The Travis Corner

[lollipop]

I am going to write my first article pretty soon here and I'll let you know when it's done (and I hope that you'll like it).

Nice.

 

[Inaut]

It took me 3 days to comb through this thread....most is way over my head but thanks @Travis and everyone for your questions/responses. information overload big time.....i need to go back to school (rodney dangerfield)..................

 

[Travis]

Travis, do you know if mucuna pruriens requires cycling? Will a tolerance develop?

I hope not; I don't think so because dopamine is one of the most fundamental neurotransmitter in a class with acetylcholine, histamine, and serotonin. But this should however be very easy to find out for certain: remember that most Parkinson's patients take L-dopa in gram amounts and have been doing so for decades? giving us quite a bit of reliable data one any tolerance. The dyskinesia side-effects noted in a small subset of Parkinson's patients is most likely on account of methoxydopamine (a.k.a O-methydopamine) and shouldn't occur in our non-Parkinson's-sized doses; these are not side-effects of dopamine itself, and we shouldn't let a few hyper-methylators—those taking massive doses—to scare us off of L-dopa and dopamine.

 

[Travis]

My Nutritional Science Blog

There are many instances of the The Steinbeck appearing in the literature, and I'll let you know next time I find one.

The Steinbeck (c. 1960): Used by authors of scientific articles when trying to appear witty; this involves the using phrase 'of mice and men' when referring to the well-established nature of a particular finding or the trans-special consistency of a certain effect. Named after the novel of same name (c. 1937) written by American author John Steinbeck.

The Reverse Steinbeck (c. 1970): Used by authors of scientific articles who are shocked by the continuing use of the Steinbeck, and even more appalled that users of such think it's original. The Reverse Steinbeck involves using the phrase 'of men and mice' in instances where others might use The Steinbeck. The Reverse Steinbeck is a device which directly transposes the original term with intent of taunting, mocking, and ridiculing Steinbeck users while discouraging its future use. ​

 

[Wagner83]

I'm sure you had given yourself a bolus dose of free amino acids; bromlain is so notorious for hydrolyzing gelatin that pineapple is contraindicated in the preparation of Jello™ due to it's collagenase activity—which you can frickin' see! I have seen this—and the enzyme activity of the extracts is even commonly reported in gelatin digestion units (GDU). I am not sure what to make of this, but it could have something to do with the sympathoinhibitory effects of glycine.

This one of the reasons why I initially decided to supplement bromelain, to pre-digest gelatin and tolerate it better. I didn't have so much gelatin, around 10 grams. It didn't really feel like strong GABA effects as there was no particular happiness and mood lift, just the lethargy part, maybe that goes well with the sympathetic inhibitory effects. I wondered if pre-digesting the gelatin could have somehow meant a much more sudden effects of its endotoxin content (after all, special low-endotoxin gelatin is manufactured for the medical field). I read on here (amazoniac, haidut) that glycine protected from the effects of endotoxin, but maybe pre-digesting it means the protective process is impaired. I don't remember particularly bad effects from gelatin without bromelain except constipation and (too) dry sinus/nose.

 

[Travis]

@Travis I have CFS / POTS / Gastroparesis. I have generally very poor appetite. I recently noticed after 5 weeks with no ejaculation, around week four I notice my stomach starts growling slightly again between meals (it hasn't done this in years) and my appetite significantly improved. However after I ejaculated, it went more or less back to normal low appetite. I have noticed a similar effect with other periods of abstinence.

I think I could be deficient in a certain mineral or hormone that is in semen that is also required for gastric acid production. Zinc is obviously the main contender as it is used in carbonic anhydrase required to produce HCl, and it is 3% RDA in semen.

The other big one is copper though I'm not sure how that relates to gastric acid, also at 3%.

I suspect I would have obtained the deficiency via dysautonomia -> gastroparesis -> poor absorption -> low zinc (or other mineral or amino acids) -> low stomach acid -> low zinc (or other mineral or amino acids) absorption, vicious circle.

My only other thought is that prolactin rises and acetylcholine testostorone, etc drops. Perhaps because my health is in such a shocking state it takes a while for these hormones to build back up? I should also mention my libido is low to very low.

You are good at analyzing these sought of things. Any ideas?

