I’ve been an even busier boy this week than ever. But I wanted to let all the blog-following faithful know what’s going on out there.
First up are 3 brand new 180 Kitchen posts. Thai coconut soup, Thai Massaman curry, and Baby Back ribs all have their own posts and tutorial videos. To see the latest there, click HERE.
I’ve also uploaded 8 new content pages to the main site at http://180degreehealth.com/. Click on any pages that interest you:
Cortisol
High-Fructose Corn Syrup
High Triglycerides
Genetically Engineered Food
High Blood Sugar
Low-Carb
Aspartame
Safe Weight Loss
The low-carb one is probably my favorite :)
I also began archiving my podcasts on a youtube channel, and they are now availabe for anyone to listen to. This week’s topic was a continuation of our discussion on leptin, fructose, and insulin resistance/type 2 diabetes/etc. In the podcast, I do provide a quick summary of Robert Lustig’s video, Sugar: The Bitter Truth for those who want a 10-minute version instead of a 90-minute version.
Check out the podcast HERE and help 180 out by clicking the Subscribe button while you’re there.
If you’re having any trouble keeping up with all that I’ve been up to, please follow me on Twitter. I’m a total Twitter whore now, and I report nearly everything I do on the internet there with direct links. I post links to good non-180 articles and videos as well as articles that I’ve posted comments on (not all, just the really good ones). I’d love to have you join me there and “ReTweet” the crap out of all your favorite 180 blurbs.
Hope you like all the goodies!
Awesome! Very interested in trying the Thai Massaman curry – it sounds wonderful. Curry plus coconut anything equals deliciousness.
haha… awesome matt, you even got richard from free the animal to calm down alittle bit, and i was just looking through jimmy moores page, and noticed his thyroid tests… went to the comments to see what people suggested, and low and behold, a comment from u and he asked u to be a guest!! i was just thinking before i checked up there that you should be a guest on his show… he definitely would gain knowledge for his own sake, reading about his weight rebounds.
troy
also.. emma(plant poisons and rotten stuff) seems to have finally fixed herself with the help of thyroid supplementation… she just posted about it a week ago… said something about not blogging about amines and garbage anymore and telling everyone to get there thyroid checked… and she is happy to eat food again!!!
troy
Thanks Troy. I got off on the wrong foot with those guys at first by going over there and stirring things up. I get their attention and get them rustled. But now we're settling in and ready to have some conversations. We all mutually know that we're 3 good guys looking for answers and trying to solve the big puzzle out. It's just, once I find holes in their dogma, I jam myself in there by force – then say I'm sorry and bring them flowers later.
Cool you know about Sean!
He was the first guy i discovered when i got more interestedt in nutrition a few years ago.
He's the one who really draged me into the whole thing and was the first to explain to me that sat fat is not the enemy. Still like him very much. He's a very cool guy with a great attitude.
"Is god stupid or why did he put all that fat and cholesterol in our food?" :D
I really liked your comment about medical students on the NY Times Well Blog:
"… those who get the best test scores were best at learning the wrong information."
Awesome comment!
Hi there,
I've got a question regarding the HED. Now, I haven't read your latest eBook (or any of them for that matter), I probably will, when I have some more money, but whatever. My question was what rough macronutrient ratio is recommended on a HED. Now, coming from a low-carb background I guess carbs still have some priority, even though I think I've done quite a good amoutn of carb loading over the last few weeks.
But just in general, how does the macronutrient ratio look like?
At a paleo (but not necessarily low-carb) blog I stumbled upon this:
Protein: about 0.8 to 1.0 grams per pound of bodyweight and not more than about 25% of calories
Carbohydrate: about 1 to 1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight and about 25% (20-30%) of calories
Fats: enough to supply the difference, i.e. 50-65% of calories
Okay, my guess is that I'm only moderatley active at the moment and I weigh around 51kg, 100g of protein is probably the max more or less. Apart from that I thought about getting roughly equal amounts of carb and fat to reach satiety (which would make the fat percentage of my calories twice the amount of the carb cals).
Does that sound okay?Or what ratio should I strive for?
"Protein: about 0.8 to 1.0 grams per pound of bodyweight and not more than about 25% of calories
Carbohydrate: about 1 to 1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight and about 25% (20-30%) of calories
Fats: enough to supply the difference, i.e. 50-65% of calories "
this seems pretty ideal…
150-200g carbs. sometimes lower..
