Friday, February 22, 2013

KDM and the WPI made an "important discovery" about ME/CFS?

KDM made an "important discovery" about ME/CFS? Together with his buddy Vincent from the WPI?

This time, it is not contamination with mouse retroviruses. This time it is supposed autoimmunity caused by human endogenous retroviruses (HERV).

Yeah, right.

And the jokers at QuacksSinking PhoenixRising treat KDM as if he is the equivalent of Ignaz Semmelweis and Robert Koch combined. KDM is a quack, and nothing but a quack, made by God himself on the eight day to take good money from unsuspecting ME/CFS patients, and trading it for pieces of papers printed with supposed but worthless test-results.

Mark my word: The next thing they'll do is try to sell expensive and useless "HERV" tests to patients – to "help" them, you know. And after a year or two, no other lab will be able to replicate their results, and the WPI will cry "foul play" and "conspiracy against ME/CFS patients", and they will be loved by the ME/CFS fringe.

I must admit: After Mikovits was kicked out from by the WPI, I had some naive hope that  the WPI and Vincent Lombardi might turn a corner to the better – oh boy was I wrong.

Working with KDM? The WPI might as well try to channel the ghost of Karol Józef Wojtyła – this would be equally useless for ME/CFS patients, but would offer a higher entertainment value. So I think you can judge someone by the company he keeps.

They say that one rotten apple spoils a barrel full of good ones – I wonder, was there ever a good one at the WPI?

Mind you, the KDM connenction – via Redlabs or what's it called – goes back to the beginnings of the WPI, as far as I know.

I'm naive, I know.

I wonder why Mikovits didn't fit in? I mean, she was the perfect fit for this den of quacks. Perfect.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

On Nutrition: Trans Fatty Acids

I'm starting a series "On Nutrition" to gather some basic health information regarding foodstuff – be warned, it will be based on evolutionary principles, the Paleo Diet and hopefully quite heretic.

First of all I want to collect what foodstuff can be involved in disease, and should therefore be avoided on a precautionary basis.

What is it and where can I find it?
Trans Fatty Acids are a type of fatty acids (of simply known as "fat"). The technical name typically used is "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil"*.

Typically Trans Fatty Acids are found in Margarine (or "Vegetable Shortening") produced from seed oils ("vegetable oils").

Unlike most seed oils, which are an oil at room temperature, Trans Fatty Acids are an solid fat, and can be used like butter.

Furthermore, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is used as an ingredient in some industrially produced foods (AKA "crap in a box").

Novel food? Industrial!
Trans Fatty Acids can be found in small quantities in naturally occurring foods. These levels are however low.

Only the industrial production made it possible to produce large amounts of seed oil and the hydrogenation of seed oils. Only since about 100 years is it possible to consume large amounts of Trans Fatty Acids. It was sold as an cheap replacement for Lard and Butter, and was being branded as "healthy" already back then.

It is chemically different enough from e.g. animal fats that it can cause disease, and it has in evolutionary terms only recently been introduced into human nutrition – so it is unlikely that we are evolutionary adopted to eating Trans Fatty Acids in any substantial amounts we can encounter with products like margarine.

Pathogenic pathways?
As the Trans Fatty Acids are close relatives of Omega-6 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids (n-6 PUFAs), they have the potential to interfere with n-6 metabolism in the human body. Especially the potential to be metabolize into substances that are close relatives of Series-2 Prostaglandines, but might have functional differences, has the potential to cause disease – especially considering the role of prostaglandines in inflammation.

Furthermore some of the health problems caused by the overconsumption of n-6 PUFAs might apply to Trans Fatty Acids as well, as they are related and chemically similar.

Self-Test?
If you regularly consume margarine, you might want to try to substitute it for at least a couple of weeks with Ghee ("Clarified Butter") or Coconut Oil ("Palm Oil") to see if it has influence on your health.

I never consumed large amounts of margarine, so I don't have any personal experience.

