nootrope's Blog

Healthy smoothie life

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 06:43:00 +0000

Life continues!

Although in many ways I'm quite healthy (knock on wood), and looking at Facebook pictures of my classmates from high school and college, I find they often look a decade plus older than I am--in some ways too being a health nut might not be ultimately so healthy. It could be a way of postponing my life. Instead of seizing the day, I just live to see another day, which I might seize instead of this one. Still, it could be that this day wasn't made for seizing, the time isn't right... yet. And there are classmates who've gotten married and had kids and then... died, of cancer. (The latest news shows that cancer can strike randomly, and environment, including diet and exercise, has only a secondary effect. Still, I act on what's in my control.)

I have a blender now and have smoothies in the morning. Now I'm doing away with a liquid "base" for the smoothie, other than water. I used to use soy milk, or coconut milk, or almond milk. Better to save the calories. I'm using pea protein mixes now, as berry antixodants compete with milk proteins. So: water, pea protein, wild blueberries, ground flax seeds. Lately some astragalus root powder. Also sometimes chia seeds, wheat germ (for versions of vitamin E), and some more exotic berries I can get frozen from an international market: black courants, sea buckthorn. Sometimes acai, pomegranate, blackberries, strawberries, or mango. Sometimes I mix in some frozen greens.

I eat a lot of natto too. And I've been making a lot of asparagus sauted in olive oil with a little garlic and some mushrooms. Asparagus has some very beneficial fiber in it. I tried Jerusalem artichoke (or "sunchoke") but it was so bland I couldn't keep up the habit of eating it. Another food I've struggled to make a habit is raw fresh rosemary leaf. I'm steaming a lot of artichokes, which I then dip in olive oil. I provide my gut with probiotics and prebiotics and try to use diet to cut down on inflammation.

It's very important to use REAL olive oil. I used to use a lot of the imported Italian olive oil, but a lot of that is fake, or adulterated. Eating a lot of safflower oil is not the path to health. So I've been using a lot of California olive oil, or even closer to home (but more expensive) artisan olive oil from the state I'm living in now.

One supplement I added to my rotation is shilajit (the Jarrow brand is standardized to fulvic acid). At first I had a boost in subjective well-being, but I've been a bit more down lately, and may try something else instead. All the cool kids and Dr. Sinclair are now into this nicotinamide riboside stuff. Perhaps I'll try that in the future.

Being a thoughtful kind of guy, and being in academia, I'm pretty far from a Trump supporter. So I've been a little down since the election (though I wasn't fully on board with Hillary either). It's been harder to bring myself to the gym. I'm forcing myself to get back in the habit.

Still alive!

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 07:31:00 +0000

I'm still alive, really I am! I wrote a great and extensive blog entry here some time ago, but my computer crashed before I could post it. I don't really remember the exact details of that lost brilliance! I'm about to go to bed, so I'll make this fairly brief.

That experiment with a ketogenic diet I tried a couple of summers ago only lasted for that summer. Now I'm trying intermittent fasting on weekends. I'm still, knock on wood, fairly healthy.

One peak of the time I haven't reported on is a visit to India about a year ago. That's where some of my favorite supplements (ashwagandha in particular) come from. The college that hosted me had some research groups that were studying particular ayurvedic herbal remedies.

Though they fed me a little too well there! I was mostly successful in working off that delicious Indian food at the gym. Through practicing some "reverse pyramidal training" (lifting more and more repetitions of lighter and lighter weights each "set") I'm pretty muscular. I've started to add in deadlifts to my routine. Sometimes I'll do a long cardio workout too, or a short and intense one. With a heavy teaching load and research projects (tenured professor) I think I approach the gym without much discipline (or at least the discipline of a fitness athlete), because it's an area of life where I'm not required to meet external deadlines and goals. Still, for 48 years old, I'm in pretty good shape.

