Total Health Breakthroughs: Alternative Solutions for Mind, Body, and Spirit

Have you noticed over the past several years that people are starting to get comfortable with the idea of carrying around “a few extra pounds?” I see this a lot in my new patients: the thinking that if you can work out “hard” you can be “fat but fit.”

Don’t believe it.

Take a recent conversation I had with one of my patients, who I’ll call Alice. She’s middle-aged. When she came to me she was “a little on the heavy side,” as she put it. I told her she really would have to drop the extra pounds to avoid heart disease and other serious health problems.

Also In This Issue:
Weight Loss: The Worst Addiction Ever: Part 1
Healthy Recipes: Chicken Capris

What is the addiction that is more difficult to manage and overcome than heroin, cocaine, speed or alcohol?

What addiction has a 95% recovery failure rate?

What highly addictive substance appears daily in the lives of every single American?

Would you buy a product that had a 95% failure rate?

Not one of us would buy a car or a computer that was known to fail 95% of the time. So why then do so many of us pay enormous amounts of money and give hours of our time to diets with a 95% failure rate??

Part 2: How HFCS Super-Sized Us

A number of studies have shown that when we drink our calories (as opposed to eat them), our brains will process information differently. Unlike solid food, liquid calories don’t satisfy hunger because they don’t suppress a hunger hormone called ghrelin which tells us to eat more. In an analysis of the eight-year Nurses’ Health Study II, it was shown that women who upped their caloric soft drink consumption from one soda per week to one or more per day gained weight and had a higher risk of type II diabetes.¹

Sodas are unquestionably linked to obesity, both the adult kind and the childhood kind. Research conducted in 2001 by David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston found that the odds of a teenager becoming obese increased a whopping 60% for each can or glass of sugar-sweetened soft drinks.²

Which brings us back to HFCS. “The low cost of high fructose corn syrup allowed the explosion of 20-oz sodas, Super Big Gulps and the like to happen,” C. Leigh Broadhurst, PhD, a research scientist and nutritionist at the USDA told me.

Part 1: The Results Are In…And They’re Not Good…

If you happened to have been away from your TV for the past month you might not have noticed that High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) appears to have a new press agent.

After years of media reports and scholarly articles¹ linking the increased consumption of HFCS with the growing obesity and diabetes epidemics, the makers of this stuff have had enough! They’re just not going to take it any more! For goodness sake, it’s made from corn! It’s wholesome! It’s no worse for you than sugar! What’s the big deal?

Well, as they say, let’s go to the videotape.

Sucrose, plain old table sugar, is a disaccharide, meaning it’s made up of two (di) simple sugars (saccharides) — fructose and glucose — linked together with a chemical bond. Fructose and glucose happen to be the very same simple sugars that make up HFCS. Table sugar is about 50% glucose and 50% fructose, while in most high-fructose corn syrups, the proportion is similar but not identical — 55% fructose and 45% sucrose.

Part 2 of a 2-part series

The use of fat and starch blocking diet aids is insanely counter-intuitive to me. I spend my life trying to get more nutrition into people, not less. Remember, anything that blocks the digestion and absorption of a macronutrient will also tend to block the absorption of micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals.

Part 1 of a 2 Part Series

In a world where the numbers of overweight and obese people only continue to climb, many people are desperate for any help they can get with weight loss. Sure, most people can lose weight following a low carb, or conversely, a low calorie, low fat diet — for a little while anyway. But long-term compliance continues to elude many people. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could eat all the carbs or all the fat you wanted and not gain weight?

If you are having difficulty losing weight even after dieting and exercising more, you are not alone. Over the years, I have helped probably thousands of people with the same problem, but I am finding this scenario to be much more common now than in the past. What I want you to know is that when you’ve tried everything and weight loss or lowering of blood sugar or lipids seems impossible, it could be that environmental toxins are disrupting your body.

Some pesticides, for instance, have been linked with suboptimal thyroid function and others to insulin resistance (IR). Certain pesticides that haven’t even been used for years, like DDT, are still a problem because they are so persistent in the environment, and from there can get into our bodies.

Researchers call these substances persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The insecticide, dieldrin, is an example. This organochlorine pesticide was used on cotton and corn from the 1950s until 1970. And although its use was banned on crops in 1974, it was still used for termite control until it was finally banned by the EPA completely in 1987. Because it is tightly bound to soil and it evaporates very slowly, dieldrin persists in the environment even though it’s no longer used.¹

So how does dieldrin affect us today? Plants absorb it from the soil, and water runoff carries the soil with the chemical into water supplies. When we eat plants grown in soil still contaminated with dieldrin, it enters our bodies. We can also get it from the flesh of animals eating contaminated plants or fish living in contaminated waters.¹

After being consumed, dieldrin is then stored in our body fat. And here’s the problem: dieldrin may be linked to disruption in the thyroid hormones, T4 and TSH. One study found that women with significantly high dieldrin in their blood had decreased T4 levels and increased TSH.

You certainly would have had to look far and wide to find a “no-spin” reporting zone a couple of weeks ago when the New England Journal of Medicine¹ published a headline-grabbing study comparing weight loss on one of three diets: (1) Mediterranean, (2) Low-Carb, or (3) Low-Fat.

I doubt if many headline writers or reporters bothered to read the entire 13-page study — they were too busy writing dramatic headlines. But God is in the details, and in this case, the details were pretty important. So let’s take a look at this fairly important study and talk about what it actually showed (and, also important, what it didn’t show).