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What is auto immune and how is it important for overall health?

In my case I had exzema which is where the immune system has decided that the enemy is my skin. This is rather inconvenient. When we visit a GP they are likely to issue a measured does of steroid cortisol cream. This helps by suppressing the immune system and thus alleviating the skin condition. However, again one is inadvertently introducing a toxin As we know from our discussions on this is another potential problem along with the other side effects of the prescription drug.

Functional medicine and antibodies

Next there is an auto immune and general health component to all this, that must not be ignored. Auto immune conditions can be complicated. Functional medicine has a lot to say about auto immune and they are helping lots and lots of people. This component if you are affected will undermine all your hard work if not addressed. There are a range of auto immune diseases where the body attacks itself. Even migraine might be put into this category. So might a family history of heart attacks in some cases be put into this category.

An example of how auto immune may contribute to a family history of heart attacks

For example, if your dad had a heart attack by his 44th birthday and the brother had a heart attack and died at 42 years of age, and you are now 40 years of age. What might you consider? Well functional medicine may take a blood sample and see if you have anti bodies around your heart? If the blood sample does show anti bodies around the heart. The doc may then say this is perhaps being caused by an auto immune reaction and your body has identified your heart as the foreign entity that has to be removed. So, your immune system is attaching your heart. You may ask what can I do about this? The doc may say, the anti-bodies are being produced by an overactive immune system which has been tricked into thinking that it should look for a specific protein that has entered your blood stream via your gut wall lining, or the immune system has become over active because of heavy metal toxicity and has deemed it a threat. Immune systems are complicated, but just to simplify it for our purposes, it has identified this protein or foreign body for eradication and sent a picture of the protein to the armed forces of your immune system (white blood cells) which are flowing around in your blood stream designed to hunt kill. However, this image happens to sometimes also look like other parts of the human body by chance. This means when the image is a match, regardless of whether it happens to be a part of your heart or the foreign body, the immune cell has no choice but to attack.

Diet, Heavy metals and stress

You may well say at this stage in our discussion, Help! Do not fear too much, all that is needed is a change of diet, maybe some de-stressing, perhaps a different job, and or even a heavy metal detox and the list goes on. A functional medicine doctor, which are often originally GPs if not still GPs will put you right about whatever the cause is. For our purposes, we are going to assume it is either a heavy metal in toxification or a diet related issue. First let us look at diet. What is it in our diets that may bring about such a horrific auto immune outcome? This is a complicated answer, which is why there are so many pages to this web site. However, to start with let us look at the most likely culprits.

Two likely culprits. The first

The most likely culprits are two types of protein that when mixed produce a hybrid environment of hypersensitivity for our immune systems. The first is WGA (wheat germ agglutinate) this protein was accidently introduced into our diets back in the 1960s by This achievement was for his contribution to making wheat able to grow shorter so that wind did not blow it over and with more seeds, so a larger bushel and lastly he made the wheat so that it could be grown in dryer conditions. Hence, he might of played a role in saving some of world from starving to death. This is indeed quite an achievement and who knows where we might all be today if he had not played his role in helping potentially millions of people all around the world from facing potentially starvation.

The second culprit

However, this achievement by Norman Borlaug did come with an additional protein WGA, that over a long period of time for some unsuspecting individuals has been causing an otherwise unnoticed reaction. This reaction is an auto immune reaction. The second protein is from diary in the form of casein 2 courtesy of the book the China Study and Dr Gundry in his further research concluded that type 2 casein is much worse than type 1. Europe mostly uses type 1, but America mostly uses cows that produce type 2. Type 2 has a much higher incidence of auto immune conditions. Worse than this if someone consumes both types, that of the wheat derived and of the casein type 2 derived, of proteins the likelihood of an auto immune response is much more likely. The China Study had some other very bad stuff to say about casein type 2, although it took a different person then who authored the China Study to derive this from all the data. Cancer seemed to be a problem in different parts of China, with some areas showing higher rates of cancer, it took a few years, but now we understand this casein type 2 is a problem for some cancers and for our purposes is also implicated in our auto immune story.

How about my early heart attacks

What I would therefore suggest is that the 40-year-old in our example above who had a family history of early heart attacks is stop all forms of wheat and lectins (stop lectins as an extra benefit, but not essential yet), and dairy. For some people even dairy from casein type 1 can be a problem. This could be incrementally achieved with blood work determining whether dairy made a difference even which dairy made the difference or whether cutting lectins helped. Of course, cutting out these two have other benefits besides auto immune, which we will come back to later.

How will I know if the changes are working

Blood work will reveal whether changing diet was enough. If it is enough, there will be no more antibodies attaching the heart (taken from the example above). Job done. However, heavy metals may disrupt the biological system enough to also cause a hypersensitivity to an ever-increasing range of foods. Just as a side, vitamin c has been found to help alleviate some hypersensitivity to some foods.

What if it is heavy metals

If it turns out that you have a heavy metal toxicity problem, then my recommendation would be to avoid the source of toxins. Second depending on the type of toxicity take chelators that best target the molecule (metals or other chemicals) in question. Do this fast and do it now. Heavy metals like lead, copper, cadmium and mercury and we may soon be adding other compounds to this in regards to achieving better health to include such things as SO2 (sulphur dioxide), sodium metabisulphite, sulphates and sulphites or sulphates etc, NaO2 (sodium dioxide), Benzoate, msg (monosodium glutamate), etc, this last group added are not widely known to be implicated in poor health outcomes for people, but for people that have had too much exposure over their lifetimes or have a sensitive pre disposition for reasons still being identified they may notice if acted upon, may experience a shift in their better health towards the positive. These other chemicals along with heavy metals have an ability to disrupt some processes in the body in my opinion. This may sound anecdotal and of course apart from the heavy metals it mostly is. However, we could do well to remember that when enough people make enough anecdotal noise, that there may be something to it, and all that remains is perhaps for the bio marker to be discovered.