Communications Within Your Body

by Rich Amber

Back in Issues 1-5, we discussed anatomy and physiology, but stopped after defining the role of most of the major organs. We didn’t thoroughly explain the skeletal system, the endocrine system, the muscular system, or the nervous system, etc. While each of those might have been briefly touched on in various articles/comments in other newsletters, it is probably time to get serious with one of those: the nervous system.

The picture above obviously contains only the major nerves. I simply couldn’t draw all the lines that represent microscopic trillions of tiny fibers that connect every piece of your body to the central core. Nor can the drawing account for the chemicals and sugars that make the final connections.

I am trying to simplify the language here as much as possible, but some anatomical words just can’t be simplified. Bear with me for a page or two and we’ll return to ‘people talk’ as soon as possible. But please do read this because most of what is explained here is relevant to the repair process we’ll discuss later on.

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Nerve Cells

Within your body, the nerves branch out like telephone wires from the central office. They run to every part of your body, from the soles of your feet to the top of your scalp and from just below your skin to the inner organs such as the heart, liver, lungs, etc. These nerves are actually single cells that have the function of carrying information from one area of the body to another area. Most of these cells are grouped together like the strands of a rope.

Nerve cells have the same basic structure as all the other body cells, with a surrounding membrane containing the nucleus and cytoplasm, but they have a very special, elongated shape. A typical motor nerve, carrying instructions from your brain to your muscle, has a tuft of short, root-like projections, called dendrites, at one end. At the other end is a long, thin projection, called the axon, which might split and divide up to 150 times and be attached to numerous muscle fibers.

Nerve cells can be thinner than the hairs on your head, but they can also be very long. The average nerve running from the base of your spine to the tip of your toe is about three feet long, but many other axons are only a fraction of an inch in length. Most nerves act as links in a chain of nerve cells rather than connecting directly to a muscle. In such a chain, each axon is in near contact with the dendrites of the next cell, but there is a tiny gap between them. Nerve impulses jump this gap with the help of chemical messengers known as neurotransmitters.

Nerve Fibers

Two kinds of nerve fibers, dendrites and axons, extend from the cell bodies of most neurons. Although a neuron usually has many dendrites, it has a single axon. In most neurons, the dendrites are relatively short and highly branched. These processes, together with the membrane of the cell body, provide the main receptive surfaces of the neuron to which processes from other neurons communicate. Often the dendrites have tiny, thorn-like spines on their surfaces, which serve as contact points for parts of other neurons. The axon, which usually arises from a slight elevation of the cell body (axon hillock), is a slender, cylindrical process with a nearly smooth surface and uniform diameter. This cable is a one-way pipe from one nerve cell to the axon terminal. Each nerve cell has a single axon, but the axon may have several branches (collaterals). The axon terminal is a point where the electrical charge sent from one nerve cell to another is changed into a chemical signal to be sent away from the region of the cell body.

Nerve/Muscle Connections

Nerves, known as sensory neurons, come from every part of your body to carry impulses to your spinal cord and on up to your brain concerning the condition of every nook and cranny in your body, including your muscles. In the same way, motor neurons send impulses to your muscles, often through intermediate connections or ‘interneurons’ in your spinal cord. These messages cross the gap at a junction between nerves and muscles, setting off a chain of events that ends in contraction. Within a second, millions of impulses reach your motor neurons. Some of the impulses are sent from various parts of your brain and spinal cord; some come from sense organs located in the joints, ligaments, and tendons; and some come from the muscles themselves. The seeds of movement are sown by your brain, in its primary cortex, an area of the brain’s wrinkled surface that spans both cerebral hemispheres.

Another patch of cortex, directly in front of the primary area, also houses neurons that are involved in movement. This area is thought to be important to speech and delicately coordinated movements such as those performed by your hand. Electrical impulses from many regions of your brain feed into your motor areas.

Your brain must collect and analyze all the sensory messages it receives before it can direct a coordinated movement. This interplay is continuous and elaborate – sight, sound, smell, pressure, and pain are all important, but so are messages bringing information about the angles and position of joints, the length and tension of muscles, or even the speed of movements. At every point along the descent from your brain to your muscle, impulses can influence interneurons to vary the precision of muscular control. Do you get the idea here that feedback from/to muscles is absolutely essential to your ability to even walk without stumbling? Read on…

An average motor neuron might have as many as 15,000 connections each, providing information from all over your body. Some parts, like your back, which have a limited precision of motion, are only equipped with a few – perhaps 50,000. Hand muscles, which perform very delicate and precise movements are driven by about 200,000 neurons. A second major transmission network produces contractions of groups of muscles and is responsible for larger muscular functions, such as running, walking, or swimming. A ‘muscle spindle’ is a sensory end organ in a muscle that is sensitive to stretching of the muscle.

