DIY Longevity Project
Daniel Sander Hoffmann
Thanks for raising the topic, Doug.
What about a formal (read: written down on good old fashioned paper) n-hands project, with detailed methodology and the like – and with n hopefully big?
By the way, how many of us are going to answer Jata’s call of duty?
Cheers,
Daniel
Is anyone here doing or wanting to do a longevity related DIYbio project? If so, and if you need a small amount of funding, email me. I may (emphasis on MAY) know of a source for a small amount of funding for related projects. No promises. Details after you email me.
- Doug
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Doug Treadwell
- Doug
erigen
folks and found we initially had difficulty planning out a project.
While we did manage to come up with a lot of ideas, few of us knew how
to execute, so plans were at a standstill. I feel that many of us
want to do something important, but without the research background,
it's difficult to know in which direction to go and how to get
started.
I really like the idea of focusing on things that really matter (ie
saving our lives) and creating a plan that can be implemented by a
group of self-taught scientists. That's extremely empowering.
Judging from the excellent execution I have witnessed in the same
DIYbio crew once we planned out our projects, I have no hesitation
that with the right planning, we can make serious waves in the biotech
industry and in therapies that change our lives.
Count me in on the longevity research work. I'd love to talk to any of
you about it.
On Dec 26, 8:46 pm, Doug Treadwell <therealepicureanid...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> I'm all for doing something formal that can be published. Obviously I'm
> among those interested in longevity research, and from what I've seen on
> this list so far I think there's, if not a majority, a significant number of
> us who are. I'm uncertain what sort of project can be done at the small
> scale, so I'm very interested in hearing suggestions from people more
> experienced in small scale/distributed research.
>
> - Doug
>
> On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 4:16 PM, Daniel Sander Hoffmann <
>
> transplex...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks for raising the topic, Doug.
>
> > What about a *formal* (read: *written down on good old fashioned paper*) *
> > n*-hands project, with detailed methodology and the like – and with *n*hopefully big?
>
> > By the way, how many of us are going to answer Jata’s call of duty?
>
> > Cheers,
>
> > Daniel
>
> > On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 6:33 AM, Doug Treadwell <
> > therealepicureanid...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Is anyone here doing or wanting to do a longevity related DIYbio project?
> >> If so, and if you need a small amount of funding, email me. I may (emphasis
> >> on MAY) know of a source for a small amount of funding for related
> >> projects. No promises. Details after you email me.
>
> >> - Doug
>
> >> --
> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
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> >> To post to this group, send email to diy...@googlegroups.com.
> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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> >> .
> >> For more options, visit this group at
> >>http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.
>
> > --
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wulfdesign
I have a lot of general tech knowledge and am fairly good at thinking
outside the box.
Skills that I can lend to the project are 3d design and printing of
test equipment prototypes.
I have a Makerbot, 24hr access to a local Hackerspace, and membership
in metal foundry co-op (casting bronze, AL, Brass).
this works specifically well if you are in the Seattle area (though
not entirely necessary).
Larry James
Wulf Design
http://wulfdesign.blogspot.com
http://www.thingiverse.com/wulfdesign
On Dec 26, 8:46 pm, Doug Treadwell <therealepicureanid...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> I'm all for doing something formal that can be published. Obviously I'm
> among those interested in longevity research, and from what I've seen on
> this list so far I think there's, if not a majority, a significant number of
> us who are. I'm uncertain what sort of project can be done at the small
> scale, so I'm very interested in hearing suggestions from people more
> experienced in small scale/distributed research.
>
> - Doug
>
> On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 4:16 PM, Daniel Sander Hoffmann <
>
> transplex...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks for raising the topic, Doug.
>
> > What about a *formal* (read: *written down on good old fashioned paper*) *
> > n*-hands project, with detailed methodology and the like – and with *n*hopefully big?
>
> > By the way, how many of us are going to answer Jata’s call of duty?
>
> > Cheers,
>
> > Daniel
>
> > On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 6:33 AM, Doug Treadwell <
> > therealepicureanid...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Is anyone here doing or wanting to do a longevity related DIYbio project?
> >> If so, and if you need a small amount of funding, email me. I may (emphasis
> >> on MAY) know of a source for a small amount of funding for related
> >> projects. No promises. Details after you email me.
>
> >> - Doug
>
> >> --
> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> >> "DIYbio" group.
> >> To post to this group, send email to diy...@googlegroups.com.
> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> >> diybio+un...@googlegroups.com<diybio%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
> >> .
> >> For more options, visit this group at
> >>http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.
>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "DIYbio" group.
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Ich bin Singularitarian
Very cool if we are able to make it work.
As a beginning, I think we must have a central place where we can
exchange ideas and new-comers can get a jump-start (Sharing of ideas
is critical in our age).
Google groups doesn't seem like a place where this can be done
effectively.
Personally, I have been thinking of a lot of ideas on starting a new
wiki-project on the same lines.
Wiki sites have the advantage of building up useful information from a
lot of contributors (wont praise too much, you all know how wikipedia
works and just how awesome it is).
So my idea is:-
1) Let us begin by having bio-pedia project.
We all will contribute to it and it will also be available to
contributors from outside.
2) Let us have 2 parallel wikis:-
preventi-pedia (where we will begin by having simple daily routine
exercises, body-care habits which promote youth and fight ageing) and
immortality-pedia (latest findings from ourselves and others about
immortality)
3) Combined contribution to the 3 wikis can generate a hell lot of
information and interest for all of us to get started.
And mind you, if the content is good, expect everybody from around the
world to contribute, thus sky-rocketing our research ideas.
Long live (like till eternity :) ) all of us!
Ich bin Singularitarian
If anyone of you has ever been sad for "being or getting older" and
rummaged through internet, you know the benefits of "keeping" what you
got rather than "renewing" it.
Also, I am sure that despite frantic searching, no one can really
gather all tips/tricks all by himself.
If the 3 wikis sound good to you, let me know and I can try to set up
the same for the group (no rights on the content! its real open source
and 100% wikipedia types).
Cat Ferguson
-cat
>--
>
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Daniel Sander Hoffmann
Sully arriving at Pandora. It is truly a whole new world, full of
possibilities!
Just to put it in context, my first computer (if I put aside the
slide rule my father gave me :) was a brand new “TK82C”, a ZX81
clone running at 3.25 MHz with 2 KB of RAM and a “semigraphical”
display of 64x44!! The clone lacked Ferranti’s ULA (Uncommitted Logic
Array, or Gate Array) chip. In its place it had a dozen TTL
(Transistor-Transistor Logic) integrated circuits, resulting in far
greater power consumption (believe me: I used to fry eggs on it for
lunch!!! :-)
That was a long time ago, long before most of you guys were
naturally designed. Now things are quite different. Now we have
amazing 3D printers and the like, and we can already dream of
nanofactories!
On the other hand, as all of you know, we live in a moment in
mankind’s history when we supposedly have the knowledge and the
technological means to change the default option from “natural death”
to “immortality” (and oh, please feel free to age and die painfully if
you follow some ethical or religious principle :-).
Alright, so what do you want from us, Daniel?
Well, the first solid fact is that I promised mom that I will be on
Mars in 2070, just in time to commemorate my 100th birthday. Will you
join me?
Yeah, I’m not the happy-short-life kind of guy. And with some luck
and help from the friends (and if I don’t get very sick, and if I
don’t get struck by a stray bullet, and if… well, you get the point) I
also plan to be swimming and catching alien fish in GJ1214b, the newly
discovered super-Earth “ocean” exoplanet (it is made up of 75% water
and only 25% rock). Nevertheless, given that it is about 40 light-
years away, I think I need some patience (one of the Seven Heavenly
Virtues :-).
The second solid fact is that I don’t trust the health system alone
to give me that.
Will you help me?
Daniel
Eugen Leitl
> The second solid fact is that I don’t trust the health system alone
> to give me that.
>
> Will you help me?
I'm afraid your best chances are with human cryopreservation.
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Ich bin Singularitarian
can kick start the wiki project.
I hope to make it the best live-healthy-life project with best brain-
storming on mars-party-of-2070, not the chicks and the booze but
surviving till then ;) and then enjoying the party on Alpha Centuri in
the year 200,009 and beyond.
dale
I've been watching antiaging since my dear old grandmother died 30+
years ago. As a DIYer from birth, it's been a pretty boreing subject
right up until SENS, iGEM, MAKE, PLOS and diybio. Now, there is SO
MUCH going on, my interest level is off the chart! I've had to build a
web site (myself) to help me monitor DIY longevity relevant subjects
at http://www.AntiAgingTech.info (check it out...suggestions
appreciated!).
To me, 7 SENS seem to be a great framework to build on and organize
DIY projects around. They even have a suggested projects list at
http://www.sens.org/index.php?pagename=aiu_research that could be
diybio relevant.
dale
ad...@AntiAgingTech.info
http://www.AntiAgingTech.info
On Dec 26, 10:46 pm, Doug Treadwell <therealepicureanid...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> I'm all for doing something formal that can be published. Obviously I'm
> among those interested in longevity research, and from what I've seen on
> this list so far I think there's, if not a majority, a significant number of
> us who are. I'm uncertain what sort of project can be done at the small
> scale, so I'm very interested in hearing suggestions from people more
> experienced in small scale/distributed research.
>
> - Doug
>
> On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 4:16 PM, Daniel Sander Hoffmann <
>
>
>
> transplex...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks for raising the topic, Doug.
>
> > What about a *formal* (read: *written down on good old fashioned paper*) *
> > n*-hands project, with detailed methodology and the like – and with *n*hopefully big?
>
> > By the way, how many of us are going to answer Jata’s call of duty?
>
> > Cheers,
>
> > Daniel
>
> > On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 6:33 AM, Doug Treadwell <
> > therealepicureanid...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Is anyone here doing or wanting to do a longevity related DIYbio project?
> >> If so, and if you need a small amount of funding, email me. I may (emphasis
> >> on MAY) know of a source for a small amount of funding for related
> >> projects. No promises. Details after you email me.
>
> >> - Doug
>
> >> --
> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> >> "DIYbio" group.
