True guidelines for common beliefs part two....Today's post:  Tuesday, 6-12-2018

There are many beliefs about many things that influence health.

Some things that are commonly thought to be harmful are not or there is a way to do them or eat them safely.

Many things thought to be safe or even beneficial are actually harmful and even deadly.

So that the final post in this series has all of these, here are the ones that I posted on last Weds, 6-6-2018.  They are worth reading if you haven’t yet seen them and acting on if you read them without using them yet.

If you have, today’s post finishes the section on egg yolks, saturated fat, and harmful and beneficial fats. It then continues after that.

This story appeared online:

11 ‘bad habits’ that are actually healthy, according to science

https://www.businessinsider.nl/bad-habits-healthy-according-to-science-2018-5/ 

Some of their coverage I thought well of and some I didn’t.  I also noticed they left out some of the more important topics.

This is my list some of which includes things they included and my comments on those from their list.

(I thought they did well on some and much less well on others.)

A.  As you may have seen, the makers of MSG have funded a disinformation campaign on Facebook that has at least a dozen people saying that the furor over MSG is based on iffy or incorrect information.

The actual research on MSG finds it is so harmful it should be illegal to add to foods –

 or at the very least illegal to put MSG in foods without informing the person eating or buying it that it’s there and abundant research shows it’s quite harmful and fattening!

My complete post on this was on Tuesday, 5-29, last week, with far more detail.

B.  They didn’t include smoking.

Roughly half the people who smoke believe smoking is harmless.  No need to inform them since they believe their lives are so messed up and out of their control they might as well smoke. So whether it’s harmful or not they really don’t care.

The other half though believes that the only significant risk of smoking is from lung cancer and most smokers escape it.

While it is true that even in heavy smokers only about a fourth get lung cancer, the other part of that saying “the only significant risk is” is SO false if there was an alarm for false statements your computer or smart phone would be vibrating so hard you’d have trouble reading this!

Two thirds of smokers get Alzheimer’s disease.  We know why. It’s no accident.

Even second hand smoke triggers heart attacks, sometimes fatal ones, in people who would otherwise not have had them for years.

Tobacco itself is radioactive; so using tobacco products or breathing its smoke sends cancer causing radioactivity to go everywhere in your body.  So it’s no surprise that half of all cancers and half of all cancer deaths are from tobacco use, smoking, or second hand smoke.

Nicotine itself is harmful to your heart and tends to cause cancer.  And vaping systems expose your lungs to other harmful compounds to we now know.

Also, most people who smoke use lighters instead of matches.  This makes the smoke much more effective at causing lung cancer and other cancers because of the short lived hydrocarbons in the hotter smoke.

So, if you smoke or use tobacco another way or are exposed to second hand smoke or vape, using a way to stop nicotine addiction completely without a substitute and staying away from second hand smoke as close to 100% of the time is the safest way to deal with it.

C.  They didn’t include soft drinks or diet soft drinks.

*Gradually over the past 70 years we have gone from no one knows what soft drinks are to most young people drink soft drinks at least a few times a week to a few times a day.

Since they see other people their age do the same and they get to see the ads for soft drinks that make them seem fun every time they go to the movies, they believe soft drinks are fun, harmless, and normal.

This is another so false the alarm would blow up your computer or smart phone deal.

Something like 30 different kinds of research shows that drinking ANY soft drinks is about as harmful as smoking heavily.  Doing so causes osteoporosis, fatty liver, and helps cause cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease. 

Drinking soft drinks is also a near perfect fattener!  Drinking one or several does nothing to turn down hunger but DOES deliver calories in a way that tends to cause those calories to become fat.  Worse the blood sugar surge causes you to become hungry for sugary foods when the rebound effect hits later.

Drinking soft drinks seems safer than smoking. The reality is that it may be worse for you!  And THAT’s not yet well known.

**Millions of people drink diet soft drinks and some nurses and diabetes educators with out of date training-- believe that they get to drink soft drinks because that doesn’t fatten them.

In fact, because they believe this, they often drink more than people who drink regular soft drinks.

Is this belief true?

Nope. Diet soft drinks and the artificial sweeteners used in them fatten quite a bit MORE than regular soft drinks! 

Worse, the artificial sweeteners themselves cause some cancers and other health problems as much as or more than as regular soft drinks using free fructose high fructose corn syrup.

[To me an article on false beliefs having to do with health that leaves out MSG; tobacco, smoking, and nicotine; and leaves out soft drinks and diet soft drinks is like an article about cars with nothing in it about engines or safety.]

D.  Many people still believe that eating, 

fats and oils and saturated fat, and egg yolks are bad for you.

Many nutritionists and diabetes educators with outdated educations still believe these things.

The article does rather better on these topics! 

