Substantial improvement with (strange) dietary adjustments

[Wonkmonk]

I made the spinach provocation test and I think I can now rule out oxalate (both soluble and insolube/bound to calcium) at least as a stand-alone contributor for symptoms.

I ate a pound of spinach, plain (nothing added), sauteed in a pan without discarding any water, for breakfast with the previous and subsequent meal both being pizza, i.e. high-calcium. I think I felt some symptoms (palpitations) right after the meal, but I think these were nocebo effects or late effects of a previous meal (e.g., pizza contains tomato, which is a nightshade) or because of the high nitrate content. There was no noticable worsening in the next 24 hours.

A pound of spinach contains about 3.5 grams of oxalates which is a dose that vastly exceeds any amount of oxalate a normal meal without high-oxalate foods (spinach, rubarb, chard, beets etc.) would contain. I would probably at some point have to test it again with a protein source (e.g., spinach pasta) and see if it's worse than kale, which contains almost no oxalates, but at this point I am confident that oxalates aren't the problem.

So why did I think oxalates are bad? It's probably because spinach contains other nutrients that do cause symotoms. It is relatively high in protein for a green and also in choline:

https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400525/data/choline/choln02.pdf

So why was spinach lasagna so bad, which brought me to the oxalate hypothesis?
*Contains lots of protein (pasta sheets, spinach, cheese)
*Contains lots of choline in the spinach and pasta, especially if the pasta is whole grain
*Contains lots of fat (olive oil, fat from cheese)
*Lactic acid bacteria from the cheese are introduced during preparation
*It sits around for a good while during preparation and has time to ferment before it goes in the oven and is sterilized
*I used frozen spinach, which is pre-heated and which bacteria can immediately use for fermentation once thawed and frozen spinach probably sits around after blanching for a few hours during production before being frozen
*There is a certain time window in the oven where it gets slowly heated between 30 C and 40 C which provides optimum fermentation conditions for bacteria.

Regarding the last point, there had once been advice by Europe's health authorities that spinach should not be reheated because even that small reheating time would produce too many nitrites:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...ng-independent-reader-complaint-a7059316.html

The advice has since been retracted, because they now think this is not a health concern, but the general principle is not in question: Even a few minutes at 30-40 C can lead to significant bacterial degredation activity, which can produce new compounds that weren't present before or wouldn't immediately be produced in the conditions of the stomach. After ingestion, some nutrients would be absorbed quickly and no longer available for the bacteria.

So the spinach lasagna - with its nutrient profile and long preparation and cooking time at moderate temperatures - provided a suitable environment for pre-ingestion bacterial fermentation and activity. I think that was the problem with spinach, not the oxalates.

 

[Dysfunkion]

Under the high dose vitamin C i after trying just plain basmati rice and peas which did not produce many symptoms and less under the higher vitamin C load made me feel generally more groggy the next day. The more veggies and high nutrient sources that are added the worse the reaction gets.

Last night I decided to purposely under the high vitamin C dose load make the worst symptom meal ever. Had cauliflower, cooked salmon, peas, some broccoli, and mixed it with some rice. It cut through the high vitamin C load and of course my more traditional symptom bubble started pushing through, the next morning here I am a much more anxiety ridden, mood swingy wreck with the return of the facial flushing response to social stress and specific related trauma triggers which when the high vitamin C load is introduced while not adding much save for peas to the basmati rice is not present but the same triggers remain but with less of a blood flow rushing to the head effect and it presents more like an anxiety ridden dysphoria with a little more neural shock like elements. Interesting how different states under the same environmental triggers change the response presentation so much. Under the high vitamin C load there different pluses and negatives neutologically for me.

 

[Artemisia]

A lot of your changes are aligned with ray peat's teachings. He said fruit was the best source of carbs. fructose is not hard on the body if consumed with the nutrients found in fruit eg potassium, to oxidize it properly. He was against polyunsaturated fat.

 

[Wonkmonk]

fructose is not hard on the body if consumed with the nutrients found in fruit eg potassium, to oxidize it properly.

Dr. Robert Lustig agrees with him. He says, in fruit, you get the poison (fructose) with the antidot (fiber, antioxidants) and therefore it's not harmful. I think the low-carb crowd mainly gets benefits from removing carbs because removing carbs for most people means removing highly processed carbs (added sugar, white flour) and that has benefits. I don't think many people would get benefits from going low carb if they had a diet high in fruit, whole grains and legumes and removed those in favor of high-carb (mainly animal) foods.

I personally have made the experience on multiple occasions that when I eat a few candy bars, I feel bad after wards (feeling jittery, unable to concentrate etc.) whereas this never happens when I eat dates, no matter the amount. I have tried up to 11 oz. (300g) of dates with no problems. That's 7 oz. (200g) of pure sugar. The fiber and antioxidants in the dates completely negated any negative effects of the sugar. I am 100% convinced that Bob Lustig and Ray Pat are right.

 

[Wonkmonk]

But back to the main topic:

Milk seems to be one of the best foods to eat (or drink) for me and that contradicts a lot of what I thought so far, because it contains lots of protein, choline, calcium and fermentable carbs (lactose), all of which I thought of as being problematic. It contains no fiber in the traditional sense though lactose is fermented by gut bacteria. Interestingly, even when I add fructose and fiber in the form of bananas as another carb substrate for the bacteria, milk still seems to cause no symptoms at all.

I suspect this is because the bacteria can't use milk protein as a protein source to make the harmful compounds. This belief is grounded in the research that has been done on the antioxidant-binding effects of milk protein (mainly casein) vs. soy protein (soy milk). Milk protein behaves very differently and binds to coffee antioxidants very strongly and these bonds cannot be released by the gut flora, so the antioxidants are not absorbed. Soy protein binds to the antioxidants more loosely and that bond is released by the gut bacteria and the coffee antioxidants end up in the blood stream. (which is generally a good thing, but that's irrelevant for what I am looking at)

Details in this video:

So, milk protein seems to have a special effect on the gut microbiota compared to other proteins, especially those in legumes, which I have identified to be particularly problematic for me (when combined with fat).

This is consistent with another observation of mine, which is that pre-fermented dairy products (yoghurt, cheese) do not seem to cause any symptoms, while pre-fermented plant-based products (e.g., soy yoghurt) seem to be problematic.

I currently "eat" one meal that's mainly milk (sweetend with bananas, but dates seem to work, too) a day and that seems to have brought some more benefits.

That said, I am still just moving to highter plateaus. I still haven't found a diet on which I am continually improving, just as with the wrong diet, I was continuously deteriorating. I am still not sure such a diet exists.

 

[Wonkmonk]

It just occurred to me that the reason why milk is so well-tolerated might be trivial: It's liquid. Maybe it's just absorbed too quickly for any fermentation in to take place. After many foods that are not well-tolerated, symptoms often don't kick in for several hours or even a day. Bread dough that ferments only 2-3 hours seems well-tolerated, while it is not after an overnight ferment. It seems the bacteria take a while to produce whatever is harmful. Milk is digested very quickly and milk protein is absorbed almost completely, so not much might be left for the bacteria.

That said, I don't really think that's the reason or at least not the sole reason because cheese, which is long-fermented, also doesn't cause a lot of symptoms. But milk is especially well-tolerated, so maybe the fact that it's liquid just provides an additional benefit.

 

[Wonkmonk]

A current hypothesis I am exploring is that fermentation temperature plays a large role for how well pre-fermented foods (or foods left at room temp for too long) are tolerated.

When I make hummus from freshly cooked chickpeas that are immediately processed, it is much better tolerated than when I make it from cooked chickpeas which were left to cool at room temp and then frozen (and later thawed/reheated for making the hummus). The food doesn't freeze immediately in the freezer. Instead, it would take hours to go from room temp to below zero degrees where bacterial activity presumably stops. Though hummus never seems to be really well tolerated ( ), there really appears to be a large difference between the two preparation methods. Hummus from canned chickpeas is also not well-tolerated.

This is in stark contrast to bread I am making that I leave to rise in the oven at 30-35 C for 2-3 hours, which is very well tolerated. On the other hand, bread left in the fridge at ~8 C for an overnight rise is very bad, although the bacterial activity is probably less than for 2-3 hours at 30-35 C, which is at or close to the optimum temperature for many bacteria.

So I think we are looking for a compound or compounds bacteria tend to make at low temperatures or a bacteria that is more active at lower temperatures or has a lower optimum temperature for its activity.

Whatever it is, I have to avoid letting foods cool down or sit for longer times and when frozen (bread, chickpeas, falafel dough) try to get them to freezing temps as quickly as possible (e.g., freezing several smaller batches instead of one large batch).

This seems like an important part of the mosaic that I have so far overlooked.

 

[Wonkmonk]

Before I forget it, here are concrete examples of cooled/frozen foods I tested several times:
*Homemade bread after cold overnight ferment --> very bad
*Expensive store-bought pizza that says it fermented for 48 hours --> very bad
*Normal commercial bread --> moderate to bad
*Hummus from frozen chickpeas --> bad
*Homemade bread (quick ferment) left for 8 hours until freezing --> bad
*Homemade bread (quick ferment), immediately frozen --> good
*Raw falafel dough (chickpeas, onions, garlic, parsley, lemon juice, salt, spices), immediately frozen --> good to moderate
*Store-bought canned chickpeas --> bad
*Various soy products (yoghurt, tofu) --> moderate to bad (but not protein isolates which are good)

I suspect that the raw falafel dough vs. cooked chickpeas isn't so bad because the bacteria have a harder time invading raw chickpeas as opposed to cooked chickpeas before freezing. Also the salt and other ingredients would be expected to impede fermentation during freezing.

I also suspect that canned chickpeas (or legumes in general) as well as soy products sit around for a longer time at room temp before being sterilized (like tofu).

It's also interesting that whatever makes me worse seems to be removed by the processing that turns soy into soy protein isolate because that never seemed to cause symptoms (same with pea and sunflower seed protein isolates). This is actually quite interesting, should this ever be studied chemically.

 

[Wishful]

I found this interesting: when the food poisoning flushed out whatever was causing my intolerance of plant embryos, it also removed my intolerance of ginger and turmeric. The ginger/turmeric intolerance predated the embryo one by a few years. Such a strange disease.