Lower Your Cholesterol Naturally

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In 1999, according to a study by IMS Health Global Services, world prescription medication consumption amounted to $342 billion. In 2006 that figure doubled to $643 billion. A significant proportion of the drugs consumed are excreted by the human body in urine and end up in municipal wastewater.

A study conducted by Université de Montréal researchers on downstream and upstream water from the Montreal wastewater treatment plant has revealed the presence of chemotherapy products and certain hypertension and cholesterol medications.

Bezafibrate (cholesterol reducing medication) and enalapril (hypertension medication) have been detected in the treated water leaving the wastewater treatment plant and in the surface water of the St. Lawrence River, where the treated wastewater is released.

The quantities of bezafibrate and enalapril detected in the raw wastewater, treated wastewater and surface water at the treatment station outlet are respectively 50 nanograms per litre, 35 ng L and 8 ng L for bezafibrate and 280 ng L, 240 ng L and 39ng L for enalapril.

Fish are ingesting cholesterol and high blood pressure drugs. Makes one wonder if their cholesterol levels are affected. Maybe just maybe they have lowered cholesterol levels.

“All in all, these quantities are minimal, yet we don’t yet know their effects on the fauna and flora of the St. Lawrence,” Professor Sauvé explains. A cheap method of collecting more data and analyzing them is needed.

When I apply for a fishing license they usually give me a listing of how much fish flesh I can eat. To my understanding this had to do with herbicides and pesticides collecting in the fish meat. Now I wonder if we have to worry about medications when we eat river fish - especially chemotherapy medications. This gives another reason to release fish after catching them.

Yesterday my post concerned testing for inflammation. I have posted an article about belly fat and how it might double death risk. Well now researchers have confirmed that fat cells inside the abdomen are secreting molecules that increase inflammation. It’s the first evidence of a potential link between abdominal fat and systemic inflammation.

For years, scientists have been aware of a relationship between disease risk and excess belly fat. “Apple-shaped” people, who carry fat in the abdomen, have a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes and other problems than “pear-shaped” people, who tend to store fat in the hips and thighs.

Too much abdominal fat is associated with a defect in the body’s response to insulin.

Using liposuction to remove excess belly fat won’t help either. In 2004, investigators found that removing abdominal fat with liposuction did not provide the metabolic benefits normally associated with similar amounts of fat loss brought about by dieting or exercising.

“Despite removing large amounts of subcutaneous fat from beneath the skin — about 20 percent of a person’s total body fat mass — there were no beneficial medical effects,” said Samuel Klein, M.D., the Danforth Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Science and the senior investigator on both studies. “These results demonstrated that decreasing fat mass by surgery, which removes billions of fat cells, does not provide the metabolic benefits seen when fat mass is reduced by lowering calorie intake, which shrinks the size of fat cells and decreases the amount of fat inside the abdomen and other tissues.”

A body stores fat as two basic types: subcutaneous and visceral. Liposuction, as mentioned above, removes fat from beneath the skin or subcutaneous fat. This fat does not secrete molecules that affect inflammation. Visceral fat – fat found close to the intestines and other internal organs – was found likely to secrete molecules that contribute to increases in systemic inflammation and insulin resistance.

The researchers sampled blood from the portal vein in obese patients undergoing gastric bypass surgery and found that visceral fat in the abdomen was secreting high levels of an important inflammatory molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6) into portal vein blood.

Increased IL-6 levels in the portal vein correlated with concentrations of an inflammatory substance called C-reactive protein (CRP) in the body. High CRP levels are related to inflammation, and chronic inflammation is associated with insulin resistance, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and atherosclerosis, among other things.

A simple test could show if you might have future heart problems. The C-Reactive protein (CRP) has been shown to be a marker of inflammation in the body particularly for inflammation due to atherosclerosis of hardening of the arteries.

Atherosclerosis is a systemic disorder and involves the injury of our arteries’ glistening and responsive lining tissue called the endothelium. This lining allows the underlying muscle layer to expand and contract in order to regulate and fulfill the expanding or decreasing needs of the tissues supplied by the blood vessels. Atherosclerosis can stiffen and distort this layer causing it to behave differently.

Atherosclerosis begins with whitish streaks being deposited in the arteries. Depending on diet and physical activity, overtime these streaks may become plaque deposits which can block blood flow through the artery.

As the plaques accumulate, part of the unstable outer surface may break off and cause a blood clot blocking flow to heart muscle and causing a heart attack.

Inflammation is a key component in the atherosclerotic process. The body produces C-reactive protein during the general process of inflammation. When atherosclerosis damages arteries around the heart, they become inflamed, which triggers CRP production, so increased levels of CRP may indicate that a patient is at risk for heart attack.

This has become particularly important since a surprising number of heart attack victims do not have high cholesterol or other risk factors of heart disease - seemingly healthy people have heart attacks.

The American Heart Association has recommended using the CRP level to determine a patient’s risk of heart disease. This simple, inexpensive blood test (high sensitivity C-reactive protein or hs-CRP test) takes the traditional cardiac check-up a step further, pinpointing those people who are at a much higher risk than others for heart disease.

