Some blood pressure drugs can blind you....

Today's Post:  Wednesday, 8-26-2015

Just a few days ago a local man died who had done a superb and notably honest job of creating and building up a local business.

He was in his early 80’s so many people wouldn’t be surprised.  But in his pictures from not that long ago he looked remarkably healthy.  And he lived here in the center of the most health informed and affluent people in the country. By my expectations for such people, he died at least 10 years early.

Then I read that a year and a half or so ago he had some kind of medical condition that caused him to go blind almost overnight.  He apparently had gone downhill since.

I wondered what had happened to him.  Then just days later I got a health email saying that some drugs for high blood pressure could cause this. People who take them DO sometimes suddenly go blind!

I followed up and found that two classes of blood pressure drugs were most likely to do this.

One I already knew to be a horrible drug that most people should never, ever take and those on it for any reason should stop taking as soon as it can be made safe to do so.  This class of drug, beta blockers, it seems is ALSO most likely to blind people taking it.

The other class was called vasodilators.

Both these drugs with high negative side effects are used to bring down such high blood pressure it’s a life threatening emergency.  But this is or should be a short term use only.

The worst drug for this sudden blindness effect is the beta blockers.  Since they help cause heart failure and ensure anyone with heart failure will get worse but are deliberately given to people with heart failure, I already knew anyone taking them was at very high risk.

But this side effect, sudden blindness, being most likely to be caused by beta blockers I didn’t find out until earlier this week.

Beta blockers are nasty for another reason.  They are addictive and hard to get off of which is complicated by the fact that to be safe and not cause surges of very high blood pressure the process has to be done gradually with the cooperation of your doctor or a very competent pharmacist.

Vasodilators apparently are almost as bad at causing sudden blindness.

The Mayo Clinic has this on vasodilators:

Vasodilators are strong medications and are generally used only as a last resort, when other medications haven't adequately controlled your blood pressure.

These medications have a number of side effects, some of which require taking other medications to counter those effects.

Side effects include:

Chest pain

Rapid heartbeat (tachycardia)

Heart palpitations

Fluid retention (edema)

Nausea

Vomiting

Dizziness

Flushing

Headache

Nasal congestion

Excessive hair growth

In addition, some vasodilators can increase your risk of developing lupus, a connective tissue disease.”

It seems you can add sudden blindness to this list!

1.  Clearly avoiding sky high blood pressure and knowing to avoid beta blockers and vasodilators would help. 

2.  So would knowing ways to avoid sky high blood pressure.

3.  And so would knowing and using ways to protect your eyesight.

A. Ways to avoid sky high blood pressure:

Get your blood pressure tested relatively often.  At least once a month or so.

Take three readings. And write them down.  If you are taking these protective actions and the blood pressure you get is below about 155 over 95 on ALL THREE readings every time, adding any drugs to lower your blood pressure too adds little protection research found.

BUT if you notice the trend is going up or stress is driving the first number particularly above 155 over 95 or you are about to get there, I found out from personal experience recently that this changes and it will pay you to take a low dose diuretic an ace inhibitor.

So, if you see higher reading than 155 over 95 even for the first reading which is the highest usually of the three, buy a monitor for about $75 and take your blood pressure at least once a week.

If you don’t take the low level and usually safer drugs at that point, you can begin to cause heart and brain and kidney damage.  By taking action at that point plus the healthy lifestyle you are more likely to avoid those.

AND, by stopping the process at that point you can avoid the sky high blood pressure that your doctors might want you to add these two damaging and dangerous classes of drugs to bring down.

Stop eating and drinking disease causing foods. 

Carefully build up to doing some kind of vigorous exercise most days of every week if only for a few minutes. 

And, eat lots of organic vegetables each day and particularly eat at least one piece of organic fresh fruit each day. 

Take at least 200 mg a day of magnesium. 

Avoid ingesting over about 2500 mg a day of salt and avoid ALL MSG.

Learn to overcome and deal with stressful events to the best of your ability. 

Make sure to get at least 6 hours of sleep a night 99 % of the time and take action to ensure what sleep you do get is good quality sleep. (Note that the vigorous exercise if done first thing in the morning most days is one of the top 3 ways to do this!)

So if you do the things above that tend to prevent high blood pressure and take action if it gets to the verge of the 160 over 100 that is most dangerous AND if it does get that high you immediately go to the safer drugs at lower doses, you can avoid being in the situation where your doctors are likely to suggest these more dangerous medications.

B.  Ways to protect your eyesight directly:

1.  Don’t stare into the sun.  Use a hat with a visor angled properly if you have to do this a bit while driving so you can see to drive safely but you can avoid most of the staring into the sun drivers who don’t do this get.

2.  When you are driving in bright sunlight OR very bright overcast, wear dark glasses that both cut glare and are rated to cut UV light.

