Ways to avoid or turn down type 2 diabetes....

Today's Post: Thursday, 3-8-2012

I’ve seen several different sources of information lately likely to be valuable for almost everyone. And I realized that they all would fit this topic.

1. One of the more interesting is a way to protect your health and take a very large bite out of high blood sugar readings.

Note that it works to do this whether you already know you are in trouble and measure your blood sugar or are on your way to type 2 diabetes but have not had it tested and are unaware you are in trouble.

People who sit for hours at work or watching TV with few breaks are at significant risk for heart disease and type 2 diabetes and obesity and even some cancers.

So, for myself I not only get up 5 times a day to get a cup of tea and the many extra trips that causes to the bathroom each day every day during the week, I added something.

When I’m done with each of the 5 cups of tea I stand up from my desk and do about 45 seconds of exercise. Then I mark down that I did it in a super simple logbook I keep.

(I thought of doing that but found without the logbook step and the link to something I was already doing, it never actually happened. But since I added the logbook and the link to what I was already doing, I’ve done it every workday for the last two years now.)

So, what’s new?

People who don’t exercise as I do in addition may need to do this twice as many times a day and exercise more than 45 seconds.

BUT they haven’t tested to be sure of that! What I do may also work.

What they did test was if getting up every 20 minutes and walking at a moderate pace or a brisk one -- for two minutes a time would lower high blood sugar. That cut the boost from eating something that was a bit sugary or high glycemic by close to 30%.

That’s a very significant drop.

A measure of average blood sugar for the last 60 to 90 days is called an HBA1C test. If it’s 5.9 or higher you are in trouble. And, every tenth of a point you go above that is dangerous to your health. Some diagnose type 2 diabetes at 6.0 or above, some to most at 6.5 or above, and everyone at 6.9 or above. Above 7.0 is deadly dangerous no matter what you call it!

So suppose you are at 7.7 without doing this active sitting break several times a day, with it a 20% drop would put you at 6.2, a dramatically safer reading.

The next step we’ll list could easily drop you another 10 % or more. That would put you a relatively safe 5.6.

Whether you are cured of diabetes at that point or in forced remission is semantics.

You may need to do the two steps every day to avoid it regardless of what you call it.

2. The second step is to avoid ALL high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners.

(And, cutting back on real sugar and virtually eliminating eating foods made from refined grains would double that effect or more.)

Why cut out ALL high fructose corn syrup?

High fructose corn syrup tastes sweeter than sugar and costs less than real sugar. So for the soft drinks and packaged dessert industry high fructose corn syrup is a cheap way to make that food or drink more addicting than regular sugar & people tend to eat or drink more and buy more.

In addition, the sweeter taste may cause you to release more insulin which then causes low blood sugar a half hour later causing you to crave a sugar fix. The combination of that & eating or drinking more than you would had it been real sugar, will make your blood sugar average levels higher. Worse, it will possibly also cause your body to down regulate its response to insulin. Then your blood sugar will tend to stay even higher.

Then your overall intake will tend to get so high that even though high fructose corn syrup only has 5% more fructose than regular sugar, at that intake level that adds up to a lot of free fructose in your blood each week. That in turn helps cause type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

(Another serious health risk with high fructose corn syrup is that 30% of all of HFCS contains mercury due to how it's processed.)

Lastly, the foods and drinks high fructose corn syrup is in often are those that it would be wise to pass up almost every time. So making them taste extra good is harmful & high fructose corn syrup does that better than sugar. )

Bottom line if you avoid ANY high fructose corn syrup, your blood sugar will be lower.

Oddly, in addition to whatever health risks artificial sweeteners may have, despite having no calories they are sweeter than sugar too. And the addicting effect and the blood sugar roller coaster and sugar cravings and eating more sugary foods that you get from high fructose corn syrup show up with artificial sweeteners too!

(The makers claim no other health harm but many people seem to experience some that seems to come with artificial sweetener intake. I have no direct experience or know of massive tests results to quote proving this. But I’ve seen enough supporting analysis and reports of harm to make me quite adverse to ever ingesting any artificial sweeteners!)

Note that if you switch from regular to diet soft drinks you may lose weight at first, but studies show you will be as fat or even fatter a few months later! The extra hunger and craving for sweets the artificial sweeteners induce will fatten you eventually. Water and tea do work to replace diet and regular soft drinks for fat weight loss by the way.

Bottom line, if you also avoid ALL artificial sweeteners, your blood sugar will be lower and your fat weight will be less.

3. Chronic inflammation makes the damage from high blood sugar worse. And, I just found out it can help cause low thyroid in people who otherwise would have avoided it. That tends to make people have low energy and be fatter. Neither of those help you lower blood sugar!

Even better, the kind of eating right that avoids chronic inflammation contains no to very little sweets which also can help lower high blood sugar.

(See our post on avoiding chronic inflammation as the most effective way to lower or prevent joint pain we did on Tuesday, 3-6, this week for that info.)

4. Did you know that even two minutes once a day of really vigorous exercise lowers your HBA1C levels?

Recent research found that it does!

Did you know that doing strength training a few times a week and interval cardio a few times a week and/or 6 miles of walking or more each week tend to make your insulin effective even if it wasn’t before and lower your HBA1C because of it?

(Strength training AND interval cardio do more than the same time spent doing only one or the other research found.)

Did you know that such regular exercise slows aging and helps prevent the damage caused by high blood sugar?

It does that too.

So, if you:

Use a logbook to ensure you take active sitting breaks,

Avoid ALL soft drinks, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial sweeteners,

Eat right to avoid high chronic inflammation,

& Do these kinds of exercise every week,

Then your blood sugar and its measure HBA1C will stay in the safe zone for most people.

Is that a diabetes cure or forced remission you must continue?

That is semantics. But it does work whatever you call it!

Strength Training and interval cardio slash diabetes and heart risks....

Today's Post: Friday, 7-29-2011

This is true for many reasons!

a) One of them is that having more muscle mass means that even when you are NOT exercising you burn more glucose and that alone helps lower your blood sugar, lower your insulin level, and prevents or turns down insulin resistance.

More on this point later in this post. This was just tested to work at UCLA!

b) The other is that the effort you make to do your last repetition in a strength training exercise or when you speed up to do as many pushups as you can do before fatigue sets in or you alternate between moderate walking and almost as fast as you can go in your walks or you run five fast 100 yard runs or do five very fast but short sets of jump rope and rest in between—

Every single one of those will cause your body to build more muscle as it recovers. But each of these also burns glucose like having 12 strong men toss it into a roaring furnace!

That’s also well established.

One study found that even two sets of really fast cardio for a minute, a short rest to catch their breath, and a second one and doing that just a few times a week for less than 10 minute time a week, lowered blood sugar for weeks afterwards. That’s because the test showed that the HBA1C reading that is the average of your blood sugar the last 60 to 90 days went down significantly in the people who did this!

c) Not only that, but this kind of exercise a few times a week regularly has been shown to sharply lower the small particle LDL that causes much to most of the blood vessel plaque that causes heart disease.

Your protective HDL goes up and your damaging levels of triglycerides go down. Research shows that directly reflects that your small particle LDL has gone down.

And, there’s more! The more years in a row you keep doing this, the more effective it gets. Recent research each year on a group of people who did this kind of exercise every week found this is true.

d) Unbelievably that’s not all either!

Lowering your blood sugar levels, recent research found, prevents excess sugar from sticking to your normally safe larger LDL particles and turning them into nasty bits of superglue that cause damage to the inside of your blood vessels and destroys your capillaries.

e) One way to see if you have been getting this kind of exercise is to check for how much muscle mass you have. That’s because the more of strength training and interval cardio you do well, the more muscle mass you have.

You don’t have to look muscular, particularly if you are female or a bit too fat. You don’t even have to weigh less. Though in that case, if you add muscle, you will also lose that much fat. Your size may go down from that even if your scale reads the same.

Here’s the report of the recent research at UCLA:

“Beef up your muscles, reduce your diabetes risk By Enrique Rivero
July 28, 2011 UCLA Newsroom

More muscle mass -- and not just less body fat -- is critical to lowering your risk for type 2 diabetes, a new UCLA study suggests.

Reporting in the September issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA suggest there is a correlation between greater muscle mass, relative to body size, and a substantially decreased risk of developing the metabolic changes that lead to diabetes.

"Our findings suggest that beyond focusing on losing weight to improve metabolic health, there may be a role for maintaining fitness and building muscle mass," said Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of endocrinology at UCLA. "This is a welcome message for many overweight patients who experience difficulty in achieving weight loss, as any effort to get moving and keep fit should be seen as laudable and contributing to metabolic change."

