with Nadine Saubers, R.N., B.S.N.
The fatigue “industry” has a lot of similarities to the weight loss “industry.” People are desperate so they will try anything, at least for a while, usually a very short while. Take weight loss. Many people want to continue to eat “their food,” and just thinking about not eating pizza, cheeseburgers, fast food fries and other non-nutrient fare is very displeasing and distressing. They believe deeply that any other diet will be total and utter deprivation and on some level not worth it. That’s why programs like Jenny Craig make so much money selling their meal plans of food consisting of donuts, pasta, pizza, and burgers. They don’t help people change their diets and lifestyle to real whole food, their shtick is to offer calorie restricted meals of the same crap that’s keeping people fat and unhealthy.
I see a similar mindset with people who suffer from fatigue too. Several years ago I spoke with a woman in the UK who had been very ill for years. She told me that she ate porridge for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I asked her if she thought she could start eating some fruits and vegetables but she told me that the thought was too difficult because she craved the porridge. I explained to her that cravings typically accompany a high carb diet because they are addictive and like sugar (and heroin) you will crave substances because of the addictive nature, not because your body needs them.
Recently I watched a YouTube video about a young woman, also in the UK, with CFS/ME. She’s living a bedridden life, taken care of by her family, and her days are filled with suffering and deprivation. Her mom came up to ask her what she wanted for breakfast, she said toast and tea. Then the camera showed her mom cutting of the crusts of the white bread toast so that the girl wouldn’t have to use excess energy chewing. So the very ill girl is starting off her day with a blast of sugar and caffeine and zero nutrients. Her diet isn’t working for her healing and recovery and I wish she knew that so she could start eating right and healing.
Feeding your body with the essential nutrients is essential for any kind of healing to occur. When you eat crap/non-nutrient food it’s not just garbage in, garbage out. It doesn’t feed your cells, it won’t give you what you need to recover, and furthermore it’s adding additional stress to your cells and a very toxic situation.
One of the interesting papers I came across lately was this one (below) about how the powerful antioxidant N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) can help with brain fog caused by chemotherapy. This is because brain fog is caused by damage to your cells by oxidative stress caused by the toxic chemicals.
We can very much extrapolate this to ordinary living. We eat a crap diet, expose ourselves to toxic stressors, we have free radicals rocking out in our bodies and central nervous system, oxidative stress goes to work on our cells doing a number of damages including mitochondrial decay and glutathione depletion.
Working against oxidative stress are antioxidants found in food like berries but not found in the diets of the 2 women I talked about above.
This is a classic illustration of how eating a diet rich in all the nutrients we need is absolutely essential for health and healing. For people who say they tried eating well but it didn’t work, you have to realize, it does work if given time. You cannot heal a body filled with damaged cells in 3 weeks or 3 months. Most people need 6 months of doing everything perfectly to see any improvements. If you continue to eat processed food, junk food, or sugar, rather than eating the diet your body requires to heal…………..you do not have a chance of recovering from CFS or any other disease.
You canot heal without giving your cells what they need, nutrients.
Why not start today to eat the most perfect diet that you are possibly able to?
Cognitive dysfunction induced by chronic administration of common cancer chemotherapeutics in rats
Gregory W. Konat, Michal Kraszpulski, Isaac James, Han-Ting Zhang and Jame Abraham, Journal Metabolic Brain Disease, 9 August 2008
Abstract Although cognitive dysfunction manifested by severe memory and attention deficits has been reported in up to 70% of cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, the mechanisms of this serious side effect have not been defined. In particular, it has not been decisively resolved whether the dysfunction is attributable to the chemotherapy or to the malignancy itself. In the present study we tested whether cognitive dysfunction can be induced in an experimental setting by the administration of commonly used chemotherapeutics to rats. Female 10 month old Sprague–Dawley rats were injected intraperitoneally with a combination of 2.5 mg/kg of adriamycin (ADR) and 25 mg/kg of cytoxan (CTX). A total of four doses were given at weekly intervals. The control group was treated with saline only. No mortality and no apparent morbidity were observed in either group. However, the chemotherapeutic treatment severely impaired memory function of rats as measured by a passive avoidance test. This memory deficiency was fully prevented by the administration of an antioxidant, N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) injected subcutaneously three times a week at 200 mg/kg in the course of chemotherapeutic treatment. These results indicate that chemotherapeutic agents alone, i.e., in the absence of malignancy, damage the brain resulting in memory dysfunction. Moreover, the results strongly indicate that the damaging effect is mediated by oxidative stress, as memory dysfunction is preventable by the co-administration of NAC.
posted on September 10, 2010 | 1,086 views | tags: antioxidants, CFS, CFS recovery, chronic fatigue syndrome, Nadine Saubers, nutrition
Toni Massari
January 2, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Hello Nadine,
I read your articles with much interest and wanted to thank you for writing about CFS/ME recovery, as well as ask your opinion about precisely the opposite problem from the one outlined above.
In October this year I was been diagnosed with CFS/ME, after some 18-24 months of progressive decline. My illness followed a pretty classic pattern: gradual onset of fibromyalgia (which I had assumed to be arthritic paincaused by the very physical natureo f my job – at the time I ran a semi-enclosed market stall, in Bristol, UK, and so was exposed to a lot of cold, humid weather).
Between in November 2007 I went through a bankruptcy and then suddenly lost my father, then two months later I went down with an unknown, but extremely aggressive virus of some sort, with 48 hours of intense headaches, vomiting anything I ingested, including water.
My energy levels have never recovered since, quite the opposite: they have been declining steadily, while my weight has increased at a vertiginous rate.
Between Winter 2008 and today (Jan 2011) I have gone from 9 to 13 1/2 stone.
The ironic thing is that:
I gave up smoking
I gave up meat and junk food (not that i had much)
I eat a healthy, balanced organic diet
On my GP’s request, I recently kept a food diary for 2 weeks and found that I was consuming between 1000 and 1500 calories a day. My Doctor said she wishes everyone of her patients had such a balanced diet.
I regularly eat soya (as tempeh, tofu, miso), eggs, diary, pulses, whole grains, nuts, seeds, fruit, root and green vegetables, all organic and some of it straight from our organic garden.
My portion size is no greater than my partner’s, but of course my exercise levels have dropped significantly, however, when I tried to exercise, using a home exercise bike a friend gave us, I had to lie down for about an hour after only 5 minutes of moderate exercise.
None of this is helped by my being post-menopausal and, at 56, I find that my knees suffer from carrying around the additional 4 stone and I find everything so much harder to do, quite apart from feeling like a small beached whale!
Thanks for your time.
Happy 2011!
Toni