Sometimes lots of theories come out of a minute variation correlation and sometimes it's just a sampling coincidence (like it's just how schizoid brains break down). I'm VERY sure, someone has altered a schizoid's diet to a more or less acidic diet before. I will bet that pH therapy won't be very effective, but it might lead to some other discovery.
>I will bet that pH therapy won't be very effective, but it might lead to some other discovery.
just a note on what therapeutic impact pH therapy have in other situation - mice study on pH therapy (baking soda added to drinking water) for cancer shows at least 2 things - neutralizing tumor pH improves response to other therapies and when alone the pH therapy reduces and slows down metastases formation (at the level of chemotherapy drugs - check out the 2 times difference in survival at the end of 4 month experiment https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2834485/figure/... ).
I've never heard someone refer to a schizophrenic as "a schizoid". Schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder are distinct disorders with different symptoms.
not in the field, but I think it's both somewhat slang for schizophrenia (see also woody allen movies), also somewhat antiquated or at least highly specific term from (iirc freudian) psychopathology
That the pH is lower has apparently been known for a while. What's not been clear is the cause of the lower pH and whether the low pH is causing the disorders or if it's just a side effect of an underlying cause or of the medications. This still isn't clear. It could even be a combination of factors, with low pH caused by lactate production stimulating the disorder which increases lactate production... etc.
IMO one aspect that isn't well understood enough, and not given enough emphasis in research, are the "cleaning" cycles of the brain. In particular, neuronal autophagy, but also cleaning cycles during sleep. If the overall PH is off, something isn't being cleaned correctly. A byproduct isn't being removed.
I'd love to know how a ten day water fast affects the mental processing and bio-markers of a group of schizophrenia patients. I'd also love to compare their brain activity in a sleep study to that of a control group.
Parallel issues here as with most dementias. Plaques seem to form in all brains, but for most people there are cleaning cycles that break them apart and remove them. With Alzheimer's disease this stops happening. Why?
Another intriguing question for schizophrenia -- eating foods rich in glutamate, for instance rich cheeses, is a negative trigger for many people with schizophrenia. Why? Well, glutamate is metabolized in the brain and it's used as a neurotransmitter. Obviously there is some sort of chemical processing issue in some patients. Figure out what exactly what the issue is and I'd bet you'll know much more about the root cause of Schizophrenia, and potentially several other major mental disorders.
"Glutamate plays key roles linking carbohydrate and amino acid metabolism via the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, as well as in nitrogen trafficking and ammonia homeostasis in brain."
"Ammonia homeostasis," sounds like something that might affect PH, right?
Weird thing with glutamate though, is that schizphrenics show lowered activation of glutamate which is supposed to be responsible for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Things that increase glutamatergic activity(like cycline) help this.
I think it's a form of bias involving negative feedback loops - since we see mostly patients with symptoms already showing, we see glutamate at the end of the process working to acidize already acidic environment i.e. against the gradient.
Maybe, if the alkaline diet reduces acidity of the brain. However, if the acidity is the result of increased energy production or a failure of the cleaning mechanisms of the brain (as one of the study authors suggests), then the alkaline diet might not be sufficient to reduce brain acidity.
Further, we don't know whether acidity is the cause or the result of the disease. If it is a result of the disease, then reducing acidity may not affect symptoms of schizophrenia, much as eliminating beta amyloid does not guarantee a reduction in symptoms of Alzheimer's
The benefits people colloquially explain as due to an "alkaline" diet are mostly related to consumption of potassium. The thing is that "alkaline" does not accurately describe what is going on with these diets, because eating food is not at all like mixing chemicals in a jar. Furthermore, as any chemist knows, the K+ ion is actually an acid, but because it acts as a counterion for stronger bases, higher potassium leads to higher blood pH. The idea is basically folk wisdom which is transmitting the findings of studies like this one:
Because consumption of K+, Mg2+, and Ca2+ decreases calcium excretion, whereas consumption of Na+ and sulfur increases it, and because calcium is more soluble in acidic solutions and less soluble in alkaline solutions, there was a tendency to refer to the former as "alkaline" and the latter as "acidic". This is infuriating to people who know enough chemistry to know that Mg2+ is in fact much more acidic than Na+.
I am an amateur, but I've put a decent amount of time towards making sense of this, and it appears to me that it's mostly potassium, and to a lesser extent calcium and magnesium, that explains what is really going on here.
Isn't the body very good at maintaining homeostasis? Meaning you could eat an alkaline diet, but if your body composition is such that you have such a given acidic composition then your body has processes to maintain whatever it's 'normal' is.
I wouldn't make that conclusion. The alkaline diet is based on some really suspect science. Testing the pH of your urine in order to determine the overall pH of your body is flawed. Believing that your body even has an overall pH is flawed.
I was going to say the same thing. I don't know the veracity of the claims regarding ph levels but it's the one tool in my toolkit that consistently gives me an immediate positive return in my mental health. It'd be great if this is something that has far reaching clinical effects.
We know recurrent episodes of apnea, over months and years, may cause an increase in carbon dioxide levels that can change the pH of the blood enough to cause a respiratory acidosis. We also know sleep apnea may be prevalent in patients with bipolar I disorder. It would be great to see a comparison study of patients with OSA versus CSA (specifically REM-related sleep apnea) examining acidosis, mood disorder prevelence, and outcomes in treated versus untreated populations.
> Other research has revealed that the brains of people with panic disorders produce elevated levels of lactate—an acidic source of fuel that is constantly produced and consumed in the energy-hungry brain.
For me, this further confirms that metabolic problems are causally-associated with 'mental disorders'.
Lactic acidosis is a medical condition characterized by
the buildup of lactate (especially L-lactate) in the body,
which results in an excessively low pH. It is a subtype of
metabolic acidosis, where excessive acid is due to a
problem with the body's metabolism.
I used the courts to get the mental health system to reduce the harm they were perpetrating upon my friend, who they thought had a 'persistent mental disorder'. Really she was just self-medicating depression with the street pharmacy. (Cocaine and the amphetamines are not very good for people's mitochondria/metabolism, which is why they're illegal.)
In response to my bullying, the treatment provider did a genetic test, and decided that she needed Folate (Vitamin B-9), as she can't convert folic acid like most people. She's doing much better on the reduced dosages of tranquilizers ('anti-psychotics')/etc.
This reminds me of research from a while back suggesting schizophrenia was related to an ancient retrovirus that entered our DNA millions of years ago and occasionally causes problems (Discover mag, "The Insanity Virus," June 2010). Reseach is ongoing: (http://discovermagazine.com/2015/sept/6-insanity-virus).
From the 2010 story:
> Sixty million years ago, a lemurlike animal—an early ancestor of humans and monkeys—contracted an infection. It may not have made the lemur ill, but the retrovirus spread into the animal’s testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and once there, it struck the jackpot: It slipped inside one of the rare germ line cells that produce sperm and eggs. When the lemur reproduced, that retrovirus rode into the next generation aboard the lucky sperm and then moved on from generation to generation, nestled in the DNA. “It’s a rare, random event,” says Robert Belshaw, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England. “Over the last 100 million years, there have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has gotten into our genome and proliferated.”
>...Perron in 2008, found HERV-W in the blood of 49 percent of people with schizophrenia, compared with just 4 percent of healthy people.
Two I am aware of that kinda fit this category are Toxoplasma gondii[1] (not technically a virus) and Adenovirus serotype 36[2]. The former has been associated with a wide array of behavioral changes, the latter is associated with obesity.
T. gondii also being the parasite that can cause toxoplasmosis in rare cases where the infected individual suffers an immune system issue (like HIV). This is the condition treated by Daraprim, aka the drug bought by Martin Shkreli's old company ('pharma bro').
I asked him once about the alleged behavioral changes associated with T. gondii and he said the research on that is bunk. Shrug...
There would be no way to answer that question with our current technology.
Even the idea of contracting a virus is not well defined. Does it have to reproduce from human cells? What if it just passes through us or lives off our gut bacteria?
The whole world is soaked with viruses. They're everywhere all the time and if they don't specifically interfere with us we never notice 'em.
Contrary to what the article states, elevated levels of lactic acid per say do not cause acidification. In fact, the increase in lactic acid correlates to but is not the causation of acidosis.
According to Robergs (2004) [1], it is the hydrolysis of ATP outside of the mitochondria (ATP produced in glycolysis) that increases the concentration of H+ and lowers pH.
Yet, still, if the concentration of lactate increases it's a good indicator of acidosis from oxygen deficiency.
>researchers continued to puzzle over if the increased acidity seen in schizophrenia and bipolar patients was truly disorder-related—or the result of other factors, such as a person’s history of antipsychotic drug use
Excuse my ignorance, but I don't see how they ruled out the possible link between antipsychotic drug use and increased acidity?
I'm also puzzled by how they can confidently diagnose rodents with human social disorders based solely on "genetic indicators" when the links between genetics and disorders like schizophrenia are still far from understood.
My medical condition makes the body too acidic. This is a well known thing. Doctors know it. Patients know it. Yet, it is not treated as a primary issue. It only gets treated secondarily to help control specific developments, like acid reflux.
