10th way to health & longevity....

Get your blood biomarkers tested regularly & know how to correct bad readings and do it if bad readings do turn up.

Today's post: Monday, 7-14-2008

One of the nice things about being willing to take charge of your health is the long list of things that have been proven to work that you can do or do more of.

We posted on 9 of the promised 10 ways last Friday, 7-11, in our most recent post.

That post also listed yet two more posts we have done on this general topic, lists of ways to stay healthy & live a long and healthy life.

One of those two, the one from Friday, 3-14-2008, had this:

“Get key health biomarkers, particularly those testable by blood tests, checked regularly. And, learn & use foods, supplements, & other lifestyle upgrades such as exercise that optimize any that are even somewhat too high or too low. Many of these other 20 methods have worked for thousand of years. This one is relatively new. But it’s extremely powerful. We’ve done many posts on it. Blood glucose, LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, & homocysteine levels that are too high will age you rapidly; cause cardiovascular disease, tend to make you senile, & /or kill you. So will having too low a level of HDL. If you know these measures, know what levels you should shoot for, & optimize them, you WILL live longer & be healthier every year you live.”

This is the 10th way to health & longevity.

In our view, it is most effective and safer by far to improve these measures with eating right, exercise, & the appropriate supplements than it is to use drugs.

And, if you do use drugs to regulate them, which may be necessary if they are at the truly dangerous & extreme levels, you’ll only get the health protection you need if you ALSO improve these measures with eating right, exercise, & the appropriate supplements that can be used safely with the drugs in question.

In addition, you can avoid drugs & getting to dangerous levels, if you improve any of these measures with eating right, exercise, & the appropriate supplements if it goes above the desirable or at least the almost OK level.

Our many posts on these measures contain many of the foods, exercises, & supplements that will improve them.

And, we are about to release an eBook on reducing high blood pressure without drugs that will cover many of them in detail.

In order to reduce high blood pressure without drugs best, you need to move many of these measures into the desirable or at least OK levels. And, if you have high blood pressure, many of them are very likely in the not really OK to the dangerous levels. The effects of the bad readings may well be causing the high blood pressure & often are.

It would help you to read our other posts & other sources to become fully informed on this subject as it is so very large.

But we summarize some of the most important information in this post.

And, you CAN get the most important measures done in virtually one pass if your doctor or HMO will work with you. (I’ve had good luck with Kaiser myself.) And, as the power of these becomes better known & how fast they can get worse or better becomes better known, I think getting them done at least once a year will become more common, available, & supported.

Here are some of the measures and the desirable & not OK numbers.

There are others; but these are some of the most important.

1. Homocysteine should be 8.9 or less. Higher levels tend to produce mental decline & cardiovascular disease. Most people over 40 & virtually all smokers tend to be well above 10.0 & many are above 12.0.

Staying away from cigarette smoke as close to 100 % as possible helps keep homocysteine levels down. Taking optimum amounts of vitamin B-Complex, & in particular, folic acid, B6, & B12 will lower homocysteine one or more points. Many people will also need to take the supplements NAC & TMG to get to or even close to desirable levels.

2. HDL should be 45 or more. And, more than 60 is even better. Levels above 60 tend to be found in people who are unusually long lived.

1,000 calories a week of exercise each week, some of which is strength training or interval cardio that is quite vigorous is one of the best & most health producing ways to increase HDL. The main supplements that increase HDL include niacin, chromium, B-Complex vitamins, choline, & supplements like grape seed extract & bilberry extract. Drinking moderately several times a week, preferably of red wine, raises HDL. Foods that contain these ingredients raise HDL, particularly foods containing choline such as egg yolks & wheat germ. And, recent studies found that eating blueberries, blackberries, etc also raises HDL.

3. Triglycerides should be 100 or less. And a measure of LESS than your HDL is ideal. It turns out that triglycerides are a more important measure than LDL since the amount of the dangerous small particle LDL that you actually need to keep really low, is found by the ratio of HDL to triglycerides.

If you have 200 or higher triglycerides & your HDL is 40 or less, you have LOTS of the dangerous small particles of LDL. And, you don’t even need a direct measure of LDL to know this. If you do have such readings as many people do, you have or are developing cardiovascular disease. So, if you do, it’s critical to your health to both increase your HDL and to lower your triglycerides.

1,000 calories a week of exercise each week, some of which is strength training or interval cardio that is quite vigorous is one of the best & most health producing ways to lower your triglycerides & to reduce the dangerous small particles of LDL in your blood. Note that it improves BOTH your HDL & your triglyceride level at the same time.

The other thing that reduces triglycerides is to eat very few if any junk foods that contain high fructose corn syrup, to eat very little if any refined grain foods, to be moderate to sparing in the number of times a week you eat regular sugar, & to eat a lot of nonstarchy vegetables.

The third way to lower triglyceride levels is to eat wild caught fish or beef fed only grass that are high in omega 3 oils & or take DHA and omega 3 supplements from algae or purified fish oil.

The good thing about these 3 things is that they all have other health benefits. Exercise also grows new brain cells & improves your circulation directly; helps keep excess fat off of you; keeps your blood glucose levels down to desirable levels; & improves your sex life.