In 2009, the UCLA researchers published a study suggesting that the ratio of waist size to hip size — an indirect measure of abdominal fat, relative to gluteal musculature — is a better predictor of premature death in older adults than either body mass index (BMI) or waist circumference. They then examined a condition called sarcopenic obesity, in which there is a low level of total body muscle mass (sarcopenia) combined with a high BMI (obesity), theorizing that the presence of this condition would correlate with higher insulin resistance and diabetes risk.

The following year, they tested this hypothesis by examining data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III (NHANES III); the data were culled from health information collected between 1988 and 1994 on 17,000 people aged 20 and older — a large number of people of various ages. They found that sarcopenia was associated with increased insulin resistance in both non-obese and obese individuals, and also with higher levels of blood glucose in obese individuals.

For the current study, they again used NHAHES III data, this time on 13,644 adults who were not pregnant and had a BMI of at least 16.5, to see how this correlation applied to individuals representing the entire spectrum of muscle mass levels, rather than only those with sarcopenia. Specifically, they wanted to determine if there was a correlation between higher levels of muscle mass and lower levels of insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes.

After controlling for age, race and ethnicity, gender, generalized obesity (high BMI), and central obesity (large waist), they found that for each 10 percent increase in the skeletal muscle index (SMI) — the ratio of muscle mass to total body weight — there was a corresponding 11 percent reduction in insulin resistance and a 12 percent reduction in pre–diabetes, a condition characterized by higher-than-normal levels of glucose in the blood.

"While we knew there was a relationship between metabolic disorders and very low muscle mass, we were surprised to find that this relationship was preserved across the range of muscle mass," Srikanthan said.”

My comment: That’s useful to know. For example, doing strength training a few times a week besides doing cardio a few times a week, builds more muscle mass than just doing interval cardio. That specifically means strength training is important to include to get this effect!

“Dr. Arun Karlamangla, a UCLA associate professor of medicine in the division of geriatrics, co-authored this study. The National Institutes of Health funded this research.”

Are you doing strength training and interval cardio yet?

If not, you can do both at home.

Pushups work for strength training. You can do each exercise with one dumbbell -- and doing a set with your left hand and immediately doing one with your right hand. This not only costs less, but you just keep exercising since every time you do a set with one hand your other hand and side are resting! That makes it possible to do several exercises in less than 10 minutes.

And, even 8 to 10 minutes, and at first as you get into it even less, of interval cardio a session for at least 3 days not in a row can enable you to be quite fit.

The Nordic Track I work out on every Saturday morning for 10 intense minute with regular bursts of faster work and easier and slower work in between did cost $150 used. And, I did have to go pick it up which took a few hours.

But I pay ZERO dollars a month for it now!

I plan to get a few heavier dumbbells now that I’m stronger and know I can buy single dumbbells at two different sporting goods chains.

But the 15, 20, & 25 pound dumbells I use now, cost less than $40 total. I started with just the 15 pound one which cost something like $5 at a yard sale and $5 for the 20 pound one at a garage sale. And the 25 pound one was about $30.

Again, I pay ZERO dollars a month for them now!

On Monday evening and Wednesday evening I do 5 short but fast sets of jump rope. The jump rope cost me less than $20 at the sporting good store.

No monthly payments needed for that one either.

And, this can take very, very little time.

Secondly, even though I do more since I have the time. I can do the first part of my strength training with my 25 pound dumbbell in about 9 minutes. At three mornings a week, I could do as little as 27 minutes of exercise each week total.

My jump rope sessions only take about 15 minutes each time. (The jumping session only takes about 7 minutes. But I do a bit of very light and brief leg exercise first to warm up and it takes a few minutes to change into dry clothes after sweating into my work out ones,) Three of those would total as little as 45 minutes a week.

Doing both would take 72 minutes each week total. That’s just a bit over 10 minutes a day average.

And if I did the jump rope sessions in the morning so I took my regular shower right after, the total would be about 54 minutes a week. That averages about 8 minutes a day.

Lastly, when you first start take it very east and build up slowly. And, when you do the interval cardio stop before you completely run out of breath and rest in between the intervals.

For example, I now do five sets of 42 to 77 jumps with my jump rope and mostly do each set without missing once. And, I really race through each set.

But I started with two sets of 14 and I had to do each set in sections because I kept messing up. I’d do a couple of jumps, miss, do a few more etc on each set!

So it’s OK to start slow and be a klutz. The secret is to keep doing the exercises and making small improvements and progress each week.

One of my favorite self-help writers puts it this way: “Inch by inch anything’s a cinch.”

News -- How high blood sugar and type 2 diabetes harm you....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 7-12-2011

This topic is so important I somehow thought I’d done a post on it when I first saw it a bit over a month ago.

Oops! I looked and apparently did not.

It’s been known that type 2 diabetes (excessively too high blood sugar all the time) does two things.

It gradually tends to destroy all your capillaries.

And, it multiplies your risk of heart attacks and heart disease. (In men, it at least doubles the risk and quadruples the risk in women.)

A new study found out a major reason and perhaps THE reason this happens.

Since your life and health depend on good blood circulation, would you inject lots of tiny bits of superglue directly into one of your major blood vessels?

Would you repeat it every day?

Likely you would choose not to do that!

A new study finds that excessively high blood sugar does exactly that to you.

The original story appeared at the end of last May.:

“Scientists Discover 'Ultra-Bad' Cholesterol FRIDAY, May 27, 2011

(HealthDay News) -- A new, "ultra-bad" form of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol has been discovered in people with a high risk for heart disease, according to British researchers.

They found that the cholesterol, called MGmin-LDL, is super-sticky, making it more likely to attach to the walls of arteries and form fatty plaques, which could lead to heart attacks and stroke.”

MGmin-LDL is normal LDL cholesterol with sugar attached.

They found this kind of LDL much stickier than normal LDL and much more likely to build fatty plaques, narrow your arteries AND begin to clog up your capillaries resulting in reduced blood flow. Then, if the process continues too long, you are in serious trouble!

This kind of LDL becomes irregular in shape and larger. This makes it sticking more likely. Worse, it makes your large particle LDL which is normally harmless as bad for you as the small particle LDL that otherwise causes heart disease. Ouch!!

This research, released online May 26 in Diabetes, has huge implications in the treatment of heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

There was one piece of good news.

“The researchers said, the results of their study shed light on how a common type 2 diabetes drug, metformin, fights heart disease by blocking the transformation of normal LDL into the super-sticky LDL.”

People who take metformin should likely supplement with 1,000 mcg a day of a sublingual B12 supplement or get periodic B12 shots if they take metformin. A new study found that taking metformin can deplete B12 otherwise.

But with that exception and keeping the dose low enough to avoid side effects that are quite rare at lower doses, metformin is quite safe unlike most of the newer drugs to lower blood sugar.

And, because it has been around for decades, it’s also inexpensive.

It also directly lowers blood sugar and your HBA1C readings.

What if your HBA1C is higher than 7.0 even taking metformin at a low or moderate dose twice a day?

It’s not complicated. But it can be a challenge to do if you aren’t used to it.

There are these parts.

1. You need to eliminate or close to eliminate the foods that slam blood sugar too high and too fast.

White rice, all refined grains, potatoes without the skin, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners – which means all soft drinks—and most real sugar need to disappear from what you eat and drink. This includes cutting back on most real fruit juices. Cranberry juice is far less harmful and vegetable juices are OK. (The average person now eats a bit over 7 tablespoons a day of sugar. The safe amount even for healthy people is less than a seventh of that.)

Similarly, you need to cut back a lot on whole grains since they also do this. (Eating oatmeal that is NOT the instant kind on some days may make sense to keep as a whole grain since it reduces LDL cholesterol.) But if you do eat any grains, eat ONLY whole grains.

One of the good news results is that many people will gradually lose over 40 pounds or more of fat without hunger if they do this.

2. Adopt a real food diet with extra nonstarchy vegetables. Eat the DASH II diet with extra unstarchy vegetables and only use olive oil. Or eat the Mediterranean diet with extra nonstarchy vegetables and far less pasta.

(These two styles have a lot of overlap in the actual foods.)

Focus on eating health OK protein foods too including beans and lentils; raw, unsalted, nuts if you aren’t allergic; wild caught fish (farmed is usually full of pollutants and has less omega 3 oils); eggs from free range chickens; very trim, skinless poultry; and only 100% grass fed beef and lamb in moderation.

People who eat this way also are:

less fat, less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease, and have lower blood pressure – even if their blood sugar was normal to begin with.

Even better, you can eat well to very well with the tastier recipes available eating this way.

And, it’s literally life-saving to eat this way for people with high blood sugar.

3. Gradually work up to doing at least 3 sessions of vigorous interval cardio and at least 2 sessions of strength training each week. Do some brisk walks too if you possibly can.

Start slowly, build up very gradually, rest in between sets even if only slightly to catch your breath and let your heart rate slow. Start each session a bit slowly.

And, go even a bit easier at first until you have eaten right for a few months.

