Seth's Blog

Greg Pomerantz writes:

Over the Thanksgiving [2012] holiday, I suggested to a relative, Richard, that he try the Shangri-la Diet. At the time I had heard about it but did not know anyone who had tried it. I did not have any particular reason to think it would work, but since Rich had tried a number of other diets (including low carb, which he is still following for the most part) I thought it would be worth a shot.

He started the diet over the Thanksgiving holiday and has kept it up since then with a few breaks. He lost 13 pounds in the first month and another 6 pounds over the next two weeks. Altogether he lost a total of 32 pounds over the 16 weeks following Thanksgiving, an average of 2 pounds per week. During this period, he traveled a fair amount and was not able to maintain the diet every day. However, he reported that one of his favorite things about the Shangri-la Diet is how easy it is to restart after a lapse. He began using extra light olive oil but has switched to walnut oil.

There were two surprising results other than the weight loss (which I think is exceptional in its own right). First, his blood sugar control has improved, even compared to the low carbohydrate diet he was (and still is) consuming. Second, he has been sleeping better at night due to a reduction in his nighttime appetite. I believe the two may be related — one of his medications for type 2 diabetes greatly increases his appetite and causes weight gain. He has been using much less of that medication because of his improved blood sugar on the Shangri-la Diet. Therefore, reduced appetite from the diet plus a reduction in an appetite-increasing medication results in lower nighttime appetite and therefore better sleep.

Kim Øyhus, a programmer who lives in Norway, writes:

Each midwinter and summer I tend to lose my feeling of when it is day or night, especially if I am in the northern parts of Norway, or if the weather is dark clouds for a long time, which often happens. So sorry, no statistics, just my sense of being unhinged from the diurnal cycle.

Taking 1-2 spoons [= 7-14 ml] of cod liver oil in the morning [7-9 am] got me back to this rhythm in about 3-5 hours. It even works for fixing my diurnal rhythm after partying to sunrise, but only after a days rest.

Is this due to Vitamin D3? (I have collected many examples of Vitamin D3 in the morning improving sleep.) Quite possibly. Cod liver oil contains Vitamin D3. When taking a Vitamin D3 supplement, the minimum dose needed to see the effect, based on the examples I’ve collected, seems to be about 1000 IU. I didn’t notice anything when I took 2000 IU. The effect first appeared at a dose of 4000 IU and was a bit larger at 6000 IU. Kim is taking 600-1100 IU of Vitamin D3, so that is consistent with the Vitamin D3 in the cod liver oil being the source of the effect.

• Fermentation forum
• Fruit and vegetable consumption today predicts happiness tomorrow
• multiple sclerosis and mercury exposure
• some bacteria protect against acne — a good reason to not take antibiotics for acne
• A fecal transplant eliminated a serious intestinal infection (in mice)
• The Iris Code (a 2004 article about Iris Chang)
• Zeo (sleep tracking) out of business

Thanks to Paul Nash and Adam Clemens.

• Why do few journalists become politicians?
• Another crowd-funded human microbiome project (in addition to American Gut, which I’ve mentioned earlier)
• Psychiatrist keeps prescribing Adderall to boy in spite of warnings from the boy’s parents that he’s addicted
• Life-logging workshop in Rome. “This creation of lifelogs . . . will enable us to better understand ourselves.”
• Indian fermented food
• Sleep helps solve difficult problems but not easy ones

Thanks to Dave Lull , Bryan Castañeda, Patrick Vlaskovits and Tucker Max.

• Interview with Jane Jacobs about The Nature of Economies. “Canada should seriously study Iceland.”
• A month with no electric light. The post is titled “a month with no artificial light” but candles are used.
• Adventures in nutritional therapy. “A record of my successes and failures trying to solve a bunch of health annoyances without resorting to prescription drugs.” I’ve linked here before but there’s lots of new stuff.
• Did you know that the inventor of the Heimlich maneuver did AIDS research?
• Falling off the 5:2 diet program (fasting 2 days per week), popularized by the Horizon TV program Eat Fast and Live Longer. It produced only a little weight loss and the other benefits were invisible.
• Great article about the connection between childhood lead exposure and adult crime rate.

Thanks to Hal Pashler.

• The Data Vigilante
• Unnecessary wisdom tooth extractions
• How American medicine is destroying itself (their title, not mine). “Look at the “breakthroughs” that have been predicted for such scientific sure things as stem-cell technology and medical genetics—but have yet to be realized. . . Our [= American medicine's] main achievements today consist of devising ways to marginally extend the lives of the very sick.”
• New kind of light bulb, matches sunlight much better. I believe building lighting will eventually  match sunlight during the day and not match it (removing the blue light that controls circadian clocks, such as the clock that puts you to sleep) after sundown. Improving sleep and health.
• Exposure to pesticides used to purify water correlated with allergies. Water with fewer microbes may be more dangerous than water with more microbes.
• Diabetes: the epidemic. Unlike other major causes of death — heart disease, stroke, and cancer — diabetes is increasing quickly.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Alex Chernavsky.

If someone sleeps well, it’s tough to kill them. If someone does not sleep well, it’s tough to keep them alive. Robb Wolf quoted someone to this effect at the last Ancestral Health Symposium. One reason it’s plausible is better sleep improves immune function. For example, why are colds are more common in winter? Well, flu bouts peak during the light minimum (December) rather than the temperature minimum (February). Less light makes sleep worse, so this supports the idea that colds are more common in winter due to worse sleep. Likewise, heart attacks are more common in the winter, suggesting that better sleep would reduce heart attacks. I stopped getting obvious colds when my sleep got much better.  Vaccinations are much less effective if the person vaccinated is kept awake the following night.

