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Jonathan: Hello. Welcome to the show. My name is Jonathan. I'll be your host for this week. Thanks for joining us on the Health and Wellness Show. Joining me in our virtual studio from all over the planet today, Doug, Erica and Gaby; Tiffany unfortunately is not going to be with us today.
Today our topic is sugar. We're going to be talking about the ins and outs of sugar, where it hides in your diet, how much sugar you're actually having even though you may not realize it, some of the addictive properties of sugar and how to understand some of the more vague points about sugar and where you find it. What is fructose, glucose, sucrose and what do they mean. First we're going to start the show with some connecting the dots from this week in the health news. Gaby has an article she wants to cover today regarding statins.
Gaby: Yes, that's right. In the news this week, Parkinson's link to statins: Calls to end widespread use of the drug widespread use of the drug. It's a study that found that those who take cholesterol lowering drugs are more than twice as likely to develop Parkinson's disease as those who do not. This was a study covering the past 20 years with over 16,000 people and it translated into 150,000 extra patients in the UK with Parkinson's disease.
There was another study linked in that same article showing how statin drugs increases the risk of diabetes by 46%. Well this is hardly any news because statin drugs are associated with over 300 adverse effects including cataracts, fatigue, memory loss, coronary calcification which is crazy because statins are prescribed to prevent precisely those. So it's hardly any news. But perhaps the important thing about this article is that these studies prompted calls to end the widespread use of statin drugs by the deputy chairman of the British Medical Association, Dr. Kailash Chand.
It also shows how most people who trust statin drugs that are surveyed in the UK, which shows how most doctors, over two-thirds, disregard mainstream guidelines advice to offer statins to more patients. This article also highlights the vital role that cholesterol has in our organism. It's very important for our brain, our immunity, hormone production and tissue integrity it just shows how people are very aware. People distrust statin drugs so that pushes them.
Doug: It's funny because even though there's this widespread mistrust it's still big pharma's number one selling pharmaceutical drug. There's some kind of disconnect there. There are all these people saying that we have to stop using these and they're mainstream people too. It's like the mainstream medical association. It's not like fringe, alternative-type people who are saying this. But there's a lot of resistance to these drugs yet for some reason, it's still the number one selling drug out there. You still have some mainstream doctors saying, "We need to put these in the water supply because they're so good." so disconnected for sure.
Gaby: Yeah I also suspect that in the US it's much more prescribed than in the UK. In the UK the surveys virtually show that they don't trust these drugs. But I think in the US either out of fear or just to stick to guidelines, it is prescribed more often.
Jonathan: So it seems like just another fall back to the standard mode of thinking. The mainstream medical establishment decides on what they think works. There's not a whole lot of critical thought that goes into it after that.
Doug: I think it's also the idea of turning around an ocean liner. It's just this behemoth and it's been 50 years of the same kind of idea, that cholesterol is bad, etc. etc. and trying to actually circumvent that, despite the fact that so much evidence is coming out right now about cholesterol, at the very least, not being that bad. A lot of people are actually coming out and saying it's good. Despite all the publicity this is getting right now, it still is taking forever to slow down this path that we're on. It's like the momentum is just so great from it that it takes a lot of energy to try and turn that around.
Gaby: Yeah, I suspect that the statin industry is the one responsible for the cholesterol myth still being alive today where there's so much data against it. It's my impression the British people are pioneers because the British medical journal which published this article speaks well about fats and against carbohydrates. Over 50 years ago, it is the same trend right now. The US is falling behind. That's my impression, at least in mainstream medicine.
Erica: More big pharma.
Jonathan: Yeah, no kidding. It just seems like it's everywhere, just in the marketing and the advertisement of pharmaceuticals. If you look around you and turn on the TV or turn on the radio, there's always something or some kind of pill. I saw a new one for a new syndrome that they're calling over-active bladder. Never mind looking into the roots of the cause, it's just, "if you pee too much, here's a pill". {Laughter}
Doug: Unbelievable!
Erica: And a host of side effects with that I'm sure.
Jonathan: Sure.
Doug: No doubt. I wonder if this overactive bladder is actually just a side effect from another pharmaceutical drug. So they've come out with this one to patch up that side effect. I think a lot of the time that's what's going on. People are developing these side effects from the drugs that they're on and then lo and behold another drug comes out that helps with that side effect.
Jonathan: Yeah, it does seem to link together that way. Just like if you find yourself in the hospital and one thing goes wrong and they give you a drug that causes a whole host of other things to happen so they have to give you drugs for those things. You just start down this chain reaction. Along the lines of the mainstream, Erica has an article that she wants to cover, talking about the Trans Pacific Partnership and harmful additives in our food and what's going on with that.
Erica: Last week on the Health and Wellness section of SOTT we carried an article called; Is the US fast tracking its way to a toxic nightmare? This was written by Alison Levy. In the summary she explains the EU prohibits many harmful ingredients America allows but multinational corporations are looking to change that and the TPP would allow them to. So for those who may not know, you can look up what the TPP is, or Trans Pacific Partnership.
In 2014 Wikileaks released a second updated version. The article says:
This article is talking about a food additive called BHT and how the EU doesn't allow it but the US does. So we have this idea of the precautionary principle and for those who may not know what it is, it's an approach to risk management which places the burden of proof to demonstrate a product or ingredient safety on the corporations that produce the product prior to the release to the public.The TPP is the world's largest economic trade agreement that will, if it comes into force, encompass more than 40% of the world's GDP. The IP chapter covers topics from pharmaceuticals, patent registrations and copyright issues to digital rights. Experts say it will affect freedom of information, civil liberties and access to medicines globally. Despite the wide-ranging effects on the global population the TPP is currently being negotiated in total secrecy by 12 countries. Few people, even within the negotiating countries governments, have access to the full text of the draft agreement and the public who it will affect the most, has none at all. Large corporations however are able to see portions of the text generating a powerful lobby to effect changes on behalf of these groups and bringing developing country members reduced force while the public gets basically no say.
Over the last few decades the US has become lax with this approach while Europe proceeds with a greater amount of caution but the contrast may not survive efforts by the US trade representative Michael Froman and multinational corporations which are currently negotiating super trade treaties happen behind closed doors.
The author of this article says that such treaties are enacted by Congress through what is known as a fast track legislation meaning that the President negotiates trade agreements and Congress can only approve or disapprove but cannot amend or filibuster the legislation. According to sources at the negotiations of this treaty, the provisions in them may well eradicate EU's higher standards. Instead of getting toxic additives like BHT and other questionable chemicals out of American products, the negotiated language will likely harmonize barriers to trade, meaning corporations can put all the bad stuff in European products that they currently don't.
The author goes on to quote a phrase from the GMO labelling movement - because GMOs are a good example of this - which we need to safeguard the public's right to know. So it doesn't matter whether we're talking about secret trade deals or the contents in food, shampoo, building products, industrial emissions, knowledge protects us. They're looking at this information as a barrier to trade, so if you know it's in your food, you don't want GMOs, you don't want toxic chemicals and additives and vaccines, this is considered a barrier to trade.
From the perspective of corporations, the less the public knows about their products, the better, right? When knowledge deters people from a product or a process the industry considers that knowledge a barrier to trade. So these new uber trade deals, the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, are posed to be fast tracked through Congress. Big chemical companies and pesticide manufacturers, all these products that are coming to be associated with cancer, autism, learning disability in children and a host of other serious illnesses, are using these trade agreements to stop government regulations and dangerous chemicals around the globe.
William Warren, a senior trade analyst for Friends of the Earth made the point that, "When you can't adequately quantify risk, the burden of proof is on the party that would introduce a potentially risky product to show the risk is low enough to avoid harm towards individuals and the public." He continues that, "The precautionary is being dismantled as it is in US policy and companies make it the public's responsibility to show harm. Unless people go to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate a safety problem, corporations have no responsibility to guarantee safety." Just think about our discussions on vaccines as an element of that and then GMO foods as well. Warren says, "Fast track trade legislation is a fundamental attack on democracy and it's frightening."