> >> To post to this group, send email to diy...@googlegroups.com.
> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> >> diybio+un...@googlegroups.com<diybio%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
> >> .
> >> For more options, visit this group at
> >>http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.
>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "DIYbio" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to diy...@googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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> > .
> > For more options, visit this group at
> >http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Parijata Mackey
As a beginning, I think we must have a central place where we can exchange ideas and new-comers can get a jump-start (Sharing of ideas is critical in our age). Google groups doesn't seem like a place where this can be done effectively
Parijata Mackey
University of Chicago
pari...@uchicago.edu
www.parijata.com
“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.” --Frank Herbert
“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.” --Oscar Wilde
Parijata Mackey
Thanks Doug for the question of the year!
I've been watching antiaging since my dear old grandmother died 30+
years ago. As a DIYer from birth, it's been a pretty boreing subject
right up until SENS, iGEM, MAKE, PLOS and diybio. Now, there is SO
MUCH going on, my interest level is off the chart! I've had to build a
web site (myself) to help me monitor DIY longevity relevant subjects
at http://www.AntiAgingTech.info (check it out...suggestions
appreciated!).
To me, 7 SENS seem to be a great framework to build on and organize
DIY projects around. They even have a suggested projects list at
http://www.sens.org/index.php?pagename=aiu_research that could be
diybio relevant.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+un...@googlegroups.com.
--
Parijata Mackey
On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 07:54:17AM -0800, Daniel Sander Hoffmann wrote:I'm afraid your best chances are with human cryopreservation.
> The second solid fact is that I don’t trust the health system alone
> to give me that.
>
> Will you help me?
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
--
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Parijata Mackey
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Eugen Leitl
> > I'm afraid your best chances are with human cryopreservation.
> >
>
> So cynical, Eugen! The man is young, he'll reach escape velocity yet...
Wasn't intending to be cynical, this is the best advice I could honestly give.
Not to rain on Aubrey de Grey's parade, but the task is not significantly
closer in 2010 then it was when I thought around 1985 that it wouldn't happen
in my lifetime. Many people have died since, and very few of them
were frozen.
Consider it the conservative approach, or your backup option, or the
first leg of your conversion process. Do your CR, exercise, gobble your
resveratrol, whatever. Just try to be not too disappointed.
Daniel C.
<rohan.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I hope to make it the best live-healthy-life project with best brain-
> storming on mars-party-of-2070, not the chicks and the booze but
> surviving till then ;)
What's the point of surviving that long if there are no chicks or booze?
-Dan
PYROcomp
Daniel Sander Hoffmann
If we keep this thread running, and discuss what we'd need, we could have something this time next week.
this is the most exciting thread I've seen on the DIYbio list in a long time
-- maybe I'm biased ;-)
Jake
There seems to be a lot of great work going on in this field.
However, why not just skip all of this far off stuff and skip straight to the goal with technology that's already almost here? Human cloning is probably possible with today's methods, if one were to make enough attempts. Spinal repair has also been accomplished in rats. The obvious conclusion is that we are on the verge of being able to clone a new body and attach your old head/brain to it.
The obvious problem with this is that it would be unacceptable, and freakishly twisted, to grow a clone of yourself and then kill it. But this could be more palatable if you grew a headless or brainless clone. This too is almost possible. In the disorder of microcephaly some people have almost no brain to speak of, and the primary gene for this is already discovered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcephaly
So the way it could possibly fit legally into our current system is that if you had a clone (assuming that's legal in your area) which had little or no brain/head it would have a poor prognosis and the only real treatment would be a brain/head transplant. Obviously you would be the best candidate to donate that organ to the clone.
This idea is obviously an ethical minefield, but I'm curious to hear what others think about the idea. It seems to me that we mostly consider the brain to be the living person. We can pull the plug on brain-dead people legally and ethically. Even if the brainless clone was considered to be a living person it doesn't seem to be that much of a stretch to say that they need a brain/head transplant to medically achieve a decent quality of life. There doesn't seem to be much of an ethical problem with growing organs in vitro and if you grew a brainless clone I think it would be pretty much like just growing all the organs at once in a convenient package.
Ethical problems aside, I'm also curious how much life extension could be attained with a simple body transplant. You'd end up with mostly new organs except for the brain or head. Even brain diseases might be able to be mostly fixed up with fresh stem cells and you'd have your clone, cord blood, etc. to harvest them from.
-Jake
_____________________________________________________
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Eric Butter
... Mac was the first one to point DIYBIOers to OSDD about a month
back. OSDD has a great project right now trying to re-annotate the
genome, proteome, interactome, etc., for M. tuberculosis. If you guys
want to make an immediate impact while still doing something very DIY,
I would suggest registering with this group. They offer rewards for
helping out, and the results of this work have some very important
public health consequences, doing dirty-work that no universities or
private industries bother with. I hope some of you check it out.
On Dec 27, 10:57 pm, "Jake" <DIYbio.list.gate...@O-Bio.org> wrote:
> There seems to be a lot of great work going on in this field.
>
> However, why not just skip all of this far off stuff and skip straight to the goal with technology that's already almost here? Human cloning is probably possible with today's methods, if one were to make enough attempts. Spinal repair has also been accomplished in rats. The obvious conclusion is that we are on the verge of being able to clone a new body and attach your old head/brain to it.
>
> The obvious problem with this is that it would be unacceptable, and freakishly twisted, to grow a clone of yourself and then kill it. But this could be more palatable if you grew a headless or brainless clone. This too is almost possible. In the disorder of microcephaly some people have almost no brain to speak of, and the primary gene for this is already discovered.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcephaly
Eugen Leitl
> The obvious conclusion is that we are on the verge of being able
> to clone a new body and attach your old head/brain to it.
Head, yes (has been done in 1930s). Brain, no (try even removing an
unfixated brain from the skull sometime). And you way overestimate
what surgery can do (go talk to a neurosurgeon to disabuse you from
your misconceptions). You also assume that your brain would for some strange
reason remain ageless.
What's wrong with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_transfer ?
Alec Nielsen
> What's wrong with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_transfer ?
For me, the major issue is creating a copy of your mind instead of
persisting with the one you've got. From the aforementioned article:
"The most parsimonious view of this phenomenon is that the two (or
more) individuals would share a past identity and memories but from
the point of duplication would simply be distinct individuals."
I'll take uploading as a backup, but retaining the atoms *and* the
bits of my mind is important to me. Viva DIY longevity!
Alec
Doug Treadwell
Eugen Leitl
> For me, the major issue is creating a copy of your mind instead of
There's no copy with a destructive (iterated ablation) scan.
See http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3853/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf
for details. Notice that people routinely tolerate flat EEG
lacunes whether induced by heart arrest, pharmaceuticals or
deep hypothermia, so personal continuity is not an issue for most people.
Subjective continuity is not even preserved during sleep anyway.
> persisting with the one you've got. From the aforementioned article:
If your state has no chance to diverge (either by being reinstantiated
from a snapshot only once, or by keeping n copies in sync) there's only one you.
Latter is counterintuitive and a pathological, since expensive to maintain and
easily disruptable state, but consider what the synchrony boundary
condition means to what you can experience or think.
> "The most parsimonious view of this phenomenon is that the two (or
> more) individuals would share a past identity and memories but from
> the point of duplication would simply be distinct individuals."
If you allow n instances to bifurcate, yes. If not, no.
> I'll take uploading as a backup, but retaining the atoms *and* the
Atoms are no big deal, many structures between your ears have a complete
turnover in less than 24 hours. Atoms are indistinguishable anyway,
but persisting arrangement patterns are.
> bits of my mind is important to me. Viva DIY longevity!
Again, nothing wrong with that. Just try to not be disappointed too much.
Ich bin Singularitarian
Bits and pieces interspersed here and there... with jokes and personal
comments going on in between (yes, I like them sometimes but still it
kind of deviates from the topic).
How about contributing to the following already existing wikis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_extension
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health#Maintaining_health
(this one I believe can be extending to a great deal by preventive,
anti-ageing, health care tips - the ones we all really need to do to
keep fit).
Some of the very common ones which I believe should be there are (and
which are usually a first sign of evading youth):
1) Back-ache
2) Dental care (receding gums, falling teeth, caries etc.)
3) Hair fall and whitening
4) Obesity
5) Sleep disorders
6) Strength/Stamina
7) Diabetes
8) Skin elasticity
Good preventive measures for the above and you immediately add 10
years of youth to your life and probably many more to overall life-
span.
Please point if any such site already exists which can list simple
things to be enlisted in daily routine for longevity.
Ich bin Singularitarian
On Dec 28, 1:11 am, "Daniel C." <dcrooks...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Ich bin Singularitarian
>
> <rohan.bansal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I hope to make it the best live-healthy-life project with best brain-
> > storming on mars-party-of-2070, not the chicks and the booze but
> > surviving till then ;)
>
> What's the point of surviving that long if there are no chicks or booze?
>
> -Dan
Off course, no point surviving without chicks, but lets make it till
then.
Chicks and booze are implementation details of the party ;)
Kyle Webb
>
> Well, the first solid fact is that I promised mom that I will be on
> Mars in 2070, just in time to commemorate my 100th birthday. Will you
> join me?
>
I'll pencil it in my date planner as a warm up for Keith Henson's Far Side Party.
Kyle
Bryan Bishop
Glad that Keith is known in these parts. He's still running around the
internet, I think, trying to solve some solar powered satellite
issues. Had a big plan last time I heard from him.
Daniel Sander Hoffmann
Daniel
Daniel Sander Hoffmann
All this is alright, but I wonder if unrestrained detour will ever
lead us to practical results. To paraphrase Woody Allen, I don't want
to achieve immortality through debate... I want to achieve it through
not dying. And I mean it!
Eugen, thank you very much for the health advice, but obviously
someone like me (sorry, Fred Mercury: Who wants to live forever? Who
dares to love forever? Well, I do! :-), well someone like me surely
already practices CR/alternate fasting (yeah, I didn’t eat yesterday,
and I’m not going to eat tomorrow as well - so today is happy day! :-)/
Resveratrol/aggressive supplementation/exercise (walking, average of
90 minutes/day + some light “heavy lifting”)/Mindfulness based stress
reduction/Autogenic training/etc. By the way, as far as animal protein
is concerned, I strictly eat salmon (I urge you to do the same, even
for a vegan like Jata :-).
