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Comment by TomSawyer | Hacker News Reader

Would you mind going into some of the specifics of the diet and how you were impaired during your recovering?

Surely =)

I made the mistake of pretty much removing the consumption of meat and fish and increasing that of lentils, beans, garbanzos, avocado, etc., which are usually quite high in copper. In fact, I didn't even eat egg. So you end up with no animal protein, which usually has zinc (antagonist of copper) and with an excess of copper. So at that point it was a pretty vegetarian (almost vegan diet). if you are careful enough and take zinc, I suppose you could make it work, but I obviously had no idea about this. I also ate more fruit than I should have, which has quite some sugar in it, which also is bad for the absorption of zinc. So yeah, some mistakes here and there :D

How were you impaired though? I'm not doubting you, but I've been a vegetarian for almost 4 years and the diet you describe is basically my diet (minus high amount of fruit). What negative impact did this have that lasted for so long?

Right, this sounds like every vegan diet I've seen, and I'd never heard of copper overdose as a risk for vegans. Was there some preexisting adrenal condition?

Apparently zinc supplementation can be dangerous as well except on a short term basis (like for a cold), so I'm not sure I wanna start warnjng my vegan friends yet.

Copper overdose is one of the most common imbalances among vegetarians/vegans; it's just not easy to diagnose, because it doesn't appear in the blood, but you need to get a tissue metal test, and those tests are not too common. Furthermore, they tend to take at least 5 years to appear. I'm not sure if there was a preexisting adrenal condition, but I wouldn't discard that as an option. If you have vegan friends, let them know that they are at higher risk of copper overloading. You could save them a lot of pain in the future (I'm not the only one with this, sadly).

And what actually are the symptoms?

In my case: pretty bad brain fog (especially when trying to bring the copper down), bad mood, sleep and digestive issues, no energy whatsoever, and depression. It depends on whether you are actively trying to bring it down or not (you could call it detox, but this word has gotten a bad press, so I would rather not use it).

Those are the signs of deficiency, not overdose. What made you think you suffered from copper overload?

I do suffer from overload and have been tested. It's common to suffer the same symptoms as someone who has a deficiency when trying to bring those levels down.

That's nonsense. Please get tested by a real doctor.

Nonsense. It only happens after prolonged massive intakes (A man who intentionally took 60mg/day for a year and 30mg for several years before that is one of the few examples found in literature.) and the signs are liver and kidney failure. It's completely unrealistic you could get that much from anything resembling normal food, vegan or otherwise.

It's perfectly realistic and more common than you think. There's plenty of evidence around which you can find with a simple google search.

http://www.westonaprice.org/modern-diseases/copper-zinc-imba...

As far as my knowledge goes, that seems to be completely made up.

My copper went through the roof, and the worst of all is that you barely notice it going up. It slowly builds and you think that you are doing fine, although I had started noticing that I had trouble focusing and had bad temper, which I had never had before (and a million other symptoms). I'm quite confident the source is this diet. Copper overload is actually more common than it seems, but a lot of people that suffer it never get diagnosed, because it doesn't appear in the blood and more often than not people blame their job or the stress for those symptoms. I'm not blaming the diet, because I made that choice and I didn't read enough about the possible downsides, but I think people should be careful when switching to certain diets (keto, vegan, etc.). You get overloaded (pun intended) by information about meat, cancer, GMO, and all that crap going around that tries to convince you that what you are doing is wrong. I should have been more careful, but I learned my lesson.

For a list of symptoms associated with too much copper, just look up Wilson's Disease. These people have dysfunctional copper excretion mechanisms and need to take drugs that chelate the copper so the body can excrete it.[1]

Looks like it's mainly liver toxicity and neurological symptoms.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson's_disease

There must be something other than the vegetarian diet you've mentioned because that's essentially one entire side of family, and quite a few of them are hale and healthy in their 70s/80s.

Yeah I'm not sure that all those vegans are aware that they should take zinc supplements.

I ate a vegan diet for many years. Zinc was one of the things I was very conscious of (I tracked my diet fairly carefully). One of the things I noticed was that if I ate a traditional (i.e. from a culture that ate that way historically) vegan diet, that getting the nutrients I needed was not nearly as difficult. I think a lot of people simply cut out animal products from a traditional meat based diet and end up with problems. Potato chips are usually vegan, but a diet consisting of only potato chips is not healthy ;-)

My own personal take on this kind of thing is that there traditional diets where people have eaten a certain way for hundreds of years. While we may not have good studies on these diets, there is a kind of evolutionary effect. As people get a lot more choice in how they eat, we're running into problems where people think they can design a healthy diet. Sometimes they get it quite wrong.

I've also spent a good part of my free time over the last 20 years reading papers on nutrition. Another big thing that I notice is that a huge proportion of these papers are terrible - poor sampling techniques, inadequate reporting of conditions, insanely small trial sizes (sometime less than 10 people!!!), statistics that are plain wrong, etc. People with particular agendas often push their point of view, backing up impressive arguments with mountains of really poor research. It is hard/impossible for the average person to adequately judge the validity of the arguments and they end up making poor dietary choices as a result. Even with the amount of time I spend, I have no idea if my current biases are reasonable or not.

Diet is hard :-( Usually I suggest that people pick a traditional diet that appeals to them, study it carefully and try to adopt it. Then they should track their health carefully and make sure to get frequent health checks.

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