The UltraWellness Blog by Mark Hyman, M.D.

How to Get "Unstuck" from Depression

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:40:04 -0400

How many of you are stuck?

Do you feel stuck in depression, sadness, or anxiety? Or are you just a little confused, overburdened, or unhappy?

Maybe you are one of the 25 percent of Americans who experience a major depression in their lifetime.

Or maybe you are taking one of the 189 million prescriptions written for depression, at a cost of $12 billion a year, and wondering if there is another way.

Perhaps, like most people who take antidepressants, you find that they don’t work, lose their effectiveness over time, or give you only slight relief from symptoms.

Or maybe you quit your antidepressant regimen after a few months, like 60 percent of people who take them do, because of side effects such as weight gain, loss of sex drive, or worse.

Are looking for a way to reconnect to your life’s meaning and purpose and emerge from a life that feels half lived? Are you looking for a way to overcome the depression that’s been haunting you?

If you are, I guarantee you are not suffering from a Prozac deficiency. In fact, I want to challenge you to consider that depression, as we understand it, does not really exist.

“Depression is not a disease…” That is how the remarkable new book, by James Gordon, MD, begins. It is called “Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression.”

James Gordon, MD, was recently given an award by the Bravewell Collaborative for being one of the most pioneering medical thinkers of our time.

Ideas that can change a culture come only a few times in a generation. “Unstuck” is such an idea. It provides an answer to the leading cause of disability -- depression -- that until now has had very poor solutions.

So why does Dr. Gordon say that depression is not a disease?

Because it is actually a sign of underlying imbalances that need to be addressed if we are to be “whole and happy.”

Dr. Gordon has been working in the field of mind-body medicine for nearly 40 years. I have come to know him well, after first meeting him when I testified before the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine. He was appointed the head of the commission. His vision for a new medicine is strong and clear.

He has treated patients, taught healthcare professionals about mind-body medicine and nutrition, and helped so many people “heal the wounds of war” and trauma by working in conflict-ridden places like Gaza, Bosnia, and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. His work, through his Center for Mind Body Medicine, has given him remarkable insight into the causes and nature of our suffering.

“Unstuck” is a guide for healing your body, mind, and soul. In this book, Dr. Gordon helps us understand why we may be out of balance and guides us to the origins of depression.

But he also helps us discover how trauma, chronic stress, lack of meaning, and the stories we tell ourselves about life can all make us depressed. And he helps us uncover the hormonal imbalances, food allergies, heavy metals, yeast infections, and nutritional deficiencies that can also lead to depression.

These problems are the real causes of depression. This is why Dr. Gordon says that depression is not a disease. Even though the symptoms of depression may be the same or similar in people diagnosed with the “disease”, the causes that lead each person to become depressed may be very different.

This concept is also the core principle of Functional Medicine and UltraWellness.

Dr. Gordon not only explains this concept, but provides practical tools to help us address each of these issues that effect the health of your body, mind and soul. He gives you:

* Clinically tested practices that use words, images, drawing, movement, yoga, and dance to help you move through depression.

* Detailed, practical plans for using food and supplements as well as the ancient and powerful methods of Chinese medicine to balance your physical and mental functioning.

* Ways to make the world’s spiritual wisdom and spiritual practices an ongoing part of your healing journey.

* And, most importantly, ways to tailor each of these approaches to help restore balance to your unique, individual life.

Dr. Gordon has many stories in his book of the journey people take to get unstuck and become whole and happy again. They reminded me of a recent patient I had who had been given the diagnosis of “depression” -- but the last thing he needed was antidepressants. In this particular case he didn’t have trauma or stress; it was his biology that made him depressed.

J.P. was an 18-year-old young man who showed up in my office with fatigue, depression, anxiety, 27 pounds of weight gain, and acne, which had worsened over the 4 years before he saw me.

He also couldn’t tolerate the cold and was tired in the morning. He had canker sores, cracking at the corners of his mouth, acne on his face, chest, back and shoulders, and seasonal allergies. He also had trouble falling asleep. His anxiety was increasing, and his depression got worse every winter.

He had been treated with an antidepressant called Paxil for 4 years. It made him crave sweets and starchy food and caused his weight gain. He had also been taking antibiotics every day for 2 years for his acne, which led to a low-grade yeast infection. Of course, he ate the typical junk and processed food teenage diet, topped off with lots of sodas.

When we examined what was really causing his depression, we found many nutritional deficiencies that have been proven to cause depression.

These included severe vitamin D deficiency. He also had severe omega-3 fat deficiencies, vitamin B6 deficiency (which is needed to make serotonin), and vitamin B12 deficiency.

He also had hormonal imbalances, with a low-level autoimmune thyroid problem as well as very high levels of insulin from all the sugar he consumed. Both of these have been linked to depression.

He also had many food allergies, including gluten and dairy. Again, these are linked to depression in many cases.

So I did what I always do, which is the basis of treatment of all “diseases” -- take away the bad stuff and add the good stuff.

We got rid of gluten and dairy from his diet. We got him to stop taking the antibiotics that caused yeast overgrowth in his gut.

We got him off his junk food and sugar diet and encouraged him to eat whole foods.

I also helped balance his thyroid with a low dose of thyroid hormone, which helped his mood, fatigue, and cold intolerance. And I gave him nutritional supplements of vitamin D, B6, and B12, as well as a multivitamin and fish oil.

After two months, his energy, depression, and cold intolerance all got better. His acne, cankers sores, and cracks at the corner of his mouth went away. He lost 15 pounds and his carbohydrate cravings were gone.

So just as Dr. Gordon shows in his book “Unstuck,” this young man clearly didn’t have the disease “depression” but simply a number of imbalances that, once corrected, took care of all his physical and emotional symptoms.

If you are suffering from depression or just feel stuck, unhappy, or that you are not living a whole life, give yourself the gift of Dr. Gordon’s book, “Unstuck.”

You can get a copy by going to the website below:

==> http://www.ultrawellness.com/unstuck

And if you feel wonderful, which I hope you do, give it to someone you know who will thank you for this gift of life.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Do you suffer from “depression” or other emotional symptoms?

What steps have you taken to address this imbalance?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

Why Food Allergies May Be Making You Sick

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:00:31 -0400

Could you be allergic to specific foods and not even know it?

Could a hidden allergic response to food be responsible for depression, ADHD, obesity, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, joint pains, arthritis, and many other common conditions that resist treatment by conventional approaches?

Nowhere in medicine is there more controversy, superstition, confusion, and zealotry than there is surrounding the subject of food allergies and illness.

Conventional allergists and immunologists generally believe that the only connection between food and allergy is through what we call a Type 1 hypersensitivity, IgE mediated response.

That’s what happens when you eat a peanut, shrimp, or other allergen and get hives, asthma, or a swollen tongue. This type of reaction can be fatal and requires a shot of epinephrine to prevent you from dying.

I remember a little two-year-old boy with such an allergy who came to the emergency room when I practiced medicine in Idaho with a face so swollen that it was tight and white because of all the swelling. He almost died.

Scary indeed.

But that is not the type of allergy I am going to talk about here. I’m talking about the same allergy I have been talking about for years and trying to explain in my blogs. It is the type of allergy that makes you crave foods, gain weight, feel tired, and suffer “brain fog.”

It is also the type of allergy connected to many chronic diseases -- but mostly ignored by conventional medicine.

However, a growing body of research helps us understand this intimate relationship between the gut, food, and illness. (1, 2, 3)

I am talking about Type 2 delayed hypersensitivity or the IgG mediated response.

Certainly, conventional medicine has historically recognized that some foods cause harm, and most doctors have, at some point in their careers, recommended avoiding certain foods to treat common conditions.

Yet many of the recommendations embraced by conventional medicine -- from low-fat diets to prevent heart disease to bland diets to treat ulcers to low-salt diets to treat high blood pressure -- have now been relegated to the pile of unnecessary or harmful advice the medical profession once gave.

While conventional medicine once embraced ideas like these -- ideas that ultimately turned out to be relatively useless -- it has, ironically, resisted the concept that changing your diet can prevent disease and be used as a tool to treat illness, often with profound results in cases where no other good treatments exist.

The need to recognize the role of diet as THE most effective tool for the treatment in disease cannot be overstated. If I could pick only one “drug” to treat disease, I would choose food. Not only because it is safer than most pharmaceuticals, but also because it works faster and better than anything else on the market.

The place where we can most easily see the true power of food as medicine lies in the exact domain where current medical practice is weakest -- in the chronic immune, hormonal, and mood problems and degenerative diseases like cancer, heart disease, and dementia that afflict modern civilization in epidemic proportions.

One of the major contributing factors to many of these chronic illnesses are IgG food sensitivities.

People can become allergic to the foods they eat. When your gut is exposed to stress of any kind (from emotional stress to environmental toxins to the high level of antibiotics and other medications prescribed to so many people today) it is weakened.

Under continued stress your intestinal lining (which is only one-cell layer thick) can be damaged. In medicine we call this “increased intestinal permeability”. When this happens, undigested food particles actually leak through your gut lining into your body.