Verdict: AVOID
The role of Trans Fatty Acids in disease are more and more being realized. Personally I think the evidence is already clear enough, and I would not wait until the evidence gets more clear to stop ASAP the consumption of Trans Fatty Acids.

The low levels of Trans Fatty Acids in naturally occurring foods should be OK though – the dose makes the poison in this case.

--

* "Fully hydrogenated vegetable oils" are by the way simple (and healthy) saturated fats.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Will "THE" cause of ME/CFS ever be found?

Whenever I read someone writing that they are looking for "the" one cause of ME/CFS, or that even "the" one cause of ME/CFS might have been pinned down, I know that the person writing has no clue about ME/CFS.

If you take at random two persons with ME/CFS – regardless of how strict your diagnostic criteria are – chances are high that their similar diseases are caused by different things. One person's body might be tormented by an food-induced autoimmunity, the other person's body might fail to recuperate from an infection.

So I do not think that one single cause of ME/CFS will ever be found, but instead the many different causes of ME/CFS in different people will be found – one by one.

Maybe Lipkin has a fast-track to finding the most prevalent causes of ME/CFS, but he will not find a silver-bullet to solve ME/CFS, once and for all.

Giving idle talk about "THE" cause of ME/CFS (and presenting it like a silver bullet) is not giving hope, it is spreading BS.

Someone giving the impression that there might be one single cause of ME/CFS is a either a charlatan, a quack or a idiotic know-nothing bullshitter.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Is POTS / OI / NMH another form of Deyhdration?

Dr. Briffa on dehydration:
I read a review paper recently about the assessment of dehydration. The authors conclude that we don’t have very good standardised tests for dehydration, but a reasonable test is to measure heart rate when sitting, and then again immediately on standing. During dehydration the blood volume tends to be lower and blood pressure too.

On standing, there is a tendency for blood to ‘pool’ in the lower body, causing blood pressure to drop further, which may induce a reflex increase in heart rate. If the pulse rate increases by 20 beats per minute or more on standing, this is generally taken as a sign of dehydration. However, as the authors concede, this test is not a particularly reliable way of assessing dehydration, even when blood volume is significantly depleted.

Monday, February 11, 2013

Anecdote: Paleo Diet helps for Crohn's

Robb Wolf has the details:

A couple weeks later, at home, bored and on Youtube, a video about the Paleo diet popped up and after watching this I was fascinated; For the next week I was locked to my laptop finding out all I could about it. I immediately decided to give the auto-immune protocol a try, and after a few trials and errors to discover what I could and couldn’t tolerate, virtually ALL my symptoms of Crohn’s were gone!

Let me break that down for you,

Joint pain-100%gone

Psoriasis-100%gone

Diarrhea-100% gone

Intestinal pain-100% gone
I think the note about the auto-immune protocol is important. IIRC Robb Wolf's auto-immune protocol gets rid of eggs and nightshades, among others, as I think eggs might be involved in the pathogenesis of Crohn's.

Low-dose naltrexone: Better than nothing?

Low-dose naltrexone for the treatment of fibromyalgia: Findings of a small, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, counterbalanced, crossover trial assessing daily pain levels.
Younger J, Noor N, McCue R, Mackey S.

Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, California.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE:
To determine whether low dosages (4.5 mg/day) of naltrexone reduce fibromyalgia severity as compared with the nonspecific effects of placebo.

In this replication and extension study of a previous clinical trial, we tested the impact of low-dose naltrexone on daily self-reported pain.

Secondary outcomes included general satisfaction with life, positive mood, sleep quality, and fatigue.

METHODS:
Thirty-one women with fibromyalgia participated in the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, counterbalanced, crossover study.

During the active drug phase, participants received 4.5 mg of oral naltrexone daily.

An intensive longitudinal design was used to measure daily levels of pain.

RESULTS:
When contrasting the condition end points, we observed a significantly greater reduction of baseline pain in those taking low-dose naltrexone than in those taking placebo (28.8% reduction versus 18.0% reduction; P = 0.016).

