First time I see someone talking about low-dose naltrexone on HN. There is a video on youtube about someone whose oral cancer was gone after taking it.
> There is a video on youtube about someone whose oral cancer was gone after taking it.
I know a guy who says that drinking noni juice cures all sorts of cancers. With your Youtube wisdom and my friends noni expertise, I'm sure the world will soon be cancer free.
You seem to have very low reading comprehension, nowhere did I say low-dose naltrexone cures cancer. There is a youtube video about someone whose cancer was cured using low-dose naltrexone.
Dismissing an unseen Youtube video given no other evidence than that it is sourced from YT seems reasonable, rational even. The prior probability of a randomly selected YT video being trustworthy is probably a lot closer to 0 than 1.
At this point you've edited this comment twice. First it was "autist", then "lol", now "This place is a meme. Prior probablity hahaahaa...". Who knows what it will be in the future.
There are no serious claims or documentation of LDN curing cancer and that's not it's actual use.
It's used to treat chronic, systemic inflammation and is one of the only "tools in the toolbox" for some very desperate people in long-term pain for years because you can't use things like corticosteroids which are destructive.
There are some cases where it can reduce inflammation well enough and long enough in some people for the body to self-heal where it could not before as the damage was too severe and dysfunctional.
This is a good site for layperson information or use google scholar for actual research
There are plenty of cases for exercise curing disease. Metabolic syndrome is basically cured exclusively through diet and exercise until it becomes too late to stop. Physical therapy is exercise and certainly that is curative. Exercise alone took my cholesterol panel from mildly elevated to absolutely normal, lowered my blood sugar, and improved many inflammatory markers. I cannot say the same for naltrexone. Bonus, my joints feel better, my lungs work better, and my CRP has never been lower.
I dont even need to link studies. Literally go to the NIH, search title for "exercise" and whatever you want, and I bet you can find enough repeatable evidence to completely change your mind. I'd argue exercise, 4-6 times a week in some form or another, is arguably the simplest cure and preventative "medication" for the largest variety of common ailments in a post-scarcity society. The fact doctors don't actually "prescribe" exercise as a first line treatment for metabolic diseases is really a failing of our drug-happy medical system.
The west is post scarcity. Obesity is an epidemic, diabetes in children is at a record never before seen, and people spend more time sitting still than moving.
People don't even always have clean water, enough healthy food, access to medical care, housing, and so on.
And you realistically cannot have scarcity in the "non-west" and then pretend you are post-scarcity in "the west". It just doesn't work like that. That's just "post-scarcity for folks and countries not being exploited", if it were true at all.
Please don't insult the thousands if not millions of athletes who have either died from incurable diseases or suffer daily from incurable chronic illness.
I personally run every day but it doesn't cure my chronic illness for years now.
Exercise can make you healthier than someone who just sits on the couch but it doesn't by itself cure disease.
Insult them? Exercise won't cure genetic diseases or cancer.
It absolutely cures metabolic syndrome in all but the most severe cases. But sure, exercise won't fix disease states like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, joint pain (especially brought on by weight), non insulin dependent T2 diabetes, etc.
I never made the claim that it cures every disease. You're an edge case. Congratulations.
It also seems like eating carbs is terrible for inflammation. If I go slightly over normal carb intake my knee/foot will hurt. I have screws in there and I bet it's extra sensitive to inflammation.
I certainly wouldn’t extrapolate to the population at large, but I can definitively state that some carbohydrates trigger a major body-wide inflammatory response in me. There’s several plausible mechanisms by which they could trigger an immune response (past gut infection training an immune response or fodmap sensitivity being the most obvious)
Same. Other substances too. A couple days ago I switched from white wine to red at dinnertime and my fresh mosquito bites immediately started itching when before that I didn't notice them as much.
It's not hard to believe that immune responses (allergic reactions being one end of that spectrum) are affected by the body's response to ingested substances. Especially given how strongly the gut microbiota affect blood chemistry.
There's certainly a lot of ways food substances can interact with bodily systems. However it can be hard to discern the exact source as different substances are correlated. Like you mention, issues with FODMAP is common, and those are often correlated with carbs. So there's a significant risk that a real effect is misattributed. Ideally you'd test if by blinding the intake, but that's often impossible or at least infeasible, so in the end we tend to latch on to some hypothesis without too much evidence.
