Posts made by CrumblingCookie

@Jaffe

I've received my order of 10kgs "organic" dextrose and am wondering whether that makes any difference to "regular" dextrose.

The organic dextrose comes in large, white, PP plastic containers and at the first (and every ensuing) opening of that container I was taken aback by a distinct plasticky smell. Luckily, however, no matter how hard I try I cannot sense that plasticky smell from the dextrose powder once I've taken it out of that container. So that's good.
Taste-wise, this particular organic dextrose seemed even "softer" than regular dextrose but I'm not very sure about this and whether that's a good (extra pure?) or a bad (solvents?) sign.
I will work/drink my way through it and report back.

Experience update:

6 weeks into dextrose now.

• In the meantime I had been taking 2grams of BCAAs (2:1:1) with every serving of dextrose for over a week, because of the thoughts from this thread on the amino acids / tryptophan shift. I will need to report back over there, too.
  Essentially, taking BCAAs did not work at all for me.
  Not only did it not improve my response to glucose, but it worsened it.
  I reckon that's due to both the BCAAs direct effects as well as due to that it lowered my appetite and thus significantly reduced my intake of proper food during that time.
  Eventually I added an additional >5grams of glycine everyday to the BCAAs, because intuitively I felt that my feeling weird and "off" was less from a glycine/BCAA combo.
  I think BCAA products should be grouped/blended with glycine as a standard.
  Anyways, they all constistently exarcerbated my intestinal upset, causing me mucuous and watery diarrhea in a sort intestinal colic. I gradually, measurably and visibly lost an excess almost 3kgs body weight (which I had suddenly put on back in April for reasons unknown).
  Also, I did sleep well anymore. That glucose-benefit on deep and coherent sleep was completely gone.
  Not at all what was expected and hoped for by correcting the presumed glucose-induced free tryptophan increase.

• Also, while having taken the BCAAs, my previous increase from 56grs to 100grs dextrose servings seemed to have been to harsh.
  I felt nausea all the time and the dextrose did not taste nice anymore but almost unbearably, undrinkably sweet.
  I had been wanting to reduce the dextrose for over a week, but pushed through - waiting for improvement. And also because I was too unwilling to measure a lower serving size and count stupidly many tablespoons. (I have lots of 2 oz. / 64ml scoops which were supplied with protein powders. Once such scoop measure 50grs of dextrose.)
  Eventually, I decreased to 80grs per serving. This was much more bearable.
  But its effect also did not last for the full time between servings anymore.
  On the plus side, this remembered me to properly eat all day.
  Especially so once I stopped the appetite-suppressing BCAAs-Glycine.

• With no BCAAs-Glycine and my food intake back up (beef, lamb, haricots verts), suddenly the glucose "kicked back in":
  I finally experienced that familiar physical weakness and calm tiredness for several days and got back better sleep again.
  My weight is back up, sadly. In part surely also due to not being reverse-puked-empty in the intestines.
  I hypothesize that it's very essential to keep eating properly while on dextrose.
  I hypothesize that this is one of the reasons for the recommendation of an only gradual increase of dextrose serving sizes - to not lower intake of proper foods but supply extra energy as needed with an ever-increasing (healing) baseline.

• I now also feel the need for more thiamin (B1) for the glucose. I will increase it to double-digits with every serving.

• I continue to have profound issues with fat digestion or bile uptake. Even the slightest amount of fat in my food is terrible for me and comes out as oily BMs.
  Cholestyramine did not work. I reckon it's either a mucosal (uptake) issue or maybe an amount or quality of bile issue.
  I don't know what to do about the former.
  For the latter (and instead of more glycine) I now take .7grs of taurine with every dextrose serving to increase my capacity for necessary bile acids conjugation (700mgs taurine is a level 1ml scoop).
  As many of you may know, taurine usually (and probably especially in use pre-damaged susceptible people) absolutely shatters glucose levels. With ample glucose I am pleased to find I can now tolerate taurine.

Summary:
Currently 5-6x daily: 80-100grs dextrose + 1.5grs potassium chloride + 10mgs thiamin with low other B-vitamins + 700mgs taurine.
Making sure to eat enough meat every day.

Perhaps the carnivore+dextrose type which DS briefly mentioned is particularly beneficial? Part of me expects wildly increased aging from advanced glycation end products. What relevance has weight and age appearance in the face of my daily misery, though.

@S-Holmes said

@lulueatsmeat You might want to hop over to the glucose loading thread. Since you've tried everything else, like most of us, it's worth a shot.

