All My Life I've Wondered What's Wrong with My Immune System

Constant infections led to over 100 rounds of antibiotics, yet my immune system recently seems to have come back from the dead. A possible factor is increasing my intake of fat soluble vitamins.

Note: this post is part 1 of a four-part series on Weston Price. Here is

Part 2: Weston Price: In Tireless Pursuit of the Principles of Human Health

Part 3: How to Incorporate Weston Price's Nutritional Principles into Modern Life

Part 4: Anecdotes from Weston Price's Book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

In Today’s Post:

• I’ve struggled with a poorly functioning immune system for my entire life

• I’m estimating I’ve been on over 100 rounds of antibiotics

• For 30 years I asked doctors what was wrong with my immune system, and no one knew

• I grew hopeful reading in the last two years about how vital fat soluble vitamins are to proper immune function, and how most modern people get suboptimal levels that compromise immune function

• The results so far of my self-experimentation have been extremely encouraging

My vitamin D levels went from 24.4 (terrible) to 69.2 by supplementing with cod liver oil and other animal foods. I started some of the foods over a year ago and have been doing others for only about 6 months (to be explained in full next week).

I took no vitamin D pills because I read that many chemical-made vitamins are often toxic. Note: I do take some supplements such as magnesium glycinate (which is an electrolyte) and whole food vitamin C. But I avoid many lab-made vitamins such as lab-made ascorbic acid marketed as vitamin C.

My Previous Pill-Popping Habits

Although I credit intermittent fasting with a huge increase in health, there’s more to my story. When I began to put into practice the principles of Weston Price on what to eat, a second wave of healing began. But before I explain that, allow me to disclose a bit more about my past health.

Most of you know that I spent my adult years stuck in the mainstream medical model of “a pill for an ill.” But few know just how entangled I was in this elaborate medicine-based rendezvous. And though I did occasionally cheat on modern medicine by tinkering with alternate cures, it wasn’t a clean break. Therefore, my sporadic attempts at alternative cures were unsuccessful, causing me to come crawling back to my abusive boyfriend called modern medicine begging for more pills.

Most don’t know the extent to which I was caught in this brutal cycle.

From childhood, my mom noticed I had constant colds, far more than her other 5 children; plus they lasted longer and were more severe.

When I turned 18, I had my first urinary tract infection (UTI). This began a pattern where I had UTIs on average every other month or about 5 a year. Over the course of 28 years, I’ve likely had well over 100 UTIs.

My frequent colds continued, and I also had on average three bouts of influenza a year. These viruses often progressed to sinus infections, bronchitis, and strep. I also had pneumonia, a stomach infection called H. pylori, mononucleosis (mono), and many female bacterial and yeast infections.

Between all these ailments, it’s likely that I have been on more than 120 rounds of antibiotics. I don’t mean that I’ve taken 120 pills. I mean 120 ten-day courses.

Even being trapped in the mainstream mindset, I still knew how terrible antibiotics were, especially at the rate I was popping them. But I just figured I was lucky to be alive. In the days before antibiotics, I figured I’d probably just be dead—I was just one of those sickly ones you read about in the novels.

My frequent UTIs developed into a condition called interstitial cystitis (IC) where I was in constant pain from chronic bladder inflammation. This is thought to be an autoimmune reaction the body has to a tissue that is constantly infected and inflamed. Because of this, I spent two years of my life on a continuous dose of antibiotics (Macrobid) to allow my body a chance to heal.

Yeah, I’ve taken a pill or two in my life. And I know what it’s like to be stuck in a bad cycle.

My health was so bad that every time my mom called me on the phone, the first thing she said was, “How’s your health?”

I also had chronic migraines that accelerated over 25 years. When I reached my peak of unhealthiness, I was averaging about 5-7 a month. My sumatriptan (Imitrex) had mostly stopped working.

Years of antibiotics, ibuprofen, and other meds had torn up my stomach. I now added gastritis to my list of problems (heartburn plus painful bloating and burping. I may have also had small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or SIBO).

The icing on the cake, or the cherry on the top, or the straw that broke the camel’s back, or the dog doo on the pile of dirty laundry (I made that last one up myself) was finding out I had prediabetes.

There was one thing I said to myself and that was: “Oh heck no.”

I knew that with diabetes comes neuropathy (severe nerve pain), high blood pressure (complete with meds), heart disease (meds to go with that too), kidney disease (not sure if there are meds, prolly are but only have a placebo effect), and then the meds for the diabetes itself, metformin, eventually insulin, and more.

