04/01/2020
Appendix.
he Doors to perception Heaven and Hell
This is your reward for reading the exercise and keep out of the cookie jar lecture.
If you want to realise how sugar levels effect your thought patterns here is some really fun interesting stuff about Aldous Huxley psychedelic drugs and should be read with music by the doors cranked up loud.
Glucose G6PD, Psychosis , Pythagoras and Aldous Huxley
Will Cola send the y z generation mad?
Firstly lets correctly define psychosis, most people think it involves crazed stabbing in the shower or Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
The correct definition according to sane.org
"Psychosis is a mental disorder where a person loses the capacity to tell what’s real from what isn’t. They may believe or sense things that aren’t real, and become confused or slow in their thinking
It is a myth ‘Psychotic means violent’, in reality people being treated for psychosis are no more likely to be violent than anyone else, but they are more likely to be the victims of violence.
Psychotic symptoms vary from person to person and even between one episode and another, so for the best diagnosis, talk to your doctor. Symptoms include:
Delusions.
False, irrational beliefs that can’t be changed by evidence and aren’t shared by other people from the same cultural background.
(This is of course subject to the caveat that beliefs shared by a culture change and that Aristarchus of Samos, Galileo and Charles Darwin were merely ahead of the game not delusional. Society is harsh on those who do not adhere to cultural beliefs Pythagoras and Jesus of Nazareth both paid the ultimate price for their revolutionary thinking. )
Disordered thinking...
Thoughts and speech that become jumbled or slowed. A person with psychosis might make up words or use them in strange ways, use mixed-up sentences or change topic frequently. They may also have memory problems.
Disordered behaviour...
A person with psychosis may become agitated, act in a child-like way, mutter or swear or otherwise act inappropriately. They may neglect their personal hygiene and housework. In severe cases, they may become unresponsive to the world around them.
Hallucinations voices and visions.
Glucose and Psychosis
Aldous Huxley, the Author of Brave New World, took part in a university experiment on mescalin.
Mescaline (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine) is a naturally occurring psychedelic alkaloid of the phenethylamine class, known for its hallucinogenic effects comparable to those of L*D and psilocybin.
The interesting thing is how it works. The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescaline inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescaline reduces the brain's normal ration of sugar a very interesting process initiates.
By starving the brain cells of glucose it offers a sort of near death change of perception.
Due to the extreme glucose deprivation, the hallucinations are intense and often regarded as enlightening and mind expanding by participants. However, I am not extrapolating this to suggest that we should all become diabetic to attain enlightenment.
The sensible mescalin user chooses a short term extreme glucose drop for a short time around 6 hours with the anticipation of a positive experience in a safe environment where they can fully focus on the trip.
In contrast the person unknowingly suffering the un-diagnosed pre-diabetic stage called insulin resistance may suffer a less extreme change of reality or thought patterns over a period of months or years in a more negative mind space in a non safe world where you have to work, function care for a family and interact with the whole gambit of society from family and friends to authority. Because the change in thinking patterns inches in slowly, as the insulin resistance very gradually induces hypoglycaemia periods, we don't notice the change in thought patterns.
If one day, all of a sudden, bright lights and flowers suddenly grew out of the dog as you watched him play in a park that became the entire cosmos, when it finished you would probably think something is wrong and see the doctor urgently getting an emergency MRI.
However what if over a period of a few months or years you feel your wife or husband is not the same and needs yelling at all the time and the kids have become unmanageable so they need a damn good yelling at.
Everything in the world is stuffed, the checkout people at the supermarket deliberately avoid you and your workmates are conspiring to have you dismissed.
It is possible that the unnoticed periods of hypoglycaemia have subtly altered your reality i.e. induced a mild form which is actually a psychosis. Then of course the yelled at family will withdraw a little because of the change and the checkout people really will avoid you. Your workmates may well in the end feel you may be better suited to another job as you are starting to no longer be a team player, Thus the psychosis, the gradual divergence from reality does in fact become the new reality.
Yes we constantly recreate our own reality which can be positive or negative. The question is Do we want our excessive consumption of sugar to create a paranoid anxiety filled reality for our children?
A Zen Monk met a traveller on the road.
