Thanks to Tucker Max.

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.

Thanks to Brody, Jazi Zilber and Mark Griffith.

I recently spoke to a large group concerning the harmful effects of glutamate, explaining it is now known that glutamate, as added to foods, significantly accelerates the growth and spread of cancers. I [rhetorically] asked the crowd when was the last time an oncologist told his or her patient to avoid MSG or foods high in glutamate. The answer, I said, was never.

After the talk, a crowd gathered to ask more questions. Suddenly I was interrupted by a young woman who identified herself as a radiation oncologist. She angrily stated, “I really took offense to your comment about oncologists not telling their patients about glutamate.”

I turned to her and asked, “Well, do you tell your patients to avoid glutamate?” She looked puzzled and said, “No one told us to.” I asked her who this person or persons were whose job it was to provide her with this information. I then reminded her that I obtained this information from her oncology journals. Did she not read her own journals?

Yet, this is the attitude of the modern doctor. An elitist group is in charge of disseminating all the information physicians are to know. If they do not tell them, then, in their way of thinking, the information was of no value.

The incentive structure of modern medicine in action. If you do harm, you are not punished — thus the high error rate. If you do good, you are not rewarded — so why bother to think (“no one told us”)? The similarity to pre-1980 Chinese communism, where it didn’t matter if you were a good farmer or a bad farmer, is obvious. It is a big step forward that the rest of us can now search the medical literature and see the evidence for ourselves.

In China the problem is much worse. A few years ago a woman was hit by a car. A second car stopped to help her. The woman told the police that the second driver had hit her. The second driver was furious, gave many interviews, and eventually a witness was found who said it was the driver, not the injured woman, who was telling the truth. Someone I spoke to attributed her behavior to the need to pay hospital bills. The driver who hit her would never be caught, she reasoned. Maybe the second driver could be forced to pay.

My Chinese tutor, who is Korean, told me a story that illustrates the depth of Chinese bystander inaction and suggests another reason for it. A friend of hers was visiting from Korea. When this friend was in Wangjing (in the Chaoyang district of Beijing), she saw a person lying on a busy street, bleeding but still alive. Apparently the bleeding person had been hit by a car. Three hours later, the friend returned — and the accident victim was still there! Now dead. So, with difficulty — she doesn’t speak Chinese — she called the police.

The police treated her as a suspect. She was forced to come to the police station five times, for hours each time.

What a deterrent to calling the police! I cannot believe the police were so stupid as to consider a Korean tourist on foot who calls the police a serious suspect in the death of someone lying in the middle of traffic. I believe that by causing her a lot of trouble, they wanted to send a message: Leave us alone. The fewer calls they get, the less work they have to do. No wonder everyone ignored the bleeding victim.

“I am afraid I am scaring you,” said my Chinese teacher. “You are,” I said.

Thanks to Hal Pashler and Bryan Castañeda.

1. A frozen dumpling made in China contained part of a cigarette. Someone took a picture and posted it. Someone from Korea noticed before it was censored. News of this spread all over South Korea.

2. Someone in China took a picture of the Yangtze River in Jiangsu Province full of pill containers (e.g., blue/green capsules) floating on the surface. Censored in China, the picture was publicized widely in South Korea. I saw it on my teacher’s cell phone.

Along similar lines, on May 2, a Korean journalist reported that she secretly entered a factory where medical pills were being made and found that among the ingredients were human baby parts. It sounds impossible, yes, but that is what was reported. (I wrote this several days ago, I should have posted it sooner.)

“I never take Chinese medicines,” said my teacher. I asked her why the Korean media like these stories so much. “They show that something impossible is happening in China,” she said.

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.

The main reason Hansen’s 1988 warming projections were too high is that he used a climate model with a high climate sensitivity, and his results are actually evidence that the true climate sensitivity parameter is within the range accepted by the IPCC.

There is no consideration of the possibilities that (a) one or more other parameters were wrong or (b) the model — aside from parameter values — is wrong (e.g., it oversimplifies). Surely you are joking, Mr. Skeptical Science.

Thanks to Phil Price.

One example involves the flu drug Tamiflu. The new analysis suggested that “Tamiflu falls short of claims—not just that it ameliorates flu complications, but also that the drug reduces the transmission of influenza.” Another example involved Prozac. The new analysis “ended up bucking much of the published literature on antidepressants. . . . [It]found no link between Prozac and suicide risk among children and young adults . . . Prozac appeared to be more effective in youth, and antidepressants far less efficacious in the elderly, than previously thought.”

Another reason to believe in the value of this new data is the work of Lisa Bero at UCSF. She looked at the efficacy of nine drugs using unpublished FDA data. “Nineteen of the redone analyses showed a drug to be more efficacious, while 19 found a drug to be less efficacious. The one harm analysis that was reanalyzed showed more harm from the drug than had been reported.”

