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294: Using Targeted Nutrition to Alleviate Hormone Related Issues With Dr. Chris Masterjohn

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294: Using Targeted Nutrition to Alleviate Hormone Related Issues With Dr. Chris Masterjohn

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and this episode is a much requested round two with Dr. Chris Masterjohn. Like our first episode, we go deep on various aspects of nutrition and Chris is one of the smartest people I know when it comes to most of these topics. He earned a PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut and served as Assistant Professor of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College. He has a really amazing guide called “The Ultimate Cheatsheet” which helps you decode your own body’s nutritional needs as well as a really informative website and podcast I highly recommend both and I know that you are going to love this episode as much as I did. Chris, welcome back. Thanks for joining us again.

Chris: Thanks for having me, Katie. It’s good to be here.

Katie: Well, your first interview was so helpful. We went deep on a lot of nutritional topics, and I’ve heard from a lot of the audience how some of your tips on like pantothenic acid helping skin has been really amazing for them. And I knew I had to have you back to go deeper on different nutrients and to learn more.

And, on this episode, I’d really love to talk a little bit more women-specific because I think women potentially deal with a bunch of symptoms that men may not face because of all the hormone changes that we go through, whether it be monthly, whether it be during pregnancy. We just have a lot more going on. I think than guys do, and I know if you look at the chart, like, you guys have hormone fluctuations, but women is almost like a roller coaster every month just because we have all these hormones coming into play.

So I’d actually love to start with just, like, an overview of things that you’ve found that seem to be nutrient deficiencies related to those hormone changes each month that come with the monthly period, with ovulation. What are some things we need to know and be aware of when it comes to that?

Chris: Yeah. So my interest in this first peaked when I was talking to a consulting client of mine who was having real, bad problems with headaches. And she hadn’t identified any triggers, and so we talked about food triggers as nothing. And she didn’t offer the fact that it correlated with her menstrual cycle maybe because she didn’t think it would make any sense until I asked. And then she was like, “Yeah. They always occur on day 13. That’s when they’re the worst.” And then a couple of days before I have my period, they often occur, and they’re not quite as bad.”

And so I looked at the chart and, you know, sure enough, that corresponds to the big estrogen peak around ovulation and then the smaller estrogen peak that happens to also be balanced with more progesterone in the days leading up to menstruation. And so, you know, at the time, I was researching histamine a lot, and so the first thing I think is, “Well, let me see what estrogen does to diamine oxidase activity.” Diamine oxidase or DAO is an enzyme that you need a number of nutrients for, including B6 and copper especially, and vitamin C.

So diamine oxidase is one of the main ways that you clear histamine. And so, sure enough, estrogen massively down-regulates diamine oxidase activity. And so, I suggested to my client she should try supplementing with diamine oxidase proactively around those times of her menstrual cycle, and it works. So, you know, that was the first place that got me interested in this. But, you know, once you look into this a little bit more deeply, I think we can paint a little bit of a broader picture and one that applies to several different contexts. So one area that’s been of quite a bit of interest, I think, for years at this point has been the fact that, for reasons that no one has really identified that well, high dose vitamin B6 supplementation has been at least promising, if not often effective, in treating morning sickness associated with pregnancy.

And so it seems like the morning sickness of pregnancy must be tied in some way to something that has to do with B6. So one hypothesis that came out a couple of years ago that I think is a very compelling argument is that estrogen increases hydrogen sulfide production, and hydrogen sulfide can generate sulfite, which is toxic, and which happens to be something that’s added to a lot of medications, cosmetics, and processed foods as a preservative that a lot of people don’t tell. You know, some people, like certain wines give them really bad headaches, and it’s because of the sulfites in the wine.

Well, when you’re pregnant, you’re making sulfite. And you’re not making sulfite to make sulfite. You’re making hydrogen sulfide gas, which, although like we would typically associate it with the smell of rotten eggs at high doses, has been discovered in recent years to be a very important signaling molecule that is, among other things, a vasodilator. So hydrogen sulfide gas falls into a very small category of things that can dilate blood vessels, along with nitric oxide, which has been known about for a much longer period of time.

And hydrogen sulfide is particularly important in delivering blood to the placenta when you’re pregnant. And it also has other activities related to pregnancy. For example, it suppresses preterm labor. And it’s necessary to keep hydrogen sulfide levels higher than they would be when you’re not pregnant or for probably anytime if you’re a man, in order to prevent you from going into labor early, but also just to keep the blood flow, the placenta going to nourish the growing baby.

And now it so happens that a small portion of hydrogen sulfide is going to be turned into sulfite, which is a toxic compound. And sulfite, we all generate sulfite in the course of normal metabolism from any of the sources of sulfur in our diet, especially the sulfur-containing amino acids that are in the protein we eat. And in order to neutralize that sulfite, we use a mineral, molybdenum, to convert the sulfite, which is toxic, to sulfate. Sulfate is both not toxic and is also highly useful. We use it for detoxification. We use it for regulating hormones. We use it to synthesize structural things that are protective against cardiovascular disease, highly protective against arthritis in our joints, and so on.

So, you basically have this balance between sulfite, which is toxic, and sulfate, which is extremely necessary and useful. And the more sulfite you generate, the more you need to convert it to sulfate. Even if you don’t need extra sulfate, you still need to get rid of sulfite because it’s toxic, and you do that with molybdenum. So that would imply that during pregnancy, because of increased hydrogen sulfide, you are going to generate more sulfite. Your molybdenum needs will increase to make sulfate.

Now, what happens to molybdenum intakes during pregnancy? Well, by far and away, the best source of molybdenum is beans. And in pregnancy, a lot of women develop aversions to beans and other molybdenum-rich foods just because they’re more difficult to tolerate digestively and, you know, maybe as well as taste aversions and things like that. So in someone who’s pregnant, molybdenum intakes tend to go down just because they’re less tolerant of molybdenum-rich foods. And then, at the same time, molybdenum needs to go up because of the increased sulfite generation. Now, why would that relate to vitamin B6? Well, it turns out that sulfite binds to B6 and essentially destroys it, basically eliminates it from the body.

So sulfite can induce a B6 deficiency, and high doses of B6 can be used to clear away sulfite that you were not able to convert into the non-toxic sulfate using molybdenum. So, basically, this hypothesis is that molybdenum needs would go up. But since most pregnant women aren’t meeting those needs for molybdenum, high doses of B6 can act as a…I want to say Band-Aid solution, but it’s not really Band-Aid because it’s not like you’re just managing the symptoms. You are clearing away the sulfite, but sort of like…you can’t… So, like, the doses of B6 used in morning sickness would be like 100 milligrams a day, completely impossible to get from food, so I don’t even want to call it a backup mechanism. Like, molybdenum at nutritional doses would be really, really useful here and would be most related to the root cause.

High doses of B6 are very natural, very safe, and effective, but they’re one step removed away from the root cause. It’s like because you didn’t have the molybdenum, you’re more reliant on the B6. And who knows exactly what that’s doing? You know, maybe the sulfite, because it’s giving you a B6 deficiency, that itself is taking away from important things that B6 would do to prevent morning sickness, or it might just be that the extra B6 is mopping up the sulfite, and the sulfite is what’s causing morning sickness.

Now, sulfite does a bunch of toxic things, but one of the things that it does is it can cause mast cells to release histamine. And histamine in the gut can give you all kinds of gut-related issues like diarrhea, for example, make you feel nauseated, you know, things that could be possibly related to morning sickness, especially if because of B6 deficiency. And actually, I think sulfite also inhibits diamine oxidase, and diamine oxidase requires B6 that’s needed to clear histamine from foods.

She might, on top of everything, become more intolerant to histamine, certain foods maybe. So who knows what the mechanisms are, but the sort of like takeaway point is that because sulfite is going up, your needs for molybdenum are going up. And if you don’t have enough molybdenum, your needs for B6 are going to go up, but they’re not going to go up within the nutritional range. They’re going to go up like ridiculously high. So, you know, maybe on a ridiculously high B6 intake from natural foods, you could hit 10 milligrams of B6, but you might need 100 milligrams to mop up all that sulfite. So it’s not insane amounts, but it’s way out of what you could get from natural foods.

And now, looking at that, I’m like, “Well, what about outside of pregnancy? You know, what’s regulating this? Is it estrogen?” And, yes, it’s estrogen that’s regulating sulfite. I don’t know what the effect of progesterone is, so I had trouble finding direct research on it. But it can’t be the case that progesterone is effective at countering the effect of estrogen because progesterone rises in pregnancy alongside estrogen, and none of this would be an issue in pregnancy if progesterone was really protective.

The other thing is if you look at, like, Plan B has some side effects that are very similar to the morning sickness of pregnancy, and Plan B doesn’t have any estrogen. It’s an emergency post-sex contraceptive that only has a synthetic form of progesterone in it. So I don’t know what progesterone does to this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if progesterone was actually acting in concert with estrogen here and maybe augmenting its effects just because this seems to be like a highly pregnancy-related thing. But in any case, you can tie this to the estrogen peaks in the menstrual cycle, especially…

You know, the big peak is around ovulation. The more moderate peak is in the days leading up to menstruation. And then you can also tie it to other supplemental estrogens. So most birth control patch or pill has estrogen in it, and then, you know, hormone replacement therapy that women would typically go on after menopause has estrogen in it. And so, any of these sources of estrogen are going to affect diamine oxidase and possibly make you histamine intolerant, and they’re also going to increase sulfite production, increase your needs for molybdenum, and possibly increase your needs for B6.

I think those are the things that are most related to headaches, nausea, you know, any other form of digestive complaints, feeling queasy or just like general GI distress, and any kind of allergy-like symptoms, so itching, hives, etc. And, you know, we could branch off from there in numerous directions, but I think that’s the sort of most interesting thing I’ve been synthesizing lately related to this stuff.

Katie: That’s so fascinating. And it seems like a vicious cycle. Once you’re in that, it will be difficult to pull out of it without, like you said, supplementation. So if I’m understanding correctly, would this be maybe something if people have symptoms more so around ovulation when that estrogen spike is, or they’re taking an estrogen-based birth control, this would be something they could look at and try?

