In Reply to: Chapter 13 posted by Robert McFerran on October 03, 1997 at 16:27:45:
Bob,
I have read chapters 9 through 13 and really don't have any great comments to make that I feel would add to your work. I have obviously done a tremendous amount of research.
Thanks for your time and effort. I look forward to reading more.
Peter
In Reply to: Re: Chapter 13 posted by Peter Wray on October 05, 1997 at 00:20:18:
Peter,
Thanks for keeping up!
You and others (via e-mail) have given great comments and helped with a lot of the typos and grammar. It's amazing how often I've read over this thing and still missed obvious errors.
Thanks again.
I'll post chapters 14 and 15 now -- that will complete the first section of the book.
Bob
In Reply to: Arthritis-Searching for the Truth-Searching for the Cure posted by Robert McFerran on September 21, 1997 at 12:02:37:
Chapter 14
By now some of the riddles of what you (and your doctor) considered a mysterious disease have begun to unravel. You can see that your body has a predetermined, true, genetic self that cannot be violated. The myriad of symptoms including problems with weight, allergies, headaches, fatigue, sleep, depression and finally arthritis are all signs that you’ve been swimming against the current. In many cases for a very long time.
Dr. Price’s work with indigenous populations demonstrates that health to some degree is inherited. Dr. Pottenger’s cat studies give hope that we can reverse inherited damage.
I’m alternately frustrated and sad that with our mountain of medical expertise that so much of health is left to dumb luck.
Witness two farmers (who happen to be brothers) living only miles apart from each other somewhere in rural U.S.A. Both eat the same foods (with breakfasts consisting of bacon, sausage, farm fresh eggs and whole milk) every day. They both do the same work, breath the same air and have similar stresses filling their everyday lives. One brother has a chronic weight problem, develops high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis and suffers an early death from heart attack. The other brother’s health seems to be almost bulletproof even though he smokes and is a moderate drinker. He lives to be 93. What’s going on here?
In this instance one brother has stumbled upon a diet that meets his metabolic needs very well. The other brother has been less fortunate. Even though he doesn’t smoke or drink he finds himself confronted with a relentless physiological stressor, a diet mismatched to his inherited metabolic needs. He is swimming against the current and as his physiological strength is depleted he is carried into a disease state.
You can also see why rheumatoid disease and arthritis in general have a strong yet unpredictable presence in so many family trees. The inborn gene holding the ‘extreme’ metabolism is like a card waiting to be dealt. Once received it can only be offset if the person inheriting it eats in an ‘extreme’ manner too. All things being equal those with metabolisms at the extreme ends of the spectrum will have a high probability for disease while those in the middle will be spared.
Dr. Wiley, armed with sophisticated blood plasma pH testing capabilities, sought to find what percentage of people would fall into each of the 3 metabolic subgroups. What he discovered was significant. Approximately 85% of all men inherited metabolisms that would benefit from the ‘light’ dietary regimen. Therefore the general movement to a more vegetarian diet, one lower in fat and especially restrictive in purine rich red meats, would have a profound benefit for a majority (85%) of the male population.
Well documented studies by Dr. Nathan Pritikin and later by Dr. Dean Ornish demonstrated that a very low fat (less than 10%) diet would actually reverse coronary and vascular disease. Of course the sample of patients that they were testing happened to be the subgrou p of the male population with ‘metabolisms that could only be satisfied with this ‘light’ diet. To make matters worse they resided in the ‘extreme’ end of that subgroup.
The remaining 15% of the male population (occupying the other two subgroups) would metabolize fats, purines and cholesterol well and show no ill effects from a diet high in these food constituents. They would, by definition, be at low risk for coronary and vascular problems. However since they didn’t display coronary problems they were overlooked in these dietary studies.
A Center for Disease Control (CDC) study recently found that obese men were 70% more likely to suffer from arthritis. At the same time men who were underweight were 40% more likely to suffer from arthritis than men of normal weight. This dichotomy strongly suggests that the men with arthritis were also the men possessing ‘extreme’ metabolisms. The CDC surmised in their study findings that weight alone is a risk factor, and a modifiable one. Their recommendation to the overweight group was to lose weight. They ignored the fact that the underweight group was similarly predisposed to developing arthritis.
