Does self building improve health?

[Onoff]

There was a piece in one of the respected broadsheets that we in the sanitised West could eventually have to import "brown gold" aka carefully screened "deposits" in pill form from skinny, Third World donors.

 

Probably the fittest I've been when I hand dug down the bathroom floor by 18" and moved the old clay drainage system! 

[Hecateh]

21 hours ago, Onoff said:

 

I really think kimchi stands on its own...as in could grow legs and walk!

I recently had a girl from Taiwan staying with me.  I began to dread opening the fridge the smell of 'that stuff' was so pungent.

1 hour ago, joe90 said:

I agree, I think a lot of alergies and medical issues are due to a sanitised world. Someone I know Is forever wiping surfaces with antibacterial wipes and keeping her daughter away from anything dirty. The daughter is always at the doctors with something or another and the mother is always asking for drugs for her. Children need to build their immune system by catching bugs and learning to deal with them. I once read an American paper that found children born naturally were less likely to develop medical problems over those born by ceaserian . Rant over ?

Always agreed with this.  When I was nursing the 'scruffy' kids were far more healthy and robust than the poor little 'darlings', they bounced back, from illness and recovered from any treatment more quickly and were far less likely to catch anything new whilst they were in.  

[newhome]

Agree with the sentiments but one of my team at work is just flying back to India as his 10 month old son is in ITU with an infection and is critically ill so there is certainly a balance. 

 

I always think that kids brought up with pets and who play outside in mud etc are generally healthier than kids brought up with work surfaces bleached to death. 

 

[epsilonGreedy]

1 hour ago, Onoff said:

Pretty sure I only put on weight after a run of antibiotics for dental issues and a mass dose of the things when we too had issues conceiving.

 

Up until then I was as skinny as a rake and had grown up playing in the woods & around animals etc. No allergies either.

 

 

Your theory is not as bizarre as it seems, some recent medical science advances are heading to a similar conclusion. In 10 years time you should be able to buy a tub of replacement hyperactive gut bacteria on the high street from Boots.

[Cpd]

5 hours ago, TerryE said:

I've also switched to a ketatonic diet for the next month or two: human metabolism has two pathways: glycolysis and ketosis; yeasts only the former -- so this will starve the bastards out.

I have now been on a strict KetoDiet for 9 months, i was severely ill with undiagnosed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that had been bad and only got worse over a two year period. When your that ill nothing is going to be a silver bullet but within 4 weeks of being on the diet I started to improve and have been improving ever since. As well as being on a keto diet I am also on a Paleo diet and this removes all dairy and a bunch of other stuff, long story short..... dairy causes inflammation in a lot of people and inflammation causes an untold amount of diverse problems, I have suffered muscle pain all my life, not something that’s always there but as a hard working hard playing guy I always suffered after hard activity. Spent a fortune on massage and chiropractors. After giving up dairy 9 months ago the pain stopped, just like that. Now that I am getting better (so far 60% better) and am working hard again it’s amazing to be able to finish at the end of the day and not be in pain. If anyone needs more info on paleo keto diets I am happy to pm you details of further research and resources. As i said I have a pretty serious diet and take a lot of mostly natural supplements but also eat fermented foods daily. I will stop now but..... it’s a bloody miracle how changing my diet and taking some supplements has brought me back from what was being very very close to the end game. 

[TerryE]

Use of PK diets is very controversial in the NHS except for some narrow cases such as epilepsy and some diabetes treatments.  Anyone who eats a normal convenience high processed carb diet will find this a hard change, but luckily we eat a Michael Pollan-style high vegetable, low carb diet, so going to a Ketogenic is only one step away for me.  I am not sure that I will totally eliminate dairy as cheese is such a pleasure in life.  But any dietary change is a price worth paying to getting this f***ing candida infection eliminated soon.

