We have more low fat, more low cal and more low sugar foods than ever - yet we are the fattest we have ever been - somethings obviously wrong!
DR RON ROSDALE says "Wise Up & Stop Using Your Muscles For Fuel!"
Some of you may be thinking, "I may eat a lot of starchy carbohydrates, but at the same meal, I am also eating protein and fat. Why am I just burning sugar and storing fat?" It's a good question, and it gets to the heart of the vicious cycle.
Let's assume that you are following the current dietary recommendations that tell you to eat more than half of your daily calories in the form of carbohydrate. You fill your plate with a cup or so of pasta, topped with meatballs, some tomato sauce and cheese.
From the minute the pasta is in your mouth, it begins to be broken down into simple sugar. Your body can only store a small amount of sugar at a time in the form of glycogen that is stored in muscle and liver. What's not stored as glycogen is burned off as quickly as possible, forcing you to burn sugar, but your cells can only burn so much off at a time.
What happens to the rest of the sugar that isn't being stored or burned? It is converted into saturated fat. What about the protein and the fat in the meal that you just ate? Some of the protein is taken up by the cells for repair and maintenance, but your cells can only utilize a small amount of protein at a time. The rest, largely, is turned to sugar and stored as saturated fat. That leaves just the fat that is not burned when sugar is around to burn, which gets stored away as more fat.
Why isn't the protein and fat burned as fuel? Because you must first burn up sugar if it is available. If you eat sugar and fat together, you have to burn sugar first before you burn the fat. Furthermore, your cells get used to burning a particular fuel, in this case, sugar.
When you are younger, your metabolism is more flexible, and you can switch fuels more easily. As you get older, your cells get stuck in a rut, and if they are used to burning sugar, they will look for more sugar to burn when they need fuel.
You have to burn almost every gram of available sugar before fat burning kicks in.
Your Cellular Addiction to Sugar
Being a sugar burner is not a good thing. Your cells begin to crave sugar, and they don't care where the sugar comes from. If you go to sleep and you're still in a sugar-burning mood, your body is going to continuing look for sugar to burn as you sleep. You won't like where it gets it.
When your cells are "hungry," they will quickly go through the starchy glycogen in your liver and muscle to get sugar, however, your body would prefer to save your stored sugar (glycogen) for anaerobic) emergencies, such as sprinting away from a lion, and therefore will only give up a small portion.
Do You Really Want to Use Your Muscles as Fuel?
Thus, your cells will continue to look elsewhere for sugar to burn by breaking down protein in your muscle and even bone, which it can also burn as sugar. This is a far more significant cause of osteoporosis than not taking calcium supplements.
Here's the kicker: As long as there is sugar to be had, and your hormones are telling you not to burn fat, your cells won't go into your fat stores. You can have pounds of excess fat just waiting to be burned, and your cells will bypass it to get to sugar. As long as you continue to eat a high-carbohydrate, high-sugar, or excess protein diet, your body will keep on burning sugar and storing fat.
As long as you are leptin-resistant, you will stay hungry because of the brain's inability to "hear" leptin. When you are leptin-resistant, your brain is telling your body to make fat, store it and, importantly, to conserve the fat that you have. You then have no choice: You must burn sugar.
Stop Eating Your Muscles
In order to break the vicious cycle, you need to retrain your brain to instruct your cells to burn fat as your body's primary fuel. When you are a true fat-burner, your cells eat fat even when you're not eating. When your cells need energy, they can get it from your fat stores. You're burning fat all the time, even when you're sleeping, and you don't eat your muscles and bone. Your brain doesn't care whether the fat just came from what you eat, or whether it comes from deep in your viscera by delving into your fat stores.
Your arteries will also be allowed to burn their own fat stores -- the plaque that ultimately can plug them up. If you start burning the fat you've stored, you feel satisfied and you won't get hungry because your cells are being properly nourished.
