Parasites Poop Too

So! Time to talk about parasites! We've had symbiotes and commensals already. Once again, I find myself hesitating on the threshold of this writing. I was sticking on commensality because I'm not sure I believe in it: I can't fathom a relationship benefiting one party without having any impact on the other. It's more natural to conceive of a relationship as either symbiotic--ultimately a win-win--or parasitic, where one party benefits to the detriment of the other.
I hesitate now for a different reason, and it's not just that some parasites are beautiful to look at, or that mistletoe, emblem of Christmas-time love, is also a parasite.

Source: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/30000/velka/goldgelber-zitterling.jpg

Instead, my problem is that Parasites and Parasitism comprise such a big, hot topic that if I pick it up I'm afraid I might drop it! Several influential thinkers in the health universe believe that parasites are the #1 cause of just about all human ailments, and that they are lurking everywhere and in everything. And these are highly qualified, legitimate people, like Dr Ann Louise Gittleman and Dr Hulda Regehr Clark. Check out Parasite Rex and the books Amazon clusters with it for some high-jink facts and scary images. I've heard several authorities say that cancer is always associated with parasitic candida. Donna Gates, whose work I admire greatly, asserts that in over two decades of working with autistic children, she has found every one of them to have candida overgrowth.

Let's zoom out just for a moment. Mushrooms and mistletoe aside, most people think of microscopic microbes when they think of parasites. But--diverting as always to my beloved etymology--"parasite" originally referred to a human being. 
Whereas a sus-sitos (the Greek for commensal, remember) is a mess-mate, who sits at table together with the others,  a para-sitos is a gatecrasher, or a dingleberry--a flattering, rather tiresome guest who shows up, hangs around, and stays uninvited to dinner. Sitos means "food" and (as I mentioned before) specifically means "grain," and where "syn/co/com" means "with," "para" means "beside, to the side of," (think "paralegal"), and also "beyond," "contrary to" (think "paranormal"). If you were an alpha male in the ancient world that coined this word, a parasite was your pet toadyish best mate who always said what you wanted to hear, whom your true friends couldn't stand because he turned you against them, and because he fed your denial, sometimes to the loss of your kingdom. So there's something even a bit nastier about this original parasite. Not only does he dine at the host's expense; he clouds the host's vision and obstructs him from doing his job properly while at the same time making the host feel good about himself!
Agh agh ahem... This sounds a lot like a sugar addiction! Dare I say it? Sugar sure can make you feel good while actually strengthening yeast colonies and blocking absorption of minerals and nutrients. I actually started writing about this a couple months ago, when I undenied my own fruitarian sugar addiction, wondered who I was feeding when I fed that, and when I finish my 21-day sugar detox at the beginning of next week I'll share more about the big differences I've been experiencing as a result of feeding different "guests."
Whoa! It was dizzyingly easy to zoom in from the macro level of interpersonal relationships to the micro level of yeast colonies promising sweet comfort if you feed them more sugar. When metaphors transfer from macro to micro this easily I feel delight at the magical, fractal, geometric, sympathetic unity of this mad whirligig of a universe.
Realize this, too: the alpha male's parasite and the yeast colony both don't only feed at their host's expense: they excrete too, and their poop and gas stink! There were no flush toilets in the ancient world, so the parasite pooping in the latrine was an extra strain on resources too, no doubt. And then I think of all the nights this year when I was back on fruit and sometimes even tipping over into more sugary sugar, lying unable to sleep at night with indigestion pains, being one big tortured latrine for my wayward guests. We end up not only not having the proper benefit of the food, but having to get rid of what is in fact toxic waste. (Here's a quick read on acetaldehyde, one of the main toxic wastes excreted by yeasts in the body.)

The fact that parasites poop too has probably been my biggest epiphany recently in understanding why they can be such a problem. But looking on the bright side, our universe is dynamic, relationship dynamics can change, and balance may not look like you expect it to. If humans had no yeast in their bodies, we could get real sick real quick, especially in our present ocean of sugar. In normal amounts, a yeast colony is actually symbiotic--they're part of the cleanup crew. They get to eat, they mop up what our systems can't handle, whatever they poop out goes easily down the drain with the rest. And the dingleberry friend? Our alpha male will indulge his uninvited visits once in a while, especially if he wants to get rid of other visitors, but he'll think twice and twice more about listening to the guy's advice, will pay more attention to his true friends, and some days he'll say "Sorry buddy, dinner tonight's invited guests only. See you later."

This dynamism is what gives me pause with the stricter "parasite as cause of all evils" line. There's increasing evidence (e.g. here) that parasites performed a useful role in pre-cleansed and sterilized humanity. Obsession with cleaning out any and all parasites from the system sounds like similar logic to vaccinating all diseases away. There is a place for parasite cleansing and there is a place for vaccinations, God help us, but with a better understanding of what it takes to be in relationship with the parasitic organism, we might be able to embody better the underlying truth, that we are all connected.

