I’ve felt my best on a carnivore diet but couldn’t keep a stable weight so I fear it’s the equivalent of saying I felt my best when I was slowly dying of hunger? ha
I have done 23andMe where can I look for those genes?
I have done 23andMe where can I look for those genes?
One of the subject genes is called MTHFR. It reduces the methylation of Folic acid by ~30-40%, depending on which paper you read. Tons of people have this. It was this AND a gluten sensitivity which resulted in me having actually low levels of usable folate.
To find out if you have this go to this link: https://you.23andme.com/tools/data/?query=MTHFR. You can enter various other SNPs there if you find any of interest.
You can download your DNA there and enter it in another site that can tell you the other genes that could affect this sort of thing.
There are other things that could affect other people in unique ways so of course this isn't the only one.
What I did is ask Claude "why would eating meat make me feel dramatically better" and it told me about these genes. And then I went to 23andme where you can see individual SNPs and then I searched for other related SNPs.
I also seem to have non-Celiac gluten sensitivity which affects my absorption of Folate (and other things if I have recently eaten gluten which was almost always until recently) which is why this was a problem for me. And zero doctors or companies have ever developed a test for this or even take it seriously, including allergists and immunologists that I saw.
> Despite lots of research – and lots of buzz – the existing scientific data doesn’t support the vast majority of claims that common MTHFR variants impact human health.
https://blog.23andme.com/articles/our-take-on-the-mthfr-gene
Is their take on MTHFR out of date?
MTHFR as told by the internet is an alternative medicine topic. It has been abused by influencers and supplement sellers because it’s extremely common to have one of these variants. The influencers use it as an “aha!” moment because most people who go looking for it will have it.
Most of the internet advice about MTHFR is completely without basis in science. If you have one of the rarer homozygous mutations then it’s worth looking at, but it’s not the explanation for all ills that you see from influencers.
Chances are good that if you’re reading this, healthy or not, you have a MTHFR variant. It does not mean anything by itself.
Methylfolate is also used as an adjunct to antidepressants because it has some efficacy in depression in some cases. That fact is probably not coincidental to all of these reports about people feeling “better” when they start taking it. MTHFR may not even be involved at all.
There are plenty of studies showing that caloric restriction calms inflammatory responses which are responsible for the majority of common diseases. Without balancing the energy intake, I'm always slightly suspicious that any improvements with changing what I eat are actually caused by the change in how much I eat.
Example:me. Another example is https://reddit.com/user/MythicalStrength who's a strongman competitor.
> often different people report completely different dietary changes helped them
Nobody fixed T2D, (some types of) epilepsy, (some cases of) mental illness like bipolar/psychosis on high carb or high protein.
As a result, some people may find it more pleasant and easier to balance energy intake with different dietary styles.