Daniel
Forum Replies Created
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Hey @Sheetal Ramchandani,
The brand Solary tests its supplements quite extensively (just check here if you’re interested). I think it’s a good choice!
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@Naveed Aslam I know TUDCA can help improve digestion and it would be a supplement that could have multiple benefits.
To answer your question about TUDCA related to cholesterol: The short answer is yes, research shows it can contribute to lowering cholesterol. But there is a ‘but’!
… understanding what elevates your cholesterol is key!
If your HDL is elevated because the body is using it as an antioxidant, would you like to drop HDL? Or would you like to lower free radicals?
If you like to lower LDL it would be a slightly different discussion. Cholesterol gets secreted through bile in the gut. A lot of the cholesterol is reuptaken by the gut and a part is secreted through the stool. TUDCA is a bile acid and could help promote the excretion of cholesterol through the stool. That could be beneficial as a temporary solution.
However, TUDCA might not address the reason why LDL cholesterol is elevated.
You could try it as a band-aid while you try to work on lifestyle factors that might increase your cholesterol.
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@Naveed Aslam I see the differences, but these labs are already a bit older and still miss the lab value reverse T3.
For understanding the new thyroid numbers context matters as well. At the moment of blood drawn, how were you feeling? Did you feel sick? What are your current serum iron values?
Is there more physical or emotional stress in your life than at your previous labs?
All these factors can influence your current fT3 levels. You might want to watch this movie about low T3 levels and this one about low T4 levels to dive a little deeper into other reasons why these numbers can drop.
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@Naveed Aslam the benefit of liquid supplements is that you can adjust the dosage easily. You could spread one dosage over 2 meals for example and see how you react to that.
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@Naveed Aslam that’s one of the reasons why Thyroid Balance course exists: to help you understand how the thyroid works and how to test it so you can make informed decisions. Unfortunately in most places, you will have to order labs through the websites of laboratories like Dotor’s Data and True Health Labs.
If you feel like ordering a comprehensive thyroid panel, True Health Labs has a panel here.
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Hey @Naveed Aslam,
I hope you are doing well over there! Even if your labs aren’t comprehensive, they do provide clues!
You can see on your labs that your HDL cholesterol (the “good” cholesterol as it was called for a long time – but we know it’s more complicated than that) is elevated. There are 2 common reasons for elevated HDL. One is a fast thyroid. We can rule that out in your case! Another reason why HDL cholesterol can be elevated is when the body is using HDL as an antioxidant.
This is more likely in your case.
If your body needs more antioxidants, you’re likely dealing with more of the usual production of free radicals. It doesn’t specify the type of free radicals you are dealing with, unfortunately. High HDL is in this case just like a shadow from something going on in the body. Medications, stress, leaky gut, histamine intolerance and high blood sugar can all contribute to free radical formation. But just by looking only at a shadow from a tree you can tell you that there is a tree, but it doesn’t tell you what kind of tree the shadow is from.
I hope that analogy made sense!
Vitamin D
Your vitamin D is perfect! I often recommend my clients to aim at serum levels around 50 ng/ml. The labs you shared use different units: nmol/l. 130 nmol/l is 52 ng/ml and that’s good! I don’t see reasons to adjust your vitamin D supplement. Make sure you aren’t depleted on magnesium though. You need magnesium to convert vitamin D into its final bioactive form in the kidneys.Since you are experiencing low T3 you could consider in future measuring a full thyroid panel. Bernadette explains what a full thyroid panel should look like right here.
I couldn’t find your previous cholesterol values so fast, unfortunately. Perhaps you could take a look at your previous results and compare the numbers. You’re on the right way if your HDL numbers have dropped.
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Hey @Noura Alhomsi,
Personally I’ve never used sea moss, but I could give you some tips. Sea moss contains a lot of nutrients, which is really great. Preferable you would like to have sea moss that is organically grown. A first sign that your supplement is fo better quality is that the bottle should say “Wildcrafted”.
Since good sea moss is wildcrafted, one batch might have a different nutrient composition than another batch, even if you stick to one good quality brand.
A little caution with sea moss. Sea moss is a great source of iodine, but be aware that too much iodine could impact your health as well. Too much iodine (just like iodine deficiency) can cause problems with thyroid health. If you have other sources of iodine in your diet (salts, iodine enriched products including multivitamin supplements!) you might want to reduce consumption of these products.
There might be other brands that are better, but this sea moss product from Codeage is good and is third party tested. The benefit is that it is in capsule form and you won’t need to find recipes to make your sea moss tasty!
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Hey @Sara,
I think there is some overlap to the answers to these questions in my answer to your previous post. In the handout I mentioned there, you can find a recipe for “Sole” which is a great source of electrolytes. Coconut water is also a source of electrolytes, although it does contain some natural sugars.
Daily vitamin C can be a great choice to support the immune system. You can find some recommendations in the handout as well.
