Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Happy May everyone!

With lots of people thinking about swimsuit season and on the diet bandwagon before summer starts, maybe this is a great time to read this article. Originally posted in Psychology Today,  one of the biggest and overlooked issues with losing or controlling your weight is controlling your insulin demand by being aware and monitoring your sugar consumption. The best side effect of monitoring sugars is reducing your risk for memory related diseases. Please read and share with someone you think may also be at risk or will benefit!

Thnak you ;)

Tim & Selena Middleton/Flickr CC
Source: Tim & Selena Middleton/Flickr CC
Do you have Insulin Resistance?
If you don’t know, you’re not alone. This is perhaps the single most important question any of us can ask about our physical and mental health—yet most patients, and even many doctors, don’t know how to answer it.
Here in the U.S., insulin resistance has reached epidemic proportions: more than half of us are now insulin resistant. Insulin resistance is a hormonal condition that sets the stage throughout the body for inflammation and overgrowth, disrupts normal cholesterol and fat metabolism, and gradually destroys our ability to process carbohydrates.
Insulin resistance puts us at high risk for many undesirable diseases, including obesity, heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes.
Scarier still, researchers now understand that insulin resistance is a powerful force in the development of Alzheimer’s Disease. 

What is insulin resistance?

Insulin is a powerful metabolic hormone that orchestrates how cells access and process vital nutrients, including sugar (glucose).
In the body, one of insulin’s responsibilities is to unlock muscle and fat cells so they can absorb glucose from the bloodstream. When you eat something sweet or starchy that causes your blood sugar to spike, the pancreas releases insulin to usher the excess glucose out of the bloodstream and into cells. If blood sugar and insulin spike too high too often, cells will try to protect themselves from overexposure to insulin’s powerful effects by toning down their response to insulin—they become “insulin resistant.” In an effort to overcome this resistance, the pancreas releases even more insulin into the blood to try to keep glucose moving into cells. The more insulin levels rise, the more insulin resistant cells become. Over time, this vicious cycle can lead to persistently elevated blood glucose levels, or type 2 diabetes.

Insulin resistance and the brain

In the brain, it’s a different story. The brain is an energy hog that demands a constant supply of glucose. Glucose can freely leave the bloodstream, waltz across the blood-brain barrier, and even enter most brain cells—no insulin required. In fact, the level of glucose in the cerebrospinal fluid surrounding your brain is always about 60% as high as the level of glucose in your bloodstream—even if you have insulin resistance—so, the higher your blood sugar, the higher your brain sugar.
Not so with insulin—the higher your blood insulin levels, the more difficult it can become for insulin to penetrate the brain. This is because the receptors responsible for escorting insulin across the blood-brain barrier can become resistant to insulin, restricting the amount of insulin allowed into the brain. While most brain cells don’t require insulin in order to absorb glucose, they do require insulin in order to process glucose. Cells must have access to adequate insulin or they can’t transform glucose into the vital cellular components and energy they need to thrive.
Despite swimming in a sea of glucose, brain cells in people with insulin resistance literally begin starving to death

Insulin resistance and memory

Suzi Smith, used with permission
Source: Suzi Smith, used with permission
Which brain cells go first? The hippocampus is the brain's memory center. Hippocampal cells require so much energy to do their important work that they often need extra boosts of glucose. While insulin is not required to let a normal amount of glucose into the hippocampus, these special glucose surges do require insulin, making the hippocampus particularly sensitive to insulin deficits. This explains why declining memory is one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s, despite the fact that Alzheimer’s Disease eventually destroys the whole brain.
Without adequate insulin, the vulnerable hippocampus struggles to record new memories, and over time begins to shrivel up and die. By the time a person notices symptoms of “Mild Cognitive Impairment” (pre-Alzheimer’s), the hippocampus has already shrunk by more than 10%.