No further problems with bipolar disorder. Sometimes I take a miniscule amount of lithium (it has general health benefits), but ashwagandha is my usual bulwark against mood problems. The CPAP helps too with sleep. I don't use it all the time, but that's better than nothing. I'll usually use it about 4 hours a night. Fewer hours of sleep with the CPAP are worth a greater number of hours with poor sleep without the CPAP.

Recent supplement experiments:

*Krill oil, reputed to be better in some ways (warding off depression, various blood markers) than regular fish oil, also contains astaxanthin, the red antioxidant pigment that gives salmon their color. I tried two month-supply bottles but haven't replenished since then.

*Apple cider vinegar. This is my current tinkering. Diluted with water, it's supposed to have multiple health benefits.

*Lemon balm. Supposed to be a calming nootropic.

*L-Citruline. Supposed to be a good supplement for athletic training.

*I have a bag of a pine bark extract I ordered from Amazon, much cheaper than certified pycnogenol. I'm not noticing as clear effects from the second bag (usually shinier hair that goes along with blocking response to dihydrotestosterone or DHT). Perhaps the quality has been reduced.

*Black seed and black seed oil. Apparently this remedy has been popular in the middle east for more than a thousand years. I was intrigued that it had some efficacy against toxoplasmosis, the parasite spread, among other pathways, by cats. I grew up with cats, though I don't know whether I have the parasite.

Trying a Keto Diet

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 02:20:00 +0000

I am trying on a ketogenic diet for the first time. I'm about a week into it.

My bipolar disorder came back for a bit--it had been about 7 years in remission--and I was hospitalized for a week and a half. There may have been outside factors that pushed me over--and then I think I became a lot worse once I became hospitalized and separated from my CPAP machine. I have severe sleep apnea and the doctors in the hospital were behind the times in realizing the strong effect of apnea, and its resultant sleep deprivation--on mental health.

I was able to turn the situation to some benefit, in that I now have a prescription for lithium carbonate, which has some life-extending and neuroprotection properties. With health insurance it's cheaper than the less-studied lithium orotate or lithium aspartate I would get over the counter. I've already cut down to a very low dose so it's not going to slow me down.

So I was feeling a need for some kind of change in my life. Thus the keto experiment. I'd also read on some forum some people describe a keto diet as the strongest nootropic they'd ever tried. That intrigued me. I knew such diets (in which carbohydrates are reduced to a minimum, forcing the body to get its energy by converting fats to ketones) were of benefit in cases of epilepsy, and there is some overlap between epilepsy and bipolar disorder. In fact, one time I had my brainwaves measured and they told me they were similar to those of a person with temporal lobe epilepsy between seizures. So maybe this diet may be of benefit to both my mood and smarts.

I'm finding it's pretty easy to eat lots of healthy vegetables on this diet, as long as they are the green leafy kind of vegetable. My go-to meal now is this: melt two tablespoons of butter, a tablespoon of coconut oil, and put in some curry powder (or freshly chopped turmeric and ginger, with cumin and coriander powders), together with a mix of garlic, shallots, and green onions. Then add in some mushrooms, and then some frozen leafy vegetables: spinach, turnip greens, kale, and/or collard greens, some herbs (sage, chives, or oregano), and some broccoli. Toss in a can of sardines or anchovies (I don't think the risk of bisphenol-A is that great, and these high-omega-3 fish are low in mercury). Salt liberally (lithium treatment requires one not take a low-salt diet!) Then when it's ready, mix in a tablespoon of sour cream, a tablespoon of olive oil, a teaspoon of toasted sesame oil, and half an avocado.

I got some "ketone strips" for checking the urine for ketone content and so far I'm mostly in the "moderate ketone level" category.

This week I've been surprised about how long I can now go between meals without snacking, and how full I feel. I might be experiencing a little less energy for exercise though. Some have said there is a period of adjustment to a ketogenic diet.

* * *

It's strange how diets go in cycles. I haven't come around to the belief that a high-fat diet is always good, or what our distant ancestors would have eaten. I'm just experimenting. Maybe it's easier to experiment in this way when others are eating high fat diets too, so I'm not completely going against the grain (or, wait a minute, I am! literally!)

