Sit Down Before Reading, A Memoir by Dave Bexfield
The concluding chapter of Sit Down Before Reading has been broken into five parts (1-5).
Part 3
Laying Siege
Dating back to 3000 BC, one of the first recognized military tactics deployed by early civilizations was the now-classic siege. “A siege occurs when an attacker encounters a city or fortress that cannot be easily taken by a quick assault, and which refuses to surrender,” explains Wikipedia. “Sieges involve surrounding the target to block provision of supplies and reinforcement or escape of troops.”
By far, sieges are most associated with the Middle Ages and their imposing castles. With the relatively rudimentary weaponry of medieval times, castles made for nearly impenetrable fortresses. Defenders could effectively blunt most forms of attack, relying on thick stone walls and high perches to thwart and repel advances. But lengthy sieges routinely presented a unique problem that even the most battle-hardened and prepared fortresses struggled to overcome. Access to food.
Historically, sieges have been quite effective in warfare, as opponents wear down the opposition by slowly strangling access to desperately needed, increasingly dwindling, resources. The consequences can be devastating, as more than one million Russians, mostly civilians, died of starvation in the infamous WWII Siege of Leningrad by the Nazis. “People ate everything from wallpaper paste to shoe leather to supplement their meager bread rations, and some even resorted to cannibalism.”
“Residents of Leningrad queueing up for water”. People in besieged Leningrad taking water from shell-holes. Location: Nevsky Prospect, between Gostiny Dvor (the long building on the left) and Ostrovsky Square. Photo credit: Boris Kudoyarov, 1 Dec1941. Wikipedia Commons: RIA Novosti
What do you think spirochetes, the microscopic corkscrew bacteria behind Lyme disease, need to survive? Where do they get their energy? “It appears that this bacterium is unable to synthesize amino acids, nucleotides, fatty acids, or most other cellular building blocks,” say researchers. “The present metabolic studies determined that B. burgdorferi is capable of utilizing only a small number of different carbohydrates as energy sources.”
Specifically, sugars, or glucose, derived from carbs. This buffet of carbohydrates circulates in the blood like floating miniature boats at a tired sushi restaurant, and “B. burgdorferi uses those nutrients to increase metabolism and rapidly replicate.”
Marauding spirochetes have overrun the traditional defenses of immune systems and established residence in the body, rendering their myriad tactics to repel and evict the raiders moot. They appear to have taken over the castle with no plans to relinquish their conquest, setting up a stout defense. Except in an unexpected twist, these drugs and diets that reduce blood sugar are all effectively laying siege, denying the bacteria critical food rations. The shapeshifting, stealthy bacteria with the indestructibility of the T-1000 Terminator has a weakness.
There’s another unexpected wrinkle.
Our body’s immune system already uses a form of siege warfare to eliminate unwanted intruders. “Iron is an essential trace element for humans and other vertebrate hosts, as well as for their microbial invaders,” explains UCLA professor Tomas Ganz, PhD, MD, in a 2010 paper. “Within hours of infection in humans and other vertebrates, concentrations of iron in extracellular fluid and plasma dramatically decrease,” a process called hypoferremia, which starves interlopers of the essential nutrient. As a defense mechanism, our bodies become temporarily anemic.
But Lyme is different, really different. Our body’s ingenious “iron curtain” defense is powerless against B. burgdorferi. “The bacterium that causes Lyme disease substitutes manganese for iron in its diet,” found a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The pathogen is the first known organism to live without iron.” Instead, researchers discovered that “to cause disease, Borrelia burgdorferi requires unusually high levels of manganese,” a stunning development. “The manganese mechanism may be a chink in the bacterium’s armor that humans can exploit,” said Hopkins’ study researcher Valerie Culotta.
Dr. Culotta was righter than she could have possibly imagined, as some of us humans already are exploiting that weakness. By accident.
While manganese is an essential nutritional element for human diets, “absorption of manganese from a meal decreases as the meal's iron content increases.” What kinds of meals are rich in iron? Those laden with meat, fish, poultry, and eggs, protein cornerstones of ketogenic and fasting diets.
