What I'm Currently Thinking

A Hand-Wavy Model

It was suggested that I should write down a summary of what I’m currently thinking about the Great Question of PUFAs and Everything, so here goes:

As you can see, I’ve gone quite mad and am literally drowning in confirmation bias. I’m looking round at all the food that’s had PUFAs sneaked into it, and all the bad things that I think PUFAs plausibly cause, and wondering how come everyone seems so well these days. We should all weigh 40 stone and be dead of heart attacks by the time we’re ten years old. And it should be bloody obvious. A single drop of olive oil on the skin should cause instant death.

The Horrors of Excess PUFAs

PUFAs are essential fatty acids. You need a bit, they're used in various essential structures and signals and you can't make them so you have to get them from your diet.

But, like vitamins, you probably only need a bit of each type, and if you're eating normal food you'll get plenty.

Again, like vitamins, you can probably tolerate quite a lot more than you actually need, but there's going to be a limit. Any excess has to be disposed of, and whatever that pathway is, there's going to be a maximum amount you can shove down it.

Once you're over that limit, PUFAs are going to build up in your body to levels that your systems aren't designed to deal with. And that's going to cause trouble.

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Amongst the weird effects of excessive PUFA consumption seem to be:

PUFA Storage and Release

Some excess PUFA just gets stored like any other fat gets stored. But that means that whenever your body runs out of carbohydrates and needs fuel, PUFAs get released along with the other fats.

Over time the levels of stored PUFA get to silly levels. It might take years to happen, but once you've got lots of PUFA stored in your fat then enough is being released to cause trouble even when you're not actually consuming any. And it takes years to get rid of them too.

Lipid Peroxidation

PUFAs are very unstable substances. In the presence of oxygen and normal body heat they react in an uncontrolled manner, in fact in an uncontrolled chain reaction, literally burning in the blood, and the combustion products are not anything you want in your body.

This, I think, is likely to cause atherosclerosis and other damage.

Interference with Leptin Signalling

Leptin is your body's fat level sensor. If you disturb how it works your appetite is going to go out of control in some way, and fail to do its normal job of keeping your weight where it should be.

You'll gain weight in an uncontrolled manner. This is what causes obesity.

Interference with Glycolysis

PUFAs seem to interfere with the main metabolic pathway, where you burn carbohydrates for energy. That's pretty much what animals do all day. Break that and you've broken life itself.

This is going to cause a lack of energy in general, probably manifesting as fatigue and mental disorders, and as low body temperature. This is chronic fatigue, depression, and all the other symptoms of hypometabolism, the famous ‘Epidemic of Hypothyroidism’ that is definitely not an epidemic of hypothyroidism. There are a lot of these!

And it's also going to disturb normal control of glucose. This is diabetes and insulin resistance.

Interference with PUFA metabolism!

Once PUFAs are present in unnaturally high levels in the blood, the normal uses of PUFAs are also disturbed. That's going to cause membranes to be made out of the wrong fats, it's going to cause signalling molecules to be at the wrong levels. All of this stuff should be very tightly controlled in a healthy system, and all of it is for something. If it's out of control then that's going to cause damage.

A lot of the problems of essential fatty acid deficiency are going to manifest themselves, even though the real problem is actually that you've got far too much of the essential fatty acids. They're just out of control, out of balance, and not working how they should.

Having bad cellular membranes is likely the cause of mitochondrial dysfunction and of intolerance to sunshine.

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And I'm sure that there are many other effects of excessive PUFAs that we don't know about yet. If you throw sand in a car engine it doesn't just break one thing!

These five are just the obvious, known effects that are manifesting as the 'diseases of modernity'. There are going to be many other subtle problems just getting lost in the noise and general ill-health of those who are suffering from PUFA poisoning.

Renounce, O My Friends, All Polyunsaturated Evil.

It is very hard to give yourself an essential fatty acid deficiency just by not eating enough PUFA.

