Experts Watching Bird Flu Carefully in Case It Takes Off
May 14, 2024 by admin
Filed under treatments
May 14, 2024 – So far, the unexpected jump of bird flu to cattle has not emerged as a new human flu pandemic. Yes, a dairy worker got pink eye this year after being infected, but a larger threat to all of us has not yet materialized.
That doesn’t mean experts are not keeping a close eye on the situation.
“The current risks to the public of this infection is very low,” said Maximo Brito, MD, MPH, a professor of medicine at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago. “The CDC is conducting surveillance for unusual flu activity in doctor’s offices and emergency rooms. No significant problems have been detected thus far.”
“Just don’t kiss or hug the animals,” recommended Tina Tan, MD, who agreed the risk to U.S. population from bird flu remains low at this point. Tan is a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, also in Chicago. Both infectious disease experts spoke during a news briefing sponsored by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA).
Infected cows have been reported at 36 farms in nine U.S. states. The federal government is requiring that cows test negative for bird flu, also known as avian flu, before crossing state lines. But the feds do not have jurisdiction within states. Instead, they are making recommendations to help state leaders, agriculture officials, and others contain the outbreak, and paying affected farmers who suffered losses in recent months.
The H5N1 virus behind bird flu has been circulating in cows since December 2023. The virus passing from wild birds to cattle was a surprise, said Brito, who is also an IDSA fellow.
How Safe Are Milk, Eggs, and Beef?
The FDA tested retail milk and found parts of the virus in some samples. Further tests confirmed that pasteurization, the heating procedure that most milk goes through before sale to the public, deactivates the virus.
“Thus, the FDA thinks that the U.S milk supply is currently safe,” Brito said at the briefing on May 9.
At the same time, drinking raw or unpasteurized milk is risker. “It is very important … to alert the public to refrain from drinking unpasteurized or raw milk, that is milk straight from the cow without processing,” he said. “There are other diseases, not only influenza, that could be transmitted by drinking unpasteurized milk.”
Do not touch surfaces that may be contaminated with raw milk, or with the saliva, mucus, or feces of any potentially infected animals, officials warn.
In areas where there is bird flu or birds that are sick, cook poultry and eggs to an internal temperature of 165 F. Don’t eat raw eggs. Also, cooking beef to the appropriate temperature prevents transmission of infection.
“To date, the virus has not been found in beef,” Brito said.
OK for Now?
The H5N1 virus could evolve an ability to move to humans more easily, “but that’s all speculative right now,” Brito said. The virus variant that is circulating among cattle is not an efficient cause of disease in humans. But there can be genetic shifts in these viruses, which has happened before. There may be added concern if H5N1 passes to pigs, he said, because their viral receptors are closer to those in humans.
If the virus does jump to people, children may be at higher risk. “As you know, kids are very different from adults in that they’re much more likely to hug and kiss an animal,” said Tan, who is also president-elect of the IDSA.
There are elementary schools that have chickens and ducks as school pets. Some families have chickens as pets. “Kids also drink a lot of milk, including some kids that drink unpasteurized raw milk,” she said.
The Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, where Tan works, is ready if H5N1 starts to cause significant infections in children. “We’re going to treat it very much like pandemic influenza. We have protocols in place for pandemic influenza and for COVID, which can be adjusted toward H5N1 if that were to become a real problem.”
Brito added, “We haven’t implemented any specific emergency protocols, but we are always monitoring what’s happening on the ground.”
How Ultraprocessed Foods Are Slowly Killing Us
May 14, 2024 by admin
Filed under treatments
Consumption of ultraprocessed foods in the U.S. grew from 53.5% of the total calories consumed between 2001 to 2002 to 57% of the total calories consumed between 2017 to 2018.1
During a lecture at the Royal Institution in October 2023,2 Dr. Chris van Tulleken from the University College London cited 60% of the total calories in Great Britain are consumed from ultraprocessed foods and 1-in-5 people consume 80% of their calories from ultraprocessed food.
A 2024 systematic review of the literature3 confirmed what multiple past studies have also shown — the higher your intake of ultraprocessed food, the higher your risk of adverse health outcomes. Many of these adverse health events are closely linked to obesity and van Tulleken finds strong associations between consuming ultraprocessed food and obesity.
During his lecture,4 he presented a slide illustrating the meteoric rise in obesity that began in the mid-1970s, calling the situation “pandemic obesity.” At the time, childhood obesity was a mere 2% but now it’s more than 20%.
Data Confirms Ultraprocessed Food Is Killing Us
To fully understand how ultraprocessed food is altering human health, it is crucial to understand what it is. The concept of ultraprocessed food didn’t become part of nutritional conversations until the NOVA system was first proposed in 2009 by Carlos Monteiro. Researchers now use this system to classify types of foods used in interventional studies.
Van Tulleken notes that the category definitions are long and involved, so he simplified ultraprocessed food as: “Wrapped in plastic with at least one ingredient you wouldn’t normally find in a standard home kitchen.”5 However, while van Tulleken notes that ultraprocessed food does drive excess consumption and weight gain, it doesn’t just cause obesity.6
There is also a strong association with a long list of other diseases such as cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, mood disorders, frailty and other “complaints that we all just think are part of growing old.”
The 2024 analysis7 included 45 unique pooled analyses and 9,888,373 participants. There was a direct association between 32 health parameters and exposure to ultraprocessed food. These health outcomes included metabolic, cancer, mental, respiratory, heart, gastrointestinal and all-cause mortality.
According to this study and others, this increasing exposure is contributing to rising rates of chronic disease and illness in the population. In other words, eating ultraprocessed foods is slowly killing us and, we really are what we eat.
Humans Have Always Processed Food
Van Tulleken notes that processed foods are not the same as ultraprocessed foods because processing is ancient.8 He calls humans the “only obligate processivores,” or mammals that must process their food before eating. Compared to other mammals of similar size and weight, humans have much smaller jaws and teeth with shorter digestive tracts.
The kitchen became our extended gastrointestinal system where knives and grinders are used to cut and chop food and cooking is used to process, mash and extract to make food more easily digestible.
“For hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve been grinding it and mashing it and extracting it and salting it and curing it and fermenting it and smoking it and doing all of these wonderful things that make diets edible and delicious,” van Tulleken said.
A 2022 paper9 noted that a food product is not simply the sum of the nutrients and that “Human diets are progressively incorporating larger quantities of industrially processed foods.” Throughout his lecture, van Tulleken agreed. In the early 2000s when Carlos Montero proposed the NOVA system, he also proposed that food is more than the sum of its parts and that how we process food matters to how our body processes food.10
What We Do to Food Matters
As an example of why processing is important, van Tulleken recounted an experiment done in the 1970s by a group of scientists in Bristol. The group used apples. They left some unprocessed, some chopped into chunks, some pureed and some were squashed with the fiber out. The processing was done immediately before the participants consumed them and what they found was revealing.11
“If you eat a whole apple, it leaves you feeling fuller for longer, it doesn’t spike your blood sugar, and you don’t get a sort of rebound hypoglycemia. If you drink the apple juice, you get a big spike of blood sugar, you don’t feel full at all. Now, when you back-add the fiber, so it’s whole pureed apple, you still get that sugar spike, and you still don’t feel satisfied.
So even when we have a pureed whole apple, it’s very, very different to eating the whole apple, to dismantling the apple with your teeth. Eating, the act of chewing, of manipulating food with your tongue, causes all sorts of internal physiological changes that are really, really important. So we do need to process food with our mouths.”