And then there’s this head-smacker that just plunked into my lap: your gender affects how well your body absorbs and retains manganese. “Men generally absorb less manganese than women, which may be related to the fact that men usually have higher iron stores than women,” reports an overview of the element by Oregon State University. “Iron deficiency has also been shown to increase the risk of manganese accumulation in the brain.”
Now everything crystallizes. Castles, armor, sieges, starvation, all of it.
It appears I’ve stumbled upon yet another hallelujah booyah (HB). But I’m afraid this HB might be an even bigger bombshell than anticipated.
To understand the level of excitement coursing through my body, imagine if I could run, it was the spring of 1983, and I was 10 miles south of my Los Ranchos de Albuquerque home, on the basketball court in the Pit after shockingly winning the NCAA championship in an unforgettable upset. That’s me, at this moment, frantically looking for hugs like the legendary NC State coach Jimmy Valvano.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “women are more likely than men to have an iron deficiency because they lose blood during menstruation, [while] pregnancy and childbirth can also cause iron deficiency,” leading to the agency’s concern with females between the ages 12-49. New research published in JAMA is confirming—and terrifying. “More than a third of young women in the United States — nearly 39 percent of those ages 12 to 21 — have an iron deficiency.” What ominously pairs with chronically low iron?
“Patients with chronic inflammatory disorders, autoimmune diseases, and infections often present with anemia, namely anemia of inflammation (AI),” reports a 2023 research article. “AI is a very frequent clinical condition affecting globally more than a billion people with chronic inflammatory disorders, such as chronic kidney disease, heart failure, and inflammatory bowel disease.”
Our bodies are desperately trying to fight off these bacterial invaders the best way they know how, cutting off supplies of iron. But when it comes to Borrelia burgdorferi, it’s as effective as restricting the amount of salad a hungry T-rex can eat. In fact, it’s making matters worse.
Less iron translates into more manganese, the mineral Lyme spirochetes require to survive. To understand what this means to your health, manganese is first absorbed in the small intestine before it is shuttled off to other areas of the body. “Most of the mineral is stored in bone, with smaller amounts in the liver, brain, kidneys, and pancreas.”
Left: Pure (99.97 %+) iron chips, electrolytically refined, as well as a high purity (99.9999 % = 6N) 1 cm3 iron cube for comparison; Alchemist-hp, 24 April 2010. Right: Pure (99.99 %) manganese chips, electrolytically refined, typical view of on air oxidized surface, as well as a high purity (99.99 % = 4N) 1 cm3 manganese cube for comparison; Alchemist-hp,
31 October 2010.
It’s all making sense—those spirochetes are drilling for manganese. And in the process, causing unspeakable damage to the environment better known as the human body. Neurological diseases and brain disorders, chronic kidney conditions, chronic liver disease and cancers, a vast range of sickness related to irritable bowel syndrome, and pancreatic illnesses including forms of diabetes, all the result of a solitary spirochetal quest.
Boys and girls have similar levels of manganese throughout childhood and adolescence, explaining why type 1 diabetes, which tends to appear in children 4-7 years old and then from 10-14, is equally prevalent in both sexes. Birth defects I’ve connected to Lyme, e.g., Down syndrome and cystic fibrosis, are divided equally among genders. The same is true of IBS, as “girls and boys are equally affected by the disorder.” But once women begin menstruating, their reserves of manganese become far more robust than those of men. And spirochetes can hardly wait, munching on manganese before it even leaves the intestines to storage centers.
“In the past couple of years, a TikTok trend has emerged in which women share what it’s like living with chronic stomach issues, including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)—a condition that affects the stomach and intestine and can cause cramping, abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea, and constipation,” reports Fortune magazine. “These women are raising awareness—the tag #HotGirlsWithIBS has over 112 million views on TikTok—while also normalizing the health issue.”
"TikTok is full of posts about gut health and digestive issues, ranging from mild gluten and lactose intolerance to severe Crohn’s disease and other forms of inflammatory bowel disease." TikTok compilation credit: Hyacinth Empinado/STAT, in the STAT article "From social media to pink billboards, it's suddenly "hot" to discuss gut diseases," by Isabella Cueto.
How cute, how quaint, say gaslighting medical providers, who “are seeing a pattern of more and younger people wanting to deal with their gastrointestinal distress,” yet doctors “suspect anxiety related to increased isolation during the pandemic is playing a big role in the increase in visits,” reports an August 2024 article from the Associated Press.