PS: To do all this you must follow a strict calorie control in order
to avoid deficits. Please don’t DIY at home without adult supervision,
ok? :-)
Cheers,
Daniel
Eugen Leitl
> Eugen, thank you very much for the health advice, but obviously
> someone like me (sorry, Fred Mercury: Who wants to live forever? Who
> dares to love forever? Well, I do! :-), well someone like me surely
> already practices CR/alternate fasting (yeah, I didn’t eat yesterday,
> and I’m not going to eat tomorrow as well - so today is happy day! :-)/
> Resveratrol/aggressive supplementation/exercise (walking, average of
> 90 minutes/day + some light “heavy lifting”)/Mindfulness based stress
> reduction/Autogenic training/etc. By the way, as far as animal protein
> is concerned, I strictly eat salmon (I urge you to do the same, even
> for a vegan like Jata :-).
Well, that may buy you up to 20 years. Maybe even 30 years if you feel really
lucky. Do you feel lucky?
Even if you're that lucky, 20-30 years around 2050 might buy you less
than you think. So, just saying: consider a backup option.
Daniel Sander Hoffmann
lucky. Do you feel lucky?
I feel lucky, Eugen :-)
By the way, I've been already trying to save some money for cryonics. But it seems to me that to get it full you’d need to be going to California (“Someone told me there's a girl out there/With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair”… :-)
How is the cryo scene in Germany going on?
Best wishes,
Daniel
maria odete madeira
Queen? Immortality? Cryogenics?
Ok, the immortal-wannabe freezes his systemic locality (I’m biased to think that these good ideas may tend to occur more frequently with the male gender, but maybe I’m wrong, of course). Then what does this immortal-wannabe do to his organic nonlocality? Would the defrosted body still be himself? Would he keep his systemic identity, besides what is stated in his ID card?
For the system (in this case the immortal-wannabe) to compute his identity, he must permanently compute his simultaneous systemic locality/nonlocality, otherwise he would lose it along with his “period of validity” (for frozen meat it may not be too long, despite the cryo company’s advertisement of mint condition conservation), and by losing it (the systemic nonlocality) the immortal-wannae would be losing the systemic whole that was himself.
On the other hand, if one believes in the platonic transmigration or, perhaps, in one of the other ones, how would the immortal-wannabe manage his two residences at once, what if the defrosted immortal-wannabe recognized himself in the gaze of Fido or Whiskers, whatever may be his new faithful pet?
One may consider also the case of Christian faith with heaven and hell, should they now rent apartments instead of permanent housing? Alas the real estate crisis reaches heaven and hell. Maybe they should have a line just for cryogenically conserved bodies, it might say: temporary residents, redeliver when done defrosting. Thinking again about it, some sort of business arrangement between cryogenics companies and heaven and hell might be in order for the whole nonlocality issue to work.
I’m sorry for the humor, but the matter of life and death is nonetheless a systemic issue, that involves an open system (the organism) and the living web it is in.
--
Daniel Sander Hoffmann
maria odete madeira
“What about the systemic locality/organic nonlocality talk?”
I sincerely hope that in each day of my life, my systemic nonlocality does not lose, in no way, its mortal organic reference…
“Maybe some bibliographical references could be helpful here.”
There are many authors on systems science and emergence who address these issues.
The song by Queen and that whole “quickening” stuff may also help, less the beheading of course (sorry, couldn’t help it, after all, I used to call the Highlander series: “O Corta Cabeças”, “The Head Cutter”).
Regards,
maria odete
Ich bin Singularitarian
Daniel Sander Hoffmann
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091209134642.htm
Daniel Sander Hoffmann
<rohan.bansal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dont you guys find it difficult to read replies here?
> Bits and pieces interspersed here and there... with jokes and personal
> comments going on in between (yes, I like them sometimes but still it
> kind of deviates from the topic).
Rohan,
Joking is a vital life-extension technique. Ops, sorry... I did it
again... :-)
And happiness promotes telomerase expression, you know…
Anyway, I agree with you that replies are difficult to follow in
Google groups.
Best wishes
-Daniel
Daniel Sander Hoffmann
Maria,
Given your profile, the material below may interest you. I would appreciate your comments. Episteme is a free journal.
Best Wishes,
Daniel
http://www.ilea.ufrgs.br/episteme/portal/pdf/numero24/episteme24_hoffmann.pdf
http://www.ilea.ufrgs.br/episteme/portal/pdf/numero23/episteme23_hoffmann.pdf
http://www.ilea.ufrgs.br/episteme/portal/pdf/numero22/episteme22_hoffmann.pdf
http://www.ilea.ufrgs.br/episteme/portal/pdf/numero16/episteme16_entrevista_hoffmann.pdf
http://www.ilea.ufrgs.br/episteme/portal/pdf/numero13/episteme13_entrevista_hoffmann.pdf
http://www.ilea.ufrgs.br/episteme/portal/pdf/numero12/episteme12_artigo_hoffmann.pdf
eight pennies
I should like to point out that mechanisms of caloric restriction are fairly well known to molecular pathophysiologists. I have linked some representative papers that I casually pulled up :
http://www.jbc.org/content/282/41/30107.full.pdf
http://www.jleukbio.org/cgi/reprint/73/6/689
http://www.jbc.org/content/282/38/28025.full.pdf
http://www.nature.com/cr/journal/v19/n7/pdf/cr200981a.pdf
http://jpet.aspetjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/26/jpet.106.110460.full.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2688445/pdf/nihms110370.pdf
http://www.jimmunol.org/cgi/reprint/179/2/1292.pdf
Now, join the dots... disembed the ageing mechanism therefrom. You can then do Google searches like "aging NF-kappaB inflammation +pdf". All will be revealed.
2009/12/29 Daniel Sander Hoffmann <transp...@gmail.com>:
> How Calorie-Restricted Diets Fight Obesity and Extend Life Span
>
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091209134642.htm
>
Daniel Sander Hoffmann
Dr. D. S. Hoffmann
http://www.transplexity.org/
http://twitter.com/transplexity
http://transplexity.blogspot.com/index.html
maria odete madeira
“Maybe some bibliographical references could be helpful here.”
Ok Daniel, humor com humor se paga!
Now, then, bibliographical references on these matters no? Or in a better portuguese phrasing: com que então, a precisar de referências bibliográficas…
I did not know the journal, and it seems a bit foolish to state that it is a very good journal, given the evidence of the high quality of the journal.
But I will certainly be reading in greater detail these interviews that you had the generosity of sharing. It is gratifying to see that altruism still survives in the human species, I only hope that the cryogenic companies do think about freezing also altruism along with the conserved body, for the good of the “future civilization”, especially if one considers a scenario of “apocatastasis” (referring to a global civilizational issue posted today in another forum by a cyber acquaintace). It is important to foster corporate responsibility, and freezing altruism may be considered, perhaps, a matter of future sustainability of humanity, extensible, hopefully, for the in silico transhumanist sollutions for life extension.
I wonder if transhumanist thinking considers something like an essence? For instance, eidos of dignity, eidos of responsibility,…
…Interesting, your notion of transplexity…
Boas Festas e um bom ano de 2010, Daniel
maria odete
JonathanCline
wrote:
> How Calorie-Restricted Diets Fight Obesity and Extend Life Span
>
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091209134642.htm
There's apparently a distinction to be made regarding the approaches
to living very very long:
A) preventing damage
B) reversing aging (magic pill)
C) backup systems (magic technology)
Since (B) is still in the works (and I don't know anything about (C)
which has already been discussed as cryo), the best course of action
is (A). SENS as a research topic is primarily focused on (B), while
scoffing at prevention techniques as insufficient and naive (which is
true, they are). As SENS is long term research though, the best thing
to do is again (A), which is where calorie restriction fits in. As
far as I know the bulk of evidence points to no fat (low fat) vegan
diet (whole plants, whole grains) being the best chance at maximizing
nutrients while simultaneously reducing calories. If anyone has an
opinion on this, please comment. What's funny is that I don't know
any no-fat-vegan microbiologists, or even student microbiologists who
will turn down free pizza. Maybe it's the same old case of doctors
who smoke & drink while prescribing for others that they should stop
smoking and drinking. Also, related to diet, our now globally
interconnected food chain, especially in the U.S., makes it very
difficult to buy any premade or prepackaged food which fits the no-fat
vegan (and no non-whole-substances) ingredient list. Complicating
this niche market is the fact that no one can agree on what can be
deemed healthy, typically as a side-effect of massive corporate
marketing and funding. To paraphrase Esselstyn: People take diet too
personally--- it's hard to believe that Grandma isn't being helpful
when offering to BBQ some steaks for lunch. Although, diet has
seemingly been shown to reverse some types of damage as well (thus
fitting into approach (B)). It's interesting to note that the oldest
written documents known (religious texts, of course, from thousands of
years BC) mention the lifespan of a healthy man to be 100 years. If
healthy individuals were making it to 100 years old back then, what
has reduced our current average longevity in the U.S. to only ~85 y/
o? One answer: diet. Weight loss is a natural healthy side effect of
no-fat vegan diets.
One area that DIY might make interesting discoveries is in the
integration of chinese medicine with current measurement technology.
Traditional labs won't look at chinese medicine, which means DIY might
find something novel. Corporate labs don't look at it unless there's
already specific targets known. SB 4.0 in Hong Kong discussed several
avenues for looking at "traditional asian medicine" for hints and
answers. (I mentioned Red Yeast quite a while back.)
Check out the Okinawa books. Controversial premise, of course.
1 - The Okinawa Way: How to Improve Your Health and Longevity
Dramatically by Bradley J. Willcox, Makoto Suzuki, Craig D. Willcox,
and Andrew Weil
2 - The Okinawa Program : How the World's Longest-Lived People Achieve
Everlasting Health--And How You Can Too by Bradley J. Willcox, D.
