If your BP is high, your arteries are too stiff. DrCate.com

A new study suggests Dr. Atkins was right: A high carb diet is not a healthy diet, and cutting carbs trims more than just your waistline. While both low-carb and low-fat diets can help you loose weight, Duke University’s well-designed study makes it pretty clear that if you want to reduce your weight and your pressure, a low-carb diet is a better choice.

From Today’s Medscape Family Medicine:

“January 25, 2010 (Durham, North Carolina) — A new randomized trial comparing a low-carbohydrate diet with a low-fat diet in combination with the weight-loss drug orlistat has found that both strategies produced meaningful weight loss among hospital outpatients over a one-year period. Strikingly, however, the low-carb diet appeared to produce significant improvements in blood pressure.

According to Dr William S Yancy Jr (Duke University, Durham, NC), lead author on the study, this is the first time the low-carb diet has been pitted against a diet drug in combination with a different diet.”

Why is low-carb better? Deep Nutrition offers the reasons:

Carbs are nothing more than sugar molecules linked together. So after a bowl of pasta or a sack of potato chips, blood sugar levels go up until the pancreas squirts out insulin to bring the sugar level back down. Even in a healthy person (with no diabetes) every bolus of carb dropped into your tummy will lead to a brief period of time where your blood sugar is higher than optimal. In this study, done on people with high blood pressure (who tend to also be insulin resistant or diabetic) that time period is extended because it takes longer for the body to respond to insulin.

And why is high blood sugar bad?

This is a basic question, and, as it turns out, answering this simple question yields an abundance of explanations for all sorts of diseases (covered in chapter 9 of the book). Today’s discussion will focus on the effects of high blood sugar on arterial flexibility.

How Sugar Affects Your Body: Understanding the Maillard reaction

Sugar spontaneously sticks to proteins. This reaction is the result of a biochemical reaction known as the Maillard reaction. It explains why sugary foods like jelly and ice cream feel sticky when they dry on our skin. You can see the Maillard reaction at work when you roast a chicken. In the hot oven, sugar molecules and proteins present within the skin of the chicken react together much faster than at room temperature (or the body temperature of a chicken). The result of all these trillions of Maillard reactions is a delicious crispy skin.

The bottom of the pan, however, often ends up coated with a black sticky gunk. On a high-carb diet, a similar sticky gunk can form inside the backbone of your arteries, leading to high blood pressure.

It works like this:

At normal blood sugar levels, Maillard reactions occur at a slow and steady rate. A healthy body has systems in place to clean up the few molecules of yucky sticky gunk that form. At higher-than-normal blood sugar levels, Maillard reactions start to accellerate, and sticky gunk builds up faster than the body can clean it up. Over years, the sticky gunk accumulates, leading to test results that draw a doctor’s attention.

Maillard reactions in your arteries can affect your blood pressure.

On a high carb diet, your arteries are bathed in glucose molecules on a regular basis. Glucose molecules react with proteins in your arteries, basically slow cooking them right inside your body.

While sticky gunk buildup in the supporting proteins of your arteries doesn’t make them quite as crispy as roast chicken skin (because the conditions are less drying inside your arteries than in an oven), arteries afflicted with sticky gunk products of Maillard reactions are going to be stiffer than normal. This is not good for your circulatory system. (Are you surprised?) When arteries loose their compliance and flexibility, it’s harder to pump blood through them. That means your heart has to pump harder and your blood pressure rises.

With so many people eating more carbs than they should, it’s little wonder that the NIH reports 90 percent of people over the age of 65 now have high blood pressure.

Antioxidants like vitamins and flavinoids in fresh vegetables slow down the rate of the Maillard reaction, which is why studies keep showing that fresh vegetables and antioxidants are good for us.

Doctor’s advice: If you want to get off your pressure pills, the first step is to cut your carbs! While this study was done on overweight people, I’m pretty sure in time we’ll see studies that show low carb diets reduce pressure no matter your weight. So keeping your total daily pasta, bread, potato, rice, fruit, and other carb-rich food consumption under 100 gm (or 3 oz) per day is a great long-term goal.