So for all of the people outside the US who have these, "no GMOs" in their products, especially in Europe and I'm not so sure about Canada, this trade agreement is going to try and dismantle all that.
Jonathan: It's quite insidious. It makes me think of how little regard there is for health when you look at something like engineering. If you're building a new automobile or some kind of industrial machine, you really have to go through a rigorous process to show that the machine or whatever it is is safe, that it's not going to explode or leak or catch on fire. You have to prove all of these things before it can be viably brought to market. But when the consideration is the health of humans, they're saying, "Screw it. We don't have to go through those kinds of stringent processes. Just get it out there. Let us make money off of it."
Gaby: Very good point.
Erica: And it goes to show too that peoples' awareness is growing. We really see this in the GMO food industry. People have started to wake up and pay attention and the EU has not allowed the products in their country and now this type of trade agreement would just fast track that so consumers would not have the choice. Because of the slack labelling laws in the US, how would you even know in your own food, what you're eating?
Doug: It just continues to accelerate more and more, the necessity for people to be aware on their own and to avoid these things, do their research, figure out what's going on, what's in their food, what foods are safe, which aren't. In this day and age we can't rely on any of these kinds of government bodies or anything like that to assure that what we're eating is safe. It's 100% up to the consumer in this day and age to figure out what is safe, for them, for the family, all those sorts of things. It just seems to be accelerating more and more.
Erica: One thing that was really interesting about this article was apparently Europeans oppose this deal, obviously, and it's being carried in the mainstream media, but there's been a complete blackout in the US about this type of information coming out.
Jonathan: Well that makes total sense.
Erica: So, we're here to try to get the information out there.
Jonathan: Exactly. It makes sense to me, in an insidious kind of way, that there would be a blackout in the US because even our "foodies" are more about taste and flavour than they are about the actual health and quality of the food. I'm sure that I'm going to insult some people by saying that, so I'm not trying to qualify everybody into the same category. But I do know some people who are really into food, so to speak, and ostensibly healthy eating and yet still don't do the research into the sources of the things that they're getting. Never mind foodies, for the average person, if you can't trust the labels then what else do they have? If they're raising kids and they're all in school and they've got a job they've got to go to and they have other engagements, they just don't have the time to really look into these things or to go find a farmer to get your meat from. Our fast paced society really negates the ability to concentrate on your food and where it's coming from.
Doug: You bring up a really good point there Jonathan. The whole foodie movement is kind of a thorn in my side, to be perfectly honest because I feel like they are a group who really could be politicized and really get down to what their food is, what's in it, but you're right, usually all the focus is just on flavour, presentation, that kind of thing. It's like a fetishization of food. There isn't a heck of a lot of care about things like GMOs. A good example of that is the whole molecular gastronomy movement where people are using all these scientific techniques to make all these new and interesting foods and using dry ice to make ice cream and all this other kind of stuff. It just gets further and further away from an actual nourishing meal, to use all these gadgets and scientific chemicals, like using some processed food ingredient to make something into a form that's new and interesting. One example I can think of is they use a thickener to make some kind of coolie or a red pepper coolie or something into these little balls like caviar and they call it red pepper caviar. But what are you eating? Yeah, it's interesting, sure. Texture is interesting and all that and you can do some interesting things as far as that's concerned but is this nourishing? Are we actually feeding our bodies things that are good here? The foodies are a sticking point for me.
Jonathan: I understand where you're coming from. It's unfortunate because even with healthy eating you can get down with flavour and you can really make an awesome tasting meal that's also nourishing. I agree it's almost like the Cirque de Soleil of cooking sometimes.
Doug: Exactly!
Jonathan: It makes me think of a show that I saw some time ago where I was looking up seafood recipes and one of them was crab legs which, since the whole thing happened in the Gulf I have stopped eating shell fish just because and that's my own personal decision on that. I won't name names but the guy was a very famous five star chef and his whole recipe was beer and Old Bay seasoning to cook these crabs' legs in. I'm sure they tasted awesome, but it's also totally laden with chemicals and artificial preservatives, MSG and everything like that, and there was no mention of that. That's just one example of the direction that seems to go in.
Doug: Yes, definitely.
Jonathan: Along those lines, we're putting all this stuff into our food, that brings me to this article that Doug is going to talk about, the changes in our brains and what's causing this. It looks like Science Daily has written about changes in brains over time. Doug, do you want to go over that?
Doug: Sure. This article caught my eye. It was published on SOTT last week. It's from Science Daily, March 5th. It was called; Changes in older brains due to vascular changes rather than neuronal activity. The articles says that previously reported changes in the aging brain using FMRI may actually be due to vascular or blood vessel changes rather than changes in the neurons themselves.
It was previously thought that changes in brain cells are what we are actually seeing in aging brains, when you start to see a lack of performance in a lot of older brains. But it's actually saying that this recent study found that it has more to do with blood vessels than it does with the actual brain cells themselves. Their research showed that age differences in signal amplitudes during a task are of a vascular, not neuronal origin. They propose that their method can be used as a robust correction factor to control for vascular differences in FMRI studies. I just thought that was very interesting that it has more to do with the blood vessels than the actual brain cells.
On a related note, there was another article on SOTT published back in 2012 called; Dementia: autoantibodies damage blood vessels in the brain. They found that arterial sclerosis or the hardening of the arteries in the blood vessels of the brain are caused by an autoimmune reaction. Just to go over quickly, these autoantibodies, which are antibodies that attack the body's tissues themselves, they're part of the immune system that mistakenly begins to attack the body itself. In this case it's the cells of the vascular system in the brain.
And just to tie another one in here, there was another article on SOTT from the end of 2013 called; Study breaks blood-brain barriers to understanding Alzheimer's. Just to quote from this article, it says that:
The scientist, Dr. Zlokovic, is quoted as saying, "Our results suggest that damage to the vascular system may be a critical step in the development of full-blown Alzheimer's disease pathology."Vascular dementias, the second leading cause of dementia, are a diverse group of brain disorders caused by a range of blood vessel problems. Brains from Alzheimer's patients often show evidence of vascular disease, including ischemic stroke, small hemorrhages, and diffuse white matter disease, plus a build-up of beta-amyloid protein in vessel walls. Furthermore, previous studies suggest that APOE4, a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, is linked to brain blood vessel health and integrity.
I just thought that this was interesting because it's a turn away from the idea that there's something wrong with the brain cells themselves and they're looking more at the blood system of feeding the brain. We can connect a few dots here. If you know brain aging is actually a vascular problem, then we could actually address it the same way we address other vascular problems; so cognitive problems might just be yet another symptom of metabolic syndrome, in other words.
Gaby: Yes. It goes back to the nourishing, like you were saying earlier about the diet. So it goes back to the nourishing problem, the vascular issue.
Doug: Yeah, exactly. In order words it's the diet. So even with the autoimmune condition, that is linked to diet through the whole thing of leaky gut where an inflamed gut lining allows undigested proteins into the bloodstream where they're attacked by the immune system. The immune system remembers these proteins and some of these proteins actually mimic the body's own proteins and organ systems and whatnot and presto! You've got autoimmunity.
With all these different vascular problems people tend to look at cognitive problems like Alzheimer's or dementia or any of these sorts of things, as a very separate thing from these metabolic syndrome type things, but it's looking more and more like they're actually quite related. Just as an example, when you eat too much fructose you get raised triglycerides in the bloodstream that lead to insulin resistance and that starts all kinds of problems in the vascular system. Where those veins and arteries are located will tend to determine what the actual problem ends up being. If they're located in the brain, then lo and behold you've got all these cognitive difficulties.
Gaby: And in contrast the way Alzheimer's disease is treated in mainstream medicine, the focus on molecular passages, neurochemistry, hard to raise levels artificially and they never look into the diet!
Doug: Yeah, they never look into the diet.
Jonathan: Yeah. That makes me think of a guy I had been looking recently, Dr. Andrew Moulden. He does work on brain degeneration from vaccines and he's got some really interesting stuff online. Part of his thesis is that these chemicals and heavy metals that are in the vaccines are degenerating the vascular system in the brain so that those tiny, tiny little pathways become corroded or they basically shrivel up so that the blood is not flowing to the correct places in the brain and you end up with a bunch of these silent strokes over time. And then that results in cognitive degeneration.
Doug: The interesting thing about Dr. Moulden is that he died under some very mysterious circumstances. He's actually no longer with us. He died I think a couple of years ago.
Jonathan: Oh, did he?!
Doug: It just makes you wonder if maybe he was digging into the wrong places.
Jonathan: Yeah, that curious. I didn't realize that. I had just stumbled across his stuff the other day. Well speaking of these degenerative things that are happening to our brains and to our bodies, one of the oldest, most commonly used and most well known is sugar, which is our topic for today. We want to go over some details about that and touch on various areas of research into sugar. First, I think one that everybody has heard is high fructose corn syrup. Erica has some material to cover on that. Do you want to go through that Erica?
Erica: Yeah, sure. High fructose corn syrup and its popularity. We've carried several articles on the Signs page about high fructose corn syrup. One informational tidbit was carried back in 2009 called; The Popularity of High Fructose Corn Syrup and the Truth is Not So Sweet. It's the most common sugar used in processed foods. High fructose corn syrup or HSCS originally comes from corn and it's subjected to over a dozen mechanical processes and chemical reactions. Of course the corn lobby insists that it's natural because it comes from corn. The reality is it's highly toxic and highly chemically produced.
It's used in almost every product found in a regular grocery store and according to Michael Pollan who wrote several books, one called; The Omnivore's Dilemma, he says that, "corn is the biggest legal cash crop in America; it is inexpensive, overproduced, genetically modified, and subsidized." So it's a big Ag subsidy program, "The food industry loves HFCS for its low cost, its ability to both extend the shelf life of food and protect frozen foods from freezer burn."
It's being touted as an alternative to processed sugar and sweeteners. The article continues, "The more fuel, energy and chemicals that go into processing a food, the less nutritious and healthy that food probably is."
Another author who has written extensively about HFCS is Dr. Hyman. He wrote an article called; The Evils of High Fructose Corn Syrup. I'm just going to go through a list of some of the things that he has shared in this article. For one, according to a CBS report, the average American eats 56 pounds of this HFCS a year.
Jonathan: Whoa!
Erica: That's like a small child's worth. {Laughter} It also represents more than 40% of caloric sweeteners added to foods and beverages. It contains anywhere from 55-90% fructose. It increases your appetite and promotes obesity more than regular sugar. It's more addictive than cocaine! It contributes to what Dr. Hyman has called diebesity, a combination of diabetes and obesity and inflammation.
This goes back to what Doug was saying, higher doses literally punch holes in the intestinal lining, sending these particles into the blood/brain barrier, as Doug was mentioning earlier. It contributes to the development and severity of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and it can interfere with your heart's use of minerals, magnesium, copper and chromium. It's made from GMO corn, which is frightening in and of itself.
And then this last little statistic is really quite scary. Back in 2009 some research was done and it was found that it contains mercury. So mercury in the HFCS is left as a residue in the production of caustic soda, which is a key ingredient. Accordingly to this whistleblower, Renee Dufault she was an environmental health officer, half of all HFCS tested contained mercury residue. According to her statement, exposure to mercury via the HFCS is up to 50 times more than mercury amalgam exposure in children ages 3-19.
Doug: Jeez!
Jonathan: Wow!
Erica: She also did say that children ages 3-19 are the largest consumers of HFCS. So this stuff is just straight up evil, as he says. There are a lot more people tuned into this, but if you go into a local grocery store and you want to buy ketchup, let's say, or any product that's on the shelf, you're going to notice that it's usually one of the first five ingredients. And they've kind of tried to change the name, calling it different things, but the bottom line is that this is in almost every single food, at least in the American supermarkets.
Gaby: Do you guys know, what are the other names it goes by in North America, as ingredients?
Jonathan: Corn sugar? Is that what they're calling it now?
Gaby: Corn sugar.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Doug: I think they call it just corn syrup too.
Jonathan: Sure. That whole marketing campaign started a year-and-a-half or two years ago, where they were going to try to flip over to calling it corn sugar and there were actually commercials where there were attractive-looking people and nice music in the background with, "It's called corn sugar now".
Doug: Yeah, it was funny. They were totally trying to spin it as natural, "Oh, it's totally natural. It comes from corn. What could be more wholesome than that?"
Gaby: More natural than corn?
Doug: Yeah, that's an argument in and of itself really!
Erica: Yeah, and you have to be vigilant. In our family the joke is, "Don't go to any of the aisles in the middle of the grocery store" right, because everything in the middle of the grocery store is packaged or can stay on the shelf for years, so you have to be really vigilant and diligent about reading labels because maybe if it's not in the first five ingredients, it's going to be somewhere in there, in the list of ingredients and as Gaby said, it's probably being changed to different names because there's so much awareness about it happening now.
Doug: I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think that they've even developed an organic HFCS so that they can use it in all the organic packaged foods out there.
Jonathan: Oh, wow!
Doug: So if that's not just so backward.
Gaby: And what's organic in your mind? Non-GMO and that's it?! I don't know!
Doug: It's a HFCS that's not sprayed with pesticides and isn't GMO, but that doesn't make it healthy.
Gaby: It's sugar nonetheless.
Jonathan: I think the corporations are definitely picking up on the fact that people are picking up on that topic. I just saw the other day in the store that there's a new brand of Coke that's got a green label and it's called Coke Life. It said, "Made with natural cane sugar and stevia". So you can still clean the leads on your car battery, it just won't work quite as fast as Coke Classic. {Laughter}
Gaby: It reminds me of McDonald's changing its colour to green from red. Like, "Oh, that's so much better!"
Erica: Yeah, it's all about perception management, the fact that it's in every single type of soda on the market still!
Jonathan: Yeah, it's everywhere. Working backwards from HFCS, a lot of people may think, "Okay, I know HFCS is bad but, why is sugar bad, even in moderation? My grandparents put sugar in their coffee and things like that. So what's the problem there?" But there are a lot of problems just with sugar by itself. Erica, there was another website we talked about earlier called, The Fix. Did you want to quote some things from that?
Erica: Yeah. I quoted; The Fix in last week's show about big pharma. It's a website about addiction and recovery and legal and illegal drug addiction. This article was written back in 2014 by Cathy Cassata and it's called; Sweet Necessity-The Perils of Sugar Addiction. The summary says: Telling a sugar addict to stop eating sugar is like telling an alcoholic to stop drinking.
According to Action on Sugar, a group of leading medical and nutrition experts, the sweet substance is bad enough that earlier this year, the group called for a 20-30% reduction in sugar added to packaged and processed foods over the next three to five years.
This woman, Kathleen DesMaisons, PhD, author of The Sugar Addict's Total Recovery Program said that:
She goes on to say, it's just like alcohol. In a recent study published in 2007 in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews: "reported that in some circumstances, intermittent access to sugar can lead to behavior and neurochemical changes that resemble the effects of a substance of abuse."Telling people to stop eating sugar is well-intended and might work for those who are not addicted to it but it's likely that many people who are obese or who have Diabetes Type 2 are sugar addicts. Telling them to stop eating sugar is like telling an alcoholic to stop drinking. There is much more to it than that.
