"Omega-3" is as vague and underdescriptive term as "marihuana". We're better educated now and we can focus on the eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) where it comes to Omega 3. And we can point at THC, CBN, CBD or any of the 100+ other cannabinoids present in cannabis flowers when we describe "marihuana", "weed" or "pot".
And there's a reason behind my local pharmacy offering THC-focused or CBD-focused pot, and my local supplements store offering DHA-focused and EPA-focused softgels, produced by the same company and under the same brand. How these these products act varies by active substances content and the person. Both "Omega 3" and "marihuana" are dumbed-down terms, meaningless when it comes to studies or papers.
There's a ton of studies on nih.gov about EPA's potential as an antidepressant, misaligned with DHA-related articles on the subject, that I could link. But I can say - purely anecdotally - that I removed psypost.org feed from my RSS reader a few months after ChatGPT became public.
The specific supplement used in this research [0] was equal parts DHA and EPA (no ALA, which is the third main Omega-3.) Determining whether the effect is specific to one of the Omega-3's or general to the class would be an expected subject of further research, as would seeing if the effect holds outside of the lab mice model.
There's a whole lot of work between this study and anything actionable other than for planning further research to confirm and better understand the effect, and whatever more general problems psypost.com may have, reporting the source of the effect as "Omega-3" is both consistent with the paper and not overly general given the actual facts.
I think there's a practical distinction between the kind of term "omega-3" is vs the kind of term "marijuana" is.
You mostly only find THC/CBD/etc in marijuana; and we mostly only consume marijuana to get those particular active ingredients into our bodies. So you can forget about "marijuana" as a category for describing those compounds, and just speak of the compounds themselves — measure marijuana strains by the presence of those active ingredients; extract and purify one particular active ingredient and sell it; etc. Doing this doesn't lose you anything; in fact, it's a pure win, as the use of precise language gives people a tool to leverage to more precisely ask for the effect they're looking for, and gives suppliers a tool to more precisely describe what they're selling.
While the omega-3 constituent compounds can be treated this way, they are not solely a thing we extract or synthesize to put in precise-molarity-per-dose pills; they're also a thing found in food. Many different foods; with most of them being foods people eat for reasons beyond just getting omega-3s in their bodies. In other words, the "omega-3" constituent compounds are nutrients.
And many of these omega-3-containing foods — fish, for example — aren't carefully cultivated species that have known ratios of the omega-3 constituent compounds that could be put on the label of the food-product. Rather, the ratio of those constituent compounds is pretty much random per individual food item. One salmon at the grocery store has omega-3 fats which happen to be high in DHA, while the next salmon beside it in the same cooler display is higher in EPA. All you can in general about a food product — all a supplier can say, and all a food shopper can generally expect to look for — is a food that is "high in omega-3s."
As long as people are interested in optimizing their health in a loose manner by eating "healthful foods" — rather than taking specifically-formulated supplements — I don't expect they'll let go of the generic categorical term "omega-3." When it comes to food, "it contains omega-3s" is almost always the tightest bound you can put on the "nutritional value" of a given food.
I'm not so sure about the incertitude you speak of about omega-3s content and ratios in food.
In fact while in Japan I used to specifically select my bags of dried sardine (niboshi) and mackerel cans by the content of EPA and DHA, clearly indicated in mg per 100g. Every such products had these indications with content varying by brands.
I guess that if you master your process you can ensure and advertise a consistent quality.
Processed fish products are a bit different from a large chunk of a single fish, in terms of the promises that can be made.
The problem with large, wild-caught fish, is that different fish are going to be living in slightly-different regions, or migrating through given regions at slightly-different times, and so eating different things; and so will have more or less of any given nutrient coming from those things in their bodies.
If you're catching large swarms/schools of fish, all the fish in a given school will be mostly identical in their nutritional content. And so, if you're doing some bulk operation like canning or drying, and you're doing it on fish that swarm/school and get caught as whole swarms/schools (such as sardine or mackerel) — then, for each catch delivered to your plant by a fishing vessel, you can take a few samples from that catch to get a sense of the average micronutrient values of that catch; and then you can store these catches separately, titrating together the different catches into each processed mixture, to achieve the a steady nutritional value in the result. (This is roughly the same thing that e.g. orange juice companies do with the truckloads of oranges they buy to achieve a consistent output juice product.)
But if you're just buying e.g. one salmon, then it came through an entirely different logistics pipeline to get to you — either an "independent" one where a small-time fisherman sold some fish directly to a local fishmonger, who then sold it directly to a local grocer, a few fish at a time; or a "big chain" one where a stream of flash-frozen fish from fishing vessels is being just-in-time streamed out to various grocery stores. (This lack of a fan-in processing step for raw large fish is also why grocers end up with so much mislabelled fish; the guy who works at a fish processing plant near the fishery will recognize all the fish that fishery tends to pull out of the water; but there's no similar expert in the meat department of a random grocery store in Idaho — in fact, that person might not even know which fishery the fish they're receiving came from!)
High quality EPA was the only thing that universally worked for a family member with depression. Tried changing sources one time and felt the difference in about 2 days. Got back on the previous source and back out of depression.
Both are necessary for most people, especially for males and for older people, because the inter-conversions between the various omega-3 fatty acids are done inefficiently by humans.
The other omega-3 fatty acids do not have known functions, except as sources of DHA and EPA, after an enzymatic conversion.
Omega 3 supplements are such a wild world. So many low quality ones, so many different types, and so many claims about them being miracle cures (that then don't hold out for later studies).
I have severe chronic dry eye, and omega 3 is one of the first things they recommend. But then in the past 5 or 6 years there have been a bunch of studies that have shown there is no actual measurable effect.
Some people still claim that it helps, but that you have to get it by actually eating Omega 3 rich fish, and not just taking the supplements. Either way, I've never seen any difference with my dry eye symptoms.
Your dry eye condition is probably way too severe for this to help, but here is a method that helps my eyes stay more healthy the more I stare into the PC screen:
Eye exercises!
Eye tissue is very suspectable to drying and eyes are fed with only one small artery.
This makes simple exercises super effective!
To enforce a routine I use 'safeeyes' on Linux. A mac alternative is EyeLeo (haven't tested). If you have a windows one, please share!
I change settings to have a break every 10 minutes for 15 seconds. Today I'll add a new exercise to do the focus shifting exercise¹, because your dry eye scared me.
It's funny, but in the weeks when I'm not using PC and don't remember to exercise eyes without prompting, I can feel my eyesight degrading and my eyes hurt.
P.S. if you've never trained your eyes, it will hurt the first few time, but it's the good pain, like from stretching. Don't overdo anyway!
¹ focus shifting exercise - taken from Huberman Lab episode on eyesight and preventing myopia: you put a thumb in front of your eyes and focus on it. Then you slowly extend your arm forward, keeping the focus on it. After your arm is stretched, you switch focus to something as close to you as your extended arm and slowly move to different objects (or trace a wall or ground), changing objects when required, until you reach horizon (or furthest possible point). Then you trace back and end up moving your thumb towards your face again. One very good exercise that is missing from safeeyes.
It is suspect to me that a lot of waste products end up being pushed as supplements. Also, there is a swath of junk science associated with nutrition publishing.
> Most of the studies about omega-3 for traumatic brain injury are in animals, but they indicate potential for healing the human brain.
> After a trauma, the brain tends to swell, and the connections between some nerve cells can become damaged, while other cells simply die.
> National Institutes of Health research suggests that omega-3 fatty acids may inhibit cell death and could be instrumental for reconnecting damaged neurons.
> Another recent study revealed genes that are activated to contain massive damage – especially inflammation – when the brain is injured. What activates those genes: omega-3.
> “We have strong data that suggest omega-3 will activate good proteins to cope with brain damage and turn off proteins that cause neuroinflammation,” said Dr. Nicolas Bazan, director of the Neuroscience Center of Excellence at LSU Health in New Orleans and author of the study.
> Bailes consulted with a fish oil expert and eventually decided that administering 20 grams a day of omega-3 fish oil through a feeding tube might repair the myelin sheath. (For comparison: A typical supplemental dose for someone with an uninjured brain is about 2 grams a day.)
Why would I refer to anecdotes from a medical doctor? If this is a real thing, we should be seeing it by now. The article you linked is nearly 15 years old.
People have been eating fish oil capsules in droves over the last two decades. They are readily accessible to people with TBIs. Where are all the miracles?
TBI is a wide spectrum of conditions akin to "trauma" in psychological terms.
I skimmed the article, but I didn't see any specific medical terms used. The reason I am curious is because I do not think that mTBI like concussions cause brain swelling since the injury is more of a functional injury than a structural injury.
I like to play ice hockey as an adult, and I try to do everything reasonably possible to protect my brain from vulcanized rubber disks flying at my head at 0 < x 100 mph. Perhaps I will add some fish oil back into my diet. I already uses Lion's Mane, but I am not sure if it truly does anything, but I love the taste of the product I use, so I will continue to use it regardless. Not sure if I have ever had a "real" concussion, but definitely some ringers.
> TBI is a wide spectrum of conditions akin to "trauma" in psychological terms.
I don't understand. "Trauma" was fairly well defined in physical terms: see Trauma Centers specializing in accident/crime victims.
Psychological "trauma" is only by analogy, and not classical "trauma", and the term is rapidly undergoing its own expansion, to a point where high prices at the grocery store can "traumatize" a sane adult with a social media account.
Well, in concussions I thought it was always odd because the literal Greek word means "wound." Concussions wound, and I am not a medical professional, cell metabolism in the brain, or something like that? Basically, concussions are functional injuries and not structural. I am of the belief that many people think trauma has to be a physical injury; however trauma is anything that injures, if I am not mistaken.
> Psychological "trauma" is only by analogy, and not classical "trauma"
I see what you mean, but I am not sure it's restricted to that term or not (outside of psychology and slang).
