Announcing the Quantified Health Prize

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Dec 2, 2011

We are giving away a $5000 prize for well-researched, well-reasoned presentations that answer the following question:

What are the best recommendations for what quantities adults (ages 20-60) should take the important dietary minerals in, and what are the costs and benefits of various amounts?

Part of the question is figuring out which ones are important. You may exclude any minerals for which an otherwise reasonable diet will always fall into the right range, or any minerals whose effects are relatively trivial.

If you have an excellent entry, even if you don’t win the grand prize, you can still win one of four additional cash prizes, you’ll be under consideration for a job as a researcher with our company Personalized Medicine, and you’ll get a leg up in the larger contest we plan to run after this one. You also get to help people get better nutrition and stay healthier.

Proposal:

Most of us spend a good portion of our time and money trying to figure out what would be best for our health, and then trying to implement those findings. We ask ourselves how to eat, how to exercise, what drugs and supplements to take and what treatments to seek, but everywhere we turn we find different opinions. Even if one reads the primary research, one finds studies riddled with problems. Most studies have an agenda to sell a product or prove a pet theory. They are then filtered by publication bias. When results are presented, many authors use framing to steer us to the conclusions they want us to draw.

We can and must do better.

We hereby challenge this community to do better. We're always saying how great and effective rationality is. This is our chance to prove it, and put those skills to the test. These problems badly need proper application of Less Wrong's favorite techniques, from Bayes' Theorem itself to the correction of a whole host of cognitive biases.

This contest is also a pilot for a larger contest; before we go and put a lot more money on the line and ask more questions, we want a chance to work the kinks out.

Entries are due by the end of day on January 15, 2012. This is a change of the original deadline, but it will not change again and it will be strictly enforced.

Final judgment will be made by Personalized Medicine’s Chief Science Officer, based on finalists chosen by our expert reviewers. If necessary, Peer Review will first be used to reduce the number of entries to a manageable size.

The contest page can be found here, and the FAQ can be found here.

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Comments

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

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I was going to make a comment about how gwern should do this, but I see you beat me to it!

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I'm flattered (and I also see that I am becoming notorious for modafinil, I hope this doesn't cause me problems later in life!), but I'm not actually sure I want to participate. The deadline is fairly short compared to last time, and dietary minerals haven't been a previous focus of mine. When I look at the list in Wikipedia of essentials or 'other' as well, the only ones I've looked into are:

iodine

Which as far as I know, while very important to human development and especially IQ, must be administered chronically and during said development - and so is fairly useless for 'adults (20-60)'.

EDIT: in my further writeup on iodine (http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#iodine), I was able to find 2 studies which used iodine on middle schoolers or college-age adults; in neither was any significant effect on IQ noticed.
Magnesium

Which may be useful in acute doses for adults, but this is based on some highly speculative small mouse studies on magnesium l-threonate, and so any material on it would be awfully short.
Potassium

User:Kevin claims potassium in various forms has helped him a lot. This has a surface plausibility because of potassium's role in neurons, but is as or more speculative than the magnesium.

I suppose I could package up the research on those 3 and hope for one of the smaller $500 prizes if it looks like, as last time, there will be few participants.

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8 points

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Would you be more inclined to participate on an extended deadline?

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grouchymusicologist

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For what little it's worth (since I'm not a potential participant here), the deadline struck me as a short one. Participants are going to do this in their spare time, and it's a busy time of year (holiday/family obligations for many people, and end-of-academic-term obligations for students and academics).

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Probably, but with diminishing returns - an additional month is worth almost as much as 2 months. More important to me is how many people would be participating and what I could dig up on any minerals.

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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.

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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!

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Any suggestions on a useful textbook?

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https://www.metametrix.com/learning-center/books/2008/leifm is the best I found in a pretty comprehensive search.

Functional Medicine is weird. It seems to be spun in all kinds of different ways by alternative medicine practicioners, but at the ivory tower level of Functional Medicine, it seems engrained in proper Bayesian paradigms. See this PDF which goes so far as to include a simple overview of AI techniques! http://www.functionalmedicine.org/ifm_ecommerce/Files/IFM%20TFM%20Chapter%205%20excerpt-128721172845367500.pdf

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Which ones have you been studying?

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8 points

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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.

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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!

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Thank you. I take that as high praise!

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Mark_Eichenlaub

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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'..."

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There's a reason there was no explicit size requirement on the recommendations. They could be one sentence, or they could be a complicated set of conditional instructions, or anything in between. It's a real life question asking for a real life solution, and time/effort/money required of the patient is one of the trade-offs involved.

Will add this to the FAQ in some form, to make sure it is clear.

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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.

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radical_negative_one

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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