Wheat, Allergies, and Asthma

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Wheat, Allergies, and Asthma

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from Tucker Goodrich: yelling Stop Wheat, Allergies, and Asthma
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Interview: Autoimmunity, Seed Oils, and Wheat (Oh My!) with Casey Ruff on Boundless Body Radio!

New posts will be at Substack.
Interview: Autoimmunity, Seed Oils, and Wheat (Oh My!) with Casey Ruff on Boundless Body Radio!

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from Tucker Goodrich: yelling Stop Interview: Autoimmunity, Seed Oils, and Wheat (Oh My!) with Casey Ruff on Boundless Body Radio!
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Interview: "The Science Behind Vegetable Oils and Why They’re Terrible For You"—The Natural State with Dr. Anthony Gustin

Dr. Anthony Gustin

We did this one quite a while ago, and it finally got released. 

I expect you all will enjoy it and hopefully learn something. 

Anthony is a very smart guy, and asks some hard questions.

He's the guy who put together the twitter thread I reposted recently: 

Can We Replace Seed Oils With Beef Tallow?

In this interview, we discuss: 

• Tucker’s backstory and how he went from being a Chief Technology Officer to studying the effects nutrition has on our health
• The serious health conditions Tucker experienced firsthand
• Why Tucker didn’t get better even after eliminating sugar and carbs and what he removed next
• The approach Tucker used to remove wheat and seed oils from his diet and what happened when he did
• Does consuming wheat or seed oils give you different symptoms?
• The food that gave Tucker the biggest reaction and why that is
• What Tucker removed from his diet that eliminated all of his health problems
• How is family reacted when he removed these offenders from their diet too
• What happens when seed oils break down in the body
• What we’ve learned from the Hadza tribe
• The shocking reason why seed oils were created in the first place plus how they’re made
• How we went from having virtually no chronic diseases to 60% of the population experiencing them
• And more...

(From Anthony's show notes.)

There's a second half coming soon, so follow Anthony's podcast to stay up to date!

 

P.S. Here is part 2: Interview: "The Research on Vegetable Oils and Inflammation, Cholesterol, Chronic Diseases, and More (Part 2)"—The Natural State with Dr. Anthony Gustin

NB: We are both advisors/consultants to Zero Acre Farms.  

The Folate Experiment

 My mother has gotten senile. So when she recently told me about how she thought she had some sort of genetic folate absorption problem, it was a little short on details, and she hasn't seen the physician who diagnosed her for decades. But she has been supplementing with folic acid for years, and attributes it to a big improvement in her health.

Well, it's a bit problematic. But when she told me back in my early 20s that she had a problem eating wheat—something she doesn't remember at all now—I should have listened.

Solgar Folate 1,333 MCG DFE
(Metafolin® 800 mcg) 

So, I figured I'd give it a shot. Supplementing with folate (the natural form, don't supplement with folic acid) seemed pretty harmless, so I bought the brand Chris Kresser recommends, and proceeded.

I noticed some benefits (mainly concerning anxiety) right away. That was kind of what I was looking for, and it was in the list of symptoms that my mother had mentioned. I noticed that if I didn't take it, the anxiety returned, so I set a reminder in my calendar to take it, 

I also recommended it to my daughter, who has had some pretty severe anxiety issues over the years, which the "health professionals" have been useless at treating.

This post moved to Substack.

Interview: "Seed Oil Apocalypse: Toxic Food and the Health Crisis"—Primal Edge Health with Tristan Haggard

 A good chat with Tristan Haggard of Primal Edge Health. We got into a few new areas, talked about wheat and wheat poisoning at length, for instance, and got into some details about my own health experiences that I don't think I've covered elsewhere. 

I don't believe he has a podcast, we did this as a livestream on Youtube.

Does Linoleic Acid Induce Obesity? Part 1

[P.S. Part 2: Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass and 4-Hydroxynonenal]

Introduction

OK folks, into the wayback machine.

In 2010 I stopped eating seed oils, and saw a chronic inflammatory bowel disease resolve in days:

“So a few months ago, I stopped eating industrial seed oils (veggie oils). In two days the diarrhea stopped. Eat the oils, it started again. I no longer craved starch or sugar, so I didn't eat any wheat for a week, without meaning to….  So now I could turn the symptoms of the last 16 years on or off, based on eating veggie oils or wheat. Wow!” (Goodrich, 2010)

Post moved to Substack.

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

How the Food Industry Implemented the Dietary Guidelines

"On being challenged on the incompleteness of the science, Senator McGovern said 'Senators do not have the luxury that the research scientist does of waiting until every last shred of evidence is in...'"

Senator George McGovern

That was 1977, at the occassion was the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which ultimately led to the U.S. Dietary Guidelines under which we continue to live.

The American Medical Association's response was "The evidence for assuming that benefits [are] to be derived from the adoption of such universal dietary goals … is not conclusive, and there is potential for harmful effects," which may be one of the great understatements of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Senator McGovern, having left government and failed while attempting to run a business due in part to excessive regulation, reflected in 1992:

"The problem we face as legislators is: Where do we set the bar so that it is not too high to clear? I don't have the answer. I do know that we need to start raising these questions more often."

It's nice that Senator McGovern, who by all accounts was a decent person, had this revelation later in his life. Unfortunately, we continue to live under the regime of the Dietary Guidelines he implemented. Fuller accounts of those guidelines and the flaws thereof are available elsewhere, what I'd like to focus on is what happened after they were implemented.

In 2011,  the Institute of Food Technologists published an account:

"The American Dietetic Assn., Inst. of Food Technologists, Intl. Food Information Council (IFIC), and the North American branch of the Intl. Life Sciences Inst. convened 2 expert roundtables of rigorous discussions, whose purpose was to enable the 2 key scientific audiences to interact, innovate, and close the knowledge gaps that are crucial to integrating and translating the DGA [Dietary Guidelines for America]. As stated at the outset, the content of this paper is formed from the proceedings of the roundtables held in early October 2010 in Chicago, Illinois, and in Washington, D.C."

