Avenues of MS research everywhere!

My own research into increasing variety of movement.

New news, apparently… not the same old news!

Quite often there’s not much to report in MS research or what there is to report is all the same shape – either ineffective or carries the potential of life threatening side effects but… there appear to be a handful of avenues opening up!

A family friend from the US sent me this link last week the way concerned friends do. It’s nice to know that folk care and are thinking about you which can give as much of a lift as anything from a blister pack or bottle.

This article was referenced in the Newsweek article and it prompted me to buy some

  • Tavegil/Clemastine, an OTC (over the counter, no prescription required) antihistamine. It was the only molecule tested (out of a 1000 in their lab) that had any effect on the growing of a myelin like substance on little glass pyramids or something like that (yes, science is strange) but perhaps it will help my body regrow some myelin?
  • I’ve been using phospholipid complex since December (mentioned here) and enjoying a poached egg yolk every day to try and support my brain by giving it building blocks for the last few months.

Interestingly, to an utter non-scientist like myself this page describes part of the reason as to whether there might be a useful effect.

I’ve been signed up to be contacted and perhaps get enrolled in the SMART trial. It will be trialling three existing treatments that were developed for other conditions and, I believe are now out of patent so there is little money to be made from them in their original setting (it could be argued).

  • Ibudilast was one of the three therapies to be tested on secondary progressive MS patients when I showed interest last summer. It has been used in Japan (mostly) for the past 20 years as an asthma therapy. It’s a very good anti-inflammatory, apparently.
  • Riluzole has been used to treat The Ice Bucket Challenge disease or more properly Motor Neurone Disease once also known as ALS or Lou Gehrigs disease, I think?
  • Amiloride which is used to treat heart disease – got no punchlines or interesting facts about that treatment or condition.
  • Fluoxetine (better known as Prozac and usually used to treat depression) is taking the place of Ibudilast.

To a layman, I see the mention of having an effect from the antihistamine on asthma and see that the Japanese asthma treatment has been taken out of the MS trial (being funded by Edinburgh University) and I wonder whether perhaps the drug’s creator might be able to change a molecule or two and get another lease of life out of the out of patent drug by repackaging it as an MS treatment?

Seeing this article about the possible role of a psychedelic drug in the treatment of asthma (well, it worked on mice in the lab) leads me to think the creators of pharmaceutical interventions employ  what seems to be a scattergun approach to the therapies they push on us the patients and it really is worth not holding one’s breath for miracles. I’m an entire human being – my body and brain can’t easily get by without the other!

“What we have demonstrated for the first time is that they are also effective in treating physiological diseases outside of the brain, a completely new and exciting role for this class of drug” says study author Dr. Charles Nichols.

a line of wild animal toys

Whilst keeping an eye on various pharmaceutical offering in the pipeline I think I’ll keep up with my personalised integrative approach. My most recent exercise addition is ‘walking like an animal’ using hands and feet not on hands and knees. I can’t manage the half an hour a day that was recommended to me but after a few goes each day for the last couple of weeks I’m an awful lot better at it than I was!

This physiotherapist in Scotland was reported in New Pathways magazine last year and has now received funding to investigate his results from Edinburgh Napier University. I don’t know how or even whether it is allied to the Edinburgh University conducting the MS SMART trial at the top of this post but I think I’ll continue looking at healing my body from a number of different angles.

making life a little bit better

A scarecrow frightening birds from a snowladen field in midwinter nicely sums up just how ‘surplus to requirements’ my poorly performing body can sometimes help me feel. At the same time the image reminds me the world keeps turning and what seems fixed and permanent now will eventually pass.

I figure this online presence allows me to share the stuff I’ve found makes my life a little better (see some of them here) in the hope that you will also share some of the approaches you are taking that have been making your life a little better. We could all try some of these things and by doing this we could make all our lives a little bit better.

I’m not making any huge claims. This is intentional. I, like everyone on earth have good days and bad days so I don’t want to set myself up for a fall (or fail for that matter) which would leave me with useless negative thought patterns shuffling through my head. I believe making life a little bit better can be well within all our grasps.

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks as my eyes have been playing up; making staring at screens awkward at best and the comprehension of words delightfully imprecise. I seem to have a jazz interpretation of predictive text going on between my eyes and brain.

I’ve been trying to work out whether this change in my vision is the fallout from a sugary christmas bringing on a New Year bloom of the opportunistic pathogen, candida albicans or simply recovery from a 24hr viral tummy bug that involved being sick a lot just before christmas.

small improvements

I now wonder what the point is in wasting valuable brain processing power on a query whose answer won’t bring a different outcome. The question of whether a viral fallout or a refreshed candida overgrowth has given me a blurry eye is unlikely to bring any improvements (I’m already back to being on the sugarless wagon).

  • Instead I’ve been going to bed early and sleeping deeply behind our blackout curtains. Our brains fix themselves best when we give them plenty of sleep.
  • I’ve been keeping up doing superslow hand weight exercises to try and stave off sarcopenia (muscle wasting through age isn’t inevitable but through inactivity it pretty much is).
  • The other thing I’ve been doing that helps me feel a little bit better is lying down for 20 minutes minimum with knees bent, feet flat on the ground and a book under my head. The vertebra in my spine seem to like having the chance to soread out (especially as I sleep on a slope (mentoned in the link list on the first line of the second paragraph of this post)

On the radio this morning was an interview with Dr Kate Granger who, after feeling dehumanised and no more than a bed number whilst in hospital started a twitter campaign to get consultants (the folk who mostly are no longer in white coats) to introduce themselves to patients under their care when on their rounds.

