@DavidPS

This is a sounder model, but that's all it is as it is only less sound.

How the medical system has put insulin at the apex of its medical malfeasance dogma is appalling, along with its many falsehoods. To name a few more equivalents of Nobel laureate level hoaxing such as the banshee worship of non-existent viruses, the bedevelling of CO2 within and without the body (downplaying its salutary role as an all important pH buffer within, and its regulatory role in providing earth with a green blanket of forests), the vilification of protective hormones such as progesterone with the false worship of estrogen in its altar of repose with western christian churches in an evil collaboration of promoting superstition and fear.

Even the bioenergetic community blathers on the term insulin resistance as it echoes in unison with the false reliance on insulin as it's savior, refusing to see insulin as just another stress hormone from the true Peatarian view of it. Instead of less insulin being seen as beneficial, insulin is viewed as needed and vital to blood sugar regulation.

To such extent that when the body refuses to lower blood sugar as the charlatans would have us believe, it is never called an acute phase biomarker but instead the body is considered stupid and unwise and in dysregulation.

Insulin does more than just lower blood sugar, and it only does so when the body's ability to absorb and metabolize sugar efficiently via the mitochondria. Only when the body fails in lowering blood sugar does insulin step in. And in corrective fashion, when it tells the liver to convert excess blood sugar to fat.

But when the body is doing well in absorbing and metabolizing sugar, with little or no help from insulin, there is just a minimum level of insulin around that is keeping insulin from inhibiting other metabolic pathways such as lipolysis (as well as other processes which space and the interest of brevity does not permit).

Lipolysis being uninhibited is wrongly viewed as evil from the false notion that there is forum consensus of fat or beta-metabolism as being unequivocally unsound. This is a mental block which keeps most Peatarians from really achieving metabolic health.

Why would inhibiting lipolysis be a bad idea, I ask? For one, how would you lose weight when you don't convert fat cells into fatty acids for these fatty acids to be used as a substrate for producing energy in the mitochondria?

Couple this with the inane idea that more insulin is needed as the solution to lowering your blood sugar, according to mainstream medical thought and experts, not on the strength of evidence but on the usual Nobel Prize-level of propaganda and hoaxing and insulting of our intelligence with Pied Pipers of long noses where we only see long noses as normal only because our de facto religion sanctifies long noses.

Without realizing that an overabundance of insulin not only keeps fat stores in stasis, as we keep our overweightness and obeseness fully intact; while at the same time our liver is told by insulin to tack on more weight by converting blood sugar to fat, and the obvious outcome would be weight gain and poor health.

And then we are mad at United Healthcare for being the proverbial hitman for the lying pharma complex for denying us treatment from being so sick from stupidly taking hook line and sinker pharma's obvious lies as we descend into metabolic hell.

@Kilgore

Thanks for the reminder. I've eaten carpaccio both in an Italian restaurant and at home. It was easy to make and there was no need to eat it at a restaurant. Especially when I could keep a piece of sirloin or beef nape (the meat by the neck with is marbled) cheap, have it frozen for 2 weeks to make it more safe to be eaten raw, then slice the meat across the grain thinly like Korean style using a manual slicer (Korean style) which makes short work of slicing fully frozen meat.

Preparation is almost non-existent as after slicing the meat you you lay the strips in a plate and drizzle with lemon juice and put capers to add some sourness and flavor and a bit of bumpiness into the adventure. Depending on your personal preference, you can add some salt and pepper or kick it up a notch with cayenne pepper.

If I'm having it with slices of french bread or baguette, then I can use the olive oil as a dip with the bread instead. Or I might open up a small can of liver spread, a poor man's paté, and spread it over the slice of bread and enjoy the carpaccio to my liking.

This meat slicer is simply indispensable. I was glad I could buy this for a song, as previously in looking for a meat slicer, it was the underpowered and unreliable electric meat slicers that have bad reviews due to their unreliable operation and short life, not mentioning they hog valuable counter space, or the pricey industrial and overkill and pricey meat slicer, both of them very unforgiving of careless mistakes involving our delicate fingers:

https://s.lazada.com.ph/s.LZCzn

@Njegos

May you go a long way in that quest.