3.  Take the antioxidant Astaxanthin daily because its tiny size has been shown to be unusually protective for your eyes.  6 mg a day is good; but 12 mg a day is better.

4.  Use other methods that DO protect your heart and never take statins.  Statins cause more cataracts than the few heart attacks they prevent.

(Doing these first four things tends to prevent cataracts or cause them to worsen much more slowly.)

4.  Eat organic fruit that is dark or blue or purple colored and take bilberry supplements.

(Bilberries are a kind of blueberry that is unusually eye protective. It’s easy to get the supplements but very hard to get bilberries in most places.

In England in World War II the RAF pilots who had eaten bilberries reported they saw better, particularly at night.)

Eat organic blueberries at least two or three times a week.

Eat other similar fruit when you can. Organic raisins, organic prunes, organic dark cherries, organic purple grapes, organic plums all work.

5.  The carrot stories are true also.  People who eat organic carrots often also see better and see better at night.  And carrots are not just high in beta carotene. They are also very high in the considerably more protective alpha carotene AND unlike supplements, they have HUNDREDS of other kinds of carotenes!

Also, eat organic broccoli and organic greens that are dark green such as collard greens and kale and swiss chard.  These dark green vegetables have hundreds of carotenes too; it’s just that the dark green pigments hide the yellow and organge and red carotenes!

6.  Take the actions from taking niacin to regular vigorous exercise to totally stopping all foods and drinks with high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, wheat of any kind, and trans fats also.  Why? Because these actions help maintain blood flow everywhere in your body – including your eyes. 

7.  Get eye health exams a least every year or two also. 

With luck these actions will prevent sudden blindness from happening to you!

Easier way for many to do first for fat loss....

Today's Post:  Friday, 8-21-2015

Many, many months ago if not years a woman who worked in Canada as an air traffic controller found it was not that great for her health due to the stress level and the shift work hours.  She is Rosalind Gardner.

But she had a secret weapon.  When she first became an air traffic controller she had serious doubts she could do the work.  But somehow she got the idea that every time she felt lost or unsure, she would ask herself what she thought an experienced controller would do.  Every time she did this which almost always worked, she became more confident and got good at the job.

Meanwhile, she dated and tried out some dating sites.  Since she tried out many, she began to see the good and bad points of each one. 

Then she found out that if she sent someone to a dating site who became their customer the site company would pay her a referral fee.

She wondered if she could find people online who wanted a dating site but would like a balanced and fair and well done review.

She thought that it might be enough people would buy that way she could turn it into a business.

It did work because people could tell she was fair and included good and bad points so they picked the one that sounded like the best fit for them AND did sign up.

Meanwhile, this was a lot of work on top of a too demanding job. And it didn’t pay that well. But then she remembered becoming a controller.  Then she used the same method.  She asked herself what someone making a lot of money doing what she was doing would do.

And, since she was very motivated to make enough to quit being a controller and have a better life, when she found something she thought someone like that would do, she made herself do it as well as she could.

Shortly after that she was making enough to quit being a controller and did so.  Then when she realized just how much she was making, over $400,000 a year, she added the business of teaching other people the business she found out how to do.

Why tell this story in a post on fat loss? 

Because a man who was hundreds of pounds over fat decided instead of trying all the diets that had failed him again and again to instead ask himself what an effortlessly thin person would usually do and simply do that instead.

This was quite a leap of faith given where he started.  But he found it doable so he kept going for a bit.  Then he started gradually losing his extra fat and then he lost more and then he lost more.

In fact by eating and acting as someone would who was thin just by following their normal life style and keeping it up long enough, gradually he WAS an unusually trim person who ate what he normally ate.  He lost over 200 pounds in the process.

He was a very bright guy.  So he realized he might make some money by teaching others his key things he had done and this style of thinking about it.

Yes, you can get his online coaching program and membership site and become his customer.

But why not learn the basics first for just a tiny investment and try them?

Some people have just done that and lost a lot of fat! 

And others decided they needed extra help and signed up with his program.  They liked his ideas and wanted to make sure they followed them well and had that support.

So what happened?  His method now has hundreds of people who have used some form of his ideas who have lost well over 30 pounds each of excess fat.

Here’s that info in case that sounds like something you would like to try or check out:

The Gabriel Method of fat loss is a mental approach to cause easier faster, and more reliable fat loss by switching your thinking from ways that fatten you to ways that keep you lean.  

Done properly it is unusually effective in part because it helps you to switch from thinking like a powerless and unhappy fat person to thinking like a healthy and capable and MUCH happier person.

Many people are unable to lose fat they keep off and some people do so but aren’t much happier.  The thing I find appealing about using or adding his approach is that it not only can help you lose fat you keep off; but you will be a happier person too!

"With The Gabriel Method approach, weight loss becomes enjoyable, and the ultimate goal is to transform you into a naturally thin person."

