Watchman News

By Dr. Mercola

I’ve long said that the best strategy for achieving health is avoiding a visit to your doctor in the first place. Why? Because in many cases you will simply leave the office with a prescription or two, which will rarely solve your health problem. Most doctor visits result in “solutions” that only suppress your symptoms, often causing other side effects and problems.
Rather than advise patients about the true underlying conditions and real solutions that lead to health, they are left putting toxic Band-Aids on gaping wounds. As shown in the slideshow above, and as I detail in depth below, there are actually many reasons why avoiding your doctor may be in the best interest of your health …

1. Annual Pap Smears

Many physicians still advise women to receive yearly pap smears, but the newest guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force specifically recommend against this. The new recommendations call for women to undergo PAP screening only once every three years, beginning at age 21 and ending around age 65.
When testing is more frequent, or started before age 21, there’s a chance of detecting human papillomavirus (HPV), and associatedlesions, more frequently. If a physician detects such lesions, they will assume they are “pre-cancerous” and treat them accordingly. However, most HPV infections and associated low grade squamous intra-epithelial lesions clear up on their own without treatment,1 while the treatment itself can lead to cervical incompetence and/or miscarriage in the future. Since most cases of HPV clear up on their own, this is a case where the treatment may do more harm than good.
That said, PAP smears (which screen for cervical cancer typically associated with HPV) are one of the best tools for preventing cervical cancer deaths – but getting one every year is likely unnecessary.
Evidence shows that screening women for cervical cancer more frequently than every three years does not detect more cancer. Women who have not been exposed to HPV are not at risk for cervical cancer. Further, even if you are exposed and the infection does not clear up on its own (which is not common), it can take 10 years before it progresses to cancer. Cervical cancers are very slow growing, which is why less frequent PAP screens are still effective.
Despite the new PAP screen guidelines, most physicians continue to recommend annual PAP screening to their patients, mostly because they (and their patients) are in the habit of doing so. Some physicians also fear their patients will not come in for annual exams and other screening if the PAP is not required every year.
There is also a good deal of evidence that the revised PAP guidelines are part of a plan to rescue Gardasil (HPV) vaccine sales, which are embarrassingly low. The HPV vaccine is a heavily promoted and very expensive vaccine, but it has been a flop, with less than 27 percent of women opting to receive it, and reports of serious adverse effects continuing to pour in.

2. Mammograms

Only about 1 in 8 women whose breast cancer was identified during a routine mammogram actually had their lives “saved” by the screening, a recent analysis estimated2 – and this does not accurately account for how many women will fall victim to mammogram-induced breast cancer.
Using breast cancer data from The National Cancer Institute and The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers calculated a 50-year-old woman’s likelihood of developing breast cancer in the next 10 years, the odds the cancer would be detected by mammography, and her risk of dying from the cancer over 20 years.
They found that a mammogram has, at best, only a 13 percent probability of saving her life, and that the probability may actually be as low as 3 percent. No matter what analyses they used, including considering women of different ages, the probability of a mammogram saving a life remained below 25 percent. Researchers concluded:
“Most women with screen-detected breast cancer have not had their life saved by screening. They are instead either diagnosed early (with no effect on their mortality) or overdiagnosed.”
This bears repeating:
Mammograms often diagnose lesions or tumors that may never threaten a woman’s life. They also often result in false positives that lead to over-treatment, i.e. misdiagnosed women often undergo unnecessary mastectomies, lumpectomies, radiation treatments and chemotherapy, which can have a devastating effect on both the quality and length of their lives. Plus, a mammogram uses ionizing radiation, which in and of itself can either induce or contribute to the development of breast cancer.

3. Cold and Flu

Think it’s wise to go to a conventional physician for these? Think again. Thanks to routine over-prescription of antibiotics, and the prescription of inappropriate antibiotics, you’re likely to walk away after being told to take a drug you don’t actually need.
Antibiotics do NOT work against viruses, hence they are useless against colds and flu’s. Unfortunately antibiotics are vastly over-prescribed for this purpose. If you have a cold or flu, remember that unless you have a serious secondary bacterial pneumonia, an antibiotic will likely do far more harm than good, because whenever you use an antibiotic, you’re increasing your susceptibility to developing infections with resistance to that antibiotic — and you can become the carrier of this resistant bug, and can spread it to others.
The first thing you want to do when you feel yourself coming down with a cold or flu is to avoid ALL sugars, artificial sweeteners, and processed foods. Sugar is particularly damaging to your immune system — which needs to be ramped up, not suppressed, in order to combat an emerging infection. This includes fructose from fruit juice, and all types of grains (as they break down into sugar (glucose) in your body).
Ideally, you must address nutrition, sleep, exercise and stress issues the moment you first feel yourself getting a bug. Getting plenty of high quality sleep will be crucial to your recovery. This is when immune-enhancing strategies will be most effective. In addition, the research is quite clear that the higher your vitamin D level, the lower your risk of contracting colds, flu, and other respiratory tract infections. I strongly believe you could avoid colds and influenza entirely by maintaining your vitamin D level in the optimal range.

4. Cholesterol

Many doctors are unaware that a high-fat diet is NOT the cause of heart disease. They are fooled into believing that total cholesterol is an accurate predictor of heart disease. If you visit your physician and you have high cholesterol, you’re likely to be told two things:

Take a statin cholesterol-lowering drug and
Don’t eat saturated fat.

While statin drugs do lower cholesterol very effectively, cholesterol is not the culprit in heart disease. Plus a report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims that no study has ever proven that statins improve all-cause mortality3 — in other words, they don’t prolong your life any longer than if you’d not taken them at all. And rather than improving your life, they actually contribute to a deterioration in the quality of your life, destroying muscles and endangering liver, kidney and even heart function. The best ways to optimize your cholesterol levels and your heart health have to do with lifestyle measures, including eating healthy minimally processed fats and avoid highly processed vegetable fats and oils that are loaded with toxic omega-6 fats.

5. Depression

Once again, you’re more likely to leave the doctor’s office with a prescription for a drug that could be more dangerous than the problem itself. Every year, 230 million prescriptions for antidepressants are filled, making them one of the most prescribed drugs in the United States. The psychiatric industry itself is a $330 billion industry—not bad for an enterprise that offers little in the way of cures.
Despite all of these prescriptions, more than one in 20 Americans are depressed.4 Of those depressed Americans, 80 percent say they have some level of functional impairment, and 27 percent say their condition makes it extremely difficult to do everyday tasks like work, activities of daily living, and getting along with others.
The use of antidepressant drugs—medicine’s answer for depression—doubled in just one decade, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005.
If these drugs are so extensively prescribed, then why are so many people feeling so low?
Because they don’t work at addressing the cause.
Research has confirmed that antidepressant drugs are no more effective than sugar pills. Some studies have even found that sugar pills may produce BETTER results than antidepressants! Personally, I believe the reason for this astounding finding is that both pills work via the placebo effect, but the sugar pills produce far fewer adverse effects.
Many people forget that antidepressants come with a slew of side effects, some of which are deadly. Approximately 750,000 people attempt suicide each year in the US, and about 30,000 of those succeed. Taking a drug that is unlikely to relieve your symptoms and may actually increase your risk of killing yourself certainly does not seem like a good choice. In addition, since most of the treatment focus is on drugs, many safe and natural treatment options that DO work — like exercise, the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), vitamin D, and proper nutrition — are completely ignored.

6. High Blood Pressure

The definition of what constitutes high blood pressure expanded greatly in 2003, so that drug companies could sell drugs loaded with side effects to 45 million extra people. Because the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (rife with drug industry conflicts of interest) decided that what were in actuality relatively low blood pressure readings were a risk for heart disease, millions more over the years, were suddenly labeled abnormal, and in need of “treatment” for a condition that didn’t exist in medical literature until that panel met.
Uncontrolled high blood pressure is a very serious health concern that can lead to heart disease and increase your risk of having a stroke. The good news though is that following a healthy nutrition plan, along with exercising and implementing effective stress reduction techniques will normalize blood pressure in most people.

7. PSA Tests for Prostate Cancer

These tests actually reveal very little, and an irrelevant positive result will likely lead to a biopsy that comes with infection risk. The prostate-specific antigen test (PSA test), analyzes your blood for prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a substance produced by your prostate gland. When higher-than-normal levels of PSA are detected, it is believed that cancer is present. However, PSA screening barely has any impact on mortality rates from prostate cancer. As a result, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force will soon recommend that men not get screened for prostate cancer.
Today, many experts agree that PSA testing is unreliable at best and useless at worst for accurately diagnosing prostate cancer. Many also agree that routine PSA blood tests often lead to over-diagnosis of prostate cancer, resulting in unnecessary treatments. Similar to mammograms, the PSA screen has become little more than an up-sell technique. The false positive rate is high, and the bulk of the harm is a result of subsequent unnecessary treatments.
Diet is actually a factor that can greatly impact your prostate health and help prevent enlarged prostate and prostate cancer, but many physicians fail to address this.
You’ll want to eat as much organic (preferably raw) food as possible, and liberally include fresh herbs and spices, such as ginger. Make sure to limit carbohydrates like sugar/fructose and grains as much as possible to maintain optimal insulin levels, which will help reduce your cancer risk in general. Highly processed or charcoaled meats, pasteurized dairy products, and synthetic trans fats correlate with an increased risk for prostate cancer and should also be avoided.

8. Inappropriate and Unwise Dietary Advice

Most doctors are clueless about what constitutes a healthy diet. As such, they will recommend health catastrophes like artificial sweeteners, vegetable oils in lieu of butter, and fat-free pasteurized dairy products. Most will also neglect to tell you about the foods you could be eating more of to optimize your health, like fermented vegetables, raw dairy products, healthy fats (like saturated and animal-based omega-3s), grass-fed beef and more.
In addition, most are ignorant about the importance of how to cook your food – most foods are best consumed when raw or only lightly cooked, and this includes animal proteins like eggs and meat. A discussion about food quality is essential to health (i.e. getting your meat from a small local farmer instead of a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO)) but you will almost never hear this from your family physician. Wondering how to truly eat healthy? See my nutrition plan for a comprehensive (and free) guide.

9. Prescription Drugs Might Kill You and They Don’t Address the Cause of the Problem

A drug prescription is usually a Band-Aid that gets nowhere near the root cause of illness. And many drugs are dangerous. Last year an analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC) revealed that deaths from properly prescribed drugs now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States! And when you add in deaths attributable to other medical care modalities, like hospital admissions and surgery, the modern medical system becomes the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.
Authored in two parts by Gary Null, PhD, Carolyn Dean, MD ND, Martin Feldman, MD, Debora Rasio, MD, and Dorothy Smith, PhD, the comprehensive Death by Medicine article described in excruciating detail how everything from medical errors to adverse drug reactions to unnecessary procedures caused more harm than good. That was in 2003. In 2010, an analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine found that, despite efforts to improve patient safety in the past few years, the health care system hasn’t changed much at all.5
For one of many examples, the birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin, which have been endorsed by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee, contain a drug called drospirenone that makes women who take it nearly seven times more likely to develop thromboembolism. This is an obstruction of a blood vessel that can lead to deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, stroke, heart attack and death.
Why did the FDA approve this dangerous drug? It turns out that at least four members of the advisory committee have either done work for the drugs’ manufacturers or licensees, or received research funding from them. According to the Alliance for Natural Health:

“Each of those four panelists who received money from the pill’s manufacturer voted in favor of the pill. Interestingly, the committee’s ruling that the drug’s benefit outweighs the risks was decided by a four-vote margin. Ironically, while the FDA allowed voting by advisors with business connections to drospirenone, the agency barred … Sidney M. Wolfe, on the grounds that he … had advised his readers not to take Yaz based on several years of data.”

10. Your Doctor Might Not Even Tell You the Truth

A U.S. telephone survey found that 79 percent of Americans trust their doctor.6 But a recent survey of 1,900 physicians revealed that some are not always open or honest with their patients The results were less than impressive, to put it mildly:

One-third of physicians did not completely agree with disclosing serious medical errors to patients
One-fifth did not completely agree that physicians should never tell a patient something untrue
Amazingly 40% believed that they should hide their financial relationships with drug and device companies to patients
Ten percent said they had told patients something untrue in the previous year

When making health care decisions, you should certainly get your physicians’ advice — that’s what you’re paying them for, after all. Hopefully you have chosen a health care provider who has similar philosophies about health as you do, and whose expertise you can trust. But remember that when making health care decisions, you must be your own advocate; it’s important to ask questions before opting for tests, procedures or treatments, and it’s your decision if you’d rather opt for less medical intervention while choosing a more natural way of healing your body.
Ultimately, the more you take responsibility for your own health — in the form of nurturing your body to prevent disease — the less you need to rely on the “disease care” that passes for health care in the United States. If you carefully follow some basic health principles — simple things like exercising, eating whole foods, sleeping enough, getting sun exposure, reducing stress in your life, and nurturing personal relationships — you will drastically reduce your need for conventional medical care, which in and of itself will reduce your chances of suffering ill side effects.
But in the event you do need medical care, seek a health care practitioner who will help you move toward complete wellness by helping you discover and understand the hidden causes of your health challenges … and create a customized and comprehensive — i.e. holistic — treatment plan for you.

By Dr. Mercola

Here are some questions posed by Dr. Robert Lustig, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Why do we eat more than we are supposed to?
Why are we eating more?
What happened to make us eat more?

For 50,000 years or more, humans relied on a remarkable, naturally-occurring hormone called leptin to regulate what we ate, and it told our brains when we’d had enough. But somehow in recent years that regulator has become confused, and suddenly it seems like people just don’t know how to stop eating.

So why are we eating more? The answer lies in understanding the biochemistry of the brain, where the signals that tell your body you’re full are no longer working.

What Happens When Your Brain Can’t Hear Leptin’s Signals …

Leptin is a hormone produced by fat tissue, which relays important messages such as whether you should:

Be hungry, eat and make more fat
Reproduce and make babies
“Hunker down” and work overtime to maintain and repair yourself

Although most think of their brain as being “top of the food chain” in terms of making decisions to keep your body functioning, your brain actually depends on your fat to “speak” to it and tell it how much energy your body has available, and then what to do with it.

Growing evidence shows that leptin may influence areas of your brain that control the intensity of your desire to eat. It has also been found that leptin not only changes brain chemistry, but can also “rewire” the very important areas of your brain that control hunger and metabolism. The way your body stores fat is a carefully regulated process that is controlled, primarily, by leptin. If you gain excess weight, the additional fat produces extra leptin that should alert your brain that your body should stop creating and storing more fat and start burning the accumulated excess.

To do this, signals are sent to your brain to stop being hungry and to stop eating. It is very important that your brain is able to accurately “hear” the messages leptin sends it, as otherwise your brain thinks you’re depleted and will continue to feel hungry, even starving. If your brain does not respond appropriately to leptin, you will likely continue to eat and store more fat.

So why then, if your body has an innate system, honed by eons of trial and error to regulate your fat stores to perfection, is the United States and many other countries facing an obesity epidemic of unprecedented scale?

Because many people have become “leptin resistant.”

Leptin resistance occurs when your body is unable to properly hear leptin’s signals. How does this happen? By overexposure to high levels of the hormone, caused by eating too much sugar.

You may be familiar with this process occurring with the hormone insulin. High blood sugar levels cause repeated surges in insulin and this causes your cells to become “insulin-resistant,” which leads to the production of even higher levels of insulin, eventually leading to type 2 diabetes. It is much the same as being in a room with a strong odor for a period of time. Eventually, you stop being able to smell it, because the signal no longer gets through.

The same process also occurs with leptin. It has been shown that as sugar gets metabolized and stored as triglycerides in fat cells, the fat cells release surges of leptin and those surges result in leptin-resistance, just as it results in insulin-resistance. When you become leptin-resistant, your body can no longer hear the messages telling it to stop eating and burn fat — so it remains hungry and stores more fat.
This will not only contribute to weight gain, but also increase your risk of many chronic illnesses, as leptin plays a significant, if not primary, role in heart disease, obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, reproductive disorders, and perhaps the rate of aging itself.

Too Much Sugar Overstimulates Your Brain’s Pleasure Center, Leading to Addiction

When you eat sugar it triggers the production of your brain’s natural opioids — a key initiator of the addiction process. Your brain essentially becomes addicted to stimulating the release of its own opioids. The intensity of this effect is experienced on the same level as morphine or heroin.

Researchers have speculated that the sweet receptors (two protein receptors located on your tongue), which evolved in ancestral times when the diet was very low in sugar, have not adapted to the seemingly unlimited access to a cheap and omnipresent sugar supply in the modern diet. Therefore, the abnormally high stimulation of these receptors by our sugar-rich diets generates excessive reward signals in your brain, which have the potential to override normal self-control mechanisms, create tolerance and withdrawal symptoms, thus leading to addiction.

According to Dr. Lustig, it is virtually impossible to exert enough cognitive willpower to overcome this 24/7 biochemical drive! He states in The Atlantic:i

“The brain’s pleasure center, called the nucleus accumbens, is essential for our survival as a species… Turn off pleasure, and you turn off the will to live… But long-term stimulation of the pleasure center drives the process of addiction… When you consume any substance of abuse, including sugar, the nucleus accumbens receives a dopamine signal, from which you experience pleasure. And so you consume more. The problem is that with prolonged exposure, the signal attenuates, gets weaker. So you have to consume more to get the same effect — tolerance.

And if you pull back on the substance, you go into withdrawal. Tolerance and withdrawal constitute addiction. And make no mistake, sugar is addictive.”

Tolerance and withdrawal are the hallmarks of addiction – they occur with alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, morphine, cannabis and every drug of abuse … and also with sugar. Like many types of addictions, sugar addiction can in fact be deadly. Evidence is mounting that sugar is a primary contributing factor in obesity and diabetes, but other chronic and lethal diseases.
There’s really no doubt anymore that sugar is indeed toxic to your body, and it’s only a matter of time before it will be commonly accepted as a causative factor in most cancer, in the same way that now we accept without question that smoking and alcohol abuse are direct causes of lung cancer and cirrhosis of the liver, respectively.

The Average American Consumes 12 Teaspoons of Sugar a Day

… This amounts to about two TONS of sugar during a lifetime. While it may offer a fleeting feeling of pleasure when it passes through your lips, the more you eat the more you’ll crave – and ultimately the more you’ll need to eat to get those same pleasurable feelings. This sugar addiction can actually re-wire your brain, not to mention make you very sick …

Of all the molecules capable of inflicting damage in your body, sugar molecules are probably the most damaging.

Fructose, in particular, is an extremely potent pro-inflammatory agent that creates harmful advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and speeds up the aging process. It also promotes the kind of dangerous growth of fat cells around your vital organs (visceral fat) that are the hallmark of diabetes and heart disease. As mentioned, sugar/fructose also increases your insulin and leptin levels and decrease the receptor sensitivity for both of these vital hormones, and these hormonal abnormalities are a major factor in premature aging and age-related chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease.

Keep in mind that while it’s perfectly normal for your blood sugar levels to rise slightly after every meal, it is not natural or healthy when your blood sugar levels become excessively elevated and stay that way — which is exactly what will happen if you’re eating like the typical American, who consumes on average a staggering 2.5 pounds of sugar a week!
And when you add in other low-quality carbohydrate-rich foods such as white bread, sugar, pasta, pastries, cookies, and candy, which also break down to sugar (starch is broken down into glucose) in your body and often contain added sugar as well, it’s not so difficult to see why so many Americans are in such poor health.

Can You Stop Eating So Much Sugar?

While Dr. Lustig believes the biochemical drive to consume sugar and overeat is virtually unstoppable, limiting or eliminating your sugar intake is the most effective way to break free from this disease-causing cycle. If you still want to use a sweetener occasionally, the sweet herb stevia makes a good, non-addictive sugar substitute. (It is important to avoid ALL artificial sweeteners, which can damage your health even more quickly than sugar.)

If you currently eat sugar, there’s a good chance you’re struggling with sugar addiction.

So I highly recommend trying an energy psychology technique called Turbo Tapping, which has helped many “soda addicts” kick their sweet habit, and it should work for any type of sweet craving you may have. Remember that in order to minimize your sugar intake, you need to avoid most processed foods, as most contain added sugar. Even savory foods like salad dressing, soup, and bread often contain sugar. For optimal health, eat natural whole foods primarily, and limit your fructose consumption to below 25 grams per day, including that from fresh fruit.

