Month: August 2012

How Patrick Vlaskovits Discovered His Migraines Were Due to Wheat

Seth Roberts8 Comments

My personal science taught me that (a) there are useful things health experts don’t know (b) that the rest of us can discover. I am curious how these discoveries are made. When Patrick Vlaskovits commented

I suffered migraines my whole life until my 30s. I am prescribed meds to help me manage the pain. These meds are better than nothing. Then I quit eating grain-based products, no migraines ever.

I asked him how he discovered the connection. He replied:

This was in years pre-Paleo — I played with Atkins and one day my wife said to me: “You haven’t had a migraine for at least a month now.” And it hit me, holy shit, I hadn’t.

Until then, my whole life even as a small child, I would get insane mind-melting-migraines seemingly at random —- and when they hit, my face would twitch and aside from the pain, I would experience hyper-light-and-sound-sensitivity. My response would be to sit the shower in the dark for hours on end and then crawl into bed to fall asleep and hopefully wake up sans headache. This was from grade-school through post-grad-school.

What no one had seen until then was the lag time between my digesting some wheat product and onset of migraine — usually about a day. Nowadays, I tend to eat wheat-free (and disallow it from my toddler’s diet) but I will indulge in a NYC pizza or something similar if traveling — I reckon that about 10% of those cheat instances I am hit with an earthshattering migraine.

BTW I mentioned this a few years ago to Ryan Holiday, and he mentioned it to his girlfriend — a few weeks ago I saw both of them in NYC, and she has a virtually identical story. Crazy.

He added later:

[After avoiding wheat] my nighttime tooth grinding also stopped as did my insomnia [“being tired but unable to fall asleep, would go to bed at 11pm, my mind would race for hours on end in a state of neither sleep nor being awake, I would finally fall asleep around 5 am, and have to get up at 730 am to go work, and be exhausted all day —- this went on for years”] — generally, I feel 1000x better not eating wheat –

I have been tested with a skin-prick test and was told that that my results came back normal, not sensitive to anything.

I am unsure of what it is in wheat that I react to – an obvious culprit could be gluten in modern wheat, could also be mycotoxins (per Dave Asprey’s thinking), could perhaps be pesticide residue; I simply don’t know. — however, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. A simple risk less change resulted in orders of magnitude change for the better.

Last thing, another family friend has a 10 year old who has migraines, I recounted my story to them and early evidence looks like health improvement via avoidance of wheat.

How well-known is this connection? A few articles mention it: this one, for example. Here is a whole paper — in 1979 — about how food causes migraines:

The commonest foods causing [migraines] were wheat (78%), orange (65%), eggs (45%), tea and coffee (40% each), chocolate and milk (37%) each), beef (35%), and corn, cane sugar, and yeast (33% each).

Thirty years later, this extremely useful information has yet to reach most migraine doctors, apparently. An even older article (1976) said:

The 10 chief offenders among food allergens are cow’s milk, chocolate and cola (the kola nut family), corn, eggs, the pea family (chiefly peanut, which is not a nut), citrus fruits, tomato, wheat and other small grains, cinnamon and artificial food colors. Food allergy results in a remarkable variety of clinical syndromes.

The Mayo Clinic website says that migraines are sometimes caused by food but fails to say that if you suffer from migraines you should try an elimination diet to look for possible causes.

The Cost of Hope by Amanda Bennett

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I came away from The Cost of Hope by Amanda Bennett (copy sent me by publisher) full of admiration for two people the book barely mentions: Bennett’s parents. How did they raise her to be such a competent and resourceful person? The book isn’t about her. It is mainly about her husband’s fatal illness and their marriage. She never brags, but glimpses of staggering competence slip through. In 2006,

I am the only editor of a major newspaper in the United States [the Philadelphia Inquirer] to run the Danish cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb on his head instead of a turban–the cartoon that causes riots in Europe. By the following Monday, protesters are in front of our building carrying signs with my face and the face of Hitler. Joe Natoli, my publisher, and I plunge into the crowd, shaking hands, talking to families, listening to their stories. The crowd turns friendly. I emerge with several copies of the Koran.

She tells this story because her husband is proud of her, which means a lot to her:

The pride I see on Terence’s face . . . keeps me going, even when I am scared.

However, she was courageous before she met him. In 1983, she took a job in Beijing as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, which is where she met her husband. Their first encounters, she says, were a series of fights.

Most of the book is about what happened when her husband came down with a rare form of kidney cancer — especially how much the treatments cost. For $600,000 — paid mostly by insurance — they bought a few more years of life together. It was worth it, says Bennett, adding but did it have to cost so much? Her best insight comes when she notices the wildly different prices paid for exactly the same treatment (CAT scans) — exactly the same treatment, same machine, same operator. The “retail” rate is, let’s say, $20,000. One insurer pays $5,000, another pays $1,000. She wonders why. Her moment of insight comes when she is back in Beijing at a fakes market with her 10-year-old daughter. At such markets, tourists are told prices wildly above what the seller will accept. In one case a fake Chanel purse is offered for 2000 yuan ($300). A woman who pays 200 yuan walks away happy. “I got it for 200!” she tells her friends. Bennett’s (adopted Chinese) daughter pays 20 yuan. (Apparently Bennett has her parents’s parenting skills.) Wildly inflated retail prices for health care — so much more than what sellers will accept that they are almost meaningless — exist to take advantage of poor negotiators, Bennett realizes.