Yesterday his paperback was $11.11 before tax and shipping fees.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Gabriel-Method-Revolutionary-DIET-FREE/dp/1582702187

The Gabriel Method: The Revolutionary DIET-FREE Way to Totally Transform Your Body Paperback – December 30, 2008

False health info to avoid, part II....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 8-18-2015

(This post begins by listing the things we had in Part I last Friday, 8-14.  We decided to leave it in part II for people who missed part I. 

                                          We also added key points and made it a bit easier to read.)

But if you read part I, feel free to scan down until you see: Start of Part II.)

There are quite a number of things that were once thought to be true that would be better or at least OK to use to protect your health.

So many of these turned out to be totally false or only true under certain conditions that it can help you stay healthy to know what now looks to be the correct information.

1.  We now know that for most people too much real sugar is bad for you. 

True.  Most people today are mostly sedentary and will be much healthier if they limit their calories from sugar to two % or less of total calories.  (This is added cane sugar in granular form or sucrose from raisins, or dates, maple syrup, or molasses, etc.  Sugars included in whole fruits and vegetables otherwise are not included in this calculation.)

People who take supplements for health that also help to process sugar such as cinnamon and alpha lipoic acid and people who are quite active or do vigorous exercise every day may be OK with up to 5% of calories as sugar.

Because the average American takes in far more than that, just eating less sugar is very important.  (Above that amount, sugar causes heart disease and type 2 diabetes, and obesity.)

But sugar tastes good; so many things have been thought to be OK to use as substitutes and still eat instead of eating less sugar.  (The idea was to be able to eat more sweet treats without the normal harms.)

Unfortunately many people still believe in one or more of those things and eat them instead of just eating way less real sugar.

Here’s a list of them. 

The very bad news is that they are all WORSE for your health than the sugar they replace NOT better.

a)  Agave nectar.  Despite having a promisingly low glycemic index, agave nectar is a slightly harsh tasting form of free fructose.  And, free fructose turns out to be MORE harmful than sugar and more fattening too!

 If you want to avoid type 2 diabetes and heart disease try hard to avoid ALL forms of free fructose from high fructose corn syrup to agave nectar.

Warning, many products in health food stores, even those with other ingredients that are much more carefully selected for being health OK use agave as a sweetener.  In fact, I found recently even their employees often don’t yet know agave is more harmful than sugar!

b)  A very similar sweetener also still in products in health food stores, even those with other ingredients that are much more carefully selected for being health OK use concentrated fruit juice.  This sounds OK because the fructose in real whole fruit is safe to eat. 

What this misses is that without the fiber and other nutrients in whole fruit, the fructose in fruit stops being safe to eat without those parts of the fruit.

Because of this even organic fruit juice of high nutrition fruits are harmful enough to limit as much or more than real sugar.

What about fruit juice concentrate as a sweetener?  BAD news:  It tastes a bit better than agave but is also free fructose; and you are far better off healthwise if you never eat any!

c) Artificial sweeteners.  Sugar has calories and too much of it slams up your blood sugar causing all kinds of health problems.

What if you found chemicals that tasted sweet or sweeter even than sugar that had no calories?

Wouldn’t that allow you to eat things taste as sweet as sugar added ones without the fattening effect and without the health harm?

OUCH!  It’s complicated exactly why and how this happens but foods sweetened with artificial sweeteners are MORE effective as fatteners and produce even more diabetes and heart disease than the sugar they replace! 

Part of it is basic biology in mammals.  The effect even happens in rats!  In people it’s even worse since people who use artificial sweeteners often eat other harmful and fattening foods too AND eat more of them believing they are protected by the sugar that they didn’t eat.

On top of that, the Center for Science in the Public Interest lists all the most used artificial sweeteners as mildly carcinogenic.

But if you drink five diet soft drinks a day for 15 years, the huge multiplier factor times something mildly carcinogenic once or twice a year becomes something that looks far more likely to be a significant risk factor for cancer. (5 X 365 X 15 = 27,375)

Many people still think the sugar substitutes listed above are safe and effective health aids. 

That’s NOT true!

Conclusion:  So, eat real whole fresh fruit, small amounts of real sugar on occasion, and eliminate all these other sweeteners if you want to keep good health. 

2.  Whole wheat.  

This one is slightly more complicated and is even more harmful due to how many people used to believe it and because some health professionals who by now should know better still believe it.

Real whole wheat does have more B complex vitamins than white, refined grain wheat.  And, it does have more fiber.

And, it’s quite true that fiber and B complex vitamins in your food are good for you.

So intuitively it looks like whole wheat should be good for you.

B complex vitamins from supplements or from egg yolks or liver from animals fed only their natural foods from unpolluted sources are not just good for you, they are vital to good health.

And, enough fiber helps you feel full and helps you digest your food and eliminate the rest with no extra problems.

That means that if whole wheat is bad for you – and it’s extremely harmful – something else must be going on.

