Seth’s blog

My work is all about how the past was better for us. People stood more; so they slept better. They ate more animal fat; so they slept better. They saw more faces in the morning and fewer faces late at night, so their mood was better. Their food had more bacteria growing on it, so their immune and digestive systems worked beter. And so on.

Past meaning 100,000 years ago. In Beijing, I am moving from one apartment (A) to another apartment (B). Apartment A is in a modern building, Apartment B is in a building maybe 40 years older. To my surprise, Apartment B is clearly better than Apartment A. The biggest improvement is that Apartment B has all-incandescent lighting. Apartment A was all-fluorescent. Exposure to fluorescent light in the evening can interfere with the faces-mood effect because it can resemble sunlight. Incandescent lamps are so much cooler than the sun that the light they emit is very different. Another improvement is that Apartment B, unlike Apartment A, has a sun deck. So it’s easy to get lots of sunlight in the morning — important for sleep and for the faces-mood effect. The third improvement is that Apartment B, like Apartment A, is on the sixth floor — but  Apartment B is a walk-up. Walking up six flights of stairs will tire out my legs so that when I do one-legged standing (to sleep better) I won’t have to stand as long before getting exhausted. When I lived in Apartment A I could have taken the stairs, but I never did.

I am staying in a nice hotel near Shanghai. Last night I dreamed that my stuff (suitcase, etc.) had been put in the hallway outside my room. As — in the dream — I was walking to the front desk to complain, I realized I must be dreaming. This couldn’t possibly have happened, I thought. It was that realistic. Later that night I had another mild realistic nightmare — about missing the bus.

I rarely have dreams like that. During the day I’d had a lot more Chinese food than usual. Two big meals. (Lunch, at a restaurant, had included yogurt, incidentally.) Without my friend’s experience I would have never connected the Chinese food and the nightmares.

Jenny Holzer, the artist, says, “I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not.” I suspect she’s not eating enough animal fat. At my local Beijing supermarket yesterday, I asked a butcher to cut the meat off a piece of pork fat. Reverse trimming. At the moment, I think about 180 g of animal fat/day is a good dose. I’m much less concerned about amount of meat. Another instance, I thought to myself, where I want the opposite of everyone else. But that’s far more true in America than here. In China but not America, I can buy pork belly at any supermarket; in China but not America, there is vast selection of pickles and yogurt at any supermarket.

At a dinner for foreign teachers at Tsinghua, I met a Canadian woman who teaches English literature. Soon after she moved to China, she started having nightmares every night. For dreams, they were unusually linear and realistic. They were nightmares in the sense that they felt “sinister”. This hadn’t happened to her before. It was especially puzzling because she was having a good time.

On a forum for foreigners in Beijing, she asked what might be causing the problem. MSG, she was told. All Chinese restaurants use MSG. She started cooking her own food. The problem went away. Whenever she ate a restaurant meal, the problem returned. The time between meal and sleep made a difference. The dreams would be more vivid if she slept soon after the meal.

Here is a discussion of the MSG/nightmare link with many stories about it. I believe we like the taste of MSG because glutamate is created when proteins are digested by bacteria. We like glutamate because we need to eat bacteria to be healthy. Bacteria are too big and varied to detect directly; it’s much easier to evolve a glutamate detector.  The problem is that now you can have glutamate in your food without bacteria. Apparently cooked tomatoes and garlic are other sources.

With PubMed I found two relevant articles. One reported an experiment where hyperactive boys got better when additives, including MSG, were removed from their food. The other is a review article about the effects of MSG that mentions sleep.

I’m sure from the personal stories that MSG causes nightmares — and therefore probably also causes other problems. (That glutamate is a neurotransmitter makes the MSG-nightmare link even more likely.) Here are researchers from the Scripps Clinic in San Diego saying MSG is safe:

Since the first description of the ‘Monosodium glutamate symptom complex’, originally described in 1968 as the ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’, a number of anecdotal reports and small clinical studies of variable quality have attributed a variety of symptoms to the dietary ingestion of MSG. . . . Despite concerns raised by early reports, decades of research [this review was published in 2009] have failed to demonstrate a clear and consistent relationship between MSG ingestion and the development of these conditions..

What the woman I met did in a week or so (establish that MSG has bad effects), medical researchers — at least, judging by this review — have failed to do in 41 years (”decades of research”). Just as dermatologists have been unable to figure out that acne is caused by diet.

More about the dangers of MSG.

A few nights ago I slept surprisingly well: I woke up feeling more rested than usual. Each morning I judge how rested I feel on a scale from 0 to 100 where 0 = as if I hadn’t slept and 100 = completely drained of tiredness. I got scores of 100 after standing 9 or 10 hours during the day. That showed what was possible but that much standing was unsustainable. Without extreme standing, 99 has seemed to be the maximum.

A few nights ago, I did better. The ratings for that night and the preceding four nights were: 98.9, 98.8, 99, 98.8, 99.2. Doesn’t look like much, but actually the improvement was so clearly unusual I didn’t need records to notice it. If I gave the scores for the preceding 100 nights you’d see it was rare to score above 99. Moreover, I was keeping the amount of animal fat I ate constant, unlike previous nights with scores above 99. The difference between 98.8 and 99.2 is easy to notice. Think of the difference between 12 and 8.

What had improved my sleep? I could think of four unusual things about the preceding day:

1. Several cloves of garlic in the pork-belly soup I ate for lunch. I’d never before added any garlic.

2. I began using f.lux, which reduced the color temperature of my computer screen after sunsight.

3. I’d played Dance Dance Revolution (on the Wii) for 10 minutes at 8 pm. Usually I do it in the morning (much longer, 30-50 minutes).

4. More bike riding than usual (including two long stretches that added up to 66 minutes).

All four seemed unlikely. 1. Who’d heard of garlic improving sleep? Not me. 2. Laptop screens are quite dim compared to sunlight. 3. The amount of exercise was small. I’d played Wii Tennis for longer periods in the evening without noticing any change. DDR in the morning hadn’t made an obvious difference. 4. I’d ridden my bike for 50-odd minutes at a stretch without noticing better sleep. This was only slightly more.

Now I am testing these possibilities. If you have any idea which it is — perhaps it is none of them — please comment.

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