Healthy Andy

There’s some really interesting research that recently came out not only on inflammation and obesity, but inflammation and diabetes as well.  Really, the two are closely related because of the influence of the hormone insulin, so this shouldn’t be so surprising, especially if you’ve read my post on insulin and weight gain.

To sum up, consuming a diet high in fat seems to create a problem with inflammation in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain that links the nervous system to the endocrine (hormonal) system through a little nubbin at the base of the brain called the pituatary gland (also called the “master gland”).  This inflammation then impairs the effects of two hormones, insulin and leptin, on signalling the body about fat storage.

Okay, let’s break down what that all means.

Inflammation and Obesity

First off, there’s a chemical on/off switch for inflammation in our body called NF-kB (NF- “kappa” B).  When NF-kB is activated, it’s like in those submarine movies where that klaxen horn begins blaring Ah- WOOO-GA!  Ah-WOOO-GA! and a voice shouts over the loudspeaker “Dive!  Dive!”.

Okay, maybe that’s just my hyperactive imagination.  But seriously, when NF-kB is activated, it tells the body that inflammation is necessary in that area.  We’ve discussed NF-kB in detail before in this post on inflammation and antioxidants.  The key thing to realize for this discussion is, a high-fat diet seems to activate NF-kB in the hypothalamus, leading to inflammation in that area.

This leads to resistance to the hormones insulin and leptin.  Insulin we’ve discussed many times before- it’s the hormone involved with controlling blood sugar.  It’s also the hormone of interest in diabetes and the pre-diabetic state called “metabolic syndrome”, “syndrome x”, or just plain “insulin resistance”. 

Resistance to insulin causes all kinds of health problems, but in this case, we’re mostly interested in the fact that abnormal expression of insulin causes weight gain.  If you’ve heard of low-carb diets, the whole mechanism behind their action is to control the levels of insulin in your body so that you don’t get fat.  Once again… abnormal action of insulin leads to fat gain.  Since an inflamed hypothalamus leads to abnormal action (i.e., resistance)  of insulin, it therefore also leads to fat gain.

Inflammation, Leptin, and Hunger

What about that other hormone, leptin?  What the heck IS that other hormone, leptin?

Leptin is a hormone that controls the sensation of hunger and/or saiety (the feeling of being full).  Again, when inflammation kicks in throughout the hypothalamus, you end up with an abnormal expression of this hormone… in other words, an inflamed brain is always telling you you’re not full yet, no matter how full you actually are.

So not only does an inflamed brain disable the hormonal mechanisms that help burn off fat and sugar (that’s insulin), it also disables the hormonal mechanism that tells you to stop stuffing your pie-hole in the first place!  Is it any wonder how this could lead to weight gain? 

There’s been links between inflammation and obesity before, but this is a much stronger link because the hypothalamus, as I mentioned earlier, pretty much runs the show when it comes to your hormones.  That means that inflammation there is going to have a far greater effect than inflammation in the peripheral tissues.

Fat Quality and Inflammation

I talk a lot about the importance of healthy fats in the diet, and how the balance of Omega-3 (anti-inflammatory) fats and Omega-6 (pro-inflammatory) fats is so vital to proper function in the body.  It may very well be that it is not a problem of overall quantity of fats, but an overdose of those inflammatory Omega-6 fats that is leading to this inflammation problem in the hypothalamus.

In fact, one of the articles on the subject shows that saturated fats are far more likely to induce this inflammed state in the hypothalamus, and therefore leading to the disruption in insulin and leptin that contributes to weight gain. Monounsaturated fats did not seem to have the undesirable effects.

My advice is, this is even more evidence to avoid processed foods (which are high in pro-inflammatory Omega-6s) and stick to a whole foods diet (also called a “primal” or “paleo” diet).  Additionally, supplementing with Omega-3 fats like fish oils can help reduce inflammation, and antioxidants can help, as well.  Read that article I linked to above for evidence on how antioxidants seem to shut off that NF-kB inflammation switch.

Since inflammation and obesity are linked, you want to avoid that situation as much as possible.  A healthy whole foods diet is the best defense.  After all, who wants an inflamed brain?

Stay healthy!

 More and more news on the health benefits of green tea keep pouring in.  The latest comes from Japanese researchers published in the journal Chinese Medicine.

They did what’s called a literature review, which is what it sounds like.  Rather than set up a specific experiment and generate new data, the researchers instead sift through many, many other research papers and try to use the sum of that data to achieve some new insights.

These are tricky to do, more tricky than you might think.  The main thing is, what studies do you include in your review?  If you go cherry-picking this article you like here, that article you like there, you may end up biasing your results significantly. 

At the same time, there’s a lot of junk science out there, my friends.  You can’t take every article, because some are just crap (here’s an example of a bad study on fish oils) and will skew your results in an inaccurate direction.  So it can be a bit of a delicate dance.

Health Benefits Of Green Tea

So what did the researchers find?  Well, after selecting 105 articles to go through, the researchers reported:

• There are very potent antioxidants in green tea called catechins that strongly contribute to the overall antioxidant network in the body.  Catechins keep coming up over and over again in the study, and if you read much at all about green tea, you’re going to keep coming across the word “catechins”. This antioxidant effect is actually measurable in the blood plasma (by reducing signs of oxidative stress).  For more on how antioxidants actually work, find out how blueberries will take a bullet for you.
• Going back to catechins, there’s some evidence that they help prevent degenerative diseases of various kinds, including cardiovascular diseases like hypertension and coronary heart disease (clogged arteries).  For more on this, read this article on antioxidants and arteries.  Trigycleride levels are also reduced when green tea extracts are used.
• Green tea and extracts of green tea like EGCG can help with obesity.  It’s possible that this is due to an increase in thermogenesis (creation of body heat), or it could be due to more optimized use of glucose.
• Which leads us to the health benefits of green tea for diabetics.  Green tea and it’s extracts seem to help in glucose metabolism… there is a measurable reduction of glucose levels in the presence of green tea anitoxidants.
• Various anti-fungal and anti-viral (including influenza) benefits were found, including Candida Albicans specifically .
• How about bone density?  There’s evidence green tea can help with increased bone mineralization (density), which makes sense considering this study on how green tea helps your teeth (actually, it helps reinforce that study quite a bit).

In short, green tea is pretty amazing stuff.  A lot of the benefits can be attributed to the strong antioxidant properties found in green tea, but there seems to be a lot more to it than that.  As much as we know, there’s still a long way to go to understand exactly how this stuff is so darn good for us.

By the way, green tea is actually rather low in caffiene.  Ounce for ounce, it has about one-fifth the caffiene content of a cup of coffee.  Which is good for me, because too much caffiene makes my heart explode out of my chest.

Fire down some green tea and stay healthy!

The CDC released a report recently concerning the prevalence of diabetes in this country, and it basically made me flip my lid.  I mean, I knew it was bad, but this is freakin’ NUTS.

Little side note: I decided I had to write a full article on this, because I was in the middle of writing an article on garlic and heart health, and diabetes came up, and I started flying into a written rant about how bad diabetes is (it makes sense if you read the article), that my heart health post started turning into a diabetes post.  So, short story long, I decided to cut most of that info out of the garlic article and make a seperate post about the absolutely insane breakaway pace that type 2 diabetes is taking over this country.

Anywho, the CDC reports that currently, the prevalence of diabetes in Amercia is one in ten.  ONE IN TEN.  Among older individuals, it’s as bad as one in four.  And it’s only going to get worse.

We Americans are busily eating our way into a diabetic nightmare.  If our current trends (meaning, eating sugary processed food with both hands and some sort of trowel or other small shovel-like instrument) continue, we’re well on the road to one in five or even ONE IN THREE Americans having type 2 diabetes within thirty or forty years.

HOLY.  CRAP. 

Folks, it’s really, really tough to describe just how bad this situation is without using profanity, or fire, or setting something on fire while screaming profanity, or some other shrieking, fiery, uncontrollable fit of rage and despair.

Okay, let’s take this one step at a time.  First, I’ll talk a little bit about the history of type 2 diabetes, then we’ll talk about what the disease actually is, what causes it, and why it really, really sucks to have it.

The History Of Type 2 Diabetes

Let’s get a little historical perspective on this.  Diabetes has been recognized for a LONG time, but has been considered a very unusual and uncommon condition for, well, pretty much thousands of years.  Essentially, until the modern era.

