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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2140 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 4, 2023

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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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.

So, the grains in common use 20k years ago are not the same as today

I agree! I'm a big fan of ancient grains. But

causing oxidative stress

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.

Ancient humans ate a variety of fibers and plant matter consistently, which we do not

Again, agree! But

Antioxidants from green tea and cocoa are healthy,

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 USDA removed the table showing the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) of Selected Foods Release 2 (2010) table due to the lack of evidence that the antioxidant level present in a food translated into a related antioxidant effect in the body.[70]

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.

Natural vitamin c is healthy, taking 2000mg will negate your exercise for that day

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 /

Participants in the vitamin C and E group increased their vo2max (mean ± s.d.: 8 ± 5%) and performance in the 20 m shuttle test (10 ± 11%) to the same degree as those in the placebo group (mean ± s.d.: 8 ± 5% and 14 ± 17%, respectively)

Consequently, vitamin C and E supplementation hampered cellular adaptations in the exercised muscles, and although this did not translate to the performance tests applied in this study

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

Vitamin C and/or E did not attenuate aerobic exercise induced improvements in maximal aerobic capacity (𝑉O2max) (SMD -0.14, 95% CI: -0.43 to 0.15, P = 0.35) or endurance performance (SMD -0.01, 95% CI: -0.38 to 0.36, P = 0.97). There were also no effects of these supplements on lean mass and muscle strength following RT (SMD -0.07, 95% CI: -0.36 to 0.23, P = 0.67) and (SMD -0.15, 95% CI: -0.16 to 0.46, P = 0.35), respectively. There was also no influence of age on any of these outcomes (P > 0.05). These findings suggest that vitamin C and/or E does not inhibit exercise-induced changes in physiological function. Studies with larger sample sizes and adequate power are still required.

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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