- Cancer Diagnosis-Do Your Homework – YouTube
- “The amount of difference that you could see in the human body between starting a cancer treatment the day after you’re diagnosed and starting that same treatment 2 weeks or a month after… will have no difference in the outcome.”
- “I think the first thing somebody should do [after a diagnosis of cancer] is go home, relax… purchase 4 or 5 videos, where at least some of them have to be from holistic people, on cancer and cancer therapies and watch them all, preferably with a loved one, and take notes.”
- Safe, Natural Tips for Cancer Patients! – YouTube
- “We have to get rid of all the foods that we know are causing a problem… We want to reduce as much as somebody can those things that are going to feed cancer.”
- “You want to bring in all the foods as concentrated as possible… We want lots of good nutrients.”
- “Where else are poisons coming into your body? … We need less poisons coming into the body.”
- “We have to get your detox channels working… I always concentrate on supporting liver function and supporting kidney function…”
- “So first we get those 2 organs working really, really well… now we have to start removing poisons from our mesanchyme, from our intercellular spaces, from the cells in the body.”
- Maintaining Nutrition During Cancer – YouTube
- “We want the foods to be as nutrient-dense as possible… We have to make the best possible taste to the most nutrient-dense possible foods and very often that may end up being a smoothie.”
- We Are Causing Most of Our Cancers! – YouTube
- “Lots of people that die with one [cancer or cardiovascular disease] have the other…”
- CANCER: Doctor’s lack of knowledge can shorten your life – YouTube
- “We are exposed to far more chemical toxins than our bodies were ever designed to be able to handle and detoxify… We consume low-quality inferior nutrients from packaged foods, canned foods, preserved foods, irradiated foods, and even microwaved foods… Our immune system gets further depressed by… our consumption of far, far more sugar and sugar converting foods… than we were designed to healthfully process.”
Alternet: 7 Drugs Whose Dangerous Risks Emerged Only After Big Pharma Made Its Money
It is the business model for new drugs that provokes Big Pharma to bury risks and exaggerate benefits. A new drug under patent has a high price and no competition, and will make millions or even billions every year it is under patent. A settlement for death or injuries down the road is a nuisance and just the cost of doing business…
The 7 drugs profiled are: Vioxx, Fosamax, Lipitor, Nexium, Aderall, Paxil, and Ambien.
7 Drugs Whose Dangerous Risks Emerged Only After Big Pharma Made Its Money | Alternet
Research Collected: December 2013
pertussis, creativity, paternal dietary folate and pregnancy, gender gap in research funding, serotonin Continue reading ‘Research Collected: December 2013’ »
Examining overly simple models: Vitamin D Status
The default model of nutritional deficiency looks something like this:
- Marker for nutritional status is low
- Recommendation/treatment is to increase intake of that nutrient
The problem is that both of these points may be incomplete, to the point of leading to ineffective remedies.
Continue reading ‘Examining overly simple models: Vitamin D Status’ »
A Lifelong Fight Against Trans Fats
From the New York Times:
[Dr. Fred Kummerow] became a pioneer of trans-fat research, one of the first scientists to assert a link between heart disease and processed foods.
It would be more than three decades before those findings were widely accepted.
“Cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, except if it’s oxidized,” Dr. Kummerow said.
“You can have fine levels of LDL and still be in trouble if a lot of that LDL is oxidized,” Dr. Kummerow said.
“Eggs have all of the nine amino acids you need to build cells, plus important vitamins and minerals,” he said. “It’s crazy to just eat egg whites. Not a good practice at all.”
“What I really want is to see trans fats gone finally,” he said, “and for people to eat better and have a more accurate understanding of what really causes heart disease.”
A call to end the demonization of macronutrients
First, fat was declared to be bad, unhealthy, and disease promoting. Though this belief has hardly subsided there also arose a group of individuals declaring that carbohydrates were the real problem behind disease and should be avoided. Most recently there has been a push to declare protein as promoting poor health. All of these beliefs rest on a foundation of overly simplistic models that neglect the reality that all of these macronutrient groups are important to health. These models satisfy a need in people have certainty and simplicity in a complex and uncertain world. The problem is that they do not serve the health of the public or individuals.
