My health journey: part 3

In June last year I wrote a post indicating that I had eradicated h. pylori bacteria (finally) from my gut and I believed I was on a healing journey from thereon out. Well that it seems now was only the start of the journey and I had still a long way to go. Here I will try to document some of my journey after June 2018.

At that time I was following the Dave Hompes h. pylori diet which meant eating regular small meals always including some animal protein with each meal. This was to keep your blood sugar stable.

At that time I still would get acid reflux and gastritis due to the damage done to my body but eventually, by eating low acidic foods, my stomach healed and I was largely relieved of reflux and gastritis.

My journey continued

The problem I learned from what followed is that h. pylori bacteria are opportunistic and only succeed when the environment is weakened as mine was. I was left at this point with a weakened immune system, along with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and overactive bladder, or possibly interstitial cystitis (I.C.). I really needed to find a cure but my doctors told me it is incurable. I also had a recurrence of prostatitis and I wasn’t going back to taking pharmaceutical drugs.

Also I soon developed gastroparesis, where you are nearly always nauseous because the food in your stomach does not leave soon enough. The only way to counter it is eat again and the new food in the stomach pushes out the old lot and you get relief for awhile.

I sought out medical help, though I did not want to take drugs. I was offered Iberogast, a herbal tonic, which is supposed to help but it didn’t. I found an integrative doctor who gave me some herbal pills but they didn’t work either.

Finally I tried a Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor. She gave me a course of Chinese herbal medicine as well as acupuncture and cupping (to draw out poisons from my body). I attended that practice for about 3 months.

Within a few weeks on the Chinese herbal medicine I had relief from the gastroparesis. Thank God for that!

What follows is the most interesting part of the story. It has a biblical creation message too.

A biblical message

One thing I was told by Traditional Chinese doctor is that my problem was in my liver. She said that IBS and other gut issues according to their practice results from a sluggish liver.

I read about another approach, to clean and heal the liver, which was largely only eating fruits and vegetable and taking certain herbal and mineral supplements. So why not give it a go? (See update at the end of the post.)

This new diet was essentially about cutting out all the troublemakers for the liver and digestive system and eating whole foods like vegetables and fruits, organic where possible. The troublemakers are gluten (which I was already avoiding), dairy, eggs, corn, soy, msg, canola oil, pork, food preservatives, colours and particularly “natural flavours”, all processed foods and in particular the sugars. This includes any forms of these. It also required cutting down on fats or all types and starting the day with 16 oz of celery juice.

As a result I became almost a vegan again, this time for 9 months. It was not required to give up meat entirely but I was not eating much anyway nor fat so to reduce fat it was natural to give up most meat. I continued eating canned wild caught salmon. I started this new diet in December 2018.

At first on this diet my gut reacted badly and was much worse but over time it calmed down and I found more energy and I felt I was getting better, especially by the end of 6 months. But after 6 months the improvements with reduction of gut bloating and pain and bouts of diahorrea did not continue. In fact, I progressively developed pains in various places in my body.

But by 9 months I was healed of IBS BUT I had developed many more pains, in my legs, feet, back (upper and lower) and everywhere. This is when I learned about oxalates that are found in all foods.

Oxalic acid is an organic acid, which found in fruit and vegetables, and the amount in any one plant determines how much it is attacked by pests. Evolutionists would say that the plants have evolved the oxalates to ward off pests. But biblical creationists would say that the oxalates, which are a poison, are the result of the Curse. Remember, no pests existed before the Curse, so there was no need for plants to have natural pesticides “built in”.

High oxalate plants (e.g. spinach, rubbarb, chard, almonds, cashews etc) are easy to grow because no pesticides or fungicides are needed. They are highly nutritious foods but they are also high in oxalates. These oxalates accumulate in our bodies and form tiny crystal that cause all sorts of of damage and disease. This poison is not one that the liver can detox by filtering and modifying the molecules as it does with other poisons.

Many people don’t show symptoms because they either have not accumulated enough oxalates due to age or they have good gut flora that contains oxalobacter formagenes, and that bacteria is able to break down the poison for elimination from the bowel. Antibiotics kill off the oxalobacter and those people who have had prolonged use will accumulate oxalates a lot more than others. Our bodies do eliminate them but if you have a comprised gut, which I have due to h. pylori and coeliac disease, those crystals accumulate everywhere and will eventually result in a lot of pain and some, serious health problems.

I recognised that this must have been happening to me. Here I was healing from IBS, which my GP said was incurable, but the “cure” was causing other problems and that meant a lot of pain. This is another aspect of a sin-cursed world. At the Curse God said:

Thorns also and thistles shall it [the earth] bring forth to you; and you shall eat the herb of the field;

Genesis 3:18

Here God placed many impediments into the created order. One of those impediments is the anti-nutrients in plants, which we eat. Ironically those highest in nutritional value are those highest in oxalates.

So despite the claims of the vegans, there is no magic bullet, there is no perfect way of eating to overcome all illness and disease. We can certainly should clean up our diet and not eat pesticide-laden foods or all those toxic processed so-called foods. But all plants contains some level of oxalates.

After the Flood God commanded that mankind eat animal protein. Besides a few fish types, animal flesh doesn’t contain any oxalates whatsoever. So to reduce oxalate intake or go to a low oxalate diet one essentially must eat animal flesh. This is what, in fact, happened after the Flood.