My two cents says if we minimize stress, we would be producing energy efficiently and that energy would be used more productively. By that I mean that energy is not wasted on fighting small fires endlessly, and by avoiding such small fires we conserve our energy. Needless to say, large fires are even worse and use up our body stores of energy and nutrients and endogenous sources of helpful substances such as enzymes and hormones. But it is often the small fires that escape our attention as these constant small fires can be persistent and never go away and stay with us undetected throughout extended periods. If you added all the misspent energy our body has to allocate to keep defending itself from the wear and tear from these stresses, it would mean that our body would not have a net surplus of energy to use on non-essential improvements or appurtenances.

To be truly healthy we would have to bathe ourselves in the luxury of being nutritionally abundant through what we eat and breathe and drink and what energy the sun passes on to us. And then we have to convert and store and use this energy optimally through both oxidative and reductive forces.

Our understanding of bioenergetics should make us appreciate the wisdom of our body to know when and when not to use our oxidative potentials just as it knows when or when not to use reductive potentials, such that both potentials produce complementary sources that harmonize with each other. There is no other way I can describe this than by using the TCM concept of yin and yang. And Ray Peat would often cite the vitalism of Vernadsky et al who oppose the materialistic construct of modern medicine as based on the materialistic philosophical construct of Descartes, which forms very much a western christian divide distinct from the eastern christian approach of earlier Grecian philosophies.

Didn't we start off venturing into wholistic ideas based on the one-sided views of health where everything involving antioxidants is good and all that involves oxidation is bad? Such that when Ray talked of oxidative processes as good I was confused as hell in the beginning I encountered his ideas. It was hard to reconcile the idea that antioxidants can be just as bad as oxidants, and that they can each be as good as the other.

We are to learn that Linus Pauling and the field of orthomolecular medicine was rather incomplete in forming the initial concept of the benefits from antioxidants, in a Popeye and Brutus kindergarten view of antioxidants being all good and oxidants being all good. In the heyday of antioxidants being being king, when Pauling was alive, we were just beginning to form a rudimentary understanding of what is good and what is bad for the body.

If history serves me right, it was only in the 1970s that researchers started to find out about the beneficial role of oxidants to our health. And from then, the trickle would snowball into our current understanding of bioenergetics courtesy of Ray Peat sharing us his distillation and condensation of these ideas that made acceptance of oxidation as healthful and existential.

Not only that, we would later on learn of ROS - reactive oxygen species - and though they are the stuff that is misunderstood as "all evil," we would come to appreciate that our immune system uses these ROS in a way that benefits our health, by using them to fight pathogens and toxins.

Still, our understanding is not fully formed yet. And there are still many things we cannot agree on given that we are constantly being fed misrepresentations by so called experts from the mainstream school and from alternate channels, each with its own blend of sound and unsound ideas preying on gullible and impressionable minds. Worst of all, there are far too many experts who write books based on half-formed and wrong ideas, and become bestselling writers, based on the strength of book sales whose buyers can read but lack the ability to be critical enough who take wrong ideas hook line and sinker.

Still, as imperfect as all this is, we should still be able to get it right once we know the history of a patient, make theory into practice by really forming our ideas on Peat's research and writing, and make the dots connect.

If you begin to appreciate oxidative stress, and you also get to understand what reductive stress is, you would have come closer to untangling mysteries such as what this thread is about.

@Njegos Laudable of you. But first fix yourself so if you still have it in you, to change the world starting with those around you. The world and its inertia is not an easy project but one can still dream.

@CrumblingCookie said in Oxalobacter formigens after guts nuked by antibiotics. Sources? Possibilities?:

@yerrag said:

Use of natural substances available in nature that are known for their antifungal properties may help as a start. Taking turpentine orally, for example. This would help change the microbiome towards a dominance by bacteria instead of fungal forms.

When you said turpentine, did you only think of its antifungal properties or of more?

I've been harboring some aversion to turpentine and didn't try it as intended. A few days ago, however, I started 4-5 times daily 4-5 drops of aforementioned monoterpenes (from peppermint oil) and whilst it's ached a little inititally and especially when taken without any dextrose (it's recommened to be taken with sugar, just as turpentine) its effects are remarkably beneficial and remarkably quickly so.
I've tried to find associations of turpentines/terpenes with intestinal mucosa.

