Like the other commenters here, I will miss Seth's writing. He shared so much and influenced so many others. He had both the curiosity and the courage to try crazy things and shared what he learned with the world. RIP, Seth.
Well, there are "rumors" of links between eating too much fat and cardiovascular diseases, and he was abusing butter as of late...
http://blog.sethroberts.net/2012/08/22/why-self-track-the-po...
He was well known for self experimentation and writing the book, "The Shangri-La Diet".
All those experiments start with a very restricted diet and then they start adding apples, pork.... The restricted diet consists of what is considered safe food. ( A pear for example) Double blind means that nor the participants nor the observers know which of the two groups follows the highly restricted diet. The participants are young children.
> The parents and teachers who filled in the questionnaires could not be blinded as they had to supervise the food intake of the child and knew whether the child was following an elimination diet.
Do you have a reference of a similar article with a double blind test?
Another question: Pears, apples and quinces are very related plants. Why pears are safe and apple not? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinae
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964443/
Seth Roberts: "The Growth of Personal Science: Implications for Statistics" (pdf)
http://media.sethroberts.net/blog/pdf/2012-09-24-The-Growth-...
-- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
I had the pleasure of knowing Seth personally and am deeply saddened to hear this news.
http://betabeat.com/2014/04/seth-roberts-final-column-butter...
Anyone who stakes their life on a single published meta-analysis is unwise. Anyone who puts faith in a single assessor of cardiac risk, coronary CT, is unwise. It is ironic that the most apt assessment of Seth's life and death comes from a margarine commercial popular in the 1970s: "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."
Your comments in this thread are inappropriate and untimely. We do not yet know what caused Seth's collapse, and to jump to blame his experiments because you disagree with his methods is shortsighted.
So perhaps what finally killed Seth relates not to his experimental treatments, but to whatever underlying preexisting conditions inspired him to invest such effort. Seems worth considering, anyway.
You may be right about what killed him, asshole, but how about you let his body get cold first before you start tut-tutting and wagging your finger?
http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/11/25/butter-and-arithmetic...
It happens all the time up here in Canada when people shovel snow.
"It was nice to know all that but I did wonder: Was I killing myself? Fortunately I could find out. A few months before my butter discovery, I had gotten a “heart scan” – a tomographic x-ray of my circulatory system. These scans are summarized by an Agatston score, a measure of calcification. Your Agatston score is the best predictor of whether you will have a heart attack in the next few years. After a year of eating a half stick of butter every day, I got a second heart scan. Remarkably, my Agatston score had improved (= less calcification), which is rare. Apparently my risk of a heart attack had gone down."
[1] http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=self-experimenter-free-f...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11FREAK.html?page...
I've been following his Shangri-La diet for over four years now. Here's a page about my results, although it's a bit out of date:
Then I increased cardio, stopped the diet (why? I don't recall), and proceeded to gain it back (while doing 3+ hours/week of cardio). I've tried various things with limited success and been meaning to try Shangri La again.
Personal anecdote, post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc.
(I'm going to cut my flaxseed oil consumption on the theory that it might have contributed to his death, as long as I don't hear otherwise, but there are other ways to hack the flavor-calorie association, like wearing a noseclip sometimes when you eat.)
It did however make me not hungry at all, I would barely eat throughout the day.
It caused social problems though, because at night I still wouldn't be hungry, so I would just sit there at dinner while the family ate, and they would constantly be asking if I was ok.
I stopped losing weight when I hit the set point, and stopped the diet a while after that. Eventually I gained the weight back.
Interestingly, a few years later I started exercising regularly as a way to loose weight, and now I'm once again stuck at the same set point, which is about 15 pounds more than I'd like to be. Still trying to figure out how to lower that set point.
Tried both oil and sugar water.
Following the Shangri-la forums, I notice that a lot of people lost SOME weight using his diet but practically nobody reached their ideal weight or anything near it. At best it's one tool in the toolbox, but in no way a "cure" for being overweight. I think the effect is real, and really hope somebody does more rigorous testing to figure out when and how the effect works so the diet can be made more effective/reliable/convenient, to the degree that's possible.
I am sad to see this. I only recently learned of the site. I have done my own personal health experiments and had hoped to make contact and what not, but did not get around to it. I imagine a lot of people will say his experiments killed him or believe it even if they don't say it.
I increasingly think there is no point to trying to share such info. If you die under a doctor's care, they say your condition did you in. If you die doing alternative stuff, they say the alternative stuff did you in. It seems pretty no win, in that regard.
I never knew him, yet it feels like a personal loss for me.
I get a lot of feedback from people about all kinds of projects that my work is "too niche" and only serves a tiny population. I don't think that's true at all and I am trying to figure out what I am doing wrong.
http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/07/22/google-yes-wikipedia-...
Swartz also wrote about Roberts' Shangri-La Diet on his blog, claiming that through it "losing weight has to be one of the easiest things I’ve ever done":
I think Seth Roberts was the very definition of a hacker. Not computer hacker. Hacker.
I started the diet about 5 weeks ago. The oil drinking helped to make my cravings tolerable. I quit after 2 weeks because I didn't seem to need the oil any more. My cravings have been under control since without the oil. (I've lost about 3 inches of waist. I've not measured my weight because I don't care about that. I'm feeling lighter and better than I have in about 4 years.)
I think there's value to his theory of set-points, and to the use of unflavored oil as something that breaks the brain's flavor-calorie connection. Nevertheless, I'd be severely concerned by this news if I were still on the diet, or if I were on the diet long-term.
I won't say that diet can't lead to suicide but...it was suicide for Swartz, right?
nope.gif
I don't even care about the weight loss and cardiac shit, I think I've seen enough here.
Seth did report a lot of N=very-small anecdotes uncritically. You might say he was encouraging people to do their own N=1.
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
Double-blind peer-reviewed replicable studies or GTFO.
Listen to a cardiologist trying to talk Seth out of his course, at around 11 minutes in this 2008 video:
http://www.amazon.com/Supertraining-Paperback-Yuri-Verkhosha...
A fitness buff throughout his life, so never straying far from a conventionally healthy diet in the first place, he famously doubled down on conventional wisdom and went on a low fat, vegetarian diet after suffering a heart attack at a young age. He did everything right, according to establishment wisdom. After a few years, at only 58, he died from a heart attack or stroke. Those of us who are skeptical of the diet-heart hypothesis were not surprised.
The point is, it's very easy to support a side with your favorite anecdote.
After decades of motivated science, the support for the diet-heart hypothesis is poor. Stephan Guyenet, a Ph.D. neurobiologist who studies obesity for a living, has a blog where he examines the evidence in detail. Here's a sample:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/07/diet-heart-hyp...
If you disagree, I'm sure Stephan would welcome you opening a dialogue with him in the comments on his blog. I'd be interested in that.
It seems that Mel Siff didn't follow a low fat vegetarian diet himself, based on his response to a critical article about him: (full response here: http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6558 )
Interestingly, I cannot recall anyone by the name of Glassman ever staying in the Siff household or studying me in the laboratory to examine my eating habits, so I am intrigued to know where he found this inside information. The abbreviated tale of my cardiac rehab programme (http://www.worldfitness.org/drmelsiff.html) certainly said nothing about my specific breakdown of macronutrients in my diet.
Had he read a little more carefully what I wrote, he would have noticed that my diet comprises something like 50-60% lipids (no fried foods, no transfats, no animal fat, plenty of fish) and under 30% carbohydrates (no refined carbs) and hasn't deviated much from that sort of balance for many years - I have never been a lover of high carb diets and have eaten little or no sugar (other than about 1-2 tablespoons of honey or a few servings of fruit a day). Where on earth does he obtain that nonsense from about my diet?
So, he says there he ate about 50-60% fat. It's strange though that he says "no animal fat" but plenty of fish, which is of course animal fat.
Edit: downvotes? Where is the evidence of what actually killed Seth? What makes a 'cardiologist' correct here, vs a scientist?
