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There are two problems with this consensus. First, 15 per cent is not very high. Second, no one actually knows why aspirin reduces heart disease. Is it because it is a blood thinner, and thin blood is good for the heart? Does aspirin somehow slow down hardening of the arteries? No one knows.
But let me lay out a conjecture and challenge the medical community to disprove it. I have argued that excess iron increases cortisol and promotes plaque formation. This is the reason why men are more susceptible to heart disease than women in their thirties, forties and fifties. Post-menopause, women's iron levels gradually increase, and they catch up with men in the heart disease stakes in their seventies and eighties. Enter the humble aspirin. Aspirin has been shown to increase microbleeds in the brain according to a well accepted Dutch study. But where else in the body are we bleeding when we take regular aspirin?
We know that in larger doses, aspirin causes full-scale bleeding in the stomach and in the gastrointestinal tract. But what about microbleeds in the stomach at lower doses? I conjecture that the reason aspirin reduces the incidence of heart disease is because even in low doses it causes microbleeding in the stomach and gastrointestinal tract. Unlike the Dutch study, where MRI scanners were used to look at microbleeds in the brain, no one has yet looked at the stomach and intestinal tract of aspirin users using MRI scanners.
If my conjecture holds, the microbleeds leach out blood and hence iron from the body, and the lower iron levels in turn reduce plaque formation in arteries. If true, this conjecture could revolutionize our thinking on how to delay or reduce the incidence of heart disease. Don't bother with bleeding your gut by taking aspirin, because I will offer you a much safer and healthier prescription to get your iron levels down. Simply go to your nearest blood donation centre and donate a pint of blood.
And do this every six months. We are back to bloodletting again. We have so far discussed the role of iron as an essential nutrient for bacterial growth, both in the laboratory and in the human body. This is certainly true of many of the bacteria that are part of the symbiote, which is why maintaining the iron balance is so important in keeping bacterial infections in check. The reason I spent so much time on it is that bacteria that crave iron will gravitate towards animals that hoard it in their blood, including humans, and since this book is about enjoying a long and healthy life, we need to better manage the iron problem. However, any attempt to reduce a subject as complex as human health and symbiote balance to a simple remedy is clearly not going to work in every instance. This is because evolution is a wonder of nature, and the complexity generated by the laws of evolution is massive. Iron balance is a good place to start looking when there are health problems, because iron is an essential nutrient and can easily be imbalanced, particularly if there are changes in our diet, exercise patterns or physiology.
But iron is not the only game in town, as far as bacteria are concerned. There are a few bacterial pathogens that have evolved to cause harm to humans even without using the excess iron stores in the human body. Probably the most famous of them from a human disease standpoint is Borrelia burgdorferi, which is the pathogen that causes Lyme disease. B. burgdorferi uses manganese instead of iron as a growth medium. Manganese is present in both men and women, which is why Lyme disease affects both men and women equally. B. burgdorferi not only needs manganese to thrive, but because it competes with the human host for the body's stores of manganese, it causes all sorts of symptoms associated with manganese deficiency, which is a type of anaemia.
Iron, manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc are next to each other on the periodic table of element and they share many properties; for instance, they are all metallic. The first four are also paramagnetic elements that show magnetic properties. In chemical form, these six metals are essential micronutrients for the human body, and a balance of these chemicals is important to maintain good health. In fact, the chemical form of cobalt in the human body is none other than our friend vitamin B12, which is essential for the functioning of our brain and nervous system. Similarly, human bodies contain almost 10 mg manganese.
A healthy symbiote balance means a healthy immune system balance. When we take antibiotics and temporarily weaken the bacterial symbiote, the immune system can become hypersensitive, causing all kinds of autoimmune diseases. This alone is reason enough to minimize the use of antibiotics in public health today.
Aspirin use has also been linked to high mortality associated with 1918 influenza. Check out lots of articles on the subject ... basically bayer had just introduced aspirin, but doctors were unaware of appropriate dose, and were giving roughly double recommended dose. There is evidence that aspirin rather than the influenza attributed to higher fatality rates, as those without aspirin were likely to recover. Don't remember the mechanism, exactly, for how aspirin led to fatalities, but it escalated negative impact of influenza, and articles on the web explain the hows and whys (I don't recall the specifics, but since reading those articles, made sure our home was aspirin - free). tylenol (acetominiphen) is no better, as it destroys liver (hence, it is a poison) ... better to tough it out, or use a natural pain reliever instead.