An informative animated video of a typical interaction with a Dr after a patient gets his cholesterol results with the Dr’s automatic response being to push a Statin…EXCELLENT!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

If all Doctors followed the latest cholesterol treatment guidelines, and all their patients took their prescribed statin medication, there would be 3.5 million more diabetics in America. But wait! There is another pill (injection actually) that has been shown to reduce the risk of diabetes. And it’s only about $50,000 per year per patient. Let’s see 3.5 million times $50,000. What does that bring us to?

Pharmageddon!

We are stuck in an absurd cultural habit of thinking that medication will save us from lifestyle and social diseases.

Two separate studies in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) underscore that we have come to the end of an era of being saved by medication. Antibiotics and vaccines were a huge advance in medicine in the 20^th century. But the single pill for the single ill just doesn’t work for 21^st century chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes.

Statins cause Diabetes

The latest cholesterol guidelines (ATP III) increased the number of Americans who should take statin therapy from 13 to 40 million. Those additional 27 million are ones without heart disease, but who have high cholesterol. This type of treatment is called primary prevention. I have extensively reviewed the research on using statins to prevent heart attacks in people who never had them. The data is weak and shows no benefit, except the Jupiter trial, which ONLY showed benefit if patients also had inflammation (high C-reactive protein), not just high cholesterol or LDL. If you just had an elevated cholesterol, statins didn’t help.

I have previously written about research that showed that statins increase the risk of diabetes. This latest study examined five major clinical trials on statins including 32,752 non-diabetics over 4.9 years. During the study period 2,749 patients (or 8.4 percent) developed diabetes. Those on the highest doses of statins (which are increasingly prescribed by physicians) were at the highest risk of developing diabetes.

While there was a slight overall reduction in risk of heart attacks in the patients treated with statins, the authors found that you have to treat 155 people for one year to prevent just one heart attack or death. If a doctor had to prescribe antibiotics to 155 people to cure just one patient of pneumonia we would think that antibiotics weren’t very good medication. But that is exactly the “number needed to treat” to prevent just one cardiac event. On top of that for every 498 people treated, one more person would become diabetic. If these drugs were not the top selling drugs in history we might accept a small risk, but if we treated everyone who “needed” them, we would have over 3.5 million more diabetics in America.

Using statins may be an acceptable risk if there was no other treatment for heart disease. And we spend over $100 billon a year on angioplasties (which don’t benefit 95% of people receiving them), and cardiac bypasses (which reduce the risk of death in only 3% of people who receive them), while ignoring that heart disease is a lifestyle and social disease that requires lifestyle medicine and a social cure which would prevent over 90% of all heart disease.

Immune Suppressing Medication Prevents Diabetes

In another study of nearly 14,000 patients, published in today’s issue of JAMA, researchers from Harvard found that those treated with powerful immune suppressing medications (TNF alpha blockers like Remicade or Enbrel), reduced their risk of getting diabetes.

Sounds great. We have an explosion of diabetes. By 2020 one in two Americans will either have pre-diabetes or diabetes. The authors said “there is evidence suggesting a possible role for … immunosuppression in diabetes prevention”. But the side effects of these drugs are overwhelming infection, increased cancer risk and death. And they cost about $50,000 per year per patient. Were the authors serious about using these drugs for diabetes, another lifestyle and social disease?

Yes diabetes is an inflammatory disease. And yes, reducing inflammation can prevent and even reverse diabetes. But it won’t be by taking aspirin, Advil, or some high-powered immune suppressing, toxic, expensive medication. The major cause of inflammation is our processed, high sugar, low fiber, fast food, junk food, calorie-dense, nutrient poor industrial diet and our couch potato lifestyle. A plant based, whole foods, real food diet without sugar and flour in pharmacologic doses along with anti-inflammatory omega 3 fats and a good dose of exercise can dramatically reduce the risk of and even reverse heart disease and diabetes. And they cost a lot less.

Last week a study in JAMA found that the risk of diabetes, heart attacks and death increased significantly with more than 2 hours of television watching per day. The average American spends seven to nine hours in front a screen every day. We have a social problem, a host of chronic diseases driven by a food industry and screen dominated culture and the breakdown of communities. Cooking real food takes a bit more time, but people spend more time watching cooking shows on television that actually cooking.

The answer to our exploding health care costs and burgeoning chronic disease is not going to be found at the bottom of a pill bottle, but at the end of our forks and the soles of our shoes. Please save us from Pharmageddon.

For many thousands of years, humans have enjoyed eggs, probably one of nature’s most convenient and nutritious foods. Many feel that eggs are one of nature’s perfect foods as they are one of the few foods containing all the essential amino acids. With these, our bodies can make whatever non-essential proteins they need.

Eggs are relatively low in calories and contain many other healthy nutrients, including vitamins B12, C, D, E, and K, as well as the minerals iron and zinc. They’re also a rich source of choline, important for brain functioning in particular but actually essential for the functioning of all cells. They are also a rich source methionine, which is important for detoxification function and the carotenoids, lutein and zeaxanthin, which are helpful for eye function.

In spite of the egg’s reputation for increasing cholesterol–one of the most common medical myths–research has shown that humans do not increase blood cholesterol levels by eating cholesterol. Yes, you read correctly there is little or no connection between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol.

We increase cholesterol by eating refined processed flour, sugars and fats. When you eat refined and processed grains, sugar or drink soda or juice, these are converted into sugar and then your liver converts them into fat, including cholesterol. So your liver makes most of your cholesterol.

What types of eggs are best? The content of the egg is dependant on what was in the chicken that laid it. Mass produced eggs from caged hens eating processed grains treated with antibiotics and pesticides will produce eggs with a completely different composition of fatty acids than free range chickens eating organic feed. These are two different foods. Choose organic, free range, preferably heirloom eggs.

A Caveat: I have observed over the years that some people develop an allergy or sensitivity to eggs if they eat them daily or very frequently. In fact a new study supports consuming eggs in moderation after finding no evidence that eggs increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (1).

References:

1) Djoussé L, Gaziano JM. Egg consumption in relation to cardiovascular disease and mortality: the Physicians’ Health Study. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 87, No. 4, 964-969, April 2008.

Reprinted with permission from ExperienceLife.com

The prescriptions we take to regulate cholesterol, blood pressure and stomach acid are supposed to make us healthier. But could these medications be doing us more harm than good?

He had been a faculty member in three departments of a major university with an IQ north of 180. Over time, the professor lost the ability to recognize people he’d known closely for decades and to read more than a page of text at a time. He’d repeat the same thing over and over, not recalling he’d already said it. The diagnosis: rapidly progressive Alzheimer’s. When he went to his 50th college reunion, he wore a sign around his neck with his name and the statement, I have Alzheimer’s. Old friends needed an explanation for why he couldn’t recognize people he’d known for decades or repeated himself endlessly throughout the night.

