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A Bioenergetic View of Autoimmunity [Generative Energy #12]
#12: A Bioenergetic View of Autoimmunity
01:16 - Danny’s introduction to autoimmune conditions
02:07 - Autoimmunity and cancer — two peas in a pod
02:58 - Jamie Cunliffe (link: home_page)
03:12 - The mainstream view of autoimmunity
04:53 - “The exact cause of autoimmune disorders is unknown.”
05:40 - Basics of the immune system
07:19 - So-called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis
09:25 - Higher ratio of women to men suffering autoimmunity
10:22 - Autoimmunity and immunodeficiency (i.e, HIV)
11:08 - Estrogen, cortisol, and the thymus gland
12:38 - Estrogen actives the adrenal system
13:54 - Immune system as a “clean up the mess” system
15:05 - Autoimmunity and liver disease
15:51 - Danny’s anecdote about compartmentalized thinking
16:43 - Problems with the mainstream therapy of autoimmunity
18:26 - Drugs that suppress the immune system are dangerous
19:53 - Danny doesn’t need a reference
20:28 - Drugs generally aren’t thoroughly tested
21:18 - X-rays as a treatment for acne
23:44 – Thoughts on the paleo autoimmune protocol
26:15 - The alternative’s love affair with pre- and probiotics
27:33 - A sterile intestine and autoimmunity
28:27 - Autoimmunity or tissue damage
29:22 - The calcium to phosphate ratio
29:47 - Aspirin for autoimmunity
31:13 - Niacinamide for autoimmunity
31:40 - NAD+/NADH in autoimmunity
33:50 - Structure and function in autoimmunity
34:23 - Hans Selye’s work on stress and energy
35:10 - Calcium, aspirin, niacinamide, methylene blue, tetracycline antibiotics
35:30 - Biotin for multiple sclerosis
37:23 - Pyruvate decarboxylase and biotin
38:27 - Some context with supplements/foods
41:32 - Sugar’s role in supporting immune function
42:52 - Total cholesterol, LDL, HDL, and immunity
44:37 - High levels of cholesterol — low rate of metabolism?
47:24 - Testing for metabolic function
51:00 - Where can we find more of your work, Georgi?
D: Hello everyone, I'm Danny Roddy of dannyroddy.com and today I'm talking with Georgi aka haidut of raypeatforum.com. Georgi is an independent health researcher and the owner of idealabsdc.com, a small company producing high-quality boutique supplements with the focus of supporting a healthy metabolism. Today, Georgi and I will discuss autoimmune conditions from a bioenergetic point of view or the interaction between an organism and its environment and how those changes influence cellular respiration. In addition to thanking Georgi for talking with me today, I'd like to think my patrons for making this show and all the content I produce possible. If you'd like to become a patron, go patreon.com/dannyroddy. Without further ado, here is the show.
D: A way maybe to start the show would be to explain how I came across the concept. Are you familiar with Datis Kharrazian and his book 'Why do I still have thyroid symptoms when my lab tests are normal'?
G: No, I'm not, but I had a brush with MS - according to official medicine - so I have personal vested interest in the whole autoimmunity thing.
D: I want to hear about that. This this was a book I came across in about 2009 and this is when I maybe first started to hone in a little bit more on thyroid problems. And then Chris Kresser started a series about Datis Kharrazian's work on autoimmunity and tied it into gluten and vitamin D and now it's an 'autoimmune protocol'. And the idea is just that your own body is attacking you and basically wants to kill you, and...
G: Does that remind you of another disease...?
D: Ha, yeah it does. Like the cancer thing we have talked about repeatedly. But I'm pretty ignorant on the mainstream's view, because I was introduced to the alternative view almost instantly and because I didn't have really any foundation of what would cause an autoimmune problem I was just interested in Chris Kresser's and the Perfect Health Diet Paul Jaminet's and Datis Kharrazian's view. And then later and - we'll get into it - but Ray Peat's completely alternative view of the immune system based on Jamie Cunliffe's work. But why don't you give me an overview of your thoughts on the mainstream's view of autoimmunity as well as your own experience and anything else that you wanted to add in, Georgi.
G: So, the mainstream view is that there are a number of autoimmune conditions where the body's immune system goes into overdrive and it starts attacking and destroying selective tissues, depending on what specific condition you've been diagnosed with. Like in the case of multiple sclerosis they are claiming that the attack mounted by the immune system causes demyelination of the nerves and this interferes with the signals that your central nervous system is sending to your limbs. So eventually people with MS are being told that they will develop - if not paralysis, they'll develop severe movement disorders, lack of bowel control, some people develop mental disorders as well. In the case of rheumatoid arthritis - I think that almost everybody has heard of it - used to be thought of as a disease of old people, but now it's not uncommon to see somebody in their twenties or thirties have rheumatoid arthritis. So in that condition the immune system attacks the joints and ligaments, so these people have pain and swelling in their knees and elbows and shoulders. And whenever they have an attack they're saying the immune system is destroying the connective tissue that's in their joints. In the case of lupus, I guess the most common symptoms that are visible are on the skin. There's a very characteristic sign of lupus, they call it the 'butterfly', it's on the face, around the nose and it does look like a butterfly whenever these people are having an acute exacerbation, which is really what they call the attack of the immune system. And then, so, what else - psoriasis, I guess, is a very common one. Basically, for all these, you see a lot of ads on and the underlying explanation isthe same: there is no known cause of autoimmune conditions. Some of the official speculation is that it's caused initially by a viral agent - and we'll talk about this later. Specifically in the case of multiple sclerosis they're claiming that it's probably caused by something called the JC virus, which more than 90% of the people carry within them. But then the official medicine says even though the initial immune attack may be caused by a viral agent or some other pathogen, that's really not the important thing, because eventually the immune system somehow goes into overdrive and it doesn't turn itself off after the pathogen has been handled. So, that contributes to the symptoms.
D: Did you want to cover a little bit like the basic view of the immune system like a self versus non-self?
G: Yeah, basically, the immune system produces antibodies and, dependening on the pathogen, the antibodies can be targeted against a virus or, if the antibodies are the so-called autoantibodies, people with hepatitis - which is also another thing that is thought to be an autoimmune condition - they produce antibodies that seem to be targeted at the tissue of the liver. So each specific tissue can have an antibody produced for it and that's one of the diagnostic methods for a specific autoimmune condition. But that that seems to only work in sort of advanced cases where there is they actually tissue breakdown. And even then it's really not - even modern medicine doesn't claim that these autoantibodies are causative somehow, they're just saying it's a biomarker of the fact that your immune system is attacking you, because these antibodies are specific to that particular tissue which has been affected by the disease. And I guess the parallel is from whenever you get attacked by a virus, we produce antibodies against that virus, so the assumption is if you're producing antibodies against a tissue that is your own, it's almost as if your body is trying to reject it. And people that have organ transplants, they sometimes produce autoantibodies against that foreign organ that has been transplanted. That may be another reason why people are starting to think about your immune system trying to sort of reject your own organs, due to them somehow being pathological. I'm sorry, not the organs, but the immune system somehow getting demented and starting to attack your own organs.
