《扑灭地狱之火》
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Chapter 5 The Real Experiment I would like to claim that I conducted that thought experiment to get to this point.
However,
I did not.
I took a far more direct approach.
I conducted a real experiment.
First,
I need to put this in the context of my own health conditions at the time.
In the fall of 2013,
I started to experience some rather severe fatigue.
It was getting worse and more or less turned into unrelenting chronic fatigue.
In the years leading up to this time,
I was in generally good health.
I did have some minor health issues creeping up on me that I had just assumed were due to aging.
These were mostly joint pain in the knees,
and dull,
blurry vision,
and several other minor things.
One other weird thing started happening to me around this time.
For most of my career,
I had been cycling to work,
both during the summers and winters.
I’d go at a good speed and wasn’t shy of hitting bumps and “shooting” off curbs etc.
But now,
even small bumps or even just dropping down off a six-inch curb hurt my brain.
As the bike slightly impacted the road,
my arms impacted the frame; and my brain ever so slightly impacted the inside of my skull.
It was quite noticeable and moderately painful.
I just assumed I was coming down with the flu.
That flu never did develop.
I didn’t think at the time that I had inflammation of my brain.
Of course,
I’d been sick before,
and naturally,
I always recovered.
So I was just expecting the same would apply to the fatigue.
It did not.
It only got worse.
I went to see my doctor multiple times regarding the fatigue.
He had no clues or answers for me.
The Real Experiment Chapter 5 50 Just to quantify the severity of the fatigue,
I needed 12 hours of sleep per day.
On top of that,
I was trying to get a mid-afternoon nap each day.
I was just completely wiped out.
I was forced to quit my job over it too.
So,
I was typically going to bed at 8:30 p.
m.
and waking up about 8:30 a.
m.
A lot of mornings after waking,
I felt no better than I had before I went to sleep.
Sleep provided no relief.
That may sound strange,
but it’s true.
More consultations with my doctor resulted in no answers.
Around February 2014,
I started to develop a rash on the backs of my hands.
I made several visits to my doctor and was diagnosed with adult eczema.
At this point,
I had only a vague understanding of what eczema even was.
I thought it was just a rash.
My doctor explained to me that I now had an autoimmune disease.
I thought: “Oh,
that doesn’t sound good”.
I had almost never even heard the term autoimmune disease before.
He explained that my immune system was now being extra- aggressive and attacking my own skin.
He went on to explain that there was no known cause and no cure.
Furthermore,
he told me that for adults my age,
it’s just going to get worse.
Being a good doctor,
and wanting to put all the cards on the table,
he also explained to me now that I have gotten one autoimmune disease,
I’m probably going to get more.
He said that it’s nothing I’ve done wrong,
implying that it is just more or less bad luck.
I thought: “Oh,
great! That was not exactly the news I was hoping for as I headed into my retirement years.
But the reality is what reality is”.
My doctor prescribed steroid creams and told me that I’d be using these for the rest of my life.
He told me to go easy on them because there are long-term negative side effects.
I’m thinking: Hmm… I’ll be using these for the rest of my life yet there are long-term side effects? How’s that going to work out? Does this imply that long-term might not translate into a long-time? The Real Experiment Chapter 5 51 I thought: “Okay,
we’re dealing with modern medical science,
and if that’s the best it can do for me,
then that’s fine.
I’ll just have to live with that.
Oddly,
I had not made the connection between the fatigue and eczema conditions.
Neither did my doctor suggest that they were connected.
Overall,
my health had declined into a very bad state.
I will go into a lot more detail of this decline in a later chapter since there are some very important clues there.
By July 2014,
the bank account was draining,
and I was considering trying to get back into work.
I was joking with my wife that maybe I could find an employer who would let me have mid-afternoon naps.
Being realistic about my chronic fatigue,
it was clear to me that my life would now be nothing more than work and sleep,
at best.
Also,
I had band-aids on most of my fingers,
like permanently now.
By this point in time,
I had gone through thousands of band-aids.
It was going to be kind of tough getting back into work looking like this and having some creepy clear fluid leaking from my skin.
I was fortunate to find another job with a start date of August 11 th .
