What I Am All About

Monday, January 13, 2020

Nanobes and Coronary Artery Disease

Something I Discovered En Route to Looking Up Other Things

I got my chest CT results and an incidental finding is that I have "severe coronary calcification." So, I started looking up ways to decrease it and found a great article on outpatient chelation therapy. The researchers used a combination of plant powders and tetracycline orally, and EDTA suppositories per rectum. 

But why the antibiotic? The article sites nanobacteria (nanobes) as a causative factor in coronary artery disease and the tetracycline kills them off. 

This is the first time I've heard about nanobes, sooo...

https://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/nanobes/index.html


Friday, January 10, 2020

Polyphenols

Polyphenols are chemicals found abundantly in many types of foods, especially brightly colored fruits and veggies, but also teas, coffee, chocolate, and herbs/spices. Red wines are a rich source, too.

Of the top 5 polyphenol-containing foods, four are from berries. In order:

1. Wild Blueberries
2. Blackberries
3. Pomegranate
4. Cranberries
5. Blueberries

You can add strawberries and raspberries as close contenders.

Try to include at least 2 cups per day of these fruits in your diet.

Monday, January 6, 2020

Citrus Fruits and Kidney Stones "...lemonade therapy appears to be a reasonable alternative for patients with hypocitraturia who cannot tolerate first line therapy."

Although a terribly small study, let's hope it's a springboard to greater things. One other issue I have with this study is that they don't reveal how much real lemon juice is in their lemonade. 

Permit me to help translate some of the medspeak:

"Citrauric" simply means the amount of citric acid in your urine.

"Nephrolithiasis" is the term for kidney stone formation. 'Nephro' means kidney, as like the medical specialty Nephrology. 'Lith' means stone. Think of 'monolith,' or a large monument carved from a single (mono) rock.

"Hypocitraturia" is a chronically low (below normal) level of citrate in your urine.

Here are excerpts from the study. The full link is found at the end.

"Purpose: Citrus fruits and juices are a known natural source of dietary citrate. Of all the citrus juices, lemon juice appears to have the highest concentration of citrate. Therefore, lemonade therapy has been proposed as a potential treatment for patients with hypocitraturia. We retrospectively evaluated the impact of long-term lemonade therapy on urinary metabolic parameters and stone formation in patients with hypocitraturic nephrolithiasis."

"Conclusions: Due to its significant citraturic effect, lemonade therapy appears to be a reasonable nn.alternative for patients with hypocitraturia who cannot tolerate first line therapy. Future study in the form of a prospective, randomized trial is needed to validate these findings."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17382731