Announcing the Quantified Health Prize

Sweet, gwern's modafinil fund was getting kind of low anyway.

DEADLINE CHANGE: We have decided based on feedback to extend the deadline to January 15, 2012, to allow people time to find the contest or take care of finals and holiday obligations, but it will not change again and will be strictly enforced.

Ohh, this is exactly my field of study (currently). I may have to consider a submission. A good excuse to motivate me to consolidate my research anyhow!

You might want to post this over at the Immortality Institute (http://imminst.org/). They recently created a multivitamin using community input, so all of this has been discussed over and over again there already.

For a second there I thought this was you, personally, wanting an answer to this question, which was funny but not really ridiculous or out of character.

Good luck. Hope this gets good results!

The contest asks for "A recommendation list that tells people what they should do based on their situation, without any additional information or explanation. Keep it as short as possible, but no shorter."

Are there limits on the sorts of recommendations that are considered acceptable? For example, could one recommend no mineral supplementation? Alternatively, instead of recommending mineral quantities, could the paper recommend a procedure of personal experimentation saying, "take mineral A and monitor the results with process A', then adjust according to criteria A*, then take mineral B and monitor the results using criteria B'..."

If anyone entering this contest wants help from someone who develops and implements Bayesian statistical models for a living, let me know. I won't be entering the contest myself -- I don't have time for the required literature search -- but I can help out with some modeling and Bayesian analysis. One caveat -- my experience is with models of consumer choice used in marketing research, rather than analysis for medical research.

I plan to submit an entry to this. I hope that I don't get steamrolled by someone amazing.

I don't have much prior knowledge in this area. Do you think that will be a problem?

But I’m just an undergraduate, and I’m not even studying biology. Am I qualified to enter this contest?

Absolutely! What we are looking for is in-depth analysis of the published data, not specialized knowledge of biology.

I imagine that prior knowledge of statistics is what's most helpful here, rather than medicine or biology.

I think the presentation needs to include how to tailor the information for your own personal situation. A person with a mineral deficiency can receive enormous benefits from supplements but a person who does not have such a deficiency may receive no benefit or worse. You don’t need to be a Bayesian to understand that just because a mineral supplement will help a specific individual with a specific individual condition, it does not follow that more of that mineral will provide any benefit for a generic human without that condition or deficiency.

A place to start research might be with the minerals that are generally accepted as being important to maintaining bodily functions and the generally accepted minimum daily requirements of those minerals. In an ideal world, where would we get those minerals? Is that source available to me specifically in my current place and time? Is the availability of that mineral in my body impacted by medication? other foods? levels of physical activity? environmental degradation? my own health status? It seems to me that specific personal circumstances will be a major factor in determining whether supplements are needed. So I would like to read about how to evaluate my personal circumstances relative to my mineral needs as a generic human. That will help me determine whether to supplement specific minerals in my diet. Then I can determine the best way for me, in my circumstances, to ingest more of those minerals.

Being healthy is the goal. If one is healthy, I am not sure that one can become healthier in any abstract sense. I am, fortunately, healthy. In order to maintain my current favorable health status, common sense (not necessarily wrong) tells me to continue my current nutritional regimen – which includes a basic (non-mega) multi-vitamin/mineral supplement taken as a form of insurance since I can’t be certain that it provides any benefit. If I have to take medication for some reason, or if I engage in unusual physical activity or experience unusual life conditions, I try to understand how this will affect my normal balance and I try to compensate for the effect – possibly with nutritional supplements. How can I best compensate? The research described above would be really helpful.

and what are the costs and benefits of various amounts?

Does cost just refer to price, or does it include risks?

I'd like to see information on how a person can tell if they're deficient or oversupplied in a nutrient and what to expect if the problem is being remedied. For example, a person might have a blood test which shows a deficiency, but if they trouble absorbing the nutrient, just taking more may not help and (faint memory) they might even be deficient while having what seems to be enough in their blood.

To Less Wrong: what are your priors on nutrition? Not necessarily what you do, but what your prior life experience and research has led you to believe is actually correct.

I'll start:

Paleo diet is great, except some carbs and gluten are fine in moderation except in a minority (though possible a high minority, like 40%) of people with outlying genetic mutations that make them process carbs improperly (I admit my prior on this is partially determined by my current unwillingness to stop eating pizza and sandwiches). Intermittent fasting helps prevent cancer.

If you eat paleoish with 5-6 servings of diverse fruits and vegetables daily, you might only be deficient in vitamin D, fish oil, Vitamin E, zinc, magnesium, calcium, (and iron for women) potassium, sodium, lithium.

