Achy Bones: Osteoarthritis

I thought we’d share some on arthritis today because it is a significant problem and probably the number one cause of disability in America.  About 50% of adults over the age of 65 have arthritis that impairs normal daily activities.  We’re talking over 20 million people with osteoarthritis and another 10 million with other kinds of arthritis.  It’s an incredibly disabling event that is happening to a large percentage of adult America.  I thought it would be interesting for us to gain a little knowledge and understanding of that area.

In truth, the term arthritis is kind of a catch-all for multiple problems.  In fact there are probably over 100 conditions that could cause arthritis.  It’s a highly diverse topic.  By and large probably 40 – 50% of all arthritis would fall under the category of osteoarthritis.  There are others: gouty arthritis, lupus arthritis, fibromyalgia, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.  There are all different kinds of arthritis.  I thought we might cover osteo today and maybe next week work on some of the other arthritises.  They are really different things completely.  What they have in common is that they just all manifest in the joints.  It looks like the same critter but there are a lot of different possibilities there.

So what is arthritis?  It’s a condition of the joints that is usually characterized by pain and stiffness with limited range of motion and swelling.  As I just mentioned there are a hundred different things that cause that.  It can involve, also, the immune system and even other organs in the body including the bowel and spleen and liver and other parts of the body and has significant implications for other parts of the body.  But when we think of the term arthritis we usually think of joints and joint pain.

Certainly the most common joints affected are our fingers.  Usually the knuckle joint first and then the next up.  These joints in our hands are the most commonly affected.  However, the ones that get us the worst are usually hips and knees.  Those are the big ones that wind up in surgery.  When you think of the economics of having a huge problem that you have to deal with you usually think of hips or knees, but by far and away the most common daily problem that we encounter is arthritis and osteoarthritis of the hands.

As far as male/female it’s usually about 50% of women, about 40% of men.  That may be due to calcium loss during pregnancy and things like that.  It could also be related to less exercise.  There are a lot of things we don’t know about it.  We have some statistical numbers, but that doesn’t necessarily relate to fact or reality of what is actually going on there.  You can take some guesses.  If women have it more than men, maybe it’s because of babies.  Maybe it’s because they aren’t as physically active.  Who knows?  We really don’t know the answers to those questions.

What’s going on in that joint when osteoarthritis occurs?  Normally is there is cartilage on the surfaces so that the bones don’t rub bone to bone.  Then you have a little sack around the joint called the bursa that holds fluid on there.  It’s kind of a lubricant on the two joints which are surfaced with cartilage.  That cartilage begins to break down.  Realize that cartilage doesn’t have any blood.  It has no nerves and it has no lymphatics.  It’s kind of a unique tissue in the body.  It grows slower than molasses.  It’s like brain cells.  They grow very slowly and reproduce very slowly.  It’s a different sort of situation that the muscles or other tissues of the body, even kidneys or liver or bowel because it grows so very slowly.  Cartilage is composed of about 95% water.

So those joints begin to get inflamed, whatever may be the cause of it, and there are lots of different causes.  Osteoarthritis begins to happen a lot of times even in your teenage years.  By the time you’re 50, half of us have some osteoarthritis.  By the time you’re 70 it’s almost universal.  

It’s interesting as you look at different other vertebrates in the animal kingdom. Most people might think you get arthritis because you’re walking and standing.  But whales and porpoises have arthritis.  They’re surrounded by water, that’s a pretty good cushion.  It’s interesting that the only two animals that don’t get arthritis are bats and tree sloths which hang upside down to sleep.  So let’s hear it for the inversion tables here.  I propose that we have a study.  Anyone who wants to enter my study to sleep upside down on an inversion table every night, we’ll publish a paper in about 10 years and tell whether that had an effect on you.  I’m just joking about that. But it would be interesting to see if people that use inversion tables daily have a little less arthritis.

Anyway, you’ve got this cartilage which has no nerves, no blood vessels, no lymphatics.  You’d think that trauma would have a lot to do with causing arthritis.  If trauma were a cause then long-distance runners would all have osteoarthritis.  They don’t.  They don’t get it at any different rate than the rest of us.  

