CrossFit Rising

May 2nd, 2010 - Lupus

Systemic lupus erythematosus, usually known as “lupus”, is an auto-immune disease which affects and estimated 1.5 million Americans and 5 million people worldwide. It affects women more often than men (9 times more often), and those of non-European descent more often than those of European descent. The term “auto-immune” means that the body's immune system can no longer tell the difference between foreign invaders and it's own tissue. The immune system attacks the body, resulting in a variety of diseases including Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Immune Deficiency Syndrome (CFIDS), Crohn’s Disease, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, Multiple Sclerosis, Psoriasis, Type I Diabetes, Arthritis... and so on. It's quite a list.

From the Lupus Foundation of America website:

"The most common symptoms of lupus, which are the same for females and males, are:

• extreme fatigue (tiredness)

• headaches

• painful or swollen joints

• fever

• anemia (low numbers of red blood cells or hemoglobin, or low total blood volume)

• swelling (edema) in feet, legs, hands, and/or around eyes

• pain in chest on deep breathing (pleurisy)

• butterfly-shaped rash across cheeks and nose

• sun- or light-sensitivity (photosensitivity)

• hair loss

• abnormal blood clotting

• fingers turning white and/or blue when cold (Raynaud’s phenomenon)

• mouth or nose ulcers

Many of these symptoms occur in other illnesses besides lupus. In fact, lupus is sometimes called "the great imitator" because its symptoms are often like the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, blood disorders, fibromyalgia, diabetes, thyroid problems, Lyme disease, and a number of heart, lung, muscle, and bone diseases."

Lupus isn't curable, but the symptoms are treatable. The symptoms are most commonly treated by drugs (but what symptoms aren't, these days?). The treatments may include non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, corticosteroids, anti-malarial drugs, immunosuppressives, and anti-coagulants.

Lupus can be fatal. The most common causes of death within five years of diagnosis are organ failure and overwhelming infections, but the most common cause of death overall is cardiovascular diseases acquired from corticosteroid therapy.

According to the NIH and LFA, the cause or causes of lupus are unknown. They suspect genetic, environmental, and hormonal factors, which sounds like a clever way of saying, “it could be anything”. There is this from the LFA website: “Can something in your diet cause lupus? We don't think so.”

It would seem that Loren Cordain, PhD., author of The Paleo Diet, begs to differ. The following is from an interview found here.

Robert Crayhon: Are multiple sclerosis, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis rare in populations where no grain products are consumed?

Loren Cordain: Some epidemiological evidence would indicate exactly that. Part of the problem in getting epidemiological evidence like this is that there are very few populations on this planet that don't eat cereal grains...Prior to acculturation, Eskimos and peoples of the far North were reported to have a low incidence of auto-immune diseases. With acculturation, the prevalence of auto-immune diseases are increasing in these populations and may approach Western levels.

Experimentally, we know that the expression of certain auto-immune diseases (e.g. insulin dependent diabetes mellitus IDDM) increases in animal models when they are fed high cereal grain diets. We believe that cereal grains may influence immune function by the ability of their lectins (specifically wheat germ agglutinin-WGA) to allow passage of undegraded dietary antigens and antigens derived from intestinal pathogens (viruses and bacteria) to peripheral tissue. Through a process called molecular mimicry, in which there are structural similarities between the body's own tissue and that of the dietary antigen and/or the intestinal pathogen antigen, the immune system loses the ability to distinguish self tissue from non-self tissue and mounts an immune attack upon the body's own tissue. Many of these structural similarities between cereal grain peptides and the body's own tissues seem to involve collagenous tissues.

Robert Crayhon: Which grains have protein sequences closest to human collagen tissue?

Loren Cordain: The literature suggests that the alcohol soluble portion of wheat contains peptide sequences that may mimic peptide sequences in the body. But it's a more complicated issue than that. It has to do with the genetics of the person with the auto-immune disease as well.

Robert Crayhon: The upshot of all this is that it couldn't hurt if you've got an auto-immune disease to try a grain-free diet.