Upon reading this, many years later, I was appalled to see what had gone on in the food industry in response to these so-called Guidelines. I published what I will confess was a Star Wars-inspired, somewhat hyperbolic tweet-thread, from which this post is taken.

I've found the Evil Empire (Food Division)'s plans for all of us. The roadmap for the conspiracy is open access, as it happens. First, the marching orders (the Soviets would've loved the tone):

"A coordinated strategic plan that includes all sectors of society, including individuals, families, educators, communities, physicians and allied health professionals, public health advocates, policy makers, scientists, and small and large businesses (e.g., farmers, agricultural producers, food scientists, food manufacturers, and food retailers of all kinds), should be engaged in the development and ultimate implementation of a plan to help all Americans eat well, be physically active, and maintain good health and function...."

"It is important that any strategic plan is evidence-informed, action-oriented, and focused on changes in systems in these sectors (United States Dept. of Agriculture 2010a)." Note well: only "evidence-informed", weaker language even than evidence-based.

Who's the audience? "Food scientists and nutrition scientists (dietitians and nutrition communicators)" The stormtroopers of the New Food Order, in other words.

How are they doing? “What has been done till now isn't working. To do nothing more effective than we have, means that five years from now we'll be in an even worse situation."

That's harsh! Who said that? "Linda Van Horn, a professor of preventive medicine at the Northwestern Univ. and chairman of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee." Well, she should know! (Van Horn was again on the Advisory Committee in 2020.)

So what are our Food Lords going to do about this "unconscionable" (Van Horn) failure? "Food scientists, dietitians/nutrition communicators, and government representatives" have a plan, with some gobbledygook:

"Reduce the incidence and prevalence of overweight and obesity in the U.S. population by reducing overall caloric intake;" They're going to starve us...

"Shift food intake patterns to a more plant-based diet that emphasizes vegetables, cooked dry beans and peas," Make us (more) malnourished...

"Reduce intake of foods containing added sugars, solid fats (SoFAS), refined grains, and sodium (USDA 2010a)." And make us hate our food.

"Two well-known successes cited were the consumer switch to whole-wheat products and the move away from trans fats." Who got us to eat trans-fats in the first place?

"Richard Black, PhD, a nutrition scientist at Kraft Foods, offered the group some of his company's insights about the obesity issue:" It's quite sensible, actually, read the whole thing. Let's hear it for industry pushback!...

Black: "Recommending dietary change that is so extreme as to be only aspirational rather than achievable will not serve the greater public need for dietary guidance to address the obesity epidemic.... After all, we are asking people to fundamentally change how they think about food, shop for food, prepare food, and eat food. This will take time, patience, commitment and trust from everyone."

I think he was sealed in Carbonite after. 

Next speaker: "...consumer taste likes and dislikes, some of which are genetically based, are a major challenge to vegetable acceptability." New Food Man is required, in other words. GMO foods are not enough, we need GM people! "Nelson Almeida, PhD, FACN, a food scientist with Kellogg Co." Made it perfectly clear that more plant-based means more carbs: “Currently, the wheat flour tortilla is the fastest growing product line of all grain-based products."

"Penny Kris-Etherton, PhD, The Pennsylvania State Univ." advocates brainwashing: "cognitive-behavioral strategies have proved effective in behavior change—notable among these is motivational interviewing, with its well-ordered feedback and monitoring."

"Robbie Burns, formerly of Cadbury" offered more common sense: "Since their inception in 1980, Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) have included, in some form, advice to decrease dietary intakes of added sugars, solid fats, refined grains and sodium.... As a result and to meet consumer desires for more healthful products, the food industry has developed alternatives where all these negative components are reduced and in some cases eliminated.”

They called for "Trust and mutual understanding" between parties implementing the DGA; but for, the victims? "Stealth vs persuasion Consumers have been resistant to dietary change, partly because of established food preferences: “stealth” methods of change are... effective..."

"Food scientist participants of the roundtables informed their dietitian colleagues that food companies typically spend 60% to 70% of their research and development budgets on renovation and only 30% to 40% on innovation of new food products." Woah!

"Dietary change advocates have argued that the food industry, with its highly persuasive... marketing departments, can simply produce products with healthier nutrition profiles and “sell them” to consumers. The 80% to 90% failure rate of new products is a sobering reality check."

"A public preference for extremely short ingredient lists on processed food products also poses major challenges to food scientists in renovating/reformulating food."

So if you're wondering why opposition to people like Professor Tim Noakes and Nina Teicholz and the whole idea of Real Food is so vehement, it's literally a conspiracy. 

Read it and weep (Rowe et al., 2011).

---

McGovern, G. (2012, October 21). George McGovern in the Journal. Wall Street Journal. https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203406404578070543545022704.html

Rowe, S., Alexander, N., Almeida, N., Black, R., Burns, R., Bush, L., Crawford, P., Keim, N., Kris-Etherton, P., & Weaver, C. (2011). Food Science Challenge: Translating the Dietary Guidelines for Americans to Bring About Real Behavior Change. Journal of Food Science, 76(1), R29–R37. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2010.01973.x

Who’s On The Guidelines Committee. (n.d.). The Nutrition Coalition. Retrieved April 23, 2021, from https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/2020-dietary-guidelines-committee

Why Does the Federal Government Issue Damaging Dietary Guidelines? Lessons from Thomas Jefferson to Today. (2018, July 10). Cato Institute. https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-does-federal-government-issue-damaging-dietary-guidelines-lessons-thomas

The Paleo Canteen Podcast: Tucker Goodrich — Goodbye Mr. Wholewheat

A new podcast interview, with Ally Houston.