I dont really agree with matts view on on low carb… the people that fail dont eat enough raw animal fats in there diet or raw greens..
What's raw animal fat?
" What's raw animal fat?"
are you from planet earth?
Matt,
Nice to hear that you and Richard are discussing and integrating nutritional theory. I think the gap between low-carb, paleo, Weston Price, and other well-meaning, sensible health movements is bound to be closed eventually. Your work with Richard suggests this is going to happen soon! Keep it up!
I tried to engage in a discussion with Dr. Kurt Harris over at PaleoNu about the effects of gluten on health, and, wow, was he not willing to budge at all. Check out the blog post he wrote in response to my contentions on the difference between sourdough and whole wheat bread and what the WAPF actually says about the subject:
Avoid Poison or Neutralize It?
Then scroll down to the comments and find my comments (ctrl+F, then enter "Ryan Koch"). I didn't even try to offend him, but, boy, did he take my comments personally!
It was entertaining for sure. I eventually just realized that he's an ornery man who refuses to budge and gave up. I want to write more on the subject on my blog once I finish my "Small Game in Primitive Living" series.
Anyway, nice job, Matt. Way to build bridges.
"are you from planet earth?"
yupp how about you? so…what is it? I mean what's fat that is not raw?
sorry raw animal fats, raw cream, raw egg yolks, anything raw, not cooked
For raw fats try also like salmon ceviche or lox, steak tartare, and carpaccio, these things are really yummy too.
Mmmm, raw animal fat. I used to be into that. Didn't do much for me. Used to eat tons of raw cream, raw butter, with plenty of raw meat, cheese, eggs, etc.
Madmuhh, I'm not sure there is really an ideal ratio or that anyone has or could even determine that with certainty. I know in my own diet that a 2 to 1 ratio of carbs to protein (say 250g and 125g) yields the best results. My fat intake usually hits the 50% mark by percentages. Schwarzbein has also stated that a 2:1 ratio is probably ideal. But this can be tweaked with great flexibility I'm sure. But personally, I find to make a meal satisfying and to make a baked potato taste just right, or a bowl of oatmeal, it needs a certain amount of fat to suit my tastes.
Ryan –
You got a good head on your shoulders sonny boy. I'll check that out as soon as I finish posting this comment. Once low-carbers understand that ingesting carbohydrates does not cause insulin resistance or hyperinsulinemia, they will come around. Then we can all be friends with all the macronutrients while trying to make the best choices in each of those categories.
Jim –
Enjoyed your comments at the well blog too. Thanks for swinging by here.
Oh and Jannis, Sean from Underground Wellness is a riot. The two of us together would be a more synergistic combo than chocolate and vanilla.
Matt, your low-carb post really spoke to me. I was low-fat a couple years ago and it really ruined my emotional and physical health. Schwarzbein is what got me out of that, and Nourishing Traditions/WAPF came next. However, I'm still holding onto a few pounds of fat I'd rather be without (though it might be a vanity thing since I'm a healthy weight), so low-carbing appealed to me. However, after going fairly low-carb (50 g a day on average for a couple months), my husband and I have noticed old symptoms like irritability, junk food cravings, coffee cravings and mood swings coming back. It just dawned on my it's probably the low-carb. Your low-carb page came right on time for me, and I'm ready to approach things in a more balanced way again. Thanks a million!
Matt whats a typical daily menu look like for you?
Matt,
The low carb link is great. I have been Paleo for several months with about 50g carbs, and I am thinking to add carbs back into the mix. I am thinking upping it to around 100g and following the Schwarzbein recommendations for carbs. Any opinions on what the lower bound is for carbs to keep metabolism revved?
Nice to hear that you and Richard are discussing and integrating nutritional theory. I think the gap between low-carb, paleo, Weston Price, and other well-meaning, sensible health movements is bound to be closed eventually. Your work with Richard suggests this is going to happen soon! Keep it up!
Intellectually I think he is already there. He has made comments suggesting that there should be some moderate carb or high carb paleo sites out there. Ha! Well of course they then would no longer be paleo as traditionally understood.
It is the old problem with science I posted about, where even accepted new information is still viewed through the lens of the old paradigm.
I tried to engage in a discussion with Dr. Kurt Harris over at PaleoNu about the effects of gluten on health, and, wow, was he not willing to budge at all. Check out the blog post he wrote in response to my contentions on the difference between sourdough and whole wheat bread and what the WAPF actually says about the subject
Ha! So that was you. Someone posted it on the WAPF chapter leader group. I haven't engaged but I will soon, and it will provide great fodder for some upcoming blog posts!
