More ways to avoid the health hazards of sitting too much....

Today's Post:  Friday, 8-10-2012

1.  The good news first:

You will be dramatically healthier if you do both some strength training AND some interval cardio in every week and do one or the other on most days of every week.

If you do these exercises first thing or nearly first thing each morning, it can be more doable and in fact it IS doable for most people.

This is particularly true because if you are short time to do a half hour some days, you can just do part of your routine or half of it that day.

But the health effects remain! 

I can cut the last 4 minutes of my leg exercises from 25 to 21 when needed.  I can cut my strength training from 30 minutes to 15 minutes since the most important and vigorous exercises are in that first half.  And, with extra chores each Friday morning, I only do my 4 part abdominal workout which is just 6 minutes to do.

This means every single day I get 2 minutes or more of vigorous exercise.  But even on a day I had to cut back to just that two minutes, I get 40 % of more of the health benefits! 

I usually get 100 % of my exercises done and rarely get less than 75%.  But I can cut back a session or two or even skip some rarely when I have to.  So I find it totally doable.

So most days I do fit in the whole exercise session without needing to delete any of it.

So doing enough exercise to avoid being weak, to be decently fit, and get dramatic health benefits IS doable.  And, it likely is for you; and it is for most people.

2.  Here’s the bad news though:

There are three major problems if that’s all you can do and you sit too much every day.

a)  Your disease protection from exercise is only partial if you sit for too many hours each day.  (And sitting a lot without any exercise is deadly.)

The worst one is that if you still sit for 6 to 12 hours or more each day between work and home every day single day as most of us do now, the health protection from that good exercise program is far more partial than I or anyone else once thought.

Instead of being 90% + protected from heart disease as you would be if you also walked around as much each day as most people used to do 100 years ago or more, you might only be 55% protected – because you simply sit too darned much!

(I overcome that with supplements to some degree.  But I’d love to upgrade my protection anyway.)

One study found that people who sit more than 6 hours a day increased their rate of death from any cause by 37% for women and 18% for men.

A different study of people over 45 that lasted 11 years found that people who sat over 11 hours a day had a 40% increased risk of dying the first 3 years of the study alone.

Preventive medicine and exercise specialist for the Stanford Center for Disease Prevention and professor of emeritus of the Stanford University School of Medicine, William Haskell, said directly regular exercise “probably doesn’t wipe out all of the negative health consequences” of sitting 12 or more hours a day as many people do now.  He did also say that at least exercising was much better than doing nothing!

(We cover 3 solutions at the end of this post.)

b)  There is also research on how many calories a week it takes to stay healthy.

The good news there is that even a tiny walking total or comparable amount of exercise that burns 500 or 600 calories a week gives you a full 40% of the protection of an ideal exercise program that burns 2800 to 4200 calories a week.

This proves William Haskell right by the way.  It’s dramatically better for you to do even this tiny amount of exercise each week than none at all.

But what if you want 100 % protection or close to it?!

With my schedule, I’m not able to walk much.   100 to 200 calories a week from walking is likely what I average.  But I do add 1000 to 1100 calories a week with my morning exercises.

So I almost always get 1200 calories a week of exercise and walking totaled together.

That, however, is at least 1600 calories a week short of the 2800 calories a week for best health results.  And, it’s 800 calories a week needed for the 2,000 calories a week needed for very good health results.

But there is no more room to add more hours exercising to my life.  I have to work and need to drive there and to run errands by car.  I need some quiet time at home to read when I’m not at work or running errands.  And, I’m already using up some of my time each day exercising.

This is even more true for most people.  People have second jobs and children to tend and more!

(We cover 3 solutions at the end of this post.)

c)  We posted yesterday on the many reasons that regular exercise is essential for fat loss and keeping off the fat you lose.

As with health even a little bit of exercise each week helps.  And most people have time for interval cardio and strength training that burn calories after you stop actually exercising each day and build muscle so you avoid losing muscle plus the muscle you add burns extra calories.

But how many calories a week of exercise gets the best fat loss results?

We actually know!

The ongoing study of people who have lost over 30 pounds and kept it off shows that such people get an average of a bit over 2800 calories of exercise each week!

Notice that’s 1600 calories or more than from exercise each week than I have time to do!