There are only a couple of things that are known to prevent osteoarthritis.  One is weight control.  If you are over weight you should modify that and change that.  Exercise, you might think, would pound the cartilage, causing damage.  Actually this is beneficial because there are no blood vessels going to it.  The way it gets its nutrition is by compression and relaxation.  It kind of pumps the fluid of the joint in and out of the cartilage surfaces as you exercise.  That’s why you would think, okay, my joint is hurting, I should stop using it.  Instead, the exercise is beneficial to it because it pumps nutrients and oxygen into the cartilage surface.

Treatments – the common varieties such as acetaminophen, aspirin, and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatories are hugely and broadly used with some significant benefit.  There are also downsides to a lot of those.  The acetaminophen can harm the kidneys; the non-steroidal drugs may cause bleeding from the bowels.  

Natural things that are of benefit I would put fish oil right at the top of things I would do to keep my joints healthy and functional.  If you’ve got some osteoarthritis, certainly chondroiton sulfate and glucosamine are highly beneficial.  Curcumin is a known anti-inflammatory.  There are others such as nettle leaf.  And I certainly won’t forget MSM.  Those are good things that have benefit for osteoarthritis.  

We’ll talk about some of the other forms of arthritis next week and what we can do about those.

Preventing Cancer

Okay, last week we talked about some of the traditional cures you’ll find for cancer in the medical field, and a little about the effectiveness of those treatments. Now we’ll ask the question, what can I do to prevent cancer or maybe treat it more naturally? Again, let’s go back to the causes. We’ll start with the number one cause, emotional issues. I tell every patient that I have, every one that I ever advise, two primary things: you have to be living in forgiveness and living in love. Forgiveness is the greatest emotional issue of life. You might have heard myself and my friend Dr. Loyd both talk about that in the past through The Healing Codes. I encourage you to go and investigate more of that because forgiveness is the greatest issue of life. 

Unforgiveness simply ties you to that person you don’t forgive. It doesn’t hurt them at all. You’ve got to let it go and cut the rope. You’ve got to be living in forgiveness. The positive side of that is living in love. That restores the joy to your life, and happiness.  Happiness is not about stuff, it’s about where you’re living your life. Those are emotional issues. That all relates to cellular memory and the other things that Dr. Loyd and I love to talk about.

Hypoxia. If you’ll remember, we talked about low oxygen tension in the blood a few weeks ago. That’s a huge one. How do you get the oxygen tension up in your blood? By changing your pH. The way to do that is to eat alkaline-ash foods and drink alkaline water. Those are really important issues if you’re trying to prevent cancer or get better if you have it. You want your body PH to be alkaline. That allows oxygen to turn loose out there on the other end and oxygenate the tissues. If cells can just have oxygen they can work miracles as far as staying healthy and utilizing the energy and the resources that they’ve got.  

What are alkaline-ash foods? Basically that’s lots of vegetables, less meat, healthy fruits.  That’s it in one sentence or less. You’ve got to move the pH and shift that.  

Environmental toxins – I’ve mentioned heavy metals earlier. Unfortunately there are not many natural ways to get heavy metals out of our bodies. EDTA and DMPS, DMSA are FDA approved drugs. They remove metals very effectively from the body and they have virtually no side effects. This is one place where I’m just going to recommend drugs. If you have heavy metal toxicity, if you have a “silver” filling in your mouth then you have heavy metal toxicity. If you live in America and drink water that comes through our pipes and breathe the air that has metal in it and live in a city where everything is metallic, then you probably have enough heavy metals where you need to get some out of your system. It dumbs down the immune system and the immune system can’t deal with heavy metals very easily.  

There are all kinds of other environmental toxins that you want to decrease your exposure to those: pesticides, all kinds of chemicals. Wash your food or if you can afford it buy organic. If you can’t buy organic, at least wash your fruits and vegetables off with hydrogen peroxide or other detoxifiers and neutralizers that are designed for that.  