Silly girls. And then those girls grow up to be women. And guess what’s waiting in adulthood?
Women are up to 10 times more likely to have autoimmune liver disease than men. Women “have a greater risk of developing dementia during their lifetime… [and] around twice as many women have Alzheimer’s disease—the most common type of dementia—compared to men. Chronic kidney disease is more common in women. And pancreatic cancer rates are rising fastest in women, particularly young women, according to a 2023 study.
It appears that the mystifying gender gulf—the one tilting decidedly to the female persuasion in autoimmune disease and so many other illnesses—finally has a sensical answer. (Unsurprisingly, my not-so-confident “hunch” concerning the Xist gene in Chapter 48 was off.) The risk of iron deficiency in men (and with it an increase in manganese) doesn’t rise until they approach their mid-60s. This helps explain why “most men start experiencing severe complications when they hit their late 50s to mid-60s,” as cancer rates and heart complications, and myriad other health issues, increase precipitously.
But women? There is an unmistakable bullseye on their backs, particularly during those years when they are menstruating, those same prime years when autoimmune diseases are most likely to strike. In the futile struggle to protect itself, human evolution is even getting involved. A study released by Harvard in late May of 2024 confirmed that “the average age at menarche—the first menstrual period—has been decreasing among younger generations in the U.S.” As autoimmune diseases have soared in the last 50 years, it’s no coincidence that “studies have shown trends towards earlier menarche over the past five decades.” With their coveted stores of manganese, vulnerable female immune systems are trying to kickstart iron depletion, its most reliable defense mechanism against bacterial invaders, and the result has been the earlier and earlier arrival of a woman’s first period. It won’t matter.
We now know the bacteria’s modus operandi. B. burgdorferi’s quest for manganese is central to its survival and proliferation. And to achieve this goal, Lyme spirochetes have adopted a relentless drill-baby-drill approach to access reservoirs of the trace element in their hosts. In response, the body fruitlessly tries to restrict the bacteria’s access to the wrong trace element, iron. The result?
Unfathomable carnage of human health.
No, no, no, it couldn’t be that easy. For all of this to be true, scientists would have to witness low iron levels in all the conditions I’ve linked to Lyme. “Anemia of chronic disease happens when you have an autoimmune disease or other illness lasts longer than three months and that causes inflammation,” says the Cleveland Clinic, listing some of the conditions that may cause anemia. Cancer. Chronic kidney disease. Heart failure. Autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, vasculitis, sarcoidosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and irritable bowel syndrome. What about mental disorders?
“Research suggests a connection between low iron levels and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia.”. It’s bad. “Anemia relates to a 34% increase in dementia risk, and 41% for Alzheimer’s disease,” found another study. “The prevalence of dementia is expected to increase threefold over the next decades, with the largest increases predicted in the countries where the prevalence of anemia is highest.”
Researchers, though, are puzzled.
“Little is known about the relationship between iron deficiency and autoimmune disease,” says a 2019 study by Taiwanese scientists, which found a “meaningful association between iron deficiency anemia (IDA) and later autoimmune disease development.” After analyzing the data, clear trends emerged. “Among patients with IDA, female patients and patients with the simultaneous chronic diseases of allergic rhinitis, urticaria, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), hyperlipidemia, or hypertension had a significantly higher risk of autoimmune disease. The risk of autoimmune disease was considerably higher within the 2 years after an IDA diagnosis.”
Our last hurdle involves long Covid. Sure enough, “new research has shown that people with long COVID may have a higher risk of low iron levels.” University of Cambridge researchers discovered that “people who developed long COVID had more problems regulating iron levels, which was noticeable as soon as two weeks after they had COVID-19.”
Of course, we now know that as iron levels drop, manganese levels rise, to the overjoyed glee of Lyme spirochetes. I gotta feeling it looks something like an unmoored sea of ecstatic Minions preparing to party like there’s no tomorrow.