Chris: Yeah. In fact, I’d go a little bit further than that. So another thing that has been known for decades to happen when women are on birth control is that the amino acid, tryptophan, which is used to make serotonin, and is used to make melatonin, and is also used to make niacin, which is vitamin B3, estrogen increases the production of niacin, vitamin B3, from tryptophan. And in so doing, there’s a neurotoxic compound that kind of spills out of the pathway called kynurenine. And there are studies…this has been known for a long time and yet no one knows it because what happened was they tested different doses of B6 to see what could normalize tryptophan metabolism.

And I would imagine this to be beneficial for insomnia and headaches in particular. Anyway, so what they did was they tested a couple of low doses, up to 2 milligrams, and they tested 20 milligrams. And they found that 20 milligrams of B6 completely made tryptophan metabolism totally normal, but all of the doses that they considered reasonable to get from food didn’t. And so, they basically dismissed their own finding, about 20 milligrams, and said like…because there’s this bias in mainstream nutrition where they don’t want everyone running around taking supplements.

So they looked at that, and they said like, “That effect can’t be, like, a real effect.” Like, B6 obviously isn’t doing something here because 20 milligrams is a ridiculous dose, and we’re not going to tell people to take 20 milligrams, even though it’s well under what the Institute of Medicine has set as the dose that would have no safety concerns, which is 100 milligrams. So the reality is that the data have said, for decades, that 20 milligrams of B6 normalizes the negative effects of birth control on tryptophan metabolism, and there are no reviews that say that.

I have to go back and look at the original papers because all the reviews from people that I would expect about this…sorry, not expect, that I would respect and that would be considered prestigious, they just cite these people citing their own data saying that B6 didn’t fully normalize tryptophan metabolism. And you have to go back to the paper and see that 20 milligrams does. So I would go more than that to say that anyone who’s on supplemental estrogen should, by default, take 20 milligrams of B6 and tweak from there, but I would do it as a precautionary measure.

Katie: Wow, that’s amazing. And the safety data, just to reiterate what you said, is up to 100 milligrams that can be safely taken based on what they’ve demonstrated? Is that also during pregnancy?

Chris: Yeah. There’s no alteration to the safe limit in pregnancy for B6 or for molybdenum, which is the other nutrient we were talking about before. And, you know, there are people anecdotally who believe that they’ve developed problems from taking high doses of B6 that are in that range, but there’s no published data of case reports showing that. And the published data of case reports shows that B6 can have neurotoxic effects at very high doses. All of those studies have used pyridoxine, and I actually think pyridoxal 5-phosphate is the ideal for P5P.

All of those studies also showed that the consequences went away as soon as you removed the supplement. And the minimum dose of B6 in any of those studies was 500 milligrams a day. Nothing below that has been shown to have negative effects. So when the Institute of Medicine set the tolerable upper intake level or TUIL, which is…you know, a lot of people are familiar with the RDA.

The TUIL, the upper intake level, is always set alongside the RDA, And the definition is basically, this is the dose that we would expect to have no risk of adverse effects in the general population. And that doesn’t rule out that someone might have a hypersensitivity disorder or something like that. But, you know, if you take 100 people and you put them all on 100 milligrams of B6, you would expect approximately zero people to develop any problems from that.

You know, what they did with that was they took the lowest observed adverse effect at 500 milligrams, and they applied a safety factor of five-fold to that. So they said, “We don’t have any evidence of this occurring at less than 500 milligrams, so we’ll take 500 milligrams as the dangerous dose and say that, you know, even if there’s 1,000 things that we don’t know, 100 milligrams should be like the mega safe dose.” And then 20 milligrams has been shown to normalize tryptophan metabolism, which is five times under that. So it’s 25 times under what we have case reports showing problems of.

And so, you know, there’s, like, dramatic windows of safety applied to get down to 20 milligrams. You know, and it’s not well-studied, like, maybe the ideal dose that you need is 10 milligrams. I don’t know. But there’s some studies suggesting that 5 to 10 milligrams are not enough to normalize markers of B6 status in pregnant women, which suggests, to me, that the ideal dose for, like, minimizing risk of B6 deficiency symptoms during pregnancy and during any conditions of supplemental estrogen is probably at least 10 milligrams. And, you know, 20 has been shown to be effective in studies, so I’m happy with that, and I’m content that it’s not a safety risk.

Katie: When especially that’s a water-soluble vitamin. So, like you said, as soon as you stop taking it, your body should be okay, even if you had a high dose.

Chris: Yeah, I mean…so I actually think that’s a myth that has been propagated very widely and doesn’t have that much basis that the solubility of a nutrient is related to its toxicity profile. So, like vitamin E, although it might have some negative effects at high doses by interfering with the function of other fat-soluble vitamins, it doesn’t actually have a toxicity syndrome at all, and vitamin B6, which is water-soluble, does. So even though…I mean, like yes, what the case reports showed is that it’s reversible. I have no idea if that relates to its water solubility or not.

So, like niacin has a serious toxicity profile at very high doses, totally water-soluble, you know. So, like niacin and B6, both have toxicity profiles at very high doses. Thiamine, which is water-soluble doesn’t. Riboflavin, which is considered a water-soluble vitamin, but it’s actually, like, 50% fat-soluble. It’s just, like, halfway in between water and fat solubility on a chemical solubility level, and at hundreds of times the normal intake has produced no safety concerns whatsoever.

So I actually think that the solubility really is, like, largely unrelated to the safety of nutrient. But, yeah, it appears to be completely reversible on the basis that the case reports showing, like, tingling in the hands and feet on it that when you remove it, it goes away.

Katie: That’s a really interesting point and good to know because that’s definitely something I have heard quite a bit, is that if it’s water-soluble, it’s fine, and you have to be really careful with fat-soluble vitamins. Since there’s an estrogen component here, is it also logical to suggest that maybe people with, for instance, PCOS or other things that lead to estrogen dominance or have an estrogen dominant component could benefit from experimenting with this as well?

Chris: Yes, I think so. And actually, I think there’s quite a lot of unanswered questions here. So, for example, in males, testosterone also increases hydrogen sulfide production in certain cells. And so it’s, like, what does the increased androgens do in PCOS to this? I have no idea, you know. I’m highly confident in what estrogen is doing here. I’m rather confused about what testosterone is doing. And, I really have no idea what progesterone is doing.

So I’m highly confident that anything where you’re approaching estrogen levels seen at the peaks during the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, birth control, and hormone replacement therapy are highly relevant. I think PCOS has a complex hormonal profile that I don’t really understand exactly how it would relate to this. But I would definitely consider it because, if you think about the recommendations that I would make to compensate for this, basically molybdenum, you know, the average dose that you would try to get by default every day is like 45 micrograms.

The safe upper intake level is 2,000 micrograms or 2 milligrams. And the safety profile from that, I couldn’t find any reliable human data suggesting problems with excess molybdenum, so they actually took fertility problems in female rats at the body weight-adjusted equivalent of 50 milligrams a day and applied this extraordinarily huge safety factor to wind down to 2 milligrams a day as the safe upper limit for humans.

So, you know, to go from a normal…like, imagine a pregnant woman is reducing her molybdenum intake just sort of by, you know, food aversions, and maybe getting down to 30 micrograms a day. There’s a lot of room to go up between 30 and 2,000 micrograms. And so I’m guessing that, you know, 300 to 500 micrograms would be more than enough and way within the upper limit for molybdenum.

And like I said before, 20 milligrams of B6 should be more than enough. In most cases, you could go up to 100 and still way within the upper limit. And I would say that, you know, anything that seems sex hormone-related could plausibly relate to these things. My confidence being really high if estrogen being high is the main thing, and then the more complexities you add to that of hormonal imbalance, I’m less and less sure exactly what it means.

But if the symptoms of headaches, of insomnia, of queasiness or nausea, of GI distress, or of anything that seems related to allergies like hives, and itching, and redness, any of that cluster of symptoms that go along with definitely high estrogen and maybe other abnormalities in hormone metabolism, I would say, would be something where trying this completely safe thing of adding some extra 300 to 500 micrograms of molybdenum and 20 milligrams of B6 to, like, try and see if it works.

Katie: That makes perfect sense. To circle back on histamine for a minute, this is something I’m hearing a lot more about from the audience increasingly, so I’m wondering if it’s something that’s on the rise. Is this something that is universally worth trying for anyone suffering from histamine issues, and are there other things that come into play as well when we’re just talking about histamine?

Chris: Yeah, okay. So I think that there are some complexities when you get to histamine. And, it depends where it’s coming from, and it depends whether, for example, it’s a food-based thing or it’s more than that. So let’s, like, sort of start with the gut and work our way inside. So, in the gut, there’s histamine that you encounter in your food, and you can also have gut bacteria producing histamine. And if the gut bacteria are producing it, I don’t know exactly what to do about that. But, you know, shifting the microbiome with prebiotics and probiotics would be the thing that really fits the bill.

But anyway, let’s just assume the histamine is coming in from your food because there’s plenty of histamine in foods. And if the histamine is coming in your food, then nausea and diarrhea are probably the big things you would expect at the gut level, but then histamine can get inside your blood. And when it’s systemic, then that’s where you can start to get more allergy-like symptoms like hives, itching, or redness, flushing. That’s also when you could get changes in blood pressure.

By default, histamine lowers blood pressure, but sometimes you get an adrenaline response to that that causes secondary increase in blood pressure above normal. So any changes in blood pressure could be plausibly related. And then histamine can increase the permeability of the blood-brain barrier generally and let stuff in, including itself. And if histamine gets into the brain, histamine in the brain usually, by default, is produced inside the brain in a highly regulated fashion to regulate your wakefulness and alertness.

And this is why if you take Benadryl, for example, you get sleepy, and it might knock you out because it’s antagonizing the histamine in your brain. On the flip side of that though, too much histamine in the brain could cause insomnia, or cause generalized anxiety, or could cause panic attacks. So, you know, trace it from the gut through the brain, and you’re getting nausea, diarrhea, then you get inside, hives, itching, redness flushing, then blood pressure changes, and you get into the brain, insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks.

