Wednesday, August 25, 2021

How Much Seed Oil Is Too Much? Short-term Consequences of Going Off The Wagon

A cold day in Hell's Canyon
Have I mentioned I got married?

So this post is going to be a joint effort with my wife, Jen.

We went to high school together in Connecticut, and reconnected after many years and found ourselves to be a very good fit.

Unbeknownst to me, she had been suffering from a chronic auto-immune disease, fibromyalgia, for decades, since shortly after we graduated high school.
"Fibromyalgia affects about 4 million US adults, about 2% of the adult population."
When we reconnected in 2019, she was a Greger-style near-vegan, running her own organic farm in upstate New York, and producing most of her own food. She was also quite ill, overweight, and on a number of medications.

So at our first dinner together, after negotiating with the waitress about what food I could eat and winding up with a plate of sausages and a hard cider, I mentioned why I eat the way I do, and told her what to eat:
"Avoid seed oils, refined carbohydrates, refined sugars, and make sure to eat animal protein and animal fats."
Just a sentence. While we were friends, I didn't want to get into a diet debate with a vegan.

A few weeks later she let me know that she had fixed her diet, and was down 17 lbs already (for a total of 56 lbs over the next few months, back to beauty-queen weight).

What she didn't mention until much later was the fibromyalgia. What a near-vegan diet, a physician's care, and drugs hadn't accomplished was fixed with a paleo diet in a few months: the pain went away, for the first time in decades.

She had also suffered from cracks in her heels. I first learned about this from the Barefoot Sisters (podcast at the link), who were also vegetarians. I've long had a suspicion that heel cracks were a function of a low animal-fat diet, and along with the fibromyalgia, the heel cracks resolved.

So two years into this process, we went to LA for a few days for the Ancestral Health Symposium 2021, where I spoke. Since we were staying in a (very nice!) hotel where the conference was held, it was unavoidable that we were going to have to eat out in restaurants, something we do very rarely at home.

We are always careful when we eat out, since I am ridiculously gluten-intolerant. I have no choice. But seed oils are much harder to manage when eating in restaurant. We went to an In-N-Out Burger joint, for instance, and ordered burgers without buns or sauce, telling them I had a wheat allergy. But it's not possible to determine in what they are cooking the burgers. What do they use to lubricate the grill? Obviously we skipped the fries!

Same problem with the restaurant at the hotel: what are the vegetables cooked in? Given that they wouldn't put butter on the table even when they served gluten-free toast (what was in the toast?), I doubt they were using butter for the bread or the sautéed vegetables.

My general assumption is that since I don't have an acute reaction to seed oils, a little bit when I rarely eat out isn't going to harm me.

So when we get home, Jen reveals that her fibromyalgia is back. So are the cracks in her heels. She also had a rather severe intestinal distress which she'd rather not detail here! 

All three are improving, but that's a pretty severe reaction to a few days of not rigorously controlling her diet! The intestinal distress required a fast and a period of carnivory to resolve.

When fibromyalgia was full-on she describes it as having a "whole-body sprain", but now it's just in a few locations, like her hips.  Now the connection between fibromyalgia and seed oils is pretty clear (Albrecht et al., 2019; Cordero et al., 2011; Meeus et al., 2013), and I've helped others put it into remission via a low n-6 diet, but I've never heard of it coming back from just a few days of not-so-careless eating!

Luckily she's improving already.

So this raises a number of questions: 
  1. What is the amount of n-6 fats that causes these illnesses?
  2. What is the  amount stored in adipose tissue, and how does this interact with dietary intake?
  3. How long does it take to clear these fats out of the body, until one can tolerate a small intake?
Jen's only been eating this way for 2 years, after years of being on a high n-6 diet. It took me 5 years to really start feeling totally well, and the last odd health improvement happened after 7 years.

Five years is about how long it should take adipose tissue to lose stored n-6, based on the half-life of fats in adipose tissue. Some tissues with a high turnover, like the skin or gut, appear to happen quickly, some, like cartilage, likely take years, if ever.

In celiac it is recognized that a lack of exposure builds tolerance, and that symptoms also may take a while to return. This was my experience, and my tolerance to small, accidental exposures has grown. Not sure if this will directly apply to Jen's auto-immune condition, however.

In talking to Aaron Blaisdell, the founder and director of AHS, he described how he put his 'genetic' porphyria into remission, he said he suspects it was the seed oils that caused it (an update from his previous position.) For a guy who used to blister under the sun and had to wear denim and canvas when outside, he's looking quite tan!