Loren Cordain: Well, it's more than grain-free. We found again from a Paleolithic perspective that humans didn't drink a lot of dairy, nor did they consume legumes or yeast-containing foods. Dairy, legumes, and yeast contain peptides with amino acid sequence that are homologous to amino acid sequences in a variety of human tissues as well.

Basically what he is saying is that a number of foods contain lectins, these lectins allow particles of not-fully-digested matter to pass through the intestinal wall (rather than being absorbed) and into the bloodstream, where the body recognizes them as invaders and “kills” them. Unfortunately, these “antigens” are similar enough to our own tissue that our body now recognizes parts of us as invaders as well. This leads to much unpleasantness.

All of this can be avoided by not consuming foods which have lectins. This means grains and legumes and yeasts. It's really that simple. But if this news is reaching you a little too late, and you are already suffering from one auto-immune disease or many, you may need to take more steps. Cutting out dairy and nightshades may also be helpful, although the evidence implicating these guys is a bit scanter. It's possible that neither dairy nor nightshades are harmful in the absence of grains, legumes, and yeasts, but the simplest test will tell. Cut them out. Feel better? Put them back in.  Feel worse?  Then it worked.

As with pretty much all nutritional research, this information is preliminary. Much, much, much more research needs to be done before the above recommendations can be touted as undeniable fact. But what is undeniable is that the recommendations I am making are healthful in a great many ways, for all people, auto-immunity notwithstanding. Do yourself a favor and give it a try. But be smart about it. If you have some sort of disorder, talk to your doctor before making the switch.

SOURCES:

http://www.lupus.org/webmodules/webarticlesnet/templates/new_learnunderstanding.aspx?articleid=2232&zoneid=523

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_lupus_erythematosus

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/tutorials/lupus/id209104.pdf

http://chetday.com/cordaininterview.htm

April 11th, 2010 - Fiber Menace

     I have recently finished reading Konstantin Monastyrsky's book, Fiber Menace.  Monastyrsky is a Ukrainian immigrant, who graduated medical school with a pharmacist degree, but chose to work in the high-tech and financial fields.

    In this book Monastyrsky attacks the popular belief that dietary fiber is essential for good health.  In fact, he claims, overeating of dietary fiber is actually the root cause of a great many conditions which it is supposed to prevent or heal, including constipation, hemorrhoids, IBS, colon cancer, and so on.  Considering that fiber is almost universally regarded as not only "good for you", but absolutely necessary for our personal survival, this is a truly bold claim to make. 

    Interestingly, he backs the claim up using the very same sources (The Mayo Clinic, The American Dietetic Association, The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, etc.) which most doctors and researchers use when recommending that we maintain a high-fiber intake.  The book is laced throughout with quotations from these sources and, subsequently, his rebuttal of their interpretation of the data.  In addition, he sites numerous sources in support of his hypothesis.  Of course, I cannot proclaim, "This man speaks truth!", without having read into his sources, and read rebuttals of his arguments and the sources used for those rebuttals.  I haven't done that... yet.  But I will say that his conclusions frequently seem like the obvious ones, and the "authorities" often seem to be contradicting themselves, sometimes in the same paragraph.

    The super-short version:  Human beings are not designed to digest large amounts of fiber.  Fiber damages our digestive tracts digesting incompletely, preventing absorption of nutrients, making the "chime" passing through out small intestine bulky and hard, instead of liquid, fermenting in our large intestine, killing off the helpful bacteria in our guts, causing constipation and the attendant straining and large, impacted stools, which in turn causes a host of other troubles such as hemorrhoids, and so on.  He does not paint a pretty picture, and at times his descriptions are blunt and graphic, but throughout there seems to be a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor as well.  Not that cheek. 

    In addition to the dangers of fiber he also has chapter concerning the over-consumption of water, the dangers of a high-carbohydrate diet, why many people are unable to maintain an Atkins or South Beach style low-carb diet, and of course, how to remove fiber from your diet without incurring the wrath of "fiber addiction".

