Author: slimemoldtimemold

Anonymous vs Pseudonymous Internet Science

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People frequently ask us why we are anonymous. The answer is that we’re not anonymous, we’re pseudonymous. Both of these approaches are useful ways to conduct your internet science, so here is a quick guide to choosing which one works best for you: 

Anonymous

  • No name attached at all.
  • Highest level of separation between government identity and the individual.
  • Can be good for one-off research or theoretical pieces that don’t need to be connected to other things you’ve worked on, or things that might be better for a different audience.
  • For study participants, the best option to protect their privacy.
  • Literally you can do infinite anonymous identities.
  • Naming conventions: numbering is easy, but there’s lots of opportunity to be creative. Or just say “by Anonymous”. Actually Google Docs has a nice approach: 
Anonymous NyanCat

Pseudonymous 

  • A pseudonym is like a band name. It’s a name that you will use multiple times, and a name that can develop its own reputation.
  • A pseudonym may or may not be connected to a legal name — this can also change over time or in different contexts. Lots of people are known by a stage name or a pen name professionally, but you can still find their other names without too much trouble. You may not immediately know Jay Z’s government name, but it’s not hard to find out that he was born Shawn Corey Carter.
  • Pseudonyms are great for groups! Fighting for first authorship is stupid — just come up with a silly name instead. 
  • You can also have multiple pseudonyms. Generally it makes sense to pick one name for a given project and stay with that for a while, so that people can get to know your style and see what you do as a body of work that should be considered. But using different pseudonyms for different projects, or when you’re working with different groups, is a good approach.

Conclusions: Really it’s a spectrum. There are lots of different options that can work, depending on the project and your specific concerns. 

Philosophical Transactions: Jon on One Year Post-Potato-Diet

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Previous Philosophical Transactions:

Jon was a participant in our Potato Diet Community Trial. He recently sent us an email with an update on how he’s doing, which is reproduced below with his permission.

I don’t know if you wanted a 1 year followup.

So last year at this time I’d just come off my first potato diet and it seemed like the weight was staying off at least partially out of sheer cussedness and a desire to see my much-touted diet work out as well as I’d hoped. Where am I at a year later?

At the end of that first potato diet I was at 168, having lost about 15 pounds from my start of 183.6. Last time I weighed myself I was at around 172. That’s practically within water-weight of that 168! And that 172 is approximately stable compared to a month ago or whenever I last weighed myself!

In the last year I’ve done a couple more tries at the potato diet, neither of which were as successful as that first one. But I think when it comes down to it the potato diet knocked my basic set-weight down by about 11 pounds! The biggest ongoing change in my diet is having tater tots and sausage for breakfast almost every day, generally replacing cereal in the old regime.

Anyway, absurdly pleased by that result–potato diet wasn’t a magic bullet for me but it halted the inexorable upward slide of my weight, got me down a little bit and has kept me stable for a year.

Even though it never worked as well again (probably lack of accountability from not being part of a study) the potato diet was still life-changing and has improved my health long term! Please let me know if you need any more data, I’m happy to provide it! Thanks,

Jon 

Links for September 2023

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ExFatLoss publishes a summary of the ex150 trial results. “Just like the proverbial dog chasing an automobile, I realized that I didn’t know what to do next. When I first asked for volunteers to try ex150, I was worried: what if this crazy cream diet doesn’t work for anyone else? What if it only works for me? Spoiler alert: it seems to work for nearly everybody. Young and old, men and women, obese to normal weight, very active to lazy.” We’d quibble a little: it worked for nearly everyone, but also 10 out of 10 participants had previous experience with low-carb/keto/carnivore. It’s not clear if it would work for the average person. Even so, a great start and an interesting finding. We hope to see ExFatLoss continue his research and would be interested to see others replicate this result! 

Luck based medicine: angry eldritch sugar gods edition — an n=1 self-experiment, concluding among other things that “1-2 pounds of watermelon/day kills my desire for processed desserts, but it takes several weeks to kick in.” The author also says, “metabolism is highly individual and who knows how much of this applies to anyone else.” And we agree. We will need hundreds or thousands of people doing n=1 studies like this in order to crack nutrition. You go back and look at 19th century astronomy, there were scores of astronomers tracking each new comet and asteroid. A 21st century nutrition science will rely on similarly broad participation. Nutrition may well be more confusing, and maybe more complicated, than the heavens. Fortunately it is easier to eat lots of watermelon than to set up an astronomical observatory.

Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships, Northeastern University researchers say — they also like youtube.

Cleopatra (1917) is a lost film starring early sex symbol Theda Bara, the original “vamp”. All known copies were lost in a 1937 studio fire, and only tiny fragments remained. Until this month when someone found a fragment included with a toy film projector listed on eBay, and uploaded 41 seconds of footage to YouTube.

Unclear if it’s promising or not, but it’s an exciting idea: Gene-Engineered Mouth Bacteria

The term “go ham” is an acronym. As if that’s not bad enough, “Pakistan” is also an acronym. 

The song “Frank Mills” from the musical Hair was inspired by real Lost and Found submissions to Rave Magazine in 1966, and here they are: 

Creator of comic series Fables releases the series IP to the public domain after clash with DC over video game adaptation:

I chose to give it away to everyone. If I couldn’t prevent Fables from falling into bad hands, at least this is a way I can arrange that it also falls into many good hands. Since I truly believe there are still more good people in the world than bad ones, I count it as a form of victory.

… In the past decade or so, my thoughts on how to reform the trademark and copyright laws in this country (and others, I suppose) have undergone something of a radical transformation. The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want.

In my template for radical reform of those laws I would like it if any IP is owned by its original creator for up to twenty years from the point of first publication, and then goes into the public domain for any and all to use. However, at any time before that twenty year span bleeds out, you the IP owner can sell it to another person or corporate entity, who can have exclusive use of it for up to a maximum of ten years. That’s it. Then it cannot be resold. It goes into the public domain. So then, at the most, any intellectual property can be kept for exclusive use for up to about thirty years, and no longer, without exception.

Of course, if I’m going to believe such radical ideas, what kind of hypocrite would I be if I didn’t practice them? Fables has been my baby for about twenty years now. It’s time to let it go. This is my first test of this process. If it works, and I see no legal reason why it won’t, look for other properties to follow in the future. Since DC, or any other corporate entity, doesn’t actually own the property, they don’t get a say in this decision.

A Meat Thread on twitter: “Let me tell you the story of this still of stephen colbert wearing meat goggles, my buddy Frank, and how I learned to distrust science journalism.” The upshot: “Frank is fine, the world barely remembered the story two months later and he went on to get a doctorate from Chicago and is doing great work. But I never again trusted a science article from a newspaper.” 

