All this is good advice, but there is really only one thing you have to do to improve the chances that you will live longer: Look further down the road.

Looking Further

You spend your days making decisions. You decide to get out of bed, what to eat for breakfast, what clothes you are gong to wear during the day… Many of these decisions are automatic such as brushing your teeth, wearing a seatbelt, scratching your head. And each of those decisions , no matter how minor,  has an impact on your life. Some have a small impact on your life. Other decisions have more impact such as: should you move? should you marry? should you take that job?

The most important decisions you make, though, are the ones that appear to have little impact on your life when taken as a one-time event, but when repeated over a whole lifetime, have a huge impact.

Take a look:

• One cigarette means nothing to your health, but a pack of cigarettes a day for years equal cancer.
• One soda is a tasty treat, three sodas a day means a bigger chance for being overweight and having diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease…
• Driving in a car is the easy way to get to the store, walking instead of driving every day means you live longer.
• You may be too busy to call a friend back, but having good friends means you are more likely to live a longer and fuller life.
• You can’t find the time to exercise today, but exercises over a lifetime gives you energy, better sleep and can forestall diseases such as dementia, heart disease, diabetes and more.

There are more of these you can probably think of, consider adding yours to the comment section below!

Our Brains

Here is the problem: our brains are not set up to look further down the road. Are brains are set up to notice sudden and dramatic threats and adjust to them. If people took a puff from a cigarette and fell down dead, then we would avoid them. But since they kill us slowly, we seem to hardly notice the destruction because it is so slow. The same is true of sugar and other poor foods that we eat. The same is true about deciding to exercise, or take time with friends or the hundred of other healthy things we could be doing.

Humans are unique, though, in the fact that they can see further down the road, they can look at their futures.

Here is what you should commit to in order to increase your odds of staying on the earth longer:

• Eat better: I suggest Eating Below the Glycemic Index you can also try my 30 Sugar Free Days as a way to kick start a healthy eating plan.
• Exercise: Move your body around every day, sweat a little.
• Make Connections: Connect to friends, family and other social groups.
• Laugh: If you are not enjoying life, what is the point?

Take the time to develop habits that empower you and lean you towards better health, the payback is well worth the effort.

Her latest book, The Calcium Lie: What Your Doctor Doesn’t Know Could Kill You covers the many problems that calcium creates.

Startling new statistics on diabetes released by the National Institutes of Health this week show that the rates of diabetes and impaired blood sugar in American are increasing at alarming levels.

Nearly 13% of American aged 20 and over have diabetes, but 40% of them don’t know it. This puts them at high risk for the tragic side effects of diabetes, including heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, blindness, impaired circulation that can lead to amputations and more.

If that’s not gloomy enough for you, consider this: From 1995 to 1997, there were 4.8 new cases of Type 2 diabetes per 1,000 Americans. Ten years later, that rate had increased by 89% to 9.1 new cases per 1,000 Americans.

Worse yet, 36% of men and 23% of women and 16% of teenagers have “pre-diabetes,” says the NIH.

The term “pre-diabetes” is a con. It means that you have impaired blood glucose function and without drastic measures, you will soon have diabetes and all of its ugly companion diseases. It lulls too many patients into complacency.

It’s even more frightening when you consider the number of teenagers who are being diagnosed with diabetes or more benign-sounding “pre-diabetes.” The disease now known as Type 2 diabetes was once known as adult onset diabetes.

Diabetes was once the province of senior citizens. The dread companion diseases are more-or less accepted turf there. But there is something inherently wrong when we think of obese teenagers with arterial blockages, having heart attacks at 30 and bypasses at 35, if they survive that long. Just think about where these poor kids will be when they’re 40.

These statistics aren’t just numbers, folks. They are our mothers, father, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives and, sadly, our children. They are real people and this illness takes a toll on everyone around someone with diabetes.

This a tragedy of national proportions. Diabetes is a terrible disease. There are no two ways about it. Once you’re diagnosed, the changes of reversing diabetes are diminished. The chances of controlling it are better. But the best bet is prevention.

How can you prevent diabetes?

1. Stay away from sugar and foods with hidden sugar: This is a good start, but it’s not the entire answer.
2. Control your weight: Most of us know that obesity is a factor in almost all cases of Type 2 diabetes. Studies also show that just losing 10% of your body weight can dramatically lower blood sugars.
3. Exercise is another key factor in diabetes management and prevention., not only for the obvious reasons. Muscle activity actually helps your body to better use the insulin that your pancreas is producing.
4. Know your mineral status and correct mineral imbalances to help prevent a downward spiral of metabolic problems that lead to diabetes and a host of other health problems, according to Robert Thompson, M.D., with whom I wrote The Calcium Lie: What Your Doctor Doesn’t Know Could Kill You (InTruth Press, 2008). Learn your mineral status by getting a hair tissue mineral analysis and following the recommendations tailored to your specific needs.