 Hippocrates, the great Greek physician who lived circa 400 BC,  identified it but called it “rare”.  Galen (circa 200 AD), the big heavy-hitter physician of the Roman era, only saw TWO cases in his entire career.  For those of you who have never heard of Galen, picture a real-life “House, MD” who was living in the Roman Empire.  He ended up as the personal physician to several emperors, and his theories and writing influenced Western medicine for over a thousand years after his death… and he only ever saw TWO cases of diabetes.

Other documents from Arabic and Ayurvedic sources mention the disease, but again, the condition was so rare that it was poorly understood and treatments for it seemed random and ineffective. 

Jumping forward to 1825, a physician named Pratt writing a dissertation on diabetes called it a “rare occurence”.  And finally, in 1958, the prevalence of diabetes was reported as 1 in 100 (M Engelgau et al.  Ann Intern Med. 2004;140:945-950), which was probably a dramatic increase from 100 years earlier.

Fifty years later, we’ve gone from 1 in 100, to 10 in 100… and rising.

Type 1 Versus Type 2 Diabetes

So just what the heck is diabetes, and what’s the big deal about it?  Simply put, diabetes is too much sugar in the blood.  This happens for one of two reasons:  either the body isn’t making enough insulin (insulin removes sugar from the blood), or the body is making insulin, but the insulin isn’t working.  There’s also gestational diabetes (caused by pregnancy) but I don’t want to confuse things here so let’s just stick with Type 1 and Type 2.

Type 1 is the not-making-insulin kind.  It’s also called “juvenile onset diabetes”, although it can come on in adulthood.  The body doesn’t make enough insulin because the organ that makes insulin, the pancreas, is being progressively broken down by the body’s own immune system (an “autoimmune” disorder).  It seems to be caused by a genetic predisposition that gets triggered by an environmental event (nobody’s really sure what that is).

Type 2 is the I’ve-got-insulin-but-it-ain’t-workin’ kind.  It usually starts out as a pre-diabetic state called insulin resistance, which is what it sounds like. 

Insulin basically signals the cells of the body to open up and let sugar go from the bloodstream into the actual cell itself.  Each cell has a wall that acts, well, like a wall… keeps the inside stuff in and the outside stuff out.  But just like you need to take stuff into your house (like groceries) and out of your house (like the garbage), your cell needs to exchange stuff with its environment.

So, the cell has little doorways all over its surface, on the wall, and certain chemicals signal the cell to open up the door and let something in.  Sort of like ringing the doorbell (well, it’s actually more like a secret knock, but that’s not important to this discussion). 

Anyway, insulin rings the doorbell to tell the cell to open up and let sugar in.  When you’ve got insulin resistance, it’s kind of like a pain in the ass little kid in the neighborhood has been just RINGING, and RINGING, and RINGING your doorbell, and you get to the point of loathing where you just don’t answer the door anymore.  In other words, the signal is being sent, it’s just not being answered.

Why so your cells start to ignore the signal?  Again, think of that pain in the ass kid who over-rings the doorbell.  In the modern era, we don’t eat just a little bit of sugar, we eat HOLY COW BAM KAPOW DROP A BOMB OF SUGAAAAAAR!  We FLOOD our body with the stuff, far more than the human body has evolved to handle over the millions of years we’ve developed as a species.

Think about it.  How much sugar do you think a caveman ate, say, 15,000 years ago?  In evolutionary terms, 15,000 years is very recent. Homo sapiens sapiens is around 150,000 years old as a distinct species, and our primate evolutionary predecestors can be tracked back over 50 million years.

Do you like they had a lot of Frosted Flakes back then?  High-fructose corn syrup?  Ben and Jerry’s ice cream?

Not so much.  Mostly, it was a lot of meat and nuts and vegetables and fruit.  There’s sugar in fruit, of course, but also a lot of fiber that tampers how quickly it enters the bloodstream.  It’s only after we started refining foods that we essentially started main-lining sugar… and, as a consequence, overloaded over bodys’ cells with annoying ringing doorbells that they eventually stopped answering (which we now call Type 2 diabetes).

