Readers may wish to note that Medical Hypotheses is not a peer-reviewed medical journal, as is often assumed. Medical Hypotheses is often known for publishing wild conjecture, such as the notion that AIDS does not exist or is not related to HIV.
I won't get into other criticisms, but this post has a high ratio of errors in the areas in which I am non-ignorant. This makes me more reluctant to trust the claims in areas in which I am ignorant.
Since higher social status seems to increase life expectancy I have wondered if there is a way of "tricking yourself" into thinking your status is higher than most people would believe. Perhaps, for example, if you have little hope of having a prestigious career you could devote lots of time to becoming a respected leader in World of Warcraft. Or might it even be enough to become the ruler of a virtual kingdom in which you are the only non-computer player?
On the other hand, you'd probably waste far more time pressing the same button over and over again in World of Warcraft, then you could hope to gain in increased lifespan even if that trick worked. The question is whether there's an efficient way of tricking your brain into believing you have high status.
Vitamin D deficiency may also have something to do with multiple sclerosis-- incidence of the disease is positively correlated with latitude-- that's a just a maybe, though-- there are plenty of other theories.
Stephan Guyenet's blog is my favorite on diet from the kind of perspective presented in this post. It's wide-ranging with regular critical discussion of research, with links to the sources. (My layman's opinion.)
This is really interesting; thank you. I'm curious what your sources on diet (which I would like to see more of) say about variety in the dietary needs of modern humans. Even if you discount the extremes (totally sedentary people and professional athletes), people may for example put on muscle and fat very differently from one another due to both genetic differences and lifestyle choices. Would any common variations that you know of--for example, regularly getting more exercise than recommended, or having a genetic tendency for a skinny or fat body type--alter your advice?
By the way, there's a typo in the diet section: "potassium to suite diet."
the web of hormones, metabolism and gene expression are highly complex and inter-related, and one gets full benefit only by correcting the majority of the deviations
This smacks of superstition. This package-belief boosts serves to add fake certainty, distracting from the need to justify each part of the package.
That is, I need to see evidence for this package-claim - until then, I reject it. Show a benefit to following each part of the program vs. not, either in context of following all (or a core majority of), or none, of the others.
Thanks for outlining a health program that will help out solving many health problems that are related to our modern lifestyle. I am afflicted with cohn's disease, fat related issue, diabetes, etc.
I have only begun with a rigorous running routine. I scouted out the location of the college gym and did research on weight training so I can burn more calories.
Now, I have diet information and others to work with. The biggest diet challenge will probably be about eliminating high corn fructose. They're prevalent everywhere.
It's going to be hard, but it's going to be worth it.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. -Mark Twain
No, I trust this information but reading health advice on the internet or getting it from the media gets confusing. The biggest problem is that it's all about what information is more novel or interesting, and not what is actually more practical. I would like to see all this information gathered into whatever is the most efficient way that can be backed up by scientific evidence, not "this just in, a new study shows that consuming large amounts of X is actually good for you."
Unless you are currently taking 5000 IU of vitamin D3 per day the odds are you probably are vitamin D deficient.
From what I understand, the vitamin D 'bucket' can store more than a day's worth, so you could also take 15000 IU every 3 days. Does anyone know if this wouldn't work?
Thanks for writing this up. I'm in the middle of re-hauling my goal system and trying to set up healthy habits and finally start truly exercising, motivated by my true goal - experience the world for as long as possible. This gathers a lot of information into one place, and I'd be grateful if you either updated it or continued to post new information - especially given knb's criticism. Please don't be discouraged by it - update beliefs, then update the post :)
One simple step is the James Bond Shower. Turn the water on hot, then switch to cold right before you finish.
Perhaps the Open Thread would be a better place for this comment, but I'm interested in suggestions for a scale.
Based on the large number of proponents of a "Paleolithic" diet here on Less Wrong, I've decided to take it seriously enough to try it for a while. So far (slightly less than a week) I'm not enjoying it at all, but I'd like more quantitative feedback. Over the past five months (the way I was previously eating), I've maintained a pretty steady dw/dt = -0.8 kg / week, but my current scale is broken, and so I can't compare that to what I'm trying now.
reduce or eliminate the starchy foods: bread, pasta, potatoes, and rice. Replace with real vegetables - the kind that actually have high micronutrient content and high fiber content.