This one: https://bioenergetic.forum/topic/2319/glucose-loading-cures-everything/351

This. Join us self-determined guinea pigs :-).
You may want to have a look into the Marshall Protocol, too. Because acne as a constant skin infection you are not overcoming and also malfunctioning thyroid hormone metabolism fits that, too.
https://mpkb.org/home/mp

Without assessing the validity of your gut feeling (maybe you don't need exogenous fatty acids but more endogeneous synthesis with the help of B5 and B6 and B7?),
@gentlepotato said in Glucose loading cures everything?:

What fat source has the most nutrients per grams that would be supportive, in terms of neurotransmitters, brain health, Krebs cycle, mitochondria?

I'd confidently say cocoa butter (pellets) and beef or lamb tallow to this, as they contain lots of valuable long-chain saturated FAs and stearic acid (for mitogenesis) especially.
Or instead of tallow: Fatty cuts of beef or lamb and eat/keep/separate the fats after c. 3hrs of low-temp cooking.

I haven't yet read through that paper you posted and the itaconate ways.
Thanks @S-Holmes. Not sure which homeopathic remedy would be right for me right now. But I've added Glechoma tincture for my detox suppport (Lysimachia=Gold Coin Grass=Jin Qian Cao may be more available to some).

@gentlepotato said

If you think you have a “glucose limitation” look up the hormones produces in the hypothalamus, pituitary gland and adrenals, and you might find the explanation for your weird symptoms.

Do you mean to say that e.g. a suppressed circadian TRH curve or a stunted TSH response to exogenous TRH (i.e. a functionally atrophied pituitary gland) could be commonly associated with overall glucose limitation?
Reading your long post had me impressed as it means some of your brain was clearly working well enough to start and accomplish that.

@gentlepotato said

I am guessing that with hypoglycemia there’s often less ability to store glucose. I think maybe the liver (and body overall) will store fat instead, when it’s not able to store glycogen (or doesn't have any extra glucose to store?

Which is another reason I think taking big doses won’t be helpful: I don’t think the body is able to store the extra glucose well - yet. That will change with time I think, because if the liver is storing fat it will start to release it and store glucose instead.

Interesting. And maybe this relates to what I am going through described further below?

@S-Holmes said

I think supporting healing with "energy medicine" is advisable.

What measures do you mean by "energy medicine"?

@Jaffe on noticing any difference between dextrose products' quality:
I have not yet switched to the organic dextrose but will report when I notice any differences or when not.

Experience update:

4 weeks into dextrose now.
Last Tuesday/Wednesday I had made the large increase from 5x c. 56grs to 5x 100grs daily.
To my surprise this time I felt weak and drowsy for only one day, in contrast to my previous increases.
On the plus side I have not been feeling "snackish" anymore in between my dextrose servings. So the higher serving size for me currently lasts longer than the previously lower amount.
By Friday the anticipated digestive troubles began to set in again, starting with terribly oily and unformed BMs. I have eaten no fats and no oils within the past week. Seriously zero.
Throughout Saturday I had mucuous watery diarrhea. Followed by a some flatulence.
Since Sunday it's awfully oily BMs again.
I took activated charcoal and psyllium on Friday and on Sunday. I am thinking that I may need regular daily GI binders. I don't know if cholestyramine would help and have just drunk a 4grs package of that.
Also, on Friday evening I had started to add 2grs BCAAs to every dextrose serving because of the tryptophan shift brought up in the other thread here.
Clearly, adding BCAAs did not alleviate the digestive issues as hypothesized but probably even enhanced the GI issues from upping dextrose in me enormously.
And I can't say whether this is ought to be a categorically "good" thing to my body's benefit.
Practically and right now there's definitely something very off.

I appreciate all helpful suggestions on these reactions and how to manage them.

I've received my order of 10kgs "organic" dextrose and am wondering whether that makes any difference to "regular" dextrose.

I.e. how big of a glyphosate burden there could at all be in "regular" dextrose after it's enzymatic processing and filtration, i.e. its "processing factor" which is hopefully <1.
Since dextrose powder is practically protein-free, there also shouldn't be much glyphosate (glycine-like) residues?
Does anyone have an inkling?

Seeing that dextrose is being consumed as an isolated substance, devoid of any protein and especially glycine natural to all foods I am thinking that any residual impurities could in theory have a much bigger negative impact.
Maybe that's significant. Maybe it's not. I couldn't find any analytics.

Here's my preliminary collection of various bits of info:

• The official MRL (Maximum Residue Level) of glyphosate

• for sugar is 25ppm (US), !!!

• for sugar beets is 15ppm (EU), !!!

• However, since dextrose is derived from starch and therefore either cereals or corn:

• for cereals it's 30ppm (US, EU), !!!!