Every moving thing that lives shall be meat [meaning food] for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

Genesis 9:3

The fact that mankind now would eat a lot of animal flesh meant that man could avoid a lot of oxalates, especially in a new hostile world where survival was paramount.

Back to my story. In September 2019 I started to reduce my oxalate intake. I had been eating 6 or 7 potatoes a day and many times I ate spinach as well I was juicing a whole bunch of celery each day. These are all high oxalate foods. I stopped these and within a week or so I noticed a reduction in leg and back pains.

Now I learned that when one decreases oxalates one has to go slowly as if you go too fast, you body starts to release the crystals back into your blood stream (called dumping) as it starts to eliminate them. If you reduce slowly the body also more slowly releases the oxalates for elimination. But if you do it too fast, as I initially did, the flood of these nasty crystals–remember oxalates are poisons–causes all sorts of symptoms, and some can be serious. I developed heart palpitations with chest pains and started feeling quite sick. One week alone I went to the emergency 4 times and later had a thorough heart investigation, which thankfully, found nothing wrong.

However I have learnt that many of my mystery symptoms going way back many years — with many hospital visits which found nothing — can be due to oxalates in my tissues and dumping when I may have reduced my intake without knowing it.

Several months ago I had also developed eye problems with inconsistent intra-occular pressure (raised pressure is a symptom of glaucoma) but the optomologist found nothing wrong. I have a follow up visit January 28th and I am hoping the reduction of my oxalate intake will have further benefits to my eyes. Some people report a crust of fine crystals from their eyes in the mornings. I had also very bad dry eyes which has now largely been relieved with reduction of oxalates.

Now I am reducing oxalates more slowly. After 4 months I am in a lot less pain. I have had a lot of pain in my body over the past 3 years from all different causes, some of which I have explained. Now finally I am starting to feel like a normal person again. Thank the Lord! So whatever your problem might be don’t give up. It may take some time but healing is possible.

To lower oxalates, I have transitioned back to eating animal flesh: lamb, beef, chicken, turkey, and wild caught salmon. It is all free range or organic. (I found a butcher who can do bulk supply and hence the cost per kg is quite affordable.)

Some people transition all the way to only eating meat and fats and oils with some minerals, on what is called a carnivore diet. There are no oxalates in meat. So it seems to work for them. I have not gone that far yet but I understand the motivation. I do however each a lot of good animal fats, and limit carbs. I no longer eat potatoes, or much rice (but that is for another reason).

There is a lot of info available on oxalates. Google search or go to Trying Low Oxalates group on FaceBook. This group shares anecdotes but they only accept evidence based information.

One other resource/protocol I fully recommend–which I am also doing–is the Root Cause Protocol. This is science based and is about getting vitamins and minerals into us, mostly from food sources, but more importantly it is about reactivating the anti-oxident power of ferrous iron in the liver, reducing inflammation and disease. By transforming ferric iron to ferrous iron it becomes the most powerful anti-oxident available and it will help to bring our minerals back into balance and reduce diseases of all types.

Update 11/1/2020: There is a great danger when looking to alternative medicine and alternative health practitioners that one will end up with a counterfeit from the other kingdom–the dark kingdom of Satan–which is often subtly disguised as another approach. But in reality, though they will have a partial truth, and even can provide partial healing, the source of the healing is not from God but from Satan.

Many in the alternative health community are involved in the New Age practices, which is a veiled version of Hinduism. So there is the danger there. It is a counterfeit of God’s real healing power. I now have come to recognise that Traditional Chinese Medicine practice is part of this. I did get some healing from the herbs they gave me but I do not recommend any of these so-called “healers”.

The near vegan diet I used for 9 months came from another practitioner, who said that he got his information from God. But I now recognise that it was not from the living God but one of these New Age counterfeits. He did not acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ and used other spiritist type language. He also made some claims that by my own experience were wrong, and as we know if the information was directly from the Creator of the universe, it would be correct.

One example of that incorrect information was the issue to do with oxalates. The practitioner mentioned them in one of his books but said they cause no problems. My experience and that of many thousands of others, who were once on a green smoothie diet or a celery juice diet says otherwise. Many vegans had to give up their vegan ways because of the intense pains they developed from consuming all those oxalates in their diet.

Once you understand where their information comes from you can also discern whether it is genuinely from the Lord.

Let me add one more caution. I also have come to believe that what we are offered in the standard Western medicine cannot be relied upon either. Ok, we need to go to the ER for emergencies but for any chronic disease, which there are many with no cure in site, what the local GP offers amounts to another form of witchcraft. (In the Bible the witchcraft practitioners used herbs and potions to heal. In the Greek the word for witchcraft is pharmakia, from which our modern word pharmacy is derived.)

Today, the modern doctor prescribes you a pill to suppress your symptoms. One pill per symptom. But they have very little idea about how to actually cure disease. And taking their “medicines” is what made me so sick in the first place.

Natural healing, healthy diets and herbal supplements have their place but they are no replacement for the greatest Healer of all. Let us instead look to Jesus Christ for the healing we need.

4 Surely He [Christ] has borne our griefs [pains]
And carried our sorrows [sicknesses];
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted [on the Cross for us].
5 But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities [sins];
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed [of disease in the body as well as in the soul].

Isaiah 53:4-5

Additional Information

H. pylori infection: My advice