Just another data point, but my journey through digestive issues and recovery was kicked off by the worst depression and burnout I ever experienced, which started in 2019 and lasted 3 years.
My best guess for what happened is that work stress, excessive celebration and coping with the cognitive dissonance of the pre-COVID era and subsequent pandemic, combined with overtraining and the misuse of protein shakes in place of food, left me in a chronically dehydrated state. The body tries to collect moisture from the gut, which opens an opportunity for bacteria to get into the body cavity and blood, which is colloquially called leaky gut. This sets off food sensitivities and eventually an autoimmune condition/response to lectins, gluten, etc, which have proteins similar to linings in the body, joints and thyroid. Then a cascade happens where everything goes out of whack quickly. In my case, I went from being in the best shape of my life, the strongest I had ever been in the gym, to barely able to get out of bed in the morning. In other people, it might present as chronic fatigue, arthritis, etc.
I didn't really believe any of this in 2018, and my meal plan then consisted entirely of everything that I can't eat today. So I consider what people say politely, but for the most part, they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. This experience has made stuff like GMO foods sound absolutely insane to me. Like, why would we ever taint our food supply to make food 5 cents cheaper or "feed the world" when we've been operating under artificial scarcity since the end of the second world war? It's all a crock.
Every time you eat inflammatory food, the risk is similar to smoking a cigarette. Probably nothing will happen, but if it sets off your immune system, you may wake up one morning chronically depressed and/or unable to eat something that you rely upon. It got me after I turned 40, YMMV.
> I didn't really believe any of this in 2018, and my meal plan then consisted entirely of everything that I can't eat today.
I suspect you had the same degree of confidence in your understanding of these issue then as you do now. It's interesting that you can reflect on your overconfidence in the past, but don't seem to express any skepticism regarding your current beliefs surrounding nutrition.
By the way, I'm not saying that you're wrong! GMOs may be bad, but I think you would do well to level some degree of skepticism over your current understanding of nutrition as you do toward your past understanding. Consider that perhaps you will be here in 2026 telling us about how you got it wrong today.
There's an asymmetry in the risks associated with choosing either a) to restrict or b) not to restrict the set of foods you eat.
Overconfidence in (b) carries more risk than overconfidence in (a). The set of chemicals that are toxic is much larger (as in >>>) than the set of chemicals that are necessary for sustaining life.
The set of nutrients that will cause some kind of problem if missing is actually pretty large; consensus dietary advice usually includes the keyword “varied.”
I'm sorry to hear about your experiences and it sounds like you learned a lot from firsthand knowledge. But, respectfully asking, what does inflammatory foods or poor eating habits have to do with GMO foods?
1. Genetically modified (GMO) foods can cause non-food compounds to get synthesized in the food that our bodies have never seen before, which can trigger autoimmune issues. I consider this the lower risk.
2. GMO foods are designed specifically to allow more use of pesticides and herbicides. These get incorporated into the food and can stay around after washing, especially in processed food. Pesticides are low-level neurotoxin and disrupt gut nerves, while herbicides disrupt gut flora. Loosely, what happens is that the body is sensitive to most plant husks, since they are designed to keep bugs out that feed on them. GMO copies that defense mechanism, often amplifying it hugely, resulting in amplified food sensitivities. I consider this the higher risk, so high in fact that the consequences of it can be life-altering.
Edit: These effects combined turn ordinary food into inflammatory food
My impression is quite the opposite - GMO insect-resistant plants enable using much less pesticides (the savings from reduced frequency and quantity of pesticides being the economic reason for choosing such crops) than non-modified equivalents.
GMO roundup resistance allows us to use a bunch of herbicide without killing the food crop. This seems to indicate that we’d be using a lot more roundup on those crops than otherwise.
This article [0] points towards the reality being somewhere in the middle - more herbicides but less insecticides.
> GMOs have been changing the way that pesticides are used in agriculture. Herbicide-tolerant genetically modified (GM) crops have led to an increase in herbicide usage while insecticide-producing GM crops have led to a decrease in insecticides.
