redcairo Posted March 7, 2019 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 4 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
gendao Posted March 8, 2019 ^ Interesting. What brands did you take, what was your dosage, and for how long? And how did your eyesight improve, exactly? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
redcairo Posted March 9, 2019 (edited) This is a sales site but does have some overview info on serrahttp://www.serrapeptase.org/ Note that each uses a 'serrapeptase unit' of measure so the acronyms differ The brand I was using was Doctor's Besthttps://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EPQNAUC/ The brand my friend was using was SerraEnzymehttps://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 Edited March 10, 2019 by redcairo 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites