Seeking Health

PEPPERx3

Everything’s relative nowadays and my idea of health is probably quite different to yours or a kitten’s for that matter.

I’ve been doing family this past weekend so that my husband and I’d be at home to pick up our new kitten from the Blue Cross (a pet rehoming charity in the UK). And then stay at home to keep her (and us) entertained. She’s working a treat so far.

I think I need to get back to short posts. The ability to edit myself and turn one post into two or three had left me while dealing with our dying cat but, as you can see I don’t think I’ll be distracted by old age and possible pain of another being for the moment rather, enthusiastic exuberance and the idiocy of youth!

Bring it on.

The first thing that caught my eye on my return was an article about untested Ebola treatments causing a UK team of medics to walk out of their voluntary positions in Ebola treatment centres in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The team felt it would be unprofessional giving a treatment originally developed for heart conditions to a group of physically weakened and physiologically complicated sufferers (liver and kidney failure are amongst Ebola patients’ complications). The treatment had limited antiviral properties. The WHO had identified over 50 other treatments that had greater anti-viral strengths. The team were exposing themselves to the patients’ contagious blood all for questionable benefit.

This is another article that’s been brought to my attention. Statins are a drug that have been around for a while and have had some very good PR behind them as you’ll see from the post that explains the difficulties that arise when equating the NNT (Number Needed to Treat in order to see a worthwhile treatment outcome) for preventive medicines where you’re not saving lives rather, preventing deaths.

It’s fascinating stuff and really worth reading if only to get a bit of a handle on how we are so easily persuaded of a thing’s worth by sets of numbers which get mistakenly conflated with other meanings of numbers in other scenarios.

I could list the sorts of pharmaceutical therapies involving supplementation that have received similar treatments but this is a short post as it’s Christmas Day, I’ve just been playing with the kitten at the top of the page and now need to get me some xmas w friends.

Happy Christmas folks.

New Year post will be a rundown of the various strategies we can all do to help us feel at our best.

Happy New Year (depending on the depth of my gluten free mince pie haze) there maybe a post before NYE!

Where?

Where are the friends?

I was asked last week ‘where can I find stuff on your site?’

Only being a graphic designer/photographer and not being a web developer or coder (how lame does that make me sound?) for the moment, I had to point the subscriber to the magnifying glass/search box until I get posts categorised in a more useable way.

Eat, Movement and Sleep pages with links to all posts that make mention of them will be arriving first, I think. Perhaps over the holidays?

I’m in the hands of friends and family who are more IT literate than I (or should that be ‘me’?)

Being half American with Stateside cousins I’m dimly aware of Thanksgiving and consciously taking the time to think about what I have to be thankful for. My friends are pretty near the top of the list. Being able to ask for help at certain times helps everyone involved feel good in that exchange of skills.

Until we’ve eaten enough mince pies and gluten-free sweet potato brownies (recipe to follow when it’s finessed) the search box works pretty well to put any term in and see if it’s been talked about in previous posts.

Information is all well and good but when searching for something in particular becomes a task of arctic expedition proportions it can turn the joy of finding stuff out into a chore.

I’d really rather not turn a visit to this site into an extended geography homework session!

I’m just going to squeak this link in; it’s unrelated to the power of searching data but exercise really does make all the difference to me and makes my experience of life, richer.

challenge, perhaps?

a challenge to let the right ones in

in this post I’d like to add a supplement that I’d left off my previous two yeast posts. You could argue it was one of the most important additions during an effective dismantling of an overgrowth of candida.

  • Permavite powder; I didn’t use it for the first two months of my candida clearout which I mention here and here while I focused on reducing the invasive parasite which itself, I’ve been told was causing holes in my gut. Intestinal permeability can be caused by many things including a bedded in overgrowth of the yeast candida. When the parasite has been allowed to multiply unchallenged its form changes and it turns into a fungus, creating a thread like structure called hypha which can burrow beyond the gut and set up home all over the body.
  • HCL supplements; as we age we naturally produce less hydrochloric acid in our stomachs. When all is working well this is our first line of defense against bacteria that comes into the digestive tract in and on the food we eat. If we eat a low salt diet this can also impact how much acid we produce as sodium is needed in the creation of this essential acid.