Then in another paper in the journal Nature, 2012, it's suggested that warnings like on alcohol, should be placed on products containing sugar. The paper included evidence that fructose and glucose in excess can have a toxic effect on the liver. The metabolism of ethanol, the alcohol contained in alcoholic beverages had similarities to the metabolic pathways that fructose took. The authors also reported that sugar increased the risk for some of the same chronic conditions as alcohol does. So people who get clean from drugs and alcohol gain weight and it seems they replace that urge with food addiction,
DesMaisons said she noticed a clear connection between sugar and alcohol while working in a treatment centre in the 1980s. "I worked with many alcoholics. I'd ask them what they ate. Many said they ate lots of sugar and didn't eat breakfast or regular meals throughout the day." So when she asked them to change their eating habits and improve their nutrition, she saw many improvements. After seeing how healthy nutrition helped many addicts, DesMaisons founded the Radiant Recovery Program, a free online community dedicated to healing unbalanced sugar sensitivity.
Her work is based on the premise that some people are predisposed to addiction. This group of people has a type of brain and body chemistry that makes them more vulnerable to addictive substances and behaviour. They'll be very drawn to sugar way before they discover alcohol because sugar creates the same biochemical response that alcohol does in the brain.
Then she goes on to some information about your brain and body on sugar and what we've covered in previous shows; all carbohydrates are converted into glucose during digestion. She goes on to say, that Americans are now consuming about 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day!
Jonathan: Wow!
Erica: Yeah.
Gaby: How many?
Erica: 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day. So that may be in addition to what they're already eating. So she says, "Who's at risk for sugar addiction? People with lower levels of beta endorphins get a more intense reaction when they consume sugar and alcohol because they have more receptors opened up. So they get a bigger hit and a bigger withdrawal when all the extra receptors empty out."
And then she goes on to talk about ways to cut out sugars, and we're going to cover some of that in our talk today. The most important step to recovery she said, "Is giving your brain the nutrients it needs to heal itself. She goes on to say," eating breakfast is one of the most important things you can do, especially a high fat breakfast". She says, "This is not a laughing matter. While it may seem farfetched to compare overeating sugar to problem drinking or drug use, we laugh off sugar addiction and people think they're not addicted. I work with people all over the world who are addicted to sugar and don't know what to do about it. There is a lot of pain associated with this addiction and it's very real."
So if anyone wants to check out that article, it's Sweet Necessity-the Perils of Sugar Addiction. There's a lot of added commentary in the article about sugar as a drug and what it does and then the importance of eating a healthy breakfast to help withdrawal from those symptoms.
Jonathan: Sure. I can definitely attest to that. I can't say that I've been 100% off of sugar for a long time. It finds its way into my diet in bits and bites here and there, but I'm nowhere near what I used to eat or drink in terms of soda. I've completely quit drinking any kind of soda. But I remember the first time I realised, "I need to stop doing this" and really cut back on sugar, the cravings were just over the top. It's almost consuming, like you want a cookie or go get a bag of chocolate chips just to try to satiate that. But I think that has a lot of metabolic causes and imbalances in the body that Doug was going to talk about. Do you want to go into sugar metabolism and insulin spikes?
Doug: Yeah, sure. I think to just segue over a little bit; a lot of people don't really have the information in order to actually get off these sugar addictions and issues with sugar. People think that as long as they're not drinking soda and eating candy and all this other kind of stuff that they don't have this sugar addiction problem. But like Erica was saying, with every carbohydrate, once your body has digested it, its sugar. So really the way to deal with these issues is to do a low carb diet, specifically to get you into ketosis.
We've covered this in past shows, particularly on our show about ketosis, but there is a very real difference between sugar metabolism and fat metabolism in the body. I'm not going to get into a lot of detail on this because we have covered it before, but when you eat sugar, your blood sugar goes up and your body releases insulin in order to get that sugar into the cells to be burned as energy.
The issue with that is that in burning the sugar, your body actually ends up creating a lot more free radicals as a result, as a by-product, than it does versus fat metabolism. So in and of itself, burning sugar is an inflammatory diet that will increase your inflammation just because you are creating so many more of these free radicals.
On the other hand, if you're eating fat, your body doesn't release insulin. There's no need for it to. Some fats go directly into the cells for burning. Others need to be broken up first before they can do that, but it's a much cleaner burning fuel. Now because your body has to release insulin in order to deal with blood sugar - and it should be pointed out here that having high blood sugar is actually quite toxic and the body pulls out all the stops in order to get that blood sugar back down. One of the things it will do is put fat to the side in storage until it has burned all the sugar because it really needs to get rid of that as quickly as it possibly can.
So having high blood sugar regularly, by eating a high carbohydrate diet, leads to all kinds of problems, one of which is glycation. This is where sugars actually bind onto proteins in the body and cause a carmelization effect. They actually coat the cells and they lead to all sorts of problems. The proteins cannot function properly if they're coated in this sugar coating. So that can lead to all sorts of different problems where the body just can't perform the tasks that it needs to perform.
There are also tonnes of information about the detriment of having high insulin regularly. Every time you're eating a meal your insulin's going up. Every time your insulin goes up, you're knocking years off your life, maybe not years, but it does add up. So with these insulin spikes, unfortunately you end up riding this roller coaster where you eat sugar, it raises your blood glucose levels, your body releases insulin, in many cases releases too much insulin because it's kind of panicking because it's getting such a huge hit all at once. And that makes your blood sugar go too low and then suddenly you go into this panic mode because the body will actually activate the adrenal glands in order to get the blood sugar back up again to a stable level. Then that's when you get that "hangry" thing, where you're hungry and angry and moody. Of course what you're doing at that point is craving sugar like crazy, because you need to get that blood sugar back up again.
So it just leads to this cycle where you have a high carbohydrate breakfast then by 10:00 in the morning you're craving a snack or maybe a coffee with lots of sugar in it or cookies or a pastry or something along those lines, so you eat that. Then your blood sugar drops again, so for lunch you have more sugar. Then you have that 3:00 in the afternoon drop in energy and you're looking for more sugar to replace that. And it's not necessarily "sugar". It can be any kind of carbohydrate, even just craving a sandwich or French fries or something like that. It's the same thing. You're still craving sugar is what you're doing.
These are some of the quick, off-the-top-of-my-head kind of negative properties of sugar consumption.
Erica: Yeah, we see that, as I was saying earlier, in grocery stores. People are coming home from work. They're tired. They go into the grocery store. Everything's packaged and they get their hit of HFCS and sugar and then the process just begins and continues on and on.
Gaby: It's not even the supermarket. You cannot avoid it. You cannot even walk 50 metres and there it is advertised. There is candy everywhere, snacks everywhere. People have it in their pockets 24 hours. It's crazy.
Doug: Yeah, it's amazing how our society is built around this addiction. Everything around you is feeding this idea of, "Oh, why not have a snack? Why not have this? Have that?" It's all just to feed this whole cycle.
Erica: Yeah, very much agreed on that! You really see it in children. There are all these foods marketing to children, fast foods, unhealthy foods. And having worked with children for several years, you can see them crash and burn. When I worked at Head Start, one of the things that the USDA did was offer all low income children chocolate milk first thing every morning. And we did a campaign trying to get chocolate milk off the menu and they said, "Absolutely not! This is the milk that we give to these kids and it's a low income food program and we're not going to take chocolate milk off the menu."
Gaby: It reminds me how the brand name Milka chocolate was the sponsor of the Olympic Games. You'd have to eat I don't know how many bars of chocolate milk in order to get a basketball. It's crazy.
Erica: The scary thing about chocolate milk is milk is evil in and of itself and maybe we'll do a whole show on that, but the reason it's chocolate milk is because it's all the grade of milk that they can't use, whether it's got pus or toxins in it, and they just add chocolate to it so you can't see that it's not really white milk anymore, it's now brown, chocolaty milk. So it's the lowest grade possible food they could be giving to these children, starting at age 3!! So it's just setting up what Doug talked about; a lifelong struggle with addiction and then negative health consequences as a result.
Gaby: Ending up with Alzheimer's disease.