In 2016, Kevin Hall, a scientist and nutrition researcher with the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, was at a conference with a representative from PepsiCo.12 They discussed the recent NOVA classifications and Brazil’s food guidelines to avoid ultraprocessed foods. Hall believed it was a silly rule because obesity had nothing to do with food processing.
He was attracted to the idea that food is the sum of its nutrient parts. Yet, there was damning evidence in the scientific literature that appeared to be correlative rather than causative. He believed that ultraprocessed foods were being wrongly blamed and so at the end of 2018 he and his colleagues were the first to test whether diet could cause overeating and weight gain.
In a randomized controlled, crossover study,13 participants ate either an unlimited amount of ultraprocessed food or an unprocessed diet matched for equal amounts of salt, fat, sugar and fiber for two weeks. The researchers found that while on the ultraprocessed food, the participants gained roughly 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) and lost the same amount on the unprocessed diet.
Van Tulleken was also curious about how ultraprocessed foods affect the body. So, over one month, the 42-year-old increased his daily intake from 30% of ultraprocessed products to 80%, which mimicked how 20% of the U.K. population eats. By the end of four weeks, van Tulleken experienced a myriad of changes, including:14
|
Poor sleep |
Heartburn |
|
Anxiety |
Sluggishness |
|
Low libido |
Unhappy feelings |
|
Hemorrhoids (from constipation) |
Weight gain of 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds) |
“I felt 10 years older, but I didn’t realize it was all [because of] the food until I stopped eating the diet,” van Tulleken told the BBC.15 This is significant since the physician recognized that he had purposely changed his diet, and yet he did not recognize that feeling 10 years older after only four weeks was associated with the food he was eating.
Your Brain Predicts Nutrition From Taste
Van Tulleken makes the point that “The brain is a prediction engine. It’s constantly making predictions about the world. And when you get a mismatch between a prediction … there may be a stress response.”16
In his first example, he uses artificial sweeteners and Diet Coke. He notes that these artificial sweeteners are not linked to weight loss and the phosphoric acid in the beverage doesn’t just dissolve teeth, it also reduces bone density. He frames it as a way of “commodifying ill health.”
Looking at the labels on ultraprocessed foods, he noticed a theme.17 Each begins with four commodity crops — rice, corn, soy and wheat. The crops are broken down into powder, so they have “a nearly infinite shelf life and cost very, very little.” These are then mixed with commodity oils such as vegetable, sunflower and palm oils. These can be mixed with a little meat if needed and then the additives are included.18
“In the UK and in Europe we have around two and a half thousand additives that we use in food, and they’re somewhat regulated. In the United States, there are between 5,000 and 15,000 additives. No one has a list. The FDA who regulate, or are supposed to regulate additives, don’t have a list of all the additives that are added to food.”
Finally, whey powder, which was once a waste product of the dairy industry, and sugars may be added. Many of these ultraprocessed foods are being sold as healthy. The rating Diet Coke receives is an interesting example, which “gets four green traffic lights on the bottle. So, this isn’t just a health food. This is the healthiest product you can possibly buy. Very few foods get four green traffic lights.”19
As van Tulleken notes, the body has evolved a sophisticated system for understanding what food does. This may have been the basis for manufacturers developing the “bliss point,” or the point where salt, sweetness and richness were perceived as being just right on the tongue.20 When you taste sweetness, it prepares the body for sugar and carbohydrates.
The initial theory was that the taste released insulin, which dropped blood glucose and made you hungry. Van Tulleken notes that more recent research has demonstrated that artificial sweeteners increase blood glucose, which may be part of a stress response when the body predicts sugar and doesn’t receive it.21
And the same may be happening with fat. In the 1980s when fat was demonized, food manufacturers began producing low-fat products. The food manufacturers also created the sensation of fatty textures but without real fat. Van Tulleken notes that your mouth isn’t tasting for fun, it’s an early warning system.
So bitter taste identifies toxins and sweetness tells your body that sugar is on its way. If your mouth detects fat in food that doesn’t have fat or savory tastes without protein, he and others believe this is one factor that drives excess consumption. The flavor tells your body a nutrient is coming, but it never arrives. This throws off the homeostatic mechanisms built into mammals.22
“And remember, we do all have an internal mechanism that is able to say ‘I am full.’ There is no obesity in wild animals, and that is not to do with scarcity of food. Many animals live with very plentiful food, but they have homeostatic mechanisms …
We all have a way of keeping all of our internal physiology the same. Our temperature, our blood pressure, our oxygen levels, our carbon dioxide levels, our blood pH, our sodium, our potassium, we regulate it all tightly. It would be bizarre if we didn’t do the same for calorie intake, and we can if we eat real food.”
Debunking Food Manufacturers Reasons for Obesity
As the manufactured food industry became a primary driver of obesity and ill health, they also began proposing reasons that people were obese that had nothing to do with the ingredients in the manufactured products. However, as van Tulleken notes throughout his lecture to The Royal Institution, these reasons have since been debunked.
• Calories in, calories out — The theory is that if you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. Van Tulleken notes that the phrase “exercise is medicine” was trademarked by the Coca-Cola Company and developed in partnership with the American College of Sports Medicine.23
However, through study of different populations, researcher Herman Pontzer24 found the benefits people spend roughly the same number of calories no matter the activity level. The difference is in where the calories are expended. In people in Western society, calories are spent on inflammation, anxiety, and toxic hormone levels. The benefits of exercise appear to be dampening those factors, which explains why you cannot out exercise a bad diet.
• Willpower — The second reason trotted out to explain obesity is a lack of willpower,25 which has been used as a proxy for poverty.26
During the lecture, in addition to other evidence to debunk the theory, van Tulleken points listeners back to the graph presented at the start of lecture demonstrating the meteoric rise in obesity at nearly the same point that ultraproccessed foods became popular, noting that “unless you propose that simultaneously there was some failure of moral responsibility in all those different communities, the willpower argument doesn’t stack up.”
The Most Destructive Ingredient in Ultraprocessed Food
While ultraprocessed foods contain a wide variety of harmful ingredients, including synthetic and/or genetically engineered compounds and contaminants like pesticides, one of the most harmful ingredients found in most processed and ultraprocessed foods is the omega-6 fat linoleic acid (LA), thanks to the liberal use of seed oils in the making of these products.
One significant problem with polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) like LA is that they are chemically unstable, which makes them highly susceptible to being damaged by oxygen species generated from the energy production in your cells.
This damage causes them to form advanced lipoxidation end-products (ALEs), which in turn generate dangerous free radicals that damage your cell membranes, mitochondria, proteins and DNA. LA also breaks down into harmful metabolites such as oxidized LA metabolites (OXLAMs), which have a profoundly negative impact on your health. These ALEs and OXLAMs then go on to cause mitochondrial dysfunction, which is a hallmark of most all chronic disease.
The video above reviews the health risks associated with vegetable oils and seed oils, which are found in most processed foods. It shows how chronic diseases such as heart disease began to skyrocket after the introduction of these oils to the market.
Seed Oils Are Far Worse Than Sugar
While most nutritional experts blame the epidemic of chronic disease on the increase in sugar consumption, the role of sugar is relatively minor when compared to the impact of seed oils.
Processed foods typically contain about 21% sugar. However, up to 50% or more of the overall calories contained in most processed foods come from seed oils.27,28 The connection is further confirmed by looking at the U.S. carb consumption. It’s been declining since 1997, yet obesity and Type 2 diabetes have steadily increased. Interestingly, this continued rise coincides with the surge of seed oil consumption.
