On Wednesday I said there is no reference condition and no instrument to measure against it. Here is what I did about that anyway, including the part that contradicts me.
Okay, I understand your books. I am 79, keto for 5 years with my wife along for the ride. Both lost 70 lbs, and ALL medicines. My trial of two is still different. You are missing key nutrients.
1. Boron 10mg. Totally cured our gum disease. This made a huge difference in our quality of life. Going in for a cleaning, and that's it.
2. Lithium Orotate 5mg. Mellow is the right word
3. Iodine 6mg. Helped vision and nerve damage. I can drive at night again.
4. Quercetin 500.mg. Got us seniors to avoid COVID entirely.
5. Sulforaphane half a cup of broccoli sprouts daily got entirely rid of "senior" skin in 8 weeks. No more age spots or mystery bruises.
6. L. Reuteri yogurt. Half a cup of home fermented every day. Happy gut.
Seventy-nine years old, five years in, both of you, seventy pounds apiece, and off every medication. I have been writing about this for a while now and that sits near the top of anything anyone has sent me. Congratulations — and to your wife especially, because the one who comes along for the ride is doing something harder than the one who got the idea.
You will laugh at my position, though. The Substack series you just finished was me taking my own list apart and coming out the far end with fewer bottles than I started with. I am a terrible audience for an addition. I got that way honestly: by looking hard for support for things I had been swallowing for years and not finding it.
So let me do what I always do, which is admire the result and then poke at the explanation.
Here is what I think you have actually pulled off, and it is bigger than you are claiming. You changed six things at once and six things got better. You have matched them one to one — and the truth is nobody could, because the experiment worked too well to be readable. Six levers in, six needles moved, and no way to see which hand was on which.
Then there is a seventh item, mentioned almost in passing, that I would put above all six: you came off all your medications.
Think about what that alone buys you. Drug-induced gum disease is thoroughly documented — the dry-mouth drugs especially, antihypertensives, antidepressants, antihistamines, anticholinergics — and the calcium channel blockers cause outright gum overgrowth. Easy bruising with thin, fragile “senior” skin reads like a textbook description of long-term anticoagulant, antiplatelet, or corticosteroid use. Two of your six victories may belong to the hardest thing you did rather than the newest thing you added.
That is not me taking anything away from you. That is me handing it back with a bigger label on it.
I am not saying the boron did nothing — it may well have done exactly what you think. I am saying neither of us can tell from here, and living with that uncertainty is most of why I write the way I do.
For what it is worth, I did try the lithium orotate. I could not tolerate it and I stopped. No verdict implied — you and your wife are thriving on it and I am one man who was not. But it is the cleanest illustration I own of why I will not hand anybody my list and call it a recommendation. Same molecule, two households, opposite answers, and both of us telling the truth.
There is one thing I would genuinely like you to check, and I am going to make the case without quoting you an RDA, because you and I both know how those numbers get made.
Look instead at the highest-iodine population on earth. Japan eats seaweed daily and takes in somewhere between one and three milligrams a day; their own stated ceiling is three. You are at six. So the issue is not that you have exceeded a Western committee figure — it is that you are at roughly double the intake of the people who have eaten more iodine than anyone alive, for centuries. Transient hypothyroidism and iodine-induced goiter are common enough in Japan to be a recognized clinical picture, and they generally reverse when the seaweed comes out.
And there is a mechanism here rather than a guideline. As thyroids age they accumulate nodules that go autonomous — they stop taking orders from the pituitary and start running on whatever substrate shows up. A gland like that is no longer governed by signal. It is governed by supply. Flood it and it makes hormone because it can, and nothing upstream is left to tell it otherwise. That is the Jod-Basedow phenomenon, it has a long literature, and the group named at greatest risk is older adults coming from lower-iodine intake. That is anatomy, not orthodoxy.
I am not your physician and I am not telling you to stop anything. I would simply want a TSH and a look at the gland before carrying six milligrams into another year — if only because the one thing that would be a genuine shame now is a thyroid problem turning up to spoil the best five years you have had.
On the COVID one I will only smile and say this: most of us who took nothing did not get it either. An absence is the hardest thing in the world to pin on anything.
And I notice two of your six are not supplements at all. Broccoli sprouts and a yogurt you ferment in your own kitchen are food. If you made me bet which two still look good in ten years, I would put my money there without hesitating.
You may be right about more of this than I am — that is half the pleasure of the subject. And you are plainly doing something right, at an age when most people have quit trying.
One last thing, and it matters more than anything above it. You came here to pass something on. Unprompted, to a stranger, with nothing in it for you. That is the entire ask at the end of the book, and you did it without needing to be asked twice. Thank you for that. Keep doing it — and I will keep arguing about the details, which is also how this is supposed to work.