T. S. Eliot wrote the book that was the basis for the musical CATS. Also he wrote it under the pen name “Old Possum”.

Mark Twain invented the bra clasp. But he did it under his other name, Samuel Clemens: 

Mysteries Contest: Winners

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Thanks to everyone who participated or voted in the Mysteries Contest! The winners are:

FIRST PLACE:
What’s the Deal With Airplane Food Iodine and Longevity? by Kevin Shea, writing as Lee S. Pubb.

SECOND PLACE:
Why is autism rare among the Amish? by TripleTaco.

THIRD PLACE:
Have Attention Spans Been Declining? by niplav, writing as Cennfaeladh, who also blogs at niplav.site. Also, honorable mention to niplav for getting by far the most (30,000+) pageviews.

We’ve been in contact with all three winners and will be sending them their awards shortly. Congratulations! 

In addition, TripleTaco gave us this proposed explanation to the list of Amish mysteries. For your consideration: 

After I formed my own theory of what caused Autism, I looked hard to see if anybody else had come to the same conclusion. After a long time of looking, I finally found one researcher, Max McDowell, who explains what he (and I) believe likely causes autism in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHhAnCTVLG4

If I were naming this, I’d call it “face starvation”. Babies have a crucial window in which they need a certain amount of eye contact and starving them of that causes autism for many children. He goes on in that video to describe many of the same mysteries I described in my mystery post. The theory lines up with the mysteries perfectly.

The video has been out for over 2 years and at this moment it has 114 views. His idea was first published all the way back in 2004, so it’s not new at all. It’s just being utterly ignored, and for very strong reasons:

First of all, he calls himself a “Jungian Psychoanalyst”, which frankly makes him sound kind of woo-woo and makes it harder to take him seriously. Secondly, he’s well outside of the academic circles that have earned the right to talk about autism and its causes. He’s an outsider. Thirdly, it’s a shocking, awful idea, and anybody championing it will be pilloried from all sides. The idea is threatening to the neurodiversity camp who don’t want autism treated like a disorder at all. The idea is threatening to parents who aren’t eager to hear that their own technology habits may have contributed to severe lifelong difficulty in their child. The idea is threatening to existing researchers who are far along other research paths and stand to gain little from such a simple tidy explanation, especially when championing it would get them in all kinds of hot water from every direction. Frankly, this idea is way too controversial to put my own name on, which is why this is an anonymous contribution. 

Even if we’re right, I’m not hopeful that people are going to start taking this idea seriously. There are some ideas that are just too controversial to be taken seriously. 

Links for August 2023

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nematode theory of Barbie

Why I’m quitting peer review – The Academic Health Economists’ Blog

You may not think of grantmaking as jet-setting, but Stuart Buck makes it sound like being James Bond. More seriously, a fascinating look at the life and times of the most active “metascience venture capitalist”, who ”funded some of the most prominent metascience entrepreneurs of the past 11 years, and often was an active participant in their work.”

And another, from the archives (so to speak): A Report on Scientific Branch-Creation: How the Rockefeller Foundation helped bootstrap the field of molecular biology 

Our experiments consisted of inoculating exponentially growing bacteria into a given medium and following bacterial growth by measuring optical density. Samples were taken every fifteen minutes, and the technicians reported the results. They were so involved that they had identified themselves with the bacteria, or with the growth curves, and they used to say for example: “I am exponential,” or “I am slightly flattened.” Technicians and bacteria were consubstantial.

So negative experiments piled up, until after months and months of despair, it was decided to irradiate the bacteria with ultra-violet light. This was not rational at all, for ultra-violet radiations kill bacteria and bacteriophages, and on a strictly logical basis the idea still looks illogical in retrospect. Anyhow, a suspension of lysogenic bacilli was put under the UV lamp for a few seconds. 

… 

It was a very hot summer day and the thermometer was unusually high. After irradiation, I collapsed in an armchair, in sweat, despair, and hope. Fifteen minutes later, Evelyne Ritz, my technician, entered the room and said: “Sir, I am growing normally.”

Willow maybe-illegalism

When You Give a Tree an Email Address:

Being a Lizard — a response to Adam Mastroianni’s invitation to a secret society. The author describes the process of setting up a DIY biology lab, including thoughts on location and instructions on how to spend cents on the dollar for your own lab equipment. We only wish there were more detail, maybe even a complete guide to help others set up their own labs, but maybe that will come in a future post.

One biohacker in particular I got in touch with told me to aim to spend 1-2 cents on the dollar against new pricing on the equipment I needed. At first I thought he was being hyperbolic, but then I started looking in some of the places he told me to, and before I knew it, I was finding and buying thousands of dollars worth of equipment for literally hundreds, making the initial cost barrier I’d perceived negligible. 

You’re probably wondering why this is the case. Well, because the people that are liquidating these items see it as junk that is taking up rentable space, especially large items like biosafety cabinets and CO2 incubators. If you’re patient, these items can literally be acquired for free. Just last week I bid for a $9,000 incubator for < $50 and a 4 hour drive to Iowa State University.

So why isn’t there more demand for this equipment in the open market? According to the NIH, the average research project grant size is over a half a million dollars. You can spend up to $25,000 on a single piece of equipment under a grant budget without even needing to ask for approval. Academic labs and companies with funding have every incentive to buy the coolest new piece of equipment on the market to do their research, and are under time constraints that don’t warrant cutting costs by searching the secondary market. 

Independent biohackers on the other hand are working under the opposite set of constraints. We may have a surplus of time to answer our research question outside of other commitments, but are constrained by resources and expertise to do so.

“Wernicke‐Korsakoff syndrome is the partial destruction of the brain resulting from a lack of thiamine (vitamin B‐1).” This sometimes comes to pass as a result of malnutrition, but it’s more stereotypically associated with severe and long-term alcoholism. Fortunately, treatment and prevention are quite simple — just give people thiamine. So in the 1930s and 1940s, people started to experiment with adding thiamine directly to alcoholic beverages, and found that it was stable in several favorites, including beer, wine, and whiskey. This seems like the ideal public health measure — vitamin fortification in a product that will go directly to people at risk of a terrible disease resulting from a lack of that very vitamin. However, in 1940 this idea ran afoul of our arcane legal system. In Irish mythology, there are magically binding vows called geasa, and the doom of heroes often comes from having multiple geasa that come into conflict. For example, Cú Chulainn has a geas never to eat dog meat, and he has another geas always to eat any food offered to him by a woman. When an old crone offers him dog meat, he’s trapped. Federal rulings have the same problem (modulo dog meat). You have to list all food additives on the label. But you also aren’t allowed to list the vitamin content of alcoholic beverages — that might imply that drinking alcohol is healthy. So we really dropped the ball in 1940 and we should really consider a return to the idea of adding thiamine to alcohol… reports this New York Times article from 1979. Maybe there were good reasons we didn’t, or maybe this is several millions of dollars in public health savings just lying on the sidewalk. You decide! Here’s a 1978 N Engl J Med article on the same idea if you want to learn more. 

