Chromium can lower high blood sugar significantly

False headlines & the truth about vitamins and minerals, Chromium....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 5-1-2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the truth is far different.  Very different!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We covered vitamin C on Thursday, 4-12

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

Last week, on Tuesday, 4-24 we covered calcium.

This week we cover Chromium.

If you ever ingest refined grains or sugar or artificial sweeteners or high fructose corn syrup and don’t exercise or eat many foods high in fiber, your blood sugar will tend to rise dramatically.

Then your body will play catch up and release a surge of insulin to allow your body to bring your blood sugar back to normal and to use some of the sugar.  Then it drops too low when this process overshoots and you become hungry for something with sugar in it.

This is a VERY bad idea indeed.  You wind up eating more sugary calories than you burn and the excess insulin causes your body to store the excess as fat.

But if you keep doing it, it gets worse.

You get fatter of course; but you also begin to have your body pay less and less attention to the insulin surge.  It’s like living next to a road that always has sirens or has trains in the middle of the night.  Your body always reacts but your notice of it gradually is less and less.

When that happens, your blood sugar doesn’t go back to normal. And I believe some of the insulin is left over too because your body releases more since it works less well.

It’s called insulin resistance.

Two things happen then. 

With more sugar and insulin in your blood, you get even fatter.

But the extra sugar sticks to your LDL cholesterol and treats your capillaries and blood vessel walls to a sand-paper like effect.

If THAT gets too bad, it causes all sorts of problems with your circulation all over your body.

You can wind up with severe heart disease, being blind, having ED, having vascular dementia, and foot amputation if it gets bad enough or continues long enough.

The best cure for this is to:

1.  Never eat or drink artificial sweeteners or high fructose corn syrup.  (That means never drink ANY soft drinks or eat foods containing these things.)

Similarly, virtually eliminate eating refined grains or foods containing them and even then eating them in tiny quantities only and not very often.

It also helps to cut down on sugar to 2 to 5% of calories.  And, 2% is better for you and less fattening.

Similarly, restrict even 100 % whole grain foods to small servings. Or don’t eat them every day.

2.  Eat nonstarchy vegetables, some whole fresh fruit, health OK protein foods, and health OK oils and spices instead.  The Mediterranean and DASH II diets and their combination in other words is what to eat instead most of the time. 

3.  Get moderate and/or vigorous exercise almost every day of every week.

But if you have not been doing these things and have high blood sugar or you do them and your blood sugar is still a bit high, isn’t there something you can do?

Or if you are pretty good at these things but not perfect, isn’t there something else you can do?

Yes.

One of the most effective and safest ways to do this AND get extra heart protection is to take 200 or 400 mcg a day of chromium polynicotinate a day.

In addition to eating right and regular vigorous exercise taking this much of this chromium supplement makes your insulin work better again.  So your body lowers your blood sugar closer to desirable levels but uses less insulin. 

(Solgar makes a chromium polynicotinate supplement that I take.  The small amount of niacin in the supplement helps protect your heart and is one of the reasons my protective HDL cholesterol level is so high.  Since heart disease protection is so important for people with blood sugar problems, I think this form of chromium is far and away the superior one to take.)

In fact in one study, Dr Sears quotes, some diabetics took chromium supplements for 30 days. Their heart risky LDL went down by more than 10 points. Their HBA1C, a measure of their average blood sugar, went down.  The chromium made a significant difference in their fasting blood sugar too.  It went down by 26 points.

This actually happened to me a few years ago! 

I was mostly eating right, exercising regularly, drinking no soft drinks, and taking some heart protective supplements.  But back then I knew little about blood sugar risks.  I’d allowed myself to use a bit too much sugar on my oatmeal and was eating sugar added apple sauce.

Mercifully, my doctor then knew to add fasting glucose to my cholesterol tests.  I got 115 on my fasting glucose.  That should have scared me severely.  But then I didn’t know that.  Thankfully my doctor knew it was bad news and told me.

I’d heard chromium might help.  So I cut the sugar on my oatmeal in half and went back to ONLY eating no sugar added apple sauce AND I began taking 200 mcg a day of chromium polynicotinate a day.

My retest after that was 87; and I’ve never tested over 100 again.  I’ve also cut back more on my sugar since then for fat loss reasons.

Adding the chromium was a significant contributor to that 28 point drop.

So, taking chromium supplements can be very protective indeed!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what’s new?

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

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

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

That’s a very significant drop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why cut out ALL high fructose corn syrup?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent research found that it does!

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

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

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

It does that too.

So, if you:

Use a logbook to ensure you take active sitting breaks,

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

Eat right to avoid high chronic inflammation,

& Do these kinds of exercise every week,

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

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

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

Action items to prevent heart disease, diabetes, & cancer....

Today's Post: Thursday, 9-15-2011

The current UN meeting on the worldwide crisis in disease and increased health care costs caused by preventable, non-communicable diseases has already released the information that 90% of the diseases and health care costs in the United States are caused by these diseases

This is a timely reminder to consider doing the things yourself that will help you escape these diseases and health care costs!

Consider these.

1. Sugar, refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, and, surprisingly, artificial sweeteners as well, each tend to cause blood sugar surges, lower your protective HDL and increase your harmful triglycerides. These effects tend to make you fat and cause heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

Cut your use of sugar in half. Eliminate any food or drink that contains refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, or artificial sweeteners.

Drink water, tea, coffee, or vegetable juice instead. Eat only 100 % whole grains or eat nonstarchy vegetables or beans instead of refined grains.

Extra benefit: If you have been eating and drinking a lot of these things, this can give you effortless fat loss. The extra fat will leave you; and you’ll NOT be hungrier.

2. The health benefits of the DASH II diet and the Mediterranean diet are very high. They help prevent all these diseases from Alzheimer’s disease to heart disease and high blood pressure. The combination of these two diets is likely the best diet to eat to stay healthy.

The two key things that seem to have the most health benefit are to eat lots nonstarchy vegetables and use only extra virgin olive oil or olive oil.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

a) Add one nonstarchy vegetable one time each day. Add one serving to your lunch or dinner. (Adding more than one a day each week can be faster than your body can adjust to it. So don’t add more than two a day the first week.)

Raw broccoli florets or cauliflower florets help prevent aggressive cancers. Tomato slices are also good for you and taste good. They too are nonstarchy. And there are dozens more nonstarchy vegetables you can try.

Nonstarchy vegetables have truly awesome health benefits and almost zero calories. So they combat diseases and help people avoid fat gain without extra hunger at the same time!

b) Get some mild tasting olive oil or extra virgin olive oil. Use that instead of all other oils or margarine. Use it instead of butter where you can. Where you can’t substitute olive oil for butter, use half as much butter.

