MCAS, EMF and GRAS

First what do I mean by these abbreviation?

  • MCAS – Mast Cell Activation Syndrome as well as many other issues
  • EMF – Electromagnetic Fields– from sunlight to microwave to cellular radio wave
  • GRAS – Generally Recognized As Safe — an item deemed safe by authorities but may lack hard evidence. See GRAS History. It also include items that are “grandfathered” in and later shown to be unsafe:
    • Example: Smoking was healthy
    • PCB and Asbestos were safe

This is not intended to be JFK Jr like conspiracy theory — just raising questions and suggest testing approaches. If something is new and a potential profit maker, effective testing is never done.

EMF – Electromagnetic Fields

The chart below shows the scope of EMF

We know that values across this entire spectrum can cause disease, typically cancer.

  • Too much ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun can damage DNA in your skin cells and cause skin cancer. ” [Src]
  • “Ionizing radiation, such as X-rays, has enough energy to remove tightly bound electrons from atoms. This process can lead to DNA strand breaks or alterations, potentially resulting in mutations that may cause cancer or other health issues.” [Src]
  • “Cancer in radar technicians exposed to radiofrequency/microwave radiation” [src]

In today’s world, we are adding more and more electromagnetic frequencies:

  • Cell Phones – 800 MHz, 850 MHz, 1700 MHz, 1900 MHz, and 2100 MHz (or 2.1 GHz)
  • Wifi – 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz
  • Bluetooth – 2.4 GHz,

An analysis of data from five Northern European countries showed an increased risk of acoustic neuroma in those who had used a cell phone for 10 or more years [2600 studies on pubmed].

Microbiome shifts from radio waves

Several bacteria are known to be altered due to radio frequency (RF) exposure. Research has shown that RF radiation can affect bacterial growth, antibiotic sensitivity, and microbial composition.

  1. Enterococcus faecalis:
  • Exposure to 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz RF radiation altered its antimicrobial sensitivity1.
  • After 6 hours of exposure, the bacteria showed decreased susceptibility to antibiotics.
  • Longer exposure (24 hours) increased the bacteria’s susceptibility to antibiotics1.
  • RF-exposed bacteria showed faster growth rates compared to non-exposed bacteria1.
  1. Klebsiella pneumoniae:
  • Exposure to 900 MHz RF radiation for 12 hours significantly increased its sensitivity to various antibiotics2.
  • RF-exposed bacteria showed faster growth in the exponential phase compared to non-exposed bacteria2.
  1. Gut microbiota:
  • Exposure to 4.9 GHz RF radiation altered the gut microbial composition in mice, reducing microbial diversity3.
  • The relative abundance of Firmicutes increased, while Muribaculaceae decreased after RF exposure3.
  1. Other bacteria:
  • Studies have shown that RF exposure can affect the growth and antibiotic sensitivity of Escherichia coliEnterococcus hirae, and Staphylococcus aureus1.

Hypothesis: Some conditions may be encouraged by RF Exposure

Whether this includes Mast Cell Activation Syndrome is to be determined. It is clear that other conditions are impacted.

What can you do:

  • Avoid carrying cell phone on your person, i.e. place on desk at home or car seat driving
  • Avoid Bluetooth headsets
  • Keep WiFi hubs as far away from your usual living space as practical

Experiment: Go camping in an area that is very low RF (turning off cellphones) My own favorite area is the drive between Hay River and Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of Canada.

Ongoing ME/CFS Journey

Prior Posts

Dealing with ME/CFS and many microbiome dysfunction is rarely a short journey

Comparisons

I have done a trimmed version below excluding ranges from most various labs. Remember lab ranges are suspect because of The taxonomy nightmare before Christmas… For the measures based on other samples from the same lab, we see improvement from the prior test although we have 15% more bacteria reported.

Criteria12/3
2024
9/2
2024
1/22
2024
9/12
2023
2/22
2024
8/11
2022
3/25
2022
12/3
2021
8/31
2021
Lab Read Quality9.89.17.93.59.75.56.23.67.8
GanzImmun 141616161515171720
Outside Range from Lab Teletest172320 202424222225
Outside Lab Range (+/- 1.96SD)7121510119914
Outside Box-Plot-Whiskers474854564236425942
Outside Kaltoft-Moldrup85113123 70139567859140
Bacteria Reported By Lab689600511399666478613456572

Looking at Symptom Matching Patterns, we see significant improvement. 10 have improved and 1 has become worse. Remember that with 15% more bacteria, the odds matching should increase if there was no change.

Remember, Microbiome Prescription does not claim to cure or fix issues; it’s aim is produce suggestions that are more likely to help than picking random items. Let us look ahead for the next leg of the journey for better health.