I never gained the 70 or more pounds of fat people my size who sit as much as I do often do.  That’s because I eat right and exercise.  I’ve also lost 30 pounds and have kept off over 20 pounds of that. 

But if what if I could do another 1600 to calories each week of exercise instead of sitting still for hours?

If I could do that while I read or work and people who watch too much TV could also, that might just be doable!

2.  The 3 pieces of good news is that there are now three ways to do this.

The best of these 3 methods still needs some upgrades to make it more doable for many more people and cost far less.

But these methods exist at all now.

And, until very recently they did not exist.

a)  The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper now has a weekly Health section.  Two days ago on Weds, 8-8-2012, they highlighted an internet related start up, Kismetrics, with many software people most of who are well under 35.

To help people avoid sitting AND spend less money, they simply set out their computer work stations on high tables and spent less on desks and chairs.  People there stand while they work.

To some degree that works.  Their people report less back problems or even having them go away.  And you shift positions and burn calories more while standing than while sitting. 

The article also says bigger more established and comparable companies here in the Silicon Valley such as Google and Intuit are trying them.

For some younger people this may help.  And it certainly can save money who have these younger employees willing to try something different.

But to me this is a bit of help for some people but NOT a good solution for most of us.

People who are older or overweight or worse – OR both as many people now are likely would be unwilling to stand all day while working or unable to continue it if they tried it.

Worse, it’s NOT a long term solution.  Dentists as a profession recently went from standing to do their work to sitting while they work because the dentists who stood for years and decades all usually developed varicose veins from standing too much!

Lastly, Dr William Haskell noted that the low calorie use of this has resulted in no studies whatever showing that standing while at work helps with fat loss.

b)  The second method is a bit similar.  The best good news is that it IS at your desk exercise – not just standing there. 

The even better news is that using it while you work it DOES result in fat loss!

Conceptually it’s similar. You WALK on a treadmill while working on a high desk.

Steelcase, the office supply and desk company, makes the already set up for you version.  They call theirs the “Walking Desk”

The two pieces of bad news here are that:

It has the same problems that standing too much does if you keep using it!

& It costs about $4,000.  Ouch!

The walking desk DOES get some sales since the need for what it does is so great.

But this is not close to the universal solution most people can use that we now so badly need.

c)  The third solution is potentially the best for many people.

It’s new and is available now.

(See http://www.activoffice.net/ .)

Bryan Wassom of Pleasanton, California, despite being a regular runner sat enough that he had more belly fat than he wanted.

(This is something a lot of people have now – including me!)

So, he set up a recumbent bike and desk combination in his home office.  He rode it for 9 months and found he lost 18 pounds of fat off his tummy.

WOW!

But even though he is now set up to sell them although on a small scale at first, he hadn’t yet had anyone try it out in a regular work office.

So when I phoned him after the news in our local San Jose Mercury newspaper about it came out – AND I was quite enthusiastic about its potential, he asked if I would beta test one in exchange for having one to use at no charge.

Since they currently cost about $2,000 to buy and I’d not tried one, I immediately said yes.

There is significant good news and bad news.

Summary first:

If you can make it work for you at all, it may be the very best fat loss solution for at your desk exercisers ever found or likely to be.

It takes WAY to much room and makes your existing desk almost impossible to use as you were doing before.  It also costs too much for widespread use.

Good news first.

I have an at home set of tricycle style pedals on the floor that moves my knees too high to use at work but is effortless for me as a fit person to use.  At home though I keep falling asleep on our couch by the time I sit down there.  So I’ve not been able to use it much.  And between being that easy and hardly getting to it, it has had minimal effect on my fat loss.

The at my desk exercise bike is dramatically better for fat loss.  

Even on the lowest setting -- comparable to biking on well paved and level ground, it’s about four or five times more exercise to run.

You have to do more than just make the pedals go. 

You have to do it while your legs are more elevated. And you must use the pedals that work your calf muscles with each turn instead of just on the bottom of your feet.

Your abdominal muscles are under so much continuous tension that you likely double your fat loss just from that alone.  But that also means that over time you’ll tighten them up enough your waist will be and look an inch less even before your fat loss!

