For the Week of July 14

— Exclusive Leaked Documents: American Dietetic Association is Intentionally Using State Legislatures to Block Alternative Nutrition Providers and Restrict Free Speech (and a list of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ corporate sponsors).

— “Using human brain imaging, researchers have found lower dopamine (linked to reward and pleasure response) receptor levels in obese people compared to subjects in their recommended weight range.
By the same token, restricting food appears to increase dopamine receptor levels (through gene expression, of course). Mice whose food intake was limited showed higher dopamine D2 receptor levels than mice that were allowed to eat all they wanted. The better reward response your brain has, the more sensitive it is to pleasure. Consequently, you feel pleasure and motivation from lower intake of food or other rewards, and perhaps you simply learn to derive more pleasure from eating healthy foods – the foods your genes expect you to eat. If your response is dulled over time through junk food or overeating, it will take more to trip the pleasure response. This pattern clearly impacts more than weight; it’s one of long-term mental well-being and overall happiness.” (Your Brain on Junk Food, Mark’s Daily Apple)

— The same thing is true of sleep deprivation. It is also true of video games (Quote: “Computer game playing may lead to long-term changes in the reward circuitry that resemble the effects of substance dependence. The brain imaging study showed that healthy control subjects had reduced dopamine D2 receptor occupancy of 10.5% in the caudate after playing a motorbike riding computer game compared with baseline levels of binding consistent with increased release and binding to its receptors.”) Is it also be true of porn? Meanwhile, PET Scans Link Low Dopamine Levels and [unproductive expressions of] Aggression. If you find yourself numbed to feelings of pleasure (anhedonic depression) or prone to outbursts of anger, it may be that things like excess sugar, overeating, lack of regular sleep, or porn and/or video games have downregulated your dopamine levels. You may be tempted to fight the anhedonia by overindulging in these things instead, but the only way out is to resensitize yourself by enduring a period of abstinence from any or all of them. I, for one, have really vividly discovered how directly my state of mind is determined by these basic small things. I’ve reached the point where I’m tweaking them constantly because it just feels worth it.


— By the way, there is even evidence that orgasm itself, with a partner or not, can contribute to these cycles—and a growing movement who say their sex lives became better once they began avoiding orgasm and its inevitably accompanying hangovers and mood spirals. (The term: “karezza.” More)  The owner of Reuniting.info is also the author of Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships. Meanwhile, Psychologists Discover Oxytocin Receptor Gene's Link to Optimism, Self-Esteem, and "Mastery." Personally—increasing oxytocin most definitely seems to improve all three of these, for me.


— BPA exposure linked to brain tumor diagnosis. (Just three months after the FDA declined to ban the product, used in the lining of most plastics and canned foods).


— Dariush Mozaffarian, et al. “Dietary fats, carbohydrate, and progression of coronary atherosclerosis in postmenopausal women” Am J Clin Nutr November 2004 vol. 80 no. 5

Quote (from here) describing the implications of this study:

“This goes against most all conventional wisdom, but it is high levels of sugar and carbohydrates that really lead to heart disease. It may seem counter intuitive, but there is not only scientific research to back it up, but biologically plausible mechanisms to describe the pathogenesis (disease progression). To make an extremely long and complicated story short, I’ll give you an analogy to describe how saturated fat and cholesterol are not causing the heart disease: even though they are found in the “clogged arteries,” the clogging only happens in the presence of systemic inflammation.

Think of a PVC pipe. If you pour olive oil or liquid bacon grease down the tube, it will float right through without incident. You can continue to pour more and more down there and it won’t clog up, especially if you’re also sending other things down the tube that will interact with the fat to help it through.Now, take a pad of steel wool to the inside of the PVC pipe, THEN pour bacon grease down there. Then pour some more. And some more. All the nooks and crannies (inflammation) created by the steel wool is going to give the fat a place to get lodged. Once this happens, more fat is allowed to build up, and, over the course of 40 years, you can see how this could clog the PVC pipe until nothing can flow through.”

— Low Blue Lights. “Your body produces the important hormone melatonin, the so-called sleep hormone. Increasing your body’s melatonin production can improve your sleep. Melatonin is produced by your pineal gland, normally only when you are in darkness. Using artificial light in the evening before going to bed shuts down melatonin production. Blue rays in ordinary light are the problem: Only the blue component of light shuts down melatonin production. We have glasses and lights with filters that eliminate only the blue component of light. Using them for one to three hours before retiring allows melatonin to be produced naturally. While using them, the remaining colors of light allow you to read, watch television, etc.” (Their research page starts off with, “The impact of light from computer monitors on melatonin levels in college students.”)