A couple of other tricks to try to kick your sugar cravings:

Exercise: Anyone who exercises intensely on a regular basis will know that significant amounts of cardiovascular exercise is one of the best “cures” for food cravings. It always amazes me how my appetite, especially for sweets, dramatically decreases after a good workout. I believe the mechanism is related to the dramatic reduction in insulin levels that occurs after exercise.

Organic, black coffee: Coffee is a potent opioid receptor antagonist, and contains compounds such as cafestrol — found plentifully in both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee — which can bind to your opioid receptors, occupy them and essentially block your addiction to other opioid-releasing foods.ii,iii This may profoundly reduce the addictive power of other substances, such as sugar.

References:

i The Atlantic February 21, 2012
ii Clin Exp Pharmacol Physiol. 2012 Feb 14.
iii Nature. 1983 Jan 20;301(5897):246-8.

By Dr. Mercola

You may be aware that vitamin D and calcium are a powerful duo for bone health, including the prevention of osteoporosis. One of the undisputed benefits of vitamin D is that it helps you ABSORB calcium – this link has been known for many decades.
But there is also evidence that vitamin K, and specifically vitamin K2, is another key player in your bone health, and may be just as crucial in helping you prevent bone fractures as you age.

A Powerful Nutrient Trio to Reduce Your Osteoporosis Risk

A study published in Osteoporosis International has concluded that lifetime supplementation with vitamin K1 or, even better, K2, vitamin D3, and calcium is likely to reduce fractures and increase survival in postmenopausal women. Bone loss speeds up most dramatically during the first 10 years after menopause, which is the period when osteoporosis is most likely to develop.
Many are under the mistaken impression that a prescription drug combined with calcium supplements is the answer to strong healthy bones, but the regular consumption of a healthy diet, along with safe sun exposure and extra supplementation when appropriate, is likely to be far superior.
Theorizing that vitamin K might have a role in the primary prevention of fractures, researchers studied the cost-effectiveness of various interventions for preventing fractures in 50-year-old postmenopausal women. They learned that the vitamin K1, vitamin D3, and calcium combination could reduce the lifetime probability of at least one fracture by 20 percent, but adding vitamin K2 to vitamin D3 reduced it by 25 percent.

Vitamin K1 and K2: Which is Better for Your Bones?

In case you weren’t aware, vitamin K comes in two forms, and it is important to understand the differences between them before devising your nutritional plan of attack.

Vitamin K1: Found in green vegetables, K1 goes directly to your liver and helps you maintain a healthy blood clotting system. (This is the kind of K that infants need to help prevent a serious bleeding disorder.)
Vitamin K2: Bacteria produce this type of vitamin K. It is present in high quantities in your gut, but unfortunately is not absorbed from there and passes out in your stool. K2 goes straight to vessel walls, bones, and tissues other than your liver.

There are several different forms of vitamin K2: MK4, MK7, MK8, and MK9. The form of vitamin K that has the most relevance for health benefits is MK7, a newer and longer acting form with more practical applications. MK7 is extracted from the Japanese fermented soy product called natto. You could actually get plenty of MK7 from consuming natto, as it is relatively inexpensive and available in most Asian food markets.
Few people, however, easily tolerate its smell and slimy texture, so oftentimes people who find natto unpalatable prefer to take a supplement. Most vitamin K2 supplements are in the form MK7. You can also get MK7 by eating fermented cheeses. There has been some remarkable research about the protective effects of vitamin K2 against osteoporosis:

A number of Japanese trials have shown that vitamin K2 completely reverses bone loss and in some cases even increases bone mass in people with osteoporosis.i
The pooled evidence of seven Japanese trials show that vitamin K2 supplementation produces a 60 percent reduction in vertebral fractures and an 80 percent reduction in hip and other non-vertebral fractures.ii
Researchers in the Netherlands showed that vitamin K2 is three times more effective than vitamin K1 in raising osteocalcin, which controls the building of bone.iii

Why Vitamin K is So Important if You Take Calcium and Vitamin D

If you currently take calcium and vitamin D for your bones, it’s important that you also get plenty of vitamin K2. These three nutrients have a synergistic effect that cannot be achieved when one piece of the puzzle is missing. Specifically, here’s a simple explanation of why the benefits of calcium and vitamin D are largely dependent on vitamin K:

Calcium: There is new evidence that it is vitamin K (specifically, vitamin K2) that directs calcium to your skeleton, while preventing it from being deposited where you don’t want it — i.e., your organs, joint spaces, and arteries. A large part of arterial plaque consists of calcium deposits (atherosclerosis), hence the term “hardening of the arteries.”
Vitamin K2 activates a protein hormone called osteocalcin, produced by osteoblasts, which is needed to bind calcium into the matrix of your bone. Osteocalcin also appears to help prevent calcium from depositing into your arteries. So while increasing calcium is good for your bones, it is not so good for your arteries, which can become calcified. Vitamin K helps protect your blood vessels from calcifying when in the presence of high calcium levels.
Vitamin D3: As mentioned, vitamin D helps your body to absorb calcium, but vitamin K directs that calcium to your skeleton where it’s needed. You can think of vitamin D as the gatekeeper, controlling who gets in, and vitamin K as the traffic cop, directing the traffic to where it needs to go. Lots of traffic — but no traffic cop — means clogging, crowding and chaos everywhere!
In other words, without the help of vitamin K2, the calcium that your vitamin D so effectively lets in might be working AGAINST you — by building up in your coronary arteries rather than your bones. There is even evidence that the safety of vitamin D is dependent on vitamin K, and that vitamin D toxicity (although very rare with the D3 form) is actually caused by vitamin K2 deficiency.iv

How to Get These Nutrients From Natural Sources

Calcium, vitamin K2 and vitamin D3 are obviously available in supplement form, but you should know that you can also get them naturally from food and the sun.
Calcium, in particular, is better utilized by your body if it’s food-based calcium. Good sources include raw milk and cheese from pasture-raised cows (who eat plants), leafy green vegetables, the pith of citrus fruits, carob, sesame seeds and wheatgrass, to name a few. Calcium from dietary sources is typically better absorbed and utilized than calcium from supplements, which may increase your risk of heart attack or stroke.
As for vitamin D3, exposing your skin to natural sunlight is the best way to get enough of this important nutrient. Vitamin D from sunlight acts as a pro-hormone, rapidly converting in your skin into 25-hydroxyvitamin D, or vitamin D3. The next best option is using a safe tanning bed to achieve similar results as that from natural sunlight exposure, and the third best option is taking an oral vitamin D3 supplement whenever natural sun exposure is not an option, then monitoring your levels to be sure you’re within the therapeutic range.

Ideally, optimize your vitamin K2 through a combination of dietary sources (leafy green vegetables, fermented foods like natto, raw milk cheeses, etc.) and a K2 supplement, as most people don’t get sufficient amounts of vitamin K from their diet to reap its full health benefits. You must use caution with vitamin K if you take anticoagulants, but if you are generally healthy and not on these types of medications, I suggest 150-300 mcg daily.

The Vitamin That Is ‘as Good as Drugs’ at Reducing Blood Pressure

One of the best parts about optimizing your levels of vitamin D3 is that you will experience a host of beneficial “side effects” – even above and beyond your bone health.
In research presented at the European Society of Hypertension conference in London, scientists studying the effects of vitamin D3 supplementation on heart health reported that they’ve found that patients with high blood pressure can experience significant improvements in their condition by taking only the supplement, without high-power drugs. The majority of the study’s participants were deficient in vitamin D, and while scientists stopped short of recommending vitamin D be substituted for blood pressure drugs, they did say the study shows that supplementation with vitamin D was “as powerful” as the drugs.
Both vitamin D3 and vitamin K2 are important for your heart health, as they work together to increase Matrix GLA Protein (or MGP), the protein responsible for protecting your blood vessels from calcification. In healthy arteries, MGP congregates around the elastic fibers of your tunica media (arterial lining), guarding them against calcium crystal formation.

4 Steps to Help Protect Your Bones No Matter What Your Age …

One of the best ways to achieve healthy bones is a diet rich in fresh, raw whole foods that maximizes natural minerals so that your body has the raw materials it needs to do what it was designed to do. In addition, you need healthy sun exposure along with regular, weight-bearing exercise. To sum it up:

Optimize your vitamin D3 either from natural sunlight exposure, a safe tanning bed or an oral vitamin D3 supplement. Check your blood levels regularly to make sure you’re within the optimal range.
Optimize your vitamin K1 through a combination of dietary sources (leafy green vegetables, fermented foods like natto, raw milk cheeses, etc.) and a K2 supplement, if needed. Although the exact dosing (for oral supplementation) is yet to be determined, and you must use caution on the higher doses if you take anticoagulants, if you are generally healthy and not on these types of medications, I suggest 150-300 mcg daily.
Make sure you do weight-bearing exercise, which has profound benefits to your skeletal systems. My favorite is Peak Fitness but it is also very important to do strength-training exercises to produce the dynamic electric forces in your bones that will stimulate the osteoblasts to produce new bone.
Consume a wide variety of fresh, local, organic whole foods, including vegetables, nuts, seeds, organic meats and eggs, and raw organic unpasteurized dairy for calcium and other nutrients. The more of your diet you consume RAW, the better nourished you will be. Minimize sugar and refined grains.

By Dr. Mercola

In the video above, part two of the excellent series “The Skinny on Obesity,” Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, and Elissa Epel with the Center for Obesity Assessment, Study and Treatment at the University of California, continue the discussion about the impact of sugar on disease rates around the world.

If you missed part 1, you can view it here.

While total calorie consumption has contributed to increases in diabetes rates around the world, they don’t explain the whole story.  In 1985, the year I finished my residency and started in private practice, the average number of calories consumed per day for the global population was 2,655.
At the time, 0.62 percent of the global population had diabetes.

By 2010, the average daily caloric intake had risen to 2,866—an eight percent increase—but surprisingly, the diabetes rate rose by a whopping 727 percent, to 5.13 percent of the total global population.

When scientists dug deeper to determine what it is that people are eating that’s contributing most to the global crisis in obesity and obesity-related diseases, they discovered that a calorie isn’t just a calorie.

The source of the calories you consume makes all the difference in the world. They discovered that it’s the increase in total fats and carbohydrates specifically that’s causing the massive weight gain in people around the world. What’s more, there’s just ONE food on Earth that, because of its unique composition, metabolizes in your body as both fat and carbohydrate—and that product is sugar.

Sugar is Both a Fat and a Carb, and this Combo Drives World-Wide Obesity-Related Disease Rates

Sugar is the only calorie source that correlates with the increase in diabetes. In 1985, when the world-wide sugar consumption was 98 million tons, diabetes affected 30 million people. By 2010, sugar consumption had risen to 160 million tons, and global diabetes prevalence reached 346 million people. Overall, sugar is 50 times more potent than calories, in terms of causing diabetes. But why does it have this extraordinarily potent effect?

The answer lies in its unique structure. As just mentioned, it metabolizes as both fat and carbohydrate, and the reason for this is because it contains both glucose and fructose. These two sugars are not interchangeable, and your body processes each of them differently.

Sucrose (table sugar) is 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is anywhere from 42 to 55 percent fructose depending on which type is used. Glucose is the form of energy your body is designed to run on. Every cell in your body uses glucose for energy, and it’s metabolized in every organ of your body; about 20 percent of glucose is metabolized in your liver. Fructose, on the other hand, can only be metabolized by your liver, because your liver is the only organ that has the transporter for it.

Since all fructose gets shuttled to your liver, and, if you eat a typical Western-style diet, you consume high amounts of it, fructose ends up taxing and damaging your liver in the same way alcohol and other toxins do. In fact, fructose is virtually identical to alcohol with regards to the metabolic havoc it wreaks. According to Dr. Lustig, fructose is a “chronic, dose-dependent liver toxin.” And just like alcohol, fructose is metabolized directly into fat—not cellular energy, like glucose. So eating fructose is really like eating fat—it just gets stored in your fat cells, which leads to mitochondrial malfunction.

Not even fatty fruits like avocado or coconut have this effect, because your body treats them as either a fat or a carb—not both. Sugar is the only food that functions as both a fat and a carb simultaneously, and it is this combination of fat and carb that causes metabolic derangements and, subsequently, disease. So, please, don’t be fooled: when it comes to sugar, the claim you hear on TV, that “sugar is sugar” no matter what form it’s in, is a misstatement that can, quite literally, kill you—albeit slowly.

Carbohydrate Biochemistry 101

To further explain the differences between glucose and fructose, and the similarities between fructose and ethanol (alcohol), let’s review how each is metabolized in your body.

Glucose Metabolism: Glucose is a product of photosynthesis and is found in rice, corn and other grains. Once you take in glucose from a meal, 80 percent of it is used by all of the organs of your body; 20 percent goes to your liver to be metabolized and stored. The following is what happens to that 20 percent, once it reaches your liver (this is normal, and how your body was designed to operate):

Whatever glucose your body doesn’t need immediately gets converted into glycogen for storage in your liver. Glycogen can be easily converted to energy when you need it. Your liver has no limit to how much glycogen it can store without detrimental effects.
A small amount of pyruvate is produced, which ends up being converted to ATP (the chemical storage form of energy) and carbon dioxide.
Insulin is released by your pancreas in response to the rise in blood glucose (i.e., blood sugar), which helps the glucose get into your cells. Without insulin, your cells would not be able to process the glucose and therefore would have no energy for movement, growth, repair, or other functions. Insulin is key to unlocking the door of the cell to allow the glucose to be transferred from the bloodstream into the cell.
When you consume 120 calories of glucose, less than ONE calorie contributes to adverse metabolic outcomes.

Fructose Metabolism: 100 percent of the fructose you consume goes directly to your liver. Fructose metabolism creates a number of adverse effects, including:

Fructose is immediately converted to fructose-1-phosphate (F1P), depleting your liver cells of phosphates. This process produces waste products in the form of uric acid. Uric acid blocks an enzyme that makes nitric oxide, which is your body’s natural blood pressure regulator. Hence your blood pressure rises, leading to hypertension. Elevated uric acid levels can also cause gout.
Almost all of the F1P is turned into pyruvate, ending up as citrate, which results in de novo lipogenesis, the end products of which are free fatty acids (FFAs), very low-density lipoproteins (VLDLs are smaller, denser LDLs that get stuck beneath your epithelial cells and stimulate plaque formation), and triglycerides. The end result is hyperlipidemia.
Fructose stimulates g-3-p (activated glycerol), which is the crucial molecule for creating triglycerides within fat cells. The more g-3-p that is available, the more fat is deposited.
FFAs are exported from your liver and taken up in skeletal muscle, causing skeletal muscle insulin resistance. Some of the FFAs also stay in your liver, leading to fat accumulation, hepatic insulin resistance and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)
Insulin resistance stresses your pancreas, which pumps out more insulin in response to rising blood sugar as your cells are unable to get the sugar out of your bloodstream, and this can progress to type 2 diabetes.
When you consume 120 calories of fructose, about 40 calories contribute to adverse metabolic outcomes.

Ethanol Metabolism: After consuming an alcoholic beverage, 10 percent of the ethanol gets broken down by your stomach and intestine as a “first pass” effect, and another 10 percent is metabolized by your brain and other organs. The fact that ethanol is partially metabolized in your brain is the reason you experience that familiar “buzz.” The remaining 80 percent is broken down by your liver, causing the following metabolic cascade:

Your liver converts ethanol to aldehydes, which produce free radicals that damage proteins in your liver. Excess citrate is formed in the process, stimulating the production of FFAs, VLDL and triglycerides.
The resulting lipids, together with the ethanol, create a cascade of inflammation, causing hepatic insulin resistance, liver inflammation and cirrhosis. Fat accumulation in your liver can also lead to fatty liver disease.
FFAs cause your skeletal muscles to become insulin resistant. This is a worse form of insulin resistance than hepatic insulin resistance and can lead to type 2 diabetes.
When you consume 120 calories of ethanol, about 40 calories contribute to adverse metabolic outcomes—the same amount as fructose.

Liver Toxins Cause Identical Diseases

As you can see, in nearly every way, fructose is metabolized the same way as ethanol, creating the same toxic effects in your body. However, while Dr. Lustig uses the term “liver toxin” to describe fructose, he’s also careful to note that it’s not fructose per se that is toxic. There are instances when your body can use it. The problem is that people consume so MUCH of it that it turns toxic by virtue of the fact your body cannot use it. It simply gets shuttled into your cells and stored as fat. So it’s the MASSIVE DOSES you’re exposed to that make it dangerous.

When you compare the health outcomes of fructose versus alcohol consumption, you end up seeing a very familiar pattern—the diseases they cause are virtually identical! According to the chart included in the video above, these include:

Chronic Ethanol Consumption
Chronic Fructose Consumption

Hypertension
Hypertension

Cardiomyopathy
Myocardial infarction

Dyslipidemia
Dyslipidemia

Pancreatitis
Pancreatitis

Obesity
Obesity

Hepatic dysfunction (ASH)
Hepatic dysfunction (NASH)

Fetal alcohol syndrome
Fetal insulin resistance

Addiction
Habituation, if not addiction

How Much Fructose is Safe to Eat?
If you want to shed excess pounds and maintain a healthy weight long-term, and RADICALLY reduce (and in many cases virtually eliminate) your risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer, then start getting serious about restricting your consumption of fructose to no more than 25 grams per day. If you’re already overweight, or have any of these diseases or are at high risk of any of them, then you’re probably better off cutting that down to 10-15 grams per day.

I’ve also included a chart below of fructose levels in fruit to give you an idea of what 25 grams a day looks like. Just remember fruit is only one source, as fructose is a staple ingredient in the vast majority of sweetened beverages and processed foods of all kinds, from pre-packaged meals to baked goods and condiments.

In the past many have objected to my position on limiting fruit intake and I am fine with that, BUT if you are convinced, for whatever reason, that you can have unlimited fruits than I would strongly encourage you to have a blood uric acid level drawn. High uric acid is a potent marker for fructose toxicity, so if your levels are above:

4 mg/dl for men
3.5 mg/dl for women

… then you would be wise to avoid all forms of fructose until your levels have normalized—just as you would with high insulin levels. Here’s a quick reference list of some of the most common fruits that you can use to help you count your fructose grams:

Fruit
Serving Size
Grams of Fructose

Limes
1 medium
0

Lemons

1 medium

0.6

Cranberries

1 cup

0.7

Passion fruit

1 medium

0.9

Prune

1 medium

1.2

Guava

2 medium

2.2

Date (Deglet Noor style)

1 medium

2.6

Cantaloupe

1/8 of med. melon

2.8

Raspberries

1 cup

3.0

Clementine

1 medium

3.4

Kiwifruit

1 medium

3.4

Blackberries

1 cup

3.5

Star fruit

1 medium

3.6

Cherries, sweet

10

3.8

Strawberries

1 cup

3.8

Cherries, sour

1 cup

4.0

Pineapple

1 slice
(3.5″ x .75″)

4.0

Grapefruit, pink or red

1/2 medium

4.3

Fruit
Serving Size
Grams of Fructose

Boysenberries
1 cup
4.6

Tangerine/mandarin orange

1 medium

4.8

Nectarine

1 medium

5.4

Peach

1 medium

5.9

Orange (navel)

1 medium

6.1

Papaya

1/2 medium

6.3

Honeydew

1/8 of med. melon

6.7

Banana

1 medium

7.1

Blueberries

1 cup

7.4

Date (Medjool)

1 medium

7.7

Apple (composite)

1 medium

9.5

Persimmon

1 medium

10.6

Watermelon

1/16 med. melon

11.3

Pear

1 medium

11.8

Raisins

1/4 cup

12.3

Grapes, seedless (green or red)

1 cup

12.4

Mango

1/2 medium

16.2

Apricots, dried

1 cup

16.4

Figs, dried

1 cup

23.0

What Can You Use to Sweeten Your Food if You Don’t Eat Sugar? (Hint: NOT Artificial Sweeteners)

It’s important to realize that when we talk about “sugar,” ALL sugars are included. So when you’re evaluating your sugar consumption, you can’t stop counting once you’ve accounted for the number of spoons of table sugar you’ve added to foods and beverages. You must also include all other types of sweeteners, such as HFCS, honey and agave.

