Archive Page 2
Yesterday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reports that the very inexpensive nutritional supplement niacin worked better to clear arteries than the not so cheap and side effect rich drugs Zetia– a drug used in addition to a statin, and Vyotrin– a single pill which combines a statin with Zetia.
Much of the information I’m posting here comes from The Washington Post.
A recent trial gave 200 people one of the drugs or Niaspan, a form of the B vitamin Niacin. They were followed for 14 months. The results showed a decrease in artery clogging plaque in the niacin group but none in the pharmaceutical group. It’s plaque that causes problems and deaths not the cholesterol itself.
Vytorin and Zetia are among the most popular prescription drugs and were introduced with lots of fanfare and expensive advertising. Don’t worry though, Merck made their money back on those expenses. Last year, physicians in the United States wrote a total of more than 29 million prescriptions for them, and worldwide sales totaled $4.56 billion, according to Merck.
Critics of the study complained that it involved just 200 patients, was ended early, and examined what is known as a surrogate marker — the amount of plaque on artery walls — rather than evaluating the rate of heart attacks and stroke.
The study’s author, Allen J. Taylor of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Washington Hospital Center, said the trial ended early because the results were quickly apparent. “It couldn’t be more clear,” Taylor said. “It would have been unreasonable to continue the experiment because the trial had met its objective — niacin is superior to ezetimibe.”
Because plaque can clog arteries and restrict blood flow to the heart and brain, cardiologists view plaque as a good indication for the risk of heart attack and stroke.
The patients who took Niaspan had less plaque in their arteries and also had higher levels of high-density lipoprotein or HDL. Known as “good” cholesterol, HDL is believed to remove cholesterol from the arteries and carry it back to the liver, where it is passes from the body.
The patients who took Zetia had more plaque in their arteries but lower levels of LDL. They also had more heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular problems than the patients taking niacin.
If you are on Zetia or Vyotrin please find out more about using niacin as a safe alternative. And if you are worried about LDL cholesterol being some form of evil to be avoided at all costs, please stop back here tomorrow and the days following. I’m going to do my best to explain simply why it’s not evil, why HDL and triglyceride levels are much more important to pay attention to, and why low levels of cholesterol is unsafe at any age but especially midlife and beyond.
Whether you have diabetes or not managing stress is vital to your overall health for so many reasons. In diabetics however it is even more so because stress increases the fight or flight hormones adrenaline and cortisol. One of the many physical responses that occur is an increase in blood sugar levels so we will have the energy to flee or fight the thing that caused the stress in the first place. It worked perfectly in the days of caves and wooly mammoths but can be harmful these days unless we truly are in danger.
In non-diabetic people insulin levels self regulate during times of stress which in turn manages blood sugar levels. In diabetics this system is broken or working below optimal so blood sugar levels rise–just the thing people with diabetes are working to avoid.
“There is a myth out there that it’s all about food as to why the blood sugar rises,” says Richard Hellman, MD, former president of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The truth is that other factors play a role, he explains, including stress.
First line of defense, know when you are stressed and build in some time to release it. If you have been under long term, chronic stress such as caring for an aging parent or juggling cash and credit to keep your family afloat, your efforts to manage your blood sugar naturally or with insulin and diabetes drugs must be accompanied with a concerted effort to de-stress. If you have never been one to pay attention to stress or finding ways to relax and think it’s for weak of wimpy types, now would be a good time to wise up and pick a relaxation method.
The suggestions are ubiquitous but I’ll list some here: yoga, pilates, Tai Chi, any form of exercise, breathing, meditation, laughter, connecting with people you enjoy, and so on.
And the small daily stressors can add up so why not practice detached observing the next time the line at the grocery store is being held up by the cashier chatting with an elderly shopper? How about laughing off the snarky teenager who had to finish texting before he took your order at the deli counter? All of these things we allow to annoy/stress us are really just plain silly if you think about it.
Take this information to heart–the quality of your life depends on it. Maybe not now, but left unattended, stress–especially for those with diabetes–can rob you of mobility, sight, the use of your limbs, and the ability to live a full, joyful life.