From hs-CRP results, doctors gain crucial insight into inflammation of the blood vessels around the heart.

Results:

• Less than 1.0 mg/L = Low Risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD)
• 1.0-2.9 mg/L = Intermediate Risk for CVD
• Greater than 3.0 mg/L High Risk for CVD

The hs-CRP test may help you avoid a heart attack when you think you don’t fall in the high risk category.

This post blows my mind. Now gastric bypass surgery is being been done on our children! But with the rise of childhood obesity, I guess it was only a matter of time that this would be considered. Wow! Our society has to wake up and stop the madness.

Researchers say type 2 diabetes has traditionally been considered an adult disease. But with the rise of childhood obesity, the rate of type 2 diabetes among children has increased more than tenfold in the last two decades, from 3% to nearly half of all new pediatric diabetes cases.

A small new study shows Roux-en-Y gastric bypass weight loss surgery halted the use of medications for type 2 diabetes in 10 out of 11 obese adolescents treated with the procedure. And the surgery reduced their risk factors for heart disease.

Previous studies have shown that weight loss surgery can prompt the remission of type 2 diabetes in adults, but this is the first study to show that the treatment may have the same effect in adolescents.

In the study, researchers examined the effects of the gastric bypass surgery on 11 extremely obese adolescents with type 2 diabetes and numerous heart disease risk factors.

A year after the weight loss surgery, researchers found evidence of remission of type 2 diabetes in all but one of the patients.

Specifically, the average BMI (body mass index, a measure of obesity) was reduced by 34% and fasting blood glucose and insulin concentrations decreased by 41% and 81%, respectively. Improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol levels, two major risk factors for heart disease, were also observed.

Research has found that people are now drinking almost 50 additional calories of sweetened beverages daily compared to two decades ago, for an average of about 300 calories per day coming from such drinks. At this rate it doesn’t take long before more pounds are packed on.

So, even if you have the exact same diet as you did 20 years ago and your activity level hasn’t changed, those seemingly harmless 50 extra daily calories could cause you to gain five pounds every year.

Super sizing is one contributor to this increase. One 12-ounce can of soda has about 10 teaspoons of sugar. However, today the old can of coke looks small, but the 20-ounce bottle looks normal.

And another problem is sugar-sweetened beverages which include soda, sport drinks, fruit drinks, punches, low-calorie drinks, sweetened tea and other sweetened drinks can be found anywhere.

Drinking something that tastes good and gives you an energy boost is hard to put down. But the fact that those drinks can contribute to you becoming overweight, obese, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Soda pop has been shown to remove calcium from bones as well as weaken stomach acid making proper digestion difficult.

Say you are drinking 300 calories a day in sweetened beverages (which is quite easy) - if you stopped you could lose 2.5 pounds a month.

A handwriting expert from Wiltshire, England asked 61 heart patients from Pool Hospital in Swindon to provide handwriting samples for her, then compared these to samples provided by people without any cardiovascular disease.

“I’ve found one particular movement in the writing, although I actually believe there’s far more than just the one link, and my research is going to be continuing, looking to see if I can find those other links as well,” said Christina Strang (the Graphologist).

She asked each person to write down 100 words about a holiday or something, but she only analyzed the last 30 words because this is when they are relaxed and write naturally.

Strang discovered that handwriting samples from heart patients contained twice as many “resting dots,” produced when the pen pauses on a piece of paper for mere milliseconds, as the samples from healthy people.

“These resting dots can be because the heart misses a beat or a sudden pain,” Strang hypothesized.

Strang also hopes to see whether the same signs can also be used to detect the early stages of other chronic conditions, such as diabetes and arthritis.

It’s amazing how many different ways people are using as tools to help identify heart disease. Is this possible?

A study performed by researchers in Edinburgh Scotland suggests that as little as three minutes of high-intensity exercise every other day may help sedentary people ward off diabetes. The first thought that comes to my mind is check with your doctor first before doing intensive exercises.

The results of a small clinical study suggested that a supervised exercise regimen of very brief, high-intensity workouts improved a variety of laboratory measures related to diabetes (Note that the study involved a small number of healthy young men). Two weeks of brief episodes of high-intensity training led to significant improvement in multiple parameters of blood glucose and insulin action in healthy volunteers. The six training sessions lasted a total of 15 minutes. Each session consisted of four to six 30-second sprints on a stationary bicycle.

The risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes can be reduced by regular physical activity. However, no consensus exists as to the optimal amount or intensity of activity required to improve the risk profile, the authors noted.

In the past recommendations for improved glycemic control typically emphasized several hours of moderate or vigorous exercise each week, a goal ignored by the general population because of lack of time and motivation. Recently, low-volume, high-intensity interval training has been suggested as a time-efficient exercise protocol to improve aerobic fitness.

