.”
• Ancestral Health Symposium 2012 (Boston) recaps. I thought Robb Wolf’s talk was excellent. Jay Stanton had original ideas about weight control. Most of the other talks, not so much.

Parkinson’s disease often runs in families and some of the genes responsible have been identified. One is called PINK1. A new fruit fly model uses fruit flies with a similar genetic defect.

Patrik Verstreken and his team used fruitflies with a genetic defect in PINK1 or Parkin that is similar to the one associated with Parkinson’s. They found that the flies with a PINK1 or Parkin mutation lost their ability to fly.

Upon closer examination, they discovered that the mitochondria in these flies were defective, just as in Parkinson’s patients.  Because of this they generated less intracellular energy – energy the insects needed to fly. When the flies were given vitamin K2, the energy production in their mitochondria was restored and the insects’ ability to fly improved. The researchers were also able to determine that the energy production was restored because the vitamin K2 had improved electron transport in the mitochondria.  This in turn led to improved energy production.

The obvious conclusion is that some Parkinson’s patients may benefit from eating more Vitamin K2. Less obvious and less certain is that our diets contained more K2 in the past (so that the various genes that now cause Parkinson’s were rendered harmless).  Warren Buffet famously said about risk exposure: “”It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked”. Likewise, changes in diet (such as reduction in K2 intake) expose disease-causing genes. I have made this point several times. It is counter-intuitive that disease-gene linkages suggest bad environmental changes.

Thanks to Melissa McEwen.

In this post a contract artist who calls himself Wolverine gives a long list of life-threatening medical errors that happened to him. I hope that he will eventually add dates so that the rate of error becomes clearer [more: all the errors happened within a 14-month period] but even without them the stories suggest that life-threatening errors are common. (As does the effectiveness of surgical checklists.) Medicine is a job where if you make a mistake only the customer suffers not you. Surely this is why the error rate is so high. Wolverine was operated on by a surgeon who, because of a fatal error, had lost his license to practice in California. He changed states, was hired again, and made the same error on Wolverine.

I learned about this from Tucker Goodrich, who has been corresponding with the author and told me something remarkable:

He’s eating a paleo with raw milk diet.  The other transplant patients he knows are all eating the modern American diet and dying of infections; he’s been infection-free for two years.

• more health, less profit?
• Long interesting review of Michael Mann’s new book. “The controversy is actually very simple. Mann’s papers give undue focus to a small amount of data.”
• excellent article in The Smithsonian about fermentation. “We’re trying to see if there’s a way to get more of that umami richness and less fishiness.”
• Flaxseed in Human Nutrition (1995 book).
• Spy magazine highlights.

Thanks to Tom George and Mark Griffith.

• The advantages of raquetball self-education
• Nassim Taleb on British economic governance. I like the idea of a list of firms that will be bailed out.
• Lactofermented mayonnaise. “[Without fermentation this] will only last for about a week in the refrigerator. On the other hand, [if fermented (7-12 hours at room temperature), it] will last about 6-8 weeks or longer.”
• Cosmic rays and cloud formation. Does cosmic ray variation cause global temperature variation?
• Man the opportunist by Melissa McEwen
• WSJ anti-AGW letter writers respond to critics.

Thanks to Ryan Holiday, Matt Cassel, Tom George and Dave Lull.

• Comparing one elbow to the other. I have no idea what “clinical epidemiology” is. The level of self-deprecation is remarkable. From the BMJ Christmas issue.
• The value of cod liver oil. From the BMJ Christmas issue.
• More evidence for radiation hormesis (beneficial effects of small amounts of radiation).
• Evolutionary medicine reaches the BMJ. The word paleo does not appear.
• Medical journals: “information-laundering operations for drug companies”

Thanks to Robin Barooah and Mike Bowerman.

I wrote recently about how our health care system resembles a protection racket. In a protection racket, you or someone else threatens people so that you can make money protecting them. Modern health care, especially in America, ignores prevention. It says let them get sick. Let the general public get sick so that we (health care providers) can make money treating them.

The profitability of let them get sick is illustrated by some numbers in Run Barefoot Run Healthy, a new book by Ashish Mukharji  (who gave me a copy). Ashish has run several marathons. Before he started running barefoot, running caused all sorts of problems. To deal with them was costly:

• Two or three pairs of orthotics (a type of insole): $200-$300 each.
• One MRI, for what turned out to be ITBS (Iliotibial Band Syndrome, a thigh injury): around $1,000.
• Twenty or more deep-tissue massage treatments for ITBS: around $80 each.
• Corns removed (twice): $500 per treatment.
• Twenty or more sessions of physical therapy for ITBS and Achilles tendonitis: $100-$250 per session.
• Several visits to orthopedists and podiatrists: $150 per visit.
• Cortisone injection for plantar fasciitis: $200.

Since he started barefoot running (3 years and 2 marathons ago), he has incurred no (zero) running-injury expenses. Interviews with other barefoot runners convince him this is typical. Long ago a runner friend of mine told me everyone who runs eventually hurts themselves. The truth of this was confirmed many times by runners I met after she said this. Now it appears she was right because all the runners she and I knew wore shoes.

I started barefoot running/walking on my treadmill a year ago. I have never had running injuries (probably because I walk — uphill fast — much more than run). Going barefoot saved time. During the first few months, I got four or five cuts (actually, splits) on the sides of my feet. The skin was split by  downward pressure. The cuts made ordinary walking (in shoes) a little unpleasant. I did nothing  about them. They healed and have not recurred.

A better health care system would have discovered the damage caused by running shoes long ago. We are lucky to live when personal scientists such as Ashish can figure out the truth themselves and tell others.

• Western Governors University: An innovative online university focused on students.
• Tucker Max’s talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium about the paleo movement’s neglect of fighting
• Van Gogh is Bipolar, a restaurant in Quezon City, the Philippines.
• “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” The Rockefellers by Edward Jay Epstein.