Then there are the foot ulcers that don’t heal and a greater susceptibility to infection. I just pictured myself hooked up to an IV port of an antibiotic cocktail to stay alive.

I was already a “walking Walgreens” who never left the house with fewer than 5 medications in my purse: antibiotics for a flash UTI (they hit fast), Azo bladder pain pills in case the IC became unbearable (it flared often), sumatriptan for a flash migraine (so I could drive home if one hit), ibuprofen because, I can’t remember now—I think to combine with triptan since it no longer worked well, and Pepto Bismal chewable capsules for a flash gastritis attack, especially necessary after taking the first four.

But with this new prediabetes diagnosis, I was staring down the barrel of many more pills.

Doc, What's Wrong with My Immune System?

For nearly three decades I visited numerous doctors and specialists and always asked the same question: Doc, what’s wrong with my immune system?

No doctor knew. They were taught only how to attack the pathogen and not how to strengthen the host.

And then…this faint glimmer of hope was sparked in me when I began fasting simply to reverse my prediabetes but found the other health problems began to subside. Migraines became less frequent, my IC pain began to ease up. Change didn’t happen all at once. From Aug 2022 to March 2023, the seven months when I was losing all my weight, I still had several colds and flus per usual.

I remember being particularly discouraged when I had the flu right in the middle of my two-month carnivore experiment in February and March of last year. I was having zero sugar and didn’t even cheat when we went to Florida for spring break and the rest of the family was frequenting ice cream shops. So getting sick was disappointing because I was sure that going off sugar and carbs would solve all my problems.

However, I continued to slowly see many positive changes in my health. This is the point at which I started to become strange—one could even say a little fanatical. Yes, one could definitely say fanatical.

I have a deep dark secret that I’ve never told anyone on this Subsack. [Deep breath]. Okay, here it goes: when I was a kid, I was a nerd’s nerd. I took this nerdy thing to a level that most nerds can’t even imagine. I’m talking about going to the public library and checking out shelves of science books and reading them cover to cover. I believe I read every last book in the public library about marine biology, and I had a fairly large library in the Chicago suburbs.

I also read every book about turtles, and frogs, and salamanders and newts. It was bad. It was real, real bad.

I had a few friends…but most of them were my frogs, rabbits, birds, hamsters, toads, kittens, turtles, newts, anoles, sea anemones, snails, and numerous fish occupying both an elaborate freshwater tank and a saltwater tank. They all lived peacefully in my bedroom (until the cat got the hamster).

Just imagine long hair:

When other girls were obsessed with painting their nails, I may or may not have had a diamond back terrapin obsession.

Fast forward to today. Lurking beneath the film of my normal-seeming life was this obsessive-compulsive reader-scientist just waiting for a new topic to plummet me back down into the dark depths of my latent childhood science-reading addiction. You never really recover. Once a pathological science reader—always a pathological science reader.

So when I began to feel better fasting, I suddenly found I was caught in the grip of a new obsession. And I was going to read. it. all—as in, everything worthy of being read.

And not just any old health blogs—too underwhelming. I mean the most hard-core science I could find about human biology, and digestion, and fasting, and autophagy, oh, and the microbiome (FASCINATING!) and nutrition, and supplements, and minerals, and vitamins, and mitochondria, and the electron transport chain in the mitochondria (that thing is lit! did you know that you that complex IV can use photons? This may be related to why red light therapy has so many anti inflammatory effects) and all things nerdy biochemistry, and then epigenetics, and then single nucleotide polymorphisms such as MTHFR (I have so many things to say about SNPs later), and then I started reading about sleep, and all the genes that are activated in your brain when you view bright morning light, and then adrenal fatigue, and hormones, and then ketones and how they down-regulate inflammation and heal some people of mental health problems, and they positively alter gene expression, and regulate the gut microbiome. I know I’m forgetting about 85 other topics but if you follow this Substack for the next 17 years, I’m sure I’ll get to them eventually.

But my real love, that completely put me over the edge, almost more than reading about how many positive changes fasting and ketones instigate in the body, was the nerd-engrossing info about fat-soluble vitamins (I bet you didn’t see that coming.)

I mean, for real, the things are like magic in the body. I thought ketones were IT—the most amazing molecule in the human body. But alas, I threw myself at them too quickly.