Starting to Talk Diet Again: Fruit

 http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=715

When I started this blog, it was pretty much a food blog, and pretty much a raw-vegan-oriented, gut-restoring/low sugar-oriented, permaculture/grow-your-own-food-oriented blog at that. I posted recipes more than once a week, I talked plants and herbs, I reviewed other bloggers' recipes.

That all stopped a couple years ago, and since then I've been almost afraid to talk about food because it's such a tricky topic tied in with my general health and wellbeing. It's true, I am somewhat of a freak around food, but through recent self experimentation I've come to realize that--in certain respects--my body isn't that different from anyone else's. And, since I do have a near-freakish amount of knowledge about diet and nutrition, it's time to share some of this experience.

Why else should you listen to me? My perversity and paradoxical nature, which leaves me tripping along both sides of any line in clay or sand (or macronutrient balance) and thus able to channel both sides. Consider this:

(1) When put under strong pressure to go inpatient this last winter, I drove across the country instead--and am loving my new environment!

(2) Having gotten myself out of an unprecedented and horrendous binge-purge cycle, I am now fasting (sundown to sundown) every other day (even though I know that fasting can drive eating if you're not careful)!

And that's enough for about five blog posts right there... 

Doorful of tinctures and potions--can't we just live on those?--but as you can see (bottom left) I still love carrots

...and I'll likely go on for at least five blog posts, as there is so much to talk about, so much to which many will relate, who wouldn't have expected me to be able to relate to them/you!

Today, though, I'm going to kick off with a renunciation of my ultimate redoubt of denial: fruit.
It's a funny cyclical serendipity that I was pretty much off fruit when I first started the blog, as it's the one food I've gravitated toward for much of my life and about which I've had almost magical beliefs. Renunciation doesn't always happen all at once. Fruit and its sugars have been controversial for as long as I've been studying nutrition, and as the voices grow ever more unanimous about the deleterious effects of sugar, fruit continues controversial. I've always so wanted it to be good and perfect...
I have believed:
(1) Fruit is humankind's most natural and ideal and perfect source of sustenance (cue Garden of Eden and fig leaves and happy bonobos).
(2) Fruit is easier to digest than anything else.
(3) (In my body at least): the sugar in fruit doesn't have the negative impact that other kinds of sugar have.

Myth (1) I really had to let go of this as soon as I studied any anthropology, but, more importantly, as soon as I became an arborist and tree carer. The truth:

Most fruit today is no more or less natural than any other man-made item, even as alive as it is. The peach tree whose fallen, bruised fruit were calling me and the clamoring craving colonies in my belly--none of its seeds could grow a fruit. The tree itself couldn't stand up by itself. Its fruit is so much sweeter than even drosophila can handle! It's analogous to those superbred turkeys that can't mate naturally anymore.

Note, by the way, "no more or less natural": two possibilities here: either (1) man-made = unnatural by definition or (2) anything man made is part of nature, as is man him/herself, so this peach is natural in the same way that a good quality home made bread might be.

Note, too--and this was the myth that I had to explode for myself: "natural" is not necessarily synonymous with "beneficial in your body" (am I really going to step on the "natural" rattlesnake?)

(2) Fruit seems to be easier to digest than anything else for me, and for the most part. I've gotten plenty sick from eating fruit too. How much of the ease is simply lifelong habit? And how much of the ease is because of the prevalence of simple sugar, in which case, is it feeding me or is it feeding a yeast colony? Some of the cravings I've dealt with recently suggest the latter, although I know that losing a lot of (non excess) weight last winter, moving across the country, and then doing a job that involved a lot of heavy lifting may have had something to do with that too. 

It's a great question to keep asking, literally, metaphorically, with every turn of the attention, every absorption: Who am I feeding? What part of me? Symbiote? Commensal? Parasite? (And the etymologies of those three words deserve a post of their own.)

(3) Dovetailing nicely with the "who am I feeding" question is the belief that fruit's sugar is somehow different (at least for me), that its packaging with vitamins and fiber meant it didn't impact blood sugar. I was a fruitarian for about six years, and it probably saved my life at the time, bringing me back from an almost fatal low. It's true that in practice, when I moved to Hawaii--fruit heaven--I found myself much better off with more avocados, coconuts, and greens... but fruit remained the ideal. I have fruitarian-oriented friends, and I sense a righteousness to their choice; it seems almost like a religion.

Especially with all the hard physical work, and all the fasting, I've had the opportunity to feel really hungry at times. And I started to notice that when I ate a whole bunch of fruit, I didn't feel any less hungry than when I started--sometimes more hungry.

So that's when I got a blood glucose meter and started obsessively tracking my blood sugar. And that's for the next post. I'll close with an openended question: which data are more useful: "how you feel after eating something" or "a readout on a meter (which has some margin of error)" (Obviously, the answer is "both," but how do you weight the two kinds of data?)