Sometimes I put olive oil in my bread, since it works better as pizza dough. Never was a fan of the whole “dip your bread in oil” thing, but I suppose I could give it a few more tries.
The impression I get, though, is that if I’m going to see major benefits from switching to paleo those benefits will come more from excluding grains (and going into ketosis) than from including more fats.
High quality olive oil tastes much better than the cheapest oil (even within the EVOO category), which matters a lot for dipping. Flavors differ a lot by variety: there are buttery, olivey, “fresh” herbal-tasting, and peppery oils (that’s within the spectrum of unflavored oils, obviously flavored ones differ along more dimensions).
The impression I get, though, is that if I’m going to see major benefits from switching to paleo those benefits will come more from excluding grains (and going into ketosis) than from including more fats
I’d say the opposite. There’s quitea bitof evidence that eating certain types of fats is good for your brain. I personally have found significant mental performance after eating butter or MCT oil.
Ketosis is a bit extreme in excluding carbs (especially for someone who lives on bread!) and isn’t necessary. I couldn’t measure any difference in mental performance in/out of ketosis (though there could have been subtle differences in a dimension I wasn’t measuring. I generally stay out of ketosis because when I’m in ketosis I won’t eat enough which can effect my energy levels until I force myself to eat.
Hm. Helpful! I’m guessing I should set up a simple arithmetic test like he has so I can track mental changes that way, then try adding some butter to my diet.
I’ve been using Alexei’s life tracking app, which is quite convenient for this sort of thing, if you have a droid.
Be careful with what you’re testing, and be mindful when you’re performing cognitively demanding tests. Simple arithmetic (e.g. 5+6) for the most part is a single memory look up, not actually doing math. Times for me did not really suffer much under severe sleep deprivation, though my overall performance did. MCT oil did show improvements here (by the time I started jotting numbers down I had fully incorperated dairy fat so it’s harder to test). You might want to try dual N back or something to test other dimensions.
Playing guitar has been a pretty sensitive cognitive ability sensor. Piracetam makes me noticeably faster (even to friends who see me play less than monthly), but butter doesn’t seem to speed up my absolute speed much. What it does is help me reach my top speed with sequences of notes that I’m not quite as used to playing. I’d guess that single look up arithmetic would under report the awesomeness of butter.
Agreed that it’s a simple memory look up. I think the benefit of it over dual n-back (something I’ve started but have only done a little bit) is that the practice effects are much smaller, since I’ve already heavily practiced doing simple arithmetic, whereas results with dual n-back will also show my normal learning.
But, I suppose if I’m also interested in learning speed (and I am) and not just memory speed, then that makes DNB a better choice.
I’ve got experience with serious sleep dep and have a PVT program already ready to go, but that’s really boring to use and I don’t expect it would give any interesting results when I add fat to my diet.
It’s nothing special- it runs in Ruby Shoes and I can email you the source code if it would be at all interesting. I wrote it after reading a number of papers describing sleep dep experiments that used it.
It shows a stimulus (increasing time in red in the center of a black background), then once you click in the upper left corner it waits 2-10 seconds (chosen at random) and then shows you another stimulus. This goes on for ten minutes. You get a host of reaction times (and so can watch that change) but the real value (and the reason it’s boring) is that your ability to sustain concentration drops with sleep deprivation, and so lapses (where it takes you at least twice as long as your baseline, typically .5 to .8 seconds) start showing up. They become more frequent and longer the more sleep deprived you get (at my worst, it took me about fifteen seconds to respond to a stimulus; I didn’t code it but the paper I took the parameters from had a buzzer sound if you went 30 seconds without a response). It outputs the times (absolute times of stimuli, responses, and false starts) to a text file, and I never wrote any analysis code because I considered the affiliated sleep experiment a failure.
It’s also a very good proxy for driving- it involves a lot of staring at boring, barely changing views, and then when one gets into an accident, it’s typically something that noticing it coming a half-second earlier could have helped a lot with. And so when you find that a half-second of inattention goes from a <1% of the time thing to a 5% of the time thing, you swear off the heavy machinery.
If you want a small change in a paleo direction, put butter or olive oil on your bread.
Sometimes I put olive oil in my bread, since it works better as pizza dough. Never was a fan of the whole “dip your bread in oil” thing, but I suppose I could give it a few more tries.