Neural Vesicle

A neural vesicle is sac-like structure that contains fluid for chemical transportation of impulses. Well, honestly folks, while we liken nerves to phone wires, your body does not really contain copper wires. Nerves are, after all, tissues and it’s the chemicals that allow this tissue to transmit those electrical signals. No chemicals? The message doesn’t get through. Fouled chemicals? The message is garbled and you turn into a dancing scarecrow figure.

OK, enough of the technical stuff. What does all this mean to you?

You have all experienced things like hunger pangs. Something in your gut says, ‘Hey, bozo! Feed me!’ This happens because a signal travels up the nerves from that organ to your brain, which interprets that signal to mean something (it might pick from a list posted on the cortex walls) and says, ‘Oh, I’m probably hungry,’ at which point you go eat something and the signal ceases (only too often replaced with a new signal that is interpreted as ‘Dang, I ate too much.’ ). After a few years of living in your Earthly body, you rarely even pause in your interpretation of what these signals mean, but just automatically assume what it means. This is important because we have programmed ourselves to certain responses to certain signals and what if we are receiving erroneous signals? Do we then perceive that which is not there at all? Or perhaps we fail to perceive that which is indeed right in front of us. The remainder of that conversation should be handled by your friendly neighborhood shrink. J

How about the signals that tell us we have a pain? If you get a jab in your toe, the nerves in that area send a cry to the brain. Again, you interpret what it means, and look down to see this thorn in your foot. You remove the thorn because you have decided it is the cause of that pain. What would happen if the nerves, which act like a telephone line, were not functional? How would the damaged area ever communicate that it needed attention, or worse, that it was in dire need of immediate assistance before cellular or tissue death became imminent?

Remember the little cartoon thing a couple issues back, where Sir Bifidus was defending Castle Intestina? How did he put out the 9-1-1 call for reinforcements? That signal had to go through the nervous system. You aren’t even conscious of most of the communications going from one part of your body to another part, but they are absolutely essential to your well being. That call for help was sent out to activate your immune system. What if it was never received?

What if, say, an army of foreign invaders was attacking your hometown, but all the telephone lines had been cut? (OK, for the yumpy generation, all the cell phone towers have been destroyed too.) How would anyone else even know you were under attack? Likewise, how can your immune system respond if it doesn’t even know there is a problem? It is things like this that make me say to you, ‘Use your brain!’ I am not being condescending when I say that – honest. We all have such problems, but we cannot go through life trusting that everything is OK with our autonomic processes when we live in such a toxic world. Occasionally, we must sit down and consciously think about what we are doing to our bodies, what the airborne or food-sourced toxins are doing to our bodies, and how we can fix these things if there is a failure to communicate because the phone wires were cut.

So, this brings us to the process of communication, cell-to-cell, and how we can best ensure that the process Nature intended is best able to function as planned. Even with a nutritious diet, your immune system needs cell-to-cell communication to defend against foreign invaders. And that leads us to another of medical science’s subsets: Glycobiology.

Glycobiology is the study of the life of our immune cells, which must communicate with eight different simple sugars that are required for proper functioning. OH NO!!! HE SAID THE SUGAR WORD!!! Simple sugars, the good stuff… polysaccharides*1. This is not the same as that refined crap you put on your breakfast cereal, in your coffee, or in soda pop in megadoses. Those are the bad sugars. (Dani Veracity just wrote an interesting article on the bad stuff: The politics of sugar: why your government lies to you about this disease-promoting ingredient available for you to read at:

 http://www.NewsTarget.com/009797.html ).

Note 1: Polysaccharide: Any of a class of carbohydrates whose molecules contain chains of monosaccharide molecules.

‘This is going to be the future (in medicine). We won’t (fully) understand immunology, neurology, developmental biology, or disease until we get a handle on Glycobiology.’ – Gerald Hart, Johns Hopkins University

When researching Glycobiology, I’ve found that the entire surface of cells is coated with sugars built into complex, multi-branched chains. These chains are linked to proteins in the membrane, where they can promote (or sometimes interfere) with cells binding to each other. These sugar chains are first attached to proteins inside the cell where they help proteins get in shape for their jobs. As the proteins percolate toward the cell surface, the sugar chains are sculpted for specific needs. The entire process, called glycosylation, recruits a force of more than 500 genes for this job.

