Tuesday, February 15, 2011
If you have made the decision to improve your diet and lifestyle for good health, one of the first items on the dietary agenda will probably be reducing the quantities of red meat in your diet. Of course, this should be combined with ensuring that the red meat you do consume is lean.
Many of us embark on an improvement plan without giving much thought to the good things that go along with the undesirables in what we have been eating. Limiting the amount of red meat in your diet is a step in the right direction, but did you know that Vitamin B12 is one of the good nutrients we get from meat?
If your dietary change is driven by medical need, you may be planning on severely restricting the meat in your diet.
 If any of these apply to you, you should consider including a Vitamin B12 supplement OR a Daily Multivitamin which contains Vitamin B12.
If you are unsure whether you need supplementation, ask your doctor to test your Vitamin B12 levels.
A good quality One per day Multivitamin is worth considering in any case, to ensure that you are receiving acceptable quantities of all of the essential nutrients needed to ensure that you maintain good health.
Remember to add a daily Multivitamin supplement to your anti aging shopping list!
In a fast changing world, women face a growing number of health issues. Amongst them is the need to support DNA gene structure within the breast. Many factors of our lifestyle can be detrimental to breast health. These include the natural changes triggered by the aging process and the daily bombardment of damaging environmental estrogen-like compounds in foods and the environment. The result is an increased need to support the cellular structure of a woman’s breasts.
There is a wealth of scientific research shows that specific plant extracts can positively influence cellular status in the breast and alleviate some of the anxiety that women face in trying to maintain a healthy balance of estrogens.
Estrogen is broken down into two important metabolites within the body. These two metabolites are the “good” 2-hydroxyestrone and the “bad” 16 alpha-hydroxyestrone. Scientific reasearch indicates that nutrients such as indole-3-carbinol (I3C) can tip the delicate balance of estrogens in favor of the good form.
If you are a woman and wish to proactively restore your youthful hormonal balance, you can now take a phytonutrient-based formula called Breast Health Formula, specially developed to help support healthy estrogen activity and detoxification. Some of the active ingredients in Life Extension Breast Health Formula are:
- Phytoestrogens — these plant based compounds function as selective estrogen receptor modifiers, helping to block certain estrogen receptor sites on cells, denying bad estrogen the opportunity to exert its harmful effects
- Plant lignans — known to boost beneficial enterolactone levels, favorably altering estrogen metabolism
- Cruciferous vegetable extracts and I3C — these compounds help to effectively increase “good” estrogrens while reducing “bad” estrogens
- Calcium D-Glucarate — inhibits beta-glucuronidase, (a bad enzyme responsible for ripping the glucuronide conjugate off the estrogen) safely facilitating the removal of harmful estrogen from the body.
- Vitamin D — restores healthy genetic regulatory switching to aging cells
Breast Health Formula provides all of these nutrients which have been demonstrated to provide broad-spectrum support for preserving optimal breast health
 Breast Health Formula
Monday, November 29, 2010
This month the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2010 featured results presentations from two important studies which indicate that development of cardiovascular disease is more closely linked to lifestyle than being genetically predisposed to acquire the disease.
The first study, from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, evaluated data from 2,336 men and women aged 18 to 30 upon enrollment in a longitudinal study titled the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults. The study was sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Factors assessed over the term of the study include Diet, physical activity, weight, blood pressure, smoking status, alcohol intake and glucose levels were measured at commencement of the study and followed up at the seventh and twentieth years.
Sixty percent of those study participants who maintained five healthy lifestyle factors (healthy body mass index, low intake of saturated fat, limited alcohol consumption, regular exercise, consumption of healthy amounts of potassium, calcium and fiber and never having smoked) had a low risk profile for cardiovascular disease after 20 years. Those who maintained only four factors saw the low risk percentage drop to 37 percent. Only 30 percent showed low risk for maintaining three factors, only 17 percent were found to have low risk with two factors maintained and a worriesome 6 percent for one or none.
