Seignalet’s diet: Hi, does anyone have... - PBC Foundation

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Seignalet’s diet

drewh profile image
11 Replies

Hi, does anyone have experience of following Prof Jean Seignalet’s diet protocol for autoimmune disease? There are claims of recovery on his French website, including for two with PBC. Drew

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drewh profile image
drewh
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Betonarme profile image
Betonarme

interesting stuff....I'll dig this.

Here: seignalet.fr/images/pdf/aut...

They claim 6 pbc patients out of 7 got total remission and 1 patient shows definite improvement. Looks like He advises us that we should go back to roots as our hunter & gatherer ancients do eat: ancestral diet!

It might work....I believe that many autoimmune disorders has to do with Technology and it's effects on environment.

Thanks for the share of information.....

drewh profile image
drewh in reply to Betonarme

Thank you! That is an updated version of the pdf I had seen. It's the old story of swings and roundabouts. Cooking gave humans the possibility of eating infected and also semi-digestible meats along with the legions of plants that have evolved to make substances that deter or kill off animals that eat them. Much of early medicine is based on the supposedly judicious used of such plant poisons. Of course, when plants need to have animals eat and disperse their seeds then the fruits that contain the seeds are ripened. For ripened read 'pumped full of the ridiculously (nearly 10x that of glucose!) sweet sugar known as fructose'. We cannot do much with fructose and in high amounts it promotes swift passage through the gut to disperse any seeds that survive.

So there are downsides to eating some plants uncooked (e.g. the potato family), and meats also. However, there are also downsides to eating cooked foods. For example several of the 'paleo' diets that I have looked at seem to go in for toasting and browning. The trouble with such cooking procedures is that the heating changes some of the food substances to produce a substance called acrylamide. Many lab workers use pure acrylamide on a daily basis. About twenty years ago the Swedish health authorities investigated how much lab workers were ingesting acrylamide. They were shocked to find that non-lab workers used as controls had similar amounts of acrylamide in their blood as the lab workers did. The acrylamide story has been investigated ever since. Here is a link to Cancer Research UK's article on acrylamide and cancer: cancerresearchuk.org/about-...

What is not discussed is the effect of cooking produced acrylamide on autoimmune disease which is rising in the so-called developed world. No one has apparently drawn a clear relationship between high heat cooking (especially prevalent with convenience foods) and autoimmune disease, but I note that what appears to be a unique feature of Seignalet’s diet is that cooking above 100C. (the temperature of water boiling) is avoided - steaming, poaching, raw eggs and meats are the order of the day. If there are also other products of high heat cooking along with acrylamide then a low heat cooking version of Seignalet’s diet seems to be a valid way forward. Maybe!

Optiplex990 profile image
Optiplex990 in reply to drewh

How can one tell if a report like this diet is a genuine report. With so much scamming and fake news floating about on the internet, it is understandable if one becomes sceptical and reluctant to even investigate claims like this. Not to mention false hope to those who have enough problems and emotions to deal with.

Betonarme profile image
Betonarme in reply to Optiplex990

This is one of the first questions one asks after seeing a piece of paper, stating "with our approach we achieved this and that"......You are of course right....We can also be not 100% assured that some other clinical trials (key words: randomized, open label, double blind etc.) are not manipulated.

But with the Diet above, they don't sell us some chemical with some potential side effects. All they say: Do not eat this but this and that and so on. Anyone can try it out at no risk to see if it's working......This is all I can say at the moment.

Optiplex990 profile image
Optiplex990 in reply to Betonarme

Surely to convince the only evidence needed to verify the trials is for a statutory body to interview and have access to medical records of the patients who has undergone the clinical trials.

Biddyb profile image
Biddyb

Not seen it but will certainly take a look thanks for sharing

kandiepat profile image
kandiepat

Yes, Thankyou for posting. I'm into diets at the moment - but I thought our bile ducts have closed up or disappeared, how can a diet sort that problem out? I was told I was on Urso for life. I know Tumeric gives me a pain and I assume that it comes up against a blocked duct or something. I must look at Seingelets diet and see what it says. kandiepat

Shulsey profile image
Shulsey

Im a bit skeptical myself. I have a hard time believing that these people went into complete remission. It seems that it would have been such a amazing ordeal that we would all have seen it somewhere or our specialists would know of this. I've never heard of PBC going the other direction. If our livers are at cirrhosis stage you cannot reverse that. The liver tries to regenerate, but due to the bile ducts being "out of order" this only causes scaring. This is something that should be discussed with a heptologist. They are the doctors that will be able to research if this is for real. I think I'll send this article to my university hep & see what he says.

Stay strong❣️

Shannon

Optiplex990 profile image
Optiplex990 in reply to Shulsey

While I would like it to be the case for these people and others like them. Your sentiments are mine. How can this be pursued? So that all PBC patients are made aware of this.

We could even setup a trial of our own???

drewh profile image
drewh in reply to Optiplex990

Unlike the authors of other paleo-type diets that I have come across, Jean Seignalet was a full medical professor who was recognised in the French medical community as having a research background, with publications in mainstream medical journals such as the Lancet. He was responsible for a kidney transplant clinic, and has published on immunological matters at a level that would appear to be more than sufficient to give support to a full trial of his dietary treatment in the light of the claimed benefits.

translate.google.com/transl...

However, I guess his findings would have difficulty in finding funding for a full impartial national trial because of the biomedical approach that prevails in the medical community. Indeed, from a brief perusal of the French website it would appear that supporters and those who have benefited from the diet have ernestedly requested a national medical trial in France.

autoimmunemom.com/diet/dr-s...

seignalet.fr/en/who-is-jean...

seignaletplus.com/

Remember that remission is not the same as cure. For remission to be maintained the diet would have to be maintained as well. It is presumably best to adopt the diet early in an autoimmune disease. Perhaps others can find evidence to the contrary. I would say that there are still going to be problems that some people will meet adjusting to the diet for themselves and also to their environmental exposures (where possible). A look at the FODMAP diet may given further insight - I am thinking particularly of plant saponins, phytates and lectins. There will also be compounds known as AGEs, HCAs, andPAHs. Yes, it can appear complicated, but it will turn out to be that the basics are clear and simple. Seignalet's perceptions are based on perceptions that may be more than 30yrs out of date, although insightful in that light.

On acrylamide:

healwithfood.org/list/foods...

healthambition.com/acrylami...

thehealthyhomeeconomist.com...

geneticliteracyproject.org/...

Apparently a translator has translated the Seignalet diet book with the permission of Prof Seignalet's daughters:

amazon.com/prevent-reverse-...

Good luck with that!

Right, I'm just going to try this chamolmile tea that I have bought. Cheers!

whym profile image
whym

Hi Drew, our son potentially (we're not so sure about this right now) has PSC and UC. As soon as we learned about his liver issues we changed to a kind of paleo/seignalet diet and his calprotectine level level dropped from 900 to low 300s in two months. His colonoscopy was showing mild issues. Doctor said this was a coincidence of course and said we shouldn't bother about food and this was just a coincidence. He wouldn't allow some more months to see what would happen prescribed nasty medication. Not going down that path yet. Have you tried a diet change?

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