Issue #3. February 2014

This section features new content from 180 founder Matt Stone.

Welcome to the February edition of the 180D Newsletter! A million things going on as always, but here are the two biggest announcements:

1. Solving the Paleo Equation is now available for purchase, finally! Don’t be fooled by the title, it’s not a book about what early hominids ate. Far from it. In many cases it’s a critique and revision of the entire Paleo diet and lifestyle, and it’s the most professional and complete work in the?180D library without question.It’s published through the world’s largest publisher of Paleo books. We have infiltrated, mwahahaha! Enter the “Stone” Age! This is by far the finest of all books written by me, and the content added by Dr. Garrett Smith (who co-authored the book)?on exercise, sleep, recovery, and more are outstanding. Please grab a copy and help push this to the New York Times bestseller list.Click HERE for the paperback and HERE for the Kindle version. Sorry no free?days will be run on this book since it is published through an?outside publishing company, but I got a way to compensate for that…
2. FREEbruary! FREEbruary?has begun! Every day this month there will be a?FREE book giveaway!Check your emails to keep up with’the latest free sale. The first book to go free from February 1-5 is Diet Recovery 2.Please share this link on?Facebook and Twitter to tell those you know about the?giveaway.

Disconfirming Thoughts

?Recently I was reading’some anti-stress books. No, I’m not stressed. I was reading them for education’s sake. In one of the booksI was reminded of a stress-mitigating strategy I’ve been a strong, albeit rather quiet advocate of since I came across it in 2006.And that strategy is to?go through the conscious effort of thinking “disconfirming thoughts” whenever you are truly plagued by a recurring strong emotion.

Of course, most people think of this?as a way to relieve themselves of strong negative emotions. That’s great and all, but I think this lacks a full understanding of the?inseparable relationship between positive and negative mood states. Therefore, I greatly prefer the term “equilibration” as it pertains to neutralizing strong emotions, which was the first term I heard used when I was initially exposed to the idea. This term is used in reference to making positives and negatives balance out and become equal in a sense, where neither positive nor negative predominates as it pertains to an emotionally-charged?issue, person, place, thing, event, etc.

I’m?bringing this up because I was tasked with writing the Stress section in Solving the Paleo?Equation, but I just brushed past this topic pretty quickly.I really?could’ve written much more, and it’s been weighing heavy on my conscience lately. But that’s kinda what the internet is for I guess–the ultimate venue for public conscience-clearing.

The Anatomy of an Emotion

Feelings of emotion are driven, at the core, by our beliefs. Let’s say you believe that Gerald Absamillion is the perfect mate for you. He has a lot of money, gives you great?foot massages, and?has the absolute sexiest?physical attribute a man can possibly have. No, not abs!Think between the nose and upper lip. Yes, a mustache of course. Gerald is one smooth son of?gun.You’re convinced he’s Mr. Right. Your soul mate?for’sure.

Then he dumps you. Your?emotion is?extreme’sadness. In fact, you could say that your?perception of negativity is determined by the degree with which you perceived positives in ol’ Gerald. The more you?adore Gerald, the more it hurts when?he hits the road and takes that prickly?butt-tickler with him.

If you had negative beliefs about Gerald and your relationship with him,?or heaven forbid you didn’t like his mustache and secretly wished he?had shaved the thing years ago, you might have been relieved from the breakup. Maybe even elated.

The belief really determined your emotions. The event itself wasn’t inherently positive or negative. You also don’t have the ability to see into the future, which could involve finding a guy who would give you a whole body massage and had?an EVEN TICKLIER mustache. Or it could?involve?feeling relief that you and Gerald?broke up only to discover later that your next boyfriend likes to physically abuse you. Hey, Gerald was a little gassy sure and had hairy triceps, but you could suddenly?feel negatively about the breakup really quickly if?your?next relationship were to turn abusive.

Sorry, let’s get back on topic here. Mustaches are great aren’t they?

Crap, this article isn’t about mustaches. I scrolled up to see the title and remembered. Sorry about that.

Hopefully you see what I’m saying here. Everything we perceive as negative or positive has the power to create positive and negative emotions in certain circumstances. It all comes back to beliefs. Beliefs are set into motion typically by how we perceived certain events in the past. When we change our perceptions about something or our beliefs–our emotions, no matter how strong or how long we’ve held onto them, are INSTANTLY dissolved.

And when strong emotions are dissolved, we instantly are relieved of a tremendous load of stress, as stress is a natural extension of having unbalanced emotions. I can say, definitively, that all the sugar, starch, salt, massages, warm baths, meditation, sleep, and essential oils on the face of the planet are a wet Band-Aid compared to the true, deep?equilibration of a polarized emotion.

Of course, we tend to drift towards the negative when underfed and lacking sleep no doubt. I don’t mean to negate’the importance of metabolism and sympathetic nervous system deactivation in battling negative?emotions. They often just don’t enter our psyche when we feel good, and thus don’t?create so much stress in our bodies.

But there is also only so much that good self-care and abundant nourishment can solve. For many’true emotional traumas and painful past experiences, much more health-enhancing work can be done on the purely?psychological front.

Here is a real life example that I actually witnessed. It may sound simple, and it is. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t powerful. Everybody in the room was fighting tears, and many were losing that fight.The cool thing is that this very important?psychological’shift didn’t require years of therapy. In fact,?when the right counterbalancing thoughts hit her, those long-held?beliefs were INSTANTLY obliterated.

A woman in her late 30’s admitted that the biggest unresolved emotional trauma of her life was her father’s taking of his own life a couple decades earlier. When the beliefs that were driving her polarized beliefs about the event were fleshed out, it was revealed that she primarily resented her father for this event because he was?”a coward”?and “didn’t love her.”

The practitioner trying to help this woman?”equilibrate” her?emotions had to be’very firm in?his resolve to make her face the fallacies of her own beliefs. It is, from experience, just about the most psychologically difficult and strenuous thing a human can do.In fact, this woman became irate and’tried to storm out of the room,?but the practitioner actually?physically grabbed her and pulled her back into the room. She was totally freaking out. It was pretty crazy.I thought my heart was going to crack a rib.

Finally, this woman relaxed a little.She mentions that her dad was a “coward” and the practitioner immediately jumped all over that. He was like, “Really? Putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger is being a coward? That takes some serious balls!”

Something clicked in the woman and her emotional state radically changed. Her hatred towards her dad and lingering anger towards him?over his?cowardice instantly shifted. She softened.

And then the big hit came. She really?felt unloved when her father took?his life. But after thorough questioning it was revealed that he?had done many things to hurt his family. He didn’t want to hurt his wife or?daughter, but he had. It tore him up inside, and he kept repeating those behaviors. Finally, he took his life.

The woman realized?all the?ways that he?had shown love for her. She realized that a big part of his suicide had to?do with hatred towards himself, a?belief that his family was “better off without him,”?and a strong desire not to hurt his loved ones any more.

The lines were grayed. This woman, in a matter of a few short minutes, realized’that her beliefs about her father being a coward who didn’t love her might have been completely untrue. The moment she realized that, her decades-long emotional stress from the event and way of seeing the world around her was completely turned upside down. She wept, and we all wept with her, as the anger she had for her father was swiftly displaced with an overwhelming feeling of love.

Change your thoughts. Change your perspective. Change your opinion. Change your point of view. Change your life.

What we believe about the people and events and circumstances in our lives are always half truths. There are always details and perspectives that we haven’t considered, and those perspectives often hold the key to balancing out how we feel. When we disprove our beliefs we can no longer have such polarized emotions stemming from those beliefs. The end result is a lot less emotional stress and psychological turmoil–leading to lives with a lot less baggage.

Challenge your greatest convictions, most negative beliefs, as well as your most?irrational infatuations?(which co-create the negative beliefs). The goal is to equalize, or “neutralize” how you feel by simply proving yourself wrong (or “disconfirming” in keeping with the title of this article). This kind of thing deserves just as much attention as?any other health practice. Probably more.

In simplest terms, “Change how you think, and change how you feel.”

This section features one of the greatest hits from 180D’s seven year blog and its 666 published posts.

Strengthen Bones and Teeth with White Sugar

Strengthen bones and teeth with white sugar? What am I crazy? If you don’t know much about me, you would say yes. Stick around long enough and you might find I’m surprisingly sane.

I have no interest in perpetuating dogma or saying the same thing everyone else says and thinking like everyone else thinks. The bottom line is that I and several others I communicate with have noticed a tremendous loss of tooth sensitivity as our teeth have become stronger. That much is indisputable fact. No one could convince me that my teeth haven’t become significantly less sensitive over the past year, because they have, and it’s obvious.

What I want to know is why. This post is about exploring the potential mechanisms behind the increase in tooth strength I and others have experienced eating freely of sugar ? in ?natural? form, from whole foods like fruits, and even from totally refined white sugar (and evil high-fructose corn syrup, but I didn’t want to scare the health fanatical too much by using that in the title!).

How is such a thing possible? It makes no sense that a food with no nutrient value whatsoever, not a trace of minerals, could increase the density of bones and teeth. How could adding it to one’s diet possibly help?

A brief history of my mouth?

At age 12 it was Katie. I kissed her on the cheek and then she told me things were ?getting too serious? and totally dumped me. Dyke. Then Kelly. Courtney. Then that one chick that ran away from home and lived in my closet without my parents knowing for 3 days?

Wait, wait. Not that kind of mouth history. And no, not an ?oral history? in the tribally indigenousey kind of way. I describe my mouth as one with ?more metal than a Slayer concert. I had severe tooth decay as a kid, had all my molars filled, had all my baby teeth fall out, and had all my adult molars filled with amalgams by age 12. My teeth seemed better after puberty for a while, but got super sensitive when I started restricting my diet.

The worst was actually as a low-carber on a ZERO sugar, and I mean zero ? from all sources (including fruit, juice, etc. ? as well as white flour) diet.

Huh? My early research pointed me towards white sugar as being the primary culprit in tooth decay. That’s what everybody thinks, both mainstream and alternative, both past and present. I mean, I like taking the opposing viewpoint and all, but I never could do it with sugar. That just seemed impossible.

It’s not impossible.

It’s not impossible when you get beyond the very limiting nutritionist mindset and instead branch out into a physiology mindset, and even further. What matters is not what you eat per se, but how your body works. How your body works is the true bottom line. What you eat is a big factor. Definitely an All-Star on the Health Team. But it doesn’t matter how good your players are if they still can’t put the pieces together well enough to win the game. Putting more focus on basic bodily functions and taking attention away from the small details of nutrition has been a huge catalyst to greater success.

When it comes to bones and teeth, which share many physiological principles (bones and teeth tend to regenerate together, or degenerate together ? the same factors that affect one affect the other), it’s not so much what you eat. It’s more a matter of what your body does with what you eat.

I ate a very nutritious diet growing up. I drank over a gallon of whole milk per week even at only 8 years old. I never drank soda. My mom cooked tons of homecooked meals with real, unrefined foods. For a while my dad cut white flour and white sugar out of the house completely. Even the breakfast cereals I ate were the most fortified ones. I certainly had enough raw nutrition to have great teeth. But I didn’t. They were horrible. My health sucked too. I was sick all the time.

Now my diet is roughly the same, worse in many ways (I eat Cocoa Puffs instead of more whole foodsy Total or Raisin Bran or Just Right. I drink at least a little Coke almost every day), and my teeth are getting stronger. It’s all in the details. My body functions differently now because of how I get the details right and the total net sum of all my metabolic functions is generally far better than it was during my adolescence.