And, eating very few of the listed bad carbs & eating a lot of nonstarchy vegetables helps keep excess fat off of you & keeps your blood glucose levels down to desirable levels.

Note that the previous 9 ways we posted about on Friday contain this kind of eating right & exercise.

But measuring HDL & triglyceride levels may show you need to do a better job on eating right & exercise &/or add the appropriate supplements to move these two indicators into the safe or desirable levels.

4. LDL should be 129 or less for sure. And, LDL of 100 or a bit less may be even more desirable.

If your HDL level is greater than your triglyceride level and you eat a lot of fruits & vegetables, which contain antioxidants & take antioxidant vitamins & supplements, getting below 100 LDL total is not as important as it is for people with the opposite situation, It’s the oxidized and small particle LDL that harms you. So if you do a great job of minimizing THAT measure, total LDL is less critical.

That said, if your LDL is 130 or more, particularly, 160 or more, it’s good idea to bring it down.

Doing so will also help lower the oxidized and small particle LDL in your body. However, doing this by eating right, taking niacin, & taking sterol supplements will do the job for most people & is dramatically safer than taking statin drugs and has virtually no side effects compared to taking statin drugs.

5. Blood glucose measures are critically important. Your fasting glucose reading should be 99 or less & your HBA1C reading should be 5.8 or less. 89 or less on the fasting glucose reading & 5.7 or less on your HBA1C reading is ideal.

Readings on the HBA1C test of 6.0 or greater are now diagnosed as type II diabetes. 7.1 or higher HBA1C are dangerous & will tend to cause your doctor to prescribe drugs because of this.

Such readings dramatically increase your risk of heart attack & harm your blood circulation all over your body a lack which has reliably caused people to get mental decline, ruined kidneys, go blind, & have their feet amputated from lack of circulation.

And, fasting glucose readings of 100 or more, particularly over 110 or triglyceride levels of 150 or more are warning signs your HBA1C will likely go over 5.9 unless you take action to lower your blood sugar levels to the desirable range

Three things bring down blood sugar readings that are too high.:

a) Exercise does it best. And since most of us have sedentary jobs & commuting methods, it is critical to do regular exercise each week. And, no surprise, 1,000 calories a week of exercise each week, some of which is strength training or interval cardio that is quite vigorous is THE best & most effective way to do this.

If you measure your blood glucose before such exercise & ten or so minutes after, you can see dramatic drops in blood glucose. Even better, if you do such exercise regularly, your body will process the sugars you do eat enough better, the pre-exercise readings will be lower also.

b) Almost as important is to eat very few if any junk foods that contain high fructose corn syrup, to eat very little if any refined grain foods, to be moderate to sparing in the number of times a week you eat regular sugar, & to eat a lot of nonstarchy vegetables.

c) The supplements alpha lipoic acid & chromium help keep blood sugar readings where they should be also.



As you can see, getting these 5 blood biomarkers tested may well show you if you have been eating right & exercising well enough to protect your health. They begin to show WHY eating right and exercise have the health protective effects they do.

But they also may well show you that you need to take much stronger action than you had realized. And, they may well also show you that in your particular case, there are certain supplements you need to begin to take right away if you want to stay healthy.

I include this 10th way to stay healthy because it enables you to see – and correct -- problems with your health well before they start to do your health serious harm if you do these tests every six months or so

And, in most cases, you’ll be able to correct them before they do you serious harm or put you at levels where your doctor will be sure to write you a prescription for drugs which all too often have harmful or quality of life ruining side effects.

NOT getting them is like driving your car on the freeway without being able to see where you are going.

I can attest from personal experience that this is true even if you are practicing most of the other 9 ways to stay healthy.

I didn’t know that a fasting glucose reading of 115 was dangerous. When my blood test showed that reading, my doctor knew to tell me I needed to reduce it. I was already eating right mostly, exercising, & taking many of the supplements to protect my heart, including chromium polynicotinate.

But, I’d allowed myself to use more brown sugar on my oatmeal than was good for me & to eat my daily applesauce serving using applesauce with sugar added.

I immediately renewed buying & eating ONLY applesauce with no sugar added. I cut my modest intake of brown sugar in half, I began taking 200 mg a day of alpha lipoic acid, & I added a good bit of cinnamon with the brown sugar I still used. (Cinnamon buffers & reduces the blood sugar boosting effects of eating sugar.)

My subsequent readings have been below 100 & often below 90.

But had I not had the test to know & taken these corrective actions, I might have developed low level type II diabetes before I knew I had a problem.

In addition, when my LDL tested as 130, I added a bit more niacin each day & began taking 3 tablets a day of the sterol beta sitosterol each day. Then when I’ve been tested since, I’ve seen readings like 96 or at or just above 100.

So, getting re-tested, I knew my corrective actions got the job done.

Here again, without the tests, I’d not have know I needed to take action. And without the rests, I would have had no way of knowing I’d succeeded.

These tests didn’t used to exist. But now that they do, they give us an incredibly powerful way to take control over our health & to protect it BEFORE it’s harmed.