Seth’s blog

On the Shangri-La Diet forums, Timothy Beneke has posted about a creative method of avoiding compulsive eating.

Tim has been an excellent weight-loss engineer. His discovery, after losing 80 pounds, that he could lose even more by eating taste-free nutritionally-balanced mush is one reason I believe the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet. The theory predicts this will work, yet the mush is quite different nutritionally than flavorless oil or sugar water.

Joan Roughgarden has responded to my comment about her recent KQED radio appearance. Her response includes this:

Today, in 2007 only a few, like Roberts, still take Bailey’s work seriously.

In 2006, Bailey’s work was featured on 60 Minutes in a piece titled “The Science of Sexual Orientation.” After the piece aired, a blogger criticized Bailey. Shari Finkelstein, the producer, responded:

His work is highly regarded by all of the researchers in the field who we spoke with.

What a difference a year makes, if Roughgarden is correct.

In this podcast, New Yorker writer Burkhard Bilger talks about the guitars of Ken Parker. A lot of research goes into them. I propose that we enjoy music because enjoyment of music creates demand for musical instruments, which leads to material-science research. My previous earlier posts about human evolution have said something like this — art generates research — several times. Previous examples were visual.

Josh McDermott, a psychologist at MIT, has compared human and animal responses to music. From an in-press paper:
When presented with a choice between slow tempo musical stimuli, including lullabies, and silence, tamarins and marmosets preferred silence whereas humans, when similarly tested, preferred music. . . .There appear to be motivational ties to music that are uniquely human.

An article in the latest issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology reports a correlation between fish consumption and worse pregnancy outcomes. It was done in Denmark. Mothers who had eaten fish four or more times per month during their pregnancy had babies that were less healthy on several measures of fetal growth than mothers who had not eaten fish.

The differences were small; they required a sample of about 40,000 women to detect. However, they are convincing partly because this effect was found for only fatty-fish consumption. For lean fish, the results were quite different. Organic pollutants accumulate in fat; mercury accumulates in protein, so these results are more likely due to organic pollutants than to mercury.

A reason to get one’s omega-3 from flaxseed oil rather than lots of fish or fish oil.

Earlier post about a study that found beneficial effects of pregnant women eating fish.

Reference: Is High Consumption of Fatty Fish during Pregnancy a Risk Factor for Fetal Growth Retardation? A Study of 44,824 Danish Pregnant Women. Th. I. Halldorsson, HM Meltzer, I Thorsdottir, V Knudsen, and SF Olsen. Am. J. Epidemiol. 2007 166: 687-696.

Recently I described how, while testing flaxseed oil, I noticed that some eggs I had eaten seemed to have had a flaxseed-oil-like effect. The eggs came from grass-fed chickens; such eggs are believed to be high in omega-3. So the inference was plausible. But was it true?

To find out, I deliberately tested eggs. I used 2.5 large eggs (2 large, 1 small) to make scrambled eggs, which I ate. Here’s what happened:

The blue line shows when I ate the eggs. The red line is the average of the pre-egg reaction times. The main result is that, as suggested by the earlier data, there was a flaxseed-oil-like effect. I’m not sure what to make of the lowest point. I had eaten half of a cheese-and-mushroom crepe before that measurement. If the crepe was digested quickly, that would have reduced reaction time. (Sugar drinks clearly do this.)

Here are the accuracy values.

Mostly there was little change in accuracy. However, one value (90%) was very low, the lowest value in a long time. It happened before the biggest changes in reaction times. It might be due to the eggs.

My main conclusion is that yes, the eggs acted like flaxseed oil — presumably because of their omega-3. In addition, the results increase my belief that this method can measure the brain effects of ordinary food and can generate ideas worth testing.