It's also good to be aware of how strong the nocebo effect can be in this context. If you are convinced of the danger of something it can lead to significant issues. For an extreme example, severe airborne peanut allergy seems to be hard to be reproduce in controlled studies, yet there's people having significant symptoms from this, like lack of breathing etc.
Basically, when it comes to food, a lot of skepticism, including to our own experience, is often required. The risk is that we otherwise end up with unnecessary restrictive eating.
Personally I have a lot of things I "can't" eat, but even then, I try to challenge it now and then, sometimes I find something in a category I can actually eat and sometimes it turns out that I can eat it in low amounts or slowly learn to handle it.
High uric acid causes high blood pressure as well as gout.
High amounts of fructose, when digested, causes inflammation, and results in elevated uric acid.
Your body can digest small amounts of fructose in your intestines, which is why eating fruits (along with the higher fibre content) doesn't cause the ensuing inflammation.
Purines in beer can also result in high uric acid.
The inflammation from high intake of fructose causes your body to go into fat storage mode from fat-burning mode (bears/birds will increase fructose intake to increase fat storage before their long hibernation/migration south).
As humans get older, their body will adjust to convert glucose into fructose when sodium levels increase (by the time you notice your thirst from eating salty foods, your body has already switched into glucose->fructose conversion). read statements above to see what happens when your body processes fructose.
While it seems there might be an association, blaming fructose for gout seems just to be a scapegoat for a crappy diet that replaces processed meats with loads of HFCS overall
I have my own anecdotal evidence to support my own case.
My diet is very clean. But at one point I lived in a country with an abundance of fruit and after about 2 years of indulgence I got a toe pain. Didn’t think much of it. Thought I just hit it. But then it lasted almost for a year. That’s when I got worried, did a bunch of reading. Fructose connection was a very clear one, where the traditional connection was actually not supported by evidence at all.
I reduced fruit intake significantly, and literally within days the pain went away.
And any time I eat lots of fruit a few days in a row the pain will slowly creep back in.
At this point I believe it’s not only about the total intake per day, but also the frequency. I can eat a lot in one day and get nothing. But if I indulge a few days in a row a trickle of pain will remind me that I need to ease up.
I think it just takes time. Perhaps liver clears out the purine and/or uric acid. From all the stuff I read before about fructose, even unrelated to gout, I think this mostly happens during the periods of fasting. So most likely at night and during deliberate fasts.
But to answer your question. I was eating about half a watermelon a day, plus some other smaller fruit. Then when I moved countries again, to yet another fruit abundant one, but with less watermelon access, I was eating 4-6 peaches per day.
> Uric acid is a normal body waste product. It forms when chemicals called purines break down. Purines are a natural substance found in the body. They are also found in many foods, such as liver, shellfish, and alcohol. They can also be formed in the body when DNA is broken down.
"A quick search" determines that the main source of uric acid are dietary sources and that there are factors that might make its clearance slower. Fructose, if it's a significant factor, is down there in the list of things that should be checked
Eh, daddy had gout. I have some other acid-related condition and stopped drinking orange juice for a time because it was making my big toe hurt.
I'm not that invested in the topic, but I still think leaping to the conclusion that fructose suggests another commenter just has a crappy diet is borderline "personal attack" and also simply unfounded.
You can eat a lot of fish and fruit and those things can contribute to gout.
Fructose simply isn't the only thing that contributes: Being male, eating some meat, fish, and seafood, being overweight, and so on can contribute. It isn't really processed meats that do it, but certain types of meat. Gout used to be a disease of the rich - who were the folks that were likely to eat the foods that lead to it (and have an amount of other contributors).
My brother got gout in high school: He wasn't eating too badly, was a healthy weight, but probably had a "rich" diet and was male.
If you're interested in this Jason Fungs books go into his theory on why fructose is bad for us. His theory is based on the idea that fructose is much like alcohol in our bodies inability to process it properly
The scientist Lew Cantley has done nice work in this area. He describes how fructose changes liver metabolism, and is linked to some cancers. His concern is mostly large amounts of high fructose corn syrup, and if I recall, one would have to eat unrealsitc amounts of natural fruit to get any of the negative impacts he was looking it.
Gout is definitely not limited to diabetes. I’m not overweight, no history of diabetes in the family, and I eat very clean otherwise.
It’s more related to your ability to metabolize fructose which is a rabbit hole of a topic of itself. But a good science based overview is on YouTube. Check Sugar the Bitter Truth video.