There’s a whole other post on the finer details of our salt consumption (table salt=bad, rock or sea salt=good) but here is someone else’s version for the moment. Processed (ie table salt) versions of sodium have been stripped don’t hold the minerals that our bodies were developed to ingest at the same time as the electrolyte sodium.

If you’re getting heartburn or recurrent UTIs consider looking into the benefits of taking an HCL supplement with every meal. It may be responsible for reducing tiredness/fatigue after eating. This tiredness could also be down to eating foods your system has an intolerance to or a disordered bloodsugar response which I talk about briefly here.

A number of naturopathic approaches say these holes, which are sometimes referred to as Leaky Gut Syndrome can lead to undigested food particles entering the bloodstream. When this happens the immune system sees stuff that is not ‘self’ and mounts an immune response.

‘Leaky gut’s’ very existence is hotly debated in certain circles but some of the people questioning the theory’s existence (in my experience) talk of mysterious triggering of auto-immune conditions but so far have offered no better alternative.

  • Gluten
  • Legumes
  • Nightshade family of vegetables
  • Long term use of antibiotics, ibuprofen and any number of other medications.

Having the troops on high alert, facing a challenge with every forkful and behaving in a twitchy, trigger happy manner, attacking anything that looks a little bit different to self (a little like some members of the US police force) is not a long term strategy for any body.

As I started to see signs the overgrowth was lessening including waking with a clearer head, not feeling so… puffy and swollen and the size of my potbelly reducing aswell as losing 7 pounds and counting (whilst not even trying to) I started to use Permavite with each meal to build up my gut lining.

Slippery Elm, Aloe Vera and Marshmallow root supplements, okra green foodstuff and chia and flaxseed all have mucilaginous properties (they go gooey with water) and soothe the GI tract by creating another barrier to protect the gut lining from bacteria in the belly.

 

I listened to a presentation by Suzy Cohen the author of Drug Muggers, a pharmacist and functional medicine practitioner in the US, recently. In the book she talks about the various interactions prescription drugs can have with each other and the food we eat (fruit juice and cholesterol lowering drugs don’t mix, apparently) and the side effects they can have on our bodies.

Ability to edit myself has slipped (you may have noticed) while dealing with a dying cat at home.

She’s no longer in pain so I’m hoping to get back to doing the things I do every day to feel a little bit better.

LOTS of advice givers!

 

advice aplenty

As patients of incurable conditions nowadays we’re surrounded by advice from mostly well meaning folk. Today’s post will look at a handful of these suggestions. Some of them I first heard in relation to lesseniing MS’s effect on the body but which now have a wider audience.

 

I asked my neurologist, about 15 years ago about what different sorts of foods should or shouldn’t I be eating?

It won’t really make any difference, came his reply, as long as you eat a sensible low fat diet; the same thing as everyone is encouraged to do. I can refer you to our hospital’s dietitian if it’ll make you feel any happier?

His utter lack of interest in the fuel we provide ourselves with I felt was shortsighted at the very least. I’ve never put diesel in my petrol car because I’ve heard the car wouldn’t run so well if I were to do so. I went to the appointment and was told the only evidence she could find after searching the available data was a diet high in polyunsaturated fatty acid was mentioned in a couple of studies as showing potential worth in following.

 

Things have moved a little in the intervening years – well, there’s more information to be aware of and a greater need to pick a path through the avalanche of data.

15 years later and one of those suggested approaches to eating is widely recognised as Paleo. The Western world and our cousin seem to be on some form of it. You could argue the rest of the world are still on it (assuming they’re not yet under the shadow of the golden arches).

This shifting and creeping nature of food advice I feel highlights the similarities between various chronic diagnoses and people in general. We’re all trying to slow the aging process or, at least  ensure our time on earth is as comfortable and productive as it can be. Chronic disease is just some of our bodies choosing to age differently.

As scare stories about our food sources and methods of commercial production are revealed even some perfectly working bodies are wishing to keep those bodies from unnecessarily deteriorating by jumping on the bandwagon of… essentially… not eating stuff from packets.

 

Saturated fat is no longer the devil in disguise but it is considered so to some MS diets (see further down for a link to the Swank diet).

