Important cancer news....
Today's Post: Monday, 8-3-2009
If you are trying to prevent cancer, this news is both good and bad.
The bad news is that many Americans today may be at greater risk from cancer than they may have known -- and that many of the foods and drinks they think nothing of consuming may well cause their chances of getting cancers, including a very deadly one by nearly double.
The good news is that the things that people can do to prevent or reverse this risk have many other health benefits -- from losing belly fat to losing overall fat weight to preventing heart attacks and heart disease. And, they increase longevity in several other ways as well.
The Reuters headline for this story was: “Drug cuts diabetics' pancreatic cancer risk: study”
“Diabetics who took the drug metformin, which makes the body process insulin better, had a 62 percent lower risk of pancreatic cancer compared to” similar people who did not.
And they also noted: “Prior studies showed a lower cancer risk in diabetics who took metformin.”
This suggests that people who have high levels of insulin are at greater risk of getting cancer and getting pancreatic cancer in particular.
So it’s quite significant that the article also says:
“In addition, we see some increased risk of pancreatic cancer associated with the use of insulin and the use of insulin secretagogues." Those are drugs, such as sulfonylureas and glinides, which stimulate the pancreas to secrete more insulin or raise circulating levels of insulin.
Diabetics in the study who had taken insulin were nearly five times more likely to develop pancreatic cancer. And those who took insulin-stimulating drugs were 2.55 times more likely to develop pancreatic cancer.”
Metformin also helps prevent sugar cravings and tends to cause people to lose belly fat or not gain as much.
That too may be as a result of Metformin lowering insulin levels by making what is already there work better at lowering too high levels of blood sugar.
Low doses of Metformin tend to have few side effects. But larger doses can cause more side effects than many people can put up with.
So, it’s particularly good news that there are so many other ways to improve insulin resistance and lower insulin levels.
But before we list those, it’s important to note that if you are diabetic -- whether type 1 or type 2, or you have HBA1C levels much above 5.9 even if not diagnosed with type 2, or if you are very overweight or fat--
this set of research shows that you need to be really sure to do the other things that prevent cancer in addition to doing things to improve your insulin resistance and lower your insulin levels if you can – or even more so if you cannot.
As we’ve posted before, these methods include eating raw cruciferous vegetables; eating both raw and cooked vegetables such as carrots and tomatoes that contain carotenoids; staying away from tobacco smoke by both not smoking and avoiding second hand smoke; taking 2,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3, and taking 500 to 600 mg a day of a turmeric supplement.
Here are several other things besides taking metformin that improve insulin resistance and lower your insulin levels.
A. Stop causing your body to need so much insulin.
1. Stop ingesting high fructose corn syrup in either foods or soft drinks. Stop using artificial sweeteners in either foods or soft drinks. Stop drinking any soft drinks if you can manage it.
(Artificial sweeteners, and to some extent even the safer natural sweeteners that contain no sugar, cause rebound hunger, sugar cravings, and usually cause people to eat more real sugar or more high fructose corn syrup.
2. Stop eating refined grains or foods made from them and go a bit easy even on whole grain foods.
3. Only eat foods that have added sugar occasionally – a few times a week instead of several times a day.
4. When you do eat something sweet, try to avoid super size servings AND try to eat something that is low glycemic first such as nuts or nonstarchy vegetables or health OK proteins.
That set of things sharply lowers the amount of excess sugar your body needs to bring down by releasing extra insulin. So they lower your average level of insulin.
B. Do your best to only eat health OK fats and oils.
1. Do eat a moderate, daily amount of foods that have almost all monosaturated oil only. That tends to lower insulin levels and has already been shown to help people lose belly fat for that reason – just like the Metformin in the studies does!
Extra virgin olive oil, nuts if you aren’t allergic and if you eat only the raw or dry roasted ones, avocados, and avocado oil all are high in monosaturated oils. Even better they let you keep or increase your HDL that protects your heart while helping to lower excess LDL with the same benefit.
2. Stop eating most foods and oils that are high in omega 6 oils. That includes corn and soy oils and the fatty part of meat or full fat dairy products from grain fed animals.
That gives you a higher percentage of monosaturated oils when you do that AND eat more foods with monosaturated oils. It also reduces inflammation and your exposure to herbicides, pesticides, and GMO foods designed to contain pesticide and be used with lots of herbicide. That means that this step also very likely helps prevent cancer in other ways.
3. Eat more wild caught fish and seafood and take purified fish oil supplements. And, if you can eat walnuts in addition to steps 1 & 2. That lowers your inflammation, tends to prevent or improve depression, protects your heart, and improves your thinking ability.
4. Stop eating excessive amounts of fatty meats and dairy fat from grain fed animals. In addition to the protection this gives you from omega 3 oils and the other problems in such fats, it helps prevent excess LDL and protects your heart for that reason.
Similarly, simply stop ingesting any hydrogenated vegetable oils. In addition to the benefits of not ingesting the base oils that are high in omega 6 oils and the other problems we listed, hydrogenated vegetable oils directly cause heart disease.
So, not only do steps 3 & 4 make room for the oils in steps one and two which protect your health and help prevent cancer, steps 3 & 4 help prevent heart disease.
C. Close to the best way besides taking Metformin and doing ALL these food related steps to improve insulin resistance and lower your average blood levels of insulin is to do regular vigorous exercise. And, each week, doing both two or more sessions of strength training and three or more sessions of interval cardio are great ways to do that.
Such exercise is so effective that there are people with early or low stages of type 2 diabetes caused by insulin resistance who have had it disappear by adding such exercises to their lives.
These need not take lots of time or any equipment --although that can be helpful.
For quick exercise, doing as many fast pushups as you can, can take less than a minute to do – although you may need a few minutes to catch your breath after that.
You can also do four different kinds of abdominal exercises as fast as you can without stopping between sets. (I do 98 reps each in my routine and find the four sets take me about five minutes to do.)
You can also walk for 2 minutes, walk very briskly for 2 minutes, walk for 2 more, walk very briskly for 2 minute, and end with a normal speed walk of 2 minutes. The whole thing can take 10 minutes for a really quick interval cardio routine.
If you have an OK surface to do it on, have a decent jump rope, have no medical reason not to, and aren’t too heavy, you can also do one minute of jumping rope at an easy pace and then do several surges where in each one you gradually speed up to really fast, go back to moderate and then speed up again for a total of 8 minutes and then do a last minute at a very easy pace.
Such exercise has been shown to lower insulin resistance, lower insulin levels, lower blood sugar levels, including HBA1C, if they are high, and it also tends to remove excess fat, particularly belly fat from your body.
We’ve known those things and that such exercise increases your heart protective HDL cholesterol. Now we know that such exercises help prevent cancer too!
That’s good news indeed.
Today's Post: Monday, 8-3-2009
If you are trying to prevent cancer, this news is both good and bad.
The bad news is that many Americans today may be at greater risk from cancer than they may have known -- and that many of the foods and drinks they think nothing of consuming may well cause their chances of getting cancers, including a very deadly one by nearly double.
The good news is that the things that people can do to prevent or reverse this risk have many other health benefits -- from losing belly fat to losing overall fat weight to preventing heart attacks and heart disease. And, they increase longevity in several other ways as well.
The Reuters headline for this story was: “Drug cuts diabetics' pancreatic cancer risk: study”
“Diabetics who took the drug metformin, which makes the body process insulin better, had a 62 percent lower risk of pancreatic cancer compared to” similar people who did not.
And they also noted: “Prior studies showed a lower cancer risk in diabetics who took metformin.”
This suggests that people who have high levels of insulin are at greater risk of getting cancer and getting pancreatic cancer in particular.
So it’s quite significant that the article also says:
“In addition, we see some increased risk of pancreatic cancer associated with the use of insulin and the use of insulin secretagogues." Those are drugs, such as sulfonylureas and glinides, which stimulate the pancreas to secrete more insulin or raise circulating levels of insulin.
Diabetics in the study who had taken insulin were nearly five times more likely to develop pancreatic cancer. And those who took insulin-stimulating drugs were 2.55 times more likely to develop pancreatic cancer.”
Metformin also helps prevent sugar cravings and tends to cause people to lose belly fat or not gain as much.
That too may be as a result of Metformin lowering insulin levels by making what is already there work better at lowering too high levels of blood sugar.
Low doses of Metformin tend to have few side effects. But larger doses can cause more side effects than many people can put up with.
So, it’s particularly good news that there are so many other ways to improve insulin resistance and lower insulin levels.
But before we list those, it’s important to note that if you are diabetic -- whether type 1 or type 2, or you have HBA1C levels much above 5.9 even if not diagnosed with type 2, or if you are very overweight or fat--
this set of research shows that you need to be really sure to do the other things that prevent cancer in addition to doing things to improve your insulin resistance and lower your insulin levels if you can – or even more so if you cannot.
As we’ve posted before, these methods include eating raw cruciferous vegetables; eating both raw and cooked vegetables such as carrots and tomatoes that contain carotenoids; staying away from tobacco smoke by both not smoking and avoiding second hand smoke; taking 2,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3, and taking 500 to 600 mg a day of a turmeric supplement.
