What are the risks of contracting the brain parasite toxoplasma from cat litter or meat? 

The brain parasite toxoplasma “is responsible for considerable morbidity and mortality,” that is, disease and death, “in the United States.” It holds second place as the leading cause of foodborne-related death in the United States, after Salmonella. The parasite can invade through the placenta, so it can be especially devastating during pregnancy, leading to miscarriages, blindness, or developmental delay. It can impair cognitive function in adults, too, which explains why those who are infected appear to be at increased risk for getting into traffic accidents, for instance. “Multiple lines of evidence indicate that chronic infections caused by T. gondii [toxoplasma] are likely associated with certain psychiatric disorders in human beings.” It may even increase the risk of developing leukemia. That’s a lot! So, how do you prevent it? 

The parasite can get into the muscles, so we can contract it through meat consumption. We can also get infected through contact with feces from animals like cats. Thankfully, in cats, the “danger of infection exists only when the animal is actively shedding oocysts,” the tissue cysts formed by the parasite. Cats get it from eating infected rodents, so those “that are kept indoors, do not hunt, and are not fed raw meat are not likely to acquire T. gondii infection and therefore pose little risk to humans.” If neighborhood or feral cats are turning gardens or sandboxes at your local playground into a litter box, though, that could be a problem. As many as 6 percent of stray cats or those with outdoor access may be actively infected at any one time. They only shed the parasite for a few weeks, though, so if you adopt a cat from a shelter, they should be safe as long as they hadn’t just gone in. 

Many women have heard about the cat connection but may be less aware of the risk of foodborne infection. Only about one in three may be aware that toxoplasma “may be found in raw or undercooked meat. Nevertheless, a high percentage of women indicated that they do not eat undercooked meat during pregnancy and that they practice good hygienic measures such as washing their hands after handling raw meat, gardening [where cats may be pooping] or changing cat litter.” 

What’s the riskiest type of meat? “Cattle are not considered important hosts” for the parasite; it’s more pigs and poultry, as well as sheep and goats. The prevalence of infection among factory-farmed pigs varies from 0 to more than 90 percent. Ironically, “the likelihood of T. gondii infection in organic meat…appears to be higher than that in conventionally reared animals” because organically raised animals have outdoor access. 

Who undercooks pork and poultry, though? Surprisingly, when it comes to reaching necessary pathogen-killing temperatures, about one in three Americans may undercook meat across the board. A single slice of ham, for example, can carry more than a thousand parasites per slice. 

“Current meat inspection at slaughterhouse cannot detect the presence of T. gondii” parasites. There are tests you can perform, but “there is no widespread testing in meat inspection.” However, the risk from a single serving of meat is very small. The average probability of infection per serving of lamb, for example, was estimated to be about 1 in 67,000. The reason there are 16 times the number of cases attributed to pork consumption is not because pigs are more affected; we just happen to eat a lot more pork chops than lamb chops in the United States. 

Is there anything we can do if we’re one of the approximately one in four Americans who has already been infected? Well, one of the problems with having these parasites in our brain is accelerated cognitive decline as we age. A study evaluated older adults every year for five years and found that the executive function of those testing positive for toxoplasma seemed to drop more quickly over time, as did a measure of their overall mental status. You can see this at 3:26 in my video How to Prevent Toxoplasmosis. 

Reduced folate availability is also associated with cognitive decline, and the two may actually be related. “Recent evidence suggests that T. gondii may harvest folate from host neural cells”—directly from our nerve cells. So, beyond dopamine production, which is why we think toxo increases the risk of schizophrenia, the parasite may be sucking folate out of our brain. Enough to affect our cognitive functioning? 

Perhaps so. In the graph below and at 4:04 in my video, you can see a chart measuring cognitive function across a range of folate concentrations. Among those who are uninfected, it doesn’t seem to matter whether they have a lot of folate or just a little; they obviously have enough either way. But those who are infected have worse scores at lower levels. The same with vitamin B12, so it’s important to get enough B12 and folate. For B12, the official recommendation is that all people aged 50 and older should start taking a vitamin B12 supplement or eat vitamin B12-fortified foods every day. And, anyone on a plant-based diet should start taking that advice at any age. Folate is found concentrated in beans and greens, so following my Daily Dozen recommendations will get you more than enough. For example, half a cup of cooked lentils gets you halfway there, as does three-quarters of a cup of cooked spinach. 

Of course, toxoplasmosis is not the only reason to make sure you get enough vitamin B12. See, for example, Vitamin B12 Necessary for Arterial Health, and check out my optimum nutrient recommendations. 

This was part of my four-video series on toxoplasmosis. If you missed any of the others, see: 

• Toxoplasmosis: A Manipulative Foodborne Brain Parasite 
• Long-Term Effects of Toxoplasmosis Brain Infection 
• Does Toxoplasmosis Cause Schizophrenia? 

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The number one killer on Earth is a bad diet, and high blood pressure is killer number two. The reason it’s so deadly is that it increases your risk of dying from so many different diseases—from heart disease and stroke to kidney and heart failure.

There’s an exponential increase in our risk of dying from a stroke or heart disease as our pressures go up, starting from around 110 over 70. We used to consider a blood pressure as high as 175 to be normal, but that’s “normal” if you wanted to die from the normal diseases, like heart attack and stroke.

 

What Is the Normal Blood Pressure Range?

A “normal” blood pressure of 175 over 110 could put you at more than a 1,000 percent higher risk of dying from a stroke compared to the ideal pressure—not the normal pressure, but the ideal, which is down around 110 over 70. 

As I discuss in my video What the New Blood Pressure Range Guidelines Mean, the definition of high blood pressure, hypertension, dropped from as high as 190 over 110 down to 160 over 95, with treatment thresholds for high-risk groups starting at 150 over 90 down to 140 over 90, then, most recently, down to 130 over 80. Now, with this new definition, instead of one in three Americans having hypertension, it’s closer to one in two people or two-thirds among those over the age of 45.

The bottom line is that Americans are diseased. The number one killer of American men and women is heart disease, a disease that can be prevented, arrested, and reversed with a healthy enough diet. 

A blood pressure of 120 over 80 may be normal, but 110 would be a better top number and 70 a better lower number, as even down in that range between 70 to 75 or 75 to 80, each 5-point increment is associated with a third more stroke and at least a fifth more heart disease. So, why are the new guidelines up at 130 over 80?

 

Popping Pills to Push Down Pressures

With an average of three different blood-pressure drugs, you can force blood pressures down from 140 to 120, compared to taking only two blood-pressure drugs, and high-risk people live longer because of it. Researchers found significantly less death in the intensive treatment group, but, because of the higher doses and drugs, more side effects, so you have to weigh the risks versus the benefits.

One to 2 percent of people on blood-pressure drugs for five years will benefit—not having a cardiovascular event when they otherwise might have, for instance—but that has to be balanced against the higher risk of adverse side effects. The drugs may decrease the risk of cardiovascular events by 25 percent but increase the risk of a serious side effect by 88 percent, but events can include death, whereas most side effects are more on the order of fainting.

If we use drugs to push high-risk people down to a top number of 120, more than 100,000 deaths and 46,000 cases of heart failure may be prevented every year, but “43,000 cases of electrolyte abnormalities and 88,000 cases of acute kidney injury” could be caused. Not great, but better than dying.

Lowering blood pressure is good for your heart, kidneys, and brain, but at a certain point, the side effects from the drugs could outweigh the benefits. Ideally, we want to get patients’ blood pressures as low as possible, but we only want to use drugs to do it “when the effects of treatment are likely to be less destructive than the elevated [blood pressure] BP.”

 

How to Lower Blood Pressure Naturally

If only there were a way to lower blood pressures without drugs to get the best of both worlds. Thankfully, there is: regular aerobic exercise, weight loss, smoking cessation, increased dietary fiber intake, decreased alcoholic beverage intake, consumption of a more plant-based diet, and cutting down on salt. The advantage is, first of all, no bad side effects. Some lifestyle interventions can actually work better than drugs, because you’re treating the cause, and they actually have good side effects instead. So, we aren’t talking about just 1 or 2 percent of people benefitting over five years. Everybody benefits.

 

What Foods Lower Blood Pressure?

Eating a plant-based diet filled with fiber and potassium-rich foods and less saturated fat may drop pressures. As I discuss in my video How to Lower Blood Pressure Naturally with Lifestyle Changes, even just adding fruits and vegetables to the diets of hypertensives can lower their systolic blood pressure—the top number—by seven points. That’s the kind of blood pressure improvement you might get from losing ten pounds, but it was achieved just by eating more fruits and vegetables. And, if that’s combined with a drop in meat consumption, slashing intake of saturated fat and cholesterol, pressures can be cut by 11 points.

 

What Is the Quickest Natural Way to Lower Blood Pressure?

It’s simple: Eat more plants and less meat, restrict alcohol consumption, lose excess weight, exercise regularly, and cut salt intake.

When individuals were put on a purely plant-based diet, even one moderate in sodium, hypertensives saw their systolic pressure drop by 18 points, even after nine out of ten of them reduced their blood pressure medications or stopped them entirely—all within just seven days. That’s pretty impressive! What if you took that same diet but added fasting? A drop by 37 points!

 

Does Fasting Lower Blood Pressure?

In my video Fasting to Naturally Reverse High Blood Pressure, I discuss what happens with medically supervised water-only fasting in the treatment of high blood pressure. All of the study participants came in hypertensive with blood pressures over 140 over 90, but nine out of ten of them—89 percent—walked out with pressures under 140 over 90. The average reduction in systolic blood pressure was 37 points, which is remarkable compared to other interventions, including drugs. And that was just the average drop. Those who came in with really high pressures (over 180, for instance) experienced a 60-point drop, and that was after they had all stopped all their blood pressure medications.

The researchers concluded that “medically supervised water-only fasting appears to be a safe and effective means of normalizing blood pressure.” (No one should be fasting unsupervised for more than a day or two.)

 

Dropping Down and Staying Down

The secret to long-term benefits may be in helping to kickstart a healthier diet by cleansing our palate, which has been so deadened by hypersweet, hypersalty, hyperfatty foods. After not eating for a week, your regular, normal, healthy real food tastes good again. The ripest peach in the world might taste sour after a bowl of Froot Loops, but fasting may re-sensitize our taste buds, such that you can enjoy something like corn on the cob without added butter and salt. So, you get the best of both worlds: tastes great and less killing.

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The brain parasite toxoplasma may be one of the most important risk factors for schizophrenia. 

Toxoplasma “infects about one-third of the population of developed countries” and about one in four adults in the United States. However, the “life-long presence of dormant stages of this parasite in the brain and muscular tissues of infected humans is usually considered asymptomatic from a clinical point of view.” There is “a complex and dynamic interplay between the parasite, brain microenvironment [our brain], and the immune response that results in the detente that promotes the life-long persistence of the parasite in the host.” We can’t rid it from our brain, but we can at least keep it from killing us, unless we get AIDS or another disease that causes our immune defenses to drop. 

“Within the past 10 years, however, many independent studies have shown that this parasitic disease…could be indirectly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths due to its effects on the rate of traffic and workplace accidents, and also suicides. Moreover, latent toxoplasmosis is probably one of the most important risk factors for schizophrenia.” 

As I discuss in my video Does Toxoplasmosis Cause Schizophrenia?, schizophrenia does have a strong genetic component. But, even if you have the exact same genes as a schizophrenic—for instance, if your identical twin has schizophrenia—the chances of you having it are still probably less than 50 percent. So, what else might increase risk? As you can see at 1:22 in my video, studies performed over five decades in 20 countries found toxoplasma infection nearly triples the odds of schizophrenia, “which is more than any ‘gene for schizophrenia’ that has been described so far.” Now, obviously, everyone who gets this parasite in their brain does not develop schizophrenia. It may depend on where exactly in the brain the parasite takes up residence. But this “increased prevalence of toxoplasmosis in schizophrenics was demonstrated by at least 50 studies…” 

Those were published studies, though. What about studies that weren’t published? Maybe some didn’t find any connection, or perhaps there were others that were just shelved. “In schizophrenia, the evidence of an association with T. gondii [toxoplasma] is overwhelming, despite evidence of publication bias.” 

It’s still just an association, though. Instead of toxoplasma causing schizophrenia, maybe schizophrenia causes toxoplasmosis. “Institutionalized psychiatric patients may be fed undercooked meat, thereby increasing their exposure to T. gondii,” for example. That’s where military studies come in. “The U.S. military routinely collects and stores serum [blood] specimens of military service members,” which “affords a unique opportunity” to check people for infection well before the diagnosis of disease, so you can see which came first. And, indeed, the toxoplasma came first. The infection was found prior to the onset of psychotic symptoms. 

“The strongest evidence for the causal [cause-and-effect] role of Toxoplasma in triggering schizophrenia comes from a recent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study showing that differences in brain morphology [structure], originally thought to be characteristic of schizophrenia patients…are actually present only in the subpopulation of Toxoplasma-infected patients,” that is, only in those infected with the parasite. There are “gray matter anomalies” more often found in schizophrenia patients. But, as you can see at 3:12 in my video, when you divide the subjects into those who tested positive and negative for toxoplasmosis, you only really see it in the infected brains. 

Does this mean we might be able to treat schizophrenia with antiparasitic drugs? There is a tetracycline-type drug, minocycline, that can kill toxoplasma in mice and seems to improve symptoms when given to schizophrenics, but it may also have independent anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties, so we don’t know if was a toxo effect. “Future research should look to delineate the antiparasitic effect of minocycline” by testing the patients for toxo to see if the drugs work better in those who have been infected. 

There have been four randomized controlled trials specifically evaluating antiparasitic drugs in patients with schizophrenia, and no effect has been found. But, incredibly, not a single one of those studies used a drug that has been shown to actively kill off the parasites once they have been walled off in the brain. “After acute infection, parasites form walled cysts in the brain, leading to lifelong chronic infection and drug resistance to commonly used antiparasitics.” However, “there are currently no ongoing trials of anti-Toxoplasma therapy in schizophrenia despite ample evidence to justify further testing.” I hope a researcher reading this will realize the “time is ripe to evaluate antiparasitic drugs in Toxoplasma-infected patients with schizophrenia.” 

 This video is part of a series on toxoplasmosis, including: 

• Toxoplasmosis: A Manipulative Foodborne Brain Parasite 
• Long-Term Effects of Toxoplasmosis Brain Infection 
• How to Prevent Toxoplasmosis 

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