Wonk wrote:For instance, I notice zero ill effects when eating dairy, legumes, nuts, seeds. I can't say I notice any difference when consuming gluten, either. My inclination is to believe that only those who are sensitive to these foods will have problems, but I could be wrong.
Kresser recently did a post on the different levels of gluten intolerance that most people overlook:
http://chriskresser.com/50-shades-of-gluten-intolerance
Basically you go gluten-free for 30 days and see if you notice a difference (be sure to eat
plenty of non-gluten sources of carbs when you do this: potatoes, sweet potatoes, white rice, etc or you will trigger glucose issues). Of course, once you do that you are pretty much close to a PHD diet.
Wonk wrote:Does anyone know of a nutrition (or digestion) testing protocol that can be evaluated to find evidence of foods that would be damaging to an individual--even if they are asymptomatic? I'd like to see personal evidence before largely eliminating foods I enjoy.
As Kresser explains, the tests either don't exist yet or they are largely inconclusive. For instance, many people are scared into thinking they are allergic to certain foods via IgG tests, but all that does is show you which foods are passing through your gut barrier and triggering antibody responses
on that day.
Here, read this transcript from Episode 6 of Chris Kresser's Podcast with Kurt Harris:
The Healthy Skeptic Podcast: Episode 6 wrote:Chris Kresser: So, we had a patient who was just really, really sick, and he was just getting sicker and sicker. He weighed about 90 pounds. I think he was about 6 feet tall. And the doctor had him on a restricted diet, you know, one of those food allergy type of diets where all you're eating is, like, broccoli, venison, and quinoa.
Kurt Harris, MD: The Specific Carbohydrate Diet?
Chris Kresser: No, no, just like a really, you know, they do the IgG food testing, which is kinda bunk anyways.
Kurt Harris, MD: Yeah, that's pretty bunk.
Chris Kresser: And then they find out you can only eat strawberries, broccoli, quinoa, and ostrich! You know? And so, he was doing that, and he kept removing foods until he was literally down to, like, broccoli and steamed whitefish or something. That was all he was eating. And he just kept getting sicker and sicker. So, he disappears for about six months, comes back a completely different person. He's back up to 160 or 170, which was his normal weight, you know, completely normal complexion. Literally, we didn't even recognize him, and the doctor was saying: What happened? Was it diet? And the guy was like: Yep, it was diet. And he said: Was it the candida diet? Was it the Specific Carbohydrate? What was it? And he said: It was the beer and pizza diet! [laughter] And this guy literally, I mean, the guy got to this point where he was like: OK, if this is my life, I'm fine with just flaring out. You know, this isn't worth it. And if I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna have fun. And so, he started going out. You know, he wasn't ever hanging out with his friends anymore because he was on such a restricted diet, he had no social life, so he just said: Forget it. I'm gonna drink beer and eat pizza at least three times a week, and then the other times I'm gonna do whatever I want. And that completely restored his health. So, go figure. I mean, if that's not an example of going from orthorexia to, and the effect of stress on our gut and on our overall health, I don't know what is!
Kurt Harris, MD: Yeah. I should call my blog The Bubble-Bursting Blog or something, because my most popular posts, I think, are these kinds of posts, but they're also probably why I shut off comments.
Chris Kresser: Right.
Kurt Harris, MD: It's like, you know, maybe running a marathon five times a year is not good for you. Maybe if you have an allergic reaction to butter that consists of, I don't know, anything that happens as soon as you put butter in your mouth, maybe that's all in your head. I mean, there are people claiming reactions that there's no physiologic way that there could be that reaction other than a psychosomatic reaction. And then let's stop there. What does psychosomatic mean? Does that mean it's all in your head? No. It means it's created by a real organ, which is your brain. And you know, you just suggested that leaky gut can actually be caused by a lesion in the brain. I have no doubt — And I'm a physician, OK? Some things are obvious to me. I've had patients that have urticaria, which is big, red welts that happens in response to stress. I've seen patients have asthma that puts them in the hospital because they have a crappy homelife. I've seen this. This is not controversial to me. Why is it so hard to believe that somebody could convince themselves that they're allergic to everything except oatmeal and chicken breasts? Now, why did I pick that as an example? I had a patient — Actually she's not a patient anymore because my practice closed, but this is a woman that I've known that was in my practice for five years. She was healthier than you might think, but she ate nothing but oatmeal and chicken breasts.
Chris Kresser: Wow.
Kurt Harris, MD: And she claimed she was allergic to everything else. I should say parenthetically the problem with this IgG testing and any kind of antibody testing is that when you have — I also have a problem with the term "leaky gut" because people mean different things by it, but when you have actual leakage of tight junctions and things going into your bloodstream, you can have an immune response mounted to almost any of those molecules going through there. The correlation of the immune level response or finding the antibodies with the clinical effect is poor to nonexistent, meaning if they tested me, they might find some level of detectable antibodies to lamb and beef because I live on lamb and beef, but that wouldn't mean that I'm having any particular symptom due to that. So, that's how some people get in a bind. Not only are they convincing themselves they're having problems, but then they get testing done, which is bogus, that reinforces that they really are allergic to everything, and actually maybe they do have leaky gut, but the problem is the leaky gut, not the particular things that are leaking.