Just underneath this sensitive gut lining lies 60 percent of your immune system. It “sees” these undigested food particles as foreign molecules that could potentially hurt your system.

So it does what it is designed to do, it attacks them!

The result is that you become allergic to the foods you eat. You don’t develop the kind of allergy that could kill you (the IgE mediated response), but you can develop a seemingly more minor food sensitivity that causes a vast array of symptoms like weight gain, fatigue, brain fog, depression, and many others.

These are IgG food allergies. And they are rampant in today’s world.

Lately, I have been wondering why I see so many patients with these food allergies.

I think it is because we are eating food that stresses our bodies out!

==> The Stress of Our Food

While thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions can trigger a stress response, so can any physical or chemical insult. One of the biggest stress triggers can be the food we eat.

Most of us think of food as just calories. But new findings make it clear that what you put in your body is much more than just energy. The quality and type of food directly influences your genes and the stress response.

“Xenohormesis: The Attack of the Foreign Molecules in Food!”

In his movie “Supersize Me,” Morgan Spurlock ate three fast food meals a day for one month. Most of us recognize that eating a lot of fried, processed food, full of trans fat, high-fructose corn syrup, and calories will make us gain weight, promote heart disease and diabetes, and even give us fatty livers.

But what struck me the most was not that his cholesterol or blood sugar went up, but that his personality changed. He became aggressive, depressed, restless, and foggy and only felt “good” when he was eating the food. He became “addicted” to the food and felt “drugged.”

The explanation for this may be that our current food supply -- which is genetically modified or engineered, grown in depleted soils fertilized with petrochemicals, shipped in boxes across thousands of miles, and filled with antibiotic-, hormone-pumped livestock or farmed fish that is fed grain rather than the grasses or algae that are their native foods -- can send the wrong signals to our bodies. (4)

Our cells see these foods, which are a far cry from what we evolved to eat, as foreign. “What’s this?” our cells say, “Something foreign? Something dangerous? Let’s get in gear by activating the stress response.”

When the body’s stress response is activated by these “foreign” molecules in food it is called xenohormesis. The concept of xenohormesis (5) describes the effect of foreign molecules on our biology. They produce a stress response, triggering the whole cascade of stress-related cellular signals that makes us sick. Essentially, they create IgG food sensitivities like those I described above.

This causes obesity, illness, and brain dysfunction.

In fact, it appears there is a close connection between the obesity epidemic we are seeing, the growing problem of chronic illness, the epidemic of ADHD and behavior problems in children, and the increase in these food allergies. (6)

Not only do we need to think of the nutrients in our food, but we also need to think about the quality of our food.

Are there “stress” molecules in our food? What kind of information does the food we eat send to our bodies?

The old idea that food is simply a method for delivering energy in the form of calories is giving way to a new model of food -- food as information.

Our evolutionary adaptation to a particular diet (7) has perhaps set the conditions that alter gene expression patterns to trigger illness, rather than support health when our bodies are placed in the context of an evolutionarily unfamiliar landscape of nutrient-poor fast food, increasing sedentary behavior, and incessant stress.

RD Laing wrote, “Insanity is a sane response to an insane world.” (8) Maybe disease is a normal response to a diseased world -- and a toxic diet.

As a species, we evolved eating a complex, unrefined wild diet consisting of a wide variety of plant and animal foods rich in phytonutrients, fiber, and omega-3 fatty acids. Therefore our genes express themselves properly when we eat these foods, sending out messages of vital health.

Today, our unhealthy diet triggers different and diseased patterns of gene expression – one that leads to the epidemic of chronic illness we are now seeing.

The USDA reports that the top nine foods eaten by Americans are whole cow’s milk, 2 percent milk, processed American cheese, white bread, white flour, white rolls, refined sugar, colas, and ground beef.

All of these foods are foreign to our genome, which evolved on a Paleolithic diet.

This “mono diet” creates altered patterns of gene expression. This leads to disease, including food allergy or sensitivity. (9)

Dairy and gluten, for example, are two generally well-accepted food antigens responsible for a whole array of complex diseases, including autoimmune diseases, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, hormone problems, and even neurologic and behavioral disorders. (10,11)

The bottom line is this ...

We have to develop a new framework for thinking about the relation of food, illness, and health.

==> Food is our greatest ally in helping to prevent and treat illness.

I have seen so many patients with chronic conditions get better with allergy elimination diets, including people with irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, migraines, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity, psoriasis, eczema, hives, arthritis, asthma, sinus problems, and even bed wetting.

We have to realize that food is both our worst enemy -- and greatest healer.

So try to do the following this summer:

2. Try an allergy elimination diet: Get rid of gluten and dairy for two weeks and see how you feel.

3. Try to eat only organic, unprocessed, local foods for a few weeks this summer.

4. Try buying food from the farmers’ market, or your local community supported agriculture projects.

Taking these steps may not only help you lose weight, but make you feel dramatically better in ways you never expected.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

Have you been told you have food allergies?

Which foods give you the most problems?

How has an allergy elimination diet affected your symptoms?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

References

(1) Lindqvist U, Rudsander A IgA. antibodies to gliadin and coeliac disease in psoriatic arthritis. Rheumatology (Oxford). 2002 Jan;41(1):31-37.

(2) Hafstrom I, Ringertz B, Spangberg A., A vegan diet free of gluten improves the signs and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis: the effects on arthritis correlate with a reduction in antibodies to food antigens. Rheumatology (Oxford). 2001 Oct;40(10):1175-1179.

(3) Riordan AM, Rucker JT, Kirby GA, Hunter JO. Food intolerance and Crohn’s disease. Gut. 1994 Apr;35(4):571-572.

(4) Lamming DW, Wood JG, Sinclair DA.Small molecules that regulate lifespan: evidence for xenohormesis. Mol Microbiol. 2004 Aug;53(4):1003-9. Review.

(5) Yun AJ, Doux JD. Unhappy meal: how our need to detect stress may have shaped our preferences for taste. Med Hypotheses. 2007;69(4):746-51.

(6) Bazar KA, Yun AJ, Lee PY, Daniel SM, Doux JD. Obesity and ADHD may represent different manifestations of a common environmental oversampling syndrome: a model for revealing mechanistic overlap among cognitive, metabolic, and inflammatory disorders. Med Hypotheses. 2006;66(2):263-9. Review.

(7) Eaton SB, Eaton SB 3rd, Konner MJ. Paleolithic nutrition revisited: a twelve-year retrospective on its nature and implications, Eur J Clin Nutr. 1997 Apr;51(4):207-216.

(8) Laing R.D. The Divided Self – An Existential Study in Sanity & Madness. Pelican Books [1959 / 1965].

(9) Hunter JO, Food allergy – or enterometabolic disorder? Lancet. 1991 Aug 24;338(8765):495-496.

(10) Saukkonen T, Virtanen SM, Karppinen M. Significance of cow’s milk protein antibodies as risk factor for childhood IDDM: interactions with dietary cow’s milk intake and HLA-DQB1 genotype. Childhood Diabetes in Finland Study Group. Diabetologia. 1998 Jan;41(1):72-78.

(11) Farrell RJ, Kelly C Celiac Sprue, NEJM 2002 346 (3):180-188

Why Lead Poisoning May be Causing Your Health Problems

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:54:08 -0400

We are too heavy -- and I don’t mean overweight.

You see, we’re heavy with metals, not fat. Nearly 40 percent of us have toxic levels of lead in our bodies. And we don’t even know it.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have symptoms.

You may have headaches, insomnia, irritability, a low sex drive, or tremors.

You may have mood problems, nausea, depression, memory difficulties, trouble concentrating, poor coordination, or even constipation.

Yet most of us attribute these symptoms to other problems. We don’t recognize that they may be caused by lead poisoning.

I just returned from a medical conference on heavy metals and health. Although I have been treating toxicity from heavy metals for more than a decade (including in myself) I was surprised to hear about new research that has been completely ignored by the media.

A study published in 2006 in the conservative medical journal Circulation, for example, should have been on the front page of the New York Times.

Let me tell you about why the study was so important -- and why you probably won’t hear about it from your doctor.

Researchers measured the blood lead levels of 13,946 adults who were part of the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They were recruited from 1988 to 1994 and were then followed up on for up to 12 years. The goal of the study was to track what diseases people developed and why they died. (1)

Now, it’s important to remember that since lead was removed from gasoline and house paint several decades ago, the average person’s blood lead level has dropped dramatically.

But our levels of lead are still a great deal higher than those of people who lived before the industrial age. That’s because we continue to be exposed to lead in our soil and water, as well as from our own bones, where it is stored once it’s introduced into our system.

Fifty years ago, the average blood levels of lead were about 40 micrograms/deciliter. The level considered “safe” by the government has continued to fall and is now considered less than 10 micrograms/deciliter.

But this new study and others like it question the idea that ANY level of this toxic metal is safe.

In this study, researchers found that a blood level of lead over 2 micrograms/deciliter (that’s 2, not 10 or 40) caused dramatic increases in heart attacks, strokes, and death.

In fact, after controlling for all other risk factors, including cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, and inflammation, the researchers found that the risk of death from all causes in people with a lead level that high increased by 25 percent, deaths from heart disease increased by 55 percent, risk of heart attacks increased by 151 percent, and risk of stroke increased by 89 percent.