Vacation Study Ideas

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There are lots of stories where an American goes on vacation for a few weeks, to Europe or Asia or wherever, and loses a significant amount of weight without any special effort. 

whole thread here

(Though sometimes it’s not weight, it’s something else like acne breakouts or digestive issues.)

There are also some stories that are exactly the opposite: someone from Europe or Asia or wherever goes on vacation to America for a few weeks, and GAINS a significant amount of weight without any changes. 

Some stories describe what are almost simple ABABA-style experiments, where a person goes back and forth from America to other parts of the world and sees their weight reliably yo-yo as they move from country to country. We shared one such story in Part X of A Chemical Hunger, this account from Julius: 

I currently live in Seattle but have moved around a lot. I’ve made 6 separate moves between places where I drank the tap water (mostly USA/UK/Hungary) and places I haven’t (South East Asia, India, Middle East). Whenever I’ve spent significant time in bottled water countries I lost weight (up to 50 lbs), and each time, save one 3 month stretch in Western Europe, I gained it back in tap water countries. I also lost weight for the first time in the States (20 lbs) this year around the time I switched to filtered water.

We can also share this story, from another reader (lightly edited per his request):

I quit my job and moved to northwest Thailand. I lived there for about 1.5 years and lost 100lbs. At the end, I was thinner than I’d ever been as an adult, even in Germany, just under 200lbs (or ~90kg). I didn’t do much if any exercise and I typically ate as much as I wanted.

Then I moved to SF and gained the 100lbs back within 2-3 years. I worked out while I was still thin, but, again, it didn’t stop the gaining and eventually became impractical as I was too fat to run. Peaked around 300lbs once again.

So then I thought, it’s the work stress. So I quit my job once more, and I moved to Las Vegas, where I lived for an ENTIRE YEAR without a job. And didn’t lose any weight. 

During these last few years, I would often vacation in Thailand for 1-3 months, and always lose weight without trying. Typically, if I was there for at least 1 month, I’d see some noticeable fat loss on the order of a few pounds, and feel my belt get looser.

Even right now, as I’m visiting with my family back in Germany, I am visibly and belt-feel thinner after only 3 weeks of being outside the US, despite zero exercise and eating a ton of salami and cheeses.

Anecdotes are fun, but so far there hasn’t been any systematic study. If this vacation weight loss effect is real, it seems like it would be good to know. It would give us a powerful tool for causing weight loss (just take a trip to somewhere leaner than where you’re living right now), and it would help us get closer to finding out what causes obesity. 

In particular, it would provide more evidence for the contamination hypothesis, since losing weight on vacation is a pretty strong hint that something about the environment is to blame. Most of the anecdotes above seem pretty confident their weight loss has something to do with the “unprocessed” foreign food, but there are reasons to think it might be some other part of the foreign environment. And if we could study vacation weight loss in a systematic way, we might be able to narrow things down.

Systematic

Happily, the plural of anecdote IS data, so these anecdotes do start us off with data we can use. 

But this data is not very systematic, and may not be representative. In particular, if you go on vacation to Europe and you lose no weight, you probably don’t post about it on social media, and you probably don’t email us to tell us about the weight you didn’t lose. 

We can correct for this by trying to collect data in a more systematic way. We can also try to come up with a design that lets us account for some alternative explanations (more on this in a bit). 

We have a few ideas for study designs, but we’re not sure what kind of design would be best. We’ll describe general ideas for designs below, and please, let us know what you think.

If any of the designs seem good, we might run one of these studies at some point. But it’s somewhat of a shame for us to be running so many of these internet studies. No one should have to take our word for these things — it would be better if the work/knowledge/expertise were spread around the community. 

So if you want to help run one of these studies, or if you want to take point and run it yourself, let us know and we can talk about collaborating. Or you can just take the design and run with it, we’re not your mom.

Walking

But first: Some people are skeptical that there is something special about vacation. The most common alternative they offer is some form of, “it’s all the extra walking”.

But there are some problems with this response. For starters, it assumes that all these people are walking more, but you don’t always walk more on vacation than you do at home. Some people have very active day jobs, and there’s nothing stopping you from sitting quietly in your hotel room for a week straight. 

It ignores the other details people often mention in these stories, like that they also ate much more and ate “worse” than normal on vacation. From a simplistic CICO perspective, this extra food should balance out the extra walking.

And if extra walking on vacation were the cause of vacation weight loss, then extra walking ANYWHERE should cause weight loss. This would mean that slightly more mild cardio is a good treatment for obesity in general. But “slightly more mild cardio” doesn’t work as a treatment for obesity, so it’s clearly not the cause of vacation weight loss. 

More importantly, many people who lost (or gained) weight on vacation make it clear that they don’t think it was the extra walking. Yes, they are not totally neutral parties, but no one is a totally neutral party, and they are the only ones with firsthand knowledge of their own cases.

There may be other reasons to doubt that extra walking is to blame. Friend-of-the-blog dynomight is skeptical that the walking explanation survives back-of-the-napkin math:  

But all this debate is really for nothing. We can just check. 

For starters, it’s easy enough to ask people to count steps. Their phones make estimates automatically. We can see if people are walking more on vacation and if how much extra walking they do is at all related to how much weight they lose. 

We can compare Americans who go on vacation to Europe with Europeans who go to vacation in America. Maybe both groups walk more than average while they’re on vacation, but if the Americans lose weight in Europe and the Europeans gain weight in America, that would suggest that the extra walking has little to do with the weight change. 

We can also compare between states. Different US states vary widely in their obesity rates, from 25% in Colorado to more than 40% in Kentucky. If it’s something about the environment, then people from Kentucky should lose weight when they vacation in Spain, but people from Colorado might not. Similarly, we can look at people taking vacations in different US states. Europeans might gain weight in Mississippi but might not gain weight in Massachusetts. 

We could even do something ludicrous like: “take identical obese twins, send one twin on vacation to Italy and have the other twin stay in America and try to match their walking distance as closely as possible.”

With the right design, it should be relatively easy to tell if walking is to blame. It’s fine if somehow it turns out that extra walking is the real cause of vacation weight loss, but clearly this is somewhat controversial — we should do a study and see. 

Design #1: Existing Cohort Study

First, we could use data that someone else has already collected.

Programs like the Fulbright Program and the Peace Corps send young people to different countries around the world. These programs are already doing a controlled study on the vacation weight change effect, they just don’t know it. For example, the Philippine-American Fulbright Commission takes young people from a fat country (America) and sends them to a lean country (the Philippines), and also takes young people from a lean country (the Philippines) and sends them to a fat country (America), in both cases for about a full year. 

These programs may already be recording students’ weights before and after their trip abroad, perhaps for medical reasons. If so, all the data we need already exists out there in some database. If not, all that would be required would be convincing the program, or even just some of the students, to start recording their weights before and after the exchange.

