Back in roughly 2007, I managed to acquire a clostridium difficile infection. It’s a really serious infection, usually preceded by antibiotic exposure, and it can often can lead to death if not treated. In my case, it mostly started out with flu symptoms, but gradually led to me being hospitalized for a few days due to loss of fluids. Once being discharged from the hospital, I was prescribed flagyl to combat the c. diff infection. I did one or two rounds of that over a month or two, but unfortunately still tested positive for c. diff. at the end of it. Since the c. diff wasn’t really responding ...

A few years ago I visited my physician here in Chilliwack with a complaint of nasal congestion that simply wouldn’t go away. It’s something that I’ve mostly always dealt with, but only started to complain about it when I realized that other people didn’t seem to have the same problem. My doctor noticed that the inside of the nose was inflamed, so he prescribed nasal corticosteroids to help me breathe better. Since that time I’ve visited many different countries around the world. In some of them my nose was just as congested as it was back home. But in many of them my nose completely ...

Cyclical Ketogenic Diet (CKD), photo from Wikipedia It’s no surprise to anyone reading my site that I’m a big advocate of reducing carbs. Pretty much everything out there nowadays is full or both refined carbohydrates and sugar, often in the form of high fructose corn syrup. While complex carbohydrates aren’t that bad for a person, anything that converts immediately into glucose (such as simple carbs and sugars) can cause large insulin spikes, leading to fat gain and ultimately diseases such as diabetes. Unfortunately there’s so much misinformation in this area that most people are completely ...

The more research that’s published, the more evidence I seem to run into that indicates insulin resistance (and consequently obesity) seems to be related to oxidative stress and/or nutritional deficiencies. As I’ve pointed out before, one of the strange paradoxes that most theories generally can’t explain is why obesity often goes hand in hand with poor nutrition. That is, if obesity is caused solely by overeating, then we should see the lack of obesity in populations where food is scarce or nutrient poor. As several populations have shown us (most notably the Pima Indians), that isn’t ...

I’ve been writing about obesity and something called hyper-insulinemia for about as long as I can remember. For those of you who don’t know, many people nowadays have something called metabolic syndrome, which is a cluster of symptoms including obesity, high blood pressure, elevated insulin levels, and high cholesterol. The main component of all of these is something called hyper-insulinemia (which is also called insulin resistance). What I just wrote is pretty much accepted as fact nowadays. What is still up for debate is a) whether insulin resistance is the cause or the effect of obesity ...

The American Heart association has just gone on record as recommending that sugar consumption be drastically reduced. I should point out that this is in stark contrast to their longly held assertions that saturated fat is the primary cause of heart disease, and carbohydrates essentially are harmless. So this is a warning to everyone that you should limit your sugar intake in the interest of good health. I personally wouldn’t be surprised at all if you’ll continue to see these ongoing shifts in policy, up to the point where the policy has completely changed to recommend that refined carbohydrates ...

Almost two years ago, I was at work one day, banging on the keys and writing some code. Suddenly, I felt cold, and realized that my hands and my fingers were shaking. I tried to stay at work as long as I could, but after a while my hands were shaking so bad I could hardly function at my job, so I went home. I curled into bed, and wrapped my duvet as tightly as it would go around myself. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t stop shivering. I ended up eventually falling asleep, and slept most of the night away. When I woke up, I was drenched in sweat, feeling like absolute garbage. Six ...

About a year ago, I was admitted to St. Paul’s hospital for what would later turn out to be a rather severe pneumonia. I don’t really get sick very often, so for me to suddenly be bed ridden after only two days of feeling bad was a very strange event. In fact, looking back I sometimes wonder if what I really had was pneumonia, or if that was just a symptom of what I actually had. I was going over my medical records a few months ago, and found all the reports from St. Paul’s. When they admitted me I was in pretty rough shape. I had a massive fever, low oxygen in my blood, and I was so dehydrated ...

I finally got a hold of my doctor back in Vancouver today to try to figure out what’s wrong with me and what I can do about it. It turns out that I have a fairly serious infection caused by a bacteria called “clostridium difficile.” C. Difficile sometimes lives in the intestines and is normally kept in check by a range of good bacteria that also live there. Unfortunately, as a result of the antibiotic treament I had in the hospital (which was clindamycin I believe), a large portion of the good bacteria have died off, leaving a pile of bad stuff to proliferate: Clostridium Difficile Infection ...

Sylvain sent me this link today that basically concluded that one or more cans of diet soda can lead to health risks such as the metabolic syndrome “We found that one or more sodas per day increases your risk of new-onset metabolic syndrome by about 45 per cent, and it did not seem to matter if it was regular or diet,” Dr. Ramachandran Vasan, senior investigator for the Framingham Heart Study, said Monday from Boston. .. The study included nearly 9,000 observations of middle-aged men and women over four years at three different times. The study looked at how many 355-millilitre cans of cola ...