Autoimmune Diseases and Hope

This post discusses how anecdotes can be helpful, how science sometimes surprises with confirming anecdotal evidence, and a surprising study that links a pathogenic bacteria to autoimmune diseases.

[This post is repeated content from the original email Autophagy without Weight Loss, Autoimmune Diseases, Fasting for Women but separated for easy access.]

Overview of post:

• Thousands of people have anecdotally healed their autoimmune disease through a zero carb diet without knowing why this works.

• Sometimes anecdotal evidence can be helpful when that’s all we have.

• However, several studies have shown the pathogen klebsiella is responsible for autoimmune diseases in many people. This pathogen can be starved on a zero-carb diet.

One of the hardest things in life can be having a health problem that doctors have no cure for.

When I was a kid, I remember thinking that medicine had a cure for every ailment. If you had a headache, you take a pill. If you have cancer, chemo can cure that. But as I grew older, I realized that there are many diseases that medicine is powerless to heal. Often medication can manage symptoms, and do little else.

Autoimmune diseases are one example where modern medicine has no ability to cure. All it can do is manage symptoms and suppress the immune system.

But don’t get me wrong. Modern medicine has done some wonderful things. I once had walking pneumonia and the antibiotics had me feeling like a new person within two days. My kids had strep a few times growing up and I was very thankful for antibiotics then too. When it comes to broken bones, you better believe I’m thankful for the gift of hospitals, surgery, and anesthesia.

But the problems I just mentioned refer to acute events. Sometimes it’s easy to make the jump from thinking that if a little medical intervention in a crisis is a good thing, then a lot of medical intervention is always better.

I’ve been guilty of making this mistake myself. For years I’ve suffered from a disorder called interstitial cystitis (IC) which is a fancy name for chronic inflammation and pain in the bladder. It is an autoimmune disorder but no one knows what causes it or cures it.

Like other inflammatory diseases, IC flares at times and the pain would keep me from sleeping. Over the course of two decades, I visited multiple urologists. They did various tests such as CT scans and internal scopes, we tried medication, I did an elimination diet but nothing helped even slightly. 

However, after fasting for several months, my pain has dramatically improved.

Although this is merely one anecdote, it does make me think about the relationship between high insulin and high inflammation in the body. Throughout the years that I was searching for a solution to my constant pain, I kept asking the question: my body wants to heal itself, but why can’t it?

There’s a principle that I drew from this experience: sometimes we have to think outside the box and look for an answer in a very unexpected place.

All those years, I was looking in the wrong places: visiting specialists, trying medications, having expensive tests. And although there’s nothing wrong with looking for answers there, if they don’t have the answers, it’s time to approach it from a different angle. 

A meat-only diet? Say what?

Here’s another extremely strange anecdote to chew on. The well-known clinical psychologist, Jordan Peterson, has a daughter named Mikhaila, who completely reversed her debilitating rheumatoid arthritis (RA) by going on a meat-only diet. RA is an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the joints. Eating only meat is one of the very last cures that most mainstream doctors would recommend. Most people wouldn’t even think to try that. But it somehow worked for her. 

The dominant narrative pushed by mainstream media is very cohesive: eat often, eat first thing in the morning, eat mostly plants, and avoid too much meat, eggs, and animal fat. But if that’s not working for you, don’t be afraid to question those guidelines.

Mikhaila Peterson explains in her interview with Joe Rogan that she largely figured out for herself by trial and error that eating only meat would heal her body. And that courage to think outside the guidelines was more helpful than the dozens of specialists she visited and the myriad of medications she was on. 

I want to think more like that. I want to listen to more stories about how people healed themselves doing things that no one expected would work. 

Someone I know well was recently experiencing joint pain and she read that raw goat milk is one of the highest foods in the powerful antioxidant glutathione. She started drinking a lot of it daily and her symptoms slowly went away. But more surprisingly, she’s never had regular periods in her entire life. After starting the raw goat milk, she then had her first three regular cycles ever. 

As I was puzzling over this, I reminded myself that we don’t have to know why something works to know that it works. But then, I recently happened upon this article in PubMed linking glutathione deficiency with severe COVID.

That told me that there really is something to having enough of this glutathione stuff in the body. If the absence of glutathione can cause a susceptibility to viruses, then it’s not hard to see how the addition of glutathione could also correct an autoimmune response and a hormonal imbalance. (Note: glutathione supplementation in pill form has not been found to be effective.)

If I had access to a lab and unlimited funds, I could have tested this friend for glutathione deficiency before she started the goat milk. Then I could have tested her 1 week in, 2 weeks, 4 weeks, taken hormone samples, published a study, perhaps found out some other interesting things, and made it all official.

But even though I don’t have those capabilities, her problem has still been solved and that’s what matters.

In this particular case, I now have a clue as to what the mechanism might be for why something as odd as drinking enough goat milk could help someone’s health.

