Archive for the ‘Supplements’ Category
Vitamin D on the brain
Filed under: Hormones, PublicHealth, Supplements, Vitamin D | Tags: Hormones, PublicHealth, Supplements, Vitamin D
Comments (1) 
The drumbeat regarding the essential role circulating vitamin D plays in human health is getting louder and louder by the day. I personally find this especially gratifying because I’ve been alerting friends and family to the importance of vitamin D for years. My latest find on this topic, however, could be cause for concern for many who make a good living off of the negative health effects that closely correlate with rampant vitamin D deficiency.
University of California Television (uctv.tv) has an entire video series on the topic: Vitamin D Deficiency: Treatment and Diagnosis. You may watch it streamed directly from the site, or download the individual audio or video files for playback locally. I find that even though there are often presentations that go along with the talk, the audio by itself is quite useful in most cases.
There are two talks that bear particular note:
Vitamin D Prevents Cancer: Is It True?
First Aired: 09/28/2009
In a new study, researchers at the UCSD School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center used a complex computer prediction model to determine that intake of vitamin D3 and calcium would prevent 58,000 new cases of breast cancer and 49,000 new cases of colorectal cancer annually in the US and Canada. The researchers’ model also predicted that 75% of deaths from these cancers could be prevented with adequate intake of vitamin D3 and calcium. Join Carole Baggerly with GrassrootsHealth as she discusses this new research.
D-Lightful Vitamin D: Bone and Muscle Health and Prevention of Autoimmune and Chronic Diseases
First Aired: 03/11/2009
Can vitamin D help prevent certain cancers and other diseases such as type 1 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain autoimmune and chronic diseases? To answer these questions and more, UCSD School of Medicine and GrassrootsHealth bring you this innovative series on vitamin D deficiency. Join nationally recognized experts as they discuss the latest research and its implications. In this program, Michael Holick, MD, discusses vitamin D relating to bone and muscle health and the prevention of autoimmune and chronic diseases.
There are also a raft of resources at the GrassrootsHealth site.
One picture says many, many volumes on this topic. It’s entitled Disease Incidence Prevention by Serum 25(OH)D Level. The story it tells is that there are clinically-verified correlations between the incidence of specific conditions and levels of circulating Vitamin D. Based on this large (and growing) body of evidence, it is reasonable to infer that by increasing our serum Vitamin D levels into the optimal range of 50 ng/ml, the following conditions could be reduced at the indicated rates:
- Breast Cancer: down by 83%
- Ovarian Cancer: down by 17%
- Colon Cancer: down by 60%
- Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma: down by 18%
- Type-1 Diabetes: down by 66%
- Fractures (all combined): down by 50%
- Falls (women): down by 72%
- Multiple Sclerosis: down by 54%
- Heart Attack (men): down by 30%
- Kidney Cancer: down by 49%
- Endometrial Cancer: down by 37%
This topic is especially relevant to me and my family. As an African-American who lived his entire life above the 38th parallel (Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington, DC and Seattle, to be precise), the absence of adequate sun exposure during most months of the year had a profound effect on my health (primarily in the very early onset of severe periodontal disorders, seasonal allergies, lower bone density). This is a message that literally needs to be trumpeted from the rooftops for everyone – especially anyone who skin has a lot of melanin (like mine).
The optimal range (50 ng/ml) must be put into context: In A recent NHANES study (2001-2004), only 3% of black folks were in the ‘sufficiency’ range of >30 ng/ml. That is not a typo: three percent – and remember, the optimal range begins at 50 nl/ml. Of even greater concern is that prevalence of deficiency (<10 ng/ml) is at 29%.
This is the real pandemic.
The kicker here is that vitamin D is about the least expensive dietary supplement available. At about $.05 (that’s FIVE CENTS) a day, most of us can, over time, get our levels in the optimal range.
