“We use the word ‘inflammation’ colloquially, as if we understand what we are saying. But dig a little deeper and the word becomes a clown car of meanings. Is it the chronic irritation of an autoimmune disease? The lingering residue of a postviral syndrome? A nonhealing wound?”
Good description of a generic catch-all term that could have a variety of specific meanings.
A lot of medical terms have been hijacked by influencers, including some influencer doctors.
“Dopamine” is the other big offender. So many social media doctors and influencers building huge podcast followings with “dopamine” babble. Huberman is one of the worst offenders, but he seems to slip past a lot of people’s filters because he’s a doctor and he mixes actual studies into his extremely long podcasts so that people assume everything he’s saying is accurate.
The issue with the Huberman Lab is, like others mentioned below, his content gets digested and then repackaged by a lot of micro-influencers all ofer the place, with short summaries that present bits and pieces of his podcast as solutions to everything. I started listening to his episodes from the first one, and it crazy to see what he actually discusses and how he presents things and then see what the internet makes of it. My girlfriend told me some weeks ago about that "Doberman" guy that I listen to, from a reel she saw somewhere about how he takes cold showers in the morning, and it's funny because in his podcast he clearly said he doesn't like or do cold showers, and he only presented that as an option based on some studies. He seems very down to earth and never promises things or presents solutions, you can see his academic background, but what the internet has done with his podcast and remixing his content is insane.
I don't understand this comment at all. Huberman, to me, has provided the most nuanced understanding of dopamine and dopaminergic effects accessible to the broader public. There's a lot of clickbait around him, and no doubt many "influencer doctors" who make a bad name for themselves, but this is a very clear take on dopamine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU. I wouldn't call it babble.
(Huberman is also not a physician, but a PhD, which is an important distinction.)
His long-form podcasts and interviews get hijacked into little snippets and "motivational" youtube videos. There is a huge industry of "recycling" channels that only do that, even more so now with shorts. So his 2h+ talk about morning routine studies or whatever gets turned into a video called "Neuro Expert's 21-step Morning Routine to live into your 90's". It becomes 4minutes, has peppy music in the background, can be distilled into a 30s short with effort. His channel gets points or money or whatever for you watching it, the recycling channel gets money for making it, and you as the viewer get stuck with the shit-end of the stick.
That's not even mentioning the "rebuttal" industry that'll create content criticising or rebutting his content, which gets recycled the same way. It's elephants all the way down, and our attention is sucked up by it.
I couldn't block and ignore these channels quickly enough, and no matter what I did YT kept recommending them. So glad I'm off YT.
>I don't know about anybody else but if $lowcostbehavior has a small chance of leading to $goodoutcome I still wouldn't mind hearing about it
This has traditionally been the excuse of quacks
>I've tried multiple things he mentioned which haven't worked which also didn't cost me anything.
And this is "throw things on a wall and see what sticks".
It's ok if you're doing research (even there though it should be tamed as an approach) but it's not OK when giving medical and health lifestyle advice.
On an individual basis, there's nothing wrong with "throw things on a wall and see what sticks" as long as those things are low cost and low risk. For a lot of this stuff there is no high-quality research available (and probably never will be) so you just have to do your own informal n=1 experiments to see what works for you: not truly scientific but good enough. Andrew Huberman has always been clear about which protocols are actually supported by high-quality evidence and which are just speculative.
Not really. Quacks usually try to sell you profitable remedies that have no chance of working and only cite scientific research in order to be misleading.
That's their regular selling tactic. But their excuse when they're called for selling snakeoil and bullshit health regimens. Then it's: "it works for some", "doesn't hurt to try", "better that not taking anything", "at least it gives people hope".
In this case he doesn't sell snakeoil directly: he sells talking about remedies and regimens for YT eyeballs and popularity (which can be turned into money indirectly).
>That's their regular selling tactic. But their excuse when they're called for selling snakeoil and bullshit health regimens. Then it's: "it works for some", "doesn't hurt to try", "better that not taking anything", "at least it gives people hope".
I seem to recall listening to a podcast where he cited a study that wasn't very conclusive and he said that it wasn't very conclusive.
So no. No it is not.
>In this case he doesn't sell snakeoil directly
If I had a dollar for every person who told me that he's selling snake oil without giving a clear example I'd be able to set up my own version of herbalife.
I really find it weird how many people despise him for really vague reasons. Like, why? He's pushing scientific studies. There is nuance. Not everything is expected to work. Not every study that shows something interesting has a high p value. He says all this. Quacks dont.
He seems to get paid for promoting stuff like blood tests and some supplement company. I tend to ignore that stuff as I ignore all adverts but I would be reluctant to assume that he's selling quack medicine this way.
Some people do seem to assume that since he's getting paid to promote supplements, that those supplements are basically another herbalife. I haven't seen anybody give any evidence for this though.
"I love doing ** because it gives me a dopamine hit!" — so annoying.
Here's what dopamine does, in very simplistic words, from a dopamine connoisseur (i.e. ADHD person): it tells your brain "hey, this is important, carry on!". It's not responsible for the pleasure, it's just motivates you to continue doing a thing.
Dopamine is when you're hungry, and tremble in excitement before your first bite of a hot pizza. Dopamine is the thrill of the chase.
Most likely a lack of seretonin response. I'm ignoring the "pizza mouth" aspect, since that is your pain nerve receptors, but the "yes, this is good" neurotransmitter is Serotonin.
As in, I tremble with excitement just to rediscover that, after all, I'm still sensitive to gluten and in a few hours I'm going to need a bathroom. The best part of pizza is everything before that first bite and the crushing realization that I should've gone for a steak instead.
Hijacking this comment to ask about Bryan Johnson. Anyone have any good criticism of his blueprint. The amount of supplements he takes seem really extreme.
Talking about this btw: https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com/
Ah Bryan Johnson, the guy who claims his body is clinically 18 while having the outward appearance of his actual age (46). When you Google "Bryan Johnson" it autocorrects to "Bryan Johnson creepy".
I’m very tired of people using clinical-sounding terms to describe their felt, first-person, lived experiences when it adds no preciseness—which should be the whole point of using such terminology.
