Posts made by yerrag

@shitty_kidneys said in Polycystic Kidney Disease:

Other than that it appears to be a very slow but unstoppable time bomb.

Other than PKD looking unsightly, why do you consider it a time bomb?

I don't have it, but wonder if it could be mischaracterized mainly for being hideous, and instead of seeing as harmful, is it possible the cyst(s) is (are) protective because they wrap pathogens to where they don't proliferate, enclosed in a tough coccoon?

I am myself cursed with keloids that keep getting worse. I also have temporal arteritis, which is a bulge on my temple. They are benign and they are hard to get rid of. But because they pose no harm, they are low in my priority list. But mainly so because I believe them to enclose microbes that my immune system cannot destroy and so my body did plan b- to enclose and isolate these microbes.

I wonder if the cysts in the kidneys are anything like my keloids.

@API-Beast

I had reactive hypoglycemia my whole life until the turn of the century, so now I have been normoglycemic for 23 years already. Of these years, the 1st 17 years I still needed help with managing it by having to eat low-glycemic food like brown rice over high-glycemic food like white rice, and had to eat more meat as it keeps my blood sugar from dropping when the protein slowly gets converted to sugar with adrenaline and cortisol signaling the conversion of protein into sugar to augment my blood sugar when it goes near low levels. But in the last 6 years, I benefited from going as much as possible going cold turkey on PUFAs for at least 4 years (more or less) before seeing my hypoglycemic condition disappear. This was in line with Peat's ideas, but that was before I heard of Ray Peat. But when I read more and more of Peat's articles, the more I was convinces Ray was onto something, and I began to absorb as much as I can by reading his writings, although I doubt I can ever absorb enough he's written over his lifetime.

The key things that worked for me I can sum it up with these actions:

1. Getting rid of mercury toxicity by removal of a mouth filled with 11 mercury amalgams with a dentist aligned with IAOMT, and subsequently undergoing DMSO chelation using a series of IV chelation (about 12 weekly sessions, although it may be as high as 18 sessions). These days, I think the chelation may be more easily done using a substance more safely and more effectively. Emeramide, however is not FDA-approved as the FDA drags its heels, but there is a Facebook group that helps in getting and sharing information (though I left that group as I felt the moderators are idiots, to say the least, hung up on what I perceive as being stuck up on rigid rules that suppress what I consider valid observations that would better be appreciated and used to advance the connection of dots, something that a good moderator should possess, which the RPF cub of a lion lacks as well).

Mercury displaces oxygen from any to all of the four binding sites in hemoglobin for oxygen, and reduces the ability to transport a key substrate, oxygen, from being used optimally with sugar for mitochondrial respiration, from which we produce energy.

I was able to benefit from this improvement the first 17 years. I got an energy boost in the form of becoming flu and fever-free since then, when I used to have flu once to twice a year. My endurance running was also boosted, from being exhausted running just 1 km. Without much training, I was instantly transformed into running 5 km uphill without breaking a sweat.

Still, my Achilles heel of being downed by taking a teaspoon of white sugar still exists. And I was still prone to allergic rhinitis. And I was still very sensitive to MSG and it would crash my blood sugar when I eat a bit too much from Chinese and Japanese foods made by wannabe chefs that cheat.

2. It was only when I listened one day to an interview from a doctor (I forgot his name) but he coined the term "parent essential oils." He seemed very convincing in an arrogant manner in maligning PUFAs. But I had to think it through very hard his ideas as until then I was a believer of UFOs Erasmus, who wrote "Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill" from the 80s. What made me rethink my attitude was my reasoning that it is plausible that people who lived inland in the tropics where plants produced little or no PUFA and who ate little omega-3 from being far from the sea, would have long perished by being deficient in the so-called EFAs (essential fatty acids).

So I there and then decided to throw away cooking oils I had such as soya oil, corn oil, and canola oil (such as the wrongly revered Wesson brand) and restricted myself to coconut oil and butter for cooking. I stayed off junk food as I began to develop the habit of reading the ingredient list of processed foods. And I avoided eating out as much as possible, given restaurants and chefs only care about flavor and had no iota what is healthful or not. Not that the fault lay with them, given the general population is blind as a bat when it comes to what is healthful or not.

It was a few years later that I would read of and embrace Ray Peat (around 2016) and I would join RPF.

I think it was Ray who said that it takes 4 years for PUFA to be totally eliminated from the system. Since I already had a headstart, I figured 2017 would be the end of 4 years of going cold turkey on PUFA. So I did a test of my blood sugar. I took a teaspoon of white morning as I skipped breakfast that morning, and waited to feel bad and sick from a sugar low I had learned to expect to be bad for me. The test lasted 5 hours and I didn't feel sick, and I broke the test by having lunch. I did the same thing the next day, but extended the test till dinner time. Seeing it was no fluke, ai declared myself fully cured of hypoglycemia.