So, any of those things, the first line of defense is the production of diamine oxidase in the gut. So you can think of histamine as having two main defenses. Diamine oxidase is the extracellular defense. Methylation is the intracellular defense. When you’re eating food, that’s outside your cells, and it’s going through your gut, which is actually literally everything from your mouth to your anus is outside your body because we’re all sort of, like, a cylindrical tube, where the inside surfaces, mouth, the anus, that’s outside the body. The skin is the outside surface outside the body, and things get absorbed to get inside the body.

So, in the gut, you’re outside the body, you’re outside your cells. You’re producing massive amounts of diamine oxidase or DAO for the purpose of completely neutralizing all the histamine in your food. And the diamine oxidase could be missing from the gut due to nutrient deficiencies, or due to intestinal damage. Nutrient deficiencies, the ones that are most relevant are B6 and copper. There’s some possible…and actually manganese is also important there, possible roles for vitamin C and possible role for riboflavin, although that hasn’t been shown with the human enzyme.

Now, on top of that, you could just have intestinal damage that’s damaging the cells that produce diamine oxidase. That kind of unravels a whole another area that I’m not really an expert in. My expertise is really in the micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals. For example, if you have an autoimmune condition like celiac disease that’s destroying the intestinal cells, or you have some pathogen in there that’s, you know, your immune system is trying to defeat the infection and is causing damage to your intestinal cells, possibilities like that are reasons for having low diamine oxidase activity.

And then, of course, I don’t really know anything about how to modify this, but you could also have gut bacteria that are producing histamine as well. Then when you get inside…and actually this isn’t just inside. So, inside your body, or even in the gut, you can have increased mast cell burden. Mast cells are those cells that produce histamine. And now we’re getting into the area where we’re not talking about the histamine in foods, we’re talking about the histamine that you produce yourself. And so the normal way that you would think about this, like, the kind of conventional thing that would happen is in an allergy.

And in a traditional conventional allergy, you have your immune system reacting to some allergen, produces IgE antibodies that then activate a cascade of things that leads ultimately to the release of histamine by mast cells. You can also have things that cause mast cells to release histamine that you’re not allergic to, and that’s what sulfite does that we were talking about before. So sulfite will just act on the mast cell to make it release histamine, but it’s not an allergy because there was no antibody made by your immune system.

It looks like an allergy because you get itching, hives, you know, redness, any of the traditional allergic symptoms that are caused by histamine, and it kind of walks and talks like an allergy because you might get it in response to certain specific foods if those are foods that have histamine in them or have sulfites in them that cause histamine release or whatever, but it’s not an allergy because, in the case of sulfite or dietary histamine, there’s no antibody-mediated response. So it looks, talks, walks, smells like an allergy, but it’s not.

And in the mast cell, there’s two categories of things that we should care about. One is antioxidants because oxidative stress increases histamine release from mast cells, and the other is methylation. And those two things are both, like, big cans of worms that we could each spend an hour talking about just on its own. But to briefly summarize, antioxidants, I think, a lot of people think about is like, “Oh, those are the things that are in berries, and fruits, and vegetables, and stuff like that,” which I think is a misleadingly simplistic way to think about it. Your antioxidant defense is very much based on minerals and protein-related things that you make yourself. And I don’t mean you make the minerals. I mean, you eat the minerals and you make enzymes that require the minerals.

So very briefly, protein, zinc, copper, selenium, iron, and manganese, vitamin E, and vitamin C, and all those colorful things in fruits and vegetables that people call antioxidants, those things together are the things we care about in terms of antioxidant defense. And then, on the second category, methylation, that’s where we get into B12, folate, and choline as the top nutrients, and then we can peel layers away to get at many minerals and B vitamins working underneath those as the main support.

You know, so that is, I think, a pretty broad view of histamine generally and all the potential things that you could work on related to it. And then you want to ask questions like, where is histamine coming from? Because it might be primarily hormonal, like we were talking about before, or you might have, you know, a rare condition like mast cell activation disorder, mast cell activation syndrome, which might require finding a very good specialist to start digging away at.

Katie: That was an amazing overview. Thank you for that. I think you’re right. There’s so much at play there, but I think so much of what you just said is probably going to be really helpful to a lot of people. And, for my own curiosity, I wonder if there’s a difference or any other considerations for women who tend to have their symptoms right around their periods or not at ovulation when estrogen strikes, but they have things like migraines, or PMS, or other symptoms right about when their period begins? Are there other nutrients that come into play in that scenario?

Chris: Yeah. So, first of all, I look specifically at this once to look at water retention. And, in general, I think that the other symptoms of PMS kind of go hand in hand here, but I didn’t look at them as much as I was looking at water retention. And I was actually surprised to find that the key difference between women who have PMS symptoms, including water retention, which I was more focused on, and those who don’t is that they actually have higher progesterone levels in the days leading up to menstruation. So the progesterone should be like an ovulation-related sort of, like, post-ovulation spike during the breakdown of everything produced during ovulation, but it should be cleared effectively by the time you get into menstruation.

And the women who have PMS-related symptoms, especially where I was looking at in water retention, they basically produce the same levels of all the hormones, but the primary difference is the clearance rate of progesterone is a lot lower. And my suspicion is the water retention issue is driven by the fact that one of the ways that you can get rid of excess progesterone, it’s… Actually, this isn’t really a way of getting rid…it shouldn’t be a way of getting rid of progesterone. But progesterone, if it’s elevated and not cleared through the normal ways, can spill over into aldosterone production, which can cause retention of sodium and loss of potassium, and with retention of sodium comes retention of water.

I don’t know if that would cause some of the other symptoms, although I could imagine it would because if you retain water, you’re going to get swelling everywhere. And if your blood volume is increasing, and you’re getting generalized swelling in extracellular space, you’re going to put pressure in a lot of places that wouldn’t otherwise have pressure. And, in your head, I think that would cause a headache. I’m not saying that’s the only thing, but it just might be a contributor there.

And so, specifically, in the case of water retention, salt is controversial. So there are some cases that I think are the exception to the rule where sometimes you can reduce water retention by increasing salt, but that’s not normally the case. And I think for most women in that case, probably reducing salt and increasing potassium is going to be the thing that’s best going to help the water retention. In terms of both, and I don’t know the mechanisms here, but in terms of both the water attention and the other symptoms of PMS, magnesium and B6 have been the top things that have been helpful.

I think the doses… I’m blanking here. I don’t have 100% confidence on this, but I believe that the papers I was looking at, the doses are around, like, 40 milligrams of B6. I would use P5P for the form of B6, and somewhere around 200 or 300 milligrams of magnesium, so higher doses of B6 and people are usually using lower doses of magnesium that a lot of people are using. But both of those seem to have some positive benefits in a number of human trials.

And then for PMS symptoms, the data is less good for manganese, but low manganese levels correlate with PMS symptoms. And it’s possible that manganese supplementation would help, but no one has clearly shown that. But notably, manganese along with B6 are co-factors for diamine oxidase, so it could all come back to histamine metabolism in some way in terms of some of those symptoms. But I don’t think histamine would be related to the water retention, but headaches and mood disturbances, maybe.

Katie: That’s really interesting. And I’m definitely gonna plug your book, “Testing Your Nutritional Status,” because I think that’s a great place for people to delve in and try to figure out what they specifically need to take.

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Katie: But I am curious, when it comes to women and hormone fluctuations, either during pregnancy or just during normal monthly cycles. Are there nutrients in general in any amounts, that you would say, on average most or all women should be taking or it’s safe to take than not take?

Chris: Can you go over the context again? You were talking about pregnancy, or you were talking about through the menstrual cycle.

Katie: I would say they need to be separate answers. During pregnancy, are there things that women need to be especially cognizant of and then also hormones?

Chris: Yeah. So, pregnancy, the nutritional recommendations are generally made around birth defects. And I think those are… I mean, I would reinforce those. So, like, the typical pregnant woman is going to get put on prenatals to have extra folic acid in them, for example. I would say you want to make sure you’re getting full…I would prefer using methyl folate as a supplement. But I think making sure you’re getting the RDA for folate through that is really important. I mean, that’s mainly used to prevent neural tube defects, which are mainly spina bifida, and then another rare one that is just fatal.

It’s, quantitatively, like, the likelihood of that happening is very small, but the consequences are so devastating that, you know, it’s just worth it to reinforce those recommendations. One nutrient that I haven’t talked about yet, but it applies across the board to all estrogen-related things here. And actually, this is a good bifurcation between pregnancy and other estrogen conditions. So, estrogen increases copper absorption from the gut, and the placenta during pregnancy causes all that extra copper to go to the baby.

So I don’t think that you need extra copper during pregnancy because you hyper absorb copper and you hyper transport it to the fetus. But estrogen outside of pregnancy causes you to hyper absorb copper just as much, and you don’t have a placenta. So, there’s nowhere to put it. It just accumulates. Now, in most cases, probably what happens is the woman’s liver just makes more proteins that bind copper such as ceruloplasmin to protect the copper from causing problems. But if the woman does not make enough ceruloplasmin and other copper-binding proteins, the free copper can cause a lot of problems. It can cause serious problems in the eyes. It can accumulate in the brain and contribute to neurodegenerative diseases later in life.

It can generally cause oxidative stress. So, what I would suggest is, normally, I would say the upper limit for what you really want to steer clear of copper is, like, 10 milligrams. I would cut that down to 5 milligrams for anyone who is on supplemental estrogen. You know, during the estrogen peaks in the menstrual cycle, if the menstrual cycle is normal, I’m not too worried about it because it just goes up for a couple of days, comes down, goes up for another couple days, comes down. It’s not a major…you’re gonna hyper absorb copper during that time, but, you know, more days than not, you just have normal estrogen levels for a woman and so it all kind of evens out.

But when you’re on birth control, or when you’re on hormone replacement therapy, those are essentially the only other conditions where you’d have chronic exposure to estrogen like you would in pregnancy. So, you’re going to hyper absorb copper and not have any place to put it. So I think it’s best to cut the upper limit for copper in half, down to 5 milligrams, and then just more generally not go out of your way to increase the 5 milligrams. So, I’m not too worried about foods. Copper-rich foods include liver, mushrooms, seaweed, shellfish.

