Two youtube videos to showcase two critical wellness subjects

The first is about the blind faith in doctors that is part of our culture--click here

and the second is more information about salt.  Click here

If you've followed me for long or read any of my e-books, you know that I've reported that restricting salt has no good evidence behind it.  This doctor explains further why this is not only not effective treatment, but deadly if you don't get enough!

The Diet That Shook Up Tennis!!!

The full Wall Street Journal article is at the below link.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703509104576327624238594818.html 

The article is about the new Wimbledon winner, Novak Djokovic, from Serbia.

Here is a quote:

"But no one would have predicted what has transpired since January. Djokovic's season has gone from good to great to outrageously, impossibly, unrealistically phenomenal. In an age when even small sports achievements can get enormous hype, there's really no superlative to describe what the soon-to-be 24-year-old has done this year."

And what made the difference for this elite athlete?  He discovered his gluten allergy and got off gluten--no wheat!  And went from a pretty good tennis player to the world's best. Can eliminating wheat really make that much difference?  Well, Novak defeated Andy Murry of Great Brittain in the semi finals.  Murray is ranked fourth in the World.  Andy Murray’s diet was in the news earlier this week too (before he got knocked out of Wimbledon). It’s the usual carb-loaded fare many sportsmen and women are advised to eat--and the same level of blood sugar and insulin swamping of the typical American diet.

What elite athletes show us is a microcosm of the larger area of nutrition.  If you want optimal performance (for your life) try an anti-inflammatory diet like your long ago ancestors were adapted for.  Your genetics are the same as theirs.  No, there has been no adaptation in humans for grains and sugars in 10,000  years.  None.  It wrecks havoc.  Elimingating that havoc is most likely why Novak Djokovic beat Nadal and Murray at Wimbledon and has the Wall Street Journal speaking in such over-the-top-superlatives.  What do you suppose it could do your your ability to feel and perform better?

More on Gut Bacteria (and enzymes)

Below you will find some links to general information and some specific info, too, about what's known or strongly suspected about gut bateria and the health and aging issues I talked about briefly last time.  They are worth at least a quick perusal.

But while I am still on this subject I want to discuss som major MIS-information that shows up in gut flora/fermented foods discussions and also in many other areas of nutrition--especially the raw foods stuff.

Enzymes in food.  Touted as being very health-ful to eat raw, untreated enzymes.  Here's the deal.  Yes enzymes are important--even critical for well being.  They are proteins with a very specific 3-dimensional shape and they help chemical reactions that otherwise could not happen.  You body makes trillions of enzymes over your lifetime.  They always need the right building blocks to be constructed, of course--like particular vitamins or minerals.

The enzymes in the food we eat are specific for the compound it comes in.  Enzymes in carrots help the carrot plant in some way.  Enzymes in kefir (for instance) are specific for the bacteria and yeasts in the kefir, so they can digest the components of milk in the fermenting process.  When you eat the enzymes from something raw, the acid in your stomach and the digestive process denature that enzyme just as your digestion breaks down ANY protein molecule.  They're protein and they do not survive your stomach acid.  They have the same use to you as a molecule of any protein--nothing special.

There are those who would have you believe eating enzymes is particularly healthful.  No!  Having adequate nutrition to build the specific enzymes your body needs is very healthful, but eating those from "out there" doesn't mean diddley!  This kind of junk science is all over the net.  Be wary.  Enzymes you build internally keep you alive.  Enzymes you eat are fuel--nothing more!

Ok, here are some links to gut flora:

http://omgfatloss.com/blog/can-your-gut-bacteria-make-you-fat/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110517110315.htm  make you anxious
http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/News/2010/news100819.html  in digestion
http://coolinginflammation.blogspot.com/2010/04/aging-gut-flora.html in aging
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/04/us-bacteria-disease-idUSTRE62244320100304 in disease
http://www.purenewyou.com/shop/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=162 general info and disease discussion

The Role of Healthy Gut Flora in Health

Sometimes I learn slowly.  I got a lot of really bad health information over the years--especially before I started asking questions and challenging a lot of "everybody knows" stuff.  Some was by omission.  Or almost omitted.  Like the whole thing about gut flora.  What's really the case is that the healthy bacteria and yeasts in your digestive tract play a huge role in wellness, aging, digestion, how fat or thin you are and what diseases you have.