Changing levels of manganese—“difficult to assess and not routinely measured in clinical practice,” according to the NIH—have been implicated in a broad range of health conditions, from a wide variety of cancers to mental disorders to neurological diseases. “Associations have been observed between Mn accumulation and neurodegenerative diseases such as… Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” reports a 2023 study. It’s also been “connected with susceptibility to neurodegenerative diseases, fertility, and infectious diseases… including metabolic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes mellitus/insulin resistance, osteoporosis, obesity, atherosclerosis, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.”
Obesity? Does Lyme also have its claws in our never-ending fight against weight gain? That would mean being overweight has little to do with willpower and everything to do with an untreated disease. That would mean a full rewrite of our understanding of diet and nutrition.
Science, stop meddling with our biases!
Upending Nutrition
I hadn’t investigated the connection between autoimmune disease and obesity. Um.
“Obesity may be associated with an increased risk of several autoimmune diseases, such as asthma, hypothyroidism, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and type 1 diabetes,” says one 2023 study. “Compelling epidemiological evidence reveals a strong association between being overweight or obese and the risk of developing autoimmune diseases,” says another from 2023. “Emerging data identify a key role for chronic inflammation in mediating obesity related disease states and reveal higher incidence of autoimmune disease development,” says a third from 2022. And then there was a 2023 study that tied it all together—iron, glucose, fat metabolism and obesity. Researchers have known about the iron-obesity link for more than 50 years, dating back to the 1960s.
Children and adolescents with overweight and obesity are twice as likely to be iron deficient, with prevalence of iron deficiency increasing with body mass index (BMI). Pregnant women with obesity have impaired iron absorption in late pregnancy, and their offspring have reduced iron stores aged six months. Adults with obesity are also at higher risk for iron deficiency.
These inflamed bodies are frantically trying to fight off infection by cutting off iron. No wonder the newest diet drugs are having such a dramatic effect in the overweight community. Many of these patients have Lyme disease. They’re sick. And they are finally getting appropriate treatment.
It also looks like we can put a fork in the battle-of-the-bulge diet wars, which will almost certainly earn me prized real estate on the dartboards of diet influencers worldwide. This could easily be the topic of an entire volume of books, but from my perch, our diets—basically the whole lot of them, from paleo to Mediterranean to anti-inflammatory—are all limiting carbohydrates in one way or another, slowing down Lyme disease with varying degrees of success. The most effective diets simply restrict the most carbs, the most popular being the easiest to follow.
That’s it.
Given the ubiquity of Lyme in society, it makes total and complete sense that “the rise in overweigh and obesity has paralleled the increase in the incidence of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases,” according to a 2023 Lancet study. Even so, nutritionists and dieticians naturally flinch at diets that are clogged with fat like ketogenic diets, as do researchers. When faced with a clear paradox—“despite the fact that the high-fat Arctic diet may sound like a heart attack waiting to happen, the Inuit tend to have low rates of heart disease and diabetes”—it’s a struggle to comprehend what is happening.
I’ve shown that the “it-must-be-the-genes” knee-jerk reasoning is not merely deeply flawed, it’s just wrong, like so many other medical theories I’ve dismantled in this memoir. It’s convenient to blame the Western diet for our ills, the endless buckets of deep-fried shrimp (at least before Red Lobster’s bankruptcy) and slabs of death-by-chocolate cake, yet an iron-clad connection has been as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster. For good reason. Neither exists (sorry, Nessie fans).
Western diets aren't causing autoimmune disease, nor are they triggering cancer, autism, long Covid, Alzheimer's, or almost any other health condition, including Lyme disease. Ah, but like dry timber in a parched forest, those carb-laden diets are largely responsible for fueling the relatively recent worldwide crush of illness, not starting the fire. (So, partial credit?)
But, but, but what about eating our fruits and veggies, cutting back on salt, upping our fiber intake, and limiting sugars and alcohol?? What about following federally recommended dietary guidelines?
The foods and beverages that people consume have a profound impact on their health. The scientific connection between food and health has been well documented for many decades, with substantial and increasingly robust evidence showing that a healthy lifestyle—including following a healthy dietary pattern—can help people achieve and maintain good health and reduce the risk of chronic diseases throughout all stages of the lifespan.
