I've been writing this blog with two main target audiences in mind. One group I've been writing to is the patient that might benefit from more information on nutrition, lifestyle and health. The other group is the acupuncturist or health care practitioner who might benefit from summaries of studies I'm reading or things I find in the research, which may apply to their practices, or they might just find interesting.
I've split these up now. For patients trying to keep track of new articles on various health concerns I've started doing those over at my Healing Jones blog. As of this post, I just finished a recipe for bone broth that I think my patients will really benefit from. I would encourage my patients and lay readers to keep track of postings there and post questions or comments on those articles as this is a great venue to discuss these topics.
For practitioners looking for juicy research developments those will continue here at Modern Herbal. For my next article I'm gathering research on how the variations in the microbiota may influence the absorption of different herbs in our pharmacopeia. I'm pretty excited about that, and there is some pretty neat stuff out there.
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
How to Prevent Alzheimer's Disease with Bottled Water
Alzheimer's disease is a slow, tragically insidious, soul wrenching disease. It grinds out a gradual destruction of neurons by causing neural atrophy, and gumming up the wiring with amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. It doesn't just result in a slow death, it also washes out a person's personality and independence. Who they are ceases to be before their physical shell does, and that is traumatizing to witness. We can't say that we've got a full understanding of everything that is happening. What we can say that it is a multi-factorial disease. Like most diseases of modernization (autism, diabetes, auto-immune disease, cancer) there are a lot of causative factors in Alzheimer's disease.
Our current understanding puts a lot of emphasis on a few key factors: insulin function in the brain, vascular damage, and neurotoxicity from environmental toxins. Aluminum has come up in research over the years, and while there is nothing approaching a consensus on this factor, it remains a significant area of ongoing research. Aluminum, like any mineral, is important but not by itself. Our understanding of minerals, and indeed all nutrients, has evolved. Our current understanding of minerals (not yet embraced by all) is that minerals act in coordination with each other, and no mineral can be understood in any valuable way without the context of other minerals and nutrients it occurs with.
One mineral that has gained a lot of popularity for its importance in chronic disease is magnesium. Most of the people who read this blog know that most people eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) are deficient in magnesium, and that supplementing it is important for their health and can improve various conditions from insomnia to heart disease and high blood pressure. But there are a lot of other minerals that are being ignored and the intake of them can be just as important. One that is less talked about is silica. Silica is an important mineral to discuss, and as you will see it bears heavily on the development and prevention of Alzheimer's disease.
Silica is one of the 3 most abundant elements on the planet (along with aluminum and oxygen), but isn't much talked about. On the surface there doesn't seem to be much to talk about. When we examine the presence of silica in our bodies not a whole lot shows up. We see it present in connective tissue and bones mainly, where it contributes to the matrix lending those structures their strength and resiliency. But, when it comes to interacting with our biology from an enzymatic stand-point, it is basically inert. Magnesium plugs in as a key player in all sorts of enzymatic processes in our bodies. Unlike magnesium, there don't seem to be any enzymes that use or rely on silica to function.
It does, however, perform one very, very important job in the body. Remember that aluminum and silica are 2 of the 3 most common elements on our planet, and as such our biology is built around these elements existing in a particular ratio in the food and drink we take in. Our body, in its incredible, brilliant complexity, has evolved a process using silica to chelate excess aluminum out of our bodies. Silica in a meal with aluminum will also prevent it from being absorbed in the first place. In the proper, naturally occurring ratio it does a pretty good job of doing that. When our intake of micronutrients is generally low, as it is with current agricultural techniques, we don't get nearly enough silica. Yet aluminum is ubiquitous. It comes from our cookware, it's in storage containers, and it's used in drinking water treatment plants so it's in city water. Basically, we get way too much aluminum, and without the silica to counter it, our bodies accumulate excess aluminum. That's not a good thing.
Getting that excess aluminum out of the body is important, because aluminum has been found to be neurotoxic. The plaques formed in Alzheimer's disease contain aluminum. Most of the studies on Alzheimer's find that people with higher aluminum exposure are more likely to develop Alzheimer's. (For instance: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361923001004592). And all of the studies looking at the effect of aluminum on brain function find it to be neurotoxic.
Studies also demonstrate that patients who consume more silica (due to increased amounts in their food and water) tend to have lower levels of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. (Here are two examples: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/81/4/897.short, and http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/169/4/489.short.)