I have known a number of bipolar people and I tend to easily click with them. I don't think I am actually bipolar, but I do suspect my medical condition sometimes impacts my brain functioning in a similar manner.
Without bothering to get into lengthy anecdata I think a) acidosis likely is a root cause of mental health problems but b) solving it isn't as simple or straight forward as just controlling the acidity.
If your body functions different from the norm such that the result is high acidity, there will be a lot of other knock off effects.
So, it is a little like saying "Deserts are deserts because they lack water. So let's just add water." Well, no, they typically lack water because they are in the rain shadow of a mountain range. Importing water doesn't fix that. Importing it consistently, for many years may allow you to mitigate many of the effects, but you will have to keep working at it. You will not find that climate in the area "normalizes" just because you imported water and grew plants. You will still be in the rain shadow of a mountain and if you stop importing water and stop lovingly tending to human planted flora, it will eventually revert back to desert.
Interesting analogy but it doesn't always hold. Take the greening of Ascension Island [1] where planting trees created a virtuous cycle: the trees trapped more moisture which promoted the growth of more trees.
In biology there are many complicated feedback loops and in some cases a parameter seems to get stuck outside of the normal range. In those cases, bringing the parameter back into the normal range can be enough to allow the normal feedback mechanisms to work properly again.
Some examples:
* Eczema: There can be a loop between irritation, inflammation, damage to the skin, more irritation. Treat the skin with steroids to both improve symptoms and disrupt the loop.
* Myopia: Studies have shown that undercorrecting for near-sightedness actually makes it worse [2]. Bringing it back into the normal range doesn't just help the symptoms, it also makes it progress slower.
* Depression: Maybe operating at a higher level, but there's a clear loop between changed behaviour and improved motivation.
Even something like acidity could be like this. You could speculate a link between gut bacteria and acidity, whereby changing the acidity directly could alter the balance of bacteria which locks in the change in acidity.
I am aware that the existence of trees tends to promote rain, so, no, it isn't an absolute, black or white thing.
My medical condition is genetic in origin. I have reversed a lot of my symptoms and, yes, maintaining my improved condition is easier than I expected.
I have come to believe that "the normal progression" of my condition is rooted in a nasty positive feedback loop. If you can interrupt it, it is game changing.
But interrupting it isn't for sissies, so to speak.
Even so, my body will never be normal. But it is sort of like being a Kosher Jew: As long as I abide by particular dietary and lifestyle restrictions, I don't have to be sick all the time, even though it means I can't live "normally." I am happy to accept that deal over the alternative.
Go look up Dr Dom D'agostino's work on using "medical keto" (as in, 4:1 ratio (in grams) of fat to carbs+protein, while keeping carbs at below 30g and enough protein to maintain muscle) to control epilepsy in drug resistant patients.
That kind of answers your question, but not directly.
After 15 years of panic attacks, anxiety, migraines, hay fever... if finally found the solution: learn to breathe correctly again.
The best and cheapest thing I've ever learned for my health!
This is just one site, but there are many more on the web.
Not affiliated to a single one of them, but hopefully I can share the joy of a panic attack free live with at least one other person. :)
I'm pleased that the technique worked for you and don't want to denigrate your experience, but looking around it seems that there's very little evidence to support the Buteyko technique, and a fair few red flags:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/buteyko-breathing-technique...
If it works for you it works for you, but I'd caution readers to be skeptical when trying it out.
I agree that everyone should be skeptical and look for evidence.
For me personally it has been a godsend, that's what I can state. I also know about 5 other people who have applied this knowledge and all had noticeable improvements in various areas.
Experience may vary of course. Bodies are also different.
You can go the Buteyko way, Chi-Gung, Yoga, Wim Hoff method etc etc. whatever works if you need it.
Generally I do however think that breathing is way, way underappreciated as a cause for various diseases.
I've seen 5 medical specialists who overlooked my breathing _patterns_. I've been hooked up to heart monitoring devices, gave plenty of blood to examine and all that jazz.
The solution was literally right under my nose.
In the end it was a $5 USD discounted book about Buteyko's research that made all the difference.
Breathe through your nose, your mouth is for eating and talking. That will already help many people. :)
52 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadhttp://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v9/n7/full/4001511a.html?fo...
Sometimes lots of theories come out of a minute variation correlation and sometimes it's just a sampling coincidence (like it's just how schizoid brains break down). I'm VERY sure, someone has altered a schizoid's diet to a more or less acidic diet before. I will bet that pH therapy won't be very effective, but it might lead to some other discovery.
just a note on what therapeutic impact pH therapy have in other situation - mice study on pH therapy (baking soda added to drinking water) for cancer shows at least 2 things - neutralizing tumor pH improves response to other therapies and when alone the pH therapy reduces and slows down metastases formation (at the level of chemotherapy drugs - check out the 2 times difference in survival at the end of 4 month experiment https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2834485/figure/... ).