His condition seemed hopeless when he applied to enter a clinical trial testing a new Alzheimer’s drug at Duke University.

Before he started the clinical trial, his wife took him off his cholesterol-lowering statin drug, simvastatin. By the time he got to Duke, he was no longer qualified to participate; he didn’t have Alzheimer’s, doctors said. Instead, he entered another study: The Statin Study Group, directed by University of California at San Diego (UCSD) physician and scientist Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD. “There are people with extremely severe functional deficits caused by statin drugs,” Golomb says. Two years after he stopped taking simvastatin, the patient reported his recovery was complete. His mind was clear and he was back to reading three newspapers daily.

Statin’s side effects are rarely so severe, but they are far more common — and numerous — than generally thought. And statins aren’t the only popular drug with unpredictable side effects. Three common classes of prescription drugs in the United States — statins for reducing cholesterol, angiotensin II antagonists for lowering blood pressure, and proton pump inhibitors for reducing stomach acid — can all cause side effects worse than the problems they aim to treat. And the symptoms caused by one drug may necessitate the use of the others.

For large numbers of people with questionable risk factors, these drugs deliver little or no benefit, but that hasn’t stopped pharmaceutical manufacturers from aggressively marketing them as preventive treatments. Underlying their marketing strategy is a host of scientific studies that “exaggerate positive results and bury negative ones,” says Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Bloomsbury USA, 2007). “The science on which so much of prescribing is based is biased, shaky, over-marketed and misinterpreted. These are excellent drugs when used on the right people. The problem comes when they’re marketed to everyone on the planet. There’s benefit to a few people, but when you start giving them to everybody, they may do more harm than good.”

Cholesterol Conundrum

The rise in widespread use of statins coincided with lifestyle changes in post–World War II America. As the population gradually migrated to car-friendly suburbs and became increasingly sedentary, the food industry began filling supermarket shelves with more processed “convenience” foods packed with high-fructose corn syrup, trans fats and other pro-inflammatory ingredients. Before long, coronary heart disease (CHD) became a major cause of death.

At first, many experts attributed the problem to a single, simple cause: A high-fat diet thought to fuel high levels of a molecule called cholesterol in the blood. In optimum quantities, cholesterol is essential for cellular health, but in excess, the experts said, it coated and hardened the arteries, preventing blood from circulating and causing heart attacks and strokes.

That view has changed in recent years: The problem is not cholesterol, per se, but a low-density lipoprotein (LDL) that carries cholesterol through the blood and deposits it in arterial plaque, where it can do the most damage to the body. Also at fault are triglycerides, another type of fat circulating in the blood and coating arterial walls. (A protective cholesterol-carrying molecule, high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, lowers CHD risk.) Elevated levels of the offending molecules may not be a problem for the fit and healthy, but for those at risk due to obesity, diabetes, hypertension or smoking, they increase the likelihood of disease.

Scientists are beginning to revise the dietary factors once thought to underlie CHD. Instead of placing saturated fat at the root of the disease, some of the newest studies point to processed carbohydrates like white bread, sugar and rice, which are known to increase triglycerides and boost insulin production. The surging insulin causes diabetes and obesity, increasing inflammation along with the unfavorable LDL cholesterol known to damage arterial walls.

Despite an increasingly clear connection between diet and heart disease, pharmaceutical companies in the 1990s saw a burgeoning market for a class of drugs called statins, which block production of LDL in the liver, reducing its levels in the blood. And, by 1994, they had the research they needed to argue that these drugs could prevent heart disease.

The Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study, sponsored by pharmaceutical giant Merck, showed that the cholesterol-inhibiting drug, simvastatin (brand name: ZOCOR), could lower LDL levels by 25 to 35 percent and reduce myocardial infarction (heart attack) by 25 to 30 percent in those with normal cholesterol but who have other risk factors, like hypertension, smoking or diabetes.

With the advent of statins, our Big Mac nation was given license to stay the course: We kept consuming processed foods through the rollout of lovastatin, simvastatin and atorvastatin — otherwise known as Lipitor — which for many years has been the top-selling drug in the world. Just last year, rosuvastatin (brand name: Crestor) was approved as a preventive for healthy individuals with low cholesterol counts and no risk factor beyond an elevated level of C-reactive protein (CRP), a sign of inflammation in the body. Once prescribed statins, these people were advised to take them for life.

That’s when cardiologists and epidemiologists adept at reading statistics finally began breaking ranks. Their concerns about statins’ side effects were well placed. A study published in The Lancet in February 2010 showed statins could increase the risk of type 2 diabetes by 9 percent. Other recent studies have traced statins to headache, joint pain and abdominal pain, as well as linked the drugs to peripheral neuropathy, the sense of tingling and numbness or burning pain, often in arms and legs.

At UCSD, Golomb has been studying a series of lesser-known (but not less common) neuropsychiatric and cognitive side effects. Her interest began when, as a medical student in the late 1980s, she became aware of two studies linking cholesterol-lowering drugs to violent death. “In these studies, the decrease in death from heart disease was fully offset by increases in violent death from suicide, homicide and accident,” she says. Golomb’s neurobiology research told her the reports made sense. “Cholesterol is a very high fraction of the dry weight of the brain,” she says, and aids the function of neurotransmitters — the molecules of emotion and cognition that help the brain do its job. Force cholesterol levels down by artificial means, and brain infrastructure suffers. Her own paper on low cholesterol and violence was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1998.

As word got out, Golomb’s lab received a steady stream of email from statin users with a wide range of problems neither reflected in the literature nor taken seriously by their doctors. The effects, documented in her multiyear study, include reduced energy and a lack of interest in activity, increased fatigue after exercise, erectile dysfunction, and a significant reduction in the ability to achieve orgasm. “Half the people who reported any symptom reported more than one,” Golomb adds.

This reflects what the evidence shows — a common mechanism based on statin disruption of the mitochondria, the energy-producing parts of cells. “We are conditioned to think of cholesterol as a nefarious substance that courses through the blood for the sole purpose of congealing in our arteries and causing cardiovascular disease, but there is a reason why evolution mandates that every cell in our body produces it, and that it circulate through our blood,” Golomb says.

So what’s a statin-taker to do? If you are experiencing troublesome side effects, but have heart disease or serious risk factors and can’t stop taking the drugs entirely, you may still want to consider taking a brief break from the med to see if it seems to be causing your symptoms. If so, you should ask your doctor to prescribe a different drug or lower your dose.