The net result is that even this low level exercise takes some effort at first -- AND while you are doing it and for 15 minutes or more after you stop you are slightly warm as if it was 5 or more degrees warmer in your office.

(Bryan, who worked up to using it for many hours a day, got a quit fan to keep this from causing him to sweat too much and recommended I get one eventually also.)

BUT, note what that means!  Once you build up to it a bit, you literally burn extra calories just like a furnace at the same time you work at your desk!

And, that happens every weekday without adding any new time to your schedule!

No wonder Bryan lost 18 pounds!

The bad news is that only people with larger offices and who have very high motivation will find it usable at all.  Then it costs $2,000 too.

For those people, I think it will become famous!

And, as Bryan and his people make improvements in how comfortable it is to sit on, how to design the desk part to be smaller or easier to use or both and more, more people will be able to use it OK.

I got mine a week ago today and have used it this week.

I still need to make my seat softer and develop more work arounds to make my files more accessible.  And, I need to get far more fit and used to using it.

But I hate my the extra fat on my belly so much, I WILL do it.

But what about people who need something they can use at their existing desk and chair without all these challenging adjustments?

What about people who can only afford two or three hundred dollars for at an your desk exerciser and people who need something far easier to use and get used to or who need to avoid generating quite that much heat?

I know how to make one! 

And, while I hope to help Bryan sell and upgrade his great fat loss product and sell it to people like me who want its benefits, I also want to work with him to build and make that other  product since 250 to 25000 times as many people will be able to use it and will buy one.   

Eating excessive salt causes bone loss....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 7-31-2012

Many people in the United States today eat a lot of packaged snacks and bread and other foods that come with a high salt content.   Some of these foods such as salted nuts and chips do taste salty.  But others like different kinds of breads and prepared foods such as TV dinners do not.

Some people, I used to be one!, put extra salt on some kinds of foods BEFORE they taste them.

And, some people by habit add a good bit of salt to some kinds of foods.

Until recently, the only widely known reason NOT to do these things was that some people who do get high blood pressure.

(We did also know that people who take in close to 1500 to 2,000 mg of salt and eat a lot of vegetables have somewhat lower blood pressure than those who do not.  And in people who have high blood pressure, it usually goes down somewhat by eating this low moderate amount of salt.  The studies on this DASH II diet have shown these things.

Note that this is NOT a close to zero salt or sodium diet.  It’s just low moderate intake.  Much lower to zero intake of salt causes other health problems.)

But in the last few weeks, new research is showing that excessive salt intake is dramatically more harmful than most people knew until now!

We posted recently on the discovery that excessively high salt intake, over 5,000 grams a day, was found to cause internal blood vessel damage directly.  Then this damage causes high blood pressure, heart disease, and gout!

The news for such excessive salt intake just got even worse!

Understandably when you eat 3 times too much salt, your body tries to get rid of it.  The recently announced research found that when that happens, it takes calcium out of your bones along with the excess salt.

Medical News today had this:  “Depleting Calcium Stores In The Body

http://mnt.to/a/47pN

The scientific community has always wanted to know why people who eat high-salt diets are prone to developing medical problems such as kidney stones and osteoporosis.

Medical researchers at the University of Alberta may have solved this puzzle through their work with animal lab models and cells.”

They found this effect.  When there is excess sodium and your body gets rid of it, it pulls calcium to go with it.

We now know that eating excessive salt is extremely harmful and in multiple ways including bone loss.

How to avoid excess salt.

1.  Eat more foods that salt has NOT been added to.  Raw broccoli florets and unsalted, raw or dry roasted nuts, whole fresh fruit, and many other foods work just fine with no salt added. 

2.  Either stop eating high salt foods or where salt has been added for you or eat them far less often.

The other ingredients in many of these foods such as packaged snacks, refined grain breads, and commercial baked goods, and fast food are as bad for you as the excess salt because they contain things like oils high in omega 6, refined grains, partially saturated oils high in omega 6, high fructose corn syrup, and excessive sugars.

So, you benefit in multiple ways when you slash your intake of such foods to zero to or near zero.  You’ll not only avoid the excess salt in them and be and stay healthier by avoiding these other ingredients, you’ll be far less fat too!

