RedFox said:
Not only does the breakdown of the system lead to chronic disease, but so does chronic disease lead to the breakdown of the system. Catch 22.
That's exactly what I've been thinking. Hulda Clark had 2/3 of the picture, I think -- toxicity and infection. Amy Yasko's tripartite model adds the crucial third element, which is genetics. It comes down to knowledge of the machine, which in the current context means knowledge of your genetic profile and weaknesses, knowledge of environmental toxicity and how it affects your body, and knowledge of infectious agents and how they interact with the first two. Gaps in knowledge along any of these three lines will weaken the effects of what you are trying to accomplish along the others.
I came across an interview with Chris Kresser and Paul Jaminet yesterday that is relevant to the diet/infection question, particularly if you're looking at protozoa like toxomoplasma gondii. The whole article is probably worth reading, but here's the relevant part:
http://chriskresser.com/episode-15-dr-paul-jaminet-on-chronic-infections-depression-more/
Chris: Right, so how can somebody, the second part of that question is how can someone distinguish between, what are the symptoms of infection first and then how can someone distinguish between the different types of infection fungal, bacterial, parasitic?
Paul: Yeah well this is one place I think diet can really help, is in diagnosis. Medicine is still in a primitive state it’s not very good for diagnosing these infections much less treating them. But a lot of these pathogens respond very differently to different diets. So one of the key differences is in how they respond to a ketogenic diet for instance. So pathogens that have mitochondria like fungi and protozoa can metabolize ketones for energy. Bacteria and viruses can’t, and so if you go on a ketogenic diet you’ll starve bacteria and viruses but you’ll feed fungi and protozoa. And so a simple thing to do is go on a ketogenic diet for a while, do your symptoms get worse or better. And that can tell you which class of pathogen you have, one with mitochondria or one that doesn’t have mitochondria. And those kinds of tests can be a big help, and I think part of the reason medicine doesn’t succeed against all these diseases is that nobody varies their diet, they’re always eating the same diet. It’s always 50% carbs with lots of wheat and sugar, plenty of vegetable oils, if you tell people to change their diet and eat healthy they look around and find other sources of the same nutrients, certainly never sample a ketogenic diet. So our basic diet, the perfect health diet, aims to be pretty much balanced, it aims to supply in food the amounts of nutrients that your body needs. And we tweak it in various ways so we tend to be very slightly low carb, but for therapeutic purposes and certain diseases we might go to more extreme diets like a ketogenic diet that’s more low carb or there’s a few diseases that may benefit from going higher carb. But also even apart from treatment the diet is a good diagnostic tool. And it’s also helpful for gut infections to vary the types of food you eat, different foods get digested in different places in the digestive tract. Different things are accessible to different kinds of pathogens, the time scales in which things happen have diagnostic value. So fungi tend to do everything slower than bacteria, they multiply a lot slower, so fungal infections tend to be relatively stable whereas bacterial infections can be much more variable. There’s a lot of ways you can manipulate diet and help understand your own disease and that can guide you to good treatments.
Chris: What’s interesting is, as you’re probably aware in the alternative health world there’s a lot of different perceptions about how to deal with fungal infections and the word candida is thrown around a lot, which I think obviously that candida infection is real but I also, in my experience see it kind of slapped on as a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning we can’t figure out what else it is so we’ll just call it candida. But I’m really interested in what you were saying, I read your article when you talked about how fungi can utilize ketones and tend to progress on ketogenic diets because one of the interesting things about how the candida diet is typically administered is people remove fruit, they remove carbohydrates, starchy tubers and grains and I think they end up being on a very low carbohydrate diet in a lot of cases and perhaps not completely ketogenic or not strongly ketogenic but maybe mildly ketogenic and I see a lot of patients who just get worse and worse on those diets so I wonder if it has something to do with this mechanism that you’re talking about.
