low testosterone levels put men at risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and early death?? One study shows that testosterone treatment reduces LDL cholesterol and increases HDL cholesterol.? Another study that looked at the cause of death in almost 2000 men aged 20 to 79 years.? The men with low testosterone at the start of the study had a 2.5 times greater risk of dying during the next ten years compared with men with higher testosterone levels.? These studies, and more, will be presented at The Endocrine Society’s annual meeting, in San Francisco, suggest that testosterone therapy has several positive effects.
(Vitacost.com Daily Health Tip; June, 2008)

Despite what your eye doctor may say, there are natural, common-sense strategies you can employ to help protect your healthy vision.

1. Quit smoking, if you currently do. Smoking ramps up free radical production throughout your body, and puts you at risk for less-than-optimal health in many ways. If you want healthy vision for your whole life, you cannot afford to risk less-than-optimal eye health with cigarettes.
2. Lose weight. If your over weight you’re going to have all the negative effects associated with being over weight or obese like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, which can harm your eyes.
3. Care for your cardiovascular system. High blood pressure can cause damage to the minuscule blood vessels on your retina, obstructing free blood flow.
4. Normalize your blood sugar. Excessive sugar in your blood can pull fluid from the lens of your eye, affecting your ability to focus. And, it can damage the blood vessels in your retina, also obstructing blood flow.
5. Eat plenty of fresh dark green leafy vegetables. Studies have shown that a diet rich in dark leafy greens helps support eye health. And that those with the highest consumption of carotenoid-rich vegetables, especially ones rich in lutein and zeaxanthin, had increased vision health.
6. Consume omega-3 rich foods. Consume fresh caught salmon, or use a reputable omega – 3 supplement. A study published in the August 2001 issue of Archives of Ophthalmology found that consuming omega-3 fatty acids was protective of your healthy vision.

Mercola.com

A study published in Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Disease, 28 February, 2009, found vitamin K consumption to strongly reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. This finding surfaced with an analysis of a cohort study, Prospect-EPIC, consisting of 16,057 women aged between 49 and 70, none of whom had cardiovascular disease at the start of the study. To the surprise of many, those who got their vitamin K from plant forms by eating lots of leafy vegetables did not fare better than the normal population. However, those women who got their vitamin K from animal sources like whole eggs, cheese, goose liver, and animal fats had substantially reduced incidence of cardiovascular disease.
Enig, Mary., and Sally Fallon. ?Caustic commentary? Wise Traditions, 2009;(10)2:11

Unfortunately, the researchers are calling for vitamin K2 supplementation not a healthy diet consisting of animal products, which would yield a whole host of other health benefits.

Dr. James Stein, MD from the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison, praised the JUPITER study for exposing the fact that current therapeutic LDL-cholesterol levels are not only arbitrary, but are in fact a poor indicator of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. ?Most patients with heart attacks have normal cholesterol values,? he stated. With the cholesterol theory crumbling the industry is under intense pressure to come up with a new risk factor, and one that can be treated with the same statin drugs they have invested so much money in. Enter Dr. Ridker and C-reactive protein (CRP). Ridker has been pushing treating CRP with statins for years. But is CRP a risk factor? A National Panel on CRP found no evidence treating CRP levels will improve survival rates (www.urmc.rochester.edu/pr/News/story.cfm?id=182). Elevated CRP levels are associated with many things including; anger, stress, arthritis, cancer, lupus, pneumonia, TB, oral contraceptive use, pregnancy, heart attacks, surgery, trauma, intense exercise, etc. It?s a marker for disease, not the cause. But since statins lower CRP levels slightly, you can count on CRP becoming the new cholesterol. The public will be made to fear CRP, be tested for it, and be put on dangerous statins to lower it. What a racket.

Saturated fat found mainly in animal products has been vilified by physicians, the media, and the edible oil industry for over 60 years, despite mounds of evidence to the contrary. A meta-analysis of 21 prospective epidemiologic studies that had a total of 347,747 participants, showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease or stroke.

