Solutions to drugs that keep you fat 8—Migraine drugs….

Today's Post:  Friday, 5-11-2012

Friday, 3-9-2012, our post “Some drugs can keep you fat” listed several kinds of general strategies to drugs that tend to fatten you or keep you fat.  For most of them, there is a better drug or a way to improve your condition that avoids using that drug.

Friday, 3-16, we covered anti-depressants since some of those can keep you fat.  Some don’t including Zyban aka Wellbutrin that helps some people quit smoking.

Friday, 3-23, we covered blood pressure lowering drugs.

Friday, 3-30, we covered drugs for type 2 diabetes.

Friday, 4-6, we covered statin drugs.  (There are far better ways to protect your heart.  And statins cause the exercise that is essential for beneficial and permanent fat loss harm you instead.!)

Friday, 4-13, we covered Corticosteroids.  (Some problems those help are hard to treat without them but your doctor may be able to help you use them in a way that minimizes the fat gain.  The better news is that for asthma, using corticosteroids can almost always be temporary.)

Friday, 4-20, we covered Birth Control pills. 

Today we cover migraine drugs.

Some of them will fatten you a lot.  There’s three kinds of good news  though.

1.  Some migraine drugs don’t fatten you. One or more of those might work for you and solve the problem caused by the kinds that do.

2.  The exercise and physical activity that help cause fat loss and helps you be healthy and keep off the fat turn off or turn down migraines for many people!

3.  There are also many other nondrug ways to turn off migraines that work for some people.

Combining these strategies has a good shot at helping you with both fat loss and being migraine free or far less often and severely bothered by migraines.

Best of all, treating migraines with the combination largely turns off the extra heart risk that people who have migraines often have.

1.  Take less fattening migraine drugs. 

A Newsmax article on fattening drugs noted that Depakote and Depakene, antiseizure drugs, are sometimes used to treat migraines but have very strong appetite boosting effects in many people.  They quote Louis Aronne, M.D., medical director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Program in New York as noting that Imitrex or Topamax are less likely to cause you to gain weight or fat. 

Switching migraine drugs can really help. Dr. Aronne noted one of his patients lost 50 pounds by switching to less fattening migraine drugs.

2.  The exercise and physical activity that help cause fat loss and help you be healthy and keep off the fat turn off or turn down migraines for many people!

I’ve read that the majority of people who have migraines who begin to exercise have fewer migraines while some have none and others who still have them have milder ones.  That means you can take the drugs less often, not at all, or in smaller doses.

Doing vigorous exercise every week tends to strongly improve your circulation.  In fact, every year you do it, the better it works!  Interval cardio and strength training really help.

Your blood vessels become more responsive and flexible and have less plaque clogging them up. 

Such exercise tends to prevent or turn down insulin resistance and high blood sugar levels which helps prevents damage to the inside of your blood vessels.

And at any given weight, you will be less fat and have more lean weight and muscle mass.

Even better, when you stop eating and drinking the most fattening stuff almost all the time and eat more health supporting foods, that also helps improve your circulation and blood vessel health. Eating right tends to prevent or turn down insulin resistance and high blood sugar levels which helps prevents damage to the inside of your blood vessels as just one example.

And, there’s a reason this helps turn down or turn off migraines and the extra heart risk people who get migraines have.

Migraines in part are a malfunction of your blood vessels which dilate or not in ways that produce migraines but are not entirely normal.  Making your blood vessels healthier and function better with exercise and eating right begins to normalize them and often does so enough to turn off migraines.

That means that the work you do to cause fat loss and to keep it off is also a migraine preventive and treatment to some degree.

So having migraines is an extra incentive to do the things that will make and keep you less fat.

3.  There are other things besides drugs that eliminate or turn down migraines.  Try them because they have solved the problem for other people!

Some supplements work.

Magnesium is often deficient in people who get migraines and it is critical to having your blood vessels be normal and flexible.  Today most people tend not to get enough in food too.  (Eating nuts if you aren’t allergic and eating greens and some other nonstarchy vegetables tends to work well for people losing fat and keeping it off.  And these foods are high in magnesium.)

a) Taking 200 to 600 mg a day of magnesium works well for many people.  A double-blind study of  people who often got migraines and who took 600mg magnesium a day experienced a 41.6% fewer migraines!  Taking that much magnesium also helps lower blood pressure a bit in people for whom it’s high and has many other health benefits.

(Important note:  Don’t take lots of Milk of Magnesia AND take that much magnesium too.  The overdose of magnesium that huge an intake causes can be harmful.)

b) B complex vitamins help.  In addition to eating foods high in them such as egg yolks, take a good multi vitamin and a good B complex supplement.  (I think Solgar’s B Complex plus C, stress formula is the best and take that myself.)  In fact one source said doing so and including some extra folic acid with the other B vitamins tended to reduce the frequency and severity of migraines. (Extra folic acid is taking 400 to 800 mcg a day in addition to the 400 mcg in most multi vitamins.)

