I have some more evidence that the problem is in fact in the microbiome. I found out that fat, especially palmitoleic acid, Omega-3s and monounsaturated acids make me worse. FWIW, the effect seems to be lowest for Omega-6 linoleic acid (which is often regarded as unhealthy).
But: The worsening only or mainly seems to take place under two conditions:
(1) Repeat consumption of these fats on at least 2-3 subsequent days.
or (2) if I eat these fats after having eaten very gut healthy foods in the past days.
To test this, I took one for the team and ate 300g (11 oz) of homemade walnut butter in one meal with some honey to wash it down. In the previous meals the last day, I avoided gut healthy foods like fruit and lentils and ate just white spaghetti with a bit tomato, white bread with some mushrooms etc.
The result was: Hardly any symptoms. So it is very likely not the absorbed Omega-3s in walnuts that cause the problem.
But: When I eat 100g (3 oz) of walnuts repeatedly over several day, I do worsen considerably. When my diet includes gut healthy foods like lentils or fruit, that happens even more. When I eat avocados, which by itself is heart-healthy, I worsen much more quickly as well.
Conclusion: Fat is problematic only when eaten together or after gut healthy meals. The gut healthy foods (lentils, avocados, oat porridge, fruit...) feed the gut microbes and when they thrive, they produce something problematic from the fat that makes me worse.
Paradoxically, it must be the "good" microbes that cause this and it's probably ubiquitous strains because the same worsening happens when I eat some fermented products like soy. It also looks like plant based fiber is needed for this fermentation, because there is much less worsening for cow milk's yoghurt compared to soy yoghurt.
I suspect that a similar thing is going on with oxalate, which like fat (fatty acids) is also an acid (oxalic acid), so there may be a link. It does not appear to happen with acids in fruit. Not sure about vinegar yet.
The bottom line is: This is a microbiome thing, but it likely couldn't be fixed with antibiotics or a microbiome transplant because the offending organisms are likely ubiquitous and can't be eliminated from the gut.
Now I'm horrible at quote separating and there's a lot to respond to here so I'll do the best I can. Lentils are a death sentence to me, I feel horrible after them. Avocado not as much but I had baked avocado recently on it's own and had a reaction, not a severe one but a histamine feeling face burn thing but nothing in the way of brain fog, felt a little more anxiety at most. Lentils though makes me feel extremely out of it and induce extreme brain fog to the point where I can barely function after consuming anything more than a very tiny amount.
Besides peanuts I don't really eat any other nuts so I don't know what my reaction to walnuts are generally like, occasionally I'll get a small pack of pistachios but I don't get much of anything from those small dollar packets and probably don't have them nearly enough to put a dent in any symptom presentation.
That is a general theme though that's been going on for years with me, all of the foods that are thought to be great for the guts give me the worst issues and if you give me yogurt I feel horrific, basically any kind. I respond best to the non-dairy kinds though though dairy in general makes me very lethargic, some brain fog, and gives me digestive problems. I can consume it without it becoming a disaster but I'm careful with it and normally never consume it. The other weekend I had some ice cream and was alright.
I've been on before one of the most potent herbal antibiotics barely known to man osha root when I started trying to chip away on my Lyme disease on my own with herbals and it was one of the first things that launched me out of the deep end of moderate and as I began to tolerate cistus incanus better (which took literally months of daily drinking) I also started getting better at a baseline. But somehow these reactions that are multi day long reactions that ill chain each other together still plague me and my dietary sensitivies effect me just as much as they ever did.
That's fascinating because that's exactly my experience as well. Palmitoleic acid (repeat consumption) mimics a cold or flu perfectly. Sweating, headaches, increased fatigue, even a sore throat. It was so realistic I started taking zinc and echinacea like I do when I feel like I have a cold. Could I just have had a cold coincidentally? I can't rule it out, but I could reproduce the same effect with palmitoleic acid, so I would have had a cold twice right after repeat palmitoleic acid consumption and that would be a bit much of a coincidence.
I think the palmitoleic acid or some compound produced in the microbiome leads to dormant viral reactivation throughout the body and that produces the feeling of flu-like illness.
What was the dose you used as I want to test this out myself but safely as I don't know what my tolerance is, to help narrow things down.
Fermentation and soy. I found everything soy related to be very bad for me except maybe soy-based protein extracts which I felt I could tolerate. That's why I think it's the fiber and the fat that when fermented produce harmful stuff
I thought so for a long time, too, but today I know (or at least very strongly suspect) that fruit is only a problem in connection with other foods. When I eat low-fiber, low-fat, low-oxalate foods like white spaghetti with a bit of tomato only (and salt), white bread and some fried mushrooms, I can eat 2 pounds of fruit (pure, nothing else) in one meal with no problems. The problems start with repeat consumption of fruit or when meals around the fruit meal contain high fiber (e.g., lentils), high fat (e.g., nuts, cheese, eggs, avocado) or high oxalate (e.g., sweet potato).
The main problem: It's hard to find foods that are all low-fiber, low-oxalate and low fat all at the same time. Lean meat and white bread might work as well, but I don't find much else.
It may be worthwhile to check if your effects are from the fruit itself or from the combination of the fruit with foods from other meals eaten at the same time.
That's so interesting because I noticed that as well. My nose just started running. I am not entirely sure yet, but I think it got better after I went low fat again. The challenge is to stay low fat and not go higher in fiber. Normally low-fat foods are higher in fiber. Maybe very lean meat is really worth looking into.
I don't normally touch any of the fake meats, I suppose I can try as it probably wouldn't hurt more than trying a little tofu again. The Chinese place downtown has some simple options with it. Speaking of soy and tofu though I miss their Mapo Tofu terribly but I just can't eat that anymore or my baseline drops like a fly in fact I was eating that often when I actually managed to hit severe after that summer crash where I was taking saw palmetto and got PFS mixed into this. Looking back it's a miracle I'm still alive, no idea how I made it.
When that was at its worst sweet potato was really bad for me, it would induce instant brain inferno but now being much better than I was then can consume moderate amounts and be alright, lentils would also hit me much harder to the point of feeling like I was gonna collapse so this all is starting to make more sense now on what is going on here. Peanut butter was also much more volatile back then.
I'm not touching fruit again though unfortunately, I'm brave but I just don't want to risk that because my most severe worsenings came from fruit, apples above all.
I get reactions from meat from just the juices alone, my last encounter with beef that was accidental where I didn't even eat any but just had some food it touched where I thought there was none (the chef at the place just took it off and gave me the dish back to me, what an asshole). I had to run home before we did anything else that night to get the activated charcoal and my night was still largely ruined.
Plain rice is low-fat, low-oxalate and low fiber, so that would fit into the theory. I could imagine that the bugs can load up on one nutrient, store that for a day or two and then use another nutrient from a very different meal to produce the suspected harmful compounds and that's why it can take days for symptoms to resolve.
Maybe because of the lower arsenic content. I think I do react negatively to rice even though it is low-fat, low-oxalate and low-fiber, and the only explanation I have would be arsenic.
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences in so much detail. That really helps a lot with trying to find patterns and generate new ideas on what to try next.
I suspect that is why myself, with plain rice there isn't much to work with so it's probably not going to do much unless that gut bacteria load itself is out of control. I get very minimal symptoms from brown rice but I can't digest it well and with how limited I already am and how little is being properly absorbed seeing as my weight never goes up and if I'm not careful drops off more quickly I can't risk getting any less food. I also work full time (somehow, we get lots of sitting time but I'm still pretty wreaked by friday) so that all gets burning much quicker these days. I wish I could simply eat more but doing so makes me worse so I'm stuck in a strange purgatory here. Basmati is probably the lowest in starch content besides brown rice which is why I initially thought I could handle it better.
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On the past few days though. The night before last night was a disaster unexpectedly. I had a migraine and was just craving some hangover style salty rice noodle deliciousness, I handle the mei fun from the Chinese place alright so I didn't think of this much giving me any set backs. I had the Blue Dragon brand rice noodles and the ingredients were just rice flour and water which may itself have been the culprit as the mei fun noodles from the chinese place look just like long grain white rice thin spaghetti but these were more translucent and sticky (should have been my first sign things were about to go horribly wrong but migraine brain doesn't care). So I cooked some veggies, all of which together or on their own I have almost no reaction to and manageably so with my current eating schedule with basmati rice and tossed the noodles in. Plated myself some and just some bites in I realized I made a horrible mistake but kept eating my plate anyways because I was hungry and I wouldn't have made through work the next day without it. The heavy anhedonic brain fog was at a peak, my face felt like someone sprayed pepper spray all over it, my sinus was dripping like a faucet and partially constricted, my anxiety skyrocketed, and sleeping was possible but it felt like I just passed out and warped to my dreadful 5 AM alarm. All day at work still with the remains of the migraine too making this one a real good time I was a mess. A lesser version of what was going on the night before but the face burning was still pretty intense. Face felt super inflamed too and I was extremely irritatable and not very social like usual despite my fatigue there normally. I had a harder time breathing too but managed to keep things under control and get it done because I'm the master of masking and know what I'm doing so well there I can auto-pilot the vast majority of my tasks.
Today which was the next day I was still feeling the aftermath of that moderately but it really started tapering off throughout the day. But like a true gambler never knowing when to quit I decided to head to the grocery store and get some corn with some cauliflower and a bag of bean sprouts (which is what I usually put in my rice with some peas too sometimes). I put it all in a pan with some salt and a couple pinches of dried sichuan pepper like usual and tried it. I got rather quickly some facial burn, some flu like feelings with a bit of nasal drip, and a little brain fog but nothing too crazy. Just uncomfortable because of the facial burning thing and flu like effects. Compared to basmati rice the corn is much less brain foggy and I retain some more cognitive energy BUT the immune reaction like facial burn thing is noticeably worse and I'm getting a bit more nasal drip. So corn can do the same general thing but is better in some areas and is worse in others, it trades symptom flares around a bit compared to rice.
edit - With corn this reaction also starts to drop off much faster instead of heavily dragging into the next day which rice does much more easily. Maybe with corn there's a bunch for the bacteria to initially use all at once and even with some extra veggies there isn't much there to use after where rice starch tends to just sit there and be fermented much easier. My reaction to the enriched bread was also a day after I went out to eat and also had a bunch of "gut healthy" foods including a lot of avocado so that also lines up with your experiences too. What I'm thinking is the bacteria uses the nutrients from the enriched products to great more of what they produce when given more feed. If that's correct though I wonder what exactly it is producing that does the thing.
Later on here and throughout the day I'm just feeling kind of mentally blah and spicy faced but it still stands that this was leagues better than the worst rice can offer me or something like avocado can on it's own. Tonight I am having just brown rice with some sea salt/a little pepper and seeing what happens for the hell of it because I'm hungry and going to feel like crap anyways over the weekend so why not. Have not had any peanut butter or snacks since the morning so there's nothing else immediately in my system. I don't know what to snack on anyhow since everything makes me worse besides something unfulfilling and sad like raw carrots and celery. lol I have also experimented with chickpeas/hummus/chickpea tofu before but those are also off the table as they make me immediately extremely tired and foggy for some reason. The big issue like you said though is that what is doing this is probably a common bacteria that can't be eliminated or not at least in any normal fashion without bombing your guts to death with antibiotics and something you wouldn't want to do anyways because you also need it and doing something like that would cause an infinite amount of other issues but once it gets over grown controlling it becomes extremely difficult because of the food sensitivities the imbalance causes and in my case since chronic other infections like Lyme for example are also invited to the party in my guts put all carnivore diet options off the table because of my meat problems and even the leanest seasoned white meat chicken won't do the job because I won't even have enough energy to function.
edit - Scratch that last part we got thrown off because I am terrible at making brown rice and burnt it so we aren't having any. Instead because I got mad I rage ordered some take out and stuffed my face with some veggie mei fun and sushi. Interesting thing is when I got home since it was cool I nuked it in the microwave and noticed after eating it all and inhaling my sushi that I'm not really having a reaction at all. the mei fun had rice noodles, a mix of veggies, and some egg in it cooked with what I imagine is just a little common cooking oil as it was kinda bland. the sushi was just various fish and avocado, nothing special. Not really having much of a reaction at all though surprisingly besides feeling a bit more tired because I had a lot. This gave me an idea. What would happen if I took my usual rice and veggies that normally to some degree like everything else give me a reaction and nuked it in the microwave? If I have no reaction at all I have more theories on what could be going on. This isn't anything completely unheard of either, you can find some reports in the MCAS subreddit of this microwave phenomenon.
edit 11/07 - I also noticed a weird one and this has been a repeatable since the summer but I just wasn't sure until I had it in all sorts of situations multiple times, drank at the same time every day. You know that reaction I get from the rice that is worse for me? I get the same thing to a lighter degree from a specific brand of ground coffee (if it matters Java Time, dirt cheap brand I got in bulk over the summer) and I'm not sure if it's the brand entirely or the grind that is also an issue as it's very fine ground as opposed to my usual medium grind I drink daily. If I had anything to eat like rice the day before it then this reaction will be worse even if I previously didn't have much of a reaction to the food I had the night before like was the case last night to my surprise with the takeout I got. There was some avocado I had in the sushi I ate, no soy/teriyaki either, and there was at most a small as needed amount used to cook my mei fun that didn't seem to do anything to me up front. I can drink as much as I want of any other coffees and this doesn't happen. My green tea I drink afterwards will also potentiate this reaction a bit whereas if I'm having any other coffee on a day where I didn't have anything for dinner the night before will do just about nothing. The cistus incanus tea doesn't effect this reaction and may even help keep it more under control but I'm not sure as I haven't gone a day without it many months.
Also comes with some nasal drip as per usual with this and a bit of that heavy anhedonic feeling that I now clearly see was when I was doing far worse the cause of my lack of interest in everything under the layers of everything else going on. Everything was chaining on to what appears to be the gut based immune response to now what I so far have narrowed down. Everything that does isn't always related, uncooked peanut butter (cooking at most in a larger amount consumed will make me have some nasal drip and feel a bit blank but nothing crazy, can easily be minimized), some rice good/some rice fine enough, tortilla chips, soy sauce, the specific coffee brand, and enriched bread (I still need to see what my reaction is to white pasta with a little salt). This coffee after a meal the day before, the worst of the rice specifically perpetuates the anhedonic feeling the worst in any circumstance followed by the uncooked peanut butter but the cooked peanut butter in any circumstance does not initiate it all even if I'm able to get a response out of it. The soy sauce and enriched bread reaction feels more "excitotoxic" and leaves me mostly intact but over stimulated in negative ways with a lot more of "the burn". I haven't had anything with lentils in quite a while so I don't know where those currently stand with me. Very strange, the more I learn, the more morbidly fascinating this becomes.
There is also foods that produce an ENTIRELY different class of a reaction with me. Those are my reactions to land meat. Fried food, and gluten itself. Land meat will make me have psychiatric symptoms similar to that of someone I imagine with dementia would have and a warm otherwise sedated/largely unreactive states. Fried food and especially deep fried food to varying degree's will me almost instantly very heavy and sedated feeling and like the meat reactions largely unreactive to the world around me. Gluten generally makes me more heavy and produces the same sedated and unreactive thing but also has a hint of the flu like symptoms with the nasal drip and a bit of inflammation there but minimal burning if at all.
Tonight I decided to try just plain peas boiled in water with sea salt and couple pinches of dried sichuan pepper, peas are not a main culprit in what is going on here. Barely any reaction at all. If involved in some way they aren't directly. My main issues appear to be coming from long range reactions initiating from major trigger with the 2 main branches of reactions I have above. Green peas have lots of fiber, plenty of starch, some natural sugars, around as many carbs as peanuts, and probably sit around to ferment as much as corn does. Yet at the same time it doesn't do anything, I really don't get it.
