Posts

Could Your Pills and Food Be Causing a Leaky Gut?

Image
Common drugs, foods, and beverages can disrupt the integrity of our intestinal barrier, causing a leaky gut. Intestinal permeability, the leakiness of our gut, may be a new target for both disease prevention and therapy. With all its tiny folds, our intestinal barrier covers a surface of more than 4,000 square feet—that’s bigger than a tennis court—and requires about 40% of our body’s total energy expenditure to maintain. There is growing evidence implicating “the disruption of intestinal barrier integrity” in the development of a number of conditions, including celiac disease and inflammatory bowel disease. Researchers measured intestinal permeability using blue food coloring. It remained in the gut of healthy participants but was detected in the blood of extremely sick patients with sepsis with a damaged gut barrier. You don’t have to end up in the ICU to develop a leaky gut, though. Simply taking some aspirin or ibuprofen can do the trick. Indeed, taking two regular aspirin (32...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keeping Better Score of Your Diet

Image
How can you get a perfect diet score? How do you rate the quality of people’s diets? Well, “what could be more nutrient-dense than a vegetarian diet?” Indeed, if you compare the quality of vegetarian diets with non-vegetarian diets, the more plant-based diets do tend to win out, and the higher diet quality in vegetarian diets may help explain greater improvements in health outcomes. However, vegetarians appear to have a higher intake of refined grains, eating more foods like white rice and white bread that have been stripped of much of their nutrition. So, just because you’re eating a vegetarian diet doesn’t mean you’re necessarily eating as healthfully as possible. Those familiar with the science know the primary health importance of eating whole plant foods. So, how about a scoring system that simply adds up how many cups of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, chickpeas, split peas, and lentils, and how many ounces of nuts and seeds per 1,000 calories (with or without coun...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Low Can LDL Cholesterol Go on PCSK9 Inhibitors?

People with genetic mutations that leave them with an LDL cholesterol of 30 mg/dL live exceptionally long lives. Can we duplicate that effect with drugs? Data extrapolated from large cholesterol-lowering trials using statin drugs suggest that the incidence of cardiovascular events like heart attacks would approach zero if LDL cholesterol could be forced down below 60 mg/dL for first-time prevention and around 30 mg/dL for those trying to prevent another one. But is lower actually better? And is it even safe to have LDL cholesterol levels that low? We didn’t know until PCSK9 inhibitors were invented . Are PCSK9 Inhibitors for LDL Cholesterol Safe and Effective? I explore that issue in my video of the same name. PCSK9 is a gene that mutated to give people such low LDL cholesterol, and that’s how Big Pharma thought of trying to cripple PCSK9 with drugs. After a heart attack, intensive lowering of an individual’s LDL cholesterol beyond a target of 70 mg/dL does seem to work better t...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Beat Heart Disease Before It Starts

Image
Why might healthy lifestyle choices wipe out 90% of our risk for having a heart attack, while drugs may only reduce risk by 20% to 30%? On the standard American diet, atherosclerosis—hardening of the arteries, the number one killer of men and women—has been found to start in our teens. Investigators collected about 3,000 sets of coronary arteries and aortas (the aorta is the main artery in the body) from victims of accidents, homicides, and suicides who were 15 to 34 years old and found that the fatty streaks in arteries can begin forming in our teens, which turn into atherosclerotic plaques in our 20s that get worse in our 30s and can then become deadly. In the heart, atherosclerosis can cause a heart attack. In the brain, it can cause a stroke. See the progression below and at 0:35 in my video Can Cholesterol Get Too Low? . How common is this? All of the teens they looked at—100% of them—already had fatty streaks building up inside their arteries. By their early 30s, most alrea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is Fasting an Effective Treatment for Diabetes?

Image
By losing 15% of their body weight, nearly 90% of those who have had type 2 diabetes for less than four years may achieve remission. Currently, more than half a billion adults have diabetes, and about a 50% increase is expected in another generation. I’ve got tons of videos on the best diets for diabetes, but what about no diet at all? More than a century ago, fasting was said to cure diabetes, quickly halting its progression and eliminating all signs of the disease within days or weeks. Even so, starvation is guaranteed to lead to the complete disappearance of you if kept up long enough. What’s the point of fasting away the pounds if they’re just going to return as soon as you restart the diet that created them in the first place? Might it be useful to kickstart a healthier diet? Let’s see what the science says. Type 2 diabetes has long been recognized as a disease of excess, once thought to afflict only “the idle rich…anyone whose environment and self-support does not require ...
Post a Comment
Read more

All About Allulose

Image
Sugar and high fructose corn syrup are the original industrial sweeteners —inexpensive, filled with empty calories, and contributing to diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, cavities, and metabolic syndrome. Artificial sweeteners, like NutraSweet, Splenda, and Sweet’N Low, are the second-generation sweeteners. They are practically calorie-free, but cautions have been raised about their adverse effects . Sugar alcohols, such as sorbitol, xylitol, and erythritol, are the third-generation sweeteners. They’re low in calories but carry laxative effects or even worse . What about rare sugars like allulose?   What Is Allulose? Allulose is a natural, so-called rare sugar, present in limited quantities in nature. “Recent technological advances, such as enzymatic engineering using genetically modified microorganisms, now allow [manufacturers] to produce otherwise rare sugars” like allulose in substantial quantities.   Allulose and Weight Loss What happened when resear...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can Olive Oil Compete with Arthritis Drugs?

Image
What happened when topical olive oil was pitted against an ibuprofen-type drug for osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis? Fifty million Americans suffer from arthritis, and osteoarthritis of the knee is the most common form, making it a leading cause of disability. There are several inflammatory pathways that underlie the disease’s onset and progression, so various anti-inflammatory foods have been put to the test. Strawberries can decrease circulating blood levels of an inflammatory mediator known as tumor necrosis factor , but that doesn’t necessarily translate into clinical improvement. For example, drinking cherry juice may lower a marker of inflammation known as C-reactive protein , but it failed to help treat pain and other symptoms of knee osteoarthritis. However, researchers claimed it “provided symptom relief.” Yes, it did when comparing symptoms before and after six weeks of drinking cherry juice, but not any better than a placebo, meaning drinking it was essentially no ...
Post a Comment
Read more