Measured, Managed

After a single drink, you think: I can still drive safely.

After two or three drinks, you think: I’m getting drunk, I probably shouldn’t drive.

After four or five drinks, you think: wait, I can totally still drive!

Obviously, five drinks in, you’re drunk as a skunk. But your ability to perceive that has declined alongside all of your other cognitive abilities. That’s why, despite all of the national campaigns against the real danger of driving drunk, about 20% of US drivers do it every year.

Our brains lie to us all the time, in large part because they so quickly adapt to novel stimuli. What at first seems out of the ordinary quickly becomes the new normal. And once we acclimate, our subjective self-evaluations are basically crap.

Consider something many of us do, like multi-tasking. Perhaps you tell yourself that you’re good at it, that you’re practiced at flitting seamlessly from one focus to the next, that you can effectively handle multiple things at the same time.

Turns out, you’re wrong. Not only has a growing body of research shown that we’re terrible multitaskers, it’s also shown that we’re terrible at knowing how bad we are at it. In one great Stanford study, researchers even found that the better people thought they were at multitasking, the worse they actually performed on multitasked tests.

Or consider sleep, where many of us have convinced ourselves that we can get by fine on less than seven or eight hours a night.

In another great study, researchers took well-rested subjects, then reduced their sleep from eight to six hours a night. After a single sleepless night, the subjects performed less well on cognitive tasks, but they also knew that their performance had declined. In fact, for the first three days, performance continued to drop daily, though subjects also correctly assessed their worsening mental states.

But by the fourth day, things changed. Subjects didn’t get better at the tests; in fact, from that point on, performance continued to drop. But people completely lost the ability to tell that it did. They reported to researchers that they felt fine, believing that they’d returned to solid performance, even as their test results continued to go down the toilet.

So what’s the moral of the story? If you can’t trust your brain, you need to trust objective measures instead. Testing blood alcohol content, or even just counting drinks, is more useful than seeing if you feel buzzed. Start tracking the number of hours you sleep. Do workouts where you can measure performance changes over time. Log the time you spend on deep, focused work versus responding to emails and wrangling small, seemingly urgent tasks. In short, start quantifying yourself; it’s the only way to know what’s really happening in your life.

May 24, 2016

High and Dry

Like many people, I wasn’t particularly surprised by a recent, much-reported study demonstrating that a Dyson Airblade hand-dryer basically does the same thing that every hand-dryer does: blow all kinds of germs back onto your hands. (Though, in the case of the Dyson, it does manage to blow those germs at impressive velocity.)

The study did, however, remind me of this great TED talk, about how to dry your hands using a paper towel:

Like the previously-blogged Bloomberg video on how to tie your shoes, this hand drying thing has stuck with me ever since, as it really works.

April 25, 2016

Real Food

I got a few emails in the wake of Monday’s blog post on farmers’ market shopping saying, ‘but I take lots of vitamins! Shouldn’t that make up for the reduced vitamin-load in the foods I buy at the grocery store?’

Short answer: no.

Allow me to take you a further step down the food industry / nutrition rabbit hole.

First, to kick things off, you need to know a little about micro-nutrients, or essential vitamins and minerals. There’s scientific consensus on this full official list:

First, there are water-soluble vitamins:
– Biotin (vitamin B7)
– Folic acid (folate, vitamin B9)
– Niacin (vitamin B3)
– Pantothenic acid (vitamin B5)
– Riboflavin (vitamin B2)
– Thiamin (vitamin B1)
– Vitamin B6
– Vitamin B12
– Vitamin C

Then you have the fat-soluble vitamins:
– Vitamin A
– Vitamin D
– Vitamin E
– Vitamin K

You have the major minerals:
– Calcium
– Chloride
– Magnesium
– Phosphorus
– Potassium
– Sodium
– Sulfur

And you have the trace minerals:
– Chromium
– Copper
– Fluoride
– Iodine
– Iron
– Manganese
– Molybdenum
– Selenium
– Zinc

So how did the scientific establishment come up with this list?

Basically, these are things that, if you leave them out of a rat’s diet, the rat dies. That’s how we deemed them essential.

But wait, you might be saying. Couldn’t there be other vitamins that are important, that lead to serious problems if we omit them, but don’t actually lead to death? I mean, there a lots of terrible things that can happen to you short of actually dying.

And, in fact, you’d be totally right.

For example, we know that if you don’t eat enough Lutein and Zeaxanthin, you’ll get macular degeneration and go blind. But, hey! At least you’re still alive!

