Drugs in America

We have a split personality in this country about which drugs are "good" and which drugs are "bad." Both kinds are powered by desire for huge financial gains, regardless of the story we've been told. In fact, the motivation and self interest of the corner drug dealer and cartels of Mexico etc, are at least fairly obvious and honest about their self interest. They want your money, want to get users hooked and have no care about long term effects. The motivations of Big Pharma are exactly the same, but they lie about it.

No drug prescribed by a doctor or hospital is without a huge biological price tag--some worse than others. Most are not even as effective a treatment as they've told us. I was apalled to find my mother taking a drug for arythmia, one of the side effects of which is "irregular heartbeat!" WHAT!!!

A powerful and informative article with info you may not know re: drugs can be found here

short version: http://tinyurl.com/6hlrtae
or long version:

http://www.sayerji.com/published-writings/drugs-the-illegality-of-healing-and-pharmaggedon?utm_source=www.GreenMedInfo.com&utm_campaign=d6338dec87-oct.news&utm_medium=email

Worth a look! (Drugs, the Illegality of Healing and Pharmageddon)

For more info about being a smarter health care consumer, see the ebook by the same name available here: http://mindingthemiddleagedmiddle.com/e-books.shtml

It's an information age! Finding the right information is the trick!

Best wishes,

Ellie

Did they warn you about this drug you get at every meal?

How many of these adverse health effects are you noticing? They are from this highly toxic drug:
1. Fatigue.
2. Brain fogginess and inability to focus.
3. High blood sugar.
4. Intestinal bloating ,
5. Sleepiness, especially after meals.
6. Weight gain
7. Increased blood triglyceride levels.
8. Increased blood pressure.
9. Depression.
10. Acanthosis nigricans.
11. Increased hunger
12. Abnormal blood clotting
13. Increased inflammatory cytokine levels.

The drug? INSULINIf you checked even one off that list, you need more information about this powerful drug. Every meal, every snack, you might be getting a toxic dose. How?

Insulin is produced by your pancreas when your blood sugar increases. If you eat carbohydrates (sugar, grains, starchy root veggies, regular vegetables and fruits). These foods convert to glucose in your blood. They don’t all convert at the same rate, however. Some carbohydrates convert quickly and flood your blood with sugar (which is toxic). Insulin is released to bring down this blood sugar.

But high levels of insulin are also toxic, as witnessed by the above list.

Fortunately, we have scientific tools to evaluate the blood sugar from food and the resulting insulin response. They’re called glycemic index and glycemic load. The first is about the speed that a food converts to sugar and the second (load) is about the absolute amount of sugar. The glycemic load is the more useful of the two for our purposes. If the glycemic load of a food is below 10, you won’t end up with too much toxic blood sugar or insulin. At http://mindingthemiddleagedmiddle.com/articles.shtml the last article on that page is a list of very low glycemic load foods. If you like looking things up online, try this website: http://nutritiondata.self.com/ You can look up a wide variety of foods and adjust the serving size to see what the glycemic load is. Remember, to avoid toxic levels of insulin, keep load at 10 or below.

No question, insulin is a drug with very harmful potential. Note that it increases blood pressure, harmful clotting disorders, makes you hungrier and causes system-wide inflammation (which starts all disease processes.) These are HUGE!!! This is a dangerous drug!

But here’s the definition of a drug… any substance that, when absorbed into the body of a living organism, alters normal bodily function.

When you eat sugary foods or high density carbohydrates like grains, they alter normal bodily functions (by increasing insulin). Food is a drug. And the scary thing about it is that it’s a drug you put into your body multiple times per day. Eat wisely!

The problem with observations

I look at the pictures out there of all the swimmers who have made a splash. I note that they tend to be long, lean folk and have what's commonly called a swimmer's build. I, myself, want a swimmer's build, so it makes sense for me to take up swimming! Right? If I swim enough, I will develop a swimmers build!

This is a common mistake humans make about observations. We assume that swimmers got their build by what they do. But in actual fact, if you go to a swim meet and watch all the swimmers in all the qualifying rounds, you would see practically every sort of body build there is. As competitors swim in each succeeding competitive heat, an evolution of appearance happens. Winners of each race tend to become more and more similar in build until the championship race, to us, it appears as though all the swimmers have the same type of body.

There is a body type that's well suited to doing well at swimming and that's what we've seen. Those born with a swimmer's build tend to do better at this sport. They're good at swimming in part because they started out long and lean. They didn't get that way as a result of what they did! This is the fallibility of human observation. And we need to remember that fallibility when we're looking at scientific studies, for that same problem can crop up there, too. Just because things happen together, doesn't mean they are cause and effect!

Media is very prone to this sort of jumping to conclusions. Scientists do it too, sometimes, especially when their funding is involved. To top it off, in scientific studies--especially about nutrition--it's very complex what people eat and hard to figure out all the possible variables. They're called confounding factors. Suppose they do a study that concludes that people who eat less meat have fewer heart attacks. Can we conclude that meat causes heart attacks? What if it turns out that the people in this study who eat less meat, are also way more health conscious than the other group which contains a lot of smokers and drinkers. Now what does it tell us? Hmmm.

It pays to be very cautious about drawing conclusions. Interpretation killed a lot of great theories. Like I have to swim to get a swimmer's build. It turns out, I have to pick my parents to get that swimmers build!

