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A Medical Emergency, 5 Years Low A, SIBO...and help wanted
For what it is worth, my bet is that the parasites are an effect not a cause. Drinking untreated river water is a bad idea. Anyone doing that is bound to have made one or two other less than trivial mistakes along the way. Speaking from the most humbling experience imaginable.
So my bet is that he is deficient and has been so long that his current systems are too broke to repair and protect themselves as they need. Suggest you drill down on thread on twitter / x on @nutridetect and ask questions of everyone on those threads about Garrett Smith and his recommendations. If more willing to look without spending money, drill down through Garrett's 160 livestreams posted on youtube. If willing to risk $100 annual subscription, get on Love Your Liver network and argue out ideas with all of us on there to help your son come up with his own protocol to turn things around.
Having made similar mistakes and having worked through various paradigms for the last 5 decades, it is understandable that he gets some temporary relief each time he studies and tries a new paradigm. To get past that slow long descent through ever worse problems requires a more basic workable knowledge.
#toxicbiletheory has and is working out to be that paradigm for a growing number of us. Grant is far from alone in getting good results. Best of luck. Hope he and your whole family do better soon.
Quote from Sarabeth on July 29, 2024, 5:36 pmI wanted to quickly update you all, because if I wait for quiet and peacefulness and an attentive brain, I will never post again, and I rarely read anymore anyway, so I'm gonna go for it with two children whining at once and a third about to start...
My eldest "baby" is recuperating. It's been almost eight weeks since the horrible event and subsequent surgery, and after I last posted here, we consulted with Karen Hurd. Her unique and interesting approach to "SIBO" seemed absolutely worth trying, since she advocates for eliminating supplements if at all possible (he wasn't on any at that point), using food to heal, and since he was eating an incredibly limited diet - meat and broth - at that point, it was very easy to test whether a food agreed or disagreed with him.
Synopsis of Hurd's approach (which is totally ignoring of Grant's vitamin A hypotheses in her personal opinions and practices, but is incredibly compatible so long as you remove the high-beta-carotene veggies): she claims that sugar does not "feed" "bad gut microbes" in the small intestine or anywhere else, at least not by way of causation like many gut-health protocols claim. And it is true that many people have similar "overgrowths" of "bad" bacteria in the "wrong" parts of the digestive tract and have zero symptoms from them, so I can buy her theses on that point, at least. Instead, she says that sugar triggers a hormone cascade after every meal, which overwhelms the liver and biliary system, because not only insulin ("the master hormone") but all sorts of other hormones - rather than being mopped up and recycled by the bile and the liver - get "dumped" into the digestive tract, and the body, sensing emergency, turns off a bunch of enzymatic and other digestive processes to cope. Then, rather than food getting digested by enzymes etc. and absorbed throughout the digestive system, the body essentially turns on fermentative digestion (not as a cause of the problem, but as a result). Once this switch has flipped, all of a sudden microbes in various places are inundated with all sorts of undigested foods they shouldn't have access to during normal digestion, and can have a field day, causing all sorts of digestive and other problems, gas, pain, bloating, nausea. Toxins are supposed to be captured in bile and then dumped into the large intestine and pooped out. But he body re-uses ~95% of the bile again...and the situation with such haywire digestion is that not much of the toxin load is being excreted, but rather continues to go round and round in the bile, overwhelming the system after every meal, resulting in the body's so-called "enterohepatic circulation" becoming greatly impaired and toxic.
What to do? Hurd says we need to use soluble fiber, which has a great affinity toward absorbing certain toxins, and acts as a binder, allowing them to be excreted in the poop.