The traveller asked "What are the people like in the next village".
The Monk asked "What were the people like in the last village"?
The traveller said "A bunch of mean angry louts"
The monk said “The people in the next village will be the same.”
Shortly after the monk met a second traveller who asked
"What are the people like in the next village".
The Monk asked "What were the people like in the last village"?
The Traveller said "kind generous and welcoming"
The monk said “The people in the next village will be the same”.
The moral being is that our perception creates our reality, Is too much sugar going to change the perception and reality of the next generation?
It is all about G6PD
A 2003 study by Alberto Bocchetta, initially shows the relationship of (G6PD) deficiency with acute psychosis, catatonic schizophrenia, and bipolar disorders. His findings potentially showed evidence linking diabetes with episodes of psychosis.
“Bocchetta’s study showed that aforementioned psychiatric disorders can directly be associated with glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, a cytosolic enzyme in the pentose phosphate pathway for maintaining the nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH), which in turn regulates the glutathione in cells that protects red blood cells from oxidative damage. The oxidative damage of the blood is essentially what triggers psychosis because of the deficient supply of oxygen in the nerves and brain that induces hallucination and delusions”
Since diabetes causes inhibition of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, diabetic people experience deficiency of Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, This also reduces the life and efficiency of your red blood cells further reducing the supply of glucose to the brain which in turn triggers episodes of psychosis.
This is the double whammy. Our brain cells the generator / engine of our thoughts needs a good and steady flow of fuel (glucose and oxygen). Poisoning ourselves with sugar has now caused periods of low glucose and now has degraded the red blood cells which deliver the other vital ingredient oxygen.
Bocchetta’s study concludes“Thus, diabetic patients with extremely low blood sugar, tend to experience Psychotic episodes. This is typically manifested in the highly aroused and suddenly perked up personality of a diabetic person suffering low sugar levels. Corollary to which, the study also tends to suggest that controlling the blood sugar level of people would in turn help control psychosis separately of the anti psychotic medication”.
So where does Pythagoras come in? Most of you probably know him by that damn theory about triangles.
Find the missing length of a right triangle using a² + b² = c². If you read a bit of history you may have been told he ran a cult with strange rules including "Don't eat the beans" Fava Beans to be precise.
Bonkers we thought until we discover that Around 510 BC, Pythagoras noticed a connection between fava bean ingestion and haemolytic anaemia: a blood disorder that causes weakness fatigue and psychosis. This connection worried him so much that he forbade his followers from ever eating the Vicia Fava.
Pythagoras was actually right on the mark . In 1956, Carson et al. discovered that there was indeed a link between fava bean ingestion and haemolytic anaemia. Their publication defined this condition as fauvism.
Psychotic mania in glucose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase-deficient subjects
Alberto Bocchetta corresponding author
"Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) is a cytosolic enzyme whose main function is to produce NADPH, a key electron donor in the defence against oxidizing agents and in reductive biosynthetic reactions [1]. More than 100 missense mutations in the human X-linked gene encoding G6PD are known to date. The main clinical consequence of these mutations is an enzyme deficiency associated with acute haemolytic anaemia, triggered by fava beans, drugs, and some other sources of stress"
So here is how it works. Excess sugar consumption is leading us to a whole generation of insulin resistant pre-diabetic young adults?
Insulin resistance is associated with lower levels of G6PD and an induced form of haemolytic anaemia. This double whammy of drops in overall blood sugar level and red blood cells less able to deliver glucose to brain and nerve cells starves the brain cells of glucose, thus subtly changing thought patterns and reality of a whole generation for the worse.
As a post script according to Doigenes Laertius “Pythagoras met his death in this wise As he sat one day among his acquaintances at the house of Milo, it chanced that the house was set ablaze out of jealousy by one of the people who were not accounted worthy of admittance to his presence, though some say it was the work of the inhabitants of Croton anxious to safeguard themselves against the setting-up of a tyranny. Pythagoras was caught as he tried to escape; he got as far as a certain field of beans, where he stopped, saying he would be captured rather than cross it, and be killed."
His fear of the beans was so extreme he died at the hands of his perusers rather than flee through a field of Fava Beans.
Bob Wardell 19/04/2018
