Contributor's Corner

New ideas and thoughts from some of our very favorite health and wellness experts.

Monthly Archives: June 2011

3 Tips for Yoga Newbies

By guestblogger / June 28, 2011

by Jason Wachob

Whether you read about Shiva Rea’s inspirational yoga journey on the cover of Experience Life’s Jan/Feb 2011 issue, or you saw Jennifer Aniston credit yoga for her “Decade of Hotness” award that Spike TV awarded her (yes, this is true), there’s no denying that more and more people are embracing yoga.

Yoga’s great for toning your body, healing injuries, winding down, and overcoming stress. If you’re thinking about walking into your first yoga class, here’s what you need to know.

1. Anyone can do yoga. If you can breathe, you can do yoga. It doesn’t matter if you’re nine years old or 90-years old (my grandmother started when she was 90!), as long as you can move and you can breathe, then you can practice yoga. This is one of the great things about yoga — you can start wherever you are, and go at whatever pace you want, and there’s no one-size fits all practice. As yogi Seane Corn says, “Yoga is about becoming together and becoming whole” — and this all starts with the breath! So if you can breathe, you qualify!

2. Check out the poses. If you decide that you want to go to your first class, it’s a good idea to check out a yoga poses for beginners library so you can become somewhat familiar with the many different poses. This way you won’t find yourself continually looking at the person in front of you or next to you as you move through class. You might find yourself doing this anyway (which is more than fine), but becoming more familiar with the poses will make you feel more comfortable.

3. Find what styles and teachers are a fit for you. There are many different styles of yoga — in some you’ll move more and in others you’ll hold poses for a longer period of time. It’s pretty safe to say, though, that there’s a style (and a teacher) that will be just right for you. It may mean taking a number of classes from different instructors at different studios, but sooner or later you’ll find the right teacher and the right style. When you find it, you’ll know. When you’re researching studios in your area makes sure to ask which teachers and classes are beginner-friendly.

So if you’re sitting on the yoga “fence,” realize that anyone can do yoga – all you need to do is be able to breath and move. Once you’ve made the decision to give yoga a try get familiar with the poses, shop around for styles and teachers, and take your practice wherever you want to go!

Jason Wachob is one of the founders of MindBodyGreen.

10 Ways Your Food Can Bring Out the Best in Your Genes

By guestblogger /

by Frank Lipman, MD

Most of us believe that age related diseases like high blood pressure, heart disease, arthritis, adult onset diabetes, stroke, cancer, etc are the inevitable consequences of aging, but we are now finding out that this is not necessarily true. We actually have a lot more control over how we age than you might think. Healthy aging is mainly the result of how we “communicate” with our genes — through our diet, our lifestyle and the environment we bathe them in.

Healthy habits nurture healthy genes.
When most of us think of genes, we think of the ones that determine particular characteristics such as whether we have brown hair, blue eyes or long legs, or those that predict specific childhood diseases. These genes are “fixed”, but are only few in number. By far the vast majority are the thousands of genes that direct all of our biochemical processes and that render us susceptible to the many chronic diseases so many people are experiencing today. While we are each born with a set of genes — a baseline set of conditions which we can’t change — we can change how they are expressed.

This means that most genes in and of themselves do not create disease. Rather, the likelihood of developing disease and disability is determined by the way we live our lives and by the choices we make. You may have the genes for and be susceptible to heart disease or diabetes or arthritis, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you will get those diseases. In other words, these genes do not cause disease per se unless they are thrust into a detrimental environment, one conducive to expressing these genes as chronic disease.

There are multiple factors in your diet, environment and lifestyle that affect your genes and how you age. Many of these are within your control. Of all the factors, diet is the easiest to control and probably the most important determinant of how our genes are expressed.

A revolutionary new science, Nutrigenomics, is showing how different foods may interact with specific genes, how food “talks” to our genes and how our genes express themselves after the conversation. It is confirming that food provides potent dietary signals that directly influence the metabolic programming of our cells and modify the risk of common chronic diseases. It is telling us that food is information, that it contains “instructions” which are communicated directly to our genes.

Armed with this information, your genes commandeer various metabolic actions and affect millions of critical biological processes, including cholesterol levels, aging, hormone regulation, weight gain and loss, and much more. Eat the right foods and they will send instructions to your genes for good health. Eating the wrong foods however, sends messages for disease.

What we are finding out is that there is so much more to food than just the nutrients we have discovered thus far. Real food is packed with thousands of compounds which have a complex and dynamic relationship with one another and your genes. With processed foods however, these micronutrients have either been altered or are missing, and therefore they can never deliver the same beneficial messages to your genes. Just as a computer program won’t function well when it gets fed bad data, neither will your body. Once you understand that food is “data” or complex information that the body uses to direct the multifaceted actions that keep us vibrantly alive, it’s easy to understand that loading up on junk food is like taking the fast lane to a giant system failure.

Foods loaded with sugar, trans fats and chemicals, and foods processed beyond recognition, are simply “bad data” for human consumption. I call these “food-like substances” because they are not real food. If you eat these regularly, your body stops working properly.

