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Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

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Re: Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

#61

Post by JanSt »

spraak wrote: post #57
JanSt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to lower your LDL I'll advice you to eat nothing but white bread with slices of highly processed meat for a week. Will lower your HDL and increase Trigs too, but if LDL is your primary concern: Go for it. Here is the thing: it's not as easy as LDL = BAD. For older people higher LDL is actually protective, for women there seems to be nearly no effect whatsoever. Don't be fooled by simple answers.

> If you want to lower your LDL I'll advice you to eat nothing but white bread with slices of highly processed meat for a week. That sounds like dubious advice. On what basis would you recommend that? There are healthier ways to have low LDL, namely just eating whole plant foods. A variety of fruits, vegetables, beans, grains, nuts and seeds, and spices is my recommendation.

I'm not recommending it at all. It's to show, that LDL is not a good measure of cv health.

Re: Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

#62

Post by spraak »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #13
Aromasin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found with me that, after trying keto for ages and loving how I felt but hating the diet itself, I managed to pin point the issue down to grains. Any form of grain, be it rice, wheat, barley, oats etc, all seemed to mess me up big style. I'n now on a diet of mostly fruit, nuts, beans, seeds and tubers and I'm better than I was on keto on almost every measurable factor. I think cutting out the carbs initially imp…

Maybe it is glycemic load? I completely agree, but I get hit hard by sugars, bread, mashed potatoes and cheap fries (really good fries I justify).

Processed carbohydrates will by definition hit you hard. Added oil is also hard. Try intact grains, e.g. rice, quinoa, millet, barley, etc. Even whole wheat bread or pasta will hit harder than boiled wheat grains.

Re: Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

#63

Post by JanSt »

spraak wrote: post #58
JanSt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to lower your LDL I'll advice you to eat nothing but white bread with slices of highly processed meat for a week. Will lower your HDL and increase Trigs too, but if LDL is your primary concern: Go for it. Here is the thing: it's not as easy as LDL = BAD. For older people higher LDL is actually protective, for women there seems to be nearly no effect whatsoever. Don't be fooled by simple answers.

> For older people higher LDL is actually protective, for women there seems to be nearly no effect whatsoever. Don't be fooled by simple answers. Your last statement is in direct contradiction with all of your previous simple answers. Where is there evidence of the protective effect of LDL?

How so? LDL can be a marker of bad health, but is not so by any means in all cases.

Relevant study: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/6/e010401

Re: Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

#64

Post by coldtea »

sz4kerto wrote: post #20

I developed a pretty bad pollen allergy around the age of 30. Every spring I had to take antihistamines that helped a bit (not completely), but they made me either anxious or sleepy. Then just for fun I made a bet with a friend of mine -- I tried to do a half-distance amateur tri race (1.9k swim, 90k cycle, 21k running) without any carb intake. So I dramatically decreased my carb intake for 3 months or so from Februa…

1/2 weeks seems trivial to A/B test.

Just eat no gluten but still carbs for 2 weeks, see what happens, and then all carbs again.

Re: Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

#65

Post by coldtea »

poseid wrote: post #35

started to feel changes in sleep patterns at the end of my 30ies as well... from what i know my eating patterns did not change over the past 15-20 years so much. what are scientific papers on the relation between sleep and nutrition? might be interesting to learn more on this for the future.

>started to feel changes in sleep patterns at the end of my 30ies as well... from what i know my eating patterns did not change over the past 15-20 years so much.

No, but your body's abilities and stamina changed a lot...

Re: Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

#66

Post by devilmoon »

collyw wrote: post #42
devilmoon wrote: post #26

Something to consider when talking about anything wheat/gluten related is that SO many people nowadays are starting to show signs of gluten intolerance/allergy and this might be due to glyphosate rather than the gluten itself. I come from Italy and trust me when I tell you that everyone and their uncles eat a diet that is 99% gluten-based, however until a few years ago nobody ever had problems with it. I am starting…

What's the advice for avoiding it? Organic food (which I always thought was a fad)?

I don't think there's a way to readily avoid it, unless you can grow and process the crops yourself. Organic food, afaik, more times than not is worse than run-of-the-mill industrial products so tread carefully. Unfortunately I don't have much advice to give here since I cut out gluten almost entirely from my diet.

