What resveratrol DOES do....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 1-22-2013

As some of you know, taking 100 mg a day of the trans form of the supplement resveratrol that is found in red wine and other foods, was once thought to slow aging by boosting the sirtuins that you otherwise had to eat near starvation amounts of food all the time to do.

The findings testing this were negative to mildly positive and nothing to write home about or act on.

BUT, there WERE also findings that taking 100 mg a day of the trans form of the supplement resveratrol was strongly heart protective.

A bit over two weeks ago I got an email from Dr Al Sears.

That email contained WHY taking 100 mg a day of the trans form of the supplement resveratrol is so good for your heart.

And, it showed that taking 100 mg a day of the trans form of the supplement resveratrol does slow your rate of aging somewhat BUT in a different way than the original speculation.

1.  Taking 100 mg a day of the trans form of the supplement resveratrol….“stimulates the production of adult stem cells called endothelial progenitor cells.

These stem cells are so powerful, they have the ability to seek out, repair and heal the trouble areas in the lining of your blood vessels called the endothelial cell barrier or ECB.”

“Since the release of a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003, scientists and researchers have focused more and more on the power of these endothelial progenitor cells.

And for good reason. The study from the New England Journal of Medicine showed a “strong correlation” between the number of progenitor cells circulating in the blood and a person’s overall risk of heart disease.1

The connection is so strong, I could make the case that the number of progenitor cells will become the new “marker” of cardiovascular health, even replacing the two major forms of cholesterol, HDL and LDL.

Simply stated, the more of these progenitor cells you have, the more likely you are to avoid disease. This view is supported by the fact that patients with diabetes, high blood pressure and/or cardiovascular disease have low levels of progenitor cells.”

“In many recent studies I’ve read, I find that resveratrol increases the number of these endothelial progenitor cells.3,4,5,6”

This is dramatically important because without these stem cells to safely repair your inner surface of your blood cells, the endothelium, here’s what happens.

This causes inflammation and the back up repair system of pasting cholesterol into your blood vessel walls as an emergency fix gets triggered.  (It happens a bit even before that and much more easily if you have lots of small particles of LDL.)

That causes your blood vessels to become gradually blocked or to have chunks break off later and block all blood flow causing strokes and heart attacks.)

BUT these progenitor stem cells apparently create a repair WITHOUT any of that heart attack, stroke, and vascular dementia causing plaque build up!

So the finding that taking resveratrol helps make that happen is truly a HUGE discovery!

2.  “Resveratrol also has the distinction of activating telomerase, the enzyme that rebuilds your telomeres.”

THAT directly slows and has even been shown to partly reverse aging!

It isn’t sirtuin release.  But it does slow aging.

As many of you know, telomeres are the caps at the ends of your strands of DNA. 

When your telomeres are long enough, all the copies of your DNA are virtually identical and as good as the old ones they replace.

BUT when your telomeres get too short, the copies stop being exact and do NOT work as well as the originals.  Then every time they get copied, the copies get worse.  Then your cells don’t work.  Oops!

You are more likely to get sick and eventually all your systems no longer work.

BUT, keeping your telomeres long prevents this aging process and can even reverse it somewhat!

Conclusion:

1.  If you take 100 mg a day of the trans form of the supplement resveratrol, your protection from blood vessel diseases and the heart and brain damage and diseases caused by blood vessel disease goes WAY up. That’s because you get blood vessel repair that DOES NOT cause those diseases!

2.  If you take 100 mg a day of the trans form of the supplement resveratrol, your telomeres stay longer which ALSO prevents these same disease and slows your rate of aging!

Not bad!

I’m glad I take the 100 mg a day of the trans form of the supplement resveratrol.

This research certainly makes it look like a VERY good idea!   

Two ways to slow aging that work....

Today's Post:  Friday, 1-18-2013

Many people don’t think they want to live longer since today many older people are confined to nursing home or are invalids at home or simply don’t feel well all the time and have no energy.

But what if you could have 20 or 30 more years of healthy and enjoyable life?

If you simply slowed aging to very, very little & slowed way down AND were able both to be disease free and have the same energy you had as a young person and you could avoid the drugs that cause you to not to feel well or get sicker?

Two unusually powerful ways to do both have each been researched to work.

1.  The better known method is to get vigorous exercise most days of every week.

Stanford Researchers noticed that people there who started out as runners seemed to be younger looking than their colleagues at Stanford who didn’t run besides being less fat.

They decided to set up a matched group of Stanford people the same ages and economic group as the Runners to see if there was a difference over time.

During the study the runners mostly had to stop running from injuries BUT virtually all kept up some kind of regular and vigorous exercise.

What happened?  The exercise group got far less of the diseases the control group got, they tended to stay alive during the study, and they continued to look younger.  By the end of the study, the control group people looked much older and many of them had already died.

Then another study found that blood markers for heart health improved in another group of regular, vigorous, exercisers after a year.  But the huge news is that every year they continued exercising, they kept getting better and better heart and other protection and even more desirable blood markers for heart health! 

Yet another study looked at muscle cells.  Before the older group began exercising their muscle cells were operating less efficiently and at an older, more aged level.  Then after a period of regular and vigorous exercises for those muscles, the post test showed them completely restored and basically young muscle cells!

It’s proved beyond doubt as far as I’m concerned.  Regular vigorous exercise slows to almost stops aging AND is a dramatically effective way to avoid disabling or deadly diseases.

Exercisers quite literally have more years of healthy life where they almost have the same ability to do what they did as younger people!

To me that’s extremely clear and I’ll fight to keep up some kind of vigorous exercise no matter what.

(For exercise to be safe, start at an easy level and make progress slowly but steadily and avoid overdoing it until you know what your body can tolerate. 

Take breaks if you get too winded until you recover.  Working past that point can be harmful.  You just gradually build up to where that point becomes hard to reach. 

AND, it’s imperative that you learn how to prevent heart disease and heart attack.  We post on that often and there is a quick summary in the next section.

I got into studying heart protection so I’d be able to prevent heart problems caused when doing my exercises.  My blood tests show my efforts are working too.)

2.  CoQ10 prevents the mitochondria that are the power source inside all your cells from aging.

People make CoQ10 internally as young people and gradually make less until they lose the protection and their hearts pump less well and they have lower energy reserves.  They then act and feel much older.