D: And these antibodies have really specific names, like the anti-thyroid antibody. I'll get an email every so often from somebody with so-called Hashimoto's disease and they'll be very concerned with antibodies and it seems like a pretty confusing problem. Do you have any thoughts specifically on Hashimoto's disease?
G: It's possible to cause it, actually, very easily. If you go and get, I would say, more than three dental x-rays in a month, you have a dramatically higher chance of developing so-called Hashimoto's. So, in this case, here is a clear example that there is no pathogen associated with it, right? So, going back to the statement that the real cause of autoimmune disease is unknown, but in some cases is caused by a virus, well, in this case, there is no virus known that is attacking the thyroid in any shape or form - or, at least, not one to cause the type of damage that would trigger an autoimmune response. But if you expose the thyroid to some kind of an assault, like ionizing radiation - and in some cases actually has been shown that direct injections of some sort of a liquid that is being used to enhance the imaging - I think they call it a gadolinium agent - it's also radioactive. So, some people who get an MRI of their neck or some other tissue in the area, actually even in their head, they may get Hashimoto's as a result of them being injected with this agent. Of course, nobody will admit it, but the fact that it happens and it's so strongly associated with the ionizing radiation from the x-ray or from the gadolinium agent sort of suggests that if there is such a thing as an autoimmune condition of the thyroid, it's not caused by a pathogen. I think there's enough evidence to discard the official hypothesis that the immune system is attacking the thyroid. The only thing that can be said of this case is that as a result of radiation there's an overactive immune response targeted at the thyroid, but not that the immune system is somehow trying to reject it. Here's the funny thing about autoimmune conditions - several things that are being openly admitted by mainstream medicine. One of them - and probably the most important thing - is that there is an abnormally high ratio of women to men suffering from these autoimmune conditions. So, if you look at the ads on TV, whether it's psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis - especially lupus and psoriasis, I think the ratio is much higher there - multiple sclerosis. All of these autoimmune conditions, if you take the average, the ratio of women to men suffering them is about 4 to 1. Now why hasn't anybody looked at what is the difference between men and women and start with the obvious thing: hormonal, right? So why has nobody paid attention to the hormonal differences and what role hormones play in autoimmune conditions. Believe it or not there is tons of evidence that hormones play a role - completely aside from what Ray has written. And it's widely acknowledged that there is a hormone imbalance that exists in all of the autoimmune conditions. So, for example, there's also a great parallel between the autoimmune conditions and the conditions of immunodeficiency, the most notable of which is HIV. If you take a person with HIV and you blind the doctors who are performing the diagnosis or treatment, if they don't know that the person has an HIV but they just perform a number of tests, that person will easily meet the criteria for at least one autoimmune condition. It looks like they're producing autoantibodies and their body is trying to reject their tissues, but they're systemic, so there's really no organ. So if you believe the official diagnosis, you can reframe HIV as a systemic autoimmune condition. That would be a perfectly valid definition, according to the current diagnostic criteria.
D: Are the steroids acting on the immune system primarily through destroying the thymus gland?
G: Oh, absolutely. And the reason I mentioned the increased ratio of incidence in women versus men is - so let's start with something obvious. So, estrogen is something that does a number of things in the body that can push you into the direction of both autoimmunity and immunodeficiency. Now here's something that immediately tells you something's wrong with the official theory. The autoimmune condition is supposed to be a condition with an immune system in overdrive, right? So, it should be the exact opposite of a person with a condition of immunodeficiency. However the two tend to co-occur almost always. I'll just give an example: the person with HIV, they can easily meet the official diagnostic criteria for a number of autoimmune conditions. So, you can't have it both ways. One of these theories is wrong, or both are explained by a higher umbrella (so to speak) and that higher umbrella in this case can be tied to the hormones estrogen and cortisol. So estrogen does a number of detrimental things. And keep in mind when I say estrogen, it's not just the estrogen you're producing, there are tons of chemicals in your environment that have estrogenic effects. And they're much more potent than estradiol, which is probably the most potent estrogen your body produces. And ionizing radiation is another agent that has extremely highly estrogenic activity in effects on the body. The polyunsaturated fats are a great example, because they're both estrogenic and immunosuppressive. So what estrogen does is basically it activates the adrenal system. Your adrenal glands start producing more cortisol, at the same time estrogen is turning off the negative feedback response, so basically your pituitary gland doesn't really get the signal that you're producing too much cortisol, so you'll keep increasing the production of the hormone called ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone), so you'll keep producing even more cortisol. So that's what estrogen does: it is the stress hormone, the shock hormone. So as long as estrogen is high, you will have high cortisol. And estrogen and cortisol, they promote each other. Both estrogen and cortisol increase serotonin. Both estrogen and cortisol increase prolactin, so you will get basically the entire plethora the whole field of stress / disease. And everybody knows - nobody denies - that cortisol destroys your thymus. So at the same time, because these are the truly catabolic hormones, there will be tissue breakdown. So it has been shown that in people with autoimmune conditions, if you can remove portions of that tissue that is considered to be to be damaged, the immune response stops. So the view that is much more likely to be associated with reality is the fact that the immune system response is simply there to clear the debris that are caused by decaying and dying cells and this decay - as we all know - it's usually triggered by the stress response and by the resulting bioenergetic deficiency. And if it's systemic enough, you will essentially get HIV or cancer. If it's localised, you'll get one of these official autoimmune conditions that are known by names like rheumatoid arthritis (if it's in your joints), multiple sclerosis or lupus (if it's in your nervous system), psoriasis (if it's in your skin). So just because something appears in a specific organ that does not mean it is not a systemic disease. In the vast majority of cases it is. And it cannot be any other way. These cells communicate with each other. They send signals that are distributed around the entire body, so your entire body knows, for example, that you have a lesion on your arm and that lesion is a psoriatic lesion, so you are likely to have symptoms of psoriasis elsewhere in your body, no matter how much modern medicine tries to deny it. For example, people with autoimmune conditions - if we assume they're all being caused by estrogen, by ionising radiation, basically by toxic chemicals with estrogenic activity - you would expect people with a high estrogenic burden to have a high incidence of liver disease. And lo and behold that is the case. Go pick any autoimmune condition you would like and then go and check on PubMed and see if these people have a high incidence of liver disease. They all do. So, to me, that is the smoking gun that one of the hormones - specifically estrogen - is directly causative of the pathology that results in the immune response and the immune response is simply there to pick up the debris and get rid of it, because if it accumulates too much you will die probably from septicemia or some other kind of a blood poisoning.
D: So you bring up a good point. These steroids are often not thought to be involved in so-called autoimmune problems. You'll see somebody focusing really tightly on what their physician... like the antibodies, but they don't measure things like the prolactin level or they're ignoring a high TSH or they haven't checked the temperature of the person and it seems to be a compartmentalized view of what's going on. Like they already know that the body is destroying itself so they don't really investigate the other markers.
