Monthly Archives: December 2010 - Page 3

RSS Feed Problem at MyYahoo

Posted by on December 19, 2010 5 comments

A reader emailed me to say that Yahoo’s MyYahoo feed reader has not published RSS updates from the perfecthealthdiet.com RSS feed since the site changed servers a month ago. I’ve reproduced the problem.

There is a workaround. MyYahoo users can use our Atom feed. Click the “Add RSS Feed” button and use this URL: https://perfecthealthdiet.com/?feed=atom

As far as I know other feed readers are working fine. If anyone else is not receiving updates, can you let me know what reader you use?

Also, if any technologically sophisticated readers know how I can get Yahoo to start receiving updates again, I’d be grateful for information.

Thanks!

Love in Nature

Posted by on December 18, 2010 No comments

These Clark’s grebes are beautiful … I bet they’d be tasty, too!

Mice Who Tear Their Fur Out and The Psychiatrists Who Treat Them

Posted by on December 17, 2010 39 comments

Chris Highcock of Conditioning Research mentioned a fascinating paper yesterday, and then Dr. Emily Deans blogged about it. The paper tells about mice who tore their fur out – akin to the condition of “trichotillomania” in which humans tear their hair out – after being put on a high-tryptophan diet. [1]

Dr.Deans points to the paper’s importance:

As far as I know, it may be the only paper showing a definitive development of psychopathology with an adjustment of diet.  So that’s a big deal!

Since I suspect that most psychopathologies are induced by diet in the context of infection, I think this shows that psychiatric researchers have barely begun to understand their diseases.

As soon as I saw Chris’s post I knew I had to blog about it, because I had similar symptoms to these mice.

My Experience

Briefly, I had a chronic bacterial infection of the brain and nerves, probably from Chlamydophila pneumoniae, plus a few other problems which masked the bacterial infection until I fixed my diet.

C. pneumoniae is a parasitic intracellular bacteria whose main activities are reproduction and diversion of the immune system. Its main effects are:

  • Neuronal hypoglycemia. C. pneumoniae steals glucose products like pyruvate for energy. This can create hypoglycemia in neurons even if blood glucose levels are normal.
  • Serotonin deficiency. C. pneumoniae steals key amino acids like tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine for protein and niacin synthesis. Of these tryptophan is most important. To block C. pneumoniae activity, the innate immune response triggered by interferon gamma sequesters tryptophan. This denudes neurons of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is made from tryptophan.
  • Inflammation. C. pneumoniae is able to trigger inflammation which re-directs the immune response away from itself toward extracellular pathogens.

Thus common symptoms of a bacterial infection of the brain are those of cognitive hypoglycemia and serotonin deficiency. Symptoms include:

  • Hypoglycemia : Feeling nervous or jittery; mood changes such as irritability, anxiety, restlessness; confusion, difficulty in thinking, and inability to concentrate; poor coordination.
  • Serotonin deficiency: Anxiety, depression, impaired memory or cognition, low self-esteem, loss of pleasure, poor impulse control, insomnia.

These lists don’t fully capture the experience however.

I started having these symptoms in 1992 during a year-long course of antibiotics, and they would get worse for about the next 15 years. I experienced a dramatic loss of happiness and positive emotions. I had always been happy; now suddenly I wasn’t. Along with this came a weird mental state which is hard to describe, because it has no normal analog. Irritability or anger come closest, so I’ll use those words. But understand that it was a generalized state, not irritation or anger directed at anyone in particular; being naturally phlegmatic, I doubt in 20 years I was uncivil to anyone on more than a few occasions. It was just a persistent irritated/angry emotional state that I was well aware was unnatural and could consciously control.

It seemed like this negative emotional state would build up, and could be discharged a bit by a few expressive habits. I would wring my hands; I still have some slightly twisted finger bones and calluses from over a decade of hand-wringing. And, when alone, I would sometimes scratch my head. This sometimes led to hair loss and bare patches.