I mean, they’ll always be my first love. I haven’t abandoned them. That abusive boyfriend with the drugs, I completely left him. But ketones, it’s complicated. The fat-soluble vitamins flat swooped me off my feet, and honestly, they mean even more to me than ketones now (did I just say that out loud?)

It’s true, my dear ketones, I love you, I’ll always love you, I’ll always need you, I’ll always want you, but I actually want the fat-soluble vitamins even more, as strange as that sounds. (See, people imagine that we science nerds are too academic and cold for love. But little do they know how passionate we are in our own special way.)

So, I’ll wrap this up here quickly since I can see you’re getting bored. (I have to constantly remind myself that even though I never tire of drooling over juicy biochemistry articles, my readers actually have lives, and they don’t want to spend all day reading about my love affairs with organic compounds.)

The Bottom Line

So, the end of this story is that I discovered these fat-soluble vitamins, or rather, I was introduced to them by Chris Masterjohn who was introduced to them by Weston Price. And I read Masterjohn’s numerous fascinating articles and then Price’s book, and there’s been a change in me.

I implemented all the steps. Because that’s what nerds do. They do all the things. So I did every last health thing that Weston Price observed the isolated people with near-perfect health doing. I was already doing some of them (raw dairy, local eggs, and beef liver) but I saw the biggest change when I added in the rest.

My last UTI was 16 months ago, October of 2022. I consider that a miracle.

I am now nearly through the very first winter of my life without a cold or flu. And even if I come down with a bug tomorrow, it will be by far the healthiest winter in my life. No one in my family can remember a time when everyone else had a cold or flu that I didn’t get, but that happened this winter, twice. Also, I have 7 grandkids ages 4 and under whom I saw frequently this fall, and who had numerous colds. I didn’t catch one.

Plus, I have no migraines, or gastritis, or IC symptoms, or pills in my purse (much to the disappointment of family members who came to think of me as their ibuprofen dealer).

I know this can sound like a one-off anecdote—and it is. However, when you combine my story with the thousands of people Weston Price carefully studied who had near complete immunity to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis as long as they stayed on the high vitamin ancestral diet, then I’m no longer one isolated anecdote, but I’m part of a long line of people who all had the same results.

So next week I’ll give you the details of what Price observed, what I did, and Price’s theories on why it works. Chris Masterjohn did his PhD on the interactions between vitamins A, D, and K, and his research has been seminal in confirming so much of what Price observed (BTW, E is important too but I’ll get to that later).

The news keeps saying that “Disease X” is coming and that it may be 10 times deadlier than COVID. Whatever.

Anyway, it’s never a bad idea to have a well-functioning immune system.

I hope you’ll consider, if not my health transformation, the hundreds of case studies of disease immunity that Price documented and that later scientific research has only confirmed.

Lastly, please understand that I am vehemently opposed to ever using affiliate links because my credibility is everything to me. The worst thing that could happen is for someone to get to the end of my post and wonder if it was all an infomercial for a product I get kickbacks on. The people getting kickbacks are the doctors who are paid from their drug lords, and I will never participate in that. So rest assured, my only motivation is that others can find the health I’ve found.

Well…to be completely honest…I DO have one additional motivation. I would like nothing more than to bankrupt the legal drug cartel, aka big pharma, and all its shills who are trying to force on us experimental drugs and gene therapies that were pushed through regulation at lightning speed. And the best way to bankrupt them is to have an army of people who have the strongest possible immunity.

If you can’t wait until next week, pick up a copy of Weston Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Or, scroll down to “The President’s Message” in this newsletter from The Weston Price Foundation where Sally Fallon gives a helpful overview of how the fat-soluble vitamins initiate immunity to pathogens.

All my life, I wondered what was wrong with my immune system. I may have figured it out. I hope you can too.

[This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not designed as a substitute for medical advice or to treat, diagnose, or cure a medical disease. Talk to your doctor before beginning any dietary changes or starting fasting, especially if you are on medications for diabetes. Fasting while taking certain medications such as Metformin and especially insulin can lead to dangerously low blood sugars. If your doctor does not support fasting, search for a physician who will support your fasting journey. Fasting is not recommended for those pregnant, breastfeeding, or for children and teens still growing and developing. For those with diabetes, personal fasting coaches are available through TheFastingMethod.com. I receive no compensation or ad revenue for anything in this newsletter including links to books, videos, websites, coaching services, podcasts, or supplements.]