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Protein / PUFA interactions

Protein is also essential for life, and you need it in fairly large amounts. Too much protein in a healthy body shouldn't be any sort of problem. The excess should just get dealt with, the carbon skeletons of spare amino acids getting burnt for fuel, the excess nitrogen excreted as uric acid. This system should be perfect. The amount of protein in foods is highly variable. An omnivore should be able to live on anything from a fairly low protein diet to a very high protein diet.

But I'm coming to believe that there's some sort of tension between disposing of excess PUFAs and disposing of excess amino acids.

When you eat more protein than you actually need, that somehow stops you clearing the excess PUFAs from your blood, and makes all the associated problems worse.

So I would say, if you're healthy, don't worry at all about protein. Your appetite will make sure you get enough.

But if you're suffering from being poisoned by PUFAs, trying to keep your protein intake down to the amount you actually need might alleviate some of the effects, and might help you clear the polyunsaturated horror from your system a bit faster.

You don't really need to worry about protein deficiency, as long as you don't ignore protein cravings.

Your body should know when you're short of protein, and you'll find yourself longing for steaks and cheese and other high-protein foods. If you find yourself craving protein, satisfy your cravings until they go away.

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So what does this model predict?

If you start off healthy, then you can actually eat pretty much what you like. Moderate amounts of PUFA in your diet won't do you a great deal of harm at first. Most of it will just get stored without doing much damage.

But the longer you keep eating PUFAs, especially if you eat a high-protein diet, the more you'll store in your fat cells, and the more you'll have in your blood, and the worse your health will get.

The first thing you'll notice, as long as you're not doing a keto diet, will be some of the 'symptoms of hypothyroidism'. As PUFAs start to interfere with glycolysis, you'll see a low waking temperature, and you might feel fatigued.

You might also start to gain weight as the PUFAs interfere with how leptin works.

But I think that these days there are some people who were born full of PUFAs, who drank PUFAs in their mother's milk, whose childhood food was so full of PUFAs that they literally have never known what it's like to be well, to function normally.

They have never had enough energy, they have always struggled with their weight, they have never been quite right in the head. For them all these symptoms are just 'normal'. But it's a poor sort of normal.

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What can be done about it?

The first thing to do is to, within reason, eliminate all sources of polyunsaturated fat from your diet.

That should produce an immediate slight improvement. You should just feel a bit better and it should be easy to notice.

You will not fix all your problems instantly. You'll have plenty of PUFA stored up, and, like with any slow poison, it will take a long time to clear out of your system even after you stop taking it.

But you should notice immediate improvements in mood and in general well-being. You'll still have large amounts of PUFA in your system, but there'll be a bit less than there was, and things should start working better.

I noticed immediate improvements in my long-standing fatigue, and my weight stopped its inexorable rise and began to fall.

One thing that most people seem to notice within six months is that they become much more tolerant to sun exposure.

If you're fat and you're not trying to control that by starving yourself then you should see that the uncontrollable weight gain stops, and probably your weight starts to fall slowly.

But if you've been trying to control your weight by going hungry, then you won't see that. Chances are that your weight is already lower than your body would like it be. But the hunger should at least start to lessen.

I don't think there's any great downside to this. You weren't designed to eat large amounts of PUFAs. Any sensible diet should provide enough of all the necessary types. You might manage to cause an essential fatty acid deficiency if you try to live on water and fat-free ship's biscuit or something like that, but at that point you're going to be giving yourself all sorts of vitamin deficiencies as well.

So don't do that! Just eat real food, of the type that your great great grandparents would have eaten and done well on.

A word of caution. Modern meat contains quite high levels of PUFAs because the animals are fed on high-PUFA foods, and they accumulate PUFA in their fat just like we do.

Fortunately ruminants seem immune to the effects of PUFAs because of their digestion, so it's still safe to eat beef and lamb. But you should probably avoid chicken and pork unless you know it's been fed on PUFA-free food.

And watch out for peanut butter. Even the good stuff which seems really wholesome is full of linoleic acid.

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Anything else?

Try not to eat more protein than you need. The essential requirement seems to be about 0.6g/kg/day. So if you weigh e.g. 90kg, you don't need more than 54g of protein per day. And possibly even less than that, since fat stores don't seem to need as much protein for maintenance as other types of tissues do.

