redcairo

I know this doesn't normally fall into cool pictures, but -- My only child just had her first child, a boy (William Kaine) Friday night, and now I'm a grandma. So this is the cool picture I've been staring at lately. :-) PS here he's being held by my dad, the maternal great-grandfather.

Mongol Rock or something. Actually kinda cool :-)

I love this simple slow song

Sounds good MuadDib. I used to eat this "propolis" that came with a raw honey I was fond of. It's a weird stuff but my body liked it. The last honey I tried when off keto temporarily was a raw asian honey/pollen/propalis blend that kinda reminded me of this honey-butter emulsified stuff my dad used to eat -- very thick, likely centrifuged -- eye-rollingly dreamy. I bet honey's great in kefir, but I've never tried it. Great idea.

I don't know about the conspiracy part. However, this push on calcium is fairly typical of the kind of thinking in western medicine. People have problems with their bones having enough calcium. They have these problems because vitamin D3 and vitamin K2 are chronically deficient in the population, and without these vitamins, the calcium will not store very well in the bones and instead tends to store in joints and spine, generally places that cause pain eventually (and a growing need for drugs and medical intervention). But our medical paradigms don't do very well at the holistic "interconnected" element of all the vital nutrients (despite that scientifically we usually know them... on paper, anyway). So they say, "low calcium in bones... stuff more calcium into the body!" Even though that is not the fix and causes other problems. I've lately been looking into what is needed to DEcalcify the body (when in inappropriate places), solely to keep my inserted bovine heart valve as healthy as possible.

Aside from Lugols (a liquid, and I think a 2% limit since people use it to make drugs so they don't sell the higher %s in retail now), there is also a capsule form called Iodoral which comes in two doses (for those interested).

Potassium affects the heart and until yesterday (coincidentally) the highest dose capsule on the market appeared to be 99mg. I found one yesterday someone pointed me to, that is 200mg ('pure encapsulations' brand on amazon if you are still looking). The RDA for potassium is incredibly high. So far the only thing I've found with a huge dose of it is orange juice concentrate. And even drinking the entire thing didn't hurt me. So I guess the 99mg limit is to protect people with some kind of other problem it could interfere with. Otherwise, you can buy potassium in powder form and measure it out. I use potassium sometimes as salt, and as baking soda (also with cream of tartar to make baking powder, along with EnerG which is a potassium/magnesium blend for baking soda instead of sodium).

Allegedly, the goat/cow colostrum used as a supplement is not a permanent supp (like say, niacin or something) but rather, a temporary supp to assist with healing the intestinal system and reducing inflammatory response. It's bleeping expensive is all I know. I actually have some and have not opened the package.

That is very interesting, thanks. It reminds me of a meditation that ... well never mind but an identity in my inner world shared with me, related to the heart chakra and to visualizing and 'breathing/pushing' the 'shape of your fear' (however it intuitively presents to you when you ask for it to) out of your body. It's had a couple astounding results with me. In both examples, when it finally reaches my primary 'edge' (skin) and starts pushing through (this is all imaginal, as energy), it shifts me into the NOW with the energy -- like extreme emotion IN the moment of it -- but once it's fully out and passes, it's gone -- and from then on, the event in question is "information not emotion" in me. Sounds like a similar end result.

On another forum this was recommended for both whitening and remineralizing teeth, and I went to see the ingredient and saw the reviews were about that topic also: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ILIO85Q/

It's a conspiracy because without sufficient sodium your body will not maintain sufficient stores of potassium, magnesium, calcium, or some other minerals, which makes you a better consumer of a/ more food your body drives you to eat to get it (especially "ingestible entertainment" of today's commercial world) and b/ medical services, surgeries and drugs that are mostly the follow ons of what happens to human health when it has insufficient minerals. Most people with alleged high sodium problems actually have potassium deficiency.

