Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity

I wondered what "processed meat" means exactly and looked it up in one of the studies:

“Red meat” was defined as unprocessed meat from beef, hamburgers, lamb, pork, or game and excluding poultry, fish, or egg; “processed meat” was defined as any meat preserved by smoking, curing, or salting or addition of chemical preservatives, such as bacon, salami, sausages, hot dogs, or processed deli or luncheon meats, and excluding fish or eggs; and “total meat” was defined as the total of these 2 categories.

I also looked up "resistance training," but it is not clear exactly what is meant, and I have to assume that it is strength training.

I recommend adding this post to the boring advice repository.

3[anonymous]12y

So is ground beef that is wrapped in a package like this usually processed or unprocessed meat?

[-]mare-of-night12y120

Where I've heard the term used, it'd be unprocessed. As someone who can't eat the usual meat preservatives at all for health reasons, I can tell you for sure that typical plastic wrapped hamburger meat isn't preserved with anything (which, based on the examples, would probably be the reason why processed meat is bad for you).

2Gunnar_Zarncke12y

I think it counts as unprocessed.

2CronoDAS12y

So a McDonalds hamburger is "unprocessed" meat, then?

4juliawise12y

Their website says the ingredients are beef, salt, and pepper.

7Gunnar_Zarncke12y

It appears that the beef patties indeed do not contain additives: http://designtaxi.com/news/353751/McDonald-s-Reveals-How-Its-Beef-Patties-Are-Made/

4Gunnar_Zarncke12y

If the beef were created and processed freshly then yes. But as I understand McDonalds the "beef" of the hamburger arrives heavily pre-processed at each "restaurant" and I'd bet that it incorporates salt, artificial smoke, heating, flavoring and what not.

0taryneast12y

Does the hamburger incorporate salt?

-1Antiochus12y

Looks like I'm going to have to rethink my lunches.

[-]Scott Alexander12y421

This is good stuff!

One addition I would make to your "sleep" section: between 5% and 10% of Americans have moderate or severe sleep apnea, mostly undiagnosed. Untreated sleep apnea more than doubles mortality through a combination of cardiac problems, stroke, and maybe a cancer-promoting effect as well. There are well-known effective treatments for sleep apnea and it is kind of dumb not to get them.

The main symptoms of sleep apnea are excessive snoring, and feeling very tired during the day even if you slept a normal amount the night before. It is most common in obese and older people but sometimes happens in normal-weight and younger people as well. If you think you might have this condition, probably your highest-priority longevity intervention (after quitting smoking, if you do that) is to go to your doctor and get it checked out.

9Qiaochu_Yuan12y

Crap. Alright, I sleep alone so I don't know if I snore or not, but I can test this with an iPhone app. Thanks for giving me the push I need to do this (I had briefly considered the possibility of sleep apnea before but didn't see any easy next actions).

9Qiaochu_Yuan12y

Update: I had some trouble with the app the first two nights (it stops recording if you exit it in any way), but I have audio evidence that I snore now (I don't know what counts as excessive). Time to go see a doctor about a diagnosis.

6Eliezer Yudkowsky12y

CPAP (auto-adjusting pressure) didn't work on me. What else is there?

7Scott Alexander12y

Complicated. I think I'm seeing you tomorrow night, I'll talk to you then rather than demand your medical history on a public forum.

2Eneasz12y

UPPP Not terribly expensive. The recovery is painful. But the pain is temporary, and the improvements are amazing. It was a major turning point in my life, and I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who is considered a good candidate (consult your specialist)

1Mathieu Tarral5y

Hey, you can try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandibular_advancement_splint way less invasive than CPAP, and easier to sleep with

1MarkL11y

Buteyko breathing [1] and high-intensity interval training [2]. YMMV, etc. [1] http://store.breathingcenter.com/books---in-english/buteyko-breathing-manual-download [2] e.g. "sprinting" on an elliptical Sleep apnea is caused by low CO2 tolerance which causes you to breath off too much CO2, and low CO2 levels relax smooth muscle, including the smooth muscle of your throat (which otherwise should actively maintains your airway at all times). The above two practices increase CO2 tolerance. (Low CO2 tolerance can be caused by many things (e.g. too much mouth breathing from allergies, jobs which require lots of talking or singing or instrument playing, lots and lots of sitting without exercising, chronic anxiety, etc.) Evidence: 1. Personal/anecdotal: Intense jaw clenching, tongue soreness, turbinate opening within a few days of starting buteyko breathing, objectively far less moving around during sleep, subjectively deeper more refreshing sleep. 2. This is how I think (poorly edited rant): http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/rant-thought-stopping-truths-e-g-weight-loss/ 3. Clinical trial(s?) show that Buteyko breathing does stuff (e.g. improves asthma symptoms without increasing lung capacity)

1[anonymous]12y

I have two relatives that had apnea - one got rid of it by losing weight, the other by having her tonsils removed.

0MartinB11y

Did you go to a Sleeplap? They are supposed to fit it, have a pile of different masks to choose from. As far as I know cpap is the way to go with APNEA.

1MartinB11y

I've got it :-) Actually I read about it before, but delayed going to the doctors for a few years. Afterwards it took about 6month of preliminary testing till I got the appointment in the sleep lab - since it is not an emergency situation. But afterwards the CPAP helped me right away. Its ridiculously effective. (Around the same time I started using f.lux to dim the brigtness of the monitor which is a good idea anyway (redshift for linux), and later got an eye mask to keep lights out.) From the self help group I got some material for the practical questions. And read many sad stories of those who need decades to figure it out. Not all doctors know about sleep apnea. But numbers are rising. One danger ignored is professional drivers who cause accidents by being tired. Might account for 7% of the total traffic accidents. But eitherway if you have it treatment is there. The published papers I read (mostly metastudies) usually deal with compliance rates in combination with some other factor. Medical compliance is stupidly low, many people don't use their CPAP even if it works. But I saw no other treatment options that were seriously explored. A nice feature is that CPAP is purely external, so no changes in your body, no operations and no big problems if you forget it occasionally. To correct the symptom list above: snoring is a common signal, but not all snoring is from APNEA. You can have it checked out, if its a problem. The mean part is the daytime fatigue, which others will usually assume is due to a lazy lifestyle, partying to long or such. It takes a while to make the leap from daytime fatigue - despite extensive sleeping to an actual problem in the sleep. And one plus point: you look and sound a bit like Darth Vader while sleeping :-)

1Jonathan_Graehl12y

I snore when I'm very tired and sleeping on my back (when my jaw relaxes down in that position it's harder to breathe even through nostrils). Any cheap advice for that (besides don't do it)? Are there harmless allergy meds that would be worth taking for better sleep when I have mild nasal congestion from seasonal pollen etc?

1RomeoStevens12y

Thanks! I believe it was you who pointed out that longevity is only 20-30% genetics that sent me down this rabbit hole to begin with.

1TylerJay12y

If I remember correctly, Yvain argued for a salt intake lower than 1500mg / day, whereas on your meal squares page, you made an argument for having 3000mg / day. Wy do you think you disagree on that one?

2RomeoStevens12y

Differing takes on which evidence is more valid. Many studies say reducing salt is healthy. A few studies say it is unhealthy, and point to the fact that all the other studies actually say "salt reduces blood pressure" and that it turns out that in this particular case the reduction was not correlated to overall mortality. It would seem that reducing salt has detrimental effects that outweigh the blood pressure effect.

0[anonymous]12y

Should people with hereditary low blood pressure ignore most of this advice / do the opposite? For example it seems processed meats --> increased salt intake --> increased blood pressure --> increased mortality, which doesn't apply to people with low blood pressure.

0RomeoStevens12y

The causal pathway is not necessarily (in fact almost certainly not) exclusively via blood pressure, so I wouldn't do this.

0[anonymous]12y

What proportion of it is through blood pressure and could you elaborate on what the rest of the causal pathway is? Trying to decide whether it's worth cutting down on processed meats even though it may result in less protein intake overall (because I can't be bothered cooking / preparing non-processed meats).

3RomeoStevens12y

I wouldn't venture a quantification. Whey protein and eggs?

[-]RomeoStevens12y310

Over the last year I have become dramatically better at instilling habits in myself. I posit two main reasons for this. The first is understanding the habit formation process, as summarized by Kaj Sotala here. The second is learning to create plans that are more robust against random failure. I used to model myself as a coherent agent with some set amount of willpower to expend on the various things I found unpleasant. More recently, I model myself as a bunch of sub-agents with different goals. The subagent that tends to make plans for what I’m going to do this week is NOT the same sub-agent that will actually have to do these things. So now I make plans that can take into account a low motivation sub-agent being in charge. Sometimes this is as simple as a part of your plan that says “IF you don’t want to go to the gym THEN you will go to the gym anyway.” Yes, seriously. Sometimes it is making the activation costs of a particular action easier by removing friction from your process. Sometimes it is modeling my future self as an idiot who can’t stop eating cookies and doing things like preemptively throwing cookies away.

How would I actually go about forming a new habit? Let’s use fl... (read more)

8AndekN12y

I had the same experience for years. Every six months or so I would read an article like this one reminding how important it is to floss, visit a dentist or something similar. Then I promised to myself that from now on, I'd floss daily. And then I'd forget to actually do it. After reading The Power of Habit (the book Kaj Sotala summarised in his article linked above) I realised that just trying to remember would never work. Instead, I needed to create a cue. I did this by placing the floss in front of my facial cleanser. Then, every evening when I reached for the cleanser (this already was a habit for me), my hand would hit the floss. That reminded me to floss and only after flossing I would clean my face. And it worked. I don't have to think about flossing anymore: after a month it had become a habit and now, after six months or so it's starting to feel weird that there was a time I didn't floss every day.

1LucasSloan12y

Link?

0RomeoStevens12y

fixed.

0pinyaka11y

Can you talk more about this? How do you think about sub agents? How do you make plans for them? I mean, do you write plans down, visualize doing something in a particular setting, etc.? What are your planning sessions like?

2RomeoStevens11y

I used IFS frameworks at the beginning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model Now that I am used to doing it regularly and have built up some internal trust, I can often just ask around internally about how different parts feel about an action and get coherent answers.

0pinyaka11y

Thanks, that looks interesting. How did you learn specific IFS techiniques? Did you attend a workshop, work with a therapist, read books, extensively google stuff, etc.?

0RomeoStevens11y

Sessions with friends, reading stuff online mostly. I refer to it as psychotherapy lite because it is pretty hard to do wrong. The goal is to explore and see if anything surprising pops up. I might be missing some useful stuff from not having read any of the books yet. But part of the reason I haven't is because even with the basics I found tons of low hanging fruit.

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke12y310

Judging from the votes and quality couldn't this go to Main? At least with minimum further streamlining?

And if not why not?

4curiousepic12y

Now that it's in Main, I'm wondering why it hasn't yet been promoted? The current situation is low-visibility, given LW reading trends.

[-]D_Malik12y110

On eating more fish: How worried should I be about mercury poisoning? Is it worthwhile to carefully select fish for low mercury content?

For instance, one guy on /r/fitness reports that 2 cans of chunk light tuna a day gave him mercury poisoning; while you're not recommending that much fish, I'd expect that health detriments appear long before full-blown mercury poisoning.

(I'm not expecting you in particular to tell me this, I just want to know if someone on LW has already done this research.)

5juliawise12y

For pregnant women, these days they're recommending oily, low-mercury fish like salmon, herring, and sardines. Chart

3aelephant12y

I would recommend against eating canned food to limit your exposure to Bisphenol A. I would also not eat tuna every single day for such an extended period of time!

0taryneast12y

supporting data ?

6aelephant12y

Bisphenol A and human health: a review of the literature

0taryneast12y

I can't access the actual article, though the abstract certainly indicates that BPA is harmful. Does the article include evidence showing that eating canned food is a significant exposure risk? What kinds of cans specifically? what kinds of foods? Are there other significant sources of BPA?

4aelephant12y

Here's a randomized trial from JAMA showing more than 1000% increase in urinary BPA after consuming canned soup: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367259/ BPA used to be in a lot of plastics, but I think it has been phased out. Perhaps someone else can confirm or refute that. Another source is transdermally through handling receipts. I've heard of at least one health conscious workplace giving their cashiers wooden tongs to handle the receipts. Best practice would probably be to email them instead. Saves paper too.

2RomeoStevens12y

Oh yeah, salmon is easily the best for health benefits AFAIK. I should include this in the post.

[-]Prismattic12y120

Must be wild salmon, not farmed salmon. The difference in Omega 3/6 ratio is immense.

0[anonymous]12y

Is tuna all right if I have a hard time getting salmon? I can get tuna salad at the grocery store or tuna sandwiches for lunch comparatively easily, but salmon can be expensive here.

2[anonymous]12y

I was going to recommend kipper, but this says it's not that much better than tuna. It's still better, at least in terms of mercury. This PDF says canned sardines have 1 gram EPA+DHA per 100g, whereas herring has slightly more and tuna is all over the place. Not very good evidence for kipper vs. sardines (I buy kipper just because I can't stand sardines, though I'll look out for salmon now that it's been mentioned), but either looks to be preferable to tuna.

1RomeoStevens12y

Tuna has among the highest mercury content per serving IIRC.

-3LucasSloan12y

The health benefits of fish outweight the health detriments of mercury until way beyond the level of consumption you're likely to get to. Just eat fish.

[-]Lumifer12y120

The health benefits of fish outweight the health detriments of mercury until way beyond the level of consumption you're likely to get to.

Supporting data..?

[-]NancyLebovitz12y110

Sunlight leads to less cardiovascular disease. (nitric oxide)

Sunlight leads to less cardiovascular disease Vitamin D.

And see if you can have someone in your life who can advocate for you in medical matters if you're not in good enough shape to advocate for yourself. (Anyone know if deeply incompetent medical care is as bad a problem in countries which aren't the US?)

