Soy & Seizures
5:58AM in Apr0n, back home tagged epilepsy, glutamic acid, glutamine, good, how i brain, quack science, seizures, soy, stupid head types, tofu Glutamic Acid, it's coming to get you... or not? All I can say is I love my tofu
Seriously, who's going to just walk away from that? That new restaurant Skillet can suck itTuesday I got a call regarding soy products causing seizures. Granted it was offered though wary in no small part to my general unwillingness to pay attention to criticism regarding diet choices. Additionally she was cautious, as evidenced by the dubious, utterly-qualified way in which the potential issue was brought up. This is not a post about people in general or the specific thoughtfulness behind the concern. I am already difficult to talk to sometimes, so maybe an account of why is called for from time to time.
Disclaimer:
At a structural level, being told something about my health always has a mental interaction. I would like to document that. Be it advice, suggestions, raw data, personal reflections; I take it all in. I do not mean to discourage discussion to me about my health; I do intend to inform every person of the consequences to the unmitigated write access they have to my core programming.
Here goes...
I fucking love being epileptic and all the fun that comes with it. No matter who is concerned about you, no matter how delicately they deliver the most considered and deliberated data, if the data is health related there is always a twenty minute to four hour delay before I the autobodies back down.
It never has much to do in any objective way with the speaker, or even the particular suggestion. The person needn't intend or intone an ounce of condescension, a drizzle of pretension, and they don't even need to be telling you something because they know better than you.
People talking about my health has a long and pedantic history. Typically it took the form of authority and advocate. Consequently, add participant I learned to be subject first and foremost, spectator and repository of the oral history of them-that-came-down-the-mountain thereafter.
Now, in thirty two years I have developed a patchwork of orphan cognates derived from doctors (the same advice repeated year over year changes shape), other epileptics, and web sites (order of authority descending).
They generally are utterly irreconcilable, each datum a factoid of eventually unknown origin, lacking context and scope, applicable only as some effectively deprecated record. Each pointer making a pivot on a path with no beginning and no particularly tangible end.
Frequently, when someone requests a commit of some new record, it is met with a visceral defensiveness no matter how well-meaning it may have been.
Occasionally I can recompose and listen; this can take twenty minutes to an hour or more. Frequently I won't notice that it's advice. Problem-solving gets frequent passes; that is, until I realize that what ever the problem, no matter the solution, I've almost inevitably thought it through before.
The problem with advice, problem-solution sets, and general data is that it is heavily taxing to engage. Imagine a piece of software you've been working on for some eighteen years. Itself being built with habits developed from the fourteen years prior. And in those eighteen years you have revised and constructed new and exciting methods to deal with the problem.
You've scrapped years of data. years of dedication to failed paradigms that started of with high promise, executed better and worse, lived in denial of its painful inefficacy, dealt with the fallout, not dealt with it, and ultimately threw it out and tried all over again.
Each time you meet a new doctor, try a new drug, change your diet, listen to someone with an opinion, listen to lived one about how concerned they are, listened to how much they get hurt, each time you listen to a smug snake-oil bullshit doctor show on the teevee programmed for the bourgeois and destitute alike; something inside you happens.
You recompile. You make room for whatever they say. You line it up and make it soluble and pretend it's palatable. You rewire some permissions, check for conflicts, comment out the old shit or the less useful stuff or the stuff you're not delusionally attached to, change your tags on it all. And then you compile. You take those bits and scraps of scripts of floating data fit for the Pacific trash island, and convert them to executable code.
And you walk around with this always and everywhere. You never suffer, you never go negative, you never get weak; and people laud you for this because fuck-all if they don't, they don't want you doing any of that shit for their own sanity. Oh christ you want needs and must-needs? Well you must not need my support because if you put your needs anywhere near me I will withdraw faster than you can imagine.
You have this fuck ton of code towering over you that will topple over if you stop loving it. This program is your whole life. It is your identity, it is your heat and soul, it is your wants and your hopes and limitations and family and friends and lovers woven into every line. No deletions ever, you comment that shit out. No elegance, no "code is poetry" in here; it matters too much for that.
Do tofu and other soy products cause seizures?
Well, according to this guy who believes in the healing power of coffee enemas, yes.
oh, but there's so much more;
WHY NUTRITIONAL BALANCING SCIENCE?
Most cases of epilepsy or seizures are, in fact, just biochemical imbalances that may be subtle, but due to their nature or location, they have very powerful effects upon the central nervous system. This is the reason I imagine that so many people respond well to our approach.
Oh, so the science is that the glutamine causes seizures?
"These findings support the hypothesis that a deficiency in hippocampal glutamine synthetase causes recurrent seizures, even in the absence of classical mesial temporal sclerosis, and that restoration of glutamine synthetase may represent a novel approach to therapeutic intervention in this disease."
glu·ta·mine (glt
-m
n
)
n. Abbr. GluA nonessential amino acid that occurs widely in proteins and blood and other tissue and is metabolized to yield urinary ammonia. Also called glutaminic acid.
Reader Comments (1)
Well. 2,169 mg (http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/legumes-and-legume-products/4393/2) in a half cup of tofu, as compared to 3,669 mg (http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/poultry-products/703/2) in a half cup of chicken (skinless, boneless, grilled). If the concern is glutamic acid, it is present in a lot of foods.
The problematic element in all of this is that it borders on the whole MSG debate and a thousand other dubious and propagandized claims.
So at the end of the day, how does one go about caring about this information?