Health

Ethical diets

Posted by Peter on January 8, 2015
Posted in: Health, Politics. Tagged: , .

I’ve seen some discussion of whether effective altruists have an obligation to be vegan or vegetarian.

The carnivores appear to underestimate the long-term effects of their actions. I see a nontrivial chance that we’re headed toward a society in which humans are less powerful than some other group of agents. This could result from slow AGI takeoff producing a heterogeneous society of superhuman agents. Or there could be a long period in which the world is dominated by ems before de novo AGI becomes possible. Establishing ethical (and maybe legal) rules that protect less powerful agents may influence how AGIs treat humans or how high-speed ems treat low-speed ems and biological humans [0]. A one in a billion chance that I can alter this would be worth some of my attention. There are probably other similar ways that an expanding circle of ethical concern can benefit future people.

I see very real costs to adopting an ethical diet, but it seems implausible that EAs are merely choosing alternate ways of being altruistic. How much does it cost MealSquares customers to occasionally bemoan MealSquares use of products from apparently factory-farmed animals? Instead, it seems like EAs have some tendency to actively raise the status of MealSquares [1].

I don’t find it useful to compare a more ethical diet to GiveWell donations for my personal choices, because I expect my costs to be mostly inconveniences, and the marginal value of my time seems small [2], with little fungibility between them.

I’m reluctant to adopt a vegan diet due to the difficulty of evaluating the health effects and due to the difficulty of evaluating whether it would mean fewer animals living lives that they’d prefer to nonexistence.

But there’s little dispute that most factory-farmed animals are much less happy than pasture-raised animals. And everything I know about the nutritional differences suggests that avoiding factory-farmed animals improves my health [3].

I plan not to worry about factory-farmed invertebrates for now (shrimp, oysters, insects), partly because some of the harmful factory-farm practices such as confining animals to cages not much bigger than the animals in question aren’t likely with animals that small.

So my diet will consist of vegan food plus shellfish, insects, wild-caught fish, pasture-raised birds/mammals (and their eggs/whey/butter). I will assume vertebrate animals are raised in cruel conditions unless they’re clearly marked as wild-caught, grass-fed, or pasture-raised [4].

I’ve made enough changes to my diet for health reasons that this won’t require large changes. I already eat at home mostly, and the biggest change to that part of my diet will involve replacing QuestBars with a home-made version using whey protein from grass-fed cows (my experiments so far indicate it’s inconvenient and hard to get a decent texture). I also have some uncertainty about pork belly [5] – the pasture-raised version I’ve tried didn’t seem as good, but that might be because I didn’t know it needed to be sliced very thin.

My main concern is large social gatherings. It has taken me a good deal of willpower to stick to a healthy diet under those conditions, and I expect it to take more willpower to observe ethical constraints.

A 100% pure diet would be much harder for me to achieve than an almost pure diet, and it takes some time for me to shift my habits. So for this year I plan to estimate how many calories I eat that don’t fit this diet, and aim to keep that less than 120 calories per month (about 0.2%) [6]. I’ll re-examine the specifics of this plan next Jan 1.

Does anyone know a convenient name for my planned diet?

footnotes

0. With no one agent able to conquer the world, it’s costly for a single agent to repudiate an existing rule. A homogeneous group of superhuman agents might coordinate to overcome this, but with heterogeneous agents the coordination costs may matter.

1. I bought 3 orders of MealSquares, but have stopped buying for now. If they sell a version whose animal products are ethically produced (which I’m guessing would cost $50/order more), I’ll resume buying them occasionally.

2. The average financial value of my time is unusually high, but I often have trouble estimating whether spending more time earning money has positive or negative financial results. I expect financial concerns will be more important to many people.

3 With the probable exception of factory-farmed insects, oysters, and maybe other shellfish.

4. In most restaurants, this will limit me to vegan food and shellfish.

5. Pork belly is unsliced bacon without the harm caused by smoking.

6. Yes, I’ll have some incentive to fudge those estimates. My experience from tracking food for health reasons suggests possible errors of 25%. That’s not too bad compared to other risks such as lack of willpower.

Poor Economics

Posted by Peter on December 10, 2014
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics, Health. Tagged: .

Book review: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo.

This book gives an interesting perspective on the obstacles to fixing poverty in the developing world. They criticize both Jeffrey Sach and William Easterly for overstating how easy/hard it is provide useful aid to the poor by attempting simple and sweeping generalizations, where Banerjee and Duflo want us to look carefully at evidence from mostly small-scale interventions which sometimes produce decent results.

They describe a few randomized controlled trials, but apparently there aren’t enough of those to occupy a full book, so they spend more time on less rigorous evidence of counter-intuitive ways that aid programs can fail.

They portray the poor as mostly rational and rarely making choices that are clearly stupid given the information that is readily available to them. But their cognitive abilities are sometimes suboptimal due to mediocre nutrition, disease, and/or stress from financial risks. Relieving any of those problems can sometimes enable them to become more productive workers.

The book advocates mild paternalism in the form of nudging weakly held beliefs about health-related questions where people can’t easily observe the results (e.g. vaccination, iodine supplementation), but probably not birth control (the poor generally choose how many children to have, although there are complex issues influencing those choices). They point out that the main reason people in developed countries make better health choices is due to better defaults, not more intelligence. I wish they’d gone a bit farther and speculated about how many of our current health practices will look pointlessly harmful to more advanced societies.

They give a lukewarm endorsement of microcredit, showing that it needs to be inflexible to avoid high default rates, and only provides small benefits overall. Most of the poor would be better off with a salaried job than borrowing money to run a shaky business.

The book fits in well with Givewell’s approach.

The Depths

Posted by Peter on August 25, 2014
Posted in: Book Reviews, Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic, by Johnathan Rottenberg.

This book presents a clear explanation of why the basic outlines of depression look like an evolutionary adaptation to problems such as famine or humiliation. But he ignores many features that still puzzle me. Evolution seems unlikely to select for suicide. Why does loss of a child cause depression rather than some higher-energy negative emotion? What influences the breadth of learned helplessness?

He claims depression has been increasing over the last generation or so, but the evidence he presents can easily be explained by increased willingness to admit to and diagnose depression. He has at least one idea why it’s increasing (increased pressure to be happy), but I can come up with ideas that have the opposite effect (e.g. increased ease of finding a group where one can fit in).

Much of the book has little to do with the origins of depression, and is dominated by descriptions of and anecdotes about how depression works.

He spends a fair amount of time talking about the frequently overlooked late stages of depression recovery, where antidepressants aren’t much use and people can easily fall back into depression.

The book includes a bit of self-help advice to use positive psychology, and to not rely on drugs for much more than an initial nudge in the right direction.

Folate

Posted by Peter on August 14, 2014
Posted in: Health. Tagged: .

I recently tried larger-than-normal methylfolate supplements. I had known that my genes caused problems with processing folate (MTHFR T/T), but hadn’t noticed any effects from supplementing at 800mcg/day.

Due to a report that several milligrams/day helped with depression, I changed from 400mcg/day to 2mg/day. I felt like my mind started working better within hours (although I haven’t seen much change in behavior). I saw a clear and large improvement in my heart rate variability starting after one day.

I’ve experimented for 5 weeks randomly altering my dose from 1 to 3 mg/day. On the week when I switched from 3 to 1 mg, my mood slowly got worse. I felt much better withing hours of switching back to 3 mg. I haven’t noticed any clear difference between 2 and 3mg.

Crickets

Posted by Peter on July 17, 2014
Posted in: Health. Tagged: .

I finally found a way to buy insects in enough quantity to satisfy my desire for nutrition from insects: World Ento, which sells dried crickets and cricket flour at a price per gram of protein comparable to seafood. (H/T Holden Karnofsky.)

According to Organic Value Recovery Solutions, crickets have impressive amounts of the nutrients I’ve found the hardest to get good amounts of. Here are examples of how much I’d get if I got my 2000 calories a day from crickets:

  • B12: 20 times the RDA (more than 3 times that of eggs)
  • Folate: 5 times the RDA (3 times that of eggs)
  • Zinc: 9 times the RDA (5 times that of eggs)

(using data for eggs from pastured chickens).

They have plenty of fiber and good amounts of most minerals and B vitamins.

The cricket flour tastes ok in brownies, but I’ll want some other recipe for regular use.

Update 2015-01-05: ThailandUnique has a better selection of insects. My favorite so far is the Big Cricket.

Ambronite

Posted by Peter on June 2, 2014
Posted in: Health. Tagged: .

Yet another soylent competitor has appeared: Ambronite.

It’s higher quality and high price than Soylent or MealSquares. It has more B12 than MealSquares even though it’s vegan.

It’s low enough in saturated fat that I probably want to add an additional source of saturated fat to my diet, but that’s a nice problem to have – I’d want to add chocolate anyway. My biggest reservation is the high level of polyunsaturated fat – if I could get a version without the walnuts I’d probably be satisfied there.

Most ingredients look like what our ancestors evolved to eat, but the first two ingredients listed are oats and rice protein.

Nutritional Meals

Posted by Peter on March 21, 2014
Posted in: Health. Tagged: .

I’ve been thinking more about convenient, healthy alternatives to Soylent or MealSquares that are closer to the kind of food we’ve evolved to eat.