You know, those other foods have things that balance copper and protect copper from causing problems like zinc, for example. So I’m not saying, you know, micromanage your fruits and don’t hit 5 milligrams. But I’m saying like, you know, if you’re taking supplements, don’t use supplements to go above 5 milligrams total intake. And, you know, don’t go out of your way to try to hit 5 milligrams or higher with your foods.

But for pregnancy, I would say, you know, the copper is just sort of, like, you want to get your minimum requirement for copper, and you don’t have to alter it because you are going to absorb it better, and you are going to do something with that copper. So another concern with pregnancy is vitamin A. And I don’t think the evidence is strong on this, but there is some very limited evidence that I think is very shaky that vitamin A intakes over 10,000 IU during the first eight weeks of pregnancy could cause birth defects.

And I want to reiterate here, like, triple reiterate here, the data is not good, the data is not good, the data is not good. However, most women have no need to go over 10,000 IU of vitamin A. I mean, yes, if you have signs of vitamin A deficiency because you’re poorly absorbing it, or there’s some other thing that is causing your needs to go up, and you’re monitoring blood levels, and you’re working with someone who’s sort of managing your nutrition with you, fine.

But if you’re planning on getting pregnant, and you don’t have any symptoms of vitamin A deficiency, and you don’t have any reason to think you have higher than normal needs of vitamin A, then, even though the data is not good, the data is not good, the data is not good, it’s prudent to not supplement with vitamin A to bring your intakes of retinol, which is the animal form of vitamin A that we’re most concerned with here, to not bring those over 10,000 IU per day.

After eight weeks, it doesn’t matter. So I think that’s one concern that women will encounter, and that’s basically, like, if they hear it. They might hear it put another way by someone who’s looked at the data less, like, “Vitamin A is toxic to your baby. Don’t take vitamin A when you’re pregnant.” So what I just said I think is the way to say that that actually sticks to the kernel of truth that’s there. And then, like we said before, managing morning sickness and just being proactive with, I would say, maybe like 100 to 300 micrograms of molybdenum on a proactive basis and 10 to 20 milligrams of B6 on a proactive basis as P5P.

And then, you know, I mean, for women who are philosophically natural-minded and don’t want to take extra supplements, I would say, like, you know, try to hit your targets for those foods. But honestly, like, telling a woman to eat a lot of beans when she’s pregnant might not go over very well. So taking 100 to 300 micrograms of molybdenum, taking 10 to 20 milligrams of P5P form of B6, and then… Well, one thing I didn’t mention before is that, folate, all the emphasis is on folate, but choline is very important to methylation, helps conserve folate.

And although we don’t have data in pregnant human women, we have data from rats suggesting that, if we were to extrapolate to humans, suggesting that if a woman got three times the basal requirement for choline during pregnancy, and during nursing, and then supported the growing child with three times the minimum recommendations for the first four years of life, that that could have extremely profound benefits to the brain, especially as an increase in audio spatial memory dealing with, you know, sounds and visual perception of space, preventing interference memory, which is the kind of memory loss where you forget where you parked your car when you go to the grocery store because you parked at that grocery store, you know, 350 times before, and you’re mixing all the 350 memories of where you parked your car.

And then, also, in these rats, it basically fully protects them from age-related senility at the end of life. So we’re talking about choline during pregnancy, nursing, and first four years of the child’s life, conferring brain benefits at, you know, 70, 80, 90 years old. So, I think, I actually have a good thing to link in the show notes would be my choline database. You can also Google “Masterjohn choline database,” and you can go see my recommendations there of how to get choline from foods. And if you could make a mix of choline and betaine that gets up around 1,200 or 1,300 milligrams a day from those foods, then I think that would be great to do. And you can make up the balance of supplements. I have specific recommendations for how to get choline supplements on there as well.

And I would summarize those by saying phosphatidylcholine is the best form of choline to take, and it’s the form that’s predominant in food. And you just have to be careful that, usually, when you take a supplement, the dose of phosphatidylcholine and not the dose of choline is mentioned on there. So you have to multiply it by…excuse me, you have to divide the dose on the bottle by eight to know the amount of choline you’re getting. And then trimethylglycine or TMG, you could just sort of like take that alongside the phosphatidylcholine half and half to get that.

And then the last thing I would mention is biotin. So about one-third of women spontaneously become biotin deficient during pregnancy, and biotin deficiency can cause a lot of skin problems and mood problems. So depression is a major risk of biotin deficiency as is dermatitis, which can affect a number of areas around the face and also the perineum, which is between the vagina and the anus. Particularly dermatitis in that area, like, being in the perineum would be kind of a red flag for biotin deficiency.

But also the fact that just with good markers, we know that a third of women just become biotin deficient when they’re pregnant because of their pregnancy, and it goes away after pregnancy. But, you know, how many women develop skin problems and depression during or after pregnancy? So, there, getting a few eggs a day would be your best bet. And honestly, if you try to meet the choline requirements I was just talking about, you will, by accident, meet the biotin requirements. But it’s also perfectly safe to put, you know, as much as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 milligrams of biotin in your food, which is actually way higher than what you would need.

What you’re getting for food if you shoot for, like, four egg yolks a day is going to be more on the order of 30, 40, 50 micrograms, and a microgram is a thousandth of a milligram, you know. Basically, with a supplement, if you add like 1 milligram of biotin in there, you’re getting completely safe amount of biotin that is definitely in excess of what you need. That’s my general view of pregnancy.

Katie: That was super helpful. And the last one I’ll ask you about today, but I think I’m just gonna have to keep asking you back is vitamin D because I know I’ve seen studies on vitamin D deficiency, and like low birth weights, or premature labor, and there seem to be some really big implications, but also it is one that can store in the body for at least from what I’ve read. So I know it’s one that you want to test and you want to know what your levels are. Do you have any data that you’ve seen or guidelines you would give about what target vitamin D level to aim for and what form is best to get that from?

Chris: Yeah. So, you know, vitamin D is interesting because there has been so much enthusiasm and research on vitamin D promoting high levels of it that we kind of have this…you know, which was genuinely merited by the fact that there has been and still is widespread inadequate vitamin D levels. Like, there was a study in the UK a couple of decades ago that showed that in a third trimester of pregnancy, women in the UK, on average, would have their vitamin D levels dropped to zero.

That’s, like, you know, ridiculously in need of a Vitamin D, right? And yet, we have, like, this bifurcation between kind of the general population where they probably need more vitamin D, and then we have health-conscious populations where everyone’s supplementing. And the funny thing that…you know, the majority of those people are probably getting too much, even though they, you know, certainly are people with very high needs that are minorities but are important to include here.

And so, yeah, it’s fat-soluble. But, you know, more importantly, it does have a toxicity profile, and it does increase the risk of soft tissue calcification. And I also think we always have a danger when people are told to avoid vitamin A and to take vitamin D. The risk of soft tissue calcification is going to increase because vitamin A protects against soft tissue calcification caused by too much vitamin D. So, I think, on a background for vitamin D supplementation, you don’t want to get into the hype around paranoia about vitamin A because that in and of itself is going to make vitamin D less safe.

But in pregnancy, the vitamin D needs are very similar to a non-pregnant woman for the first two trimesters. And then, in the third trimester, the fetal skeleton starts to get mineralized. And when that happens, there’s, like, a massive mobilization of calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D all going towards the mineralization, the fetal skeleton. And that’s when you see 25(OH)D levels, which is the marker that we use for vitamin D nutritional status drop in women’s blood.

Now, vitamin D is also complicated by the fact that the levels of the markers change during pregnancy. And so, it’s actually, like, it makes things difficult because the way that they change are not… It’s well-characterized what happens, but it’s not well-characterized what it means in terms of how to re-interpret the markers to know whether women need more or less. And, as a result, I think that the reason that makes things difficult is that we have this voluminous data on, you know, thousands of studies of tens or really hundreds of thousands of people on how to interpret those markers, and they just don’t apply to pregnant women.

So what happens in pregnancy is that 25(OH)D, which is the traditional marker that is mostly used to assess vitamin D status, goes down, calcium levels go down, and parathyroid hormone levels go down. Parathyroid hormone or PTH is generally a marker of…like, the higher it is, the more you need vitamin D and calcium. And meanwhile, calcitriol, which is the active hormonal form of vitamin D goes up. And I think these are probably adaptations to supply calcium to the fetus while simultaneously minimizing the risk of bone loss to the mother because PTH, which rises when you have deficient calcium and vitamin D, helps mobilize calcium to get into your blood by taking it out of your bones.

So, basically, what pregnancy is doing… And calcitriol, the active hormonal form of vitamin D, it does take calcium out of your bones, but it also increases absorption of calcium from your food. So, basically, PTH and calcitriol are two different ways that you can mobilize more calcium into the blood, which, in the case of pregnancy, you’re trying to get it to go to the fetus. And what pregnancy is doing is, and I don’t know what mediates this, estrogen, progesterone or, you know, chorionic and…I don’t know what it is. Something in pregnancy is shifting the balance to a calcitriol dominant state to take more calcium out of your food and less calcium out of your bones. That way, overall, you get net more calcium moving to the fetus, but to the degree you’re not taxing the mother’s bones.

You can support that system by supplying more vitamin D to the mother, and that’s going to funnel in to bring 25(OH)D levels back up, which we measure as the main marker of nutritional status. It’s also the precursor to calcitriol, so it’s going to spill into calcitriol production. The more calcitriol you get and the less PTH you get, the more you’re going to protect the mother’s skeleton, while also simultaneously maximally extracting calcium from food to shift towards the fetus. At the same time, you can support that by getting more calcium in the diet.

We talked about this last time. I think the calcium requirements, the official calcium requirements are not changed during pregnancy if I remember that right, but, I think they clearly are, physiologically. And more to the point, I think a lot of women who are, you know, maybe altering what they eat because of pregnancy and their food aversions and so on, and then, on top of that, women in our audiences who are health conscious are often…especially like in the Paleo world, this is also true in the vegan world. A lot of people are worried about calcium supplements.

