Learning and using today's "wellness-hack" will help you to win in any health challenges you are facing, and its not obvious or well known.
The brief Introduction post sets the stage for this and the posts that followed.
If you have not done so, please do consider reading Part 2 - Mood and Part 3 - Move before reading this post.
How to be stressed out and lazy, yet remain disease free
Personally, I don't live an ideal "healthy" lifestyle, I have hardly exercised at all for 3 months, and I have been trading crypto currencies pretty heavily since October 2017 while still running a small business, which as you know is anything but calming.
I have seen big shifts in my personal wealth, and like many here, I have made a decent fortune and lost it again. Active trading is pure fear, interrupted with dopamine hits. As I write so often, stress, anxiety, agitation and tension are fear that have no outlet.
In Fear our whole biology switches over from "digest, repair, build, test-select-reject mode", towards, all out survive the next 3 seconds mode. We are ready to fight for our lives or run from the towering angry bear, except there is no Bear. (plenty of Bull n' Bearish market signals though lol)
Just a lot of mental chatter, confused body language and sub-optimal inter-personal communications. - yeah left unchecked, fear turns us into flustered, ineffective control freaks. (its not as hysterical as it sounds)
So I have had very little movement therapy and LOTS of stress. Yet I have not even had a sniffle or a sore throat, let alone a cold, flu or other virus in this whole time. While others I work ad live with, suffer from skin irritations and cold and flu symptoms, I am left un-touched. How could this be?
MACRO-PHAGE = big - eater
I want to try to skip the jargon and use as little of the bio-chemistry talk as possible. Very few Doctors and Chemists actually demonstrate ideal wellness anyway. So time spent in the books and labs, while valuable and fascinating, guarantees nothing in terms of real life performance over time. (There are some brilliant exceptions, such as Dr. Dominic D' Agostina)
A macrophage is like a PAC-MAN - its a White blood cell that travels our organ systems "engulfing" or swallowing anything that is not helping the body.
They eat up, left over building materials, viruses, or any substance that is causing a disturbance to our healthy function.
Macrophages are the Armed forces of our immune system. So what are they "armed" with?
The LEGO Model
Electrons act like the little bumps on the lego bricks of organic matter
We know that all matter is held together and apart by the electrical bonds within the chemical structure of molecules.
For any movement to occur, changes in the "charge" must happen. The cosmos is flowing, there is nothing BUT change going on. How the bumps on our lego bricks are responding to that change determines our level of functionality and enjoyment - enjoinment.
Our body is composed of Amino acids, (proteins, structure) and Fatty acids (mostly in skin and membranes), Minerals such as calcium, sodium, magnesium and potassium flow through this enabling action. These "electrolytes are like the water in your car battery. They enable the lego bricks to move and re-combine. They enable the creation of charge, the movement of electrons.
Enter Oxygen
Our lego bricks are like proteins wrapped in fat, bathed in a nourishing liquid of charged minerals. It take about 20 years to gather all the piece and put together a nice model. But its not all about gathering and sticking bricks together.
(thank you Dr. Shawn Baker for that wonderful insight)
Our food is the lego bricks, (the amino and fatty acids with minerals) of other organisms. We need to pull these models apart and modify the bricks to suit our own structure. To shift the little knobs on the bricks we need to apply charge - we need to move those electrons.
There are 2 ways we can do that. With and without Oxygen.
Oxygen is super powerful because it is electron hungry, we can use it to rip apart other molecules as it steals their electrons. It is the oxygen in water that makes metal rust, together with salt, (sodium is an electrolyte) that process accelerates rapidly.
Once we invite Oxygen into our bodies, it can also start to rip us apart - that is called oxidation and it is the primary reason for early ageing.
To calm Oxygen down, we need to give it some electrons, so that it does not take them from our precious lego brick model.
Enter Vitamin C - the Electron Donor
Vitimin C, also known as ascorbic acid is an electron donor. Electron donors are called "anti-oxidants".
There are many assumptions about anti-oxidants found in plants, most are not helpful and are quite miss leading. A lot of the Oxidation we experience, especially in our arteries is FROM eating certain plants. More about that later..
To be effective these anti-oxidants need to be at the right place at the right time in sufficient quantities. We need to transport them, and that is what our immune system does.
Packing the PAC-MEN
To be effective in eating up the bad guys, Macrophages need to be loaded up with Ascorbic Acid,(vit. C) so that they can engulf and neutralise problems - if these big white blood cells, (macrophages) arrive on the scene without their precious cargo, they too become oxidised and die. A lot of that mucus running out of your nose when your sick, is dead macrophages.