Finally, do what ever it takes to fend off the diabetes monster. It is one of the most terrible diseases we face and one of the most preventable. It’s up to you.

–Kathleen Barnes

http://www.kathleenbarnes.com

Twitter: @KathleenSBarnes

The reason why the history of health is interesting is that what people worry about has changed over time. Ask someone 200 years ago what health concerns they have and you would hear them say that they fear some sort of accident or infection. The reason why they feared accidents and infections is because most people died from infections or injuries 200 years ago.

What is remarkable when you ask that same question of people today is that, while infection is a worry for us to, it is a small concern compared to our fear of cancer or heart disease or a dementia like Alzheimer’s. This dramatic shift in our health concerns has happened in the last 100 years and I’m not sure most people are aware of it or what it means about where you turn for health care or how it should change the choices you make every day.

The Nobel Battle

For most of human history, the battle for health has been a battle over infection and sudden illness. This is a battle that modern medicine has waged well and has, for the most part, won. The introduction of wonder drugs like antibiotics, steroids, anti-inflammatories and more were a boon to our health and longevity. While there is a great debate about just how much these drugs have done for our health and longevity, it is pretty clear that the wonder drugs did play a role in the improvement of our health. Yes, improved sanitation and food handling have reduced infectious disease, but the drugs, too, have played an important role.

Combine the change in sanitation, the introduction of emergency medicine to deal with accidents, and powerful drugs and you change the average life expectancy from around 40 or 50 years old 100 years ago to around 78 today. Quite an accomplishment.

Out goes the era of infections and sudden diseases and in comes the modern age with new health challenges.

Enter the Era of Slow Diseases

Slow diseases are completely different from sudden diseases like infection and accidents. No longer are we terrified about getting the plague or other infectious disease, we are now mostly concerned about cancer, diabetes, heart disease. These new fears reflect the reality. Yes, there is AIDS, bird flu and other infectious diseases, but your risk of dying from one of those infectious diseases is small compared to the risk that you are going to die from a disease that slowly creeps up on you.

You currently have a 1 in 5 risk of dying from heart disease and about a one in seven chance of dying form cancer.

But these slow diseases are fundamentally different from the diseases of previous generations and require you to think and act differently.

To understand why you have to think differently, you have to remember the frog in the pot of boiling water. Many people have heard about the story of the frog in the hot water: If you put a frog in some very hot water, it will jump right out, but if you put him in cold water and slowly bring it to a boil he will die. The diseases we face are exactly like the slowly boiling water: they are slow that it is not apparent that we are in danger until it is too late.

Confusing the Role of Medicine

I  think the biggest problem people have when they have a slow disease is confusing the role of medicine and drug therapy. If you have an sudden injury, acute infection, then standard medicine is the way go. But when you have a slow disease, your approach has to be different. Yes, you can go to traditional medicine if you have something like arthritis, and they can help your pain go away, but the medicines they are giving you do nothing to address the underlying cause of the disease. You may feel better, but that feeling is not going to last, as the drugs either have side-effects that are worse than the disease, or they stop being effective.

Slow diseases require a different approach and a different attitude on your part. I’m sorry to say this to you if you don’t know it, but medicine is never going to find a cure for cancer, or multiple sclerosis, or diabetes, or heart disease or hundred of other slow-developing diseases. I know you want to believe that medicine will cure everything (and I would like to too) but these diseases do not lend themselves to being cured by a pill. The body is just too complex and the drug solution not helpful enough.

I’m not alone is saying this, even the American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society would agree: you can prevent up to 70 percent of these diseases by changing your diet and your habits.

Change Your Approach

Since the chances you are going to be faced with a slow disease are much higher than an acute or sudden disease, you have to change your approach to health care. Your health is in your hands. The small little things you do every day are important. Taking the stairs instead of an elevator, choosing to avoid soda and sugars, getting enough sleep, maintaining a regular health regime… all these are important.

You cannot wait for medicine to cure the diseases you will have in the future; that help will never come. You have to pay attention to the temperature of the water around you and jump out of the pot before it starts boiling instead of waiting until tomorrow to start changing. There is no more powerful thing that you can do then to change your habits and improve your health.

Health News:

HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY (HRT): HRT and the risks of breast cancer were reviewed in a recent symposium. It appears that even using HRT for a short time increased the risk of breast cancer. Which begs the question: why use HRT? The risks are not a small increase, but for some women constitute a doubling of their risk for breast cancer.

Dr. Scott’s Comments: Hormones are powerful and can create huge problems in our bodies. Estrogen, in particular, is a problem for women because of the risk of breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancers. Part of the problem lies in the fact that most HRT are synthetic hormones that are not natural to humans. Other problems have to do with the fact that many chemicals in our environment act like estrogens (including plastics, pesticides, and a host of other chemicals). The final question has to be should we be putting hormones in an aging person at all?