Such exercise turns off insulin resistance and directly burns up the excess blood sugar in your blood too.

The combination of even some of these 3 strategies often works wonders.

One man found that his blood sugar went from diabetic levels to normal in just a few weeks from completely stopping eating white rice and weight lifting 3 days a week. He liked being stronger; but the not eating rice was a hassle since his culture and all his family traditionally ate rice every day.

The strategy that works best is to do the things you can easily do immediately.

And, gradually make upgrades that you keep doing.

(I’ve cut the amount of sugar I eat in half three or four times now, for example.)

4. Do the safe things that lower LDL cholesterol.

The dangerous byproduct is made from excess sugar plus LDL. So while you are reducing your blood sugar, lowering your LDL too makes sense!

Eat beans and lentils, eat whole apples occasionally, try unsweetened applesauce with cinnamon, eat old fashioned oatmeal occasionally, and take sterol supplements.

(I take 4 a day of the Natrol cholesterol balance sterol supplement as one of the things I did to go from LDL of 130 to 73 without drugs.)

Regular exercise as we describe in #3 above also lowers LDL and triglycerides and increases HDL in addition to lowering high blood sugar.

But it gets better, the more years in a row you do it, the better your results get!

And, it gets better than that, such exercise directly slows aging.

Taking 300 mg niacin supplements once after your two largest meals for a total of twice a day and two 300 mg supplements of the slow niacin release inositol hexaniacinate or “no flush” niacin is safe for most people. (It’s safest to have your doctor test your liver function from time to time if you do. But that’s enough to lower your LDL and boost your HDL and less than the level that causes more liver problems.)

And, it is dramatically safer and cheaper than statin drugs.

(It’s not yet known among doctors, but only a minority of people benefit much from statin drugs. All the rest are more protected by niacin and get something like 1% protection from statin drugs. The genetic test to see if you are in the minority that statins will help only costs about $150. And even then, the side effects from statins can be serious enough, you should try every thing else first.)

Ways to prevent or reduce blood sugar surges....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 9-15-2009

Yesterday, we posted on several ways you can boost your immune system even while you get older. We also did a related post last Friday.

We ended with this:

“7. Go very easy on sugar when you eat it; don’t eat it often; don’t use other kinds of sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners or refined grains or foods that contain them and get regular exercise, including some vigorous exercise without overdoing it when you are well.

Eating sugar and blood sugar surges tend to directly turn down your immune system.

That’s one the main reasons why diabetics have trouble throwing off infections.

Sugar and related foods such as refined grains cause blood sugar surges. Artificial sweeteners are likely bad for you directly AND they cause sugar cravings that cause most people to wind up eating more sugar and related foods. Exercise, particularly regular and vigorous exercise helps burn blood sugar directly & helps your insulin control it normally instead of ineffectively.

In fact, there are enough ways to prevent or reduce blood sugar surges, our post tomorrow will be about them.”

As you can see this section of yesterday’s post lists many of the ways to do that.

1. Sugars, high fructose corn syrup, and refined grains and many starchy foods, such as white potatoes and rice produce blood sugar surges. That’s particularly true if you don’t eat food with health OK protein, health OK fats or oils, and foods that contain fiber at the same time to buffer the effect. Artificial sweeteners are likely bad for you directly AND they cause sugar cravings that cause most people to wind up eating more sugar and related foods.

So, one of the most effective ways to prevent or stop blood sugar surges avoid eating foods or processed pseudo foods that contain these things. That specifically means to avoid ever drinking soft drinks, for example.

So, the best way to avoid blood sugar surges is to come as close as you can to not eating or drinking these things. You don’t have to put out the fire if you don’t light it in the first place.

Of course this puts a priority on eating health OK protein foods such as nuts, beef fed only grass, eggs from truly free range, pasture fed chickens, and wild caught fish; eating health OK oils from nuts, extra virgin olive oil, and avocadoes, truly large amounts of several kinds of nonstarchy vegetables, some whole grain foods if you aren’t trying to lose fat weight, and some whole fruit -- for most or all of your food.

These are the foods that humans evolved to eat and thrive when they did. Like it or not, your body is set to eat that way too.

2. Muffle the effect if you do occasionally eat things that cause blood sugar surges otherwise.

For example, if you eat raisins, which even though they have some fiber have enough concentrated sugars to boost blood sugar, eat some pecans at the same time. The pecans contain health OK oils, health OK protein, and fiber. So the combination produces far lower blood sugar spiking than eating just the raisins. It even tastes good. Or in other words, the combination of the high glycemic raisins with the very low glycemic pecans produces a moderate glycemic effect.

If very occasionally you eat apple pie, make sure it has plenty of cinnamon or add some to your piece. They tested the glycemic effect of apple pie expecting it to be high and found it was quite moderate & then found the cinnamon in the pie filling was the cause.

Or, if you want to have some croutons made from refined grain flour in your salad, be sure to add some extra virgin olive oil and some vinegar to the salad as the dressing and some chopped boiled egg or shrimp, or feta cheese.

The health OK oil in the extra virgin olive oil, the fiber in the greens, and the protein in the chopped boiled egg or shrimp or feta cheese are all low glycemic foods. And the vinegar slows the emptying of your stomach which has a proven lowering & slowing effect on the resulting increase in blood sugar.

3. Increase your body’s ability to handle it when you do boost your blood sugar temporarily.

Having adequate chromium and magnesium in your system has this health effect and others. So, you can increase your body’s ability to handle sugars without bad health effects by taking 400 to 600 mg a day of magnesium and 200 to 400 mcg of chromium polynicotinate.

But the most effective way to help your body handle sugars and other high glycemic foods is to get enough exercise.

One way to do it is to go on a walk, just after eating. That’s pretty straightforward since you then actually use the additional blood sugar somewhat as it tries to build up, the build up is less. You actually directly lower your blood sugar by doing so.

The other way to do it is to do some vigorous exercise most days of the week and do it every week. One study even found that 2 minutes of vigorous exercise two or three times a week worked. Things like 5 minutes three times a week of jumping rope and 20 minutes of strength training twice a week with a day of rest in between also work. These things dramatically improve your body’s response to insulin, so when your body acts to damp down and use the blood sugar that surges in and to lower your blood sugar to safe levels, the insulin does the job.

Totally sedentary people develop insulin resistance so this effect of insulin happens far less or even not at all. Then insulin levels and blood sugar tend to surge easily and stay too high.

And, THAT tends to cause type 2 diabetes and virtually always causes you to gain excess fat.


So, if you want to keep your immune system strong; avoid type 2 diabetes and drugs for it; and avoid or reverse being too fat, do as many of these things as you can to prevent or lower excessive blood sugar surges.

Exciting news on type 2 diabetes & obesity….

Today's Post: Monday, 7-27-2009

We’ve already posted that eating health harmful foods and not exercising produce very different effects than eating right and exercising and that this is particularly true for whether or not you get too fat or get type 2 diabetes. We’ve also posted that quite vigorous exercise for even as little as 30 seconds a time done a few times each week lowers insulin resistance!

But new research that was in today’s health news has some extremely promising information.

It seems that the health habits that cause being too fat as well as the fat cells themselves cause inflammation and harmful changes to your immune system.

And, if you normalize your immune system, particularly the mast cells that act up in allergies, and you lower inflammation, you can get extra leverage on losing the fat AND you may largely TURN OFF type 2 diabetes and do so even if you haven’t yet lost all the fat you should.

That is extremely important news. Many of the blood sugar lowering drugs for type 2 diabetes don’t work well and have unpleasant or dangerous side effects. They seem to work mostly on turning down the symptoms of type 2 rather than turning off the causes.

To be sure, much of this new research has been done in mice.

But, to me it looks quite likely to apply to people too.

A. The most exciting study was done on using either of two allergy drugs to treat the mast cell dysfunction that overfed and fattened mice who developed type 2 diabetes also got.

When the researchers fed the mice normally and stopped overfeeding them, the mice got somewhat better on being overfat and having type 2 diabetes.

When the researchers gave the mice either an allergy drug called Zaditor (ketotifen) or cromolyn sodium, an asthma drug, that reversed the mast cell abnormalities apparently caused by being or becoming overfat. The mice lost more fat and got even better on having type 2 diabetes than just feeding them better achieved. That was true for either drug.

And, if the mice were fed better AND got one of the drugs, they lost 100 % of the extra fat and the type 2 diabetes.

If that applies to people, it is HUGELY important.

1. Some low level or early stage type 2 diabetics can partially reverse the type 2 diabetes by simply stopping the health harmful foods and beginning to eat right instead. But often they only get a partial improvement.

Adding one of these drugs or a supplement with similar effects might well convert this to complete reversal of the type 2 diabetes.

Since the drugs are already FDA approved as allergy drugs, it may not be necessary to wait for research to try them since some doctors may well be willing to write what are called second use prescriptions.

