SIBO & The Connection to Sulfur
https://www.metagenicsinstitute.com/pul ... bo-sulfur/
“Sulfur is part of our constitution.” – Dr. Deanna Minich
You may be familiar with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), but what about its critical connection to sulfur? Drs. Minich and Briggs explore the SIBO-sulfur link in this cutting edge discussion, where they use a root-cause, personalized lifestyle medicine approach to examine gut dysbiosis and SIBO symptomology.
Dr. Briggs shares valuable information on the clinical patterns related to sulfur metabolism in her patients with SIBO, defined as bacteria in the small intestine. She describes SIBO pathophysiology and the variety of symptoms and chronic health manifestations that can result. Clinical assessment tools exist (e.g. breath tests and advanced stool studies) that healthcare practitioners can leverage to pinpoint SIBO etiology and provide information on the bacterial overgrowth climate in the gut of the individual patient. Dr. Briggs describes the overarching gut microbiota imbalance she has observed in patients with SIBO, specifically a lack of Lactobacilli and an excess of sulfur-reducing bacteria.
Upstream causal factors are explored next. SIBO-predisposing contributors from the diet can include heavily processed foods, inadequate plant foods and phytonutrients, and undigested protein. You will learn about the critical importance of pH balance in the gut and stomach acid sufficiency and how widespread use of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) has contributed to SIBO prevalence. Drs. Minich and Briggs concur that clinicians must: 1) address stomach acid first, and then 2) ensure healthy sulfur metabolism.
The impact of genotype (e.g. mutation in the cystathionine β-synthase [CBS] gene) on sulfur sensitivity and the critical conversion of sulfites to sulfates are deliberated next, along with the pleiotropic impact of sulfates in health, the connection to demineralization (specifically the essential trace mineral molybdenum), and the wide reaching impact of a sulfite:sulfate imbalance on histamine production, methylation, the hormonal milieu, butyric acid production in the gut, and much more.
Drs. Briggs and Minich wrap up their discussion by offering practical insights and recommendations regarding specific foods, differentiating plant vs. animal sources of sulfur, their preparation, and how targeted nutritional bioactives can be strategically integrated.
This Metagenics Institute LIVE broadcast took place live October 23, 2018 on the Metagenics Institute Facebook page.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
– Hello everybody and welcome to Metagenics Institute’s Personalized Lifestyle Pearls. And tonight we have Dr. Bridgette Briggs, and I know Dr. Briggs from way back, I think it might even be something like probably seven to nine years ago that Bridget and I met for the first time. So welcome, Bridget.
– Hi, good to see you again, Deanna.
– Likewise. And it’s been nice chatting with you. We had a little bit of some time behind the scenes to catch up on each other’s lives. For those of you who don’t know Dr. Briggs, she is a seasoned functional medicine practitioner. She is board certified in family medicine, she has a thriving practice in Southern California. In fact, I was catching up on what she does in her practice. I mean, she’s busy all the time. What I really like about her practice is that she’s able to have an insurance-based model doing functional medicine. She actually gets to think about root causes behind things, and her patients really get the best of both worlds with standard allopathic care combined with the deeper thought process that goes into it. So, Bridget, it truly is a great honor and a treasure to have you here to share your pearls of wisdom. So thanks for being on.
– It’s fun, thank you.
– So I know you can talk about a lot of different things and through the years I’ve come to know you as, you’ve got this very leading edge streak where you start to identify patterns in your patients. I mean, you’re truly boots on the ground, observing, doing pattern recognition, doing the timeline, looking at the matrix, pulling it all together. And so you could talk about many different things. Goodness, whether it’s epigenetics, methylation, but tonight, you want to talk about small intestinal bowel overgrowth and the patterns that you’re seeing with sulfur metabolism. So it’s an exciting topic. And first of all, let’s talk about SIBO, small intestinal bowel overgrowth. A lot of people talk about this. I first want you to define it for us. Talk about what is SIBO exactly and how do you know if you have it?
