For long time followers of this blog will remember my account of my time at the start of my GI-trouble journey, which largely started in 2005-2008 when I was hit with an abscess, multiple corrective surgeries, ulcerative colitis and celiac disease. This was a particularly bad time in my life. After going gluten-free things got much better, I healed, but I was still left with many food sensitivities, including IBS symptoms and horrible gas.
Since I've been using hookworms, by and large I've been riding a cloud of normalcy. Stools are normal, well-formed, produced at an acceptable frequency and are painless. When my hookworms have died off because of ignorance or carelessness, my old symptoms return and I have to temporarily go back on a restricted gluten-free diet and suffer from low grade colitis symptoms regardless how cleanly I eat. Thirty days after larvae inoculation though, I'm back to good health.
So understanding all this, I've been disappointed recently seeing blood in my stool. I've seen this before. With ulcerative colitis I would regularly turn the bowl red. In fact, I was banned from donating blood for 5 years because of low iron, and it's only been recently that I've restarted donating. I've tracked down the problem to peanuts, both whole and peanut butter. So far as I know, peanuts are my only Achilles heel, though I suspect pistachios might have the same effect.
I'm mid-cycle with hookworms, so I don't think I'm deficient in hookworm protection. I'm thinking rather I've probably always been vulnerable to peanuts and simply wasn't observant enough to notice. Not great, but this is a still far cry from the old days when any meat would have me screaming in pain and a sandwich would make me projectile vomit and feel like passing out.
Googling, I found this article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9428217/. It talks about how peanut lectin interacts with cells in the colon in some individuals. Seems hookworms make my GI tract almost normal, but not 100% normal, and peanuts are simply beyond what hookworms can help with.
After my successful incubation last month, I took the opportunity to use some of the larvae for an early inoculation. I used 18 larvae. Going forward, I'm going to use 10 larvae every 2 months and see how that goes.
