Glucose loading cures everything?
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Hello there.
I've started this a week ago and I'm on 200gr of dextrose per day.
The first night was filled with vivid dreaming of a kind I probably have had to catch up with for a very long time (I dreamt of a prior surgery experience when I had actually been under full anesthesia). However, the 25gr's effects waned after about 3,5-4 hours. Whenever this happened, my pulse rose for no reason (I've been having this for years).
About half an hours after the next dose, the dextrose's effect kicked back in for me and I was calm and off to another 4hrs of deep yet eventful sleeping.About two days in I suddenly had watery diarrhea for half a day.
About a day or two later, I had strong gastrointestinal cramping with a high frequency of almost spastic bowel movements. These were relieved several hours after ingesting psyllium and activated charcoal. I suggest glucose definitely sets some things in motion about restoring forwards peristalsis/motility of the gut and digestive organs.The pure dextrose is really totally different to sucrose or honey. Pure dextrose powder is also so much better than those sour little fruit-flavoured dextrose tabs/lozenges available for purchase. Those are sickening after only a few and had been my only prior experiences with dextrose.
After a couple of days, however, my high pulse remained and it felt as if the dextrose had no more effect. I was also craving something which at first I mistook for being thirsty or hungry:
I need a few mgs of thiamin with each dextrose dose and 1.5grs of potassium chloride. The latter tastes surprisingly extraordinarily good with dextrose.
Both potassium and chloride ions are essential for increasing glucose phosporylation, intracellular (structured) water and volume, and the full-on insulin production and release from pancreatic beta cells. Fructose inhibits all of that.
Sodium is shit. Sodium enhances the cortisol and adrenaline signalling and by this is contrary to the utilization of glucose.
With these, thiamin and potassium chloride, the dextrose dosing has been working for me for the past days without weird cravings and its effects also seem to not wane as quickly as before (heart rate, etc). So I will continue with this regimen and perhaps increase it every week.When I tried 50grs dextrose in the beginning, that was too much as my stomach felt heavy and I had a mild feeling of nausea.
Please give it some thoughts and a try yourselves. I would like to hear others experiences also for the chloride supply without sodium.
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@CrumblingCookie said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
Sodium is shit. Sodium enhances the cortisol and adrenaline signalling and by this is contrary to the utilization of glucose.
Not according to renal function, Ray Peat, and my experience it isn't.
But hopefully we can shed some light on what's separating us.
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@ThinPicking said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
Not according to renal function, Ray Peat, and my experience it isn't.
But hopefully we can shed some light on what's separating us.
I would be very interested in seeing this salt mysterium lifted. I hypothesize that a lot of the benefits felt from sodium chloride are due to the chloride ions. And in spite of the actual sodium fraction unless there's some acute benefit from its upping of adrenal hormone functions.
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@CrumblingCookie said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
I would be very interested in seeing this salt mysterium lifted.
I think this has been done in the last 15 years at least. And RPF is a goldmine if you don't have an existing archive.
However my comment above was more for the room because your rejection was strong. If you're struggling with sodium, assuming you've had that trouble with it added to solid food, not in attempt to find a concentration above hypotonic in a drink that "works" for you, and assuming you hadn't been adding a bolus of fluid on top of that food. Please don't change your behaviour or doubt yourself for the comment.
I'm currently down a few rabbit holes about this paradigm split. Which has been present for a lot longer than 6 months, I just didn't notice. Generally I'm paying far more attention to things I have no need to see for the whole experience. And hopefully for your benefit more than my nerd. There's obviously a reason nature likes fructose after all.
CC. Are you also a vitamin A disrespector?
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@CrumblingCookie
Lol -
@CrumblingCookie So you just created the account to say a bunch of trash? Hmmm.. suspicious.
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Raz... I know. I know.
But something is going on with them. Do you have people in your life who never seem to eat fruit or put sugar in tea or coffee? Because I do. Beside a monologue about oxidative metabolism, I never thought twice about it. Until recently. Maybe this is less of a thing in Romania (sorry if I got the place wrong).
Holmes was already here. And she started the thread. Only Brad can stop this being a thing really.