Craig Willcox, and Makoto Suzuki
The above follow similar lines of study to:
3 - The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever
Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and
Long-term Health by T. Colin Campbell, Thomas M. Campbell II, Howard
Lyman, and John Robbins
4 - Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary,
Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure by Caldwell B. Esselstyn
As I mentioned in previous threads, DIY could perform some interesting
crowd-source experimentation here. Everyone get their body metrics
measured, then embark on some dietary/stress-reduction change, and re-
measure periodically. Cycle through enough data and iterations and
people, and that's an interesting result.
## Jonathan Cline
## jcl...@ieee.org
## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223
########################
Nathan McCorkle
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Nathan McCorkle
Rochester Institute of Technology
College of Science, Biotechnology/Bioinformatics
JonathanCline
>
> What's wrong with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_transfer?
It misses these neurons, doesn't it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=gut+neurons
Given that many of my successful decisions have been based on "gut
feeling" (especially successful stock market decisions this past year)
I'm wondering if "mind transfer" if/when possible is really capable of
reproducing my "thoughts" accurately. By this I mean literally "gut
feeling," I don't mean a metaphor. I realize it sounds like a nut-job
idea to initiate actions with neurons other than the brain (at least
to me it does), so this is on my list of unanswered bio questions.
Any idea?
Aaron Hicks
I eat tons of fat, usually butter and olive oil, as well I try to get totally saturated oils first, then totally unsaturated second, the in between region I try to stay away from, I figure I give my body consistent building blocks to maximize what enzymes get transcribed and used. I have consistently weighed 160 pounds +/-7 lbs for at least the past 7 years. I eat sugar, but tend to stray from things with fructose or fructose glucose syrup, I remember hearing fructose has some weird stress pathways that it upregulated, whereas sucrose metabolism is enzyme rate controlled, and glucose is pretty simple with basically the upregulation of insulin. I don't eat sugar all the time, maybe once or twice a day on days I do eat it, and I don't have it everyday, I always try to combine my sugar intake with fats as well... in fact my method for buying ice cream is to find the highest fat:sugar ratio, I will choose fat over sugar anyday... skips catabolic/metabolic steps, can be used for new cell membranes hopefully keeping me elastic, energy dense, and damn tasty.
Of course, they didn't, and we know now that uncooked or lightly cooked meat (and other organs) contain far more vitamin C than was previously thought. Stefansson and Andersen came in at about 80% of calories from fat, with the balance from protein; by volume, this works out to about 50% fat, 50% lean meat. This ratio comes up repeatedly amongst individuals who go this route.
Stefansson didn't follow such strict dieting all his life, but he believed strongly in carbohydrate restriction; he died at the age of 82, in 1962, with his arctic explorations long behind him (his last being in 1918).
Saturated fats have a great deal of value in human nutrition. For one thing, the need for "anti-oxidants" is reduced by eating fats that aren't unsaturated (and, therefore, are not readily oxidized). A diet high in mono- and polyunsaturated fats, OTOH, needs antioxidants to prevent the oils and fats from going rancid inside the body.
More importantly, animal fats provide plenty of cholesterol; the compound is only poorly correlated with cardiac risk, but if one consumes cholesterol, the body's pathway to producing it is downregulated. As noted in "Good Calories, Bad Calories," cholesterol is a very poor gauge of cardiac fitness. See also:
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b51238/Good-Calories-Bad-Calories/Gary-Taubes/?si=0
And, in fact, most of the rest of "Good Calories, Bad Calories." 162 pages of references, over 600 pages in total- all on why carbs aren't good.
Instead of cholesterol, triglycerides are a much better indicator of cardiac risk; trigs, in turn, come from consumption of carbohydrates, not fats.
Amazing how Americans keep getting fatter despite how the products they consume contain ever less fat, isn't it?
-AJ
Doug Treadwell
What I have in mind is to take a typical book, which includes human and nonhuman aging processes, a lot of historical background, etc. and condense it down to the essentials. Only human relevant aging processes would be included, historical background would be limited to one line summaries like "so and so concluded in 1976 that such and such..." (with either a + button to expand, link to a wikipedia article, or reference to the page and book that the summary came from).
If anyone here has a good idea for a research project already, shout it out. I think we need to get more information on the subject though before we can decide on a particular research project that is within our resources and yet still doing practical work.
By the way, the Campaign Against Aging ( www.campaignagainstaging.org ) is very interested in working with DIY biologists.
- Doug
--
eight pennies
My views are not mainstream; BUT TOTALLY EVIDENCE-BASED. I can cite hundreds of papers published in peer-reviewed journals; and trace signalling pathways that are involved. I should be able to collate the pdfs shortly. I'm not sure that "books" on ageing are written to elucidate evidence-based scientific knowledge. I suspect they are either written to make money, or to enforce an ideological position.
The pathways involved in ageing are sometimes highly conserved in the eucaryotic genome. Certainly, mammalian ageing is close to identical with human ageing. I think the difference lies in scaling factors under the control of modifier genes that are rapidly and drastically altered by single-nucleotide polymorphisms; and evolutionarily thus very plastic. Hence, I think that non-human data are highly relevant; especially as ageing, per se, is not considered a pathology in current medical ideology.
Pseudolus
something -alter something in ourselves. I am trying to think of some
definitive ways --the day to day things we all could do to contribute
towards DIY longevity
I see DIYBiohackers doing for longevity, what OpenSource Linux has
done to Microsoft.
It is a matter of control and options available on OUR terms.
I see DIYBiohackers as the means around bureaucratic controls from
special interests that will be hurt from advances in technology.
Politicians and the medical priesthood think they own us. I see the
DIY community breaking the back of this monopoly.
Most endeavors begin and end with profit in mind. I think there are
longevity ideas out there that are discarded because they are not
patentable or profitable. DCA (dichloretic acid) as a cancer killer
is an example. It is a compund that has been around for years and is
not patentable. It's cancer curing possibilities have only recently
been looked at. No one is going to fork out millions of dollars to
push this through bureacratic hurdles and testing if they can't have
an "exclusive" on it. I see online support groups conducting cheap
self studies to help with their particular ailments. Maybe
DIYbiohackers can support these self studies/self medication efforts.
I read about Kaiser getting a 25 million dollar federal grant to do a
comparitive analysis of 100,000 genomes. If the gov't is funding it,
maybe the results could be obtained through Freedom of Information or
something. Knowing which genes to fix is most of the battle. Or
maybe there is some backdoor political arrangement whereby taxpayers
fund the research and Kaiser gets the patents.
I am always hearing about 16 different ways of attacking cancer.
Maybe some of these are publicly funded. Maybe we could monitor
patent applications. If we aren't selling the stuff, it should be
legal to reproduce. Maybe our niche is to remove the bottleneck?
I read about scientists who cured color blindness in monkeys. They
did it with an engineered retrovirus. Maybe a group like this could
maintain a library of known fixes for known problems "for educational
purposes only". If a member then self medicates at his own risk,
that's his problem. (be sure to report results back)
Maybe we could monitor the exciting things being done with laboratory
animals and give people the opportunity to try those things
themselves. Maybe this could be a forum of known and tried animal
experiments, best practices, etc.
They have treated mice for some forms of protein crosslinks. This
reduced wrinkling. How many old people are there out there that might
be willing to try a human equivalent of this? Will there be
mistakes? Sure. But how many people died during the 16 years the FDA
sat on penicillin? (until WW2 forced the issue)
I may be a cynic, but I think an actual cure for heart disease or
cancer will put a lot of people and pharmaceuticals out of business.
I think their business models are centered on "how can we alleviate
suffering, yet keep them needing our expensive drugs". The DIY
community may help shift this paradigm towards simpler and fewer, more
permanent fixes. Probably preaching to the choir here, but is there a
consensus or view here of self medication? What is the end result of
what we are trying to do here anyway?
The medical industry has done NOTHING to help my wife with her
fibromyalgia. The information age is all about empowering us on our
terms. Maybe this community could just provide the tools and feedback
mechanism for the more desparate and daring among us who are willing
to try new things.
Pseudolus
Doctors/clinicans are talking about methods for drawing everything
out-- making it more difficult and expensive (to keep their jobs).
They envision everyone having their genome tested and analyzed. Then
the relevant problems remediated or fixed on an individual basis.
Instead, why don't we just catalog all known genetic defects and their
healthy counterpart. Cystic Fibrosis, for instance, is a disease
caused by three missing base pairs. Create an innoculation that
basically does a find and replace for ALL these known issues. If you
happen to already have a healthy section of code, then the "fix" will
replace a healthy code with another good copy of the code. The code
all comes from the same place anyway (our deep/shared ancestry).
Service Pack I could be known genetic problems with optimal fixes.
Service Pack II could include transhuman fixes: genes for enzymes to
metabolize arterioslerosis, ability to regrow limbs, cancer
remediation, etc.
You could then go in and mass innoculate and make this whole process a
lot faster, cheaper and widely available.
AARON LEWIS DINKIN
is actually implemented think about how it could in turn be
weaponized? So instead of curing cancer for example, the enemy makes
a weaponized innoculation to give you a quick acting lethal malignant
cancer?
Doug Treadwell
Pseudolus
secret Microsoft update. Logistically I think this would be difficult
and ethically problematic for any universal implementation. No one
would be forcing anyone to take anything. I would imagine the
elderly, the chronically sick or those with known genetic defects
would be among the first to want to try anything like a human service
pack. Everyone else can wait and see. With open source, you would
know what all the fixes were in this "service pack". Maybe there
could be different flavors of service packs. If you are richer, you
could bypass this generic fix, have your genes sequenced, analyzed and
specific changes implemented.
I am just looking at cheap possibilites for the masses. Thinking
outside of the box of having to sequence,analyze and individually
treat ~ 5 billion genomes.
Another side benefit. If the gov't funds such a service pack or two,
they could give baby boomers a choice. Get fixed with a service pack
and continue working and living younger and healthier lives. Or you
can retire. Could be what saves us from our demographic problems
(Social Security). Same thing for Japan/China/Europe etc.