Alzheimer’s Disease is Type 3 Diabetes

Suzi Smith, used with permission
Source: Suzi Smith, used with permission
The major hallmarks of Alzheimer’s Disease—neurofibrillary tangles, amyloid plaques, and brain cell atrophy—can all be explained by insulin resistance. A staggering 80% of people with Alzheimer’s Disease have insulin resistance or full-blown type 2 diabetes. The connection between insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s Disease is now so firmly established that scientists have started referring to Alzheimer’s Disease as “Type 3 Diabetes.”
This does not mean that diabetes causes Alzheimer’s Disease—dementia can strike even if you don’t have diabetes. It’s more accurate to think of it this way: Insulin resistance of the body is type 2 diabetes; insulin resistance of the brain is type 3 diabetes. They are two separate diseases caused by the same underlying problem: insulin resistance.

Are you already on the road to Alzheimer’s Disease?

You may be surprised to learn that Alzheimer’s Disease begins long before any symptoms appear.
The brain sugar processing problem caused by insulin resistance is called “glucose hypometabolism.” This simply means that brain cells don’t have enough insulin to burn glucose at full capacity. The more insulin resistant you become, the more sluggish your brain glucose metabolism becomes. Glucose hypometabolism is an early marker of Alzheimer’s disease risk that can be visualized with special brain imaging studies called PET scans. Using this technology to study people of different ages, researchers have discovered that Alzheimer’s Disease is preceded by DECADES of gradually worsening glucose hypometabolism.
Brain glucose metabolism can be reduced by as much as 25% long before any memory problems become obvious. As a psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of college students, I find it positively chilling that scientists have found evidence of glucose hypometabolism in the brains of women as young as 24 years old.

Real hope for your future

We used to feel helpless in the face of Alzheimer’s Disease because we were told that all of the major risk factors for this devastating condition were beyond our control: age, genetics, and family history. We were sitting ducks, living in fear of the worst—until now.
The bad news is that insulin resistance has become so common that chances are you already have it to some degree.
The good news is that insulin resistance is a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s Disease that you CAN do something about.
Eating too many of the wrong carbohydrates too often is what causes blood sugar and insulin levels to rise, placing us at high risk for insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s Disease. Our bodies have evolved to handle whole food sources of carbohydrates like apples and sweet potatoes, but they simply aren’t equipped to cope with modern refined carbohydrates like flour and sugar. Simply put, refined carbohydrates cause brain damage.
You can’t do anything about your genes or how old you are—but you can certainly change how you eat. It's not about eating less fat, less meat, more fiber, or more fruits and vegetables. Changing the amount and type of carbohydrate you eat is where the money's at.

Three steps you can take right now to minimize your risk for Alzheimer’s Disease

1. Find out how insulin resistant you are. Your health care provider can estimate where you are on the insulin resistance spectrum using simple blood tests such as glucose, insulin, triglyceride and HDL cholesterol levels, in combination with other information such as waist measurement and blood pressure. In my article How to Diagnose, Prevent and Treat Insulin Resistance, I include a downloadable PDF of tests with healthy target ranges for you to discuss with your health care provider, and a simple formula you can use to calculate your own insulin resistance.
RaviKrishnappa/Pixabay
Source: RaviKrishnappa/Pixabay
2. Avoid refined carbohydrates like the plague, starting right now. Even if you don’t have insulin resistance yet, you remain at high risk for developing it until you kick refined carbohydrates such as bagels, juice boxes and granola bars to the curb. For clear definitions and a list of refined foods to avoid: http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/refined-carbohydrate-list/  
3. If you have insulin resistance, watch your carbohydrate intake. Unfortunately, people with insulin resistance need to be careful with all carbs, not just the refined ones. Replace most of the carbs on your plate with delicious healthy fats and proteins to protect your insulin signaling system. The infographic below provides key strategies you'll need to normalize blood sugar and insulin levels.
You can wield tremendous power over insulin resistance—and your intellectual future—simply by changing the way you eat. Laboratory tests for insulin resistance respond surprisingly quickly to dietary changes—many people see dramatic improvements in their blood sugar, insulin, and triglyceride levels within just a few weeks.  
If you already have some memory problems and think it’s too late to do anything about it, think again! This 2012 study showed that a low-carbohydrate high-fat diet improved memory in people with “Mild Cognitive Impairment” (Pre-Alzheimer’s Disease) in only six weeks.
Yes, it is difficult to remove refined carbohydrates from the diet—they are addictive, inexpensive, convenient, and delicious—but you can do it. It is primarily your diet, not your DNA, that controls your destiny. You don’t have to be a sitting duck waiting around to see if Alzheimer’s Disease happens to you. Armed with this information, you can be a proactive swimming duck sporting a big beautiful hippocampus who gets to keep every single one of your marbles for the rest of your life.
Suzi Smith, used with permission

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Happy Spring!