Also, trace minerals are good (such as in ConcenTrace supplement), but there is probably not good evidence on this.

It might be possible to get an almost totally healthy no supplement diet if you were willing to eat lots of organ meat and use a Vitamin D Lamp.

I've posted a critique of the contest's internal assumptions here, along with part of my answer:

http://www.aquatic-ape-diet.com/blog/2011/12/02/critiquing-the-lesswrong-mineral-supplementation-5000-contest/

I'm actively interested in optimizing my health, and I take a number of supplements to that end. The survey would seem most interesting if its goal was to find how to optimize your health via supplements. As it turns out, none of the ones I take qualify as "minerals". If it turns out in fact that taking Vitamin XYZ is the single best thing you can do to tweak your diet, then this survey's conclusions, whatever they turn out to be (eg. that Calcium is better than Selenium) will be misleading. Maybe that's the next survey.

FYI, I'm taking: vitamin C, green tea extract, acetyl-l carnitine, vitamin D-3, fish oil, ubiquinol, and alpha lipoic acid. I've stopped taking vitamin E and aspirin.

This concept is fantastic - I'm going to publicize it to some friends.

I'll be doing this - might as well put my notes to use.

Their website does not appear to be working. Is Personalized Medicine defunct?

Anyone else giving this a serious shot? I'm curious to trade strategies, wondering if mine is the dominant one and this is a competition of research or a competition of strategies.

My strategy: recommending basically no supplemental minerals, except where indicated by testing.

I've been struggling for some time with the issue of how to know what and whom to believe when it comes to lifestyle medicine (the effects of nutrition, supplements, exercise, etc. on health on longevity)... and it has occurred to me that I'm ignoring the elephant in the living room. As I understand it, the one non-obvious lifestyle change for which there appears to be good evidence of a very strong effect on longevity is caloric restriction.

When I first heard about CR over twenty years ago there were already decades of research demonstrating its apparently universal efficacy in extending the lives of mice and other short-lived creatures, and the case for CR has only gotten stronger since then as research has progressed to longer-lived creatures. It is arguably misguided to spend a lot of effort trying to figure out the right supplements to take (given the equivocal nature of much of the evidence) if you haven't yet made CR part of your lifestyle.

Is there a way to hide banned comments?

Would it be wrong to suppose that the body is more active in metabolism than given credit for? Every chemical induced regularly over a period of time is not guaranteed- but still subject to requiring a higher threshold than was previously necessary. My proposal is not empirical whatsoever, minus the observation of my own habits and metabolism. Given, I am young, and still have a metabolism that acts like ants on a cookie, i still fully support the idea that the body changes over time, and supplements and dietary habits must adapt as well.

Consider that someone has taken calcium supplement for years. An important answer to know would be; would stopping the supplements for a week cause a sharp drop in calcium levels, or would the body have a reserve of calcium to sport the break?

By the way my body acts, and what I would put my pennies on- is that I would witness a sudden drop in calcium levels, and require to take additional supplements to back up the gap, or possibly resort to feeding myself smaller supplements daily to ween my body off the daily dependence on calcium pills, and thus requiring my body to extract more calcium from the foods I ingest.

The reason I say this is because it directly affects the truth in the response to the above prompt.

In my case, a recursive-sum type function based on past diets and supplements would be necessary to determine the proper amount of minerals I take daily. All I'm proposing is, that the answer to this prompt lies less on the side of what, when, and how, and more towards the notions of how your metabolism has been crafted by past habits.

I know that when I eat fast food, which I inadvertently eat almost daily, my body- as its been conditioned, bypasses all the fats and greases. I'll admit I could be more savvy on Bayes Theorem or other theories of conditional probability, but I think that what's going on here relates to how the prompt must be answered. It's my assumption that because of the levels of fats and greases I put into my body, (also- my metabolism) my body chooses to extract very little, as it picked up on the trend that fats and 'bad carbs' come by the pound. Relating to this, I think if I stopped eating fast food and adopted that shellfish diet that seems popular around here, my exposure to fats at that point would begin to take stronger effect, and more unwanted chemicals would be processed by my body. I have a few vegetarian friends, and oddly, they all seem to be overweight. It seems their bodies have been taught by near-starvation to engulf anything that touches the stomach.

Is this credible? No, not at all. Is it logical- barely, if so. Just saying. Food for thought.

should take the important dietary minerals in

A normal diet provides easily enough calcium to meet most people's needs [EDIT: That is completely wrong, but still works for the purposes of my question]. Is the question asking about how much we should consume in total, or how much of the various minerals we should consume from supplements? In the first case, the answer is "about as much as you are currently consuming", while in the second case, the answer is "probably none."