On the positive side you can be taking anti-oxidants. That’s spelled f-r-u-i-t usually: blueberries, blackberries, grapes, grapeseed extract, wine, all different kinds of fruit. You can help yourself out and buy a good anti-oxidant formula from your nutrition store that would have grapeseed extract in it, alpha-lipoic acid, vitamins C, vitamin E and other anti-oxidants. Those are very, very significant.  

If I had a choice and I could only take my vitamin pill every day or my anti-oxidant, I would probably choose my anti-oxidant. They are just huge. We have so many oxidizing things in our environment that anti-oxidants are very significant.  

The food, the way it’s grown and processed and delivered to us these days, have significantly less anti-oxidants in it than if you grow your own in the garden.  You may need a boost there from those.

Radiation. Well, the best way to probably avoid radiation is not to go to the doctor’s office and get X-rays. Let’s talk about testing here for a little bit. There are common uses of X-rays. There are radiation studies like PET scans and different uptake studies, and there are CT’s. These are all using radiation. There is also a test called MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) with which you can see almost everything you can see on a CT (even better sometimes), that doesn’t have radiation.  There is also ultrasound. The point is, there are other ways to study things without radiation.

Stay out of sun beds, tanning beds and things like that. Stay out of the sun during solar flares. On the other hand, we probably should get 15-20 minutes of direct sun every day. It’s pretty healthy for you because you need your vitamin D3 which helps prevent cancer.  It’s very, very healthy for you. It’s the over exposure where we go out for an hour or two when we’ve been inside under the fluorescent lights all the rest of the week that is so damaging.

We’ve mentioned viruses as a cause of cancer. There’s just not a whole lot to do about viruses except to keep your immune system totally up to speed. Staying out of stress is probably the number one thing. Orally there are some things that are probably good for helping your immune system fight viruses.  These include the arabano dilactan, beta 1-3 glucans, things like that available at a nutrition store.  

Alternative medically there is hydrogen peroxide, ozone, ultraviolet blood irradiation that can help and silver may be an agent that may help with viruses.  

That’s a wrap on our talk on cancer.  I know I’ve dwelt on the topic for a while, but I wanted to share that with you. Hopefully it will be valuable information for you that will be of some practical benefit. It’s a huge subject and we could talk about it for hours.  There are books written about it inches thick. In comparison this is less than a thumbnail sketch, but there it is.  

Standard Treatments for Cancer & Why They May Not Work

We’re continuing from last week. We talked about cancer, what it is, a little bit about cancer cells and the causes of cancer. If you didn’t see that post I urge you to go back and look at it.  It will be very informative.

Let’s talk about how standard medicine treats cancer and then we will move on to other possibilities next time. There are currently three ways to treat cancer: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Let me say this very loud and clear. If you are going to get a standard medical cure for your cancer it should probably be surgery. That is: if the cancer is singular, if it is still one single tumor, if it hasn’t spread yet, and if they can go in and do a good “no touch” technique and remove the whole thing. You notice there are a lot of “if’s” in there.  If they can do all that and get it out, then you do have a chance of a standard medical cure, and that would be surgery.

The caveat to that is if they don’t get it all or if they biopsy it and run a needle through it cutting across lymphatics and veins and go through that tumor and back out again. Or they might not do good surgical technique when removing it. In either case, they have just spread it. That would be a problem. The point stands, however, that surgery would be the best standard medical cure, given the right conditions.

The next standard way of treating cancer is radiation. Radiation, which are X-Rays as I mentioned last week, causes cancer. It’s interesting – I guess you could say we’re treating fire with fire there. Radiation is frequently used to kill cancer cells. We also know that it does increase the risk of cancer of whatever you are radiating later. If you don’t kill all the cancer it increases the chance of having multiple lines of cancer cells instead of just one. There are some definite downsides for radiation. It also damages the immune system locally and to some degree more broadly. But it certainly damages the immune system less dramatically than chemo does.  

What I used radiation for in my alternative cancer clinic was mainly to de-bulk tumors. I didn’t use it a whole lot of times, but there is a new form called IMRT which helps you get less radiation. Radiation therapy is getting a little better. If you have an IMRT machine locally available it can be of benefit.

