Category: health

Xylitol Research

Seth Roberts7 Comments

After learning about the dramatic effects of xylitol on lichen planus, I looked around for a good summary of xylitol research and found this:

Xylitol and other natural sweeteners were tested extensively in Finland as potential replacements for sugar during the early 1970’s. A series of over 20 research reports (edited by Professors Arje Scheinin and Kauko Makinen) was published together in Acta Odontologica Scandinavica, Supplement 70, in 1975. These investigations became known collectively as the “Turku Sugar Studies.”

Sweeteners were tested for their effects on dental and general health. The main trials involved the long-term substitution of either fructose or xylitol for sucrose (ordinary table sugar). This involved a huge cooperative effort between scientists and food producers. Separate fructose and xylitol versions of common food items were provided for the volunteers.

These trials (including blood and urine tests) established the safety of relatively large amounts of xylitol (often 70 grams per day or more) consumed regularly over a period of years. The xylitol group reported that xylitol-sweetened foods were comparable to the familiar sugar flavors.

The control group who consumed normal amounts of sugar continued to experience tooth decay, as would be expected. The fructose group also continued to have tooth decay, although progression appeared to be somewhat slower.

The results of a xylitol diet on oral health were dramatic. New tooth decay was practically eliminated. A therapeutic remineralizing effect was noted where the decay process was reversed. A parallel study achieved similar 90% reduction in tooth decay simply by adding a small amount of xylitol, delivered in chewing gum after meals) to a normal (regular sugar) diet.

Here are some of the major findings of the Turku Sugar Studies:

  • Xylitol can be incorporated into a wide variety of food items to directly replace sugar. More than 100 different products were made with xylitol.
  • The taste and overall quality of the xylitol products was comparable, and in some cases superior, to regular sugar items.
  • Substantial amounts of xylitol can be consumed regularly with no adverse health effects.
  • No potentially damaging bacterial adaptations to xylitol occurred.

Especially early on, there were some instances of gastrointestinal discomfort and even osmotic diarrhea in the xylitol group. After a short period of adaptation (few weeks), these symptoms diminished and became no more frequent than in the other groups. A few individuals were more sensitive than the rest of the group. Even exceptionally high intakes of xylitol of over 200 grams in a day did not necessarily cause any problems. Discomfort was more likely to occur with liquid ingestion on an empty stomach.

It is not necessary to eliminate sugar to dramatically reduce tooth decay. Similar results can be obtained simply by adding a small amount of xylitol to a “normal” diet. Xylitol can provide a natural “antidote” for the damaging dental effects of ordinary sugar. A little more than a teaspoon of xylitol per day can provide amazing protection against tooth decay, when used in chewing gum after meals and snacks.

The last point is especially interesting. Xylitol doesn’t work because you eat less sugar. It works, apparently, because it stops/prevents something that sugar starts, perhaps adhesion of certain bacteria to teeth and gums.

Here (video) is coverage of xylitol research in American mainstream media (in this case, ABC News). The useful information (about a xylitol study) is diluted by unhelpful information about xylitol in fruit and brushing and flossing.

Introduction to Inside Tracker

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Inside Tracker sells blood panels — for example, 20 things measured in your blood (e.g., hemoglobin, magnesium, Vitamin D). It was founded in 2009 in Boston, Mass., by Gil Blander, a biology Ph.D., and two other people. They started offering the service in late 2011. Their main customers are athletes (20% professional, 30% amateur) and many Quantified Selfer’s (20%). I recently interviewed Dr. Blander:

What have you learned from the data you’ve collected?

Around 60% of the population has low Vitamin D.[What’s low Vitamin D?] As of today, if you look at the ranges of the diagnostic companies, they are saying that everything below 30 ng/ml is low Vitamin D. We are giving you your optimal zone based on age, gender, athletic activity and ethnicity. We also compare you to your peers.

What else?

More than 50% have high cholesterol (total and LDL). With folic acid, about 40% of the population have high folic acid. This is because of supplementation.