I'd love to know how a ten day water fast affects the mental processing and bio-markers of a group of schizophrenia patients. I'd also love to compare their brain activity in a sleep study to that of a control group.
Parallel issues here as with most dementias. Plaques seem to form in all brains, but for most people there are cleaning cycles that break them apart and remove them. With Alzheimer's disease this stops happening. Why?
Another intriguing question for schizophrenia -- eating foods rich in glutamate, for instance rich cheeses, is a negative trigger for many people with schizophrenia. Why? Well, glutamate is metabolized in the brain and it's used as a neurotransmitter. Obviously there is some sort of chemical processing issue in some patients. Figure out what exactly what the issue is and I'd bet you'll know much more about the root cause of Schizophrenia, and potentially several other major mental disorders.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25236722
"Glutamate plays key roles linking carbohydrate and amino acid metabolism via the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, as well as in nitrogen trafficking and ammonia homeostasis in brain."
"Ammonia homeostasis," sounds like something that might affect PH, right?
What is the significance behind ten days of starvation? Why not 1 or 2 or 3? 10 sounds 100% arbitrary.
Isn't increasing carbon dioxide in the air a standard stress invoking procedure in lab tests on rodents etc?
Further, we don't know whether acidity is the cause or the result of the disease. If it is a result of the disease, then reducing acidity may not affect symptoms of schizophrenia, much as eliminating beta amyloid does not guarantee a reduction in symptoms of Alzheimer's
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/87/5/2008/2846608
Because consumption of K+, Mg2+, and Ca2+ decreases calcium excretion, whereas consumption of Na+ and sulfur increases it, and because calcium is more soluble in acidic solutions and less soluble in alkaline solutions, there was a tendency to refer to the former as "alkaline" and the latter as "acidic". This is infuriating to people who know enough chemistry to know that Mg2+ is in fact much more acidic than Na+.
I am an amateur, but I've put a decent amount of time towards making sense of this, and it appears to me that it's mostly potassium, and to a lesser extent calcium and magnesium, that explains what is really going on here.
In this case, you'd try an acidic diet in order to coerce your body's natural processes to bring yourself to a more normal pH.
Obviously I don't know if that would work, but nobody can really say one way or the other without doing some proper research.
For me, this further confirms that metabolic problems are causally-associated with 'mental disorders'.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acidosisI used the courts to get the mental health system to reduce the harm they were perpetrating upon my friend, who they thought had a 'persistent mental disorder'. Really she was just self-medicating depression with the street pharmacy. (Cocaine and the amphetamines are not very good for people's mitochondria/metabolism, which is why they're illegal.)
In response to my bullying, the treatment provider did a genetic test, and decided that she needed Folate (Vitamin B-9), as she can't convert folic acid like most people. She's doing much better on the reduced dosages of tranquilizers ('anti-psychotics')/etc.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-integrationist/2014...
From the 2010 story:
> Sixty million years ago, a lemurlike animal—an early ancestor of humans and monkeys—contracted an infection. It may not have made the lemur ill, but the retrovirus spread into the animal’s testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and once there, it struck the jackpot: It slipped inside one of the rare germ line cells that produce sperm and eggs. When the lemur reproduced, that retrovirus rode into the next generation aboard the lucky sperm and then moved on from generation to generation, nestled in the DNA. “It’s a rare, random event,” says Robert Belshaw, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England. “Over the last 100 million years, there have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has gotten into our genome and proliferated.”
>...Perron in 2008, found HERV-W in the blood of 49 percent of people with schizophrenia, compared with just 4 percent of healthy people.
I've often wondered how many viruses we contract that don't present any obvious symptoms.
How would we know to look for them?
Does anyone know if this idea has been looked in to?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii#Immune_respo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenovirus_serotype_36#Role_in...
I asked him once about the alleged behavioral changes associated with T. gondii and he said the research on that is bunk. Shrug...
https://insta724.com/ideas/ycombinator
Even the idea of contracting a virus is not well defined. Does it have to reproduce from human cells? What if it just passes through us or lives off our gut bacteria?
The whole world is soaked with viruses. They're everywhere all the time and if they don't specifically interfere with us we never notice 'em.
[1] Biochemistry of exercise-induced metabolic acidosis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15308499
Note: During low oxygen levels in tissue, metabolism becomes anaerobic -> lactic acid is produced. Lactic acid <-> lactate + H+.