Researchers fed older rats CoQ10 and found they acted as if they were younger, they were more active and began having sex again and looked less aged and aged more slowly.

But Coq10 is NOT what your body uses directly.  Your body converts the CoQ10, aka, ubiquinone, to the ubiquinol form and uses that.

So researchers then tried feeding the rats ubiquinol directly.

WOW!  The rats fed ubiquinol then acted and looked like much younger rats!

And they lived about 10 to 24% longer!

Now, in people, we know from blood tests why this is so. 

People who take ubiquinol instead of CoQ10 have FOUR times the blood level of the active form, ubiquinol than people who take CoQ10 at the same dose AND that blood level remains that good TWICE as long!

(One of the reasons statins are such undesirable drugs is that they seriously deplete CoQ10 and ubiquinol in people taking them.  That’s a known and understood effect.

But, far worse, people taking statins without also taking 300 mg a day of ubiquinol tend to have the very protective vigorous exercise they should be doing harm them and their muscles and to feel much older and have far less energy.

Recent research found that indeed it was the CoQ10 depletion that caused the muscle harming effect.  So if you are taking statins.  Find out if your genetic test places you in the group statins help protect you or in the one where they hardly do.

Find out the other ways that work to protect your heart, in addition to regular, vigorous exercise. Taking niacin and sterol supplements, virtually never, ever eating hydrogenated oils, and completely avoiding tobacco smoke are the most effective. But there are many others.

Then, if you are in the group they help and you want to keep taking them, the research shows you can do so with dramatically more safety and side effect if you also take 300 mg a day of ubiquinol.)

To get these effects:

If you are over 40 and often feel less energetic even when you aren’t sick, consider taking 50 to 100 mg a day of ubiquinol.

If you are over 60 take 100 to 150 a day of ubiquinol.

I’m 69 as of next month and take 150 mg myself.

Clearly the research shows that doing regular, vigorous exercise and taking ubiquinol can slow to almost reverse aging.

Sure other things can age you faster, smoking for one.  And there are many other ways it’s desirable to protect your health.

But using those two methods alone can do most of the heavy lifting!   

BIG increases in HDL and heart protection....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 12-11-2012

Earlier this week, I got an email with answers to questions by Peter Hibberd, M.D.

His brief article:

What Can I Do to Boost My HDL? was actually written first on Wednesday, November 21, 2012,  week before last.

He lists regular exercise and taking niacin and taking omega 3 supplements as ways to increase your HDL

He says that the effects of these are not additive and that adding 3 to 6 points total to your HDL level is about all you can expect from doing these things.

Meanwhile, I’ve done a set of things over time that have raised my HDL from the mid fifties to the mid nineties and my last HDL reading was 105. 

That 40 point increase is way more than 3 to 6!!

(Maybe my genetics for HDL are favorable; but the huge increase in HDL and my family background of heart attacks suggest that this effect was and is NOT genetic.)

It seems I’ve done some things outside of Dr Hibberd’s experience!

I’ve gradually found out what some of them are and why some of them work.

The best news is that the most effective methods lower HDL because they lower the risk of heart disease.  And, they all have other health benefits!

In fact, recent research found that just taking a drug that increased the HDL reading without doing those methods did little to lower the risk of heart disease. 

When high HDL readings reflect high heart protection, that’s quite a different story!

A.  I’m indebted to Dr Randall Stafford from the Stanford Prevention Center for the knowledge I list next.

The key factor to look at is the number of small particle LDL particles in the blood.  It’s been found that these particles are so tiny they stick into the molecular wall of your blood vessels and cause plaque build up and I suspect trigger inflammation which then speeds up plaque build up.

But here’s the two key insights he shared at a talk I was lucky enough to hear.

1.  The one he stated directly is this.  You don’t have to get the expensive direct test for these particles because research, I think at Harvard, found that you get an almost exact indication of how many of these you have by looking at the ratio of HDL to triglycerides and an inexpensive lipid panel has those along with total cholesterol and LDL.

So, High HDL & low triglycerides is very protective.  Low HDL and very high triglycerides combined will kill you eventually.

2.  The hugely important fact that he did not state directly has several parts.

If you stop doing the things that increase the number of small particle LDL particles directly and begin to do the things that lower the number of small particle LDL particles directly your HDL will go up and your triglycerides will fall.

And, if you do all those things, the resulting increase in your HDL AND your actual heart protection will go up by quite a bit.  This effect can be far larger than an added 6 point increase in HDL and I think often is.

Similarly, actions and foods that research finds cause the HDL levels of people who do them to go down and/or their triglycerides go up are indirectly but in my view conclusively proved to cause an increase in the number of small particle LDL particles in people who do them.

B.  Enough general stuff, what will protect you and boost the heck out of your HDL levels due to the actual protection you get?

1.  Taking niacin lowers the number of small particle LDL particles.  That’s why it not only increases HDL but lowers triglycerides.  And, the health effect is strong enough the death rate from all causes in people who take niacin go down. (I’ve found that even 300 mg once each after my two largest meals helps but rarely gives me a flush reaction.  Since I finally found a reference suggesting that 300 mg of inositol hexaniacinate actually does deliver about the equivalent of 250 mg of niacin in a very slow release style I also added two of those each day.)

2.  Regular exercise does increase HDL.  But it can and does increase HDL a lot and lowers the number of small particle LDL particles a lot!  But there are some things to know about how to maximize this effect.  Vigorous, even if brief, exercise works far better than light exercise to do this.  That means that even 10 minutes or so of interval cardio and progressive strength training doing some of each every week will produce this effect the best.  But there’s also a new discovery.  The more consecutive years you do this the bigger this effect gets! If after 1 year it boosts your HDL by 5 points after 10 to 15 years of regular exercise it may boost your HDL more like 25 points!

3.  Eating hydrogenated oils was directly tested to increase the number of small particle LDL particles.  That means that a food that has ANY amount of hydrogenated oil, even a tiny bit, is heart attack starter.  Always read labels and never eat this stuff voluntarily – ever!  (Not only is this stuff in most packaged snacks and desserts because it’s cheap and produces long shelf life, shortening, nondairy creamer, and most margarines are MADE OUT OF hydrogenated oils.)