Don't forget about the neuropeptides: Brain neuropeptides such as oxytocin, enkephalins, and β-endophin are released afterwards and these molecules also control appetite. Endophins are actually the most well-known and powerful signalers of food intake: Proopiomelanocortin and ghrelin are widely-regarded as the canonical food-intake regulators (along with the larger insulin-like protein hormone leptin) and they are both endophins—or endogenous opiate peptides acting on the δ- and μ-receptors. One of the best antidotes for the endorphins and exorphins is coffee: this contains an anti-opiate as strong as naloxone called caffeoyl quinide—formed upon roasted from dehydration of caffeoylquinic acid—and is present at the highest amount in medium roasts (it is destroyed upon further roasting).

 

[Travis]

@Travis - I don't know how you can stomach a blended pineapple smoothie even with an added banana. It's so bitter! I had some leftover pineapple slices this morning and blended them with unpasteurized orange juice and nonfat milk powder. I couldn't finish it due to the bitterness.

It wasn't a Dole™ was it? The Costa Rican pineapples are far better than the Hawaiian ones; I won't even buy those.

 

[Fractality]

It wasn't a Dole™ was it? The Costa Rican pineapples are far better than the Hawaiian ones; I won't even buy those.

No - it was a Del Monte and the night before I marveled at its sweetness. It's probably because the slices I blended included the core. Even though when I eat the unblended core it isn't bitter. The blending process must make it bitter. At least I got a strong dose of bromelain though!

 

[YourUniverse]

I hope not; I don't think so because dopamine is one of the most fundamental neurotransmitter in a class with acetylcholine, histamine, and serotonin. But this should however be very easy to find out for certain: remember that most Parkinson's patients take L-dopa in gram amounts and have been doing so for decades? giving us quite a bit of reliable data one any tolerance. The dyskinesia side-effects noted in a small subset of Parkinson's patients is most likely on account of methoxydopamine (a.k.a O-methydopamine) and shouldn't occur in our non-Parkinson's-sized doses; these are not side-effects of dopamine itself, and we shouldn't let a few hyper-methylators—those taking massive doses—to scare us off of L-dopa and dopamine.

Thank you sir. @dq139 check this out!

 

[800mRepeats]

@Travis - I don't know how you can stomach a blended pineapple smoothie even with an added banana. It's so bitter! I had some leftover pineapple slices this morning and blended them with unpasteurized orange juice and nonfat milk powder. I couldn't finish it due to the bitterness.

No - it was a Del Monte and the night before I marveled at its sweetness. It's probably because the slices I blended included the core. Even though when I eat the unblended core it isn't bitter. The blending process must make it bitter. At least I got a strong dose of bromelain though!

Hmm... I have always found pineapple and dairy (in combination) to be bitter. Typically, this might be some pineapple and other fruit to go with a cheese omelet. Or even a piece of string cheese eaten in the neighborhood of some pineapple.
As such, I can't imagine I'd EVER want to blend pineapple into a smoothie with milk powder.

 

[Fractality]

Hmm... I have always found pineapple and dairy (in combination) to be bitter. Typically, this might be some pineapple and other fruit to go with a cheese omelet. Or even a piece of string cheese eaten in the neighborhood of some pineapple.
As such, I can't imagine I'd EVER want to blend pineapple into a smoothie with milk powder.

I wasn't sure the milk powder would go well with it but I figured I could use a protein boost. Next time I'll try it without the milk powder but I'm not entirely convinced that adding 1/3-1/2 a cup of quality milk powder would be the reason for the bitterness.

 

[X3CyO]

Depends what your goals are I would think?

Beef is much tastier and has more saturated fat and vitamins and minerals. Depends if you want less calories and are trying to lose weight?

You should try a dry herb vaporizer if you can delineate the difference between tobacco and pure nicotine. I think its similar to the coffee vs caffiene argument in that the whole plant is more beneficial than a single constituent.

Id like to warn you too that vaping can lead to pneumonia ive noticed according to my friends. They reccomend using a moderate to high nicotine amount to prevent overuse.

 

[dq139]

Thank you sir. @dq139 check this out!

@jamies33 interesting stuff man..I had a hunch that dopamine is very importan, thanks for the heads up

 

[SB4]

Don't forget about the neuropeptides: Brain neuropeptides such as oxytocin, enkephalins, and β-endophin are released afterwards and these molecules also control appetite. Endophins are actually the most well-known and powerful signalers of food intake: Proopiomelanocortin and ghrelin are widely-regarded as the canonical food-intake regulators (along with the larger insulin-like protein hormone leptin) and they are both endophins—or endogenous opiate peptides acting on the δ- and μ-receptors. One of the best antidotes for the endorphins and exorphins is coffee: this contains an anti-opiate as strong as naloxone called caffeoyl quinide—formed upon roasted from dehydration of caffeoylquinic acid—and is present at the highest amount in medium roasts (it is destroyed upon further roasting).