I have pity for those who fall for Huberman. Listening to him for 30 minutes was enough to unsub him again. Low signal noise ratio, and a lot of excited talk about almost nothing. What a shill!
Many people on social media use the word inflammation as if they're describing a root cause that they have control over, such as dietary cholesterol or exercise. But my understanding of this word is that inflammation is a symptom– an indirect result of any number of other factors.
Inflammation is just an activation of the immune defense system - the swelling is entirely intentional and healthy. What is annoying the immune defense system is the problem, and can in some cases be caused by a bug in the system (auto-immune disease).
Erroneously attributing correlation as causation is a common mistake. Blood cholesterol - entirely distinct from dietary cholesterol - was also commonly completely misunderstood as a cause, even though it like inflammation is a healthy and necessary response turned into a symptom...
The "Declownification" of medical diagnoses has continued for a long time. I met a medical historian giving a tour of the apothecary shop in Colonial Williamsburg who described how "consumption" was a clown car of tuberculosis, lung cancer, black lung (from mining), and a host of other lung ailments.
Over time each was identified as something unique, given a more precise name and treatment methods and eventually nobody is diagnosed with "consumption" anymore.
We still see much of the same thing going on today with many syndromes which are largely collections of symptoms with no definitive diagnostic test: depression, leaky gut, chronic fatigue, long COVID, etc. In many cases the symptoms probably aren't just psychosomatic and there is some underlying pathology but the root causes are unclear and we're probably inappropriately bundling multiple distinct conditions together.
There is an industry that tries to mask and treat the symptoms without treating the cause of the symptoms.
Such sociopathically managed activity incentives the masking with long treatments for life, that gradually degrade other properly functioning systems (with over time require additional masking treatments, in loop).
So every time I read about symptoms without investigating what causes the triggering of such symptoms, I assume it is promoting that criminal but legal activity.
"“We were actually surprised that reduced inflammation was the biggest explainer, the biggest contributor to the benefit of activity,” says Mora, “because we hadn’t hypothesized that. We knew that regular exercise does reduce inflammation over the long term, but we also knew that acute exercise transiently increases inflammatory biomarkers during and immediately after exertion.” About a third of the benefit of regular exercise, they found, is attributable to reduced inflammation."
From my understanding of exercise and inflammation, is that inflammation is the bodies stress & repair mechanism kicking in as a result of muscular damage etc from exercise. The acute inflammation following exercise is the body signalling to repair itself, hopefully resulting in adaptations that make the muscles and surrounding tissue stronger.
Following that your body in theory is better equipped to cope with future exercise/movement stresses, therefore attributable to reduced inflammation long term.
This is why there is somewhat of a debate in the exercise community around the true benefit of ice baths, hot/cold plunges, compression leggings etc. Whilst they feel good, these work to try to reduce inflammation, which is not necessarily what we want after exercise. There is a time and a place for reducing inflammation.
In my thesis-length comment above (below) I said that inflammation is a symptom and not a cause. Some causes are 'good', ie. exercise, and some causes are bad, ie. allergies.
I treat the pain / inflammation from 'good' causes as a well-earned reward (if God exists, this is one of its greatest practical jokes).
Treating inflammation from 'bad' causes (outside of genetic disposition) is probably a bad thing in that it's treating symptoms, not trying to find the cause, and in fact actively supressing the ability find the cause.
Edit: added 'Treating' in front of the last sentence so it makes sense.
This is how I tend to feel about fevers. Fevers are commonly treated with fever suppressants, which doesn't make a lot of sense if you consider that the fever is something that you do to an infection, not something that the infection does to you.
The slight difference here in some cases (few) a fever can go too far and if your body temperature goes too high you can suffer organ failure. Now whilst this isn't overly common for the average cold or flu this is where medication would be required.
For the average person and the average fever, people don't really need to take fever suppressants but they do often allow people to go back to work sooner.
Some inflammation is good to repair damaged stuff, be it muscles, tendons etc. Very often I see this in gym freaks or rock climbers, fighting inflammation at all costs without understanding underlying processes.
Or in case of infection move temperature further away from optimal one for breeding foreign bacteria/viruses, at that scale and numbers its statistics game so any advantage, even by just raising overall temperature is acceptable.
The problem is our bodies sometimes go haywire and don't regulate properly.
Yep, I agree, inflammation is a symptom not a cause. (I also commented on your comment).
My comment just above doesn't describe it as a cause, but a symptom, in this case muscular damage from exercise. In your case, it was due to S1 L5 discs pulling on each other during exercise, which is different.
But nonetheless, inflammation brought upon as a symptom of something else. Which goes for almost everything else in the body when inflammation arises.
Albuterol doesn’t treat inflammation directly, but is absolutely critical for emergency management. And control meds for children seem to (oddly) have zero actual benefit in controlled studies almost every time. But do seem to work.
Which is pretty odd, no?
There is a lot we don’t know about asthma.
Exercise and stress reduction do seem to help, but also not in obvious ways.
Well, asthma is multifaceted. You can have an obstruction caused by muscles contracting, or by mucus from inflammation. In either case, dilating the muscles, which is what albuterol does, can give you better air flow, lessening your perceptible symptoms. You'd still want a corticosteorid-based medicide to treat the inflammation if you have that kind of asthma, though, as the chronic inflammation can worsen your illness over time, hence my original comment.
Generally I assume that holes get larger due to certain muscles tensing and smaller due to certain other muscles tensing. (It's also possible that holes get smaller due to swelling in the tissue surrounding them, and larger when that swelling subsides, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.)
Are you saying that the muscles that dilate the hole are themselves "dilating" when they tense, while the muscles that contract the hole are not "dilating" when they tense?
Ah, is your objection to the mixed terms, or to the intent of the poster? Or not an objection and a curious question? It can be hard to tell here.
Pretty much all of the bodies sphincters and regulated ‘pipes’ (including circulatory, GI, respiratory) either constrict (muscles tense) or dilate (muscles relax). Often there is minimal/no counter acting structure except perhaps for some ligaments/support structure, and the ‘opening’ force is provided by another means.
Confusingly, the optical pupils are the other way around - the pupillary dilator muscles have to contract to dilate the pupil. They are not the common case.