If the cells don’t take the sugar out of the blood… it stays there.  Hence, high blood sugar.

Effects Of Diabetes

Okay, you say, but so what?  So I’ve got tons of sugar in my blood, doesn’t that just make me a sweet, sweet person?

Mmmmm no.  Diabetes actually wrecks absolute havoc on the body.  It significantly increases the risk of cardiovascular disease (discussed in this post on garlic and hearth health) and related death.

Oh, but there’s more.  How about diabetic retinopathy, which is going blind due to the death of the small arteries of the eye?  Or diabetic gangrene, which is the formation of ulcers that don’t want to heal or other pieces of the body simply dying and rotting away.  There’s also diabetic neuropathy, which is losing sensation and other neural function in various areas of the body (especially the feet).

Remember, your nerves and blood vessels branch out into tinier and tinier versions to reach out into every bit of you.  Diabetes kills those smaller branches off, more and more, until things start going numb and just plain dying.

Those are just the obvious things that we can definitely blame on diabetes.  But think about it.  If the condition is killing off the smallest branches of nerves and blood vessels, damage like that is going on all over the body.

Imagine if tomorrow, every driveway in America disappeared.  Now every little alleyway and side street.  Even though the major highways and throughfares are intact, how is the average family going to get stuff delivered to their house?  Get groceries there?  Take the trash out?

They can’t.  And so, they’ll starve to death in a pile of garbage.  Nice, hunh?  The same thing happens in the bodies of diabetics, causing God only knows what kind of damage throughout the body.

The bottom line is, diabetes IS a big deal and you don’t want it.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, sugar is tasty, slow poison and should be treated as such.  If Americans insist on gobbling that poison down in ever-increasing bucketloads, you can expect the CDC’s dire predictions about the prevalence of diabetes to come true.

Stay healthy!

Source article on CDC’s announcement: http://www.usmedicine.com/news/2010/10/26/cdc-projects-potential-for-sharp-rise-in-diabetes-prevalence.html

Yet more evidence has come out regarding garlic and heart health.  

It’s no big news that garlic is helpful for the heart and cardiovascular system in general; plenty of articles have been written before on the topic.  However, this latest study highlights the actual mechanism by which garlic oil can protect the heart from the ravages of diabetes.

Diabetes And Heart Health

So what’s the big deal about that?  Simple, really.  Diabetes tears up the cardiovascular system- diabetics are almost 70% more likely to have heart disease as a cause of death and adults with diabetes are 2-4 times more likely to die of heart disease than non-diabetics (more fun statistics on diabetes here).  Oh, and by the way, diabetes also happens to be exploding in this country at a breakaway pace.

I’m not exaggerating.  As of the writing of this article, something like 1 in 10 Americans has Type 2 diabetes… that’s the kind you acquire later in life, usually by burning out your pancreas by eating sugar by the bucketfull.  ONE IN TEN.  For those over 65, it’s more like one in FOUR.

Oh, but it gets better.  The CDC recently released an estimate that Americans are on track to raise those overall rates to one in five or perhaps even one in THREE.

I don’t want to get off topic with a rant on how bad diabetes really is, but I feel the need to include a little something because it seems like people shrug off this disease like it’s no big whoop.  WRONG.  Back in my diagnosis classes, the running joke was this… if on a test, you’re asked which organ does something, and you don’t know, guess “liver” (because the liver does so darn much).  If you’re asked which disease can inflict some horrible symptom on you, and you don’t know, guess “diabetes” (because diabetes does so many bad things to your body).

Garlic And Hearth Health

Okay, now that I’m done ranting about diabetes, let’s get back to what garlic oil can do to prevent heart disease in diabetics… because as we’ll see, the mechanisms of action should also help non-diabetics as well.

The researchers fed diabetic rats either garlic oil or corn oil (as a control group).  One nice part of this study is the researchers actually made their own garlic oil with fresh garlic using steam distillation, which would ensure high quality.

While the rats were still alive, they tested their cardiac function with echocardiography (ultrasound, basically) and found that while diabetes (which they induced with a drug) caused decreases in heart rate, body weight, ejection fraction (that’s a measure of how much blood is actually squirted out of the heart with each beat), and fractional shortening (another measure of heart function), all of these nasty effects were reversed with garlic oil.