But please do not resort to using artificial sweeteners to sweeten your food once you limit sugar. There’s little doubt in my mind that artificial sweeteners can be even worse than sugar and fructose, and there is scientific evidence to back up that conclusion. I’ve compiled a long list of scientific studies into the health effects of aspartame, and it covers a range of concerns, from behavioral and mood changes, to brain damage, weight gain, pre-term delivery, and cancer.

Splenda is another artificial sweetener that is touting their “improved” versions as a smart and healthy way to sweeten your food, but please do not be misled. Splenda is likely to push your health in the wrong direction, and there’s nothing smart about that …

Consuming artificial sweeteners can cause distortions in your biochemistry, and if you drink diet soda in an attempt to lose weight, it won’t help you. Instead, most studies looking at this show very clearly that diet soft drinks actually increase your obesity risk by stimulating your appetite, increasing carbohydrate cravings, and stimulating fat storage!

So please, do your homework on this, and do not be swayed by sweet-talking dietitians, doctors, or any other health professional that tells you artificial sweeteners have gotten the ‘green light’ and are safe to use. There’s simply too much evidence pointing in the other direction. So, what can you use if you want an occasional sweetener? I recommend using:

The herb stevia (my favorites are the liquid forms that come in flavors like French Vanilla and English Toffee)
Dextrose (pure glucose) (glucose can be used directly by every cell in your body and as such is far safer than the metabolic poison fructose)

And remember, switching to cane sugar, honey, date sugar, coconut sugar, brown rice syrup, fruit juice, molasses, maple syrup, sucanat, sorghum, turbinado or agave syrup will NOT ameliorate any of the risks of sugar consumption, as they all contain HIGH amounts of fructose.

The Low-Fat Craze Adds to Metabolic Disease

If you’re in the habit of reading labels, you’ve no doubt realized it’s difficult to find any kind of processed, packaged food that does not contain some form of added sugar or high fructose corn syrup. And low-fat or “diet” foods tend to be the worst of the bunch. The reason for this is that when fat is removed, most of the flavor goes with it. To compensate, sugars are added.

In short, most processed, packaged foods are toxic for your metabolism and lead to mitochondrial damage and disease. Considering the fact that many eat virtually nothing BUT processed foods, it’s no wonder obesity-related diseases are peaking.

The answer, of course, is to return to a more natural diet, meaning a diet of whole, preferably organic, foods, cooked from scratch, without added sugars and other chemicals. Ideally, you would eat as much of your food raw as possible, as cooking destroys many valuable nutrients.

Like many people, I have very little “free time” in my life, but still I am committed to preparing over 95 percent of my meals in order to preserve my health. A major leap in the right direction would be to strive for a diet of 90 percent non-processed food and only 10 percent from other sources. To help you get started, I’ve created a complete nutritional program that is freely available online. It’s divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced, to help you progress at your own pace.

By Dr. Mercola

Of all the foods capable of inflicting damage in your body, sugar is one of the most damaging of all.
Sugar, and the type of sugar known as fructose, in particular, is an extremely potent pro-inflammatory agent that creates advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and speeds up the aging process.
It also promotes the kind of dangerous growth of fat cells around your vital organs which is the hallmark of diabetes and heart disease.
Sugar also increases your insulin and leptin levels and decreases receptor sensitivity for both of these vital hormones, and this is another major factor of premature aging and age-related chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease, as well as a leading cause of the climbing rates of overweight and obesity in developed countries.
That sugar is bad for your health is probably old news to you by now, but what may surprise you is just how much sugar is lurking in foods that are often passed off as “healthy.”
Many supposedly “good for you” foods have more sugar than a Twinkie!

Are You Eating These Sugar-Laden “Health” Foods?

The Huffington Post recently outed several foods that are so high in sugar, you may as well be eating a candy bar.
All of these also have more sugar than a Twinkie …

Yogurt: Most commercial yogurt is loaded with sugar – as in, over 30 grams for 6 ounces! This, along with the fact that commercial yogurt is pasteurized (and some also contains artificial colors and flavors), is why you should walk right on by the yogurt section at your supermarket. Watch out, too, for “light” yogurt brands that boast less sugar due to toxic artificial sweeteners.
On the other hand, yogurt that is made from raw organic milk, and which you eat either plain or only minimally sweetened with some berries or liquid stevia, is a true health food. This is something you can easily do at home and use the healthiest raw ingredients, including organic grass-fed raw milk as the starter.
Tomato Sauce: A cup of tomato sauce can add up to over 20 grams of sugar, and considering that most people eat that tomato sauce on top of pasta, another carb source, this could send you into sugar overload. Watch out, specifically, for brands that contain added sweeteners. Tomato sauce is a far better choice than a candy bar, but, ideally, make your own sauce at home, and serve it over shredded spaghetti squash instead of noodles.
Granola Bars: Sugar is often one of the top ingredients in granola bars, and, in fact, most are not much different than a candy bar, nutritionally speaking. Even the granola is simply another form of “hidden sugar” that most people eat far too much of. Remember, sugar and dietary carbohydrates (including grains like granola, which break down into sugar) lead to excess body fat, obesity and related health issues. No amount of exercise can compensate for this damage because if you eat a lot of sugar, it could be “reprogramming” your body to become fat.
Fat-Free Salad Dressing: When manufacturers take the fat out of a food, sugar is often added back in as a replacement. Fat-free French or Thousand Island dressings can contain over 40 grams of sugar as a result, turning a would-be healthy salad into something more resembling a dessert. Don’t be fooled by the “fat-free” label — it’s the carbs that are the culprit in weight gain and chronic disease.
Muffins: The high amount of carbs in most muffins will profoundly interfere with your leptin and insulin levels, and that is true even if it’s a “healthy” muffin, like a bran muffin. Of course, in order to make a bran muffin palatable, it probably contains quite a bit of added sugar, on top of the grains it’s made with. Many muffins are also jumbo-sized, easily packing over 30 grams of sugar, or more.
Canned Fruit: Fruit in and of itself can be problematic if eaten in excess, as it’s a source of naturally occurring fructose. But many canned fruits are also packed in sugary syrup, loaded with high fructose corn syrup. Just one cup of canned peaches or pears can contain over 30 grams of sugar. You’re far better off with a fresh piece of fruit instead, but use moderation. I recommend restricting your consumption of fructose to no more than 25 grams per day, with a maximum of 15 grams a day from fresh fruit. If you’re already overweight, or have cancer, heart disease or diabetes (or are at high risk of them), then you’re probably better off cutting that down to 10-15 grams per day — fruit included. 

Why a High-Sugar Diet Will Make You Fat

If you are seeking to lose weight and optimize your health, foods that contain added sugar, as well as grains like bread and pasta should be eliminated or else comprise very low percentages of your diet. Most people who bought into the “high-carb, low-fat” dietary recommendations has likely struggled with their weight and health, wondering what they’re doing wrong.
The problem is that overeating carbohydrates can prevent a higher percentage of fats from being used for energy, and lead to an increase in fat production and storage. Your body has a limited capacity to store excess carbohydrates. This is one of the reasons why elevated blood sugar follows their overconsumption. If you are not able to immediately use the sugar as a result of intense physical activity then one of the ways your body avoids dangerously elevated blood sugar is through converting those excess carbohydrates into excess body fat primarily in your belly.
The way it works is that any carbohydrates not immediately burned by your body as fuel are stored in the form of glycogen (a long string of glucose molecules linked together). Your body has two storage sites for glycogen: your liver and your muscles. Once the glycogen levels are filled in both your liver and muscles, excess carbohydrates are converted into fat and stored in your adipose, that is, fatty tissue.
So, although carbohydrates are “fat-free,” this is misleading because excess carbohydrates end up as excess fat. When you see refined grains on a food label, think of them as “hidden sugar,” and when you see sugar, think of it as “hidden fat.”
But that’s not the worst of it.
Any meal or snack high in “complex” carbohydrates, i.e. starch is actually a complex of glucose molecules, will also generate a rapid rise in blood glucose. To adjust for this rapid rise, your pancreas secretes insulin, which then lowers your levels of blood glucose. The problem is that insulin is essentially a storage hormone, evolved to put aside excess carbohydrate calories in the form of fat in case of future famine. So the insulin that’s stimulated by excess carbohydrates aggressively promotes the accumulation of body fat! This was enormously useful in ancient times when calories were frequently scarce, but today this setup is a disaster waiting to happen.
In other words, when you eat too much sugar, bread, pasta, and any other grain products, you’re essentially sending a hormonal message, via insulin, to your body that says “store more fat.”  This is actually a highly beneficial response in certain scenarios such as when calories are very scarce. This provides a major survival advantage — but for nearly everyone reading this, having insufficient calories is not an issue, so this protective mechanism actually sabotages your health.
If you’re having trouble getting your mind around this, a wonderful infographic created by Column Five for Massive Health, based on Why We Get Fat by science writer Gary Taubes, explains exactly why eating fat doesn’t make you fat — but eating carbs like sugar can kill you …

IMAGE COURTESY OF MASSIVE HEALTH. READ ABOUT THIS INFOGRAPHIC

Is It Possible to Cut Out Dietary Sugar and Still Feel Satisfied?

Based on USDA estimates the average American consumes 12 teaspoons of sugar a day, which equates to about TWO TONS of sugar during a lifetime. Why we eat this much sugar is not difficult to understand — it tastes good, and it gives us pleasure by triggering an innate process in your brain via dopamine and opioid signals.
What it is doing to us on both a physical and emotional level is another story entirely, and most people stand to reap major improvements in their health by cutting back on, or eliminating, sugar altogether from their diets. Many do not realize this, but frequent hunger may be a major clue that you’re not eating correctly. Your body needs fuel regularly and if you don’t provide it with the proper amounts of fats and protein and overload on sugars, you will not fill your energy reserves properly. This sets up a vicious cycle of cravings for the sugar that will solve the problem in the short run but serve to radically shorten your life in the long term.
Just remember that your body is very intelligent and only seeking to keep you alive and healthy. The cravings are its short-term solution to keep you alive and functioning. But you need to exert some higher order cognitive skills to understand how to shift out of carb burning and into a fat-burning machine. Fat is far more satiating than carbs, so if you have cut down on sugar and feel ravenous, thinking you “can’t do without the carbs,” remember this is a sign that you haven’t replaced them with sufficient amounts of fat. So go ahead and add a bit more healthy fats from the list below:

Olives and Olive oil
Coconuts and coconut oil
Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk

Raw nuts, such as, almonds or pecans
Organic pastured egg yolks
Avocados

Grass-fed meats
Palm oil
Unheated organic nut oils

 
According to experts, carbs should ideally make up 20-30 percent of your diet, while 50-70 percent of your diet should be healthy fats. While many can appear to be healthy on vastly different ratios it is best to examine the long-term consequences of veering far from these ratios when deciding if they make sense to follow for you personally.
In order to achieve this and minimize your sugar intake, you need to avoid most processed foods, as even savory foods like salad dressing, soup, and bread often contain added sugar. For optimal health, eat natural whole foods primarily, and limit your fructose consumption to below 25 grams per day. If you still want to use a sweetener occasionally, the sweet herb stevia makes a good sugar substitute. (Avoid ALL artificial sweeteners, which can damage your health even more quickly than sugar.)

Did You Know?

View the Infographic
Embed this infographic on your website:

Find out how much sugar there is per 100 grams of certain dried fruits, spices, condiments, and other common food products through our infographic “A Sweet Trap: Shocking Amounts of Sugar in Common Foods.” Use the embed code to share it on your website.
Find out how much sugar there is per 100 grams of certain dried fruits, spices, condiments, and other common food products through our infographic “A Sweet Trap: Shocking Amounts of Sugar in Common Foods.”

Click on the code area and press CTRL + C (for Windows) / CMD + C (for Macintosh) to copy the code.
How to Kick Your Sugar Addiction to the Curb

If you’re struggling with sugar addiction and having trouble dealing with cravings, I highly recommend trying an energy psychology technique called Turbo Tapping, which has helped many “soda addicts” kick their sweet habit, and it should work for any type of sweet craving you may have. A couple of other tricks to try to kick your sugar cravings:

Exercise: Anyone who exercises intensely on a regular basis will know that significant amounts of cardiovascular exercise is one of the best “cures” for food cravings. It always amazes me how my appetite, especially for sweets, dramatically decreases after a good workout. I believe the mechanism is related to the dramatic reduction in insulin levels that occurs after exercise.
Organic, black coffee: Coffee is a potent opioid receptor antagonist, and contains compounds such as cafestrol — found plentifully in both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee — which can bind to your opioid receptors, occupy them and essentially block your addiction to other opioid-releasing foods.i ii This may profoundly reduce the addictive power of other substances, such as sugar.

References:

i Clin Exp Pharmacol Physiol. 2012 Feb 14.
ii Nature. 1983 Jan 20;301(5897):246-8.

By Dr. Mercola

Alzheimer’s disease is currently at epidemic proportions, with 5.4 million Americans — including one in eight people aged 65 and over — living with Alzheimer’s disease, according to the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2011 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figuresi.
By 2050, this is expected to jump to 16 million, and in the next 20 years it is projected that Alzheimer’s will affect one in four Americans.
You do not, however, have to feel powerless against this disease, as although there is no known cure as of yet, there are simple strategies available to significantly lower your risk.

The Alzheimer’s Risk Factor You Probably Haven’t Heard Of …

Do you heed the advice of public health officials who advise putting on sunscreen every time you go out in the sun?
This could very well be raising your risk of Alzheimer’s disease because it blocks not only your body’s ability to produce vitamin D, but also your production of cholesterol sulfate.
Unfortunately most of you reading this have probably only heard of cholesterol referred to in a negative way, but actually adequate cholesterol is essential for good health.
For example, 25 percent of the cholesterol in your body is in your brain, even though your brain is only 2 percent of your body’s weight. The cholesterol is absolutely essential for neuron transport, which is why lack of cholesterol can negatively affect your brain function. But impaired memory and dementia are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to low cholesterol’s impact on your brain. Having too little of this beneficial compound also:

Increases your risk of depression
Can cause you to commit suicide
May lead to violent behavior and aggression
Increase your risk of cancer and Parkinson’s disease

That’s a bit of background to get you warmed up to the idea that cholesterol is your friend, not your enemy. Now, getting back to sunscreen and Alzheimer’s, using these products will make it virtually impossible for your body to do what it was designed to do, which is produce important, disease-fighting substances like vitamin D and cholesterol sulfate when exposed to the sun. Dr. Stephanie Seneffii, a senior scientist at MIT who has a wealth of information about the importance of sulfur, explains:

” … depletion of sulfate supply to the brain is another important contributor to Alzheimer’s, and I further think that sulfate is supplied to the brain principally by sterol sulfates like cholesterol sulfate as well as their derivatives like vitamin D3 sulfate. Both cholesterol sulfate and vitamin D3 sulfate are synthesized in the skin upon exposure to sunlight, and it is theorized that the skin is the major supplier of these nutrients to the body. This is why I believe that excess sunscreen use and excess sun avoidance are another principal causative factor in Alzheimer’s disease.”

Why is Cholesterol Sulfate so Important?

Your skin produces large amounts of cholesterol sulfate, which is water-soluble and provides a healthy barrier against bacteria and other potentially disease-causing pathogens that might otherwise enter your body through your skin. And, due to its polarity, it can enter both fat cells and muscle cells with equal ease. Dr. Seneff proposes that, because of this, cholesterol sulfate may be able to protect fat and muscle cells from glucose and oxygen damage.
She also argues that when you’re deficient in cholesterol sulfate, your muscle and fat cells become more prone to damage, which subsequently can lead to glucose intolerance, a condition where your muscles cannot process glucose as a fuel. As a result, your fat cells have to store more fat in order to supply fuel to your muscles, and excess fat accumulates as damage increases.
Sulfur also plays an important role in glucose metabolism. She hypothesizesiii that if a sufficient amount of sulfur is available, it will act as a decoy to glucose, effectively diverting it to reduce the sulfur rather than glycating and causing damage. This would have the beneficial effect of reducing inflammation, as sugar (glucose) is highly inflammatory and wreaks havoc in your body.
What does this have to do with your brain? The process applies not only to fat and muscle cells, but also to cells in your brain (and, in fact, to all cells in your body). Dr. Seneff explains:

“Essentially all cells in the body are surrounded by an exterior coat made up of complex molecules called “GAGs” — glycosaminoglycans. These contain sugars, proteins, and a large population of attached ions, particularly sulfate anions. These serve, I believe, an important role in helping to safely break down sugar. Simply stated, the sulfur atom deflects the reducing actions of sugars away from the vulnerable proteins.
The sulfate anions also provide a negative field around the cell, which is very useful for keeping bacteria out, because bacteria are also negatively charged, and hence repelled by the cell’s negative electric field. So cells with lots of surrounding sulfate are afforded protection from invasive bacteria. If a bacterium does get in, the cell will have to release oxidizing agents to kill it, and the cell itself will suffer damage from exposure to its own defense system. The fats in the cell membrane are more vulnerable to oxidative damage when there is insufficient cholesterol to protect them.”

This means that depletion of the sulfate supply to your brain could leave your brain cells more susceptible to damage and may increase your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Seneff also points out to recent papers that have also linked insufficient cholesterol with Alzheimer’s and mental decline:

Serum levels of cholesterol as well as the ability to synthesize cholesterol are inversely associated with mental declineiv in the elderly
A study directly comparing Alzheimer’s patients with age-matched controls showed a reduced serum level of LDL in the Alzheimer’s patientsv, with the more severe cases showing further reduction in LDL

Vitamin D Deficiency Also Increase Alzheimer’s Risk

Sunscreen is a double-edged sword when it comes to your brain health, as aside from blocking your ability to produce cholesterol sulfate, it also blocks your production of vitamin D — and there is no shortage of research linking vitamin D to brain health. One such study was actually launched after family members of Alzheimer’s patients who were treated with large doses of prescription vitamin D reported they were acting and performing better than before.
Strong links between low levels of vitamin D in Alzheimer’s patientsvi and poor outcomes on cognitive tests were revealed. Researchers believe that optimal vitamin D levels may enhance the amount of important chemicals in your brain and protect brain cells. Vitamin D may also exert some of its beneficial effects on Alzheimer’s through its anti-inflammatory and immune-boosting properties. Sufficient vitamin D is imperative for proper functioning of your immune system to combat inflammation that is also associated with Alzheimer’s.

Safe Sun Exposure Without Sunscreen

If you work outdoors all day as part of your job, or if you need to protect sensitive areas of your face, like around your eyes, that are particularly susceptible to photoaging and not large enough a surface to impact vitamin D levels if blocked with sunscreen, certain sunscreens available in most health food stores, and my Healthy Skin Sunscreen, are safe to use when the need arises. However, I personally use and recommend wearing a hat when you are in the sun as this typically can shade the sensitive skin around your eyes.
I would avoid applying sunscreen regularly as most commercial ones have toxic chemicals that you should not be exposed to. If you do use a sunscreen make sure it is safe and natural. Remember once your skin turns the lightest shade of pink (if you’re Caucasian), it’s time to get out of the sun. Past this point of exposure your body will not produce any more vitamin D and you’ll begin to have sun damage. And sunburn anywhere on your body is not good for your health.
If sunshine outdoors is not an option for you because of the winter or your job, you can get many of the same benefits by using a safe tanning bed (one with electronic ballasts rather than magnetic ballasts, to avoid unnecessary exposure to electromagnetic fields). Safe tanning beds also have less of the dangerous UVA than sunlight, while unsafe ones have more UVA than sunlight.
In terms of vitamin D, it’s especially important to get it from sun exposure or a tanning bed, rather than a vitamin D3 supplement if at all possible, because when you expose your skin to sunshine, your body produces vitamin D3 sulfate. This form of vitamin D is water-soluble, unlike oral vitamin D3 supplements, which is unsulfated. The water-soluble form can travel freely in your bloodstream, whereas the unsulfated form needs LDL (the so-called “bad” cholesterol) as a vehicle of transport. Dr. Seneff believes that the oral non-sulfated form of vitamin D may not provide all of the same benefits as the vitamin D created in your skin from sun exposure, because it cannot be converted to vitamin D sulfate.