And couldn't find much, really. From a bit of crossreading, however, it appears to be the case that turpentine AT LOW DOSES, but not at large doses (opposite effects!), exhibits trophic effects on the intestinal mucosa and villous length and proliferation by releasing cytokines (and perhaps improved microcirculation).
It helps to maintain villous lenghts during a couple of days of starvation/fasting (I hadn't known that villous atrophy sets in so quickly from a "use it or lose it" point).

So overall, low but not high doses of turpentine seems to stimulate the intestinal mucosa, and sort of imitate a well-functioning microbiome--brush border interaction in the absence of a proper microbiome?
Or maybe it reinstates the proper microbiome by putting right the brush border functionings? It's difficult so say with these reciprocities.

I get little information from the medical literature about turpentine and that had been a problem for me, more so in the past as I was so tied to what the medical literature deletes constantly from past records of cures. Now I am not so dependent on what the pharma complex borne from the Flex or Report as commissioned by Rockefeller to destroy our health by making conventional pharma-based medicine practically like the only medicine we have been programmed to accept, with all its pretensions to being scientific but in reality has a lot of hokum and snake oil and charlatanry embedded in it. It's only real claim to legitimacy is that it intertwines some good juju with threads of poison and superstition and mask them as legitimate potions.

Luckily, there are some doctors that use turpentine and one of them is Dr. Jennifer Daniels. I went to her website and requested a free book and in that book she explains how turpentine can be used. I've used it for a treatment lasting 2 weeks where I would take a teaspoon of it poured over a teaspoon of sugar each night. She encourages it's use against candidiasis, and no doubt has antifungal properties. I don't have candidiasis but I went to have my blood examined using live blood analysis and discovered my red blood cells to harbor fungal species much like candida that would act like a parasite as it's life cycle revolves around feeding off my the blood in rbc's and making the red blood cells hemolyze, or breakdown and die. This process of hemolysis is hard to identify using standard blood tests, and the only visible indication is that my urine appears amber (like pale pilsen beer with a reddish tinge to it , the tinge being the tint given to it by hemolyzed blood. After taking turpentine, I would see my urine color turn more golden yellow or even like mountain yellow with a neon glow to it. I would later on observe that the wbc count in my CBC reduced to indicate a lower level of low-grade (meaning no fever) infection in my blood. Subsequently, with other efforts to lower infections with the use of suppositories with essential oils, I was able to lower the level of infection and inflammation to such effect that my blood pressure got lower, from 240/160 to 189/120. Still high, indicating the effect from remaining lead toxicity as well as a recently developed free iron toxicity.

Since I have come to employ substances more and more that do not conform to the standards used by standard conventional medicine, but align well with Peaty principles, my health has improved in many ways.

Use of turpentine is just one example. But I must warn that I don't just willy nilly use these substances without a lot of thought and consideration, and I dare only to treat myself. For making a mistake can have terrible consequences, one of which I experienced last year and continue to recover from (which involves heart failure where my heart stopped for 15 minutes). It is risky and that's why I can only risk myself. My consolation was that I was still careful, but careless enough that I didn't do enough of dotting my i's and crossing my t's. Lessons learned surviving it were invaluable though, as I learned so much about heart failure, and how easy it is for dead red blood cells in a mass die off from hypoxemia (from respiratory issues such as bronchitis in my case but in general from ARDS such as those involving COVID) could result in a long or even permanent case of hardness of breathing.

Dead red blood cells that aren't recycled but stay stuck in the a congested lymphatic system are not easily seen in the opacity of the lymphatic system, and a constant but slow release of these is toxic, as the enzyme heme oxygenase, which thankfully Ray has written a lot about, will cause the release of carbon monoxide and free iron, which would cause lungs to get wet and breathe poorly and contribute greatly to the development of heart failure. But this mechanism isn't acknowledged in medical circles, who would merely address the issue with prescription medicine that only address the symptoms while letting its true causes fester.

@Njegos

Your low temperature is enough to tell that your metabolism is low and that you are hypothyroid. But calling you hypothyroid is not the most helpful as it gives the idea that it is only your thyroid condition that is sub-optimal, and this condition, while applicable, gives the impression in many that taking thyroid supplementation would be the magic bullet to cure you of your condition. Too many thyroid supplementers are guilty of using the pharma medical model of taking pharma drugs regularly to alleviate the expression of a symptom, to simply stop any more attempt to permanently rid one of a pathology by identifying the root cause/s with the follow-up intention of eliminating the root cause.

