Dr. Arturo M. Volpe

A recent study on antibiotics was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (“Antibiotic use in relation to the risk of breast cancer” (JAMA, 2004; 291: 827-835).

The study concludes that antibiotic use is associated with an increased rate of breast cancer, although researchers could not identify a specific mechanism through which cancer might be caused.

It is interesting to note that this study relates to all antibiotics and not to a specific type. Considering the huge differences in chemical makeup between different classes of antibiotics, it is likely that cancer is a result of something all antibiotics do to the body, and not of a specific chemical they contain. In addition, it would seem odd that antibiotics cause breast cancer, a hormone-related cancer, and not other types of cancer.

This study especially captured my attention because of information contained in the book “The Circadian Prescription” by Sidney Baker, MD. Dr. Baker is a respected authority on integrative medicine and founder of Defeat Autism Now! (DAN) and his book, published in the early 1990s, offers a precise explanation of how antibiotics can lead to breast cancer and in Dr. Baker’s opinion prostate cancer as well.

To understand Dr. Baker’s explanation it is important to know that all of us were “designed” to host a dense population of bacteria often referred to as “healthy flora” or more simply “good bugs” in our digestive tract. The numbers of these inhabitants of our digestive system are astounding. We used to hear estimates of billions, or hundreds of billions, but then it was trillions and hundreds of trillions. Apparently, the latest consensus is that they number in the quadrillions! Considering that our entire bodies are made up of one hundred or so trillion cells, there are clearly more bacteria in us than human cells.

These bugs are not just casual residents in our bodies; they play important roles and contribute in a very significant way to our overall health. We rely on them to produce certain
vitamins and other nutrients that we need but which are not contained in sufficient amounts in our food.

It’s a perfect relationship: the bugs live on fiber and other parts of our food that we cannot digest and, in turn, they produce fatty acids and vitamins (such as biotin) that are essential
to our health. Some of these bacterial substances also help regulate our hormone chemistry and thereby protect us from hormone-related cancers.

But what happens if the “good bugs” are somehow turned into “bad bugs?” Now we may harbor bacteria and also possibly yeast that, instead of working for us work against us, waging chemical warfare on our bodies and even our brains. Instead of producing vitamins for us they produce poisons. Instead of helping regulate our hormones they harm them, introducing hormone-like substances in our bodies that can wreak havoc with our own hormones and increase our risk of cancer, including breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men.

In a nutshell, antibiotics are the prime cause of damage to our intestinal flora. Antibiotics are designed to kill bacteria, but in addition to killing their intended targets, they also kill the
bacteria that contribute to our health, thus enabling opportunistic “bad bugs” or yeast cells to take their place.

According to Dr. Baker, just a single dose of antibiotics can damage our flora to such an extent that it could take months or years to recover, even if we are taking specific action to
promote such recovery.

We all know that antibiotics can be lifesaving if used appropriately, but knowing their darker side helps us understand why they should be used only when strictly necessary. When they must be used, Dr. Baker recommends consuming plenty of fiber to limit the damage by feeding the good bugs, plus yogurt containing live “healthy” bacteria. If damage is thought to be extensive due to long-term or frequent use of antibiotics over the course of many years, more drastic corrective measures may be needed and it would be advisable to work with a doctor or a nutritionist experienced in this area.

Tags: Cancer
Comments Off on Antibiotics and Cancer

This may sound like a dream come true! If you hate vegetables, or if your child stubbornly refuses to eat any, just take a pill or a flavored powder and get the same benefits. I hate to always be the one to give out the bad news, but I don’t think this is a good idea.

First of all, one of the main benefits of vegetables is what they are not. Vegetables are not junk food, so if you eat a vegetable you are not, at least at that moment in time, eating junk food. But if you take a pill.

Vegetables are also not starches. If you’ve been a reader of this newsletter for a while, you know that I am no friend of excessive starches or carbs. One way to moderate starch intake is to increase the amount of vegetables in a meal.

Let’s take broccoli and rice to illustrate this point. A cup of cooked broccoli contains 45 calories, 4 grams of protein, no fat and 8 grams of carbohydrate (raw broccoli contains less). In contrast, the same amount of cooked rice has 185 calories, 4 grams of protein, also no fat, and 42 grams of carbohydrate. In other words it would take five and a quarter cups of broccoli to match the carbs in a single cup or rice.