In addition, taking much larger amounts of vitamin B2, riboflavin, has helped some people with migraines. 

One study found that taking 400mg of vitamin B2 a day cut the number of migraines by more than 50 %.

In fact, one source said taking this much riboflavin is as effective for reducing migraine headache frequency as the beta-blockers, bisoprolol (Zebeta) and metoprolol (Lopressor). (Those drugs have side effects well worth avoiding including making your exercise harder to do well and much less effective at making you more fit and able. That’s a fattening effect which makes taking the riboflavin look a lot better by comparison.)

On the negative side. taking vitamin B2 by itself didn’t test as reducing the severity or duration of the remaining migraines.  And, the frequency reduction often took up to 3 months to fully kick in.  (Note too that taking riboflavin tends to turn your urine crayon yellow for a brief time after you take it.)

c) One source said that taking CoQ10 cut the frequency of headaches by about 30% and the number of days with headache-related nausea by about 45% in adults. Note that taking it in the ubiquinol form gives you higher blood levels of it and that it stays in your bloodstream longer.  That may well mean that taking 100 or 50 mg of ubiquinol at just before breakfast and another 100 or 50 mg of ubiquinol just before lunch would do an even better job!  Doing so also strengthens your heart, gives you more energy and tends to lower your blood pressure significantly if it’s high.   One study found doing this dropped high blood pressure by an average of 16 over 10.  That’s a big drop.  Many drugs for high blood pressure with all their side effects don’t do that well.

Doctors who have used both CoQ10 and ubiquinol find their patients get far better results taking ubiquinol.   And the fact that taking it helps lower high blood pressure suggests that it normalizes blood vessels which would tend to prevent migraines.

d) Other supplements that can help.:

Butterbur herbal supplements also have had good effects at 150 mg once or twice a day in cutting back migraine frequency up to 48%.  The fact that taking butterbur helps reduce smooth muscle spasm sounds like a reason why it works.

Feverfew has helped some people; but when I tried it I got a headache from taking it!  So I cannot give it a good review here even though it may work for others.

Taking 100 to 600 mg a day of alpha lipoic acid may also help somewhat.  The good news is that doing so has many other health benefits including being a non drug way to lower high blood sugar and increasing the effect of the other antioxidants you eat or take.

e) One of the more effective ways to stop migraines for some people is to discover and stop eating the foods that trigger them in you.

For example, one lactose intolerant boy was given milk at his school and promptly developed bad migraines which vanished when this was found out and he stopped drinking milk at school.

Phenylethylamine, tyramine, aspartame, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, alcohol, and caffeine have caused migraines for other people. 

The good news is that avoiding some of those things helps prevent fat gain or improves your health.

So just do that right away!

The artificial sweetener aspartame, sold as NutraSweet, found often in diet soft drinks acts as an appetite booster for sugary foods.  So simply not ingesting things that contain aspartame, is a double win.  You’ll find fat loss easier and may get fewer migraines!

Monosodium glutamate, MSG, tends to boost blood pressure due to its extra sodium and is also a proven fattener.  So simply not ingesting things that contain MSG is a double win.  You’ll find fat loss easier and likely will get fewer migraines! 

It’s tricky to avoid since they hide it behind many names such as autolyzed yeast.  Also, try to avoid using foods or spices that contain the catchall word, “spices” in the ingredients list.  This is often done to hide MSG being an ingredient.  (Annie’s yellow mustard is the only one I could find without the dreaded “spices” ingredient; so I recommend that one!)

Avoiding most packaged snacks helps avoid being fat due to the refined grains and junk oils that tend to be in them.  And it also helps avoid MSG and other MSG related flavor boosters often added to make the food more addicting.

Nitrates and nitrites in processed meats have been recently found to cause some significant increase in heart disease risk.  So things like NOT eating hamburgers at fast food places or eating sausage often or only eating nitrate and nitrite free bacon can help you avoid them.

Phenylethylamine is in chocolate and tyramine is in some aged cheeses and in some wines I think.  Given what they are in hopefully they don’t trigger migraines for you or if they do the effect is mild. 

This is also the case for alcohol and caffeine which can be triggers for some people.  Drinking alcohol in moderation instead of in excess also helps with fat loss.  So that’s a plus. 

And drinking tea can help some people who find the higher caffeine content of coffee to be a problem.

One source said this, “The identification of food triggers, with the help of food diaries, is an inexpensive way to reduce migraine headaches.”

So if you get migraines, delete aspartame and MSG from what you eat and drink. Cut way back on processed meats.  And use a food dairy to see if chocolate or the kind of wine you drink or cheeses you eat are triggers.

