Thoughts on curing your autoimmune disease…

Published in Nuda Newsletter #3

I have an autoimmune disease called ankylosing spondylitis. It gave me severe back pain for around ten years. But I cured it via diet, by at first avoiding starches and then avoiding vegetables, eating only meat and fruit, in order to heal my gut. I had to find how to cure it myself. Doctors only prescribed drugs. The mainstream explanation of autoimmune diseases is “molecular mimicry”—that the body attacks itself by accident. In the case of ankylosing spondylitis, it’s theorized that the body produces antibodies targeting a bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae, and that the antibodies also attack my collagen and a protein called HLA-B27 that resemble the bacterium’s surface enzymes. 

However, in Gut and Physiology Syndrome (2020), Natasha Campbell-McBride argues against the molecular mimicry theory. In her view, “the immune system does not attack perfectly normal tissues ‘by mistake,’ but tries to deal with damaged tissues.” My body was cleaning itself of misshapen and damaged proteins—parts of me that had been contaminated by glyphosate and other modern toxins. It was not, according to Campbell-McBride, attacking my healthy proteins. Campbell-McBride suggests renaming “autoimmune disease” to “contamination disease.” Her theory makes more sense to me than the molecular mimicry theory.

Words

Tao Lin