Tips for Lowering Triglycerides

Having high triglyceride levels increases your risk of strokes and heart attacks. Triglycerides are a type of fat that is present in your blood. Levels of more than 200 are considered elevated.

Unlike your cholesterol levels, which are largely controlled by your genetics, your triglyceride levels are largely controlled by the choices you make.  For the vast majority of people, positive lifestyle changes will likely be very effective in lowering elevated triglycerides.


 


Here are some steps you can take:

Eat only enough calories to maintain a healthy weight. Your body can only use so much energy. If you eat more calories (energy) than you need, the surplus will be converted to trigycerides, which are stored in fat cells but also build up in your blood.

Steer clear of refined carbohydrates and sweets.Highly-processed foods such as candy, sodas, ice cream, pastries, and breads all raise your blood sugar, which can lead to the formation of triglycerides.  Choose foods with a low glycemic load. These foods help to keep your blood sugar steady and triglycerides down.

Cut back on (or eliminate) alcohol.
Excessive alcohol consumption raises triglyceride levels. Men should limit alcohol consumption to 2 drinks a day; women to one.  A drink is defined as 1 12-ounce beer, 1 5-ounce glass of wine, or 1 1/2 ounces of hard liquor.

Eat more fish.Fish contains omega-3 fats (specifically DHA and EPA) that can help reduce elevated triglyceride levels.  The recommended amount to lower triglycerides is 2 - 4 grams of EPA + DHA per day. That's about 6 ounces of wild salmon, per day.  Other good source of  EPA and DHA include mackerel, herring, sardines, fish roe (caviar) and fish oil supplements.

Obesity: Billions Served

Did you know that over one billion people are now overweight?

Research by Aline Jelenkovic Moreno states, "Obesity is seen as the great pandemia of the 21st century. Recent data point to more than a billion adults in the world suffering from overweight, of which 300 million are clinically obese. What is more, the rates of child obesity show a worrying increase, with more than 155 million children and adolescents being overweight, of which 40 million are clearly obese."

 

Can you believe that more than a BILLION people are overweight?  It has been long understood that the U.S. population is about two-thirds overweight, but now it seems our country's unhealthy habits have spread globally. This is a rather large wake-up call.

For obesity to be one of the top diseases (and causes of death) in the world should come as an outrage. Besides quitting smoking, it is one of the most preventable diseases in the world to fight against.

Why not just casually try to put an end to obesity? Well, we are bombarded from every angle by food manufacturers promoting unhealthy foods and diets. The fact that obesity rates have increased as food becomes more processed and unnatural is not a coincidence.

Plus, exercise is seen as a luxury for those who have the time.

Unfortunately, being active is not a luxury anyone can afford not to indulge in. The fact that most people sit for the majority of the day is a good indicator that at least 30 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity is needed.

In what way can we reverse the obesity numbers and prevent them from climbing.

In order to create permanent change we must look at weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight as simply a by-product of valuing health. Right now, the majority of people place convenience (which includes processed foods, fast food, and medication) above living a healthy lifestyle. This leads to not wanting to put in the extra effort needed to eat well, exercise, and live an overall healthy life.

Unless we're willing to change our individual and collective view of how we live our life, then we may be headed for higher obesity rates and all the effects it carries along with it.

I for one will continue to spread the word about how to live a life based on eating well, proper exercise, and stress reduction, which in turn will provide you with a life-time of healthy benefits - I hope you'll help me in spreading this word!

Why Lead Poisoning Could Be Causing Health Problems

WE ARE TOO HEAVY — and I don’t mean overweight. We’re heavy with metals, not fat. Nearly 40 percent of us have toxic levels of lead in our bodies. And we don’t even know it. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have symptoms …

 You may have headaches, insomnia, irritability, a low sex drive, or tremors. You may have mood problems, nausea, depression, memory difficulties, trouble concentrating, poor coordination, or even constipation. Yet most of us attribute these symptoms to other problems. We don’t recognize that they may be caused by lead poisoning.

A study published in 2006 in the conservative medical journal Circulation, for example, should have been on the front page of the New York Times. Today I will tell you why the study was so important, and why you probably won’t hear about it from your doctor. Then I will give you 6 tips to help get the lead out.

Studies Show Any Lead in Your Body May be Unsafe

In the study mentioned above, researchers measured the blood lead levels of 13,946 adults who were part of the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They were recruited from 1988 to 1994 and were then followed up on for up to 12 years. The goal of the study was to track what diseases people developed and why they died.(i)

Now, it’s important to remember that since lead was removed from gasoline and house paint several decades ago, the average person’s blood lead level has dropped dramatically. But our levels of lead are still a great deal higher than those of people who lived before the industrial age. That’s because we continue to be exposed to lead in our soil and water, as well as from our own bones, where it is stored once it’s introduced into our system.