In my youth I was constipated, had cold hands and feet a lot (had to hold little hand heaters while skiing), had low blood pressure and a very low resting pulse rate (40-45 beats per minute as a teenager), etc. Now I don’t suffer from any of those shortcomings. I have raised my metabolic rate tremendously.

And now for a grand revelation. The process of actually increasing bone and tooth density is a very anabolic process. It depends upon secreting a lot of the hormones of youth while having a lower secretion of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that break bone down, slow the rate of tissue renewal (a factor in the collagen synthesis that takes place in bones to keep them from breaking down), and reduce thyroid output.

If you are in a calm, warm, toasty, high metabolic state, with a body temperature around 99 degrees F, with great circulation to the hands and feet ? a simple outwardly indicator of what’s going on inside, you can be pretty certain that your stress system is quieted down. When it is, your body goes into a state conducive to laying down fresh muscle mass, bone mass, tooth mineral, connective tissue, and so on. Even on a diet with less than optimal nutrient loads, the body still can maintain a positive mineral balance (and a positive collagen balance which seems to have even more to do with bone health and the prevention of bone deterioration with aging than minerals) ? meaning more minerals going in than coming out. After all, human breast milk is no more nutritious than a bowl of ice cream sweetened with buttloads of white sugar, and babies are growing bones and teeth like weeds at a young age.

What helps keep the body in that state more of the time? Frequent feedings, and feedings that emphasize sugar at that. When you eat, the glucocorticoids, or stress hormones, shut down. But after a couple of hours the glucocorticoids rise once again to raise blood sugar. Even a miniscule amount of carbohydrate is enough to keep the glucocorticoids suppressed. That way your body doesn’t have to borrow sugar from the adrenal glands and enter into a temporary catabolic state. This is obviously why bodybuilders swear by the power of frequent feedings, trying to spend more time in the growth state with more ?anabolic drive? to steal a phrase from Stephen Cherniske.

Anyway, all I have needed to get some great tooth strengthening is to eat a surplus of calories (and probably get double the nutrients of someone on a whole foods diet by sheer quantity of food ingested, despite the large amount of refined carbohydrates in my diet), eat frequently ? particularly of the primary anti-stress S’s? sugar, starch, and salt, take in the ideal amount of fluids (not too much!), and in-turn keep my hands and feet warm and body temperature high as much of the time as possible.

Even if you are freaking out about how many nutrients you may be missing out on ? that infamous ?nutrient debt,? you can easily make up for lost minerals in refined sugar by consuming cheese, milk, shellfish, some blackstrap molasses, and taking supplemental minerals like my favorite Min-Col. Or just some good wholesome foods in general.

Sugar used to actually hurt my teeth when I ate it! Eating a simple banana on a low-carb diet would make my teeth ache for two days! Eating tons of sugar at first made my gums bleed for months! But alas I have no problems there anymore, no matter what I eat. Not because my diet is better or more nutrient-dense, but because my health is better and I digest and metabolize foods differently because of it. I hope some of you can grasp that concept.

And of course hypothyroidism is known to cause tooth decay, and normalizing thyroid function reverses it. That’s what’s really going on here, and sugar, from natural or even refined sources, plays a big role in increasing metabolic rate.

Dentists are far too caught up in a mechanistic view of how tooth decay works. ?Sugar ya see feeds bacteria, which leads to fermentation and the production of acids as a by-product, then this wears down tooth enamel ? the first step in the development of tooth decay.

Nutritionists are too mechanistic too. ?Sugar don’t got no minerals ya see, and teeth are made of minerals, so if you eat the ‘toxic anti-nutrient? known as sugar yer teeth are just gonna waste away.

Well, I eat sugar all damn day long from fruit, sweet potatoes, juice, Coca-Cola, dried fruit, kid cereals, ice cream, chocolate, English muffins slathered with Smuckers, I make totally badass Tiramisu by the way, and even eat sugary stuff right before bed, and only brush a couple times a week? and my teeth just keep getting stronger. It’s not just me either. I’m hearing this reported more and more when people get things really dialed in tight.

When your body is healthy, you don’t get cavities. When it is compromised, you very well might. Sure, dental hygiene and all that plays a role, and nutrient intake plays a role, but they are small roles in that battle. I would say dental hygiene contributes to, at most, 20% of my own dental health. Nutrient density doesn’t contribute much at all, as eating a very nutritious whole foods diet prohibits me from consuming enough calories to get into a high-metabolic, anti-stress, tooth-strengthening state.

Anyway, throw that kink into your health food fetish. There is a lot I left out for the sake of brevity, such as the role carbohydrates play in carbon dioxide levels, and the role of carbon dioxide in bone synthesis, but Danny has got that covered somewhat in the featured article coming up.

Some links?

Thyroid and Dental Caries

Osteoporosis, Aging, Tissue Renewal

Can Thyroid Disease Make You Prone to Cavities?

Thyroid Tie with Tooth Decay

Tooth Decay and Thyroid Problems

Sucrose and Metabolic Rate

This section features recipes, cooking tips, and food discussion by Matt Stone.

Celery Root

Okay, okay. I’m kinda back on the pizza diet right now. But it’s not by choice. I’m just too fricking busy right now working on launching new books, caring for my new infant?180 Radio (it’s a girl!), and engaging in overall quantities of Tom Foolery unimaginable to most people (like recording a dozen audiobooks in January).

But the love for food is there. In fact, I’m actually going to smoke a giant bone-in rib roast to enjoy while I watch the Broncos emasculate a team that prides itself on defense. Ha! You’ll need a lot more than the league’s best defense to stop?what’s coming your way?Seahawks. 41-17 Broncos.

My favorite team’s easy stroll to victory aside, you must know about this celery root stuff. To state the obvious, it’s the root part of celery. It’s like a celery-flavored potato. Really good. Not as starchy and carbohydrate-dense as it would be in my ultimate food fantasy, but it’ll do.

