Meat allergy from tick bites is on the rise–and US doctors are in the dark | Hacker News Reader

Meat allergy from tick bites is on the rise–and US doctors are in the dark

arstechnica.com

50 pointsranger20721 comments

I recently got tested for Alpha-Gal due to some issues when I eat meat (autoimmune flare ups). It came back negative, and a random comment on here referring to Neu5gc gave me another place to look, which seems to be helping (I’m essentially vegan + fish now).

As far as my doc not being prepared, he was 100% onboard with investigating it. I probably got lucky.

> vegan + fish

According to Wikipedia's table (and the term's page itself) that is still 'pescatarian': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Varieties

I looked it up because I happened across the table recently and wondered what this was called - I did think pescatarian implied dairy & eggs. (So maybe you were right, 'vegan + fish' is easier than 'pescatarian w. dairy or eggs'...)

I mainly specify for ease; not a ton of people know what pescatarian is. Vegan + fish is easy to parse for your average person.

When I was pescatarian I found very few people knew what that was, so I cut the seafood and became vegetarian. Now I don’t have to explain myself.

> I did think pescatarian implied dairy & eggs

Agreed, GP is technically pescatarian (no meat except fish, dairy/eggs are irrelevant), but pescatarianism is usually used to indicate a subset of vegetarianism not veganism, so "vegan + fish" conveys more information to me.

Most docs respond to logic and reason. I suspect the challenge is differentiating “I want to try this crazy fad with little scientific backing” from “I’d like to explore this as a possible path of treatment. Here’s the science and what we need to do to support this line of inquiry”

So much this. Bringing peer reviewed papers and the like was a major factor in how I’ve managed my care and my sons Chemotherapy.

Radiolab had a great episode about it in 2016:

https://radiolab.org/podcast/alpha-gal

Surprised nobody's made an indie movie in which bioterrorists get the material from.these ticks into the food supply somehow.

I can imagine it working either taken way too seriously like a Tom Clancy script, or super tongue-in-cheek and parody-like.

I don't know the specifics, but a tick bite is apparently the reason Wendell from level1techs is rapidly losing weight. :(

I think its his diet, more specifically. Sucks that it's forced on him, but at least it's only a second-order effect.

I think I’d rather get Lyme disease than a meat allergy.

Idk, one of my relatives had it and he suffered from back spasms and locked joints for about a decade after his diagnosis. Lyme disease is no joke

I was vegetarian for over 7 years, and I have since switched to a carnivore diet. I have had no issues so far, and I have lost 13 lbs. and packed on more lean muscle.

On the dark side of things, alpha-gal is not found in primate and human and human meat, so along with the cordyceps zombie apocalypse, it's not looking good for humans ;)

That is a dramatic change. What caused to go make the switch? Do you miss being a vegetarian?

I was a vegetarian while living in Macau, China for over 6 years and a year in Indonesia as well as when I came back to the US, so for about 8 years actually. It was very hard to avoid "vegetarian" meals with animal broth in them. I got down to 178 lbs and I was ripped, but I felt I was hitting a wall in going beyond a certain amount of effort whether reps with push ups, pull ups, or running times. I also felt like I had a brain cloud after a little exertion. I have been experiencing a much more keener sense of alertness, focus, and clarity and more strength endurance while on the carnivore diet. My body craves my late morning meal and I have not tired of the basic menu choice. I am also very interested in how a vegetarian diet that is soy-based (tempeh was a favorite, my wife's Indonesian), beans, legumes, or dominated by a few choice vegetables can lead to build up of an unwanted substance. Isoflavones (phytoestrogens) from soy products and consuming certain quantities, or like broccoli having thiocyanates that can lead to issues with the thyroid. My mom had thyroid issues, and I am hyper, so I flagged this. The more I read about the bad in vegetables rather than the "you can never get too many vegetables" mentality made me not take for granted that vegetables are healthy. Moderation in everything, however, a strictly beef diet with very low sugar intake seems to be doing wonders for my health. I remember eating a lot of cashews and I was told that the antioxidant oxalic acid is good for you, however, 3 to 4 oz. a day is too much and is bad for the kidneys. I loved cashews!

That's an interesting story, thanks for sharing. An all meat diet sounds pretty extreme to me, but I know it's gotten popular lately and it seems to work for some people.