Coconut Oil Offers Profound Benefits for Your Brain

Coconut oil may help protect you from Alzheimer’s by providing your brain with an additional fuel supply. Your brain actually manufactures its own insulin to convert glucose into the fuel it needs, but recent discoveries indicate that your brain can essentially become “diabetic.” As you may know, diabetes is the condition where your body’s response to insulin is weakened due to “insulin resistance”—your body eventually stops producing the insulin necessary to regulate blood sugar.
Just like with diabetes, your brain can become insulin resistant. If this happens, your brain loses its ability to convert glucose into energy, leading to essentially a starvation state, and this can result in brain atrophy. This is what happens to Alzheimer’s patients—portions of their brain start to atrophy, or starve, leading to impaired functioning and eventual loss of memory, speech, movement and personality. Given this, you can now understand why diabetics have a 65 percent increased risk of also being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease—BOTH conditions are tied to insulin resistance.
This is where coconut oil may help.
Coconut oil provides ketones to your brain, and ketones appear to be the preferred source of brain food in patients with diabetes and/or Alzheimer’s. Coconut oil is a primary source of ketones, since it contains 66 percent medium chain triglycerides (MCTs), a type of fat your body can easily and quickly convert into ketones.
In effect, coconut oil is a fat that acts like a carbohydrate in your body, and carbs are your brain’s favorite food. For more about this, refer to this article, which discusses this in more detail. Therapeutic levels of MCTs can be achieved by taking just over two tablespoons of coconut oil daily (about 35ml or 7 level teaspoons), but I recommend working your way up to 4 tablespoons per day, gradually, beginning with just one teaspoon in the morning, WITH a meal to minimize the risk of stomach upset.

Other Important Tips for Alzheimer’s Prevention

In order to effectively prevent a disease, you must address its underlying causative factors. Although we do not have definitive “proof” of what, specifically, causes Alzheimer’s, a number of factors have been linked to an increased risk of dementia, and we know enough about those to in turn make educated recommendations for preventing this type of brain deterioration. Some of the best strategies for Alzheimer’s prevention, aside from adequate sunlight exposure, include:

Fructose. You simply MUST keep your level below 25 grams per day. This toxic influence is serving as the master regulator of brain toxicity. Since the average person is exceeding this recommendation by 300% this is a pervasive and serious issue. I view this as the MOST important step you can take.

Additionally, when your liver is busy processing fructose (which your liver turns into fat), it severely hampers its ability to make cholesterol. This is yet another important facet that explains how and why excessive fructose consumption is so detrimental to your health.
Keep your fasting insulin levels below 3. This is indirectly related to fructose, as it will clearly lead to insulin resistance. However other sugars, grains and lack of exercise are also factors here.
Vitamin B12: According to a small Finnish study recently published in the journal Neurologyvii, people who consume foods rich in B12 may reduce their risk of Alzheimer’s in their later years. For each unit increase in the marker of vitamin B12 (holotranscobalamin) the risk of developing Alzheimer’s was reduced by 2 percent. Very high doses of B vitamins have also been found to treat Alzheimer’s disease and reduce memory loss.
Eat a nutritious diet, rich in folate, such as the one described in my nutrition plan. Strict vegetarian dietsviii have been shown to increase your Alzheimer’s risk, whereas diets high in omega-3’s lower your riskix. However, vegetables, without question, are your best form of folate, and we should all eat plenty of fresh raw veggies every day.
High-quality animal based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil. (I recommend avoiding most fish because although fish is naturally high in omega-3, most fish are now severely contaminated with mercury.) High intake of the omega-3 fatty acid DHA helps by preventing cell damage caused by Alzheimer’s disease, thereby slowing down its progression, and lowering your risk of developing the disorder. Researchers have also said DHA “dramatically reduces the impact of the Alzheimer’s gene.”
Avoid and remove mercury from your body. Dental amalgam fillings are one of the major sources of mercury, however you should be healthy prior to having them removed. Once you have adjusted to following the diet described in my optimized nutrition plan, you can follow the mercury detox protocol and then find a biological dentist to have your amalgams removed.
Avoid aluminum, such as antiperspirants, non-stick cookware, vaccine adjuvants, etc.
Exercise regularly. It’s been suggested that exercise can trigger a change in the way the amyloid precursor protein is metabolizedx, thus, slowing down the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s. Exercise also increases levels of the protein PGC-1alpha. New research has shown that people with Alzheimer’s have less PGC-1alpha in their brainsxi, and cells that contain more of the protein produce less of the toxic amyloid protein associated with Alzheimer’s.

I would strongly recommend reviewing the Peak Fitness Technique for my specific recommendations.
Avoid flu vaccinations as most contain both mercury and aluminum!
Eat plenty of blueberries. Wild blueberries, which have high anthocyanin and antioxidant content, are known to guard against Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases.
Challenge your mind daily. Mental stimulation, especially learning something new, such as learning to play an instrument or a new language, is associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s. Researchers suspect that mental challenge helps to build up your brain, making it less susceptible to the lesions associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Avoid anticholinergic and statin drugs. Drugs that block acetylcholine, a nervous system neurotransmitter, have been shown to increase your risk of dementia. These drugs include certain night-time pain relievers, antihistamines, sleep aids, certain antidepressants, medications to control incontinence, and certain narcotic pain relievers.

A study found that those who took drugs classified as ‘definite anticholinergics’ had a four times higher incidence of cognitive impairmentxii. Regularly taking two of these drugs further increased the risk of cognitive impairment. Statin drugs are particularly problematic because they suppress the synthesis of cholesterol.

As Dr. Seneff reports:

“Statin drugs interfere with cholesterol synthesis in the liver, but the lipophilic statin drugs (like lovastatin and simvastatin) also interfere with the synthesis of cholesterol in the brain. This would then directly impact the neurons’ ability to maintain adequate cholesterol in their membranes. Indeed, a population-based study showed that people who had ever taken statins had an increased risk of Alzheimer’s diseasexiii, a hazard ratio of 1.21. More alarmingly, people who used to take statins had a hazard ratio of 2.54 (over two and a half times the risk to Alzheimer’s) compared to people who never took statins.”

For more information, read Dr. Seneff’s essay on statins and Alzheimer’s diseasexiv.

$29 Billion Introduction from 29billion on Vimeo.By Dr. Mercola

Millions of people around the world take medications known as statins to lower their cholesterol.
The current value of the cholesterol-lowering drug industry is estimated at around $29 billion — and this is clearly a conservative estimate considering spending on cholesterol drugs in the United States alone reached nearly $19 billion in 2010.
But have the facts about cholesterol and heart disease been distorted by drug companies eager to increase their profits? 
A new documentary film project is underway to look for answers, and get the truth out about cholesterol once and for all…

Why Haven’t You Heard the Truth About Cholesterol?

There may be $29 billion very good reasons why … and this is the premise behind the new documentary film $29 Billion Reasons to Lie About Cholesterol (based on a book by the same name, authored by Justin Smith). As the film’s synopsis explains:

“So many resources are currently directed at cholesterol-lowering, however, a huge body of evidence suggests that this cholesterol-lowering is having little or no effect on people’s health. In fact, it may even be doing more harm than good.
We want to present the facts about cholesterol to the general public. These facts are fully supported by published studies within the medical literature, but unfortunately they are hardly ever discussed.
The pharmaceutical industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year promoting the idea that high cholesterol causes heart disease. The other side of the story receives very little attention. As a result, even doctors may have been misled; since they have only been exposed to the pharmaceutical industry’s viewpoint.”

Could it be possible that nearly everything your doctor and the media is telling you about high cholesterol and how it relates to saturated fats, heart disease and strokes is wrong?
Absolutely!
Could it also be possible that the makers of statin drugs are generating massive ill-gotten profits of this completely misguided and patently incorrect medical dogma — while patients, maybe even you or someone you love, are risking poor health or even death as a result? Yes!  And it’s time the word got out.

Does Lower Cholesterol Really Lead to Better Health?

A major clue that something is very off with the notion that high cholesterol causes heart disease can be found in this: even as cholesterol levels have become lower, rates of heart disease deaths have not followed suit!
In a report by Smith, it’s noted:

” … between 1994 and 2006 the percentage of men aged 65 to 74 with ‘high’ cholesterol decreased from 87% to 54% … Despite this, the rate of coronary heart disease for this age group stayed about the same … Other age groups have experienced an increase in the rate of heart disease as the number of people with ‘high’ cholesterol has decreased.”

Now here’s something you might find surprising: it turns out evidence linking high cholesterol to heart disease is actually weak, including the results of the Framingham Heart Study, which is often cited as proof of the lipid hypothesis (the notion that dietary fat leads to high cholesterol and causes heart disease).
The Framingham Heart Study began in 1948 and involved some 6,000 people from the town of Framingham, Massachusetts who filled out detailed questionnaires about their lifestyle habits and diets. The study is credited with identifying heart disease risk factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure, lack of exercise and, yes, high cholesterol.
Despite being widely publicized, the cholesterol link was weak, as researchers noted those who weighed more and had abnormally high blood cholesterol levels were slightly more at risk for future heart disease. What you don’t hear about is the fact that the more cholesterol and saturated fat people ate, the lower their cholesterol levels. In a 1992 editorial published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. William Castelli, a former director of the Framingham Heart study, stated:

“In Framingham, Mass., the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol … We found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least and were the most physically active.”

Cholesterol is simply not the main perpetrator causing heart disease. Dr. Stephen Sinatra, a board certified cardiologist and a prominent expert in the field of natural cardiology, explained in a recent interview: 

“Let’s face it, cholesterol is something your body needs. If you look at the MRFIT study [Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial] where they looked at 180,000 men over a period of… 13 years (1973-80); men with cholesterol of 330 had less hemorrhagic stroke than men with cholesterol less than 180. If you look at cholesterol numbers, the higher cholesterol number would give you protection from hemorrhagic stroke. (I’m not talking about ischemic stroke now but hemorrhagic stroke.)
… [W]e need cholesterol in our skin to activate vitamin D3 from sunlight.  We need cholesterol to make our sex hormones… to make our adrenal hormones.  We need it for lubrication.  We need it for neurotransmitter function in the brain. When LDL is driven too low, it’s no wonder that a lot of patients develop memory problems or pre-Alzheimer’s, or even total global amnesia, which is really losing one’s memory.  It’s very frightful and I have seen several cases.… There are so many other aspects that in my mind play a much bigger role that I put cholesterol down at the low end of the spectrum.”

Most of Your Body’s Cholesterol is Made by Your Liver, Not “Ingested” Via Your Diet

If high cholesterol and high-fat diets are really NOT the cause of heart disease, then how did this massive misinformation campaign start? It actually started more than 100 years ago when the lipid hypothesis was developed by a German pathologist named Rudolph Virchow. After studying arterial plaques from corpses, he theorized that cholesterol in your blood led to the development of plaques in your arteries.
Meanwhile, in 1913 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nikolaj Nikolajewitsch Anitschkow fed rabbits cholesterol and determined that it led to atherosclerotic changes (apparently no one questioned the fact that rabbits are herbivores and do not naturally consume cholesterol!).
This started the notion that eating cholesterol leads to plaque deposits in your arteries, and at that time it was believed that all cholesterol in your blood was due to dietary sources. This, however, is not true, as it’s now known that your liver makes about 75 percent of your body’s cholesterol. That’s right! Even if you didn’t eat any cholesterol, you would still have cholesterol in your body, which is a good thing considering it’s needed by every one of your cells to produce cell membranes.
Your diet is actually an afterthought when it comes to what your cholesterol levels will be, but this simple truth is largely ignored or unrealized even by many physicians. In fact, statins are actually HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, that is, they act by blocking the enzyme in your liver that is responsible for making cholesterol (HMG-CoA reductase).

How Low Should Your Cholesterol Go? Official Guidelines Unsupported by Research, Influenced by Drug Company Dollars

The other interesting point to the cholesterol myth has to do with how low your levels should actually go; this, too, is a product of misinformation. In 2004, the U.S. government’s National Cholesterol Education Program panel advised those at risk for heart disease to attempt to reduce their LDL cholesterol to new specific, very low, levels.
Before 2004, a 130-milligram LDL cholesterol level was considered healthy.
The updated guidelines, however, recommended levels of less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk — levels that often require multiple cholesterol-lowering drugs to achieve. In 2006, a review in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that there is insufficient evidence to support the target numbers outlined by the panel. The authors of the review were unable to find research providing evidence that achieving a specific LDL target level was important in and of itself, and found that the studies attempting to do so suffered from major flaws.
Several of the scientists who helped develop the guidelines even admitted that the scientific evidence supporting the less-than-70 recommendation was not very strong! So how did these excessively low cholesterol guidelines come about?  Eight of the nine doctors on the panel that developed the new cholesterol guidelines had been making money from the drug companies that manufacture statin cholesterol-lowering drugs — wouldn’t you know it, the same drugs the new guidelines suddenly created a dramatically larger market for in the United States.
The Washington Post reported:

“The extent of the connections was stunning: Of the nine members of the panel that wrote the guidelines, six had each received research grants, speaking honoraria or consulting fees from at least three and in some cases all five of the manufacturers of statins; only one had no financial links at all. If all the members with conflicts had recused themselves, in fact, only two would have been left.”

Did You Know Statins Can Actually Harm Your Heart?

While statin drugs do lower cholesterol very effectively, if cholesterol is not the culprit in heart disease, what purpose does this serve?  A new look at statin cholesterol-lowering drugs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims that no study has ever proven that statins improve all-cause mortality — in other words, they don’t prolong your life any longer than if you’d not taken them at all. And rather than improving your life, they actually contribute to a deterioration in the quality of your life, destroying muscles and endangering liver, kidney and even heart function.
According to Stephanie Seneff, author of this stunning revelation:

“Statin drugs inhibit the action of an enzyme, HMG coenzyme A reductase, that catalyses an early step in the 25-step process that produces cholesterol. This step is also an early step in the synthesis of a number of other powerful biological substances that are involved in cellular regulation processes and antioxidant effects.
One of these is coenzyme Q10, present in the greatest concentration in the heart, which plays an important role in mitochondrial energy production and acts as a potent antioxidant …
Statins also interfere with cell-signaling mechanisms mediated by so-called G-proteins, which orchestrate complex metabolic responses to stressed conditions. Another crucial substance whose synthesis is blocked is dolichol, which plays a crucial role in the endoplasmic reticulum. We can’t begin to imagine what diverse effects all of this disruption, due to interference with HMG coenzyme A reductase, might have on the cell’s ability to function … There can be no doubt that statins will make your remaining days on earth a lot less pleasant than they would otherwise be … ”

Take one study in Clinical Cardiology, which found heart muscle function was “significantly better” in the control group than in those taking statin drugs! The researchers concluded:

“Statin therapy is associated with decreased myocardial [heart muscle] function.”

What’s often the end result when your heart muscle function is weakened or decreased? Heart failure! The study did not address causes, but it’s widely known that statins lower your CoQ10 levels by blocking the pathway involved in cholesterol production — the same pathway by which Q10 is produced. Statins also reduce the blood cholesterol that transports CoQ10 and other fat-soluble antioxidants.
The loss of CoQ10 leads to loss of cell energy and increased free radicals which, in turn, can further damage your mitochondrial DNA, effectively setting into motion an evil circle of increasing free radicals and mitochondrial damage. As your body gets more and more depleted of CoQ10, you may suffer from fatigue, muscle weakness and soreness, and eventually heart failure, so it is imperative if you take statin drugs that you take CoQ10 or, if you are over the age of 40, the reduced version called ubiquinol.

Statins Increase Your Risk of Chronic Disease

Statins appear to provoke serious risks of chronic disease, including diabetes, through a few different mechanisms. One primary mechanism is by increasing your insulin levels, which can be extremely harmful to your health. Chronically elevated insulin levels cause inflammation in your body, which is the hallmark of most chronic disease. In fact, elevated insulin levels lead to heart disease, which, ironically, is the primary reason for taking a statin drug in the first place!
It can also promote belly fat, high blood pressure, heart attacks, chronic fatigue, thyroid disruption, and diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. These drugs have also been directly linked to over 300 side effects, which include:

Cognitive loss
Neuropathy
Anemia

Acidosis
Frequent fevers
Cataracts

Sexual dysfunction
An increase in cancer risk
Pancreatic dysfunction

Immune system suppression
Muscle problems, polyneuropathy (nerve damage in the hands and feet), and rhabdomyolysis, a serious degenerative muscle tissue condition
Hepatic dysfunction. (Due to the potential increase in liver enzymes, patients must be monitored for normal liver function)

Did You Know?

View the Infographic
Embed this infographic on your website:

Learn the better indicator of heart disease risk than just your total cholesterol – plus the dangers of statins and the need to supplement with CoQ10 if you’re taking these cholesterol-lowering drugs – through our infographic “How to Make Sense of Your Cholesterol Levels.” Use the embed code to share it on your website.
Learn the better indicator of heart disease risk than just your total cholesterol – plus the dangers of statins and the need to supplement with CoQ10 if you’re taking these cholesterol-lowering drugs – through our infographic “How to Make Sense of Your Cholesterol Levels.”

Click on the code area and press CTRL + C (for Windows) / CMD + C (for Macintosh) to copy the code.
Are You Ready to Stop Buying Into the Cholesterol Lie?

The bottom line is this: your body NEEDS cholesterol — it is important in the production of cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D and bile acids that help you to digest fat. Cholesterol also helps your brain form memories and is vital to your neurological function. Further, there’s no doubt that statin drugs can wreak havoc with your health, and there’s compelling evidence that most people who currently take them simply do not need them.
If your physician is urging you to check your total cholesterol, then you should also know that this test will tell you virtually nothing about your risk of heart disease, unless it is 330 or higher. HDL percentage is a far more potent indicator for heart disease risk. Here are the two ratios you should pay attention to:

HDL/Total Cholesterol Ratio: Should ideally be above 24 percent. If below 10 percent, you have a significantly elevated risk for heart disease.
Triglyceride/HDL Ratio: Should be below 2.

The fact is that 75 percent of your cholesterol is produced by your liver, which is influenced by your insulin levels. Therefore, if you optimize your insulin level, you will automatically optimize your cholesterol! By modifying your diet and lifestyle in the following ways, you can safely optimize your cholesterol and lower your risk of heart disease at the same time:

Reduce, with the plan of eliminating, grains and sugars in your diet, replacing them with mostly whole, fresh vegetable carbs. Also try to consume a good portion of your food raw. 
Make sure you are getting enough high quality, animal-based omega 3 fats, such as krill oil.
Other heart-healthy foods include olive oil, coconut and coconut oil, organic raw dairy products and eggs, avocados, raw nuts and seeds, and organic grass-fed meats.
Exercise daily.
Avoid smoking or drinking alcohol excessively.
Be sure to get plenty of good, restorative sleep.

One final point to chew on, Dr. Seneff actually believes it’s difficult to get “too much” cholesterol in your diet, particularly in the standard American diet. But you may very well be getting too little, and that can cause problems.
Foods that are very high in cholesterol, like caviar, liver, and the adrenal glands of bears, were highly valued in some cultures that also had very low rates of heart disease and other modern diseases. Likewise, many foods that are today shunned because they are high in saturated fat, such as grass-fed beef, egg yolks, coconut oil and butter, and therefore “bad” for your cholesterol are actually among the healthiest fats you can eat!

By Dr. Mercola

Calcium is one of the most popular dietary supplements on the market, largely because of the widely circulated mantra that mega-doses of this mineral are essential for building and maintaining healthy bones.
As a result, many people believe that taking a calcium supplement is a simple way to prevent bone fractures associated with osteoporosis.
What they have not been told is that while you can force increased bone mineral density with calcium supplements, you cannot be sure that this will result in greater bone strength.
Be Careful In Interpreting Bone Tests Results

Bone density, while an excellent measurement of compressive strength, does not reveal tensile strength, i.e. whether or not your bone will resist breaking from being pulled or stretched, as commonly occurs in a fall or similar trauma.
Moreover, “osteoporosis,” as presently defined by bone scans (DXA scan) using the T-score, inappropriately defines “normal bone density” according to the standard of a 25-year old, young adult.
In other words, if you are 40, 50, or even 100, the T-score-based system says your bones are not normal, or even diseased if they are not as dense as they were when you were a young adult.
If in fact they used the age-appropriate Z-score, most cases of “osteopenia,” and many cases of “osteoporosis,” would suddenly disappear because they were inappropriately classified from the start.
Do Calcium Supplements Predispose You to Breast Cancer?

