I was thirty-two years old and just beginning to really struggle with my health when I first heard that coconut oil was healthy. I didn’t know anything about thyroid, the endocrine system, or cellular respiration, but the advice about coconut oil was convincing enough that I decided to try it.

I bought a jar and scooped out a modest spoonful and swallowed it, chasing it with some milk. I had recently read a book about liver health and another from a vegetarian celebrity nutritionist, and expected near-miraculous benefits from coconut oil. But much to my horror, in less than ten minutes I was in the bathroom vomiting and evacuating my bowels like I had caught ebola, and was confined to the bathroom for three hours before by body stopped spasming and I finally stopped feeling like I was going to die.

It was a few more years before I tried coconut oil again, and if you are familiar with my work you will know that I do recommend it for many health problems, and it is not only safe, but highly protective of many systems in the body. The reason I had that initial reaction to it was because I had spent the previous twelve years of my life dieting, under-eating, and avoiding calorie-dense foods like butter and ice cream, and frequently ate low-carb, so my body was not able to digest the highly saturated fat of coconut oil because of the nutritional abuse I had subjected it to. Saturated fats also strongly stimulate bile secretion, because being saturated they require high amounts of bile to absorb, and I probably stimulated an over-expression of bile acid or spasming of my gall bladder by suddenly introducing such a large amount of saturated fat after having been starving myself of it for so long. Later when I was further convinced of the health benefits of coconut oil it took quite a bit of courage to try it again, this time in smaller doses, and to this day I still feel nauseous at the smell of virgin coconut oil and only use refined (which I love).

A little while after the publication of Fuck Portion Control I caught oral disease after returning to the dating pool after recovering from my traumatic breakup and recovery from Alcoholism and Addiction. I did not know what it was at the time, and but it had been happening with regularity and curing it with antibiotics worked but did not prevent me from getting it every time romantic encounters escalated. I decided to remain infected and figure out what it was that kept happening and, as I had done with so many other problems I with which I had dealt, learn how to cure and prevent it.

Unfortunately most of my previous experiences had been extremely productive and progressed to resolution in a relatively short period of time. Each problem I tackled took only a few months to understand and pull the threads of discovery which allowed me to cure my alcoholism, then my cancer, then my weight gain, then my hair loss (although actual progress in regrowing it would encounter frequent setbacks as I tried and dealt with other factors), then my erectile dysfunction and insomnia. Having amassed an enormous and unmatched understanding of the human body, figuring out how to cure whatever annoying bug it was I kept getting from the dating pool would be a very simple matter.

It turned out to be far more complex than I anticipated, and taken more than two years and such frustrating struggle with it that I was often tempted just to get some antibiotics and be done with it. If I had, however, I would not have come to discover a fundamental biological pathway which has remained unnoticed to biological science, which is a fundamental respiratory pathway that underlies all metabolic disease and the frustration of researchers, doctors, and patients alike.

A common feature of all metabolic disease including aging, diabetes, thyroid disorders, obesity, insomnia, cancer, renal disease, and more, is the elevation of circulating phosphate in the body, often termed hyperphosphatemia. This state of excess phosphate is frequently the subject of many drugs and medical treatment, with phosphate binders such as sevelamer or calcium carbonate or calcium citrate, or kidney dialysis or low-phosphate diets focused on resolving this state of hyperphosphatemia, because the excessive phosphate drives metabolic decline through promoting high parathyroid hormone expression, tissue calcification, and related conditions like cardiovascular calcification and disease and kidney failure. Most people struggling with advanced metabolic disease are often on phosphate binders and other treatments like thyroid medication or acetazolamide to increase the rate of cellular respiration. Dr. Peat frequently discusses hyperphosphatemia in his articles and the impact it has on aging and general metabolic decline.

The problem has been that aside from dietary intervention and medical treatment, the state of hyperphosphatemia as seen in metabolic disease has not really been understood, and is essentially reduced to “just because” in the context that aging is unavoidable and happens to everyone, or attributed to dietary phosphate (the latter is the greater context of Peat’s writing). But the body does not do anything by accident, as it is often treated. There is a purpose for elevated phosphate during aging and metabolic disease which has somehow gone unnoticed during the entire history of medical research and discovery, though many studies come very, very close to accidentally elucidating it.