When study results were separated and analyzed in specific sub-groups such as men, women, caucasian and african-American, the findings remained similar.
The second study, the Framingham Heart Study, also conducted by Northwestern University, looked at three generations of families. In this study also, researchers determined that the majority of cardiovascular disease found in study subjects was caused by lifestyle factors, with heredity being the involved in only a small proportion of subjects. Lead author of the study, Feinberg School postdoctoral fellow in preventive medicine Norrina Allen said “What you do and how you live is going to have a larger impact on whether you are in ideal cardiovascular health than your genes or how you were raised”.
Northwestern Memorial Hospital cardiologist Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD, who also serves as chair and professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern Medicine said “Health behaviors can trump a lot of your genetics. This research shows people have control over their heart health. The earlier they start making healthy choices, the more likely they are to maintain a low-risk profile for heart disease.”
Dr Lloyd-Jones added “We really need to encourage individuals to improve their behavior and lifestyle and create a public health environment so people can make healthy choices. We need to make it possible for people to walk more and safely in their neighborhoods and buy fresh affordable fruit and vegetables in the local grocery store. We need physical activity back in schools, widely applied indoor smoking bans and reduced sodium content in the processed foods we eat. We also need to educate people to reduce their calorie intake. It’s a partnership between individuals making behavior changes but also public health changes that will improve the environment and allow people to make those healthy choices.”
Glutathione therapy is producing extremely impressive results for patients with Parkinson’s Disease under the care of holistic practitioners, and is highly recommended by such well-known alternative health doctors as Dr. Marcus Laux and Dr. Julian Whitaker. Dr. David Perlmutter, M.D. and Board Certified Neurologist, calls this “the glutathione miracle”.
Glutathione is one of the most important brain antioxidants and a vital brain chemical. In fact, glutathione helps to preserve brain tissue by preventing cell damage caused by free radicals. According to Multiple Sclerosis survivor William Code MD, glutatione levels in the body are an indicator of health and longevity potential. By the time a serious chronic disease such as a neurodegenerative disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome or even cancer is diagnosed, your glutathione levels are already seriously depleted.
Almost all Parkinson’s patients have been found to be substantially reduced in glutathione. According to Dr. Code, at the time of diagnosis with either Multiple Sclerosis or Parkinsons Disease, the body’s cellular glutathione is only 5% of what it should be. He suggests that glutathione supplementation, either intravenously, with liposomal glutathione or with glutathione precursors such as non-denatured whey protein powder can produce a remarkable response.
Dr. Perlmutter quotes a landmark study from the Department of Neurology at the University of Sassari, Italy:
“In this research protocol, Parkinson’s patients received intravenous glutathione twice daily for 30 days. The subjects were then evaluated at one month intervals up to six months. The published results indicated that all patients improved significantly after glutathione therapy with a 42% decline in disability. Once glutathione was stopped, the therapeutic effects lasted 2-4 months. Further, the researchers indicated…”glutathione has symptomatic efficacy and possibly retards the progression of the disease”.
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is a term used to describe accumulation of fat in the liver of people who drink little or no alcohol.
Nonalcoholic fatty liver (NAFLD) disease and its more advanced form, Nonalcoholic steatotic hepatitis (NASH), the most prevalent form of progressive liver disease in the United States, are considered to be a manifestation of insulin resistance syndrome. There is increasing evidence that steatosis in NASH is a result of the pathology in fat metabolism occurring in obesity and insulin resistance. For steatosis to progress to necroinflammation and fibrosis, the theory of mitochondrial oxidative-stress induced cellular damage is receiving wide acceptance.
This common, obesity-related liver disease is widely viewed in standard medicine to have no known treatment, however information from a range of recent studies indicates that certain dietary supplements may provide significant benefits for those living with the disease.
NAFLD is often simply referred to as “fatty liver”
Which supplements can help?
