Thank you for all the advice and words of encouragement. I’ve been reading a lot of papers on methylation and the effects on the body, below is an article that seems to sum it up if interested…
The paper on contraception and autoimmunity is taken from "The Linacre Quarterly", a publication of the "Catholic Medical Association".
"The Catholic Medical Association opposed the Right to Contraception Act in 2022. They oppose emergency contraception even in cases of rape and have a long history of opposing access to oral contraception."
Josh Axe is a popular alternative, chiropractic and naturopathic medicine practitioner. I wouldn't take anything on his site too seriously. Methylation is a real and critically important physiologic process but Josh Axe and others like Ben Lynch push the idea that fixing problems with "methylation" is the key to healing a wide variety of health conditions.
There is some sensible advice on the site but a lot of nonsense too (promoting bone broth, colloidal silver and gerson therapy for cancer) and the benefit of following the good advice has nothing much to do with any beneficial effect on "methylation" but is just good general lifestyle and nutrition advice. These sites are mostly intended to convince people that they need to buy supplements, books or courses from the creator or drive monetized social media engagement.
Yeah. Full disclosure, I haven't read the review paper but given the source, it can be expected to have such a heavy bias that I would lean towards reading a more independent analysis first because there is such a high probability that they found what they wanted to find according to the journal's ideological stance.
Exactly! Given that 23andMe are a company that sells genetic tests, the fact that they straight up say that MTHFR testing is unnecessary should be enough to put it firmly to bed, since if anything, you would expect their bias to be in exactly the opposite direction.
They have all the incentive in the world to suggest it might be useful but despite this they cannot stand behind it.
It is a pity really that there is so much hype and misinformation with people concentrating overmuch on the one thing. There are snps which in combination and if expressed may well affect health, and the MTHFR variants may play a small or possibly larger part in that whole effect for some of us. A few on here have mentioned having MTR snps as well, for example. If there are a number of snps in the same areas of processing, a small dysfunction may over time become significant. I have the neural tube defect and risk and benefitted hugely from methylfolate and magnesium, so I think that the genetic test (which I did subsequently, and not 23and Me for the sake of clarity) gave me useful information - but I didn't think it was the answer to all my woes or everyone else's, just a part of the picture. Cheers
Thankyou, I had a hyperthyroid flare which the endocrinology department expected to go away as they reckoned it was hashimotos rather than graves. Then I eventually gave in to my doctors persistence to take HRT. The hyperthyroidism came back and I've been battling it for 2 more years. Recently I decided to come off HRT and my symptoms and thyroid blood tests returned to normal (so far) The study could explain why. 🤷♀️
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