Simon Olesen

N. Neta wrote:
My top 3 recommendations for healthy eating:
1. No sugar
2. No processed food
3. Intermittent fasting (we eat breakfast and lunch within a 6 hour window, and fast for 18 hours until next breakfast).

I like your perspective, mine is a bit different but with much the same consequences in terms of daily choices:
1) Recognize your sugar cravings, but understand where they are coming from
Consider your body fat a power reserve, like a battery. That fat battery has between 60 and 100 times the power/gram energy capacity of a commercial lithium cell so if you carry around 25kg of fat that's the equivalent of 1.8 tons of Tesla model 3 batteries. Sweet cravings with that amount of backup power seems more likely to be a sign of faulty battery access than an actual energy need. If you crave sweets and feel tired despite having such a huge energy reserve something has to be up with that and it's a really good idea to find out why your body is making you crave fuel.
2) Be realistic with food, processed food is convenient but also tainted in unobvious ways:
If your only obligation to your shareholders were to sell as many candybars as possible would you sell candybars that actually worked well to refill a human body with energy, or would you sell broken-fuel candybars that sends the signal to the human body as if it is indeed refilling you with energy (sweet satiating dopamine) but fill it with trans fat and vegetable oils that impair human lipid metabolism so that they get the instant energy top up, but at the cost of wrecking their "battery access" meaning impaired lipid metabolism so that they soon need another candybar, and another, and another. I dislike conspiracy theories, but none the less a lot of what passes as food is damaging in really unobvious ways. However what happens to people that eat a lot of it for a long time is far from unobvious.
3)Eat intuitively, but you're not a cow so do not graze like one.
You can make a healthy person diabetic in 4 day's by giving them a glucose drop that does pumps them with carbs for 96 hours straight, humans have never had constant access to food during the day and our body is simply not designed to handle it well. Allow yourself to go hungry once in a while, it's better when you're not busy. Allow your body the best possible odd's at navigating what is good for it, that's what your tongue and sense of smell is for so don't confuse it with MSG and other frankenfoods.

Robert Lemair wrote:Anything with a high sodium level

exactly, drinking too much water flushes out electrolytes, sodium being the main one flushed, but also the easiest one to replenish.
Low sodium means the body has a hard time maintaining serum osmotic pressure and struggles to move water from extra/intra cellular space and into the bloodstream -> Edema (bloating)
Low potassium will cause the body to struggle maintaining intracellular pressure and it compensates by increasing extracellular pressure -> Edema
Low magnesium impairs circulation, which means edema becomes more prevalent further from the heart (feet)
Magnesium and potassium are a bit harder to get than sodium but important too.
If the kidneys are starved of one electrolyte it tends to sacrifice others to spare it, drinking to much water with too little electrolytes can be quite unhealthy.

It's easy to find low salt diet studies that finds it to lower blood pressure on the short term
It's ahrder to find one that does it long term (2 years+) because of the mechanism above
And it's almost impossible to find credible studies that finds a positive correlation between low salt diets and life time outcomes 2 years+ (mortality, not "risc factors")

Mark Brunnr wrote:I think we are dealing with being "consumers in a marketing society" far more than as "citizens in a healthy society" these days. Very good point about nutrient deficiencies leading to cravings, and too often we reach for the sweet/salty/fatty items that are constantly pushed at us. Our brains push the endless ads/commercials/billboards to our periphery but it still sees the messages. Our brains are smart enough to know which foods that we eat have nutrients we are lacking. I wonder if it then picks from a list of foods, and all those ads are the last thing our distracted brain recalls?

I don't know exactly how our brain knows to pick food with nutrients we are lacking, but I'm pretty much certain that food manufacturers try and shortcut that circuit in unobvious ways like:
* Carbonated drinks comes with unbound phosphoric acid which draws out electrolytes when excreted by the kidneys, and mammals are more attracted to the taste of carbonation when they are short of electrolytes, so our brain is geared to identify carbonation as a sign of electrolytes which is sensible since electrolyte concentration is largely directly proportional to the concentration of electrolytes in natural water (springs and lakes) but in the case of soft drinks we get leeched of electrolytes instead of refilled with them.
* Craving for unsaturated fatty acid foods seems to increase the more short of omega-3 fatty acids the body is, but the easily accessible food sources are actually super high on omega-6 fatty acids which compete with omega-3 fatty acids in storage and transport mechanism so the foods the body identifies as helpful ends up exacerbating the problem (and the cravings)

Mark Brunnr wrote:
Sadly taking a multivitamin in pill form without chewing short-circuits our brains ability to properly digest it. Chewing/tasting provides our brain with early signals that allows it to start producing the digestive enzymes needed to break down and absorb the nutrients we eat. While our stomach will dissolve the vitamin, I wonder if there's enough time after that for the various vitamins and minerals to be bound and fully absorbed when our body doesn't know what we just swallowed?

