This Is MS Multiple Sclerosis Community: Knowledge & Support

Perhaps we have been misled about diet once again; maybe the no-fat/low-fat diets recommended by many, from Swank on, are not the best for fighting MS – according to this article by Dr. Joseph Mercola, dietary fat, not glucose, is the preferred fuel of human metabolism: http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitnes ... ucose.aspx



As I stated once before, FATTY fish, fish OIL, essential FATTY acids, avocado, nuts with their OILS, even olive OIL, and other monounsaturated FATS may be beneficial to us because, as the above article says, the fats are the preferred fuel in our cells. Cod liver OIL may offer us more benefits than just the vitamin D. We simply have not been getting enough dietary fat. The Western diet has too many carbohydrates, sugar and starch.

hip hip! i eats ma fats with glee healthy fats only though, and with an eye to balancing omegas. for sure, you need fat in your system to be able to absorb fat-soluble nutrition.

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my approach: no meds so far - just balanced whole foods (partial 'paleo', much less outright elimination), science, supplements, & bloodwork
my regimen - www.thisisms.com/ftopict-2489.html
www.whfoods.com, www.nutritiondata.com

The question here is how do you define "Healthy Fats"?

Before you can approach this you first need to look at Ancel Keys, the father of the "Lipid Hypothesis" who brought us the association of heart disease and Saturated Fats, this is based on the 6 country study which showed a lineal relationship between the intake of saturated fats and heart disease, very neat, except that he omitted the data of 16 other countries that he also looked at and when all the data is plotted there is no relationship at all, just a bunch of dots on a piece of paper.
The USDA pryamid was based on this information and for the last 50 years there have been numerous studies trying to conclusively prove a causal relationship and the best of these could only be described as inconclusive, I won't bore you with all the links.

All cell (bi lipid) membranes in the human body are composed primarily of Saturated Fats, the reason for this is Saturated Fatty acids are long molecules with all the carbons linked by double bonds which makes them nice and straight so they can pack in nice and tight and stop cell walls leaking. There are also some monounsaturated and a small amount of polyunsaturated (PUFA's) (O3 & 06) oils in the cell walls as well, now the mono's are bent, they have a kink, the poly's are bent more than once, because of this they do not pack tightly. We obviously need some in the cell walls, but it appears that excessive consumption of "Healthy" polyunsaturated plant oils may well be causing our cell membranes to leak which is expressed as systemic inflamation, the cut off point seems to be the ratio of O6:O3 at around 10:1, any higher and we get an increase of O6's in our cell membranes and the expression of inflamatory Cytokines.

I read a study, done on rats, but that's all there is at the moment, basically alterations in saturated fat in the diet were pretty much benign, monos had some effect, poly's a bit more, but the biggest effect was seen when the ratio between O6:O3 went over 10, that's when the composition of the cell wall changed for the worse. Ancestral estimates for humans were between 5:1-1:1 where as modern Human diets sit at between 10:1-16:1 which puts the bulk of the population in the danger zone.

Regarding the Carbs, basically we were never designed to process those volumes on a daily basis, yes occassionally, but not constantly, if you look at the human digestive process, all excess carbs have to be processed by the liver to fatty acids for storage, we only have limited glycogen stores for glucose, so constant carbs, spike the insulin, then overload the liver. In contrast to this Fatty acids are absorbed by the intestine and go directly into the blood stream bypassing the liver, and then are either metabolised or go straight into storage.

So in the 70's we were told to eat more carbs, causing inflamation through high blood sugar and insulin levels repeatedly, then told Saturated Fat and Cholesterol were bad, even though they are benign building blocks of our cells, then told to increase our consumption of PUFA's, even though we could only have ever got these in trace quantities before industrialisation, now we have multiple sources of systemic inflamation, add to this, Vitamin D, circadian rhythms, environmental toxins etc, etc, then just wait for the final trigger and ask why did we get sick?

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I am just an interested individual trying to crack the autoimmune nut.
Partner has Graves Disease, 5 years, showing good test results, looking forward to potential remission in the near future.
3 friends have MS, 1 just recently diagnosed, severity 7/10.

Animals don't have cell walls. Plants and bacteria do. If we had cell walls, we would be so stiff we couldn't move. Phospholipids are typically composed of one saturated fatty acid and one unsaturated fatty acid. Having mostly saturated fatty acids packed nice and tight would be counter to the fluid mosiac model of the plasma membrane. When cells need patchy, non-fluid areas of the plasma membrane, they do it by enriching part of the membrane with cholesterol and sphingomyelin. These areas are known as membrane lipid rafts. They're vitally important for cellular signal transduction. Cell membranes maintain their selective permeability through the hydrophobic/hydrophylic interactions of the plasma membrane bilayer while using tightly regulated ion channels and other transporters for moving molecules in and out of the cells. Other pathways include recepter mediated endo and exocytosis such as clathrin and coatomer coated pits and vessicles for example.

NHE

Thanks for the clarification,
I did say membranes a couple of times, but just started interchanging with "walls" by mistake.
I will look into it a bit deeper, I'm not fully up to speed with all the chemistry, but more looking at the bigger picture, from what I have read our cell membranes are predominantly saturated, with an intermingling of both poly & monounsaturated as well as cholesterol and a variety of receptors, all of which control the degree of flexability and permeability.
The question is, is our unnatural intake of Omega 6 fatty acids from plant sources and subsequent reduction of Omega 3 and saturated fatty acids having a detrimental effect on the integrity of our cell membranes?

It is only in the last 50 years that we have had access to and been consuming vast quantities of these vegetable oils, with the one exception of "Olive Oil" which has been around for thousands of years, but it is a mono and does not seem to be as detrimental as the polyunsaturated oils. Even a large number of the olive oils available today are not pure and are often heated to extract more oil and then are often blended with other oils to increase yield.

_________________
I am just an interested individual trying to crack the autoimmune nut.
Partner has Graves Disease, 5 years, showing good test results, looking forward to potential remission in the near future.
3 friends have MS, 1 just recently diagnosed, severity 7/10.

Here's a couple of the studies I looked at,
basically, they indicate, at least in rats, the composition of fatty acids in the diet does have a direct bearing on the composition of serum fatty acids, adipose tissue and cell membranes.
To me that suggests that if the diet is sufficiently different there may be altered functionality in individual cell membranes, also potentially hormonal controls as adipose tissue is an active endochrine organ and possibly a number of other unidentified factors as well.
The biggest influence appears to come from the 06:03 ratio and keeping that well below 10:1 and the easiest way to do that is to reduce the consumption of 06 oils and increase consumption of 03 oils.

Links:

http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3260/


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22489205

_________________
I am just an interested individual trying to crack the autoimmune nut.
Partner has Graves Disease, 5 years, showing good test results, looking forward to potential remission in the near future.
3 friends have MS, 1 just recently diagnosed, severity 7/10.

yep

_________________
my approach: no meds so far - just balanced whole foods (partial 'paleo', much less outright elimination), science, supplements, & bloodwork
my regimen - www.thisisms.com/ftopict-2489.html
www.whfoods.com, www.nutritiondata.com