– So when we think about SIBO or SIBO, excuse me, what we’re thinking about is really the idea that bacteria from the colon are trans migrating past the ileocecal valve and kind of setting up an imbalance in the bacteria that’s found in the small intestine. And so we traditionally say that because of the pH changes of the GI track, certain bacteria are though to propagate more so in the small intestines and their job is really in the fermentation and the further breakdown of the food and the helping of the assimilation of the micro and macronutrients. And more of the colonic bacteria have a very different role. And so when those bacteria floors get mixed, we start to see patients who have a lot of similar symptoms of bloating, gas, indigestion. And because it may correlate also with symptomatology of leaky gut, many of them developed systemic problems, like joint inflammation, fatigue, feeling very viral, or sometimes into that chronic fatigue fibromyalgia side of things. So in traditional medicine, I feel like we like to put the body into body systems and think that gastrointestinal symptoms would be all gut related. It wouldn’t really connect to the joint or to fatigue or even to hormone changes or acne. So I see this as one of the core imbalances that many people are undergoing. And so SIBO balance or restoring balance has been a great way to watch little things inside the body get dramatically better without even knowing the connection. But as you said, Deanna, I like to watch patterns. And so in the last decade, I think there’s been a dramatic rise in SIBO. I think that we have the ability to measure it now where in the past, maybe that wasn’t really as well understood so maybe we didn’t know to call it SIBO. But now today with the breath tests, for example, and they’re done at very standard labs, they don’t have to be done specifically at a GI clinic any longer, we can send people to quest, Genova and other companies have tests that you can mail to your patients. So many patients are coming in with evidence-based studies, like a breath test that can even delineate if the patient is a methane producer or hydrogen ion producer. And so as we do the studies, we’re seeing bacterial changes relate to which type of SIBO you get.
– So let’s just back up just for a second, ’cause you and I are on the same page when it comes to root cause based medicine, right? So how did the bacteria even get misaligned in the gut then? Like if we just go a bit further and say, well, how did we get into that state to begin with before we even get into the diagnosis and then the trends that you’re seeing with sulfur, how did we get ourselves into that in the first place?
– I think the early research that really came to the forefront of our understanding was for example, PPIs. We began to see evidence when patients were taking proton pump inhibitors, which next to cholesterol medicine seemed like everybody was prescribed some kind of a prescription for heartburn. And what we began to see is that patients over a period of time after they were on a PPI, had a much higher prevalence of the development of SIBO, or SIBO. So as we’re seeing some of that evidence thinking in the understanding of what other co-factors may predispose us to that. So we began to realize that that heavily processed foods, patients that are eating more foods in a package or a box, has a tendency to lead to some of the nutrients that are not completely well metabolized, those nutrients that travel down too far down the GI track, change the pH again. And as that pH changes between the ileocecal valve, the small intestines and the colon, we begin to see a valve that remains open and then the trans migration of bacteria. Next is, high animal meat, patients that eat a high animal meat diet, not blended with all those vital nutrients and that high concentration of plants and the fiber, these patients seem to have a lot more undigested protein moving down the GI track and then this tends to set up the changes in the bacteria.
– So I have a lot of different points on that. So if they’re not digesting protein, they’re probably not producing enough stomach acid, right? They have achlorhydria and hypochlorhydria probably because of the connection, whether to the PPI or just through aging or other causes or even stress. And so, when we look at SIBO and some of the things that you can do, would one of the things be addressing the upstream cause which would be in part, looking at protein digestion and helping to replete with good stomach acid?