3.  Always taste your food first!  Then add other spices you like and as little salt as possible.

(One piece of good news is after a week or so of no longer eating excessive salt, you taste salty tastes better and you’ll find you enjoy foods as much as you did before with far less salt.

You do NOT need to eat zero salt.  If the food would taste better with some salt or you have been sweating a lot, adding some salt to taste is completely OK.  Just avoid using five times that much!)

Only spicing foods with salt is like painting with only white paint!  

Eating spices such as basil, oregano, turmeric, curry blends, black pepper, minced garlic, and chopped onion or chives – or ginger or red pepper or cinnamon and more is like painting with all the colors.

These foods also often taste better and mellower and blend better when eaten with some extra virgin olive oil.

Best of all each and every one of these spices and the olive oil has health BENEFITS instead of health harms.

Foods you used just dump salt on can taste BETTER with well chosen spices and no or far less salt.

II.  Quick list of other tips to keep your bones strong

1.  We now know that taking calcium supplements increases heart disease risk; and it doesn’t build bone if you are low in vitamin D.

Conversely, if you eat FOODS high in calcium and take 3,000 iu a day or more of vitamin D3, that DOES build your bones without boosting your heart attack risk.

2.  Vigorous or weight bearing exercise builds bone.  The ideal is to do at least a few minutes of interval cardio and strength training every week in sessions of at least a few minutes most days or every day each week.  Then doing as much walking or moderate leg exercise each week as you can fit in also helps.

3.  Eating foods high in magnesium and taking magnesium supplements has also been found to build bone.  So has taking boron supplements.  Nuts and dark leafy greens are high in magnesium and have other health benefits.  (The people who are allergic to nuts can at least eat the greens.)

4. Avoid the other things that REMOVE bone. 

a) Never or hardly ever drink soft drinks either regular or diet!

The phosphoric acid added to make them taste “crisp” leaches calcium out of your bones.

Avoiding soft drinks is also a very effective way to lose fat and actually be LESS hungry!

b)  We just posted here on why to avoid excessive salt intake because one of its harms is that eating excessive salt leaches calcium out of your bones.

c)  And, completely avoid tobacco smoke.  Another recent research study found that exposure to tobacco smoke causes the bone breakdown process needed for continuous repair of your bones to go into overdrive enough that it causes more bone loss than your body can add back.

That’s a direct cause of net bone loss!  

Exercise at your desk to lose fat and keep your health....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 7-17-2012

It’s not widely known yet but there are now two ways to exercise at your desk while you work so you get the moderate exercise without taking time from your work.

One of them is new and can be used more of the time you are at your desk than the first one to come out.  It also costs less than half as much!

 This is extremely important news for two reasons.

1.  Doing nondistracting exercise at your desk has the potential to double or triple the amount of fat you can lose and keep off and to cut the time necessary nearly in half!

(I manage to squeeze in a bit less than half an hour a day of interval cardio and strength training each day.  But that much exercise leaves me about 1800 calories a week short of the 2900 calories a week people who have lost over 30 pounds and kept it off get on the average.  I don’t have more time.  But if I can arrange to get that added 1800 calories a week while I’m working at my desk, I CAN do that!

I lost 20 pounds recently and then regained 9.  I’ve kept off the 11 pounds because I’ve continued the eating upgrades since I began.

But had I lost 6 pounds too in the first part when I lost so well by using an at your desk exerciser I would have lost 26 pounds.  And had I lost another 6 pounds during the time when I regained, I’d have only gained back 3 instead of 9.  That means I’d be 23 pounds less fat than when I began now instead of 11!  That’s a BIG difference. )

This means that everyone who would like to be less fat or who is working to do so but sits at work now has access to this solution too!

2.  People today, between sitting at work and sitting at home, often sit for well over 8 hours a day.  This causes many health problems and literally billions of dollars a year in potentially. avoidable health care costs.

(I sit at work over 9 hours a day and about 2 hours at home each workday myself.) 

But research shows that this is a very powerful risk factor for heart disease and stroke and other diseases. 

Worse, exercising with interval cardio and strength training for an average of a bit less than 30 minutes each day while protective against this problem is only partly effective.

But if 80 to 90 % of the time you are sitting at work you are getting constant mild exercise by keeping your feet moving with such an exerciser, that problem is gone completely.  The health problem of sitting is virtually wiped out!