This is pretty much the ideal experiment. It’s systematic — we will get information from everyone, whether or not they gain or lose weight. The sample size is huge. And the data may already exist.

The problem is that we don’t know if there’s any way for us to GET this data. We haven’t had any luck trying to get in touch with Fulbright or any of these other programs, and we doubt they would be willing to make this data public.

If anyone thinks they could put us in touch with anyone on the Fulbright Philippines Board of Directors, or anyone at a similar organization (the American armed forces might have similar data), we would love to do this analysis. But barring that, we’ll have to come up with ways to collect our own data. 

Design #2: Retrospective Vacation Study

Second, we could collect vacation information that already exists.

People have gone on many vacations over the course of human history [citation needed]. So for this design, we would systematically collect all the existing vacation stories we can.

This could be as simple as setting up a google form and asking people to submit stories about their past vacations (or other international trips, like exchange programs or briefly being an expat). The form would include just a few simple questions — how long the trip was, how much they weighed before, how much they weighed after, where they went, etc. Then we could look at this data to see if there’s any support for the vacation effect. 

You might want to limit this (and the designs we talk about below) to trips that are at least two weeks long, because one week probably wouldn’t be enough to get a clear signal. 

The upside of this design is that you might be able to get a lot of data pretty quickly. But there are some downsides.

First off, people may not remember how much they lost, how long they were gone, or other details of the trip. In short, the measurements will be noisy.

Second, you can’t ask people to collect specific data, or ask them to collect it in specific ways, because the vacation has already happened. If people happen to have measurements of how much they walked on their vacation, that would be great, but most people won’t have collected that data. 

Finally, there’s bound to be a selection effect. People who lost weight on vacation are probably more likely to respond than people who gained weight. This isn’t totally damning since we can still see things like 1) whether people lost more weight on longer vacations, 2) whether people lost more weight when they traveled to leaner countries, or 3) whether younger people lost more weight than older people. But it is a limitation. 

So it would be easy to run this study, and maybe informative if we got enough responses, but there are some problems with this kind of design.

Design #3: Prospective Vacation Study

Third, we could collect vacation data as it’s being created.

People continue to go on vacations today; in fact, many people are planning vacations right now. So another option would be to ask people to sign up to report on any vacations they’re about to take, and provide us a little data about the before and after. 

The design would be pretty simple: first a pre-vacation survey, where people tell us about the vacation they’re about to go on, where they’re coming from, where they’re going, how long it will be, and how much they weigh right now. We’d also ask them to give us some measure of their average activity, maybe their average steps per day over the last three months — something easy that should already be captured by their phone.

Then when they get back, there’d be a post-vacation survey, where people could tell us what their weight was after the vacation. We’d also ask them for their average steps per day while on vacation, so we could get a sense of if they are walking more or less than normal. We could also ask them to report subjectively on measures like whether they exercised more or less than usual, and whether they ate more or less than usual.

This would help keep selection effects somewhat in check. No one knows before a vacation whether they will gain or lose weight — they can’t decide whether or not to sign up for the study based on their weight change, because it hasn’t happened yet. 

If we have a high attrition rate, with lots of people filling out the first part but not filling out the second, this could be a sign that people who gain weight don’t come back and report their weight gain. But if the attrition rate is low, that suggests there isn’t much post-hoc selection. 

We can also do comparisons just within the people who respond. Maybe the attrition rate is high, but if all the Americans going to Europe report losing weight, and all the Europeans coming to America report gaining weight, we can be fairly sure that’s not just selection. 

The downside is that this approach would be pretty slow. There are lots of vacations, but we have to wait for people to come to us one by one as they jet off on their various trips. 

This design is also not very controlled. We don’t get to pick the vacations and we don’t get to pick the vacationers. It’s a convenience sample, and while it might still be revealing, there are limitations. 

Design #4: Controlled Vacation Experiment

Fourth, we can go out of our way to create the data we want.

It’s within our power to make vacations happen under controlled conditions — recruit some people who are obese and who can spend a month or two abroad (perhaps they have a remote job), and send them to a lean country for a couple weeks to see what happens. As with the other designs, you could have them track their exercise and other confounders if you want.

This is a version of what we have previously called “Slime Mold Time Mold’s Excellent Adventure”. 

We were originally concerned that even if things were perfect, weight loss would be pretty slow. Even if you sent people to Japan for a month, they might not lose weight quickly enough for you to reliably detect the change. We thought that you might have to send people abroad for closer to a year, just to pick up on the effect.

But the results of the Potato Diet have convinced us that under the right conditions, quite a lot of weight loss can happen in just a few weeks. So now we think that a vacation study of 2-4 weeks might actually be informative. 

And you may not need very many people. It’s still not clear how many people lose weight on vacations, but if the effect is consistent enough, you could find strong evidence with just a few participants (yet another n of small opportunity). If five obese people go to Italy for a month and all of them drop 10 lbs while sitting around and eating spaghetti alla carbonara ad libitum, that would be strong evidence, even with the small sample size.

The ideal countries to send people to would probably be Vietnam (leanest country in the world, about 2% obese), Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Japan, or South Korea (all less than 5% obese). There are many relatively lean countries in South America and Europe, but even Albania is more than 20% obese, so you would probably get a weaker effect. 

This wouldn’t be too expensive. It costs around $4,000-$5,000 to send someone to a lean country for a month, so you could likely send around 10 people to one of these countries for a month for less than $50,000. Not pocket change, true, but cheap in the grand scheme of scientific studies. Given that many people enjoy vacations [citation needed], you might even be able to get people to pay for half of their trip.

It might make sense to run one of the other studies first to see if they back up the anecdotes, before spending all this money. But the other study designs aren’t nearly as controlled. If you’d be interested in funding this study, or helping us arrange all the travel details (booking hotels and flights is not our strong suit), please let us know. Or you can ignore us, recruit 10 obese volunteers, and send them to Myanmar all on your own. Just let us know what you find out! 

Similarly, anyone who is at all overweight could run this as an N=1 self-experiment, or get a few friends and run it as an N of small. You just need to be in a position to spend a few weeks in one of these lean regions.

The main drawback is that the small sample size would keep you from making interesting comparisons. Sending 10 obese Americans on a one-month trip to a small Asian country could make a strong case for the vacation effect, but it wouldn’t let us answer questions like the following: do young people lose weight faster on vacations than old people? Do other demographics (like ethnicity) have an impact? Do people lose weight faster in Peru (19% obese) than in Spain (27% obese)? Do people with BMI < 25 also lose weight on vacations? 

This would be another reason to run multiple studies with different designs. Sending people on a planned vacation gives you a lot of experimental control with the limitation of a small sample size, while other designs can give you a large sample size at the cost of experimental control. Both could tell us a lot, and they’d be stronger together — triangulation is the name of the game. 