Ultimately, the “calcium is good for your bones” mantra is yet another example of a good theory gone wrong, and represents how broadly deluded the mainstream medical community is about bone health and the nature of osteoporosis, and its highly fabricated twin condition “osteopenia.” 
There are actually a number of studies indicating that mass market calcium supplements increase your risk for cardiovascular incidents and other problems, while offering little benefit to your bones. Only because something can increase your bone density: eating what amounts to chalk or pulverized bone meal, or worse, chemicals like the drugs Fosamax and Evista, does not mean this will translate into improved health for your bones, or any of your other organ systems.
Indeed, before jumping off the lemming-like cliff of conventional medical wisdom, consider there is a solid body of research indicating that higher bone density may actually increase the risk of malignant breast cancer by 300% or more! Considering that close to 1 in 4 women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lives, with breast cancer top on the list, isn’t the neurotic fixation on increasing bone density with calcium supplements misplaced, especially when it may increase the overall risk of dying from cancer and, as we will see, cardiovascular disease (the #1 killer), as well?
Calcium Can be Beneficial or Deadly Depending on Where it Ends Up in Your Body

Calcium is the most abundant mineral in your body, necessary for not only bone health but also regulating your heartbeat, conducting nerve impulses, clotting blood and stimulating hormone secretions. Your body does not make calcium, and in fact loses calcium daily through your skin, nails, hair, sweat and elimination, which is why you must replace it via your diet.
It has been estimated, however, that your body excretes as little as 100 mg a day, making the current recommendations by the National Osteoporosis Foundation for women over 50 to take 1200 mg a day, a bit troubling.  When we compare our calcium-rich diet to the traditional calcium-poor Chinese peasant diet, which was free of cow’s milk and calcium supplements, approximately 250 mg a day of plant-based calcium was all that was needed to fulfill their bodily needs – and this is a culture with no word for “osteoporosis” in its 3,000+ year old language!
The truth is that taking any calcium in excess or isolation, without complementary nutrients like magnesium, vitamin D and vitamin K2, which help keep your body in balance, can have adverse effects, such as calcium building up in coronary arteries and causing heart attacks. Even taking calcium with vitamin D does not appear to be enough to prevent these types of adverse effects.
So when you take a biologically foreign form of calcium (such as limestone, oyster shell and bone meal (hydroxylapatite), or when your body’s ability to direct calcium to the right places becomes impaired (as when you are deficient in vitamin K2), calcium may be deposited where it shouldn’t be, which can lead to multiple health problems.
Often, much of the burden of removing the excess calcium falls on the kidneys, which is why it has been proven on numerous occasions that calcium carbonate rapidly calcifies arteries in those with compromised kidney function, especially hemodialysis patients.  Calcium deposits are, in fact, major contributors and even causative factors in many conditions, including the following:

Cellulite and scar tissue
Coronary artery disease and atherosclerosis
Dental plaque and gum disease
Hypothyroidism

Obesity and diabetes
Alzheimer’s disease
Breast cancer and cysts (fibrocystic breasts)
Gallstones, colon cancer and Crohn’s disease

Kidney stones
Ovarian cysts
Cataracts, glaucoma, and macular degeneration
Bone spurs, stiff joints, osteoarthritis, tendonitis and bone cancer
Too Much Calcium May Create Mineral Deficiencies that Promote Disease

Robert Thompson, M.D. wrote a book on this subject called The Calcium Lie, which explains that bone is comprised of at least a dozen minerals, and the exclusive focus on calcium supplementation is likely to worsen bone density and actually increase your risk for osteoporosis. Dr. Thompson believes overconsumption of calcium creates other mineral deficiencies and imbalances that will increase your risk of heart disease, kidney stones, gallstones, osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism, obesity and type 2 diabetes.
If your calcium supplement is being turned into “little rocks” that are being deposited in your soft tissues and arteries, you can begin to understand how this could be increasing your risk for a heart attack, stroke or other health condition.
Many believe that arterial plaque is simply a buildup of cholesterol. But in reality, more than 90 percent of these fatty plaques are calcified. Cholesterol is soft and waxy and does not impair the elasticity of your arteries. But calcium deposits are like concrete, “hardening” your arteries and impairing their ability to expand. It is calcium — not cholesterol — that induces arterial stiffness and makes the plaque less stable and more prone to chipping off and subsequently inducing a life-threatening clot.
This is particularly important for postmenopausal women because hormone balance is necessary for proper calcium signaling — directing your body to deposit calcium into your bones. When hormones fall out of balance, this signaling causes calcium to slowly exit your bones and become deposited in your arteries instead. Simply taking a calcium supplement will not solve the problem because if your body cannot direct the calcium to the right spot, it will cause far more harm than good.
Why Vitamin K2 is Crucial if You Take Vitamin D and Calcium …

Vitamin K2 engages in a delicate dance with vitamin D; whereas vitamin D provides improved bone development by helping you absorb calcium, there is new evidence that vitamin K2 directs the calcium to your skeleton, while preventing it from being deposited where you don’t want it — i.e., your organs, joint spaces, and arteries. As mentioned, a large part of arterial plaque consists of calcium deposits (atherosclerosis), hence the term “hardening of the arteries.”
Vitamin K2 has also actually been found to decalcify certain tissues undergoing pathological (also known as ectopic) calcification.
Vitamin K2 activates a protein hormone called osteocalcin, produced by osteoblasts, which is needed to bind calcium into the matrix of your bone. Osteocalcin also appears to help prevent calcium from depositing into your arteries. In other words, without the help of vitamin K2, the calcium that your vitamin D so effectively lets in might be working AGAINST you — by building up your coronary arteries rather than your bones. This is why if you take calcium and vitamin D but are deficient in vitamin K, you could be worse off than if you were not taking those supplements at all.
Food is the Best Source of Calcium

In order for calcium to do your body good, it must be in a bioavailable form and balanced out with vitamins D and K and other important trace minerals, as part of a total nutritional plan.
 Good sources include raw milk and cheese from pasture-raised cows (who eat the plants), leafy green vegetables, the pith of citrus fruits, carob, sesame seeds and wheatgrass, to name a few. It’s worth mentioning that the studies done about calcium from dairy products are all done with pasteurized dairy, rather than raw dairy products that have more of their nutrients intact, and this muddies the results of these studies.
Calcium from dietary sources is typically better absorbed and utilized than calcium from supplements, which is why studies involving calcium from natural food sources have shown favorable results, including a 25 percent lower risk of dying from all causes, and a 23 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease.
You also need sources of silica and magnesium, which some researchers say is actually enzymatically “transmuted” by your body into the kind of calcium your bones can use. This theory was first put forth by French scientist Louis Kevran, a Nobel Prize nominee who spent years studying how silica, calcium, magnesium, and other minerals are related and transmutable into one another through low-energy nuclear transformation only found within living systems.
His theory explains how cows and chickens produce far more calcium in their milk and eggs than is found in their diet, or why, workers exposed to extremely high temperatures (130 degrees F) in the Middle East are known to consume salt tablets, which their bodies convert to potassium (as measured by their excreta), resulting in a reduction in their bodily temperature.
Good sources of bone-strengthening silica are cucumbers, bell peppers, tomatoes, and a number of herbs including horsetail, nettles, oat straw, alfalfa, and raw cacao, which is also extremely rich in highly bioavailable magnesium.
Dr. Thompson recommends the use of natural unprocessed salt as a far better alternative to calcium supplements because it provides the trace minerals you simply cannot get from food grown in today’s mineral-depleted soils. My favorite source of trace minerals is pure, unprocessed Himalayan salt, which contains 84 elements needed by your body.
The bottom line is, optimize your vitamin D levels through sun exposure and consume a variety of fresh, local organic whole foods, including vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, organic meats and eggs, unprocessed salt, and raw organic unpasteurized dairy, which will give you the bioavailable calcium your body needs along with the trace minerals and other cofactors it needs to be absorbed and properly utilized by your body.

By Dr. Mercola

There are many reasons why breastfeeding is a superior option to formula feeding for babies, however, a new study provides one of the most compelling to date.
Infant formulas are typically processed under high heat, and this leads to the formation of advanced glycation end products (AGES).
AGES are sugar molecules that attach to and damage proteins in your body.
Not only do they build up in your body over time, leading to oxidation and speeding up the aging process, but they also lead to inflammation, which in turn is linked to a number of chronic diseases, including diabetes and heart disease.

AGES Double in Infants Switched From Breast milk to Formula

If you’re a breastfeeding mom who needs encouragement to continue nursing for one year or beyond, consider this fact: when infants were switched from breast milk to commercial formula within the first year of life, their levels of AGEs doubled to levels found in people with diabetes.
Many of the infants also had elevated insulin levels, which may be directly attributable to the AGEs in the infant formula.
While a woman’s blood level of AGEs does impact her newborn’s levels (the researchers found newborns’ blood levels of AGEs were nearly as high as that of their mother’s, which is yet another why pregnant women should cut back on their processed food intake), her breast milk is still a superior source of nutrition. Infant formulas processed with high heat may have 100 times more AGEs than breast milk.
As a result, formula-fed babies are being exposed to unacceptably high levels of these toxins, putting their health at risk — completely unbeknownst to most parents!

Why Exposing Your Baby to High Levels of AGEs Could be Tragic …

Glycation is a process in which the sugar in food bonds with proteins and forms so-called ‘advanced glycation end products’, or AGEs. It’s a fitting acronym because – along with oxidation – it’s one of the major molecular mechanisms whereby damage accrues in your body, which leads to disease, aging, and premature death.
When sugar is glycated, it contributes to inflammation, which activates your immune system defensively.  Macrophages are scavenger cells that are part of your immune defense system, and as such they have special receptors for AGEs, aptly called RAGEs (think: raging inflammation). These RAGEs bind to the AGEs and get rid of them.
Unfortunately, this process can leave its fair share of battle scars. Inside your arteries, for example, the scar tissue created from this process is called plaque. This also explains why there’s such a strong connection between diabetes and heart disease, and why infants exposed to high levels of AGEs in infant formula may have had elevated insulin levels.
To avoid AGEs in your diet, you need to pay attention to avoiding foods cooked at high heat, including processed and pasteurized foods like infant formula.
In July 2011, the first study in humans showing that AGEs promote insulin resistance and diabetes was published. People with diabetes who ate an AGE-restricted diet (this included foods that were poached or stewed instead of cooked at high heat, such as grilling, frying or broiling) had a 35 percent decrease in insulin levels, to give you an idea of just how great an impact appropriate dietary changes can have on your, or your child’s, health.

Many Infant Formulas are Loaded With Sugar

Tragically, many infant formulas are more than 50 percent sugar — 43 percent being corn syrup solids, which means they’re also high in fructose. Metabolically, consuming fructose is very similar to alcohol on a chronic basis, so there appears to be a surprising similarity between giving your infant a can of soda, or a bottle of most conventional infant formulas.
I’ve written numerous articles about the dangers of consuming fructose, including its ability to trigger glycation, disturb your metabolism, elevate blood pressure and triglycerides, cause weight gain, heart disease and liver damage, and even deplete your body of vitamins and minerals.
There is no way that a baby should be consuming any corn syrup whatsoever, and the fact that infant formulas are able to be marketed as nutritious for babies when they’re loaded with corn syrup is incredibly deceptive. If you currently have infant formula in your home, check the label for corn syrup or corn syrup solids, and in the interest of your baby, throw the can away if you find it.

Infant Formula is Also Inferior to Breast milk Because of What it Does NOT Contain …

Nearly all commercial infant formulas contain substances your infant is better off avoiding, like corn syrup and AGEs, but it also is lacking in other key components that breast milk naturally provides. Chief among these are probiotics, friendly bacteria that help your body to thrive. In Greek, the term pro means “for life,” and the large amount of careful research surrounding these healthful microorganisms suggests that they are an integral part of your, and your child’s, well-being.
Breast milk is a natural source of probiotics, so babies who are breastfed receive an ideal source of your first immune-building good bacteria, and as a result also tend to have intestinal microflora in which beneficial bifidobacteria predominate over potentially harmful bacteria.
Some infant formulas do contain added probiotics, but they are going to be inferior to those that are found naturally in breast milk. Others contain none at all. Ideally, you should be sure you are getting probiotics while you’re pregnant, from eating traditionally fermented foods like kefir, natto and sauerkraut, which are rich in probiotics, or taking a high-quality probiotic supplement, and then continue these probiotic-rich foods in your infant’s diet.

Make Sure You Baby is Also Getting This …

The omega-3 fat DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), an essential structural component of your brain and retina, is found naturally in breast milk and is missing entirely from many infant formulas. DHA is essential to your child’s development and if your child is deficient in it, their nervous  and immune system may never fully develop, leading to a lifetime of unexplained emotional, learning and immune system disorders.
DHA makes up 15 percent to 20 percent of the cerebral cortex and 30 percent to 60 percent of the retina so it is absolutely necessary for normal development of the fetus and baby.
Because a fetus depends on mother’s DHA sources, the constant drain on a mother’s DHA reserves can easily lead to a deficiency and some researchers believe that preeclampsia (pregnancy-related high blood pressure) and postpartum depression could be linked to a DHA deficiency — just one more reason why it’s so important to maintain your levels during pregnancy.
After your child is born, it’s essential that he or she continues to receive DHA either from breast milk or a high-quality animal-based supplement. In the past, the ideal way to receive these fats was from seafood. However in the last 50 years industrial pollution with chemicals and heavy metals has changed all that. In fact, babies exposed in the womb to higher levels of mercury, due to their mom’s fish-rich diet, scored lower on skills tests when they became infants and toddlers. To put it simply, the beneficial effects of the omega-3s were cancelled out by the mercury.
The best alternative to seafood is an animal-based omega-3 fat supplement, of which krill oil and fish oil are the two major players. But there is reason to believe that krill oil actually offers superior benefits.
Fish oil is certainly more widely known, and this is related to the fact that the bulk of the published studies are done with fish oil and not krill oil. That is changing, but it will take many decades before krill oil catches up to fish oil in terms of popularity. That said, it just doesn’t make sense that you and your family have to wait decades to get the benefits of krill oil, as it is, in my opinion, the preferred choice. You can read more about why that is here.
I believe all pregnant and breastfeeding women would be wise to supplement with a high-quality animal-based omega-3 fat like krill oil, and if your baby is formula-fed, you can give krill oil to them directly. Consult your holistic pediatrician for proper dosage.

Do You Need Help With Breastfeeding?

Unfortunately, the United States is not the most breastfeeding-friendly culture, so surrounding yourself with women who have experience in this area can be a great help. Whether you want to prepare beforehand, or find you’re having trouble breastfeeding once your baby is born, Le Leche League is a terrific resource to consider.
Keep in mind that while there are certain medical conditions that can prevent a woman from breastfeeding, the majority of women are able to produce adequate supplies of milk and breastfeed successfully. Often, those who believe they cannot may be misinformed, and believe they don’t have enough milk; this is a common misperception. However, in the vast majority of circumstances, all women have enough milk to breastfeed.
The more your baby nurses, the more milk you will produce. Mom needs to drink plenty of water and seek optimal nutrition while nursing, and the beginning weeks and months are critical in the process.
If you find you are unable to breastfeed, the next best alternative is donated breast milk from a healthy, trusted donor, which has been screened for hepatitis C and HIV. If that is not available, another option is to make a healthy homemade infant formula. There may be others, but here is one recipe for homemade formula created by the Weston Price Foundation, which I believe is sound.
As an aside, definitely avoid all soy infant formula, as it is loaded with toxic elements like high doses of manganese and aluminum, not to mention the hormone-disrupting potential of the soy itself.

By Dr. Mercola

If Pfizer has its way, your child’s gummy bears may be replaced with chewable Lipitor
The exploitation of children for the sake of profit is yet another loathsome strategy drug manufacturers are willing to deploy, this time for the purpose of extending Lipitor’s patent to hold off generic brand competition.
We are already drugging children into complacency with psychotropic stimulants such as Ritalin if they are bored or distracted in the classroom, and devastating their developing immune systems with massive amounts of sugary drinks and a growing barrage of mercury-laden vaccines.
The following trends are quite disturbing:

According to one study, American children take antipsychotic medications at six times the rate of U.K. children.
One in four American kids takes a prescription drug for a chronic health condition.
One in five teens has high cholesterol.
Heartburn and acid reflux medications among adolescents has jumped 147 percent since 2001.
Girls aged 10 to 19 taking medications for type 2 diabetes has jumped almost 200 percent in the past nine years.
Children and adolescents make up the leading growth category for the pharmaceutical industry, with increases nearly four times higher than those seen in the rest of the population.

“No Child Left Unscreened”

Pumping statins into your children, like we are already doing with psychiatric drugs, would be disastrous, as the damaging side effects are now well established.
And if the government gets involved in mandating cholesterol screenings, it then becomes a slippery slope toward YOUR loss of parental choice about YOUR child’s medical care. Often the government passes off recommendations as “medical decisions” but they are really “monetary decisions.”
You should be the person in charge of your child’s health — not some government agency with a competing agenda!

Generation XL

It is indisputable that childhood obesity is placing the very future of the developing world at stake — a topic I am so concerned about that I wrote a book called Generation XL. If the childhood obesity epidemic is not reversed, we will, for the first time in history, see children living shorter lives than their parents.
Indeed, something must be done about escalating childhood obesity and “adult” diseases showing up in our children.
But massive statin campaigns are certainly NOT the answer.
The cause of the problem is unhealthy lifestyle choices — and drugs do nothing to address this. As mentioned in the source article, Harvard researchers found 85 percent of heart disease can be prevented by lifestyle changes alone — diet, exercise, and supplemental nutrients.

What is Really Making Your Child Fat?

The modern Western diet has become exceedingly reliant on high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), refined grains, processed foods and artificial sweeteners — a “perfect storm” for weight gain and poor health.
HFCS is now the number one source of calories in the US, and free-floating fructose is now the leading culprit for the obesity epidemic.
Sugar — specifically fructose — is metabolized by your child’s body in such a way that nearly all of it is converted to fat.
Fructose is a very different sugar from glucose, which humans were designed to use for energy. Fructose is actually closer to ethanol, in terms of how it’s metabolized. Unfortunately, fructose is the number one source of calories in the American diet, and children and adolescents are its number one consumers.
If you wish to promote your children’s health and well being, it is essential to limit their fructose consumption.
You may have been deceived into thinking that dietary fat is the reason for your child’s weight problem. But low-fat diet foods actually CAUSE weight gain in the majority of people, rather than saturated fats.
There are other factors that influence whether or not your child may develop a weight problem and other related health issues. There are genetic, emotional, social and environmental factors.
For example, researchers at the University of Illinois and the Harvard School of Public Health report that toddlers in day care tend to gain more weight than those who are cared for at home. They found babies spending more than 9 months in day care gained 0.4 pound more than those cared for by their parents. Although the higher weight gain was not easily explained, they speculated it had to do with “irregular eating patterns,” as well as possibly the types of foods they were fed.
One hypothesis suggested by scientists was that day care workers might use food to sooth crying babies more than parents do, which could theoretically set up your baby for “emotional eating.”
There is evidence that childhood obesity is not only related to adult obesity but to poor health in adulthood as well, so it is very important to pay attention to your child’s diet and eating patterns from day one.

Total Cholesterol Number Alone is Virtually Useless

If your doctor is urging your child to get her total cholesterol level checked, you should realize this test tells you virtually nothing about her risk of heart disease — unless it is 330 or higher.
Without also knowing lipid values, total cholesterol is meaningless. If you are going to participate in a screening, make sure a complete fasting lipid profile is what is being done.
What matters is how much HDL your child has in relation to her LDL and triglycerides.
The purpose of HDL is to take cholesterol from your child’s tissues and arteries and transport it back to her liver, where it can be reused. It is her body’s way of recycling and reusing cholesterol — because cholesterol is vital for health, not the villain it has been made out to be.
LDL particles come in a variety of sizes, and it’s the small, dense ones (VLDLs) that can potentially be a problem because they can squeeze through the lining of your child’s arteries and oxidize, causing inflammation.
Here is a simple way to determine if your child has too much bad LDL (VLDL):

If her triglycerides are low and her HDL is high, then the LDL she has is the good variety.
If her triglycerides are high and her HDL is low, then the LDL she has is the bad variety. The triglyceride-to-HDL ratio is a far better indicator of cardiovascular disease than the total cholesterol-to-HDL ratio that nearly everyone uses.

