Your autoimmune condition isn't what you think

But the symptoms are caused by a 'loop in the brain.'

It’s just after Christmas in 2023, and I’m reacting to something I ate.

I’ve been playing private investigator with food my whole life at this point, so I quickly identify what I think the culprit is: apple-cider vinegar.

Maybe whatever company produced it used solvent in the process. I didn’t make it myself, you see.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

My next thought: I should learn to make it myself. To take control over what I ingest, to make sure it’s as pure and close to the source as possible. After all, if

Ashley Adamant

can do it, I can, too. How have we lost these key survival skills? As Western civilization continues to collapse, aren’t we all going to need to relearn old habits, like making vinegar out of fruit scraps? Limitless progress is just a myth.

I’ve written about this already. I call it our slowpocalypse.

Welcome to the slowpocalypse

But as I explained last week when I dismantled the argument for free-range backyard chickens, I’d be adding handcrafting vinegar to an incredibly lengthy list:

growing a good portion of our fruit and vegetables, sprouting and grinding grain, baking with sourdough, culturing dairy and kefir water, growing herbs to use for herbal medicine, washing dishes by hand, filtering tap water, and preserving food through canning, fermentation, and dehydrating.

I did all that while also volunteering as a citizen scientist, conducting bee surveys in my garden. AND I was working as a story consultant on app games (that biz is called Brunette, too), managing a full-time staff of five, and writing posts at least once a week for this Substack.

That’s a lot.

It was already too much, and the idea of adding handmade vinegar to the list kind of broke me.

Don’t get me wrong—I’d definitely felt the benefits of a cleaner diet. I’d crested into my fifties here without any life-threatening chronic diseases while my Gen X cohort suffers higher rates than the Boomers before them¹.

Diet didn’t solve my problems

However, the diet I went to great lengths to achieve hadn’t moved the needle at all on mast-cell activation syndrome (MCAS). While not life-threatening, the host of MCAS symptoms I’d lived with since early childhood lower my quality of life on a daily and nightly basis.

Desperate for new solutions, I found myself reading through details posted online for yet another highly restrictive diet for MCAS. But that diet wasn’t the answer. I’d tried it before. It’s not only nearly impossible to achieve but pretty much drains all pleasure from eating.

I found the answer instead in the comment section for that diet post, where a woman claimed her daughter’s MCAS had been completely cured through brain retraining.

She linked to The Gupta Program.

Backed by science

As I am skeptical and make a habit of doing my own research, I looked at several other programs as well but returned to Gupta because of the clinical research they’ve done to show a 52 percent increase in overall health specifically for MCAS sufferers after at least three months on the program².

None of the many interventions tried over the course of my half-century battle gave me that kind of success! Not even treatment with low-dose naltrexone (LDN), which is the latest offering from mainstream medicine, which likes to find pharmaceutical solutions.

Letting go of the dream

LDN gave me some relief. The drug works in part by tricking your body into manufacturing more “feel-good” chemicals like serotonin; people with autoimmune conditions often have lower levels of these. But after a year, LDN wasn’t working for me at all anymore; all of my symptoms slowly returned.

Always an active dreamer, I had also gone completely dreamless, an aspect of my creative personality I dearly missed. After all, I’d authored an entire detective series about sleuths who solve crime through psychic dreaming.

The lack of dreams was a small price to pay for better health, though, and since those dreams often manifest as nightmares, I was OK with it. If LDN had continued to offer at least some measurable relief, I’d still be on it.

That goes the same for my extreme urban-homesteader eating practices. I’d adopted what you might call the nourishing traditions diet, popularized by Sally Fallon’s landmark book of the same name. Here’s where I spell out my diet:

Navigating the autoimmune condition

At the end of the piece, I talk about the next step in my health journey—meditation and brain retraining—posing these questions:

Is it possible to rewire your brain to stop triggering an autoimmune response to perfectly safe foods? Or even teach your body to rely on its own natural detoxification systems rather than shifting into fight-or-flight reactions?

The answer to both questions is yes.

After more than a year on the Gupta Program and supporting interventions, I’m at a 65 percent improvement in overall symptoms so far.