From the very beginning of my eczema diagnosis,
I had this feeling that I had somehow done this to myself,
even though my doctor assured me it was just bad luck.
On August 8 th ,
I decided I just had to try to do something to get this eczema condition under control.
Clearly,
the steroid treatments are a dead-end.
Also,
I’ve been told not to use them on my face.
My face was somewhat red with inflammation,
and I felt that it could break out with the eczema rash at any moment.
There was no way I was going to be able to keep this new job if I had a flare-up on my face.
That was just going to scare people I work with.
Okay,
at this time,
I knew next to nothing about eczema.
I started to do a bit of research about this nasty condition.
Let me now take you through that discovery process.
The Real Experiment Chapter 5 52 The first surprising thing to discover is that there are over 20 million people in North America with this nasty disease.
In the U.
K.
it is around 6 million cases,
in Canada it’s around 3 million,
and in Australia it’s about 3 million too.
Wow,
that’s totally shocking! I had no idea.
At least,
I’m not alone.
About 20% of young kids in North America now “get” eczema.
It has increased 42% in just five years in the U.
K.
21 and has increased at least 300% since the 1960s.
There are similar rate increases currently happening in the United States,
Canada,
and Australia too.
More and more adults are picking up eczema in their fifties.
So,
we have this U-shaped pattern in the incidence rates.
It looks something like this.
Figure 9 Pattern of incidence rates of Eczema in the USA After doing an intense amount of research,
umm,
for about 30 minutes,
the other thing I discovered is that there’s a very well documented list of trigger foods for this condition.
They’re not cited as being the root cause of the condition.
They are just foods that make it worse or that can cause you to go into “flare-up”.
Flare-ups are periods of intense inflammation,
and the skin breaking into lovely little lesions.
The various lists of trigger foods mostly include milk,
dairy,
eggs,
tomatoes,
bell peppers,
citrus fruits,
fish,
and peanut butter.
21 Eczema cases rise dramatically http://news.
bbc.
co.
uk/2/hi/health/7955312.
stm The Real Experiment Chapter 5 53 Well,
that’s an interesting list.
I’m a bit shocked to see my old friend milk listed.
I have been drinking milk all my life—and lots of it,
and maybe an unreasonable amount of it too.
I’ve never had a problem with milk.
Yet,
here it is on a list of foods that can make my condition worse.
How strange.
Has my old friend turned on me? Has my overconsumption of it caused me to have some intolerance to it? What the heck is in milk these days? I go to the fridge,
pull out the milk jug and read the label.
It proudly states vitamin D and vitamin A added.
Okay,
those are vitamins; those are good for us,
right? Could I be getting too much of one of these? I do some intensive research about vitamin D,
umm,
for like 15 minutes.
Oh,
isn’t this surprising? Vitamin D is actually used as a rat poison.
I used to shoot rats on the farm when I was a kid.
I did not like these animals one bit,
but I did have a ton of respect for how tough they were.
If you don’t know it,
these are incredibly tough and resilient animals.
Yet,
we are able to kill them with vitamin D overnight? Why is this substance in our milk? Are we really,
really sure it’s safe? More importantly,
are we really,
really,
and absolutely sure that it’s safe over a long period of time? How about for 100 years of consecutive daily consumption? Well,
we had better be! Coincidentally,
there has recently been a quite a bit of news about everybody being low on vitamin D,
and it has apparently somehow happened all of a sudden too.
This is all strange,
new information for me; and I am not sure what to make of it.
Okay,
the next question I had was: what other foods in that list of trigger foods contain vitamin D? Almost none do; just the fortified dairy.
So now,
after another 30 minutes of my intense research,
I cross vitamin D off the suspect list.
Next,
I move on to vitamin A.
The first question I have is how many of the foods on the trigger list contain vitamin A? Isn’t that interesting? It’s almost all of them with the exception of peanut butter.
The other The Real Experiment Chapter 5 54 interesting observation is that all of these trigger foods actually have quite high levels of vitamin A too.
Doing 40 more minutes of intensive research,
surely there have been studies ruling out vitamin A as a factor in eczema? But no,
I can find no research whatsoever linking these two things.
At the least,
I expected to find some research that has considered this and has ruled it out.
But,
I can find nothing.