[-]zedzed12y110

(edited to add sources) (edited to add music-nerdery)

Reviewing my notes from Wiseman, I can add the following recommendations for stress:

*Listen to classical music. Actually, if you check the study, only major, baroque music was helpful. I recommend the Brandenburg concerti.

*Spend at least 30 minutes outside on warm, sunny days.

*Laugh at least 15 minutes a day.

*Source: Music can facilitate blood pressure recovery from stress.

*Source: A warm heart and a clear head. The contingent effects of weather on mood and cognition.

*Source A correlational study of the relationship between sense of humor and positive psychological capacities

*Source The Effect of Mirthful Laughter on the Human Cardiovascular System

(background: I've trained in classical cello for 11 years. What follows has an inferential distance of 1 for me, and an inferential distance of quite a lot for a layperson. You should probably move along)

If you check out the music study, you'll notice that it talks about "classical" music, while I'm specifying "major, baroque". Here's why.

Classical and baroque music are different. Colloquially, "classical" refers to old music that typically gets played by v... (read more)

6[anonymous]12y

Does it matter which kind of laughter? Is laughing with others a lot better than doing it alone? Is schadenfreude laughter as good as any other kind of laughter?

6Emile12y

Obligatory.

5jobe_smith12y

That's a good question. What if it turned out that laughing maniacally after committing an act of villainy was the healthiest of all? Would that change people's views about altruism?

2TheOtherDave12y

I don't know if it's healthy, but I find maniacal laughter quite satisfying. Fortunately, I do enough theatre and similar performance that I have many opportunities for it.

0CCC12y

Hmmm. It would be sufficient for the maniacal laughter to take place; technically, the villainy is unnecessary, as long as the necessary parts of the brain can be fooled. One way to do this would be with a computer game; playing civilisation (for example), betraying your computer-player allies, and then laughing maniacally about it. Alternatively, for more of a challenge (in case overcoming difficult opposition turns out to be a necessary element), one could play a game against human players (Diplomacy might work well here) and laugh maniacally if one achieves victory. (Since the game is structured in such a way that at least one player must eventually achieve victory, someone will have the opportunity to gain the health benefits of the maniacal laughter; one may have additional opportunities during the game to laugh maniacally as well).

4zedzed12y

3benkuhn12y

Are you referring to the "Mozart Effect" studies? That's what I found in the book (or at least the parts of the preview that were accessible), but Mozart is actually classical, not baroque. The effect seems to be small and specific to one particular type of task, according to this Nature meta-analysis: As a side note, if you're going to cite studies it would be great to continue Romeo's trend of actually linking to the relevant studies, since there's not enough info in your comment to find the ones you're referring to and I don't own Wiseman. I don't really trust Wiseman (or pop-sci books in general) to interpret findings with anything remotely resembling rigor.

5zedzed12y

See edit. Thanks for suggesting I put in sources. It didn't occur to me, but it really should have. I generally don't trust pop-sci either, but Luke recommended Wiseman repeatedly, and since I trust Luke, I see Wiseman as a way of getting useful results without the work of reading all the science myself, much the same way I just give to Givewell's recommended charities rather than evaluate them myself. I could, but they have a comparative advantage, and I'm guessing you'll agree doing the verification is expensive. If there's a flaw in this reasoning, I'd appreciate a head-ups. Thanks!

6benkuhn12y

For clarity, I don't trust Wiseman since I've never read anything and my prior for pop-sci is low. Luke's endorsement is a positive update to his credibility. Fully verifying is expensive, but spot-checking is cheap (this post took me about 10 minutes, e.g.). Similarly, most people barely check GiveWell's research at all, but it still matters a lot that it's so transparent, because it's a hard-to-fake signal, and facilitates spot-checking. Re: music--it looks like you were referring to a different study on the benefits of listening to music than the one I found in Amazon's preview of Wiseman. "Listen to classical music " would have been another high-VoI addition to the OP. Further studies indicate that "self-selected relaxing music" has the same effect, and that it's probably mediated by general reduction of SNS arousal. This suggests that (a) if you're doing an SNS-heavy task, like difficult math, you may not want to listen to music at the same time; (b) anything else you would expect to move you around the autonomic spectrum should work the same way (e.g. meditation). On the other hand, neither of the studies asked subjects to do anything while listening to music, so it's unclear whether the effect would stay visible. A possibly interesting meta-analysis is here. If doing anything while listening to music makes the effect go away, then I would guess that meditation or the autonomic-spectrum navigation that CFAR teaches is a more efficient way to reduce blood pressure. I don't know if Wiseman went into any of those in his book, but my take-away is to do some research before installing any new habit.

1Will_Sawin12y

Difficult math is SNS-heavy?

1benkuhn12y

At least according to Val, activating System 2 requires SNS activity.

0Anomylous11y

Anecdote: My mom once tried to invoke the Mozart effect by putting on his music while me and my sister were doing schoolwork, hoping that it would make us more productive. It had just the opposite effect - we sat there and enjoyed the music, rather than doing our math assignments.

[-]Vokasak11y100

Usually I'm content to just lurk and read interesting posts, but here there's finally something well enough into my area of expertise that it worth making an account to contribute to!

The e-cig linked as a suggestion is a (low end, generously speaking) clearomizer system. There's nothing wrong with that, they will work as advertised and be less harmful than tobacco and all that good stuff. And if you're buying e-cigs en masse to hand out to smoker friends you can't beat the price. But it's a bit misleading to say one of these alone will add an arbitrary number of years to a persons life. The heating coils in any kind of ecig don't last forever, and low end devices like the one in the OP tend not to be disassemble-able/customizable. At $5, tossing it out and getting a new one is no big deal, really. But still.

A former smoker with disposable income (read: anyone who could afford to sustain their own tobacco habit in the first place) that's just a bit pickier would get more mileage out of a rebuildable atomizer based mechanical mod system, even a lowerish end one. It'll cost more since you'll have to buy parts individually (think building your own computer), but the increased quality o... (read more)

1Angela Pretorius5y

You appear to be very knowledgeable about vaping. Can I ask you for some personal advice? My husband tried to switch to e-cigs on several occasions. Every time he was back to smoking within a couple of days. He has been using cheap clearomiser e-cigs, and he says the vape liquid leaks into his mouth and leaves a nasty taste, and I suspect that the nicotine content of his vape liquid is too low. I have been trying to persuade him to try buproprion or more expensive e-cigs or vape liquid with a higher nicotine content. These are the replies that I usually get: 'I can quit without bupropion. I am smoking at the moment because of stressful event X, and I will quit on date Y when my life will be less stressful' 'I will have the same problems with the expensive e-cigs' 'I'm not really addicted to nicotine. I am just a puffer and I don't draw the smoke deep into my lungs. I only smoke to keep my hands busy/deal with stress/keep me awake at work.'

1RomeoStevens11y

Thanks for giving people detailed options! I am liking the mini protank myself. Glass and steel instead of plastic.

[-][anonymous]12y100

Are there any decent vegetarian substitutes for fish?

[-]RomeoStevens12y130

No. If you are a vegetarian for moral reasons consider how your personal consumption impacts suffering on the margin and maybe consider at least drinking milk.

2[anonymous]12y

Is it that we don't know what makes fish so effective, or we do know and can't get it any other way?

5ephion12y

The main benefits of fish are high protein content and most of the fats are essential omega-3 fatty acids, including the protective EPA and DHA which are mostly unavailable in plant form. The omega-3 fatty acid ALA, which is available in many plans, only gets converted at a rate of 2-10%. If you wanted to get 2g/day of EPA+DHA, you'd need to consume 20-100g of ALA, or 37-186g of flaxseed oil.

2[anonymous]12y

What about algae oil? I'm also looking at krill oil. My vegetarianism is approximately Peter-Singer-When-He-Still-Ate-Mussels (http://www.wesleyan.edu/wsa/warn/singer_fish.htm), and I'm pretty sure Krill are simple enough that there's no disutility in consuming them, but I'm having trouble finding anything definitive.

3RomeoStevens12y

I have a general heuristic in my diet of "if you need to process ten thousand of something to get the amount you want to eat, don't do that."

7juliawise12y

What about yeast? This seems like a silly heuristic.

0RomeoStevens12y

I'm not at all confident eating lots of yeast is great for our gut bacteria.

2trist12y

Perhaps the reference is to "nutritional yeast", which are all dead, and won't impact your gut bacteria aside from being provided with more nutrients.

0juliawise12y

I was thinking of bread, actually. Not that bread is the greatest for you, but the problem isn't the yeast (which are dead, anyway).

0Lumifer12y

Replace yeast/bread with yogurt, then.

0RomeoStevens12y

it would be reasonable for, by yourself, to create yogurt. It would not be reasonable for you by yourself to produce canola oil.

1Lumifer12y

And how is this relevant to the discussion?

0RomeoStevens12y

one is processing 10,000 of something to get an edible amount. One is letting some warm milk sit with a starter culture.

4ephion12y

For which respect? Tempeh is a great source of vegetarian protein and micronutrients, as fermentation removes all the nasty stuff from soy. Algae supplements have a good bit of the n-3 fatty acid DHA and EPA, but are extremely expensive with average prices being $60/mo for the recommended 2g EPA/DHA per day. Contrast this with $8/month for fish oil of the same power.

1gimpf6y

Very late update: In the meantime products have become available with an EPA/DHA ratio of ~ 3/2 (prev. it was always 1/2). Price for monthly dose remained the same.

-2James11y

On this topic, I'm a bit concerned about the argued support for fish eating. RS writes, 'Pescetarians live significantly longer than vegans,[4] lending support to fish consumption.' But this doesn't follow. Does fish consumption make a difference vs. lacto/ovo vegetarianism? If not, there's no support for fish consumption (but perhaps milk/eggs). The cited study (from the abstract) seems to rate longevity between each group equally, at least from ischemic heart disease, indicating no effect: 'mortality from ischemic heart disease was 20% lower in occasional meat eaters, 34% lower in people who ate fish but not meat, 34% lower in lactoovovegetarians...' Briefly checking wikipedia and other sites, I can't find significant support for fish-eating vs lacto/ovo vegetarianism, but I'd be interested to hear if I'm missing something. In addition to pure health issues, I'm also concerned that eating fish will have a high disutility, for you get less kg of meat per death. Brian Tomasik has had a stab at crunching the numbers here: http://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/. That treats all animal pain as equal, and finds that farmed salmon results in estimated 200x more suffering than beef per kg. You may want to factor in sentience complexity, indirect effects, pain responsiveness, etc. But the intuitive problem is that it would have to be massively less bad to eat fish vs most mammals to conclude that it's better to eat them, for their relatively lower mass will mean killing many more to achieve the same amount of meat. Of course, the moral disutility of fish-eating is distinct from its health effects. I only raise it in case people want to consider balancing disutility of production with utility gained from health benefits, if any, from consumption.

0RomeoStevens10y

Average is the same for lacto-ovo and for pescatarians but the CI is narrower for pescatarians. The lacto-ovo CI is just barely significant. I'm not covering normative issues in this post as it is a massive topic.

[-]Pat Myron7mo90

https://kyhealthnews.net/2022/02/14/a-healthier-diet-could-add-years-to-your-life-study-says-more-than-a-decade-in-your-20s-and-eight-or-nine-years-even-at-age-60

[-]Vaniver12y90

I don’t care if you start with an exercise habit of one pushup a week, but you must do something.

Beeminder Beeminder Beeminder. Having an email reminder to exercise, and a penalty for not doing so, has been tremendously helpful for me- I now actually lift weights three times a week, as compared to just when I remembered to do so on my own.

8shokwave12y

Counterpoint: Beeminder does not play nice with certain types of motivation structures. I advocated it in the past; I do not anymore. It's probably not true for you, the reader (you should still go and use it, the upside is way bigger than the downside), but be aware that it's possible it won't work for you.

5taryneast12y

Yeah. Beeminder doesn't work for me either - nor do most online punishment-based motivators. My problem with it is that it doesn't punish you for failing to do the thing you need to do. It punishes you for failing to record the fact that you did the thing you need to do. So if you're time-poor (like me) and still managed to do the thing... but didn't have time to go online and tell beeminder that you did the thing... you still get punished. :(

2Adele_L11y

Yeah, I have the same problem with it. When my productivity went up, I actually went off the road because I couldn't be bothered to record it all.

1ThoughtSpeed8y

Agreed that this is a problem! Thankfully there are a lot of integrations with Beeminder that automatically enter data. You can hook up hundreds of different applications to it through IFTTT or Zapier.

1OphilaDros12y

The beeminder team sends "legitimacy check" emails if you've derailed on your goal which explicitly asks if it was a case of forgetting to enter the data. I've written in once or twice when I've derailed on account of not entering the data on time and have had quick responses from them, and haven't been punished. Were you unaware you could do this?

0taryneast11y

Kind of. I was aware you could appeal the decision, but I felt that would be an imposition on some poor moderator... and given I'm pretty sure this would occur on a regular basis, decided I didn't want to do that. What would work for me, would be for a short "grace period" in which we could update the decision ourselves. Like I said - fitocracy gives you a week or so to back-date your past workouts. Of course fitocracy doesn't run with a monetary punishment so it's not as bad for you to backdate... Basically - I conclude that beeminder's mechanic doesn't fit well enough to my likely usage patterns to be worth it.

0A1987dM12y

Have you checked out their Android and iPhone apps? Also, I think if you have a US cell phone number you can add data via SMS.

0taryneast12y

That still counts as going online to checkin. Other means of getting online aren't the solution. If it's 11:30pm and I have to be in bed half an hour ago in order to be up in time for work tomorrow - it doesn't matter how many avenues I could take to get online... I still can't spare a minute to do it. I prefer fitocracy's approach - you can checkin for something you did within the week, but no further back. For beeminder - even allowing for "actually I did do this yesterday" would be better than the current approach.

-1A1987dM12y

That's an overestimate of the time it takes to submit data via the Android Beeminder app by about an order of magnitude, at least if your phone within reach of hand from your bed.

2taryneast11y

No. It isn't. Even when my iPad is on my bed. Generally I must: 1. open my eyes (after my brain spits up the info that I've forgotten to do it) 2. grab the iPad 3. switch it on 4. swipe and type in my PIN 5. click the main button to get from my alarm-clock screen to the icon-menu 6. swipe through menus until I get to the app 7. load the app 8. then do the updating on the actual app 9. double-click the home button co I can: 10. close the app, then click back on my alarm-clock app 11. switch off. 12. put the iPad back in position on the bed 13. close my eyes 14. try and get back into the restful frame of mind for sleep that I was in before all this. I count steps 1-13 as being roughly a minute of time. I reckon step 14 is the doozy...

4Prismattic12y

My workplace has a gym. I generally scarf my lunch at my desk and use my actual lunch hour at the gym. This pretty much guarantees that I will go work out at a more-or-less set time every weekday. Between this and a weekly judo class, I typically exercise 6 days a week, without really having to remember anything. (Downside/tradeoff -- less socialization, which, like exercise, reduces stress)

[-]TimFreeman12y80

I have experienced consequences of donating blood too often.The blood donation places check your hemoglobin, but I have experienced iron deficiency symptoms when my hemoglobin was normal and my serum ferritin was low. The symptoms were twitchy legs when I was trying to sleep and insomnia, and iron deficiency was confirmed with a ferritin test. The iron deficiency symptoms went away and ferritin went back to normal when I took iron supplements and stopped donating blood, and I stopped the iron supplements after the normal ferritin test.

The blood donation pl... (read more)

2A1987dM12y

IIRC, where I am they don't even allow you to donate blood if you've already done so in the past three months or, if you're a fertile woman, in the past six months.

[-]TylerJay12y80

Great article. Lots of really good information. A few questions:

Well it turns out that fish oil pills suck, and you’d need to take approximately 9 times as much to have the same effect as eating fish, at which point they’d have dangerous blood thinning effects.

Does anyone have a link to this full study? I'd like to see the full data. The abstract is confusing. It says you would need " two- and ninefold higher doses of EPA and DHA, respectively, if administered with capsules rather than salmon," but it's not clear which numbers you need ... (read more)

2RomeoStevens12y

We're going to be replacing our current sunflower seeds with high oleic acid versions which will bring us down to under 5% of calories from PUFA. Do you have a jailbroken version of that study anywhere? That's a really large effect, and the best evidence against PUFA yet if true.

2Mqrius12y

The maximum total energy from PUFA has been a discussion point with DIY Soylent makers as well. The final consensus was that it should definitely be below 10%, and possibly below 4%. The 4% figure comes from The perfect health diet, which uses this as a source: Angela Liou Y, Innis SM. Dietary linoleic acid has no effect on arachidonic acid, but increases n-6 eicosadienoic acid, and lowers dihomo-gamma-linolenic and eicosapentaenoic acid in plasma of adult men. Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids 2009 Apr;80(4):201–6, http://pmid.us/19356914. I've also got a copy hosted at http://forecast.student.utwente.nl/Lesswrong/ but only download that if your university or company legally gives you access to Elsevier content. For the discussion and links to other relevant papers, see http://discourse.soylent.me/t/optimal-micronutrient-ratios/5049/52 and further posts For my Soylent, I ended up getting most fats from macadamia oil (mostly Omega-9 aka MUFA) and MCT oil (Medium-chain saturated fat), since they don't have any negative effects associated with them. Correct me if I'm wrong.

2Mqrius12y

My university has access to the paper. I've got it hosted on my server, but you're only allowed to download it if you have legal access through your university as well. If you have legal access, feel free to click this link: http://forecast.student.utwente.nl/Lesswrong/The%20importance%20of%20the%20ratio%20of%20omega-6%20omega-3%20essential%20fatty%20acids.pdf

2TylerJay12y

I don't, unfortunately. I thought it looked really high as well. The wording of the abstract seems to indicate that it was an observational/epidemiological study, not an RCT, but you can never really tell from the abstracts.

[-]erratio12y70

I notice that I am confused about what makes a post worthy of being Promoted. This post is well-researched and has an incredibly high score and lots of interesting comments. Is it that MIRI/CFAR/et al are afraid that someone might implement these and later sue if they don't get results, or somerthing?

As it is, Main but not Promoted is currently the least visible location on the site.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky12y100

Well, I was surprised by the flossing claim, looked it up and found a correlational study with control variables. Give me my choice of control variables in a correlational study and I will prove that smoking cigarettes prevents lung cancer. And I was a bit worried about other items listed even before then. So I decided not to promote.

4CCC12y

Honestly, I'm surprised that there aren't more posts tagged 'longevity' on this site. Cryonics is wildly popular here, as a way to continue one's existence in the future, after one's physical body gives out; however, simply surviving long enough for someone to invent a cure for aging seems to be another way to solve the same problem and, moreover, one which can be worked concurrently with cryonics.

5scav12y

Also, nobody knows whether people currently being cryonically preserved by current methods can ever be thawed and healed or uploaded into an emulator. It would suck to die and get frozen a year before they realise they were doing it all wrong.

[-]iarwain112y70

Regarding driving safety: A couple of years ago I asked my old driving instructor if he knew of a good book on driving safety I could use to increase my skills. He pointed me to some of Fred Mottola's guides at the National Institute for Driver Behavior. I ordered pretty much all of the reading / course material he has available, and I thought they were excellent. There's a lot of little tips for marginally increasing safety, and he focuses a lot on developing good habits so it doesn't require constant vigilance.

In order to get the full benefits of his pro... (read more)

0oge11y

Hey [iarwain1] I'm interested in trying out the driving guides. Could you please recommend one of the books to start with before buying the rest? Also, do you happen to know of anyplace where I can take a "simulated accident" course (in the Bay Area, if possible)?

1iarwain111y

The Ten Habits book is the main one, but there's also the Zone Control system which is mostly a very expanded version. Here's the product list. Don't buy the mirrors.

[-]timujin12y60

Get tape and cover lights. Try orange glasses to prevent blue light from destroying your endogenous melatonin production after 10pm.

I have always been confused about this one part. Seems like this is the place to ask, for once.

Where do these exact o'clock figures always come from when people are talking about sleep optimizing?

I mean, 10pm by which clock? Certainly, the position of arrows on my watches does not influence melatonin production. Is it calibrated by amount of daylight? But in the area I live in, 10pm can be a middle of the night or not-even-... (read more)

1RomeoStevens12y

completely arbitrary. You want to be doing it at a consistent time several hours before you want to be asleep.

0timujin12y

That's cool, but I am still curious about from whence exactly you got the number.

0RomeoStevens12y

I have heard it repeated several times and personally put them on at 10:30 in order to fall asleep around 1:30.

[-]octopocta12y60

I'm very surprised that there is no mention of a low-dose aspirin regime here. Low dose aspirin can greatly reduce chances of stroke, heart attack, and cancer. The main caveat is that there is increased chance of bleeding or stomach ulcer, the latter of which can be avoided by taking with food.

9RomeoStevens12y

I looked into the numbers and it's a wash for people under 45. The risks are greater than often presented, likely because the marketing is targeted at people at heightened risk who really do need to be convinced to take it.

1gwern10y

Link? (Perhaps you didn't take into account the roughly 5 year lag before the reductions start becoming visible?) My own reading of the meta-analyses is the opposite: that while not studied very much, the cost-benefit is probably even more positive than for older people since the all-cause mortality reduction does not seem to vary by age, the benefits seem to be cumulative/have that lag (so you want to start before the cancer/death risks start going up), younger people have far more DALYs to lose, and the risk of bleeding increase substantially in the 70s and higher. No one seems to show any increase in risk or reduction in effect extrapolating from the ~50yo cutoff in most studies, and at least some people like Rothwell are raising the question of suggesting baby aspirin use for the middle-aged.

0RomeoStevens10y

My impression was that when looking at subgroups the low risk groups didn't show any significant risk reduction, and that the higher your risk profile goes the more you reduce risk[1]. So I guess a 5 year lag implies it would be reasonable to start taking it at 40. But an individual has access to better predictors than population wide analysis of age cohorts. The problem is that there is no easy way to judge the balance of risks as you age. Mortality from GI bleeding is low, but not that low[2]. I would hazard a guess that someone who gets regular blood panels and finds themselves leaving the very low risk cluster of parameters (ApoA:ApoB, CRP, high BP) it is probably on net worth it. 1. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199704033361401 2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3309903/ (table 4)

1curiousepic12y

Is it worth it to carry around aspirin to take if you even worry you might be having a heart attack, for people under 45?

1RomeoStevens12y

carrying a small first aid kit in your day bag is pretty reasonable.

0[anonymous]12y

I'm not a doctor, but my understanding is that aspirin won't do anything for a heart attack once it starts -- the possible benefits are prophylactic, not curative, and come from low doses over time.

-4Lumifer12y

If you worry about having a heart attack, there are better things than aspirin to carry with you.

4Vaniver12y

This post would be much more helpful if you had listed those things. The only thing I'm seeing suggested besides aspirin is nitrates of some form, which appear to be prescription.

1Lumifer12y

I am not a doctor and I don't want to give medical advice to unknown people over the 'net. If curiousepic has a medical condition that causes him to have a well-founded fear of a heart attack, he really should ask his doctor -- who, among other things, will know what that condition is and can write prescriptions.

2Vaniver12y

Wouldn't it be better to say something like "ask your doctor, who can give you answers tailored to your medical history," then?

-1Lumifer12y

No. It is a condescending answer which provides no information. My answer points out that things better than aspirin exist but leaves open the question of what would actually be appropriate for the OP. Essentially, it tells him to explore the matter further.

3Vaniver12y

Why do you think it's condescending? But is that true? As far as I can tell, the other things that are available are recommended to people who cannot take aspirin for whatever reason, and so to call them "better" seems not quite right. But saying "explore the matter further" in response to someone saying "is X worth it?" seems profoundly unhelpful, especially when you don't actually say that, compared to saying "explore the matter further by talking to your doctor" or "explore the matter further by looking into miracle drug X."

[-]James_Miller12y60

Examine.com is much less positive about CoQ10 writing "all the noticeable effects (more vitality) could potentially be placebo. It is very much a faith buy and the costs if you take it in the wrong manner (without a fatty transport) could be quite high financially."

6RomeoStevens12y

mean decrease in systolic pressure over 8 studies of 16mm Hg kicks the crap out of a lot of interventions, including some prescription ones.

0PeterDonis12y

Are there any theories about the mechanism involved here? I've done a fair bit of Googling about this but haven't found any discussion of underlying mechanisms, only the statistics. I know that CoQ10 is critical in the metabolic cycle that produces ATP, and therefore is involved in energy production everywhere in the body; but I'm not sure how to get from that to the specific result of lowering blood pressure (rather than something more general like "feel more energetic").

0RomeoStevens12y

The fact that blood pressure is an independent predictor of mortality would imply it affects, and is most likely affected by, a lot of metabolic processes.

4[anonymous]12y

From my own looking around I would recommend adding CoQ10 if you are on statin anti-cholesterol medications. They interfere with its recycling within your body, and while there's a reason that the active part of CoQ10 is called 'ubiquinone' (its in EVERYTHING that was once alive) its plausible that levels might drop enough to mess with higher metabolic levels if you are on these drugs. Source: anecdotal evidence and a recent study that seemed to show that statin drugs cause people to stop getting cardiovascular benefits from aerobic exercise.

[-]brazil8412y50

I was pretty surprised about blood donation. My intuition is screaming that it must be one of those correlation/causation things where unhealthy people are discouraged from donating blood, but on the other hand, the researchers are all surely very well aware of this issue and must have taken steps to correct for it.

Anyway, have you thought about typically sub-clinical viruses like cytomegalovirus? I recall reading that a CMV infection cuts a few years from your life expectancy. I don't have research to back it up, but I think it's a good idea to avoid having intimate contact (e.g. casual sex) with lots of people.

[-]Lumifer12y130

I was pretty surprised about blood donation.

Males tend to have iron overload which is bad for you. The easiest way to fix it is to bleed on a regular basis.

Women don't have that problem.

[-]khafra12y230

Those of us disqualified from donating blood should probably try to get into some form of exercise that involves a lot of blood loss; like skateboarding over sharp rocks, fencing with un-foiled blades, or taunting apex predators in their natural habitat. A new Ev-psych explanation for why men engage in this sort of activity more than women!

4Nornagest12y

Huh, a plausible longevity argument for Mensur fencing. Never thought I'd see that in the wild. (Snark aside, I imagine it'd be rather difficult to find a hobby that reliably takes a pint of blood a year and doesn't kill or seriously injure you.)

[-]Lumifer12y180

I imagine it'd be rather difficult to find a hobby that reliably takes a pint of blood a year and doesn't kill or seriously injure you.

Pet leeches :-P

4maia12y

Hmm. Do the studies account for this? Also, that would mean women on medication that stops their period also might have this problem.

6Vaniver12y

Indeed; also post-menopausal women.

3[anonymous]12y

Wouldn't necessarily call it iron overload, but definitely higher levels. Hmmm... as someone who is a carrier for hemochromatosis (thanks 23andme!) perhaps I should consider this more than the average person...

2Lumifer12y

I thought it was a pretty standard term.

6[anonymous]12y

Yes it is, but generally for rather more clinically significant levels. The difference between men and women exists but is much much smaller than the difference you get from, say, hereditary hemochromatosis. Ordinarily I hate nomenclature quibbles but labelling the normal state of half the population as a pathology seems out of place.

2Lumifer12y

Well, nobody claims all males suffer from iron overload. On the other hand, the correlation between blood donation and mortality seems to suggest that there is a nontrivial amount of people (very likely males) with "clinically significant levels" who are probably not aware of that fact.