Even better, an article recently came out that the reason that the supplement quercetin tended to turn off or turn down allergic reactions was because it had exactly this normalizing effect on the body’s mast cells. So, by taking 250 mg a day to 250 mg 3 times a day, you might well get similar effects.

Quercetin is also in foods. Quercetin is in apples, onions, and black tea. And every one of those are things that you can eat or drink that help you lose fat and eat right.

2. Many people eat better enough to lose about 5% of their bodyweight of their excess fat.

But, despite the massive health benefits of doing so, they don’t lose all their excess fat or look that different. So, in part because of that, many people then give up the effort and gain back the fat they lost.

But if by also taking one of the two drugs or the supplement quercetin, they lost close to all their excess fat with much the same effort, they might be so pleased they would maintain their eating right and keep the fat off.

And, by losing fat more quickly, more people would continue until they got results.

That’s also a huge potential benefit.

B. Other studies found that over eating (or drinking) health harmful foods and drinks also messed up the number of T-cells your body produces and sharply increased inflammation.

That in turn tended to bring on type 2 diabetes or make it worse. (Increased inflammation also magnifies pain and increases heart disease and heart attack risks!)

But that is also of interest.

1. If you stop eating meat from grain fed animals or farmed fish and eat other protein foods instead such as nonfat or very lowfat dairy foods, nuts, beans, or eggs &/or eat meat only from animals fed only grass or wild caught fish & or only eat small servings of the very leanest meat from grain fed animals, the amount of excess saturated fat and omega 6 oils you ingest will drop. If you also stop using other vegetable oils such as corn oil, canola oil, and soy oil and only use extra virgin olive oil, the amount of excess omega 6 oils will drop again. If you stop eating all refined grain foods; and only eat whole grain foods in moderation, that will cut your intake of excess omega 6 oils further.

If you eat wild caught fish and seafood high in omega 3 oils &/or take omega 3 supplements, that will also help restore a more desirable balance of omega 3 to omega 6 oils.

Each of these steps has been shown to reduce inflammation. By doing them all, you can reduce inflammation a lot.

2. Even better, regular exercise that isn’t overdone to the point of injury, reduces inflammation.

3. Lastly, in addition to normalizing your mast cells, the food component and supplement quercetin lowers inflammation.

So does turmeric.

So, if you take all these steps to lower inflammation, your fat loss will be better and your leverage on stopping type 2 diabetes will be better.

C. In addition, there are a number of foods and supplements and actions we now know tend to normalize your immune system. They not only make it stronger, they also tend to stop it from OVER-reacting with things like allergies, inflammation, autoimmune disease, and sepsis.

The number one most important item on that list is to be sure to get at least 2,000 iu a day of vitamin D3. Since many of us work indoors and don’t get outside that much on week-ends either, that means taking at least that much D3 from supplements.

D3 is so effective in this regard many now think that taking 5,000 iu a day of D3 may tend to prevent getting swine flu and other new flu variants AND to ensure surviving it if you do.

Taking probiotics also tends to strengthen your immune system and make getting flu and colds less likely.

Mushrooms, not just taking the exotic mushroom supplements but even eating button mushrooms a few times a week on your salad, boosts your immune system.

Taking at least 1,000 mg a day of vitamin C or more and up to 45 mg a day of zinc strengthens your immune system. Eating organic vegetables and whole organic fruits each day that are high in natural vitamin C also helps.

Lastly, regular socializing with people, NOT treating the people around you harshly when it’s not called for, and making special effort to notice what people do right and be kind to them, has massive benefits for your immune system.

Why even a bit of fat loss is so good for you….

Today's Post, Monday, 6-1-2009

You may have read that if you are overfat and don’t exercise, getting into some form of safe, regular exercise will improve your health even if you lose no weight on the scale right away. We’ve posted that here several times.

You may also have read that losing enough fat to cause you to lose as little as 5 % of your bodyweight will give you health benefits you might have thought you’d need to lose four or five times as much to get.

If you lose the fat weight by beginning to exercise, the direct benefits of exercising are one of the reasons. (And regular exercise makes it dramatically more likely the weight you lose is fat instead of bone or muscle – plus dramatically more likely the fat you lose will stay lost.)

But the health benefits of losing even 5 or 10 % of your bodyweight are so dramatic, clearly something else must be happening too. In fact, losing that much by positive diet changes only has almost as good effects. So what gives?

Earlier today I read the reason why.

In a NewsMax Health email in a “Blaylock Tip” titled: "Beer Gut Could Lead to Deadly Diabetes",

DR Blaylock says that the fat INSIDE your belly, the internal abdominal fat, studies have found, releases lots of chemicals and hormones that cause or help cause “diabetes, hypertension, and abnormal blood lipids (high LDL-cholesterol and triglycerides with low HDL).” And, as we’ve noted in our posts, that combination of bad readings, low HDL plus high triglycerides and high LDL means that you have lots of the small particle LDL that glues itself into the surface of your blood vessels and directly causes plaque build up and cardiovascular disease.

Now, here’s the key fact in his email.:

Losing even 5 to 10 percent of your weight reduces internal fat by more like 30 %!

Another study he reports found that 70 % of people who had metabolic syndrome were cured when they lost that much internal abdominal fat. A separate study helps explain why, that much abdominal fat loss causes a dramatic reduction of insulin resistance. That not only can cure metabolic syndrome, it can prevent or help cure type 2 diabetes.

And there is even more. Using surgery to remove virtually all the excess abdominal fat reduced “hypertension by 62 percent, diabetes by 77 percent, abnormal lipids by 70 percent, and sleep apnea by 86 percent.”

Among other things that shows that one of the most effective treatments for sleep apnea is fat loss that helps get rid of internal abdominal fat. This sounds like a way to cut sleep apnea out completely!

And, even a 5% drop in bodyweight can get rid of up to 30 % of internal abdominal fat.

Early to Rise also had an article recently on this topic.:

“This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com . “


Why Swimsuit Season Isn't the Only Reason to Reduce Your Waist Size

By Jonny Bowden

The main reason people over 65 wind up in the hospital is heart failure. And the very best predictor of whether or not you're likely to get heart failure might surprise you.

It's waist size.

A new study published in the journal Circulation tracked data from two Swedish population-based studies. Together, the studies included 80,000 men and women, aged 45-83. All participants filled in questionnaires about their height, weight, waist size, and other vital statistics. Researchers then followed the subjects for seven years.

The researchers found - not surprisingly - that being overweight was linked to a risk for heart failure. But they also found that even within the normal weight range (with a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 or less), those who had an extra 10 cm (about 4 inches) on their waist had about a 15 percent higher risk. This went up to 18 percent for those who were heavier (with a BMI of 30 or more).

Nutritionists and smart doctors have long known that a 35-inch waist for women and a 40-inch waist for men represent danger points for insulin resistance. And insulin resistance is the cornerstone of Metabolic Syndrome, also known as pre-diabetes, which significantly increases the risk for heart disease.

If your waist is over 35 inches (for women) or 40 inches (for men), it's time to start doing something about it. I've found that a low-carb diet is one of the most effective ways to combat belly fat and reduce the size of your waist.

[Ed. Note: In addition to eating a low-carb diet, you'll want to engage in regular exercise to help burn fat. For dozens of easy-to-follow exercises you can do at home, plus the latest breakthroughs in the health industry, sign up for ETR's free natural health newsletter right here.” (Go to http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com .)
“For more advice about staying fit and healthy, check out health expert Jonny Bowden's site, JonnyBowden.com.]”

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Here’s two of the best ways to lose inches off your waist and internal bodyfat too.:

1. So, a low carb diet, or at least one that removes the worst carbs close to completely, while adding more health OK proteins and oils such as grass fed beef, nuts, nonfat and very lowfat dairy, wild caught fish, extra virgin olive oil, and avocados AND a lot more green or nonstarchy vegetables not only is one of the best ways to lose fat, it’s quite effective at losing this internal bodyfat as well.

Plus the foods with monosaturated fatty acids, what Prevention magazine labels, MUFA, in nuts, extra virgin olive oil, and avocados apparently are directly effective in helping to reduce belly fat. (Their book is called the Flat Belly Diet.)

You also need to eliminate all hydrogenated vegetable oils, most butter and other dairy fat, most other kinds of oils, high fructose corn syrup, foods made with refined grains, and as much sugar as you can bring yourself to give up. (Sugar once or twice or even five times a week may be OK in small amounts if you eat this way otherwise and exercise regularly. Eating large amounts of sugar, eating it several times a day, or doing either while eating these other high carb and bad fat sources will grow internal belly fat.)

2. The most effective kinds of exercise to lose bodyfat, lose internal fat, and turn off insulin resistance have a key similarity. They may not last huge amounts of time. But they are vigorous and can be safe once you build up to it gradually and keep the high intensity per time brief.