There most certainly is!  Here’s the long list!

a)  Most foods labeled as whole wheat aren’t. 

They contain a bit of it to avoid being totally false labeled; but most of the flour is brown color added refined grain white flour which does NOT have the extra fiber and B complex vitamins.

b) Slamming your blood sugar too high when you eat a food is both fattening and tends to cause type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  That’s why limiting even real sugar so strongly is so important to staying lean and in good health.

Even real whole wheat, just like refined grain wheat, does this fifty percent MORE than sugar!

How often is safe to eat that kind of food?  If you eat the 2 to 5 % of your calories as sugar already, the right answer is never or once or twice a year at best.

c)  But the wheat and whole wheat in stores isn’t the same wheat people ate in biblical times.

So eating it today is even more harmful still!

Hybrid wheat was developed many years ago.  The idea was that wheat was then thought to be a safe, staple food to eat; but people were going hungry because there wasn’t enough food.  So the hybrid wheat they developed would grow remarkably more wheat per acre.  And that did allow enough wheat to be grown to feed more people less expensively.

Did they think to monitor the hybrid wheat for harmful health effects at that time?  Nope.

The problem now is that all this wheat people think is safe to eat is hybrid wheat today. AND, hybrid wheat has a new component that causes allergies to wheat in some people and worse, severe allergic reactions to gluten in some people.

Gluten allergies produce all kinds of nasty but hard to diagnose symptoms if you don’t know where they are coming from.  And, as a result, thousands of people feel like hell and don’t know why because they have been eating hybrid wheat in large amounts.

If you know that, it’s easy to avoid the problem, stop considering ANY food that contains wheat a food.  At best, it’s a semifood that is only safe to eat a few times a year at most.

d)  Over 90 % of the wheat in stores today was grown using GMO seeds.  You’ve almost certainly eaten some and are reading this, so GMO wheat is clearly not as toxic as cyanide. 

Is GMO food of any kind safe to eat longer than 6 months in terms of its long term effect on your health?  If you have or plan to have children and grandchildren and descendants beyond that, will they be able to have kids and if so, will they be healthy?

The studies done on this that I’ve seen reports on say no it isn’t safe in both of these two ways.

In the rest of the world GMO foods are banned or at least it’s mandatory to label them.

In the United States, the people who make money by using or making the chemicals for GMO foods are working very hard and spending some of that money on lobbying in an effort to keep you from knowing if anything you eat has GMO ingredients.

My hope is that their DARK act will be killed in the US Senate and that effort will fail.

But whether or not the DARK act passes, there is a SURE way to avoid GMO wheat, as harmful a food as wheat is, you can do that by no longer eating ANY wheat.  And regardless of GMO issues your health will be better because you did so.

Start of Part II

e)  With that lead-up, can you imagine there is yet another reason to never eat wheat or eat it very rarely because of its negative health effects?

Unfortunately there is! 

And, it’s an important reason because the effects include helping to cause heart disease, most cancers, and likely Alzheimer’s disease and autoimmune diseases too.

In Part I we wrote.

Slamming your blood sugar too high when you eat a food is both fattening and tends to cause type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  That’s why limiting even real sugar so strongly is so important to staying lean and in good health.

Even real whole wheat, just like refined grain wheat, does this fifty percent MORE than sugar!

The higher levels of blood sugar and the higher average level this leads to cause serious diseases TWO ways.  

* The extra sugars get stuck on to your blood cells and make them like spikes that tear up the inner surface of your blood vessels including the capillaries.

* The extra sugars also interact with your LDL cholesterol and make it split up into tiny pieces that are so small they begin to line the inside of the surface of your blood vessels and gradually reduce circulation and make any clots traveling by get stuck and STOP blood flow resulting in a heart attack or an ischemic stroke. 

This is reflected in low HDL levels and very high triglyceride levels and increased LDL levels.

So the extra blood sugar surge from eating wheat is scary harmful because it tends to do these two things.

Can you imagine there is yet another reason to never eat wheat or eat it very rarely because of its negative health effects?

The oil in the wheat is very high in omega 6 oil. 

Unfortunately humans evolved in conditions where the foods provided them with about an equal amount of omega 3 oils from fish or tree nuts or fats in animals fed only their natural foods and some omega 6 oils.

The result was a balance of omega 3 and omega 6 oils.

But as described in the book Anticancer: A New Way Of Life  by David Servan-Schreiber MD,

when you eat lots of wheat and other grains and fat from animals fed corn and soy both also high in omega 6 instead of their natural foods, you wind up with less omega 3 oils and LOTS more omega 6 oils.

You quite literally wind up with ten to twenty times too much omega 6 oils in the ratio between them instead of one to one.

But there’s more.  That condition is EXTREMELY HARMFUL if it goes on very long.

