Category: Health Tips

Does that mean many doctors are living in the past?
Or that they are not doctors but drug pushers?

Seems most of the world could do a lot worse than emulate the eating habits of our northern neighbours!

The Situation – Most people today do not maintain optimal health and die 20-80 years earlier than they need to.

The Cause – We are not educated on the 12 Pillars of Optimal Health so do not work on maintaining them.

The Remedy – Enlighten people on what it takes to operate a body in optimum condition and make it easier for them to do so by providing solutions to their challenges.

The 4 Pillars of Optimal Diet Summarised
If I were to distill the last four years of nutritional research into four words, those would be Diversity, Density, Purity and Restriction.

I believe you should target improvement in your diet by focusing on them in that order.
The reason I say that is that by far the majority today are malnourished – they are not taking in the variety, quality or quantity of nutrients their body needs to maintain optimal health. And they are taking in too many toxins and too many empty calories. As a result they lack energy, get sick and die earlier than necessary.

Part of the reason for this is because society focuses on calories and not nutrients.
Calories measure energy, not nutrition. One calorie is the amount of energy that it takes to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. Water does not need nutrition to be heated! A body needs calories for energy and nutrients to maintain optimal health. You can get calories without nutrients but you can’t get nutrients without calories. So on which whould you focus? That’s right! Nutrients!
There are hundreds and hundreds of different nutrients. They don’t just number the dozen odd vitamins and 70 odd minerals. If most of us have difficulty tracking calories then there are way too many different nutrients for you and I to track daily. That’s why people promote counting calories. It is nutritional folly, but it is easy to communicate. As a society we are off-track by focusing on calories over nutrition.

Nutritional Diversity
Your body is not simple. It is extremely complex. As an example, your pancreas produces enzymes for digestion as well as 5,000 other chemical reactions in the body! To properly nourish it and keep it well, your nutrition needs to be as diverse as your body is complex!

Feed your body too narrow a range of foods and you will miss out on essentiual nutrients.

Comparative example: The ancient Aztecs cultivated 229 different crops. Today, 66% of Americans get two thirds of their calories from 4 – wheat, rice, corn and soy and their derivatives!

I believe this lack of nutritional diversity is part of the reason for the modern epidemic in degenerative disease.

Researchers recently tested 150 exhumed Egyptian mummies for cancer. Only 1 tested positive. Today, more than a third of people will die from cancer.

My research points to a wider range of nutrients as being essential to optimal health.
Practice Nutritional Diversity – eat a wider variety of foods!

Nutritional Density
One of my theories is that a big part of the weight gain most people experience is due to their body receiving too little nutrition from the calories they consume.

Nutrient densiity comes from foods with nutrient\calorie parity – where the calories are nutrient dense. Most processed food is empty calories – the calories are majorly devoid of nutrients. On a normal diet you get some energy from the calories but too few nutrients. If you eat only enough to maintain your weight, you are malnourished because the calories do not contain all the nutrients the body requires.

So, feeling the lack of nutrients, the body says, “I didn’t get what I need, feed me some more!” and you are dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t! If you don’t eat more you do not nourish the body adequately. If you eat more, you stack on the weight. Well, even if you eat more of the same you still don’t get the nourishement the body needs.

Cooking food destroys enzymes and some vitamins so raw food is more nutrient dense. Some food needs to be cooked but most people eat way too big a percentage of their diet cooked. Eat more raw food.

In order to attain and maintain optiomal health and weight, a body needs most calories from nutrient dense foods.

Practice Nutrient Parity – eat nutrient dense foods!

Purity From Toxins

There is a strong link between environmental toxins and cancer. Good health does not live in a toxic waste dump.

Major food companies employ food chemists to design and add chemicals to your food to increase your desire to eat more. There is a reason these chemicals are called excitotoxins! They are toxins that excite your appetite!

The liver is responsible for processing toxins out of your blood and processing fats. If you are suffering from toxic overload, do you think your liver will focus on vital toxin removal or fat processing?

Practice Food Purity – get rid of artificial flavours, colours, preservatives and other additives from your foods!

Calorie Restriction

Calorie restriction is a proven strategy to extend healthy and maximum life span. Some animal studies have shown up to a 40% increase in maximum life span by restricting calorie intake.