0G0W5111y

I suggest you read this article, which suggests that blood donation doesn't decrease mortality. What do you (or anyone else) think of it?

1RomeoStevens11y

There is a review floating around where some researchers investigated exactly this claim and concluded that the reverse causation effect only accounted for about 30% of the effect. This is one of those situations where the costs and benefits are a massive enough ratio to make it worth the risk that it isn't doing anything IMO.

0G0W5111y

I tried to find it but failed. Do you recall it's title or authors?

0RomeoStevens11y

Sorry I don't. Don't see it with a cursory search in google scholar either.

0G0W5111y

Oh well. I'll still mention this in Immortality: A Practical Guide if that's okay with you.

1RomeoStevens11y

Oh if you want to cite it I'll look a little harder. This review actually seems pretty thorough and reports a negative result (though still positive for people who have already experienced a CHD event): http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/103/1/52.full They discuss why they think positive results happened in previous studies. I'm updating away from the hypothesis as a result of finding this. Blood donation still has enough other studies showing various benefits and essentially no studies showing harm (except for excessive donation, more than twice a year IIRC) that I think it is worth it, but the mortality effects might not be very high.

0G0W5111y

Keep in that one of blood donation's supposed mechanisms is to prevent iron overload, but only ~0.5% of the population has iron overload to begin with. See ChrisT's comment.

0Lumifer11y

My post mentions a specific reason -- iron overload -- which is bad for you. Blood donation fixes that problem if it exists. That particular argument does not rely on correlations at all.

0G0W5111y

Your post also mentioned that males tend to have iron overload. I find this to be suspect, as if males tended to have iron overload, the study would have probably found that blood donation decreases mortality. That said, for those who do have iron overload, blood donation likely does fix that.

0Lumifer11y

I don't know how prevalent iron overload is. It might well be rare enough so that its effects are lost in the noise. I wasn't claiming that donating blood is necessarily healthy, my point was rather that mechanisms (not correlations) by which blood donation could be useful for health exist.

0G0W5111y

If you don't know how prevalent iron overload is, then you can't know that men tend to have it, so I suggest editing you comment to say "some men have iron overload" instead of "men tend to have iron overload."

1ChrisT11y

Iron overload / haemochromatosis occurs in approx 0.5% of the population of Northern European origin (and less in other ethnicities). Undiagnosed and untreated the iron will build up in the liver and other organs and cause a variety of unpleasant side effects. Venesection is the standard treatment, though I suggest that less than 0.5% of the population is not significant enough to explain the other studies. Source: http://www.haemochromatosis.org.uk/index.html

[-]D_Malik12y50

Also relevant to longevity are supplements for reducing the cognitive decline that comes with aging, such as piracetam.

[-]AlexSchell12y50

I can't donate blood where I live. Perhaps I should look into good old-fashioned bloodletting.

[-]michael_b11y40

Why should we listen to you and not, say, the Harvard School of Public Health ?

That is, why do you think you did a better job of reading and interpreting the literature and publishing guidelines?

7Anders_H11y

For career reasons, I am unable to give a complete answer to this question (see my contact details). I just want to give the general advice that it may be a good idea to beware of people who use the word "science" and the brand name "Harvard" to promote their personal views on questions that are not answerable without long-term randomized trials with perfect adherance (or alternatively strong causal assumptions that are unlikely to hold in these particular settings) I am not claiming that aspiring rationalists can necessarily do any better, I just want to make the point that it may be better to admit ignorance (or high-variance priors) rather than appealing to the authority of "Harvard"

2michael_b11y

Noted. To be clear, the question I'm asking is why is OP a more worthy authority than the rest? Why should we listen to OP and not follow, say, the UK's NHS healthy living guidelines? I hope the answer is better than "because nobody at the NHS is a member of LW"

4ChristianKl11y

For political reasons the NHS couldn't write things like

-1michael_b11y

Fair point.

1RomeoStevens11y

Ditto for these NHS healthy living guidelines. Where do I contradict them? I had thought my main takeaways were pretty uncontroversial WRT mainstream advice.

3RomeoStevens11y

I am having a hard time finding places I disagree significantly with them. Are you referring to sodium? Here is their article on the salt controversy: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/the-new-salt-controversy/ "pointing out that the committee’s conclusions discounted effects of sodium reduction on blood pressure." “Discounting the especially large blood pressure reduction going from 2,300 to 1,500 mg in prehypertensives, hypertensives, older adults and blacks who are especially vulnerable to the effects of high sodium betrays an unbalanced weighing of the evidence.” -Dr. Frank Sacks There are a couple problems with this critique. 1. It does not seem to me after reading the IoM report that they are discounting BP effects. They are explicitly noting that the BP reducing effects are not resulting in the expected mortality reduction if salt had no positive health effects. BP is a proxy measure for CVD and mortality risk. We shouldn't stick religiously to the proxy if we can gain access to the actual underlying thing we care about. 2. the "especially large reduction" comment seems inappropriate given that the IoM was NOT asked to establish sodium guidelines for people who display an especially high sodium sensitivity or have medical conditions but for the general populace. It also seems to be disregarding the fact that extreme sodium reduction has resulted in higher hospitalizations even in these "at risk" groups. I agree there is ambiguity about where in the 2g-4g consumption level is ideal. I also agree that the recommendation for certain sub-populations might be different. But the evidence of <2g=harm seems pretty solid. This evidence is not exclusively from mortality statistics as Dr. Sacks implies but also from hospitalizations as mentioned. I have not been able to figure out why the low sodium is being pushed so aggressively. Much of the language used (in that article for instance) leads me to believe that perhaps the belief is that they need to

2michael_b11y

Sorry for the confusion. I'm picking authorities at random and asking why I should trust you over them, not vouching for any authority in particular. Perhaps I should have asked more bluntly: who are you and why are you qualified to give us health advice? No offense. :) More a curiosity than anything: dairy isn't represented at all on the HSPH's "healthy eating plate" but is specifically highlighted in your section on nutrition. Why the discrepancy?

0RomeoStevens11y

I'm not. I'm a random person who is investigating the advice of professionals and trying to determine the interventions with the highest reported effect sizes in the literature. I'm not running studies myself or claiming anything in the absence of studies. Milk and eggs is because of the Adventist health study and others: "mortality from ischemic heart disease was 20% lower in occasional meat eaters, 34% lower in people who ate fish but not meat, 34% lower in lactoovovegetarians, and 26% lower in vegans. " http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/70/3/516s.full Keep in mind that it is perfectly valid to infer that if I disagree with a mainstream source on healthy advice this is minor evidence I am wrong.

2IlyaShpitser11y

Seconding Anders_H here (will not get into specifics for similar reasons). ---------------------------------------- Our opinions should not be treated as independent, of course.

0[anonymous]11y

Heh, do you know who Anders_H is?

[-]John_Maxwell11y40

Regarding sleep temperature, I've seen contradictory recommendations.

This article references a finding that "finding that facial warming helps send people to sleep". And Wikipedia writes

Some of the few factors known to increase slow-wave sleep in the sleep period that follows them include body heating (as by immersion in a hot tub)...

Though, this guy writes

"A hot bath will increase your skin temperature, which eventually decreases your core body temperature. Do the same thing for yourself that you’d do for a young child—make sure you

... (read more)

[-]John_Maxwell11y40

On the topic of whether it's useful to worry about longevity when you're young: I just saw this article in the NY Times, which suggests that it is.

[-]Xodarap12y40

Ovo-lacto vegetarians live significantly longer than vegans

Where does it say that the difference is significant? The only mention of this I see in the cited paper is table 7, and the CIs there overlap a great deal. (And it goes on to say that the numbers should be "interpreted with caution because of the uncertainty of the dietary classification of subjects in the Health Food Shoppers Study".)

-2RomeoStevens12y

A lot of these studies point to the same small amounts of data. This article for example discusses a new study that again reanalyzes the Adventist study data http://www.nleducation.co.uk/resources/reviews/vegetarians-live-longer-and-healthier/ We don't really have anything better though. And what little evidence we have points towards ovo-lacto and pescatarians having better health.

2A1987dM11y

BTW, this article suggests that legumes have some positive effect on longevity, fish might have a smaller such effect, meat may have a negative effect, alcohol has a rather broad confidence interval (which I suspect is because they're trying to model a non-monotonic effect with a linear model), and none of the other food groups they considered have much of an effect.

0RomeoStevens11y

I would guess that legume consumption is positive for the elderly because their folate absorption declines with age (along with other B vitamins like b12). I wonder if anyone has tried to test that yet.

2Xodarap12y

Um, the article you linked seems to say that vegans are healthier: The difference might not be significant, so I don't know that we would call this conclusive proof. But it seems like if you're going to lean one way, it would be towards vegans being healthier. Especially since "animal products are bad" is a much simpler model than "animal products are bad, except for these few exceptions."

0RomeoStevens12y

I guess I completely failed to discuss that the studies I linked to do not constitute the entire set of studies I drew from for the recommendations. I will expand on some of the points when I have time.

4Xodarap12y

Sounds good. Just reading the wikipedia page#Health_studies) on eggs seems to indicate that evidence for their health benefits is questionable at best, (and even though you were trying to make the argument that eggs were healthy you couldn't find the evidence to do so at first) so given that you're only mentioning "the largest high level features of a diet that have positive or negative impact", I'm not convinced eggs are worth including at all.

0RomeoStevens12y

Yeah, I believe choline is more important than the conventional wisdom suggests given its interaction with various nootropics. It's really hard to get enough without eggs. Eggs are also absurdly bioavailable compared to everything else.

1orthonormal12y

How many eggs per week would you need to eat in order to avoid choline deficiency?

0RomeoStevens12y

I eat 2-3 eggs a day. You do get a little choline from other sources.

1orthonormal12y

Er, that's not what I asked; averting a deficiency presumably takes less consumption than that. Do you have evidence about choline levels, and what does that evidence say about how many eggs you'd need to eat per week to avoid it?

0RomeoStevens12y

Averting an acute deficiency is completely different from optimal for health. I don't have a simple cite saying this amount of choline is optimal. I have an impression based on peoples response to extra choline. Edit: to clarify, choline is not the sole reason I strongly recommend eggs. It is possible to get enough choline without eggs, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of the populace does not meet the adequate intake makes me suspect most diets don't fulfill this.

1Qiaochu_Yuan12y

The last time I tried doing this I ended up with some constipation. It's possible I wasn't drinking enough water at the time, though.

0Wei Dai11y

It seems pretty easy to supplement with soy lecithin. Is there any reason not to do that?

0RomeoStevens11y

Not particularly for choline other than my normal anti-processed-food-until-proven-otherwise heuristic, but eggs do also contain lots of b12, selenium, and a smaller amount of a ton of other nutrients.

0Pablo11y

Eggs are very high in methionine, though, and there's evidence that methionine restriction can increase both mean and maximum lifespan. Some very knowledgeable folk, like Michael Rae, have dropped eggs from their diet for this reason.

0RomeoStevens11y

Thanks for the pointer, I am reading the rat and mice studies. So far the evidence seems weaker than the CR evidence, which is pretty bad.

0Pablo11y

Do you mean that the CR evidence is bad, or that it's bad that the evidence for methionine restriction is weaker?

0RomeoStevens11y

"CR works in humans" evidence is bad. "CR works in primates" is bad. "CR works in mice" is shakier than it has been presented.

0Pablo11y

I don't think this is an accurate characterization of the state of the evidence. See here for a rigorous examination of the relevant issues. Also, it seems inconsistent to dismiss the evidence for CR in humans as "bad" and yet praise intermittent fasting (IF), given that (1) IF has been studied much less extensively than CR, (2) IF hasn't generally shown health benefits comparable to those of CR, and (3) it is generally believed that the benefits that IF does confer are explained by its ability to mimic CR.

0RomeoStevens11y

My praise for IF can not be based on longevity considerations because the evidence simply isn't there. It is based on shorter term considerations regarding blood markers that should lead to better health outcomes, as well as quality of life considerations. I read the linked examination of various CR studies, if anything I am even more dubious than before. There are simply way too many free parameters in the studies that have been done so far for me to feel confident in their results. CR requires an extraordinary lifestyle change that induces some changes that seem quite bad (hormonal and immune system), it would take excellent evidence of benefit to be worth these downsides. The methionine evidence seems even more preliminary, and I'm not going to get rid of nutrient dense food items in my diet based on it until there is stronger evidence. I'd specifically point to the "Diminishing returns hypothesis" section of the paper as representative of my impression across all studies so far.

1Pablo11y

We observe even better blood markers (and other biomarkers) on people doing CR. My point is that there is no relevant line of evidence that provides stronger support for IF than for CR. So it's hard to square your claim that the evidence for CR is bad with your praise for IF. Upon reading your second paragraph, it now seems to me that you are actually using different evidential standards to assess these two dietary interventions, on the grounds that one (but presumably not the other) "requires an extraordinary lifestyle change". I think however that it's much clear to keep the evidential question ("does CR work?") separate from the practical question ("should I try CR?"), and use consistent evidential standards across the board. Once you reach a position about the degree to which the existing evidence supports the claim that CR has various health benefits, you can then proceed to tackle the issue of whether the benefits are worth the costs. And note that methionine restriction doesn't require anything remotely like the sacrifices required by CR, so we should clearly keep the two questions separate in this case.

0RomeoStevens11y

No we don't, we see immunosupression, elevation of some stress markers, and sex hormones crashing. The stronger support for IF is that you can lead a normal life and meet all the usual criteria we use for assessing health. With CR we improve some markers for health at the cost of others and hope we have chosen the correct ones to downgrade in our estimation of effectiveness for longevity. If I based lifestyle changes on studies with similar levels of evidence to methionine restriction, I would be pulling a Ray Kurzweil and taking dozens of supplements. Rat/mouse models should NOT inform lifestyle changes. Their purpose is to explore hypothesis space cheaply.