When they physically examined the hearts of the diabetic rats, they found cardiac damage typical of that caused by diabetes (altered gene expression, decrease in the actual muscle protein fibers that make the heart contract).  Again, for the rats given the garlic oil, these telltale signs of heart damage were decreased… and the more of the garlic oil the rats got, the less damage there was to their hearts.

The researchers believe that the garlic oil helps prevent damage caused by Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS), which you may have heard of out on the streets by the term “free radical”.  Diabetes-caused hyperglycemia (too much sugar in the blood) leads to an increase in free radicals, which are especially damaging to the heart tissue.

If you read my article on how antioxidants work, you know that basically they absorb those nasty free radicals before they can cause damage to your body.  What sort of damage?  How about altered gene expression (switching inappropriate genes on and off like a crazy little kid playing with a light switch), or altering the electrical conduction of the heart (remember it’s a muscle and needs to contract rhythmically, which is done electrically), or even apoptosis (programmed cell death). 

That last one, apoptosis, is done by your body on a regular basis to clear out the worn-out cells. A somewhat harsh metaphor is, to take the weak, lame horse out of the herd and shoot it to put it out of its misery (and perserve the health of the rest of the herd).  But free radicals seem to send that process haywire, so perfectly good horses are getting shot with no rhyme or reason, and much too often. 

(My apologies to you horse lovers out there.   No actual horses were harmed during the writing of this metaphor.)

The bottom line is, free radicals tear your heart muscle down… make it weaker bit by bit by breaking down the heart muscle itself and altering how well it conducts the very electrical signals that make the heart beat nice and regular like it’s supposed to.  Since diabetes increases the level of free radicals dramatically, that obviously will cause a lot of damage to the heart… unless you have some trusty-dusty antioxidants to absorb those ugly free radical and spare your heart muscle.  That’s why when you increase your intake of garlic, heart health increases along with it (according to this research).

Further Implications Of The Garlic Oil Study

By the way, there’s a lot implicated by this really well-designed study.  While the researchers were looking at extreme cases of damage induced by diabetes, free radicals are constantly on the attack in your body.  It isn’t just diabetes that creates free radicals.  You’ve got free radicals in you right now, just from regular, normal metabolic processes.  Then, exposure to all the junk and toxins and crap floating around in our food, water, air, and sprayed onto our furniture, clothing… I’m going to stop before I get on a rant, here. 

Suffice it to say that all the toxic crap surrounding us in the modern age dramatically increases the levels of free radicals in our bodies.  This study shows in a very real, nuts-and-bolts sort of way what the damage caused by free radicals looks like… at least in the heart.  But similiar damage is caused throughout your body by free radicals.  We just haven’t gotten around to cataloging it so thoroughly as in this study on the heart.

That’s why I keep telling people to get some extra antioxidants into their lives.  A healthy diet isn’t enough.  If this were a thousand years ago, and we didn’t have an environment so polluted that even seabirds in the Arctic are full of mercury, then sure, a healthy diet should do the trick.  But we’re under chemical stresses our ancestors never even dreamed of.  So along with a good multivitamin and fish oils (I talk about the reasons for those in other articles), I definitely advise that you take a good, potent antioxidant supplement to protect you from the ravages of free radicals.

Get a little garlic in you and stay healthy!

Source article:  http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/jf101606s

In yet another shocking incidence in which medications turn out to actually be bad for you, two studies found that Avandia, a medication for diabetes, increases the risk of heart attack and similar dropping-dead-from-heart-not- working problems.

Of course, GlaxoSmithKline, the makers of Avandia and a very long word to type, claim that Avandia is perfectly safe and will actually make you a better Scrabble player (okay, I made that last part up).  They cite “better, newer” studies (read: studies we bought and paid for) which proclaim Avandia’s safety.

Unfortunately for GSK, the latest released study shows an increased risk of heart attack (39 percent) and heart-related death (43 pecent) from those taking Avandia.  The FDA is convening a special panel of experts to help them decide whether or not these pesky side effects are sufficient to remove the drug from the market, but they’ll probably chicken out, since they’re fairly useless.

One more reason to say no to sugar, folks.

Source article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/health/29drug.html?partner=rss&emc=rss