coping mechanisms Archives • Page 2 of 3 • Chronic Alternatives

positivity, because you’re worth it!

It’s been a kind of a busy season including the most recent piece in my health and wellbeing puzzle which involved a welcome shot of positivity… and an overnight stay in den Haag last month.

Most if not all the posts in this blog from the last year and more, address something in life which can be adapted or adjusted to make our life a little bit better.

Life hacks?

Hardly, as I lack the dedication to attach scientific rigour to things I’ve found out and chosen to share with anyone that’s interested.

Looking online; reporting on hacks would appear to be a mainly male pursuit, or perhaps they’re just the ones that better broadcast their results?

Anyway, speaking to the dutch therapist and walking away with a stack of his handwritten notes has left me googling quite a lot!

…”And then I discovered the PADs.

Well, I didn’t discover them, of course — they’ve been known for decades — but what I learned in my little sabbatical from corporate science here at Atlas is that autoimmune disease is caused by autoantigens.

Duh, you say.

But that statement has more content than your typical tautology. Autoantigens are active participants in the initiation and development of autoimmunity. After all, breaking tolerance is not a trivial thing — we have elaborate mechanisms to make sure that it doesn’t happen. So you need to produce autoantigens in sufficient quantity and context to prompt your immune system into performing an unnatural act. Then, over subsequent years and decades, you have to continue to produce autoantigens to mature the immune response to the point that it becomes clinically relevant. Once disease gets going, autoantigens are the raw fuel for the inflammatory cycle that sets up in target organs, and they drive the formation and deposition of immune complexes, which account for much of the morbidity and mortality in patients.

So, yeah, autoantigens are kind of a big deal. What if you could stop the body from producing them? What if you could deprive the immune system of its inflammatory fuel?”

PAD inhibition, just one amongst a stack of other scribbles from the dutchman,

led me to the quote above which is the most rational description I’ve seen for contracting a variety of chronic conditions and explains the relative lack of effectiveness of immunomodulators

I feel like I’ve been given a lifeline! Having a condition that people don’t seem able to treat effectively can ultimately be quite lonely. The consultation with a Dutchman left me feeling more optimistic than I have for a long time.

I believe that positivity, now bathing my body’s cells in place of state engineered defeatism is as much of a boost to my health as any amount of exercise and personalised physio. In the next few posts I’ll go further into what I’ve been told and found out, including breathing exercises and eating plenty of good fats, no stuff from packets and a little less than a kilo of veg a day!

stress and pedalogate!

My lack of speed in getting a post out allows me to refer to stress and pedalogate and roll a couple of subjects together that I think are related.

One of them has a more English sensibility to it and the other is global in its appeal. Both, I feel are worth thinking about a bit more thoughtfully as human beings.

The first is Pedalogate! The British media had a field day when the newspapers were full of stories that highlighted some of the NHS’ more surprising expenditure.

Our national Health Service was paying for leisure activities (instead of questionably effective pharmaceutical treatments?) for some patients with various types of long term illness. At the bottom of this post will be a link to an article from the Daily Mail. Our chances to experience escapism should never be looked down on. whether through a James Bond movie, a good book or creating imaginary worlds!

My recent researches investigating psychoneuroimmunology have included the findings from the endocrinologist Hans Selye in the 1930s. His groundbreaking work looked into the effects of stress on the immune systems of lab rats.

His General Adaptation Syndrome examined an organism’s ability to take stress in its stride.

As an exquisitely balanced organism we’re designed to be resilient and thrive under fire from the slings and arrows that life has in store for most if not all of us.

The breakdown of this bouncebackability happens over long term exposure to a stressor.

It seems this crucial piece of research that is now coming back into prominence hasn’t necessarily been taken to heart by the wider public?

At best, the wide ranging effects of stress seem to be paid lip service to.

But ultimately the research points toward this: We can affect how our body functions by how we think!

How huge is that?

Sitting in a pedalo on a lake and feeling nature around us can help us to think more clearly.