The problem is that while inflammation is useful when you first get an injury or minor injury it’s only safe if it stays below a certain level AND if it goes away when its healing purpose of calling in the repair team is done.

When your omega 3 oils and omega 6 oils are balanced, that’s what happens.

There is enough pro-inflammatory omega 6 the inflammation and warning happens.  Then when that’s done enough there is enough anti-inflammatory omega 3 to turn it back off again to a normal setting with no inflammation.

But people who don’t get much omega 3 and eat wheat, even real whole wheat, as a staple – several servings a day food, have something much worse happen.

Their inflammation is high and too high all the time!   (The doctors measure this with something called HSCRP, high sensitivity C- reactive protein.  When that measure is above 3.0 or 5.0 and never 1.0 or less, that’s what it reads – high inflammation all the time!)

Is a high HSCRP level of inflammation like that safe?  No. Not if it’s always that high!

Do we know what high chronic inflammation tends to cause that is unsafe and undesirable to have?  Yes.

Unfortunately we do --from the painful to the deadly and very expensive to treat -- after people get them:

Many cancers, osteoarthritis, heart attacks, strokes, and Alzheimer’s disease.

So is whole wheat a health supporting food?  No.  Those conditions are what people in good health AVOID getting!

Note that the ratio is key. 

This means that besides never eating wheat -- or corn or soy fed animals -- and hardly ever eating other grains, you can also BOOST how much omega 3 you get.

You can take omega 3 supplements  and the most effective omega 3, DHA, as a supplement and eat wild caught fish low in mercury but high in omega 3 oils to get more omega 3 oils.

3.  There is also a plant based omega 3 that is in walnuts and a European salad green, purslane and flaxseed oil and some other foods.  For vegetarians those can be good foods to eat.

The plant based omega 3 is also in canola oil. 

So some people thought canola oil might be a health supporting food.

As a result, canola oil is used in many foods instead of soy or corn oil.

Much to my shock, Whole Foods still uses canola oil heavily in many of its deli and canned foods.

But the data show canola oil is nearly as high in pro-inflammatory omega 6 oil as soy and corn oil are.

Worse, to process the rape seed oil bitterness out to make canola oil, the oil is heated enough to harm the omega 3 oil and make it more harmful than health supporting AND turn some of canola oil’s omega 6 oils into the very harmful trans fats.

And, over 90% of canola is from GMO plants.

You don’t have to do without oil because the neutral monosaturated omega 9 oil that extra virgin olive is mostly made of IS  MUCH safer to eat in moderation. 

In fact monosaturated oils and the micronutrients in extra virgin olive oil are health PROTECTIVE!

But canola oil is so much cheaper than extra virgin olive oil, as long as people don’t know to avoid canola oil, food companies will still use it.

True some canola oil is likely less harmful than lots of corn or soy oil.

But using less oil and adding only extra virgin olive oil yourself is far better for you.

Conclusion:

1.  Eat whole fresh fruit and small and occasionally eat real sugar. 

Avoid ALL other sweeteners.  They turn out to be NOT safe or even health protective and they are MORE fattening!

(Stevia may be one exception; but it tends to have a bitter taste.)

2.  Never eat ANY wheat, whole or refined.  And eat very few other grains.

3.  Avoid almost all oils except extra virgin olive oil.  For sure eat no corn, saffola, soy, or canola oil. 

(Organic coconut oil and butterfat from animals fed only their natural foods may be safe in moderation.)  

My monthly fatloss report....

Today's Post:  Monday, 8-17-2015

[This month’s report is a mixed review with some positive and some negative events to report. I both gained some leverage and lost some. That status seems like AND IS where I’ve been stuck for some time!

My hope of course, is that I’ll gradually make progress by relentlessly continuing the things that have lost and kept off the fat I no longer have;

Having the things I’ve added get traction and gradually help lose some more fat;--

AND find things with more leverage that work well when I try them -- and then keep doing them also!]

Note:  Be sure to read the last section even if you skip the first ones. There is significant good news in fat loss for everyone, not just me, listed there!

Here’s the key news. 

1.  Last month, I lost .4 pounds, about half a pound net.

My waist didn’t go down and chest and hips went down a quarter of an inch each.

That’s close enough to measurement error tolerance, it’s pretty close to no change.

2.  The foods and supplements that I had hoped would help with increasing my muscle and strength may be working.  I didn’t get measurably stronger since last month BUT I kept my gains and did so despite some real stress and way too hot workout conditions. 

3.  I also continued the two things that may have been as important or more so than the foods and supplements. 

The Perfect Workout information was that optimum progress came with slow repetitions of 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down.  I had been doing much faster although slow reps; but when I re-read that 10 seconds each way is best, in one of my two weekly strength training sessions I have been doing just that.  It does seem to be working.

And, I read a study that people doing strength training who were given a placebo they thought was anabolic steroids increased the weight they used right away to levels the people not given anything were doing!