Final Notes

As far as we know, no one has ever done a vacation study like this, so any study at all would be interesting. It doesn’t have to be perfect — we should start by getting our toes wet. 

We’re talking about these designs like they’re all about obesity, but this approach doesn’t have to be used to study obesity. You could also use it to study, say, migraines. Lots of people think they are gluten or lactose intolerant — but are they still gluten or lactose intolerant if they’re eating bread or milk in, say, Italy? Might be interesting to find out. 

As always, we are happy to help with designs and methodology. If you want to run one of the studies described above, please contact us! 

Vote in the Mysteries Contest

slimemoldtimemold, , 2 Comments

Thank you for reading the entries in our Mysteries Contest. 

Please vote for your favorites here, using approval voting (i.e. vote for however many you want).

We will probably keep voting open until the end of the day on August 31 in case you want a chance to go back and re-read your favorites. In case you’ve forgotten, the finalists are:

  1. Why is autism rare among the Amish?
  2. Have Attention Spans Been Declining?
  3. What’s the Deal With Airplane Food Iodine and Longevity?

That’s right, only three finalists!

Your Mystery: What’s the Deal With A̶i̶r̶p̶l̶a̶n̶e̶ ̶F̶o̶o̶d̶ Iodine and Longevity?

slimemoldtimemold, , , , , 10 Comments

[This is one of the finalists in the SMTM Mysteries Contest, by a reader writing under the pseudonym Lee S. Pubb. We’ll be posting about one of these a week until we have gotten through all the finalists. At the end, we’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked.]

Background

Element 53, iodine, is a mineral essential to human health largely because it is utilized in the production of thyroid hormones.[1] For much of recorded human history, societies the world over suffered from the iodine deficiency disorder known as goiter–swelling in the neck resulting from an enlarged thyroid gland. It was common in regions where topsoil was regularly eroded (e.g., by flooding), as topsoil is rich in iodine, normally leading to its uptake in food crops. It’s also abundant in foods derived from the ocean, as ocean water contains iodine.

While Chinese doctors are said to have prescribed the consumption of animals’ thyroid glands to treat goiter as early as the 7th century, it was only in the early 20th century that large-scale research was done on iodine supplementation. It was found that sufficient levels of iodine consumption eliminated goiter in the vast majority of cases, and we began iodizing salt soon after. (Which is why I had to give this lengthy background on goiter, instead of just saying “that giant lump in your friend’s neck”.) The FDA recommends that Americans consume 150 mcg of iodine a day, and expect that the vast majority of Americans will achieve this through salt consumption.

(Very likely the reason you don’t have a goiter.)

That said, while the level of iodine supplementation present in modern-day table salt is clearly sufficient to greatly reduce the incidence of goiter, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the ideal level for overall thyroid health.[2] (The FDA’s upper limit is set nearly 8 times higher than the RDA, at 1,100 mcg, suggesting that considerably more than the recommended amount isn’t expected to be deleterious to human health.) The thyroid largely regulates metabolism, and you may be familiar with some mysteries raised about human metabolism over the past century.[3] There are also a number of diseases directly associated with thyroid function, and these are pretty common in the present day (especially among women), with around 20 million patients in the United States estimated to have some kind of thyroid disorder. Thyroid functioning is screened for by doctors via blood tests measuring thyroid hormone concentration. Common disorders include hypothyroidism, in which an abnormally low level of thyroid hormone is produced, and hyperthyroidism, in which too much is produced.

INTERESTING!:

The Blue Zones are regions around the world renowned for their high proportion of centenarians, people living to the age of 100 or later. These are Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece, and Loma Linda, California. These zones are now getting the shit studied out of them by anthropologists, doctors, etc., so we can try and figure out why they live so long and hopefully use it to improve human healthspan elsewhere.

You will not be surprised, given the background I just provided, to find out that iodine appears to be related to the mystery of the blue zones.

In the study Association of endemic goitre and exceptional longevity in Sardinia: evidence from an ecological study, the authors note “The spatial analysis revealed that the goitre rate (p < 0.0001), the proportion of inhabitants involved in pastoralism (p = 0.016), the terrain inclination (p = 0.008), and the distance from the workplace as a proxy for physical activity (p = 0.023) were consistently associated with population longevity at an aggregated level in the 377 municipalities.” Which is to say, a higher goiter rate in a municipality was the measure they studied that was most clearly associated with greater longevity. This association had an extremely–to my mind, an almost outrageously–low p-value.

 The study goes on to say that, “from a worldwide perspective, the finding of an epidemiological association between goitre prevalence and longevity does not seem to be limited to Sardinia, but partially shared also by other populations where long-lived subjects are numerous. Most of the Longevity Blue Zones in the past were niches of endemic goitre as well. In Costa Rica, where the Nicoya LBZ was identified in 2007 (Rosero-Bixby 2008), high prevalence of endemic goitre has been reported since the 1950s (Perez et al. 1956) possibly aggravated by a gross excess of calcium ingested with drinking water (Boyle et al. 1966). In another LBZ, Ikaria island, the iodine level in spring water is remarkably low (Pes and Poulain 2014).”

So great, restrict iodine and you’ll live forever, right? AGING SOLVED! WE DID IT, YOU’RE WELCOME, aging is just iodine damage.

…Except.

Another Blue Zone is Okinawa, where most of the population routinely consumes nutritionally large quantities of seaweed–one of the richest natural sources of iodine. How much iodine are they consuming? I don’t have great numbers on Okinawa itself, but mean consumption of iodine in Japan is estimated at around 1-3 milligrams a day–that’s 1,000-3,000 micrograms of iodine. Remember that the FDA puts the RDA of iodine at just 150 micrograms, and the UL at 1,100 micrograms! Apparently, many Japanese people are consuming considerably more than the “tolerable upper intake level” for iodine. Centenarianhood is apparently their reward. Japan has 86,000 centenarians (.06% of their population, the highest percentage in the world), and a life expectancy of 84.62 years, second only to Hong Kong (the population of which, as of 2011, had a high risk of iodine deficiency).

These studies, taken together, suggest that having a moderate iodine intake leads to early death. As the Buddha said, “seek extremes in all things and maybe you can live to be a hundred”.

It is difficult not to propose any explanations for this, but that is the task that has been assigned to me, so, there you have it. Low iodine is correlated with longevity. High iodine is correlated with longevity. The thyroid is truly the most mysterious organ.

[1] If that first sentence surprised you, you’re in good company; iodine is “the heaviest element commonly needed by living organisms.”

[2] Plus, there’s bound to be population variance–I, for one, use kosher salt in my cooking, because Alton Brown told me to, and it’s not iodized. I’m surely exposed to iodized salt via processed foods and restaurant meals, but I do consume those somewhat rarely, at least compared to the number of meals I prepare at home.