• for corn it's 13ppm (US) !! or 4ppm (EU).

• It therefore seems dextrose derived from corn would be generally preferable.

• The ADI (Allowed Daily Intake) for glyphosate is 1.75 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight per day (mg/kg/bw/day) in the USA while the European Union has set it at 0.3. (0.5?),

• This 0.3mg/kg/bw/day means an officially allowed maximum of 21mg glyphosate per day for somebody weighing 70kgs. This could be 700grs of dextrose.

• We all know those MRLs are set way too benevolent. Probably by some orders of magnitudes.

• Officially, dextrose from cereals could contain up to 30mgs of glyphosate per 1kg?
  However, in the few origin declarations which I've seen the dextrose actually comes from China and only gets repackaged domestically.
  I couldn't find MRLs on finished dextrose, neither for the USA nor the EU.

@haidut
I had also read your previous post on that 300mg-biotin-per-day study and can attest by my own experience that there really are things opening up at thrice daily doses of about 100mg B7.
Practically, however, I ran into a few issues. What are your opinions on these?

Biotin:

1. I don't understand how study participants could cope for so long with such high doses, since B7 competes with B5 for uptake? Especially with regard to restoration of myelin sheaths, cell membranes and endogenous fatty acid synthesis they are both interdependent. I kept running into deficiency of one or the other and had to alternate both at least once every few days.
2. I felt that at such high doses, purity and fillers really become a significant issue. I've tried different brands because of this and they ranged from awful (with excessively much MCC) to something-is-still-off. Pharmaceutical quality in general is only >97.5% purity which by itself I consistently find totally inadequate in many cases.
3. Perhaps related to 2). My GI system and BMs became unbearably upset by high biotin doses. I suspect biotin exhibits inhibiting effects on aminooxidases similar to thiamin (thiamin metabolites) through displacement of enzymatic flavoproteins? I'm convinced much of the beneficial effects in Antonio Costantini's high-dose-thiamin therapy stems from MAO inhibition in the ganglions.

Riboflavin:

1. Are such high bolus doses really sensible in people who are unaffected by that recognized genetic riboflavin transporter defect?
   .1) I have noticed much better effects and tolerability from single digit mg doses continually (3-4x) throughout the day instead of higher doses twice or once daily.
   .2) Someone on the forums reported to have had his actual serum/blood FAD and FMN levels tested with different amounts of B2 and that their ratio and the absolute value of FAD totally plumetted from high doses of B2, whereas FAD and also his symptoms improved with low doses.

Side note: I have used B2 in amounts up to 2grs for clostridioides prophylaxis because of the studies on its redox effects and the aerobic-anaerobic gradient of the intestinal lining and its microbes. While such amounts are probably really not harmful, they made for purging and very awful BMs.

Hope you are doing well! And thanks for all the work!

@LetTheRedeemed said

It would be a moot point as the glucose itself is found to push tryptophan in the bloodstream. In fact I was reminded of my issues, as people were describing problems on the protocol of glucose, so I think I may have found the problem.

It also gave me diarrhea. I’d be interested to know if people are getting digestive problems on the protocol… of course they may call it a herx reaction or detox

Yes. I have been getting rough digestive issues for a couple of days after every increase in dextrose and have written on this in the other thread.

I've only just read Limon9's 2022 post and the table in
Yokogoshi H, Wurtman RJ. Meal composition and plasma amino acid ratios: effect of various proteins or carbohydrates, and of various protein concentrations. Metabolism. 1986 Sep;35(9):837-42.
Dextrose really more than doubled rat plasma tryptophan. And especially Leucine really tanked to about half. When there was no dietary protein.

There are two valuable approaches here I see opening up:

1. Take gelatine or BCAAs together with each dextrose serving or pay heed to being "loaded-up" all day with sufficient dietary protein in digestion.
2. Yerrag's mentioning of lowering the insuline-spike from carbohydrates/sucrose/dextrose by facilitating cellular uptake and metabolic usage of glucose.
   This can underscore the importance of:
   ...2.1) Gradual increasing of dextrose servings in accordance to the increase of metabolic glucose usability.
   ...2.2) Cofactors for cellular glucose uptake and sparing of insuline. E.g. potassium and chloride.

I'm already doing 2.2) but haven't been able to eat my usual amounts of meat recently.
I will try a 1000mg capsule BCAAs with every serving.
Oddly, however, and despite preexisting serotonin issues of mine, when I had tried these BCAAs capsules before they had made my GI system much worse instead of better.
Are BCAAs and glucose perhaps significantly reciprocal in their requirement?
I know that gelatine/collagen/glycine and also AAs like taurine lower blood glucose and can effect stress reactions, which stands in stark contrast to what they ought to bring about.