Paul: Yeah I think it’s very likely. It’s not bad to go low carb by standard American diet standards, I think probably optimal for candida might be 600-800 carb calories a day, the average American gets maybe 1700 so cutting carbs in half for the average American is a good move. But going too low carb definitely risks systemic invasion so the very low carb approach, it’s not bad for a fungal gut infection but it’s not that good either. It doesn’t do that much to promote good bacteria taking over the gut. A lot of plant foods can really help suppress fungi in the gut and promote bacteria. So they can help give you a better gut flora and I think a lot of people who go extremely low carb can end up with a gut dysbiosis of some kind after years on these extreme low carb diets.
Chris: Yeah I agree with that and I’ve definitely seen that to be true in my practice. And what about brain infections Paul, this is something you’ve talked a lot about are the nerves in the brain susceptible to the same pathogens?
Paul: Yeah they are. The brain seems to be more vulnerable to bacteria especially and a little less vulnerable to fungi. There are some protozoa that can live well in the brain, some viruses flourish there. The thing about the brain is it’s pretty rich in glucose which bacteria like. Or glucose products like pyruvate or lactate which they can metabolize. So it’s kind of a paradise for bacteria and so it’s very important to maintain the integrity of the blood-brain barrier and try to help keep them out. But just like people get leaky guts they get a leaky blood-brain barrier. Also it’s not uncommon if people get some kind of trauma to the head, they get some kind of brain injury involving bleeding, that breaches the blood-brain barrier and very commonly people get brain infections that develop after some kind of head trauma. They’re not uncommon and bacteria do well in the brain, and fortunately ketogenic diets can be very helpful. Bacteria can’t metabolize ketones, when you’re on a ketogenic diet glucose levels decrease, so you’re starving the bacteria. And ketogenic diets also promote autophagy which is part of the immune response. And you can also promote that even more with a low protein diet and so in that process the cell basically has its own self digestion machinery, little digestive vesicles called lysosomes that go around and look for junk that the cell doesn’t need and they destroy it, digest it, and among the things they’ll find when they’re looking for junk are bacteria and viruses. So keeping autophagy going very frequently by occasional fasting or occasional ketogenic dieting or low protein dieting either intermittently or regularly, all of those things will help promote brain health and help keep your brain free of infections. And I think brain infections are responsible for a lot of late life degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and probably others too. The brain is kind of a special place, it’s a little sheltered in terms of its nutritional status, it doesn’t vary as much with diet as the rest of the body. It has its own kind of immune functions, it’s own kind of needs, so the symptoms are a little different. So I would say in general the three places to look for different kinds of, classes of symptoms would be the gut, brain, and the body. And each one has it’s own characteristic symptoms and pathologies.
So that's a bit of a revelation about candida. At first, one might think that it would be a good idea to starve fungi and protozoa of ketones, but the issue may be a bit more complex. If you have infections, you're essentially eating for two, kind of like being pregnant (I know that's a weird thought) -- so the situation might be something like this Q/A interchange on Stephen Buhner's site about arginine:
http://buhnerhealinglyme.com/uncategorized/okay-to-supplement-l-arginine-with-mycoplasma/
Dear Stephen,
I read an article on the Rain-Tree website about supplementing l-arginine with mycoplasma, saying: “supplementing back the depleted amino acids has been reported to be helpful in some recovering from these infections. These include L-cysteine, L-tyrosine, L-glutamine, L-carnitine, and malic acid. Remember, however, that mycoplasmas thrive on arginine! Avoid L-arginine supplements and multi-amino acid formulas containing L-arginine, as well as foods rich in arginine to avoid feeding the mycoplasmas. The richest food sources of arginine (to avoid) are nuts and seeds, including the oils derived from seeds and nuts which should be eliminated or drastically reduced in the diet.” Under these circumstances, is the use of L-arginine when treating mycoplasma still okay? Also, would it be okay to take milk thistle, which is a seed?
Stephen’s response:
Here is the skinny on mycoplasmas and arginine: many mycoplasmas take arginine from the body to grow. THINK ABOUT IT: many mycoplasmas take arginine from the body to grow. WE, their human hosts, NEED arginine to be healthy. The mycoplasmas are going to get arginine no matter what. In fact what they do is scavenge if from your body’s tissues. That depletes your body of that substance and believe me, it is a crucial substance that you really do need. Some websites share horror stories About FEEDING the mycoplasmas if you take L-arginine. No matter what they will get it one way or another, so it matters not, for them, if you take a supplement or not. However FOR YOU, it is rather crucial to keep your arginine levels high since it is essential to your healthy functioning. Further, a number of mycoplasmas are actually sensitive to arginine, it can reduce their numbers in the body. So no matter what, you should be taking an L-arginine supplement or else eating foods high in arginine. Several score peer reviewed journal papers have noted that the only way to resolve cellular problems in infected mycoplasma cells is TO REPLACE THE ARGININE. So, yes, take the arginine. And the milk thistle is good to take as well.
While doing some other research yesterday, I ran across this guy named Gary Tunsky:
http://www.phcelltox.com/
He seems to be one of a group of doctors that I think of loosely as Christian Libertarian (also including Dr. Tent, Douglass Kaufmann, Joel Wallach, Leonard Horowitz, etc). This is a video of his where he talks about his basic model of health:
I'm not quite sure what to think of him yet -- he claims in another video that he gained his most significant insights after receiving a "download from the Holy Spirit", and when he emphasizes certain points, his pronunciation changes and it reminds me of how Barbara Marciniak speaks when she's channeling the Pleiadians. Anyway, from one article that's been carried on Rense's site (again, the whole article is worth taking a look at, maybe especially the part about cholesterol):
_http://www.rense.com/general62/molecularterrorism.htm
Protocols To Treat Mycoplasma
Since Mycoplasma cannot be successfully treated with the usual short course duration of antibiotics due to their intracellular location, slow proliferation rate and inherent resistance to most antibiotics, the few Mycoplasma experts that specialize in this field are recommending six-months to one year of non-stop treatments using strong antibiotics such as Cipro and Doxycycline. However, if a patient does not want to destroy their body and immune system with Cipro and Doxycycline, a total overhaul of every cell from head to toe using a multi-faceted, non-toxic, holistic treatment approach is absolutely necessary to overcome Mycoplasma infections naturally. This is why vitamins and nutritional supplementation are so important in the therapy. Chronic illness patients must also be weaned off antidepressants and other potential immune suppressing drugs before they can fully recover from their illnesses.
I'm not sure what to think of this, although I know it's the direction Stephen Buhner is going in (
Herbal Antibiotics,
Herbal Antivirals). Whether or not one uses an antibiotic protocol to treat a chronic infection may ultimately depend on several factors, including access to resources, cost variables, and a number of other things. I'm considering the antibiotic protocol myself, and will talk to my doctor about it in a few days, but I wanted to bring this up as something that may deserve some additional research.
Speaking of disinfo sites, there's one thing I'd like to ask for some help on from anyone with the interest and time. It turns out that mycoplasmas have been discussed on several alt/disinfo forums, and there's a particularly good collection of links here:
_http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=190065.0
In several cases, there are links to other forums, and sometimes those have links to other forums (etc, etc). Some of it is blatant disinfo about things like chemtrails, but I noticed that there are also some links to threads on Grant and Nancy Nicolson, who are the developers of the protocol that Gaby is currently refining and has recently attached a few papers on. That may be worth following up on.
Finally, here's a paper on mitochondria and osteoarthritis that has some interesting information that ties in to other things we're looking at:
http://www.wellnessresources.com/health/articles/mitochondria_and_osteoarthritis_an_exciting_new_frontier/
Laura said:
Now, another thing has been on my mind over the last few weeks. Keep in mind that today I'm finishing up my 8th cycle of metronidazole and on this one, have had virtually no reaction that I can detect. What is on my mind, what I have noticed for a few weeks now, is a subtle change in thinking. I don't want to say too much because I need to continue to observe this, but what I will say is that it is like chains are falling off my mind.
In addition to that, there is a different feeling in my legs. I've commented often enough about the fact that my legs have always felt leaden especially when I go up and down stairs. Well, it's too soon for a significant change, but there is enough difference to notice.
That's excellent news, Laura -- it would certainly be unsettling to find out one has been living for decades with psychedelic compounds in their system. Best wishes on your continued improvement, and looking forward to updates!