Saturated fats have been nourishing societies around the world for thousands of years. If animal fats (saturated fats) are so dangerous, and vegetable oils (polyunsaturated fat) are so healthy, why are we so unhealthy as a nation? The scientific data of the past and present does not support the assertion that saturated fats cause heart disease. As a matter of fact, people who have had a heart attack haven?t eaten any more saturated fat than other people, and the degree of atherosclerosis at autopsy is unrelated to diet.Ravnskov, Uffe. ?The cholesterol Myths: Myth number 4?

Coronary heart disease is associated with diet. Nutritional recommendations are frequently provided, but few long term studies on the effect of food choices on heart disease are available. We followed coronary heart disease morbidity and mortality in a cohort of 1752 rural men participating in a prospective observational study. Dietary choices were assessed at baseline with a food questionnaire. 138 men were hospitalized or deceased owing to coronary heart disease during the 12 year follow-up. Daily intake of fruit and vegetables was associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease when combined with a high dairy fat consumption, but not when combined with a low dairy fat consumption. Consuming wholemeal bread or eating fish at least twice a week showed no association with the outcome.

Food Choices and Coronary Heart Disease: A Population Based Cohort Study of Rural Swedish Men with 12 Years of Follow-up

Today in the United States one person will die from CVD every 37 seconds. This year in the U.S. over 1.2 million people will have a heart attack and just short of half will die. Approximately 80,000,000 people or roughly 25% of The U.S. has cardiovascular disease(CVD). It became our number one killer in the 1950′s and has not slowed down.(1)

Do you believe consuming saturated fat and cholesterol cause CVD? Do you believe eating polyunsaturated oils like canola and corn oil are not only good for you but lower your risk of CVD. If you answered yes to both of these questions, you are among the 10′s of millions who need to be enlightened by reading my article “Fats, Cholesterol and the Lipd Hypothesis”.

The truth is, saturated fat and cholesterol have nothing to do with your risk of cardiovascular disease. As a matter of fact there are many studies that show that people who have heart attacks do not eat anymore saturated fat than people who don’t have heart attacks. More-over the degree of atherosclerosis at autopsy, in heart attack victims, is unrelated to diet. It is also interesting to note that half of all heart attack victims do not have “clogged” arteries.

I have personally witnessed and cared for many patients who were experiencing (the big one) massive heart attacks in the emergency room. The degree of blockage had a wide range with the most common seemingly being between 80, 90 percent. But the interesting thing was, some people literally had no plaque what-so-ever according to cath lab reports. It was during my time working in emergency department, because of so many discrepancies, that I became very curious about what actually caused CVD.

Too much or too little sleep can boost your risk of death, British researchers report.

“In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping seven or eight hours a night is optimal for health,” study author Jane E. Ferrie, of University College London Medical School, said in a prepared statement.

Her team studied more than 8,000 people, aged 35 to 55, who were followed for a number of years.

Among participants who slept six, seven or eight hours a night at the start of the study, a decrease in nightly sleep duration was associated with a 110 percent excess risk of cardiovascular-related death.

Similarly, among those who slept seven or eight hours per night at the start of the study, an increase in nightly sleep duration was associated with a 110 percent excess risk of non-cardiovascular death.

The study appears in the Dec. 1 issue of Sleep.

On average, most adults need seven to eight hours of sleep per night to feel well-rested and alert, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

An analysis of the Prospect ? EPIC cohort, which consisted of 16057 post menopausal women between the ages of 49 ? 70, found vitamin K reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). None of the participants had CVD at the start of the study. Those who got their vitamin K by eating leafy green vegetables had the same risk of CVD as the general population. Those who obtained their vitamin K by eating whole eggs, cheese, goose liver, and animal fats had a substantially reduced incidence of CVD when compared to the general population. (Wise Traditions 2009;10(2):11)

We are continuously told to reduce our sodium intake by eating a low sodium diet. Dr.s, dietitians, and nutritionists insist it’s good for our cardiovascular system especially if one has cardiovascular disease. But is it?

Salt induced hypertension, despite what you’ve heard, is very uncommon. More-over, the vast majority of people who switch to a diet low in sodium have no change in blood pressure and may be doing more harm than good. According to a cohort study of 7154 individuals, sodium is inversely related to cardiovascular mortality.

After adjusting for variables, low sodium consumption was associated with a 37% greater risk for cardiovascular disease mortality, and 28% increased risk of all-cause mortality.