When the cell begins to broadcast their existence through signaling on a frequency different from that of the immune system, they are, literally speaking, “looking for trouble”. As explained in the first part of this series, all cells of the body resonate on a common signaling frequency because they originate from a common source, the fertilised egg or zygote, which gave rise to them all. Should the immune system itself step out of tune, this may spell doom as well, as it would in that disoriented state, see everything in its environment, the cells and germs alike, as “enemies” to be destroyed. The connection between cell signaling and disease, including Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), should be well appreciated if we have a picture of what is going on, or which may occur in our intestine. In this regard, I would like to make quick references to intestinal diseases caused by some popular foods, and how they impact on the immune system and the health of other part of the body, including the brain.
Celiac disease
Some people call it sprue. Some others say they are different but related. The common features of the disease include mal absorption, inflammation of the small intestine, or abnormal collapse of flattening of the Villi (through which nutrients from digested food are absorbed). These will present all sort of signals, including indigestion, pains, bloating, and weight loss etc. One of the major causes is food intolerance, which arises when certain proteins in enemy foods do not agree with the proteins in the body. In our time, the chief food culprit has been named as whole Wheat Bread. Other accomplices are rice, rye and barley. In my late 20s up to my early 30s, I was a whole wheat man. I bought all the whole wheat bread I would eat for breakfast in one whole week and store it in well wrapped up, deep freezer. I even went for weetabis as an evening snack. I retraced my steps, however, in my 40s when I began to notice rich, red blood on tissue paper whenever I cleaned up after a rest room visit. About 10 years before then, my maternal grandmother had died of breast cancer, and I had begun to take health matters serious, as I explained in www. Olufemikusa. com. Luckily for me, my experience responded beautifully to calamus root and stinging nettle root. It may very well have been a bleeding polyp or internal hemorrhoids. When I discovered that whole wheat bread could be the cause, I kicked it out of my diet. I helped many people in my circumstances do the same by sharing information with them.
Wheat
Whether it is whole wheat or refined wheat, the problem modern wheat slams on human health are more or less the same, many believed that modern whole wheat has been genetically modified, altered from mother nature’s original formula. It is like a molecule of water. It is made from two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen under certain conditions of temperature and pressure. If you alter the statue of quantum of any or more of this variables, what result from that is not the molecule of water as we have historically known it, and the function it would perform in the body would be that unintended by Mother Nature. That is what may have befallen whole wheat and human health.
Gluten
Loaded with gluten, bread made from wheat is pliable and attractive. While flour bread is made by removing fiber and other nutrient from whole wheat to make it longer and more palatable, many people cannot tolerate or digest gluten. But there are other people who do not immediately react to it, although it is wrecking havoc in their intestines and bodies. The human immune system, perhaps because of antigen differences, sees gluten as a foreign body, an enemy, and attacks it. This “war” damages the wall of the intestine, a hallmark of celiac disease. Even people, who may not present core celiac disease symptoms come off with intestinal damage, evidence of which could be pain, anemia, bloating, stool inconsistency, tiredness, microbial over breeding. This may cause “leaky gut syndrome”, a condition which makes the intestinal lining more permeable and allows larger than normal nutrient particles to pass through into the blood stream to the cells.
Apart from these discom features, whole wheat has been found, as at 71 counts, to be as high on the Glycemic Index as white bread. This is the rate at which a food substance allows its sugar content to cross into the blood stream. At this high GI, whole wheat causes, like white bread rapid injections of glucose into the bloodstream, stressing the pancreas, and increasing the risk of glycation (damage to proteins and fats by sugar molecule) hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) and even diabetes.
Phytic acid
This is a nutrient robber. Wheat has lot of it. Phytic acid teaches from the body such important alkalising minerals as calcium, magnesium and zinc, and depletes the body’s stocks of vitamin D, which are needed for healthy bones and prevent cancer.
Brain disease
Gluten in wheat has been linked to some brain disease, including cerebella ataxia, gluten ataxia, and schi zophrenia, autism and epilepsy, although more studies in respect of autism and epilepsy are suggested by researchers.
Gliadin
Found in the gluten of wheat, gliadin is a protean protein, the most abundant protein in wheat. It is one of the cardinal reasons wheat has become dangerous today to human health. For the gliadin of 2018 is not the gliadin of 1960. The gliadin of today has been dramatically modified genetically to increase the yield per acre. That means that the gliadin-enriched wheat of today, made by the human intellect. It’s not the wheat Mother Nature developed for the feeding and health of man at God’s command.
Dr. William Davies, writing on this subject, says: “Gliadin is degraded to a collection of polypeptides called exorphins” in the gastro-intestinal tract. Exorphins cross the Blood-Brain-Barrier and bind to opiate receptors to induce appetite as well as behavioral changes such as behavioral outbursts and inattention in children with ADHD and autism, hearing voices and social detachment in schizophrenics and the mania of bipolar illness.
People, who consume gliadin consume 400 calories more per day. Incidentally, antibodies to gliadin are capable of binding to nervous system tissue and may contribute to immune immediate neurological impairment such as cerebral ataxia, and gluten encelopathy. Gliadin, particularly the Omega fraction, is also responsible for allergic responses, including baker’s asthma, and the odd wheat dependant exercise induced analphylasis.
Dr. Davies said the gliadin-modified wheat was developed in the United States in the 1960s, introduced to farmers in the 1970s, and gained currency throughout the country because the yield per acre was 10 times bigger than that of the natural wheat. Ladies and gentlemen, that wheat is now been massively grown in Nigeria and imported for many wheat-derived food products.
