Best Health And Wellness Info

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The following video quickly and easily dispels the popular myth that high cholesterol is the cause of heart disease.  While cholesterol plaque of the blood vessels is involved in the development of heart disease, the amount of arterial plaqueing that occurs is not proportionate to one’s blood cholesterol level.  What causes the accumulation of cholesterol in the arteries, and subsequently results in heart disease, is damage and inflammation of the blood vessel walls.  By controlling inflammation and keeping toxins like homocysteine under control, you can have a much greater effect on lowering your heart disease risk than you ever could by lowering your cholesterol. 

Cholesterol and Heart Disease

Stay tuned to my blog for more on natural remedies. 

Share This

Dr Whiting on Diabetes and Hypoglycemia

The above is an excellent video by Dr.Whiting that explains how obesity, hypoglycemia, and type II diabetes are connected and how excess insulin (resulting from consuming too many carbohydrates) produces numerous health problems.  The video does a great job of explaining why the conventional “diabetes diet” that is commonly recommended is not an effective nor healthy approach to managing diabetes. 

Unfortunately, the conventional dietary recommendations for type II diabetes are focused on the fact that diabetics tend to develop problems with elevated blood lipids (cholesterol and triglycerides), but they fail to look at where these high lipid levels come from.  Because the focus is on blood lipids, the diet recommendations are to limit cholesterol and triglygeride (fat) intake.  But in most cases, very low fat diets tend to be very high carbohydrate diets.  As Dr. Whiting explains in the video, excess carbohydrate gets converted to fat, and for most people, a high carbohydrate intake will produce a far greater elevation of blood lipids than even a relatively high fat diet.  Thus, the often-recommended “diabetic diet” will typically cause diabetics to gain weight, develop even worse diabetic conditions, and have even more problems with elevated blood lipids and the problems they cause (cardiovascular disease and plaqueing in small blood vessels that lead to diabetic neuropathy, vision loss, etc.). 

Now, many doctors will dismiss these concepts, and many patients will continue down the path of destruction by following the conventional low-fat diet approach.  To the skeptics who believe that the conventional approach must be correct (otherwise why else would their doctor, the American Diabetes Association, etc. continue to recommend it), I offer the following challenge:  Test it yourself.  Try switching to the type of diet Dr. Whiting mentions (you can get more information from his website at http://www.healthyinformation.com/ or contact me for diet recommendations).  You don’t have to do it for very long - one or two weeks is usually sufficient to see a difference.  Try it for a couple of weeks and see what happens.  I can tell you if you follow the recommendations consistently for that length of time, you’ll likely see a drastic improvement in your blood sugar (be sure to monitor it closely, especially if you are taking insulin, because you’ll need to adjust your medication dosage accordingly).  And if not, you can always go back to the conventional diabetes diet. 

Now, a lot of people have trouble initially when they switch to a lower carbohydrate diet (this is not an extreme low-carb diet like Atkins, but it is much lower in carbohydrates than you are probably used to), not because it causes any problems (other than maybe some blood sugar swings the first day or two until the body adjusts), but because they are addicted to the carbohydrates and don’t like not eating them.  If you stick to it though, you’ll get used to it and most people actually don’t miss the pasta, the bread, the sweets, etc., once they’ve been off them for a couple of weeks.  So if your real reason for not wanting to try this other approach is that you are addicted to carbs, you need to make a decision as to what’s most important to you:  go on eating carbs and sufer the inevitable decline in your health, or tough it out for a couple of weeks until you get past your addiction and reap the long-term rewards of feeling better (usually surprisingly better), and being much healthier.  I hope that you will give this other approach to diabetes a try, and I wish you good luck!

Share This

While cholesterol continues to be portrayed in the media and in advertisements as a deadly poison to be eliminated at all costs, the real story is gradually making its way to world - and it’s not what the drug companies want you to think!  Here’s a couple of other perspectives on cholesterol from the blogosphere…

Lack of Cholesterol Is Worse than High Cholesterol Levels

Deficiency in (bad) blood cholesterol can be even more dangerous, than high cholesterol level, claim Japanese scientists. They have found, that maintaining a low cholesterol level for a long time or decrease of cholesterol level …

Boycott Corn Syrup

High triglyceride levels raise blood levels of the bad LDL cholesterol and lower blood levels of the good HDL cholesterol, which increases heart attack risk. 1) Lancet 2001;357:505-08. 2) European Journal of Cancer Prevention, 1999, …

Pfizer’s Cholesterol Drug Boosts Death Rate by 58 Percent

Patients who take the cholesterol drug torcetrapid, intended to increase levels of HDL (”good”) cholesterol and lower LDL (”bad”) cholesterol levels, have a 58 percent higher risk of death than similar patients who do not take the drug, …

Stay tuned to my natural remedies blog for more cholesterol updates.

Share This

Since the explosion in the number of prescriptions for statin drugs, I’ve noticed a trend in the patients I see in my practice.  People who suddenly develop joint and/or muscle pains without any history of trauma or unusual stress, infection, or toxic exposure tend to have one thing in common:  they are taking statin drugs to lower their cholesterol.

This is primarily true in cases where the patient develops pain all over, as opposed to a specific muscle or joint, but it has been my experience that the onset of even localized unexplained pains can sometimes be traced to taking statins.

Many of these patients come in pre-diagnosed (either by themselves or another doctor) as having arthritis, fibromyalgia, bursitis, etc. because those are the most common diagnoses that fit the pain patterns these people are having.  But the sudden onset with no immediately apparent cause is a tip-off that statins may be involved.

The existence of statin-induced muscle damage and pain syndromes is acknowledged by the drug manufacturers; however, the official stance is that this is a rare problem.  But my experience says otherwise.

In fact the problem is so common, now when I see a patient who has pain all over, I usually find myself asking when they started taking the statin drugs rather than asking if they are taking statins.  In the vast majority of cases, the response to that question is that the patient started on statins just before they started developing the pain.  In a smaller group, they may have been on statins for several years, or may have recently changed from one statin drug to another, but in almost all cases of sudden onset, widespread pains, they are taking statins.

Now that might be circumstantial evidence, but in those patients who stop taking the cholesterol drugs, my expereince has been that nearly all of them report symptom improvement within a few days.  Of course, one might argue that the resolution of the pain after getting off the statins is circumstantial too, but if I’m on that jury, I’m going to render a guilty verdict.

Some people do just fine on statins and do not have any significant pain or other side-effects, but for those who do develop statin-related pains, it is a sign of potentially dangerous muscle damage and my recommendation is to discuss getting off the drugs with the prescribing physician.  What should you do if your physician isnt willing to even try taking you off the drugs?  My advice is to find another physician.  At the very least, such pain can be very debilitating and can severely diminish one’s quality of life and your doctor needs to recognize that the harm the drugs are obviously doing probably outweighs the benefits they might be providing.  One of my patients told her doctor that she was quitting the statins and he told her that she had to keep taking them in order to prevent a heart attack, to which she replied that she’d rather die of a heart attack than live like she had been with the statin-related pain (and she meant it!). 

Ultimately, high cholesterol in and of itself is actually not the big danger that we’ve been led to believe anyway (more on that in a future post), so for those who do experience statin-related pain, in my opinion the damage from the statins usually far outweighs the benefits they may provide. 

Stay tuned to my natural remedies blog for more information on cholesterol and your health.

Share This