Paleo Diet and Paleolithic Diet Questions & Answers

Question

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If one was over-fat and mal-nourished, then subsequently turned their health around with proper nutrition, weight bearing exercise and supplements (magnesium, D, K2), is it possible to weigh more, but measurements and body fat percentage remain the same?

Do your bones and organs get heavier as you become healthier?

Since there can be 2-5 pounds of bacteria in a healthy gut, if you heal your gut from many years of daily anti-biotic use/poor nutrition/wheat consumption do you now have more bacteria and therefore increase in weight?

What about blood volume? Joints, connective tissue etc?

Is this possible and if so does it take years or can noticeable healing happen within months?

I am really interested in the mechanism of what healing, exercise and proper nutrition does to the weight of the skeleton, organs and intestinal tract--not body re-composition (the understanding that muscle weighs more than fat is a given).

edited Mar 22 2011 at 1:36

asked Mar 17 2011 at 19:53

texasleah
4,809●1●14●35

	This is an interesting question - I was disappointed when it sunk out of sight the first time round and am glad that you bumped it with a bounty. Here's hoping that this time we'll get our answer. – Simibee Mar 22 2011 at 1:52
	I hope so too Simibee. I don't know why I am so interested in this, but as I am healing I envision my bones, teeth and heart getting stronger and denser so I am really curious. – texasleah Mar 22 2011 at 13:56

Kaz · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-22 05:30:26Z UTC

Regarding bones, yes, I imagine they would become heavier as they heal and repair.

A simple google search confirms my hypothesis:

Reversal of low bone density with a gluten-free diet in children and adolescents with celiac disease

http://www.ajcn.org/content/67/3/477.short

I'm sure other studies exist, as well.

Also, there's the exercise aspect involved, as well. I've always been under the assumption that weight-bearing exercise can prevent osteoporosis, and I found this to back up my conjecture:

Weight-Bearing Exercise, Overexercise, and Lumbar Bone Density Over Age 50 Years

http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/149/10/2325

I have access to other scholarly journals on my college account; if you wish for me to research it further, I'd be happy to. :)

ETA:

I found that sometimes having larger organs is not a sign of good health, as this study on obesity suggests:

The effect of obesity on kidney length in a healthy pediatric population.

Source: Pediatric Nephrology; Oct2009, Vol. 24 Issue 10, p2023-2027, 5p, 3 Charts, 2 Graphs

"As weight has been shown to correlate strongly with the size of various organs, we have observed that obese children have larger kidneys than their normal-weight counterparts...According to this analysis, obese patients had significantly larger kidneys than those of normal-weight patients ( P < 0.01)."

However, I still need to keep digging to find a relationship between organ weight and health restoration.

On a side note, I asked an optometrist if a larger eye was an indicator of good health, and he said it was usually indicative of myopia because "the focal point in a myopic eye is in front of the retina, so the bigger the eye, the more nearsighted." He didn't comment on whether or not that was necessarily an unhealthy eye, though.

So, not always is larger better. :)

losterman · Answer 2 · 2011-03-22 13:20:19Z UTC

Interesting question, especially regarding the weight/density of organs. I'm going to assume you don't have access to human organs, but you might have access to animal organs, yeah? How about buying a bunch of kidneys (or...something else) from grass-fed and grain-fed cows and weighing them up? See if there are any reliable differences? You'd have to control for the size of the organs, of course.

Yay science--I think I might just do this myself. Better yet, a bunch of people should do it, and we could compile a massive organ density dataset. Takers?

Ian · Answer 3 · 2011-03-22 01:39:30Z UTC

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found this

http://books.google.com/books?id=hS3_Wn_HSFQC&pg=PA62&lpg=PA62&dq=healthy+organs+denser&source=bl&ots=no-fYuP7p4&sig=QSFwe7SnhYe3ak7a8lVUkQ3Iy4A&hl=en&ei=fv2HTcHKJeSY0QGqxfT6DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=healthy%20organs%20denser&f=false

answered Mar 22 2011 at 1:39

Ian
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There's no way to put this gently, (or perhaps I'm too tired to try)so I apologise in advance if this comes off a little harshly. I don't really think that an uncited/unsubstantiated claim found in a quackish, raw foods diet book written by someone with no evident qualifications, falls under the category of appropriate evidence. – Simibee Mar 22 2011 at 1:49

Do healthy and well-nourished internal structures and organs weigh more than unhealthy ones?

3 Answers