Common sense. Eminently logical. A nutritional slam dunk. We also need to “eat clean” and avoid heavily processed and genetically modified foods, right? After all, you are what you eat. Is what we’ve been told, repeatedly. Just one wee, tiny problem. (By now, I expect scientists are in agreement that they don’t like it when I find wee, tiny problems in their research.) None of these sweeping claims about nutrition are exactly backed by science. “Well-documented” and “increasingly robust” evidence isn’t as supportive as you think.
Nutritional theories, such as red meat causes cancer, are “based almost entirely on a type of research method called nutrition epidemiology, which is just untested theories, essentially, guesswork,” said Harvard-educated nutrition specialist Dr. Georgia Ede in an interview. That’s one reason coffee is good for you one week, and then practically rat poison another. The same is true of diets. Without a clear medical reason to do so, eliminating fat, dairy or gluten from a diet has such weak empirical support that doctors have started pushing back, even against the recommendations of behemoths like the American Heart Association.
In a near 10-year-old piece from The New York Times, “How the Sugar Industry Shifted the Blame to Fat,” the opening sentence spells out what happened. “The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.” Three Harvard scientists got $50 grand each from a sugar trade group to get a journal article published in the New England Journal of Medicine that would minimize “the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.”
A year after that NYT piece, in 2017, the book The Case Against Sugar hit bookshelves. “Bad science and the processed-food industry have colluded to make fat public enemy No. 1 — all the while neglecting carbohydrates, especially the highly processed and easily digested kind,” reads the NYT review of Gary Taub’s investigative work. “The rising belief that dietary fat consumption was the cause of obesity and heart disease — which had been written about sporadically for decades — suddenly coalesced into fact, shifting the public’s attention away from sugar.”
It worked, and astonishingly well. Everyone was taught that saturated fats cause high cholesterol and heart disease, that choosing fat-free or low-fat is always preferable for health reasons. In 2017 a contingent of physicians finally had had enough and penned a scathing rebuke of the popular dogma surrounding nutrition.
Despite popular belief among doctors and the public, the conceptual model of dietary saturated fat clogging a pipe is just plain wrong. A landmark systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies showed no association between saturated fat consumption and (1) all-cause mortality, (2) coronary heart disease (CHD), (3) CHD mortality, (4) ischemic stroke or (5) type 2 diabetes in healthy adults. Similarly in the secondary prevention of CHD there is no benefit from reduced fat, including saturated fat, on myocardial infarction, cardiovascular or all-cause mortality.
It gets worse. This team of cardiologists “contend that the ‘fat free’ movement caused higher intakes of carbohydrate foods, including sugar,” a catastrophic dietary change that we now know is inadvertently supercharging undetected cases of Lyme. In paper after paper, doctors from all walks are screaming to be heard, that “the development of the diet-heart hypothesis in the mid twentieth century led to faulty but long-held beliefs that dietary intake of saturated fat led to heart disease.” That “numerous meta-analyses and systematic reviews of both the historical and current literature reveals that the diet-heart hypothesis was not, and still is not, supported by the evidence.” That “there appears to be no consistent benefit to all-cause or cardiovascular disease mortality from the reduction of dietary saturated fat.” That saturated fat unexpectedly has “an inverse relationship with obesity-related type 2 diabetes.” Unheard screams, mirroring those from the Lyme community.
A dietician friend of mine is similarly exasperated. She has long mused that people without celiac disease are doing themselves no favors by embarking on gluten-free diets, a feeling reinforced by the research. And for the life of her, “anti-inflammatory” diets make little sense, because nutrition doesn’t work that way, despite the unsupported advice from leading centers, like Johns Hopkins and Harvard, which warn us that many of the “major diseases that plague us — including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, depression, and Alzheimer's — have been linked to chronic inflammation.” And they know this how? “Many experimental studies have shown that components of foods or beverages may have anti-inflammatory effects,” said Dr. Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Alright. (Pause, deep breaths, maintain composure.) So, “components” of diet “may” tamp down chronic inflammation. Geez. Evidence-based nutrition is fuzzy, and frustrating. Shades of grey are the rule—and everyone in the field knows it. So, let’s make it black and white. WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK IS CAUSING CHRONIC INFLAMMATION, CYTOKINE STORMS, AND THE ENDLESS REVOLT OF OUR BODIES AS IF THEY WERE UNDER REPEATED ATTACK?!
