Understanding Metabolic Heath & Healing

(Geoffrey) #1

Help me to understand just what is metabolic health exactly.
Are all metabolic heath issues curable or treatable through nutrition?
Are allergies, such as pollen, ragweed, considered a metabolic ailment?
Is asthma metabolic and treatable through diet?
I don’t suffer from any of this but in seeing how much the carnivore diet can heal and reverse so many ailments I was just wanting a better understanding of metabolic ailments and how nutrition influences us.
This was a recent topic that was brought up to me on a different forum and got me to wondering about allergies and asthma in relationship to our metabolic heath.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #2

Metabolic health is the ability to survive and thrive. So not just no ill effects, but also a sense of vitality and life. The best measure is to look at mitochondria. If they are damaged, then our metabolism is unhealthy, and this can be manifested in various ways. If they are healthy, they are busy joining and separating, making ATP, making baby mitochondria (mitogenesis), influencing gene expressions, ensuring that the cell dies (apoptosis) at the end of its lifespan (instead of becoming a cancer), and so forth.

If the issue is strictly metabolic, then nutrition plays a big role in healing. However, there is certain damage that cannot be reversed. For example, early Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed, but past a certain point, the damage is done, and while proper nutrition can help a great deal, it is not going to heal the damage. (Or, even if it does heal, nerve healing takes such a long time that it might as well be irreversible when it’s bad enough. Does that make sense?) In other words, all metabolic diseases are generally treatable by the proper human diet, but some are not always curable by it.

Asthma, in my experience, can be helped to some degree by keto, but not all that much. Other factors play a much bigger role.

By the way, researchers are starting to identify almost all (if not all) of our chronic diseases as metabolic damage. This includes most cancer (Thomas Seyfried says all cancers without exception, in fact), Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, autism, gender dysphoria, eating disorders, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and a host of other conditions not generally thought of before as metabolic in nature. And while there can be a genetic predisposition to many of these conditions, a proper diet can keep most of the population safe from developing them, and an improper diet is likely to bring them on.

(Geoffrey) #3

Great explanation Paul, thanks. The initial explanation was insightful and I’ll have to marinate on it for a good while to fully Grok it.
The rest of it was something that I was on track with but was hoping for validation.

(Edith) #4

I think allergies can improve on keto/carnivore because we have either removed something from our diets as a result of following this WOE such as wheat or because the anti-inflammatory properties of keto lighten the loads and make us less sensitive to the allergens when we are exposed.

(Geoffrey) #5

I don’t have any allergies except to one medication and I have no desire to test it against carnivore. The results might not end well. :dizzy_face:‍:dizzy:

Pre carnivore I would get some itchy eyes at times and need some medicated eye drops but it was nothing severe.
I’ll be curious to see what happens this spring.

#6

I am, just now, reading a book called “Brain Energy”, Christopher Palmer. He develops exactly the theory PaulL has, as always, so eloquently written about.

I need to finish the book first, though for now (I emphasise this) I have the impression that, at times, he wants to explain too much, as in: it can be that metabolism can influence all sorts of diseases, but it’s a very big logical step to infer from this that all diseases can be reconducted to and find their roots in metabolic issues. Also, I see a lot of correlation mentioned, but we all know that correlation does not equal causation, so the fact that, say, people with certain psychotic episodes tend to have certain metabolic issues does not mean that it is the metabolic issue that caused the psychotic episode.

I suffer (from birth) from bronchial and allergic asthma. I have, up to now, not noticed any benefit from my 10-11 weeks of ketogenic diet.

Ask me again in 3 years’ time, but I am not holding my breath…

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #7

However, Dr. Palmer is not talking about all diseases, only the chronic mental health and motor-neuron diseases that have been plaguing us in a major way since the advent of the dietary guidelines. In fact, all the diseases he discusses can be shown to be the result of mitochondrial toxicity and a lack of energy in parts of the brain.

Similarly, Dr. Thomas Seyfried believes that all cancers are the result of metabolic damage. It has long been believed that the cause of cancer is genetic, but experiments have shown that the mitochondrial damage comes first. In fact, it has been shown that when the mutated nucleus of a cancer cell is put into a normal cell, the cell remains normal, whereas when the mitochondria from a cancer cell are transferred into a cell with an unmutated nucleus, the cell becomes cancerous. And treatments with a very low-carb diet have been shown to have beneficial effects on various types of cancers, with or without radiation or chemotherapy. There are several case studies of patients wilth glioblastoma multiforme, a particularly aggressive form of cancer (of the brain), in which a ketogenic diet has helped produce amazing results.

Infectious diseases are a completely different story. A ketogenic diet can help strengthen the immune system, so we can fight off an infection more easily, but it doesn’t address the disease directly, because infectious diseases are the result of pathogens, not metabolic damage.

#8

Thanks Paul, again let me read and digest the book.

This is very interesting. I also knew that the combination of fast and chemotherapy is being researched, which aligns with what you say about keto diet. In both cases, stronger general health of the sane cell and sugar deprivation of the cancer cells increases the effect of chemotherapy.