From experience of making video content about food (just regular food, with ingredients), then watching the internet respond, I think it’s true to say that if anyone tells you either:
or
That person is a tinfoil wingnut. The internet wants there to be One Simple Trick That Doctors Hate. There isn’t.
A leading practitioner of dire warnings about awful terrible food that supposedly causes INFLAMMATION and numerous diseases, is former cardiac surgeon Steven Gundry (or as I think of him, the King of Clickbait).
Gundry warns against eating vegetables/plant products that contain lectins (which they all do including whole grains, in varying amounts, especially beans, soybeans and peanuts). He does this despite a lack of evidence for such sweeping claims.* And oh by the way, he’s got lots of books and supplements to sell you.
Gundry also made the news recently with an abstract published in Circulation, which claimed that mRNA Covid-19 vaccines cause massive inflammation in the body leading to heart disease. Knowledgeable professionals were not kind to his theory, which was however eagerly taken up by antivaccine loons.
*if you eat immense quantities of raw beans, for instance, it might not be good for you, or to those around you for that matter.
Eat more beans. But not human beans. Soylent beans.
Diet is a tricky matter. In the real world studies are going to run into many difficulties. Take the aforementioned Tom Brady. He’s clearly doing something right. My guess is that avoiding tomatoes isn’t part of it. Avoiding sugar, starch, and highly processed red meats is the most likely reason he benefits from his diet, with the tomato thing just something that he thinks is of benefit but probably really isn’t. Can I prove that? No, because that would require a complicated study that would be extremely hard to run.
ETA. Setting up the study in theory isn’t that difficult. Running it in the real world is a whole different ballgame.
That’s part of the difficulty in interpreting tests like the c-reactive protein and sed rate. In a patient with a known problem, and symptoms pointing to worsening of that problem (“Doc my fingers that hurt from my RA are hurting more than usual”) them it’s probable that is the source. But in someone with vague and chronic complaints and no previous diagnosis, further work up would need to be done.
Uh… It typically causes a little inflammation, which is good, and triggers the immune systems to recognize that there’s a problem it needs to learn about. Vaccines are sometimes administered with an adjuvant, whose role, as best as i can tell, is to trigger just enough inflammation to alert the immune system. They are commonly used with vaccines that are otherwise a purified antigen that might not, by itself, alarm the immune system enough. Inflammation is one way the body can alert the immune system, “hey, come look at this”.
In rare cases, the covid 19 vaccine does cause enough inflammation to cause myocarditis (inflammation of the tissue around the heart. “itis” means “inflammation”.) Covid 19 can also cause myocarditis. As can several other viruses (and vaccines, for that matter.)
I haven’t read that study, but honestly, it sounds like a “water is wet” result that was misinterpreted.
My father was a doctor, and he put a lot of faith in the sed rate as an indicator of overall health. When my mother had a large, but encapsulated cancer, my dad was very encouraged when her sed rate came back completely normal. I think he felt that if the cancer had spread around, inflammation from the immune system attacking it would have shown up in the sed rate, and the normal sed rate suggested that the apparent encapsulation was real. And indeed, surgery successfully removed that cancer, despite its size.
I gather that c-reactive protein is similarly a very generic indicator of levels of inflammatory response. No doubt, in a healthy person, that number goes up and down for all sorts of reasons. And i suspect that if it’s persistently high, that’s a sign that something bad is going on. But yeah, it wouldn’t tell you what is the cause.
Inflammation is good, required for hosts of reparative and protective processes, including preventing infections and cancer.
Inflammation is bad contributing to heart and vascular diseases, endocrine dysfunctions, so on.
So the very specific details matter and having the subtle complex dance choreographed well is key. What is where when all matters.
Different inflammation markers have different significances in different contexts. Some more specific for overwhelming infection, some better to track response in conditions like inflammatory bowel disease or juvenile immune arthritis of different types, some for risk of vascular disease. But they are all still crude measures.
Certain nutrition plans (eg the Mediterranean diet) and regular exercise help the dance get performed well. Other nutritional habits, such as lots of added sugars and processed foods, lack of exercise, gets the dancers colliding with worse health outcomes more likely. That much we know.
Even Gundry has had to damp down his enthusiasm for the findings, as a correction to account for numerous deficiencies was issued.
“Definitive conclusions cannot be drawn about a possible link between the mRNA vaccines and future ACS (acute coronary syndrome) risk, according to a correction issued…on the Circulation journal website, which had published an abstract from the virtual American Heart Association (AHA) 2021 Scientific Sessions.”
“All strong conclusions and alarmist phrasing have now been removed from the corrected abstract, with additional wording acknowledging that no rigorous comparisons have been made between vaccinated and unvaccinated subjects.”
“The content of the new abstract speaks for itself—it includes observational findings, from a small set of patients treated at one facility, using a risk estimator for 5-year risk that has not been validated in this population,” Manesh Patel, MD (Duke University, Durham, NC), chair of the AHA Scientific Sessions program committee, said in a statement sent to TCTMD. “The research author has also clarified that there was no control group—no unvaccinated patients were included, and no statistical comparison was conducted. The research author’s conclusions have been updated to reflect these critical details.”
