Toxin Bombshell - You Can’t NOT Touch This

August 5th, 2010

Last week we experienced one of the landmark “freak out” moments in the history of discovering how we are poisoning ourselves. Years ago we learned that phthalates, the chemicals that make softer plastics, were hormone mimicking and thus very bad for us. They were in widespread use, including in pacifiers and water bottles. So, people moved to hard plastics, thinking they were safe. Then we recognized that bisphenol A (BPA) used in many products, including those hard plastic drinking bottles and the lining of metal food cans, was also an endocrine disruptor. Oooops! Honestly, those who touted BPA bottles as safe were at best woefully ignorant, because BPA was developed in the 1930’s AS A SYNTHETIC ESTROGEN. It waned in popularity after DES (yes that DES) was found to be stronger and therefore “better”(???). Recent government studies testing American citizens for environmental toxins in our blood found that everyone tested was contaminated with BPA

Last week even the new level of concern proved naively optimistic, with the discovery that we may have been blaming the wrong items for our BPA exposure. Spoiler alert - this discovery does not mean water bottles and those cans and other BPA sources are okay. Unfortunately, we just learned that another source appears to be far worse. Worst of all, that source is very, very difficult to avoid.

Got your interest?

The big nasty source is paper sales receipts. Investigators analyzed receipts from all the usual sources (ATMs, banks, grocery stores, gas stations, etc). Excepting ATMs, they were all heavily contaminated with BPA. While we have been fretting about exposures in the microgram range and lower, some of the receipts tested in this new study contained as much as 41 milligrams of BPA, nearly 3% of the weight of the receipt.

Now for those of you who don’t have much scientific training, 1 milligram (mg) is 1,000 micrograms (mcg). So, a receipt with 41 mg contains 41,000 mcg of BPA.

The sliver of good news is that BPA is probably absorbed less through our skin than by swallowing it. The obvious bad news is what to do about touching all of those receipts?

All I can suggest is to not accept any more of them than you have to, and wash your hands after touching them. The largest US manufacturer of these receipts, accounting for 40% of the market, has announced that because of their own concerns, their paper has been BPA-free for the last couple of years. Hopefully other manufacturers will follow suit and commercial establishments will have some way to choose BPA-free receipts. As the paper is processed into receipts by other paper companies, businesses cannot buy their paper directly from the primary non BPA company and no company is required to declare BPA content. I am hoping that the companies selling BPA-free papers will recognize this as a healthy marketing opportunity.


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Vitamin D and Neurologic Disease

July 13th, 2010

Vitamin D has been all the rage for a few years. Ironically, despite the fact that everyone knows that our bodies create vitamin D in response to sunlight and most of us experience mood changes during the darker months, the high likelihood of a link had not been researched.

A study was just published correcting this blatant neglect and it was a very well designed interventional trial to boot. Over 900 elderly women and men were evaluated for evidence of depression and tested for their vitamin D blood level. They were followed for 6 years. At the end of the study women who had low vitamin D levels at the beginning of the study were twice as likely to develop depression. Low vitamin D males were 1.6 times as likely to become depressed.

Multiple Sclerosis has long been linked to vitamin D, with deficiency likely to make people susceptible and supplementation as an effective treatment. The association between vitamin D and MS is clearly important.

Other recent studies have confirmed links between vitamin D levels and various neurologic diseases, including Alzheimer’s. Sceptic that I am, some of those studies do not prove causation to me. I want to know that blood levels were low before the onset of any symptoms because people who are not well, especially if “not well” includes limitations to their mobility or thinking, will tend to go outside less than other people. Consequently they will have relatively lower vitamin D blood levels.

