Chasing hormones may have short term benefit but without addressing WHY they are imbalanced in the first place will leave you frustrated in the long term.
No Symptom Is Stupid – Video
Double Diabetes
A few weeks back I had posted a picture of the infamous Unicorn Frappuccino. It was an image that equated the sugar load of the beverage with eating 3 Snicker’s bars. I made the comment ‘that if you’re as excited about this drink, then you should be as excited about diabetes.’
What ensued was a firestorm that I could have never predicted. I was getting hammered for perpetuating the notion that sugar causes diabetes and the shaming police were flicking on sirens and showing their lights all over the place. I was being accused of perpetuation a stigma, disease shaming, and diet shaming.
And it wasn’t coming from anyone with type 2 diabetes but those moms and loved ones of people with type 1 diabetes. The momma bears were in full force and after I let the dust settle, I understand why. They are constantly having to explain and defend that their child’s condition isn’t from bad parenting nor chronic, reckless, lifestyle decisions.
Raising 3 boys with my wife, I know a mom will blame herself for anything that isn’t favorable, even if it’s out of her control. But where my point was being missed was that even though something isn’t your fault, it’s still your responsibility. And even if your child has type 1 diabetes, that child will have better outcomes by avoiding the things that contribute to type 2 diabetes…specifically a high sugar diet.
Regardless of the presentation of Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, there’s a common theme, the regulation and utilization of insulin. One doesn’t produce insulin, the other, the cells don’t listen to insulin well.
In either scenario, the less need for insulin, the better the outcomes. If you consume the unicorn, regardless of endogenous insulin production or exogenous insulin injection, the high sugar load calls for a higher insulin need.
What I want to make clear is that even with type 1 diabetes, this doesn’t mean someone cannot develop type 2 diabetes simultaneously. Insulin is essential to the body for many reasons. But too much insulin becomes annoying to the cells, and the cells can start to ignore the signal, no matter if you’re type 1.
This means that for a type 1 diabetic, not only can you provide better health outcomes by limiting foods that require a high insulin response (grains, legumes, juices, sugar, etc), you can save some money by not needed as much insulin to combat those high glycemic foods.
I know for those moms with a type 1 diabetic kid, you want to provide what you can since they have started life with some extra challenges. But I challenge the notion that even though the type 1 diabetes was not your fault, that creating a low glycemic diet with time restricted eating will benefit the ups and downs of sugar spikes and insulin needs. So yes, that does mean limiting grains, juices, and everything that is the Standard American Diet. Yes, that probably does mean trying the total opposite nutrition advice of your dietician, pediatrician, and USDA sponsored eating plan.
But I also know that I get discredited because I don’t have the right initials after my name or the specialty after my name. But here’s someone that does. Take a look at his lectures, his documentary, his book, and take that information in the context of the insulin demand, not if insulin is coming from internal administration or from injection administration.
And to the woman/women that automatically assume I’m trying to sell something with my anti-sugar message, the only thing I’m trying to sell is creating a life culture of creating more health and needing less healthcare. It’s no surprise that healthcare is expensive. 86% off our healthcare costs are from chronic illness. If we want to have better health outcomes, then we have to stop arguing over who is going to pay for healthcare and instead ask what are we paying for? I said this with Obama, I will say this with Trump. I didn’t say no healthcare and I didn’t say perfect health. But if you haven’t realized it yet, the more we grant access of emergency interventions to treat chronic illness, the worst outcomes we have.
If the outcome is to create health then we have to question the health practices that have been drilled into our heads that have left us with ever increasing chronic illness. Not sure where to start? You know how to find me.
This Is Your Brain on Inflammation: ADHD, Autism, Depression, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s.
If you were a child of the 80s and 90s like myself, you will remember this commercial. “This is your brain. This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”
With the ever rising incidences and diagnoses for ADHD, Autism, Depression, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s and nothing to resolve them in the medical world, I think we can change the 80s drug slogan to make it more applicable for today. After all, the more we ‘early diagnose and manage/treat’ a condition, the more disability associated with that condition rises. The best case scenario your doctor provides is to ‘manage’ the symptoms.