HRT is a travesty because there are many natural substitutes that work just as well, without the side effects.

original article

CANCER MUCH WORSE FOR DIABETICS: Cancer is currently the number two killer worldwide and is rapidly approaching number one. People with diabetes are more than 40 percent likely to die in the years right after a cancer diagnosis than people who are not diabetic.

Dr Scott’s Comments: There are no well-established links between sugar consumption and cancer — at least not yet. This new study sheds light on another horrible aspect of diabetes: it makes surviving a cancer diagnosis harder. For me, this adds to the destruction wrought by sugar. Not only is sugar toxic to our blood vessels (witness the kidney, eye and heart damage in diabetics), but it also leads to obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Clearly we have to start avoiding the sugar and foods that act like sugar in our diets.

original article

LOW GLYCEMIC DIET FOR DIABETICS: The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association has published an article showing that diabetics eating foods that are low on the glycemic index had better sugar control than those that didn’t.

Dr Scott’s Comments: I’m going to borrow a word from my 10 year-old-daughter to describe the finding of this study: DUH! Medical science has come a long way, but they have yet to make any connection between what we eat and the diseases that we get. Maybe this study will change their minds. Yes, diabetes has something to do with the sugar and foods that act like sugar that we eat every day. I think that people eating Eating Below the Glycemic Index would fare even better… maybe even reverse their diabetes.

original article

STRESS INCREASES HEART DAMAGE: People who reported a high amount of stress in their lives increased the risk of a cardiovascular event by as much as 50 percent when compared to people who have a low amount of stress. The increase in disease was evident by the number of heart attacks, bypass surgeries, and strokes that high-stress people suffered from.

Dr. Scott’s Comments: This study shows the strong connection between our minds and our bodies. Stress is a big killer, but is often hard to define or understand. I personally feel the best treatment for stress is exercise. Whenever the world starts weighing too much on my shoulders, I know I have to get out for a run, or hop on my bike, or even just take a walk outside. It also helps to listen to other people’s worries: When you hear someone describe what they are worried about, you realize that many of their fears are ungrounded, maybe yours are too?

original article

So, you can imagine how much fun I am at parties! While I’m not above drinking a glass of wine, I really don’t drink much. I wrote a book on sugar addiction, so I don’t eat sweets. I found out while researching Sugarettes that there are foods that act like sugar, so I really don’t eat grains. I have long stayed away from dairy, so no cheese or eggnog either. I tend to wake up early, I practice yoga and I run, bike and stay in shape. Needless to say, even though my diet and exercise plan is very similar to the way humans are supposed to be living, I’m often the odd person out and my diet becomes the source of conversation.

The conversation always seems to head in a certain direction and ends up sounding something like this:

Other Person: “You don’t eat (insert: sugar, cheese, grains…)? Why not? “

Me: “No I don’t eat (insert: sugar, cheese, grains…). I don’t eat (insert: sugar, cheese, grains…) because I don’t think they are the best foods for humans to eat. “

Other Person: “Oh, I eat everything. I don’t care. You know, you eat well and then you die anyway, might as well have fun.”

I call this the Hit by a Train theory: you live a good life, you avoid bad foods, you are good to other people and then you are hit by a train and you die at a young age. Why bother?

Well, there are actually very good reasons to bother. Let’s start by taking a look at the odds.

What are the Odds?

A quick look at the odds will answer a lot of the question about why you should bother.

Here are the odds for some of the major diseases and accidents:

• Diabetes: 1 in 3
• Heart Disease: 1 in 5
• Cancer: 1 in 7
• Accidents: 1 in 22

Clearly, you are much more likely to get diabetes, heart disease, or cancer than you are to die of an accident. And all of these diseases are preventable by the way you choose to live your life.

How Was Your Trip?

While the above statistics may be enough to convince you, here is another thought to think about. If you have cancer, or diabetes, or heart disease, how enjoyable is your life?

Recent research shows that diabetes cuts 14 years off of your life, but that is not all. When measuring quality of life, that number jumps to 20 years lost.¹ What this means is that people who are diabetic lose their eyesight, their kidneys stop functioning, they have heart attacks, they lose limbs to amputation. In essence, they lose the ability to live their lives the way that they want to, losing the quality of life.

When asked about death, most people claim that they are afraid of it, but they fear something even more: People fear losing control of their bodies, they fear that someone will have to take care of them and change their clothes (and diapers), they fear losing what they enjoy in life. They hate the thought that they are alive, but cannot live: they cannot play golf, or play with their grandkids, or travel, or finish their life’s work.

This is what is lost when people have cancer, heart disease, diabetes or other preventable diseases; the loss of quality.

Make the Most of Your Life

Making the most of your life means taking a longer view on life and not just focusing on the moment. Sure, sugar tastes good, but how long does that sensation last?