News Diet Coming From Europe!

There’s a new diet coming at us from Europe. I haven’t read the book so I can’t really speak to the details, but it’s a variety of high protein, very low carbohydrate diet. I mean, you can hardly get serious about losing weight without at least considering insulin (which stores fat and prevents fat burning). Insulin is secreted in response to blood sugar and blood sugar ONLY comes from the carbohydrates you eat—not protein or fat. So there are a lot of these showing up!

I’m a proponent of much lower carbs than most Americans eat. I’m also a proponent of higher protein than most Americans eat. This particular diet suggests high protein and low fat (something I recommend in my e-book, “Minding the Middle Aged Middle.”)

So I bring this up because of a comment in the news article I read. Here’s a quote, by someone opposed to this diet.

“Even if you can survive it for the first few days, it’s hard to stick with it.
It’s hard on your kidneys. "

Note the bolded sentence. This particular person says eating lots of meat is hard on your kidneys. He say this as though it is fact and not subject to any question. Here’s the history on this really stupid piece of misinformation that keeps getting passed around—and oh, yes, it REALLY annoys me! Like so much of the information we are “fed!”

In 1983 some researchers discovered that higher protein in the diet resulted in more blood flow through the kidneys. Like many myths, this began with the mistaken ASSUMPTION that more blood flow was hard on the kidneys. That erroneous information has stuck in much of the popular psyche and press, including some medical people who should know better. Much research since then has demonstrated that more blood flow is not stressful on the kidneys and does no harm whatsoever. High protein is not damaging to or hard on the kidneys!

This blog, my website, my e-books are pushing against a tide of this kind of crappy information that is foisted on us. There is so much bad information out there! Some is bad science, some is misinformation by those who haven’t a clue, and some is based on economic interests. I’ll keep telling you about bad information and where you can get better information, but please, please, be wary about what shows up in the popular media. I understand how hard it is to tease out what’s really good information. But it’s worth your effort!

Best wishes!
Ellie

How Did You Feel the Last Time You Had a Fever?

Do you recall that really awful feeling when you had the flu or an infection of some kind? Once your temp goes up to about 100 degrees or so, you were experiencing the effects of inflammation--your body's immune system fighting off invaders, either bacterial or viral.

Even minor fevers feel pretty darn awful. There is lethargy and tiredness that puts you right down, usually literally into bed or flat on the couch. The all-over achy feeling sometimes morphs into pain every time you move. Your head feels hot, then you have chills, as temperature regulation is all over the place. Your brain gets fuzzy, and it’s hard to track the simplest ideas or sequences. That extra heat that we call fever, is designed to make your body inhospitable to the invaders. And it feels crappy to the max.

Inflammation is part of your body’s remarkably beautiful adaptation that keeps you healthy. It came about during millions of years of development so you would outlive bacteria that wanted to make a meal of you. During that development—right along with it in fact—your diet consisted of the things that small family groups managed to hunt and gather--leaves, berries, roots, small birds and reptiles, bugs, and the game they killed. Those things were ‘factored’ into the system of inflammation.

Along comes “civilization” and agriculture. Now you hunt a loaf of bread and gather a Big Mac and coke. Oops, the system was not developed with these things factored in. A biology that’s designed with low calorie, low glucose, high animal products and animal fat plus plenty of exercise now is trying to deal with high calories, masses of glucose and oil from plants rather than animals plus remote control. What’s a biology to do?

The short answer is that your biology says, “We’re under attack! Let’s raise a fever and kill off the invaders.” But this attack is not quite the same as bacteria so your body does the best it knows how—it causes an all-over, system wide inflammation that we now know as chronic inflammation. Every cell in your body is now inflammed—simmering.

So when you have chronic inflammation, you are more tired than you should be. You might be foggy. Or you have aches and pains that you didn’t used to have. You want a nap, or your knees hurt, or you can’t think straight, or you go to the doctor and he calls it “arthritis” or “you’re just getting older” or “high stress.” Or someone makes up a new name so they can sell you medication, like “restless leg syndrome,” or “chronic dry eye” or “light bladder leakage.”

Your birthright as a human animal is vibrant, vigorous good health and feeling good. Not tired, not achy, not foggy, not anxious, depressed or diseased. The trick to feeling good, not feverish, is to eat a low calorie, low glucose, high animal product diet and quit making your body think you’re under attack!

Chronic inflammation not only makes you feel crappy, eventually it damages organs, tissues and other things inside you. Now you have honest to goodness disease to deal with. But it all stems from departure from what your biology was designed to deal with. What this blog/newsletter is about is figuring out how to get back to what we’re adapted for because there’s a huge payoff in how we’re going to feel.

I'd love to hear your story! I'll be telling my own!

A Big Fat Controversy

That low fat diet that your doctor told you to go on to lose weight and lower cholesterol? It made you fatter, raised your triglycerices and "bad" cholesterol. Finally, the word is starting to get out there in the mainstyream media. See this article in the Huffington Post and start watching as more and more people report the low fat diet was a crock! Saturated fat is what we were designed to eat, not vegetable oil or (gasp) trans fat (a franken food if there ever was one.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristin-wartman/a-big-fat-debate_b_831332.html