What's wrong with me?

[marcmagus]

I feel as though I've been increasingly falling out of touch with my friends. I also feel that, given that I seem inclined to use this journal as a means of halting that slide out of touch, I'm not posting nearly enough about what's going on in my life. Accordingly, I'm going to attempt to post more, not because I feel guilty so much as because I

Comments

[soulchanger]

I've been studying nutrition a lot, and since you haven't mentioned diet as a strategy you've tried yet, I thought I'd suggest something that could help.

Omega 3 fatty acids are known to both reduce inflammation and promote nerve health, while the omega 6 fatty acids make them worse. Omega 3 comes from animals that eat more or less natural diets - for instance, wild fish, grass-fed animals and their milk/eggs - and to a lesser extent from certain nuts, seeds, and vegetables. Omega 6 comes from grains, grain-fed animals, and certain nuts and legumes. Ideally you'd want a ratio of omega-6:omega-3 to be very low - 4:1, 2:1, or even 1:1 - but in a modern diet that ratio averages as high as 20:1 and can go up to 40:1 in many cases. You can get dietary supplements of Omega 3, but look for DHC and EPA specifically (these are longer-chain fatty acids that your body needs. You can make these out of ALA - the stuff in flaxseed oil - but that process produces harmful waste products, so it's better to get them directly). You can also get omega 3 enhanced eggs, which are extra tasty in addition to being extra healthy. If you're interested in a more radical approach, brains are specifically very high in omega 3 (although not so much human brains, because humans don't generally eat a natural diet).

[marcmagus]

Thanks. I'm trying to improve diet in general, but to some extent it's getting lost in the shuffle. (I'm also trying to cook more, but like a lot of the things I'm trying to do, the positive of the action competes with the negative of it hurting [and anything which hurts may also be causing harm])

I'd caught something once about the Omega balance thing (maybe in In Defense of Food?), but I proceeded to forget about it. I should make a note to look into that more closely, probably in a way that works as a positive lifestyle change even if I don't get a measurable positive effect from the dietary change, so I don't give up on it out of lack of tangible results...

[pigfish]

By the same token, I'm aware of at least one article that correlated increased nerve pain with high omega-3 content (and found no significant role for omega-6 content, or 6:3 ratio). I think this is still one of those "hotly debated issues" in neuroscience.

[soulchanger]

The important thing to note about that study was that the subjects were given their fatty acids in the form of vegetable oils - which contain significant amounts of ALA but no EPA or DHA. As I said above that's problematic because the body needs the longer-chain stuff (ALA has 18, EPA 20 and DHA 22 carbons in a chain) and the process of lengthening the ALA is slow and produces a bunch of nasty byproducts. The authors of the study acknowledge that they did not intend to study the entire family of omega-3s and thus did not include fish oils or anything else with EPA or DHA.

The science of n-3s is actually fairly well-understood - it's just that when the media gets a hold of something they compulsively turn it into a controversy even if it means the science gets elided.

[pigfish]

Based on how poorly understood neuronal functioning is, I'm not sure we can say that the science of fatty acids is well-understood, at least in conjunction with neurons.

The scientists around here (i.e. my professors) remain unconvinced.