Coconut oil

I’m passing on some news about the purported benefits of coconut oil when treating alzheimers, dementia, epilepsy, Parkinsons and schizophrenia.

The video clip states that coconut oil raises the overall cholesterol score, but actually that is because it raises good cholesterol. This is also what niacin (Vitamin B3) does. I had my yearly medical check-up recently and the doctor reported, once again, that my overall cholesterol reading was really high. “But, don’t worry,” she reassured me. “That’s because your good cholesterol is extremely high and it has raised the total score.” Dr. Abram Hoffer recommended niacin to his schizophrenia patients and he also said that the vitamin was good in preventing dementia/alzheimers.

Here’s the consumer’s view of coconut oil. Gianna Kali at Beyond Meds has allowed me to reprint her comment in the main body of this post. I like her idea of using coconut butter as a substitute for peanut butter.

Coconut in general and coconut oil are both foods of the gods…especially if you’re eating a grain free diet like I am…it’s a great substitute.

I eat coconut flour for baked goods and coconut butter to replace peanut butter and cheese…and yes…it helps as a substitute…totally…I miss cheese and it sort of is like a spread that works…I also make homemade coconut milk since I no longer drink cow’s milk and then the coconut oil I use in all sorts of cooking and baking too.

It’s a wonderful food all around the coconut…it’s high in protein and fiber and the fat is good for your brain and body in general.

I eat tons of saturated fat…both animal and plant (coconut oil is a saturated fat…my cholesterol went DOWN when I stopped eating grains and increased healthy fats…people don’t know that grains and carbs is what make cholesterol go up in a lot of people….not fats!! and the grains and carbs will mess with people with blood sugar problems too.

Animal fat needs to be grass fed to be really healthy…in any case both my cholesterol and glucose levels have returned to healthy levels since eating this way.

“Doc Martin” calls vitamins “placebos”

Following my post yesterday about the British television show “Doc Martin” and the use of placebos, I deliberately avoided revealing what the placebos actually were in order not to distract from the main points I wanted to raise. The “placebos” that Doc Martin and his predecessor gave the patient were vitamins.

Now, if you, like me, are a fan of another doc, “Doc” Abram Hoffer, you may object to calling vitamins, “placebos.” Niacin in very high doses in combination with an equal amount of vitamin C and other B-vitamins, is very effective in reducing psychotic symptoms, anxiety, and increasings one’s focus. Ever since I learned about niacin and started giving it to Chris to help his psychosis, I also put myself on three grams per day of niacin,vitamin C, and I added a B-complex and zinc. I got amazing results in just three days. My ability to focus increased about five-fold, my hair got thicker and my skin got smoother. I was less anxious.

People are unique in their nutritional needs. People under stress need much larger amounts of certain B vitamins than they get from eating an otherwise healthy, well-balanced diet. Smoking depletes vitamin C, alcohol depletes the B vitamins, and so on. Don’t assume that vitamins are worthless just because someone calls it the placebo effect.

B vitamins for brains

Here is yet another B vitamin study raising tantalizing links between ingestion of high doses of B vitamins and staving off dementia. Dr. Celeste de Jager of Oxford University, who led the trial, said, “A lot of the time brain changes start in your forties and fifties before you get clinical symptoms. I would think that in middle age people should start thinking about their vitamin levels.”

A full scale national (U.K.) trial to establish whether the breakthrough can actually delay the slide into Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia is expected to begin within the next year.

Let’s not forget that Dr. Abram Hoffer also endorsed high doses of B vitamins, especially Vitamin B3 (niacin) for not only schizophrenia but also for preventing dementia, although, in the latter case, he did not conduct clinical trials. Anecdotally, he noticed that after he started recommending niacin to his older relatives, over a twenty-five year period, none developed dementia. He recommended a daily 3 grams of niacin or niacinimide for people in their fifties and older, along with an equal amount of vitamin C and a B complex.

The endorsement surrounding B vitamins, and vitamins in general, is rather timid, and vitamins may never become officially sanctioned by the medical profession because, after all, vitamins in their pure form can’t be patented. They are low cost. If you want to get serious about getting the best benefits from them, you often have to take megadoses, and that’s when it gets tricky. Very few doctors will go on record to endorse high doses of vitamins. Their patients, on the other hand, often take their health concerns into their own hands. Nobel prize winning chemist Dr. Linus Pauling collaborated with Abram Hoffer in research into high dose vitamin C as an adjunct cancer therapy.