– Absolutely, so one of the things that we see all the time is in these advanced stool studies, we start to see patients that are having excessive protein metabolism, short chain fatty acids, or we’re seeing the lack of some of those healthy short chain fatty acids. So we can see evidence of fat malabsorption, protein maldigestion, and same thing with carbohydrates. So the beauty of those advanced stools is we can almost pinpoint people who seem to have a tendency of having the hyperchlorhydria. And most of the studies that where they’re going down for the pH pro, these patients with GERD, majority of them, eight out of 10 are actually developing hypochlorhydria, which again is shooting acid up and down the esophageal system because the pH is not becoming acidic enough to close the valves. And that’s where we
– Yeah, I mean, just the dots are all connecting, right? So if we don’t have enough stomach acid, then we probably don’t have good iron absorption or mineral absorption, we probably have H pylori because we’ve got overgrowth in the stomach. So do you see that patients with SIBO have a whole host of different things going on, and it’s mainly connected into this mechanism of action?
– I do, completely. And oftentimes an imbalance where they don’t have enough of the lactoBacilli, which that should be very fulminant. We should have tons of the lactoBacilli, but many of them are culturing negative for lactoBacilli and other bacteria, like the sulfur producing and the sulfur reducing types of bacteria are thriving in certain of these disease stage creating a lot of the symptoms.
– So I’m wondering rather than measuring the gases, and this is all very organic by the way, everybody, I mean, Bridget, and I haven’t rehearsed this, but I’m just getting so intrigued, just listening to you and just formulating all these other questions. So you did talk about the gold standard test, a breath test to measure these different gases. And based on the ratio of these gases, we can say something about the bacterial overgrowth in the gut. And I’m thinking would it not make sense to simply be looking at hypochlorhydria as that first line of attack, or maybe even in conjunction with? Because it’s such an easy thing. In functional medicine, we talk about repleting stomach acid all the time, and there’s even a set protocol of how to do that.
– Yes, and the irony Deanna, is it feels like everybody flunks. And I think that correlates with the vast array of patients that have GERD or heartburn, is, are we really saying to patients who have GERD you have too much acid? Or should we really be saying, this is hypochlorhydria and using things like zinc supplementation or hydrochloric acid supplementation to enhance their HCL production. I mean, how many patients come in the door and they’re like, how come when I do Apple cider vinegar, Dr. Bridget, I feel better? They’re restoring their own pH. And it’s just an old wives tale, or actually potentially does work.
– Well, I was just going to ask you about that. So what do you think about Apple cider vinegar? So you’re saying patients are coming to you and they’ve tried this on their own and you are seeing that they have some symptom improvement?
– Absolutely, all the time. Same thing with just diluted lemon juice. They wake up and they have this every morning and they’re like, okay, all my heartburn is gone, Dr. Bridget, I don’t need you any longer. And I’m like, congratulations, I believe you. It’s pH balance is such an important element of body health, whether it’s in the GI track or whether it’s in serum in the blood is pH is a critical mechanism for oxidation, reduction and all of that. So the GI tract is especially, especially pH sensitive. Especially when we remember the end of that, protein digestion primarily happens in the stomach. So when patients have inappropriate acid production in the stomach, pepsinogen is a pre enzyme. It’s not active to the pH of the stomach drops below 2.2 then it’s converted to pepsin, which is where we can chop up the protein. So these patients with low stomach acid have this undigested protein running down the GI track, and this is definitively becoming putrefactive, it’s affecting butyric acid levels, it’s feeding bad bacteria. So I think you hit it on the nail, which is address stomach acid and the stomach first.
– Yeah and it’s not such a hard fix in some ways, as long as we can identify it. So you saying that makes me think that if we have undigested protein, what could happen then is, number one food intolerance or number two further on to food allergies. So that’s gonna take us into the discussion on sulfur because sulfur is part of our constitution. It’s one of the elements that comprise us. So what you’re seeing, well, tell us what you’re seeing with patients with SIBO, small intestinal bowel overgrowth and sulfur containing foods, which are everywhere. I mean, that’s like meat, dairy, eggs, even vegetables, we’re talking cruciferous vegetables. So what are you seeing that they can’t tolerate these foods at all?