A pedalo trip could give the patient a brief respite from the situation they’re more than capable of getting themselves stuck in by repeating negative thought patterns.

Being given the chance to leave our everyday existence allows us breathing space and the chance to get a bit of distance on a situation that, if we’re off sick from work we could probably benefit from!

This autumn has involved taking apart some of my own negative thought processes some of which go back decades and I hope now I am aware of them, I will be able to examine and change my situation?

The article in the Daily Mail

an explanation of the image (I don’t have one of a pedalo) but its creation represents my efforts at escapism which gives me the chance to take me out of myself, get a bit of distance and think more clearly.

How’s your community?

This post is about a question I’ve had for quite a long time.

I started wondering about a week before I broke my foot. Two metatarsals as it turned out the next morning at Accident and Emergency made a truly memorable definitive almost, cracking sound.

Instead of earning the injury smothered in glory and basking in shades of heroism on a field of play somewhere, I misjudged the last step at the bottom of a flight of stairs… in my own home.

I was distracted by something (you’ve perhaps noticed that likelihood from the breadth of previous posts). I choose to keep reminding myself fuzzy thinking and unclarified thought processes happen even to people without the cognitive issues MS can bring.

…Let’s get back to a topic in this post:

At the end of 2013 as an owner of a long term condition and a potential beneficiary of future medical research, I was invited to take a tour around a stem cell lab in Cambridge. The mice whose brains provide said cells are looked after incredibly well. Good food (I assume although I didn’t taste it), fresh air and calming, soothing treatment right up until the point of execution.

Even before a trial can start the three Rs of animal research must be asked before any vivisection can take place:

Replace the use of animals with alternative techniques, or avoid the use of animals altogether.
Reduce the number of animals used to a minimum, to obtain information from fewer animals or more information from the same number of animals.
Refine the way experiments are carried out, to make sure animals suffer as little as possible. This includes better housing and improvements to procedures which minimise pain and suffering and/or improve animal welfare.

(Taken from Understanding Animal Research (the organisors of the event at one of Cambridge University’s colleges).

Their physical condition was being well taken care of but the thing that might have distracted me from the bottom step before I met it sooner than expected, was curiosity and concern about the animals’ wellbeing as I knew their health was well catered for.

The folk working in the lab were very pleased with their new consignment of individually air conditioned living quarters: each mouse’s bedsit was a bit bigger than the size of a shoebox. Each animal was effectively in solitary confinement and had a layer of clear, climate controlled air and at least 2 sheets of rigid plastic between it and its neighbour.

It’s hard not to draw a human analogy as these experiments are being undertaken because the mice are similar to us. The life of a mouse is worth less than that of a large primate in animal research circles; The study has gone through the three Rs so human and mouse brains must be similar enough to be worthy of taking animals’ lives.

These mice didn’t have any social interaction or while we’re thinking about it, access to exercise.

A lab assistant had been telling me of playing the radio 24/7 so the cortisol levels of the mice didn’t spike in response to stray loud noises (which were now being muffled by local radio). Uneven hormone levels could introduce an unwanted variable into the studies, making the end results at best, unreliable.

whilst the mice seemed to be well cared for during their shortened lives their care seemed to fall short (in the eyes of this non animal biologist)

We, as humans are advised to get some movement into our daily lives. Our bodies, we’re told, will function all the better for it. Without movement our bodies will atrophy and succumb to all manner of lifestyle diseases. Sarcopenia (muscle loss) we’re told isn’t an inevitability of growing old. Our brains will also suffer from slowed cerebral bloodflow brought on by reduced physical activity.

It’s suggested we cultivate human interaction in our lives and be present in our community. Study after study show survival rates and life expectancy decline with increasing isolation.

The mere extension of life is no measure or indication of the quality of that life but our experience of life becomes richer in company… even if it’s only to give us the chance to grumble about others: we NEED others in our lives!

To this end I am setting up a public meeting to listen and talk with and to our community about itself.

I’m not entirely sure what the take home from this post is other than don’t be mistaken for a mouse, get as much movement as you can and speak to people on whatever platform you can. Reading this online you have access to a computer; search for a special interest or support group if it’s tricky to get out physically and meet up – no matter what our situation there’s bound to be someone else in our shoes that’s set up a group for people like us (fellow human beings).

Seek out connection, the quality and length of our lives a bit depends on it!

Another post will focus on how our microbiome, made up in part by the communities of bacteria in our bodies that help digest our food and produce happy brain chemicals also need to be paid attention to. How can we eat better to help keep them, and us, happy and functioning as best we can?

This blog is about finding ways for everyone to feel a little bit better.

Thanks for joining in, it would be great to hear your thoughts on some of the issues covered in this post.

Investigate!

Blue skies are here again!

As an antidote to the functional infographic of pathologies further down the page here’s some blue sky to gaze at 🙂 although there does seem to be quite a lot of it about looking out of the window at the moment.

Apologies for sparse posts recently. I promised a post about stress reduction strategies in my last post and that’s still to come as I talked about the bad effects of stressors on the body. The good effects we can generate are still to come… I’ve not forgotten about it.

I’ve been getting my learn on using a somewhat scattergun approach.

There are various functional approaches to improving wellness including FMT and cPNI (a bunch of acronyms again). These strategies have held my attention as I’ve chosen to investigate them aswell as taking an online microbiology course from the University of Boulder.

I received this graphic from a health blogger I’ve been following for… what must be 10 years?

I need to adjust my thinking on this ‘new’ technology! I know a version of the web has been around since the 50s but I had no dealings with ARPA net, the military early adopters.

Finding approaches to fixing my leaky gut is something I plan to revisit (after talking about gut permeability in previous posts) Step up candida to take your rightful place as just ONE of many things that can cause a leaky gut.

Christa Orrechio is another health and wellness online presence I listen to and will be trying some more approaches that will deal more effectively with bloating and other digestive issues which are some of the more visible signs of an unhappy tummy.

I’d been on rotations of various anti virals, antifungals and anti-parasitic protocols before but a more integrative/holistic protocol that promises to deal with inflammation of the gut lining before worrying too much about clearing gut baddies (fatigue and brain fog are two other symptoms).

Stressors

Today’s post is suitable for those with MS and those who live in the world, generally. Stress is everywhere and it’s worse for us all than we might at first think.

Apologies Shakespeare for paraphasing the start of Sonnet 43:

Sress, how do we love thee? let me count the number of ways (in no particular order)

Sugar causes our body to make changes (normalise elevated blood sugar) to get back to a level playing field (homeostasis). This requirement of extra chemical processes is a stress on our body. Although as the last chocolate brownie post said, if we consciously choose sugar enjoy the experience that can come from it (breaking sweet bread together).
sugar, is just one of the addictive substance which all present a psychological aswell as physiological stress for us: We’re no longer choosing that last cookie/insert preferred naughty but nice poison here. Instead we’re in the grasp of something we have no control over.
Lack of control in all sorts of arenas can cause our bodies stress.
Lack of sleep: I started this post in my head whilst lying awake unable to find sleep. I’d done all the ‘concentrate on your breathing’ and ‘watch intrusive thoughts drift past on a waterway of calm’ but the waterway of calm was more of a babbling brook and had the potential to reach rushing, Niagran proportions.
In this age of 24hr rolling news, with its wails of heightened terror alerts and tales of impending doom every day our body and brain can be forgiven for being in a state of constant arousal. This is fine for short bursts, it allows us to do the living of life.

Our brains can get stuck in the fight, flight or freeze mode (deadline brought forward or an altercation with someone from work are our modern equivalents of a sabre tooth tiger).

Unfortunately, this gives us a permanently elevated cortisol level.

When these stressors come into our life the sympathetic nervous system throws out cortisol as if our lives depended on it. The body can’t spend any time in ‘rest and digest’ mode. Food doesn’t get digested effectively and nutrients aren’t absorbed. Our body is ready for the ‘off’.

