Posts

A Surprising Vegetable Approach to Insomnia

Image
Lactucin, the hypnotic component of lettuce, is put to the test in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of lettuce seeds. “There is a perception that time spent asleep is time wasted,” but it’s widely recognized that insufficient sleep is linked to multiple acute and chronic conditions and increases the risks of death and disease. As I discuss in my video Natural Dietary Remedy for Insomnia , forcing people to get only six hours of sleep per night for one week can change the expression of more than 700 genes. The most dire effect may be endothelial dysfunction. The endothelium is the thin layer of cells that lines the inside of blood vessels and is responsible for allowing our arteries to relax and dilate properly. Randomizing people to get five instead of seven hours of sleep for about a week results in a significant impairment in artery function from just that two-hour nightly difference. How bad is a week of getting only five hours a night? Sleep deprivation ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Protect Your Arteries from Saturated Fat with These Foods

Image
If you’re going to have something unhealthy, is there anything you can eat with it to help mitigate the damage it may cause? If you compare the artery function of vegetarians and meat-eaters, the healthy ability of arteries to dilate and let more blood flow is significantly better among those eating a vegetarian diet. And not just by a little—we’re talking four times better, as you can see below and at 0:24 in my video Foods to Help Protect Your Arteries from Saturated Fat . Vegetarians do tend to be younger, smoke less, be slimmer, and have lower rates of diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and heart disease. But the researchers controlled for all that and only let healthy nonsmokers into the study. They also recruited a group of meat eaters who were similarly slim, with comparable blood pressure and nearly identical cholesterol levels. Yet the really healthy cohort of omnivores still got their arteries handed to them by the vegetarians, and the longer someone was me...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can Exercise Counteract a High-Fat Meal?

Image
There is a window of time in which sufficient physical activity can help mediate some of the damage caused by eating an unhealthy meal. I’ve previously discussed studies that show a single meal high in saturated fat can impair artery function in men, as measured in the arm, but what is more concerning is blood flow to the wall of the heart. Researchers randomized men to eat either a high-fat meal that was more than 60% fat, half of it saturated, with more than an egg’s worth of cholesterol, or a low-fat meal that was mostly carbs, less than 10% fat, and had 50 times less cholesterol. Below and at 0:47 in my video Exercising to Protect Your Arteries from Fast Food , you can see a Doppler recording of the left anterior descending coronary artery, known as the widow-maker, before the high-fat meal (top). Its nice strong signal was squeezed down within hours after eating; the image (bottom) was taken five hours after the high-fat meal. The coronary flow reserve decreased after a sin...
Post a Comment
Read more

How a Single Meal Can Cripple Your Arteries and Lungs

Image
What happens within hours of eating a high-fat meal? We are only as old as our arteries. What can we do to preserve arterial function as we age? A poor diet and sedentary behavior can lead to adverse aging processes, like impairment of the little power plants in our cells, which can result in free radical formation, oxidative stress, and inflammation, which lead to the artery dysfunction that can end in cardiovascular disease that ends us. In a series of videos I did about a decade ago, I discussed landmark research showing that a single high-fat meal could cripple artery function within hours of consumption, compared to no change with a low-fat meal, as you can see below and at 1:04 in my video Saturated Fat Causes Artery and Lung Inflammation . In the study, the high-fat meal that so crippled artery function included Sausage and Egg McMuffins from McDonald’s. How do we know the sausage, egg, or cheese was to blame? What about the crappy carbohydrates in the biscuits or somethi...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Is the Best Poop Position?

Image
The Squatty Potty is put to the test. Previously, I’ve talked about the potential efficacy of prunes and dried figs to keep us regular. What influence does body position have on defecation? While squatting continues to be the traditional position for people in Asia and Africa, Westerners have become accustomed to sitting on toilet seats. When we do that, we sit upright, and our poop is forced to make a nearly 90-degree turn, the “anorectal angle,” which you can see below and at 0:37 in my video The Best Poop Position for Constipation . Now, that’s a good thing in terms of keeping us from pooping our pants every time we sit down. But when it comes to doing our business, toilet posture defeats the purpose of our body’s brilliant design—like trying to drive a car without releasing the parking brake. Yet, many physicians are hesitant to discuss “such an unmentionable bodily function,” or they may just be ignorant. Doctors don’t know squat. Of course, this is coming from someone who ow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can Ultra-Processed Foods Be Fixed by Tweaking Their Nutrients?

Image
What happened when ultra-processed foods were matched for calories, sugar, fat, and fiber content in the first randomized controlled trial? In the United States, “junk food” is often used to describe less-healthy foods, like candy, ice cream, and chips, but there isn’t a consistent definition, so nutrition researchers came up with the concept of ultra-processed . The term “ultra-processed food”—if you want to call it that— describes industrial formulations that are typically seen in those long list of ingredients, which, besides salt, sugar, and fat, aren’t typically found in any cookbook, like various flavors, sweeteners, colors, emulsifiers, and other additives used to imitate real foods or to hide undesirable qualities of the final product. This roughly corresponds to my idea of “red light foods” in my traffic light system, in which, ideally, we should maximize intake of green light foods, minimize yellow light foods, and avoid red light foods. Indeed, most of what people eat a...
Post a Comment
Read more

How the Fight to Ban Trans Fat Was Won

Image
What was the secret to the public health community’s triumph when past attempts to regulate the food industry failed? There are three broad approaches to mediating the ruin of risky choices: inform people (like using labeling), nudge people (for example, by offering financial incentives), or directly intervene to make the activity less harmful. Which do you think prevented more car fatalities: mandating driver education, labeling cars about crash risk, or removing the human element altogether by just making sure airbags are installed? There are public education nutrition campaigns, ranging from “sugar pack” ads on public transit that inform consumers about the amount of sugar in soft drinks to “Hot Dogs Cause Butt Cancer” billboards that educate about the link between processed meat and colorectal cancer, as shown here and at 0:52 in my video How We Won the Fight to Ban Trans Fat . But is there a way to make products nutritionally safer in the first place? The ban on trans fats...
Post a Comment
Read more