But here’s the reality. Symptoms aren’t stupid. Your body never does anything stupid. Symptoms are nothing more than your attempts at buying time to escape what is potentially dangerous or harmful. That potential danger could be something you ate, a lack of movement, a poor relationship, or chemical influence. One of those symptoms is inflammation, regardless of the condition or disease process.
“This is your brain. This is inflammation. This is your brain on inflammation. Any questions?”
If there’s a commonality of brain inflammation to all these mental/emotional conditions, then how does the brain get inflamed? Don’t think of inflammation as an isolated event. Inflammation is a byproduct of an immune response due to trauma. And again, don’t look at trauma as just an event. Trauma is a persistent pattern of dysfunction. It could be physical, chemical, or emotional/social/spiritual.
Our immune system (inflammation) gets activated for 2 main reasons.
You Don’t Have Adrenal Fatigue | Stop Making Your Identity a Catch Phrase
For those that aren’t familiar with the adrenal glands, they have huge function in your health expression. Every second of your day, your nervous system has to organize and coordinate your life experiences: What you eat, how you think, how you move, wind changes, social influences, spiritual experiences, and congruency in purpose and practices.
With every single item, within microseconds, your nervous system has to decide if these particular influences will cause you harm or cause you happiness. More often than not, your nervous system will be cautious and engage functions that shift you into immediate survival and protection. The first set of organs that your nervous system talks to are your adrenals.
There are two major hormone groups (but many more) that the adrenals release to help you adapt when life throws curve balls at you. One group is the catecholamines (adrenaline, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc) that primarily work on functions of heart rate, blood pressure, muscle contraction, and triggering your brain for reaction over reason. The other class is cortisol that primarily works to get your body to release stored energy (sugar) to give you instant fuel to escape a potential danger.
The longer someone is in the this state of protection, the more the body creates a default setting into that expression. And the longer than is expressed, the more apt you favor catabolism (tissue destruction). This sounds bad but no reaction or symptom is stupid. These expressions are creating pathways for you to buy time to escape what is potentially life threatening. The more this reaction is repeated, the harder it is to keep up with the demands. It’s like if you sprinted instead of walked to do everything. You’re going to get tired.
Tired ≠ Fatigue
Think Before You Go Pink
Since October and Pink are in full swing, let’s take a look at the mammogram effectiveness and think before you go pink.
One of the rally points behind all the pink hoopla is that mammograms save lives…or do they? The Cochrane Collaboration did a systematic review of 7 very large studies already performed looking at rates of breast cancer and death for those that got mammograms and those that did not.
This review included over 500,000 women from the US, UK, Canada, and Sweden. The conclusion was pretty evident…there was no change in death rates between those that had regular mammograms and those that did not.
What I found interesting was one of the studies done by the University of Copenhagen and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (essentially their version of the US’s NIH). They looked at deaths due to breast cancer between the years of 1997-2006. For those in the age category of 35-55, there was a 5% decrease in deaths d
ue to breast cancer that got regular mammograms. For the age group 55-74, there was a 1% decrease in deaths.
That’s pretty compelling evidence that mammograms save lives…until you look at the women that did NOT get mammogram screenings. In the age group of 35-55, there was a 6% decrease in deaths and a 2% decrease in deaths in the older age group.
If less people die in the group that did not get mammograms, you can have 2 conclusions. 1. Mammograms don’t save lives. 2. Mammograms actually kill 1% of the population. Science isn’t just about the results reported, it’s about the conclusions reported.
What's worse that heading in the wrong direction? Heading in the wrong direction...ENTHUSIASTICALLY! Click To Tweet
Why are mammograms so highly relied upon by the medical community? It’s because they operate in a reactive model. You might think, ‘No, you’re wrong. Mammograms are used to early detect and prevent cancer.’ My point exactly.
