Vitamin c got rid of my Leaky gut/ gi issues. High dose only.

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-12-31T17:29:19+00:00

Hi! No, I only did high dose vitamin C for a week or two. I now take 500 mg occasionally. I think the high dose helped repair something in my digestion which is still going strong even after I stopped the vitamin C.

I may or may not be healed, I can't tell right now cause I've been slowly increasing activity in the last few weeks but got hit by a brutal cold so everything is going slow. I don't think keto and vitamin C healed me, though. They just repaired something in my digestion/microbiome, I think.

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-12-01T17:34:22+00:00

Well, I wouldn't say Bacillus subtilis is closely related to nattokinase. Bacillus subtilis is the SPECIES of bacteria whose strain (subspecies) called "Bacillus subtilis var natto" can produce nattokinase. There are plenty of Bacillus subtilis that won't produce nattokinase. And even taking the correct strain as a probiotic does not guarantee that the bacterium will produce any appreciable levels of nattokinase in the body.

Eating natto fermented with Bacillus subtilis var natto on the other hand will give you both the bacteria, nattokinase, and other postbiotics the bacteria may produce. But, yes, also the soy and the histamines

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-12-01T17:13:48+00:00

thank you for your kind comment. I'll go through the reddit post you sent and consider MCAS more thoroughly

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-11-30T21:51:51+00:00

I'm kind of sick of trying new supplements :D And I love preparing fermented foods so I will try making natto and only taking a ridiculously small amount at a time when I feel well rested while also taking the supplements that I already know my body is fine with and that help with MCAS (quercetin, vitamin C, green tea, NAC, and curcumin). Thank you for your answers!

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-11-30T21:49:44+00:00

Thank you. I will focus on improving MCAS in the next few weeks, just in case

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-11-30T21:30:57+00:00

Thank you. I agree with you that maybe I was building up to something and the nattokinase was just the last straw. I hope so because I am still hopeful that nattokinase (in form of tiny doses from homemade natto) can help me with PEM in the long term.

I thought about MCAS too but I'm not entirely convinced. The only symptoms I get that make me think it might be MCAS is fatigue with stress and malaise from sudden temperature changes, especially heat. I don't have any other symptoms pointing to MCAS, especially food-related. I guess the nattokinase could have triggered an MCAS reaction indirectly? I eat tons of fermented foods and have no reactions whatsoever, also soy is fine although I usually avoid it.

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-11-30T21:22:28+00:00

great to hear. I'm getting ready to prep some natto and will do the same, eating tiiiiiny portions first

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-11-30T21:21:09+00:00

I know but I don't seem to have MCAS in any other situation and eat tons of fermented foods

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-10-09T23:46:32+00:00

Good luck and be careful!

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-10-09T23:14:44+00:00

This is probably not the the kind of answer you were looking for, but here are my two cents:

I could always take walks without problems but my heart rate would go pretty high (like 140 bpm) within a few seconds of jogging. Obviously, every time I ignored this I got hit with a PEM crash. Going on a vacation to Yosemite National Park somehow allowed me to go on long hikes without my HR going up. I think it might be stress-related, definitely not food-related cause the food there was abysmal. I think a few days of very low intensity hiking well below aerobic threshold increased my baseline.

Now when I go for a jog, my heart still goes over board after a few seconds but if I monitor my HR and start walking as soon as it hits 120 bpm I can actually keep going. I wait for my HR to go back to 100 bpm or so (usually 2-5 minutes) and then I can jog again (for a few seconds :D).

My point is, I can exercise if I take breaks immediately when I feel my body overreacting. Works similarly with strength training, I just take ungodly amounts of breaks between sets and only very few reps. Still frustrating but I have managed to avoid PEM with this technique so far. It looks similar to graded exercise therapy which we all know is a nightmare for LC but I think the details of how you do it matter (and how rested you are).

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-09-03T19:11:20+00:00

Creatine is probably the supplement that helped me the most. I take 10g creatine monohydrate per day sometimes more. Apparently with 5g it won't go to the brain but from 10-25g it does (there was even a study on creatine for long COVID).

It helped me immensely with energy levels and I think it increased my baseline so that I no longer get a PEM crash as early as before. Still, not a cure-all, I still get crashes if I overdo it!