Going Forward

Since we have Symptoms entered, we will get 3 sets of suggestions, two will produce probiotics only. The Using PubMed Studies to filter is ignored since we have a good collection of symptoms. I view this choice to be inferior because the reported shifts are suspect due to The taxonomy nightmare before Christmas…

From the 51 symptoms indicated, we ended up with 49 bacteria deemed to high or low. That is about 7% of the reported bacteria. I usually expect 5-10% of the bacteria being flagged using symptoms. If the percentage is over 10%, I advocate removing milder symptoms — why? to reduce “noise” in targeting bacteria.

In terms of results, there was an unexpected result, walnuts and aspartame were near the very top suggestion(. This was followed by a bunch of antibiotics with 50% being reported by specialist to help CFS. These include (in order).

The top probiotics were:

Only one vitamin makes it above by arbitrary 50% of highest priority: Vitamin A. My personal approach taking Vitamin A is 5-7 days of 50,000 IU per day. This dosage is deemed safe, especially for a short period [2004]. This approach came from the Complete German Commission E Monographs. View this as an antibiotic to include in the rotation.

Amino Acids were: {glycine}, {Theanine} and {Glutamine}. Common supplements: Tauroursodeoxycholic acid  a.k.a. Tudca. Diet type: Low FODMAP. Herbs or spices: Morinda citrifolia {Noni}.  {Baicalin },  {garlic}, {Eugenic acid} – usually found in  clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, basil, and bay leaf.

Foods of special interest:

I will leave it to the reader to review the avoids (the top ones include: {slippery elm}, {Stevia}, Heyndrickxia coagulans {B. coagulans}, High Fat and High Sugar diets).

The probiotic list are only those with no adverse effects and positive effect. This boils down to two: Lacticaseibacillus casei (as above) and  Lactobacillus Helveticus

KEGG Probiotics

Based on Compound, we have:

And for Enzymes

Why E.Coli probiotics are not in the first list.

The first list is based on published studies. Most published studies use 16s (cheap) processing and that technology is very weak for detecting E.Coli so shifts go unseen and unreported. See ME/CFS: The Evils of Lactobacillus Probiotics? for more information. The table below show that Shotgun detects E.Coli 90-100% of the time, while 16s detects it 0.1% to 50% of the time. If the research cannot see it, they cannot report what shifts it.

The KEGG approach is not dependent on someone doing a study with (expensive) shotgun testing; it uses the genetics of the bacteria alone.

Notes on Changing Symptoms

My first draft of this post used his symptom list before he trimmed it of items that are now mild. The core suggestions did not change much — but there was some reordering happening.

Trying out the new Over and Under Represented Algorithm

The question is how do you deal with over or under represented? I mentally stepped away from this individual sample and realized that for a population of similar people, you will try to increase the under represented and decrease the over represented. Using this as my initial algorithm, I went to the Old UI where you can individually select it (if you have symptoms entered).

The top items were the same antibiotics as above

And the commercial probiotics had the top one being one of those listed above.

This suggests that there is significant convergence in suggestions although a very different path was taken. Adding this to the above consensus, I noticed a few significant shifts:

I extracted a “everyone agrees” food list that is shown below

  • Taraxacum officinale {Dandelion}
  • Petroselinum crispum {Parsley}
  • (2E,4E)-5-(1,3-Benzodioxol-5-yl)-1-(1-piperidinyl)-2,4-pentadien-1-one {Piperine}
  • Citricidal {Grapefruit seed extract}
  • Hibiscus {Rose mallow}
  • Euterpe oleracea {Acai}
  • Myristica fragrans {Nutmeg}
  • Apium graveolens {Celery}
  • Carum carvi {Caraway}
  • Armoracia rusticana {Horseradish}
  • Dysphania ambrosioides {Epazote}
  • Coriandrum sativum {Coriander}
  • Sinapis alba {yellow mustard}
  • Cuminum cyminum {Cumin}
  • Tea tree
  • Garcinia mangostana {Mangosteen}

Bottom Line

Assuming antibiotics are available, I would do the following sequence with 7-10 days of each.

  1. metronidazole [CFS]
  2. Bifidobacterium longum subsp. longum
  3. Vitamin A (Increases B.Longum and E.Coli)
  4. Symbioflor-2
  5. amoxicillin [CFS]
  6. Limosilactobacillus reuteri {L. Reuteri} (No studies found that it is decreased by amoxicillin)
  7. ciprofloxacin [CFS]
  8. Bifidobacterium longum subsp. longum (ciprofloxain increases it)
  9. Mutaflor

While not listed at all in the consensus, I would suggest doing d-ribose concurrently because it increases both E.Coli and Bifidobacterium. It does show up in the under/over representation as a negative with no impact on the other 6 suggestions list — so I would ignore this negative.

As always, no one knows how to precisely fix the microbiome, the above is computed (thus no human bias) to most likely help.