Kidney Disease
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38043090
The piece linked to in the comment engages in industry standard language of a sort intended to gatekeep out non professionals. This allows professionals to sound smart and knowledgeable while effectively saying nothing.
Gulf War Syndrome means: American military personnel who served in the Gulf War got sick. We don't know why.
Last I checked, there were three different sets of symptoms for Gulf War Syndrome. It's possible there are different maladies getting this label because it really just means "I served in the Gulf War and my health mysteriously went to hell after that and no one can fix me."
The linked piece is conjecture. It's an attempt to formulate a hypothesis to try to explain something in a way that sounds plausible. It probably has no serious traction because it's not really science. It's not really supporting a conclusion or explaining a known event.
It's also guilty of the cardinal sin of science: Confirmation Bias.
Humans try to look for things which agree with their ideas. They don't look for checks and balances usually. They don't look for things which contradict them.
So for example you ask someone to guess a set of numbers and they list even numbers, get told "yes, those are all in the set," guess even numbers as the set, get told "no" and continue to ask about more even numbers. The set may be all real numbers but they have gotten fixated on even numbers. They typically do not list an odd number to see if that also fits.
There are more than 60 known genetic kidney diseases. This is a broad topic that I won't be delving into anytime soon.
Things I know:
Watermelon is excellent kidney support. I consumed it something like 6 days a week most weeks for two years. Previous calculations have suggested that eating watermelon every other day may roughly approximate my "dosage."
Kidneys and liver work together. The liver uses a lot of glutathione. You cannot directly supplement glutathione. You need a glutathione precursor.
Milk thistle is a glutathione precursor. It is what I used as liver support. Some people don't tolerate it well. I have been unable to find the recommended alternative in my records and the group where I got the info no longer exists. If you don't tolerate it, you need to look for a different glutathione precursor.
See also: Liver Support
The linked piece talks about vitamin A. It's a lipid and toxic chemicals accumulate in fat. This is part of why it's generally advisable and a longstanding known human best practice to eat lower on the food chain.
See also:
Toxic chemicals in fats also fits generally with the function of the kidneys because they clean the blood and it fits with the larger known context that we are poisoning our planet with PFAS ("forever chemicals"), microplastics, pesticides, petrochemicals and assorted other newly created man-made chemicals that life did not evolve with historically.
I avoid peanut oil which is very pro inflammatory. The linked piece speaks of the arachidonic acid pathway and years ago I thought arachidonic acid was why peanut oil was pro inflammatory. A man with a PhD in chemistry made a remark about it and it may have been a typo of arachidic acid.
So my understanding of arachidonic acid is on shaky ground, possibly due to taking a statement to heart from someone I trusted who may have typoed the pertinent detail because searches do not confirm what I thought I knew.
BUT I also avoid corn oil which does cause me problems and my reading indicates it doesn't contain arachidonic acid but does contain precursors which the body readily turns into arachidonic acid.
So I have one piece of info that fits my previous ideas and one piece which contradicts them.
Best practice: Start a food journal and closely track all oils and fats you consume and try to identify which ones cause YOU problems and eliminate them from your diet.
This works whether or not you have a fancy hypothesis for why. It's a symptomatic approach which is a longstanding default treatment modality in the face of not knowing what is wrong because it's a best practice that works without pretending you are smart and know things and deserve the big bucks and spiffy title.