Nearly 40 percent of all Americans are estimated to have blood levels of lead high enough to cause serious health problems.

Fifty years ago, the average blood levels of lead were about 40 micrograms/deciliter. The level considered “safe” by the government has continued to fall and is now considered less than 10 micrograms/deciliter. But this new study and others like it question the idea that ANY level of this toxic metal is safe.

In this study, researchers found that a blood level of lead over 2 micrograms/deciliter (that’s 2, not 10 or 40) caused dramatic increases in heart attacks, strokes, and death. In fact, after controlling for all other risk factors, including cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, and inflammation, the researchers found that the risk of death from all causes in people with a lead level that high increased by 25 percent, deaths from heart disease increased by 55 percent, risk of heart attacks increased by 151 percent, and risk of stroke increased by 89 percent.

What’s even more remarkable is that nearly 40 percent of all Americans are estimated to have blood levels of lead high enough to cause these problems. This is potentially a greater risk for heart disease than cholesterol! But this study is not the first indication we have of problems with lead.

A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that high blood pressure in postmenopausal women is strongly correlated to blood lead levels. This is because bones break down faster during menopause releasing stored lead and injuring blood vessels, which leads to high blood pressure.

High lead may also be responsible for kidney failure as well. A study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that using chelation therapy with EDTA to reduce lead levels in patients with kidney failure could prevent further loss of kidney function, save billions in healthcare costs, and eliminate the need for dialysis in millions of people.

Wow! Take a moment to digest that. Chelation therapy saves lives and billions of dollars. But your doctor probably isn’t offering this as standard treatment, because, as I have said many times, doctors, don’t learn two of the most important things in medical school: How to help people improve their nutrition and how to deal with environmental toxins.

Lead is not only linked to heart disease, high blood pressure, and kidney failure, it is also connected to the epidemic of children with ADHD, developmental and learning problems, and autism. Even though the “safe” blood levels of lead has been set as 10 micrograms/deciliter, recent studies show that the greatest drop-off in IQ scores in children occurs in those who have lead levels between just 1 and 10 micrograms/deciliter. This is particularly troubling, because more than 10 percent of poor and inner city children have lead exposure levels higher than 10 micrograms/deciliter!

A doctor recently treated a young boy with extremely high lead levels who had Asperger’s syndrome, severe ADHD, and violent behavior. He likely got the lead from his mother, who had very low vitamin D levels and had developed osteoporosis, which released a lot of lead from her bones during pregnancy. This lead got into the boy’s body in the womb across his mother’s placenta. Thankfully, the doctor got rid of his lead over time through chelation and nutritional support. Doing so dramatically improved his attention, behavior, and social skills.

This young boy is, unfortunately, not alone. We live in a sea of heavy metals. Lead is still found in our soil and water. In areas with a history of industrial pollution, people track lead into their homes from contaminated soil. The sad result is that regular house dust often contains 17 times the level of lead it once did. In Washington, DC, the water was so contaminated with lead recently that the government had to provide free water filters for everyone in the city. Up to 20 percent of the city’s tap water may be contaminated.

So what can you do about this?

6 Tips to Help You Get the Lead Out

Luckily there are steps you can take to help you heal from lead poisoning if you have been exposed. Try the following:

1. Find out if you are lead-toxic. The easiest test is a simple blood lead test. Be sure the lab can measure VERY low levels of lead accurately. Anything higher than 2 micrograms/deciliter is toxic and should be treated. Unfortunately, the blood test only checks for current or ongoing exposures, so you must also take a heavy metal challenge test with DMSA, EDTA, or DMPS, which can be administered by a doctor trained in heavy metal detoxification. Consider undergoing chelation therapy if your lead levels are high.
2. Reduce your exposures by having a “no shoes in the house” policy. A great deal of lead can be tracked into your house in the dust on the soles of shoes. Leaving your shoes at the door helps reduce the amount of contamination in your home.
3. Test your water for heavy metals. There are a number of home test kits available online. If you prefer to have a professional test your water, call your city water provider or look for labs in your area that will perform this kind of test.
4. Buy a carbon or reverse osmosis water filter for your drinking water. These filters remove lead and other toxic substances like PCBs. They are my favorite kind of filter and the type I use in my home.
5. Take 1,000 milligrams of buffered ascorbic acid (vitamin C) a day. This helps remove lead from the body.
6. Take 2,000 to 4,000 IU of vitamin D3 a day to prevent your bones from releasing lead into your bloodstream.

Even though many of us have toxic levels of lead in our bodies, there is a lot we can do to prevent it and treat it. Doing so is an essential step to healing your body and achieving lifelong vibrant health.