(Be sure to never eat anything that contains hydrogenated oils or trans fats as they are proven heart attack starters.)

Using only olive oil increases your HDL, lowers your LDL, and lowers your level of chronic inflammation. Each of those effects protects your heart.

3. Exercise prevents disease, grows new brain cells, and slows aging. And, a surprisingly small amount gives you 40% of the health benefits of an ideal exercise program.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

Try doing some kind of strength training at home for just a few minutes first thing two mornings each week. Take one day off in between. This can range from doing 3 pushups from your knees and 5 half squats each time to 15 or 20 minutes using dumbbells for several exercises each time.

And, three or more days each week take a 15 to 20 minute walk or two 10 minute walks. Walk normally for most of it but trying a few bursts of walking really fast each time.

But get started with something you can do this week!

Once you can do just that much and keep doing it each week, you get 40 % of the health benefits of an ideal program. Of course, once you do that, you can add more if you have time.

4. Avoid tobacco smoke.

Yes, it produces 30 % of all cancers and 25% of heavy smokers get lung cancers. To be fair some smokers don’t get cancer.

NEWSFLASH: Tobacco smoke is horribly worse for you than that. And no one exposed to it escapes harm! (Unfortunately few smokers have any clue about the larger dangers from smoking.)

EVERY single exposure to tobacco smoke begins to deposit the plaque in your arteries that causes high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, dementia, and erectile dysfunction. It also causes you have the lung power and breathing capacity of a MUCH older person. This is true even for teens and brand new smokers!

There’s more too!

Exposure to tobacco smoke triggers heart attacks in people who would have otherwise escaped them.

And second hand smoke harms the people who are exposed to it in all the same ways, including babies and small children.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

If you smoke, contact the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association and use their help to make a strong, focused, and determined effort to quit. Try the over the counter nicotine products if the nicotine craving gets too bad for you to handle. (Knowing the information above will make it easier for you than it is for most people trying to quit.)

If you smoke and decide not to quit, at least for the next week, make a very strong effort to never smoke in public or around your friends and family. See if you can protect the people around you from second hand smoke even if you keep smoking.

Also, if you are a doctor, for the next week, ask every patient if they smoke. For every one that does, hand them a copy of this information and PRESCRIBE in writing that they quit. Studies show this gets results. Most people respect doctors and often do as they are directed by their doctors.

5. There are supplements that help prevent these diseases as well.

Supplements are not always effective; but those that are can be more effective for prevention than drugs when several are taken in combination. Supplements usually have NO side effects. Even better, the ones with health benefits often protect several parts of your health at the same time!

Here’s an example.

Vitamin D3 has recently been found to help prevent many cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune diseases, and to build your bones better than taking calcium.

They found that’s true IF you take 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day. (This helps replace the over 10,000 iu a day people used to get from being out in the sun all day.)

Supplements are food concentrates or pure and consistent versions of folk remedies used safely for hundreds of years or are substances natural to the human body.

Thousands of Americans are preventing many of the most expensive diseases to treat by taking supplements.

Heart attacks, cancers, and Alzheimer’s disease can take over $50,000 each to treat.

Estimating that 30 % of the population takes supplements and at least a third of those or 10% are successfully preventing these diseases, if these supplements were suddenly unavailable nationwide, our health care costs would go up at least 10%.

For example, in 2009, New York City was estimated to have a population of 8,391,881. So it has about 8,400,000 now. If we estimate half of those are adults, that’s 4,200,000 adults. This means that if 10 % of these people who are preventing those diseases with supplements, New York has 420,000 people who are NOT getting these diseases.

The added health care costs each year that would be incurred in New York if everyone were no longer able to get these supplements would run to billions of dollars.

Incredibly, that will happen soon unless it is stopped.

The FDA has just proposed re-classifying almost all supplements as drugs and removing them from the market completely. Only the handful that drug companies successfully get to pass the tests that drugs pass would ever be available again. That would be as much as ten years from when they were removed and they would cost over 10 times as much as now.

Even worse, a simple registration process with the fees for random testing from each supplement company would allow the FDA to find and remove the small number of companies making supplements for weight loss, muscle building, or sexual restoration that contain dangerous drugs not listed on the label.

So consider doing this sometime you schedule now for some time this week.

Write both your US representative and Senator to demand of the FDA that they remove their proposal and use the kind of simple registration process instead that would help the FDA more quickly remove the real problems.

This will save the United States from billions of dollars of new health care costs each year that supplements are now preventing.

Even more reasons to eat less processed meats....

Today's Post: Thursday, 8-11-2011

A few posts back we noted the news of research showing that processed meats were far more likely to cause heart disease than meat that isn’t processed and other sources of protein such as wild caught fish, eggs, lowfat dairy foods, nuts, and beans and lentils. Even chicken, turkey, full fat cheese, and other sources were better for you than processed meats.

Processed meats include: hot dogs, lunch meats, bacon, pepperoni, sausage, and ham.

Now there is more bad news for these foods. Eating even a small serving daily was tested as making colon cancer, prostate cancer, and some other cancers more likely.

The non-profit organization, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, had this in their article I saw:

“At least 58 scientific studies have looked at the issue, and the jury has rendered its verdict, which is now beyond reasonable doubt. The more hot dogs people eat, the higher their risk of colorectal cancer. And it's not just hot dogs. Any sort of processed meat -- bacon, sausage, ham, deli slices -- is in this group.

And here are the numbers: Every 50 grams of processed meat you eat on a daily basis (that's about one hot dog) increases your risk of colorectal cancer by 21 percent. And just as there is no safe level of smoking, no amount of hot dogs, bacon, sausage, ham or other processed meats comes out clean in scientific studies.

The problem goes beyond colorectal cancer. An NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study found a 10 percent increased risk of prostate cancer for every 10 grams of increased intake of processed meats. Other studies have linked these same products to leukemia and ovarian cancer.

Exactly how processed meats do their dirty work is not clear; it could be their nitrites, saturated fat or other ingredients.”

But there’s MORE yet. Other research recently in the news shows one of the ways that eating processed meats causes or worsens heart disease had this:

“Red meat boosts diabetes risk: US study AFP Weds, 8-10-2011

Two slices of bacon, a hot dog or a serving of deli meat daily has been found to significantly boost the risk of getting type 2 diabetes, said a major US study published on Wednesday.

The research by experts at the Harvard School of Public Health represents the largest study of its kind to date and appears in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Eating 50 grams of processed red meat every day increased a person's diabetes risk by 51 percent, while eating 100 grams of unprocessed red meat each day, about the size of a deck of cards, boosted the risk by 19 percent.

However, those risks went down if the red meat was substituted with nuts, white meat, low-fat dairy or whole grain proteins.”

Our news is this.

