Treating patients with a diagnosis of fibromyalgia and/or chronic fatigue syndrome can be at best daunting, at worst depressing.
There are many, many root causes involved in both these conditions.
But at the heart of both, and indeed, arguably, all health conditions, are inefficient mitochondria.
The number one source of free radicals/oxidative stress is your metabolism, thus your mitochondria.
Remember excess free radicals equals oxidative damage and effectively accelerated aging.
It is part of how food goes off and metal rusts.
You have to burn glucose (or ketones if you are on a ketogenic diet) within the mitochondria to produce ATP.
This is essentially a breaking of bonds, which releases electrons.
Hence, the last part of the energy cycle is called the electron transport chain (ETC).
All mitochondria have some “leakage” of free radicals. The more inefficient they are, the greater the free radical production.
Not only will inefficient mitochondrial producing free radicals make you tired, but the subsequent oxidative damage will also produce sustained low-grade inflammation.
And the second biggest cause of oxidative damage is…… inflammation.
And this sets up a vicious cycle that drives many chronic conditions.
Now, whenever possible, I’m all about getting at the root causes of the system imbalance, which is producing symptoms.
So, if we look at the Krebs cycle, we note there are many key steps that are all B vitamin dependent.
If they slow down, our mitochondria will suffer, produce less energy and more free radicals, driving oxidative damage and increasing pain levels and fibrosis of connective tissues.
That is exactly why our unique one-day multi essential contains the same high-dose B vitamins that you would only get normally in a separate B complex.
Feel free to compare us against high-street or even professional brands and watch the video at the bottom of the sales page once you are logged in as a practitioner.
You can watch it here: Click the image or the link below, 8 mins
Note also, there is another key steps that is limited by carnitine, which shuttles fat into the mitochondria.
And also Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA).
Hence, we have the new product out next week, Meta Boost (cos it boosts your metabolism via more efficient mitochondria).
Hence, by using those two products, we reduce the oxidative damage/stress load via increased mitochondria efficiency, but at the same time, we want to increase our anti-oxidant defence network.
For that, we once again use ALA and our old friend SOD.
SOD is the apex anti-oxidant in every cell, the very first anti-oxidant you use.
ALA helps us to recycle other anti-oxidants.
We talked about them before here:
https://lessons.academyofchiropracticnutrition.com/beautiful-nutritional-theories-and-ugly-truths/
By using the apex anti-oxidant SOD and its complimentary partner ALA, we are really dampening down the damage and the inflammation.
We especially love the fact that EXTRAMEL, our patented SOD, is a whole food supplement that also contains catalase and glutathione.
BUT…..
However, sometimes patients are hardcore and really need to be propped up to allow us to break the vicious cycle.
They want to feel better quickly and in some patients, we simply can’t resolve the root cause of their issues.
Therefore, we need to put in place palliative care.
Enter D-Ribose.
When we have enough glucose and oxygen to make ATP and we can recycle it efficiently from ADP back to ATP we are in good shape – remember the TP stands for TRI-PHOSPHATE, you remove a phosphate to use stored energy and you get ADP – Di-phospahte, stick another phosphate on and you are good to go again.
But if we are low in the nutrients or high in toxins this can be compromised and we end up low in ATP.
So we have to find an alternative supply.
We could use glucose to make D-ribose and that becomes a new ATP.
But it takes 1-4 days to happen (via the pentose phosphate shunt if anyone is nerdy enough to care).
So the only other alternative in the short term is to turn glucose into lactic acid and make a meagre 2 ATP’s as a byproduct.
Plus, in order to recycle lactic acid back into glucose, it requires 6 ATP’s, leaving us between a rock and a hard place with some seriously sore and weak muscles from massive lactic acid build up.
So we can use D-Ribose now as a supplement, directly as a pre-cursor to ATP, a true biohack if I ever saw one.
15 grams daily (5 grams x3 is best as it’s in and out quite quickly).
I use it for CFS/Fibromylagia type patients, some athletes, plus I use it personally for exercises to reduce DOMS.
There are also some supplements with D-Ribose aimed at heart issue patients to increase the output of the cardiac muscle.
It is certainly not a cure and it’s not the cheapest supplement.
But for some patients, it is part of breaking the vicious cycle of pain and inflammation & they can use it to get through days/events that will ordinarily be beyond them and that can be an amazing thing.
D-ribose is available on www.naturaldispensary.co.uk via Cytoplan, Biotics and others.