[3] Iodine was once used to treat flour, oxidizing it to allow gluten to more easily form bonds and create the texture all us non-celiacs love in bread and pizza. But around the same time we began to study iodine supplementation, we invented potassium bromate, and started brominating flour instead to achieve the same effect–potassium bromate produced a very white flour that rapidly oxidized. Iodine is a necessary mineral, though, and bromine isn’t. So there was likely a point in recent American history where iodine consumption in bread decreased. You’re also really not supposed to consume the potassium bromate, but the thought is that baking temperatures sublimate the bromine–ah fuck I guess you really *shouldn’t* eat raw cookie dough? fuck.

Links for July 2023

slimemoldtimemold1 Comment

ExFatLoss has published five ex150 case studies this month, all of which saw some weight loss, though some saw more than others: 48 year old female loses 14.6lbs in 30 days; 26 year old male loses 5-8lbs in 26 days, mostly water weight; 38 y/o female loses 11lbs in 30 days eating 2,700kcal/day; 37 y/o female loses 9lbs in 30 days; and 60 y/o male loses 13lbs in 30 days. We look forward to the eventual summary report! 

Energy Startup Says It Has Achieved Geothermal Tech Breakthrough — Hopefully they’re right, home geothermal would be great! 

Why is everyone talking about aspartame recently? Dynomight explains in detail: WHO aspartame brouhaha

Edge interview from 1996 with Francisco Varela — “I’m perhaps best known for three different kinds of work, which seem disparate to many people but to me run as a unified theme. These are my contributions in conceiving the notion of autopoiesis — self-production — for cellular organization, the enactive view of the nervous system and cognition, and a revising of current ideas about the immune system.” Actually here’s some more: 

The idea arose, also at that time, that the local rules of autopoiesis might be simulated with cellular automata. At that time, few people had ever heard of cellular automata, an esoteric idea I picked up from John von Neumann — one that would be made popular by the artificial-life people. Cellular automata are simple units that receive inputs from immediate neighbors and communicate their internal state to the same immediate neighbors.

In order to deal with the circular nature of the autopoiesis idea, I developed some bits of mathematics of self-reference, in an attempt to make sense out of the bootstrap — the entity that produces its own boundary. The mathematics of self-reference involves creating formalisms to reflect the strange situation in which something produces A, which produces B, which produces A. That was 1974. Today, many colleagues call such ideas part of complexity theory.

The more recent wave of work in complexity illuminates my bootstrap idea, in that it’s a nice way of talking about this funny, screwy logic where the snake bites its own tail and you can’t discern a beginning. Forget the idea of a black box with inputs and outputs. Think in terms of loops. My early work on self-reference and autopoiesis followed from ideas developed by cyberneticists such as Warren McCulloch and Norbert Wiener, who were the first scientists to think in those terms. But early cybernetics is essentially concerned with feedback circuits, and the early cyberneticists fell short of recognizing the importance of circularity in the constitution of an identity. Their loops are still inside an input/output box. In several contemporary complex systems, the inputs and outputs are completely dependent on interactions within the system, and their richness comes from their internal connectedness. Give up the boxes, and work with the entire loopiness of the thing. For instance, it’s impossible to build a nervous system that has very clear inputs and outputs.

“The causal faithfulness condition, which licenses inferences from probabilistic to causal independence, is known to be violated in dynamical systems exhibiting homeostasis. Using the example of the Watt governor, I here present a precise causal characterization of such violations, which differ from cases involving cancelling paths.”​​

Profile of Tufts biologist Michael Levin. Quotes: 

Another thing is [the slime mold] has these vibrations. It’s constantly tugging on the surface. We have this wild paper where we put one glass disc here, three glass discs back here. There’s no chemicals, there’s no food, no gradients. It’ll cogitate for about four hours, just kind of sitting here doing nothing. And then boom!—it grows out toward the three. 

What it’s doing is sensing strain in the medium. It’s pulling, and it feels the vibrations that come back. It’s ridiculously sensitive because each disc is like 10 milligrams. For whatever bizarre reason, it prefers the heavier mass. During those four hours it collects the data, decides where it’s going, and then, boom!

…

If you place a small piece of food nearby and then a much larger piece of food far away, it tends to go for the larger piece and bypasses the small one, which I thought was really weird, because why wouldn’t you grab it along the way? But it just sort of fixated on the big one and went for that. Maybe it thought it would come back later for the smaller.

Related: pea plants may be able to sense the size of a stick before touching it. (h/t @emollick) Barbara McClintock would approve. From the paper:

The mechanisms by which plants could perceive the differences between support sizes remains to be explained. Based on the evidence that plants have at their disposal a great variety of sensory modalities (Karban, 2015), we hypothesize three possible situations. First, plants may use echolocation to acquire information about the support. Recent reports showed that plants emit sonic clicks and capture the returning echoes to get information about their surroundings (Gagliano, Renton, Duvdevani, Timmins, & Mancuso, 2012). This bio sonar may provide information about the thickness of the support to the plants, which will act accordingly. Second, several studies have suggested that the leaf’s upper and subepidermis comprise cells acting as ocelli, eye-like structures allowing plants to gather visual information about their environment (Baluška & Mancuso, 2016). Support for this contention comes from studies on Boquilla trifoliolata, a climbing wood vine that modifies the appearance of its leaves according to the host plant, perfectly mimicking the colors, shapes, sizes, orientations, and petiole lengths of the leaves. Crucially, the plant leaf mimicry occurs even without a direct contact between the vine of Boquilla trifoliolata and mimicked host trees, which supports the idea that plants are capable not only of sensing but also of decoding visual inputs (Gianoli & Carrasco-Urra, 2014). Thus, climbing plants may benefit from a vision system that is able to process the proprieties of the support. Lastly, plants may acquire information about the support using chemoreception of volatiles. It is well known that plants release airborne chemicals that can convey ecologically relevant information about the stimuli they interact with (Karban, 2015; Runyon, Mescher, & De Moraes, 2006).

Emojis Are Increasingly Legally Binding. But They’re Still Open to Wide Interpretation

@ArtirKel on twitter: “TIL in kidney transplants they don’t always take out an old one and replace it. It’s not unusual to keep adding kidneys. Thus we end up with this guy that has 5 kidneys at one point:” 

RemissionBiome project covered in The Guardian: Does the microbiome hold the key to chronic fatigue syndrome?

characterdesignreferences.com — Art of the Sword in the Stone (part 1)

Alice Maz — toward a system of neo-xunism:

Xunzi starts with the Confucian core of virtue, learning, ritual, and filiality. He strips away spiritual explanations and justifies his positions on consequentialist grounds. Confucius saw morality as an emanation of Heaven, whereas Xunzi sees it as a tool crafted by man to create human flourishing. And then he borrows the rationalism of the later Mohists, the practicality of the Legalists, and the flexibility and comfort with the ineffable of the Daoists.