The article says this about eating eggs:

“Eggs – an animal product high in cholesterol, fat, protein, and several key vitamins and minerals – have been vilified for years. But as it turns out, eggs are actually pretty healthy. And ordering just the whites, a practice that low-fat food advocates say is a way to shave off calories, fat, and cholesterol, is completely unnecessary.

Whole eggs are high in a handful of key vitamins and minerals that you can’t get from many foods like vitamin B12 and phosphorus. They’re also rich in muscle-fueling protein and satiating fat, which makes them filling and unlikely to be overeaten.

Plus, the cholesterol eggs contain does not appear to lead to high cholesterol levels in healthy people. Just as eating fat does not translate into being fat, recent

research has shown that eating cholesterol doesn’t necessarily translate into having high cholesterol.“

Not bad!  Certainly closer to accurate than the old advice was.  Egg yolks DO have many nutrients you need and in highly bioavailable forms.  Ovo or lacto ovo vegetarians do not need to take the long list of supplements that vegans do to stay healthy. Eating a few eggs a week can solve that problem.

However, eggs can be from chickens fed pesticide and herbicide sprayed grains.  This makes such eggs have some pro-inflammatory omega 6 oil and a surprising amount of concentrated pesticides and herbicides.

So eating those kinds of eggs is still something that should be limited.

The much better news is that eating eggs from chickens that really are fed on pastures they walk around on from insects and earthworms and some organic additions are now available.  Whole Foods now stocks those.

You can eat at least a whole egg a day including the yolk from such chickens.

There are still some possible upgrades.  But this kind of eggs ALSO has more of the nutrition you eat the eggs to get!

This was the end of last week’s post.

Egg yolks from hens truly fed their natural diet on unpolluted pastures they walk around on are both safe and beneficial to eat.

When added to a diet with abundant organic vegetables and fruit, they tend to support very good health.

Also, to the extent eating them boosts cholesterol, the choline in the egg yolks raises the beneficial HDL cholesterol which has heart and brain boosting effects.

Such egg yolks also contain l-carnitine; and both choline and l-carnitine have nerve and mitochondria boosting effects.

Some research has found that a bacteria that causes calcium deposits in your blood vessels TMAO blooms when you eat a lot of choline and l-carnitine.

This suggests that eating egg yolks or taking choline or l-carnitine as supplements might boost this bacteria and cause this effect.

The much better news is that many of the most heart protective things you can do produce the reverse effect so well that it looks totally safe to ignore it!

a) Take probiotics and eat organic yogurt with live cultures and no sweeteners and sauerkraut made with organic cabbage.  To some extent this leaves less room for the TMAO producing bacteria.

b) Do things that put calcium into your bones without overdoing it and remove calcium from your blood vessels.

Take at least 400 mg a day of magnesium.  Don’t consume too much real sugar and consume no free fructose from juices or juice concentrates and never consume it from high fructose corn syrup with all that excess fructose also free fructose.  (If you get enough magnesium you tend to add enough calcium to bones for strength but not too much.  But since most younger people eat too little magnesium and don’t take it as supplements and the free fructose and excess sugar they do consume deplete magnesium, they often have weak bones that uptake too little calcium leaving it to harden their blood vessels.)

Take at least 10,000 iu of vitamin D3 and take vitamin K2.  Enough magnesium and K2 cause the calcium you eat to make strong bones AND actively remove it from your blood vessels!  Also do NOT, repeat NOT take statins.  They harm your mitochondria and deplete vitamin K2 and also cause calcium to be added to your arteries by actual test because of this. NOT taking artificial sweeteners or drinking diet soft drinks prevents calcium from leaving your bones and weight bearing exercise and strength training add calcium to your bones.(This set of actions directly stops TMAO from doing the reverse.)

c) TMAO is also thought to cause excess clotting.

So, do things that keep your blood vessels healthy and flexible and prevent blood from clotting too easily.

Eating organic fruit and fruit extracts and organic vegetables does the reverse plus it helps keep your blood vessels strong and healthy.

This is known to prevent both kinds of strokes and heart attacks.

Lard and butter and whole milk from cows fed only grass or organic greens on unpolluted grass are actually beneficial to eat in moderation for much the same reasons as egg yolks.

The same is true of organic coconut oil.

So it’s a myth that these things are harmful that most people don’t yet know and many nutritionists trained before the research was done showing this don’t yet know that saturated fat from egg yolks, dairy products, and meat is NOT harmful if it’s from animals that are fed right.

These things are true however:

*Those same foods from chickens and cattle fed grain that has been sprayed with herbicides and pesticides ARE harmful from the excessive pro-inflammatory omega 6 oils in the grain and the bioconcentrated herbicides and pesticides in the fat.