Yes, you might be hit by a train not matter what you do, but being healthy means two things. First, it means that you stay healthy enough to live your life the way you want to live it. Second, if you are hit by a train and you happen to survive, then you are more likely to bounce back quicker when you are healthy than when you are not.

Health is an investment. You make little “deposits” every day and it pays off for the rest of your life. Enjoy yourself, but find enough balance to invest in your health also.

1. K. M. Venkat Narayan, James P. Boyle, Theodore J. Thompson. Lifetime Risk for Diabetes Mellitus in the United States. JAMA. 2003;290:1884-1890.

You open a can of soda and pour that sugary drink into your mouth. The sugar travels down your throat and into your stomach; the sugar then has a very short trip from your stomach into your blood stream. As that sugar starts to move its way throughout your body, it eventually makes its way to your brain. You brain is happy with this shot of sugar you just gave it, because, while it only makes up only two percent of the body weight, your brain uses one-half of all the sugar energy in the body.¹ 

But, is there such a thing as too much sugar for your brain? And that soda you just drank, it will cause your blood sugar to skyrocket and eventually drop; what happens to your brain then? And what about other sugar-brains questions: doesn’t sugar make you or your kids hyperactive, and doesn’t sugar change your mood?

The short answer to these all these questions is: we don’t know. Scientific studies on the effects of sugar on the brain are sparse at best and most medical professionals and organizations will say that sugar has nothing to do with mood or hyperactivity. If you are surprised by that stance, you are not alone.

Most parents have witnessed firsthand the effect of sugar on little kid’s brains. Most adults will tell you that they have experienced a sort of mental fog from eating too much sugar, not to mention the sugar high and the sugar crash. But none of these experiences mean anything to researchers who report that there are no such things as sugar highs or lows or that hyperactivity could be caused by too much sugar.

But just because there isn’t much research on how sugar and foods that act like sugar and how they affect mental function, doesn’t mean there isn’t any. This article will piece together the bits of information out there on sugar and brain function to get a better understanding of what sugar is doing to our brains. As usual, I will be including not only sugar, but foods that act like sugar in the discussion.

Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor

Let’s start with a brain chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF is the key to understanding what happens when sugar hits our brain.

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor is responsible for the development of new brain tissue. If you didn’t have this chemical in your brain, your brain wouldn’t develop properly and you would die very soon after birth. The key to BDNF is to understand what it does: it helps to create new neurons (nerve tissue), and, therefore new memories.

You want as much BDNF around as possible if you want to learn, grow, and have normal brain functioning.

Research has shown that high sugar diets (along with high fat diets and lack of essential fatty acids) decrease a BDNF.² In fact, the relationship between BDNF and sugar gets even more interesting: low amounts of BDNF actually leads to insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and even diabetes.³ This means that high sugar in the blood leads to low BDNF, and then low BDNF leads to a worsening of blood sugar control, which leads to high blood sugar, which leads to worse blood sugar control… and the cycle continues.

In an interesting study on rats, it was discovered that the animals that had the best ability to learn spatial and memory tasks also had the highest amount of BDNF. It took only two months on a high sugar and high fat diet to significantly reduce BDNF in the brains of the experimental animals and for the reduction to have an effect on the animal’s ability to perform spatial and memory tasks.⁴

Low BDNF is no small thing as it has also been associated with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, Huntington’s disease, Rett syndrome, and schizophrenia.

But there is much more to the sugar-brain story than BDNF, let’s take a look.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is one of the best places to start when discussing how sugar affects our brains. There are quite a few clinical studies that link the consumption of grains (foods that act like sugar) with schizophrenia.⁵ It has long been thought that people who are schizophrenic may have a problem with the protein found in many grains (gluten) and there is a strong association between schizophrenia and Celiac disease.⁶

Interestingly, there is also a close association with poor blood sugar control (metabolic syndrome) and the severity of schizophrenia:

It appears that the same dietary factors which are associated with the metabolic syndrome, including high saturated fat, high glycemic load, and low omega-3 (PUFA), may also be detrimental to the symptoms of schizophrenia.⁷

These researcher show that once again, a diet low in essential fatty acids (omega-3) and high in fat and sugar will decrease BDNF and it makes me wonder if sugar and foods that act like sugar may be the “smoking gun” in schizophrenia.

Depression and Anxiety

As a hint that how we live and what we eat have some effect on our moods, it has long been known that coronary heart disease and diabetes all are common in people with depression.⁸ This means that the same dietary conditions that create heart disease and diabetes also can lead to depression. Interesting…

Sugar consumption in population studies have been shown to have a close link with major depression.⁹ Researchers suggest that the sugar and brain association may be due to the oxidative stress that sugar can cause or the change in beta-endorphins (brain chemicals that make us feel good) that comes about because of sugar use.

Anxiety, too, has been closely linked with sugar use in a number of studies.¹⁰

Children

Perhaps the biggest questions arise when discussing children, mood, behavior and sugar. While any parent would tell you that sugar can dramatically change the behavior of a child, the medical community is silent. There have been a few studies that show an association between high blood sugars and problem behaviors, but these studies have mostly been performed in children who already have blood sugar problems (such as diabetes).¹¹¹² More studies need to be done and need to be done in children with normal blood sugar.

Autism is an interesting exception to the lack of research. A review by the prestigious Cochrane review admitted that many of the studies linking foods that act like sugar (grains) and gluten to autism have been of poor quality, but they do point to one study that does show a relationship between a gluten-free diet and improvement in the symptoms of autism.¹³ While far from conclusive, these studies open the possibility of a solution for the growing epidemic of autism.

Brain Plan

Okay, let’s say you actually want to take care of your brain. What is the best way to go?

• Avoid grains and sugars: Read my book Sugarettes or take the 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge, and get yourself off sugar and foods that act like sugar.
• Exercise: It has been shown that exercise is great for your brain, and it increases BDNF.¹⁴
• Supplement: Your brain thrives on vitamins, especially the B vitamins and make sure you are taking some form of omega 3 oils (fish oils).

We can take care of our brains much better than we do and knowing that the foods that we put into our mouths can dramatically how we think, how we feel and act, and which diseases we get means that your brain and how well it functions is in your hands. You have a choice and what you eat and drink can make dramatic differences in how you think, feel and behave.

Citations:

1. Fehm HL, Kern W, Peters A. The selfish brain: competition for energy resources. Prog Brain Res. 2006;153:129-40.
2. Molteni R, Barnard RJ, Ying Z, et al. A high-fat, refined sugar diet reduces hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor, neuronal plasticity, and learning. Neuroscience. 2002;112(4):803-14.
3. Krabbe KS, Nielsen AR, Krogh-Madsen R, et al. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and type 2 diabetes. Diabetologia. 2007 Feb;50(2):431-8. Epub 2006 Dec 7.
4. Molteni R, Barnard RJ, Ying Z, Roberts CK, Gómez-Pinilla F. A high-fat, refined sugar diet reduces hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor, neuronal plasticity, and learning. Neuroscience. 2002;112(4):803-14.
5. Peet M. International variations in the outcome of schizophrenia and the prevalence of depression in relation to national dietary practices: an ecological analysis. Br J Psychiatry. 2004 May;184:404-8.
6. Kalaydjian AE, Eaton W, Cascella N, Fasano A. The gluten connection: the association between schizophrenia and celiac disease. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2006 Feb;113(2):82-90.
7. Peet M. Nutrition and schizophrenia: beyond omega-3 fatty acids. Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids. 2004 Apr;70(4):417-22.
8. Peet M. International variations in the outcome of schizophrenia and the prevalence of depression in relation to national dietary practices: an ecological analysis. Br J Psychiatry. 2004 May;184:404-8.
9. Westover AN, Marangell LB. A cross-national relationship between sugar consumption and major depression? Depress Anxiety. 2002;16(3):118-20
10. Yannakoulia M, Panagiotakos DB, Pitsavos C, et al. Eating habits in relations to anxiety symptoms among apparently healthy adults. A pattern analysis from the ATTICA Study. Appetite. 2008 Nov;51(3):519-25.
11. Valdovinos MG, Weyand D. Blood glucose levels and problem behavior. Res Dev Disabil. 2006 Mar-Apr;27(2):227-31.
12. McDonnell CM, Northam EA, Donath SM, et al. Hyperglycemia and externalizing behavior in children with type 1 diabetes. Diabetes Care. 2007 Sep;30(9):2211-5.
13. Millward C, Ferriter M, Calver S, Connell-Jones G. Gluten- and casein-free diets for autistic spectrum disorder. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2004;(2):CD003498.
14. Exercise: Ang ET, Gomez-Pinilla F. Potential therapeutic effects of exercise to the brain. Curr Med Chem. 2007;14(24):2564-71.

I have long said that exercise is a panacea and a cure-all, and recent research has backed up my claim. I find it funny to think that Ponce De Lion, the legendary explorer who went off in search of the fountain of youth, actually found the elixir to long life, only it wasn’t a fountain at all, but the exercise he was getting looking for the fountain. Ponce De Lion would have lived a long life if an arrow hadn’t cut it short.

Exercise is a powerful way to change how you feel and it can actually alter or reverse many diseases. If exercise were a drug, doctors couldn’t keep it on the shelf. Exercise is truly the best drug ever, and the incredible part about the exercise story is that this “drug” is free and it has virtually no side effects.

The importance of exercising is summed up well in this quote:

The Global Burden of Disease Study initiated by the World Health Organization included physical inactivity among the most important risk factors threatening global health. A sedentary life style may be as detrimental to health as smoking.(1)

Read that again! That quote is saying that not exercising has the same bad health effects as smoking. Clearly you have to get up off your butt and start moving it around some.