Not OP. In many cases, the genetic modifications are either performed to either let the plant produce (more) lectins that kill insects, or make the plant immune to certain herbicides like glyphosate. The human gut and microbiome might be able to deal with lectins they have evolved to deal with, and in “normal” quantities. But those additional GMO lectins are suspected to be hard on the intestinal barrier. If that barrier is compromised, autoimmunity might be the result, as OP indicated.
This is exactly the problem. The idea of GMOs is fine, but if it's increasing the load of gut damaging chemicals in the food supply that is not good. And the truth is we simply don't know, so it's crazy to just assume that these GMO foods are gut safe. These days it seems everyone I know has some kind of gut issue (myself included), so I think we should be cautious with GMOs.
Also why would GMO be bad? The criticism comes mostly from people that also believe in osteopathic / homeopathic medicine in my social circle.
I find it a terrific chance for humanity to engineer plants in such a way that they are more robust against disease and bad weather (with CRISPR/CAS and such methods).
Here is my criticism of GMO foods; or at least, the reason I'm wary of them. I don't believe in any "woo" at all.
Why would the massive corporations that have driven the food in our supermarkets ever cheaper, ever thinner in nutrients, ever higher in fat and sweeteners and fillers, ever more laden with pesticides and antibiotics, ever more processed—why would they use a technology like GMO crops for good? Why wouldn't they just splice pesticide and sugar genes into them directly and juice the yield even harder so that the soil is stripped and ruined even faster? I think they will be used to boost profits, not make our food more nutritious, or even cheaper in any way except per calorie.
I understand there are potentially benefits, e.g. growing crops resistant to pests so that spray pesticides can be reduced. I just have no faith whatsoever that these kinds of considered actions will be taken, based on the last 100 years of technology. It's just going to be wheat and corn, wheat and corn, wheat and corn until caloric yields approach insolation and the soil is as gray and lifeless as the moon.
The risks from unknown unknowns are even worse with genetic engineering in crops, due to the inevitability of hypothetical "harmful to humans genes" propagating from one population to others by pollination.
Currently there doesn't appear to be any evidence that GMO is bad for your health and most GMO is just transplanting genes from other edible organisms.
Hopefully regulators aren't going to allow insertion of engineered genes producing novel molecules without going through actual medical grade trials for those molecules. Or it may torpedo the entire industry.
In every case of GMO food I have encountered, the compounds are not novel. Rather, they're an adaptation or resistance found in one species and transferred to another.
I don’t think GMO is necessarily bad, but while companies are working on ways to make plants more robust, I doubt they’re taking the long term effects on human health into account.
In theory, there are lots of fine things we could do with GMOs. In practice, basically the only common use of GMOs is to allow indiscriminate use of pesticides and herbicides. This is purely about profit for chemical companies, without regard for environmental impact. I don't care to eat more pesticides and herbicides, either.
Nature produces both edible products, inedible products, and toxic or partially edible (tomatoes, potatoes, etc.) products. AFAIK, there is almost no risk in transferring genes from one edible non-toxic product to another edible non-toxic product. For all other gene transfers, testing is required.
"AFAIK, there is almost no risk in transferring genes from one edible non-toxic product to another edible non-toxic product. "
And where is your knowledge coming from?
I am certainly not a biologist, but as far as I know, there are quite some plants that are edible in the breed we eat - but a different wild form is toxic (carrots for example). How are you sure, the wrong (dormant) genes do not get transfered and activated, without testing?
Or even with the same plant, potatoes. The root is good for us, but the flower is toxic.
In other words, you always have to do extensive testing, when you play around with genes.
Genes are not computer modules you just swap around and turn on and off. It is way more complicated.
Are you implying oranges and bananas were made with modern GMO methods?
I agree that the anti gmo/vaxx etc. crowd is quite irrational in many regards, but I can see a difference between traditional breeding plants - and directly editing DNA.