Edited May 18, 2018 by TerryE
Sentence got lost; replaced it

[Onoff]

All I know is if I have a cored & sliced apple and handful of unsalted nuts (ideally walnuts) in the morning I'm good until well past lunchtime. As long as i drink I'll make it to early evening. More energy and clarity than if I eat a full English. I try and limit meat to once maybe twice a week. I will after a couple of weeks have to have a steak or I get a bit antsy!

[SteamyTea]

Allergies:

I am allergic to just about anything with fur.  Most of my early life I was a wheezy child.  Because it was the 1960's and 70's it was because I was all caused by what we now call stress.

My parents always had a cat or two.

Left home to go to university and my wheezing cleared up.

 

A decade ago I started working back in catering as the hours suited me while I was studying again.  As it was a fish restaurant I was eating fish 3 or 4 times a week.  Fish is good for us as we all know.

After a few weeks I could hardly talk, my voice was croaky and I had trouble swallowing.  This was put down to me being a smoker.  Stopped smoking and it did not get better.

Bugger me I am allergic to fish.  Rub a tiny bit on my skin and it erupts and cracks in minutes.

 

So I am very wary of 'diets' being a cure all.  The Mediterranean diet is a killer for me, almost.  I like Pizza.

 

Cleanliness:

We live in a society that takes this seriously, it is very unlikely that we by goods that have anything nasty on them, food included.

So an extra bit of cleaning around the house with bleach and sprays is not going to make much difference. 

I think obsessive cleaning is a different problem and often forced on others.  I think they call it Münchhausen Syndrome by proxy.

 

Medical Research:

Just read Ben Goldacre's (who has a fantastic mother) Bad Science and other books to realise just how hopeless medical research has been (thankfully improving now).

[TerryE]

7 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

So I am very wary of 'diets' being a cure all. 

 

Depends on how you approach it. I see diet is what you eat and how you eat it for the long term.  Individuals can find that they have different food intolerances, so you should understand if you have any and simply avoid those foods. High carb diets can cause a lot of problems for many of us as we get older: obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, etc.

 

In my case I have a very specific problem because a course of antibiotics probably saved my life, but also totally buggered up my gut ecology as a side effect leading to this candida explosion. In my case, changing my diet can address this.

 

Horses for courses.

[Jeremy Harris]

9 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Medical Research:

Just read Ben Goldacre's (who has a fantastic mother) Bad Science and other books to realise just how hopeless medical research has been (thankfully improving now).

 

Take a look at the work being done by Cochrane (http://www.cochrane.org/ ).  Much of it highlights just how dire a great deal of medical research is.  One could be forgiven for thinking that medical researchers had never heard of the scientific method, their work is so appallingly bad. 

 

It's not just research either, a lot of the measurement methods used every day in medicine are really poor.  Blood pressure is a really good example.  The actual measurement equipment and the technique, be it auscultation or oscillometric, is reasonably good, and probably has a repeatability and accuracy of around +/- 5mmHg, but there are large errors introduced by the way the patients arm is held, the height of the cuff relative to the heart and whether the measurement is made on the dominant or non-dominant arm.  These variations are enough to make the difference between someone being diagnosed with high blood pressure when it's really normal, or someone with high blood pressure not being diagnosed at all.  Add in that around 20% or more of the population will appear to have elevated blood pressure when it's measured in a clinical environment ("white coat hypertension") and that the accurately measured effect of even the very best anti-hypertension drugs is similar to the normal measurement error in magnitude, and this whole area of health care starts to look very dodgy indeed.

[newhome]

I find ketogenic and paleo diets very challenging to stick to. I have done both in the past but can’t maintain them for a long period. But that’s because I don’t have any food intolerances to my knowledge so I don’t have that extra motivation to do so. 

 

I had a BUPA health check (company policy before travelling to India for work) whilst following a ketogenic diet and was given a lecture about ensuring that my diet was balanced, ie included carbs. It showed up due to the presence of ketones plus I had been fasting pre the cholesterol test so a double whammy from the ketones perspective. Clearly the doctor thought that only diets containing carbs were a healthy way to eat. The food they provided after the health check to end the fast was all carb laden too. 

