Ways to lower high blood sugar and increase fat loss....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 7-26-2011

Today, I got an email about an inexpensive supplement that does both!

But there are some other things that work. So they are in this post too

1. Eating and drinking too many high glycemic foods and drinks (fast carbs that cause blood sugar surges) directly raise blood sugar. Blood sugar surges cause extra insulin release.

And, if you do that too often and don’t exercise, you get “insulin resistance” with the result that both your blood sugar and insulin stay too high.

High levels of insulin tell your body to add to your fat deposits and tend to prevent you from getting the energy in your fat back out even if you need it. That makes you gain fat easily and have to work much harder to lose any.

It was recently discovered that excess blood sugar harms you by making your LDL into glue like particles that damage the walls of your larger blood vessels, build up into artery closing plaque, and tend to gradually destroy your capillaries. The excess sugar literally sticks on to your LDL particles.

So, we now know that one solution is to eliminate drinking soft drinks even the diet ones, eliminate eating refined grains, ingest no high fructose corn syrup, and cut back quite a bit on real sugar. Since this also lowers your triglycerides too, doing this protects you from heart disease two ways!

Many people today eat or drink these things several times a day. Unfortunately, the safe level even for healthy people is a few times a month!

These practices are common today. But they are NOT normal to your body. People did not do this at all before a few hundred years ago or do it this much until 20 or 30 years ago. So our bodies aren’t designed to handle it well. It’s like trying to burn gasoline in a diesel engine. Our bodies are adaptable enough to handle it some but NOT in this much excess.

2. Vigorous strength training and interval cardio and frequent moderate activity every week burn the excess calories and uptake the sugar into your muscles to do so.

This directly reduces your blood sugar and turns down insulin resistance so your insulin levels drop too.

Quite vigorous exercise sessions of as little as a couple of minutes at a time a few times a week have even been shown to lower higher HBA1C levels, the most accurate reading of blood sugar.

3. There is a drug that both lowers blood sugar and prevents the blood sugar from sticking to your LDL. It’s called metformin and a half dose with meals taken twice a day can help both lower your blood sugar and protect you. But high doses can have side effects. And everyone who takes it should supplement with the orally absorbed B12 tablets of 1,000 mcg a day since taking it can deplete your B12 levels according to the research.

Since you need a doctor’s prescription, it can be expensive to get. But if your HBA1C is over 6.0 or worse over 7.0, it could be very important to your health to get it anyway.

4. Here’s the news.

There is an inexpensive supplement that also lowers high blood sugar, lowers insulin resistance and insulin levels, and helps with fat loss!

It’s banaba leaf extract.

It has several components that work together to get excellent results.

In practice it lowers high blood sugar but unlike some of the drugs, it does NOT overdo it and cause your blood sugar to go too low.

It contains corosolic acid which apparently acts as an insulin mimic or substitute in lowering your blood sugar which tends to cause your body to release less real insulin.

It contains ellagic acid which helps with glucose absorption and ellagitannins which activate insulin receptors. That double action both lowers high blood sugar and reduces insulin resistance. This means your insulin levels fall and go down more quickly when your body releases insulin. With less insulin in your system, you gain fat less easily and burn it off MORE easily.

There was even one study that suggests banaba leaf extract can significantly reduce the fat in people with fatty livers.

And, this may also mean that it can help reduce belly fat and internal visceral fat.

In my own case, I eat almost well enough and exercise almost well enough so my blood sugar is in good shape or close to it.

But my belly fat is another story! So, having read this more complete account of the actions of banaba leaf in lowering insulin too, I plan to try it myself.

Add muscle and remove fat....

Today's Post: Thursday, 6-9-2011

Half of Americans are too fat and most of the rest of us would like to be less fat.

Since muscle burns more calories than fat, if you have more muscle, you can eat more and still be trim.

Exercises such as strength training and interval cardio and vigorous or forceful activities people do tend to add muscle, burn calories while doing them, AND burn calories after you do them. They are also marvelously good for your health!

