This article might appear to be about thallium and rocket fuel in your food, but it really isn’t. We all agree that it is important to be careful about what we eat. The most important reason to be careful is not because of what we know. More important is what we don’t know. Many people think they have a healthy, or even excellent diet because they eat organically, avoid gluten or maybe because they are vegan. Those can be good ideas for some, but a healthy diet is too slippery to grasp quite so easily. Concerned about the quality of food, organic food has become very common. A far cry from when I first joined an organic food co-op 45 years ago. Although folks are wisely cautious about pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and GMOs, very few people consider the water that went into their food. That’s a big mistake. In my book, Better Than Medicines, I recounted a study that revealed this problem nearly 20 years ago. Over 80% of the organic greens sold in the San Francisco Bay Area were found to contain rocket fuel! How could that be? It turned out that the storage tanks at Edwards Air Force base were leaking the fuel into the regional ground water. As I also recounted in Better Than Medicines, there have been incidents of deadly e coli (stool bacteria) spread to organic crops in water run-off from neighboring cattle ranches owned by the same conglomerate. “Organic” used to mean small family farms with fastidious attention to the crops. It is an entirely different world today. The quality of water applied to crops is a gaping wide and serious blind spot in our knowledge about the safety of foods we consume. It’s a big deal, but it’s still just one element of our ignorance. Your food is a product of the environment in which it is grown. Here is another example: Just about every patient I see believes that the best thing they do (or should do) to make their diet perfect is to consume huge quantities of dark leafy green veggies. In my official role as a troublemaker, I have to shatter that illusion. Although I value the rich vitamin, mineral, polyphenol and alkaloid content of those earthy greens, that rich intensity also leads to problems. First, many think of plants as a wonderfully gentle form of life here to provide humans with nutrients. This rainbows and sunshine image is not real. In truth, biologically-speaking and just like us, plants...
The results of a four-year study of over 150,000 American households were just released and found that 2/3 of the calories purchased were “highly processed foods”. Not processed, HIGHLY processed. The consequences for our health and well-being are immense. Some of you might be shaking your head, tsk-tsking at those other people who live on McDonalds “food”. They are right to believe that fast food from such establishments is not so healthy. Their mistake is that even those of us who eat organic foods eat too much processed food. Highly processed organic is only marginally better than highly processed nonorganic. Did you ever see the movie Super Size Me? If you haven’t, I urge you to do so. In the film Morgan Spurlock experiments on himself by eating only McDonalds food for a month. He also decided that if the clerk asked if he wanted to have the meal “super sized”, which was McDonalds sale campaign at the time, he had to say yes. He also had to finish all the food. Before he began his month-long McDonalds feast, he saw three medical doctors, a family physician, a cardiologist and a gastroenterologist. The doctors each conducted a physical exam and ran blood tests and an ekg.on Mr. Spurlock. They all told him that he was in great health, and the McDonald’s diet shouldn’t cause him any significant harm. They were quite wrong. Right away his energy level dropped. He began to suffer headaches and depression. He gained 10 lb. in the first week. His heart became irregular and his blood tests showed liver damage as a consequence of the diet. The same physicians who had reassured him before the experiment began, now urged him to abort the test after just two weeks. He ignored their advice and finished out the 30 days. It took him over a year to lose the 25 lb. he gained. A few years after Super Size Me came out, an unusually perceptive patient who ate a lot of food from a local organic fast food producer jokingly suggested that we run the same sort of test on him. Of course, that would have been foolish, maybe even unethical, given what he and I both knew. Organic is good, but not good enough. When I started eating organic food back in 1970 (seriously, it has been that long), “organic” meant something quite different from what the word means today. In truth, the word doesn’t have a different meaning, but the food it refers to is quite different....