So, I thought, what if I just boosted the weight in a comparable way?  I did so.  And it seems to be working!

There is also better news.  I’ve discovered that when I can get to a gym with heavy barbells and resume doing the deadlifts I did when I was last lean at my goal weight and increase the weight to what I did then or close to it, there is strong evidence I’ll gain enough muscle in my lower back, buttocks, and legs to remove at least half and maybe a good bit more of my excess fat!

(My recovery from my Achilles tendon injury on my left leg is 100%; and the repair of the stress fracture in my lower left leg seems to be standing up still to the very slow building back program I’ve been on.  And, I’m getting close to a level where I may be able to speed my progress a bit.)

So I wrote last time; but the progress has stalled due to how weak the muscle got.  And, it’s not responding as well as I’d hoped – at least not yet.

4.  My blood pressure medication the doctor gave me seemed to have no effect for the first 4 weeks I took it.  But a few days ago, it may have begun doing some good as my blood pressure readings have improved.  (This was a low dose of an ace inhibitor.)

Even better, I likely have some water weight to lose.  I have some accumulated water and swelling in my ankles.  If I lose that retained water, it may cut my weight from just over my goal weight by 6.5 pounds to a pound or two closer at least!

NOPE!  Either my body just stashed the extra water in other locations or I gained some fat to replace the weight. 

I just added the low dose diuretic she suggested for my blood pressure.

(When my blood pressure was in the 145 over 80 to 155 over 85 range, I think I likely did the right thing to do other protective things and not take the blood pressure drugs. 

But some recent stress drove it up well above 160 over 100 long enough that it may have caused some mild heart and kidney distress – and the ankle swelling. 

And, I long ago read that once your blood pressure goes above 160 over 100 and stays there, the studies show that it IS protective to take drugs to bring it down and dangerous to not do so.

So when I went to the doctor last time, five days ago, expecting my blood pressure to be what it had been, 155 over 85 and it was over 160 over 100 instead, I consented to try a blood pressure drug or two.)

So far, the low dose of the first one has low enough side effects I can stay on it as long as I need to.

I’ll likely need to double the dose of that one, an ace inhibitor, and add a diuretic.  It remains to be seen if I’ll find that doable or not.

**The news this month is still good so far!

*Last but far from least, my blood pressure is likely to go down because I’ve successfully switched away from the proton pump inhibitor I was taking to an H2 blocker for my reflux. 

Stanford just did a study proving proton pump inhibitors prevent normal nitric oxide release that relaxes your blood vessels and this directly causes high blood pressure from this effect.

So, stopping the proton pump inhibitor will cut my blood pressure for sure over the next few weeks.  What I don’t yet know is whether it will be by 5 points or 20.  It depends on how reversible this damage turns out to be and what percentage of my high blood pressure it was causing. 

5.  The GOOD news is that my ability to lose at least 10 to 20 pounds of belly fat may be on its way to me now! 

I wrote this headline last time.  The gadget arrived just a few days ago.   It may yet deliver on its promise.

But yesterday when I finally had time to open the package and try to use it, I found that I’d expected a much more usable and well designed version than showed up.

The cold packs seem fine.  But the vest for my upper chest and shoulders may only be usable if I can get the missing directions on how to make it work and stay on me!

And, the waist wrap seems to hang too low by a bit with no way to adjust it up.

Lastly, I only was able to put the cold packs in the freezer for a couple of hours and then it was 95 degrees in our apartment for the half hour I wore them.

I’m assuming there is a way to make the top stay on.  And clearly, wearing the cold packs on a more normal day when they have been in the freezer for at least the previous 24 hours will get more effect.

But the test got postponed by the extra month it took to arrive so zero effect this report.  And, the next month and maybe even October will be blocked by the hot weather from the full effect

Even so, it may work yet! 

The effect is so robust you may be able to eat MORE and still lose fat.

This apparently turns on your brown fat and removes some fat by that metabolic increase even when you aren’t wearing it. 

But the big effect is the direct burning of calories to stay warm while you are wearing it.

This is doable because you can wear a hat and gloves to minimize how cold you feel: AND you can read or work on your computer while you are wearing it!

It’s even possible that wearing the cold packs after a hard workout earlier in the day may enable you to recover better and make faster progress at building muscle.

Some people who had 25 or 30 pounds of fat to lose lost it in two months. One even lost it in one month.

I doubt seriously if I’ll be able to wear the packs enough to do that each week. 

But it does sound very much as if I’ll be able, FINALLY, to lose five pounds of fat each month for a few months in a row.

That may well be the best potential news that has ever been in my fatloss reports or in my blog at all for that matter.

*That’s because I may become quite well do to do personally by selling a fat loss set of products guaranteed to work – because they always do.

*And, it may give doctors a safe way AND totally effective way to help obese patients lose their excess fat. 