High creatine kinase (CK) is another common problem. When you exercise, some of the muscle cells break down and this protein leaks into the blood. An example is a marathon runner. Before the marathon it’s below 200 U/L. After the run it can be as high as 10,000 U/L. If you over exercise the level might be above 1000, and you have a much higher chance of getting injured. A bit more than 30% of our customers have high CK. It has a half life of 5 days. Your steady state CK should be less than 1000. Some supplementation can lower it, such CoQ10 and others.

Another marker we measure is hemoglobin. It measures the amount of iron in your blood cells. If you have low hemoglobin you compromise your athletic ability and decision making. About 30% of our customers have low hemoglobin. Another marker related to Iron is ferritin (protein that binds to free Iron), If you have low ferritin, take iron supplementation or eat iron rich food, that will increase both ferritin and hemoglobin. If you have normal ferritin and low hemoglobin, there are limited interventions to help you increase your hemoglobin, you may need to go to a high altitude place. Women below 50 tend to have low ferritin. The percentage is 10% among non-athletes, jumping to 30% among athletes. We also find it in athletic males. When you exercise, you have microbleeding from your gut. Among male athletes, 10-12% have low ferritin. The major concern is that they don’t know this.

What have you learned about how to increase Vitamin D?

When we started, we looked at the literature, it said you should take 400-800 IU/day. We found that even if you just take 1000 IU/day you will just maintain the level you already have. To increase it you need to consume at least 2000 IU/day. I started by testing myself. I found I had pretty low Vitamin D. At first I tried just food — fatty fish and mushrooms. I ate fish twice/day and a lot of mushrooms for a couple of months. Then I measured it again. It hadn’t changed. Then I took 1000 IU/day. I tested my blood again and it still hadn’t gone up. Then I went to 4000 IU/day and this brought me to the optimal level. And we saw the same with some of our customers.

Testosterone is a very interesting hormone. It’s hard to measure. When you overexercise, it’s low, because of the stress. It’s strongly influenced by amount of sleep, if you don’t sleep well, it will go down. We found if you look at the average consumer, around 10% have low testosterone, and none of them knew it. It’s an expensive test. Insurance companies won’t pay for it unless there is a reason.[What’s low testosterone?] The adult male: below 348 ng/dl. Women have about 20 times less testosterone. Only a tiny percentage of women, about 1%, have low testosterone.

TO GET 10% OFF ON INSIDE TRACKING TESTS, USE THIS CODE: SHANGRILA10

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Celiac Experts Make Less Than Zero Sense

Seth Roberts15 Comments

In the 1960s, Edmund Wilson reviewed Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Wilson barely knew Russian and his review was a travesty. Everything was wrong. Nabokov wondered if it had been written that way to make sense when reflected in a mirror.

I thought of this when I read recent remarks by “celiac experts” in the New York Times. The article, about gluten sensitivity, includes an example of a woman who tried a gluten-free diet:

Kristen Golden Testa could be one of the gluten-sensitive. Although she does not have celiac, she adopted a gluten-free diet last year. She says she has lost weight and her allergies have gone away. “It’s just so marked,” said Ms. Golden Testa, who is health program director in California for the Children’s Partnership, a national nonprofit advocacy group. She did not consult a doctor before making the change, and she also does not know [= is unsure] whether avoiding gluten has helped at all. “This is my speculation,” she said. She also gave up sugar at the same time and made an effort to eat more vegetables and nuts.

Fine. The article goes on to quote several “celiac experts” (all medical doctors) who say deeply bizarre things.

“[A gluten-free diet] is not a healthier diet for those who don’t need it,” Dr. Guandalini [medical director of the University of Chicago’s Celiac Disease Center] said. These people “are following a fad, essentially.” He added, “And that’s my biased opinion.”

Where Testa provides a concrete example of health improvement and refrains from making too much of it, Dr. Guandalini does the opposite (provides no examples, makes extreme claims).

Later, the article says this:

Celiac experts urge people to not do what Ms. Golden Testa did — self-diagnose. Should they actually have celiac, tests to diagnose it become unreliable if one is not eating gluten. They also recommend visiting a doctor before starting on a gluten-free diet.