The recommended daily amount seems to be about 0.8g/kg/day, allowing a bit extra for a safety margin, so if you weigh 90kg that would be 72g of protein per day. Still not much!

But be careful with this. Protein is absolutely beyond doubt essential to life. If you find yourself craving protein-rich foods, eat them.

That should produce a similar improvement, if I'm right about protein interfering with PUFA disposal. You can clear the stuff faster, so the bad effects will lessen.

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Anything else?

You should find that those two things together produce a large and noticeable improvement. If they don't, then PUFA poisoning is not your problem!

And doing both those things is quite difficult. You're probably avoiding eating a lot of things at this point.

But if you feel better but you still aren't feeling well, then there are a couple of even more extreme changes to your diet that you can make.

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Ketosis

By eliminating all carbohydrate from your diet, you completely bypass the 'glycolysis is blocked' problem. You get loads of extra energy as a result, and it seems to be a panacea for various sorts of mental disorders. You're not actually fixing the underlying problem any faster, but you might feel a lot better as a result, as long as you keep doing it.

Ketosis looks like a human-specific adaptation to carbohydrate shortage. That makes it relatively recent in evolutionary terms, and so I'm reluctant to claim that it's a good idea to do it long term. But lots of people have done it long term, and there don't seem to be any obvious drawbacks, except that, with no glycogen reserve, your sporting performance will be somewhat diminished. Not much of a problem for most people I imagine.

I've tried ketosis myself for several two-week periods, and after an initial couple of days of 'keto flu' it always makes me feel great. Boundless physical and mental energy, but it always feels a bit 'thin', somehow. It reminds me of the state I used to be in after a couple of hours of hard exercise back when I was sporty. You're still going fine, but there's not much left in the tank.

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Carbosis

The opposite! Eating a huge amount of carbohydrate also seems to make people feel better, anecdotally.

On historical and evolutionary grounds I'd imagine that there's little problem with doing this if you're healthy, especially if you're descended from farmers.

There are some suggestive studies from the first half of the last century, where extremely low fat diets worked well for people long term. My own Irish ancestors seem to have done quite well on a diet which was almost entirely potato-based in the run up to the Great Famine. And in fact for most of recorded history carbohydrates have been the staple food of most people. But of course the people in those old studies, and all those pre-twentieth century farmers, probably weren't suffering much from polyunsaturated fat poisoning.

I've tried this myself for a couple of weeks and I was full of energy and bounce, and it didn't feel thin at all, it felt like the sort of good health I used to take for granted in my youth. In fact I felt a bit too energetic and lively.

It might be that what's happening here is that by filling the blood with glucose, you're preventing the release of your fat stores, which includes the stored PUFA, thus fixing all the associated problems at once. No, or at least very little, PUFA in the blood, and everything just starts working again.

But another possibility is that having a really large amount of glucose around is somehow 'overdriving' the glycolysis pathway in people, and making it work at full power even though it's still partially blocked.

And I'm a bit worried about what sort of consequences this might have. Fats, especially saturated fats, are fairly inert molecules. They contain a lot of energy, but they need a certain amount of persuasion to react and release that energy at room temperature.

That's not as true of glucose, a more chemically active fuel, which needs to be under fairly good control to work safely.

Glucose is osmotically active, too much of it can cause cells to swell and burst, and a lot of the problems associated with diabetes are probably caused by poor glucose control.

I'm also a bit worried about the polyol pathway, which looks like a sort of emergency measure to deal with excess glucose. If glucose levels get too high in cells, it will get converted to sorbitol, a sugar alcohol, which is presumably less likely to cause damage than glucose itself, but still maybe not a great thing to have in your cells in large quantities due to its reactive properties. Again, a lot of diabetes problems seem to be associated with the activation of the polyol pathway.

Still, there are a lot of anecdotes of modern people feeling great in 'carbosis', including me for a couple of weeks. So perhaps my worries here are unfounded. Time will tell.