Chemotherapy works by damaging cells that are in the state of division. Whatever cells in your body are dividing it’s going to damage those cells. The theory behind chemo is that your cancer cells are going to be the most rapidly dividing cells in your body so it’s going to do more damage to them than it does to any other organ system or any other cells. Unfortunately that is not true for a lot of tumors. A lot of them are fairly slow growing.  The slower growing the less true that would be.  

The other problem there is the most naturally occurring rapid division in your body is from your immune cells. Therein lies a huge problem. If you ask a chemo doctor, “Doctor, could this chemo possibly ever kill all of the cancer cells?”  the answer will always, absolutely, 100% of the time be no. Chemo can never kill 100% of the cancer cells. You kind of scratch you head and go, “Well, okay, if chemo isn’t going to kill 100% of the cancer cells then what’s going to kill the rest of them?” The answer is your immune system. Then you go, “Okay, I thought chemo damaged my immune system. Isn’t that why you check the white blood count every time I come in before you give me another dose?” Therein lies the catch 22 with chemo. It damages the only thing that can possibly save your life. Unless your immune system steps up and kills the last 10 or 20 or 30% of the cancer cells you will not survive.

There are a few cancers, usually leukemias, lymphomas and blood type system cancers, and testicular cancer that there are some very effective chemos for. You can count those on your fingers. The others are poorly responsive to chemo in general. Outside of the handful of cancers that are very responsive it may not be a good way to go.

Next week, we’ll talk about some natural means of preventing and treating cancer. Stay tuned.

Cancer & It's Causes: Part 2

Last week I started a multi-week talk about cancer. I began with defining exactly what cancer is: a cell that loses the knowledge of when to stop growing. I also talked a little about how emotional issues and wrong beliefs can be the primary causes of cancer because of the latent stress they cause to the body. This week I’ll talk more about phsysiological causes of cancer. 

First we’ll talk about hypoxia. Hypoxia is a scientific word for not enough oxygen in the tissues. Oxygen deficiency is a cause of cancer. We’ve known that for over 80 years. Dr. Otto Warburg described that in 1925 and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1931 for discovering the cause of cancer was low oxygen at the tissue level. Some of you are also aware that an acid pH causes cancer. These are actually one and the same thing. The acid pH prevents the delivery, the unhooking of oxygen out on the tissue level. So the cells don’t get oxygen when you have an acid environment in your body. That’s why having enough oxygen in your tissues is so critical. There are medical tests that look for this. You put a probe on your finger and it tells you how saturated your blood is with oxygen. Unfortunately, you can have 100% oxygen saturation in the blood and have extremely poor delivery of oxygen out in the tissues because of that acid pH in the environment.  

Another cause of cancer are environmental toxins. I was reading an article in the paper here a couple years ago. It was talking about the annual meeting of all the water treatment plant people that treat water for people to drink. They said they knew that chlorine caused cancer. They just didn’t know what to do about it because they couldn’t treat enough water for everybody without the chlorine. There are known environmental toxins; lead, mercury, chlorine, the different chemicals, pesticides; all kinds of chemicals that we have, unfortunately, in our environment. We’re still putting a lot of these toxins that help facilitate cancer into our system.

We all know that radiation causes cancer. Madame Curie, the discoverer of X-rays, died of, you guessed it, cancer. She didn’t know to protect herself with lead shields and lead aprons because she’d just discovered X-rays and didn’t have a clue that they caused cancer. We get natural radiation from the sun and from space. It’s raining down on us all the time. The medical community is, oddly, pretty free with radiation. There was a period when we were much more careful with radiation. For example, my daughter was getting an X-ray taken a couple years ago and I asked for a shield to put over her ovaries. They looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Why would you do that?” Well, X-rays damage tissue and they cause cancer. Right? “Oh, this isn’t much radiation.” We kind of treat it cavalierly and with bravado. “Oh well, it’s just a little bit of radiation.” Sadly, our medical environment is a significant source of radiation. Woman are encouraged to get mammograms. That’s a lot of radiation, especially if you talk about having it every year.  It may be that you may not be able to not have cancer at some point in time if you get enough radiation.