– We have our unique genotypes that are out there, for example your patients who have that homozygous CBS gene. So we know that they are often your Europeans that come from colder areas of the world. And so genotypically, sulfur is the fourth most abundant molecule in the human body. So if you’re not going to eat it in the diet, let’s say, you’re not growing up in equator type of environment. And your only main sulfur vegetable is gonna be cabbage, well, you come to California with that type of Scottish genotype or Irish genotype, and you’re buying a juicer and you’re eating broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, and kale, and they develop bloating and gas and indigestion. They’re just over sulfur producers. So then you not have the GI issues with the hypochlorhydria, but they’re hyper ingesting non-seasonal foods or through juices that their little bodies can’t tolerate. So they end up getting a burden of histamine and remember, how do we treat GERD? Early days, we use the Pepcid AC, the anti-histamine families. And so they take the right PPI or the right proton pump inhibitor. And they feel like that’s the treatment, but really it was the dietary connection to this massive ingestion in a sulfur sensitive individuals. So we have the genotypes, okay. Two we have those that your body is not good at converting sulfites to sulfates? So we get this sulfate deficiency and that happens in people, for example, that are demineralized. So let’s say I am eating a highly processed diet, I’m not getting adequate amounts of minerals that are trace, like molybdenum. Molybdenum is the key mineral needed to activate the SUOX enzyme to revert sulfites to sulfate. So I can handle some of those sulfur foods as long as I can appropriately convert them to the sulfate, which have a critical role in detoxification as you mentioned Deanna by the liver. It’s important hormone detoxification. So we see these patients with high estrone sulfate, we see them with high DAGAS. These PCOS girls that have that androgenic acne, which we connect the GI tract, the gut, or this endometriosis which we see has a bacterial component in OBGYN medicine to something that pelvic change but we think it may be bacteria. So I think there’s a hormone connection to the imbalance in sulfites and sulfates. And sometimes simple mineral deficiencies that you and I can implement quite lovely and helping people to produce those good sulfates. So this is why our seniors, they feel so much better when you give them the cosamin sulfate, chondroitin sulfate. This is where prescriptions Deanna, that we’re using all the time in medicine that are sulfating our patients like, albuterol sulfate for Bronco construction. We use plaquenil, hydroxychloroquine sulfate for all this autoimmune human disorders were magnesium sulfate musculoskeletal tension. These patients, you sulfate them, or you just give them molybdenum and all of a sudden they come in and they’re like, I don’t have chronic neck and muscle spasms, my GI tract is normal in three days on molybdenum because you’re generating that biofilm, that nice burglar layer that bacteria can now thrive. And lastly, Deanna, I think the connection to butyrate how sulfites prevent the natural balance and health of the function of butyrate. So if we don’t have enough bacteria number one, we’re not making healthy butyric acid, that’s like the miracle grow on a lawn of the gut. If I want my lawn to grow, I have to put miracle grow well, I need to butyric acid to regenerate my gut.
– It’s a great metaphor.
– Yeah, they knock out that healthy butyric acid so these patients have leaky gut, they have oxidation, they have bad bacteria and then all this protein, fat, carbohydrate maldigestion.
– Dr. Bridget, you said a lot over the two minutes or so. And I was jotting some notes because I wanna play that back for everybody. ‘Cause you said so many great things and I don’t want it to be missed. And by the way, for anybody that’s online and I see we’ve got a number of viewers, please type in your questions and we’ll get them answered. We’ll do our best. So lemme just play certain things back. So first we talked about low stomach acid and its connection to small intestinal bowel overgrowth. And then we transition into talking about sulfur, sulfur metabolism and one of the things that you said is that people from perhaps the Northern European ancestry who have a snip or a variant in a specific gene cystathionine beta synthase, may have issues with sulfur. And that can be remedied by reducing sulfur in the diet and taking molybdenum. So I wanna ask a couple of things here. So first and foremost, I made a notation, do you see a difference, I don’t know if you’ve had your patients do this, between plant-based sulfur and animal-based sulfur? Because it’s a different matrix, it’s a different complex. And so first I’d like to know that. And then of course, I’m sure that most people online wanna know about your dose of molybdenum.
