The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Given "meat" was a human dietary staple for a million years, and "grain" has been a dietary staple for (some for) 100k, both have dozens of useful dietary components with complex effects, and "inflammatory" in this context means "some response to harmful stimuli", and the scientific backing for their inflammation being, variously, observational diet-survey studies and questionable in vitro experiments - the claim that "meat and grain are inflammatory" isn't very useful.
Similarly, the claimed antioxidants in black tea and ginger also coexist with dozens of other compounds (although not useful ones), their antioxidant efficacy was demonstrated in in vitro studies with little relevance to human consumption (as distribution and metabolism significantly affects those compounds), said antioxidant effect has no proven relationship to whatever the claimed inflammatory mechanism of grain or meat was, and even if those antioxidants were effective, they'd be much less efficient at preventing oxidative damage than the evolved biological mechanisms for doing so - like catalase, glutathione, superoxide dismutase - complex, finely tuned proteins, as well as others.
So - evening, naturally.
synthetic antioxidants can be more potent than the endogenous ones
many popular polyphenols not only act as direct antioxidants but upregulate the production of some of the endogenous ones.
this is of course technically true, but not true of the 'healthy antioxidants' people refer to. any specific examples you mean?
That seems unlikely to be relevant to health overall? I suspect the studies supporting this are not good.
I mean vitamin E and C are quite weak but there are plenty more interesting ones that are semi-popular.
I'm pretty sure a few popular polyphenols are more potent than GSH. I mean I haven't checked since a long time but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that EGCG (from tea) is more potent or equipotent.
Haha funny. What could be more relevant to your health than the thing that drives 90% of your body degradation, the multiplier of our decrepitude, the root cause of ageing, oxidative stress!
You have no idea what this evoke in my mind, I have read more than 10000 papers in pharmacology, including a few thousands in gerontology. Oxidative stress is the root cause and the co-factor to most age related conditions/diseases to exists. Even more, it is a cofactor in most human diseases.
There is nothing that is more relevant to your health, and there is nothing that is supported by as many corroborating studies on earth.
Now if your question was more about polyphenols than oxidative stress in general, I don't see a salient distinction.
The potency of some is comparable or superior to the endogenous antioxidants and their upregulation of them is indeed relevant.
However an optimal antioxidant prophylaxis does not necessarily involve polyphenols, they are good candidates though.
The potency of an antioxidant does not matter that much in practice as there are even more important criteria, such as:
the half-life, many antioxidants have bad half life, however their upregulation of endogenous ones, such as does the prodrug NAC, do last a long time.
the tissue dispersion, you want liphophilic ones and hydrophilic ones, or at least an amphiphilic.
reactive specie specialization, such as the key role of SOD for superoxides.
oral bioavailability, e.g. EGCG needs omega-3 and vit C for absorption and maybe piperine.
not paradoxically being pro-oxidative in various body conditions, a common phenomenon
One of the most potent antioxidant all arround is emoxypine, which not so surprisingly is btw the most potent anti-hangover agent.
The most neutral and effective mainstream antioxidant to take is NAC (gsh)
But why stop there?
NAC is a potent endogenous antioxidant.
however the limitation with antioxidants is that they dilute in your body and therefore are everywhere but in small quantity.
For various reasons, including antioxidative stress, you can't litterally saturate your body with antioxidants and therefore their effectiveness, while real, is often mild.
Some researchers have made a brilliant observation, 98% of our oxidative stress is generated in the mitochondria, as a byproduct of oxy(gen) energy generation.
The other observation to make is that the mitochondria respirate and that it is cyclycally, the only membrane in the human body to be electronically negatively charged.
Based on that observation, via an electron donor, they have been able to design a substance that specifically enter, magnetically, into the mitonchondria and accumulate in it.
Therefore for the first time in medecine history, we can saturate the mitochondria with an antioxidant, SkQ1, the biggest disruption of the century, which is empirically found to be 1000000 times more potent than NAC.
SkQ1 prevents alzeihmer, parkinson, tumors, and most age related diseases, in vivo.
Yeah, that would be relevant. But looking at wiki for causes of aging, 'oxidative stress' is one of many. And different kinds of oxidative stress need different responses!
If you've read so many papers, can you point me to a review that backs up your claims?
When asked which specifically, you said "pretty sure a few polyphenols" and "wouldn't be surprised ... EGCG". Any sources? Because I highly doubt.