As were heading into this Easter Holiday weekend, the last big sugar holiday until Halloween, I found another great article to share about sugar and labeling from Experience Life magazine from Lifetime Fitness. It really gets you thinking and possibly questioning your consumption and possible adjustments or swaps for healthier choices for your families Easter basket :)

Sweet News About Food Labels

Added Sugar in labels
Next year, the FDA will require food manufacturers to disclose added sugars on nutrition labels. Learn why it’s a big win for your health.
You know a sugary treat when you see one — a slice of cake, a wedge of pie, a scoop of double-fudge ice cream. But you may be surprised by how much sugar you don’t see in your everyday diet.
Let’s say you start your day with low-fat yogurt topped with berries and granola (50 grams of sugar); you drizzle fat-free dressing (8 grams) on your salad at lunch, sip your favorite coffee shop chai latte (42 grams) in the afternoon, and then tuck into a big bowl of pasta and tomato sauce (30 grams) at dinner. Between naturally occurring sugar in these foods and hidden added sugar, you’ve consumed 130 grams of sugar by the end of the day — roughly 33 teaspoons, or two-thirds of a cup — without eating anything that resembled dessert.
Nearly two hundred years ago, the average American ate about 6 pounds of sugar a year; by 1999, annual consumption had ballooned to more than 100 pounds. That much sugar is foreign in terms of human evolution and beyond our bodies’ ability to process it, says Lisa Nelson, MD, a family physician and the director of medical education at Kripalu Center in Stockbridge, Mass. “Most people are unaware of how detrimental sugar is to their health — and how pervasive it is.”
Fortunately, identifying the hidden sugar in processed foods will soon be easier, thanks to new labeling requirements approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in May 2016. Beginning in July 2018, food makers will be required to list added sugars both in grams and as a daily percentage value (DV) on nutrition labels. These two sugar line items are components of the most significant retooling of the label in 20 years. (For details of other label changes, see below.)
The new FDA label requirements will align with recommendations from the World Health Organization that adults and children limit added sugars to no more than 10 percent of daily calories. That works out to approximately 6 teaspoons (24 grams) for women and 9 teaspoons (36 grams) for men. As for children, the American Heart Association (AHA) recommends no more than 3 to 6 teaspoons (12 to 24 grams) daily, depending on weight and height, and that kids under 2 consume no added sugars.
Cutting back to 6 or 9 teaspoons of added sugars may seem daunting. But reducing sugar consumption can dramatically improve your health — and the new labels will be a big help.

SUGAR SHOCK

Since nutrition labeling became law in 1990, the information that food manufacturers must provide has combined natural and added sugars into one lump sum presented simply as “sugars.” Consumers have had no way to decipher how much sugar is naturally occurring in a food versus how much is added during processing.
Added sugar is especially obscured in foods containing fruit or dairy because both contain naturally occurring sugars (fructose and lactose, respectively). For example, one serving of a popular mixed-berry yogurt has 26 grams (6.5 teaspoons) of sugar. But the amount that occurs naturally in the fruit and milk versus how much is added to make the yogurt taste sweeter is anyone’s guess. Food makers further complicate the problem by referring to added sugar by more than 60 different names, making it less recognizable on ingredient lists. (For sugar’s many aliases, see “61 Names for Sugar“.)
The current nutrition label also gives no indication of how much added sugar you’re getting relative to the recommended daily value — and it’s often significantly more than you think.
The new label will provide much-needed transparency for consumers. “Sugars have been hidden for far too long,” says Marion Nestle, Ph.D., MPH, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning). “For people who read labels, this information is going to come as a big surprise.”
Jacob Teitelbaum, MD, internist, integrative-medicine physician, and coauthor of The Complete Guide to Beating Sugar Addiction agrees: “It was a brilliant move for the FDA to separate out sugars added during processing,” he says. “This gives people the information they need to make common-sense decisions about sugar intake.”