– Sure.
– Let’s all say molybdenum. Such a MB. It’s one of those trace minerals we don’t hear a lot about. We hear about manganese and boron and the macro minerals, calcium, magnesium, and iron and zinc. But now you’re talking about it. It’s smaller and ultra trace. So two things first, let’s talk about the plant versus the animal-based sulfur, and maybe talk about some of the sulfur containing foods and maybe interactions with histamine and then talk more about dose of molybdenum.
– Hi, so yeah, there’s a big difference between plant-based sulfur foods, because generally that is not gonna be as much methionine in our system. When you talk about animal meat, you’re gonna really be ingesting methionine in high concentrations. That is an essential amino acid, you and I have to eat that. And then we can recycle it as well. But it is one of those essential amino acids that our bodies can now convert into cystine through that methionine door. But preliminary all animal meat, especially that red meat, the amount of sulfur is going to be one of the highest. And the only thing that’s really gonna be to in that department is gonna be those apricots that are dried and things like that, or in heavily processed foods that have use the preservative sulfate or sulfites, which is always illegal in organic. So whenever you go organic fruits and vegetables, we don’t have to worry about the preservatives and the pesticides. Now let’s talk about the fruits and the vegetables. What we do, if you Google, like the people grams, you’ll see the darker the green, the higher the sulfur. But we’re not gonna get to the level of the animal meat, right? Nowhere near. And so first I wanna make it critically clear, we all need sulfur. It is essential and we never wanna tell a patient, stop eating all your broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale. Between the red meats, the animal meats and the veggies, we need those high antioxidants. It’s really never pulling it out altogether, but really trying to eat it seasonally. And according to like not a high concentration in one meal, you know? And when we talked about it-
– I’ve had a number of people tell me, I just wanna interject here quickly because some people might be thinking this as well. I’ve had a number of people tell me that they can’t have garlic, not even a little bit on a pizza or a healthy pizza or even broccoli, just a serving a broccoli, just bloats them and they feel so uncomfortable. So is there a remedy for them?
– Yes, well, first of all, we all know, even in beauty and in hair that when see people who have really curly hair that is disulfide bonds. And so how do we break curly hair? We heat it. We break sulfur bonds by heat.
– That’s a great analogy.
– Yeah, so whenever you’re thinking about trying to help a sulfur sensitive individual tolerate the Brussels sprout, you can’t sim it and serve it or the garlic, you can’t serve it fresh. It’s very allicin burdened. The more you cook it down and heat it, you start to break down some of those sulfur bonds. So they can do a garlic clove in the oven when it’s all cooked and mushy, but they certainly can’t do it super fresh. And I giggled ’cause my husband and I are the opposite. He won’t touch Brussels sprout unless they’re killed. I won’t eat them unless they’re fresh because I’m Latin, he’s Scottish. Like we can giggle about bit but we have a hard time meeting in the middle. And so this is where the more European they are, I’m like stay with the blonder lettuce. The more you can tolerate the sulfur cravers, I want it dark and I want it fresh. And you will have these Europeans, they can’t eat fresh salad. They just can’t. The salad is the biggest trigger. But when they take the spinach and they cook it down, they have no problem. So we just need to find the mechanism to get it in our bodies that suits us. But molybdenum always helps.
– All right, so what’s the dose? Give us the magic dose for most people. Do you do it per body weight and how often?