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Does anyone have a CGM to see a minute by minute status of blood sugar after taking in the bolus of dextrose? Actually, Dr. Stephens wouldn't find that hard to do. Instead of a spinal tap, he can ask his patient/clients if they can be a test subject, which isn't a hard ask at all.
It would tell us how high blood glucose went after the bolus intake before dropping, and how fast and how low blood sugar goes down. Does it go down so low to be hypoglycemic, and if not, why?
The fact that this is easy to do but not being done makes me suspicious that Dr. Stephens isn't really interested in getting to the meat of it, and would rather have this remain as s mystery.
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Of course, Stephens is a neuro guy. As a carpenter seeing everything as a nail, Stephens would want to use a spinal tap.
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@yerrag What's in it for him? He told me his client fees are "whatever you can afford" meaning free for some. His books are by no means best sellers. He for sure isn't in this to get rich.
I see in Dr Stephens what made me a fan of Dr Peat many years ago. He believes everyone should have access to free or affordable health information that, instead of filling the coffers of the medical industrial complex, will actually promote health and well-being for any and all, and that it shouldn't only be accessible to the wealthy and elite.
So being the perennial lab rat that I am, I'm happy to participate in what may end up being a massive paradigm shifting experiment. So far so good.
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@yerrag said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
Of course, Stephens is a neuro guy. As a carpenter seeing everything as a nail, Stephens would want to use a spinal tap.
This I think. Although the CSF is closer to (his) wire. For the same reason he may be a little blind to the invasive/uncomfortable nature of it, temporarily.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10174426/
I've never had one, but know someone with hydrocephalus. These tests aren't very nice.
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@ThinPicking said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
@evan-hinkle said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
so maybe a quarter tsp or so of added salt per meal
Thanks Evan. I'm not reducing what's going on here to this, but still...
That doesn't sound like very much to me and Jennifer is certainly right about this.
I agree that salted food tastes over-salted after a period of reduced salt intake.
In my experience if I'm lacking in it for a while, I have to slowly ramp up. Or resist a thirst response. And vice versa. If I overdo it. I have to slowly add water. And resist a salt taste. But the latter is very rare for me these days.
I consider Rays "salt to taste" line a cautionary. Because so many people in so many different states would pick up on it. Haidut and others posts on RPF were more useful to me in pushing the boat, so to speak. And finding out that more was better, for me.
This has been my experience, as well. For the majority of my life my diet has been unprocessed so my taste for salt was low, but a practitioner recommended I increase my salt intake and it turned out that more was better for me, too.
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On the advice of @ThinPicking , (and some studies I read “over there” ive decided to up the salt. Today is day one, we’ll see. I never ate salt growing up, so the two tsp a day I was eating over the past year or so was an insane amount to me, lol.
On another note, I’ve decided to lower my dose of glucose. I had a hit to do so today and it felt “right.” I have heard that perhaps when the brain “wakes up” keeping it in a steady supply more frequently is a better strategy than larger doses 3-4 times a day. I have found this to be true, as the larger doses seemed to return the very symptoms that had originally been eliminated. The lower dose with more frequency, (same daily total dosage) has again eliminated the brain fog and returned the state I was initially experiencing.
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@ThinPicking said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
I'm currently down a few rabbit holes about this paradigm split. Which has been present for a lot longer than 6 months, I just didn't notice. Generally I'm paying far more attention to things I have no need to see for the whole experience. And hopefully for your benefit more than my nerd.
Please do share the findings you unearth when you resurface from that. I can't stem more of that myself right now. I know there's a lot. Only last month haidut also wrote about sodium chloride again in a brief sum-up, the deductions of which I found very unsatisfactory and essentially inconclusive. I reckon you will find a lot of positives on glucose utilization through oxphos and insuline responses by potassium and chloride. And by magnesium on a later, deeply intracellular level.
@ThinPicking said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
But something is going on with them. Do you have people in your life who never seem to eat fruit or put sugar in tea or coffee? Because I do. Beside a monologue about oxidative metabolism, I never thought twice about it. Until recently.
Have you noticed any other common traits in these people? As in eating extraordinarily lots of starches or vegetables? Or having had a fortunate upbringing without events which fostered and engrained the notorious learned helplessness and its associated chronic metabolic shifts?