The flavor is quite powerful in some sense, but very smooth and pleasant. It’s most frequently combined with seared scallops in the form of a puree or simple soup–just like it is currently being served at one of the restaurants I used to work at. I think it goes?well with lots of things, and typically use it just as I would mashed potatoes or soft polenta. I’m sure with the beef I’m eating tomorrow it would have been a real crotch rocker. Speaking of crotch-rocking, someone entered’their 180 Chili in a chili contest and won it! Told you I’m legit!

Anywho, I watched that Alton Brown lunatic totally botch celery root cookery in one of his episodes. He like, boiled it or steamed it or something, then warned of not pureeing it for too long? Dude, it’s not a Russet.There are a lot of fat soluble flavors in celery root, and the only way to cook it is covered?predominantly in heavy cream (with?a little water), or at least half and half. When you’ve brought it to a boil and have let it simmer until super soft, you should then puree it like?your food processor has done something to piss you off.

When?working in restaurants, I would often just turn the food processor on and walk away, work on something?else for a few?minutes, and then come back to an incredibly delicious root vegetable puree?as smooth as shaving cream. Unlike starchier foods like potatoes, pureeing it like?you’re mad at it won’t make it gummy and gross. It?will make it perfect.

So buy that gnarly-looking hairy?bulb at your supermarket one of these days and’try it.

Oh yeah, I?guess I should also’tell you that?you should?peel the thing really well (I?just?do it with a?knife, it can be a little much for most peelers to handle), so that only the white flesh remains. Then cut it into little squares so it cooks?quickly and evenly. And don’t you dare drain any of the liquid off before?pureeing it! If you want it like mashed potatoes, don’t use that much liquid. Just barely, barely cover it. For a soupI think it should still be completely plain (no onions or garlic or anything that would pollute the?root), just use some milk in cooking it so it’s not TOO heavy from the butterfat. Season with salt only and serve with something. Anything.

This section highlights one of the best health-related videos on the web each month.

Sandra Aamodt Stops Dieting

This section features an article by one of the leading minds in health each month.

Carbon Dioxide: An Essential “Vitamin”

By Danny Roddy

Author of Hair Like a Fox

?Carbon dioxide is the chief hormone of the entire body; it is the only one that is produced by every tissue and that probably acts on every organ. ?Yendell Henderson (“Carbon Dioxide,” Cyclopedia of Medicine, 1940)

?The use of CO2 for synthetic purposes by the mammalian cell is now being studied in detail; it has already taken on tremendous significance since it completely reversed the hitherto firmly accepted view that CO2 is merely a waste product of animal metabolism. ?R. Levin, “Carbohydrate Metabolism,” in Diseases of Metabolism, G.G. Duncan, ed., 1964

Glossary

• Mitochondria?- The structure inside the cell in which energy is produced by respiration is called the mitochondria. The vitality of the mitochondria, their capacity for oxidative energy production, is influenced by nutrition and hormones.
• Thyroid?- Thyroid hormone is necessary for respiration on the cellular level, and makes possible all higher biological functions. Without the metabolic efficiency, which is promoted by thyroid hormone, life couldn’t get much beyond the single-cell stage. Without adequate thyroid, we become sluggish, clumsy, cold, anemic, and subject to infections, heart disease, headaches, cancer, and many other diseases, and seem to be prematurely aged, because none of our tissues can function normally.
• Fermentation?- The conversion of glucose to lactic acid, providing some usable energy, but many times less than oxidation provides. Lactic acid, produced by splitting glucose to pyruvic acid followed by its reduction, is associated with calcium uptake and nitric oxide production, depletes energy, contributing to cell death. The presence of oxygen normally restrains fermentation so that glucose is converted to carbon dioxide instead of lactic acid.
• Oxidation?- Oxidation refers to the combination of a substance with oxygen. This can be beneficial, as in normal respiration that produces energy, or harmful, as in rancidity, irradiation, or stress reactions.
• Oxidative Metabolism?(Mitochondrial??Respiration) – The ability of cells to consume oxygen and produce useful biological energy.
• Carbon Dioxide?- Carbon dioxide, produced in the cells, releases oxygen into the tissues, relaxes blood vessels, prevents edema, eliminates ammonia, and increases the efficiency of oxidative metabolism.

More than a year ago, Dr. Chris Masterjohn made many lay people aware of carbon dioxide’s critical role in health. In his article, Nutritional Adjuncts to the Fat-Soluble Vitamins, Dr. Masterjohn noted that not only is the view of carbon dioxide as a “waste product” misinformed, but that carbon dioxide is a critical cofactor for the utilization of several important nutrients such as vitamin D, vitamin K, and calcium.

He concluded the article with:

?It is clearly time to move beyond viewing each vitamin in isolation. The fat-soluble vitamins not only synergize with each other, but cooperate with many other nutrients and metabolic factors such as magnesium, zinc, fat, carbohydrate, carbon dioxide and thyroid hormone. ?Dr. Chris Masterjohn (Nutritional Adjuncts to the Fat-Soluble Vitamins, 2013)

In an older article, I wondered whether Dr. Masterjohn’s view of carbon dioxide would permeate into the various nutritional realms. Along with Andrew Kim, Phil (Pranarupa), and Ray PeatI consider Dr. Masterjohn to be a “thought leader” in nutrition. In fact, I wasn’t surprised to learn that many ?evolutionary? or ?Ancestral? Internet diet experts regularly turn to Dr. Masterjohn for clarification on complicated subjects.

Carbon dioxide is essentially a ?new? subject for those espousing the benefits of evolutionary or ancestral nutrition. For instance, Robb Wolf’s The Paleo Solution references carbon dioxide once in the context of making a margarita. Sisson’s Primal Blueprint also makes a single reference to carbon dioxide when explaining the process of gluconeogenesis. I don’t have access to The Perfect Health Diet, but Paul Jaminet linked to a New York Times article on carbon dioxide. Paul commented on the article explaining that he finds it challenging to keep his mouth closed while breathing and that he must be deficient in carbon dioxide, which might be accurate.

