Seth's Blog

A reader named Nicole, who lives in Washington D.C., writes:

I have been an avid follower of Seth’s blog since Boingboing.net first posted something about or by him. And when I heard that my brother was planning to get my niece’s tonsils removed, I remembered the Boingboing article Seth wrote about tonsils and their important, if not completely understood, role as part of our immune system. So I sent that article along. My brother responded quickly with: “Wow, thanks. I won’t be getting her tonsils out any time soon.”

Nice to hear!

Patrick Tucker, an editor at The Futurist, posted a request on the Quantified Self Forums for “astounding” predictions based on self-quantification. He is writing a book about using data to make predictions.

Here are examples from my self-measurement:

1. Drinking sugar water causes weight loss. The self-quantification was measuring my weight. It began when I found a new way to lose weight, which pushed me to try to explain why it worked. The explanation I came up with — a new theory of weight control — made two predictions that via self-experimentation I found to be true. That gave me faith in the theory. Then the theory suggested a really surprising conclusion, that loss of appetite during a trip to Paris was due to the sugar-sweetened soft drinks I had been drinking. If so, drinking sugar water should cause weight loss. (The nearly-universal belief is that sugar causes weight gain, of course.) I tested this prediction and it was true. More.

2. Seeing faces in the morning improves mood the next day (but not the same day). This is so surprising I’ll spell it out: Seeing faces Monday morning improves my mood on Tuesday but not Monday. For years I measured my sleep trying to reduce early awakening. Finally I figured out that not eating breakfast helped. There was no breakfast during the Stone Age; this led me to take seriously the idea that other non-Stone-Age aspects of my life were also hurting my sleep. That was one reason I decided to watch to watch a certain TV show one morning. It had no immediate effect. However, the next morning I woke up feeling great. Via self-measurement of mood, I determined it was the faces on TV that produced the effect, confirmed the effect many times, and learned what details of the situation (e.g., face size) controlled the effect. More.

3. One-legged standing improves sleep. Via self-measurement I determined that how much I stood during a day controlled how well I slept. If I stood a long time, I slept better. Ten years later I woke one day after having slept much better than usual. The previous day had been unusual in many ways. One of them was so tiny that at first I overlooked it: I had stood on one leg a few times. Just for a few minutes. Yet it turned out that it was the one-legged standing that had improved my sleep. Without the previous work on ordinary standing I would have ignored the one-legged standing — it seemed trivial.

4. Butter is healthy. I found that butter improved how fast I can do arithmetic problems. No doubt it improves brain function measured in other ways. Because the optimum nutrition for the brain will be close to the optimum nutrition for the rest of the body — at least, this is what I believe — I predict that butter will turn out to be healthy for my whole body, not just my brain.

5. Mainstream Vitamin D research is all messed up. Via self-measurement I confirmed Tara Grant’s conclusion that taking Vitamin D3 in the morning (rather than later) improved her sleep. It improved my sleep, too. When I had taken it at other times of day I had noticed nothing. Apparently the timing of Vitamin D — the time of day that you take it — matters enormously. Take it at the right time in the morning: obvious good effect. Take it late in the evening: obvious bad effect. Vitamin D researchers haven’t realized this. They have neither controlled when Vitamin D is taken (in experiments) nor measured when it is taken (in surveys). Because timing matters so much it is as if they have done their research failing to control or measure dose. If you fail to control/measure dose, whatever conclusion you reach (good/no effect/bad) depends entirely on what dose your subjects happened to take. And you have no idea what dose that is.

The newly-released climate scientist emails (called Climategate 2.0) from University of East Anglia (Phil Jones) and elsewhere (Michael Mann and others) show that top climate scientists agree with me. Like me (see my posts on global warming), they think the evidence that humans have caused dangerous global warming is weaker than claimed. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they kept their doubts to themselves: “I just refused to give an exclusive interview to SPIEGEL because I will not cause damage for climate science.”

This is a big reason I have found self-experimentation useful. It showed me that experts exaggerate, that they overstate their certainty. At first I was shocked. My first useful self-experimental results were about acne. I found that one of the two drugs my dermatologist had prescribed didn’t work. He hadn’t said This might not work. He didn’t try to find out if it worked. He appeared surprised (and said “why did you do that?”) when I told him it didn’t work. Another useful self-experimental result was breakfast caused me to wake up too early. Breakfast is widely praised by dieticians (“the most important meal of the day”). I have never heard a dietician say It could hurt your sleep or even a modest There’s a lot we don’t know. My discoveries about morning faces and mood are utterly different than what psychiatrists and psychotherapists say about depression.

