Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?
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I am overweight at 107kg, just below my max of 115kg from 5 years ago. Could this be the cause of the hypoglycemia?
I don't know since when I have had this symptom, my life had been riddled long depressive phases as well as periods of burnout, which really muddied the water about what was hypoglycemia and what was not. Though I do remember that people would mistake me for being stoned in high school, which could have been hypoglycemia as well.
I say reactive hypoglycemia because it is especially noticeable a few hours after eating starch, where it is often so bad I can't do anything else than lying in bed until my body recovers. But there might be a general, chronic element to it as well.
It is causing me massive trouble as an artist, I can find maybe an hour per day where my blood sugar is high enough to work on art. Outside those blessed moments my creativity and dexterity just goes into the drain.
Sorry for all the rambling but this is all very new to me and I would be very grateful to have some tips on how to manage my sugar levels.
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@API-Beast Maybe something in here can help: https://constantinek.substack.com/p/how-to-utilize-glucose-well
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@API-Beast said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
I say reactive hypoglycemia because it is especially noticeable a few hours after eating starch, where it is often so bad I can't do anything else than lying in bed until my body recovers. But there might be a general, chronic element to it as well.
It is causing me massive trouble as an artist, I can find maybe an hour per day where my blood sugar is high enough to work on art. Outside those blessed moments my creativity and dexterity just goes into the drain.
I'm pretty sure that "reactive hypoglycemia" is a new fangled phrase used to avoid using the words "beri beri" or thiamine deficiency.
When you have a thiamine deficiency, you cannot burn glucose via oxidative metabolism because thiamine is required for that process. When you eat starch, that starch turns into glucose and your body would love to burn it for fuel. It will use up every last bit of thiamine in you to try to burn that glucose; this makes the thiamine deficiency worse which makes you feel really bad.
In 2020, I took Bactrim antibiotic for a UTI. That mistake nearly killed me. I was already borderline deficient in thiamine long term (unknown to me) and the Bactrim blocked my thiamine function on top of that. I was pretty much living on 1% low-fat milk and oranges during that time and I packed on 25 pounds in 25 days. My body couldn't burn the glucose for fuel so it packed it all into storage as fat. I recovered via high dose thiamine hcl along with a few other vitamins that get used up faster when your oxidative metabolism starts working: magnesium, niacinamide, and riboflavin. Once I got up to my "optimum" dose of thiamine hcl (1 gram, 2Xday), my entire digestive tract normalized in 2 days. I experienced resolution of many long term health problems from taking high dose thiamine hcl.
On a brighter note, I should add that I experienced amazing improvement within 45 minutes of taking my first higher dose of thiamine hcl (300-350mg), taken with water only, and spaced away from eating anything by at least 30 minutes. My body temperature went up a full degree to normal, my inflammation disappeared, and my brain fog cleared. This response showed me clearly that I had a problem with thiamine deficiency/functional blockage, which inspired me to research thiamine further. I spent the next 4 months increasing my dose of thiamine hcl until I reached my "optimum dose". I've been taking that dose of thiamine hcl for 3 years (1 gram, 2Xday).
links for your consideration:
Elliot Overton's youtube thiamine videos
start with this oneDr. Derrick Lonsdales's articles
start with this oneDr. Costantini's website
Dr. Costantini's Therapy page that includes how to formulate your optimum dose based on your weight.P.S. I'm a textile artist; I'm back at work doing what I love to do with enough energy to make it fun again!
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@Sophocles @mostlylurking
Thanks to you both, it has been very helpful in making sense of it all.I will try to supplement high dose Thiamine to see if it caused by a deficiency and Nicotinamid to help reduce the FFAs. FFAs seem like a likely culprit due to dealing with stress and high weight.
Further I will try to adjust my diet a bit to include more liver, fruit, eggs and potatoes to help with the other nutrients needed.
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@API-Beast said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
I will try to supplement high dose Thiamine to see if it caused by a deficiency and Nicotinamid to help reduce the FFAs. FFAs seem like a likely culprit due to dealing with stress and high weight.
Sounds like a good plan. I just wanted to say that I personally found taking smaller doses (100mg) of niacinamide more frequently (4Xday) worked better for me than taking 200mg of niacinamide 2Xday. Niacinamide is water soluble so it only stays around for maybe 2 hours; I think this is why I do better on the smaller and more frequent dose.
Sorry if I overwhelmed you with all the links to information. It took me months to read/watch all this stuff.
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@API-Beast
I had reactive hypoglycemia my whole life until the turn of the century, so now I have been normoglycemic for 23 years already. Of these years, the 1st 17 years I still needed help with managing it by having to eat low-glycemic food like brown rice over high-glycemic food like white rice, and had to eat more meat as it keeps my blood sugar from dropping when the protein slowly gets converted to sugar with adrenaline and cortisol signaling the conversion of protein into sugar to augment my blood sugar when it goes near low levels. But in the last 6 years, I benefited from going as much as possible going cold turkey on PUFAs for at least 4 years (more or less) before seeing my hypoglycemic condition disappear. This was in line with Peat's ideas, but that was before I heard of Ray Peat. But when I read more and more of Peat's articles, the more I was convinces Ray was onto something, and I began to absorb as much as I can by reading his writings, although I doubt I can ever absorb enough he's written over his lifetime.
The key things that worked for me I can sum it up with these actions:
- Getting rid of mercury toxicity by removal of a mouth filled with 11 mercury amalgams with a dentist aligned with IAOMT, and subsequently undergoing DMSO chelation using a series of IV chelation (about 12 weekly sessions, although it may be as high as 18 sessions). These days, I think the chelation may be more easily done using a substance more safely and more effectively. Emeramide, however is not FDA-approved as the FDA drags its heels, but there is a Facebook group that helps in getting and sharing information (though I left that group as I felt the moderators are idiots, to say the least, hung up on what I perceive as being stuck up on rigid rules that suppress what I consider valid observations that would better be appreciated and used to advance the connection of dots, something that a good moderator should possess, which the RPF cub of a lion lacks as well).
Mercury displaces oxygen from any to all of the four binding sites in hemoglobin for oxygen, and reduces the ability to transport a key substrate, oxygen, from being used optimally with sugar for mitochondrial respiration, from which we produce energy.
I was able to benefit from this improvement the first 17 years. I got an energy boost in the form of becoming flu and fever-free since then, when I used to have flu once to twice a year. My endurance running was also boosted, from being exhausted running just 1 km. Without much training, I was instantly transformed into running 5 km uphill without breaking a sweat.
Still, my Achilles heel of being downed by taking a teaspoon of white sugar still exists. And I was still prone to allergic rhinitis. And I was still very sensitive to MSG and it would crash my blood sugar when I eat a bit too much from Chinese and Japanese foods made by wannabe chefs that cheat.
- It was only when I listened one day to an interview from a doctor (I forgot his name) but he coined the term "parent essential oils." He seemed very convincing in an arrogant manner in maligning PUFAs. But I had to think it through very hard his ideas as until then I was a believer of UFOs Erasmus, who wrote "Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill" from the 80s. What made me rethink my attitude was my reasoning that it is plausible that people who lived inland in the tropics where plants produced little or no PUFA and who ate little omega-3 from being far from the sea, would have long perished by being deficient in the so-called EFAs (essential fatty acids).