Unfortunately, the medical system and it's doctors are woefully inadequately trained and equipped to to any semblance of root cause analysis, and this are unable to help you solve your impaired metabolism, which really is at the heart of your condition.

If the world were not dominated by a system where doctors serve as errand boys and drug distribution networks for the pharma cartel, and have the freedom to troubleshoot your body like mechanics would fix your car, with payment only necessary upon a repair fully done, you would find yourself being helped and not being told of the oft-repeated and used narrative that "our researchers have found no cure with all their research and that the only answer is to rely on expensive intervention with drugs and surgery and with implants if not transplants and toxic substances." It goes without saying that this level of intervention is very costly and this model of keeping people alive as zombies takes a lot out of our lives and leaves at best those remaining behind destitute to continue carrying the burden of the ones that have passed away.

Yet it is not impossible to learn of bioenergetics principles based on Ray Peat's research that would restore back to the body it's metabolic vigor without so much as costing us to lose out material possessions.

The problem is that there is no medical discipline srevolving around Peat research that has been formalized to compete against the AMA and it's sanctification by arbitrary nature as defined by the corrupt practices of the Nobel committees that honor snake oil and frauds as science and worthy of recognition while true discoveries are left unrecognized and unusable in contributing to a continuing and snowballing rate of advancement in medicine and health.

Not that there is no one to help you, but those that can help you exist as pockets and islands of isolation, and what effective solutions they offer are walled off in obscurity where only family members and self benefit from applying goods principles off Ray Peat's research. The rule of law favors bad juju, and good medicine is always persecuted by the the wrath of the law. In pursuit of the so-called aim of protecting the public.

But all the writings of Ray Peat of free. In it are kernel of truth that one can use, even at its very basic ideas it isn't hard to implement in one's own practices, lifestyle, and habits

Just know how to use the power of computers and search, and search thru his works, and distill it. If you are not so confounded and confused by competing arguments from the mainstream purveyors of science, and have a simpleton-like belief in Peat, and give him a chance, or the benefit of the doubt, you will be able to see your metabolic health improve. His ideas are foundational though they are hardly unique, and are mostly already in the public domain. Mostly they are based on earnest research. And truth always will hold water and substance, and healing powers. Some have been discarded for modern ideas where novelty carries a preium to produce profit for the modern snake oil salesmen, as they slither their way to rob both private and public health finances and community chests.

I can rattle off many Peat ideas I have adopted only to realize later how much my health has improved. It does not take a genius. It takes in reading him to recognize him as credible and to see how connected and coherent his ideas are after reading through enough of his articles to see how connected they are. And to see the body as a unity where internal systems synergistically operates in a virtuous fashion in a seemingly perpetual showering of vigor and robustness towards creating more structure, where intelligence and wisdom feeds off and enriches the mind and spirit.

If you want to improve, start reading so you can get
good ideas straight from Peat. Don't get carried away by too much dependence on drugs as well as supplements. Concentrate on getting nourishment from the clean upstream water source, and less on the polluted downstream.

@Insomniac

I've long considered the benefit or harm from mere increasing or lowering of bp to be dependent on context. People in relative good health worry about rising BP, only to realize they haven't yet experienced the other side of the coin in poor health, where low BP is what needs to be concerned about.

MB causing high BP is more s function of MB increasing metabolism, and when that happens, there isn't much to be concerned about.

@NNight said in Carbon Monoxide Poisoning from Heme Oxygenase Breaking Down Hemoglobin:

I don't know if it will be useful to you (you've already been there and done that), but TonEBP/NFAT5 activation could help deactivating HO-1:

We found that TonEBP is a potent suppressor of HO-1 in human and mouse macrophages.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.00850/full

The FXR might help too to rebuild heme:

FXR orchestrates the expression of multiple heme biosynthetic enzymes. Finally, human HepG2 cells and primary human hepatocytes treated with obeticholic acid, showed increased expression of several heme biosynthetic genes.

(In the liver...)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37695073/

Seems like the directions would be complicated, or materials not easily available. But thanks.

I could have gone at it at 1mg/kg of my bodyweight at 70 mg. Oh well.