What exercises do that?

Interval cardio, progressive strength training, playing competitive sports, jumping rope, using a mini-trampoline, quite brisk execution of martial arts moves or routines such as Tae Bo or Karate or Kung Fu all work.

And, many of these are in fact on record as being effective at losing fat and belly fat.

Lose fat plus prevent diabetes and heart attacks....

Today's post: Tuesday, 4-7-2009

There are several things that tend to make you fat or keep you that way. And, many of those same things also tend to cause type 2 diabetes and heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases.

So, anytime I read something with important information on how to prevent this situation or help fix it if it is already in bad shape, it really gets my attention.

For example, if you are sedentary and never active and never get any very vigorous exercise from competitive sports or strength training or interval cardio AND you eat lots of fast carbs (high glycemic foods) such as foods with high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and refined grains and very little fiber, you will get “insulin resistant” which means you get high levels of insulin in your blood that no longer lowers excess levels of blood sugar. And, if that becomes excessive or goes on too long, you get fat; you get high blood sugar to the point it begins destroying your capillaries and the parts of you that that depend on them; and your chance of getting a heart attack or becoming senile skyrocket.

If you get lucky and your doctor finds out in time to reverse this with diet and exercise instead of the many type 2 diabetes drugs with nasty side effects, you will be lucky indeed.

But there’s more. Eating (or drinking) such high glycemic junk is a direct cause of high triglycerides and all kinds of cardiovascular disease.

So, you can find out how to do the reverse of the causes of this and take supplements that help reverse it BEFORE it harms you. If you know how & do it, you can avoid many really nasty drugs and diseases AND avoid many doctor visits you’ll have to pay for in some way. AND you’ll be a lot less fat.

So, anytime I read something with important information on how to prevent this situation or help fix it if it is already in bad shape, it really gets my attention.

And, if you want to stay healthy, live long, and avoid unnecessary suffering and doctor visits, I recommend you take that same interest.

Today’s article in the Total Health Breakthroughs email I get has several really important points to make that are really important in this area. And it includes some very valuable information that is new or very little known.

Here’s that article.:

"This article appears courtesy of Early to Rise's Total Health Breakthroughs, offering alternative solutions for mind, body and soul. For a complimentary subscription,
visit http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com"

“Falling Off the Diet Bandwagon? Read This

By James LaValle, R.Ph, ND, CCN

A New York Times article this week confirmed my worst fears – stress is sending Americans to candy stores in droves.1

While at first glance this little headline, "When Economy Sours, Tootsie Rolls Soothe Souls" seems amusing, from my perspective it unwittingly brings up two important issues in healthcare today:

The simplistic assertion that to manage our weight, all we have to do is control calories in and calories out.

There are many factors that influence our ability to lose weight and keep it off, and this headline is an example of an important one – stress. Stress from economic crisis is doing what we see over and over again in patients at LMI -- reducing serotonin and inducing carbohydrate cravings.

So what's the harm in eating a little candy if you're stressed? Nothing if you can stop at "a little," but if you make that stop at the candy bowl too much of a habit, you can quickly undo weight loss and start to increase health risks.

Stress management is such an important factor for long term weight control, I have made it one of the key components of my approach to weight loss.

What do you do when stress is causing candy cravings -- give in? Not in my book. You take steps to better manage your body's response to that stress. What we do is choose from a variety of supplements that we have found to be very effective in combating stress – Relora for example for carb-related cravings. If you can enhance Relora's effect with stress reducing mind-body exercises like Missy discussed in her February 24 article – all the better.

The belief that sugar and sweets are relatively benign foods.

For example, many diets allow the intake of refined sugars in candies and desserts as long as the overall caloric intake is controlled. The rationale is that by allowing yourself to eat a small amount of sweets, you won't feel deprived. It seems reasonable, but in my experience, this approach will not work for many people for a number of reasons.

One reason is because once some people start eating the sweets they just can't stop; instead of eating one of those little 100-calorie snack packets, they end up eating the whole box.

A study published in a journal called Eating Behavior looked at people with low mood who crave sweets, just like we are seeing now with people who are stressed and trying to lift their mood with candy. The study found that those people who get the biggest mood boost from sweets also have the worst control over their intake of sweets.2 So, it gets to be a vicious cycle. And according to this study, the better the sugar makes you feel, the more likely you are to over eat sweets.

Unfortunately, eating too much sugar is indeed harmful. For one, studies show it raises triglycerides, blood fats that increase heart disease risk and that are deposited as fat in our fat cells. A very recent study found that while all sugars consumed in excess of our caloric needs are quickly converted to triglycerides, when the proportion was 50% or more of the sugar as fructose, the production of body fat increased significantly -- and it even increased the production of fat from foods eaten later at lunch.3

Sugar also depletes chromium 4 and magnesium,5 two minerals that are needed to properly process glucose. For example, insulin receptors need 4 molecules of chromium for them to become active; if you don't have the chromium, the receptors simply don't work. In fact, chromium depletion is a hugely under-recognized cause of insulin resistance, in my opinion.

Interestingly, a study from 2004 found that depressed individuals who had the highest level of carbohydrate cravings had significantly reduced carb cravings and improved mood and energy when given 400 mcg and then 600 mcg of chromium.6 (Instead of reaching for the candy bowl, try some chromium instead.)

Magnesium is also important for insulin to function properly; a recent study found that magnesium intake was one of only two dietary factors that can significantly increase our production of adiponectin, a hormone that improves insulin receptor function and helps control weight.7 (The other factor that increased adiponectin was high intake of non-starchy vegetables, in my opinion another important part of any good weight management program.)

So, the more sweets you eat, the more you deplete the very nutrients that are needed to help your cells metabolize the sugar in them. It is via depletion of minerals that consuming too many sweets could indirectly be leading to insulin resistance.

Here's my point. You could constantly be regaining weight because you don't recognize that stress chemistry keeps leading you back to over intake of sugars. Or perhaps a history of high sugar intake has depleted your chromium and magnesium and contributed to insulin resistance and reduced adiponectin.

Perhaps you have just never learned how to eat more of those non-starchy vegetables that are so advantageous for your health and weight. If this sounds like you, maybe it's time to stop putting your hope in over simplistic approaches to diet and start looking for more comprehensive solutions. If that is the case I strongly encourage you to consider the approach in my Metabolic Code Diet, which will reduce your stress and help you attain permanent weight loss the healthy way.

References

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/nyregion/24candy.html?th&emc=th.

2. Kampov-Polevoy AB, et al. Eat Behav. 2006 Aug;7(3):181-7.

3. UT Southwestern Medical Center (2008, July 28). Limiting Fructose May Boost Weight Loss, Researcher Reports. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 30, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/07/080724064824.htm.

4. Kozlovsky AS, et al. Metabolism. 1986 Jun;35(6):515-18.

5. Paolisso G. et al. Diabetologia. Sep 1990. 33(9):511-14.

6. Docherty JP, et al. J Psychiatr Pract. 2005 Sep;11(5):302-14.

7. Cassidy A, et al. J of Nutr. Feb 2009. 139(2):353-358.

[Ed. Note: James LaValle is the founding Director of the LaValle Metabolic Institute, one of the largest integrative medicine practices in the country. Dr. LaValle is Executive Editor of THB's The Healing Prescription and the author of The Metabolic Code Diet: Unleashing the Power of Your Metabolism for Lasting Weight Loss and Vitality…..] “

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Here are some of the key points in his article that I think are either useful or exciting. I also include some of my suggestions.

1. Many people are eating more candy now because of the recession and its related stress and the relatively low cost of candy as a treat people can still afford.

Read a good book from your local library or get a DVD from Netflix. This can be a better reward or even a better stress reliever instead of eating candy. Plus it can be free or cost as little as daily candy treats.

Stop eating or buying any soft drinks or foods that contain refined grains or high fructose corn syrup and most foods that contain sugar. Some people can cut their grocery bill or total “food’ money in half by doing that. Then you can afford more things you find rewarding but cost more than candy and STILL be money ahead!

For stress relief, try Tai Chi or meditating. (Tai Chi can be done in less time and gets twice the stress relief results as meditating and it also is an exercise that builds muscle and burns calories which meditation does NOT do. But for some people, meditation works well to relive stress and they like doing it. So that does work for some people.)

2. Get a good grip on the reality that soft drinks or foods that contain refined grains or high fructose corn syrup and most foods that contain sugar are about as good for your health (in any kind of quantity, more than once or twice a week total) as arsenic.

The closer you can get to zero on consuming them, the healthier you will be and the less excess fat you will carry around.

3. If you are fat, have elevated blood sugar or type 2 diabetes, or have simply been eating and drinking a lot of these fast, junky carbs, you will be healthier and less fat if you take one to three capsules of chromium polynicotinate that have 200 mcg of chromium. (Solgar makes the kind I take.) I believe this form avoids some problems people got from taking the chromium picolinate version and the nicotinate part means that you also get a form of niacin that helps to lower LDL & triglycerides and increase HDL.)

