Chris Kresser is a health practitioner who writes about diet, nutrition, seed oils, saturated fat, and digestive problems like acid reflux.
HN commenters link it for dietary and health claims, such as acid reflux without medication, artificial sweeteners, and red meat, and one notes he is more than an acupuncturist.
Never heard of that, but I guess it makes sense. I always recommend fermented products to friends and family, such as kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, kefir, buttermilk. If you can find ways to work these things into your diet, even a little bit, it's always a good way to promote probiotics and help your gut do it's job properly.
In regards to the acid-reflux or GERD problem, through practicing keto I inadvertently learned that the common wisdom is just plain wrong. Many doctors will tell you the problem is too much acid. This couldn't be more wrong. Either they are behind on the current literature, or they have no incentive to recommend real long term treatments because the ant-acid market is a HUGE cash cow for pharmaceutical companies. This is a case where unfortunately the combination of capitalism and medical treatments have led us astray.
The problem is not too much acid, but too little acid. This sounds very counter-intuitive but I can give you the quick TL;DR. The main idea is that GERD is a result of mal-digested carbohydrates that cause excess gas in your gut. Your esophagus isn't burning because there was too much acid and it overflowed. It's burning because your gut isn't digesting all the bread and pasta you put into it, causing gas, which makes the 'flap' that separates your stomach and esophagus to get forced open and leak acid.
This is why a low carb diet is the perfect treatment. You temporarily reduce your bready carb intake, introduce probiotics, and over…
"Plant foods are vastly more nutritious than animal sources."
Well, the question I responded to was about inexpensive nutrient-dense foods. Based on this organ meats, eggs and fish/shellfish beats plant foods all to hell.
"Where is the fiber..."
Fiber is nutrient-dense? Nope, it's not. It's not even digestible by the body. Why start out a criticism by leading with your worst card? Let's move on to the rest of your hand...
"Or the vast array of phytochemicals, polyphenols/flavonoids"
What value do these supply? Serious question. I know there is a lot of interest in them as an area of study, but they sound like the hope/hype behind anti-oxidants, for which the science has not panned-out favorably.
"the WHO has recently pointed out that processed/red meat is carcinogenic."
Their recommendation is based on epidemiological surveys, not randomized control trials. I could just as easily point to studies showing higher cancer rates of vegetarians [0] versus meat eaters. But it doesn't matter, because virtually all nutrition studies are based on questionnaires where they ask "How much steak did you eat last week?" or "What percentage of your total diet was leafy greens last month?" which is about as reliable as you might expect. It is extremely difficult to arrive at meaningful conclusions from epidemiological studies, because there are so many built-in confounders and biases. Even then, the associations are extremely weak (For comparison, the p-value of relative risk for…
"When you look at the data, blaming GERD on too much stomach acid doesn’t make sense. Stomach acid actually tends to decline, not rise, with age, while GERD risk increases with age. (4) In fact, 40-year-olds, on average, generate about half as much as stomach acid as 20-year-olds do. And, according to one study, over 40 percent of people age 80 and up may be producing almost no stomach acid at all."[4]
This condition is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achlorhydria , and one of known side-effects of that is gastroesophageal reflux disease.
"The ideal pH for the stomach can approach 1 but should be below 3, where most pathogens cannot survive. When the pH rises above 5, several dangerous bacterial species are able to survive. Acid-blockers can increase the stomach’s pH ..."[4]
For lower esophageal sphincter to properly work, you in fact need normal levels of acid and proper acidity.[0][1][2][3] If you have the oposite, the sphincter does not fully close and boom, there's your heart burn.
The real mechanism of gerd is more complicated than "too much acid" or "acid too strong". I don't suggest you start drinking unwatered vinegar. I suggest you study the sources I've linked and only then decide for youself.
> I've seen vinegar recommended for GERD online before, but was curious whether there's much medical know-how behind it (studies or at least a clear theory of why it would help me vs. PPIs).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTzxfoL82n8
[1]…
The reason that health care costs rise in almost all countries is that we are doing something wrong.
The question is what?
Can it be that doctors who do not try to find the root causes of diseases have no solutions ?
Can it be that doctors who prescribe drugs to suppress symtoms cause problems in the long run ?
Cancer is a disease with high costs where a lot can be gained.
Watch a documentary about Dr Burzynski who has a cure for various types of cancer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBUGVkmmwbk
The documentary shows how officials and the National Cancer Institute work against him and hence continue the high cost.
On websites like https://drhyman.com and https://www.chriskresser.com you can find doctors who explain a lot about root causes of diseases and how to cure oneself. If all would read these sites the costs for health would drop more than 50%.
It's worth noting, that despite being blocked out in the diet list in the research, the state of red meat is still not firm [0]. There seems to be a body of evidence that naturally fed ruminants are very good sources of nutrition for people. It's worth noting said nutrition profile does change DRAMATICALLY when they're fed unnatural sources (grain/feed) over natural sources.
If you don't eat meat because you don't want to for whatever reason, but there is a LOT of bias in food research.
In general, avoid refined sugars, avoid refined seed oils, avoid other refined/processed foods... increase intake of less processed (even if cooked) foods, and try to eat fattier fish 3-4 times a week.
https://chriskresser.com/does-red-meat-cause-inflammation/
We've not cut anything else: dairy, nuts, alcohol, eggs, carbs, fats, proteins, sugar. Not sure what else it could be. For example, turns out malted vinegar causes a reaction, the sole "trigger" ingredient in it is barley.
6 months of no-symptoms-barring-accidental-gluten is proving somewhat compelling, after 5 years of mounting health issues.
This is an article we came across that was quite a eureka moment, my wife was a classic Hashimoto's case hence our initial route with endochrinology specialists:
http://chriskresser.com/the-gluten-thyroid-connection/