0Pablo11y

Your epistemology seems flawed. We have multiple lines of evidence and a proper Bayesian agent will take these all into account. This is especially the case when certain types of evidence will only be available after a period of several decades or even several generations. In such cases, we need to rely on the limited evidence we have at present. In any case, your original point was that the evidence for methionine restriction was worse that the evidence for CR, which you claimed was "pretty bad". Yet your grounds for concluding that the evidence for CR was "pretty bad" were partly based on practical considerations which do not apply to methionine restriction, so that argument doesn't really work.

0RomeoStevens11y

Let's drop CR for now then and focus on Methionine. The hypothesis here is that I should be dropping foods with known health benefits like salmon[1] and whey[2] from my diet based on a rodent model. I can't find any studies on human methionine restriction, do you have any pointers? Also, is there any reason I couldn't achieve the same effect with a methionine inhibitor like SAMe? Another plausible idea is that methionine is not a problem itself but is merely a symptom of a different issue, such as glycine deficiency (we don't eat connective tissue much anymore). [1] http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/109/22/2705.short [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21338538

0Pablo11y

The dairy meta-analysis you provide was supported by the "Dairy Innovation Australia Limited", which makes me skeptical of their findings, given the multiple ways in which data can be aggregated to yield specific conclusions, and the evidence documenting the degree to which financial incentives can affect scientific findings. I haven't looked at the other study, but I'm happy to accept that the evidence for the health benefits of fish is strong. I haven't researched the literature on methionine restriction extensively, but here's a paper I found after a quick Google Scholar search. More generally, I think having answers to questions of the following sort would be very helpful in these discussions: "To what degree do hypotheses confirmed by non-human animal models are later vindicated by experimental studies?" and "To what degree do hypotheses confirmed by correlational human studies are later vindicated by experimental studies?"

2IlyaShpitser11y

That depends on what you mean by a 'correlational study.' People who analyze observational data with causality in mind spend a lot of time thinking about potential confounding and what to do about it. For example, here's an analysis of a very large longitudinal dataset with the aim of determining a causal effect: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1138/2012/09/ije_2009.pdf which does very sensible things. If you look at sensible analyses of observational data, then 'the vindication rate' will be related to how often the needed assumptions actually hold. If you look at non-sensible analyses (e.g. that aren't adjusting for confounder bias, and so on), then it's just garbage, no reason to expect better than chance then.

0RomeoStevens11y

Not sure of actual base-rate but I know it is very poor, which is why most researchers don't take animal models very seriously. Not sure, I think also very poor, but having a measure of this would be very valuable.

0orthonormal11y

Reminder to expand on this. (Someone sent me a link saying that eggs are terrible for life expectancy, and I found it dubious so I came back here to look for links to studies.)

0RomeoStevens11y

Link added to parent thread. Still have more to investigate. This area is extremely frustrating because of the decade-plus lead times on studies.

-3RomeoStevens11y

This overview of studies is a reasonable place to look: http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/dxrates Note the conclusion: even though several RR's look better for vegans, the data can't yet make a strong case that veganism is actually better than pesc or ovo-lacto vegetarian diets. In particular, 1.0 RR is often within the 95% CI. This is also worth looking at if I forgot to link it anywhere else: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/93/1/158.short

2Xodarap11y

Right. So given that we don't actually have any evidence to support claims like "Ovo-lacto vegetarians live significantly longer than vegans" don't you think it makes sense to remove those claims?

0RomeoStevens11y

No, I'm in agreement with the article that this meta analysis is the best data we have. It finds significant improvements for fish, dairy, and eggs vs vegans.

0Lumifer11y

It's 15 years old. I'm pretty sure there is more data available today.

0RomeoStevens11y

There's a 2012 meta-analysis of longevity which did not separate out vegans, and a 2014 meta-analysis on blood pressure which also did not separate out vegans. If you have any pointers I'm glad to look at more.

0Lumifer11y

No pointers, sorry. But for fun I searched PubMed for "vegan" and it came up with 3200 hits... Random example thought not meta.

0RomeoStevens11y

again look at confidence bounds. Most of the studies you'll find to simply lack the statistical power to make concrete recommendations. Fish seems unambiguously good and shows the largest effect sizes vs vegans (e.g. http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=1710093), I agree that ovo-lacto evidence is weaker, but I'll maintain that there is slight evidence in favor of it. Given that a diet including fish, eggs, and milk, is much much easier to adhere to it remains something I recommend. Remember that my approach to nutrition in the OP is that effect sizes are small and you should focus your efforts elsewhere. I do appreciate you taking the time to argue this point, smacking various claims with a hammer is essential.

0Xodarap11y

At last, we have reached convergence! I disagree slightly (the most recent article you linked again does not find significant differences between vegans and vegetarians as far as I can tell) but I'm fine calling that "slight evidence". The problem was that the OP said: Which doesn't sound like it's true in either the statistical nor the colloquial sense of the word. Right? So can we just remove that sentence pretty please?

1RomeoStevens11y

Sure, seems reasonable.

[-]waveman12y40

Interesting that there is not much discussion in the comments about weight loss, which is very hard as we all know. And not much discussion about cholesterol either for some reason.

I would just like to point out that Body Mass Index and cholesterol are not very good predictors of risk and that there is some evidence that waist/hip ratio may be a better metric to track.

https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2003/179/11/waist-hip-ratio-dominant-risk-factor-predicting-cardiovascular-death-australia

3Jiro12y

Is body mass a good predictor of risk for people who know that they are not in an obvious category where body mass is expected to be a poor predictor? That is, if you exclude the bodybuilders and limit its use to relatively average-appearing people, is body mass then useful?

8Lumifer12y

BMI is a horrible metric that was never intended to be used for evaluations of individuals (it was supposed to be used for evaluation and comparison of whole populations), is known to scale wrongly with height and basically should just be ignored.

2[anonymous]12y

While you are technically correct, that shouldn't function as an excuse to let oneself get overweight. My BMI was just measured a couple weeks ago to be 23.7 (between 18 and 25 is "normal"), and even after you account for the fact that I carry some muscle thanks to a year of strength training, I'm still visibly chubby and the nurse told me to lose weight. I agree with her on this.

7Creutzer12y

But what you're doing is exactly ignoring the BMI: the BMI is supposed to be normal, but you think you should lose weight.

1[anonymous]12y

Yes, that's my point. However, I'm abnormal: the most common use of ignoring BMI is to let oneself remain overweight against the evidence of its health detriments.

-2Lumifer12y

That's a non sequitur. To quote you from another post You don't know that. Asserting an opinion and describing reality are two different things.

4[anonymous]12y

I have not run a statistically significant experiment, no, but I have simpler never heard of anyone even ignoring their BMI when it's a reason to eat more and exercise less. You could say that I have more than a completely baseless prior but less than a completely well-evidenced posterior.

0Lumifer12y

Huh? You're making no sense. The great majority of people ignore their BMI because they don't care. A notable number ignores their BMI because they have better metrics. I ignore my BMI because I think that it's a silly number that tells me nothing that I don't already know.

1brazil8412y

I recall reading that BMI correctly predicts obesity in 95% of men and 99% of women. Do you disagree with this?

2ephion12y

The best metrics are body fat percentage or fat-free mass index. For what it's worth, even vaguely muscular people are going to blow apart the BMI scale. I'm 5'10" and 190lbs at around 13% body fat. My normal weight range according to BMI is 130-173lbs. If I got down to that without losing any muscle mass, I'd be 5% body fat, which is severely underweight. I was completely sedentary before weight training, and I've only been training powerlifting for 1.5 years with moderate results (ie, I'm not quite as strong as most high school football players).

3RomeoStevens12y

I disagree, it's fairly hard for people to get much above BMI of 28 while lean. You are likely underestimating your BF, have you done a bod pod or other immersion test?

2ephion12y

I haven't. I use calipers and visual estimation compared to DEXA confirmed images. Calipers, if taken at face value, report me to be at 8-10% BF which is definitely too low. Visually, I currently look like pictures of guys in the 13-15% range, so I add 5% to the calculated result. Even at 16% BF (the highest estimate I can get), I'd be around 7% BF with a BMI of 24.8. That's underfat yet very close to overweight.

0brazil8412y

Would you mind posting a self-pic?

0RomeoStevens12y

ah, you sound more than just vaguely muscular then ;)

0waveman11y

Do you have a comparison study which included hip/waist as well as body fat percentage? I have some doubt that your claim is true because the distribution of the fat seems to be very important eg fat around the hips is far less damaging than fat around the abdomen.

0brazil8412y

For what it may be worth, I am "vaguely muscular" and my BMI of 23.6 seems about right in terms of assessing my level of overweight.. I do agree that muscularity can foul up the BMI scale but I think it take more than just modest muscularity to do so.

0brazil8412y

I recall reading that BMI correctly assesses obesity in 99% of women and 95% of men. I can try to dig up a reference for this if you like. So the answer to your question would seem to be "yes."

2brazil8412y

I agree, but significant permanent weight loss is a very difficult and complex problem. So perhaps it's a matter of what is the low-hanging fruit. Arguably it's a lot easier to get in the habit of flossing or taking vitamin D supplements than it is for a fat person to get thin and stay there. When people go on health kicks, attempting to lose weight is very frequently the number one priority. Possibly because there is so much stigma associated with obesity. But a good argument can be made that other things, such as exercise, should be a higher priority.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky12y30

I clicked through to your recommendation to floss and saw an associational study with a set of control variables. This is such a horribly bad sign that it makes me doubt the rest of your post.

[-]RomeoStevens12y100

Floss does have the weakest evidence going for it, hence its position last on the list. It stayed above the "worth it" line due to the low cost and risk. I also believe it has an impact on quality of life even if the mortality effect turns out to be small. I do need to add a discussion of this to my post at some point.

3John_Maxwell12y

Some mouthwashes may be risky

1Dorikka11y

Necroposting, but do you have any more information on mouthwashes as a source of risk? The one I use (Crest pro health) doesn't appear to contain chlorohexadine, but does contain another chlorine compound (cetylpyridinium chloride).

2zedzed11y

Wikipedia says cetylpyridinium chloride is an antiseptic. Assuming the blood pressure-raising mechanism is, in fact, killing off beneficial microbes, then we would expect cetylpyridinium chloride to have similar effects.

0[anonymous]11y

I don't know anything about whether this product causes heart attacks, but any mouthwash containing cetylpyridinium chloride may cause horrible stains on your teeth. Check out the customer reviews on Amazon, where this mouthwash has a one star average rating. I can testify from personal experience that this phenomenon is real, and not some negative marketing campaign instigated by their competitors: I used this mouthwash for less than a month, and it took my dental hygienist almost an hour to remove the stains.

6Anders_H11y

I understand your skepticism about associational studies. Clearly, the likelihood ratio from seeing a positive result in such a study should be tiny in most cases. But just out of curiosity, if you automatically discount all cohort studies, where do you expect evidence on the causal effects of lifestyle interventions to come from? Nobody questions that doing a randomized controlled trial would provide much stronger evidence, but a RCT with a lifestyle intervention as the exposure and mortality as the outcome would take decades to complete, would require a very large sample size, and would have several potential threats to its validity, including low adherence to treatment assignment and loss to followup. Furthermore, you would need a separate arm for every possible variation of the intervention, and you would need to do one of these trials for every possible lifestyle intervention In the absence of an RCT, the best we can do is a properly designed and properly analyzed cohort study. As far as I know, instrumental variables are the only other option that is seriously considered, but there are very few perfect instruments, and in most realistic epidemiologic settings, using a weak instrument is probably worse than doing a cohort study. If you want to go into a further discussion on this, as a starting point, see the article "Instruments for Causal Inference: An Epidemiologist's Dream?" by Miguel Hernan and Jamie Robins, and focus on the section on how minor violations of unverifiable assumptions can blow up the bias. I am not suggesting that cohort studies are the answer, but rather that we only have four options: Either (1) Conduct a lot of very expensive randomized controlled trials on every possible lifestyle intervention and wait a couple of decades for the results, or (2) do associational studies, or (3) Postulate that we understand physiology and biochemistry well enough that we can learn about the effects of lifestyle intervention simply by reasoning, or (4

6gwern10y

RCTS are less expensive than you think and correlational approaches more. The alternative is that instead, we run lots and lots of very expensive enormous national surveys and countless analyses of the form 'blueberry consumption associates with better health (again)' which still wind up being wrong something like 2/3rds the time, which wrongness itself wastes even more money by sending researchers down dead-ends (looking for the exact flavenoid which improves health) and distorting the general populations' expenditures & quality of life & trust in science. Correlational trials are only a bargain if you're trying to maximize citation count and confusion. On a more positive note: #4 is unacceptable because human life is so valuable. Each year of life is worth scores of thousands of dollars, and good knowledge about lifestyle interventions like resistance exercise or aspirin can be applied to the entire American population of 300 million people indefinitely. So it's worth paying for lots of trials from any kind of cost-benefit perspective. And of course there's all sorts of ways to optimize these trials to reduce the already-trivial cost of running them: factorial trials (why study just one intervention at a time?), trials designed ahead of time to fit into meta-analyses so they can borrow strength, informative priors on parameters like effect size (eg any RR <0.90 is implausible for these kinds of interventions), sequential trials to re-allocate across arms (like Thompson sampling) or just to halt early once enough information has accrued for a decision-theoretic judgement that an intervention has proven useless or useful (and can be rolled out to the population), and use of exotic covariates (the genetics of placebo response looks very interesting for increasing power)...