(The legal folks had them put all kinds of disclaimers on it just in case there are hidden safety issues for people such as those with type 2 diabetes in using it.

Since it has such a high caloric burn rate per hour, just like exercise capable of doing  so, it may indeed be that you have to know what precautions to use to use it safely.)

False health info to avoid, part I....

Today's Post:  Friday, 8-14-2015

There are quite a number of things that were once thought to be true that would be better or at least OK to use to protect your health.

So many of these turned out to be totally false or only true under certain conditions that it can help you stay healthy to know what now looks to be the correct information.

1.  We now know that for most people too much real sugar is bad for you. 

True.  Most people today are mostly sedentary and will be much healthier if they limit their calories from sugar to two % or less of total calories.  People who take supplements for health that also help to process sugar such as cinnamon and alpha lipoic acid and people who are quite active or do vigorous exercise every day may be OK with up to 5% of calories as sugar.

Because the average American takes in far more than that, just eating less sugar is very important.

But sugar tastes good; so many things have been thought to be OK to use as substitutes and still eat instead of eating less sugar.

Unfortunately many people still believe in one or more of those things and eat them instead of just eating way less real sugar.

Here’s a list of them.  The very bad news is that they are all WORSE for your health than the sugar they replace NOT better.

a)  Agave nectar.  Despite having a promisingly low glycemic index, agave nectar is a slightly harsh tasting form of free fructose.  And, free fructose turns out to be MORE harmful than sugar and more fattening too!

 If you want to avoid type 2 diabetes and heart disease try hard to avoid ALL forms of  free fructose from high fructose corn syrup to agave nectar.

Warning, many products in health food stores, even those with other ingredients that are much more carefully selected for being health OK use agave as a sweetener.  In fact, I found recently even their employees don’t know agave is more harmful than sugar!

b)  A very similar sweetener also still in products in health food stores, even those with other ingredients that are much more carefully selected for being health OK use concentrated fruit juice.  This sounds OK because the fructose in real whole fruit is safe to eat. 

What this misses is that without the fiber and other nutrients in whole fruit, the fructose in fruit stops being safe to eat without those parts of the fruit.

Because of this even organic fruit juice of high nutrition fruits are harmful enough to limit as much or more than real sugar.

What about fruit juice concentrate as a sweetener?  BAD news:  It tastes a bit better than agave but is also free fructose; and you are far better off healthwise if you never eat any!

c) Artificial sweeteners.  Sugar has calories and too much of it slams up your blood sugar causing all kinds of health problems.

What if you found chemicals that tasted sweet or sweeter even than sugar that had no calories?

Wouldn’t that allow you to eat things taste as sweet as sugar added ones without the fattening effect and without the health harm?

OUCH!  It’s complicated exactly why and how this happens but foods sweetened with artificial sweeteners are MORE effective as fatteners and produce even more diabetes and heart disease than the sugar they replace.  Part of it is basic biology in mammals.  The effect even happens in rats!  In people it’s even worse since people who use artificial sweeteners often eat other harmful and fattening foods too AND eat more of them believing they are protected by the sugar that they didn’t eat.

On top of that, the Center for Science in the Public Interest lists all the most used artificial sweeteners as mildly carcinogenic.

But if you drink five diet soft drinks a day for 15 years, the huge multiplier factor times something mildly carcinogenic once or twice a year becomes something that looks for more likely to be a significant risk factor for cancer.

Conclusion:  So, eat real whole fresh fruit, small amounts of real sugar on occasion, and eliminate all these other sweeteners if you want to keep good health. 

Many people still think they are safe and effective health aids.  That’s NOT true!

2.  Whole wheat.  

This one is slightly more complicated and is even more harmful due to how many people used to believe it and because some health professionals who by now should know better still believe it.

Real whole wheat does have more B complex vitamins than white, refined grain wheat.  And, it does have more fiber.

And, it’s quite true that fiber and B complex vitamins in your food are good for you.

So intuitively it looks like whole wheat should be good for you.

B complex vitamins from supplements or from egg yolks or liver from animals fed only their natural foods from unpolluted sources are not just good for you, they are vital to good health.

And, enough fiber helps you feel full and helps you digest your food and eliminate the rest with no extra problems.

That means that if whole wheat is bad for you – and it’s extremely harmful – something else must be going on.

There most certainly is!  Here’s the long list!

a)  Most foods labeled as whole wheat aren’t.  They contain a bit of it to avoid being totally false labeled; but most of the flour is brown color added refined grain white flour which does NOT have the extra fiber and B complex vitamins.

b) Slamming your blood sugar too high when you eat a food is both fattening and tends to cause type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  That’s why limiting even real sugar so strongly is so important to staying lean and in good health.

Even real whole wheat, just like refined grain wheat, does this fifty percent MORE than sugar!

