Healthy Andy

All right, you horny little freaks.  I know at least some of you out there are quickly scribbling down 800 numbers listed during late night TV commercials for male sex enhancement pills, but seriously, lay off of that crap. 

The FDA agrees with me, at least in the case of the ridiculously named Man Up Now pills, which they have labelled as dangerous, and rightly so.  Like many other sketchy supplements out there, these pills contain dangerous active ingredients that closely mimic prescription drugs.

For Man Up Now (Really?  That’s REALLY the name?  Jeesh!), we’re talking about Viagra.  Big shock there.  The way Viagra works is, by encouraging the relaxation of arteries (called vasodialation) and therefore an increase in blood flow to the, um, area of interest.  Since an erection is essentially a hydraulic phenomenon (more blood goes in than out, filling up the penis and making it hard), that increase in blood flow helps those with erectile function get what they’re looking for.

Folks, there’s really no way to talk about this stuff without using terminology that’s going to make you snicker.  So go ahead and giggle.  I can’t hear you.

Okay, so here’s the thing.  Vasodialation, or widening of the arteries, lets more blood through, but also reduces blood pressure.  Any time you increase the diameter of a hose, you decrease the pressure of the fluid travelling through it.  The opposite is also true… decrease the diameter, increase the pressure.  You know this if you’ve used your thumb to block off part of the end of a garden hose to make the water shoot out further.

What this all translates to is, if you’ve already GOT low blood pressure, you really don’t want to go making it even lower by gobbling down questionable male enhancement pills and forcing it so low you keel over dead.  That’s really not how you want your body to be found.

I know what (most of) you are thinking.  “Okay, Healthy Andy, but what CAN I take?”

Perverts.

Well, without getting into this too much and thereby turning this site into something that will get filtered out by your workplace internet, remember what I said earlier about the erection being all about hydraulics?  That means that the healthier and more responsive your vascular system (arteries and veins) is, the more responsive your equipment will be as well. 

So anything that helps your cardiovascular system, basically, will help you out down below.  As a prime example, read this post on how antioxidants keep arteries elastic to steer you down the right path.  Pliable, responsive arteries are the key to success with the vascular system.

That’s right, boys.  Turns out the best male enhancement pills are blueberries and other superfoods.  Other than that, good old fashioned stuff like regular exercise will help you out far more than any supplement with a silly name.

Avoid the late night 800 numbers and stay healthy!

Link to the FDA’s warning:  http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm236538.htm

In yet another installment of the You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me files, fire retardant chemcials were found in nine of ten samples of butter tested in Dallas grocery stores.

You know, people sometimes shake their heads and laugh at me when I get off on a rant about the amount of chemical pollutants in our air, water, and food supply.  To them I say, FIRE RETARDANT CHEMICALS, IN FREAKIN’ BUTTER!

The chemicals in question are known as PBDEs or polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and are used as a fire retardant in foam, fabric, and plastic.  In addition, the researchers in this study also measured levels of HBCDs, another class of fire retardant chemical.

Health Dangers Of PBDEs

Of course, gobbling down chemicals designed to make foam less likely to burst into flames isn’t so fantastic for the human body.  Studies suggest that exposure to these PBDEs are linked to fun stuff like decreased thyroid function, decreased sperm count, and disruptions to the endocrine system (that’s your hormones). 

We know even less about the effects of the HBCD class of chemicals, but studies on rats suggest neurotoxicity, cancer, and more hormonal disruptions.  Hurray! 

What’s even worse, both of these chemicals have been positively identified in humans.  Specifically, breast milk, blood, and fat (a lots of toxins seem to end up getting lodged in your fat and stuck there).

The Study

So this stuff is out there, in a big way, and is causing people all kinds of problems.  From the data in the study, these chemicals seem to be concentrated mostly in eggs and dairy, butter being the big heavy hitter, followed by meat, fish, and then vegetables.

The methods used in this study were fairly straightforward.  The researchers went to five different grocery stores on two different occasion, each time buying a sample of 31 different types of food.  That gave them ten samples each of 31 varying food choices, which they then tested for the levels of the chemicals mentioned earlier.

What’s really disturbing to me about this research is, that even though PBDEs aren’t being used much any longer (due to health concerns), there are still very high levels of this stuff persisting in the environment.  Sure, the levels may be lowering, but the lesson to be learned here is that contaminents, once in the environment, tend to stick around longer than you might like to think.

And, as a bonus, more and more of the HBCD type of chemical is showing up as manufacturers switch over to that class of flame retardant since they can’t use PBDEs.  So we seem to be trading off one toxic pollutant for another.

Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t identify brand names, so there’s no way to tell if, say, organic food has lower levels of these contaminents or not.  It’s hard to guess.  One possible source of the contaminents mentioned by the authors is the wrappers of the various foods, but because these chemicals are floating around all over the place, it’s hard to say. 

My best guess is, organic is probably safer, but avoid plastic wraps and foam containers if possible.  Some stores will still wrap up meat products in old-school waxed paper.  Definitely avoid heating things up in the microwave in plastic or foam containers… sort of like what I advise doing to avoid BPA (another horrible, horrible chemical added to plastic and used in canned food as well).

In the end, though, we are somewhat dependant on the government to regulate and monitor this sort of activity, which means all we as individuals can do is hold our leadership responsible for actually following through with protecting the public.

Other than that, follow the advise I mentioned earlier about avoiding the stuff as much as possible, and keep your exposure to other chemicals as low as possible by sticking to organic whole foods, filtered water, and the like.  You may not be able to avoid everything, but the less you’re exposed to, the better. Keep up your intake of detoxifying foods like cruciferous vegetables and supplement with antioxidants to boost your body’s ability to deal with the toxins you can’t avoid. 

Stay healthy!

Original article: http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/fetchArticle.action;jsessionid=BAEBDC758FF379DB96950C569B49793C?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1289%2Fehp.0901345

Science gets a gold star today.  A big step forward in the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS) was taken when British researchers discovered a key molecular component to repairing the damage caused by this nasty, nasty disease.

MS is a condition in which the insulating sheath of the nerves, called myelin, is worn away slowly over time.  It’s an autoimmune condition, which means the body’s own defenses are causing all of the damage… sort of like biological friendly fire.  The immune system, for reasons unknown, becomes confused and begins attacking and destroying the body’s own myelin.

Why is that a big deal?  Well, myelin works like the insulation on an electrical cord.  Ever have a vaccum cleaner that was so old and abused that the cord had little holes worn through to the actual metal, putting you in constant danger of electrocution or house fire (or was that just mine?)?

The same thing happens with MS.  That insulating myelin allows for maximum efficiency when it comes to transmitting electrical (neurological) impulses, so when little holes begin wearing through here and there, you get slower transmission of nervous system signals and short-circuiting type problems.

Needless to say, a short-circuiting, sparking, slow nervous system is kind of a bad thing.

Most therapies up until know have tried to limit damage and slow the progression of the disease (with mixed results), but for the first time, some options are opening up for actually repairing the little holes in the insulation… sort of like wrapping electrical tape around that old vaccum cleaner’s cord (not that I ever needed to do that, of course).

Specifically, the British researchers found that if they stimulated a certain molecule in rats (that goes by the somewhat awesome name of ”RXR- gamma“), the rats would begin repairing their own myelin sheaths.

This is really impressive and revolutionary stuff.  Up until now, getting a diagnosis of MS was a bleak, bleak situation.  And make no mistake, it’s still a huge problem, but at least now there’s some hope of an eventual solution that provides real, lasting relief to a notoriously difficult to treat condition.

Researchers hope that these new findings will lead to human clinical trials within five years and widely available treatment within fifteen years.

Nicely done, Science.

Stay healthy!

It may seem strange to talk about the immune system in a series on life extension and how to live longer, but hey, you can’t live forever if you get sick and die, right?

It’s more than just dealing with the sniffles.  The same principle we’ll be discussing about the immune system also applies to the body’s ability to maintain itself over time.  Specifically, we’ll be talking about stress.

Less Stress Means Life Extension

We’ve already seen that stress can affect aging throught the action of cortisol in the previous article about living longer.  There’s more to it than that.  To understand how stress acts as a double-whammy to our body, we need to talk breifly about the stress response and how our body functions on autopilot.

First off, your central nervous system (CNS), which is your brain and spinal cord, run the show.  You know already that you have things about your body that you can control voluntarily (like muscle movments) and there’s other things you don’t control voluntarily, that act on a sort of autopilot (like digestion).

Well, we science types like to make big names for stuff, so we call the autopilot part of your nervous the Autonomic Nervous System. Don’t act like you’re not impressed with that name.   It’s actually easier to remember as just the Automatic Nervous System, but that doesn’t sound as jazzy or give you an extra word to use to win a difficult Scrabble game.

Autopilot Settings

These autopilot functions bascially operate on one of two settings.  The big fancy words are sympathetic and parasympathetic; we’ll just call them “Fight or Flight” and “Feed and Breed”.

