Seth’s blog

This comment was made recently on an earlier post:

I am so glad I found this blog.

My daughter has had coughing fits for 24 months (she’s 5 1/2 yo).

Inhalers, several doctors, nothing helped. She routinely coughed until vomiting. After one 10 hour coughing fit I reached my limit and scoured the web.

After putting in her whole medical history as search qualifiers I found this [post]. The prior eczema and antibiotics were key indicators.

After 3 days of drinking 1 probiotic shake a day, she showed very marked improvement. After 1 week, no symptoms. This is a girl who’s been unable to run and play for 2 years. Who woke up coughing and gagging most nights.

After 6 weeks of the same regimen, she still shows no symptoms and is running and playing full blast.

The pulmonary specialist discounts the results we’ve seen as a fluke . . . we’ll see. Previously my daughter’s lung capacity was measured at 47% of expected.

“Unable to run and play for 2 years”! I’m impressed. Not only (a) the improvement is huge, but also (b) it resembles verification of a prediction, not just something a theory can explain, (c) it wasn’t obvious to “several doctors” or (d) the rest of the Internet, and (e) after it happened it was dismissed by an expert, even though the evidence for causality is excellent. The verification aspect reminds me of Pale Fire:

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

In an earlier post I pointed out that modern molecular biology has one big feature in common with cargo-cult science (activities with the trappings but not the substance of science): relentless over-promising. David Horrobin, in a 2003 essay, agreed with me:

Those familiar with medical research funding know the disgraceful campaigns waged in the 70s and 80s by scientists hunting the genes for such diseases as cystic fibrosis. Give us the money, we’ll find the gene and then your problems will be solved was the message. The money was found, the genes were found - and then came nothing but a stunned contemplation of the complexity of the problem, which many clinicians had understood all along.

During the question period of a talk by Laurie Garrett about science writing at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, I said there was a kind of conspiracy between scientists and journalists to make research results (in biology/health) appear more important than they really were. Oh, no, said Garrett. If she’s right, then journalists are completely credulous. They have no idea they’re being scammed. If I wrote a book called The Real Scientific Method, there would be a whole chapter on better ways (cool data) and worse ways (over-promising) to promote your work.

The discovery of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain how much fat you have, was front-page news in 1994. Supposedly this discovery would help people lose weight. It is now abundantly clear that it hasn’t and won’t. The discoverer of leptin, Jeffrey Friedman, gave a talk at UC Berkeley several years ago and resembled a deer caught in the headlights. All he knew — following the party line — was that genetics was important. That genetics was so obviously not the reason for the obesity epidemic . . . he didn’t mention. This interview gives a sampling of his views. He really does believe in the primacy of genes:

Over the years, Dr. Friedman says, he has watched the scientific data accumulate to show that body weight, in animals and humans, is not under conscious control. Body weight, he says, is genetically determined, as tightly regulated as height.

Never mind animal and human experiments that show adult body weight is controlled by recent diet. Adult height is not controlled by recent diet. What about the obesity epidemic? Well,

“Before calling it an epidemic, people really need to understand what the numbers do and don’t say,” he said.

This is what one molecular biologist — a professor at Rockefeller University — is reduced to: telling us what data collected by other people “do and don’t say”. Not to mention qualifying the obvious (Americans are much fatter now than 50 years ago). I’m sure his lab has all the trappings of modern science. But the planes don’t land.

A journalist named David Freedman has figured this out.

This comment by goblyn on the Shangri-La Diet forums made me laugh:

When you’re on Atkins it gets harder when you start wanting to sell your first born for a piece of bread.  On Weight Watchers you’d kill for a pizza.  On South Beach you’d sleep with Donald Trump for an order of buffalo wings.  On the cabbage soup diet, you’d willingly chop off your hands if you could eat something…anything…other than cabbage soup.  On SLD it gets harder when you are suddenly only losing 1 lb a week rather than 4.

So well written! The comment continues, in very gratifying way:

It’s harder when you effortlessly eat 1400 calories a day and don’t feel deprived.  It’s harder when you have to buy a whole new wardrobe.  It’s harder when you’re out with friends and they all think you’re anorexic because you get stuffed from the bread they served before the meal…  But there’s rarely a moment when it’s actually HARD.  SLD is easy.  Yes the weight loss slows down, yes the AS [appetite suppression] gets less noticeable, but at no point does it stop working.  You won’t suddenly find your weight skyrocketing from eating a piece of celery.

This old comment made me laugh me when I reread it recently:

It was slightly embarrassing when friends would ask how long I had been on [the Shangri-La Diet]. I lied and said a day - it had only been eight hours but, hey, without SLD, I normally would have done a great deal of damage in those 8 hours. It’s now been a week and I’ve lost three pounds. I love the luxury of choosing finer foods now that I’m no longer compelled to eat everything in sight when dinnertime comes around. The Monster has been rocked to sleep

From a review of The Shangri-La Diet:

Seth Roberts, the diet founder and book author, attempts to explain the science behind how this works, but I won’t even begin to try to explain it here. I will admit that it is both counterintuitive and at times seems contradictory, but since there was little risk involved I was willing to give it a try.

I was nervous to add the calories into my diet (approximately 120 per tablespoon of olive oil), when all my life experience told me that I should be cutting fat and calories. However, I have only been following the plan for about a week and am amazed at the results. After just one day it was like having instant willpower.