Items That Caught My Eye

Posted by on July 16, 2010 4 comments

I’m still working on lengthy posts explaining how to recover bowel health.  In the meantime, here are a few interesting items from around the Web:

  • The “Paleo Rodeo” always has an interesting collection of posts.
  • Dr. Briffa comments on a New York Times story that a drug company hid evidence from clinical trials that their drug was deadly. This sort of behavior is outrageous but, alas, only too common.  Some treatments have about as much substance to them as Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund: they thrive, but only because of dishonesty by their developer and polite aversion of the eyes by everyone else.
  • The Daily Mail (UK) reports that shrimp are getting hooked on Prozac. The antidepressant causes them to leave their rocks and expose themselves to predators. It’s a worthwhile reminder that drugs are powerful:  even when heavily diluted, they can substantially alter behavior.
  • Speaking of Prozac and of drug company deceptions, Bruce Charlton points out that the over-the-counter antihistamine chlorpheniramine is safer than, and similarly effective to, Prozac, and that drug companies were suppressing evidence of inefficacy and safety hazards for their patented SSRI antidepressants as early as the 1960s. He concludes provocatively that “the whole official medical research literature, going back at least three decades, is pervasively unsound and untrustworthy.”

It is hard, sometimes, to avoid the conclusion that medicine has been diverted from healing into an unremitting pursuit of money. What is more, even the best doctors and scientists must join the pursuit, simply to remain in the field.  This suggests that the true trouble is less medical than economic and political.

Fortunately, it is often possible to make an end-run around the medical industry. For most conditions, the Perfect Health Diet is a more effective therapy than all the drugs in the pharmacopeia. And it’s available on this blog for free – no prescription, and no health insurance necessary.

Bowel Disorders, Part I: About Gut Disease

Posted by on July 14, 2010 43 comments

Unfortunately, two people dear to me have recently developed ulcerative colitis.  Both live in the same household – a hint that the disease has a shared cause, like diet or an infectious pathogen.

Ulcerative colitis is a form of inflammatory bowel disease in which open sores, or ulcers, dot the colon. It often produces bloody diarrhea and abdominal pain.

Ulcerative colitis is closely related to other inflammatory bowel disorders, such as Crohn’s disease. Crohn’s patients have damage to the small intestine as well as colon, but many of the symptoms overlap. It is quite likely that all the inflammatory bowel disorders are essentially the same disease induced by different casts of pathogens.

These diseases probably develop through a hierarchy of causes:

  • Food toxins damage the intestine and make it leaky to gut bacteria and bacterial proteins.
  • Malnutrition impairs the immune response to toxins and slows the healing of intestinal injuries. This makes the intestine even more leaky and damaged.
  • Damaged immunity allows bacteria to penetrate the gut mucosa and infect intestinal cells, and to enter the body and create systemic infections including intracellular infections of immune cells.  The immune response to these infections creates an inflammatory environment which makes the gut even leakier.  The infections also weaken the ability of the immune system to heal the gut.
  • Entry of toxins and bacteria into the body leads to autoimmunity. Food toxins conjugate with human proteins and provoke antibodies against the human protein; bacterial proteins that are ‘molecular mimics’ of human proteins engender antibodies that strike both the bacterial and human proteins. 
  • Autoimmunity leads to further damage to the gut and to other tissues, like the thyroid, which are important for immune function and wound healing. Hypothyroidism, for instance, promotes disease progression.
  • In its early stages, development of the disease may be accelerated by a long course of antibiotics or an infection that causes severe diarrhea. These kill healthful gut bacteria and facilitate their replacement by pathogens.

If we prioritize these in terms of damage caused, then ulcerative colitis is an infectious and autoimmune disease, since these two factors do the most severe damage. It is generally unclear which is doing the most damage. Food toxins and malnutrition continue to be secondary sources of damage.

On the other hand, if we prioritize chronologically in terms of the original causes, the disease is originally caused by food toxins and malnutrition and sometimes antibiotics, which cause intestinal damage and infections, followed by autoimmunity. 

Multifactorial nature of the disease – and the cure

Given the many factors that contribute to the disease, many steps may need to be taken to cure the disease:

  • In our view, various dietary and nutritional tactics are critical, with toxin elimination and vitamin D normalization among the most important steps.  Most medical treatments are likely to be ineffective if the diet is bad.
  • Steps to improve gut flora may be essential. This is a fascinating approach which is gradually migrating from alternative medicine to research hospitals. In effect, friendly bacteria become warriors against pathogens on the patient’s behalf.
  • Medical treatments can be very helpful, and can include antibiotics such as rifaximin to treat infections and thyroid hormone to promote healing and immunity. Extremely popular among doctors is the use of anti-inflammatory drugs to help reduce autoimmune damage. Both antibiotic and anti-inflammatory drugs have dangers however.

This is a complex disease so I’ve decided to split up my discussion into a series of posts. Luckily, almost all of it is equally helpful for other digestive conditions; the same steps will heal acid reflux, for instance.

