Brain's Dumped DNA May Lead to Stress, Depression
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
It is already known that a wide range of disorders, inside and outside of the brain, are linked to inflammation and also should be categorized as mitochondrial disorders.
Unfortunately, when these two are put together, you end up with an inability for doctors to tell patients they have an inflammation problem: all the tests say negative (I've even met people where this is true, yet they clearly have obvious symptoms of it). However, when you put the patients on a strict anti-inflammation diet and lifestyle, the symptoms go away, as if by magic (and since doctors never recommend regimes that work, patients themselves have to go out and do it themselves; without proper guidance, this has mixed results).
That said, surprisingly common advice works for a wide range of people: avoid foods that interfere with your body's ability to engage autophagy (such as grains and sugars; for some people this means a strict but clean keto diet), regular one-meal-a-day intermittent fasting (helps maintain a state of regular autophagy), stop being overweight (the first two help a lot with this), regular sleep cycles and enough sleep (the previous three help with this), and regular exercise (HIIT is most effective for the results required to prolong life; and all the previous suggestions free up time and energy to fit this into your lifestyle, where for many, it wouldn't have fit before).
I've never seen a doctor in the field ever recommend any of these, yet the past decade of science has been entirely focused on these because of how effective they are to treat common (and dangerous) diseases. There is a disconnect between what we know and what is practiced.
My personal experience says otherwise. Whenever I have tried to reduce carbohydrate intake my system goes haywire. I suffer constipation, body aches, overall weakness in body during night while sleeping, I sleep worse. I workout every day and I have realized carbs are extremely important (even though I try to take plenty of protein). When I resume carbs most of the problems I cited above, go away.
Supplement with electrolytes.
And eating too many grams of protein causes gluconeogenesis.
I personally have no problems with a keto diet, and I feel much better and less bloated. But people respond differently to it. If you feel it doesn't work for you, don't do keto.
People do tons of things that are unhealthy but don't lead to immediate death. Loads of people smoke for years without dropping dead as well.
Parts of the two groups mentioned above have been on keto since the 1930s. A diet that's about a century old can't really be categorized as a fad. And while there have been oodles of studies highlighting the dangers of the western diet, which is killing millions, I haven't seen the same for keto.
Of course, there are many confounding factors here. But it's indisputable that keto works in improving epilepsy sufferers' lives.
More than 10 years ago I did HIIT for running. After warm up (20 km walk to the running path) I started with walking 2-3 minutes and then running as fast as I could for 30 seconds. The first times felt like I would die. It was hard to breathe, and a lot of pollen in the air did not help.
The walk and run is 1 cycle. When beginning the training, the cycles start at a low number of repetitions (1-2). The repetitions increase every time when training. So if on Monday I did 4 cycles on Wednesday I would do 5.
I started all this at the beginning of my summer vacation and after my vacation I could run 10 km without a lot of effort (when starting I could not really do even 3 km on one go). It just felt good to run. Then work started to get busy again with other people coming back from their vacations, winter came and all that which made it harder to train and to find time for it, that broke the training rhythm and I stopped.
But I was surprised at how well HIIT worked.
After some time of doing HIIT and improving, I stopped with adding repetitions and just ran in a sane pace, since it felt nice.
The disconnect has been present since the 1800's (ref: Mad in America [0]), where the Quakers got much better results in their Asylums [1] than the medical asylums. The Quakers were pushed out of the asylum business by doctors, who by the early 1900's thought their patients benefited from getting lobotomized and electrocuted.
2 days ago I saw this article from 15 years ago in /newest:
Diseases of the Mind (2003) (newsweek.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17975716
Someone noticed a link between cortisol and psychosis in the 1950's. Scientists have known since the 1970's that so-called "mental" problems are related to the metabolism, that stress impairs the metabolism, and that "mental" problems resolve with appropriate metabolic interventions. Infections are a type of stress - I think emotional stress is a more important factor for most such patients than actual infections.
[0] https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0465020143 [1] http://qmh.haverford.edu/
Stress tends to increase cortisol, which results in precursor (progesterone/pregnenolone) depletion. Progesterone/pregnenolone also become DHEA, testosterone, etc. If the body doesn't have enough raw material to produce needed hormones, many issues can accumulate.
Cortisol tends to slow thyroid function, lead to increased estrogens, and put the body in a state of degeneration. Brief states of degeneration and halting of healing/renewal processes are fine, as it's necessary to produce flight/flight energy. On the other hand, the body isn't able to heal/build if sustained.
I know enough exercise helps regulate my mood. Seems like there’s a link there somewhere.
"Oh sweet I guess I should exercise then."
Except the basis for the decision to exercise or not has already been confirmed in inumerous ways on these grounds, and it is redundant since we should expect massive stress of any sort (exercise included) to result in large cascading changes in the body.
Or the other way around, the body is so intricate that any individual biochemical pathway is unlikely to play a significant role in the whole, and so we should explain things in terms of the whole to actually learn something. The OP mentioned mood. But there are a lot of unnoticed alternative pathways at play here, why wouldn't they also have a connection to mood?
Maybe if you were in particular seeking a way to mimic exercise with drugs this kind of thing becomes more useful.
It was the basis of much practical knowledge for most of history.
He's not talking about the DNA being affected (as if it were sensitive to something), he's talking about it _causing_ effects.
If I'm missing something, please correct me. Otherwise I'll assume he misspoke.
Yes, that's what the article is about? It's explained in the second half, no? Starting at "But how was this inflammation triggered by mitochondrial DNA leaking out of cells?"
And I only point it out because, given he's an expert on the topic, it's always possible that he actually meant to say it this way and that I, being a layperson, missed something that would explain it.
1. Feel foggy, slow, like I had some alcohol, without any of the pleasant euphoria.
2. Am more likely to get into arguments.
3. Become anxious.
And it gets much worse with high-glycemic foods(sugar).
No more cheat days with ben and jerry for me :(