Our prehistoric ancestors actually ate a lot more fat than we do today, and did not routinely eat grains or much fruit because they weren't often available. They had no choice but to be fat-burners, and not surprisingly, their bodies were leaner, their bones stronger, and they did not appear to suffer from the same chronic diseases we do today.
I'm not suggesting that they ate an optimal diet. They had limited choices, but ironically, they probably ate better than most of the world's population does today.
Once you become a proficient fat-burner, when your cells need energy, they will get it from your fat stores. Your brain doesn't care whether the fat comes from the food you just ate, or from the fat that is embedded in your abdomen, arteries or other places in your body. It will start burning off the excess fat you have stored by feeding your cells the healthy fat they need.
And, you will not be hungry: You will get healthier and you will slow the rate at which you age.
Dr. Mercola's Comment:
I could not agree more strongly with Dr. Rosedale's elegant and eye-opening explanation of how our metabolism works. Understanding these principles will help us choose our foods more wisely.
Just to remind you about Dr. Ron Rosedale's credentials, 10 years ago I listened to his lecture on insulin and it transformed my entire understanding on nutrition and was largely responsible for my first NY Times best-selling book.
He is also one of this country's leading experts on leptin, a hormone whose appreciation is where insulin's was 10 years ago. Over the past few months, he has been kind enough to expand on the new appreciation of leptina number of times on my Web site.
The original draft of his book, The Rosedale Diet, had the best explanation of the science of leptin written. However, publishers are under pressure to sell books to the masses to make money, thus his book was edited to do so, and some of the science did not make it past the scissors.
The public's loss is your gain in this case, as you are now able to read some excerpts of his original version that have not been previously published.
In addition to sharing nutrition interests, Dr. Rosedale and I both share photography as a hobby. Later this summer we are getting together so he can teach me some of his landscape photography insights.
DR RON ROSEDALE says "Burn Fat Not Sugar To Loose Weight" When we talk about what to eat, we must first realize who, or rather what, is eating.
In fact, we, ourselves, are not really doing the eating. It is our cells that eat. When we put food in our mouth, that is just a continuation of the transport of food from the farms to the grocery store then into our mouth; the food is then transported to our cells by our bloodstream. It is our cells that really do the eating and that need the fuel and the parts to regenerate themselves.
And cells can only eat two kinds of food for fuel. They can eat sugar or they can eat fat, and their health and your health will be determined by the primary fuel that they burn.
I have been asked to summarize in a single sentence what would best promote health. It is this: Health and lifespan is determined by the proportion of fat versus sugar people burn throughout their lifetime. The more fat that one burns as fuel, the healthier the person will be, and the more likely they will live a long time. The more sugar a person burns, the more disease ridden and the shorter a lifespan a person is likely to have.
Becoming a Fat Burner
How does one learn to, and how does one become a fat burner? How does one change their primary fuel from sugar to fat?
One gets good at most anything by doing it frequently. You can become a good tennis player by playing tennis frequently and a good golf player by golfing frequently. Likewise, your body becomes adapted to burning fat by burning fat frequently.
However, most people become very adapted at burning sugar; your body continues to want to "keep playing" sugar, to burn more sugar, even when you are not eating. When you're sleeping at night, your body then prefers to burn sugar and it gets that sugar by breaking down proteins in your body, which means lean body mass, which includes muscle and bone. I call that metabolic momentum.
Your body continues to like to do what it has become accustomed to doing. If you have burned sugar throughout the day, you prefer to burn sugar at night even when you are not eating. Your body does not store very much sugar and prefers to hold onto much of it and, therefore, you'll continue to manufacture sugar by a process called gluconeogenesis from lean body mass. You store fat -- and, in many people, lots of it -- in your "cupboard" and not very much sugar, because fat is the fuel that your body would prefer to store and later to burn to stay healthy.
However, when you eat sugar and fat together, your body will burn sugar first. I believe that it burns the sugar off because that is one way to get rid of it. Sugar causes damage by glycosylation and having it around too long is extremely damaging and accelerates aging.