Michael
those chaps… don't want to even remotely recognize that carbs arent' the problem… they will feel like there betraying eachother and everything paleo stands for….hahaha… they will learn…
heeha' heeha'…. sorry matt. i am drunk!!!
troy
Michael,
Yup, that was me. It really irked me that he didn't link to my blog or even mention my name. Glad to hear there's troops on the way! Don't be surprised if he ignores your comments, as it took me three times to finally get my comment accepted, after which he simply said, "I'll respond in a blog post."
I think the fact that I pointed out his errors was unacceptable to him at first, and when he finally decided how to weasel his way out of it, he attempted to make me look foolish for thinking the way I was. Not very classy, in my opinion.
And, if you read the comments, you'll see some of the personal mud-slinging this guy engages in with me, saying I am disrespectful for not calling him "Doctor" and for referring to him as "dude," talking down to me because I was vegetarian for three years of my life.
Good luck, and let me know how things go with that!
I think your post about the problem with science is dead on, and I think many folks in the paleo low-carb world fit into this well. I really liked this quote:
The fundamental paradigm, once established, is no longer tested or questioned, and all further research soon becomes minor applications of the paradigm, minor clearing up of loopholes or anomalies that still remain in the basic vision. For years, decades, or longer, scientific research becomes narrow, specialized, and always within the basic paradigmatic framework.
Amen, brother!
Hi Matt.
So, what about substrate utilisation? The fact is that people's bodies on average don't burn that much carbohydrate at rest (unless you ram in an ass-load of carbs and fill glycogen stores). Modern life is increasingly sedentary with increasing car use and most jobs involving sitting.
Remember that you are n=1 and what works for you doesn't necessarily work for everyone else. Where are your ancestors from? Mine are from Northern Europe. I think that it makes a difference. A LCHF diet seems to suit my body much better than a HCLF one in terms of appetite control and how I feel.
Nige.
Nigel, I do think ratios of macronutriants will be different for different people and origins probably play a part in this BUT Matt never recommends low fat, he is big into high saturated fats etc and HED is high everything :)
Matt, can you please go into blood sugar a little more some time?
My fasting blood sugar was back up to 103 again this morning (from 91 yesterday morning) and then back down to 88 2 hors after breakfast (eggs, bacon, tomatoes, sourdough bread and butter)
I'm really starting to think that rest is the key to this whole thing. This past week I've had a total metabolic meltdown: digestion lousy, urinary tract infection for the first time in a year, moods all over the map (same rage followed by sadness that I used to get all the time on the pill) and the lowest body temps since I started keeping track. The main thing I've done differently is not sleep very well. A couple of late nights stacked up on top of a couple early mornings. Of course the tiredness makes me crave sugar, white bread, caffeine all the more, but really I think it's the rest that threw me off. How to hit the reset button is the question. The more I obsess about being tired, the less likely I am to sleep.
There's an interesting article in a recent New Yorker about john Mackey, founder of Whole Foods. He talks about his attempts to pull processed food with refined sugar out of the store. Mackey is another emaciated looking vegan, by the way. Ironic since WF is one of the few half ways decent meat counters in the city. Now if only he'd agree to start pulling everything with soy out of the store. It would be empty outside the produce department, I think.
I agree Jenny, when sleep is lacking old symptoms come back. 8-10hrs a day is really optimal
I have read on many adrenal fatigue sites that sleeping between 7am and 9am is really important as this is when the adrenals are firing up and the sleeping during this time can be very beneficial, can't wait til I can sleep in again!
Having a 2.5yr old can throw a wrench in getting enough rest.
Great resources, thanks.
On a related note, I think that it is very healthy to eat fish whole, especially small fish.
You get all of the nutrients you need, and small fish are pretty safe as far as toxic metals are concerned.
This post talks about smelts in particular, but sardines seem to be very good too:
http://healthcorrelator.blogspot.com/2010/01/eating-fish-whole-smelts.html
Ryan, Michael, thanks you guys. You guys are like my long-lost health brothers. Maybe we could team up for like a male version of Charlie's Angels – although those Crossfit Paleo people would probably whoop our asses. We could be Weston's Angels or something along those lines. Crap, that was pretty unprofessional sounding, I'm not a doctor, and I spend years as a vegetarian. PaNU dude would hate that. I'll be all over that guy the next time he posts something about low-carb's amazing virtues.