Part II will deal with the food toxins, how they contribute to inflammatory bowel disease, and how the diet should be altered to minimize its toxin load. 

Part III will deal with the nutrients needed for proper gut and immune function, and how malnutrition contributes to the disease and can be repaired.

Part IV will deal with tactics for restoring healthful gut flora.  This can itself be a curative therapy for inflammatory bowel disease, as doctors are increasingly realizing.  And it is perhaps the easiest (if the ickiest!) of therapies.

Part V will deal with dietary tactics for defeating infections.  These can be extremely helpful in overcoming any chronic infectious disease, and there is an undeniable infectious component to ulcerative colitis.

If I haven’t become exhausted, I may add a brief note regarding medical therapies.  Doctors have a choice of anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive therapies appropriate for autoimmune diseases, and antibiotic and probiotic therapies appropriate for infectious diseases. Our bias is in favor of defeating infections; many autoimmune conditions, we suspect, will disappear within months after the infections that spawned them have been defeated.

Although bowel diseases are more complex than diseases like Alzheimer’s, you’ll notice that the dietary and nutritional strategies for all diseases are nearly the same.  So, if you can’t wait for me to write, a good start would be to read about The Diet and our Eleven Steps for Overcoming Alzheimer’s and Other Chronic Infectious Diseases.  Those have the guts of the strategies.

Related Posts

Other posts in this series:

  1. Bowel Disease, Part II: Healing the Gut By Eliminating Food Toxins m July 19, 2010
  2. Bowel Disease, Part III: Healing Through Nutrition July 22, 2010
  3. Bowel Disease, Part IV: Restoring Healthful Gut Flora July 27, 2010

Of Recovery, Hope, and Happiness

Posted by on July 13, 2010 4 comments

This blog is written for everyone:  for healthy people who want to maximize their fitness, energy, and longevity; and for ill people trying to recover.

But in a special way, this blog is directed toward patients suffering from chronic disease who are searching for hope and an effective path forward.

Medicine does not know how to treat chronic diseases. Chronic disease patients are usually told that their disease is incurable, because available treatments do not cure.  Doctors hope only to manage symptoms and maybe slow progression a bit.

Medicine does not work because:

  • Diet and nutrition are crucial to a cure – but most people, especially most chronic disease patients, eat unhealthy diets.  How many chronic disease patients drink sugary beverages?  Most, because a glucose spike will make them feel better for an hour by relieving intracellular hypoglycemia.  Yet this same glucose spike enables bacteria to reproduce and promotes disease progression.
  • The ubiquity, devastating effects, and potential for effective treatment of occult infections have not been appreciated by biomedical researchers, because (a) the pathogens are so hard to detect, (b) the pathogens usually cannot be studied in culture, (c) their effects are variable in different persons and different sites of infection, and (d) the infections don’t respond to the usual 2-to-6 week courses of antibiotics that work against acute infections. 

A principal goal of this blog is to show chronic disease patients how to progress toward health by eating a healthy diet that maximizes their immunity against infection.  Combined with appropriate antibiotics, many chronic diseases can be cured; virtually all can be slowed in their progress.

In early posts, I have written of several cures:  of Ladybug’s cure of fibromyalgia, and Sarah Wheldon’s cure of multiple sclerosis. For knowledge of an effective path forward is the father to health, and knowledge that others have trod that path successfully is the mother to hope and persistence.

One of the effects of my own illness had been to eliminate my happiness.  I had always been happy, and then, gradually, I wasn’t.  For years I had an emotional dullness that verged on irritability or anger. Yet when I took antibiotics, there was an immediate change – an overwhelming euphoria that lasted days – followed by a return to normalcy. I became happy again. Now I wake up every morning with a feeling of immense gratitude. I am happy always, and can’t stop smiling.

Ladybug, the Australian painter who cured her fibromyalgia, tells me she has the same gratitude and delight in life.  But, a talented artist, she expresses them much more eloquently. I hope readers will enjoy this painting as much as I do. Here is Ladybug, “On Top of the Hill”:

On Top of the Hill

The Danger of Protein During Pregnancy

Posted by on July 12, 2010 64 comments

At PerfectHealthDiet.com we’re advocates of protein restriction. We recommend:

  • Avoiding all protein-containing plants, as plant proteins tend to be toxic;
  • Striving to eat fatty, not lean, meats and fish, in order to keep protein intake down and fat intake up.

Protein restriction helps protect against viral and bacterial infections by promoting autophagy, the process of intracellular protein scavenging, digestion, and recycling.  During autophagy, bacteria and viruses, as well as junk human proteins and damaged organelles, are digested.  Autophagy has been strongly linked to longevity [1] and is protective against many diseases.

Our advocacy of low protein intake separates us from many other Paleo bloggers.  Loren Cordain, the dean of the Paleo movement, has long advocated consumption of lean meats.  Although he has moderated his stance somewhat, the front page of his site still places lean meats first among his favored foods:

Learn how a diet based on lean meats …

The Paleo Diet is a way of eating in the modern age that best mimics diets of our hunter-gatherer ancestors – combinations of lean meats …

(The other major difference we have with Dr. Cordain is his exclusion of starchy foods from a “Paleo” diet, even though starchy tubers have been part of the ancestral human diet for 4 million years. But that is a story for another day.)