When younger and working long hours outside the home, if I started feeling a bit ill or even was surrounded by people ill, I would shift to eating for breakfast a couple raw garlic cloves, with a bit of medium cheese (jack, cheddar, or colbyjack) to sort of "blunt the fire," and scallions (also w/the cheese) dipped in the hottest salsa I could stand. At the time I would eat a rolled up flour tortilla heated and dipped in the salsa as well (I can't do that now, and I also think cheese is not ideal for this). I can't prove it helped me, but I was NEVER sick -- for years, when everybody else was. PS the super-healthy enzyme whose name I can't recall right now that is credited to garlic needs 10 minutes of oxygenation on exposed surfaces to develop.

I'm a serious carnivore. So I have zero beliefs about plants vs. animals being better or more spiritual etc. as some do. However if I eat meat consistently I feel heavier, and red meat consistently makes me feel "dark inside." When I have had bouts of very little meat or cheese and more veggies, I feel much lighter inside, and have a number of subjective, anomalous perceptions I don't get with a lot of meat in my diet. Such as that with classical music, I can "almost" feel the tones "inside my torso" as if they are each a thin moving line of color dancing around. Sadly, I don't much like veggies, especially detest green ("bitter dirt") things, I react to nearly all forms of grain, and carbs (from tubers and starches) make me miserable and fatter. So I pretty much have to eat meat, and only an occasional salad. Still, I admit that my body feels differently depending on my food. I often fast -- although I admit my longest fast in the last few years is two weeks -- and I like that feeling as well.

@liminal_luke I used to follow Martin's blog when it was active, way back when. Now that fasting is more popular in internet discussion, there is: scheduled eating -- any fast less than 24 hours cyclic fasting -- any 'consistent' schedule like day on/off, or 5:2, etc. intermittent fasting -- for >24hrs, UN-regularly scheduled eating Used to just be 'IF' for everything Now the terms are just a mess lol The last couple weeks I've been doing 2 or 3 simple 1MADs (23hr fast, 1hr eating window) followed by 72h fast, back and forth. I was just speeding up my return to keto to minimize misery. Getting a keto mojo really helped me a lot. Unless I change my mind (which I might soon), my current rule is I figure my GKI (glucose ketone indicator -- which is glucose divided by ketones divided by 18) and if it's over 4.0 I fast for another day and if it's 4 or less I go ahead and eat, either 1 meal, or a 3-4 hour window, depending on what I have and feel like. Martin really deserves credit for his proactive work with weight lifting and cyclic fasting in the early days. Other people wrote books basically just ripping off his ideas! If you have an interest in keto/fasting/lifting, the ketogenicforums.com have several people real into that there.

You can always use magnesium (epsom) salt. Then you have both a salt and magnesium which most of us are deficient in allegedly anyay. And that stuff comes in bulk, less expensively than ordinary culinary salts.

You've already got most the responses I would share -- bone broth/stock primarily. Meat... and beans are great if your diet allows 'em. Some offbeat things I have added to stews & similar foods that have improved them: - chopped spinach. It's usually not even taste-able. It just adds a sort of 'broad thickening of flavor'. - charnushka seed (black caraway). A LITTLE goes a long way. It just adds a 'depth, a warm dark undertone.' - szechuan peppercorns (which are neither peppers nor peppercorns) for anything spicy, adds a tingle to them. charnushka and szechuan are the dark smoky and zinger exciting passion of spices lol - truly, a good sea salt and some black peppercorns or cracked peppercorns really do make the base - there are very few stews I've made and experimented where a LITTLE bit of cocoa, or tomato powder, or chili powder, did not actually improve it without adding any 'recognizable' taste, no matter what it was (the same goes for mushroom powder and so on) -- but add a sort of 'complexity' to it. In fact the curries I've made with the most ingredients ("let's just dump nearly everything on the spice rack in!") slow cooked have had the most amazing effect on my body-reaction to the 'complexity' of them. As if somehow, the variety and the array of 'combinations' those molecules created, fed something in my body it doesn't normally get. - I bought this big container of mixed dehydrated organic veggies. I know, no enzymes, but they'd be killed by cooking anyway. I toss half a cup into a lot of stuff and since they rehydrate in the liquid, they take on the flavor of what I'm cooking instead of much of their own (so they go with anything), and they (like the spinach) add a little bit of fine-bulk, which since I can't have much besides meat and minimal stuff (as I'm keto) is helpful. I use an instant pot. It's super easy to braise/brown a roast, sautee some onion/garlic, dump everything else in and pressure cook it until the meat is falling apart, then depending on what it is, sometimes I'll slow cook it a few hours after -- like if I'm making something with curry or alfredo because I don't do the pressure cook on the coconut milk or the alfredo, nor on things like chili peppers since they can overcook. And when it's over there's nothing but one pot to wash and it's not huge or heavy and cleans easily. It took me a long time to start using the thing for some reason but once I did, it is my favorite thing in my kitchen -- followed by my Ninja food processor/blender.