There are now two solutions to this problem and I’m working on a third one.

1.  The first one is the Steelcase walking desk or “Walkstation.”  See http:// http://store.steelcase.com/brochures/walkstation/ . 

This works partly but has two significant problems. 

It’s not usable for enough of the hours in the day you work for the best fat loss results and health results.  Even two hours a day of working while walking on the treadmill that it comes will burn 300 to 400 calories a day.  But few people will want to stand more than that a day while working. 

(At its set speed of 2 miles an hour, that’s mild enough to not detract from your work and equal walking 4 miles a day.  So it is better than sitting the whole time particularly for fat loss.)

Secondly, it’s much more expensive than I’d initially heard and starts at $4399.  OUCH!

2.  The second one is new and solves one of those two problems and partly solves the second one.

A man in Pleasanton, California has begun selling a desk plus recumbent bike combination for closer to $1800 to $2,000.  At a health show last Saturday, the people trying it praised it for having ample and usable desk space.  And, it costs thousands less than the walking desk!

That’s a lot better price wise than over $4,000!

(I think it’s still about five to ten times higher than what I think the market needs. It also isn’t easily retrofittable to the existing desks people already have. That’s important because I think everyone should work at an exerciser of this kind! I hope to help create that solution too.)

However, the active desk recumbent bike plus desk DOES do a great job on the health and fat loss side!  You can use it almost all the time you would otherwise sit at your desk instead of just part of the time.  So the exercise can be even more gentle and nondistracting than walking yet easily help you burn 2,000 calories per five day week or more.

As an example, Bryan, the man making them, is a regular runner.  But he needed to burn more calories a week to stop being fat as much as he needed and wanted to do. 

He’s used his active desk for 9 months.  AND, he lost 18 pounds!

The best news is that it’s available now directly through Bryan at bryan@activoffice.net .

He is also possibly going to sell it on Amazon soon.

If the price is something you can afford at all, and you have the bit of extra space where you work, I strongly recommend you consider getting one.

PS:  I got a much less expensive exerciser at my local BIG 5 sporting goods store.  Much to my great irritation, it raised my knees too much to fit at my desks either at work or at home.

But the key thing for this post is this: 

I’ve found I can use it while sitting on our couch at home and reading.  And, even though it’s not nearly as smooth to use as Bryan’s recumbent bike, I am easily able to start going and keep going on automatic pilot yet read with no noticeable effort or distraction for an hour or two at a time.  

BIG added boost to heart protection also strengthens bones!

False headlines & the truth about vitamins and minerals, Vitamin K2....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 5-29-2012

Most doctors know little about supplements including vitamins and minerals and are too busy to find out more unless they somehow get updated by their patients or other doctors who know more. 

Some doctors have studied supplements and find they can get superior results with patients by using the indicated supplements.  Since the supplements cost less than drugs and have virtually no side effects that harm quality of life, far more of their patients actually take the supplements than take many drugs.

The drug companies don’t like the competition from those supplements that do work but have none of the side effects most of their drugs do and the supplements cost less.

 (Some drugs do important things and do them fast that supplements cannot do.  And, for some things the drugs are the better choice. Then too some supplements may not be that effective.

But the drug companies appear to be deliberately misinforming doctors and the media and thus many of the rest of us about supplements that do work.)

So you may have seen headlines like “Vitamins are a waste of money or dangerous” AND “Vitamin E causes Prostate Cancer.”

But the truth is far different.  Very different!

1.  Most vitamins and minerals are beneficial and some are spectacularly beneficial. 

There are a few vitamins and minerals that do have side effects in doses that are too large.  But if you know what level is safe on those few, those same vitamins and minerals can benefit you.

This makes the headline, “Vitamins are a waste of money or dangerous” false & I think deliberately misleading.

2.  We know 4 things about vitamin E and prostate cancer.  The headline as quoted, “Vitamin E causes Prostate Cancer" is completely false.  And the other 3 things help prevent prostate cancer!  (The study did not test real vitamin E but a poor artificial copy that was not real vitamin E!)

We covered vitamin E the first week in this series, on Tuesday, 3-13-2012.

