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My 16-month theanine self-experiment

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Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#421

Post by CamperBob2 »

eru wrote: post #405
CamperBob2 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably so, but all I can find are other plagiarized copies. :-P The New Yorker's paywall has successfully obscured the origin of the joke, so that's on them, as far as I'm concerned.

Yes. Well, instead of an actual web link, you could just mention that it's from the New Yorker.

"It's from the New Yorker. The most important magazine of our time. Probably the most important magazine that ever was."

(From a vaguely-remembered 1990s-era ad campaign that I thought was excruciatingly self-indulgent at the time, but which evidently worked.)

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#422

Post by Suppafly »

K0balt wrote: post #383
luqtas wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fortunately* citzen science was replaced by solid methods... this is a long fancy self reported post on a metric that is easily figured out by biomarkers (stress levels). what's the consequences if the author decided to make some claim about a substance?

I think you are ignoring the fact that citizen science was alive and very well up into the 1980s. It was never a replacement for professional science, but rather citizen scientists often observed things that were deemed worth of follow-up by academic researchers. Citizens scientists rarely post “facts” but rather interesting avenues for research or further investigation. Part of being an educated citizen scientist is…

>I think you are ignoring the fact that citizen science was alive and very well up into the 1980s.

Some version of that still exists among people with a naturalist bent recording observations of reptiles, birds, plants, etc. But yeah, we don't really have backyard chemists analyzing things anymore.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#423

Post by Suppafly »

mg wrote: post #167
kortilla wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the issue is that an experiment with 1 person can’t prove much because you can’t have a control group. Too much other stuff is changing in a single persons life that could account for all observed side effects. You also have latent side effect issues. A person could smoke for 10 years, not smoke for another 10, and then conclude that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Then they get lung cancer 20 years later. Excelle…

An experiment of 1 person can very well produce useful data. It depends on the setup of the experiment. Imagine an experiment where a person's thumb gets randomly hit with either a hammer or a feather once per day. And they then subjectively rate the experience. After 1000 days of collecting data, I doubt that we would wrongly come to the conclusion that the hammer treatment leads to the nicer outcome. The setup of t…

A similar, actually useful, experiment is the one where a guy cracked the knuckles of only one hand for several years and found no ill effects from doing so compared to the other hand with non-cracked knuckles.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#424

Post by Suppafly »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #204
grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a mattress encasement, it's like a HEPA filter bag for the mattress (cuts off the mites food supply and preventing allergens becoming airborne). Skips the whole trying to clean porous foam problem.

I read that mites can't survive temperatures above 60C, and wondered then about just a big plastic bag around the item then fill it from a hot air source (hair dryer, fan heater)? I think the problem would be temperature control, as you don't want to damage the item, but need to maintain an even, specific air temperature, you'd need turbulence. Then vacuum clean afterwards. Maybe a wallpaper remover style device with…

>I read that mites can't survive temperatures above 60C, and wondered then about just a big plastic bag around the item then fill it from a hot air source (hair dryer, fan heater)?

People do something similar to kill bedbugs, I think they make specialized equipment to do so, but it might just be something like an off the shelf heat gun.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#425

Post by Enginerrrd »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #213
mg wrote: post #126

This is great. The author defines their own metrics, is doing their own A/B tests and publishes their interpretation plus the raw data. Imagine a world where all health blogging was like that. Personally, I have not published any results yet, but I have been doing this type of experiments for 4 years now. And collected 48874 data points so far. I built a simple system to do it in Vim: https://www.gibney.org/a_syntax_…

This is an N=1 trial. Dressing your N=1 trial up with lots of pseudo controls and pseudo blinding and data collection does not make it better. In fact: putting this much effort into any medication trial makes it much more likely that you’re going to be incentivized to find effects that don’t exist. I think it’s nice that the author admits that they found nothing, but statistically, worthless drugs show effects in muc…

>Dressing your N=1 trial up with lots of pseudo controls and pseudo blinding and data collection does not make it better.

This is only an appropriate criticism in so far as you want to make conclusions about theanine as an intervention in the broader population.