This is a great example of evolutionary biology setting us up to function best in a particular environment. Our job then is to fix our exposure to come more in line with the biology we have developed. The trick is, how to get that silica? Unfortunately, in the majority of food sources silica is not well absorbed. We don't get a lot out of the fibrous vegetables that contain the most (celery, chard, kale). Silica also comes in barley, oats and other grains, in which it can be much better absorbed. It will be concentrated in the outer layers of the grain so whole grains are the best source. Its presence in grains in turn means that it will be present in beer, the highest content is found in IPA, (Indian Pale Ales, cheers). Without knowing the aluminum content of those foods you won't really know the amount of silica you are absorbing (remember that silica is bound to aluminum in food, preventing your absorption of either). While it's great to not absorb that aluminum, the silica isn't helping to clear excess aluminum from your body if it is just going through the intestines, so the trick is to get it from sources free of aluminum.
A great option is drinking water from a region where the water is naturally high in silica. This is the case with water coming from areas with a significant amount of volcanic rock. One safe and easy source is the "Fiji" brand of mineral water. They list the silica right there on the side of the bottle, 92 mg/L (more than twice the daily intake of the subjects in the study below). This is an effective and safe way to obtain a measurable increase in your silica intake on a regular basis. This pilot study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22976072) found that silica rich mineral water resulted in reduced body burden of aluminum (measured by a steady reduction in urinary excretion of aluminum). This study also found that the cognitive function was measurably improved in 20% of the dementia patients in this study with the only intervention being regularly consuming 1 liter of water containing 35 mg of silica daily for 12 weeks.
Given this information it should follow that the rate of Alzheimer's Disease should be very low in Fiji, and in fact it is. In a 192 country ranking Fiji rates right near the bottom at 190th out of 192. The United States, for comparison, is number 3.
The participants in this study used 35 mg of silica per day in drinking water. One half liter of Fiji mineral water is enough to maintain that dosage, which amounts to less than a dollar per day. It's also a therapeutic option that has no significant down side. If it works (which the science certainly indicates it should), then great. If it doesn't work, you paid a little extra for water, but still probably improved your health by staying better hydrated.
There is obviously another significant argument to make here about whether or not you can justify shipping water bottles made in China to a remote island to be filled with a jungle damaging industry in an otherwise pristine area, then shipped further across the ocean to briefly support our cognitive function before becoming just another empty plastic bottle in the recycling or the landfill. I'm going to gracefully decline involvement in that argument and leave that decision up to you. If you can't bring yourself to do it, and I don't blame you, you can always just supplement with silica instead.
PS: Here's the cheapest option I found for Fiji water:
FIJI Natural Artesian Water, 50.7 -Fl. Oz Bottles (Pack of 12)![]()
And here's a great book about Alzheimer's by my aunt, and about my grandmother:
Elsie at Ebb Tide: Emerging from the Undertow of Alzheimer's![]()
Our current understanding puts a lot of emphasis on a few key factors: insulin function in the brain, vascular damage, and neurotoxicity from environmental toxins. Aluminum has come up in research over the years, and while there is nothing approaching a consensus on this factor, it remains a significant area of ongoing research. Aluminum, like any mineral, is important but not by itself. Our understanding of minerals, and indeed all nutrients, has evolved. Our current understanding of minerals (not yet embraced by all) is that minerals act in coordination with each other, and no mineral can be understood in any valuable way without the context of other minerals and nutrients it occurs with.
One mineral that has gained a lot of popularity for its importance in chronic disease is magnesium. Most of the people who read this blog know that most people eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) are deficient in magnesium, and that supplementing it is important for their health and can improve various conditions from insomnia to heart disease and high blood pressure. But there are a lot of other minerals that are being ignored and the intake of them can be just as important. One that is less talked about is silica. Silica is an important mineral to discuss, and as you will see it bears heavily on the development and prevention of Alzheimer's disease.
Silica is one of the 3 most abundant elements on the planet (along with aluminum and oxygen), but isn't much talked about. On the surface there doesn't seem to be much to talk about. When we examine the presence of silica in our bodies not a whole lot shows up. We see it present in connective tissue and bones mainly, where it contributes to the matrix lending those structures their strength and resiliency. But, when it comes to interacting with our biology from an enzymatic stand-point, it is basically inert. Magnesium plugs in as a key player in all sorts of enzymatic processes in our bodies. Unlike magnesium, there don't seem to be any enzymes that use or rely on silica to function.
It does, however, perform one very, very important job in the body. Remember that aluminum and silica are 2 of the 3 most common elements on our planet, and as such our biology is built around these elements existing in a particular ratio in the food and drink we take in. Our body, in its incredible, brilliant complexity, has evolved a process using silica to chelate excess aluminum out of our bodies. Silica in a meal with aluminum will also prevent it from being absorbed in the first place. In the proper, naturally occurring ratio it does a pretty good job of doing that. When our intake of micronutrients is generally low, as it is with current agricultural techniques, we don't get nearly enough silica. Yet aluminum is ubiquitous. It comes from our cookware, it's in storage containers, and it's used in drinking water treatment plants so it's in city water. Basically, we get way too much aluminum, and without the silica to counter it, our bodies accumulate excess aluminum. That's not a good thing.
