Interesting questions, Wayne.
I had never heard before that ME/CFS patients might be overly alkaline. Most people are overly acidic, from what I know.
(Of course. We're backwards on everything else, so it makes sense that we would be on this one too.)
I actually wonder if for more or less healthy people who are getting a fair amount of mycotoxin exposure, over acidity might be a consequence of that. I see in various articles that medicines and chemicals in the diet are extremely acid, so the idea that a particularly poisonous substance might be similar does not seem unreasonable.
However, there's a difference between people affected by mold and people with ME/CFS. Just doing a quick skim of the Internet, I wonder if the low oxygen levels in our bodies might be related.
https://health.google.com/health/ref/Alkalosis
If so, then I believe that is downstream from toxic mold exposures.
Stachybotrys produces a high amount of oxidative stress. One way to counter that oxidative stress is to decrease the oxygen levels in the system.
In other words, if Stachy + Oxygen = Damage, then subtracting out the oxygen will result in less damage.
(I think subtracting the Stachy is a better choice.)
So if this is the case, it may be that the system will remain alkaline until the oxygen toxicity component is fixed....no matter what people do with the diet.
I'm not sure what to say about the kefir. I've heard good things about it from a couple of different "Moldies," but they seemed to think it was because it was a pretty robust way of delivering probiotics.
I'd like to say that certain foods helped to reduce reactivity, but unfortunately that's not been the case. Back when I was getting substantial mold exposure, fixing my diet helped be feel a bit better. After an extended period of mold avoidance, I started being able to eat whatever I wanted without apparent negative consequence.
I tend to think that at least some of the food reactivities in this illness are due to perforations in the gut. Trichothecenes have been shown in a number of studies to cause that particular problem, so I tend to think that the elimination of mold toxins from my system allowed my gut to heal and thus all foods to be tolerated. This is only speculation though.
I hate to admit this, but the only food that I've found that seems helpful to me when I am being hit by toxic mold is sugar (or other similar substances like honey). Other Moldies have stated this too, so I tried to figure out why. My comments on this are below.
Obviously sugar is no solution though!
Melatonin is protective against oxidative stress, though the animal studies it's been tested in have used a whole lot of melatonin. A substantial dose (20 mg) seems a little helpful for me. The most recommended herb is curcumin, but I've not felt that makes much difference. Vitamin C (especially in IV form) is helpful if the exposures are mild; at higher levels, it seems to do nothing.
A comment from Erik's book about the peanuts is at the bottom of this post. (Hitler's Bunker, where Erik was stationed in the Army in the 1970s, was full of toxic mold that made a whole bunch of people sick.)
I'm not sure exactly what to make of this phenomenon. The most superficial hypothesis is that people are responding to the aspergillus on the peanuts rather than the peanuts themselves, but I don't think that's it. These individuals don't go into anaphylaxis when they encounter aspergillus toxins elsewhere, and my guess is that the peanuts used in lab studies might be more free of such toxins than average peanuts.
I'm wondering if it might be something like the immune system associates the protein (peanut) with the toxin (a chemical) as a result of one or more simultaneous exposures, and then starts to respond to the protein regardless of whether the toxin is present. Sort of like operant conditioning in psychology.
I don't know enough about allergies to be able to judge whether that's plausible.
Really interesting questions!
Best, Lisa
*
The following is from Shoemaker's "Mold Warriors." It's in reference
to the fact that people with mold illness (such as many ME/CFS
patients have) are low in VEGF:
>If you're low VEGF, you'll be low in delivery of oxygen to capillaries too. And that deficiency is made tremendously worse with activity. The active cell, looking for oxygen, won't have the right amount available to burn glucose for energy. Normally the cell gets two ATP (energy) molecules from the initial breakdown of sugar (glucose), generating breakdown products (pyruvate and lactate). These compounds are full of locked-up energy and can be processed further in mitochondria, but only if oxygen is present.
>
>The mitochondria are called the "powerhouses" of the cell, because they generate so much extra ATP. Using oxygen, the two sugar breakdown fragments are eventually broken down into water and carbon dioxide, creating 36 additional ATP molecules along the way. If there isn't enough oxygen available during exercise, the cell acts like it doesn't have any mitochondria. The cell starts to be energy inefficient, burning a huge amount of sugar but giving the cell only two of the required ATP at a time, not two plus the 36.
>
>Then the cell quickly begins to consume all the stored sugar (glycogen) from the cell's warehouse. But the amount of the storage glycogen is limited and must be replaced quickly -- or else we die. So to restore glycogen levels, the cells reach for whatever alternative fuel sources it has on hand. Typically, that's your own body's protein, because protein is quickly broken down into amino acids. Two of those building blocks, alanine and glutamine, are rapidly turned from amino acids into sugar. Glycogen is replenished and we live! But the cost of burning lean body mass is enormously expensive for biotoxin patients. We can measure lean body mass too.
So for me, when I get hit with a lot of biotoxin exposure, that's when
my cravings for sugar go up.
The interesting thing iis that this section makes it seem like
consuming sugar at that moment isn't necessarily such a bad thing. If
the cell is burning sugar like crazy, then it's either going to come
from converting muscle (which sounds bad to me) or from sugar that's
just been consumed. If there has to be a choice, isn't it better to
keep the muscle rather than burning it up?
I ask this because I'm convinced that at moments of big exposure,
eating sugar actually is a good thing for me. Much better is to get
away from the exposure, and usually I try very hard to do that. But if
I can't get away, sugar helps somewhat. I honestly don't think it's
bad for me.
I was in Chicago (where I was getting more exposure) from July through
November. I ate a goodly amount of sugar and gained some weight. After
a week away from the city, in a clear area, my sugar cravings have
disappeared and my waistline has gone down to where it was at the
beginning of summer.
The downsides of sugar are that it is itself inflammatory, that it
feeds candida, that it offers empty calories and that it encourages
the body to produce more insulin (thus craving sugar to compensate).
These things are bad. But I wonder if the decreased mitochondrial
output and/or burning of protein stores might be even worse.
Again, staying in a bad environment and eating a lot of sugar to
compensate is a very bad strategy. This is emergency use only. Other
tools I use during bad exposures include very strong coffee, ibuprofen
(usually three tablets) and high-dose melatonin (20 mg). (Plus strong
peppermint tea, though there may be no downside to that.) This is self-
medication, no doubt. But sometimes that seems to me to be called for.
*
> Many years ago, before the rash of peanut allergy problems, I was allowed to sit in, as an observer, when the industry asked to have the amount of mold material that is deemed acceptable to be raised by a factor of 10, as they were experiencing profitability problems. That increase was ultimately granted.
> I had a government scientist tell me at the time that we normally had poorer immune response to toxins than to proteins and that the first responses to too much moldy material may be an allergic response to peanut protein. He had suggested that this increase was not a good idea to the industry representatives, but was told to butt out.
> Several years later, we started to hear about peanut “allergy” and even anaphylactic shock.
> I still wonder if the triggering event for many people who react to peanuts is one of a hit from some very moldy peanut material (not all standards are met in all instances) that is then displayed as an overreaction in an allergic response.
A perfect question!
That incident I described took place in Hitler's Bunker, as we jokingly called it.
Perhaps that was why my CO had such a severe reaction.
-Erik (2009, IAQ)
All edited, I think. :Retro smile:
