Two Different Ways to Fuck Your Van

Reasoning by Analogy is Best Reasoning; Many Such Cases

If you put a bit of petrol in a diesel engine, everything still works fine, but as you put more and more in, the engine will get less and less efficient.

Alternatively, if your head gasket starts leaking your engine will not work very well whatever fuel you put in it. Because it will not be able to hold the pressure that moves the pistons.

In either case, you might find that you need to turn the idle screw a little, so that the engine doesn't just stall whenever you're not driving hard.

One difference is that, if you put the fuel back to normal in the first case, everything will quickly go back to normal. Such effects are very obvious and easy to notice.

But in the second case, that won't work, and you will need to replace the gasket.

So what if using the wrong fuel somehow damaged the gasket?

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To speak a little less metaphorically, polyunsaturated fats are perhaps not the fuel for which human metabolism was designed.

They are rather odd things for a large predatory mammal to burn. Not many in the human diet until very recently.

They need to go through different chemical pathways, that certainly exist in humans, but which may not be able to cope with doing a large fraction of the energy-generation. That’s a possible reason why polyunsaturated fats might not be an ideal food.

But that might not be the only, or even the main drawback of eating polyunsaturated fats.

A crucial part of your metabolism, your engine as it were, is the inner mitochondrial membrane, which should be a solid barrier across which pressure can be generated, much like the head gasket in an engine.

If that membrane leaks charge, then the citric acid cycle and the electron transport chain can be working as well as they like; ATP will not get generated, although heat still will.

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We know, I think, that 'Chronic Fatigue Syndrome', is at its root a mitochondrial dysfunction.

Probably all the other things that get diagnosed as 'type 2 hypothyroidism' by various lunatics and quacks are of similar cause.

And my long abstinence from polyunsaturated fats (nine months now…) seems to be slowly fixing my chronic fatigue.

Thyroid, perhaps, was 'turning up the idle screw' on my broken metabolism.

And now that it is starting to work properly again, my engine is over-revving, and I'm needing to turn it back down.

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So now I'm starting to wonder how polyunsaturated fats might be damaging the mitochondrial membranes.

I'm thinking that polyunsaturated fats are not natural things to be found in cell membranes. But they are found in modern cell membranes in large quantities.

And I might think that the whole problem.

Except for the inconvenient detail that the inner mitochondrial membrane is actually made of linoleic acid in the form of cardiolipin, and so excess linoleic acid in it is unlikely to spoil it much.

That seems to be one of the reasons that linoleic acid is essential to humans. We can't synthesize it (although there are creatures that can) from anything simpler, and yet we need it to make cardiolipin.

A beautiful hypothesis slain at birth by an ugly fact.

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But it seems like a bit of a coincidence.

I am worrying about excess polyunsaturated fats in the diet. Cutting them out seems, completely unexpectedly, to be fixing my long-term fatigue, forcing me to drop my thyroid dose.

And yet the obvious membrane that might be the cause of the fatigue is made of polyunsaturated fats.

What if my body had been trying to rid itself of excess polyunsaturated fats?

What if a side effect of that detoxification attempt was to damage the very membranes on which metabolism depends?

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Brad Marshall has spoken of detox reactions to PUFAs. This I have witnessed myself.

And my sources inform me that one Tucker Goodrich has spoken of interactions between PUFAs and cardiolipin and mitochondrial dysfunction.

But Tucker Goodrich seems to communicate only in incomprehensible rambling podcasts; much like the late Ray Peat, only not even written down, so there is even less hope of extracting the message.

I am a lazy man. The Lord knows I will read to excess, but I would rather die than listen to hours of podcasts. Does anyone know what he has been saying on this subject?