SWEET VICTORY

Added sugar is the processed food industry’s Swiss army knife — it does a little bit of everything. Sugar boosts volume, retains moisture, extends shelf life, and enhances the texture of processed foods. With that kind of utility, it’s not surprising that an estimated 74 percent of packaged foods contain added sugars. And with that kind of market presence, it’s no wonder the new labels are controversial within the sugar industry and unpopular with many processed-food manufacturers.
Indeed, the FDA’s resolution to highlight added sugars can be likened to the agency’s decision a decade ago to flag trans fat on food package labels. “It took at least 10 years to add trans fat,” says Rachel K. Johnson, Ph.D., RD, a professor of nutrition and food sciences at the University of Vermont in Burlington, who served on the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee in 2000. “Added sugars have been in the works even longer. This was a big win.”
Even small label changes are important because the sugar industry has a long history of using smoke and mirrors to sway public perception. A study released in JAMA Internal Medicine in September 2016 reported that starting in 1965, a sugar industry trade group paid to fund studies by Harvard scientists that downplayed sugar’s role in coronary heart disease, and instead blamed saturated fats and cholesterol. (For more on this, see “Sugar-Coated Lies.”)
The subterfuge continued in the 1970s when independent research linked sugar to upticks in obesity and type 2 diabetes. With profits at stake, sugar conglomerates hired a public-relations firm to restore sugar’s image. Doctors and dentists were paid to spread the word among patients and colleagues that sugar was harmless.
The Sugar Association trade group spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bankrolling research guaranteed to cast sugar in a positive light, including a white paper that deemed sugar “harmless when eaten in reasonable amounts.” It purchased ads in newspapers and magazines touting sugar as a healthy nutrient and a way to manage weight. The illusion paid off: By the 1980s, the public’s trust in sugar was restored.
For the next two decades, the Sugar Association so effectively convinced health organizations that sugar was harmless that researchers looking to study its ill effects couldn’t find funding. The industry’s refrain was that saturated fats and excess calories, not sugar, were responsible for the rise in diet-related chronic conditions. It maintained that “a calorie is just a calorie,” and if consumers gained weight, it was because they were eating too many calories — not too much sugar.
The overall calorie theory has many detractors, including Richard Johnson, MD, chief of the Division of Renal Diseases and Hypertension at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. In his studies on lab animals, Johnson found that fructose stimulates weight gain primarily by altering the appetite, which leads to increased food intake.
When he fed groups of mice or rats a sugar-based diet or a starch-based diet with the same number of calories, there was no difference in weight gain. The lab animals that received a sugar-based diet, however, developed many features of metabolic syndrome, including high blood pressure, insulin resistance, elevated triglycerides, and fatty liver.
To take a closer look, he restricted the number of calories in the rats’ high-sugar and high-starch diets. The sugar-eating rodents still went on to develop fatty liver and type 2 diabetes, while the starch-fed animals did not.
The results proved that all calories are not created equal. “Our studies show that sugar had an independent effect on fatty liver and diabetes when caloric intake is equal,” Johnson says. (See “How Sugar Makes You Sick,” below.)
Yet, it wasn’t until 2014, when scientists definitively linked excessive sugar consumption to heart disease in humans, that the FDA lumbered into action. The catalyst was a JAMA Internal Medicine article reporting the results of a study in which people who ate the most added sugar (more than 21 percent of daily calories — more than twice the recommended amount) were twice as likely to die from heart disease than people who ate the least, about 10 percent or less of daily calories.
It was a matter of time before the accumulation of evidence tipped the scales, says Laura Schmidt, Ph.D., MSW, MPH, professor of health policy at the University of California, San Francisco.
“Now we know that too much sugar doesn’t just make us fat; it makes us sick,” says Schmidt.