@yerrag said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
Of course, Stephens is a neuro guy. As a carpenter seeing everything as a nail, Stephens would want to use a spinal tap.
If we're after the question of where and how the given dextrose really disappears into across the different tissues I can see the necessity to align measurements of BG with measurements in CSF over time. My impression also is that he says those remarks about spinal taps in a slightly humorous way and he wouldn't really want to perform them. He's a psychologist, after all, with a specialized understanding for neurological patterns as these relate to behaviour. Spinal tapping would need to be done by clinical experimental neurologists or neuropsychiatrists with an understanding for a variety of specific markers for energy metabolism which are not usually part of even extended CSF testing panels and certainly not in ambulatory settings. It could be wise to kindly decline if anyone ever offers you an ambulatory spinal tap.
@Razvan
If you're doing perfectly well with regard to your physical and mental health by all means continue whatever you use to do but don't flatter yourself by falsely assuming that I were here to talk shit with you. -
Having a mystery live on requires a high priest and a cult surrounding and supporting that priesthood.
Keeping things as a mystery disables rather than enables. Having an ignorance and joyfully accepting it goes with the false virtue of humility hat comes with saying "I am not worthy."
If the mystery is gone and you know why, in this case, dextrose loading restores your brain as well as the entire body's metabolic capacity, wouldn't you be off on your own instead of having to rely on the possibility that you need to be coached by Dr. Stephens as a fallback if your experimenting goes awry?
Aren't there enough mysteries around us that makes the world dependent on high priests to weave a fairy tale existence revolving around many phenomena that can't be proven yet accepted by the mainstream? Such as the existence of virus and the rabbitholes of rabies and COVID that emanate from our worship of those who claim to understand what we cannot fathom?
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@ThinPicking said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
I've never had one, but know someone with hydrocephalus. These tests aren't very nice.
Indeed. Dr. House the show makes it appear a spinal tap is as needed as a cup of coffee.
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@CrumblingCookie No problem.
Thanks Mosaic01 ! -
@CrumblingCookie said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
If we're after the question of where and how the given dextrose really disappears into across the different tissues I can see the necessity to align measurements of BG with measurements in CSF over time. My impression also is that he says those remarks about spinal taps in a slightly humorous way and he wouldn't really want to perform them.
Sorry I don't have a built-in filter like you do-
- to know when to take him seriously or not.
I don't have your solomonic wisdom.
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I cant say much about the mechanisms but ive been trying it for 3 weeks. Effects came in immediatly.
started at 20g 3x a day but im now at 50g 4x a day.
Dextrose feels absolutely different to other carb sources (maybe due to the microbiome).
Not realy fond of dr stephens explanation tho. Totally understand anyone who doubts the whole thing.
The effects and changes i experience are amazing however. With only little sideeffects.
I will report back in 6 months wether im diabetic and fat or if i abolished my health issues. -
@Ben said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
Dextrose feels absolutely different to other carb sources (maybe due to the microbiome).
Not realy fond of dr stephens explanation tho. Totally understand anyone who doubts the whole thing.
Hello Ben. If you're comfortable doing so, could you share difficulty with sugar/fruit relative to this?
I'm gathering, and reading, and thinking. Sure I'm not the only one. So your answer's for the room.
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Not realy having difficulty per se with other carb sources. But they do almost nothing for energy or brainfog or wellbeing. They just satiate and taste ok or make me sleepy. Some even cause minorish issues like pizza/certain breads/orange juicr
causing inflammation in my gums on some days, rice seems to make my digestion back up a little(constipation?) and soft drinks, fruit juices and honey make my teeth sometimes feel unpleasant.Dont have any of that with dextrose. The high dose at once might make one feel a little off for 2-5 mins but then its good mood and brainfunction for me.
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@Ben said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
Not realy fond of dr stephens explanation tho. Totally understand anyone who doubts the whole thing.
The effects and changes i experience are amazing however. With only little sideeffects.