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Astra Zeneca has imagined it, and now they’re going to see their dream come true. On December 16, the FDA announced their approval of Astra Zeneca’s cholesterol-lowering drug Crestor for use in people without high cholesterol despite the fact that a new study showed conclusively that the drug causes diabetes. By a vote of 12 to 4, the panel judged that even people at very low risk of heart disease should take the cholesterol medication anyway.

“I do think the diabetes problem is real, but I’m comforted by the fact that the drug works even in that patient group, so it’s very convincing,” said Michael Proschan, a statistician with the National Institutes of Health. In other words, even after Crestor gives you diabetes (or some other problem, see below), it may still cut your risk of certain types of heart disease, so why worry?

How you see the world with diabetic retinopathy

If you’ve been reading my blog, you probably aren’t surprised by this absurd determination. As I’ve said elsewhere, the intention of the drug companies is to market their products like Wrigley’s markets chewing gum: to sell to everyone, not just sick people. And the FDA often lends them a helping hand.

The December 16, 2009 declaration was made after the FDA completed a review of a large study published in 2008, known as the JUPITER study.

In designing the JUPITER study, Astra Zenica wanted to show that Crestor might benefit people without high cholesterol in order to expand Crestor’s potential customer base by an estimated 65 million people. So Astra Zenica enrolled people with normal cholesterol but high levels of body inflammation as measured by a protein called CRP, or C-reactive protein. Then they waited to see what would happen.

The study concludes that Crestor reduced the subjects’ risk of certain kinds of heart disease by 40%. But that’s not what the study actually shows—and the FDA knows it!

The people who make money selling Crestor designed and paid for the study, so of course it would be foolish to take any of these results at face value. But that’s exactly what the FDA does, assuming enough of us will be fooled by the pretense of oversight to make this whole charade profitable.

To give JUIPITER and other studies the appearance of legitimacy, drug companies have perfected the art of stacking the deck in their favor by a variety of methods. Basically, they cheat.

How drug companies cheat…

Firstly, they tend to pick the kinds of people likely to benefit from the drug, and exclude those likely to suffer side effects from entering their studies. In the case of JUPITER (as is the case with most cholesterol drug studies), by excluding anyone with heart failure or a history of cancer from participating, they reduce the number of people who suffer from the known propensity of Crestor to damage heart muscle cells and derange the immune system. (They don’t advertise that they did this so your doctor may have no idea that the drug has not been tested on people with these two common conditions.)

Secondly, they use statistical terms that don’t mean what most people (including doctors) think they mean, which brings us to that supposed 40%. Nobody’s risk was cut by 40%, only their relative risk was cut.

Huh?

The people enrolled in JUPITER were all at low risk of suffering a stroke or heart attack, with an average probability of 2.8 percent over the 1.9 years of the study. The drug cut their risk down to 1.6 percent. You and I would read that as a reduction of 1.4%. But applying the strange math of statistics, they can actually lie and get away with it, and they do so by comparing not the ABSOLUTE risk (1.4) but the RELATIVE risk (40 percent). Where does 40% come from? Simple: 2.8 is 40% more than 1.6, so the relative risk reduction is 40%.

Statistical manipulations are frequently employed by the authors of drug company-sponsored studies to make almost every drug seem far better than it really is.

The third way drug companies cheat is by pretending they don’t understand basic physiology.

Crestor Causes Diabetes, Diabetes Causes Heart Disease, Therefore Take Crestor to Prevent Heart Disease (???)

JUPTER showed that taking Crestor will INCREASE your relative risk of developing diabetes—by a whopping 29 percent over just 1.9 years. Over a longer period of time than 1.9 years, presumably a larger proportion of people would develop diabetes. Diabetes increases your risk of heart disease. And over all that time, many of those people who have Crestor to thank for their diabetes will also develop heart disease.

By the way, every doctor understands that diabetes increases your risk of heart disease. So where is the outpouring of protest by concerned physicians?