This article makes it very clear that taking chromium may be as valuable in turning off insulin resistance and lowering high blood sugar as vigorous strength training. So if you to all 3 – stop ingesting fast, junky carbs; take chromium; and do vigorous strength training at least two or three times a week, you can vastly improve or turn off insulin resistance.

4. Similarly, taking 200 to 600 mg a day of magnesium will help with insulin resistance and high blood sugar by improving adiponectin levels AND doing that has been shown to help control your appetite and prevent overeating -- plus taking that much magnesium insures you have it for the other functions your body needs to work right and will help prevent or improve high blood pressure.

So taking chromium and magnesium will improve your health, help prevent insulin resistance or stop it, do the same for high blood sugar AND help you turn down sugar cravings.

Personally, I already take them both. But I did not realize how valuable they were for fat loss and blood sugar control. (Note that taking magnesium AND a lot of magnesium and Milk of Magnesia or similar over the counter remedies that contain magnesium at the same time can overdose you and cause problems. So if you take those cut back on your magnesium to 200 mg a day until you stop taking the over the counter remedies that contain magnesium.)

5. He also shows in his article that if you stop eating or buying any soft drinks or foods that contain refined grains or high fructose corn syrup and most foods that contain sugar and take the supplement alpha lipoic acid your triglycerides will go down which will turn off much of the cause of heart disease – even to the level of reversing it!

6. Though he understates why, he does make it clear that eating a lot of nonstarchy vegetables instead of these foods can really help. (You can easily substitute water for soft drinks and have no problems with getting hungry. But if you eat no refined grain foods or sweets, you’ll get hungry if you don’t eat something else. Vegetables work as a substitute and not only fill you up and provide fiber, they give you important nutrients and virtually no calories or glycemic effect.)

Though it’s not in his article, it’s recently been discovered & recently reported in the health news that the increase fiber you get from doing this decreases your visceral and belly fat.

And doing those two things makes you look better and far less likely to have heart disease or get a heart attack.

Sweets and fat loss....

Today's post: Tuesday, 3-3-2009

The evidence is in. The studies have been done. Sweet foods and tastes tend to fatten those who eat them. And it now looks like many kinds of sweet foods and tastes cause disease directly.

But we’re all descended from famine survivors who loved sweets. So never eating any sweets deprives you of one of life’s pleasures and lowers your quality of life.

So, the question is how to enjoy sweets without being harmed by them.

There are several answers that work.

Here are ten for starters.

1. Have other things you enjoy eating that support your health and eat sweets much less often than most people in the United States now do. This means a few times a week or less instead of several times a day or more.

2. Have smaller servings of extremely good sweet things instead of large amounts of pretty good but not great sweet things.

3. Eat fruit, sugar, and use natural sugar substitutes only with some real sugar.

4. Do NOT use or ingest other sweeteners at all. (We say why later in this post.)

5. Eat sweets along with foods that have a low glycemic index because they contain protein, fat, or fiber. (Raisins and pecans eaten together taste great and their combination is much lower in glycemic index than raisins alone for example. Ice cream and chocolate candy are lower in glycemic index than most sweets for this reason.)

6. Never eat sweets that have any health damaging ingredients.

7. Be sure to do both strength training and interval cardio each week. This increases your body’s ability to digest and process the sugar you do eat. It’s simple, if you value your health and don’t exercise, eat NO sweets.

8. Take the chromium polynicotinate supplement that and consider taking the supplement alpha lipoic acid. These also help your body process the sugar you do eat.

9. If you are fat or begin getting closer to obese than just a bit overweight, cut the amount of sweets you eat a week in half. (Some people will need to cut that in half again.) And be sure to exercise each week.

10. Get your fasting glucose and HBA1C blood sugar readings done. If your fasting glucose is 100 or more or your HBA1C is 5.8 or more, do ALL of the above.

For related info with ideas on OK ways to enjoy sweets, see our post, Health OK Desserts & Snacks.... posted on Tuesday, 1-27-2009.

But since so many people now are fat and sick because they eat harmful sweets or used to do so, the rest of this post is about why to avoid those.

Here’s why to follow these 3 steps above.:

3. Eat fruit, sugar, and use natural sugar substitutes only with some real sugar.

4. Do NOT use or ingest other sweeteners at all.

6. Never eat sweets that have any health damaging ingredients.

A. Eat fruit, sugar, and use natural sugar substitutes only with some real sugar.

Our bodies have evolved to eat some fruit and occasionally eat things with sugar. That works Ok when the foods with sugar are infrequent and the people eating it get lots of exercise. That’s how we evolved for our bodies to work. So eating fruit and some real sugar is OK if you exercise right each week.

But you may want to eat sweets more often or need to cut back on sugar more. To get the sweetness of sugar without the glycemic impact you can substitute natural sweeteners with much lower glycemic indexes and or calories.

But even those, I think, should be substituted for half or 60 percent of the sugar rather than all of it. Here’s why.:

Artificial zero calorie sweeteners wind up giving people the same problems with overweight and diseases as the regular sweeteners do. The studies find this consistently. Artificial zero calorie sweeteners aren’t good for you directly is likely part of it. But most of it is because your body’s processing is thrown off by getting the sweet taste but not the sugar and most of that is reflected by sharply increasing your appetite for real sugar to compensate.

I think natural sweeteners with much lower glycemic indexes and or calories do this too.

So one way to avoid it is to get half the sweetness from sugar and half from sweeteners with much lower glycemic indexes and or calories. The hope is your body gets enough sugar that you avoid the rebound effect of giving it the sweet taste with no sugar. But you cut the sugar in half.

Parade Magazine for this past Sunday, March 1, 2009 had an article titled The Scoop on Sugar Substitutes by Joy Bauer.

In it she describes erythritol, a very sweet and natural sugar alcohol that does NOT make you gassy like its cousins sorbitol and xylitol. ZSweet is the commercial version sold at Whole Foods. She also describes new sweeteners that contain just the sweet part of the natural plant stevia. (I’ve not tasted them to know if that means they have edited out the horrible poor quality marshmallow taste of whole stevia; but I strongly suspect they have.) PureVia and Truvia have that stevia component. This stevia component is much sweeter than erythritol but does not have the physical properties of sugar for cooking so those two products also contain erythritol. Agave nectar does not have zero calories or zero glycemic effect. But people like the taste and it has a MUCH lower glycemic index than sugar.

The other thing you can do is use forms of sugar that is both sweet and has a distinctive taste. 100 % real maple syrup, honey, brown sugar, and dark molasses all have this characteristic.

Using those instead of white sugar may enable you to use less sugar or get more enjoyment out of the sugar you do eat.

In some recipes you can also use cinnamon which reduces the glycemic effect of the sugar.

B. Do NOT use or ingest other sweeteners at all.

The Center for Science in the public interest is quoted as noting studies that show that saccharin and aspartame increase the risk of cancer. (These are known as Sweet’n Low, and as Equal or Nutrasweet.)

Sucralose, known as Splenda, is made with a chlorinated version of sugar. This provides the taste of sugar with no calories. But other chlorinated hydrocarbons include pesticides, herbicides, and poison gases. My strong suspicion is that Sucralose will eventually prove to have very serious health issues even though they’ve not been found yet. I have very strong reservations about its use for people to eat.

And, as we already said, people who use these sweeteners as complete sugar substitutes seem to wind up getting the same fat gain and diseases as people who eat that much sugar.

But the real horror story in sweeteners to totally avoid is high fructose corn syrup. Part of why it is more fattening and harmful to health is because it is cheaper and tastes sweeter than sugar so people wind up eating a good bit more of it. Since 95 % of Americans should eat far less sugar, that’s already a serious problem.

But there is more. Just today, Reuters health news had a report of a study with these key statements that I put in bold about high fructose corn syrup.:

“A sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup has been widely used in sodas and processed foods since the 1980s, and some researchers have blamed this trend at least in part for the concurrent rise in obesity and diabetes.

The authors of the current report, in the journal Cell Metabolism, explain that some studies have shown that fructose is metabolized differently than glucose is, being more readily converted into fat.

Other studies have linked diets heavy in high-fructose corn syrup to elevated risks of high triglycerides (a type of blood fat), fat buildup in the liver, and insulin resistance, note Dr. Gerald Shulman and colleagues at Yale University School of Medicine.”

Oops! These studies mean that ingesting high fructose corn syrup, particularly in any larger amounts, leads to obesity, type II diabetes, & heart disease. (We now know that increasing triglycerides increases the amount of the small particle LDL that causes heart disease.) Ouch!

That means that no one who wants to stay healthy or avoid being fat should eat or ingest ANY high fructose corn syrup or anything containing it.