Yes - and this is also what happens in nature all the time. Only slower and random.
And surprise: many plants are poisenous.
And even with the slow method of natural breeding, poisenous traits can creep back in. The potential and speed of GMO methods is just way higher. For good and also bad results. So it is not the same.
Right, and GMOs are much more targeted engineering. It's the same bs of "we don't know the future side effects in 30 years" scaremongering of anti vaxxers.
Just like with vaccines having plenty of resistant food so people don't starve far overvalue whatever little side effects you might get.
I bet you two are the type who smugly told everyone off for believing the "completely disproven" lab leak theory for a year, before never mentioning it again.
I'm not into osteopathy or homeopathy but my concerned about GMO are because I don't trust that the scientist really know what they are doing, or can fully understand the impact any changes they might make, not only on humans, but on the environment at large. Nor do I trust our government to be able to police and regulate the industry. Nor do I trust big farma to put health before profits.
I think humans always genetically "engineered" plants by selection process.
Our current cultivated plants are the result of thousands of years of breeding.
Who knows what accidental genetic damage from breeding will cause problems in humans?
Harmful crop breeds would have been selected against over the course of many generations, right? Now we're doing it on a larger scale, so the risks and rewards are greater. What is our knowledge of the risks and rewards? Are the rewards aligned with general human wellbeing, or just a profit motive? I don't know.
I must have missed the announcement that we had worked out exactly what causes food allergies and intolerance and have promised not to do anything that could trigger them when doing GM.
One of the modifications some GMO plants have is to produce more/more effective lectins to make them more resilient against insects. Given research on lectins shows many of them are harmful to human health, it seems like a valid concern.
As just one example, if you live in an area where it is difficult to get dietary Vitamin A, you might enjoy the benefits of not going blind due to Vitamin A deficiency by eating Golden Rice[0].
Have you ever eaten a SweeTango apple? It is one of dozens of varieties that have been created in the last hundred years using genetic engineering via cross breeding[1]. Do you know why commercial tomatoes are so bland? Genetic engineering via selective breeding[2].
The fact of the matter is that all of the crops and livestock that we cultivate today are genetically engineered. The main distinction now is that we are technologically advanced enough to introduce beneficial modifications deliberately, rather than relying on random mutations and gene recombinations that occur in nature at random over hundreds or thousands of generations.
It boils down to cost in the same way that you and I not owning a private jet boils down to cost—which is to say, as nice as it would be, there are probably not enough resources on the planet to feed everyone a balanced diet without these continued advances in food production, as the current conventional farming practices are not long-term sustainable, and they are already required to actually feed everybody on the planet today.
> Genetic engineering goes way beyond the possibility space of selective breeding, which we have thousands of years of experience with.
And inside that possibility space are things like extremely high-yield crops that end hunger forever. Grains like Golden Rice that solve nutritional deficiencies caused by incomplete diets. Nuts that are modified so they don’t trigger life-threatening anaphylaxis. Crops that absorb and sequester CO2 more efficiently. Delicious new hybrids that don’t even exist right now. Foods genetically modified to be low in FODMAPs so people who have gut problems aren’t so restricted in what they can eat.
All the problems that exist now with diets have hypothetical solutions in genetically engineering crops to create more of the nutrients that we need to be healthy, and to eliminate the bad stuff that makes us sick, down to the point of being able to provide ideal nutrition for a specific person’s body. However, we’re unlikely to get there if people’s imaginations are always focused on the potential negatives instead of balancing those risks with the obvious potential and need for this sort of technology to be developed.
A liveable Earth? Look up "nine planetary boundaries". The "biogeochemical boundary" especially pertains to the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, both necessary to plants. Nitrogen- and phosphorus-supplying fertilizer is energy intensive to produce and toxic in wide-area run-off. Some crops live in a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, so scientists are actively researching ways of engineering that abiility into other crops -- which would greatly reduce the need for producing fixed nitrogen for fertilizer, which, in turn, would greatly reduce the need for the high fossil-fuel-consuming method of generating fixed nitrogen for fertilizer, thus helping out on the global warming front. It's not all about cost.