Okay,
there’s tons of research about vitamin A itself.
I have no knowledge about the function of this vitamin whatsoever.
I quickly find myself on the NIH (National Institutes of Health in the USA) site,
reading about vitamin A toxicity.
Isn’t this strange? There is something like 20 documented symptoms of vitamin A toxicity,
and I personally had about 19 of them! Wow,
that is surprising.
The one symptom I don’t quite yet have is death.
Reading a bit more about vitamin A toxicity,
it is documented that you need to consume what appears to be massive doses of it before you get into a toxic state with it.
The cited classic case is of someone eating polar bear liver.
Well,
I sure have not been eating polar bear liver.
Okay,
maybe there’s no connection here.
Doing a bit more reading,
though,
I discovered that the body stores the vitamin A you consume.
That’s an interesting little detail,
and that little detail changes everything.
I’m an engineer; back in the day,
I loved integrals.
As a geologist,
a human lifetime is a mere micro-blip of time.
Time,
integrals,
and stored consumption leading to a toxic state,
hmm; it’s at the least a possibility.
Could it be that a lifetime of consumption has actually turned into a condition of vitamin A toxicity? Yet,
there is no research I can find linking this potential condition with eczema or any other autoimmune disease.
Most importantly,
there is no research ruling it out.
That’s so odd to me.
The Real Experiment Chapter 5 55 We have tens of millions of people with autoimmune diseases,
and the symptoms of the autoimmune diseases are a perfect match for vitamin A toxicity.
Okay,
the next question I have is how many foods have vitamin A.
I do an inverse search: How many foods have zero vitamin A? Just to be clear,
this is not foods that are just labeled as having 0% RDA,
it is foods with zero molecules of vitamin A.
I expect to find hundreds,
if not thousands,
of foods.
I have no idea how many foods don’t have any vitamin A since I had no prior knowledge whatsoever about it.
If I had to make a guess,
I would have guessed that only about 5 or 10 percent of our foods contain some vitamin A.
My reasoning is that it must be a small number of foods because we are supplementing our milk and dairy with what is documented to be a micronutrient.
Surely,
we are doing this for a very good reason,
right? There must be a substantial risk of not getting enough of it,
right? Well,
it turns out,
there are about five foods of any substance that have zero amounts vitamin A.
So,
the inverse of this is that nearly all foods we consume can have at least some vitamin A content.
Amazingly,
that is like 99.
9% of all foods have some vitamin A,
or what is called a vitamin A precursor.
Okay,
almost all foods contain some vitamin A.
The more popular foods such as eggs,
milk and low-fat dairy products,
many fruits,
tomatoes,
tomato based sauces,
bell peppers,
fish,
cheese,
pizza,
yams,
sweet potatoes,
many spices,
carrots,
etc.
are very high in vitamin A.
Now add to that just the abundant volume of food consumed per person in North America.
If vitamin A is considered to be a micronutrient,
how the hell could anyone in North America be deficient in it? It’s well known that the body stores and accumulates it.
If you accumulate too much of it,
you will get extraordinarily and painfully sick.
So,
in the face of all that,
we are supplementing the national milk supply with it.
It’s not voluntary on the The Real Experiment Chapter 5 56 part of the milk producers either; it’s mandatory by legislation.
We have legislated a potential toxin into the national milk supply.
Why? Why the hell would we do that? Could it be that the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions? Moreover,
in the United States,
many wheat flours and breakfast cereals are supplemented with it too.
I just have to be missing something here.
Surely,
the experts know what they are doing; right? I just have to be missing the obvious because this just does not add up at all.
Legislation mandating this substance into the North American food supply since the early 1970s? Once again,
why? Okay,
this is just vitamin A,
let’s not get too alarmed about it.
But,
the vitamin A added to our low-fat dairy is actually no ordinary vitamin A.
It is called vitamin A palmitate.
This is the retinol (the regular alcohol form of the vitamin A molecule) combined with palmitic acid.
Palmitic acid is a fatty acid and a major component of palm oil.
The vitamin A palmitate added to our milk synthetic manmade molecule.
Of course,
this combination is used to keep the retinol stable in milk,
and also greatly facilitates the uptake of it by the body.
