Physiology 101: Liver and Thyroid Thyroid, of course, is primarily known as the hormone responsible for your metabolism—defined as the chemical processes that keep your body going. The fuel required for metabolism is primarily glucose. You can get glucose from your food, of course—but if you haven’t eaten in awhile [...]
Your liver is quite the multi-tasker. Its most important job is to detoxify foreign chemicals, but it also does a number of other important tasks, including regulating blood sugar levels, making bile to help digest fats, making your blood’s carrier proteins and clotting factors, acting as a repository for a [...]
Far and away the most common causes of hair loss are hypothyroidism, low ferritin, and high androgen levels (such as testosterone, androstenedione, and DHEA). Less common but still prevalent are the apparently autoimmune condition alopecia areata, and the stress-induced telogen effluvium. But one I also see quite a bit is [...]
Underarm odor happens when we sweat: the bacteria that are always present on the skin break the sweat secretions down into odor-causing fatty acids. Because sweating is one of the body’s four main emunctories (routes of excretion) for toxins, it is definitely true that body odor is a function of [...]
What Are Oxalates? Oxalates are organic acids (which means they are compounds that contain hydrogen and can lose a proton). They’re naturally found in some foods, and they are formed as byproducts of metabolic processes in the body, as well as byproducts of fungal metabolism. Oxalates by themselves are generally [...]
Biochemistry 101 Protein, one of the three types of macronutrients (the other two being carbohydrates and fat) is made up of twenty building blocks called amino acids. Two of those amino acids contain the atom sulfur in their structures: methionine and cysteine. A thiol is a compound containing a sulfur [...]
The incidence of autism even as recently as 2004 was one in 166. Now it’s as common as one in 68, according to the CDC. What’s going on here? The Interleukin-6 Connection The first piece of the puzzle was this article, which shows that when a pregnant mom gets a [...]
How Teeth Stay Healthy There are four layers to your tooth, listed from outer to inner: enamel (hardest and most mineralized), dentin (a protective, also mineralized layer), pulp (containing blood vessels and nerves), and cementum (covering the roots—also mineralized). Just like any other part of your body, teeth are living [...]
Immunology 101 Mast cells are a type of white blood cell that resides in connective tissue, containing small granules (small little packets) of compounds that play a role in immunity. The most well known is histamine, but others include leukotrienes (which also play a role in allergies), serotonin, ATP (your [...]
I wrote here on the general naturopathic approach to treating migraines. As a rule, migraine predisposition tends to boil down to one of four things, or a combination of the following: food allergies, estrogen dominance, a backed-up liver, and/or cervical vertebral rotation or structural problems. But what of those migraines [...]