Vitamin E
In the study published online in the New England Journal of Medicine, 247 adults with advanced fatty liver disease were randomly assigned to take a high dose of vitamin E (800 international units), the diabetes drug Actos or dummy pills for nearly two years.
The vitamin and drug were tested because earlier research suggested liver cell deterioration and insulin resistance might be involved in the development of the disease.
Biopsies before and after treatment showed that liver function improved in 43 per cent of those in the vitamin E group compared with 19 per cent in the placebo group.
“In all honesty, I was surprised,” said lead researcher, Dr. Arun Sanyal of Virginia Commonwealth University. “A vitamin has not been previously used to cure a serious disease” that is not caused by a deficiency. Vitamin deficiency has been cited as the cause for a range of health problems from rickets and osteoporosis (casued by a lack of vitamin D) to scurvy resulting from a massive deficiency in vitamin C.
Study participants on the diabetes drug Actos also improved, but to a lesser degree and with a significant drawback: they gained 10 pounds on average, which remained even after they stopped taking the drug.
Liver expert Dr. Sammy Saab at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes vitamin E could potentially become the initial treatment for advanced cases of fatty liver disease.
Magnesium
Given the role of insulin resistance in Non alcoholic fatty liver disease and the incidence of obesity and type 2 diabetes in NASH, addressing the “first hit” of insulin resistance and triglyceride storage in hepatocytes is crucial.
Depletion of magnesium from normal cells creates cellular insulin resistance. Magnesium levels are related to insulin resistance in type 1 and 2 diabetics and in nondiabetics.
When a nondiabetic group of subjects were fed a low magnesium diet for four weeks, insulin sensitivity decreased by 25 percent. Magnesium supplementation in type 2 diabetics has also been shown to lead to a significant lowering of fructosamine levels, indicating an increase in insulin sensitivity.
There is evidence that magnesium may also act as an antioxidant: magnesium increases the rate of production of the free-radical quenching enzyme superoxide dismutase, while magnesium depletion appears to increase cellular sensitivity to oxidative damage and the production of oxygen radicals in cell studies. There are no studies in NASH patients looking at either magnesium levels or magnesium supplementation on liver enzyme levels or liver histology. There is sufficient evidence though, that reducing insulin resistance in both diabetics and nondiabetics with both fatty liver and NASH improves steatosis. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that maintenance of healthy magnesium levels through supplementation will be beneficial.
Betaine
Betaine, along with choline, methionine, vitamin B12, and inositol, were first known for their ability to protect against the development of fatty liver in animals as early as 1954. Choline, the precursor to betaine, was considered the first known hepatoprotective nutrient soon after its discovery in 1932 when it was recognized that a choline deficiency induced almost immediate pathological changes in hepatic cells in animals.
To assess whether oral betaine would raise SAMe levels and decrease hepatic steatosis, seven patients with biopsy-proven NASH were given 10 grams of anhydrous betaine solution twice daily for 12 months. By the end of the trial significant decreases in ALT and AST occurred; normalization in three patients, decreases greater than 50 percent in three others, with one remaining unchanged.
Betaine plays a critical role in one of three pathways that allow for the recycling of methionine in the liver and regeneration of SAMe from homocysteine.
For more information about life extension supplements which could be beneficial to your liver, visit Antiagingshoppe.
How do I know if I have fatty liver?
• You will probably be overweight, especially in the abdominal area
• You will find it very hard to lose weight
• You may have elevated cholesterol and triglycerides in your blood
• You may have Syndrome X
• You may have diabetes type 2
• You will be very tired
• You may have problems with your immune system
What are the consequences of fatty liver?
A healthy liver regulates your body’s fat metabolism and is the major fat-burning organ in your body. In fact a healthy liver not only burns fat, it can actually pump excess fat out of your body through the bile into the gut. So, if your liver is healthy you will not have much difficulty in controlling your weight. On the other hand, a liver which is fatty is doing the opposite of what it should be doing. A fatty liver is storing fat when it should be burning fat and removing the excess from your body. A fatty liver actually becomes a warehouse for fat and if this is allowed to progress over many years, your liver may finally become just a “bag of fat”. This can have dire consequences for your health and longevity.