You may have heard of the term “Fight or Flight” before in reference to the stress response.  It’s what it sounds like.  When your body is under stress (feels threatened), it responds as it evolved to respond over the course of many thousands of years of living under dangerous conditions.  In short, it jacks you up temporarily so that you can fight like crazy or run like the devil.  So blood flow increases to the muscles, eyesight becomes more acute, stuff like that.

This temporary boost comes at a cost.  The other systems… the Feed and Breed systems… shut down to conserve energy so that the Fight or Flight systems can have everything.  So digestion, tissue repair, reproductive functions, all shut down, including the immune response. 

Your body is a survival expert.  It will kill you in the long term to keep you alive in the short term. After all, it’s no good to be able to digest your food nicely, if YOU’RE also being digested nicely by a sabre tooth tiger.  So the stress response is designed to get you out of a pickle, fast, and then shut down so that the regular maintenance fuctions (Feed and Breed) can take back over again.

Stress Is Stress

Much like “parts is parts”, stress is stress, according to your body.  Remember, the body does not think on a conscious level, it responds.  So any stress your body encounters, physical or otherwise, will be responded to the same way… Fight or Flight.  This includes emotional stress, which I’m sure you have very little of in your daily life.

Or, you could be like most people and have CONSTANT emotional stress.  And that’s where the real problem comes in.  Our physiology is designed to handle short bursts of stress followed by long pauses during which we can repair and maintain our bodies.  If we’re always stuck on RED ALERT, our bodies can’t ever switch back into the autopilot mode that lets us repair our bodies.

And so, things start falling apart.  Listen, your body is a complex piece of machinery.  It requires constant maintenance.  Individual cells are constantly dying off or wearing out and need to be replaced.  Nutrients need to be delivered.  Waste products need to be removed.

If the maintenace crew is constantly on break because your body thinks you’re at war, then all that stuff just doesn’t get done.  That’s why I say chronic stress makes you get sick and die young… but what I should say is it makes you get sick and get old before your time, because that’s what is really happening.

Less Stress Means Living Longer

So what can be done?  Well, the simple thing to do with stress is to avoid it as much as possible.  I’ve been talking about emotional stress in this article, but make no mistake, there’s other stresses, too… chemical being the next most common.

Such as, all the nasty chemicals we spray on our crops and dump in our water and spew into the air, or mix into things that we constantly come into contact with (like clothing or furniture).  All of that crap wasn’t around during the hundreds of thousands of years that our bodies evolved.  Some of those chemicals (most of them, really) are going to be recognized as a threat by your body and then… yep, you guessed it.  Red Alert.  Fight or Flight.

In other words, yet another reason to stick to unprocessed, organic whole foods and drink filtered water.  You’re not going to be able to eliminate all industrial chemicals from your life, but you can reduce some of the volume.

Emotional stresses are the tough one to deal with.  Our society is built around them. Mortagages, careers, student loan debt, family obligations… it comes at you from all sides.

Again, you’re not going to be able to get rid of all of it.  But try to at least not VOLUNTEER for extra stress in your life.  Keeping up with the Joneses is one of the most common (and useless) causes of stress out there.  Forcing yourself to work in a stressful job you hate and going to debt all to buy a bunch of crap you don’t need is a recipe for permenant, unrelenting stress that you could voluntarily avoid.

Surround yourself with positive, supportive people as much as you can.  A lot of emotional stress is due to mental outlook, and the more social support you have, the more likely you are to avoid over-reacting to life’s problems (which would just make a little bit of stress into a whole lot of stress).  The more positive social support a person has, the more they’re able to not “sweat the small stuff”.

We’re social creatures and we want some degree of acknowledgement from our peers, which a lot of us feel we have to create with lots of money or things or good looks or other material whatnot.  If you already have that acknowledgement from your friends and family, you’re not as likely to feel you have to chase after it with that whole materialistic Keeping up with the Joneses nonsense.

Series Recap

So if you’ve read through part one on how to live longer, and part two on living longer, you probably have realized that a lot of this stuff overlaps and feeds off of each other.  And, a lot of things you do for life extension in one area works for another.  So here’s a quick list of things you can do to keep from keeling over dead before your time:

• Eat whole, organic foods and drink filtered water.
• Exercise regularly.
• Get enough sleep and don’t eat right before bedtime.
• Cigarettes, alcohol, drugs in general… all are a no-go.
• Do your best to avoid other sources of toxins and supplement with antioxidants to deal with those you can’t avoid.
• Keep up with friends, family, and positive social support in general.
• Avoid taking on unnecessary garbage that will lead to more emotional stress.

Those are the basics, my friends.  Our time on this Earth is short enough.  No need to speed up the inevitable, so take care of yourself!