Want to know what’s even more remarkable?

Nearly 40 percent of all Americans are estimated to have blood levels of lead high enough to cause these problems.

This is potentially a greater risk for heart disease than cholesterol!

But this is not the first indication of problems with lead.

A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that high blood pressure in postmenopausal women is strongly correlated to blood lead levels.

Why is that?

Well, during menopause, bones break down faster -- releasing stored lead and injuring blood vessels, which leads to high blood pressure. (2)

And high lead may also be responsible for kidney failure as well.

A study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that using chelation therapy with EDTA to reduce lead levels in patients with kidney failure could prevent further loss of kidney function, save billions in healthcare costs, and eliminate the need for dialysis in millions of people. (3)

Wow! Digest that. Chelation therapy saves lives and billions of dollars. So why isn’t your doctor offering this as standard treatment?

The answer is this: As I have said many times, doctors don’t learn two of the most important things in medical school: how to help people improve their nutrition and how to deal with environmental toxins.

And not only is lead linked to heart disease, high blood pressure, and kidney failure, it is also connected to the epidemic of children with ADHD, developmental and learning problems, and autism.

Even though the “safe” blood level of lead has been set as 10 micrograms/deciliter, recent studies show that the greatest drop-off in IQ scores in children occurs in those who have lead levels between just 1 and 10 micrograms/deciliter. (4)

This is particularly troubling, because more than 10 percent of poor and inner city children have lead exposure levels higher than 10 micrograms/deciliter!

I recently treated a young boy with extremely high lead levels who had Asperger’s syndrome, severe ADHD, and violent behavior.

He likely got the lead from his mother, who had very low vitamin D levels and had developed osteoporosis, which released a lot of lead from her bones during pregnancy. This lead got into the boy’s body in the womb across his mother’s placenta.

Thankfully, we got rid of his lead over time through chelation and nutritional support. Doing so dramatically improved his attention, behavior, and social skills.

Lead is still found in our soil and water. We live in a sea of heavy metals. In areas with a history of industrial pollution, people track lead into their homes from contaminated soil. Today, regular house dust often contains 17 times the level of lead it once did.

In Washington, DC, the water was so contaminated with lead recently that the government had to provide free water filters for everyone there. Up to 20 percent of the city’s tap water may be contaminated.

So what can you do about this?

Find out if you are lead-toxic. The easiest test is a simple blood lead test. Be sure the lab can measure VERY low levels of lead accurately. Anything higher than 2 micrograms/deciliter is toxic and should be treated.
Unfortunately, the blood test only checks for current or ongoing exposures, so you must also take a heavy metal challenge test with DMSA, EDTA, or DMPS, which can be administered by a doctor trained in heavy metal detoxification. (See www.functionalmedicine.org or www.acam.org to find a qualified doctor.) Consider undergoing chelation therapy if your lead levels are high.
Reduce your exposures by having a “no shoes in the house” policy.
Test your water for heavy metals.
Buy a carbon or reverse osmosis water filter for your drinking water.
Take 1,000 milligrams of buffered ascorbic acid (vitamin C) a day, this helps remove lead from the body.
Take 2,000 to 4,000 IU of vitamin D3 a day to prevent your bones from releasing lead into your bloodstream.

Even though many of us have toxic levels of lead in our bodies, there is a lot we can do to prevent it and treat it.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Do you suffer from any of the symptoms of lead toxicity?

Have you been tested for lead poisoning? Do you plan to be?

Which of the other steps have you tried?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

REFERENCES:

(1) Menke A, Muntner P, Batuman V, Silbergeld EK, Guallar E. Blood lead below 0.48 micromol/L (10 microg/dL) and mortality among US adults. Circulation. 2006 Sep 26;114(13):1388-94.

(2) Nash D, Magder L, Lustberg M, Sherwin RW, Rubin RJ, Kaufmann RB, Silbergeld, Blood lead, blood pressure, and hypertension in perimenopausal and postmenopausal women. JAMA. 2003 Mar 26;289(12):1523-32.

(3) Lin JL, Lin-Tan DT, Hsu KH, Yu CC Environmental lead exposure and progression of chronic renal diseases in patients without diabetes. N Engl J Med. 2003 Jan 23;348(4):277-86

(4) Canfield RL, Henderson CR Jr, Cory-Slechta DA, Cox C, Jusko TA, Lanphear BP.Intellectual impairment in children with blood lead concentrations below 10 microg per deciliter. N Engl J Med. 2003 Apr 17;348(16):1517-26.

Why Eating a Low-Fat Diet Doesn’t Lead to Weight Loss

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:24:54 -0400

Is being heavy in your genes?

Not so fast.

Obesity genes account for only 5 percent of all weight problems.

But what about the other 95 percent of weight problems?

And why are we seeing such an epidemic of obesity in America today? It is the single most important public health issue facing us.

If genes do not account for obesity, is our high-fat diet to blame?

Wrong again!

But fat contains 9 calories per gram, so shouldn’t eating more fat (and more calories) make you gain weight?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, pioneering research by Harvard Medical School’s David Ludwig shows us the real reason that low-fat diets do not work -- and reveals the true cause of obesity for most Americans.

He correctly points out that careful review of all the studies on dietary fat and body fat -- such as those done by Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health -- have shown that dietary fat is not a major determinant of body fat.

Let me repeat that.

==> Dietary fat is not a major determinant of body fat.

And that’s not all.

The Women’s Health Initiative, which is the largest clinical trial of diet and body weight, found that 50,000 women on low fat diets had no significant weight loss.

Another study looked at people who followed four different diets for 12 months -- and found no dramatic differences between those who followed low-fat, low-carb, and very- low-carb diets.

You’ve got to wonder: Why aren’t we seeing any significant effects from these various diets?

The main reason, Dr. Ludwig suggests, is that we are looking for answers in the wrong place.

==> The future of treating obesity and weight is in personalizing our approach.

This is the approach I wrote about in my book “UltraMetabolism.” It’s called nutrigenomics. It is the science of how we can use food to influence our genes and personalize our approach to health.

Let me explain how I diagnose and treat obesity.

Over the last 15 years, I have tested almost every one of my patients using a test that most doctors never use. In fact, it is even harder to find in the research, except in this pioneering work by Dr. Ludwig.

This test is cheap, easy to do, and it is probably the most important test for determining your overall health, the causes for obesity, and your risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and premature aging.

Yet it is a test your healthcare provider probably does not perform, does not know how to interpret, and often thinks is useless.

Thankfully, Dr. Ludwig’s research brings this critical method of diagnosing the cause of obesity and disease to the forefront.

You see, in two recent studies, he found that the main factor that determines changes in body weight and waist circumference (also known as belly fat) is how your body responds to any type of sugar, carbohydrate, or glucose load.

The most important test to determine this doesn’t measure your blood sugar or cholesterol.

It tests your insulin level.

You have to check it after drinking a sugary beverage that contains 75 grams of glucose.

This test has shown me more about my patients than any other test. It helps me personalize and customize a nutritional approach for them.

And its usefulness is now being borne out in this research by Dr. Ludwig and his colleagues.

In one study, for example, Dr. Ludwig and his colleagues followed 276 people for six years.

They performed a glucose tolerance test at the beginning of the study and looked at insulin concentrations 30 minutes after the people consumed a sugary drink. This gave the researchers a rough estimate of whether they were high- or low insulin secretors.

During the course of the study, they looked at the people’s body weight and waist circumference or belly fat.

They found that those who were the highest insulin secretors had the biggest change in weight and belly fat compared to the low insulin secretors. And people who were high insulin secretors and ate low-fat diets did even worse.

This makes perfect sense -- because insulin does two things:

It stimulates hunger.
It is a fat storage hormone, which makes you store belly fat.

So, after you eat a high-carbohydrate meal, your insulin spikes and your blood sugar plummets -- making you very hungry.

That is why you crave more carbs, more sugar, and eat more the whole day.

Dr. Ludwig also found that the patients who ate a low glycemic load diet -- which lowers blood sugar and keeps insulin levels low -- had much higher levels of HDL “good” cholesterol and much lower levels of triglycerides.

It appears that the best way to address your cholesterol is not necessarily to eat a low-fat diet, but to eat a low glycemic load diet, which keeps your blood sugar even.

I highly recommend reviewing Dr. Ludwig’s research on PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s database, to learn more about his exciting and pioneering work.

I also encourage you to read his book, “Ending the Food Fight.” It is the first and only roadmap for dealing with our exploding childhood obesity epidemic.

Finally, I encourage you to ask your physician to do a glucose tolerance test and measure your insulin and blood sugar at 30 minutes, one hour, and two hours to get the best picture of your insulin profile.

If you are a high insulin secretor and your insulin goes over 30 at a half hour, one hour, or two hours, you produce too much insulin and need to be sure you are staying on a low glycemic load, whole-foods, unprocessed diet, which I describe in “UltraMetabolism”.

The bottom line?

If you want to fit into your jeans, you have to fit into your genes.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

What seems to trigger weight gain for you?

How have different diets worked for you?