Big business would be a fool to fold its arms amid the torrent of revelations of its misdeeds. So, here and there, now and then, one find its defenders telling us the picture is not as bad as painted by prophets of doom. To this fight back, I always hurl a wise saying of our fore fathers in Yoruba land… “Ogun ti a gbo tele ki n pa aro ti o li ogbon” (A pre-announced war does not kill a wise, lame man).
Earlier, I said many factors hang about cell signaling. As just shown, leaky gut syndrome is one of them. Another is acidosis. RA hypothesis suggests that because RA sufferers were on acidifying diets for a long time, their systems become acidic, and, in the environment, immune cells easily become not only stressed up, but disoriented and mistake-prone. The way out of this, which I discovered and followed, is to switch over to alkaline –forming foods. That is why I always speak of the greens and of the need to mineralise because mineralisation promotes the possibilities of alkalisation. My son, Seun, frowned when as I was eating, and asked him to add Spirulina and Asparagus powders to his plate of beans for lunch.
But I admire him for chewing his food to paste, before swallowing it. Many years of dead-lines life in the newsroom have made me one of the fastest eaters around. But I always remember this stuff about polysaccharides, disaccharides and monosacharides, leaky gut syndrome and rheumatoid arthritis.
We remember cell signaling even in the fertilisation of the human egg by a sperm cell. We often see that the sperm has no eyes as such, and depends largely on signaling to find and fertilise the egg in the fallopian tube. What accounts for this dexterity, they say, is Calcium. This mineral is said to help the egg signal its whereabouts to the male cell, which tracks the echo to the egg. Dr. Frank Orthoefer, Ph. D., gives us a picture of cell signaling in his book, LECITHIN AND HEALTH.
He says: “Lecithin is the messenger, which carries the signals or message from the exterior of the cell across the cell membrane to the interior of the cell where biochemical functions occur. The message may be a signal from hormones produced in other parts of the body, or from many other substances exterior to the cell. Without this process, cells could not grow, replicate or absorb and utilise nutrients for energy. The outermost membrane of the cell is almost a master switch for the cell. The cell membrane controls passage of nutrients, charged ions, molecular messages (hormones) cell-to-cell communication and even cellular shape. Protein are embedded in the membrane and manage the activity of the cell membrane. Co-ordination of the activities is dependent on the phospholipids present.
Dr. Othoefer’s book (ISBN 1-890 612-03-0) is recommended for your family health library, because the confirmation it provides about cell signally touches on some of the possible causes of today’s devastating diseases, including dementia, memory problems, psychiatric challenges, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis, to mention a few of them.
Dr. Orthoefer says, for example: ‘‘The co-ordination of cellular activity leaks to a collection of cells within specific tissues or organs that perform their role as part of the total organism. Obviously, for all higher animals, including humans, all cellular systems or tissues must work in conjuction, forming various tissues or organ systems. lecithin is involved in the signalling and co-ordination of cellular activity that together make up the whole organism. The suggestion I pick from this is that if the immune system is attacking the joints, the signalling system has gone out of order . Either the joints are signaling that they are now foreign bodies, and the immune system is attacking them as such, or the joints are still signally that “we are still loyal, sir”, as the civil population salute armed security personnel in Nigeria, for their safety, and the immune system no longer understands that language because it is now vibrating on a different frequency in this regard. Lecithin may help to make a difference, supporting co-ordination efforts of the body.
Zinc and Copper
I am not saying Lecithin is the all-in-all or first among equals in RA Theraphy. Signalling problems may lie behind other possible sources, including hormonal and enzyme imbalances. RA sufferers are known, for example, to exhibit zinc defficiency. Zinc goes with copper everywhere. Zinc defficiency may mean too much copper in the zinc copper ratio matric, or plain copper defficiency as well: like zinc, copper is nutritionally vibrant. it helps major heart function, prevents anaemia, helps to reduces high cholesterol, uric acid and blood sugar level, is good for immunity and bone strength. It comes with zinc, ideally was ratio 8:1. Many zinc and copper supplements parade copper as gluconate, copper sulphate and copper acetate. This are said to not readily increase copper levels in tissues and in the blood. Going by landmark studies in which some RA sufferers had remissions of pain and swelling for about three years, copper salicylate, copper acetate and copper aspirinate. Some of them help heal peptic ulcer and produce super oxide dismutase (SOD), an anti-inflammatory natural anti oxidant. In the readily available copper brands, copper sebacate is found to be more the therapeutic copper gluconate and copper sulphate and copper acetate. I prefer to take zinc alone and obtain my copper from the greens (spirulina, kale, chlorella etc). In the 1980s when I had symptoms of RA, I wore a copper bracelet, which was in vogue then for arthritic therapy.
Some other measures
RA loves cold. So, warm bathe and heat application should help. Aloe Heat Lotion, camphorated castor oil and cayeme pepper roll-on cream help to reduce inflammation and pain. Aloe vera gel is a known immune system modulator. It improves low activity and is calming in hyper-activity. There are tissue or cell salts such as calflor which are anti-stiffness and mag phos which improves metabolic activity in sluggish tissues. Ferrum phos, forcibly, as it were takes oxygen to oxygen starved parts of the body such as the inflamed and stiff, immobile joint. Some studies find that RA sufferers are Vitamin C deficient. One doctor in England found out that his patient improved when they went off poultry chicken. Some patients avoid the night shade family of foods. Such as white potatoes, tomatoes, egg plant, tobacco, all peppers except black pepper. Vegetable juices, are suggested, but not so much vegetable oils because they provoke inflammation.