Here’s what Dr. de Jager has to say. It’s hardly bold. To my way of thinking, if you want results, you probably need consistent and high daily doses of certain vitamins targetted to the specific condition.

“People should not begin taking supplements without consulting their doctor because they can have a harmful impact on other conditions such as cancer,” she added.

Asked if she would take the vitamins as a precaution, Dr de Jager said: “I would ask the doctor to check my B12 and my folic acid levels for starters.”

“I take supplements when I’m feeling a bit low, I don’t take one every day but I would certainly have multi-vitamins and B vitamins in my cupboard.”

An excellent web site with factual information on vitamins and supplements is www.doctoryourself.com

B3 or no B3, that is the question

In response to Gianna Kali’s post today, here’s my two cents worth on the subject of vitamin supplements. I agree and I don’t agree, and I think we both can agree that it depends on the situation.

Being a skeptic myself, I leave a large space in my head for the thought that pharmaceutical companies, who have enormous amounts of money to spend on “information dissemination” or “disinformation,” are understandably concerned that the public is turning more and more to vitamins instead of going to their doctors and asking for prescriptions. Doctors should also be concerned about this. It is in pharma’s best interest to trash the benefits of unpatentable vitamins. A study here, a study there that claim that vitamins do not hold up to scientific “rigor”.

That being said, vitamin supplements are big business, too. I have written about this elsewhere in my blog where I refer to it as the tyranny of vitamins. At one point Chris was on thirty-five different supplements per day, a very restricted diet, and he still landed back in the hospital. (Demonstrating to me that the mind, once again, is superior to matter. All the vitamins or medications in the world won’t work if the mind is in shut down mode.) Thirty-five vitamin supplements per day is unsustainable.

I agree with Gianna that the body may need vitamins from time to time that it may not need long term, and that a healthy diet is of course, what we all should be ingesting, and I also believe that there are certain conditions that need heavy artillery to be brought in. Readers of this blog already know that I consider B3/niacin and vitamin C essential. For vitamin E, I’ll use my own father as an example. The other day I came across a book on vitamin E by Wilfred and Evan Shute that he had taken the time many years ago to put in its own dust jacket. That’s how important the advice in that book was to him. He had been a heavy smoker for years and finally was had a by-pass operated for a blockage in his leg. The circulation in that leg plagued him the rest of his life, making walking difficult for him. My mother found out about the results that the Shute brothers clinic in London, Ont. was having with vitamin E and they paid a visit. He was on 800 IU of vitamin E for the next thirty years of his life. He was ecstatic about the general feeling of well-being and energy that Vitamin E gave him. The damage had been done on the leg, walking on it would be always be difficult, but the vitamin E really boosted him enormously. I experience the same energy boost from vitamin E and have made it one of my basic vitamins.

So, in this case, I do take issue with the Healthy Skeptic (not surprisingly, a doctor), who quotes this study by the NIH which raises this rather strange allegation:

High-dose vitamin E supplementation increased the risk of death from all causes.

Andrew Saul, creator of  http://www.doctoryourself.com/, has an answer to the charges that vitamins in high doses cause death. “Where are the bodies?” Please take a look at this page. It’s an eye-opener.

Over a twenty-seven year period, vitamins have been connected with the deaths of a total of eleven people in the entire United States. Poison control statistics confirm that more Americans die each year from eating soap than from taking vitamins.

Where are the bodies?

A 27-year review of US poison control center annual reports (1) tells a remarkable and largely ignored story: vitamins are extraordinarily safe.

These statistics specifically include vitamin A, niacin (B-3), pyridoxine (B-6), other B-complex, C, D, E, “other” vitamin(s), such as vitamin K, and multiple vitamins without iron. Minerals, which are chemically and nutritionally different from vitamins, have an excellent safety record as well, but not quite as good as vitamins. On the average, one or two fatalities per year are typically attributed to iron poisoning from gross overdosing on supplemental iron. Deaths attributed to other supplemental minerals are very rare. Even iron, although not as safe as vitamins, accounts for fewer deaths than do laundry and dishwashing detergents.

Our only defense is to know what works for us, to be skeptical of competing claims, and of course to eat foods as close to their natural source as possible.

Suspend disbelief

Another variation on the creativity theme is one that I found put me in good stead for going holistic. In a BBC News article reporting on the recent findings from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden linking creativity to schizophrenia, psychologist Gary Fitzgibbons says that “an ability to ‘suspend disbelief’ is one way of looking at creativity. “When you suspend disbelief you are prepared to believe anything and this opens up the scope for seeing more possibilities.”