Another major reason why seed oils are exponentially more pernicious to your health than sugar is that they last much longer in your body. The half-life of LA is around 600 to 680 days, or approximately two years. This means it will take you about six years to replace 95% of the LA in your body with healthy fats. This is the primary reason for keeping your LA intake low as possible.
Meanwhile, your glycogen stores will be exhausted in about one to two days. So, if you go on a sugar binge, that sugar doesn’t stick around for years destroying your health like the LA in seed oils does. Seed oils also play a far greater role in obesity than sugar.
Obesity Is a State of Energy Deficiency
It’s important to understand that obesity is a state of energy deficiency due to inhibited mitochondrial respiration, which causes calories to be stored as fat instead of being burned for fuel. The solution is to optimize your mitochondrial function and raise your metabolic rate.
This inefficient burning of fuel (metabolizing of food) is why people who are obese typically also struggle with other health issues, such as low energy, fatigue, an inability to maintain focus, digestive problems and poor immune function.
It is important to note there is a difference between energy and fuel. Your body uses food for fuel to create energy, which it uses in bodily functions, including muscle contraction, digestion, and cognitive function. An important misconception about weight gain is that you are converting your fuel from food into energy, which is adenosine triphosphate (ATP).
Without activity to burn the energy, your body converts ATP into body fat. In other words, you’re not producing enough energy and you’re in an energy-deficient state, but you have enough fuel. The fuel is stored because your body cannot efficiently metabolize it.
The result is body fat and insufficient energy which forces your body to down-regulate other systems, such as reproductive hormones, thyroid activity, and systems that are not essential for survival. Unfortunately, you also experience perpetual hunger because the hunger signal is predominantly regulated by energy availability.
This in turn leads to overeating, resulting in a vicious cycle of low energy and weight gain. The goal is to fix your metabolism or low energy production. Several strategies can help. You’ll find a deeper discussion about this vicious cycle, several suggestions to fix it and links to more help in “Obesity Study: ‘Fat but Fit’ Is a Myth.”
Chronic Pain Due to Mitochondrial Dysfunction, Niacinamide Can Treat It
May 14, 2024 by admin
Filed under treatments
About 21% of U.S. adults suffer from chronic pain, with new cases occurring more often than new cases of other common conditions like diabetes, depression and high blood pressure.1 Pain is considered chronic if it occurs every day or most days over a period of three months or more.
For about 8%, the chronic pain is considered high-impact,2 meaning it limits life or work activities, demonstrating the heavy burden this condition places on those affected. Many reach for dangerous opioid drugs for relief, which suppress mitochondria3 — the last thing you want if you’re struggling with chronic pain.
Chronic Pain Is a Symptom of Mitochondrial Dysfunction
Researchers with Utrecht University in the Netherlands revealed that nicotinamide riboside (NR) — a form of vitamin B3 and precursor to nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), a molecule involved in DNA repair and healthy aging — helps relieve chronic pain in mice4 by improving mitochondrial function.
“Previous research has linked chronic pain to dysfunctional mitochondria, particularly those in specialized nerve cells, called sensory neurons, which detect changes in the environment,” New Scientist reported.5
For the study, an inflammatory substance was injected into the paws of 15 mice, which led to changes in mitochondrial function, even a week later after the inflammation had resolved. The mitochondrial changes were associated with greater pain in the mice, which also had lower levels of NR in the mitochondria of their sensory neurons compared to mice that didn’t experience inflammation.6
NR plays an important role in mitochondrial function, so researchers gave the mice a high dose, which alleviated pain.
“Together these findings indicate two things: first, that inflammation can impair mitochondrial function in sensory neurons and that these impairments increase the risk of chronic pain, even after inflammation has resolved. Second, that taking nicotinamide riboside supplements may help treat this chronic pain by restoring mitochondrial function,” according to New Scientist.7
The study may help shed some light on why some people continue to experience pain even after inflammation has healed, which remains a largely unanswered question. The researchers noticed that even after the initial pain from inflammation goes away, the nerve cells involved in sensing pain still show changes in their mitochondria that disrupt the balance of certain chemicals in the cells.
However, adding the NAD+ precursor NR helped mice recover from pain, even when it was chronic. This suggests that managing mitochondria function in these nerve cells is crucial for overcoming persistent pain after inflammation.
Vitamin B3 for Chronic Pain
As noted in the blog To Extract Knowledge From Matter, which is inspired by the work of the late Ray Peat, niacinamide, another form of vitamin B3 involved in similar cellular processes as NR, may be useful for relieving chronic pain:8
“The study … is one of the first to demonstrate that chronic pain is not an organic disorder of its own, but a symptom of an underlying mitochondrial dysfunction. This not only explain why the intervention with niacinamide worked in alleviating the pain (by improving mitochondrial function), but also why treating chronic pain with opioids is about the worst intervention one could choose.
Why? Because opioids are among the most potent suppressors of mitochondria, which means that as soon as one stops taking them the chronic pain will be much worse, leading to more opioid use and so on — a vicious cycle with usually lethal outcome (overdose).”
In fact, one study found that people who use opioids tend to have fewer mitochondria in their blood. Further, being exposed to the synthetic opioid fentanyl before birth was found to change the number of mitochondria in the blood and the activity of genes related to mitochondria in the nucleus accumbens, a brain area important for feeling pleasure, in young offspring.9
To Extract Knowledge From Matter continued explaining why the featured study’s use of vitamin B3 is superior to opioids for chronic pain:10
“The niacinamide dose used in this study was on the high-side (HED [human equivalent dose] ~35mg/kg daily), but considering it was administrated only once and the pain was completely resolved, it is a low-risk intervention in such doses for humans, especially compared to opioids.
Also, there are prior animal studies showing that lower doses (HED 3mg/kg daily) taken for a few weeks can also relieve chronic pain, which lowers the risk of such intervention even more.”
Your Mitochondria Need Niacinamide
Niacinamide, also known as nicotinamide, is a form of niacin (vitamin B3) that plays a vital role in energy metabolism. It’s essential for the mitochondrial electron transport chain to function. Without it, your mitochondria cannot make energy.
Niacinamide is so important because it is a precursor for NAD+, which is involved in the conversion of food to energy, maintaining DNA integrity and ensuring proper cell function. NAD+ is also a primary fuel for sirtuins, longevity proteins that become depleted with age.
Niacinamide at a dose of 50 milligrams (mg) three times per day will provide the fuel for the rate limiting enzyme for NAD+, NAMPT. Niacinamide also has potent antiobesity effects, can help prevent neurodegeneration and heart failure, and reverse leaky gut.
Niacinamide may also help prevent neurodegeneration by allowing for higher energy levels through energy metabolism in the mitochondria. “There are many studies, going back decades, demonstrating that a drop in NAD+ levels, and thus of NAD/NADH, is a common feature of virtually all neurodegenerative diseases,” writes Peat’s student Georgi Dinkov, a bioenergetic researcher.11
I recommend getting niacinamide in powder form because the lowest available dose in most supplements is 500 mg, and that will decrease NAD+ due to negative feedback on NAMPT, which is the opposite of what you’re looking for. Niacinamide will only cost you about 25 cents a month if you get it as a powder. Typically, 1/64 of a teaspoon of niacinamide powder is about 50 mg.
I also recommend taking one aspirin tablet daily. Aspirin plays a role in mitochondria function12 and also has other health benefits. Importantly, it helps increase the oxidation of glucose as fuel for your body while inhibiting the oxidation of fatty acids, specifically linoleic acid (LA). Dinkov adds:13
“Since aspirin is known to modulate autophagy (raise it when it is abnormally low and lower it when it is abnormally high) and niacinamide is a very effective NAD precursor, it is reasonable to try them in combination that should be synergistic when it comes to protecting the brain (and the entire organism) from diseases and even aging.”
Why Avoiding LA in Ultraprocessed Foods Is Important for Pain Relief
Lowering your LA is the single most important strategy you can take to not only lower reductive stress in your mitochondria but improve your overall health, including relief of chronic pain. LA is an omega-6 fat found in the vegetable oils and seed oils common in most ultraprocessed foods.
The main reason why excess LA causes disease is that it prevents your mitochondria from working well. Mitochondria produce most of your cellular energy in the form of ATP, and without ATP, your cells cannot function and repair themselves normally.
Polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) such as LA are easily damaged by oxygen in a process called oxidation,14 which triggers the creation of damaging free radicals.15 These, in turn, give rise to advanced lipoxidation end products (ALEs)16 and in the case of omega-6 fats, oxidized LA metabolites (OXLAMs).17,18
These ALEs and OXLAMs then go on to cause mitochondrial dysfunction, which is a hallmark of most chronic disease. In addition to oxidation, inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction, processed seed oils can also inhibit cardiolipin, an important fat in the inner membrane of your mitochondria.
Cardiolipin is important because it influences the structure of the cristae inside your mitochondria, which is the area where energy production occurs. If cardiolipin is damaged, then the complexes will not be close enough together to form supercomplexes, and thus the mitochondrial energy production will be impaired.
Cardiolipin also works like a cellular alarm system that triggers apoptosis (cell death) by signaling caspase-3 when something goes wrong with the cell. If the cardiolipin is damaged from oxidative stress due to having too much LA, it cannot signal caspase-3, which means apoptosis does not occur.
As a result, dysfunctional cells are allowed to continue to grow, which can turn into a cancerous cell. The type of dietary fat that promotes healthy cardiolipin is omega-3 fat, and the type that destroys it is omega-6, especially LA.
The good news is that dietary changes can improve the composition of fats in your cardiolipin in a matter of weeks, or even days. So, even though it will take years to lower your total body burden of LA, you will likely notice improvements well before then.
How to Optimize Your Mitochondrial Function
To optimize your mitochondrial function, you want to avoid LA as much as possible and increase your intake of omega-3s. Primary sources of LA include seed oils used in cooking, ultraprocessed foods and restaurant foods made with seed oils, condiments, seeds and nuts, most olive oils and avocado oils (due to the high prevalence of adulteration with cheaper seed oils).
Animal foods raised on grains, such as conventional chicken and pork, are also high in LA. Another major culprit that destroys mitochondrial function is excess iron — and almost everyone has too much iron. You can learn more about the health risks of excess iron in my interview with Christy Sutton, D.C. The most effective way to lower your iron is to donate blood two to four times a year.
As mentioned, I also recommend taking 50 mg of niacinamide three times per day. It’s also helpful to make sure you’re getting all the other B vitamins, as they too are crucial for mitochondrial function, especially regular niacin, riboflavin and folate.
Oftentimes, decreased mitochondrial function is due to a deficiency in B vitamins, and that’s easy to fix with a low-dose, high-quality B complex. Usually, when this is the case, improvement can be seen — and felt — within two to three weeks.
Diverse Agriculture Benefits People and the Environment at the Same Time
May 14, 2024 by admin
Filed under treatments
Industrialized farming is characterized by monoculture, or growing one type of crop over a large area, season after season. While said to be efficient and profitable, this oversimplification of farming systems comes with significant drawbacks that put human health and the environment at risk.
Diversification, on the other hand, may be the age-old “secret” to not only increase crop yields and improve food security but also protect the planet. “If you look at how ecosystems operate, it’s not just plants growing alone. It’s not just animals or soil. It’s all of these things working together,” Zia Mehrabi, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a news release.1
Mehrabi and colleagues conducted a study showing that diversified agriculture had “win-win outcomes” for both society and the environment.2 To put it simply, “Drop monoculture and industrial thinking and diversify the way you farm — it pays off,” said Laura Vang Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, the study’s lead author.3
Landmark Study Reveals Major Benefits of Diversified Agriculture
Using data from 24 studies in 11 countries, spanning 2,655 farms, the scientists revealed that five diversification strategies led to positive outcomes for people and the planet. This includes:
- Livestock inclusion and diversification
- Crop diversification, including crop rotation and cover crops
- Soil conservation and fertility management, such as compost application
- Noncrop plantings, including hedgerows
- Water conservation, such as contour farming
Contour farming, for instance, is an agricultural technique where crops are planted following the natural contours of the landscape rather than in straight lines. This method is particularly useful on sloped land, as it helps reduce soil erosion by slowing runoff water and allowing it to soak into the ground rather than washing soil away.
By planting along the contours, farmers can create natural barriers that trap water and reduce the velocity of water moving across the surface. Hedgerows, meanwhile, are lines of densely planted shrubs or trees that are commonly used as boundaries between different sections of land. They’ve been used for centuries in agriculture, particularly in Europe, to mark property lines, contain livestock and provide windbreaks to protect crops.
In addition to improving biodiversity in agricultural landscapes by providing a variety of plant species and supporting different types of wildlife, hedgerows help to reduce agricultural runoff, filter pollutants and improve water quality in nearby streams and rivers.
Use of Multiple Diversification Strategies Led to the Greatest Benefits
On farms using diversification strategies, social benefits, including human well-being, crop yields and food security, were noted, along with environmental gains, including improved biodiversity.4 The benefits were greatest when multiple diversification strategies were used at once, and applied to all different types of farms.
“The group discovered that farmers and ranchers can achieve many more benefits if they employ several agricultural solutions in tandem, rather than just one at a time,” the University of Colorado reported. “For Mehrabi, the study reveals a new vision for food around the globe — one in which farms and pastures work less like factories for churning out calories and more like healthy natural ecosystems.”5
What’s more, the study spanned agricultural operations across the globe, from small farms in rural Africa to plantation crops in Southeast Asia and large-scale farms in North America and Europe. “The crazy thing is that the positive effect of adding multiple diversification practices is true across wildly different contexts,” Mehrabi said. “It works on industrial farms in the U.S. and in small-scale maize farms in Malawi.”6
Half of the farms in the study, for instance, used some form of livestock integration, in which animals and crops are raised together within the same farming operation. Benefits include nutrient recycling, as animal waste provides a rich source of organic fertilizer for the crops, enhancing soil fertility without the need for chemical fertilizers.
Livestock integration also provides a natural form of weed and pest control. Sheep and goats, for instance, can graze on weeds, and the grazing has an added benefit of improving soil structure and aeration. The study revealed that livestock integration increases the amount of food the farm produces, reduces damage to soil and decreases environmental pollution. As the University of Colorado noted:7
“In many cases, Mehrabi said, more diverse farms can deliver extra benefits because they can better weather natural disasters like droughts or heat waves. In other cases, the positives are more subtle. If small-scale farmers grow fruit trees amid their crops, for example, they can eat those bananas or papayas themselves while selling the rest of the harvest.”
Green Revolution Ushered in Industrialized Agriculture With Negative Effects
The Green Revolution that occurred between the 1940s and 1960s is heralded with increasing agricultural production worldwide. But it was instrumental in the implementation of industrialized agriculture, including genetic engineering, monocrops and increased use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
Soil degradation, reduced soil fertility, pollution from chemical inputs and increased water use are all part of the Green Revolution’s legacy. According to the featured study:8
“Historically, the architects of the Green Revolution were primarily concerned with breeding crops and developing agronomic inputs to increase staple crop yields and respond to food security needs.