So I there and then decided to throw away cooking oils I had such as soya oil, corn oil, and canola oil (such as the wrongly revered Wesson brand) and restricted myself to coconut oil and butter for cooking. I stayed off junk food as I began to develop the habit of reading the ingredient list of processed foods. And I avoided eating out as much as possible, given restaurants and chefs only care about flavor and had no iota what is healthful or not. Not that the fault lay with them, given the general population is blind as a bat when it comes to what is healthful or not.
It was a few years later that I would read of and embrace Ray Peat (around 2016) and I would join RPF.
I think it was Ray who said that it takes 4 years for PUFA to be totally eliminated from the system. Since I already had a headstart, I figured 2017 would be the end of 4 years of going cold turkey on PUFA. So I did a test of my blood sugar. I took a teaspoon of white morning as I skipped breakfast that morning, and waited to feel bad and sick from a sugar low I had learned to expect to be bad for me. The test lasted 5 hours and I didn't feel sick, and I broke the test by having lunch. I did the same thing the next day, but extended the test till dinner time. Seeing it was no fluke, ai declared myself fully cured of hypoglycemia.
My fasting blood sugar would be 84 and my blood sugar would stay that way throughout the day except after meals, which would go to 140 an hour after a meal and begin going down until it levels off at 84. This is how a personal with food sugar metabolism should be, as reflected in stable blood sugar levels.
In the RPF forum, I would encounter people who don't understand the way blood sugar is regulated, and I had given up on those who consider blood sugar rising to 140 right after a meal (with rice or bread or pasta with meat and veggies) as a spike, and for all all such spikes are a no-no. They would brandish out their new tool of a tool, called a continuous glucose monitor (cgm for short), and for being so equipped, they would proceed to make a faulty analysis. Because they have such as tool, they consider themselves well-placed to solve their blood sugar problems.
But they are sort if reinventing the wheel, and replacing a tool used in the past with inferior analysis. The tool uses in the past is a 5hr oral glucose tolerance test, which nowadays has been abandoned by modern medicine and in its place is at best a 3hr glucose tolerance test, and at worst an HbA1 test. And sad to say, even a doctor I respect, Thomas Cowan, uses the HbA1c. Oh well, no one's perfect. Including Ray Peat, who I believe would have lived longer had he been as open to the idea that viruses don't exist as much as Cowan does.
- Use of a good tool to measure and diagnose yourself (or with the help of an alternative doctor) of your blood sugar using a 5 hr oral glucose tolerance test.
It can be done yourself. Easy peasy. I've shown how it can be done at RPF. It is a disappointment that I cannot convince anyone at RPF to lift a finger nor pry himself off his fat ass to do it.
It doesn't cost much to get the tools and supplies to get started. But this is to be expected from people uses to taking magic bullets. Give them a process with simple directions. They rather get it simplified further and compressed into one step of downing a magic pill.
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@yerrag said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
Mercury displaces oxygen from any to all of the four binding sites in hemoglobin for oxygen, and reduces the ability to transport a key substrate, oxygen, from being used optimally with sugar for mitochondrial respiration, from which we produce energy.
Thank you for your write up! I have mercury poisoning myself. However, my 8 fillings were removed the dangerous way with no safety protocol whatsoever which caused my mercury load to be quite high. I was chelated with DMSA + EDTA by IV decades later, but I really don't think it resolved much. I've decided to wait until the real Emeramide is approved by the FDA because of the danger of heavy metals contamination in the knock offs. Apparently my body cannot detox heavy metals. In the meantime, I've found great health improvement via high dose thiamine.
Mercury causes high oxidative stress, high reactive oxygen species. I believe that this caused my low glutathione level that I had for many years. High oxidative stress depletes thiamine. Thiamine lowers oxidative stress, if you have (supplement) enough of it; my own glutathione level has normalized since taking high dose thiamine hcl, which I think proves that my oxidative stress level now has enough thiamine to deal with it.
a link or two about oxidative stress and thiamine:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197018613000120
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197018601001206?via%3DihubThere's new research that points to the main cause of mercury issues as being selenium deficiency. I added 200mcg of selenium to my supplement regime and my doctors remarked that my blood tests showed my health is improved.
Severe elemental mercury poisoning managed with selenium and N-acetylcysteine administration
The discussion about mercury poisoning here is pertinent to the topic of hyperglycemia (I think) because heavy metal poisoning increases oxidative stress which depletes thiamine and causes thiamine deficiency which derails glucose metabolism.
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@mostlylurking said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
@yerrag said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
Mercury displaces oxygen from any to all of the four binding sites in hemoglobin for oxygen, and reduces the ability to transport a key substrate, oxygen, from being used optimally with sugar for mitochondrial respiration, from which we produce energy.
Thank you for your write up! I have mercury poisoning myself. However, my 8 fillings were removed the dangerous way with no safety protocol whatsoever which caused my mercury load to be quite high. I was chelated with DMSA + EDTA by IV decades later, but I really don't think it resolved much. I've decided to wait until the real Emeramide is approved by the FDA because of the danger of heavy metals contamination in the knock offs. Apparently my body cannot detox heavy metals. In the meantime, I've found great health improvement via high dose thiamine.
Thanks for the correction! I don't retain names well, and you'll find me posting in the manner of "a doctor I don't remember the name of" occasionally. Rather than dig up his name and lose my trend of thought, I'd much rather continue writing to keep what I had mentally organized in my mind intact to be able to write out my thoughts. I was referring to DMSA when I said DMSO in my previous post.
I'm sorry that the IV chelation didn't work as well on you as it did me. I had mercury successfully removed, not just because hair and nail tests proved to its success, but my greatly improved resistance to flu, which had been a great thorn, and my greater endurance in running long distances proved it. As to the use of Emeramide, I used 20g of it last year, not for mercury toxicity, but for lead.
In the ongoing trials for approval of Emeramide, the approval for mercury toxicity is the sole intent though, as to include other heavy metals such as lead risks further delay of approval.
But I can understand your caution in waiting it out for FDA approval. Even with FDA approval, there is no guarantee as effects vary by the wide variety in context.
In my case, I was very sick for the entire year from using the Emeramide I bought from Fandachem of China, but I never thought I got an inferior grade of Emeramide. It is fake only because it did not come from the inventor's company but making Emeramide isn't rocket science. I can even say you can make it if you had a small lab with simple equipment like some Pyrex distilling flasks and beakers and some Bunsen burners. And a good handle on chemistry. For that reason, I felt I am getting a very high quality generic substance. If we can buy antibiotics from India, even Rapamycin, with confidence, there is no reason why I would need to wait for FDA to approve formally Emeramide and be held hostage to a bureaucracy known for its corruption and regulatory culpability to conspire with special interests that profit from making the US (and to a leaser degree the world) their milking cow since the Flexner Report came out a century ago. From that point on, wide scale racketeering was employed making the government its enforcer and accomplice using the legal system to transform medicine into legalized snake oil for a population made into a market for blockbuster drugs and vaccines designed to intoxicate people from birth.