Milk kefir is the bomb. The stuff is legendary in the parts of the world where it began. My kefir (Barney, I named it) and I are in love with each other. I'm shifting my eating plan/schedule a little and I think I'm going to start making a protein drink using kefir, protein powder, some supplements I want to take that are powders, and possibly cocoa and glycine (which works oddly well for sweetening cocoa). I haven't had as much recently because I was reinducting to keto and some 72h fasts, and the carb count on kefir is too iffy-wonky to be sure about. Never hurt me on keto but I try to make any restart period as close to ZC as possible. But it greatly improved my health, including the sense that it somehow 'filled in some nutrient-deficiency blanks' that existed and I didn't really know about until I sensed they were being taken care of now. Obviously a very subtle subjective feeling. RC

Tuesday night, a tiny tornado twisted up my garden arbor, just a bit of my cinderblock garden, ripped the wooden backyard fence into a few major pieces, obliterated a chaise and misc. stuff out there, threw a gigantic branch at the back of my house, ripped off very major branches of all five of the trees on my lot (four are ~7-10 stories tall), and threw one of those uber-branches right through my brand new screen porch door. A number of city biz lost their big high lighted signs and bit of roof or things on it, some houses had carport awnings twisted into pretzels, and a few entire trees were ripped up, one two doors down which luckily only clipped the very edge of their roof when it fell. Which is to say we got lucky, it was very small, it was fairly high up, and it was moving at a decent speed. My neighbors have been chainsawing all the giant tree parts it to bits in prep for getting rid of all the waste, the other neighbor's putting the fence back together. Apparently me being a woman with a heart condition has inspired them to volunteer. Nicest guys ever. I lived in California all my life and 95% of the time I didn't even hardly know my neighbors. Different culture than the Ozarks. It's this way all over the city. I'm willing to bet that within a week there will be almost no sign a storm happened anywhere here, aside from a few missing things not yet replaced or rebuilt. I had forgotten that tornados when picking up everything include all the trash in every retail dumpster of all kinds, oh boy, and every garden pot and offbeat thing anybody has in a back yard, industrial or retail storage yard, etc. It's a blessing that this was very 'high' (minimal effect on ground-things) plus limited to this tiny area moving one direction, or we would also have been gifted, like Joplin was, with every cow, horse, outdoor pet or animal, along with everything else. This is just a tiny thing... high winds with a bit of suction and lift, mostly six feet up or higher. Joplin and Picher were horrible. Basically lift 40-80% of every imaginable thing up including telephone poles and wires and vehicles and houses, blender it, then distribute it in a thick layer evenly everywhere. My next door neighbor of the time was a managing nurse at the hospital that was so wiped out there, she had just got home and turned around and left again and did emergency triage for a week. I kept her kid. I didn't drive through Joplin until two weeks later. The Corps of Engineers in this country is AMAZING. And they had volunteers from all over the nation fly and drive in to volunteer to run bulldozers and cranes and work on power poles and everything you can imagine. Two weeks later when I drove through the main roads, they had managed to get all of them bulldozed off (pushed off to the sides) so emergency vehicles could get through, they were doing that from the instant it was over. Looking at the horrific mangled "integration" of structures, vehicles, trees and poles, endless phone/power lines, animals, trash, and god knows what else, along with the shocking devastation to buildings (now merged with parts of cars and more) was truly, deeply traumatic. We were all "OMG!" when we began the drive. It's flat out here, 'mostly', so it would be everywhere, then you'd come over the slightest rise and again the entire environment as far as the eye could see was just total devastation. (Kinda reminded me of driving cross-country from California where somewhere around early New Mexico you start thinking you're on an endless road but must be in a loop you'll never escape. The billboards repeat, in