Month: January 2020

The poem above was written for me by Anna P., a college freshman at Spring Hill University in Mobile Alabama..  

There’s a reason why the first thing we often ask someone when we meet them, right after we learn their name, is “where’s home for you?”

For me home is 100% in Nature.  It does not require a house for me.  This makes my perspective unique in the West.  

We may use our homes to help distinguish ourselves, but the dominant Western viewpoint is that regardless of location, the individual remains unchanged. It wasn’t until I stumbled across the following notion, mentioned in passing in a book about a Hindu pilgrimage by William S. Sax, that I began to question that idea:  People and the places where they reside are engaged in a continuing set of exchanges; they have determinate, mutual effects upon each other because they are part of a single, interactive system.

What I learned from Eastern philosophy is that while in the West we may feel sentimental or nostalgic attachment to the places we’ve lived, in the end we see them as separate from our inner selves. Most Westerners believe that your psychology, and your consciousness and your subjectivity don’t really depend on the place where you live, They come from inside — from inside your brain, or inside your soul or inside your personality. But for many Eastern cultures, a home isn’t just where you are, it’s who you are.

I realized I am relentless chaos years ago.  That is where my home is built.

In the modern Western world, perceptions of home are consistently colored by factors of economy and choice. There’s an expectation in our society that you’ll grow up, buy a house, get a mortgage, and jump through all the financial hoops that home ownership entails.

The endless options can leave us constantly wondering if there isn’t some place with better schools, a better neighborhood, more green space, and on and on. We may leave a pretty good thing behind, hoping that the next place will be even more desirable.

In some ways, this mobility has become part of the natural course of a life for this Black Swan. The script is a familiar one: you move out of your parents’ house, maybe go to college, get a place of your own, get a bigger house when you have kids, then a smaller one when the kids move out. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even if we did stay in one place, it’s unlikely we would ever have the same deep attachment to our environment as those from some South Asian communities do. It just doesn’t fit with our culture.

But in spite of everything — in spite of the mobility, the individualism, and the economy — on some level we do recognize the importance of place. The first thing we ask someone when we meet them, after their name, is where they are from, or the much more interestingly-phrased “where’s home for you?” We ask, not just to place a pushpin for them in our mental map of acquaintances, but because we recognize that the answer tells us something important about them. My answer for “where are you from?” is usually NYC, but “where’s home for you?” is a little harder for me to answer because I do not resonate with the concrete jungle any longer.

That environment taught me what not to seek in a home.

Home is where my heart beats well in Nature, then by its most literal definition, my home is wherever I am at that moment. I make the best of it because I a confident that I am making the choices of where I should be living for me.

Home is where I have all my skin in my own game.

And the truth is, the location of your heart, as well as the rest of your body, does affect who you are. The differences may seem trivial (a new subculture means new friends, more open spaces make you want to go outside more), but they can lead to lifestyle changes that are significant.

Memories, too, are cued by the physical environment we choose these days. We remain clueless about how the nnEMF footprint changes our feelings about the place we live now. When you visit a place you used to live and feel the difference now, these cues can cause you to revert back to the person you were when you lived there. You realize for the first time just how relative time is.

The rest of the time, different places are kept largely separated in our minds. The more connections our brain makes to something, the more likely our everyday thoughts are to lead us there. But connections made in one place can be isolated from those made in another, so we may not think as often about things that happened for the few months we lived someplace else. Looking back, many of my homes feel more like places borrowed than places possessed, and while I sometimes sift through mental souvenirs of my time there, in the scope of a lifetime, I was only a tourist in my own journey.

I can’t possibly live everywhere I once labeled home, but I can frame these places on my walls. My decorations can serve as a reminder of the more adventurous person I was in New York City, the more carefree person I was in Connecticut, and the more ambitious person I was in New Orleans. I can’t be connected with my home in the intense way Easterns are, but neither do I presume my personality to be context-free. No one is ever free from their social or physical environment. This is ever more true in todays social media terroir. And whether or not we are always aware of it, a home is a home because it blurs the line between the self and the surroundings, and challenges the line we try to draw between who we are and where we are.

For me right now as a soloist, home isn’t a place. It is a person. And I think I am finally getting home right.

I live in my own little world. But its ok for me. It appears they know me here well and I like that discomfort.

Reading Anna’s poem made me realize discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life………….I rather like that.

Thiamine, also known as vitamin B1, is now known to play a fundamental role in energy metabolism.  When we are deficient in B1 the mitochondrial matrix suffers from pseudohypoxia.   Its discovery followed from the original early research on the ‘anti-beriberi factor’ found in rice polishings. After its synthesis in 1936, it led to many years of research to find its action in treating beriberi, a lethal scourge known for thousands of years, particularly in cultures dependent on rice as a staple.

Thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) is the active co-enzyme form of thiamine and it is abundant in human RBC’s.  For this reason it is a reasonable marker that we can use in mitochondrial matrix failure associated with higher heteroplasmy states.  When we see abnormal peripheral smears in patients it signifies that we might want to clinically assess TPP activity and thiamine levels in our patients.  Some disease states associated with high mitochondrial density show these clinical features more often than not because certain organs have higher mitochondrial capacity.

When TPP is abnormal so is transketolase in RBC’s.  Transketolase is an enzyme of both the pentose phosphate pathway in all organisms and the Calvin cycle of photosynthesis.

When RBC transketolase is abnormal this is a beacon that RBC might not have a high fidelity signal connecting the sun to our colony of mitochondria.  This fosters the development of heteroplasmy in an insiduous way.  If one is not looking for it, a relative thiamine deficiency can manifest in many disease or non disease states.

In humans, transketolase connects the pentose phosphate pathway (EMF 4) to glycolysis, feeding excess sugar phosphates into the main carbohydrate metabolic pathways. Its presence is necessary for the production of NADPH (PPP), especially in tissues actively engaged in biosyntheses, such as fatty acid synthesis by the liver and mammary glands, and for steroid synthesis by the liver and adrenal glands. Thiamine diphosphate is an essential cofactor, along with calcium as a co-factor.

THE KEY LINK:

Thiamine Pyrophosphate (TPP) is the cofactor needed for the following reactions, Thiamine is required for only 4 biochemical reactions in the body  1. Pyruvate dehydrogenase 2. α ketoglutarate dehydrogenase  3. Branched-chain ketoacid dehydrogenase  4. Transketolase  TPP is involved in energy metabolism. Deficiency of TPP will affect the link reaction and TCA cycle. This leads to reduced ATP production and can alter function of the Pentose phosphate pathways I wrote about in EMF 4 blog post.  Red light from the sun can augment this ATP loss from thiamine deficiency.

Transketolase is an enzyme that uses a thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) as its KEY cofactor to conduct a 2 carbon transfer from ketoses onto aldoses in humans. In the Pentose Phosphate Pathway (EMF 4 blog), it performs both a transfer of carbons from xylulose-5-P onto Ribose-5-P and onto Erythrose-4-P, setting them up for reaction with transaldolase.

Transketolase activity is decreased in deficiency of thiamine and can be used as a marker of heightened heteroplasmy by enlightened physicians.

RBC transketolase activity is reduced in deficiency of vitamin B1, and may be used in the diagnosis of Wernicke’s encephalopathy and other B1-deficiency syndromes if the diagnosis is in doubt. Apart from the baseline enzyme activity (which may be normal even in deficiency states), acceleration of enzyme activity after the addition of thiamine pyrophosphate may be diagnostic of relative thiamine deficiency from any causes.  This altered activity can be quantified as follows:

a. 0-15% normal

b. 15-25% deficiency

c. >25% severe deficiency

CENTRAL LEPTIN RESISTANCE:  LONG LOOP OF BAZAN

Liver disease is one such disease state that causes central leptin resistance (Leptin resistance Part Deux blog).  Most cases of liver disease have central leptin resistance associated with them due to damage of the long loop of Bazan (image below).  This limits the reincorporation of DHA into human cell membranes and fosters inflammation because the elvanoids cannot be made to curtail the inflammatory cascade.

 

Simultaneously, thiamine can be depleted because of altered matrix functioning.   There is brisk evidence that thiamine deficiency is found in many liver diseases.  The literature reports 58% of patients with chronic liver disease have B1 deficiency, moreover, the incidence is higher in alcoholic than in non-alcoholic hepatic patients. It has also been shown that daily supplementation with high doses of thiamine hydrochloride (200 mg/day) for one week can restores levels of thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) in most cases.  Since TPP is the active co-enzyme form of thiamine, it also stimulates synthesis of the enzyme transketolase. Because of the essential role of TPP as a co-factor in intermediary metabolism of carbohydrates, lipids, and protein it can be a proxy marker for mitochondrial matrix dysfunction.  It maybe a NOVEL new way for us to indirectly measure heteroplasmy levels in humans.

THE LINK TO TECHNOLOGY:

Because thiamine is a major factor in the metabolism of glucose, it has long been known that ingestion of simple carbohydrates, processed in the body mainly to glucose, automatically increases the need for dietary thiamine. Since Frey and Volkow work, we know exposure to nnEMF also increase AMPK and glucose metabolism it should be clear that technology use and abuse can mimic nutritional problems historically associated with Vitamin B1.  Thus, high calorie malnutrition and technology abuse should be commonly associated with a chronic relative thiamine deficiency, irrespective of its fortification in food substances or the diet of any patient.  This relative deficit might lead to unusual presentations of disease linked to elevated heteroplasmy in humans.

QUICK SUMMARY:

Thiamine is normally present in pastured  lean pork and other meats, wheat germ, liver and other organ meats, poultry, eggs, fish, beans and peas, nuts, and whole grains. It is lower in foods like those mentioned above that have been altered by man’s input into food webs.  Blue light screens and nnEMF field deplete cells of thiamine because of how they affect AMPk pathways and glucose metabolism to mimic high calorie malnutrition.  Modern dairy products, fruit and vegetables are not good sources of B1.  In fact most of them deplete thiamine stores.  Humans only have the ability to store 14-18 days of this essential vitamin.  This storage ability is decreased by technology abuse and by vegan/vegetarian diets.   The RDA is 0.5 mg per 1000 kcal, adequate for a healthy individual consuming a healthy diet. Considerable losses occur during cooking or other heat-processing of food. Polyphenolic compounds in coffee and tea inactivate thiamine so that heavy use of these beverages could compromise thiamine stores in tissues.  

CITES:

http://jackkruse.com/emf-4-why-might-you-need-carbs-for-performance/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6435462/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6459027/

When a wise person speaks he understands fully the intent of the words, but what the ignorant person hears is subject to their present set of knowledge. There is an inherent disconnect. There is always a loss of information and energy transfer in this case which is why social media is not the ideal place to explain yourself in order to teach.

This requires the student having skin in the game to understand things well and it is best done in person. Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind in the under-educated mind. It is far safer and wiser for the quantum biologist to remain on the solid ground of the physics of light and eschew the shifting sands of philosophic extrapolations found in modern physics. The ignorant among us can know things, but the point of life is to understand how all things link back to the fabric of nature and life.

Life also has another surprise for those with natural wisdom: When we talk sense to a fool they often try to label you foolish only because of their own ignorance. If your audience is not wise this can lead to meme creation and control of many other lean minds. The goal is to make the curious wise with nature’s wisdom quickly to overcome the wasteful inertia of a paradigm’s core beliefs. This is why I am allergic to a closed mind who buries curiosity. What is the core message for a curious mind? Just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean or imply that the truth is not being delivered to you. Your wisdom myopia does not trump the deep truths buried in nature’s laws. There is a science of light out there to understand, and to bring it to biology is to brighten everyone’s perspectives. Today, biology is in the dark ages of understanding how light works with and within cells and innovates life from abiotic atoms.

This must change if medicine is to advance. An age in science is called dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see what is already published in the literature but still have yet to understand how it links back to life. Their educational myopia allows them to remain in the dark because they continue to misunderstand the implications of this data.

Your friends and family might not understand your new found ideas so this might help you help them to improve your relationships with in your circle of six.