Going back to topic, I got sick by encountering a perfect storm of my own making when I used Emeramide as I was not yet fully recovered from acute bronchitis (which I caused unwittingly by taking cinnamon bark orally in a a manner that caused my lungs to be irritated and filled with mucus with the ability to expectorate it disabled). The detox process involving Emeramide caused more mucus to be produced, worsening my ability to breathe. This further deprived me of oxygen and the downstream effects slowly developed and it led to heart failure and I needed to be revived and placed in an ICU intubated. I was still strong enough to only stay at the ICU for two days though, and when I was released from the hospital, I didn't think I would find myself returning for another stay 5 months later. In short, it was that bad.
I am now certain that I will be fully recovered. All the signs point to it. But the takeaway here is that I should have let my lung to recover fully before doing my lead detox with Emeramide. The stress of undergoing a healing crisis during the lead detox was too much to bear when I was still recovering from acute bronchitis. I was too excited to begin to detox lead with Emeramide that I lost sight of healing first from my condition of acute bronchitis.
Lesson learned and thankful.
Mercury causes high oxidative stress, high reactive oxygen species. I believe that this caused my low glutathione level that I had for many years. High oxidative stress depletes thiamine. Thiamine lowers oxidative stress, if you have (supplement) enough of it; my own glutathione level has normalized since taking high dose thiamine hcl, which I think proves that my oxidative stress level now has enough thiamine to deal with it.
a link or two about oxidative stress and thiamine:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197018613000120
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197018601001206?via%3DihubThere's new research that points to the main cause of mercury issues as being selenium deficiency. I added 200mcg of selenium to my supplement regime and my doctors remarked that my blood tests showed my health is improved.
Severe elemental mercury poisoning managed with selenium and N-acetylcysteine administration
The discussion about mercury poisoning here is pertinent to the topic of hyperglycemia (I think) because heavy metal poisoning increases oxidative stress which depletes thiamine and causes thiamine deficiency which derails glucose metabolism.
Thanks for sharing. I will catch up with this. Except for using it for daily supplementation with other b-vitamins, and when I needed to lower lactic acid in blood to lower acidity in cases of high serum acidity (to make room for blood to contain more CO2), I have little immediate need yet to megadose with thiamine.
Have been meaning to read Derrick Lonsdale's book, but I still have yet to finish any of Ray Peat's four books.
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It's all about how you react to it
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@yerrag said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
@yerrag said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
Mercury displaces oxygen from any to all of the four binding sites in hemoglobin for oxygen, and reduces the ability to transport a key substrate, oxygen, from being used optimally with sugar for mitochondrial respiration, from which we produce energy.I have a little different perspective regarding how my mercury affects my health, probably based on my own personal experiences and research. This does not mean we are not both correct.
I look at it this way:
Mercury causes severe oxidative stress (perhaps via what you just wrote?) Thiamine is used to quench the oxidative stress. But then thiamine stores get depleted and it becomes deficient. Also, the body's glutathione cycle gets overwhelmed and reduced glutathione becomes deficient and cannot recover.It is my understanding that the mercury cycles between being in circulation and being more safely parked in storage, possibly in the bones, but also possibly in the fat, including the brain. Occasionally, something stirs the mercury out of storage which causes the body to have to deal with it again via thiamine, selenium, and probably the glutathione cycle. Because I do not have full understanding (who does?), I do not know if thiamine (or selenium) could actually bond so firmly to the mercury to be able to escort it out of the body in some small degree. There are reports of selenium + NAC working extremely well.
Side note: thiamine is used to chelate lead successfully so I suppose it may be able to do likewise with mercury to a very small degree. (Please note the issue of zinc depletion). Dr. Lonsdale spoke of the ability of TTFD to chelate lead.
Thanks for the correction! I don't retain names well, and you'll find me posting in the manner of "a doctor I don't remember the name of" occasionally. Rather than dig up his name and lose my trend of thought, I'd much rather continue writing to keep what I had mentally organized in my mind intact to be able to write out my thoughts. I was referring to DMSA when I said DMSO in my previous post.
Good news! I was hoping that is what you meant to write.
You write very well.
I'm sorry that the IV chelation didn't work as well on you as it did me. I had mercury successfully removed, not just because hair and nail tests proved to its success, but my greatly improved resistance to flu, which had been a great thorn, and my greater endurance in running long distances proved it. As to the use of Emeramide, I used 20g of it last year, not for mercury toxicity, but for lead.
Your immune system improvement does point to successful removal of toxin load. I survived organophosphate poisoning in 1994 via detoxing that included 60+ EDTA IV chelations. But EDTA does not chelate mercury. But it worked on lead, cadmium, arsenic, etc. That doctor knew about thiamine; I was swallowing 16 big b-complex caps/day (=1600mg thiamine hcl). So I recovered. But the mercury was still in my body.
I suspect that my own load of mercury is/was(?) pretty high due to the dangerous way my amalgams were removed. If mercury is firmly parked in storage in the body it does not show up in hair and nail tests. Many believe that it is safer to allow it to stay in storage than to stir it up with chelation which pulls it back into circulation. That said, I myself have undergone at least 3 EDTA IV chelation series totaling over 100 IVs in all. I wouldn't do it again though.
It is now understood that physicians who chelate people should always ascertain their thiamine status before chelating them because chelating a thiamine deficient person can kill them. It is also believed that EDTA IV chelation works better if thiamine is supplemented too. I was chelated in 2014 for lead, nobody bothered about thiamine, and I developed a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis.
In the ongoing trials for approval of Emeramide, the approval for mercury toxicity is the sole intent though, as to include other heavy metals such as lead risks further delay of approval.
But I can understand your caution in waiting it out for FDA approval. Even with FDA approval, there is no guarantee as effects vary by the wide variety in context.
In my case, I was very sick for the entire year from using the Emeramide I bought from Fandachem of China, but I never thought I got an inferior grade of Emeramide. It is fake only because it did not come from the inventor's company but making Emeramide isn't rocket science. I can even say you can make it if you had a small lab with simple equipment like some Pyrex distilling flasks and beakers and some Bunsen burners. And a good handle on chemistry. For that reason, I felt I am getting a very high quality generic substance. If we can buy antibiotics from India, even Rapamycin, with confidence, there is no reason why I would need to wait for FDA to approve formally Emeramide and be held hostage to a bureaucracy known for its corruption and regulatory culpability to conspire with special interests that profit from making the US (and to a leaser degree the world) their milking cow since the Flexner Report came out a century ago. From that point on, wide scale racketeering was employed making the government its enforcer and accomplice using the legal system to transform medicine into legalized snake oil for a population made into a market for blockbuster drugs and vaccines designed to intoxicate people from birth.
Going back to topic, I got sick by encountering a perfect storm of my own making when I used Emeramide as I was not yet fully recovered from acute bronchitis (which I caused unwittingly by taking cinnamon bark orally in a a manner that caused my lungs to be irritated and filled with mucus with the ability to expectorate it disabled). The detox process involving Emeramide caused more mucus to be produced, worsening my ability to breathe. This further deprived me of oxygen and the downstream effects slowly developed and it led to heart failure and I needed to be revived and placed in an ICU intubated. I was still strong enough to only stay at the ICU for two days though, and when I was released from the hospital, I didn't think I would find myself returning for another stay 5 months later. In short, it was that bad.