It is however, perhaps much BETTER than large N trials if the author wishes to draw conclusions about how theanine affects THEM.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#427

Post by strontian »

natdempk wrote: post #366
strontian wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nice! I recently got dust mites out of my home completely, and it was a miraculous upgrade to my health, including several symptoms that are outside the definitions of allergic asthma/eczema/rhinitis. One important thing people are missing about dust mite allergy is the many ways in which they directly damage your immune system and body, outside of the usual frame of "allergies" which is based on type 2 hypersensitiv…

Appreciate the resource -- I think my biggest question from reading it: How can you actually tell if you have dust mite problems? How can you tell if they've gotten better or not? How can I tell if I've hit a point where things are about as good as they're going to get? etc.

I have asthma symptoms from dust mites, and discovered that sniffing items creates a reaction in my lungs that is pretty sensitive to the amount of allergen in the item. Dust mite allergens also have a distinct but subtle smell you can learn.

Regarding whether or not your health issues are caused by dust mites, if you have any of the allergic disease, or if you have a tested dust mite allergy, it is likely they are causing problems. Disease severity is also associated with dust mite exposure.

Basically, the worse you have allergies, the more likely it's dust mites.

It's an almost certainty you home has dust mites and their allergens, unless you live in a very dry climate.

My advice is to create conditions in your house in which dust mites cannot thrive, which is relatively easy to verify with hygrometers. Over time, this will lead to lead to lower allergen levels, particularly if you are proactive about removing the ones that are currently there.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#428

Post by A7C3D5 »

pnm45678 wrote: post #266

> I think these are the possibilities: > Theanine works, but I got fake theanine. I’d add one more possibility: “Theanine works but I need a higher dosage to feel the effect.” FWIW my purely anecdotal findings are that supplier does matter. Natural Factors Suntheanine gave me a noticeable effect. Nature’s way L-Theanine did not.

I used to take theanine in college, and this was my experience even over a decade ago.

Suntheanine was consistently effective and most of the other brands were seemingly inactive or unnoticable. I've always had to order online as all of the brands I've bought in store seem to be bunk.

Even still I found tolerance to rise quickly with daily theanine use.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#429

Post by K0balt »

Suppafly wrote: post #422
K0balt wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are ignoring the fact that citizen science was alive and very well up into the 1980s. It was never a replacement for professional science, but rather citizen scientists often observed things that were deemed worth of follow-up by academic researchers. Citizens scientists rarely post “facts” but rather interesting avenues for research or further investigation. Part of being an educated citizen scientist is…

>I think you are ignoring the fact that citizen science was alive and very well up into the 1980s. Some version of that still exists among people with a naturalist bent recording observations of reptiles, birds, plants, etc. But yeah, we don't really have backyard chemists analyzing things anymore.

Astronomy also has an important citizen-science component, and many discoveries are made by amateur astronomers each year.

Another interesting aspect of citizen science is replication of existing scientific research, Often with experimental modifications that make the experiment much more approachable for amateurs. Sometimes this even leads to process improvements that facilitate industrial application.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#430

Post by sgc »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #392
sgc wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have taken a well-calibrated photo of the cup each time without looking, maybe with a color card in the bottom, and only entered results at the end of the trial. Given that there is no documentation of whether the events during the hour of test time were more or less stressful than those before it, and no taking the time of day, diet and exercise, sleep, location (quiet island or next to a construction site),…

If your sample is blinded yet you consistently guess correctly, then presumably either 1. you failed at blinding or 2. there is a strong and discernible effect, regardless of what your other metrics might say (your other metrics could always be flawed after all). > no documentation of whether the events during the hour of test time were more or less stressful than those before it, and no taking the time of day, diet…

He has 94 data points. Not nearly enough to average out so many potentially confounding variables, and there is no way to know they would. That will be the case in almost all N=1 experiments. Perhaps he takes the pill at the onset of stress, and stress almost always tends to build afterwards. This would be a probable case for many people trying to use theanine in this way. I could never accept that we should presume it would average out, and thus I consider logging potentially confounding variables essential to a valid experiment of this type of uncontrolled experiment. Your hypothesis would be much more relevant in a larger experiment of course.
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