Dietary Sulfur and Metabolic Illness

One theme which permeates my work is the element sulfur. I haven’t written very many articles in the blog section about sulfur because, in truth, I haven’t until more recently fully understood its purpose in the body and diet. Sulfur is clearly very important for our health and plays many roles in antioxidant function, detoxification, protein synthesis, and immune function, and a deficiency of the sulfur amino acids methionine and cysteine can stunt growth, impair tissue regeneration, and interrupt detoxification pathways which also includes the detoxification of fatty acids from the body during healthy weight loss. In fact, as I came to understand sulfur differently than from currently ambiguous ideas about weight and fatty liver, it is clear the liver uses sulfur to detoxify fatty acids and excrete them from the body, so dietary sulfur deficiency causes non-alcoholic fatty liver and weight gain. Contemporary medical ideas do not actually explain what causes fatty liver, and only recommend vague and unhelpful advice like “maintain a healthy weight,” as if that ever helped anyone trying to lose weight and be healthy.

But sulfur can also be a liability, since many opportunistic pathogens also require sulfur for their metabolic function. In fact, the most pathogenic varieties are also those which produce volatile sulfur compounds responsible for halitosis (the medical term for bad breath), which results from their metabolism of sulfur in the process of infecting our tissues. Halitosis is not just an inconvenience either—it is made by pathogens which gain entry to our bloodstream through the oral cavity and in so doing gain access to other areas and organs throughout our body. These microbes contribute to long term metabolic decline, catalyze cardiovascular disease, hernia, insomnia, hair loss, libido dysfunction, and can even disrupt pregnancy. They are also found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and likely play a role in the etiology of those diseases.

Dietary sulfur being so complex as both a necessity and a liability for our health is one of the reasons why metabolic wellness can be so difficult to achieve, because the biochemistry behind its function is so complex and intertwined with the immune system, the digestive system, and the detoxification systems it has been very challenging to research. In my own experience I purposefully infected myself with these oral bacteria several years ago in order to understand what they were, what they do, and how to get rid of them. Interestingly, while common oral care products can superficially treat these pathogens which include those like P. gingivalis or T. denticola and mask the odor of halitosis they do nothing to treat them once they’ve infected the gums or penetrated through to the cardiovascular system. Any gum bleeding and redness or persistent halitosis in spite of good oral care habits are signs of infection which is why those with these problems also experience other health challenges like insomnia, weight gain, depression, and even alcoholism since alcohol is antibiotic and can help to suppress pathogens to some degree. Other sulfur metabolizing pathogens are those such as H. pylori and C. difficile which colonize the stomach and gastrointestinal tract, respectively, disrupting digestion and causing chronic constipation or recurrent diarrhea (the latter is the body’s way of trying to expel them) and result in severe disruptions to nutrient absorption and metabolic integrity. C. difficile even produces a phenylalanine derivative which stimulates adrenaline release inbetween meals so it can feed on the glucose released into our blood stream which can cause insomnia and manic psychological disorders (waking up in the middle of the night with a racing heartbeat is a major symptom of having C. difficile).

Many of my articles offer lots of free information, but my work investigating sulfur metabolizing pathogens has taken so many years and been extremely challenging, so this time I will direct you to the purchase of my book, if you would like to learn about dietary sulfur and how to resolve the pathogens which exploit it you can support my work, especially since this also involves several chapters of the book and is not simple nor easy to do and requires a lot of information. You can always get these pathogens treated with antibiotics, but it requires a rather vigorous treatment with not very high success rates. It also doesn’t protect against reinfection, which is really the entire problem since most humans on earth are carriers of at least one of these pathogens, which have evolved for millions of years alongside us and our evolutionary ancestors to be extremely opportunistic. The good news is that we can be easily resistant to them, that’s why we are even a species at all since an inability to do so would easily have resulted in our elimination. So simply restoring the protective mechanisms and working with our innate immune function can restore resistance and promote resolution of these harmful, invasive, and metabolically destructive microorganisms.