You've been through the mill. Me too.
I am now certain that I will be fully recovered. All the signs point to it. But the takeaway here is that I should have let my lung to recover fully before doing my lead detox with Emeramide. The stress of undergoing a healing crisis during the lead detox was too much to bear when I was still recovering from acute bronchitis. I was too excited to begin to detox lead with Emeramide that I lost sight of healing first from my condition of acute bronchitis.
Lesson learned and thankful.
Mercury causes high oxidative stress, high reactive oxygen species. I believe that this caused my low glutathione level that I had for many years. High oxidative stress depletes thiamine. Thiamine lowers oxidative stress, if you have (supplement) enough of it; my own glutathione level has normalized since taking high dose thiamine hcl, which I think proves that my oxidative stress level now has enough thiamine to deal with it.
a link or two about oxidative stress and thiamine:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197018613000120
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197018601001206?via%3DihubThere's new research that points to the main cause of mercury issues as being selenium deficiency. I added 200mcg of selenium to my supplement regime and my doctors remarked that my blood tests showed my health is improved.
Severe elemental mercury poisoning managed with selenium and N-acetylcysteine administration
The discussion about mercury poisoning here is pertinent to the topic of hyperglycemia (I think) because heavy metal poisoning increases oxidative stress which depletes thiamine and causes thiamine deficiency which derails glucose metabolism.
Thanks for sharing. I will catch up with this. Except for using it for daily supplementation with other b-vitamins, and when I needed to lower lactic acid in blood to lower acidity in cases of high serum acidity (to make room for blood to contain more CO2), I have little immediate need yet to megadose with thiamine.
It is my understanding that thiamine is required for oxidative metabolism to work properly. If there is a thiamine deficiency, the process gets derailed and the end product is lactic acid (the issue you describe above). If thiamine is available for the process, the end product is carbon dioxide which is very important for the body.
Elliot Overton on energy metabolism and the benefit of high dose thiamine
Have been meaning to read Derrick Lonsdale's book, but I still have yet to finish any of Ray Peat's four books.
Dr. Lonsdale's book is very expensive, but a good read and I found it helpful. His articles are posted (for free) here. Here is a good one to start with.
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Just wanted to give a quick status update, 3 days on Thiamine now:
The reactive hypoglycemia is gone, on the weekend before I started Thiamine it was really bad to a point where I couldn't derive energy from sugar or carbs at all. Since starting I ate potatoes, croissants, drank sugar tea as well as sweets and fruit and all without any crashes. Energy levels are generally higher too.
That said, it seems like the body is slow to adapt to suddenly having Thiamine available. Lots of sudden changes in mood, from being happy, calm and content to angry, to frustrated, to sad. (Beats just being depressed like before though.) I just think it is a big change in the biochemical balance and will take some time to stabilize.
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@mostlylurking said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
@yerrag said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
@yerrag said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
Mercury displaces oxygen from any to all of the four binding sites in hemoglobin for oxygen, and reduces the ability to transport a key substrate, oxygen, from being used optimally with sugar for mitochondrial respiration, from which we produce energy.I have a little different perspective regarding how my mercury affects my health, probably based on my own personal experiences and research. This does not mean we are not both correct.
I look at it this way:
Mercury causes severe oxidative stress (perhaps via what you just wrote?) Thiamine is used to quench the oxidative stress. But then thiamine stores get depleted and it becomes deficient. Also, the body's glutathione cycle gets overwhelmed and reduced glutathione becomes deficient and cannot recover.I'm not sure if I have to question whether the stress brought upon my mercury toxicity is oxidative stress, as my experience with it, where I experience hypoxemia and hypoxia leads me towards producing less energy. This failure to energize maximally and optimally is a reductive stress as it is a failure in oxidative processes, and this down regulation in energy production leads to many imbalances. Instead of the rusting away of oxidative stress, where tissues are destroyed an an active manner, tissues deteriorate, in a passive manner, with less nutrients delivered so to speak. Mercury, by merely reducing oxygen supply, does enough harm already.
Now, I am not sure if mercury acts like lead and iron as they are involved in lipid peroxidation chain reactions, which indeed produce a lot of oxidative stress.
But I suspect that it doesn't. As looking back, I believe I had both mercury toxicity and lead toxicity at the same time but if mercury produces reductive stress and if lead causes oxidative stress, the kinda balance each other out in masking the effects of both these stresses. It was after I successfully removed mercury from my system that the oxidative stress from lead toxicity was unmasked. As I then began to experience an increase in my blood pressure.
As I felt the oxidative stress from lead required my body's primary antioxidants to be used continually to counter the oxidative stress. Since albumin is the primary antioxidant in the ECF, I was using up albumin as it gets oxidized when it acts as an antioxidant. But albumin has other uses, and because it was heavily being used, my blood was always low in volume, as albumin is needed to hold on to salt, and salt attract water from the non-blood ECF into the ECF in blood in the form of plasma. With low blood volume, the body compensate by increasing blood pressure to ensure enough blood goes around the body, especially vital organs.
That said, it still does not make thiamine less useful, as it is possible a lot of NADPH is needed to produce ROS that is used by neutrophils and macrophages and eosinophils as white blood cells go an an endless recurring loop in trying to rid the body of lead, which remains stubborn in not getting phagocytized and excreted away. It may be that I would need more thiamine than the RDA to make up for the heavy use of thiamine to produce NADPH in the pentose phosphate pathway.
It is my understanding that the mercury cycles between being in circulation and being more safely parked in storage, possibly in the bones, but also possibly in the fat, including the brain. Occasionally, something stirs the mercury out of storage which causes the body to have to deal with it again via thiamine, selenium, and probably the glutathione cycle. Because I do not have full understanding (who does?), I do not know if thiamine (or selenium) could actually bond so firmly to the mercury to be able to escort it out of the body in some small degree. There are reports of selenium + NAC working extremely well.
A lot of substances are said to such as vitamin C. Alpha-lipoic acid as well. Then there is cilantro and there is some clays. I'd rather not waste my time putting much in them. The few that I've tried I've given up mainly because I don't have the confidence they would work, and I believe in going the long haul if I have the xonfidence. Without confidence, I wouldn't want to see my time wasted seeing something not working.
Side note: thiamine is used to chelate lead successfully so I suppose it may be able to do likewise with mercury to a very small degree. (Please note the issue of zinc depletion). Dr. Lonsdale spoke of the ability of TTFD to chelate lead.
I would rather place a bet on Emeramide. Thiamine would be better for where it is has its strengths.
Thanks for the correction! I don't retain names well, and you'll find me posting in the manner of "a doctor I don't remember the name of" occasionally. Rather than dig up his name and lose my trend of thought, I'd much rather continue writing to keep what I had mentally organized in my mind intact to be able to write out my thoughts. I was referring to DMSA when I said DMSO in my previous post.
Good news! I was hoping that is what you meant to write.
You write very well.
Thank you. Being in such forums, we all get the chance to improve on our writing.
I'm sorry that the IV chelation didn't work as well on you as it did me. I had mercury successfully removed, not just because hair and nail tests proved to its success, but my greatly improved resistance to flu, which had been a great thorn, and my greater endurance in running long distances proved it. As to the use of Emeramide, I used 20g of it last year, not for mercury toxicity, but for lead.