I am hoping technology can advance to the point that when biological
attacks or incidents become known, they can be quickly diagnosed and
remediated. Maybe this is where the DIYBio types can thrive. Cheap
and quick genetic analysis and remediation capabilities. The rest of
the system is certainly not geared for rapid response. Why would a
foreign govt or religious fanatic attack us in a way we could quickly
fix? (assuming we develop better analysis/remediation capabilities.)
The most deadly diseases are not quick acting. Instead, they culture
and spread before manifesting themselves. I think the Unix world has
a better track record of controlling the "viruses" or problems than
the Oligopoly has.
On Jan 5, 4:00 pm, AARON LEWIS DINKIN <cyan....@gmail.com> wrote:
> So Microsoft Windows Live Updates for the human body? If this process
> is actually implemented think about how it could in turn be
> weaponized? So instead of curing cancer for example, the enemy makes
> a weaponized innoculation to give you a quick acting lethal malignant
> cancer?
>
> > .- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
wulfdesign
I love it!
wulfdesign
someone in a basement or garage hacked their own genome and made
improvements.
I imagined it at LEAST 15-20 years down the road by some high school
or collage student.
not 10yrs away by an open source community of BioHackers.
possibly looking for a cure for a loved one (or self),
that no big company would consider,
nor government would allow,
cause it wouldn't make them bank,
or considered too much of a risk (even for the Terminally ill).
this is why we need to develop these sorts of technologies for
ourselves.
if this was available 10-15 years ago I may have not lost a niece to
an incurable disease.
(or a child to something else)
you could look at this as a moral imperative if you like.
how many more of us have to suffer or die by disease or aging cause
the knowledge to remidy it currently alludes us?
-L
eight pennies
It is NOT at all conceptually - or perhaps even technically - difficult to fix many genome based problems NOW. The vast majority of poor - not "DISASTROUS" - phenotypes are derived from Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) acting alone or in concert. On average each of these SNPs will serve to increase Km, the Michaelis constant (i.e decrease binding affinity), if they are not binding-neutral http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/75/4/616. Now most cellular signalling systems are "opposed" at or near a node; i.e., they have both an 'upregulator' & a 'downregulator' control arm leading to the process (sort of a "biceps-triceps" arrangement).
So with increased Km at a node in the signalling network, the signalling or effector action there will proceed more sluggishly. You then mess up the 'downregulator' control arm using a decoy oligonucleotide to reduce nuclear localization of a transcription factor; or an antisense oligonucleotide that targets a response element on DNA to interfere with transcription; or to interfere with a particular sequence on mRNA to interfere with translation. Half-life of native nucleic acid fragments in the system is really low, so you might want to modify your oligonucleotides, e.g., by using Oligonucleotide phosphorothioates (OPS).
You'd be surprised with what you might accomplish with such primitive technology.
The trick, I think, is to master one's understanding of the signalling & effector networks in the cell.
Nathan McCorkle
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Nathan McCorkle
One of the more interesting texts on the subject is "Fat of the Land," by the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. After much disdain from the medical community when it came to Stefansson's assertions that, with his tenure amongst the Eskimo, he would eat nothing more than fat and protein for over a year at a time, he and a volunteer (Karsten Andersen) spent a year eating nothing more than meat and fat. The entire period was spent either locked in Bellvue, or under direct observation (while in public) to make sure they weren't sneaking any vegetable matter. At the outside, medicos thought they'd expire at the 6 week mark, suffering horribly.On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 6:11 PM, Nathan McCorkle <nmz...@gmail.com> wrote:I eat tons of fat, usually butter and olive oil, as well I try to get totally saturated oils first, then totally unsaturated second, the in between region I try to stay away from, I figure I give my body consistent building blocks to maximize what enzymes get transcribed and used. I have consistently weighed 160 pounds +/-7 lbs for at least the past 7 years. I eat sugar, but tend to stray from things with fructose or fructose glucose syrup, I remember hearing fructose has some weird stress pathways that it upregulated, whereas sucrose metabolism is enzyme rate controlled, and glucose is pretty simple with basically the upregulation of insulin. I don't eat sugar all the time, maybe once or twice a day on days I do eat it, and I don't have it everyday, I always try to combine my sugar intake with fats as well... in fact my method for buying ice cream is to find the highest fat:sugar ratio, I will choose fat over sugar anyday... skips catabolic/metabolic steps, can be used for new cell membranes hopefully keeping me elastic, energy dense, and damn tasty.
Of course, they didn't, and we know now that uncooked or lightly cooked meat (and other organs) contain far more vitamin C than was previously thought. Stefansson and Andersen came in at about 80% of calories from fat, with the balance from protein; by volume, this works out to about 50% fat, 50% lean meat. This ratio comes up repeatedly amongst individuals who go this route.
Stefansson didn't follow such strict dieting all his life, but he believed strongly in carbohydrate restriction; he died at the age of 82, in 1962, with his arctic explorations long behind him (his last being in 1918).
Saturated fats have a great deal of value in human nutrition. For one thing, the need for "anti-oxidants" is reduced by eating fats that aren't unsaturated (and, therefore, are not readily oxidized). A diet high in mono- and polyunsaturated fats, OTOH, needs antioxidants to prevent the oils and fats from going rancid inside the body.
More importantly, animal fats provide plenty of cholesterol; the compound is only poorly correlated with cardiac risk, but if one consumes cholesterol, the body's pathway to producing it is downregulated. As noted in "Good Calories, Bad Calories," cholesterol is a very poor gauge of cardiac fitness. See also:
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b51238/Good-Calories-Bad-Calories/Gary-Taubes/?si=0
And, in fact, most of the rest of "Good Calories, Bad Calories." 162 pages of references, over 600 pages in total- all on why carbs aren't good.
Instead of cholesterol, triglycerides are a much better indicator of cardiac risk; trigs, in turn, come from consumption of carbohydrates, not fats.
Amazing how Americans keep getting fatter despite how the products they consume contain ever less fat, isn't it?
-AJ
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Aaron Hicks
Saturated fats have a great deal of value in human nutrition. For one thing, the need for "anti-oxidants" is reduced by eating fats that aren't unsaturated (and, therefore, are not readily oxidized). A diet high in mono- and polyunsaturated fats, OTOH, needs antioxidants to prevent the oils and fats from going rancid inside the body.
Do you have any references or supporting information that one might better/more easily find references to this? I'm pretty interested to know if its true, and if so why it is.... If I had some serious evidence/proof, I'd cut out all the unsaturated fats in my life.
It's really basic chemistry; fats go rancid because they are oxidized. These oxidized fats are hard on the body; far worse are trans-fats, of course- the body doesn't have a really good pathway for dealing with them, but they occur naturally in small quantities. Take a look at a trans-fat molecule, and an unsaturated fat molecule, and one can see how oxidative attack of the trans-fat is made very difficult- one reason why junk foods used so much of the stuff. The fats are less prone to going rancid in storage. (We've known trans-fats are bad since the 1950s, but the data were largely ignored until the past decade.)
Of course, those double bonds in unsaturated fats are readily oxidized by atmospheric oxygen, and they go rancid. We are told we need more unsaturated fats (preferably polyunsaturated), but then we also need to stuff ourselves full of the anti-oxidants to keep the fats from oxidizing, ironically enough.
There's some stuff on this in "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes, IIRC. I've been doing so much reading that the precise origins of much of this- which is peripheral to my main interest- has gotten a bit hazy. There may be some more in "Protein Power" by the Eadses, but unfortunately their stuff is woefully poorly referenced, and their biochemistry is a bit wonky. They're doctors, not biochemists. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancidification
http://www.cip.ukcentre.com/Rancidity.htm
http://www.heall.com/body/healthupdates/food/saturatedfat.html
Unfortunately, I can't point in the direction of primary, peer-reviewed literature because 1) this stuff is peripheral to my main interests and 2) the idea that anything other than what the American Heart Association says is good for your heart has been taboo and marginalized. Note, of course, that it is beyond reproach nowadays that trans-fats are awful, despite the AHA foisting them upon us for decades. Now the AHA is even recommending to stay away from sugar, having ignored the data for decades.
-AJ
Cathal Garvey
I'm intrigued by your perspective, but all the theory in the world is worth nothing without epidemiology to back it.
How does your low-unsaturate diet measure up to the large-scale data? How do you explain the generally accepted fact that vegetarians have lower risk of cardiac complications etc, despite having a largely unsaturated fat diet?
I'll grant you that in air, unsaturates go bad. But the cells from which they are derived are anything but passive, and in a membranous structure the oxidatable groups you mention are generally hidden from attack by oxidative molecules. Furthermore, the systems evolved for their uptake are indubitably capable of maintaining their desired structure until their incorporation into membrane structures.
Finally, the assertion that saturated fats are better for membrane fluidity is confusing: The twisted, inflexible nature of unsaturated fats on a molecular level is precisely what leads to the increased fluidity for which they are recommended, because it inhibits the formation of neatly stacked and energetically stable structures. By contrast, the flexible nature of saturates permits crystallisation more easily- this is most easily observed in their melting temperatures which are generally higher than with unsaturates.
Like I said, I'm interested if skeptical: is there a large study or epidemiological foundation to this high-saturates, low-carb/unsaturates diet?
On Jan 13, 2010 7:37 PM, "Aaron Hicks" <aaron...@gmail.com> wrote:On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 10:53 AM, Nathan McCorkle <nmz...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> Saturated fats ha...
It's really basic chemistry; fats go rancid because they are oxidized. These oxidized fats are hard on the body; far worse are trans-fats, of course- the body doesn't have a really good pathway for dealing with them, but they occur naturally in small quantities. Take a look at a trans-fat molecule, and an unsaturated fat molecule, and one can see how oxidative attack of the trans-fat is made very difficult- one reason why junk foods used so much of the stuff. The fats are less prone to going rancid in storage. (We've known trans-fats are bad since the 1950s, but the data were largely ignored until the past decade.)
Of course, those double bonds in unsaturated fats are readily oxidized by atmospheric oxygen, and they go rancid. We are told we need more unsaturated fats (preferably polyunsaturated), but then we also need to stuff ourselves full of the anti-oxidants to keep the fats from oxidizing, ironically enough.