Research currently underway is addressing a variety of diseases based on defects in glycosylation, including the metastatic spread of cancer, inflammation, female infertility, and a rare family of diseases known as Congenital Diseases of Glycosylation (CDG).

So you see, not having the proper eight simple sugars can cause our bodies to get pretty screwed up. So how do we ensure we have these? Well, that leads us to Glyconutrients.

Simply stated, the Greek word glyco refers to ‘sweet.’ Hence, a glyconutrient is a biochemical that contains a sugar molecule. The prefix ‘glyco’ can be placed in front of a fat, protein or any molecule and suggests that a sugar is attached. Glycobiology is the study of the sugar portion of these proteins and fats.

So here’s a few definitions for the remainder of this newsletter: Glycoprotein = Sugar attached to a protein; Glycolipid = Sugar attached to a fat; and Glycoform = Any sugar form.

Virtually every cell in your body is covered with minuscule hair-like glycoforms. Until the invention of the electron microscope, scientists could not see these molecules on the surface of the cells. They could detect hairs (proteins and fats), but could not distinguish that on the surface of those hairs were trillions of other molecules – sugar molecules (glyconutrients).

Glyconutrients are not vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, herbs, enzymes, or homeopathic drugs. They are carbohydrates from plants. Just as there are essential proteins called amino acids and essential fats called fatty acids, glyconutrients are the newly discovered class of necessary carbohydrate nutrients. Glyconutrients, when taken in proper balance, allow your body to once again do what it always should have been doing – communicating events or needs through your nervous system.

Sugar-bound glycoforms work to keep our hormones in balance, to fight off disease invaders, to enable blood to clot, to give our cells their structural support network and (perhaps most important of all) to create a complex cellular messaging system.

Glyconutrient #1 Glucose is readily available in our diets (converted from white sugar, fructose and starchy foods) and in most cases is oversupplied in the form of sugar cane, rice, corn, potatoes, wheat, etc. Use care here – most of that list is on the mycotoxin list too.

Glyconutrient #2 Galactose is readily available in our diets. It is obtained from the conversion of lactose (milk sugar) and is also easily obtained from other dairy products.

Glyconutrient #3 Fucose is not readily available in our diets but is readily found in breast milk and in several medicinal mushrooms, but try to stay away from the mushrooms because they are… yup, big fungi. Fucose has numerous well-documented benefits for the immune system.

Glyconutrient #4 Mannose is not readily available in our diets. It plays a profound role in cellular interactions and has even been known to lower blood sugar levels. It is absolutely vital to proper immune defenses against microbial invaders and has a natural anti-inflammatory effect.

Glyconutrient #5 Xylose is not readily available in our diets. It is often seen in sugarless gums and candies, in that it has a sweet taste but does not cause tooth decay. It has recently been added to nasal sprays and appears to discourage the binding of allergens and pathogens to mucous membranes. It also has known antibacterial and antifungal properties and might help prevent certain cancers.

Glyconutrient #6 N-acetyl-neuramic acid is not readily available in our diets, but it is another sugar that abounds in breast milk and dramatically impacts brain function and growth. It, too, boosts immune function and has documented antiviral actions. Interestingly, in certain disease states, the ability to digest this sugar is impaired.

Glyconutrient #7 N-acetyl-glucosamine is not readily available in our diets. It is particularly beneficial for cartilage regeneration and joint inflammation. Glucosamine, a well known natural medicine for arthritic conditions comes from this sugar compound. It has many more therapeutic effects. Deficiencies or malfunctions of this sugar have been linked to diseases of the bowel.

Glyconutrient #8 N-acetyl-galactosamine is not readily available in our diets. It is the least known of the essential sugars, although it appears to inhibit the growth of some tumors and, like the other sugars, plays an individual role in keeping cell communication clear and promptly delivered.

Note: Some of these apparently go by various names, depending on which source you are reading. There are also other plant carbohydrates that also are claimed to work as glyconutrients, but are not necessarily among the eight essentials.

These glyconutrients are so important to our health, that Mother Nature has made provisions to ensure we get them early on in life. Breast milk contains five of the essential glyconutrients mentioned above. Emerging research continues to support how important breast-feeding is to human development, both short term and long term. The areas most noted as positively affected by breast milk nourishment are immune function and brain development.