Your immune system improvement does point to successful removal of toxin load. I survived organophosphate poisoning in 1994 via detoxing that included 60+ EDTA IV chelations. But EDTA does not chelate mercury. But it worked on lead, cadmium, arsenic, etc. That doctor knew about thiamine; I was swallowing 16 big b-complex caps/day (=1600mg thiamine hcl). So I recovered. But the mercury was still in my body.
I'm glad thiamine was able to tide you by. Your efforts at chelating mercury may yet see success with Emeramide. But I still think you would have succeeded with the use of DMSA. There may be some confounding variable involves that your doctor failed to take into account. And I hate to be in the unfortunate position of running into a naturopath that doesn't know what he's doing.
I suspect that my own load of mercury is/was(?) pretty high due to the dangerous way my amalgams were removed. If mercury is firmly parked in storage in the body it does not show up in hair and nail tests. Many believe that it is safer to allow it to stay in storage than to stir it up with chelation which pulls it back into circulation. That said, I myself have undergone at least 3 EDTA IV chelation series totaling over 100 IVs in all. I wouldn't do it again though.
I think I lucked out then having a good biological dentist working together with a good naturopath to ensure nothing slips thru the cracks. I was entirely dependent on their expertise then.
It is now understood that physicians who chelate people should always ascertain their thiamine status before chelating them because chelating a thiamine deficient person can kill them. It is also believed that EDTA IV chelation works better if thiamine is supplemented too. I was chelated in 2014 for lead, nobody bothered about thiamine, and I developed a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis.
No wonder you are strongly spreading the news on thiamine. Thanks to you, we are learning. I may try megadosing to see if I can find a way out of my Parkinsonian symptoms, which I got from my having used cinnamon bark oil wrongly a year ago.
In the ongoing trials for approval of Emeramide, the approval for mercury toxicity is the sole intent though, as to include other heavy metals such as lead risks further delay of approval.
But I can understand your caution in waiting it out for FDA approval. Even with FDA approval, there is no guarantee as effects vary by the wide variety in context.
In my case, I was very sick for the entire year from using the Emeramide I bought from Fandachem of China, but I never thought I got an inferior grade of Emeramide. It is fake only because it did not come from the inventor's company but making Emeramide isn't rocket science. I can even say you can make it if you had a small lab with simple equipment like some Pyrex distilling flasks and beakers and some Bunsen burners. And a good handle on chemistry. For that reason, I felt I am getting a very high quality generic substance. If we can buy antibiotics from India, even Rapamycin, with confidence, there is no reason why I would need to wait for FDA to approve formally Emeramide and be held hostage to a bureaucracy known for its corruption and regulatory culpability to conspire with special interests that profit from making the US (and to a leaser degree the world) their milking cow since the Flexner Report came out a century ago. From that point on, wide scale racketeering was employed making the government its enforcer and accomplice using the legal system to transform medicine into legalized snake oil for a population made into a market for blockbuster drugs and vaccines designed to intoxicate people from birth.
Going back to topic, I got sick by encountering a perfect storm of my own making when I used Emeramide as I was not yet fully recovered from acute bronchitis (which I caused unwittingly by taking cinnamon bark orally in a a manner that caused my lungs to be irritated and filled with mucus with the ability to expectorate it disabled). The detox process involving Emeramide caused more mucus to be produced, worsening my ability to breathe. This further deprived me of oxygen and the downstream effects slowly developed and it led to heart failure and I needed to be revived and placed in an ICU intubated. I was still strong enough to only stay at the ICU for two days though, and when I was released from the hospital, I didn't think I would find myself returning for another stay 5 months later. In short, it was that bad.
You've been through the mill. Me too.
I am now certain that I will be fully recovered. All the signs point to it. But the takeaway here is that I should have let my lung to recover fully before doing my lead detox with Emeramide. The stress of undergoing a healing crisis during the lead detox was too much to bear when I was still recovering from acute bronchitis. I was too excited to begin to detox lead with Emeramide that I lost sight of healing first from my condition of acute bronchitis.
Lesson learned and thankful.
Mercury causes high oxidative stress, high reactive oxygen species. I believe that this caused my low glutathione level that I had for many years. High oxidative stress depletes thiamine. Thiamine lowers oxidative stress, if you have (supplement) enough of it; my own glutathione level has normalized since taking high dose thiamine hcl, which I think proves that my oxidative stress level now has enough thiamine to deal with it.
a link or two about oxidative stress and thiamine:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197018613000120
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197018601001206?via%3DihubMaybe. And you could very well be right.
There's new research that points to the main cause of mercury issues as being selenium deficiency. I added 200mcg of selenium to my supplement regime and my doctors remarked that my blood tests showed my health is improved.
Severe elemental mercury poisoning managed with selenium and N-acetylcysteine administration
The discussion about mercury poisoning here is pertinent to the topic of hyperglycemia (I think) because heavy metal poisoning increases oxidative stress which depletes thiamine and causes thiamine deficiency which derails glucose metabolism.
Thanks for sharing. I will catch up with this. Except for using it for daily supplementation with other b-vitamins, and when I needed to lower lactic acid in blood to lower acidity in cases of high serum acidity (to make room for blood to contain more CO2), I have little immediate need yet to megadose with thiamine.
It is my understanding that thiamine is required for oxidative metabolism to work properly. If there is a thiamine deficiency, the process gets derailed and the end product is lactic acid (the issue you describe above). If thiamine is available for the process, the end product is carbon dioxide which is very important for the body.
Elliot Overton on energy metabolism and the benefit of high dose thiamine
Have been meaning to read Derrick Lonsdale's book, but I still have yet to finish any of Ray Peat's four books.
Dr. Lonsdale's book is very expensive, but a good read and I found it helpful. His articles are posted (for free) here. Here is a good one to start with.
I spend some time going thru the material you shared. It's eye-ooening to say the least.
Thanks!
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@yerrag said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
Mercury causes severe oxidative stress (perhaps via what you just wrote?) Thiamine is used to quench the oxidative stress. But then thiamine stores get depleted and it becomes deficient. Also, the body's glutathione cycle gets overwhelmed and reduced glutathione becomes deficient and cannot recover.
I'm not sure if I have to question whether the stress brought upon my mercury toxicity is oxidative stress, as my experience with it, where I experience hypoxemia and hypoxia leads me towards producing less energy. This failure to energize maximally and optimally is a reductive stress as it is a failure in oxidative processes, and this down regulation in energy production leads to many imbalances. Instead of the rusting away of oxidative stress, where tissues are destroyed an an active manner, tissues deteriorate, in a passive manner, with less nutrients delivered so to speak. Mercury, by merely reducing oxygen supply, does enough harm already.
I think that "oxidative stress" is a big tent that includes all the stress that happens when there is a problem with burning glucose + oxygen cleanly. If the burn isn't clean, oxidative stress happens. Thiamine is needed for clean efficient oxidative metabolism.
Thiamine also acts as a powerful antioxidant. If you have high oxidative stress, it will use up your available thiamine and cause a thiamine deficiency. Your body can make workarounds so that you don't die but the problem continues on.