There's some stuff on this in "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes, IIRC. I've been doing so much reading that the precise origins of much of this- which is peripheral to my main interest- has gotten a bit hazy. There may be some more in "Protein Power" by the Eadses, but unfortunately their stuff is woefully poorly referenced, and their biochemistry is a bit wonky. They're doctors, not biochemists. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancidification
http://www.cip.ukcentre.com/Rancidity.htm
http://www.heall.com/body/healthupdates/food/saturatedfat.html
Unfortunately, I can't point in the direction of primary, peer-reviewed literature because 1) this stuff is peripheral to my main interests and 2) the idea that anything other than what the American Heart Association says is good for your heart has been taboo and marginalized. Note, of course, that it is beyond reproach nowadays that trans-fats are awful, despite the AHA foisting them upon us for decades. Now the AHA is even recommending to stay away from sugar, having ignored the data for decades.
-AJ
Aaron Hicks
As much as I'd like to spoonfeed, I'm in the middle of writing a couple of books and unable to do so. Start with Taubes' book and go from there.
-AJ
Brent Neal
On 13 Jan, 2010, at 17:15, Cathal Garvey wrote:
> I'll grant you that in air, unsaturates go bad. But the cells from
> which they are derived are anything but passive, and in a membranous
> structure the oxidatable groups you mention are generally hidden
> from attack by oxidative molecules. Furthermore, the systems evolved
> for their uptake are indubitably capable of maintaining their
> desired structure until their incorporation into membrane structures.
Cathal - I think you're dead on here. Generally, you don't need
oxidative molecules, but simply something that wants those electrons
more than the double bond does. Free radicals will do that as well.
Good thing for us that the body is 70% water, which quenches free
radicals pretty quickly. The literature on the subject - academic
literature, mind you, not pop medicine, - indicates a strong
correlation between unsaturated fats and heart health. The mechanism
is explained by the fact that your body generates high density
lipoproteins from monounsaturated fatty acids, amongst other things.
Several recent studies (e.g. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 90, 288 (2009)) show
that common polyunsaturated fats like linseed oil, which is 55%
linolenic acid (18:3 n-3) will reduce overall cholesterol and LDL
while having no significant effect on HDL.
If you're worried about peroxidation of your unsaturated fat filled
diet, take more vitamin E. But, if you're a vegetarian, your likely
sources of a-tocopherols is the same as your sources of unsaturated
fats - i.e. nuts and seeds. Nature is a pretty smart bitch after all. ;)
B
--
Brent Neal, Ph.D.
http://brentn.freeshell.org
<bre...@gmail.com>
Aaron Hicks
The literature on the subject - academic literature, mind you, not pop medicine, - indicates a strong correlation between unsaturated fats and heart health.
Hardly pop medicine; this goes back to Ancel Keyes himself and the data he fudged. The Framingham Heart Study showed that "the lack of association between serum cholesterol level and the incidence of sudden death suggests that factors other than the artherosclerotic process may be of major importance in this manifestation of coronary artery disease." He was a lead researcher- not the first one- of the Framingham study. In the late 1980s to the early 1990s, Harvard, UC-San Francisco, and McGill in Montreal looked at saturated fat.
The Taylor study out of Harvard suggested those at greatest risk for heart mortality (hypertensive smokers) might lose an extra year of life; healthy non-smokers' risk was to lose between 3 days and 3 months. Browner's UCSF study suggested an average increase in life expectancy of 3-4 months- an estimate that included speculative data suggesting the low fat diet would also reduce cancer deaths- a subject Taubes investigates in greater depth. The McGill study showed a potential increase in life expectancy of between 4 days and 2 months, provided sat fat could be reduced to 8% of all calories consumed.
From Geoffrey Rose, epidemiologist, in 1981: One man in 50 might expect to avoid a heart attack by avoiding saturated fat for an entire lifetime. "Forty-nine out of fifty would eat differently for forty years and perhaps get nothing from it." This is not dissimilar to the number needed to treat (NNT) of statins, which puts the utility of some of these drugs as perhaps 1 in 250 (NNT = 250), meaning that hundreds of people must be treated over the course of years for one to see benefit. Like the tiny caveat with Lipitor ads says: "That means in a large clinical study, 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% of patients taking Lipitor." It's worse than that- more like an NNT of 100, meaning that each heart attack prevented costs hundreds of thousands of dollars while those who see no benefit get diarrhea and other side-effects.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_04/b4068052092994.htm
There are bigger questions about what statins do to the brain- which, after all, is 70% fat; take out cholesterol, and people start to go all loopy and get depressed. Deaths from suicide and violent death may outweigh the gains from lowering cholesterol (if reduced cholesterol lowers the risk of heart attack in the first place). See studies like:
ALLHAT (2002): Same rate of heart disease, heart attack, and death rate.
Oxford's Heart Protection Study (2002): Failed to publish cumulative data on mortality, despite requests to do so. "Simvastatin had an 87.1 percent survival rate after five years compared to an 85.4 percent survival rate for the controls, and these results were independent of the amount of cholesterol lowering."
Japanese J-LIT study (2002): "The results: no correlation between the amount of LDL lowering and death rate at five years."
MIRACIL (2001): No change in death rate. No significant change in re-infarction rate. No change in need to resuscitate from cardiac arrest.
Statins and Women (2003), University of British Columbia Therapeutics Initiative: No study demonstrating significant reduction in mortality with statins use in women.
There are another good dozen studies and meta-studies that show similar questions about the efficacy of statins. At best, the TV ads really stilt their efficacy.
Moreover, what if there's something to how people decide to avoid fats? The country is told sat fat is deadly- go for the unsaturated stuff. From Taubes:
"Few experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified. If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it.
What this means is
that even saturated fats—a k a, the bad fats—are not
nearly as deleterious as you would think. True, they
will elevate your bad cholesterol, but they will also
elevate your good cholesterol. In other words, it’s a
virtual wash. As Willett explained to me, you will
gain little to no health benefit by giving up milk,
butter and cheese and eating bagels instead.
But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it’s true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease."
None of the studies above, BTW, looked much at carbohydrate consumption. The ones that did suggested a stronger correlation with heart disease and carbohydrate consumption than fat consumption.Anyway- turns out Taubes' whole book (best as I can tell) is available on Google Books. "Good Calories, Bad Calories." It's a long read, heavy with references.
-AJ
Cathal Garvey
I'm confused by the logical leap here between the well-supported statement that unsaturates can lower ldl and raise hdl, therefore even saturates raise hdl. Why do you say that? I've never heard of lard raising hdl?
As to the studies, thanks for that list. It'll be interesting to compare/contrast sources of actual data to support the hypothesis that saturates aren't damaging. However, I remain skeptical: as any nutritionist will tell you, the field is rife with awful 'science' from special interests supporting this or that miracle cure diet, the Atkins diet being only the most notorious. Even a "few dozen" studies is a drip in the ocean, and against the fact that unsaturates haven't been credited for that long, it wouldn't be surprising to have a collection of studies showing fats in general to be o.k. if the distinction wasn't made by the researchers.
On Jan 16, 2010 7:12 AM, "Aaron Hicks" <aaron...@gmail.com> wrote:On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Brent Neal <bre...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The literature on the subj...
Cathal Garvey
I'm now sorely tempted to write something like this in the references chapter of my thesis! :D
On Jan 16, 2010 3:51 AM, "Aaron Hicks" <aaron...@gmail.com> wrote:
As much as I'd like to spoonfeed, I'm in the middle of writing a couple of books and unable to do so. Start with Taubes' book and go from there.
-AJ
On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Cathal Garvey <cathal...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm intrigued ...
Brent Neal
On 16 Jan, 2010, at 2:12, Aaron Hicks wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Brent Neal <bre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The literature on the subject - academic literature, mind you, not
> pop medicine, - indicates a strong correlation between unsaturated
> fats and heart health.
>
It's interesting to note that the references you quote are no more
recent than 2003. I'll be interested to see if there are results more
recent than that. The literature on unsaturated fats tends to be a bit
more recent, going up to present day.
eight pennies
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1783656/pdf/1743-7075-4-3.pdf/?tool=pmcentrez
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2637549/pdf/nihms-88996.pdf/?tool=pmcentrez
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2503276/pdf/nihms-54771.pdf/?tool=pmcentrez
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2270845/pdf/1743-7075-5-4.pdf/?tool=pmcentrez
...of course the situation is extremely complex... and ethnogenic snps confound things.... but a trend is clear. Stay thin; unbdereat; try to keep fat consumption down. Possibly, if you can, avoid animal fats - especially if you are not of Western European extract.
Aaron Hicks
As to the studies, thanks for that list. It'll be interesting to compare/contrast sources of actual data to support the hypothesis that saturates aren't damaging. However, I remain skeptical: as any nutritionist will tell you, the field is rife with awful 'science' from special interests supporting this or that miracle cure diet, the Atkins diet being only the most notorious. Even a "few dozen" studies is a drip in the ocean, and against the fact that unsaturates haven't been credited for that long, it wouldn't be surprising to have a collection of studies showing fats in general to be o.k. if the distinction wasn't made by the researchers.
The Framingham study is particularly telling as- for decades- researchers attempted to pin cardiac mortality on serum cholesterol, to confirm the work by Ancel Keys. Instead, the associations turned out poor, with "no predictive value" for women over 50, and a poor association for women under 50. The values men under study in Framingham weren't much better; as men aged, the lower their cholesterol tended to be when they died. There's this banana-shaped curve where mortality increases at both ends: very low cholesterol and very high cholesterol. The minima seems to be around 180-220 or so, which is hardly what the statin ads on TV have to say about it.