Okay, I understand your books. I am 79, keto for 5 years with my wife along for the ride. Both lost 70 lbs, and ALL medicines. My trial of two is still different. You are missing key nutrients.
1. Boron 10mg. Totally cured our gum disease. This made a huge difference in our quality of life. Going in for a cleaning, and that's it.
2. Lithium Orotate 5mg. Mellow is the right word
3. Iodine 6mg. Helped vision and nerve damage. I can drive at night again.
4. Quercetin 500.mg. Got us seniors to avoid COVID entirely.
5. Sulforaphane half a cup of broccoli sprouts daily got entirely rid of "senior" skin in 8 weeks. No more age spots or mystery bruises.
6. L. Reuteri yogurt. Half a cup of home fermented every day. Happy gut.
You are missing out.
Kenneth.aull@gmail.com
Seventy-nine years old, five years in, both of you, seventy pounds apiece, and off every medication. I have been writing about this for a while now and that sits near the top of anything anyone has sent me. Congratulations — and to your wife especially, because the one who comes along for the ride is doing something harder than the one who got the idea.
You will laugh at my position, though. The Substack series you just finished was me taking my own list apart and coming out the far end with fewer bottles than I started with. I am a terrible audience for an addition. I got that way honestly: by looking hard for support for things I had been swallowing for years and not finding it.
So let me do what I always do, which is admire the result and then poke at the explanation.
Here is what I think you have actually pulled off, and it is bigger than you are claiming. You changed six things at once and six things got better. You have matched them one to one — and the truth is nobody could, because the experiment worked too well to be readable. Six levers in, six needles moved, and no way to see which hand was on which.
Then there is a seventh item, mentioned almost in passing, that I would put above all six: you came off all your medications.
Think about what that alone buys you. Drug-induced gum disease is thoroughly documented — the dry-mouth drugs especially, antihypertensives, antidepressants, antihistamines, anticholinergics — and the calcium channel blockers cause outright gum overgrowth. Easy bruising with thin, fragile “senior” skin reads like a textbook description of long-term anticoagulant, antiplatelet, or corticosteroid use. Two of your six victories may belong to the hardest thing you did rather than the newest thing you added.
That is not me taking anything away from you. That is me handing it back with a bigger label on it.
I am not saying the boron did nothing — it may well have done exactly what you think. I am saying neither of us can tell from here, and living with that uncertainty is most of why I write the way I do.
For what it is worth, I did try the lithium orotate. I could not tolerate it and I stopped. No verdict implied — you and your wife are thriving on it and I am one man who was not. But it is the cleanest illustration I own of why I will not hand anybody my list and call it a recommendation. Same molecule, two households, opposite answers, and both of us telling the truth.
There is one thing I would genuinely like you to check, and I am going to make the case without quoting you an RDA, because you and I both know how those numbers get made.
Look instead at the highest-iodine population on earth. Japan eats seaweed daily and takes in somewhere between one and three milligrams a day; their own stated ceiling is three. You are at six. So the issue is not that you have exceeded a Western committee figure — it is that you are at roughly double the intake of the people who have eaten more iodine than anyone alive, for centuries. Transient hypothyroidism and iodine-induced goiter are common enough in Japan to be a recognized clinical picture, and they generally reverse when the seaweed comes out.
And there is a mechanism here rather than a guideline. As thyroids age they accumulate nodules that go autonomous — they stop taking orders from the pituitary and start running on whatever substrate shows up. A gland like that is no longer governed by signal. It is governed by supply. Flood it and it makes hormone because it can, and nothing upstream is left to tell it otherwise. That is the Jod-Basedow phenomenon, it has a long literature, and the group named at greatest risk is older adults coming from lower-iodine intake. That is anatomy, not orthodoxy.
I am not your physician and I am not telling you to stop anything. I would simply want a TSH and a look at the gland before carrying six milligrams into another year — if only because the one thing that would be a genuine shame now is a thyroid problem turning up to spoil the best five years you have had.
On the COVID one I will only smile and say this: most of us who took nothing did not get it either. An absence is the hardest thing in the world to pin on anything.
And I notice two of your six are not supplements at all. Broccoli sprouts and a yogurt you ferment in your own kitchen are food. If you made me bet which two still look good in ten years, I would put my money there without hesitating.
You may be right about more of this than I am — that is half the pleasure of the subject. And you are plainly doing something right, at an age when most people have quit trying.
One last thing, and it matters more than anything above it. You came here to pass something on. Unprompted, to a stranger, with nothing in it for you. That is the entire ask at the end of the book, and you did it without needing to be asked twice. Thank you for that. Keep doing it — and I will keep arguing about the details, which is also how this is supposed to work.