This Elliot Overton video is very good and well worth the time.
"In this video, I will explain the rationale behind high-dose thiamine therapy as a tool for bypassing metabolic blocks caused by factors unrelated to nutritional deficiency, and examine how this can be a useful therapy for chronic health conditions characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction."This website has some good articles about mercury. A lot of thought has been put into them. I have never tried their detox protocol so I cannot provide an opinion on it.
https://www.mercuryfreekids.org/mercury-101https://www.mercuryfreekids.org/mercury101/2018/1/21/thiamine-saves?rq=thiamine
https://www.mercuryfreekids.org/solutions
At the bottom of each article is a collection of links to other articles.
Now, I am not sure if mercury acts like lead and iron as they are involved in lipid peroxidation chain reactions, which indeed produce a lot of oxidative stress.
I believe all the heavy metals increase oxidative stress. The Elliot Overton video (linked above) touches on heavy metals blocking oxidative metabolism.
But I suspect that it doesn't. As looking back, I believe I had both mercury toxicity and lead toxicity at the same time but if mercury produces reductive stress and if lead causes oxidative stress, the kinda balance each other out in masking the effects of both these stresses. It was after I successfully removed mercury from my system that the oxidative stress from lead toxicity was unmasked. As I then began to experience an increase in my blood pressure.
I think that perhaps you are overthinking it. I don't believe different heavy metals balance each other out; I think they all cause serious interference in body functions by blocking oxidative metabolism.
As I felt the oxidative stress from lead required my body's primary antioxidants to be used continually to counter the oxidative stress. Since albumin is the primary antioxidant in the ECF, I was using up albumin as it gets oxidized when it acts as an antioxidant. But albumin has other uses, and because it was heavily being used, my blood was always low in volume, as albumin is needed to hold on to salt, and salt attract water from the non-blood ECF into the ECF in blood in the form of plasma. With low blood volume, the body compensate by increasing blood pressure to ensure enough blood goes around the body, especially vital organs.
yes. Ray Peat talked about the importance of albumin; but I've managed to forget a lot of what I've read about it (sorry).
I believe that every cell in the body is powered by ATP (cellular energy) and if something is interfering with that process then there will be problems all over the body, including the albumin and the blood cells and the immune system. I think that restoring good oxidative metabolism is key; if the body has enough cellular energy, it can counteract the oxidative stress and repair itself.
That said, it still does not make thiamine less useful, as it is possible a lot of NADPH is needed to produce ROS that is used by neutrophils and macrophages and eosinophils as white blood cells go an an endless recurring loop in trying to rid the body of lead, which remains stubborn in not getting phagocytized and excreted away. It may be that I would need more thiamine than the RDA to make up for the heavy use of thiamine to produce NADPH in the pentose phosphate pathway.
Yes. The RDA for thiamine is meant to keep you breathing; the amount recommended is totally inadequate for healthy total body function.
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) "are molecules capable of independent existence, containing at least one oxygen atom and one or more unpaired electrons. This group includes oxygen free radicals, e.g. superoxide anion radical, hydroxyl radical, hydroperoxyl radical, singlet oxygen, as well as free nitrogen radicals. Under physiological conditions, small quantities of ROS are formed during cell processes, such as aerobic respiration or inflammatory processes, mainly in hepatocytes and macrophages. Reactive oxygen species are primarily signalling molecules. In addition, they induce cell differentiation and apoptosis, thus contributing to the natural ageing process. They also participate in muscle contractions, regulation of vascular tone, and determine bactericidal and bacteriostatic activity. Increased production of free radicals is caused by excessive exposure to UV radiation, long-term stress conditions, intense physical exercise, improper diet and use of stimulants. Under physiological conditions, there is a balance between the generation and removal of free radicals from the body. The aim of the article was to review the current state of knowledge regarding oxidative stress, free radical function and free radical diseases.... Excessive formation of free radicals contributes to oxidative stress, causing damage at the molecular and cellular level. Reactive oxygen species in vitro cause chemical modifications as well as damaging effects to proteins (aggregation, denaturation), lipids (peroxidation), carbohydrates and nucleotides (changes in the DNA structure). These changes contribute to the development of many free radical-mediated diseases. Oxidative stress has a particularly adverse effect on the circulatory, respiratory and nervous systems."
Thiamine is known to reduce ROS and oxidative stress.
The importance of thiamine (vitamin B1) in humans
"Lukienko et al. [114] investigated the antioxidant effects of thiamine in rat liver microsomes, and its interaction with reactive oxygen species. Their results indicate that thiamine is protective against a variety of toxic agents that promote oxidative stress. The authors explain that in the presence of oxidants a thiol form of thiamine is oxidized to thiamine disulfide, tricyclic form to thiochrome. The antioxidant effect of thiamine is probably related to two-phase reaction of opening of thiazole ring with formation of anion of thiol form of thiamine and unstable tricyclic form. In an another study, the hydroperoxide generation in linoleic acid peroxidation was significantly decreased by thiamine hydrochloride [115]."Thiamine is known to resolve lead poisoning. It is used in veterinary medicine for that purpose.
Lead Poisoning in Animals
"Thiamine (2–4 mg/kg per day, SC) alleviates clinical manifestations and reduces tissue deposition of lead. Combined Ca-EDTA and thiamine treatment appears to produce the most beneficial response."It is my understanding that the mercury cycles between being in circulation and being more safely parked in storage, possibly in the bones, but also possibly in the fat, including the brain. Occasionally, something stirs the mercury out of storage which causes the body to have to deal with it again via thiamine, selenium, and probably the glutathione cycle. Because I do not have full understanding (who does?), I do not know if thiamine (or selenium) could actually bond so firmly to the mercury to be able to escort it out of the body in some small degree. There are reports of selenium + NAC working extremely well.
A lot of substances are said to such as vitamin C. Alpha-lipoic acid as well. Then there is cilantro and there is some clays. I'd rather not waste my time putting much in them. The few that I've tried I've given up mainly because I don't have the confidence they would work, and I believe in going the long haul if I have the xonfidence. Without confidence, I wouldn't want to see my time wasted seeing something not working.
Cilantro and the clays are really not good ideas to use because the potential for contamination with heavy metals is very high.
Side note: thiamine is used to chelate lead successfully so I suppose it may be able to do likewise with mercury to a very small degree. (Please note the issue of zinc depletion). Dr. Lonsdale spoke of the ability of TTFD to chelate lead.
I would rather place a bet on Emeramide. Thiamine would be better for where it is has its strengths.
Please look into thiamine; it is very important for cellular energy creation and also for its anti-oxidative properties.
Thanks for the correction! I don't retain names well, and you'll find me posting in the manner of "a doctor I don't remember the name of" occasionally. Rather than dig up his name and lose my trend of thought, I'd much rather continue writing to keep what I had mentally organized in my mind intact to be able to write out my thoughts. I was referring to DMSA when I said DMSO in my previous post.
Good news! I was hoping that is what you meant to write.
You write very well.
Thank you. Being in such forums, we all get the chance to improve on our writing.