I only made it very recently. I had tried absolutely everything and gotten almost nowhere. I finally stumbled onto everlywell.com tests, took the comprehensive test of 200+ foods, and discovered almonds and dairy were the main culprits. I would ave been very unlikely to eliminate almonds as part of an elimination diet.
Anyway, once I was able to feel better again, even for a day or two, I then was able to try other changes along the decision tree in the problem space. It soon became obvious what caused what. Everlywell says that 18 months of avoidance can often allow us to eat foods we're sensitive to again. I've blabbered about it at length in my previous comments, probably too much haha.
What you have described is EXACTLY what I have been experiencing myself over the last year. This is the first time I have ever seen my symptoms and trajectory laid out like this anywhere, it’s truly surreal. Words cannot convey how much I would appreciate any help finding treatment. I’m honestly nearing the end of my rope dealing with this with no end in sight. I’ve lost 30 pounds of muscle and I’m currently too sick to work anymore. My doctors have been useless and basically clueless.
Oh man, sorry to hear that. Here are some more data points about what I was doing in the 6 months before I got sick that might help:
* Glutamine every day for "gut health" (not the culprit, but I think I was self-medicating without realizing it)
* Animal Flex joint supplement (not the culprit, but I think that I was using the glucosamine-chondroitin component to heal my inflammation and gut lining so joint pain relief was just a bonus)
* Zinc gluconate multiple times per week or every day (not the culprit, but I had heard that ZMA was good years before and noticed a good bump in my workout recovery)
* Whey protein powder (almost certain that this was not the culprit, any brand, but the ones containing casein are hard on me and may have set off my initial digestive issues)
* BCAAs (almost certainly not the culprit, any brand, this is the best recovery aid that I've found after whey if taken immediately after a workout)
* Pre-workout (almost certainly not the culprit, any brand, but my burnout did coincide with drinking up to 3-4 cups of coffee some days at work and then a pre-workout at night before the gym)
* Bean burritos with onions and peppers every day (main culprit, I think that my food sensitivity to legumes coincided with S&W discontinuing pinquitos sometime around 2015, then I switched to pinto beans which are much harder on the gut and almost certainly GMO today, I see that S&W has pinquito heirloom beans on Amazon now that I'll try)
* Whole wheat bread (main culprit, I'm unable to eat several whole grains now, even oatmeal, unless they are gluten free, I believe that herbicides in the husk triggered it and that everyone is vulnerable to this one)
* Almond butter (main culprit, I was trying to eat less meat and it backfired spectacularly, see the Vertical Diet by Stan Efferding to learn how diets go wrong in the health and fitness world and leave older lifters only able to eat ground beef and rice)
That's all the physical side. I realize now after going through a healing and growth process during the pandemic that I had multiple opportunities to correct my course, but I ignored them before I was "woke":
* Due to multiple traumas over the course of my life, I had learned to turn off my feelings entirely (main culprit, I just took it and it in many jobs and relationships, without communicating or setting boundaries)
* Even when under crushing feelings of burnout, which I now realize is severe anxiety and a shut down response when the mind and body don't know what else to do, I forced myself to keep going to work and the gym (main culprit, I needed rehab on my injuries and nutrition before doubling down on more work)
* I didn't go to the doctor, because I was embarrassed that I let my life get so out of control, so I just worked harder and harder and ignored my health (main culprit, my life had become the movie Bright Lights, Big City and I was putting everything off indefinitely)
Writing this out, it's almost kind of funny because it would be easy to diagnose someone if they came to me with this list. The main culprit for me seems to be that I didn't prioritize my health, like ever, until it failed. Keep in mind that my work capacity at this point was tremendous. I was working 40-45 hours per week and going to the gym 5 times per week for massive 1.5 hour split workouts and eating 4000+ calories per day. I started breaking out really bad and getting joint paint and GI distress, but just kept acting like everything was normal.