I first began to suspect that the calcium and phosphate imbalance which accompanies metabolic decline as the underlying factor for oral disease after common supposed treatments for oral health failed to produce any useful results (like oregano oil or other alternative treatments). The problem was that all studies on oral pathogens will show beneficial effects from nearly every nutritional factor, herb, or other intervention when done in a lab. But in an actual warm, nutritive human body these pathogens act extremely virulent and are even able to manipulate our immune system and farm and harvest other microbes in the environment of our mouth for their own benefit, and anything short of complete eradication fails to resolve the problems they cause. Most at risk for chronic oral disease are monogamous couples (especially heterosexual) because they never have occasion to suspect a sexually transmitted disease and thus never get treated and so suffer under the influence of these pathogens for decades. Or, if they are incidentally treated for another reason, will only treat one partner or not coordinate treatment since they aren’t aware of these pathogens and will continue passing them back and forth between each partner. Extreme oral care such as frequent mouthwashes and obsessive brushing can also inhibit the symptoms of oral disease such as bleeding or gum irritation, but the bacteria actually invades the cardiovascular system and causes heart disease and cholesterol and plaque buildup (and weight gain in response to infection), and are even found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, and can promote spontaneous abortion and fertility problems. These pathogens can even be passed between parents and children since salivary exchange with drooling infants or sharing food and drink with close family members is all that is required to facilitate infection and reinfection (I believe that the excessive salivary production in infants is specifically designed to combat oral infectious pathogens).

Antibiotics will wipe out these pathogens, but they do nothing to prevent reinfection, which is the real problem, and why it has proved so difficult to figure out how to resolve this issue. After the failure of so many attempts and strategies I began to focus on the fact that pathogens like P. gingivalis (as well as Candida, H. pylori, Treponema denticola, and others) directly promote and benefit from an excessive increase in intracellular calcium (these pathogens are explained in more detail in my book). Finally understanding this I then tried to use nutrients like vitamin K2 to address this problem, since K2 is responsible for protecting soft tissues from calcification and normally regulates calcium in calcium sensitive pathways, or utilizing or avoiding vitamin D, all of which failed. Aspirin can inhibit these pathogens, which is why it is useful in restraining metabolic diseases like cancer or thyroid problems, which was also a clue that led me to uncover this heretofore unknown respiratory pathway, but it also cannot cure it. All these failures finally led me to understand that it was the actual excess of phosphate and intracellular calcium at the root of general metabolic decline which was the factor being exploited by these pathogens and causing systemic metabolic disease, and needed to be addressed.

So, how to address it then? Most medical advice (even from Dr. Peat) is to reduce phosphate intake or use phosphate binders such as calcium. While this may help to improve symptoms and prognosis, it only does this in the short term and fails to fully resolve these diseases and related symptoms in the long term, and will in all cases continue to progress because the body is elevating phosphate on purpose, not as a side effect of high dietary phosphate (although that can be a factor which increases severity of symptoms). My experience with health and biology has taught me that the body doesn’t do anything on accident, so trying to understand why the body raises phosphate excessively I realized suddenly that it was a compensatory mechanism to assist the body in acid/base balancing in order to maintain sufficient cellular respiration. Cellular respiration declines during metabolic disease, which means that the body produces less CO2 as a result, and carbon dioxide and its subsequent conversion to bicarbonate or carbonic acid is vital to sustaining life. I realized that when this decline in cellular respiration occurs the body needs help to maintain the pH of tissues to continue cellular respiration, since the quantity of CO2 production is reduced, so it purposefully recruits phosphate and calcium to sustain pH because if it had to continue relying on CO2 during metabolic decline there would be an insufficient amount to maintain both pH and gas exchange which occurs in the lungs, our blood, and tissues to drive respiration. This association with pH and respiration is so apparent that I am still surprised I am the first to realize this connection of insufficient cellular respiration with the state of hyperphosphatemia, but it appears I am.

This naturally led me to understand that raising cellular respiration rate was also the key to reversing hyperphosphatemia and the resultant tissue calcification associated with so many metabolic disorders. There are many tools which do or try to achieve this increase in metabolic respiration, including vitamin B1 (thiamine), vitamin B3 (niacin or niacinamide), aspirin, thyroid medication, vitamin C, or even pharmaceuticals like acetazolamide, and in fact I leverage many of these in my book already to address symptoms and conditions of metabolic decline such as cancer, libido dysfunction, thyroid disease, hair loss, depression, etc. But I had already been using all of these in various capacities and yet was still burdened with oral disease (which even things like iodine, hydrogen peroxide, and other common treatments were surprisingly ineffective). So the next thing to do was figure out what factor was preventing sufficient cellular respiration. Since none of these other factors were the answer, it greatly narrowed down the possibilities, and one of the factors I suspected was oleic acid. I suspected it because, while my diet contained some, it was one of the nutrients which had taken a back seat due to my adoption of coconut oil and other dietary behaviors during my recovery from severe metabolic illness (coconut oil is too low in oleic acid to be a source for it). There is some oleic acid in dairy fat, and our body can even make a small amount, but an increase in oleic acid in circulation is also associated with many metabolic diseases like heart failure, which similarly to hyperphosphatemia or high sodium is regarded as a liability or marker of disease rather than the body trying to rescue us from it, since humanity has over its recent history been taught to despise, resent, and distrust our bodies and mortality. But oleic acid is the factor which drives respiration sufficiently to reverse excess hyperphosphatemia because the primary enzyme which regulates cellular respiration, cytochrome oxidase, has a high affinity for and requires oleic acid in order to produce robust enzymatic activity (the study in that link shows increased enzyme activity under the influence of oleic acid, if you don’t know what K(m) means). Cytochrome actually has binding sites meant for oleic acid, and oleic acid prevents the denaturing of cytochrome during activity, thus prolonging the enzyme’s half-life and thus its activity and effect on our physiology, which is exactly why it is elevated in circulation during metabolic disease—the body trying its damndest to save itself. All the other tools used to promote an increase in cellular respiration merely activate the enzyme, where it is oleic acid which guarantees the stability and proliferation of the enzyme in the first place.