Ah, China.  Builders of the Great Wall, creators of a pictographic language used in countless American back tattoos, and, apparently, producers of the most horribly toxic export products in the world.

Yes, they’re at it again, this time with decorative glasses marketed to kids.  You know those fun, brightly colored glasses with likenesses of Wonder Woman, Spider Man, Shrek, and so on?  Turns out, a lot of what makes those colors so pretty is lead and cadmium. 

A lot of people have heard of the health dangers of lead, but cadmium is actually more dangerous.  Of course, that doesn’t stop manufacturers from continuing to use these materials, because after all, kids love bright colors and profits are profits.

The Associated Press actually commissioned their own testing of a bunch of these glasses and found some disturbing results.  How disturbing?  How about lead at 1,000 times the legal limit?  Some of the decorative enamel on these glasses clocked in at THIRTY PERCENT LEAD.

These weren’t knock-off or rare brands, either.  McDonald’s, Burger King, Coca-Cola, Disney… major brands, millions of drinking glasses with potentially dangerous levels of lead and cadmium.

The AP took a bunch of glasses ranging from decades-old to new and found that some of these glasses “shed” lead and cadmium at levels that may not make a child keel over immediately, but certainly could create problems with repeated exposure.  By “shed”, they meant particles of lead or cadmium that came off of the glass due to touching it repeatedly.

Be careful out there, parents.  You can’t trust manufacturers to police themselves, so be wary when buying decorative glassware or plastic items, especially if they’re fire engine red (that’s what cadmium is used for).

Source article:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40309111/ns/health-kids_and_parenting

Our anti-aging discussion continues with the hormonal component of living longer.  The endocrine system is extremely complex and inter-dependent, each hormone affected by others and affecting others as well, so discussing what one hormone does can get a little dangerous.  It creates the illusion that it’s easy to make one change without causing any others.

But, trying to deal with them all at once is too complicated, so we do have to split things up somewhat.  The main hormones we’ll be dealing with when it comes to how to live longer are HGH (Human Growth Hormone), insulin, and the sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen).

Living Longer:  Human Growth Hormone

HGH is pretty much what the name implies.  It makes little baby people turn into big adult people, and continues to stimulate the growth process (in terms of maintenance and response to exercise) throughout adult life as well.

More specifically, HGH does stuff like:

• increase muscle mass
• mineralize (increase calcium in) bone
• boosts the immune system
• makes internal organs grow/maintain themselves
• promotes fat burning
• general increased sense of well-being

Like most hormones, HGH secretion begins to drop off with age, to the tune of about a 10-15% decline per decade after 30.  Not surprisingly, people started experimenting with hormone replacement about 20 years ago, and found that as HGH levels were restored, there were some positive effects (mostly related to that list I just went over).

Replacing HGH is tricky, though, and expensive.  I talked to an expert on this (an MD who has been doing this in his clinic for years), and here’s what he told me.  First off, the body’s levels of HGH are not constant, they’re pulsatile; your body releases it in waves about every four hours or so.  The size of the pulses varies, too, so you have to inject your HGH at very specific times (usually very early in the morning).

Over-doing it also is a problem… just look at Sylvester Stallone.  Nobody’s really sure what the safety limits are, but the side effects of too much HGH are things like a thickened jaw, finger and toes, or sometimes an acquired diabetes or impotence.  And that’s just what we know about.

The bottom line is, I’d stick with more natural methods until a lot more mistakes get made on people other than you, and those issues work themselves out.  So what can you do about your HGH levels?  Well, you can either stimulate the secretion of HGH or prevent its decline.

The best way to stimulate HGH is through intense exercise.  The more intense the exercise, the bigger the surge.  Of course, you have to be careful not to go too crazy by trying to pick up a Volkswagen or something, because then you’ll just end up hurting yourself.

An interesting stimulant of HGH is ghrelin, a hormone released due to hunger.  There’s some studies out there on caloric deprivation leading to longer life in mice, which may be as a result of increased HGH secretion due to hunger.  Not that I’m recommending starving yourself or anything, but I found that connection interesting.

Sleep is an important part of HGH secretion.  The vast majority of HGH is released during sleep, especially one hour after falling asleep.  Which leads me into how to avoid LOSING Human Growth Hormone.

There are two big hormonal antagonists to HGH- insulin and cortisol.  Insulin, of course, is the blood sugar hormone, and surges way too high on intake of refined carbs.  So sugar and bread and all that stuff not only makes you fat, but old, too.  Awesome.

Related to that, remember that your biggest surge in HGH is one hour after bedtime… so don’t have any insulin floating around messing things up at that time.  In other words, no eating before bed.  Preferably, at least three hours before bedtime.