How common is fatty liver disease?
In the USA the incidence of fatty liver is between 15 and 20% of the general population. The disease usually develops in people who are middle-aged and overweight or obese. Up to five per cent of Americans have the most serious form of it. The incidence rate is much higher in obese individuals. Fatty liver is the most common cause of abnormal liver function tests in the United States. Fatty liver disease can also occur in children.
What other things should I do to reverse a fatty liver?
Conventional or orthodox medicine has no specific therapies or drug treatments to reverse fatty liver disease. In fact many drugs such as cholesterol lowering drugs can exert toxic effects on the cells in the liver.
An article in the journal Medicine Today recommends a gradual reduction in weight, which has been shown to improve liver function and reverse liver damage. However, the authors were careful to warn against very rapid weight loss from fad diets or radical surgery, which may actually have a negative impact upon the progression of liver injury. The good news is that gradual weight reduction, with as little as a 5 to 10% loss of initial body weight over 6 months is recommended.
So, fatty liver can be reversed but this can take some time – years in some cases. If you are overweight & find it very difficult to lose the excess weight, this may actually be a consequence of fatty liver disease. It is also important to look at all the factors relevant to your present weight & state of health.
Apart from diet and nutritional deficiencies, the most important factors are –
• Insulin resistance or Syndrome X
• Fatty Liver disease. The liver contains an excessive amount of fat and the normal healthy liver tissue is partly replaced with areas of unhealthy fats.
• Toxicity
How is Toxicity affecting my liver?
You may have a build-up of fat-soluble toxins (such as insecticides & pesticides), drug metabolites or waste products of metabolism in your fatty tissues and liver. This slows down the metabolism of the fatty parts of your body & also over-burdens your liver. This means that the liver burns fat less efficiently. Gentle and regular detoxification is very helpful when trying to lose weight. Drinking plenty of water, raw vegetable juices and liver detoxification formulas will help the detoxification process.
How long will it take to see results?
The liver has become a fat storage organ rather than a fat burning organ – so this situation must be reversed before actual weight loss can occur. Obviously this will depend on the extent of the fatty liver as to how long this will take. Also be prepared for the fact that you will more than likely hit a ‘plateau’ – where weight loss will stop or slow right down – this may go on for weeks or a month or two. Don’t be discouraged at this time – the fat loss is occurring – but is happening within your liver so you may not see any visible fat loss from the body – s stick with it! You must be diligent and patient – the symptoms you are experiencing have taken years to develop and you cannot reverse them with a couple of weeks of “dieting
  
A US-based study on Monday linked eating white rice to higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, and backed long-held claims that brown rice is healthier than the white variety.
People who ate at least five servings of white rice per week had a 17 percent greater risk of developing diabetes than those who consumed less than one serving per month, Harvard School of Public Health scientists found.
Examining data from over 197,000 adults for up to 22 years, the study also found that consuming two or more servings of brown rice per week was associated with an 11 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes than those who ate less than one serving a month.
Patients with diabetes have high blood sugar levels, which are linked to the body’s inability to produce enough insulin in order to properly break down sugars and starches into glucose for energy.
“We believe replacing white rice and other refined grains with whole grains, including brown rice, would help lower the risk of type 2 diabetes,” said lead author Qi Sun, of Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
While still lower than in Asian countries, US rice consumption is increasingly rapidly. More than 70 percent of the rice consumed in the United States is white, the researchers noted.
According to the researchers, replacing just a third of a typical daily serving of white rice with the same amount of brown rice each day would lower the risk of type 2 diabetes by 16 percent.
They also found that replacing white rice with other whole grains, such as barley and whole wheat, could reduce risk of the disease by 36 percent.
“From a public health point of view, whole grains, rather than refined carbohydrates, such as white rice, should be recommended as the primary source of carbohydrates for the US population,” said senior author Frank Hu.