*The foods high in monosaturated oils are so heart protective, although it is true that animal based saturated fat from naturally fed cattle and chickens is safe and beneficial, the reason to limit your intake is make room for lots of these foods.

Raw, shelled, tree nuts for those not allergic, organic avocados, and organic extra virgin olive oil are in this list of foods. 

(Peanuts have too much omega oils and tend to contain cancer causing aflatoxin and are often not grown organically.

Cashews have too many lectins so some people have an allergic reaction to them; and the rest of us should eat them very seldom.)

Last but far from least, taking olive leaf extract adds to this heart protective effect.

*The nerve and brain beneficial and anti-inflammatory omega 3 oils from wild caught fish and seafood is so valuable and health producing, you should also limit fats from land animals to make room for them. 

(Or you can take supplements of purified omega 3 and DHA in addition to eating wild caught small fish and salmon that are high in omega 3 oils but not mercury.)

In addition to the nerve and brain beneficial and anti-inflammatory omega effects of omega 3 oils from wild caught fish and seafood, eating and taking DHA boosts HDL cholesterol and lowers inflammation and triglycerides so it is enormously heart protective and protective of blood circulation to your brain.

*Next in the article, they say this:

“Breakfast is not mandatory, despite what you may have heard.

Although it was once believed that skipping the first meal of the day leads to weight gain, several recent studies have found the opposite – that fasting, or occasionally skipping meals, may actually help some people lose weight.

These eating plans are known as intermittent fasting, and one of the most popular involves abstaining from food for 16 hours and eating for eight. That leads most people to shift their eating window back a few hours from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m., essentially foregoing breakfast.

Large studies have found intermittent fasting to be just as reliable for weight loss as traditional diets. A few studies in animals suggest it could have other benefits, such as reducing the risk for certain cancers and even prolonging life– but those studies need to be repeated in humans.”

This does work for some people.

Bullet Proof teaches to consume coffee and ghee and their blend of lighter and better tasting MCT oils that boost ketones you and your brain can use for energy instead of glucose for breakfast and then eat health ok protein foods and health ok fats and oils and organic and nonstarchy vegetables later in the day.

I tried it and could do it. But it was not effective for fat loss for me and I prefer to eat breakfast.

But the point is accurate.  It does work for some people.

Because breakfast is often the meal you can fix and eat at home and have the most control over and having your hunger turned down or off can protect you from eating sugary treats with refined grain hybrid wheat in many workplaces, I think most people will do better at fat loss by eating a breakfast high in health OK proteins and fats and oils and nutrition.

Most people I think do better at fat loss by always eating breakfast.  But some people have done well without it this other way.

*Next, in their article they discuss coffee:

“Drinking coffee

In March, a California judge ruled that Starbucks and other coffee businesses must include cancer warnings on their products.

Despite this frightening announcement, there’s extensive scientific research on coffee which suggests that, if anything, regularly drinking the brew is linked with a reduced cancer risk as well as a range of other health benefits, such as protecting against diabetes and boosting heart health.

That said, doctors recommend limiting your caffeine intake to 400 milligrams per day, or about 3 to 4 standard cups of drip coffee.”

This is weak and confusing coverage in my opinion.  This is what this is about:

Coffee and instant coffee that you drink is made from roasted coffee beans that are then ground and hot water used to extract the active ingredients and flavor.

When foods with any carbohydrate are roasted with high heat it causes the release of acrylamide which has been found to cause cancer in higher doses.

This means that roasted coffee beans do have some acrylamide in them.

Is this likely to cause people who drink coffee or instant coffee to get cancer?

I agree with their apparent view that the answer is probably not.

But what they don’t say is why.

And, they don’t say how to dramatically reduce the risk which is most important.

Here’s what they left out:

Most of the acrylamide people consume comes from toasted NOT organic refined grain hybrid wheat.  If you know to NEVER eat that food  and why and almost never do, you’ll escape enough acrylamide to make the small amount in roasted coffee beans far less dangerous.

The many kinds of antioxidants and cancer preventing substances  in coffee beans are so many and so effective, the actual data tend to show coffee drinkers are healthier and less likely to have cancer than people who don’t.

Then too it’s extra important to get organic coffee and instant coffee.  The coffee made from heavily sprayed coffee beans may cause cancer from the herbicides and pesticides and this risk is in my opinion about 100 times greater than the risk from the tiny bit of acrylamide.

So, consider drinking only organic coffee and instant coffee to prevent cancer if you want coffee that does not cause cancer.

Last but far from least, completely avoid tobacco, its smoke, and nicotine and eat a very low inflammation lifestyle and take supplements that support it and those such as olive leaf extract that tend to prevent cancer.

THAT will prevent cancer in people who drink organic coffee and instant coffee despite the small amount of acrylamide in the roasted coffee beans!

Part 3 will continue next week.