447 karma · joined November 16, 2015
Yes, I do intend to challenge your position, but I mean no offense. Maybe the problem is not slumping nor coding, but the chips. The first step to fixing health, be it physical or mental, is fixing one's diet.
I once considered myself one, until I started actually rolling the blinds up in the mornings (Spanish blinds block all light) and staying away from blue light in the evenings. Being brought up in a cloudy, rainy town and having a very obstructed view of the outside from my bedroom window didn't help, I must admit.
Also I wonder if certain habits and behaviors, like dopamine-induced compulsive social browsing or gaming, food addictions, etc. play a role here.
I follow a carnivore diet and have always been a bit scared of messing up my microbiome, while finding it quite strange that I defecate non-negligible amounts of waste, once a day on average.
Only recently has my knowledge gap been filled when I found out that our microbiome can survive solely on amino acids. In fact, all this "gut-brain axis" stuff regarding the production and/or catabolism of neurotransmitters by gut bacteria only makes sense if bacteria can ferment amino acids. Thinking that some bacteria strain can produce neurotransmitters from fibre is an insult to intelligence: where does the nitrogen come from?
Take, for example, minerals (electrolytes). Calcium absorption is greatly affected by the rest of your diet (fibre intake, phytates, oxalates and other antinutrients). A person eating a high amount of nuts containing calcium might absorb less than someone eating only meat (fish), which contains much less calcium by weight, but none of the factors that negatively affect absorption.
In other words, RDAs are not fixed. Someone on a purely carnivore diet needs less than 80 mg of magnesium per day, while someone on a vegetarian diet might need over 500 mg to maintain magnesium status.
Pardon the math analogy, but regarding the direct comparison of different food items, it is clear that some order relation can be defined between them (e.g. an apple is better than a serving of fries), but that relation is far from being complete. Is an apple always healthier than an rib-eye? Are they even comparable? Is a bowl of steamed rice healthier than a slab of butter?
> Early diagnosis of the GLUT1 deficiency syndrome is important because adherence to a ketogenic diet (Glossary) [15] is an effective treatment for most patients [83]; in general, ketogenic diet efficiently suppresses epileptic seizures in childhood drug-resistant epilepsy [87].
Regarding your quote, please read the sentence right before it:
> A thromboembolic occlusion of a brain-supplying artery leads to an acute disruption in blood supply to a specific brain territory, causing cerebral ischemia (Figure 1b). Within minutes, glucose depletion and associated compromised bioenergetic pathways cause extensive neuronal death in the core of the infarction, and over time in the surrounding tissue [90, 91].
The sentence you quoted is in the context of a fucking stroke and has absolutely nothing to do with diet. Are you aware of that?
And again, the brain still has glucose readily available (and uses it) when on a ketogenic diet.
Please do try to inform yourself and/or read more carefully before judging others' views.
In case you wonder, the brain uses around 25% glucose and 75% ketones even in deep ketosis. Glucose in the blood is stable, and spent glucose is replenished through gluconeogenesis on demand.
I would like to know what your point is here. Thanks.
It must be clear to you, then, that nothing points to a mechanistic or causal relationship between high LDL in the blood and CVD. LDL does participate in the formation of atheroma (albeit in an altered state), but so do so many other molecules and cells. Do macrophages cause disease? Well, they must be there for it to develop, but they are an otherwise vital part of our bodies. Same goes for LDL.
As for the misinformation I am spreading, what are you afraid of? Do you think me saying LDL is not a predictor or cause of CVD (which, again, is true, and you know that) is going to cause harm to anyone? How so? By them gorging on butter? If you still believe saturated fat is bad, well...
This conversation is rather futile, and we both know it. Either way, I'm curious: what is a heart-healthy diet for you? Also, I would ask of you to please keep the fancy words for more relevant uses. I am not a native English speaker and I fear I might not understand some.
To be honest, you can bear the burden of proof yourself. If you want to show me I'm wrong, I'm more than willing to review the evidence. Unless of course you're just projecting the whole armchair thing onto others.
Lastly, if you think of it, asking others to prove the irrelevance of LDL with regards to CVD is straight non-sense. Do I also have to prove to you that wearing grey socks doesn't cause disease?
What does that tell you?
Absolutely nothing. I could go with the "get rid of poison" narrative, but that is a bit too extreme and is usually taken with a great deal of psychological resistance. I couldn't blame you.
Also, I believe that a well-formulated ketogenic diet is pretty far from starvation, enabling me to do exactly the same, if not more, as when I was running on carbohydrate. Of course, you might believe otherwise, but do take the time to think critically about where this belief stems from.
It can also burn other stuff [0] and have almost no requirements for glucose, all of which can be provided through gluconeogenesis from amino acids and the glycerol backbone of fat.