First of all, my son tried beans, which fascinatingly - since we had thought it was triggered by carbs in general - did not cause indigestion (which is possibly bile reflux?? He reports it is incredibly intense and unpleasant when it happens). He quickly ramped up to eating 1/3 cup of beans 6X day. Next came rice, which was a thumbs up in that it also did not cause indigestion. It seemed that Hurd was right about simple sugars including fruit being very different hormonally and digestively from starches. It's been really really hard for him to gauge his appetite, because....for years it's been mostly nonexistent, in that he ate when it was mealtime, ate what he was served, ate a lot when he was growing...and then recently after the new year and until the surgery, kept eating obsessively even when full. He didn't ever develop any sort of Body Intuition around food, possibly a continuation of the fact that after having a severe eating disorder as a small child, he had to literally force himself to eat from the age of six onward, and even once he liked and felt nourished by eating, his appetite was never "usual." He thinks that a lot of sensations that he used to think were "hunger" or "fullness" were actually pain, bloating, gas, etc....and so in place of intuition right now, since he still cannot gauge quantities, he settled on Hurd's suggested servings: in addition to beans 3x day between meals, for each meal he's now eating about 3-4oz lean meat, 1/3 cup cooked beans, ~1 cup cooked white rice, along with lots of water.
Every attempt to add either more animal fat or vegetables has resulted in that terrible indigestion. Eating more food overall has also not worked too well, since his digestion feels pretty delicate and perhaps his stomach shrunk? It must have. The constipation finally cleared after two weeks, but motility is still not great. Hurd suggests avocado/non-animal-fats to help this, once he can digest them, so he will be trying avocado later this week since many trials of vegetables have just not been working. (Ordinarily she recommends nuts in addition to the beans etc. for constipation (side note: which has been working GREAT for me!), but that does not seem at all advisable for a recuperating stomach so he hasn't tried these. Additionally, he discovered that overdoing exercise in heat (even a semi-vigorous walk) could bring on the bile (?) reflux.
He has lost about 30 pounds since the surgery and would like to regain that muscle, obviously. He is exhausted and prone to extreme fatigue, and I suspect that his iron and zinc are low or dysregulated, but we are scared to try any supplements ever again. Not sure how to proceed on that one. Not really sure how to proceed overall, although Hurd's ideas have shown extremely promising initial results (i.e stability and turning around the Degeneration that seemed to be happening in his digestion for the first few weeks after the surgery) so he is certainly continuing for now.
It's not clear why exactly his gut is behaving this way. We talked with someone who had the exact same stomach-rupture-"out-of-the-blue" in his early twenties (incidentally, it was during a through hike of the Appalachian trail!), and this person similarly took something inadvisable for stomachs - ibuprofen - right before the rupture...but it shouldn't have _caused_ the rupture, just like Ben's betaine hcl consumption was certainly in retrospect inadvisable, but most people who take it - almost everyone - does NOT rupture their stomach. Anyway, this person was put on PPIs 18 years ago, and continues to take them now, since he was told he'll need them for the rest of his life.
It's certainly likely that my son would be told to take a PPI now, but I can't see any reason it would do anything besides (possibly) cover up symptoms, and it could cause a lot of damage. So I'm hopeful that Hurd's dietary approach will continue to be useful. I am curious if others have had experience with her protocol? If you've posted on this forum and I haven't found it, feel free to paste links for me. My brain is toasted.
Okay, must go. Thank you all so much for your thoughts and well wishes.
Good on you. Hurd is genius. Surprised she has not incorporated activated charcoal in that mix yet. Beef and bison on your best bet for zinc, taurine and everything else needed to repair. Small meals are a good thing. Might be interested to know that Barry Sears in '95 published Zone Diet. Small meals 6 times a day for a total of 1500 to 2500 calories depending on size and activity level. Meals balanced with carbs/fat/protein - 40/30/30. The reason I brought it up: Sears was researching how aspirin works when he stumbled on to its activity on metabolism in particular insulin. He reasoned out and proved that metering the macros in terms of time and in balance improves the hormone balance and flow minimizing symptoms. Helped me gain back weight in the 90's and 2000's. Glad to see improvements keep them coming.