I will report back in 6 months wether im diabetic and fat or if i abolished my health issues.Yes. Also, diabetics will admonish us of the impending doom and immediate and forceful creation of long-term diabetic damages on kidney, heart, eyes and everything due to apparently not really measurable spikes in BG and insuline and the signalling for such drastic insuline spikes and due to the apparently covert extreme stress signalling for regulation of BG when the dextrose serving wears off.
I wonder whether there's no cause to worry about the latter as long as dextrose dosing is so that liver glycogen stores always remain full? Or as long as dextrose dosing is sufficiently continuous, either by osmotic stomach concentrations (with little water or with foods) or by 2-hourly servings? Would these measures reliably prevent the otherwise typical and dreaded stress responses which we otherwise might not even consciously take notice of (as diabetics would warn)?
Maybe Dr. Stephens' therapeutic approach as far as we know it is not the cleverest or gentlest way to go about it yet. However, there's undeniably something fundamentally effective about regularly lots of dextrose.
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@Ben I think we could use more science in the explanation, but he admits that this isn't something that has been researched much. I began homeopathy 35 years ago with no "research" to be found. It saved my life. This can't hurt, and I'm retracing something every day. These past few days it's been covid tongue. Red meat...
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@Ben Great report!
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I've gotta say, we love the glucose therapy so far. We had a long day yesterday and got home late. I don't believe we could have kept up the pace without it. Even my husband, who isn't always enthusiastic about yet ANOTHER experiment was asking for more. Both of us were transformed within seconds each time after taking it and we were able to keep up with our little grands (2 and 6) until very late.
The next test was whether I would have insomnia after a very busy day and long drive home. I usually have to start winding down around 8:30. Unloading the car and putting away groceries (which I was doing at 11 PM) will usually keep me awake for hours. But a small dose of glucose water and a snack and I was out fast.
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@S-Holmes how much dextrose are you taking?
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Thank you @Ben
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@Razvan I try to be consistent with 12 grams every 2 hours. We were taking 25 grams 4 times a day but it seemed to make us lethargic so may have been triggering a healing "crisis."
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Speaking of herxing, we have both had SYMMETRIC itchy rashes, lasting about an hour each, my husband's on both forearms and mine on both pinky fingers. In classical homeopathy, itchy rashes represent the pinnacle of healing.
You never want to suppress an itchy rash. Case in point. My mother had an itchy rash on her legs. The doctor gave her steroid cream for it. Long story short, she ended up in the ER with pneumonia. The skin and lungs are functionally connected. When eruptions are suppressed the lungs are adversely effected.
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I recall reading somewhere where Ray says BG going high isn't that harmful as the body has ways to deal with it. But he didn't elaborate. But later on I would learn that the body converts glucose to fructose under high BG conditions, and also dumps glucose into urine as kinda like a safety valve.
OTOH, being low on blood sugar leads one to be unable to sleep, leads to high stress hormone levels, fainting, lowered immunity, and to becoming sensitive to respiratory allergies and to being vulnerable to infections leading to fever and flu.
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@S-Holmes said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
I've gotta say, we love the glucose therapy so far. We had a long day yesterday and got home late. I don't believe we could have kept up the pace without it. Even my husband, who isn't always enthusiastic about yet ANOTHER experiment was asking for more. Both of us were transformed within seconds each time after taking it and we were able to keep up with our little grands (2 and 6) until very late.
The next test was whether I would have insomnia after a very busy day and long drive home. I usually have to start winding down around 8:30. Unloading the car and putting away groceries (which I was doing at 11 PM) will usually keep me awake for hours. But a small dose of glucose water and a snack and I was out fast.
Do you always use it in water? I've tried milk and like it more since it's not so sweet. But not sure if that is a good thing or not.
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@ThinPicking said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
Thank you @Ben
I have that same experience. 25 grams makes me feel exhausted. I'm doing smaller increments now too. Still afraid to gain weight but we'll see.
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@happyhanneke I use it in water, coffee, lemonade in place of sucrose. I sometimes use both sucrose AND dextrose if I need more sweetener but don't want to overdo the dextrose.
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Dr. Stephens in an email exchange with me: "You will be so excited with the outcome of this."
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Same. This dextrose protocol is like nothing I’ve tried before. So much different than high sucrose and general high carb eating.