People would not be well served by losing or increasing weight as a means of decreasing their risk for developing arthritis. The underlying reason for their obesity or inability to gain weight is an ‘extreme’ metabolism. If they don’t match the appropriate diet to their inherited metabolic type they would never be able to normalize their weight naturally.
The underweight group could artificially double their caloric intake while the obese group employed diet drugs to normalize their weight but the same deleterious metabolic process would continue. They might actually achieve their normal weight but, fundamentally and metabolically, nothing has really changed. They would still be much more likely to develop arthritis (even at a normal weight) and more medical confusion would be heaped onto the arthritis pile. Abnormal weight correlates with incidence of ar thritis but only because mismatched diet/metabolism creates persistent weight problems.
The balanced diet advanced as nutritionally sound a generation ago is a far cry from what is promoted today. It has taken 30 years for medicine to realize the simple fact that diet was indeed a key factor in, among other things, cardiovascular disease. As a result the healthy American diet has grown progressively lower in fat, protein and especially purine. This movement (as you will soon see) has really done little more than ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’. We are still ‘rolling the dice’ and relying on luck for the largest part of our health.
While a minority of 15% of men will pay the price for eating a ‘light’ diet, women will suffer much more. The casualty count is apparent when you see the statistics showing women are seeing physicians at a rate five times more often than their male counterparts. Dr. Wiley has found that fully 50% of today’s women will require a ‘heavy’ eating regimen at least part of the time.
We are all standing at an intersection preparing to watch an inevitable collision. Women driven by the ever increasing societal pressure to be thin are embracing low fat, high complex carbohydrate, more vegetarian-like diets in every increasing numbers. 50% of women will find magic in these diets, the others will find poison. Even more daunting is the fact that the gene for the ‘heavy’ diet is dominant in women. This means more women will inherit the metabolic need for exactly the opposite of what is being espoused as healthy, wholesome and nutritious.
Dr. Wiley made an even more extraordinary discovery when further observing the metabolisms (and blood plasma pH’s) of women. It would serve to explain why some women complained so bitterly during the pre-menstrual part of their cycles (PMS) while others noted that their major symptoms occurred during menses and still others complained of post menstrual difficulties.
Many women, however, showed no intensification of symptoms at all throughout their hormonal cycles. It is little wonder why physicians concluded that psychological stress or hypochondria was at the root of the majority of these complaints from their female patients. There was little other obvious explanation.
This could also be used to explain away the fact that depression and other mental conditions exhibit a strong gender bias toward females. However hypochondria can not be blamed for the strong preference that rheumatoid diseases exhibit toward women.
Autoimmunity is fairly widespread, occurring in about 5% of the adult population in North America and Europe. Over two-thirds of the patients are female and many have more than one autoimmune disease (the risk of a second autoimmune disease is markedly increased after development of the first). Women are diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis three times more often than their male counterparts. Other rheumatoid diseases show an even greater bias. Ninety percent of lupus sufferers are women.
Wiley discovered that the metab olic needs of many women would actually change with their hormonal cycle. In other words a diet that was matched perfectly during one portion of a menstrual cycle might be completely inappropriate for another part. If a woman ate the same diet all the time she would suffer a huge amount of physiological stress during that portion of her period when her foods didn’t match her metabolic needs. That applied stress would prompt an exacerbation of symptoms.
I have to admit the first time I considered Wiley’s discovery of metabolic cycling I was very skeptical. Dr. Watson had already found that his patients would need to eat in an even more extreme fashion in times of severe cold or heat. For example those already on the ‘heavy’ diet (rich in purines, fats and restricted in carbohydrates) would have to eat even more fat while increasing their restriction of carbohydrates to feel their best. Symptoms would tend to exacerbate during these climactic extremes if this wasn’t taken into account.
This aspect paralleled my readings in nutritional anthropology. The northern cultures that used animals as their primary nutritional source had even more limited access to carbohydrate (from vegetation) during long and bitterly cold winters. Inhabitants of arid climates during hot, drought conditions would face a similar situation. In both instances their bodies would be genetically tuned to accommodate for an even higher percentage of their nutrition from animal sources in order to survive. At times when vegetation was more abundant more would be consumed.
The idea that individuals would vary a bit within their metabolic subset in concert with the seasonal changes seemed very plausible. The possibility of women actually changing their metabolic subset within their hormonal cycle did not.
