Seth’s blog

The more I played racquetball, the more accurate my shots became — the more control I had. It was a kind of learning: learning to place the ball. I was fascinated by how little we knew about how that learning took place. I studied associative learning in my own research. The motor learning during racquetball resembled associative learning in the sense that my actions (hitting the ball with the racket) were shaped by what happened next (accuracy of placement). Yet I knew nothing non-obvious about motor learning.

This background of ignorance is why I find my latest flaxseed oil results so interesting. As I’ve posted, I’ve started using a new test in which I use the touchpad to “toss” the cursor from one spot to another (that is, move the cursor with a single finger movement), and measure how close it “lands” to the target. The function relating cursor position to finger position on the touchpad isn’t simple.

Of course I wanted to see how flaxseed oil affected performance on this task. I doubted that it would. This task is untimed. No time pressure. It is like shooting free throws. Most of the previous tasks I’ve used that have shown a flaxseed-oil effect have been tasks where you respond as fast as possible. My balance test was go at your own pace, but it involved a huge amount of computation. Balancing my body on one foot for several seconds seemed to involve a lot more computation than moving a finger about an inch.

Usually I take 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil just before bedtime. One recent day I took it much earlier and did the toss test at 30-minute intervals before and for several hours afterward.

Here are the results plotted as a function of test session number.

Here are the same results plotted versus the time of the test:

Here is a close-up of the crucial data:

About two hours after I drank the flaxseed oil, my accuracy got worse. Then it slowly got much better. The amazing thing about the improvement is that it reached a maximum long after you would think that the effects of the flaxseed oil had worn off. My overall level of omega-3 is high because I take 4 T flaxseed oil per day. The effect of shifting when I drink the 4 T is just to change the timing of a short-lived peak. Usually that peak happens when I’m asleep and my omega-3 levels are reasonably constant while I’m doing the test. In this case the peak happened while I was doing the test.

I’ll discuss what this might mean in a later post.

Drug addiction, sure. The first pleasurable drugs were probably discovered hundreds of thousands of years ago, if not much earlier. All cultures use drugs. Drugs physically reach the brain. But video game addiction? Video games are a millisecond old, compared to drugs. How did they get so potent so fast?

Self-experimentation made me ask. Using an ordinary psychological test and a speeded arithmetic task, I discovered a fast-acting effect of flaxseed oil. About two hours after ingestion of 4 tablespoons, my brain worked detectably better. The effect wore off over several hours. To properly study this effect, and exploit it to learn more about what fats we should eat (which has been very hard to figure out), I would have to test myself many times per day for many days. Thousands of tests. It would be a lot easier if the tests were fast, portable, and fun — especially fun. Many computer games have these traits. But they don’t provide the data I need, which is a measure of how well my brain is working, and they take too long.

After talking with Greg Niemeyer, I came up with four properties, shared by many games, that might be why they are fun: 1. Right difficulty level. Neither too easy nor too hard. This is a variable emphasized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow. 2. Feedback. You learn how well you are doing. 3. Variety. Not the same thing over and over. 4. Color. I constructed a task with all four features. To my dismay, it wasn’t fun! (So much for the placebo effect.) I had to force myself to do it.

I had no idea what was wrong. Then, as I’ve written, a friend gave me a bilboquet, which led me to think that there were two principles of fun-making I’d left out: 1. Hand-eye coordination. We enjoy tasks that involve this. 2. Completion. We enjoy tasks where something is cleared up or put neatly together.

I used these ideas to construct a new test. It consisted of moving the cursor around the screen from one colored circle to the next. I move the cursor to a circle and click on it. That circle disappears and a new circle appears somewhere else. It’s a bit like shooting one circle after another. Aim, click, aim, click. Each circle is effectively a new trial. The speed at which I moved the cursor to the new circle and click on it is the main measure. There is trial-by-trial feedback: the color of the next circle depends on how quickly I got to the last circle. Here’s a screen shot (cursor not shown):

I did this on a Thinkpad. I used the trackpoint to move the cursor. This had the pleasant feature that there was no obvious learning curve — I didn’t improve with practice. Presumably because I have years of practice with the trackpoint

Eventually I got around to the big question: Was this test sensitive to the effects of flaxseed oil? I’ve done two series of measurements to answer this. Here are the results from the first series:

The green line shows when I drank 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil (without lignans). Here are the results from the second series:

Again, the green line shows when I drank 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil.

Both times the results resembled my previous results. The flaxseed oil appeared to cause a decrease (= improvement), which reached a maximum around 2 hours after ingestion and declined. The results were far from beautiful but because of the similarity to earlier results (here, here, and here) I found them fairly persuasive. They certainly suggest doing more with this test.

Then I made a different game…

My visit to Greg’s class.

Anonymous writes again:

I got caught in a nasty achilles lock the other day–it’s an MMA [mixed martial art] submission move–and while trying to escape, I accidentally dislocated my fibula at the knee. It made a LOUD popping noise, to the point where everyone in the gym stopped. It popped it back in immediately, and other than some instability, it felt OK. Thankfully there was a doctor there (by chance–he does MMA and was in my class). He spent like 15 minutes examining my knee and said that other than some stretched ligaments, it was fine. His quote (I’m paraphrasing):

“That’s amazing. You should need reconstructive surgery right now. I don’t know how that happened, you must have rubber ligaments.”

