Regarding adiponectin, Nancy wrote
Mine has been testing too low (higher is supposed to be better) so I've been trying to increase it,…
Low is good! Sort of. It's not as simple as that. I am not an expert, but during Dr Gundry’s dinner Q&A session at the Ancestral Health Symposium, I did have an “aha” moment regarding adiponectin.
With my "I'm not an expert" disclaimer, I believe adiponectin is merely a "traffic sign" indicating there is a lectin sensitivity, but not the marker to chase, that marker is TNFalpha.
The “problem” with adiponectin is what it says can be confusing. It's supposedly a "skinny" hormone, but skinny women can have high adiponectin (lectin sensitivity). And evidently obesity can mask what’s going on, i.e. adiponectin should be high if they’re lectin sensitive, but it’s not. Additionally, if you take lectins away from those with high adiponectin, the adipoenctin might stay high, because it's just a "traffic sign," a pointer as it were, it does not reflect inflammation.
Here’s excerpts from what I transcribed from Dr Gundry’s Q&A session on August 12, 2016:
“Years ago when I started getting really interested in this, I noticed that a lot of my patients with auto-immune disease and or elevated inflammatory markers had an elevated adiponectin and I thought that was very curious because
adiponectin in theory is a very good hormone. It’s a skinny hormone, it reduces diabetes. But when I started looking at the literature, there are some fascinating studies, so when we looked at adiponectin and dementia, it turns out the women’s health study showed that
skinny women with high adiponectin levels had a very high incidence of dementia, now that doesn’t make sense if adiponectin is so good for you. Plus if you look at people with rheumatoid arthritis they have a very high adiponectin level, and most people with rheumatoid arthritis are actually quite thin. So I said that’s interesting, there’s two things that are really an interesting marker for adiponectin, so what I did was I took away major lectin containing foods from patients with an elevated TNFalpha and we do a health survey of all of our patient’s family history and people with elevated adiponectin had a fascinating family history of auto-immune disease, irritable bowel, hypothyroid, by the way, …"
He then discusses if you’ve had your tonsils out that this indicates lectin sensitivity. He then goes on to say regarding his own experience,
“Then I realized what these were was this wonderful collection of dead white blood cells that were being spit out of my tonsils and (I was) prone to chronic sinusitis, and I was thin, and my father has psoriasis, and my aunt had psoriasis, so I come from a wonderful auto-immune family. I don’t have psoriasis, I’ve had a couple patches of it through my life, but I don’t have it. So all this added up, so I started looking at the lectin literature I said, oh my gosh, I have every known symptom of being lectin intolerant. So I permanently removed lectins from my diet, all these things went away. …”
Short discussion of another patient here.
“So we started to take the lectins away from people and their TNFalphas fell to normal, and oh by the way their joint pain went away, and their brain fog went away, whatever, but their adiponectin stayed high, so I concluded and gave a paper to the American Heart Association that an elevated adiponectin is merely a marker, a pretty doggone good marker, that they’re lectin sensitive.”
This should be the paper that he presented to the AHA
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/129/Suppl_1/AP354
He went on to say
“The only thing that screws that up is obesity. So it’s fascinating when I take my obese patients who I really suspect are lectin sensitive and we get them to lose weight, their adiponectin goes sky high, far higher than you would think from a little bit of weight loss. Then I go, I knew it! So that’s the adiponectin connection."
Question from the audience: “So they could have low adiponectin and be lectin sensitive….”
Dr Gundry:
“Correct, because they’re obese. Yes. If you’re thin and have low adiponectin and don’t have any of the other inflammatory markers, odds are you’re not lectin sensitive. Having said that, everyone know about wheat germ agglutinin? So gluten gets a lot of publicity. I think gluten is an innocent bystander. He’s getaway car driver, the robbers are wheat germ agglutinin. You can have a normal gut lining, no leaky gut, and wheat germ agglutinin is a very tiny protein Gluten is a huge protein. Gluten in general cannot get through the gut lining unless it turns on zonulin and breaks the gut lining. But wheat germ agglutinin can get through the gut lining without any problem. The problem with wheat germ agglutinin it’s one of the master mimicking lectins. It can bind to sialic acids on your blood vessels. It can bind to an insulin receptor on fat cells and (stay open?)… But one of the things we’re missing, especially in old age, is that wheat germ agglutinin binds to insulin receptors on muscles and insulin receptors in the brain and blocks them. Muscles can’t get to the glucose when binds to insulin receptors in muscles so have sarcopenia (? I think this is what he said ) and when it happens in the brain it blocks the affect of insulin. So a lot of what we think is Type 3 Diabetes is actually the accumulation through the years of wheat germ agglutinin.
Whew! Clear as mud, huh?
You also asked
Do you take ginko, Theresa? The reason I ask is because I've read that a side effect can be bleeding of the eye. I hope you're no longer having that problem.
I do not take ginko, but I’ve also not had eye issues, I think you might be confusing me with someone else, but interesting nevertheless.