Seth’s blog

Roberto Medri, a 27-year-old who works in Italy for Bain & Company, a consulting firm, writes:

I have had bad shaving problems since I started working three years ago. I tried pretty much everything: multiple blades, old-time safety razors, expensive British shaving soaps, silvertip brushes, pre-shaving oil and creams, abstruse shaving methods and blade techniques: all to almost no avail. Instead, my face would bleed more and more every day, making it frustrating and time-expensive to shave, only to get results which ranged from laughable to frightening.

I noticed two patterns:

• Once in a couple of months, I used to have a perfect shave: fast, enjoyable, baby-butt smooth with no irritation. I was not, however, capable of isolating the deciding variable, as those epiphanies seemed to be completely random.
• When I took up a new remedy (another pre-shave cream, steamed towels, etc.) things got better for 2-3 shaves, then back to normal horror.

A fortnight ago, I began having perfect shaves. Consistently. I am simplifying my routine because all toners and moisturizers now seem useless. My towels are not stained, I am on time, I actually look forward to shaving every morning (with but only a slight fear of it all ending).

The only explanation I can think of is that, following your advice, I started taking four softgels/day of flax oil about a month ago.

It’s very difficult to get flaxseed oil in Europe (bottled oil simply is not available). I have recommended flax to my colleagues also plagued by red necks to no avail: they are elite in two ways, white collar elite (working for Bain) and dietary elite (as Italians, which supposedly have the best and healthiest food ever), so it fits with your reasoning that they are very change-averse. In fact, a manager told me that my taking softgels during the day is “inappropriate” and “disturbing” colleagues.

Here is a comment left on my earlier canker-sore post by a reader named Ted:

I found out quite by accident WALNUTS get rid of [canker sores] quite quickly. The first sign of an ulcer I chew walnuts and leave the paste in my mouth for a little while (30 seconds or so).

The first time was by accident, my ulcers disappeared so quickly I knew it had to be something I ate. And the only thing I had eaten differently the past day was walnuts.

Flaxseed oil and walnuts differ in lots of ways but both are high in omega-3. My gums got much better around the time I started taking flaxseed oil. I neither noticed nor expected this; my dentist pointed it out. Several others have told me the same thing. Tyler Cowen’s gums got dramatically better. One reader started and stopped and restarted flaxseed oil, making it blindingly clear that the gum improvement is caused by flaxseed oil. There is plenty of reason to think the human diet was once much higher in omega-3. All this together convinces me that omega-3 can both prevent and cure canker sores. Not only that, I’m also convinced that canker sores are a sign of omega-3 deficiency. You shouldn’t just get rid of them with walnuts; you should change your diet. Omega-3 has other benefits (better brain function, less inflammation, probably others).

Let’s say I’m right about this — canker sores really are prevented and cured by omega-3. Then there are several things to notice.

1. Web facilitation. It was made possible by the internet. My initial interest in flaxseed oil came from reading the Shangri-La Diet forums. I didn’t have to read a single book about the Aquatic Ape theory; I could learn enough online. Tyler Cowen’s experience was in his blog. Eric Vlemmix contacted me by email. No special website was involved.

2. Value of self-experimentation. My flaxseed oil self-experimentation played a big part, although it had nothing to do with mouth health. These experiments showed dramatic benefits — so large and fast that something in flaxseed oil, presumably omega-3, had to be a necessary nutrient. Because of these results, I blogged about omega-3 a lot, which is why Eric emailed me about his experience.

3. Unconventional evidence. All the evidence here, not just the self-experimentation, is what advocates of evidence-based medicine and other evidence snobs criticize. Much of it is anecdotal. Yet the evidence snobs have, in this case, nothing to show for their snobbery. They missed this conclusion completely. Nor do you need a double-blind study to verify/test this conclusion. If you have canker sores, you simply drink flaxseed oil or eat walnuts and see if they go away. Maybe this omnipresent evidence snobbery is . . . completely wrong? Maybe this has something to do with the stagnation in health research?

4. Lack of credentials. No one involved with this conclusion is a nutrition professor or dentist or medical doctor, as far as I know. Apparently you don’t need proper credentials to figure out important things about health. Of course, we’ve been here before: Jane Jacobs, Elaine Morgan.

