Welcome back from your second and last intermission. I trust the wait wasn’t too long. In today’s post, I’ll be concentrating on how cortisol is regulated by the body, and how these regulatory systems are shaped by immune activation. There is a happy medium where hormone concentrations within a defined lower and upper limit … Read More →
“Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.” Thomas Jefferson Abbreviations: BCM7: beta-casomorphin-7 C. albicans: Candida albicans FOS: fructooligosaccharide GERD: gastroesophageal reflux disease GI: gastrointestinal H. pylori: Helicobacter pylori, aka Campylobacter pylori IBS: irritable bowel syndrome LES: … Read More →
I can almost hear the moans coming from some of you as you read the title of this post. You’re no doubt thinking, “For real? You haven’t posted in a while, but you’re going to trash what I do to relax and unwind on my night off? Seriously?” No dear reader, not entirely. Me … Read More →
It’s been known for quite a long time that shift workers are at an increased risk for developing a number of diseases. Observational studies have found a strong association between shift work and heart and cerebrovascular diseases. (1) Other studies have noted robust correlations between shift-work and the risk of obesity (2) (3), diabetes … Read More →
Today I want to continue my discussion of foods, drinks and drugs that tend to aggravate an infected and inflamed gastrointestinal mucosa. Fiber The last post covered gut bacteria’s well-known ability to produce intestinal gas by fermenting fiber. However, dietary fiber, especially insoluble fiber, has other damaging characteristics. As I’ve mentioned before, fiber swells … Read More →
In this fifth and final post on gut dysbiosis, endotoxemia and heart disease, I want to explore the role cholesterol plays in all of this. As you know, I consider cholesterol an innocent bystander in this piece, not the villain. So what is cholesterol? Cholesterol is an alcohol but not the same type of … Read More →
As we are about to enter the festive 2012 holiday season, I thought it appropriate to blog about heart disease. Many of you may not know this, but the holiday season sees more deaths from heart attacks than any other time of the year. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah y’all! (1) For those of … Read More →
As promised in the last post, I want to now turn my attention to alcoholic liver disease (ALD). ALD is a major cause of mortality. It claims more than 75,000 lives worldwide each year. Of the estimated 14 million alcoholics in the United States, about 10% to 20% will develop cirrhosis at some point. … Read More →
This is the sixth post in my series on small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). Today I want to talk about those dietary factors that cause impaired intestinal motility and inflammation. I was hoping to include my thoughts on plant lectins in this post, but once I realized I was closer to writing a small book … Read More →
This is the fifth post in the small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) series. This and the next post deal with nutritional factors that predispose to SIBO. As I discussed here and here, there are a number of “non-dietary” causes of SIBO. Nevertheless, many of these diseases are clearly due to dietary factors, such as … Read More →
This is the third part of my blog series on small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). In part one, I covered what it is and in part two I discussed what diseases are associated with it. This and the next two posts covers the causes of SIBO. As I wrote in my opening article in … Read More →
In the previous two posts I wrote about the different types of gut flora and their physiological functions. In this post, I want to write about what can go terribly wrong when our commensal gut flora are unhappy. Let’s first define the term dysbiosis or disordered flora. I find that this term is thrown around … Read More →