PS:
a) How much BCAA or gelatine do you reckon are necessary to compensate the AA-shift by every xx grams of dextrose (if there were no other dietary protein)?
b) Perhaps I'm being too dumb atm to see the mechanism behind these extracellular amino-acid shifts. Do they happen because the non-tryptophan amino acids are being "put to good use" by insuline and/or carbohydrates?

@LetTheRedeemed

I did a deep dive in to why I was getting headaches from too much sugary foods away from meals

Would you try pure dextrose sugary foods as a crosscheck to your experiences with sugary sucrose (50% fructose) foods?

(USA Smarties, maybe marshmallows if you can find good ones not loaded with phosphates, homemade dextrose-only muffins, gummi bears, cakes etc.)

@happyhanneke

On his website, he links an article on
"Brain capillary pericytes are metabolic sentinels that control blood flow through a KATP channel-dependent energy switch"
(energy-dependent and K+ influx activation).
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(22)01768-5

Maybe someone would like to dig into this and report. There could be much more at play than an oversimplified assumption of glucose-sensing. Perhaps (re)stimulation of cell differentiation of those pericytes. Or (re)stimulation of their KATP expression. And perhaps CNS revascularization overall.

@ThinPicking said in Glucose loading cures everything?:

The Faustian chemist types are doing their own thing.

I can agree with this statement. After all, every single individual does and is ought to do her own thing.
I feel no need to debate that. "Faustian chemist types" made me chuckle a little. It seems you generally understood the groups I described as distinct subsets of a general population who never dabbled in self-experimentations of all sorts and who may thus have varying baselines to both the better and the worse.

@gentlepotato said in Glucose loading cures everything?:

100 x 5, or 20 x 5?

100gr x5. I.e. 500gr per day.

@gentlepotato said in Glucose loading cures everything?:

Anyone who's followed RP for a while will probably be more experienced with markers than most of Stephen's patients. We may have an easier time noticing what works for us, and ability to tweak it so it works better.

The levels of adrenergic hormones or also especially PRL over the medium term will be of particular interest to me. My BG 2 hours after 50gr of dextrose comes in at 85 mg/dL. Rather than BG I may be more interested in whether there are (slight) measurable increases in urine glucose as a hint for the ideal serving size at any point in time. I will look for (semi)quantitative test-stripes for that.

Concerning followers of RP I see also the downside potential for much more irregular and messed-up results among such groups of people because of the maybe many peculiar drugs they can be using. As a prominent example of this there's certainly their utter misunderstanding of nonvitamin D3 and widely wrecked innate immunity through that alone. Perhaps there's even been aggravation of glucose-limiting events due to prior "unfueled" B-vitamin gorging.
On the other hand, various things like avoidance of PUFAs should likely play into reaping more benefits of OXPHOS glucose burning.

I'm over three weeks into dextrose now and upping my servings to 100gr (5x a day).

@Mauritio said in Ergothioneine - amino acid for life extension.:

I've only tried it a few times. It felt pretty good, but unfortunately increased my hair loss.

I wonder whether this could be related to the glutathione system. Perhaps that needs to step up accordingly. Would some 1:1 Glycin and NAC and some xx mg ascorbic acid do the trick?
If that hair loss for you really knocks through within only two days of taking ET it's an undesired but actually very convenient marker.

@yerrag

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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@Insomniac said in Lidocaine:

Were you taking it for anti aging or pain?

Against pain, for which it was mildly effective and good for sleep, too, but only initially. The mind-numbing effect it initially had was also a little scary at first and felt somewhat similar to that drag into an empty black hole of a propofol injection. However, I later didn't feel that anymore.
The positive effects waned or shifted to higher doses by about every other day. I had started at 20mg lidocaine p.o. and whilst I took up to 200mg eventually, I felt no more benefit above 60mg or 80mg. Beyond that it turned to enhanced pains and also immune suppression by both lidocaine or procaine. The procaine I didn't like even at lower doses.

To take (ox)carbazepine along with these substances would prevent their action on CRH receptors but it's possible that the latter is essential to their overall effects. Such a combination would perhaps render them mainly useless.

Beware that both lidocaine and procaine exert agonism at (peripheral) CRH receptors.

Also, they both significantly inhibit osteoblasts. Procaine does that right away and this is very relevant already after a week of use. I.e. teeth can suddenly become wobbly in the weeks afterwards. Lidocaine at first promotes them (50-70mg max?) but then also drastically inhibits beyond low doses.

@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.

@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.