If you are interested in this topic (inflammation prevention and reduction), take a look at the Wim Hof method (the Iceman). In its simplest form, it consists of two simple techniques: cold exposure and deep breathing with hyper-oxygenation. Anyone can do it, whatever their age or physical condition.
In general, the best thing about this is that it is unlikely to hurt you.
It is unlikely to help you, either, of course. At best, this is in the "studies suggest" but there also isn't anything robust to link it to, well, anything.
> there also isn't anything robust to link it to, well, anything.
That's not really fair either. Wim Hof has been working with scientists for decades, and there are entire chapters in textbooks about how he has helped develop our understanding of physiology [0]. Read the comments there! See https://www.wimhofmethod.com/science for more links. There's a lot of interesting things being learned.
I am biased, because after many years and many attempts to quit tobacco, I quit forever within a week of starting Wim Hof. It was so much less effort. I didn't even spend any money - just YouTube videos and a free app were enough.
I've also gone from someone who hates the winter to someone who quite enjoys it - another huge quality of life bump.
It's real easy to see how effective the method is--you just do it. Maybe it didn't work for you, but ignoring the testimony of thousands of people (and significant actual research) seems like a weird grudg.
Not to discount those studies, but it's best to look outside of the main website for a balanced view. If there were ten studies showing the Wim Hof method works, and five hundred showing it doesn't, which studies do you think wimhofmethod.com would choose to link to?
This is why you need to find an unconnected source.
> Two studies have had significant, promising results. One had a small group of people practice the technique for eight weeks while they prepared to travel to Antarctica. They didn’t find significant chemical changes, but that may be due to the small sample size. They did, however, find that people’s reported stress levels and depressive symptoms had significantly decreased thanks to the technique.
> Another study injected people with E. coli endotoxin. Those who had been practicing the Wim Hof technique had fewer symptoms and better overall immune responses than those who hadn’t.
This isn't a case of there being no there there. More studies would be great but let's not pretend this is woo.
Your link also doesn't show that there are many studies the Wim Hof website are ignoring, so that's a really weird point to try and make. Would you prefer that I link to some other collection of the same exact links?
There is also evidence that Wim Hof's abilities are not related to his lifestyle, as he has a twin brother with similar responses, despite that his brother leads a sedentary lifestyle without any of the practices to cold exposure of his brother.
> There is also evidence that Wim Hof's abilities are not related to his lifestyle
I think you're misinterpreting the point of that study. "A lifestyle with frequent exposures to extreme cold does not seem to affect BAT activity and CIT (cold-induced thermogenesis)" is not the same thing as "Wim Hof's abilities are not related to his lifestyle."
Wim teaches people to do what he does. He has trained people to do some of the things he does, like their blood killing E. Coli (!), or bringing 70+ year olds up mountains in their boxers (!).
I know from personal experience that those methods increase resistance to cold. But you don't need to rely on my testimony, there's video of him teaching people this stuff. It's not a trick.
I am well aware of his methods, I'm just pointing out that someone with identical genetics to him had similar abilities despite never doing any of the stuff Wim does. It is a point worth making.
No mention of the adrenal glands which sit on top of the kidneys, passively diffusing 80+ hormones through the pumping of the kidneys and movement experienced from exercise into the blood stream, some of which that last a fraction of a second, where adrenaline helps to shut off part of the immune system.
So is this study, observing the effects of the adrenal glands and subsequently released hormones or not?
This article recapitulates a press release [1], except for one important thing: the latter holds a link to the actual paper [2]. Unfortunately (although not atypically), that paper is behind a paywall, and its abstract does not mention statistical results.
2. Murugathasan, Mayoorey, Ardavan Jafari, Amandeep Amandeep, Syed A Hassan, Matthew Chihata, and Ali A. Abdul-Sater. “Moderate Exercise Induces Trained Immunity in Macrophages.” American Journal of Physiology-Cell Physiology, June 12, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpcell.00130.2023.
63 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadThey modulate opioid receptors, increase endorphins and drive down interleukin cytokines.
Unfortunately neither actually cure the source of the inflammation, disease etc.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=naltrexone+inflammation...
https://google.com/search?q=naltrexone+inflammation+cytokine...
I know a guy who says that drinking noni juice cures all sorts of cancers. With your Youtube wisdom and my friends noni expertise, I'm sure the world will soon be cancer free.