– There’s two transporters, one on the intestine and one on the kidneys. So molybdenum works in both, both in absorbing the appropriate amount of sulfur, but ideally converting to sulfate and it works on the kidneys to make sure you pee out excess. So about 600 micrograms twice a day in patients that are the most symptomatic with sulfur. Now, for people like myself, Deanna, I don’t need any molybdenum. I am a sulfur craver. I don’t want to eliminate any access. And in fact what’s really interesting is if you use too much molybdenum, you actually start to break sulfur bonds. So I started getting really flexible, you can actually start pull my hand to pull me out of joint of my It’s interesting because sulfur is notorious for strength and twisting, right? Disulfide bonds, help with turning and twisting, which is why we see the curls. This is heavily involved in your tendons, which is why your tendons’ been stretched. So people who have tight tendons and tendonitis, bursitis, plantar fasciitis, when you get the molybdenum, they’re like, why did that just take my plantar fasciitis away? So it really, you have to kind of feel the body out and find your sweet spot. So I get hyper flexible. The next person they’re like, wow, I don’t have all my muscle attention and my tendon issues. So it is a benign mineral that you start to feel your body.
– Does anything happens to hair?
– It gets straight. I’ve been notorious to straighten people’s hair. So I always warn everybody, if your locks get a little bit less straight, sorry. ‘Cause I do love curls.
– So what you’re saying is for people with the CBS snip and people can get that snip by getting your genes tested through a qualified health practitioner, somebody who knows a bit genomics, right? Somebody like you. So then you see whether or not you’ve got the CBS snip and if you do, it might be worthwhile to be on a dose of, I like how you call it, molly. It’s so much easier than molybdenum.
– I call it molyb.
– You need to eat 100 micrograms twice a day, right? Excellent, so gosh, talk a little bit about histamines too before we close. Because you did mention that by way of sulfate. So what’s the connection because we’re hearing so much about people being very sensitive to histamine containing foods.
– Yes, absolutely. So what we have to remember is every time the body produces sulfites, whether we’re eating sulfites or whether our body’s producing it through that transsulfuration pathway, the natural by-product of sulfites is histamine. They go hand in hand. So if I eat a high, if I eat a high sulfur diet, I’m gonna have more histamine. Which means we tend to have the rosacea, the flushing, the itching, the heartburn, because that’s the histamine. So we want to help patients neutralize histamine, things to remember methylation, you can use histamine demetholate to break down histamine. We can use vitamin C to break down histamine. We can use cosataine to break down histamine, nettlesleave. And then I love off-label sulfation. So when you get somebody’s mag sulfate, your crazy itching and their tinnitus, and their ringing in their ears is incredibly important. And often in these sulfur sensitive individuals, you have to put them on a low histamine diet. So that’s like avocados, Cortes, citrus, pineapple, strawberries. There’s an overlap of these sulfur and histamine foods. So it’s pulled back a little bit, but many times these patients are aware. They know, if they eat pineapple, or if they eat citrus or feed strawberries say, either tend to be more hyper excited. They can’t turn off at night. They can’t sleep. They wake up normal as the day goes on, they get a little bit more excitotoxic. That’s the histamine, it’s a powerful excitatory neurotransmitter. And so when you pull them out, they’re like, I sleep better, I’m less itchy, I’m less agitated. So yes, the molly helps to lower the burden kind of getting that sulfide out as quickly as possible and then using a lower histamine diet so they don’t get that kind of combination toxicity
– Excellent, low histamine diet. And I would think that methylation, you mentioned methylation before, and you’ve been known for your work on methylation. And so I’m thinking that it’s all fitting as part of this big web, right? And if we had the biochemical pathways, we would see how transsulfation connect right there with methylation.
– Right.
– So really what we’re talking about here is proper detoxification, helping the body to do its job of excreting the toxic load better. And the power of food as I listened to you talk about following a low histamine diet and watching that we’re getting the sulfates and not the sulfites and making sure that we have that conversion, it’s so important. Bridget, as we close, top five foods that you think are wonderful for people with SIBO. Maybe you can leave us with something around food. What might be the top five that you think would be healing for the gut for these folks?