G: Right and I think the main reason is because the official medicine says there is no known cause of these things, so the best thing we can do is manage the symptoms. But here is why even managing the symptoms it is idiotic the way it is currently done. Basically the mainstream therapy in the absence of all these commercial drugs for fifty years has been cortisol. Almost anybody with an autoimmune condition if they have the so-called acute exacerbation (in other words, a flare up or an attack, so to speak) they will get a shot of cortisone, right. So in some people, at least, back in the day (like, thirty years ago) this was actually their chronic treatment. They were getting cortisone injections or infusions for years - sometimes for decades. Now, if the immune system was the problem and you were suppressing it with cortisone (which it does very effectively) you would expect that this will be a so-called disease-modifying treatment, right. Well, it not only wasn't, but these people died a lot earlier than the ones who didn't get any treatment. So right there and then I think the pharma industry wisened up to that fact. That's why they started going after all these other drugs, but their underlying mechanism of action is all the same: they suppress the immune system. And if you look at any ad for any immune condition - I do challenge you, go on TV and look at any ad - and listen to the side effects, they all have increased chance of blood cancers, lymphoma and a particularly nasty thing has been happening recently. It's known to be caused truly by the JC virus. It is a condition called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). Just google PML and read the Wikipedia page. It is a very nasty neurodegenerative disease that kills you in about a year. So you can think of it as a very accelerated version of of the disease ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), except that this thing truly destroys your brain very quickly and you die from the same symptoms as you do from ALS. So, any drug for an autoimmune condition that suppresses your immune system - and pretty much all of them do - will have that listed as a side effect. So, if you listen to the ads on TV they'll tell you there is an increased risk of a number of blood cancers including lymphoma and I think immunoblastic... I would have to see but one of the leukemias, increased risk of multiple myeloma, increased risk of other cancers they are finding lately, especially of neuro glioblastoma, which is the brain cancer. The brain is especially sensitive to the suppression of the immune system and anything with an estrogenic effect. So basically anything that suppresses your immune system, whether that's cortisol or one of these newer drugs the side effect is cancer. So that's what current medicine is offering you. And I think the official explanation is that, well, yes, so what we did is we calculated how many people are likely to get cancer as a result of this drug and of those people how many are likely to die and we compared it to the number of people that are likely to die from not treating their condition and we basically decided on a pure cost-benefit analysis as a result of that it's worth pushing these drugs. Remember, first we don't know if these numbers are right, and the reason we don't know these numbers are right is - aside from the fact that big pharma is known to lie and falsify evidence (Danny, I'll send you a reference on that) - it actually even made the New York Times but [D: You don't need to send me a reference!] apparently it is so systemic that right now there is a serious doubt that about 700 of the 1000 most important generic drugs being produced and sold in the United States, the evidence around them is at best questionable and in some cases it was known to be fraudulent. So what you have there is the official treatment. So I challenge you to go and check for yourself. Basically if you get any of these drugs... so I wanted to also point out that the reason why we shouldn't be so trusting, not so much because the FDA may be evil or incompetent but because we don't really know - and Ray said it many times and it's been verified... most older doctors will tell you - we don't know the full side effect profile of a drug until at least 20 years have passed with that drug being used in a wide circulation. In other words, that is the true clinical trial: it's starting to sell that drug to the general public and twenty years later accumulating the data and seeing what the drug does. So, in effect, all these clinical trials that have been done for all of the drugs that you're currently putting in your mouth, all they really achieve is showing that these drugs will not kill you immediately - in other words, within a year. Anything after that is fair game.
D: Something I love that Ray said was that x-rays used to be used to treat acne and ringworm and lupus. And then my friend Lex Rooker - I think he's about sixty years old - he verified that and told me, yeah, I used to go get x-rays for my acne. And the bizarre part about that being that he explained how effective it was for temporarily reducing the inflammation and getting rid of his acne. And of course the long-term harmful effects of getting chronic x-rays for a problem like that, causing things like cancer and so on. And never really knowing if the treatment you're receiving is safe until way later, like you're talking about.
G: Yeah, and you know I think whenever you are about to injest a drug, which even now has the admitted side effects of increased cancer, you should probably be asking yourself 'is this really worth it'? Now I'm not encouraging people to stop taking their drugs. What I am encouraging is that you should question your doctor to the very end and ask for data and ask for information and evidence that it is truly worth it to take a drug for a condition that in many cases is not lethal - I know it's very unpleasant - but you should question your doctor to give his or her view of why the benefit is higher than the risk in this particular case. And you shouldn't just accept the regurgitations from... because many doctors will just hand you over the brochure that the pharma company gave them and they'll say read up on that. Would you take as the official version... if you go to your mechanic and he says 'this car is done and needs to be replaced', wouldn't you ask for a second opinion? Somebody who was not involved. And actually, ideally, if you take it to another mechanic that mechanic may also say the same thing. Keep in mind they're in the same industry, so they all have an incentive to fix your car and charge you. So it would have been great if there was a way to go to somebody who does not have a vested interest in you buying that drug in asking for a second opinion. Unfortunately for many people in the western world that's not possible because any doctor will have a vested interest, cause they're probably selling the same drug. That's how they make money, that's how they pay their loans from medical school, by selling you these things that that official pharma brochures say that they're both safe and effective.
D: So like shifting over to the alternative, cause I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are convinced that their physician might not know exactly what they're doing. What's wrong with something like - if you're not familiar with the paleo autoimmune protocol, it's a highly restrictive, basically vegetable and meat diet. If you were diagnosed with an autoimmune problem, what would be wrong with just tackling that diet to the extreme, would you see any problem with that?
G: I see a huge problem with that. I mean, that diet is basically the reduced version of the official treatment with cortisone. What you will get from eating all this meat and vegetables is likely a drop in blood sugar - because protein stimulates insulin release like nothing else, not even glucose compares to it - and after the blood glucose falls, you will get cortisol increase, and cortisol will start eating at your muscle tissue and destroying your thymus and also stimulating the production and release of estrogen, so it will burden your liver, it will inhibit the conversion of the hormone T4 into the active hormone T3. So, if we agree with the idea that cortisol and estrogen, these catabolic stress hormones, are only beneficial in the short run, because they suppress your immune system, but they truly contribute to pathology long-term, that'll be one of the worst diets you would want to do. I mean, it will be not as powerful, but it will be similar in principle to doing the radiation treatment, or eating a diet that is high in PUFA (that probably will have a similar effect) or getting a cortisone shot. I mean, if anything, the cortisone shot may actually be the least damaging, because there are ways to control the side effects of cortisone. I don't know if there are ways to control systemic side effects of a bad diet. If you increase your intake of the hormone DHEA, maybe even progesterone, you can negate some of the side effects of a cortisone injection that is given to you for acute exacerbation, but if you eat a poor diet that chronically tells your body that these things need to be overproduced, I don't know how you would defend against that, other than correcting your diet. You know, that'll be the first thing to do.