Astronomers solve mystery of how a mirror-like planet formed so close to its star — David Brin describes it like so: “A mirror-like planet with an albedo of 0.80 reflects so much light from its very nearby star that astronomers suggest a gas giant lost all atmosphere but vaporized glass&titanium for a mirror-like composition.”

Drew Savicki on twitter: “I have a spreadsheet tracking all politician’s favorite ninja turtle. I have received 14 answers. … No member of Congress has answered Raphael so far. Will that change?” (Here’s the sheet.)

More beaver illegalism

Still not Sold on Seed Oils

slimemoldtimemold, , , 17 Comments

Our friend and colleague Experimental Fat Loss over at Experimental Fat Loss just put out a post titled Seed Oils explain the 8 Mysteries of Obesity.

In this post, he takes a look at the 8 mysteries about obesity that we presented in Part I of A Chemical Hunger, and points out that most of them fit the seed oil hypothesis (viz. the obesity epidemic is caused by seed oils, and linoleic acid is probably the mechanism) pretty well.

We agree with ExFatLoss that the mysteries of obesity fit seed oils pretty well. This is part of why when we investigated seed oils in Interlude E (as ExFatLoss mentions) we took them seriously as a hypothesis.

There is room for multiple theories at once. Disagreement and uncertainty at this stage is normal/healthy and it just shows that this is an area where we still don’t understand everything. We can entertain seed oils as a possible explanation, whereas things like “diet and exercise” are non-explanations. And it’s quite possible that many things contribute at once. If any single cause could potentially explain half of the obesity increase since 1970, or even just 25%, that’s still a big deal. 

We also really like this passage, which we think bears reproducing:

By the way, I find the way scientists talk about the “cafeteria diet” to be mystical to the point of being comical. Really, you couldn’t recreate lab chow that made the rats as obese as the human cafeteria diet? Weird, the cafeteria managed to do it.

They somehow imbue “human junk food” with a mystical, obesogenic property that cannot be explained by the sum of its parts, almost like the immortal soul. Please. You could start by differentiating fatty acids.

But despite the good fit with the first 8 mysteries, we’re still not convinced that the seed oil hypothesis is a fit for the evidence overall. In this post we try to explain why.

7 Out of 8 Ain’t Bad, But This is Out of 10  

If we wrote A Chemical Hunger today, Part I would include 10 mysteries, not 8. And one problem with the seed oil hypothesis is that while it provides a pretty good fit to 7 of the 8 original mysteries, it doesn’t match the two new ones.

ExFatLoss pays special attention to the map of obesity in the US (below) which shows a relationship between obesity and elevation. He suggests that could be explained if lower levels of oxygen found at higher altitudes compensate for the damage seed oils do to your metabolism (presuming seed oils do damage to your metabolism, of course), but he admits that this is “not exactly a slam dunk”. 

We take some issue with this interpretation. The mountain ranges definitely stand out as less obese, but the distribution of obesity is not actually a great match with altitude. Low-lying areas of Florida, Massachusetts, and California, for example, also have very low rates of obesity. 

This is why we prefer an interpretation based on the length of the watershed, which we think is a proxy for the levels of some contaminant in the water. Longer watersheds have more of a chance to pick up the contaminant, and to pick up more of it, assuming there is any contamination in their higher reaches. 

In this model, these regions of Florida, Massachusetts, and California are not obese because while they are low-elevation, they are also at the end of very short watersheds, which probably don’t contain much contamination. In some cases (like Boston and San Francisco), the water is piped from pristine wilderness reservoirs deep in the mountains. 

But that map is one thing. A theory of obesity should also be able to explain this map: 

Mystery 9 is that there is a lot of international variation — some countries are much more obese than others. The most obese nations on Earth are all tiny Pacific Islands. The Middle East is by far the most obese region in the world. The next runners-up are the USA, Canada, and Australia. And these are just the highlights — ideally a theory would be able to explain the whole pattern that appears on the map. 

Seed oils would seem to have a hard time accounting for this pattern, though of course we’re open to explanations. But if Kuwait loves seed oils in a way that Pakistan doesn’t, well, we haven’t heard about it.

In comparison, this mystery is one reason to prefer the lithium hypothesis. You see, fossil fuels are often accompanied by horrible brines, brackish and sometimes radioactive water that is brought to the surface as the oil and gas are extracted. Many of these brines, especially in arid regions, are extremely high in lithium. Despite industry promises, huge volumes of brine are regularly spilled or otherwise improperly disposed of (or sometimes just intentionally used to irrigate crops), and this is a huge source of lithium contamination. We cover this all in more detail in Interlude G, if you want to read more. 

So under the lithium hypothesis, the US, Middle East, Canada, and Australia are all unusually obese because they are all major oil producers, producing from oilfields in arid climates, which have brines high in lithium, leading to major contamination. Major oil producers like Russia and Norway are not very obese because their oilfields are not in arid climates, so their brines probably are not high in lithium, leading to much less contamination (and/or their oilfields are remote enough, or offshore enough, that the contamination doesn’t reach their populations). If this is the case, the map of obesity should roughly line up with the map of oil production, which it does:

The remainder of the international pattern can be explained by other fossil-fuel mining (coal, for example, is also often high in lithium), other forms of intensive mining that might also stir up lithium, countries importing most of their food from one of these high-lithium countries (remember that the US is a major food exporter), and possibly some other sources like desalination. 

Mystery 10 is the variation of obesity rates between professions. Some professions are much more obese than others. Truck drivers, mechanics, firefighters, and transportation workers, for example, tend to be especially obese. Meanwhile teachers, lawyers, engineers, and “health diagnosing occupations”, as four more examples, are much less obese than average. 

The two main sources for these patterns are this survey of more than 37,000 workers from the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries and this 2004-2011 NIH survey of US workers, if you want to take a closer look at the details. People often write this off as being about race or class, but the NIH analysis finds the same general patterns within each race, and many professions at similar class levels have very different rates of obesity.

Again, it seems difficult for the seed oil hypothesis to explain this pattern. Stereotypes about truck drivers aside, do we really think that mechanics consume that much more canola oil than lawyers? 

And again, we see this as another reason to prefer the lithium hypothesis. There are some exceptions, but overall the ranking of professions by obesity rates looks like a pretty good proxy for “amount of exposure to vehicles and heavy machinery”, and lithium grease is the most common lubricating grease used in vehicles and heavy machinery. 

We should be clear that this doesn’t leave the seed oil hypothesis totally dead in the water. A theory doesn’t have to fit all 10 mysteries to be correct. For example, the obesity epidemic could have multiple causes — maybe seed oils caused much of the baseline increase and something else is responsible for the variation internationally and between professions. It’s still possible that this is massively multicausal.