As someone put it in an email to me, “Don’t follow the example of the person who improved her health without expensive, invasive, inconclusive testing. If you think gluten may be a problem in your diet, you should keep eating it and pay someone to test your blood for unreliable markers and scope your gut for evidence of damage. It’s a much better idea than tracking your symptoms and trying a month without gluten, a month back on, then another month without to see if your health improves.”

Are the celiac experts trying to send a message to Edmund Wilson, who died many years ago?

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments
  • Experiments suggest flu shots reduce heart attacks and death. Huge reduction: 50%. The new report (a conference talk, not a paper) is a reanalysis of four earlier experiments. I was surprised to learn that the CDC uses heart attack outbreaks to locate flu outbreaks, implying that the new finding is not a fluke — there really is a strong connection. I already knew heart attacks are more common in the winter, which also supports a connection with flu.
  • Une histoire des haines d’écrivains by Boquel Anne and Kern Etienne. Published 2009. About literary feuds. One of my students was reading a Chinese translation.
  • Correspondences between sounds and tastes.
  • Report on fraudulent Dutch research. “The 108-page report says colleagues who worked with Stapel had not been sufficiently critical. This was not deliberate fraud but ‘academic carelessness’, the report said.” I doubt it. Based on my experience with Chandra, I believe Stapel’s colleagues had doubts but did nothing from some combination of careerism (doing something would have cost too much, for example a lot of time, and gained them nothing), ignorance (not their field), and decency (they saw no great value in ruining someone). I wonder if the report considered these other possible explanations (careerism, ignorance, decency).

Thanks to Tim Beneke.

Bacteria are Neither Good nor Bad

Seth Roberts15 Comments

Health experts call bacteria “good” and “bad”. Bad bacteria make us sick. Good bacteria help us digest food, and a few other things. Let me propose another view. Any bacteria (i.e., bacterial species) will make us sick if it becomes too numerous — so all bacteria are “bad”. All bacteria protect us against other bacteria — so all bacteria are “good”. The terms “good” and “bad” are misleading. It is like saying a person is inherently rich or poor. Anyone, given a lot of money, becomes rich. Anyone whose money is taken away becomes poor. Low bacterial diversity or reduction of diversity makes it more likely that one bacterial species can overwhelm its competitors, producing sickness. When this happens, to say that the species (e.g., H. pylori) that became numerous “caused” the sickness (e.g., ulcers) is to seriously misunderstand what happened and how to prevent it from happening. We are taught that our immune system protects us from infection. We should be taught that bacterial diversity does the same thing.

The following story, from a reader of this blog, suggested these ideas:

My wife had a lot of problems, visceral fat that wouldn’t go away being one of the most obvious symptoms. Every time I convinced her to try a ketogenic (= very low carb) diet, she would get sick. I went to NYC to see Paul Jaminet speak. He suggested that she likely had some type of gut infection or dysbiosis. Not a bad theory, as she’d undergone prophylactic antibiotic treatment to clear up an H. pylori infection. (Yes, I know, but at the time it seemed like the thing to do.)

She started putting on weight after that, which is typical.

Finally she gave VLC [very low carb] one last try. She wound up getting inflamed lymph nodes in her thighs. Our doctor was wondering if she might have bovine tuberculosis or the bubonic plague, either of which would explain her symptoms. (The nodes were inflamed, black-and-blue, and sensitive. This is a typical symptom of bovine tuberculosis, and the disease spreads from the gut to the body through the bowel. As we consume raw milk, this wasn’t a crazy theory, but there have been no recorded outbreaks in Connecticut for years and years.) All the tests he did for an infection came back negative, but her symptoms clearly suggested she had one.

Finally she went to see a new OB-GYN. His nurse/dietician reaffirmed everything I’d been telling her, and she finally decided to go fully ketogenic. Once again, she got sick, but this time she decided to tough it out. Sure enough, after many weeks she started feeling better, and more importantly, the weight started coming off, and the visceral fat started reducing.

She did a stool test, and (I haven’t seen the results yet) we were told that she had the obesigenic gut biota. So she started an intensive probiotic regimen. This helped her one negative from the ketogenic diet: constipation.