And, it gets worse -- because when you eat hydrogenated oils it takes your body weeks to get rid of half of it!  Do you realize what that means?  If you eat even a little bit every day, after a few weeks, you have enough built up in your system to cause you serious harm.  I’ve long thought that the only safe amount hydrogenated oils to eat is zero.  Now we know that’s quite literally true!

Realize that most people still eat lots of this stuff daily and the fact that it looks like HDL can’t be boosted much becomes understandable.  It’s like trying to lower the water level in the middle of a flood.

But, turn off the flood and add the other things and you will see far more results!

4.  Tobacco smoke exposure also boosts the number of small particle LDL particles.  It’s been directly shown to cause plaque build up and a lowering of HDL and an increase in triglycerides.

If you want high protection and high HDL do everything sane and in your power to avoid breathing tobacco smoke -- ever.

5.  Are there other things that have health benefits and that increase HDL levels?

Indeed there are, and a key to having high protection and HDL levels is to do as many of them as you can.

a) Eating organic berries often increases HDL and I believe the bilberry extract supplement I also take daily does too.  These have other health benefits also.

b)  Eating raw or dry roasted tree nuts if you aren’t allergic on a daily basis does not cause fat gain unless you dramatically overeat them on purpose and does increase your HDL and has many other proven health benefits.

c)  Eating foods such as egg yolks, ideally from hens only pasture fed their natural diet, boosts choline which in turn boosts HDL and provides brain benefits besides.  Wheat germ, ideally from non GMO wheat is high in choline.  And the supplements lecithin, choline, and citicoline are high in choline and DMAE is turned into choline by your body. 

Taking 250 to 300 mg a day of pantothenic acid, vitamin B5 also increases your HDL and I think most people are deficient in it.  I was taking this and recently found from Dr Oz that it also strongly boosts HDL to take it.

d)  The supplement chromium polynicotinate only has some niacin but when taking the supplement, the combination seems to increase HDL and lower LDL more than just the niacin in it would account for; and taking adds a great deal to your blood sugar control.

6.  Is there anything that lowers HDL levels that it makes sense to avoid? 

Yes, eating oils high in omega 6 lowers LDL levels.  BUT eating these oils also lowers HDL and causes inflammation and we now know it speeds aging too.  Worse, I just read that these oils contain some hydrogenated oils due to how they are processed.

If you have been eating these oils, switch to extra virgin olive and only that instead.  It won’t boost your HDL by itself but your HDL may well go up when you switch because you will remove a cause that was lowering your HDL!  And doing this is heart protective by reducing chronic inflammation too!

7.  Eating foods made out of refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, or eating too much regular sugar – all of which most people do in large volume lowers the dickens out of your HDL levels.  Drinking soft drinks has the same effect!  Worse, people who eat and drink this stuff in large volumes have sky high triglycerides!

That means that eating and drinking these foods and nonfoods boosts the devil out of the number of small particle LDL particles in your system.  It’s a deadly combination!

Want high HDL and great heart protection?

Stop totally ingesting any of this stuff or eat it only rarely and not every week.

Small wonder increasing HDL looks undoable, they tested it on people eating and drinking this stuff in volume.

And, there’s a second benefit by stopping this stuff totally or almost so.  Besides exercise it is the one sustainable way to lose fat and keep it off.  It also adds heart protection by helping prevent or turn down type 2 diabetes and low blood sugar.

8.  Eating some raw onions and eating some minced raw garlic occasionally or taking the aged and deodorized garlic supplement and taking omega 3 oils or eating fish high in it -- each lowers triglycerides.  That means doing these things lowers the number of small particle LDL particles in your system.

What happens if you do each of these things or most of them pretty well?

You boost your HDL far more than 6 points the more of them you do and the longer you do them; and you get an even bigger increase in heart protection.   

Exercise is more protective than statins....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 12-6-2012

Medical News Today had this recently:

“Statins Used For Cholesterol Control Together With Physical Fitness Reduce Death 

Rate

http://mnt.to/a/49wX

But here is the key quote in that article:

"Surprisingly, the study revealed that even people with dyslipidaemia who do not take statins, but are physically fit, were about half as likely to expire from any cause during the median 10-year follow up, than those who were taking statins, but were not physically healthy."

This study leaves out that the very exercise that is most beneficial in heart protection, fat loss, and preventing high blood sugar -- such as interval cardio and progressive strength training, tends to seriously HARM people who are taking statins to lower their LDL and that only people who have a certain genetic pattern get much heart attack protection from statins.

Inadvertently I suspect, these researchers proved that exercise alone reduced death rates a lot in people with high LDL who took nothing to lower the LDL directly.

Since the exercise is more protective by actual test, that suggests to me that “evidence based medicine” shows that prescribing statins is second best advice or worse!

They also left out that, for people taking statins, I believe I saw there are studies that show ZERO reduction in death rates.  This is even more the case for the majority of people who do NOT have the genes that the people do -- who statins do help.

Then they leave out that there are 6 successful and safe methods to lower LDL without statins and -- in addition to regular exercise.

And one of those, taking niacin, does show a reduction in death rates!  Even better, taking just one 300 mg tablet once after your two largest meals each day minimizes the flush, is thought to be safe, and DOES help lower LDL.  And, like exercise, taking niacin also boosts HDL and lowers triglycerides.

The second is taking sterol supplements.  Natrol’s cholesterol balance that I take is quite inexpensive.  And as a natural food component sterols are safe to take!

The third is eating foods high in soluble fiber such as beans and lentils, apples and applesauce, oatmeal, and many vegetables.

The fourth is completely avoiding eating ANY foods containing hydrogenated oils even in small amounts.  This avoids heart disease by not just lowering LDL but avoiding the hydrogenated oils making the LDL you already have directly cause heart disease! 

The fifth which most smokers don’t know about is to completely avoid exposure to tobacco smoke.  This lowers LDL, prevents heart disease in other ways such as preventing the plaque build up in your blood vessels.  AND, it avoids having tobacco smoke trigger heart attacks you would otherwise have escaped -- which we now know both smoking and second hand smoke do!