Yes folks, low-carb can definitely start to suck over the long-haul. It's amazing how sensitive to it I am now. 1 day of low-carb eating can make me smelly and grouchy. I actually yelled at my computer the other day, but cured myself by eating a big load of homemade sourdough rye. Go figure.
100 grams of cars is still way too low for me. It's even way too low for Schwarzbein now, who has gradually upped her carb recommendations. If you are young, active, and don't have metabolic syndrome she would no doubt rather have you eating at least 50g per meal, maybe more if she's talking about 2:1 carb to protein ratios.
Elizabeth –
Don't worry about a few pounds of extra weight. You'll be happier and healthier with it than without it. Focus on health exclusively. If it disappears, great. If not, no big deal.
Nigel-
Chinese office workers eat tons of carbs and sit around all day long without getting fat. I don't think carbs or calories or physical activity levels have that much to do with body fat levels over the long haul.
Jenny –
I agree. I think the greatest resistance I get from people is on my recommendation to rest well and sleep well, avoiding strenuous exercise during the "healing phase." But I have found the rest to be amazing – not just the sleep, but really taking it easy.
Jedi-
Your fasting glucose is high, but you don't seem insulin resistant as your glucose level falls upon eating. Perhaps you might be better off with a little more carbohdyrate in your diet. It's great that you're paying attention, and I'm sure it will come down over time. Don't be nervous about your numbers right now though. Just watch them and see if you can track signs of progress. For me, pushing higher in both carbs and calories shoved all my glucose numbers down within a couple weeks.
Matt Stone said…
"Nigel-
Chinese office workers eat tons of carbs and sit around all day long without getting fat. I don't think carbs or calories or physical activity levels have that much to do with body fat levels over the long haul."
Define "tons of carbs". Tons of rice perhaps, but rice is mostly water and it also contains fibre/fiber, so it's more filling than and nowhere near as calorie-dense as bread, pasta, potatoes etc. Do the Chinese drink tons of sugary drinks? I think not!
By tons of carbs I mean like 400-500 grams per day. White rice doesn't have much fiber. Sedentary office workers in China were found to eat more calories than sedentary Americans, with way lower BMI's and tiny waist circumference (more important). Potatoes are far less calorie dense than rice. Potatoes have like 500 calories per pound! I dare you to try and gain weight sitting around eating 6 pounds of potatoes per day, boiled, without added fat.
No, the Chinese do not sit around drinking Big Gulps. Very observant. Nor do the Japanese. Nor do the French who eat your dreaded white flour.
But they are all eating more and more sugar and getting more and more obese. Fructose as a carbohydrate instead of starch changes everything – especially when it's refined fructose combined with a ton of vegetable oil. That's the pefect lab rat diet for inducing metabolic syndrome.
Undertow wrote:
"Having a 2.5yr old can throw a wrench in getting enough rest."
I hear ya! When my four year old gets enough sleep gets enough sleep everything is fine at our house. When his schedule is off we all suffer. He can take a 20 minute power nap or even just sit down for a few minutes and be totally refreshed. Oh to have those adrenal stores again!
@Undertow and Jenny – I'm very sure that it's no coincidence that I packed on the pounds in my very frequently sleepless 'baby decade'.
Good to hear of the dialogue happening between Matt and others on the issue of carbs. Starting a bit over a year ago I tried low carb paleo for several months and lost weight although I was increasingly concerned about the brittle nails and hair loss that coincided with that experiment. Then I fell off the wagon while on holiday, and I’m really glad I did because it was a chance to take a closer look at the carb question, including coming across Matt. The nails and hair have improved now after several months back on carbs.
The grand synthesis on diet and health will need to have a wider social angle I think, however, going back to a point I made on the fructose post a few days ago about social stress and obesity. Lustig, Gary Taubes, Richard Johnson ? they’re all brilliant for showing us HOW, biomedically, things like increased consumption of fructose and refined carbs generally have contributed to obesity and metabolic disease. They’ve also exposed some of the WHY: bad science , inertia, the power of special interests, etc. But we have to look at the social context of individuals, too, if we’re going to really put all of the pieces together on the WHY question.
According to the recently published book The Spirit Level by epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett, obesity is ASSOCIATED with greater social inequality between and within rich countries and as obesity rates have increased, so have their social gradients ? i.e. more unequal countries like the US and UK have higher rates of obesity than more egalitarian places like the Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands and the same association between income inequality and obesity holds between US states. Just one case that suggests there’s also some kind of CAUSAL relationship is from Germany where data shows a rise in BMI for children, young adults and mothers among former East Germans since reunification and the rapid increase in social inequality that followed there.
I don’t doubt the paleo insight that there have been some negative health consequences for humanity because of the dietary changes that accompanied agriculture, but it seems equally obvious that carbs have featured in the human diet in a variety of ecological niches for a very long time preceding agriculture and over the past 10, 000 years many cultures have also made extremely successful adaptations to an agriculturally-based diet, as Price and McCarrison showed. What we may have been less successful at is psychic adaptation to the stresses of life in hierarchical, materially unequal societies. This whole problem is not just that individuals are eating more refined carbs, fructose, and industrial seed oils, it’s also about who is eating more and under what kind of social conditions and stresses.
Thanks Lisa. Great thoughts. Amongst wealthy nations the poor are typically the least healthy and most overweight. That's not true of poor nations though. Poverty, as long as adequate food supplies are availabe, has no such association.
Also keep in mind that perhaps the healthiest person I've ever met lived under by far the most stressful circumstances. Like T.L. Cleave, I believe that stress is not a core factor behind disease causation. Instead, it seems to bring weaknesses caused by diet and poor heredity to the surface more quickly. It is, in the words of Cleave, an "aggravating factor," but not a causal one.
http://180degreehealth.blogspot.com/search/label/Layla%20Sheikh
Interesting statistic here from the Statistical Abstract, published by the US Census Bureau:
In 2004, 6.9% of consumer spending was for food, vs, between 11 and 18% in most European countries. The US adult obesity rate was triple or more thnt most European countries as well.
Sadly, most people will draw the conclusion that our obesity rate is so much higher because our food is so cheap and we eat too much of it for that reason, when really the problem is that the cheap food is so nutritionally deficient that it fucks up the metabolism. When I was in Europe, I noticed a much higher emphasis on serving quality foods, and that seems to be reflected in these economic statistics.
We are getting what we pay for!
Scott
Interesting statistic here from the Statistical Abstract, published by the US Census Bureau:
In 2004, 6.9% of consumer spending was for food, vs, between 11 and 18% in most European countries. The US adult obesity rate was triple or more thnt most European countries as well.
Sadly, most people will draw the conclusion that our obesity rate is so much higher because our food is so cheap and we eat too much of it for that reason, when really the problem is that the cheap food is so nutritionally deficient that it fucks up the metabolism. When I was in Europe, I noticed a much higher emphasis on serving quality foods, and that seems to be reflected in these economic statistics.
We are getting what we pay for!
Scott
Thanks for your thoughts, Matt. As you say, there is no connection between absolute (rather than relative poverty) and obesity, and that’s one of the key planks in Wilkinson and Pickett’s arguments about the relationship between a variety of well-being indicators and social inequality. Historically, since the epidemiological transition and the rise in material living standards in the rich countries, a law of diminishing returns has taken effect and increasing affluence has ceased to improve well-being. Quite the contrary, the social distribution of what were formerly considered the diseases of affluence such as heart disease, stroke and obesity has flipped in the rich countries since the 1950s so that these are now more the bane of the poor than the rich.
On the topic of stress and metabolic disease, I was just looking at Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and was surprised to see him comment that only a few studies have looked at the question of whether or not low socioeconomic status is in fact associated with chronic activation of the stress response. Among these however a study of children in Montreal and one of men in Lithuania support an association between low SES and elevated glucocorticoid levels.
What’s also interesting and very suggestive is that it’s how poor you feel relative to others that seems to count, not how absolutely poor you are. As Sapolsky puts it:
Once those basic needs [for physical safety from predators, adequate shelter and sufficient calories to sustain health] are met, it is an inevitable fact that if everyone is poor, and I mean everyone, then no one is. In order to understand why stress and psychological factors have so much to do with the SES/health gradient, we have to begin with the obvious fact that it is never the case that everyone is poor thereby making no one poor. This brings us to a critical point in this field ? the SES/health gradient is not really about a distribution that bottoms out at being poor. It’s not about being poor. It’s about feeling poor, which is to say, it’s about feeling poorer than others around you.
Sapolsky is not a big fan of the social effects of agriculture either:
Agriculture allowed for the stockpiling of surplus resources and thus, inevitably, the unequal stockpiling of them ? stratification of society and the invention of classes. Thus, it allowed for the invention of poverty. I think that the punch line of the primate-human difference is that when humans invented poverty, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.