When I was in graduate school, low-fat was all the craze. The China Study had concluded that a diet high in vegetables and rice and low in meat was best. Now that study has come in for a lot of criticism. This is when grains were at the base of the food pyramid. I had a colleague in grad school, a real fitness buff, whose father was a nutritionist, who told me very seriously that fat should be stripped down to the lowest levels possible in the diet, 5 percent of calories, or so.

I read about Gary Taubes, who rants about carbohydrates and grains being the cause of obesity, and I think he has gone too far in the other direction. Instead of dispelling new dogmas, I think he's more in search of the old time religion of his youth, when higher fat diets were common. We focus on issues that are too narrow: insulin! Gut bacteria! Antioxidants! Caveman food we evolved for! But their real life interaction is too complicated for such sloganeering.

I am trying on a high-fat diet but it's not with an illusion that it's superior for either weight loss or health in general. In the high carbohydrate 90s I was slender--though of course I was younger--one neighbor called me to my housemate "the thin man." I was vegetarian then, and now I'm eating bacon and grass-fed beef to boost my saturated fats. I will eventually come to a conclusion on what works for me. It's just that for now I've decided to take that risk of change and experimentation.

I have more to say about life extension in general and my life, but I should get some exercise and sleep!

Human Enhancement at Shakespeare's 450th Birthday

Wed, 23 Apr 2014 19:22:00 +0000

Shakespeare turns 450 this April 23. I'd already been thinking about him. Why? Well, here we often talk about "nootropics" and "transhumanism" and the singularity and--well, to use a Shakesperian phrase--the Brave New World that our technology is ushering in, and the people who will be in it. We see ads online for "lumosity", a company offering brain games to make us smarter; we play Mozart to toddlers because of a poorly proven "Mozart effect". We want to enhance. But our vision of that enhancement is often limited. It's more kind of the sleek enhancement of a machine. Shakespeare represents to me a vision of a fully rounded human intelligence, truly enhanced in all human dimensions. Not a google glass-wearing cyborg who can call up wikipedia facts instantaneously, but someone with superior empathy, imagination, and wit.

So what lessons does the well-rounded genius of the Bard have to offer us? First, that there is something to be said for the simple and crude processing power of cognition--but only as a prerequisite. Obviously, Shakespeare had to be smart in conventional ways, at least, to write what he did, to work with structures such as iambic pentameter and the sonnet form. He had to have a terrific associative memory to fit in all the wordplay. Second, I wouldn't be surprised if Shakespeare at times enhanced his creativity with the mind-altering technologies of his time: his plays are full of characters getting drunk, specifically Fallstaff with his cheap "sack". He seems to have been very aware of the folk-medicinal values of many herbs: Ophelia in Hamlet says, "Rosemary, that's for remembrance." I've even read that digging through his yard has revealed some pipes with residues of some modern recreational drugs. Did those inspire some of his verbal flights of fancy? Again, whatever role such might have played seems as if it would only work given superior gifts in the first place and their successful development.

After I started writing this I saw a similar take here: http://www.salon.com/2014/04/23/shakespeare_on_drugs_the_secret_narcotic_history_of_the_worlds_greatest_playwright_partner/

One other crucial factor of course must be Shakespeare's embedding in his society. He had rival playwrites, collaborators, a theater troupe to perform his plays, and a diverse audience that appreciated both low humor and high philosophy. Obviously not everyone of his time and situation created on his level, and yet just as obviously many periods of human history, even though by chance one might expect harbored potential Shakespeares, did not deliver any. A crucial part of what made Shakespeare who he was must have been that he not only wrote plays but performed in them. He knew what worked with audiences and what did not. Similarly Mozart and Beethoven were both performers and creators.