Albuterol acts directly on bronchial smooth muscle forcing it to relax (and also decreasing any immediate stress response in those cells). Which allows the alveolar duct to dilate during respiration.
I’m not aware of any significant muscular structure that actually would pull open the alveolar ducts - the force to inflate them comes from air inflating the lungs against the slight vacuum in the pleural breathing spaces from the action of the diaphragm and accessory breathing muscles.
The characteristic wheezing of asthma is due to the alveolar ducts (and bronchial in bad cases) muscles contracting excessively, constricting the airway and making it impossible to get adequate tidal volume. Sometimes it’s excessive due to the presence of mucus that isn’t being taken into account, other times even without it.
Counterintuitively, the difficulty breathing is generally because the air already inhaled cannot escape easily enough to allow room for more air. The wheezing is strongest on exhalation, and when responding to calls in the past, I’ve personally heard so bad it was clearly audible through multiple interior walls and the exterior wall - and outside the building. With an ambulance and fire truck running outside.
That is for adults who have stronger muscles. Pediatric patients are usually much more subtle.
Inadequate respiratory tidal volume is of course an immediate life threatening emergency, and very high on the ‘kills ya faster’ list. Time wise, potentially similar to hypovolemic shock or cardiac arrest.
It seems saying the ‘muscle dilates’, while not being technically exacting, isn’t misleading in this situation.
> Pretty much all of the bodies sphincters and regulated ‘pipes’ (including circulatory, GI, respiratory) either constrict (muscles tense) or dilate (muscles relax). Often there is minimal/no counter acting structure except perhaps for some ligaments/support structure, and the ‘opening’ force is provided by another means.
> Confusingly, the optical pupils are the other way around
There is no muscular action involved in constricting the pupil?
My understanding is based on what I was taught about how muscles work - specifically, that they can be in one of two behavioral states:
1. The muscle is trying to tense.
2. The muscle is not trying to tense.
Along with a continuum of physical states:
A. The muscle is fully contracted.
B. The muscle is fully extended.
As far as I was taught, muscles cannot extend themselves; some external force, most commonly another muscle, needs to draw them away from their (perhaps partially) tensed state. (And in the case of a cramp, this process fails because the muscle is still actively tensing.) Hence, as you just noted, the opening of the alveolar ducts is driven by tensing in the diaphragm. Or, when food passes from the esophagus into the stomach, what's happening is that muscles in the esophagus are tensing above the food to force it downward.
> Albuterol acts directly on bronchial smooth muscle forcing it to relax
So the immediate question prompted by my model here would be "does albuterol force the muscle to lengthen [a change in the physical state of the muscle], or does it stop the muscle from resisting as other processes lengthen it? [A change in the behavioral state.]"
> Ah, is your objection to the mixed terms, or to the intent of the poster? Or not an objection and a curious question? It can be hard to tell here.
My objection is to the fact that if you tell me a muscle is dilating, I have no idea what that means. Dilation isn't a concept that applies to muscles, whether in a direct or a metaphorical sense. Muscles, to the best of my knowledge, do not have any behaviors that it would make sense to describe as "dilating". Dilation refers to a hole getting larger, while muscles are unlike a hole in that they exist and occupy space, and they can't get larger, only smaller.
I didn’t say the muscle was dilating, fyi. That was another poster.
I’m just pointing out that while it’s not technically correct, you can figure out what they mean if you look at the actual details.
The iris does have a sphincter and dilator muscle, unlike most of these because unlike most there is no common counter pressure to expand them. Well, no safe one anyway.
For examples of ‘normal’ sphincters and controlled tubes in the body, for instance, the rectal sphincter vs feces (propelled via the smooth muscle in the colon or pressurized in various ways), esophageal sphincter vs various ways stuff gets pushed or propelled through it, blood pressure against the arterial smooth muscles, air pressure via the esophagus into the lungs vs the negative pressure pleural space, the small and large intestine, etc.
If they relax, they no longer resist those forces, and hence the sphincter or tube will dilate.
This is also why various things tend suddenly leak out upon death. No ennervation, no tensing, sphincter dilates. At least until rigor mortis sets in.
Albuterol forces smooth muscle to no longer tense - aka relax. So any sphincter, tube, or duct that muscle controls will dilate if there is any force present, which there generally is - or the patient is already dead.
It protects the organism from infection long enough for it to reproduce. Probably why inflammation increases progressively with age. It isn't for longevity.
We're programmed to die anyway because it's good for the next generation. Dying makes room for the next generation, and kills off the parasites accumulated in our bodies that have adapted too well to living off of us.
The reason humans live to be grandparents is the grandparents' role is to take care of the grandkids while the parents work.
I think it's quite likely that, like the circadian rhythm, your body needs a steady drumbeat of inputs to regulate itself and without them disregulation can set in and spiral.
I'm trying to find an "elastic theory of inflammation" .. i don't know how this is called in medicine, basically what's the threshold of your body in its current state between appropriate amount of stress (hence the elastic term, your body can absorb said stress and go back to optimal function) and damaging levels of stress. For instance in a video someone talked about how 15 min of low effort legwork (gentle biking for instance) would be perfect to stimulate cartilage cell growth.
This is also in the same landscape as hormesis (controverial or not).
I think we'd need to be clearer on the parameters and definitions of what damaging levels of stress are. You might be able to measure stressors applied to the body and then body the bodies inflammation markers (new field).
15 minutes of low effort legwork might stimulate cartilage cell growth. But what's to say that an hour or so of low effort legwork (biking) isn't beneficial to the bodies endurance systems. Both of which the body would recover from and go back to optimal function.
Even hard workouts have their place in developing a healthy body, of which your body returns to optimal function through the bodies recovery processes.
Sure but it's important to be able to map it based on your body current capabilities. Of course I'm biased, I'm asking because my body now can only operate in a narrow range of effort, and I cannot risk overburdening it or I pay a hefty price. So knowing what's the optimal kind and amount would help me stabilize or even recover.
Inflammatory signaling isn’t all “bad”, just like how oxidative stress and cortisol aren’t unilaterally bad.