And I would say that in pregnancy, especially in the third trimester, to support mineralization of the fetal skeleton with minimal risk to the woman’s bones, you at least want to hit the RDA for calcium, and I would say go a little bit above it. So consistently hitting like 1,200 or 1,300 milligrams of calcium I think would be the ideal thing, alongside taking whatever vitamin D will keep your 25(OH)D levels up into the normal range, which, you know, to me, you’re looking at 30 to 40 nanograms per milliliter, in my opinion. And then, you know, it’s perfectly safe to take an extra 1,000 or 2,000 IU of vitamin D if you’re not measuring your blood level, but it’d be ideal to measure your blood levels.

Katie: Amazing. That is so practical and helpful. And, once again, our time has completely flown by, and you’re just gonna have to come back at some point.

Chris: I would be happy to.

Katie: Thank you so much for the time today. I know how busy you are. And I’m so grateful for you coming back again to share even more, and I look forward to more episodes in the future.

Chris: Awesome. Can’t wait.

Katie: And thanks to all of you for joining us and listening today, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama Podcast.” If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/targeted-nutrition/

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ebenpink · 6 years ago

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Is Iron the New Cholesterol? http://bit.ly/2FLdGfI

One thing I’ve realized being in this game for so long is that if you’re convinced that meat truly is deadly, you’re not going to stop looking for reasons why. They’ve tried blaming just about every part of meat over the years, including the protein itself, the saturated fat, the cholesterol, the methionine, the char on BBQ, and even the obscure compounds like TMAO or Neu5gc. The latest component of meat they’ve zeroed in on is iron—the essential mineral responsible for energy production and a host of other vital functions.

The experts’ track record with all the other “evil meat components” has many of my readers skeptical, so they asked me to weigh in on iron.

Iron is an essential mineral, integral in the production of energy and the creation of blood cells. If pregnant women don’t get it, they can’t deliver oxygen and nutrients to their growing babies. If kids don’t get it, they shortchange their mental and physical development. If adults don’t get it, their basic day-to-day physiological function falls apart. Without adequate iron, our antioxidant defenses, our immunity, and our metabolic function all suffer. Hell, most countries even mandate the fortification of refined flour with large amounts of iron to prevent these tragedies.

Iron also has a dark side. A large body of observational evidence links elevated iron levels to diseases and disease states like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, insulin resistance, inflammation, Alzheimer’s disease, hypertension, fatty liver, hypothyroidism, arthritis, and cancer. You name it, it’s probably linked to elevated iron. And as much as I’d like to, I can’t dismiss these connections as non-causal.

For one, iron is inherently reactionary: The very same proclivity for electron exchange that makes iron so integral in biochemical reactions that address stress and support health means it can also create free radicals that damage DNA, cells, blood lipids, and increase stress and harm health.

Two, there’s a little something called hereditary hemochromatosis.

Hereditary hemochromatosis is a genetic condition increasing a person’s absorption and retention of dietary iron. This has benefits in certain contexts—carriers have a natural resistance to the bubonic plague, as one effect of hemochromatosis is to render white immune cells iron-deficient and thus resistant to the plague virus which feeds on iron—but it’s mostly negative in today’s relatively plague-free world. Most of the hemochromatosis literature focuses on homozygotes (carriers of two copies of the gene) and specific “iron overload-related diseases,” which include cirrhosis, liver fibrosis, liver cancer, elevated liver enzymes, “physician-diagnosed symptomatic hemochromatosis,” or finger arthritis. Those are bad conditions to have, to be sure, but that’s not even a complete list. Homozygous carriers of the mutation also have greater risks for diabetes, arthritis, fatigue, liver disease, and frailty and muscle loss. They’re more likely to experience neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Even heterozygous carriers (those who carry just one copy of the variant) have an elevated risk of iron overload compared to the general population.

Okay, okay. But couldn’t it be that the hemochromatosis gene is increasing disease risk through another, non-iron route? Perhaps high iron is just a marker of disease, not a cause. After all, most genes are pleiotropic—they have more than one effect.

Probably not. The most reliable treatment for hereditary hemochromatosis is phlebotomy. Literally removing iron from the body by draining blood is the first (and often only necessary) line of defense against hereditary iron overload. And it works really well.

Besides, phlebotomy may also be beneficial in people without clinical iron overload or hemochromatosis. It’s the most effective way to reduce iron stores and tends to increase insulin sensitivity. In insulin resistant men with fatty liver, blood donation normalized insulin sensitivity and liver enzymes. In meat eaters, blood donation reduced ferritin levels to match those of lacto-ovo-vegetarians and improved insulin sensitivity. One study even tested the effect of randomized phlebotomy on cancer incidence. After four and a half years, those subjects placed in the phlebotomy group lived longer, had less cancer, and had lower ferritin levels than the subjects who didn’t donate blood.

I can’t argue with the research, but the idea that a primary component of a food we’ve been eating for millions of years and to which we may even owe much of our brainpower—the iron in meat—still rankles. Is iron truly inherently “bad,” or is there anything about our modern environment that makes it so?

Possible Modern Influences On Iron Levels

Less Bleeding

One factor is that we don’t shed as much blood as before. Most men engage in far fewer bouts of direct violent conflict. Most people have fewer parasites feasting on their blood. And when’s the last time you exchanged blood oaths with anyone? We have fewer opportunities to bleed, in other words. That’s why regular phlebotomy can be such a useful tool for men (and some women) with too much iron in their bodies—it emulates all the bloodletting we used to do in a controlled, safe fashion.

Less Intense Activity

We use iron to generate energy. The more physical activity in which we engage, the more iron we utilize. This is usually couched in warnings for female athletes engaged in intense training, but it can also explain the beneficial effects of exercise in people with iron overload. There are even cases of “mild exercise” causing iron deficiency, so everything that increases energy expenditure—walking, gardening, hiking—will at least subtly reduce iron stores. More activity, less iron sitting around idle getting into trouble.

Too Many Seed Oils

I strongly suspect that the unprecedented dissemination of high-omega-6 seed oils throughout our food systems, our body fat, and our cellular membranes are exacerbating—if not causing—the relationship between excess iron and various diseases. Take the supposedly ironclad (pun intended) relationship between heme iron and colon cancer, which is mediated by iron’s peroxidative alteration of fatty acids in the colon. In animal studies that seek to show this relationship, you can’t get the colon cancer to “take” unless you feed the animal high-PUFA oils along with their heme iron. In one study, feeding heme iron to rats promoted colon cancer only when fed alongside high-PUFA safflower oil. Feeding MUFA-rich and far more oxidatively-stable olive oil alongside the heme prevented the colon carcinogenesis. In another paper, only mice consuming fish oil-based and safflower oil-based diets exhibited carcinogenic fecal peroxides after eating heme iron; a coconut oil-based group of mice had no negative reaction to heme.

Among a cohort of US nurses, where PUFA intake is around 7% of calories and comes from seed oil, iron intake has moderate links to colon cancer. Among a cohort of Swedish women, where PUFA intake is under 5% of calories with a greater proportion coming from fish, the association is far weaker.

What To Do About All This?

First, men and postmenopausal women should figure out their hemochromatosis status. Both men and women with hereditary hemochromatosis have elevated risks of iron overload-related diseases, but they are much higher for men. (Premenopausal women have a handy built-in mechanism for shedding excess iron—menstruation.) Modern men and older women, with our absence of intestinal parasites and our lower tendency to engage in bloody hand-to-hand fighting, have few opportunities to shed iron. Your doctor will be able to order the test, or you can go through a genetic testing service and look for positive hits on C282Y and H63D.

Do it earlier rather than later. Studies indicate that one of the biggest predictors of whether someone with genetic iron overload develops liver cancer is their age at diagnosis of hemochromatosis. Those who wait risk incurring more damage.

Even if you’re negative for hereditary hemochromatosis, you can still have iron overload. Determine this by asking your doctor for a ferritin test. According to the Mayo Clinic, for men, the ferritin reference range is 24 to 336 ng/ml, and for women, it is 11 to 307. That is a wide range, and levels that your doctor would probably classify as technically normal have been associated with insulin resistance, atherosclerosis, and reduced telomere length (a marker of aging).

From what I can tell, levels approaching 200 ng/ml in men should definitely be classified as “high.” And lower may be even better. In one study, egg-and-dairy-eating vegetarian men had ferritin levels of 35 ng/ml and better insulin sensitivity than meat-eating men with ferritin levels of 72 ng/ml. After donating enough blood to hit 35 ng/ml, the meat eaters insulin sensitivity improved.

Dr. F. S. Facchini has used blood donation to induce “near iron deficiency”—the lowest body iron store that allows normal red blood cell production—in his gout patients, clearing them of gout attacks for as long as they maintained it. His patients at high risk for heart disease also saw major benefits from hitting very low ferritin levels (“to levels commonly seen in premenopausal females”), including increased HDL and lower blood pressure, even if they started with normal ferritin.

What seems safe is to stay on the low end of normal—say, from 50-150 ng/ml—as long as no symptoms of low iron arise.

As for women? Higher levels don’t seem to correlate with the same health issues in women. Lucky.

Now, say you have high iron, whether it’s hereditary hemochromatosis or just high normal ferritin levels….

What Should You Do About High Iron Levels?

Donate Blood

The quickest, safest way that also does the most social good (if you care about that sort of thing) is to donate blood. When you donate blood, your body must upregulate hemoglobin production to replace the lost blood. That requires iron, which is taken from body stores.

Don’t Manage Iron Overload With Diet

By that I mean stuff like:

Don’t give up red meat.

Don’t stop eating liver every week.

Keep eating oysters.

Don’t religiously adhere to reverse-kosher (only eating meat in the presence of dairy to inhibit iron absorption).

If you make dietary iron the focal point, you’ll miss out on all the incredible nutrients iron-rich foods like red meat and liver can offer. Besides, you’ll run yourself ragged following even more food restrictive rules that increase the chance of other nutrient deficiencies.