GET YOUR FACTS

The new FDA label requirements will give consumers more information.

LABEL EXPOSÉ

Will the new labels offer a completely transparent view of added-sugar content? “Only time will tell how food makers will try to subvert the new labels,” says Teitelbaum.
Experts predict one loophole will lie in the use of concentrated fruit juice as a sweetener. Requirements do limit the amount of concentrated juice — which contains significantly more sugars than the same volume of unconcentrated juice — that manufacturers can use without being labeled as “added sugar.” But a certain amount of that added sugar will remain hidden.
Still, it’s important to celebrate a victory before girding for the next battle. Added sugars will be on the nutrition labels of some 700,000 packaged foods sold in the United States within the next two years. Big food makers (those with more than $10 million in annual sales) must comply by July 26, 2018; smaller companies have an extra year to get on board.
Nutrition and public health experts believe that calling out added sugars on nutrition labels will put pressure on the industry to reformulate products, much in the way that labeling trans fat did 10 years ago.
“It is already happening,” says Nestle. “That kind of change is reason enough to have this kind of labeling.”
This article originally appeared as “Sweet News” in the January/February 2017 issue of Experience Life.
Catherine Guthrie is an Experience Life contributing editor.

Monday, March 20, 2017

Hello
Just for the fun of it, I thought I'd share some interesting facts about common foods I ran across. Lots of surprises. Healthy eating and...Happy Spring!!


True Food Facts
Did you know?
- A strawberry isn’t a berry but a banana is.
- Avocados and watermelon are berries, too.
- Cashews grow on trees like this and the part that is not the nut is called the Cashew Apple.
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-11/3/12/asset/buzzfeed-prod-fastlane01/sub-buzz-3474-1478190962-1.jpg
- That brussels sprouts grow in long stalks like this:
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-11/1/3/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web04/sub-buzz-30628-1477986361-1.jpg
- Ketchup used to be sold as medicine.
- Carrots were originally purple.
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- McDonald’s sells 75 hamburgers every second of every day.
- Yams and sweet potatoes are not the same thing.
- Ripe cranberries will bounce like rubber balls.
- An average ear of corn has an even number of rows, usually 16.
- Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas.
- Honey never spoils or molds. You can eat 32,000-year-old honey.
- Peanuts are not nuts. They grow in the ground like this, so they are legumes.
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-11/1/3/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web08/sub-buzz-28991-1477985374-1.jpg
- Coconuts kill more people than sharks every year. So do cows.
- Pound cake got its name from its original recipe, which called for a pound each of butter, eggs, sugar, and flour.
- Honey is made from nectar and bee vomit.
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-11/1/3/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web15/sub-buzz-32649-1477985312-1.jpg?resize=625:410
- Pineapples grow like this.
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-11/1/3/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web07/sub-buzz-12086-1477985130-1.jpg?resize=625:357
- Kiwis grow on vines.
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-11/1/3/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web01/sub-buzz-846-1477986317-1.jpg
- Ginger is the root of a plant.
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-11/1/3/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web09/sub-buzz-3853-1477986333-1.jpg
- Cinnamon is the inner part of this tree.
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-11/1/3/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web01/sub-buzz-1356-1477986401-1.jpg
- And artichokes are flowers that are eaten as buds. This is what they look like when flowered:
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-11/1/3/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web12/sub-buzz-3757-1477986265-1.jpg
- Apples, like pears and plums, belong to the rose family.
- The official state VEGETABLE of Oklahoma is the watermelon.
Peas are one the most popular pizza toppings in Brazil!
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- There are over 7,500 varieties of apples throughout the world, and it would take you 20 years to try them all if you had one each day.
- The twists in pretzels are made to look like arms crossed in prayer. Awe ;)
- Canola oil was originally called rapeseed oil, but renamed by the Canadian oil industry in 1978 to avoid negative connotations. “Canola” is short for “Canadian oil.”
- Finally, did you know no matter what color Fruit Loop you eat, they all taste the same.
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