She’s thrilled with the progress she’s seeing, and her few lingering issues after going primal 2.5 years ago seem to be resolving. The constant yeast infections have abated, and she’s planning a new wardrobe, heaven help me.

There are several interesting things here: 1. A very-low-carb diet made her sick. 2. This happened after antibiotic treatment. 3. Tests for infection were negative. 4. If she waited long enough, the low-carb-induced illness abated. 5. Probiotics helped. 6. Fermented foods didn’t help. At the time of Paul Jaminet’s diagnosis, says the reader, they were already eating plenty of fermented food: “Sauerkraut, yogurt, home-made kefir, the whole drill. No effect.”

How can these observations be explained?

With some general ideas. Each bacterial species keeps similar species in check by competing for the same resources (food and location). No two species need exactly the same things but there is plenty of overlap. For example, Species 1 needs Resources A and B, Species 2 needs Resources A and C. They keep each other in check by reducing the supply of A. Suppose C = carbohydrate. By reducing C, a very-low-carb diet reduces the number of Species 2, making more A available. This allows Species 1 to greatly expand. Maybe this expansion kills off Species 2. Armed with vast amounts of A, Species 1 out-competes other competitors. Its numbers greatly increase, causing sickness.

The notion that some bacteria are good and others are bad is absurd because all are safe in small amounts and all will cause sickness in large amounts. If any one person was replicated in millions or billions of copies it would cause enormous damage, waste and disruption, no matter who it was. Suppose I was genetically replicated so that there were hundreds of millions of me. I only like a few singers, such as Michelle Shocked and Cat Power. There would be a huge undersupply of records by those singers and a huge oversupply of other music. The music industry would collapse. I am a certain size. There would be a huge shortage of clothes of my size and a huge oversupply of clothing of other sizes.

The bacterial ecosystem is not self-correcting. It is the opposite: disruptions tend to spread. Suppose you eat too little carbohydrate. This reduces Species 2 (which needs A and C = carbohydrate). This means there is more Resource A for Species 1 (which needs Resources A and B). Species 1 increases. By virtue of increased numbers, it pushes down its competitors for Resource B. These weakened competitors, which also need D, E, and F, begin to lose battles for those resources against other bacteria that need D, E, and F. They decline in number. No longer with substantial competition for what it needs (A and B), Species 1 multiplies unchecked and causes damage until A and B run out. (Which may be why the reader’s wife, after a long illness, got better.) Fever fights infection because bacteria that grow best at one temperature (normal body temperature) do less well against competitors at a higher temperature.

The tests for infection failed to come up positive because they looked for too few bacteria. According to this view, there are thousands of bacteria inside us that can run out of control. You can test for only a tiny fraction of them. Fermented foods failed to help because they did not provide enough diversity.

We have a huge preference for diversity in what we eat. We much prefer a meal with three foods than one food, for example. The usual view is that this preference evolved because we need many nutrients (e.g., many vitamins) to be healthy. Now I wonder. Maybe the protective effect of bacterial diversity was the main reason. If so, taking a multi-vitamin pill is not going do much good, which is what research suggests.

These ideas are obviously supported by evidence that fermented foods improve health and antibiotics harm health, which I’ve covered many times. They are also supported by two recent studies with a different emphasis. One of them found that teenagers who had more biodiversity near home had more bacterial diversity on their skin. (Maybe there are other important drivers of diversity besides fermented foods.) The other found that people with sinusitis had less bacterial diversity in their nose than people without sinusitis and that increasing diversity tended to prevent sinusitis. Someday the 2005 Nobel Prize for “showing” that ulcers are “caused” by H. pylori will seem as medieval as the 1949 Nobel Prize for prefrontal lobotomies.

The practical consequences of this view include: 1. Antibiotics should be a very last resort. When given, they should be followed by treatments that restore bacterial diversity. The reader’s story suggests restoration of diversity may not be easy. Plainly diversity should be tracked after antibiotics. 2. Epidemiological studies should not just ask how did the germs spread? They should also ask why were they allowed to do harm? Why didn’t natural defenses – the immune system and other bacteria – suppress them to harmless levels? To the epidemiological neglect of immune function we can add neglect of this line of defense. 3. There should be convenient ways to measure one’s bacterial diversity so each of us can learn where we are and what makes it go up and down. 4. Researchers should study what makes bacterial diversity go up and down. Here is a recent study about this: old people living in an old-age home, who ate a restricted diet, had less bacterial diversity than people the same age who lived independently and ate more varied foods.. 5. Researchers should learn the correlates of high and low diversity. Take a group of people, measure their bacterial diversity, track their health for six months.

 

 

 

How Patrick Vlaskovits Discovered His Migraines Were Due to Wheat

Seth Roberts8 Comments

My personal science taught me that (a) there are useful things health experts don’t know (b) that the rest of us can discover. I am curious how these discoveries are made. When Patrick Vlaskovits commented

I suffered migraines my whole life until my 30s. I am prescribed meds to help me manage the pain. These meds are better than nothing. Then I quit eating grain-based products, no migraines ever.

I asked him how he discovered the connection. He replied:

This was in years pre-Paleo — I played with Atkins and one day my wife said to me: “You haven’t had a migraine for at least a month now.” And it hit me, holy shit, I hadn’t.

Until then, my whole life even as a small child, I would get insane mind-melting-migraines seemingly at random —- and when they hit, my face would twitch and aside from the pain, I would experience hyper-light-and-sound-sensitivity. My response would be to sit the shower in the dark for hours on end and then crawl into bed to fall asleep and hopefully wake up sans headache. This was from grade-school through post-grad-school.

What no one had seen until then was the lag time between my digesting some wheat product and onset of migraine — usually about a day. Nowadays, I tend to eat wheat-free (and disallow it from my toddler’s diet) but I will indulge in a NYC pizza or something similar if traveling — I reckon that about 10% of those cheat instances I am hit with an earthshattering migraine.

BTW I mentioned this a few years ago to Ryan Holiday, and he mentioned it to his girlfriend — a few weeks ago I saw both of them in NYC, and she has a virtually identical story. Crazy.

He added later:

[After avoiding wheat] my nighttime tooth grinding also stopped as did my insomnia [“being tired but unable to fall asleep, would go to bed at 11pm, my mind would race for hours on end in a state of neither sleep nor being awake, I would finally fall asleep around 5 am, and have to get up at 730 am to go work, and be exhausted all day —- this went on for years”] — generally, I feel 1000x better not eating wheat –

I have been tested with a skin-prick test and was told that that my results came back normal, not sensitive to anything.

I am unsure of what it is in wheat that I react to – an obvious culprit could be gluten in modern wheat, could also be mycotoxins (per Dave Asprey’s thinking), could perhaps be pesticide residue; I simply don’t know. — however, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. A simple risk less change resulted in orders of magnitude change for the better.

Last thing, another family friend has a 10 year old who has migraines, I recounted my story to them and early evidence looks like health improvement via avoidance of wheat.

How well-known is this connection? A few articles mention it: this one, for example. Here is a whole paper — in 1979 — about how food causes migraines:

The commonest foods causing [migraines] were wheat (78%), orange (65%), eggs (45%), tea and coffee (40% each), chocolate and milk (37%) each), beef (35%), and corn, cane sugar, and yeast (33% each).

Thirty years later, this extremely useful information has yet to reach most migraine doctors, apparently. An even older article (1976) said:

The 10 chief offenders among food allergens are cow’s milk, chocolate and cola (the kola nut family), corn, eggs, the pea family (chiefly peanut, which is not a nut), citrus fruits, tomato, wheat and other small grains, cinnamon and artificial food colors. Food allergy results in a remarkable variety of clinical syndromes.

The Mayo Clinic website says that migraines are sometimes caused by food but fails to say that if you suffer from migraines you should try an elimination diet to look for possible causes.