Cortisol is a stress hormone.  It has nice short-term anti-inflammatory effects, but the long-term effects are pretty nasty.  For this discussion, we’ll stick to its effects on HGH.  Simply put, it acts as an antagonist to HGH, reducing its effectiveness.  So, stress, sleep deprivation, and overloading on caffiene, will not just make you sick, but old before your time as well.

There are some supplements called HGH secretagogues that provide the body with natural enhancers to Growth Hormone production.  The main action seems to be from arginine, an amino acid that suppresses another hormone that acts to block HGH called somatostatin.  The expert I mentioned earlier claims that he’s tested people on secretagogues that had their HGH levels increase by 10-20%, but it takes months to get up to that level.    I don’t know of any official studies backing up those findings, but there is a study on arginine and increased growth hormone levels.

How To Live Longer:  Sex Hormones

Another big area for hormone replacement is with testosterone and estrogren, the two main sex hormones.  Like HGH, both of these tend to decrease with age, with undesirable consequences.  So this is another important factor to living longer.

I’m not going to go too much into HRT (hormone replacement therapy), because it’s not really my area, but I will re-interate that HRT is a tricky business and shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.  Too much of a hormone is just as bad as too little, and there’s a bad tendency in our culture to think that if a little of something is good, more is “more good-er”.

What I will talk about is natural ways to prevent decline or other interference with the sex hormones.  Let’s start with testosterone.

Testosterone, of course, is the Manly Man hormone, that makes boys into men and men want to drink beer and kill stuff.  Seriously, though, it is the masculinazing (I think that’s a word) hormone that is responsible for all kinds of physical and behavioral effects like the building up of muscle mass and bone density, and the various secondary male characteristics like facial hair, etc.

As I mentioned, testosterone levels decrease with age, but there’s ways to increase it naturally as well.  Vigorous resistance training will increase testosterone levels.  Proper amounts of sleep also promote the release of testosterone, at least during sleep.

There’s some interesting behavioral effects on testosterone as well, mostly concerning power (really, the perception of power).  Winning competitive events increases testosterone levels, and losing them decreases testosterone. Really, any perception of an increase in power, domination, or social status has a corresponding increase on testosterone, with the opposite being true for a loss in those areas.

So I guess the lesson there is, don’t take on a challenge you can’t beat!

There’s other little things that will decrease testosterone, like a zinc deficiency or eating too much licorice (I know, that one’s a little weird, isn’t it?).  Actually, though, the big threat to testosterone is environmental. 

Specifically, pro-estrogenic or estrogen-like chemicals that are present in the water, air, food- or anywhere, really- due to industrial contaminents.  These are contaminents like pesticides and herbicides as well as other chemicals, that have gotten so prevalent in our enviroment that there are places where fish are experiencing mass sex changes due to the levels of estrogenic compounds in the water.

That means pretty much every guy out there is being exposed to large levels of estrogenic compounds, which reverses the effects of testosterone.  Uh-oh.

It’s bad for women, too, by the way.  Remember, just because women need estrogen (actually, men need some too, just like women need some testosterone), doesn’t mean that more estrogen is more better-er. Sending hormones spiking out of balance is always a health problem.

So what can be done about these negative hormonal influences?  Well, the best thing is avoidance, so here’s another good reason to eat organic, whole foods… to avoid the estrogenic effects of the chemicals in refined foods.  Trying to minimize exposure to man-made chemcials in general is also a good idea… not always possible in today’s society, but the more you can avoid it, the better (you’ll remember from the last post on how to live longer that this also helps with avoiding free radicals).

Oh, and bad news for men… hops is very strongly estrogenic.  Yes, hops, as in, “used to make beer” hops.  In fact, there’s a condition called Brewer’s Droop that’s caused by a beer brewer handling so much hops that he absorbs it through his skin and begins having problems with, erm, “standing at attention”.  So if you beer drinkers want to stay being “real men”, you’d better start eating organic!

The intake of cruciferous vegetables (like broccoli) is also good for helping the body clear out toxins in general, and can help with removing excessive estrogenic compounds from the bloodstream.

All of these interventions are also obviously good for women, too, since as I mentioned, excessive estrogen is just as bad as too little.  In fact, being exposed to excessive estrogen likely reduces the body’s ability to make its own estrogen.  Any time you add extra hormones to the body from an outside source (like, say, anabolic steroids), your body begins to shut down its own production of that hormone, and eventually, the glands that produce them will atrophy (shrink up and get weak).