I told him about taking 4 tablespoons of flax seed oil every day, and he was shocked, and said he was going to research it to see if that could be why I got so lucky. Told him to Google you, it’s all there.

The injury happened Friday. Today (Tuesday) the doctor looked at my knee again in class, and he was amazed not only at the lack of swelling, but that I was able to roll today (not full speed, just lightly).

I have played sports my whole life and have had at least half a dozen various knee injuries. Things like minor cartilage tears, hyperextensions, strains, etc.–none that were this major (a dislocation of a bone at the joint). Of those injuries, I was out longer and recovered much slower than I have with this one. I know this isn’t proof of anything, and I don’t know how much the flaxseed oil has had to do with what happened, but even the doctor is shocked.

More about omega-3 and sports injuries here and here and here.

Addendum. He uses Whole Foods flaxseed oil without lignans.

When I buy flaxseed oil, I have a choice: with or without lignans. I almost always choose without. Apparently that’s the right choice, witness this from the SLD forums:

I’ve been trying to figure out what besides overeating might cause these flare ups with my gallbladder. It seems clear from the last few days that one of the things that can set it off is Flax Seed Oil with lignans. When I consume 2-3 tablespoons a day of FSO without lignans, I don’t notice any problems. The FSO goes down easy and I don’t feel nausea or pain. But with the lignans I often do. To be sure, I decided to switch from FSO to ground up flax seeds mixed into my oatmeal. And today, the first time I tried that, an hour later the familiar nausea is back.

Susan Allport is the author of The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them, which for me was the best source of introductory information on the subject. Chapter 1 is here. A video.

What have been the main reactions to your book?

The best reaction has been from scientists and the American Oil Chemists Society (AOCS), whose members were happy to have the history of this important research laid out for the public and for themselves. The book hasn’t yet caught on with general readers — in part because the material is somewhat difficult and in part because most people think that the problems with fats are with trans fats or saturated fats or cholesterol: three long detours on the road to dietary understanding, in my opinion.

Learned anything since you wrote it that you would include in a revised/expanded edition?

I would certainly include a key piece of evidence that has been available for some time but not brought to light. It has to do with the argument that we don’t elongate and desaturate the parent essential fatty acids very well (the omega-3 fat: alpha linolenic acid and omega-6 fat: linoleic acid). Therefore, the argument goes, it doesn’t matter about the quantities of these parent fats in the diet. What matters is the amount of long chain fats (in fish, etc.)

But here’s the rub and the lie to this argument.

According to the Nationwide Food Consumption Survey and other data, Americans consume more long chain omega-3 fatty acids than they do long chain omega-6 fatty acids (See “Polyunsaturated fatty acids in the food chain in the US”, Am J Clin Nutr 2000;71 S 179s-88s.) Yet their tissues are full of these highly inflammatory omega-6 fats.

How did this happen? There is only one way. The large amount of linoleic acid in the diet (about 7% of energy) overwhelms and outcompetes the much smaller amount of alpha linolenic acid (about .7% of energy). So it does matter how much linoleic acid we consume. Linoleic acid is the elephant in the living room and the reason we are experiencing the many chronic illnesses that are associated with an insufficiency of omega-3s.

I like to think that anyone who has read my flaxseed oil results (flaxseed is high in alpha linolenic acid, the short-chain omega-3 fat) would agree. Next question: My impression is that the optimal amount of omega-3 is highly unclear. Do you agree?

The optimal amount of omega-3s in one’s tissues does seem to vary, somewhat, according to where one lives. In the cold Artic, humans benefited from a very high proportion of omega-3s in their tissues, and there they weren’t penalized for having a lower proportion of omega-6s b/c there are few infectious microorganisms in the Artic. (Omega-6s, remember, are important in mounting a good immune response.) In more temperate and tropical regions, we need a more balanced amount of 3s and 6s in our tissues. We’ll be learning a lot more about these optimal amounts in the future.

What’s most critical to understand, though, is that omega-3s and omega-6s compete for enzymes and for positions in our cell membranes. So the amount of omega-3s you need to eat in order to achieve a given (optimal) amount in your tissues depends entirely on the amount of omega-6s you’re eating. If you’re eating small amounts of omega-6s, you need to eat only small amounts of fish and greens. If you’re eating, as most Americans are, large amount of omega-6s, you’ll need to eat large amounts of fish and greens — more fish than there are in the ocean!

Which widely-listened-to nutrition expert or group of experts has best appreciated the importance of omega-3s? Which has worst appreciated them?

I’ve had very good conversations with Dr. Mehmet Oz, and I know that Andrew Weil has a very good understanding of the issues. Epidemiologists seem to have the least appreciation because they have little knowledge and appreciation of biochemistry, in general.

In that last question I was thinking of Walter Willett, whose book Eat Drink and Be Healthy fails to clearly distinguish omega-3 and omega-6 fats. Since he’s an epidemiologist, that agrees with what you say. Can you say more about the reaction of epidemiologists?

For Willett to observe the difference between the two families of fats in his type of research, he would need subjects with very different proportions of these fats in their tissues. He doesn’t have that since all of his subjects eat a similar American diet. He also doesn’t see it because he doesn’t control for the two families and their competitive interactions. What we need to do to achieve a good understanding of the role of the two families of essential fats in health and disease is to take experimental work (which clearly shows important differences b/n the two families) and use it to frame our prospective studies. (And because of the competitive interactions, we can’t use fish intake as an indication of omega-3 status; we must use tissue levels of the two families!)