Here are two ratios, easily calculated from a lipid panel, which can help you evaluate your child’s heart disease risk:

HDL/Total Cholesterol Ratio: Should ideally be more than 24 percent. If it’s less than10 percent, your child has a significant risk for developing heart disease.
Triglyceride/HDL Ratio: Should be less than 2.

Now, here’s the bottom line: Dietary fat raises the large, buoyant LDL — the one that is harmless. Dietary SUGAR raises the small, dense LDL (VLDL) — the one that correlates with heart disease.
The type of fat that is beneficial comes from organic meats and dairy and natural whole foods, NOT trans fats, which can be deadly and should be avoided altogether.

Cholesterol is NOT the Villain in Childhood Obesity

Cholesterol has been terribly vilified, when in reality it is essential for a wide variety of vital functions in your child’s growing body, including:

Maintaining healthy cell membranes
Producing a variety of hormones, including estrogen, testosterone and vitamin D
Producing bile acids, which aid in fat digestion
Cholesterol also helps your child’s brain form memories and is vital to her overall neurological function.

On the flip side, there is strong evidence that having too little cholesterol increases your risk for cancer, memory loss, Parkinson’s disease, hormonal imbalances, stroke, depression, suicide, and violent behavior.
Before 2004, a 130 LDL cholesterol level was considered perfect. But now, many physicians are recommending levels of less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk. In order to achieve these outrageous and dangerously low targets, you typically need to take multiple cholesterol-lowering drugs!
So, the guidelines have progressively widened the pharmaceutical market. If children are subjected to universal cholesterol screening, the drug companies increase their target market that much more.

Statin Side Effects: Keep Out of the Reach of Children!

In 2007, the American Heart Association first recommended the use of statin drugs for children with high cholesterol. Then, in 2008 the American Academy of Pediatrics followed suit, recommending cholesterol-lowering drugs for children as young as age 8.
Now they are concocting ways to place more and more children on statins, in spite of the overwhelming evidence for serious side effects — nearly 900 studies point to the damaging effects of these drugs.
The list of statin-related health problems includes the following:

Muscle damage (potentially permanent), mostly related to CoQ10 depletion
Heart damage, heart failure and strokes
Neuropathy
Immune system suppression
Pancreatic dysfunction
Hepatic dysfunction
Increased cancer risk
Cognitive impairment
Depression

In addition to these risks, there are also risks from insufficient CoQ10 levels, which directly relate to the use of statins:

Impaired white blood cell activity
Reduced muscle strength contraction — especially for the heart muscle
Impaired liver function
Decreased cell growth and division
Decreased ability to neutralize free radicals

And now, it would appear, they are pushing a massive kiddie-statin campaign, disguised as “preventative medicine.”
Pfizer has been in legal trouble a number of times over fraudulent claims about the “health benefits” of Lipitor. Lipitor is particularly damaging if you are diabetic, doubling your risk for stroke. And with childhood diabetes rates increasing by leaps and bounds, prescribing Lipitor would be extremely risky to these diabetic or pre-diabetic kids.
According to an excellent report in 2008 in the New England Journal of Medicine, long-term data about the safety of statins for children is completely lacking. Ferranti and Ludwig write:

“At 8 years of age, a child’s brain and other organ systems remain in dynamic stages of growth and development, raising concern that long-term pharmacotherapy initiated at this age may adversely affect the central nervous system, immune function, hormones, energy metabolism, or other systems in unanticipated ways.”

It is one thing to medicate the child who has a rare genetic defect in cholesterol metabolism, but quite another to treat masses of at-risk children whose symptoms reflect easily modifiable lifestyle factors.
As the article says, “Once this door has been opened, the pharmaceutical industry will happily walk through it.”

Top 10 Ways to Help Your Child Achieve Optimal Health and Body Weight — Without Drugs

While prescription of a cholesterol-lowering medication may be warranted in a few rare cases, 99 times out of 100, hyperlipidemia and hypercholesterolemia can be corrected with some simple lifestyle changes.
Here are my top 10 recommendations:

Eliminate all sodas and fruit juices.
If your child is already overweight or obese it is particularly important to lower their total fructose intake, INCLUDING fruit, until their weight normalizes. It would also be helpful to severely limit grains, even apparently healthy ones like whole organic grains, until their weight normalizes.
Help your child get regular exercise.
Prepare the right foods for your child’s nutritional type. I now offer the full nutritional typing program free of charge.
Encourage your child to eat a good portion of her food raw.
Make sure your child is getting plenty of high-quality, animal-based omega3-fats. My favorite is krill oil.
Introduce your child to a variety of heart-healthy foods such as olive oil, coconut and coconut oil, organic raw dairy products and eggs, avocados, raw nuts and seeds, and organic grass-fed meats that fit within her nutritional type guidelines.
Introduce your child to strategies that help her address emotional challenges, such as EFT.
Make sure your child gets plenty of restorative sleep.
Finally, make sure your child’s vitamin D levels are within therapeutic levels.
Vitamin D is not “just a vitamin,” but rather the only known substrate for a potent, pleiotropic (meaning it produces multiple effects), repair- and maintenance hormone that serves multiple gene-regulatory functions in your child’s body.

Low levels of vitamin D are associated with an increased risk of heart disease.
About 70 percent of U.S. children have inadequate levels of vitamin D, so this should be one of the first issues you address to keep your child’s heart healthy.

A Call to Action for the Sake of ALL Children

The Alliance for Natural Health has an on-line “action alert” letter you can send to your Congressional representatives about repealing the law that allows drug companies to extend their patents by testing drugs on children.
It is quick and easy to do! Just click here.
If you care about this issue, I encourage you to take a moment to let your rep’s know how you feel.

By Dr. Mercola

Tens of millions of Americans are taking cholesterol-lowering drugs—mostly statins—and some “experts” claim that many millions more should be taking them. I couldn’t disagree more.
Statins are HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, that is, they act by blocking the enzyme in your liver that is responsible for making cholesterol (HMG-CoA reductase).
The fact that statin drugs cause side effects is well established—there are now 900 studies proving their adverse effects, which run the gamut from muscle problems to increased cancer risk. For starters, reported side effects include:

Muscle problems, polyneuropathy (nerve damage in the hands and feet), and rhabdomyolysis (a serious degenerative muscle tissue condition)
Anemia

Acidosis
Sexual dysfunction

Immune depression

Cataracts

Pancreas or liver dysfunction, including a potential increase in liver enzymes
Memory loss

 
Muscle problems are the best known of statin drugs’ adverse side effects, but cognitive problems and memory loss are also widely reported. A spectrum of other problems, ranging from blood glucose elevations to tendon problems, can also occur. There is evidence that taking statins may even increase your risk for Lou Gehrig’s disease, diabetes, and even cancer. Statins currently available on the U.S. market include1 :

Advicor (lovastatin with niacin) – Abbott
Crestor (rosuvastatin) – AstraZeneca
Mevacor (lovastatin) – Merck
Simcor (niacin / imvastatin) – Abbott

Altoprev (lovastatin) – Shionogi Pharma
Lescol (fluvastatin) – Novartis
Pravachol (pravastatin) — Bristol-Myers Squibb
Zocor (simvastatin) – Merck

Caduet [atorvastatin with amlodipine (Norvasc)] – Pfizer
Lipitor (atorvastatin) – Pfizer
Vytorin (ezetimibe/simvastatin) – Merck/Schering-Plough
 

Statin Drugs: A Surprising Cause of Diabetes

Statins have been shown to increase your risk of diabetes through a few different mechanisms. The most important one is that they increase insulin resistance, which can be extremely harmful to your health. Increased insulin resistance contributes to chronic inflammation in your body, and inflammation is the hallmark of most diseases. In fact, increased insulin resistance can lead to heart disease, which, ironically, is the primary reason for taking a cholesterol-reducing drug in the first place! It can also promote belly fat, high blood pressure, heart attacks, chronic fatigue, thyroid disruption, and diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.
Secondly, statins increase your diabetes risk by actually raising your blood sugar. When you eat a meal that contains starches and sugar, some of the excess sugar goes to your liver, which then stores it away as cholesterol and triglycerides. Statins work by preventing your liver from making cholesterol. As a result, your liver returns the sugar to your bloodstream, which raises your blood sugar levels.
Now, it’s important to realize that drug-induced diabetes and genuine type 2 diabetes are not necessarily identical.
If you’re on a statin drug and find that your blood glucose is elevated, it’s possible that what you have is just hyperglycemia—a side effect, and the result of your medication. Unfortunately, many doctors will at that point mistakenly diagnose you with “type 2 diabetes,” and possibly prescribe another drug, when all you may need to do is simply discontinue the statin in order for your blood glucose levels to revert back to normal. So if friends or loved ones you know are on a statin (and one in four Americans over 45 are) and they are told they have diabetes, please do them a favor and tell them about the information in this article.

Major Statin Drug Study Found to Be Flawed

A study known as the JUPITER trial initially suggested cholesterol-lowering statin drugs might prevent heart-related death in many more people than just those with high cholesterol. But two years after its publication in 2008, researchers came out saying the JUPITER results are flawed — and that they do not support the benefits initially reported. Not only is there no “striking decrease in coronary heart disease complications,” but a more recent report has also called into question drug companies’ involvement in such trials.
According to a report by ABC News2 :

“… major discrepancies exists between the significant reductions in nonfatal stroke and heart attacks reported in the JUPITER trial and what has been found in other research … ‘The JUPITER data set appears biased,’ [the researchers] wrote in conclusion.”

If You Take Statins, You MUST Take CoQ10

Statins deplete your body of CoQ10, which can have devastating results. If you take statin drugs without taking CoQ10, your health is at serious risk. Unfortunately, this describes the majority of people who take them in the United States. CoQ10 is a cofactor (co-enzyme) that is essential for the creation of ATP molecules, which you need for cellular energy production. Organs such as your heart have higher energy requirements, and therefore require more CoQ10 to function properly. Produced mainly in your liver, it also plays a role in maintaining blood glucose.
Physicians rarely inform people of this risk and only occasionally advise them to take a CoQ10 supplement. As your body gets more and more depleted of CoQ10, you may suffer from fatigue, muscle weakness and soreness, and eventually heart failure.
Coenzyme Q10 is also very important in the process of neutralizing free radicals. So when your CoQ10 is depleted, you enter a vicious cycle of increased free radicals, loss of cellular energy, and damaged mitochondrial DNA. If you decide to take a CoQ10 supplement and are over the age of 40, it is important to choose the reduced version, called ubiquinol. Ubiquinol is a FAR more effective form—I personally take it daily for its many far-ranging benefits. As for dosage, Dr. Graveline, a family doctor and former astronaut, made the following recommendation in a previous interview on statins and CoQ10:

If you have symptoms of statin damage such as muscle pain, take anywhere from 200 to 500 mg
If you just want to use it preventively, 200 mg or less should be sufficient

Statins Impair Numerous Biological Functions

Statin drugs also interfere with other biological functions, including an early step in the mevalonate pathway, which is the central pathway for the steroid management in your body. Products of this pathway that are negatively affected by statins include:

All your sex hormones
Cortisone
The dolichols, which are involved in keeping the membranes inside your cells healthy
All sterols, including cholesterol and vitamin D (which is similar to cholesterol and is produced from cholesterol in your skin)

It’s still uncertain whether statins actually deplete your body of vitamin D, but they do reduce your body’s natural ability to create active vitamin D (1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol). This is the natural outcome of the drug’s cholesterol-reducing ability, because you need cholesterol to make vitamin D! It’s the raw material your body uses for vitamin D conversion after you’ve exposed your skin to sunlight. It’s also well-documented that vitamin D improves insulin resistance, so needless to say, when you take a statin drug, you forfeit this ‘built-in’ health-promoting mechanism, which is yet another clue as to how statins can cause diabetes.

Ninety-Nine Out of 100 People Do Not Need Statin Drugs

That these drugs have proliferated the market the way they have is a testimony to the power of marketing, corruption and corporate greed, because the odds are very high— greater than 100 to 1—that if you’re taking a statin, you don’t really need it. The ONLY subgroup that might benefit are those born with a genetic defect called familial hypercholesterolemia, as this makes them resistant to traditional measures of normalizing cholesterol.
And, even more importantly, cholesterol is NOT the cause of heart disease.
If your physician is urging you to check your total cholesterol, then you should know that this test will tell you virtually nothing about your risk of heart disease, unless it is 330 or higher. HDL percentage is a far more potent indicator for heart disease risk. Here are the two ratios you should pay attention to:

HDL/Total Cholesterol Ratio: Should ideally be above 24 percent. If below 10 percent, you have a significantly elevated risk for heart disease.
Triglyceride/HDL Ratio: Should be below 2.

I have seen a number of people with total cholesterol levels over 250 who were actually at low risk for heart disease due to their elevated HDL levels. Conversely, I have seen many people with cholesterol levels under 200 who had a very high risk of heart disease, based on their low HDL. Your body NEEDS cholesterol—it is important in the production of cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D, and bile acids that help you to digest fat. Cholesterol also helps your brain form memories and is vital to your neurological function. There is also strong evidence that having too little cholesterol INCREASES your risk for cancer, memory loss, Parkinson’s disease, hormonal imbalances, stroke, depression, suicide, and violent behavior.

Statins Should NEVER Be Used By Pregnant Women

One in four Americans over the age of 45 is now taking these drugs, and few are properly warned about the related health risks. Part of the problem is that many doctors are not even aware of all the risks. A study published last spring highlighted this dilemma.
Most disturbingly, the researchers found that physicians were lacking in awareness of the teratogenic risks3 (ability to cause fetal malformations) of statins and other cardiovascular drugs they prescribed for their pregnant patients. The study followed an earlier report, which had concluded statins should be avoided in early pregnancy due to their teratogenic capability4. An even earlier 2003 study5 had already established that cholesterol plays an essential role in embryonic development, and that statins could play a part in embryonic mutations or even death…
Indeed, it’s difficult to look at these facts and not reach the conclusion that the pharmaceutical industry is quite willing to sacrifice human lives for profit. Statins are in fact classified as a “pregnancy Category X medication.” Meaning, it causes serious birth defects, and should NEVER be used by a woman who is pregnant or planning a pregnancy.

Parents Beware: Outrageous Push to Put Kids on Statin Drugs!

In a bold attempt to increase profits before the patent runs out, Pfizer has introduced a chewable kid-friendly version of Lipitor. Its US patent for Lipitor expired in November 2011, and seeking to boost sales of the drug, children have become the new target market, and the conventional medical establishment is more than happy to oblige.
Researchers and many doctors are now calling for universal school screening of children to check for high cholesterol to find those “in need of treatment.” In addition, older siblings, parents, and other family members might be prompted to get screened as well, the researchers say, which would uncover additional, previously undiagnosed adults in need of the drug.
This is clearly NOT the way to improve public health. On the contrary, it could produce a new, massive wave of extremely dire health consequences in just a few years’ time.
So rather than improving school lunches, which would cost about a dollar a day per child, they’d rather “invest” ten times that for tests and drugs that in no way, shape, or form address the root cause, which is an improper, unhealthy diet! All they’re doing is allowing all the industries to maintain or increase their profits: Big Pharma, Big Sugar, Big Corn and the processed food industry.
Who pays?
You and your children! And in far more ways than one!

Optimizing Your Cholesterol Levels, Naturally

There’s really no reason to take statins and suffer the damaging health effects from these dangerous drugs. The fact is that 75 percent of your cholesterol is produced by your liver, which is influenced by your insulin levels. Therefore, if you optimize your insulin levels, you will automatically optimize your cholesterol. It follows, then, that my primary recommendations for safely regulating your cholesterol have to do with modifying your diet and lifestyle:

Optimize your vitamin D levels. Research by Dr. Stephanie Seneff has shed additional light on the extreme importance of appropriate sun exposure for normalizing your cholesterol levels and preventing heart disease. For more information, please see this previous interview.
Reduce, with the plan of eliminating, grains and sugars in your diet. Ideally, you’ll also want to consume a good portion of your food raw.
Make sure you are getting plenty of high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil.
Other heart-healthy foods include olive oil, coconut and coconut oil, organic raw dairy products and eggs, avocados, raw nuts and seeds, and organic grass-fed meats as appropriate for your nutritional type.
Exercise daily. Make sure you incorporate Peak Fitness exercises, which also optimizes your human growth hormone (HGH) production.
Address your emotional challenges. My favorite technique for stress management is the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).
Avoid smoking or drinking alcohol excessively.
Be sure to get plenty of good, restorative sleep.

Unlike statin drugs, which lower your cholesterol at the expense of your health, these lifestyle strategies represent a holistic approach that will benefit your overall health—which includes a healthy cardiovascular system.

The Baycol Statin Recall and Safety Issue:

In August 2001, Bayer AG, the maker of Baycol (cerivastatin), a popular cholesterol-lowering drug used by about 700,000 Americans, pulled the medicine off the market after 31 people died from severe muscle breakdown, a well-recognized side effect of cholesterol-lowering drugs. Related articles follow:
Statins: Is the Danger in the Dose?
Here is the hard data on Baycol-associated adverse reactions. If you or someone you know is taking one of the statin cholesterol-lowering drugs, this is a “must-read” article by Jay Cohen, MD to help you understand the potential dangers that this exposes you to.
Baycol Pulled From Market as Numerous Deaths Linked to It
Baycol, a cholestrol-lowering drug (statin), has been voluntarily pulled off the market because of numerous deaths associated with its use.
The Baycol Recall: How Safe is Your Statin?
With the recall of Baycol, patients are now searching out a new drug to take its place, but are other statins really safe? Here are some precautions necessary for anyone taking Baycol or any statin.
Baycol: Another Fluoride Drug Bites the Dust
Baycol is just one of many fluoride drugs to be pulled from the market due to health hazards posed. Read about this and some of the others in this informative article written by Andreas Schuld and Wendy Small.
BMJ: Bayer faces potential fine over cholesterol lowering drug
Bayer might have to pay a fine to the German government of about $23,400 for withholding from the German authorities information on the drug’s potentially fatal interaction with another drug.
Lipitor Tied to Liver, Kidney Injury, as Well as Muscle Damage
It seems that Baycol is not alone among cholesterol lowering drugs in posing serious dangers to the public. A number of legal actions are also being pursued against Pfizer Inc., the manufacturer of the Lipitor.
Excerpts from Public Citizen’s Health Research Group’s Petition to Require a Box Warning on All HMG-CoA Reductase Inhibitors (“Statins”):

” … Public Citizen, representing 135,000 consumers nationwide, hereby petitions the FDA pursuant to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act 21, U.S.C. Section 355(e)(3), and C.F.R. 10.30, to add a black box warning and additional consistent bolded warnings about this serious problem to the label of all statins marketed in the United States.”
“Doctors and the public must be warned to immediately discontinue use of statin drugs at the onset of muscle pain, muscle tenderness, muscle weakness or tiredness.”
“Prompt cessation of the use of statins at the first sign of muscle pain, muscle tenderness, muscle weakness or tiredness and prompt evaluation by a physician including a blood test for creatine phosphokinase (a measure of muscle destruction) may avoid the progression to more extensive muscle damage, rhabdomyolysis and death.”
“Rhabdomyolysis has been reported with all statins currently marketed in the United States.”