 

I also avoid antibiotics if I possibly can. I had need of them in a big way a few years ago and without doubt they saved my life so I prefer to save their use for critical events such as that, not every tiny thing that our immune systems would probably kick into touch anyway. 

 

 

Edited May 18, 2018 by newhome

[Cpd]

21 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

So I am very wary of 'diets' being a cure all

I hear you and don’t propose that one “diet” fits all, however I believe that We will look back in the comming years and recognise that high carb / suger and dairy diets have been pretty unhelpful in regards to good health. Yes we all have individual requirments and any diet should take this into account but I would not be to quick to dismis the importance of a good diet and A healthy gut. I think people’s hackles go up when people talk about diet for a bunch of reasons..... there really is growing body of evidence that our old established food triangle is more upside down than right way up.  Each to there own and all that but personally having benefited so greatly by changing the foods I eat (before becoming ill I scoffed at diets) I am now a total believer in how important It is to eat a diet targeted at individual  needs.

[epsilonGreedy]

22 minutes ago, Cpd said:

I hear you and don’t propose that one “diet” fits all

 

 

The right diet for a person can be determined by analysis of an individual's own DNA plus the DNA of their resident gut bacteria. There are some excellent TedX talks on the subject available on YouTube.

 

My niece is in her second year studying Medical Science and loves to talk about all of this new science, customized gene specific medical treatment is where medicine is going.

 

The human race is in an unhappy place right now, modern farming and food processing has supported a population explosion from 2.5 billion to 7 billion in just 70 years, unfortunately science is in catch-up mode trying to comprehend why the result is so many people with low grade chronic complaints. 

[Jeremy Harris]

4 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

The human race is in an unhappy place right now, modern farming and food processing has supported a population explosion from 2.5 billion to 7 billion in just 70 years, unfortunately science is in catch-up mode trying to comprehend why the result is so many people with low grade chronic complaints. 

 

Medical science also has a great deal to do to clean up it's act and start working to a recognised scientific method.  From just a few months of reviewing evidence from studies, I can state categorically that around 80%, perhaps more, of the evidence from medical trials and studies is flawed, and well over 50% of it is very deeply flawed, so much so that it's just wrong.  Clinical decisions have been made on much of this flawed evidence, too, and that has added to our problems, rather than aid them.

 

Another thing that has become clear from reviewing evidence is that almost all the deeply flawed evidence is produced by pharmaceutical company studies and trials.  Even some work from apparently reputable sources has been found to be flawed, where that work has been sponsored by industry.  The main issues seem to be reports of studies and trials that fail to include all the data; it seems very common for findings that don't support the objective of the sponsoring company to just be omitted from the reported evidence, and it's often not easy to find out details of those excluded findings.  IMHO, this is a much more serious issue than the corruption within the VAG group over their doctoring emissions testing, yet it's one that receives relatively little publicity.

[joe90]

After years of I’ll health and the death of my wife caused by cancer I am fairly well read on diets and health. A fascinating read is about blue zones https://www.bluezones.com/ this is places round the world where people live the longest and what they do and eat. Apart from diet ( mostly fresh, mostly vegetarian) I was fascinated that happiness and family integration was a key factor that lead to long life.

[DeeJunFan]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

Allergies:

I am allergic to just about anything with fur.  Most of my early life I was a wheezy child.  Because it was the 1960's and 70's it was because I was all caused by what we now call stress.

My parents always had a cat or two.

Left home to go to university and my wheezing cleared up.

 

 

I'm the same .  Anything with Fur, nuts (tree,ground and peanuts), Pollen (tree & grass), fish (White and Shellfish),  Cucumber, melon, kiwi, soy & eggs

 

I had an issue with Gluten but a dietitian had me do a reset phase.   Off everything Wheat, milk & cheese for 6 months then begin to re-introduce and i'm ok with most things now. 

 

But all of my allergies are the same.   Its hard to have a very healthy diet when all the healthy stuff is bad for you and all the unhealthy stuff is A OK. 