These somewhat avoidable states of stress also use up our store of various B vitamins which can further impact on our body’s ability to cope with stress…

Essential maintenance gets pushed to the bottom of the body’s priority list, including essential, unpanicked functioning of our immune system. If we’re stuck in this mode for extended periods of time the immune system can start going a bit postal. Some argue our increased stress levels are contributing to the increase in auto-immune related disorders.

When the parasympathetic nervous system is engaged, our body can start spending time and energy repairing and protecting itself.

Both these nervous systems are part of the autonomic nervous system. (We’re a complicated little kit of no instructions, aren’t we?) Mostly, the ANS is in charge of stuff so we don’t have to consciously think about it: like when to start panicking, breathing, sweating and when to get roused into anger or lust.

Stuff we don’t need to have much control over.

But some of it… we can shape.

The jolt of coffee feeling that cortisol produces (a release of adrenaline accompanies caffeine and contributes to many of the cells in the body getting focused. They are undistracted and better able to prime themselves for flight); This feeling can become quite addictive. I’m curious myself whether this might explain some of the interactions in our lives that seemed to erupt from nowhere?

Are some of us addicted to that caffeine free, self produced little buzz of hyper-alertness?

How can we get our bodies under the parasympatheic nervous system’s shielding wing?

Look out for the next installment which explores some of the strategies to get to that calm, healing space most of us visit briefly most days.

Gorgeous gluten free brownies

After speaking to a number of people I feel assured that the batch of dairy and gluten free ginger brownies made recently is worth sharing.

It’s been tricky trying to be mindful of following a reduced sugar diet whilst also testing chocolate brownie recipes (bearing in mind my candida/leaky gut posts of the last few months). Notice my use of the word ‘mindful’. I wouldn’t have made the brownies at all if I were following a strictly low sugar lifestyle 100% of the time.

But, I figure life needs to be considered in the round: making these brownies has given me an excuse to consume more sugar but it also causes me to see the appreciation and enjoyment in people’s faces when they eat the product I’ve made.

I think my soul benefits more from that social interaction than my digestive tract suffers from dealing with its temporarily higher sugar contents!

I’d love to enter into a debate about whether its healthy to use sugar as a reward in society but it seems pretty ingrained and I’m trying to address my ease to fall into argument (it doesn’t make our cells happy but that’s a topic for another post)!

(I’m not an anthropologist or dietician (not even sure how to spell it) so the above statement hasn’t been scientifically verified).

There does seem to be quite a lot of delight seen in people’s faces when they taste these gluten free brownies. Especially when you introduce them as a reduced sugar, vegetable based, gluten and dairy free, sweet treat.

People don’t tend to expect an awful lot with that sort of billing.

Ginger and chocolate brownies using sweet potato allows for reduced sugar and serves as the sweet route to one of our five a day!

I’m glad I saw this post online recently. Apart from the sugar you could call this recipe a healthfood 😉

Ingredients and method:

2x100g slab of dark chocolate
2x eggs
2x teaspoons of vanilla extract
5x balls of ginger in syrup chopped up (from cake making aisle of supermarket)
200g of cooked sweet potato
125g of brown sugar (no need to use special sorts)
100g of gluten free plain flour
100g of coconut oil
A pinch of baking powder (less than a ¼ teaspoon)

Optional extras

Up to 100g of whatever else you like in brownies; flaked almond, crushed walnuts, brazils and pecans all work.
fresh blueberries, dried cranberries soaked in ginger wine
A rounded tablespoon of cocoa powder
A teaspoon of ginger powder.

Line a shallow baking tray (eg 26x20cmx3cm depth) with greaseproof paper (some recipes suggest putting the oven on at the start but I don’t like working against the clock) turn it up to 180C (160 fan oven) gas mark 4/350f

Get two, big mixing bowls (don’t try doing it all in one bowl, it’ll work but the extra washing up extravagance is worth it). The sweet potato flesh can make the finished brownie quite heavy. I know the point of brownies is that they’re not cake but the finished texture is a little less vegetal lumpen)

FIRST BOWL: break up a pack and a half of the chocolate slabs and spoon the coconut oil on top (exact measurements don’t seem to have been essential: if stuff is a few grams under it doesn’t seem to have mattered). Microwave for a minute or so until the mixture is well on its way to melted.

