Category: movement

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.

Any port in a storm?

water water everywhere

I chose this image of mine to illustrate the need of any port in a storm but it’s a disordered environment, really. The glowering images of a storm on a Norwegian sea I’d thought of to illustrate this post are on a packed away external drive at the moment. I feel now, this image works better – something’s wrong with what would normally be a charming image of rural countryside.

There might be any number of contributing factors that bring a hint of the nautical to what should be a bucolic agrarian scene.

Brain you tube: The body will keep circulation for as long as possible to basic stuff like breathing. The newer stuff – thinking, writing poems, doing a One Direction dance are not worth saving at all costs by the brain. They’re less important because they aren’t essential for our survival. I think it’s good to get an image of how things are supposed to be.

Fecal transplants seem to be something that’s been helping conditions obviously affecting the gut – Clostridium Difficile for example. Now it’s also being suggested for neurological disorders such as MS, Parkinsons and Autism.

This post will be full of things that have caught my eye recently. Here’s one to throw into the mix: alkalize for health. We all know that veg especially greens are good for us (read previous post here where I speak about folate) but also making our body less acid has untold benefits for a body that’s become used to one too many cakes or steaks (both food items I heartily approve of but probably not that extra helping?) Trying to increase the number and variety of veg in the diet I see as the take home message of the page.

Get to know your body whether it’s behaving well or not. I had my genome sequenced. I mention my experience of the process in previous posts here and here. It’s pointed out that my supplementing with

  • vitamin B12 will be better being done with hydroxy rather than methyl B12.
  • My vitamin D receptors aren’t working properly which could explain my especially bad SAD in December/January.
  • certain glutathione processing SNiPs were completely missing so it seems it would be a good thing to supplement with glutathione (I’m using a cream applied under the ribs (over the liver) that will be absorbed transdermally and will hopefully give my liver a bit of a leg up and help it rid the body of general day to day toxins. I hope this might result eventually in a bit more energy. I probably have a lot more reading to do!

Here is another page that highlights why we want to get all the vitamin D we can. The methylation cycle is fiendishly tricky to understand (well, it is for me anyway).You may have noticed from the flavour of the posts on here so far that I’ll point you toward things that aren’t necessarily cures – the approach, protocol or exercise regime won’t make you all better by tomorrow but I’ll suggest things that might make life a little better whether you may be someone with a condition, care for someone with a condition or, you’re entirely well and somehow ended up on this site.

How does this help?

It might not help anyone else but I take some comfort knowing there may have been an underlying reason I didn’t fully engage in life at school and could never have been considered life and soul of the party! Half the population are thought to have impaired SNiPs. The information I’ve found out about me makes me wonder about the worth of double blind placebo controlled trials for complex conditions and also all the people who grew up being told they were slow, stupid or lazy.

All these lines of investigation and exploration might help an individual a little bit. I believe any port in a storm will do for me. Having a chronic, neurological disorder I believe can sometimes be likened to being lost at sea. You can’t rely on a stable base or solid ground or anything!

Dr Amy Yasko, a molecular biologist with an interest in healing her child’s autism has written about the process she has taken to getting a disordered brain back to some kind of normal.

I consider myself to be at the beginning of this process.

  • I took a food intolerance test over 10 years ago so know what foods my insides prefer not to deal with (dairy and gliadin, gluten essentially).
  • I got 23andme’d this summer and have found out I need to reshape a malfunctioning (from birth) methylation cycle and
  • I’ve been on a candida clearout for the past few months (please read 2 earlier posts on the subject here and here).

I wonder whether a body not working optimally from before birth also contributed to some of the vascular issues whose existence is being debated in cases of MS. I went to get CCSVI’d by Dr Sclafani in Brooklyn two years ago and have mentioned it here)The hypothesis that Dr Paulo Zamboni first put forward in 2009 but was initially investigated by Dr Franz Schelling (which i talk about here) is called ccsvi.


As we know, MS (and life) is multifactorial.

Improving Prognosis?

The image of ivy is from my back garden and illustrates one of the few things that truly thrive there.

NIHCE have issued guidelines to address which treatments might be worth the NHS providing for MS patients. Aside from the disease activity going on in our brains we have similar symptoms to many other chronic conditions. Some of those symptoms are brought on by our bodies becoming increasingly inactive due to deterioration in our brains. It’s even been cheerily suggested by a London research establishment MS could be rebranded as a form of dementia. With this in mind I thought I’d share a link I was sent that was made with seniors in mind but could be useful for anyone that doesn’t move as much as they used to.

  • NIHCE have suggested no longer financing injections of B12 to try and reduce fatigue (unfortunately, I’ve never been able to get hold of any through any number of GPs) but perhaps with more people asking for some basic maintenance strategies from their GP things might change?
  • Vitamin D supplementation is involved in many processes carried out in the body every day and helps regulate the body’s own immune activity. it might be wise to address both of these deficiencies in the general public aswell. A GP can carry out this test.
  • On the pharmaceutical side NIHCE would also prefer not to pay for Fampridine and Sativex. There wasn’t enough evidence to show statistically significant efficacy for all four supplementation approaches.

ivy up close

News of the Commonweath Fund’s conclusions about the brilliance of the NHS in a global league table of developed nation’s healthcare systems (as long as you don’t have a long term condition) I’ve mentioned in another post. The NIHCE use all sorts of equations and algorithms including weighing up loss of tax earnings for the country if these citizens can no longer earn and contribute. Perhaps  the measure for the wellbeing of patients with long term health conditions needs to be adjusted?