Firmly established conventional guidelines on blood pressure and salt are finally eroding. It’s about time. For decades I’ve guided my patients along a different path, telling them that I am not concerned by their blood pressure in my office and that they need salt to live. Both of these blood pressure-related opinions have gotten me in hot water with other docs. It’s time for another victory dance. You tell me. If you are worried, anxious, stressed or fearful what happens to your blood pressure? Do you feel as calm and relaxed in the doctor’s office as you feel at home? Is there some “body-wisdom”, a biologically wonderful reason why your blood pressure and pulse rate should increase when you are stressed? The answers are obvious. Well, the answers are obvious to you and I, but they have not been to conventional medicine until now. Just about anyone’s blood pressure will be unusually high in the doctor’s office. Our blood pressure and heart rate rises with stress, so that we can respond to the stress. Yes, that was much more functional for humans when the “stress” was an attack from a saber tooth tiger than it is now, when the stressor is finding a parking space or some conflict at work. Taking this one more step, the simple question is: “Do you think that checking your blood pressure in your doctor’s office is a decent way to determine if you have high blood pressure?” The organization that creates the guidelines for medical screenings for disease the United States Preventive Services Task Force - USPSTF has now achieved a level of common sense equal to your own. They made an official (although still preliminary) declaration that patients should not be diagnosed with high blood pressure on the basis of in-office measurements. Of course, in line also with your common sense, we should not ignore it when a patient has dangerously high blood pressure, even in our offices. Do check your blood pressure yourself. Make sure you are relaxed before you check it. If it is high (140 if you are young,160 if you aren’t, 130 if you have diabetes or kidney disease) talk to a doctor or other health professional about it. Do you remember Mahatma Gandhi, the grandfather of nonviolent resistance? One of his greatest strategic triumphs was when he organized a march to the sea to make salt from seawater. That might sound like a pleasant school outing, except for two facts. One was that the British government (at the time the...
Probiotics are good for you. Of course that’s what the name “probiotic” means and far from newsworthy. In the past couple of decades we’ve been learning more and more and more. A couple of new findings about probiotics are especially interesting. Many years ago when I was offered a job at the University of Texas Medical Branch, I proposed several studies. One of those was to administer probiotics to newborn babies to see if we could reduce the rate of colic. A similarly designed trial of nearly 600 Italian infants was recently published. The probiotic (Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 17938) cut episodes of inconsolable crying by about half. The same was true of the frequency of regurgitation (spitting up/vomiting). It also reduced constipation in the newborns. Add that to previous studies showing probiotics reduce allergies and lower the rate of one of the most serious problems newborns suffer (necrotizing enter colitis). My decades-long advice to parents, advising them to start probiotics in pregnancy and give them to their newborn babies, seems better and better. Another of my probiotic predictions seems to be coming true. Taking a certain probiotic (lactobacillus rhamnosus) has been linked to weight loss. A range of studies and scientific evidence about why so many people are getting fat have been building towards this. Undoubtedly the problem is far more complicated and many of the factors, like environmental contamination with endocrine disrupting chemicals, we can’t change easily or quickly. Just as certainly, these findings demonstrate that there are actions we can take in addition to the vitally important diet and exercise improvements most people should make. The principle attention regarding specific probiotic species and weight loss is focused on the relative balance of two species (firmicutes and bacteroidetes). When firmicutes predominate, people tend to acquire and maintain more body fat. Animals, including humans, that live in colder climates tend to be larger, with higher levels of body fat. As the cold environment demands burning calories to keep warm, and fat is a rich source of calories, this would seem to be a good adaptation. Also, with the plethora of food sources available in tropical environments, animals do not need to store calories. A worldwide study of 1,200 people found that the balance of firmicutes and bacteroidetes paralleled those long-established observations. The closer people lived to the equator, the greater the predominance of bacteroidetes in their digestive tract. Observing a pattern does not establish causation, nor does it prove that changing the bacteria in our intestines will cause weight...
The mission of this site is to inform and empower you. Representing the sum of my experience as well as the latest clinical research, my perspective is often somewhat at odds with the simplistic articles appearing in the media. Applying the information here you can become healthier, stronger and hopefully happier. Look around and let me know what you think.