While changing the macronutrient composition of an individual’s diet may be health promoting it is problematic to promote the hypothesis that there is a single macronutrient change that will benefit everyone. So rather than worrying about how much fat/carbohydrates/protein one is consuming here are some better places to put that energy:
Continue reading ‘A call to end the demonization of macronutrients’ »
Research Collected: October 2013
- Dietary carbohydrate dictates development of Type 2 diabetes in the Nile rat. (2013 Sep)
- Suggests that the Nile rat has a similar etiology of Type 2 diabetes mellitus to humans: high carbohydrate diets.
- “Dispersing dietary [carbohydrate] by fiber or replacing it by moderate fat (reducing the glycemic index and load) delayed the onset of diabetes but did not prevent signs of insulin resistance. A very low content of dietary [carbohydrate] (high fat) seemed to prevent even these early indicators of insulin resistance.”
- Comparison Between the Effects of Continuous and Intermittent Aerobic Exercise on Weight Loss and Body Fat Percentage in Overweight and Obese Women: A Randomized Controlled Trial (2013 Aug)
- 45 women in 3 groups: control, continuous exercise (40min per day in 1 session, 5 days per weeks), intermittent exercise (40min per day in 3 sessions, 5 days per week)
- “A self-monitoring calorie-restrict diet was recommended to all participants.”
- weight loss after 12 weeks:
- control: 2.0kg / 4.5lbs
- intermittent: 3.3kg / 7.3lbs
- continuous: 1.2kg / 2.7lbs
- suggests intermittent exercise is more effective than continuous
- not addressed:
- why did the continuous group lose less weight than the control group?
- if 2.0kg / 4.5lbs of weight loss is attributable to calorie restriction, what happened to the weight of those women when removing that restriction?
- Obesity and Mortality Risk: New Findings From Body Mass Index Trajectories. (2013 Sep)
- “we defined 6 latent BMI trajectories: normal weight downward, normal weight upward, overweight stable, overweight obesity, class I obese upward, and class II/III obese upward. Using survival analysis, we found that people in the overweight stable trajectory had the highest survival rate, followed by those in the overweight obesity, normal weight upward, class I obese upward, normal weight downward, and class II/III obese upward trajectories.”
- A summary from highest to lowest survival in 9,538 adults aged 51 to 77 years
- overweight stable
- overweight obesity
- normal weight upward
- class I obese upward
- normal weight downward
- class II/III obese upward
The importance of access to health research
I don’t think the importance of Ancel Keyes’ so-called “Seven Countries Study” can be understated in regard to its effect on US health policy and beliefs. If someone wanted to examine this 60-year-old paper for themselves they would find obtaining any information about it very difficult to obtain. It can be found in PubMed (assuming one knows the actual title: Atherosclerosis: a problem in newer public health) but there is not even an abstract published, let alone the full text of the paper. And if one were inclined to read the 2 peer-reviewed rebuttals (that I’m aware of) to that paper published a couple of years afterwards those are similarly unavailable. A couple of days ago EFF weighed in on the subject of public access to health research:
In the digital age, it is absurd that ordinary members of the public, such as healthcare professional and their patients, cannot access and compare the latest research quickly and cheaply in order to take better care of themselves and others.
— A Case Study in Closed Access
Since 2008 all research funded by the NIH must be submitted to PubMed Central within 12 months of publication in a journal (NIH Public Access Policy Details). While this is a huge step forward there are still issues with the availability of older research both publicly and privately funded. It is important, especially in matters of health and public health policy, that people have access to the relevant research.
Fruit Oils
I was just thinking about how the oils I tend to use are all fruit oils:
- Coconut Oil
- Palm Oil
- Olive Oil
I’m not sure if there’s any significance to that but I thought it was noteworthy.
The Sad Life of Ignaz Semmelweis
Ignaz Semmelweis’ life paints a portrait of those who make profound discoveries which are deem unscientific by the contemporary medical and scientific communities. Despite his successes in reducing mortality of puerperal fever, aka childbed fever, his ideas were rejected by most scientists and physicians at the time. His attempts and failure to convince doctors of the importance of sanitizing their hands and instruments led to his increasing erratic behavior, thus reinforcing the belief of his critics that he was crazy. And there is more to the story that is even sadder. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider whether something similar could still happen today.