 

I'm currently starting to do some intermittent fasting as there are some good studies around it and i have a few friends who like it. 

 

Started with OMAD (one meal a day)  so 23 hours fasting and 1 hour eating window.   It was pretty easy to do and the energy levels were good.   Then i went on a trip to India and  as always happens i got the Deli Belly and a bad Flu so starting back on the OMAD next week hopefully when i'm totally recovered. 

 

 

[MikeGrahamT21]

Theres the old saying, we are what we eat, I am a great believer in it, and think food plays an immense role in our overall health.

 

There are many many essential oils, herbs etc which could replace and probably better many modern medicines, but they will never get a look in whilst the big pharma are around, their multi billion $£ industry will always see that cheap, profitless oils, herbs and the like will never make it in front of their drugs, and until that changes I think we will always be on the back foot. Majority of answers to most problems are found in nature, we just choose to ignore them in order to make money, and lots of it! The worlds greed is slowly killing us all off, and the rich just don't see it.

[SteamyTea]

19 minutes ago, DeeJunFan said:

fish (White and Shellfish)

I often wonder if freshwater fish has the same affect.  Not putting i to the test to find out, but you can try it and report back.  I always though that a tingling on the tongue and roof of the mouth was normal.

 

I had an stomach infection, Helicobacter Pylori, for 40+ years, nearly all my life.  So I always thought that indigestion was just normal.  Was not until my Father got treated for it and we were chatting about the symptoms that I realised that I may well have it.  My Father was one of those people that had a good long term memory and could place when it started.  Balikpapan 1962.  I was treated in 2003.  So all I can say is that the two major world contributions from Australia are the rotary washing line and the cure for HP.  Well done Australia.

Edited May 18, 2018 by SteamyTea

[daiking]

11 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

I often wonder if freshwater fish has the same affect.  Not putting i to the test to find out, but you can try it and report back.  I always though that a tingling on the tongue and roof of the mouth was normal.

 

I had an stomach infection, Helicobacter Pylori, for 40+ years, nearly all my life.  So I always thought that indigestion was just normal.  Was not until my Father got treated for it and we were chatting about the symptoms that I realised that I may well have it.  My Father was one of those people that had a good long term memory and could place when it started.  Balikpapan 1962.  I was treated in 2003.  So all I can say is that the two major world contributions from Australia are the rotary washing line and the cure for HP.  Well done Australia.

 

I can date my long term indigestion problem back to 2008 and the birth of my first child...

 

brining this vaguely back on track, becoming immersed in your ‘build’, devoting every spare hour to it will mess up your diet and whilst the amount of physical activity may mask your bad diet for a while, you can’t, won’t out run it.

 

Not that I can blame anyone but I am addicted to sugar. It is incredibly hard to come off it. Most days I would kill for a bucket of shreddies and half a gallon of milk. That shit is lethal.

Edited May 18, 2018 by daiking

[epsilonGreedy]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

Medical science also has a great deal to do to clean up it's act and start working to a recognised scientific method.  From just a few months of reviewing evidence from studies, I can state categorically that around 80%, perhaps more, of the evidence from medical trials and studies is flawed, and well over 50% of it is very deeply flawed...

 

 

The scientist within you should be able to prove yourself wrong. One of the greatest achievements of the 20th century was the lengthening of life expectancy, this suggests that medical science is doing good science. That achievement is even more remarkable considering that the majority of humans in western society are trying very hard to terminate their lives early through reckless excess consumption and idleness. 

[SteamyTea]

2 hours ago, epsilonGreedy said:

One of the greatest achievements of the 20th century was the lengthening of life expectancy,

Most of that was done by reducing infant mortality and vaccination against killer, or life shortening, diseases.

At the top end, improved working conditions, better home comforts and labour saving devices have played dividend.

Also we have not had a major war that wipes out 3 million fit young men (7.5% of the population).

Or Spanish Flu, that killed more people world wide than the Great War (though may not have killed more British, though it did tend to hit people in midlife worse than the two extremes).