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Edit:
Though, I asked ChatGPT for the hell of it. It says that concussions are mTBI because the "Trauma" part describes the action in which a concussion is acquired. -- external force making contact with the head.
So, I guess I am wrong lol. I thought trauma had to cause physical damage and not necessarily be by physical means.
> and the term is rapidly undergoing its own expansion
No one ever said English was a beautiful language. Especially in its vernacular. Nevertheless, I find such uses of "traumatize" to be traumatizing.
Sorry, this was just a quick search, I first heard about this from Dr. Barry Sears, and he had several accounts of miraculous recovery with massive doses of fish oil (20g+)
This is incredibly common with things such as fungi, which are known to have numerous benefits across a wide body of studies. The catch is that most of the supplements are just filler, leftover parts you can't use for much else e.g. ground up stem or even growth medium that has little to nothing in it.
Table salt is refined after harvest, removing all other minerals and nutrients that aren't NaCl. And then those "waste products" are sold very lucratively to specialized supplement companies -- magnesium, selenium, calcium: you know, highly valued trace minerals.
Your table salt is a pure and translucent white because it's nutritionally worthless. You can season food, but you're not adding any micronutrients. And this is why low-sodium diets became very important: not because the salt itself was harmful, but because its essence has changed!
Salt's name will not inform you whether it's been refined. Sea salt, Himalayan salt, Kosher salt. The key is inspecting it for dark particles and natural impurities. Beware opaque boxes.
Unrefined salt may carry an FDA-mandated warning that claims it doesn't contain iodide, but welcome to Bizarro World, because they don't remove naturally-occurring iodide, but since it hasn't been added back in, they're obligated to deny it.
Ingesting iodine, much less deliberately fortifying salt for everyone to ingest, is the worst possible way to use it. Ingested iodine can lead to serious trouble, and does not produce the desired effect on the thyroid.
I ordered some potassium iodide from an organic supplement vendor. Indeed, the product directions said to take by mouth. I was directed in no uncertain terms to ignore that. I applied it transdermally.
Transdermal application has great advantage. You can't overdose. The skin will absorb a necessary amount, and no more. Wipe off the excess.
About 20 years ago, an inexperienced but eager PA started me on Levothyroxine for no good reason. It appears that no lasting damage was sustained by my thyroid.
Today, my TSH/T4/T3 levels are completely normal. I've been drug-free for over 12 months. Last week, my PCP agreed that there is no evidence of thyroid dysfunction.
I'm curious about your statement that transdermal overdose is impossible. If I applied this to the entirety of my body simultaneously, how would my foot know to stop dragging in the potassium iodide after my neck got its fill?
Wouldn’t you have to consume extreme amounts of iodized salt for it to become an issue? At that point excess sodium would probably be causing significantly bigger problems..
Exactly, exactly, and that may indeed be the intent: make this heretofore innocuous and beneficial staple into something really undesirable, while you plead with us to moderate consumption. Then the "I-told-you-so's" come naturally!
Iodine deficiency leads to goiter in adults and cretinism (decreased height, lower IQ and in some cases mental retardation) in infants and small children.
Many places can get enough iodine through vegetables, but many places cannot. The small amount of added iodine in iodized table salts are typically not enough to cause any issues but are enough to backfill any nutritional deficiencies.
There's no value in demonizing something you don't understand. Let people eat their salts. There's no harm in unrefined salts, but normal table salts should likely be consumed occasionally by almost everyone.
Unrefined salt isn’t a good source of any of the minerals that it incidentally might have. Kinda sounds like you’re about to link us to a blog post about how it cures diseases (that also sells unrefined salt).
I am not, but consider that unrefined salt is less worse than the refined stuff, which as I pointed out, does nothing but season food.
You should also consider the inestimable value of salt to the ancient world, and perhaps not merely for its preservative uses. Perhaps salt today is uniformly worse than it was thousands of years ago, because all the really good deposits are tapped out?
Salt is one of the many things that is still trading on its "brand name" and reputation, yet it's been replaced by an impostor.
Table salt does more than season food. It can increase your blood pressure and CVD outcomes, especially in the doses you get from packaged foods and some cuisines. That's something to consider when most of us are dying of heart disease.
I don't buy the claim that unrefined salt is less worse than refined salt because we're talking about minute amounts of nutrients. You get the nutrients from the food you eat, not the salt you put on it. Do the math and show me otherwise.
There are conflicting studies, but recently, it was determined you need adequate vitamin B levels to support omega-3.
As an aside, you can definitely over-dose on omega-3 which can cause afib, and increase your chance of stroke. I was taking 2 grams per day and definitely had arrhythmia issues. Decreasing the dosage to 500mg per day eliminated the arrhythmia.
General feeling. At night I could definitely feel it going to sleep, and it went away after decreasing the dose. It could be a coincidence, but regardless of my personal experience, there's actual science behind it. Too much o3 can affect the blood vessels.
People can often feel arrhythmia. It can feel like heart fluttering, or skipping a beat, like when you get startled. Depends on the type of arrhythmia too.
I'm about 10 years into this, and I've tried many many things. It's all about management now. It really depends on the type of dry eye you have, so I'd recommend seeing a dry eye specialist if you haven't. Getting a meibography done is really important for seeing the state of your glands.
The things that work the best for me currently are Systane Hydration PF eye drops, NuLids, Manuka Honey gel, OcuSoft lid scrubs, moving out of a dry climate, and limiting screen time. Inflammation in general causes it to flare up -- diet, lack of sleep, alcohol, stress, staying up late coding or gaming, all seem to cause inflammation and make it worse for me.
I've also done Restasis, Xiidra, Cequa, IPL, Radio Frequency, warm compresses, and punctal plugs, without much success.
Wow you've tried the whole industry. The only thing I can recommend to you would be to try a brand of drops called Optase, they are more quality and thicker than everything else on the market.
Here's a HN post with a really good top comment that talks about psychological eye strain that really resonated with me, plenty of other advice in there too you might like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34518343
I haven't tried Optase, but it's worth a shot. Systane Hydration PF has been the best for me, and it is also a lot thicker.
Thank you for the link! It resonates with my experience. I do think there's a psychological aspect of it for me. When I'm depressed or disassociating (which is frequent) it's easy to just stare at a screen and not blink at all.
I used to have this problem too. Tried prescriptions, systane, hydration eye drops etc etc, but in the end but actually worked was baby shampoo rinsing my eyes twice a day and washing them it took some time but now it's completely gone. But for me I believe it was some sort of blepharitis that was blocking the glands that produced the lubrication my eyes needed, and now that I have a good routine, it appears to have solve the problem.
I have had dry eyes, still occur in the summer when AC is blasting and right before winter.
My solution was seeing an eye doctor, which recommended cyclosporine drops (I took them for 2 years every night), mediteranian diet, Omega3.
Also cleaning my eyes with soft tooth brush and child shampoo (tearless) every night.
Naturally you have some little bacteria called Demodex on your eyelashes, but they might cause problems. The only way to get rid of them is clean your eyelashes with Teatree extract.
I was recommended Blephademodex wipes, which I had to warm up in microwave and then clean my eyes.
All this solutions together made my dry eyes more manageable.
That’s a lot of different things to consider and try, thanks!
What worked for me was drinking massive amounts of water throughout the day.
Not so much to cause hyponatremia, of course, but it was a cheap easy way to establish a baseline for me (i.e. helps with dry climates, salty foods, dehydration, etc). And yeah, I tried some of those other things too.
I'm doing IPL/RF now which is theorized to help with inflammation, but now I know to be more careful with healthy lifestyle. Too bad this understanding of computer lifestyle and dry eye syndrome was that well explained and emphasizsd 15 years ago.
Have you noticed any improvement with IPL/RF? I've done 5 sessions - I saw improvement after the first and fourth, but regressed pretty quicky back after a few days. I've heard some people saying they had to do like 10 to start to notice a bigger difference. The problem is it's so expensive (I have to pay $750 for the combo session).
Here is what I've learned about honey. Honey is a good source of antihistamines, because the bees who collect pollen are constantly powdered all over with it. Therefore, they produce natural antihistamine to protect themselves and the hive when they return.
So, the best honey, especially for someone who has allergy symptoms, would be honey that's produced and harvested locally, reflecting the pollinated flora in your area. I purchase "Local Hive" brand, which offers several regional varieties from around these United States, as well as Wildflower, etc.
Mānuka honey would originate Down Under, although it seems that it's produced elsewhere now, but what are the chances that allergies are sensitive to the mānuka tree alone? That being said, I received some from a friend as a gift, when I was singing in choir but throat pain was acting up. It's exotic, it's thick and rich; it tastes really, really good. I'm not opposed to enjoying it as a treat!
I think Manuka Honey's claims to do anything that normal honey wouldn't do is bunk, but it seems to be relatively skin safe and tolerated so it's not harmful.
However, it seems to have a lower PH than regular honey and exhibits antibiotic properties (which most honey does as honey doesn't typically go bad), so maybe there are some topical applications that make sense for it.
I have uveitis and it certainly helped for me. I think what happens is a lot of people don’t lower the amount omega 6 and just increase omega-3 by a small amount. It took a drastic reduction in omega 6 for it to help.
Perfluorohexyloctane helped me quite a bit. You can ship it from Europe for something like $20 per vial (EvoTears), or get in the US for $700 (Miebo). The vials are literally identical.
Nifty but perhaps distressing. A brief search found nothing about what happens to it after you put it in your eyes. I assume a bunch of it ends up in your tear ducts, to your nose, and into your stomach. And then?
For me, Xiidra combined with once a day Pataday (which actually dries the eye, but for me helped stem inflammation that was harming my ability to form a tear film), plus this iTEAR device (https://olympicophthalmics.com/itear-100/), was incredibly helpful.