Let’s take a look and see just how powerful of a drug exercise can be.

Health Benefits of Exercise

The research supporting the benefits of exercise is enormous and the following are just a sample of what is out there.

• Cardiovascular Disease: Exercise improves heart function, blood flow to the whole body, nervous system control over the heart, and a technical measurement called endothelial function in patients with heart disease.(2) It appears from a large number of studies that exercise can help prevent heart disease. Exercise even helps people who have had a heart attack, reducing symptoms, complications, trips back to the hospital, and longer life. Not only that, but their quality of their life is better, they have lower depression, and they return to work or active life quicker than people who don’t exercise.⁽³⁾
  

• High Blood Pressure: The good news is that high blood pressure appears to respond best to moderate exercise (as opposed to strenuous exercise). With as little as 30 minutes of continuous exercise a day, patients are able to reduce their high blood pressure. It is important to note that the kind of exercise is important: continuous. Continuous exercise is walking, running, biking and not tennis, golf or even soccer or basketball.⁽⁴⁾ The jury is still out if weight training or high-intensity exercise will help high blood pressure.

• Rheumatoid arthritis: Moderate exercise has been shown to improve the symptoms (less pain) and the functional ability (they can do more) in people with rheumatoid arthritis.(5)

• Diabetes: Exercise has been studied in diabetics for a long time and has been shown to improve blood sugar control and reduce the need for medications. In a new study on the effects of exercise in diabetics, researchers were able to prove that long-term blood sugar control (by measuring hemoglobin A1c) is much better in diabetics that exercise than those that don’t, even when there they didn’t lose weight because of the exercising.(6)

• Weight Loss: As you can guess, exercise and weight loss has been extensively studied. A new study on overweight children showed that exercise helped them (more than adults) maintain their weight loss over a long period of time.(7) This study is so important and demonstrates that exercise can become a habit if introduced early enough in someone’s life. While normal-weight people should exercise at least 30 minutes (moderate intensity) on most days; overweight people should exercise 60 to 80 minutes a day.(8)

• Cognitive function: There is pretty good evidence that exercise will help maintain brain function, including memory, cognitive function, and attention in older adults. Since Alzheimer’s (and dementia in general) are becoming such a health disaster, it is good to know that exercise can be preventive.(9)

• Depression and Anxiety: A prescription for exercise often works better in people with depression and anxiety than taking a drug. New research suggests that this effect may be due to the ability of exercise to help us deal with stress.(10) Who couldn’t use a little stress and anxiety reduction?

What Else?

Exercise has been show to:

• Improve self-esteem, especially in children.(11)
• Reduce the risk for colon cancer.(12)
• Improves our quality of life, especially in older people.(13)
• Reduce back pain.(14)
• Prevent osteoporosis.(15)

Move Your Buns Around

Okay, I didn’t quite tell you the truth above, there are side-effects from exercise and you can hurt yourself; luckily, though, most of the damage you can do is only temporary (unlike some drug damage).

Here is what you need to know to get started on your own exercise program:

• Always check with your health care provider before starting an exercise program.
• You don’t have to kill yourself; moderate exercise is what has been shown to be the most effective for most conditions.
• Start slow and build up to 30 minutes every (or most) days. You’ll want to do more if you are overweight.
• Pick a continuous exercise: this means your heart rate is up for a sustained period. Choose exercise like running, walking, cycling, cross-country skiing and others.
• Consider adding weight lifting into your program.

Most of all, you want to have fun and stick with it. Yes, it can be a drag putting on clothes and getting out the door in the rain and snow, but most people love their exercise once they get going. If you can’t exercise outside, I recommend that you “pay” for the television that you watch by putting an exercise bike or a treadmill in front of the TV.

Take advantage of the best drug ever and start your exercise program today!

Citations

1. Erikssen G. Physical fitness and changes in mortality: the survival of the fittest. Sports Med. 2001;31(8):571-6.

2. Humphrey R, Bartels MN. Exercise, cardiovascular disease, and chronic heart failure. Arch Phys Med Rehabil. 2001 Mar;82(3 Suppl 1):S76-81

3. Ades PA, Coello CE. Effects of exercise and cardiac rehabilitation on cardiovascular outcomes. Med Clin North Am. 2000 Jan;84(1):251-65, x-xi.

4. Pescatello LS. Exercise and hypertension: recent advances in exercise prescription. Curr Hypertens Rep. 2005 Aug;7(4):281-6.

5. Metsios GS, Stavropoulos-Kalinoglou A, et al. Rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease and physical exercise: a systematic review. Rheumatology (Oxford). 2008 Mar;47(3):239-48.

6. Boulé NG, Haddad E, Kenny GP, et al. Effects of exercise on glycemic control and body mass in type 2 diabetes mellitus: a meta-analysis of controlled clinical trials. JAMA. 2001 Sep 12;286(10):1218-27.