Don’t Manage an Iron Overload That Doesn’t Exist

I’ve seen people go down the rabbit hole of iron obsession without actually confirming they even had too much iron. They started giving blood (even self-administered), trying to reduce iron absorption by pairing dairy and calcium with their iron-rich foods, avoiding iron-rich foods—totally blind. Iron is an important nutrient. Deficiency is real. Anemia is no joke. Get tested before you start messing around with iron.

Follow a Healthy Primal Eating Plan

Whether it’s keto, low-carb, moderate-carb, or even vegetarian, going Primal will mitigate many of the potential effects of high iron by:

Avoiding Seed Oils and Excess Omega-6 Fats. Seed oils almost certainly make the “iron overload problem” worse, and may even be responsible for its negative effects and link to various diseases.

Including Phytonutrient-rich Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs, Teas, and Coffee. Polyphenols both inhibit iron absorption and reduce the oxidative interaction between iron and lipids.

So to sum up, get tested and be aware of the iron issue, but don’t let it rule you. It’s iron overload, not overlord.

Take care, everyone. What do you think of iron? Ever get tested? Ever give blood? See any benefits?

Let me know down below!

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References:

Tamosauskaite J, Atkins JL, Pilling LC, et al. Hereditary Hemochromatosis Associations with Frailty, Sarcopenia and Chronic Pain: Evidence from 200,975 Older UK Biobank Participants. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2019;

Burke W, Imperatore G, Mcdonnell SM, Baron RC, Khoury MJ. Contribution of different HFE genotypes to iron overload disease: a pooled analysis. Genet Med. 2000;2(5):271-7.

Allen KJ, Gurrin LC, Constantine CC, et al. Iron-overload-related disease in HFE hereditary hemochromatosis. N Engl J Med. 2008;358(3):221-30.

Nowak A, Giger RS, Krayenbuehl PA. Higher age at diagnosis of hemochromatosis is the strongest predictor of the occurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma in the Swiss hemochromatosis cohort: A prospective longitudinal observational study. Medicine (Baltimore). 2018;97(42):e12886.

Larsson SC, Rafter J, Holmberg L, Bergkvist L, Wolk A. Red meat consumption and risk of cancers of the proximal colon, distal colon and rectum: the Swedish Mammography Cohort. Int J Cancer. 2005;113(5):829-34.

Liu B, Sun Y, Xu G, et al. Association between Body Iron Status and Leukocyte Telomere Length, a Biomarker of Biological Aging, in a Nationally Representative Sample of US Adults. J Acad Nutr Diet. 2018;

The post Is Iron the New Cholesterol? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

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courage-a-word-of-justice · 8 years ago

Text

Kado 11 | Boku no Hero Academia 26 | Hina Logi 1 | Grimoire of Zero 12 (FINAL) | Tsukigakirei 12 (FINAL)

I’ll just leave another reminder for this straw poll here, because I need a tiebreaker vote.

Kado 11

Even anisotropic beings have dreams? Welp, that was unexpected.

Uh, hey. Kado staff. Algerian people don’t all look like Asians, y’know? Google says Algeria is in Africa…

So, staff. Why is Shindo the only man/person/human who can stop zaShunina?

Oh yeah. Shinawa knows a way to stop the fregonics!

Basically how I feel about Kado is how Hanamori feels about the situation + Saraka right now – confused and torn.

(laughs) Thank…(face falls) you, Hanamori, for making me laugh with your mapo tofu comment and remember why I loved this show in the first place. It was fleeting, but good…Wait, but isn’t abduction against the law?

Uhhhh. Kado staff. The fregonics suit has boob space. Meaning a woman will wear it…awkwarddddddd…

Finally, we get back from our “shonen battle” roadtrip to drive to the final battle.

zaShunina’s like an old lady now, LOL. Reading on a rocking chair and enjoying the sunset.

Yeah…please just keep your lips away from each other, guys. I was here for the negotiation, remember?

Oh. That wasn’t a boob plate. I was LOLling at their idea to give that to a woman, because the one woman who needs that plate is Shinawa, whose job is already over. Good thing I was wrong there, then. It’s also interesting to note this suit looks like a gladiator suit…like humanity has reverted itself to medieval times to fight zaShunina, who represents the future. (I’m still laughing though, because I knew Shindo was hot under that shirt, but damn, I did get more than enough eye candy this season just by this one gladiator suit…and zaShunina’s butt.)

Well, I kinda did get what I wanted by having the Hanamori/Shindo ship broken, but even though I got a het ship (which I’m normally more supportive of), I don’t support this het ship at all.

It’s cute to see a floating pink cube act like a phone. Or one of those annoying fairy companions…

Welp, it’s almost over. See you next ep for the final simulcast commentary.

Boku no Hero Academia 26

Apparently BnHA’s on break this week, meaning I’m caught up after this.

There was a thing called work experience that we had to do at one point – that’s how I got the experience needed for One Wish They Never Wanted’s bookstore scenes.

It’s cool to see Eraserhead and Present Mic in the same situation as Deku and everyone else. Aizawa looked kinda bishie then, which is unexpected.

I don’t get the reference involving acid blood…

That’s nice. I already knew the names everyone was going to come up with due to the time I’ve spent on the wiki, but the homage becomes much more significant when you see it in context.

Dangit, Midnight. You stole my explanation thunder.

I always wondered why Shouto never got a better hero name. So he literally just used his own name, huh?

I wanna cry at the Iidas’ plight but I have no tears, dangit!

I don’t get it- what’s the “air chair exercise”?

Gran Torino. I’ve watched the movie that has that name, it’s about a vintage car (Ford Gran Torino), an old guy called Walter (Walt for short) and racism. I always suspected Walt was the reason Gran Torino (hero) was named thusly...but until Horikoshi says something about it, we’ll all have to keep speculating…(By the way, the racism perspective in that movie resonated with me, despite my not being a Hmong person. Maybe I’m not properly acknowledging it, but it might be one of my inspirations for Half-Paid Heroes…?)

Hina Logi 1

I have come here to hate on this magical girl spinoff, because man, Luck and Logic squandered what could have been a very good plot – it was “pretty but no substance”, to quote a past me. Indeed, it’s because magical girls are my passion that I have high expectations of new entrants into the genre…

Okay, what is this? Hogwarts???...Actually, the best match, right down to the white turrets, would be Alfea of Winx Club.

It’s stoic girl, Ojou-sama + companions and Shinawa-lite. See? Stereotypes, although I ribbed the names from ANN (having read it a few weeks before I got here). However, before I read ANN, I’d already predicted this would be a pile of road apples.

I feel like I should know who Nina is (from ANN), but I didn’t get far enough to familiarise myself with Nina in the original Luck and Logic, haha.

This genki glutton girl is basically gender bent shonen cliché, y’know? Serve me something slightly different, and I’ll be a happy camper.

I can’t believe I laughed at Nina going “my teacher told me to”, because I expected it.

The humour isn’t funny in this for the most part…the eyecatch says, “16th May. Fluffy! (Fuwaafuwaa!)” “Fluffy” of course being in reference to the messed-up hair.

Urgh, this fanservice is driving me up the wall and giving me a headache…

Ooh, nice transformation sequence!

Enough with the yuri between Nina and Lion! Gah!

“May 16th. From this point forward, [Kagura] became very angry.” (I had to Google the teacher’s name. She’s so insignificant this episode, I can’t even remember it…)

Lion’s face is getting more annoying by the second…

“May 16th. Everyone ate heartily.” (I used the word “heartily” because I didn’t have a better substitute for oishii in this case, but *shrugs* I don’t care either way.) The use of itadaku I’m still fairly new to, so hopefully someday I can use the word with confidence…

“…reminds me of my mommy.” – Gah, Lion. Are you a toddler? I imagine you with a toddler’s tone when the subs say that.

“Send your beloved Hina on a journey.” – It’s actually a reference to something. Check this article’s title for what it is. That’s a Japanese proverb which says to not baby your kids too much.

I feel like this is a pretty clean drop. After all, if I rage for all the wrong reasons (and come out with a slight headache in the end), you know that the show is a drop.

Grimoire of Zero 12 (FINAL)

Thirteen’s with the crew at the end of the OP. Huh.

I have the feeling that Holdem will never kill Thirteen, even though that dogface is trying to stab the sorcerer right now.

Intruders,much? It’s an army!

It seems like these animal fights were meant to be a big spectacle but observe the background animals and see how off model they are. That’s how much care was put into what was meant to be the show’s climax this ep.

I would’ve loved to see Mercenary do a Batman backhand. Those are always cool and sometimes funny.

The cloud and white-frame animation look gorgeous in a sakuga way! Now we’re talking!

Having someone die solves nothing. It is only those who need an outlet for blame that require needless death, am I right?

Ohhhhhhhh! One kiss made at least 2 or 3 people jealous, LOL.

I wanted to see Mercenary as a human. He could’ve been real hot…dangit.

The ED song is real cute and iyashikei. I don’t think I’ve properly listened to it until now, so…good on me for doing so, haha.

Tsukigakirei 12 (FINAL)

Tsukigakirei’s been a middle ranker for me most weeks, so to suddenly get better around the time when Kado fell was practically begging for the two to switch places…(Note: I’ve made a personal ranking for each ep in a document I’ve kept all to myself, and I haven’t posted them online. That’s why I’ve had comments that indicate where shows are on that ranking at the start and end of an ep’s simulcast commentary.)

That sparkly shot of the river is in the OP too, so when there was a shot of Kotarou and Akane, I was disappoined I wasn’t seeing the OP (even though I still think the live-action bit is a lil’ weird). It’s cute how those guys are wearing the same jackets, though.

There’s a water thermos in the back of Tachibana’s (glasses guy’s) bookstore.

Kotarou’s dragon background is so cool. I want one.

The thing with the rhino doesn’t translate well. The word for “goodnight” here is oyasuminasai and rhino is sai, so…yeah. I think it would be better to call it “sleep rhight” (including typo) to convey that pun better, but hey. I’m not going to major in Japanese.