A lot of people have a really broken, superficial understanding of these topics and assume that all these processes and chemicals in our body are bad and must be reduced as much as possible, but they play important roles in the body.
Many people are surprised to learn that taking a lot of antioxidants before working out actually reduces the effectiveness of exercise. Influencers have peddled this idea that oxidation is bad and antioxidants are good for so long that people think it’s a number they just need to push downward as much as possible with as many supplements as they can take.
A lot of the longest living people (and maybe more telling, communities with the longest living members) are not very gym focused at all.
If you walk everywhere every day, do most of your daily chores by hand, and don't sit in an office all day, you are likely getting plenty of exercise even if you never touch a set of weights or treadmill.
They also, by definition, came of age when we knew much less about longevity. They may not necessary be living the most longevity promoting lifestyle - just one that's markedly better than the average.
I would agree with that. Maybe walking is key. After visiting Paris, and seeing lots fit people despite a diet of croissants, baguette, butter and cheese. But they also walk so much...
You don't really understand what a Catholic monk's life is like, do you?
Monks traditionally and currently do hard manual labour. They may work on a garden, farm, distilling equipment, artisanal endeavours such as carpentry. Monks (and nuns as well) have to do all the work in a monastery, which includes the daily chores, the cooking and cleaning. What did you expect, that they have servants to do that for them?
Plus, most healthy religious communities believe in real recreation on days of rest, and so they engage in athletics and sports as well. It's actually absurd to conceive of monks who are sedentary or lazy, no matter what the time period or region they may occupy.
Even if this is true. What you might be observing is the effect not the cause.
In other words ... older people that are healthier are able to exercise more. Just a thought.
Statistical effects can really mess with people's perception of cause and effect.
"Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not."
A classic example of something like it, is during WW I the British saw a lot of airplanes were coming back with fuselage damage. So they started reinforcing the fuselage. Why this is a logical mistake is that these were the surviving airplanes.
It's both. If you don't exercise at all you will waste away - the older you are the worse this gets. But I know two people a little over 80. Both were very active people up to about 5 years ago when one got arthritic hip and knee issues for which there is no easy fix. They are nearly debilitated and this is affecting the rest of their health. The second person just keeps on going. The first person would definitely be the same if not for the issues.
Note that they both made it to 80. Presumably because they were continuously active until that age at least.
That reminds me of my father (currently 76) who got a large dog. Now he walks it (or the dog walks him) for miles twice per day and his doc is extatic because that got rid of quite a few of his old age problems.
I know a guy who almost became a zen monk. By march he writes the allotted number of scientific papers for the year (he works for a govt lab). He's the editor of the top journal in his field.
Meanwhile, he's self taught himself philosophy and teaches it (pro bono?) at a University you've heard of.
Robert Lustig makes the point in this podcast with Huberman that the sugars and transfats in processed food are responsible for a lot of inflammation that comes from the modern diet.
For myself i have mild kidney disease .. diagnosed at 40 with 55% kidney function out of 100 but with diet change (3 liters of water daily, only eat chicken, rice, salads, no greasy or fast foods, popcorn... things that do not have preservatives in it, avoid taking all/any medications & exercise daily) i now maintain a function of 80 to 85% out of 100.
In my experience what you put in your body matters 100%. I do miss the damaging foods i use to eat growing up but it's either contiune eating bad and meet your decline quicker or change your lifestyle to continue enjoying a 100% full life for years to come.
No I never did protein shakes to bulk up. Most I ever weighed has been 180 to 185 (5'10) pounds but use to focus all my gym routine on weights and weight machines. I Was a lot more cut then...now leaner and still pretty cut (173 pounds 5'10 at 48) via a lot of swimming, hiking, biking & sometimes small weights(on a break currently from any weights).
After recently taking and highly regretting taking a high one dose of doxycycline my function took a temporary (hopefully) hit falling 15 to 20 points(past three years I've maintained around 80/85 function out of 100). I can tell per itchy skin, minor joint pains (creatinine build up) or sitting too long feeling my leg has fallen asleep(before diagnosis when I was at 55 function I did a long drive got out of the car & my legs fell asleep so bad I could barely walk until they woke up per say). Ive changed my diet further as my most recent labs (get tested once to bi-monthly) showed my LDL cholesterol is Way too high..now eating meat (chicken..high in cholesterol)only once a day, no ice cream (high in cholesterol) , a reduction of cheese intake and no cheat days (once I got my function up to 80/85 I allowed myself a cheat day or two). If blood isn't flowing in a healthy manner to kidneys due to high LDL then I think that is another factor along with the one high dose of doxy I took that has currently has my function not where it was but I believe it's a temporary thing.
Eating less cholesterol doesn't significantly lower blood cholesterol levels. Almost all of the cholesterol in your body is endogenously produced.
And high LDL isn't necessarily a problem by itself. The problem happens when cholesterol is formed into plaques as a reaction to arterial damage. Better to prevent that damage in the first place rather than worrying about cholesterol levels.
If you search the web "How to prevent arterial damage," most of the search results point to a heart healthy diet / lifestyle. As well all my doctors have advised the same thing (primary care who retired, current primary care and my kidney doctor).
Here's an exert from one of the sites "American Heart Association's (AHA) "Life's Simple 7" steps for heart health were 10 times more likely to have low blood pressure and flexible arteries than those who didn't.
The AHA's steps include controlling cholesterol, keeping blood sugar low, being active, eating a healthy diet, keeping off extra weight, and not smoking. (The seventh step is maintaining normal blood pressure, which the researchers were already measuring.)"
My lifestyle (what i eat and many times a week exercise) is pretty close to following all those steps. I definitely could follow it better as well become a vegetarian.
All my posts here are just sharing what I did to increase my kidney function, lessen amount of gout attacks (5 to 6 in 8 years isnt a ton ... im not taking any meds for it) and try to keep my cholesterol in check.. all without getting on medications that my kidney doc says meds will damage your kidney. This is just what helped me and Im a huge believer in what you put in your body matters. Others can try to do the same thing if they want there is no harm in living a healthier lifestyle. Yet it may or may not work for them but they can try and stick to it and see. All what's important to them .. eating tasty unhealthy food and having their health decline further or better their health and in turn their quality of life hopefully over a longer period of time.