About the Experts
Joseph Mercola, DO
Founder and Owner of Mercola.com. 
Uffe Ravnskov, MD
Born 1934 in Copenhagen, Denmark Graduated 1961 from the University of Copenhagen with an M.D. 1961-1967: Various appointments at surgical, roentgenological, neurological, pediatric and medical departments in Denmark and Sweden. 1968-1979: Various appointments at the Department of Nephrology, and the Department of Clinical Chemistry, University Hospital, Lund, Sweden. 1975-79: As an assistant professor at the Department of Nephrology. 1973: PhD at the University of Lund. 1979-2000: A private practitioner. Since 1979 an independent researcher. A specialist in internal medicine and nephrology. Honored by the Skrabanek Award 1998.
For more information about him, see Dr. Ravnskov’s Web site.
Jay Cohen, M.D
Jay Cohen, M.D., is an associate professor of Family and Preventative Medicine and of Psychiatry at the University of California in San Diego. He is the author of two books and has numerous papers published in peer-reviewed journals. His book, Over Dose: The Case Against the Drug Companies, is an outstanding read.

In 2009, the increase of prescription drug use among children was nearly four times higher than in the overall population, making children the leading growth demographic for the drug industry.
One in four insured children, and nearly 30 percent of adolescents, took at least one prescription medication to treat a chronic condition in 2009.
Reuters reports:

“Over the past nine years, the most substantial increases in the medicating of children were seen in drugs for conditions not typically associated with them, such as for type 2 diabetes and antipsychotics … Some long-standing childhood maladies also saw large increases, such as asthma.”

A 2009 study in The Lancet found that new cases of type 1 diabetes in kids could double in the next 10 years. Possible reasons for this dramatic rise include:

Too big too fast. The “accelerator hypothesis” theorizes that children who are bigger and grow more quickly are more likely to develop type 1 diabetes.
Too little sun. The “sunshine hypothesis” comes from data showing that countries situated closer to the equator have lower rates of type 1 diabetes.
Too clean. The “hygiene hypothesis” is the notion that cleanliness — lack of exposure to certain germs and parasites — may increase susceptibility to diseases like diabetes.
Too much cow’s milk. The “cow’s milk hypothesis” states that exposing babies to infant formula containing cow’s milk in the first six months of life damages their immune systems, and can trigger autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes.
Too much pollution. The “POP hypothesis” alleges that being exposed to pollutants increases diabetes risk.

Unlike type 2 diabetes, which is caused by insulin resistance and faulty leptin signaling due to inappropriate diet and lack of exercise, people with type 1 diabetes do not produce insulin and must therefore inject insulin several times a day if they are to remain alive.
Tragically those with type 1 diabetes can have the healthiest lifestyle possible yet still suffer many diseases, as current technology is a poor substitute for a fully functioning pancreas.
Type 1 diabetes is actually an autoimmune disease, in which the immune system destroys pancreatic cells that produce insulin. The disease tends to progress rather quickly and therefore needs to be diagnosed early, as it can result in serious long-term complications including blindness, kidney failure, heart disease and stroke.
While type 1 diabetes is far less common than type 2, accounting for only 5-10 percent of people with diabetes, it is steadily on the rise. Rates of type 1 diabetes in children under 5 are expected to double between 2005 and 2020, and cases among children younger than 15 are expected to rise by 70 percent during this time, a Lancet study showed.
What is fueling this rise is the question on everyone’s mind, and the research is pointing to one very prominent, and easily fixable, problem: vitamin D deficiency.

Vitamin D May Prevent Type 1 Diabetes

It has been known for some time that type one diabetes is virtually unheard of the closer one gets to the equator. This spurred research which suggested that if a pregnant woman has optimal vitamin D levels during her pregnancy she should radically reduce if not virtually eliminate the child’s risk of getting type 1 diabetes!
Receptors that respond to vitamin D have been found in nearly every type of human cell, from your bones to your brain, and also your pancreas.
According to Dr. Michael Holick, who is one of the leading vitamin D researchers in the world, children receiving vitamin D supplementation from age 1 on had an 80 percent decreased risk of developing type 1 diabetes.

New Research Confirms Pregnant Women Seriously at Risk of Vitamin D Deficiency

This is crucial information for any woman who is pregnant or planning to become pregnant, as a separate study by Drs. Hollis and Wagner found that over 87 percent of all newborns and over 67 percent of all mothers had vitamin D levels lower than 20 ng/ml, which is a severe deficiency state. As a result, they recommended that all mothers optimize their vitamin D levels during pregnancy, especially in the winter months, to safeguard their babies’ health.
To do so, pregnant women may need to consume 10 times as much food-based vitamin D than is currently recommended, a new study by Dr. Hollis and colleagues confirmed.
Currently, guidelines recommend pregnant women consume from 200 IU to 400 IU of vitamin D a day, an amount that is far too low.
In the new study, which was presented at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Vancouver, B.C., women who were at least 12 weeks pregnant took 400, 2,000 or 4,000 IU of vitamin D a day.
Those who took the highest amount — 4,000 IU a day — were the least likely to go into labor early, give birth prematurely or develop infections.
Unfortunately, according to a separate new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 97 percent of African Americans have vitamin D levels that are too low for optimal health, along with 90 percent of Mexican Americans and 71 percent of whites.
These are staggering numbers that could increase your newborn’s risk of developing type 1 diabetes!
Also, if you are the parent of an infant, it is crucial that you test their vitamin D levels and use safe sun exposure and supplementation as necessary to increase their levels. Doing so now could potentially save them the lifelong pain of developing type 1 diabetes.

What Should Your Child’s Vitamin D Levels Be?

From my perspective, with the mountain of scientific evidence we now have on the benefits of optimal vitamin D levels in pregnancy it is reprehensible criminal malpractice to not routinely check a pregnant woman’s vitamin D level during the pregnancy.
Of course, it is still not the “standard of care” at this point and no physician will lose his license for failing to do this check, but you don’t have to wait for the “standard of care” to catch up to reality. Encourage every pregnant woman you know monitor her vitamin D level during her pregnancy.
Based on the most recent research, the current recommendation for dosage via oral supplementation is 35 IU’s of vitamin D per pound of body weight, as shown in the chart below.

Vitamin D Dose Recommendations

Age
Dosage

Below 5
35 units per pound per day

Age 5 – 10
2500 units

Age 18 – 30
5000 units

Pregnant Women
5000 units

WARNING:
There is no way to know if the above recommendations are correct. The ONLY way to know is to test your blood. You might need 4-5 times the amount recommended above. Ideally your blood level of 25 OH D should be 65 ng/ml.

 
Keep in mind that these recommendations are only an estimate, as it is simply impossible to make a blanket recommendation that will cover everyone’s needs.
The only way to determine the correct dose is to get your blood tested since there are so many variables that influence your vitamin D status.
Getting the correct test is the first step in this process, as there are TWO vitamin D tests currently being offered: 1,25(OH)D and 25(OH)D.
The correct test your doctor needs to order is 25(OH)D, also called 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is the better marker of overall D status. This is the marker that is most strongly associated with overall health.
I recommend using Lab Corp in the U.S. When you get your results back, the “normal” 25-hydroxyvitamin D lab range is between 20-56 ng/ml. As you can see in the chart below, this conventional range is really a sign of deficiency, and is too broad to be ideal.

In fact, your or your child’s vitamin D level should not be below 32 ng/ml, and any levels below 20 ng/ml are considered serious deficiency states, increasing your risk of cancer and autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, just to name a few.
The OPTIMAL value that you’re looking for is 50-70 ng/ml.
This range applies for everyone: children, adolescents, adults and seniors.
For more information on optimizing your vitamin D levels, please watch my free one-hour vitamin D lecture.

What Else Can You do to Help Prevent Type 1 Diabetes?

There are a number of other factors that may also contribute to type 1 diabetes. To keep your, and your children’s, risks as low as possible, try the following steps.

Breastfeed your baby: Bottle-fed babies tend to grow faster, and this is not a positive result. Instead, babies that gain a lot of weight in their first year of life may have an increased risk of type 1 diabetes.
The second reason why breastfeeding is preferred is because you will not have to expose your child to pasteurized milk-based formula. Exposure to pasteurized cow’s milk early in life may also increase your child’s risk of type 1 diabetes.

Avoid feeding your infant cereal: Cereal is often one of the first solid foods to be introduced into the infant diet and most pediatricians encourage their patients to start these foods at about 4 to 6 months of age. This is truly unfortunate, as grains are not a healthy choice for most people, including infants, and infants fed cereal also have an increased risk of type 1 diabetes.

Infants will do just fine starting out on a vegetable source of carbs, so do your child a favor and give them veggies rather than cereal.

Do your homework before vaccinating: There is speculation that the growing number of autoimmune diseases plaguing children may be related to the growing number of vaccinations they receive. There has been a 17-fold increase in type 1 diabetes, from 1 in 7,100 children in the 1950s to 1 in 400 now, according to Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD, which correlates with a rise in vaccines.

Is There a Cure for Type 1 Diabetes?

As it stands, seeking to prevent type 1 diabetes is currently your best option, and I cannot stress enough the importance of optimizing your vitamin D levels, especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding.
That said, there is encouraging research involving the use of stem cells to replace pancreatic islet cells and thereby cure type 1 diabetes.
In 2007 the British Times Online reported on the first clinical evidence for the efficacy of Hematopoietic stem cells (stem cells derived from bone marrow) in type 1 diabetes.
The Brazilian study, published in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that treatment-related toxicity was low, with zero mortality. All but two of the volunteers (93 percent) in the trial did not require daily insulin injections for up to three years after the end of their treatment, as the therapy allowed their bodies to start producing the hormone again naturally.
The main drawback with the particular therapy used in that study, from my standpoint, is that drugs were used to first suppress the patients’ immune system before receiving transfusions of stem cells drawn from their own blood.
Suppression of your immune system could lead to all types of health problems — after all, your immune system is your primary line of defense — however, the theory of using stem cells to reactivate natural insulin production is an intriguing and hopeful one and I remain highly optimistic that it will one day soon provide an effective treatment option for type 1 diabetics.
The technique has not yet reached the mainstream, as there is little incentive for drug companies to sponsor research into such therapies that may free their current “customers” from insulin, but it’s not completely out of the question yet.
In an accompanying editorial in JAMA titled “Cellular therapy for type 1 diabetes: has the time come?”, Dr Jay Skyler of the Diabetes Research Institute at the University of Miami, wrote:

“Research in this field is likely to explode in the next few years and should include randomized controlled trials, as well as mechanistic studies.”

Again, for now please use prevention as your primary route of attack against type 1 diabetes. For those of you who already have it, stay tuned to the newsletter, as I’ll be reporting on any new information that comes up.

Over 80 percent of the people on the Internet search for health information, but the field is loaded with misinformation, deception, and outright fraud.
When I started this Web site in 1997 it was with the intention to provide you and your family with a treasure trove of knowledge and health wisdom that will allow you to identify inexpensive safe and natural alternatives to dangerous drugs.

Origins of “Doctors are the Third Leading Cause of Death”

In July, 2000 I analyzed a JAMA article by Dr. Barbara Starfield from Johns Hopkins School of public health. I carefully reviewed her data and drew the conclusion that doctors were the third leading cause of death. I created that headline, and over the last ten years it has been widely distributed all over the Internet.
When I contacted Dr. Starfield for a follow-up, she told me that she did not agree with my conclusion, but still felt that the conventional medical system was the leading cause of death. Well, four years later, Gary Null published a report which indeed confirmed that fact.
So, with time I realized that one of my primary purposes in life is to catalyze a transformation of this fatally flawed medical system that has been corrupted by multinational corporate drug and food industry interests which put their bottom line profits far ahead of improving the human condition.
The purpose of this site is to provide a comprehensive educational effort to expose the fraud, deception and misinformation that is prematurely killing hundreds of thousands of people every year in the US alone, and also causing needless pain and suffering in millions of others.
It might be obvious to most that I am bucking this corporate system, and they are not going to go down without a fight. They are constantly seeking to discredit me so the message won’t be heard.

Truth is Violently Opposed Before it is Accepted as Self Evident

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher known for his philosophical clarity. I believe he made one of the most valuable observations on the shifting of human views when he stated that all truth goes through three stages:

First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Finally, it is accepted as self-evident

This is not only true for health but all areas of life. However since my entire formal professional training is in health, I would like to share with you a dozen experiences from my professional career that validates Shopenhauer’s observation, and why I will not quit despite the efforts of my critics and detractors.
I already covered the first three in this previous article.
The next three of the 12 truths I will cover in this four-part series have reached the final stage and are now widely accepted by the medical profession, although some of my recommendations still include refinements that have yet to be embraced by conventional medicine.
The remainder is in varying degrees of acceptance, and some will not be widely accepted for quite some time, but the evidence is clear for all those who are willing to objectively review the data.

Truth # 4: Omega-3 Fats are Essential for Optimal Health and Brain Function

It is widely accepted that omega-3 fats are useful for health. Even the FDA allows claims for omega-3 for heart disease. This is one of the only food health claims that the FDA allows.
Unfortunately, a majority of people are sorely deficient in this essential nutrient, and making matters worse, our modern diet is loaded with omega-6 fats, which can cause health problems when consumed in excess.
The ideal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats is 1:1. Today, though, our ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 averages from 20:1 to 50:1! When the ratios between the two fats are this skewed, poor health is virtually guaranteed.
Researchers have agreed that including more omega-3 than omega-6 in your diet may help protect your tissues and organs from inflammation, one of the underlying causes of countless chronic diseases and aging.

Why You Don’t Want to Be Deficient in Omega-3’s

Fortunately the vast majority of the public already understands and appreciate the importance of omega-3 fats. Even the conservative FDA allows claims for the reduction of heart disease for omega 3 fats because of the overwhelming scientific evidence.
Omega-3 deficiency can cause or contribute to serious health problems, both mental and physical, and may be a significant underlying factor of up to 96,000 premature deaths each year. Compare that to the estimated 40,000 women who die from breast cancer each year in the U.S. and the implications of omega-3 deficiency becomes quite clear.
In fact, omega-3 deficiency has recently been revealed as the sixth biggest killer of Americans, so this is yet another recommendation that could prove to be life-saving.
But there is still plenty of confusion about omega-3 fats as many “experts” fail to appreciate the importance of animal based omega-3 fats. They advocate primarily plant based omega-3 fats that have ALA. While plant based omega-3 fats are necessary and highly beneficial and should also be consumed, the evidence is very clear that they are not an acceptable substitute for animal based omeg-3 fats.
This is primarily related to the fact that your body does not easily convert the ALA in plant based fats to the longer fats of EPA and DHA. If you have diabetes, are overweight, have high blood pressure or high cholesterol, your body has even more difficulty converting these fats.
Animal based omega-3 fats contain two fatty acids crucial to your health, DHA and EPA. These two fatty acids, not ALA, are pivotal in preventing heart disease, cancer, and many other diseases. It is also important to realize that over 50 percent of your brain is is made up of DHA Low DHA levels have been linked to depression, schizophrenia, memory loss, and a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
In fact, the results of three studies published in 2008 showed that low concentrations of EPA and DHA resulted in an increased risk of death from ALL causes and accelerated cognitive decline.
Researchers are now also linking inadequate intake of these omega-3 fats in pregnant women to premature birth and low birth weight, and to hyperactivity in children.
I first started emphasizing the importance of this healthy fat in 2000 Unfortunately, many are still not getting enough omega-3 in their diet — a problem that’s easily remedied by supplementing with a high-quality source of animal-based omega-3 fats.
The practical question becomes how you are going to obtain your high quality omega-3 fats. Ideally we would all receive them from sea food. Unfortunately due to industrial pollution most of the sea food is now contaminated with heavy metals like mercury and industrial toxins like PCBs, PDEs and dioxins.
Because of this, most have decided to take a fish oil supplement. This is what I had recommended ten years ago but new evidence suggests that there may be even better sources of animal based omega-3 fats.
My current favorite is krill oil. Krill are very tiny shrimp like creatures that are actually the largest biomass in the world, far exceeding the amount of fish in the world. Their harvest is carefully regulated so that they are not at risk of being harmed for centuries under current harvesting guidelines. They are clearly the most sustainable source of animal based omega-3 fats in the world today.
Their harvest is carefully regulated by major environmental organizations like the World Wildlife Foundation and CCAMLR (Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources).
Additionally because the krill fat is attached to phosphates they are far more readily absorbed than fish oil and therefore you need FAR less. A typical dose is only 1 gram per day not the 3-5 grams that are used in fish oil. Their better absorption also virtually eliminates any problem with burping or belching.
Lastly, they have very powerful antioxidants, called astaxanthin that help protect the highly perishable DHA and EPA fats and help protect and preserve them until you are able to swallow them.
About the only problem with krill is that they should not be taken if you have an allergy to shellfish.
An emerging modification of the omega-3 recommendation is the importance of HIGH QUALITY omega-6 fats. Omega-6 fats have been vilified for their negative influence on health. But there’s an increasing appreciation that this may not be entirely accurate.
Why?
Because most of the omega-6 fats found in modern, processed foods are damaged through heating and processing. Consuming large amounts of these damaged omega-6 fats is likely what magnifies the health problems related to omega-3 deficiency.
It is clear to me that the future of medicine will eventually become more precise in this area and recommend avoiding or eliminating damaged omega-6 fats, especially trans fats, and replacing them with high quality, unprocessed or minimally processed, omega 6 fats.

Truth # 5: Vitamin D and Sun Exposure Saves Lives

Public health officials, the media and most physicians have been telling you for years that the sun is dangerous and should be avoided. And to complicate matters they encourage you to slather yourself with sunscreen every time you go outside.
It is shocking that this highly counterintuitive recommendation could have been so widely accepted, as nearly everyone realizes that you feel better when it is sunny outside. You NEED sun to stay healthy.
As a result of a relentless marketing campaign linking sun exposure to skin cancer, vitamin D deficiency is now the norm rather than the exception.
In the United States, the late winter average vitamin D is only about 15-18 ng/ml, which is considered a very serious deficiency state. It’s thought that over 95 percent of U.S. senior citizens, and even higher percentages of deeply pigmented African Americans or other deeply pigmented individuals may be deficient, along with 85 percent of the American public!

The Role of Vitamin D in Your Body

There are only 30,000 genes in your body and vitamin D has been shown to influence over 2,000 of them. That is one of the primary reasons it influences so many diseases, from cancer and autism to heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis.
The misguided advice to avoid the sun like the plague may very well be responsible for over 600,000 preventable cases of cancer each year, and the loss of as many as one million lives worldwide from other preventable diseases!
These are extraordinary statistics, and the remedy is so shockingly simple, and inexpensive …
By getting more appropriate sun exposure, your body will naturally produce vitamin D, which has been found to be a major key that can help prevent a vast number of major diseases and minor ailments alike.
For example, studies have shown you can decrease your risk of cancer by MORE THAN HALF simply by optimizing your vitamin D levels with sun exposure.
Vitamin D even fights colds and the flu, as it regulates the expression of genes that influence your immune system to attack and destroy bacteria and viruses. In fact, it is very rare for someone with optimized vitamin D levels to come down with the flu.
I have been extolling the virtues of safe sun exposure and optimizing your vitamin D levels for over a decade now. Hopefully you have been paying attention and are now reaping the benefits.
The best way to obtain your vitamin D is by regularly safely exposing large surface areas of your skin to the sun or a safe tanning bed. Notice I said large surface areas of your skin. Simply walking outside to your car completely clothed will simply not cut it.
Also, if your schedule or geography prevents this type of exposure then you will want to take oral vitamin D. It is not nearly as good as sun exposure but will help you benefit from vitamin D. The typical adult dose is 5,000-6,000 units per day. Avoid taking 1,000-2,000 units and thinking you are doing ok. In all likelihood, you’re NOT.
Two thousand units a day is simply NOT enough vitamin D for nearly any adult unless they are receiving UV exposure from the sun or a safe tanning bed.
I’ve also recently released updated dosing recommendations. Based on the most recent research, the current recommendation is 35 IU’s of vitamin D per pound of body weight. So for a child weighing 40 pounds, the recommended average dose would be 1,400 IU’s daily, and for a 170-pound adult, the dose would be nearly 6,000 IU’s.
The KEY to remember with all dosing recommendations however is that they are only to be used as suggestions. The only way to tell if you are taking the correct dose is to measure your vitamin D blood level, 25 hydroxy D.. You do not need to do the more expensive 1,25 dihydroxy D, and it is important to have the test done at Lab Corp.