Trichotillomania

This kind of behavior turns out to be not that rare. About 4% of the population is said to have “trichotillomania,” compulsive pulling or twisting of the hair causing hair loss. Trichotillomania strikes women more frequently than men. [Wikipedia, “Trichotillomania” ]

Serotonin depletion is a common feature of mood disorders. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of these disorders are due to brain infections, and the serotonin deficiency is due either to theft of tryptophan by bacteria or to the immune response to intracellular infections, which increases interferon gamma and decreases serotonin.

Evidence, such as it is, is consistent with that idea. People with mood disorders or depression are far more likely than normal people to test positive for antibodies to chronic intracellular pathogens like coronaviruses. [2]

Drugs Help At First, But Often Do Long-Term Harm

The first impulse of modern medicine is to fight the body’s response to disease. If the body has downregulated serotonin, doctors look for drugs that upregulate it.

That is why people with depression and mood disorders are commonly given SSRI’s, drugs that raise serotonin levels.

If these diseases are due to infections, then we would expect the SSRI’s to improve mood immediately, but also to defeat the body’s immune response, supply the pathogens with tryptophan, and promote their replication. As a result, the disease should progress faster. In time, the patient will become worse than would have been the case without the drugs.

And, more often than not, this is what actually happens. Drugs are often “unsafe at any dose”. Antidepressant treatment increases mortality in men by 30%.

The Mice Who Tear Their Hair Out

One of the common breeds of mice used in laboratory research is the C57BL/6 breed. This breed has “an easily irritable temperament … [and] a tendency to bite … [and] display barbering behavior.” [Wikipedia, “C57BL/6”] In barbering, “individuals pluck whiskers and/or fur from their cage-mates and/or themselves.” [1]

C57BL/6 mice also have a modified immune response:

The immune response of mice from the C57BL/6 strain distinguish it from other inbred strains like BALB/c. For example the immunological response to the same pathogen in C57BL/6 mice is often of an opposite spectrum compared to BALBb/c mice, namely C57BL/6 shows Th1 and BALB/c shows Th2 response in response to intracellular pathogen Leishmania major, where a Th1 response results in a resistant ie healer phenotype (since the pathogen is intracellular), whereas a Th2 response results in a susceptible (nonhealer) phenotype. [Wikipedia, “C57BL/6”]

This Th1 response increases interferon gamma levels:

The Th1 response is characterized by the production of Interferon-gamma … [Wikipedia, “Adaptive Immune System”]

Interferon gamma, of course, sequesters tryptophan and diminishes neuronal serotonin levels.

All this sounds familiar: C57BL/6 have lower serotonin; they become irritable and will bite and tear fur out.

Like trichotillomania in humans, tearing of fur is more common in female mice than males:  “Barbering is more frequently seen in female mice; male mice are more likely to display dominance through fighting.” [Wikipedia, “C57BL/6”]

Research Idea: Treat the Mice As We Do Humans

If these mice went to a human psychiatrist (and had health insurance), they’d be prescribed SSRIs to raise their serotonin levels.

A group at Purdue led by professor of animal sciences Joseph Garner decided to see if they could cure barbering through an alternative dietary therapy that would raise serotonin levels just like SSRIs.

[W]e wished to test the hypothesis that a diet which increases serotonin metabolism would decrease the hair-plucking behavior of barbering mice. [1]

The treatment diet was essentially identical to the control diet, except for these differences: Tryptophan levels were four times higher, methionine levels were the same, and other amino acids were halved. Overall protein levels were cut from 24% to 13.3% of calories. Since tryptophan competes with other amino acids for entry to the brain, this shift in amino acid composition led to much larger tryptophan entry to the brain. [1, Table 2] The lost protein calories were made up by increasing carb intake from 57.3% to 68.0%, which I consider a relatively marginal change. In both diets fructose was minimal, 2.5% of calories, and glucose, mostly from starch or dextrose, provided the bulk of the carbs.

The tryptophan was converted to serotonin in the brain, but not for long. Serotonin levels were 55.5 ng/ml in brains of mice on the control diet, 57.6 ng/ml in brains of mice on the high-tryptophan diet [1, Table 3]. However, levels of serotonin metabolites – the leftovers after serotonin destruction – were much higher in the treatment mice.

The results weren’t good:

[E]levating brain serotonin metabolism by tryptophan and carbohydrate supplementation increased the severity of barbering, and induced ulcerative dermatitis. In humans, the induction of compulsive skin-picking by serotonergic agents (SSRIs) has been reported. (24,43) Thus, the current data suggest a homologous outcome in mice, achieved nutritionally instead of pharmacologically. [1]

If you don’t like scientific-ese, here’s Professor Garner in the press release:

[The] diet … was expected to reduce abnormal hair-pulling. Instead, mice that were already ill worsened their hair-pulling behaviors or started a new self-injurious scratching behavior, and the seemingly healthy mice developed the same abnormal behaviors….

“We put them on this diet, and it made them much, much worse,” Garner said.

This does indeed sound like a “homologous outcome” to the experience of human patients treated with SSRIs!

Very likely if the mice had been interviewed at Day 1 after initiation of the high-tryptophan, they would have reported mood improvements, just as human patients do on SSRIs. As with humans on SSRIs, the negative effects took some time to appear. The increase in scratching behavior was not apparent at 6 weeks after initiation of the high-tryptophan diet, but was apparent at 12 weeks (3 months) [1, Figure 4]. Ulcerative dermatitis tended to appear after about 10 weeks on the high-tryptophan diet [1, Figure 3]. 

Conclusion

I’ll follow up in my next post, on Monday, with speculation about what is happening in these mice.

In the meantime, I think it is worth remarking how an intervention thought to be beneficial – restoring serotonin levels to “normal” – has health-impairing consequences over time in both mice and people.

In many ways, contemporary medical practitioners resemble the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. They have at their disposal powerful magic drugs, whose long-term consequences they do not fully understand. The drugs come into wide use, and only years later do we learn that they do more harm than good. And the data showing they don’t work is always “surprising” and “paradoxical.”

In my view, the philosophy behind drug-based medicine is misplaced. Too often drugs are designed to fight or defeat the body’s natural mechanisms. As my parable argued, I believe it is much more effective to cooperate with the body through diet and nutrition.

References

[1] Dufour BD et al. Nutritional up-regulation of serotonin paradoxically induces compulsive behavior. Nutr Neurosci. 2010 Dec;13(6):256-64. http://pmid.us/21040623.

[2] Okusaga O et al. Association of seropositivity for influenza and coronaviruses with history of mood disorders and suicide attempts. J Affect Disord. 2010 Oct 26. [Epub ahead of print]. http://pmid.us/21030090. Hat tip Dr. Deans, http://evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.com/2010/11/depression-flu-and-to-do.html.

Two Art de Vany-Related Ideas

Posted by on December 14, 2010 75 comments

I mentioned Art de Vany’s new book on Saturday; today I came across a few blog posts relating to some of his more important ideas and thought I’d talk about them.

The Economic Analysis of Diet

Today I recorded an interview with Jimmy Moore, which should appear on his “Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show” sometime early next year.

One of the things we talked about was our “economic” approach to nutrition and diet – how analyzing nutrients the way economists analyze factors of production helps sort out the confusing, seemingly contradictory results found in the scientific literature.

Since any factor calorie that is overly abundant will look like a “bad factor calorie” and any factor calorie that is too scarce will look like a “good factor calorie,” it’s easy to explain why the same nutrient can appear as “good” or “bad” in different studies.

Today, Mark Sisson features a passage from Art’s book. He says this:

At some point I realized that a human being is just another economic system. Indeed, your body contains an entire economy. There is the allocation of assets according to a hierarchy of needs. There are competing interests that sometimes struggle over resources and other times cooperate for the common good. There are surpluses. There are shortages. Like economies–like the movie industry–your body is a complex, decentralized system poised between chaos and order.

We tend to think of biologists as rigorous “hard” scientists and of economists as mushier “soft” scientists, but actually in analyzing complex cooperative networks economists are decades ahead of biologists.

The analysis in many biology papers, if translated into an economics paper with factors of production substituted for the dietary nutrients, would be recognized immediately by most economists as primitive and fallacious. Economists have developed many analytical ideas that diet researchers could usefully copy. It’s no surprise that Art and I both found our economics backgrounds helpful in sorting through the diet literature.

Intermittency in Diet

If there is a single idea that I associate with Art, it’s the desirability of intermittency and randomness to explore the extremes of the body’s metabolic networks.

Art touches upon this in the passage at Mark’s site:

According to chaos theory, certain systems that seem to be random in fact are not–it’s just difficult for us to perceive, at the outset, all the subtle factors that set the course and determine the outcome….

Another scientific concept, the power law, also comes up often in my discussions of health and fitness. It is based on the Pareto principle, named for Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. In essence, it describes the relationship between how common a factor is and how much influence it exerts. It says that the most unusual events will have the greatest impact. Pareto’s study determined that 80 percent of privately held land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population.

Similar power laws exist all around us.…

There is a power law of exercise, too: Your least frequent, most extreme exertions will have the greatest influence on your fitness. The peak moments of a workout count far more than the amount of time you spend working out…. When a work-out becomes an unvarying, monotonous routine, it loses its effectiveness.

Art’s ideas suggest that it might be beneficial to explore dietary extremes, for instance in calorie intake. Sometimes we should fast, forcing our body to economize on nutrients; sometimes we should feast, giving our body a surplus of nutrients that it has to dispose of.

In our book we discuss the benefits of intermittent fasting – it promotes autophagy, which extends lifespan and protects us against bacteria and viruses – but we don’t discuss whether feasting has any merits.

While there has been no real scientific study of feasting (except in the context of every-other-day implementations of intermittent fasting), feasting has been a hot topic in the Paleo blogosphere lately:

Coincidentally, Chris Masterjohn today offers us a review of Tim Ferriss’s new book, The 4-Hour Body.

For weight loss, Ferriss recommends intermittent fasting and feasting:

His fat-loss regimen sticks to a five-rule “Slow-Carb Diet” six days a week, but on the seventh day he resteth. This is the day for “reverse Lent,” otherwise known as bingeing on whatever the heck you want. In fact, Ferriss considers overfeeding one day a week to be a critical component of his fat loss regimen because of its effects on metabolism-boosting hormones.

In this respect he seems to have come to conclusions similar to those of Ori Hofmekler of Warrior Diet fame, who advocates fasting in the day and overfeeding in the night, and Matt Stone, whose High-Everything Diet uses overfeeding as its very lifeblood.

Stone recently told Jimmy Moore that one of the issues he’s still trying to tweak with his diet is to get rid of the initial gain in weight. Tim Ferriss may have solved that problem with his version of overfeeding, as folks on his diet usually gain weight on overfeeding day but nevertheless experience a net loss of several pounds per week from the very beginning.

So add Ferris to the group of self-experimenters who find benefits from occasional feasting.

Chris also discusses protein restriction:

Ferriss notes that periodic fasting from protein induces a process called autophagy, wherein the cell cleans out its mishandled, degraded, and aggregated proteins that otherwise accumulate. This is consistent with my experience. I had developed a problem with small wart-like risings on my hands and fingers at one point. Complete fasting for two weeks helped somewhat, but going vegan for two weeks made them completely disappear. The problem has never come back, despite my regular sumptuous feasting on animal foods of all kinds.

Perhaps protein cycling provides an answer to the question I had raised in The Curious Case of Campbell’s Rats. Namely, is there an intermediate intake of protein that maximally protects against cancer, toxicity, and fatty liver under all conditions? Perhaps the answer is not an intermediate intake of protein, but a periodic cycling of protein intake.

We note in our book (and this blog post) that protein restriction, even if calories are not restricted at all, promotes autophagy and therefore intracellular immunity and longevity. So we’re happy to endorse protein restriction.

But high intake of protein, especially of ketogenic branched-chain amino acids like leucine, does promote muscle synthesis. So what is a bodybuilder or athlete, who seeks the greatest possible muscle growth, to do?  Is there an inevitable conflict between athleticism and longevity?

It’s possible that protein cycling – say, a week of protein restriction followed by a week of high-protein intake – might help resolve the dilemma, providing 80% of the longevity and health benefits of protein restriction and 80% of the muscle synthesis benefits of high-protein diets.

If so, Art de Vany would not be surprised.