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@yerrag said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
OTOH, being low on blood sugar leads one to be unable to sleep, leads to high stress hormone levels, fainting, lowered immunity, and to becoming sensitive to respiratory allergies and to being vulnerable to infections leading to fever and flu.
By this I must have been having functionally low glucose throughout the miserable half of my life.
Generally irrespective of whether my fasting BG was a mere 60 or a borderline-high 99 mg/mL. -
The funny and cruel thing is that we are always concerned with high blood sugar, and we never hear a pipsqueak about low blood sugar.
Just as we hear of high cholesterol and worry about it, and never hear talk of the danger of low cholesterol.
Same of high blood pressure and low blood pressure.
As well as high temperature and low temperature.
How we are programmed to be blind to what really presents to be more of a danger, and spend our time worrying about what's less worrisome.
I'm glad we don't perceive friend to be enemies, and enemies to be our friends.
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@yerrag said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
I'm glad we don't perceive friend to be enemies, and enemies to be our friends.
This looks to be a normative statement? As opposed to a positive, factual statement of the predominant opposite.
In a few consecutive mornings I noticed my pulse remained elevated for longer than half an hour after my first dextrose serving.
I speculated that this may be due to me immediately soaking up all the dextrose after having used up all my glycogen stores over the long stretch of time overnight. And I wondered whether increasing my (morning) serving size could alleviate this.It seems it indeed does so.
These mere 6-14gr more dextrose per serving, however, have reintroduced the sleepiness I had been having before especially during the first two-three days of dextrosing.
As someone wrote in another thread: I have no idea whether this would be related to brain healing. -
It's a lot easier if you have BG data with you. I would get a glucometer and start measuring my BG in 15 minute intervals from zero to say 3 hours. This means about 12 or 13 needle punctures into your fingers which is not painful.
Then you can see how high your BG goes before it comes down, and how fast it comes down, and how low it goes before it begins to go up.
I have a glucometer to do my own 5 hr oral glucose tolerance test from time to time and I learn a lot about how my body handles and regulates blood sugar this way.
If you've never used a glucometer, .you may be turned off by having so many pinpricks done. But if you've had at least one done, you know it's not painful.
OTOH, I think having a CGM device is a bit much. You can get enough useful data from a glucometer without having to have a CGM attached to you all the time.
With the BG data presented in an x vs y graph, x being BG and y being time, you can easily visualize and determine what is going on with how your BG fluctuates after an intake of dextrose. It would vary from person to person, which is why it is very helpful as it gives you your context, and that matters a lot.
If I have blood sugar problems, I would do this. But then, I don't have BG issues. But still, I use my own 5 hr glucose tolerance test for improving my blood sugar regulation.
5 yes ago my fasting BS was s very nice 84. Now, it' at 95, which many would still envy but it shows my blood sugar regulation has worsened.
Having a 5hr OGTT chart would help identify where the problem is that I need to work on.
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Thanks for your thoughts. I won't do that glucose monitoring, though, because the significance and meaning of any measurements would need to be allocated to individual reactions, feelings, situations and all their changes over time.
It would vary from person to person, which is why it is very helpful as it gives you your context, and that matters a lot.
Exactly! So that would be a lot of individual empirics and may or may not show anything helpful. I can see the "academic" appeal of documenting and analysing this for oneself. I would even be curious about the diagrams of others who are going for the dextrose. E.g. if you were to start dextrose and continue your previous BG testings that would be even more revealing with regard to the changes and altered response curves.
For myself, however, I consider it too much effort which I would expect to be more sensible if along with glucose there could also be fully quantitative quick-testing of cortisol and adrenaline levels to match up with and complement the picture of why the BG is at its level at any given time.
Also, indeed I really hate those pinpricks.Over at the RPF some peeps are backpedalling about dextrose in rather weakish and discombobulated ways. I would bet on that they are not getting their corequirements for electrolytes and B vitamins right, which some others are now starting to tentativily give considerations to. I hope they'll follow up on these and report what can be useful for my course.
After my increased dextrose serving sizes three days ago I am today having watery diarrhea again. I surely believe they are causally connected. And hopefully again transient.