That's cool you follow your diet and I'll follow mine and my doctors advice. For me the lifestyle I changed to I've seen positive results and maintained them for years.
There is no reliable evidence that drinking some protein shakes can cause kidney damage. You would have to get over 4 grams of protein per kg of body weight per day to even start risking some damage, and even serious weightlifters usually aren't consuming that much.
If you have damaged kidneys and you're a bodybuilder umm that's not a good combination as your kidneys can not break down creatinine like a normal kidney does. So protein shake sounds to me like a bodybuilder.
Curious what is your interest in this subject? Do you have CKD, a researcher, a doctor or ?
However, I feel best when intermittent fasting or doing keto. (Don't do keto unless you can stay in ketosis.) I don't take anything for "inflammation reduction", and I tend to have fewer CRF-related responses when I'm not in an environment where I'm having any hypersensitivity responses to allergens. Getting a bad respiratory illness will 100% of the time trigger a flare up, as well as certain GI conditions.
Immunity is characterized by cascade responses, and stopping your internal police force from getting the wrong idea and starting a riot that turns into a police state is a lifelong challenge. I've tried amino acid restriction, been on Prednisone, and am otherwise "healthy" by my routine panels.
I wish i could eat steak and cheeseburgers like i use to, but for me it all started with my first gout attack right before my kidney issue was spotted. I have had 5 to 6 gout attacks in the last 8 years. Last being a bad one in Sept 2022.
My previous diet was going to steakhouses a few times a week with mac n cheese and mashed potatoes with country gravy as side dishes. Shared dessert with my dining partner(s). My body to enjoy the same full life of hiking up mountains, skiing, biking, swimming, enjoying lots of intimacy for years to come without drugs can no longer take my previous diet. I'd be on dialysis most likely now or in the next few years if I chose a bad diet over continuing to live the same full life ive always enjoyed by revolutionizing my diet.
I don't eat a lot of foods containing fructose as I read labels of what I'm buying/eating. Like cereals (use almond milk) i eat do not contain any fructose ... few ingredients in them.
My kidney doc says i was born with small kidneys and that might be why i have mild CKD and or i took a medication that damaged my kidneys. Initially in 2019 she didnt advocate for changing diet .. seemed on the fence but to me it makes perfect sense what you put in your body matters a 100%.
I read stuff on the Internet that day she diagnosed me and went to the store. Threw away all foods in my house that had preservatives and started to read labels at the store finding foods made with simple to a few natural ingredients. I increased my daily water intake to almost nothing to 3 liters a day, stopped eating all beef, pork and only eat grilled chicken, fruits, salads, rice, almond milk, breads (grains), avoid fried foods, cut down on dairy, do some type of exercise & or go to the gym daily (though ive always done that but stopped lifting heavy weights .. lots of cardio (running, swimming, lite weights) as kidney cant break down creatine as it use to when you lifted weights) and as mentioned i do my best to avoid taking all/any medications. It took 4 to 6 months for my function to rise from 55 to around 70 and in the coming years i got and maintained it from 75 to 85. I go for monthly to bi-monthly renal lab testing to ensure it's all good. I also strive to eat 1500 to 2000 calories a day (5'10 173 pounds). Unfortunately recently i decided to take a high dose of doxyclcyine (throughout past few years ive taken two smaller/longer doses of it without issue for flu) and it brought my function down :-( Working hard now to get it back.
This is my journey .. i am not a doctor but from my experience and doctor worth their salt they should be advocating revolutionizing your diet ... some will say that's how it goes get ready to go on dialysis in a few years or so. Those doctors need to be ignored and find one who believes in nutrition and see how revolutionizing your diet most likely will heal your kidney some or by a lot too.
**I eat out a lot throughout each week ... chic fil a (grilled nuggets, fruit cup, salad, water or unsweet tea & lemonade), Cava (chicken & rice bowls), Chipolte (chicken and rice bowls), Panera (Apple fuji salad or half of one of their chicken sandwiches.. sometimes do eat turkey) or at home cook spaghetti, air fried chicken tenders, pasta and still eat sweets but i calorie count daily and weigh myself daily too. Ha too most i sound obsessed but i am obsessed about my health and ive seen / see results from being such!
He's a poor debater in that video, and he's begging the question in many cases.
He actually agrees with Lustig that highly processed food is addictive (he gives different reasons), but he pretends to disagree (go virality!). He's inventing strawmen in order to have something to argue with. They are actually making the same prescription but for different reasons: eat less processed food and reduce caloric intake if you want to lose weight.
He agrees that fruit is harder to consume, and is therefore a better vehicle to consume fructose if one is trying to limit caloric intake.
The intestine is made of intestinal epithelial cells, bound together by proteins to form a barrier. That class of proteins is called tight-junction proteins (eg zonulin). Fructose nitrates those proteins, causing them to be transiently permeable, allowing some of the sewage in your intestine to enter your bloodstream, leading to leaky gut. Leaky gut leads to inflammation of the liver, which leads to systemic inflammation. A biomarker of that inflammatory immune response is creactive protein (CRP). Lustic says 93% of Americans have leaky gut.
The answer is an unqualified yes for at least one of my family members.
After seeing many doctors over many years and receiving many diagnoses that didn't add up and which did not result in any health benefits, we finally saw benefits from change in diet. The starting point was a healthy, balanced diet, with very little sugar/sweets, no alcohol. Starting BMI was in normal range.
Removing all grains from the diet helped out. Family member lost a size in clothes, but did not lose weight. This was reduction in inflammation throughout the body, and relieved some symptoms.
Trial and error led to eventually getting on the lion diet (only red meat. no veg, fruit, grain). This has led to correcting of many health issues. Family member is now off of blood pressure medicine, can think clearly, no longer has signs of rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, etc. If you're interested, look up 'mcas'.
Every person is different, but transformation to health after many years is marked.
> Trial and error led to eventually getting on the lion diet (only red meat. no veg, fruit, grain)
Of course, if one is subscribed to any or many of the various general anti-red-meat narratives, from environmental to medicinical, they won't be interested in taking this up anyway, so the below advices is for the others really, any potential quick-adopters.
