Promising way to prevent stress from harming you....

Today's Post: Monday, 9-28-2009

Since today and at many times in history, many people simply are too stressed even if they have good coping skills and are initially in good mental health, if there were ways to avoid that stress causing health harm, it would be dramatically valuable!

So, imagine my delight at discovering that two things I already have been doing have that effect!

In the email I got last Thursday, 9-24, Dr Robert J Rowen’s Second Opinion Health Alert had a very important article that reveals a way that apparently does exactly that.

His title was: “Tasty extract stops stress-induced liver damage.”

The study he report was done on mice. But as you’ll see, we have ample evidence it works in people also.

In the study, researchers restrained a group of mice -- which frightens and stress them. That stress caused lipid peroxidation in their livers as measured in their blood by checking their levels of alanine aminotransferase, ALT, where high levels of ALT indicate serious liver damage. And, all of the stressed mice had ALT levels indicating likely liver damage.

Then the researchers fed the stressed mice bilberry extract. Their oxidative stress was lower and they had lower ALT increase than the mice that didn't get bilberry extract. In addition, a key chemical marker of cellular damage, malondialdehyde, was significantly lower in mice that got the bilberry extract.
Now here's a real pearl.

Restraining the mice also caused them to have much lower levels of vitamin C (173 mcg per gm) in their tissues compared with the mice that were not restrained (400 mcg per gm). But the restrained mice that got the bilberry extract, had vitamin C go back to 347 to 451, or about what the unstressed mice had!

X* X* X* X*X*

He also suggests that eating blueberries may well have similar effects in people. Since blueberries do have many studies that support similar effects – in people -- and bilberries are a kind of blueberry, I’m virtually certain he’s correct.

Eating blueberries has been shown in people to not only slow mental aging but to actually regain lost mental abilities in older people.

And, vitamin C tends to prevent your telomeres from unraveling. Since that is perhaps the way cells age, that makes adequate blood levels of vitamin C very important in slowing aging.

It’s well known that excessive stress tends to shorten telomeres and increase the rate of aging.

But now we know that taking bilberry extract and eating blueberries can largely prevent this effect by keeping your blood levels of vitamin C at good levels!

So, take at least 1,000 mg a day of vitamin C. Eat organic vegetables and some whole fruit daily. Take a bilberry supplement. (Nature’s Way makes a bilberry supplement that adds the flu fighting elderberry extract add virtually no added cost.) And, eat blueberries often.

(Both Whole Foods and many old style supermarkets sell inexpensive packages of organic blueberries now.)

I buy two 10 ounce packages a week and eat a third of the 20 ounce total on my oatmeal three times a week. It tastes good and may be one of the smartest things I ever started doing according this research.