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I think it's mostly because you are afraid of pinpricks. Getting BG data is one set of useful data more than you currently have. I have used that data alone without needing more and it has made me able to improve my blood sugar regulation thru analyzing and identifying where my blood sugar issues are coming from. Whether it is from poor absorption of glucose at the outset by seeing a very high initial buildup or spike of BG, or whether it is by the large and steep drop in BG that goes into BG low territory, which could indicate a lack of glycogen stores if not a blunted adrenaline response.
But most Americans are wimps given the way they are raised with most if not all dental clinics needing to heavily sedate patients undergoing extraction and not able to stand the simple sight of a large needle. Or in undergoing a minor surgery that would need only local anaesthesia, with the patient unable to bear being conscious, would prefer general anaesthesia.
But thanks for admitting so, as I've wondered why all of RPF, heavily Americans, acting in a psychologically tribal way, are resistant to undergo the pinpricking involved in a a 5hr OGTT, and prefer to use the useless HbA1c test, which Peat himself has rightfully criticized as POS (my paraphrase). Trained methods are hard to unlearn even when shown to be wrong, as if there is a hive mind at work, even in a forum that aims to be bioenergetically strong, operating on autopilot.
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I have listened to the whole first talk which was linked in this thread and I am not impressed. He did not really address the difference between taking pure glucose and consuming starchy / sweet foods except of saying "the brain has turned down the valve" due to "glucose limiting injuries", whatever that is supposed to mean. But somehow pure glucose is avoiding this "turning down of the valve".
I think the results he gets with his patients are a mixture of providing glucose which is easily assimilated and a placebo effect. Drinking a coke is probably just as effective as swallowing 10 dextrose tablets. -
@Atman We've been drinking Mexicola for years. We've been doing the dextrose powder for 2-3 weeks. There is a HUGE difference between the two. I told my husband we need to start calling dextrose "magic powder."
If you understand that you will likely do some serious retracing on dextrose you will be more inclined to persevere when it gets bumpy. Dr. Stephens told me it will likely get a bit rough as healing occurs.
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@Atman said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
Drinking a coke is probably just as effective as swallowing 10 dextrose tablets.
Some of you guys keep saying this. People experimenting with dextrose will tell you it’s much different from sucrose and starches.
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@Atman said in Glucose loading cures everything?:
I have listened to the whole first talk which was linked in this thread and I am not impressed.
If you can Atman, do it again and in context. Attach a ultra wide angle lens and use an ultra low shutter speed. Maybe there's something happening here. Maybe something is different about them. It could be nothing, or it could be profound.
https://youtu.be/AiyoNM7OT7Y?si=-vBclIdhTCsDNvbP - November 2019
https://youtu.be/J7sG-ePM6Hw?si=3VuouVdJaAO3gZDo - June 2024Pay attention and you'll see he's less animated. He's aging. Faster than he ought to in my opinion. Maybe something happened to him. Maybe the mud we've all been dragged through had something to do with it. And maybe something more personal prior that made him think about this in the first place.
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Is there expected weight gain due to high dextrose consumption?
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@tubert Some gain weight and some don't. I read that if people cut back on other carb sources they will be less likely to. Dr. Stephens said of his patients who gained weight over the 4 to 6 month period, they were able to lose it after. (No details were offered about how they lost the weight. I assume they felt better so were more motivated to move.)
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I may go on a glucose and brewers yeast diet for a while... maybe eat one meal a day..
and see what happens. I'll take supplements for micronutrients that are missing (like B12). -
I've been following this thread and several on RPF on this topic.
On RPF, there have been a couple recent negative experiences and one or two people have stopped the protocol. But there have been a lot of positive reports too and generally a lot of optimism around and embracing of the protocol.
It seems here there is largely an openness, despite reasonable skepticism and questioning of how it would work and why it would be better than loading up on starch or white sugar loading.
I have been doing something close to the protocol for 2-3 weeks now; nothing major to report good or bad.
Does anyone here have a good summary of benefits / drawbacks you've felt from the protocol? I know several are doing it (@S-Holmes @evan-hinkle @CrumblingCookie @Jaffe @happyhanneke @Ben, maybe others )