It's a mighty fine regime but: for starters, this better be fatty red meats, not overly lean, since this WoE usually (by prescription or just general satiety dynamics of meat-to-satiation) tends to dial down carbs severely or cut them completely, and you want plenty of your 2X00 kcal / day to come from not proteins but either fats or (if you still think them desirable or necessary after a while) carbs, and trust me you'll soon-enough rather gobble extra helpings of butter or yolks (or the copious meat fats that usually get trimmed off) than drink tablespoons of oils.. burning proteins for fuel energy is an emergency measure, they're not an ideal "calorie source for burning". (Search terms: "protein poisoning" or "rabbit starvation" in the absence/lowness of both carbs and fats.)
The second caveat is that pork is generally categorized as red-meat just like the ruminant kinds (in the modern world, beef and lamb, but everywhere humans evolved had their own variants, whether gazelles or caribou) but while I can vouch for years of daily satisfaction with a ruminant-meat+butter+eggs setup with no sense of lack or deficiency, I somehow deep down wouldn't trust the non-ruminant, only-so-labelled "red meat" of pork to deliver a like track record (and I have no cultural/religious imperative to be either halal or kosher). I like me a good piece of salami or bacon every once in a blue moon just fine, but the "lion diet" or sustainable human carnivory regime isn't about thriving-on-cold-cuts-and-pork-chops, without even having tried I think that quite impossible.
The third reminder is to mind nutrition completeness: fresh fatty ruminant meat and soft-boiled / sunny-side-up eggs (ie. with runny yolks but cooked whites) are "nutritionally complete" as far as a human cares (ignoring the modern notion of roughage aka "fiber" as some sort of nutrient, what's by-definition undigestable/unabsorbable is not simultaneously nutritive as-in nourishing). BUT processed meats incl. cured / smoked hams, sausages, patés and all that jazz aren't, neither is a roast that has been baking away in the oven for 2+ hours. Slightly pink and still-quite-juicy and you're good for sure. Whether that's steak or just mince. (And for that aspect, another good reason to emphasize ruminants over pork, fowl or seafoods. Doesn't mean the latter are taboo or "bad food", just perhaps in-the-long-run not "the staple" for max well-being.)
So to sum up: 1. ensure sufficient non-protein kcal inputs still (I can only speak for animal fats myself), 2. mostly-ruminants is likely superior on a basically-meat-only regimen, 3. for full nutrition ensure absolute dominance of fresh-not-processed meats and of rare-or-medium-rather-than-over-cooked meat.
Also, listen to appetite and fullness signals much more alertly and trust them. There'll be days of gorging and feasting as well as lean days this way, but they're directed by something better informed about your body than current science: namely, your body.
Definitely. I think people live in way more stress than they are aware of. You don't really get aware of how much stress you lived in until you 'detox' from all that by doing something like yoga and meditation consistently for a while. Then you see, "Oh my god, there's a new way to be. I never knew I could feel like this."
And you realize, like, holy shit...people are living their lives, locked up and trapped by this stress, and they're just used to it so they don't see it? Ugh...so bad. And so much avoidable suffering.
I guess that's also why something like "low-dose aspirin" is effective against many different conditions. People here also mention diet, which is think is true as well. One thing I noticed after regular yoga and meditation was my dietary choices totally changed. Things that I used to eat didn't feel healthy anymore--it was not based on any education (this was back in early 2000s I was not exposed to any of the current obsession with diet at that time), just my body's awareness.
Obviously the genesis of these things would be complex, but that inflammation/stress/cortisol would play a significant role in worsening conditions, maybe to the point of being the "camel straw" that causes them, and would also play a significant role in harming the body's ability to heal itself from these...is pretty obvious I'd say.
Exercise helps with this right? Exercise, aspirin, diet, avoiding definite inflamers like alcohol, cigarettes (tho some nicotine by itself might actually be good, cigarette not good), toxic chemicals in environment and food...practicing the right way in these things probably help a lot because of their connection with inflammation.
Wouldn't say it's that simple. Life is inherently suffering and everything in modern society amplifies it. If we don't want people suffering from bad diets, then why sell shitty food in the first place?
If [the U.S. Department of Health] can’t even recognize nicotine is carcinogenic given their sensitivity for identifying carcinogens, the likelihood that it has any cancer causing properties is approaching…zero.
There were sufficient effect size data to conduct meta-analyses on nine performance domains, including motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory. We found significant positive effects of nicotine or smoking on six domains: fine motor, alerting attention-accuracy and response time (RT), orienting attention-RT, short-term episodic memory-accuracy, and working memory-RT (effect size range=0.16 to 0.44).
Good in what sense? it's has bad effects, but it's addictive because of what it does for its users. It's great at sharpening the mind and focusing and looked at as a tool like that, it's quite good at it. It's the smoke from smoking to get it that's a problem.
Quite an extreme statement. It’s important to remember these questions are often nuanced and could even be considered unsettled. Do you or anyone have any evidence of what you claim? I’m very interested in it.
I guess I’m referring to how it’s neuroprotective specifically, thank you! :)
I’ve seen the direct opposite claim made here too. If this is already a settled question as I think you’re suggesting, it would be super high value information content for you to post that conclusion, I reckon.
In 2004 [1] (20 years ago!!) Time magazine ran a pretty interesting article about inflammation and its effects on the body.
I remember It got my attention as I had just started suffering with "IBS". Fast forward 20 years and It is still pretty relevant. I recommend reading it.
Anecdote (may actually not be related, but I think it is):
I had back surgery a few years ago due to infrequent recurring of sciatic pain that, during an "episode", made me unable to work for a couple of weeks at a time (I was unable walk or stand or sit for longer than two to three minutes without sciatic pain increasing to intolerable levels).
It looked like a relatively simple, and not even particularly extreme, bulging L5 disc impinging on the S1 nerve. What they found out during the surgery (because there's no high-enough resolution scanning to detect this) was that the S1 nerve was actually 'tethered' to the slightly bulging L5 disc due to scar tissue that had become 'sticky' over a number of years (apparently scar tissue, in areas that get recurring aggravation, can become sticky).