It’s the small things that can make life a little bit better. See a report into the benefits of compassion led patient care here.

I’ve touched on a number of things in this post which I’ll be returning to more fully in future. I guess I can sum up the content by saying getting lots of sleep and lying down have been helping me feel a little bit better recently.

 

D’oh, it’s dopamine!

lights

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.

 

 

 

 

Self improvement

self improvement

 

There are some things I’ve been doing for a long time

  • gluten and dairy free,
  • sprouting seeds,
  • my own modified version of Pilates
  • occasionally visiting an osteopath and a
  • Feldenkrais practitioner,
  • acupuncturist and
  • craniosacral and shiatsu therapist
  • candida I’ve covered fairly thoroughly but

I need to get more organised in sharing some of these subjects.

look out for posts this year about getting more fresh veg into your diet and dealing with an addiction to sugar. At the moment I’m trying out various ways to get back to my low sugar time last autumn that my love of sweet things all around at christmas hit right out of the park.

Sugar free really was a revelation, I look forward to getting back there again and the improvement in mobility but won’t be beating myself up if the journey meanders here and there rather than its course taking an efficient, direct line!

I’d love to hear what you’ve found has helped you.

Ditching sugar… again, hasn’t been a straightforward A to B challenge especially whilst it gets given the plethora of names to hide its presence in packaged foods. The obvious thing to do would be to never eat packaged foods again but that’s an ideal to aim for not an overnight destination. Sugar acts like any other addictive substance in the brain – we’ll reach for whatever’s necessary to get that hit of dopamine unless we pause here and there to think about what we’re doing.

Foods that turn into glucose very quickly in the body also need thinking about. That baked potato that seemed so virtuous really isn’t unless mixed with a good source of protein and/or fat. Wildly fluctuating blood sugar and insulin levels don’t appear to be good for anyone whether you may be on your type II rollercoaster, waiting in the queue or just wanting to get the best from a poorly functioning body. Exercise and apparently apple cider vinegar can help a body deal with glucose, apparently.

Let’s all flag down the self-improvement boat and do our own research. I think it might present our best chance of feeling empowered about choosing the options we’re given. This power brings a range of immeasurable benefits.

We may not have consciously chosen to be here but we can consciously choose to have an ok time whilst we are here!

 

Chasing Wellness

sprig of holly with berries

Hope you had a good few days of enjoying friends and family’s company and perhaps definitely (for me, anyway) eating more than we normally would. I posted on christmas day the next post would be listing ways we could help ourselves through appropriate

  • eating,
  • moving,
  • sleeping and
  • being still.

I’ve put these 4 aspects of our lives in the venn diagram on this site’s front page as I truly believe when we get them right (whatever state we’re in to start with) good things will follow. I can’t promise a lottery win but better nights of sleep when they’ve been thin on the ground I don’t think could ever be considered a bad result!

For the beginning of the New Year mostly I’ll be coming down off an extended sugar binge. This will more than likely involve going cold turkey from the sweet stuff for four days (again). I Broke my sugar habit at the end of August at the beginning of my candida cleanse which I’ve posted about here, here and here.

This temporary reintroduction has highlighted that my body works better without this substance in it. Whether this is because I’ve been feeding bacteria and causing a boom in numbers of the wrong sort, that don’t help my day to day functioning or I’ve been creating blood sugar rollercoasters that are hard for my system to work around I probably don’t need to investigate further!

I believe, in myself at least and perhaps others that sugar (and to a lesser extent foods that quickly turn into sugar in the bloodstream) functions like a recreational drug eg cocaine in my brain and delivers a release of dopamine, the reward neurotransmitter (more to follow on this subject soon). It feels like my system over the past week or so has behaved as if functioning from underneath a warm, comfortable duvet. This is a nice state to be in when there aren’t things to do but when ‘things’ includes walking with relative ease it’s time to put down even the gluten free mince pie for another year. Saying goodbye to a slightly fuzzy ‘brain fog’ brain will be nice too!

I’ve dealt with addiction to other substances over the years but seeing some foodstuffs as having addiction qualities in this light rings many bells.

It may just be a disordered insulin response which can be addressed with a reduction in sugary, xmas foods and by doing some focused exercise like using a form of HIIT on my exercise bike which I’ve developed over the past year or so after reading other’s thoughts on the technique and through trial and error.

  • I’ve found short bursts of getting my heart rate up that aren’t long enough to effect a change in body temperature (which can temporarily worsen some MS symptoms) work well for me. So far I’ve been doing this every other day to give muscles a chance to rest and repair but I may try daily with slightly less resistance to address the gluten free mince pies of the season!
  • doing planks a few times throughout the day.
  • Check with your doctor before starting any new exercise. Andrew Marr, a BBC journalist and presenter had a stroke after attempting a version of HIIT (high intensity interval training) exercise.
  • I’ve also been doing less Pilates type floor exercise the past week or so which can help with balance and all of this (extra food and drink and less sleep and movement) that the season brings is being remedied this month.

2015?

Bring on the super wellness!

Do leave a comment, I’d love to hear about what approaches you’re finding work well for you.

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!

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.