Given the intense popularity of the fat soluble vitamins evangelized by these authors?and the news that carbon dioxide was needed to utilize them properlyI was enthusiastic at the prospect of shifting from “the diet wars” (i.e., ‘what’s carbon dioxide?’) into a golden era of holism.

A year after his original publication, however, I think it’s safe to say that the health arena is not interested in carbon dioxide. And that when given the choice, would rather obsess about calories, “resistant starch”, “adrenal fatigue”, “metabolic damage”, “serotonin deficiency”, “pregnenolone steal”, and a handful of specialized allergies that when added up would not allow anyone to eat anything (e.g., histamine, FODMAPS, etc.).

Carbon Dioxide in The Real World

I may be preaching to the choir, but for me, things became clearer when I began exploring the work of Ray Peat. While many focus (or obsess) on Peat’s various food recommendations, his thoughts on hormones, exercise, and nutrition may come off as completely bizarre outside the context of protective carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is produced from ?efficient? cellular respiration, which is stimulated by thyroid hormones. Carbon dioxide allows cells, tissues, and organs to better absorb oxygen (i.e., the ?Bohr effect?), or as my buddy Phil (www.pranarupa.wordpress.com) has said, ?carbon dioxide breathes oxygen into us. According to Albert Szent-Gy?rgyi, Ray Peat, Gilbert Ling and others this reciprocation of ?efficient? metabolic energy maintains the structure and “coherence” of the entire organism.

Hormones and signaling substances strongly associated with decreased levels of carbon dioxide tend to be anomalous in common health conditions such as anxiety[1], depression[2], and diabetes[3,4,5]. After a few years of coaching (www.dannyroddy.com/coaching) men and women with various health problems, I noticed that the sicker someone was the lower their carbon dioxide levels tended to be. As Paul Jaminet pointed out, the inability to breath through your nose may be sign of insufficient carbon dioxide. In fact, along with body temperature and pulse, being aware of ?how? you breathe may be another self-diagnostic to estimate thyroid performance without expensive lab tests.

Sleep apnea (or feeling like you’ve been hit by a bus when you get up) is another condition that probably stems from insufficient carbon dioxide production. Acetazolamide, a drug that inhibits the enzyme that degrades carbon dioxide is an effective treatment for sleep apnea.[6]

Carbon Dioxide and The Immortal Frog

In Albert Szent-Gy?rgyi’s book, Bioenergetics, he explains that a resting cells has a good balance of electron acceptors and electron donors. While the cell is constantly oscillating between the ?resting? and ?living? state, a balance is maintained by draining electrons into oxygen as long as it’s available (i.e., if adequate carbon dioxide is generated). While the environment bombards us with electron donors, such as estrogen,[7] leading to an overly reduced, inflammatory, ?inefficient? energetic state, electron acceptors such as carbon dioxide do the opposite.

A fun, interesting representation of this balance may easily be understood in Dr. Peat’s famous ?immortal frog? story. In his article, Protective CO2 and aging?, Dr. Peat explains that when frogs burrow in the mud their carbon dioxide levels increase. While researching the long dormancy of frogs, Dr. Peat recalled a newspaper story he had read in the 1950s where workers turned over an old concrete structure and found a dormant living toad enclosed in the concrete. The concrete had been poured decades earlier.

If a premature burial in cement is similar to mud, the frog’s unbelievable longevity may be the result of the protective effects of carbon dioxide?a topic that has been largely unexplored aside from a few heretical thinkers:

More Reading

• Carbon Dioxide and aging [Ray Peat] – http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/protective-co2-aging.shtml
• Carbon dioxide, Glycation, and the Protective Effects of Fructose [Andrew Kim] – http://www.andrewkimblog.com/2013/01/carbon-dioxide-glycation-and-protective.html
• Pranayama, carbon dioxide, mitochondria, coherent energy flow, regeneration and individuation [Phil] – http://pranarupa.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/pranayama-carbon-dioxide-mitochondria-coherent-energy-flow-regeneration-and-individuation/
• Articles tagged ?Carbon Dioxide? on FunctionalPS [Rob Turner] – http://www.functionalps.com/blog/tag/carbon-dioxide/

References?

1. Giannini, A.J. et al. Reversibility of serotonin irritation syndrome with atmospheric ???? anions. J ???? Clin Psychiatry. ???? 1986 Mar;47(3):141-3.

1. William, N.H., Thomas, J.K. Thyroid hormones and the treatment of depression: An examination of basic hormonal actions in the mature mammalian brain. Synapse. 1997 Sep;27(1):36-44.
2. Scale, T., Harvey, J.N. Diabetes, metformin and lactic acidosis. Clin Endocrinol (Oxf). 2011 Feb;74(2):191-6
3. David, P.W., et al. Central Sleep ApneaImprovement With Acetazolamide Therapy. Arch Intern Med. 1982;142(10):1816-1819.
4. George W. Corner and Arpad Csapo. Action of the Ovarian Hormones on Uterine Muscle. Br Med J. 1953 March 28; 1(4812): 687?693.

4. Crawford, S.O., et al. Association of blood lactate with type 2 diabetes: the ???? Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Carotid MRI Study. Int J ???? Epidemiol. 2010 Dec;39(6):1647-55. Epub 2010 Aug 25.
5. Reaven, G.M., et al. Measurement of plasma glucose, free fatty acid, lactate, and ???? insulin for 24 h in patients with NIDDM. Diabetes. 1988 ???? Aug;37(8):1020-4.

This section features some thoughts and experiences shared by a 180 reader. If you would like to contribute, send an email to rob@180degreehealth, and you can be the next featured reader.