But we don’t always find that connection. And that’s okay if the thing we’re doing works.

Sounding Like a Weirdo

Those three examples I just mentioned are merely anecdotes and nothing more. The same health hacks may or may not work for you. As with every last thing in life, results will vary. But these three stories have one thing in common: people who weren’t afraid to experiment with doing something that sounds a little cuckoo. 

I was once at a dinner party with a doctor who had been in practice for 30 years and I mentioned that my dad had reversed his type 2 diabetes through fasting. This doctor narrowed his eyes, tilted his head, and said, “Faaaaassstiiiiiing?” like it was the stupidest idea he had ever heard.

I can imagine him laughing with his coworkers about this newsletter. Fasting? Eating only meat? Drinking raw goat’s milk? What’s next? Hopping on one foot while singing the alphabet?

But who’s having the last laugh when I now sleep better at night with my bladder pain gone and I’m 4 months into not having monthly migraines which I’ve had my entire adult life? Mikhaila Peterson’s autoimmune disease is in complete remission, and my friend’s joint pain is gone and her periods are regular. And we did all this without any prescribed medications.

The Plot Thickens

I write my posts weeks in advance and everything you just read above was set to publish in last week’s newsletter. But my total content ended up being way too long so I decided to save this section for this week.

As it turns out, in the meantime, I happened upon a crazy study. I had every intention of simply giving you the Mikhaila Peterson anecdote without the slightest clue of why a meat-only diet could have cured her. But finding this study the other day blew me away.

The title is The Link between Ankylosing Spondylitis, Crohn’s Disease, Klebsiella, and Starch Consumption. The researchers are using the term “Anklosing Spondylitis” (AS) to refer to “reactive arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, undifferentiated SpA, and arthritis associated with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which includes Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC).” Later in the study, it applies these findings to other autoimmune diseases as well.

Chew on this quote:

The results of a large number of studies support the idea that an enteropathic pathogen, Klebsiella pneumoniae, is the most likely triggering factor involved in the initiation and development of these diseases. Increased starch consumptions by genetically susceptible individuals such as those possessing HLA-B27 allelotypes could trigger the disease in both AS and CD [Crohn’s Disease] by enhancing the growth and perpetuation of the Klebsiella microbes in the bowel.

My Translation: Researchers have found a pathogenic (bad) bacteria called klebsiella present in people with a host of autoimmune conditions. This bug feeds on starch and can be starved in the absence of starch. The researchers actually suggest a possible solution for autoimmune could be going on a zero carb diet, exactly what numerous people like Mikhaila Peterson have found works anecdotally.

After citing over 80 studies, the last sentence of the conclusion reads:

Dietary manipulation in the form of low starch diet intake can be included in the management of patients with AS or CD, especially when used in conjunction with the current medical therapeutic measures.

My Translation: It’s likely that my own autoimmune remission could be because I starved those little buggers to death without even knowing why fasting was working. I solved my own issue despite not having a lab or funding or microscopes or letters after my name or expensive drugs at my disposal.

It could be that Mikhaila Peterson’s debilitating disease (her specialists said it was the worst autoimmune case they had seen in their careers) was cured because she also starved off some little micro doodads with a fancy Latin name. I don’t know for sure and maybe we’ll never know. Do we have to know?

The point is that sometimes medicine comes along and shows that something crazy, something that medical professionals scoffed at, actually has a scientific basis.

But even if I don’t know that basis, if what I’m doing is working, I’m going to keep doing it. Maybe someday science will catch up with me.

In the meantime, I’m not going to wait around for the results of some randomized controlled trial to give me permission to try a health change that has worked for others. When it comes to medications, however, it’s different since they often have 47 side-effects (read off auctioneer-style at the end of the commercial). In that case, we should wait for randomized controlled trial confirmation because you never know how a drug will throw off the delicate balance in the human body.

My encouragement to you this week is if you have a chronic health condition, don’t be afraid to try something completely out of left field. And especially don’t be afraid to try something that questions the dominant health narrative you’ve heard your entire life.

Keep learning and asking questions. Demand answers that correspond with demonstrated results. I’m not suggesting things like the supplement/herb/essential oil world, which are sometimes just as fruitless as so many medications.

But what if there’s a free, simple solution for you? It’s probably going to require some self-control and maybe a little hard work. But wouldn’t the results be worth it? 

So here’s my challenge for you: Have the courage to do something a little odd. Drink nothing but goat’s milk for one week if you want. Or eat beef and butter for a month to starve a pathogen. It’s your life. You can experiment any way you want. The diet police aren’t going to parachute in, slap that egg out of your hand, and start shoveling the Lucky Charms down your throat.

In closing, you may enjoy hearing Mikhaila Peterson tell her autoimmune story herself. In her own words, she was dying and now she’s not. Here’s to hope: