Donna’s Blog

The more I learn about diet and the immune system –and hear from thousands of patients — the more I’m convinced that food really is medicine. More and more studies are linking a healthy diet to a better chance of doing well with autoimmune disease. Recent studies show that when immigrants from South Asian countries move to Western countries and begin to eat processed food diets, they show an increase of autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. Likewise, research has shown that when people with diseases like Crohn’s and rheumatoid arthritis switch to what experts call an anti-inflammatory diet — largely a diet based on whole, natural foods — their symptoms improve. And yet more research shows that boys and girls on a similar whole foods diet were at a lower risk for developing Crohn’s disease, while those on a highly processed Western diet were at a higher risk.

Such an Anti-Autoimmune Diet focuses on lamb, chicken and turkey; fish with low mercury content such as flounder or tilapia; hormone-free eggs; vegetables; fresh fruits; and gluten free grains.  What have your experiences been with diet and recovery?  I’d love to hear.

Hi all. Welcome to my website readers and to my Amazon readers, who are now able to access my blog on Amazon.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Since The Autoimmune Epidemic came out I’ve heard from key scientists from around the country who wanted to make me aware of additional groundbreaking studies on the effects of environmental chemicals and pollutants on the immune system (in addition to the dozens I discuss in my book).

As with global warming, the evidence continues to steadily, quietly mount that as we toxify our environment we are toxifying ourselves. As we leave a carbon imprint on the world around us we leave an indelible chemical imprint within. Here are some recent findings on what top scientists are uncovering about the toll that chemical imprint is taking on our human health:

John Peterson Myers, Ph.D., chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, and co-author of the classic book Our Stolen Future , has a fascinating — and disturbing — paper on low dose exposures and their effect on the human immune system:

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/sciencebackground/2007/2007-0415nmdrc.html

_____

Meanwhile, a recent international meeting of the Japanese Society of Allerology also focused on low level exposures to chemicals heightening immune system sensitivity and responses. Several papers — both of which describe heightened immune system reactivity far beneath levels of contaminants currently considered toxic — attracted a lot of attention:

http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/NewScience/oncompounds/phthalates/2006/2006-1010takanoetal.html

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/newscience/2007/2007-0401naritaetal.html

_________

Dr. Joachim Mutter, MD, wrote to tell me about studies on mercury triggering autoimmune disease and writes:

“(a) In animal studies, mercury was found to trigger, accelerate, and exacerbate autoimmune diseases such as lupus-like syndromes (Via 2003)
(b) Higher incidence of diabetes among mercury poisoned individuals (Uchino 1995)
(c) Autoimmune development of Multiple Sclerosis can be provoked by mercury and other metals (Stejskal 1999b)

Constant low-dose mercury exposure, as is typical with amalgam bearers, has been considered as a cause for certain autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, or systemic lupus erythematosis (SLE), by many authors (Bartova et al., 2003; Berlin, 2003; Hultmann et al., 1994, 1998; Pollard et al., 2001; Prochazkova et al., 2004; Stejskal and Stejskal, 1999; Stejskal et al., 1999; Sterzl et al., 1999; Via et al., 2003; Sterzl et al., 2006).”

…and he says,

“These effects can occur with exposure below acceptable safety limits (Kazantzis, 2002)”

Here’s a trick on how to quickly read the above studies for yourself — and do your own research. You can look at these studies by going to Pubmed — via the U.S. National Library of Medicine at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ – and input the author + date + mercury in the following format (for example):

Bartova[Author] AND 2003[Publication Date] + Mercury

The study will appear if it’s still in the databanks (older studies may not be). This way, you can do a bit of your own research and read the original abstracts of many of these papers on mercury and the immune system and see what you think.
_________

Meanwhile, Dr. Arlene Blum, MD, is working on helping the public to better understand the health consequences of flame retardants. You can learn more at:

http://greensciencepolicy.org

_______

And one upcoming study, not yet published by a group of researchers from around the country, shows what may turn out to be the most startling news of all. While current tests to determine levels of chemicals and pollutants are done by analyzing blood, urine and hair, scientists are finding that the levels of toxins are significantly higher when they test for these toxins in our fat.

This isn’t really surprising since it’s in our fat that we store toxins. What is surprising is the tests these scientists have done which show that levels of PCBs and chlorinated pesticides found in our fat are, on average, one hundred times higher than what shows up in our bloodstreams and urine.

Blood chilling indeed.

Please also check out my website at donnajacksonnakazawa.com for more information about the factors that are combining in our 21st Century life and causing our immune systems to be overtaxed.

Let me know what you think of the gathering evidence that we’re outpacing our evolutionary ability to keep adapting to so many chemicals and pollutants in our world.

When I set out to write THE AUTOIMMUNE EPIDEMIC I had — as many of you know — deep personal reasons for doing so. Like the hundreds of you who have written to me since THE AUTOIMMUNE EPIDEMIC came out, I suffer from a range of autoimmune diseases, including Guillain Barre Syndrome (GBS), small fiber sensory neuropathy, thyroiditis and others.

In 2005, when I found myself paralyzed for a second time from GBS — unable to move much more than my head, unable to reach out and hold my young son or daughter, I had many long months to think. I was struck by the fact that I was lying just a few floors away from where my own father had died in 1972 — 33 years earlier — from what would certainly now be diagnosed as autoimmune disease. My dad checked into the hospital to have part of his intestines removed — for an inflammatory bowel disorder. He was also on heavy doses of steroids for what was very likely rheumatoid arthritis (though we wouldn’t have known to call it that at the time). A few hours after his surgery, his surgeons realized that the steroids were causing the surgical sutures to dissolve. There was nothing to be done. He never came home.

There one day, playing checkers and taking us out for a sail, then ripped away from us, a young father of four — at the age of 42.

Thirty-three years later there I was — paralyzed by a neurological autoimmune disease — with my own two children at home, and told I might never walk again. Every fiber of my being wanted to get up and walk out the door of that hospital, raise my young son and daughter the way any other mother might, love them, tie their shoes, smooth back their hair, dry their tears, play checkers and chess, toss the football, go for a jog beside my kids on their bikes, or even just stand at the sidelines of a lacrosse game and cheer – all the things my dad just didn’t get a chance to do for very long with me.

I’m walking well now, after a long haul. Like many of you, I have good days and bed days; a kind of mercurial up and down that most autoimmune disease patients know all too well. And even on the best of days it’s a little like having the flu by seven p.m. I know, from the hundreds and hundreds of letters and emails that you’ve sent me, that you know how that feels, too. Like all of you, I am continually searching out — and implementing — ways to become as healthy as I possibly can.

And that’s what THE AUTOIMMUNE EPIDEMIC has really been about: helping you, the patients, to understand both what goes into your “barrel” to play a role in triggering autoimmune disease – and what you can take out of that barrel to help ameliorate disease and move toward your optimum level of health and well-being.

There are so many of us out there searching for these answers. Rates of autoimmune diseases have tripled in the last four decades and 1 in 9 women (and 1 in 12 Americans) can now expect to have an autoimmune disease. Indeed, a woman today is 8 times more likely to have an autoimmune disease than breast cancer.

In listening to your “Letters from the Autoimmune Epidemic” you seem to be particularly interested in sharing your ideas and insights about what works and what doesn’t in terms of helping you move toward wellness.

It is my deepest hope that this site will become a place where we can all support, educate and help each other.

I urge each of you to post your story — your “Letters From the Autoimmune Epidemic” — below.

What has given you hope? What helps you on the road to health and what do you need to avoid? We can all learn from your observations.

The registration process allows you to maintain as much privacy as you need.

Working together, perhaps we can make sure that we all get to be the active, vibrant parents and spouses and friends — or kids-growing-up-to-have-normal-lives — that we long to be. Isn’t it time we raised our voices in unison to make change happen? Let’s raise our collective voices — now.