This is the first of two episodes, the next one with Ken Strain and me should drop next week.

 Resources for topics discussed are below. (Yes, the format kind of stinks, but that's what happens when you do html formatting in Microsoft Excel via formulas.)

Timestamp format is Hour:Minutes:Seconds

If you find anything egregious as far as typos go, let me know in the comments.

Enjoy!

P.S. Timestamps adjusted: -26 seconds. It will match the podcast now.

0:02:13, comment: "Mr. Whole Wheat", resource: ""Diverticulitis": My Story"

0:07:53, comment: "Somewhat bizzare blogger", resource: "Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization, Part III"

0:08:20, comment: "Weston Price's book", resource: "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration"

0:12:58, comment: "Carbohydrate cravings", resource: "Linoleic Acid, Fat Rats In Labs, and Fat Humans"

0:15:21, comment: "I can't remember the term for not being able to recognize faces", resource: "Prosopagnosia Information Page"

0:15:35, comment: "Later in the attack… Supergirl", resource: "Supergirl (TV series)"

0:21:03, comment: "There's a quote that doctors always use…", resource: "The Plural of Anecdote is Data"

0:22:11, comment: "An RCT of parachutes", resource: "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial"

0:22:28, comment: "Parachute invented by a scientist", resource: "Louis-Sebastien Lenormand"

0:25:01, comment: "The effect it had on my health", resource: "My Vitamin D Experiment"

0:25:56, comment: "ADHD… Dr. Alessio Fasano", resource: "Neurologic and Psychiatric Manifestations of Celiac Disease and Gluten Sensitivity"

0:31:28, comment: "[Dr.] Tro Kalajian", resource: "Dr. Tro's Medical Weight Loss & Direct Primary Care"

0:36:07, comment: "Dr. [Michael] Eades", resource: "The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D."

0:39:45, comment: "Dr. Atkin's Book", resource: "Robert C. Atkins, 72, Creator of Controversial Diet, Dies"

0:49:47, comment: "Lots of babies", resource: "RESULTS OF THE SELF-SELECTION OF DIETS BY YOUNG CHILDREN"

0:53:49, comment: "Inject either THC or 2-AG", resource: "Endocannabinoid levels in rat limbic forebrain and hypothalamus in relation to fasting, feeding and satiation: stimulation of eating by 2‐arachidonoyl glycerol"

0:53:50, comment: "Inject either THC or 2-AG", resource: "Observational analysis of feeding induced by Δ9-THC and anandamide"

0:53:58, comment: "2-AG goes up normally in the body", resource: "The role of fatty acids and their endocannabinoid-like derivatives in the molecular regulation of appetite"

0:54:24, comment: "They preferentially eat sugar", resource: "Cannabinoid influences on palatability: microstructural analysis of sucrose drinking after Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol, anandamide, 2-arachidonoyl glycerol and SR141716"

0:54:38, comment: "When it hits the stomach, it's triggered by seed oils", resource: "The role of fatty acids and their endocannabinoid-like derivatives in the molecular regulation of appetite"

0:55:06, comment: "There was a human drug… that blocked 2-AG's effect", resource: "Leptin-regulated endocannabinoids are involved in maintaining food intake"

0:57:00, comment: "The increase in seed oils", resource: "Changes in consumption of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in the United States during the 20th century"

0:57:22, comment: "How much is actually in people's fat tissues", resource: "Increase in Adipose Tissue Linoleic Acid of US Adults in the Last Half Century"

0:57:56, comment: "There's a couple of studies where they take people on a high carb diet", resource: "Effect of a 6-Month Intervention with Cooking Oils Containing a High Concentration of Monounsaturated Fatty Acids (Olive and Canola Oils) Compared with Control Oil in Male Asian Indians with Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease"

0:57:56, comment: "There's a couple of studies where they take people on a high carb diet", resource: "Metabolites of arachidonic acid and linoleic acid in early stages of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease—A pilot study"

0:58:33, comment: "They're the leanest industrail population on Earth", resource: "Big Government, Small Bellies: What Japan Can Teach Us About Fighting Fat"

0:59:08, comment: "How sticky the starch is", resource: "Yes Virginia, The Paleo Diet Was Low-Carb"

0:59:42, comment: "The rate of periodontal disease", resource: "Periodontal Disease"

1:01:27, comment: "All of the animal populations", resource: "Lab animals and pets face obesity epidemic"

1:01:34, comment: "Racoons in Toronto are getting obese", resource: "Enhanced access to anthropogenic food waste is related to hyperglycemia in raccoons (Procyon lotor)"

1:02:03, comment: "Well you know it's pollution", resource: "HOW TINY NAURU BECAME WORLD'S FATTEST NATION"

1:05:16, comment: "French eat more calories", resource: "List of countries by food energy intake"

1:06:04, comment: "Breed's prone to obesity", resource: "A Brief Guide to the Norwegian Elkhound"

1:09:44, comment: "Diabetics are prone to infections", resource: "Infections in Diabetes Mellitus and Hyperglycemia"

1:11:32, comment: "I read Thomas Malthus' book", resource: "An Essay on the Principle of Population"

1:13:18, comment: "Our back molars grew bigger", resource: "The Story of the Human Body, pg 56 kindle edition"

1:13:22, comment: "Chimpanzees can use tools to dig up tubers", resource: "Savanna chimpanzees use tools to harvest the underground storage organs of plants"

1:13:51, comment: "A lot of the big megafauna went extinct", resource: "Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change"

1:13:56, comment: "There start appearing shell middens", resource: "Shell middens as archives of past environments, human dispersal and specialized resource management"

