Category: Cholesterol levels (Page 5 of 5)

B vitamin possible cure for Alzheimer’s

One out of every eight Americans gets it, and 47% of those who reach 85 years of age have it. Up to now Alzheimer’s was a disease without a remedy. Sure, there are nutritional or drug based substances that slow the symptoms, but If nothing else killed you Alzheimer’s would over a period of time.

Up until recently Alzheimer’s patients took medications just to be able to dress, bathe, use a phone, and other basic necessary functions by themselves a while longer. A team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, has announced the discovery of a true cure for Alzheimer?s. The best part of this cure is it’s cheap and widely accessible. The cure is vitamin B3, nicotinamide, or more commonly referred to as niacinamide.

Kim Green, Ph.D., director of the team at the University of California, Irvine, bought a year?s supply of niacinamide for $30 and stirred it into the drinking water of forty lab mice, half of which were
specially bred to get Alzheimer’s disease.

After treating the mice for only four months, he discovered what should have been front-page news in every city in the world. ?Cognitively, they were cured,? said Dr. Green. ?They performed as if they?d never developed the disease.?

All the researchers in the study were both astonished and excited. Rarely do you hear researchers using the word ?cured,? but that?s exactly what happened.

At the end of the study, the diseased mice that were treated with niacinamide performed just as well in memory tests as healthy mice! The niacinamide not only protected their brains from further memory loss, but incredibly, it also restored lost memory function.

Human trials are underway.

The earliest indicator of coming Alzheimer?s may not be a memory test at all, but a test of your sense of balance.

Dr. Kaufman often tested the impact of niacinamide on balance, and my colleague Julian Whitaker, M.D., editor of Health & Healing, uses it as a test of aging. Borrowing a bit from both of them, here is how you can test yourself:

1. Stand on an uncarpeted floor barefoot or in low-heeled shoes. Close your eyes and balance on your right foot. Slowly draw the heel of your left foot up to where it touches your right kneecap. Don?t wave your arms for balance, just see how long you can stand there. (If you?re accident-prone, have somebody to catch you.)

2. Do the same standing on your left foot.

3. Repeat #1 and #2.

Then average your four scores.

The average by age group is:

Your Age – Seconds
Up to 20 – 30
30?39 – 25
40?49 – 15
50?59 – 10
60?69 – 7
70+ – 5

Why such a large difference between ages? It?s because certain nerve fibers in your spinal column tell your brain the location and angle of each joint in your body…but if you stop assimilating enough B vitamins, the fibers eventually stop sending their messages upstairs?and that?s definitely a pre-Alzheimer?s condition.

Statins benefits do not outweigh risks.

A review of the literature by the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, cites nearly 900 studies which show adverse effect of statins, which are widely used in treating high cholesterol. Researchers report that muscle adverse effects are the most commonly reported problem in the literature and by patients. Adverse effects are dose dependent, and risks are amplified by drug interactions, thyroid disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and genetics.

The risk of adverse side effects goes up as age goes up, and this helps to explain why statins benefits have not been found to exceed their risks. Unfortunately, researchers report the physician awareness of statin side effects is low.

Statin side effects may include:
Increased cancer risk
Sexual dysfunction
Immune system suppresion
Cognitive loss
Neuropathy (numbness, tingling in extremities)
Anemia
Cataracts
Hepatic dysfunction.
Pancreatic dysfunction

American Journal of Cardiovascular Drugs

Good Calories, Bad Calories By Gary Taubes

For decades we have been taught that fat is bad for us, carbohydrates are good, and that the key to a healthy weight is eating less and exercising more. Yet with more and more people acting on this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. With seven years of research, Taubes argues persuasively that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates (white flour, sugar, easily digested starches) ?via their dramatic effect on insulin, the hormone that regulates fat accumulation?and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the numbers. There are good calories, and bad ones. Taubes traces how the common assumption that carbohydrates are fattening was abandoned in the 1960’s when fat and cholesterol were blamed for heart disease and then?wrongly?were seen as the causes of a host of other maladies, including cancer. He shows us how these unproven hypotheses were emphatically embraced by authorities in nutrition, public health, and clinical medicine, in spite of how well-conceived clinical trials have consistently refuted them. He also documents the dietary trials of carbohydrate-restriction, which consistently show that the fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be.

Good Calories Bad Calories is the end of the debate about the foods we consume and their effects on us.

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