Hey Lisa - I noticed the "re-acquired sugar addiction". What is up with this symptom? It hits me every time I have the slightest flare. I check my sugar with a meter and it goes up some, but not a lot. I'll wake up in the middle of the night and the granola bar craving hits me and I'll eat it too! I figured it must be thyroid or adrenals acting up, but not sure what to do about it?
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 (and perhaps Mike or others who know something about physiology can comment) is 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.
Does anyone have any thoughts about this though? I'm really going out on a limb here, suggesting that sugar can have a function.
On another note, I just found some spray magnesium at a health food store. Would it be better to just spray it on my skin or to mix it with hand cream?
Thanks, Lisa