The sixth is to take a turmeric or curcumin supplement daily. I found after I began doing this my LDL went down! And then after that, I found from Dr Dean Ornish that this was a known effect.  Doing so along with some black pepper each day helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease and cancer!  (I’d begun it to avoid Alzheimer’s disease.  So having my LDL, which was already low, go down too was a nice surprise!) 

Does this mean a doctor who prescribes statins to lower your LDL levels and nothing else and does NOT do the $150 genetic test first under-informed?

Unfortunately it does.

But although there are some preventive medicine doctors and some of the better informed cardiologists who know this information, at this writing, an unfortunately large percentage of most other doctors do NOT know this information.

Why have heart attack starter with your coffee?....

Today's Post:  Friday, 10-19-2012

As my regular readers know, partially hydrogenated oils and hydrogenated oils are extremely harmful if ingested.

But they are still legally in a huge list of foods.  Just read the labels and pass on anything that lists ANY partially hydrogenated oils or hydrogenated oils!

The problem is that they cause heart and blood vessel disease if ingested and likely help cause cancer and osteoarthritis too.

They cause the LDL in your blood to have far more of the small particle LDL that is one of the major causes of heart and blood vessel diseases.

These particles are literally so tiny they fit into the chinks in your blood vessel walls.  They tend to stick there and cause inflammation.  Then your body adds more to try to repair the damage.  Your plaque builds up then and begins to harden and close your blood vessels.

(You can see this in your lipid panel blood test because your protective HDL will go down and your harmful triglycerides will go up. And your HSCRP blood test of chronic inflammation will go up.)

Oops!

That tends to increase your risk for heart attacks, strokes, ED, and high blood pressure. The inflammation tends to cause osteoarthritis and helps cause cancers.

If you add eating excess salt, it also tends to cause gout.

But there is worse news yet!

When you eat partially hydrogenated oils and hydrogenated oils, in part because they are not natural foods your body has evolved to process, your body takes weeks to get rid of half of what you ate.

THAT means that if you eat partially hydrogenated oils and hydrogenated oils --even a little every day, you gradually build up a level that ensures these harms will befall you.

Case closed.  There is NO safe amount of partially hydrogenated oils and hydrogenated oils.  Eating less is still dangerous! 

The only exception is if you accidentally have some a few days a year, your body likely rarely has a high level.  But ingesting partially hydrogenated oils and hydrogenated oils several times a week is still extremely dangerous if you keep doing it too long.

It couldn’t be simpler. 

Partially hydrogenated oils and hydrogenated oils are heart attack starter!

OK. So why the title of this post?  “Why have heart attack starter with your coffee?”

Because with the exception of some added ingredients, nondairy creamers are mostly partially hydrogenated oils and hydrogenated oils.

And while coffee itself is mostly good for you -- between its increase in mental sharpness and its high level of antioxidants, if you add partially hydrogenated oils and hydrogenated oils by adding nondairy creamer, it’s no longer safe to drink any!

Meanwhile millions of people in the United States drink several cups of coffee a day with nondairy creamer.

Yikes!

What can you drink instead? 

Some coffee tastes good enough and its level of harshness on your throat is low enough you can drink it black.

You can have a bit of half and half in your coffee on occasion.  Though this is high in saturated fats, the amount is not large and it is MUCH safer than nondairy creamer.  It’s particularly likely to be OK if you eat right and eat very little saturated fats otherwise. (For convenience, you can get the small packages of half and half that many restaurants serve.  They don’t need refrigeration.  And what you don’t use right away can simply be tossed.)

It also works to use a bit of two percent lowfat milk.  That works for my family and it has far less saturated fat than half and half.  Most workplaces have a refrigerator where you can keep a quart of two percent lowfat milk.  You also get a bit of protein that way.

The other solution is to have tea or green tea after your first or first two cups of coffee.  Tea with a bit of cooler water to drop it to drinkable temperature is OK with no milk.  In fact, it has more health benefits that way!

So, if you use nondairy creamer, one of the best things you can do for your health is to stop using it and never buy it again!

How to boost your protective HDL levels....

Today's Post:  Monday, 8-6-2012

The kind of HDL that indicates heart protection tends to cause or be caused by low levels of small particle LDL. 

And, if the HDL is not oxidized and increased by things with other health benefits, it is most protective.

(I raised my HDL from the mid fifty range to the 89 to 96 range using the methods here.)

1.  One of the most powerful ways to increase HDL is to avoid the things that lower it or cause an increase of the harmful small particle LDL. 

(Harvard researchers found that the lower the level of small particle LDL, the lower the level of triglycerides and the higher the level of HDL.)

2.  So the second thing to do is to increase the things that lower small particle LDL directly.

3.  The third thing to do is to do things that increase HDL that are safe and have other health benefits.

1.  STOP and avoid things that lower your HDL as completely as you can.

a) As we posted about last week, it takes work today to avoid eating trans fats and hydrogenated oils.

But it’s very important to do so.  The big recent news is that if you eat trans fats regularly they build up to very harmful levels.  They increase the level of the harmful small particle LDL in your blood directly. And, the resulting level of HDL will go down.

b) Tobacco smoke both direct smoking and second hand smoke not only lower HDL, they make what is left over less protective.  This directly results in the build up of plaque on the insides of your blood vessels.

To the maximum extent you can arrange it, avoid breathing tobacco smoke.  Breathing it is a direct cause of heart disease and will show a drop in your HDL that understates the harm it does.

c)  Don’t eat high fructose corn syrup or foods containing it.  To do so, like trans fats, you have to avoid foods likely to contain it and always read labels.  Avoid eating real sugar more than a few times a week and a few times a month is better.  Eat close to zero foods containing refined grain.  And eat low moderate amounts of even 100 % whole grain foods.

And, drink zero soft drinks both regular and diet.

Each of those foods and drinks tend to be fattening and cause excessive blood sugar swings.  That increases heart disease and overall disease risk for other reasons.

AND, they also lower your HDL and boost the dickens out of your triglyceride levels.  Without eating that stuff almost always, your triglycerides will be below 100. By ingesting a lot your triglycerides will be over 200 – maybe over 300 in bad cases.

Your HDL will also go down and your small particle LDL will go up. Your HDL will be much higher if you rarely eat this stuff!