In a world in which everyone were artificially enhanced, would a society congenial to a Shakespeare result? To be so broad-minded as the Bard you'd need to know and have imaginative sympathy with both simpletons (Bottom) and scheming aristocrats; gravediggers and drunkards and homeless wanderers and bookish sages and starry-eyed youth and the ruthlessly ambitious and powerful old men losing their grip.

I don't know the answer; but sometimes it's hard to repeat by design what was never designed in the first place.

Public service, ashwagandha and oxygen

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 21:24:00 +0000

A bit of a public service announcement: Our interest in life extension here is mostly an individual thing or an interest in advancing the frontiers. Progress also needs to be made in making more widely available medical and nutritional advances to developing countries. For example, this charity came to my attention:

www.vitaminangels.org

I don't mean this to be a grim call to duty--after all the site came to my attention through a Facebook note from the beautiful girl in high school who all the guys had a crush on.

I'm always reminded that the advance of humanity depends on the advance of all of us. This guy was in the news recently:

Srinivasa Ramanujan, Indian peasant boy who was such a math genius that even now his guesses are being turned into discoveries with fundamental applications.

These days we're used to thinking of progress as the inevitable result of historical forces. The singularity will result from Moore's Law, not through anything individual people do. It has a momentum of its own. Inventions begat inventions, and we are only the hosts of progress-memes, increasingly to be discarded as computers themselves begin to at least seem to innovate.

But individuals do matter... Economist Paul Krugman admits that his motivation for becoming a social scientist was Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilology, science fiction novels that posited a predictive science of how a society would develop. Yet in the novels, those predictions were derailed by a single person with mutant abilities.

With the problems presented by a world increasing from a population of 7 billion it's important to build on the abilities present in that huge population. Perhaps through nootropics we can augment our intelligence a bit, but those in advanced economies can also augment the lives of some of those 7 billion; like karma those benefits could redound to us.

Another unrelated thought: a publication last month indicates that ashwagandha can help ameliorate memory impairment from oxygen deprivation. I was wondering whether this was part of why it was so helpful for me. With a new diagnosis of sleep apnea, it could be that the ashwagandha was protecting my brain from the oxygen deprivation resulting from the 60 times an hour my breathing was interrupted during sleep.

Or perhaps not entirely unrelated: another important note of modesty is that not only do we have medical benefits to spread to the rest of the world, but also ancient traditions such as ashwagandha of ayurvedic medicine (which I suppose Ramanujan must have sampled) are of benefit.

Healthy Life Update

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 04:53:00 +0000

What's new with me? I have a girlfriend. She's 8 years younger (I'm now 45), an impressive person with an exotic background. That she's a high energy extrovert means I need regular down time on my own. I hope she doesn't resent that. I'm still working hard towards tenure. Living in a town in which I use a car instead of a bicycle, and overwhelmed with grading, I end up eating too much and exercising too little. I weigh about 25 pounds more than I'd like to. Some of the added weight may be muscle (using creatine regularly, I'm now bench pressing 100 pound dumbells in each arm for 6 repetitions). I'm using my CPAP machine, but not as much as I should. I'd been using it an average of 4 hours a night but I need to bring that up to the full night.

I still have a full head of hair with only a few wisps of grey in my beard. When I look at photos of myself, or my reflection in the mirror, I think I look more mature now but in a good way. I see pictures of myself in my 20s and 30s and see a self a little more adrift. Sometimes may gaze was distant and unfocused (perhaps from the lithium I was taking--now thanks to maturity, the CPAP machine, or my herbal regimen, it appears I no longer need such medications). I may have a bit of a crow's foot by one eye. Maybe the extra weight, together with some aging, adds some gravitas. I think our society is more forgiving signs of aging in men than women.

My latest healthy obsession is consuming a variety of carotenes and anthocyanins. I've been drinking saffron tea regularly (it's not really all that expensive compared, say, with drinking tea at a cafe), and with the season eating a lot of winter squash and pumpkin. Studies show it's not actually being sun-tanned that's generally found most attractive (at least for light-skinned people) but a slight orange hue from carotenes in the diet. And these compounds have benefits for vision and for the brain as well as skin. Anthocyanins, which are common in berries, can be had without calorie cost by making purple corn tea, or Chinese black rice tea. I think studies show that while berries benefit the brain, eating a variety of berries is of even more benefit. So I try to get a variety of anthocyanins.

