As a side note, after too much reading on individual nutrients and amino acids and such, I eventually realized that you can't really address any health issue, whether prevention or cure, without ensuring you have a good full-spectrum of nutrients coming in. Since people tend to fall in patterns of habit, this is even more important, since being heavily skewed toward getting more of one thing and too little of another, if present, has likely been present for years if not decades, greatly aggravating the problem.
I knew someone who griped that his son went on lowcarb and got gout. Three times. I assured him that there was no reason for lowcarb itself to give you gout, but certainly with any eating plan you can skew your intake in such a way as to have side effects. Well it turns out there are a few amino acids and minerals really critical to the urea cycle; knowing he had gout issues, did he read anything of this, attempt to get them into his diet? No. And it turns out that went he went lowcarb, he would immediately begin drinking literally 12++ diet cokes a day, and narrowed his food intake to almost nothing but burger patties and sometimes bacon/eggs. Gee I can't imagine why this might lead to other things... but it doesn't really have anything to do with lowcarb, per se.
People can implement any diet well or badly (for example 'paleo' who all but live on maple syrup based recipes, every eating plan has a subset of folks for whom everything is a dessert). And I don't think it's just this example of paleo or the gout, I think it's also more subtle and pervasive, in that when people come to a diet, they aren't coming as tabula rasa, they're coming with a history.
So I came to lowcarb thinking, "Well, I'm insanely fat, but weirdly enough aside from asthma/reflux I have no other illness at all." My blood markers were healthy for example. But this was insane. Actually I think my liver was severely screwed up and pretty well has to be for any person to get to 500#. But I didn't get diagnosed by anybody with a liver issue. So it wasn't until I did lowcarb really "well" and lost a lot of weight fast, that all the sudden I seemed to start having problems with my liver ('seemingly' -- only a guess -- not being able to make enough ketones, fast enough, to maintain me anymore). But lowcarb didn't hurt my liver. It saved my life. I had that issue walking in, it's just that I didn't know about it until some other situation forced it into symptoms I couldn't ignore.
And everybody does this. I think when people have health issues the first thing they should look at is a) what am I eating that I might actually be 'reacting' to, and b) what am I not eating, of the full spectrum of aminos, enzymes, minerals, lipids, that might be necessary for robust health? Possibly with c) considering my past, what nutrients have I most likely spent years/decades deficient in? I think those three questions, applied to food choices, could probably go a long way to helping peoples' health regardless of what kind of eating plan they are on.
PJ
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