If you’ve been prescribed the drugs prophylactically, it may be time to talk with your doctor about getting off statins entirely. According to internist and clinical pharmacologist James M. Wright, MD, PhD, professor at the University of British Columbia, statins have no proven net health benefit as a preventive. As managing director and chair of the Therapeutics Initiative, a group that evaluates drug studies in Canada, Wright is an expert on meta-analyses — the large “studies of studies” — that take every last bit of data into account. His latest review of the data — and the most comprehensive to date — was published in the Therapeutics Letter in 2010: “Statins do not have a proven net health benefit in primary prevention populations,” he wrote, adding that the “claimed mortality benefit” for this group is “more likely a measure of bias than a real effect.”

The data is especially murky for people with elevated cholesterol but no other risk factors. “This is a gray area,” he notes. In short, there’s little credible evidence that attempting to lower a high cholesterol count with drugs is beneficial unless other risks are elevated as well.

Walter Willett, MD, chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, adds that even for those who need the drug, “statins only reduce risk of heart disease modestly, about 30 percent, and thus are not sufficient.” Lifestyle changes (see “Many Problems, One Cure,” page 65) are required to take patients the rest of the way. For many, making the right lifestyle changes is all that’s required.

Halting Hypertension

Similar criticisms have emerged regarding the conventional treatment of high blood pressure, the measurement indicating how hard circulating blood pushes against arterial walls. Pressure may rise and fall throughout the course of a normal day, but if it stays too high for too long, it damages blood vessels, the kidneys and the heart. Hypertension, while asymptomatic, is a major cause of heart failure, heart attack and stroke.

Anyone who’s been to a doctor knows that blood pressure consists of two separate readings — systolic pressure (the higher top number, measured as the heart is beating) and diastolic pressure (the lower bottom number measured between beats when the heart is at rest). It is the higher, systolic pressure that is most often used to determine risk.

For many years, physicians have treated even slightly high blood pressure with drugs that counteract the vessel-contracting hormone, angiotensin. First, the pharmaceutical industry introduced angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors; later, when ACE inhibitors went off patent, drug companies began selling angiotensin II antagonists, also called angiotensin receptor blockers, or ARBs. But the data has not held up, says Wright, who also serves as coordinating editor of the Hypertension Group at The Cochrane Collaboration, whose systematic reviews of healthcare studies are considered the gold standard of evidence.

“Our job is to systematically review all the evidence related to blood pressure and hypertension, and what we are discovering is that the evidence for blood pressure treatment at more moderate levels is not as strong as we had previously thought,” he says. Indeed, while doctors routinely treat patients with mild to moderate systolic pressure of 140 to 160, it is only for those with moderate to severe hypertension — people with blood pressure over 160, the top 5 percent of the curve — that “we get a modest bang for our buck. Between 140 and 160 there is no good evidence that the benefits outweigh the harm,” he says.

Wright especially takes issue with marketing efforts to push ARBs rather than the less-expensive ACE inhibitors. The drug companies claim their studies showed better health outcomes with ARBs, he says, but recent research challenges that claim. A 2010 study published in The Lancet Oncology, for instance, reported an increase in cancer diagnoses among ARB users. Other side effects include headache, dizziness, lightheadedness, nasal congestion, back and leg pain, and diarrhea. And, while rare, side effects such as kidney failure, liver failure, allergic reaction, a drop in white blood cells and localized swelling of tissues (angioedema) can all be fatal.

The Acid Erasers

Another popular class of drug, generating more than $13 billion a year in the United States alone, is the proton pump inhibitor (PPI). These drugs reduce between 90 and 100 percent of acid in the gut by shutting down a system known as the proton pump.

The PPIs, including Prevacid, Nexium, Aciphex and Prilosec, originally were used to manage ulcers, a condition in which acid coursing over open stomach sores caused incapacitating pain. But research later confirmed that most ulcers are caused by the spiral bacteria Helicobacter pylori and could be effectively treated with a brief regimen of antibiotics. Use of PPIs then shifted to common conditions like ordinary heartburn (the burning sensation behind the breastbone) and the far more painful and persistent gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD (which results when muscles between the stomach and esophagus stay partly open, allowing stomach acid to leak up, or reflux, into the esophagus, causing pain).

PPIs can, in fact, effectively treat some noninfectious ulcers and severe cases of reflux, but it’s increasingly clear that long-term use can be dangerous, according to a series of studies published last year:

•  Research from the National Institutes of Health, published in Current Gastroenterology Reports, shows that long-term use of PPIs can limit the body’s absorption of essential nutrients, including calcium, magnesium, iron and vitamin B12, which require gastric acid to be absorbed. Risks include not just osteoporosis, but also anemia, fatigue, seizures and cardiac events.

•  The Annals of Internal Medicine reports that long-term use of proton pump inhibitors increases cardiovascular risk for those already suffering myocardial infarction or stroke.

•  The Archives of Internal Medicine reveals that PPIs substantially increase the risk of infection from a particularly hardy bacteria called Clostridium difficile. The study also linked long-term PPI usage with spine, lower arm and total fractures in postmenopausal women. Perhaps even more alarming was the finding that as many as 69 percent of people taking PPIs don’t need them to effectively treat their symptoms.

While almost no one should be using these drugs for years at a time, once someone has been taking them long enough, the habit can be hard to break. It’s been suggested that when patients stop PPIs, a rebound effect increases acid production for a while, causing painful reflux symptoms again. “People should hold out until the excess acid dissipates and the symptoms go away,” says pharmacologist Wright.

Having appropriate levels of acid in the stomach is the healthiest situation of all. Eating high-fiber whole foods (such as beans, veggies and nuts), taking digestive enzymes and probiotic supplements, and decreasing chronic stress can all help to bring your gut back into balance.

Changing Course

If there’s any silver lining in this cloud of overmedication, it’s that Americans have been programmed to at least consider their risk factors for chronic disease. “We have this culture of ‘let’s catch it before it’s too late,’” says Brownlee. Unfortunately, she notes, rather than encourage people to make proactive adjustments in the way they eat, move and manage stress, the drug and medical industries have largely encouraged them to take medication. “What it has done is create a whole nation of perfectly well people who have been turned into patients,” she says. “Most of these people just have risk factors. They are not sick.”

But many doctors rely on pharmaceutical reps and materials for the latest information on treatment options. And they’re inundated with reports — that may or may not be credible — about the latest research. As Golomb notes, clinical studies designed to prove the efficacy of a certain drug have inherent limitations, particularly as it relates to examining safety.

“The people most likely to allow adverse effects to be identified, like the elderly or those on multiple drugs with health problems, are often excluded from participating in trials but not from receiving the drug in the real world,” Golomb says. “This occurs in part for sound reasons like minimizing risk to those in the study, but it also reduces the ability to identify an increase in problems if there is one. Because studies are designed in a way that obscures the harms associated with drugs, serious problems often show up only years after a drug has been fully approved by the FDA.”