Thanks, you have given me something to think about. If this hypothesis is correct, why would it take so long for my body to recover from neuropeptides (4weeks+) I wonder.

I shall give coffee a try again in the near future, but I have tried it in the past and it made me heart pounding far worse. Things have changed since then however. Cheers.

 

[Travis]

I wasn't sure the milk powder would go well with it but I figured I could use a protein boost. Next time I'll try it without the milk powder but I'm not entirely convinced that adding 1/3-1/2 a cup of quality milk powder would be the reason for the bitterness.

Me neither, but I can say that I've never actually had a pineapple that I'd describe as bitter. I've had acidic pineapples, to be sure, and perhaps even some that I'd considered almost tart . . . but never a bitter one. I know magnesium can be bitter, and the only time that I recall having even a mildly bitter pineapple smoothie was the one time I'd added a chelated-magnesium tablet to it.

 

[Travis]

No - it was a Del Monte and the night before I marveled at its sweetness. It's probably because the slices I blended included the core. Even though when I eat the unblended core it isn't bitter. The blending process must make it bitter. At least I got a strong dose of bromelain though!

I've ruined my fairy share of blended creations: The latest one that I had to discard suffered from too much juniper and an excessively-long blending time, causing the entire smoothie to get warm and over-extract the juniper berries; I was busy doing dishes, and other things, and had sort-of neglected this one. But there was also something else peculiar about it, perhaps having to do with the textural effects from the cinnamon bark.. .

I have learned a few lessons and can say that apples should never be blended at all; there should perhaps even be some sort of law against this, or all blenders should get together and file a class-action restrainin orders against all apples (Oster™ vs USAA). Of 'not allowing apples in the vicinity of the blender' is my first Cardinal Rule of Blending—the second being 'don't talk about Blending Club' (lol; not really).

But as anything goes: practice does make perfect—so long as you have a decent memory (avoiding aluminum, mercury, lead, dried starch, and keeping serotonin in-range should help with this). I am looking forward to a week of eating the sweeter lower halves of the pineapples while blending the upper halves—and also the enzyme-rich core—with juniper berries, fennel seed (anise), and a dash of sodium bicarbonate for the bubbles. I find thin-bark cinnamon sticks go great in the French press with either coffee, green tea, or chamomile flowers, but I don't feel that they have a legitimate place in the blender—perhaps which could be my third Cardinal Rule of Blending?

 

[Travis]

Thanks, you have given me something to think about. If this hypothesis is correct, why would it take so long for my body to recover from neuropeptides (4weeks+) I wonder.

I shall give coffee a try again in the near future, but I have tried it in the past and it made me heart pounding far worse. Things have changed since then however. Cheers.

Adding to that, I was reading about methylxanthines again and had discovered that theophylline is actually a metabolite of caffeine; the difference between theophylline, theobromine, and caffeine is simply one easily-removed N-methyl group. Theophylline is certainly the most active of the three and works in the lowest dose; it is actually a fairly powerful drug and is even used pharmacologically for treating asthma. Even though theophylline is well-known to cause cardiac effects, caffeine exists in coffee in much higher levels and works on the same receptor. But you might think that there would be some differences between roasts and growing regions in coffee's methyxanthine profile, making a person perhaps want to try a few types. What I find personally the best is whole been—ground at the store—Costa Rican coffee. The price means very little when it comes to ~90% of whole-bean coffee as the flavor is far more heavily dominated by the degree of roasting and the time elapsed since, besides the region it'd been grown. In my grocery store, the best ones are the whole bean bulk coffees having the highest sales: The increased turnover of such coffees makes them less stale, and thus better than many other brands that would otherwise win the taste-test identical storage conditions. I have had pre-ground Kopi Luwak a few times and have even roasted my own, on multiple occasions, and I maintain that there is very little correlation between a coffee's price and its quality (r≈.14).

I drink so much coffee that caffeine is probably my body's primary methyl donor: caffeine ⟶  theobromine/paraxanthine/theophylline + X–CH₃​

I feel that if people 'don't like coffee' they're simply doing it wrong, and had most likely formed their opinion through drinking exclusively Folger's™ pre-ground (or similar). I do understand this position, and if that was the only coffee in existence then I'd have to agree; I would also 'not like coffee' in that instance. This is similar to how people can get a bad impression of pineapples from just eating Hawaiian Dole's™, or even 'hate durian' based primarily on improper storage effects.

