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Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease

harvardmagazine.com

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Re: Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease

#71

Post by atomical »

redwards510 wrote: post #44
bsmith wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome that it worked so well for you while it did. Tip for others who may try this: don't forget to lower your macros (and, in turn, calories) an appropriate amount as your weight drops. The same diet that maintains keto at 250 lbs won't keep you in keto at 190. For much, much more: https://peterattiamd.com/

Keto is the absence of carbs. So the same diet that maintains keto at 250 will keep you in keto at 190, since it is what you eat, not how much you are eating. But you are absolutely correct that one must change their caloric intake as they lose weight if they want to keep losing weight.

Are you saying someone on keto can eat 4,000 calories of butter and not gain weight?

Re: Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease

#72

Post by toomuchtodo »

ixtli wrote: post #66
rossdavidh wrote: post #63

My prediction: 1) reducing chronic inflammation by, for example, exercise or eating better food, is proven to have good health effects 2) pharmaceutical companies try to make that into a pill 3) dang, the benefits of the pill are not nearly as big as if you exercise and eat better food, and not nearly as big as our early trials of the drug indicated they would be 4) we must need a different kind of pill

Yup! I would also predict this. You simply can’t engineer your way out of needing better living conditions.

Sometimes you’re in the conditions you’re in because of mental or emotional issues, and require the assistance of a mental health professional to get back on track (for example, overeating from emotional trauma leading to obesity and inactivity).

Re: Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease

#73

Post by atomical »

et2o wrote: post #33
LinuxBender wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did. In fact that was a great start, but once you reach a certain point (in having metabolic syndrome), the Keto+IF reaches diminishing returns. It did bring me down 18 inches on the waist. The gut and hypertension will remain. In fact, my hypertension actually went up. To go further requires either Metformin or Berberine. I opted for Berberine, but time will tell.

Congratulations on your progress! Interested why you decided against metformin. Lots of people without DM or Metabolic syndrome are taking it for its apparent life extension effects (mostly unproven this far in humans). For diabetes, there's pretty solid evidence. I work in this space tangentially and I had not heard of berberine before. What are you hoping to achieve with this supplement?

Metformin is great if you like shitting your pants constantly. The life extension crowd is going to give us a lot of laughs.

Re: Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease

#74

Post by lhl »

LinuxBender wrote: post #9
rq1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go for keto + IF. It helped a lot of people.

I did. In fact that was a great start, but once you reach a certain point (in having metabolic syndrome), the Keto+IF reaches diminishing returns. It did bring me down 18 inches on the waist. The gut and hypertension will remain. In fact, my hypertension actually went up. To go further requires either Metformin or Berberine. I opted for Berberine, but time will tell.

Congrats on your progress! I assume you still have metabolic syndrome (have you gotten your fasting insulin tested? What's a shame is most doctors test that, which is a $30 assay and the only way to calculate HOMA-IR or QUICKI IR estimates).

While I can't disagree w/ Metformin/Berberine being effective for glucose control, I personally don't think that they aren't great long term for the dysbiosis, B12-deficiency (for metformin) and toxicity (for Berberine) effects... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5478780/

Most people that haven't long-term diabetic (eg, completely destroyed beta cells) should be able to get their health back in order via primarily dietary interventions, although it may require some detective work (conscientious dietary, blood work, body composition tracking).

Some of the hypertension may require addressing the IR, which can just take time to resolve: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/3299096/

Some of it may also be insuring adequate electrolytes, most people are much too low on ketogenic diets: https://blog.virtahealth.com/sodium-potassium-magnesium-keto...

I think waist:height ratio is definitely the best home measurement, but hopefully you're getting good supporting bloodwork as well, which can be very helpful in helping diagnosing problem areas. Also I found DXA and RER testing to be personally quite useful as well, especially for tracking progress on visceral fat (I took off 25% of my body weight off starting last summer). Good luck!

Re: Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease

#75

Post by orangecat »

rossdavidh wrote: post #63

My prediction: 1) reducing chronic inflammation by, for example, exercise or eating better food, is proven to have good health effects 2) pharmaceutical companies try to make that into a pill 3) dang, the benefits of the pill are not nearly as big as if you exercise and eat better food, and not nearly as big as our early trials of the drug indicated they would be 4) we must need a different kind of pill

What is your reaction when social conservatives say that there's no need for contraception or STD vaccines, because you can just not have sex unless you're prepared to accept the responsibilities of pregnancy and raising a child?

Re: Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease

#76

Post by lhl »

phil248 wrote: post #26
LinuxBender wrote: post #6

In my case, inflammation is a side effect of insulin resistance, like my fellow 83 million Americans with metabolic syndrome. If I can reverse the cause long enough, the liver should stop dumping fat into the adipose tissue and triglycerides may drop.