Summary:  A few migraine drugs can make you a lot fatter.  But you can possibly eliminate migraines and can for sure make them a lot less frequent and milder without ever taking those drugs.

Even better, most of the steps that will do that for you HELP you with fat loss and improve your health!

Your migraines may be preventable….

Today's Post: Tuesday, 6-29-2009

If you get 12 migraines a month now – and 3 of them are so bad you can’t work or enjoy your life, wouldn’t it be great if you could get one or two weak ones – or none at all – most months.

Some recent information I’ve gotten suggests you may well be able to do exactly that!

And no drugs are needed either!

1. Last Thursday, Health Day online news listed many things that trigger migraines.

So, since migraines likely won’t occur at all if they are never triggered or turned on, if you consistently manage to avoid many of the things on that list, you’ll have a lot less migraines. Even better, many of those things that seem to trigger YOUR migraines are avoidable. Better yet, you even get extra health benefits from avoiding some of them!

Do the best you can with that & then turn off most of the rest of your migraines with the next methods we include today.:

2. Today, Al Sears MD’s “Doctor’s House Calls” email listed 3 supplements that EACH been found to cut the amount of migraines people get in half.

3. Separate research found that people who get regular exercise get half as many migraines. So, if by avoiding some things and taking one or more of these supplements cuts down on your migraines enough to do regular exercise, you may get very few.

4. Lastly, separate research has found that people who get migraines are at somewhat higher risk of heart disease.

The good news in that is that both migraines and heart disease apparently have some common causes and that suggests that doing things that keep the inside of your blood vessels, or endothelium, healthy, will prevent BOTH. In fact, many of the things in the previous 3 sections likely work because they have precisely this kind of protection for your blood vessels.

So that means that also doing what you can to protect your heart in other ways will tend to prevent migraines as well as heart attacks!

That gives you four separate and powerful ways to prevent migraines.

Here’s the info.

1. Here are some ways to avoid the triggers of migraines.

a) I’ve found out separately from the Health Day article that being around cigarette smoke can trigger migraines. It can be hard to quit and may be hard to avoid cigarette smoke for some people. But doing it pays off big time! Smoking also both causes heart disease AND triggers heart attacks. It also causes close to one third of ALL cancers.

So, if you smoke, quit -- get the prescriptions from your doctor that have been shown to work and help from a support group if you need it. And every time you CAN do so, avoid other people’s smoke.

You’ll not only have fewer migraines, you’ll have fewer medical bills, be in better health otherwise, and live longer!

b) Too much or too little sleep can trigger migraines. Find out how much sleep you do best on and how much you can get consistently. Then, to the maximum extent you can, go to bed and get up at the exact same time at least 5 days a week -- & all 7 if you can manage it.

Do what you can to have where you sleep, dark, cool, and quiet. Some people use earplugs. Those cut back on racket but you can still hear the alarm clock and other things you need to hear. (Also getting regular exercise will help you sleep better.)

c) Aspartame has been shown to trigger migraines and may have other even more harmful health effects. So, don’t drink any soft drinks or use artificial sweeteners. They all make you fat, tend to help cause heart disease and type 2 diabetes -- in addition to some triggering migraines. You can use some real sugar and perhaps some natural sweeteners with no or fewer calories. But you’ll have fewer migraines and be healthier if you have no artificial sweeteners. (We just did a post a few days ago on what you can drink instead of soft drinks. Many of those have no calories at all.)

d) Monosodium glutamate aka MSG is one of the food additives that trigger migraines. Since it also tends to make you fat. And some research suggests it may help cause Alzheimer’s as well, again, if you avoid MSG every way you can, you’ll not only get fewer migraines, you’ll be less fat and likely be healthier. (We did a recent post on how they found out MSG fattens you.) So, don’t buy or eat things that contain MSG and say so on their labels. And, only eat in Chinese restaurants that say they do not use it and don’t use it.

e) Missing meals can be hard to avoid.

But small meals can often be MUCH better than none. Use your creativity to use small meals you can eat on the go. Pecans and raisins in a small bag you keep in your pocket or purse can work. A single banana and a piece of cheese can work. The commercial meal replacement product Ensure isn’t too bad, just check to be sure it doesn’t have any artificial sweeteners. (I don’t remember that it did when I had to have some before a medical procedure.)

If you use this method to miss no meals totally or only one a week, you’ll clearly have way less migraines than missing five or more meals totally.

Loud noise can trigger migraines. If you can’t avoid it, use ear plugs. But when you can avoid it do so! This will not only save you getting some migraines, it may save you having to buy a hearing aid later.

f) Changes in the weather, hormonal changes, & stress are hard to avoid. But as we point out separately, people who get regular exercise handle them better and can overcome more. If you have time and can learn to do it, Tai Chi also works to relieve stress.