Jonathan: Yeah, that just gives me the shivers to think about when I remember being in high school and for lunch or dinner sometimes it would be a Sub sandwich and a half gallon of chocolate milk, and just down it. Ugh! Doug there were some other topics that you were going to talk about - the glycemic index, and I wonder if people are aware of that term and if you could go over that a little bit and what it means? What are some of the myths around the glycemic index?
Doug: It was a couple of decades ago that they came out with this glycemic index. It's a number that's associated with a particular type of food that indicates the food's effect on a person's blood glucose or blood sugar level. They determine it by feeding a food in its pure form to a healthy, fasted subject and then they measure the resulting blood sugar rises. They do that over multiple subjects and they come up with an average and that becomes the glycemic index for that food.
The way they record it, the number is usually between 50 and 100 and 100 represents what pure glucose will do to your blood sugar levels. You can find all kinds of charts online that show the glycemic index for a whole different range of food, from every processed food you can think of to actual natural foods. The idea is that by keeping your glycemic index of foods low, you're eating healthier because it keeps your insulin levels low, it keeps your blood sugar levels low. It's claimed to be associated with diabetes management, improvement in blood lipids like cholesterol levels and reduced risk of heart attack, although there's some controversy around that. Some people say that there haven't actually been any findings that have shown that.
In general foods that have a low glycemic index take longer to digest, so they prolong satiety whereas high glycemic index foods cause blood sugar fluctuations. In and of itself, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It may not be a bad idea to have an idea of how a food is going to actually affect your blood sugar levels. But the problem is, as with most fad diets - and a whole diet did crop up around this. There are a bunch of books out by the guy who developed, talking about how to eat a low glycemic index diet.
But the problem with this is that it's only looking at a very small part of the issue. The glycemic index might be interesting information, but it doesn't really tell you much about whether a food is actually healthy. A case in point is fructose, as we were talking about before. I know Gaby is going to be going into fructose a little bit more. Fructose doesn't actually cause an immediate rise in your blood sugar levels because it needs to be converted by the liver before it can be released. So it's kind of petered out by the liver rather than going directly into the bloodstream. But this doesn't make it good for you, as we were just discussing with the HFCS. Fructose can have a really detrimental effect on the body.
A couple of years ago in health food circles, agave syrup became a really big thing. Everybody was all onboard on this agave syrup thing because, "Oh, it's a low glycemic sweetener". So it started showing up in every single health food you can think of. There's suddenly all this agave syrup. But the problem with agave syrup is that it's essentially the same thing as HFCS only maybe not quite as processed, although there's a lot of controversy around that as well because it's really high in fructose. So yeah, it doesn't have a high glycemic index, but its 55-95% fructose or something along those lines.
The same thing could be said about honey. Honey is mostly fructose, so it doesn't have as big an effect on the glycemic index. Even the paleo favourite, sweet potatoes, one of the reasons that it's not affecting blood sugar so much is because it has more fructose than it does glucose in it. So we thought all these foods were completely innocuous because they don't cause this spike in blood sugar, but it's only because they're loaded with fructose.
The same thing could be said for a lot of these artificial sweeteners. If you take in something like aspartame, yeah, it doesn't have an effect on your blood sugar levels, but it can play absolute havoc with the body in other ways because it's a dangerous chemical. We could do an entire show around aspartame and artificial sweeteners. But most of these artificial sweeteners are the exact same way. By just concentrating on the glycemic index, you're completely narrowing your focus so that you're not noticing all of the other kinds of things that go on.
It's the same kind of thing that happens with calorie counting. If you just focus in on the calories, you can really let in a whole bunch of toxic, terrible stuff into your diet, just because it's low calorie. It's the same thing with the glycemic index.
Jonathan: Right.
Doug: We here at SOTT are very big proponents of the ketogenic diet and the glycemic index really ignores the total carbohydrates that you're eating in favour of looking at its quality. Anything that has a high fibre content that is a complex carbohydrate versus a simple carbohydrate is going to have less of a glycemic index. And just too quickly go through complex versus simple carbohydrate, a complex carbohydrate is one that, on a molecular level, the carbohydrate chain is more complicated. It has more branches so it takes longer for the body to break it down. Because it's taking longer for the body to break it down, it's going to enter the bloodstream more slowly, therefore have a lower GI.
Simple carbohydrates are the opposite. They're very simple chains and they can be broken down very quickly. So those things end up raising blood sugar much more quickly. But again, focusing on these things, you're not looking at the total amount of carbohydrates that you're getting. The fact of the matter is, if you're eating too many carbohydrates, you're keeping your insulin levels high and you are avoiding fat burning which is the ultimate state that you want to be in, a fat burning state. As long as you're still eating carbohydrates, even if you're keeping them low GI carbohydrates, you are essentially keeping yourself out of the fat burning mode and setting yourself up for all kinds of health consequences.
I'll just point out here quickly also that the paleo/ketogenic diet is, just by its nature, the lowest glycemic index diet that you can possibly do because it has no carbohydrates on it or very little. Meat and fat don't have a glycemic index, so basically zero.
Jonathan: I've definitely noticed since going onto the keto diet, I've been much more sensitive to that. Over the holidays, I think I mentioned previously, I slipped and had some pie and some cake - not a tonne, but just the little amount that I did have, I noticed it right away. I noticed the feeling of having that sugar in my system. Gaby did you want to talk about fructose a little bit as well? You were going to talk about the calorie myth.
Gaby: Yeah, I think you guys covered it pretty well. I just wanted to give you examples to portray it. An analogy "as above, so below" the case "as below, so above", to portray the toxic effects of fructose we can recall how foie gras is made. Foie gras is French for fatty liver. It is made by force feeding ducks or geese large amounts of corn. Their livers grow six to ten times their size and the liver is packed with fat. So that's the effect of fructose on the liver. It's the same with human beings. The animals, in the case of foie gras, have to be sacrificed within a week otherwise they will die from the fatty liver disease.
In humans, it has gotten to the point that fatty liver is so common that it's the most common cause of chronic liver disease in the developed world. It affects 70 million adults in the US and it is expected to reach epidemic status by the year 2030 where 50% of the US population will have it. It's so common that when people have an abdominal ultrasound, it is reported - and most of the doctors will say, "Oh your ultrasound came back normal. You just have a little fat on your liver but that's okay". Actually, no, it's not okay! It's a sign that you're very ill.
When a person has fatty liver it doesn't matter if the person is very skinny. If there is fat in the liver it predicts very strongly the development of diabetes in five years. This was a study done involving over 11,000 people. It was crazy. To recapitulate, fructose has a very special ability to induce metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance. It includes fatty liver and to increase your triglycerides which is correlated with heart disease. It promotes visceral fat which is also related with heart disease and bad health in general. It's what is called beer belly basically. It also increases high blood pressure, cancer, very bad health.
It's so common that people are saying, "No, no, some fat in the liver, that's fine, that's okay". Well no.
Jonathan: It's unbelievable.
Gaby: Yes, that's one side of the coin. The other example also ultimately fatty liver is, going back to what Erica was discussing about addiction and alcohol and similarities to fructose, fructose is metabolized very much the same way as ethanol, as alcohol. It's considered a toxin for the liver. When there is cirrhosis of the liver we mostly think of two causes, it's either alcohol or a virus like hepatitis B virus. There are a growing number of idiopathic causes for cirrhosis. Idiopathic in natural medicine means, "we don't know what causes it". So now we're looking closer at fructose and a whole epidemic of fructose addiction that we have, as the cause of cirrhosis of the liver.
For me the most outrageous thing is that fructose, at least in Europe, is sold for diabetes and to lose weight, going back to the caloric myth, because it has a very low glycemic index. It can be sold as low in calories. So it is promoted for diabetes whereas we have all this research showing that the larger amount of fructose you consume, the more diabetes you will have. So it's a complete disconnection between the food industry and the medical research that we have and people, not knowing any better, will consume fructose to lose weight, to control their diabetes and when they go to their medical check up they will say, "But I don't eat anything at all and all my parameters are getting worse". I believe the person, that they're not eating anything; just maybe they're eating everything with fructose.