“These findings could have even greater implications for Asian and other populations in which rice is a staple food.”
Rice loses most of its bran and germ — its most important sources of fiber and nutrients — when it is refined to produce the white variety.
Brown rice, which retains the bran and germ, has more fiber, minerals, vitamins and phytochemicals than white rice. It also usually does not cause blood sugar levels to spike as much as the white variety.
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 An article published online on June 2, 2010 in FASEB Journal reports the discovery of Temple University researchers of the benefit of a low methionine diet in slowing or reversing early to moderate stage Alzheimer’s disease in an animal model. Methionine is an essential amino acid that occurs in relatively high amounts in red meat, fish, eggs and other foods. A byproduct of methionine metabolism is homocysteine, another amino acid that has been linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease as well as cardiovascular disease when elevated.
Acting on previous findings of an association between a methionine-rich, homocysteine-elevating diet and an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease in a mouse model, Domenico Pratic? and postdoctoral student Jia-Min Zhuo sought to determine the effects of lowering homocysteine in the same strain of transgenic mice. In the current study, the animals were divided to receive a high methionine diet or a healthy (control) diet for 5 months, following which the group receiving the methionine-rich diet was subdivided to receive either the same regimen or the healthy diet for two months. “The question we asked now as a follow-up is if, for whatever reason, you had made bad choices in your diet, is there a chance you can slow down or even reverse the disease or is it too late — that there is nothing you could do,” Dr Pratic? explained.
Mice on the methionine-rich diet had higher homocysteine levels and significant behavioral impairments at 5 months compared to the control group. While those that remained on the high methionine diet continued to show elevations in homocysteine, those that were switched to the healthy diet experienced reductions in homocysteine to levels similar to those of the control group as well as improvements in fear-conditioning performance and a decrease in brain amyloid levels, which are elevated in Alzheimer’s disease.
“At the end of the study, when we looked at these mice, what we found — very surprisingly — was that switching to a more healthy diet reversed the cognitive impairment that had built up over the first three months of eating the methionine-rich diet,” Dr Praticò reported. “This improvement was associated with less amyloid plaques — another sign of the disease — in their brains.”
“We believe this finding shows that, even if you suffer from the early effects of mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s, switching to a healthier diet that is lower in methionine could be helpful in that memory capacity could be improved,” he added. “What it tells us is that the brain has this plasticity to reverse a lot of the bad things that have occurred; the ability to recoup a lot of things such as memory that were apparently lost, but obviously not totally lost.”
“This combination won’t cure you, but we believe, as we saw in this study, that it will be able to slow down or even possibly reverse the effects on the cognitive impairment,” he said.
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Eating pecans daily may delay age-related muscle nerve degeneration, U.S. researchers suggest.
Lead researcher Thomas Shea of the Center for Cellular Neurobiology at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell carried out a number of laboratory studies on three groups of mice especially bred to demonstrate a decline in motor neuron function.
The researchers found mice fed a diet supplemented with ground pecans had a significant delay in decline in motor function compared to mice receiving no pecans. Mice eating the diet with the most pecans — 0.05 percent — fared best.
Results were based on how the mice on the control diet vs. those on the pecan-enriched diet performed in specific tests.
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Brenda Denzler, a Chatham County, N.C., woman diagnosed last summer with breast cancer, does not know what caused her illness, but recent findings suggest a link between her form of cancer and a virus. She and a growing cadre of scientists are agitating for more research funds to explore whether there is a viral trigger for at least some cases of the disease.
“We have a Race for the Cure,” Denzler said, “and I’d like a race for the cause.”
Recent studies have yielded compelling connections between the human mammary tumor virus and breast cancer, particularly the aggressive form Denzler has called inflammatory breast cancer, which often presents without a lump.
In a study published last month in the online edition of the journal Cancer, researchers report that 40 percent of breast cancers they tested showed evidence of the virus, and 70 percent of inflammatory breast cancers had it.