Boy, that's a lot to lay on gut flora!  Over the coming months I will try to recreate the links to the above information and be sure to give them to you.  But you've probably only heard about gut flora in terms of a very luke warm suggestion to eat some yogurt after you've been on an antibiotic.  That's because antibiotics kill all the good guys in your gut as well as the bad ones that are making you sick.  Unfortunately there are only two or three good bacteria in yogurt and you need lots and lots--both in variety and in numbers.  Remember that our ancestors--those hunters and gatherers--didn't wash their hands or their food.  They must have eaten a lot of dirt and bacteria all day long.  There is evidence that we are designed to eat dirt and bacteria!  Ok, not so practical now days!

So I have recommended to family, friends, and clients that they take a probiotic supplement.  That's a good start.  But most are not much better than yogurt.  In the literature and blogs I comb, many knowledgeable people are recommending fermented foods for the many healthy bacteria they provide.  Among these are  sauerkraut, kefir, kimchee and miso.  Other pickled, brewed and fermented foods may also provide good bacteria.  In these foods, friendly enzymes, fungi and bacteria pre-digest the food and it increases the flavor, medicinal value and nutrition.

I tried kefir.  It is a fermented milk product.  The closest thing I can say is similar is buttermilk, but it's way better!  The commercial stuff I tried was unremarkable and expensive (nearly $5 for a quart of it) and as a digestive aid (cure for diahrrea or constipation) a non starter.  Which highlights the importance of LIVE bacteria and yeasts!  If it's pasteurized or heat treated, those bacteria are killed and not doing you any good. I acquired live kefir grains and started making my own.   I now love kefir. It's too early to say it's making me healthier (probably) for one thing because I'm already darn healthy!.  But digestion is working without problems and I continue to slowly lose weight.  I certainly recommend kefir for anyone and everyone.  Ask me where to get your own grains (and they grow and multiply, too!)

But I started this today to tell you about a study that shows that kefir stopped the proliferation of at least one kind of malignant cancer cells.  Kefir might be the next great cancer drug!  OK, probably one cannot extrapolate yet to that degree--but it's suggestive.  And since we know that the development of cancers are a response to chronic inflammation, we probably can extrapolate that kefir is anti-inflammatory.  Get some!  make your gut healthier but it also reduces the inflammation of a gut out of balance!

How To Avoid or Heal Out-of-Control Inflammation

Chronic inflammation (the out-of-control kind) is the immune response that changes biology from normal to simmering disease incubation.  Chronic inflammation is the body's attempt to heal insults to its biology.  Get a bee sting?  Your immune response walls off the poison with swelling, keeping it localized.  It gets red, hot and painful while the body heals the insult.  Get cut and the same response occurs.  If you are invaded by noxious viruses, your sinuses swell, become inflamed, your nose runs and you might run a fever.  Normal immune response.  Serves us well.

But when your body receives an insult that human biology didn't have to deal with in earliest  development, like something slightly toxic--not enough to kill you, but enough for the immune system to respond, it doesn't have an immune response pre-programmed in.  So your body does the best it knows how.  It causes inflammation just like it would for a bee sting or cut or virus.  Only the response is body wide because the insult isn't localized.  Every cell, now, not just a local area, gets a dose of those inflammatory chemicals the immune system uses for insult repair.

Over time, with enough chronic insult to your biology, inflammation begins damaging the body instead of repairing it.  The damage (as in the last post here) might be low thyroid or depression or the aches and pains of arthritis (or any other itis) or exhaustion.  Chronic inflammation is at the root of all of our wellness woes, large and small.  To the degree you are not vibrant, energetic, pain free, disease free, you have allow this normal repair process to go awry.

HOW?

There are three main ways chronic inflammation becomes part of your experience.

   1.  Eating or being exposed to things you are allergic to or that are toxic.  Smoking, alcohol, pesticides, smog, food allergies (known and unknown) industrial chemicals, air fresheners. 

   2.  Eating things that raise blood sugar and insulin.  High blood sugar is toxic and the insulin your body releases to deal with it is inflammatory.  A double whammy.  What raises blood sugar?  Most of the foods that are a) expensive and b) advertised endlessly!  Sugar, wheat, flour, oats, barley, rice, corn--and anything made from any of those like bread, pasta, deserts, ice cream, soda, cake, cookies, corn meal, hamburger buns, lemonade, sweet tea, crackers, chips, candy, fruit drinks, dipping sauces--well, you get the idea.  If it has sugar and or flour in it it's going to raise your blood sugar and cause inflammation.

   3.  Omega fatty acids out of balance.  Omega 3 fatty acids metabolize into anti-inflammatory chemicals.  Omega 6 fatty acids metabolize into pro-inflammatory chemicals.  If they are balanced, your body works beautifully.  About 30 or 40 years ago you were sold a bill of goods about animal fat ("dangerous" saturated fat equals heart disease)  and told to use vegetable oils instead.  But animal fat is high is Omega 3's vegetable fat is high in Omega 6's.  Hydrogenated vegetable oil is a highly toxic frankenfood!  By time a few brave souls challenged the whole saturated fat and vegetable oil bad-science-hypothesis, America was badly inflamed and sick as dogs and the medical industries dealing with that were entrenched. 

No one has a vested interest in telling you this stuff.  There's no money to be made in telling you you have total control of your wellness.  If no one bought fast food or junk food and things made from wheat, what would happen to the Gross National Product.  If no one got diabetes or cancer or arthritis, what would haven to hospitals, oncologists and endocrinologists and orthopedic surgeons???  What a financial disaster that would be!  But the alternative is that it's a disaster for how people feel, age, and their health.

You have control.  Your wellness is in your own hands.  I won't tell you that it's particularly easy to swim upstream from the conventional wisdom that "everyone knows."  I will tell you that it matters to your life and your aging and when and what you die of.  Best wishes!

Inflammation in two disorders

I  listened to a podcast today by a fellow who calls himself the Healthy Skeptic.  Click here   He often has interesting things to say about health and nutrition.  The first subject he covered today was about thyroid supplements.  That was interesting enough, but buried in there he made an almost off-hand comment.  It was that  older women often show some hypothyroidism because chronic inflammation interferes in the conversion from the inactive to the active form of thyroid hormone.

Ah, so as we age (and if we don’t pay attention to chronic inflammation) that increasing inflammation can be at the root of low thyroid.  Most doctors simply supplement levothroxine the pharmaceutical form of T-4 the inactive form of the hormone.  If the problem is in conversion to the active form, clearly that prescription will give nice numbers but not change symptoms.

So thyroid problem as we age are also laid at the door of inflammation.

You may have heard me say that many mental disorders are now known to be caused by chronic inflammation—including depression. 

Meanwhile, the magazine “Psychology Today” had a recent article titled, “Depression - Caused by Inflammation, Thus Like Other Diseases of Civilization.”    See the article here.

It very thoroughly talks about the mechanisms by which out-of-control inflammation triggers depression.  In my e-book, “Inflammation Run Amok” I talk about the mechanism of inflammation causing heart disease and other diseases.  Here, then, in my version of in a  nutshell how it causes depression.

1.  Tryptophan, an amino acid is a precursor of serotonin, the feel-good neurotransmitter.  But tryptophan is also the precursor of a lesser known neurotransmitter—kynurenic.   In the presence of inflammatory cytokines, tryptophan converts much more to  kynurenic and not to the serotonin, leaving serotonin in short supply.

2.  We have receptors (called NMDA receptors) for a neurotransmitter (glutamate) that causes excitation.  Too much glutamate pounding on these receptors causes depression among other brain problems.   Cells called astrocytes are supposed to clean up extra glutamate to prevent that.  It turns out that inflammatory cytokines interfere with the mop up process.

3.  The article doesn’t explain this thoroughly, but simply states that inflammatory chemicals (cytokines) push the brain from “happy” plasticity to a neurotoxic environment by depressing the production of a type of brain “fertilizer” called BDNF.

To sort of tie the two subjects together today, one of the symptoms of low thyroid is depression (along with a myriad of others) and now we can see that chronic inflammation is playing its negative chemical message in both thyroid and depression problems.