One thing to beware of is the high levels of omega-6 fats, in particular linoleic acid, that are found in conventional pork and chicken fat. Especially in America. Traditionally raised pigs shouldn't be an issue if you don't have a badly compromised metabolism. Accumulating too much can kick your metabolism into a lower gear, never mind the other issues that come with omega-6s.

Edit: Well I went and wrote a blog post I guess..

While some seem immune to this, there are a lot of former carnivores on reddit that ran into this, myself included. My story is basically:

1) I went keto, and dropped from 230 to below 180 pounds over the course of 9 months. Easiest shit I ever did. 2) Maintained that for a year. Also Easy 3) Eventually I discovered that the less fiber I ate, the better my lifelong constipation issues, and I just kinda naturally move into carnivore. Cool, right? 4) After maintaining another year, I started gaining weight again and having my depression come back. WTF

My set food rotation had a lot of fatty pork and chicken in it, which was persistently enjoyable and easy and quick to prepare (I cook everything on the stovetop, or oven). And hey, in the keto/carnivore world, animal fat is good, right? Well fuck me, when I eventually began to suspect the the metabolic effects of my food (which can be thought of as a pile of chemical signals) and took an omegaquant test I had astronomical omega-6 levels:

---------------------- | MinRef | MaxRef | Mine

Omega-6 Fatty Acids | 0.262% | 0.435% | 0.4224%

----Linoleic (18:2n6) | 0.150% | 0.304% | 0.2534%

Omegaquant tests is basically a test of blood phospholipids, I forget the specific part. It provides a snapshot of what kind of fats that are in circulation from either external intake or internal release over a recent period of time. Something like 1-2 weeks maby? Don't quote me on that. The values do not reflect the content of your stored visceral fat. Like most tests, the values don't have any inherent meaning, you have to correlate the values with how well an organism is doing.

>From https://omegaquant.com/faq/

>The reference ranges are provided simply to give an idea of how these values compare to a large number of others taken from a relatively healthy population. In the case of the dried blood spot assay, the reference range was taken from approximately 75,000 dried blood spots analyzed at OmegaQuant between 2015-2019. No information regarding the state of health of any of these individuals is known. The reference range encompasses 99% of the individuals in their respective populations. Although “average,” these are not necessarily “optimal” levels, i.e., target levels or levels that one should attempt to achieve.

That said, it's pretty reasonable that omega-6s with their pretty well established range of possible bad effects, is probably not what I want to be bumping up against the roof on. For comparison, most that took the test on reddit from what I recall seemed to be in the .30-.36 range, with only a handful above that.

So while monogastric animals seem to bio-accumulate omega-6s from their feed, ruminants seem to resist accumulation (possibly due to their large bacteria filled stomachs converting it?) despite the high omega-6 feed we give them. So I went all beef for a while, roughly the same calories. The firmer an animal fat is as room temperature, the more saturated it is, and the more resistant it is to rancidity. Pork fat can have so much omega-6 that it become soft and slimy, and can be graded lower or outright rejected by processors. My weight quickly stabilized, and my depression went away after a month. Unfortunately, like the others have found, the weight I gained sits around the gut and seems very persistent and hard to lose without prolonged calorie restriction, which itself risks lowering metabolism more.

As much as I like beef... there's no way I can just eat that. I eventually started playing around with adding carbs back, like potatoes and green apples, which I've found I can tolerate pretty reasonable amounts. Bread, beans and oats have to be limited or I get constipation issues again. I also have a fair amount of dairy, mostly cheese or sour cream. I've been able to sit at 195-200 pounds the entire time, and eventually started exercising, keeping the same weight... but at least converting stuff to muscle.

Wow, thanks for sharing that. So far so good for me. I mainly eat beef with very little chicken if any. My blood work is good at the present. I try and buy a high-fat steak or the 80/20 ground beef. The butcher told me they can't put anything higher in fat on the shelves than 80/20 (lean/fat) ratio. It reminds me when I always wanted regular fat yogurt back in the 90s and early 2000s and could only find low-fat this or that. But they sure didn't skimp on the added sugars!

I grew up mainly eating meat and potatoes with an Irish mom and Ukrainian Dad! I don't eat pork as a Muslim. I find if I cheat and eat potatoes or pasta, I feel it right away. I am exercising regularly 3 to 4x per week at the boxing gym. At age 59, by BP is now ranging 118-122/68-74 with a 7-day resting HR of 59.

I guess dinosaur isn’t “meat” anymore? I.e. chicken.

I'm a lazy vegetarian, but this sounds terrible.

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