Since many of the foods that have trans fats also contain refined grains and excessive sugars of some kind.  Avoiding those foods for either reason will increase your HDL and protect your heart.

(This also has some interesting effects.  At a fast food place, the bun may be worse for your heart than the hamburger!)

2. Besides upgrading your diet in these ways, there is a major way to boost your HDL by directly decreasing the level of small particle LDL in your blood.

Regular vigorous exercise most days of every week does exactly that researchers have found.

Strength training and interval cardio both do this.  As long as you do one of these most days of every week and do some of each every week, the minutes of the most intense exercise can be just a few minutes and get the effect.

To some degree more is better.  But is does NOT have to be hours and hours.  20 or 30 minutes a day is better than 10 if you can fit it in. But it does NOT have to take more than 30 minutes or so.

Moderate exercise is different.  If you can get a few hours a day of walking or some other much less intense exercise too, it will help.  It will help with fat loss and over all health protection.  (It’s because hardly anyone has time for that today that I’m so interested in at-your-desk exercisers.)

I do the regular vigorous exercise for strength training and/or interval cardio from 6 to 45 minutes once every day each week.  25 to 30 minutes in the morning is most typical.

This has been proved to increase HDL and heart protection.

3.  There are a number of foods and supplements that boost HDL and have other beneficial health effects.

a) The most helpful is the B vitamin niacin.  I take 300 mg twice a day once after breakfast and once after lunch.

This mostly avoids the flushing effect which is like a mild instant sunburn in sensation that goes away after an hour or two.  Larger doses on an empty stomach are more problematic.

People who take extra niacin have been found to die less often of any cause than people who do not. 

The reason for this is that taking niacin measures as if it lowers small particle LDL directly.  That means it prevents heart disease and helps prevent other diseases caused by impaired circulation.  Taking niacin measures as increasing HDL AND lowering triglycerides.  The research at Harvard found this means that taking niacin almost certainly lowers the amount of small particle LDL directly. 

So, you might predict niacin would lower overall LDL a bit too to reflect that.  Taking niacin DOES lower LDL too.  Taking niacin is most protective because it apparently lowers the most harmful kind of LDL not just all of it.

b)  I also take 300 mg a day of inositol hexaniacinate twice a day before breakfast and after dinner.   This molecule has 6 niacin parts and one inositol core.  Apparently as you digest it the niacin is removed slowly over time.  I finally found a reference which suggests that this 600 mg total gives me the effect of 500 mg of niacin a day but so slowly as to produce no flush.  And in fact it is often labeled as No Flush Niacin. 

c)  I also take 200 mcg a day of chromium polynicotinate.  That only has 2 mg of niacin.  But added to my other 1100 mg a day it may help.  The chromium also prevents blood sugar surges if I eat something sugar or grainy which is heart protective.  But Dr Julian Whitaker also reports that the people taking chromium that he treats lower their LDL and increase their HDL cholesterol.  So taking this supplement looks to boost my HDL more than just the 2 mg of niacin would suggest.  It definitely protects my heart by its help in normalizing my blood sugar levels.

d)  People who eat berries tend to have their HDL go up.  In addition, the micronutrients in berries are very high in antioxidants and other health benefits.  This means that eating berries both increases your HDL and keeps it protective by stopping it from being oxidized too!

Eating berry supplements also helps protein and vitamin C keep your blood vessel walls strong.  So doing so helps prevent heart disease an extra way and protects you from strokes too.

I take bilberry supplements each day from Nature’s Way for their vision and blood vessel protection.  They added elderberries so I now take 3 a day to ensure I get enough of the bilberry each day.  But that may well have boosted my HDL 5 points or more too!

I also found that people who began eating organic blueberries got such a brain boost it was like they were 12 years younger on the tests.  So I now eat two 10 ounce packages of wild organic frozen blueberries each week that I buy at Whole Foods.

I began that for the brain benefits.  But that too may have boosted my HDL another 5 points or more.

e)  Some people are severely allergic to tree nuts. But people who can eat nuts and eat a few daily get an increase in HDL.  The people who eat raw nuts or dry roasted nuts get the health OK monosaturated oils and some other health beneficial oils.  (The oiled and salted kind have excess salt and the oils are usually bad for you omega 6 oils.  So avoid those!)

But there’s more.  People who can eat nuts safely and do so several days a week get so many health benefits besides higher HDL, they tend to live several healthy years longer than people who don’t.

I eat walnut halves and pecan halves for lunch every weekday and some Saturdays.

This too helps boost my HDL.

f)  Drink one or a bit more of alcoholic drinks most days each week.  And, most of those times drink red wine.

(Some people drink more than two a day or more than three a day if they drink at all.  Those people should not use this one.)

But for people who can mostly stick with one glass of red wine with dinner, doing so does boost your HDL. And, red wine also has resveratrol and saponins and other heart protecting ingredients besides the alcohol. 

More than 1 drink a day boosts your HDL a bit more but begins to have life threatening increases in your accident risk and to produce other problems.  In men at least, more than one a day tends to add fat to your belly too.  Part of my fat loss was due to my cutting my intake of red wine from 12 a week to more like 7 or 8 a week.

g) Taking choline and eating foods high in it also boosts HDL cholesterol.  I take lecithin capsules and B Complex tablets that have some extra choline – a total of about 260 mg a day.  And I eat some wheat germ every other day and two whole eggs including yolks every other day.  (I recently was able to start to get eggs at Whole Foods that were pasture raised instead of grain fed.  So I now get less of the harmful omega 6 from the egg yolks than I once did.)

The other benefit of this is that extra choline has a brain boosting effect because it gives your body the building block to make the neurotransmitter, acetyl choline.

These things have certainly worked for me.   When I just did some cardio, my HDL tended to be in the mid fifties.  When I added all these other actions, it has measured between 89 and 96.

News in heart disease prevention....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 6-12-2012

There are several parts of heart disease. 

So the good news is that there is a lot that can be done to prevent it because there are many ways to prevent each of the parts.

The bad news is that you have to do most of these things to get decent heart disease prevention.

There are apparently four parts of heart disease:

1.  Too much damage to the endothelium or inner surface of your blood vessel walls, particularly in the arteries leading to your heart.  But that damage in blood vessels to and inside your brain and your kidneys also can cause you serious harm or kill you.