Chris Kresser: Exactly. Or maybe they had leaky gut and those larger molecules slipped through, created an immune response six months ago, and those IgG antibodies are still there because they last for three to six months, but the body already repaired that damage long before.
Kurt Harris, MD: Sure.
Chris Kresser: I've also heard — I don't know if you've heard stories like this, but I had a colleague who drew his own blood on the same day, marked the vials with two different bogus names, and sent them into the same lab. He got back completely different results. One was, like, if you eat peanuts you're gonna die, and then the other one was, like, go ahead and eat peanuts, no problem.
Source:
http://chriskresser.com/the-healthy-ske ... -episode-6
So, a reaction to a food can be caused by many, many things. And even the lab results are just unreliable.
Another thing to consider is that eating a food you technically aren't "allergic" to may have an adverse effect on your gut — which can exacerbate real allergies by making the gut more leaky.
For instance (and I'm wildly exaggerating here to make a point), imagine you take a food allergy test and it says that you aren't allergic to steel nails. So, you go ahead and eat steel nails for breakfast every morning and wonder why you start becoming allergic to all these other foods. As you might guess, the steel nails are wearing away at your gut lining and letting the foods you are truly "allergic" to slip through the gut barrier. In a way, that's pretty much what gluten and improperly prepared grains do to your gut. You may not be "allergic" to them, but they aren't exactly good for the gut barrier either.
So, it's way, way more complex than most people realize.
Wonk wrote:I know spectracell does a micronutrient test but to my knowledge does not enter the world of paleo.
I've heard Kresser and Robb Wolf mention the Spectracell test on occasion in their podcasts. Even Tim Ferriss has mentioned it (Ferriss is good for "life hacking" not nutrition). But, I believe Kresser recommends the NutrEval FMV test... from Genova:
Chris Kresser wrote:I do probably think it’s pretty safe to say that if you have autoimmune disease, you’re likely to be glutathione deficient. You know, there are correlations there. And we know that that doesn’t mean that that’s true in every case, that there’s even a causal relationship, but there are a lot of known mechanisms, and I think the overall evidence base is pretty solid on this.
In terms of figuring out if you are glutathione deficient, one test that I like for that is the organic acids panel from Genova or Metametrix, and they’re actually the same thing now. Genova bought Metametrix recently, and so they’re merging. I mean, they’re still kind of separate entities, but I think that’s gonna change over the next few months. Anyhow, they do a urine organic acids panel, and this test, as I said before, measures levels of organic acids in the urine that are byproducts of central energy pathways and microbial metabolism. So there are a lot of cycles in the body, and each step in that cycle requires specific enzymes to complete and go to the next step, and each of those enzymes requires particular nutrients. And so if one of those enzymes isn’t functioning properly, you’ll get a buildup of the metabolite prior to that step on the cycle, and that will spill over into the urine — Well, you know, if it’s in the digestive tract, it will go through the gut barrier in the blood and it’ll be filtered out by the kidneys and end up in the urine. And there are other ways it can end up in the urine, too. And then based on which metabolite is showing up in higher concentrations in the urine, you can trace it backwards and say: OK, so that enzyme in that cycle is not working very well, and what nutrients does that enzyme require? OK, glutathione is something that that enzyme requires. So there are a number of markers on the organic acids panel that when elevated or low can signal a glutathione deficiency, and they can also signal a glutathione demand, meaning the body is under some kind of oxidative stress and glutathione is being required to deal with that. And so in that situation, that person might not be glutathione deficient at that time, but if that oxidative stress or whatever is causing the glutathione demand continues, they will be eventually. So that test is pretty helpful for that, and I do use it pretty regularly in my practice. It’s becoming one of my favorite and most useful tests, and of course, that will be something we’ll cover in that clinician training program.
Source:
http://chriskresser.com/adrenal-fatigue ... -arthritis
If it makes you feel any better, I recently took this NutrEval FMV test (it's expensive) after eating
PHD 80% of the time and my results were pretty much perfect. My oxidative stress was very low. My glutathione was perfect. CoQ10 was right on target (even though I don't supplement). All my nutrients were perfect except my zinc, carotenoids and folate were a tad low. Even my Omega 3/6 ratio was perfect — which even amazed me. The only supplements I take regularly are FCLO/HVBO, Magnesium, a little iodine and a few mineral drops (since my local water is void of minerals). And since I was on PHD most of my nutrition came from eggs, potatoes, meat, and the occasional serving of offal.
So, a PHD-style diet clearly works (for me) in terms of nutrition. I don't believe I consume RDA levels of every nutrient, and yet it appeared as though I was not wildly deficient in anything.
It all makes me wonder if some of the RDA's are designed for people who are eating a diet high in grains (which would rob nutrients from the body).