I hope that the FDA will eventually require that all raw data from drug trials be publicly available as a condition of approval. (The same should also be true of journal articles, as a condition of publication.) It is abundantly clear that drug company analyses are often misleading — which harms the public.

Such means of surveillance — available to those in power, but not to the rest of us — make those in power more powerful, harder to unseat. However, Epstein’s book also shows the effect of lower-tech new recording devices, especially CCTV recordings, cell phone records, and key-entry logs. They make it harder to lie. DSK’s accuser, Nafissatou Diallo, was lying, no doubt. The district attorney’s office got to “Version 3″ of her story before giving up.  The discrepancies between what she said happened and the key-entry records reveal her lies beyond doubt. The new recording devices also pull two people into the story who otherwise might have remained out of it: a security guard and the head engineer at the hotel, who went into a private loading-dock area and did a kind of victory dance shortly after 911 was called. The 911 call made the matter public, which effectively destroyed DSK’s chance of elective office. They claim to not remember what they were celebrating. If it had nothing to do with the 911 call, it is exceedingly strange — another freakish coincidence — that it happened at exactly the same time.

Three Days in May is a new kind of investigative journalism in the sense that it is based on detailed electronic records (such as CCTV tapes and key-entry records) that weren’t available until recent years. Stories and movies are often set in remote locations or times to give the story a kind of freshness. Here freshness derives from the information being used. Epstein assembles hundreds or thousands of facts from these records into his story. I was interested to see a kind of power-law distribution of information value, the same thing I see in my self-experimentation: almost all of the facts tell us just a little, a very tiny fraction of them tell us a lot. Although electronic surveillance is usually considered a government tool (“Big Brother is Watching”) Epstein’s book makes a more subtle point.  These records make false accusations more difficult to sustain and conspiracies more difficult to carry out without detection — and who does that help? In any case, Three Days in May is a fascinating true crime story — and the criminal is not DSK.

I began the morning faces therapy in April, 1997. I can think of only two significant changes over the years in my use of the therapy: 1) I use a mirror instead of videotapes, and 2) I accept that once or twice a week I’m too tired to start as early as I’d like (so I get more sleep instead). To elaborate:

1) When I restarted the treatment in 2006 after having been hospitalized, I was too depressed to deal with videotaping. In fact, I was too depressed to get out of bed so early. The mirror solved both problems, because I could easily prop it on my mattress top. After a few days I was able to get up, allowing me to listen to music, use bright lights, etc., during the treatment.

2) Whether for lack of discipline or the proper genes, I simply can’t go to sleep early enough so that I can get up early every morning. (Granted, I haven’t tried everything, but for the sake of the argument, let it stand.) This shortcoming used to bother me a great deal. Then on October 6th, 2011, I read in this blog about someone else who didn’t always start the treatment early, because he was “too tired to get up early”. Well! It didn’t seem so bad if someone else had the same problem. Over the years I’ve found that starting 30-60 minutes late once or twice a week doesn’t seem to perturb my mood enough to cause great concern.

I asked how the therapy has helped him. He replied:

The benefits of the morning faces therapy have been both 1) quantitative and 2) qualitative.

1) I have had bipolar disorder for 27 years. With the therapy, I’ve been medication-free for 6 years, and I was on much reduced doses of medication for about 7 years. So it’s fair to say the therapy has reduced the severity of the illness by around one half. Also, the lithium that I took in part caused kidney disease, whereas, obviously, there are no side effects from looking at faces in the morning.

2) The qualitative difference seems far more important to me. I am basically content with life; I am comfortable in my own skin. I’ve never felt like this before, and life without this is empty.

Note to skeptics: you might think, well, bipolar disorder is known to go in remission, and maturity often brings contentment. But this fails to explain why stopping the treatment brings back both the illness and the essential sadness.

The first randomised study of coronary artery bypass surgery was not carried out until 16 years after the procedure was first developed, a conference on overtreatment in US healthcare was told last week. When the results were published, they “provided no comfort for those doing the surgery,” as it showed no mortality benefit from surgery for stable coronary patients.

One participant said that overtreatment cost one-third of US health care spending. As far as I can tell, no one said that “evidence-based medicine” underestimates — in the case of tonsillectomies, almost completely ignores — bad effects of treatments. This failure to anticipate and accurately measure bad effects of treatments makes the overall picture worse. Maybe much worse.

Thanks to Melissa McEwen and Bryan Castañeda.

How did you learn about it?