I'm sorry that the IV chelation didn't work as well on you as it did me. I had mercury successfully removed, not just because hair and nail tests proved to its success, but my greatly improved resistance to flu, which had been a great thorn, and my greater endurance in running long distances proved it. As to the use of Emeramide, I used 20g of it last year, not for mercury toxicity, but for lead.
Your immune system improvement does point to successful removal of toxin load. I survived organophosphate poisoning in 1994 via detoxing that included 60+ EDTA IV chelations. But EDTA does not chelate mercury. But it worked on lead, cadmium, arsenic, etc. That doctor knew about thiamine; I was swallowing 16 big b-complex caps/day (=1600mg thiamine hcl). So I recovered. But the mercury was still in my body.
I'm glad thiamine was able to tide you by. Your efforts at chelating mercury may yet see success with Emeramide. But I still think you would have succeeded with the use of DMSA. There may be some confounding variable involves that your doctor failed to take into account. And I hate to be in the unfortunate position of running into a naturopath that doesn't know what he's doing.
Doctors "practicing" medicine can be dangerous to your health.
I suspect that my own load of mercury is/was(?) pretty high due to the dangerous way my amalgams were removed. If mercury is firmly parked in storage in the body it does not show up in hair and nail tests. Many believe that it is safer to allow it to stay in storage than to stir it up with chelation which pulls it back into circulation. That said, I myself have undergone at least 3 EDTA IV chelation series totaling over 100 IVs in all. I wouldn't do it again though.
I think I lucked out then having a good biological dentist working together with a good naturopath to ensure nothing slips thru the cracks. I was entirely dependent on their expertise then.
It is now understood that physicians who chelate people should always ascertain their thiamine status before chelating them because chelating a thiamine deficient person can kill them. It is also believed that EDTA IV chelation works better if thiamine is supplemented too. I was chelated in 2014 for lead, nobody bothered about thiamine, and I developed a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis.
No wonder you are strongly spreading the news on thiamine. Thanks to you, we are learning. I may try megadosing to see if I can find a way out of my Parkinsonian symptoms, which I got from my having used cinnamon bark oil wrongly a year ago.
You noticed! If you are having symptoms of Parkinson's, I think that it would be helpful for you to watch the very short before and after patient videos who were treated for Parkinson's with thiamine hcl by Dr. Costantini. These videos really were helpful to me.
Watch the "before" and the "interview" of Maurizio (it has English subtitles); it is the second one from the top.
Maybe. And you could very well be right.
I think Dr. Costantini was right and also Elliot Overton and also Dr. Lonsdale. I was very fortunate to have found their work on line. Without access to the internet, I would be living in assisted living right now.
I spend some time going thru the material you shared. It's eye-opening to say the least.
Good Deal!
Thanks!
You're welcome!
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@mostlylurking said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
I think that perhaps you are overthinking it. I don't believe different heavy metals balance each other out; I think they all cause serious interference in body functions by blocking oxidative metabolism
I think a lot admittedly. At times it helps. For the most part it may not be productive but that gets me through sorting and threshing out ideas "experts" have missed.
Not all heavy metals act in a similar fashion. The distinctions do matter. Lumping them together is convenient, but not really helpful. Being detailed and thorough is important. We can learn from piecing together puzzles and different puzzles while sharing the same interlocking set of piece involve varying ways of solving them.
It may be that mercury share a common property with lead and iron in causing lipid peroxidation chain reactions, but mercury also distinguishes itself in attaching to hemoglobin. And this distinction may be what separates mercury in the degree to which it causes lipid peroxidation reaction. If mercury attaches first to the hemoglobin in rbc's first before all the rbc's get saturated with mercury, then there may be no free mercury left to undergo lipid peroxidation in other tissues. It would then only have a reductive stress effect, and no oxidative stress effect.
I am hypothesizing, but aim not throwing darts blindfolded either. Hope you understand my approach to problem solving, as I believe we are each as capable as the "experts" and actually each of us have an edge as we are each our own experiment and can be more effective in determining cause and effect, even if the effort is disparaged by the "evisence-based" nonsensical pseudoscience masking as science around us.
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@yerrag said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
I think a lot admittedly. At times it helps. For the most part it may not be productive but that gets me through sorting and threshing out ideas "experts" have missed.
Are you able to turn off the thinking or has it become circular? Circular thinking is sort of like stewing on something, but you go round and round, really don't get to a conclusion, and cannot turn it off. I went through that for many years. But now I don't do that very much. At least I get to choose the topic....
Not all heavy metals act in a similar fashion. The distinctions do matter. Lumping them together is convenient, but not really helpful. Being detailed and thorough is important. We can learn from piecing together puzzles and different puzzles while sharing the same interlocking set of piece involve varying ways of solving them.
Lumping them together (as Elliot did in the video) is convenient if you understand that they all interfere with oxidative metabolism and high dose thiamine is a workaround for all of them. So there is that.
Lumping them together is not particularly good if you are researching the differences in them which I'm sure exist.
It may be that mercury share a common property with lead and iron in causing lipid peroxidation chain reactions, but mercury also distinguishes itself in attaching to hemoglobin. And this distinction may be what separates mercury in the degree to which it causes lipid peroxidation reaction. If mercury attaches first to the hemoglobin in rbc's first before all the rbc's get saturated with mercury, then there may be no free mercury left to undergo lipid peroxidation in other tissues. It would then only have a reductive stress effect, and no oxidative stress effect.
Mercury evidently also distinguishes itself by causing selenium deficiency. Selenium is very important for health; it is needed to convert T4 into the active T3 (search for Selenium in the article); if you cannot convert T4 to T3, you are in big trouble.
I am hypothesizing, but aim not throwing darts blindfolded either. Hope you understand my approach to problem solving, as I believe we are each as capable as the "experts" and actually each of us have an edge as we are each our own experiment and can be more effective in determining cause and effect, even if the effort is disparaged by the "evisence-based" nonsensical pseudoscience masking as science around us.
The reason why I'm so pro thiamine is because it actually helped me. My chiropractor said to me, "you know you're messing with your electrical system, right?" And I did intuitively know that. There were shorts in my current (the power force that runs through all of us); taking high dose thiamine hcl restored my energy flow.
Please watch the before and after videos of Dr. Costantini's patients to visually see and better understand what I'm talking about. Maurizio's section includes an interview (with English subtitles!) which is very short and very informative. But watch Maurizio's Before video first. The Bruno series is very good and includes an interview with his wife. These are real people who were given their lives back via high dose thiamine hcl, by injection, but Dr. Costantini provided information about thiamine hcl oral dosage, which is what I follow.
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@mostlylurking said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
you able to turn off the thinking or has it become circular?
I sleep. I take time off. It refreshes my mind. When stumped, I give up thinking and the next day I often have a solution. I am also self-aware that my thinking process does not become circular. I doubt in how I explain things that you would find evidence of circular thinking, but if you catch any, I would welcome pointing that out to me.
Intellectual pursuits where differences occur are a normal part of learning from each other, and even more common are where it leads to talking down to one another. It's not productive as I experience with @CO3. But that comes with the territory. At that point I would fold and wish such people a good life as everything is a waste after that.
