Bowel Tolerance Regulation

This forum will focus on the interesting topic of titrating oral vitamin C intake to so-called bowel tolerance, the point just prior to the onset of diarrhea

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scurvyencounters
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Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#1  Post by scurvyencounters » Sat Oct 25, 2008 1:18 am

I am curious about how bowel tolerance is regulated. I read somewhere that adrenalin/noradrenalin levels may be involved.

Most in my family are somewhat in a normal range of bowel tolerance, but my son with schizophrenia has extraordinarily high bowel tolerance. Yet I know of children with autism with constant diarrhea that cannot handle any vitamin C. Similarly for people with clostridia difficile.

It seems to me that bowel tolerance is a good mechanism for most people to determine their vitamin c needs, but some people need more than their bowel tolerance will permit.

Are there any tricks to suggest for helping people with diarrhea? Any other thoughts from the experts?

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#2  Post by Dolev » Sat Oct 25, 2008 8:01 am

Are you in contact with an orthomolecular psychiatrist about your son's condition?
Dolev

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#3  Post by ofonorow » Mon Oct 27, 2008 12:40 pm

scurvyencounters wrote:I am curious about how bowel tolerance is regulated. I read somewhere that adrenalin/noradrenalin levels may be involved.

Most in my family are somewhat in a normal range of bowel tolerance, but my son with schizophrenia has extraordinarily high bowel tolerance. Yet I know of children with autism with constant diarrhea that cannot handle any vitamin C. Similarly for people with clostridia difficile.

It seems to me that bowel tolerance is a good mechanism for most people to determine their vitamin c needs, but some people need more than their bowel tolerance will permit.

Are there any tricks to suggest for helping people with diarrhea? Any other thoughts from the experts?


If you can afford it, Lypo-C completely avoids the issue of gas/diarrhea. It is unknown (at least by me) whether one packet is worth 5 grams of ordinary C, or 10 grams as LivonLabs.com suggests (I think their comparison is w/r to sodium ascorbate IV) but if you can determine the equivalence in your son's case, I would be interested.

There is a trick to taking Lypo-C, especially for kids. To take Lypo-C , fill a glass about 1/4 full (or less) with a juice, like grape or cranberry. Empty the Lypo-C packet into the small amount of juice. Stir to keep it from sticking to the glass (it will not dissolve) and swallow in one gulp. You don't taste it this way.
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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#4  Post by scurvyencounters » Mon Oct 27, 2008 5:22 pm

We use lypospheric sometimes but it is too expensive for full time use. Although lypospheric is great for systemic functions, it seems important for bacterial dysbiosis for the non-systemic environment of the bowel to be supported also. I have read that vitamin C weakens bacteria, so I conclude that bowel concentration of vitamin C must be high enough to make the antibiotic effective. Does that make sense?

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#5  Post by scurvyencounters » Mon Oct 27, 2008 5:24 pm

Dolev wrote:Are you in contact with an orthomolecular psychiatrist about your son's condition?


Yes

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#6  Post by scurvyencounters » Mon Oct 27, 2008 5:48 pm

ofonorow wrote,
If you can afford it, Lypo-C completely avoids the issue of gas/diarrhea. It is unknown (at least by me) whether one packet is worth 5 grams of ordinary C, or 10 grams as LivonLabs.com suggests (I think their comparison is w/r to sodium ascorbate IV) but if you can determine the equivalence in your son's case, I would be interested.



I think it would be quite impossible to accurately determine any kind of equivalence. There are several variables in my son's symptoms. His demand for vitamin C is extraordinarily high. Part of the vitamin C is systemic, but due to dysbiosis, there is also a vitamin C effect upon the bowel microbial environment apart from the physical osmotic effects. And his anti-psychotic medications are known to promote constipation which throws in one more quirk into the bowel tolerance mix!

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#7  Post by Ralph Lotz » Fri Oct 31, 2008 10:25 am

Is your son using a good probiotic such as Florajen 3 or Healthy Trinity?
I know of a gastroenterologist who has had great results using Florajen 3 for C. difficile.
http://www.florajen.com/products-florajen3.shtml
"Unless we put medical freedom into the constitution...medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship..force people who wish doctors and treatment of their own choice to submit to only what..dictating outfit offers." Dr. Benjamin Rush

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#8  Post by J.Lilinoe » Sat Dec 20, 2008 8:21 pm

Thanks for the suggestion, Ralph. Sure miss your input on this forum.
You, Dolev and Seymore haven't posted in a while. Take care.