So, what is a person to do? Obviously, I am not your physician, so I cannot give you medical advice. However, I have it on extremely good authority that it is safe practically everyone to take 1,000 IU (international units) of oral vitamin D daily (you want the D3 form, not the D2 form). If you do not know your vitamin D levels, make a beeline to your doctor’s office to get tested. Please do not simply accept the ‘normal/not normal’ pronouncement from your doctor. Obtain the actual test results and read it for yourself to determine your levels. Ideally, you will want to test at least twice a year (once at the end of the winter, and again at the end of summer) to make sure you’re staying in range. Just so your expectations are appropriately set, it took me about two years to get my levels stabilized in the optimal range.
Please, please, PLEASE, do what you can to raise awareness of this inexpensive and powerful way to improve our health.
p.s. I have been alerted by one of my readers – who is also a physician – that I should take care to warn people who have kidney problems (renal disease, renal failure) or elevated creatinine levels (which is an indicator of diminished kidney function)that they should always check with their physician before taking any dietary supplements.
Micronutrient Triage Theory
Filed under: Diet, Longevity, Nutrition, Supplements | Tags: Diet, Longevity, Nutrition, Supplements
Leave a Comment What could be a major key to understanding how we progressively acquire disease, endure chronic conditions and face decline as we age is laboring in obscurity. For my money, it is as cogent an explanation as any I’ve heard for the broad spectrum of ailments, conditions, diseases (pick your terminology) that seem to creep up on us, seemingly out of nowhere, as we age.
The triage hypothesis posits that the risk of degenerative diseases associated with aging, including cancer, cognitive decline, and immune dysfunction, can be decreased by ensuring adequate intake of micronutrients: the 40 essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids. The hypothesis was first put forth by Dr. Bruce Ames, a Biochemistry professor at University of California at Berkeley. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s one of the most prolific (and some would say controversial) scientists around. Here’s an hour interview that gives you a pretty good sense of his views.
Perhaps a post on another day would muse about his views regarding pesticide residue in food and the affect of exposure to environmental toxins. This day, though, we’ll let him speak for himself regarding his micronutrient triage hypothesis (from the seminal article):
I propose DNA damage and late onset disease are consequences of a triage allocation response to micronutrient scarcity. Episodic shortages of micronutrients were common during evolution. Natural selection favors short-term survival at the expense of long-term health. I hypothesize that short-term survival was achieved by allocating scarce micronutrients by triage, in part through an adjustment of the binding affinity of proteins for required micronutrients. If this hypothesis is correct, micronutrient deficiencies that trigger the triage response would accelerate cancer, aging, and neural decay but would leave critical metabolic functions, such as ATP production, intact. Evidence that micronutrient malnutrition increases late onset diseases, such as cancer, is discussed. A multivitamin-mineral supplement is one low-cost way to ensure intake of the Recommended Dietary Allowance of micronutrients throughout life.
If this theory pans out, we could see enormous implications on our ability to proactively ensure the optimal set of micronutrients to stave off the scourges of aging. Dr. Ames, in fact, recently published an article homing in on the effects of Vitamin K insufficiency that appears to support the hypothesis.
You’ve got to be in it for the long haul on this one as it will likely take years to build up enough evidence to become mainstream. But, in the meantime, why not fill up you body’s tank of necessary micronutrients with the right diet and appropriate supplementation.
You have very little to lose (a few dollars) and potentially a whole lot to gain.
Female Hormone Restoration
Filed under: Hormones, Supplements | Tags: Hormones, Supplements
Leave a Comment Well, it’s time to get back in the saddle.
I’ve been reluctant to get this post out there for many weeks. In large part because it covers a subject about which I have no direct experience and never will. I have an enormously healthy respect for the female endocrine system and bow down to its complexity and nuance. Us guys don’t have a clue. However, I have been getting more and more inquiries from the women in my life to share what I’ve learned over my years of reading about health issues.