I’d also recommend getting a humidifier for each of your main rooms and using distilled water with it.
LPR is really tricky because weeks of "good behavior" can be undone very easily with one wrong move. It also took me years to figure out it was LPR because it doesn't have traditional acid reflux symptoms and can also look a lot like allergies or other things my doctors labeled it with instead. For me it was especially debilitating because it inflamed my Eustachian tubes, which meant my middle ears filled with way too much fluid, and i'd have 5+ hour long vertigo attacks where i literally could not move a single inch and was vomiting the entire time and sometimes only had a few minutes of warning before this started. if this happened in public, which it thankfully never did in a way i couldn't get home or to my car quickly (to pass out in the back seat and barf out the window), it would have been absolutely awful. the other shitty symptom as i said was extremely dry eyes, like painfully dry, which i think was actually more just them stinging which feels identical to dry. no amount of eye drops helped, and i tried like 6 different types.
anyway lots of tips online for LPR that are true for me:
* nothing carbonated. this is one of the worst things i can do
* nothing acidic. some fruit juices like pineapple in particular are really, really bad for me. coffee, even with milk and ice and sugar, is also really bad for me. overly acidic foods (vinegar, tomato based stuff, etc) are also bad.
* anything spicy is really bad too
* no caffeine
* stopping eating before i feel full. this is hard for me because i've been a "eat until i'm stuffed" person my entire life and it's really satisfying for me to do so.
* stopping drinking helps but i got symptoms to go away pretty well even with moderate+ levels of drinking. but mostly just sticking to liquor and no cocktails or beer or seltzers. wine seems okay.
* sitting upright after eating for at least an hour or two
* not eating for at least a few hours before bed
* exercise helps a bit but isn't critical for me
* daily allergy pill and nasal spray, even missing one day sucks
dry eyes are my first symptom that i did something "wrong". once i learned to listen to that it helped a ton. if i do "wrong" things for like a week straight, the constant dizziness starts, and if i go on much further than that then the vertigo attacks start.
The elephant in the room is that true randomised controlled trials take decades to do and even then are almost impossible to build in a way that teases out nuances such as the specific effects of individual compounds within a supplement.
So we are effectively left with pseudoscience as the only other option, but what would you rather do - sacrifice all of the insight and knowledge we are learning at such a rapid pace in medicine today, just because there's no feasible way to prove it within your lifetime (like, if you wait 20 years for observational studies to show that humans benefit from Omega 3 you will have missed the entire window when it would have been beneficial).
We have to find a balance, but it can't sit at the extreme of requiring everything to meet an impossible bar of scientific proof before we start to benefit from it. But the price to pay is that some of them are not going to pan out.
I've researched trustworthy brands a lot, the ones I settled on are Nootropics Depot, Viva Naturals and Nordic Naturals. I prefer those with only Vit E as preservative.
I generally don't get headaches luckily. When my dry eye was a lot more severe I had to strain to see the screen, and would sometimes get them then. It's better managed now (but still severe).
I used to (and I didn't find much relief from eye drops). For the headaches, turned out they were migraines, which I was getting from screwing up my face because my eyes were uncomfortable.
Why are we still looking at mice studies for such a human-used substance?
This study used EPA: 0.55 mg/kg/day, and DHA: 0.55 mg/kg/day.
Among the largest I've heard in human studies are things like 4,400mg EPA and 2,200mg DHA.
Examine.com is one of the best resources to understand what evidence shows about supplements.
EPA appears to be the component that works for depression.
Also, important these days, is the quality: it should be filtered from heavy metals, and processed and stored in a way that avoids it going rancid by the time you consume it.
I strongly believe in the benefits of having a higher omega-3:omega-6 ratio than is common nowadays.
> Once the behavioral tests were completed, the mice were killed, and their blood and tissues were analyzed to assess the biological effects of stress and omega-3 supplementation.
I think they are trying to show biological causes by carefully controlling the mice’s entire life and then cracking them open at the end of the study. Can’t really do that with humans.
On a related topic, I started taking bacopa monnieri and it improved my memory and mental endurance, anxiety and depression. I gave it to my wife and had the totally opposite effect:
Also I can drink coffee and won't make any effect on my sleep, while my wife gets the boost. I wouldn't be surprised the effects of all those supplements depend on your body chemistry.
They can't differentiate the population, so all these studies will average zero.
Are you measuring your vitals during sleep with a watch or a ring? Might not be affecting your ability to fall asleep but hard to imagine it does nothing to your brain or heart while you’re unconscious
Bacopa Monnieri aka Brahmi has been very effective to eliminate mental turbulence for me. It has a calming, sharp, bitter effect. It's like it's cleaning something up. If my mind is overactive in bed at night I take Brahmi and I quickly feel settled.
Yep, what works for one may not work for others. Some people find L-theanine supplement helpful for reducing anxiety. For me it kind of worked, but then gave bad anxiety as a withdrawal symptom.
This definitely tracks with my experience. I take a tablespoon of cod liver oil daily and I've definitely noticed a complete flatlining of my emotional states. My baseline is just basic calmness and a general lack of "monkeymind"/intrusive thoughts. Really amazed its not a more prescribed treatment.
used to drink cod liver oil daily, then i learned how it's processed...
I would advise just taking vitamin d pill and eating 2 to 3 times a week fat fish.
Everything is so polluted that either you're drinking oil that contains plastics and chemicals, or you're drinking an oil that has been completely destroyed and rebuilt using vitamin D, A and omega 3 from third party manufacturer.
What am I meant to be getting out of that link? I don't care about vitamin A/D and I don't see any point where they're adding third-party omega 3s back in.
It also seems pretty low-quality. "Our oil uses some mysterious process labelled 'oil released in 15 minutes' so it's good! Their process uses a grinder and a centrifuge, and look, we added bloodstains and made the centrifuge brown to show how bad that is!"
I believe when you heat the oil to 374°, it kills vitamins but also Omega 3. It's the oxidation, that's why Omega 3 is sold in pill or you get something like 3 month to end your bottle of cod liver oil.
I didn't notice the color as distracting, the oil actually change color when heated up.
Look if you are interested in your health, there are plenty reputable source of information on cod liver oil.
> The results indicate that although currently produced fish oils may undergo rigorous purification procedures and show low contaminant levels, cod livers sourced from the Baltic and consumed locally, continue to contribute substantially to the dietary intake of these contaminants.
So for what it's worth here's my experience -- generally not super impressed with supplements, tried cod-liver oil, didn't notice much effect, but after starting to make homemade salmon sashimi from costco salmon (Yes it's a thing, youtube it), I started noticing reduced anxiety and better concentration on days when I did so.
I would eat about 2/3rds of a pound of raw salmon and notice this effect (which would be like $60 or more at a sushi restaurant). I've done this at least 20 times now and never had any issues.
Generally I don't mention the mental effects of the salmon to people because I feel like they wouldn't take it very seriously, but since you're asking and it's on-topic, I thought I'd share.
I believe they are amongst the best source of Omega 3.
Technically you could still eat cod liver but you would still eat big amount of pollutants because it's the liver.
Does it also flatline your positive emotions? Ashwaganda does a similar thing for a lot of people, it tamps down their anxiety and depression but suppresses most other emotions as well (it's called anhedonia).
I would definitely say so. I can still feel happy if I choose to but I don't feel upward swings. Overall I'd say its a net positive as I generally feel content.
High long chain omega 3 and low omega 6 not only revered my hyperlipidemia (through stimulating reverse cholesterol transport) but notably reduces my symptoms of schizoaffective disorder bipolar type (I am assuming this is through assisting with carecholamine receptor function).
I came to the conclusion this diet would help me by noting the polymorphisms in my FADS1 and FADS2 genes linked to needing more long chain PUFAs.
You might also be interested that omega 3 is responsible for making natural Cannabinoid (endocannabinoids) in humans which could be linked to the lower anxiety.
Whenever I get my cholesterol tested I have low good cholesterol and high bad cholesterol, is that hyperlipidemia? Any recommendations on how to get high long chain omega 3 and low omega 6 in my diet? Any supplements or brands I should take? Any books that you recommend I read?
Yeah, I've noticed too much Omega 6 is at least one big cause of my anxiety.
Avoiding vegetable oils (and foods that are cooked with it) and just using coconut oil, tallow, butter etc. reduces my anxiety to the point that it's barely noticeable.
IMHO, Omega 3 increases GABA and Omega 6 increases Glutamate. I am going to guess that if you ever smoked pot that high THC weed makes you severely anxious?
Omega 6 creates an endocannibinoid that is more like Delta 9 THC and Delta 9 THC increases glutamate release. This will cause psychosis in people who have high glutamate levels or low GABA levels.
Well this is a great thing to see an hour after buying some O3s.
I have read though that omega-3 supplements seem to not do much, it's the intake of them dietarily that show results, I'm not sure how current that research is. I've also read that algae as a source might be better? There's a tremendous amount of conflicting information.
> I have read though that omega-3 supplements seem to not do much
afaik that holds for a lot (if not most) commonly used supplements (vitamins are another popular offender). Sometimes the reason is the food matrix effect, where just isolated nutrients are not as beneficial as when they are consumed along with other nutrients. Sometimes (like vitamin D or testosterone), the biomarker is reflective of health status, not predictive.
From this [1] podcast (2y old at this point) I too seem to remember that it doesn't do much most of the time, that supplements are generally untrustworthy w.r.t. dosing and purity and there's also a slight chance of giving yourself afib.
Or a worse one. I know you're making a joke, but it doesn't seem that funny to me — U.S. biomedical industry goes through about 111 million lab mice and rats each year [1]. Most mice lives are short and cruel, living their entire lives in tiny plastic boxes and often subjected to horrific experiences. We should be more thankful.
I really appreciate that someone else shares my opinions on this matter. It pains me what we do to animals for our benefit. I suppose there is no other alternative, but that does not diminish the cruelty.