Add the sweet potato flesh and flour, a pinch of baking powder (ginger and cocoa powder, if using), break up the remaining half bar of chocolate, add that + whatever extras you might be choosing.

SECOND BOWL: add the sugar and eggs and whiskn for a minute or two (so the mix is airy but we’re not looking for meringue consistency). Our household’s first electric whisk a few months back was a revelation.

Tip the FIRST BOWL,into the SECOND BOWL, stir gently together until well mixed, pour into the lined tray and put in the heated oven for 20 minutes (check at 18 minutes, an overdone brownie is a terrible thing!)

Look out for my chocolate beetroot brownie recipe coming soon.

Project MS

It’s not really Project MS, it’s ‘project me’.

Project managing the most important project of our lives can get pretty stressful if we allow it to. When you think about it, we all project manage our own health (to a greater or lesser extent) every day of our lives.

If we go out to a party we might try and arrange not to have anything too taxing to do the day afterwards. If we help friends celebrate a little too enthusiastically with either cake or booze or a very late night we might take a few more walks, early nights and fewer parties for the next few weeks.

I’m choosing to be aware of my own behaviours in order to get the best care for myself.

We need to be our own project managers and call on the trades that have historically done us well: physiotherapists, nutritionists and a variety of bodywork technicians.

The impact of disordered blood flow in the MS patient, it has been argued, contributes to the lesions or scars in brain tissue and perhaps an overall shrinking of brain volume over time (although reduced activity can also be at fault here?) Deterioration in mobility for people with multiple sclerosis is, in part affected by having less real estate in the brain for messages to get through to where they need to go.

The head needs a steady flow of blood to transport oxygen and glucose to the brain. In MS patients with slower blood flow it has been hypothesised, brain cells can die sooner than for everyone else. Exercise, with its increase in heart rate and breathing might slow down what is apparently inevitable atrophy in the MS’d brain.

The congenital vascular abnormality theory is not widely held by many doctors. It feels like, from this patient’s perspective, medical professionals seem willing to state there are many potential causes for MS but neurologists seem unwilling to accept that the plumbing (fluids flowing in and out of the brain) cannot be one of those mysterious, as yet unidentified causes.

In the case of MS it seems treating the body (for the patient who owns the body) allopathically – dealing with symptoms rather than getting to the root of the condition (what the experts should be up to?) seems to be our best bet for feeling a little better.

Over the past 20 years I’m not sure I can include neurologists in the list of effective tradespeople for the body?

I think I’ll stick to the alternative, functional practitioners. People working in things that affect me every day:

Nutritionist, functional doctor,
Physiotherapist, Osteopath, Feldenkrais method practitioner,
Shiatsu, Acupuncture and Cranio Sacral Therapist.

So far, I’ve found these professionals to be of most use in keeping my body working as best it can… not forgetting doing an awful lot of reading of my own.

At the moment I’m quite taken with You Are The Placebo it brings a refreshing way of looking at the body we inhabit. It was preceded by Biology of Belief which got me thinking differently about a lot of things. Whist working fairly hard on getting my body to do its best I’ve realised it’s time my mind had some attention, too.

D’oh, it’s dopamine!

We’ve made it through the holidays.

Hurrah!

This post might seem long but it’s kind of all connected.

This post will be looking at how we might think a bit differently about aspects of ourselves by becoming more aware of the role of dopamine. You may have noticed from my somewhat nightmarish vision of christmas decorations and my language that I don’t relish the season we’ve now turned our back on. I’m preferring instead to embrace all that a New Year can bring. I don’t think I’ve ever been considered the life and soul of a party but that’s ok with me.

lacking drive?
low on motivation?
finding it hard to engage and live life fully?

