Health & WellnessS


Bacon n Eggs

There is only one type of cholesterol: here's why

We keep hearing about different types of cholesterol. It's all nonsense. There's only one cholesterol molecule, so there's only one type of cholesterol. What started this nonsense of types of cholesterol?

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© Morgue File
Just how many types of cholesterol are there? The more we're indoctrinated with the cholesterol-as-poison myth, the more types they seem to find. HDL. LDL. VLDL. And those pesky triglycerides: Are they a type of cholesterol? Here's the truth:

None of them are cholesterol, and there is only one type of cholesterol! That's right. HDL, LDL, and VLDL aren't cholesterol. And cholesterol isn't a fat.

All that nonsense bandied about to make you fearful that your cholesterol levels are too high ... well, unless they're the "right type" of cholesterol ... or maybe it's making sure they're at the right balance ... or whatever the latest fad among doctors happens to be ... It's all pure and utter nonsense. It's a cooked up jamboree of confusion, designed to put not only you, but also your doctor, off balance and disoriented so you'll buy into the idea that you really must take their poisons ... uh, drugs, or you could die tomorrow.

Eggs Fried

Tax fat, get fat - and sick

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Pastured butter is a great way to get healthy animal fat.
The proponents of a truly bad idea never give it up if it fails. Especially if they are in the medical profession. Even if totally fails. Especially if it totally fails.

A case in point is the fat tax. The idea is that you can make people thinner by heavily taxing the purchase of foods containing the "ultimate evil" - animal fat. This truly bad idea was tried in Denmark in 2011. A tax ranging as high as twenty percent was placed on foods containing saturated animal fat, like butter and cheese. The Danes did not reduce their consumption of these foods at all, often buying them from other countries. After a year of total failure, the Danish government admitted failure and abandoned this stupid, tyrannical tax.

Yet medical voices in the U.S., completely aware of the Danish failure, are still calling for a fat tax in America. A tax that would have to be high enough to stop people from buying foods containing animal fat.

Reducing the consumption of healthy animal fats will make people malnourished, not thinner

The basic idea behind the fat tax, that forcing people to eat less fat will make them thinner, is just not true. A huge campaign to reduce the eating of animal fats has been waged in the U.S. for over fifty years.

Americans eat much less saturated animal fat than they used to, which is the goal of the fat tax. And what is the result of this "success"?
  1. Americans are much fatter and sicker than ever before.
  2. Seventy five percent of young Americans who try to join the military are rejected as physically unable to serve.
  3. Chronic illness, especially among young people, has greatly increased.
  4. The U.S. spends far more money on medical costs per person than it did before fat restriction was advocated.

Life Preserver

Kick your cholesterol panel in the butt!

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Take a look at what Wheat Belly Blog reader Allen posted about his cholesterol testing:

Just wanted to report that I had my first blood test since starting Wheat Belly back in July, 2012. I just got a note from my company doc:

"I just wanted to write as your medical consultant how impressed I was by your recent labs. You said you lost 20 pounds - congratulations. Your hemoglobin A1c was fine, not indicating pre-diabetes. And your lipid profile showed more improvement than I've ever seen from weight loss, exercise and diet - many find this just genetic and cannot get it down with just these measures, but your's has really improved.

Total cholesterol (in U.S. units) down from 264 to 197, LDL or bad cholesterol down from 203 to 138, HDL or good cholesterol from 21 way up to 47. Your triglycerides are normal now.


This is great - glad you were so successful!"

His doctor's comment that Allen's lipid profile "showed more improvement than I've ever seen from weight loss, exercise and diet" hints at the extravagant metabolic transformations that develop with elimination of all things wheat.

When you eliminate wheat, 2 + 2 = 11 . . . the total is greater than the sum of the parts. Beneath the surface of his markedly improved lipid values, Allen has also:

Cow

Let them eat grass

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© Jeff PangGrassfed sheep thriving in rocky pastures.
Yet another arm of the United Nations is demanding that we stop eating meat, "to save the planet."