Another potential cause out there is nutrition, or should I say the lack of nutrition. You’ve got to have the right nutritional things to provide for proper cell structure, proper materials to grow, to maintain health, and the proper detoxifiers or antioxidants.  Nutrition or lack thereof can be put in that list of potential causes for cancer.  

I’d probably list the last cause of cancer as viruses. Every cancer cell will have a virus in it. Viruses play two roles in cancer. One is as a direct causative agent in the cells, helping them lose control. On a broader scope, we all have viruses hanging around. You might’ve seen or heard of somebody having shingles when they’re 70 or 80 years old. Where has that virus been? Where did that come from? That came from when they were 8 or 10 years old and got chickenpox and now 7 decades later it’s popped out and bitten them. Where was it all that time? It was right there in the body. Viruses are tough critters. They live in our bodies and our immune system has to stay constantly vigilant to protect us from them. 

There are some of the causes of cancer. This is a really big subject. What I’m going to do is come back next week and share some more about current therapies and other ways to look at treating cancer. Come back next week and we’ll give you the rest of the story.

Cancer & Its Causes

Some of my first posts on this blog were talking about breast cancer. Now I’ll return to the subject but talk in a more general sense about cancer. Cancer is a huge subject.  There is a lot of material to cover so I’ll probably post for the next few weeks on cancer. It’s certainly of interest to all of us, and we all know someone that has had it. It’s not a pretty thing. There’s a real struggle to find a cure for cancer in the medical establishment but for most cancer there’s no good treatment.

Let me get right into the scope of the problem. Economically, billions are spend in research every decade and multi-billions of dollars are spent treating the disease every year. It’s a major industry. It's not fun to think of it in this way, but the financial outlay and costs to the U.S., and to the world is almost beyond comprehension. 

Since 1955 the incidence of cancer world wide has increased world-wide by over 40%.  That’s a big number. In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer. At that time it was the 8^th leading cause of death in the nation. Today it is number two. There was a period in 2005-2006 where it was actually reported in the news media that it was the leading cause of death. So you’ve got to ask yourself, “Are we winning this war?”  Needless to say the answer to that is a really big, “NO”.  

There’s also a paradox here because the only treatments that a person can receive legally are those which are approved by the government. These are: surgery, radiation, and chemo-therapy. If a physician administers anything that is not approved by the government, they can end up loosing his license or even going to jail. It kind of puts a damper on anybody that might want to receive treatments other than what the government has approved.

So the question is, what is cancer? What on earth is this? Why is it what it is?  Cancer is your very own cells that are trying to escape their toxic environment. That toxic environment happens to be your body. I know that’s kind of a different way of looking at cancer cells, but it’s true. Cancer is normal cells trying to escape a toxic environment.  

Let’s get a little more specific. Cancer is when a cell loses the knowledge of when to stop growing. You know that if you cut yourself the skin starts growing together from each side. When those cells meet in the middle they stop growing. They “know” when they’ve met each other and they “know” that they’re supposed to stop and how the normal healing process is supposed to be. There is an innate “knowledge” there and they “know” to stop growing. Well, cancer cells has lost that knowledge of when to stop growing.  

There’s also another characteristic of cancer cells: they’ve lost the knowledge of what they are supposed to be. A liver cell forgets that it is a liver cell and starts growing out of control. The less knowledge they have of what they’re supposed to be the worse the cancer is. In medical terms that’s called “undifferentiated”, or less specific cells. The less specific they are the worse that tends to be.  

Another thing we know about cancer cells is they’re extremely inefficient users of energy.   Whereas a normal cell gets 38 units of energy out of a certain type sugar, cancer cells only get 2. And as I’ve mentioned in a previous post about sugar, cancer can only burn sugar for their nutrient supply. These are a few things that distinguish what makes a cancer cell different.

What causes it?  Later I’ll talk more about different causes of cancer. But for now, recall what I said about cancer as cells trying to escape a toxic environment. What causes that toxic environment? Well, I’d say the first issue that we have to look at is (as people close to me will know that I’ve said it for years) emotional and physiological stress. If you’re familiar with my work on the Healing Codes with Alex Loyd, you’ll know that stress equates to unhealthy cellular memory down deep inside, or wrong beliefs. That’s what ultimately causes physiological stress in the body. Emotional issues and wrong beliefs can be the primary causes of cancer from my perspective.  