the same pattern, which increases this feeling!) I think the body senses this on some really core level that we consciously cannot. You always hear people on the news saying that pictures can't convey it and I think that's what the people really mean, natural disasters shock your body in some way even just to observe after the fact, the sheer scope of them. We were utterly silent for 90% of the drive in stunned horror, then we went to a steakhouse and I had two drinks -- I don't drink, I hadn't had a drink in probably 15 years (no big deal, just not my thing) -- the drinks didn't help like I thought they would. I had photos on my celfon that I had intended to put online to show friends and coworkers. I put off even looking at them. And put it off. And put it off. A year later, I deleted the lot of them without ever looking at them. That's how upsetting it was. Anyway, I was feeling like we were starting to exceed probability here of how long since this precise region (my house) had been affected by cycling winds. Mind you we get "straight-line" winds that are tornadic speeds, they just don't get the fame. But since they aren't cycling they don't suck things up into the sky and most stuff does ok at resisting high winds, aside from the little things (garden pots and trash and so on). I was at home (my dad has a shelter but I'm still not recovered enough to get back up that vertical ladder with the huge step at the top). I've been here 19 years and in that time only once prior have I felt the need to take some kind of shelter. Which I don't have. I have a bathtub, and that's a possibility, but it's on the outer southeast wall which is the most dangerous. My bedroom closet is right in the middle of the house with a regular-knob door, which makes it the safest place in the house, even though closets are not all that safe (and drywall is laughable for protection, however, it is in the middle, which helps). (If the house is directly hit, at ground level, let alone by something slow-moving, we're all toast.) I had an intuition suddenly that this was an emergency for me, and the storm wasn't even that bad at all comparative to many, but I trust my intuition, which I consider my subconscious + psi, since it has successfully saved my life many times. I ripped out 75% of my closet content and boxes frantically -- I'm seldom in my closet and hadn't realized my house helper had shifted it to that state -- and just as I was about at that point, it felt like a whompf of wind hit the bedroom window-wall, and then the cat flap on the door in the window lifted OUT and fully up, suctioning, and I dived for the closet, and my cat Miri (just one of them but the closest to me and the only one in my room) was happy to dive in there with me. About seven seconds after that, standing cramped in the dark and holding the doorknob in case suction pressure hit the door, there was this big crash-thud-sharp sound that I couldn't tell if it was something IN my room (couldn't think of anything in there huge and heavy and high-to-fall that could make that sound) or just outside it. Turned out to be a tree limb larger than most trees, that hit the back wall, blessedly it was very parallel when doing so and it hit the edge of the metal awnings over the two back windows, and then fell down and some of its big branches hit the house, but it was ok... far as I know so far. In the front of the house, my front tree was just devastated by it. Not ripped up (fortunately). I paid an arborist a small fortune to improve all these trees last winter, or they'd have been so unbalanced and top heavy and wide they might have fallen, so, lucky that. Every limb that wasn't nearly vertical was torn off. Fortunately they all fell mostly straight down, so although it trapped my vehicle just a little, it didn't damage anything. The side tree lost a big limb through the porch door, but fortunately only through the door, and only the screen, and that's easily replaceable and not expensive. I just bought this house two months ago. I've been living in it for 19 years paying the house payment/insurance/taxes (my dad bought it, he had credit but no money and I had a steady income but no credit). I've been pricing home insurance, which costs more than I expected, and haven't yet found a plan and bought it, so I have no insurance -- so I'm incredibly fortunate this didn't turn out badly for me. Here's a few (messy!) pics. My neighbors got VERY lucky that tree fell the direction it did A block away