7. Sothern MS. Exercise as a modality in the treatment of childhood obesity. Pediatr Clin North Am. 2001 Aug;48(4):995-1015.

8. Leermakers EA, Dunn AL, Blair SN. Exercise management of obesity. Med Clin North Am. 2000 Mar;84(2):419-40.

9. Angevaren M, Aufdemkampe G, Verhaar HJ. Physical activity and enhanced fitness to improve cognitive function in older people without known cognitive impairment. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2008 Apr 16;(2):CD005381

10.  Salmon P. Effects of physical exercise on anxiety, depression, and sensitivity to stress: a unifying theory. Clin Psychol Rev. 2001 Feb;21(1):33-61.

11. Ekeland E, Heian F, Hagen KB. Can exercise improve self esteem in children and young people? A systematic review of randomised controlled trials. Br J Sports Med. 2005 Nov;39(11):792-8

12. Trojian TH, Mody K, Chain P. Exercise and colon cancer: primary and secondary prevention. Curr Sports Med Rep. 2007 Apr;6(2):120-4.

13. Stewart KJ. Physical activity and aging. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2005 Dec;1055:193-206.

14. Hayden JA, van Tulder MW, Tomlinson G. Systematic review: strategies for using exercise therapy to improve outcomes in chronic low back pain. Ann Intern Med. 2005 May 3;142(9):776-85.

15. Hingorjo MR, Syed S, Qureshi MA. Role of exercise in osteoporosis prevention–current concepts. J Pak Med Assoc. 2008 Feb;58(2):78-81

According to recent research, the number of people with diabetes has doubled in the last 10 years.¹ The report, by the Centers for Disease Control or CDC, shows that the nation (and really the whole developed world) is becoming heavier and heavier (see YouTube video) and with that excess weight comes an increasingly large number of people who have diabetes.

Having diabetes is far from a mild disease; it has major implications on the quality of life. People with diabetes are much more likely to have:

• Heart disease
• Kidney disease
• Eye disease (cataracts, macular degeneration, blindness)
• Vascular disease (stroke and poor circulation to hands and feet)
• Loss of nerve sensation (neuropathy)

Life Expectancy

Diabetes is harmful and it will cut your life short. Diabetics lose an average of 12 years for men and 14 years for women from their lives. ⁵ Yes, women are harmed by diabetes more than men.

There is associated problem with diabetes that doesn’t get much attention that has to do with the quality of life lived by a diabetic. The quality of life deteriorates rapidly in people with diabetes: blindness, losing limbs, heart disease, kidney failure and more. When scientists make an estimation of the loss of not only years lived, but also the quality of those years, they come up with something they call “quality-adjusted years”. Men lose an average of 19 quality-adjusted years and women lose around 22 years.⁵

I don’t know about you, but 20 years kicked off of a life seems rather significant.

It is Bad and Getting Worse

Population estimates are hard to come by, but the current number of people with diabetes is estimated somewhere between 4.3 to 16.6 percent of the population,² with certain ethnic groups such as Native American and Hispanics at the high end of those calculations.

But even those percentages don’t tell the whole story. What you really want to know is this: what are your chances of getting diabetes? It is easy to think that your chances of getting diabetes are between 4.3 to 16.6 percent (like the population estimates), but that is not true. To find out your own risk, you have to look at lifetime risk (the chances you will get diabetes some time in your life). What are your lifetime risks for diabetes? The esteemed Journal of the American Medical Association or JAMA made these estimates in 2003:

For people born in 2000, their lifetime risk for getting diabetes is 32.8 percent for males and 38.5 percent for females.⁵

That is incredible: an almost 40% risk of getting diabetes some time in your lifetime.

It Doesn’t Have to be This Way!

Here is the thing you need to know: diabetes is completely preventable. It is the one disease that I can say for sure that you never have to suffer through as long as you follow my dietary advice. No pills, no drugs… just follow dietary advice. I detail just what diet to follow in my book Sugarettes, but let me give you an outline of what you need to do:

• Avoid sugar in all its forms: soda, cookies, candies…
• Eat a diet at or below the glycemic index
• Find ways to deal with your sugar addiction
• Exercise

That is it. Sounds simple, but following it is hard.

Diabetes has doubled in the last 10 years, don’t let you or a member of your family become one of the statistics.

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). State-specific incidence of diabetes among adults–participating states, 1995-1997 and 2005-2007. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2008 Oct 31;57(43):1169-73.
   
2. Ramsey F, Ussery-Hall A, Garcia D, et al. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Prevalence of selected risk behaviors and chronic diseases–Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), 39 steps communities, United States, 2005. MMWR Surveill Summ. 2008 Oct 31;57(11):1-20.
   
