Flu Shot? or not?

Can I have your child?

 

formerly required a prescription. i don't really equate 'prescription' with 'drug.' after all, look at all the non-prescription things, the illegal things, the household things that people use to alter their bodily function somehow. and i know nothing of the japanese protocols for prescriptions and such, so i can't comment on their reasoning for it.

i guess i can't really clear things up for you any better than i've already tried. we are talking different angles of the same problem here, so in some way yes, these are all inter-linked. but drugs are not the same as food. though food, as we see, can sometimes contain traces of drugs (ie growth hormone, etc) and food obviously contains nutrients, which are not drugs because they're part of food.

chalk it up to how intertwined biochemistry and nutrition and pharmacology are...

no. the result of the extra chromosome is that extra genes are present. not all genes end up as proteins that make chemicals. so i'm still not sure where extra chromosome=extra chemicals.

what i'm saying is that the genes that cause toxicity provide a normal function at a normal expression level and are NEEDED but at a very careful balance. too MUCH causes cellular dysregulation and pow, improper development. a protein that inhibits nuclear translocation is going to be toxic if there's too much there- and no chemicals are produced to do this to counteract them.

but progesterone acts through a RECEPTOR. progesterone receptors are nuclear receptors that directly regulate gene expression so they're a special case. i would not count progesterone as a nutrient under any circumstances, whether you supplement it or not.

we know the body has to have everything it NEEDS- all the proper fuels- to work properly. and this is why nutrition is so important. if we're deficient, that can alter body function through things like gene expression. if we don't have enough of a particular functional group- say a sulfhydryl group donor, we will see problems because of that. and the body adapts. sometimes by changing gene expression, depending on other circumstances. so nutrition is important for gene expression, but one cannot use nutrition to specifically cause targeted up- or down-regulation as we would love to be able to do in DS. it is simply not possible.

the neurological defects are there at birth. you can't compensate for decrease volume and neuron number of a given region of the brain, or reduced synaptic plasticity and dendritic branching. you can provide an environment where the maximal use of those facilities is possible, but there is a threshold beyond which you cannot pass.

while we can possibly supplement to provide some improvement (though controls/comparison would be extremely difficult given the wide variability of individual impairment), i do not for one second believe that we can correct such a complex genetic problem with any method given the current state of collective scientific knowledge. that is not to say i don't wish we could. but i'm being a realist here.

i still can't understand it. my concerns are twofold: first, MAOB is going to be upregulated. this means you commit to taking it long term, or it sucks when you're not taking it. secondly, since we're talking about a normal aging adult here, we don't know how much is too much to put in that synaptic space. if there's a major supraphysiological effect, the presynaptic neuron autoreceptor stimulation will signal the cell to produce less dopamine.

so if you're going to volunteer yourself for it, at least be very careful about the dose. the average parkinson's patient gets 10 mg/day, and that's a highly dysfunctional system by the time you show symptoms. hard to compare that to a normal aging system.

and you don't want to know what increased dopamine at the terminal does to adolescents.

there are plenty of unconventional treatments for pain. it depends on what the pain is, how it's caused, where it is, etc. we do know that vitamin c can neutralize free radicals, but not all problems are caused by reactive oxygen species.

ay, but all that sodium... and the side effects, ouch.

i'm on the fence about calling a vaccine a drug. on one hand, it does ramp up the immune system. on the other hand, all it's doing is exposing you to something you may be exposed to in the future anyway, but with serious pathogens it's less likely to kill you. i think vaccines deserve their own designation.

if my stomach was the problem, i would be looking into the stuff you've pointed out. unfortunately, my family has a weak lower esophageal sphincter that does not close the stomach off from the esophagus- it's not really a problem with the digestive tract so much as the muscle that separates the highly acid-tolerant part from the other stuff. so i can't eat acidic foods very often, and when i do i really pay for it later. i cut nearly all the possible causes, except for tomatoes, i love tomatoes.

we can't target that muscle specifically though (see a trend here? :lol so we have to create that abnormal state of lowered stomach acid to compensate for the acid coming up into the esophagus.

it's a price i'm willing to pay to not be in constant misery, and my digestion has been just fine all this time.

nattokinase is intriguing- though again i wonder how it gets absorbed. they claim it is absorbed in the small intestine after a few different searches, though it must have an extremely neutral charge to it for a 27 kDa molecule to make it through the membrane. i'd be curious to know how much of it is actually absorbed vs what's adminstered. and how on earth is it able to handle room temperature without denaturing? so many questions... and every paper i've glanced at ends with "needs more investigation" so none of them have really been answered yet.

would be far easier to just take vitamin c, really. and immeasurably cheaper, given the unknowns that require testing for recombinant enzymes and the risks one takes until it's known and possibly engineered, purified and the administration system is figured out. then you have to define the distribution based upon blood flow, which does not necessarily localize to wherever higher concentrations of antioxidants may be needed, etc.

whew! good thing i've got a slow day here at work today

 

Why thank you!