Dr. Jason Fung has a book out now called 'The Obesity Code' which is hugely geared to both intermittant and longer-term fasting, its research and application. He's a diabetes nephrologist (kidney specialist) by trade. He addresses precisely this stuff. I only just ordered it but friends say it's a very good book, logical and laid out well so it all wraps together. One of the core things on this though, that is different than what we knew 5 years ago let alone 50, is that the body treats "under-nourishment" dramatically differently than it treats "no food at all." The former it makes you hungrier and it reduces your metabolic rate, as if it is making you a competitive eater (compared to the equally hungry people around you) and a competitive wait-er (through the winter or whatever). But the latter, it actually drops your hunger entirely within 2-3 days, clears your mind, clears out the body in half a dozen ways, and increases your competitiveness for hunting and high level competition (physical and mental), while -- and this is the big deal -- not reducing your BMR, and protecting your lean body mass. Other interesting stuff I saw while browsing on the topic, so the book is probably worth reading... I was real into about 7 years ago, when it was considered a bodybuilder niche topic at LeanGains, now there's research we didn't have then plus some from the past that was kind of lurking unnoticed that finally got pulled into the larger picture. Some pro sports coaches are now publicly putting the fasting approaches in play so it's getting more attention than it used to. I had a (birth-defect-related) heart issue crop up then and had to drop weight lifting (and eventually was bedridden) and so I haven't even looked at the topic since then, but now I'm enthusiastic again. I used to fast a lot when I was pretty young, more for spiritual reasons -- felt like it really "re-set" me. Trivia: current record holder is the very fat guy who fasted (under medical sup of course) for 382 days. Suggestions along with it are mineral supplements and water; and sometimes stool softeners. Also if someone hasn't eaten all that well and is not lowcarb before they begin, their shift into keto is likely to kick their ass with the 'induction flu' when the first most-toxic fat cells dump into the bloodstream. So a month or so of lowcarb, with a few days of high-nutrient and supplements, before dropping into a long fast might be good planning. RC

I have no opinion on it. One thing I have learned is that I can only be so obsessive about my food. There is a limit, after which, we either hit the issue of "don't like it much anymore" or "can't afford it anymore" or "there isn't truly enough evidence to radically change this thing for me at this time." Or simply, "I only have so much space for food-related paranoia after which I almost want to say screw it for EVERYTHING because it becomes too much." :-) I actually have no direct access to sheep or goat milks in any case. Nor could I drink much kefir if I had to afford them. So that'll have to remain in the category of yet-too-obscure-to-worry-about for me. ;-) RC