As a result of their absence not killing you, even though most of us prefer to be able to see things, Lutein and Zeaxanthin aren’t officially vitamins, and don’t appear on any RDA list.

And those are just two of more than 600 carotenoids, all of which are just as likely to be biologically important, as are any number of other types of compounds found in foods. Micronutrient triage theory still a fairly new field of research, and there’s lots we don’t know.

Which is, in short, the problem with just taking vitamins instead of eating fresh foods, as well as the problem with making fake, industrial foods.

Michael Pollan has written about the idea of ‘nutritionism,’ the dominant paradigm in the food industry that sees foods as essentially reducible to the sum of their nutrient parts. By that approach, you can break foods down into their constituent nutrients, and then package them back together into something new, with no ill effects. In fact, sometimes the ‘new food’ is even better than what you started with. A protein bar is super healthy, right?

Unfortunately, it turns out we actually suck at that kind of disassembling and re-assembling, most likely because we wildly underestimate the number of things (like the aforementioned Lutein and Zeaxanthin) we lose in the process, things that are hugely important but we just don’t know about yet.

Consider a version of this problem that you probably already know about: baby formula. Breast-feeding (or pumping) is difficult and time-consuming. So, since 1867 (and “Liebig’s Soluble Food for Babies”), we’ve been trying to make a commercially-available replacement. By now, formula is an $8 billion global market. Each year, companies spend unfathomable amounts of money on R&D, trying to improve just that one single food. And, even so, it still sucks. Kids raised on the most cutting-edge formula still fare less well than those breast-fed real milk.

In other words, even after we’ve focused literally a century and a half of heavily funded nutritionism efforts on a single food, we still can’t make that food as good as the original.

In which case, what are the odds that your Egg Beaters are actually healthier than a couple of fresh eggs?

That one’s not rhetorical, because we actually know the odds are zero. It turns out, if you feed rats a diet of just eggs, they live long and healthy lives. Whereas rats in the same study who were fed just Egg Beaters died after three or four weeks.

To recap: we clearly have no idea about all the important stuff food contains. So eating ‘designed’ foods is clearly a terrible idea. Instead, eat real foods. Eat a variety of them. Eat foods that can go bad, and eat them before they do. Try and get them as fresh as you can, because that’s when they have more of the stuff that we still don’t really know about but you clearly need to have a long and happy and healthy life.

Bon appetite.

March 16, 2016

How You Like Them Apples

I am, by nature, a very skeptical person. Which comes in handy in the fitness and nutrition worlds, where ardently-claimed but scientifically-bankrupt stupidity abounds.

That’s why, though I grew up in the Bay Area, even at one point attended a summer camp where we had to ‘thank the spirit of the water’ each time we flushed the toilet, I’ve long been skeptical of the whole ‘farm to table’ movement.

I’d written off a lot of the appeal as hipster nonsense – the twee fetishizing of the ’craftsmen’ ethos. Sure, buying at a farmer’s market allows you to vicariously live a small slice of the farmers’ neo-luddite life. But farmers’ market food is, well, still just food.

Turns out, I was totally wrong.

Over the last few months, I’ve been spending more time learning about the mechanics of the global food production system, and its impact on the nutrition of what we eat.

Consider an apple. You see them, year-round, in large piles at every grocery store. Appealingly glossy, perfectly ripe, available organically-raised in an endless array of varieties.

But here’s something you probably don’t think about when you see them: those apples are old. Really, really old.

In fact, on average, the apples in your grocery store, whether organic or not, were picked ten months ago. Then they were stored in extreme cold for months and months. Cold generated using a mix of gasses that are so toxic that produce workers intermittently die just from going in to the apple storage freezers with a leak in their protective gear.

And even if that gas doesn’t permeate the apple itself, the effects of time certainly do.

By the time you pick that apple off your grocery store shelf, it has less than 10% of the micro-nutrient content than it did a week after it was plucked. In other words, we spend huge amounts of money converting a vitamin-packed healthy snack into a empty-calorie sugar bomb.

So, what can you do? That’s where farmer’s markets come in. The food you’re buying there this week was, on average, picked within the last two weeks. Which, when it comes to nutritional content, is a world of difference. Plus it tastes better, too. And, in most cases, it even costs less than the stuff you can find in-store.

So, it appears, I’ve circled back to my hippy roots after all. I’ve resolved to shop for more produce (and meat and cheese and more) at my local farmer’s market this year. You can find ones near you with this handy USDA tool, and I’d encourage you to do the same.