3Anders_H10y

I agree with almost all of this. I do however think that it would be very hard to convince a sufficient number of people to let their lifestyle choices be assigned by chance, and even harder to convince them to adhere to the assigned randomization arm over several decades. Note that if you use a factorial design, you are limiting yourself to study only joint interventions. For example, if you conduct an experiment where you first randomly assign alcohol, and then randomly assign smoking, you will be able to figure out the joint effect of these interventions and the interaction between them, but you will not be able to estimate the overall effect of using alcohol, because part of that effect may be mediated by an increased chance of taking up smoking. This can make it difficult to interpret the trials, particularly if we use high dimensional factorial designs. I am also skeptical of re-allocation across arms, but I'll have to read up on Thompson sampling.

0IlyaShpitser11y

What about (2'): "do associational studies, but try to implement assumptions needed for g methods to work via study design." That is, make sure exposures are given only given the observed past, there isn't interference by construction, etc.

0John_Maxwell12y

Out of curiosity, do we have hard data on the reliability of this vis-a-vis RCTs?

[-]brazil8412y30

By the way, it seems to me that we need to think in more detail about the relationship between happiness and stress. For example, I have pretty high-stress job (I am a litigation attorney) but at the same time it's a lot of fun most of the time and I am reasonably happy with it. How many more years could I expect to live if I were a trust fund baby?

A few studies have been done on the relationship between retirement age and longevity. As I recall, the best studies seem to show little or no relationship once you eliminate consideration of individuals wh... (read more)

7RomeoStevens12y

My understanding is that how you respond to stress is a better predictor than total amount of stress.

8brazil8412y

That raises an interesting question. Just from simple observation, it's clear that a lot of people respond to stress by engaging in unhealthy behaviors like binge eating, excessive alcohol consumption, etc. So if stress is correlated with health problems, perhaps the causation is indirect.

9RomeoStevens12y

We do have some reasons to expect direct causation such as inflammation and immunosupression.

[-]A1987dM2y20

The ToC makes it looks like "blood donations" and "exercise" are among "things that will eventually kill you"...

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke3y20

Changing bed cloth once a week.

This recommendation is not in the list and I heard about it the first time just now:

Huffington Post: This Is What Happens If You Don't Change Your Bed Sheets (And how often the average person actually does it.)

I can't vouch for it but the potentially long list of benefits - and the long time you spend in bed - same as the arguments for mattresses - make this a potentially high-value intervention.

[-]ChristianKl11y20

How good is the case for eating garlic when one looks at more than just blood pressure?

0RomeoStevens11y

Not sure. It also might help with blood lipid profile: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22234974 no other effects that I'm aware of (of sufficient size).

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke12y20

Buying an e-cig for yourself or people you know who smoke are possibly the single cheapest intervention for adding years to life. E-cigs have very high success rates in getting people to quit smoking and are absurdly cheap. You can spend under $10 and add 14 years to someone’s life. I buy them just to give away.

I have bought such an e-cig and gave it to a friend. It was received positively. It also prompted a discussion about the (unknown?) effects of e-cigs. Even though this was only cited as an often given counter-argument I nontheless wonder what the research behind e-cigs shows? Can you provide references that back your claim of getting people to quit?

4RomeoStevens12y

Effect in people not intending to quit: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/11/786

[-]ChrisHallquist12y20

How much have you looked into potential confounders for these things? With the processed meat thing in particular, I've wondered what could be so bad about processing meat, and if this could be one of those things where education and wealth are correlated with health, so if wealthy, well-educated people start doing something, it becomes correlated with health too. In that particular case, it would be a case of processed meat being cheap, and therefore eaten by poor people more, while steak tends to be expensive.

(This may be totally wrong, but it seems like an important concern to have investigated.)

2RomeoStevens12y

My process is to collect a list of confounders by looking at things controlled for in different studies, and then downgrading my estimation of evidence strength if I see obvious ones from the list not mentioned in a study. This is probably not the best way to do this but I haven't come up with anything better yet.

[-][anonymous]12y20

Ok, so basically, I need to floss more and drive less recklessly (when I drive at all, which is rarely). But other than that, I'm doing good at targeting longevity.

steeples fingers

Eeeeexcellent. Everyone who claims to aim for immortality or personal happiness but doesn't exercise, turn in your rationality card right now.

I can't claim any super-insightful techniques for actually building good habits and making good decisions, personally. My main technique is just to make a decision by putting myself in the shoes of future-me and asking what he's going to care about more.

[-]Pablo12y20

This is a useful post. Thank you for writing it.

You claim that "Eggs and whole milk are very nutrient dense." I think that's quite a controversial statement. Here are the nutrition facts for 100 Calories of whole milk and spinach:

[-]ephion12y140

I've downvoted your post due to use of a misleading graphic (EDIT: Downvote retracted after your reply). The graphic is comparing low fat milk, not whole milk, while whole milk has much more nutrition than low fat milk. Additionally, nutrient density can refer to both nutrients/calorie, nutrients/volume, and nutrients/price. All are important measures. Spinach wins on nutrients/calorie, but the other two, not so much.

Whole milk, for example, has 124IU of Vitamin D while the chart only lists 2.4 IU, which approximates the 1% fat figure from Google's nutrition information.

This is what 200 calories of whole milk looks like. This is 200 calories of eggs. This is 100 calories of spinach.

Spinach has little protein (0.9g/serving), while eggs and milk both contain 8g and 7g per serving. This extremely important number is missing from the chart. A cup (30g) of spinach (standard serving size) contains 7 calories, so you'd need to multiply your numbers in the charts by 0.07 to get the expected nutrition per serving of spinach. A serving of whole milk (8oz/244g) is around 148 calories, so we'd need to multipy by 1.48 for a serving:serving comparison. Doing this, the differences in nutrient c... (read more)

6Pablo12y

* I originally used whole milk in my graph, but later removed it because the data was for fortified milk. (Clearly, in assessing the nutrient density of a food, one should exclude whatever nutrients are added in supplement form by manufacturers.) I have now found data for unfortified whole milk, and have updated my original comment with a graph displaying nutrition data for that type of milk. * Whole milk does not contain significantly more vitamin D than low fat milk does. The figure you quote corresponds to fortified whole milk, which for the reasons mentioned in the preceding bullet point should not be used in this context. And even if we used both fortified whole milk and fortified low fat milk, it would also be false to say that former contains significantly more vitamin D than the latter does. * Nor is the nutrient content of whole milk higher than that of low fat milk; if anything, the opposite is the case. Here's an isocaloric (100 Cal.) comparison of the nutrient content of whole milk and low fat milk: * According to Wikipedia, "Most commonly, nutrient density is defined as a ratio of nutrient content to the total energy content." That source also provides other definitions, while noting that they are less commonly used. But none of those definitions include the two alternative definitions you provide yourself. Nor have I seen those definitions used in journals or respectable discussion groups, like the Calorie Restriction Society mailing list. I think it's unfair to claim that my graph is misleading--and downvote me accordingly--for relying on the most commonly accepted definition of that expression, instead of using definitions which are rarely if ever used by knowledgeable authorities. * Everything else you write might support your argument if price or volume were relevant metrics for assessing the nutritional density of foods. It doesn't support your argument under adequate definitions, and sometimes provides extra support for my own position

5fubarobfusco12y

Most of the milk I see for sale is fortified with vitamins A and D. I would want studies regarding milk's health effects to report on the same sort of milk that I can buy in a store.

0Pablo12y

I think that for the purposes of assessing the claim in question ("Eggs and whole milk are very nutrient dense"), unfortified versions of those foods should be considered. Otherwise, we should also regard cereals and many other foods as "very nutrient dense", simply because manufacturers decide to fortify them in all sorts of ways. (And I note that it's generally not a good idea to obtain your nutrients from supplements when you can obtain them from real food instead.) In any case, even if we used data for fortified milk, it would still be false, in my opinion, that "whole milk is very nutrient dense." Vitamin D levels make a minor contribution to overall nutritional density.

0shokwave12y

I suspect the real issue is using the "nutrients per calorie" meaning of nutrient dense, rather than interpreting it as "nutrients per some measure of food amount that makes intuitive sense to humans, like what serving size is supposed to be but isn't". Ideally we would have some way of, for each person, saying "drink some milk" and seeing how much they drank, and "eat some spinach" and seeing how much they ate, then compare the total amount of nutrients in each amount on a person by person basis. I know this is not the correct meaning of nutrient dense, but I think it's more useful.

0Pablo12y

I think the best we can hope in this context is to have a number of distinct and precise metrics--like nutrients per calorie, nutrients per dollar and nutrients per bulk--, feed these to intuition, and decide accordingly. In other words, when it comes to food, I think we should make decisions according to a "rational" rather than a "quantified" model, given the difficulties of coming up with adequate definitions of a "serving size". Your approach wouldn't work, I believe, because how much people eat of a given food often depends on the presence or absence of other complement and substitute foods.

0Jiro12y

Googling quickly brings up http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/NutritionInsights/insight11.pdf Serving size is defined as follows: 1. Amount of foods from a food group typically reported in surveys as consumed on one eating occasion; 2. Amount of foods that provide a comparable amount of key nutrients from that food group, for example, the amount of cheese that provides the same amount of calcium as 1 cup fluid milk; 3. Amount of foods recognized by most consumers (e.g., household measures) or that can be easily multiplied or divided to describe a quantity of food actually consumed (portion); 4. Amount traditionally used in previous food guides to describe servings. While the amount of food people would eat is not the only factor used, it's a major one.

1A1987dM12y

Why should I care what someone's semi-arbitrary idea of what a serving is is?

1Jiro12y

Because people eat by servings, not by fixed numbers of calories. Comparing by semi-arbitrary servings isn't perfect, but it's better than not comparing by servings at all, and you haven't offered any serving sizes that you believe are better, so semi-arbitrary is the best we have.

4Nornagest12y

Servings are fine for candy bars, but they're almost totally meaningless if we're talking about fungible ingredients like spinach; those are going to be used in all sorts of ways, almost all of them different from whatever the relevant regulatory body had in mind. (Milk and eggs are a bit less so since they're often consumed in quanta of one egg or a glass of milk, but neither one's exactly an uncommon ingredient.) I'm not sure there's a perfect way of comparing nutrient density under these circumstances, but volume is probably what I'd go for; you can only fit so much on a plate, so ingredients generally displace each other on a volume basis. For leafy greens in particular I might use cooked volume, since they usually cook way down.

2A1987dM12y

Who eats 30 grams of spinach and then stops?

0Jiro12y

That doesn't mean that people don't eat by servings, it means that 30 grams isn't a good serving size. Furthermore, since we're comparing different foods, the fact that 30 grams may be too small is compensated for by the fact that the serving size for milk is a cup, which is also too small.

2RomeoStevens12y

Two points that came up in my research: 1. whole milk and eggs are associated with significantly lower mortality for vegetarians, and somewhat lower mortality for the general populace. 2. fruit has twice the effect of vegetables on mortality risk per serving. I am basically highly dubious of the proposition that we are supposed to munch on leaves all the time. Past and extant hunter gatherer groups eat tubers, fruit, and nuts as their plant material. We simply don't see these groups pursuing leafy greens as a significant calorie source.

2Lumifer12y

Huh? I rather suspect fruit here is working a proxy for something else (maybe wealth). Nutritionally, the major difference between fruits and vegetables is that fruits have MUCH more sugar. In particular, fructose which doesn't have a sterling reputation, to put it mildly.

5RomeoStevens12y

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/136/10/2588.short http://www.neurology.org/content/65/8/1193.short Yup. Surprised me a bit too when I first saw it. Fructose effects are not linear. The liver has some ability to process a certain amount of fructose every day, it is going well beyond this limit that is harmful. 5 servings of fruit is probably going to be 30-50g of fructose, which has been proposed as the approximate amount we can process.

0[anonymous]10y

The Perfect Health Diet people largely agree. http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2012/01/is-it-good-to-eat-sugar/ Their recommendation is a max of 25g fructose or 15% of carbohydrates should be fructose.

0Lumifer12y

Yes, I understand there are studies. That doesn't make me trust their conclusion. I don't have time to dig into these papers right now, but I wonder how well they controlled for e.g. socioeconomic status and latitude.

5Nornagest12y

Wealth doesn't look likely to me -- vegetables aren't a lot cheaper than fruit where I live, unless we're talking potatoes and such, and those usually aren't counted as vegetables in these analyses. I would be interested in what fruits and vegetables are respectively displacing in the diet. If a lot of these people are eating fruit for dessert instead of e.g. cake, or for breakfast in place of Pop Tarts, then dramatic longevity effects wouldn't surprise me but also wouldn't be an unqualified endorsement of more fruit for everyone.

3Lumifer12y

Carrots, cabbage, onions, squash -- not cheaper than fruit? But yes, I don't think it's purely a matter of money but may be a matter of culture as well. Yep, a very good point.

3Nornagest12y

I just looked these up on Safeway's online store for my area, and found carrots at about 80 cents a pound, cabbage at a buck a pound, onions at about 56 cents and squash at about a dollar. (You can squeeze a bit more out of some of these if you're buying in 10-pound increments, but I consider that impractical for individuals or small families.) Compare to cheap apples at $1.09 a pound, grapefruit at $0.66, or bananas at about $0.85. Fruit does go a lot higher -- if you're buying berries or tropical fruit, you can easily be spending five or six bucks a pound. But if you're mainly looking for frugality, you have plenty of options in each category. I expect this to be skewed a bit by season, too -- there aren't many cold-season fruits.

0Pablo11y

Do we have data on the eating habits of hunter gatherers to draw such detailed conclusions about the nutritional composition of their diets? Personally, I think we should rely primarily on prospective epidemiological studies about the health effects of various types of foods on different cohorts, rather than on speculative historical studies about our Pleistocene ancestors. I don't think anyone is claiming that people should regard "leafy greens as a significant calorie source". Rather, the claim is that people should eat lots of vegetables (not just leafy greens, by the way), where "lots" is something like the NHS "five [portions] per day" recommendation--which only 10% of young Britons comply with. That's maybe 500 grams of vegetables per day. Even if you eat that many veggies, the calories derived from vegetables would only constitute 5-10% of your total daily calories.