Yeah I completely agree, and by taking a pill with no taste we shortcircuit instinctive body regulation mechanisms that are designed to identify and seek vitamins that we are short of in order to keep us properly nourished.
I can imagine a squirrel seeking nuts and beetles or whatever it needs when it is short of something, but I really cannot imagine that same squirrel able to reliable pick one vitamin capsule instead of the other and doing so in the right ratio, it's just too artificial and disconnected from natural regulation mechanisms.

oops i forgot the body's most important natural anti-inflammatory agent, the anti-oxidant glutathione, and the one antioxidant the body can actually regenerate in meaningful amounts!

So of course it's not talked about in the doctors office, much better to sell people steroids (artificial stress hormones like cortisol, say hello moonface!) than reinforce the body's own natural system to safeguard itself from chemical attack. Anyway the body is not great at absorbing it directly from food, but quite good at absorbing the amino acid precursers, the most important one being cysteine. Healthy and unstressed animals have higher cysteine (and ultimately glutathione) levels much like we do, and it's an amino acid we can generate in theory, but in practice it's only viable in miniscule levels.

Homocysteine is supposed to be this big boogeyman that people get from eating red meat, but ofcourse that's a sham, elevated homocysteine is indeed associated with all autoimmune (inflammatory) disorders, but the actual explanation is that high homocysteine level is as a consequence of the body's failure to convert homocysteine to the crucial anti-oxidant glutathione which has severe consequences. In general it's because of insufficient B12, B6, B2 (and B1 in circumvent ways)
Methionine <-> homocysteine <-> cysteine


So homocysteine is not just some random villain meateaters get from their unsavory distaste for franken-food-replacements, it's a basic component of the most important anti-inflammatory agent we have to defend ourselves from detritus clogging up everything, joints, veins and cells.

Larger schema here, bottom left is the glutathione recycling:


You would think that the obvious first measure of medicine would be to support that system, and diagnose what it is that sabotages it's attempt to keep us healthy, but NO, for 50 years it's been headlines like this: The Homocysteine Paradox
As if it's the most flappergasting surprise that when serum overflows with one vital component block_A while having a complete absence of composite product A_B it just wont help to dump all the block_A's in a black hole high on drugs!

It makes as much sense as it would if a foreman inspecting a building site, saw a huge pile of bricks and a very rickety house and immediately concluded that all those bricks must be very bad bricks and spend great energy, money and public relations babble on justifying getting rid of every single evil brick pile, for 50 years! And then write another article marveling on how wobbly houses are even though he spent his life getting rid of all the "bad" bricks lol.

Long story short: Cysteine is important so don't jump-scare your chicks or their eggs are going to be starved of the very essence that keep your knee's lubricated and your arteries flowing freely, and also get your vitamins, and stay off the seed oil so poor maligned homocysteine has a chance to regenerate and drive glutathione instead of getting knocked out for good.
If you did run out of happy chicks and welfare cows I guess you can buy NAC as a supplement, But NAC alone is not enough, needs zinc, magnesium, B vitamins and sensible levels of related amino acids.

Rebecca Marcella wrote:sometimes it's just an uphill battle to get ENOUGH food and energy into my body let alone the RIGHT food.

I am so frustrated by a system that is not evolved for someone like me. I have a hunter gatherer's brain. I like to meander, pick things up, talk, move around and spend as minimal time as possible being a "productive member of society". I wish I could go back in time and keep some of the aspects of modern life like medicine  while keeping the aspects of indigenous societies that we evolved for like walking, gathering, tight knit social communties, and real fucking food.

I completely agree, especially the "science" behind "vegetable" oils and powdered eggs/milk is so absurdly warped in the media and official dietary rhetoric that it makes it difficult for me to have a sensible relationship with what I put in my mouth. I do get it from the manufacturers point of view, that science is a part of marketing, especially for products that doesn't taste good, but it's a headfuck to deal with!

I think we are drilled to have a bad relationship with food, drilled to think that our own instinctive inclination to pick what we need for nutrients is "unwholesome" that we should be discouraged from connecting with your own body and it's need for real sustenance but I'm certain that at least in my case it was unhealthy for me to disconnect from myself like that.

I used to have super strong cravings for chocolate, like if I woke up early I could open several doors to reach the kitchen and find the chocolate without really waking up and remembering it. Turn's out it was not just because I was "bad" or "gluttonous" instead I was desperately short on magnesium and dark chocolate does contain a whole lot of magnesium, even if it is difficult to absorb. And once I started adding magnesium flakes to my water in order to get magnesium like we have done for a million years that craving went away completely, and also my health improved immensely.