However, the focus of their policies on simplifying agricultural systems came with unintended large and negative environmental impacts such as pollution, as well as social side effects such as farmer indebtedness, reduction of peoples’ dietary diversity, and reduced resilience.
This has led to widespread calls for a change in agricultural development policy that addresses the negative side effects directly through the action of biologically diversified farming systems.”
The Corbett Report further explained why the so-called “Green” Revolution served to make oligarchs richer while threatening farmers and the environment:9
“It was John D. Rockefeller III who, when sitting on the Board of Trustees of the Ford Foundation, convinced his fellow oligarchs to join the ‘Green Revolution’ by founding the Intensive Agriculture District Programme in India, which exacerbated the disparity between rich feudal landowners and poor farming peasants.
And then of course there’s the Rockefeller’s work in Africa, which today takes the form of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. AGRA’s stated goal is to ‘elevate the single African voice’ on the world stage.
It all sounds nice and fuzzy until you learn that 200 organizations have come together to denounce the alliance and its activities. They claim that the group has not only ‘unequivocally failed in its mission’ but has actually ‘harmed broader efforts to support African farmers.'”
AGRA, an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,10 was launched in 2006 with funding from Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It’s essentially a Gates Foundation subsidiary and most of its goals are centered on promoting biotechnology and chemical fertilizers.
After more than a decade, AGRA’s influence has significantly worsened the situation in the 18 African nations targeted by this “philanthropic” endeavor. Hunger under AGRA’s direction increased by 30% and rural poverty rose dramatically.11 During our interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted:12
“He [Gates] got African countries to switch from traditional agriculture … to GMO monocultures, with this idea that this is part of globalization that will bring big corporations in who will buy your products, give you cash and lift everybody’s standard of living up. That was the promise. But exactly the opposite happened …
It’s been an absolute calamity for the people of Africa. I think there’s 30 million additional people who have become food insecure as a direct result of Gates’ Green Revolution, but Gates and his companies have made a killing … In each philanthropical effort he makes, there’s always, at the end of it, some moneymaking scheme for Gates and his foundation.”
Living in Concert With Nature Makes Biodiversity Thrive
Diversified agriculture depends on living in concert with nature and creating thriving, self-sustaining ecosystems. Some farmers have also learned how to harness the natural environmental benefits of wildlife around them — even beavers, which are often mistakenly viewed as pests.
Centuries ago, about 200 million beavers maintained a “lush Eden of interlocking streams, creeks, ponds, lakes and rivers,” according to author Roberta Staley in Modern Farmer.13 But as their animal pelts became prized for trading, their numbers dwindled — and so did their priceless gift to the environment.
Staley relates the story of Jon Griggs, manager of Maggie Creek Ranch in Elko, Nevada. The 200,000-acre ranch’s streams dried up after beavers were removed from the property for felling trees and blocking irrigation ditches. Then, Griggs partnered with the Bureau of Land Management and beavers were reintroduced, restoring balance to the ecosystem not only on the ranch but on surrounding public lands. Staley reported:14
“First, cattle’s access to creek beds during the spring and summer growing periods was restricted, allowing brush and grasses to regrow. As a result, creeks began widening, cooling and deepening. Willows took root, creating an ecosystem that could support beavers, which consume such woody species.
… Griggs watched as a new generation of Castor canadensis began to re-engineer the landscape by building dams, creating pools of water that preserved the snow melt and the dozen or so inches of annual rainfall. The moisture created green oases half a mile wide that emanated from the creeks. Grazing expanded. Cattle had more and better-quality drinking water. Trout flourished. The creeks flowed year-round.”
Staley also interviewed the owner of a 10,000-acre ranch that includes national forest in Idaho. The area’s main source of water — Birch Creek — dried up, but was restored when beavers were released. But not only did the beavers restore a crucial water source for the ranch’s cattle, they also led to an increase in other wildlife, including reptiles, water fowl, insects and mammals.15
It’s another powerful lesson on how embracing nature can solve many of the environmental challenges that modern-day farming created.
Overcoming Barriers to Diverse Agriculture
The Science study acknowledged that financial and other barriers exist for many farmers interested in switching to more diverse agricultural practices. Government subsidies exist, but they’re overwhelmingly geared toward support of industrialized programs at the expense of biodiversity and small farmers alike. The University of Colorado explained:16
“Governments already spend huge sums to buffer the agricultural industry. Some nations, for example, subsidize farmers so that they can grow water-intensive crops in areas that don’t get a lot of rain. That money might be better spent, Mehrabi said, in helping farmers diversify.”
Too Many Children Are Taking Melatonin
May 14, 2024 by admin
Filed under treatments
Mercola proudly supports these charities and organizations. View All
Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked. The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your health care professional before using products based on this content.
If you want to use an article on your site please click here. This content may be copied in full, with copyright, contact, creation and information intact, without specific permission, when used only in a not-for-profit format. If any other use is desired, permission in writing from Dr. Mercola is required.
‘Strong and Consistent Evidence’ Links Multivitamins to Memory and Cognitive Benefits
May 13, 2024 by admin
Filed under treatments
Mercola proudly supports these charities and organizations. View All
Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked. The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your health care professional before using products based on this content.
If you want to use an article on your site please click here. This content may be copied in full, with copyright, contact, creation and information intact, without specific permission, when used only in a not-for-profit format. If any other use is desired, permission in writing from Dr. Mercola is required.
3 Women With Eczema Describe the Ways They Combat Nighttime Flare-Ups
May 13, 2024 by admin
Filed under treatments
If you have eczema, you know what it’s like – that frustrating struggle to catch some ZZZ’s.
The problem is at once physical and emotional. “When my eczema is flared, nighttime often fills me with anxiety,” says Nicola Johnston, a digital content creator who lives in Carlisle, England, near the border of Scotland. “I have experienced nights in so much pain that I cannot sleep, and I’ve scratched so hard that my sheets were covered in blood. This is why I’ve worked to establish a good evening routine that will allow me to have a comfortable night’s sleep and get the rest that my body needs.”
But that rest can be elusive when you’re tormented by “itching, flaky skin, raised red rashes, cuts, skin tightness,” the symptoms listed by Elise Loubatieres, a London-based editor and beauty influencer. In many patients, eczema is itchiest at night, sometimes due to a lack of time for self-care earlier in the day. Natalie Findley, a holistic chef from Whistler, British Columbia, has had a similar experience. “Nighttime flare-ups taught me that something wasn’t working,” she says. “Not getting enough sleep was not doing me any good.”
If you want to turn down eczema flare-ups, finding out what works best for you calls for trial and error. But it also helps to get advice from people who understand firsthand what you’re going through. Here, three women who’ve been there offer tips on how to prepare for bed, get as comfy as possible, deal with symptoms, and reset your emotions in the morning.
When it comes to preparing for bed, Findley favors consistency. “I try to keep my routine the same each night,” she says. Before doing anything, she sets “an intention to sleep better.” From there, Findley likes “to cleanse and moisturize my skin, drink some herbal tea, do some journaling, read, express gratitude, and then I am in bed by 10 p.m.”
An equally firm believer in the step-by-step approach, Johnston focuses first and foremost on comfort. “I start my bedtime routine by having a lukewarm bath to soothe my skin, if my skin is feeling particularly flared,” she says. “I then apply an emollient-based product that is going to lock in moisture and be slowly absorbed through the night. I put on lightweight satin nightwear that keeps me cool. In making up my bed, I personally prefer a silk pillow, as this is gentler on my facial eczema and doesn’t absorb any product I apply to my face like a cotton material would.”