180 Reader Jessie Reimers

How the super healthy, low carb/sugar- paleo diet ruined our health and’sanity

Originally published on www.thehealthyjessie.com

If you are doing awesome on it, great!

Peeps if you are following paleo, LCHF, primal or some other way of eating and it’s working for you and you feel amazing, that is super fantastic, I’m honestly very happy for you. This isn’t for you… or maybe it is so you know what to watch out for, I simply implore you to listen to and love your body and change shit up if you need to. If all is going well, fantastic!! Much health and happiness to you. This is my story and my partners so you don’t have to relate to it in any way, shape or form. If you’re going to be a nasty, uppity cunt about it, please keep it to yourself. I’m 3 days overdue pregnant and I don’t give a fuck about your precious ego or how I didn’t do it right or how you have the answers and are better than everyone. Seriously. Suck a fuck! Read with an open mind or go along on your merry way.

Pre Paleo

When I met Dan he was fit, robust and literally NEVER, EVER got sick. We enjoyed watching tv series (Game of Thrones, True Blood, The Walking Dead) together whilst eating mix bag lollies and we LOVED to eat out. We didn’t worry about what we ate. Dan subsisted on mainly cereal, subway, Boost smoothies, omelettes and some vegetables and meat now and then; I remember he would eat like four bowls of cereal in the morning- so a pretty high carb diet, our favourite cuisine was Japanese, especially the sticky rice and the green tea ice cream for dessert. We had shitloads of sex. ?I’m talking 5 times a day. Fucking good times, literally.

Image by Bailey is Brown

Getting sick- start of diet obsessions

I had battled candida in the past but when I met him I was doing pretty well as I had been on a long course of daily Diflucan and that seemed to sort that out for a while, unfortunately it appeared to really mess with my immune system and I began getting vomiting bugs all the time and contracted some nasty viruses such as Eppstein Barr and Adeno virus. I was very, very sick, got down to 38kg, hospitalised multiple times, could not take care of myself at all, he basically had to nurse me full time at my mums house. I began obsessively researching as the antidepressants and sleeping peels and diagnosis of it’s all in my head from all the Drs, specialists and the hospital basically just giving me a drip and vomiting suppressants and sending me on my way wasn’t a great deal of help.

So I became obsessed with the candida diet, did that for a few months but in the end found that whole grains and loads of vegetables definitely was not my cup of tea- I was fucking starving and couldn’t stick to it at all, the food tasted so bland and shitty to me. I started seeing all sorts of holistic practitioners. I got ?diagnosed? with everything under the sun. Apparently I was intolerant to just about every food/chemical/substance on earth. I tried the failsafe diet. Fuck that was good times. Really. I loved eating a diet made up of 10 foods, when I ate anything not failsafe I’d have a huge reaction. One time I ate something with tomato and eggplant. My tongue swelled up in my mouth to four times its size and I could barely fucking breathe, my lips were raw red and I thought I was going to die. Took some antihistamines and that calmed that down but wtf, I used to be able to eat those foods without that kind of shit happening. I mean I am anaphylactic allergic to peanuts and cashews but not to a fucking tomato and some eggplant. Jesus. So ditched the failsafe mental asylum and continued to plough my way through a fuckload of research. Thus my introduction to the Weston A Price Foundation and then to stuff like the GAPS and Body Ecology Diets and Paleo in general. This way of eating was far better, Dan loved it too. Fuck I felt like I was the smartest little shit around. Eating like our ancestors, never entering the big two supermarkets. If I did I would stare in disgust at what other people were buying/feeding their kids and how fat, sick and depressed everyone looked. What an uppity wanker- seriously.

Learning lots of amazing things

I am actually very grateful for a lot of the amazing knowledge I gained in my hours, upon hours upon hours of reading books, blogs, studies, research etc. I think supporting grass fed, organic, locally sourced animal products is extremely important over supporting grain fed, factory farmed fucked up shit from the supermarket. I am all for organic, seasonal/local and eating real food. I am all for avoiding PUFAs as much as possible as I actually think they alone are the most damaging part of the modern human diet (margarine, vegetable/seed oils etc, some nasty ass and seriously damaging/inflammatory shit). I don’t want to ingest aspartame or a huge clusterfuck of additives, preservatives, colours and e numbers. But things started to go pretty darn sour 12 months down the track of our perfect, superior, ancestral, grain free, sugar free, low carb, paleo, real food, egomaniac, better than everyone diet. Interestingly the more symptoms we got the lower carb, lower sugar we tried to go.. this is what started happening. I’ll start with Dan and then run through my symptoms.