All of the above could describe what I’ve always felt was part of my ‘nature’. Since signing up to 23andme (previous mentions of it here, here and here). I’m beginning to see that the chemistry lab in us all is shaped by our genes and so an impaired neurotransmitter production here and utilisation issue there might explain me sometimes preferring a good book to a good party.

I’m finding out the bits of me that don’t work as well as they could and realising my inner curmudgeon might in part, be thanks to the chemistry lab.

Many of the posts on this site are about investigating how to make life a little better. Sugar’s not come out smelling of roses on these pages. I’ve not been able to find anything good it can bring to the table apart from cake which we all know is really nice (for birthdays and very special occasions).

Having indulged in various sugary confections over the holidays I’m eager to get started on reducing the sugar again and getting back to a simpler way of eating. I talked about noticing the difference here but got a little distracted from my sugar free desires by birthday cake!

I found out something which might stiffen my resolve when it comes to the sweet stuff.

23andme analysis has thrown up some interesting things about dopamine in me. There are ways to protect what we have and get more, naturally. Finding I’m low in/poor at using this stuff through having wonky vitamin Dreceptors could answer an awful lot of questions about my behaviour in years past and the actions of a reformed sugar addict when relapsing with (gluten free) mince pies in recent weeks.

A diet high in sugar can wear out the dopamine receptors which can make what dopamine there is in the system less useful again.

One thing I’ll definitely be continuing with is supplementing with phospholipids over and above the

krill oil I take daily. I also started, back at the beginning of December taking two teaspoonfuls every morning of
Empirical Labs Phospholipid Complex. I bumped into this site whilst researching the stuff.

Go to about halfway down the NCBI post, The US National Centre for Biotechnology Information (better known as the reliable and often cited PubMed) for studies on depression, improvements in coping with stress as well as repairing brain matter. It really seems to be a wonder substance. It has a consistency a bit like bitumen or treacle (for its stickiness not sweetness). When I first started I thought it could waterproof the hull of any nearby boat. It helps strengthen the edges of all our cells not just those in the brain.

I think I feel… less… wobbly? Like I’m more in charge of keeping my body under control (both mentally and physically). I feel less prone to overbalancing whilst standing completely still. I thought this increased stability may have come from reducing a candida overgrowth since Septembe but the stability’s still there even after struggling to reduce my sugar consumption since a sugary christmas. more to follow on this struggle in another post.

Whatever caused the improvement I’m happy about it and whilst it would be nice to treat my body as an experiment and only change one variable at a time I also don’t want to hang about getting myself well.

After reading the US Pubmed post I’m going to make sure I never run out of this phospholipid complex ever again!

I think it’s fascinating the many and varied roles dopamine plays, including

brain function,
metabolism,
energy production aswell as affecting mood as mentioned at the top of this post.

The role that phospholipids seem to play in our harvesting of dopamine I’ve only just scratched at the surface of. You can perhaps tell I still have a lot more reading to do on the subject but thought I’d share this burst of enthusiasm with you!

There are so many possible suspects involved in us not feeling our best. I’m choosing to see the addressing of potential problems as a challenge to be entered into with curiosity and an open mind.

New Year’s resolutions are for the birds, feeling better is a lifelong undertaking (albeit taking in a few duvet days along the way). Cutting ourselves some slack/being kind to ourselves is just one way to get the best for and from us.

I hope, with a return to low sugar food in my diet and a regular intake of healthy fats I will achieve weight loss , my pre christmas energy levels and will have no need to make this noise.

happy New Year.

LOTS of advice givers!

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!

Candida Schmandida?

There’s regularly much mention in complementary/well being/alternative circles about troubles with candida albicans, its overgrowth and the many and varied symptoms it can create in humans. This post will be looking at just one strand of how to get a body working better by introducing how to see if it’s a problem for you.

My next post will go into greater detail about how to reduce it’s presence in the body. Have a look online there are many people who suspect it could be an issue for a great many people – not just those with MS or other auto-immune conditions.