0Lumifer11y

The shape of the human teeth and the specifics of the human digestive tract are pretty good indicators of what we evolved to eat. It is rather obvious that humans did not evolve eating only plants.

2Pablo11y

Sure, but that is not what is being discussed here. I asked for historical evidence bearing on the question of whether we should eat lots of vegetables, which RomeoStevens seems to dispute on the basis of evolutionary considerations. The evidence you supplied is only relevant for challenging the claim that we should eat only vegetables--an entirely different claim, considering that vegetables would represent only 5-10% of total calories in a vegetable-rich diet.

0Lumifer11y

What is a "vegetable" pre-agriculture and pre-gardening? Vegans certainly put out claims that we should eat only plants.

0Pablo11y

I have been a vegetarian for 14 years (and a vegan, intermittently, for a total of 3-4 years), and during all this time, which involved reading countless books and papers on human nutrition, and meeting vegetarians and vegans at talks and conferences in various countries, I haven't ever encountered the claim the we should only eat vegetables. It's possible that you are right and vegans do make such claims, but I would need a few references to accept a statement that contradicts my experience to such a degree.

0Lumifer11y

I am consistently using the word "plants" and you are consistently talking about "vegetables". As I mentioned, I am not sure what counts as a vegetable in the pre-gardening world. Some tubers, probably, anything else?

0Vaniver11y

According to Linnaeus...

0Pablo11y

In the context of nutrition, the terms 'vegetable' and 'plant' are used interchangeably. As the Wikipedia article on 'vegetable' reads: "In culinary terms, a vegetable is an edible plant or its part, intended for cooking or eating raw." It seems that this exchange has served no useful purpose. I suggested that we should eat lots of vegetables, and everything that was said in reply to that claim was either irrelevant or relevant but not supported by evidence.

-2Lumifer11y

Nonsense. Vegetables are parts of plants, just as, for example, fruits, berries, nuts, and seeds (including grains) are. You are not calling walnuts vegetables, are you?

0Jonathan_Graehl12y

Fair point, but how long does it take to eat+digest (cooked or uncooked) 100 calories of spinach compared to 100 calories of whole milk? How much does it cost? Etc. I agree that you shouldn't count the vitamin-fortification of milk as part of the value unless it turns out that milk is an especially good transport for what's added to it.

0Pablo12y

Yes, I agree those are relevant considerations. I'd just keep them separate from the issue of nutrient density.

[-]Shmi12y20

I wonder if farmed salmon, presumably full of colors and antibiotics, has the same beneficial effect as wild.

[-]ephion12y110

A quick google search indicates that salmon farming has become much better in recent years, and might surpass wild salmon soon. Most of the information on fatty acid profiles that I can find is from 2008, before these advances. The chart on this page indicates that farmed salmon has much more fat with a smaller proportion of omega-3. The total n-3 is close (1.8g farmed vs 1.7g wild), but if most of the extra fat is n-6, then you're not doing much for fixing the 3:6 ratio.

[-]framsey12y20

What do you think of the health effects of too much sitting? That seems to be a hot topic recently. http://www.mayoclinic.org/sitting/expert-answers/faq-20058005

5RomeoStevens12y

Breaking up long sitting periods with stretching and walking around is a safe bet, but the studies are actually less clear than the editorials on them would lead you to believe.

0[anonymous]10y

I'd love links to some of the studies!

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke12y20

I missed a section on sugar (even if it just says that this is not covered or e.g. link to http://lesswrong.com/lw/je5/critiquing_gary_taubes_part_3_did_the_us/ )

ADDED: And a sentance about caffeine.

0RomeoStevens12y

While average sugar consumption is certainly too high, a lot of nutrition concerns seem to be overblown for how large their actual effect size is. Of course, hopefully increased fruit consumption is having a substitution effect on other sugars in the diet.

2waveman12y

Downvoted so I should say why. 1. Citation required. 2. When I saw Professor Lustig's talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM) and followed up the literature I personally cut my sugar intake from average (almost all from fruit by the way) to low. Consistent with his claims, my cholesterol (particularly LDL), triglycerides, and inflammatory markers fell dramatically, to the point that my doctor told me this is good but we don't want cholesterol any lower. The authorities recommend limiting sugar intake. One issue is that modern processed foods are full of sugars, in part to make "low fat" foods tolerably palatable, so you are probably getting more than you think. Even some canned sardines I bought the other day has added sugar. Also be aware of the various euphemisms for sugar (HFCS, fructose, sucrose, etc). inb4 I have no citation.

4Lumifer12y

It is pretty clear there is WIDE individual variation in response to low carbs. Low-carb and paleo forums are full of people who eat none or very little sugar and their lipid panels horrify mainstream doctors. See e.g. this or this.

4RomeoStevens12y

My physical and mental performance improved when I went from VLC to a more moderate 150ish grams a day. My HDL, Triglyceride, and c-reactive protein numbers are great, and my total cholesterol is 220, which is right in the middle of the lowest risk group. We see pretty much every hunter gatherer group using tubers extensively, along with some fruit, as a carb base.

2Lumifer12y

As far as I know going VLC will (typically) push both your LDL and HDL numbers up and will drastically lower your trigs. CRP is an inflammation measure, not part of the lipid panel. You mean "We see pretty much every tropical hunter gatherer group". The Inuit/Eskimos obviously don't.

0RomeoStevens12y

The Inuit are a fairly large outlier in dietary makeup.

2Richard_Kennaway11y

Then it is all the more important to see how well or badly they do on their diet.

0waveman11y

My experience also. I formed the view, based on how I felt, that if I stayed on very low carb for much longer I would die, and a little bit of clean starch really made all the difference.

0waveman11y

Indeed. Healthy nutrition is not a matter of making a single choice, and individuals vary greatly in their responses to foods and drugs. (As one example: Green tea puts my blood pressure -up-, quite a lot, up to 12 hours later). Lustig is making two main points I think: 1. Carbs aint carbs. Fructose in its various forms is more like a saturated fat metabolically than a carb. 2. The safe dose of fructose is pretty low for most people. I haven't heard him advocate VLC. The most important point is that carbs aint carbs.

0Lumifer11y

True, but then fats ain't fats as well -- different fatty acids have rather different effect on humans. Which is also true of different amino acids...

1RomeoStevens12y

Very low LDL is predictive of greater mortality, not less.

0waveman11y

I was not clear; the inflammatory markers were super-low but LDL wasn't. Just low enough. I had had exteremely low LDL in the past and I did not want to feel that way again eg tendency to depression, low tesosterone etc.

0waveman11y

To be clear I did not go very low carb. I continued to eat ~2 apples a day or equivalent, and several small potatoes or equivalent.

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke12y20

Very good post.

How I plan to act on it:

reduce processed meat further (but not unprocessed meat)
consider adding some restance training to my exercise (once I figure out which fits best and needs no weights etc.; probably http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyweight_exercise )
check my blood measures with you info in mind
consider yearly blood donation
More exposure to sun

I already ordered an e-cig to give to an acquaintance.

4[anonymous]12y

OP said that you shouldn't publicly commit to your plan because it makes you less likely to do it. Can I ask why you decided to do so anyway?

2Gunnar_Zarncke12y

Why do you think so? From procrastication and other advice I took it that publicly committing to a plan makes you more likely because or social pressure. What did I get wrong?

[-][anonymous]12y120

Why do you think so?

It's slightly counterintuitive, but studies say that this is what happens. I'll just paste a few paragraphs from the article linked by OP:

Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen.
Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you're less motivated to do the hard work needed.
In 1933, W. Mahler found that if a person announced the solution to a problem, and was acknowledged by others, it was now in the brain as a “social reality”, even if the solution hadn't actually been achieved.
NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer has been studying this since his 1982 book “Symbolic Self-Completion” (pdf article here) - and recently published results of new tests in a research article, “When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?”
Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others.
Once you've told people of your intentions, it gives you a “premature sense of completeness.”
You have “identity symbols” in your b

... (read more)

0A1987dM12y

TED talk: Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself

0TylerJay12y

I'm confused here too... Commitment and Consistency pressure are well-researched and documented phenomena...

0[anonymous]12y

Derek Sivers has argued that "announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you're less motivated to do the hard work needed". The page includes links to studies, but I haven't read them yet

3Gunnar_Zarncke11y

Update * I reduced processed meat * I did donate blood today and created a yearly schedule. * I forgot about sun exposure :-(

3ephion12y

Why avoid weights? They're the most efficient and effective way to do strength training. Bodyweight exercises are OK but they fairly quickly top out on any benefits, unless you get rings and other gymnastic equipment. You can get a barbell and 300lbs of weights for under $300 used, with which you can do deadlifts, overhead press, and barbell rows. That's a complete, full body routine of scalable difficulty which will last you for quite some time and requires no other equipment.

5Gunnar_Zarncke12y

Because they take space, are no fun, cannot be combined with useful activity and often encourage too simple movement patterns. The only weights I'd consider are those to be worn on arms and thighs and can be continuously worn and are combined with all movements.

[-]ephion12y160

You appear to possess some misconceptions about weight training.

they take space,

A stack of plates with the barbell stored vertically takes 0.2m^2 (~2sqft). Here's a picture of a 330lb set for demonstration; wine bottle and keyboard for scale. I have a lot more equipment than just the barbell, but that's because I do powerlifting and it's a hobby.

are no fun

This is a matter of perspective and preference. I find weight lifting to be extremely fun, especially the sport of powerlifting. Furthermore, it has no bearing on the fact that weight training is the most effective and efficient means of getting stronger.

cannot be combined with useful activity and often encourage too simple movement patterns.

The deadlift, overhead press, and row are three of the most fundamental movements a person can do. In sports science terms, these are highly general movements, which means that increasing strength in these movements will have positive carry over to every other physical pursuit that uses similar movements. Runners use the deadlift to improve their running speed, for example, and throwers use the overhead press to improve their throwing distance. Your assertion that they can't be ... (read more)

5waveman12y

I would agree with this. I have found weightlifting ("Starting Strength" program is a good place to start) tremendously beneficial in real life applications. Eg helping my brother dig trenches at his house, lifting things into the car, my back problems have gone away, I am a lot more flexible and agile etc. Also my blood pressure is a lot better (117/77 this morning). Key points: 1. Full body compound exercises. Not "curlbro" isolation exercises. 2. Weights not machines (I tried machines and found that specific muscles got big but I did not gain real world strength). 3. Progressive increase in load. 4. Sufficient rest days. For health purposes 1-2 workouts a week is quite sufficient. It will not get you "toned for summer" in minimum time but you will get good benefits. 5. Good form - do the lifts properly. And allied to this, do not rush. Newbie gains are good for 6-8 months and then you will slow down no matter what you do. If you take your time you will avoid injury. Lifting weights is one of the safest forms of exercise statistically. 6. Sufficient nutrition - a nutrient rich diet with sufficient protein and other nutrients. Unfortunately most personal trainers have minimal training and often give bad advice. You need to do some research.

2Lumifer12y

Storage isn't the real problem. You need, for example, a floor which will survive 300+ lbs of steel dropped onto it from more than six feet. Lifting weights without a spotter or a rack is risky, especially for beginners. Weightlifters keep on saying that, but I see no sense in this. Why in the world, say, an overhead press is a "fundamental movement"? If asked about highly general fundamental movements, I'd probably say run, climb, swim.

1ephion12y

Unless you're doing olympic weightlifting (at which point you'd be using rubber bumper plates), you'll need to drop weights from hip height at most. Any weight you can overhead press, you can safely lower slowly to the ground. A 300lb deadlift will have two 150lb contacts with the floor -- if your floor isn't built to withstand 150lbs of force (an average person jumping), then it's not fit to live on. For the bench press or squat, yes. For the deadlift, overhead press, and row, no. In the deadlift and row, the weight is never over you, and in the event of failure, dropping it is simple and easy. For the overhead press, a failed weight is still light compared to a person's ability to control it to the ground. Furthermore, you should almost never be training to the point of failure if your goal is strength. In an overhead press, you 1) use your shoulders and triceps to move the weight up, 2) use your abs and back to stabilize your torso, 3) use your legs to balance yourself and stay in line, 4) brace your entire body to transmit force from the floor to your hands. Increasing the weight used increases the demand placed upon the entire body to develop strength. How can that not be a fundamental movement? And how could improving these four points not have carry over to other tasks and movements? These are actually fairly specific movement patterns, even though they're rather common. If you only trained running, you would not improve your squat much -- but if you trained squatting, you'd improve your running, jumping, kicking, and any other motion that involves leg or hip extension. If you train climbing, you won't help your swimming much -- but if you train rows or chinups, you'll improve both. Someone runs across a field -- using leg and hip extension trained in the deadlift and maintaining good posture also developed by the deadlift. They swim across a river -- using pulling muscles developed by the row and pushing muscles developed by the overhead press. They cli

2Lumifer12y

In theory. In practice (especially with beginners) you lose your balance or you get a sudden pain or something else happens -- and you would just throw the barbell on the floor. Force isn't measured in pounds. What matters is momentum and contact surface. Drop your 300 lbs barbell even from hip height onto a wooden floor and it will leave dents. Maybe we have a different idea of what "fundamental" means :-) I am not arguing that weightlifting doesn't develop muscles or that muscle strength isn't useful. I just don't see why, say, climbing a tree is less "fundamental" than taking, essentially, a very heavy stick and raising it over your head.

0A1987dM12y

What about the bench?

2ephion12y

You don't need a bench. Overhead pressing (and push pressing for intermediate trainees) is sufficient to develop pushing power, and is a better movement for balanced shoulder strength and posture. If you really want to develop the chest muscles, then you can do floor press for most of the same benefits without purchasing a bench.