Have you ever had you insulin and blood sugar tested?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

References:

Ebbeling CB, Leidig MM, Feldman HA, Lovesky MM, Ludwig DS. Effects of a low-glycemic load vs low-fat diet in obese young adults: a randomized trial. JAMA. 2007 May 16;297(19):2092-102

Chaput JP, Tremblay A, Rimm EB, Bouchard C, Ludwig DS.
A novel interaction between dietary composition and insulin secretion: effects on weight gain in the Quebec Family Study. Am J Clin Nutr. 2008 Feb;87(2):303-9

Are You Also Being Deceived into Eating Fake Frankenfoods?

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:07:20 -0400

Should we buy food with health claims on the label?

These days, we are seeing more and more health claims that go beyond the usual. These include “trans fat-free,” “gluten-free,” “heart healthy,” and foods spiked with vitamins, such as my new favorite: Diet Coke Plus, with vitamins and minerals.

We see whole-grain Pop Tarts and Tyson chicken with misleading labels such as “raised without antibiotics.” We see natural sweeteners called Sweet Fiber. We see whole-grain Cheerios that are still full of sugar.

Now you can get “health food” like salads at McDonald’s, but with salad dressings that have more calories than a Big Mac.

And we also see antioxidant-spiked junk food and ginkgo-spiked energy drinks.

What should we make of all these marketing claims? Do they provide any benefit?

In Michael Pollan’s new book “In Defense of Food,” he rails against the notion of “nutritionism,” the idea that we can single out nutrients from whole foods, add them back to processed food, or take them as supplements, and achieve health benefits.

His point is very well taken.

We must be very careful to avoid the marketing ploys of the food industry, which wants to trick us into eating more junk food by putting it in friendlier packaging.

Make no mistake.

These foods are still wolves in sheep’s clothing.

We need to be very wary of any food that comes in a package, box, or a can. That is not to say that there are not some good whole foods that are available in boxes, packages, or cans.

However, most of what is available in the marketplace is simply not real food.

A recent patient of mine is a food scientist who works for a large food industry company. His job is to invent and create new foods in the laboratory by mixing food and chemicals to create certain tastes and flavors that mimic real food or that stimulate appetite and satisfy our need for various tastes.

Think of these as “Frankenfoods.”

My patient became quite sick from handling these compounds and chemicals everyday. I have been working hard to get him to not only stop eating processed food, but also to stop playing with it.

He wore a funny T-shirt to my office, which listed the top 10 reasons to major in food science, a scientific discipline that teaches people how to invent foods for the food industry.

According to his shirt, here are the top 10 reasons to become a food scientist:

Eat ice cream for breakfast and get credit for it.
We are in it for the dough.
Grocery shopping is research instead of a chore.
We get to eat the results of our research project.
Because hairnets are a fashion statement.
Because we know what is really in your hot dogs.
Not only do we know how to drink beer, we can make it.
Cheese, yogurt, and buttermilk -- who says we are not cultured?
As long as you are eating, we will be working.
We have not stopped playing with our food and now we are playing with yours.

He gave me an industry trade journal called “Food Business News,” which I found very enlightening.

I was shocked to read the very careful and deliberate marketing ploys used to gain a foothold in our increasingly health conscious market.

The advice to the food industry was clear: Modify packaging and ingredients in food just slightly to give the impression of health, while continuing to provide poor-quality, nutrient-poor, calorie-dense foods.

For example, there was an ad for Food Ingredient Solutions, a company that provides new types of food coloring. This allows manufacturers to color junk food with natural pigments, which can replace the artificial coloring used in tablets, coatings, pan confections, rubs, sauces, and more.

Who are they fooling?

Tyson Foods cleverly labels their chicken as “produced without antibiotics that impact antibiotic resistance in humans,” meaning they did use antibiotics -- just not ones that cause problems in humans.

Conagra, which has been losing money, is creating a food line called Healthy Choice Steamers.

Another article documented a company called Fitch Ratings who said that innovation in the food industry will continue in areas of “perceived” health and wellness, convenience, and ethnic products.

Read that carefully.

“Perceived” health and wellness -- not actual health and wellness.

As long as you make people think they are getting something healthy, that is good enough -- even if it is the same old junk food.

Other new junk foods include allergy-free junk foods and energy drinks. There was also an article about Lean Pockets. This company now offers whole-grain pocket sandwiches, which are still full of chemicals and processed food, but now have a few more flecks of fiber to give the illusion of a health food.

There is even an ad for something called Vegi Pure, a compound designed for cholesterol reduction that puts plant phytosterols in sugary junk food!

So what’s the bottom line?

As I have always said, if it has a label, do not eat it. And as Michael Pollan says, “Eat food [meaning real, whole food]. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

We have to be very cautious as consumers to recognize label claims for health benefits on processed foods, which sprinkle miniscule, non-therapeutic amounts of healthful ingredients into otherwise poor-quality, high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods, giving us the illusion that we are doing something good for ourselves.

I encourage you to eat food that comes from a farmer’s field and not a food chemist’s laboratory -- and you will not have to worry about all these functional food claims.

Here is what to eat:

Whole, real food such as vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, lean animal protein like small wild fish and poultry, and whole omega-3 eggs.
Small amounts of grass-fed, antibiotic- and hormone-free beef or lamb.

That is it.

Food scientists tend to make us think that we need all these special ingredients in foods to stay healthy.

Bu they are just extracting them from real, whole foods -- so why not start with the whole food in the first place?

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Have you sampled any of these “Frankenfoods”?

What did you think of them?

Why do you think the food industry is trying to make junk food seem healthier?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

How Dietary Supplements Can Save You Thousands

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:20:22 -0400

Spending just pennies a day on healthcare can reduce our expenditures by $24 billion over five years.

Sound crazy? It’s true.

New research from the Lewin Group has shown that spending pennies a day on a few key nutritional supplements can dramatically reduce sickness and chronic disease -- and greatly decrease healthcare expenditures as a result.

How did they come to this conclusion? And why haven’t we heard about it?

The Lewin Group looked only at rigorous scientific studies that documented the benefits of nutritional supplements. They used the Congressional Budget Office’s accounting methods to determine the economic impact of supplements. And they kept their analysis specifically to Medicare patients and women of childbearing age.

Although nutritional therapies can help a broad range of illnesses, the group only looked at four supplements and disease combinations because of the rigor and validity of the scientific evidence available for these nutrients and diseases.

While there are many other beneficial nutritional therapies that have been proven helpful in studies, the ones in this particular study are only those that are unquestionable, beyond scientific doubt, well-accepted, and proven to help.

Yet they are also under-used and not generally recommended by healthcare providers.

The study looked at:

Calcium and vitamin D and their effect on osteoporosis
Folic acid and its ability to prevent birth defects
Omega-3 fatty acids and their benefits for heart disease
Lutein and zeaxanthin and their benefit in preventing major age-related blindness, or macular degeneration

Let me review these in more detail.

Most of us hear the refrain from our physicians that nutritional supplements just produce expensive urine, that you do not know what you are getting, or that there is no scientific proof to support their claims.

My advice to these doctors is to do their scientific homework.

Let’s start by looking at calcium and vitamin D.

First, I want to point out the vitamin D research referred to in The Lewin Group study is older research. Newer research, as I have discussed in my vitamin D blogs, suggests that higher doses of vitamin D3, such as 1,000 to 2,000 IU a day, have even greater benefit.

Based on that older research, the study’s authors determined that providing Medicare-age citizens with 1,200 mg of calcium and 400 IU of vitamin D would result in reduced bone loss and fewer hip fractures. The researchers estimated these supplements could prevent more than 776,000 hospitalizations for hip fractures over five years and save $16.1 billion.

Next let’s look at omega-3 fats. Omega-3 fatty acids help prevent cardiac arrhythmias, improve cell membrane function, reduce inflammation, lower cholesterol and blood pressure, and have many other benefits.

The Lewin Group found that giving the Medicare population about 1,800 mg of omega-3 fats a day would prevent 374,000 hospitalizations from heart disease over five years. The Medicare savings from reduced hospital and physician expenses would be $3.2 billion.

This is pretty convincing data, but it doesn’t stop there. The Lewin Group also analyzed the economic effects of lutein and zeaxanthin.

Lutein and zeaxanthin are carotenoids that are found in yellow and orange vegetables. I recommend taking them in combination with the hundreds of other carotenoids found in yellow and orange foods.

Taken as supplements, these have been shown to treat macular degeneration, which is the loss of central vision, a major reason people over age 65 require nursing home care.

The study found that taking 6 to 10 mg of lutein and zeaxanthin daily would help 190,000 individuals avoid dependent care and would result in $3.6 billion in savings over five years.

Lastly the Lewin Group looked at the effects of taking folic acid. 44 million women of childbearing age are not taking folic acid.

If only 11.3 million of them began taking just 400 mcg of folic acid on a daily basis before conception, we could prevent birth defects called neural tube defects in 600 babies and save $344,700,000 in lifetime healthcare costs for these children. Over 5 years, this would account for $1.4 billion in savings.

