nervous-system health

[dash21]

What are the best foods that help repair and maintain the nervous system?

1. Generally.

and

2. With problems like neuropathy (and possibly fibromyalgia).

?

[Aytundra]

1. Generally

- Folic acid helps neural tube development in fetal development.
- Glial cells and Schwann cells, and Oligodendrocyte myelinate* the nerves; Try to find a way to grow these cells, maybe more fats?(*myelinate = cells covering nerve cells, like plastic on cable cords covering the metal cord to keep the electricity current from spilling out if water splashes onto it)

[dash21]

Fats? Mt Doctor told me to avoid fats, becuase I'm developing high-cholesteol (Even though fruit, nuts and some raw vegis are now what my diet is mainly composed of- I still have a ways to go, to improve my diet, and get the right amount of nutrients.)

...but I've also heard that fat and cholesterol are not what really cause heart-disease, so I don't know how seriously to take the fats direction, nor what my cholesterol should be. I think the Doctor said it was 1 point from being into the serious "High" level.

Meanwhile, my nervous-system is going crazy, even though I am not diabetic. I suspect its a combination of lower spine issues and carpal tunnel agrivation.

[Aytundra]

Fats? Mt Doctor told me to avoid fats, becuase I'm developing high-cholesteol

Uh oh
here we go again,
someone else with a mis-definition of cholesterol.

Oscar, is a sterol a fat?
i think Oscar defined fats for me one time in the non-Wai forum.

[Aytundra]

I suspect its a combination of lower spine issues and carpal tunnel agrivation.

Maybe it is not about what you can eat to fix it, but on how you can move/exercise/imagine-to-relax to fix these.
Erik Franklin teaches dance, studied anatomy, and studied Alexander Technique, he has written exercises for lower backs:
http://franklinmethod.com/blog

[Oscar]

Oscar, is a sterol a fat?

No. Both fats (=triglycerides) and sterols are lipids.
Triglyceride:

Sterol:

i think Oscar defined fats for me one time in the non-Wai forum.

I did? Can you find it?

[Aytundra]

i think Oscar defined fats for me one time in the non-Wai forum.

I did? Can you find it?

I never saved that thread,
it got deleted after 30 days in the "Other Opinions Forum"

I had a list of questions, this was my draft:
1) What is a Saturated Fatty Acid?
2) What do you think a Saturated Fatty Acid can do to the body?
3) a) True or false? Saturated fatty acids are Fatty Acids.
b) True or false? Unsaturated fatty acids are Fatty Acids.
c) True or false? Fatty Acids can include saturated fatty acids [0 double bonds], and unsaturated fatty acids [1 to 1 + # double bond(s)] (monounsaturated fatty acids [1 double bond], and polyunsaturated fatty acids (omega6 fatty acids [3 double bonds] and omega3 fatty acids [3 double bonds]).

4) True or false? Saturated fatty acids can include:
Lauric acid, 12 carbons,
Myristic acid, 14 carbons
Palmitic acid, 16 carbons
Stearic acid, 18 carbons
Arachidic acid, 20 carbons?
{I want to say that palmitic acid the 16 carbon fatty acid is made in anima

5) True or false? Sterols (like cholesterol) are not Fatty Acids.
{When average-non-science people say "eat less fat", sometimes they mean to say eat less cholesterol (too long of a sciency word to say), and reading that article in the textbook, I was like is the target audience for the science-less person? i.e. "Animal fat from red meat and cooking fats should be minimized".}

[Aytundra]

Fats? Mt Doctor told me to avoid fats, becuase I'm developing high-cholesteol

You are inaccurate in your terminology, or your doctor is inaccurate in his terminology.
Blood test measures cholesterol, triglycerides, high-density-lipoprotein levels and low-density-lipoprotein levels.
As Oscar said, fats and sterols belong to lipids.
Your doctor probably saw that a lipoprotein level was increased compared to a previous blood test of yours, or increased and falls in a range that were above the values that a normal-average-set-of-people-in-his-classification-chart-under-some-parameters-displayed.