Loubatieres scrupulously preps her skin and takes medication to prevent symptoms later. “I have been prescribed antihistamines to help with the itching,” she explains. “I also make sure that I apply emollients to my skin liberally and frequently in the hour leading up to bedtime.”
To Findley, the choice of bedding fabric is less important than the way it’s washed. “I don’t use any particular kind of sheets to relieve my eczema, but I use natural and clean laundry detergents.” she says. “Even though many regular products claim to be clean, they use a lot of harmful chemicals and ingredients in detergents that aggravate eczema and your overall health. I use detergents that are hypoallergenic and without any fragrances. My favorite laundry detergent is Tru Earth.” Her bedside companion is also natural and gentle: “If I need some relief, I always use calendula and comfrey-based salve, with some shea butter, to calm the itchiness and dry skin.”
Johnston has an unusual trick for dealing with one of eczema’s side effects – a trick that involves a trip to the nail salon. “A great tip I have found is having acrylic gel manicures,” she notes. “It means that your nail itself becomes thicker and doesn’t break your skin when you’re scratching in the night. This has been a great help with healing my eczema.”
Aware that overheating can bring on eczema, Loubatieres takes a proactive approach. “I try to stay cool using a stand-alone fan, and I also use a handheld fan to pinpoint itchy areas for some relief,” she says. “I ensure that my sheets and sleepwear are either 100% cotton or silk to reduce irritation. I also have eczema gloves and Cosi Care [aka “safe scratchers”], which are itching tools that allow you to satisfy an itch without causing damage.”
Whenever she begins to feel itchy, Findley does simple breathing exercises to calm her body. “I close my eyes, breathe in slowly and count to five, and hold for 2 seconds, then breathe out slowly and count to seven. Or I will just breathe in slowly until my chest and belly are full with air, hold for a few seconds, and breathe out slowly all the way. I repeat this multiple times until I’m relaxed. I also imagine myself sinking into my pillow as I breathe out, and it relaxes me and my muscles until I finally fall asleep.”
Johnston tries to nap during the day whenever possible. That way, in the event of a nighttime flare-up, she’s not completely exhausted the next day, And the extra rest is also calming. “By keeping my daytime stress levels to a minimum,” she says, flare-ups become less likely.
As Loubatieres sees it, you’ve lost the battle when you give in to the urge to itch. “At night I tend to get what I call ‘scratch attacks,’ where I uncontrollably and incessantly scratch despite breaking skin and causing myself pain,” she says. “It feels very satisfying in the moment and provides relief from that bone-deep itching sensation. But I try to get up and distract myself in some way. If I stay in bed and don’t keep my hands busy, I’m more likely to indulge in a scratch.” Indeed, taking up a hobby – drawing, knitting, playing guitar, anything that involves using your hands – can be an ideal diversion between a flare-up and the welcome moment when you feel really sleepy.
In the light of day, after successfully dealing with her nighttime flare-ups, Findley developed a fresh philosophy. “I made it a habit to clean up my diet and reduce stress and anxiety with meditation, journaling, and sleep hygiene. To treat the root cause of my issue, I switched to a plant-based diet. I also cut out dairy, as it’s pretty inflammatory. … I drink a lot of water each day. Now my eczema has cleared up! I find that fueling your body with the proper nutrients will support your immune system, therefore improving your eczema.”
Johnston emphasizes the importance of knowing your true self. “Often, it feels like you are your eczema, like it’s a defining characteristic,” she says. “It’s important to learn that your value comes from you and not your skin. I also learned to be kind to my skin. Not looking at it with hatred and resentment, but to see my eczema as a friend that was telling me there is an imbalance somewhere that I need to put right. It’s really important to listen to your body and notice your triggers.”
Whatever strategies you adopt, Loubatieres says, you should treat yourself with compassion. “After a scratch attack, I personally get a huge amount of guilt,” she admits. “I think I’ve caused my skin a lot of harm. However, I have to remind myself that it’s a condition that I cannot control. Skin eventually heals.” Her best advice for getting a good night’s sleep: “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
How Can You Tell if Eggs Have Expired?
May 13, 2024 by admin
Filed under treatments
Mercola proudly supports these charities and organizations. View All
Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked. The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your health care professional before using products based on this content.
If you want to use an article on your site please click here. This content may be copied in full, with copyright, contact, creation and information intact, without specific permission, when used only in a not-for-profit format. If any other use is desired, permission in writing from Dr. Mercola is required.
Nailing the Sweet Spots for Exercise Volume
May 13, 2024 by admin
Filed under treatments
Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published November 26, 2023.
In the video above, I interview Dr. James O’Keefe, a cardiologist with the Mid-America Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, about exercise dosing. He completed his cardiology training at Mayo Clinic.
He and three other coauthors published a meta-analysis in the March-April 2023 issue of Missouri Medicine,1 the journal of the Missouri State Medical Association, which has profound implications. I view this study as a landmark that radically changed my views on exercise.
Without doubt, we need exercise. The question is, how much? Many of us who are committed to being optimally healthy tend to overdo it, which is certainly true in my case. Had I had the information in O’Keefe’s study earlier, I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort.
Too Much Exercise Can Backfire
As it turns out, O’Keefe also has a history, just like me, of overdoing it when it comes to exercise, which is ultimately what led him to pursue this research, trying to find out where the sweet spot is — the amount of exercise that delivers the greatest benefits.
“I’ve always used exercise, whether I’m nervous or happy or sad. Exercise has been my coping mechanism. I played varsity basketball and ran track. When I quit playing basketball in college and focused on medicine, I made a personal note that I have to exercise every day because this is super important for me.
A lot of people have this notion that if some is good, more is better. So I got into triathlons and I was running 5K, 10K races and occasional marathons. I was really, really fit and I was pushing my body. But when I got to be about 45, I started to get palpitations and sometimes I’d get this aching after a really high intensity bike ride or things like that.
I realized, ‘Wait a minute, where did I get this notion that if exercise is good, this extreme exercise in middle age is better?’ It’s just not. And so I started doing research. I have a lot of connections around the world in the clinical research community. We started looking at this question, and sure enough, it’s quite obvious that you can overdo exercise.
I did a TED Talk on it. It has millions of views. And I’ve just focused on this. Exercise is good for you — 70% of U.S. adults don’t get enough exercise, and they would be healthier getting more exercise, any exercise.
In fact, the first 20 minutes of exercise will get you most of the benefits. Even getting out for a walk is dramatically better than sitting on the couch, sitting in front of a screen or sitting behind a windshield.
We have a sedentary lifestyle, and if you don’t actively incorporate movement into your day, you’re going to be in trouble, no question about it, just like following the standard American diet will absolutely get you in trouble.
But about 2% of people are overdoing it. It might be 5%. Highly active people, competitive people. And it’s probably because the world you and I live in — I know a lot of people like this. I see patients like this all the time.
They come with AFib, or accelerated atherosclerosis with a lot of calcium in the coronary, or ventricular problems. It can even shorten your lifespan if you get really extreme about it.”
Do We Have Programmed Life Expectancy?
O’Keefe recounts the story of how his mentor at the Mayo Clinic, decades ago, would admonish him when he’d go for a run at lunchtime saying “You know James, you’re just wasting your heartbeats. Your heart has only so many heartbeats.”
His mentor made the case that everything appears to have a sort of programmed life expectancy that correlates with your heart rate. A hummingbird, for example, has a heart rate of 500 beats a minute and lives a year or two. The mouse has a similarly high heart rate and lives about two years. Animals with really slow heart rates, on the other hand, like the whale, can live 200 years.
This is not to make a case for being a couch potato, though. “It’s a complex math problem,” O’Keefe says. What you want is to do enough exercise so that your pulse remains nice and low while you’re not exercising.