Getting that excess aluminum out of the body is important, because aluminum has been found to be neurotoxic. The plaques formed in Alzheimer's disease contain aluminum. Most of the studies on Alzheimer's find that people with higher aluminum exposure are more likely to develop Alzheimer's. (For instance: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361923001004592). And all of the studies looking at the effect of aluminum on brain function find it to be neurotoxic.
Studies also demonstrate that patients who consume more silica (due to increased amounts in their food and water) tend to have lower levels of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. (Here are two examples: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/81/4/897.short, and http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/169/4/489.short.)
This is a great example of evolutionary biology setting us up to function best in a particular environment. Our job then is to fix our exposure to come more in line with the biology we have developed. The trick is, how to get that silica? Unfortunately, in the majority of food sources silica is not well absorbed. We don't get a lot out of the fibrous vegetables that contain the most (celery, chard, kale). Silica also comes in barley, oats and other grains, in which it can be much better absorbed. It will be concentrated in the outer layers of the grain so whole grains are the best source. Its presence in grains in turn means that it will be present in beer, the highest content is found in IPA, (Indian Pale Ales, cheers). Without knowing the aluminum content of those foods you won't really know the amount of silica you are absorbing (remember that silica is bound to aluminum in food, preventing your absorption of either). While it's great to not absorb that aluminum, the silica isn't helping to clear excess aluminum from your body if it is just going through the intestines, so the trick is to get it from sources free of aluminum.
A great option is drinking water from a region where the water is naturally high in silica. This is the case with water coming from areas with a significant amount of volcanic rock. One safe and easy source is the "Fiji" brand of mineral water. They list the silica right there on the side of the bottle, 92 mg/L (more than twice the daily intake of the subjects in the study below). This is an effective and safe way to obtain a measurable increase in your silica intake on a regular basis. This pilot study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22976072) found that silica rich mineral water resulted in reduced body burden of aluminum (measured by a steady reduction in urinary excretion of aluminum). This study also found that the cognitive function was measurably improved in 20% of the dementia patients in this study with the only intervention being regularly consuming 1 liter of water containing 35 mg of silica daily for 12 weeks.
Given this information it should follow that the rate of Alzheimer's Disease should be very low in Fiji, and in fact it is. In a 192 country ranking Fiji rates right near the bottom at 190th out of 192. The United States, for comparison, is number 3.
The participants in this study used 35 mg of silica per day in drinking water. One half liter of Fiji mineral water is enough to maintain that dosage, which amounts to less than a dollar per day. It's also a therapeutic option that has no significant down side. If it works (which the science certainly indicates it should), then great. If it doesn't work, you paid a little extra for water, but still probably improved your health by staying better hydrated.
There is obviously another significant argument to make here about whether or not you can justify shipping water bottles made in China to a remote island to be filled with a jungle damaging industry in an otherwise pristine area, then shipped further across the ocean to briefly support our cognitive function before becoming just another empty plastic bottle in the recycling or the landfill. I'm going to gracefully decline involvement in that argument and leave that decision up to you. If you can't bring yourself to do it, and I don't blame you, you can always just supplement with silica instead.
PS: Here's the cheapest option I found for Fiji water:
FIJI Natural Artesian Water, 50.7 -Fl. Oz Bottles (Pack of 12)
And here's a great book about Alzheimer's by my aunt, and about my grandmother:
Elsie at Ebb Tide: Emerging from the Undertow of Alzheimer's
Saturday, February 22, 2014
FAHF-2 Chinese herbal formula for peanut allergies
Never has such a small, modest legume been so feared as the peanut for the allergic person. It's notorious for creating significant anaphylaxis reaction in those susceptible.
Food allergies such as this one are caused by an excessive immune response mediated by IgE. Symptoms typically appear within several minutes and can include abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting or an anaphylaxis reaction involving throat swelling and rash.
Treatments that have been explored include extended courses of injecting minute amounts of peanut protein, or administering small amounts of peanut protein orally to desensitize the immune system. These approaches have been met with overwhelming indifference. In the case of the injected proteins, a subject was killed instantly by a miscalculated dose that put an end to that investigation. In the case of oral desensitization, it's a long and slow process, but has made its way into regular clinical application For many it's too time consuming or too expensive. It requires going into the doctor weekly for more than 40 weeks.
Our understanding of how these allergies occur within a Chinese Medical paradigm would be an interesting discussion. But, an article in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology might help answer that question for me.