March 14, 2016

Accumulate / Disperse

Recently, I’ve been reading The Book of Life, an online philosophy textbook by The School of Life. In short, the book is about “developing emotional intelligence through the help of culture.” As they put it:

We address such issues as how to find fulfilling work, how to master the art of relationships, how to understand one’s past, how to achieve calm and how better to understand, and where necessary change, the world. You will never be cornered by dogma, but we will direct you towards a variety of ideas from the humanities – from philosophy to literature, psychology to the visual arts – ideas that will exercise, stimulate and expand your mind.

Some of their content is stronger than other parts. But, if nothing else, it’s given me considerable food for thought.

This weekend, I read their article on “What Good Business Should Be.” It argues, among other points, that we should do good through accumulation, rather than just through dispersal:

The standard trajectory of philanthropy is: acquire a fortune by rigorous means and then disperse it to good causes. Plutocrats like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick or Andrew Mellon made money in so-called ‘low’ areas of the economy like coal mining, railways, abattoirs, and packing factories – areas where you squeeze costs as tightly as you can and are always looking to reduce benefits as much as possible. However, once the money is in the bank, these rich people wholeheartedly turn their attention to ‘higher’ causes – among which art (and all that it celebrates, like kindness, beauty and tenderness) looms especially large.

It’s not ideal to ignore the higher needs of mankind for many decades while pulling together an astonishing fortune and then, later in life, suddenly to rediscover these higher needs via an act of immense generosity towards some localised little shrine of art (an opera house or a museum). Would it not be better and truer to the values underlying many works of art, to strive throughout the course of one’s life, especially within the money-generating day-job, to make kindness, tenderness, sympathy and beauty more alive and real in the world?

Tantalisingly and tragically, the difference between beauty and ugliness, goodness and cruelty is in most enterprises a few percentage points of profit. Therefore, for the sake of just a tiny bit of surplus wealth, wealth that isn’t strictly even needed, human life is daily being degraded and sacrificed.

It would be more humane if rich business people agreed to sacrifice a little of their surplus wealth in their main area of activity and in the most vigorous period of their lives, in order to render the workplace more noble and humane – and then bothered less with dazzling displays of artistic philanthropy in their later decades?

What we’re asking for is enlightened investment where a lower return is sought on capital in the name of Kindness and Goodness. There would be less fancy art at the end of it, but the values within works of art would be far more widely spread across the earth. The true test is how much goodness is done in the process of accumulation.

In the real world, the most effective philanthropists seem to embody the accumulate-then-disperse model. Consider Bill Gates, who in his Microsoft days was a step away from Monty Burns, yet who now runs arguably the most impactful nonprofit in history. And, on the other side, companies like Tom’s. Sure, they donate a pair of shoes for each pair they sell. But I often suspect that the net result is a large marketing boost, but only a very small external positive impact. It’s good through accumulation, sure, but a rather limited good.

Still, business good by accumulation is a different thing when it permeates every aspect of operations, rather than being simply bolted on the side of each purchase. Companies whose products or services themselves actually make consumers’ lives better, while also providing a livable wage to the employees – domestically and abroad – throughout their business and supply-chain.

For that kind of good business, the real driver remains in the hands of consumers. You can buy ethically-raised, locally-sourced beef, for example, that’s far healthier than factory-farmed steaks, and supports a sustainable nearby farm business, rather than a global food-manufacturing consortium. But most of us would rather save a few dollars at the register, even if we know the cheaper beef hurts us and our world more than the pricier farm-raised option. So, as The School of Life argues, there’s real need for education, for making consumers think more about their choices. Which, at some level, is what the Book of Life is about itself.

As I said, I don’t agree with everything I’ve read thus far. But I don’t begrudge the time spent reading any of it. Consider checking it out.

March 7, 2016

Word

When I was a kid, my father would constantly use slang he’d picked up from my brother, me and our friends. Slang that was, inevitably, about three years out of date.

Now in my mid-30’s, I understand. I have no organic tie to what the cool kids are saying. But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on trying to keep a finger on the pop culture language pulse. Thanks to the internet, even old white guys can figure out what words are happening right now. And with 2016 upon us, it’s a good chance to take a look at what to say – and what not to say – if you want to look like you have a clue. In other words, bae, if you’re still using ‘on fleek’, your squad is going to look pretty basic. (Equally done: YAS, I might be turnt but I can’t even with all the feels.)