One of these days I'm going to try vinpocentine again. Looking back at the time when I took it, I realize I had some good insights then. I think someone on the forum here bad-mouthed it so I stayed away. But it may be worth another try.

still alive

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 01:59:00 +0000

Hey, I'm still alive! All I have to do is keep doing this, forever, and I'll be immortal!

Before I review my supplement, exercise, and nutrition experiments I thought I'd review a movie I saw last night whose central themes are relevant to this site: Darren Aranofsky's "The Fountain."

As you can see from the image above, it is visually sumptuous. Three levels of plot: one, the story of a Spanish conquistador searching for the fabled Tree of Life (Fountain of Youth), another, the story of a medical researcher trying to find a cure for cancer while his wife is dying of it, and the final plot level, illustrated above, the conquistador/medical researcher (both played by Hugh Jackman--either the researcher is the reincarnation of the conquistador or the conquistador is from the novel his wife is writing) floats in the Mayan afterlife towards a dying star (actually in the film, the Orion Nebula).

So it is a little confusing, but I enjoyed it. I felt strange that during breaks from watching this film all about the issue of immortality, I was skimming Longecity.org, and when Hugh Jackman finally got to drink from The Fountain that gives everlasting life, I was taking a sip of green tea.

Of course, as most fiction about the quest for immortality, in the end it cops out and suggests that we're better off just focusing on the here and now and achieving some kind of higher plane metaphorical immortality by becoming fertilizer for flowers. (Heck, I can produce natural fertilizer while I live--why would I have to die to do that?)

I've also been reading this fascinating book about the Americas, pre-Columbus:

The common tie is that The Fountain deals extensively with the legend of a Fountain of Youth in the Americas, and also the fascination with the Mayas and their view of the afterlife. Some New Agers even now are freaked out about the Mayan calendar supposedly ending at the year 2012. Still, the early inhabitants of the Americas were really fascinating. Among other things, they bred corn (maize), which is unique among grains for its high yield and also for the dramatic difference between the modern form and whatever wild forms it must have been bred from. (The husk prevents modern maize from spreading on its own.)

For a week or two I was consciously watching the food I ate that came from the Americas: corn, quinoa, some chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, tomatoes, beans, squash, peppers, purple potatoes, avacadoes, chocolate. I disagree with the paleo advocates who say these foods are not healthy because they were not eaten while our species evolved over 100,000 years in Africa. (Neither do I have any native American ancestry--new evidence suggests that the Americas may have been inhabited for as long as 30,000 years.)

Why? For one, not only have we evolved to eat certain foods, but we have also, on shorter time scales, performed artificial selection on our foods to make them parts of a nutritious diet. We were not "meant" to eat corn? Well, we meant to make corn something we could eat. Another argument is that many foods all over the world are distantly related, and produce similar phytochemicals and macronutrients. If grapes are good for us, why not the native muscadine grapes? Still another argument: in many cases humans have discovered that plants were edible by watching animals eat them. Certainly what's good for one animal may be bad or poisonous or indigestible to another (we don't have the stomachs cows have!) but for example, fruit, which spread by animals it benefits, may also be of benefit to other animals.

Americas aside, even in Europe and Asia, prior to the arrival of modern humans, Neandertals and Denisovians were shaping the landscape, spreading fruits and grains they ate. And how does one account for what "we" have evolved to eat when many of us have some Neandertal or Denisovan ancestry?

Though in my experiment with a "diet from the Americas" I may have had too much corn -- genetically modified corn may be a bad thing! http://ergo-log.com/...ricans-fat.html

* * *

Life and medical issues... Thanks to reading the forums here, I think I solved my indigestion / GERD problem. I started out with some triphala and then got a large supply of limonene, which I think really did the trick.

