Dr. Doni Wilson explains how chronic inflammation from leaky gut, food sensitivities, and infections like Lyme can disrupt methylation in people with MTHFR mutations. Inflammation slows the conversion of folic acid to folate, blocking the production of SAM, a key methyl donor. Treating the underlying inflammation often needs to happen before methylation supplements will work.
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December 5, 2017
She states she has two MTHFR mutations.
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Hello everyone, I think you can hear me.
I'm here in my office, excited to talk with you about MTHFR tonight. If you guys are there and you joining us, then please write in the comments.
Or hit like and tell me where you are and what you're up to and what your questions are. I'm looking forward to just talking through about my blog post from this week and about a class I'm offering related to MTHFR and answering any questions that you might have. So let's see, this recent blog post is about MTHFR and inflammation.
Inflammation is kind of a vague thing. A lot of times we'll say inflammation. People will say, what do you mean by inflammation? What are you talking about? So I like to explain that inflammation is, it's something that our bodies do naturally. It's part of our immune response. It's something that's good and we need it. So say if we have a, if we injure ourselves, you get a cut or bruise or a bump, you want inflammation to happen because it brings blood flow to the area and helps your body heal. It's just that when inflammation keeps on going long term that it becomes more of an issue. And there's a few major sources of chronic inflammation that are common that I often see for patients. One of those is in the digestive tract where what can happen in the digestion is this thing called leaky gut and food sensitivities. There's also what can happen is imbalanced gut bacteria. And then we also can get inflammation from other infections in the body like viruses or Lyme and these things cause I call them inflammatory messengers. So it's inflammation messages that travel throughout the body. So even if it starts in your gut, it doesn't stay in the gut. It can go to the nervous system, to your joints, to your skin showing, you know, could be redness if it's on the skin, but if it's in the nervous system, we don't see the redness, we just experience it as maybe headache or anxiety or even depression from inflammation in the nervous system. So this, I can go back and talk through some of those details some more, but the idea is that when we have inflammation in our bodies, it bogs down the methylation. So if you have, if you're one of the one of us who have an MTHFR mutation, I have two of them. So maybe you as well know that you have an MTHFR mutation, then this inflammation further slows down the methylation process. So it's one thing to have An MTHFR mutation, it's another thing to have inflammation adding on top of it, slowing things down. So you might have had MTHFR mutation your whole life and have it not affect your health, you know, feel just fine. And only when inflammation starts happening, say from digestive issues or food sensitivities or an infection like Lyme or viral infection like Epstein Barr virus, then all of a sudden this MTHFR becomes an issue. You start to get more and more symptoms because the inflammation is further preventing methylation from working well.
So MTHFR and methylation is something I'm going to be talking a lot more about in a class I'm offering. It's next Thursday and so if this is something you've been curious about or heard that you have MTHFR and you're trying to figure out how to address it for yourself and what impact it may be having on your health, maybe you got a genetic report and you're trying to understand what it means and how to understand it. Those are the kinds of things we're going to talk about in the class.
And really digging into this idea of what are the things that block methylation and make it even more likely than an MTHFR mutation is going to create symptoms for you. Anyways, I'm hoping maybe there's some of you listening in or maybe you'll listen later to this recording and.
Hopefully be able to tell comment below. I'll also put a link in the comments to the blog post that I'm referring to so you could read more about it.
I call it, I think of it like these are the blocks, the things that block methylation. Maybe I should start by just explaining what methylation is.
Because mthfr, we know, is the enzyme that turns folic acid into folate. And then the next step in the process is the folate has to get together with the B12 and the homocysteine to eventually make something called SAM. And SAM is what really goes out into our bodies and does all the good stuff to make healthy cells and process our neurotransmitters and so much more. But if the folate is never able to get together with the B12 and if the two of them are not able to successfully make SAM, that's when you can start to experience health issues related to ineffective methylation. So that process of the B vitamins turning into SAM is what we call methylation. Methylation. I sometimes just say it's what the B vitamins are up to. Right? We kind of have a sense that B vitamins are important and we need more of them when we're under stress. And this is exactly why, because when we're more stressed, then our methylation has a harder time making sam. So we need. Sometimes we need more B vitamins in order for it to work well. But what I would say is we want to get to the underlying cause. We want to figure out what is the stress that's stressing out your methylation. What is it? Inflammation. And this is what this blog article is about, is the case of how inflammation becomes a stress to your biochemistry, to your methylation. And if we can address inflammation, all of a sudden methylation starts working better. So sometimes it's not about. Sometimes MTHFR is not just about putting in more folate. Even if you're putting in the right form of methylfolate, you're not going to get very far if you have a lot of inflammation in your body. So you're. I always recommend starting with looking at do you have food sensitivities?
Do you have leaky gut? Is there imbalance of bacteria in your digestive tract where those bacteria are creating inflammation? Maybe for you, your digestion, you've been working on it, your diet's clean, but maybe you have exposure to Lyme or you have, say, Epstein Barr virus or another virus that's been activated in your system, again because of stress. And so that's creating inflammation. And we may need to address that chronic infection before we can really move on to supporting MTHFR and methylation, because otherwise we're just basically working against ourselves. Sometimes I think of it like a sink that's clogged, right? If the drain is clogged and you just keep putting in more water, it's not going to go down the drain until you deal with what's clogging the drain. So we need to deal with what's clogging the drain. Then we can put in more methylfolate and have the whole system be able to use it.
So, anyway, so I'm so excited. I'm hoping the blog post is really helpful for you guys. And for those of you who might be interested in the class, what we're gonna do is we're gonna get in, we're gonna talk through some more about the exact enzymes, how to know if you have an mthfr mutation or SNP, what are the other SNPs that are involved, and I'll show you looking at a genetic report, maybe if you have one, you can be looking at yours during the class and see how this all fits together, what tests you could be doing to know better, how this might be affecting your health.
And how to get your methylation flowing again.
And I'll talk more about my approach, how I help people to do that. So, anyway, so I'll put the link down in the comments. If you guys have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, I'm going to put this live for you to listen in. And I look forward to your comments, and I look forward to you joining me in the class, if that sounds like something that would be helpful for you. All right. Talk to you soon.
