Take a look at these informative videos from Dr. Mercola before rushing off to get your vaccine:
I love watching the Kona Ironman on ESPN every year. While I don’t think it was broadcast yet, I sat down and watched some of the past years Ironman and can’t help but get inspired. I was sitting there thinking to myself, “If a guy with two prosthetic legs can do this, I can certainly try to do it myself.” If you’ve never watched it before. Check it out this year. It is always on ESPN.
Anyway, it is a little late in the year to start training as it has been freezing out lately (thanks a lot global warming!). But today was really nice out and I decided to go for a nice bike ride while I still could. Snapped this pic of a nice fall tree and full moon in the back ground along the way:
I really don’t know to much about training for a triathlon, but I’ve set a goal of competing next summer so I better learn fast! I’ll post my progress every now and then so come back and check in. And if you have any triathlon experience, leave me some tips… I could use them!
I have found a wonderful product from a company called Whole Health that I have to share with you. It is called Anti-Inflammatory Support and contains a number of wonderful all natural botanicals that have been used for years as a natural cure for inflammation. My wife has started taking it, in conjunction with her special diet (here), in order to help keep her rheumatoid arthritis at bay. So far we have seen some really good results.
What is special about this product is it’s unique blend of botanicals which include:
400mg of Boswellia
400mg of Bromelain Extract
400mg of Curcumin Extract
400mg of Ginger Extract
150mg of Quercitin
150mg of Rutin
50mg of Tyrpsin
I was specifically looking for a blend of bromelain, curcumin and quercitin and this is the only product that I have found that combines each one. Plus, it has the bonus of boswellia, ginger rutin and tyrpsin!
I’d like to tell you about how each one of these botanicals works to fight inflammation, but that would be one really really long post. So I plan on breaking it up into two or three different posts so that I can give you all the details. So for now I’d like to use this post tell you that if you are looking for a natural inflammatory fighting product, give Whole Health’s Anti-Inflammatory Support a try and come back to read the follow up botanical posts.
This isn’t your usual statin drug/big pharma bashing post. Statin drugs have done wonders for those suffering from high cholesterol levels and have helped lengthen the lives of people taking them. Statin drugs are some of the most widely used drugs today and this is evidenced by the fact that worldwide there was around $13 billion dollars in revenue from the sale of Lipitor alone (Forbes). However, there is an inherent risk in taking statin drugs. To understand the risk you need to know a little bit about how statin drugs work.
While your diet contributes to cholesterol in the body, around 80% of the total cholesterol is synthesized in your liver. This is what makes Lipitor, Crestor, Vytorin, Caduaet and other statin drugs so effective.
Cholesterol synthesis is a lengthy process that begins with a molecule called Acetyl-CoA which is used in various functions throughout the body. There are more steps than the those in the diagram above, but I removed the non-essential steps to help focus on how statins work. Once Acetyl-CoA is transformed into another substrate called HMG-CoA, statin drugs do their work. They inhibit an enzyme called HMG-CoA Reductase that transforms HMG-CoA into Mevalonate. Without mevalonate, which is the next substrate needed, cholesterol synthesis can no longer move forward. This is great news if you have hypercholesterolemia. But there is one small problem.
Somewhere alone the process of cholesterol synthesis is a substrate formed called Farnesyl-PP. This is an important substrate for the fact that it is needed to form two important compounds. Cholesterol is one and CoQ-10 is another. Statins stop the production of farnesyl-PP by inhibiting the process way back at the HMG-CoA step. So, it inhibits the production of both cholesterol (good) and CoQ-10 (very bad!).
Considering that CoQ-10 production is generally decreased the older we get, this inhibition by statin drugs is important because CoQ-10 is used in nearly every cell in the body. It is an essential anti-oxidant used in the production of ATP, which every cell in your body uses for energy. There has been some evidence that reduced CoQ-10 can even contribute to heart disease, has been used for treatment of migraines, cancer, hypertension and has shown to be beneficial for those following episodes of cardiac arrest. I’ve included some research papers at the end for further reading on these topics if you are interested.