The 6 Steps to Kill Hidden Bad Bugs in Your Gut that Make You Sick

Doctors are trained to identify diseases by where they are located. If you have asthma it’s considered a lung problem; if you have rheumatoid arthritis, it must be a joint problem; if you have acne, doctors see it as a skin problem; if you are overweight you must have a metabolism problem; if you have allergies, immune imbalance is blamed. Doctors who understand health this way are both right and wrong. Sometimes the causes of your symptoms do have some relationship to their location, but that’s far from the whole story.

By understanding disease in the 21^st century, our old ways of defining illness based on symptoms is not very useful.  Instead, by understanding the origins of disease and the way in which the body operates as one whole, integrated ecosystem we now know that symptoms appearing in one area of the body may be caused by imbalances in an entirely different system.

 

 

If your skin is bad or you have allergies, can’t seem to lose weight, suffer from an autoimmune disease or allergies, struggle with fibromyalgia, or have recurring headaches, the real reason may be that your gut is unhealthy. This may be true even if you have never had any digestive complaints.

 

There are many other possible imbalances in your body’s operating system that may drive illness as well. These include problems with hormones, immune function, detoxification, energy production, and more.

 

Let’s take a deeper look at the gut and why it may be at the root of your chronic symptoms.

 

Symptoms Throughout the Body are Resolved by Treating the Gut

                                         

                                           Ulcerative Colitis

 

Many today do have digestive problems including reflux or heartburn, irritable bowel, bloating, constipation, diarrhea and colitis. In fact, belly problems account for over 200 million doctor’s visits and billions in health care costs annually. But gut problems cause disease far beyond the gut. Patients with colitis could also have inflamed joints and eyes, and that patients with liver failure could be cured of delirium by taking antibiotics that killed the toxin-producing bacteria in their gut.  Could it be that when things are not quite right down below it affects the health of our entire body and many diseases we haven’t linked before to imbalances in the digestive system?

 

The answer is a resounding yes. Normalizing gut function is one of the most important things doctors can do for patients, and it’s so simple. The “side effects” of treating the gut are quite extraordinary. Patients find relief from allergies, acne, arthritis, headaches, autoimmune disease, depression, attention deficit, and more—often after years or decades of suffering. Here are a few examples of the results achieved by addressing imbalances in the function and flora of the gut:

• A 58-year-old woman with many years of worsening allergies, asthma, and sinusitis who was on frequent antibiotics and didn’t respond to any of the usual therapies was cured by eliminating a worm she harbored in her gut called Strongyloides.
• A 52-year-old woman who suffered with daily headaches and frequent migraines for years, found relief by clearing out the overgrowth of bad bugs in her small intestine with a new non-absorbed antibiotic called Xifaxin.
• A six-year-old-girl with severe behavioral problems including violence, disruptive behavior in school, and depression was treated for bacterial yeast overgrowth, and in less than 10 days her behavioral issues and depression were resolved.
• A three-year-old boy with autism started talking after treating a parasite called Giardia in his gut.

 

These are not miracle cures, but common results that occur when you normalize gut function and flora through improved diet, increased fiber intake, daily probiotic supplementation, enzyme therapy, the use of nutrients that repair the gut lining, and the direct treatment of bad bugs in the gut with herbs or medication.

 

A number of recent studies have made all these seemingly strange reversals in symptoms understandable.

 

Let’s review them.

 

Research Linking Gut Flora and Inflammation to Chronic Illness

Scientists compared gut flora or bacteria from children in Florence, Italy who ate a diet high in meat, fat, and sugar to children from a West African village in Burkina Faso who ate beans, whole grains, vegetables, and nuts. The bugs in the guts of the African children were healthier, more diverse, better at regulating inflammation and infection, and better at extracting energy from fiber. The bugs in the guts of the Italian children produced by-products that create inflammation; promote allergy, asthma, and autoimmunity; and lead to obesity.

 

Why is this important?

 

In the West, our increased use of vaccinations, antibiotics, and enhancements in hygiene have led to health improvements for many. Yet these same factors have dramatically changed the ecosystem of bugs in our gut, and this has a broad impact on health that is still largely unrecognized. There are trillions of bacteria in your gut and they collectively contain at least 100 times as many genes as you do. The bacterial DNA in your gut outnumbers your own DNA by a very large margin. This bacterial DNA controls immune function, regulates digestion and intestinal function, protects against infections, and even produces vitamins and nutrients.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can bacteria in the gut actually affect the brain? They can. Toxins, metabolic by-products, and inflammatory molecules produced by these unfriendly bacteria can all adversely impact the brain.

 

 

When the balance of bacteria in your gut is optimal this DNA works for you to great effect. For example, some good bacteria produce short chain fatty acids. These healthy fats reduce inflammation and modulate your immune system. Bad bugs, on the other hand, produce fats that promote allergy and asthma, eczema and inflammation throughout your body.