As far as the sleep apnea -- I got myself tested and I DO have SEVERE sleep apnea! I have a BPAP machine (CPAP is Continuous Positive Airway Pressure; BPAP or bi-CPAP has different air pressure during inhalation and exhalation). I wonder if sleep apnea was the underlying cause of my bipolar disorder? Both can run in families. Perhaps epidemiologically some fraction of bipolar disorders are really sleep apneas? (One therapist told me I was "The calmest bipolar person off meds" she had ever seen.)

My apnea - hyponea index is around 60. Perhaps poor sleep is one reason why I have gained about 10-15 pounds in the past year.

Diet, Supplements

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 02:04:00 +0000

Here's one staple of my diet I like to think is particularly healthy:

I make a meal centered on a mixture of lentils, split peas, and semi-grains. The nutrition pendulum has swung away from grains, since the "food pyramid" of last decade over-emphasized them. But I think legumes like lentils and peas should be at the center of any diet to promote longevity, given that the longest-lived peoples in the world tend to be great legume consumers. What I do is:

Start boiling some water, add lentils and split peas. If I have a grain or semi-grain I want to mix in that takes a long time to cook (wild rice), then I add it at the start too. I'm pretty generous with adding spices too, as spices such as cumin and turmeric can be incredible sources of cancer-fighting chemicals (see for example the links in the World's Healthiest Foods site). I add in about 6 cloves of garlic and one carrot, sliced. When the lentils and peas are about half-cooked, 20 minutes in, I add the semi-grains: quinoia (not really a grain--red or black quinoia for extra phytochemicals), buckwheat (in the toasted form of kasha), sometimes black "forbidden" rice. This is also a good stage at which to add some salt. I only add sliced beets at the very end (they will also color the rest of the mix). Beets are a good source of TMG (trimethyl-glycine) and also uridine monophosphate, good for the brain. I cook until all the water is boiled away and all the lentils, peas, and grains are tender, usually a total of 30-40 minutes.

Then I'll top a plate of this stuff with a teaspoon of nutritional yeast, a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, some balsamic vinegar, and perhaps anchovies (high in omega-3 fatty acids yet low in heavy metals).

Another staple is oatmeal with ground flax seed, cinnamon, pecans and walnuts, dates, wild blueberries, coconut oil, honey, and either pieces of dark chocolate or cacao nibs.

I get greens mostly from frozen ethnic meals these days: spanakopita or saag paneer.

* * *

Some supplement experiments I hadn't reported on previously:

Pterostilbene is a substance I had been very excited about, and only last summer did supplements appear on the market with high doses created synthetically. This stuff is similar to resveratrol, which was widely touted by Dr. Sinclair at Harvard as a mimetic of calorie restriction. Pterostilbene, however, was found particularly in wild blueberries, which had been shown to delay the decline in mental functioning of lab animals. So I was pretty excited about the possibility of taking large doses of this regularly.

However, during the time I was taking pterostilbene I also had frequent colds. The dose is many times higher than one could ever get from berries. I've also read the criticism that the benefits of resveratrol and calorie restriction only appear for lab animals that are not exposed to the same kinds of pathogens they might encounter in the wild. Calorie restriction / resveratrol may only improve health under pristine laboratory conditions.

Now I'm trying some chlorella. There are apparently two different species of this algae used as nutritional supplements and I'm trying each. I'd tried some earlier without noticing that sometimes one or the other species was included. Particularly because I read that my mutation in the MTHFR methylation gene (C677T) leads to problems dealing with heavy metals that could be ameliorated with chlorella supplementation.

* * *

I'm still looking to lose some weight, in the hope that this will help me sleep better at night. I have some concern I could have sleep apnea, and carrying extra weight is a risk for this (it makes it harder to keep one's airway clear for breathing). I've gained 10-20 pounds in the last year, as I've moved to a part of the country where I can no longer walk around town to meet my needs--instead I need to drive a car. So like most Americans, I'm now packing a little extra weight. I tried a combination of quercetin and fo-ti (contains stilbenes similar to resveratrol but cheaper) combined with a focus on cardio workouts. At least my waist size seems to be shrinking, through slowly.