The Cost of Hope was a pleasure to read and, as I’ve said, Bennett is an astonishing person, but it omits an important point. Bennett, like most people who write about the high cost of American health care, fails to point out its central tenet: First, let them get sick. Bennett’s husband died young (early 60s). He was significantly overweight, how much we aren’t told. Apparently he had diabetes — again, few details are given. Obesity and diabetes are preventable. One of the first treatments her husband receives for his cancer is IL-2, meant to boost the immune system. What about boosting his immune system before he got sick? For example, by improving his sleep. This neglected approach might have prevented or delayed her husband’s cancer and extended his life much more cheaply and painlessly than what happened. The biggest flaw of her book is her failure to ask — literally ask, such as ask the head of the National Institutes of Health — why prevention, especially cheap prevention, is ignored.

What Was Mark Bittman Thinking?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

Stephen Dubner has drawn my attention to a recent comment by Mark Bittman, the main food writer at the New York Times (the most prestigious and influential newspaper in the world), on his NY Times blog:

Sysco is the latest food giant . . . to come out against gestation crate confinement of pigs. . . .

Speaking of pigs, the VP of PR for Chick-fil-A dropped dead of a heart attack the week after the chain’s latest homophobia/anti-gay marriage scandal.

As Dubner says, my first reaction is: Was the Times website hacked? Apparently not. My second reaction: Is Bittman in good health? If so, I hope he will explain why he thought it was a good idea to call a person a pig. That the person in question recently died and his family is grieving makes this even stranger. Dubner emailed Bittman about it but got an automated reply.

More. Bittman removed the comparison and apologized.

Vitamin D3 Timing and Sleep: More from Tara Grant

Seth Roberts5 Comments

It is from Tara Grant, a California journalist whom I met at the 2011 Ancestral Health Symposium, that I got the idea that the time of day you take Vitamin D3 matters (morning good, evening bad). She recently wrote more about her experience:

I had never had a sleep problem growing up, or during my 20s or early 30s. I kept a regular sleep cycle, woke up rested, preformed well in school and never needed to have naps. However, when I was in my mid-to-late 30s, the sleep problems started. [She woke up many times per night.] This was around the same time I went Primal and adopted several changes in my diet and lifestyle, including taking supplements. One of those supplements was Vitamin D3 [10,000 IU/day], something I had never taken before.

The sleep problems persisted for a couple of years. When I changed the time of day I took my Vitamin D [making sure to take it in the morning, never in the evening], they resolved. I didn’t change anything else, as I didn’t need to.

My experience has been that Vitamin D3 in the morning improved my sleep and that the dose needed to get this improvement was more than 2000 IU. Doses of 4000 IU and more were effective. More than 20 people have had similar experiences. A few people have found that Vitamin D3 in the morning did not improve their sleep.

Fibromyalgia Improved by No Longer Eating Fruits and Vegetables

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A British doctor in her 40s suffered from a range of problems that all started around the same time:

My legs ached and tingled, I felt tired and my mood was flat. I slept badly — I suffered from restless legs and my muscles kept twitching — and couldn’t concentrate during the day. . . I stopped enjoying going out and couldn’t get enthused about seeing friends. . . . In December 2010, I had great trouble climbing into the loft to get the Christmas tree, having neither the strength nor the enthusiasm for it. . . . I longed to retire early, so I could stay in bed all day.

She diagnosed herself as having fibromyalgia, a disease usually said to have “unknown cause”. Treatments for fibromyalgia include “painkillers, antidepressants, anti-epilepsy drugs, and cognitive behavioural therapy,” wrote the doctor. She noticed her symptoms varied with what she ate:

The muscle pains were worse after eating carrots, potatoes and parsnips. My son’s girlfriend made a delicious parsnip soup for a dinner party last year, and I enjoyed a big bowlful. The following day my legs were aching worse than ever, and I felt terrible. . . . [Using a food diary, I learned] I was also badly affected by potatoes, green beans, carrots, almonds and tomatoes. I searched the internet and found that, among many different theories, some suggested a link between fibromyalgia and dietary oxalate, though this isn’t recognised by the medical profession.

Many vegetables contain a lot of oxalate, which acts as a pesticide.

I tried a low oxalate diet, cutting out virtually all ‘healthy’ food — I avoided most fruits and vegetables, salads, beans, nuts, wheatgerm, soya — as well as tea, coffee and chocolate.I could eat meat, fish, dairy, cheese, white rice, white pasta and only low-oxalate fruit and vegetables, such as bananas, peas, mushrooms, onions and cauliflower. Within a few days the symptoms were totally gone; I could walk without pain and sleep normally. My motivation came back — in the eight months since starting the diet I’ve painted the house, landscaped the garden and booked a holiday. Having suffered from the need to pass water frequently, my nocturnal trips to the bathroom have ceased. And, bizarrely, my teeth have felt clean all day long. . . . I’ve found eating any high-oxalate food results in tingling legs and muscle pains within a matter of hours. I’ve become so adept at noticing the signs I can tell what foods and drinks have oxalates in a short time after ingesting them.