I feel the same way about the "Boar's Head" meat recall in the US due to Listeria. 7 million pounds of meat must be disposed of. That means every single one of the pigs died for that meat died for absolutely nothing at all. It just doesn't sit right with me.
This isn't funny. Mice and rats are among the most intelligent animals used in research, and despite ethical regulations on their treatment, they are often ignored. Many of these animals endure severe procedures without adequate pain relief, or none at all. This widespread suffering also causes mental health problems for many of the researchers who have to regularly euthanize them. These animals sacrifice their lives to improve human health and well-being. At the very least, we should show respect for their pain and suffering, which is undertaken for our benefit.
There's a study about omega3 supplementation that says that if children in a family supplement it, that the parents have a better relationship, even if they don't supplement. I can probably dig it out, given enough time with a search engine.
Another one is D. over the course of three years i managed to help my wife get above 100ng/ml 25-hydroxy-D on a blood test. Of course every doctor called and said "too high" and her Calcium is too high too, but not from the D3, folks, because she takes K2 Mk7. Her calcium is high because she mostly drinks fortified orange juice and was taking 1200mg calcium per day at the direction of her oncologist. She has a lot of chronic issues and we're slowly trying to mitigate everything possible with diet and supplements. The specialist said "stop calcium immediately" and "reduce D for 1 month" only. for those aware her Ca was 10.9 ("good" range is ~9.0 - 10.2). I guarantee that her calcium will go back to normal because of the K2 between now and her next blood panel. note: they don't actually test D levels unless you ask, in general. One might wonder why that is - i know i certainly do.
In fact, i was just about to go to the pharmacy to get Omega-3 supplements when i saw this post. Her chart shows that she must supplement omega 3, since she won't eat baked salmon. My kid already has vitamins with omegas in them.
What i recommend is actually reading studies - completely - and if you have any questions or doubts, befriend researchers in biology or other life sciences that can skim the paper and tell you "meh" or "hey that's cool". Studies contradict, studies may have bad inputs or methodology, the only way to know for sure is to read as many as you can as thoroughly as you can, and if possible, consult experts. Medical doctors of the "PCP" persuasion are not experts, generally.
You could just pay for an examine.com subscription. That’s pretty much what they offer as a service - third party evaluation of studies to provide unbiased advice for different supplements.
This is exciting, and should be fairly easy to confirm/deny with a double blind trial in humans. There's no money to be had in it for big pharma, so funding it would have to come from some other means, but it should be possible.
There's already research on Omega 3 supplementation's impact on depression + anxiety symptoms in humans. The results generally show that Omega 3 is roughly as effective as antidepressants, and can be safely taken in addition to antidepressants for an even greater effect.
> Fish oil supplementation has been noted to be comparable to pharmaceutical drugs (fluoxetine) in majorly depressed persons, but this may be the only cohort that experiences a reduction of depression. There is insufficient evidence to support a reduction of depressive symptoms in persons with minor depression (ie. not diagnosed major depressive disorder)
They give it a B for the research and an effect size of moderate improvement. Also a B with a small effect size for anxiety.
> A meta-analysis of 35 small, randomized trials found that fish oil can slightly improve depression when compared to control. However, this improvement may be too small to be noticeable. Also, adding fish oil to antidepressant medication seems to be more beneficial than antidepressant treatment alone
In short, sounds like it’s worth throwing in as an adjunct treatment for people wanting to take a kitchen sink approach
> They give it a B for the research and an effect size of moderate improvement. Also a B with a small effect size for anxiety
To be fair, this is among the most highly rated things on the entire site - let not the "B" scare you off. A moderate effect size is pretty substantial, all things considered.
As the other comment mentions, mouse studies are hilariously cheap compared to human trials. We're talking many orders of magnitude. A couple grad students can do a mouse study at costs very much approaching zero.
All omega-3 supplements are probably somewhat rancid and possibly harmful, specially in solid / pill form! I personally take cod liver oil (liquid) from a reputable brand, but I still don't %100 trust it to be healthy. It's much better to eat fatty fish or actual cod liver.
Anxiety and depressions are feelings. Eating feels good for a little bit. But I could easily make the claim that getting a dog and taking it for regular walks in nature counteracts symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Doing Yoga with synchronized breathing...same
Taking a hot bath, a sauna session, a massage, sex, a long list.
Why do so many people think eating something is the path to good health.
Also knowing how things are encoded in neural networks, where it's a combination of variables that sets off some behaviour. Why do Scientists still persist on trying to isolate a single variable.
I take it you were never in a psychiatric hospital with people urging you to get ECT?
I was. Hot baths don’t work, but that’s just me. Blanket recommendations are useless and harmful. It turns out I have a genetic issue causing my mood issues and diet is my treatment.
By all means, eat as much healthy food as you can afford. But whatever caused your psychiatric problems, it couldn't have been food. Unless you're so poor that you severely malnourished, or you're eating something severely toxic. And even then, lots of places in this world with malnourished populations that are not depressed.
Improving the quality of your life is not just food. It's all the other things that go into it. Like autonomy, sense of security, friends, social status, finances, physical activity levels, etc.
So be sure to look after improving those things too.
And my suggestion for walking a dog, is a simple and practical suggestion for something that will get you both companionship and exercise.
From personal experience, quitting smoking helped with anxiety. That longing feeling for a cigarette was making me anxious, and that feeling would persist even after having one. So quitting was helpful. But again, smoking is not eating.
I have a Partial PNP Deficiency that makes it harder for me to break down Inosine and Guanosine (and xanthine). My PNP enzyme only functions at about 12% of most "normal" people.
After going on a low specific purine diet I no longer need any of the three psychiatric medications I was on but for klonopin since there are some triggers I cannot avoid.
Food did this. Food and having a good doctor who did not give up on me. Food and knowing what my genetics are. I get that some people might benefit from Yoga, etc, but to serve a blanket statement like that is just ignorant of the genetic and environmental diversity of humanity. I have these genetics because I have Sami heritage and I am adapted to live in a cold climate and eating low purine, high zinc foods. Zinc also helps me break down the purines by stimulating LACC1, which is a sort of PNP backup. A zinc deficiency when I was young left me with an undecended testicle because of my LACC1 genetics.
I do not think the spectrum of autism are caused by a single gene or environmental factor. I was diagnosed with Asperger's as well, much too late in life.
"Omega-3" is as vague and underdescriptive term as "marihuana". We're better educated now and we can focus on the eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) where it comes to Omega 3. And we can point at THC, CBN, CBD or any of the 100+ other cannabinoids present in cannabis flowers when we describe "marihuana", "weed" or "pot".
And there's a reason behind my local pharmacy offering THC-focused or CBD-focused pot, and my local supplements store offering DHA-focused and EPA-focused softgels, produced by the same company and under the same brand. How these these products act varies by active substances content and the person. Both "Omega 3" and "marihuana" are dumbed-down terms, meaningless when it comes to studies or papers.
There's a ton of studies on nih.gov about EPA's potential as an antidepressant, misaligned with DHA-related articles on the subject, that I could link. But I can say - purely anecdotally - that I removed psypost.org feed from my RSS reader a few months after ChatGPT became public.
The specific supplement used in this research [0] was equal parts DHA and EPA (no ALA, which is the third main Omega-3.) Determining whether the effect is specific to one of the Omega-3's or general to the class would be an expected subject of further research, as would seeing if the effect holds outside of the lab mice model.
There's a whole lot of work between this study and anything actionable other than for planning further research to confirm and better understand the effect, and whatever more general problems psypost.com may have, reporting the source of the effect as "Omega-3" is both consistent with the paper and not overly general given the actual facts.
[0] Linked from the story, but: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235228952...
I think there's a practical distinction between the kind of term "omega-3" is vs the kind of term "marijuana" is.
You mostly only find THC/CBD/etc in marijuana; and we mostly only consume marijuana to get those particular active ingredients into our bodies. So you can forget about "marijuana" as a category for describing those compounds, and just speak of the compounds themselves — measure marijuana strains by the presence of those active ingredients; extract and purify one particular active ingredient and sell it; etc. Doing this doesn't lose you anything; in fact, it's a pure win, as the use of precise language gives people a tool to leverage to more precisely ask for the effect they're looking for, and gives suppliers a tool to more precisely describe what they're selling.
While the omega-3 constituent compounds can be treated this way, they are not solely a thing we extract or synthesize to put in precise-molarity-per-dose pills; they're also a thing found in food. Many different foods; with most of them being foods people eat for reasons beyond just getting omega-3s in their bodies. In other words, the "omega-3" constituent compounds are nutrients.
And many of these omega-3-containing foods — fish, for example — aren't carefully cultivated species that have known ratios of the omega-3 constituent compounds that could be put on the label of the food-product. Rather, the ratio of those constituent compounds is pretty much random per individual food item. One salmon at the grocery store has omega-3 fats which happen to be high in DHA, while the next salmon beside it in the same cooler display is higher in EPA. All you can in general about a food product — all a supplier can say, and all a food shopper can generally expect to look for — is a food that is "high in omega-3s."
As long as people are interested in optimizing their health in a loose manner by eating "healthful foods" — rather than taking specifically-formulated supplements — I don't expect they'll let go of the generic categorical term "omega-3." When it comes to food, "it contains omega-3s" is almost always the tightest bound you can put on the "nutritional value" of a given food.
I'm not so sure about the incertitude you speak of about omega-3s content and ratios in food.
In fact while in Japan I used to specifically select my bags of dried sardine (niboshi) and mackerel cans by the content of EPA and DHA, clearly indicated in mg per 100g. Every such products had these indications with content varying by brands.
I guess that if you master your process you can ensure and advertise a consistent quality.
Processed fish products are a bit different from a large chunk of a single fish, in terms of the promises that can be made.