Soy is another plant that has pro-estrogenic compounds, and huge, raging debates go on all over the Internet about whether or not soy is a dangerous thing to consume.  To be quite honest, the evidence is conflicting and there’s no clear answer, so I’ll just say this.  Considering the potential for hormonal influence, it’s probably a good idea to avoid massive quantities of soy.  Not avoidance entirely… I don’t think that’s necessary… but if you’re guzzling down a gallon of soy milk and day and eating loads of fast food (which uses a ton of soy protein), then you might be causing problems for yourself.

So, to sum up, here’s a list of things to do to avoid problems with these major hormones involved with aging:

• Get vigorous exercise regularly
• Get sufficient sleep and don’t eat before bedtime
• Reduce your stress
• Stick to unrefined (whole) foods that are organic
• Filter your water and try to reduce exposure to man-made chemicals

Those are the major areas in which you can make a difference most easily before you go running to the doctor for HRT.  The natural methods to living longer are always the best ways.

By the way, an excellent book on testosterone, its effects on health, what can interfere with it, and details on its replacement, is The Testosterone Syndrome by Eugene Shippen.  Here’s a link to it on Amazon.  Another one I’ve read and thought was decent was The Natural Testosterone Plan, so you might want to have a look at that one as well.

Stay healthy!

Everybody wants to know how to live longer, right?  I mean, you don’t hear a whole lot about advice about how to shorten the typical life span.

Anti-aging is a big, BIG topic, however, so I’m going to break this up into three sections:  toxins, hormones, and the immune system.  There’s some overlap between the groups, but we’ll stick with that for simplicity’s sake.  Today’s post will be on toxins and free radicals, and we’ll cover the other two in successive posts.

How To Live Longer: Toxins

First off, quit smoking.  Yes, yes, yes, I know that’s cliche’ advice a thousand times over, but there’s a reason why it’s cliche’… because the evidence for it is so overwhelming.  Even a little bit of smoking is bad for you, as I discussed in this article on the smoking dangers of even a light habit. 

That article was just on the obvious downsides of smoking… lung cancer and emphysema.  But, there’s oh so much more that smoking will do.  As an example, as soon as you take a drag on a cigarette, you paralyze the cilia, or little itty bitty hairs that line your respiratory passages… you know, the tubes that carry AIR to your body.

Why are those little hairs important? Well, because they sort of wave around and push mucus up and out of the body to clear out all the gunk that gets trapped in it.  Okay, I know that’s a little gross to think about, but you know what’s even more gross to think about?  Tarry, filthy thick sludge that’s stuck in your lungs and respiratory tract because it ISN’T being cleared out on a regular basis.

This is an important part of the immune system, and even a little cigarette smoke paralyzes it and brings it to a standstill (I told you there would be some overlap between today’s catagories).  But wait!  There’s more!

Smoking is the poster boy of toxins because it’s a dramatic example of one of the main mechanisms by which toxins age you… free radicals.  I’ve written in more detail about free radicals in this post on how antioxidants work, and also in my free guide to nutritional supplements, but let me give you the quick version.

Free radicals are highly reactive molecules that damage anything they touch.  You can think of them almost like little bits of acid floating around, ruining whatever they come into contact with.  A commonplace example of the effect of free radicals is the rusting of metal.  

They occur naturally in the enviroment and in the body (due to regular metabolic processes like energy production), but contact with various toxins and pollutants REALLY ramps up your exposure to these little devils. 

Obviously, increased exposure to those toxins will increase how many free radicals you get bombarded with… or how much acid gets sprayed on you, if you like that metaphor. And these free radicals, once they get inside of you, tear down and break down your cells and tissues and organs bit by bit, until they slowly become less effective and eventually don’t work at all.

Sound like aging to you?  It should, because the action of free radicals is considered one of the main causes of aging.  Not only do free radicals directly break down the substance of your body, they mess with your genes as well.  That’s right, free radicals will eventually attack and break down portions of your very genetic code, altering the function of those genes.

Ever hear of cancer?  There’s a pretty good example of what can happen once DNA goes awry.  But that’s just a major, obvious end-result that we’ve managed to directly link to genetic damage… how many other minor, less noticeable diseases or ill effects are being caused throughout the body by genetic damage caused by exposure to toxins and free radicals?  Odds are, we’ll never sort all that out.

Avoid Toxins For Life Extension

What can you do about these free radicals so you can live longer?  Well, step one is avoidance, obviously, which is why I started this section off with “quit smoking”.  You’ve already got enough free radical nonsense to deal with from all of the industrial pollutants and toxins choking the environment; no need to go making things worse by VOLUNTEERING to pollute yourself further. 