Here are several other things besides taking metformin that improve insulin resistance and lower your insulin levels.
A. Stop causing your body to need so much insulin.
1. Stop ingesting high fructose corn syrup in either foods or soft drinks. Stop using artificial sweeteners in either foods or soft drinks. Stop drinking any soft drinks if you can manage it.
(Artificial sweeteners, and to some extent even the safer natural sweeteners that contain no sugar, cause rebound hunger, sugar cravings, and usually cause people to eat more real sugar or more high fructose corn syrup.
2. Stop eating refined grains or foods made from them and go a bit easy even on whole grain foods.
3. Only eat foods that have added sugar occasionally – a few times a week instead of several times a day.
4. When you do eat something sweet, try to avoid super size servings AND try to eat something that is low glycemic first such as nuts or nonstarchy vegetables or health OK proteins.
That set of things sharply lowers the amount of excess sugar your body needs to bring down by releasing extra insulin. So they lower your average level of insulin.
B. Do your best to only eat health OK fats and oils.
1. Do eat a moderate, daily amount of foods that have almost all monosaturated oil only. That tends to lower insulin levels and has already been shown to help people lose belly fat for that reason – just like the Metformin in the studies does!
Extra virgin olive oil, nuts if you aren’t allergic and if you eat only the raw or dry roasted ones, avocados, and avocado oil all are high in monosaturated oils. Even better they let you keep or increase your HDL that protects your heart while helping to lower excess LDL with the same benefit.
2. Stop eating most foods and oils that are high in omega 6 oils. That includes corn and soy oils and the fatty part of meat or full fat dairy products from grain fed animals.
That gives you a higher percentage of monosaturated oils when you do that AND eat more foods with monosaturated oils. It also reduces inflammation and your exposure to herbicides, pesticides, and GMO foods designed to contain pesticide and be used with lots of herbicide. That means that this step also very likely helps prevent cancer in other ways.
3. Eat more wild caught fish and seafood and take purified fish oil supplements. And, if you can eat walnuts in addition to steps 1 & 2. That lowers your inflammation, tends to prevent or improve depression, protects your heart, and improves your thinking ability.
4. Stop eating excessive amounts of fatty meats and dairy fat from grain fed animals. In addition to the protection this gives you from omega 3 oils and the other problems in such fats, it helps prevent excess LDL and protects your heart for that reason.
Similarly, simply stop ingesting any hydrogenated vegetable oils. In addition to the benefits of not ingesting the base oils that are high in omega 6 oils and the other problems we listed, hydrogenated vegetable oils directly cause heart disease.
So, not only do steps 3 & 4 make room for the oils in steps one and two which protect your health and help prevent cancer, steps 3 & 4 help prevent heart disease.
C. Close to the best way besides taking Metformin and doing ALL these food related steps to improve insulin resistance and lower your average blood levels of insulin is to do regular vigorous exercise. And, each week, doing both two or more sessions of strength training and three or more sessions of interval cardio are great ways to do that.
Such exercise is so effective that there are people with early or low stages of type 2 diabetes caused by insulin resistance who have had it disappear by adding such exercises to their lives.
These need not take lots of time or any equipment --although that can be helpful.
For quick exercise, doing as many fast pushups as you can, can take less than a minute to do – although you may need a few minutes to catch your breath after that.
You can also do four different kinds of abdominal exercises as fast as you can without stopping between sets. (I do 98 reps each in my routine and find the four sets take me about five minutes to do.)
You can also walk for 2 minutes, walk very briskly for 2 minutes, walk for 2 more, walk very briskly for 2 minute, and end with a normal speed walk of 2 minutes. The whole thing can take 10 minutes for a really quick interval cardio routine.
If you have an OK surface to do it on, have a decent jump rope, have no medical reason not to, and aren’t too heavy, you can also do one minute of jumping rope at an easy pace and then do several surges where in each one you gradually speed up to really fast, go back to moderate and then speed up again for a total of 8 minutes and then do a last minute at a very easy pace.
Such exercise has been shown to lower insulin resistance, lower insulin levels, lower blood sugar levels, including HBA1C, if they are high, and it also tends to remove excess fat, particularly belly fat from your body.
We’ve known those things and that such exercise increases your heart protective HDL cholesterol. Now we know that such exercises help prevent cancer too!
That’s good news indeed.
Labels: good news for preventing cancer, important cancer news, improve insulin resistance, lose belly fat and prevent cancer too, lower HBA1C, new ways to prevent cancer, prevent pancreatic cancer
posted by David at 2:05 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home