Some serious rockstars (Srivastava, Dr. Li and friends) at Mount Sanai School of Medicine have tested an herbal formula that was able to entirely eliminate the anaphylaxis reaction in mice with peanut allergies. The formula, called "Food Allergy Herbal Formula" (FAHF for short), and it's successor FAHF-2 are modified versions of Wu Mei San. The initial formulation included xi xin and fu zi, FAHF-2 did not, but was still effective. Other researchers in other facilities took this and ran with it, and there have been and are several studies all over examining this effect and trying to understand it. (here's the study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15637565 not sure if there is a full text version out there, but if someone finds one could you post a link to it in the comments? I have the full text version so I'll try to summarize all the important details :)
There are actually a lot of really interesting things to learn from these papers. Not the least of which being that they could get rid of a food allergy! But also, how exactly did they get mice to be allergic to peanuts in the first place? And what does that tell us about the allergic process in general? Not only that, but in the study we are examining they also did some tinkering with the murine immune system prior to the study, depleting the CD4 T cells in some mice and the CD8 T cells in other mice, and neutralizing the interferon gamma in a third set. This makes it possible to identify which aspects of the immune function the herbal formula acted through.
So I know it's the first thing you want to know, so I'll tell you now here are the ingredients, it's a modified Wu Mei San:
Prunus Mume
Zanthoxylum schinifolium
Angelica sinensis
Zingiber officinalis
Cinnamomum cassiae
Phellodendrom chinense
Coptis chinensis
Panax ginseng
and Ganoderma lucidum
and the Chinese:
Wu Mei
Cang Er Zi
Dang Gui
Sheng Jiang
Gui Zhi
Huang Bai
Huang Lian
Ren Shen
and Ling Zhi.
Here are the juicy tidbits:
First an immune hypersensitivity to peanuts was established. The specifics about how that happened is interesting. Here's a previous study that looked at how this is done: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21762973. The authors found that in order for an antigen to result in an allergic response it needed to be administered with an adjuvant (read "toxic ingredient") to completely freak out the immune system. In the absence of a wickedly toxic tag-along these antigens could not create an allergic reaction. In these mice they mixed cholera toxin with pureed peanuts and fed it to the mice over a 5 week period. When they fed these mice plain old peanuts at week 14 they had increased histamine response, lower temperature, and peanut specific IgE and IgG indicating indeed they now had a peanut allergy. (did we need more reasons to avoid toxins in children and breastfeeding mothers, anyway?)
They administered 64 mg of the herbal mixture twice daily for 7 weeks (from week 8 through week 15). The ratio of each herb in the final formula isn't available in this paper, but is published in "phytotherapy research." I've requested a full text from the author...fingers crossed. I'll let you know if I find out.
So in the FAHF-2 treated mice the peanut allergy was completely abolished for 40 weeks and even at up to 90 weeks they had only a very mild reaction. The sham group had significant reaction to the peanut challenge at every testing (done 7 times over 50 weeks) with "near fatal reactions." (In fact one mouse did die from the peanut allergy challenge at week 40. Our hats go off to him in gratitude as he joins a long list of mice suffering for the sake of our health going all the way back to the tortured specimens of Hans Selye.)
The discussion section suggested the benefits are a result of a relative increase in the TH1 division of the immune system (demonstrated by the attenuation of the FAHF-2 effect with neutralization of interferon gamma, and with the depletion of CD8 cells.)
There is currently a human trial going on using FAHF-2 in peanut allergies with promising preliminary results. The ability to rebalance an imbalanced Th1/Th2 immune system is a significant accomplishment with far reaching implications. It is also a useful piece of information as we consider which herbal formulas fit our patient's presentations. It is disturbing that this information isn't spreading quickly across our professional circles. A repurposing of our medicine with this sort of clinically validity is big news for us, and we should be the first to know, not the last. It's an exciting and valuable opportunity to gain a more nuanced understanding of how our herbs influence the immune system in general. It also has repercussions in how we approach clinical problem solving. It echos teachings from Heiner Fruehauf that urge us to reframe our idea of parasite, or Gu patterns as encompassing a wider range of conditions involving systemic immune dysfunction and chronic illness.
For more information on Gu syndrome look at Heiner's stuff here:
http://www.prodseminars.net/product/gu-syndrome-unique-strategies-treatment-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-fibromyalgia-lyme-disease-p
and here: http://www.classicalchinesemedicine.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/fruehauf_guinterview.pdf
and here: http://www.classicalchinesemedicine.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/fruehauf_guinterview.pdf
For a great blog on food allergies and the experience of a human subject in the FAHF-2 human trial:
And here's a link to the an article by Jake Fratkin on Dr. Li's work on allergic conditions including this formula:
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