slurred speech

The Exquisite Simplicity of Health and Illness: Mitochondria and Energy

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For years I have struggled to get people to understand the relative simplicity of what causes us to get sick. Our medical model implies that each disease has a specific cause, and therefore, has a specific treatment. If you look seriously at what makes us tick, there are several obvious factors involved. Yes, we are provided with a “blueprint”, given in code called DNA, by our parents. Since the discovery of DNA, medical research has emphasized almost to exclusion of other factors, that genetics is the primary research area. The most amazing recent finding is that our cellular genes (the blueprint) can be manipulated by our diet and lifestyle.

Diet and Stress

Even though the great Hans Selye studied the effects of physical stress on animals, we have neglected it in relationship to human health. He said that humans were suffering from what he called the diseases of adaptation. What he meant by that was that any form of “stress” has to be met by an adaptation that requires a huge amount of energy. The brain causes the body to go into a defensive mode when we are attacked by a microorganism and it should not be surprising that it requires energy. Sometimes a severe form of stress is associated with fever that should be regarded as an automated defensive action. In fact, I knew of a patient in whom the cause of her persistent fever could not be determined by standard laboratory methods. It was written off as “psychosomatic”, because of personality factors.

The idea, however, seems to me to be a reduction to absurdity based on collective ignorance of the underlying mechanism. The symptoms that we develop are caused by all the actions that make up the defensive mode and we call that the disease. For example, fever is part of the defense because it renders the attacking organism less efficient. Hence, the attacking organism is a “stressor”. Perhaps prolonged mental stress can produce fever in a metabolically abnormal brain because of causative misinterpretation by the brain.

It has long been time-honored that we bring the temperature down artificially as part of the treatment for infection, thus losing an important part of the defense. It wasn’t the flu virus that caused Reye’s syndrome, a disease that caused the death of many children. It was the aspirin given by the mothers to bring their child’s temperature down.

Energy Deficiency and Mitochondria

When you read a telegram giving you bad news, when you ride a bicycle, when you run cross country or shovel snow, we take it for granted that the energy will be forthcoming, that is if we think about it at all. Energy deficiency in the heart muscle could easily explain the “drop-dead” phenomenon occasionally experienced by elderly people in the winter when shoveling snow, usually written off as a heart attack from coronary disease that could easily be part of the event. Could that death have been prevented by analyzing the state of nutrition for that individual?

Another great discovery is that we have a separate set of genes that preside over the functions of our mitochondria. These are the organelles within each of our cells that produce the energy that enables us to function. Sick mitochondria produce sick people, because energy consumed must be met by energy synthesized. We now know that mitochondria have their own genes completely separate from the “blueprint” genes. Mitochondrial genes are passed to the children by the mother. When damaged mitochondrial genes are passed on to children, it becomes a form of maternal inheritance. An obvious question is whether the damage to genes can be caused in adult life from malnutrition or whether the damaged genes passed on to the children are invariably inherited from grandma.

Energy synthesis depends upon an exquisitely complicated set of nutrients that are derived from what we eat, so nutrition becomes the third factor. It is therefore very likely that an element of each of these factors is always involved. Yes, it is true that a genetic mistake may be the primary cause, but a lot of genetic mistakes are really risk factors that begin to produce a given disease in relationship to “stress” and “nutrition”, both of which always play a part.

We now know that the induction of the first symptoms of beriberi, a well-known vitamin deficiency disease that has dogged mankind for centuries, can be fully initiated by sunlight exposure in a person with marginal deficiency. There may be mild symptoms attributed to other “more acceptable” causes or even no symptoms of vitamin deficiency prior to sunlight exposure. In the early investigation of beriberi, the appearance of symptoms in many individuals at the same time misled the investigators who concluded that it was due to a mysterious infection. We now have reason to believe that ultraviolet light imposes a “stress” in an individual whose metabolism is marginal, thus initiating the true underlying cause.

Healing Comes Naturally If We Let It

The human body, as we all recognize, is beautifully designed and healing is a natural phenomenon built into our system. The body knows exactly what to do, but like stress factors, healing requires energy. So, it seems to make absolute sense that we cannot possibly produce healing by the use of compounds that are completely foreign to our cellular system. Shouldn’t we be using methods that assist the healing process by stimulating mitochondria to produce the necessary energy? Surely, the only possible assistance must be through the use of nutrients. At present, we know that there are well over 40 separate non-caloric nutrients that we must get from our food to maintain health and this may not be a full complement.

Feeding the Body Fuel to Heal: Of Vitamins and Minerals

I give this as a forerunner to news that I came across quite recently. I am reasonably sure that it will be known by people who love American sports. Everyone knows the name of Bernie Kosar, the great quarterback of the Cleveland Browns back in the good old days. Bernie understood the highs and lows of football. He had hundreds of concussions, broken bones and torn ligaments over 8 ½ seasons. In retirement he suffered pounding headaches, sleepless nights, anxiety and increased weight. Speech slurring made people think that he was drunk. Amazingly, his family didn’t believe that he had genuine symptoms and thought that he was merely trying to gain attention. The slurred speech was thought to be due to alcohol, the weight gain from overeating. After his retirement, apparently he spent some time in Florida and he learned there of a physician who was using intravenous vitamins to treat the kind of symptoms of which he complained. He tried it and immediately began to feel better. In fact he was so impressed that when he came north to live in Ohio he looked for a physician who could continue this treatment. He was directed to a doctor Pesek, founding holistic physician and CEO of Vital Health in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr.Pesek uses holistic superfoods and megadose vitamins to treat his patients. Kosar gets two or three intravenous infusions of vitamins a month. His headaches have decreased, his sleep is improved and he has lost 60 pounds in weight. This is loss of accumulated water in the tissues, a signature of  mitochondrial disease, not loss of fat. In fact he is so impressed that he is going to bring it to the notice of the NFL concussion settlement. He wishes that he had started it earlier. He says that “he knows of guys who are older and some who are younger than me and it goes south quickly”.

Healing the Brain

Because the methodology is “out of the box”, it is likely that a common explanation would be the so-called placebo effect. But that effect has to have a mechanism and perhaps the approach with nutrients actually stimulates this effect. What we know about brain injury is that the damage upsets the normal balance of metabolism. It causes a release of oxygen radicals, a phenomenon that can be likened to the production of sparks in a fire. The damage is cumulative, eventually giving rise to the kind of symptoms experienced by Kosar and also by Mohammed Ali, who went on to suffer from Parkinson’s disease. Neglect the early symptoms, almost always mistaken for psychosomatic disease, and the damage slowly accumulates, eventually becoming irreversible and untreatable. I suggest that this is represented as one of the many neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Under the present medical model, it might easily be assumed that intravenous vitamins are a specific treatment for the effects of concussion and should be reserved for that. The point is that there are many avenues to metabolic imbalance. For example, if type I diabetes was determined by a genetic effect, why do the symptoms not appear for many years?  If genes are solely responsible, diabetes should be present at birth. The answer is that other factors come into play including malnutrition and aging. In fact, in the state of genius, it might be that even the best possible diet does not provide sufficient energy, perhaps explaining the long-term illnesses of the historical figures, Mozart and Charles Darwin, both of whom suffered lifelong from symptoms that have often been regarded by historians mostly as psychosomatic.

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This article was first published on July 31, 2017.

The Red Thread and Thiamine

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There is a saying in China about a Red Thread connecting people who are destined to meet and/or help one another in a profound way no matter how far apart they may be. Our adopted daughter Abby is that red thread. Abby was abandoned and found on the day our oldest daughter, Kayla, turned thirteen. It was at this time Kayla’s health issues were becoming worse. Although we didn’t know exactly what was amiss, we knew that something was wrong. In our efforts to help Abby, our family’s health issues were brought into stark relief. It seems that all of us have suffered from longstanding thiamine insufficiency. Even though my two daughters were born worlds apart, that red thread connects us. We published Abby’s story last week in the hopes that it might help someone else. Here is Kayla’s story.