We covered vitamin D3, on Tuesday, 3-20-2012.

We covered vitamin B3, niacin, on Tuesday, 3-27-2012.

We covered the other B complex vitamins last week on Tuesday, 4-3-2012.

We covered vitamin C on Thursday, 4-12

On Tuesday, 4-17, we covered vitamin A & carotenes and related compounds.

On Tuesday, 4-24, we covered calcium.

On Tuesday, 5-1, we covered chromium.

On Thursday, 5-10, we covered Selenium.

On Tuesday, 5-15, we covered Zinc & copper which interact

Last week, on Tuesday, 5-22, we covered magnesium.

This week we cover vitamin K2.              

Wow!  It adds massive extra protection for your heart and strengthens your bones too!

This is still not very well known.  I just learned it myself last Friday, 5-25-2012, from the email I got that day from Natural Health Dossier.

I’d heard that taking vitamin K2 could at least partly avoid the easy bruising and possible hemorrhages from overdoing ways to protect your heart that reduce too much blood clotting.

Too much clotting and plaque build up inside your blood vessels both narrows them and then closes them entirely if you get a big clot into your bloodstream causing a heart attack or obstructive or ischemic stroke. 

So doing things like drinking red wine and taking ginkgo biloba and taking deodorized garlic and omega 3 supplements and eating wild caught fish high in omega 3 plus other heart protective things such as avoiding trans fats that reduce plaque build up each help prevent these two things and protect you from heart disease and heart attack.

I do enough of these things to have HDL, LDL, & triglyceride readings showing unusually high heart protection.  But from doing so many or from taking niacin’s effect on my liver too, I began to get extra bruises on my left hand without any blows and I began to get bad bruises if I did hit my hand.

So, when I heard that taking vitamin K2 would both turn down such easy bruising and help my liver do so as well by boosting its health, I began taking vitamin K2.  And, it did help quite a bit!

It seems that was no accident.  Wikipedia has that "Vitamin K was identified in 1929 by Danish scientist Henrik Dam" who found that both vitamin K1 and vitamin K2 are essential to some degree to enable enough blood coagulation or clotting.  (Coagulation was & is spelled with a K in Danish apparently.)

From the broccoli I eat and the large amount of tea and green tea I drink, I was already getting plenty of K1.  So what I likely was short of was indeed vitamin K2.

So when I also heard that adding vitamin K2 to eating calcium in foods and taking ample magnesium and vitamin D3 plus strength training plus NEVER drinking soft drinks made that set of things build my bone strength even more, I was delighted.

It seems the K2 acts as a catalyst working with these other things to deposit calcium into your bones in a way that strengthens them.

Nice to know. 

In fact, since drugs for osteoporosis have such dreadful side effects and tend to do more harm than good protecting your bones, this is very important information to know!

But what the email last Friday from Natural Health Dossier added was truly HUGE news.

This is so much so it should have been a front page news article everywhere.

It wasn’t.  But here it is for you.

It seems that vitamin K2’s action of putting the calcium into your bones is only a quarter of the value and half the story!

Vitamin K2, in doing this for your bones, ALSO PREVENTS THAT CALCIUM FROM DEPOSTING INTO THE PLAQUE INSIDE YOUR BLOOD VESSELS!

“Dr. Leon Schurgers, who leads the heart research program at the world-renowned Cardiovascular Research Institute in the Netherlands…”did some research on vitamin K2.

“His research shows that this vitamin - which most Western diets are seriously lacking - can slash your risk of heart disease by 57 percent.”

Note that this is on top of any other heart protective actions you may be taking or doing.

“Dr. Schurgers's breakthrough offers a new understanding of the role of calcium in heart disease and how it may be a big factor in most heart attacks.

His study shows that this little-known vitamin can redirect that calcium to where it needs to go in the body and help to keep your arteries clear of plaque.

"We have shown that cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis have common pathways," says Dr. Schurgers. "Studies show that calcium is linked to both diseases."

"Lack of [calcium] in the bones makes them weak," says Dr. Schurgers. "But excessive amounts in the blood leads to cardiovascular disease."

His latest research shows that Vitamin K2 can combat both diseases.