I’m timing this post with the online availability of an extensive take on the bio-identical hormone replacement issue from Life Extension Foundation. Many of you may remember that the goddess of daytime TV herself, Oprah Winfrey, took on this issue (quite courageously, in my opinion) back in January. She clearly promoted the idea that the decline in hormone creation that comes with peri-menopause and menopause can be offset (carefully and under the care of a knowledgeable physician) by using compounds that are identical to those synthesized by your own endocrine system (hence the term bio-identical). This is in contrast with the FDA-approved (and quite often detrimental) compounds synthesized from the hormones of horses that do not have a chemical structure like those hormones circulating in human beings.
For this, she gets slammed by Newsweek (whose major advertisers include pharmaceutical makers) for putting forth Crazy Talk.
Life Extension has Oprah’s back. If you have any interest in this topic please carefully read this recent article at Life Extension that goes into considerable detail on this controversy and provides a good foundation for understanding the issues pertaining to female hormone restoration.
If you want to go into more depth, there are a couple of authors whose work I’ve read helped me understand the complexities in my own simple way – and I think might have much better guidance than I can give you:
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The Natural Hormone Makeover: 10 Steps to Rejuvenate Your Health and Rediscover Your Inner Glow |
I consider Dr. Cohan a mentor even though I’ve never met her. It is primarily through her work I came to understand how little I knew. But once I read it I was hooked. She goes into substantive detail about how to best manage your hormone balance (for women at any age) to ensure optimum health and get maximum energy.
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The Savvy Woman’s Guide to Testosterone: How to Revitalize Your Sexuality, Strength and Stamina |
One of those unfortunately-titled books, because it’s about way more than testosterone, but I think the publisher thought it might sell better with the title. I like it as a complement to Dr. Cohan’s book because it covers much of the same material from a different angle.
There are other books out there too: The Venus Week, several of Dr. Christiane Northrup’s books that provide other points of view, but for my money Dr. Cohan strikes the right balance on a number of fronts.
Mark Sisson – Primal Blueprint
Filed under: Exercise, Nutrition, Supplements | Tags: Exercise, Nutrition, Supplements
Leave a Comment Hey everybody, got a great new site/book for you. It’s The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson. Think Paleo diet (with a few differences), Crossfit (no cardio here) and supplements (think Life Extension) and you get an idea of where Mark is going.
Check him out. It’ll be worth it to you!
Pillars of Weight Loss – Life Extension
Filed under: Diet, Exercise, Nutrition, Supplements | Tags: Diet, Exercise, Nutrition, Supplements
Leave a Comment Life Extension Foundation have done it again. They’ve taken all of the best advice that’s is now emerging on the blood testing, supplement and dietary (well, almost) front and compiled it all together into their Nine Pillars of Successful Weight Loss.
The entire write-up is worth your time – whether or not you think you need to loose weight – because the principles apply to everyone. It’s about optimal overall health. If everything’s in balance, it’s almost hard to put on a lot of fat.
Please do yourself a favor pick up the .pdf from the site. Here is a brief sidebar that gives you a sense of where they’re taking this:
- Simply eating less and exercising more is not enough to help most people remove excess body fat and keep it off. A comprehensive program is necessary to aggressively target the many factors that contribute to excess body fat.
- Excess body fat is not only unsightly, it can be deadly, increasing the risk for heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Abdominal fat is particularly dangerous.
- A comprehensive fat-loss program includes improving insulin sensitivity, achieving youthful hormone balance, controlling the rate of carbohydrate absorption, controlling the amount of dietary fat absorption, increasing physical activity, normalizing brain serotonin, restoring energy expenditure rate, and adopting a long-term healthy eating strategy.
- Certain nutritional supplements offer important support for reducing appetite, promoting satiety, and enhancing fat-burning.
- The rewards of removing excess body fat go far beyond a slim physique to the promise of a lengthy, disease-free life.
On the dietary side of things, I remain hopeful they’ll get a copy of Good Calories, Bad Calories and begin to step away from the low-fat, calorie restriction premise that still underlies much of their dietary advice. At least this time around, they make a pretty strong statement about the consumption of simple carbohydrates and how the emphasis on low fat approaches quite often result higher consumption of said carbohydrates.