D: The other side of that coin usually is attempting to 'fix the gut' and usually the way to do that from the alternative is to take fermented foods or prebiotics or probiotics. What are your thoughts on that?
G: Well, so, here's, I think, a perfect example is if you think that probiotics are good for you, I should tell you that even modern medicine admits that the lactobacillus strain may be a direct cause of lupus. So, if you don't believe me, if you don't believe Ray, just go and google 'lactobacillus space lupus' and read the links that are coming from PubMed. That's official research. Don't read the blogs - some of them are legit, but if you want to show you doctor something that that he or she will take more seriously - ha, I don't know, maybe they won't - but show up wth PubMed studies if you want to have a 1% chance of being taken seriously. So do that and see... right now there's a serious debate about whether some of the lactobacillus strains, especially, I think, the casei one, lactobacillus casei is a direct cause of the trigger that actually starts lupus. They're not gonna say it's the causative agent and you shouldn't be eating your yogurt and things like that, they're saying it may be the thing that triggers that bad immune response that never seems to go away. For example, I don't know that there has been a single case of a baby - which tend to have a mostly sterile gut - having an autoimmune condition. And also I have seen studies on animals and on adult animals that have had their guts rendered sterile, in other words there is almost no bacteria there. These animals are remarkably resilient to things like endotoxemic shock and the development of autoimmune conditions. There is a rodent model of multiple sclerosis, it's called EAE (experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis)... it has been shown that taking the human equivalent dose of tetracycline - I think it was only about a hundred milligrams - given to rats basically prevented them from developing this condition, no matter what causative agents the scientists tried to administer.
D: When we're talking about autoimmunity, we're really talking about tissue damage.
G: Exactly. So I think the term autoimmune should be reframed into... there is excessive tissue damage going on somewhere, it's always systemic, but you may have the exact symptoms in the specific tissue, even though if you do the proper tests you will probably find the systemic biomarkers as well. So I think the autoimmune condition should be reframed as 'systemic tissue damage', 'systemic wasting syndrome' almost, if it's systemic. Like HIV, basically - it's the autoimmune condition of the entire body. HIV people basically waste away, kinda like diabetic people or people with cancer. In fact, if you see a person with advanced AIDS, it will be impossible for you to tell the difference between that and a cachexic cancer patient dying from the loss of muscle mass and other important tissues, like the thymus and liver and brain.
D: And you mentioned there was a drug for AIDS, that the sole mechanism of the drug was to deplete phosphate, showing the importance of regulating parathyroid hormone and prolactin, which they seem to increase each other.
H: Yeah. And here are some of the other things that have been tried for AIDS. So, depleting phosphorous was one thing, which has the side effect of increasing calcium, so the calcium to phosphorus ratio will increase as a result of that drug. Other things that have been tried for AIDS include aspirin. As a matter of fact the trial was so successful that it was stopped in the mid nineties and if you look at the preliminary results that were published, they said it is extremely promising, but some people got elevated liver enzymes, so we stopped it. Nobody died, right. I mean, these people have a deadly condition. Is that a reason to stop a trial? But apparently it is. But the conclusions are there: 4 grams of aspirin daily for two weeks basically completely removed the symptoms of AIDS - and we're not talking about HIV, we're talking about AIDS which is already the manifested disease. These people already are at risk of dying from pneumonia or even from a simple flu virus, because their immune system is already destroyed. So inhibiting the release of free fatty acids, which is one of the primary mechanisms of aspirin, in opposing estrogen, which is probably the primary mechanism of action of aspirin, even though it binds to no known receptor, right. If you look at the way aspirin stimulates the cells, and the way it works on metabolism, and the way it works on tissues, and you count - let's say you pick fifty different ways it does that and you do the same thing for estrogen, it will be approximately in the opposite way. So you can think of aspirin as the functional estrogen antagonist. So, aspirin was very successful. Niacinamide was also extremely successful. 3 grams of niacinamide for a month, again, put these people in remission. So what does niacinamide do? A number of good things, but again the primary thing is it lowers lipolysis, so inhibits lypolysis, you have less free fatty acids in the blood and increases the levels of NAD to NADH, because niacinamide is a precursor to NAD. So it puts your body in an oxidized state versus a reduced state. If you check the NADH levels of any person with an autoimmune condition or HIV or cancer, you'll find that it's abnormally high. Normally the ratio of NAD to NADH in healthy people is about one thousand. In in sick people it can drop to as low as a hundred or even lower. So that'll be a very good way to test for systemic disease: check the NAD to NADH ratio. So, niacinamide being a precursor to NAD raises that ratio and basically when you raise that ratio your body does not have to be stuck in glycolysis. So whenever you have an overproduction of NADH - and we discussed this in one of the previous shows - when we have an excess of NADH the body needs its NAD in order to continue metabolising it to keep you alive. So what does it do? It tries to oxidize NADH back to NAD. And in the absence of oxygen in hypoxic conditions, in anaerobic conditions when oxygen cannot do its job of oxidizing NADH back to NAD - it normally does it in the electron transport chain - the body will use pyruvate to oxidize NADH. And in oxidizing NADH, pyruvate will be converted to lactate. So, test anybody with an autoimmune condition or HIV, you will find their lactate is high and carbon dioxide is low. So if you look systemically, there is very little difference between a person with HIV and a person with cancer. There's very little difference between a person with an autoimmune condition and a person with cancer. It's probably just a matter of intensity. But if you look at advanced cases, and I think there was a recent study done on multiple sclerosis, people with advanced cases of multiple sclerosis called primary progressive MS (PPMS), they had actually the same systemic biomarkers as people with stage three cancer. So, this tells you something. These are diseases that are apparently caused by different agents, right - a lot of them apparently are genetic, at least that's the official version - however they all seem to manifest in a very similar, if not the same, way and the agents that help are all agents that oppose estrogen, oppose cortisol, stimulate oxidative phosphorylation, inhibit excessive glycolysis, stimulate the Krebs cycle. So it all comes down to structure and function. Without proper energy, in other words without proper function, you cannot maintain structure and some cells will begin to disintegrate. What is the natural response of the immune system in this case? Go out there, take these things and get them out of the body, right. You don't want to die from blood poisoning. That's the purpose of the immune system, not to attack you. And in a very similar way, that's how cancer develops. In a hypoxic condition the cells, since they cannot perform their differentiated function, they revert back to their primary function, which is division and growth.
D: Hans Selye's work forms a good foundation for that, what you just mentioned, that general adaptation syndrome and how something like stress and energy could result in all these different diseases. I think he mentioned like if you were talking to a caveman and were telling him electricity could light a lamp and a radio and the computer, the caveman would be like 'you're crazy', but we kinda do the same thing with medicine, like it has to be all these very specific things and they can't relate to each other.
G: Then why are they together in the same sack, right? [Laughing.] Randomly, the environment by random mutation and random decisions of impersonal atomic forces, somehow these things came together.
