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Wellness Wednesday for January 4, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Is it best to have antioxidant foods with inflammatory foods that you already eat (grains/meat), versus on their own? Eg, black tea and ginger with red meat, versus black tea and ginger in the morning and red meat at night?

Given "meat" was a human dietary staple for a million years, and "grain" has been a dietary staple for (some for) 100k, both have dozens of useful dietary components with complex effects, and "inflammatory" in this context means "some response to harmful stimuli", and the scientific backing for their inflammation being, variously, observational diet-survey studies and questionable in vitro experiments - the claim that "meat and grain are inflammatory" isn't very useful.

Similarly, the claimed antioxidants in black tea and ginger also coexist with dozens of other compounds (although not useful ones), their antioxidant efficacy was demonstrated in in vitro studies with little relevance to human consumption (as distribution and metabolism significantly affects those compounds), said antioxidant effect has no proven relationship to whatever the claimed inflammatory mechanism of grain or meat was, and even if those antioxidants were effective, they'd be much less efficient at preventing oxidative damage than the evolved biological mechanisms for doing so - like catalase, glutathione, superoxide dismutase - complex, finely tuned proteins, as well as others.

So - evening, naturally.

So, the grains in common use 20k years ago are not the same as today. Most common grains eaten today are inflammatory, causing oxidative stress.

Ancient humans ate a variety of fibers and plant matter consistently, which we do not. They may very well have combined natural anti-inflammatory herbs etc with large meals. Garlic and meat is a good example. Your comment is not useful to my question. Antioxidants from green tea and cocoa are healthy, and my question is whether the combination of these healthy natural “fighters” of oxidative stress with exogenous anti-inflammatory compounds is good for health.

I suppose, on revisiting my question, it’s a good idea to combine inflammatory food with anti-inflammatory plants as this is how most ancient societies cooked

So, the grains in common use 20k years ago are not the same as today

I agree! I'm a big fan of ancient grains. But

causing oxidative stress

This is mostly meaningless without a ton more context. Many critical biological processes cause oxidative stress, which is why we have catalase, peroxidases, etc. To claim they cause more of a specific type of oxidative stress, or do so in a specific way, might be interesting, but requires actually making that claim. And "black tea and ginger" are not going to prevent the kinds of 'oxidative stress' that they might cause.

Ancient humans ate a variety of fibers and plant matter consistently, which we do not

Again, agree! But

Antioxidants from green tea and cocoa are healthy,

They aren't so by functioning as 'antioxidants', because of the reasons above

No one claims that the oxidative stress from modern grains are healthy. Oxidative stress from eating is generally always considered unhealthy. The stress from exercise is healthy so that your body repairs muscle damage. The endogenous antioxidants are not sufficient for combatting the spike in oxidative stress from eating which is why fasting and food sources that reduce meal-related oxidative stress are correlated to health

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "oxidative stress from modern grains" - what specific kinds of oxidative stress do modern grains cause, with some evidence? Maybe connect the 'food sources that reduce meal-related oxidative stress' to specific dietary antioxidants, with studies linking those to health? And for 'correlated with health' - large observational studies observing correlations between diet and health are not great evidence, and multiple of them often report inconsistent results!

From wikipedia

The USDA removed the table showing the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) of Selected Foods Release 2 (2010) table due to the lack of evidence that the antioxidant level present in a food translated into a related antioxidant effect in the body.[70]

The rest of the section has more on ways 'antioxidants are good' might not be accurate

The systems are more complex than scientists think which is why you shouldn’t supplement exogenous antioxidants outside of their natural form. Nuts consumption is strongly tied health, E supplements are not. Natural vitamin c is healthy, taking 2000mg will negate your exercise for that day.

Re E: https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/truth-about-vitamin-e-vitamin-e-safer-implied

Surely you don’t believe that the endogenous antioxidant mechanism is sufficient for health, because then the inflammation from refined grains would be easily dealt with, right? So the only question then is whether natural exogenous antioxidants taken with inflammatory food reduces the inflammatory effect temporally

I don't think the harms of refined grains occurs primarily via 'inflammation' that needs to be treated by 'exogenous antioixdants'. When you say "Strongly tied to health", I think you're referring to methodologically poor studies.

I actually agree that vitamin supplementation is in many ways worse than eating whole, natural foods.

Natural vitamin c is healthy, taking 2000mg will negate your exercise for that day

Do you have a source for this?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4001759/

There’s a lot, just search “vitamin c blunts/reduces exercise/adaption”. Plug them into scihub to access for free

Also check out the studies on hormesis /

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