I'm not at all saying this to you and don't infer you are, as evidently you're not. And I'm not intending to patronize either when I say your dogged sharing of the benefits of using thiamine is admirable to a fault. Your insistence lets the hardened of heart open to the idea you espouse and that opens up a solution to be considered. But when one is so insistent that it is his way or the highway, and resorts to insults and to ad hominems, I know the best thing to do is to ignore him.
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@mostlylurking said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
Mercury evidently also distinguishes itself by causing selenium deficiency. Selenium is very important for health; it is needed to convert T4 into the active T3 (search for Selenium in the article); if you cannot convert T4 to T3, you are in big trouble.
I'm a believer. Once I noticed my cats got hyperthyroid. They both in a short time became thin from plump, from heavy eaters to hardly. They each had two lumps on their throat. I had cats die before but didn't notice this connection. I had slowly developed the habit of observing over the years, and had already read a lot of Peat's ideas, and gave each of them selenium which I had bought for myself. I am normothyroid, but I bought selenium in case something would go wrong with my intakes of iodine, which Ray was extremely cautious about. Overnight, the cats recovered.
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@mostlylurking said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
reason why I'm so pro thiamine is because it actually helped me. My chiropractor said to me, "you know you're messing with your electrical system, right?" And I did intuitively know that. There were shorts in my current (the power force that runs through all of us); taking high dose thiamine hcl restored my energy flow.
Please watch the before and after videos of Dr. Costantini's patients to visually see and better understand what I'm talking about. Maurizio's section includes an interview (with English subtitles!) which is very short and very informative. But watch Maurizio's Before video first. The Bruno series is very good and includes an interview with his wife. These are real people who were given their lives back via high dose thiamine hcl, by injection, but Dr. Costantini provided information about thiamine hcl oral dosage, which is what I follow
Say no more. I began a 1-week trial of 1500mg thiamine HCl last night. It isn't a big leap for me now as I've used 1000mg before and a headache I was having (I rarely have headaches and this stood out) quickly went away. At the time of my headache, my breath rate at 26 per minute meant my blood was very acidic, and I suspect my metabolism had turned glycolytic, and I had plenty of lactic acid in my blood with little space to spare for CO2. I was breathing in carbogen but it was having no effect as the high breathing rate was expelling the CO2 in carbogen I was breathing in. Thiamine, as I understand it, would convert lactic acid eventually to glucose in the liver thru the Cori cycle, I believe. And that is what I think happened. For on the same day, my headache was relieved as my breath rate went down to 16.
With more CO2 in my blood, my platelets could carry CO2, and serotonin to the CO2, and serotonin would be deactivated in my lungs, and there would little serotonin free to get into my brain. Not making this up, but this is the benefit from reading first hand Rayçs books and newsletters.
Thank you very much for taking the time to share with me the links. I'm sure they will be very helpful. Especially the ones on Parkinson's.
Temporal thinking is the faculty that’s
engaged by an enriched environment, but it’s
wrong to call it “thinking,” because it’s simply
the way organisms exist... - Ray Peat Nov 2017 Newsletter -
@yerrag said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
@mostlylurking said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
you able to turn off the thinking or has it become circular?
I sleep. I take time off. It refreshes my mind. When stumped, I give up thinking and the next day I often have a solution. I am also self-aware that my thinking process does not become circular. I doubt in how I explain things that you would find evidence of circular thinking, but if you catch any, I would welcome pointing that out to me.
All very good! Your brain's working well. I suffered from circular thinking for many years. So did my brother; he showed me the condition of his mouth when he was 55; he still had all the amalgam fillings he got as a child. He was desperate to get the circular tick tick tick to turn off. I didn't know how to help him (this was 15 years ago). He committed suicide a few months later.
Intellectual pursuits where differences occur are a normal part of learning from each other, and even more common are where it leads to talking down to one another. It's not productive as I experience with @CO3. But that comes with the territory. At that point I would fold and wish such people a good life as everything is a waste after that.
If people always agreed, nobody would ever learn anything.
Trying to understand where the other person is coming from via an online chat can be difficult at times. Everybody isn't always playing with the same deck.
I'm not at all saying this to you and don't infer you are, as evidently you're not. And I'm not intending to patronize either when I say your dogged sharing of the benefits of using thiamine is admirable to a fault. Your insistence lets the hardened of heart open to the idea you espouse and that opens up a solution to be considered. But when one is so insistent that it is his way or the highway, and resorts to insults and to ad hominems, I know the best thing to do is to ignore him.
Sorry if I've been driving some to the brink.
I closely followed Ray Peat's written work for 5 years and some of my health issues did get a lot better, but what I was doing I think sabotaged me too. 5 years is a long time. Then, in 2020, I got really sick; I was borderline thiamine deficient even though I was taking 200mg/day of thiamine hcl (took it with OJ - oops). And then I took some Bactrim antibiotic (for a UTI) which nearly killed me because it blocked my thiamine function. Long story short, I tried some thiamine hcl with water and experienced massive improvement in 45 minutes. It made me a believer in what Elliot Overton, Dr. Lonsdale, Dr. Chandler Marrs, and Dr. Costantini were proselytizing about.
I hope we can agree that optimizing oxidative metabolism so that the body has enough energy to function properly and maintain repairs is key to health. Ray Peat's work is oriented in that direction. Because I read Peat's articles (multiple times) I caught some little things. One is that good thyroid function plus a good diet (devoid of PUFA) will result in good oxidative metabolism, assuming something else isn't blocking it.
One of those things that can block oxidative metabolism is thiamine deficiency. I know this isn't the case for everybody, but I also realize that some of the Peaty things that people do will lower their thiamine supply including: eating sugar/carbs; drinking coffee; avoiding nuts, seeds, grains, pork. A list for dietary sources for thiamine reads like a Ray Peat avoidance list.
I had a few email exchanges with Ray Peat. I remember him telling me in 2020 that if you've got heavy metal poisoning, all bets are off. This exchange occurred during the time I was trying not to die from the Bactrim debacle and my gut was just a mess and Peat was advising me to take thiamine hcl and magnesium to heal my gut. Ray was right about what I needed to take; I just needed a lot more of it than he suggested. But then, I have heavy metal poisoning, so all bets are off.
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@yerrag said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
@mostlylurking said in Just found out I have reactive hypoglycemia. What now?:
Mercury evidently also distinguishes itself by causing selenium deficiency. Selenium is very important for health; it is needed to convert T4 into the active T3 (search for Selenium in the article); if you cannot convert T4 to T3, you are in big trouble.
I'm a believer. Once I noticed my cats got hyperthyroid. They both in a short time became thin from plump, from heavy eaters to hardly. They each had two lumps on their throat. I had cats die before but didn't notice this connection. I had slowly developed the habit of observing over the years, and had already read a lot of Peat's ideas, and gave each of them selenium which I had bought for myself. I am normothyroid, but I bought selenium in case something would go wrong with my intakes of iodine, which Ray was extremely cautious about. Overnight, the cats recovered.
Hah!! That's a wonderful story! I had cats for many many years; they're wonderful animals. The choices for cat food in the grocery store is just awful. Too much A, too much ash, too much pufa.
I've been taking selenium since last summer. I got blood work done late September and both of my doctors remarked on how much healthier I'd become.
Can you point me to reliable information about iodine? And what's the deal with getting selenium for your iodine intake?
