Designs for Health Research & Education Blog
Breathe Easier with Bromelain
Posted on Thu, Oct 09, 2014 @ 09:30 AM
Here: http://info.designsforhealth.com/blog/breathe-easier-with-bromelain accessed 10/10/14
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"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol. In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to "pure" fluid was alcohol. Whatever health risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol's antibacterial properties. Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties. Many genetically minded historians believe that the confluence of urban living and the discovery of alcohol created a massive selection pressure on the genes of all humans who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Alcohol, after all, is a deadly poison and notoriously addictive. To digest large quantities of it, you need to be able to boost production of enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases, a trait regulated by a set of genes on chromosome four in human DNA. Many early agrarians lacked that trait, and thus were genetically incapable of "holding their liquor." Consequently, many of them died childless at an early age, either from alcohol abuse or from waterborne diseases. Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol. (The same is true of lactose tolerance, which went from a rare genetic trait to the mainstream among descendants of the herders, thanks to domestication of livestock.) The descendants of hunter gatherers--like many Native Americans or Australian Aborigines--were never forced through this genetic bottleneck, and so today they show disproportionate rates of alcoholism. The chronic drinking problem in Native American populations has been blamed on everything from the weak "Indian constitution" to the humiliating abuses of the U.S. reservation system. But their alcohol intolerance most likely has another explanation: their ancestors didn't live in towns."
--Steven Johnson, in The Ghost Map, pages 103-4.

A new study shows that patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) do not progress to dementia if they drink enough coffee! Gotta love it. I'm going to start drinking a whole pot, by golly. The researchers in this study think that it's the caffeine, and not the anti-oxidants, that has the anti-dementia effect, but according to mouse studies, it has to be coffee. Those patients with a little MCI who java it up enough to have a plasma caffeine level of 1200ng/mL did not go into dementia. 100%. The caffeine appears to inhibit an enzyme used in the manufacture of beta amyloid! They're also tracking cytokines in the plasma and finding that there's a particular profile assorted with conversion to Alzheimer's disease (low IL-6, IL-10, and G-CSF). In the future we might consider testing for those cytokines to detect impending dementia in healthy patients.
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and including Persistent Organic Pollutants and Plastics
Kids with exposure to nature have less ADHD
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sites for assessing micronutrient contents of food
www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/
www.nutritiondata.com
( our last nutrition I lecture with professor Gerber, moved forward from same date 2009, already got thyroid, anemia bitsCollapse )

Funny how exciting a revelation like this can be to me. I finally understand why in alcoholic liver disease the AST is often elevated more than the ALT. Also the GGT may be normal. Why? Because both AST and GGT are dependent on vitamin B6 for their manufacture, and that particular nutrient is depleted by heavy drinking. Ha. Why didn't somebody tell me that years ago?

GENETIC TESTING COULD PREVENT ADVERSE DRUG EFFECTS
more than 50% of pts have variations in 8-10 liver enzymes that affect drug metabolism
Mayo Clinic psychiatry and psychology dept has used genetic testing x2yrs
other clinics and departments are catching on
varying enzyme levels affect how long drug stays in system, how much it builds up with dosing
or how much levels dip between doses
pts who are unresponsive to their meds, or have bad reactions to meds, will be interested in this
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Methotraxate is one of the drugs often used in chemotherapy. It interferes with folate metabolism by acting as a competitive inhibitor of the enzyme dihydrofolate reductase. Without this enzyme, the cells are starved for tetrahydrofolate, and unable to make purines (adenine, guanine) and dTPM. This is especially toxic to fast-growing cells, like cancer cells.

How does a cancer become resistant to this drug?
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... should stop drinking and eat selenium.

Esophageal Cancer Risk Factors
ALDH2 Deficiency and Selenium
Jacob Schor ND FABNO
April 15, 2009
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1. Vitamins: small, low molecular weight, organic mols required for normal function, most we don't synthesize, classified as fat or water soluble.

Which vitamins are derived from isopentenyl pyrophosphate? Vitamin A (terpene), D, E, K, cholesterol
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