Therefore, your body might get rid of sugar to minimize the damage caused by keeping it around. You'll have to burn off almost all the sugar that you eat before you can start burning fat and, in most cases, that means that the fat you have eaten with sugar gets stored. Your body continues to become adapted to burning sugar and not fat.
People get fat not so much because they eat fat, but because they have forgotten how to burn it, and because of poor hormonal communication.
Leptin Resistance
Leptin resistance causes an increase in visceral fat. This smothers your liver from receiving proper hormonal signals. Your liver is a very important metabolic organ and when it cannot listen to signals properly -- for instance from insulin -- it makes too much sugar contributing to insulin resistance and diabetes.
Insulin and Leptin Resistance
Obesity is the price you pay to keep your blood sugars down. If you continue making fat out of sugar, it takes sugar out of your bloodstream, keeping your blood sugars low. You continue getting fat and having poor insulin sensitivity, but are not yet diagnosed with diabetes.
However, your fat stores start leveling off. When you stop making fat and finally stop becoming more and more obese, your blood sugars rise because you have no place left to dump it into. A popular class of diabetic drug (the PPAR gamma agonists) works by making more fat cells to dump sugar into. They make you fatter but, once again, do not address the primary problem.
It is important to note that, contrary to the belief of almost everyone, the public and medical professionals alike, diabetes is not a disease of blood sugar: It is a disease of insulin signaling.
Lowering blood sugar without addressing the primary problem of insulin resistance gets you nowhere at best, and most of the time will make you worse. Just as you can become hard of hearing, so too do your cells become "hard of hearing." Two hormones that they have a difficult time listening to over time are insulin and leptin.
Just as increased noise exposure can cause increasing deafness, so does increasing insulin and leptin exposure cause your cells to become more and more deaf to the life-promoting messages that insulin and leptin are trying to deliver to them.
A Note on Health
We are really a colony of cells. We are not a single individual. We are 10 to 15 trillion individual cellular lives that are trying to live in harmony. It is only a testament to the fine behavior orchestrated by hormonal orders that we perceive our 10 trillion lives as a single individual. We are really a finely tuned ant colony or beehive.
Our 10 trillion lives are like an extremely cooperating military. The military is controlled by officers handing out orders. The officers comprise a hierarchy; some are generals, some are corporals, and some are captains. There are sergeants and privates. Insulin and leptin would most definitely be considered generals giving orders to many other hormones, many other subservient officers, which in turn must give orders to others.
I would consider cholesterol to be perhaps a corporal only because cholesterol itself can be made into more prominent officers, into other hormones. Glucose is nothing more than a private listening to orders.
It isn't the glucose that you want to change per se, but orders given to it. The same goes for cholesterol. If you want to be healthy, you must change the orders being handed out. That means changing hormonal signals as high up the hierarchy as one can. Fortunately, it is not that difficult to change those orders, or have those orders better heard and understood, especially of the two important generals: leptin and insulin.
Dr. Mercola's Comment:
Dr. Ron Rosedale is one of this country's leading experts on leptin, a hormone whose appreciation is where insulin's was 10 years ago. Over the past few months, he has been kind enough to expand on the new appreciation of leptina number of times on my web site.
The original draft of his book, The Rosedale Diet, has the best explanation of the science of leptin written; however, publishers are under pressure to sell books to the masses to make money, and therefore the book is edited to do so, and some of the science did not make it past the scissors.
The public's loss is your gain, as you are now able to read some excerpts of his original version that have not been previously published.
DR RON ROSEDALE'S 21st Century New Kid On The Block - LEPTIN!
Normally, leptin's function is to reduce appetite and induce fat burning (among many other functions). That is what high leptin signaling in a brain would do. Low leptin (in the brain) is an indication to eat more and store more fat (to successfully reproduce and to live long enough to do so).
However, elevated leptin in a fasting blood sample indicates leptin resistance and likely low leptin signaling to some parts of the brain while other parts of the brain get the full high signal. In other words, some of the brain only hears a whisper while other parts (of the brain and periphery) get screamed at.