The problem with large, wild-caught fish, is that different fish are going to be living in slightly-different regions, or migrating through given regions at slightly-different times, and so eating different things; and so will have more or less of any given nutrient coming from those things in their bodies.
If you're catching large swarms/schools of fish, all the fish in a given school will be mostly identical in their nutritional content. And so, if you're doing some bulk operation like canning or drying, and you're doing it on fish that swarm/school and get caught as whole swarms/schools (such as sardine or mackerel) — then, for each catch delivered to your plant by a fishing vessel, you can take a few samples from that catch to get a sense of the average micronutrient values of that catch; and then you can store these catches separately, titrating together the different catches into each processed mixture, to achieve the a steady nutritional value in the result. (This is roughly the same thing that e.g. orange juice companies do with the truckloads of oranges they buy to achieve a consistent output juice product.)
But if you're just buying e.g. one salmon, then it came through an entirely different logistics pipeline to get to you — either an "independent" one where a small-time fisherman sold some fish directly to a local fishmonger, who then sold it directly to a local grocer, a few fish at a time; or a "big chain" one where a stream of flash-frozen fish from fishing vessels is being just-in-time streamed out to various grocery stores. (This lack of a fan-in processing step for raw large fish is also why grocers end up with so much mislabelled fish; the guy who works at a fish processing plant near the fishery will recognize all the fish that fishery tends to pull out of the water; but there's no similar expert in the meat department of a random grocery store in Idaho — in fact, that person might not even know which fishery the fish they're receiving came from!)
High quality EPA was the only thing that universally worked for a family member with depression. Tried changing sources one time and felt the difference in about 2 days. Got back on the previous source and back out of depression.
What was the EPA source/supplement, if you don’t mind?
Costco: Krill Oil
https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-krill-oil-500mg%2C...
I had been under the mistaken impression that DHA was only interesting inasmuch as your body inefficiently turns it into EPA.
DHA and EPA have distinct roles in the body.
Both are necessary for most people, especially for males and for older people, because the inter-conversions between the various omega-3 fatty acids are done inefficiently by humans.
The other omega-3 fatty acids do not have known functions, except as sources of DHA and EPA, after an enzymatic conversion.
"Omega-3" is to "cannabinoid" in your analogy. "Marihuana" would be on the level of saying "Fish Oil".
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Omega 3 supplements are such a wild world. So many low quality ones, so many different types, and so many claims about them being miracle cures (that then don't hold out for later studies).
I have severe chronic dry eye, and omega 3 is one of the first things they recommend. But then in the past 5 or 6 years there have been a bunch of studies that have shown there is no actual measurable effect.
Some people still claim that it helps, but that you have to get it by actually eating Omega 3 rich fish, and not just taking the supplements. Either way, I've never seen any difference with my dry eye symptoms.
Your dry eye condition is probably way too severe for this to help, but here is a method that helps my eyes stay more healthy the more I stare into the PC screen:
Eye exercises!
Eye tissue is very suspectable to drying and eyes are fed with only one small artery.
This makes simple exercises super effective!
To enforce a routine I use 'safeeyes' on Linux. A mac alternative is EyeLeo (haven't tested). If you have a windows one, please share!
I change settings to have a break every 10 minutes for 15 seconds. Today I'll add a new exercise to do the focus shifting exercise¹, because your dry eye scared me.
It's funny, but in the weeks when I'm not using PC and don't remember to exercise eyes without prompting, I can feel my eyesight degrading and my eyes hurt.
P.S. if you've never trained your eyes, it will hurt the first few time, but it's the good pain, like from stretching. Don't overdo anyway!
¹ focus shifting exercise - taken from Huberman Lab episode on eyesight and preventing myopia: you put a thumb in front of your eyes and focus on it. Then you slowly extend your arm forward, keeping the focus on it. After your arm is stretched, you switch focus to something as close to you as your extended arm and slowly move to different objects (or trace a wall or ground), changing objects when required, until you reach horizon (or furthest possible point). Then you trace back and end up moving your thumb towards your face again. One very good exercise that is missing from safeeyes.
Eyeleo seems to be for windows only. If anyone is interested: http://eyeleo.com/
It is suspect to me that a lot of waste products end up being pushed as supplements. Also, there is a swath of junk science associated with nutrition publishing.
It's used in TBI, see Dr. Barry Sears for some accounts.
"Fish oil helped save our son" https://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/19/health/fish-oil-brain-inj...
> Most of the studies about omega-3 for traumatic brain injury are in animals, but they indicate potential for healing the human brain.
> After a trauma, the brain tends to swell, and the connections between some nerve cells can become damaged, while other cells simply die.
> National Institutes of Health research suggests that omega-3 fatty acids may inhibit cell death and could be instrumental for reconnecting damaged neurons.
> Another recent study revealed genes that are activated to contain massive damage – especially inflammation – when the brain is injured. What activates those genes: omega-3.
> “We have strong data that suggest omega-3 will activate good proteins to cope with brain damage and turn off proteins that cause neuroinflammation,” said Dr. Nicolas Bazan, director of the Neuroscience Center of Excellence at LSU Health in New Orleans and author of the study.
> Bailes consulted with a fish oil expert and eventually decided that administering 20 grams a day of omega-3 fish oil through a feeding tube might repair the myelin sheath. (For comparison: A typical supplemental dose for someone with an uninjured brain is about 2 grams a day.)
> Dr. Barry Sears
Why would I refer to anecdotes from a medical doctor? If this is a real thing, we should be seeing it by now. The article you linked is nearly 15 years old.
People have been eating fish oil capsules in droves over the last two decades. They are readily accessible to people with TBIs. Where are all the miracles?
TBI is a wide spectrum of conditions akin to "trauma" in psychological terms.
I skimmed the article, but I didn't see any specific medical terms used. The reason I am curious is because I do not think that mTBI like concussions cause brain swelling since the injury is more of a functional injury than a structural injury.
I like to play ice hockey as an adult, and I try to do everything reasonably possible to protect my brain from vulcanized rubber disks flying at my head at 0 < x 100 mph. Perhaps I will add some fish oil back into my diet. I already uses Lion's Mane, but I am not sure if it truly does anything, but I love the taste of the product I use, so I will continue to use it regardless. Not sure if I have ever had a "real" concussion, but definitely some ringers.
> TBI is a wide spectrum of conditions akin to "trauma" in psychological terms.
I don't understand. "Trauma" was fairly well defined in physical terms: see Trauma Centers specializing in accident/crime victims.
Psychological "trauma" is only by analogy, and not classical "trauma", and the term is rapidly undergoing its own expansion, to a point where high prices at the grocery store can "traumatize" a sane adult with a social media account.
Well, in concussions I thought it was always odd because the literal Greek word means "wound." Concussions wound, and I am not a medical professional, cell metabolism in the brain, or something like that? Basically, concussions are functional injuries and not structural. I am of the belief that many people think trauma has to be a physical injury; however trauma is anything that injures, if I am not mistaken.
> Psychological "trauma" is only by analogy, and not classical "trauma"
I see what you mean, but I am not sure it's restricted to that term or not (outside of psychology and slang).
------ Edit:
Though, I asked ChatGPT for the hell of it. It says that concussions are mTBI because the "Trauma" part describes the action in which a concussion is acquired. -- external force making contact with the head.
So, I guess I am wrong lol. I thought trauma had to cause physical damage and not necessarily be by physical means.
> and the term is rapidly undergoing its own expansion
No one ever said English was a beautiful language. Especially in its vernacular. Nevertheless, I find such uses of "traumatize" to be traumatizing.
Sorry, this was just a quick search, I first heard about this from Dr. Barry Sears, and he had several accounts of miraculous recovery with massive doses of fish oil (20g+)
This is incredibly common with things such as fungi, which are known to have numerous benefits across a wide body of studies. The catch is that most of the supplements are just filler, leftover parts you can't use for much else e.g. ground up stem or even growth medium that has little to nothing in it.
Table salt is refined after harvest, removing all other minerals and nutrients that aren't NaCl. And then those "waste products" are sold very lucratively to specialized supplement companies -- magnesium, selenium, calcium: you know, highly valued trace minerals.
Your table salt is a pure and translucent white because it's nutritionally worthless. You can season food, but you're not adding any micronutrients. And this is why low-sodium diets became very important: not because the salt itself was harmful, but because its essence has changed!
Salt's name will not inform you whether it's been refined. Sea salt, Himalayan salt, Kosher salt. The key is inspecting it for dark particles and natural impurities. Beware opaque boxes.
Unrefined salt may carry an FDA-mandated warning that claims it doesn't contain iodide, but welcome to Bizarro World, because they don't remove naturally-occurring iodide, but since it hasn't been added back in, they're obligated to deny it.
In most industrialised countries, table salt has iodine as an additive. I would not call that "nutritionally worthless".
I would consider it potentially harmful.
Ingesting iodine, much less deliberately fortifying salt for everyone to ingest, is the worst possible way to use it. Ingested iodine can lead to serious trouble, and does not produce the desired effect on the thyroid.
I ordered some potassium iodide from an organic supplement vendor. Indeed, the product directions said to take by mouth. I was directed in no uncertain terms to ignore that. I applied it transdermally.
Transdermal application has great advantage. You can't overdose. The skin will absorb a necessary amount, and no more. Wipe off the excess.
About 20 years ago, an inexperienced but eager PA started me on Levothyroxine for no good reason. It appears that no lasting damage was sustained by my thyroid.
Today, my TSH/T4/T3 levels are completely normal. I've been drug-free for over 12 months. Last week, my PCP agreed that there is no evidence of thyroid dysfunction.
I'm curious about your statement that transdermal overdose is impossible. If I applied this to the entirety of my body simultaneously, how would my foot know to stop dragging in the potassium iodide after my neck got its fill?
Wouldn’t you have to consume extreme amounts of iodized salt for it to become an issue? At that point excess sodium would probably be causing significantly bigger problems..