Cheaper alternatives? A free application called F.lux will help eliminate some of your computer screen’s blue light, and darken it to boot (that’s not ideal, but it’s certainly useful). Better, Uvex S1933X Skyper Safety Eyewear looks like a much cheaper Low Blue Blight equivalent ($10 to LBL’s $70).

— Adam Kokesh takes on intellectual property. (“As Adam explains, intellectual property indeed does not help the “little guy,” it actually puts precisely the “little guy” at a severe disadvantage to corporate giants and those with the lawyers and resources to use arbitrary government intellectual property and patent laws (backed by government force, as with all laws) as a dangerous tool to reduce and/or prevent competition (and innovation).”)

— People who argue that race is only a “social construct” typically argue that this is proven by the fact that there is “more genetic variation within groups than between them.” Why it is fallacious to leap from here to the claim that race differences don’t exist at all is easy enough to demonstrate, and countless demonstrations can be found by simply searching for the phrase, “Lewontin’s Fallacy.” Suppose adult men range in height from two feet tall (midgets) to eight feet tall (giants). Suppose women range in height from two feet tall (midgets) to seven feet tall (giants). Here we have a case where there is five or six feet of variation within the sexes, and only a single foot of variation between them. Does it follow that there are no sex differences in height at all? Obviously not. Men are on average taller than women, and the total range of variation among and between men and women has no bearing whatsoever on the fact.

However, it turns out that the central claim might not even be true: Steve Hsu (professor of physics at the University of Oregon) writes, “Deep sequencing of the human genome, which reveals rare variants (here, defined as those found in fewer than 0.5 percent of the population), shows that there is actually more variation between groups than within groups. (So what you may have been taught in school is not true — sorry, that's how science works sometimes.) The figure below, from this July 6 Science article, shows that over 50 percent of rare genetic variants are found in African populations (which have greater genetic diversity) but not in European populations. About 41 percent of all rare variants are found only in Europeans and not in Africans, and only 9 percent of the variants are common to both groups.” (Razib Khan of the brilliant, top–notch site Gene Expression comments here: “One of the major takeaways is that a lot of this variation is going to be population specific. … If I read this right we may be entering into a golden age of demographic history reconstruction, as rare variants and whole-genome catalogs of a huge number of humans are going to allow us to generate a very fine-grained map of human population diversity.”)

— Here is more information on the ‘excess empathy’ theory of autism. There is also this study: “This article has outlined an account of autism as an empathy imbalance disorder. I have argued that people with autism tend to have low CE (cognitive empathy) ability but high EE (emotional empathy)sensitivity. The behavior patterns that lead to a diagnosis of autism might be generated by this imbalance. There is evidence that seems consistent with the hypothesis that people with autism have low EE sensitivity, but there is growing evidence that supports the EIH (Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis). People with autism may use avoidant patterns of attention to restrict empathic arousal, … The surfeit concept also relates well to the account of autism as an intense world syndrome characterized by hyperfunctionality and a hyperresponsive amygdala. … The central proposal of this article has been that most people with autism have a capacity for EE that outstrips their CE ability in a problematic way.” I completely relate to this description of ‘inability to process a simultaneous sense of self and other.’ I actually had that issue on the occasions I tried to talk to psychiatrists, before I started figuring things out on my own: they would ask questions, but I would be too involved in trying to analyze them and figure out what they were thinking behind the facade to, literally, so much as even think about my own issues and whatever it was I had come there for—I wasn’t the least bit embarrassed, or unwilling to give them the benefit of the doubt; I just, literally, lost my sense of self.

This especially happens in groups. Even if I’m close friends with everyone in a group, I will shut down and become silent in groups because I’m incapable of processing everything that’s happening on every level (what does he think of me and her? what does she think of me and him?) and so I just become mindblind to the entire group, unless I can single one person out and ignore everything else that’s happening. I’ve only learned to tolerably handle this, when I have to, by either acting as if I’m putting on a performance and mentally focusing only on my own self, or by focusing on one person but pretending that they want to see me interacting with the group (so that I’m then putting on a show for their sake). Anyone I’m not directly interacting with and focusing on becomes a sort of prop in my interaction with whoever I’ve singled out. You can just imagine what this meant for my personality in high school …

— “Man is always separated from what he is …. He makes himself
known to himself from the other side of the world, and he looks from the horizon
toward himself to recover his inner being.” — Jean Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness)