Seth Roberts
| Seth Roberts | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 17, 1953 |
| Died | April 26, 2014 (aged 60) Berkeley, California |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Known for | Self-experimentation |
Seth Roberts was a professor of psychology at Tsinghua University in Beijing and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of the bestselling book The Shangri-La Diet. He was well known for his work in self-experimentation which led to the discovery of his diet, multiple publications and a popular blog.
Roberts's work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine and The Scientist. He was also a contributor to Spy and a member of the university's Center for Weight and Health.
Roberts died in April 2014 after collapsing while hiking.
In the early 1980s, Roberts suffered from insomnia. Through self-experimentation, he set out to solve this problem by varying aspects of his lifestyle, like exercise and calcium intake. After many failures to see an improvement in his sleep, he eventually discovered that delaying breakfast, seeing faces in the morning light, and standing solved this problem. When Roberts discovered a trend or solution, he typically looked backwards evolutionarily for an explanation. Roberts would later apply this mentality to solving problems in health, sleep, and mood, among other things.
The accuracy of Robert's conclusions have been questioned by scientists who challenge that his experiments lacked a control group and were subject to various biases.
Roberts was called the "champion of self-experimentation" for his contributions to the field. Professor Tyler Cowen called Roberts' theme of experimenting on the self the "highest stage of science."
As a graduate student, Roberts studied animal learning, specifically "rat psychology." After Roberts read a report by Israel Ramirez studying the effect of saccharin on weight gain in rats, he thought of his new theory "in seconds." Roberts tried about ten different variations, such as eating sushi, eating foods with low glycemic index, and drinking vinegar, before arriving at the Shangri La Diet.
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