3 strategies to protect your eyes....

Today's Post: Thursday, 3-22-2012

1. Recently one of my health emails said that eating bilberries, a kind of blue berry common in England and Scandinavia, or taking bilberry supplements protects the retinas in your eyes.

Doing this has also been found to improve night vision.

Alpha-carotene, beta-carotene, lutein, zeaxanthin, and lycopene are carotenes or carotenoids which also help prevent damage to your retina. And the most effective of these for protecting your retina I’ve read are lutein & zeaxanthin. They are high in egg yolks, broccoli, and leafy dark green vegetables.

Because these foods have multiple other health benefits, all the carotenoids are valuable for your health and the several dozen other carotenes may also help your eyes and health. These nutrients ARE better to eat instead take in a supplement.
(Taking lycopene for prostate cancer prevention seems to be one exception to that. But eating a lot of vegetables with the many kinds of natural carotenes may help prevent all cancers. So men interested in that protection should still eat those vegetables each day also!)

Ways of eating thought to be health supporting all vary a bit. But ALL of them suggest eating 5 to nine vegetables a day. Eating two or three servings a day of vegetables that are orange or dark green is one good way to help do that.

2. This way of eating also helps prevent cataracts where your lens to your eye gets cloudy and hard to see through.

Another way to protect your eyes from cataracts and from damage to your retina is to avoid excessive exposure to very bright lights and direct sunlight.

Eating enough carotenes does help prevent that damage by making your eyes harder to damage and easier to repair.

But things like never staring directly at the sun, wearing a brimmed hat outdoors during the day, and wearing dark glasses on sunny days or in conditions with a lot of glare also do that.

3. Getting good circulation to your eyes, optic nerve, and the part of your brain that your optic never connects to also help you keep good vision.

But there is another critical reason to keep up good circulation to your eyes.

Good circulation to your eyeball helps it to empty out fluid when needed which prevents fluid from building up.

If excess fluid does build up too far, that can cause glaucoma, an eye disease that destroys your optic nerve and tends to create permanent vision loss.

Dr Dharma Khalsa’s email also noted that taking ginkgo biloba has been found to increase circulation to your eyes.

It’s better known for increasing circulation to your brain.

But it also helps prevent eye damage too it turns out by improving circulation to your eyes.

Note that 60 mg a day of ginkgo may well be enough if you are keeping your HDL cholesterol up and your triglycerides and LDL low to protect the circulation to your heart and brain.

Also note that it takes a few weeks to take ginkgo until it builds up to full strength.

But even more importance taking it means that before surgery you should stop for a couple of weeks in advance.

Warning: Taking ginkgo and blood thinners at the same time can kill you.

It seems that taking ginkgo causes prescription blood thinners to work a few times better than usual.

So you can’t add taking ginkgo if you are on blood thinners. And you can’t safely take blood thinners if you take ginkgo.

Second, in addition to eating right and exercise to protect your heart and circulation you also need to do so to prevent high blood sugar.

High blood sugar causes excess sugar to stick to your blood cells and LDL particles. That tends to destroy capillaries.

If that happens in your eyes you can suddenly lose vision temporarily while you are driving. I spoke to a woman who found out she had high blood sugar when that happened to her!

But if this goes on too long, it can blind you.

So in addition to the protection it gives your heart, eliminate all soft drinks. Virtually eliminate eating foods that contain refined grains or high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. Stop eating packaged snacks and desserts. And cut back a lot on eating foods that contain sugar.

In addition to that do vigorous exercise most days of every week.

Of course each of these actions has other health benefits. Many people who make these health upgrades lose most of their excess fat without dieting.

And doing these things tends to slow aging which also protects your eyes.

Self-test to control blood sugar….

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

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

Why worry about that?

For two reasons.:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old situation was this.:

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that was last month.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what the numbers mean.:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metrika and Bayer have created a lifesaving test.

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

Your health depends on your blood sugar levels...

Today's post: Monday, 3-3-2008

Every part of your body depends on proper blood flow to operate well. And, some parts can be harmed if your tiniest blood vessels, your capillaries, rupture or swell up too much.

Excessive blood sugar levels in your blood both cause that kind of capillary damage & can shut off blood circulation to key body parts.

Excessive blood sugar levels in your blood also tend to build up unstable plaque on your blood vessel walls. So, in addition to slowing blood flow & often causing high blood pressure, sometimes the plaque breaks loose. That causes heart attacks, strokes, & other life threatening & life taking events. People with high blood sugar levels get two to four times as many of such events than people with Ok levels.

The bad news is that your blood sugar levels may be too high right now as you read this.

The good news is that you can get your blood tested to find out if that’s the case. And, if it hasn’t gone too far, you can reverse the problem.

So, the most important thing is to get your blood glucose levels checked every 6 months or a year.

The other key thing is to follow the practices that keep your blood levels where they should be all the time.

Why be forced to reverse something after it’s started to harm you or be forced to take expensive drugs that only partly solve the problem & have side effects when you can prevent the problem in the first place?

Chances are many of you reading this haven’t gotten your blood sugar levels tested at all or within the past year.

So, make a strong effort to work with your doctor to have your fasting blood glucose & HBA1C levels checked soon -- & then at least once a year.

(Soon you will be able to test the more important of these two, your HBA1C levels, yourself. Bayer bought Metrika that was selling a self test HBA1C device to doctors to send home with their patients. Sometime in 2008 --- this year, they expect to release an Over the Counter Version.)

So you know how to read the results, your fasting glucose ideally should be 89 or a bit less. Between 90 & 100 suggests you probably need to exercise more & eat better. Between 101 & 119 means that it is imperative that you do so. And, over 120 means your doctor may well be advised to also put you on medication & most will do so.

HBA1C is even more important. Since it measures the sugar on your red blood cells which tend to die off & get replaced every two or three months, it is a superb & extremely accurate reading of your average blood sugar over the past two or three months.

This reading should be 5.7 or a bit lower. 5.8 or 5.9 suggests you probably need to exercise more & eat better.

6.0 to 6.2 is borderline type II diabetes which means that it is imperative that you do so. Some doctors will also prescribe a drug & classify you as diabetic at that level. So, if you take prompt action at lower levels, you can avoid this level of reading. And, if you get a reading of 6.0 to 6.2, & take massive action immediately, you can stay off drugs.

At 6.3 to much higher, you are in serious trouble; & your doctor will be well be advised to also put you on medication & almost all of them will do so.

To repeat, high blood sugar levels will do you serious harm from putting you on kidney dialysis to blindness to impotence to amputation of your feet to death by heart attack or stroke.

You can’t be safe if you don’t know what your levels are by getting them tested.

And, you can’t keep the levels in the safe zone unless you do regular exercise each week, ideally including strength training & eating right.

Eating right means eating much less sugar than the average person now does; never drinking soft drinks; never or almost never eating foods containing high fructose corn syrup; eating almost no refined grain foods at all; & eating lots of low starch vegetables; health OK protein; & some health OK fats each day.

This style of eating has a very low glycemic index & glycemic load. It tends to give you a smooth un-spiky flow of blood sugar & keep your body able to regulate itself with small amounts of insulin.

That lifestyle results in optimal to pretty safe levels of blood sugar.

And, if you have been eating the other way & not exercising, switching permanently to this life style will slash most of your excess fat off your body with it never to return.

You can also move your blood sugar a bit lower with 200 mg a day or a bit more of alpha lipoic acid.

You can also eat a teaspoon a day or so of cinnamon as a spice &/or almost every time you do allow yourself sugar. Another way to get cinnamon is to take the CinnamonForce supplement from a company called New Chapter.

But suppose you already eat better than most people & get regular exercise already. Is it still important to get your blood sugar readings regularly?

I can tell you YES, definitely !! from personal experience.

Before I learned this info, I was in that category. Mercifully when I got my cholesterol levels checked that I knew then to do, my doctor included fasting glucose. Mine was 115. Given my lifestyle, that was dangerously high.

I immediately switched back to no sugar added applesauce from the sugared applesauce I was eating; cut the amount of added sugar I was eating by about 60 percent; & began taking 200 mg a day of alpha lipoic acid. I also continued eating right otherwise & exercising. I was lucky. My readings since have been lower than 89.

I’ve also added more raw broccoli & cauliflower to my weekday lunches since then to help me lose some fat I wanted to get rid of. (These foods also prevent cancer about 10 times better than the cooked kind.)

My point is that no matter what, you do need to get your blood sugar levels tested regularly.

If you don’t, it’s about as safe as driving at normal speed on the freeway without being able to see where you are going.

To put it mildly, this is NOT a good idea.

New info on fighting type II diabetes…..

Today's post: Thursday, 1-17-2008

(We start with the most important info. But to many of you, it’s old news. The new info is in the article I include at the end of this post.)

Many people today get no exercise. Even more unfortunately, many still drink soft drinks even though there is solid evidence that doing so helps make you fat & sick. Add sedentary jobs &, for most people, getting to & from work with no walking needed.

What does that give you?

This recipe is perfect for creating what is called insulin resistance & unhealthily high levels of blood sugar. So, it’s no surprise that many people are arriving there. And, for most people, as they get older, if that process once starts & gets through the undesirable level to the early stages of type II diabetes, they will often damage their health before they find out what the cause is.

(Since diabetes harms the capillaries that are the part of the blood delivery system where the blood actually delivers food & oxygen to your cells & removes CO2 & wastes, it causes serious harm. Diabetes also apparently makes cardiovascular disease develop faster & become more deadly.

If left undetected &/or if left untreated, it produces effects like fatal heart attacks, blindness, & cuts off circulation to your feet enough to cause the need for amputation. It also ruins your kidneys forcing you to be on dialysis or die.)

The best news is that all this is quite preventable.

The first line of defense is to get your blood sugar levels tested every year or two or twice that often if you are more than a bit too fat.

There are two tests to get each time, which are your fasting glucose level & your HBA1C.

Ideally, you want your fasting glucose level to be 99 or less.

Levels between about 100 & 119 are a warning light & suggest you take action to bring the level down. And, the higher the number in that range, the more undesirable it is. 120 & over may be type II diabetes. Somewhere slightly above that over 126 or so, most doctors will diagnose you as having type II diabetes.

However, since the fasting glucose is a snapshot of a particular time, it may read as much as 10 or 15 points above what is typical for you, so unless you are well over 126, most of the better doctors will look at your HBA1C reading before deciding.

The HBA1C reading is so valuable precisely because it DOES reveal what your typical blood sugar readings have been over the last 60 to 90 days.

If it’s 6.0 or higher (about 5.0 to 5.8 is desirable), your blood sugar level has been too high, & most doctors will diagnose you as having type II diabetes.

(HBA1C measures the blood that is stuck on the surface of your red blood cells. The reason it gives you the moving average of the last 60 to 90 days, is that’s because that’s about how long your red blood cells live.)

In today’s world NOT getting these two tests with reasonable frequency is about as safe as driving on the freeway without being able to see out of your windshield.

It tends to result in avoidable injury or death.

So the first way to fight back is to get both of these tests at least every two years.

And, if you are fat, don’t exercise yet, &/or drink soft drinks more often than two or three times a week, every 6 months to a year is safer.

The second line of defense is even more important as it prevents the problem to begin with.

The bad news is given our current economy & lifestyles, it’s a bit more of a challenge to do.

At least it has extra benefits such as becoming much less fat; having more energy, & improving your sex life.