1:14:40, comment: "We ran out of butter and animal fats", resource: "Response to Gary Taubes on Omega-6 Fats (Seed Oils) and Obesity"

1:15:33, comment: "The horrible things that corn and soybean agrictulture is doing", resource: "Perspectives On The Vulnerability Of U.S. Agriculture To Soil Erosion: Discussion"

1:16:20, comment: "I have... a couple of fantastic books about the Indians", resource: "Review: "Empire of the Summer Moon""

1:16:20, comment: "I have... a couple of fantastic books about the Indians", resource: "Plenty-coups: Chief of the Crows"

1:16:28, comment: "What did we feed 'em?", resource: "Response to Gary Taubes on Omega-6 Fats (Seed Oils) and Obesity"

1:17:34, comment: "They are all malnourished", resource: "The world health report, Chapter 4: Childhood and maternal undernutrition"

1:18:08, comment: "You retweeted an article recently by an Indian writer", resource: ""Vegetarianism in India neither comes from a love for animals or humans. It only comes from a love of power and hierarchy.""

1:28:40, comment: "The Maffetone Method", resource: "Dr. Phil Maffetone's "Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing" Review"

1:29:45, comment: "The Seven Phases of Heart-Rate Training", resource: "The Seven Phases of Heart-Rate Training"

Response to Gary Taubes on Omega-6 Fats (Seed Oils) and Obesity

Recently the Human Performance Outliers podcast with Shawn Baker and Zach Bitter interviewed Gary Taubes. [1]

I was a guest on their sixth episode: [2]



Where we discussed omega-6 fats (n-6) from seed oils, and their impact on health and fitness.

Shawn posed a question to Taubes about processed vegetable oils (seed oils), as a follow-up of sorts to our discussion.

This is actually the second time that a question from me about one of my favorite topics made it into a podcast interview w/ Taubes, the first was in 2011, detailed in this post. [3]

---

PS: They had me back on their podcast to discuss this post:

---

"Taubes answers about the way I expected him to.  Thoughtfully, but wheat and linoleic acid have not been focuses of his research."

This post has moved to Substack.

The Rice Experiment

My daughter recently moved to Japan for school and discovered the Freshman 15. For folks who are not familiar with that phrase, it's used to describe what happens to people when they first go away to college and start eating in the cafeteria all the time.

"Cafeteria Diet Is a Robust Model of Human Metabolic Syndrome With Liver and Adipose Inflammation"

So the Freshman 15 refers to the 15 pounds you gain when you go away to college.

Except in Japan. There it refers to the 15 pounds that everyone loses when they first go on the Japanese diet in the cafeteria at school there. (Western food is basically not available.)

My daughter was not overweight, so I was surprised I started getting panicked texts from Japan about the fact that she now had "nothing to wear" as she'd leaned out so much that her jeans were too big. She's been on and off the Paleo diet over the last seven years, so she pretty much knew that it worked for her, and worked in the short-term.

But she was in Japan...

"So, what are you eating?"

"Rice. I've never eaten so much rice. I got a rice cooker, and all I'm eating is rice."

Obesity Among Adults, 2015 or Nearest Year

Huh.

The Question

"Adult obesity rates are highest in the United States, Mexico, New Zealand and Hungary, while they are lowest in Japan and Korea."

If you buy the carbohydrate/insulin-causes-obesity model, this is a major paradox. The Japanese diet has long been predominantly carbohydrate-based. Obesity has been increasing over time (although obviously not by much), but it's been doing so as carbohydrate consumption has gone down from historically high levels.

If carbohydrates caused obesity, Japan would be one of the fattest nations on earth, not one of the thinnest.

Nevertheless, patterns of health in Japan have changed since WWII with the adoption of a more American-influenced diet. "Western" diseases have emerged, although they have been largely protected from much of the obesity epidemic affecting the rest of the Industrialized Nations.

Japan: Calorie Consumption and Breakdown by Type of Nutrient

So I got curious. When my daughter moved to Japan, she left behind her rice cooker, as it was too expensive to ship it over there.

So I had a perfectly nice, functional rice cooker sitting there gathering dust on the kitchen counter.

And I had a daughter in Japan who increased her rice consumption (along with a bunch of other changing variables) and leaned out.

I've also been doing a fair bit of reading about the Japanese diet and the changes thereto since the end of World War II. While I initially found the whole low-carb argument to be pretty compelling as a primary cause of obesity, there are a number of problems with it as a hypothesis. A hypothesis that generates paradoxes typically has some fundamental flaw. The most famous example of this is the French Paradox, where you have a hypothesis that says that saturated fat causes heart disease, and you have these French people who eat much more saturated fat than Americans, and yet have less heart disease. This led to the silly resveratrol fraud, to explain away the paradox.

The carb/insulin-causes-obesity hypothesis has an even worse paradox in Japan.

The Experiment

I was kind of inspired by Stephan Guyenet's recent expirment:

"Where the praties grow: My seven-day potato diet experiment"

In which he noticed that very little happened. Sounds good!

I've been eating low-carb for almost eight years now. I'm not religiously low-carb, as I'll have some rice or potatoes now and again, but I'll often go a week or so with no carbohydrates at all aside from what's in milk.

I've been weight-stable for that entire period, after a two-month initial weight-loss period, in which I went from about 185 to 168. I'd been at 168 until about a year ago, when I stopped going to the gym and lifting weights regularly, at which point I dropped to about 160, primarily (if the mirror is any indicator) from losing muscle mass in my upper body.

I used to weigh myself almost everyday, so I'm quite familiar with the ups and downs of my body weight, although it's frankly gotten quite boring, as I'm totally weight stable, absent muscle gain or loss. So for the last 18 months I've just been going by my belt, which is, at the end of the day, the best indicator. As a confounder, I've been lifting weights again, and my weight (and results in the mirror) have been increasing. This should not affect the belt.