3. Magliano DJ, Shaw JE, Shortreed SM, et al. Lifetime risk and projected population prevalence of diabetes. Diabetologia. 2008 Sep 23
   
4. Mainous AG 3rd, Baker R, Koopman RJ, et al. Impact of the population at risk of diabetes on projections of diabetes burden in the United States: an epidemic on the way. Diabetologia. 2007 May;50(5):934-40. Epub 2006 Nov 21.
   
5. K. M. Venkat Narayan, James P. Boyle, Theodore J. Thompson. Lifetime Risk for Diabetes Mellitus in the United States. JAMA. 2003;290:1884-1890.
   

How do you know if you are addicted to sugar?

Addictions can be tricky to define; there are both physical and psychological addictions. Proving something is an addiction is a bit difficult, but the test below is a test that would work for any addiction. Give it a try:

• Have you ever used sugar as a reward for something? Was sugar the treat you gave yourself after you completed a task or a job well done?
• Have you ever used sugar to change your mood, like when you felt sad, tired, or when you needed a lift?
• Have you ever eaten sugar even when you weren’t hungry? You just finished a meal and are very full, but still you order dessert or go to the fridge and pull out the ice cream.
  
• Have you ever tried to stop eating sugar and couldn’t? You tried a diet like Atkins or South beach, but felt endlessly drawn by sugar and foods that act like sugar and couldn’t stick to the diet.
• Have you ever taken a small bite of something sweet and felt compelled to finish the whole thing? You thought you were just going to have a bit of something, but then you at the whole thing. Sugar foods count here too: have you ever started to eat a bag full of potato or corn chips and finished the whole bag?
• Have you ever quit eating sugar and when you started eating it again, couldn’t stop binging? When you took sugar out of your diet and then returned to it, did you binge on sugar and sugar foods?

If you answered yes to one or two of these questions, then you probably have a sugar problem. If you answered yes to two or more of these questions, then you can be guaranteed that you are addicted to sugar.

The signs of addiction are typically:

• Using the addiction for a reward
• Using a substance to change a mood
• Feeling compelled to consume the addiction even though you don’t need it
• Binging, especially when the addicted substance is removed for a while

Sugar has all characteristics of an addiction and the scientific community is just beginning to wake up to that fact. But before you dismiss the addiction as just as a funny thing we all do, you need to realize that sugar addiction ultimately means harm to your body. Sugar consumption is associated with increased weight and obesity, diabetes, heart disease and potentially many other diseases.

Getting off your sugar addiction can be hard, but you can do it with the proper support and help.

You may have heard of high and low glycemic index foods and that you should eat as many low glycemic foods as you can if you want to keep your blood sugar low or if you are diabetic, but you may not have heard of the concept of Eating Below the Glycemic Index.

A typical glycemic index chart looks something like this:

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Click to Enlarge Chart

What you should notice about this chart, or any glycemic index chart, is that there are a number of foods that are missing. The reason why these missing foods are not on the chart is that they don’t have any effect on your blood sugar at all. But just because these foods are not on the glycemic index doesn’t mean they are not important, in fact the opposite is true.

Below the Glycemic Index Foods:

Here are the foods that are below the glycemic index. You can safely eat as much as you want of them and they will have no impact on your blood sugar:

• Onions and garlic
  
• Cruciferous vegetables: Broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, chard, kale, and cabbage
• Lettuce of all kinds: red leaf, green leaf, iceberg…
• Mixed greens: spinach, arugula, endive, dandelion greens, escarole, radicchio, red mustard and various lettuces: red leaf, green leaf, romaine
• Avocados
  
• Meats: fish, chicken, beef, pork, wild game
• Eggs
  
• Mushrooms: Shitake, Maitake, Reishi and others
  

What is amazing about all these foods is that they are not only low on the glycemic index, but many of them are what I call Disease Busing Power Foods because they pack that additional nutritional punch that makes them not only good for you, but can actually prevent (and maybe even treat) many common diseases (such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and others).

By choosing foods from below the glycemic index, you are picking the very best nutrition you can find. You are not only keeping your blood sugar low, but you are also giving your body that extra boost it needs to navigate our stressed-out over-processed and sometimes toxic world.

Cannot Live on “Below” Alone?

You may look at the Below the Glycemic Index foods and think that you cannot live on those foods alone. Fair enough. The next best place to choose your foods from is the low glycemic index foods, the best of these include:

• Nuts: peanuts, cashews, almonds, walnuts…
• Fruits: apples, kiwi, cherries, berries (strawberries, blueberries, blackberries…)
• Beans: pinto, chickpea, butter beans, lima bean, black beans, lentils…
• Grains: while I’m not a big fan of grains, if you want to include them in your diet try to prepare them as most people make rice: boil and eat them. The whole grain with the lowest glycemic index is barley. You should also choose the whole-grain versions and not the “white” versions. If you simply must have your grains ground and processed, choose pasta as it generally is very low on the glycemic index.

Below or Low

As you can see, the best way to eat is to choose foods low or below the glycemic index. While it can be difficult at times, these foods are what your body need to thrive.