Now,
isn’t this a dirty,
sneaky little trick to play on the body’s cells.
Cells will be taking on what appears to be a lipid,
but this lipid now has a tag-along toxic molecule.
Brilliant! How,
and why was this fateful decision made? Did they have any long-term history of using this combined molecule in the human body? No,
of course not,
because it is a synthetically made molecule.
Yet,
someone made the colossal assumption that this was going to be safe for everyone.
After all,
what could possibly go wrong with unnaturally combining one of the most fundamental hormones in biology with a fatty acid and putting it into the nation's milk supply? I needed to delve into this subject just a little bit more.
Was there some great outbreak of vitamin A deficiency that happened in the late 1960s in the USA? I was not able to find any history of that having happened.
So why not provide just an optional milk choice with the supplements for The Real Experiment Chapter 5 57 consumers that had an explicit need for the extra A & D? After all,
vitamin A and D are powerful hormones.
How could anyone assume we should all start adding this to our everyday diet? To use an analogy,
imagine that you’ve inherited a beautiful,
and extremely expensive gold watch.
The watch has a fantastically intricate and complicated set of gears and related mechanisms.
The watch is working absolutely flawlessly.
The watch is the epitome of the perfect blend of mathematical science,
art,
craftsmanship and style.
Then,
just on a hunch that you can make it better,
every day you crack open the back case and drop in one grain of sand.
One grain of sand might not harm it,
but adding more over time will absolutely destroy it.
Now,
why on earth would anybody do this? The answer is that they wouldn’t! When something is working perfectly,
the golden rule is DON’T mess with it.
Yet,
I believe that this legislation has done precisely that with the supplementation of the nation's milk and dairy products.
Once we reach the tipping point,
everyone's beautifully functioning bodies will be slowly destroyed,
and with one molecule at a time.
Clearly then,
our elevated levels of vitamin A consumption should be a prime suspect in the epidemics of the autoimmune diseases.
I think that there is no way in hell that this has not been extensively researched.
Yet,
I can find nothing linking vitamin A toxicity with autoimmune disease.
Moreover,
it’s very high in this list of trigger foods too.
I did find some websites recommending vitamin A to combat,
or treat,
an autoimmune disease.
However,
there is very little research supporting these recommendations.
What research there is,
it looks to be very new.
What are the chances that this potential connection has been overlooked? The obvious scientific question here should be: in these lists of cited autoimmune disease flare-up trigger foods that universally include milk,
dairy,
eggs,
tomatoes,
bell peppers,
citrus fruits,
fish,
(peanut butter being excluded because it’s a well-known allergen),
what are the The Real Experiment Chapter 5 58 common chemical compounds they all share,
other than H 2 O? After all,
the chemical culprits we are looking for is very likely shared by all of these foods.
For example,
what chemical compounds are common to both orange juice and fish? I’m guessing there are only a few compounds,
and that one of them is vitamin A or one of its precursors.
Of course,
we should not guess,
so we will go through this analysis in a later chapter.
Okay,
the total amount of time of my intense research has been about four hours.
I asked myself the simple question: what if I eliminate vitamin A from my diet for a while? From what I’ve read,
I have at least a year’s worth of storage built up.
It can’t do any harm,
and I have nothing to lose by doing it.
However,
I’m realistic,
so the chances of anything coming of this are about one in 6 billion.
Once again,
I trust the experts,
and therefore,
I just have to be missing something.
It’s totally crazy,
but I decided to conduct that exact experiment.
First,
I reduced my consumption to low and then near zero vitamin A.
My diet was now almost exclusively rice and beef.
That’s three meals a day,
seven days a week.
The same two-course meal three times a day is rather monotonous.
So,
some days I spice it up to a four-course meal by adding salt and pepper.
I started this experiment August 9th.
I went cold turkey off the steroid cream treatments for my eczema-affected skin.
And,
no,
I’m not recommending that you do this 22 .
Within three days,
I notice a significant drop in my overall body-wide inflammation.
It is a remarkably quick change and very noticeable.
22 http://www.
huffingtonpost.
ca/2015/05/15/steroid-cream-addiction_n_7236986.
html The Real Experiment Chapter 5 59 For the next three weeks,
there is a little bit more progress,
but very subtle,
and I could be easily judging it wrong.