And by the way, every academic physician who has published a paper does understand the difference between relative risk and absolute risk. So where are the John’s Hopkins and Harvard intellectuals warning people about the misrepresentations of the facts?

This apathy on the part of many MDs is a big reason that people are loosing faith in allopathic medicine, skipping important vaccines, and putting off the purchase of health insurance until after its already too late.

Diabetes not only increases your risk of heart attacks and strokes, but also of cancer, chronic musculoskeletal pain, dementia, and more. Crestor itself, by reducing your body’s ability to make isoprene units, directly increases your risk of all these things as well.

This increase in diabetes was the reason for the FDA’s mandatory review, but I think anyone who follows the news knows that the FDA is bought and sold and the review process is nothing more than window dressing serving to do little more than offer an excuse for more interviews and more free advertising for the supposed benefits of our latest wonder drug.

So should you get your CRP tested? Sure. If it’s high, that’s a good indication that the diet you are following is likely to make you sick. (CRP is also elevated when the immune system is highly active, as it is during infections and autoimmune disorders.) But if you ask your doctor if Crestor—or any other cholesterol-lowering medication—is “right for you?” keep in mind, he or she may be inclined to simply continue going along with whatever the FDA recommends.

If you care about your health, don’t let your doctor off the hook so easily. Ask why you’d want to take a pill that’s been proven to put you at risk of diabetes.

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DNA Vaccines Change us at a Cellular Level

Recently, though, I heard about a new biotech initiative to make DNA-Vaccines. The thought of this makes my blood run cold. They are talking about turning people into genetically modified organisms.

DNA-vaccines are nothing like the vaccines that have been used for the past 150 years.

Regular vaccines inoculate a vaccine-recipient with the same proteins they would be exposed to anyway were they to get infected with the virus in question. DNA vaccines work by altering our DNA, changing us at a cellular level.

The benefit, some argue, would be that the new DNA vaccines could be produced more quickly and provide a longer period of immunity.

Normally, proteins in the vaccine are made in eggs or by genetically modified bacteria. Inoculation then injects these proteins into the interstitial area between muscle cells where they attract the attention of the immune system and trigger an immune response. When we are exposed to the actual infectious organism after a vaccine our immune system already has the antibodies to fight it off.

DNA vaccines require special technology to deliver the DNA not to the interstitial spaces between muscle cells, but into the muscle cell itself. And not just into the cell, but into the cell nucleus. Once the new DNA arrives, the muscle cell will be forced to produce viral proteins—potentially for the rest of your life.

“Extended immunostimulation leads to chronic inflammation” – Neeraj Kumar, M. Sc. Biotech at Kurukshetra University

According to Neeraj Kumar, M. Sc. Biotech, a potential disadvantage is the fact that this “extended immunostimulation leads to chronic inflammation.” In other words, you might develop a serious auto-immune disorder along the lines of lupus, or potentially even a neurologic disorder like myasthenia gravis.

While it’s true that infectious diseases like malaria and TB are widespread and life-threatening and a new technology that might help better defend against them would be welcome, I for one have no interest in signing up to become a GMO product of the Inovio Corporation.

Watch the the first two minutes of Dr. Joseph Kim’s interview, CEO of Inovio Corp, and decide for yourself if he cares more about safety or profits.

Here’s a video produced by Neeraj Kumar, M. Sc. At minute 2:17 he lists the “disadvantages” of this new technology.

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This month’s release of historically non-aggressive guidelines suggest, for some cancers anyway, it just might.

1. The American Urologic Association (AUA) now recommends that certain men with prostate cancer should be offered the option of surveillance rather than treatment.
2. The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) now recommends less frequent mammograms. The old recommendations were for an annual mammogram starting at age 40. The new recommendations are to start at age 50, and only get screened every other year.

A Kinder, Gentler Approach

The AUA has recognized that in treating prostate cancers that are unlikely to ever spread, doctors may have subjected hundreds of thousands of American men to unnecessary procedures and suffered needless complications, including loss of bladder control and sexual function. This is the rationale for less aggressive care. Nevertheless, the AUA worries that few people will take this safer option.