It makes perfect sense, when you think about it. When you bathe your genes in an unhealthy environment, like the one created when you eat junk food, your genes “miscue” metabolic actions that can trigger disease. For example your body responds to “food-like substances” as if they are “foreign bodies”. This prompts an inflammatory response as your body tries to protect itself. Over time, continued consumption can lead to the development of a low grade chronic inflammatory condition which is now becoming recognized as an important precursor to a variety of more serious forms of illness.

Bottom line: the food you eat affects the functioning of your genes.
Here are 10 ways to improve the “conversation:”

1) Eat real food ie fresh, whole, unrefined and unprocessed food. Food is more than a delivery system for nutrients containing protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. Real food is more than the sum of its parts, it’s about how it all works together, about the integrity of the information or the total message. Although you should know how to read food labels, most real food does not come with a label …vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, grass fed meats, wild fish, organic chicken and eggs etc.

2) Although there is no one right diet for everyone (as we are all different), try to eat as close to nature as possible because the further removed food is from its source the less good data it will contain, and the more likely it is of being a “food-like substance” and not real food.

3) Select fruits and vegetables in a wide variety of colors. For a list of fruits and vegetables with the most and least pesticides, check out www.foodnews.org.

4) Buy fresh foods whenever you can, preferably organic and locally grown if possible. Fresh foods are better than frozen foods, which are better than canned foods.

5) Stop eating when you are 80% full.

6) Be skeptical of foods that come individually labeled with a health claim. Most healthy foods don’t need a health claim. Have you ever seen a health claim on a bunch of broccoli or on a box of blueberries?

7) Be wary of foods you’ve seen advertised as the vast majority of these are processed foods.

8) Be careful of obsessive calorie counting. Figuring your diet simply in terms of calories or even percentages of protein, fat and carbohydrate, can inadvertently deprive your body of the “complete” messages that real, whole foods provide.

9) Enjoy your food, preferably in the company of people you love.

10) Don’t waste your time feeling guilty if you ate the “wrong” thing.
I think Michael Pollan summarizes it really well in his brilliant book, In Defense of Food: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He too is talking about real food.

Frank Lipman MD is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of Integrative and Functional Medicine.

The Dangers of the Medical Industrial Complex

By guestblogger /

by Mark Hyman, MD

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.

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.

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.

1. Follow the money. Look carefully at who funded the study. Be suspicious if it was funded by drug companies.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

To your good health,
Mark Hyman, MD

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.

Mark Hyman, MD is family physician, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, and an international leader in his field.

Reposted from http://drhyman.com/the-dangers-of-the-medical-industrial-complex-3260/

Intentionally Create What Matters Most

By guestblogger /

by Maryanne O’Brien

It’s easy to get caught up in the flow of life and simply drift along without a clear destination. Daily demands sweep us away and before we know it weeks disappear, and months fly by. The accelerating pace of life keeps you so busy that if you’re not careful you can end up sacrificing what matters most – your health, your relationships and your happiness.

This is why it’s so important to have a reflection practice where you regularly check in on your life. You listen to what your heart has to say about the way you live, work and play. You listen to your inner knowing. You slow down, tune in and look for the wisdom that awaits you.

When you intentionally create your life and connect to your heart, you are able to tap into your real power, passion and purpose. You begin to feel excited, inspired and energized by your life again. You happily and fully engage in your life – stretching, growing and transforming. You feel alive!

Setting goals is how you ensure you stay connected to what matters most. Goals direct your mental, physical, emotional and spiritual energy. They help you to strengthen your self-awareness, live mindfully and stay inspired. They keep you focused, so you stay on track.

Setting intentional goals helps you get really clear about what you want. You look at what you value and identify what matters to you. Then, you decide where you want to advance and you do something about it.

Since it takes energy to achieve you’re goals, it’s very important that you also check in on your motivation, belief and commitment. A few basic questions will quickly surface key insights about your goals. You’ll see if it comes from a desire to grow or if it’s rooted in fear. You’ll see where things are likely to be easy. And where you’ll hit resistance.
Run each goal through this series of questions and see what comes to light-

• Why do you want it?
• Why do you believe you can achieve it?
• What are you willing to do to create it?

The Live Dynamite Intentional Creation exercise guides you through the thought process, gives you an example and provides workspace for your reflections.
Make the time this week to identify what you want to create in your life. Set one goal that excites you and take action every day to advance. Experience how much fun it is to intentionally create your life.

Get good at living™!
Maryanne
Maryanne O’Brien is the founder of Live Dynamite, a life skills program that inspires, empowers and supports people to consciously create the life they want.

Contributor's Corner

Monthly Archives: June 2011

3 Tips for Yoga Newbies

Trackbacks

10 Ways Your Food Can Bring Out the Best in Your Genes

Trackbacks

The Dangers of the Medical Industrial Complex

Trackbacks

Intentionally Create What Matters Most

Trackbacks

SEARCH

Subscribe by Email

Recent Posts

RECENT COMMENTS

CATEGORIES

MONTHLY ARCHIVES