Here’s some food that exceeds the recommended daily intake of most vitamins and minerals with only about 1300 calories (leaving room for less healthy snacks):

  • 4 bags of Brad’s Raw Chips, Indian
  • 1.5 bags of Brad’s Raw Chips, Sweet Pepper
  • 6 crackers, Lydia’s Green Crackers (vitamin E)
  • 1 oz Atlantic oysters (B12, zinc) (one 3 oz tin every 3 days)
  • 1 brazil nut (selenium)

Caveats: I’m unsure how accurately I estimated the nutrition in the processed foods (I made guesses based on the list of ingredients).

This diet has little vitamin D (which I expect to get from supplements and sun).

It’s slightly low in calcium, sodium, B12, and saturated fat. I consider it important to get more B12 from other animal sources (sardines, salmon or pastured eggs). I’m not concerned about the calcium or sodium because this diet would provide more than hunter-gathers got and because I don’t have much trouble getting more from other food. And it’s hard not to get more saturated fat from other foods I like (e.g. chocolate).

I don’t know whether it has enough iodine, so when I’m not having much fish it’s probably good to add a little seaweed (I’m careful to avoid the common kinds that have added oil that’s been subjected to questionable processing).

It has just barely 100% of vitamin E, B3, and B5 (in practice I get more of those from eggs and sweet potatoes).

It’s possibly too high in omega-3 (10+ grams?) from flax seeds in the Raw Chips (my estimate here is more uncertain than with the other nutrients).

The only convenient way to get oysters that keep well and don’t need preparation is cans of smoked oysters, and smoking seems to be an unhealthy way to process food.

Note that I chose this list without trying to make it affordable, and it ended up costing about $50 per day. I don’t plan to spend that much unless I become too busy to cook cheaper foods such as sweet potatoes, mushrooms, bean sprouts, fish, and eggs.

In practice, I’ve been relying more on Questbars for convenient food, but I’m trying to cut down on those as I eat more Brad’s Raw Chips.

Quantified Self Conference

Posted by Peter on October 15, 2013
Posted in: Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

The Quantified Self 2013 Global Conference attracted many interesting people.

There were lots of new devices to measure the usual things more easily or to integrate multiple kinds of data.

Airo is an ambitious attempt to detect a wide variety of things, including food via sensing metabolites.

TellSpec plans to detect food nutrients and allergens through Raman spectroscopy.

OMsignal has a t-shirt with embedded sensors.

The M1nd should enable users to find more connections and spurious correlations between electromagnetic fields and health.

Ios is becoming a more important platform for trendy tools. As an Android user who wants to stick to devices with a large screen and traditional keyboard, I feel a bit left out.

The Human Locomotome Project is an ambitious attempt to produce an accurate and easy to measure biomarker of aging, using accelerometer data from devices such as FitBit. They’re measuring something that was previously not well measured, but there doesn’t appear to be any easy way to tell whether that information is valuable.

The hug brigade that was at last year’s conference (led by Paul Grasshoff?) was missing this year.

Attempts to attract a critical mass to the QS Forum seem to be having little effect.

More Ancestral Diet Evidence

Posted by Peter on June 24, 2013
Posted in: Health. Tagged: , .

There was a large shift in our ancestors diet about 3.5 million years ago to food derived from grasses and/or sedges. This has potentially important implications for what diet we’re adapted to. Unfortunately, the evidence isn’t specific enough to be very useful:

The isotope method cannot distinguish what parts of grasses and sedges human ancestors ate – leaves, stems, seeds and-or underground storage organs such as roots or rhizomes. The method also can’t determine when human ancestors began getting much of their grass by eating grass-eating insects or meat from grazing animals.

Paleofantasy

Posted by Peter on April 26, 2013
Posted in: Book Reviews, Health. Tagged: , , .

Book review: Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live, by Marlene Zuk

This book refutes some myths about what would happen if we adopted the lifestyle of some imaginary hunter-gather ancestor who some imagine was perfectly adapted to his environment.

I’m a bit disappointed that it isn’t as provocative as the hype around it suggested. It mostly just points out that there’s no single environment that we’re adapted to, plus uncertainty about what our ancestors’ lifestyle was.

She spends a good deal of the book demonstrating what ought to be the well-known fact that we’re still evolving and have partly adapted to an agricultural lifestyle. A more surprising point is that we still have problems stemming from not yet having fully evolved to be land animals rather than fish (e.g. hiccups).

She provides a reference to a study disputing the widely held belief that the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer made people less healthy.

She cites evidence that humans haven’t evolved much adaptation to specific diets, and do about equally well on a wide variety of diets involving wild foods, so that looking at plant to animal ratios in hunter-gather diets isn’t useful.

Her practical lifestyle advice is mostly consistent with an informed guess about how we can imitate our ancestors’ lifestyle (e.g. eat less processed food), and mainly serves to counteract some of the overconfident claims of the less thoughtful paleo lifestyle promoters.