It is valid to be concerned about artificial fertilizers, which have caused great harm. But the UN solution, to stop eating meat, is, to be polite, nonsense.

The UN Scientists reason that eighty percent of artificial fertilizers are used to grow crops fed to meat animals. Thus, they think, if we stop eating meat, we will use less artificial fertilizers. But the truth is that if we stop eating animal foods, we will all suffer from severe malnutrition, and the myriad illnesses that come with the lack of vital nutrients. The research of Dr. Weston A. Price established that we need good animal foods to be well nourished and healthy.

My solution is practical, and will greatly increase the food supply. Stop feeding grains and other crops to meat animals. Let the animals eat the their natural food, the food that makes them healthy.

Let them eat grass.

Hearts

A young doctor fights the depression epidemic In Palestine

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Dr. Mohammad Herzallah of the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative
Forty percent of Palestinians are clinically depressed, a rate unmatched anywhere in the word. It's more than triple that of the U.S., ten times higher than in the U.K., and four to eight times higher than in Scandinavia, where the sun doesn't shine for a good part of the year. For Palestinian neuroscientist Mohammad Herzallah, this epidemic is an opportunity, if a tragic one, because it has made his country an ideal place to do groundbreaking research into the effects of depression on the brain.

I caught up with the 27-year-old doctor at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif. this week. Herzallah grew up in Palestine and got his medical degree at Al-Quds University in the West Bank, just a 15-minute walk from Jerusalem but a two-hour drive once through the checkpoints. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University in Newark, Herzallah was awarded a coveted TED Fellowship this year for his efforts to set up the first infrastructure for neuroscience research in one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. His Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative opened its lab three and a half years ago at Al-Quds and now has 22 students, 14 medical specialists and four therapists. It has established partnerships with medical centers at Rutgers, Harvard, the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland and SISSA in Trieste, Italy.

Snowflake Cold

Feeling cold may add years to your life

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© ReutersCold air may trigger the longevity gene in humans.
Living in cold and frigid temperatures may be worth while as new research shows possible benefits of cold air for humans. A research study done at the University of Michigan observed the effects of cold air on the gene receptor, TRPA-1. The TRPA-1 receptor channel can be found in the nerve and fat cells of nematodes, also known as roundworms. It was discovered that roundworms live significantly longer under colder environments because the cold air seems to start a domino effect beginning with the receptor that eventually leads to the activation of the DAF-16/FOXO, the gene linked to longevity.

Previous findings concluded that the cold induced a form of hibernation in the roundworms' bodies which was the main reason why roundworms have longer lifespans under cold weather. Past findings believed that the cold triggered the roundworms to hibernate since they are cold blooded organisms, and thus, those findings could not be applied to warm blooded mammals. However, the new research refutes that idea because roundworms with nonworking TRPA-1 do not live longer in the cold, which stresses the importance of this receptor channel. The old understanding did not consider the role of the TRPA-1 in understanding the roundworms' lifespan. The new research also found that these mechanisms do not only exist in cold blood organisms like the roundworms, but also, in warm blooded bodies like humans.

Cupcake Pink

Midnight snack could make you fat

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Working late-night shifts or eating at the wrong time can increase the risk of metabolic syndrome, obesity, and diabetes.

New research from Vanderbilt University explains why it matters not only what you eat, but also when you eat it. Insulin action rises and falls according to a 24-hour, circadian rhythm, the researchers team led by Carl Johnson, Ph.D. found. What's more, mice unable to keep the time for one reason or another get stuck in an insulin-resistant and obesity-prone mode.
Insulin, which is made in the pancreas, plays a key role in regulating the body's fat and carbohydrate metabolism. When we eat, our digestion breaks down the carbohydrates in our food into the simple sugar glucose, which is absorbed into the blood stream.