Dr. Kathleen T. Ruddy, a breast cancer surgeon in Belleville, N.J., said such findings ought to inspire an all-out drive down that avenue of inquiry, but scientists face a conundrum: They can’t get research dollars until a more direct link is discovered, and a more direct link can’t be discovered without money for research.
To date, Ruddy said, less than $1 million has been allocated for breast cancer virus studies from the National Institutes of Health. Other big funders such as the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have also kept funding low.
Undaunted, Ruddy has launched an unorthodox campaign that includes social media to raise awareness, interest and money . She started a non-profit called the Breast Health & Healing Foundation, self-published a book, organized a conference, developed an iPhone application, created a YouTube video, began a Web page, a blog and a Twitter account.
“My job, as I see it, is to try and raise awareness as much as possible and create … a critical funding tipping point to find the money and get it to researchers,” she said.
“Once we’ve got the proof _ and I don’t think we’re that far away _ the whole world of breast cancer could change overnight,” Ruddy said. “We would be able to develop a targeted therapy to treat that form of disease, test women to find out whose was caused by the virus and whose wasn’t, and maybe test women who have been exposed to the virus but haven’t gotten the disease yet.”
Ruddy, while acknowledging her theory is outside the scientific mainstream, noted that similar theories linking viruses and cancers were proven true, often after years of skepticism. The human papilloma virus is now known to cause cervical cancer, and a vaccine has been developed to thwart the spread. Epstein-Barr virus is linked to a form of lymphoma, and other viruses can lead to liver cancer and leukemia.
“This is not just me with an idea,” Ruddy said, noting that the science is further along in Australia and Europe. “There’s a body of published research and esteemed researchers who have asked a question, does this virus cause breast cancer? Am I on the periphery? Yes. But we are penetrating the mainstream.”
Dr. Kelly Marcom, who studies breast cancer and genetics at Duke University Medical Center, said the notion of a breast cancer virus is gaining credence and should be examined more closely.
He said the scientific view of viral cancers has oscillated from enthusiasm several decades ago, to serious doubts in the more recent past, to a growing curiosity at present.
“It’s a tough thing to prove,” Marcom said. “But there are a lot of potential causes of breast cancer. Sometimes a cancer looks the same, but maybe some could be caused by viruses and others not by viruses.”
Marcom said modern tools are helping researchers detect the differences among cancers, particularly as geneticists explore the molecular origins of tumors. That kind of genetic focus could help prove or disprove a viral connection.
He agrees that more research is warranted.
“We need a better understanding of the mechanism of how it might cause cancer and more epidemiology on tumor samples,” Marcom said. “We need to pursue every option.”
Denzler, 56, said she is eager for research sooner than later. Her cancer is in remission after an onslaught of chemotherapy, surgery and radiation. But long-term prognosis is dim _ at best, the five-year survival rate for inflammatory breast cancer is 50 percent.
Inflammatory breast cancer, which accounts for up to 5 percent of all breast cancers, is almost never detected until the late stages, when the breast appears inflamed as the tumor invades the lymph vessels in the skin. Unlike many breast cancers that form a lump, inflammatory breast cancer grows more like an algae bloom throughout the breast tissue.
“I want to find out what caused my cancer and spare others,” Denzler said. “If we find out it’s caused by a virus, and we can develop a vaccine for this and prevent women from going through this, why would we not want to do that? It’s seems like a promising field of research.”
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Folic acid, the vitamin linked to the prevention of birth defects, may also prevent and help treat depression.
In two trials, around 1,000 people are being given a daily dose of folic acid, the synthetic form of the vitamin folate.
In one new trial, at the University of Oxford, researchers are looking at whether it can prevent new episodes of depression in young people.
In the second trial, at Bangor University, North Wales, researchers are treating adults with moderate to severe depression.
Research shows that up to a third of people with depression have low levels of folate. Studies have also shown that the greater the folate deficiency, the more severe the depression symptoms.
People with low levels also have a poorer response to antidepressants.
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