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Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

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Re: Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but only in the sense that a car crash is a mechanical problem (there may be repairs to make). >lots of grains and refined foods i.e. rather tasty! I don't think we can escape from motives here: they select what type of diet we prefer given the choice. The market caters to that.

> i.e. rather tasty! Most people don't find refined foods tasty. In blind taste tests, people vastly prefer the old McDonalds fries back when they used actual potatoes and fried them in lard. Then the American Government said it was illegal to use lard for "health reasons" and they need to use vegetable oil instead. As it turns out, vegetable oils are considerably more pro-inflammatory than lard and, as a result, are…

Thank you. Good examples. Yes, some substances cause more inflammation than others. The tar in cigarette smoke more so than vaping vapour. Vegetable oil more than lard or beef dripping. Yes, it gets worse with age.

However, people don't prefer substances that cause more inflammation because they cause more inflammation, rather people prefer things that they find more pleasurable. This might include not having to switch restaurants and consuming things that are cheaper.

This is not inconsistent with the idea that chronic pleasure-seeking without respite causes chronic inflammation, e.g. if we indulge gluttonous impulses by eating sufficient amounts of chips fried in lard with mountains of blueberries for pudding then we're going to acquire the same problem.

>Self-stimulating activities and inflammation are orthogonal. Mechanical problems don't always cause accidents and accidents aren't always the result of mechanical problems.

I guess I'm claiming that they aren't. That car accidents aren't usually caused by mechanical faults was my point.

>smoking pot is anti-inflammatory

On the face of it this does look like a good counter-example. I might have to do some reading! It could be that cannabis relieves mental stress by a different route and this outweighs the effects of the 'high' (is there a high?)

>PS: are you a bear or ilk?

No, I'm not a joiner but I'm sympathetic to those guys. Discovered!

Let me add that I don't think that the inflammation problem is unsolvable. I'm a firm believer that everything good can ultimately be felt to be good, to the point where no discipline is required to purse it.

Re: Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

#52
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i.e. rather tasty! Most people don't find refined foods tasty. In blind taste tests, people vastly prefer the old McDonalds fries back when they used actual potatoes and fried them in lard. Then the American Government said it was illegal to use lard for "health reasons" and they need to use vegetable oil instead. As it turns out, vegetable oils are considerably more pro-inflammatory than lard and, as a result, are…

> back when they used actual potatoes What are they using now?

I don't know but they taste like potatoes with some kind of added coating.

Re: Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

#53
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to see when comparing diet with life expectation throughout the world. Carbs bad, fat actually alright.

> Carbs bad But Japan.

I'm in there currently.

I somehow do not see the high carb stuff.

Re: Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

#54
post #6

Alternatively, you can quite dramatically reduce inflammation in the brain via some simple lifestyle modifications (cutting out sugar, intermittent fasting): Mattson, Mark P., Keelin Moehl, Nathaniel Ghena, Maggie Schmaedick, and Aiwu Cheng. “Intermittent Metabolic Switching, Neuroplasticity and Brain Health.” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 19, no. 2 (February 2018): 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.156 . Pinto,…

Eight of those studies have been published only in the past 3 years. Until I see a pattern of repeated results, I'm going to file these under "pop science." "Keto is the shizzle, let's get our pubz!" Let's see what happens as others work on repro over the next 10+ years.

TIL the benefits of eating less refined carbs and intermittent fasting is still up for debate to some folks.

Re: Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

#55
post #6

Alternatively, you can quite dramatically reduce inflammation in the brain via some simple lifestyle modifications (cutting out sugar, intermittent fasting): Mattson, Mark P., Keelin Moehl, Nathaniel Ghena, Maggie Schmaedick, and Aiwu Cheng. “Intermittent Metabolic Switching, Neuroplasticity and Brain Health.” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 19, no. 2 (February 2018): 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.156 . Pinto,…

The keto diet is a low fiber high saturated fat intake diet. The effects of low fiber consumption and high intake of saturated fat are well established, and they certainly aren't inflammation reducers. Also, fasting is not without risks.