So it’s up to doctors to practice some healthy skepticism when pharmaceutical reps promote studies heralding the next miracle drug, says Brownlee. “While physicians are now aware that the information they are getting from the drug industry is not unimpeachable, the bigger issue is that they often aren’t trained to tell good data from bad.”

And they should avoid continuing-education conferences paid for by the drug industry, she adds. “When gastroenterologists go to their annual meeting and there is a purple bus paid for by the maker of the purple pill, it is time to worry. One of the problems we have is that many physicians are not aware of the poor evidence for efficacy, and they also are not aware of side effects, because most of their information is not coming from unbiased sources. It is coming from the manufacturer, who has every reason to downplay the negative and emphasize
the positive.”

For patients seeking unbiased information, two credible resources are The Cochrane Collaboration (www.cochrane.org) and Clinical Evidence (clinicalevidence.bmj.com/ceweb/index.jsp), both of which feature summaries of valid pieces of research that provide important, relevant, more accessible information to patients and doctors.

At the very least, patients should ask their doctors to explain the pros and cons of every drug in a way they can understand, so patient and doctor can share the decision about treatment, says Brownlee. “If your primary-care doctor says, ‘I’m ever so busy, I’m not going to do that,’ you might need to find a new doctor who will help you be informed and who will share treatment decisions with you,” she says.

Patients must be “assertive, smart consumers” to make sure they are not being overmedicated or getting drugs they do not need, says Joseph T. Hanlon, PharmD, MS, professor of medicine in the University of Pittsburgh’s Division of Geriatrics and Department of Pharmacy and Therapeutics, and health scientist at the VA Pittsburgh Health Care System. “Make a list of every drug you are on and make sure you can answer five questions: What is it called? What are you taking it for? How and when are you taking it? What are the common side effects? And when will the treatment stop?” Hanlon says. “Medical schools don’t always do the best job of teaching prescribing. You are your own best advocate.”

Reprinted with permission from ExperienceLife.com.  Written by Pamela Weintraub, a features editor at Discover and author of Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic (St. Martin’s Press, 2008).

Used with permission from www.vitalchoice.com

Gary Taubes is the bestselling author of Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat, and he covers the diet-health beat for The New York Times. While we don’t agree with everything he concludes about diets, we think most of what he says about foods and diet is accurate. We do think he performed a public service by penning the recent article, “Is Sugar Toxic?” for the paper’s Sunday magazine.

Taube begins his piece by noting a YouTube hit few would have predicted: “On May 26, 2009, Dr. Robert Lustig gave a lecture called ‘Sugar: The Bitter Truth,’ [the video of which] … has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month … “

As he says, these are “… fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.”

We encourage you to read Taubes’ essay, which echoes what we’ve been saying, based on the hard evidence: namely, that all sugar – along with corn starch and refined white flour – is bad for your heart and metabolism.

The facts show that it’s a satisfying but distracting folly to vilify high-fructose corn syrup … and by implication or assertion downplay the (equal) damage done by cane sugar, agave syrup, and other natural sweeteners … refined or not.

It’s quite clear that cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are equally bad … because both are about half glucose and half fructose.

While corn syrup is synthesized (okay, not ideal) and cane sugar is “natural” (but unnaturally refined), this makes exactly zero difference in your body’s reaction to their fundamental components: glucose and fructose.

Cholesterol-fat theory of heart disease: A fiasco from the get-go

In his seminal 1986 book, Sugar Blues, William Duffy presented a compelling evidence-based case that sugar causes heart disease and diabetes. Duffy relied heavily on the work of John Yudkin, M.D., a British nutrition expert who’d first made the case in his book Sweet and Dangerous, published in 1978. Yudkin’s work was dismissed by mainstream medicine, which instead went along with a Congressional panel’s well-meant – but almost entirely erroneous – assertion that dietary cholesterol and saturated fats cause most heart disease.

Sadly, that unscientific Congressional report set the agenda for medical research for decades, even as it justified development of hugely profitable cholesterol-lowering drugs. This miscarriage of medicine happened even though it soon became clear that most of the “evidence” for this theory consisted of deliberately cherry-picked data … much of it from University of Minnesota nutritionist Ancel Keys’ famed “Seven Countries Study”.

To be sure, a small group of genetically unusual people need to drastically limit intake of cholesterol and/or saturated fats and take drugs as needed to manage heart risks.

But these very uncommon exceptions only highlight the compelling evidence that for most people, the cholesterol and saturated fats in animals foods are actively healthful. You’ll find links to earlier New York Times reporting on the myths underlying the cholesterol-fat theory of heart disease in our article, “Cholesterol Fiasco Undermines Accepted Theory”.

For an excellent history of how cholesterol and saturated fats were named guilty … without credible evidence … we refer you to a recent essay by Steven Malanga of City Journal, titled “The Washington Diet”.

For even more detail on this topic – and the specific, evidence-based clinical implications of various blood cholesterol and fat test results – see the two-part video titled, “I have high cholesterol, and I don’t care” by Chris Kresser, author of The Healthy Skeptic blog.

Some of the outrage-inducing history Malanga covers in “The Washington Diet” can be gotten – in a friendlier, funnier way – from the movie “Fat Head” and other videos by former comedian and former health writer Tom Naughton.

This article comes to us courtesy of Vital Choice Wild Seafood & Organics, my favorite source of clean fish and it is reprinted here by permission.

As we all know, daily exercise is absolutely critical to maintaining health — no big news here. And for those of you who are doing the daily routine, keep up the good work! Recently though, several studies have come to the disturbing conclusion that daily exercise may not be enough to combat the effects of prolonged bouts of sitting. It appears that all the sitting most of us now do (let’s hear it for the digital age) is putting us directly on the path to increased risks for heart disease, diabetes, cancer and even early death — which is very bad news for millions of office workers. So how can we transform our sedentary jobs into more active, health-promoting ones, right now? Here are a few simple steps to take  and implement at the office today — to help save your health:

Rethink your day.
Look at every activity you do at the office and figure out how to do it with more physical involvement, no matter how minor the activity might be. Every added motion will contribute to better health overall, so start your day off on the right foot — park your car at the far end of the lot and climb the stairs to your office instead of taking the elevator.

Overhaul your work habits.
Walk to the copy machine instead of having the intern do it. Pick up your mail from the mailroom instead of waiting for it to come to you. Walk to the department head’s office to discuss an idea instead of emailing. Whatever the reason, just get up from your chair every 30 minutes to promote blood flow.

Alarm yourself.
Can’t remember to get up and move around at regular intervals? Then put your cell phone on vibrate and set reminder alarms so you know that when the phone starts wiggling on your desk, it’s time for a quick stroll to the water cooler.