Coconut Oil/Foot Fungus Update

Seth Roberts19 Comments

A month ago I wrote about Chuck Currie’s discovery that coconut oil cured his foot fungus and seems to be curing his toenail fungus. He put coconut oil on his foot, put it in a plastic bag, and put a sock on it. Then he could walk around or whatever — vastly more convenient than the soaking remedies (e.g., soak your feet in vinegar) many people recommend (which I tried) and incomparably better than the foot fungus and toenail fungus remedies you find in a drugstore (which I tried many times).

For some strange reason I had foot fungus on one foot but not the other — for ten years. I have been doing Chuck’s remedy for a month. Within a few days it was clear it worked. Now the “good” and “bad” foot are indistinguishable. I am writing this post because I discovered that the plastic bag is unnecessary, making it even more convenient. I put the coconut oil on my feet and then put on socks. It still works. Nothing bad happens to the socks, which I think are a cotton/polyester blend.

I’ve been using Whole Foods house brand (“365″) food grade (‘expeller pressed virgin organic”) coconut oil. A 16-oz jar cost about $8. Maybe it will last 4 months with daily application. (For toenail fungus. My foot fungus is completely gone.) All other commercial foot fungus remedies should quietly disappear…

Coconut Oil Cures Foot Fungus

Seth Roberts12 Comments

About ten years ago my doctor pointed to a thin white line on my foot: That’s fungus, he said. Huh. He prescribed an antifungal medicine, previously available only by prescription, that had recently become over-the-counter (OTC). I tried several OTC remedies from my drugstore. None worked. According to the directions, they were to be applied twice per day. My doctor said the reason for the failure was that I hadn’t precisely followed the directions. This reminded me of a doctor who said that fat people know what to do about being fat (eat less) and simply fail to do it.

Years later I discovered that socks matter. With a much larger number of socks, my foot fungus got much better. Apparently the fungus died if it didn’t come in contact with my foot within a week or so. (I had it only on one foot.) With a large number of socks, my foot fungus never got really bad. But it did not entirely go away.

I discovered that tea tree oil works. When my foot fungus got noticeable I would put on some tea tree oil and it would get better.

In January I went back to Berkeley for a month. Without doing anything, my foot fungus seemed to vanish. Apparently being away from my apartment for 4 months was enough to get rid of the fungus. When I returned to Beijing in February, the fungus returned within a day or two. The shape of a particularly bad spot matched exactly where a plastic sandal touched the upper part of my foot. A sandal I’d worn in the shower to prevent foot fungus.

All this is to show how little I know about foot fungus in spite of having it for years.

In November (3 months ago) a reader of this blog named Chuck Currie wrote me:

Sometime in the spring I noticed that I was getting what looked like a rash around the large toe of my right foot. It began spreading, first under and between my toes and then across the top and then under my foot. There was a definite line with little bumps that showed it progression. And, it itched really bad – like bad athlete’s foot.

In July I was prescribed Nystatin and Triamcinolone Acetonide cream. [I tried this — Seth] I was told to put it on twice a day, which I did. Because I wear flip flops all summer, I didn’t need to cover it. The cream did not work at all. It actually seemed to make it worse.

I have been interested in coconut oil since going paleo, even though I can’t eat it, or coconut milk – they really upset my stomach. I was reading an article on coconut oil that mentioned its anti-fungal properties and I remembered reading this before. So I thought I would give it a try on my foot.

After showering, I cover my foot with coconut oil, place a plastic bag over my foot (the kind you put produce in) to keep it from being wiped off and then place a sock over the bag to hold it on. I leave it on for two or three hours and then take everything off and lightly wipe my foot with a paper towel and go to bed.

I do this three or four nights a week and have been doing it for three months. I knew immediately that it was doing something. My foot became very warm, almost like it was on fire, the first time I did this. It didn’t have this effect the second time. My fungus/rash started to retreat. My skin would dry out and flake off between sessions, like I was using an exfoliate.

Then I noticed that my [toenail fungus] started to clear up and I could see the nail growing from the cuticle on my big toe was clear, not yellow and thick. By now the line has progressed two thirds of the way up my toe. At this rate, it should be completely clear in another couple of months.