 

So like expectants, and the associated 'health' of the nation, seems to be unaffected by diet or self building.

 

Edit

Spanish Flu killed 228,000 of the UK population (0.5%).

Edited May 18, 2018 by SteamyTea

[TerryE]

2 hours ago, epsilonGreedy said:

One of the greatest achievements of the 20th century was the lengthening of life expectancy, this suggests that medical science is doing good science.

 

If you've watched any of Hans Roslings GapMinder talks then these provide a slightly different interpretation.  Basic stuff like

• A basic understanding of sepsis, hygene, clean drinking water and sewage disposal
• Adequate nutrition
• Vaccination programs
• Improvements in anti and post natal care

are the dominant factors here.   That's why places like the province of Kerala in India has a higher overall life expectancy than Washington DC in the USA.   A lot of the improvements in healthy care are now largely nullified by the -ve consequences of the high-carb excess western diet, leading to obesity, high blood pressure co risks and diabetes.

 

IMO, UK healthcare is good (or in fact great) in parts, but there are whole areas where it performs poorly.  A good example is CFS/ME that @Cpd and I suffer from, and people with other systemic diseases like IBS.  If you read the NICE guidelines, they attempt to distill all diagnosis and treatment down to simple ladder logic: do this test, if +ve then proscribe this drug; treatment by the application of point drugs to remove point symptoms.  But the human body is not a simple linear system.  You must use a systemic approach to diagnose systemic problems.  Any mathematician or systems architect will tell you that  linear approximations only useful in defined domains, and that you have to take a systemic view to understand the system better.

 

In the case of CFS, a typical GP will offer Prozac and referral to a psychiatrist for CBT.  A homeopath with expertise in treating CFS will cover lifestyle, diet, sensible exercise regimes, massage, etc. and yes they will often offer sugar pills. 

 

I believe in Avogadro's number over sugar pills any day, yet in this second case the whole treatment bundle is often effective and can be boosted by a placebo effect from those little pills; it is far more likely to lead to the patient's recovery than "Prozac and piss off".

 

Edited May 18, 2018 by TerryE

[SteamyTea]

6 minutes ago, TerryE said:

"Prozac and piss off".

One of the problems of that class of drug is that it is not affective in all people.  Estimates of effectiveness range between 0 and 70%.  This is a case of very bad medical practice.

 

"If you drink and smoke less than our Doctor, you will be fine".  when having my lifestyle criticised by my GP, I offered to race him to the roundabout and back, he declined

(my local GP surgery was put into special measures, and they wonder why the health of people in Cornwall is so bad, we have a dreadful NHS down here compared to most parts of the UK).

[Jeremy Harris]

3 hours ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

The scientist within you should be able to prove yourself wrong. One of the greatest achievements of the 20th century was the lengthening of life expectancy, this suggests that medical science is doing good science. That achievement is even more remarkable considering that the majority of humans in western society are trying very hard to terminate their lives early through reckless excess consumption and idleness. 

 

 

The scientist within me has proved this to be true, though, otherwise I wouldn't have written what I did. 

 

Take a look at the Cochrane evidence, or better still, volunteer to help - anyone can help in some way, not just those with a background in peer reviewing papers.  It's an eye opener to see just how really bad the evidence is from the majority of medical trials and studies, frankly it's appalling in some cases, and should have more publicity.  Last time I mentioned Cochrane to my GP, she agreed that it was the gold standard for evidence of treatment effectiveness, but shook her head and said that very few of her colleagues bothered to check the Cochrane evidence and often prescribed on the basis of papers they had read in journals or promotional material sent out by pharmaceutical companies, as long as it fell within NICE guidelines. 

 

Cochrane is a voluntary body that collects all the available evidence on any particular condition or treatment and independently reviews that evidence to check whether the conclusions drawn from it are valid or not.  The shocking thing is that a great deal of them aren't.

[Onoff]

My old GP was an absolute star!

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2086062/Rude-GP-Dr-Richard-Dunn-told-patient-Youll-die-horrible-death.html