One recent study of Parkinson’s Disease and vitamin D does, fairly well at least, satisfy my skepticism. Finnish scientists analyzed blood of 3,000 individuals sampled between 1978 and 1980. After 30 years they found that individuals with the lowest levels of vitamin D were three times more likely to have developed Parkinson’s compared to those with the highest levels. As the number those developing Parkinson’s was small and the study was not one where vitamin D was given to healthy people to see whether Parkinson’s was prevented by the intervention with vitamin D, there are still some flaws but not enough to discount the findings. As we have often observed links between various environmental toxins and Parkinson’s and vitamin D helps our bodies clear such toxins, a causative connection is certainly possible. Also, as vitamin D has so very many biological effects, it is certainly possible that it might influence the rate of Parkinson’s and other neurologic disease by other means.

As is perfectly obvious at this point, everyone excepting a very few with a couple of rare disease, should make certain that she/he has good levels of vitamin D . In my opinion that means 50 ng/ml or above.


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Social Support to Change

July 7th, 2010

Most of us are social creatures. Other people are very important to our enjoyment of our daily lives. This has important impacts on our health.

Most of the time we think about this because of the difficulties social influences can present. A person who is working to overcome drug or alcohol addiction usually faces pressure from his/her old group, many of whom have the same problem. Sometimes people have to build a new social network in those challenging circumstances.

We often forget that social connections can, and should be, of great help. If your friends and family have good health habits, it can be uncomfortable not to go with the flow. You can also take an active role to better your own health and that of your friends or family.

I see this most often with exercise. Many times I have seen women training to complete their first running race together. Some people join walking groups, tennis clubs or join an athletic team because they then create a regula exercise habit built into their social network. There is social website called Get Up and Move where people challenge friends to be active by posing specific activity challenges for themselves. What better gift could there be for someone you care about than to come together in this way to feel better?



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Use Medication Only When You REALLY Need To

June 29th, 2010

It is always smart to avoid overusing medication. Two recent studies are convincing reminders of this wisdom.

In one study, 2 million Britons using statin drugs were found to have unexpectedly increased risks of cataracts and kidney failure. While other problems like liver and muscle damage, are well-known, these links were a surprise.

Also surprising was the finding that using certain common blood pressure lowering medications was associated with a rather dramatically increased risk of cancer. Combining data from over 200,000 patients, researchers found a 1% increase in cancer rates, most notably lung cancer. While a 1% increase is not a big number, when you consider how many people take these medications, it adds up. This echoes an old but ignored study that found an association between breast cancer and higher usage of prescription medication.

It is always important to do the basic things, eating right, exercising, etc, before jumping to prescription medicines which are often powerful but often more likely to be toxic than helpful. I am consistently impressed by the power of seemingly mundane lifestyle changes. The truth is that they do more than prescription medications and in a much broader, more comprehensive way. More wholistic/holistic to use those old but quite serviceable terms. I also see that, contrary to the expectations of some, making these changes is not a sacrifice. People feel so much better that their most common regret is that they did not make the changes long ago.


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Cancer, Changing Climates, Multiple vitamin

June 7th, 2010

It seems that warmer weather might actually be peaking shyly and belatedly around the corner. The odd weather has not been unique to Sonoma County. I attended an excellent meeting on the treatment of cancer with nutrition and alternative therapies near San Diego, and it was even cooler than here. Honestly, even it were snowing or dumping cold rain, the meeting was so good that I would not have much noticed the weather. It has taken far too long, but the medical climate is also changing growing awareness, supported by scientific study, of the vital impact of nutrition, a broad range of environmental factors and supplements on both the prevention and treatment of cancer. Since the meeting, and reflecting increasingly rational attitudes in medicine, a study was published showing that intravenous vitamin C cut cancerous tumor size and growth in mice by approximately one half. I expect to write more about information presented at the cancer meeting in the near future.

Now that my MVM is available for sale on Amazon, it might be more convenient for many of you to order it that way, and certainly easier for your friends and family living at a distance. As we need to establish ourselves on Amazon, every time you or someone you refer orders my MVM on Amazon up until October 1, Melanie will credit your account $5 towards a nonMVM supplement purchase through the office. Contact Melanie for any questions by calling the office (707-545-1554) or emailing her at [email protected].


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