Would her discovery help others? She suggested the diet to five women in her practice.

They had all presented with at least four of the following [eight] symptoms: muscle pain, tingly legs, fatigue, irritable mood, bladder irritation, poor concentration, restless legs and poor sleep.
I asked them to score the severity of these symptoms before and after changing to a low oxalate diet. . . . . Out with bran-based cereals, nuts, spinach and smoothies, and in with Rice Krispies, sausages, shortbread and cola! . . . All the patients improved significantly — on average their symptom score halved after three weeks of the ‘unhealthy’ diet.

This surprises me. I would have thought that a condition as vaguely defined as fibromyalgia would have more than one cause.

In any case, this is extraordinary progress — published in The Daily Mail. Surely more important than any of the 7000 peer-reviewed articles on fibromyalgia I found via PubMed. A PubMed search for “fibromyalgia oxalate” turned up nothing.

More about a low oxalate diet. Thanks to Dave Lull.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Thanks to Tim Beneke and Bryan Castañeda.

Whose Side is the FDA On?

Seth Roberts7 Comments

The FDA is supposed to protect Americans against unsafe drugs — drugs with bad side effects, for example. According to this interview with Ronald Kavanaugh, a former FDA employee who worked there 10 years, that is not what actually happens. Here are excerpts from the interview:

I think most people would be shocked at how malleable safety data is. Human studies are usually too short and the number of subjects in them too small to adequately characterize [= detect] the most dangerous risks.

Human clinical pharmacology trials are typically done in Europe, yet clinical pharmacology reviewers at FDA have been barred from analyzing this information prior to studies being conducted in the US.

If reviewers say things that companies don’t like, they will complain about the reviewer or they will call upper management and have the reviewer removed or overruled.

When you do raise potential safety issues, the refrain that I heard repeatedly from upper management was‚”where are the dead bodies in the street?” Which I took to mean that we only do something if the press is making an issue of it.

FDA’s response to most expected risks is to deny them and wait until there is irrefutable evidence postmarketing, and then simply add a watered down warning in the labeling.

Which is why bad side effects are sometimes discovered after FDA approval.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to John Batzel.

My Dental Exam: Good Gums

Seth Roberts14 Comments

A week ago I had my teeth cleaned. So dirty! said the dental hygienist. This wasn’t surprising. Because I am in China a lot, I get my teeth cleaned only twice per year. Long ago they got dirty so fast my dentist insisted on four cleanings per year. “But aren’t my gums okay?” I asked the hygienist. They felt okay. Not tender. They did’t bleed when I flossed (which wasn’t often). No, she said. You have pockets of 5 (= 5 mm depth). There is bleeding. Indeed, when I washed out my mouth with water at the end, there was some blood.

Yesterday I had my teeth examined. The hygienist was wrong. Almost all my pockets were 2′s, with a few 3s. That’s very good and a vast improvement from the 4s and 5s I had before I became a big fan of flaxseed oil. My gums improved exactly when I started drinking flaxseed oil, no doubt because the omega-3 in flaxseed oil reduces inflammation. My gums were fine in spite of all the plaque — which is supposed to make gums bad. Apparently the hygienist was so devoted to her theory (lots of plaque = bad gums) that she failed to see an exception she stared at for 30 minutes.

There is a well-established correlation between gum disease and heart disease (more gum disease, more heart disease), probably because both are caused by inflammation. So good gums is very good news — it shows I am doing a good job of reducing inflammation throughout my body. These results also support two of my pet theories:

1. Studying what foods make the brain work best is a good way to improve overall health. I started studying flaxseed oil, and how much to take, because I discovered by accident that it improved my balance. Experiments (what is the effect of flaxseed oil on my balance?) soon showed the optimum amount/day was more than flaxseed oil makers recommended! Before I started eating lots of butter, the optimum for me was about 3 tablespoons/day. After I started eating lots of butter, the optimum seems to have gone down to 2 tablespoons/day. Gum improvement seems to be easy to notice at about 1 tablespoon/day.

2. Our health care system fails to get the simplest things right. Omega-3 is not a mysterious nutrient. It has been shown to improve health in thousands of studies. It is well-known that it is anti-inflammatory. It is also well-known that too much inflammation is a major problem. Even so, our health care system has failed to grasp that a large fraction of the population eats too little omega-3 and this has an easy fix. Other examples of failure to get the simplest things right include gastroenterologists not realizing that digestive problems may be caused by food, dermatologists not realizing that acne may be caused by food, and everyone not realizing that cutting off part of the immune system (tonsillectomies) is a terrible idea.

What other simple things does our health care system get wrong?