What if we challenge some of these assumptions:
Heredity
My mom and dad both have Type II diabetes. My mother had a quadruple bypass in 2013. My paternal grandfather died of a heart attack. My maternal grandparents both died of cancer.I'm screwed...
I am beginning to think genetics plays a different role in what I'm being told because if diabetes were hereditary, why didn't my grandparents have it?? Or their parents? Doesn't it seem strange that diabetes and heart disease is getting worse? If it's being passed down like old family photos, then I should see a pattern that is clearly absent.
Look at this for diabetes:
Rate per 100 of Civilian, Noninstitutionalized Population with Diagnosed Diabetes, by Age, United States, 1980–2011
Heart disease:
The Coronary Heart Disease Epidemic
And here is a general search engine called WONDER from the CDC for causes of death.
CDC WONDER
I would argue that due to genetic origins, your metabolism might be predisposed for certain dietary needs. If you ignore those needs, then combine that with a sedentary lifestyle, THAT could be root cause. In other words, instead of seeing diabetes as the inevitable result of genetics, perhaps if you just eat the right things and get some exercise, you never have to go down that road.
The above is NOT a revelation, or it sure shouldn't be. We know diabetes is a metabolic disease. So is coronary heart disease (CHD). Eat crap. Sit on ass. Get sick.
Note - metabolic is the part that should be striking.
me·tab·o·lism [məˈtabəˌlizəm] noun
the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life.
What do we know?
Fact: You should get most of your calories from healthy whole grains and cerealsWait - The western diet and lifestyle and diseases of civilization
The net here is - if you look at hunter gatherer populations, they don't have our problems. If you give them McDonald's and Coca Cola, they develop them. Take the crap away again, and they go back to healthy.
Their natural diets are high protein + high fat.
"Forks over Knives" links protein to cancer, but I recently watched a TED talk about angiogenesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiogenesis) that talks about how the circulatory system can adapt and grow or shrink based on what our bodies need. i.e. to get more blood to an injury, more vessels can grow to affect that, then trim back when no longer needed. Your body can actually bypass a clogged artery (which doctors call a "natural bypass"). I point that only because the point of the talk was that well-fed cancer flourishes. If you starve it, it stalls or even goes into remission. What if reducing protein means we starve the cancer? Would that not also imply that we are starving ourselves?? Another argument to that is that "back in the day" your ancestors didn't get 3 squares a day... they ate when there was food, which means they probably had to fast sometimes. Perhaps this allows the body to detox and heal itself vs constantly having to digest the crap we put in our bodies today. Hmm...
Fact: High cholesterol causes heart disease.
Wait - Most heart attack patients' cholesterol levels did not indicate cardiac risk
"75% of heart attack victims had normal cholesterol"... come again??
If high cholesterol is the reason for heart disease, which is the cause of heart attacks, then something in this article doesn't make sense. If your cholesterol is good, you won't die of a heart attack, right?? WRONG!
How did that make you feel? Are you on a statin?? Did your doctor mention CoQ10?
CoQ10 and Statins: What You Need to Know
I have had 4 separate doctors prescribe a statin, and nobody ever said "Take CoQ10 as well Carric". Supposedly it has been known for like a decade that statins block the a fundamental process that makes cholesterol, but it also the process that produces CoQ10 (and a few other vital hormones). What are we doing??!! The answer: we really have no idea, so we need to stop dicking around with what has evolved as an almost perfect system!!! We are treating symptoms that don't even tie back to any root cause...
Also, as it turns out, we don't even get the story on cholesterol. I'm sure you have been told "Your LDL cholesterol is high, and HDL is low. Let's get you on [insert harmful poison] as a vital imperative". There are at least two kinds of LDL, one of which is not harmful. I read the Brits recently discovered a third that is "glycated", meaning it's sugary sweet and even more sitcky. LDL B is the bad stuff. It's tiny particles that get into your arterial wall, then when they oxidize, your body responds as it would to any foreign body. Inflammatory response.
If heart disease has nothing to do with cholesterol, then what is root cause? My research indicates inflammation, which is actually caused by what we are putting into our bodies. The trick is, if you do research on what you should and should not eat, you will get a million different answers. We keep adjusting the food pyramid for US citizens. Well, how the hell is that working out for us?? Not that anyone actually follows it, but look at what we DO eat, and you may find a pattern. We vilify fat, but it's almost always mixed with tons of sugar. Ansel Keys' data was cherry picked (the guy who is responsible for linking fat to heart disease - do the research vs just taking my word) too. So what to do? Well, I know "paleo" is a popular fad, but honestly - what did your ancestors eat?? What did the pioneers eat? They lived hard lives, but they didn't have heart disease and diabetes.