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#9  Post by wendypape » Tue Feb 22, 2011 8:30 pm

I would like to mention that sodium ascorbate and asorbic acid are very well tolerated by myself and 3 children, in fact we can take ALOT - me probably 20 grams a day, my children up to 10 grams. my husband? Not even 1000mg and it would go right through him! So for years he never took any.

Til we found lypospheric. bingo. No bowel tolerance. When he developed severe and debiliating back pain last year, sciatica, disc rupture etc. I started googling. He was taking about 6 packs of the lypospheric c but it and the magnesium therapy-topically and orally, 4 different chirprctors, physio therapist, massage, 9 msm day, dmso topically, b12 therapy, inversion therapy - even grandma bought him dr. ho's stabilizer belt off of tv. it was a very stressful year for us, our marriage etc. you have no idea until your mate is laid up all the time and practically crawls to work- especially with homeschooling the 2 older kids, still brestfeeding my youngest etc.

Bottom line it took me reading several articles to him about back weakness being a deficiency in c and someone else's testimony for him to bump it up...he started with 18 packs of lypo a day...then down to 15 as we ran into supply issues. he stayed at 15 and within a few days he felt wayyy better, by the end of the week he was sitting at the kitchen tble for the first time in almost a year. within 2 weeks he was off all pain meds (which only dulled the pain), by the 3rd week he was dancing a jig almost. truly miraculous. will he admit it was all the c? no... LMAO he says could have been the wheatgrass (true), but then the last 3 weeks he's been real busy...and i notice him grumpy and slowing down and i ask if he's hurting...he says his hip is hurting again! how many c did you have today i ask? 3 he says.... 3??????????? how many yesterday? maybe 5 he says.... arghhhhh ah how soon they forget! So he's learning, ho[efully he won't always have to take this much... good news is we buy wholesale now LOL but we can't afford to have him not well, so we are borrowing and getting by! The money he was putting out for all these other practitioners that weren't working could have better gone to the C!!!! anyhow, my point to this whol estory is my husband has never been able to handle C until now! yeah for lypo!

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#10  Post by Lemonaid » Sun Feb 27, 2011 2:47 pm

Wendy, I would look into getting the large ultrasonic cleaner from Harbor Freight, some bulk lecithin granules, and ascorbic acid powder and making homebrew lipo-C.

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#11  Post by gofanu » Mon Feb 28, 2011 11:57 am

I suggest that everyone remember that bowel tolerance is not a goal, but a limit. It is the amount of (ascorbate) that can be absorbed without causing loss of the ascorbate itself, plus anything else that may be carried off with it. That is chiefly water, all electrolytes, and any nutritionally valuable components that might be resident in the large intestine.

The observed fact that ascorbate to BT "cures" many conditions is indicative of the situation that ascorbate status, or the status of other things (antioxidants, glutathione, iodine, etc) ascorbate function can overlap, is rate limiting so far as a "healthy condition" is concerned.

We appear to have reasonable evidence that the ascorbate requirement for healthy non stressed adults is more than 5gm/day, and probably more than 10gm/day in our world. We also seem to have good experience that suggests a healthy person has a BT well in excess of their requirement, say 10-20gm/day. Unhealthy folk can be much higher, per Cathcart and others.

So, anyone who cannot attain BT in excess of their requirement likely has some other rate limiting problem; now we are talking about the rate of ascorbate absorption. This does not mean that BT is sufficient to meet needs, only that it is all one can absorb right now. The trick then, is to improve the rate/amount of ascorbate absorption to better approach the need, while fixing whatever other problem(s) there may be. Eventually all will be reasonably "well", BT will go up to normal healthy but not to "sick" status, but requirement will go down.

BT is reached when the contents of the large intestine are hypertonic with respect to the bloodstream. Hypertonic can mean any dissolved substance in solution, and I've never heard what substance(s) exactly is involved here, but I suspect it is largely sodium. The body is designed to neutralize acid (H+) solutions coming from the stomach, and the major means is by excreting sodium bicarbonate at the entrance to the small intestine, so whether you take ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate, it will be sodium ascorbate at the end of the line - if it hasn't been absorbed. Of course, if there is too much ascorbic acid moving too quickly, or the acid neutralizing mechanisms are not right, there might be H+ left over. I've never taken NaAsc, so I have no experience there.