To start the year off right, here are 12 words that are au courant:

1. Snatched.

The new ‘on fleek.’

“Have you seen Tina yet? Her new haircut is snatched!”

2. Lit

Awesome.

“Just made it to Tom’s house; the party is lit.”

3. Boots

An intensifier added to the end of a verb or adjective.

“I haven’t eaten all day and I’m hungry boots.”

4. Sis

The new bro.

“Sis, you going to the show tomorrow?”

5. Cancel

To reject something.

“Should I but these shoes?”
“Cancel.”

6. Keep It

The opposite of ‘cancel’: approved.

“I just updated my profile pic.”
“Keep it.”

7. Hunty

The new ‘squad.’

“Sarah’s hunties are the best.”

8. Fam

Also like squad, but singular; a member of your group.

“He forgot your birthday? Fam, you need to DTMFA.”

(Side note: DTFMA, though not new, is evergreen, thanks to the inimitable Dan Savage. ‘Dump the motherfucker already.’)

9. Savage

Hardcore.

“I think she drank the entire bottle of tequila last night. It was savage.”

10. Goals AF

Outgrowth of squad goals, plus abbreviation of ‘as fuck’, meaning something you want.

“Did you see Joe’s new car? Goals AF.”

11. Extra

Try-hard.

“She put on makeup to go to yoga. So extra.”

12. Netflix and Chill

This one’s on the cusp of tipping from new to tired, but it’s having a second life as essentially an ironic version of itself. Come over and hook up.

“Hey baby, want to Netflix and chill tonight?”

Nota bene: if your game is strong, go with “Amazon and anal” instead.

January 11, 2016

Delicious

Though I’ve now spent more of my life on the East Coast than the West, as a Bay Area native, I have a special spot in my heart for the Golden Gate Bridge. So I was particularly happy to see this morning’s [Writer’s Almanac newsletter](http://writersalmanac.org) note that construction of the bridge began on this day in 1933. And I was even happier to learn that the bridge is painted International Orange.

Previously, I knew about International Orange only from my youth of marine biology internships, as the US Navy (followed in turn by a slew of ocean-related product manufacturers) made the color their official standard for life vests, wetsuit color striping, and general safety use.

It was a few decades after that standard went into use that icthyologists started investigating color perception and preference in sharks. And, basically, there was only one color that sharks were strongly attracted to.

Ever since then, International Orange has also been known as Yum Yum Yellow.

If you’re windsurfing the Bay, I wouldn’t get too close to the bridge.

January 5, 2016

Tested

Recently, I’ve been considering getting a PhD in Evolutionary Psychology as a side-project. At the intersection of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology, it’s a fast-changing field that also draws in part from animal psychology, anthropology, artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, economics, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy. Or, in short, basically everything I’m interested in, all rolled into one.

So, as a first step in that project, I’ve started studying for the GRE, the first time I’ve had to seriously face off with a standardized test in a decade and a half. Fortunately, standardized tests are totally my bag. But, on the math side at least, they also depend on a fair amount of knowledge that I haven’t had to dredge up from the recesses of my brain for nearly a decade or two.

Ask me to calculate the volume of a sphere, and my conscious mind reaches back to thoughts so old that they feel like they’re being read from microfiche. Even so, it turns out “V=4/3πr^3” is tucked down there somewhere. It’s just slow as molasses bringing it back.

Hence the studying, and the re-learning of high school math from scratch. Sure, once I take the test, that knowledge will once again quickly descend into the unused and unplumbed depths. But, at least for the moment, if you need to know how many chocolates Alan has when Betty has four more than half as many and Susan has two less than twice what Alan has, I’m definitely your go-to guy.

November 13, 2015

Family Meal

A University of Michigan report that examined how American children spent their time between 1981 and 1997 discovered that “the amount of time children spent eating meals at home was the single biggest predictor of better academic achievement and fewer behavioral problems. Mealtime was more influential than time spent in school, studying, attending religious services, or playing sports.”

November 1, 2015

Chorus

It’s amazing how big of an impact small improvements can make in your life.

Considering it’s just ten bucks, the SoundBot HD Shower Speaker sounds remarkably good, and has transformed an otherwise fairly forgettable ten minutes of my day into an off-key sing-along that invariably brightens my mood.

Apologies to my dogs who are forced to hear it, but there’s nothing like belting terrible, terrible Top 50 pop to start the day on the right foot. Selena Gomez, look out.

October 21, 2015