To me at least, the following seems a reasonable working hypothesis of one of the ways stress might contribute to the problems:
Disruption to neurochemicals such as dopamine and serotonin from the chronic stress of relative poverty –> greater susceptibility to the psychotropic properties of grains, sugar and all the crappy processed permutations thereof –> SES/health gradient.
The life courses of individuals are way more complicated of course and that is where the luck of the draw in all kinds of environmental factors and events and genetic/epigenetic make-up will make for a whole spectrum of outcomes that statistical averages will necessarily obscure.
@Scott
"Interesting statistic here from the Statistical Abstract, published by the US Census Bureau:
In 2004, 6.9% of consumer spending was for food, vs, between 11 and 18% in most European countries. The US adult obesity rate was triple or more thnt most European countries as well."
Interesting data, Scott. I'm sure you're right about food culture and food quality. I also wouldn't mind betting that the very high baseline of US obesity rates reflects that very fact that the US is where cheap industrial foods have made the biggest inroads for longest. No US states have rates under 20% apparently, compared to an average of 10.2% in Sweden in 2007, for example, according to the latest OECD health data. Although the US shows the same strong correlation between income inequality and obesity as can be seen in other rich countries, it's way up above the regression line in Wilkinson and Pickett's graph linking the two factors in these countries.
As a kid in Australia some decades back, I can remember how hearing of US "advances" in food processing (whipped cream and cake frosting in cans!!) thrilled and horrified us. Sadly, there's probably less and less difference between what's on offer in shops and restaurants there and in the US on that score anymore.
Phew, one year for healing, that's a long time. Especially if you consider how young I am, heck, I should be partying all night at my age. But on the other hand, I've been low carb for only a year and before was quite alright, so maybe things will go upwards faster for me. I already did see some nice progress, before I got a little sick a few days ago.
And I really feel at home here at 180, because there are so many people here who are fucked up in the same way as I am. :-)
I decided to try some iodine supplementation to see how that will affect me, I'll report to you guys how it goes. Hooray for self-experimentation!
I'm still a little in the paleo camp however and so far, I've only been incorporating potatoes, sweet potatoes, starchy veggies and some occasional rice (I'm having coconut rice today, hopefully this will taste better than pure rice, which is quite bland imo). Do you think that's enough variety?
Also hooray for you getting on the low-carb-show, Matt. I'm really looking forward to that. That's gonna be awesome!
Thanks Madmuhh,
That's plenty of variety. Those are my primary starch staples as well. As we all know, glutinous grains are a serious point of contention, and many people simply fare better when choosing other sources. Grains have no advantages that potatoes don't have for example.
How the hell did that comment end up in here. I was about to comment on your most recent post, now it seems like I wrote something that was totally out of context. Nah, well, what the heck!
Matt:
From your discussion on cortisol:
"5.To top all of that off, cortisol, the "fire fighter," tends to suppress immune function (another one of the prominent side effects of cortisone). This triggers overactivation of the immune system which leads to allergy (more inflammation and more cortisol) and sometimes even autoimmune diseases in which the immune system is so vigilant it begins attacking itself!"
This seems contradictory. Does cortisol suppress immune function or trigger overactivation of the immune system? I don't get it!
I have a close family member with MS who lives a very hectic lifestyle, skips meals or even goes all day without eating, gets little sleep and a high powered job. Wonder if high cortisol levels are involved, and I also wonder if a healing program would help with symptoms.
I guess that is a little contradictory. I was hypothesizing that the immune system can and often does overcompensate for the suppressive effects of cortisol. Like with insulin. If cortisol suppresses insulin binding, then more insulin is produced to compensate. If cortisol inhibits immune function, that could easily lead to immune system hypervigilance to override/compensate.
MS is absolutely caused and cured with diet – as are many autoimmune conditions. Aurora, for example has autoimmune iritis, that was brought on by a combination of:
1) Dying family member
2) Grad school stress
3) Marathon running
4) Low-calorie, very low-carb eating
5) Caffeine, alcohol, Ritalin, and oral contraceptives
With the exception of still eating a pretty low-carb, low-calorie diet, all of those factors have been eliminated, and her iritis is totally gone. The eye doctor was amazed at her improvement.
Autoimmune conditions appear to all be fundamentally the same. Eat well, sleep well, live well, rest well, avoid drugs/stimulants/etc. and you heal. At least, one should try to do everything they can to be healthy before seeking other means of healing.