As would be logically expected but which I hadn’t anticipated the increase in oleic acid accompanied by respiratory stimulating factors produced in me the very same side effects which I had experienced using acetazolamide (which as a medication promotes CO2 retention)—strong diuretic effects of increased urination and pronounced thirst as well as marked changes in breathing function. The latter is actually a bit uncomfortable because when the body is subjected to reduced metabolic function and thus low CO2 production it naturally simulates unconscious breathing changes such as shallow breathing or even breath holding (which many people try to address through breathing practices but which do nothing to address the underlying metabolic deficiency since such practices are not how human biology works). Sleep apnea is an extreme development of this adaptation to low CO2 as the body literally holds its breath for an alarming amount of time, involuntarily, in order to drive up the dangerously low levels of CO2 but which can wake a person during the dead of night and have them gasping for air. Oppositely, reversing these conditions does not immediately resolve breath holding or shallow breathing until the body has spent substantial time with sufficient, unassisted CO2 sufficiency, and this prolonged shallow breathing can increase CO2 so much it will displace oxygen. This is not dangerous at all because CO2 strongly protects mitochondria, but it can make a person suddenly aware of their shallow breathing or breath holding and induce panic attacks or palpitations due to the reduction in oxygen, and full breaths are needed to properly ventilate the excessive CO2 and take in more oxygen sufficient to harmonize with the CO2 increase. This obvious elevation of respiration caused simply through an increase in dietary oleic acid (and use of other respiratory stimulation factors) confirmed all of my suspicions of a connection between respiration and hyperphosphatemia which is driven by oleic acid deficiency, and put simply the metabolic decline of aging and many metabolic diseases has its root in dietary deficiency of oleic acid, but is more supported as well by factors which increase and promote active and healthy cellular respiration, since for instance respiration can decline through metabolic regulating factors like a deficiency of sunlight, as discussed in my book.

So oleic acid directly facilitates cellular respiration which in turn produces sufficient CO2 to relieve the body of the states of hyperphosphatemia seen in metabolic disease and aging (as well as the resultant soft tissue calcification), and thus hyperphosphatemia is essentially caused by oleic acid deficiency. I debated posting about this on my blog and worried about sharing it in my book seeing as I am not a professional, accredited researcher with access to circles of scientific progress, and this discovery will easily be stolen by unscrupulous actors and the credit taken by others without your help. Besides integrating this knowledge into your own life, please actively distribute and discuss this discovery onto blogs, forums, and other online venues where you participate in order to both bring awareness of this newly discovered, fundamental aspect of human biology which may help many countless people as well as leave a digital “paper trail” of my work. The state of hyperphosphatemia caused by this deficiency of respiration also does things like impairs vitamin D function and the extraction of citric acid from the citric acid cycle (discussed in my book), which manifests as bone disorders like osteoporosis and even the formation of kidney stones. It has extremely widespread implications. But oleic acid is generally considered an optional, healthy dietary indulgence rather than a fundamental and essential nutrient required for basic human wellness, and the inclusion of ample and generous dietary oleic acid is an easy enough task to accomplish so long as people are aware of its inextricable importance to our health, which requires the spread of this information. More confirmation of my discovery can be found in countless studies, such as this which shows an inverse relationship between dietary oleic acid and periodontal disease.

Beyond the general inclusion of oleic acid in the diet, I have been purposefully obtuse about specific foods, other factors required to activate metabolic respiration, and related therapies to such conditions because they are discussed in depth along with many other metabolic conditions in my book, Fuck Portion Control. This therapy will help resolve conditions such as osteoporosis, kidney failure, oral disease, Multiple Sclerosis (I believe), and improve the quality of libido, sleep, and other disorders related to calcium and phosphorus dysfunction. The Perfect Child is my new book which discusses mental health and resolution of experiences of abuse and trauma. Or you can read about how calorie counting works against weight loss, or the toxic ingredients in energy drinks. Or browse through my recipes in the food blog