Since zero calorie soft drinks seem to have the same negative health and fat gaining results, that means that enjoying sweets without hurting your health or getting fat unnecessarily means drinking absolutely NO soft drinks.

The only good news is that avoiding foods that have high fructose corn syrup makes it a lot easier to eat less sugar. Almost every prepared food sold in stores that used to have sugar, now has high fructose corn syrup instead. We strongly recommend you avoid them ALL.

C. Never eat sweets that have any health damaging ingredients.

In addition to high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners, refined grain foods, and hydrogenated fats are proven to be fattening and harmful to your health to eat. (Refined grain foods are often higher in glycemic index than sugar; and hydrogenated fats also increase the amount of the small particle LDL that causes heart disease.)

Virtually all packaged snacks or commercially prepared sweets have one of more of these ingredients.

So, very only eat small amounts of home-made treats or those sold in stores like Whole Foods.

Right now, this problem is so bad, the only good news is that it gives you extra incentives to eat fewer sweets. This is because it limits the amount of them that are at all safe to eat as much as it does.

30 SECONDS of vigorous exercise lowers blood sugar....

Today's post: Monday, 2-9-2009

If your blood sugar is too high, you may have heard that exercise will help lower it. You may even have heard that progressive strength training and interval cardio do the best job.

But if you haven’t been exercising and do NOT have an extra half an hour a day or the budget to go to a gym or buy home exercise equipment, you may have done nothing about it.

The same is true for the situation if you are fatter and heavier than you should be and don’t exercise. Even if you’ve not tested it, your blood sugar is likely to be too high. In addition, if you can lower it slightly if your blood sugar is even a bit high, you’ll tend to lose some fat.

What if you could exercise for only ONE minute a day at home on some days AND in only 2 weeks, you could lower your blood sugar level significantly?

You can do just that!

The report of some new research has been out for over a week. We even posted: “Minutes a WEEK of exercise can help....Thursday, 1-29-2009” a week before last Thursday based on our initial reading about it.

But I missed something. I’d read that the study had found that just minutes a WEEK of vigorous exercise had an astoundingly large beneficial effect on the health of the people in the study who did it. But what I missed was that in only 2 weeks, it lowered their blood sugar levels significantly.

So, when I saw the article in today’s Early to Rise email, I knew it was important enough to post immediately.

Here’s the article. As usual, my added comments follow it.

“This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com .”


“Improve Your Metabolism in Just 2 Weeks!

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

It's hardly news that exercise is good for you. It can help keep weight off, build a bigger brain, improve mood, and lower the risk of cancer and heart disease. Many people are put off by the idea of exercise because of time constraints. But research continues to demonstrate that you don't have to spend an hour in the gym or on the track to get the significant health benefits.

Case in point: A new study out of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland found that high-intensity exercise for brief periods of time may help reduce the risk of diabetes.

In the study, published in the journal BMC Endocrine Disorders, researchers had young healthy male volunteers use exercise bikes to perform rigorous 30-second sprints. Over the course of two weeks, the subjects performed 30 of these sprints (about two or three a day) for a grand total of 15 minutes of exercise.

You read that right - 15 minutes. Over the course of two weeks.

And this low-volume, high-intensity training substantially improved both insulin action and blood sugar control.

"Doing a few intense muscle exercises, each lasting only about 30 seconds each, dramatically improves your metabolism in just two weeks," said James Timmons, a professor at the University and one of the researchers.

I've been an advocate of short, high-intensity training for years. Now, in addition to the many studies showing that this kind of exercise improves cardiovascular fitness and is an effective way to burn fat, the Heriot-Watt study shows that it may be an effective weapon in the fight against diabetes.

This finding is important, because it helps make the case that there's a lot you can do for your health in very little time. If, that is, you train smart. While walking 30 minutes a day is terrific, and weight training and spin classes and all the other ways to exercise still have their place, it's nice to know that you can still get a lot accomplished even if you have only a few minutes a day to work out.

[Ed. Note: If 15 minutes over the course of two weeks can help improve your health, there's no excuse to avoid exercise. For more advice about staying fit and healthy, check out health expert Jonny Bowden's site, JonnyBowden.com ....]"

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Here are some other points and ideas on how to use this.

1. The people studied were relatively young and in good health. My guess is that older people or people who are in less robust health AND who have NOT been getting any exercise at all might need to build up to this kind of intensity rather than just doing it right off the bat.

But the evidence is that your body can get used to this kind of exercise if you build up to it over a period of time. And, if you do that and do such a short, 30 to 60 second session, of exercise even after you’ve built up to it, it is even safer.

2. To illustrate that, here are three at home exercises from our post on 1-29.:

In this case, they did an abbreviated interval cardio exercise by having the people do a 30 second session on an exercise bike while pedaling as fast as they could.

a) But one set a day in about a minute of as many fast pushups as you can do until you cannot do another will likely also work.

b) Or doing half squats as fast you can for one minute each time

c) or doing one set of as many crunches as you can in one minute would also likely work.

So, if all you can do now is 3 pushups where you do them where you only have your knees bent and touch, so called women’s push-ups, instead of regular push ups where you support yourself on your toes and keep your legs straight, do that the first time; then do them a bit faster the second time; and then do 4 the time after that; & keep improving. When you keep doing this even 3 days a week with a day off in between each time, you will gradually build up to being able to do 30 or 40 really fast. (Note that if you do get strong enough to do 40 really fast from the knee pushups, you’ll likely be strong enough to do at least 5 regular pushups and can then build up to 30 or 40 of those really fast for even better results.)

For best results do half squats (easier on your knees and easier to do fast than full squats) or crunches on the other days of the week. (Or you could do jumping jacks if you like them instead.) Then gradually build up to where you can do something like 98 in less than a minute.

It may take you a couple of months to build up to doing the kind of really vigorous and fast exercise that gets these really good results. But you’ll find you CAN do it. If you do it, you’ll get really good results too just like the people in this study. The evidence is that you can do it safely by gradually building up to it in this way.

BUT the truly HUGE news is that you can get significant results in just ONE minute a day. And, you can do it at home. No extra money or gym needed—or travel time to a gym either.

If you can do more once you get used to exercising or you already have a walking program or do less intense strength training at a gym twice a week, that’s great as it would be if you added it later.

But by adding just ONE exercise for ONE minute or even a bit less at least 4 days a week, you can get extraordinary results.

Think about it. You can do that much even if you don’t have time for more.

How omega 6 oils and sugar make you sick....

Today's post: Friday, 2-6-2009

If you’ve read our posts for awhile now, you already know we recommend taking omega 3 oil supplements and eating wild caught fish not too high in mercury -- 2 or three times a week so you have an adequate omega 3 oil intake. Doing so has abundant health benefits from lowering your triglycerides to protect your heart to making you feel better and improving your personal relationships by helping prevent or turn off mild depression and excess irritability.

You’ve also read we suggest you NOT ingest oils high in omega 6 such as corn, soy, safflower, canola, etc. And, we also recommend NOT eating refined grains and minimizing whole grain foods in part to avoid their excessive omega 6 oils. We also recommend minimizing the animal fat you eat from animals fed grain instead of their natural foods in part because doing so avoids the high level of omega 6 oils in the meat of animals fed grains.

Lastly, we recommend when you want to use an oil, you use primarily extra virgin olive oil.

If do all three, you increase your omega 3 oils and lower your omega 6 oils. Doing these 3 things also has other health benefits. By moving your ratio of omega 3 oils from the far too little most people get and minimizing the excessive omega 6 oils most people get, the evidence shows you will have far better health.

Similarly, you’ve read that we recommend you ingest NO transfats including doing so by NEVER buying or ingesting anything with hydrogenated vegetable oils in it or on its label; ingest NO high fructose corn syrup; stop eating refined grains and things made from them; and being quite moderate in eating sugar or foods that contain it.

We still do! Please follow these recommendations. You’ll be far less fat; & the list of diseases and avoidable medical costs you’ll avoid is LONG.

But what if we and the other up to date health experts who have been saying similar things haven’t convinced you yet or you haven’t yet begun to follow these recommendations?

Please read this article from today’s TotalHealthBreakthroughs email. Dr Lundell does a superb job of explaining why to do so and how not doing so is so much more harmful to you than you might have imagined.

My title for the article is: HOW too much omega 6 & sugars cause disease.

Here’s the article.:

"This article appears courtesy of Early to Rise's Total Health Breakthroughs, offering alternative solutions for mind, body and soul. For a complimentary subscription,
visit http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com"

“Heart Surgeon Admits Huge Mistake!

By Dwight Lundell, MD

….

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. Let's say you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.

While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.

What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.

While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator -- inflammation in their arteries.

Let's get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6's are essential --they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell -- they must be in the correct balance with omega-3's.