Those who have read the pre-publication draft of our book know that we place high store on human breast milk as an indicator of the optimal composition of the human diet.  Human breast milk provides only 7% of calories in the form of protein. (Carbs are about 38% and fats about 55%.) One can debate whether 7% is the right level of protein for adults; but, if the principle of natural selection is sound, it must be that infants need a low-protein diet.

Science bears this out.  As our book notes, diets containing 20% of calories as protein are highly toxic to infants. Pre-term infants fed 20% protein diets had more fever, lethargy, and poor feeding than infants fed 10% protein diets, and lower IQs at ages 3 and 6 years. [2] Even a slight increase in the protein content of formula, from 7% to 9%, significantly increased the likelihood that babies would be overweight by age 2. [3]

Given our skepticism toward high-protein diets, especially for babies, we were pleased to see Dr. Cordain in his most recent newsletter [The Paleo Diet Update v6, #20 – Protein Intake for Pregnant Women] acknowledge the dangers of high protein intake by pregnant mothers. Dr. Cordain advises a pregnant mother:

[Y]ou probably should increase your fat and carbohydrate consumption, and limit protein to about 20-25% of energy, as higher protein intakes than this may prove to be deleterious to mother and fetus for a variety of physiological reasons….

“Protein intakes above this [25% of total calories] threshold may affect pregnancy outcome through decreased mass at birth and increased perinatal morbidity and mortality.” [4]

The physiological basis for this aversion stems from a reduced rate of urea synthesis during pregnancy that is evident in early gestation [5] as well as increases in the stress hormone cortisol [6]. Hence, pregnant women should include more carbohydrate and fat (i.e. fattier meats) in their diets and limit dietary protein to no more than 20-25% of their total caloric intake.

What are the long-term effects of a high-protein diet during pregnancy on the offspring?  In long-term follow-up studies of the adult children of mothers who ate high protein diets while pregnant between 1948 and 1954, it was found that by age 40 offspring commonly had high levels of the stress hormone cortisol [6] and high blood pressure [7,8].  The effects of faulty maternal diets can be long-lasting.

At PerfectHealthDiet.com, we think 20% is still likely to be a bit more protein than is desirable. We would advise pregnant mothers to restrict protein to about 15% of calories and to strive to obtain 30% of calories as carbohydrates.  As long as adequate carbs are obtained, there is only a modest need for protein and as little as 10% of calories as protein may be sufficient.

Note that this advice is very close to the ratios of 30% carb, 15% protein, and 55% fat that we recommend to adults and children generally.  Pregnant women may benefit from slightly more starch and slightly less protein than others; but on the Perfect Health Diet, pregnancy should not require a significant change in eating habits.

[1] Jia K, Levine B. Autophagy is required for dietary restriction-mediated life span extension in C. elegans. Autophagy. 2007 Nov-Dec;3(6):597-9. http://pmid.us/17912023.

[2] Goldman HI et al. Clinical effects of two different levels of protein intake on low-birth-weight infants. J Pediatr. 1969 Jun;74(6):881-9. http://pmid.us/5781798. Goldman HI et al. Effects of early dietary protein intake on low-birth-weight infants: evaluation at 3 years of age. J Pediatr. 1971 Jan;78(1):126-9. http://pmid.us/5539071. Goldman HI et al. Late effects of early dietary protein intake on low-birth-weight infants. J Pediatr. 1974 Dec;85(6):764-9. http://pmid.us/4472449.

[3] Koletzko B et al; European Childhood Obesity Trial Study Group. Lower protein in infant formula is associated with lower weight up to age 2 y: a randomized clinical trial. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 Jun;89(6):1836-45. http://pmid.us/19386747.

[4] Speth JD. Protein selection and avoidance strategies of contemporary and ancestral foragers: unresolved issues. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1991 Nov 29;334(1270):265-9; discussion 269-70. http://pmid.us/1685584.

[5] Kalhan SC. Protein metabolism in pregnancy. Am J Clin Nutr. 2000 May;71(5 Suppl):1249S-55S. http://pmid.us/10799398.

[6] Herrick K et al. Maternal consumption of a high-meat, low-carbohydrate diet in late pregnancy: relation to adult cortisol concentrations in the offspring. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2003 Aug;88(8):3554-60. http://pmid.us/12915635.

[7] Campbell DM et al. Diet in pregnancy and the offspring’s blood pressure 40 years later. Br J Obstet Gynaecol. 1996 Mar;103(3):273-80. http://pmid.us/8630314.

[8] Shiell AW et al. High-meat, low-carbohydrate diet in pregnancy: relation to adult blood pressure in the offspring. Hypertension. 2001 Dec 1;38(6):1282-8. http://pmid.us/11751704.