excellent article about insulin resistance

i came across this from "nourished" magazine... it is a long read, but well worth the time.

Insulin Resistance: The Real Culprit
By Ron Rosedale

Let’s talk about a couple of case histories. These are actual patients that I’ve seen

Patient A saw me one afternoon and said that he had literally just signed himself out of the hospital “AMA,” or against medical advice. Like in the movies, he had ripped out his IV’s.

The next day he was scheduled to have his second by-pass surgery. He had been told that if he did not follow through with this by-pass surgery, within two weeks he would be dead. He couldn’t walk from the car to the office without severe chest pain. He was on eight different medications for various things. But his first by-pass surgery was such a miserable experience he said he would rather just die than have to go through the second one and had heard that I might be able to prevent that.

To make a long story short, this gentleman right now is on no insulin. I first saw him three and a half years ago. He plays golf four or five times a week. He is on no medications whatsoever, he has no chest pain, and he has not had any surgery.

more...

the good news about cholesterol

Cholesterol is used to make your hormones, cell walls, to repair wounds...the list goes on and on. The cholesterol that is found in people's arteries is there as a patch to keep the blood vessel wall from tearing. It's not the cause of the problem, it's there trying to solve a problem (inflammation the vessels). more egg, less biscuit

high cholesterol does not correlate to higher incidence of heart disease. in fact, "high" cholesterol reading can be an indicator of longer life in elderly women!

visit THINCS for more information about cholesterol

doctor malcolm kendrick discusses the following facts with BMA in leeds, november 2007:

fact one: cholesterol and/or saturated fat in the diet do not raise cholesterol levels

fact two: fact one is unimportant because a raised cholesterol level does not cause heart disease

fact three: statins do not protect against heart disease by lowering cholesterol levels

fact four: chronic stress is likely cause of most heart disease

part 1/5 (be sure to watch them all)

fat is not to blame...

watch this short video that outlines the genesis of the 'lipid hypothesis"


read this article published by MSNBC and men's health magazine.

listen to an interview with gary taubes.

listen to NPR discussion between gary taubes and doctor ronald krauss.

read following comment from uffe ravnskov, published on nina planck's website:

Uffe Ravnskov is a leader of a loose international network of doctors, scientists, and researchers known as The Cholesterol Skeptics. On November 25, 2007, Ravnskov, who is the the author of a terrific and admirably brief book called The Cholesterol Myths, wrote this note.

'An interesting discussion between Gary Taubes and Ronald Krauss aired on November 2 (Talk of the Nation). Krauss was previously head of the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association, the organisation that publishes the official US guidelines for prevention of heart disease. Krauss and his group were the first to show that a high level of small, dense LDL was a much stronger risk factor for coronary heart disease than LDL, and also that there is an inverse association between intake of saturated fat and small, dense LDL, thus a strong argument against the idea that saturated fat causes heart disease. Recently I asked Krauss why the AHA still warns against saturated fat. He answered that decisions for guidelines are made by voting and there is still a majority in favor of the traditional view.'

Science, as anyone who has read Thomas Kuhn, or who follows Bush administration policy on environmental and medical issues knows, can be political. And when medical and nutritional advice are decided democratically - that is, by voting - it takes time for the dominant consensus to gain critics and lose proponents. Many have observed that ideological renewal doesn't happen until some critical number of influential proponents die off - literally.

Let's hope they get the good news in time, and don't die of heart disease from eating too much powdered skim milk, spray-dried eggs, corn oil, and whatever new-fangled trans fat-free vegetable oil spread is being advertised on NPR this morning. I've seen one study (Nutrition and Metabolism, January 15, 2007) on the new fake vegetable oil spreads which are trans-free; they increased heart disease risk factors. K.C. Hayes found that these interestified fats reduce HDL and raise blood sugar. The control group ate regular palm oil, a traditional saturated vegetable fat.

Remember the general rule: If your great-grandmother ate it, it's probably okay. Here's my three-point plan: One, eat diverse traditional foods, no matter what your tradition is, Irish, Swedish, Jamaican, or Malaysian. Two, avoid industrial foods, especially corn oil and sugars of all kinds. Three, eat the traditional foods you happent to prefer. Now stop worrying about your diet.