Inconvenience yourself.
Ordering lunch from the corner deli? Not so fast. Put the phone down, push yourself away from the desk, step outside and go get lunch yourself — on foot.

Hydrate with a purpose.
An unusual idea one of my patients uses to keep herself from sitting too long: she drinks a lot of water. The result, she makes frequent trips to the ladies room, always opting for the one that’s the furthest away from her desk, enabling her to sneak in a little exercise without leaving the office.

Get up, stand up.
Get a headset and stand up or walk around your office during conference calls, assuming you’re not on a live video feed! Behind closed doors, another one of my patients does squats and lunges during long calls to help him stay alert and fit.

Work while you work it.
Keep light weights or a dumbbell or two in your desk drawer so you can pump a little iron while checking emails and web surfing. If you have a very progressive company, you might be able to convince them to install a few treadmill workstations, also known as “stand-up desks,” so that employees can walk while working on their computers.

And one last piece of advice? ……Just keep moving!

We have all been led to believe that cholesterol is bad and that lowering it is good. Because of extensive pharmaceutical marketing to both doctors and patients we think that using statin drugs is proven to work to lower the risk of heart attacks and death.

But on what scientific evidence is this based, what does that evidence really show?

Roger Williams once said something that is very applicable to how we commonly view the benefits of statins. “There are liars, damn liars, and statisticians.”

We see prominent ads on television and in medical journals — things like 36% reduction in risk of having a heart attack. But we don’t look at the fine print. What does that REALLY mean and how does it affect decisions about who should really be using these drugs.

Before I explain that, here are some thought provoking findings to ponder.

• If you lower bad cholesterol (LDL) but have a low HDL (good cholesterol) there is no benefit to statins. (i)
• If you lower bad cholesterol (LDL) but don’t reduce inflammation (marked by a test called C-reactive protein), there is no benefit to statins. (ii)
• If you are a healthy woman with high cholesterol, there is no proof that taking statins reduces your risk of heart attack or death. (iii)
• If you are a man or a woman over 69 years old with high cholesterol, there is no proof that taking statins reduces your risk of heart attack or death. (iv)
• Aggressive cholesterol treatment with two medications (Zocor and Zetia) lowered cholesterol much more than one drug alone, but led to more plaque build up in the arties and no fewer heart attacks. (v)
• 75% of people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol
• Older patients with lower cholesterol have higher risks of death than those with higher cholesterol. (vi)
• Countries with higher average cholesterol than Americans such as the Swiss or Spanish have less heart disease.
• Recent evidence shows that it is likely statins’ ability to lower inflammation it what accounts for the benefits of statins, not their ability to lower cholesterol.

So for whom do the statin drugs work for anyway? They work for people who have already had heart attacks to prevent more heart attacks or death. And they work slightly for middle-aged men who have many risk factors for heart disease like high blood pressure, obesity, or diabetes ^[2].

So why did the 2004 National Cholesterol Education Program guidelines expand the previous guidelines to recommend that more people take statins (from 13 million to 40 million) and that people who don’t have heart disease should take them to prevent heart disease. Could it have been that 8 of the 9 experts on the panel who developed these guidelines had financial ties to the drug industry? Thirty-four other non-industry affiliated experts sent a petition to protest the recommendations to the National Institutes of Health saying the evidence was weak. It was like having a fox guard the chicken coop.

People with the lowest cholesterol as they age are in fact at highest risk of death. Under certain circumstances, higher cholesterol can actually help increase life span.

It’s all in the spin. The spin of the statistics and numbers. And it’s easy to get confused. Let me try to clear things up.

When you look under the hood of the research data you find that the touted “36% reduction” means a reduction of the number of people getting heart attacks or death from 3% to 2% (or about 30-40%).

And that data also shows that treatment only really works if you have heart disease already. In those who DON’T have documented heart disease, there is no benefit.

In those at high risk for heart disease about 50 people would need to be treated for 5 years to reduce one cardiovascular event. Just to put that in perspective: If a drug works, it has a very low NTT (number needed to treat). For example, if you have a urine infection and take an antibiotic, you will get near a 100% benefit. The number needed to treat is “1″. So if you have an NTT of 50 like statins do for preventing heart disease in 75% of the people who take them, it is basically a crap shoot.

Yet at a cost of over $28 billion a year, 75% of all statin prescriptions are for exactly this type of unproven primary prevention. Simply applying the science over 10 years would save over $200 billion. This is just one example of reimbursed but unproven care. We need not only prevent disease but also prevent the wrong type of care.

If these medications were without side effects, then you may be able to justify the risk – but they cause muscle damage, sexual dysfunction, liver and nerve damage and other problems in 10-15% of patients who take them. Certainly not a free ride.

So if lowering cholesterol is not the great panacea that we thought, how do we treat heart disease, and how do we get the right kind of cholesterol – high HDL, low LDL and low triglycerides and have cholesterol particles that are large, light and fluffy rather than small, dense and hard, which is the type that actually causes heart disease and plaque build up.

We know what causes the damaging small cholesterol particles. And it isn’t fat in the diet. It is sugar. Sugar in any form or refined carbohydrates (white food) drives the good cholesterol down, cause triglycerides to go up, creates small damaging cholesterol particles, and causes metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes. That is the true cause of most heart attacks, NOT LDL cholesterol.

One of the reasons we don’t hear about this is because there is no good drug to raise HDL. Statin drugs lower LDL — and billions are spent advertising them, even though they are the wrong treatment.

If you’re like most of the patients I see in my practice, you’re convinced that cholesterol is the evil that causes heart disease. You may hope that if you monitor your cholesterol levels and avoid the foods that are purported to raise cholesterol, you’ll be safe from America’s number-one killer.

We are all terrified of cholesterol because for years well-meaning doctors, echoed by the media, have emphasized what they long believed is the intimate link between cholesterol and death by heart disease. If only it were so simple!

The truth is much more complex.

Cholesterol is only one factor of many — and not even the most important — that contribute to your risk of getting heart disease.

First of all, let’s take a look at what cholesterol actually is. It’s a fatty substance produced by the liver that is used to help perform thousands of bodily functions. The body uses it to help build your cell membranes, the covering of your nerve sheaths, and much of your brain. It’s a key building block for our hormone production, and without it you would not be able to maintain adequate levels of testosterone, estrogen, progesterone and cortisol.

So if you think cholesterol is the enemy, think again. Without cholesterol, you would die.

In fact, people with the lowest cholesterol as they age are at highest risk of death. Under certain circumstances, higher cholesterol can actually help to increase life span.

In reality, the biggest source of abnormal cholesterol is not fat at all — it’s sugar. The sugar you consume converts to fat in your body. And the worst culprit of all is high fructose corn syrup.

To help clear the confusion, I will review many of the cholesterol myths our culture labors under and explain what the real factors are that lead to cardiovascular disease.