See also:
http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg158/MDA2008/6a00d8341d0fcc53ef01156f35e74d970b-.png
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 5:26 AM, Brent Neal <bre...@gmail.com> wrote:
It's interesting to note that the references you quote are no more recent than 2003. I'll be interested to see if there are results more recent than that. The literature on unsaturated fats tends to be a bit more recent, going up to present day.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/business/15drug.html
Vytorin- lowers cholesterol (while increasing the rate of plaque formation)- and increases cancer risk by 61%.
http://www.wellnessresources.com/freedom/articles/vytorin_increases_cancer_risk_by_64/
Statins and prostate cancer (2008):
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSPAT26581320080822
The Golomb and Evans review (900 papers) showing statins are bad juju:
http://www.labmeeting.com/paper/28645174/golomb-evans-2008-statin-adverse-effects-a-review-of-the-literature-and-evidence-for-a-mitochondrial-mechanism
And then there's statins and vitamin D, mentioned here (along with some denigrating remarks about the link between heart disease and cholesterol):
http://resources.metapress.com/pdf-preview.axd?code=3252535263362294&size=largest
There's been a lot of research recently on statins and vitamin D, as shown by a quick PubMED search, and one of the more interesting questions is what happens to vitamin D levels with statins, as cholesterol is a precursor to vitamin D. Given its importance in some 400 different aspects of human biochemistry- including prevention of cancer- some interesting questions about safety arise very quickly.
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 5:44 AM, eight pennies <eightp...@gmail.com> wrote:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2637549/pdf/nihms-88996.pdf/?tool=pmcentrez
...of course the situation is extremely complex... and ethnogenic snps confound things.... but a trend is clear. Stay thin; unbdereat; try to keep fat consumption down. Possibly, if you can, avoid animal fats - especially if you are not of Western European extract.
You realize, of course, that third link is from "Low-Fat Diet and Exercise Preserve eNOS Regulation and Endothelial Function in the Penis of Early Atherosclerotic Pigs: A
Molecular Analysis." While I'm sure that's... very interesting to someone, I'm not sure how well endothelial function of the penis in arteriosclerotic pigs weighs in to the discussion.
The whole "lipid hypothesis"- arteriosclerosis being a function of serum cholesterol- has proven downright dangerous; even the best and largest studies fail to show a good association. Instead, the correlation with triglycerides is much better. Trigs, in turn, are more strongly related to carbohydrate consumption- an assertion even the AHA will confirm:
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=183#Triglyceride
Heck, the AHA even came out and said that sugar intake should be limited:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/25/aha.sugar.added/index.html
That took over 60 years to come out. The science is a little behind the times.
-AJ
Cathal Garvey
Cholesterol is mistakenly taken to be a *cause* of heart disease, when really it's just a marker of underlying issues that lead to clogged arteries and ailing hearts. You may be right, the Trigs might serve that task of marking disease more effectively. And this would certainly account for the utter failure of a class of drugs (statins), that are designed to reduce cholesterol, to create a real benefit for patients.
However, it would be a mistake to draw conclusions backward and announce that since the flawed treatment didn't work, the underlying causes are conspiracy/stupidity/beaurocratic errors. It's very easy to point fingers, not so easy to pinpoint facts.
I speak from personal anecdotal experience; the traditional "old fogie" demographi in Ireland suffers from ridiculously bad heart health due to the so-called "Irish Breakfast" of meat, meat and more meat (and butter too!), and a small intake of vegetables, fruit or unsaturates. The result of course is morbidly obese people in ICU countrywide dying of every complication under the sun with very little quality of life. By contrast, the Mediterraneans eat a diet similarly rich in fats, but which is predominantly composed of unsaturates, and incorporates far more fresh produce, and they seem to do just fine like that. Hardly Okinawan, but you take what you can get!
eight pennies
Cathal Garvey
Indeed, penile endothelium is a great model when you think about it. It is well vascularised with large vessels, and its function is entirely dependent on the health of those vessels. In fact, with impotence being one of the common complications of arteriosclerosis (and smoking) it makes an excellent and highly relevant model for human disease.
On Jan 17, 2010 3:30 AM, "eight pennies" <eightp...@gmail.com> wrote:
"...endothelial function of the penis in arteriosclerotic pigs" is perhaps to a layperson as quizzically funny and irrelevant as Anna Nicole Smith's autopsy citation of an "unremarkable" anus. Unfortunately (or otherwise) the penile endothelium is a sensitive model for assessing the disfunction that contributes so much to arterial disease - that kills so many human beings every day.
2010/1/16 Aaron Hicks <aaron...@gmail.com>> > > > On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 3:43 AM, Cathal Garvey <cathal...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> As to t...
> -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group. > ...
Aaron Hicks
I speak from personal anecdotal experience; the traditional "old fogie" demographi in Ireland suffers from ridiculously bad heart health due to the so-called "Irish Breakfast" of meat, meat and more meat (and butter too!), and a small intake of vegetables, fruit or unsaturates. The result of course is morbidly obese people in ICU countrywide dying of every complication under the sun with very little quality of life.
From the chart I posted before:
http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg158/MDA2008/6a00d8341d0fcc53ef01156f35e74d970b-.png
The Irish have middle-of-the-pack heart disease rates despite fairly high consumption of saturated fats.
By contrast, the Mediterraneans eat a diet similarly rich in fats, but which is predominantly composed of unsaturates, and incorporates far more fresh produce, and they seem to do just fine like that. Hardly Okinawan, but you take what you can get!
The presuppositions that the Mediterranean diet is intrinsically healthier are based on data from Crete and Corfu, and are based on the work of Keys and his "Seven Countries" study, which ignored data from Italy and the Mediterranean coast of Yugoslavia. If you're not already familiar, Keys' work has been discredited, having been the seven data points out of a total of 22- the ones that supported his theories, and the ones that consumed the most animal fats. To wit:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_xlflFL230eI/SaRbYXpNi1I/AAAAAAAAAQQ/jnaD1GfEJiw/s1600-h/9.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_xlflFL230eI/SaRbYqZi9nI/AAAAAAAAAQY/fgtN3theJvI/s1600-h/10.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_xlflFL230eI/SaRbYvITSBI/AAAAAAAAAQg/jvCJCYzqzX0/s1600-h/11.jpg
Pretty damning evidence- until the "other countries"- the ones Keys intentionally ignored- are examined:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_xlflFL230eI/SaRbYyuE3gI/AAAAAAAAAQo/DFCutePfeJE/s1600-h/12.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_xlflFL230eI/SaRb8HGRTsI/AAAAAAAAAQw/uZyoSzX97yg/s1600-h/13.jpg
In fact, if all of Keys' data are examined, a pretty scatter plot is produced:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_xlflFL230eI/SaRg47O8MYI/AAAAAAAAARg/u0m8oIU3iTI/s1600-h/15.jpg
The red dots represent the Masai, the Inuit, the Rendile, the Tokelau, and other populations that live almost entirely upon animal proteins. In other words, the populations getting upwards of 50% of their calories from fat have the lowest levels of heart disease mortality. Note, too, from all of Burkitt and Trowell's work that in Bantu, "modern" diseases- including cardiovascular disease- were all but unknown. By mid-20th century, heart disease had arrived- starting in the cities, where obesity had gained prominence, as had diabetes. The introduction of the sugar and refined flour of Western cultures had taken root, as is noted in a number of B&T's publications- although they blamed fiber. Having read their books, it's difficult to see how they overlooked sugar- not to mention fermentation, used by the natives for centuries- a process that burns up carbohydrates, but was largely abandoned by mid-century. Go figure.
Keys high-graded his data to fit his notions; this has been demonstrated repeatedly, but people still believe in the lipid hypothesis. Go figure.
As for the "hardly Okinawan," note that increased levels of dietary fat have *reduced* heart disease mortality substantially in Japan. From Taubes:
"In the late 1950s, Keys supported his fat hypothesis with the disparity in fat consumption, cholesterol levels, and heart-disease mortality he found among Japanese men living in Japan, Hawaii, and Los Angeles. This association was then confirmed, more or less, in his Seven Countries Study, in which the Japanese villagers still had remarkably little fat in their diets, low cholesterol levels, and fewer heart-disease deaths over ten years than any other population with the exceptions of those of the islands of Crete and Corfu and the village of Velika Krsna in what is now Serbia. By the mid-1990s, however, the Japanese contingent of the Seven Countries Study, led by Yoshinori Koga, reported that fat intake in Japan had increased from the 6 percent of calories they had measured in the farming village of Tanushimaru thirty-five years earlier, to 22 percent of calories. “There have been progressive increases in consumption of meats,fish and shellfish and milk,” they reported. Mean cholesterol levels rose in the community from 150 mg/dl to nearly 190 mg/dl, which is only 6 percent lower than the average American values (202 mg/dl as of 2004). Yet this change went along with a “remarkable reduction” in the incidence of strokes and no change in the incidence of heart disease. In fact, the chance that a Japanese man of any particular age would die of heart disease had steadily diminished since 1970. “It is suggested that dietary changes in Tanushimaru in the last thirty years have contributed to the prevention of cardiovascular disease,” Koga and his colleagues concluded."
References:
Keys in the 1950s on Japanese men: Keys 1957. The Seven Countries Study: Keys 1980:86; Keys et al. 1994. Japan in the 1990s: Koga et al. 1994 (“…progressive increases…,” “remarkable reduction,” and “It is suggested…”). Average American cholesterol values: National Center for Health Statistics 2006.
Koga, Y., R. Hashimoto, H. Adachi, M. Tsuruta, H. Tashiro, and H. Toshima. 1994. “Recent Trends in Cardiovascular Disease and Risk Factors in the Seven Countries Study: Japan.” In Lessons for Science from the Seven Countries Study, ed. H. Toshima, Y. Koga, and H. Blackburn. Tokyo: Springer-Verlag, 63–74.
Moreover, Keys' work on the Japanese failed to take into consideration sugar intake. At the time, sugar consumption in Japan was low- under 40 pounds per capita. Ditto with Crete and Corfu, which had only two dietary surveys to back up his assertions: Keys' survey, and a Rockefeller Foundation study from 1947. Rockefeller said sugar consumption was 10 pounds a year, while Keys' pegged it at 16 pounds a year.
In total, most of the work in this field fails to take into account sugar intake, blaming fats instead. (Interestingly, the much-vaunted "China Study" placed a negative correlation between intake of dietary fats and heart disease.) Similarly, concepts that removal of dietary fat during rationing for World War II causing decreases in heart attacks during rationing are more likely attributable to rationing of sugar and refined flour instead- not to mention increases in physical activity (gas rationing) and weight loss (reduction in total calories consumed).