So the long and short of it is, supplementation with CoQ-10 should be essential if you are on statin drugs and are even a good idea in those getting older in age or looking for a good anti-oxidant to supplement with. The thing that is interesting is that the medical community knows of this side effect, but rarely suggests supplementation of CoQ-10. So next time your in, ask your doctor about it.
Now I think I have written enough… see you next time.
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Muscle Coenzyme Q10 Level in Statin-Related Myopathy
Coenzyme Q10 Combined With Mild Hypothermia After Cardiac Arrest
My wife has been using some all natural body products, called Miss Percie, that she found online that I thought I would share with you. She purchased the Relaxing Gift Set online (Miss Percie) which includes a body oil, a sugar scrub, and bath salts.
They are (from the website) “a relaxing blend of essential oils of lavender, frankincense, eucalyptus, and ginger.” The seller has an entire ingredient list online all of which are all natural or organic. There is even some background information on the individual ingredients.
It is a great way to purchase environmentally and human friendly products and support a small business. Check it out.
I can not vouch for the authenticity of this movie, but it sounds pretty real. If it is, it says a lot about the garbage the pharmaceutical industry is selling you. I particularly like the part where she admits that she doesn’t take the vaccine and then quickly asks “Why are you asking me that?” Hilarious!
I’m not trying to be a Big Pharma basher. I think they do a lot of good in the world, but every company has to make money, right?
I personally never get a flu shot. The reason the flu comes around every year and we never develop an immunity to it is because the influenza virus, which causes the flu, mutates so fast that by the time it comes around every year it is different enough from the strain the year before that our body does not recognize it and can not act fast enough to prevent infection. This is called “antigenic drift.” The mutations are small but different enough to cause illness.
Vaccine makers base their vaccines off of strains the year before and the virus that appears in China and East Europe before it makes it to the western world. So it is really hit or miss. If they guess right the vaccine works. If they guess wrong and the virus mutates enough, the vaccine is nearly worthless as our body will not recognize the new virus and can not react to it fast enough. I personally don’t think it is worth the risk. I have never had a flu vaccine and have gotten the flu a total of once. I’d say those are pretty good odds. I would much rather keep my immune system strong and if I do happen to get the flu, fight it off naturally.
One instance in which I would get a vaccine is viruses like the large pandemics of Influenza like the Spanish flu of 1918 that killed 20 to 40 million people worldwide that are cause by large mutations called “antigenic shifts.” These mutations are so drastic that it is almost completely different from the virus it came from. These new antigenic shift mutations are highly virulent and cause severe illness. The scare of the “bird flu” is due to an antigenic shift. While highly virulent in humans, it has yet to mutate to a form highly transmissible to humans. Once it does, it will spread like wild fire and cause serious illness and probably lots of deaths. If a vaccine became available at that point, the risk would definitely be worth the reward, in my opinion.
So the results are in from the ELISA/ACT food allergy test my wife took. (I know its a little late but I’ve been studying for midterms.) The results show strong allergies to Peanuts and all cow dairy including cheeses and butter. Moderate allergies are a little more interesting. They include:
- Baker’s Yeast – but brewer’s yeast is fine which is good since we are amateur home brew beer makers:)
- Chicken
- Quinoa – a wheat alternative
- Candida Albicans – a wild yeast that can cause serious GI infections
- Caffeine
- Silicates – found in salt and food additives used to prevent clumping and caking
- Beryllium Oxide – found nataurally in mineral rocks, coal, soil and volcanic dust and used in various industrial applications
- Chinese Ginseng
So the next stop is to avoid all dairy and peanuts for a minimum of 9 months and all moderately sensitive items for at least 6 months. The idea is that eating these items causes the immune response to rage out of control causing chronic inflammation which manifests itself in the form of rheumatoid arthritis. ELISA/ACT claims over 900 autoimmune inflammatory diseases including “Addison’s syndrome to thyroiditis and lupus (SLE), from eczema and psoriasis to allergic migraine headaches and multiple sclerosis, from asthma and pneumonitis to myocarditis and pericarditis, from rheumatoid arthritis to connective tissue syndromes, from glomerulonephritis to interstitial cystitis, from ulcerative colitis (UC) to regional enteritis (RE) to irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), from Sjogren’s syndrome to hepatitis, from uveitis to vasculitis, from myofascial pain syndromes to fibromyalgia (FM), from mitochondrial dysfunction syndrome (MDS) to chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS)” can be helped by eliminating food allergies many of which they provide case studies for: http://www.elisaact.com/test/nonhc/case-studies.asp
Check it out if you are looking for a homeopathic alternative treating your autoimmune disease. I’ll keep you posted on our progress to let you know how it is working for us.