The key is too much damage.  If you do the things that prevent it, the second part no longer happens and most heart disease no longer happens.

2.  The next key part is too much repair.  Your body sends in extra lipids and proteins and, according to new data, stem cells, to do repairs and the result is like putting band-aids on top of band-aids if too much is done. Plaque builds up when that it is done. That results in narrower blood vessels with less room for blood or blood clots to pass through. That results in less circulation to the parts of you that blood vessel serves.  Worse, if there is a blood clot, it may stopper up the blood vessel and no blood flows at all.  Then you have a heart attack or obstructive stroke.  That often kills or causes severe damage.

3.  This plaque build up becomes much worse if the plaque is also calcified.  This prevents your body from gradually removing some of the plaque and makes your blood vessel less flexible.  That causes high blood pressure which can damage you and it makes it more likely clots passing through will stick.  Clots that would have been pushed through a more flexible blood vessel even if narrowed, will now stick.  Bad news indeed!

4.  If new plaque is added so quickly that it breaks off before it’s fully stuck on or when the patch won’t stick since so much is already in place or some of the repair breaks off an old repair, you can cause a blockage in the narrowed blood vessels.  Or if your blood develops too much clotting factors or no longer has enough anti-clotting factors, you can get a traveling blood clot too big to pass through the narrowed blood vessels. 

1.  Most of the causes of too much damage to your blood vessel walls are known.  Those few people who know them and see to it that they stop happening to them get good to excellent protection from heart disease.

a) Avoid excessive levels of the dangerous small particle LDL.

People who get regular and vigorous exercise have lower LDL cholesterol and usually have higher HDL and very often have lower triglycerides.  These are markers that they have less small particle LDL.  Those particles are so small they literally stick into chinks in the blood vessel walls.  That both causes damage and tends to make repairs build up and stick on more than is desirable.

There is some evidence that taking niacin also reduces the amount of this dangerous small particle LDL.  So people who take niacin not only have lower LDL & triglycerides and higher HDL, it’s because of this underlying effect.

But perhaps over half of heart attack prevention is to STOP doing or NOT doing things that cause more of this dangerous small particle LDL.

Most Americans are at very high risk because they don’t know to stop or don’t do it if they know.

Ingesting any hydrogenated oils or the related trans fats boosts this dangerous small particle LDL.

Drinking soft drinks both regular and diet boosts this dangerous small particle LDL.

Eating high fructose corn syrup or refined grain foods or excessive amounts of sugar also boosts this boosts this dangerous small particle LDL.

This can be seen by the low HDL levels and very high triglyceride levels of people who eat and drink this stuff.  Work at Harvard found that this combination is a reliable indicator of the level of this boosts this dangerous small particle LDL.

(Note that boosting HDL in isolation without reducing the amount of boosts this dangerous small particle LDL is like putting a heater next to a thermostat and thinking the whole room is warmer because the indicator of temperature goes up.  If the HDL goes up because there is less of this dangerous small particle LDL, it’s protective.  If it goes up with no change in the dangerous small particle LDL, it may do very little as recent drug efforts have found.)

Smoking tobacco and being exposed to second hand smoke sharply increase the amount of this dangerous small particle LDL it also causes the irritation and inflammation that cause and speed up excess damage and repair.  Ways of looking at plaque build up in the blood vessels reliably show smokers and those exposed to second hand smoke have more plaque build up by far than people not exposed to second hand smoke.

Bottom line, if you eat right and exercise and avoid tobacco smoke, you have good heart attack protection.  If you also take niacin and take sterol supplements if your overall LDL is much over 100, you will have excellent heart attack protection. 

(The DASH II diet with some extra virgin olive oil and wild caught fish or the Mediterranean diet with a bit less pasta and more vegetables are two similar and doable ways to eat right.)

b)  Chronic inflammation tends to damage your  blood vessel walls AND makes over repair much more likely.

Omega 3 supplements and eating wild caught fish containing omega 3 oils turns down chronic inflammation.

Each of these cause excessive amounts of omega 6 oils which causes or boosts chronic inflammation.: 

Eating more than a moderate amount of 100% whole grains or eating a lot of refined grain foods and consuming a lot of cheap vegetable oils high in omega 6 such as corn and soy.

(Using extra virgin olive oil instead and eating mostly beans and lentils and vegetables and health OK protein foods instead helps prevent this.)

Eating more than a tiny amount of fats from animals fed mostly on grain.  Eating lots of fatty meat from animals fed grain may well cause far more heart disease from this omega 6 boost than it does from excess saturated fat!  (The excess saturated fat tends to boost total LDL cholesterol; but some saturated fat from small amounts of meat from animals NOT fed grain and fed grass and their normal diet may be relatively harmless.)

The DASH II diet does this by stressing nonfat and lowfat dairy and skinless poultry and a smaller amount of very lean and fat trimmed meat.  The Mediterranean diet does this by having far less dairy and more wild caught fish and vegetables.

c)  Blood vessel damage also comes from excess sugar stuck onto even large particle LDL which is like treating your blood vessel walls with moving particles of glass!  Yikes!

The better news is that the 3 things we just covered largely prevent this from happening.

Regular and vigorous exercise and NOT eating refined grains and sugar foods or drinking soft drinks tend to prevent the spikes in blood sugar and insulin and your body beginning to stop using insulin that cause this high blood sugar effect.

Eating the health OK proteins and oils and vegetables and low glycemic fruits tend to give you the kind of steady blood sugar and low insulin that prevents this high blood sugar damage to your blood vessels.

You can also take chromium polynicotinate and alpha lipoic acid to prevent high blood sugar. 

If it gets high or is high because you are just upgrading to a healthy lifestyle, smaller and divided doses of the drug Metformin with meals can also help.

d)  Blood vessel damage also comes from oxidized lipids.  But that’s already mostly covered.  If you eat a lot of vegetables almost every day and some high nutrition, low glycemic fruit such as berries you have a high intake of antioxidants.  That’s also true for the vitamin E complex if you eat extra virgin olive oil an avocado and nuts if you aren’t allergic.