Mammograms can’t prevent breast cancer. Only you can do that. Early detection is not prevention either. If there’s something detected, that means you already have it. It wasn’t prevented. If you get a negative scan, you get told to ‘continue doing what you’re doing.’ So you do what you have always done and then a couple years later, oops, cancer is spotted.
“We don’t know how this happened. You had clear scans prior to this. It must be genetic. Did your mom have breast cancer? You must have the BRACA gene.” Fear based care is then dictated from uncertainty, reactive care. And we start painting anything and everything pink in the name of women’s health.
What drives cancer? Inflammation, insulin resistance, immune system imbalances, hormone imbalances, autonomic imbalances, deficiencies, and toxicities. Your routine mammogram won’t pick up on any of those; only possibly detect something after you already have it.
Yes, women going through cancer need support but all this pink washing does nothing but feed a system that’s already broken and statistically is a waste of a lot of time and money. What’s worse that heading in the wrong direction? Heading in the wrong direction…ENTHUSIASTICALLY! Think before you go pink.
Hormone Imbalance Treatment
What do you think of when you hear the term ‘Hormone Imbalance?’
Weight Gain?
Loss of Muscle Mass?
Poor Sex Drive?
Fatigue?
Anxiety, Depression, Irritability, or Brain Fog?
Poor Sleep?
Hot Flashes?
What hormones come to mind if you’re seeking hormone imbalance treatment?
Estrogen?
Testosterone?
Progesterone?
Thyroid?
These initial impressions just scratch the surface concerning hormone imbalances. Before you even think about the specific hormones, you should back track and look at what coordinates and organizes your hormones, the nervous system. If you’re not addressing the nervous system, you’re not getting to the route cause of your hormone imbalance.
The nervous system organizes and coordinates your life. The hormone that is released is just an effect of how your nervous system (you) is interpreting your environment. This organization can be generally lumped into 2 categories.
Life is organized into PROTECTION or it’s organized into GROWTH.
Dr. Bruce Lipton PhD says it best, “You can’t be in growth and protection at the same time.”
What does that mean for your hormones and the results of your hormone imbalance treatment? Unless you address the underlying nervous system imbalance, your desired results probably won’t be lasting or satisfactory.
Incredible Insulin
Pure and simple, the better you are at regulating insulin, the better life you will live. I’m not talking about destroying your body to the point where you have to check your blood sugar 3x/day and regulate the spikes with an extra injection of insulin. Even if you’re a type 1 diabetic with an insulin pump, your choices can have a dramatic effect on the amount and frequency of usage.
If I’m speaking at an event and the topic of insulin arises, which it most likely will, people are quick to blurt out, ‘it regulates sugar.’ Yes, you are correct but this just scratches the surface to how insulin will impact your life, for better or worse, in sickness and in health.
Weightloss Rollercoaster
Yes, it is true that insulin reacts to elevations in blood sugar. As blood sugar levels rise, this is a signal to your nervous system that you have more energy than is needed at this point in time. You can either drastically increase your energy demands by sprinting and doing box jumps or you can rely on insulin to store it for later.
Your body will first store it in the liver and muscles in the form of glycogen. If you added up all the stored energy in your liver and muscles, it may last you 24 hours. This is why exercise alone, though fantastic for brain development and nervous system regulation, often fails as a weight loss strategy for many people. Someone is looking to burn off that spare tire. Unless you plan on exercising non-stop for 24 hours, you may not get past the stored energy in your liver and muscles to touch the stuff around your midsection.
What kills your 6 pack dreams even more is that you reward yourself for all that hard work you just accomplished. You know better than to eat garbage. Instead you go for the ‘healthy’ low fat, low calorie goods. In reality, you just ate a 1/2 cup of sugar, which gets redeposited back into your liver and muscles. Since you didn’t use ALL your stored liver and muscle glycogen during exercise and just consumed more sugar than you burned off, you added another layer of insulation for the winter.