Chronic
Once you have it - you just have to live with it forever. I don't like that idea... So I found this book called "How to Cure Diabetes" by Dr. Sherry Rogers, and it gave me real hope. Have I cured it? No, but I'm making progress. When I cut out carbs, and eat grass-fed meat, olive oil, avocado, butter from grass fed cows, vegetables (no fruit), my blood sugar slowly works its way down to normal. Now, I will state the caveat that I changed a lot of things at once, which was stupid because it doesn't help me isolate cause and effect, but I was actually struggling until I added "intermittent fasting". Most of us feel HORROR at that word, but I read a book on it:
Cristian Vlad Zot, Richard David Feinman
and while I feel it was slightly "hokey", I think it's good information. The author is Romanian and clearly didn't ask a native American to edit his content, but I have no issues with that. It just means some of the expressions are a bit odd, and I'm "pretty sure I know what he meant". The net is: we can go hungry, and it's not the end of the world. Reading about people going 10, 30, 389 days with no food was an eye-opener. I know - it sound crazy, but you should be challenging what you think you know.
A few of the things I'm taking and have read about:
Acetyl L-Carnitine - I have read it can assist with nerve demyelination, and is being used to help treat MS. Why? My goes feel a bit fuzzy a good bit of the time because I ignored my diabetes. I'd like to get things back to normal, thank you very much.
Magnesium - I take some stuff called "Natural Vitality Natural Calm Magnesium Powder" (you can get it on Amazon, where I get all my supps). I mix in a few things for a "detox" drink once or twice a day.
Vitamin C - I buy the powder and mix in my detox drink above.
Vitamin E -pretty fundamental anti-oxidant. The more I read, the more I believe it's a must.
Glutathione - Recommend you just do some of your own research. From what I can gather, it's a major anti-oxidant, and helps your body detox.
COQ10 - essential anti-oxidant. Most concentrated in the heart.
I take some other things, but the above is most of it, and based on my reading has been confirmed as a good part a supplement stack.
Why do I take these? Well, I mentioned "inflammation" above in relation to cholesterol and heart disease. I am reading this book right now:
Stephen Sinatra, Jonny Bowden
These doctors argue that CHD comes from inflammation, which is a natural and healthy process in the body - but not when it is systemic and chronic.
The more I read, the more I'm convinced that it is this chronic inflammation, caused by a MYRIAD of factors, that leads us to all of our modern problems, so you have to try and figure out why so much inflammation to really vet this out, and this is again where things get a bit muddy.
I have read peanuts are inflammatory as well as toxins like plastic (regardless of whether or not it has BPA's), pesticides, steroids, hormones, mold toxins, etc. All of these things provoke an immune system response, which results in inflammation.
A few years back I read about people arguing that we MUST detox. I researched further and found medical doctors debunking this saying "Our bodies are designed to detox. Let it do it's thing, and quit eating weird stuff and shoving things up your bottom". I put the matter to rest, and decided not to worry about it.
With my current set of issues, more data, and more thought - I would tend to agree that toxicity is part of the problem. We are bombarded by crap constantly from various energy sources (appliances, phones, the sun), the water, the things we eat are brimming with poison. I would agree that under normal, natural circumstances (i.e. before the industrial age and gross consumption of processed foods) that yes, the body could probably deal with all that, and we would be fine.
I would say it's a different story these days. You should really do some research on what GMO means, and look at the ingredients on food labels. There is plenty of stuff online up on youtube, and on Netflix as well as books and Internet resources. Some of it comes across as a bit "kooky conspiracy theory", but I believe there is a thread of truth in it.
Pair the likely "toxic load" we all suffer along with inflammation caused by sugar, stress, nuts, omega-6 fatty acids, oxidation of our body's cells from free radicals, and it starts to feel like perhaps we should be helping our natural systems with less crap, and the things it needs to purge and heal itself. Anti-oxidants pair with free radicals so they aren't destroying your cells, and avoiding some of the toxic stuff in our society has to have a positive net effect.
The real question is: if we provide a more healthy set of circumstances for our bodies to flourish, will they get all the way back to healthy?
Losing the fat is KEY. I recently ready it's now considered an organ, so if you are above 30% body fat (buy a scale that measures this - even if it's not 100% accurate, it gives you an idea), your systems are utterly out of whack.
We were not designed to carry tons extra fat around beyond a certain point. Some is fine to make it through the times in our species' past when there was no food. You can go for quite some time on JUST water, and while I have not yet tried it, I understand that once you get past the initial withdrawal from carbs and your body switches to burning fat, it's vaguely euphoric (and getting the brain to run on keytones is supposed to yield mental clarity according to the Bulletproof guys).
I want to still believe we aren't being lied to, but I think we are, and the misinformation is so pervasive that even doctors who want to do the right thing are giving bad advice.
I don't want to regurgitate a book's worth of content, and I could go on for a lot longer, but I think this is a good start. The message is: have hope, and ask questions. There may be a way to get the body back on track so it heals itself, and if you can reshape behavior early (like how you feed your kids), maybe we could turn this thing around.
We are living longer despite the adversity we are creating for ourselves, but I think we could absolutely live a hell of a lot better. That's what I'm after personally. Look good - feel good - enjoy life.
Stop treating the necessary, self-inflicted diseases (especially with this asinine symptom-centric nonsense approach) and start preventing it.