Low-dose naltrexone was also associated with improved general satisfaction with life (P = 0.045) and with improved mood (P = 0.039), but not improved fatigue or sleep.

Thirty-two percent of participants met the criteria for response (defined as a significant reduction in pain plus a significant reduction in either fatigue or sleep problems) during low-dose naltrexone therapy, as contrasted with an 11% response rate during placebo therapy (P = 0.05).

Low-dose naltrexone was rated equally tolerable as placebo, and no serious side effects were reported.

CONCLUSION:
The preliminary evidence continues to show that low-dose naltrexone has a specific and clinically beneficial impact on fibromyalgia pain.

The medication is widely available, inexpensive, safe, and well-tolerated.

Parallel-group randomized controlled trials are needed to fully determine the efficacy of the medication.
Color me unconvinced.

The results may be "significant" in the statistical sense – and then even barely, just look at the p-values and the small sample size. To me however they don't look significant in the common sense of the word.

LDN may help some patients, a bit – so I won't blame you if you do give it a try. A cure or significant help, LDN is not.

If the (small) benefits of LDN outweigh the side-effects, that can this study not answer.

Feedback!

I was just wondering: Is there anything you find helpful in this blog? If so, please leave a comment! Short one, long one, thoughtful one, quickly written one – any comment will do, raise your voice.

At the moment I'm a bit out of energy, and non-Internet things (aka "The Real Life") keep me from blogging more.

Also, my quest for health takes me a bit away from ME/CFS, both in a more broader sense (as I will try to focus more on nutrition and health, and mainly the Paleo Diet) and a more narrower sense (as I might have Behçet's, which might have been caused by dairy and eggs).

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Amazing

I would not have thought it possible: Now that Cort Johnson has left Phoenix Rising and is blogging on his own website, this has resulted in a lower quality of both his postings on his new website and lower quality postings on Phoenix Rising by the remaining fools tools bloggers.


Oh well, so much for our only hope – harhar.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Vegetable Oils, PUFAs, Omega-6? Don't eat it.

If you need any more evidence that seed oil (aka "vegetable oil") is bad for your health, here it is:
Use of dietary linoleic acid for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death: evaluation of recovered data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study and updated meta-analysis

Advice to substitute polyunsaturated fats for saturated fats is a key component of worldwide dietary guidelines for coronary heart disease risk reduction.

However, clinical benefits of the most abundant polyunsaturated fatty acid, omega 6 linoleic acid, have not been established.

In this cohort, substituting dietary linoleic acid in place of saturated fats increased the rates of death from all causes, coronary heart disease, and cardiovascular disease.

An updated meta-analysis of linoleic acid intervention trials showed no evidence of cardiovascular benefit.


These findings could have important implications for worldwide dietary advice to substitute omega 6 linoleic acid, or polyunsaturated fats in general, for saturated fats. 
To sum it up: The advise of the past decades for a "heart healthy" not only has no health benefits, it actually creates the problem it perpetuates to fight.

Don't eat vegetable oils, because vegetable oils cause disease.

Eat saturated fat, because saturated fat does not cause disease.

I know this will make most doctors unhappy, but hey: go fuck yourselves. Handing out murderous advise for decades? If people find out, there'll be a shortage of pitch-forks, I hope – one can dream, right?

(via)

[Update] Stan the Heretic an his take on the matter:

This high multiple factor seems to be confirm by the data from Table 5 indicating that for every 5% PUFA increase (in absolute energy%) the All cause mortality, the Cardiovascular disease mortality and the Coronary heart disease mortality increased by 31%, 35% and 26% respectively (relative risk factor).

This implies a proportionality factor of about 5-7. That is, for every 1% added Poly-Unsaturated Fatty Acids ( PUFA) in absolute calories % of the total, cardiovascular mortality INCREASED by 5 to 7%. This is big news!
[Update] Chris Kresser on the same topic.

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