Posts made by yerrag

@Not_James_Bond

Oh, so you were banned, and I wondered about where you went. The worst fears I had gladly weren't realized. Glad to see you. I wanted to say hi, but I've been low energy lately and do more putting things off than doing lately. My being on bp medication lately had to do with it as I continue to recover from my heart failure incident. It's a bitter pill to swallow but I'm working to wean myself from them still. Solving high bp that is outside metabolic causes is a solo flight, and one bioenergetics is ill-suited to address.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@CO3 I love your sarcasm

at least you still retain a bit of that despite being wrecked by SAD all these years.

@CO3
Now now, calm down.

@CO3 I respect your belief in what Google can easily find for you and you being given to accept it. It's much easier to believe something that is well illustrated by a great graphic designer.

But I can only share what I discover myself, and I will say it is anecdotal, and that it is my experience, and I won't force fit you into my experience. I won't pretend to tell you that it "almost always" is fungal- as I can only make myself less credible in my being presumptuous.

@Regina You're welcome. Thanks for standing up to charlie (and that includes many former ROF members here). My regret is I got banned earlier (September last year) so I didn't get the purple heart sendoff you all did.

In an email exchange I had with Ray, I was surprised that he didn't know much about RPF, and when I broached the subject of the "Ray Peat" diet, he was quick to say there is no such diet. I only brought that subject up because I wanted to ask him if he could spare the time to write about how to make someone transform from poor sugar metabolism to spanking good.

It was revealing that Ray Peat never recognized nor endorsed RPF. I thought it strange Ray would do some podcasts with Gyorgi and with Danny, but Charlie was never acknowledged afaik. Now I think I know why. Ray, I suspect, knew something if only by gut feel and he must go by the adage that if you had nothing pleasant to say about someone, it is best to stay mum. I was late to the party.

@CO3 If you could write a sentence to explain it briefly, and post a link that would spare me the hassle of using Google. I don't trust it and give Google search results to hand me an answer that involves some sort of semblance of truth.

@Inzil there is a wide variety.

as general as saying white sugar is bad so avoid it. some would say honey is better because it is not processed. some would say all kinds of sugar is bad and so go carnivore or ketogenic. but some would a little sugar/carbs is okay but not much. some would say go on intermittent fasting.

what they won't tell you is to test you correctly for problems in blood sugar regulation so as to know whether there is something in you that needs to be fixed as far the ability to optimally metabolize sugar goes. some would do a test and give you a false negative ( that you don't have a blood sugar regulation problem when you actually do) and this would reinforce your thinking that carbs are really bad and that yo should avoid it at all cost.

a lot of hoops to go through as I said. and you are none the better for it.

believe it or not, I benefited from doing my research reading old books I borrowed in the public library and found the answers. this was pre-1994 which meant Netscape wasn't yet around to have the internet to mislead me thoroughly. Nowadays if I started my research off the internet, I wouldn't know to sort out fact from fiction. Lots of gaslighting going on to add to add to the level of confusion in media. Social media is no help either as it adds more noise and distracts me from focus.

@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.

@thebodyelectric_

I used artemisia annua extract or turpentine or suppositories made of essential oils that have antifungal properties. Not together, but separately.

The art annua extract I made mixing 700mg of gin with dried artemisia annua (as fresh ones are not available) in a bucket covered in newspaper of sackcloth to allow it to breathe over 10 days, after which I will strain the liquid. I would take 35ml each day over a week or two.

For turpentine, I would take a teaspoon of it poured over a teaspoon of brown sugar (or a cube of it if available) and down it with water. For a week or two.

Using a suppository I would use it for a week. It is more involved as I had to order suppository molds and a few organic essential oils.

@Peatly

@Seam

If you feel good eating it, it means you're taking well to it and it does you good. Continue to eat and don't deprive yourself of a food source of sugar and potassium just because others don't take to it well because their own experience rightly says so because they have a different context. They may have problems metabolizing sugar and you don't.