So, it would seem not just the oil but the heating of the oil is relevant.

  • This is one that I found recently. I was under the impression that canola oil as a foodstuff was questionable? For a start, there’s no such thing as a canola plant that might produce canola seed (Canola is in fact, according to wikipedia, a creation of the main suppliers of rapeseed oil from Canada).

I include links from a variety of sources to highlight the need to keep our wits about us!

The image is a field of oilseed rape in high summer near my home  – when becoming rapeseed oil it can be extracted mechanically involving solvents and heat; Canola (amongst others) or it can be cold pressed like the best virgin olive oils and this process is likely to cost more.

Canola provides omega VI essential fatty acid (which sounds like it should be a good thing, right?) but if we eat a typical Western diet/SAD (standard american diet) we’re most likely brimful of VI but deficient in omega III.

In a perfect world/caveman times/paleolithic era before farming when we lived in small communities and hunted and gathered for each other (pretty far from where we in the Western world are now) we’d eat a roughly one:one balance of the two fats but we eat biscuits and other tasty and addictive stuff from packets.

  • This is another oil story  (olives this time) but it has good news!
  • We’ll save saturated coconut fat for another post (one of the paleo folk’s essentials).

Stuff from packets is made to make profit (nothing wrong with that) but using the cheapest possible ingredients often means using these cheap seed and vegetable oils that are extracted in ways that involve substances I wouldn’t want to eat before it even gets to our plate, mouth (or oven for that matter).

Omega VI tend to be pro-inflammatory which, if you have a long term health challenge I believe your symptoms could be exacerbated by inflammation brought on by consuming way more VI than III?  This is what the ‘avalanche’ link at the top of the page says, anyway. Even if you don’t have a chronic condition a body will be happier and function better with less omega VI.

Check with your care giver or do a search on google but inflammation appears to lie at the heart of many intractable conditions for which there has been no cure found, as yet.

  • Omega III is anti-inflammatory and found in raw nuts and oily fish. Inflammation, as I discuss in an earlier post happens in our body and it’s a smart method to get the organism to sit still and allow healing to happen rather than cause further damage (a vast simplification but you get the gist).
  • Here is another page detailing the issues we have with inflammation in the body.
  • Here is another ms specific diet from a doctor with MS.
  • We haven’t even got onto the SWANK or the
  • Best Bet Diet (which is a modified Paleo approach and reduces the amount of foodstuffs the body might potentially react unfavourably to.
  • There are now so many nutrition based approaches for dealing with a long term condition we have a flood of information and websites and folk offering advice.
  • Which I appreciate is what I’m doing but at least I have no bias; I’m throwing bits of all that I’m aware of at you!

I’ve been listening to a talk from Sarah Ballantyne (author of the Paleo Approach, auto-immune diet book) and she explained some of the reasons for avoiding legumes (beans, chickpeas, peanuts, peas) and nightshade family (potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants/aubergines, peppers).

Saponins somehow came into her explanation. They can contribute to making holes in your gut which allows food particles to enter the bloodstream and create things for your immune system to throw a hissy fit at. Fatigue can be one of the side effects. I’m putting together an article on the subject of a leaky gut at the moment.

Getting a bit of the ‘why’  has helped me knock legumes off my daily diet something I’d struggled with in the past (legumes and nightshades were verboten on the Best Bet Diet also).

I’m choosing to follow an adapted paleo diet (sweet potato in place of white potatoes but I don’t go quite as crazy for bacon as they seem to. It was a bit of a bind to avoid eating legumes after stopping gluten a lot but not all of the MS (and lifestyle paleo) diets agree that our bodies weren’t built to tolerate a grain which has only really been around in an evolutionarily noticeable quantity for not more than 10,000 years.

Farming and a steady food supply has brought huge progress to society if you are one of the consumers. If you have been one of the producers of grain, you have been tied to the soil and made a slave to this phenomenally successful organism.

I’d love to hear from you to find out what foods you’ve found worth avoiding or ones you really can’t imagine ever avoiding!

We’re all basically the same but slightly different beings.

Find your own path, I’d love to hear it.

I still don’t think I’ve settled on mine although this article (from a mainstream news source) is a help!