You absolutely have to deal with those issues if you want to get well and stay well. I frequently use the analogy, “Where do cactuses grow?” Well, we don’t see them here in East Tennessee. We see oak trees and grass and briars and bushes. We don’t see cactuses because they grow out in the desert. That’s the environment that they grow in. On the other hand, in Arizona they don’t have many live oak trees because the soil, the sunshine, and the water isn’t environmentally friendly to them. So the inside environment is what you want to change if you want to get well. In other words, where we really want to be is working on prevention. Physiological stress is what we want to stay out of. You can go to The Healing Codes site and hear Dr. Loyd and I talk about physiological stress, cellular memory and what causes that, along with the emotional issues that lead to physiological stress that, to me, are the primary cause of cancer.

Next time I’ll talk more about causes of cancer that relate to our physical environment as opposed to our emotional environment. Stay tuned. 

Strokes Don't Just Happen To The Elderly

Strokes are not a good thing to have. It’s the third leading cause of death in North America. It’s the number one cause of long-term, serious disability. Three quarters of a million people will have a stroke this year and a third of those are going to die from that stroke. These are really big numbers.  

It’s not an old person’s disease necessarily either. A third of all the people that get a stroke will be under age 65. Those are numbers we best perk our eyebrows up and pay attention. The other thing that’s important to know is that if you’re African American those numbers go up even more dramatically. There is a three-fold increase if you have those genetics. Those are numbers that should get our attention.

What is a stroke? A stroke is when blood flow to a part of the brain stops. Within minutes brain cells begin to die. There are two kinds of stroke. You can have a blood loss in the brain where an artery starts bleeding from an aneurism or something like that. That produces a stroke. Then there is a clot-type stroke where you get a plugging. One way or the other a stroke is essentially loss of blood flow to an area of the brain. That’s why strokes can look so different. It’s whatever part of the brain that the blood is going to that gets stopped up or starts bleeding, that’s the area that is affected. That’s why some people can get numbness on a leg or arm or part of the face, or even have speech loss or vision or balance loss. 

Now if you’re having a heart attack, you can cognitively with your brain think about that.  “Okay, my chest feels tight. I’m sweating. I’m feeling anxious. I’ve got pain in my left arm.” You’ve read these symptoms and you can think about them and say, “I may be having a heart attack. Dial 911.” The problem with stroke is your thinking organ is being affected. You may not be able to reason about it. It is important for all of us to know the signs of stroke so that we can recognize it if it’s happening to someone else.  

If we do see it happening it’s really important that we do something about it. There’s a time for energy medicine and there’s a time for waiting on things. There’s a time for doing herbals and homeopathics and nutritionals, but this is the time to head for the hospital or dial 911 because of the long-term implications of letting this slide for just minutes.  

Remember I mentioned that there were two different kinds of stroke? There is the bleeding and then there’s the stoppage, the clot-type events. One of the problems from the medical side that doctors face with a stroke is after you get to the hospital they’ve still got to figure out which that is because you treat these two kinds of strokes two completely different ways.  

With the clot they are going to give you some medicine to help dissolve the clot. But if you’re bleeding, that would be the absolute worst thing you could do. You’re probably going to have to get an MRI or CT. They’ve got to wait for one of those to get empty and then do the scan, then get the results. That’s why it’s important not to let any time at all get by before you go to the hospital. If you get to the hospital and the symptoms resolve, hey, you can always go home! Regardless, this is a very time-critical issue.  

What does a stroke look like?  Sudden weakness or numbness any place in the body, face, arm, leg, the abdomen and chest. Dimness or loss of vision usually in one eye. It’s usually one-sided unless there’s a huge aneurism with a lot of blood loss or something. Then it can be both sides. Usually strokes are one sided. Loss of speech or trouble talking, articulating, getting your words out. That is a one-sided event but it takes both sides of the tongue working and the cheeks to get words out. Sudden or severe headache, dizziness or instability walking, falling. These are acute. These are things that happen quickly. I’m not talking about having a little trouble with your balance for the last few weeks and it may be a little worse this week. No, I’m talking about a sudden inability or sudden event.