Cancer cell surrounded by immune system cells

The USPSTF has recognized that by treating tiny, early stage breast cancers so aggressively, doctors may also have unknowingly subjected hundreds of thousands of American women to unnecessary procedures, leading to needless complications including disfigurement and even death, all the while assuming they were saving people’s lives.

Years ago, I asked one of Hawaii’s top breast surgeons what the natural course of a tumor were a patient to refuse treatment and let nature take its course. He told me he had never seen a study to answer that question so, unfortunately, he had absolutely no idea. Now, with support of USPSTF, more surgeons will hopefully share this honest appraisal with their patients and encourage them to re-prioritize their lives in order to pursue a healthier mode of living.

Your Body’s Best Defense: A Vigilant Immune System

We’ve all gotten used to the idea that cancer is universally devastating and that technology is the only hope for salvation. Our bodies have little defense, the thinking went, against this most evil of villains. Andrew Weil was one of the first to challenge this mythology, and in 2000 his book Spontaneous Healing cited several instances of patients who’s cancers spontaneously regressed. It’s now well accepted that our bodies may be busy slaying cancerous cells all the time. (The medical term for this is immunosurveillance.)

Unfortunately, we still have no way of identifying which cancers the immune system can and will catch and which it won’t.

With further study, we may learn that regression is the natural course for many early or non-aggressive cancers if we successfully support our immune system function with good sleep, exercise, stress reduction, and of course a healthy diet built around natural, authentic cuisine.

We’ve learned a lot about cancer in the past 20 years, but by and large we’re still in the Dark Ages. We have yet to fully understand and appreciate a healthy immune system’s role as a shield against incipient (and potentially also more advanced) cancers.

Bottom line: high tech solutions can be useful in a fight against cancer, but supporting your immune system with real food and a healthy lifestyle is the best way to live happily ever after.

Recommended reading on the fascinating topic of Immunosurveillance:

Cancer immunoediting: from immunosurveillance to tumor escape. Nat Immunol. 2002 Nov;3(11):991-8.

Abstract: The concept that the immune system can recognize and destroy nascent transformed cells was originally embodied in the cancer immunosurveillance hypothesis of Burnet and Thomas. This hypothesis was abandoned shortly afterwards because of the absence of strong experimental evidence supporting the concept. New data, however, clearly show the existence of cancer immunosurveillance and also indicate that it may function as a component of a more general process of cancer immunoediting. This process is responsible for both eliminating tumors and sculpting the immunogenic phenotypes of tumors that eventually form in immunocompetent hosts. In this review, we will summarize the historical and experimental basis of cancer immunoediting and discuss its dual roles in promoting host protection against cancer and facilitating tumor escape from immune destruction.

Tumor immunoediting and immunosculpting pathways to cancer progression. Semin Cancer Biol. 2007 Aug;17(4):275-87.

Abstract: Recent studies have suggested that a natural function of the immune system is to respond and destroy aberrant, dysfunctional cells by a process called immunosurveillance. These studies also suggest that the tumors that arise despite immunosurveillance have been immunosculpted by the immune system. The purported abilities of tumors to induce immune tolerance and suppression, the increased pathogenic behavior of the tumor cells following exposure to immune effectors and the loss of immunogenicity (i.e. immunoediting) often observed in advanced stage tumors could be the result of immunosculpting. In some cases, these immunosculpting features may be permanent and irreversible. However, in other cases, reversible epigenetic mechanisms may underlie the immune resistant tumor phenotype. Regardless, these immune-induced alterations could contribute to cancer pathogenesis. Understanding the mechanisms by which tumors evade immunity will be important for disease prevention and therapeutics.

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Tiger's Concussion

With an injury like that, I would tell a patient to expect between six weeks and six months of after effects, including headaches, irritability, and concentration deficits. This can be frightening and frustrating for both patient and the people they live and work with. In rare cases, these problems can persist for years.

That’s the scary news.