This is a sales site but does have some overview info on serra http://www.serrapeptase.org/ Note that each uses a 'serrapeptase unit' of measure so the acronyms differ The brand I was using was Doctor's Best https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EPQNAUC/ The brand my friend was using was SerraEnzyme https://www.amazon.com/SerraEnzyme-Serrapeptase-250-000IU-Tablets/ Note they have their own website and buying direct multi bottles is way less $ I absolutely suck at doing nearly anything consistently, so I can only be generalized about dosage: I took about 4-5 of the 120,000 unit capsules each night before sleep for about 4- months. I missed days sometimes. My lungs, though clearly damaged and clearly healed, and my eyes, though my eyesight is abysmal and at that time it clearly improved, neither of those had objective medical measures before and after. My friend however, both she (w/lipedema) and her sister (with damaged knee joints) had medical diagnoses of these things, and long term on them, and measurable results. So probably if I had to recommend a brand it might be hers. It costs more for sure, though their bulk buy on bottles at their home site is a whole lot less than amazon. And like I said I think individuals may react to the coatings on the capsules differently, and so some brands may be less, or not, effective for some people (like if they don't dissolve properly), or may even cause some reaction. Eyesight: I was way, way beyond legally blind most of my life, it was just correctable. I had LASIK circa 2001 or so which corrected it (though I wish I'd known more about it at the time and would have done radically more water-intake and eyedrops, no matter that I didn't *feel* the need most of the time). The improvement in my eyesight came circa... 1995 (edit: what was I thinking??) 2015 or so?? ...when my distance vision detail had reduced some, and I was getting a lot of 'floaters' that were problematic. My vision simply improved overall, and the floaters vanished. Since then my age (and probably open heart surgery didn't help as it seemed to age me about 20 years in a week in some respects) has toasted my close-up vision, but serra did help noticeably (and by accident) back then. The irony is I didn't take it for the lung problem or eyesight! I didn't even realize it was so good for those things until I went to pubmed after it had clearly improved this in me, just out of curiosity. I took it because I thought it might help with the adipose leg effects from lipedema. I cannot say whether it did for me or not, because my heart was failing then, and I was growing slightly larger daily (from edema) so there just isn't any way to tell. I am still gradually working on getting water and fat down and building muscle back up (I have daily ongoing newly-generated edema, drastically better than before surgery but still some), so I'm not yet in a place where I can really tell what's going on with the lipedema issue. I'm working in response to a couple decades of combined anorexia (not nervosa, just lack of appetite) caused by the unknown heart valve problem (because massive oxygen/nutrient % was not getting to my body/brain -- 70% at the point of surgery! -- which explains the profound energy issues for years), so I have to keep eating to gain or re-plete body tissues, then shift and eat to lose some more body fat, so it's taking awhile and will probably be a few more years before I feel like I'm normalized to some degree. When I get a little leaner it should become more apparent, then I could take serra and measure whether it helped that. My body (which I talk to in dreams, meditations, and sometimes visions), told me to have nitrogen when asleep, and that's the core of proteins, so I have been working on ingesting protein before sleep, which rules out taking serrapeptase then like I used to. And I've been drinking a little bit of kefir every few hours all day and evening, so I'm never far from food intake. So I haven't been taking serra recently. RC

PS I think I'm also going to do some instant pot yogurt, but since it doesn't have a "lives forever" lifeform at the center of it, this seems a lot less fun. ;-) RC

Hi Julian, Not his specifically, but lectin-free, yeah. The protein of grains is gluten, the protein of legumes is lectins. They are both very large proteins. If they are denatured they are usually considered less an issue (edit:) for some with only minimal responses (like sprouting grains or pressure cooking on high for 45m beans which destroys them so seems pointless to me). Most people I know don't have any symptoms from things like beans, just various sorts of grains. I've done beans in and out of a lowcarb diet (not keto but VLC), but I find that while it's awesome for filling stews around meat, it tends to make me want to eat more of it, and I don't gain but I don't lose weight either with many in my diet. Edited to add: as books (like Wheat Belly) describe though, research shows some things like glutens and lectins can cause a ton of body damage while giving people no symptoms whatever. There's a whole lot on kefir online, though most is the same simple stuff. Being a lunatic (obviously) I spent a few hours a day for a week speed-reading reviews for different kinds of kefir grains from different sellers, to see what might be best and what people said good and bad. Over 3000 by the time I was done (oy!). And I just googled and read everything I could find about it. And I went to youtube and watched tons of videos about it, people making it. So that's all I can recommend, I don't read a book on it or anything. The "inflammation reduction" I seemed to get from it with several doses a day for a couple weeks wasn't really in those reviews so wasn't expected by me, but in bulk the reviews did support great results with the overall digestive system for tons of people. RC