I assure the reader that it's not the carb-heavy legume staples I eat that have added to my weight: more likely it's the indulgence in cheap Vietnamese Pho soup with lots of red meat cuts that I should swear off in the interests of health and longevity!

For help sleeping, I'm relying on ashwagandha, melatonin, relora (magnolia bark extract), holy basil, and MindCare (which contains bacopa, ashwagandha, and gotu kola, among other herbs). When I need to perform on little sleep, I take some rhodiola. Lots of herbs with many potential interactions? Sure. But these herbs are mostly on the calming/adaptogen/reduce cortisol side of things, and many have been in common use for centuries.

My mental health, knock on wood, has continued to be quite good, to the extent that I don't think people would suspect it's ever been anything other than good. As long as one's able to have some self-objectivity, I think self-experimentation can go a long distance. Doctor supervised treatments themselves I think are still in a dark age. They are still trial-and-error, still perform rarely above placebo. In the gym last night I saw news coverage of some very prominent mental-health lapses: both the young guy who popularized the anti-Kony video (Kony is an African warlord who uses child soldiers) and the American soldier in Afghanistan who massacred whole families after several stressful tours of duty including a head injury. Anyway, I wonder whether not only these people didn't get needed help, but that any help they got may have been counterproductive. Ayurvedic herbs like ashwagandha seem like light sabers, health weapons from a more civilized time, compared with the blasters of medicines developed by modern pharmaceuticals.

Update

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:33:00 +0000

I've had a couple of birthdays since I last posted here. 44 years in to my hoped for long life, and still experimenting with "nootropic" improvements to my ways of thinking and feeling.

The basics of my life now: I'm employed as a tenure-track professor. It's a small university and not one as prestigious as those I'd taught at temporarily earlier. Yet it's not only good to be on the track towards job security in these precarious times, but I'm also in a position to make a difference to my students. I feel more of a whole person when I survey my field and interact daily with people instead of research only a narrow specialty. Wish I had more time for my own projects though!

In terms of my health: my schedule and new geography have made it harder to keep going to the gym regularly. I'm not in nearly as good shape I was in before. I'm still muscular but I've gained a modest amount of weight (about 10 pounds). I get nervous when swamped by exams to grade, lectures to prepare, and long-distance research collaborations, and then it's harder to get to sleep.

I'm still on the adaptogens. Ashwagandha, either from Banyan Botanicals, or as sensoril. (I had a Relora (magnolia bark extract) and L-theonine supplement I picked up cheap for a while). Still the usual cordyceps, reishi, schisandra, sometimes ginseng, sometimes ginkgo, sometimes bacopa, etc. Mostly I have in my mind "good stuff that's helped me" and I cycle a large fraction of this into use at any one time. I also try not to get too carried away. I added Royal Jelly at some point to that list of good stuff, following some positive articles in ergo-log.com.

I have a doctor's appointment in a week. Been a while since I had a physical. There are a couple of health issues I have: last summer I nearly choked on a bay leaf (what kind of restaurant puts those in a burrito where you can't see them?) and now, perhaps as a consequence, I have digestion problems (I self-diagnose as GERD). I aso wonder whether I have sleep apnea. Last vacation, I kept falling asleep during the day and then my parents or brother would tell me I was snoring really loudly.