The two biggest parts of it are to:

1. Get a minimum of regular exercise each week.:

a. Do progressive strength training at least two days a week with at least one day off in between for at least 20 minutes. More is better; but you may find that level a lot easier to fit into your life, particularly at first.

b. Do some aerobic exercise at least three days a week. Vigorous interval training seems to work the best; but even walking for 20 minutes each time is enormously better than no exercise at all.

c. Limiting watching TV also helps as you burn less energy watching TV than you do sleeping !! And, it’s a great way to find the time to exercise if you watch a lot of TV now.

2. Cut out & sharply reduce eating sugars that come with no nutrition & fiber in the same food.

Doing otherwise not only produces type II diabetes, it makes you fat & has been implicated as a likely cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

a. Soft drinks are so bad in this regard, the most it’s likely safe to drink is two or three a week. None ever is far safer. Oddly, the evidence of the studies is that diet soft drinks have the same effect. Water, tea, & coffee without sugar are far better substitutes,

b. Candy & desserts do taste really good. But eating two or three a week or less is far safer than eating two or three a day as many Americans do now.

c. People did NOT evolve eating grains. Early on when most people ate food made from whole grains & everyone got LOTS of exercise, grains seemed an OK food to eat.

Eating refined grain foods with little or no exercise in your life, however, is NOT safe.

The safest strategy is to eat very little in the way of grain foods; &, except for quite rare treats, NEVER eat refined grain foods.

(Since, so far, well over 90 percent of fast food & restaurant sandwiches are made with refined grain bread, this means ordering your sandwiches “Atkins style” with no bread. This saves the food place money, so only the stupidest with give you a hard time about serving you that way. You may need to be careful they really believe you & serve you as requested though as many are not used to the request as yet.)

c. Eat a LOT more vegetables. Many people eat none if you don’t count potatoes & potato based French fries. Eat at least two servings a day; & 5 or more is better.

d. Eat well from health OK protein foods & moderately from health OK fats & oils.

Wild caught fish high in omega 3 oils has both. So do nuts, which have strong health benefits if you aren’t allergic. Grass fed only beef has both. Beans & lentils are excellent as they have both protein & fiber. Avocados & extra virgin olive oil are excellent. Some lean poultry & eggs are good in moderation.

The bad news is that you may like to eat the kind of “semi-foods” that were popular & which you may be used to & feel deprived that the blood tests show you should stop eating them.

The best way to look at it is that these foods never were safe for people who get little or no exercise to eat. The good news is that you now know this is so; & the tests prove it’s happening to you. This actually gives you a considerable advantage over the unfortunates who don’t yet know any better.

What about drugs & supplements?

There is a safe diabetes drug when taken in small doses called Metformin. But many people cannot abide the side effects of large doses. And, some of other drugs have worse side effects. To be fair, the damage of really high levels of blood sugar is even worse.

Cinnamon spice & the supplements alpha lipoic acid & chromium polynicotinate do seem to help.

For some new info on two drugs it may be best to avoid & an even more powerful supplement, check out this article that came out last Friday.

"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"

“Friday, January 11, 2008

Diabetes and the Drugs to Control It Could Shorten Your Life

By Shane Ellison

I'm often asked, "How can I live to be 100 years old?" My answer is simple, "Just say no to prescription drugs and learn how to control insulin and blood sugar."

Why? Because the populations that live the longest are naturally highly sensitive to insulin.

Conversely, those who die the youngest from conditions such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer are grossly insensitive to insulin or are taking a prescription drug.

In the US, the biggest threat to longevity is type II diabetes caused by high levels of blood sugar and insulin resistance. It has become a nationwide epidemic that can steal 11 to 20 years from a person's lifespan.

To curb the threat, physicians are madly prescribing anti-diabetic drugs like Avandia and Actos. With so many people using them, scientists have learned two valuable lessons about longevity.

First lesson: You cannot use these drugs to increase lifespan.