My father would have loved to have had that chance. Let’s not waste it.

Even though the number of those who suffer from autoimmune diseases has more than tripled in the three decades since my father died, this still remains a silent epidemic. Consider these facts:                 1) Ninety percent of people still say they can’t name a single autoimmune disease.

2) Autoimmune disease research still gets one-tenth the funding of cancer (despite the fact that autoimmunity afflicts close to three times the number of people).

3) Autoimmune disease is still not a reportable disease (doctors don’t have to report data to any national registry when a patient is diagnosed with autoimmune disease — the way they must when a patient is diagnosed with cancer) so we still don’t really know how many people really have these diseases. Indeed, our ballpark number of 24 million may be much lower than the reality.

For decades, not much happened in terms of our progress in diagnosing and treating these diseases, either. But we’re now entering a new era of understanding as to how these diseases attack the body and how to treat them – not just with emerging drugs but with a whole new range of approaches that are often driven by patients searching for a road to wellness.

We can share that knowledge today as never before and help change the course of these diseases.
What do you think needs to happen — on a national level?

Some people believe that the sole cause of rising rates of immune-mediated disorders is due to what is called “the hygiene hypothesis.”  The hygiene hypothesis holds that the root cause of rising rates of immune related diseases stems not from the fact that we are living in too dirty a world, but, rather, from the fact that we are living too clean.  In other words, our lack of exposure to certain viruses and the swill of bacteria that most of our ancestors were exposed to living without vaccines or modern hygiene means children’s immune systems are no longer forced to build up the necessary immune defenses they need.  In a world of well-vacuumed homes, scrubbed bathrooms and more time spent in minivans than mucking about through the woods and farmland, coupled with massive vaccination programs that prevent full-fledged infection from many childhood diseases, our immune systems are, in a sense, overprotected.  They have so little to react to that they may be overreacting to anything – kind of like a bored teenager who is likely to get in more trouble when they don’t have enough to do.

However, immunotoxicologists at our research institutions agree almost universally that the hygiene hypothesis is hardly enough to fully explain today’s autoimmune epidemic.  At the same time that we are living with fewer exposures to natural pathogens, we are coming into contact with many times more artificial invaders in our day-to-day lives.  So that at the same time our immune systems may be confronting less natural dirt and muck and deadly outbreaks of disease, we’re encountering an endless slew of artificial toxins that confuse and overtax the immune system.  Interestingly, immigrants from other countries who are exposed to numerous infections and have few vaccines as young children develop allergies and autoimmune disease at rates similar to those of Americans soon after they immigrate to this country.

Each person, with his or her unique genetic composition, is exposed to a unique combination and level of autogens depending on what they encounter in their day-to-day lives through the air they breathe, the substances that come into contact with their skin, their stress levels, their diet and their genetic predisposition. Chemicals and heavy metals, additives in our highly processed twenty-first century diet, and viruses and bacterial agents to which we’re exposed all combine to impact our immune system. Chronic stress, which releases a slow drip of cortisol into our body, also plays a role in triggering autoimmune diseases. As long as your barrel is less than full, however, your immune system is still able to deal with what it confronts every day. But once the immune system becomes overburdened and that barrel fills to capacity it can begin to misread signals, causing the immune system to make costly mistakes and attack the body itself. Unfortunately in modern life we’ve created a perfect storm of factors – a plethora of chemicals, heavy metals, processed food additives, viral hits and stressors – for today’s autoimmune epidemic to take hold. So much of what we encounter in twenty-first century life is causing our barrel to fill to the brim – and spill over. At that point, disease strikes.

Recently, researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins reported that even people without a genetic predisposition are vulnerable to autoimmune diseases. Whether or not you get an autoimmune disease depends on how many of these triggers you’ve been exposed to over your lifetime – or how full your barrel is. People with a genetic predisposition may be more vulnerable, but anyone whose immune system is overtaxed or over-stimulated can develop an autoimmune disease.