Dan’s body starts falling apart

Dan was the most chilled dude I have ever met when I met him, nothing could fire him up, he was very even tempered and just went with the flow pretty much all the time. He smiled a lot and was happy doing just about anything, even cleaning makes that boy happy, seriously. Like I said he never got sick, literally never in his life even had a common cold and he had boundless energy, we used to walk 8ks a day min and he was a runner and into loads of sport. Plus don’t forget the sex :P but he started to lose his health, he got dandruff all the time and weird rashes on his body, he became snappy so much more easily and really fatigued, in more recent times he started to get horrible digestive upset, I won’t embarrass him too much with the finer details but it wasn’t pleasant, he also started vomiting a lot which was truly bizarre and developed sinus issues, poor sleep and his muscles literally started wasting off his body- no matter how much pasture raised bacon, eggs, organic grass fed meats, super healthy fats and vegetables he consumed in a day. He became scared of carbs and even fruit and stopped eating his beloved bananas even.. he wouldn’t even touch sweet potato, we were so obsessed it was mental. He started lying around watching cricket all day, not having the energy for anything much at all. He was super moody and his zest for life had all but disappeared. He couldn’t exercise anymore, if he did he would get sick again. Weird stuff started happening to his teeth and he was getting kind of stinky, he?d never had a bad smell problem before haha (sorry babe). He decided that our water filter must not be clean enough and that’s why he was sick all the time and kept cleaning the water filter, even though Dom was drinking from it and he was totally fine- good thing Dom was still getting carbs from all the other places he went huh? I can only imagine if we had him 24/7 and he didn’t get any carbs or sugar- fucking bad times for his growth and health that would have been. Dan would say he must have got sick from cleaning the bathroom or not washing his hands after doing the dishes or something, he was freaking out about everything and would not TOUCH any food that wasn’t from our house and totally organic/paleo. I think it’s possible he was even more paranoid about it all than me. Poor bastard. Wtf had I done to him. I said we should go even lower carbs absolutely no sugar. Only fruit allowed was berries, lemon and lime and absolutely no grains (we?d been grain free for the best part of a year anyway) or starchy vegetables allowed. Ketosis and gut healing protocols and supplements would cure us. This was a week ago. I posted about the gut healing protocol on my page. A few people were smart enough to call me out on it and say it was a fucking bad idea, given I’m pregnant and will also need to be producing titty milk. One chick in particular kept commenting and private messaging me stuff. Stuff about low carb/no sugar not being the answer and how it could really harm our metabolism and adrenal and thyroid health. I thought she was a bit mental but good thing I love to read. She implored me to read more from Josh and Jeanne Rubin and this batshit Matt Stone fellow. I read 6 of his books in a few days. I’m like that. Then I thought about my own symptoms over the paleo time.. what had happened to me?

My health starts deteriorating again..

Well initially we felt amazing and were on top of the world. Pretty common scenario. Super fucking human we were. Knew it all. Did it all right. I mean shit I have 5,500+ people following my facebook page and liking, sharing and commenting on all the stuff I shared- good thing I ripped into veg/seed oils and highly processed shit more than I did natural sugar and carbs.. so hopefully I haven’t caused too many people lasting damage like I have to my own family.. although I definitely did encourage low carb/high fat.. fuckity.. hopefully if anyone else is experiencing issues this will help them on their way. I started to really lose my appetite. I seriously could not face bacon and eggs at breakfast. I wasn’t hungry until 10.30/11 and then I’d make a smoothie and usually not eat again until 5.30 or 6 where I’d push my meat, veg and fat around the plate. It wasn’t always like this, I used to love the food and Dan is truly an amazing cook but I was just so fucking bored out of my mind. I was constantly exhausted, like could barely walk 50 meters down the road without moaning and groaning and wanting to sleep on the side walk (this is prior to me being so heavily pregnant). My moods were psycho, everything made me angry and irritable, I mean I am a pretty firey person in general as you lot I’m sure are well aware but seriously. This one day I was driving home and I started screaming and crying and punching the steering wheel because the red light was taking too long to turn green and my aircon was broken and it was fucking hot sitting there in the sun. Like properly just losing my shit. Completely mental. Thought it was just hormones. This started happening more and more. Something tiny would set me off and I would go fucking ballistic, swearing and crying and screaming and slamming doors like my good old 15 year old self. A grown woman, behaving like one of those disturbed teenagers you see on those weird American shows that get sent to bootcamp and then come home all normal again, for a bit, then they start smoking crack again or whatever. I spent lots of time hiding in my bed, I found it difficult to answer the phone and emails again, I found it extremely difficult to cope with criticism of my work on here, I would cry virtually at the drop of a hat and had suicidal feelings often. Never feeling good enough and so ultra fucking paranoid about shit that just seriously DOES NOT EVEN MATTER.

I was also experiencing lots more digestive problems, couldn’t take a shit half the time, ended up with haemorrhoids, needed a bucketload of magnesium to get things moving, candida wouldn’t go away and would flare up hugely if I ate anything outside my paleo list, which was becoming a more regular occurrence. The cravings were constant and I felt so much guilt that I couldn’t just be good and stick to the perfect diet that was apparently so fucking satiating and not depriving at all. My arthritis/RSI was playing up terribly in my hands and arms, I had pains all over my body and what felt like shin splints despite doing sweet fuck all in the way of exercise, I started waking at 2am and being unable to sleep. I was angry and irritable virtually all of the time.

Social anxiety- epic cravings

We had no life. Seriously. Even at Christmas time I would read the ingredients on say mint jelly (one of my favourite things of all time dating back to lovely memories as a child, slathering it on my meat) and I WOULDN?T PUT IT ON, because it contains sugar. That devil poison shit that is killing us all. I wouldn’t eat grains or if I happened to I would get really sick and feel really guilty. I never liked fruit much anyway. When I went super low carb, no sugar, my cravings were out of control. I thought I had a major addiction and problem that I needed to fix but my body is, as it turns out a fuckload smarter than me and when I went to McDonald’s eight times in a fortnight and ate the shit out of a large cheeseburger meal and a sundae, hiding the evidence and crying in guilt and literally ate 2/3 of this amazing cake my sister made for my son’s birthday in TWO DAYS. I thought maybe my body is really sending a strong message here. Maybe I’m not a weak piece of shit after all.

Questioning the low carb/sugar obsession

So I read Paleo Myths, Eat for Heat, Diet Recovery 2 and a bunch of other books by Matt Stone, I read Don’t Quit Sugar by Cassie Platt which I’d previously said a lot of disparaging shit about. I looked into the work of Ray Peat and Danny Roddy, I checked out Go Kaleo and I started taking our temperatures. According to Matt Stone and many others, these super restrictive diets fuck you mentally (obviously) but also for many people really destroy metabolism, thyroid and adrenal health. Dan’s raising temp was 34.4, mine was 34.8. Really if your metabolism and thyroid are functioning correctly you should be BARE MINIMUM 36.6, even better 37.2 or higher (99 Fahrenheit). Clearly we were fucked and our bodies were literally starving, particularly funnily enough for CARBOHYDRATES (that devil shit that is making us all fat and sick) and SUGAR. As well as salt, saturated fat, sleep and starch. The s’s for dealing with stress.

