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Comment by nusl | Hacker News Reader

Coincidentally I recently started changing my diet to combat inflammation from my bad habits and covid recently. I've found that a combo of 16-8 intermittent fasting, no or very low sugar/processed food/high GI food intake, higher amounts of "clean" proteins, low red meat, and moderate exercise has massively improved my life. The weight loss is also surprisingly good despite being a side goal. I take and eat foods containing magnesium and potassium too but am unsure if that has helped.

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Can't +1 enough. The single best thing I've done in my entire life, for my emotional and physical health was cutting sugar and moving to IF. The pain and inflammation in my lower back serves as a stark reminder of why cheat days are not worth it. Cutting gluten also removed a huge, huge amount of inflammation for me.

Falling asleep, staying asleep, are improved. Chronic pain from inflammation is reduced, mobility increased. I've throw in some regular exercise and my body feels better at 30-something than it did ten years prior.

And my god, my skin. Nowadays if I cheat and have something sugar bomby, I can feel my face and nose get greasy an hour later. My skin and oil type are not compatible with, at the very least, processed sugar.

You mention cheat days. I cheated a bit on the weekend with a few not-terrible but also not-great things and it's had a disproportionately negative impact. Also, I forgot to mention sleep playing a big role too. I stayed up way too late and paid for it today. Also had half of a no-sugar no-alcohol drink but the gas for whatever reason really hung around for a while. Back to straight water it is. It's surprising how quickly sugar takes effect.

Seems like there is a bit of a buffer but I blew through it

The older I get, the more sidecars tack onto my pods and I'm now having to prune them with more effort

The weight loss may be the primary cause of reduced chronic inflammation, more so than any particular food choice.

Diet and lifestyle ( 'brand' name is probably not good when it's your food.....)

That's possible yeah. I worked this out over a longer period of time, testing adding/removing things and intentionally eating "trigger" foods to see if it actually causes issues or was just a temp problem or some sort of mental trick.

Same here, but I opted for the carnivore diet.

Interesting but you're going in the exact wrong direction. "There's evidence that diets high in red meat and processed meats may contribute to inflammation."

Is that true for unprocessed meats like steak, too? Stats predominantly reflecting a diet consisting of pizza, sandwiches, burgers (chased down with soda and/or beer) are irrelevant, if we’re talking about carnivore.

I know. It may well be so, but I'm willing to try it because I don't find "may contribute" to be a strong deterrent, even supposing it's not wrong. There are many people with various inflammations that have found the carnivore diet to be very effective, (e.g., see Mikhaila Peterson). It may be that red meat is bad, or not entirely healthy, and the diet could still work because it's a very extreme keto and elimination diet. Elimination diets are known to work, see the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) diet. Leaving out all processed food or some vegetables could mean excluding some unknown allergenic or noxious substance to which some of us may be too sensitive to. There's also an interesting argument about it being the diet we evolved with for millions of years.

And yet you can find thousand of videos online of people who healed their lifelong health issues on carnivore eating beef and all of their inflamation is gone, so doing a reality check would be wise first.

I wanted to avoid that much red meat since it also caused problems for me, but not as obviously, so I didn't go with this. I still eat vegetables and other things, and avoid red meats about 90% of my meals, so probably not the same.

Different things work for different people though, so this thing that I came up with may only work well enough for me but not for others, and carnivore for others.

How are you measuring inflammation levels?

I can feel connective tissues and other pains that have been attributed to it by medical folk. It got pretty bad. Stress, anxiety, and other things also contribute. I noticed that it would be worse shortly after consuming high raw sugar foods or fatty/carby things like pizza, so I changed the diet over time to see what helped and didn't and ended up with this. Red meat also contributed but not as obviously/responsively. The changes I made caused these issues to slowly decrease and now pretty much entirely gone away.

What are examples of clean proteins?

Boneless-skinless chicken breast, 97/3 ground turkey, white fish, low fat/low sugar greek yogurt and other similar dairy products like Skyr.

Meat, fish and dairy have higher levels of dioxins.

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/where-does-the-arsenic-in-c...

What’s the definition of a clean protein. Do any plant proteins qualify?

what kind of improvements?

Hey. Reposting my other comment here since the reply is similar:

I can feel connective tissues and other pains that have been attributed to it by medical folk. It got pretty bad. Stress, anxiety, and other things also contribute. I noticed that it would be worse shortly after consuming high raw sugar foods or fatty/carby things like pizza, so I changed the diet over time to see what helped and didn't and ended up with this. The changes I made caused these issues to slowly decrease and now pretty much entirely gone away.

So, very minimal or no body pains in general where it used to be a lot worse. Sleep is improved, and my energy levels are more stable. I've also noticed that I don't get hungry as often, and when I do it doesn't cause mood issues like it used to. I used to be quite grumpy if I hadn't eaten in a while.

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