Unhealthy Beginnings for My Beautiful Daughter: IVF and Induction

Common sayings like ‘you are what you eat’ can be haunting, leading to guilt when we see our children suffer the consequences of our own ill health, especially during pregnancy. My gut was messed up and had been for a very long time before becoming pregnant. I was likely deficient in thiamine and other nutrients and perhaps that is why I struggled to get pregnant in the first place. Sometimes gut dysfunction is obvious, as with constipation or diarrhea, but more often it manifests itself in other ways. That was me. I had/have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and most likely also, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia syndrome (POTS). I did not know any of this though before pregnancy and have only recently, after hours upon hours of research, come to learn how my health impacted my daughter’s health.

Kayla was our first hard-fought-for child. We were married 10 years and had undergone numerous fertility treatments before we finally achieved a successful IVF. Looking back, I realize that I was not healthy prior to or during my pregnancy, even so it was mostly an uneventful pregnancy with little to no typical unpleasantries. I had low progesterone early on that required progesterone injections and suppositories, but after 13 weeks everything stabilized. I had a high blood pressure reading at only one routine visit in my 39th week. The doctor decided to induce. We didn’t question it at the time, but later did. At the hospital, he administered Pitocin, a synthetic oxytocin, without any nurses in the room and left.  The nurses later commented that they were surprised, since my blood pressure was back in the normal range upon admission. Pitocin is just one of my regrets. Why was my body not triggering labor? Gut dysbiosis? Maybe/possibly/probably or maybe she just wasn’t ready to come out.

A Truly Gifted Child

Kayla was an extremely bright child. She wanted to learn chess at four years old. By age 9, I stopped playing with her because she always won. She gave her math brilliant-grandfather a run for his money.  She was homeschooled through 9th grade followed by private and then public school. She was a straight ‘A’ student, participated in various athletics (swim, track, dance, horse riding, etc.) and mastered two musical instruments by the end of high school. Kayla ranked in the top 5th percentile nationally and did well in first semester of college, but little did we know how precarious her health had become. Perhaps because of her intelligence and achievements, many of her health issues and difficulties were disregarded by physicians. On the surface, she looks well. She is very high functioning, but she has been plagued with an assortment of complicated and largely unrecognized health and neurological issues since birth. During her first semester of college, a series of stressors brought her health crashing down and she is only now beginning to recover. Part of her recovery has been diet, part involves thiamine, but we are still missing some pieces, which is why we are publishing her story.

Early Childhood Symptoms and Triggers

Her early childhood was marked by early bouts of bronchitis necessitating antibiotics. She suffered croup through age 7 years and seasonal allergies through her teens for which she used Claritin regularly. Nighttime enuresis was a problem until we removed gluten from her diet when she was 12 years old. Similarly, her speech was often and seemingly randomly slurred. She received speech therapy through the school to no avail. In 2018, we removed dairy from her diet and the slurring disappeared. It appears that just as a gluten reaction triggered her nighttime enuresis, the ingestion of dairy was some sort of trigger for her slurred speech. I should note, before learning this, we experimented with probiotics, fish oils, digestive and pancreatic enzymes, and a variety of other supplements off and on for years with no noticeable or lasting changes. Her younger years were marked also by body temperature dysregulation, i.e., hot in the winter, cold in the summer. Finally, most things, not all, came easy to her. She had extreme strengths and weaknesses with her strengths often masking her weaknesses. Noticed by many of her extracurricular teachers hard things seemed easy, and easy things hard. Her brain craved complexity.

Vaccinations, Cyclic Fevers, and Green Drinks

In her preteen years, she received numerous vaccinations (required and strongly recommended) prior to our trip to China to adopt her sister. Shortly after, she began to develop worsening mood swings, anxiety, depression, brain fog and has experienced dizzy spells off and on since then.