Taking some vitamin A and lots of vitamin C and some natural vitamin E and a small amount of selenium, 200 mcg a day also has antioxidant effects.

e)  Both Linus Pauling and Dr Matthias Rath have said that failure to have a high intake of vitamin C also causes blood vessel damage.  Animals that make their own vitamin C don’t get excessive blood vessel damage or repairs and avoid heart disease.  Taking at least 500 mg a day of vitamin C, and 2,000 mg a day in divided doses may work better may well prevent much of the excess damage and repair that causes heart disease. 

There is also some evidence that once you take that much vitamin C, also taking 1,000 mg of lysine and 500 mg of proline will cut your blood vessel damage even more by building up the strength and resilience of your blood vessel walls.

2.  Too much repair.

Many of the actions that prevent excess damage also directly prevent excess repair.  This is particularly true of avoiding things that boost chronic inflammation because when your inflammation level is high it signals your repair process to stay on high also.

That means that everything to avoid excess omega 6 and add healthy forms of omega 3 does double duty to prevent heart disease.

Another bit of recent news is that the “omentum” that lines your abdomen is the source of the stem cells used in blood vessel repairs.  Besides a bad life style causing obesity, this may also mean that having too much fat in your gut and too much omentum also tends to cause too much repair.  That may be another reason to add some fat loss to healthy lifestyle upgrades.  It likely tends to stop overdriving your blood vessel repairs.

Lastly, using ginger and turmeric as spices often not only improves your immune system and lowers LDL cholesterol a bit they both turn down excessive inflammation.  So does taking curcumin from turmeric as a supplement.

3.  Too much clotting.

Having a good omega 6 to omega 3 ratio by stopping excess omega 6 and taking omega 3 supplements and eating wild caught fish high in omega 3 also cuts down on excess clotting. 

So does eating crushed fresh garlic or taking deodorized garlic as a supplement. 

And so does the vitamin E complex in extra virgin olive oil and avocados and nuts and taking a natural vitamin E supplement.  (The synthetic vitamin E is an inaccurate copy and harmful to take much of.)

So does taking the supplement ginkgo biloba.

(So does taking aspirin but with dangerous side effects.  If you do the other things, aspirin and other blood thinners are usually not needed unless your clotting factors start out enormously high.)

4.  Calcifying the plaque.

New research has found that eating foods high in calcium and taking 2,000 or more iu of vitamin D3 and taking magnesium and never drinking soft drinks and getting weight bearing exercise keeps your bones strong.

Taking calcium as a supplement is ineffective as a bone protector and not needed if you do the other things just listed.

But new research has found worse effects from taking calcium as a supplement.  It tends to slam into your blood stream in a way that causes it to add to the calcification of your plaque in your blood vessels and make a heart attack more likely.

Then what if you could take something that moved calcium already in your body from your plaque in your blood vessels and use it to strengthen your bones instead?  What if it took new calcium from foods you ate and made sure it strengthened your bones and never went into the plaque in your blood vessels?

That agent exists.  It does those things.  And it’s available as a supplement.  It’s vitamin K2.  Most people don’t get enough. 

So if you want to protect your heart and have strong bones, take vitamin K2 every day.

And do NOT take calcium supplements, eat foods high in calcium and do the other things to protect and strengthen your bones instead!

So there you have all of the ways to prevent heart disease and how much of the recent news about heart disease fits into it—except one.

What about statin drugs? 

Millions of older people today take them.  But if you do the things listed here you’ll have better heart disease and heart attack prevention than they provide. 

For those in the majority of people, they do little for 100 people must take them to prevent one heart attack.

There is a different group of people with different genes who do benefit more.  So if your doctor has you take the genetic test that shows you are in that group and you have had a recent heart attack or have LDL cholesterol WAY over 160, statins may help.

But recent news came out verifying what I had long suspected about my parents.  They both were taking statins but began to complain of what they thought of as age cause losses in energy and stamina.  That does exist.   But I suspected the statins they took were causing most of it.

The news is that taking statins DOES cause this effect.  New research verified it.

Other studies show that taking statins often causes the same vigorous exercise you need for good heart protection to damage your muscles instead.

So, only take statins if you are in the group that have had the $150 genetic test and found you are in the group that benefits more and you have had a recent heart attack or have LDL cholesterol WAY over 160.

STOP eating things that cause heart disease, avoid tobacco smoke, eat the foods that prevent heart disease, build up gradually to regular vigorous exercise for at least a few minutes on most days, and take the key supplements and you CAN prevent or turn down heart disease.

Few people will need to add statins to that and most should not.

Exercise to protect your heart more safely and effectively....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 6-5-2012

Exercise to protect your heart is one of the most effective ways to do so. 

A.  But it can be risky and create the reverse effect under some circumstances.

1.  Recently a study was done which found that in one set of 6 studies of exercise and heart risk measures:  blood pressure, insulin levels, HDL cholesterol, and triglyceride, “about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures….&…” About 7 percent got worse on at least two measures”

2.  In some people, shoveling snow and long runs have caused fatal heart attacks.  And, studies of long distance runners have found several kinds of indicators of heart damage.

So how do you make sense of this and get the heart protection exercise can offer without the risks or make the risks much less likely?

1.  Clearly the exercisers in the first set of studies had recently added exercise in order to get this kind of before and after comparison.

There are 4 explanations that occur to me.

First, note that changes for the worst only happened in 10 % of the people.  So despite the fact it sounds bad, most people who begin to exercise escape it.

Second, some people new to exercise overdo how much they exercise or how fast they ramp up the effort or duration of the exercise. 

If you overtax your heart longer than it has the capacity for, it can cause damage or even a heart attack.  (This is clearly what happens to snow shovelers and many long distance racers.  We’ll come back to that point later.  Avoiding this kind of overstress is a BIG key to exercising safely and in a way that strengthens your heart.)

Third, some people may knock loose some plaque or show initial recovery stress more than others.  The good news for this is that adding some other ways to improve these measures and continuing to exercise long enough will reverse the problem.

Four, some people who exercise then eat more of fattening and harmful treat foods than the protection they get from the exercise can cover.  (For example if you walk two miles and then eat a large piece of pie as a reward, between the sugar and the refined grain in the pie and pie crust and the over 300 to 500 calories in the pie, you will then get fatter.  And with the sugar and the refined grain and often the hydrogenated oils in the crust, it will tend to boost your insulin and triglycerides and lower your HDL more than the exercise did the reverse.)