It's so strange that we are not taught to read and understand our own cravings as a strong sign that we need something and that that something is probably not a daily mountain of marabou!

I know for a fact that my own sense of taste changed a LOT when I started getting proper magnesium, in the beginning the same flakes tasted lightly sweet with a faint bitter kick and now the bitter/salty taste is just overwhelming when taking a sip of that same old concentration.

Why is nobody talking about stuff like this anywhere?
And why did buffalo walk straight across the US only to stop and lick on some stones and not others. Didn't anyone whisper Mmmmmm Marabou to those primitive beasts, why has noone removed those rocks, made some slick them chocolate adds for ruminants and a confusing fog of dietfads, mood stabilizers and insulin to keep them addicted!

I've had my own runaround in the medical system, it was hard to keep my bearings through it all, I wish you all the best👍

Your milk craving makes total sense, I have it much the same way with milk but I can't tell what specific thing in it that I crave.
I used to have super strong sugar cravings, or sweet cravings really, and I think it is simply a sign of low access to energy reserves, in my case because of magnesium deficiency and insulin resistance. A lot of it stopped when I got more magnesium and went low carb but I still have a bit of it when I wake up early. Chocolate cravings were insane too and went away in a few days when I got the magnesium in other ways. So odd that nobody tell us stuff like this in school so that we grow up with the knowledge to try and self-correct deficient mineral status rather than look at it as if it's a matter of will to eat "healthy"

Props for being adventurous and giving it a try!
But maybe it's not so bad that the experiment failed, when eggs are dried the cell walls collapse from lack of pressure and the essential fatty acids stored inside and other reactive nutrients are exposed to air and heat. Oxidization of cholesterol, sphingomyelin, PUFA oils and some other components are unavoidable, even when doing it in cold conditions and low pressure a substantial proportion of the essential nutrients become quite toxic, they add TBHQ and dry eggs in seconds in the industry to limit it, but it is still a huge problem with oxidation under storage. Also TBHQ is a fat soluble toxin.

As an experiment you could try and find an ant hive you want gone and see what happens if they eat it, I don't know what the answer is but scientist have been killing rats with large doses of dehydrated eggs for a while.

Anne Miller wrote:Are there foods or herbs that help with swollen feet?  My ankles do not appear to be swollen just my feet and not the toe area, either. This has been going on for about a month and some days it is better.

I have been trying for the last year to drink as much water as possible. I know I drink at least 64 oz, plus more since I add ice.  I am sure this is probably not enough water though I am doing the best I can.  Sometimes I get so sick of water ...

Hey, usually it's a bad idea to drink water when you feel sick of drinking water, regulating water intake is a really fundamental priority to all animals, and even though we humans walk on two legs that sick feeling we get from doing such a fundamental thing is a warning sign that it might not be a good idea. Practically speaking drinking a lot of water can lead to electrolytes (and B vitamins) getting flushed out of your system, which means that intercellular potassium concentration becomes too low to exert enough osmotic pressure on extracellular fluid to maintain basic human shape (hypokalemia->edema) and it can lead to low blood natrium which forces the body to substitute other electrolytes in confusing ways in order to maintain ph and some circulation. If you feel dizzy, confused or sick of drinking water, or dizzy when standing up, please take a moment and listen to your body, does your body crave to munch on something salty? If so at least consider that the salt it craves is what it thinks it needs and consider discussing it with your doctor if he is someone you can talk with.

In general edema is an electrolyte problem and can be helped with sensible electrolytes, but that electrolyte problem might be driven by other things like diabetes, thiamine deficiency, high cortisol, PH issues, or by a combination of electrolyte problems and circulatory problems.
This guy has a decent video on signs and symptoms for edema:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZLo_-jXwPw

Hmm not sure if this is really alternative, but I know my doctor didn't talk about it:
* magnesium deficiency can drive inflammation and high cortisol, which means the body will spend less time and resources in parasympathetic mode repairing itself which leads to a number of issues including "worn down" joints but in this case the proper term would be "under-repaired joints"
* Zinc deficiency can drive immune dysregulation which can become systemic making the body more likely to attack itself
* Low stomach acid leading to malnutrition which can and will wreck pretty much anything.
* Insulin resistance is a huge one, it's a known factor in joint pain, swollen joints and systemic stress but doctors do not test for it or consider it an issue before your are so insulin resistant that your body routinely fails to produce enough insulin to keep your blood sugar in control over time, in which case they prescribe you insulin and painkillers. There is a lot you can do to keep insulin resistance down and avoid insulin/sugar spikes, both components of that spike causes systemic damage and impairs cell repair.