Before the holidays my housemate caught the flu and needless to say, I was a bit scared. I had my flu shot, but who knows if he had the same viral strain as what the vaccine contained. So for two weeks I alcohol swabbed every possible thing he could have touched in the kitchen before I cooked or ate anything. At one point I even wore rubber gloves and kept a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer in my pocket at all times. I'm sure all of these infectious disease precautions worked to some extent (thank you CF for educating me on the correct protocols), but I am also sure that the herbs I took and the food I ate also helped me keep the virus at bay. In fact, my other housemate caught the virus from him, and she's a very healthy person. After I proved to her that my protocol was working (which I will explain below) by not catching the virus from my first housemate, she took all of my advise very seriously, and recovered pretty quickly (a lot quicker than the first housemate, who did not take my advise seriously).

Firstly, I adhered to my no-sugar, GAPS/Paleo-like diet, which I have described in this website. This diet is also very high in antioxidant rich fruits and vegetables, which help fight viruses and boost the immune system. Secondly, I ate a lot of garlic. At least 2 cloves a day, in my food or chopped up raw and swallowed with water. In addition, I sinus rinsed with garlic-water. This is the secret to killing any viral sinus infection. I swear, this is what got rid of my last cold in three days. Three days! That's a first for me. They usually last a week or two, and then turn into some kind of viral bronchitis. Anyway, if you use a neti pot or a sinus rinse sqeezey bottle (NielMed brand) this is what you do to prepare the garlic water, which you will add to the regular warm saline solution that you rinse with. First, crush a small clove of garlic with the flat of a knife and let it sit for 10-15 minutes. Then chop it up very small and put it in a little glass, shot glasses work best. Next, add about 1 ounce or less of water to the glass and crush the garlic with your finger. You should be able to see the oils from the garlic mix into the water. Crush the garlic until the water is relatively murky with the oils. I usually let the mixture sit for 15-30 minutes. Then pour the  garlicky water into the neti pot or squeezy bottle, careful to avoid pouring the chunks of garlic in (you don't want chunks of garlic lodged up your nose, or maybe you're in for a little excitement?). Add warm water and the salt packet, then rinse. It's gonna burn for a few seconds, but that means it's working! If you also have a sore throat, gargle with garlicky saline water, too. Garlic is one of the most powerful anti-viral substances in the world. There are no pharmaceuticals as powerful. If you've got an active cold, I suggest garlic rinsing at least twice a day. If you're working on prevention, rinsing once a day should be good. Oh, and after you're done rinsing, eat that garlic left over at the bottom of your shot glass! 

Thirdly, I discovered a new herbal medicine that I am convinced was the main reason I dodged the flu and my second housemate did not: andrographis. Andrographis is a bitter herb well known for its powerful antiviral properties, and has been a go-to medicine to treat colds and flus for centuries. I happened to be taking andrographis at least a week before housemate #1 caught the flu because two different herbalists had recommended I take it to fight my chronic lung infections (it's also a powerful antibacterial). It is sold at my food coop's supplement section under the name "Kold Kare" and conveniently comes in little green tablets, which are easy to take with the rest of my morning and evening pills. For prevention I take 1-2 tablets twice a day with meals. It is very bitter, so it can cause digestive upset on an empty stomach. If you already have a virus, I would take 2 tablets twice a day until all symptoms are completely gone. I am still taking 1 tablet twice a day because my housemates are not yet symptom-free, plus I've still got my own bacterial infections to deal with. After housemate #2 caught the virus, a few days into it she went to the coop and got Kold Kare, and the next day her symptoms were already improved. In 3-4 days she was over the hump and almost completely back to normal. I am convinced andrographis had a lot to do with her quickened recovery, and she is also convinced (plus she garlic rinsed). Housemate #1 has not fully recovered yet. 

So anyway, I hope my two discoveries (garlic rinsing and andrographis) will help you avoid catching anything during cold and flu season. Be diligent and use these herbs at the first sign of exposure, even before you feel any symptoms. If you wait until you start feeling a tickle in your nose or throat, it may be too late to avoid catching it. However, even if you do catch a virus, these herbs can help you recover more quickly and possible help avoid having the virus move into the lungs. Good luck!

It's been over 6 months since I've started a strict GAPS-like diet and I've decided it's time to start reintroducing foods. My digestive system is happy with the changes I've made and I am digesting really well. But I have had trouble keeping weight on and my lung functions have not improved. The reason I stayed so strict on the GAPS diet for so long was to see if I could correct my gut flora sans antibiotics, and if that would help improve my lung functions. It did not. 

I have a very heavy bug burden - the MRSA is always there ready to cause me a fever and an infection if I'm not on antibiotics all the time. I really tried to stay off the antibiotics (both oral and IV) for long periods of time. I tried a month, then two months, then three months. I felt like crap, but I convinced myself that I was benefitting my microbiome by trying to regrow the beneficial bacteria in my guts by taking a break from the antibiotics. But without the antibiotics, my MRSA infections kept getting slowly worse. My regimes of eating well, exercising diligently, taking herbs and supplements, and experimenting with enzymatic biofilm inhibitors certainly helped - they've helped A LOT. But I've just got too much MRSA down there, and the bacterial biofilm issue is something that no one has yet helped me address in any significant way. So while I am going to continue with my dietary, herbal, and supplementary regimes, I am also going to try being more aggressive with antibiotics this next year to see if this will help my lung function and my quality of life improve. Part of my willingness to be more aggressive with antibiotics is my new discovery that IV vancomycin has no impact on the gut flora, and therefore will not disrupt all of the hard work I've been doing to restore my intestinal microbiome to a healthy ecosystem. 