Taken together, these four simple interventions, which cost pennies a day, could produce a combined savings of $24 billion over five years. This does not even include benefits to people younger than 65 or any of the other benefits of nutritional supplementation, such as improved immunity, cognitive function, and mood.

In this study, the researchers were extremely strict and only looked at nutrient interventions that met three criteria.

The supplement had to produce a measurable physiological effect.
This physiological effect had to create a change in health status.
The researchers only looked at health problems where a change in health status is associated with a decrease in healthcare expenditures.

The Lewin Group’s study is intriguing. The economic impact of investing a few pennies a day in nutritional supplements is compelling.

But what’s downright frightening is that studies by the US Department of Health and Human Services prove that the typical American diet does not always provide a sufficient level of vitamins and minerals – meaning we are at greater risk for conditions like those outlined above.

Because of our consumption of low-nutrient, high-calorie foods that are highly processed, hybridized, genetically modified, shipped long distances, and grown in nutrient-depleted soils, many of us are nutritionally depleted.

In fact, a whopping 92 percent of us are deficient in one or more nutrients at the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) level, which is the minimum amount necessary to prevent deficiency diseases like rickets or scurvy -- diseases that are the result of not getting enough vitamins and minerals. The RDA standards do not necessarily outline the amount needed for optimal health.

What’s more, our government’s nutrient guidelines ignore the fact that many Americans, because of genetic variations and unique needs, may need higher doses of vitamins and minerals than the RDA.

Vitamin deficiency does not cause acute diseases such as scurvy or rickets, but they do cause what have been called “long-latency deficiency diseases.” These include conditions like blindness, osteoporosis, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, and more.

What all this adds up to is clear.

Nutritional supplements do not just make expensive urine.

Based on mounting evidence and confirmed by the Journal of the American Medical Association (1) and The New England Journal of Medicine (2), I strongly believe that we should all be taking certain basic supplements.

Here are the supplements I recommend for everyone:

A high-quality multivitamin and mineral. The multivitamin should contain mixed carotenoids, which include lutein and zeaxanthin as part of their mix, as well as at least 400 mcg of folate and a mixed B-complex vitamin.
Calcium-magnesium with at least 600 mg of calcium and 400 mg of magnesium. The calcium should be calcium citrate or chelated versions of minerals. Do not use calcium carbonate or magnesium oxide, which are cheap minerals that are poorly absorbed.
Vitamin D3, 1,000 to 2,000 IU a day (people who are deficient in vitamin D will need more).
Omega-3 fatty acids that contain the fats EPA and DHA, 1,000 to 2,000 mg a day.

The cost is low, the benefit is high, and the risk is non-existent for these nutritional supplements. Not only will you feel better, have better immune function, and improve your energy and brain function, but you will also prevent many problems down the road.

So, eat a healthy diet -- and take your nutritional supplements every day.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

What supplements do you take every day?

How does your doctor feel about nutritional supplements?

Which of these nutrients do you typically get from your diet?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

REFERENCES:

(1) Fairfield KM, Fletcher RH. Vitamins for Chronic Disease Prevention in Adults: Scientific Review. JAMA 287: 3116-3126.

(2) Willett WC, Stampfer MJ. What Vitamins Should I Be Taking, Doctor? N Engl J Med 345:1819.

Artificial Sweeteners Could Be Sabotaging Your Diet

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:27:55 -0400

There’s no doubt about it.

Artificial sweeteners cause obesity.

I always thought it was funny to see a very large person order a Big Mac, large fries -- and top it off with a Diet Coke. I also found it peculiar that I rarely saw thin people drinking diet sodas.

So I began to wonder if there could be a link between diet beverages or artificial sweeteners and obesity.

As I began to explore this notion, I discovered a number of different research findings that pointed to this very phenomenon.

First, our current obesity epidemic has coincided perfectly with the introduction of large amounts of artificial sweeteners into our food supply. Although we cannot say for sure that this means artificial sweeteners cause obesity, it certainly makes me wonder.

Next, a body of research indicates that just the thought or smell of food initiates a whole set of hormonal and physiologic responses that get the body ready for food.

This is familiar to us from Pavlov’s dog experiment, where he trained dogs to salivate by associating the ringing of a bell with the presentation of food. By doing this repeatedly, he eventually trained the dogs to salivate in anticipation of food simply by ringing the bell -- without any food at all.

Think of diet sodas and artificial sweeteners as ringing the bell for your physiology.

But why is that bad? And why is it even worse to ring the bell with artificial sweeteners and then not provide any sugar along with the bell?

What happens to the body?

Our brains know how to get our bodies ready for food. It is called the cephalic (for “head”) phase reflex. Your brain is preparing for food even before your fork or cup crosses your lips.

This allows you to anticipate and prepare for the arrival of nutrients in your intestinal tract, improves the efficiency of how your nutrients are absorbed, and minimizes the degree to which food will disturb your natural hormonal balance and create weight gain.

So in a way, your body is already preparing to regulate your energy balance, metabolism, weight, calorie burning, and many other things -- just by thinking about food.

Any sweet taste will signal your body that calories are on the way and trigger a whole set of hormonal and metabolic responses to get ready for those calories.

When you trick your body and feed it non-nutritive or non-caloric sweeteners, like aspartame, acesulfame, saccharin, sucralose, or even natural sweeteners like stevia, it gets confused.

And research supports this.

An exciting new study in the Journal of Behavioral Neuroscience has shown conclusively that using artificial sweeteners not only does not prevent weight gain, but induces a whole set of physiologic and hormonal responses that actually make you gain weight.

The researchers proved this by giving two different groups of rats some yogurt. One batch of yogurt was sweetened with sugar. The other was sweetened with saccharin.

They found that three major things happened over a very short period of time in the rats that were fed artificially sweetened yogurt.

First, the researchers found that the total food eaten over 14 days dramatically increased in the artificial sweetener group -- meaning that the artificial sweetener stimulated their appetite and made them eat more.

Second, these rats gained a lot more weight and their body fat increased significantly.

And third (and this is very concerning) was the change in core body temperature of the rats fed the artificial sweeteners. Their core body temperature decreased, meaning their metabolism slowed down.

So not only did the rats eat more, gain more weight, and have more body fat, but they actually lowered their core body temperature and slowed their metabolism.

As I have said many times before, all calories are not created equal.

The most astounding finding in the study was that even though the rats that ate the saccharin-sweetened yogurt consumed fewer calories overall than the rats that ate the sugar-sweetened yogurt, they gained more weight and body fat.

These findings turn the conventional view that people will consume fewer calories by drinking artificially sweetened drinks or eating artificially sweetened foods on its head.

Despite their name, these are not “diet” drinks. They are actually “weight gain” drinks!

We’re surrounded by low-calorie, “health conscious foods” and diet soft drinks that contain sweeteners. As a result, the number of Americans who consume products that contain sugar-free sweeteners grew from 70 million in 1987 to 160 million in 2000.

At the same time, the incidence of obesity in the United States has doubled from 15 percent to 30 percent across all age groups, ethnic groups, and social strata. And the number of overweight Americans has increased from about 30 percent to over 65 percent of the population. The fastest growing obese population is children.

My bottom line?

Avoid artificial sweeteners, including aspartame, acesulfame, sucralose, sugar alcohols such as malitol and xylitol (pretty much anything that ends in “ol”), as well as natural artificial sweeteners like stevia.

Stop confusing your body. If you have a desire for something sweet, have a little sugar, but stay away from “fake” foods.

Eating a whole-foods diet that has a low glycemic load and is rich in phytonutrients and indulging in a few real sweet treats once in a while is a better alternative than tricking your body with artificial sweeteners -- which leads to wide scale metabolic rebellion and obesity.

So, put that teaspoon of sugar in your tea and enjoy!

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Do you use artificially sweetened products?

How have they affected your weight?

What sweet treats do you indulge in?

Has this finding taken you by surprise?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

REFERENCES:

Swithers SE, Davidson TL. A role for sweet taste: Calorie predictive relations in energy regulation by rats. Behav Neurosci. 2008 Feb;122(1):161-73.

Food as Medicine: Powerful New Drug Could be at the End of Your Fork

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:28:41 -0400

It shows that food is the most powerful “drug” we have not just to prevent, but also treat, cure, and reverse most chronic illnesses.

Unfortunately, most physicians did not learn the two most important things we need to know about in medical school -- nutrition and the role of the environment and toxins in our health.

My goal is to help my patients heal and get better and I have no particular allegiance to any type of treatment -- whether it is a drug, surgery, radiation, or new procedure.

I have at my disposal the best medicines and pharmaceutical treatments. I can send patients to the best surgeons and specialists anywhere in the world.

But time after time, I find the most powerful, fastest acting, and most dramatic results come from using food as our main medicine.

I use food for healing, not because I believe it is better to use natural treatments than to use drugs, but because it works better and only has positive side effects.

And I’m not alone.

This June, I will be giving the keynote speech on the history of nutrition and medicine at a course in Baltimore called “Food as Medicine,” sponsored by the Center for Mind Body Medicine.

You can find out more about this here:

http://www.ultrawellness.com/fam

This course breaks important ground in bringing nutritional science to healthcare professionals in a digestible, practical, hands-on format.