None is appropriate as a response for hacker news. Please read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's used to treat chronic, systemic inflammation and is one of the only "tools in the toolbox" for some very desperate people in long-term pain for years because you can't use things like corticosteroids which are destructive.
There are some cases where it can reduce inflammation well enough and long enough in some people for the body to self-heal where it could not before as the damage was too severe and dysfunctional.
This is a good site for layperson information or use google scholar for actual research
https://ldnresearchtrust.org/what-is-low-dose-naltrexone-ldn
I dont even need to link studies. Literally go to the NIH, search title for "exercise" and whatever you want, and I bet you can find enough repeatable evidence to completely change your mind. I'd argue exercise, 4-6 times a week in some form or another, is arguably the simplest cure and preventative "medication" for the largest variety of common ailments in a post-scarcity society. The fact doctors don't actually "prescribe" exercise as a first line treatment for metabolic diseases is really a failing of our drug-happy medical system.
So, a world that doesn't exist?
People don't even always have clean water, enough healthy food, access to medical care, housing, and so on.
And you realistically cannot have scarcity in the "non-west" and then pretend you are post-scarcity in "the west". It just doesn't work like that. That's just "post-scarcity for folks and countries not being exploited", if it were true at all.
I personally run every day but it doesn't cure my chronic illness for years now.
Exercise can make you healthier than someone who just sits on the couch but it doesn't by itself cure disease.
It absolutely cures metabolic syndrome in all but the most severe cases. But sure, exercise won't fix disease states like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, joint pain (especially brought on by weight), non insulin dependent T2 diabetes, etc.
I never made the claim that it cures every disease. You're an edge case. Congratulations.
Sounds like medically unsubstantiated anectdote.
It's not hard to believe that immune responses (allergic reactions being one end of that spectrum) are affected by the body's response to ingested substances. Especially given how strongly the gut microbiota affect blood chemistry.
It's also good to be aware of how strong the nocebo effect can be in this context. If you are convinced of the danger of something it can lead to significant issues. For an extreme example, severe airborne peanut allergy seems to be hard to be reproduce in controlled studies, yet there's people having significant symptoms from this, like lack of breathing etc.
Basically, when it comes to food, a lot of skepticism, including to our own experience, is often required. The risk is that we otherwise end up with unnecessary restrictive eating.
Personally I have a lot of things I "can't" eat, but even then, I try to challenge it now and then, sometimes I find something in a category I can actually eat and sometimes it turns out that I can eat it in low amounts or slowly learn to handle it.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V02z9mqTWzg
High uric acid causes high blood pressure as well as gout.
High amounts of fructose, when digested, causes inflammation, and results in elevated uric acid.
Your body can digest small amounts of fructose in your intestines, which is why eating fruits (along with the higher fibre content) doesn't cause the ensuing inflammation.
Purines in beer can also result in high uric acid.
The inflammation from high intake of fructose causes your body to go into fat storage mode from fat-burning mode (bears/birds will increase fructose intake to increase fat storage before their long hibernation/migration south).
As humans get older, their body will adjust to convert glucose into fructose when sodium levels increase (by the time you notice your thirst from eating salty foods, your body has already switched into glucose->fructose conversion). read statements above to see what happens when your body processes fructose.
There’s a strong link with fructose and gout.
My diet is very clean. But at one point I lived in a country with an abundance of fruit and after about 2 years of indulgence I got a toe pain. Didn’t think much of it. Thought I just hit it. But then it lasted almost for a year. That’s when I got worried, did a bunch of reading. Fructose connection was a very clear one, where the traditional connection was actually not supported by evidence at all.
I reduced fruit intake significantly, and literally within days the pain went away.
And any time I eat lots of fruit a few days in a row the pain will slowly creep back in.
I think it just takes time. Perhaps liver clears out the purine and/or uric acid. From all the stuff I read before about fructose, even unrelated to gout, I think this mostly happens during the periods of fasting. So most likely at night and during deliberate fasts.
But to answer your question. I was eating about half a watermelon a day, plus some other smaller fruit. Then when I moved countries again, to yet another fruit abundant one, but with less watermelon access, I was eating 4-6 peaches per day.
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?con...
"A quick search" determines that the main source of uric acid are dietary sources and that there are factors that might make its clearance slower. Fructose, if it's a significant factor, is down there in the list of things that should be checked
I'm not that invested in the topic, but I still think leaping to the conclusion that fructose suggests another commenter just has a crappy diet is borderline "personal attack" and also simply unfounded.