Cholesterol Myths

One of the biggest cholesterol myths out there has to do with dietary fat. Although most of us have been taught that a high-fat diet causes cholesterol problems, this isn’t entirely true. Here’s why: The type of fat that you eat is more important than the amount of fat. Trans fats or hydrogenated fats and saturated fats promote abnormal cholesterol, whereas omega-3 fats and monounsaturated fats actually improve the type and quantity of the cholesterol your body produces.

In reality, the biggest source of abnormal cholesterol is not fat at all — it’s sugar. The sugar you consume converts to fat in your body. And the worst culprit of all is high fructose corn syrup.

Consumption of high fructose corn syrup, which is present in sodas, many juices, and most processed foods, is the primary nutritional cause of most of the cholesterol issues we doctors see in our patients.

So the real concern isn’t the amount of cholesterol you have, but the type of fats and sugar and refined carbohydrates in your diet that lead to abnormal cholesterol production.

Of course, many health-conscious people today know that total cholesterol is not as critical as the following:

• Your levels of HDL “good” cholesterol vs. LDL “bad” cholesterol
• Your triglyceride levels
• Your ratio of triglycerides to HDL
• Your ratio of total cholesterol to HDL

Many are also aware that there are different sizes of cholesterol particles. There are small and large particles of LDL, HDL, and triglycerides. The most dangerous are the small, dense particles that act like BB pellets, easily penetrating your arteries. Large, fluffy cholesterol particles are practically harmless–even if your total cholesterol is high. They function like beach balls and bounce off the arteries, causing no harm.

Another concern is whether or not your cholesterol is rancid. If so, the risk of arterial plaque is real.

Rancid or oxidized cholesterol results from oxidative stress and free radicals, which trigger a vicious cycle of inflammation and fat or plaque deposition under the artery walls. That is the real danger: When small dense LDL particles are oxidized they become dangerous and start the build up of plaque or cholesterol deposits in your arteries.

Now that we’ve explored when and how cholesterol becomes more problematic, let’s take a look at other factors that play a more significant role in cardiovascular disease.

Prime Contributors to Cardiovascular Disease

First of all, cardiovascular illness results when key bodily functions go awry, causing inflammation ^[3], (vii) imbalances in blood sugar and insulin and oxidative stress.

To control these key biological functions and keep them in balance, you need to look at your overall health as well as your genetic predispositions, as these underlie the types of diseases you’re most likely to develop. It is the interaction of your genes, lifestyle, and environment that ultimately determines your risks — and the outcome of your life.

This is the science of nutrigenomics, or how food acts as information to stall or totally prevent some predisposed disease risks by turning on the right gene messages with our diet and lifestyle choices. That means some of the factors that unbalance bodily health are under your control, or could be.

These include diet, nutritional status ^[4], stress levels ^[5], and activity levels. Key tests can reveal problems with a person’s blood sugar and insulin, inflammation level, level of folic acid, clotting factors, hormones, and other bodily systems that affect your risk of cardiovascular disease.

Particularly important are the causes if inflammation, which are many, and need to be assessed. Inflammation can arise from poor diet (too much sugar and trans and saturated fats), a sedentary lifestyle, stress, autoimmune disease ^[6], food allergies ^[7], hidden infections such as gum disease, and even toxins such as mercury. All of these causal factors need to be considered anytime there is inflammation.

Combined together, all of these factors determine your risk of heart disease. And I recommend that people undergo a comprehensive medical evaluation to see what their risk really is.

Zeroing in on Key Factors for Heart Disease

There’s no doubt about it, inflammation is key contributor to heart disease. A major study done at Harvard found that people with high levels of a marker called C-reactive protein (CRP) had higher risks of heart disease than people with high cholesterol. Normal cholesterol levels were NOT protective to those with high CRP. The risks were greatest for those with high levels of both CRP and cholesterol.

Another predisposing factor to heart disease is insulin resistance ^[8] or metabolic syndrome, which leads to an imbalance in the blood sugar and high levels of insulin. This may affect as many as half of Americans over age 65. Many younger people also have this condition, which is sometimes called pre-diabetes.

Although modern medicine sometimes loses sight of the interconnectedness of all our bodily systems, blood sugar imbalances like these impact your cholesterol levels too. If you have any of these conditions, they will cause your good cholesterol to go down, while your triglycerides rise, which further increases inflammation and oxidative stress. All of these fluctuations contribute to blood thickening, clotting, and other malfunctions — leading to cardiovascular disease.

What’s more, elevated levels of a substance called homocysteine (which is related to your body’s levels of folic acid and vitamins B6 and B12) appears to correlate to cardiovascular illness. Although this is still somewhat controversial, I often see this inter-relationship in my practice. While genes may play a part, tests done as part of a comprehensive evaluation of cardiac risk can easily ascertain this factor. Where problematic levels occur, they can be easily addressed by adequate folic acid intake, along with vitamins B6 and B12.

Testing for Cardiovascular Risk Factors

Heart disease is not only about cholesterol. It is important to look at many factors that contribute to your overall risk. And it seems that insulin and blood sugar imbalances, and inflammation are proving to be more of a risk that cholesterol.

If you want to test your overall risk, you can consider asking your doctor to perform the following tests:

1. Total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglycerides. Your total cholesterol should be under 200. Your triglycerides should be under 100. Your HDL should be over 60. Your LDL should be ideally under 80. Your ratio of total cholesterol to HDL should be less than 3.0. Your ratio of triglycerides to HDL should be no greater than 4, which can indicate insulin resistance if elevated.
2. NMR Lipid Profile. This looks at your cholesterol under an MRI scan to assess the size of the particles, which can determine your cardiovascular risk. This is a very important test that can further differentiate the risk of your cholesterol and can be an important factor to track as your system improves and your cholesterol transforms from being small dense and dangerous to light and fluffy and innocuous. It is done by a company called Liposcience and is also available through LabCorp.
3. Glucose Insulin Tolerance Test. Measurements of fasting and 1 and 2 hour levels of glucose AND insulin helps identify pre-diabetes and excessively high levels of insulin, and even diabetes. Most doctors just check blood sugar and NOT insulin, which is the first thing to go up. By the time your blood sugar goes up, the train has left the station.
4. Hemaglobin A1c. This measures your average blood sugar level over the last 6 weeks. Anything over 5.5 is high.
5. Cardio C-reactive protein. This is a marker of inflammation in the body that is essential to understand in the context of overall risk. Your C-reactive protein level should be less than 1.
6. Homocysteine. Your homocysteine measures your folate status and should be between 6 and 8.
7. Lipid peroxides or TBARS test, which looks at the amount of oxidized or rancid fat. This should be within normal limits of the test and indicates whether or not you have oxidized cholesterol.
8. Fibrinogen, which is another test looking at clotting in the blood. It should be less than 300.
9. Lipoprotein (a), which is another factor that can promote the risk of heart disease, often in men. It should be less than 30.
10. Genes or SNPs may also be useful in terms of assessing your situation. A number of key genes regulate cholesterol and metabolism, including Apo E genes and the cholesterol ester transfer protein gene. The MTHFR gene, which regulates homocysteine is also important and may be part of an overall workup.
11. Get a high-speed CT or (EBT) scan of the heart if you are concerned that you have cardiovascular disease. This may be helpful to assess overall plaque burden and calcium score. A score higher than 100 is a concern, and a score higher than 400 indicates severe risk of cardiovascular disease.