We, meaning the overall health promoting industry and the more knowledgeable people in it, DO know some of the reasons for this.

Although these foods are high in fat, saturated fat, salt, and preservatives such as nitrites and nitrates, none of which is good for you -- particularly not in high daily doses, I think most of the damage comes from a different source.

These high fat meats are virtually all from grain fed animals. In his book, Anticancer, A New Way of Life, New Edition, Doctor David Servan-Schreiber makes a very strong case that the very high amounts of omega 6 oils in the fat of meats from animals fed grain, particularly corn, causes chronic inflammation.

We know that such inflammation causes heart disease. Dr Servan-Schreiber makes a strong case in his book that it also helps cause many cancers. These many studies seem to find strong evidence this is the case.

But there’s more. The grain these animals are fed contains some of the pesticides and herbicides that were sprayed onto the grain. It’s not a lot on the grain. But cattle and other large animals eat a lot of grain. And these pesticides and herbicides are then bioconcentrated in the fat of the animals that eat the grain.

Most of these processed meats taste good unfortunately.

What can you do now that you know this?

1. For one thing, you can eat these foods a LOT less. Instead of once to three times a day, if you have them at all, drop them to once or twice a month. That’s over 30 times safer to start with.

2. For ham, a processed meat, and beef and lamb, two of the red meats, another way to go is to start with lean versions and trim off most to almost all of the fat.

(I once de-fatted a 10 pound ham my wife brought home one Thanksgiving as a gift from her job.

I cut off all the easily accessible fat. I cut the rest into about one inch cubes. Then I boiled those cubes and removed all the chunks of fat that came loose. Then I put the water and ham chunks into the refrigerator overnight. The next morning, I skimmed off the layer of saturated fat off the top. Then I repeated the whole process a second time. Did the whole process a third time. And after skimming off the saturated fat off the top of the water, I poured out the water.

What I wound up with was about a pound or so of pea sized pork chunks that were dramatically less fat. Needless to say the salt and processing chemicals were also more than 95 % gone.

I then cooked it with small green peas and pearl onions. It was pretty good actually. But that was a LOT of work.)

You can always cook fat removed grain fed meats into mixed dishes with onion, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, and other spices to get good flavor and the stick to your ribs effect of the original.

3. It’s also possible to buy beef and lamb from animals fed only grass --100 % grass fed. (Grass fed, grain finished beef costs more and is not that much better than just grain fed.)

Such real grass fed beef and lamb is leaner and less fat to start with, so you may need to cut them into smaller chunks and perhaps cook them into mixed dishes with onion, some extra virgin olive oil, garlic, and other spices for the best eating.

But the excessive omega 6 oils and all or most of the bioconcentrated herbicides and pesticides are gone. The animals never ate them to begin with!

So eating such meats as often as once or twice a week is likely safe.

4. The best solution is to eat other kinds of protein foods on most days.

Beans and lentils are very inexpensive and good for you in many ways besides not having animal fats high in omega 6 oils. They have incomplete proteins but need not be eaten by themselves. You can eat them with two percent lowfat milk. You can eat them with eggs. You can eat them with cheese. And, I even eat them with wild caught salmon occasionally.

Wild caught salmon, sardines, herring, and small mackerel are fish that do you triple good. They are all good protein sources. They all have enough oils to be quite filling. But best of all, they are high in the omega 3 oils that lower inflammation and help balance any omega 6 oils that you do eat.

Eggs and skinless poultry from pasture fed chicken and turkey are OK. And they aren’t too bad in moderation if even grain fed because they have so much less fat than red meats and processed meats.

Mushrooms and nuts (if you aren’t allergic to nuts) are also high in protein. Like beans and lentils, they are incomplete proteins; but also like beans and lentils they provide many kinds of health benefits besides the protein in them.

Whole grain foods are like beans and lentils as they have incomplete protein. Eating some is OK. But you need to avoid too much or eating them without less glycemic foods to balance them. Refined grain foods and even 100 % whole grain foods eaten by themselves boost your blood sugar more than sugar does.

The summary is that processed meats are best eaten if at all as a very infrequent treat.

Eating them more often than that tends to cause diseases -- heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and colon cancer and other cancers to be specific.

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

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

This is true for many reasons!

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

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

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

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

That’s also well established.

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

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

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

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

d) Unbelievably that’s not all either!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you doing strength training and interval cardio yet?

If not, you can do both at home.

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

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

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

But I pay ZERO dollars a month for it now!

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

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

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

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

No monthly payments needed for that one either.

And, this can take very, very little time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many are worried about the wrong health risks...

Today's Post: Tuesday, 7-19-2011

In a recent news article the most worried-about health risks were cancer and memory loss in a survey of baby boomers.

But the dangers of the related categories of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity actually contained far more risk.

Oddly, a different recent news story on how good health habits protect people from Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of mental decline suggests that may be OK.

Why is that?

The habits that tended to cause mental decline they listed as smoking, depression, low education, diabetes, too little exercise, obesity and high blood pressure.

Other than low education, the good health habits for these factors are almost identical to those for the second group that has more risk.

1. If you stop smoking and begin to relentlessly avoid second hand smoke, your level of heart disease and heart attack risk stops going up and begins to go down sharply. (That’s the BIG risk of smoking. ALL smokers and those exposed to second hand smoke get that one!)

But that also makes your circulation to your brain better which prevents vascular dementia and helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease

If you have high blood pressure and begin to avoid tobacco smoke, it gets lower overall. It gets much lower during the times each day you were exposed to tobacco smoke before. That too cuts your heart attack risk. It also cuts your risk of stroke which can cause brain damage or severe brain damage.

What about cancer? True some people smoke and die of something else—often heart disease. BUT, a full fourth of heavy smokers get lung cancer. And tobacco smoke causes 30% or more of ALL cancers – NOT just lung cancer. It couldn’t be clearer. If you’d rather not get cancer, avoid tobacco smoke!

2. What about exercise? Something like 75% of Americans don’t get the minimum needed for good health.

If each week, you do at least two sessions of strength training with a day of rest in between; at least three sessions of interval cardio with a day of rest in between; AND if you can, also do more moderate exercise equal to a few miles of walking, ideally 5 or 6 miles a more a week, your risk of everything on this list goes down.

It’s not easy to get into or keep doing this. But by exercising first thing in the morning at home and breaking it into 10, 15, 20, or 30 minute sessions, you can fit it in on most days.

Also do the other thing that makes continuing to do exercise dramatically easier.

Keep a record -- using abbreviations to make it quick -- to enter what you did every day to show what exercise you did. You can see if you do too little. And you can also see that if you almost always exercise, the few days you really have to skip aren’t that bad.