Lipoproteins are like a car or a truck in your blood stream (the highway and roads).
Lipoproteins carries lipids (fats, sterols and others...etc) to the heart and away from the heart, as well as to and from other organs.
A lot of readers like to assume these lipoproteins only carry cholesterol.
And when the lipoproteins are increased relative to some parameters, they believe that cholesterol is getting higher a.k.a using the high-cholesterol terminology.
That is false/bad thinking.

Fats, some fats, take a car ride in these lipoproteins, and when these fats increases, lipoproteins on the road increases.
Because some people and some medical professionals only like to assume lipoproteins carry cholesterol, they say that look you have lots of lipoprotein and that is you are developing high-cholesterol. and they say it so quickly, they just say "you are developing high-cholesterol, eat less fats."

Though there may be some truth to that statement, eat less fats to have less cholesterol, that is only true if it is animal fats, because animal fats have fatty acids and cholesterol listed simultaneously in food tables.

To complicate matters, if you look at food tables, oils, vegetable oils, beans and a bunch of foods, have fatty acids MUFA, PUFA, Saturated fats,...etc. but definitely NO cholesterol, hence, I can argue that your doctor is wrong to say a statement of "avoid fats, because (you're) developing high-cholesterol", because simply avoiding oils and beans will not lower your lipoprotein levels of cholesterol, because you did not even add any cholesterol. But if your doctor said "avoid fats, because (you're) lipoprotein levels are increasing", then I can buy the fact that you should eat less oils or beans etc...

Lipoproteins are not the bad guys.
You don't need to decrease or increase lipoproteins.
The thing you need to worry about is who is in these cars or trucks.

You need to worry about the damaged fats and sterols.
Oxidized cholesterol, from cholesterol being cooked, and oxidized in that process will also sit in these cars.
Similarly cooked fatty acids, probably some may be damaged also can sit in these cars.
And when these cars carries damaged molecules to your heart et al., your organs can't use them and they have to deal with garbage/trash.


There is one more perspective on that statement, the gene perspective:
"to avoid fats, because I'm developing high-cholesterol" is a ridiculous statement.
Are your genes, coding for more human-cholesterol to be produced?
If you are then, you are probably "developing high-cholesterol".
but what are the chances that your genes suddenly got mutated to code for making more cholesterol than what you normally make?
and how would fats influence the making of cholesterol? when it is the gene?

---
- rambles of aytundra, no facts or quotations, please read with caution.

[RRM]

Yes, and what is a natural (healthy) level for some, maybe unnaturally high for others.
Absolute levels are therefore insufficient for any diagnosis.
Instead, you need to have your levels measured in different years before you may be diagnosed properly.

[Aytundra]

Fats? Mt Doctor told me to avoid fats, becuase I'm developing high-cholesteol

Oscar in Jan 2, 2007, highlighted the things that these transporters carry; assuming those percentages are still true today, here is the link and post.
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1038&p=10827&hilit ... ons#p10827

On a side note: to clarify about HDL/LDL: they are lipo-proteins, transporters of fat and cholesterol. There are also Chylomicrons and VLDL. What do they transport?

Protein, triglycerids, phospholipids, cholesterol in percentages.
1. Chylomicrons: 1.7 - 96 - 0.8 - 1.7
2. VLDL: 10 - 60 - 18 - 15
3. LDL: 25 - 10 - 22 - 45
4. HDL: 50 - 3 - 30 - 18

As we can see, LDL relatively transports the most cholesterol (45%) and HDL is next (18%). Likewise it will transport more of the oxysterols. So the problem doesn't lie in HDL/LDL itself, but the oxysterols they are transporting.

In addition to Oscar's post; LDL (10%) also transports more fat than HDL (3%), so that an increased fat consumption may lead to a higher LDL/HDL ratio.