Doug: Yeah, it should be pointed out too that fructose sugar itself, table sugar, is half glucose and half fructose. So a lot of the negative effects of sugar might actually be from the fact that 50% of it is fructose.
Gaby: That's a very good point.
Doug: It comes back to the same thing again with the glycemic index. People are looking at fructose as this alternative because, "Oh look, it has a low glycemic index." But the whole process that fructose goes through in the liver, the liver has a choice where it can either convert it to glucose and use that to burn as energy, but chances are if somebody's eating a high fructose diet, they have high blood sugar pretty much all the time. So the body converts it to triglycerides instead, which is a fat and there it can be stored. And where is it going to store it? Well, it'll store it in the liver. So then you end up with this fatty liver condition.
High triglycerides in the blood are correlated at the very least with insulin resistance. I'm actually of the opinion that it probably leads to insulin resistance. I won't get too much into that because it gets complicated. But this idea that fructose is some sort of healthy alternative couldn't be more misguided. Then that gets into the whole thing about fruit. The main sugar in most fruits is fructose.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Doug: So everybody is walking around talking about how healthy these fruits are when really you're just getting a hit of this fructose.
Gaby: I read that it takes a few scoops of ice cream or a soda and the fructose will get converted into fat in the liver. Just smaller amount maybe gets stored as glucose, but more than that, it gets converted into fat. It reminds of what Erica was saying about the 22 teaspoons of sugar being consumed by people nowadays. The American Heart Association has recommended that five percent of calories should be from added sugars, no more than that. On a 2,000 calorie diet is 24 grams or 6 teaspoons! A can of coke has 39 grams. A medium-sized yogurt has 40 grams. And people are eating yogurt thinking that they will lose weight. Well, they're over the top of caloric intake from added sugar.
Erica: Not to mention all the toxic additives in there too. Or these low fat Yogurts like Doug was mentioning, with aspartame in it.
Gaby: Yeah, that's not even going to the milk proteins.
Doug: Yeah, exactly.
Jonathan: From a lay person's perspective here, what role does lactose play in this because lactose is a milk sugar, is that correct?
Gaby: That's right, yes.
Jonathan: Is that also converted into fat when it's processed through the body?
Gaby: It's sugar.
Jonathan: Sure.
Doug: I'm not actually sure. I'd have to look that up.
Gaby: Yes, the sugar from milk it has fat as well if it's not low fat. And there are proteins in milk, including casein, which is the equivalent of gluten in toxicity and in addictive properties as well. It's among the worst food items out there that are extremely popular. Elderly are forced to eat yogurt thinking that it is better for their health. So just like, finalize the Alzheimer's disease, so to speak.
Jonathan: We'll have to talk about doing a show on milk one of these days coming up, or dairy.
Gaby: That's a good idea.
Jonathan: We had talked before the show a little bit about an interesting thing that I personally just recently learned about. I had heard about this before but had not really known very much about it, but that when you get too much sugar in your gut, it can actually ferment. Gaby, when you were talking about fatty liver, even if you're not drinking alcohol you can blow positive on a blood alcohol test because of the fermentation that's happening in your gut with the sugar while it basically sits there and rots. Is that right?
Gaby: Yes, and this was while researching the candida overgrowth problem. When you eat too much sugar, there is an overgrowth of all the fungi in your gut, especially candida, but other fungi as well. I read this case of a person who didn't drink alcohol but he tested positive on the alcohol test because he was fermenting the sugar in his gut. It was being converted into alcohol in his bloodstream. Just to give you an idea of how many diseases or problems we have like brain fog, but also feeling dizzy and drunk, just from eating sugar, carbohydrates.
Jonathan: Yeah. I know the term "sugar buzz" is fairly common, like "Whoa, I got a sugar buzz from that!"
Gaby: It's interesting. Actually Robert Lustig, a professor of neuroendocrinology at the University of California, and professor of paediatrics and he has done pioneering research on fructose. He called his latest article; "Fructose is like alcohol without the buzz". You don't get drunk but you have all the chronic effects from drinking alcohol, just from fructose alone which is high uric acid levels, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, fatty liver and so forth. It's the same thing as drinking alcohol long term.
Doug: Yeah, he comes right out and says that fructose is a poison, that it's not a food.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Erica: He also goes on to say that high doses are almost unavoidable in modern society, like we talked about. If you don't have the knowledge and awareness and you're struggling with this sugar addiction and you walk into a grocery store, it's almost unavoidable that you don't get that hit, so to speak.
Doug: I was really surprised to find that even deli meats a lot of times have sugar added to them, or condiments.
Gaby: I was going to say, I have gone into a supermarket for deli meats and I have gone out empty-handed because all of them had added fructose.
Jonathan: Yeah. Even most of the commercially available ham and roast beef is coloured with caramel.
Doug: Erica was mentioning ketchup before. Ketchup is basically HFCS with a little bit of tomato purée added to it. All these things that you would never expect to see sugar in have sugar or HFCS or something along those lines. It's really funny too, when you see in the health food industry, they keep coming up with these alternative sweeteners and things like that, that are just sugar. The big one right now is coconut sugar. Everybody's like, "Oh yeah, coconut sugar! That's great!" before it was maple syrup or honey or agave. I think that people really need to be aware that at the end of the day, there really is very little difference.
These things are sugar. Yeah, you might be getting it from a cleaner source that's not from GMO corn. It's from coconuts which are maybe a little bit healthier in some ways, but at the end of the day, sugar is sugar and your body really isn't processing it any differently. It's not having any different effect. So all these people who are loading up on healthy coconut milk ice cream that's sweetened with coconut sugar, you really aren't making that much of a difference between that and going to a Dairy Queen.
Jonathan: Yeah. What recommendations can we give to people if they're still eating a lot of sugar or any processed sugar for sure, on how to get that sweet taste with some of the natural sweeteners like we were talking about, stevia, xylitol and erythritol. What is the difference there and what's the metabolism involved in sugar alcohols like erythritol?
Doug: Basically the idea is that sugar alcohols in particular are natural, but they are not processed the same way by your body as actual sugar is. So they don't cause an insulin response. They don't tend to be absorbed as a carbohydrate, at least not as much. Xylitol; in and of itself which is a sugar alcohol, actually has a lot of beneficial effects in the body. It will kill of a lot of different bacteria that might be pathogenic bacteria. They've done a lot of studies with milk bacteria and found that xylitol actually kills off the bacteria that are responsible for cause cavities and gingivitis and that sort of thing. So you'll see a lot of health store toothpastes now are sweetened with xylitol a lot of times. You have xylitol breath mints and things like that because they do have a beneficial effect.
There haven't been a lot of studies on overgrowth of candida or other bacteria in the digestive tract, but I think we can probably safely assume that xylitol will have a beneficial effect in that way. Stevia is another natural one. It's an extract from the stevia plant. Some people don't find it an agreeable sweetness. Some people compare it to something like aspartame or something like that because it has that almost chemical sweetness to it. But nonetheless, I find that if you use that in conjunction with xylitol, you get a nice balanced sweetness to things.
There's also erythritol which is another sugar alcohol. I don't think it has the same kind of effect as xylitol does in terms of being antibacterial, but I think it causes less gut disturbance in general. The negative side of sugar alcohols is that if you eat too much of them they can cause digestive issues.
These things need to be used in moderation. Any sweetener does. It's not like you can get rid of sugar and then suddenly starts binging on xylitol or something like that. You really need to use it selectively.
Jonathan: I use stevia myself and I try to keep it down because of course if I end up using too much then it has almost a metallic taste to it. Let's go to Zoya's pet health segment. We have that queued up. Zoya's going to tell us a little bit more about how to maintain the health of your pets in a natural way. So we'll go to her and then we will come back with our recipe of the day at the end which is going to be aioli and how to make your own aioli and we'll talk a little bit about the origins of that as well if you're not familiar with it. It's similar to mayonnaise but I think a lot of our listeners are probably familiar with what aioli is. We will do that when we come back.