Re: Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

#67

Post by laforge »

coldtea wrote: post #51
laforge wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you want to consider to switch to a whole food plant based diet. Other than the other „lifestyle“ diets such as low carb, the plant based is actually backed by science. A good source is nutritionfacts.org and the book „how not to die“ by the same author. If you asked me to switch two months ago, I‘d say no way. But the science behind it convinced me to try it and it is so much easier than expected.

If the science is a private website and a book by the same person, it's not really "science". And by mixing and matching different research papers, any diet peddler/author/etc can make it appear as their specific diet is "backed by science" (when it's just a bunch of disparate papers in its favor, without context -- e.g. later responses to those papers, quality and reproducibility, papers that study the exact opposit…

Generally I agree, but I don't think that this applies to nutritionfacts.org. The website is not by a single individual with commercial interests. All revenue from the book goes to his foundation, which runs the website. And the book has round about 100 pages of references. Here is a video where he explains how he does his research and how the videos are created: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/behind-the-scenes-at-nutrit...

Re: Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

#68

Post by Aromasin »

xenihn wrote: post #40
Aromasin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found with me that, after trying keto for ages and loving how I felt but hating the diet itself, I managed to pin point the issue down to grains. Any form of grain, be it rice, wheat, barley, oats etc, all seemed to mess me up big style. I'n now on a diet of mostly fruit, nuts, beans, seeds and tubers and I'm better than I was on keto on almost every measurable factor. I think cutting out the carbs initially imp…

What about quinoa? If that's still an issue, what have been your favorite substitutes for grains? I'm fond of riced cauliflower.

Quinoa is great, as are lentils and corn. You can also get lots of different types of cous-cous made using legume flour. Those are my go to's if I want to add something grain like to my meals. I've experimented with some others like Teff and Amaranth, but they still made me feel sluggish and restless.

Re: Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

#69

Post by spraak »

JanSt wrote: post #63
spraak wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For older people higher LDL is actually protective, for women there seems to be nearly no effect whatsoever. Don't be fooled by simple answers. Your last statement is in direct contradiction with all of your previous simple answers. Where is there evidence of the protective effect of LDL?

How so? LDL can be a marker of bad health, but is not so by any means in all cases. Relevant study: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/6/e010401

That study is problematic: https://www.cebm.net/2016/06/cebm-response-lack-association-...

And just one? Lots of studies showing the opposite.

Re: Turning the Puzzle Sideways: Sleep, Diet and the Brain-Gut Connection

#70

Post by devilmoon »

wtdata wrote: post #37
devilmoon wrote: post #26

Something to consider when talking about anything wheat/gluten related is that SO many people nowadays are starting to show signs of gluten intolerance/allergy and this might be due to glyphosate rather than the gluten itself. I come from Italy and trust me when I tell you that everyone and their uncles eat a diet that is 99% gluten-based, however until a few years ago nobody ever had problems with it. I am starting…

The reason so many people are showing a gluten allergy/intolerance is a fad propagated by social media. It has nothing to do with evolution - obviously - since it doesn't work in such a small time frame, and it has nothing to do with glyphosate, since glyphosate is used in most of the other (gluten free) crops as well.

I used to think like you wrt the social media conditioning, however now that I've experienced IBS on myself I changed my outlook on it. I am sure that there are people who eat specific diets just because it is a fad and they get conditioned into it by their social circles or influencers they follow, however I am also now quite sure that some of these conditions are very real and people suffer quite a lot because of it (and not necessarily in a physical way but through a very high psychological burden also).

I can tell you from my personal experience (YMMV etc.) that I was able to eat anything and everything without a single problem whatsoever until my early twenties. I was the type of person to eat a kebab at 4am and then go straight to bed and sleep like a baby, now even thinking of doing something like that makes me feel sick. Some of it might be due to aging, certainly, and the doctors I've spoken to have also suggested that increased level of stress might've had something to do with it (which ties in nicely with the gut-brain link), but still what I experienced is that from a certain point forward I wasn't able to eat most foods anymore without feeling really sick (and this has been diagnosed as being IBS, which is truly just a catch-all for gastroenterologists when they don't know what the fuck is causing you problems). From my experience going forward I don't think that it's triggered by very specific foods or stress by themselves, and I've come to the conclusion that it must've been something systemic that I did that led to this outcome (i.e., eat small amounts of glyphosate every day multiple times a day for years).

I think we should really take better care of ourselves and at least explore these potential risks very carefully before dismissing everything as a social media fad / zoomer thing

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