2.  If you overtax your heart longer than it has the capacity for, it can cause damage or even a heart attack.  (This is clearly what happens to snow shovelers and many long distance racers.)

Your heart can crank up intense effort for short periods of time.  And if you then let it rest, it can even do it again safely.

And as long as you do it lightly enough and rest soon enough, unless you were right on the verge of a heart attack when you began, your heart will make itself stronger both in how much it can ramp up and how long it can stay ramped up.

People who have heart problems while shoveling snow often start with untrained hearts and then cut themselves no rest breaks at all. 

The good news is that you can feel the effect, your heart rate speeds up noticeably and you get out of breath.  So notice if that happens after say 5 shovel-fulls.  Then stop and rest until your heart rate and breathing get back to normal.  Then do 3 shovel fulls and rest and repeat that.  If you are out of shape, you may find you have stop before the snow is gone.  Or you may need long enough rest breaks that you run out of time before the snow is gone.  But you will make some progress on removing the snow and avoid triggering a heart attack!

The better news is that if you do comparable interval cardio as an exercise that you do several times a week for a couple of years, you will then be able to do 5 shovel fulls and only rest for 5 seconds and still do it safely.  But shoveling snow is enough work, the short and regular rest breaks are essential.

Long distance running races are NOT good health protecting exercise because as many people do them, there are none of these kind of rest breaks for your heart.

Conversely, one study found that runners who ran shorter runs totaling up to 20 miles a week did get health protection and a lower overall chance of death.  And, since those were exercise runs and not races, people doing them could alternate a moderate or high moderate pace with faster sections several times during each run.

The good news is that by doing very vigorous exercise you build up to and alternate that with rest or a much easier effort, you can get quite fit with 3 or 4 sessions of this kind of interval cardio a week with sessions of only 10 minutes each. 

If you have time, doing a lot of walking too helps; and it’s moderate enough to not tax your heart unless you are massively overfat.

There are other kinds of interval cardio.  But Dr Al Sears’s PACE program and his articles on it is an excellent source for the information here.

It also helps that I’ve also experienced these effects personally while exercising and doing strenuous yardwork.

B.  You can stop doing things that harm your heart or make it less safe to exercise and do or begin to do things that protect your heart and make it safer to exercise.

Other studies show that continuing to get vigorous exercise every week with this approach not only moves all your heart risk indicators to more positive levels, it does so more every year you continue to do it.  Properly done -- and with the right support -- regular vigorous exercise will improve ALL of your heart indicators and do it safely.

a) One half of this is to stop doing things that harm your heart as soon as you even think of exercising and stay stopped as long as you do vigorous exercise.

1 & 2:  The two worst things to stop are exposure to tobacco smoke and ingesting any hydrogenated oils. 

Exposure to tobacco smoke, even from second hand smoke, actively works to create small particle LDL and deposits it into your blood vessel walls.  Avoiding tobacco smoke totally or virtually always even for second hand smoke makes it MUCH safer to exercise.  (And, if you quit, gradually getting into exercise once you stop will double your chances of quitting and begin to repair some of the damage.)

Eating hydrogenated oils and trans fats actively works to create small particle LDL and deposits it into your blood vessel walls.  Find out how to ingest NONE of this stuff and do it and exercising will become far safer.  Avoid most commercial baked goods since most of it still uses shortening which is all hydrogenated oil.  And, always read labels when the food has one.  If it lists ANY trans fat reading but zero OR any hydrogenated oils don’t buy it or eat it. (Zero means less than half a gram of trans fats per serving. So if it contains any hydrogenated oils, it can have significant amount of trans fats & usually does even if it SAYS zero.)

3.  Ingesting high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners or refined grains is double nasty. 

(So is eating real sugar.  So minimize how much you eat.  Eat 7 tablespoons a month or less instead of 7 tablespoons a day!)

Ingesting these things tends to cause high blood sugar which adds a harmful version of LDL to your blood cells which causes or worsens heart disease. 

Even worse, ingesting these things boosts your triglycerides a lot and lowers HDL.  That means that, just like tobacco smoke and hydrogenated oils, ingesting these things often works to create small particle LDL and deposits it into your blood vessel walls.

If you stop ingesting these things, that too will make exercising to protect your heart safer and work better.

Stopping these blood sugar boosters and stopping trans fats and hydrogenated oils also helps a lot in losing fat and keeping it off.  That helps keep your blood pressure down and cuts your heart some slack when you aren’t exercising.

b) You can also eat foods and nutrients that make exercising safer and more heart protective.

1.    Eating or taking antioxidant nutrients and enough health OK protein and oils or fats makes your ability to exercise safely greater.

Studies have found that people taking vitamin C and E and selenium and who eat a lot of vegetables and some fruit tend to be able to exercise more without it depressing their immune system and slowing their recovery time from exercise.  Eating foods high in these things does even more to protect your health because of the very large number of added nutrients plus the vitamins and minerals they have.

2.  Whole eggs, wild caught fish, beans and lentils and black-eyed peas, and for those not allergic nuts, and nonfat and low fat dairy gives your body the protein it needs to recover from exercise.

3.  And, it’s easier to stay on an eating plan that has some fats and oils.   And omega 3 and monosaturated oils are actually good for you.  Extra virgin olive oil, wild caught fish, omega 3 supplements, and if you aren’t allergic nuts, and avocados all fit here. (Unfortunately, fats from grain fed animals and cheap vegetable oils such as corn and soy are too high in omega 6 oils which cause inflammation.  That inflammation causes heart disease. So here again making only  the health supporting choices makes exercising for heart protection safer.)

4.  Real niacin even in 300 mg amounts taken after meals is unusually heart protective because it boosts HDL and lowers LDL and triglycerides.  It also has been shown to lower the overall death rate of people who take it.

And, if your total LDL is over 100, taking sterol supplements lowers LDL significantly but with virtually no side effects.

Doing those two things in addition to the others listed here makes exercise for heart health dramatically safer and so much more effective it’s as if the exercise has a supporting wind at your back.

Bottom line, you CAN exercise more safely and get better heart protection if you know how do it.