Seth’s blog

Thanks to Honest Medicine, I found some interesting videos about the ketogenic diet. The first two are from Dateline NBC: Part 1 and Part 2. In Part 1, Dr. Donald Shields, head of pediatric neurology at the UCLA Medical Center, says, in answer to a question about why he didn’t recommend the ketogenic diet to the Abramsons, who discovered it for themselves:

Because I don’t think we had exhausted all the medical approaches [to treating their son’s epilepsy] yet. There were actually still other medications that we hadn’t tried yet.

The last is a great talk (9 minutes) by Dr. Deborah Snyder. “To say the ketogenic diet has touched my heart would be a great understatement,” said Dr. Snyder.

More videos from The Charlie Foundation. The Ketogenic Diet and Evidence Snobs.

The creator of Dilbert blogs:

About two years ago I started taking magnesium supplements because I saw something on the Internet that indicated it might help my knees problems. (My knees always hurt after exercise.) The magnesium either worked, or it was a remarkable coincidence, that after 15 years of knee pain it suddenly went away and has stayed away.

Recently I realized I haven’t had any allergy or asthma symptoms for well over a year. For the first time in my life I went through the entire allergy season without so much as a sniffle or a wheeze. And I didn’t even use my allergy or asthma meds. On a hunch, I googled “magnesium allergy” and discovered that doctors sometimes use magnesium to treat asthma attacks. And a magnesium deficiency apparently does promote allergies.

One of the comments is curious: “There’s nothing wrong sharing what happens to you, Scott.”

Thanks to cp.

If we can believe a movie based on a true story, the doctors consulted by the family with an epileptic son in …First Do No Harm knew about the ketogenic diet but (a) didn’t tell the parents about it, (b) didn’t take it seriously, and (c) thought that irreversible brain surgery should be done before trying the diet, which was of course much safer. Moreover, these doctors had an authoritative book to back up these remarkably harmful and unfortunate attitudes. The doctors in …First, as far as I can tell, reflected (and still reflect) mainstream medical practice.

Certainly the doctors were evidence snobs — treating evidence not from a double-blind study as worthless. Why were they evidence snobs? I suppose the universal tendency toward snobbery (we love feeling superior) is one reason but that may be only part of the explanation. In the 1990s, Phillip Price, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, and one of his colleagues were awarded a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study home radon levels nationwide. They planned to look at the distribution of radon levels and make recommendations for better guidelines. After their proposal was approved, some higher-ups at EPA took a look at it and realized that the proposed research would almost surely imply that the current EPA radon guidelines could be improved. To prevent such criticism, the grant was canceled. Price was told by an EPA administrator that this was the reason for the cancellation.

This has nothing to do with evidence snobbery. But I’m afraid it may have a lot to do with how the doctors in …First Do No Harm viewed the ketogenic diet. If the ketogenic diet worked, it called into question their past, present, and future practices — namely, (a) prescribing powerful drugs with terrible side effects and (b) performing damaging and irreversible brain surgery of uncertain benefit. If something as benign as the ketogenic diet worked some of the time, you’d want to try it before doing anything else. This hadn’t happened: The diet hadn’t been tried first, it had been ignored. Rather than allow evidence of the diet’s value to be gathered, which would open them up to considerable criticism, the doctors did their best to keep the parents from trying it. Much like canceling the radon grant.

The ketogenic diet.

Here’s part of the abstract from a recent paper titled “A Low Dose of Dietary Resveratrol Partially Mimics Caloric Restriction and Retards Aging Parameters in Mice”:

We fed mice from middle age (14-months) to old age (30-months) either a control diet, a low dose of resveratrol . . . or a calorie restricted (CR) diet and examined genome-wide transcriptional profiles. We report a striking transcriptional overlap of [the effects of] CR and resveratrol in heart, skeletal muscle and brain. Both dietary interventions inhibit gene expression profiles associated with cardiac and skeletal muscle aging, and prevent age-related cardiac dysfunction. Dietary resveratrol also mimics the effects of CR in insulin mediated glucose uptake in muscle.

This is from the introduction:

Resveratrol, a natural compound found in grapes and red wine has previously been shown to extend lifespan in S. cerevisiae, C. elegans and Drosophila through a SIRT1 dependent mechanism. However, recent studies have failed to reproduce these life extension results and other studies have demonstrated that the ability of resveratrol to activate yeast Sir2 or human SIRT1 is substrate-specific in vitro and resveratrol has no effect on Sir2 activity in vivo . . . . Recently, mice fed a high fat diet supplemented with high levels of resveratrol . . . were shown to have extended lifespan as compared to controls, and several metabolic alterations similar to what is observed with CR.

I first heard of the wonders of resveratrol from James Johnston and Donald Laub, authors of The Alternate Day Diet. Here is a review article about it. The interest of the new study is that a low (i.e., practical) dose is effective.

Thanks to Bob Levinson.

Ever heard of lutein? If you have consider yourself well-informed. There is no Recommended Daily Allowance. But a study of monkeys fed a laboratory diet, presumably containing all necessary nutrients, found that they got macular degeneration eight years earlier than monkeys fed ordinary foods. The missing nutrient appears to be lutein, which is found in green leafy vegetables such as spinach. More info here.

One more indication that our knowledge of nutrition is incomplete even at the simplest (single nutrient) level.

Thanks to Martha Neuringer, who was one of the first researchers to study the brain effects of omega-3s.