#12: A Bioenergetic View of Autoimmunity
01:16 - Danny’s introduction to autoimmune conditions
02:07 - Autoimmunity and cancer — two peas in a pod
02:58 - Jamie Cunliffe (link: home_page)
03:12 - The mainstream view of autoimmunity
04:53 - “The exact cause of autoimmune disorders is unknown.”
05:40 - Basics of the immune system
07:19 - So-called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis
09:25 - Higher ratio of women to men suffering autoimmunity
10:22 - Autoimmunity and immunodeficiency (i.e, HIV)
11:08 - Estrogen, cortisol, and the thymus gland
12:38 - Estrogen actives the adrenal system
13:54 - Immune system as a “clean up the mess” system
15:05 - Autoimmunity and liver disease
15:51 - Danny’s anecdote about compartmentalized thinking
16:43 - Problems with the mainstream therapy of autoimmunity
18:26 - Drugs that suppress the immune system are dangerous
19:53 - Danny doesn’t need a reference
20:28 - Drugs generally aren’t thoroughly tested
21:18 - X-rays as a treatment for acne
23:44 – Thoughts on the paleo autoimmune protocol
26:15 - The alternative’s love affair with pre- and probiotics
27:33 - A sterile intestine and autoimmunity
28:27 - Autoimmunity or tissue damage
29:22 - The calcium to phosphate ratio
29:47 - Aspirin for autoimmunity
31:13 - Niacinamide for autoimmunity
31:40 - NAD+/NADH in autoimmunity
33:50 - Structure and function in autoimmunity
34:23 - Hans Selye’s work on stress and energy
35:10 - Calcium, aspirin, niacinamide, methylene blue, tetracycline antibiotics
35:30 - Biotin for multiple sclerosis
37:23 - Pyruvate decarboxylase and biotin
38:27 - Some context with supplements/foods
41:32 - Sugar’s role in supporting immune function
42:52 - Total cholesterol, LDL, HDL, and immunity
44:37 - High levels of cholesterol — low rate of metabolism?
47:24 - Testing for metabolic function
51:00 - Where can we find more of your work, Georgi?
D: Hello everyone, I'm Danny Roddy of dannyroddy.com and today I'm talking with Georgi aka haidut of raypeatforum.com. Georgi is an independent health researcher and the owner of idealabsdc.com, a small company producing high-quality boutique supplements with the focus of supporting a healthy metabolism. Today, Georgi and I will discuss autoimmune conditions from a bioenergetic point of view or the interaction between an organism and its environment and how those changes influence cellular respiration. In addition to thanking Georgi for talking with me today, I'd like to think my patrons for making this show and all the content I produce possible. If you'd like to become a patron, go patreon.com/dannyroddy. Without further ado, here is the show.
D: A way maybe to start the show would be to explain how I came across the concept. Are you familiar with Datis Kharrazian and his book 'Why do I still have thyroid symptoms when my lab tests are normal'?
G: No, I'm not, but I had a brush with MS - according to official medicine - so I have personal vested interest in the whole autoimmunity thing.
D: I want to hear about that. This this was a book I came across in about 2009 and this is when I maybe first started to hone in a little bit more on thyroid problems. And then Chris Kresser started a series about Datis Kharrazian's work on autoimmunity and tied it into gluten and vitamin D and now it's an 'autoimmune protocol'. And the idea is just that your own body is attacking you and basically wants to kill you, and...
G: Does that remind you of another disease...?
D: Ha, yeah it does. Like the cancer thing we have talked about repeatedly. But I'm pretty ignorant on the mainstream's view, because I was introduced to the alternative view almost instantly and because I didn't have really any foundation of what would cause an autoimmune problem I was just interested in Chris Kresser's and the Perfect Health Diet Paul Jaminet's and Datis Kharrazian's view. And then later and - we'll get into it - but Ray Peat's completely alternative view of the immune system based on Jamie Cunliffe's work. But why don't you give me an overview of your thoughts on the mainstream's view of autoimmunity as well as your own experience and anything else that you wanted to add in, Georgi.
G: So, the mainstream view is that there are a number of autoimmune conditions where the body's immune system goes into overdrive and it starts attacking and destroying selective tissues, depending on what specific condition you've been diagnosed with. Like in the case of multiple sclerosis they are claiming that the attack mounted by the immune system causes demyelination of the nerves and this interferes with the signals that your central nervous system is sending to your limbs. So eventually people with MS are being told that they will develop - if not paralysis, they'll develop severe movement disorders, lack of bowel control, some people develop mental disorders as well. In the case of rheumatoid arthritis - I think that almost everybody has heard of it - used to be thought of as a disease of old people, but now it's not uncommon to see somebody in their twenties or thirties have rheumatoid arthritis. So in that condition the immune system attacks the joints and ligaments, so these people have pain and swelling in their knees and elbows and shoulders. And whenever they have an attack they're saying the immune system is destroying the connective tissue that's in their joints. In the case of lupus, I guess the most common symptoms that are visible are on the skin. There's a very characteristic sign of lupus, they call it the 'butterfly', it's on the face, around the nose and it does look like a butterfly whenever these people are having an acute exacerbation, which is really what they call the attack of the immune system. And then, so, what else - psoriasis, I guess, is a very common one. Basically, for all these, you see a lot of ads on and the underlying explanation isthe same: there is no known cause of autoimmune conditions. Some of the official speculation is that it's caused initially by a viral agent - and we'll talk about this later. Specifically in the case of multiple sclerosis they're claiming that it's probably caused by something called the JC virus, which more than 90% of the people carry within them. But then the official medicine says even though the initial immune attack may be caused by a viral agent or some other pathogen, that's really not the important thing, because eventually the immune system somehow goes into overdrive and it doesn't turn itself off after the pathogen has been handled. So, that contributes to the symptoms.
D: Did you want to cover a little bit like the basic view of the immune system like a self versus non-self?
G: Yeah, basically, the immune system produces antibodies and, dependening on the pathogen, the antibodies can be targeted against a virus or, if the antibodies are the so-called autoantibodies, people with hepatitis - which is also another thing that is thought to be an autoimmune condition - they produce antibodies that seem to be targeted at the tissue of the liver. So each specific tissue can have an antibody produced for it and that's one of the diagnostic methods for a specific autoimmune condition. But that that seems to only work in sort of advanced cases where there is they actually tissue breakdown. And even then it's really not - even modern medicine doesn't claim that these autoantibodies are causative somehow, they're just saying it's a biomarker of the fact that your immune system is attacking you, because these antibodies are specific to that particular tissue which has been affected by the disease. And I guess the parallel is from whenever you get attacked by a virus, we produce antibodies against that virus, so the assumption is if you're producing antibodies against a tissue that is your own, it's almost as if your body is trying to reject it. And people that have organ transplants, they sometimes produce autoantibodies against that foreign organ that has been transplanted. That may be another reason why people are starting to think about your immune system trying to sort of reject your own organs, due to them somehow being pathological. I'm sorry, not the organs, but the immune system somehow getting demented and starting to attack your own organs.