Paleo is based on assumption that diets of agricultural era and modern diets are anything alike - they're not!
Agricultural era diets were based on around cereals, potatoes, etc., and we had thousands of years to adapt to them.
Modern diet are based on vegetable oil and sugar, and they're destroying everyone's health. I mean it by vegetable oil and sugar - these two categori...
Aside from the ridiculous (See: Autism and Vitamin D):
So I should get exercise, moderate sunlight, eat healthy omega-3's and vitamin D's (also moderately) and not fried obesity food, and sleep in a dark setting?
Of the 2000 hours of peak mental function per year claimed in the first paragraph, how many are wasted on trendy speculation and obvious repetition?
The trouble with this sort of recommendation [low- carb and paleo diets] is that it would take a large-sample double-blind longitudinal study to generate even weak evidence that the proposal actually increases longevity, and performing such studies isn't remotely feasible.
This is not true at all, and blindly worshipping the double-blind study like this will prevent you from learning anything. Dietary studies, with few exceptions, cannot be blind since people know what they're eating. But people can easily observe what effects diets have on them, as long as they're keeping the right quantitative data. Weight isn't the right variable to be tracking, since it can't distinguish fat from muscle, and many studies went astray that way. But tracking exercise reps, body fat percentage, energy levels and various interesting blood tests are all feasible, useful and actually done. A simple observational study plus an understanding of biochemistry is sufficient to justify a dietary preference, so long as certain known traps are avoided.
I won't mix claims about the goodness or badness of particular diets in here, but I'd like to say that the questions are answerable, and some diets are better than others in general. Individual biochemistries vary in ways that interact with possible diets, but those interactions can be understood, and many of them are understood, so it's wrong to point to individual differences as though they make diet inherently mysterious.
There is a hope that medical technology, accelerated via a Singularity, will advance to the point where we have full mastery over biology and can economically repair organ and cellular damage faster than aging accumulates it. There is sufficient evidence to put a reasonable bet on that happening by mid-century.
Downvoted for Kurzweilian faith and weasely wording of prediction.
Possibly Related To: Diseased Thinking, Thou Art Godshatter
There are 8760 hours in a typical year. A typical 30-year old will spend about 2900 of those hours sleeping, around 160 of them impaired or incapacitated by illness and will experience perhaps 2000 hours of peak mental function.
As one ages, the fraction of hours spent sleeping decreases slightly, but eventually the annual hours of peak mental function declines as well, and the annual hours spent ill increases nonlinearlly until one eventually makes that final hospital visit.
There is a hope that medical technology, accelerated via a Singularity, will advance to the point where we have full mastery over biology and can economically repair organ and cellular damage faster than aging accumulates it. There is sufficient evidence to put a reasonable bet on that happening by mid-century.
But for most of us that still leaves an unnaceptably high risk of death in the cumulative years between now and then. Cyronics enrollment offers a further hope, but in practice probably only results in a modest improvement in long term survival odds after full discounting for the technical risks and uncertainties.
In the end it all comes down to a die roll. Wouldn't you like to get an extra +1 or two?
With a simple evolutionary health optimization, one can:
Evolution and Health
Our bodies are the collective result of countless layers of mindless complex adaptations, evolutionary godshatter from a bygone history. The current sub-species or races of humans today are just a small sampling of a much larger space of genetically related human ancestors who roamed the earth for hundreds of thousands of years before the modern era. Our modern genomes are a wide and highly irregular sampling of this diverse set of historical adaptations.
For most of that time the earth was considerably colder and very different than it is today - we currently live in a warm peak between large glaciations. These wide climate swings created complex dynamic patterns of shifting ecological niches. At glacial peaks, sea levels were over 100 meters lower than today and most of the terrestrial world was connected, allowing large waves of nomadic migration in giant mammals.
Again and again tribes of homo sapiens with increasingly advanced technological hunting cultures expanded out of Africa, where humans originated and the ecosystems had more time to co-evolve. The farther humans migrated out of Africa, the more they encountered megafauna unadapted to human hunting, and the more they became specialized technological apex predators.
By roughly 10,000 BC nearly all the terrestrial megafauna outside of Africa was extinct. Shortly thereafter early agricultural centers began to spring up in several megafauna-depleted regions; nascent civilizations in the making - only to fail and rise again. In the ten thousand years or so since these first large-scale farming experiments, the homo sapien genome has had limited time for any new novel adaptations.