And what about the good things actually contained in vegetables that you would not get from a pill? The first of these is water, and to go back to our example broccoli is 90% water. This means that vegetables also help hydrate the body, something no pill will do.

The water in vegetables also forms a complex matrix with minerals and other nutrients, thus enhancing their absorption. This matrix is broken when vegetables are dehydrated and processed to make them into pills. Also, it is unclear to me if and to what extent nutrients are preserved during the process.

The next important component of vegetables missing from a pill is fiber. Our cup of broccoli contains a respectable 4 grams of fiber, not as much as found in prunes, for example, but well in excess of the 0.7 grams in a cup of white rice. Brown rice is a good source of fiber but still comes in at only 3 grams per cup. Fiber is completely eliminated or at least drastically reduced when vegetables are concentrated to make them into pills.

Finally, consider that vegetables sometimes contain bad things as well, like pesticide residues. If the manufacturer of a vegetable extract does not guarantee an organic source, it is likely that these chemicals are concentrated in the final product after the water and fiber are removed.

Some vegetables also contain naturally occurring anti-nutrients. For example, spinach is rich in calcium, but also contains oxalic acid that prevents us from absorbing that calcium. Cooking inactivates oxalic acid and thereby makes th e calcium available to us. Of course other nutrients, like vitamin C, are lost in cooking, which is why I recommend eating a mix of raw and cooked vegetables.

My point is that these vegetable pills or powders are always promoted as preserving the goodness of raw vegetables but no reference is ever made to the downside, like the lack or fiber and the presence of anti-nutrients found in raw vegetables but not in cooked ones.

Now that you know that vegetable powders or pills are not a solution, what do you do about your child who still refuses to eat any vegetable? Unfortunately this is a complex question that I cannot answer in general terms, but one that I have been working on, many times successfully, with individual families. Realizing that there are no quick and easy solutions is a good place to begin when developing a successful strategy.

Tags: Diet
Comments Off on Vegetables in a Pill?

Before beginning this discussion, it’s worth mentioning that mercury is the single most toxic non-nuclear element known to man. To get an idea of how toxic it is, consider that adding 1/70th of a teaspoon of mercury every year to a 25-acre lake will pollute it in just a few years to the point of making the fish in it hazardous for human consumption (1). A well-recognized safety threshold for mercury in human blood is 5.8 parts per billion, a minuscule amount.

In infants and small children, mercury interferes with normal neurological development and is suspected of causing a broad range of disorders from autism to ADHD and dyslexia. In
adults, its effects are non-specific but it can play a role in causing a multitude of conditions including depression and anxiety, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and immune system disorders.

Nevertheless we continue to pour mercury into our environment, primarily from coal-burning power plants that, according to estimates, spew 40 tons or 80,000 lbs of mercury into our environment each year in the U.S. alone (2). Mercury has now been detected everywhere in our surroundings, including in New York snow and rain at levels far above those considered safe (3). This mercury then flows to lakes and oceans, where it accumulates in the fish we eat.

We have also been operating on the premise that adding a little mercury here and there isn’t going to hurt anyone, and so we’ve put it in vaccines and other medications as the
preservative thimerosal. We also use it to make dental fillings known as “silver” or amalgam fillings, which are 50% mercury, even though it has been shown to leak from these fillings (4).

The results are beginning to be revealed. Studying levels of mercury in umbilical cord blood, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently concluded that as many as 630,000 babies are born each year in our country at risk of lowered intelligence and learning problems due to exposure to mercury in the womb.

This finding doubles previous estimates by the EPA. In earlier studies, the agency only evaluated levels of mercury in women’s blood, considering 5.8 parts-per-billion (ppb) to be the threshold for danger.

Looking instead at umbilical cord blood, the EPA came to the realization that a fetus has no means of excreting mercury, so levels as low as 3.5 ppb in maternal blood lead to a
dangerous buildup in newborns. The EPA estimates that 1 in 6 women in our country has blood levels of mercury above 3.5 ppb (5).

Another astounding piece of the puzzle comes from a recent Institute of Medicine press release relating to an independent review of vaccine safety data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (6). Analyzing pre-existing data, investigators concluded that children who receive three vaccines containing mercury as the preservative thimerosal are 27 times more likely to develop autism than children who receive the same vaccines without thimerosal. By comparison, men who smoke have a risk factor for developing lung cancer of 22 times over men who do not smoke, while for female smokers it is only 11 times more likely.