LDL cholesterol is not a predictor, indicator or otherwise relevant measure with regards to disease, at all. If anything, HDL/trig ratio might be.
However, exercise alone is not always sufficient. Daily meditation sessions help tremendously. But the icing on the cake (pun intended) is, in the end, nutrition.
Our body (and thus our mind) works with what we put inside it. In fact, our body is made exclusively of what we, or our mother, ingested in the past. There is no escaping that fact, and most people seem to ignore it every single day.
Personally, switching to a zero-carb ketogenic diet has done wonders for my overall health and well-being, including mental health. I am of course very biased in affirming this, but I honestly think sugar and most other plant substances (except perhaps some fruits and their oils) are there to harm us. The phytotoxin defense hypothesis really resonates with my experience.
^: I have had recurrent depressive episodes throughout most of my life, and antidepressants make me manic, but I otherwise experience no "natural" mania, only a mild hypomania.
> If the data do not contradict the null hypothesis, then only a weak conclusion can be made: namely, that the observed data set provides no strong evidence against the null hypothesis. In this case, because the null hypothesis could be true or false, in some contexts this is interpreted as meaning that the data give insufficient evidence to make any conclusion; in other contexts it is interpreted as meaning that there is no evidence to support changing from a currently useful regime to a different one.
Also, keep in mind that in this study, the intervention (the difference between both groups) was, basically: perform an intense 1-hour bout of exercise and immediately replenish all calories spent.
The null hypothesis is, thus:
"In sedentary people, performing an intense bout of exercise and immediately replenishing spent calories doesn't affect next day metabolism."
Being unable to reject that statement doesn't immediately confirm it in statistical terms, but even if that were the case, it is such a lousy statement to begin with, that any headlines coming out of it are outright misinformation. Both groups were equally sedentary and that might have nothing to do with any observed effects.
> These data indicate that physical inactivity (e.g., sitting ~13.5 hrs/day and <4,000 steps/day) creates a condition whereby people become "resistant" to the metabolic improvements that are typically derived from an acute bout of aerobic exercise (i.e., exercise resistance).
Also note that the researchers _immediately_ re-fed the group who participated in the intense exercise:
> The additional energy expenditure from the exercise session was estimated via indirect calorimetry. This energy was then replaced with additional caloric intake with the post-exercise dinner (Clif® Builder’s®; ~40%/30%/30% of calories from carbohydrate, fat, and protein, respectively).
This is especially bad because it isn't mentioned anywhere in the abstract (I checked the full-text).
Shit science.
A dissatisfaction with one's work that manifests as some sort of "what I do doesn't have meaning" or "what I do doesn't help anyone" is usually just an "I don't do anything relevant in my spare time" that is looked at through the wrong lens.
In a capitalist society, one should not rely on the same activity for both sustenance and psychological well-being or fulfilment. As many have pointed out before me, here and elsewhere, any hobby or similar activity stops being enjoyable once it becomes your job, i.e. once you pay your bills with it.
Instead of trying to stretch our daily jobs to fit two different goals, I believe we should, in fact, shrink our jobs so that they leave enough space for different activities that try to tackle the lack of meaning or passion in our lives: volunteering, cooking, making of art or just simply being there for our loved ones.
In other words, instead of the "equate life worth to career, find out life has no meaning, change career, equate life worth to new career" cycle, try the "equate life worth to... well, life itself" for once.
The study was published in the journal BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and none of its authors are affiliated with the NIH, judging from their affiliation statement in the paper itself:
Author details
1 AOMA Graduate School of Integrative Medicine, Austin, TX 78745, USA.
2 NoviSci, Durham, NC, USA.
3 TrueNorth Health Center, Santa Rosa, CA 95404, USA.
4 TrueNorth Health Foundation, 1501 Pacific Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA 95404, USA.
There is also no mention of northern cuisine except for pulpo a feira. Spanish gastronomy is a very regional thing.
When I think of the food industry, I tend to think more in terms of "behaviour reinforcement" and "psycho- and physiological addiction".
We do assign the masculine gender to it when we attach adjectives to it, but never an article, which actually is a bit strange once you think about it.
For example, "the Internet is full of X" is "Internet está lleno de X". To refer to a slow Internet connection, we would say "Internet va lento" or "me va lento Internet". No trace of "el Internet".
Also, I think in Latin America they treat it as feminine and always attach the definitive article, so "the Internet" is "la Internet".
And as a last comment, just to see how crazy language is, we always use "la intranet". Maybe because that is a "concrete" place, while the Internet is a more abstract medium.
I suggest you give almonds, macadamia nuts and pork rinds a go.
There's also this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24917038
Either way, it greatly depends on what you understand by "efficient". I dare to assume you are referring to ease of access, which is by no means a measure of efficiency.