“That’s the way to maximize your heart rate,” he says. “But you don’t want to be exercising intensely for five, seven hours a day, let alone do a full-distance triathlon. You’re just asking way too much of your heart. There’s an intuitive logic about this as well. Like everything in nature, you’re better off not [being] in the extremes.
And that’s true with exercise. When you drill down on what types of exercise really correlate best with longevity, it’s not the maximum amount of high intensity interval training. Some of that’s important, but more is not necessarily better for vigorous intense exercise.”
Take-Home No. 1: Too Much Vigorous Exercise Backfires Big Time
O’Keefe’s systematic review revealed that if you’re sedentary and begin to exercise, you get a dose-dependent decrease in mortality, diabetes, depression, high blood pressure, coronary disease, osteoporosis, sarcopenia, falls and more. So, most definitely, you can dramatically slow aging and improve life expectancy with exercise.
However, at the very high end, the people who are doing the highest volume of vigorous exercise start losing those benefits.
“They’re not as bad off as sedentary people, but virtually every study you can find, they will lose some of those benefits for longevity, and certainly for things like atrial fibrillation.
If you go from sedentary to exercise moderately, you have less atrial fibrillation. But if you’re doing full distance triathlons when you’re over age 40 or 45, you start seeing a 500% to 800% increase in atrial fibrillation.”
O’Keefe cites a large-scale study that followed about 1 million individuals for more than 10 years. While vigorous exercise up to 75 minutes per week reduced the risk of all-cause mortality and other diseases in a dose-dependent manner, benefits plateaued after that.
So, people who were doing four to seven hours of vigorous exercise per week didn’t get any additional benefit, “and probably, from a cardiovascular standpoint, lost a little bit,” O’Keefe says.
Take-Home No. 2: You Cannot Overdo Moderate Exercise
In the case of moderate exercise, however — loosely defined as exercising to the point where you’re slightly winded but can still carry on a conversation — it’s very clear that more IS better and cannot be overdone.
“We’re talking gardening, housework, walking, recreational bike riding, yoga, nonintense swimming, pickleball. [When doing] these things, more is better,” O’Keefe says.
Perhaps even more surprising, moderate exercise also improves all-cause survival better than vigorous exercise — about two times better. “If you look at the people who are doing the most vigorous exercise compared to the people doing the most moderate exercise, the moderate exercisers have twice as good a reduction in long-term mortality as the high volume vigorous exerciser,” he says. What this means in practical terms is that:
a) There’s no need to engage in high-intensity strenuous exercise beyond 75 minutes per week. Doing so can be highly counterproductive. If you’re an overachiever, stick to moderate exercise instead and your benefits will continue to accrue and your efforts won’t eventually backfire.
b) Once you get into your mid-40s and 50s, exercise should be fun and stress-reducing, not competitive. In his analysis, O’Keefe also stresses the importance of “social exercise” over solo exercise — playing a game of pickleball with friends, for example.
Several years ago, he conducted a study with colleagues in Copenhagen, Denmark, in which they looked at long-term granular data on physical activity and longevity.
Playing tennis conferred 9.5 years of extra life expectancy; playing badminton got seven years; running, swimming and cycling were associated with just 3.5 years of extra life expectancy. Health club activities such as weightlifting and running on a treadmill only conferred 1.5 years of additional life expectancy compared to sedentary life.
At first, O’Keefe thought the analysis had somehow gone wrong. But then he realized it was the social aspects of the sports that conferred the added benefits.
“Exercising and making social connections at the same time, that is an absolute goldmine of a longevity activity,” he says. “That means that even walking with your dog or your friend or [playing] pickleball is huge … The whole thing is to move your body in a fun, playful manner and make it social.”
What Big Data Tell Us About the Benefits of Walking
Walking should not be underestimated either. The average American walks about 3,800 steps a day, which is just short of 2 miles. It’s about 2,000 steps per mile, and every 1,000 steps you get on average per day reduces your mortality by 10% to 15%, O’Keefe notes.
“There’s been more and more studies on this all the time, using activity trackers. We’re getting big data, like the UK biobank, which is a half a million people, and there’s a sizable subgroup of them who have been wearing activity trackers and been followed for 10 years now.
Clearly, more is better. You get the big gains going from sedentary lifestyles — 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day — up to 7,000 or 8,000. [Here] you have this very steep reduction in mortality, improvement in survival. It continues to about 12,000 steps a day. Most of the studies show that it plateaus at 12,000.”
Track Your Steps, but Beware of EMFs
If you’re strapped for cash, you don’t need to invest in a special fitness tracker. Most cellphones have free activity trackers, so all you need to do is carry your phone with you. It’s not ideal due to the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) emitted, but you could put it in airplane mode.
In November 2023, I gave a lecture at an autism event called Documenting Hope in Orlando. They’re committed to research and have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to do detailed analyses of autistic children to identify the causes of autism.
I almost fell off my chair when I heard the results. EMF was the No. 2 cause of autism. No. 1 was antibiotics, No. 3 was toxins and No. 4 was vaccines. So, please, do take EMF exposures seriously. While adults aren’t going to develop autism from EMF exposure, it can still cause neurological damage. So, keep your cellphone in airplane mode when not in use, or better yet, in a Faraday bag.
Take-Home No. 3: Overdoing Strength Training Is Worse Than Doing Nothing at All
O’Keefe’s meta-analysis also detailed the sweet spot for strength training, and the results truly shocked me. I radically changed my exercise program after reviewing these data.
Without question, strength training will improve muscle mass, muscle and bone strength. It can also boost your testosterone level if not overdone. It helps to improve mood and prevent falls. As you get into your 30s, you start to lose muscle mass and if you don’t train to maintain muscle mass, you’ll eventually end up with sarcopenia (low muscle mass) or osteoporosis (low bone density). O’Keefe comments:
“I’ve always been a fan of strength training … But again, the devil is in the details about the dosing. When you look at people who do strength training, it adds another 19% reduction in all-cause mortality on top of the 45% reduction that you get from one hour of moderate exercise per day.
When I strength train, I go to the gym and spend anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes, and … I try to use weights that I can do 10 reps with … After that, you’re feeling sort of like spent and … it takes a couple of days to recover. If you do that two, at the most three, times a week, that looks like the sweet spot for conferring longevity.”
The graph above, from the meta-analysis, shows the J-shaped dose-response for strength training activates and all-cause mortality. As you can see, the benefit maxes out right around 40 to 60 minutes a week. Beyond that, you’re losing benefit.
Once you get to 130 to 140 minutes of strength training per week, your longevity benefit becomes the same as if you weren’t doing anything, which is nothing short of shocking. If you train for three to four hours a week, you actually end up with WORSE long-term survival than people who don’t strength train!
Recall, when you’re doing intense vigorous exercise in excess, you’re still better off than people who are sedentary. But for some (yet undetermined) reason, excessive strength training leaves you worse off than being sedentary.
So, the take-home message here is that 20 minutes twice a week on non-consecutive days, or 40 minutes once a week is the sweet spot. You also don’t want your exercise regimen to center around strength training. It should be an add-on, as you get far greater benefits simply from walking, or any other moderate exercise.
What About When You Do KAATSU?
Now, there may be a caveat to this. Conventional strength training involves lifting weights that are anywhere from 70% to 90% of your one-rep max, and that’s the style of weight training most studies are based on. Another form of strength training is blood flow restriction (BFR) training or to use the Japanese term, KAATSU.