I do believe that if my MRSA wasn't such a nuisance, the GAPS diet would have had a greater impact on improving my lung health. That is why I think it is so important to rebalance one's gut flora at an earlier age, possibly before big bugs like MRSA and pseudomonas have taken hold. The healthier the gut microbiome, the healthier the lung microbiome, and the more resilient the entire body becomes to resisting infections by these nasty pathogens. More and more studies are showing that if our microbiome is dominated by a healthy and diverse ecosystem of beneficial bacteria, we become better protected from infection and colonization by all pathogens (colds and flus included), but especially the typical big bad CF bugs, pseudomonas and MRSA. Remember that Germ Theory is only a piece of the puzzle - we must also keep in mind the Hygiene Hypothesis. Just because a germ (e.g. MRSA) is in your environment does not guarantee you are going to catch it and become colonized with it. That depends heavily on the strength of your immune system, your diet, the species that make up your microbiome, and a number of other factors. There is an often-told story of a famous scientist who wanted to challenge the wildly popular Germ Theory in a public way, so in front of a lecture hall of students he chugged a glass of water laced with cholera. He claimed that his microbiome was healthy enough that he would not be susceptible to infection by the cholera in the water he just drank. And sure enough, he was right. He did not develop a cholera infection, proving that there is more to the equation than exposure = infection. So in my mind, a lot of CF medicine should be focused on infection prevention, but not just with good hygiene and contagion control. Infection prevention can be much improved by optimizing the health of one's microbiome, and this is where the most exciting new research is headed. This is what is going to revolutionize medicine. 

Tending the Garden
Although I am going to be willing to use antibiotics, including oral antibiotics, more often in the next year as part of my new experiment, I am also going to be focusing more closely on tending to my gut microbiome. By becoming more diligent and regular about eating and taking in more probiotics and well as prebiotic foods, I am hoping that I can rebalance my gut microbiome even when I am on oral antibiotics. I will do this in 3 ways: 1) by making sure to eat lots of probiotic and fermented foods, especially saurkraut and kimchi, 2) by taking particularly well-studied strains of probiotics like Lactobacillus rhamnonsus GG (i.e. Culturelle) as well as an effective multi-strain probiotic everyday, and 3) by including a number of prebiotic foods in my diet. 

In the last month I've slowly added back in a little bit of grains (rice, quinoa, and millet in some seed crackers I buy) and added potatoes back in. I've discovered that my I still cannot control my blood sugar when I eat straight-up grains (i.e. a side of rice), plus my guts don't like it, so I only eat grains if they're mixed in with something else, like a bunch of seed in my Mary's Gone Crackers (I'm addicted to those things). For some reason my blood sugar is much more controllable (using insulin) with potatoes than grains, so I've started to eat some of those when I want to eat a carby meal. And I've also added in unmodified potato starch (Bob's Red Mill brand) as a prebiotic supplement in all of my smoothies. Unmodified (meaning unheated, unprocessed, and raw) potato starch contains a huge amount of resistant starch, a kind of carbohydrate that is completely unabsorbable and unusable by us, but is fantastic food for probiotic bacteria living in the colon, particularly bifidobacteria which are very important for our digestive health and regulating the immune system. Supplementing with raw potato starch to help boost the probiotic populations in our colon is becoming a really popular topic right now in the Paleo and Ancestral Health communities right now, so I thought I'd just on the bandwagon and try it. Check out this article if you want to read more about this topic in the Paleo blogosphere. 

Since starting this change in my diet I have actually noticed a big difference in my energy levels. I have a lot more energy and get tired less often, even when I feel "sick". I feel more robust, and even when I get a fever my temperature is higher than it used to be a few months ago, which I see as a good sign because it may be that I have more energy now to really get a good, high fever going. I am gaining weight again. My stools are phenomenally regular and beautiful, and I have no adverse G.I. symptoms at all, not even a little gas. In the beginning when I started using the potato starch in my smoothies, I did see a little uptick in the amount of gas I had, but that subsided in a week or two. 

Prebiotics
Anyway, as part of my new experiment I am focusing more on prebiotics. But be aware that in the beginning stages of the GAPS diet, prebiotics are significantly reduced and it is advised to avoid them as much as possible. This is because in someone with severe gut dysbiosis, eating prebiotics can actually feed those populations of pathogenic bacteria that are causing the person such digestive problems. However, as the theory goes, once these pathogenic bacteria have been "starved out" by adhering to a strict GAPS diet for many months, it may then be a good idea to begin to add in prebiotic foods alongside probiotic supplements to repopulate the guts with beneficial bacteria and to provide those bacteria with the fodder they need to rebuild a healthy and stable microbiome. In fact, eating prebiotic foods like fibrous veggies or potato starch has actually been proven to be more effective at building populations of probiotic bacteria like bifidobacteria in the colon than taking supplemental probiotics in pill form alone. However, I think the most effective strategy is to eat prebiotic foods and probiotic foods and supplements together, once the beginning stages of the GAPS diet have been completed. Again, every body is different, so the length of time one needs to stay on the strict GAPS diet and the way one begins to transition off the GAPS diet will look different for everyone. 

So far I have liked the results of my new strategy, and I will continue to keep you updated on any changes or improvements I experience.