My wife has pretty severe Rheumatoid Arthritis and has tried many different treatments. She was started off on daily doses of methotrexate (a chemotherapy drug) and prednisone (a corticosteroid). This worked well until she started losing all of her hair, felt weak and tired, and decided we needed to try something else.
She had started a new job which had good health insurance, so her Rheumatologist decided to put her on Humira, a monthly injection which, according to their website:
HUMIRA is a medicine called a TNF blocker, a type of protein that blocks the action of TNF-α, a substance made by your body’s immune system. People with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have too much TNF-α in their bodies. The extra TNF-α can attack normal healthy body tissue and cause inflammation especially in the tissues of your bones, cartilage, and joints. HUMIRA can help block the damage that too much TNF-α can cause. HUMIRA may prevent further damage to the bones and joints of moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis patients, and may help the ability to perform daily activities.
Humira worked GREAT for her, She felt fantastic just days after her first injection. However, one warning which states you should call your physician immediately is “warm, red, or painful skin.” After her second injection she developed a serious skin rash which was a reaction to the drug and use was discontinued.
So now she was not taking any medication while waiting for insurance to approve a different treatment of Remicade. Her RA got so bad she had trouble with normal activities of daily living. She was in serious pain and absolutely miserable. Remicade is another (in fact one of the first) TNF blockers and according to their website:
REMICADE targets specific proteins in the body’s immune system to help control the development of inflammation, significantly reducing painful symptoms in diseases such as plaque psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, adult Crohn’s disease, pediatric Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and ankylosing spondylitis.
Remicade worked well for awhile. It wasn’t as effective as Humira was and instead of a monthly injection that you could do at home required a trip to the hospital for a monthly IV infusion. It did work well enough to continue using until her body began to develop anti-bodies against the drug. Her rheumatologist stated she had only heard about a couple of other patients that this happened with so once again treatment stopped.
We increased her Omega-3 supplementation to help keep the inflammation down until insurance approved yet another drug: Orencia.
Orencia is also a monthly infusion at the hospital but instead of blocking TNF, “works in a fundamentally different way than any other rheumatoid arthritis treatment. ORENCIA works early in the RA inflammatory process at the T-cell level and can reduce the activation of T cells, which reduces the activation of other cells in the RA inflammatory process.”
T-Cells are an important white blood cell that are crucial to your bodies immune system. They help fight viral and bacterial infections. And that is the power (and the problem) behind Orencia: it lowers your immune system so that it can not attack your own body (as is seen in auto-immune diseases). In fact, that is how ALL RA treatments work. They don’t fix or heal or cure RA, they lower your immune system so that it can’t damage your own body as much.
This is great if you are in serious pain and having trouble simply walking or cutting your food or sleeping because the pain is so intense. But there are serious side effects that come along with this. This list is from the Orencia Website:
Possible Side Effects of ORENCIA® (abatacept)
ORENCIA can cause serious side effects including:Serious infections. Patients receiving ORENCIA have a higher chance of getting infections including pneumonia, and other infections caused by viruses, bacteria, or fungi. Call your doctor immediately if you feel sick or get any of the following signs of infection: fever, feel very tired, cough, feel flu-like, or warm, red or painful skin.
Allergic reactions. Allergic reactions can happen on the day of treatment or the day after receiving ORENCIA. Tell your doctor or get emergency medical help right away if you have hives, swollen face, eyelids, lips, tongue, throat or trouble breathing.
Cancer (malignancies). Certain kinds of cancer have been reported in patients receiving ORENCIA. It is not known if ORENCIA increases your chance of getting certain kinds of cancer.
Vaccinations. You should not receive ORENCIA with certain types of vaccines. ORENCIA may cause some vaccinations to be less effective.
Respiratory problems in patients with COPD. You may get certain respiratory problems more often if you receive ORENCIA and have COPD, including: worsened COPD, pneumonia, cough, or trouble breathing.
The more common side effects with ORENCIA in both adults and children are headache, upper respiratory tract infection, sore throat, and nausea. Other side effects in children may include diarrhea, cough, fever, and abdominal pain.
This list is pretty standard for Remicade, Humira, Enbrel, and other RA drug treatments.
So we decided to do something different. She is still on Orencia which is working decent, but we recently went to a Chiropractor that talked at my school who specializes in internal medicine as well. He stated that he treats RA almost exclusively as an allergic reaction to something we eat. He draws blood for a test called ELISA/ACT which is an allergy test for over 450 different things including common things we eat, preservatives, food coloring, and environmental factors.
He got the results back the other day and called to tell her to immediately cease and desist the eating of all dairy, peanuts, ginseng, bakers yeast and of all things: chicken.
We are going in tonight to talk to him in person and get the details about the test and put together a game plan to try to make her better. The beautiful thing about this, is that instead of just minimizing the progression of the disease like the chemotheraputic approach, it actually removes the cause of the disease and hence… the disease itself!
We are hoping that this works well enough to get her off all drug treatments and back to normal, healthy, pain free living. We are really excited about this and will post from time to time about her progress and how things are working. Until then, Live Happy Live Healthy!
I stated in part two, that you are what you eat. This is literally true. Once ingested and absorbed, fatty acids of all types are taken up by cells and embedded within the cell membrane. Every cell in your body has a phospholipid bi-layer which basically means that each cell’s membrane is made up of two layers each made up of fatty acids and phosphorous molecules. So when you eat lots of foods containing omega-6 fatty acids, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids contained within your cell membrane increases. This literally makes every cell in your body more inflamed and makes you feel worse.
But I’ve already talked about that in previous posts. What I want to talk about today is the dangers of oxidative stress and the importance of taking anti-oxidant supplements if you are not getting enough from your diet.
Oxidative (or peroxidative) damage occurs when free radicals “steal electrons” from lipids (or fatty acids). The free-radical reaction happens in three different steps:
1.) Initiation – is the formation of a free radical. Most often this is an oxygen molecule. We use oxygen every second of our life to make energy called ATP. And our body is pretty good at it. However, nothing is 100% effective and every so often something goes wrong and the result is an oxygen free radical. These free radicals entire purpose in life is to find an electron in order to make themselves a stable molecule. They often accomplish this by stealing it from the nearest molecule it can get it from.
2.) Propagation is the second step. Once an Oxygen free radical steals an electron from a fatty acid, the oxygen molecule is stable but the fatty acid then becomes unstable and becomes a free radical itself. This reaction continues over and over again.
3.) The third and final step in free radical reactions is Termination. This is where propagation ends due two every cell being satisfied with a stable number of electrons. This happens one of two ways. Either another free radical (of the same species ie. two oxygen free radicals) meets up with the original free radical and share an electron making both free radical molecules stable (this is unlikely to happen due to the distance between free radicals in comparison to other cells). Or, an anti-oxidant donates an electron to a free radical making it stable.
The beautiful thing about anti-oxidants is that they have the ability to donate an electron without becoming unstable. This allows free radicals to become stable, and keep anti-oxidants stable, there by putting an end to the propagation step of the free radical reaction.
One of the most important anti-oxidant is Vitamin E which is a fat soluble vitamin and is also embedded in cell membranes. When free radicals come along, Vitamin E donates a hydrogen molecule to it which turns it into a harmless metabolite. This is such an important reaction that some research suggests that:
…vitamin E and related nutrients may collectively be important in protecting the body against and treating conditions related to oxidative stress such as aging, arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular disease, cataracts, diabetes, infection, and some cases of Alzheimer’s disease (Mahan 79).
For this reason, increasing the amount of anti-oxidants in your diet is important if you are also increasing the amount of Omega-3 fatty acids in your diet. While some doctors believe that supplementing with Omega-3 is worth it even if you are not supplementing with anti-oxidants, in my humble opinion, the importance of free radical scavenging by anti-oxidants is hard to over-emphasize and should probably be done with or without supplementing with fatty acids.
References:
Gropper, Sareen S., Jack L. Smith, and James L. Groff. Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism. Belmont: Brooks/Cole, 2004.
Mahan, L. Kathleen, and Sylvia Escott-Stump. Krause’s Food and Nutrition Therapy. Philadelphia: Saunders, 2007.
I bet you think the best source of omega-3 fatty acids is fish oil. You’d be right… well sort of.
Omega-3 fatty acids are found in a variety of sources including leafy greens, flaxseed oil and grasses which give you an omega-3 called Alpha-linolenic Acid. The problem is that alpha-linolenic acid must first go through a 3-step process of being converted to EPA before it can be used by our bodies as an anti-inflammatory agent. To complicate the issue, our bodies are not very good at transforming alpha-linolenic acid to EPA. So, much of the omega-3 that is ingested from vegetable and flaxseed sources is wasted due to the low conversion rates.
The benefit of getting your omega-3 from fish sources, is that they have already been converted to EPA by the fish. So, upon eating fish, you are getting a pure dose of EPA ready to be absorbed and used by your body. Simple, right? Fish really is the best source of omega-3 fatty acids, but, I’m afraid to say that it isn’t quite that easy.
What the “experts” on the Today show haven’t told you, is that the type of fish you are eating matters. For example, Floyd H. Chilton, Ph.D., in his book “Win the War Within,” explains that farmed salmon, which is available in every supermarket in the country, contains 700 milligrams of the beneficial anti-inflammatory omega-3 EPA. The bad news is, it also contains 1,306 milligrams of the inflammatory omega-6: arachidonic acid. Let me remind you that arachidonic acid isn’t bad for you, it is the ratio of arachidonic acid to EPA that is the difference. By eating farmed salmon you are actually eating twice as many omega-6 fatty acids as omega-3 fatty acids.
On the other hand, wild caught salmon contains only 303 mg of arachidonic acid which reverses the ratio to one omega-6 for every 2 omega-3 you are eating. He goes on to explain that the difference is what the fish are fed. Wild Salmon have a diet of omega-3 rich plankton while farm raised salmon eat mostly cheap corn feed rich in omega-6. Remember, you are what you eat. Fish eat omega-6, you eat fish, you get omega-6. Fish eat omega-3, you eat fish, you get omega-3.
Chilton also explains that buying only wild caught fish isn’t the solution either. Farmed rainbow trout contains 260 mg of EPA and only 25 mg of AA (arachidonic acid) while wild trout contains only 167 mg of EPA and 109 mg of AA. Science Daily magazine also discovered fish with high amounts of AA. Their story reads:
The researchers found that farmed tilapia contained only modest amounts of omega-3 fatty acids — less than half a gram per 100 grams of fish, similar to flounder and swordfish. Farmed salmon and trout, by contrast, had nearly 3 and 4 grams, respectively.
At the same time, the tilapia had much higher amounts of omega-6 acids generally and AA specifically than both salmon and trout. Ratios of long-chain omega-6 to long-chain omega-3, AA to EPA respectively, in tilapia averaged about 11:1, compared to much less than 1:1 (indicating more EPA than AA) in both salmon and trout.
So here you are, trying to eat right and feed your family healthy fish, and you end up making the problem worse by feeding them a ratio of AA to EPA of 11:1!!! So what do you do?
Chilton’s book is great if you are seriously interested in reducing inflammation in you or a family member. He explains in depth what foods to eat and what to stay away from. He provides menus, explanations, resources and a ton of other information.
Dr. David Seaman is a chiropractor that is serious about inflammation. For a more in-depth and technical read, try his article called “The Diet-induced Proinflammatory State: A Cause of Chronic Pain and Other Degenerative Diseases?” published in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics.
And of course, you can always use Omega-3 supplements, stay away from peanut butter (4400mg of omega-6, trace amount of omega-3 in just 2 tbsp), high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oil (3264mg of omega-6 in one tbsp)and, well, pretty much anything made from corn. And let me know if you have any questions. Leave a comment or send me an email and I will respond as soon as possible. In part 3 i am going to explain the importance of taking your omega-3 with antioxidants. Until then, Live Happy. Live Healthy!