    While there are some topics on which Monastyrsky and I disagree (supplementation, the make-up of a "good" low-carb diet, and others), I do strongly recommend this book.  It is clearly written, and he pulls no punches.  Whether fiber is truly the menace he claims I do not know, but he doesn't dance around the subject at all, he just lays it all on the table.  I respect that.  A gruesome and delightful little book.

March 14th, 2010 -

    In the course of wandering around the internet, reading all the boring nutrition articles I could find, I came across something by Dr. Sears called "Good Grains".  That's William, not Barry, by the way.  In this article he extols the virtues of whole grains.  He talks about what a great source of protein they are, their fiber content, the vitamins they provide in abundance... on and on.

    Anyone who reads these little nutrition rants, or who has made the mistake of asking me about food and health, probably already knows that I advise the total avoidance of gluten grains, and a strict limiting of other grains.  I won't bore everyone with the details, I will just say that it seems foolish to call anything other than meat "a good source of protein", or amino acids, for that matter.  I will also mention that the health benefits of fiber are being debated.  Most of all, the Dr. seems to be either unaware or unconcerned with the growing body of evidence that gluten (a protein in wheat and some other grains) is essentially poisonous to humans, leading to chronic inflammation and the host of problems that causes.  In fact, this doctor seems to be a big fan of gluten!

    Ignoring all that, what I want to talk about today is the commonly held belief that we need to eat carbohydrates in order to get our full compliment of vitamins and minerals, and Dr. Sears' claims that whole grains are a "good source" for some of them. 

    First, a quick look around the internet reveals many sites containing vitamin and mineral charts.  Take a peak at a few of them and see if you can find some indication that whole grains are a better source than meats, cheeses, vegetables and fruits.  Keep in mind that "enriched" means the grains had nutrients artificially added to them.  It seems pretty clear that one could easily replace every grain in his diet with fruits and vegetables, thereby avoiding the hazards of gluten and the effect that processed flours have on insulin levels, while still getting just as good or even better micro-nutrient levels.

    One thing that I rarely hear mentioned is that meats are chock-full of micro-nutrients.  The misconception, I think, is that we eat meat for the proteins and amino acids, and then we must eat carbs for the micro-nutrients.  The fact is that we can get all of those micro-nutrients from meats in varying degrees.  Actually, many of these nutrients are in meat in better forms (for human purposes) than in plants.  Examples are vitamin K, which is K₂ in meat and K₁ in plants, or the misnamed vitamin D (actually a hormone), which is D₂ in plants and D₃ in meats.

    Take a quick look at the nutrient profile for equal amounts of hard-boiled egg^[1] and whole wheat flour^[2].  The egg is has either nearly the same amount, or more, of calcium, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, folate, choline, B-12, A, lutein+zeaxanthin, E, D, as well as Omega-3 fatty acids.  From this it is clear that eggs are at least the micro-nutrient equal of whole wheat.  But there is a twist to this.  Those numbers are for a 100g serving.  In real terms, that is two medium hard-boiled eggs, or almost a whole loaf of bread using this recipe.  Which is the more realistic serving size?  So in order for us to get almost the same micro-nutrients, we can gorge ourselves on bread, or have a two-egg omelet for breakfast^[3]. 

    Once again we see a medical "authority" toeing the conventional wisdom line, advocating a diet heavy in a substance which has been implicated in dozens of serious diseases, provides no nutritional value which cannot be gotten elsewhere, and would end up displacing many healthier foods in our diets.  I see this all the time, and I always ask myself the question, "why?"  Why would someone who has devoted his career to helping people be healthy ever advocate something which is a best a poor nutritional choice and at worst, a destroyer of health.  I have not yet found the answer to this question.  What are your thoughts?

   

-Goat

   

[1]  Search for NDB No. 01129.

[2]  Search for NDB No. 20080.

[3] Use pastured eggs (not the same thing as pasteurized!), throw in some pastured ham and pastured cheese, fry it up in pastured butter, and you will have eaten USDA's recommended amount of most of the vitamins and minerals in one sitting.  Not that the USDA's RDA should be considered authoritative, mind you, since they are based upon people who were eating a diet which a "paleo" minded person would consider inherently unhealthy.