Calorie restriction also provides a greatly lowered risk for most degenerative conditions of aging, and improved measures of general health.

Practice Calorie Restriction to live healthier and longer!

I have heard it said that if you can make money doing what you love doing, you will never work a day in your life.

Getting a Yes or No from a psychiatrist?
There is something about getting a “yes” or “No” from a Psychiatrist on such a simple question. Watch this video and be prepared to hear the shocking truth. Share this and you will save people you care about from the most dangerous drug pushers, the ones that hide in plain sight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=3PGsds_A56E

High blood pressure is primarily related to your body producing too much insulin. Over 85 percent of those with hypertension can normalize their blood pressure through simple lifestyle modifications, such as avoiding sugars and grains, exercising regularly, optimizing your vitamin D levels, and getting sufficient amounts of animal-based omega-3 fats such as krill oil. From Dr Mercola

Rutin flavonoids prevent blood clots by inhibiting platelet aggregation
Researchers identified quercetin-3-rutinoside (rutin), a bioflavonoid that is naturally found in many fruits, vegetables and teas including onions, apples, and citrus fruits. The scientists noted that “Rutin proved to be the most potently anti-thrombotic compound that we ever tested”, as the flavonoid was shown to inhibit both platelet accumulation and fibrin generation during thrombus formation. Three to five daily servings of rutin from dietary sources or supplementing with 500 mg per day is shown to reduce platelet stickiness leading to blood clots and risk of early death from stroke and heart attack. http://www.naturalnews.com/036070_rutin_flavonoids_blood_clots.html

In recent weeks my description of the possible scale of the Vioxx Disaster has begun getting a little coverage on the web and in the British press, leading to some strong “push back” by people who say I can’t possibly be right. They may certainly be correct in their opinion, but I think their reasoning is mistaken, so I thought I’d briefly summarize the analysis once more, emphasizing again that the evidence is purely circumstantial… …It seems to me that a Vioxx-induced premature American death toll which was well into the hundreds of thousands is the most parsimonious explanation of these surprising mortality statistics.

(*) In 1999, Vioxx was marketed to the American people by Merck as a particularly effective anti-pain medication with minimal side-effects, a sort of super-aspirin substitute targeted at arthritis sufferers in the over-65 category. Backed by an eventual half-billion dollars of advertising, it soon became one of the most widely popular—and lucrative—drugs in this country and the world, with some twenty-five million total American prescriptions. As a consequence, it also became one of Merck’s most important revenue sources.

(*) In 2004, a detailed published FDA study proved that Vioxx had deadly consequences in its patients, greatly increasing the risk of sudden cardiovascular death, and had probably killed at least 30,000-60,000 Americans since its introduction. Learning of the pending publication of this study, Merck immediately pulled the drug from the market. The media later discovered that Merck had apparently been aware of these huge cardiovascular health risks from the very beginning, but had decided to ignore them, presumably because the drug was so lucrative. Merck eventually paid some $8 billion dollars in total government fines, legal expenses, and damages for Vioxx-related deaths.

(*) As it happened, the 2004 American death rate unexpectedly dropped by 50,000, the greatest such national decline in sixty years, a decline whose cause completely mystified American health authorities, who searched in vain for some possible logical explanation. This decline was almost entirely due to fewer deaths in 65+ age range, mostly due to a large drop in cardiovascular fatalities.

(*) Interestingly enough, an examination of the American mortality data freely available on the government CDC website reveals a corresponding rise in deaths for Americans 65+ which had previously occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced. This 1999 mortality rise was the largest in the past fifteen years, and—perhaps coincidentally—a sharp shift in the rate of cardiovascular deaths had once again been the leading factor.

It is completely impossible for me to say whether or not the recall of a an extremely popular but deadly drug proven to cause cardiovascular deaths among its 65+ target population had any direct connection to the huge drop in cardiovascular deaths among Americans 65+ during that same year. Similarly, the earlier sharp rise in 65+ cardiovascular deaths the year the drug had been introduced may or may not be purely coincidental. But one would think these intriguing facts might arouse a bit of curiosity within American media and government circles.