D: And these antibodies have really specific names, like the anti-thyroid antibody. I'll get an email every so often from somebody with so-called Hashimoto's disease and they'll be very concerned with antibodies and it seems like a pretty confusing problem. Do you have any thoughts specifically on Hashimoto's disease?
G: It's possible to cause it, actually, very easily. If you go and get, I would say, more than three dental x-rays in a month, you have a dramatically higher chance of developing so-called Hashimoto's. So, in this case, here is a clear example that there is no pathogen associated with it, right? So, going back to the statement that the real cause of autoimmune disease is unknown, but in some cases is caused by a virus, well, in this case, there is no virus known that is attacking the thyroid in any shape or form - or, at least, not one to cause the type of damage that would trigger an autoimmune response. But if you expose the thyroid to some kind of an assault, like ionizing radiation - and in some cases actually has been shown that direct injections of some sort of a liquid that is being used to enhance the imaging - I think they call it a gadolinium agent - it's also radioactive. So, some people who get an MRI of their neck or some other tissue in the area, actually even in their head, they may get Hashimoto's as a result of them being injected with this agent. Of course, nobody will admit it, but the fact that it happens and it's so strongly associated with the ionizing radiation from the x-ray or from the gadolinium agent sort of suggests that if there is such a thing as an autoimmune condition of the thyroid, it's not caused by a pathogen. I think there's enough evidence to discard the official hypothesis that the immune system is attacking the thyroid. The only thing that can be said of this case is that as a result of radiation there's an overactive immune response targeted at the thyroid, but not that the immune system is somehow trying to reject it. Here's the funny thing about autoimmune conditions - several things that are being openly admitted by mainstream medicine. One of them - and probably the most important thing - is that there is an abnormally high ratio of women to men suffering from these autoimmune conditions. So, if you look at the ads on TV, whether it's psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis - especially lupus and psoriasis, I think the ratio is much higher there - multiple sclerosis. All of these autoimmune conditions, if you take the average, the ratio of women to men suffering them is about 4 to 1. Now why hasn't anybody looked at what is the difference between men and women and start with the obvious thing: hormonal, right? So why has nobody paid attention to the hormonal differences and what role hormones play in autoimmune conditions. Believe it or not there is tons of evidence that hormones play a role - completely aside from what Ray has written. And it's widely acknowledged that there is a hormone imbalance that exists in all of the autoimmune conditions. So, for example, there's also a great parallel between the autoimmune conditions and the conditions of immunodeficiency, the most notable of which is HIV. If you take a person with HIV and you blind the doctors who are performing the diagnosis or treatment, if they don't know that the person has an HIV but they just perform a number of tests, that person will easily meet the criteria for at least one autoimmune condition. It looks like they're producing autoantibodies and their body is trying to reject their tissues, but they're systemic, so there's really no organ. So if you believe the official diagnosis, you can reframe HIV as a systemic autoimmune condition. That would be a perfectly valid definition, according to the current diagnostic criteria.
D: Are the steroids acting on the immune system primarily through destroying the thymus gland?
G: Oh, absolutely. And the reason I mentioned the increased ratio of incidence in women versus men is - so let's start with something obvious. So, estrogen is something that does a number of things in the body that can push you into the direction of both autoimmunity and immunodeficiency. Now here's something that immediately tells you something's wrong with the official theory. The autoimmune condition is supposed to be a condition with an immune system in overdrive, right? So, it should be the exact opposite of a person with a condition of immunodeficiency. However the two tend to co-occur almost always. I'll just give an example: the person with HIV, they can easily meet the official diagnostic criteria for a number of autoimmune conditions. So, you can't have it both ways. One of these theories is wrong, or both are explained by a higher umbrella (so to speak) and that higher umbrella in this case can be tied to the hormones estrogen and cortisol. So estrogen does a number of detrimental things. And keep in mind when I say estrogen, it's not just the estrogen you're producing, there are tons of chemicals in your environment that have estrogenic effects. And they're much more potent than estradiol, which is probably the most potent estrogen your body produces. And ionizing radiation is another agent that has extremely highly estrogenic activity in effects on the body. The polyunsaturated fats are a great example, because they're both estrogenic and immunosuppressive. So what estrogen does is basically it activates the adrenal system. Your adrenal glands start producing more cortisol, at the same time estrogen is turning off the negative feedback response, so basically your pituitary gland doesn't really get the signal that you're producing too much cortisol, so you'll keep increasing the production of the hormone called ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone), so you'll keep producing even more cortisol. So that's what estrogen does: it is the stress hormone, the shock hormone. So as long as estrogen is high, you will have high cortisol. And estrogen and cortisol, they promote each other. Both estrogen and cortisol increase serotonin. Both estrogen and cortisol increase prolactin, so you will get basically the entire plethora the whole field of stress / disease. And everybody knows - nobody denies - that cortisol destroys your thymus. So at the same time, because these are the truly catabolic hormones, there will be tissue breakdown. So it has been shown that in people with autoimmune conditions, if you can remove portions of that tissue that is considered to be to be damaged, the immune response stops. So the view that is much more likely to be associated with reality is the fact that the immune system response is simply there to clear the debris that are caused by decaying and dying cells and this decay - as we all know - it's usually triggered by the stress response and by the resulting bioenergetic deficiency. And if it's systemic enough, you will essentially get HIV or cancer. If it's localised, you'll get one of these official autoimmune conditions that are known by names like rheumatoid arthritis (if it's in your joints), multiple sclerosis or lupus (if it's in your nervous system), psoriasis (if it's in your skin). So just because something appears in a specific organ that does not mean it is not a systemic disease. In the vast majority of cases it is. And it cannot be any other way. These cells communicate with each other. They send signals that are distributed around the entire body, so your entire body knows, for example, that you have a lesion on your arm and that lesion is a psoriatic lesion, so you are likely to have symptoms of psoriasis elsewhere in your body, no matter how much modern medicine tries to deny it. For example, people with autoimmune conditions - if we assume they're all being caused by estrogen, by ionising radiation, basically by toxic chemicals with estrogenic activity - you would expect people with a high estrogenic burden to have a high incidence of liver disease. And lo and behold that is the case. Go pick any autoimmune condition you would like and then go and check on PubMed and see if these people have a high incidence of liver disease. They all do. So, to me, that is the smoking gun that one of the hormones - specifically estrogen - is directly causative of the pathology that results in the immune response and the immune response is simply there to pick up the debris and get rid of it, because if it accumulates too much you will die probably from septicemia or some other kind of a blood poisoning.
D: So you bring up a good point. These steroids are often not thought to be involved in so-called autoimmune problems. You'll see somebody focusing really tightly on what their physician... like the antibodies, but they don't measure things like the prolactin level or they're ignoring a high TSH or they haven't checked the temperature of the person and it seems to be a compartmentalized view of what's going on. Like they already know that the body is destroying itself so they don't really investigate the other markers.
