Whole Body Health and Healing

11/10/2023

One of the most important predictors of your cardiovascular health is your diet.

08/16/2023

-Protein Source and Longevity-
For some reason our society has become protein-obsessed, and while we need protein, (just as we need carbohydrates and fats), different protein sources affect our health differently. If you look at the largest cohort study on diet and health in history, the NIH-AARP study, they found that replacing just 3 percent of energy from animal protein with plant protein was associated with a 10 percent lower overall mortality in both men and women and cardiovascular disease mortality (the number one cause of death in America).

It should be noted that of all the animal protein sources, eggs were the worst. Swapping in 3 percent plant protein for egg protein was associated with twice the benefit, exceeding 20 percent lower mortality in men and women. If you think eggs are a healthy way to get your protein, think again!

AARP study NIH AARP NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study (NIH-AARP Diet and Health) was developed at NCI to improve our understanding of the relationship between diet and a wide range of malignancies.

08/04/2023

😂

07/24/2023

A newly published study examined 8,690 foods contained in the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies and found the foods that are highest in prebiotics. Prebiotics are best described as foods that feed and promote healthy gut bacteria. For more information, click on the article.
Foods highest in prebiotics include dandelion greens, Jerusalem artichoke, garlic, leeks, onions, cowpeas, asparagus, and Kellogg's All-Bran cereal.

There is growing evidence that consuming prebiotics—certain types of fiber often found in plants that stimulate beneficial bacteria in your gut—can help to maintain a healthy gut microbiome. In a new study, scientists estimated the prebiotic content of thousands of food types by using preexistin...

05/04/2023

It should come as no surprise that highly processed foods are (as a rule) not good for our long term health. This is also accumulating data indicating that these foods are not good for psycho-emotional (mental) health as well. Here are some highlights of the article.

• Roughly 60% of the calories in the average American diet come from highly processed foods. (In Canada this is around 50%)
• Diets high in highly processed foods are strongly associated with increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cancer.
• These foods appear to have a significant impact on our minds, too.
• Research from the past 10 years has shown that the more ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) a person eats, the higher the chances that they feel depressed and anxious.
• A few studies have suggested a link between eating UPFs and increased risk of cognitive decline.
• “Ultraprocessed foods include ingredients that are rarely used in homemade recipes — such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, protein isolates and chemical additives” like colors, artificial flavors, sweeteners, emulsifiers and preservatives, This classification system is now used widely by nutrition researchers.
• UPFs make up a majority of the packaged foods you find in the frozen food aisles at grocery stores and on the menu at fast-food restaurants — 70% of the packaged foods sold in the United States are considered ultraprocessed. They’re increasingly edging out healthier foods in people’s diets and are widely consumed across socioeconomic groups.
• “Ultraprocessed foods are carefully formulated to be so palatable and satisfying that they’re almost addictive,” said Dr. Eric M. Hecht, a public health researcher at the Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University.
• Diets that are high in ultraprocessed foods are typically low in fiber, which is mostly found in plant-based foods like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Fiber helps feed the good bacteria in the gut. Fiber is also necessary for the production of short-chain fatty acids, which play an important role in brain function.
• Chemical additives in UPFs might also have an impact on gut flora. “Emerging evidence — mostly from animal studies, but also some human data — suggests that isolated nutrients (like fructose), additives such as artificial sweeteners (like aspartame and saccharin) or emulsifiers (like carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate-80) can negatively influence the gut microbiome,” Marx said.
• Poor gut microbiota diversity — as well as a diet high in sugar — may contribute to chronic inflammation, which has been linked to a host of mental and physical issues.

----- How to recognize ultraprocessed foods -----

The best way to identify ultraprocessed foods is to read product labels. “A long list of ingredients, and especially one that includes ingredients you would never use in home cooking,” are clues that the food is ultraprocessed, said Whitney Linsenmeyer, an assistant professor of nutrition at Saint Louis University in Missouri and a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Chemical names, unpronounceable words, and anything you would be unlikely to find in a kitchen cabinet are often signs that a food is in the ultraprocessed category.