If anyone is in this boat and their health isn't working anymore, I'd highly recommend a full reboot, getting away for a few weeks and setting your ego aside. Meditate on your specific injuries and identify what's hurting in the body. Then address those injuries directly. You might need to go to a holistic or eastern medicine specialist because western medicine often misses secondary or multiple causes. I'd prescribe:
* Take 2 weeks off from work, gym, and other obligations like family
* Drink the maximum amount of water per day you're allowed, and give your kidneys and other organs a rest (at least a gallon)
* Abstain from all supplements, possibly even a multivitamin (listen to your body's cravings and feed it what it needs)
* Switch from nutrient-dense foods to nutrient-sparse foods, so eat leafy greens instead of peas, pumpkin seed granola instead of eggs, baked chicken and rice instead of steak, etc (stop stoking your boiler for a while so it can heal)
* Get your testosterone, thyroid and other hormones checked (that much muscle loss sounds hormonal, also, my weight has fluctuated that much and it does come back in a few weeks/months so take heart that it's probably going to be ok)
* Move your body for the sake of movement, do stretching/yoga, dance, or just walk (spirit communicates with our reality through movement, that's how reading signs and Tarot work, I added this because lack of woo-woo is what made me sick because I was dead inside)
Edit: one last thing was ashwagandha, I took it for 3 months recently and it seems to have repaired something with my digestion and took my mood from a 2-4 to a 7-8 consistently with no other changes. I still have the afterglow of the energy boost a month after tapering off and stopping. If anyone does this, be sure to check in with a friend or doctor so that you don't accidentally take it too long and hurt yourself.
This was a _fascinating_ read and I thank you for writing that all up - I'm in your "3 year" dip and in the past made attempts at tackling the gut biome issue with cycling probiotics, fresh vegetable fibers, organic/local yogurts, staying away from fake sugars and other dietary things that blow out the biome and even after a few weeks of doing this I never felt any better - would shrug my shoulders and go back to not really caring.
Was there 1 inflammatory food item that is like kryptonite to you now? Fake sugars? Wheats?
Same age as you. I've recently got diagnosed "leaky gut" / auto-immune reaction as well and had food intolerances discovered. Mainly milk / nuts / eggs / grains / beans. Happy to talk and exchange insights if you like.
Inflammation is a necessary function of the human body. There are no anti-inflammatory diets[2]. Short term inflammation has no bearing on health markers[3].
Just focus on a diet rich in whole foods, mostly plants that you can stick to over the long run.
My best guess for what happened is that work stress, excessive celebration and coping with the cognitive dissonance of the pre-COVID era and subsequent pandemic, combined with overtraining and the misuse of protein shakes in place of food, left me in a chronically dehydrated state. The body tries to collect moisture from the gut, which opens an opportunity for bacteria to get into the body cavity and blood, which is colloquially called leaky gut. This sets off food sensitivities and eventually an autoimmune condition/response to lectins, gluten, etc, which have proteins similar to linings in the body, joints and thyroid. Then a cascade happens where everything goes out of whack quickly. In my case, I went from being in the best shape of my life, the strongest I had ever been in the gym, to barely able to get out of bed in the morning. In other people, it might present as chronic fatigue, arthritis, etc.
I didn't really believe any of this in 2018, and my meal plan then consisted entirely of everything that I can't eat today. So I consider what people say politely, but for the most part, they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. This experience has made stuff like GMO foods sound absolutely insane to me. Like, why would we ever taint our food supply to make food 5 cents cheaper or "feed the world" when we've been operating under artificial scarcity since the end of the second world war? It's all a crock.
Every time you eat inflammatory food, the risk is similar to smoking a cigarette. Probably nothing will happen, but if it sets off your immune system, you may wake up one morning chronically depressed and/or unable to eat something that you rely upon. It got me after I turned 40, YMMV.