As anyone paying attention has noticed, it isn’t just climate scientists, doctors, dieticians, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists. How can you tell when an expert is exaggerating? His lips move. There are two types of journalism: 1. Trusts experts. 2. Doesn’t trust experts. I suggest using colored headlines to make them easy to distinguish: red = trusts experts, green = doesn’t trust experts.

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.”

When The Shangri-La Diet was published (2006), I enjoyed checking its Amazon rank. The rank got worse. I checked less often. Eventually it was usually above 100,000 and I barely checked at all.

A few months ago, I noticed it was much better than I expected — maybe 40,000. How did that happen? Were sales improving? To find out, I subscribed to RankTracer, which records Amazon rank every hour and plots the results. (more…)

For an article about self-experimentation and self-tracking to appear in Men’s Fitness UK this summer, Mark Bailey sent me several questions.

In what ways have the results of your self-experimentation directly affected your daily life e.g. health / work / lifestyle changes?

1. Acne. My dermatologist prescribed two medicines. I found that one worked , the other didn’t.
2. Weight. Found new ways to lose weight (e.g., nose-clipping).
3. Sleep. Found new ways to sleep more deeply, avoid early awakening (e.g., one-legged standing).
4. Mood, energy, serenity. Found that morning faces make me more cheerful, more energetic, and more serene.
5. Productivity. After I started to track when I was working, I discovered that a certain feedback system made me work more, goof off less.
6. Inflammation. Self-experimentation led me to take flaxseed oil. In the right dose — which I determined via self-experimentation — it greatly reduces inflammation. As a result, my gums are pink instead of red. They no longer bleed when I floss.
7. Balance, reflexes. Flaxseed oil improved my balance and quickened my reflexes — I catch what I would have dropped.
8. Blood sugar. I found that walking a lot improves my blood sugar level.
9. Mental clarity. I found that flaxseed oil and butter improve how well my brain works in several ways.

Changes 1-6 are/were obvious. The rest are more subtle.

(more…)

On my Psychology Today blog someone left a surprising comment about why the Shangri-La Diet isn’t more popular:

Seth, I’ll tell you why. Because we are majorly competitive bitches, we women who care about our appearance. I’m 41, I have three children and I am a size 6. I fit into my wedding dress and the jeans I wore in college. How? Shangri-La. And there is no way in hell I am going to share my secret with anyone.

Went to the movies this weekend with a group of friends. They had the usual movie fare, I ordered a cup of tea (bag on the side), added two tablespoons of sugar (put the teabag in my purse for later), sipped it slowly throughout the movie, had not ONE craving for the popcorn or nachos or M&M’s everyone else was scarfing. I went home and had a light dinner and felt terrific!

Sounds more like an ad than an actual comment, but it could hardly be more vivid and I believe it.

I will always remember the day (today) my work appeared in a graphic-design magazine.

During the last half of 2010, I noticed today, hits at the Shangri-La Diet forums steadily increased. The number of hits went from about 300,000 in July to about 500,000 in December.

Before that the number of hits had steadily declined from a high of about 900,000 in August 2009. The number of hits had tended to be higher in the summer so the recent increase is counter-seasonal.

I am looking forward to reading Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us — And How to Know When Not to Trust Them by David Freedman because of this sentence in an excerpt:

Cancer experts shake their heads today over the ways in which generations of predecessors wasted decades hunting down the mythical environmental or viral roots of most cancers, before pronouncing as a sure thing the more recent theory [that] cancer is caused by mutations in a small number of genes — a theory that, as we’ll see, has yielded almost no benefits to patients after two decades.

He’s referring to the oncogene theory of cancer, for which Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus won a Nobel Prize in 1989.  I made a similar comment at a dinner:

Several years ago, at a big Thanksgiving dinner in an Oakland loft, I told the woman sitting next to me, a genetic counselor, what a travesty the Biology [Nobel] prizes were. The discovery that smoking causes lung cancer had improved the lives of millions of people, I said [yet the discoverers hadn't gotten a Nobel Prize]; the discovery of so-called oncogenes hadn’t improved the life of even one person. She replied that she was the sister of [Harold Varmus]. The next day I learned she complained I had been rude!

I’m glad Freedman agrees with me. My low opinion of oncogene theory didn’t prevent Varmus from becoming head of the National Institutes of Health, whose recent budget was about $30 billion/year.

Thanks to Kathy Tucker.