 

[Koveras]

Coupled with fatty acid synthesis is the enzyme stearoyl–CoA desaturase: Found on the endoplasmic reticulum, this enzyme desaturates this newly-formed stearic acid to oleic acid; this double bond increases membrane fluidity, a property which has long been observed in mitotic cells. The double bond also increases the volume—or lowers the density—of the dividing cell membrane, due both to steric effects and the increased molecular kinetic energy inherent to all unsaturated fatty acids (relative to their respective isocarbonic saturated analogues). So both the increase in fatty acid synthesis coupled with thier desaturation serves to both increase the fluidity and size of the cell membrane, preparing it for mitosis. It should then be no surprise that stearoyl–CoA desaturase is consistently found upregulated in cancer:

But since it'd been a female patient, the reduction of estradiol had likely been more important; which would lower growth by downregulating prolactin receptors, promote microtubule stability by diminishing 2-methoxyestradiol, and help retain cell membrane fatty acid saturation by attenuating the transcription of stearoyl-CoA desaturase.

I did see a microarray analysis on estradiol showing that it had induced the upregulation of two key fatty acid-synthesizing enzymes, something I've mentioned before but should reiterate because these two enzymes were the ones most strongly induced (over tenfold): Estradiol had greatly increased both fatty acid synthase and stearoyl–CoA desaturase, the latter desaturating the newly-synthesized stearic acid produced by the former into oleic acid and incorporated into the growing cell membrane. Everyone knows that a mitotic cell must essentially duplicate every one of its components before it can proliferate, or perhaps completing the duplication process shortly after division, yet most people appear to concentrate solely on the chromosomes (the replication of which polyamines naturally accelerate). Little attention is given to the duplication of the cell membrane, which must also occur; estradiol appears to catalyze this process by strongly inducing two obligatory enzymes.

There even exists an intracellular enzyme, stearoyl–CoA desaturase, which makes this conversion using newly synthesized stearic acid conjugated with coenzyme A. The transcription of this enzyme is under genetic control, and it is most powerfully upregulated by estradiol (a 7× induction has been found in one study).

It looks like methionine and cysteine restriction (vegan diet anyone?) might be a viable way to decrease stearoyl–CoA desaturase activity

@Obi-wan

J Lipid Res. 2011 Jan;52(1):104-12. doi: 10.1194/jlr.M010215. Epub 2010 Sep 25.
Cysteine supplementation reverses methionine restriction effects on rat adiposity: significance of stearoyl-coenzyme A desaturase.
Elshorbagy AK1, Valdivia-Garcia M, Mattocks DA, Plummer JD, Smith AD, Drevon CA, Refsum H, Perrone CE.

Stearoyl-CoA desaturase-1 (SCD1) is a key enzyme in fatty acid and energy metabolism, but little is known about its nutritional regulation. Dietary methionine restriction in rats decreases hepatic Scd1 mRNA and protein, increases energy expenditure, and decreases fat-pad mass/body-weight% (FM/BW%). In humans, plasma concentrations of the methionine product, cysteine, are associated with obesity. To determine which consequences of methionine-restriction are mediated by decreased cysteine availability, we monitored obesity-related variables in 4 dietary groups for 12 weeks: control-fed (CF), methionine-restricted (MR), MR supplemented with 0.5% l-cysteine (MR+Cys) and CF+Cys rats. MR lowered weight gain and FM/BW% despite higher food intake/weight than CF, and lowered serum cysteine. Hepatic Scd1 expression was decreased, with decreased serum SCD1 activity indices (calculated from serum fatty acid profile), decreased serum insulin, leptin and triglycerides, and higher adiponectin. Cysteine supplementation (MR+Cys) essentially reversed all these phenotypes and raised serum cysteine but not methionine to CF levels. Adding extra cysteine to control diet (CF+Cys) increased serum taurine but did not affect serum cysteine, lipids, proteins, or total weight gain. FM/BW% and serum leptin were modestly decreased. Our results indicate that anti-obesity effects of MR are caused by low cysteine and that dietary sulfur amino acid composition contributes to SCD1 regulation.

 

[Koveras]

Edit: Also interesting to note the increases of arachidic and behenic in MR

 

[Inaut]

Kind of off topic now but does anybody cook with or eat beef tallow? I was looking at the stearic acid content and it’s quite high up there.. Any reasons why one wouldn’t? I frequent a top tier butcher shop in my city and have passed it over on many occasions.