Why do you get strokes? What are the risk factors? High blood pressure is way up top there. High cholesterol combined with high blood pressure leads to hardening of the arteries. Diabetes is a risk factor. Smoking is a risk factor. Heart disease is a risk factor.  You could throw a clot up to the brain if you have fibrillation or something like that. Arteriosclerosis can occur in the carotid artery and a piece of plaque could brat off there and go up to the brain. It’s all pretty much vascular related except for the smoking. Of course that causes arteriosclerosis so we’re back to the same idea of one cause with a lot of things that feed into that.  

What can you do to prevent strokes from happening? If you’re smoking that can be helped. You can stop that. Keep your blood pressure down. Eat healthy. Eat reasonable portions of meat. I only eat one portion of meat a day and I’ve tried to trim that down to about half the size I used to eat. I take fish oil every day. I take olive oil every day. Probably at least equal to vitamins, maybe even more important, are antioxidants. All of this damage occurs in a general form that we’ll call oxidative. Another way to say that is we’re rusting. Antioxidants help prevent that process. Those are some of the things we can do in a preventative fashion.  

Sugar Kills

Blood sugar is a fascinating topic.  It’s coming more and more into our public awareness all the time, especially as we become more aware of sugar and some of the bad side effects of that high fructose corn syrup can have.  We’ve all been aware of blood sugar for a long time.  It’s something you’re supposed to be aware of.  Doctors check for it.  Some of us even have trouble with low blood sugar even though most public awareness centers around high blood sugar.

There are a lot of people who have low blood sugar too.  In fact most people who drink a couple of cups of coffee in the morning get a message that triggers their brains to think that they have low blood sugar, so they mobilize blood.  I guess that’s why it’s such a popular thing to have the “mocha-chocha-chocolata-whatever” with your coffee these days for an extra $5.  When you drink that massive amount of caffeine it tells the brain that you don’t have enough blood sugar, even though your levels might be quite adequate.  So your liver starts mobilizing sugar to put it into the blood stream. 

Most of the focus these day is around high blood sugar.  That’s what’s normally called diabetes.  Most of the focus is particularly on Type 2, because that is the one we can do the most about.  We can’t do a lot to cure Type 2, but we can certainly mitigate it’s effects with standard medicine.  Too much blood sugar for too long has some really horrific symptoms.  You can loose toes, get kidney damage, lose kidneys, heart disease, heart attacks.  All disease across the board goes up when your blood sugar goes up.  Your life expectancy goes down.  Even cancer risk goes up.  Research papers are coming out about that any given week.  All of those things are harmful effects of increased blood sugar.  

Where is this coming from?  Well we’ve got, as I mentioned previously, high fructose corn syrup in everything these days.  There’s plenty of information online that you can find about high fructose corn syrup, what’s in it, and some of its damaging properties.  Plain old refined sugar isn’t a healthy thing to eat either.  

Interestingly, the brain has to have sugar to run on.  In fact, that’s all the brain can burn.  It doesn’t have any protein or fat stores.  That’s why it is so important that your blood is kept in a fairly range of blood sugar.  Your brain doesn’t work without it.  

There is another interesting caveat and that is cancer cells also can only burn sugar.  They can’t mobilize protein or fat either for their energy resources.  Muscle cells, liver cells, other cells in the body can all break down protein and fat to locally generate sugar inside of the cell for its use as an energy source.  But brain cells, and interestingly enough, cancer cells can’t do that.  They have to get their supply of sugar directly from the bloodstream.  That’s their basic energy.  That’s the gasoline.  That’s what we run on.

How do you keep it at a good level? We’ve tried to substitute insulin and drugs for good old exercise and diet.  Those are the cornerstones of maintaining a good blood glucose level.  Even diabetics can lower their blood sugar without using any extra insulin or drugs just by exercising.  It’s the magic key that opens the door to get sugar out of the blood and into the cells without anything else.  Just good old wholesome exercise and eating right…  by eating right I mean protein, healthy fats, lots of vegetables and fruit and staying away from the sugars as much as we can.