But I've been thinking lately about palpitations, and what makes them worse. I've gotten so good at controlling them that I can basically shut them off with diet and exercise protocol. As I've mentioned in the past, cheese appears to be a prime contributor. Cottage cheese and milk seem almost as bad. However, I can consume 50 or 100g of butter in a day, and have no palpitations at all. So I'm starting to revise my theory that omega-6 is the culprit, as it's present in all these. But casein is one of the few ingredients common to cheese, cottage cheese, and milk, but absent from butter.
I've also observed that some cheeses cause palpitations more intensively than others. The difference appears to be protein content; the more protein (equivalently, the less fat) by percentage, the worse the palpitations.
Now why would a dairy protein, which surely doesn't much influence blood viscosity, contribute to palpitations? I have no idea. I'm just following the data where it leads me. Perhaps palpitations are more influenced by heart rhythm than blood viscosity, and perhaps casein does something disruptive in this regard. If you're a cardiology PhD student, then you just found your thesis study topic!
I would be remiss if I didn't mention here how cheese made from grass-fed cows is rich in conjugated linoleic acid and vitamin K2, which may serve to protect us from cancer and thwart vascular calcification, respectively. But these nutrients are found in the fat. So you might switch from your skim or part-skim cheese to the richer stuff. But if it comes from grain-fed cows or a nonsense processed food company, look elsewhere. If you think I'm nuts, then read what this PhD neurobiologist and nutrition researcher has to say about the matter.
I have to wonder whether casein is also the culprit in the association between skim milk and prostate cancer, as described in this Reuters article. A friend of mine, who is as much a nutrition nut as I am, once told me that rodents who obtained more than 5% of calories from casein, developed atypically high rates of cancer. Consider that heresay, but perhaps you can Google around and find the data.
By the way, I finally got off my longterm addiction to milk last year. For that matter, I rarely consume cottage cheese anymore, either (although it's a good sugar-free calcium source). But I do eat a stick of butter every 3 days or so, an egg almost daily, and probably a 300g of cheese a week. My high-fat diet (which, critically, is omega-3-6-balanced) keeps me lean and allows me to avoid the "afternoon drowsies" so familiar to those who eat lots of refined carbohydrate.
In writing this, it just dawned on me that calcium, like casein, is common to most dairy foods except butter. I wonder if it's actually the calcium that's to blame. As this study and many others appear to confirm, low serum magnesium exacerbates MVP. Magnesium and calcium have similar chemical properties; the same can be said of sodium and potassium. We find that ions with such similarities tend to compete with one another in the body. I wonder if these high-calcium dairy foods are causing magnesium to be out-competed in its role in regulating heart rhythm, for a period of several hours following digestion.
Let's not forget that calcium is a necessary nutrient. I haven't noticed palpitations from other sources. Perhaps there is something about the dairy delivery mechanism of this nutrient that's to blame.
So it could be casein, calcium, both, or neither. If it turns out that casein or dairy-delivered calcium drives palpitations, then I want 5% of your Nobel Prize! ;-)