The dangerous LDL - small dense lipids that create blockages and cause areas of the heart or brain to die, are actually oxidised cholesterol that form plaques that include the macrophages sent in to clean up without adequate vitamin C.
Here's the kicker
We have known that Vitamin C is great for the immune system for a long time. What has become "forgotten" or completely missed is another critical piece of understanding that arose from the research at around the same time that Linus Pauling starting talking about the benefits of Vitamin C.
GAA - Glucose Ascorbate Antagonism
Structurally the glucose or "sugar" molecule is similar to Ascorbic acid.
Our macrophages become pre-saturated with glucose and then can not take on board ascorbic acid.
So we send our soldiers of to battle un-armed, they get slaughtered and their bodies add to the inflammation and infection. Fungus, which does not use oxygen, love to ferment sugar, and that process is highly correlated with cancer.
Bio-Hack - 5- lower your blood sugar and increase your vitamin C intake
First of all, prevention saves way more energy than cure, so the best thing to do is avoid inviting excessive oxidants into your body. This reduces your requirement for vitamin C and the other precious anti-oxidants
Using fat rather than carbohydrates for your main food requires about 28% less oxygen to get the electrons needed for energy.
If you are not able to use fat for fuel, (ketogenic diet) then you will need to Fast( go without food) to lower your blood sugar enough to be able to load your macrophages.
One of the most Oxidative foods I know of is Vegetable Oils - they are seed oils that used to be industrial lubricants but have been sneaking into the food supply over the last 100 years or so. Polyunsaturated Fats (PUFA) have un-saturated chemical bonds - just like oxygen they are on the rampage looking to steal electrons.
Omega 3 fatty acids are a super food, that when found in animal sources come with the antioxidant partner to make them useful to the original animal - Salmon gets its orange colour from Astaxanthin, the anti oxidant that is present in its omega 3 rich membranes.
ALA as found in Flax Seed oil can not be used as a safe substitute for Omega 3 from animal sources, as it converts inefficiently, does not have the anti-oxidant partner and they, like nearly all seeds are high in omega 6, a PUFA that we require in small doses only.
The best source of naturally occurring bio-available anti oxidants and omega 3 is from grass that has been fermented by enzymes produced by the bacteria that lives in the 4 giant fermentation vats of a cow, goat, sheep or other ruminants stomach. These animals chew grass and weeds all day long, often regurgitating it and re-processing it again, to turn that cellulose into the most precious fatty acids on Earth.
If you really do not want to be a part of that ancient food chain, you can eat the "ghee" which is made by removing the milk proteins (whey and casein) from butter. That way you can get everything you need to wrap your lego bricks and build your nervous system and leave the animal to live a bit longer grazing on pasture, before something else eats it.
Vitimin C - is one of many anti oxidants, you can take it as a supplement in a sugarless form, or you can eat low fructose berries and limes. So long as you can lower your blood sugar it will be able to do its job.
Personally as a full carnivore, I rarely eat plants at all, there is enough vitamin C in the meat I eat and because I use fat for fuel rather than carbohydrates, my blood sugar remains low. I am not wasting precious anti-oxidants on putting out fires in my arteries from seed oils. Also my mitochondria use less oxygen to produce ATP, the molecule our bodies use to transport electrical energy. My demand for anti-oxidants is lowered and my macrophages have plenty.
Carbohydrates are mostly grains, which are grass seeds. Vegetable oils are also made mostly from grass seeds, flower seeds or legumes, (seeds from a pod like soy). So you can probably see the pattern here, grass is great, seeds are hell. Once this is understood, there is not so much need to fight nature with agriculture, when grass, weeds and pasture cover over 20% of the dry land surface already. Those rich soils we have been exploiting, were created over centuries by animals like gazelle and bison. Roaming over hills and flood plains, kept moving by predators.
This is worth researching and testing for yourself. Can you imagine how critical this is, and yet many IV's in hospitals still contain dextrose, (sugar). Is this because many medical students are still taught that it is essential for cellular energy function?*
If if was I would be dead, I have gone for months on end without eating any carbohydrate, fruit, plant, root-vegetable, sugar, glucose, or other processed or non-processed plant products. With no supplements. You don't have to be carnivore to be healthy, you do need to wrap you lego bricks nicely and lower your blood sugar as much as possible.
I really hope this was understandable and worth your time to read.
This is pyshcobiology, biology with little hacks to unwind the psycho from our otherwise healthy DNA lol..
=8-P
*Any glucose that the body does need, (red blood cells and our brain needs a little), we can get from gluconeogenesis (GNG). Converting protein into glucose on an as required basis, there is even a little known metabolic pathway for converting fats into glucose.
Further research:
Amber O Hearn
Csaber Toth
Esmée La Fleur
Dr. Ron Hunninghake