Feel initially amazing and get to your ideal body weight by quitting sugar?

In Cassie Platt’s book Don’t Quit Sugar she explains- ?Many people experience profound results through quitting sugar, particularly in the short term. Mentally, there’s increased energy, blunted appetite and noticeable mood enhancement. Physically, there’s seemingly effortless weight loss. What most fail to realise is that such changes are attributable to a state of cellular stress and consequent rise in stress hormones. For three months, six months, perhaps a year (this is affectionately termed the ?honeymoon phase?), stress hormones can make you feel excellent, promotion euphoria and a heightened sense of wellbeing. But beneath the surface, stress hormones do exactly as their name suggests- they’re a stress on the body in its entirety. Prolonged elevation can break down body tissue, impair thyroid function, damage the metabolism and devastate the body physiologically.

Signs that your metabolism is on the decline

• Low body temperature (increase sensitivity to cold, consistently cold hands and feet). TICK
• Frequent urination- pale in colour. TICK.
• Digestive issues- bloating after meals- delayed gastric emptying, less than one daily bowel movement. TICK.
• Poor sleep quality (insomnia, waking up during the night)- TICK.
• Low sex drive or impaired sexy function- TICK.
• Thinning hair or hair loss
• Infertility
• Absent, irregular or difficult periods.
• Thinning hair or hair loss.
• Thin outer third of eyebrows.
• Dry skin, especially on the hands and shins.
• Fatigue (feeling tired, sluggish or weak). MASSIVE TICK.
• Brain fog or poor mental focus.
• Mood disorders, increased anxiety or depression. YES!!
• Oedema (water retention), particularly facial puffiness
• Weight fain
• Muscle aches or weakness. TICK!

Cassie’s book also delves into many more facts and fiction about sugar including the whole insulin resistance escapade, fructose fear, fatty liver, sugar makes you fat, humans apparently ?not being evolved? to eat sugar and even the need to cut out sugar in order to stop feeding candida. MYTHS!! She then provides a how to guide to sugar, the best ones to use and how to incorporate them safely in your diet. When we talk about sugar, I merely mean sugar from fruits, starchy vegetables, raw honey, maple syrup and yes even pure cane. Not highly manufactured, processed versions like HFCS which IS damaging and a pretty bad idea for health.

EAT THE FUCKING FOOD

So yeah.. now we are eating all the foods. All the time. Min 3500 calories a day for me, more for Dan. Today I had a glass of freshly juiced, organic OJ (OJ CONTAINS AS MUCH SUGAR AS COKE OMG WE?RE ALL GONNA DIE), I had two pieces of Turkish toast for breakfast, with a shitload of butter. Then I had weetbix with raw milk. I had a pie for lunch, with sauce and a mango smoothie, I ate some Turkish delight and some lollies, I had 3 ice creams. I had scallops and mash in butter sauce for dinner. I drank apple juice. Oh yeah I also had a cheeseburger too. I was fucking hungry. I’ve been doing this for a week now. Literally eating all the things, what I want, when I want to. I’m not going to carry on like this forever but funnily enough processed, calorie dense foods can be just what the Dr ordered to smash your metabolism back up to its rightful place and sort your shit out, plus it’s the best way to cure years of deprivation and starvation. Get it all in there. You’ll stop craving so much shit if you just eat all the things and get it done. I know, I know, completely mental right? Our temperatures are already rising, today I was 36.6 during the day and 35.5 upon rising, a definite improvement. I look forward to being a normal part of society again, eating nourishing foods but also enjoying my sister’s pastries, Turkish toast and juice.

Where to from here..

All I can say is you need to listen to your body and do what’s best for you once again. You can’t prescribe a one way diet for everybody on the planet earth. It just doesn’t work out. Sorry. Do your own goddamn research and for fucks sake google where to get the books (amazon kindle people, keep up). Google the blogs, just fucking google it all. Check out these posts from previous low carb paleo peeps too http://huntgatherlove.com/content/breaking-paleo and http://butterbeliever.com/low-body-temperature/ and http://www.cheeseslave.com/why-i-ditched-low-carb/. Don’t bother commenting about what I’m choosing to eat and how I’m choosing to deal with what I believe actually got to the point of an eating disorder. Google Geneen Roth, feedbag method etc and shove your judgments up your ass.

I’m having a fucking good time EATING THE FOOD and feel about a million percent better in every way. So does Dan J I will probably lose a lot of my audience with my very different attitude towards food and health, that’s ok, I hope that I will also gain a new audience and retain a lot of my old fans as well. I think I can still be proud of a lot of the work I have done. Saturated fats are a very important part of the diet, eating local, organic, sustainable food is awesome, PUFAs and highly processed man-made oils and ‘spreads? are in no way healthy. I’m not sitting here swilling vegetable oils and HFCS by any means. But I think a much more relaxed and enjoyable approach is needed in many cases and you may need some carbs and sugar. Type 2 diabetes and all the other complications that paleo/low carb claims to save you from are not as simple as they are made out to be. I think the paleo movement has a lot of wonderful and very positive aspects but I think the low carb, sugar fear mongering campaign is pretty akin to the saturated fat and cholesterol fear mongering propaganda and that makes me really, really sad. I really hope that I haven’t harmed anyone else with what I thought was the holy grail of dietary advice. That’s the thing that freaks me the fuck out the most and lead me to abruptly shutting down my page. I guess I can say that I never wanted people to just do what I do anyway, all I wanted was to share information with the world and get people CRITICALLY THINKING and now I am taking a critical approach once again and turning a lot of what I thought I knew on its head. Again all covered in Matt’s books and by the likes of the others mentioned.. check it out it really is very interesting..hope there is still some love for me and my ramblings out there. Be kind to yourselves..

That completes Issue #3 of the 180 Newsletter. You can comment on this newsletter?in the forums HERE.