Seth Roberts

Continued from Part 2:

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours. This is part 3.

SETH: You wrote that New York Times piece, and from my take on it, you had a bunch of evidence, and then you got a book contract. Is it fair to say that you found out that what you wrote in the piece was mostly right?

Continued from Part 1:

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours. This is part 2.

SETH: What do you think about prions?

GARY TAUBES: Here’s the problem with prions: the claim is that here’s a radical discovery — an infectious agent that doesn’t have nucleic acid — and it’s based fundamentally on a negative result, which is that when researchers have gone looking for the nucleic acids they failed to find them. Therefore, so the logic goes, they must not be there.

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — "Good Calories, Bad Calories" — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours.SETH: I just spoke to someone who reduced the carbohydrate in his diet, for various reasons, including your book. He found that his performance on mental problems started improving again. It had stopped improving; it had been constant for a long time, and then it started getting better. So it may be that when you reduce the carbohydrate in your diet, your brain starts working better.

Many parents have said yes. David Healy, a Scottish psychiatrist, prompted by those stories, did a small experiment in which undepressed persons took anti-depressants. About 10% of them started having suicidal thoughts.

In the New York Times, Abigail Zuger, an M.D., recently reviewed a book called Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine by R. Barker Bausell — the “truth” being, if I read Zuger correctly, that it’s all baloney. Zuger calls the book “immensely educational”. Not educational enough:

Someone named Scylla waterboarded himself and provided a detailed account of what happened. “Old” self-experimentation, you could say, was doctors doing dangerous things to themselves for a short time to prove some idea that they already believed (e.g., a dentist using laughing gas as an anesthetic); “new” self-experimentation is me doing something perfectly safe for a long time to solve a problem that I have no clue how to solve. What Scylla did is between the two. Short duration, not completely safe, done to find out if waterboarding is torture or not. Scylla had no strong opinion about this when he started.

The other shoe drops. A year ago Atul Gawande wrote in The New Yorker about the Apgar score, a low-tech measurement of newborn viability that led to vast improvements in obstetrics. That’s the “how to improve?” side of things. Now Gawande has written about something equally simple and powerful on the “here’s how to improve” side of medicine: the use of checklists to improve ICU treatment.

About 10 years ago, a UC San Diego psychology professor named Ben Williams, who is in my area of psychology (animal learning), managed to successfully cure his own terminal cancer by self-experimentation. He wrote a book about it called Surviving Terminal Cancer. As this WSJ story shows, his approach — which can be summed up think for yourself — is spreading.

The press release had a curious title: “Omega-3 fatty acids protect against Parkinson’s.” The certainty suggested an experiment, but Parkinson’s is too rare to study prevention experimentally. The press release turned out to be about a rat study that used a drug called MDPT to cause brain damage that resembles Parkinson’s. Rats given a high-omega-3 diet suffered much less damage — apparently none — from the drug.

Here’s a nice post about dietary puzzles in which a group of people who should have a high or low rate of heart disease don’t. For example, Spanish paradox. Those naughty Spaniards are eating more fat and less carbs and getting LESS heart disease, now there’s a surprise. Good thing their medical system is so marvelous.

Gary Taubes spoke at Berkeley a few weeks ago; the title of his talk was “The Quality of Calories: What Makes Us Fat and Why No One Seems to Care” (webcast). Did you know that the last edition of Dr. Spock’s baby book advocated a vegan diet? One of many fascinating details.Also this:

Andrew Gelman: You’d think we prefer an upward spike in pleasure — we’re happier for a while, then return to normal — to a downward one, but the evidence isn’t clear. Seth: I know someone who woke himself up so he could enjoy falling asleep. Andrew: Really? Seth: Yes, really. Andrew: Was that you? Seth: No, it wasn’t me. Andrew: If I heard about someone doing that, I’d think it was you. Phil Price: That’s brilliant, actually.