Methods

Rice. Made in California.

Diet is my usual diet paleo/primal diet. I avoid wheat and seed oils, eat a fair bit of beef and the occasional pork, fish, and chicken, in that order. I eat fruit and vegetables in small quantities on a regular basis, but not every day. I eat some sugar, in the form of a candy bar or a bowl of ice cream one or twice a week. I recently tracked my calorie consumption for a day to prove a point, and it was about 2,700 kilocalories (kc). Counting calories was a horrible experience, and I won't be doing it again.

Cuisinart Rice Cooker. Don't buy this model.
It leaks and seems like it's going to explode.

I exercise consistently, running 3.3 miles at an aerobic pace 5 days a week, and trail run 8.25 miles one day a week. I do some minor weight lifting and body-weight exercises six days a week, as little as needed to see an effect.

Rice Bin. Optional

Rice was mostly the Nishiki sushi rice you see in the picture. I got some other rice at the beginning, but prefer this since Grace yells at me if I'm not sufficiently Japanese in these things. I don't know that it makes a difference, as starch is starch, basically. Most days I made one meal with rice, typically 3/4s of a cup dry, which, after adding 1 cup of water, yields about 3 cups of rice cooked. That's 241 kc/cup, or 723 kc total. That's 27.6% of my daily calorie intake, mostly from carbs, as there's about 9% protein in rice and a little bit of fat. So, technically, still low-carb, but far above my average daily intake for the last many years.

Meal with Rice, Beef, and Vegetables.

So I mostly ate the rice as my morning meal, after I'd done my run. Most days I did not have a second helping, but on a few I did, same amount, but with my evening meal. In keeping with the Japanese theme of things, I tried to make some Japanese-style meals, as seen at the right. Meat, mostly beef, some vegetables such as the red peppers and pickles you see to the right, tamari (gluten-free soy sauce), and daikon radish (a Japanese radish) were typical. Sometimes I added a fried egg, cooked in butter.

In keeping with my philosophy that if you eat a healthy diet you should not need to obsess about it, I didn't, and didn't track closely. I started in late October, about at month after my daughter had arrived at school, and continued until the middle of December, at which point I stopped the experiment. See results.

Measurements were performed when I got dressed. As it happens, one of the very best measurements of the health of your diet is your waist, and your waist-to-height ratio.

J. Crew Black Leather Belt

The belt I used for this purpose is actually a terrific indicator of my overall health. I bought it at J. Crew back in the 1990s in my 20s, in my hipster phase (I've been told), and had to stop wearing it as my waist expanded in my late 20s. As I'm stubborn, and cheap, I put the belt and the pants I owned at that point in a box and kept them, with the goal that I would one day figure out why I was gaining weight and fix the problem. Having solved it, that belt is now again a standard part of my wardrobe.

If you look closely at the belt you'll see that the only worn hole is the second one. So buckling my belt to the second hole will be my measure, and it's clearly a long-term one.

Results

So from late October to early December I had a helping of rice per day, infrequently two. Something had to go in this experiment, as and protein consumption tends to remain somewhat constant, my increase in rice calories caused a decrease in consumption of calories from dairy. Yogurt and milk (both full-fat) consumption went down dramatically.

I found a number of things surprising about this experiment.

I experienced "idiopathic postprandial syndrome" (IPS, aka hypoglycemia or "hangry") for a couple of days at the beginning. This was a regular part of my life prior to fixing my diet, and one of the main reasons I stay low-carb. Main symptom is the shakes and anxiety a few hours after a carb-containing meal. Oddly, however, this went away after the first few days, never to return.

Satiety increased. IPS is typically accompanied by carb cravings. Oddly, after the initial IPS and carb craving passed, I found the rice diet to be insanely satiating. Much more so than fat. I was pretty much done for the day after that rice meal in the morning. Most days I would have a second, smaller meal in the evening, or a large snack.

I really came to enjoy the rice! You'd think it would be pretty bland, but I came to quite enjoy the smell and taste, and to look forward to it.

Athletic performance remained the same. I didn't change my routine there, continuing to do my runs fasted in the morning, and noticed no difference, no change in carb cravings, and no problem with stamina when I was on my runs except for the first couple. I noticed no change in the increases I was seeing in my running pace and in my weight lifting routine, and the weight gain I was seeing continued as I would expect it to. I put on three pounds after starting to lift, and prior to starting this experiment, and I'm now up to 169. Mr. Mirror tells me it's going into my upper body (see below).

I do not test ketones, so I have no idea what those were doing. The fact that my fasted runs were unaffected suggests my metabolic flexibility was pretty good, as runs were still fueled by fat, as they took place typically about 22 hours after my rice meal.

Heart palpitations got pretty severe. I've experienced these for a long time, typically after eating carbs, especially sugar. It's usually in the form of skipped beats, and as at one point I went in for a stress test and they found nothing, I've not worried about it. The confounder here is that I have been pursuing a Maffetone Method fitness program for some months, and my max and resting heart rate have come down dramatically, and my running pace at a fixed heart rate has gone up quite a bit. The palpitations started before the rice experiment started, and ended (mostly) before it finished. But it was kind of annoying for a while there, although it never cause any interruption in my routine. So the palpitations may have been my heart restructuring as a result of the training.

So why did I quit? Well, after the middle of December I started putting on weight in my middle, and went from the second hole in my belt to the first. My recently-acquired jeans no longer fit.

Abort! Abort!

That happened suddenly in about a week.

I have no desire to put non-muscle weight on, and the fact that it hit the belt tells me that's what it was. So I've now been off rice for about a week an a half, and the belt now buckles on the second hole again, but still a bit snugger than before. As I mentioned, I've been weight-stable for a very long time. Two things will reliably cause me to add fat: salted pistachios and egg nog. (For me, two of the highest-reward foods going.) So when I suddenly start adding fat, and I'm not eating either one of those two foods, something is up.