It’s also fun when you gradually can do more. You can SEE the improvement in your records. (I just did my Nordic Track at a low, easy effort to avoid getting my wife’s cold. Then I happened to see that was equal to my best effort results from just a couple of years ago!)

The other two alternatives that work are to replace some TV watching with exercise some evenings a week or to get in your moderate exercise by riding an exercise bike or walking on a treadmill while watching the lighter TV programs you watch.

If people knew what exercise did FOR them and what not exercising did TOO them, few would be without it!

It protects against the ALL the big worries.

Because this kind of exercise dramatically slows aging, it keeps your immune system young and strong and helps prevent cancers. (That works even better if you also take antioxidant vitamins and supplements and get antioxidants in vegetables and fruit that you eat.)

Because this kind of exercise improves your circulation and helps prevent or improve high blood sugar AND triggers the growth of new brain cells, it also prevents vascular dementia and helps prevent or slow Alzheimer’s disease.

Exercise also helps prevent the other big risks.

It lowers high blood pressure. It helps prevent obesity or make it easier to get rid of. It directly reduces your risk of heart attack and stroke if you do it right. Recent studies even found the longer you exercise & do it every week regularly without a break of more than a few days the better your protection gets!

Vigorous exercise and moderate exercise you enjoy or do with people you like, helps prevent or stop depression. So it makes you feel better and removes that cause of mental decline too.

(Your feel-good neurotransmitters go up, your circulation to your brain goes up, you get distracted mentally from your worries, and in doing the exercises you learn proactive skills that help you escape or solve problems!)

As the study we posted on recently found, exercise also prevents you from overreacting to stress and makes you much more resilient.

Few people go without sleep or water or food or air for very long! They can feel the effects quite quickly.

In the world people evolved in, exercise was inescapable. So we don’t have a similar system to let us know we are at risk from too little of it.

But the effects of not exercising regularly are quite serious.

So, no matter what health risks you’d like to avoid, if you exercise every week, your risks will drop!

3. The other factor you can fix to prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure is what you eat and drink.

It’s not yet well known. But ingesting too many sugars and high glycemic foods and NOT eating nonstarchy vegetables and whole fruit of many kinds, causes everything you’d like to avoid.

When you eat that way, your HDL goes down and your LDL and triglycerides go up which we now know causes heart disease. Worse, I read recently when you eat or drink too many sugars and boost your triglycerides, your HDL stops protecting you as its particles also become small enough to damage your artery walls.

You get blood sugar surges and mood swings which make avoiding depression harder. Those cause cravings for more of the same and the insulin surges that this triggers help make you get fat and stay that way.

They also boost your blood sugar level which, along with no vigorous, regular exercise, helps cause type 2 diabetes.

And, when your blood sugar goes up too high it sticks to your LDL and turns it into something like superglue particles which then destroy some of your capillaries and harms the inside of your larger blood vessels and begins to clog them up too.

This decreases blood circulation to your brain and is even thought to trigger the deposits and damage of Alzheimer’s disease.

So it’s a good news -- bad news picture.

The good news is that no matter what health risks concern you, 90 % of the key ways to protect yourself are the same.

Avoid tobacco smoke as close to 100 % as you can manage.

Exercise most days of every week.

And, eat and drink real foods instead of fast foods, soft drinks, packaged snacks, and packaged and commercially made desserts.

Each of these in today’s world takes an extra effort to do.

But the more you know WHY to do it and the more you learn it and the better you get at doing it, two great things happen.

It begins to be your new normal lifestyle and feel comfortable to you. And you find ways to enjoy parts of it.

And, your health improves dramatically while all your health risks drop like a stone!

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

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

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

Oops! I looked and apparently did not.

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

It gradually tends to destroy all your capillaries.

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

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

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

Would you repeat it every day?

Likely you would choose not to do that!

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

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

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

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

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

MGmin-LDL is normal LDL cholesterol with sugar attached.

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

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

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

There was one piece of good news.

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

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

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

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

It also directly lowers blood sugar and your HBA1C readings.

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

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

There are these parts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People who eat this way also are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, gradually make upgrades that you keep doing.

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

4. Do the safe things that lower LDL cholesterol.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do cardio AND strength training for triple benefits....

Today's Post: Monday, 11-29-2010

Last Tuesday, 11-23-2010, AP reported study led by Dr. Tim Church of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

This study, published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, tested the results over nine months of three groups each exercising for 45 minutes on three days a week.

One group did all cardio on a treadmill that became slightly more difficult due to increasing the incline during the session.

One group did all strength training.

And, the third group did progressive strength training AND some cardio.

Each group worked out for about 45 minutes at each session.

(They did have a fourth comparison group that did some stretching instead.)

The study results showed that only the group that combined aerobics and weights both lowered their blood sugar and lost weight, even though all three fitness groups reduced their waist sizes.

Since one of the biggest health risks today is developing or dealing with type 2 diabetes, which is blood sugar that is unhealthily high and tends to stay that way AND high blood sugar tends to also gradually make you fatter, this result is extremely important.

41 % of the people in the group that did both cardio AND strength training either reduced their diabetes drugs or lowered their average blood sugar as measured apparently by the HBA1C test, as compared to 26 % for strength training only, 29 % who did aerobics only and 22 % in the non-exercise group.

We’ve known that cardio exercise is important because it helps protect your heart unless you overdo it and gives you a reserve if you need to use your resulting aerobic fitness in a real life emergency situation.

(In cardio, Dr Al Sears and others have found that interval cardio where you exert extra effort or speed up but rest or slow down as soon as you begin to tire and repeat once you recover and very gradually do more over time, has many benefits. You get in shape faster. You build more cardiac capacity and reserve. And, it’s MUCH safer than pushing yourself for quite a time after you begin to feel overtired. The best news is that interval cardio can been done in less time and with BETTER results than longer, steady pace cardio.)

We’ve known that strength training is important because it helps prevent obesity and declining ability to do things on your own as you get older that require some strength.

So, since both kinds of exercise results are valuable, if you know this and all the extra benefits of exercise too, you may already be doing both cardio and strength training.

(Regular vigorous exercise done several days each week, is a very powerful heart protector. And, it literally prevents your brain and memory ability from shrinking, helps prevent obesity or end it, slows aging, and even improves your sex life.)

But this new study is extremely valuable, because it shows that some of each does MORE for you than doing either cardio OR strength training by itself FOR THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME EACH WEEK.

This literally means that doing both each week gives you a strong EXTRA benefit.

Doing both protects your health better than doing one or the other in the same amount of time.

No matter whether you do jump rope and dumbbell exercises at home for your cardio and strength training as I do or to both your interval cardio and strength training at a gym as the people in this study did, if you do both kinds every week, it will give you a lot of extra benefit we now know. (Gyms can also show what exercises to do if you are new to it.)

So, if you haven’t already started doing some of each, cardio AND strength training, every week, consider beginning right away.

High Fructose Corn Syrup is much worse for you than I thought....

Today's Post: Thursday, 10-21-2010

I’ve already posted that because of the way some of it is made about 30 % of all the foods and drinks that contain high fructose corn syrup also contain mercury.

This includes many brand name products. I found one I’d actually eaten on the list in the article I initially read.

So, avoiding it all is a good idea for that reason alone.

Also, the average American eats or drinks about ten times too much sugar, a bit over 7 Tablespoons a day. Even if high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contains just a bit more fructose than sugar when you multiply that by ten times or more and do so 7 times every week, if fructose will make you fat and harm your health simply never eating or drinking HFCS and always reading labels to do so is protective.

And, I have read that that much fructose does make you fat and harm your health.

So always avoiding HFCS is a good idea. Also, because it also is in so many things that are fattening or which harm your health from their other ingredients, if you always avoid HFCS, it’s an effective way to lose fat painlessly and protect your health.

But it seems I far understated the case!

Today, I got an email from Natural Health Dossier.

Their email first warns those who already know to avoid HFCS but have not yet heard it may soon be called corn sugar to avoid HFCS by that name also when it appears as it well might.

Than they quote Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D. as saying about HFCS, "It is the major driver of the obesity epidemic."

They then quote Dr Weill as saying this.: "HFCS contains 14-percent fructose. That's much more than regular corn syrup. It has disruptive effects on metabolism, because the body doesn't utilize fructose well. Humans have never before consumed it in such quantity."

Their article then continues with this.:

“A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition confirms this. It showed that U.S. consumption of HFCS skyrocketed by over 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990.
The study estimated that we consume over 300 of our daily calories from HFCS.
And the corn industry's own statistics confirm this. They say the number of people drinking sodas loaded with HFCS shot up by 135 percent between 1980 and 2000.”

They then again quote Dr Weill.:

"HFCS promotes weight gain. It doesn't trigger the process by which the body tells us it is full. What's more, HFCS elevates triglycerides."

But we now know that elevating triglycerides is a sure way to produce heart disease. Oops! That means always avoiding HFCS will help you prevent getting or worsening heart disease.

THAT is a block-buster thing to know that I had NOT yet heard of.

They then quote a study done by Rutgers University in 2007. That study found that HFCS is more addictive than sucrose.

Then they added another blockbuster I did not yet know.

“Scientists at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland studied the effect of fructose on children with a predisposition for diabetes and 24 healthy kids. Sixteen had diabetic parents; eight did not.

“….by the end of the study all the kids had higher triglycerides. Their insulin sensitivity was significantly decreased. The purpose of the study was to show the effects of HFCS on kids with diabetes. Instead it showed that the sweetener affects everyone.

Their research showed it increased blood levels of triglycerides by 110 percent in the children of diabetics. But HFCS also increased triglycerides in kids with healthy parents by over 50 percent. “

We’ve already seen the previous evidence about boosting the heart harmful triglycerides. But the blockbuster here is that ingesting HFCS worsened insulin resistance. Oops again! That means that ingesting HFCS is a direct cause of type 2 diabetes as well as obesity and heart disease.

“Further studies revealed fructose decreases signals from three critical hormones. These hormones are insulin, ghrelin, and leptin. And they control blood sugar levels, appetite, and fat storage. They tell you how much you need to eat and when to stop eating. They also tell your liver whether to burn or store glucose.

Over-eating is one consequence of your body losing touch with these signals. Insulin resistance is another. The study concluded that fructose "leads to obesity and diabetes." “

“The University of Toronto also investigated HFCS. They fed it to Syrian golden hamsters - which have a fat metabolism much like ours. In just weeks, the hamsters suffered raised triglycerides and became insulin resistant.”

We’ve posted separately that for different reasons both diet soft drinks and regular soft drinks make you fat. And, for that reason a superb and relatively painless way to be less fat is to never or very close to never drink any kind of soft drink.

They then suggest always reading labels and to pass on eating or drinking anything that contains any HFCS at all.

They then quote Dr Weill again as saying this:

"Giving up products containing HFCS will benefit your health and help control your weight."

They then listed a long list of products where many of them now contain HFCS:

“Bread
Crackers
Ice cream
Jams
Jellies
Ketchup
Salad dressings
Soda
Soup”

I’ve also seen it in candies
and peanut butter
and commercial baked goods
and chocolate syrup
and premade coffee drinks.

HFCS is also in most syrups -- other than real molasses and pure maple syrup.

So if a food or drink has a label always read it. Mercifully you can now find many brands of these foods that have sugar instead or which have neither sugar OR HFCS. (Ice cream usually has sugar—or HFCS. But many breads and peanut butters do not have either sugar OR HFCS.)

The article closes by saying that eating real foods from desirable sources is a sure way to avoid HFCS and to be in better health otherwise.

“…. pick fresh, low-glycemic veggies and fruits.

Opt for natural, grass-fed meats... free-range poultry... cage-free eggs... and coldwater wild fish.

Natural foods like organic yogurt and unsalted nuts like walnuts and almonds are also safe bets.”

(Unsalted raw nuts that have also NOT had any oils added to them or in dry roasted form work great as a food or snack with surprising extra health benefits. But they only work for people who have no allergy to nuts.)

Cooked beans and lentils, garlic, onions, and spices also work well.

As I’ve posted before, water, tea, black coffee or coffee with only 1% lowfat milk, water that’s only been carbonated, unsweetened cocoa, and red wine in moderation or even some dark beer are all dramatically less fattening and better for you than all soft drinks.

So the bottom line is avoid ALL soft drinks and HFCS.

You’ll be dramatically healthier we now know -- and far less fat.

Overcome the health harm from sitting too much....

Today's Post: Friday, 1-22-2010

Last Wednesday, 1-20-2010, there was a health news story on the AP online news that had results of a study showing that sitting too much causes health harm; and, according to this study, regular exercise was insufficient to overcome this health harm completely.

Further, it looks like virtually everyone today sits too much, well over 4 hours a day, & that doing so tends to cause type 2 diabetes, obesity, & heart disease. That much sitting also tends to increase the death rate & shorten people’s lives. This last point explains AP’s headline on the story.:

“Experts: Sitting too much could be deadly” was AP’s title.

It seems it matters not why you are sitting, the harm is from going over a certain number of total hours for any reason per day or per week.

In an editorial published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Elin Ekblom-Bak of the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences said that the genes which regulate the usage of glucose and fats begin to malfunction after 4 hours of continuous sitting.

(In a related study, Jean Mayer, PhD found that below a certain level of physical activity, about half an hour a day of moderate exercise, people were hungry for MORE calories than they were burning up while above that level they only got hungrier if they used and needed more and their appetite matched what they actually were using.)