Creative people and people with schizophrenia see unusual connections in problem solving that others miss. Psychiatry has traditionally labelled this as “psychotic thinking” in its patients. The problem is, when it tips into psychosis, people see too many possibilities. An embarassment of riches, so to speak.

In order for me to move past the straightjacket thinking that is the medicalized model of schizophrenia, I had to suspend many disbeliefs that were really society disbeliefs (individuals have always held beliefs that go against society, but these are considered “unsanctioned” and heretical beliefs). I had to embrace ideas that “everybody knows” are wrong, such as the belief that vitamins are an effective tool for treating schizophrenia, or the belief that the family contributes to mental illness. On this last point, lots of people will say, sure, sure, of course families contribute to mental illness, but they may equate mental illness with mild depression or troublesome personalities, which just about everybody understands on some level. Psychosis is a different beast, entirely. When you observe psychotic behavior, it seems really freaky and foreign. That’s where you have to suspend your wanting to disbelieve that it is an understandable reaction to a trauma. No, no, no, people may say, psychosis must be a brain disease because it’s so weird. Nobody would act that way unless they were sick, because everybody else in the family is “normal.”

Suspending disbelief opens up avenues of possibilities. Entrepreneurs have often said that they simply weren’t aware that something couldn’t be done. If that kind of thinking is admired in business and science, it should also be encouraged in healing. So what if it doesn’t work for you? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Here’s a comment I sent to the New York Times in response to the article Alzheimers Stalks a Colombian Family. I have reprinted reader “Jonathan”‘s response to my comment afterwards. I never waste a chance to introduce a healing thought. Some people will take it. Others, like Jonathan, well, you’ll read what he has to say.

Rossa Forbes

How many people are aware of Dr. Abram Hoffer’s thoughts on preventing alzheimers and dementia? Not many, I am guessing. Dr. Hoffer is otherwise known for his treatment of schizophrenia using high doses of niacin and vitamin C in combination with B-complex. When my memory started to falter in my early fifties, I followed his advice and saw huge results within three days. There is something that can be done that doesn’t involve waiting for dubious drugs with side effects. I believe that I read about this discovery in Dr. Hoffer’s book, How to Live with Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia used to be called dementia praecox, because doctors at the time felt it was similar to the dementia that is observed in the elderly. They changed their mind when they realized that schizophrenia doesn’t always take a downward course. Dr. Hoffer also said that the megavitamin therapy is preventative – once dementia has set in, the vitamins offer limited benefit.

Jonathan from Chicago responds:

Every time there is a medically related article, the quacks come out of the woods to pimp their high dosage Vitamin C and other supplements. Do they really think high dosages of supplements come with no side effects?

Orthomolecular medicine has been discredited since the 1970s. Your quack fudged the numbers.

Acne

Can psychosis be kick-started by taking certain prescription medications? We all know that recreational drug use can bring on psychosis, so why not prescription meds?

When Chris was about sixteen, he had severe acne. This, according to Dr. Abram Hoffer, is also a sign of pellagra (vitamin B deficiency). He noticed that many of his schizophrenic patients reported having severe acne as a teenager, therefore he concluded that vitamin B deficiency is associated with schizophrenia.

Not thinking much about it at the time, and on my friend’s suggestion, Chris started taking a certain acne drug. It cleared up his acne in no time, but it also was so strong that it caused the skin on his lips to literally flake off. After taking it for a couple of months, he stopped. About a year later (or was it only six months? I can’t exactly remember), he started showing early signs of psychosis.

Maybe there is no connection to taking the drug and his later psychosis. One can really never know for sure about this things. Many young men who aren’t taking medication begin to develop psychosis around the age of 18. Still, it is a powerful drug. So is angel dust, and marijuana, and cocaine and . . .

Trauma in suburbia

The trauma or shock basis of schizophrenia seems to be accepted by the holistic medical community but does not get a lot of play in the mainstream medical community. In fact, no medical doctor we consulted ever raised the issue with us. What they did say was a little different. I remember being asked by two different doctors what Chris was like at the age of ten. This seemed like a strange question at the time. I was too shell-shocked myself from the diagnosis to ask them why they raised the question. So, instead I answered,”well, uh, let’s see. He was overweight and into playing Magic cards. Other than that, there’s not much to report. He had friends, he seemed normal”.