The good news is most people do make complete recoveries after this kind of head trauma. But recovery isn’t automatic. As with any injury, you have to give your body a chance to heal. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroscientist and author of My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, advises head-injured patients to appreciate the power of sleep to allow the brain to heal.

Rest gives your brain time to repair. But it also needs the raw materials to rebuild. That other half of the brain injury recovery equation depends entirely on what you eat.

What foods does a recovering brain need?

• Quality fats and proteins
• Antioxidant rich fresh herbs and vegetables

The brain is composed almost entirely of fat and proteins. What Tiger’s brain needs right now are quality fats and proteins like those found in eggs from free-ranging chickens (with access to insects–high in long-chain omega-3 fats which concentrate in the egg), raw fish, and bone stocks. Fresh vegetables (notice I’m not saying “fruits and vegetables”) supply the vitamins and antioxidants that prevent those delicate omega-3 fats from breaking down.

What foods harm an injured brain?

• Sugar and carbohydrate rich foods
• Vegetable oils (soy oil, canola oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, grapeseed oil, sunflower oil)
• These impair the formation of new membranes and synapses

What Tiger needs to avoid are high sugar and high carbohydrate foods including juices, fruits, breads, pasta, potatoes, and all the other “white” stuff, along with vegetable oils that have been deodorized and refined (and so are full of fats that can damage nerve cell membranes)

So here’s my advice, Tiger: Follow Dr. Taylor’s advice and get plenty of rest–more than you think you need. And please eat plenty of quality, brain-building foods. Before you know it, you’ll be feeling like yourself again. Your brain wants to give you a full recovery, but it needs your help.

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Barefoot running is making fast tracks in the running world. Proponents believe wearing shoes alters the runner’s gait in ways that lead to injury, and the popularity of a new book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superatheletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen is spurring this craze onward.

The percentage of runners suffering injuries has been climbing lately, in spite of what we think have been improvements to running-shoe design, McDougall asserts. While I agree that ill-fitting footwear can contribute to injuries, many other factors could also explain why runners of any given age seem to be getting more injuries today than in the past.

One of the most important overlooked factors in running is that of connective tissue strength.

Connective tissue health is vital to your health, as it forms the backbone of your entire musculoskeletal and circulatory systems, as well as your digestive system and your skin. The subject of connective tissue certainly deserves more coverage than it typically gets in athletic magazines, medical journals, and sports medicine clinics. Look for more posts on this fascinating science in the near future!

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The two big questions I’ve been getting about the flu this year are, Should I get the H1N1 vaccine? and Is the H1N1 flu as scary as people seem to be saying?

Let’s start with the second question first.

Is the N1H1 flu especially dangerous?

The N1H1 swine flu virus is, like any other flu virus, potentially deadly — particularly to very young children, the elderly, pregnant women, and people with certain chronic diseases, like diabetes. But this particular flu has the potential to pack a little more punch than other flu viruses because, to put it simply, our immune systems haven’t seen anything like it in a while and will therefore be caught a little off guard.

The last time anything like this swine flu circulated was in the 1970s. In the 1950s, there was a virus even more like this year’s H1N1 swine flu. In fact, this 1950s-era flu was so similar that epidemiologists believe having been born before 1950 might offer some limited protection from this year’s H1N1 flu pandemic.

I use the word pandemic in the same way the CDC uses it: Pandemic means only that the flu is occurring out of season, having started in May rather than the usual October or November.

Of course, many of us don’t want to depend solely on our immune systems to defend against the flu. That’s why we have vaccines. Let’s take a moment to understand how the vaccine production process works.

Eggs for vaccine incubation being candled to evaluate their quality

Every flu virus particle is covered with tiny little proteins. These proteins determine how the virus will behave in your body and how your immune system will react to it. Researchers use these proteins to identify and classify viruses into various families. Using combinations of letters and numbers — usually H and a number followed by N and a number — vaccine manufacturers can create a recipe for the coming year’s vaccine that will include the right mix of proteins from the families of viruses we are most likely to encounter.