Neither is Good Communication
Low leptin signaling getting through to the appetite center of the brain induces the brain to want to make the rest of your body hungry and will alter physiologic functions so as to make you store more fat. Ultimately, and finally, increasing fat stores should manufacture more leptin to overcome the resistance but, in the meantime, one continues to get fat and often ultimately obese.
This is similar to insulin resistance, when high fasting insulin indicates low activity in some parts of your body and a disruption in insulin signaling that is being compensated for by your pancreas making more insulin. What is lost, however, is your orchestration of insulin levels among various tissues. If your liver is insulin-resistant, it continues to make sugar out of protein, and if your muscles are insulin-resistant, they cannot burn that sugar either.
However, until your fat tissue becomes insulin-resistant, it continues to "hear" the high levels of insulin that are caused by the elevated sugar, and insulin's signals to fat tissue is to take that sugar, make fat out of it, and then store it. The positive side of this is that you're still able to take sugar out of the blood to make fat out of it. This keeps you from becoming diabetic, at least in the short-term.
In this regard, one could say that obesity is the price one pays to keep from becoming diabetic. One continues to gain weight until the adipose tissue ultimately becomes resistant. At this time, your "wastebasket" to store the excess sugar becomes full, sugar accumulates in your blood, and conventional medicine will diagnose you as a diabetic, though the root problem of insulin resistance and perhaps more importantly, leptin resistance, began decades prior (perhaps even before you were born if your mother was feeding you lots of sugar/starches when you were a fetus).
Leptin Resistance Distorts Hormone Levels Too
Likewise, when one becomes leptin-resistant, as indicated by high fasting leptin, once again you lose the fine orchestration of hormone levels. As the appetite control centers in your hypothalamus become leptin-resistant and cannot hear the message from leptin to curb hunger and stop storing fat, it believes that you do not have enough fat stores to live through a potential famine and you must eat more and make more fat.
Also lost is the knowledge of where to put that fat, and there is a preponderance stored in your abdomen, including your abdominal organs such as your liver, disrupting your liver's ability to listen to other signals such as those from insulin. This causes your liver to manufacture too much sugar from protein contributing to diabetes, and contributes importantly to the breakdown of your muscle and bone causing weakness and osteoporosis. The communication and knowledge of where to put calcium is also disrupted. Calcium is deposited in your blood vessels instead of your bone, which contributes to osteoporosis while calcifying and hardening your arteries.
However, it appears that the master control center of your sympathetic nervous system in your brain does not become leptin resistant, does not put in earplugs from the years of excess noise and it continues to hear the loud messages of elevated leptin causing overstimulation of your sympathetic nervous system. This can create serious problems to your health, including the following:
- Diabetes
- Elevated blood pressure
- Increases in blood coagulation
- Elevated T-3 and temperature
- Heart disease
- Increased inflammation
To summarize, normally leptin, secreted acutely in response to a meal or chronically in response to increasing fat stores, in a leptin-sensitive individual, will reduce hunger, increase fat burning and reduce fat storage.
However, when one is leptin-resistant -- as indicated by an elevation in fasting serum leptin -- the part of leptin's message that would normally reduce hunger and fat stores and increase fat burning does not get through to the brain (here mimicking low leptin), so one stays hungry and stores more fat, rather than burning it. However, the message to increase sympathetic nervous system activity gets through all too loudly and clearly, so one stays hungry, continues to get fat, and gets elevated sugar, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, heart disease and accelerated aging.
When one becomes more leptin-sensitive after following the program outlined in The Rosedale Diet, as indicated by a lower fasting leptin, all of a sudden your brain is able to hear leptin's messages much more clearly, and the now louder and more accurate message to your appetite control center and other parts of your hypothalamus to reduce hunger and get rid of some (lots of) stored fat gets heard. Now, your brain finally realizes that you have stored far too much fat, it is a danger to your well-being and the brain had better do something about it.
The lower leptin reduces the volume that your sympathetic nervous system hears. The hormone is making less "noise," but instead is allowing the orchestra to play the fine music that was originally written.
Dr. Mercola's Comment:
Dr. Ron Rosedale is one of America & Canada's leading experts on leptin, a hormone whose appreciation is where insulin's was 10 years ago. Over the past few months, he has been kind enough to expand on the new application of leptin a number of times for Mercola.com.
The original draft of his book, Thr Rosedale Diet, had the best explanation of the science of leptin written. However, publishers are under pressure to sell books to the masses to make money, thus his book was edited to do so, and much of the science did not make it past the scissors.
In this case, the public's loss is your gain, as you are now able to read some excerpts of his original version that have not been previously published.
DR RON ROSEDALE'S Insulin & Its Metabolic Effects Presented at Designs for Health Institute's BoulderFest, August 1999 Seminar by Dr Ron Rosedale
Case Histories
By-Pass Surgery
First, let's talk about a couple of case histories. These are actual patients that I've seen; let's start with patient A. This patient 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 IVs.
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 surgery, within two weeks he would be dead. He couldn't even walk from the car to the office without severe chest pain.
He was on 102 units of insulin and his blood sugars were 300 plus. He was on eight different medications for various things. But his first by-pass surgery was such a miserable experience that he said he would rather die than go through the second one. He came to me because he had heard that I might be able to prevent this.
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. He started an organization called "Heart Support of America" to educate people about the alternatives to by-pass surgery that have nothing to do with surgery or medication. That organization, as he last told me, had a mailing list of over a million people.
High Triglycerides/Cholesterol
Patient B is a 42-year-old man who was referred by patient A. He had a triglyceride level of 2200, a cholesterol level of 950 and was on maximum doses of all his medications. He was not fat at all; he was fairly thin.
This man was told that he had familial hyperlipidema and that he had better get his affairs in order, because if that was what his lipids were despite the best medications with the highest doses, he was in trouble.
Whenever I see a patient on any of those medications, they're off the very first visit. They have no place in medicine. He was taken off the medications and in six weeks his lipid levels, both his triglycerides and his cholesterol, were hovering around 220. After six more weeks, they were both under 200, off of the medications. As I said earlier, they have no place in medicine.
I should mention that this patient had a CPK that was quite elevated. It was circled on the lab report that he had brought in initially with a question mark by it because they didn't know why. The reason why was because he was eating off his muscles--if you take (gemfibrozole) and any of the HMG co-enzyme reductase inhibitors together, this is a common side effect, which is in the PDR; they shouldn't be given together.
So, he was chewing up his muscles, including his heart, which they were trying to treat. If indeed he were going to die, it would be that treatment that would kill him.
Severe Osteoporosis
Let's go to something totally different--a lady with severe osteoporosis. This fairly young woman was almost three standard deviations below the norm in both the hip femeral neck and the cervical vertebrae and was very worried about getting a fracture. She was put on a high-carbohydrate diet and told that this would be of benefit. She was also placed on estrogen, which is a fairly typical treatment.
They wanted to put her on some other medicines, but she wanted to know if there was an alternative. Although we didn't have as dramatic a turn around in this case, we did take her off the estrogen she was on and got her to one standard deviation below the norm in a year.
Severe Angina of the Leg
Claudication, that is, severe angina of the leg when you walk (this is the same thing as angina of the heart, except of the leg), is characterized by pain in the legs after walking a certain distance.
My stepfather had extremely severe claudication. It was a typical case; he would walk about fifty yards and then get severe, crampy pain in his legs. He was going to see the best doctors in Chicago, but they couldn't figure out what was wrong with him initially.
For example, he went to a neurologist who thought it might be neurological pain or back pain. Finally, he went to a vascular surgeon who thought it was vascular disease, so they did an arthrogram--sure enough he had severe vascular disease. They wanted to do the by-pass surgery that is typically done for this, and he was considering it because he had a trip planned to Europe in two weeks, and he wanted to be able to walk around.
Ten years prior he'd had an angioplasty for heart disease. At the time I'd told him to change his diet, but of course he didn't. This time, however, he listened. I said that if he did exactly as I told him, he could avoid the by-pass and be walking just fine in two weeks. Modulating this one aspect of his disease--I have never seen it fail--works very quickly to open up the artery.
High Cancer Risk
This patient had a mother and sister who had both died of breast cancer. I put her on the exact same treatment as the other cases I just mentioned, because they all had the same thing wrong with them.
A Problem with Typical Treatments
What would be the typical treatment of cardiovascular disease? First they check the cholesterol. To treat high cholesterol (over 200) they put you on cholesterol lowering drugs, which shut off your CoQ10. What does CoQ10 do? It is involved in the energy production and protection of little energy furnaces in every cell, so energy production goes way down.
A common side effect of people who are on all these HMG co-enzyme reductase inhibitors is that their arms feel heavy. Well, the heart is a muscle too, and it's going to feel heavy too.
One of the best treatments for a weak heart is CoQ10 (for congestive heart failure). But doctors have no trouble shutting CoQ10 production off so that they can treat a number.
The common therapy for osteoporosis is drugs, and the common therapy for calaudication is surgery. For cancer reduction there is nothing.
But all of these have a common cause--the same cause as three major avenues of research in aging, one of which is called caloric restriction.
Caloric Restriction Research
There have been thousands of studies done since the 1950s on caloric restriction of laboratory animals. If you restrict calories but maintain a high level of nutrition, called CRONs (Caloric Restriction with Optimal Nutrition), or adequate nutrition, CRANs (Caloric Restriction with Adequate Nutrition), these animals can live anywhere between 30 percent and 200 percent longer, depending on the species.
Researchers have tested caloric restriction on several dozen species, and the results are uniform throughout. They are doing it on primates now, and it seems to working with primates, though we won't know for sure for about another 10 years.
Centenarian studies
There are three major centenarian studies going on around the world. They are trying to find the variable that would confer longevity among this group of people who live to be 100 years old. Why do centenarians become centenarians? Why are they so lucky? Is it because they have low cholesterol, exercise a lot and live a healthy, clean life?
Well, the oldest person ever recorded was Jean Calumet of France who died last year at 122 years of age. She smoked all of her life and drank.
What researchers are finding from these major centenarian studies is that there is hardly anything in common among these people. They have high cholesterol and low cholesterol, some exercise and some don't, some smoke, some don't. Some are nasty as can be, some nice and calm and some are ornery.
But, they all have relatively low sugar for their age, and they all have low triglycerides for their age.
And, they all have relatively low insulin.
A Common Cause
Insulin is the common denominator in everything I've just talked about. They way to treat cardiovascular disease and the way I treated my stepfather, the way I treated the high risk cancer patient, and the osteoporosis and high blood pressure. The way to treat virtually all of the so-called chronic diseases of aging is to treat insulin itself.
The other major avenue of research in aging has to do with genetic studies of so-called lower organisms. We know the genetics involved. We've got the entire genes mapped out of several species of yeast and worms now. We think of life span as being fixed, sort of.
Humans tend to have an average life span of 76 years, and the maximum lifespan was this French lady at 122 years. In humans we feel this length of time is relatively fixed, but in lower forms of life it is very plastic. Lifespan is strictly a variable depending on the environment. Other species can live two weeks, two years or sometimes 20 years depending on what they want themselves to do, which depends very much on the environment.
If there is a lot of food around they are going to reproduce quickly and die quickly, if not they will just bide their time until conditions are better. We know now that the variability in lifespan is regulated by insulin.
Often it is thought that insulin's role is strictly to lower blood sugar. I once had a patient list off about eight drugs she was on and not even mention insulin. Insulin is not treated as a drug. In fact, in some places you don't even need a prescription, you can just get it over the counter, it's treated like candy.
Insulin is found in even single-celled organisms and has been around for several billion years. Its purpose, in some organisms, is to regulate lifespan. The way genetics works is that genes are not replaced, they are built upon. We have the same genes as everything that came before us--we just have more of them.