Roughly 60% of the calories in the average American diet come from highly processed foods. We’ve known for decades that eating such packaged products — like some breakfast cereals, snack bars, frozen meals and virtually all packaged sweets, among many other things — is linked to unwelcome heal...

05/03/2023

Low-Carb Diets Found to Increase Mortality Risk by up to 38%, and Keto Diets Increase Mortality Risk by up to 28%

A study published this week in the Journal of Internal Medicine, based on research from Harvard University and Tulane University looked at data of 371,159 participants aged 50 to 71 dating back to the 1990s, a**lyzing the links between diet and length of life.

Participants were split into two groups, comparing those who ate the least carbs with those who ate the most carbs – and it turns out cutting them out isn't a good idea for your long-term health.

Meanwhile, a low-fat diet, another popular choice for those aiming to lose weight or boost their fitness, is shown to reduce your risk of early death each year by up to 34%. They found that eating a low-carb diet showed patterns contributing to an early death, with people on keto-style diets 28% more likely to die from any cause, compared to those eating high-carb diets. However, those on a low-fat diet, regardless of whether this was 'healthy' or 'unhealthy', reduced their likelihood of an early death compared to those on high-fat diets. The risk of dying from any cause each year was down 21% on any type of low-fat diet, and down 34% on a healthy one.

Specifically, low-fat diets were associated with a lower cardiovascular mortality of 16% and lower cancer mortality of 18%.

Don't fear carbohydrates! If you want to avoid anything, avoid processed food and a high fat diet.

Journal of Internal MedicineEarly View Original ArticleFree to Read Low-carbohydrate diets, low-fat diets, and mortality in middle-aged and older people: A prospective cohort study Yimin Zhao,  Yimin Zhao Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Peking University, Beij...

04/27/2023

Better yet, let's not even call it exercise; just call it "movement".
Some of the longest lived groups of people on the planet (those living in the Blue Zones) don't do formal exercise, but their routine involves a lot of movement.

04/17/2023

Flax seeds are your friends. To obtain the most benefit, don't forget to grind them before consumption.

Lignans are an anticancer plant compound found throughout the plant kingdom and may be beneficial for breast and prostate cancer prevention. Lignans can be found in foods, such as sesame seeds, whole grains, and cruciferous vegetables, but flaxseeds are the world’s most concentrated source. They may contain up to 800 times more lignans than any other foods. Just a teaspoon a day can give you your daily dose, but make sure it is ground flaxseed so the nutrients can be absorbed. Those who eat more plant-based foods may consume up to eight times more lignans on a daily basis than those eating a diet heavy in animal products.

A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial of flaxseeds in breast cancer patients found that flax appears to have the potential to reduce human breast tumor growth in just a matter of weeks. Flaxseed consumption may play a role in preventing and treating breast cancer by blocking the inflammatory effects of interleukin-1 (IL-1). An inflammatory molecule, IL-1 may help tumors feed, grow, and invade. Our body produces an IL-1 receptor antagonist that binds to the IL-1 receptor and blocks IL-1's action, and the activity of this protective inhibitor can be boosted with the drug tamoxifen or by eating flaxseeds. One month of flax was able to increase the anti-inflammatory inhibitor levels by more than 50 percent, better than even the drug.

Now, lignans are not a magic bullet to prevent breast cancer. You can’t just sprinkle some flax on your bacon cheeseburger. As part of a healthy diet and lifestyle, though, lignans might help to reduce breast cancer risk in the general population.

Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen recommends 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseeds each day. Learn more about the Daily Dozen at https://nutritionfacts.org/daily-dozen/.

See the research studies and learn more by visiting the following pages on NutritionFacts.org:
"Can Flaxseeds Help Prevent Breast Cancer?" at https://bit.ly/3EK8C6Q
Lignans topic page at https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/lignans/
Flaxseed topic page at https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/flax-seeds/

03/22/2023

Constipation and Fibre

Nearly 60 million Americans suffer from chronic constipation, a condition more commonly experienced in women and the elderly. Constipation is not only incredibly uncomfortable; there are also extremely painful complications such as a**l fissures often associated with this condition.