But, you know, whatevs.
Fructose simply isn't the only thing that contributes: Being male, eating some meat, fish, and seafood, being overweight, and so on can contribute. It isn't really processed meats that do it, but certain types of meat. Gout used to be a disease of the rich - who were the folks that were likely to eat the foods that lead to it (and have an amount of other contributors).
My brother got gout in high school: He wasn't eating too badly, was a healthy weight, but probably had a "rich" diet and was male.
Edited to add link: https://www.cdc.gov/arthritis/basics/gout.html#causes
I doubt I have gout, though, lol. I am a little over 6' and weight 73kg? I always associated gout with diabetes.
It’s more related to your ability to metabolize fructose which is a rabbit hole of a topic of itself. But a good science based overview is on YouTube. Check Sugar the Bitter Truth video.
The pain is more like the usual soreness from the injury, just worse.
It is unlikely to help you, either, of course. At best, this is in the "studies suggest" but there also isn't anything robust to link it to, well, anything.
Cold causes vasoconstriction, leading to increase in arterial blood pressure. Might not be good for some people.
I don't think that's true, or fair to say...
> there also isn't anything robust to link it to, well, anything.
That's not really fair either. Wim Hof has been working with scientists for decades, and there are entire chapters in textbooks about how he has helped develop our understanding of physiology [0]. Read the comments there! See https://www.wimhofmethod.com/science for more links. There's a lot of interesting things being learned.
I am biased, because after many years and many attempts to quit tobacco, I quit forever within a week of starting Wim Hof. It was so much less effort. I didn't even spend any money - just YouTube videos and a free app were enough.
I've also gone from someone who hates the winter to someone who quite enjoys it - another huge quality of life bump.
It's real easy to see how effective the method is--you just do it. Maybe it didn't work for you, but ignoring the testimony of thousands of people (and significant actual research) seems like a weird grudg.
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6jqaALpEFM
This is why you need to find an unconnected source.
For example:
https://www.webmd.com/balance/wim-hof-breathing-technique
Reading through that gives the more expected info: studies are mostly inconclusive and of small sample size.
> Two studies have had significant, promising results. One had a small group of people practice the technique for eight weeks while they prepared to travel to Antarctica. They didn’t find significant chemical changes, but that may be due to the small sample size. They did, however, find that people’s reported stress levels and depressive symptoms had significantly decreased thanks to the technique.
> Another study injected people with E. coli endotoxin. Those who had been practicing the Wim Hof technique had fewer symptoms and better overall immune responses than those who hadn’t.
This isn't a case of there being no there there. More studies would be great but let's not pretend this is woo.
Your link also doesn't show that there are many studies the Wim Hof website are ignoring, so that's a really weird point to try and make. Would you prefer that I link to some other collection of the same exact links?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof#Resistance_to_cold
I think you're misinterpreting the point of that study. "A lifestyle with frequent exposures to extreme cold does not seem to affect BAT activity and CIT (cold-induced thermogenesis)" is not the same thing as "Wim Hof's abilities are not related to his lifestyle."
Wim teaches people to do what he does. He has trained people to do some of the things he does, like their blood killing E. Coli (!), or bringing 70+ year olds up mountains in their boxers (!).
I know from personal experience that those methods increase resistance to cold. But you don't need to rely on my testimony, there's video of him teaching people this stuff. It's not a trick.
Do you mean, in relation to the OP's claim that Wim Hof training is "unlikely to help you"? How so?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25427090
"The anti-inflammatory effect of bacterial short chain fatty acids is partially mediated by endocannabinoids" (2021) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2021.1... https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/exercise-lowers-in...
"The Endocannabinoid System and Physical Exercise" (2022) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9916354/
What are the relations between exercise and diet (and [health] conscientiousness)?
/? Omega 6:3 ratio (and inflammation): https://www.google.com/search?q=omega+6+3+ratio
So is this study, observing the effects of the adrenal glands and subsequently released hormones or not?
1. https://www.yorku.ca/news/2023/06/15/new-study-gives-clues-o...
2. Murugathasan, Mayoorey, Ardavan Jafari, Amandeep Amandeep, Syed A Hassan, Matthew Chihata, and Ali A. Abdul-Sater. “Moderate Exercise Induces Trained Immunity in Macrophages.” American Journal of Physiology-Cell Physiology, June 12, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpcell.00130.2023.