In a separate study in Canada, also noted in the AP article, it was found that people who sat more had a higher death risk, whether or not they exercised.

The story also quoted statistics showing that most people sit half their waking hours. So, if you sleep 6 or 7, which is close to average today, most people including me and thee, sit for 8 & a half to 9 hours a day or more.

Worse, if the average person watches TV 30 hours a week, which is about what I’ve seen quoted, this is particularly harmful since you burn fewer calories while watching TV than you do when you are asleep. Needless to say this also means that your circulation is very low, your muscles and motor nerves are not getting any action when this happens. This suggests that most of us get over 4 hours a day of this kind of sitting which is most likely to be harmful to our health.

Similarly, a recent story found that teens while sitting while using some form of media (from texting to video games, to watching TV, to email & using the internet on a computer) now average over 8 hours sitting a day by just while using some kind of media.

So, it’s simple. Virtually everyone sits too much now for good health.

But surely there must be something that can be done to overcome the health harm from this.

Here are seven things you can do that I think will work. Five you can try as soon as this afternoon while two you may have to work a bit for several days or longer to set up.

Some you may like and find easy and some you may not. Do what you can!

1. Drink multiple cups of tea or green tea or clean water or vegetable juice each day. (More than 3 cups of coffee will disrupt your sleep; but it takes far more tea or green tea to do this.)

If you do this, every so often, you’ll need to get up take a bathroom break. That provides regular breaks in your sitting each day.

(Note that soft drinks, both regular & diet, tend to make the health harms of sitting greater and so are NOT a good idea for this use.)

You can even prime the pump a bit extra by getting a drink of water right after you get out of the bathroom.

2. Part of the health harm from sitting may well come from NOT going outside and getting enough vitamin D from sunshine. We now know this causes everything from depression, to heart disease to autoimmune diseases to cancer to rickets & more.

You can overcome this in two ways.

You can take a daily walk outside each day for 20 minutes as part of your lunch hour. Surprisingly, this actually can give you a surprising amount of vitamin D even on an overcast & rainy or snowy winter day. (Your eyes adapt to the lower amount of light so it looks dim. But the actual amount of light measured by a meter is well over 10 times what it is inside even if it does NOT look that way.) Of course, this also can be part of your regular exercise to do this & has other health benefits from doing it.

And, it’s quite inexpensive to take enough vitamin D3 to overcome this part of the problem. We know that it takes at least 1700 iu a day of vitamin D to work. 400 to 800 will avoid the very worst deficiency states but little more than that we now know. The woman I posted on last time now takes 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 in the winter & 5,000 iu a day the rest of the year. That may be close to the ideal amount. It definitely is safe as I posted on yesterday.

3. In the same way that fat people who exercise have better health than sedentary thin people, things like regular strength training and interval cardio and regular walks and other regular moderate and vigorous exercise WILL largely offset the harm from sitting too much.

It may well be wise to do more than that if sitting too much is that harmful. But, the health records of the people who do regular exercise shows that it is somewhere between mandatory for good health & very highly recommended.

In short, if you sit much, you’re really asking for it if you don’t get regular exercise.

Harry Truman and a woman Venture Capitalist mentioned in Tina Seelig’s recent best seller, “What I wish I knew when I was twenty” both did as a matter of policy was to have many face to face conferences while going on a walk outside.

It looks like they were on the right track. (I presume the woman Venture Capitalist still does it.)

4. Virtually all the kinds of health problems they now think sitting too much causes are all also caused by drinking soft drinks and eating sugary or overly salty junk foods and packaged snacks and desserts and other commercial baked goods using mostly refined grains and harmful fats and oils.

So, if you eat and drink this way now, AND sit too much, you are getting a double dose of trouble!

So one cure is stop doing it!

Stop eating or drinking anything with high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils and oils high in omega 6 such as corn and soy or refined grains and/or which has had tons of salt added to it. Stop ingesting that stuff; and paying the people who make and sell it now for making you fat & sick.

Instead, learn to eat vegetables and health OK fats and protein foods and some regular amounts of fresh fruit as well. Many kinds of traditional cuisine use spices to make such real food taste good. Some of the dishes are delicious in fact. Start finding out more of these ways of eating you like and learn to only eat that way.

Only eat sugary treat foods once a week or less if at all & only eat versions that leave out the most harmful ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils and oils high in omega 6 such as corn and soy.

5. Find a way to get your TV watching to 10 hours a week or less most weeks. ONLY watch the shows you like best. Stop watching anything that’s OK but not great or just to pass the time. If you need someone to keep you company when you are alone and bored, listen to the radio while you do something active or phone friend. Sometimes exercise instead of watching TV. Use faster input media for most news stories than sitting passively watching TV. (Reading the stories that actually interest you on Yahoo is both dramatically faster than watching TV news and much more focused on your actual interests. Using weather.com, slow as it is to access sometimes, is faster than sitting through half an hour of local TV news to see the weather on TV.) Tape many shows & edit out the commercials to see more of what you want in less time.

6. It may well make sense to either get a timer that flashes a light in a color you find OK every 20 to 30 minutes & stand up, if only for a few seconds as soon as you can after the flashing starts every time.

Since this is quiet, it will not disrupt you if you are on the phone when it happens. And, you can continue writing or looking at the internet too. Simply continue without interruption but stand up while you continue.

7. The fix that I think makes the most sense is for a company that makes bicycles or exercise equipment now or a startup specializing in it to do is to make several versions of an under the desk or in front of the couch miniature exercise bike.

Then people can simply keep it going while they sit even if their pace it varies in speed and is rarely if ever done fast.

This will keep up their circulation and normal metabolism but can be done without distraction once you get used to it & without having to worry about getting sweaty -- as you might do if you were focusing on it and doing it as fast as you can.

I’ve not seen such a thing myself. But if one already exists, given this information, internet sales also would work and may happen soon!


Five of these 7 things you can literally begin within the next few days. If you want to stay healthy, I think you owe it to yourself to do your best to do all five of them.

Getting the kind of timer I describe or an under the desk mini-exercise bike style exerciser may take a bit longer.

But it looks like it may be important to add them when you can.

New information on insulin resistance....

Today's Post: Thursday, 9-17-2009

In much the same way that too many fires for the available fire fighters to put out will make the fire fighters look inefficient, the main cause of insulin resistance is to cause so many more and so much stronger blood sugar surges than your body is programmed to overcome will make its insulin seem ineffective and your blood sugar will rise above desirable and health OK levels.