Conclusions

Around the same time I decided to abort I talked to my daughter and she relayed that she was cutting back on the rice for the same reason. [P.S. I clarified this point, she's been gaining weight but it's muscle as she's been working out, so it's still working for her.]

Based on my reading about the Japanese diet, I figured this might actually work. But clearly I'm doing something different than they are.

My primary thought going into this was that the omega-6 fats were the primary cause of obesity, and that as I am very diligent in not eating them, that I would not experience any weight gain. That didn't work. There's some evidence that the omega-3 fats prevent obesity, and the fish-heavy Japanese diet would provide a lot of those, whereas mine does not. Stephan's potato experiment may have been too short to notice this, as it took about six weeks for the fat accretion to commence in my case.  I've always thought that carbs were a co-factor to omega-6, and I still think that's the case, but they may also be a stronger stand-alone factor than I had thought. Although we still have the Japanese paradox to account for...

In the short term, I'm going to let my waist get back to what I'd like it to be, and then I'm going to try it again. There may have been some other factor that I didn't notice that caused the sudden fat accretion, and I'm kind of curious to see if that's the case.

Since this is an n=1, the only way to account for such things is to remove the experimental substance, let conditions return to baseline, and then re-commence the experiment.

Plus I still have a couple pounds of rice in the pantry.

P.S. 1/8/2018: 

The rice experiment is back on. I I think that the slight increase in waist size is more a function of my increased training load than the rice consumption.

I ditched the rice for a bit, and saw no change, but have noticed that I'm getting noticable abdominal muscles, and have gotten some cramps in the abs. My glutes and hip flexors have also increased in size.

So I think this is a fine lesson in not doing two things at the same time when you're trying to conduct an experiment.

The belt is on the second notch still, it's just a bit snugger than before. Body weight was 175 (!) when I last measured it a few days ago. Again, from the mirror and my pants, the weight seems to be muscle.

So I'm back on the rice...

We shall see.

Omega-6 Fats: The Alternative Hypothesis for Chronic Disease

People have been asking me to write a post on what I've been learning about diet for a long time, specifically focusing on linoleic acid and omega-6 fats. Well, here it is.  Credit goes to Raphi Sirt of Break Nutrition, who hit me up at just the right time.

[P.S. Sadly Break Nutrition has gone offline. Here's a PDF version of the article as it was published there, I'll try to update this post with the references at some point—links in the PDF don't work.]

Here's the published version over at BN ("Omega-6 Fats: the Alternative Hypothesis for Diseases of Civilization"), and here's the tweet announcing its publication:

Omega-6 fats: the alternative hypothesis for diseases of civilization https://t.co/InPohCor0W @tuckergoodrich guest-post for @breaknutrition

— Raphi Sirt (@raphaels7) August 25, 2017

Reception seems to have been quite good.  Mark Sisson mentioned it in his weekly 'net round-up, and then re-tweeted it separately:

Why omega-6 seed oils may be the primary cause of the diseases of civilization. - https://t.co/VplHreSrrq

— Mark_Sisson (@Mark_Sisson) September 1, 2017

Prof. Tim Noakes also retweeted the original tweet. Probably my favorite reaction was this one:

Personally blown away by this amazingly well researched piece by @TuckerGoodrich (my compliments to you sir). Read: https://t.co/QM0GCJFjub

— Joris Snellenburg (@jsnellenburg) November 2, 2017

So I was pretty happy with the reception, and with the piece. Raphi was a good editor, and added a lot to it with some citations to studies backing up the argument that I'd never seen before. So if you're interested in the topic, go read that version.

Raphi also asked me to be on his podcast. Due to my verbosity, and prediliction to avoid brevity and drill down, it turned into two episodes. They're below, in order.

Episode 23 – Tucker Goodrich dishes on bad fats



Episode 24 – Tucker and Gabor on Seed Oils vs Refined Carbs – Part 2



I thought I would post the first draft here, mainly to get it off my hard drive, but also to have something to reference in posts on this blog. Links to citations, if you're curious, are in the final.

So here's the rough draft as delivered to Raphi:

"There’s Something Uniquely Terrible about Wheat in the U.S."

Mark Sisson is an intelligent man, and a careful observer. His anecdotes are therefore worth more than most published reasearch.

From his post on observations while traveling abroad:

"...This means I’m quite attuned to the quality of wheat. Wheat simply doesn’t affect me to the same degree in other countries. When I was in Greece, a couple times I had some baklava after dinner or pita dipped in hummus or olive oil. Pita is unleavened. It certainly isn’t fermented. It’s about as unaltered as you can get. And it didn’t affect me...."

And this:

"Industrial Food is Addictive

"...It’s a damn shame. but industrial food always wins. It’s supposed to, and that’s the problem."

Low-Carb Athletes: Chris Froome, Tour de France Winner 2013, '15, '16.

I think we're pretty close to putting this whole thing to bed.  Two of the three Hardrock 100 winners are low-carb athletes, and the third, while high-carb, trains fasted for hours on end and can do prodigious feats on stored fat along.  (I haven't done a post yet on any of them!).

Now this.

"Especially the carbs, he's got such a sweet tooth. But he's found now that if he does cut back on carbs the weight does come down a lot easier than it did in the past. And cutting out foods like breakfast cereals and a lot of the wheat products and bread but still eating enough food — the right food — that he is able to not feel hungry during the day. If you look at his build from the 2011 Vuelta compared to now, he's still lean but his muscles look a lot more defined. So now he has found a way of doing it ..."

That's his girlfriend and nutrition advisor.