Notice I said “most likely.” It’s kind of a guessing game. Any given year, the “seasonal” flu shot might contain, say, H2 or 3 and N3 or 5 based on epidemiologic predictions, which are, like the weatherman’s predictions, not 100 percent guaranteed. Most years, however, they get it pretty close.

(I’ve oversimplified this a little. There are actually several families of flu viruses, including swine flu, avian flu, and influenza B. A vaccine against H1N1 swine flu wouldn’t protect you from H1N1 avian flu. But the techniques of making the vaccine and their potential side effects are essentially the same.)

Once vaccinated, when your body sees those viral proteins again (if someone with the flu sneezes on you), your white blood cells can destroy them so fast you may never even feel sick.

The only thing different this year is that the CDC didn’t know H1N1 swine flu was on its way and therefore didn’t tell the vaccine manufacturers to include it in their recipe.

And that’s why, this year, there’s a second shot — to complete the recipe.

Which brings us to the first question: Should I get the vaccine?

For those of you who get the flu vaccine every year as a matter of course, go ahead and get the seasonal vaccine and the H1N1 vaccine. You can think of the two separate inoculations as the typical, yearly flu vaccine delivered in two parts. In fact, had the CDC predicted the appearance of H1N1 swine flu virus, they would have simply added it to the ingredients in the flu vaccine in the first place.

For those of you who don’t typically get a shot but work with the public (teachers, healthcare workers, airline attendants, cashiers), you might consider getting the H1N1 flu inoculation this year. Because of the potential danger of serious illness from this relatively unfamiliar virus, in my practice I have especially recommended the vaccine to children, pregnant women, and people with certain chronic conditions — especially asthma and diabetes.

Are there any possible side effects of getting vaccinated?

Flu vaccines no longer contain any living viral particles (as they did back in the 1970s), so you can’t get the flu from the vaccine.

The flu shot still does have the potential, in extremely rare cases, to cause Guillain Barre syndrome, a potentially devastating neurologic disorder involving damage to the spinal cord that can lead to temporary or permanent weakness and paralysis. But so does the flu itself. If you feel like your risk of contracting the flu is really low, and you’re healthy enough to deal with getting sick for at least a week, then there’s relatively little benefit to you from getting the shot.

Keep in mind, if you have an immune system that is bombarded by pro-inflammatory sugar and vegetable oils, you are probably going to run a higher risk of both serious flu AND Guillan Barre than someone who takes more care with what they eat.

Nobody really knows how the vaccine or flu can lead to Guillain Barre. My personal opinion is that it has to do with the fact that one of the enzymes made by the flu virus, Neuraminidase (what the N in N1 stands for), acts upon fatty acids that make up the myelin sheath lining the cells of the nervous system.

I appreciate that many people are terrified of shots or are reluctant to get the vaccine for other reasons. Whether you get the shot is of course ultimately up to you. But I will say this: I saw a patient in June who ended up having the swine flu. Then I got sick for a week — and it sucked.

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A Picture of Health?

You may have heard Oprah’s Dr. Oz talking about an amazing new diet that, he claims, might allow us to live 150 years. I noticed that Dr. Oz seemed to be doing his best to highlight the benefits of this diet and downplay any risks, though he wasn’t following the diet himself – and I think I know why.

The diet he’s referring to is called “the calorie restriction diet,” a diet that requires you to limit your calories to 20 or 40 percent fewer than what’s currently recommended as a healthy amount, often as low as 1200 calories per day for women and 1800 for men.

This severe caloric restriction is said to engage the “sirtuin pathway,” a metabolic reaction to stress which, according to Dr. Oz, tells the body, “Don’t make more babies because you don’t have the excess abundant energy to do that—just live longer.”

Of course, though many people are dedicating themselves to these restrictions already, it’s anybody’s guess whether it will actually extend their lives. What researchers do know for sure is that if you genetically engage the sirtuin pathway in yeast, you can effectively slow all metabolic processes including reproduction and death. Whether these yeast “live” longer because they’ve been made more healthy is not well understood.

That’s why, to bolster their case, the Biotech companies funded animal research. One study the calorie restriction proponents like to point to a primate study done at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center(1).