But a lot of the answers to the above conditions are going to have to be addressed individually, since, as in Aaron's case, there are genetic factors driving individual responses to environmental triggers, and they're not always well understood.



Albrecht, D. S., Forsberg, A., Sandström, A., Bergan, C., Kadetoff, D., Protsenko, E., Lampa, J., Lee, Y. C., Höglund, C. O., Catana, C., Cervenka, S., Akeju, O., Lekander, M., Cohen, G., Halldin, C., Taylor, N., Kim, M., Hooker, J. M., Edwards, R. R., … Loggia, M. L. (2019). Brain glial activation in fibromyalgia – A multi-site positron emission tomography investigation. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 75, 72–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2018.09.018
Cordero, M. D., Alcocer-Gómez, E., Cano-García, F. J., De Miguel, M., Carrión, A. M., Navas, P., & Sánchez Alcázar, J. A. (2011). Clinical Symptoms in Fibromyalgia Are Better Associated to Lipid Peroxidation Levels in Blood Mononuclear Cells Rather than in Plasma. PLoS ONE, 6(10), e26915. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0026915
Meeus, M., Nijs, J., Hermans, L., Goubert, D., & Calders, P. (2013). The role of mitochondrial dysfunctions due to oxidative and nitrosative stress in the chronic pain or chronic fatigue syndromes and fibromyalgia patients: Peripheral and central mechanisms as therapeutic targets? Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets, 17(9), 1081–1089. https://doi.org/10.1517/14728222.2013.818657

12 comments:

  1. That's great to know how little it takes to impact.
    I know if I have seed oils (eating out) I get a headache and it hits fairly quickly.
    I have been told Vitamin E and Aspirin can help so now I carry aspirin around (not that we in Sydney Australia can go anywhere anyway!)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, aspirin blocks some of the effects of n-6 on the body. Obviously it's better to not need aspirin!

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  2. Hi Tucker,
    I follow you on literally everything and have been incorporating the no seed oil lifestyle into my family. Much appreciated for all you do. Any thoughts on Tricor (Fenofibrate)? It seems to suppress the cytokine storm in Covid 19 infections. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.660490/full

    Thought I'd pass it along. Thanks,
    Jon

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    Replies
    1. Haven't looked at it, but thanks for pointing it out!

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    2. You should look into fibrates. I asked this directly to Dr Hammock in email. I don't think he'd mind if I copied it here. I"m not entirely certain about his conclusion. Fenofibrate has a track record in decreasing atherogenesis and coronary events.

      "when the few in the world who knew what an epoxide hydrolase was
      were sure there was one and only one. among the ways we distinguished them in addition to being
      membrane bound vs non membrane bound
      9.5 ph optimum vs 7.5
      mol weight of 50 vs 120
      different substrate selectivity

      was that barbituates and classical 1A1 inducers induced the mEH and not the sEH
      fibrates induced sEH dramatically

      it still took years


      lots of herbicides are ppar agonists and most commercial fibrate drugs are petty good herbicides - go figure

      Delete
  3. Congratulations on your marriage, Tucker! I hope you make a bunch of low-linoleic kids!

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  4. jonathan...you must be "kidding"!

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  5. I think embedded in all of this is how best to detox the linoleic out of our bodies and tissues. I continually here, to just let it happen at some "natural" pace. I would suggest we could bring more science to this and ask ourselves what compounds, be it carnosine help neutralize by products like hne , what metabolic processes facilitate it, and what liver phase 2 pathways are used (glucuronidation, etc) and what binders are needed. We rarely hear people with mercury toxicity say, just let it happen naturally. Isn't there a better way. Would this alleviate some symptoms and health issues ?

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  6. Question, I have Ankylosing Spondylitis, an autoimmune disease related to Rheumatoid Arthritis. I'm on Humera, it's an immune system supresor. I've eliminated margarine from my diet about 12 to 15 years ago and the problems with my feet have gone away, I used to have dry cracked skin on my feet to the point that my feet would hurt so badly and they would be bloody every day. It used to ruin my shoes at times.
    When I found out that margarine was bad for you and stopped using it (my dad used a lot all the time and has an extended belly), my problems with my feet went away. Plus my acne like symptoms went away also.
    I didn't know it was the seeds oils causing the problems. I thought it was the hydrogenation that was causing the problem. Now I see what the problem is. I still use corn oil, even though I used Olive Oil and Coconut oil. I'm going to get rid of the corn oil and start to check the ingredients to make sure I don't get any seed oils in things like salad dressing and mayonnaise. I truly hope this will help me get off the Humera because it's awful.

    ReplyDelete

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