Unfortunately, I can’t recommend you when it comes to IV drips in Dubai because I’m living in The Netherlands. Perhaps @Bernadette Abraham could recommend something!
I don’t know how long ago you took your antibiotics to treat Pneumonia, but it’s usual to see CRP still elevated after infections. You might be free from the infection, but your body is still recovering and here your immune system plays an important role as well. You can help the body by resolving inflammation. Here vitamin D and the Omega 3 fatty acids EPA and DHEA can play a very important role. Tumeric and ginger have also been shown to be anti-inflammatory and are great choices as well.
I usually recommend my clients keep serum vitamin D levels around 50 ng/ml. If your levels are on the lower end of the reference range you can supplement accordingly. The vitamin D handout explains how you could do this (scroll down to find the pdf).
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Hey @Sara,
I’m sorry to hear that. I hope you are recovering well!
Since you have been treated with antibiotics, your microbiome can use some love and support. You’re right! Probiotics are a good choice! Foods that contain probiotics are still the best choice I think. Foods that contain probiotics are for example kefir, kimchi, kombucha, sauerkraut and beet kvass. The B Better library contains recipes you can use to make these probiotic-rich foods yourself (just click here).
If you like to use supplements, choose a broad-spectrum probiotics formula. Supplements I recommend to my clients are for example Metagenics UltraFlora Biome Pro. A second one I could recommend is a soil-based product called Megaspore by Microbiome Labs.
Since antibiotics do kill bacteria but have a lesser impact on the yeast living in the gut, this yeast could start to overgrow. To prevent this from happening you can combine your probiotics supplement with a supplement that contains the beneficial yeast Saccharomyces Boulardii.
If you have decided to use foods: foods often already contain S. Boulardii, so you don’t have to worry about that.
Be aware that after a round of antibiotics, it can take a few months before balance is restored in the microbiome.
Immune support & coughing remedies
The B Better library also contains a handout full of tips & protocols that you could use (it’s called “B’s Medicine Cabinet Must Haves”). There is a recipe containing honey that could help if you’re still coughing for example. The handout also contains an immune boosting protocol.I hope these tips help and you’ll feel better soon.
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Hey @Bahareh Safapour and @Bernadette Abraham,
Although I have never used the product, I can give you some background information about what they write on their website.
The ingredients in ASEA Redox water are deionized water and sodium chloride. The only place I could find something about their ingredients was on the FAQ page. Although I usually try to keep my opinion out of my posts, but I don’t think this is a great sign.
ASEA Redox water contains the word “Redox”. In chemistry, a redox reaction is a reaction in which electrons move from one atom or molecule to another atom or molecule. Without going too deep into what redox reactions are, you should know they are very common. Examples are iron getting in touch with water causing rust. In fact all rusting metals are examples.
The baking soda test (to get an indication if you produce enough stomach acid), is also a redox reaction. Antioxidants, when they neutralize free radicals, are other examples of redox reactions. When we produce energy in the mitochondria a lot of redox reactions take place as well. The point is: redox reactions are a common type of chemical reactions and are everywhere.
Now let’s take a look at the ingredients: sodium chloride is simply kitchen salt. Deionized water, according to the website, is water free from ions by a method using electricity (electrolysis is the term for this). It is therefore removed from minerals that make water hard (don’t confuse this with water that is free from pollution. Microplastics, BPAs and other toxins that don’t respond to electrolysis). You can make the case that distilled water is cleaner since bacteria and viruses are also cooked out.
Sodium and Chloride ions have the potential to absorb and donate electrons, however… they are two ions that prefer to stay ionized. This is the reason why salt dissolves easily in water. For that reason, they aren’t well suited for many redox reactions.
For a redox reaction, you would like to have molecules or atoms that like to share or receive electrons. Chloride ions (which are negative because they have an electron too much) are really really fond of their extra electron and don’t like to donate them easily. Sodium ions (which have a positive charge because they lost an electron to the chloride) really like to lose one electron and won’t really accept an electron easily. They are therefore very hard to form redox reactions with.
My overall impression of the website is, that the person who wrote the text on the website, wasn’t able to clearly explain how their product works. It sounded sciency, but the explanations didn’t make things more clear to me if I’m being honest. If the ingredients are truly simply deionized water and kitchen salt, I like to have a really solid explanation before buying this product.
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Hey @Sara Almansoori,
There is no protocol to treat cancer. That doesn’t mean you can help cancer patients. For example, you can support them when they are on chemotherapy or radiation therapy. In both forms of therapy, the body deals with a lot of free radicals. The damage done by these therapies can be partly reduced by helping patients to get enough antioxidants.
You might have learned that cancer cells use more sugar as an energy source. Cancer cells burn sugar mostly anaerobic even when there is oxygen present. This is also called the Warburg effect. Anaerobic glycolysis (burning sugar without oxygen) takes place in the cytoplasm of a cell, while aerobic glycolysis (burning sugar with oxygen) happens in the mitochondria.