This historical observation leads to a simple but suprisingly powerful top-level belief. Our genome is optimized for genetic fitness functions that no longer exist; an evolutionary environment from the paleolithic era. Thus all else being equal we should expect significant deviations from that environment to have negative effects more often than positive.
Evolution is near-sighted. In thou art godshatter, Eliezer Yudkowsky asks:
Why wasn't a concept of "inclusive genetic fitness" programmed into us, along with a library of explicit strategies? Then you could dispense with all the reinforcers. The organism would be born knowing that, with high probability, fatty foods would lead to fitness. If the organism later learned that this was no longer the case, it would stop eating fatty foods.
One answer is that explicit linguistic conceptual knowledge is much more complex and developed long after simple reinforcement strategies. The other perhaps more obvious answer is that explicit conceptual strategies are inherently serial and are thus extremely computationally limited in the slow but massively parallel human brain. Every day our brains are unconsciously evaluating vast quantities of probabilistic inferences tied to simple reinforcers in an attempt to maximize our inclusive genetic fitness and spread our genes.
Regardless of whether or not we are interested in maximizing genetic fitness, we can now use our advanced conceptual knowledge of evolution, genetics, and health to identify and map out the hidden assumptions of the numerous ancient programs in the genome, how they can go wrong in the novel modern environment, and how we can best trick these adaptive systems back into their optimal operating modes.
Evolution had no incentive to optimize for environments significantly different than those it encountered, and the web of complex interdependent genetic programs that maintain our bodies have numerous subtle minor failure modes, most of which are not fully understood.
A key insight is that the web of hormones, metabolism and gene expression are highly complex and inter-related, and one gets full benefit only by correcting the majority of the deviations. If this is done then one can significantly reduce the chance of succumbing to the diseases of civilization.
What are some of the modern environmental deviations?
Hunter-gatherers were certainly not sedentary, but probably had an average daily activity level still below that of today's professional athletes. It's pretty clear though that they spent a good chunk of time walking and running. The effects of exercise on health have been fairly well studied. Of interest to pragmatic instrumental rationalists is that only mild exercise is required. Studies have shown that the main longevity boost is somewhere around 2 to 5 years and requires just 100 to 300 calories of exercise per day. [1] Suspected mechanisms involve cortisol regulation, endorphins, and triggers that activate cellular repair. Sex may be the most efficient form of exercise for the calorie budget.
Our ancestors ate a variety of foods with significant geographic and temporal variation. But if you sum the typical average over a swath of ancestors, it is believed to have consisted largely of lean game meat, offal, fish, nuts, higher-fiber vegetables, low-sugar fruits, shellfish and insects. At the macro-level the diet would be more balanced between protein, fat and carbohydrate, significantly different than the high carbohydrate and low protein modern diet.
Modern humans today eat a diet that is superficially super-good - it consists of the foods blind evolutionary adaptations thought we needed more of . . . ten thousand years ago. Our taste buds are primed to favor foods that are rich in calories overall and high in ancient rarities such as sodium and certain fats.
We now have specific evidence for a whole range of health problems associated with the modern diet: excess calories and caloric density, high glycemic index causing excessive insulin production and spiking (mainly via over-abundance of concentrated starch and sugar), imbalanced omega 3 / omega 6 fatty acid profile and imbalanced sodium/potassium profile.
The exact mechanisms are complex and not fully understood, but in general this diet will cause one to put on weight and is linked longer term to an entire cluster of diseases - largely the metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease.
A simplified paleo-diet solution:
Night
Nights would overall be much darker than they are today (unless one lives in some remote wilderness), and that darkness would start much earlier. Campfire light is considerably different than modern artificial illumination.
Even small amounts of light can block melatonin production. Thus modern human's sleep cycle is completely unoptimized. We don't get enough bright sunlight in the day, and we get far too much light at night. The evidence suggests that melatonin/sleep imbalance can effect everything from mood to the immune system to aging itself.
Interestingly enough, human melatonin production may be optimized to ignore campfire light (from wikipedia):
Production of melatonin by the pineal gland is inhibited by light and permitted by darkness. For this reason melatonin has been called "the hormone of darkness". Its onset each evening is called the Dim-Light Melatonin Onset (DLMO). Secretion of melatonin as well as its level in the blood, peaks in the middle of the night, and gradually falls during the second half of the night, with normal variations in timing according to an individual's chronotype.