Dr. Jim Gordon, who was the chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, pioneered this course more than seven years ago. He was recently honored as one of the five pioneers of integrative medicine by the Bravewell Collaborative and has been a leader in mind-body medicine, nutrition, and healing for nearly 40 years.

Over the last seven years, he has trained hundreds of practitioners, including faculty from more than 50 medical schools, which are now including this knowledge of how to use food as medicine in their curriculum.

Clearly, things have changed.

I remember a food-related meeting years ago, which included the nutritionists, doctors, chefs, and owners of Canyon Ranch, where I worked. I made it very clear during that meeting that I believed the future of nutrition and the culinary arts must recognize the therapeutic value of food to heal chronic illnesses.

As soon as the words “food is medicine” left my lips, I was under attack.

The vehement response from the chief chef was that food is only about good taste, not good health, and that we were not the Mayo Clinic.

Fortunately, this antiquated view is changing.

More and more food services, restaurants, and other institutions are recognizing the healing power of food and are including healing foods as part of their offerings.

The “Food as Medicine” course addresses things that most practitioners never learn in medical school, such as the scientific basis of nutrition as a therapeutic tool, how we can eat in a sustainable way, and how the health of our planet has directly affected the health of our food and the health of our bodies.

The course stresses areas such as nutrigenomics, the idea that food is information that speaks to our genes and turns on messages that create health or disease.

It also explores the role of stress, nutrition, hormone balance, the health of our gut, and the importance of detoxification and food.

The course is based on the basic tenets of Functional Medicine but is broken down into simple, practical tools practitioners can use every day with their patients.

It addresses specific nutritional approaches for conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, ADD, asthma, allergies, autoimmune diseases, fibromyalgia, and adrenal, thyroid, and neurodegenerative problems. Practitioners are advised on the use of nutritional supplements and cutting edge laboratory tests.

All this is done in an experiential way that increases self-awareness and includes food demonstrations and organic meals. In fact, this year they are using The UltraMetabolism Cookbook as a source for the meals that are served during the course.

The faculty this year is outstanding.

They include:

James Joseph, a leading antioxidant researcher from Tufts University
Collin Fogarty Draper, an expert in nutrigenomics
David Ludwig, head of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School
Gerard Mullin, from John Hopkins Medical School
Michael Lumpkin, a professor at Georgetown University Medical School
Many other distinguished speakers

The course director is actually the nutrition director of The UltraWellness Center, Kathie Swift, who has been involved in creating and developing this course over the years.

Anybody interested in nutrition is welcome to come.

Any healthcare practitioner will benefit -- including physicians, osteopaths, medical school faculty, nurses, nurse practitioners, registered dietitians and nutritionists, physician assistants, community healthcare practitioners, psychologists, mental health professionals, and other health professionals.

According to Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the leading researchers in the world in nutrition, “It is time to end the confusion. ‘Food as Medicine’ presents the best current scientific evidence for physicians, nutritionists, and other health professionals who want to counsel patients and teach students.”

I encourage all of you to tell your healthcare practitioners about it -- and consider attending yourself. This course provides tools and information to use the most powerful weapon against disease in the 21st century, your fork.

You can find out more about this here:

http://www.ultrawellness.com/fam

Remember what Hippocrates said:

“Leave your potions in the chemist’s crucible if you can handle your patients with food.”

Now I’d like to hear from you…

How does your doctor view nutrition?

What experiences have you had by using food as medicine?

Do you plan to attend the conference?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

A 7-step Plan to Boost Your Low Thyroid and Metabolism

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:16:21 -0400

Last week, I told you about low thyroid function and how it affects more than 30 million women and 15 million men.

So why are we seeing such an epidemic of thyroid problems?

Well, chronic thyroid problems can be caused by many factors. These include environmental toxins such as pesticides, which act as hormone or endocrine disruptors and interfere with thyroid hormone metabolism and function.

In fact, one study found that as people lost weight they released pesticides from their fat tissue. (1)

This then interfered with their thyroid function and caused hypothyroidism. The toxins created a slow metabolism and prevented them from losing more weight.

This study highlights the importance of overall detoxification. It is quite a significant finding that shows exactly how toxins interfere with thyroid function.

Heavy metals such as mercury can also affect thyroid function. I see many people with chronic hypothyroidism and other thyroid problems because mercury interferes with normal thyroid function.

The other big factor that interferes with thyroid function is chronic stress.

There is an intimate interaction between stress hormones and thyroid function. The more stress you are under, the worse your thyroid functions.

Any approach to correcting poor thyroid function must address the effects of chronic stress and provide support to the adrenal glands.

The next major factor that affects thyroid function is chronic inflammation. The biggest source of this chronic inflammation is gluten, the protein found in wheat, barely, rye, spelt, and oats.

Gluten is a very common allergen that affects about 10 to 20 percent of the population. This reaction occurs mostly because of our damaged guts, poor diet, and stress.

I also think eating so-called Frankenfoods, such as hybridized and genetically modified grains with very strange proteins, makes us sick.

Our bodies say, “What’s this? Must be something foreign. I’d better create antibodies to this, fight it, and get rid of it.”

This chronic inflammatory response interferes with thyroid function -- and contributes to the epidemic of inflammatory diseases in the developed world.

Lastly, nutritional deficiencies play a big role in thyroid dysfunction. These include deficiencies of iodine, vitamin D, omega-3 fats, selenium, zinc, vitamin A, and the B vitamins.

There are so many reasons for low thyroid function, yet I have seen lots of patients with this problem who were just ignored by their doctors.

==> So what’s the solution?

One young female patient of mine had more than 30 percent body fat and was unable to change her body, no matter how hard she worked. She ate perfectly, exercised with a trainer every day -- and her body still wouldn’t budge.

She also had a slightly depressed mood and other vague symptoms.

So I treated her with a low dose of Armour Thyroid, which is a natural thyroid replacement.

What happened?

Well, she not only lost 20 pounds and improved her body composition, but her mood improved and all her other symptoms went away.

How did I know she had low thyroid function?

Once I have asked about symptoms, done a physical exam, and considered all the potential causes of thyroid problems, I do the right tests.

Most doctors just check something called the thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), which doesn’t give a full picture of the thyroid. In fact, even the interpretation of this test is incorrect most of the time.

The newer guidelines of the American College of Endocrinology consider anybody with a TSH level over 3.0 as hypothyroid. Most doctors think that only anything over 5 or 10 is worth treating.

Unfortunately, this leaves millions suffering unnecessarily.

There are also other tests, including free T3 and free T4 and thyroid antibodies, which are essential.

I also look for associated problems such as gluten intolerance, food allergies, and heavy metals, as well as deficiencies of vitamin D, selenium, vitamin A, zinc, and omega-3 fats.

There are many things to consider in a careful approach to hypothyroidism.

It is one of the most common problems I see, and treating it properly makes one of the biggest differences in my patients’ quality of life.

Unfortunately, by using the old guidelines and thinking, conventional medicine misses millions who suffer with hypothyroidism.

In fact, in one study, researchers tested everybody who walked through the gates of a county fair with conventional thyroid testing. They found that according to even conservative conventional standards, half of all the people who had hypothyroidism were undiagnosed, untreated, and suffering.

So I encourage you to take the following steps:

Make a thorough inventory of any of the symptoms that I mentioned in last week’s blog to see if you might suffer from hypothyroidism.
Get the right thyroid tests including TSH, free T3, free T4, TPO, and anti-thyroglobulin antibodies.
Check for celiac disease with a celiac panel.
Consider heavy metal toxicity.
Check your vitamin D level.

Once you have confirmed that a sluggish thyroid is contributing to your symptoms, the good news is that there are many, many, many things you can do to help correct thyroid problems.

I have developed a seven-step plan to address hypothyroidism:

Identify and treat the underlying causes of hypothyroidism, like food allergies, gluten, heavy metals, nutritional deficiencies, and stress.
Support your thyroid with optimal nutrition, including foods that contain iodine, zinc, omega-3 fats, selenium, and more.
Eliminate adrenal exhaustion and minimize stress by engaging in a comprehensive stress management program.
Engage in thyroid stimulating exercise, which boosts thyroid function.
Use supplements to help enhance thyroid function, including all the nutrients needed for proper thyroid metabolism and function.
Use saunas and heat to eliminate stored toxins, which interfere with thyroid function.
Use thyroid hormone replacement therapy to help support your thyroid gland.

I believe a comprehensive approach is needed to address chronic thyroid issues and to diagnose them. Unfortunately, most of the options for healing by conventional care are quite limited and only provide a partial solution. But by following my seven-step plan you can achieve optimal health and UltraWellness.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

If you have low thyroid function, how was it diagnosed?

Which of these steps have you tried to treat it?

How have they helped?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

REFERENCES

(1) Pelletier C, Imbeault P, Tremblay A. Energy balance and pollution by organochlorines and polychlorinated biphenyls. Obes Rev. 2003 Feb;4(1):17-24. Review.

Hypothyroidism - How Your Thyroid Can Make You Sick, Tired and Overweight…

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:04:59 -0400

Are you one of the 30 million women and 15 million men who have a chronic medical problem that is both under-diagnosed and under-treated?