Our immediate ancestors that optimized and set our body’s digestion genetics tended to eat less than 3 teaspoons of sugar a day. They virtually always got that in fresh fruit that included some fiber that slowed the entry of that sugar into their blood. And, they all got lots of daily exercise. They had no TV and ate no free sugars other than honey on rare occasions. They ate no artificial sweeteners or refined grains.

So insulin resistance was extremely rare if it happened at all.

The American Heart Association just published data showing that the average adult American eats 22 teaspoons of sugar a day and the average school aged child or young person eats 34!

(The largest source of this excess sugar is drinking regular soft drinks, they found.)

That doesn’t even include the massive increases in eating refined grain foods and lack of exercise.

(See our last post for Tuesday this week for ways to avoid these blood pressure surges. The two most important recommendations in it were to NOT drink soft drinks and to get regular exercise.)

But in addition to simply being swamped, insulin apparently also becomes less effective in other ways if the system is overloaded like this.

This insulin resistance results in excessively high levels of blood sugar that cause health problems which is diagnosed as type 2 diabetes if it gets too extreme. It also causes an excessive insulin level that begins to cause you to gain excess bodyfat. So it would be great to get additional ways to reverse prevent insulin resistance.

Yesterday, Health Day online news published a study that indicates that excessive saturated fat from fatty, grain fed beef and dairy fat also tends to cause or worsen insulin resistance.

In addition, that study found that this excessive intake of that kind of saturated fat causes leptin resistance. Since normally when you eat enough, leptin is released and that reduces your appetite enough you stop eating, that means that this excessive intake of that kind of saturated fat makes you fat in two ways! It causes you to overeat. And it increases your body’s tendency to store the energy in the food you eat as fat. Ouch!

How do you use this information to lower your insulin resistance and avoid being or becoming fat?

Eat meat up to two or three times a week instead of two or three times a day. Only eat meat from animals fed only grass or eat something else. Or, eat the leanest most fat trimmed meat you can and don’t eat as much of it or as large a serving when you do eat it.

Use extra virgin olive oil instead of butter almost all the time.

If you eat cheese, eat it far less often in small servings and usually eat it with foods that have lots of fiber to muffle its effects. Some feta or blue cheese in small chunks in a salad a few times a week is one way to do that.

Eat skinless poultry, eggs, nuts, wild caught fish, some seafood, beans and lentils, and perhaps take whey or egg based protein supplements for most of your protein. Also eat very lowfat dairy products.

When you use dairy products use lowfat, very lowfat or 1% lowfat, or nonfat dairy products. Most nonfat and very lowfat cheese tastes dreadful and tends to stick to your teeth. So with cheese eat smaller portions less often mostly. But 1% lowfat milk and nonfat, plain yogurt aren’t bad.

And, since this response may be mediated by this excess saturated fat increasing your LDL cholesterol, it may also help to take sterol supplements such as beta sitosterol and up to 600 to 900 mg a day of niacin, taking 300 mg after a meal two or three times a day.

Eating foods high in soluble fiber such as apples, beans and lentils, and “Old Fashioned” rolled oat oatmeal or steel cut oatmeal can also help.

And, to come full circle, we also know that not eating refined grains and very little sugar also tends to lower LDL and increase HDL.

Lastly, note that one of the health risks from the excessive increase in blood sugar that insulin resistance causes is that it damages your blood vessels and makes heart disease and heart attacks much more likely. Since the methods to lower insulin resistance also protect your heart, that makes doing them twice as valuable.

Periodic calorie restriction prevented cancer best….

Today's Post: Thursday, 8-6-2009

Fitness expert Jon Benson came out with an eBook not long ago called the Every Other Day Diet. (See http://www.everyotherdaydiet.com/ .)

Jon found several very useful things that he put in this eBook. Switching from eating junk food seven days a week to eating right does cause fat loss for some people. Exercise does cause fat loss for some people and helps everyone to keep off the fat they lose. But restricting calories tends to work best to lose fat.

Unfortunately, most people trying to lose excess fat overdo restricting calories and find they can’t stick with it. And those who do switch to eating right and exercising and restrict calories a more moderate amount tend, eventually, to still cause their bodies to go into famine mode. Then their fat loss stops. Their metabolism slows and they get MUCH hungrier and for more fattening foods. At best that keeps people from losing all the fat they want and makes them feel depleted and less energetic. Worse, quite often it causes them to quit and gain back all they lost.

Jon found that eating special foods that are low calorie but extra filling & on alternate days eating right but all you want and even getting small weekly treats of your favorite fattening foods has several key benefits. Psychologically it is MUCH easier to be a bit hungry for one day sometimes than to be extra hungry every single day forever.

But the other benefit is HUGE. This program not only causes fat loss effectively, it completely avoids turning on a famine response. That means your hunger stays at a normal setting and your energy and metabolism stay high. You feel good and healthy. And, best of all you keep losing your excess fat until it’s all gone.

Researchers just published that this way of eating also was much more effective at preventing breast cancer, & very likely other cancers as well, than simple calorie restriction was!

Further, they suspect it was that periodic calorie restriction minimized insulin levels best which was the cancer preventative.

That’s exciting since minimizing insulin levels also prevents type 2 diabetes and may even reverse it. Low insulin levels also cause fat loss best. And lowering insulin levels is an extremely effective method for losing belly fat!

Last Tuesday Health Day online news had this headline.:

“Periodic Dieting May Cut Breast Cancer Risk”

“ Periodically cutting calories may lower the risk of developing breast cancer better than full-time dieting, according to a new study published in Cancer Prevention Research.”

The researchers took 3 groups of mice of a kind that tend to get breast cancer.

One group ate all they wanted. One group was forced to eat 25% less every day. And the third group of mice ate 25 % less on some days and all they wanted on other days.

If just cutting calories alone prevented cancer, you would have expected the mice who ate 25% less every day to have the lowest rate. That was NOT what they found.

It wasn’t even close. Yes, the mice that ate 25% less every day did better than the mice that ate all they wanted. 71% of the eat all they wanted mice got breast cancer and 35% of the mice that ate 25% less every day got breast cancer. But, in the mice “intermittently” fed 25% less only 9 % did.

“Although previous studies had shown similar results, the researchers were still surprised.”

Intermittently eating 25% less calories cut the cancer rate almost 8 times better than eating all they wanted every day. AND, it cut the cancer rate almost 4 times better than calorie restriction every day!

Since we are all descended from hunter gatherers who tended to eat well some days and not others so we are adapted by evolution to eat that way, this perhaps is not as surprising as it seems.

That’s particularly exciting since it means the doable every other day diet approach is BETTER for keeping you healthy than the virtually impossible all the time diet approach.

That’s really good news!

Two ways to power your fat loss....

Today's Post: Monday, 7-13-2009

It’s MUCH easier to eat MORE to cause fat loss than it is to eat less!