If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation. Today's mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That's a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today's food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer's disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.

There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation-causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them. One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.

Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labeled polyunsaturated. Forget the "science" that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.

The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.

What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.

[Ed. Note: Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa, AZ. His private practice, Cardiac Care Center was in Mesa, AZ. Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness. He is the author of The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie…..]”

X* X* X* X* X* X*

A. His article is brilliant at how well it describes what eating refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, and too much sugar while eating too little fiber and health OK proteins and health OK oils does too you.

“Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.“

That means if you eat this stuff and particularly if you eat a lot of it every day, you’ll tend to get insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, very high blood sugar levels – AND you’ll get fat!

“If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation. Today's mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from C. That's a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today's food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer's disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated. “

Dr Lundell also makes it crystal clear why to get plenty of omega 3 oils and minimize omega 6 oils.

B. But he didn’t add that we know that the food the people we are descended from ate a diet that was bout 1:1 or equal amounts of omega 3 and omega 6 oils and that went on for at least a million years and didn’t stop until about 10,000 years ago. He does point out that it’s only in the last 60 years that we’ve adopted eating patterns that produce “15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6.”

That mean our bodies aren’t designed to run on junk food. They won’t operate as well, stay running well, or last as long unless we eat the food our body was adapted and designed by over a million years of evolution to eat.

C. Not getting the exercise people got over 10,000 years ago is not quite as critical because the exercise demands varied. But not getting the exercise most people got until 60 years ago IS critical. Virtually no one got that less than that for the over a million years before that.

Current research backs this up. It turns out that regular exercise, particularly strength training and interval cardio tends to prevent or reverse the insulin resistance Dr Lundell describes. And, since such regular exercise also has been tested to lower the systemic inflammation he describes, NEVER getting regular exercise, makes everything he describes much worse.

So the way to good health or much better health is simple.:

Get abundant omega 3 oils every week; stop ingesting junk with excessive fast acting carbs and excessive omega 6 oils; and get regular exercise each week.

Lose fat and think better too....

Today's post: Monday, 1-26-2009

In a recent article in the online Health Day news, they reported a study that found that people who had high blood sugar simply did NOT think as well as people with normal blood sugar levels. Their blood sugar was measured by their HBA1C tests, which tests their average blood sugar for the last 60 to 90 days by measuring sugar on their red blood cells that live that long.

They thought more slowly; didn’t remember as well; and were less able to multitask. Ouch !!

Besides that, the article noted that people with such higher blood sugar were 1.5 times as likely to develop some kind of senility. (We did some recent posts on that, why it’s so, & some of the recent research on it.)

But other than the drugs that lower high blood sugar, which are not very good so far with many undesirable side effects and expensive, other than lower dose Metformin in some people, how can you bring down your blood sugar if it’s high?

1. Start lowering it the minute it tests as high. (High enough to prompt action is a fasting blood sugar of 100 or more or an HBA1C reading of 5.9 or more, possibly even 5.8.) That’s because it takes very little more to begin to put you into type 2 diabetes and the related insulin resistance, which can be harder to reverse. But at lower levels of high blood sugar, it almost always is reversible.

2. Take as much action as you can to lower it and get your HBA1C retested after 3 or 4 months to see if it worked.

For best results, get an at home fasting blood sugar test device and supplies through your doctor or HMO. With that, you get instant feedback on what makes your blood sugar worse and what makes it better. Bread, soft drinks, and other high glycemic index foods plus NO exercise tend to make it worse while zero and low glycemic index foods and vigorous exercise from brisk walks to strength training to interval cardio make it better.

3. But the best news is that if you do the things that make your blood sugar go down to where it should be, you’ll also become less fat, healthier in several ways, & your sex life is likely to improve!

That’s because when your blood sugar is just right you tend to lose excess fat; & when your blood sugar is high, you definitely GAIN fat.

Since we just posted on just this set of things last Friday, to save you time if you didn’t see that post, here are some of the key things in it that can also help you lower your blood sugar if it’s high.: (I add some extra info after these 3 sections as well.)

2. One of the very best and most effective ways to lose fat, lose belly fat, and reduce all these risks is to do regular exercise that includes some progressive strength training and interval cardio every week.

Both the total amount of calories burned even in low key exercise and activities such walking and light housework and the amount of vigorous exercise you get that causes you to exert an extra effort or to stop afterwards to catch your breath make a difference. But if you can do the more vigorous exercises several times a week without overdoing it, you’ll burn the most calories and remove the most belly fat.

Both interval cardio and progressive strength training cause increased metabolism and calorie burning for up to SEVERAL HOURS after you stop doing them. Even better they tend to reverse insulin resistance and high blood sugar and prevent their return if you keep doing vigorous interval cardio and progressive strength training each week.

Even better, such exercises help to both relieve stress and to increase the amount of stress you can handle without feeling overstressed and in need of comfort food.

(These kinds of exercise done regularly every week do an extremely effective job in lowering high blood sugar and insulin resistance. Few drugs come close. One man with type 2 diabetes virtually wiped it out with just strength training alone. You may need more than that. But you WILL see positive results from this kind of regular exercise.)

3. To the extent you can manage it, eating or drinking zero or very low glycemic index foods and drinks over 95 % of the time while avoiding artificial sweeteners -- both will help you lose fat all over and will help you lose belly fat.

Health OK proteins and fats and oils essentially get a zero glycemic rating. (They work in enough other ways to remove belly fat and protect your health, we list them in our next way to lose belly fat by themselves. But they work and fit very well here also.) The more zero glycemic foods you eat, the lower your overall glycemic index of what you ingest will be.

The very low glycemic index foods include virtually all nonstarchy and/or green vegetables.

The very low glycemic index foods also include some fruit such as whole apples and cherries and blackberries. Most other whole fruit is relatively low in glycemic index; but enough higher to eat once or twice a day rather than more often.

The lowest glycemic index beans are lentils; but the other kinds of beans are low.

Barley is the only grain that has a truly low glycemic index. But eating only whole grain foods and about a third as many grain foods as most people do now or less -- & as whole grains only -- can also help.

The second way to eat a low glycemic diet is to stop eating or drinking virtually ALL high glycemic index foods. Or to eat them extremely rarely. Since the body acts as if you ate sugar if you eat things that are sweetened by non-nutritive sweeteners, they fit in this category also.

This means essentially NOT eating any refined grain foods whether it’s bread, cereal, baked goods, or snack foods. And it means virtually never drink any soft drinks. This means NOT eating or drinking anything sweetened with high fructose corn syrup and eating very few things sweetened by sugar.

(Since many people still have no clue how fattening and bad for your health these things are, that’s why we suggested taxing them in yesterday’s post.)

Bottom line, if you eat or drink them now, and stop doing it, it’s an excellent way to lose belly fat!

(Similarly, zero, low, and some moderately low glycemic foods tend to give you normal blood sugar levels while the high glycemic foods virtually always give you high blood sugar readings.)

4. Eat more health OK oils and protein foods and mostly stop eating bad ones.

a) Monosaturated oils tend to help you lose belly fat according to the Flat Belly Diet book, which is still relatively new. Monosaturated oils also increase your HDL or don’t lower it and they lower LDL. People who are working to lose weight or fat who have some of these monosaturated oils each day, oddly enough, lose more fat; and of even more importance, they are dramatically more likely to keep off the fat and weight they lose.

They are in extra virgin olive oil, avocados, and nuts. These foods are so nutritious and have so many other health benefits they’ve been called superfoods. Eat any of them you aren’t allergic to and you’ll have better health and less belly fat.

b) Omega 3 oils lower inflammation and triglycerides and help you think better, feel better, and handle stress without getting so angry or irritable you make your problems worse!

The safer and more effective omega 3 oils are in:
DHA from algae and well purified fish oils (both available as supplements);
wild caught fish, particularly salmon, mackerel (NOT king mackerel), and sardines;
walnuts;
and some green vegetables and greens, particularly one called purslane.

Conversely, AVOID getting as many omega 6 oils and saturated animal fats as you can.

c) Omega 6 oils come from grains and most oils other than olive oil. They tend to increase inflammation and may help cause cancer, particularly if heated. Unlike monosaturated oils and omega 3 oils, they do not help you lose belly fat or protect your health.

Eating some omega 6 oils is OK in whole grains. Omega 6 oils cause health problems, including obesity if you eat 20 times that much, as many people still do. Omega 6 oils are high in animals fed grains instead of their natural diets. This means most meat in stores is higher than it should be in omega 6 oils since the animals it’s from were fed almost only on grains.

So mostly avoid meat from grain fed animals; eat whole grains only moderately; eat no refined grain foods; and avoid soy, canola, safflower, and corn oils in your food.

(To recap, exercise and eat zero and low glycemic foods. You’ll be less fat; your blood sugar will be lower; & we now know, you’ll think better too!)