At midlife, we ain’t dead yet and there is still plenty to be do and have; it takes caring for ourselves with a vengeance sometimes but the extra effort sure will be worth it if we can age with the gift of health. порнографиякартинки
Ah the lowly, lovely egg. If you know me you know I am a big fan of the egg for it’s versatility, flavor, and health attritbutes. After all it’s a perfect food, plenty of protein, low in calories, some good healthy fat and the kind of cholesterol that helps, not hurts, our over all system.
So when I got this Health Alert this morning from HSI Baltimore had to share.”Egg-Irony” – that’s how ScienceDaily referred to a new study that shows how egg consumption might alleviate a heart disease risk factor.
If you have high blood pressure, your doctor has probably pressed you to take an ACE inhibitor drug.
A couple of eggs each day might do just as well.
Two researchers at Canada’s University of Alberta recently ran lab tests to determine if consumption of fried eggs or boiled eggs would produce greater amounts of ACE inhibitory peptides.
I’ll cut to the chase: The fried eggs won.
In a recent issue of Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry the authors write: “Our results showed that in vitro digestion of cooked eggs could generate a number of potent ACE inhibitory peptides which may have implications for cardiovascular disease prevention, including hypertension.”
One of the physicians on the board of the HSI panel is Dr. Allan Spreen M.D. He’s got what some consider controversial views but he always has mainstream science to back them up so let’s see what he had to say about this egg irony.
The author of the Health Alert newsletter introduced him this way: “HSI Panelist Allan Spreen, M.D., kindly sent me the info about the Alberta egg study. But even more valuable was his commentary. Stand back and give him some swinging room. Dr. Spreen takes no prisoners in this one. ”
Dr. Spreen: “Actually, neither egg nor cholesterol ingestion has ever had anything to do with either hypertension or hypercholesterolemia [high cholesterol]. There is no correlation between oral intake of cholesterol and serum levels (I also firmly believe there’s no connection between serum levels and heart disease, but that’s an argument for another time).
“If you never eat cholesterol your body will manufacture it (or you die), and the ‘manufactured’ variety is more readily deposited in vessel walls.
“Eggs are wonderful food, always have been, and that includes the yolk (rare good source of sulfur).
Well there you have it. More good news on one of nature’s perfect, portable, frickin’ wonderfully delicious foods. Of course human trials will have to be done to prove that the heart disease protection extends to us as well as the lucky test tube organisms that had eggs for breakfast each day. But this study should at least lend some credence to the idea that eggs are not going to kill you!
What’s on your breakfast plate?
According to the Washington Post this morning the results of the first human study of bisphenol A–a chemical widely used in everyday plastic–has found that people with higher levels of bisphenol A had higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, and liver abnormalities.
The research is published in this month’s JAMA by a team of British and American scientists. They compared the health of 1,455 men and women with BPA found in their urine.
The test subjects were divided into four groups according to their urine BPA levels. “Those in the quartile with the highest concentrations were nearly three times as likely to have cardiovascular disease than those with the lowest levels, and 2+ times as likely to have diabetes” the Post reported.
While the researchers describe these findings as “preliminary” the FDA took notice and Frederick vom Saal, a reproductive scientist at the U of Missouri at Columbia said, “this is the nail in the coffin.”
As for me and my house we are moving as far away from using plastics with BPA as possible. I’ve addressed this potential danger before in the Q & A section my June ’08 newsletter and it seems the danger is more real than the skeptics, like the FDA, can refute.
So are any plastics safe? Yes, check out the bottom of bottles and other containers for the following numbers, #2, #4, #5, . These are safe leaving #s 1, 3, 6 and 7–the BPA one– as the ones to stay away from.
What about Nalgene bottles, the hard plastic ones? The makers of Nalgene products, Thermo Fisher Scientific, announced sometime back in ’07 that they would phase out BPA in production of their products and so would be safe for use as a portable beverage container.
It may take some practice to sub buying small water bottles to tote around with a glass or Nalgene or other safe container but your internal and external environment will thank you with better health.