 

Low stomach acid really scares me. All my life I've been allergic, and one of the things that I've been able to learn about it is that a normal level of stomach acid is a primary defense against pathological substances.

One of the warnings we hear about traveling to other countries is to not drink the tap water or ice. The presumed problem is that the water has unfamiliar pathogens in it that the locals can tolerate but foreigners cannot. Another consideration is that the ice (even if it is from pathogen free water) turns off stomach acid production. Lower acid + pathogens => trouble.

Dr. John McDougall believes that many reflux problems are caused by an allergy to dairy protein, and/or low fiber intake. He would put you on a high fiber vegan diet, and that would help considerably with the reflux problems. About 2 weeks of his diet is enough to check it out.

I've been on several vacation tours with Dr. McDougall, and got to speak with many people who've experienced health improvements caused by his style of eating. Reflux is high on the list of problems that get better. It's rather amusing to watch some of the people on these tours. Sometimes a spouse (generally the man) doesn't even know that all the food is going to be vegan. Consider the plight of a meat eating Creationist on a vegan tour of the Galapagos. Everybody seemed to survive the strange food except for a couple of teenagers. One teenager just couldn't stomach it, so he ate "normal" food with the ship crew. Another teenager was in drug detox, and he couldn't tolerate the high protein foods (so he just skipped the beans & fake meat products). The ship crew people thought the whole vegan approach was bizarre. A bunch of rich tourists who chose to eat poor people's food.

Dr. McDougall has a whole series of books available. The best cookbooks are "The New McDougall Cookbook" and "The McDougall Quick & Easy Cookbook". Since the McDougalls grew up in Michigan, the style is most familiar to people from that area. He also has a relatively new book (as in, I haven't read it) called "Dr. McDougall's Digestive Tune-Up". The diet can be challenging, but it's got to be better than a life on proton pump inhibitors.

The supplemental enzyme industry has long been accused of producing products that can't make it through stomach acid, and then can't be absorbed even if they do. The stomach acid problem is easily addressed with enteric coating. The molecule size problem is more difficult to explain, but it really doesn't seem to be a problem.

Cooking seems to be much more of a problem than stomach acid or membrane transport. Raw food advocates explain the healing aspects of raw food as being due to the presence of enzymes. In the absence of food enzymes, your digestive system has a larger job in processing food.

My dog gets raw meat as part of his diet because the breeder said that dogs fed such a diet live several years longer. Whether it's the enzymes or the lack of other destruction of the food I can't really say. I don't eat raw meat because I don't have the digestive equipment (high stomach acid & ascorbate) to destroy the pathogens.

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An update on vitamin D3. I was taking 50,000 IU of D3 per day for several months. A blood test came back with Vitamin D, 25-Hydroxy at 406 H ng/mL (reference is 32-100), which rather scared me. So I cut back to 50,000 IU per week instead. My allergies started bothering me again, which seemed to be related to the D3.

I just got back from my endocrinologist, and I'm back on 50,000 IU per day of D3. He says that he has been taking that much himself daily for the last 3 years. He has seen blood levels of 2000 H ng/mL, with perfectly normal calcium levels. While he didn't direct me to take that much, he did imply that it was a good thing to do. I guess he tries out these bleeding edge things himself before he actually prescribes them for patients.

The problem with such a high dose of D3 is that it increases the absorption of calcium. So any supplemental calcium would cause problems. As long as you only consume calcium in food, then hypercalcemia doesn't seem to occur.

Among the improvements that he's seen with vitamin D3 therapy are increased bone density, increased arterial flexibility, better glucose control, and increased free testosterone. These are just the things for which he has direct measures. High vitamin D status is also associated with a much more effective immune system. One might even predict fewer cases of flu...

Thirty years ago this guy had a worrisome level of calcium in his arteries. Twenty years ago the calcium was no longer visible. Now he's got the arterial flexibility of an infant. Maybe in a few decades there will be studies that demonstrate what he obviously already knows. Meantime I'm taking whatever he's taking...

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For no other reason than it seems like it would be interesting to a pharmaceutical type, here's a link to a chart on the "causes of aging": http://www.legendarypharma.com/chartbg.html . Now if I just had a large enough monitor to see it all at once... Next time I see him, I'll have to ask John Furber what he thinks of Deprenyl. I'm sure he has a well developed opinion of it. He has been reporting on Clioquinol for the treatment of Alzheimer's.