– Great question, Deanna. So, because we know so many of the patients that have SIBO one of the big complications is this lack of protein digestion. So this undigested protein kind of feeding the bad bacteria. And because the protein has such a high concentration of sulfur it drives that sulfur producing SIBO patient. Does that make sense? So I’m really gonna be talking about one of the subtypes of SIBO patients. These are the people that have a lot of the sulfur sensitivities. So they’re gonna do really well on a low sulfur diet and what’s called a failsafe diet, which is the low histamine diet as you’re trying to recover from SIBO. While they’re doing that, they’re taking their probiotic, you’re putting your good bacteria in, you’re gonna be using some of that molybdenum. And I like manganese. I like 600 micrograms and molybdenum twice a day and about 10 milligrams of manganese twice a day, ’cause that’s clearing the ammonia by product, right? The breakdown of protein is always gonna release an ammonia. So that helps the brain fog and all of that. And we’re gonna start looking at well, what are low sulfur foods and low histamine foods. So it’s things like in your vegetables, it’s your cucumbers, it’s your carrots, it’s your celery, it’s your green beans. ‘Cause patients begin to feel like, well, what do I eat in terms of vegetables? And then the blonder lettuces, like the butter leaf or the romaine and things like that. When they’re looking at fruits, like there’s a list of high sulfur and salicylates fruits. And you’ll see, like if I eat a golden delicious apple, it’s not very high in the histamine sulfur pathway. But if I eat that dark green granny, it’s higher. So we try to give our patients the handout of which foods are going to be really dominant and which ones are going to be really low in the sulfur family. So we’re getting all of our fruits, our vegetables, and you’re gonna find a lot of the spices become a problem too. So we’re like when they get back to the basics, like salt with a little bit of pepper, but not tons of all those fancy spices when you’re cooking, ’cause they tend to be activating.
– This has been excellent. What a wealth of information you are and really at a hot area of talking about gut health. It’s been said that it all begins in the gut. It all starts there in terms of our healing process. And it makes so much sense. And then backing up even further, really looking at how food ties into that and how much we can do. So, Bridget, thank you so much. It’s been a delight, we’ve had a number of viewers on, we still do. We haven’t had any questions, but I think that if people continue to post on this thread, we’ll do our best to get back to you with answers. Any parting comments for the audience, Bridget, as we leave them.
– I feel like as those of us who have played with methylation, we’ve had these patients come forward that maybe they didn’t have SIBO and we gave them SIBO. So just to remember, to know your pathways that you can give people too much methylation, like you’re European and all of a sudden they’re like, why am I all of a sudden getting the bloating and the gas? And you may think methylfolate and what have you doesn’t cause that issues, but it does. So you just have to remember, there is a connection between the methylation pathway and the transulfuration pathway. And that’s the function of the methionine gear. It’s gonna activate either transfiguration or methylation. So be careful with hypermethylating people and creating uncomfortable guts.
– Good, and you can, everybody can get those biochemical pathways, just Google methylation map or methylation pathways. Bridget, I’ll start trying out the molybdenum on myself and I’ll let you know about my hair if it straightens or not.
– , okay.
– Wonderful, thank you so much again, it’s been a delight to talk with you, take care of everybody, thank you for signing up.
– Thank you so much.
– Bye bye.
– Bye.
And as Mauricio mentioned “cold hands, low pressure, pale aspect” + I had mercury exposure too (in very high amounts). Wonder if those are just coincidences between us three... Maybe will check my homocysteine levels also.
I am sure this somewhat "rotten egg" odour is Hydrogen sulfide (still remember the smell from science class in school!) and this protective adaption theory tracks perfectly with that.
) - What it sounds like you are describing you may of been afflicted by two seperate but closely linked issues, one being the poor methylation cycle which caused a largely general imbalance in the bodies production of glutathione and many other key molecules that contribute to normal bodily function, And then also secondly - hydrogen sulfide sibo which your body may have inflicted on itself in order to facilitate and boost the important intake of sulfate through your bloodstream or other means? Would that be an accurate summary?
The explanation with enterogastrone is interesting, but it would be also useful to know how prevalent is fatigue exacerbated by meals among people without bb. For myself, I noticed that for couple hours after eating I feel even more tired that usual and extremely sleepy to the point of “dozing off” even if I have to keep eyes open 
- does that happen to you too? 