Exactly, exactly, and that may indeed be the intent: make this heretofore innocuous and beneficial staple into something really undesirable, while you plead with us to moderate consumption. Then the "I-told-you-so's" come naturally!
Try consuming at least 50g of iodine free sodium per day and come back after a while, tell us how you’re feeling…
Iodine deficiency leads to goiter in adults and cretinism (decreased height, lower IQ and in some cases mental retardation) in infants and small children.
Many places can get enough iodine through vegetables, but many places cannot. The small amount of added iodine in iodized table salts are typically not enough to cause any issues but are enough to backfill any nutritional deficiencies.
There's no value in demonizing something you don't understand. Let people eat their salts. There's no harm in unrefined salts, but normal table salts should likely be consumed occasionally by almost everyone.
Unrefined salt isn’t a good source of any of the minerals that it incidentally might have. Kinda sounds like you’re about to link us to a blog post about how it cures diseases (that also sells unrefined salt).
I am not, but consider that unrefined salt is less worse than the refined stuff, which as I pointed out, does nothing but season food.
You should also consider the inestimable value of salt to the ancient world, and perhaps not merely for its preservative uses. Perhaps salt today is uniformly worse than it was thousands of years ago, because all the really good deposits are tapped out?
Salt is one of the many things that is still trading on its "brand name" and reputation, yet it's been replaced by an impostor.
Table salt does more than season food. It can increase your blood pressure and CVD outcomes, especially in the doses you get from packaged foods and some cuisines. That's something to consider when most of us are dying of heart disease.
I don't buy the claim that unrefined salt is less worse than refined salt because we're talking about minute amounts of nutrients. You get the nutrients from the food you eat, not the salt you put on it. Do the math and show me otherwise.
There are conflicting studies, but recently, it was determined you need adequate vitamin B levels to support omega-3.
As an aside, you can definitely over-dose on omega-3 which can cause afib, and increase your chance of stroke. I was taking 2 grams per day and definitely had arrhythmia issues. Decreasing the dosage to 500mg per day eliminated the arrhythmia.
Didn’t know that was possible with Omega 3. The pills I have are 660mg and recommends 1 per day, seems you took about 3.5x that dose
By the way, how can you detect arrhythmia? Blood pressure monitor or Apple Watch? General feeling?
General feeling. At night I could definitely feel it going to sleep, and it went away after decreasing the dose. It could be a coincidence, but regardless of my personal experience, there's actual science behind it. Too much o3 can affect the blood vessels.
People can often feel arrhythmia. It can feel like heart fluttering, or skipping a beat, like when you get startled. Depends on the type of arrhythmia too.
That's exactly how "palpitations" were so named, because they can be unmistakably felt by the patient.
I have dry eye as well. What have you done that helps? Omega 3 didn’t do anything for me either.
I'm about 10 years into this, and I've tried many many things. It's all about management now. It really depends on the type of dry eye you have, so I'd recommend seeing a dry eye specialist if you haven't. Getting a meibography done is really important for seeing the state of your glands.
The things that work the best for me currently are Systane Hydration PF eye drops, NuLids, Manuka Honey gel, OcuSoft lid scrubs, moving out of a dry climate, and limiting screen time. Inflammation in general causes it to flare up -- diet, lack of sleep, alcohol, stress, staying up late coding or gaming, all seem to cause inflammation and make it worse for me.
I've also done Restasis, Xiidra, Cequa, IPL, Radio Frequency, warm compresses, and punctal plugs, without much success.
I'd like to try autologous tear serum next.
Wow you've tried the whole industry. The only thing I can recommend to you would be to try a brand of drops called Optase, they are more quality and thicker than everything else on the market.
Here's a HN post with a really good top comment that talks about psychological eye strain that really resonated with me, plenty of other advice in there too you might like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34518343
Good luck!
I haven't tried Optase, but it's worth a shot. Systane Hydration PF has been the best for me, and it is also a lot thicker.
Thank you for the link! It resonates with my experience. I do think there's a psychological aspect of it for me. When I'm depressed or disassociating (which is frequent) it's easy to just stare at a screen and not blink at all.
I used to have this problem too. Tried prescriptions, systane, hydration eye drops etc etc, but in the end but actually worked was baby shampoo rinsing my eyes twice a day and washing them it took some time but now it's completely gone. But for me I believe it was some sort of blepharitis that was blocking the glands that produced the lubrication my eyes needed, and now that I have a good routine, it appears to have solve the problem.
I have had dry eyes, still occur in the summer when AC is blasting and right before winter. My solution was seeing an eye doctor, which recommended cyclosporine drops (I took them for 2 years every night), mediteranian diet, Omega3. Also cleaning my eyes with soft tooth brush and child shampoo (tearless) every night.
Naturally you have some little bacteria called Demodex on your eyelashes, but they might cause problems. The only way to get rid of them is clean your eyelashes with Teatree extract. I was recommended Blephademodex wipes, which I had to warm up in microwave and then clean my eyes.
All this solutions together made my dry eyes more manageable.
That’s a lot of different things to consider and try, thanks!
What worked for me was drinking massive amounts of water throughout the day.
Not so much to cause hyponatremia, of course, but it was a cheap easy way to establish a baseline for me (i.e. helps with dry climates, salty foods, dehydration, etc). And yeah, I tried some of those other things too.
I'm doing IPL/RF now which is theorized to help with inflammation, but now I know to be more careful with healthy lifestyle. Too bad this understanding of computer lifestyle and dry eye syndrome was that well explained and emphasizsd 15 years ago.
Have you noticed any improvement with IPL/RF? I've done 5 sessions - I saw improvement after the first and fourth, but regressed pretty quicky back after a few days. I've heard some people saying they had to do like 10 to start to notice a bigger difference. The problem is it's so expensive (I have to pay $750 for the combo session).
Here is what I've learned about honey. Honey is a good source of antihistamines, because the bees who collect pollen are constantly powdered all over with it. Therefore, they produce natural antihistamine to protect themselves and the hive when they return.
So, the best honey, especially for someone who has allergy symptoms, would be honey that's produced and harvested locally, reflecting the pollinated flora in your area. I purchase "Local Hive" brand, which offers several regional varieties from around these United States, as well as Wildflower, etc.
Mānuka honey would originate Down Under, although it seems that it's produced elsewhere now, but what are the chances that allergies are sensitive to the mānuka tree alone? That being said, I received some from a friend as a gift, when I was singing in choir but throat pain was acting up. It's exotic, it's thick and rich; it tastes really, really good. I'm not opposed to enjoying it as a treat!
I think Manuka Honey's claims to do anything that normal honey wouldn't do is bunk, but it seems to be relatively skin safe and tolerated so it's not harmful.
However, it seems to have a lower PH than regular honey and exhibits antibiotic properties (which most honey does as honey doesn't typically go bad), so maybe there are some topical applications that make sense for it.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/manuka-honey-benefits
If Manuka honey has helped, have you considered using other antiseptics or even probiotic eye baths and bacteriophages?
How much water do you drink and do you take extra salt?
I have uveitis and it certainly helped for me. I think what happens is a lot of people don’t lower the amount omega 6 and just increase omega-3 by a small amount. It took a drastic reduction in omega 6 for it to help.
Perfluorohexyloctane helped me quite a bit. You can ship it from Europe for something like $20 per vial (EvoTears), or get in the US for $700 (Miebo). The vials are literally identical.
Nifty but perhaps distressing. A brief search found nothing about what happens to it after you put it in your eyes. I assume a bunch of it ends up in your tear ducts, to your nose, and into your stomach. And then?
It'll diffuse out eventually. It's metabolically inert, and it's been used as a vitreous humor substitute for quite a while.
For me, Xiidra combined with once a day Pataday (which actually dries the eye, but for me helped stem inflammation that was harming my ability to form a tear film), plus this iTEAR device (https://olympicophthalmics.com/itear-100/), was incredibly helpful.
I’d also recommend getting a humidifier for each of your main rooms and using distilled water with it.
I cured mine bc I figured out it was related to LPR/reflux which was causing dry eyes along with some other crappy stuff.
What was the cure?
LPR is really tricky because weeks of "good behavior" can be undone very easily with one wrong move. It also took me years to figure out it was LPR because it doesn't have traditional acid reflux symptoms and can also look a lot like allergies or other things my doctors labeled it with instead. For me it was especially debilitating because it inflamed my Eustachian tubes, which meant my middle ears filled with way too much fluid, and i'd have 5+ hour long vertigo attacks where i literally could not move a single inch and was vomiting the entire time and sometimes only had a few minutes of warning before this started. if this happened in public, which it thankfully never did in a way i couldn't get home or to my car quickly (to pass out in the back seat and barf out the window), it would have been absolutely awful. the other shitty symptom as i said was extremely dry eyes, like painfully dry, which i think was actually more just them stinging which feels identical to dry. no amount of eye drops helped, and i tried like 6 different types.
anyway lots of tips online for LPR that are true for me:
* nothing carbonated. this is one of the worst things i can do
* nothing acidic. some fruit juices like pineapple in particular are really, really bad for me. coffee, even with milk and ice and sugar, is also really bad for me. overly acidic foods (vinegar, tomato based stuff, etc) are also bad.
* anything spicy is really bad too
* no caffeine
* stopping eating before i feel full. this is hard for me because i've been a "eat until i'm stuffed" person my entire life and it's really satisfying for me to do so.
* stopping drinking helps but i got symptoms to go away pretty well even with moderate+ levels of drinking. but mostly just sticking to liquor and no cocktails or beer or seltzers. wine seems okay.
* sitting upright after eating for at least an hour or two
* not eating for at least a few hours before bed
* exercise helps a bit but isn't critical for me
* daily allergy pill and nasal spray, even missing one day sucks
dry eyes are my first symptom that i did something "wrong". once i learned to listen to that it helped a ton. if i do "wrong" things for like a week straight, the constant dizziness starts, and if i go on much further than that then the vertigo attacks start.