That’s also why the 3 supplements that seem to turn off migraines separately in the next section can be so important.

g) Drinking red wine sometimes triggers regular headaches for some people as well as triggering migraines. But it can depend on the variety and even the country of origin or batch of that particular wine. And, since there are certain chemicals that seem to cause the problem, it’s my hope that the wine industry will do more to identify those and make some or many red wines with very little or none of these nasty chemicals &/or list how much on their labels. So you can get a red wine with little or none.

So, if you drink a kind of red wine that triggers a migraine, don’t drink it again.

Also, you can drink white wine and/or do things like drink concord grape juice, take grape seed extract, &/or take resveratrol supplements to get many of the health benefits of red wine without either the red wine or the alcohol.

2. The 3 supplements that EACH turn off about half of migraines.:

(For more info from Al Sears, MD, on other topics, go to www.alsearsmd.com .)

a) Magnesium tends to protect the health of your blood vessels. Researchers found some kinds of migraines are caused by problems with blood flow and pressure in the vessels. So if you take magnesium supplements, you can help avoid those migraines. In fact, studies have shown that taking 600 mg of magnesium a day “reduces migraines by up to 41 percent.”

Taking that much magnesium (but not much more as that can cause problems) also tends to prevent high blood pressure and prevent constipation as well. You can get magnesium citrate and magnesium asporotate supplements that are most bioavailable and often come in 200 mg capsules. So taking 3 a day is easy.

b) CoQ10 – Researchers at the Head and Pain Unit at the University Hospital Zurich did a clinical trial that found that taking 300 mg of CoQ10 daily cuts migraine frequency by half.

Dr Sears points out that you need to take the CoQ10 the gel caps that contain their own oils or take CoQ10 with some kind of oil or fat -- because CoQ10 is fat-soluble. (Jarrow makes a 100 mg supplement of this kind called QAbsorb.) Taking CoQ10 with any health OK oil also works, such as extra virgin olive oil, or fatty fish, or avocados, or nuts.

CoQ10 also tends to lower high blood pressure, strengthen your heart, and keep up your energy level particularly if you are over 40. CoQ10 improves the function of your mitochondria which are your cell’s energy sources which enables it to do the other things – including prevent many migraines.

c) Riboflavin (vitamin B2) also helps keep your mitochondria able to give your cells energy. Not surprisingly a study found that taking 400 mg of riboflavin a day cut the frequency of migraines in half.

You not only can find riboflavin (vitamin B2) supplements at your local health food store, they are quite inexpensive.

So, if you find CoQ10 a bit pricey, you can take magnesium and riboflavin and prevent up to 80% of all your migraines. And you can prevent some more and get other health benefits if you can also afford to take CoQ10.

3. Separate research found that people who get regular exercise get half as many migraines. So, if by avoiding some things and taking one or more of these supplements cuts down on your migraines enough to do regular exercise, you may get very few.

Even moderate exercise flexes your blood vessels and helps to keep them healthy plus people who get regular exercise handle stress better too. They also sleep much better. So it’s no surprise regular exercise prevents migraines. It does so in all three of these ways at once.

In fact, with exercise, getting some, if only for 5 minutes each day, helps. People who have high blood pressure who exercise have lower blood pressure on the days they exercise but not always on the days they don’t exercise.

4. Since keeping your blood vessels healthy helps prevent BOTH heart disease and migraines, the other things you can do that protect your heart also will help prevent migraines.

In addition to the things listed above, you can stop eating refined grains and food made from them, eat less sugar, and eat more nonstarchy vegetables plus you can eat wild caught salmon or sardines &/or take purified fish oil supplements. That set of things lowers your dangerous triglyceride levels and your CRP inflammation.

You can eat foods such as beans, lentils, apples, unsweetened applesauce, and “Old Fashioned” oatmeal instead of “Quick” or instant; you can take niacin 300 mg to 900 mg a day, and you can take sterol supplements. Plus you can rarely eat fatty meat from grain fed animals and eat very lean meat or poultry or beef fed only grass and wild caught salmon and/or sardines instead. That set of things lowers LDL cholesterol. And doing each of those things plus getting regular exercise lowers LDL about as well as statin drugs.

Taking niacin, using extra virgin olive oil almost exclusively, drinking wine, and regular exercise, particularly strength training and interval cardio, increase your protective HDL level.

Completely avoiding trans fat and all foods that contain hydrogenated oils both will lower your triglycerides and increase your HDL.

So every one of those things will also help keep your blood vessels healthy and prevent migraines – in addition to protecting you from heart attacks and strokes.

(Avoiding cigarette smoke that also triggers migraines directly is also critically important to protect your heart and to prevent triggering heart attacks.)