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Is the World Making You Sick?

nautil.us

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Re: Is the World Making You Sick?

#51

Post by enziobodoni »

jpmattia wrote: post #47
enziobodoni wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micronutrients, even in hair. Trace metals, especially after chelation therapy, when the results are definitely misleading. Labs that associate Candida with everything. "Stealth" virus testing. Quack Lyme disease serology labs that always give positive results. Anti-malignin antibodies. Multi variate index assays predicting irritable bowel disease. IgG food allergies. Outrageously large (>50-100 component) IgE allerg…

A bit of a wild guess, but many of those look like self-diagnosing or "fringe" from folks dealing with autoimmunity issues. Is that right?

Comes from all walks, but some from those folks. Mostly folks with real problems, like those in these threads, but who have unwittingly entered into a predatory industry that relies on providing overly specific data to people with nonspecific problems.

Re: Is the World Making You Sick?

#52

Post by jpmattia »

enziobodoni wrote: post #51
jpmattia wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of a wild guess, but many of those look like self-diagnosing or "fringe" from folks dealing with autoimmunity issues. Is that right?

Comes from all walks, but some from those folks. Mostly folks with real problems, like those in these threads, but who have unwittingly entered into a predatory industry that relies on providing overly specific data to people with nonspecific problems.

I'm sorry to hear that it extends to many fields.

> but who have unwittingly entered into a predatory industry

How exactly is it predatory? Rheumatology, which rarely engages in "cures" and whose "treatments" are often an exchange of one set of problems for another (if at all), and yet never fails to collect on its patients, might well fall under that umbrella.

Re: Is the World Making You Sick?

#53

Post by o_____________o »

lukifer wrote: post #44
o_____________o wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem, isn't it? What is directly harmful to health? Beyond those agents we've universally codified as people poison, "harmful" is a constantly shifting designation that will always be misappropriated by those with a cross to bear over their pet subject. Health is such a complex, nuanced subject that its hard to imagine anything different than the messy passions we're describing.

That doesn't address the question. To most people, peanuts aren't harmful, but a small number of people can die due to exposure. A laundry detergent with no effect on most people may cause some to break out in hives. What do you call these substances, whether natural or man-made?

I understood. My answer is that outside of outright toxicants, the language will always be reduced to a "fuzzy" value, because the proposition of "harmful" is itself fuzzy, and is doubly so inside a contentious and complex environment.

Re: Is the World Making You Sick?

#54

Post by canvia »

o_____________o wrote: post #37
canvia wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of gluten in foods comes from GMO wheat which is grown using chemicals. Maybe it isn't the gluten so much as the chemicals from the wheat that the gluten is from that are causing the problems.

What? If you're not trolling, what wheat is grown without chemicals? Sincere question.

Certified organic foods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food

"Synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilizers are not allowed, although certain organically approved pesticides may be used under limited conditions. In general, organic foods are also not processed using irradiation, industrial solvents, or synthetic food additives."

Re: Is the World Making You Sick?

#55

Post by canvia »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #39
canvia wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of gluten in foods comes from GMO wheat which is grown using chemicals. Maybe it isn't the gluten so much as the chemicals from the wheat that the gluten is from that are causing the problems.

> GMO wheat which is grown using chemicals I think this comment in particular is getting downvoted because it doesn't say anything. Every food we eat is genetically modified; we've bred it to produce more over the past thousands of years. And "chemicals" is literally everything you, food, and most of the universe is made of.

There's a pretty big difference between selective breeding within an existing species and injecting foreign DNA from a different species.

Re: Is the World Making You Sick?

#56

Post by abandonliberty »

Scoundreller wrote: post #11
[deleted] wrote: post #8

[deleted]

This is why I do not shed any tears for the decline of most newspapers and TV news. Even the "good" ones tend to be hit or miss, or not call out BS when it is so obvious. The Economist seems to be one of few publications that I can consistently read without getting frustrated by emotional journalism or poor logic.

It doesn't matter, new media is just as bad. Similar pressures exist, so we get similar results.

Re: Is the World Making You Sick?

#57

Post by dTal »

zenkat wrote: post #42
claar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this was pretty much my opinion. But then my wife got sick. Spent 5 years with myriads of specialists, who all did their testings, and threw their hands up in the air. So guess where we eventually land, when traditional medicine gets us no where? Within months of removing these effect-less "toxins" from her diet, I have a wife back. So believe what you want -- I'd do the same if it hadn't radically effected my o…

My wife has nearly the same story. Complaints of fatigue, nausea, cognitive difficulties (feeling spacey, fuzzy-headed). Tried a radical elimination diet, and then reintroduced different dietary components one-by-one to see which we're causing the symptoms. Dairy and soy products were the worst, along with products containing yeast extract. Gluten also had an effect, but not as strong. She's cut these from her diet,…

I flipped through an interesting book many years ago - I can't recall the title, but it was written by a medical doctor who spent many years poking around the phenomenon on a case-by-case basis. He was more concerned with treatment than science, so no large scale studies, but there was a wealth of anecdotes. It may possibly have been "The Food Allergy Book"[0] (the Amazon description makes it sound at bit nutrition-woo ish, and there was a certain element of that, but his approaches were actually scientific with blind tests and controlling out variables and so on).

There wasn't really much focus on "root" cause, but there were some interesting patterns. Two stand out in my memory: excessive consumption of a particular thing seemed to instil the "allergy", and once present would be triggered even if the "allergen" were administered intravenously without the patient's knowledge. In one case a man who had access to cheap eggs had them daily in large quantities for years - when finally seeking treatment for some very general symptom (migraines?), the hospital took him off his egg-diet. Thereafter, even the tiniest amount of intravenously administered egg would cause drastic symptoms (what symptoms I can't recall either, but may even have been as strange as violent episodes).

I realize this isn't the rigorous science you were looking for, and I apologise for the vagueness of my memory, but if it is indeed the same thing your wife experienced you can probably rule out "learned" correlations.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Food-Allergy-Book-Walsh/dp/0963154...

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