If you’re still unsure about how to go about optimizing your vitamin D, I recommend you begin by watching my free one-hour lecture, which covers the basics.
Just imagine, following the seriously flawed health advice to avoid sun exposure at all cost may have claimed literally several million lives over the past decade. During that time, those who opposed this dogma were viewed as dangerous quacks, and now there are well over 800 scientific references proving beyond a doubt that getting proper sun exposure is not a luxury, but an absolute necessity.

Truth # 6: Cholesterol is Not the Villain You’ve Been Told it is

In the United States and many other countries, the demonization of cholesterol is very much engrained in most people’s minds. But this is a harmful myth that I have been trying to set the record straight on for more than a decade.
First of all, it’s important to realize that there’s a major difference between average and healthy cholesterol levels. It’s very similar to what we’re now seeing with vitamin D levels.
Today, with respect to cholesterol, ever lower levels of cholesterol levels are being recommended, primarily due to the significant influence of the drug industry. Cholesterol lowering drugs (statins) now generate profits to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year.
Before 2004, a 130 LDL cholesterol level was considered healthy. The updated guidelines, however, recommended levels of less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk.
In order to achieve these outrageous and dangerously low targets, you typically need to take multiple cholesterol-lowering drugs. So the guidelines instantly increased the market for these dangerous drugs.
Please understand that you have not been told the whole truth about cholesterol. Rather what you’re getting from most conventional health practitioners is little more than cleverly distorted marketing scams.
Lower is NOT always better when it comes to cholesterol. And, if your levels are too low, it could actually pose a serious health risk in and of itself.

What is Cholesterol, and Why Do You Need it?

Your body needs cholesterol. This soft, waxy substance is an integral part of your cell membranes, and it’s also the precursor (the raw material) your body uses to make your steroid hormones — one of which is vitamin D. Your skin contains cholesterol, and when UVB rays from the sun hits your skin it converts that form of cholesterol to vitamin D3, which is then transported to your blood. Your body then further converts it into the active form of vitamin D.
It also helps produce bile acids that help you to digest fat, and it’s involved in the formation of memories and is vital for your neurological function.
If you have increased levels of cholesterol, it is at least in part because of increased inflammation in your body. The cholesterol is there to help your body heal and repair.

The Risks of Low Cholesterol

Low cholesterol has its own set of health risks. It’s been linked to a variety of neurological problems, including memory loss, but it also:

Increases your risk of depression
Can increase your risk of suicide
May lead to violent behavior and aggression
Increase your risk of cancer and Parkinson’s disease

What is Too High?

Personally, I believe anything above 330 is likely too high. But another powerful way to determine if you’re at risk from abnormal cholesterol metabolism is to check your ratio of HDL, or “good” cholesterol, and your total cholesterol.
Your HDL percentage is a potent heart disease risk factor.
Simply divide your HDL level by your cholesterol. That percentage should ideally be above 25 percent. Typically, the higher the better, as there are no known side effects of having too high good cholesterol.
If your ratio falls below 15-20 percent you are at high risk, and below 10 percent, it’s a significant indicator of risk for heart disease.

Other Heart Disease Predictors that May Be Even More Important than Your Cholesterol Levels

In addition, another predictor of heart disease is your triglyceride to HDL ratio. In combination, high triglycerides and low HDL levels are an even bigger risk and are even more important to your heart health than the standard good vs. bad cholesterol ratio.
Simply divide your triglycerides level with your HDL to get this ratio. That percentage should be below 2.
One study found that people with the highest ratio of triglycerides to HDL had 16 times the risk of heart attack as those with the lowest ratio of triglycerides to HDL. So while you strive to keep your HDL cholesterol levels up, you’ll want to decrease your triglycerides.
How?
You can increase your HDL levels by exercising and getting plenty of omega-3 fats like those from krill oil. Triglycerides are easily decreased by exercising and avoiding grains and sugars in your diet.
A third heart disease predictor is your fasting uric acid levels. This too is another far more potent predictor than your total cholesterol levels. You’ll want your fasting uric acid levels to be between 3 and 5.
As I have been warning since around 2004, conventional medicine misses the boat entirely when they recommend that lowering cholesterol is the way to reduce your risk of heart attacks, because what is actually needed is to address whatever is causing your body damage — and leading to increased inflammation and then increased cholesterol.

What’s the Safest, Most Effective Way to Treat High Cholesterol?

I’ve written many articles warning you about the dangers of using statin drugs to treat high cholesterol, and equally many advising you on the proper ways to normalize your levels.
There are simple, basic strategies that can help you regulate your cholesterol.
First, you need to understand that simply lowering your dietary cholesterol intake is not an effective primary strategy. This is because 75 percent of your cholesterol is produced by your liver, which is influenced by your insulin levels.
Therefore, if you want to regulate your cholesterol levels, you need to optimize your insulin levels. High insulin levels also increase inflammation in your body, which is a primary reason why your body increases its cholesterol production. So the two – insulin and cholesterol — are tightly linked.
One of the most powerful ways you can optimize your insulin levels is by exercising, and paying attention to the foods you eat. Remember, foods that increase your insulin levels will also contribute to high cholesterol by making your liver produce more of it.
Here are my primary recommendations for safely lowering and regulating your cholesterol levels:

Get an appropriate amount of exercise.
Reduce, with the plan of eliminating, grains and sugars in your daily diet, especially fructose. It is VITAL to keep your total fructose level below 25 grams a day.
Eat the right foods for your nutritional type.
Eat a good portion of your food raw.
Make sure you’re getting plenty of high-quality, animal-based omega3-fats. I prefer those from krill oil.

I’ve treated between 20,000-30,000 patients, and I’ve only found about five people who were unable to respond to the recommendations I’ve given here. In these cases they likely had a condition called familial hypercholesterolemia.
It is extremely rare, affecting about one in 1,000 people who are on cholesterol lowering medication, but for those there may actually be some benefit to taking a statin drug.
Some have asked me about taking red rice yeast to control their cholesterol, and there is some confusion on that issue. Please understand that red rice extract is also a statin drug, with the same exact mechanism of action as other statins, even though it’s available over the counter.
The issue of cholesterol (and cholesterol-lowering drugs) is so fraught with misunderstanding and misinformation, I wrote a 17-page special report to shed some more light on the facts. It’s available for free at this link, and if you have not yet read it, I strongly urge you to do so now.
For part 1 in this series, please see this link.

Osteoporosis is a disease that causes bones to become thinner, more porous and break more easily. Osteopenia is different from osteoporosis — it is a slight thinning of bones that occurs naturally as women get older and typically doesn’t result in disabling bone breaks.
Osteopenia is a condition that only recently started to be thought of as a problem that required treatment. Until the early 1990’s, only a handful of people had even heard of the word. But osteopenia has transformed from a rarely heard word into a problem that millions of women swallow pills to treat.
The term “osteopenia” was never originally meant to be considered as a disease — it was a research category used mostly because some thought it might be useful for public health researchers who like clear categories for their studies.
But in 1995, a man named Jeremy Allen was approached by the drug company Merck. The pharmaceutical giant had just released a new osteoporosis drug called Fosamax. Since osteoporosis is a serious problem that affects millions of women, the potential market for Fosamax was enormous. But the drug wasn’t selling well.
Allen persuaded Merck to establish a nonprofit called the Bone Measurement Institute. On its board were six of the most respected osteoporosis researchers in the country.
But the institute itself had a rather slim staff: Allen was the only employee.
In 1997 the institute and several other interested organizations successfully lobbied to pass the Bone Mass Measurement Act, a piece of legislation that changed Medicare reimbursement rules to cover bone scans. More and more women got bone density tests (at Merck’s urging), and the very existence of the word “osteopenia” on a medical report had a profound effect.
Millions of women were worried by the diagnosis. And when clinicians saw the word ‘osteopenia’ on a report, they assumed it was a disease. Merck did not disabuse them of the notion.
There are no long-term studies that look at what happens to women with osteopenia who start Fosamax in their 50’s and continue treatment long-term in the hopes of preventing old-age fractures. And none are planned.

Earlier this month, a study published in the journal Science answered a question that medical scientists had been asking since 2006, when they learned of a novel virus found in prostate tumors called xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, or XMRV: Was it a human infection?
The new study provided overwhelming evidence that XMRV is a human gammaretrovirus — the third human retrovirus (after H.I.V. and human lymphotropic viruses, which cause leukemia and lymphoma). Infection is permanent and, yes, it can spread from person to person (though it is not yet known how the virus is transmitted).
That would have been news enough, but there was more. XMRV had been discovered in people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, a malady whose very existence has been a subject of debate for 25 years. For sufferers of this disease, the news has offered enormous hope. Being seriously ill for years, even decades, is nightmarish enough, but patients are also the targets of ridicule and hostility that stem from the perception that it is all in their heads. In the study, 67 percent of the 101 patients with the disease were found to have XMRV in their cells.
Many people don’t realize how severe this illness can be. It is marked by memory and cognition problems, and physical collapse after any mental or physical exertion. The various co-infections that occur only make matters worse. Many patients are bedridden. And recovery is rare. A significant number of patients have been ill for more than two decades.
It is estimated that more than a million Americans are seriously ill with the disease. (Not everyone infected with XMRV will necessarily get chronic fatigue syndrome — in the same way that not all of the 1.1 million Americans infected with HIV will get AIDS.)

By Dr. Mercola

Your adrenal glands are each no bigger than a walnut and weigh less than a grape, yet are responsible for one of the most important functions in your body: managing stress.
“The adrenals are known as ‘the glands of stress,'” writes James Wilson in his book Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome. “It is their job to enable your body to deal with stress from every possible source, ranging from injury and disease to work and relationship problems. Your resiliency, energy, endurance and your very life all depend on their proper functioning.”[1]
When your adrenal glands are fatigued, a condition known as adrenal fatigue or adrenal exhaustion, your entire body feels it and suffers from extreme exhaustion as well.
It’s estimated that up to 80 percent of adults experience adrenal fatigue during their lifetimes, yet it remains one of the most under-diagnosed illnesses in the United States.[2]

The Optimal Function of Your Adrenal Glands

Your body has two adrenal glands, located just above each of your kidneys. As part of your endocrine system, your adrenal glands secrete more than 50 hormones, many of which are essential for life and include:

Glucocorticoids. These hormones, which include cortisol, help your body convert food into energy, normalize blood sugar, respond to stress and maintain your immune system’s inflammatory response.

Mineralocorticoids. These hormones, which include aldosterone, help keep your blood pressure and blood volume normal by maintaining a proper balance of sodium, potassium and water in your body.[3]

Adrenaline. This hormone increases your heart rate and controls blood flow to your muscles and brain, along with helping with the conversion of glycogen to glucose in your liver.

Together, these hormones and others produced by your adrenal glands control such body functions as:[4]

Maintaining metabolic processes, such as managing blood sugar levels and regulating inflammation
Regulating your body’s balance of salt and water
Controlling your “fight or flight” response to stress
Maintaining pregnancy
Initiating and controlling sexual maturation during childhood and puberty
Producing sex steroids such as estrogen and testosterone

Ironically, although your adrenal glands are there, in large part, to help you cope with stress, too much of it is actually what causes their function to break down.
In other words, one of your adrenal glands most important tasks is to get your body ready for the “fight or flight” stress response, which means increasing adrenaline and other hormones.
As part of this response, your heart rate and blood pressure increase, your digestion slows, and your body becomes ready to face a potential threat or challenge.
While this response is necessary and good when it’s needed, many of us are constantly faced with stressors (work, environmental toxins, not enough sleep, worry, relationship problems and more) and therefore are in this “fight or flight” mode for far too long — much longer than was ever intended from a biological standpoint.
The result is that your adrenal glands, faced with excessive stress and burden, become overworked and fatigued. Some common factors that put excess stress on your adrenals are:[5]

Anger, fear, anxiety, guilt, depression and other negative emotions
Overwork, including physical or mental strain
Excessive exercise
Sleep deprivation
Light-cycle disruption (such as working the night shift or often going to sleep late)

Surgery, trauma or injury
Chronic inflammation, infection, illness or pain
Temperature extremes
Toxic exposure
Nutritional deficiencies and/or severe allergies

Signs and Symptoms of Adrenal Fatigue

When your adrenal glands become depleted, it leads to a decrease in certain hormone levels, particularly cortisol. The deficiencies in certain adrenal hormones will vary with each case, ranging from mild to severe.
In its most extreme form, this is referred to as Addison’s disease, a condition that causes muscle weakness, weight loss, low blood pressure and low blood sugar, and can be life threatening.
Fortunately, only about four persons per 100,000 develop Addison’s disease, which is due to autoimmune disease in most cases but can also develop after very severe stress.[6]
At the other end of the spectrum, as well as in between, lies adrenal fatigue (also known as hypoadrenia). Though the symptoms are less severe than in Addison’s disease, symptoms of adrenal fatigue can be debilitating. As Wilson writes:

“Non-Addison’s hypoadrenia (adrenal fatigue) is not usually severe enough to be featured on TV or to be considered a medical emergency. In fact, modern medicine does not even recognize it as a distinct syndrome. Nevertheless, it can wreak havoc with your life.
In the more serious cases of adrenal fatigue, the activity of the adrenal glands is so diminished that the person may have difficulty getting out of bed for more than a few hours per day. With each increment of reduction in adrenal function, every organ and system in your body is more profoundly affected.”[7]

Classic signs and symptoms of adrenal fatigue include:

Fatigue and weakness, especially in the morning and afternoon
A suppressed immune system
Increased allergies
Muscle and bone loss and muscular weakness
Depression
Cravings for foods high in salt, sugar or fat
Hormonal imbalance
Skin problems
Autoimmune disorders
Increased PMS or menopausal symptoms
Low sex drive
Lightheadedness when getting up from sitting or lying down
Decreased ability to handle stress
Trouble waking up in the morning, despite a full night’s sleep
Poor memory

Additionally, people with adrenal fatigue often get a burst of energy around 6 p.m., followed by sleepiness at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m., which is often resisted. A “second wind” at 11 p.m. is then common, which often may keep you from falling asleep until 1 a.m.[8]
Further, those with adrenal fatigue often also have abnormal blood sugar levels and mental disturbances, such as increased fears and anxiety, and rely on coffee, soda and other forms of caffeine to keep them going.
As the names implies, the most common symptom of adrenal fatigue is unrelenting fatigue, a feeling of being run down or not able to keep up with your daily demands. And because fatigue is such a common symptom, the syndrome is very often missed or misdiagnosed by physicians.

The Common Medical Test for Adrenal Function Cannot Diagnose Adrenal Fatigue

Adding to the problem of misdiagnosis is the fact that doctors typically use an ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone) test to check for problems with your adrenal glands. However, the test only recognizes extreme underproduction or overproduction of hormone levels, as shown by the top and bottom 2 percent of a bell curve.
Symptoms of adrenal malfunction, meanwhile, occur after 15 percent of the mean on both sides of the curve. So your adrenal glands could be functioning 20 percent below the mean, and your body experiencing symptoms of adrenal fatigue, and the standard test won’t recognize it.[9]
The test that will recognize adrenal fatigue, in all of its stages, is a salivary cortisol test. This is an inexpensive test you can purchase online and do at home, as no prescription is needed. However, if you suspect you have adrenal fatigue a knowledgeable natural health care provider can help you with diagnosis and treatment.

Natural, and Simple, Steps to Recover From Adrenal Fatigue

It takes time to burnout your adrenal glands, and as you might suspect it also takes some time to recover. You can expect:

Six to nine months of recovery time for minor adrenal fatigue
12 to 18 months for moderate adrenal fatigue
Up to 24 months for severe adrenal fatigue[10]

The good news is that natural treatments are very effective for this syndrome, and with time, patience, and the tips that follow it is possible to recover.

Probably the single most important area is to have powerful tools and strategies to address the current and past emotional traumas in your life. Prayer, meditation and meridian tapping techniques can be very helpful here. If you were to focus only on one area it would be best to concentrate in this area as this really is the central key to restoring your adrenal health.

Listen to your body and rest when you feel tired (this includes during the day by taking short naps or just laying down)

Sleep in (until 9 a.m. if you feel like it)

Exercise regularly using a comprehensive program of strength, aerobic, core, and interval training

Eat a healthy nutrient-dense diet like the one described in my nutrition plan, according to your Nutritional Type

Avoid stimulants like coffee and soda, as these can further exhaust your adrenal glands

Further, to maintain proper adrenal function it is imperative to control your blood sugar levels. If you are eating the right foods for your Nutritional Type, your blood sugar levels should balance out, and the following guidelines will also help:

Eat a small meal or snack every three to four hours
Eat within the first hour upon awakening
Eat a small snack near bedtime
Eat before becoming hungry. If hungry, you have already allowed yourself to run out of fuel (low blood sugar), which places additional stress on your adrenal glands

You may also want to see a physician well versed in bioidentical hormone replacement, and get tested to see if you could benefit from the use of DHEA. DHEA is a natural steroid and precursor hormone produced by the adrenals, and levels are often very low in people with adrenal fatigue. Keep in mind, of course, that DHEA is not a quick cure, and should not be used as a sole treatment.
Treating adrenal fatigue requires a whole-body approach, one that addresses the excess stress and unhealthy lifestyle habits that wore out your adrenals in the first place.
Interestingly the very first step in normalizing sex hormones, either male or female, is to first address the adrenal hormone system. For example if you were to only measure female hormones and then replace them with bioidentical hormone therapy, you will virtually be guaranteed to fail because the weakened adrenals will never allow the hormones to equilibrate properly.
Because your adrenal health is so important to your overall health and well-being, I highly recommend you work with a knowledgeable natural health care practitioner to find out if you have adrenal fatigue and then remedy it.
The tips above are an excellent starting point, however, and can be used by nearly everyone to help give your adrenal glands a healthy boost.

[1] Wilson, James. “Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome.” Smart Publications, p. 3, 2002.
[2] Wilson, James. “Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome.” Smart Publications, p. 6, 2002.
[3] MayoClinic.com Addison’s Disease http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/addisons-disease/DS00361/DSECTION=causes (Accessed June 11, 2009)
[4] National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, “Adrenal Gland Disorders” http://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/Adrenal_Gland_Disorders.cfm (Accessed June 11, 2009)
[5] Understanding Adrenal Function August 27, 2000, Mercola.com https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2000/08/27/adrenals.aspx (Accessed June 11, 2009)
[6] Wilson, James. “Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome.” Smart Publications, p. 7, 2002.
[7] Wilson, James. “Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome.” Smart Publications, p. 7, 2002.
[8] Veracity, Dani. “Recovering From Adrenal Fatigue: How Your Body Can Overcome Chronic Stress and Feel Energized Again.” Natural News, April 6, 2006 http://www.naturalnews.com/019339.html (Accessed June 11, 2009)
[9] Veracity, Dani. “Recovering From Adrenal Fatigue: How Your Body Can Overcome Chronic Stress and Feel Energized Again.” Natural News, April 6, 2006 http://www.naturalnews.com/019339.html (Accessed June 11, 2009)
[10] Veracity, Dani. “Recovering From Adrenal Fatigue: How Your Body Can Overcome Chronic Stress and Feel Energized Again.” Natural News, April 6, 2006 http://www.naturalnews.com/019339.html (Accessed June 11, 2009)

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the Mayo Clinic have developed a computer model that is intended to determine the best time to begin using statin therapy in diabetes patients to help prevent heart disease and stroke.
According to the lead author, “The research is significant because patients with diabetes are at high risk for cardiovascular disease and statins are the single most commonly used treatment for patients at risk of heart disease and/or stroke.”
The new model incorporates patient-specific data. An established risk model calculates each patient’s probability of heart attack and stroke based on risk factors, such as their cholesterol, blood pressure, etc. This overall risk “score” is used to weigh the medical advantages of beginning statin therapy against the financial cost of the statins.

Statins drugs, which are medications widely used to lower cholesterol, may cause structural damage to the muscles of people experiencing muscle aches and weakness.
The damage may occur even when tests for a protein thought to signal injury are normal, and may persist even after statin use is halted.
About 10 to 15 percent of people taking statins report myalgia, or minor muscle aches and weakness. A smaller number have stronger, persistent pain, called myopathy. In a study, researchers biopsied leg muscle tissue from 83 patients: 44 were taking statins and had serious and persistent muscle pain, 19 were taking statins and had no myopathy, and 20 had never taken statins or suffered myopathy.
Biopsies showed that 25 of the 44 with myopathy had muscle damage.