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Comment by tyleraldrich | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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