OK, so we aren’t babies at the breast any more. How do we get these when so many of them were marked as ‘not readily available in our diets’? Gee, folks, they used to be, but the modern techniques of farming and food processing destroys six of the eight natural sugars, and if sugars are added in the processing, they are not the ones you need. If anything, those refined sugars deplete your body of the nutrients it needs, as well as feeding those nasty mycotoxins we’ve been harping about.

The primary sources of glyconutrients are fungi, saps, gums, and seeds, while the secondary sources are grains, fruit and vegetables. Obviously, if you are at concerned about mycotoxin consumption, you need to steer away from the fungi, the grain, and some of the sweeter fruits.

Gum acacia from the African acacia tree contains galactose, rhamnose, arabinose, and glucuronic acid. Gum acacia has been shown to promote healing of irritated gastrointestinal mucosa and respiratory tract tissue, improve beneficial intestinal flora, control colon bifidus fermentation, and lowers triglyceride production, and serum cholesterol.

Gum ghatti from the gum of the Indian sumac contains galactose, arabinose, mannose, xylose, and glucuronic acid. The three essential glyconutrients in this gum are important for cell-to-cell communication and lowering cholesterol. This gum is also beneficial for bifidus fermentation.

Latrix deciduasi, or larch tree, contains arabinogalactan. Arabinogalactan studies show it has an anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic benefit. It also has been shown to block liver lectins that mediate tumor metastasis; block settling sarcoma L01 tumor cells, and protects intestinal mucosa against disease and cancer promoting agents. Arabinogalactan also aids recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome.

The glyconutrients in the stem and branches of Astragalus gummifer are galactose, arabinose, xylose, fucose, rhamnose, and galcturonic acid. The benefits include action as an antioxidant, diuretic, and anti-inflammatory. It inhibits tumor growth and offsets the immune suppression of cancer chemotherapy. Astragalus gummifer also stimulates synthesis of antibodies, delays the natural aging process of blastocysts (fertilized egg cells) by one third, increases the number of stem cells in marrow and lymph and stimulates stem cell development into active immune cells.

Undaria pinnatifida, a brown macro seaweed, is one of the richest known sources of fucose. Fucose influences brain development; acts as an immune modulator; inhibits tumor growth and its spread; and enhances cell-to-cell communication. High concentrations of fucose are found at the junctions between nerves, in the kidney, testes, and in the outer layer of the skin.

Echinacea contains arabinogalactan, galactose, and has the benefits gained from the intake of these glyconutrients.

Aloe Vera contains mannose, galactose, and arabinose. The leaves are particularly rich in polysaccharides that provide healing and anti-infection properties when used both externally and internally. Aloe acts as an anti-fungal, anti-viral, anti-bacterial, anti-allergy and anti-inflammatory. It also protects the liver from chemical injury.

Glyconutrient supplementation is considered generally safe and non-toxic. Anyone with diabetes should consult his/her doctor before taking some of these products. Some of the glyconutrients products on the market are made from dried fungi or yeasts and you need to avoid those products (READ THOSE LABELS!). If you experience fast or irregular breathing, skin rashes, hives, or itching after taking any supplement, call your doctor or the company’s customer service department. For some of the supplements, you need to check with your doctor if you are pregnant or breastfeeding. There are different glyconutritional supplement products on the market and the ingredients and quality standards vary. Please use caution when you go to the health food store looking for capsules. Make sure it does not contain any ingredients that add fuel to the thing you are trying to eliminate (fungi/yeast). Even if you find a capsule with the eight essential glyconutrients, watch out for what the filler is. Rice is OK, but wheat is not.

Also, please don’t buy a bottle of pills and expect miracles immediately. You did not get unbalanced overnight and you certainly are not going to get back in balance overnight. Expect to have to take these supplements for four to six months at a minimum.

Then what? Well, once you have your cell-to-cell communications back in fine working order, the next time your body is attacked by fungi/yeast/mycotoxins – or hey, even bad bacteria, your ability to call for assistance from your immune system should not be impaired. At that point, perhaps you will not need to run to the doctor for a shot of something that potentially can do you more harm than good. Nature intended your body to be able to fend for itself, so give it a fighting chance before resorting to artificial chemicals.

Of course, as always, the choice is yours and yours alone.