What matters most about what you consume is one, single factor: whether you have Lyme disease, particularly active Lyme disease.
Sacrilege! The U.S. government says that “diet-related chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and some types of cancer, are very prevalent among Americans and pose a major public health problem … [and that] more than half of adults have one or more diet-related chronic diseases.”
“Diet-related chronic diseases” is a euphemism for Lyme disease, just as “autoimmune diseases” are cases of misdiagnosed variations of Lyme disease. Diet matters tremendously if you are infected with B. burgdorferi spirochetes—and shockingly not as much as you’d think if you aren’t. The proof lies, as always, in the science.
Consider Japan and their cuisine and contrast it with nations that feast on staples of the Western diet. Japanese are generally thin, have some of the longest life expectancies in the world, and have low rates of heart disease, cancers, and autoimmune disorders. The country is even “worlds apart” on mortality rates from Covid. The connection would appear to be crystal clear—wherever you see obesity, disease and sickness follow—suggesting that the secret sauce to their good health is diet, yet every competent scientist knows that correlation does not imply causation. And the Japanese diet isn’t profoundly healthier than others. “As delicious as it is, Japanese food has plenty of carbohydrates and fats that can easily scare away the health-conscious types.” What the heck?
Once again, answers await in the anomalies. Since the days of Aristotle and Plato, we have been seeking meaning about the aging process, the philosophers in agreement that they “do not appreciate old age in general” and that it denigrates “not only physical conditions but also intellectual capacity of the soul.” But not always, which has piqued the curiosity of scientists. “For a little over a decade, scientists have been studying a subset of people they call ‘super-agers,’” reports a recent article in The New York Times. “These individuals are age 80 and up, but they have the memory ability of a person 20 to 30 years younger.” Instead of focusing on common health issues of old age such as dementia, researchers took a different approach with this somewhat rare group. What is their secret to living long and healthy lives?
The June 2024 study out of Spain the Times referenced pointed to less brain atrophy and minimal signs of Alzheimer’s compared to others the same age, supporting past research. But substantial differences between the lifestyles of super-agers and “normals” were hard to tease out. Really, head-scratchingly hard. They didn’t exercise more, researchers told the paper. “There were no differences between the groups in terms of their diets, the amount of sleep they got, their professional backgrounds or their alcohol and tobacco use.” A similar study on super-agers out of Chicago found the same thing. “Some exercised regularly, but some never had; some stuck to a Mediterranean diet, others subsisted off TV dinners; and a few of them still smoked cigarettes.”
If it’s not diet or exercise driving better health, what-o-what could it be? “Super-agers probably have ‘some sort of lucky predisposition or some resistance mechanism in the brain that’s on the molecular level that we don’t understand yet,’ possibly related to their genes,” posited researchers.
Or not.
Look closer. The super-agers also boasted some “slightly better” health markers, markers easy to brush off as TMI. Sure, they (unsurprisingly) performed a bit better on mobility tests, but they also “showed lower prevalence of hypertension and glucose disorders than typical older adults.” High blood pressure, a widespread problem that is thought to be a byproduct of poor lifestyle choices—eating unhealthily, not exercising enough, too much stress—and glucose, aka high-octane spirochete fuel.
This select group of super-agers shares a single common bond, and it’s not exercising daily or squeezing out maximum nutrients from heart-healthy meals. They all appear to be Lyme free, a conclusion that scientists have been tantalizingly close to realizing for years.
Our Colombian expert Dr. Juan-Manuel Anaya, who originally reported on the too-similar-to-be-a-coincidence likeness between autoimmune diseases in 2010 (the “autoimmune tautology” referenced in Chapter 48), observed a similar strange paradox in his latest 2024 research.
Autoimmune diseases (ADs) are one of the groups of chronic illnesses that impose a significant burden of disease and health costs worldwide. Age is a crucial risk factor for the onset of ADs. Theoretically, it is inferred that with organic and immune system aging, the loss of immune tolerance and specificity of immune activity becomes more intense, the probability of autoimmunity is increasing. However, there is a group of individuals whose prevalence of ADs is very low or non-existent, despite the biological aging.
