Monday, July 20, 2015

For potato starch, maybe less is more?

A friend who is enthusiastic about the affect potato starch had on his sleep, suggested that maybe my less-than-stellar results were caused by the amount I had been taking. Instead of 3-4 TBS/day, try a much smaller amount, he suggested, maybe only a teaspoon or so.

My results are too preliminary to get excited yet, but at least for my short trial, the smaller amount seems to help. Interestingly, my overall sleep doesn't change much, but I do notice more dreams, and Zeo confirms that my REM sleep is up quite a bit.

Here's the raw data (dumped straight from the R software I use to track everything). The one marked in red below is the most interesting number:

I tried potato starch on 91 days, and I have Zeo sleep data for a total of 45 of those days.

On 19 days I took exactly one tablespoon. On 6 days I took more than 0 but less than 1 tablespoon.

For total sleep (Z):

  • P-value on days when I had any potato starch: 0.3109656
  • P-value on days when I had exactly 1 TBS: 0.2020084
  • P-value on days when I had more than 0 but less than 1 TBS: 0.3041962
For REM Sleep (REM):

  • P-value on days when I had any potato starch: 0.2505854
  • P-value on days when I had exactly 1 TBS: 0.0603005
  • P-value on days when I had more than 0 but less than 1 TBS: 0.0012399
For Deep Sleep (Deep):

  • P-value on days when I had any potato starch: 0.5148044
  • P-value on days when I had exactly 1 TBS: 0.7402774
  • P-value on days when I had more than 0 but less than 1 TBS: 0.3264305


##                   days   Z.Mean REM.Mean Deep.Mean      Z.SD
## 0                  128 6.364245 1.817969  1.048698 0.6971406
## 0.25                 1 7.000000 2.100000  1.133333        NA
## 0.333333333333333    5 6.526667 2.136667  1.096667 0.5198290
## 1                   16 6.609979 1.975000  1.064583 0.7015906
## 1.5                  1 6.283333 1.300000  1.083333        NA
## 2                    7 6.111905 1.676190  1.019048 0.6943365
## 2.5                  1 5.750000 1.983333  1.250000        NA
## 3                    5 6.873333 2.050000  1.036667 0.6796241
## 4                    8 6.402083 1.752083  1.068750 0.7167186
## 8                    1 6.000000 1.433333  1.250000        NA