Excuse my ignorance, but I don't see how they ruled out the possible link between antipsychotic drug use and increased acidity?
I'm also puzzled by how they can confidently diagnose rodents with human social disorders based solely on "genetic indicators" when the links between genetics and disorders like schizophrenia are still far from understood.
I have known a number of bipolar people and I tend to easily click with them. I don't think I am actually bipolar, but I do suspect my medical condition sometimes impacts my brain functioning in a similar manner.
Without bothering to get into lengthy anecdata I think a) acidosis likely is a root cause of mental health problems but b) solving it isn't as simple or straight forward as just controlling the acidity.
If your body functions different from the norm such that the result is high acidity, there will be a lot of other knock off effects.
So, it is a little like saying "Deserts are deserts because they lack water. So let's just add water." Well, no, they typically lack water because they are in the rain shadow of a mountain range. Importing water doesn't fix that. Importing it consistently, for many years may allow you to mitigate many of the effects, but you will have to keep working at it. You will not find that climate in the area "normalizes" just because you imported water and grew plants. You will still be in the rain shadow of a mountain and if you stop importing water and stop lovingly tending to human planted flora, it will eventually revert back to desert.
In biology there are many complicated feedback loops and in some cases a parameter seems to get stuck outside of the normal range. In those cases, bringing the parameter back into the normal range can be enough to allow the normal feedback mechanisms to work properly again.
Some examples:
* Eczema: There can be a loop between irritation, inflammation, damage to the skin, more irritation. Treat the skin with steroids to both improve symptoms and disrupt the loop.
* Myopia: Studies have shown that undercorrecting for near-sightedness actually makes it worse [2]. Bringing it back into the normal range doesn't just help the symptoms, it also makes it progress slower.
* Depression: Maybe operating at a higher level, but there's a clear loop between changed behaviour and improved motivation.
Even something like acidity could be like this. You could speculate a link between gut bacteria and acidity, whereby changing the acidity directly could alter the balance of bacteria which locks in the change in acidity.
[1] http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2012_GreenMoun...
[2] http://www.journalofoptometry.org/en/under-correction-human-...
My medical condition is genetic in origin. I have reversed a lot of my symptoms and, yes, maintaining my improved condition is easier than I expected.
I have come to believe that "the normal progression" of my condition is rooted in a nasty positive feedback loop. If you can interrupt it, it is game changing.
But interrupting it isn't for sissies, so to speak.
Even so, my body will never be normal. But it is sort of like being a Kosher Jew: As long as I abide by particular dietary and lifestyle restrictions, I don't have to be sick all the time, even though it means I can't live "normally." I am happy to accept that deal over the alternative.
> down sugar to generate energy, which subsequently turns into acid."
The "Ketosis" / "Ketogenic diets" are helping in this case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet
That kind of answers your question, but not directly.
Bacteriocidal antibiotics which enduce mitochondrial dysfunction
Chronic sleep deprivation and stress
People with problematic genetics having children when 200 years ago it wouldn't have been possible
Lots of things that contribute to the increase in the incidence of various mental illnesses
Solutions are not easy at all either. If you ever see a diagram of what we know about metabolism it's ludicrous.
See e.g. http://www.normalbreathing.com
CNS/Diseases of the Brain Are Caused by Low Brain O2/CO2 Levels
http://www.normalbreathing.com/diseases-Brain.php
Sedatives | CO2: Natural Sedative and Tranquilizer http://www.normalbreathing.com/CO2-stabilizer.php
After 15 years of panic attacks, anxiety, migraines, hay fever... if finally found the solution: learn to breathe correctly again. The best and cheapest thing I've ever learned for my health!
This is just one site, but there are many more on the web. Not affiliated to a single one of them, but hopefully I can share the joy of a panic attack free live with at least one other person. :)
If it works for you it works for you, but I'd caution readers to be skeptical when trying it out.
I agree that everyone should be skeptical and look for evidence.
For me personally it has been a godsend, that's what I can state. I also know about 5 other people who have applied this knowledge and all had noticeable improvements in various areas.
Experience may vary of course. Bodies are also different.
You can go the Buteyko way, Chi-Gung, Yoga, Wim Hoff method etc etc. whatever works if you need it.
Generally I do however think that breathing is way, way underappreciated as a cause for various diseases.
I've seen 5 medical specialists who overlooked my breathing _patterns_. I've been hooked up to heart monitoring devices, gave plenty of blood to examine and all that jazz.
The solution was literally right under my nose.
In the end it was a $5 USD discounted book about Buteyko's research that made all the difference.
Breathe through your nose, your mouth is for eating and talking. That will already help many people. :)