If we are talking about constipation, then we are largely talking about your fibre intake, though food allergies and conditions such as gut motility also play a role. What you need to know from the get-go is that animal products contain ZERO fibre. If you have issue with constipation, the first strategy to experiment with is reducing animal products and removing all dairy from your diet. A 2013 crossover dietary trial found that 100% of children with constipation issues experienced constipation and a**l fissure relief simply by removing dairy from their diet.

As I often say, your health is related as much as to what you don’t eat as what you do eat. The “don’t” where constipation is concerned is foods that your gut might have an allergic reaction to, and the ‘do” is fibre. Now as important as fruits and leafy vegetables are in our diet, they are sadly, a poor source of plant fibre. This is because they are ninety percent water. Root vegetables have more fibre, but the real fibre superstars include legumes (beans, split peas, chickpeas, lentils) and whole grains.

Another important point is that gram for gram, fibre from fruits doesn’t seem to have the same effect on our stool output. It may take 25 grams of fruit fibre to double stool output, whereas you only need 10 grams of whole-grain fibre or vegetable fibre to do the same thing.

The standard non-pharmaceutical treatment for constipation is to add prunes (dried plums) to your diet. Prunes alone outperform prescription medications providing constipated participants a bowel movement frequency of 3.5 BM/week. (Metamucil provided 2.8 BM/week.) The only thing that works better than prunes is a vegan diet which was found to provide 10.9 BM/week in study participants.

The average North American only consumes half the recommended amount of fibre in their diet. “Populations in most Western countries must be considered by world standards to be almost universally constipated. Here, it’s an epidemic among the elderly, but it’s simply not a problem among those centring their diets around fibre-rich foods.”

While we are talking about fibre, we now know that it does so much more than improve our stool. “If you eat some whole grain barley for supper, by the next morning your good gut bacteria are having it for breakfast, releasing butyrate into our bloodstream—a compound that seems to exert broad anti-inflammatory activities, which could help explain why significant decreases in the prevalence of inflammation are associated with increasing dietary fibre intakes.”

https://nutritionfacts.org/2013/09/17/prunes-metamucil-or-a-plant-based-diet/
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/friday-favorites-is-fiber-an-effective-anti-inflammatory/
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/childhood-constipation-and-cows-milk/
https://nutritionfacts.org/2013/09/17/prunes-metamucil-or-a-plant-based-diet/

Constipation is a common problem that affects up to 20 percent of the world’s population. Nearly 60 million Americans suffer from chronic constipation,

03/21/2023

How did bacon and eggs become the standard American breakfast when we knew decades ago that oatmeal had powerful health-promoting properties? This three-part video series from NutritionFacts looks into some of the current science surrounding oatmeal and health.
Below are some of the main points raised in this evidence-based video.

• Diets high in animal fat and processed foods are an important risk factor for development of type 2 diabetes.
• It’s not just animal fat, but animal protein intake intensifies insulin resistance, which predisposes people to type 2 diabetes.
• Our health is affected as much by what we eat as by what we do NOT eat.
• Oatmeal was used for the treatment of diabetes before insulin was discovered.
• We’ve long known that higher consumption of whole grains, including oats, is associated with a lower risk of diabetes.
• There have been over a dozen randomized controlled trials looking at the metabolic effects of oats intake in patients with type 2 diabetes. Oats were found to significantly improve both short-term blood sugar control and long-term blood sugar control, in addition to lowering cholesterol levels.
• One of the ways that oatmeal helps with cholesterol levels and blood sugar control might be its microbiome-manipulating ability––in other words, having a beneficial effect on our intestinal bacteria (the anti-inflammatory effects of the short-chain fatty acids that our good gut flora makes from fibre).
• There are dozens of randomized controlled trials showing the types of fibre found in oats and beans can improve long-term blood sugar control in diabetics—in fact, nearly double the FDA threshold required for new blood sugar-lowering drugs.
• On the basis of 50 distinct bacterial markers of the f***s, you can tell who does and does not have diabetes. But change your diet, and you can change your gut flora within one day!
• Put people on a diet packed with oats, beans, fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and the number of fibre-feeders churning out the beneficial short-chain fatty acids shoots up, and fasting diabetic blood sugars drop about 25 percent within one month. And the more fibre-feeders they fostered, the better their blood sugar control.
• When the fibre-promoted short-chain fatty acid producers were present in greater diversity and abundance, participants had better improvement in their hemoglobin A1c levels (which is a measure of longer-term blood sugar control). Then, before-and-after f***l transplant studies helped nail down cause and effect.
• Oat fibre itself has been shown to act as a prebiotic, boosting the growth of beneficial bacteria like lactobacillus and bifidobacteria.