When I couldn't metabolize sugar well, I would take a teaspoon of white sugar on an empty stomach and my blood sugar would drop shortly after, and I would then start shivering and then I would start having a runny nose and then I would have a sore throat and develop a fever. Knowing that, I would avoid doing that again. But it would be natural, not knowing any better, to say that white sugar is bad- based on my experience.

But I would see others doing well eating a piece of candy, which is like taking that teaspoon of sugar, and the candy would have no effect on them and that would make me think whether there is something wrong with me. That led me to realize that what really is going on is that my body can not process sugar well.

I had to go through hoops (ie read books like Sugarbusters that also say bananas are bad as well as white sugar, as well as doctors that says so) to question the idea that sugar is bad, and to realize that sugar isn't necessarily bad, and that maybe, just maybe look inwardly and consider something is wrong in me.

That is the starting point for me to discover a different narrative, and begin for me a different journey. It would lead me to the right set of doctors to begin my healing.

Healed, I would be enjoying white sugar and bananas and other fruits as well, and not deprive myself of nutrients that come in fruits such as potassium.

I enjoy drinking real sugary Coke as I know when to avoid drinking Coke - when I am sick and my acid-base balance is off to the very acidic side as my body is vulnerable to the very acidic nature of Coke, and it would worsen my acidemia and that would only keep my body from healing.
When I am well, my body can handle the acidity as it is able to excrete out the acidity of Coke, especially when A+ for acid base balance with my reliable but cheap DIY test for acid-base balance.

I also have a diy test for blood sugar regulation that tells me more accurately how well my body processes simple sugars, in case I am not sure. Sure, the medical establishment has the HbA1c test, but it's a flawed albeit more convenient way to test and I agree with the thumbs down Ray Peat has given on it.

@risingfire

I suspect charlie hastily created RPF and reading and understanding ray peat's ideas took a back seat to his running and managing the website. this is evident in that he had not shown a mastery that comes from carefully reading Ray's newsletters and books in a way that allows him to internalize Ray's piecemeal approach to discovery where an earnest subscriber to Ray's writings could be able to slowly connect the dots and over time be able to form a comprehensive understanding of human physiology based on the fruits of Ray's condensation and encapsulation of his thorough and faithfully dedicated research that avoids the pitfalls of most researchers, who fail in digging through primary sources and are stuck with blending false artifacts of research based on funding that are contingent on pushing a false narrative where truth is secondary to profit.

If you have tried to read Ray's books and newsletters, you would know what I am talking about, as I've tried to do that and I don't even think I covered even a fifth, much less a tenth, of Peat's body of work. It isn't for the faint of heart or the weak of mind, as I find it hard to speed read through his material and to understand and internalize what he conveys I have to read at a glacial pace.

If you listen mostly to Peat's interviews, you'll likely get only only an imperfect and partially and even inaccurate understanding of Ray Peat's discoveries that he presents in his books and in reading his books, you still don't quite get the whole body of Ray's accumulated research. As you will need to be updated with subscribing and reading his newsletters. An example of that is on his latest newsletters, he began to talk more about reductive stress, and as I keep up with his writing, I would get to form a better understanding of what reductive stress is. Even as Ray wasn't able to fully explain what reductive stress in a "reductive stress for dummies" way, before his untimely death got in the way, I would slowly have developed a workable and practical understanding of what constitutes reductive stress and even be able to explain it and differentiate it from oxidative stress.

In most areas of study, it would be easier to write an encyclopedic A to Z, "All You Need to Know About Yadayada," "For Dummies" type of book that would give one a fairly good Reader's Digest version of that area of knowledge, but with Peatology it is near impossible to do.

I believe it is because the body is basically a system of interrelationships that rely on a balance of different background processes. Losing that balance leads the body to compensate in the hope that the adaptation is only temporary as the body self-adjusts to restore that balance. Because most of us is not conscious much less aware of what is going on, and even when aware we do not understand how to help the body heal itself, we tend to do nothing but allow the stress from adaptation to become a permanently worsening state. This creates a chronic state that keeps adding more stressful demands on the body. As time passes, the effects of chronic stress begin to show and slowly we begin to degenerate and become more vulnerable as a ticking time bomb that would catch us off guard.