References

(i) Barter P, Gotto AM, LaRosa JC, Maroni J, Szarek M, Grundy SM, Kastelein JJ, Bittner V, Fruchart JC; Treating to New Targets Investigators. HDL cholesterol, very low levels of LDL cholesterol, and cardiovascular events. N Engl J Med. 2007 Sep 27;357(13):1301-10.

(ii) Ridker PM, Danielson E, Fonseca FA, Genest J, Gotto AM Jr, Kastelein JJ, Koenig W, Libby P, Lorenzatti AJ, MacFadyen JG, Nordestgaard BG, Shepherd J, Willerson JT, Glynn RJ; JUPITER Study Group. Rosuvastatin to prevent vascular events in men and women with elevated C-reactive protein. N Engl J Med. 2008 Nov 20;359(21):2195-207.

(iii) Abramson J, Wright JM. Are lipid-lowering guidelines evidence-based? Lancet. 2007 Jan 20;369(9557):168-9

(iv) IBID

(v) Brown BG, Taylor AJ Does ENHANCE Diminish Confidence in Lowering LDL or in Ezetimibe? Engl J Med 358:1504, April 3, 2008 Editorial

(vi) Schatz IJ, Masaki K, Yano K, Chen R, Rodriguez BL, Curb JD. Cholesterol and all-cause mortality in elderly people from the Honolulu Heart Program: a cohort study. Lancet. 2001 Aug 4;358(9279):351-5.

(vii) Hansson GK Inflammation, Atherosclerosis, and Coronary Artery Disease N Engl J Med 352:1685, April 21, 2005

To read more articles on health and tools for self care please visit www.drhyman.com.

Your Doctors think they make decisions based on medical evidence.

But they don’t!

In fact, half of medical evidence is hidden from your doctors. And the half that’s hidden is the half that shows drugs don’t work.

The bad news is that drug companies are not policed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the way they should be. A drug should be proven both effective and safe BEFORE it is prescribed to millions of people.

Sadly, that often isn’t the case.

Let me share with you two recent examples that highlight the dangerous collusion between drug companies and our government agency. They show why the FDA should really stand for “Federal Drug Aid.”

First, we now know that the cholesterol-lowering drug Zetia actually causes harm and leads to faster progression of heart disease DESPITE lowering cholesterol 58 percent when combined with Zocor.

This challenges the belief that high cholesterol causes heart attacks and shakes the $40 billion dollar cholesterol drug industry at its foundation.

Second, it’s come to light that nearly all the negative studies on antidepressants – that’s more than half of all studies on these drugs – were never published, giving a false sense of effectiveness of antidepressants to treat depression.
Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not telling you to blame your doctor.

Instead, blame deceptive scientific practices and industry-protective government polices. Let’s talk a closer look at these findings and their implications.

I once had a patient who worked in the drug approval division of the FDA. She taught me a very important lesson.
When a drug company designs and performs a study, it has to be registered with the FDA and ALL the results must be submitted to the FDA. But it doesn’t work that way.

Instead, the pharmaceutical companies ONLY submit the data they want to get published to medical journals. That means that any negative studies are hidden from the scientific community and from the public.

And when drug studies are sponsored by drug companies – as most are – they find positive outcomes at 4 times the rate of independently funded studies. This is also true for nutrition studies funded by the food industry that show the benefits of dairy or high-fructose corn syrup.

The FDA does not release this information.

Since drug companies fund most of the research in the world, other therapies that work better – such as diet and lifestyle or nutritional therapies – never get enough funding.

That was, it didn’t until 2004 when all the major scientific journals banded together and refused to publish any data from any drug study that did not list the results of all trials, either positive or negative, in a central database. (1)
Well, that sounds good – but listing obscure, unpublished studies buried deep in a hard-to-navigate public database run by the National Institutes of Health is hardly visible public disclosure.

Sure, the research studies are at least listed, but try to find out the results. After a few hours searching around on the website clinicaltrials.gov, I gave up.

Last year, Congress passed legislation expanding how much detail must be listed, but at the end of the day, who even looks at that? Most doctors don’t even have time to read the medical journals they receive. They get tiny bits of information from drug reps, who come to their office with free lunch and a sound bite about their drug.

They get slightly more information from researchers who are funded by pharmaceutical companies and present their findings at conferences sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, using presentations prepared for them by pharmaceutical companies. Not exactly independent, evidence-based medicine!

Now let’s get back to the news about Zetia. Zetia is a new drug that lowers cholesterol by a different mechanism than statin drugs like Lipitor and Zocor.

Why does this matter?

Well, doctors have been brainwashed to think that cholesterol is the cause of heart attacks even though half of all people who have heart attacks have NORMAL cholesterol. And it seemed like the statins, which lowered cholesterol, actually reduced heart attacks.

Seems logical. If you lower cholesterol, you reduce heart attacks, right?

No!

I believe that the reason statins lower risk is NOT because they lower cholesterol, but because they reduce inflammation. In fact, studies by Dr. Paul Ridker of Harvard show that the risk of heart attacks was only reduced if inflammation was lowered along with LDL cholesterol – but not if LDL cholesterol was lowered alone. (2)

So then along comes a drug that can be combined with statins to lower cholesterol even more. Great idea? Not really.
You see, the FDA approved Zetia without any proof that it lowered heart attacks or reduced the progression of heart disease. The drug was approved solely on the basis that it lowered cholesterol.

Yet Zetia was given to 5 million people – and made the drug companies $5 billion a year. That’s almost $14 million a day! And once Zetia was approved, it’s makers had no incentive to prove that it actually did what it was thought to do – lower heart attacks.

They dragged their feet doing the studies and then released the negative data (which they did only under pressure from news agencies and Congress) after a long delay.

Wouldn’t you drag your feet too if you were making $14 million a day?

But the FDA had the negative data on Zetia – and it didn’t speak up. The data that was withheld proved that Zetia did not reduce heart attacks but actually INCREASED fatty plaques in the arteries despite lowering cholesterol.

Let that sink in for a moment.