How does one know if they are one of the 25% of Americans with "metabolic syndrome"?

Here you go: A comprehensive definition for metabolic syndrome https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675814/ - see Table 1 as the definition can vary, but NCEP ATP III is 3/5 of central obesity, fasting glucose (or high HbA1c), >150 mg/dl of TG, 130/85 mmHg blood pressure.

A recent review of 2009-2016 NHANES data concluded that only 12.2% of Americans were in "optimal cardiometabolic health". https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/met.2018.0105

The guidelines they used were (very similar but slightly more stringent than the ATP III):

* waist circumference (WC * glucose (fasting glucose * blood pressure (systolic * triglycerides (* high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (≥40/50 mg/dL for men/women)

* not taking any related medication

Even w/ ATP III, only 19.9% of American adults don't have metabolic syndrome.

What metabolic syndrome really is, is hyperinsulinemia/insulin resistance. You should get your estimates by having fasting glucose and fasting insulin tested for to get HOMA-IR and QUICKI estimates (TG-FB and TC/HDL are two other estimates you can use). If you are IR (probably 80% of American adults), then you can improve this by eating less often, eating earlier in the day, or eating less carbohydrates (especially those with a high glycemic load) - doing all three is pretty doable and actually tends to work synergistically (endocrinology!). Exercise also helps improve insulin sensitivity, but you can't really outrun a bad diet.

Re: Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease

#78

Post by RobertRoberts »

artemisyna wrote: post #40
RobertRoberts wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't change the fact that the "cause" of the whole issue is not a symptom. For example, you can get a blood infection from really bad gingivitis. But it's quite a leap to blame inflammation as the "cause" when it's really plaque (or a myriad of other related things). I think this is the foundational problem with health sciences. There is a lot money to be made treating symptoms, very money little to be made c…

I think what the other poster is saying that the bi-products of the inflammation response in themselves can also cause a problem. Yes, the obesity is probably the "cause" in the first place, but telling a person to go on a weight loss diet is going to be a bit late if that's not going to save them before the inflammation kills them. If you've got 2 or 3 different things killing you at once, you're gonna have to deal…

While I don't disagree with the concept of prioritization, that's not the same as cause and effect.

Inflammation is an effect that _can_ cause other problems. But as far as I know, inflammation is a symptom of other problems, not a cause in and of itself.

Re: Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease

#79

Post by refurb »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #62
refurb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflammation is not just a symptom, but also an underlying process. Lots of things can cause inflammation, but the underlying process can be similar. And it can have good and bad effects.

Can you provide an example where inflammation _is_ the problem and isn't a symptom caused by something else (ie, disease, damage, toxicity, etc...)?

Immune disorders like MS. The immune system attacks the persons own tissues. It’s the inflammation that causes the damage. Prevent inflammation and you stop the disease.

Re: Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease

#80

Post by lhl »

atomical wrote: post #71
redwards510 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keto is the absence of carbs. So the same diet that maintains keto at 250 will keep you in keto at 190, since it is what you eat, not how much you are eating. But you are absolutely correct that one must change their caloric intake as they lose weight if they want to keep losing weight.

Are you saying someone on keto can eat 4,000 calories of butter and not gain weight?

The wording is a bit awkward, but if you re-read what he wrote, it's not what he's saying at all.

Because a ketogenic diet depends the amount of carbohydrate restriction that will cause your body to physiologically be generating ketone bodies (eg, say less than 20g of net carbs), even at a constant formulation that doesn't change (as your TDEE changes) you will still be in the same state of ketosis - eg, if you measured your mmol concentration of BHB, it would likely remain the same. However, your caloric deficit of course would change (and you would need to lower it to match that to maintain your rate of weight loss).

In your hypothetical example, if your TDEE were 2000kCal and you were able to eat and absorb 4000kCal of butter a day, you would gain weight (although slower than the expected 0.57lb/day due to increased TDEE; this expenditure change (up to +50%!) was shown in the Vermont State Prison overfeeding experiments in the 60s). But despite that, due to the complete lack of carbohydrates, this diet would definitely stimulate ketogenesis (and would do so regardless if your TDEE were a 2000kCal surplus or deficit).

Due to the complete lack of proteins, you would eventually start consuming some lean body mass to produce some of the glucose (a percentage of glucose would be provided by the glycerol molecule holding together each triglyceride) required by the brain (~30%) and RBCs. I'd expect a pure butter diet to have about the same physiologic effect on protein-sparing as an extended fast (eg, you'd probably last a couple months before eventually expiring).

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