After learning about the role of shock in schizophrenia, I reviewed Chris’s childhood for signs of shock, but nothing I could think of pointed to a dramatic, isolating event. We lived in suburbia – how dramatic is that? We went to church, my husband and I hadn’t divorced, Chris and his brothers attended Cub Scouts, we had neighborhood boys tearing through the house in great numbers. It seemed white bread boring compared to the kind of shock that schizophrenia produces on the radar screen.

What I do know is this: Chris was a ten month pregnancy and he barely moved in utero. That is unusual. His birth was long and difficult. He didn’t have a lot of energy as a child but he also never got sick. He was abnormally healthy, almost supernaturally so. I did find it a bit strange that a child who never even had a cold developed severe acne as a teenager. Dr. Abram Hoffer observes that his patients tended never to be sick as children and that many people who subsequently develop schizophrenia had severe acne in their teenage years. (Severe acne is characteristic of pellagra, or lack of vitamin B3.)

Chris was not given to emotional outbursts and apart from crying as a baby I remember seeing him cry only once when a door slammed on his finger. He had trouble making choices and he avoided confrontation. He left it to others to choose for him. Me: “Carrots or peas, Chris?” He: “Oh, I don’t care, you decide.” While this was troubling, it wasn’t so troubling that we thought about doing something about it. Chris was a thinker and he was musically talented. He did well in school and he had interests and activities so we overlooked this aspect of his personality, hoping that time would rectify it. I remember thinking, this kid is too perfect. Being perfect was troubling, even then. I felt we were overdue somehow for “the big one.”

Orthomolecular Dr. Hoffer

Dr Abram Hoffer is the dean of orthomolecular psychiatry. He is the first, the starting point, the base, for anyone who wants to learn more about what schizophrenia is and how best to treat it using vitamin support. Orthomolecular is a term coined by Nobel laureate Dr Linus Pauling. It means “the right molecule”. It is using supplemements to correct biochemical imbalances.

Dr Hoffer is still going strong at over 90 years old. I like Dr. Hoffer. I wrote him a fan letter in 2005 after Chris had been on his recommended combination of niacinimide (vitamin B3), vitamin C, B-complex, omega 3 and zinc for only a few weeks. The changes in Chris after such a short time were noticeable, despite the fact he had been on meds for over a year. He was more focused and engaged. His skin became clearer. His hair, which was becoming alarmingly thin for someone his age, became thicker.

Dr Hoffer’s book, How to Live with Schizophrenia, is a must read. It is positive and upbeat, unlike some other well-known and widely quoted authorities on schizophrenia. It is loaded with good tips and really interesting observations. He respects his patients and learns from them.

I also have been faithfully using his recommended combination of vitamins since 2005. Interestingly, what works for schizophrenia also works to prevent alzheimers/dementia, according to Dr Hoffer. Here, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. The first is the word “prevent”. Once dementia begins, vitamins are ineffective. The closer in age you are to dementia (for all practical purposes in your sixties) you should substitute niacin for niacinimide. If you are in your fifties, you should begin with 3 grams of niacinimide per day and an equal amount of vitamin C (to prevent liver damage), a B complex (to make the other vitamins work more efficiently), and throw in an omega 3 and a zinc or another B vitamin (B-6, B-12). Niacin produces a burning sensation in your body. It is harmless, but nonetheless rather scary if you don’t know what to expect.

I never plan to be without Dr Hoffer’s recommended schizophrenia/dementia vitamins. People laughingly refer to “senior moments”, but in my early fifties I was having trouble focusing. At the time I attributed it to the stress of juggling family and work responsibilities, but I feel now that my brain was tired. After only a few days on the niacinimide formula, I felt on top of my game intellectually. I could push through to complete a complex series of thoughts. I now had intellectual energy whereas before I had little. I began reading more complex books. I began to write my own book. Like Chris, my skin became amazingly clear. My hair grew back its former thickness. I was much calmer.

If you think of holistic health as a pyramid, orthomolecular medicine is the broad base of the pyramid. Proper foods, vitamins and minerals are the building blocks of good health.

Here is Dr Hoffer’s vitamin package, courtesy of the Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation.

SUPPLEMENTS: Vitamin B3 (niacin or niacinamide) 0.5 – 2 grams 3 times daily. Vitamin B6 (for many) 250-500 mg daily. A general B vitamin formula. Vitamin C, 3 or more grams daily. Zinc (gluconate or citrate) 50 mg daily. Manganese 15-30 mg daily (if there is danger of tardive dyskinesia).