“A diet rich in Vitamin K helps to get calcium into your bones while removing it from your arteries. If your diet is low in vitamin K, you get calcium deposits in your arteries. That leads to plaque and calcification and ends in heart disease and heart attack.”

“Headed up by Dr. Schurgers, the Rotterdam Heart Study followed 4,800 participants for seven years. The study showed that people who got plenty of K2 in their diet had 57 percent fewer heart attacks than those who didn't.

The study also showed that plaque results when calcium leaves your bones and ends up in your arteries.”

(This also happens when you take calcium supplements on an empty stomach.  As we posted recently, that’s why to get calcium in food instead of supplements and if you take calcium supplements to take them only in small amounts right AFTER a small meal.)

Also note that vitamin K2 NOT vitamin K1 is the heart and bone protective one!

“If there's a K2 there's got to be a K1, right? There is. Vitamin K1 is found in leafy green vegetables like spinach.”  (And broccoli and  tea and green tea has decent amounts of K1         also.)

“Researchers at University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands studied 16,057 women for eight years. The women had no coronary heart disease at the start of the study. The study followed their intake of K1 and K2. The women getting K1 had 480 incidents of heart attack over the eight years. But the women getting K2 had nearly a 60 percent lower rate.

Researchers concluded that K1 had little effect on cardiovascular health. But K2 dramatically reduced it.

"K1 has little influence on cardiovascular health," says Dr. Schurgers. "Natural K2 prevents arterial calcium accumulation."”

That is really huge news because studies of "arterial calcium accumulation” find high levels of arterial calcium accumulation far more predictive of future heart attacks than almost all the other heart health measures combined!

Since arterial calcium accumulation is also a big reason people get high blood pressure as they get older because the stiffer blood vessels that result have more friction and less flexibility and responsiveness.

That means that knowing about eating calcium in foods and not taking it in supplements plus taking vitamin K2 is an extremely powerful way to protect your heart and prevent or reduce high blood pressure!

Wikipedia says that "No known toxicity exists for vitamins K1 or K2."  You can get vitamin K2 in 150 mcg doses.  I knew I needed more, so I take the 5,000 mcg of K2 size once a day.

I also have low level high blood pressure which may in part be from calcified plaque.  So I may have done myself a really big favor when I began to take vitamin K2!

It’s pretty simple really, vitamin K2 ensures that your body puts calcium into your bones to strengthen them and takes calcium OUT of the walls of your blood vessels where it can kill you!

Are there foods that have vitamin K2?

Yes but they may not be as good a choice for heart protection as taking the supplement.

The “best food sources of vitamin K2 include cheese, eggs, butter, chicken and beef.”

But these foods when from animals fed grain, cause chronic inflammation from excessive amounts of omega 6 oils.  And, when eaten in excess, they also tend to be harmful from having too much saturated fat.

There are two solutions.

Take K2 supplements.

And/or, eat whole eggs from chickens that at least are cage and antibiotic free.  Eat some very moderate amounts of cheese, butter, chicken and beef BUT if and ONLY if you can get them from animals only pasture or 100 % grass fed.

Self-test to control blood sugar….

Today's Post: Thursday, 6-11-2009

If you have a sore throat you know you are sick or may be coming down sick. But in the early stages, if you have high blood sugar, you may be completely clueless that you do.

Why worry about that?

For two reasons.:

It’s like correcting being a bit off course while flying in the early stages.

First, if you find out in the early stages while your blood sugar is only a little high, it’s much easier to correct and may even be fully reversible.

Second, you don’t wind up somewhere you didn’t want to go -- maybe even crash landing.

Blood sugar being too high is very like that. If it’s only a bit too high, you can still eat better and exercise more or better and put it back where it should be.

But if you wait until it’s much higher one of two things will happen, after your doctor or health plan tests you for high blood sugar, your doctor will diagnose you with type 2 diabetes and insist on having you take drugs for it – OR you’ll get frightening symptoms from the damage the high blood sugar is causing you as your first sign it’s high. NOT good!

That can be an unexpected heart attack or suddenly having numbness in different places or suddenly having blurry vision as you drive on the freeway.

And, if it’s uncorrected if after it gets really high, high blood sugar can cause blindness, senility, heart attacks, kidney damage bad enough to cause death or require dialysis, and/or foot amputation.

In addition, your body will have developed damage in its systems to correct the high blood sugar and it can be much, much harder to correct with eating better, exercise, and other nondrug methods.

The old situation was this.:

Until just recently, you had to get a fasting glucose test or a special test of your average blood sugar over the past 60 to 90 days called the HBA1C test to know if your blood sugar was too high. And you had to have your doctor or your health plan authorize that.

(Since your red blood cells live about 60 to 90 days, by testing the sugar stuck to them, the HBA1C test gives you a rather precise and accurate measure of your average blood sugar during that time. It’s so accurate in fact, doctors are now told to always use it to diagnose type 2 diabetes instead of fasting glucose which can be misleadingly high or low occasionally.)

So, you had to pay for a doctor visit &/or have health insurance to get these tests.

And, if your blood sugar was only a little high, you could have drugs prescribed for you or be diagnosed as having type 2 diabetes which then stays on your record permanently even if you later reverse the high blood sugar by eating better and exercise.

The consequences of having high blood sugar are so horrible, it was still a good idea to do.

And, if your blood sugar is quite high and you don’t yet know, it can save your life to have it tested that way even now.

But that was last month.

Today, you can test for it yourself for only about $30.

A company in the Silicon Valley, called Metrika, developed a simple and easy to use portable tester for HBA1C. It did work; but they didn’t have the manufacturing expertise to make thousands of them that were both accurate and reasonably priced.

But the drug giant Bayer bought them. Bayer had the money to hire the expertise and already had some of it inhouse in their drug manufacturing lines.

First, they made a version that they sold to doctors who then used it to get fast results when testing patients in their offices.

But they also began work on a version they could sell over the counter just like you can buy at home blood pressure testers.

It took them many months to get it right well enough to release it with the Bayer name on it. But they did.

Now, for about $30 you can buy a kit that will give you two HBA1C tests at home.

http://www.a1cnow.com/patients-families/a1cnow-self/ is the page that tells about it though it is clearly meant to be used mostly by people who already have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes instead of by people who may well not have it testing to see if their blood sugar is OK or beginning to be too high or already is too high.

That page has a link to this one: http://www.a1cnow.com/patients-families/a1cnow-self/

And, on that page it has a link to where you can buy it now through Walgreens online drugstore.

(They plan to add other retailers soon as well.)

So for about $30 you can test yourself to see where you are now with your blood sugar.

And, if it’s a bit high but not in the scary zone yet, you can test yourself again in 3 months to see if the fixes you did by eating less sugar etc and exercising more have put it back in the safe zone or not.

Here’s what the numbers mean.:

An HBA1C test of 5.8 or less is good and less than 5.5 is better.

From 5.8 to 5.9, that’s close enough to too high you should eat sugar less often, eliminate soft drinks of every kind, stop eating foods with high fructose corn syrup or refined grains in them and white potatoes; and you should get more regular exercise – at least some walking each week. (The good news is that if you do this, you’ll automatically begin to lose excess fat with no extra effort. You may even be LESS hungry.)

Some doctors will classify you as having type 2 diabetes at 6.0 to 6.4. I recently saw that the mainstream position may be to wait until 6.5 or higher to do so. But know this, if you have a reading of 6.0 to 6.4 now, you will have a reading of 6.5 or higher soon unless you take strong corrective steps. In addition to eating right, it is essential that you begin to build up to regular, vigorous exercise from strength training or interval cardio done every week, preferably both.

And, it may pay you to see your doctor. You definitely want to take strong, focused, and sustained action until you get your HBA1C at 5.9 or below as soon as you can.

At 6.5 to 6.9 you should immediately schedule an appointment with your doctor.

And, at 7.0 or even a bit higher, the appointment should be within a few days!

Above 6.5 your health of every kind is at stake in bringing down your blood sugar levels -- with drugs if you have to. And, at these levels, you should be taking the drugs.

Blood sugar that high begins to destroy your capillaries. Every part of you depends on good circulation of your blood as delivered by healthy capillaries. You want turn off the destruction before you lose something like your sight or your kidneys or your life!

Now you can get an early look at where you stand on blood sugar for just a few dollars.

Metrika and Bayer have created a lifesaving test.

Try it out. You may be VERY glad you did.