Is SkQ1 really a bigger disruption than ... sequencing the human genome, or human gene editing? Have you heard an ad for a scam medical product before? "The Atomic-Magnetic Nebulizer cures coughs, colds, canker sores, coagulation, cephalization, carcinization, and cataplexy! One of a kind! Only $99.99.99, terms and conditions may apply."
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So, the grains in common use 20k years ago are not the same as today. Most common grains eaten today are inflammatory, causing oxidative stress.
Ancient humans ate a variety of fibers and plant matter consistently, which we do not. They may very well have combined natural anti-inflammatory herbs etc with large meals. Garlic and meat is a good example. Your comment is not useful to my question. Antioxidants from green tea and cocoa are healthy, and my question is whether the combination of these healthy natural “fighters” of oxidative stress with exogenous anti-inflammatory compounds is good for health.
I suppose, on revisiting my question, it’s a good idea to combine inflammatory food with anti-inflammatory plants as this is how most ancient societies cooked
The idea of doing an opposite mechanism to fight a given toxicity is trivial and indeed a good one in theory.
People have a fuzzy understanding when they talk about inflammation though.
One would be symptoms of exogenous toxicity such as indeed oxidative stress. But that is not per se what inflammation denote, it denotes an autoimmune toxic but potentially useful reaction, mostly mediated via some Interleukins, TNF and IFN.
I'm not talking about inflammative or toxic/oxidative food but I don't think long term anti-inflammatory is consensually a sound strategy for increasing lifespan. After all in most cases autoimmunity is supposedly useful.
However you should at least take everyday potent antioxidants to increase your lifespan/healthspan.
Essentially Skq1 + nac coadministred.
SkQ1 is the discovery of the century but it needs nac to cancel its ironically prooxidative effect on mitochondria bioenergetics.
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I agree! I'm a big fan of ancient grains. But
This is mostly meaningless without a ton more context. Many critical biological processes cause oxidative stress, which is why we have catalase, peroxidases, etc. To claim they cause more of a specific type of oxidative stress, or do so in a specific way, might be interesting, but requires actually making that claim. And "black tea and ginger" are not going to prevent the kinds of 'oxidative stress' that they might cause.
Again, agree! But
They aren't so by functioning as 'antioxidants', because of the reasons above
No one claims that the oxidative stress from modern grains are healthy. Oxidative stress from eating is generally always considered unhealthy. The stress from exercise is healthy so that your body repairs muscle damage. The endogenous antioxidants are not sufficient for combatting the spike in oxidative stress from eating which is why fasting and food sources that reduce meal-related oxidative stress are correlated to health
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "oxidative stress from modern grains" - what specific kinds of oxidative stress do modern grains cause, with some evidence? Maybe connect the 'food sources that reduce meal-related oxidative stress' to specific dietary antioxidants, with studies linking those to health? And for 'correlated with health' - large observational studies observing correlations between diet and health are not great evidence, and multiple of them often report inconsistent results!
From wikipedia
The rest of the section has more on ways 'antioxidants are good' might not be accurate
The systems are more complex than scientists think which is why you shouldn’t supplement exogenous antioxidants outside of their natural form. Nuts consumption is strongly tied health, E supplements are not. Natural vitamin c is healthy, taking 2000mg will negate your exercise for that day.
Re E: https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/truth-about-vitamin-e-vitamin-e-safer-implied
Surely you don’t believe that the endogenous antioxidant mechanism is sufficient for health, because then the inflammation from refined grains would be easily dealt with, right? So the only question then is whether natural exogenous antioxidants taken with inflammatory food reduces the inflammatory effect temporally
I don't think the harms of refined grains occurs primarily via 'inflammation' that needs to be treated by 'exogenous antioixdants'. When you say "Strongly tied to health", I think you're referring to methodologically poor studies.
I actually agree that vitamin supplementation is in many ways worse than eating whole, natural foods.
Do you have a source for this?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4001759/
There’s a lot, just search “vitamin c blunts/reduces exercise/adaption”. Plug them into scihub to access for free
Also check out the studies on hormesis /
That particular study showed no performance harm of vitamin c/e. It showed some effect on markers, but that often doesn't mean what you think.
I looked for a systematic review
This doesn't mean it doesn't, and I'm sure there are plenty of positive individual studies, but does mean I'm not sold.
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