Why inflammation makes some people get a heart attack, some get depressed and some others get diabetes or cancer or osteoporosis (and on and on) I do not know.  It’s easy to just say we’re all different and we all have different histories, diets, and genetics.  As the scientists discover these different pathways to dysfunction, I will continue to report.  Reduce inflammation to reduce risk, cure ailments and age with vigor and function into your late years!!!

Want help with that?  Email me with questions and concerns.

Saturated Fat Again...

I’ve been on the lookout for an organization with whom I could volunteer some time and perhaps make a little difference in the world.  A friend sent me some info about a group locally that is teaching “Better lifestyle habits” to kids.  Since I support that concept I asked for information from the group coordinator.  In the material she sent me was a sample lesson plan, and among it was a unit about how low fat milk or skim milk was the way to go.

Even though there is oodles of research that debunks the "fat is bad" theory, it is persistent and ubiquitous among the “experts” especially those with a formal education in nutrition (registered dieticians) where they’ve been pushing this nonsense for decades!  (And how’s that working for you, America?)

So I thought I’d hit it once again from the perspective of the ‘minority report’—the information that’s not subsidized by special interests or pharmaceutical companies.

Humans developed in bands of family groups living on animal products plus the few fruits, berries, leaves, nuts and roots they could find.  The biology of those ancestors (10,000 years ago or beyond) was EXACTLY the same as our biology.  We are not designed for vegetable oils, grains, tofu and the convenience of fast food or packaged meals.  Those are constructs of profit driven industries looking for the cheapest and most addicting way to separate you from your money.

Grains are a subject for another day and another post.  Fat—especially animal fat—is my subject today.

Our ancestors not only ate all the animal fat they could get (admittedly, antelope or mastodons probably had little extraneous fat) but they also ate every edible part of whatever animals they hunted.  That would include bone marrow, liver, other organ meats including the fatty brain.  That’s our heritage.  If it were bad for survival, we wouldn’t be here; homo sapiens would have died out or been out-competed by some other species.

So with the profit motive in place, we were sold a bill of goods about 40 or 50 years ago.  Saturated fat is bad, substitute vegetable oil and eat a low fat diet.

An America got fatter and sicker.

Animal fats are good sources of Omega 3 fatty acids.  Vegetable oils are mostly Omega 6 fatty acids.  You need both but in a balance to each other because they mediate the balance of inflammation.  Enough inflammation to protect you from bacterial invaders, to clot your blood when injured, to manage anxiety so you’re alert but not paranoid, to constrict blood vessels when needed.  But too much inflammation and those actions (in hyperdrive) cause disease (yes all disease starts with too much inflammation).  See my e-book, “Inflammation Run Amok” for lots more info.

As long as omega 3 and omega 6 oils are about even, your body produces the right chemical messengers for just the right inflammation.  Drop Omega 3 fatty acid sources (animal fats) for Omega 6 fatty acids (vegetable fats) and inflammation quickly get out of hand.

There’s more to this inflammatory story, of course.  High blood sugar and high insulin are also inflammatory.  So are allergens.  So are smoking and environmental toxins.  But the body can handle some assault—it was designed that way.  What it can’t handle is low animal fat and high vegetable oils over years, along with the other assaults. 

By the way, vegetable oils are hidden in most of the restaurant and prepared and packaged foods you may be buying.  Read labels.  Decrease Omega 6 oils and increase animal fats.  Yes, butter, whole milk (if you drink milk) beef, pork, lamb and fish.  Of the animal products readily available in your grocery, chicken is very high in Omega 6.  Less chicken, more beef.

Right, beef fattened with corn is not my preference—grass fed, not factory farmed beef—would be first choice.  But factory farmed beef beats vegetable fats and grains—hands down!

Need some experts’ information?  Here’s a bit: 

In 2001, Dr. Hu, writing in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, noted, "It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health problems." [duh] Or, as Michael Pollan pithily puts it in his In Defense of Food, "The amount of saturated fat in the diet may have little if any bearing on the risk of heart disease, and the evidence that increasing polyunsaturated fats [vegetable sources] in the diet will reduce risk is slim to nil."

See http://mindingthemiddleagedmiddle.com/ for answers to health questions and e-books for real health!