So, I belong to a forum with a private area that is about dietary stuff, but in the private area are a lot of people with some serious health conditions that is what forced them toward certain dietary stuff. I don't mean they have a cold, I mean they have genetic or long-term issues, some incurable (or 'no known cure'). Common in the area (as it's low-carb) are people with diabetes and lipedema. The latter is a condition with no cure, it may be genetic nobody knows, and it's not fatal except indirectly, but it's certainly life-wrecking eventually. I stumbled on serrapeptase online years ago and speed read tons about it and put notes I skimmed into a post on that forum, to tell other people about it. One woman in particular was interested, she was lipedemic (officially diagnosed as well, most people aren't since it isn't even taught in med school, despite it's been official since 1940 and is diagnosed around the world). She made a serious and consistent effort about supplementing with this, and for the first time in *30 years* actually had a gradual, but eventually substantial, regression of some of the symptoms. Since it was helping her and had other applications, she got her sister to start taking it. She had talked about her sister over the years. She'd had knee problems and eventually was using a cane, for the prior six years at that point. After about eight months of it, the sister didn't need the cane, could walk up the stairs, was dramatically improved. Now, I started taking the stuff after this, but I only took it briefly. I'd had whooping cough a couple years prior, my lungs were damaged, and they had never fully healed. I could no longer sing. It was like the air just abruptly stops at some point. I thought it would eventually heal but it never did. After a couple months of high dose serra, my lungs healed. As a side effect I didn't expect, my eyesight got better. When I went to pubmed, I found a lot of research specifically on both lungs and eyes with serra, so I guess that's not surprising. So the type I got was nearly half the price as my friend's brand. She bought mine to save money -- and her symptoms began returning immediately. Finally in desperation she returned to her own brand -- and they began reducing again. Reading a ton of reviews, I see some signs that this is probably not that uncommon. The brands of serra all have different, proprietary coatings on the capsules. It needs to be protected from the stomach and dissolved in the intestines so that it will reach the bloodstream properly. The coatings appear to work for some people and not others -- some people seem to have a reaction to them even, and then not to another. So this is a whole secondary issue that impacts the reviews you read, and the results you get. I mean I clearly had good results from the stuff but my friend didn't from my brand. Serra will eat dead proteins. So you avoid it near food since otherwise it will just eat your food. It is fairly pricey to take the substantial ongoing dose that most people with major results I've read and talked with over the years are using. Ralis is correct however -- and this is similar to lecithin, for example -- lecithin is fantastic for clearing your arteries of cholesterol deposits. I mean really fantastic. But if you want to do that, you should instead use the amino acids recommended by Pauling & a couple later researchers instead, first, until normalized. Because lecithin is SO effective, it may break off large pieces of cholesterol in the blood stream, which can literally kill you or close enough in a bad situation. I have not personally read of serra doing this, but anything which attacks build-up of dead proteins probably has that risk. At one point, I was dying of heart failure due to a birth defect in the valve, found too late (not till after wrecking a decade of my life). I had been taking a lot of serra which had helped hugely, as noted. But I had to stop taking it, as I was so struggling with the heart condition, and the serra puts a lot of dead protein in the bloodstream to be dealt with, I could feel the greater challenge -- and I had enough issues with protein in my bloodstream due to the edema/leakage in my heart. I mention this only because there may be some medical conditions that would make it inadvisable to take much of the stuff, worth checking out. My friend and her familiy (multiple members, not just her sister) had terrific results with serra on a variety of scar-tissue issues as well. I suspect it would help with any form of dysplasia (fibrosis which often precedes cancer in breast and prostrate in particular). But in the end, she ended up using a combination of serra and nattokinase, not using it alone -- that might matter. When I finally went in for heart surgery, I don't know if this was related -- as I had eaten as well as I could for many years at that point, and had been very into weightlifting etc. until the energy issues took me down -- but when my veins were scanned, the docs were astounded. They said in today's world even many kids and most teens have some degree of arterial deposits. I was 50 and my veins were incredibly clean. I had open heart surgery with zero bypasses. It took half the time as normal. They weren't sure how I went about getting my veins that clean (especially as I was an older woman, and huge -- partly from being house/room/bed bound for years at that point, with muscle atrophy and fat gain) but said whatever I was doing, by all means keep doing that, it clearly was working. I cannot prove of course but I strongly suspect, especially given I ate very poorly up until about 8 years prior, that my high dose serra for months was probably responsible for improving the state of my veins. RC