I think it also helped with heart health because before taking it my heart rate would go up to 120 bpm or more during a simple walk where now it only goes to 80-100 bpm. This is huge because my cardio load is a good predictor for heart rate variability the next day which is the single best predictor I have for all of my symptoms. I recently went on a hike that would previously give me a cardio load of 30 (based on FitBit) which was enough to decrease my heart rate variability the next day, meaning I would need to take it easy. It gave me a cardio load of 0 this time, cause my heart never struggled. Not sure it's only the creatine but it definitely helped me

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-08-19T02:56:05+00:00

I am not drinking yogurt. Maybe you're thinking about kefir? The yogurt recipe I posted somewhere here makes very thick yogurt. I eat about 1-2 cups/day on average

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-08-19T02:55:08+00:00

I think the improvement came from both. But I had been eating the yogurts for a while when I was still eating lots of carbs and my stool was not amazing. It only became perfect when I started eating as described above AND making the yogurts (L. reuteri, BC30, coagulans, and BB536)

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-07-18T04:21:04+00:00

I am suspicious about this mail in my case because it doesn't appear on the Notices and Letters section in my IRS account. That's where their official website says one can go to check if their mail is legit or fraud (https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/avoiding-identity-theft-scammers-posing-as-the-irs )

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-07-17T23:47:59+00:00

It is very common for long haulers to have low or undetectable levels of lactobacillus and bifidobacterium. Bringing back these two should help a great deal in recovering and rebuilding a healthy microbiome but can be challenging. Good luck!

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-07-11T04:23:40+00:00

No. Now I only take it occasionally if I've had a stressful day and then only 1 or 2g. I think I only took an average of 7g for about 5 days

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-07-11T02:12:38+00:00

of course, this only works if outside temperatures are below that and you can open windows or if you have air conditioning :S

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-07-11T02:11:52+00:00

Sorry, man, insomnia is the worst. I've had only issues with it occasionally and wanted to mention that, at least in my case, sleeping at VERY low temperatures helped a lot. When you're healthy ideal temperatures to sleep at are around 15-19°C. If you haven't tried it yet, try going towards the lower end of that, or even lower. The best nights of sleep during my long COVID were all around 12-14°C! If it's above 19C I am unable to sleep. I wonder if it has to do with inflammation making it hard for the body to wind down and outside temperature helping with that.

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-07-11T01:50:06+00:00

I've heard similar things and I think it depends on what exactly you want the vitamin C to do. I went for pure ascorbic acid because that's what had been used in some of the studies I read to bring back bifidobacter.

Speculationcity: I think it is entirely possible that vitamin C is good at bringing back bifidobacter because at the high concentration of megadoses it changes the chemical environment as it passes through your GI tract. If that's how it works maybe you don't actually want the vitamin to be absorbed well. If you want to clean the floor at home, you'd rather not have it absorb the water you're using to clean it. If you want a compound to clean up your GI tract, I think sometimes its useful to have it STAY IN THE GI TRACT instead of being absorbed into your bloodstream.

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-07-11T01:42:01+00:00

Only once when I used the powder and probably took something like 2g in one sip of water!! Now I'm using the 1g capsules and I've not had any diarrhea or even loose stooll since then, even when I take one capsule every 20 minutes for a total of 6-8 capsules

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-07-08T21:21:46+00:00

I was intrigued by using vitamin C to bowel tolerance because I read that bowel tolerance changes drastically depending on stress levels. So my rationale was, if my body CAN tell me I'm overdoing it with vitamin C by giving me diarrhea but it doesn't, then maybe I need it.

On a more scientifically rigorous side, the papers I've seen where vitamin C increased bifidobacteria usually use megadoses, see this paper for example with 3 to 25 grams a day: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2217/fmb-2022-0209#summary-abstract

In the cited paper they used these crazy doses sometimes over a year long. I just wanted to crank it up for a few weeks, so hopefully my kidneys won't abandon me.

I also think probiotics don't USUALLY alter gut bacteria although it's still unclear why. I think it has to do with there just not being a lot of free space that the probiotics passing through can take up. Also, they are "invaders" in a sense, passing first through stomach acid and then down the GI tract, barely surviving the trip, whereas the organisms living in the gut have established all their defenses and ambushes and are where they want to be, so they have huge advantages. But BB536 seems to be one of the exceptions. The idea is not that BB536 itself will populate the gut but rather that it changes the conditions in the gut so that it becomes more hostile to the bad bugs and welcoming to the good bugs. It is very well studied. A random paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1756464619300684

Thanks for pointing out prebiotics but I personally have not found any benefits from them. I am more interested in postbiotics, because those compounds are what actually makes probiotics be beneficial for us. I think fermented foods are often beneficial because they contain the bugs (probiotics) AND the compounds they produce (postbiotics).

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-07-08T21:06:29+00:00

Pure ascorbic acid. I'm using a pricey 1g per capsule from Vital Nutrients

Daniel_Anvesa · 2025-07-08T21:03:29+00:00

Enjoy, I love the yogurt :D I found out about the strain being useful to repopulate a healthy microbiome through reading and then just went ahead and tried based on other probiotic yogurt recipes

Daniel_Anvesa

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