I’m conflicted about withdrawing a therapy that has worth for some people but then I remember that the NHS doesn’t have bottomless pockets and whilst some people are missing out on marginally increased walking speeds, baby units and end of life care could perhaps benefit from the spare cash? I’ll still be buying my own supplements even if it doesn’t clearly contribute to improving prognosis  on the NIHCE scale of improvement as I’m choosing to believe when their effects are all added up, these therapies are worth applying to help keep my body working as best it can. I think this outlook involving positive thinking may bring its own benefits.

A UK MS researcher agreed that good things appear to happen during O2 therapy after being asked for his opinion on a study on this website where Israeli long term stroke patients found new brain cell growth/synaptogenesis after receiving intensive O2 therapy in a decompression chamber. There are things we can do for ourselves that might help a little. I appreciate this isn’t a very rock and roll closing statement but it seems we, as owners of chronic conditions are in charge of improving our prognosis.

Simple strategies for living well

Take a piece of string, measure your height with it and fold it in half, does it fit around your waist?

Waist to height measurement is a pretty good indicator of whether you really need that extra helping of… cake/pie/favourite foodstuff!

A balanced diet is made up (thanks to Paul Chek for this simplification) of food with eyes (protein and fats) and food with no eyes (carbohydrates). Avocados and nuts are exceptions to that rule but generally vegetables growing above ground like leafy greens will be less starchy than vegetables grown below ground: potatoes, sweet potato, beetroot, parsnips and carrots to name a few.

Why does all this matter?

There are a growing number of people that believe the gut is at the heart of most disease. Hippocrates got there first over two thousand years ago but a growing number of people alive today are also questioning the quality of the food we eat nowadays and are looking for simpler/less procesed foods to eat. Stuff that our bodies have evolved to digest over multiple dozens of millennia.

There are many different versions of the ‘Just Eat Real Food‘ sentiment. Eat food, not too much and mostly plants is the simple guideline given by journalist Michael Pollan in his book In Defence of Foods.

Food = Epigenetic information. Which is a new way to think of our morning break fast.

Every piece of food we eat ‘talks to’ the cells in our body. These conversations can shape how our bodies continue to exist in their environment. I think but am not fully read up on the research yet, that what we eat over time can impact how our bodies respond to everything around us. And our decendants!

Epigenetics is a fascinating area of research: A 2nd WW dutch famine had repercussions for the grandchildren of those who lived through it. Our DNA forms the building blocks of who we are but those building blocks can be shaped by the world around us, too.

This nutrition lark seems to be far from straightforward!

I attended an online summit called the Evolution of Medicine at the end of September 2014. In it a number of functional medicine experts and enlightened ‘regular’ doctors were interviewed and issues were identified that needed to and were beginning to change in mainstream medicine.

We have a slew of chronic disease – much of it could be considered to be mediated by the way we live. Type II diabetes is better dealt with by addressing what you eat and how you move now rather than waiting for a profoundly reduced insulin response to turn into heart disease, stroke, nerve damage, wonky eyes (my wording)… the list goes on.

We eat a diet so far removed from what our bodies have been designed to cope with, no wonder they’re ‘slipping up’ and creating disease in us. It’s not just GM foods that could be storing up trouble for us and our children. Food is just one aspect of how we can make our lives a little better.

Small changes to how and how much we move can have surprisingly satisfying results. Getting outside and going for a walk every day is good for the soul as well as our heart and lungs. I’ve been performing my own version of HIIT (high intensity interval training) on my exercise bike. I can’t walk very far and have a wheelchair for events that call for more walking than say, getting round a supermarket with a trolley to hold onto so it’s not often that I can achieve a change in my heart rate.

There are a wide variety of websites I visit and gather what I hope is useful information to me and I assume others including a number of strands of research from around the world. Change in my body (including not getting out of breath so quickly) seems to be happening… slowly but I think getting the heart rate up must get more blood pumping round the body and that includes the brain so, a handful of 30 second bursts on the static bike every other day with the resistance turned up is giving my brain a treat. It also has a happy side effect of warming perpetually cold hands and feet!

To a continually pumping heart the brain is just another extremity (like hands and feet) that the pressure and circulation doesn’t always reach. Gravity works against the brain here, unfortunately.

Always low blood pressure can be as problematic as high BP resulting in fatigue perhaps partly because the brain isn’t getting enough glucose or oxygen to function optimally.

I read this in a fascinating book Why Isn’t My Brain Working by Datis Kharrazian. He has used a similar functional approach to identify strategies to improve an underperforming thyroid.

It’s always a good idea to get an MOT from your gp to check that your body can cope with the changes you’d be asking of it with a new exercise regime. I never used to be much of an exercise person but I was also a smoker as a youngster so i wasn’t really caring what my body may have been trying to tell me!

Small things can make a difference and some simple strategies have got to be worth a go, no?