Are you suffering from vague symptoms that you think are normal parts of life, such as fatigue, feeling sluggish in the morning, and having trouble with your memory, concentration, or focus?

Do you have dry skin or fluid retention?

Is your sex drive not what it used to be?

Are your hands and feet cold all the time?

Is your hair thinning, your voice a little hoarse, your fingernails a little thick?

Is your cholesterol high?

Do you have trouble losing weight or have you gained weight recently?

Are you suffering from depression or anxiety?

Do you have really bad PMS or trouble getting pregnant?

Do you have muscle cramps and muscle pain or weakness?

Most of these symptoms aren’t severe enough to send you to the emergency room, but they do significantly affect your quality of life.

And most of us accept them as a normal part of our lives without really questioning them.

If you do go to see your doctor, he or she probably shrugs it off.

Yes, doctors are experts in acute illness. But they often fail miserably when it comes to addressing subtle changes in your body that affect the quality of your life.

According to conventional medicine, low sex drive is not necessarily a disease. Neither is a little dry skin or constipation or being tired most of the day.

But for you, those problems are significant.

So what causes them?

Often, they’re caused by a condition that goes undiagnosed in half of the 45 million people who have it.

==> It’s called hypothyroidism.

When you have hypothyroidism your overall metabolic gas pedal slows down because the master gland that controls it, your thyroid gland, is not functioning at full speed.

If your thyroid slows down, every other organ and system in your body slows down, including your brain, heart, gut, and muscles.

The thyroid hormone is like a master switch that turns on the genes that keep every cell running.

This is one of those gray areas in medicine, but doctors tend to think in black and white -- you have it or you don’t, sort of like being pregnant.

Well, you can’t just be a little bit pregnant, but you can be just a little bit hypothyroid.

And it can have a dramatic effect on the quality of your life.

Yet most doctors don’t view it that way.

This problem is further compounded by the conventional belief that you can diagnose hypothyroidism only through one blood test, called TSH, and that you only qualify for treatment if your blood level is over 5.0.

Unfortunately, this view ignores a whole group of people who have what we call subclinical hypothyroidism. It is called that because doctors have a hard time diagnosing it.

Subclinical hypothyroidism may trigger many low-grade symptoms, such as fatigue, trouble losing weight, mild depression, constipation, and more. Yet it causes just slight changes in your blood tests.

In fact, it often only shows up in tests that most doctors never perform.

==> Low Thyroid function may seem subtle, but it can have serious consequences.

You see, it doesn’t just make you a little tired -- it can lead to more serious problems, including heart attacks and diabetes.

I see this all the time in my medical practice: Patients come in with vague complaints that alone may not seem too significant.

But when you put them all together, they tell an important story.

I remember the story of one patient who was 73 years old. This woman came to see me because she had been to her doctor with complaints of fatigue, sluggishness, poor memory, slight depression, dry skin, constipation, and mild fluid retention.

Her doctor’s response?

“Well, what do you expect? You’re 73, and this is what 73 is supposed to feel like.”

But I just don’t believe that is true.

I believe that most of the symptoms of aging that we see are really symptoms of abnormal aging or dysfunction that is related to imbalances in our core body systems.

I have to be a medical detective to find clues where no one else is looking and put together a story about why a person is suffering. This gets them the answers and tools they need to get well.

In this case, we tested my patient for a number of things and found that she had a sluggish thyroid. She did not quite meet all the criteria of conventional medicine for hypothyroidism, but she had an autoimmune reaction that caused her thyroid to function poorly.

By simply replacing her missing thyroid hormone, supporting her nutrition, and implementing some simple lifestyle changes, she went from feeling old to feeling alert, energetic, and youthful -- and all of her other symptoms cleared up.

I had another patient who was a 28-year-old woman who was chronically constipated. She thought it was normal to go to the bathroom every three or four days.

She also felt quite tired in the mornings and had trouble getting going. She needed coffee every morning. And at night she had trouble staying up and being with her friends and being an active 28-year-old woman.

She thought that this was just sort of a constitutional problem and that she was stuck living like that. No one had diagnosed her sluggish thyroid.

But as soon as we supported her nutrition and eliminated her food allergens (particularly gluten), which create inflammation and interfere with thyroid function, she felt better.

Her constipation resolved, she was energetic in the morning, did not need her coffee, and was able to stay up until 11:00 or 12:00 at night without any fatigue or limitations.

This problem affects men and women of all ages.

And it is very common because of all the stressors in our environment, including toxins such as heavy metals and pesticides, nutritional deficiencies, and chronic stress, all of which interfere with our thyroid function.

It’s critical to understand that your thyroid is not just linked to energy and other symptoms that I described here.

It is the master metabolism hormone that controls the function and activity of almost every organ and cell in your body -- so when it is sluggish or slow, everything slows down.

==> There is good news.

There are clear ways to diagnose the problem as well as to treat it, with a comprehensive functional medicine approach that uses the concepts of UltraWellness.

The first step is to find out if you have any of the chronic symptoms of hypothyroidism or any of the diseases associated with hypothyroidism. Ask yourself if you have any of the following symptoms:

sluggishness in the morning
poor concentration and memory
low-grade depression
dry skin
hoarse voice
thinning hair
coarse hair
being very sensitive to cold and having cold hands and feet
low body temperature
muscle pain
weakness or cramps
low sex drive
fluid retention
high cholesterol

After I have asked my patients about all these symptoms, I do a physical examination for clues to a low-functioning thyroid.

I check for a low body temperature. Anything lower than 97.6 degrees F may be a sign of hypothyroidism.

I might also find fluid retention, a thick tongue, swollen feet, swollen eyelids, an enlarged thyroid gland, excessive earwax, a dry mouth, coarse skin, low blood pressure, or decreased ankle reflexes. I might even find that the outer third of the eyebrows is gone.

These are all physical signs that can be put together along with other symptoms to form a story of what is causing the problem.

Once I have done that, I perform specific blood tests that give me a full picture of thyroid problems.

Then I design a nutritional, lifestyle, and supplement regimen and hormone replacement plan as needed to help people regain their health.

That’s all for today.

In my next blog, I will discuss the major preventable -- and mostly hidden -- factors that slow your thyroid down. And I’ll tell you more about the special tests I use to diagnose thyroid problems, as well as how to specifically treat low thyroid function.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Do you suffer from any of the signs and symptoms mentioned here?

Have you been told you have low thyroid function?

How has your doctor responded to your concerns?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,
Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

Why Antidepressants Don’t Work for Treating Depression

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:28:16 -0500

Here’s some depressing recent medical news: Antidepressants don’t work.

What’s even more depressing?

The pharmaceutical industry and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have deliberately deceived us into believing that they DO work.

As a physician, this is frightening to me. Depression is among the most common problems seen in primary-care medicine and soon will be the second leading cause of disability in this country.

The study I’m talking about was published in a recent issue of “The New England Journal of Medicine.”

It found that drug companies selectively publish studies on antidepressants. They have published nearly all the studies that show benefit -- but almost none of the studies that show these drugs are ineffective. (1)

That warps our view of antidepressants, leading us to think that they do work. And it has fueled the tremendous growth in the use of psychiatric medications, which are now the second leading class of drugs sold, after cholesterol-lowering drugs.

And it’s even worse than it sounds, because the positive studies hardly showed benefit in the first place.

For example, 40 percent of people taking a placebo (sugar pill) got better, while only 60 percent taking the actual drug had improvement in their symptoms. Looking at it another way, 80 percent of people get better with just a placebo.

That leaves us with a big problem -- millions of depressed people with no effective treatments.

Let’s take a closer look at depression.

“Depression” is simply a label we give to people who have a depressed mood most of the time, have lost interest or pleasure in most activities, are fatigued, can’t sleep, have no interest in sex, feel hopeless and helpless, can’t think clearly, or can’t make decisions.

But that label tells us NOTHING about the cause of those symptoms.

In fact, there are dozens of causes of depression -- each one needing a different approach to treatment.

==> Depression is not one-size-fits-all.

But it’s very common.

Women have a 10 to 25 percent risk and men a 5 to 12 percent risk of developing severe major depression in their lifetime. (2)

One in ten Americans takes an antidepressant. The use of these drugs has tripled in the last decade, according to a report by the federal government. In 2006, spending on antidepressants soared by 130 percent.

But just because antidepressants are popular doesn’t mean they’re helpful.

Unfortunately, as we now see from this report in “The New England Journal of Medicine,” they don’t work and have significant side effects.

Most patients taking antidepressants either don’t respond or have only partial response.

In fact, success is considered just a 50 percent improvement in half of depressive symptoms. And this minimal result is achieved in less than half the patients taking antidepressants.

That’s a pretty dismal record. It’s only made worse by the fact that 86 percent of people taking antidepressants have one or more side effects, including sexual dysfunction, fatigue, insomnia, loss of mental abilities, nausea, and weight gain.

No wonder half the people who try antidepressants quit after 4 months.

Now I want to talk to you about the reasons why doctors and patients have been deceived by the “antidepressant hoax.”

==> Despite what we have been brainwashed to believe, depression is not a Prozac deficiency!