What does the sirtuin pathway have to do with this study? Nothing. None of the monkeys in the study were given anything approximating the kind of calorie restriction that might engage the sirtuin pathway. One group was given a standard pellet regimen, and the other was overfed.

So it’s not really a sirtuin pathway study. How, then, do these scientists trick TV doctors and other media talking heads into bringing this study up and folding it into discussions about life extension?

They monkey with the language, saying that study animals have been placed on a calorie restriction diet when, in reality, they’re diets are restricted relative only to the animals in the next cage – the ones who get all the pellets they want whenever they want.

The claim is that the study group monkeys (the monkeys on the “calorie restriction” diet) went hungry, and were being compared to a control group of monkeys on a normal diet. In reality, they allowed one group of monkeys to become so obese (notice the rolls of belly fat on the monkey on the right) that they were bound to live shorter lives than their relatively trim lab mates. Then, the researchers can attribute this miracle to the wonders of Dr. Oz’s sirtuin pathway.

Here’s where the biotech companies really get excited because if we actually buy the arguments made in these seriously flawed studies then maybe, in a few years time, we’ll also be buying billions of dollars worth of pills promising to turn our sirtuin pathways on without the need to go hungry.

Life Extension Claims are Fictitious

So there’s no real life extension. It’s only life extension relative to premature death. This deception is just one of many that I found from reading the scientific papers with a careful eye for detail.

The holes in this study seem big enough to build on of Oprah’s houses in. How could Dr. Oz have missed them? I don’t know, honestly, because they admit the study flaws right in the opening language.

More than 70 years ago, it was discovered that reducing energy intake during
adult life can increase the life span of laboratory rodents. The ability of
caloric restriction (CR) during adult life to lengthen life span has been observed
consistently in many different species of mammals. In all such energy-
restriction studies described in this chapter the control group was fed ad libitum
and the CR diet group received amounts of micronutrients equivalent to those
consumed by the control group. It should therefore be kept in mind that, with
regard to food intake, ad libitum feeding in the laboratory is not the norm for
rodents in the wild. Instead, the control animals are overfed and overweight.(3)

“It should therefore be kept in mind that…the control animals are overfed and overweight.” Darn right it should, since this small fact completely undermines the popular interpretation of the study, that calorie restriction makes sense for people who aren’t overeating.

All such calorie-restriction studies over the course of the past century – and there have been hundreds – are built around the same flaws and produce the same swirling alphabet soup of self-contradiction and sleight of hand that feeds the front-line troops of the Biotech campaign.

I blame ad-libitum

Regardless of the researchers lofty claims of super-longevity, such studies’ true findings are far more humble. They show only that ad-libitum diets make animals fat, particularly when they’re caged and the stuff they’re eating is a little more nourishing than cardboard and a lot less nourishing than their natural diet.

It’s a little like locking your cat in the bathroom with an endless supply of dried chow. Come back three weeks later and you’ll find a cat that’s bored, resentful, and bigger. What, as a scientist, might you conclude from that? That you should start starving yourself and your family? Or might you infer something else?

Citing these studies as evidence, some celebrity doctors are implying that if we get terrible chronic diseases it is due in part to the fact that we lack the discipline to starve ourselves.

It’s also not a great idea to trade in your kitchen crockery for an array of digital milligram scales and teaspoon measurements, denying yourself the pleasure of a healthy diet because a bunch of manipulated studies told you that you should.

Here’s a better prescription: ape the lifestyles of people who live the longest. Eat authentic cuisine made with fresh, local ingredients, laugh, love, exercise and live passionately. And by all means, do restrict your intake of junk science.

Un-Natural Diets

References:

1.Caloric Restriction Delays Disease Onset and Mortality in Rhesus Monkeys Science 10 July 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5937, pp. 201 – 204

2. Calorie restriction and cardiometabolic health European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation 2008, 15:3–9 “Hundreds of studies have shown that CR, defined as a reduction in calorie intake below ad libitum (AL) intake without malnutrition, is the most reliable and effective intervention for improving metabolic health, preventing carcinogenesis and increasing life span in rats, mice, fish, flies, and worms”

3. ENERGY INTAKE, MEAL FREQUENCY, AND HEALTH: A Neurobiological Perspective, Annu. Rev. Nutr. 2005. 25:237–60

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At risk for what?