The stored energy that targets the butt, gut, and thighs isn’t glycogen, it’s stored in the form triglycerides. You’ve seen these on your lab work. Because it’s fat, I’m sure your well intentioned cardiologist told you to eat a diet high in complex carbohydrates and low fat. “If we need to eliminate fat, than we have to lower our fat intake.” The only thing that cardiologist did was keep himself in business with advice that resembles assisted suicide. Since ‘diet and exercise’ didn’t work for you, then you have no hope other than taking drugs. Sound familiar?
Before You Take that Cholesterol Drug…
You may not have heard of some recent news that is happening across the pond in the mother country concerning taking statins. You know statins as those drugs that are recommended to every man, woman, and child to “prevent heart attack due to all that pesky plaquing in the arteries.” For the past 40 years, our national government has had a vendetta against the little waxy substance called cholesterol.
Even dietary changes are happening. Hopefully it’s not another 40 years before they change the medical management of elevated cholesterol. Before you decide to take a statin or if people you know and love are on statins, you may want to consider a couple things.
Type 2 Diabetes
Taking statins can increase your chance of Type 2 diabetes by almost 50%, while doing NOTHING to prolong the lives of those at a low risk heart attack. In England, close to 8 million Brits take statins. It’s closer to 25 million Americans taking the essential molecule blocking drugs. Is it really working to reduce heart disease?
Researchers in Finland studied 8,749 non-diabetic men to see whether taking two of the most popular statins increased the chance of developing Type 2 diabetes.
They found those who took simvastatin or atorvastatin were 46 per cent more likely to develop the condition and those on higher doses were at even greater risk.
Last year, Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence issued guidance making 40 per cent of adults eligible for statins.
It said anyone thought to have a greater than 10 per cent chance of a heart attack or stroke within 10 years should be offered the drug on the NHS. It means virtually all men aged over 55 and women over 65 are encouraged to take statins to stave off fatal cardiovascular disease.
Back in 2013, the American College of Cardiology created new guidelines that would increase statin use in the states by an additional 13 million Americans.
If that study that involved 8700 people in Finland translates into 38 million Americans, we should see an increase in diabetes by at least 19 million Americans as well as a drastic increase in heart disease in the coming decades.
“Ironically diabetes triples the risk of heart disease for men and multiplies it by five for women, so the very drugs given to prevent heart disease may well be causing it in, potentially, millions of people. Many researchers have been aware for many years that the true rate of side effects from statins have been hidden and under-reported.”
Dr. Malcolm Kendrick
Parkinson’s
Dr Kailash Chand, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association, was speaking following research which found those who take the cholesterol-lowering drugs are more than twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease in later life than those who do not.
Rethink Birth Control Pills
For the majority of women, they are on birth control pills to prevent birth. Despite it being my wife’s body, one thing I was adamant when we got married was that she never be on birth control pills. It has nothing to do with a religious belief but the reality that I wanted my wife around for the long haul in life. I didn’t want her bombarded with extra estrogen for health reasons.
Don’t get me wrong, estrogen is essential to health but too much is detrimental to life. Just think about it, adding more estrogen into the body is a treatment to prevent the formation of life. If it has enough effect on the body to prevent a new life from forming, what effect does it have on a life that is daily attempting to build, repair, and heal?
Estrogen (as with testosterone) is a steroid hormone, synthesized from cholesterol. Since cholesterol is the basis for all these steroid hormones, in a statin-crazed-cholesterol-is-evil society, are we creating our exponential increase in hormone imbalances in the name of heart health?
Cholesterol is also the basis of Cortisol, which is your prime life saving, stress-induced, survival hormone. The body will favor survival over sex any day. It’s not news that we are a stressed out society, physically, chemically, and emotionally. Again, is the pursuit of bigger and better also a hit to our hormone imbalances?
Courtesy ZRT Labs
Once estrogen is made, it’s released into the bloodstream, where it targets specific tissues and binds to a hormone receptor. The marriage of the hormone and receptor then activates a host of genetic reactions to stimulate cell growth, healing and repair. When you hear steroid hormones, think steroids. These are hormones to build the body up.