It is principally blue light, around 480nm, that suppresses melatonin, increasingly with increased light intensity and length of exposure. Until recent history, humans in temperate climates were exposed to few hours of (blue) daylight in the winter; their fires gave predominantly yellow light. Wearing glasses that block blue light in the hours before bedtime may avoid melatonin loss. Kayumov et al. showed that light containing only wavelengths greater than 530 nm does not suppress melatonin in bright-light conditions. Use of blue-blocking goggles the last hours before bedtime has also been advised for people who need to adjust to an earlier bedtime, as melatonin promotes sleepiness.
Melatonin can be supplemented at night, but I also intend to outfit my apartment with blue-filtered lights, or perhaps try blue-filtered glasses. I have noticed that sleep is also more effective when one wakes up slowly to bright daylight.
In some sense most terrestrial vertebrates are partially solar powered - plants are not the only creatures to use solar energy directly. Unless you are currently taking 5000 IU of vitamin D3 per day the odds are you probably are vitamin D deficient.
"Vitamin" D is perhaps a misnomer. I can do no better than quote from the Vitamin D council [2]:
Technically not a "vitamin," vitamin D is in a class by itself. Its metabolic product, calcitriol, is actually a secosteroid hormone that is the key that unlocks binding sites on the human genome. The human genome contains more than 2,700 binding sites for calcitriol; those binding sites are near genes involved in virtually every known major disease of humans.
Current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, and more.
What does Vitamin D do at all these gene expression sites? We don't really know yet.
However it is clear that D is somehow involved heavily in immune regulation and brain development. Interestingly enough, almost all of the modern diseases of civilization are either inflammatory diseases or are immune regulated, including cancer, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's, just to name a few.
A number studies show that vitamin D deficiency (the default state of most of us today) increases overall rates of cancer by perhaps 50% or more - roughly double the cancer risk of smoking [3a] [3b].
An interesting quote from that article:
One of the researchers who made the discovery, professor of medicine Robert Heaney of Creighton University in Nebraska, says vitamin D deficiency is showing up in so many illnesses besides cancer that nearly all disease figures in Canada and the U.S. will need to be re-evaluated. "We don't really know what the status of chronic disease is in the North American population," he said, "until we normalize vitamin D status." (emphasis added)
I'm not aware of any other supplement, drug, or food that has this level of cancer protection. Indeed drug companies have been working on patentable vitamin D analogues for years. This is the sad state of our medical industry. The reality is most of us today are deficient - and our cancer rates are thus abnormally elevated. But we don't need an expensive new vitamin D derived drug to reduce cancer incidence.
Low vitamin D levels are also linked to metabolic syndrome and thus weight gain and diabetes. Abdominal fat in particular is linked to a cluster of diseases, including cancer, and higher vitamin D levels in the blood are linked to lower weight, and strangely - higher educational status.
It also may boost intelligence; deficiency has been linked to cognitive decline with age.
And finally, vitamin D defeciency fits the epidemic profile of autism, and has been proposed as a cause of this disorder[4].
Another role of D may be as a form of summer/seasonal signalling hormone, and could explain the apparent link between VDDS, metabolic syndrome, and weight.
If you are low on vitamin D, your body is perhaps stuck in some eternal state of fall or winter, suppressing high-energy or risky endeavors and attempting to put on fat. You are thus not getting the full mileage of your genome.
Light in general has benefits beyond vitamin D. Did you know that total light exposure has a measurable effect on mood? In fact bright light therapy is a treatment for numerous psychiatric disorders.
References/Notes:
1. Statement on Exercise: Benefits and Recommendations for Physical Activity Programs for All Americans, from the American Heart Association
2. My father founded the Vitamin D council in 2003 and is a tireless promoter and advocate for D. So I may have some bias, but at this point perhaps it's just an inside view, because D's health effects are now widely known and little of this is as controversial as it was just 5 years ago.
3. From this article, which specifically summarizes an important D cancer intervention trial.
4. Autism and Vitamin D, JJ Cannell, Med Hypotheses. 2008;70(4):750-9. Epub 2007 Oct 24. (see comments below about this controversial journal)