We have added books to our genetic library, but our base is the same. What we are finding is that we can use insulin to regulate lifespan too.
Aging is a Disease
If there is a single marker for lifespan, as they are finding in the centenarian studies, it is insulin, specifically insulin sensitivity.
How sensitive are your cells to insulin? When they are not sensitive, the insulin levels go up. Who has heard of the term insulin resistance?
Insulin resistance is the basis of all of the chronic diseases of aging, because the disease itself is actually aging.
We know now that aging is a disease. The other case studies that I mentioned, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, obesity, diabetes, cancer, all the so-called chronic diseases of aging and auto-immune diseases, those are symptoms.
If you have a cold and you go to the doctor, you have a runny nose. I did Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) for 10 years so I know what the common treatment for that is, a decongestant. I can't tell you how many patients I saw who had been given Sudafed by their family doctors for a cold who then came to see me afterward because of a really bad sinus infection.
What happens when you treat the symptom of a runny nose from a cold and you take a decongestant? Well, it certainly decongests you by shutting off the mucus, but why do you have the mucus? It's because your body is trying to clean and wash out the membranes. What else is in mucus? Secretory IgA, a very strong antibody to kill the virus. If there is no mucus, there is no secretory IgA.
Decongestants also constrict blood vessels, the little capillaries, or arterioles, that go to those capillaries, and the cilia, the little hair-like projections that beat to push mucus along to create a stream. They get paralyzed because they don't have blood flow, so there is no more ciliary movement.
What happens if you dam a stream and create a pond?
In days you've got larvae growing, but if the stream is moving, you are fine. You need a constant stream of mucus to get rid of and prevent an infection. I am going into this in some detail because in almost all cases, if you treat a symptom you are going to make the disease worse. The symptom is there as your body's attempt to heal itself.
Now, the medical profession is continually segregating more and more symptoms into diseases--they call the symptoms diseases. Using ENT for example, a patient will walk out of the office with a diagnosis of Rhinitis, which is inflammation of the nose. Is there a reason why that patient has inflammation of the nose? I think so. Wouldn't that underlying cause be the disease as opposed to the descriptive term of Rhinitis or Pharyngitis?
Someone can have the same virus and have Rhinitis, Pharyngitis or Sinusitis. They can have all sorts of "itis's," which is a descriptive term for inflammation. That is what the code will be, and that is what the disease will be. So they treat what they think is the disease, but which actually is just a symptom.
The same thing happens with cholesterol. If you have high cholesterol it is called hypercholesterolemia. Hypercholesterolemia has become the code for the disease when it is only the symptom. So doctors treat that symptom, and what are they doing to the heart? Messing it up.
What you have to do if you are going to treat any disease is get to the root of the disease. If you keep pulling a dandelion out by its leaves, you are not going to get very far. But the problem is that we don't know what the root is.
The root is known in many other areas of science, but the problem is that medicine really isn't a science; it is a business (but I don't want to get into that, we could talk for hours).
You really need to look at the root of what is causing the problem. We can use that cold as a further example.
Why does that person have a cold?
If he saw the doctor, the doctor might tell him to take an antibiotic along with the decongestant. You see this all the time because the doctor wants to get rid of the patient. In almost all cases of an upper respiratory infection, it is a virus, and the antibiotic is going to do worse than nothing, because it is going to kill the bacterial flora in the gut and impair the immune system, making the immune system worse.
The patient might see someone else more knowledgeable who will say, "No, you caught a virus, don't do anything, go home and sleep, let your body heal itself." That's better. You might see someone else who would ask why you caught a virus without being out there trying to hunt for viruses with a net. We are breathing viruses every day; right now we are breathing viruses, cold viruses and rhinoviruses.
So why doesn't everybody catch a cold tomorrow?
The Chinese will tell you that it is because the milieu has to be right, if the Chinese were to quote the French. Your body has to be receptive to that virus--only if your immune system is depressed will it allow that virus to take hold.
So maybe a depressed immune system is the disease. You can be given a bunch of vitamin C because your immune system is depressed and it is likely that the person has a vitamin C deficiency. That's where most of us are at right now, where we would recommend a bunch of vitamin C to try to pick up the immune system.
But why is the vitamin C not working? Vitamin C is made in almost all living mammals except humans and a couple of other species. Vitamin C is made directly from glucose and actually has a similar structure; they compete for one another.
It has been known for many decades that sugar depresses the immune system. It was only in the 70s that they found out that vitamin C was needed by white blood cells so that they could phagocytize bacteria and viruses. White blood cells require a fifty times higher concentration, at least inside the cell as outside, so they have to accumulate vitamin C.
There is something called a phagocytic index, which tells you how rapidly a particular macrophage or lymphocyte can gobble up a virus, bacteria or cancer cell. In the 70s Linus Pauling knew that white blood cells needed a high dose of vitamin C and that is when he came up with his theory that you need high doses of vitamin C to combat the common cold.
But if we know that vitamin C and glucose have similar chemical structure, what happens when sugar levels go up? They compete for one another upon entering the cells. And the thing that mediates the entry of vitamin C into the cells is the same thing that mediates the entry of glucose into the cells. If there is more glucose around then less vitamin C will be allowed into the cell, and it doesn't take much glucose to have this effect. A blood sugar value of 120 reduces the phagocytic index 75 percent.
Here we are getting a little bit further down into the roots of disease. It doesn't matter what disease you are talking about, whether you are talking about a common cold or cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis or cancer, the root is always going to be at the molecular and cellular level, and I will tell you that insulin is going to have its hand in it, if not totally control it.
What is the purpose of insulin?
As I mentioned earlier, in some organisms it is to control their lifespan. What is the purpose of insulin in humans? Your doctor will say that it's to lower blood sugar, but I will tell you right now that that is a trivial side effect. Insulin's evolutionary purpose as is known right now, we are looking at other possibilities, is to store excess nutrients.
We come from a time of feast and famine when if we couldn't store the excess energy during times of feasting, we would not be here because all of our ancestors encountered famine. We are only here because our ancestors were able to store nutrients, which they were able to do because they were able to elevate their insulin in response to any elevation in energy that the organism encountered.
When your body notices that sugar is elevated, it is a sign that you've got more than you need; you're not burning it so it is accumulating in your blood. So insulin will be released to take that sugar and store it. How does it store it? Glycogen?
Your body stores very little glycogen at any one time. All the glycogen stored in your liver and muscle wouldn't last you through one active day. Once you fill up your glycogen stores that sugar is stored as saturated fat, 98 percent of which is palmitic acid.
So the idea of the medical profession recommending a high complex-carbohydrate, low-saturated-fat diet is an absolute oxymoron. A high-complex-carbohydrate diet is nothing but a high-glucose diet, or a high-sugar diet. Your body is just going to store it as saturated fat, and the body makes it into saturated fat quite readily.
Insulin's Other Roles
Insulin doesn't just store carbohydrates, by the way. Somebody mentioned that it is an anabolic hormone, and it absolutely is. Body builders are injecting themselves with insulin because it builds muscle and stores protein.
Magnesium
A less known fact is that insulin also stores magnesium. But if your cells become resistant to insulin, you can't store magnesium so you lose it through urination.
Dr. Mercola's Comment:
This article is essentially a transcription of a lecture given by Dr. Rosedale at BoulderFest back in 1999, and more relevant than ever.
Note to readers: The above article was taken from my email newsletter mailings from Dr Mercola's website.
www.mercola.com.
DISCLAIMER:
Not intended to diagnose, prescribe for, treat, or claim to prevent, mitigate or cure any disease. The statements made on these web pages have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Consumers are cautioned to read all labels and follow all directions. Some of our products contain stimulants such as caffeine. Some of our products contain ingredients from shellfish sources. If you have a disease (such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes) or a medical condition (such as pregnancy) or are under the age of 18, you should consult with your physician before using these products. We do not sell stimulants to minors.
