30Dec 2011 by Marjorie 3 Comments

Scientific American article series on self-experimenters

nutritional therapy, self-experiment
While investigating insomnia I came across this 2008 series of Scientific American articles on eight people who've been experimenting on themselves to investigate a variety of hypotheses. The subjects include a cybernetics professor who's wired his nervous system to a computer, the playwright who made the movie "Super Size Me," and a cardiologist who tried an obscure drug to stop his alcohol binging. The fella after my own heart is Seth Roberts, who after ten years of experimenting, finally resolved his insomnia by moving breakfast back a few hours. He also curbed his overeating by ingesting several tablespoons of vegetable oil a day and as a result lost a significant amount of weight. Then he wrote a diet book about it and gained a significant amount of attention. One expert's…
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29Dec 2011 by Marjorie 1 Comment

Remembering our vitamin-popping progenitor

nutritional therapy, self-experiment
by guest author M.E. Editor's note: I am actually the third generation of my family to believe that nutritional deficiencies play a major role in health problems and that anyone with knowledge of the scientific method can treat him/herself. Here our guest writer and 2nd-gen orthomolecular self-experimenter M.E. -- aka Mom -- presents a brief bio of my grandfather. When vitamins weren't even a thing yet Back in 1909, a very excited five-year old boy was given a ride in the first automobile in his small Midwestern town. Little Jimmy grew up to be an engineer and remembered this “horseless carriage” in detail for the rest of his long life. He also remembered that the car’s owner, the town doctor, told him that day about a new discovery that would…
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18Dec 2011 by Marjorie No Comments

Another unexpected side effect of repletion: expanded horizons

nutritional therapy, The Weird
(Originally posted December 2011) I wrote earlier of some unexpected side effects of correcting a deficiency, and here's a new one: you learn a lot about Japanese culture. After I started researching iodine deficiency and decided to experiment with that, I was visited with cravings for sushi and Japanese movies. What with their seafood-laden diet, the Japanese ingest about 50 times more iodine than we do every day. They also have a surprisingly low incidence of a few ailments associated with modern lifestyles -- breast cancer, for one -- which got Western researchers thinking about what big doses of it might do. As to why the sushi craving appeared...maybe my body, after years of deprivation, had forgotten it ever needed iodine, and when reminded of it with a flood of…
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30Nov 2011 by Marjorie No Comments

A history of adulterated botanical drugs

reference
(Via New Hope 360.) The Fall 2011 issue of the American Botanical Council's HerbalGram features "A Brief History of Adulteration of Herbs, Spices, and Botanical Drugs," an article covering intentional and unintentional alterations going back to ancient Greece. In ancient Athens, such mischief included adding flavorings to wine to make it taste like an older vintage. Since then cinnamon oil has been watered down with wine, black pepper mixed with linseed, and green tea blackened with sheep's dung. The most famous episode was probably the Prohibition-era Jamaica Ginger scandal, in which antifreeze and plasticizers were added to a ginger extract, which paralyzed up to 50,000 people who drank it for the alcohol. Many "Ginger Jake" victims were left with a distinctive gait called the jake walk. Early detection methods included…
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19Nov 2011 by Marjorie 1 Comment

A list of supplements that don’t work very well in the versions sold in the US

nutritional therapy
Updated October 22, 2020. Originally posted November 19, 2011. Over the years I've learned that some of the nutrient supplements on the shelves in the US don't work very well, either because a significant part of the population can't process them, or because the version used is poorly absorbed by the body, or because they are so cheaply formulated that the filler would make you sick before you could get enough of the active ingredient to resolve your deficiency. Here's everything I know so far. Needless to say, the better versions are more expensive and harder to find. Folic acid Processing this synthetic vitamin into its active form requires methyl groups and those of us who are methyl-challenged (low methylators) need to use the methylfolate version. Some sources say that…
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08Oct 2011 by Marjorie No Comments

Animations: another nutritional therapy research resource

nutritional therapy, reference
I don't usually cover the cellular-biology end of nutritional therapy because 1) who cares and 2) I don't know what I'm talking about, but I came across this animation of how magnesium and calcium work together and was surprised to find it interesting. It helped cement my understanding of the minerals' roles in the body. Read More Animations: another nutritional therapy research resource
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