&

Eating less of the bad stuff is much easier if you know more completely why and how it’s so harmful to you.

Here are two articles on doing exactly that with my comments & ideas on how to use the information.

1. It’s MUCH easier to eat MORE to cause fat loss than it is to eat less!

Trying to lose fat by eating less of what you already eat can work if you don’t overdo it and it that’s only ONE of about 10 things you do. But if you overdo it to the place you get extremely hungry or trigger your body’s famine response, it causes fatloss failure.

Why not try something that decreases the calories you eat without making you less hungry and where you actually get to eat MORE food?

That method actually does exist and actually will improve & protect your health too!!

Here’s today’s article from Early to Rise that reminded me of it.:

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

ETR Monday, 7-13-2009

“The Best Diet for Weight Loss

By Craig Ballantyne

Most diet "plans" are really complicated... or downright confusing. But the truth is, eating for fat loss is simple. Just avoid junk food and eat more whole, natural foods.

If you need proof, take a look at this...

European researchers studied 89,431 men and women from five countries in Western Europe for 6.5 years. They found that the more fruits and vegetables someone ate, the greater their chances were of losing weight. It's as easy as that.

So if you want to lose fat, make sure you increase your intake of fruits and vegetables…..”

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

Nonstarchy vegetables have such low calorie counts and such high fiber, they wind up providing ZERO effective calories.

They work about five times better than most whole fruit to create fat loss.

If you eat none now, try adding one serving a day at least 5 days a week for a week.

Then add another & repeat each week until you eat 4 or 5 servings each day.

It works. And, even better, a glass of vegetable juice a day has been proven to work as well for fat loss as a whole, raw vegetable serving. So, two servings of raw vegetables; two servings of cooked vegetables; & one glass of vegetable juice works well. Just add one each day a week at a time.

You DO wind up eating a bit less of the other foods you eat. BUT you need not make ANY extra effort to do this. You simply wind up too satisfied and full to need or want second helpings.

Fresh fruit like a whole apple that is very low glycemic works almost as well.

So do berries of all kinds. But many other fruits have enough fruit sugar per gram of fiber to make you better off eating one a day but not more. And fruit juice is better skipped or drink only one a day drunk after a food that’s high in health OK protein &/or fat &/or fiber.

The good news is that both these vegetables and whole pieces of fruit, particularly if they are organically grown, have incredibly health protective nutrients.

So by eating MORE of them, you not only get almost effortless fatloss without extra hunger, you get healthier in other ways too.

2. Eating less of the bad stuff is much easier if you know more completely why and how it’s so harmful to you.

Here’s last Saturday’s article from Early to Rise that reminded me of this.:

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


ETR Sat, 7-11-2009

“How to Monitor One of the Most Important Factors in Your Health

By Kelley Herring

Because blood sugar is one of the most important factors in your overall health, you might think getting tests is a good way to keep it in check. You’d be right on that count. But you might be surprised to know that the best test may not be one you’re familiar with.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from ETR readers about blood sugar. What most of them are concerned about is this: Which test is better - fasting blood sugar, oral glucose tolerance, or random blood sugar?

The answer is “none of the above.” It’s the glycated hemoglobin or A1C test.

The A1C is far superior to the other tests. Not only can it be used to diagnose diabetes, it also gauges how well a diabetic is managing his or her condition.

And that’s not all. The A1C tells you what percentage of your hemoglobin (a protein found in red blood cells) is sugar coated (glycated). And “sugar coated” is a really bad thing when it comes to your cells. In fact, these glycated compounds are associated with an increased risk for heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s, cataracts, and many other chronic ailments.

Ask your doctor for an A1C test. Ideally, you’ll want an A1C of less than 5 percent, which corresponds to an average glucose level of 90 mg/dL.

[Ed Note: If you steer clear of sugar, you're doing yourself a big favor. But if you've swapped the "white devil" for artificial sweeteners, there's something you should know. Studies show that people with diabetes who consume sucralose have significant increases in A1C…..]”

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

Actually, HBA1C levels of 5.0 to 5.6 are excellent to good. 5.7 is on the low end of undesirable but a bit of a warning shot. 5.8 or 5.9 is a flashing yellow light and should be brought down ASAP. 6.0 to 6.3 is dangerous and some doctors will diagnose you as having type 2 diabetes. All of them will diagnose type 2 diabetes if you get from 6.4 to 6.9. And most will prescribe drugs at that range sometimes & always will if you get 7.0 or higher.

As bad as the drugs are except for low dose metformin, they are correct in doing so. HBA1C of much higher than 7.0 begins to harm your blood vessels and capillaries all over your body and begins to destroy you by doing so. Blindness, painful nerves or numbness, Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of senility, kidney failure, foot amputation, and heart attacks all get caused or triggered by such damage!

Glycation is also one of the two main causes of aging.

So, in addition to everything else it does to you, a high HBA1c reading means a high rate of aging!

So, now you know why NOT to let yourself in for high HBA1c readings, it’s worth noting that regular soft drinks, diet soft drinks, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and refined grains &/or foods made of them all tend to spike blood sugar and drinking and eating more than a very small amount each week tends to cause increases in your HBA1C readings.

So, if you drink soft drinks or at a lot of packaged snacks or white bread or commercially prepared baked goods, or eat most packaged cereals -- each week, let alone all of the above !!, you will not only be much fatter than you should be, you’ll be gradually killing yourself off too.

Worse, these foods either give you calories without turning down your hunger, or they make you hungrier for more sugar as artificial sweeteners such as sucralose and diet soft drinks do, they often make you a bit less hungry and then suddenly very hungry again when your blood sugar that was slammed up to high then goes down too low.

That means all these things make you fat by adding calories without making you less hungry or even making you MORE hungry. AND they harm your health if you ingest a lot by as about as much as smoking does!

In conclusion, if you eat a lot more vegetables and some more fresh fruit, it becomes much more doable to eat less of the bad stuff and you’ll gradually lose a lot of your excess fat.

Other tips for eating less of the bad stuff and getting away with it if you do include any at all is simply cutting the amount per week in half and then repeating the process a few times. I’ve found that one effective for the things on that list I personally like.

The other is to only let yourself have such things ONLY AFTER you’ve eaten some health OK protein or fat and some nonstarchy vegetables. Even combining the foods as in eating pecans and raisins works better than just eating the high glycemic food by itself.

The net effect on boosting your blood sugar goes way down if you do that.

And, no surprise, regular vigorous exercise tends to lower HBA1C. So, if you do that kind of exercise every week, you’ll be less fat and be more able to get away with some of the bad foods instead of none.

***

In summary, eating nonstarchy vegetables will make you less fat. And eating none or very little of the foods that spike your blood sugar not only will make you less fat, it will protect your health and reduce your rate of aging.

Why not do both?