So, it has been quite clear for years that adding muscle is an effective way to lose excess fat. It makes losing fat doable without having eat too much less. That makes the fat loss from such exercise an effective way to keep the fat off!

So both doing the exercises and adding the muscle help with permanent fat loss!

A researcher has found that a substance in apple peels and other foods, ursolic acid, enables you to safely add even more muscle when you do these kinds of exercises. It may even help people who don’t or can’t exercise keep what muscle they have.

The even more surprising news is that it also reduces bodyfat well enough in addition that it may do so directly in addition the effect of the added muscle.

(Ursolic acid is thought to do this by making both growth hormone and insulin more effective. The lower blood levels of insulin from this would help explain the fat loss.)

The researcher who did the study, a Dr Christopher Adams, of the University of Iowa, examined the genetic changes that occur when muscles waste or atrophy.
After he evaluated 1,300 chemicals, for reasons not in the news stories, he decided to test ursolic acid as a way to trigger the expression of genes that would reverse this effect.

He then fed a normal diet for them to mice with small amounts of ursolic acid included as a supplement.

The muscles of the mice got bigger; and the mice got stronger. (He apparently had a way to test their grip strength.)

The mice fed ursolic acid had lower levels of cholesterol and other blood fats that tend to damage their hearts.

AND, they had around a third less body fat!

All the news stories on this study talk about apple peel as that is apparently the inexpensive food that the researcher used in the mice when he got this effect.

Apple peel is moderately high in ursolic acid. It’s apparently the substance or part of it that gives organic apple peel a waxy texture.

I’ve always thought that apple peel tasted like thin canvas so I’ve long preferred peeled apples and applesauce.

So it’s good news that this substance, ursolic acid, is available from many other foods and three kinds of supplements.

I’ve always liked the spice, sage. Ursolic acid is in sage in a high enough concentration that the one direct supplement for it is a sage extract.

( http://www.essense-of-life.com/moreinfo/specialtyproducts/S-201/Ursolic+Acid+Capsules.htm
Ursolic Acid Capsules $79.95 Sage Extract (75% Ursolic Acid) 100 capsules 58.5 mg / serving 33 servings)

Sage is also easy to grow. So if you like it enough to include in salads or other foods, you can get it for a lot less money.

What I cannot yet tell you is how much you need to take or eat to get this effect.

I hope to find out.

Dr Adams said that ursolic acid is particularly concentrated in apple peel but is also found in cranberries and prunes -- and in basil, oregano and thyme.

Wikipedia has this: "Ursolic acid is present in many plants, including apples, basil, bilberries, cranberries, elder flower, peppermint, rosemary, lavender, oregano, thyme, hawthorn, prunes."

That reveals that bilberry supplements and hawthorn supplements likely contain ursolic acid.

"Ursolic acid is.... also capable of inhibiting various types of cancer cells by inhibiting the STAT3 activation pathway[3][4] and human fibrosarcoma cells by reducing the expression of matrix metalloproteinase-9 by acting through the glucocorticoid receptor. As medicine, it is well tolerated.... "

That too is exciting news since cancer and cancer treatments can kill in part by causing people to lose muscle mass.

That means that ursolic acid may be an underused anticancer drug too.

If it can both slow the growth of cancer cells and keep the patient’s lean muscle mass intact, it may also be more important as an anticancer medicine than has been known before.

The other news is that it may work best by eating the foods that contain it. And you can go today to the store or health food store and buy the foods or bilberry or hawthorn supplements!

You can certainly make some interesting and spicy salads with these ingredients!

It may also give doctors something to prescribe to young men who overdo anabolic steroids that is safer and effective enough to keep them from losing all the new muscle that they want to keep. That way the young men will be more willing to give up the anabolic steroids to protect their health. And, they will suffer less of a crash and burn effect on their muscles than they would have experienced otherwise.

(Note that ursolic acid has been tested to work to build muscle and remove fat as a food supplement. I am unaware that the drug version of ursolic acid has been so tested. But I would certainly expect it to work when tested.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier today I read the reason why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

By Jonny Bowden

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

It's waist size.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What exercises do that?

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

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