In addition to eliciting a moderate drop in blood sugar, anti-diabetic meds damage the cardiovascular system.

According to a recent study, Avandia users had a whopping 30-40% increased risk of heart attack and other heart-related adverse events (heart failure) compared to patients treated with placebo.(1) This risk is due to the drug's effect of lowering vital hemoglobin levels.
Hemoglobin is used by the body to transport oxygen throughout the entire 100,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries in the adult body. Without hemoglobin, a condition known as ischemia sets in. This is a fancy term for "suffocation." Clinically, heart attack or heart failure can be the result.

The prescription drug Actos has the same mechanism of action as Avandia -- they both work to reduce insulin resistance. Not surprisingly, it also carries the same risks. Health Canada sounded the alarm about this class of drugs as early as 2001! But unfortunately, the warning has not yet reached the American public.

Commenting on this unannounced danger, the U.S. Congress stated that, "the FDA's apparently callous disregard for the safety of diabetics taking Avandia is very reminiscent of the Agency's failure to move on Vioxx when substantial safety signals first became known. Like Vioxx, Avandia may have unnecessarily risked the lives of tens of thousands of Americans."(2)

Second lesson: You can fix insulin receptors naturally to increase lifespan.
This simply means that insulin receptors found on individual cells have the ability to be "re-tuned" to the insulin message. We learned this from anti-diabetic drugs that can increase insulin sensitivity by jump starting inactive or dying cells. But this benefit from drugs doesn't outweigh the risk of heart attack. Fortunately, if a drug can do it, so can Mother Nature. This is a little-known fact in medicinal chemistry.

Mother Nature always provides the "lead" in the meticulous process of drug discovery. Meaning, before there is a man-made drug for a given ailment, there is a natural substance that will do the same thing.

In the process of designing anti-diabetic drugs, Big Pharma surveyed a myriad of natural products to find a lead compound that re-tuned the insulin receptor. Among them was a substance called corosolic acid, derived from the banaba plant(3) grown in Southeast Asia.

Corosolic acid has proven safe and effective for increasing insulin sensitivity. Remarkably, users have been shown to not only lower blood sugar and insulin levels but also melt fat and build muscle in the process.

But what's really important is that by taking corosolic acid instead of anti-diabetic drugs you will lower the risk of heart attack and naturally improve insulin sensitivity. That means years may be added to your life!

Of course, lifestyle habits such as regular exercise and minimizing sugar intake are pre-requisites to the success of increasing insulin sensitivity and significantly extending your lifespan.

(You can find corosolic acid as an ingredient in several natural products sold in health food stores for glucose control and weight management.)

1. http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01636.html
2. http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2007/05/21/congress-steps-up-scrutiny-of-fda/
3. Katsuji H, et al. Journal of Pharmacological Sciences Vol. 93 (2003), No.1, pp. 69-73.
[Ed. Note: Shane Ellison is known as "The People's Chemist." He holds a Master's degree in organic chemistry and has first-hand industry experience with drug research, design and synthesis. He is the author of Health Myths Exposed and The Hidden Truth about Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs.”

X * X* X*

Note that most of the supplements at the health food store are NOT labeled as “corosolic acid” but as banaba extract or banaba leaf extract.

The info I found suggests that it is so effective, you may be wise to start with a minimum amount unless your blood sugar readings are dangerously high.

Here’s why. If in your body it cuts your blood sugar level by 20 percent, that’s good if you were at 120 fasting glucose since you will now be at about 96 which is far safer.

However, if you were at 104 &, in your body, it cuts your blood sugar level by 25 percent, you would be at 78 & possibly feel dizzy and spacey from too low blood sugar.

So, try a little to see how you do before you try larger amounts unless your levels are really high.

And, be sure to follow the steps in the most important section anyway as they both give you the most effective health protection & have other health benefits besides – even if the banaba extract is effective for you.