It is thought that the reason why cancer cells use anaerobic glycolysis is that the cell can produce faster energy (ATP to be exact) since cancer cells need a lot of energy.
Mitochondrial dysfunction might also be at play. The mitochondria for example play an important role in regulating cell death (see for example this article). If a cell lacks working mitochondria, programmed cell death could be impaired. Since all aerobic burning happens in mitochondria, anaerobic glycolysis might become the only way to produce energy.
Now to your question: does a low carb, low sugar diet help? The answer is: it depends.
One of the potential reasons for this is that not all cancers have the same adaptive metabolism, and certain cancers are affected differently by ketosis. Some cancers can shift to using ketones, while others cannot. For example, the ketogenic diet has been shown to be helpful (not as a cure, but to inhibit cell growth) in the following cancers:
Glioma cancers (cancers that start in the brain or spinal cord, such as glioblastoma – see for example this study)
Pancreatic cancer (See for example this study)
Natural sugar in these cases, still is sugar and can be used as an energy source for cancer cells.
Because not all cancers have the same adaptive metabolism and since cancer isn’t completely understood, it is hard to give some advice.
We do see uncontrolled cell growth as a disease of the body. Toxins and free radicals could for example cause damage to the mitochondria. Some cancers are influenced by imbalances in hormones (Examples are estrogen in breast cancer, and dihydrotestosterone in prostate cancer)
When people are insulin resistant they are also more at risk for developing cancer. Reversing insulin resistance can reduce free radical production and since insulin is an anabolic hormone (this means that it promotes growth factors in the body) it could influence cancer cell growth as well.
If you have for example measured fasting insulin and the lab result shows fasting insulin is elevated, a low-carb diet might reduce cell growth. In cancer survivors, reversing insulin resistance reduces the risk of developing cancer again.
Another tip I could give you:
Make sure vitamin D levels are in the optimal zone (50 ng/ml). Vitamin D can help reduce the metastasis of cancer cells.
Melatonin plays an important role in cancer as well (see this article). Besides using a melatonin supplement, focus first on good quality sleep. Melatonin is also produced in the mitochondria under the influence of near-infrared radiation. Exposure to sunlight during the daytime can therefore be helpful for mitochondrial melatonin production as well.
I hope this answers a few of your questions!
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Hey @Lana Zambarakji,
Most people have small amounts of H. Pylori in their stomachs. This is nothing to worry about! In healthy individuals, the body controls these small amounts of H. Pylori.
Although people can get alarmed by the H. Pylori section of the GI Maps, these amounts are quite common and are no reason to worry.
Stress is something you could work on with your friend. Even when all nutrients are available to produce healthy white blood cells, stress can suppress immune system function.
Since your friend had antibiotics, it’s usually recommended to use broad-spectrum probiotics 6-9 months afterwards to support the diversity in the microbiome. Antibiotics kill bacteria and other pathogens but don’t affect yeast. To prevent yeast from overgrowing in the gut, I often recommend my clients to supplement with the beneficial yeast S. Boulardii to prevent opportunistic yeast species from overgrowing.
A nice product that contains S Boulardii with a blend of probiotics is Ther-Biotic ABx from Klaire Labs.
Besides the B vitamins and vitamin D, zinc and vitamin A are also important nutrients for the immune system.
I hope this helps!
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Hey @Lana Zambarakji,
Could you help us explain what symptoms you are currently experiencing? If you’re using medications (or supplements), let us know as well!
Could you also describe your current diet? For example:
How much of your food is homemade? How much is take-out food
How many grams of non-starchy vegetables do you eat daily? An estimation is just fine.
Are you on a plant-based diet?
Streptococcus spp.
Many strains of Streptococcus are non-pathogenic and occur as commensal flora on the skin, the mouth, the upper respiratory tract, urogenital, and gastrointestinal tracts. Some strains can however cause some problems.
Mild infections could cause a variety of symptoms, depending on the place where the overgrowth is. Examples of mild symptoms can be:
Sores and blisters that form near your mouth and nose or on your arms and legs.
Pain and discomfort in your throat.
Cellulitis
Severe infections however need immediate medical attention. An infection that causes a rash, sore throat and a high fever for example.
Secretory IgA
Your IgA is on the lower end as well. This makes me curious about your serum vitamin D levels. Supporting your immune system with the right nutrients might help. These nutrients include vitamin D, vitamin B12, folate, zinc and vitamin A.
Other common reasons why Secretory IgA can be low are:
Food allergies
Stress
and since secretory IgA is mostly produced in the intestines, damage in the gut lining could also be a reason for low secretory IgA
Balancing the immune system can help you to lower the Streptococcus spp and balance the microbiome.
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Let us know if you need some clarification!
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@Sara Almansoori Did the video, including the text and links below give you some answers you were looking for?