Re: Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

#56
post #6

Alternatively, you can quite dramatically reduce inflammation in the brain via some simple lifestyle modifications (cutting out sugar, intermittent fasting): Mattson, Mark P., Keelin Moehl, Nathaniel Ghena, Maggie Schmaedick, and Aiwu Cheng. “Intermittent Metabolic Switching, Neuroplasticity and Brain Health.” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 19, no. 2 (February 2018): 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.156 . Pinto,…

Eight of those studies have been published only in the past 3 years. Until I see a pattern of repeated results, I'm going to file these under "pop science." "Keto is the shizzle, let's get our pubz!" Let's see what happens as others work on repro over the next 10+ years.

The top papers I included are purposefully recent as they are recent reviews on an emerging area of research.

Having read a lot of papers this year, my conclusion btw is actually that recent papers are much better than older papers. One, newer papers allow you to spelunk through older papers in the citation chain (all peer reviewed work has substantive reference lists), and two, and state of understanding of basic human biology is miniscule and for emerging topics (like chronic inflammation, or human metabolism) our understanding has changed enormously due to recent discoveries (at a much improving rate).

As an FYI, the inflammasome wasn't even discovered until 2002 [1] so you can basically be guaranteed that any prior research is going to be missing some key context. This is repeated for many pathways and processes that we take for granted (and a lot of it has barely filtered out to clinical practice much less pop culture) and will this will be repeating itself for quite some time, since we're still discovering so many new things that turn our understanding of biology on its head (just a handful of examples off the top of my head: role of microbiota (the wild west!), vagus nerve communication, autophagy, epigenetics, circadian clocks, and yes, most of ketone metabolism, particularly BHB as a signaling molecule).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflammasome#History

Re: Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

#57
post #6

Alternatively, you can quite dramatically reduce inflammation in the brain via some simple lifestyle modifications (cutting out sugar, intermittent fasting): Mattson, Mark P., Keelin Moehl, Nathaniel Ghena, Maggie Schmaedick, and Aiwu Cheng. “Intermittent Metabolic Switching, Neuroplasticity and Brain Health.” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 19, no. 2 (February 2018): 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.156 . Pinto,…

Have any of these studies been reproduced?

The body of work, while still emergent, is fairly robust IMO if that's what you're asking. I've cherry picked just a few out of hundreds of papers in my personal archive related to this topic, but if you have an interest you can easily check Pubmed or Researchgate to both follow the citation chain and get a sense of which research teams are publishing and working on what aspects (sadly there's no tool to do that automatically, although it seems like that might be a cool thing to build).

Re: Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

#58
post #6

Alternatively, you can quite dramatically reduce inflammation in the brain via some simple lifestyle modifications (cutting out sugar, intermittent fasting): Mattson, Mark P., Keelin Moehl, Nathaniel Ghena, Maggie Schmaedick, and Aiwu Cheng. “Intermittent Metabolic Switching, Neuroplasticity and Brain Health.” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 19, no. 2 (February 2018): 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.156 . Pinto,…

The keto diet is a low fiber high saturated fat intake diet. The effects of low fiber consumption and high intake of saturated fat are well established, and they certainly aren't inflammation reducers. Also, fasting is not without risks.

Keto is a low carb high fat diet. With keto you can have as much fibre as you like as long as it's not paired with carbs.

Re: Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

#59

Chronic inflammation appears to be caused by persistent self-stimulation -- eating for comfort or pleasure, not getting enough sleep, chain-smoking, getting high, etc, without respite. So it's not really a biological problem. It's a widespread personal problem with complex biological consequences.

Even supposing that were true, it's arbitrary to place fallible biological systems of motivation and reward into the "personal problem" category, as if they were not part of the same overall biological system.

Re: Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow cognitive decline

#60
post #5

From the perspective of a non-biologist reader only seeing popular articles, the past ten years have been completely bewildering. Nutrition has seemingly been boiled down to a couple of magic totems that are always simplistically either good or bad. Antioxidants are good. Inflammation is bad. Telomeres are good. Carbs are bad. All the "bad" things get associated with each other and anti-associated with the good thing…

> magic totems that are always simplistically either good or bad. I read a book on nutrition (forgot which) that started out with these helpful definitions: unhealthy - food we statistically eat too much of healthy - food we statistically should eat more Food that is unhealthy is almost never plain "bad". In small quantities it is probably even "good". It's just that most people have too much of it in their everyday…

Can someone please fix block quote on mobile?
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