(Aside: the initial scar tissue was likely caused by a particularly memorably nasty football injury, after which I couldn't walk properly for a couple of weeks - knee drop the spine - yep, that'd do it)
So, my issue was not actually caused by a bulging disc impinging the nerve. As it turns out, when doing physical activity (tennis, roller skating, trying to catch my misbehaving children) the S1 nerve moves slightly up and down the spinal nerve cavity as you move your legs whilst running, and this movement of the S1 nerve was 'pulling' on the 'tethered' L5 disc, causing aggravation and inflammation, and it was this inflammation impinging on the S1 nerve and causing the pain.
And since the inflammation came well after the activity it takes a while to realise what's happening, such that the cause and the effect are separated by enough time as to make the (secondary) cause (ie. running activity) difficult to diagnose.
My pain was caused by inflammation, but that's still only a symptom. The underlying cause, the real thing that actually needed to be fixed, for me, was the S1 nerve/L5 disc tethering.
Inflammation is not a cause, it's a symptom. But it could be a symptom of an individual's genetics, and therefore not treatable by anything other than anti-inflammatory drugs.
As another anecdote: I get phlegmy after eating certain things. I've heard this is a manifestation of low level allergy to whatever I've eaten. What makes sense to me is that an increased base level of inflammation is a symptom of slight allergy to something environmental.
What also makes sense to me is that physical activity reduces inflammation as increasing the flow of blood around the body increases how quickly ones blood is cleansed (by the liver and kidneys and whatever else) of things that may cause inflammation.
P.S. The surgery was a success, and I'm back to leading an active lifestyle - even more active than it would have been as I was able to experience life where movement is pain, and thus how wonderful it is to be free of that.
Inflammation is absolutely a symptom and not a cause like you say.
Exercise reduces inflammation long term because exercise creates stresses on the body, which signals an inflammatory response to repair and rebuild. Of which the muscles, tissue and cardiovascular system adapt and condition themselves to that level of stress. Therefore, our bodies become better equipped to deal with daily movement and exercise. (Very simplified to the muscular and cardio systems).
Physical activity during exercise doesn't reduce inflammation but actually creates it in the short term, for a long term reduction in overall inflammation.
Exactly! Weight lifting is a good simplified way of explaining it. You lift weights, your muscle breaks down and causes inflammation and feels sore, your body as a result signals to repair and rebuild itself. Over time your muscle becomes conditioned to that particular exercise and weight amount.
You will then be able to perform that exercise, at that weight easier without the same level of muscle breakdown, soreness or inflammation.
Same with running, with enough training you will be able to run that 5k at a time you would have been exhausted at months ago. Through enduring the constant repair and build cycle that inflammation flags from muscular and cardiovascular fatigue.
It is why so much emphasis is placed on what you do outside of exercise during recovery, than the effort itself.
This is all purely in the context of exercise and not other forms of inflammation which the article also covers.
Maybe the easiest way to think of it is that it's like how cardiovascular exercise lowers your resting heart rate over time, but really raises your heart rate during and immediately after exercise.
The acute goes up for a bit, but your body is changing due to the exercise which causes the chronic condition to reduce over time.
Sorry, my comments have been purely in relation to exercise, not with regards to inflammation brought on by food or allergies. The original comment was in relation to exercise.
When you exercise, those muscles breakdown and generate micro tears of which causes inflammation. These inflammatory signals call upon the body to rebuild itself and repair. If you've ever performed any level of exercise, lifted weights etc your body has likely felt sore as a result and your body through its inflammatory response has repaired itself. Do this enough and you will become more tolerant to that level of exercise.
It's now muscles get bigger, it's now muscles become more tolerance of endurance exercise. It's your body adapting through repeated stressors.
I had an MRI, which really only showed a mild L5 disc bulge. The public health system denied surgery because it didn't seem to be a bad enough issue as to require surgery. Even the private surgeon I went to said he was 50/50 and so it was up to me to decide whether to go ahead with the surgery because, again, the MRI didn't show anything particularly extreme. I chose surgery because within myself I knew there was something more extreme that was wrong, and the surgery, even if unsuccessful, would have been a path towards an overall cause / diagnosis.
I'm sure my case is fairly exceptional, though. The surgeon specifically came to discuss it with me while I was in recovery.
I don't want to sway you either way, I've heard more bad stories about back surgery than good ones. Having said that, outside of some kind of disastrous surgery incident, being the age I was, I'm more likely to heal faster, better, stronger, than if I waited until later in life to have the surgery. I thought long and hard weighing the risks.
One thing the MRI showed was that my lower back muscles were noticeably lacking in size - which I think is fairly normal for someone who sits at a desk most of the day. As part of my months-long recovery process I was told to see a physio to work on core strength exercises in order to build the muscles around the abdomen that can help to support the spine and take (some) pressure off the discs. I was also told to do dead lifts to build back strength, but to start very light - I started at only 5Kg at about 10 weeks after surgery. Make sure you've got the correct stance, otherwise you risk making things worse. I've continued with dead lifts over a few years, much moreso than pilates or core exercises. I aim to keep slightly increasing the weight every couple of months for as long as I can - I'm up to 50Kg (I lost about 9 months of progress when I broke my wrist a year ago - the risks of an active lifestyle :)).
There's also a posture aspect to spinal disc pressures - accentuate the natural of your spine to 'feel' what correct posture feels like (ie the opposite of slumping down in your chair - shoulders back, bum out).
A relative of mine swears by pilates for helping with back pain, after having tried both yoga and pilates.
Try pilates, try dead lifts. Get someone who knows what they're doing (a physiotherapist ) to guide you on proper posture and technique (for both pilates and dead lifts), and once you've got that down you can probably do the rest yourself at home. The heardest part is the self-discipline (a physio won't solve your problems, but they can show you what you need to do to solve them).
I've always generally disliked this thesis because it feels wishy-washy, and, also, pharmaceuticals that suppress inflammation don't increase longevity by any appreciable amount, and pharmaceuticals that increase longevity don't act directly on inflammatory markers (metformin et al).