> Omega 3 supplements are such a wild world.
That's why you should get it from seafood and grass fed mammals (if you need long chain PUFAs) or flaxseed (if you need short chain PUFAs).
There are probably many other things in seafood that co-exist with Omega 3 for a reason.
The elephant in the room is that true randomised controlled trials take decades to do and even then are almost impossible to build in a way that teases out nuances such as the specific effects of individual compounds within a supplement.
So we are effectively left with pseudoscience as the only other option, but what would you rather do - sacrifice all of the insight and knowledge we are learning at such a rapid pace in medicine today, just because there's no feasible way to prove it within your lifetime (like, if you wait 20 years for observational studies to show that humans benefit from Omega 3 you will have missed the entire window when it would have been beneficial).
We have to find a balance, but it can't sit at the extreme of requiring everything to meet an impossible bar of scientific proof before we start to benefit from it. But the price to pay is that some of them are not going to pan out.
I've researched trustworthy brands a lot, the ones I settled on are Nootropics Depot, Viva Naturals and Nordic Naturals. I prefer those with only Vit E as preservative.
What led you to settle on these?
- Nootropics Depot because I know the owner (online) and they do rigorous testing
- Viva Naturals from recommendations and testing (Labdoor)
- Nordic Naturals is a well-known premium brand
frankly I haven't documented, these are just some things out of the top my head
Another important aspect regarding supplements; so few are tested for how well they are absorbed by human digestion.
Do you get headaches because of your dry eyes? (specifically, after staring at screens for a long time)
I generally don't get headaches luckily. When my dry eye was a lot more severe I had to strain to see the screen, and would sometimes get them then. It's better managed now (but still severe).
Blepharitis perhaps?
I used to (and I didn't find much relief from eye drops). For the headaches, turned out they were migraines, which I was getting from screwing up my face because my eyes were uncomfortable.
I think there is a Russian medicine for dry eye: Visomitin
But I remember a study that claimed it does not work. Also, may be currently hard to get.
Have you tried Lutein?
It's amazing the lengths some people will go to avoid eating fish.
Fish can be prohibitively expensive even in parts of the world with access to large amounts of seashorres. Think: North Africa.
I'm not talking to them I'm on HN with a buncha rich nerds looking for supplements.
Why is that amazing. Why not get it from the source. Algae
Why are we still looking at mice studies for such a human-used substance?
This study used EPA: 0.55 mg/kg/day, and DHA: 0.55 mg/kg/day.
Among the largest I've heard in human studies are things like 4,400mg EPA and 2,200mg DHA.
Examine.com is one of the best resources to understand what evidence shows about supplements.
EPA appears to be the component that works for depression.
Also, important these days, is the quality: it should be filtered from heavy metals, and processed and stored in a way that avoids it going rancid by the time you consume it.
I strongly believe in the benefits of having a higher omega-3:omega-6 ratio than is common nowadays.
> Once the behavioral tests were completed, the mice were killed, and their blood and tissues were analyzed to assess the biological effects of stress and omega-3 supplementation.
I think they are trying to show biological causes by carefully controlling the mice’s entire life and then cracking them open at the end of the study. Can’t really do that with humans.
You have to be careful with such high doses over a long period of time. It can cause heart arrhythmia.
On a related topic, I started taking bacopa monnieri and it improved my memory and mental endurance, anxiety and depression. I gave it to my wife and had the totally opposite effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacopa_monnieri
Also I can drink coffee and won't make any effect on my sleep, while my wife gets the boost. I wouldn't be surprised the effects of all those supplements depend on your body chemistry.
They can't differentiate the population, so all these studies will average zero.
Are you measuring your vitals during sleep with a watch or a ring? Might not be affecting your ability to fall asleep but hard to imagine it does nothing to your brain or heart while you’re unconscious
Bacopa Monnieri aka Brahmi has been very effective to eliminate mental turbulence for me. It has a calming, sharp, bitter effect. It's like it's cleaning something up. If my mind is overactive in bed at night I take Brahmi and I quickly feel settled.
Whoa, the plant in my aquarium is the same in the TV jingle "for memory and intelligence, Santhosh brahmi" for the Ayurvedic supplement?
Yep, what works for one may not work for others. Some people find L-theanine supplement helpful for reducing anxiety. For me it kind of worked, but then gave bad anxiety as a withdrawal symptom.
This definitely tracks with my experience. I take a tablespoon of cod liver oil daily and I've definitely noticed a complete flatlining of my emotional states. My baseline is just basic calmness and a general lack of "monkeymind"/intrusive thoughts. Really amazed its not a more prescribed treatment.
Cod is super high in Vitamin D, and considered by many historians the secret food that contributed to Vikings success.
https://goodness-exchange.com/cod-vikings-vitamin-d/
Cod is super high in Vitamin A too and I would be worried about your liver.
According to USDA, Atlantic Cod has no vitamin A. What is your source?
Sorry, maybe it was a misunderstanding, especially since the Vikings were mentioned on the thread.
I was thinking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_liver_oil
used to drink cod liver oil daily, then i learned how it's processed... I would advise just taking vitamin d pill and eating 2 to 3 times a week fat fish.
About cod liver oil manufacturing : https://www.rositausa.com/cdn/shop/articles/Rosita-Postcard-...
Everything is so polluted that either you're drinking oil that contains plastics and chemicals, or you're drinking an oil that has been completely destroyed and rebuilt using vitamin D, A and omega 3 from third party manufacturer.
What am I meant to be getting out of that link? I don't care about vitamin A/D and I don't see any point where they're adding third-party omega 3s back in.
It also seems pretty low-quality. "Our oil uses some mysterious process labelled 'oil released in 15 minutes' so it's good! Their process uses a grinder and a centrifuge, and look, we added bloodstains and made the centrifuge brown to show how bad that is!"
I believe when you heat the oil to 374°, it kills vitamins but also Omega 3. It's the oxidation, that's why Omega 3 is sold in pill or you get something like 3 month to end your bottle of cod liver oil.
I didn't notice the color as distracting, the oil actually change color when heated up.
Look if you are interested in your health, there are plenty reputable source of information on cod liver oil.
For instance https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
> The results indicate that although currently produced fish oils may undergo rigorous purification procedures and show low contaminant levels, cod livers sourced from the Baltic and consumed locally, continue to contribute substantially to the dietary intake of these contaminants.
Any particular types of fish or sources of that fish fat?
So for what it's worth here's my experience -- generally not super impressed with supplements, tried cod-liver oil, didn't notice much effect, but after starting to make homemade salmon sashimi from costco salmon (Yes it's a thing, youtube it), I started noticing reduced anxiety and better concentration on days when I did so.
I would eat about 2/3rds of a pound of raw salmon and notice this effect (which would be like $60 or more at a sushi restaurant). I've done this at least 20 times now and never had any issues.
Generally I don't mention the mental effects of the salmon to people because I feel like they wouldn't take it very seriously, but since you're asking and it's on-topic, I thought I'd share.
Mackerel, sardine.
I believe they are amongst the best source of Omega 3. Technically you could still eat cod liver but you would still eat big amount of pollutants because it's the liver.
Does it also flatline your positive emotions? Ashwaganda does a similar thing for a lot of people, it tamps down their anxiety and depression but suppresses most other emotions as well (it's called anhedonia).
I would definitely say so. I can still feel happy if I choose to but I don't feel upward swings. Overall I'd say its a net positive as I generally feel content.
Many people complain of a similar flatlining with NAC as well, I’ve had a positive mood change because of it and drastic memory improvement.
It didn't affect me at all when I took it for a few years. No noticeable positive or negative effect.
High long chain omega 3 and low omega 6 not only revered my hyperlipidemia (through stimulating reverse cholesterol transport) but notably reduces my symptoms of schizoaffective disorder bipolar type (I am assuming this is through assisting with carecholamine receptor function).
I came to the conclusion this diet would help me by noting the polymorphisms in my FADS1 and FADS2 genes linked to needing more long chain PUFAs.
You might also be interested that omega 3 is responsible for making natural Cannabinoid (endocannabinoids) in humans which could be linked to the lower anxiety.
Whenever I get my cholesterol tested I have low good cholesterol and high bad cholesterol, is that hyperlipidemia? Any recommendations on how to get high long chain omega 3 and low omega 6 in my diet? Any supplements or brands I should take? Any books that you recommend I read?
Yeah, I've noticed too much Omega 6 is at least one big cause of my anxiety.
Avoiding vegetable oils (and foods that are cooked with it) and just using coconut oil, tallow, butter etc. reduces my anxiety to the point that it's barely noticeable.
IMHO, Omega 3 increases GABA and Omega 6 increases Glutamate. I am going to guess that if you ever smoked pot that high THC weed makes you severely anxious?
Can you elaborate on the connection you’re drawing here?
Omega 6 creates an endocannibinoid that is more like Delta 9 THC and Delta 9 THC increases glutamate release. This will cause psychosis in people who have high glutamate levels or low GABA levels.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7714685/
Omega 3 creates an endocannibinoid that is more like CBD and CBD increases GABA release.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10436...
Donuts are evil.
Well this is a great thing to see an hour after buying some O3s.
I have read though that omega-3 supplements seem to not do much, it's the intake of them dietarily that show results, I'm not sure how current that research is. I've also read that algae as a source might be better? There's a tremendous amount of conflicting information.
> I have read though that omega-3 supplements seem to not do much
afaik that holds for a lot (if not most) commonly used supplements (vitamins are another popular offender). Sometimes the reason is the food matrix effect, where just isolated nutrients are not as beneficial as when they are consumed along with other nutrients. Sometimes (like vitamin D or testosterone), the biomarker is reflective of health status, not predictive.