Understanding Ray's ideas more and more to be on the situation of having the balance that simply put is the result of our bodily processes being in a virtuous cycle that comes only from having a good understanding of what's good for us and what's not, and not being in a state of confusion about what's good and what's bad. That is an ideal situation to be in and that is what 99.99% of us are painfully not in. Instead, most of us are outside and in a state of chronic adaptation in varying degrees of being in vicious cycles.

What is worse, we are surrounded by doctors and supposed healers whose abilities are mostly inadequate, mostly having to pick up scraps from the mounds of litter that are considered knowledge wrapped in an expensive piece of paper, and many supposed healers are better in marketing their services than in healing clients, while good healers have a distaste for self-aggrandizing that they are less recognized.

If my read on charlie is right, it is like having a general lead you in a battle who is ill prepared on the art of war and the only thing he is capable of is in putting you in battles you have no chance of winning.

A war rages on in each of our own body every day. We all seem to be winning as we are breathing and living. But we are helpless as well, as we are felled easily by the element of surprise. As we don't even have an iota of what to measure to give us a "feel of where the wind is blowing" as far as virtuous or vicious cycles are concerned.

RPF is a failure IMHO in that even before Charlie began to take it into the land of soya milk and saccharin, I have not seen a case of transformation from metabolically diseased to metabolically sound. Instead, I see obese getting more obese and these failures blame it on sugar. And blame it on the "Ray Peat" diet, which I take to simply mean that these people cannot metabolize sugar optimally, and before fixing their body to be able to metabolize sugar optimally, the jump straight to a nutritional lifestyle that is rich in carbs, because Ray Peat says sugar is good. But if course they will fail. Because while sugar is good, it is only good for a metabolically healthy body. And when the body is not, the person will be obese and overweight, or be sickly from hypoglycemia.

Too bad. But RPF is just Exhibit A when it comes to health forums. Bad ideas eventually take over like rotting apples. That is what Curezone has become, as well as many others.

@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%3Dihub

Maybe. 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.

Rethinking treatment of mercury poisoning: the roles of selenium,acetylcysteine, and thiol chelators in the treatment of mercury poisoning:a narrative review

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.

Ray Peat on carbon dioxide

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!

@PrinceMyshkin

I believe it to be a systemic issue, and for it to go away you can't approach it with a magic bullet that merely eliminates the present white substance for a day or two or even a week, only to see it come back.

In my case, I have seen my white tongue become less white but never reach the pinkness I see in my cats' tongues. I think it is fungal.

I think fungus has a propensity to spread into a thin net of a web, just like in when it is in soil. It covers the tongue, and it also covers the scalp (which I believe causes dandruff). I have them both, but notice when my scalp goes the seborrheic dermatitis - free, I also have less white tongue. And this always corresponds to the time when my wbc in my CBC (complete blood count) is lower, after I have taken some antibacterials (herbs, essential oils, or chemicals such as copper acetate) followed up by antifungals (turpentine essential oils). Without antifungals, taking antibiotics/antibacterials would somehow cause a higher amount of eosinophils in subsequent CBC tests that indicate a higher fungal (or fungal parasite) presence that would also result in my scalp becoming resurgent with seborrheic dermatitis popping left and right.

Moreover, I would find my platelet count go higher each time I see my eosinophils go down signifying a lower fungal load. I believe it's because platelets have an immune function in destroying fungus and is expended in the process.

The microbiome in my blood and its vessels have its own microbiome that is separate from that of the gut, but not altogether distinct like there is a Chinese wall between them.

