Lurking-

I was thinking of you last night and have a question of my own that I will ask first lest I forget it - What is the status of your flirtation with iodine? How did it turn out in the long term? It ties in with the rest of this BTW.

As to the mitochondria, let me come at it from where I am at present, if I may. As I have reported in the thread on creatine, carnitine, and mitochondria, I was enjoying great success with acetyl-L-carnitine. I swear that my symptoms were down 50%. Using less meds and getting better response too. Sleeping great. Working like a Trojanand enjoying it. Etc.

Unfortunately, a little over a week ago and almost overnight, that all fizzled. In fat, taking the carnitine seemed to make things worse. As I tried to make sense of things, a few "random" facts came up.

The pattern that I had experienced was like a good thing that reached a level where it went bad. That is a pattern that I link to endocrine response, rightly or not. You reach a threshold. If you draw back then things settle down. If you ignore your body then critical thresholds can shift and you face a new reality.Sometimes good but often not.

So, I quickly backed off and have been letting things simmer for a week now. I intend to dip a toe in later this week. Meanwhile, symptoms drift back toward where they were five or six weeks ago but a part of the improvement remains.

ALC has been well researched and given high marks for safety. It is popular and an awful lot is consumed by the athletic community. It does its thing by transporting fatty acid fuel into the cell and to the mitochondria where it swaps it for wastes and brings them back out.

The only negative that I found were a few very vague worries about possible poblems for people who have low thyroid (hypo-). While high thyroid (hyper-) gets the attention (Graves disease etc), hypo- is actually more common but often overlooked because it moves slow and symptoms are vague. In fact, it is very, very similar to PD.

One of the things that I wonder about is if PD could be a thyroid problem.

ALC comes from our diet. The best source is meat. Red, bloody, paleolithic meat. Skip the chicken and go straight for the antelope. Pass the mastodon, please. You get the picture.

We have talked several times about the fact that many of us do best when we start the day with animal protein. And we found that many of us have blood type "O" which supposedly indicates a need for meat.

Then there was a study that many will remember from about ten years ago where a doctor in South American cattle country reported good results with giving his patients niacin. The really interesting part was the fact that the patients at baseline were consuming huge amounts of beef every day. Was it a form of self-medication where they unconsiously knew that they felt better when they had a carnitine-laden meal?

Do we have an unusual need for bovine burgers? Another possible interpretation - that brontosaurus is loaded with those pesky, slippery "B" vitamins.

Nobody believed in scurvy as a "C" deficiency at first.

Any thoughts? -Rick