Have you had what feels like fatigue out of all proportion to any exertion on your part?
Do you get aching joints not explained away by your activities?

These are just a couple of the symptoms attached to the actions of this opportunistic organism in your system. Fatigue and aching joints could be down to many other things so read on to find out how to rule this culprit out.

When I first started my ‘journey’ towards enhancing my wellbeing (soon after diagnosis) I spent the afternoon in a bookshop choosing which book to buy to tell me something about the condition, Multiple Sclerosis, a self help guide seemed to be the most positive in outlook and full of what appeared useful stuff.

This all happened in the days before I was introduced to the internet but it’s still a great book and the guidelines hold their own against many websites and blogs nowadays. I’m eternally grateful to the author Judy Graham for introducing me to an alternative way of looking at my condition before the tsunami of auto-immune journeys flooded the wellness side of the web.

I’ve hesitated to use the word empowering in previous posts but I think it’s an apt description of the book I read and how I felt after reading it.

Since then all the Ws have arrived and google helped the web become a place to go and find stuff out, whilst not even having to put your shoes on to leave the house… what progress!

Various candida cleanses are available so I thought I’d join in! Seems to me the best place to start is finding out if it might be an issue for you and could be contributing to existing symptoms you may have.

My thanks to Christa Orecchio for some of the detail collected from a talk given to Sean Croxton (I mention his JERFing mantra elsewhere on here). Just eat real food (his mantra) I mention in an earlier post and backed up by Dr Josh Axe and any number of naturopathic practitioners:

first off is candida albicans rampaging in your body?

After getting up in the morning, before you brush your teeth or have a cup of tea/coffee/hot water and lemon juice (helps alkalize your system, I’ll write about this in another post) pour a glass of water and work up some spit in your mouth then spit into the glass and leave it til after you’ve had some breakfast (not somewhere where someone might accidentally drink it!)

After half an hour or so has your spit stayed floating on the surface of the water or has it ‘grown legs’ and some or all of it has sunk to the bottom of the glass?

When everything’s in order and we haven’t been taking another curse* (sic) of antibiotics or been dealing with a range of different stressors on the body (including physiological stress from food intolerances as well as emotional and/or mental stress) we manage to co-exist with an array of symbiotic hitchikers in our systems. These guys live in our gut and help to digest our food when all’s going well and communicate with other parts of us like our brains and fat storing departments.

*Don’t get me wrong, antibiotics have their place but it seems we, as a society have come to rely on them too much which has brought its own well reported troubles.

You may have noticed, as members of the western ‘developed’ world, most of us are pretty good at not allowing our bodies to reach calm. Buddhists consider our constantly gabbling brain to be a ‘monkey mind‘. this incessant internal noise can contribute to a poorly performing immune system which, in turn can pave the way for an opportunist bacteria to make a break for the big time in your belly.

Anway, I should stop showing you evidence of my monkey mind and get back to the detail of this particular candida cleanse.

Did your spit sink?

If it did that’s a sign there are too many things living in your digestive tract (the tube between mouth and anus). In earlier posts I’ve mentioned Hippocrates and him believing that all disease starts in the gut. Most, if not all functional doctors agree.

One of the first things to do is remove from your diet stuff that these rowdy inhabitants of our gut like to eat. Unfortunately it’s the same kind of thing we can be partial to, too:

sugar
vinegar
yeast
alcohol

Incidentally, this is how sugar effects our brain without any need for ‘outside’ help. Sugar it seems doesn’t do us or critters living in us much good.

There’s more to follow but try doing less of these things to start with and see if your body behaves a little better without their influence.

My next post will go into more about the symptoms and the 2+ month protocol involved in slowly removing this energy robber from your system.

I mention Judy Graham as she talked about candida and I read about it some 15 years ago and things might have progressed differently if I’d tackled this situation then.

I appreciate if, if, if don’t amount to a hill o’ beans suffice to say I’m two months in to the no booze or sugar protocol and I think it’s doing me some good but perhaps too early to tell?