I'm thinking of swinging back a bit towards pisco-vegetarianism and away from the paleo approaches. Instead of supplementing with fish oil, I eat a huge amount of fish: sushi, mussels (cheap, environmentally ok, nutritious), sometimes burritos of packaged salmon nuked with a little parmesean cheese and some leftover greens. While I've drifted from low-fat vegan approaches (not enough B12, amino acids like carnitine and carnosine), I have these problems with paleo (even based on grass-fed beef):

Why don't more anthropologists and archaeologists support paleo diets? Most of them who blog on the internet seem to hold the approach in disrepute.
In support of paleo, it's said that when hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists, markers of health and lifespan worsened. But some of this was from the repetitive unhealthy means of securing grains (grinding, inhaling flour dust, etc.) in contrast to the cardio exercise of hunting. Some of it was not just from the foods of agriculturalists but from the lack of variety, and often in generations after people adopted a grain-based diet, the health markers improved again, as through trade and wider cultivation a better diet was achieved.
Maybe our direct ancestors came out of Africa, but now we're finding near-relative hominids lived throughout Europe and Asia too. Neanderthals didn't just eat meat either: they had both variants for the gene for bitter taste perception of vegetables.
I think some "paleo" enthusiasts have a narrow idea of how evolution "optimizes" organisms.

Thanks, ThankYou... Slate... Dual n-back again...

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 04:49:00 +0000

My membership here expired but someone with the appropriate user name ThankYou bought a couple of months' membership for me. Thanks, ThankYou!

Slate online magazine has been running a series of articles on life extension, aging, and immortality.

I made another try at dual n-back tests, interactive memory tests that are reputed to improve measures of fluid intelligence. The results were interesting: my score shot up a lot faster than it did the first time. I think I was able to recall the "trick" my mind settled on: imagine a snake going through the grid with the letters on its back, and then as each letter is called out, compare with the tail, add it to the head, and consciously try to forget the old tail. Also interesting is that after my score peaked, it fell back a bit. Perhaps I was getting bored with it? Here's a graph comparing my first run last year (asterisks) with my most recent run (+ signs):

Other than that, how are things going in my life--and my attempts to improve things by means of supplements, diet, and exercise?

Well, I got my Dr. to re-prescribe synthroid. My TSH level was 3.3, and 0.5-5.0 is the normal range, but I think I function better with extra thyroid. The 20 years I was on lithium probably had some permanent effects on my thyroid functioning.

I was a little concerned to read here, too, that a popular supplement I've been taking may cause the thyroid to become resistant to Thyroid Stimulating Hormone. Carnitine is the problem substance, and it's incorporated into Acetyl L-Carnitine.

I have some good prospects for employment: either tenure-track or part-time. Tenure-track I'd be in the fast lane, but wondering if I have the stamina and energy--and extraversion--to keep up. Part-time I'd have income, no gap on my resume (in the midst of this Great Recession) and while I wouldn't have prestige and lots of disposable income by which to improve and attract attention, I could continue the introverted seeking.

Not sure how well the introverted seeking is working out now though. Sometimes I get a little depressed. I tried cardio workouts of 1-2 hours daily and that helped for a bit. Maybe my mind, at 42, isn't up to making the great intellectual accomplishments I once dreamed about. Maybe the dreaming is fun but the accomplishing is taking more work, or more painful wandering in the dark, than I'd like.

Maybe I just need to nudge myself a bit to see the big picture and work with wisdom and intelligence. Add bacopa back in to the mix of supplements. A July, 2010 placebo controlled double-blind study shows it truly does improve the aging memory, though my memory is certainly not the weak link in my mental processing.

Other supplements: the usual ashwagandha, though I take a week off each month. Schisandra berries. Lots of tea, and one cup of coffee a day usually. A little red wine. Lots of fish with omega-3s (the green tea may counteract possible problems with mercury). Sometimes reishi or cordyceps, but I'm off them for now.

The stray gray hairs in my beard bother me but only a tiny bit--funny reading the excellent blog Inhuman Experiment which seems so well put together and balanced, and yet it spends entry after entry about experiments on supplements to reverse hair-loss. Vanity of vanities, we are a vain species! Too much hair in the wrong places we worry about, and then not enough in the right places. (Not to even mention the obsessions with skin color as a matter of race and then with tanning...) But I do feel a little sense of loss noting the gray: it marks me as being older, though one can't really notice now except from up close.