The impression I get, though, is that if I’m going to see major benefits from switching to paleo those benefits will come more from excluding grains (and going into ketosis) than from including more fats.
Dip your bread in oil with red pepper flakes, crushed rosemary, roasted garlic, and a little salt.
Alternative: balsamic vinegar or lemon juice.
Is that to improve the flavor (which I think it would do very nicely) or for health benefits?
Flavor. I have no relevant expertise on the health benefits, but I think all the listed items except the salt are neutral or better.
High quality olive oil tastes much better than the cheapest oil (even within the EVOO category), which matters a lot for dipping. Flavors differ a lot by variety: there are buttery, olivey, “fresh” herbal-tasting, and peppery oils (that’s within the spectrum of unflavored oils, obviously flavored ones differ along more dimensions).
I’d say the opposite. There’s quite a bit of evidence that eating certain types of fats is good for your brain. I personally have found significant mental performance after eating butter or MCT oil.
Ketosis is a bit extreme in excluding carbs (especially for someone who lives on bread!) and isn’t necessary. I couldn’t measure any difference in mental performance in/out of ketosis (though there could have been subtle differences in a dimension I wasn’t measuring. I generally stay out of ketosis because when I’m in ketosis I won’t eat enough which can effect my energy levels until I force myself to eat.
Hm. Helpful! I’m guessing I should set up a simple arithmetic test like he has so I can track mental changes that way, then try adding some butter to my diet.
I’ve been using Alexei’s life tracking app, which is quite convenient for this sort of thing, if you have a droid.
Be careful with what you’re testing, and be mindful when you’re performing cognitively demanding tests. Simple arithmetic (e.g. 5+6) for the most part is a single memory look up, not actually doing math. Times for me did not really suffer much under severe sleep deprivation, though my overall performance did. MCT oil did show improvements here (by the time I started jotting numbers down I had fully incorperated dairy fat so it’s harder to test). You might want to try dual N back or something to test other dimensions.
Playing guitar has been a pretty sensitive cognitive ability sensor. Piracetam makes me noticeably faster (even to friends who see me play less than monthly), but butter doesn’t seem to speed up my absolute speed much. What it does is help me reach my top speed with sequences of notes that I’m not quite as used to playing. I’d guess that single look up arithmetic would under report the awesomeness of butter.
Agreed that it’s a simple memory look up. I think the benefit of it over dual n-back (something I’ve started but have only done a little bit) is that the practice effects are much smaller, since I’ve already heavily practiced doing simple arithmetic, whereas results with dual n-back will also show my normal learning.
But, I suppose if I’m also interested in learning speed (and I am) and not just memory speed, then that makes DNB a better choice.
I’ve got experience with serious sleep dep and have a PVT program already ready to go, but that’s really boring to use and I don’t expect it would give any interesting results when I add fat to my diet.
There are definitely benefits of a simple arithmetic test, I just didn’t want you to underestimate the benefits by measuring the wrong thing.
Tell me more about your PVT program. I should probably try something like that.
It’s nothing special- it runs in Ruby Shoes and I can email you the source code if it would be at all interesting. I wrote it after reading a number of papers describing sleep dep experiments that used it.
It shows a stimulus (increasing time in red in the center of a black background), then once you click in the upper left corner it waits 2-10 seconds (chosen at random) and then shows you another stimulus. This goes on for ten minutes. You get a host of reaction times (and so can watch that change) but the real value (and the reason it’s boring) is that your ability to sustain concentration drops with sleep deprivation, and so lapses (where it takes you at least twice as long as your baseline, typically .5 to .8 seconds) start showing up. They become more frequent and longer the more sleep deprived you get (at my worst, it took me about fifteen seconds to respond to a stimulus; I didn’t code it but the paper I took the parameters from had a buzzer sound if you went 30 seconds without a response). It outputs the times (absolute times of stimuli, responses, and false starts) to a text file, and I never wrote any analysis code because I considered the affiliated sleep experiment a failure.
It’s also a very good proxy for driving- it involves a lot of staring at boring, barely changing views, and then when one gets into an accident, it’s typically something that noticing it coming a half-second earlier could have helped a lot with. And so when you find that a half-second of inattention goes from a <1% of the time thing to a 5% of the time thing, you swear off the heavy machinery.