I believe that the microbiome in my blood and vessels were infected when I developed periodontitis in my gums, and there was plenty of time for the periodontal bacteria to translocate to my blood vessels (years in fact) before periodontal infection went from stealth mode to being finally expressed as bleeding gums and loose teeth. By then the infection would see bacterial colonies lodged in the vessel walls, and over time this colony would morph into a microbiome that has more and more of a fungal component. The fungus would even morph into a fungal parasite that would enter red blood cells and feed on it's iron and cause red blood cells to hemolyze, and with having a food source, it would continue to multiply.

The higher the fungal presence internally in our system, the thicker and whiter the white tongue would be.

It was only after In began to actively reduce my fungal load, mainly to lower blood pressure, that I began to see my tongue become more pink as the white coating for thinner.

@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%3Dihub

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.

Rethinking treatment of mercury poisoning: the roles of selenium,acetylcysteine, and thiol chelators in the treatment of mercury poisoning:a narrative review

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.

@the-MOUSE

I forgot to get back to you on hemolysis.

It's hard to know whether I have hemolysis or not. We hardly suspect it because the medical establishment believes our blood is sterile. To acknowledge that is to let us know that it is not safe to trust blood transfusions, especially when blood banks are filled with the blood of strangers with diverse levels of microbes. But in the one time I gave in to curiosity and submitted myself to a live blood exam and an interpretation of it that was costly because it had to take that long to observe my blood and that isn't common and not cheap, I got to learn that I have fungal parasites that cycle in and out of my red blood cells as part of their life cycle, and that the red blood cells break down regularly. But the rate at which RBC hemolyze is low enough to be recognized by standard medical testing methods so that they don't show up in tests such as the CBC or in urinalysis.

After that realization, I began to hypothesize that that may be a reason why my platelet count, which range from the 180 to 220, where the soc (standard of care- to refer to what our conventional doctors use) range was 150-400, would be in the lower range of normal. I would want to see my platelets at around 300 to be right smack in the middle.

Some research at PubMed later, I would see low platelets as a result of having fungal parasites, for platelets are uses by the body to destroy fungal issues.

To test this out, I began taking some antifungals such as turpentine as well as artemisia annual tincture (which ai make tincture with using gin). I would take CBC tests after 2 weeks of taking each of them, and each time I would see my urine color change from the amber of red ale or pale Pilsen to a bright near fluorescent yellow color that can be described also as golden yellow, though the slight fluorescence makes me think of Mountain Dew. This is why, even now, I continue to work on lowering the level of fungal infection internally.

I don't want to give the impression that my context is everyone else's, as I have a 20 yr history of having periodontal infection that has me 5 teeth. That infection has translocated from my gums to my internal system, and what started out as a synergistic and harmful blend of bacteria of at least 4 species has morphed into having a strong fungal component, and have taken a form of parasitism that feeds off iron that it has to live off red blood cells. This condition is a large part of what causes my high blood pressure, which is another topic that I would rather not expound on in the interest of brevity.

But I hope I have given you enough reason to think of hemolysis as a possibility, but not to leave you fixated as its probability may be small in your context. Take it as food for thought and nothing more.

@BioS

It is a matter of opinion.

Your argument may have merit, but I should buttress my post by saying that temporal arteritis is an adaptation by the body to protect it from a harm that is more immediate and that if it poses harm it is a relatively lesser harm as it pushes the harm into the future. Just as what the body does with fibrosis. If there were no present danger that were greater, fibrosis would not occur as there is no purpose served by developing fibrosis than to stave off a present danger towards a future reckoning.

I also should state that correlation does not prove causality. It is too common in the practice of modern medicine to lose sight of that, and even more common for it to blame the savior as the culprit of a misdeed by mere association and lose even an inkling of what is cause and what is effect, and make a total mess of forensics, and thus do the equivalent of a mob lynching.

This is anecdotal, but a cousin recently passed away due to a heart condition, and died of a heart attack. But he died at a ripe age of 85, and I have less reason to worry about my temporal arteritis as he had one for a long time. He was a type 1 diabetic, and had long been on insulin injections. What stood out about him was that he had a full head of thick black hair, with little or no evidence of graying.