Low vitamin D has been associated with a variety of serious medical conditions, including cancer, heart failure, mental illness, multiple sclerosis, and more. And since your immune system and bones need D just to function normally, people with chronically low vitamin D levels definitely have weaker than normal bones and a disordered immune system.

How could it be that people getting so much sun still don’t have enough vitamin D in their bodies?

It could be that their skin is unable to metabolize cholesterol into vitamin D properly due to a grossly suboptimal diet.

Aquaculture Pellets

What’s more, their diets are probably lacking in natural vitamin D since only animals that have the opportunity to spend most of their life in the sun eating their natural forage accumulate appreciable amounts in their tissues. For instance, while vitamin D is abundant in the ocean ecosystem, it is not present in the pelleted diets fed to farmed fish and shellfish, so these animals contain as little as ten percent of the D in their wild-caught cousins.

The same applies to industrially produced chickens, pigs, turkeys, cows, etc., as well as to eggs and dairy.

If the surfers were vegans, they wouldn’t have been getting any D from their diet because plants do not produce vitamin D.

So what about fortified milk? Most milk isn’t fortified with natural vitamin D, but rather a less-costly fungal product called vitamin D2, which isn’t metabolized the same as natural vitamin D and does not have the same beneficial effects.

How Your Body Makes Vitamin D

Even supplements may not give us the D we need. About half of the people I am currently treating for vitamin D deficiency were taking over the counter supplements when I found their levels to be low.

Given the changes in our diets and lifestyles, it’s no wonder vitamin D deficiency is at an all-time high. It makes good sense, these days, to get yourself tested.

If it turns out you’re low, then you and your doctor can come up with a game plan which may include a dietary program, lifestyle changes, or even a prescription that can effectively bump your levels into the optimal range.

A lot of scientists are singling the praises of D, and for good reason. Getting your D up to optimal levels not only helps steer you clear of a terrifying health wipeout, but encourages healthier eating and more outside exercise. Catch that healthy wave and you’ll be sittin’ on top of the world.

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• FDA Officially Unconcerned that Crestor Causes Diabetes

I went to medical school hoping to get to the root of what makes people sick and to learn how to truly cure. But in medical school, I was discouraged from that goal. I was taught, for instance, that low back pain was a by-product of walking upright, and that our lumbar spines were simply too weak for us to be using them for anything other than crawling around on all fours. I also heard over and over that cancer and many common diseases were results of mistakes nature makes in duplicating our cellular DNA. The overarching theme was that nature was flawed and human beings were an intelligent but physically weak species. By the time I graduated, I’d been indoctrinated with the idea that disease and sickness are inevitable side effects of living, nothing could prevent them, and technological fixes were our only options.

But then I came to Hawaii. Here, I met elderly folks who were much healthier than on the mainland (Hawaii has the longest life expectancy of any state in the union, 80.8 versus 77.8, according to healthtrends.org). I met so many 70- and 80-year-old people who were actively working, driving taxis, gardening, cattle-ranching, and more, that I began to feel like the older generations were healthier than their children and grandchildren.

Hawaiian shellfish - Opihi (now endangered)

Interestingly, when these healthy people were growing up, they didn’t follow the low-fat, low-animal-protein diet that I was supposed to recommend to my patients. Whether their heritage was Filipino, Puerto Rican, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, they all grew up on traditional diets, seemingly very different from one another yet all apparently capable of building healthy bodies that lived a long time. So I came to suspect that something about our idea of a healthy diet might be terribly flawed. In 2002, I began the research that would lead to the creation of Deep Nutrition.

Come learn the secrets of Hawaii’s longevity and discover how you can recreate the key elements of a traditional diet in today’s modern world by following the Four Pillars of World Cuisine, the four categories of foods that all authentic cuisines around the world share in common.

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