The idea that sugar might be responsible lapsed into a coma until the 1970s, when Yudkin's (widely panned) book on the subject came out. It's taken another quarter of a century before the American Heart Association finally said that, er, maybe we'd better cut back on the sugar. The times are slow to change; the risk of trans fats were first identified by 1956, but continued to use them- supposing that saturated fats were dangerous- and by 1957, use of margarine had exceeded that of butter, with the American Heart Association pushing it all the way (up until the 1970s, when studies showed the polyunsaturated fats increased the risk of cancer in lab animals).
So, it's taken more than 40 years for the message to get out that trans fats need to be removed from food, and the AHA didn't even give the American public an apology. Now the Harvard School of Public Health tells us that:
"It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences."
That's from "Types of Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review" (Hu et al., Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 20(1): 5-19.
From that same study: only two studies have found a correlation between sat fat and CHD, while many more have not. Moreover, only one study has found "a significant inverse correlation between polyunsaturated fat intake and CHD."
So, hey. Do what you want. But the current thinking is that the lipid hypothesis is dead. Lots of work still to be done in this area, and don't expect it to go away without a battle- not so long as the American Heart Association is paid $50,000 for the rights for breakfast cereal companies to slap their "Heart Healthy" okie-dokie on boxes of sugary breakfast cereal simply because they use whole grains.
-AJ
Nathan McCorkle
>
> That's from "Types of Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review" (Hu et al., Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 20(1): 5-19.
>
> From that same study: only two studies have found a correlation between sat fat and CHD, while many more have not. Moreover, only one study has found "a significant inverse correlation between polyunsaturated fat intake and CHD."
>
Why does the abstract and "Teaching Points" of that paper say "Results
from epidemiologic studies and controlled clinical trials have
indicated that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat is more
effective in lowering risk of CHD than simply reducing total fat
consumption. "
Are you saying that sat fat is worse or better than unsat??? Do I
really need to give up the oils I have been dreaming of? Lard for
cookies, coconut butter, milk butter??? I usually cook with olive oil,
sunflower oil, and less often corn/canola/soybean oil. I want to live
long, but lard cookies and cakes, well, my roommate and I have been
dreaming of baking with it for the past few weeks, and yesterday I
asked a vendor at the public market when he's rendering some pig fat
to sell... how do I decide? Time is critical, I can be making bad
decisions at any moment (and God, I am really trying to get off the
sugar, its difficult tho for sure).
>
> So, hey. Do what you want. But the current thinking is that the lipid hypothesis is dead. Lots of work still to be done in this area, and don't expect it to go away without a battle- not so long as the American Heart Association is paid $50,000 for the rights for breakfast cereal companies to slap their "Heart Healthy" okie-dokie on boxes of sugary breakfast cereal simply because they use whole grains.
>
> -AJ
>
>
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Aaron Hicks
Why does the abstract and "Teaching Points" of that paper say "Results
from epidemiologic studies and controlled clinical trials have
indicated that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat is more
effective in lowering risk of CHD than simply reducing total fat
consumption. "
A very good question. The body notes this:
"Despite the long-standing interest in the diet-heart hypothesis, the number of cohort studies that have directly addressed associations between dietary fat intake and risk of CHD is surprisingly small and the results are not consistent. A significant positive association between saturated fat intake and risk of CHD was found in two studies [5,6], but not in others [7–13]. A significant inverse association between polyunsaturated fat intake and CHD was found in only one study [11], but not in others [7–10,12,13]. The interpretation of these findings is complicated by small study size, inadequate dietary assessment, incomplete adjustment for intake of total energy, failure to account for trans isomers of unsaturated fats and lack of control for intakes of other types of fat and other components of diet."
In short, everyone's happy to say sat fat is bad, replacing sat fat with unsat fat is good, and leaves it at that. Unfortunately, the empirical data to back up this assertion are lacking. The emperor not wearing his clothes and all that.
Are you saying that sat fat is worse or better than unsat??? Do I
really need to give up the oils I have been dreaming of? Lard for
cookies, coconut butter, milk butter??? I usually cook with olive oil,
sunflower oil, and less often corn/canola/soybean oil. I want to live
long, but lard cookies and cakes, well, my roommate and I have been
dreaming of baking with it for the past few weeks, and yesterday I
asked a vendor at the public market when he's rendering some pig fat
to sell... how do I decide? Time is critical, I can be making bad
decisions at any moment (and God, I am really trying to get off the
sugar, its difficult tho for sure).
Diet and health is a miasma; there are few clear-cut statements (save for that trans fats are bad), and almost every assertion that can be made about diet and health can be countered by the "wisdom" imparted by someone else. Ultimately, I would opine that the next most clear-cut assertion would be that sugar is bad (particularly high fructose corn syrup), but you already know that. A very good question to ask would be what would happen on a high sat fat diet that was relatively low in carbohydrates, preferably in conjunction with lots of vitamin D, and few grains- preferably no grains that were not fermented.
Ultimately, you have to make your own decisions. I would recommend some heavy-duty reading, including:
Fat of the Land, Vilhjamur Stefansson (1960)- I have this as .pdf if anyone wants it. Stefansson followed a low-carb diet his entire life; he died at the age of 82. His widow just died in December.
In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan (2009). Much of this book is available for reading through Google Books.
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, 2008.
Life Without Bread, Dr. Wolfgang Lutz (2000). Lutz is pretty straightforward in his recommendation: no more than 72 g/day total carbohydrates. Lutz was born in 1913; he's still alive.
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Dr. Weston Price, available as an e-book here:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html
http://www.menshealth.com/men/health/heart-disease/saturated-fat/article/a03ddd2eaab85110VgnVCM10000013281eac/4
An additional recommendation: get more omega 3 fatty acids. The omega 6 to omega 3 ratio in red meat is very high due to the manner in which factory farmed meats is produced. That's not good. If you can get grass-fed red meat, do so. Ditto with poultry: stuff that feeds on insects (versus grain) is probably a better approach than factory farmed fowl. This can be adjusted somewhat through consumption of fish oil, as well as eggs from chickens fed flaxseed.
-AJ
Cathal Garvey
When it comes to Omega 3s, I was reading up on this the night before last a lot.
My reading suggested a few things of interest. Fundamental to the whole literature was that DHA is pretty much essential for everything, and humans are really awful (particularly among animals) at making their own, due to having evolved to depend on a diet rich in fish-derived oils.
So the standard idea here is then to eat lots of fish for good health. *Not so*. Nevermind the fact that fish globally are going extinct rapidly, getting your oil from fish is exposing you to bucketloads of dioxins and mercury.
I personally recommend V-pure: http://www.v-pure.com/
Their DHA/EPA supplements are algally derived, and as they point out themselves this is where the fish get their DHA in any case. This sort of growth encourages development in algal culture, which suits us as DIY biologists, doesn't pressure fish stocks like farmed or wild fishing practices, and doesn't come with a host of modern oceanic contaminants.
Now for an interesting tidbit that I think might catch Bryan's eye (given he mentioned he was interested in modifying musculature):
Apparently the more metabolically active the cell, the more DHA is incorporated into the cell membrane and mitochondria; the increased fluidity helps cell action potentials recover more quickly and helps the cells to churn out loads of ATP. An interesting point in case was the wing musculature of birds: apparently the DHA content of their cell membranes and mitochondria is far higher than normal for vertebrate muscles. So that's how they do it!
Returning to waay back in this conversation re:rancidification however, it seems we meet a point of compromise. Although unsaturates are not given to rancidification in the digestive tract or on the cell membranes in vivo, it seems that their exposure to highly reactive oxygen molecules near active mitochondria *does* oxidise them badly; they turn into potent free radicals themselves.
This means two things: to keep your mitochondria and cells happy, you have to firstly replace that DHA, and secondly neutralise those antioxidants. You could just *not* eat DHA as suggested earlier, but since it's practically impossible to make de novo and seeing as it's essential for effective brain action potentials and muscle recovery, you're making a much worse problem for yourself in terms of general health.
Aaron Hicks
So the standard idea here is then to eat lots of fish for good health. *Not so*. Nevermind the fact that fish globally are going extinct rapidly, getting your oil from fish is exposing you to bucketloads of dioxins and mercury.
Agreed that it is doing the fish no favors, but "molecularly distilled" fish oil has become the industry standard, touting the stuff is free of dioxins and heavy metals to below detection limits by third parties at some very low level- 5 ppb for mercury, single-digit part per trillion for dioxins and furans.
-AJ
Cathal Garvey
![Mega [Andreas Stuermer]'s profile photo](http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a-/ALV-UjUNVm1hB8tAcAAFPeCKG7sAAOMXtiGvFTd7NEBaHFgxRcdy1Lnb=s40-c)
Mega [Andreas Stuermer]
That was the experiment. If you are doing this large scale, (maybe radiation-assisted) you would select for beneficial mutations.
Let's assume after x generation average lifespan will be 400 days. Then the "rendez-vous" will take place on day 380.
John Griessen
>
> Wouldn't that be worth a shot?
in any generalizable way? We don't seem to have any view of that -- the general
meaning of specific genes.
Matthew Harbowy
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John Griessen
> if you leave male rats in a cage together past their "puberty", they will eat each other.
Mega [Andreas Stuermer]
How about whole genome seq?
Cathal Garvey
Leave a few people in a cage with nothing to do for a while and they
might kill each other, too..
Twitter: @onetruecathal, @formabiolabs
Phone: +353876363185
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John Griessen
> Leave a few people in a cage with nothing to do for a while and they
> might kill each other, too..
and selective breeding could be done by just letting them have some offspring while young,
and selecting only the cruise/nursing home offspring for the longevity boost.
It could turn into menopause selectivity before advanced age.
Mega [Andreas Stuermer]
>and selective breeding could be done by just letting them have some offspring while young,
>and selecting only the cruise/nursing home offspring for the longevity boost.
Millions of years ago, mammals were nothing but tiny rats. Frequently predated by amphibians and dinosaurs.
Katherine Gordon
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