G: Right and I think the main reason is because the official medicine says there is no known cause of these things, so the best thing we can do is manage the symptoms. But here is why even managing the symptoms it is idiotic the way it is currently done. Basically the mainstream therapy in the absence of all these commercial drugs for fifty years has been cortisol. Almost anybody with an autoimmune condition if they have the so-called acute exacerbation (in other words, a flare up or an attack, so to speak) they will get a shot of cortisone, right. So in some people, at least, back in the day (like, thirty years ago) this was actually their chronic treatment. They were getting cortisone injections or infusions for years - sometimes for decades. Now, if the immune system was the problem and you were suppressing it with cortisone (which it does very effectively) you would expect that this will be a so-called disease-modifying treatment, right. Well, it not only wasn't, but these people died a lot earlier than the ones who didn't get any treatment. So right there and then I think the pharma industry wisened up to that fact. That's why they started going after all these other drugs, but their underlying mechanism of action is all the same: they suppress the immune system. And if you look at any ad for any immune condition - I do challenge you, go on TV and look at any ad - and listen to the side effects, they all have increased chance of blood cancers, lymphoma and a particularly nasty thing has been happening recently. It's known to be caused truly by the JC virus. It is a condition called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). Just google PML and read the Wikipedia page. It is a very nasty neurodegenerative disease that kills you in about a year. So you can think of it as a very accelerated version of of the disease ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), except that this thing truly destroys your brain very quickly and you die from the same symptoms as you do from ALS. So, any drug for an autoimmune condition that suppresses your immune system - and pretty much all of them do - will have that listed as a side effect. So, if you listen to the ads on TV they'll tell you there is an increased risk of a number of blood cancers including lymphoma and I think immunoblastic... I would have to see but one of the leukemias, increased risk of multiple myeloma, increased risk of other cancers they are finding lately, especially of neuro glioblastoma, which is the brain cancer. The brain is especially sensitive to the suppression of the immune system and anything with an estrogenic effect. So basically anything that suppresses your immune system, whether that's cortisol or one of these newer drugs the side effect is cancer. So that's what current medicine is offering you. And I think the official explanation is that, well, yes, so what we did is we calculated how many people are likely to get cancer as a result of this drug and of those people how many are likely to die and we compared it to the number of people that are likely to die from not treating their condition and we basically decided on a pure cost-benefit analysis as a result of that it's worth pushing these drugs. Remember, first we don't know if these numbers are right, and the reason we don't know these numbers are right is - aside from the fact that big pharma is known to lie and falsify evidence (Danny, I'll send you a reference on that) - it actually even made the New York Times but [D: You don't need to send me a reference!] apparently it is so systemic that right now there is a serious doubt that about 700 of the 1000 most important generic drugs being produced and sold in the United States, the evidence around them is at best questionable and in some cases it was known to be fraudulent. So what you have there is the official treatment. So I challenge you to go and check for yourself. Basically if you get any of these drugs... so I wanted to also point out that the reason why we shouldn't be so trusting, not so much because the FDA may be evil or incompetent but because we don't really know - and Ray said it many times and it's been verified... most older doctors will tell you - we don't know the full side effect profile of a drug until at least 20 years have passed with that drug being used in a wide circulation. In other words, that is the true clinical trial: it's starting to sell that drug to the general public and twenty years later accumulating the data and seeing what the drug does. So, in effect, all these clinical trials that have been done for all of the drugs that you're currently putting in your mouth, all they really achieve is showing that these drugs will not kill you immediately - in other words, within a year. Anything after that is fair game.
D: Something I love that Ray said was that x-rays used to be used to treat acne and ringworm and lupus. And then my friend Lex Rooker - I think he's about sixty years old - he verified that and told me, yeah, I used to go get x-rays for my acne. And the bizarre part about that being that he explained how effective it was for temporarily reducing the inflammation and getting rid of his acne. And of course the long-term harmful effects of getting chronic x-rays for a problem like that, causing things like cancer and so on. And never really knowing if the treatment you're receiving is safe until way later, like you're talking about.
G: Yeah, and you know I think whenever you are about to injest a drug, which even now has the admitted side effects of increased cancer, you should probably be asking yourself 'is this really worth it'? Now I'm not encouraging people to stop taking their drugs. What I am encouraging is that you should question your doctor to the very end and ask for data and ask for information and evidence that it is truly worth it to take a drug for a condition that in many cases is not lethal - I know it's very unpleasant - but you should question your doctor to give his or her view of why the benefit is higher than the risk in this particular case. And you shouldn't just accept the regurgitations from... because many doctors will just hand you over the brochure that the pharma company gave them and they'll say read up on that. Would you take as the official version... if you go to your mechanic and he says 'this car is done and needs to be replaced', wouldn't you ask for a second opinion? Somebody who was not involved. And actually, ideally, if you take it to another mechanic that mechanic may also say the same thing. Keep in mind they're in the same industry, so they all have an incentive to fix your car and charge you. So it would have been great if there was a way to go to somebody who does not have a vested interest in you buying that drug in asking for a second opinion. Unfortunately for many people in the western world that's not possible because any doctor will have a vested interest, cause they're probably selling the same drug. That's how they make money, that's how they pay their loans from medical school, by selling you these things that that official pharma brochures say that they're both safe and effective.
D: So like shifting over to the alternative, cause I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are convinced that their physician might not know exactly what they're doing. What's wrong with something like - if you're not familiar with the paleo autoimmune protocol, it's a highly restrictive, basically vegetable and meat diet. If you were diagnosed with an autoimmune problem, what would be wrong with just tackling that diet to the extreme, would you see any problem with that?
G: I see a huge problem with that. I mean, that diet is basically the reduced version of the official treatment with cortisone. What you will get from eating all this meat and vegetables is likely a drop in blood sugar - because protein stimulates insulin release like nothing else, not even glucose compares to it - and after the blood glucose falls, you will get cortisol increase, and cortisol will start eating at your muscle tissue and destroying your thymus and also stimulating the production and release of estrogen, so it will burden your liver, it will inhibit the conversion of the hormone T4 into the active hormone T3. So, if we agree with the idea that cortisol and estrogen, these catabolic stress hormones, are only beneficial in the short run, because they suppress your immune system, but they truly contribute to pathology long-term, that'll be one of the worst diets you would want to do. I mean, it will be not as powerful, but it will be similar in principle to doing the radiation treatment, or eating a diet that is high in PUFA (that probably will have a similar effect) or getting a cortisone shot. I mean, if anything, the cortisone shot may actually be the least damaging, because there are ways to control the side effects of cortisone. I don't know if there are ways to control systemic side effects of a bad diet. If you increase your intake of the hormone DHEA, maybe even progesterone, you can negate some of the side effects of a cortisone injection that is given to you for acute exacerbation, but if you eat a poor diet that chronically tells your body that these things need to be overproduced, I don't know how you would defend against that, other than correcting your diet. You know, that'll be the first thing to do.