Be Well,
Redefining Healthcare – Paradigm Shifts Needed
Filed under: HealthReform, Longevity, Nutrition, Supplements | Tags: HealthReform, Longevity, Nutrition, Supplements
Comments (1) It has been nearly impossible to escape the tidal wave of interest and sheer volume of ink (in paper or digital form) that has been spent on examining our current healthcare system and the myriad proposals for change that would lead to a more sustainable, humane and equitable system.
The subject of this post is a bite-sized assessment of this problem from Dr. Stanley Skollar of Life Extension Foundation (if you’ve poked around this blog, you know how highly I regard the work of LEF). ‘Bite-sized’ in that it’s not a 400 page tome, but touches on issues that have been broached by people like Clayton Christensen, George Halvorson and others of the thought leaders who I hope will play a major role in shaping our healthcare future.
There are two big numbers (out of an ocean of relevant and important numbers) I’d like to home in on in this post:
According to the Congressional Budget office, the total national spending on healthcare has more than doubled in the last 30 years. The projections are, that by the year 2035, healthcare will require more than 30% of our total GDP, 40% by 2060 and 50% by 2082!
… and …
The medical care costs for people with chronic degenerative diseases account for more than 75% of our nations two trillion plus dollars expense for all medical care!
Yes, these are big numbers and can lead to a myriad of conclusions, however, I’d like to invite you consider the possibility that one of our first orders of business should be to rethink how we provide care for those living with chronic conditions. In many cases, we have approaches that can remedy some conditions, thereby greatly reducing the overall system cost for caring for these patients.
We have more and more mounting evidence that patient-centered, coordinated care focused on overall outcomes (not merely treating the disease end-state) reduces costs and leads to healthier patients. I have been gathering examples of this evidence in my delicious favorites list. The chroniccare tag gives you 50+ examples (as of this writing, anyway) that point the way.
What is so impressive about Dr. Skollar’s article on Life Extension, is that he succinctly provides novel diagnostic guidance for a wide range of issues. Here are just a few examples:
- He succinctly cites four expressions of molecular pathology that are at the root of both so-called ‘normal’ aging and chronic diseases: oxidative stress, inflammation, glycation and defects in methylation.
- He goes on to offer novel approaches to diagnosing each of these expressions.
- Finally, he offers concrete recommendations calling out specific neutraceuticals (nutrients, dietary supplement, etc.) that have been shown to address the detrimental mechanisms previously described
It is well worth the read:
Redefining Healthcare: Towards a Shift in the Medical Paradigm
By Stanley Skollar, M.D.
Seattle: Health Summit – I get to speak
Filed under: Diet, Exercise, Longevity, Seattle, Supplements | Tags: Diet, Exercise, Longevity, Seattle, Supplements
Leave a Comment For those of you in the Seattle area, I’ve been honored to be asked to speak at
an upcoming “Young Professional Development Summit” held by the Seattle Urban League Young Professionals group. I’ll be speaking on my usual spiel, but will also be joined by two others who have great experience knowledge and insight.
Here are the particulars:
Date: Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
Panel Time: 9:15 – 10:45AM (includes time for Q & A)
Location: Starbucks Corp Headquarters
2401 Utah Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134
Panel Topic: “Taking Charge of your health in times of change.”
Men’s Health meeting recap
Filed under: Diet, Exercise, Nutrition, Seattle, Supplements | Tags: Diet, Exercise, Nutrition, Seattle, Supplements
Leave a Comment Well, my first in-person meetup took place today. It was a small and lively group. We covered a wide range of topics that I’d like to touch on in this post. We also had a great suggestion as to how to focus our next few meetings.
As mentioned, we covered pretty wide range of topics, We talked at some length about the simple, straightforward dietary advice. It’s been said before, but my #1 recommended book is Dr. Thompson’s Glycemic Load diet book. It gets you 80% there if you’re currently on a typical North American diet and its advice is very widely applicable.
