Seth’s blog

Anonymous found, to his surprise, that his martial-arts injuries healed faster after he started taking flaxseed oil (2 T/day). A comment about Popeye vitamins led him to stop taking flaxseed oil. Within ten days, his gums got worse, and his sports injuries became more painful. He has written again:

After going off flaxseed oil for about ten days and seeing all sorts of negative side effects, I have now been back on it for about ten days (this time with four tablespoons a day instead of two), and I am totally back to where I was before I stopped. Gums aren’t bleeding at all, joints and tendons don’t ache, and I feel great. Anecdotal evidence yes, but very persuasive to me. I have kept taking four tablespoons instead of the previously normal two because I think it increases my mental acuity

Very persuasive to me, too, regardless of what it is called.

Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories is overall a very good book, especially in its description of evidence. But there is also this:

Life is dependent on homeostatic systems that exhibit the same relative constancy as body weight, and none of them require a set point.

How does he think body temperature is regulated? Taubes continues:

It is always possible to create a system that exhibits set-point-like behavior or a settling point without actually having a set-point mechanism involved. The classic example is the water level in a lake, which might, to the naive, appear to be regulated from day to day or year to year, but is just the end result of a balance between the flow of water into the lake and the flow out.

No, lakes do not “appear to be regulated” because they do not exhibit anything like hunger or feeling cold. When the water level in a lake is lower than usual, nothing happens to push the level back up. Taubes continues:

When Claude Bernard discussed the stability of the milieu interne and Walter Cannon the notion of homeostasis, it is was this kind of dynamic regulation they had in mind, not a central thermostatlike regulator in the brain that would do the job rather than the body itself.

Michel Cabanac would not enjoy reading this. Whatever Bernard and Cannon had in mind, there is a “central thermostatlike regulator in the brain” that controls body temperature. It makes us seek warmth — take a warm shower, drink hot drinks, put on a jacket — when our body temperature is too low and do the opposite — such as drink cold drinks and eat ice cream — when our body temperature is too high. When our body temperature is too high, we find a warm shower more pleasant than when our body temperature is too low. These changes are obvious — at least, once you look for them — and imply a thermostat in the brain.

Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating and an innovative methodologist, has been appointed executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion for 14 months. A surprising and most encouraging choice. Brian’s research is amazingly free of dogma. He does what you should do, rather than what people tell you to do.

About cool data.

Thank you, j n kalhan, for your comment on a post of mine that speculated that Joyce Hatto and Ranjit Chandra might be twins separated at birth:

It is not true. I have personal knowledge. Dr. Chandra has no twin brother.

I ordered Fish, Omega-3 and Human Health (2005, 2nd ed.) by William Lands from Amazon in March. It came a few days ago. It is published by the AOCS Press. AOCS = American Oil Chemists’ Society.

A jewel of a book. Like a research monograph, it has lots of data, graphs, and references; unlike a research monograph, it tries to reach any scientifically literate reader, not just specialists. It has much more about mechanism than other books on the subject. “Health” in the title mainly means circulatory system health (heart disease, strokes); there is also a chapter on the immune system and a chapter on cancer. Almost nothing about mental illness or the brain. Nothing about gum disease.

I read the first edition a year ago. It is a sign of changes in my thinking that I didn’t notice a comparison of epilepsy rates in Eskimos (high omega-3 diet) and Danes (low omega-3 diet) living in Greenland. The Eskimos have twice as much epilepsy. It is the only big negative effect of the Eskimo diet. The epilepsy difference fits something I think now but didn’t think a year ago: omega-3 makes neurons more easily excited. Three observations led me to this: (a) In my choice reaction-time experiments, flaxseed oil caused an increase in anticipation errors. To reduce them, I changed from a two-choice task to a four-choice task. (b) A friend said I have become more talkative, apparently due to consuming much more flaxseed oil/day. (c) I found that flaxseed oil reduces simple RT — latency to press a button when something happens.

The two-to-one epilepsy ratio is the only case where the Eskimos are clearly worse off. The ratios in the other direction are much larger. The Danes had 20 times more psoriasis than the Eskimos (as I noted earlier), and 25 times more bronchial asthma.