4brazil8412y

For what it may be worth, I avoid weights because I want something I can do every day, any time, anywhere. Because I know that if I miss one day, there's a good chance I will fizzle out. So I do pushups, crunches, and pullups. I have a pullup bar at work which fits into the door frame and the same thing at home. But sometimes I do pullups on the subway or on one of the many scaffoldings in NYC. Using weights might very well be superior in some respects but for me the main thing is consistency.

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke12y20

The section "How to actually form new habits" is small and doesn't fit in well. I recommend removing it or making it into a separate post or add it as a comment. There are some posts on this topic already that might be referenced roughly falling into the How To Actually Change Your Mind category.

[-]Velizar4y10

The linked study for processed meat is a dead link, but it's on archive.org or alternatively this is a working link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20479151/

There is a problem with it, though. This is from the abstract:
> Conversely, processed meat intake was associated with 42% higher risk of CHD (n=5; relative risk per 50-g serving per day=1.42; 95% confidence interval, 1.07 to 1.89; P=0.04)

P=0.04 is way too high and my subjective probability for it replicating is somewhere below 50%.

[-]qbolec5y10

Why do you think exercise improves health? Is it just an educated guess (if so, then what is the reasoning behind it), or is there actually some study establishing causality? I found https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/52/14/890 which says:
> As presented by Kujala, RCTs, the gold standard in epidemiology for inferring causality, have failed to provide conclusive evidence in this context (eg, Lifestyle Interventions and Independence for Elders,⁸ Look Action for Health in Diabetes,⁹ Heart Failure: A Controlled Trial Investigating Outcomes of Exercise Traini... (read more)

[-]John_Maxwell11y10

This paper and this one (I haven't read either) make me wonder if living in a consistently warm climate is beneficial, especially as one grows older.

0Vaniver11y

From paper 1: It looks like it's relatively easy to control the amount you're temperature-shocked, and they talk some about cold adaptation but I didn't see it quantitatively linked to the other parts of the paper. In general, cold is more dangerous than heat, and while hot climates have historically had worse diseases and bugs than cold climates, it's not obvious to me that's still the case. There probably is something to retiring to Florida.

[-]ancientcampus12y10

Very nice article! Regarding the benefits of alcohol: for those curious, it is well established at this point that alcohol is actually protective against arterial plaque; it just has all sorts of other problems. This is just for kicks mostly, but I read a publication that said that for people who have ALL the following criteria:

Male (No women because alcohol increases risk of breast cancer)

45 years Does not smoke No family history of addiction or substance abuse No personal history of addiction or substance abuse "Occasional drinker" (has a cou

... (read more)

3John_Maxwell11y

It looks like there is a new meta-analysis that concludes that alcohol is bad for your heart (original paper). (I haven't read it.)

[-]brazil8412y10

As it turns out, there are actually two types of LDL,

Of course there are. For pretty much every X which is associated with human health, closer investigation will reveal that there are two types of X -- "Good X" and "Bad X."

0soreff11y

for potassium, would potassium-40 be considered the bad kind? :)

0RomeoStevens12y

Sure "healthy" and "unhealthy" as a demarcation gives the reader no info, but I already felt like I was delving into details a bit too much. I didn't want to turn it into a paper on the wonderful world of blood lipids.

0brazil8412y

Yes, I wasn't criticizing your essay so much as making a general observation.

[-]Oscar_Cunningham12y10

Could you use the standard font and fontsize please?

1John_Maxwell12y

I standardized a bunch of the formatting. Will try to do more visual polish in the next few days.

[-]CAE_Jones12y10

I am considering writing a program that will launch this page in my web browser every few hours.

(While most of these interventions are things with a surprisingly high cost in terms of stress, the one I like the least but am least stressed about is the recommendation to eat more fish. I am not a fan (nor much of an enemy) of fish. I will gladly save any recommended recipes that manage to include fish and all its benefits without making it overly obvious that I'm eating fish. I could always try and self-modify so that I no longer treat fish as pretty far down the preferred meat hierarchy, but using it in something more desirable in general sounds way more fun. Bonus points if it's something well balanced.)

5ephion12y

Have you had a seared tuna steak? Cooked properly, it's one of the tastiest things I've ever eaten.

2Alejandro112y

Here is a very simple recipe for fish that doesn't feel like fish. I made it yesterday :). In addition to being simple, it is easily tweak able/optimizable for your tastes and dietary needs. All quantities are rough approximations: Throw in a pot 1 onion (chopped), 4 celery sticks (chopped), 1 potato (diced), 2 cod fillets, and 2-3 cups of watered tomato sauce. (The one I use is a super-simple homemade one: 2 tablespoons tomato paste, 2 tablespoons olive oil, 2 cups water, 1 tablespoon sugar, and salt and pepper to the taste). Bring to the boil and simmer until cooked. (I do it in a pressure cooker, where it takes 20-25 minutes. In a normal pot it would take longer and you probably need to use more water). And there you have it. The defining taste is the celery in tomato sauce; the fish (which breaks down) and the potato are just white chunks in it giving the feelings of protein and starch without changing the taste. Makes 3-4 servings.

1RomeoStevens12y

You can get sashimi delivered to your house frozen for around $25 a pound.

3atorm12y

That seems really expensive.

0roystgnr12y

If you refer to "fish" rather than a particular species (or at least to "red fish" vs "white fish"?) then I have to wonder which varieties you've tried. There are significant enough differences between tuna, cod, salmon, and tilapia, for instance, that I would not be surprised to find a person whose liked/disliked any combination of the four.

2A1987dM12y

Do all kinds of fish have the same health effects, BTW? What about molluscs and crustaceans?

8juliawise12y

Chart

0Alicorn12y

I like to drown my slab-in-the-oven type fish in hollandaise sauce, or garlic, or both. Ceviche is surprisingly easy and can be full of non-fish flavors, especially if you use a mild (sushi-grade) fish and plenty of avocado and onion and put it on nice crackers.

0NancyLebovitz12y

What do you want concealed about fish? Would small bits of fish cooked in a strong-flavored sauce be enough to make the experience less fishy?

[-][anonymous]11y00

I praise your for the effort.

But I have one problem: how do I explain it to others? People might ask me one day "why are you doing/concerned with that?" and what my reply be? "Some guy on Lesswrong told me, but don't worry it's a rational site!"

That's silly. Instead of spreading one-dimensional awareness, you should instead spread academically correct information and let it do it's course. That way, if someone ever asks me why, I can give them a link, or at least the bottom line. Depending on how curious they are they might even read it... (read more)

3RomeoStevens11y

I would refer to the original research rather than my efforts to collect and synthesize it. I linked some of the best research I could find for each point, but it is by no means exhaustive.

[-][anonymous]12y00

Are you planning to do a post on nutrition later?

Are waterpiks as good as flossing?

0RomeoStevens12y

I'll discuss some more nutrition stuff in the exercise post. But nutrition is a giant can of worms I don't want to get too deep into. I've heard conflicting things about waterpiks. Here is a small study indicating that it is effective. I do need to expand the oral hygiene section to discuss both waterpiks, oil rinsing, and alcohol mouthwashes.

0iarwain112y

My dentist told me that waterpicks are not effective, but I don't know what he based that on. If the data proves otherwise I'd love it, since I find regular flossing to be really annoying.

[-]CronoDAS12y00

I really don't like flossing. Can I substitute antiseptic mouthwash instead?

1arundelo12y

I used to hate flossing too: 1. Bleeding gums 2. Pain in my fingers from wrapping floss around them 3. Pain in my lips and cheeks from stretching my mouth open to reach back teeth The bleeding gums go away after flossing regularly for a while. After trying several other flossing tools, I found one that solves the other two problems: the Reach Access Flosser. Its sole downside is that you have to periodically replenish your supply of disposable heads, but this is not very expensive, and the reward is healthier teeth. I started using this maybe something like five years ago, and it turned me into a flosser after decades of being a non-flosser, so I'm an evangelist for it now.

0CronoDAS12y

I mostly have problems with #1.

0EHeller12y

I lost some manual dexterity in one of my hands, and my dentist recommended a water flosser. I think waterpik is the brand, seems to work well.

0RomeoStevens12y

You can sort of substitute oil rinsing, but I'm not positive they have exactly the same disease prevention effects. It's certainly better than nothing.

0CronoDAS12y

Listerine and similar antiseptic mouthwashes are supposed to be effective against gingivitis and tooth decay, which is why I asked.

0iarwain112y

Listerine doesn't work vs gingivitis for me.

0RomeoStevens12y

While I don't think the evidence is as strong as the language in this article would imply, I do err on the side of the alcohol being bad. http://www.naturalnews.com/025581_mouthwash_cancer_alcohol.html#

0CronoDAS12y

I guess I might as well use an alcohol-free mouthwash, then. (I've heard that "Natural News" has a tendency to publish crankish alternative medicine stories, so I went to Google; there is some evidence indicating a link, but it's pretty weak and might not actually mean much of anything.)

[-][anonymous]12y00

It seems to be that many earlier studies claiming harm from red meat did not adequately separate out the huge effect size of processed meat.

And here I've been thinking getting the chicken sandwich at Subway or eating smoked turkey sandwich meat was healthy. [Edit: Because of this post, I will not be doing that anymore.]

But I am not really convinced that eating red meat can be healthy. It seems safer to keep it as an "occasional indulgence." Edit: That first link was not clear. Here's another.

[-]Jonathan_Graehl12y00

I don't know anything about testicular cancer, but are self-exams useful for breast cancer? I know that the data argues against mammogram-everyone-annually + the ensuing unnecessary surgeries caused by not-harmful tumors or other false positives - no increase at all in life expectancy and presumably there's a significant psychological (and $) cost.

0RomeoStevens12y

I'm not sure. I didn't research this very extensively. If you've already done the legwork it sounds like great material for a post, since it involves making correct tradeoffs based on probabilities.

[-]Vaniver12y130

Breast self exam is not recommended by the Susan G. Komen foundation, neither recommended nor discouraged by the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the National Cancer Institute reports no benefit but an increase in biopsies of benign tumors.

Testicular self-exams have not been studied enough for recommendations to be made, according to the American Cancer Society.

0G0W5111y

I think you may have misread the article. According your link, the American Cancer Society states that, "Men with risk factors, such as an undescended testicle, previous testicular cancer, or a family member who has had this cancer should seriously think about monthly self-exams. If you have risk factors, talk it over with a doctor. Each man has to decide for himself whether to examine his testicles each month." It also said it, "does not have a recommendation about regular testicular self-exams for all men." Perhaps you missed the "all."

0Vaniver11y

The all is implicit from the context of the OP, which was lifestyle interventions to increase longevity for the general population.

2G0W5111y

I don't see why discussing the general population causes "all" to mean "the general population." That said, I understand what you mean, so arguing further seems rather petty.

0ChristianKl11y

The American Cancer Society is made up of members that profit from an increased amount of cancer treatment. The fact that they write something that points people to taking up testicular self-exams doesn't mean that they are having evidence for that. They protested when the US government reduced breast cancer screening that produced unnecessary operations. When medicial society writes something like that it means they don't have evidence for whether it's a useful practice. If there would be evidence that a particular subgroup would benefit than the article would point it out that the evidence exist.

[-][anonymous]12y00

A word of warning about eating fish: lots of kinds of fish are contaminated by mercury. My psychiatrist ate sushi regularly and he ended up with mercury poisoning. :(

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[-]Error12y00

Melatonin pills work for many, but make sure you start with 75mcg (cut these into fourths), rather than the 3mg most pills come in.

Why is it important to use the lower dose? (I started using 3mg pills after reading recommendations here, and they work excellently)

Don’t publicly commit to your plan in the comments, this makes you less likely to do it

This one surprised me. It's the exact opposite of advice I've seen elsewhere here on social precommitments.

9mare-of-night12y

I remember seeing another LW member comment that over-the-counter drugs tend to get sold in too-high dosages because people who don't know how to dose (most customers) assume the strongest is best, and the stores stock the versions that are selling best, leading to doses that are too high for the typical user being the most commonly sold ones. I don't remember where the original comment was, unfortunately.

2Error12y

That makes sense but doesn't actually answer my question. The phrasing implied (to me) that either the smaller dose works better or that the larger has more side effects, without specifying which. I've tried 1mg pills and they didn't seem to work as well, but I'm not sure if that was placebo talking or not.

4RomeoStevens12y

For many smaller doses do work better than larger doses, though I don't have the cite handy. Better to start too small and work up than the other way around IMO. When I took large doses I had negative side effects.

2fubarobfusco12y

This is a press release, but might be a pointer in the direction of the study.

2witzvo11y

this is the insomnia study for that press release

0Douglas_Knight12y

Does the word "cite" mean that you have seen a controlled study claiming that smaller doses are more effective than large doses, and not just anecdotes?

0RomeoStevens12y

Yes. or at the very least there were issues with side effects and tolerance building.

0mare-of-night12y

This makes sense. I don't know the answer, though.

[-]RolfAndreassen12y00

the highest plurality

Excellent post, so naturally I nitpick the language... anyway, 'plurality' means "largest fraction but not a majority". So "highest plurality" is redundant.

On the subject of exercise: What intensity are we talking about for the endurance? Is it sufficient to bicycle, or do you need to work up a lot of sweat?

3RomeoStevens12y

I have a whole post on optimizing exercise parameters, it will probably go up friday.

[+]advil9y*-70

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

267

Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity

267

267

A quick FAQ before we get started

Why should I care about longevity-promoting habits at a young age?

Isn’t longevity mostly just genetics?

What sort of benefits can I expect?

How were these recommendations generated?/Why should I believe you?

Things that will eventually kill you

CVD

Smoking

Alcohol

Blood Pressure

Blood lipids (cholesterol)

BMI/Obesity

Nutrition

Blood donation

Exercise

Stress

Sleep

Cancer

Floss

Things that will kill you right now

Avoidable medical errors

Unintentional poisoning

Traffic accidents

Summary of interventions

Closing