The prebiotic fiber in oats helps to explain why oatmeal can improve diabetic control.

03/15/2023

For some reason as soon as you talk about diet, people are suddenly concerned about protein intake, and yet protein deficiency isn’t even really a thing in North America. Of the top (deficiency) nutrients of concern, protein doesn’t even show up on the list, but what always tops that list is fibre. According to Canadian food guidelines, women need 25 grams of fibre per day and men need 38 grams of fibre per day. Sadly, most Canadians are only getting about half that much.

Interestingly these public guidelines for fibre might be sub-optimal if we want better cardiovascular health at a population level. A 2013 study on stroke prevention published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that 25 grams a day of soluble fibre (found in beans, oats, nuts, and berries) along with 47 grams a day of insoluble fibre (found primarily in whole grains) was highly preventative for strokes. One would have to eat an extraordinarily healthy diet to get that much, yet these cut-off values could be considered as the minimum recommended daily intake of soluble and insoluble fibre, to prevent stroke. The study authors admit these are higher than those commonly proposed as “adequate” levels by governmental bodies, but as Dr. Greger says, “Do we want to be patronized as to what authorities think is practical, or do we want them to just tell us what the science says?” Food for thought. 😄

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/nutrients/fibre.html Canadian Fibre Guidelines
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23317525/ Casiglia E, Tikhonoff V, Caffi S, Boschetti G, Grasselli C, Saugo M, Giordano N, Rapisarda V, Spinella P, Palatini P. High dietary fiber intake prevents stroke at a population level. Clin Nutr. 2013 Oct;32(5):811-8. doi: 10.1016/j.clnu.2012.11.025. Epub 2012 Dec 28. PMID: 23317525.

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-to-prevent-a-stroke/

Insufficient intake of fiber-rich foods may lead to the stiffening of our arteries associated with risk of having a stroke.

03/15/2023

Fibre may not be a sexy subject, but there is likely no greater indicator of the quality of your diet than how much fibre you eat per day. You will find fibre in all whole plant foods. It is not present in animal foods, and processed food often contains little fibre.

Insufficient intake of fiber-rich foods may lead to the stiffening of our arteries associated with risk of having a stroke. Therefore, a high dietary fiber intake may be beneficial for stroke prevention. Watch the video “How to Prevent a Stroke” at https://bit.ly/2C6odia to learn more.

As Dr. Greger discussed in the video “Vegetarians and Stroke Risk Factors—Vegan Junk Food?,” eating vegan or vegetarian doesn’t mean you’re eating healthfully. It’s important to eat a variety of high fiber, whole plant foods for disease prevention. (See https://bit.ly/33S1H9H.)

The Daily Dozen can be a tool to get you started on eating a higher-fiber diet, as it’s packed with wholesome plant-based foods—specifically, legumes, whole grains, fruits, veggies, nuts, and seeds.

While a plant-based diet may be beneficial for preventing a number of chronic diseases, the cardiovascular benefits of plant-based diets may be severely undermined by vitamin B12 deficiency. (See https://bit.ly/2HvpHD6.) And, a regular, reliable source of B12 for those eating a plant-based diet may be beneficial for stroke prevention. (See https://bit.ly/3gyVrIh.)