5. Failure of “trusted” health websites. Health websites you might think you could trust missed this completely. The Mayo Clinic website lists 15 possible causes — none of them involving omega-3. (Some of them, we can now see, are correlates of canker sores, also caused by lack of omega-3.) If canker sores can be cured with walnuts, the Mayo list of treatments reads like a list of scurvy cures from the Middle Ages. The Harvard Medical School health website is even worse. “Keep in mind that up to half of all adults have experienced canker sores at least once,” it says. This is supposed to reassure you. Surely something this common couldn’t be a serious problem.

6. Failure of the healthcare establishment. Even worse, the entire healthcare establishment, with its vast resources, hasn’t managed to figure this out. Canker sores are not considered a major health problem, no, but, if I’m right, that too is a mistake. They are certainly common. If they indicate an important nutritional deficiency (too little omega-3), they become very important and their high prevalence is a major health problem.

Eric Vlemmix writes:

I’ve had these oral sores [canker sores, also called Aphthous ulcers] since childhood [he’s 33], but since taking flax/fish oil I have had hardly any ulcers! The times I had an ulcer it was small, less painful than usual, and would disappear in a few days. The doctors never knew what the cause of these ulcers was, and Wikipedia states: cause unknown.

I asked about his fish oil and flaxseed oil intake:

Something like 15 ml [= 1 tablespoon] of flaxseed oil daily. Most days I also take a Minami morEPA plus capsule which has 635 mg EPA, and 195 mg DHA.

I started SLD in June 2008, and I think I switched from olive oil to flax the same month. Since then I haven’t had a real serious case of ulcers. Some small issues sometimes, but not the real big and extremely painful ones that I had before. Sometimes a small mini zit-like thing.

According to Family Doctor, “Doctors don’t know of anything that prevents canker sores from forming.” The Mayo Clinic website is equally unhelpful. To prevent canker sores, EMedicineHealth advises, “Do not talk while chewing.” According to KidsHealth, “About 1 in 5 people regularly gets bothersome canker sores.”

Any canker-sore sufferer want to start taking flaxseed oil and fish oil (in the amounts Eric uses) and tell me what happens?

Gum surgery averted

At the Fancy Food Show in January, I told Stephanie Stober, the owner of Flax USA, about my omega-3 research (which used flaxseed oil). In return she gave me some of her products, including a package of roasted lightly-salted flax seeds. It stayed in my refrigerator until yesterday when I tried some it for the first time. My god, so good! (And so healthy.) I could barely keep from finishing the (2 oz.) package. I finished it today.

During my last dental exam, a month ago, I was told my gums were in excellent shape. Clearly better than my previous visit. The obvious difference between the two visits is that I now eat lots of fermented food. At the previous visit, my gums were in better shape than a few years ago. They suddenly improved when I started drinking a few tablespoons of flaxseed oil every day. Tyler Cowen is the poster child for that effect. After a lifetime of being told to brush and floss more — which I did, and which helped a little but not a lot — it now turns out, at least for me, that the secret of healthy gums is: 1. Eat fermented foods. 2. Consume omega-3. These two guidelines are not only a lot easier than frequent brushing and flossing but have a lot of other benefits, unlike brushing and flossing.

Dentistry is ancient and there are millions of dentists, but apparently the profession has never figured this out. This isn’t surprising — how could they figure it out? — but it is an example of a general truth about how things get better. (Or why they don’t get better — if only dentists and dental-school professors are allowed to do dental research.) In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs makes this point. For a long time, Jacobs says, farming was a low-yield profession. Then crop rotation schemes, tractors, cheap fertilizer, high-yield seeds, and dozens of other labor-saving yield-increasing inventions came along. Farmers didn’t invent tractors. They didn’t invent any of the improvements. They were busy farming. Just as dentists are busy doing dentistry and dental-school professors are busy studying conventional ways of improving gum health.

Jacobs also writes about the sterility of large organizations — their inability to come up with new goods and services. On the face of it, large organizations, such as large companies, are powerful. Yes, they can be efficient but they can’t be creative, due to what Jacobs calls “the infertility of captive divisions of labor.” In a large organization, you get paid for doing X. You can’t start doing X+Y, where Y is helpful to another part of the company, because you don’t get paid for doing Y. A nutrition professor might become aware of the anti-inflammatory effects of flaxseed oil but wouldn’t study its effects on gum health. That’s not what nutrition professors do. So neither dentists nor dental-school professors nor nutrition professors could discover the effects I discovered. They were trapped by organizational lines, by divisions of labor, that I was free of.