Based on these items, I have advanced a speculative hypothesis suggesting a much higher Vioxx death-toll than is currently accepted. One of the main arguments which various critics have made against my hypothesis is that although the American 65+ death rate did undergo rather surprising upward and downward shifts during 1999 and 2004, the years that Vioxx was introduced and then removed, the behavior of the death rate during the intervening years was far less remarkable. A few people have argued that the widespread use of a deadly drug during 2000-2003 would surely have caused large, continuing changes in the mortality figures, and their absence tends to completely eliminate the possibility.

Unfortunately, this reasoning is incorrect, and confuses an impact upon total longevity with an impact upon mortality rates. This can easily be understood if we consider an extreme thought-experiment.

Suppose, for example, that the government required everyone aged 65 and above to immediately take cyanide tablets, and established this as a permanent policy going forward, with mandatory cyanide doses being a fixture of every 65th year birthday party.

Obviously, this would lead to many premature American deaths and a very substantial change in American lifespans. Indeed, since our current life-expectancy is around 78, the vast majority of Americans henceforth would be killed by government cyanide, instead of dying naturally. Over the next hundred years, the overwhelming majority of all deaths would be from cyanide, and the total cyanide death-toll in America might approach the half billion mark. Clearly, cyanide would become a very major negative health factor in American society.

However, the actual impact upon the annual American death-rate would be small or perhaps even favorable during nearly the entire period in question, a totally astonishing result. This seeming paradox follows from the fact that everyone eventually dies of something, and therefore there would automatically be huge drops in cancer, heart attack, strokes, and car accident fatalities which would almost exactly balance out the rise in cyanide deaths.

Consider, for example, the American population one hundred years from now and compare it with a non-cyanide scenario. In the former case, there would be no one aged 65+, with that portion of the population having succumbed to cyanide; but those would be the *only* differences in total net-fatalities compared to the base-case Every other American death would have been the same under the two scenarios, though certainly with different timing. And if we average that small slice of additional deaths over the one hundred years in question, the average annual impact is fairly small.

Obviously, the first year of a mandatory-cyanide scenario would see a huge die-off of all those 65+. But mortality rates after that would generally be pretty ordinary, perhaps even sometimes *lower* than under the normal situation, depending upon the shape of the evolving age-distribution curve. Indeed, it is quite possible that people just looking at the mortality rates for the ninety-nine following years and comparing these with current projections might notice they were somewhat reduced, and wrongly conclude that mandatory cyanide might have significant beneficial properties, since it seemed to cut mortality rates. This rather counter-intuitive result might be termed “The Mortality Rate Paradox.”

However, if at any point, the mandatory-cyanide policy were discontinued, that particular year would see a remarkable *drop* in the annual death rate, followed by smaller changes in subsequent years, until eventually a new age-mortality equilibrium was established. Thus, the only significant signals of a mandatory cyanide policy found in the annual mortality rates would come at the beginning and at the end of the policy.

Obviously, Vioxx did not remotely have the lethality of cyanide, nor was its use universal among the elderly. Moreover, any Vioxx-related mortality shifts were substantially masked by much larger directional mortality trends due to the aging of the population, improvements in life-saving and other medical technology, and all sorts of other factors. Distinguishing signal from noise is not as trivial as examining the slope of a curve.

But it does seem a bit intriguing that the mortality-curve for Americans 65+ followed a very similar trajectory to that of the extreme thought-experiment: a sharp rise in the year of introduction, a few years of relative stability, and then a very sharp drop in the year of recall.

Most of the Vioxx defenders put the total six-year death toll perhaps around 33,000, or roughly 6,000 additional deaths per year. But the actual shifts we find at the crucial starting and stopping points are far higher than this. For example, elderly deaths actually rose 35,000 in the year Vioxx was introduced, a figure several times larger than the average for the preceding few years, and dropped by 67,000 in the year it was withdrawn, which was similarly anomalous and remarkable, many times higher than the recent average change. Both these mortality shifts were heavily driven by the cardiovascular category.

It seems to me that a Vioxx-induced premature American death toll which was well into the hundreds of thousands is the most parsimonious explanation of these surprising mortality statistics.

Ron Unz can be reached at his website.

Vioxx and the Mortality Paradox