That’s just plain silly.

Oh, and of course, there’s plenty of other ways to pollute yourself besides smoking, so here’s some common sources of toxins to avoid: 

• Other drug use, particularly recreational (that means you too, alcohol).
• Pesticides and herbicides in the food supply (which is why I buy organic).  There’s more to this than just toxins and free radicals.  Some of these chemicals can mess with your endocrine system (hormones), which I will discuss in more detail in tomorrow’s post on living longer. 
• Chemicals in the water supply (I always get the filtered stuff). This is actually a pretty big topic all by itself that I’ll be covering in another post.
• Perfumes, dyes, non-stick or non-stain sprays, coatings, and treatments.  I’m going to lump other industrial toxins and chemicals in here, particularly if you are exposed to them at work.
• The air:  this is a tough one to deal with, because it’s not like you can walk around with a gas mask on.  Well, I guess you could, but it would REALLY adversely effect your love life.  One decent solution is to use air filters in the home, which is an environment that you can somewhat control.  Something is better than nothing.

Living Longer With Antioxidants

Next, you can actually protect yourself from free radical damage, also called “oxidation”, by supplementing with…. “anti- oxidants”.  Do you see now why antioxidants are so popular?  They shield you from all that nasty damage caused by stupid free radicals so that you get to live longer.

The mechanism of how they do this is fairly simple… they neutralize free radicals by donating an electron.  Free radicals are so reactive and damaging because they’re missing an electron.  So, hand over a spare electron, and poof!  That free radical calms down and doesn’t hurt anybody.

Since antioxidants have plenty of electrons to spare, they’re great at making free radicals shut up and go away before they poke a hole in anything important.  You can see this with your own eyes with the following experiment:

Slice an apple in two and set the halves on a plate.  Soon enough, the flesh of the apple will turn brown- that’s oxidation and free radicals at work.  Now do the same thing, but coat the sliced apple flesh with lemon juice.  It won’t turn brown (or it will take a really long time).  That’s because lemon juice is chock full of Vitamin C, a basic antioxidant, which then protects the exposed apple from browning due to oxidative damage.

The “basic” antioxidants are Vitamins C, E, A, and selenium… you’ll find those in most multivitamins.  But I suggest you take some additional, more potent antioxidants because of all the pollutants floating around out there that you just can’t realisitically avoid.

One term for these heavy-duty antioxidants is “polyphenols”.  That term just refers to the molecular structure having many (“poly”) phenol groups.  That particular structure means polyphenols have a lot more electrons to donate, which means that’s just that many more nasty free radicals that can be neutralized.

Things that include polyphenols that you might have heard of include dark chocolate, green tea, and red wine.   The two big heavy-hitter antioxidant supplements I like (because there’s so many excellent studies supporting them) are called resveratrol and pycnogenol.  Resveratrol is a red wine extract, and pycnogenol is a pine bark extract that I’ve written about it in articles like this one on inflammation and antioxidants and this one on natural tinnitus relief.

Another solid antioxidant worth mentioning is Co-Q10, because it does its work in the mitochondria, which are like the power generators of each individual cell.  You can read more about Co-Q10 in this article on CoQ10, the little known antioxidant.

It’s a good idea to take a blend of various antioxidants, since each different type is good at operating in different parts of the body.  So a broad mix is better than super-dosing with just one kind.

Okie-dokie, that’s about it for our discussion of toxins, free radicals, antioxidants, and how to live longer by understanding this particular component of aging.  Next time, we’ll talk about hormones.

Stay healthy!

Okay, so maybe this isn’t exactly “health news”, but I found this study interesting.  Apparently, when women are ovulating, they tend to buy tighter, sexier clothes.

Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that.  There also has to be the perception of  potential “rival”.

Let me explain.  This study was conducted by the University of Minnesota, and basically consisted of taking 100 women, seperating them into groups according to where they were in their menstrual cycle, and them showing them pictures of attractive women who, they were told, either lived “nearby” or “far away”.

After they viewed those pictures, the women were asked what sort of clothing or other clothing-type accessories they would like to buy.  The results were pretty interesting.

If a woman was ovulating, AND she saw a picture of an attractive women who she thought “lived nearby”, she showed a definite preference for tighter, sexier clothing.  If the woman was not ovulating, or was ovulating but thought the attractive women in the pictures lived “far away” (more than 1000 miles away), there was no effect.

The researchers concluded that ovulating women will try to out-do potential rivals (the women in the pictures “living nearby”).  While it may not seem news that people will try to out-perform the romantic competition in an attempt to win the best mate, it fascinates me that this is strongly influenced by hormonal changes.