And as we’ve previously written about, reality is very weird and full of bizarre exceptions. Maybe truck drivers and other people who work around vehicles are more obese because ExFatLoss is right and oxygen levels make a difference, and people who are breathing exhaust all day get less oxygen. There’s always a way to add epicycles to save a theory, and sometimes those epicycles are actually correct. 

But that said, the fact that seed oils don’t fit these two mysteries is still a strike against the hypothesis. 

It Doesn’t Fit Case Studies

Our second gripe is that the seed oil hypothesis doesn’t fit a number of individual and population-level case studies.

N=1: Krinn & M 

The seed oil hypothesis doesn’t fit the self-experiment case study of Krinn, who has lost weight taking large doses of potassium. Krinn hasn’t changed her seed oil intake. 

The seed oil hypothesis doesn’t fit the successful half-tato dieters, the best example of which comes from our reader M. He ate more potatoes, but he was still consuming seed oils like normal, and he talks about this pretty explicitly in his report: 

I tossed my diced potatoes in olive oil before air frying, and more generally used olive oil, duck fat and avocado oil to cook other potato preparations. I probably used 1-2 “glugs” of oil per 1-1.5lb potatoes across these preparations (“lightly greased”, call it). And of course in my non-potato meals, I consumed whatever oil – and other ingredients – restaurants would be using to cook their food. Given my diet was substantially made up of non-potato meals that I actively tried to keep “as before”, I think it is a safe bet that there wasn’t any particular type of food (diary, oil, red meat, etc.) I stopped consuming, or even materially reduced my consumption in, as a result of potatoes by default (beyond the generic ~1/3 reduction from swapping out a third of my meals to be mostly potato). 

Pima

The seed oil hypothesis really doesn’t fit the case of the Pima (who we wrote about here and here). This group had a remarkably high rate of obesity in the 1960s, and we have no reason to believe they were exposed to any more seed oils than other Americans. However, we do know that their water contained 50-100x more lithium than the median dose in American municipal water sources at the time. At least one of their food plants was found to concentrate lithium in its berries, so they probably got an even higher dose from their food. 

Frankly this case study is hard to account for by anything but the lithium hypothesis, which is part of why we so strongly prefer that hypothesis. Sievers & Cannon, writing in 1973, even say, “It is tempting to postulate that the lithium intake of Pimas may relate … to relative physical inactivity and high rates of obesity and diabetes mellitus.” 

Fattest and Leanest Places in America

The seed oil hypothesis also doesn’t account for the pattern of fattest and leanest places in America. We can’t see any reason why Charleston, WV would be eating more seed oils than Bridgeport, CT. But we can see a reason why Charleston, WV would be exposed to unusual levels of lithium — because it’s a famous site for the prospecting of salt brines, including brines that as far as we can tell are unusually high in lithium. 

We are still kind of freaked out by how well the pattern of fattest and leanest places fits the lithium hypothesis. The #1 most obese community in America is downstream from three coal power plants that are well-documented to be leaking lithium into the groundwater. The #2 most obese community sits on an aquifer that is unusually high in lithium. The #5 most obese community is in an area with many oilfield brine spills. The #6 most obese community (Charleston, WV) is, as we mentioned, a famous brine extraction site. The #7 most obese community is the site of a lithium plant that recently exploded. So is the #10 most obese community — it’s home to another lithium plant that, yes, also exploded. 

Read our full report in Interlude I for all the gory details, but when you look at the most and least obese communities in America, you find a pattern that looks like fossil fuel activity and industrial lithium accidents. You don’t see a pattern that looks like canola oil taste testing.  

It Would be Easy to Test

No one believes that carrot juice can cure cancer. If it did, anyone could give some cancer patients a bit of carrot juice, effortlessly cure them, use those case studies to raise money for a clinical trial, then pass go and collect their $200 billion and Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine. We can dismiss out of hand anyone who says that carrot juice does have such wonderful qualities — if it did, they would be out there demonstrating those qualities, not arguing with us. 

Our point is, the easier it would be to collect evidence that a theory is correct, the less seriously we should take the theory in the absence of that evidence. As far as we can tell, if the seed oil hypothesis were correct, it would be easy to get evidence for it. So until seed oil theorists can present that evidence, we’re not inclined to take the seed oil hypothesis very seriously.

Compare also XKCD #808

We’re not saying this as a dig — we’re saying this to encourage seed oil believers to go out there and collect that sweet, strong evidence, if they think they can get it.

The easiest test that comes to mind would be a variation of the potato diet. We know that people lose weight on the potato diet, and the seed oil theorists presumably think that this is because the potato diet is also a seed-oil-elimination diet. People on the potato diet do take some cheat days, but they’re surely consuming a lot less seed oil than usual, maybe close to zero.

It would be easy to run a variation of the potato diet where half the participants are randomly assigned to eat their potatoes with butter, and the other half are randomly assigned to eat their potatoes with sunflower oil. (Or substitute these for whatever fats the seed oil theorists think are best and worst.) If the seed oil theory is correct, then the participants eating potatoes + butter should lose weight much faster than the participants eating potatoes + sunflower oil. If the seed oil theory is wrong, there should be basically no difference.

Ideally you would go on to test more than just two fats — butter and sunflower oil differ in more ways than just how much linoleic acid they contain! But starting with two would be fine, and it would give us an idea of whether or not there’s anything worth looking into here.

If the potato diet offends you for some reason, you could do the same thing with any other elimination diet, or any other weight-loss protocol that we know to be effective. For example, ExFatLoss could add various fats to his ex150 protocol, the same amount of a new fat every week, and see if some fats stall his weight loss and other fats don’t.

Again, WE don’t think that this would shake out in favor of the seed oil hypothesis, which is why we don’t want to run the study ourselves. But if you feel differently, you should try to prove us wrong. 

We want to emphasize that even if one of these studies did find a difference between seed oils and other fats, that wouldn’t be evidence for a specific mechanism — it wouldn’t necessarily point to linoleic acid. For example, it could be pesticides; some of these crops like grapeseed and soybeans and sunflowers might be sprayed with the same pesticide, and that might be the cause of the difference. Hell, it could still be lithium. There’s some evidence that sunflowers concentrate lithium (though “the lowest concentrations [occur] in the seeds”), so it’s possible that there’s more lithium in sunflower oil than in butter. If we need to, we can test for these things.

So this kind of study should be able to point to seed oils pretty easily — and if you’re a seed oil believer, you should try to make one of these studies happen. But if it does point to seed oils, that still doesn’t provide strong evidence for why seed oils might cause obesity. That would remain to be seen, though we would certainly be closer to an answer. 

To recap: lots of things make the seed oil hypothesis an attractive explanation, and we’re still open to the idea. But right now it doesn’t seem very consistent with the evidence, and changing our mind would require addressing some of these apparent contradictions.