Here's the athlete:

"In the Vuelta that year (2011), I think my muscles were probably lighter. I was gangly. You wouldn't look at me and say, 'That's someone who's strong.' Whereas now, my diet is a lot more protein based. I've cut back on carbs completely but I'm not losing muscle."

Yeah, that is how it works.

"I think hard about the quality of the food I'm eating – organic fruit, vegetables and meat wherever possible. It's a common misconception that because we're training five or six hours a day that we can eat what we want and burn it off. It really is a case of watching every little thing you put in your mouth and how it's going to benefit you. Your body really does respond to tweaks then."

Paul Jaminet would approve of this:

"I try to go very light in terms of diet. In the mornings I limit myself to just the one bowl of porridge, and normally a two-egg omelette, with no hint of extras on the side. No second helpings, no picking, nothing. If there is a big stage ahead that day I'll try a three-egg omelette, but warily, and I'll mix a small amount of white rice into the porridge ..."

So he's not no-carb, but he's pretty explicitly low-carb.

The incomprehension of this feat in the press is simply priceless.  I found this article, "This is what you have to eat to compete in the Tour de France", which states:

"09:00 Breakfast 

"Riders have their breakfast around three hours before the race — carbohydrate-rich foods like bread, muesli, cereal, fruit, coffee, smoothies, orange juice and even noodles help top up glycogen stores. 

"“One thing all riders avoid is eating heavy food,” says Judith Haudum, sports nutritionist to the BMC Racing team. 

"“They have to resist the enticing pastries from the hotel breakfast bar because this type of food isn’t fully digested in time for the start, making riders’ stomachs feel uncomfortably heavy.” 

10:30 Pre-race snack 

"Transfers from hotels to stage starts can be long, offering an opportunity to top up carbohydrate and calories — typically, rice cakes with honey, raisin bread or a sports bar are consumed with fluid."

No mention of Chris Froome, who won the race last year and again this year. We saw what he's eating above.  Is a three-egg omelete "heavy"?

Breakfast of champions

Here's his breakfast on a recovery day:

"The carbohydrates in the avocado (which contains about 320 calories) provide him with a source of quick energy, while the hefty amount of protein and fat in the eggs (70 calories each), avocado, and fish (100 calories for 3 ounces) helps fuel muscles and slow the breakdown of food in the body. 

"That helps steady energy levels and stave off hunger pangs. Plus, since the eggs are poached and the fish is smoked, they have no added fats or oils.

"As an added energy boost, Froome has a sachet of cherry-juice concentrate, 2 tablespoons of which would give him about 18 grams of carbohydrates and about 70 calories."

"Carbohydrates in the avocado"!?!  An avocado contains 17 grams of carbs, and a lot of that is fiber, which enters the bloodstream as fat, not glucose.  I'd be surprised if there are more than a few grams of digestible carbs in an avocado.  So that puts him at 20-30 grams of carbs for breakfast, a far, far cry from what's "required"!

I can't tell you how many times I've heard that a low-carb athlete could never win the Tour. "Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Three times is an enemy action."  The enemy in this case is coming to obliterate the carbs-are-needed-for-performance baloney we've been sold for decades.

The other thing I always hear is that low-carb doesn't improve performance.  It pretty clearly improved Chris Froome's performance!

"After Chris Froome cut back on carbs for more protein, he lost 20 pounds, started winning the Tour de France, and became a millionaire"

Your results may vary.

Via the excellent Diet Doctor.

"UNSETTLED SCIENCE: Research finds skull condition thought extinct is actually widespread…."

Iron deficiency anemia goes hand-in-hand with wheat consumption, of course...

Link via Instapundit

Linoleic Acid, Eggs, and Oxidized LDL

FuturePundit: Low Omega 6 Eggs Do Not Cause LDL Oxidation

"Hens fed a diet low in omega-6 fatty acids and high in antioxidants produced eggs which are better for your arteries.

"'Dr. Niva Shapira of Tel Aviv University's School of Health Professions says that all eggs are not created equal. Her research indicates that when hens are fed with a diet low in omega-6 fatty acids from a young age — feed high in wheat, barley, and milo and lower in soy, maize and sunflower, safflower, and maize oils — they produce eggs that may cause less oxidative damage to human health. That's a major part of what determines the physiological impact of the end product on your table.'

"Eggs made from the conventional cheaper chicken diet produced worse effects on the blood of human study participants.

"'There were vast differences in outcome among the treatments. Daily consumption of two industry-standard eggs, high in omega-6, caused a 40 percent increase in LDL oxidizability in participants. After eating two per day of the specially-composed eggs, with both high anti-oxidant and low omega-6 levels, however, LDL oxidation levels were similar to the control group eating only two to four eggs a week....'"

That said, there's not much evidence that even industrially-produced eggs have a meaningful impact on cholesterol, but personally I choose the pay extra and eat pastured eggs.  Plus, they taste better.

Linoleic Acid, Asthma, and Metabolic Syndrome—a Follow-up.

Wow. Double-whammy:

In this study, to our best knowledge, we report for the first time that 13-S-HODE, a linoleic acid metabolite, causes mitochondrial dysfunction and bronchial epithelial injury. Although much is known about leukotrienes in asthma¹², much less attention has been given to other lipid metabolites. We studied 13-S-HODE because of increasing evidence of the role of mitochondrial dysfunction in asthma^{7, 8, 9} and high concentrations of 13-S-HODE are found in reticulocytes during degeneration of mitochondria of reticulocytes¹⁶. On the other hand, mitochondrial dysfunction seems to be crucial in the genesis of epithelial injury and asthma pathogenesis in mice^{7, 8, 9}. Similarly dysfunctional mitochondria have been found in human asthmatic bronchial epithelia³⁰. Transfer of mitochondria from stem cells to alveolar epithelial cells reversed acute lung injury in sepsis, indicating the crucial role that mitochondrial health in lung diseases¹⁷. In this context, understanding the effects of 13-S-HODE on airway epithelium is essential because we found its levels to be high in the airway secretions and extracellular fluids. Also it is practically difficult to reduce the levels of 13-S-hydroxyoctadecadienoic acid (13-S-HODE) as there are many sources for its synthesis^{13, 14, 15}.