Freakonomics.  When I read about you in that book, it made sense to me. The whole idea of a setpoint. I used to be an accountant. I weighed 290 pounds. I’m 6′ 2″. I lost 25 pounds when I started driving a truck. I’ve been there for almost 12 years. Around 260. I get a lot of exercise delivering groceries. I can eat anything I want but the idea of going on a diet makes me hungry.  My doctor said lose a bit of weight but I just couldn’t do it.

How do you do the diet?

I use canola oil. I tried flax seed oil but it has a horrible taste. I have no problem taking the oil. I feel like I could do the oil for the rest of my life. At least 4 tablespoons per day. I don’t measure it. I have a jar by a sink at home, another in my truck. I take a sip, what seems about a tablespoon. I figure I’m getting at least 4 tablespoons per day.  Some days I may get only 3 tablespoons.

What effect has it had?

I feel like I’m in control. I stopped drinking sweet tea, used to drink tons of it. For 20 years. I’ve been able to stop. I couldn’t stand drinking water. Now that’s all I drink. That’s all I’ve had for two months. The most bizarre thing to me in the world. I deliver to convenience stores. All they have is soda pop and doughntuts and all that kind of stuff. I’d stop and have a doughnut and chocolate milk. Now I can go without it. I still think about it but now I can say  no.

What about weight loss?

I’m down from 255 to 229 – a little over 2 months. I don’t really try that hard. I pretty much eat what I want. On two days per week I try to eat hardly anything. Unless I almost eat nothing, I stay at the same weight. It’s not hard to do it – to eat almost nothing. Almost any time of day or night I think “I could eat something”. But then it’s okay not to. It gives you willpower – that’s how I explain it to people. Find the book and read the whole thing, I tell them. They need to understand the whole concept before they start taking oil.

Any downsides?

Eating is enjoyable to me. My mom is a great cook. My wife is a great cook. I like to eat. It’s emotionally satisfying thing to eat stuff. But when I take the oil I can not eat.  Now I eat slower. To try to enjoy the little bit of food you do it. You’re not going to eat 3 more times today. I tell myself, I’m going to enjoy every bite of this cottage cheese. Because that’s all I’m going to eat today. The social part I miss. It’s a social part of your life that you don’t have any more. Most of the time I’ve gone to eat with people since I started, I go ahead and eat something because I don’t want to be a jerk about it. I still lose weight. That will be a day where I don’t lose weight when I go out to eat. To lose weight I have to have a day when I don’t eat anything. Today is a day where I told myself I want to lose 1 more pound. I ate breakfast with a friend,. There’s nobody who expects me to eat with them. My wife’s away.

How do other people react?

My wife’s a skeptic about the whole thing. She doesn’t think I can’t keep the weight off. One lady at church, she got the book right away. She’d lost 50 pounds eating 1000 calories per day. She started the oil. She’s gung ho about it. We see each other Sunday: how much did you lose this week? we ask.

I too had no idea of the effect that Grant discovered. I had taken Vitamin D3 several times — never in the morning — but after noticing no change stopped. I tested Grant’s discovery by taking Vitamin D3 at 8 or 9 am. First, taking it at 8 am, I gradually increased the dose from 2000 IU to 8000 IU. Then I shifted the time to 9 am. The experiment ended earlier than I would have liked because I had to fly to San Francisco.

When I woke up in the morning I rated how rested I felt on a 0-100 scale, where 0 = not rested at all and 100 = completely rested. I’d been using this scale for years. Here are the results (means and standard errors):

Vitamin D3 had a clear effect, but the necessary dose was more than 2000 IU. If Vitamin D3 acts like sunlight, you might think that taking it in the morning would make me wake up earlier. Here are the results for the time I woke up:

There was no clear effect of dosage on when I got up. Shifting the time from 8 am to 9 am may have had an effect (I wish I had 3 more days at 9 am).

Many people have reported that taking Vitamin D3 in the morning gave them more energy during the day. I usually take a nap in the early afternoon so I measured its effect on the length of those naps:

Maybe my naps were shorter with 6000 and 8000 IU at 8 am. It’s interesting that 4000 IU seemed to be enough to improve how rested how I felt but not enough to shorten my naps.

What do these results add to what we already know? First, the large-enough dose was more than 2000 IU. (A $22 million study of Vitamin D3 is using a dose of 2000 IU.) The dose needed to get more afternoon energy may be more than 4000 IU. Second, careful experimentation and records helped, even though many people found the effect so large it was easy to notice without doing anything special. For example, these results suggest the minimum dose you need to get the effect. Three, these support the value of supplements.  Many people say it is better to get necessary nutrients from food rather than supplements. However, supplements allow much better control of dosage and timing and these results suggest that small changes in both can matter. I cannot imagine this effect being discovered with Vitamin D3 in food.

Thanks to Melissa Francis.