 

 

 

 

Another recent study found that the bacterial fingerprint of gut flora of autistic children differs dramatically from healthy children. Simply by looking at the byproducts of their intestinal bacteria (which are excreted in the urine—a tested regularly in a practice called organic acids testing), researchers could distinguish between autistic and normal children.

 

Think about this: Problems with gut flora are linked to autism. Can bacteria in the gut actually affect the brain? They can. Toxins, metabolic by-products, and inflammatory molecules produced by these unfriendly bacteria can all adversely impact the brain.

 

Autoimmune diseases are also linked to changes in gut flora. A recent study showed that children who use antibiotics for acne may alter normal flora, and this, in turn, can trigger changes that lead to autoimmune disease such as inflammatory bowel disease or colitis.

 

The connections between gut flora and system-wide health don’t stop there. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that you could cure or prevent delirium and brain fog in patients with liver failure by giving them an antibiotic called Xifaxan to clear out bugs that produce toxins their poor livers couldn’t detoxify. Toxins from bacteria were making them insane and foggy. Remove the bacteria that produce the toxins, and their symptoms clear up practically overnight.

 

Other similar studies have found that clearing out overgrowth of bad bugs with a non-absorbed antibiotic can be an effective treatment for restless leg syndrome and fibromyalgia.

 

 

Even obesity has been linked to changes in our gut ecosystem that are the result of a high-fat, processed, inflammatory diet. Bad bugs produce toxins called lipopolysaccardies (LPS) that trigger inflammation and insulin resistance or pre-diabetes and thus promote weight gain.

 

 Remarkable, but the little critters living inside of you have been linked to everything from autism to obesity, from allergy to autoimmunity, from fibromyalgia to restless leg syndrome, from delirium to eczema to asthma. In fact the links between chronic illness and gut bacteria keep growing every day.

 

 

So what can you do to keep your gut flora balanced, your gut healthy, and thus overcome or avoid these health problems?

 

Six Steps to a Healthy Gut (and a Healthy Body!)

 

Follow these five simple steps to begin re-balancing your gut flora.

1. Eat a fiber–rich, whole foods diet—it should be rich in beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables—all of which feed good bugs.
2. Limit sugar, processed foods, animal fats, and animal protein—these provide food for unhealthy bugs.
3. Avoid the use of antibiotics, acid blockers, and anti-inflammatories—they change gut flora for the worse.
4. Take probiotics daily—these healthy, friendly flora can improve your digestive health and reduce inflammation and allergy.
5. Use Herbalife products that counteract with cleansing and take preventive measures against diseases and bacteria. 
6. Consider specialized testing—such as organic acid testing, stool testing (new tests can look at the DNA of the bacteria in your gut), and others to help assess your gut function. You will likely have to work with a functional medicine practitioner to effective test and treat imbalances in your gut.

And if you have a chronic illness, even if you don’t have digestive symptoms, you might want to consider what is living inside your gut. Tending to the garden within can be the answer to many seemingly unrelated health problems.

Healthy Weight Gain

In order to gain weight, you need to take in more calories than you burn. A Daily Needs Calculator will give you an estimate of how many calories you require every day. For every 3,500 excess Calories (kcal) you consume, you will gain more or less one pound (about half a kg). 

Fat contains more than twice as many calories per gram as protein and carbohydrate; therefore, by adding high-fat foods to your diet this would be an efficient way to add calories. However, I assume that you are interested in healthy weight gain. In that case, you don't want just any calories; you want to add high-quality calories to your diet.

Fortunately, Nutrition Data has several tools that will help you do just that!  On every food and recipe analysis page, you'll see Nutrition Data's Nutritional Target Map. Foods that appear in the lower right quadrant of the map are ideal for healthy weight gain, because they have a high nutrient density (more nutrients per calorie) and a high energy density (more calories per gram).

Right below the Nutritional Target Map, you'll see the Better Choices tool.  Use the pull down menu to select "better choices for weight gain" and click "show me!" for a list of similar foods with a higher nutrient and calorie densities. Or, go to theFood Category Explorer, select any category, and use the pull down menu to select "Better Choices for Weight Gain."

Remember that muscle tissue weighs more than body fat. A weight training program, supported by a nutritious high-calorie diet, can help you gain weight as lean muscle mass instead of body fat. If exercise, particularly strength training, is part of your weight gain program, be sure to eat plenty of protein, which speeds recovery and enhances lean muscle gain.

The Nutrition Data community includes a lot of elite athletes and body-builders who track their nutrition very closely as part of their training regimens. Any Nutrition Datanauts with experience on healthy weight gain? I'd be interested in your input.