When Chinatsu revealed she got into the same school as Kotarou, I verbally went, “Oh no!” Don’t you remember how I was with ep 7???

Even Chinatsu has that black jacket, so it seems to be a school-issued one.

My heart just broke a lil’ bit as Chinatsu hugged Kotarou…I’m not sure what to make of it…

I’ve never seen “graduation” being abbreviated to “grad” unless it’s “grad school” and the “grad” in that stands for “graduate” (noun). It’s a very American term, so I never use it, but…the term translated to “grad” is “graduation ceremony” (sotsugyoushiki). Seriously though, CR. Enough with your Comic Sans translations.

The translation of the prologue misses something. The first sentence has da to omou at the end, meaning “I think…”.

A novel board. Y’know, like Honeyfeed. I’ve got quite a lot of experience with ‘em, because I don’t intend to be a person who gains money from writing…not fulltime, anyway.

There’s a site called Syousteuka ni Narou which is basically Honeyfeed for a Japanese audience, with the added bonus of possibly getting your works into print and then anime. The recently announced Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari, as well as Re:Zero and a lot of its kin, have come from that board. It’s pretty clear that Syousetsuka is being parodied here, that’s all…even though the titles of the websites are completely different phrases.

What’s that bird with the long neck called? The one standing in the water? I wanna know…

Normally with anime tears, it’s like me and CGI - I bash most efforts. However, I think this is the effort that I commend the most so far…this anime season is full of surprises…Well, Kotarou? Can you keep up with a girl that does track?

Everyone cries when someone leaves, so long as that person has made an impact. I know that all too well…

Dangit trash CGI people. Just as I got used to you, you become obvious again! Grah!

I admit I shed a few tears there…I’m not crying, you’re crying! (Also, if you haven’t paid any attention to what I’ve been writing, One Wish They Never Wanted was based on similar experiences to Kotarou and Akane’s graduation, although a lot of it happens outside Takuma’s point of view and so I didn’t write it.)

Oh! Hey, these are the end of ep LINE convos from previous eps, coupled with pics of the ones who typed them! The “seaman” convo would’ve made more sense if the translator would’ve bothered translating the word “semi” (short for “seminar”) as it was, because that makes more sense. I really don’t get the “marr” one though.

Well, any show that makes me cry on its first run is a show I don’t regret. I still feel weird putting Kado below it, because Kado was betted than Tsukigakirei for most of its run (as I’ve said at the start of this commentary). Regardless of what happened though, I guess…I’ll see you all for the next show then! Bye for now!

#simulcast commentary #tsukigakirei #grimoire of zero #seikaisuru kado #hina logi: from luck & logic #boku no hero academia #Chesarka watches Tsukigakirei #Chesarka watches Kado #Chesarka watches Boku no Hero Academia #Chesarka watches Grimoire of Zero #kado the right answer #hina logic

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scienceblogtumbler · 5 years ago

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Researchers find on-off switch for inflammation related to overeating

Researchers at Yale have identified a molecule that plays a key role in the body’s inflammatory response to overeating, which can lead to obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic diseases. The finding suggests that the molecule could be a promising therapeutic target to control this inflammation and keep metabolic diseases in check.

The study appears on June 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When a person overeats, the body stores excess calories in the form of fat in the adipose tissue, or body fat, said lead author Xiaoyong Yang of Yale School of Medicine. As the amount of calories consumed continues to increase, this leads to inflammation in adipose tissue and the release of fatty acids into other tissues, including the liver and muscles.

“This is dangerous,” Yang said, “and leads to metabolic disorders like diabetes.”

Researchers were aware that overeating led to inflammation and metabolic diseases, but until now, they did not know the precise way that the body’s immune cells, such as macrophages — which react to excess calorie consumption — contributed to this process. The new research by Yang and team zeroed in on a pathway called O-GIcNAc signaling, which activates when a person overeats, instructing the cells to limit inflammation.

Inflammation happens when the body’s immune system reacts to injury or threat, and involves increased blood flow, capillary dilation, and an influx of white blood cells.

“The body is smart,” said Yang, associate professor of comparative medicine and of cellular & molecular physiology. “It tries to protect against inflammation when fat builds up in the body. We discovered a key pathway that quenches inflammation caused by overnutrition.”

In particular, the researchers found that OGT (O-GIcNAc transferase), an enzyme that activates GIcNAc signaling, was responsible for activating the body’s pro-inflammatory response by turning on or off a specific signaling pathway in macrophages.

“The macrophage can be a good guy or a bad guy,” Yang said. “It becomes a bad guy in overnutrition, secreting a lot of inflammatory factors. In other contexts, it’s a good guy and has an anti-inflammatory effect. We found out that OGT tries to stop the macrophage from becoming a bad guy — to stop the pro-inflammatory response.”

Their finding suggests that OGT could be a target for new therapies to suppress inflammation and improve health.

The study also sheds light on the workings of glutamine and glucosamine, nutritional supplements recommended by doctors for arthritis and inflammation of the joints, Yang said. While researchers have known that these supplements promote O-GlcNAc signaling and reduce inflammation, they did not know how this process worked.

“Our finding further implicates how glutamine and glucosamine suppress inflammation,” Yang said.

Other members of the Yale research team include Dr. Gerald I. Shulman, Dr. Marie E. Robert, Rachel J. Perry, Yunfan Yang, Xiruo Li, Harding H. Luan, Bichen Zhang, Kaisi Zhang, Zongyu Li, Minnie Fu, Dongyan Zhang, Simeng Wang, Yuyang Liu, João Paulo Albuquerque, Qunxiang Ong, Rui Li, and Qi Wang.

source https://scienceblog.com/517149/researchers-find-on-off-switch-for-inflammation-related-to-overeating/

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ketodiet-emily · 4 years ago

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KETO DIET FAQ: 9 Frequently Asked Questions Answered

How long does it take to achieve ketosis? This is the first KETO DIET FAQ and the answer is: The transition time to nutritional ketosis will depend on many factors, including individual glycogen levels (stored glucose), activity level, age, the extent of carbohydrate restriction, and your overall diet. While many individuals will enter ketosis after approximately four days of following a ketogenic diet, some individuals may take longer. Do I need to track calories? The KD does not restrict calories consumed per day. However, to maintain ketosis, t’s essential to limit carbohydrates to approximately 20 to 50 grams per day, which can be monitored using a tracking app. For a list of macronutrient tracking apps, see “Macronutrient tracking apps for the keto diet” found in the appendix section. You can read more about custom keto diet meal plan here Can I ever eat sweets or desserts? The best keto-friendly choices for a sweet tooth include a couple of squares of high- quality dark chocolate (%80 or higher), berries with whipped heavy cream, and homemade desserts made with zero-calorie sweeteners such as monk fruit, stevia, and erythritol. You can include these options in moderation and within your daily carbohydrate limit. Many adherents find that their cravings for sugar and carbohydrates decrease on the KD, making it easier to skip desserts. How long should I follow the diet? Studies have demonstrated the beneficial effects and safety of a short-term ketogenic diet for up to six to twelve months. How long you follow the diet will be up to your individual health goals and health status. Work with your integrative healthcare practitioner to determine what is best for your wellness plan. What are exogenous ketones? Exogenous ketones are ketones that come from dietary supplements, such as beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) or acetoacetate. Supplementing with exogenous ketones may increase ketone levels in the blood and be used to complement the KD. However, consuming these supplements outside of the context of a low-carbohydrate diet is unlikely to shift your metabolism to a fat-burning ketogenic state. See more keto diet faq below Is alcohol keto-friendly? Some alcoholic beverages are high in carbohydrates and should be restricted on the keto diet, including most beer, dessert wines, coolers, and cocktails made with juice, syrups, and soda. Pure spirits, such as tequila, rye, whiskey, vodka, and gin, contain zero carbohydrates and can be mixed with water or soda water and a splash of lemon or lime juice. You may also choose to consume dry white, red, or sparkling wine in moderation. You can read more HERE What’s the difference between ketosis and ketoacidosis? Nutritional ketosis is sometimes confused with ketoacidosis, a serious complication of diabetes in which individuals have high blood glucose and ketone levels as a result of inadequate insulin production. In comparison, nutritional ketosis, induced by severely restricting carbohydrate intake, does not cause high blood glucose levels or changes in blood pH. Can I follow a keto diet while vegetarian or vegan? Individuals who follow a more inclusive vegetarian eating style, such as Lacto-Ovo vegetarian, may be able to implement the KD successfully. Individuals who eat a strict vegan diet, which restricts all animal products, should be cautious when implementing a KD. For sources of amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein, the vegan diet relies heavily on grains, beans, and legumes, foods that are also high in carbohydrates and are restricted on the KD. Special attention and planning should be given to ensure that nutrient needs are met in vegan individuals following the KD. Supplementation may be required to meet nutritional needs. What’s the difference between ketogenic, low-carbohydrate, and paleo diets? A low-carbohydrate diet commonly consists of consuming between 20 to 70 grams of carbohydrates per day, without specific intake requirements for protein or fat. A keto diet is one type of very-low-carbohydrate diet, permitting only 20 to 50 grams of carbohydrates per day while encouraging fat intake. On the other hand, the paleo diet consists of consuming only food that our prehistoric ancestors would have eaten during the Paleolithic era, such as lean meats, fish, nuts, vegetables, and fruit. A typical paleo diet does not restrict carbohydrates, and may in fact be high-carbohydrate depending on the amount of starchy vegetables, fruit, and permitted sweeteners (e.g., honey, maple syrup) consumed. Conclusion about Keto Diet FAQ As you can see, there is a lot that goes into following the keto diet and lifestyle. But do not get discouraged! Your body will thank you for cutting out those sweets and treats. Even if you feel mentally and financially drained by this diet at first, remember that the cost is actually small. Find your new favorite recipes, make your keto-approved grocery list, and head out to the store. You will soon feel and look amazing with high energy levels, less pain, and fewer worries about terrible medical conditions. Get ready to reset your body to how it is supposed to run with the keto diet! It’s Time to Start KETO diet Get what you want, how you want it – with our personalised meal plans. Read the full article

#Diet #Health #Keto #Lifestyle

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jesseneufeld · 6 years ago

Text

Is Iron the New Cholesterol?

The experts’ track record with all the other “evil meat components” has many of my readers skeptical, so they asked me to weigh in on iron.

Two, there’s a little something called hereditary hemochromatosis.

Hereditary hemochromatosis is a genetic condition increasing a person’s absorption and retention of dietary iron. This has benefits in certain contexts—carriers have a natural resistance to the bubonic plague, as one effect of hemochromatosis is to render white immune cells iron-deficient and thus resistant to the plague which feeds on iron—but it’s mostly negative in today’s relatively plague-free world. Most of the hemochromatosis literature focuses on homozygotes (carriers of two copies of the gene) and specific “iron overload-related diseases,” which include cirrhosis, liver fibrosis, liver cancer, elevated liver enzymes, “physician-diagnosed symptomatic hemochromatosis,” or finger arthritis. Those are bad conditions to have, to be sure, but that’s not even a complete list. Homozygous carriers of the mutation also have greater risks for diabetes, arthritis, fatigue, liver disease, and frailty and muscle loss. They’re more likely to experience neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Even heterozygous carriers (those who carry just one copy of the variant) have an elevated risk of iron overload compared to the general population.

Possible Modern Influences On Iron Levels

Less Bleeding

Less Intense Activity

Too Many Seed Oils

What To Do About All This?

What seems safe is to stay on the low end of normal—say, from 50-150 ng/ml—as long as no symptoms of low iron arise.

As for women? Higher levels don’t seem to correlate with the same health issues in women. Lucky.

Now, say you have high iron, whether it’s hereditary hemochromatosis or just high normal ferritin levels….

What Should You Do About High Iron Levels?

Donate Blood

Don’t Manage Iron Overload With Diet

By that I mean stuff like:

Don’t give up red meat.

Don’t stop eating liver every week.

Keep eating oysters.

Don’t religiously adhere to reverse-kosher (only eating meat in the presence of dairy to inhibit iron absorption).

Don’t Manage an Iron Overload That Doesn’t Exist

Follow a Healthy Primal Eating Plan

Whether it’s keto, low-carb, moderate-carb, or even vegetarian, going Primal will mitigate many of the potential effects of high iron by:

Avoiding Seed Oils and Excess Omega-6 Fats. Seed oils almost certainly make the “iron overload problem” worse, and may even be responsible for its negative effects and link to various diseases.

Including Phytonutrient-rich Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs, Teas, and Coffee. Polyphenols both inhibit iron absorption and reduce the oxidative interaction between iron and lipids.

So to sum up, get tested and be aware of the iron issue, but don’t let it rule you. It’s iron overload, not overlord.

Take care, everyone. What do you think of iron? Ever get tested? Ever give blood? See any benefits?

Let me know down below!

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Note: This information isn’t intended as and shouldn’t be considered medical advice. Always consult your doctor in the management or treatment of any health issue.

References:

Burke W, Imperatore G, Mcdonnell SM, Baron RC, Khoury MJ. Contribution of different HFE genotypes to iron overload disease: a pooled analysis. Genet Med. 2000;2(5):271-7.

Allen KJ, Gurrin LC, Constantine CC, et al. Iron-overload-related disease in HFE hereditary hemochromatosis. N Engl J Med. 2008;358(3):221-30.

The post Is Iron the New Cholesterol? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Is Iron the New Cholesterol? published first on https://drugaddictionsrehab.tumblr.com/

0 notes

watsonrodriquezie · 6 years ago

Text

Is Iron the New Cholesterol?

The experts’ track record with all the other “evil meat components” has many of my readers skeptical, so they asked me to weigh in on iron.

Two, there’s a little something called hereditary hemochromatosis.

Possible Modern Influences On Iron Levels Less Bleeding

Less Intense Activity

Too Many Seed Oils

What To Do About All This?

What seems safe is to stay on the low end of normal—say, from 50-150 ng/ml—as long as no symptoms of low iron arise.

As for women? Higher levels don’t seem to correlate with the same health issues in women. Lucky.

Now, say you have high iron, whether it’s hereditary hemochromatosis or just high normal ferritin levels….

What Should You Do About High Iron Levels? Donate Blood

Don’t Manage Iron Overload With Diet

By that I mean stuff like:

Don’t give up red meat.

Don’t stop eating liver every week.

Keep eating oysters.

Don’t religiously adhere to reverse-kosher (only eating meat in the presence of dairy to inhibit iron absorption).

Don’t Manage an Iron Overload That Doesn’t Exist

Follow a Healthy Primal Eating Plan

Whether it’s keto, low-carb, moderate-carb, or even vegetarian, going Primal will mitigate many of the potential effects of high iron by:

Avoiding Seed Oils and Excess Omega-6 Fats. Seed oils almost certainly make the “iron overload problem” worse, and may even be responsible for its negative effects and link to various diseases.

Including Phytonutrient-rich Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs, Teas, and Coffee. Polyphenols both inhibit iron absorption and reduce the oxidative interaction between iron and lipids.

So to sum up, get tested and be aware of the iron issue, but don’t let it rule you. It’s iron overload, not overlord.

Take care, everyone. What do you think of iron? Ever get tested? Ever give blood? See any benefits?

Let me know down below!

References:

Burke W, Imperatore G, Mcdonnell SM, Baron RC, Khoury MJ. Contribution of different HFE genotypes to iron overload disease: a pooled analysis. Genet Med. 2000;2(5):271-7.

Allen KJ, Gurrin LC, Constantine CC, et al. Iron-overload-related disease in HFE hereditary hemochromatosis. N Engl J Med. 2008;358(3):221-30.

The post Is Iron the New Cholesterol? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

0 notes

cristinajourdanqp · 6 years ago

Text

Is Iron the New Cholesterol?

The experts’ track record with all the other “evil meat components” has many of my readers skeptical, so they asked me to weigh in on iron.

Two, there’s a little something called hereditary hemochromatosis.

Possible Modern Influences On Iron Levels Less Bleeding

Less Intense Activity

Too Many Seed Oils

What To Do About All This?

What seems safe is to stay on the low end of normal—say, from 50-150 ng/ml—as long as no symptoms of low iron arise.

As for women? Higher levels don’t seem to correlate with the same health issues in women. Lucky.

Now, say you have high iron, whether it’s hereditary hemochromatosis or just high normal ferritin levels….

What Should You Do About High Iron Levels? Donate Blood

Don’t Manage Iron Overload With Diet

By that I mean stuff like:

Don’t give up red meat.

Don’t stop eating liver every week.

Keep eating oysters.

Don’t religiously adhere to reverse-kosher (only eating meat in the presence of dairy to inhibit iron absorption).

Don’t Manage an Iron Overload That Doesn’t Exist

Follow a Healthy Primal Eating Plan

Whether it’s keto, low-carb, moderate-carb, or even vegetarian, going Primal will mitigate many of the potential effects of high iron by:

Avoiding Seed Oils and Excess Omega-6 Fats. Seed oils almost certainly make the “iron overload problem” worse, and may even be responsible for its negative effects and link to various diseases.

Including Phytonutrient-rich Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs, Teas, and Coffee. Polyphenols both inhibit iron absorption and reduce the oxidative interaction between iron and lipids.

So to sum up, get tested and be aware of the iron issue, but don’t let it rule you. It’s iron overload, not overlord.

Take care, everyone. What do you think of iron? Ever get tested? Ever give blood? See any benefits?

Let me know down below!

References:

Burke W, Imperatore G, Mcdonnell SM, Baron RC, Khoury MJ. Contribution of different HFE genotypes to iron overload disease: a pooled analysis. Genet Med. 2000;2(5):271-7.

Allen KJ, Gurrin LC, Constantine CC, et al. Iron-overload-related disease in HFE hereditary hemochromatosis. N Engl J Med. 2008;358(3):221-30.

The post Is Iron the New Cholesterol? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

0 notes

fishermariawo · 6 years ago

Text

Is Iron the New Cholesterol?

The experts’ track record with all the other “evil meat components” has many of my readers skeptical, so they asked me to weigh in on iron.

Two, there’s a little something called hereditary hemochromatosis.

Possible Modern Influences On Iron Levels Less Bleeding

Less Intense Activity

Too Many Seed Oils

What To Do About All This?

What seems safe is to stay on the low end of normal—say, from 50-150 ng/ml—as long as no symptoms of low iron arise.

As for women? Higher levels don’t seem to correlate with the same health issues in women. Lucky.

Now, say you have high iron, whether it’s hereditary hemochromatosis or just high normal ferritin levels….

What Should You Do About High Iron Levels? Donate Blood

Don’t Manage Iron Overload With Diet

By that I mean stuff like:

Don’t give up red meat.

Don’t stop eating liver every week.

Keep eating oysters.

Don’t religiously adhere to reverse-kosher (only eating meat in the presence of dairy to inhibit iron absorption).

Don’t Manage an Iron Overload That Doesn’t Exist

Follow a Healthy Primal Eating Plan

Whether it’s keto, low-carb, moderate-carb, or even vegetarian, going Primal will mitigate many of the potential effects of high iron by:

Avoiding Seed Oils and Excess Omega-6 Fats. Seed oils almost certainly make the “iron overload problem” worse, and may even be responsible for its negative effects and link to various diseases.

Including Phytonutrient-rich Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs, Teas, and Coffee. Polyphenols both inhibit iron absorption and reduce the oxidative interaction between iron and lipids.

So to sum up, get tested and be aware of the iron issue, but don’t let it rule you. It’s iron overload, not overlord.

Take care, everyone. What do you think of iron? Ever get tested? Ever give blood? See any benefits?

Let me know down below!

References:

Burke W, Imperatore G, Mcdonnell SM, Baron RC, Khoury MJ. Contribution of different HFE genotypes to iron overload disease: a pooled analysis. Genet Med. 2000;2(5):271-7.

Allen KJ, Gurrin LC, Constantine CC, et al. Iron-overload-related disease in HFE hereditary hemochromatosis. N Engl J Med. 2008;358(3):221-30.

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