I have not seen any official denials of the EPA’s conclusions but I understand they are still under review. If confirmed, they are likely to have momentous repercussions. These findings clearly point away from genetics as a cause of neuro-developmental disorders and towards environmental causes. However, genetics do play a part.

In a seemingly unrelated study, investigators focused on genes that encode for glutathione-s-transferases (GSTs). GSTs are enzymes that detoxify the body from environmental poisons. Mutations in these genes are common, occurring in up to 20% of the human race, and result in a reduced ability to excrete toxins, eventually leading the toxins to build up in the body.

In the past, the presence of these mutations would not have made much difference to human health. But now, with increased levels of pollutants, these individual differences are becoming critical to the body’s ability to detoxify itself and can be the difference, for instance, between those children who withstand mercury in vaccines with little detriment to their neurological development, and those who don’t (7).

Additional research was conducted by Richard Deth, PhD, of Northeastern University and will be published in next month’s issue of Molecular Psychiatry (8). It shows that exposure
to toxic metals, including mercury, aluminum and lead, can cause adverse effects on methylation reactions in the brain and elsewhere in the body.

In simple terms, methylation reactions are basic processes whereby tiny compounds containing a single carbon atom are transferred from one molecule to another. They can be thought of as power switches used by the brain and other parts of the body to turn many critical processes on or off, including DNA function and gene expression.

If methylation is disrupted early in life for instance as a result of exposure to mercury this can affect development of the brain and lead to conditions like autism and ADHD.

One molecule that must be methylated to become active is vitamin B12. Basically, if the brain cannot methylate efficiently, any vitamin B12 that is there is useless and cannot play its fundamental role in orchestrating brain activity. This explains why regular injections of a methylated form of vitamin B12 (MB12) have produced such major clinical improvements in a majority of children with autism. These injections might repair (we hope) or may just compensate for damage previously caused by mercury.

MB12 injections have also been used for some time in Europe and in the U.S. by forward-thinking physicians in the treatment of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple
sclerosis, and other conditions that may be partially related to mercury exposure in adults (9).

These many findings on mercury also give us a better understanding of why chelation a treatment approach to remove mercury and other toxic metals from the body has been such a major help for many children with autism and ADHD.

Chelation generally involves tak ing a product called DMSA on a rotating basis. Once inside the body DMSA acts as a magnet for mercury, lead, arsenic, and other toxic metals, safely shuttling these poisons out of the body through the urine. According to data collected by the Autism Research Institute (ARI) and DAN (Defeat Autism Now), when children can be shown to excrete metals while taking DMSA they almost always improve, sometimes dramatically.

Although DMSA is safe, some may not be able to tolerate it and can experience side effects (none serious or lasting). In these cases there are other detoxification approaches that show a great deal of promise. One of these involves a type of vitamin B1 called allithiamine, generally administered in cream form and absorbed through the skin.

A type of algae called chlorella has not been recommended for detoxification because much of the chlorella on the market is compromised at the source. Since chlorella has an
enormous affinity for mercury it binds to it in the ponds where it is generally grown and is therefore already contaminated before it’s even harvested.

However, certified uncontaminated chlorella deserves a closer look as a valid, safe and cost-effective option for removing mercury from the body. Like DMSA, chlorella is a magnet for mercury and other toxic metals. It is milder than DMSA and therefore better tolerated by some individuals. While it is true that chlorella is easily contaminated from external sources, there are types that are pure. In Germany, chlorella is grown for medical purposes in enormous glass tubes that create a completely isolated environment where contamination is virtually impossible (10).

References:
(1)
(2) and
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7) Lancet, 2004 Jan 10; 363 (9403): 119-25
(8) Molecular Psychiatry 2004, Volume 9, advance online publication doi:10.1038/sj.mp.4001476. For further information contact Christine Phelan, Northeastern University, Pharmaceutical Sciences, 716 Columbus Avenue, 5th floor, Boston, Massachusetts 02120; phone: 617-373-5455
(9)
(10)

Tags: Chemicals & Environmental Issues, Mercury in Medications
Comments Off on More News on Mercury