I still get small flare ups of the rash/fungus on my foot, but it has almost completely cleared up. You can still see where it had been. The skin is dryer and lighter in color than the rest of the foot.

I think if I had done this every night the progress would have been faster. I’m now starting to put a small amount of coconut oil on the top of my foot in the morning and letting it air out for a while before putting on my socks and shoes. When the fungus was on the bottom of my foot this was not possible, but now that it only seems to be on the top, this works and I think this will speed up the process. The best thing is there are no bad effects. I use extra virgin, cold pressed, unprocessed coconut oil. My understanding is that heat processed coconut oil does not have the same anti-fungal properties.

Pretty convincing, huh? In Berkeley I bought Whole Foods house brand coconut oil (cold-pressed). Edible was cheaper than non-edible. In Beijing, after my foot fungus had gotten quite noticeable, I started to use it. At bedtime, I rub it all over my foot, put my foot in a thin plastic bag, and put on a sock. When I get up, I take off the sock and the plastic bag.

After doing this once, my foot was much better. After five applications, I couldn’t detect any fungus. Application is pleasant (without trying, I don’t miss a night) and, as Chuck says, obviously safe — I could eat what I am spreading on my foot. It costs a few dollars/month. Tea tree oil works, too, but it wasn’t easy to spread all over my foot, wasn’t pleasant to apply, wasn’t edible, and cost $15/tiny bottle. On the internet you can find many home remedies, such as soaking your feet in apple cider vinegar. Apparently they work. This is much easier.

If you try this, please tell me your experience, whether it works or not.

More Neglect of the Immune System: Bioterrorism Fear

Seth Roberts13 Comments

At UC Berkeley several years ago, I learned about an introductory epidemiology class. I knew the professor. I phoned him. “Are you going to discuss factors that make the immune system work better or worse?” I asked. “No,” he said. I wasn’t surprised. In my experience, epidemiologists completely ignore this question. As if the immune system had never been discovered. It sounds absurd, but there it is.

Epidemiologists aren’t the only ones. All well-publicized attempts to “battle” or “combat” or “defeat” or “beat” viruses, such as cold or flu viruses, neglect this possibility, in my experience. Whole books on the subject do not mention the immune system. The latest example of the blindness is an article by Michael Specter at the New Yorker website about fear caused by discovery of how to make a bird flu virus spread more easily. Maybe the knowledge could be used by terrorists. Specter writes as if the immune system doesn’t exist. He doesn’t mention it and ignores the possibility of defending against new viruses by improving immune function. For example, he writes:

Instead of focussing so heavily on human terrorists, we ought to take this opportunity to defeat a natural pathogen—one we can now recognize and manipulate with all the sophistication of molecular biology.

You don’t need molecular biology to study immune function. He also writes:

There are three conditions necessary for a flu outbreak to become a deadly pandemic, like the one in in 1918 that killed between fifty and a hundred million people. Those conditions rarely converge. First, a new virus—one that has never before infected humans and to which nobody would have protective antibodies—must emerge from the animal reservoirs where they originate. That virus has to make people sick. (The vast majority do not.) Finally, it must be able to spread rapidly and efficiently—through a cough, a handshake, or a kiss.

He writes as if whether a virus makes people sick and spreads rapidly depends solely on the virus. This is false: How well your immune system is working makes a big difference. If a virus is fought off quickly, you won’t notice — you won’t “get sick”. Because you are infected more briefly, you will spread it less. (Possibly much much less. If a virus doubles in number in 4 hours, then two fewer days of infection equals a huge reduction in the number of virus particles inside you while you are contagious.)

In this blindness, I’m sure Specter reflects the blindness of the scientists he talks to. They simply talk and think about what they do, which is molecular biology.

I became aware of the power of improving the immune system when I improved my sleep and stopped getting colds. More recently, I have become sure that eating fermented foods improves immune function. I suspect that a lot of traditional medicine, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, is effective because it improves immune function. (For example, the use of bee venom to treat arthritis.) Everyone knows at an answer-test-question level that the immune system exists. A lot has been learned about how it works. But the vast majority of doctors and other health experts (and journalists) ignore this knowledge in practice.