How often is safe to eat that kind of food?  If you eat the 2 to 5 % of your calories as sugar already, the right answer is never or once or twice a year at best.

c)  But the wheat and whole wheat in stores isn’t the same wheat people ate in biblical times.

So eating it today is even more harmful still!

Hybrid wheat was developed many years ago.  The idea was that wheat was then thought to be a safe, staple food to eat; but people were going hungry because there wasn’t enough food.  So the hybrid wheat they developed would grow remarkably more wheat per acre.  And that did allow enough wheat to be grown to feed more people less expensively.

Did they think to monitor the hybrid wheat for harmful health effects at that time?  Nope.

The problem today is that all this wheat people think is safe to eat is hybrid wheat today. AND, hybrid wheat has a new component that causes allergies to wheat in some people and worse, severe allergic reactions to gluten in some people.

Gluten allergies produce all kinds of nasty but hard to diagnose symptoms if you don’t know where they are coming from.  And, as a result, thousands of people feel like hell and don’t know why because they have been eating hybrid wheat in large amounts.

If you know that, it’s easy to avoid the problem, stop considering ANY food that contains wheat a food.  At best, it’s a semifood that is only safe to eat a few times a year at most.

d)  Over 90 % of the wheat in stores today was grown using GMO seeds.  You’ve almost certainly eaten some and are reading this, so GMO wheat is clearly not as toxic as cyanide. 

Is GMO food of any kind safe to eat longer than 6 months in terms of its long term effect on your health?  If you have or plan to have children and grandchildren and descendants beyond that, will they be able to have kids and if so, will they be healthy?

The studies done on this that I’ve seen reports on say no it isn’t safe in both of these two ways.

In the rest of the world GMO foods are banned or at least it’s mandatory to label them.

In the United States, the people who make money by using or making the chemicals for GMO foods are working very hard and spending some of that money on lobbying in an effort to keep you from knowing if anything you eat has GMO ingredients.

My hope is that their DARK act will be killed in the US Senate and that effort will fail.

But whether or not the DARK act passes, there is a SURE way to avoid GMO wheat, as harmful a food as wheat is, you can do that by no longer eating ANY wheat.  And regardless of GMO issues your health will be better because you did so.

e)  With that lead up, can you imagine there is yet another reason to never eat wheat or eat it very rarely because of its negative health effects?

Unfortunately there is! 

And, it’s an important reason because the effects include helping to cause heart disease, most cancers, and likely Alzheimer’s disease and autoimmune diseases too.

I’m out of time today.  But we will last that one and other health myths best to not believe in Part II of this post.  

Blood pressure and heart warning....

Today's Post:  Friday, 8-7-2015

There is a drug in extremely common use that Stanford researchers recently confirmed to help cause high blood pressure, artery damage, and heart disease.

You might take it or have it prescribed for you. 

I did.  In fact I took it long enough it may have caused me considerable harm despite the many things I did to do the opposite.  I’ve been taking this drug for 25 years! Or I had been.  I’ve stopped it totally now.

Prilosec, generic name omaprazole, does turn down stomach acid enough to avoid some pain from the reflux of stomach acid some people get. 

This class of drugs is called proton pump inhibitors.

Your body releases tiny amounts of nitric oxide to cause blood vessel relaxation.  Apparently too, if this does not happen or happen enough the insides of your blood vessels become damaged.  And, of course high blood pressure can and does happen in people where this nitric oxide release is impaired.

Stanford researchers recently found that taking proton pump inhibitors inhibits nitric oxide release and does cause endothelial damage and heart disease.

I’d heard somewhere this might be the case; but my doctor hadn’t seen any data. 

But then two things happened, the Stanford research was published and I saw it.  And, the researchers noted that H2 blockers also stopped excess acid but did NOT have this side effect.

(When I first heard the Prilosec might do this, I simply stopped taking it and found the side effects of no acid protection too harsh and had to resume taking it.)

And, when I started taking Prilosec, it was much more effective than taking H2 blockers.

But when I checked out H2 blockers after seeing the Stanford study, I found that Zantac, which was developed more recently, was as effective as the Prilosec!

So, now I knew that for sure Prilosec was causing my high blood pressure in part and might be damaging my heart and blood vessels too.  And, now there is an effective replacement that does not do so.

So, since that time, I now take Zantac for my acid reflux.  The Zantac does seem to be as effective as the Prilosec was for the acid reflux.

Why is this blog post a warning?  Because I may have some partially blocked arteries to my heart because of this effect and the many years I took Prilosec.

So to avoid that happening to you, it looks likely that you should not take proton pump inhibitors longer than a few weeks.

If you can take Zantac instead even for short term use -- or if you need the acid reduction longer than a few weeks, the research found it will be MUCH safer for you to take Zantac and to discontinue the proton pump inhibitors!

In my case, I’m so glad I’ve been doing enough effective things to protect my heart.  It seems I may have prevented enough damage to avoid much more serious heart problems.