Data can’t be disputed. But what can be argued over is how that data is interpreted. How does a 1% drug effectiveness turn into a 50% reduction in heart attacks? How does a 2% vaccine effectiveness turn into a 47% reduction in deaths?
4 Permissions to Dramatically Change Your Health that May Make Your Doctor Hate You
Ready to make a change? Feeling guilty about the choices you’re trying to make because it goes against everything you have heard or done the past 40 years? Here’s 4 permissions to dramatically change your health…that May make Your Doctor Hate You. Now go rock it.
Permission to Eat Fat
On my intake forms, I have a line of questions that ask the person if they feel better eating certain foods. An overwhelming majority of people mark they feel better when eating higher fat foods. But because doctors, media, and all things medical industry have villainized fat and cholesterol for 40 years, people shy away from it out of dogmatic guilt that they are harming themselves, not helping. The reality is that we all know what has happened to diabetes, obesity, heart disease, auto-immune conditions, and dementia the last 40 years as we have removed fat. We’re not any healthier.
If there’s something you should feel bad about eating, it should be sugar. Sure it tastes good, gives you an instant energy boost but have you ever looked back an hour later and said, ‘I wish I just ate more cake, cookies, breakfast cereal, and whole wheat bread. I just feel so good.” You’re chronically fatigued because you keep feeding the insulin-energy-store-overload reaction based on your high glycemic choices.
WORDS THAT MEAN SUGAR: Tango Yankee Nicole Recine RN, MSN
Breakfast is the Most Important Meal…To Skip
Breakfast vs. Dessert
On my initial intake paperwork for people, I have the potential client list out their food items. Under more investigation of the ingredients of those foods, I vote that breakfast is the most important meal…to skip entirely.
Think about it. Why is chocolate milk a ‘health food,’ great for recovery but chocolate ice cream will send you to an early grave? Please don’t hit reply with, ‘that’s why I just let my ice cream melt and call it a smoothie.’ I’ve already used that line.
Javier Zarracina/Vox
Javier Zarracina/Vox
What’s the big deal? The big deal is that in case you hadn’t seen it this week, the NY Times ran a column called, ‘How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat.’
1958 Cholesterol Wisdom
A friend of mine passed an article to me from The Wall Street Journal. It was an article about how stress raises cholesterol. My initial mental reaction was, ‘Duh, what have I been talking about for the past 10 years?’ Teaching moment: Pride comes before the fall.
I was all proud of myself that I was ahead of the curve from a major publication. As I looked for the references in The Wall Street Journal article, one was from back in 1958. This information that lifestyle (not just bad bugs, bad luck, or bad genes) affects health outcomes was being quantified 20 years before I was born. More specifically, they were looking at how stress affects cholesterol and blood clotting.
The 1958 study was titled ‘Changes in the Serum Cholesterol and Blood Clotting Time in Men Subjected to Cyclic Variation of Occupational Stress.’ It is published in the journal Circulation by the American Heart Association. The intro to the study states the following:
Accountants were selectively chosen as a self-controlled group for studying effects of cyclic occupational stress upon serum cholesterol and blood clotting time, since their routine work schedule is interrupted by urgent tax deadlines, associated with severe occupational stress. Forty male accountants (age 28 to 56) were bled biweekly for serum cholesterol and monthly for blood clotting time from January to June 1957. Complete records also were kept of weight, exercise, diet, relative work load, and any exposure to unusual avocational stress. When studied individually, each subject’s highest serum cholesterol consistently occurred during severe occupational or other stress, and his lowest at times of minimal stress. The results could not be ascribed to any changes of weight, exercise, or diet. Marked acceleration of blood clotting time consistently occurred at the time of maximum occupational stress, in contrast to normal blood clotting during periods of respite. The possible implications of these results are discussed in relation to the problem of clinical coronary artery disease.
In the chart above, group A are ‘tax’ accountants. Group B is made up of ‘corporate’ accountants. These are plots of cholesterol levels tested in 2 week intervals from January to June. Of particular interest is that the corporate accountants had higher cholesterol levels and a higher reported stress level in January than in April. But overall, it’s evident the spike in cholesterol correlates with the as the April 15 tax deadlines.
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.
Best Seth Godin Advice Ever.
I just read a great blog post from one of my most favorite authors on the planet, Seth Godin. It was only 2 sentences long. It goes something like this:
“Don’t measure anything unless the data helps you make a better decision or change your actions. If you’re not prepared to change your diet or workouts, don’t get on the scale.” – Seth Godin.
Mr. Godin is in the mar
keting world but he just nailed one of the biggest reasons why our healthcare system fails to create health. We have become a nation that is focused on our numbers. Most people know their total cholesterol, blood pressure, their weight, and maybe even their blood sugar levels.
The problem is that with all the emphasis on the numbers, only 1 solution has been offered…a drug to control that number. We have been led to believe that the only reasonable and successful manner to manage those numbers is through chemistry not innate to the body.