Centenarians. If you manage to live to see 100 candles on your birthday cake, surely some squeaked into the triple digits stringing along an autoimmune disease or two. But no, Anaya and his team of researchers discovered. There was a distinct “absence of ADs in centenarians,” a finding that defies statistical odds. (Curious cases of seemingly defying long odds have been a recurring theme of this memoir.)
Really? Good health in old age relies chiefly on the absence of active Lyme disease? Diets, genes, and chance don’t much matter? Our fourth SHARDs tenet reminds us that reliable research repeats, so we should see evidence of this health paradox in other studies. And we do.
“Despite the claim that chance plays an important role in the achievement of exceptional longevity, it has repeatedly been shown that already earlier in life, centenarians are a selected group with fewer disabilities, comorbidities, hospitalizations, and better cognitive function compared to non-centenarians.” Enter into evidence a mammoth study from late 2023, one that investigated blood biomarkers of Swedes with such exceptional longevity. Researchers sifted through 44,000 records to see what separated the super-agers from their peers. Wanna guess what they discovered was the secret sauce to aging gracefully?
“Higher levels of total cholesterol and iron and lower levels of glucose,” write the study’s authors, emphasizing “higher” and “lower” with italics (the bolding of cholesterol, iron, and glucose is my handiwork). They also pointed to other distinct markers: those related to lower inflammation, improved liver and kidney function, and lack of signs of anemia—all markers tied directly to the presence, specifically the lack thereof, of Lyme disease. If there were any dietary trends that influence longevity—for instance, people who ate more plants and eschewed red meat lived two years longer on average—they absolutely should have surfaced in these centenarian studies. They didn’t.
Mystery solved. Science has spoken. The whole concept of dieting seems to be, at best, misguided, and some popular diets may even inadvertently amplify the health risks associated with Lyme. Counterintuitively, while generally quite healthy in many respects, “veganism has been associated with adverse health outcomes, namely, nervous, skeletal, and immune system impairments, hematological disorders, as well as mental health problems,” reported a 2023 study, all symptoms that scream of Lyme’s involvement. And now we have a good idea as to why that may be. “Vegetarians have a high prevalence of depleted iron stores,” reports another study. “A higher proportion of vegetarians, compared to nonvegetarians, had iron deficiency anemia. This is especially true for premenopausal vegetarian women.” Vegetarian and vegan diets are unquestionably great for Mother Earth and fabulous for animals, but without proper iron supplementation, could provide spirochetes with a coveted manganese feast.
If you are still struggling to wrap your head around this upending of nutrition, and I imagine a great many of you are, let’s try using our box-out technique introduced two chapters ago to help it all make sense. The three distinct groups referenced above all have experienced uncommonly low rates of disease: the Inuit before 1950, centenarians, and the Japanese. That means all three, theoretically, possess the answer to good health. And that answer is??
Genetics! Except, no. In 2018, scientists analyzed over 54 million records on Ancestry.com to find the genetic secret to longevity and came away shocked. “The heritability of life span, a hot research topic for decades, is considerably less than widely thought,” researchers discovered, finding that “genes accounted for well under 7 percent of people’s life span, versus the 20 to 30 percent of most previous estimates.” The best predictor of a life span? Spouses. “They were more similar than the life spans of sisters and brothers. Since spouses share relatively few DNA variants, that suggested a strong influence of non-genetic factors that they do share.” Other studies back this finding, so much so that it’s an open secret among geneticists. It’s definitely not “good genes” driving better health.
Diet then! Except, again, no. A 2020 study aimed to separate genetics from diet by examining Japanese Americans, “who are genetically identical to the native Japanese people, but have experienced rapid and intense Westernization in terms of their lifestyles” and compared them to native Japanese. It wasn’t pretty. The authors concluded “that native Japanese people must continue the Japanese lifestyle, and that Japanese Americans should adopt the Japanese lifestyle as a preventive measure against the onset of metabolic and atherosclerotic diseases.” Makes sense, but our three disparate “disease-lite” groups all indulge in not-so-pristine diets. The Inuit: high fat and protein, few carbohydrates, and a dearth of fresh fruits and vegetables. The Japanese: high carb and plenty of fats. Centenarians: a grab bag of fun that may or may not include TV dinners on your lap in front of the tube while watching Matlock reruns. None are particularly healthy on paper, yet collectively this group has astonishingly low rates of heart disease, cancer, and other maladies despite seemingly self-destructive food choices. It’s definitely not the end result of a “healthy diet.”
Avoiding modern toxins! Maybe? Except, nah. Sure, the Inuit in the early 1900s didn’t have to worry about forever chemicals and myriad other newly developed carcinogens, but centenarians have been microwaving their food in plastic leftover containers for more than 40 years and the Japanese have more cell phones than people. Not that cell phones cause brain cancer or any other health issue (that we know of), but Japan has near equal exposure to modern ick that Americans have, and they are far healthier. It’s definitely not deft toxin avoidance.
So, luck? Statistical burps? That’s what we are left with: the scientific equivalent of fat chance. I suppose one could make that case for reaching the ripe age of 100, but to attribute the luck of the Irish to an entire island nation in the Pacific with 167 million residents seems like a statistical improbability of the highest order. It’s not simply good fortune.
What matters most about what you consume is one, single factor: whether you have Lyme disease, particularly active Lyme disease.
What does this all mean? I’m going to try to relay the consequences with the most subdued amount of giddiness that I can muster—get rid of your Lyme disease and the science appears to imply that you may be able to eat or drink pretty much whatever the hell you want (in moderation). THAT’S UTTER INSANITY, your brain is barking, as kids worldwide celebrate any reason to not eat Brussels sprouts. How could nutrition science be in such conflict, then? Upon closer inspection, it’s not, and the research is still valid. Most diet studies are infected with patients who have been literally infected with Lyme, which, in turn, drives our nutritional guidelines. The problem isn’t so much with faulty science or incompetent scientists, it’s faulty data. Our food pyramids are made of malleable sandstone, as evidence suggests that the secret key to good health is jettisoning those unwanted, spiral-shaped bacterial deviants.
Yahoo!
But about that “getting rid of Lyme” stuff… uh, I’ve got the worst kind of news. Sobering news. Until new spirochete-busting medications are developed, trialed, and released—a process that will take time, likely multiple years even at Operation Warp Speed levels—most known efforts to rid your body of entrenched spirochetes are doomed to fail.
This is a good time to remind scientists of what Chinese general, strategist, and philosopher Sun Tzu advised in his opus The Art of War. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
How can it be that a masterful collective of scientists can develop a pandemic-busting vaccine in record speed to save humanity, yet for years, decades, even centuries, generations of brilliant scientists have been in a frustrating stalemate with countless other health conditions and chronic illnesses, a history checkered with few cures and underwhelming treatments? Goose eggs in the autoimmune disease arena, thought to number over 100 maladies. Diddly in the realm of chronic disease, too many to list. Jack squat in the suffocating theater of mental illness, from dementia to bipolar disorder to autism. Cures in the cancer department restricted to a meager handful.
It makes no sense, violating the first rule of SHARDs. Are scientists of today and yesteryear a contingent of over-educated, incompetent dunderheads barely equipped with the number of brain cells necessary to properly button up a white coat? Or do they just not know the enemy?
The few types of cancers that they do have on the run—cervical cancer, lung cancer, and stomach cancer, for example—have known causes in many cases (human papillomavirus, cigarette smoking, and the spirochete helicobacter pylori, respectively). When scientists know the enemy, from Covid to HIV, it’s game over, as Tzu predicted. But when the enemy is unknown, treatments flip from curative to symptom management and crossed fingers, a mixed bag of victories and defeats.
The war these scientists think they have been fighting is 100% unwinnable. There will never, ever be a single cure for an autoimmune disease. Same with most cases of mental illness. Long Covid will persist longer, as in forever. Moon shots to cure many common forms of cancer, no matter how many hundreds of millions (billions?) plowed into the effort, will largely fail.
But what about those new semaglutide weight-loss medications, ketogenic diets and fasting?
There’s a sneaky, overlooked reason most diets crash and burn over time. Vanquishing Lyme falls into the same category. To avoid looking like the English trying to storm that French castle in that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, smarter tactics must be deployed, using all that you’ve learned over these many pages.
If you know thy enemy, the outcome of 100 battles is preordained.
It’s time to be fearless.