Zoya: Hello and welcome to the natural pet health segment of the Health and Wellness Show. Today we are going to talk about herbal medicine. It is a very broad topic so it will take several shows to cover. This segment will be an introductory one and also will include an investigation of main medicinal herbs and instructions on how to make a basic decoction. So let's talk about herbs.
People have been using plants since the dawn of humanity and have been accompanying our lives since then. According to their chemical nature, most herbal remedies are close to the nature of the animal organism. In the course of a long evolution they adapted for easy assimilation and incorporation into the biochemical processes. The vast majority of them have unique properties. They are distinguished by collinear [inaudible], very rare development of negative side effects, even with prolonged use. Herbal medicine, or in other words, Phytotherapy greatly enhances the concept of treating the patient not the disease through the mobilization of different levels of protection for the body as its positive effect can be most likely explained by information theory, which is a manifestation of the unity of flora and fauna of the planet.
The current state of affairs in the treatment of animals requires a reasonable combination of synthetic remedies with more natural ones. This will significantly reduce the toxicity of drugs, the incidents of side effects and the so-called mitigation diseases. These can be achieved by widely represented in plants the detoxification properties and the pronounced anti-toxic activity. It is known that sick animals instinctively find certain plants and use them to treat various diseases. Herbal medicine is not the prerogative of men. It is an integral part of life support of the entire animal kingdom and probably more typical for animals as their relationship with nature is more harmonious and natural. So depriving them of this connection for example by domesticating, we condemn animals for food substitutes and for treatment with unnatural synthetic means which entails poorer health of purebred animals.
Herbal medicine is chance to bring our pets to a closer connection with nature and to provide them with humane treatment that see them as one with the universe.
Another advantage of phytotherapeutic agents is that in combination with synthetic means increases the therapeutic effect of the treatment. For example, many plants, raspberry, Spanish needle, sage, camomile, yarrow, etc., enhance the therapeutic effect of antimicrobials like fluoroquinolones for the treatment of Polyarteritis, a type of kidney disease. We can quickly obtain clinical effect even without antibiotics with reasonable use of phytotherapeutic agents. With the combined therapy, previously ineffective drugs become effective. It is observed not only with fluoroquinolones and antibiotics; there are cardiotonic, diuretic, anti-epileptic herbs and also herbs that act as antidotes. It is suggested that the mechanism of their action is associated with the restoration of the body's sensitivity and stimulation of its internal reserves which are not used and maybe even suppressed by chemotherapeutic agents.
From herbs were isolated substances like alkaloids and glycocides, a variety of vitamins, essential oils, flavonoids, tannins and more. For example, aspirin, which is a derivative of salicylate found in the bark of white willow, or atropine sulphate, a so-called hormone of the plant belladonna or deadly nightshade, or extract of foxglove, the most valuable medicine for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Another example would be the poisonous plant Curare that is used for anaesthesia, etc.
The main principle of herbal medicine is based on rehabilitory action rather than overwhelming substituted and symptomatic reaction. It has to do with mobilization of various protective systems; immune, endocrine, detoxification, neural regulation and the implementation of the therapeutic action of amnigenus metabolites. The main pharmacological action of plants and especially that combination is the anti-ulcerative action. They are able to reduce the amount and severity of damage to various organs and tissues or to increase the body's resistance to damaging influences in general.
Decoction of solutions made from medicinal plants, have their own therapeutic features, a gradual, slow development of therapeutic effect, mild/moderate effect, as a rule only oral administration or external application. These characteristics, other characteristics are the factors that determine the indications for the use of herbal medicine. It is usually therapy or prevention of exacerbations of chronic diseases, co-morbidities of cardiovascular system, respiratory system and the digestive system, liver, bile ducts, kidneys, urinary tract and others.
Good results are obtained from herbal medicine as a method of repetitive therapy after an illness. Normally when using those solutions, improvement comes just after a few days, but for chronic diseases lasting effect is achieved only with prolonged and regular treatment. It should be noted however that if used incorrectly, even herbs can cause serious complications so before you start using them you should seek the advice of experienced professionals who can recommend the right dosage and method of administration. As a general rule you should use fresh herbs, home grown or bought in conventional pharmacies.
As for classification, here is a list of various main herbs used for medicinal purposes. Pay attention, the list is long. Take note that I tried to use common names for every plant but it's possible that it is named differently in your country. Maybe it will be easier after this segment will be made into an article and posted at SOTT.net and you will be able to search for the proper name on the internet and also, to be honest because I'm not sure in all the cases that I pronounce the name of the plants correctly.
Let's begin with the cardiovascular group: Lily of the valley, foxglove, hellebore, hawthorn, dill, parsley, lovage, decoction of the root of lovage.
Antispasmodic: parsley, lavender, fruit of anise, sweet clover, belladonna or fennel.
In the diseases of the liver: you can use peppermint, thyme, and calendula. Also milk thistle is very good, especially oil of milk thistle.
In order to have an anti-flatulence effect: you can use cumin, mint or dill.
In the case of enterocolitis or other gastrointestinal problems: you can use cumin.
Anti-inflammatory: also cumin, parsley and fruit of anise.
Diuretic effect: can be found in plants like flowers of black elderberry, oregano, tarragon, dandelion, juniper and the seeds and roots of celery.
In case of kidney stone disease: you can use also celery and parsley.
For laxative effect: aloe vera, borage, flax seed, lemon balm, rhubarb and calendula. Another name for calendula is marigold.
In case of cough: you can use cornflower, oak bark, field horsetail and the juice of radish.
If you need to lower body temperature: you can use anise, rosemary, viola tricolour, raspberries and St. John's Wort.
In case of allergy: you can use calendula, nettles, bloodroot, camomile, oak bark, yarrow and blueberries.
Anti-fungal effects: are found in yarrow, mugwort, calendula, red clover, cottonweed, tansey, St. John's Wort.
In case of gastric ulcer: you can use willow herb and calendula.
Plants that increase the natural resistance of the body: are cranberries, oak bark, shepherd's purse, plantain, yarrow, chicory, sage and sorrel.
Plants that increase appetite: are basil, celery, coriander, cumin, dandelion, fennel and yarrow.
Wound healing applied externally: include basil, calendula and plantain.
In case of burns: you can apply calendula, arnica and stinging nettle.
Now to use as expectorants: you can use a decoction of the root elecampane, anise, dill, fennel, mallow, primrose, thyme and marjoram.
If you need to soothe a pet you can use valerian root, but mostly for dogs because the smell of valerian excites cats because it is similar to the smell or pheromones released by a female cat in heat. Therefore cats, and especially male cats, respond so rapidly to valerian its better not to give it to them. Also catnip contains active substance nepetalactone, traditionally considered to be sedative but in many cats it has a paradoxical effect. They start licking the plant, rub against it, standing as if in stupor or suddenly start furiously gliding on the floor. Surely it can be funny but without any real therapeutic property.
So you can use instead hops, fennel and oregano.
For neurosis: you can also use Melissa (lemon balm) and thyme.
If you need to do a revitalizing balm for a pet you can use fresh juice of flowers of dead nettle.
If you need to purify the blood: you can use flowers of black elderberry, grass zinnias. The names here in this category are a bit tricky; plantain lanceolate.
Now if you need to stop bleeding: you can use dead nettle, shepherds purse, Sophora japonica and highlander pepper.
Plants that are rich in vitamins are: coriander, nettles, wild rose cinnamon, dill, tarragon, St. John's Wort, fennel, carrots, celery, parsley and anise.
And plants that have anti-worm properties: are wormwood, tansy and birch buds.
