AI told me about why eating lots of meat might make me feel dramatically better. There are genes that affect the amount of an enzyme that breaks down Folic Acid into methylfolate. I have multiple of those genes. 23andme knew I had these genes for more than a decade. Multiple doctors I told about this basically said nothing and knew nothing about this.
Exactly. It's fairly affordable. Although for me there were other co-factors for me to feel the effects in my brain (almost surely Coq10) so I felt better when I took this and ate food (which normally did also have some meat in it).
Because doctors aren't diagnostic machines, they learn a bunch of shit, use 10% of it, develop hubris syndrome and never fill in the blanks. An expert system doesn't have these same failings, but definitely has others.
I’ve felt my best on a carnivore diet but couldn’t keep a stable weight so I fear it’s the equivalent of saying I felt my best when I was slowly dying of hunger? ha
I have done 23andMe where can I look for those genes?
Just FYI this is not carnivore and I have mostly fixed this without eating pure meat. You can take methylated folate to fix this problem.
One of the subject genes is called MTHFR. It reduces the methylation of Folic acid by ~30-40%, depending on which paper you read. Tons of people have this. It was this AND a gluten sensitivity which resulted in me having actually low levels of usable folate.
You can download your DNA there and enter it in another site that can tell you the other genes that could affect this sort of thing.
There are other things that could affect other people in unique ways so of course this isn't the only one.
What I did is ask Claude "why would eating meat make me feel dramatically better" and it told me about these genes. And then I went to 23andme where you can see individual SNPs and then I searched for other related SNPs.
I also seem to have non-Celiac gluten sensitivity which affects my absorption of Folate (and other things if I have recently eaten gluten which was almost always until recently) which is why this was a problem for me. And zero doctors or companies have ever developed a test for this or even take it seriously, including allergists and immunologists that I saw.
Similar story to you with non-celiac gluten sensitivity: I was having disabling flank pain for months, but after ruling out a couple things they shrugged and gave me an IBS diagnosis and a prescription for a drug with bad long-term side effects. Someone suggested cutting out gluten, which I tried and the pain went away. Intentional and unintentional reintroduction of gluten leads to the pain coming back within a few hours.
> Despite lots of research – and lots of buzz – the existing scientific data doesn’t support the vast majority of claims that common MTHFR variants impact human health.
MTHFR as told by the internet is an alternative medicine topic. It has been abused by influencers and supplement sellers because it’s extremely common to have one of these variants. The influencers use it as an “aha!” moment because most people who go looking for it will have it.
Most of the internet advice about MTHFR is completely without basis in science. If you have one of the rarer homozygous mutations then it’s worth looking at, but it’s not the explanation for all ills that you see from influencers.
Chances are good that if you’re reading this, healthy or not, you have a MTHFR variant. It does not mean anything by itself.
Methylfolate is also used as an adjunct to antidepressants because it has some efficacy in depression in some cases. That fact is probably not coincidental to all of these reports about people feeling “better” when they start taking it. MTHFR may not even be involved at all.
Yeah, I'm always a bit suspicious of apparently effective dietary changes which result in a calorie reduction - often different people report completely different dietary changes helped them, but one thing they all have in common is being in calorie deficit.
There are plenty of studies showing that caloric restriction calms inflammatory responses which are responsible for the majority of common diseases. Without balancing the energy intake, I'm always slightly suspicious that any improvements with changing what I eat are actually caused by the change in how much I eat.
I dont think this is an either/or question. I think people struggle with multiple levels of explanation, which is almost always the case in biology, psychology, and behavior. There is also a huge amount of biologic variability between people.
As a result, some people may find it more pleasant and easier to balance energy intake with different dietary styles.
Should be easy to troubleshoot on a forum or with a specialist. You probably were eating low fat. It happens often. Feel free to describe exactly what you ate and what problems you had.
MTHFR? Very common error variants. My dad and wife have different broken variants. Very common to have errors here. Some quarter of the population do. Easy to get supplements these days. Some prenatal supplements will even do this one methylfolate instead of folic acid.
For me I had this and I believe a gluten sensitivity which impacted absorption of various vitamins. So when I cut out gluten and supplement I feel better, but kit if I continue eating gluten.