When her menses began, she bled heavy for three straight weeks. Her doctor put her on birth control pills to stop it; again, a symptomatic treatment. She was borderline to severely anemic and often had PMS and painful periods.

During her teen years, she had repeat and unexplained fevers. She was sick with high fever/flu-like symptoms for three days every four weeks for three years. She’d get sick like clockwork! She would become weak, sleep a LOT, as if she were in a coma. Her doctor was stumped. I had been reading a lot about the use of systemic enzymes used by German doctors. The book by Karen DeFelice mentioned viruses often have a cyclical pattern. So we used high doses of ViraStop2x according to her protocol for a 3-week “holding spell” and it was gone. No more cyclical episodes.

In trying to get healthier, she began “green drinks” (spinach/fruit) 5-6x week. Six months later she was very sick: anemic again, double ear infection, abnormal EEG with heart palpitations, chest pain, and shortness of breath. The cardiologist had put her on a heart monitor for three days, but the results were normal. Perhaps oxalates? I began learning more about oxalates and we began eating less of these foods overall. I’m grasping at straws…

The Red Thread and Thiamine

In 2018, we learned about TTFD/thiamine and began taking Sulbutiamine. My younger daughter, Abby, has improved immensely. In fact, my entire family now uses thiamine and we all feel much better. Before taking thiamine, we all used to be so tired after spending a day at the beach and everyone would need to nap. Now, after supplementing with thiamine for a while, everyone still has high energy levels after these trips. Except for Kayla. Her results with thiamine have been mixed. There seems to be more at play. Perhaps she requires a higher dosage of thiamine or maybe additional nutrients are needed.

Her recent labs for CBC/CMP, thyroid, A1C, vitamin D are all normal. Manganese is low and prostaglandin F2 is elevated. There is some indication of malabsorption based on her bloodwork.  Recently, an Organic Acids Test indicated normal oxalates, low dopamine and serotonin, and extremely high ketones/fatty acids. She has had high folate levels in the past, but at present are normal. Her B12 levels at present are elevated.

In 2019, she began having occasional extremely painful periods where she would be on-the-bathroom floor curled in the fetal position until Ibuprofen kicks in. Her skin is often very pale. Her doctor is not concerned about the increasingly painful menses or the ketones/fatty acid elevations.

My frustration as a parent is that because most of my child’s bloodwork is normal, the doctors write-off her symptoms as stress-related and recommend things like yoga, meditation or saunas or some fluff. Not that these things are bad, but there is something more at work here and no one seems interested in figuring it out. I am bothered that when they do see markers of inflammation or malabsorption they ignore them or really don’t know what to make of it.

Environmental Causes Of Ill-health and Longstanding Thiamine Insufficiency

Over the course of these last years, I have come to realize how important diet and environment are to health. When the pond is poisoned, sadly the tadpoles are hit first, are hit the hardest and display the affects most noticeably. Our youngest child was hit hard. Her circumstances prior to adoption were not conducive to health and she has had many struggles to overcome those early stressors and nutrient deficiencies. Likewise, owing to my ill-health prior to and during my pregnancy and the subsequent western medical treatments, Kayla struggles too. The pond was poisoned for both of them. All lifeforms that drink from a poisoned pond will manifest problems at some point, in some way. Perhaps if we had known about thiamine when they were younger, their problems wouldn’t have manifested the way they did.

Fortunately, Kayla has always eaten healthy, and has been active and athletic throughout her life. As an adult, she experiments with the removal of foods for periods of time to see if things improve, such as grains or cow’s milk and she is cooking creatively. She has been sugar-free for over a year. She takes vitamins and minerals and Sulbutiamine. She recently switched to Lipothiamine and Allithiamine and is now slowly increasing it to see if her dizziness will abate at some point.

I would trade all of her past accolades to have her in better health. We don’t know where her road will lead. Healing is multi-dimensional and someday we hope to look back at today with those oft used words “remember when…”.

Michelangelo was nearing 90 when he said “I am still learning.”  I hope to be too.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.

This story was published first on August 31, 2020.