It’s just one more example that shows how our endocrine (hormonal) system can influence specific behavior, usually without our knowledge.  But what really blows me away on this is that the effect only takes place if a specific mental trigger is in place.

So it isn’t just hormones.  It isn’t just mental.  It isn’t even the sum of those two parts.  It’s the interaction of higher-order neurology (thinking) with hormones that creates the effect. 

This kind of intricacy is why I love studying the human body. More and more, links are being made between the endocrine system and the nervous system.  Usually, you hear about it in regards to the immune system, but this is a wonderful example of how the interaction of these two systems (which used to be thought of as totally seperate) effects other areas of our lives. 

And, it’s kind of funny, too, when you think about it.  Just wait until males get their comeuppance in a similar study!

Stay healthy!

Anybody here think that delicious genetically modified food is not dangerous?  Well, I have some bad news for you.  A study published in the International Journal of Biological Sciences shows that three varieties of genetically modified corn created by monolithic agro-giant Monsanto actually cause organ damage.

Fantastic.  Especially considering how Monsanto is rapidly trying to monopolize the seed market with their patentable GM crops, and the government seems just fine with that idea, seeing as how the Supreme Court recently lifted a ban on GM alfalfa seeds.  So even though we have scientific evidence that genetically modified crops are dangerous, the government’s reaction seems to be “Eh, big whoop.”

How Genetically Modified Corn Is Dangerous

Ah, where to start.  Well, how about this little gem of an excerpt from the article itself: “One corn (NK 603) has been genetically engineered to tolerate the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup and thus contains residues of this formulation.” (emphasis mine)

In other words, these genetically modified crops actually contain pesticide residue embedded within them.  Seeing as how our bodies evolved to break down and digest corn, not “corn with Roundup pesiticide stuck inside of it”, that little extra tidbit of chemistry might just cause some problems.

The Study

What’s wild about this study is, the researchers actually used data from Monsanto itself.  You see, Monsanto actually took rats and fed them GM corn for 90 days to see if there were any effect.  They reported that there wasn’t anything to see here, move along please.

However, it turns out, when you run a proper statistical analysis on their data, there ARE health effects that begin to crop up (pun fully, fully intended).  I’ve said it before… statistics DO lie, if you know how to mis-report them.

There’s a number of disturbing things that come to light as you read this article.  First off, Monsanto only did a study for 90 days?  Are you kidding me?  People are going to be eating this corn for a lot longer than 90 days.  Last I checked, average life expectancy for an American is around 70, 75 YEARS. 

Do you think we might just miss some stuff if we only look at effects over 90 days?  Especially since, as the authors of this study note, it takes one or two years to start noticing a lot of different disease processes beginning to take place (like cancer or immune disorders, among others). 

Also, they only did this one piddily quick-o study on only one species (rats).  If we’re going to be stuffing GM crops into people’s faces for the long term, which Monsanto definitely wants to do, maybe several, longer studies using a number of different species might be in order, no?

Bah, screw all that!  There’s money to be made!

Okay, so Monsanto did a lousy study that was too short and too narrow, so it’s not surprising that they found nothing… except, when you sift through the data correctly, even with this very brief study, evidence of organ damage still comes out. 

I’m not going to go into the particulars of how the study’s authors performed their statistical analysis, mostly because it’s extremely technical and tedious and would bore the hell out of you.  As one example, the authors discuss how male and female rats had significant differences in their level of liver and kidney damage, which makes sense due to gender differences in liver and kidney metabolism, but was dismissed and ignored in the original report.

The Results

So what exactly happened to the rats?  Liver and kidney damage, mostly.  This makes sense, since those two organs do the heavy lifting in detoxifying the body… and in case you were wondering, herbicides and pesticides are toxins.  The authors don’t discount the possibility that something about the mutation process of creating a genetically modified crop might also be responsible.

The effects seemed to be dose- and gender- dependent.  So there was a link between how much GM corn a rat got, and whether it was a boy or a girl.  The effects were also different for each of the three different varieties of GM corn tested.

Effects were also found in the heart, spleen, and adrenals, but not as much as the liver or kidneys.

So, to sum up, Monsanto did a poorly-designed, super-short study on only one species, fudged the statistical data so it didn’t look like anything happened, and on the basis of that, declared their genetically modified corn wan’t dangerous.  Once somebody took the time to sort the data out properly, even in a brief 90 day time span, evidence of organ damage had already started to appear.

And people wonder why I’m so vehemently against genetically modified foods.

Avoid creepy Monsanto GM corn and stay healthy!

Research article citation: http://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htm#headingA11

 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!