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Comment by ganzuul | Hacker News Reader

I have had to deal with inexplicable anger and irritability for a long time. It is possible this traces back to being misdiagnosed and prescribed 5 antibiotic recipes back-to-back as a child.

Long and tedious story short, when I cut milk, gluten/short carbs/whatever pesticide they use for wheat, and excess sugar from e.g. prefabbed food from my diet I gained 10kg and my life basically turned around. Turns out having your gut constantly inflamed is bad for your mental health.

I have missed so many opportunities because of this. It's not right.

ED: Apparently I need to point out that one possible cause may be that antibiotics killed the gut bacteria I needed to process milk, wheat and sugar. If so, this malady could be solved with a less revolting alternative to fecal transplants.

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mental health and gut bacteria seem to be heavily correlated. Anecdotally, if I don't eat sugary "reward" food I tend to feel better. That is also why I adopted intermittent fasting. I tend to fell better mentally if I fast 24h once a week.

I have heard about fasting being helpful... Perhaps I should seek out some vegans to one-up to motivate me. :b

This can be a vicious cycle, and one which I'm actively struggling to break. I feel terrible because I eat junk food, and I eat junk food because I feel terrible. "Just stop eating junk food" is easier said than done in this case, unfortunately :|

How exactly do you fast? Is it like the extreme fasting of muslims where you don't eat or drink anything from dawn to dusk, or is it like the hindu fasting where you only eat fruits and vegetables?

When people refer to intermittent fasting, they generally mean a water fast which means you're not eating anything and only drinking water for your fasting session.

water and coffee only, from dinner to dinner

If I remember right, drinking coffee causes your body to lose water faster - so drinking coffee and water seem kind of contradictory.

While caffeine is a mild diuretic, it’s a myth that drinking coffee (or tea) causes dehydration – something I only learned in the last year or two. The BBC has a decent article on this topic: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140402-are-coffee-and-tea-...

The best and most scientific take i've seen on this is by Dr. Jason Fung in "The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets" (https://www.amazon.com/Obesity-Code-Unlocking-Secrets-Weight...)

He specifically references Muslim/Buddhist/Jewish fasts but clarifies that for the purposes of intermittent fasting, water,tea,coffee are OK.

> if I don't eat sugary "reward" food I tend to feel better

Within the past few years (I'm 48), eating a lot of sugary foods would leave me feeling like I was hungover the next day. Headaches were especially common 12-18 hours after lots of sugar.

You can have yeast growing in your gut too; your own personal micro-brewery.

fasting is bad for your gall bladder. fast with care!

thanks for the heads up, I'll be on the lookout for symptoms. I do believe though that the benefits far outweigh the risk in this case.

Interesting... I had the same experience recently.

I took 3 (increasingly more powerful) antibiotics in a short period until the docs found one that worked.

Then I spent the following days feeling super stressed/anxious for no apparent reason, but figured out it could be a side-effect of the meds. It got better though.

Also, since then, I can't stand cow milk or cheese. Learned that goat cheese is fine, for some reason.

> Learned that goat cheese is fine, for some reason

My wife gets itchy (enough that she needs antihistamines) if she has cow's milk or cow's cheese. Goat's milk? Not a problem.

Allergies are weird.

Did you experience abdominal pain before cutting these items out of your diet?

I had pain everywhere. I thought it was normal.

Wow I'm happy for you that you were able to find relief via dietary changes

It's something of a last resort. Wheat and milk are so cheap that they put it as an additive in everything, so when I buy groceries it's like I'm weeding through isles and isles of poison.

It's like I have returned to a hunter-gatherer way of life, where eating the wrong berries can be a disaster.

Glyphosate?

Who knows. When I eat too much wheat I feel like I have a hangover for two days. Over here they started adding selenium to the soil in 60s, and my grandmother tells me no one complained about bread making them sick before that.

Perhaps it's that additive that makes tractor fuel oil exhaust blue, or too much selective breeding without thought to nutrition, or some kind of preservation practice which 99% of people don't have a problem with while the remaining 1% didn't seem important to someone with a rubber stamp.

Or the 1% was unknown

An awful lot is being written about it these days. I hope we come to the root of the issue, whatever it may be.

Where is "over here" for you?

The only place I've found which has wheat which doesn't make me feel icky is Italy. And the only thing I can figure out about it is fructans (they have a finicky milling process), which seems insane.

I've been all over, and as I don't actually have celiac disease (but a very direct and obvious reaction to something in wheat; sleepy internal itchy feeling) I always try the local breads. Ukraine, Russia, Spain, etc etc all gives me the heebies. Italy's bread and pizzas mostly don't.

Finland.

I sometimes try import foods, thinking I might discover the missing piece of the puzzle. I'll keep a look out for Italian!

Keep your eyes peeled for "doppio zero" flour. Seems to be the highest quality.

Not the highest quality, just the most finely ground.

Interesting. For me it's a probablistic scale:

Coppenhagen: 100% of the what makes me feel icky immediately.

New York, London, Tel-Aviv: About 50% to feel icky.

Rome, Paris: About 25% to feel icky, usually not very icky.

Iceland: Can eat as many and as much wheat products as I want, feel great.

(Only listing places I spent enough time in to have reasonable statistics)

Following the Icelandic epihphany, I've started supplementing with sulphur (currently at 10g MSM/day and rising), and it makes otherwise-unbearable wheat much more bearable, but that's not the entire story.

Iceland has sulpher everywhere (drinking water, air, every food ..) but also has PH 8.8 drinking water - that's going to be my next experiment.

I generally drink a bunch of wine when I'm in Italy, so maybe it is the sulfur!

I was in Iceland recently, but there were so many rotten basking shark type things to eat, I don't remember having any wheat there. Also figured they probably got it from the US.

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