I’ve found new ways to improve my sleep: avoid breakfast, standing a lot, morning light exposure, one-legged standing, and eating more animal fat. I’ve confirmed Tara Grant’s discovery of the value of Vitamin D3 in the morning. I’ve made these improvements via low-tech tracking, good experimental design and data analysis, and wise choice of treatment.

I want to find out if my method and findings can help others. I am looking for people who would like my (paid) help improving their own sleep. In my search for people to try brain tracking, I judged interest and motivation partly by willingness to pay and it worked well.. If you are interested, please submit an application (see below).

At least at first, I’ll only pick one or two people. I’ll do whatever I can to help the chosen applicants measure their sleep, choose wisely what to test, do useful experiments, and analyze the data. They can have as much contact with me as they want.

There are four ways you might benefit from this: (a) Sleep better. (b) Learn how to use personal science to improve your health in other ways. (c) Help everyone learn if the treatments you try have value. (I will try to publicize the results, whatever they are.)  (d) Help everyone learn the value of personal science to being healthy.

If this might interest you, please email sleep.where@gmail.com with your answers to the following questions:

1. Name, age, sex, job, location.

2. Phone number (good times to call), skype id (if any).

3. What’s wrong with your sleep? For how long have you had this problem or problems?

4. How have you tried to improve your sleep? What happened?

5. How many colds do you get in a typical year? How long does a typical cold last?

6. How much would you pay for the first month (after a free consultation)?

7. How much would you pay per month after the first month?

Adam Clemans (28 years old, about 80 kg, pharmacist, lives in Shanghai) commented on a recent post that Vitamin D3 didn’t seem to improve his sleep (“I can’t say I noticed any improvement in my sleep from Vitamin D”). He took 4000 IU in drop form right after he woke up.

I wrote him for details. I said that since 4000 IU was the lowest dose I found effective, he might want to try a higher dose. Adam answered my questions and said he would try a higher dose. Two weeks later he wrote again:

I started taking 4 drops (8000 IU) of Vitamin D3 1st thing in the morning (up from 2 drops or 4000 IU); my sleep seemed to improve immediately and quite dramatically. I had been struggling with middle-of-the-night awakening for a week or so, but after the change I slept like a brick or a baby (pick your metaphor). I would like to experiment with this more before I say I am sold on it, but for now it seems to be working well.

He’d been doing the higher dose for two weeks. Hard to explain as a placebo effect.

• Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses (excerpt from Ric Burn’s documentary New York)
• use of Adderall to treat kids without ADHD.  Horrifying. I don’t even know if ADHD is caused by bad nutrition or if it reflects too-rigid teaching — that is, teaching all kids the same way. Roughly 99% of health care ignores the causes of things. I suppose that in a society, like ours, that pays little attention to finding out the causes of problems, the solutions to those problems will become, as the problem worsens, increasingly bizarre and dangerous.
• health benefits of kefir
• The discovery of Vitamin D

Thanks to Paul Nash.

A recent experiment published in JAMA, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, found that giving people a very large dose of Vitamin D (100,000 IU) once/month did not prevent colds, even though it greatly increased blood levels of Vitamin D. This finding supports my view that it is important to take Vitamin D in the morning. (Because a study in which this wasn’t done found no effect.) My view implies that blood levels may not matter — you can get high levels of Vitamin D by taking it at what I consider the wrong times of day. The usual thinking about Vitamin D has been that blood level is all that matters.

The editors of JAMA considered the Vitamin D study so important that they asked someone (Dr. Jeffrey Linder, associated with Harvard Medical School) to write a commentary — an associated editorial that puts the new finding in context.

Linder’s commentary (might be gated) is important because (a) it is a kind of random sample of how top research doctors think (he was selected to write it) and (b) he completely fails to grasp that the time of day Vitamin D is taken might matter. Colds, the immune system, sleep, time of day — it’s not far-fetched. When you do an experiment to see if X causes Y, and find no effect, I believe that there are usually many possible reasons other than X never causes Y.  Something was wrong with the equipment, something was wrong with your X (e.g., it was stale), something was wrong with your measurements (e.g., ceiling effect), and on and on. Linder did not see it this way.

The 2011 IOM report called for additional research to determine whether vitamin D therapy reduces the incidence of respiratory tract infections. The VIDARIS trial [= the new study] has rigorously addressed this question. Results suggest that vitamin D should join the therapies listed in the Cochrane reviewsas being ineffective for preventing or treating upper respiratory tract infections in healthy adults.

He seriously thinks one null result proves something. Sure, the new study is “rigorous” in certain ways. But it was far from exhaustive. It did not explore the many ways Vitamin D may be given, for example. It did not consider the possibility that blood levels don’t matter. Linder’s combination of (a) interest in rigor and (b) failure to understand the importance of exhaustive reminds me of a friend. When she was in 1st grade she had a pile of pennies. She knew how many she had — she had counted them. However, she did not know how to subtract. When she spent some of her pennies, to find out how many she had left she had to count them all over again.

My friend had half the skills an accountant needs. Linder’s commentary reflects only half the skills a scientist needs. To the extent that he is representative of top research doctors, this is shocking. It is as if most accountants at Arthur Andersen didn’t know how to subtract.

I have asked Dr. Linder if he has any response. If he does, I will post it.