Too much glucose in the blood is toxic, so one of insulin's roles is to stimulate transfer of glucose into our cells, thereby removing excess glucose from the blood. Specifically, insulin is required to move glucose into liver, muscle and fat cells. It also blocks the process of burning fat for energy.

Insulin action - the hormone's ability to remove glucose from the blood - can be reduced by a number of factors and is termed insulin resistance. The study found that normal "wild-type" mouse tissues are relatively resistant to insulin during the inactive/fasting phase whereas they become more sensitive to insulin (therefore better able to transfer glucose out of the blood) during the high activity/feeding phase of their 24-hour cycle. As a result, glucose is converted primarily into fat during the inactive phase and used for energy and to other tissue building during the high activity phase.
According to Research News at Vanderbilt

Pills

Protect your children from psychiatric medication

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The pharmaceutical companies have broadened their horizon. It is not enough that they have 30% of middle and upper income white women addicted to antidepressants and that 20% of adults take some form of psychiatric medication. They now want to hook as many children as possible on psychiatric medication as well.

Big Pharma has one goal: Make profits no matter what it takes. This can only be accomplished by convincing lay people and physicians that the solution to health problems is drugs. Common sense tells you that this view cannot be true. Nobody is sick because they have low levels of pharmaceutical drugs in their bodies. In fact people that are taking multiple prescribed drugs suffer from a host of side effects which can be simply annoying, sometimes debilitating and even life threatening. Unfortunately the overwhelming majority of Americans and physicians have swallowed the pharmaceutical companies' drug bait, hook, line and sinker.

Americans make up just 5% of the world's population, yet they consume over 40% of the drugs that are produced. Do you think that the billions and billions of dollars that the drug companies spend on television and other advertising have influenced this outcome? When your children went off to high school, you probably told them "Just say 'No!' to drugs!" Yet when you watch television, the drugs companies are selling you on the proposition to "Just say 'Yes!' to drugs."

Bulb

Understanding autism: Condition of brain, not a result of cold parenting

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© Antonio Olmos for the ObserverProfessor Uta Frith, photographed at the Grant Museum in London: 'I am as intrigued and mystified as I ever was.'
The neuroscientist who first recognised autism as a condition of the brain rather than the result of cold parenting

Uta Frith sits in her beautiful, book-lined sitting-room in Harrow, north London, looking out towards the Chilterns. She is emeritus professor in cognitive development at UCL - and last year was made a dame. She is warm, smiling, bespectacled, dressed in brown linen and a fine gold necklace.

Towards the end of our meeting, she describes a conversation she once had with an autistic person who was obsessed with light fittings in railway carriages and was trying to interest her in the minute differences between one fixture and the next. When she admitted she could not tell them apart, he laughed at her incredulously.

People with autism are known to have an uncanny eye for detail and Frith has always been quick to acknowledge this and their other "cognitive strengths". But she has also been responsible for penetrating the particular difficulty autistic people have with "theory of mind" - the intuition about what is going on in another person's head. The light-fittings enthusiast would have been unlikely, for instance, to have entertained the possibility that his listener might not share his consuming interest.

Comment: For more information on the causes and potential help for autism read:
Can some children 'lose' autism diagnosis? New evidence says yes
Child Autism Epidemic Firmly Linked to Environment
Autism Rates Double in Children as Vaccines Poison an Entire Generation
Understand and Prevent Autism with Seven Simple Steps


Health

Punk singer gets a brain tapeworm from a vegetarian burrito

Brain Surgery
© FacebookSinger Jay Whalley's brain surgery scars.
The singer of Australian punk band Frenzal Rhomb was diagnosed with a brain tumor after suffering seizures. After the tumor was removed, the doctors determined it was the result of an infection caused by a parasite. Specifically, a kind of tapeworm from Central America typically found in pork products. Which is extra weird since he's a vegetarian.

Basically: he ate a tapeworm and it grew in his brain and caused a tumor.

The singer, Jay Whalley suspects it came from someone who prepared a vegetarian burrito for him without washing their hands while he was on tour in Central America a few years ago.