Gut Germs Appear to Play Role in Multiple Sclerosis

My father worked in Mongolia and observed how local people in remote rural areas ate. Calories came only from meat of horses, sheep, camels and some small game plus fermented camel milk. There were no vegetables or any other plants besides few herbs that they used for tea. This is not surprising as it is very difficult to grow there anything but local grass, so one can survive only from animals that can eat that.

My father does not remember that locals got some particular health problems from that. Old people looked healthy and worked pretty much until the dearth. What is especially interesting that it was also true for descendants of Russian emigrants there from 100 years ago, but they did grow some vegetables and cereals.

Of cause, that does not prove that meat is healthy. But it does show that in a particular climate eating only meat is not harmful when the meat is from animals that was treated by locals with extreme respect and that were fed on grass that was either fresh or covered with snow at winter.

My very cursory analysis, after skimming the article follows. First, the article in general is quite misleading. It's written in a language that a layman would understand, but in a way that causes such layman to misunderstand some crucial points. I don't know if this is on purpose, or if the author is just honestly trying to address a complex topic and failing.

- Part 1. Background

> Life on earth depends on appropriate pH levels in and around living organisms and cells.

I take issue with this sentence. This is obviously true, as life must carefully control the concentrations of some substances inside and outside the cell. However, this makes it seem like pH is uniquely special. This is not true: pH is merely a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions in a solution. If this is meant to address the layman, as it's supposed to, such clarification is important. In fact, I think many of the myths around pH would be better addressed by making the pH concept taboo, and talking instead of "the concentration of H+ ions in solution".

> As a comparison, in the past 100 years with increasing industrialization, the pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 because of increasing CO2 deposition.

This is very important for the bisphere as a whole, but useless to understand the impact of pH changes in the body. I don't understand the reason for this section.

> This results in a diet that may induce metabolic acidosis which is mismatched to the genetically determined nutritional requirements

No. This is not true. Such diet may wreck your kidneys due to hypertension, and the kidney damage will give you metabolic acidosis. The diet itself will not give you metabolic acidosis, as long as your lungs and kidneys are fine. This is written in a very misleading way.

> With aging, there is a gradual loss of renal acid-base regulatory function and a resultant increase in diet-induced metabolic acidosis while on the modern diet

Now we're talking. I don' know if this is exactly true, but at least it makes sense.

- Part 2. The Role of pH in Various Cells, Organs, and Membranes

None of the mechanisms described here have anything to do with the systemic blood pH. The author doesn't say it, and he should. This section adds confusion and very little understanding

- 3. Chronic Acidosis and Bone Disease

This section is a little confusing. Many studies, little understanding.

The interesting part is this:

> There is evidence that in healthy humans the increased sodium in the diet can predict the degree of hyperchloremic metabolic acidosis when consuming a net acid producing diet

The study this is taken from has does have some regressions that advance this point, but the correlation is so weak I'm not sure we should take the results at face value.

- 4. Alkaline Diets and Musce

> Conditions such as chronic renal failure that result in chronic metabolic acidosis result in accelerated breakdown in skeletal muscle [40]. Correction of acidosis may preserve muscle mass in conditions where muscle wasting is common such as diabetic ketosis, trauma, sepsis, chronic obstructive lung disease, and renal failure

While you can manipulate the pH f patines with no functioning kidneys by giving them tablets with NaHCO3 (an alkali), you should never, ever extrapolate this to the diet of healthy people. Even in patients with kidney failure, doctors don't try to correct the pH with diet alone.

- 5. Alkaline Supplementation and Growth Hormone

> It has long been known that severe forms of metabolic acidosis in children, such as renal tubular acidosis,

No, no, no... Again, don't extrapolate from serious kidney diseases to healthy subjects.

- 7. Alkalinity and Chemotherapy

Some drugs work better with low pH and some work better with high pH. Again, you won't change the pH with diet, so this is useless to a discussion of Alkaline diet

> It has been suggested that inducing metabolic alkalosis may be useful in enhancing some treatment regimes by using sodium bicarbonate, carbicab, and furosemide

As you can see, even when you cant to induce alkalosis, you sue actual drugs, and not dietary changes (one of these drugs, furosemide, works by manipulation kidney function, it's not merely an alkali concentrate).

The discussion and conclusion say that the evidence is weak for lots of things. The only stroong part is the K/Na ratio. If the Alkali diet does this, then its benefits have nothing to do with blood alkalinization per se.

eat what your ancestors ate.

in america, there is almost a shaming done if you do not eat other cultures foods, but other cultures mostly stick to their own food (and there is a good reason for that).

[1] gives direct evidence that meat from grass-feed cows comes with higher load of endotoxins than wild game. It will be interesting to know if this is a consequence of modern breading/farming or something related to cow domestication.

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20377925

Thank you for that link.

The summary doesn't mention 'grass-fed', only 'wagyu'; wagyu is intensively grain-fed in the last year of their life or so.

To quote from a quickly-googled article:

"What many people overlook is that farmers make Wagyu as fatty as possible by feeding their cows huge amounts of grain for the last 300-500 days of their lives. Some farmers even add wine and beer to further increase fat content. The result is that a wagyu cow’s muscle tissue is thoroughly marbled with fat. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of fat that is not good for you. The mold toxins in all that grain are bad for the cow and end up in its fat, and then in you, which would mean wagyu beef has a disproportionately high toxin load."