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Progress Report - Viktor
Yes, once you have had Kim Chi it's hard to go back to regular kraut. I try to make a "less red" version of Kim Chi. The method of making it is quite different for the two products and the texture is different. One of the big differences too is that Kim Chi has some sugar, and hey, that doesn't have VA! Ourania has the idea that you can add heat by soaking pepper seeds in oil, I suppose a person could try sprinkling that on finished Kim chi. This whole fermented cabbage thing is still a work in progress for me, but really cabbage and salt is the point of it all! It's all good.
Roughly 9 months now.
Just after writing the last update I ran into a really bad cold, well basically only a completely congested nose, that would not go away. For weeks I would spray my nose 3x/day in order to breathe. Then after two weeks I developed a painful sinusitis. With heat lamp application 3x/day and some bed rest I finally became better.
This ordeal made me abandon the diet a little bit, so I ended up eating more butter and cheese again.
Then came vacation time, with lots of junk food: pasta with tomato sauce, pizza, fries with ketchup... Interestingly, all this stopped my detox symptoms pretty much.
When we got back home, detox symptoms started showing again - cloudy urine, brain fog, pain in the right foot, stiff knee. Allergies are also back it seems, I react to apple peels again, sigh.
One day my wife bought some spinach pie at the market, which tasted great, but the next day I had really bad brain fog. So I had reason again to restrict my diet a bit.
So far it's working, I'm getting better again, mostly. There last few days I had s bad migraine attack, not sure why. Maybe caused by a virus infection my son had? Today I felt rather hung over and I felt the need for fresh air. This reminded me of what Grant wrote about how RA depletes blood hemoglobin, so you end up low in oxygen capacity.
So overall I'd summarize the summer as a bit loose. I still think I made some progress. Energy levels a little bit better, I also think my testosterone is a bit higher lately, and I feel more confident and relaxed (it was rather low ~8 years ago when I measured it).
Diet mostly unchanged. I'm adding some spelt flakes or sunflower seeds to by oatmeal. Supplements are small amounts of B complex, Mg, vit C, taurine, Se. Activated charcoal as needed, or when I eat something like tomato sauce.
I may reduce these supplements a bit further and see how it goes. It feels a bit tedious to eat all those pills.
One year!
This year was quite stressful for me (unrelated to the detox), so my nutrition has much room for improvement. My VA intake is not very high, but also not very low. I had a not very bad, but very long cold in October and November (almost 7 weeks), and only after a few days in bed did it get better. Maybe it was different viruses, no idea.
The one change I made since summer is that the cold basically made me ramp up vitamin C quite a bit, hoping it would help (and maybe it prevented it from getting worse?), so I was taking up to 4g every day, at first buffered, but that made me rather thirsty at night (because of the sodium?), so I started taking it with only a little buffer. I really like the taste, the soda adds just a bit of fizz, so it's like lemonade! After a while I started having kidney pains. I think that may have been an oxalate issue, so I reduced my intake, and also started buffering more. Not sure if my early detox symptoms were also caused by oxalate, but I don't think so. I've never observed problems after any amount of potatoes or chocolate, lol.
Right now I take 500mg/day VC (so much more than before the cold), half buffered, and I think I'll keep taking it. In hindsight I probably had run into a deficit, also because I stopped eating or drinking oranges and red peppers. While I was taking the higher doses of VC, I noticed that my joint pains pretty much stopped, even my one bad finger was almost back to normal. My hand skin also felt silky smooth, very nice. Overall, my hands are probably in much better shape than usually in the winter, we'll see.
I'm suffering from a bit of vertigo and brain fog right now, not sure if these could also be oxalate related, or if reducing VC caused a VA dump? Anyway, they seem to be improving slowly.
Overall, I'll keep doing what I do, and see how it goes.
I've read that VC slows down the detox, but I'm not sure it's in a bad way. If detox symptoms are caused by too much retinoic acid, that means the body produces more RA than it can process, so using VC to slow down ALDH will basically just reduce RA production to a manageable amount. If you reduce your VA intake at the same time, the body should improve. At least that's my current approach.
I should add that before increasing VC I had some consistent light joint pain and my left knee was quite stiff, if I didn't move it for a while. I'm glad that that's much better now.
Back when my finger joint problems started, my doctor said it's probably gout and that I should reduce dairy and meat (something with purines), which didn't really seem to help, also I didn't much meat. Now I did some reading on what separates gout from the usual VA-induced arthritis, and the thing is that gout is caused by uric acid. I found a really good article on some German fitness page, which basically stated that the above hint doesn't work because the body produces like 80% of it's uric acid not from purines, but that one factor is fructose metabolism. So basically fructose = bad, and sugar is 50% fructose. And all this time I was munching chocolate like crazy (usually like 50% sugar, I.e. 25%fructose!). Wow. Why didn't my doctor tell me??
Anyway, I'm still eating fruit (apple, pear, banana), but trying to dial down the sweets a bit and have some nuts instead. My finger inflammation is much better, even with not much vit C, and my knee isn't as stiff, anymore.
I reduced vit C to about 200-300mg, which works for me, and I'm down from 2 eggs a day to mostly one, to reduce VA further.
As an experiment I started taking Lecithin, to make up for the one egg less. I'm only taking the "child dosage" of 7g, which is like 1,5g phosphatidylcholine. I started at double, but it gives me brain fog. Poop is great, though 😆
In fact, even 7g daily seems like too much. I feel, and have, quite high blood pressure, and when I stop Lecithin it seems to normalize after a few days (e.g. 147/86 vs 123/80). So not sure if it's really as good as studies seem to claim. I'm also concerned about the high linoleic acid content (I got soy lecithin, but Sunflower seems similar).
Sugar, as in fructose, is also a real problem for me. I switched from simple dextrose to sugar when I learned that the corn starch that was the basis for the dextrose was heavily sprayed with glyphosate. It wasn't organic. For a while everything was fine, but then the insomnia would come back like never before. Now I've switched back to organic dextrose and my sleep has normalized somewhat. At least not as crazy as before. Fructose actually becomes toxic in hypervitmanisos A, the liver is already overloaded, with fructose being metabolized by the liver, it will have to work in overdrive.
@christian What brand of organic dextrose do you like to use?
Thanks
It's an Austrian brand: https://www.bioservice.at/produkte/bio-traubenzucker-kristall-dextrose/ Not sure where you are. Charlie from the Ray Peat Forum recommended this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019HL11ZK/?tag=rapef020-20
I've actually been trying to find a grape derived dextrose. It's really hard to come by. There are some listings on Alibaba but they're usually from China, which makes me skeptical. Another problem with grapes is that they're pretty high in fluoride. But I would really make sure to get organic for the cornstarch made dextrose. I didn't pay attention to this issue and probably inadvertently ingested more glyphosate than I should have.
@christian Thanks. That one Charlie recommended does not say it is organic, so if we're trying to avoid glyphosate, maybe it isn't a good option. It doesn't seem to list whether the dextrose is from corn or another source.