In KAATSU, you’re using very light weights — 70% lower than conventional weightlifting. Considering you’re not pushing your body to the max with heavy weights, you can likely train longer than one hour a week without nullifying benefits. It’s closer to moderate movement exercise than conventional resistance training.
O’Keefe is not familiar with KAATSU and has not studied its effects, but he agrees that it makes rational sense that you should be able to work out longer when doing KAATSU — maybe two to three hours a week.
Get Your Nature Fix
O’Keefe’s paper also discusses the benefits of spending time in nature. A British study cited found you need at least 1.5 to two hours outdoors each week for good health, even if it’s only a local park or tree-lined street.
“And then forest bathing is really interesting,” he notes. “Japanese people who live in Tokyo, one of the biggest cities in the world, will get on a bullet train and an hour or two later be at the mountains and in the forest. They go hike around or even just sit in nature and smell the pine and the fresh air. Then they get on the bullet train and go back home.
They show reductions in blood pressure and improvement in mood. And there’s really, really strong benefits … It’s been shown to … reduce anxiety and improve sleep and all those kinds of things that are important for well-being.”
The Sit-Rise Test
Lastly, we review a simple clinical assessment that gauges nonaerobic components of fitness — strength, balance and flexibility — skills that undergird long-term survival. It’s called the sitting-rising test (or sit-to-stand test). To perform this test:
a) Standing, cross your feet at the ankles
b) Squat down until you’re sitting cross-legged on the floor
c) Raise yourself back up to standing
The object of the exercise is to sit down and stand back up using as few supports as possible. A perfect score of 10 — 5 points down and 5 points up — is obtained if you can squat down and stand back up without using your hands, elbows or knees for added stability or support. For each body part that touches the floor — a hand, forearm, elbow, knee or side of the leg — either on the way down or up, deduct 1 point.
This test has been shown to be remarkably accurate for predicting longevity. Having a score of 8 to 10 means you have a very low risk of dying within the next 14 years while a score of 0 to 3 is associated with sixfold higher all-cause mortality.
As noted by O’Keefe, the ability of this test to predict survivability “speaks to the fact that fitness is a multifaceted thing and you need to work on all those different things,” meaning balance and flexibility, in addition to aerobic exercise and strength training.
The Challenges of Parenting a Child With Eczema
May 12, 2024 by admin
Filed under treatments
A loving mother wants, above all else, good health for her child. Imagine, then, the emotional impact of discovering that your baby has eczema, of wishing more than anything to take away the itching and irritation. And imagine the worry when a woman with eczema becomes pregnant. The what-ifs are huge.
Fortunately, there is excellent information — and inspiration — to help a woman in either situation. Here, two moms reveal the great lengths they went to in their determination to give their children relief and good health.
Meghan Elliott, who lives in Kankakee, Illinois, is a busy mother of two: Nora, 4, and Charlie, 1. After the shock of finding that Charlie had eczema from birth, Elliott embarked on a quest to do everything she could to help him. She researched his needs, and then made sure the health system met them.
“Charlie had rough, scaly, bumpy skin,” says Elliott, an operations manager for the marketing company Mayhill Moon. At first, the inflammation was mostly on his cheeks and thighs, but it later began to develop on his elbows. “My son’s pediatrician officially diagnosed him with moderate to severe eczema and suggested we take him to a pediatric dermatologist.” Not a bad idea, but she and Charlie would have to spend months on a waiting list, which Elliott found “extremely frustrating.”
That’s when she set out to learn as much as possible about Charlie’s condition. One thing that struck her was that many children with eczema have moderate to severe food allergies. “Seeing how long it took to get referred to a pediatric dermatologist, I then took it upon myself to call a pediatric allergist. Thankfully, they got him in fairly quickly, and we found out that Charlie is severely allergic to all forms of eggs and also has a lactose intolerance.”
This was a watershed moment. “What we do now is lather his cheeks and chin with CeraVe Healing Ointment before and after he eats so as to not irritate his skin,” she says. “The ointment helps act like a barrier to any food that could cause a flare-up.”
Elliott carefully analyzed every aspect of Charlie’s routine to give him relief in a variety of ways. “One thing that has helped my son is giving him a bath every night,” she says. “I thought this would dry him out even more, but our dermatologist said a quick 5- to 10-minute lukewarm bath – after which we pat him dry and immediately lotion him up – will keep all the moisture in his skin. We use CeraVe lotion, shampoo, and body wash during his bath times. We also apply CeraVe healing ointment on his cheeks throughout the day to keep moisture locked in. Charlie was also prescribed two topical ointments to use as needed as well as an oral medication to help when he gets really itchy.”
To help him sleep, Elliott relies on the most gentle bedding. “We use bamboo crib sheets, and they are very breathable – when we use a flannel crib sheet, his cheeks are very irritated when he wakes up,” she says. “We also do a lot of bamboo clothing. He can wear cotton clothing, too, but we definitely stay away from any wool or polyester.” Charlie is now doing well. “We have a schedule of doctor follow-ups every 3 to 6 months, and he is doing so much better compared to where we were a year ago.”
The emotional toll of worry and constant care is considerable, however. “Parenting a child with eczema and food allergies is exhausting and frustrating,” she says. “Still, push for help in getting your child relief. My advice for other parents also going through this is to always be your child’s advocate. They can’t advocate for themselves, so it is our responsibility to do that for them.”
Karen Fischer is an award-winning nutritionist and author who lives and works on Australia’s Gold Coast. Dedicated to helping people with eczema through her online support network, she’s the owner of Skin Friend, a skin care company. Her own story – and that of her daughter Ayva, now 22 – is the reason she has made eczema relief her work and passion.
“I have lived the pain of head-to-toe eczema,” Fischer explains. “I have health practitioner qualifications, but I did not truly understand eczema until I lived it.”
Before becoming pregnant with Ayva, Fischer found herself dealing with the skin condition. “My eczema started off as a tiny patch,” she recalls. “After a bout of work stress, it suddenly spread to my entire body. Every time I ate, it would spread. Some nights the itch was so bad I could not sleep. I had to constantly wash my sheets, I could not eat out with friends, I was socially isolated. No one understood, and I spent a lot of time at home crying.”
Noticing the link between food and her flare-ups, Fischer took a close look at what she ate. “Your skin is literally made from the foods you eat, so it made sense to change my diet,” she says. “Genetics play a role, but I believe that eating healthy, low-chemical foods can compensate for these genetic defects.” Identifying which foods seemed to trigger her eczema – and eliminating them – helped Fischer get better.
Her pregnancy, fortunately, proved uneventful. “I had suffered from hand dermatitis before I became pregnant,” she says. “With healthy eating, it soon went away, so I had a rash-free pregnancy. However, Ayva developed eczema 2 weeks after she was born.” Fischer was devastated to see Ayva suffer, and the baby had difficulty sleeping, but it didn’t occur to the new mom right away that she could approach her daughter’s skin condition the same way she had managed her own. “I thought eczema was a genetic condition and there was nothing I could do, so I used topical steroids to unsuccessfully treat her eczema,” she recalls.
Then, a breakthrough: “A nurse caring for Ayva told me about food sensitivities, and she set me on the path that led to my daughter’s eczema clearing up. Nutritional biochemistry was my favorite subject at university, so I designed a diet specifically for Ayva based on the research I had read from various hospital allergy units. Ayva’s skin cleared up, and we gradually expanded her diet. The right foods can make your child’s body resilient.”
Today both mother and daughter are happy and healthy. “Eczema is a complicated skin disorder and everyone is quick to give you advice,” Fischer says – and then offers up some advice of her own. As she sees it, “Healthy eating is the long-term, permanent solution.”