That’s right: Lowering cholesterol led to more heart disease!

That turns our whole medical model upside down. It shows us that high cholesterol is NOT a disease and may or may not be related to heart attacks.

Another recent study put another nail in the coffin of the Cholesterol Myth.

A major new cholesterol drug, Torcetrapib, was pulled from the pipeline in December 2006 because despite lowering LDL cholesterol and raising HDL cholesterol in 15,000 people, it caused MORE heart attacks and strokes. (3)

This was to be the new cholesterol wonder drug. Oops.

All this points to a big research mess that is flawed in three ways.

First, what gets studied depends on who is funding it.

Since drug companies fund most of the research in the world, other therapies that work better – such as diet and lifestyle or nutritional therapies – never get enough funding.

Second, drug companies are aided by the FDA, which suppresses, hides, and doesn’t publish negative studies on drugs, only positive ones. This leads doctors to think they have all the evidence when they don’t.

Third, doctors, patients, and the media believe they have the whole truth, often until it is too late, like with Zetia or Premarin or Vioxx.

The evidence was there, but no one looked or publicized it. This makes it very difficult for consumers to get the best treatments for their health and the whole truth about drugs.

Here’s my advice on how to make sense of things.

• Follow the money. Look carefully at who funded the study. Be suspicious if it was funded by drug companies.
• Call or email your congressperson or Senator to demand better legislation providing an easy-to-navigate database of all drug trials, with consumer-friendly summaries of both published AND unpublished data submitted to the FDA so you can look up the drug you are prescribed and have a balanced opinion.
• Don’t assume that drugs are the answer to your health problems. Heart disease is NOT a Lipitor deficiency but the result of your lifestyle interacting with your genes.
• Learn to ask the question “why?” – and search for the answers. Dealing with lifestyle and environmental factors (the basis of UltraWellness) almost always works better for chronic illnesses. Drugs are there as a backup only if needed.

So take a closer look at the information you’ve been given about drugs. You might be surprised by what you find.

To read more articles on health and tools for self care please visit www.drhyman.com.

Heart Rate Variability Graph:

On exposure to microwave radiation from a DECT portable phone, Subject A evidenced no change in heart rate, whereas note Subject B shows a dramatic increase in heart rate during each exposure interval. Arrhthmia (irregular beats) and/or tachycardia (rapid heart rate) are two symptoms that some but not all people who are electrically sensitive experience.

Experiencing EHS or Electrohypersensitivity

If you experience pressure or pain in the chest, rapid or irregular heartbeat, and feelings of anxiety, you might think that you are having a heart attack. Not necessarily, says Dr. Magda Havas. According to Dr. Havas, who is Associate Professor of Environmental and Resource Studies at Trent University in Canada, you might be experiencing EHS or Electrohypersensitivity.

The Study

This week at the American Holistic Medical Association conference in Cleveland, as well as the EMR Policy Institute conference in Golden, CO, Havas will present Phase I results of a 100-person study that exposed patients to DECT cordless phone radiation while monitoring heart rate variability, or the space between the heart beats. In the image above, you see an example of an electrohypersensitive person’s response. Immediately upon exposure, the subject’s heart rate sped up, and on removal of the exposure, the heart rate went back to the baseline. The study was blinded, meaning that the volunteers did not know when the nearby cordless phone was on or off.

Impact of Microwave Radiation

Havas states, “While not everyone who is electrically sensitive responds in this manner, those who do will have difficulty being in environments where microwave radiation is present, which is virtually everywhere in our modern, wireless culture.” She adds, “Cordless phones and cell phones as well as wireless computers and wi-fi networks generate this form of microwave radiation.”

Havas’ research on wireless phone radiation’s impact on heart rate is scheduled to be published early next year. The dramatic impact of wireless phone radiation on heart rate shown in this study will surely add to the growing interest in health effects of cell phones, broadening the discussion from the cellphone-brain tumor connection to include microwave radiation’s impact on other systems in the body, including the heart. Importantly, it gives clinicians a tool with which to first discern if a patient’s cardiac symptoms are related to electromagnetic fields before prescribing symptom-suppressing pharmaceuticals or invasive cardiac procedures.

Over and over again, in my own work assessing electromagnetic fields, a wide range of symptoms are routinely found to be linked to a portable phone at the bedside, wireless routers, wireless computer and printers, radiation-emitting Compact Fluorescent Bulbs, and usually the completely overlooked wireless equipment of neighbors. For electrohypersensitive people, sometimes a return to wellness is as close as turning off the wireless, or shielding from the wireless radiation of neighbors. To learn about EMF meters, and shielding fabrics, paints, films for the windows, and bed canopies, visit www.EMFSafetyStore.com or www.LessEMF.com.

ElectromagneticHealth.org Press Release: http://sn.im/t0fzw

EMR Policy Institute Conference Agenda:

Sign EMF Petition to Congress here: www.ElectromagneticHealth.org

Stay tuned for discussion of a new retrospective research study by epidemiologist Sam Milham, MD on the historic role of electrification in the incidence of many chronic illnesses in the 20th century.

We assume many age related diseases like high blood pressure, heart disease, arthritis, adult onset diabetes, stroke, cancer etc are genetic because our parents had them and therefore inevitable consequences of aging, but this is not true.

Healthy aging is mainly controlled by how we communicate with our genes through diet, lifestyle and the environment we bathe them in. You have a lot more control than you think.

We are born with a set of genes, which are inherited. These genes give us inherent strengths and weaknesses which we can’t change. That means you may be susceptible to heart disease or diabetes, not necessarily that you will get it. How you treat your genes will determine if those susceptible genes are expressed as disease or not. Like a car if you look after it, it will run smoothly for much longer.

Your genes are pluripotential, in other words there are many potential versions of you that can be expressed or you can change how you age or what diseases you get or don’t get by either feeding your genes what it needs, giving them the right nutrients, exercising appropriately etc.

We must also differentiate between different types of genes. There are certain genes that if you are born with, you will be crippled, retarded or have some serious childhood disease and die early. I am not talking about those genes. I am talking about the thousands of genes that render you susceptible to the many chronic diseases so many people are experiencing today. In other words, genes do not cause disease per se unless they are thrust into a detrimental environment that is conducive to expressing these genes as chronic disease.

Chronic disease is determined by how you have treated your genes through out your life, what foods you eat, what you have drunk, what environment you have surrounded yourself with, what stresses you have tolerated, injuries and infections you have endured, how much love and support you have been blessed with etc….the total load concept. Food and nutrients talk to your genes as does exercise.
Have you bathed your cells in the right food, nutrients and love to optimize their function?

How can you tell if you are bathing your cells in the right environment?

You usually get early warning signs, symptoms that if not addressed, that will lead to chronic disease expressed after many years.