So metabolite damages your mitochondria, causing asthma.  Among other things, I'd not be surprised.

From 1961:

"The fatty acid composition of erythrocyte and liver mitochondrial lipids was readily and drastically altered by varying the fatty acid content of the diet."

That's in rats, but the same thing has been found in humans, in all the tissues I've read reports about. To quote from the original post: "...the risk for uncontrolled asthma increased with a higher n-6:n-3 PUFA ratio."

So that suggests that a low-omega-6 diet would be useful in inhibiting or preventing asthma.

I'd always assumed it was wheat, as it's been shown to be involved with exercise-induced asthma, along with other varieties of asthma.  Perhaps they work in concert?

Original post.

The "other things" mentioned above are likely the Metabolic Syndrome.  Another paper from the same author:

"Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Metabolic Syndrome and Asthma"

A Gift

Seth and I corresponded via email occasionally. He was very generous with his time. I wanted to copy these two posts from his blog, as I don't know how long it will remain available.

Make Yourself Healthy: Diverticulitis


You have diverticulitis when “diverticula in your digestive tract become inflamed or infected. Diverticula are small, bulging pouches.” A man in his forties named Tuck had a serious case:

In my twenties I got really sick; lying in bed for 5 days, bleeding from the lower part of my digestive tract: not pretty. . . Delirious days later and ten pounds lighter and I was recovered, except for one problem: I had diarrhea for the subsequent 14 years. . . . Two years ago [2008] I passed out on the toilet on a ski weekend. The emergency room at Bennington Hospital [Vermont] told me it was a stomach flu.
Four weeks later I got cramps at work. I had to lie on the floor until it passed. Then I drove to my doctor’s office, and he told me that I had diverticulitis, and I had to go to the emergency room. I drove myself, and barely made it. I was in agony; I nearly passed out again while they were interviewing me to see if it was “serious”. . . . I had a perforated colon. . . . I spent the next four days in the pre-operative ward, so if it got worse they could cut me open immediately. I lost 10 pounds. Then I started bleeding, and I realized these were all the same symptoms that I had had 14 years before. My blood pressure got so low that the automated blood-pressure machine wouldn’t work . . .
I mentioned to all three of the doctors I saw that I had had constant diarrhea for the last 14 years, since the first attack, and they shrugged. They told me to eat more fiber, and whole wheat, even though that was what I had been eating for the last 20 years. So I avoided surgery, started eating salad with salad dressing (containing industrial seed oils) and lots of whole wheat. . . . But the more salad and whole wheat I ate, the worse it got. I couldn’t understand why. Finally had to have eight inches of my colon removed. The diarrhea continued, so obviously the cause remained.

Then something happened that, before blogging, wasn’t possible:

Someone sent me a post that Stephen Guyenet did about how dental problems were pretty much all due to diet, not genetics, as I’d been told. As someone who’d had a ton of cavities, and 8 teeth pulled, and was determined to spare his daughters the same fate, I found this of interest.
I started reading the blog. 6 months later, I decided to stop eating seed oils, which eliminated my carb cravings, hence no wheat. Two days later, [unexpectedly] my diarrhea stopped. A good bit of trial and error, some accidental, ensued. [I learned that both] wheat and seed oils cause distress, but different types. The two combined can cause me to pass out. If I eat wheat by accident, then eating saturated animal fats (like cream) causes things to settle down.

He found that “traditional” oils (palm, coconut, olive) are okay. Industrial oils (corn, canola, cottonseed) are not. Animal fats (butter, lard, beef tallow) are best.

After 16 years my symptoms are now completely under my control. . . . I read the ingredients on everything. I make a big mistake once every 6-9 months. [Other benefits:] I’m much more resistant to sunburn, for instance, and my vision improved a bit.

So his problems were due to (a) wheat and (b) too much omega-6. His doctors had no idea.
The Mayo Clinic recommends a “diverticulitis diet” that is clear liquids and low-fiber foods. According to the Mayo Clinic, “mild cases of diverticulitis can be treated with rest, changes in your diet and antibiotics. But serious cases of diverticulitis may require surgery.” The Mayo Clinic, it appears, has no idea what causes diverticulitis.
Tuck added:

It really pisses me off when people dismiss this, because it really makes a difference.  I had a colleague who was in the hospital for a colon resection for diverticulitis.  When he heard my story, he had the hospital put him on a gluten-free diet.  Four days later, instead of having surgery as scheduled, he checked out: cured.  He’s symptom-free on a gluten-free diet to this day.

I agree. As someone on the Shangri-La Diet forums put it, “you are handed a GIFT.” A story like this is a gift.


How Common Are Medical Errors? A Horror Story

In this post a contract artist who calls himself Wolverine gives a long list of life-threatening medical errors that happened to him. I hope that he will eventually add dates so that the rate of error becomes clearer [more: all the errors happened within a 14-month period] but even without them the stories suggest that life-threatening errors are common. (As does the effectiveness of surgical checklists.) Medicine is a job where if you make a mistake only the customer suffers not you. Surely this is why the error rate is so high. Wolverine was operated on by a surgeon who, because of a fatal error, had lost his license to practice in California. He changed states, was hired again, and made the same error on Wolverine.
I learned about this from Tucker Goodrich, who has been corresponding with the author and told me something remarkable:

He’s eating a paleo with raw milk diet.  The other transplant patients he knows are all eating the modern American diet and dying of infections; he’s been infection-free for two years.