We also talked a bit about the cycle of glucose and insulin response. For a very brief video description of that process, please reference a YouTube video on Diabetes. There is a more engaging one on UnderGroundWellness.com that I was not able to find … I’ll update when I do.
Also, note that we’re all set for our next get together on Sunday March 8th at the Starbucks in Madison Park.
Hope to see you there!
Blogging to the real world and back
Filed under: Diet, Exercise, GlycemicLoad, Hormones, Longevity, Nutrition, Supplements |
Leave a Comment The whole idea for this blog was kicked off by friends asking for more information – so I figured I’d write once.
Writing is great, but I’m also very interested in keepin’ it real. So I started a real live face-to-face get together through meetup.com. You can find the meetup here: http://www.meetup.com/Mens-health.
For those of you in Seattle and environs, check it out.
Omega-3′s – there is a difference
Filed under: Nutrition, Supplements | Tags: Nutrition, Supplements
Comments (3) One of the major components of a plan to use supplements to enhance your health is to supplement your diet with Essential Fatty Acids (mostly of the omega-3 variety) as a daily regimen. It’s hard to imagine that you hadn’t heard about the benefits of omega-3′s as their general ‘goodness’ is common knowledge, so I won’t go so much into the science of why it’s a good idea to do so.
With this post, though, I’d like to highlight some of the differences between the types of omega-3′s that are available to you. Many people swear by flaxseed (and the oils derived from them) as their primary source for omega-3 supplementation. While one can’t argue with the benefits of flaxseed oil, I’m still a strong proponent of fish oils for more practical reasons.
Flax is a GREAT source of omega-3’s however if the intent is to better enable your body to manage inflammation, it has its limitations. This is primarily because the alpha-lipoic acid (ALA) from flax must be converted to EPA and subsequently DHA – which are the most potent macronutrients your body can use to create the beneficial eicosanoids that it, in turn, your body uses to manage inflammation in all its multiplicities. The thing is, you have to get LOTS of ALA (8g or more daily) in order to get the benefits. ALA-to-EPA conversion is roughly between 12%-20 % (higher for women, as a rule). Just using one source as a reference: http://www.dhaomega3.org/index.php?category=overview&title=Conversion-of-ALA-to-DHA you can see one way to describe the metabolic pathway between ALA, EPA and DHA.
So, I’m big on consuming fish oil as the source of omega-3 – primarily because they are powerful sources of EPA and DHA and, metabolically, you’ve got a much shorter and more efficient path to the end you want to achieve (more optimal inflammatory response – among other things). It’s also important to note the source of the fish oil and the methods used to make it available to consumers:
Because the source of EPA/DHA may be contaminated (PCBs, mercury, etc.) any fish oil you use should go through the purification processes needed to reduce contaminant levels to safe ranges. One very simple test you can use is to sacrifice a capsule or two of your fish oil by emptying its contents in a small container and leaving in the freezer overnight. It should still be liquid in the morning (you have to look at it immediately as it will thaw quickly as it is removed from the freezer). If it is not liquid, I would run, not walk, away from it. However, that’s not the ultimate test. The ultimate test is done at the International Fish Oil Standard Institute in Guelph, Ontario. They do the honest-to-goodness super-duper tests and publish their findings here: http://www.nutrasource.ca/ifos_new/index.asp?section=ifosconsumer. I only go for the 5-star rated ones. I personally get my omega-3’s from Life Extension Foundation (disclosure: I am also an ‘affiliate’ of Life Extension).
One final mention that is worthy of note is that there are krill-oil bas
ed supplements available as well. Krill look like little shrimp and are keystone species on which essentially all other larger species depend. What’s interesting about this source is that it’s further down the food chain (i.e. less exposure to environmental toxins) and the form that the EPA and DHA takes in krill it’s said be more bio-available (i.e. better able to be converted to usable nutrients by the body). Perhaps after I’ve looked into krill oil a bit more, I’ll write a more detailed post on it. Who knows, I might just change my tune.