Of course one of my problems with accepting the above is that I (as a man) had no frame of reference for the experience of changing hormonally or metabolically. Wiley found that men didn’t have hormonal fluctuations that co uld result in cycling into another metabolic subset.
I started asking women about their personal experiences and found that many were already aware of their need for different foods during certain points in their cycle. When I explained the idea of ‘cycling’ from a scientific standpoint they weren’t surprised at all. They had already intuited it.
Of course they didn’t know what were the best foods for them to eat. During the years their cravings might lead them to chocolate and other salty or high fat foods that seemed to ease their symptoms. These same women were the ones that would experience an increase in symptom severity at a certain point in their menstrual cycle.
Not surprisingly the women who did not experience cyclic changes in their symptom severity did not have the same strong cravings. Like men they had a harder time accepting the possibility that some women would need completely different foods during different parts of their cycle.
Dr. Wiley found that men were only capable of shifting into another metabolic subset at two times in their lives; puberty and at the end of their physical growth. The was also true for women but with a caveat. Women could also change after the birth of a baby. Wiley found that these cases were fairly rare but did happen. This might explain the onset of problems in otherwise health individuals after puberty, in their early 20’s (when growth stops) and shortly after childbirth.
Conceivably this is one reason why a woman who was able to quickly and easily normalize back to her pre-pregnancy weight after her first child could have so much problem losing weight after her second childbirth.
It’s well known that in many cases rheumatoid disease onset has occurred shortly after a birth. This metabolic ‘shifting’ phenomenon might be one of the straws that in effect ‘breaks the camels back’ after the huge physiological stress of pregnancy. My readings in anthropological nutrition illuminated the fact that our predecessors didn’t take the nutritiona
l needs of pregnant women lightly. Dr. Weston Price observed that women prepared by modifying their diet well before pregnancy took place. After conception very specific foods would be gathered (sometimes from as far away as 20 miles from their homes). These were considered a necessity in supplementing the mother’s normal diet.
In Reply to: Arthritis-Searching for the Truth-Searching for the Cure posted by Robert McFerran on September 21, 1997 at 12:02:37:
Chapter 15
We resist the fact that much of what we are is genetically predetermined – especially when it inconveniences us. We delude ourselves by thinking that our technology is clever enough to keep us healthy. If you examine what has happened to our health during the last century it becomes apparent that we can’t defy what nature has intended for us.
The monarch butterfly gives us an appreciation of the complexity of what nature has locked into our genetic code. The species travels thousands of miles during the course of a round trip migration. They start from and amazingly return to the same place. This migration seems even more improbable given the fact that at least 3 generations of monarchs are needed just to complete their northern migration. Another 3 generations will expire before reaching home. How do they navigate? How do they know where ‘home’ is when they’ve never seen it? The last butterfly that actually saw ‘home’ was 6 generations ago! Somehow the genetic information is passed (very successfully) from generation to generation.
The last 14 chapters have been devoted to carrying you upstream to find the origins of arthritis. You’ve witnessed where arthritis, rheumatoid and other auto-immune conditions have the same origin as most other chronic conditions. You’ve had to unlearn a great deal about the relationship between diet and arthritis. Initially the facts seemed to diverge but now they might be coming together a bit.
You will find that ALL people will be able to improve their arthritis simply by finding their specific food allergies, inherited metabolic identity and then eating the appropriate whole foods diet. However for most this will not be enough for a cure. There is a whole world of opportunistic micro-organisms that are vigilantly waiting for the defensive shields provided by our immune system to drop. These micro-organisms stimulate the immune system using the same gateway as foods. They have keen instincts for survival and once they’ve gotten a foothold, it will take special measures to dislodge them.
The next several chapters will be devoted to moving back downstream. We need to get a greater appreciation of what happens along the way to developing arthritis and rheumatoid disease.
In Reply to: Chapter 15 posted by Robert McFerran on October 05, 1997 at 11:36:55:
I've been looking forward to reading more chapters from your book, but can't seem to find one beyond 15. Let me know if they are labeled differently or are still under development.
Thank you.
In Reply to: Re: Chapter 15 posted by ernie on December 01, 1997 at 21:10:03:
I have also been reading your chapter, but things seem to
have come to a standstill, are you having writer's block? I
have found it interesting so far, and would like to see more