Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Luck based medicine: angry eldritch sugar gods edition, published by Elizabeth on September 19, 2023 on LessWrong.

Introduction

Epistemic status: everything is stupid. I'm pretty sure I'm directionally right but this post is in large part correcting previous statements of mine, and there's no reason to believe this is the last correction. Even if I am right, metabolism is highly individual and who knows how much of this applies to anyone else.

This is going to get really in the weeds, so let me give you some highlights

1-2 pounds of watermelon/day kills my desire for processed desserts, but it takes several weeks to kick in.

It is probably a microbiome thing. I have no idea if this works for other people. If you test it let me know.

I still eating a fair amount of sugar, including processed sugar in savory food. The effect is only obvious and total with desserts.

This leads to weight loss, although maybe that also requires potatoes? Or the potatoes are a red herring, it just takes a while to kick in?

Boswellia is probably necessary for this to work in me, but that's probably correcting an uncommon underlying defect so this is unlikely to apply widely.

Stevia-sweetened soda creates desire for sugar in me, even though it doesn't affect my blood sugar. This overrides the watermelon effect, even when I'm careful to only drink the soda with food.

My protein shakes + bars also have zero-calorie sweeteners and the watermelon effect survives them. Unclear if it's about the kind of sweetener, amount, or something else.

Covid also makes me crave sugar and this definitely has a physiological basis.

Metabolism is a terrifying eldritch god we can barely hope to appease, much less understand.

Why do I believe these things? Deep breath this is going to take a while. I've separated sections by conclusion for comprehensibility, but the discovery was messy and interconnected and I couldn't abstract that out.

Boswellia

Last October I told my story of luck based medicine, in which a single pill, taken almost at random, radically fixed lifelong digestion issues. Now's as good a time as any to give an update on that.

The two biggest effects last year were doubling my protein consumption, and cratering sugar consumption. I'm still confident Boswelia is necessary for protein digestion, because if I go off it food slowly starts to feel gross and I become unable to digest protein. I'm confident this isn't a placebo because I didn't know Boswelia was the cause at the time, so going off it shouldn't have triggered a change.

As I'll discuss in a later section, Boswelia is not sufficient to cause a decrease in sugar consumption; that primarily comes from consuming heroic amounts of watermelon. The Boswellia might be necessary to enable that much watermelon consumption, by increasing my ability to digest fiber. I haven't had to go off Boswellia since I figured out how it helps me, so I haven't tested its interaction with watermelon.

How does Boswellia affect micronutrient digestion? I have always scored poorly on micronutrient tests. I had a baseline test from June 2022 (shortly after starting Boswellia + watermelon), and saw a huge improvement in October testing (my previous tests are alas too old to be accessible). Unfortunately this did not hold up - my March and June 2023 tests were almost as bad as June 2022. My leading hypotheses are "the tests suck" and "the November tests are the only ones taken after a really long no-processed-dessert period, and sugar is the sin chemical after all". I hate both of these options.

If we use fuzzier standards like energy level, illness, and injury healing, I'm obviously doing much better. Causality is always hard when tracking effects that accumulate over a year. In that time there's been at least one other major intervention that contributed to energy leve...