The authors concluded, “Our findings warrant further studies investigating the effectiveness of high-intensity interval training in improving glycemic control in healthy middle-aged individuals at risk of developing type 2 diabetes and in patients with type 2 diabetes”.

Well, it’s a first step and a novel one at that. I do hope that a much wider study can be done, one with subjects having diabetes so that the results would have more credibility.

I always emphasize the eating of natural foods over manufactured whether it is fast food or food bought prepared. And as early as 1951, Dr. Royal Lee gave a speech which contained this quote:  “One of the biggest tragedies of human civilization is the precedent of chemical therapy over nutrition.   It’s a substitution of artificial therapy over natural; of poisons over food, in which we are feeding people poison in trying to correct the reactions of starvation.”

Medications are those chemicals he speaks of so called artificial therapy. Today we are facing an obesity epidemic and also a diabetes one which has the capacity to bring our health system to its knees. Can we afford more obesity and heart related illnesses? I think not.

Natural foods are what our ancestors ate along with daily exercise. Today our children are developing diabetes and many are obese. That is because many sit at home and play video games and snack on manufactured foods. Foods that are designed to taste and look good, but guess what - they are toxic to their hearts and their bodies in general. They are not physically active and in some areas of the country children have been placed on medications (Statins and Children) for heart disease.

Starting an eight-year old child on heart medication (Cholesterol Drugs Urged for Children) is really a bit too much - isn’t it? How about throwing away the video games, fast food, eating your vegetables, and riding your bike like the older generations did?

The new president wants to give universal health care of some kind. Do you really think we all can afford it with our children starting on medications?

In the United States, nearly 13 percent of adults age 20 and older have diabetes, but 40 percent of them have not been diagnosed, according to epidemiologists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose study includes newly available data from an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT).

An additional 30 percent of adults have pre-diabetes, a condition marked by elevated blood sugar that is not yet in the diabetic range. Researchers report these findings in the February 2009 issue of Diabetes Care.

The study compared the results of two national surveys that included a fasting blood glucose (FBG) test and 2-hour glucose reading from an OGTT. The OGTT gives more information about blood glucose abnormalities than the FBG test, which measures blood glucose after an overnight fast. The FBG test is easier and less costly than the OGTT, but the 2-hour test is more sensitive in identifying diabetes and pre-diabetes, especially in older people. Two-hour glucose readings that are high but not yet diabetic indicate a greater risk of cardiovascular disease and of developing diabetes than a high, but not yet diabetic, fasting glucose level.

“We’re facing a diabetes epidemic that shows no signs of abating, judging from the number of individuals with pre-diabetes,” said lead author Catherine Cowie, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), a part of the NIH. “For years, diabetes prevalence estimates have been based mainly on data that included a fasting glucose test but not an OGTT.

Diabetes is rising as a serious health problem in United States and much of the developed world. Obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are all interrelated. In its final stages diabetes can cause a person to become blind and loose leg(s).

Diabetes can be prevented by exercising, watching what you eat, and eating less (portion control). Fatty, sugary foods should be avoided or at least eaten less. Today even children are developing this disease. Unfortunately, obese children are seen more and more. And with the popularity of fast food and video games, they have the perfect opportunity to increase their girth and not get the exercise that the children before them did.

Recent headlines about cinnamon are the result of an accidental finding in a Maryland USDA research center. Incredibly, the catalyst was as American as good old apple pie, flavored with — what else — cinnamon. Scientists were testing the effects of various foods on blood sugar (glucose) levels. They expected the classic pie to have an adverse effect, but instead they found it actually helped lower blood glucose levels!

Next came a study in Pakistan made up of 60 people with Type 2 diabetes who were divided into 6 groups of 10. Three groups received cinnamon in the form of capsules totaling 1, 3 or 6 grams of cinnamon a day. The other three groups received placebo capsules. The capsules were taken three times a day, after meals. All three levels of cinnamon showed results, leading researchers to believe that as little as 1 gram a day of cinnamon may benefit people who have Type 2.

The fact that studies so far have involved a small amount of people and have not yet explored the long term benefits of cinnamon, would lead to the conclusion that there may not be enough evidence gathered yet, to support cinnamon as a major player against Type 2. But adding more cinnamon to already healthy lifestyle changes probably wouldn’t hurt either.

Cinnamon…

* can have favorable effects on brain function and memory

* soothes the stomach, and may help prevent ulcers

* reduces cholesterol levels – in particular, lowering bad cholesterol while leaving

good cholesterol the same

Of particular interest is cinnamon’s ability to reduce blood sugar, and increase insulin levels, results which were documented in a respected diabetes journal.

It is cinnamon’s effect on blood sugar that makes it a potential help in the war against obesity, insulin resistance, sometimes known as “prediabetes,” and the “Metabolic Syndrome.”

In addition to ground cinnamon consumed directly, one can also make a cinnamon tea and let the solids settle to the bottom or use cinnamon sticks, which make for a nice clear tea. Cinnamon can also be added to orange juice, oatmeal, coffee before brewing, salads, meats etc. It is interesting to note that the active components are not destroyed by heat.