There is very little,
if any,
improvement in my fatigue condition.
Around day 18 of this experiment,
I’m thinking this is probably not working and is just foolish.
Most of the progress was in the first three days,
and I’ve seen very little since.
That early improvement was probably just a natural cycle.
I’m about to give up.
However,
I decide to give it three more days.
Remember that I’m now going to bed at 8:30 p.
m.
and usually waking up at 8:30 a.
m.
and waking up still totally fatigued.
? Day 20: still go to bed at 8:30 p.
m.
I wake up at 5:30 a.
m.
and strangely it actually feels as if I slept okay.
? Day 21: I wake up at 3:30 a.
m.
I feel pretty good,
and I actually feel refreshed.
I think to myself,
how strange is that? ? Day 22: I wake up at 1:30 a.
m.
and I’m feeling really good.
I’m feeling totally refreshed.
I stretch out my arms,
weird,
no joint pain! No stiffness.
I wiggle my legs,
weird,
no joint pain,
and no stiffness.
Wow,
I think I’m feeling really,
really good.
The other thing that is super-noticeable is my thinking clarity.
It’s crystal clear compared to what it was just a week ago.
Fatigue,
totally gone.
Joint pain,
totally gone.
I ask myself: “what the hell was that?” Very surprisingly,
one word instantly snapped into my head.
It happened in less than a millisecond.
It was a German name.
It wasn’t a name common to my daily vocabulary either.
For the next several weeks,
more out of habit than anything else I was still going to bed around 8:30ish.
I was routinely waking up at 1:30 or 2:30 in the morning and being totally refreshed.
This was not insomnia; it was that I just did not need the extra sleep.
The Real Experiment Chapter 5 60 Sometimes,
I’d force myself to get more sleep.
Others,
I just waited awake until 6:00 a.
m.
to get ready for work.
I went to work and worked all day with no fatigue whatsoever.
Not even a mid-afternoon lull.
I started to shift my sleep cycle back to going to bed at 10:30 or 11:00 p.
m.
Now,
after six or seven hours of sleep,
I was totally refreshed.
My thinking clarity was still completely clear.
In the mornings,
I was hopping out of bed with absolutely no joint pain or body stiffness whatsoever.
Okay,
this is really interesting.
What just happened? Had my bad luck just changed? Overall,
my health was starting to make a big,
but slow,
180-degree U-turn back to normal.
At this point,
I could have just decided that this whole bad experience was nearly over and that I should move on with my life.
However,
two really important things were troubling me.
The biggest one I needed to understand is what happened with my thinking clarity.
It was not just a stunning turnaround,
but quite scary.
Had I just dodged a bullet? I could not just gloss over this possibility that that strange German name had a big meaning to it.
Did I just stumble upon something really important? Has there ever been anyone else with an autoimmune disease that has gone to a zero vitamin A diet like this? It’s pretty unlikely actually.
I still had the eczema skin condition; so I wasn’t out of the woods just quite yet.
No,
more like not at all.
Still riding my bike to work,
I decided I should extend my experiment a bit.
There is a very big staircase down an escarpment in the park on my way into the downtown.
It has about 160 steps on it.
Rather than taking the bike path down the hill,
I decided to ride my bike (no suspension) down those stairs.
That’s 160 drops of about seven inches each.
What happened? No brain pain! The inflammation on my brain was now magically gone! The Real Experiment Chapter 5 61 Okay,
I needed to dig into this some more.
My personal experiment was maybe an interesting little case study.
However,
what we really need is a big clinical trial.
How about we do a 5 million-person study and conduct it over the next 20 years.
We’ll reduce the vitamin A consumption in this 5 million-person group and see if it results in a reduction in autoimmune diseases.
Then we’ll form a committee of experts to study the results for another 10 years.
How does that sound? It should sound completely ridiculous coming from the guy who was earlier proclaiming we need to move fast and furious on this.
Fortunately,
effectively and quite inadvertently,
that exact study has already been conducted for us.
It also shows a dramatic result that needs no committee of experts to interpret.
Next,
let’s look a bit back into history,
and see if we can learn a new lesson from Charles Darwin.
He left us some more important clues.
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