My fasting blood sugar would be 84 and my blood sugar would stay that way throughout the day except after meals, which would go to 140 an hour after a meal and begin going down until it levels off at 84. This is how a personal with food sugar metabolism should be, as reflected in stable blood sugar levels.

In the RPF forum, I would encounter people who don't understand the way blood sugar is regulated, and I had given up on those who consider blood sugar rising to 140 right after a meal (with rice or bread or pasta with meat and veggies) as a spike, and for all all such spikes are a no-no. They would brandish out their new tool of a tool, called a continuous glucose monitor (cgm for short), and for being so equipped, they would proceed to make a faulty analysis. Because they have such as tool, they consider themselves well-placed to solve their blood sugar problems.

But they are sort if reinventing the wheel, and replacing a tool used in the past with inferior analysis. The tool uses in the past is a 5hr oral glucose tolerance test, which nowadays has been abandoned by modern medicine and in its place is at best a 3hr glucose tolerance test, and at worst an HbA1 test. And sad to say, even a doctor I respect, Thomas Cowan, uses the HbA1c. Oh well, no one's perfect. Including Ray Peat, who I believe would have lived longer had he been as open to the idea that viruses don't exist as much as Cowan does.

3. Use of a good tool to measure and diagnose yourself (or with the help of an alternative doctor) of your blood sugar using a 5 hr oral glucose tolerance test.

It can be done yourself. Easy peasy. I've shown how it can be done at RPF. It is a disappointment that I cannot convince anyone at RPF to lift a finger nor pry himself off his fat ass to do it.

It doesn't cost much to get the tools and supplies to get started. But this is to be expected from people uses to taking magic bullets. Give them a process with simple directions. They rather get it simplified further and compressed into one step of downing a magic pill.

@Amazoniac rabbit holes galore. makes for many shades and tints between red and blue pilling. how nice. in itself a new field of science is born to supplant virology and quantum physics.

@ThinPicking Thanks. Glad to see you here as well, where we continue to share and help each other with the same spirit we started with at RPF.

I encountered a perfect storm of my own making in a long and unending journey of 20+ years of lowering my blood pressure naturally. I went to the hospital twice in a year. A lot learned about the lungs and the heart, and how interwoven they are in a virtuous cycle when working well, and in a vicious cycle when not. RP's writings helped as I get to understand first-hand the pathology as I connect the dots that the doctors can't as they did save me but only with what they learned by rote in med school. As to be expected, cause and effect is not something part of it. A Nike ethos of "Just Do It" prevails.

@Amazoniac hey buddy glad to reconnect with you here. you can keep pestering me with your fish jokes lol

@Regina -power corrupts

@the-MOUSE I highly doubt dark urine is a sign of high CO2, but I'm open to your explanation why you think so.

I too went to Buteyko training and understand it. But I didn't stick with it. It has its use, as far training the body to retain more CO2 than what it its respiratory center would allow. It's especially helpful when the blood is too acidic because the metabolic pathway it uses makes it produce less CO2 and more lactic acid. In practicing Buteyko, the respiratory center is trained to carry more CO2 and carbonic acid in blood, making blood more acidic. Instead of the respiratory center forcing out (by more rapid breathing) CO2 to excrete carbonic acid out of blood to maintain a lower acidity, it allows this respiratory acidotic state (an acidotic state caused by more CO2 retention leading to more carbonic acid in blood). The purpose of allowing this acidotic state is to force the kidneys later to excrete this excess acidity to be relieved in the form of lactic acid in the form of urine. Over time, the lactic acid (and whatever other acids are in the system) are excreted out as more CO2 is retained. Since this is an ongoing process of retaining CO2 with Buteyko breathing becoming second nature to a practitioner, it is suitable to use when the practitioner's metabolism is defective enough to produce more lactic acid and less CO²/than it is healthful.

For me, it is make work, an added layer to my nature. I would much rather, if I can help it, fix my sugar metabolism so as to naturally produce an abundance of CO² and a minimum of lactic acid, keto acids, and whatever acids that come from taking drugs or from the body producing acids to kill off pathogenic bacteria.

That said, it is possible that you are right in seeing darker urine as a result of practicing Buteyko, as the body has to be in a more acidic state continually with an induced state of respiratory acidosis, and if a more acidic state is known to produce darker urine.

Being in a state of respiratory acidosis is permissible, as it isn't harmful as being in a state of metabolic acidosis.

@Charlie delusional and megalomania is all that is

smoke and mirrors for the hopeless and desperate

@the-MOUSE I don't pretend to be an expert on urine but I know enough about my n=1 experience with carefully observing it while over the years coming across some useful ideas on its color, specific gravity, and pH.

I have come to view dark urine as a red flag. This darkness may be because the urine is very concentrated, and if you dilute it by adding water to it to a 25% urine solution, and look at its hue ( eg red vs. brown orange vs yellow vs yellow green vs. transparent ) you can tell if the darkness you perceive in the urine is due to yellow being concentrated, which likely associates it with being acidic (especially when you have low urine output or oliguria), or that you may have have some hemolysis ongoing when the hue ranges from amber to orange to orange-reddish (from slight to worse). I would not need to talk about the obvious cases where urine is reddish that involves some bleeding in the kidneys to the bladder to the urinary tract, or when the urine is bluish from taking methylene blue or another color from medication.

When I urinate close to a golden yellow or close to bright, even fluorescent -like yellow, I am likely looking at alkali urine (a pH higher than 6.4, which is common to see in the wee hours to after waking up- from a healthy me where there us optimal acid-base balance (from having good mitochondrial metabolism that produces an abundance of CO2 that provides an endogenous pH buffering substance where CO² can become acidic by converting to carbonic acid or alkaline by converting to bicarbonate - as needed to maintain a tight pH range.

Most people make the mistake of thinking that an acidic urine, where urine pH ranges from a pH from 4.5 to 6, is no-no. I see this range often and quite regularly in my urine during the daytime. As urine pH varies with the time of day , and gets acidic during the day. I won't go into specifics but would say that as a simple generalization. Just remember that urine cannot always be acidic as the body excretes acidic urine during the day so that by the wee hours urine would be alkaline.

But to be clear, it's not enough to measure urine pH without relating it to saliva pH. The rule I gleaned reading a website ( I could not recall now) is that the saliva pH should be at least 1 pH above that of urine. Why? I tried to find sense in this rule, and what I've come up with is that urine is an excretion, and saliva is a secretion. Excretions are thrown out, while secretions are recycled within our a system. Thinking this way, it makes sense to throw out excess acidity while retaining what is alkaline- in our ECF(extracellular fluids).

It goes without saying that something is really wrong when our saliva pH becomes more acidic than that of our urine.

@consvmmatvm_est

3 months ago I renewed my driver's license. Took the eyesight test and for the first time the restriction on needing glasses to drive was removed.

It was a nice surprise, to say the least. Though I shouldn't be. As I had stopped wearing bifocals 3 months into becoming having difficulty reading small text (farsighted) while already being nearsighted, wearing glasses since high school.

It helped that my nearsightedness wasn't so bad, with my left eye at 75 and my right eye at 150, and I would only wear the glasses while driving all those years. Since I wasn't wearing glasses regularly, I may kept my eyesight from getting worse. Plus, it helped that I would do some eye exercises from time to time over those years.

But the key to improving my eyesight, I believe, rested on two things I did. The first was to ban as much as as possible the intake of PUFAs. The second was to eat beef liver for its retinol, once a week.

I didn't expect to improve my eyesight doing these. But slowly, over a period of 5 years, my eyesight improved. I thought my eyes were merely comoensating, as truth be told, I did not get the perfect 20/20 vision.

But when my driver's license was rid of the restriction of requiring me to wear glasses, it became official. I did a search of all of Peat's newsletters and articles and books, using an Android app called DocSearch+, and came to the conclusion that vitamin A, in the form of retinol (and not beta-carotene), together with an abundance of CO2 from a healthy mitochondrial metabolism based on sugar, was what made my eyesight work so well.

If I look at my eyes now, the transparency and the reflection off it is unlike what I see in others' eyes.

This is my testimony, and I am thankful for Ray Peat for providing the base for my eyesight improvement. I think this merely the tip of the iceberg, as the eyes are a good proxy for our general health. Many people in their lifetime can't avoid the most popular surgery, involving the cataract, and this, according to Ray, is the result of poor metabolism and its downstream effects.

Which is why, as a former member of RPF, I am disappointed at the direction of charlie in discrediting vitamin A, especially retinol. And also why I feel dismissive and sad for those who junk the traditional diet that is rich in carbs and embrace the carnivore, or ketogenic, or low-carb diet, together with intermittent fasting. Many so-called Peaters also, for not having the patience to read enough of RP's works, in order to connect the dots from the body of work he produced over his lifetime.

People would rather read a short article of Joe Mercola or Dr. Axe, like my siblings, and think it is not as exhaustive as connecting the dots oneself. They are mistaken as they are as easily swayed by the direction the wind blows from the many opinions out there in the net- blogs, vlogs, podcasts and all. They will never get the right foundation, by skipping the basics, which have already been sown by Ray. They just go from one guru to another, from one fad to another, and use up their energy in a mindless way. In the process burdening themselves with layers of beliefs that lack any coherence. Truly wasting away their energy that would be better spent in more productive pursuits.