After such a long list, here are short and easy instruction for how you can prepare a decoction at home. You can make it as a tea, meaning one teaspoon in a cup of hot water. Of course wait for the water to cool to room temperature. Or you can also take the same amount of the herb and water and boil it in a pot for several minutes and again wait for it to cool down. The amount of the decoction that you should give your pet depends on the herb, their weight and individual sensitivities. Some herbs like lily of the valley and foxglove should be used with extreme caution and in very precise amounts.
The father of toxicology, Paracelsus once wrote, "Everything is a poison. There is poison in everything. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison." So unless it is a relatively harmless plant like camomile or oak bark, better consult a professional on precise dosage. In general, the rule of one teaspoon being mixed with one cup of water which amounts to 200 ml of water, applies to the average human weight. So in the case of the average cat, you can give them orally in one sitting up to 5 ml which is one average syringe of camomile decoction, for example.
Also, some infusions or decoctions can be bitter and quite unattractive to the animal. To make things easier it is recommended to mix the herb with ground meat.
Well this is it for this segment. I hope that you found it useful. Thank you for listening and good-bye. {Goats bleat good-bye}
Jonathan: Alright thank you Zoya. That was awesome. As always there was a lot of great information in there so thank you for bringing us that clip Zoya.
We're going to wrap up today's show with a recipe which is aioli and how to make your own aioli at home. It's essentially like mayonnaise. It's spelled a-i-o-l-i and the word, for those who might be interested, actually comes from the provincial a-i-l or garlic-ail, or in Latin that's allium plus oil, O-I-L is oleum, so aioli essentially means garlic oil. It's an emulsion, so it's a suspension of small globules of oil and oil soluble compounds in water and water soluble compounds.
Usually egg yoke is used as the emulsifier in aioli, so people who have egg sensitivity should be aware of that. There are a lot of different ways to spice this up and do different things with it, but today I'm just going to go over the basic recipe and you can play with it to your liking.
This is my own recipe that I've used for quite a while and I make this a couple of times a week. It comes in really handy, especially in a ketogenic diet to get a lot of good oil into the diet. I use organic olive oil as the base.
So I'll take four eggs and separate out the yolks and put those four yokes into a boil and put a little bit of salt on top, start with a pinch. You can do anywhere up to 1/2 teaspoon or even a teaspoon depending on how much you're going to make. Then I use a hand mixer for this, a power mixer. Start with it on low. Whip up the yolks and then on the side I'll have a cup of extra virgin olive oil, preferably organic. Try to make sure that you're getting good oil. That's something I think we could go into on a different show; how to discern what kind of oil you're getting when you're shopping at the store. Sometimes olive oil is actually just olive flavoured canola oil, the cheap stuff. You really want to keep an eye out for that. So make sure that you're using real olive oil for this. Grape seed oil also works, safflower oil works, depending on your taste. Personally I like olive oil.
So I have a cup of olive oil on the side and these four egg yolks whipped up in a bowl, then start by adding tiny bits of oil at the beginning with the mixer going in the egg yolks. So you're whipping up the yolks and you're adding just a couple of drops at a time of the olive oil. You need to be really patient at the beginning. It can be frustrating and a lot of times you're going to end up with a broken emulsion if you add too much oil at the beginning. I did that a lot, but we'll go through in a few minutes how to rescue your aioli if that happens.
As you're whipping the yolks add a little bit of olive oil at a time. You'll start to notice that the mixture gets a lot thicker and begins to act almost like cookie dough and you'll notice that it goes from being smooth to a little bit more dense and thick. When that begins to happen you can then take your acid. I use apple cider vinegar for this. Some people use lemon juice. Those are the two most common. Sometimes it's nice to mix the two but personally I usually just use apple cider vinegar. So once the mixture starts to get really thick and it's actually hard to beat, then I'll add about 1/2 teaspoon to a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar. You can gauge it as you're going.
You'll notice that when you add the acid into this solution the emulsion breaks down a little bit and becomes much more smooth and creamy. You can try to hit this perfect on the first time; you whip eggs, you add the oil little bits at a time and then gradually more and more until it gets thick and then you add the vinegar or the lemon juice and then it becomes smooth and creamy. Oftentimes I actually go back and forth to get the right texture.
I'll get to the point where I'm adding the vinegar and it smoothes out but then sometimes I might add a little bit too much vinegar and it gets too thin, so then I add just a little bit more olive oil on the end of that and it'll thicken back up again.
Taste it as you go and see if the flavour is to your liking. Then you can also add garlic powder, or if you want to go the whole natural route, you can blend up garlic or do some roasted garlic and throw it in there. Also add some dill. In the past I've made a version of tartar sauce by adding chopped up pickles into the mix and then having that with fish or something.
So you can really do a lot of different variations of this. If you tolerate nightshades you can add paprika and that actually gives it a strange cheesy kind of flavour which I know sounds odd, but that's what it reminds me of.
That basic aioli mixture can serve as a base for a wide range of different sauces. You can put it on steak. You can put it on burgers. You can use it with fish. You can put it on salads for your dressing. There are a whole bunch of things that you can do with it.
If you happen to break the emulsion - and you'll know when this happens - if you add too much olive oil at the beginning you'll notice that the egg and the oil don't stay together in the mixture and it'll get clumpy and they'll split apart. So you'll have oil resting by itself in the boil as well as these little clumps of egg yolk by themselves, not mixed together. If that does happen, don't panic. Just take out another boil and crack or one or two egg yolks into that other bowl. Make sure to separate them from the whites. Then start over with your "ruined mixture" as if it were the olive oil, if that makes sense.
So you have your broken emulsion on the side and you have your one or two new egg yolks in a new bowl and you pour your broken emulsion in very slowly while you're whipping it with the new egg yolks. And if you do that very carefully you can actually rescue the mixture and you'll just end up with more. Like I said, don't panic if you do break the emulsion. And if you break the emulsion again and you just can't get it, I have also in the past gotten really frustrated with that and just threw it into a pan and baked it in the oven and it comes out like an omelette dish. That's a last resort if you can't rescue the aioli itself.
So that's aioli. I hope I didn't go over that too fast. I encourage everybody to give it a shot. It's really nice to have around as a garnish or a sauce, or like I said a salad dressing or to use it with a wide variety of different meals and it's a way to get good fat into your body if you use the good oil as a base.
Did you guys have anything to add or personal experience with making aioli?
Doug: I make mayonnaise pretty regularly, but not specifically aioli. We make mayonnaise in the house all the time. We use it pretty constantly. I know in cooking school they told us that one egg yolk is good for 250 ml of oil.
Jonathan: Okay.
Doug: So I think doing it with the four egg yolks to one cup of oil is a safe way to do it because then you have lots of emulsifier there.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Doug: But if you ever wanted to make a higher quantity you might even be able to go higher on the oil with it.
Jonathan: Sure, sure. I like to go high on the egg yolks to get a lot of fat in there.
Doug: Yeah, that's a good idea.
Erica: And you can add different herbs, like Jonathan was saying. If you like the taste of cilantro you can make a cilantro aioli or even basil aioli.
Gaby: I'm getting hungry! {Laughter}
Jonathan: We also have one that I like to call currioli and add curry powder on the end and it comes out pretty nicely.
Doug: That sounds good!
Jonathan: Yeah.
Gaby: That's a great idea.
Jonathan: You can add pretty much anything to aioli. I usually just do the basic mixture and then garlic powder, maybe granulated onion powder and then salt and pepper. But I also really like it with a lot of dill and chopped up pickles too. It comes out nice that way.
Alright, that's our show for today. Thank you everybody for tuning in. We look forward to being on the air again next week, Friday at 10:00 am eastern and we'll be talking about salt next week. Today was about sugar and next week is going to be about salt and we will go into some of the myths surrounding salt and why it's actually a lot better for you than a lot of people have been proclaiming for years.
Thanks to my co-hosts today for being here and we will see everyone next week.
All: Good-byes.
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