Brain retraining draws on the exciting discovery of neuroplasticity. This is the fact that your interpretations about what you experience and your beliefs about the world are not set in stone but rather clay, which can be reshaped.

Reconditioning your condition

We retrain our brains all the time when we learn new things.

The easiest, safest example is picking up a new skill, such as piano playing. Positive thinking alone won’t get you there—just believing you can play the piano doesn’t enable you to sit down and perform even something simple like “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

First you have to learn the keys and fingering. Then practice, repetition, and more practice. As any musician can tell you, it takes a lot of practice to get really good at performing music.

Through the Gupta Program, I’ve learned how the central nervous system and immune system play off each other to create a self-perpetuating loop of illness. That’s why, taking a cue from Ashok Gupta, the program founder, I have reframed my condition as neuroimmune instead of autoimmune.

It’s not that my body automatically responds to food and environmental substances that are somehow uniquely harmful to me when they cause no reaction in others. It’s that my brain has learned to trigger a response to these things, creating real symptoms in my body, which then loop back to my brain, falsely confirming that the substances are to blame.

Keep calm and Gupta on

I also learned how to calm my nervous system through meditation, a way of softening that clay, so to speak, so the brain is more malleable.

Some great meditations are available in the Gupta Program’s free trial. I don’t receive anything in exchange for mentioning the program, and I pay for my own full access to their offerings.

Past the program paywall, you’ll find helpful video diagrams that show the communication between parts of your brain and body, the neuroimmune process. Besides getting comfortable with meditation, that’s the first big lesson.

Returning to the idea of playing the piano, while positive thinking alone won’t turn you into a virtuoso, a good attitude can help. That’s challenging for those of us with these conditions. Remember what I said about our lower levels of “feel-good” chemicals? Hard to be peppy without those!

But meditation helps. So does having the support of your loved ones.

But what about food?

As of today, my biggest success in the Gupta Program has been in breaking free of my locked-in associations between food and other substances and my bodily symptoms.

That might sound easy to you, but for me it’s been quite difficult.

Our modern food supply is simultaneously stunningly good and egregiously bad. On one hand, walk into a typical American grocery store, and you’ll find aisles and aisles of colorful, seemingly healthful options. On the other hand, most of that food is processed with fillers, additives, and preservatives, many of those designed by scientists specifically to trick your taste receptors into overindulging.

In my lifetime, our wonderful whole foods have been replaced by cheaper, lab-concocted ingredients—all in the name of profit. So even the McDonald’s french fries from my 80s high-school days are now fried in seed oils instead of simple beef tallow—which actually turns out to be something of a super food—and contain other suspect ingredients.

Even what McDonald’s means by “natural beef flavor” in the above is a lab-derived flavoring processed far away from its natural origin. From their own website: “natural Beef Flavor Contains Hydrolyzed Wheat And Hydrolyzed Milk As Starting Ingredients.”

There’s a growing mountain of evidence our modern, overly processed food has contributed greatly to the sharp rise in serious illness and lowered life expectancy.

So I had to separate what’s still truly wrong with modern food from this “loop in the brain,” as Gupta calls it, the culprit behind my many symptoms.

Because they are strongly linked to chronic disease, I try to avoid processed ingredients. They’re also inflammatory, and an inflamed system is more prone to neuroimmune symptoms. An omnivore’s whole food diet is best for me and likely most of us.

Shifting from seeing my condition as autoimmune to neuroimmune was just one part of the process for me. I do have some caveats for you to consider when you sign up for the Gupta Program as well. I’ll dive into more of these topics in future posts.

1. “Gen X faces more years of ill health than baby boomers, study suggests.” 11 March 2025. CNN Health. <https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/14/health/ill-health-baby-boomers-gen-x-wellness/index.html>. July 14, 2020.

2. “Neuroplasticity Intervention, Amygdala and Insula Retraining (AIR), Significantly Improves Overall Health and Functioning Across Various Chronic Conditions.” 11 March 2025 via National Library of Medicine National Center for Biotechnology Information PubMed Central. Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal.<https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10886399/>. Dec 2023.