From this [1] podcast (2y old at this point) I too seem to remember that it doesn't do much most of the time, that supplements are generally untrustworthy w.r.t. dosing and purity and there's also a slight chance of giving yourself afib.
1. https://soundcloud.com/user-344313169/episode-193-fish-oil
There’s never been a better time to be a mouse
Or a worse one. I know you're making a joke, but it doesn't seem that funny to me — U.S. biomedical industry goes through about 111 million lab mice and rats each year [1]. Most mice lives are short and cruel, living their entire lives in tiny plastic boxes and often subjected to horrific experiences. We should be more thankful.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-mice-and-ra...
I really appreciate that someone else shares my opinions on this matter. It pains me what we do to animals for our benefit. I suppose there is no other alternative, but that does not diminish the cruelty.
I feel the same way about the "Boar's Head" meat recall in the US due to Listeria. 7 million pounds of meat must be disposed of. That means every single one of the pigs died for that meat died for absolutely nothing at all. It just doesn't sit right with me.
This isn't funny. Mice and rats are among the most intelligent animals used in research, and despite ethical regulations on their treatment, they are often ignored. Many of these animals endure severe procedures without adequate pain relief, or none at all. This widespread suffering also causes mental health problems for many of the researchers who have to regularly euthanize them. These animals sacrifice their lives to improve human health and well-being. At the very least, we should show respect for their pain and suffering, which is undertaken for our benefit.
Right up until any given study with mice concludes...
Have they made any mice immortal yet (with continuous treatments of stem cells and other therapies)?
There's a study about omega3 supplementation that says that if children in a family supplement it, that the parents have a better relationship, even if they don't supplement. I can probably dig it out, given enough time with a search engine.
Another one is D. over the course of three years i managed to help my wife get above 100ng/ml 25-hydroxy-D on a blood test. Of course every doctor called and said "too high" and her Calcium is too high too, but not from the D3, folks, because she takes K2 Mk7. Her calcium is high because she mostly drinks fortified orange juice and was taking 1200mg calcium per day at the direction of her oncologist. She has a lot of chronic issues and we're slowly trying to mitigate everything possible with diet and supplements. The specialist said "stop calcium immediately" and "reduce D for 1 month" only. for those aware her Ca was 10.9 ("good" range is ~9.0 - 10.2). I guarantee that her calcium will go back to normal because of the K2 between now and her next blood panel. note: they don't actually test D levels unless you ask, in general. One might wonder why that is - i know i certainly do.
In fact, i was just about to go to the pharmacy to get Omega-3 supplements when i saw this post. Her chart shows that she must supplement omega 3, since she won't eat baked salmon. My kid already has vitamins with omegas in them.
What i recommend is actually reading studies - completely - and if you have any questions or doubts, befriend researchers in biology or other life sciences that can skim the paper and tell you "meh" or "hey that's cool". Studies contradict, studies may have bad inputs or methodology, the only way to know for sure is to read as many as you can as thoroughly as you can, and if possible, consult experts. Medical doctors of the "PCP" persuasion are not experts, generally.
You could just pay for an examine.com subscription. That’s pretty much what they offer as a service - third party evaluation of studies to provide unbiased advice for different supplements.
This is exciting, and should be fairly easy to confirm/deny with a double blind trial in humans. There's no money to be had in it for big pharma, so funding it would have to come from some other means, but it should be possible.
There's already research on Omega 3 supplementation's impact on depression + anxiety symptoms in humans. The results generally show that Omega 3 is roughly as effective as antidepressants, and can be safely taken in addition to antidepressants for an even greater effect.
Examine.com summary:
> Fish oil supplementation has been noted to be comparable to pharmaceutical drugs (fluoxetine) in majorly depressed persons, but this may be the only cohort that experiences a reduction of depression. There is insufficient evidence to support a reduction of depressive symptoms in persons with minor depression (ie. not diagnosed major depressive disorder)
They give it a B for the research and an effect size of moderate improvement. Also a B with a small effect size for anxiety.
https://examine.com/supplements/fish-oil
I’d note it also says:
> A meta-analysis of 35 small, randomized trials found that fish oil can slightly improve depression when compared to control. However, this improvement may be too small to be noticeable. Also, adding fish oil to antidepressant medication seems to be more beneficial than antidepressant treatment alone
In short, sounds like it’s worth throwing in as an adjunct treatment for people wanting to take a kitchen sink approach
> They give it a B for the research and an effect size of moderate improvement. Also a B with a small effect size for anxiety
To be fair, this is among the most highly rated things on the entire site - let not the "B" scare you off. A moderate effect size is pretty substantial, all things considered.
> There's no money to be had in it for big pharma
IIRC there's several patent medicine versions of omega 3 such as icosapent ethyl
as opposed to supplement studies in mice, which are notoriously lucrative
As the other comment mentions, mouse studies are hilariously cheap compared to human trials. We're talking many orders of magnitude. A couple grad students can do a mouse study at costs very much approaching zero.
they are cheaper
Eating only eggs, beef, fish, olive oil, greek yogurt, blueberries, walnuts and some cheese and dark leafy greens can do the same.
All omega-3 supplements are probably somewhat rancid and possibly harmful, specially in solid / pill form! I personally take cod liver oil (liquid) from a reputable brand, but I still don't %100 trust it to be healthy. It's much better to eat fatty fish or actual cod liver.
Can you say which brand? And what research have you found on them? I also do the same and just wonder if they actually work or not
This is great, but why does Omega 3 paradoxically reduce expression of dopamine receptors and dopamine release
The dopamine hypothesis is being heavily debated and revisited these days. Might be worth checking any assumptions against current research.
Because it makes the dopamine more effective.
When I took omega-3 in addition to duloxetine, I got terrible brain zaps the whole day.
That's interesting, zaps are a withdrawal syndrome of SSRIs (and duloxetine).
Yep. That's where I knew brain zaps from, because I previously experienced them when coming off SSRIs.
I had them after an accidental too big MDMA dose, after which I felt depressed for a few weeks.
Buspirone (an anti-anxiety) gave me brain zaps within an hour of taking it. Didn't seem to help with the anxiety at all though...
It should not be title Omega-3!
The article clearly States Omega-3, 8, and Omega-9!
This isn’t new.
Does caffeine intake nullify this effect?
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Anxiety and depressions are feelings. Eating feels good for a little bit. But I could easily make the claim that getting a dog and taking it for regular walks in nature counteracts symptoms of anxiety and depression. Doing Yoga with synchronized breathing...same Taking a hot bath, a sauna session, a massage, sex, a long list. Why do so many people think eating something is the path to good health.
Also knowing how things are encoded in neural networks, where it's a combination of variables that sets off some behaviour. Why do Scientists still persist on trying to isolate a single variable.
I take it you were never in a psychiatric hospital with people urging you to get ECT?
I was. Hot baths don’t work, but that’s just me. Blanket recommendations are useless and harmful. It turns out I have a genetic issue causing my mood issues and diet is my treatment.
By all means, eat as much healthy food as you can afford. But whatever caused your psychiatric problems, it couldn't have been food. Unless you're so poor that you severely malnourished, or you're eating something severely toxic. And even then, lots of places in this world with malnourished populations that are not depressed.
Improving the quality of your life is not just food. It's all the other things that go into it. Like autonomy, sense of security, friends, social status, finances, physical activity levels, etc.
So be sure to look after improving those things too.
And my suggestion for walking a dog, is a simple and practical suggestion for something that will get you both companionship and exercise.
From personal experience, quitting smoking helped with anxiety. That longing feeling for a cigarette was making me anxious, and that feeling would persist even after having one. So quitting was helpful. But again, smoking is not eating.
> By all means, eat as much healthy food as you can afford. But whatever caused your psychiatric problems, it couldn't have been food
Are there purines, like Inosine and Guanosine, in food?
Did you even ask what my genetic disorder is?
I'm always open to learning things I don't know about ... go on
Cool.
I have a Partial PNP Deficiency that makes it harder for me to break down Inosine and Guanosine (and xanthine). My PNP enzyme only functions at about 12% of most "normal" people.
Image: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/538247/fimmu-11-0...
Paper on the topic: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10....
So how does food affect me?
They use Inosine (Inosinic acid) and Guanosine (Guanylic acid) in foods as a food additives to increase the umami.
https://www.eurofins.com/media-centre/newsletters/food-newsl...
These are also found naturally in many foods: https://www.umamiinfo.com/richfood/
When I eat these foods I cannot break these purines down and they not only cause mood issues but also an immune deficiency.
Purinergic System Dysfunction is linked to mood disorders: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4262688/
After going on a low specific purine diet I no longer need any of the three psychiatric medications I was on but for klonopin since there are some triggers I cannot avoid.
Food did this. Food and having a good doctor who did not give up on me. Food and knowing what my genetics are. I get that some people might benefit from Yoga, etc, but to serve a blanket statement like that is just ignorant of the genetic and environmental diversity of humanity. I have these genetics because I have Sami heritage and I am adapted to live in a cold climate and eating low purine, high zinc foods. Zinc also helps me break down the purines by stimulating LACC1, which is a sort of PNP backup. A zinc deficiency when I was young left me with an undecended testicle because of my LACC1 genetics.
https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q8IV20/entry
Thank you for posting the genetic polymorphism, makes it much easier to cross reference. Glad you've found an answer!
Super interesting, thanks for sharing
Thank you, interesting read. My friend that has an autistic son, wants to cure him through diet changes. Do you know anything food related to autism?
Not really, but this may be a good start:
Purine signaling pathway dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders: Evidence from multiple omics data https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9935591/
and
https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1989/10/5/184
I do not think the spectrum of autism are caused by a single gene or environmental factor. I was diagnosed with Asperger's as well, much too late in life.
Allergies are a thing. Why is it hard to believe that certain types of food affect people in specific ways?