“The abstract, as originally released, made alarming claims—that there were “dramatic changes” in a score indicative of future ACS risk after patients received mRNA vaccines—and continues to be circulated on social media by people skeptical of COVID-19 vaccines. The sole author of the abstract, which was accepted as an “ePoster” at the meeting, concluded that the shots “dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T-cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.”…Overall, the abstract has been updated (after proper scientific review) to correct some typographical errors, to clarify study processes, and to reflect the limitations of the research, including the lack of any formal statistical analyses.”
The number of Covid-19 papers that have been retracted from the scientific literature has reached at least 250, not counting “expressions of concern” and “corrections”. This inglorious record reflects at best sloppiness on the part of researchers, and in some cases outright sleaze by people pushing pet agendas.
The idea that all inflammation is bad is as simplistic as the notion that all oxidative processes in the body are bad and so we should max out on antioxidants in food and supplements. Oxidative reactions are essential for life, and even “oxidative stress” can have beneficial results in certain instances.
The supposed proinflammatory effects of some foods have to be examined in concert with other effects to determine their risk/benefit profile. Such subtleties are beyond people seduced by the idea that there is One True Cause Of Disease and that by eating the “right” diet they can dramatically reduce or eliminate multiple health risks.
If only it was that simple.
This makes me wonder if these particular markers (bolded above) are more informative if a patient’s baseline is known – and so perhaps the results from a series of periodic tests for sed rate and c-reactive protein would be ideal from a diagnostician’s standpoint. Though I’m sure vanishingly few patients presenting with an acute condition come prepared with a binder full of weekly blood test results going back years.
Once you get to a certain age … is regular “check for the heck of it” blood testing a good idea? Like quarterly or monthly? Some kind of off-the-shelf general blood panel that can determine a baseline for many markers?
Quest Diagnostics (I think they’re a national chain) offers cheap blood tests with most insurance – maybe less than $25 each (and I think often more like less than $15). I get emails from Quest every month or so advertising this service. Is this the kind of thing people are encouraged to do regularly these days to best look after their health? Analogous to how doctors will say that testing blood pressure daily and keeping a log is more useful than checking blood pressure only during doctor’s visits.
Definitely nationwide. I don’t know what advice is given on this but I didn’t know about this before and definitely want to look more into this. I need some regular blood tests and I’d rather not have to go through my doctor first. If a doctor isn’t recommending regular specific testing this is probably a waste of time and money, but most people over a certain age would qualify on that basis. Whether it is the best approach to ordering and reporting tests may still be a matter of debate in the medical community for no good reason.
Unless it’s Giant Hogweed, right?
No on each count.
There is utility in monitoring certain markers along the course of specific illnesses, to gauge progression or response to intervention.
For individuals without those specific conditions the day to day variation in most of these markers across “normal” and into what is outside of statistical normal but not of any clinical significance, is huge. And frequent. So there is no benefit of knowing those numbers. Worse though, the one out of twenty times a number will be in that top 5% declared as elevated which might cause needless concern and harms as the cause of the “elevation” is investigated and misadventures ensue.
Some people have a baseline temperature that averages lower or higher than others do. And monitoring a patient’s temperature along the course of an illness may be useful. Checking your temperature every day, or every week, or quarter even, while you are feeling well, not so useful.
See, because people have different baseline temperatures, i think there’s something to be said for checking it often enough to know your own baseline. I run a little cool, and if i hit 99F, it means I’m sick. Not “see the doctor and get worried” sick, but “take it easy for a day or two and don’t visit anyone who is especially vulnerable” sick for sure.
Partly, it also matters how you react to an unusual number. I tested really high for cholesterol at my annual physical one year. And i knew my baseline, and knew it was an outlier. When my husband got a single high reading from a new-to-him doctor, the doctor put him on a statin. When i got a high reading from a doctor who was familiar with my baseline, i said, “you know, it’s November 3 and half my calories in the last couple of days have come from leftover Halloween milky way bars. How about if we see if it’s still high next year before reacting?” And he endorsed that, and the next year my cholesterol was, again, normal.
(My husband is no longer on that statin, and his cholesterol is normal again, too.)
Or Hemlock Water Dropwort, but neither of those are foods
Trouble is that in general circulation, these boolean diet choices are often propped up with anecdotes that sorta look like they might maybe support the argument. Hey look at this guy who gave up eating wheat and he’s transformed his dad bod into the physique of an athlete! So wheat must be POISON, right?
Well, no. When that guy gave up wheat, it meant he had to give up a significant proportion of all junk food and started eating more whole foods instead. It’s not that wheat is necessarily bad, it’s that a lot of bad things often contain it. Not the same thing, but the internet wants to reduce this to One Simple Trick.
No, these blood tests would still not be very useful since too many things affect them and how they normally change is not well studied. If elevated in the absence of looking for specific things it would be hard to draw conclusions and suggest treatments. Eat healthier, eat unhealthy foods less often and in smaller amounts, get in some exercise, something you enjoy doing. Bonus points for strength and flexibility training or having a dog to walk.
Anything can be food. Once.
Especially of footballs. (Apologies).
You’re just jealous because Brady is the most hydrated person in the world, and knows better than to eat tomatoes and eggplant.
*it’s too bad a certain poster is no longer around to remind us that Tom is very popular, so this other stuff is irrelevant.
The story about Tom deflating footballs is mere puffery. If you drink enough water you become skilled at disgorging bladders, though.
Reading the link, Tom seems to know a lot about puffery. If you encourage happiness at all costs and drink each day as many ounces of water as half your body weight in pounds… you’re perhaps not overdosing on happiness, but on Ecstasy.