It all feels geared towards selling you a very vague promise of health and longevity through some obscure supplement or medication.
when I was getting diagnosed with crohns. One of the thoughts was that I had hepatitis, I did have an inflammed liver, so yes.
My immediate response was that I had gotten the vaccines for hep a,b,c. I was going to mexico, so it was to be safe but that was a few years earlier.. But there are many different ways for the inflammation. long story short... crohns. aka inflammatory bowel.
I then spent years looking to understand crohns and all the recent research.
Notably, it is correct that inflammation is the cause of many if not all of these diseases. But the obvious question is what's causing the inflammation.
Pretty extensive article and I didn't try any of the extreme things. I abided basically everything I could here. Which did improve the situation, chemo was probably the best but lots of major consequences, cannabis was probably the best overall with only minor addiction problems. But did let me figure out what isn't on this page. Basically figured out the cure to crohns, but what's super annoying was that... how did my GI doctor never talk to me about this? If he told people the cure, he'd be out of a job basically? So I post my idea to reddit and crohns forum and I get banned for medical misinformation. Kind of surprising...
So then I went backwards, if this is the cause of crohns, what else might happen. I then figured yes for sure UC and rheumatoid arthritis are just the same thing. But also almost certainly lupus, celiac, etc.
So yes, the myriad of chronic inflammatory conditions are caused by what causes the inflammation but for some reason nobody wants to know. I remember when Jeff Geerling had his crohns problems recentlyish, I posted here the cure and got flagged and shit on. Very illogical to me, but alas I'm just a programmer and not some doctor. So whatever.
It seems like (if I'm reading it right) you cured yourself so congrats on that.
Do note that unless you somehow cured at least a couple other people with Crohns using your method, it's quite possible that it only works for a small number of people (of which you are one), or even that you somehow had a mistaken understanding of the causation (i.e. something else cured it).
I personally don't think it's a big deal, but there might be a risk of others trying your method and getting adverse results (I don't know what it involves so I'm just speculating here).
Some people are offended that chronic disease patients with some intelligence can know their disease better than specialist doctors though. I never understood this reaction, I guess it's just some kind of gatekeeping that every profession has...
I'm not anything special. There are tons of people who are curing their crohns almost accidentally via other paths who just so happen to stumble into the cure because they threw a wide net.
It'snot like I'm the only person ever to have considered it neither. Easy to find after you realize, so it's certainly well within the 'many many others curing themselves'. But you look at crohns forum and it's almost as if medication, surgery, and diet are the only options? Like what? Not even the wiki page is that limited.
>Some people are offended that chronic disease patients with some intelligence can know their disease better than specialist doctors though. I never understood this reaction, I guess it's just some kind of gatekeeping that every profession has...
That makes sense to me.
For me, I just went and read every single science article available. I also have a great option to experiment on myself. Do something silly for a week or month and see how it works out. Journal and track how it goes.
I figure I'm sort of half way alleging a conspiracy, but I really don't think so, there is no Illuminati who want crohns disease to get worse.
I must say, my poos are so much better after lol.
I'm also trans and I find the same thing, the communities are super hostile to anything which might end it because they get their identity from it. Not that I'm saying there's a cure to being trans/autistic. That happens pre-natal exposure.
This comment is pretty long. I'm just trying to distill it. Are you saying you cured Crohns disease with chemotherapy and marijuana? Or are there other big things you did that you haven't mentioned?
> I suggest people pick up the book "Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive 978-0593241318" as it does a much better job at explaining these systems then my short paragraph.
I read that book just a few weeks ago and I don't recall reading anything about the stuff you mentioned.
All jokes aside, any "natural" fasting would probably be directly related to how much food is available, how perishable it is, and how long it keeps. Late winter and early spring were pretty hard times for folks living in places with 4 seasons (the time of Christian lent, in general). "natural" fasting was likely just a result of food availability.
And recommended and/or normal eating times have changed a lot through history, much as the foods we eat have. And so much of what we "know" is speculation: We can't realistically tell how often or what times any pre-history civilisation ate, for example.
"Winter" refers to an agricultural-age kind of shortage, not a ice-age-mammoth-hunters sort of situation. With most of the planet's humanity having less than 10k years of agriculture under their belt, it's perhaps been not quite as gene-shaping / evolutionary-impactful as the prior 100000-500000 years of mostly-hunting-and-scavenging (plus whatever little actually-edible non-poisonous plant/fungus stuff actual "gathering" outside cultivated-fields of bred-over-millenia varieties could in fact contribute — seasoning or snack-style most likely rather than the dominant/decisive nutriment/calory-package I'd wager).
But then, I'm not an authority on the matter, just yet-another-mildly-temporarily-curious-thread-partaker.
Certainly, hunting doesn't succeed every day or isn't done every day, so there's an assumption that "we evolved" under an alternation of feast-days (a handful) and fast-days (also a handful). I recall someone's napkin-calcs that one cow (not even mammoth), if fully (not just the fine cuts) utilized (and preservible so long), could nourish a single person for almost a year, and even a sheep for some ~3+ weeks. So as a small tribe you need not hunt or succeed every day — and when you really, really feast on fresh meat ad-lib one day, you'll easily be without (substantial) hunger at least for the next 1-3 days. I also heard once (not a scientist in that area either =) that animal predator carnivores don't nibble all the time, they strike and feast big every couple of days, nap it off, then just sorta roam and play.. outside of structured zoo/circus feeding schedules, that is. (Not that we're such a species as lions tigers or pumas, but we might have been closer to that M.O. for a long long time than today or back as tree-hopping primates.)
> Another interesting tidbit is that spinach and other similar foods once consumed in high enough quantities (as little as 1/2 a cup a week) causes little needle (Oxalates) like structures to form in our bodies, this is really bad when its in our joints. And another tidbit is that if you do over consume spinach you can be killed from it.
There is so much pseudoscience in here to unpack. You're picking and choosing anecdotes from different things (oxalate intolerance is a thing but not very common, 1/2 cup of spinach for most people is very healthy) to create a fear inducing narrative.
Yes, folks should watch what they eat, but spewing this garbage just muddies the waters on what could be the root cause for certain ailments.
Good description of a generic catch-all term that could have a variety of specific meanings.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/18/all-the-carcin...