Drug companies are not forced to publish all the results of their studies. They only publish those they want to.

The team of researchers that reported their findings in “The New England Journal of Medicine” took a critical look at all the studies done on antidepressants, both published and unpublished.

They dug up some serious dirt.

The unpublished studies were not easy to find. The researchers had to search the FDA databases, call researchers, and hunt down hidden data under the Freedom of Information Act.

What they found was stunning.

After looking at 74 studies involving 12 drugs and over 12,000 people, they discovered that 37 of 38 trials with positive results were published, while only 14 of 36 negative studies were published.

And those that showed negative results were in the words of the researchers, “published in a way that conveyed a positive outcome.”

That means the results were twisted to imply the drugs worked when they didn’t.

This isn’t just a problem with antidepressants. It’s a problem with scientific research. Some drug companies even pay or threaten scientists to not publish negative results on their drugs.

So much for “evidence-based” medicine!

Most of the time, we only have the evidence that the drug companies want us to have. Both doctors and patients are deceived into putting billions of dollars into drug companies’ pockets, while leaving millions with the same health problems but less money.

The scientific trust is broken. What can we do?

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer.

But I do think Functional Medicine, on which my approach of UltraWellness is based, provides a more intelligent way of understanding the research.

Rather than using drugs to suppress symptoms, Functional Medicine helps us find the true causes of problems, including depression.

I see this in so many of the patients I have treated over the years. Just as the same things that make us sick also make us fat, the same things that make us sick also make us depressed.

==> Fix the causes of sickness -- and the depression takes care of itself.

Just look at these few cases:

A 23-year-old had been anxious and depressed most of her life and spent her childhood and adolescence on various cocktails of antidepressants.

Turns out, she suffered from food allergies that made her depressed. Food allergies cause inflammation, and studies now show inflammation in the brains of depressed people.

In fact, researchers are studying powerful anti-inflammatory drugs used in autoimmune disease such as Enbrel for the treatment of depression.

So after she eliminated her IgG or delayed food allergies, her depression went away, she got off her medication -- and she lost 30 pounds as a side effect!

Here’s another.

A 37-year-old executive woman struggled for more than a decade with treatment-resistant depression (meaning that drugs didn’t work), fatigue, and a 40-pound weight gain.

We found she had very high levels of mercury. Getting the mercury out of her body left her happy, thin, and full of energy.

A 49-year-old man with severe lifelong depression had been on a cocktail of antidepressants and psychiatric medication for years but still lived under a dark cloud every day, without relief.

We found he had severe deficiencies of vitamin B12, B6, and folate. After we gave him back those essential brain nutrients, he called me to thank me. Last year was the first year he could remember feeling happy and free of depression.

These are just a few of the dozens of things that can cause depression.

The roots of depression are found in the 7 keys to UltraWelless and the 7 fundamental underlying imbalances that trigger the body to malfunction.

As we now see, taking antidepressants is not the answer to our looming mental health epidemic.

We need different solutions. I am very excited about my next book, “The UltraMind Solution” (coming out next year), which will address this important topic.

In the meantime, here are a few things that account for a lot of depression -- and how to fix them.

Try an anti-inflammatory elimination diet that gets rid of common food allergens (see “The UltraSimple Diet”)
Check for hypothyroidism
Treat vitamin D deficiency with at least 2,000 to 5,000 U a day of vitamin D3
Take omega-3 fats in the form of 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams (mg) a day of purified fish oil. Your brain is made of up this fat.
Take adequate B12 (1,000 micrograms, or mcg, a day), B6 (25 mg) and folic acid (800 mcg). These vitamins are critical for metabolizing homocysteine which can play a factor in depression.
Get checked for mercury
Exercise vigorously five times a week for 30 minutes. This increases levels of BDNF, a natural antidepressant in your brain.

These are just of few of the easiest and most effective things you can do to treat depression. But there are even more, which you can address by simply working through the 7 Keys to UltraWellness.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Have you been diagnosed with depression?

How have antidepressants worked for you?

Do you plan to try any of the approaches mentioned here?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

Resources

(1) Turner EH et al. 2007. Selective publication of antidepressant trials and its influence on apparent efficacy. New England Journal of Medicine. 358: 252-260.

(2) Eaton WW, Kalaydjian A, Scharfstein DO, Mezuk B, Ding Y. 2007. Prevalence and incidence of depressive disorder: the Baltimore ECA follow-up, 1981-2004. Acta Psychiatr Scand.116(3):182-188.

The Dangers of the Medical Industrial Complex

techteam@ultrawellness.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:47:59 -0500

Your doctors think they make decisions based on medical evidence.

But they don’t!

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

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

Sadly, that often isn’t the case.

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

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

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

Second, it’s come to light that nearly all the negative studies on antidepressants – that’s more than half of all studies on these drugs – were never published, giving a false sense of effectiveness of antidepressants to treat depression.

Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not telling you to blame your doctor.

Instead, blame deceptive scientific practices and industry-protective government polices.

==> Let’s talk a closer look at these findings and their implications.

I once had a patient who worked in the drug approval division of the FDA. She taught me a very important lesson.

When a drug company designs and performs a study, it has to be registered with the FDA and ALL the results must be submitted to the FDA.

But it doesn’t work that way.

Instead, the pharmaceutical companies ONLY submit the data they want to get published to medical journals.

That means that any negative studies are hidden from the scientific community and from the public.

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

The FDA does not release this information.

That was, it didn’t until 2004 when all the major scientific journals banded together and refused to publish any data from any drug study that did not list the results of all trials, either positive or negative, in a central database. (1)

Well, that sounds good – but listing obscure, unpublished studies buried deep in a hard-to-navigate public database run by the National Institutes of Health is hardly visible public disclosure.

Sure, the research studies are at least listed, but try to find out the results.

After a few hours searching around on the website clinicaltrials.gov, I gave up.

Last year, Congress passed legislation expanding how much detail must be listed, but at the end of the day, who even looks at that?

Most doctors don’t even have time to read the medical journals they receive. They get tiny bits of information from drug reps, who come to their office with free lunch and a sound bite about their drug.

They get slightly more information from researchers who are funded by pharmaceutical companies and present their findings at conferences sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, using presentations prepared for them by pharmaceutical companies.

Not exactly independent, evidence-based medicine!

==> Now let’s get back to the news about Zetia.

Zetia is a new drug that lowers cholesterol by a different mechanism than statin drugs like Lipitor and Zocor.

Why does this matter?

Well, doctors have been brainwashed to think that cholesterol is the cause of heart attacks even though half of all people who have heart attacks have NORMAL cholesterol.

And it seemed like the statins, which lowered cholesterol, actually reduced heart attacks.

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

No!

I believe that the reason statins lower risk is NOT because they lower cholesterol, but because they reduce inflammation.

In fact, studies by Dr. Paul Ridker of Harvard show that the risk of heart attacks was only reduced if inflammation was lowered along with LDL cholesterol – but not if LDL cholesterol was lowered alone. (2)

So then along comes a drug that can be combined with statins to lower cholesterol even more. Great idea?

Not really.

You see, the FDA approved Zetia without any proof that it lowered heart attacks or reduced the progression of heart disease. The drug was approved solely on the basis that it lowered cholesterol.

Yet Zetia was given to 5 million people – and made the drug companies $5 billion a year. That’s almost $14 million a day!

And once Zetia was approved, its makers had no incentive to prove that it actually did what it was thought to do – lower heart attacks.

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

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

But the FDA had the negative data on Zetia – and it didn’t speak up.

The data that was withheld proved that Zetia did not reduce heart attacks but actually INCREASED fatty plaques in the arteries despite lowering cholesterol.

Let that sink in for a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The evidence was there, but no one looked or publicized it.

This makes it very difficult for consumers to get the best treatments for their health and the whole truth about drugs.

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

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

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

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Were you aware of the studies I’ve mentioned today?

Which of the steps here do you plan to follow?

What has you experience been with medications compared to lifestyle measures?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to

http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

REFERENCES:

(1) Laine C, Horton R, DeAngelis CD, Drazen JM, Frizelle FA, Godlee F, Haug C, Hébert PC, Kotzin S, Marusic A, Sahni P, Schroeder TV, Sox HC, Van der Weyden MB, Verheugt FW.Clinical trial registration: looking back and moving ahead. JAMA. 2007 Jul 4;298(1):93-4.

(2) Ridker PM, Cannon CP, Morrow D, Rifai N, Rose LM, McCabe CH, Pfeffer MA, Braunwald E; Pravastatin or Atorvastatin Evaluation and Infection Therapy-Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction 22 (PROVE IT-TIMI 22) Investigators. C-reactive protein levels and outcomes after statin therapy. N Engl J Med. 2005 Jan 6;352(1):20-8.

(3) Kastelein JJ, van Leuven SI, Burgess L, Evans GW, Kuivenhoven JA, Barter PJ, Revkin JH, Grobbee DE, Riley WA, Shear CL, Duggan WT, Bots ML; RADIANCE 1 Investigators.Effect of torcetrapib on carotid atherosclerosis in familial hypercholesterolemia. N Engl J Med. 2007 Apr 19;356(16):1620-30.