D: The other side of that coin usually is attempting to 'fix the gut' and usually the way to do that from the alternative is to take fermented foods or prebiotics or probiotics. What are your thoughts on that?
G: Well, so, here's, I think, a perfect example is if you think that probiotics are good for you, I should tell you that even modern medicine admits that the lactobacillus strain may be a direct cause of lupus. So, if you don't believe me, if you don't believe Ray, just go and google 'lactobacillus space lupus' and read the links that are coming from PubMed. That's official research. Don't read the blogs - some of them are legit, but if you want to show you doctor something that that he or she will take more seriously - ha, I don't know, maybe they won't - but show up wth PubMed studies if you want to have a 1% chance of being taken seriously. So do that and see... right now there's a serious debate about whether some of the lactobacillus strains, especially, I think, the casei one, lactobacillus casei is a direct cause of the trigger that actually starts lupus. They're not gonna say it's the causative agent and you shouldn't be eating your yogurt and things like that, they're saying it may be the thing that triggers that bad immune response that never seems to go away. For example, I don't know that there has been a single case of a baby - which tend to have a mostly sterile gut - having an autoimmune condition. And also I have seen studies on animals and on adult animals that have had their guts rendered sterile, in other words there is almost no bacteria there. These animals are remarkably resilient to things like endotoxemic shock and the development of autoimmune conditions. There is a rodent model of multiple sclerosis, it's called EAE (experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis)... it has been shown that taking the human equivalent dose of tetracycline - I think it was only about a hundred milligrams - given to rats basically prevented them from developing this condition, no matter what causative agents the scientists tried to administer.
D: When we're talking about autoimmunity, we're really talking about tissue damage.
G: Exactly. So I think the term autoimmune should be reframed into... there is excessive tissue damage going on somewhere, it's always systemic, but you may have the exact symptoms in the specific tissue, even though if you do the proper tests you will probably find the systemic biomarkers as well. So I think the autoimmune condition should be reframed as 'systemic tissue damage', 'systemic wasting syndrome' almost, if it's systemic. Like HIV, basically - it's the autoimmune condition of the entire body. HIV people basically waste away, kinda like diabetic people or people with cancer. In fact, if you see a person with advanced AIDS, it will be impossible for you to tell the difference between that and a cachexic cancer patient dying from the loss of muscle mass and other important tissues, like the thymus and liver and brain.
D: And you mentioned there was a drug for AIDS, that the sole mechanism of the drug was to deplete phosphate, showing the importance of regulating parathyroid hormone and prolactin, which they seem to increase each other.
H: Yeah. And here are some of the other things that have been tried for AIDS. So, depleting phosphorous was one thing, which has the side effect of increasing calcium, so the calcium to phosphorus ratio will increase as a result of that drug. Other things that have been tried for AIDS include aspirin. As a matter of fact the trial was so successful that it was stopped in the mid nineties and if you look at the preliminary results that were published, they said it is extremely promising, but some people got elevated liver enzymes, so we stopped it. Nobody died, right. I mean, these people have a deadly condition. Is that a reason to stop a trial? But apparently it is. But the conclusions are there: 4 grams of aspirin daily for two weeks basically completely removed the symptoms of AIDS - and we're not talking about HIV, we're talking about AIDS which is already the manifested disease. These people already are at risk of dying from pneumonia or even from a simple flu virus, because their immune system is already destroyed. So inhibiting the release of free fatty acids, which is one of the primary mechanisms of aspirin, in opposing estrogen, which is probably the primary mechanism of action of aspirin, even though it binds to no known receptor, right. If you look at the way aspirin stimulates the cells, and the way it works on metabolism, and the way it works on tissues, and you count - let's say you pick fifty different ways it does that and you do the same thing for estrogen, it will be approximately in the opposite way. So you can think of aspirin as the functional estrogen antagonist. So, aspirin was very successful. Niacinamide was also extremely successful. 3 grams of niacinamide for a month, again, put these people in remission. So what does niacinamide do? A number of good things, but again the primary thing is it lowers lipolysis, so inhibits lypolysis, you have less free fatty acids in the blood and increases the levels of NAD to NADH, because niacinamide is a precursor to NAD. So it puts your body in an oxidized state versus a reduced state. If you check the NADH levels of any person with an autoimmune condition or HIV or cancer, you'll find that it's abnormally high. Normally the ratio of NAD to NADH in healthy people is about one thousand. In in sick people it can drop to as low as a hundred or even lower. So that'll be a very good way to test for systemic disease: check the NAD to NADH ratio. So, niacinamide being a precursor to NAD raises that ratio and basically when you raise that ratio your body does not have to be stuck in glycolysis. So whenever you have an overproduction of NADH - and we discussed this in one of the previous shows - when we have an excess of NADH the body needs its NAD in order to continue metabolising it to keep you alive. So what does it do? It tries to oxidize NADH back to NAD. And in the absence of oxygen in hypoxic conditions, in anaerobic conditions when oxygen cannot do its job of oxidizing NADH back to NAD - it normally does it in the electron transport chain - the body will use pyruvate to oxidize NADH. And in oxidizing NADH, pyruvate will be converted to lactate. So, test anybody with an autoimmune condition or HIV, you will find their lactate is high and carbon dioxide is low. So if you look systemically, there is very little difference between a person with HIV and a person with cancer. There's very little difference between a person with an autoimmune condition and a person with cancer. It's probably just a matter of intensity. But if you look at advanced cases, and I think there was a recent study done on multiple sclerosis, people with advanced cases of multiple sclerosis called primary progressive MS (PPMS), they had actually the same systemic biomarkers as people with stage three cancer. So, this tells you something. These are diseases that are apparently caused by different agents, right - a lot of them apparently are genetic, at least that's the official version - however they all seem to manifest in a very similar, if not the same, way and the agents that help are all agents that oppose estrogen, oppose cortisol, stimulate oxidative phosphorylation, inhibit excessive glycolysis, stimulate the Krebs cycle. So it all comes down to structure and function. Without proper energy, in other words without proper function, you cannot maintain structure and some cells will begin to disintegrate. What is the natural response of the immune system in this case? Go out there, take these things and get them out of the body, right. You don't want to die from blood poisoning. That's the purpose of the immune system, not to attack you. And in a very similar way, that's how cancer develops. In a hypoxic condition the cells, since they cannot perform their differentiated function, they revert back to their primary function, which is division and growth.
D: Hans Selye's work forms a good foundation for that, what you just mentioned, that general adaptation syndrome and how something like stress and energy could result in all these different diseases. I think he mentioned like if you were talking to a caveman and were telling him electricity could light a lamp and a radio and the computer, the caveman would be like 'you're crazy', but we kinda do the same thing with medicine, like it has to be all these very specific things and they can't relate to each other.
G: Then why are they together in the same sack, right? [Laughing.] Randomly, the environment by random mutation and random decisions of impersonal atomic forces, somehow these things came together.