The most obvious method of improving ascorbate absorption is to slow down the transit speed through the gut, so that the ascorbate is absorbed before it gets to the large intestine. Pauling and others have calculated the amounts of plant material our ancestors would have had to eat (and chew!) to get the required ascorbate - it represents a lot of fiber, minerals, etc. At any given time the ascorbate concentrations would be low, but the transit speeds would be slow and the churning of digestion would bring everything into contact with intestinal walls, giving good absorption. So, it appears to me that taking ascorbate with or immediately after eating is good. The exception is when you are trying to deal with sickness, when you want to immediately get ascorbate into the blood in quantity, at the expense of efficiency. Further, I think anybody who has trouble taking "adequate" amounts of ascorbate should be putting a bit in everything he eats, to get levels up. Ascorbic acid goes fine in any fruit thing, and NaAsc disappears in almost everything else, so get on it.

If there is in fact any component of H+ contributing to the hypertonic situation, then neutralizing the acid should help. This can easily be done with minerals, and it will help to improve mineral balance even if H+ is not an issue - most minerals are best absorbed from an acid solution, and many unhappy digestive systems are woefully deficient in the requisite acid. Levy has a good piece on mineral forms of ascorbate. I wanted to provide myself with ascorbate and water for traveling, so I mix 20-30gm ascorbic acid in two quarts of water with about 10% or less "dark" fruit juice, and drink it over a 10 or 12 hr period. Works wonders for fatigue and next day soreness; at 64 I have several times in the last year worked hard outside for 24hours, then driven 12 hrs, and get up after 5 hrs sleep with zero signs of having done anything out of ordinary. Then I figured that since everybody is deficient in Magnesium and potassium, I would add some of those. It turns out that both magnesium as milk of magnesia, and potassium as potassium chloride = "No salt" de-acidify this mixture at surprisingly low amounts. In fact, the "dark juices", eg cranberry, pomegranate, blueberry etc., act as a litmus indicator and turn from red to a murky purple if you put too much in, and it tastes faintly salty and utterly boring. This mixture has even better effects than the plain; you could dilute it to any level, especially for children. This is also super for rehydration in hot weather/hard work, consider it as a super GatorAide at about 10% of the price.

Normally I take my magnesium (and any other minerals-rare) as Mg oxide (it is about all there was when I started), and always take it with ascorbic acid. Contrary to what everybody seems to believe, I can identify effects in less than 30 minutes, so it must work. And if you want to talk placebo, consider that it works on uninformed people and my dog and cats too. I will make another post specifically about pain control and ascorbate/Mg/Ca.

FRM

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#12  Post by Sydney Bush » Sun Mar 06, 2011 3:31 pm

The UK NHS admits a 10% risk of hospital infection with MRSA or C.Diff. and this brought me to the Foundation website here, with the first of this thread relating to the boy with schizophrenia. I first read about a schizophrenia link to increased bowel tolerance in Pauling's 1985 "How to Live Longer and Feel Better" starting with Pp 23 and 24 which should be consulted. To be conservative I limited my "700 Vitamin C Secrets (And 1,000 not so secret for doctors!)" to this which I reproduce in Entry No: 1,575: Schizophrenia: Requirement may be ten times more for normal urinary excretion. (1973 Hoffer and Osmond) There is obviously a genetic link which must be addressed for the safety and comfort of schizophrenics.

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Re: Bowel Tolerance Regulation

Post Number:#13  Post by scurvyencounters » Mon Mar 07, 2011 11:44 am

It was more than two years ago, when I started this thread, that I was genuinely curious what mechanism might regulate bowel tolerance. I was discovering day by day that my son (with severe schizophrenia) had an extraordinarily high bowel tolerance for vitamin C. At the time, I had also been looking into gut factors according to the GAPS theory from Dr Natasha Campbell McBride's book Gut and Psychology Syndrome. And I had learned that clostridia species were part of my son's gut flora. For a year or more, we vigorously attacked the "bad" microbes. Although we did see swings back and forth in his symptoms in response to treatment, we concluded that we were not actually making any real headway against his illness. It was at that time we explored the limits of his bowel tolerance. We had been giving him about 50 grams per day to suppress constipation, but we soon learned that he could sustain over 150 grams every day.

Now, two years later, we have been detoxifying mercury and we are back down around 50 grams per day which suggests we are approaching a normalization point as we pull the mercury out of his body.

We still don't understand the bowel tolerance mechanism, but suspect it is an indirect symptom of oxidative stress which in turn regulates aerobic/anaerobic balance of the gut as well as the bowel motility. Thus, we hope that gut microbe imbalance and constipation issues as well as psychosys will also resolve themselves as mercury toxicity is corrected.

But I have little regard for genetic theories of schizophrenia except as regards to tragic inheritance of mercury via the mother's womb!


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