Statins – Children next?

Last week I raised concerns about the routine prescribing of statins, and now from the USA comes news that the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee has recommended routine screening of children, from 2 years old, for “high cholesterol”. Given the deterioration in children’s’ diets you may think that a good idea, but not when it is accompanied by the news that they are also recommending giving children as young as eight years old statin drugs. These drugs have never even been tested on children, never mind approved for their use – in fact not one single safety test has ever been conducted with children taking these powerful chemicals.

I am not going to repeat the side effects that I gave last week, but if they have such an impact on adults, can you imagine what they will do to children? Schools are having enough disciplinary problems as it is, without adding in children on drugs that can cause homicidal impulses and mental confusion. No one denies that more children are now presenting with high cholesterol levels, but surely the answer lies in controlling their diet and ensuring enough exercise? The main ‘culprits’ if a child is diagnosed with high cholesterol at the age of eight are the consumption of too great a quantity of these:

* Milk and dairy products
* Fried foods and trans fatty acids
* Processed meats and animal products

Nutritionists believe that virtually any child can be cured of high cholesterol in a matter of weeks by being fed a 100% plant-based diet, comprised entirely of non-processed foods, and including fresh, raw vegetable and fruit juices along with numerous superfoods such as apples, broccoli, wholemeal bread, salmon, bananas and brazil nuts. Simple, yes, and certainly better than putting a child on a drug regime that they could be kept on for years.

Progesterone use for endometriosis

Last week I talked about progesterone and mental health, and just like buses along comes another story about this key female hormone. I have myself written for the endometriosis society in the past about how progesterone can help with endometriosis, and now a study on female rhesus macaques monkeys at the the Oregon National Primate Research Center has brought more proof of the hormone’s effectiveness.

Apparently, female macaques in captivity are prone to endometriosis – a painful, debilitating condition where bits of tissue scattered around the pelvic cavity behave like uterine (endometrial) tissue, filling with blood and then releasing it. Conventional medicine hasn’t had much success in treating endometriosis safely and effectively, but Dr.John Lee, noting that women with endometriosis often get better when they are pregnant, recommended using high doses of natural progesterone and indeed, many of his patients found relief, though not a cure, by doing this.

In the Center’s study, seven monkeys with advanced endometriosis were injected with capsules that released progesterone continuously for up to 20 months. All of the monkeys showed significant benefit within the first two weeks and although two monkeys then got no further benefit, the other five continued to do well. If you know someone suffering from this painful condition it would be worth suggesting they talk to their doctor about obtaining natural progesterone in cream or sub- lingual form – don’t treat it with yam cream which converts insufficient progesterone in the body to be of use.

Natural progesterone cannot be obtained in the UK without a doctor’s prescription, but you can buy it over the internet and import it for your own use with no restrictions.

The secrets of longevity – Part 1

I imagine that you, like me, want to live as long as possible – but, I want to have a healthy, active life too. How to achieve that has been the subject of much research and debate, and I have found evidence of three different communities who seem to have achieved this. People on the remote Japanese island of Okinawa, in the small Sardinian mountain town of Ovodda and at Loma Linda in the USA live longer in these three places than anywhere else on earth.

At an age when the average Briton is predicted to die (77 years for men and 81 for women) – inhabitants of these three places are looking forward to many more years of good health. Often they’re still working in jobs as demanding as heart surgery.

Their reasons are not all the same, so I thought I would share their secrets with you over the next three weeks.

Let’s start with the Japanese island of Okinawa. With a population of one million, they have 900 centenarians, four times higher than the average in Britain or America. Even more remarkably, the region of Ovodda is the only place in the world where as many men as women live to be 100 years of age, which goes against the global trend of women outliving men.

There is one remarkable scientific fact that sets Okinawans apart from the rest of us, they actually age more slowly than almost anyone else on earth.

“The calendar may say they’re 70 but their body says they’re 50,” says Bradley Willcox, a scientist who is researching the extraordinary phenomenon. “The most impressive part of it is that a good lot of them are healthy until the very end.”

Finding the cause of their exceptional longevity is not simple but the spotlight has fallen on one hormone – DHEA. It’s a precursor of both oestrogen and testosterone and produced in the adrenal glands. While scientists don’t know what it does, they do know that the hormone decreases with age and levels decline at a much slower rate among the Okinawans.

Explanations for this seem most likely to be found in their diet as they not only eat more tofu and soya products than any other population in the world, but have what scientists refer to it as a rainbow diet. That is one that also includes a wide range of different vegetables and fruit, all rich in anti-oxidants.

That sounds familiar enough, but it’s what they don’t eat that may be at the heart of their exceptionally long lives.

The Okinawan’s most significant cultural tradition is known as hara hachi bu, which translated means eat until you’re only 80% full. In a typical day they only consume around 1,200 calories, about 20% less than most people in the UK. The ‘all you can eat’ buffet is not something that would appear in Okinawa, and this voluntary calorie restriction is not fully understood by scientists call it caloric restriction, but they think it works by sending a signal to the body that there is going to be a impending famine, sending it into a more protective, self-preservation mode.

“It’s this ability to trick their bodies into starvation that may be keeping Okinawans physiologically so young. It’s a stark contrast with the cultural habits that drive food consumption in other parts of the world,” says Mr Willcox – and he has studied them long enough, so he should know.

So, if you want to live longer, eat less. Start with smaller portions on a smaller plate, your body will thank you for it. If your family have expectations of an early pay out from your will, then they may of course not be quite so pleased!

Natural baby products

As you saw in last week’s item about shampoo, products for babies and children are not always as pure as we imagine them to be. If you do want to have an entirely natural, organic range of products then specialist online company Bebeco would be a good place to look.

They produce a nappy balm that is super sensitive on baby’s skin and contains only organic sunflower oil, cocoa butter, carrot oil, coconut oil, olive oil, and local beeswax. If your baby has a real problem with dry skin and eczema, then their problem skin cream helps soothe it with all-natural ingredients of organic sunflower oil, organic calendula petals, local beeswax, and lavender essential oil. If cradle cap is the problem then try their treatment oil with organic jojoba oil, organic calendula, marshmallow root, and almond oil. It also makes a lovely massage oil for baby, and presumably Mum too. www.bebeco.co.uk for details.

Oh, and by the way, on the subject of babies, it has always been know that breastfeeding gives much greater protection against infection and helps build the immune system, but now it turns out there is another good reason to keep off the bottle where possible.

A massive survey carried out by doctors of 13,889 children and their mothers has revealed that breastfed babies are more intelligent than those weaned on formula milk.

Of those mothers, around half had attended clinics promoting breastfeeding and 43% of them fed their babies only on breast milk until the age of three months, compared with 6.4% of women at other clinics that didn’t promote breastfeeding. At the age of six and a half, children who had been exclusively breastfed scored 7.5 points higher in verbal intelligence tests and 5.9 points higher in overall IQ tests.

As a significant number of babies are actually allergic to cow’s milk, this is another reason to add to the file of pluses for breastfeeding, where that is possible for mother and baby.

Statins – Saint or sinner?

Many of you will have heard of Patrick Holford, the UK’s leading nutrition expert, and I have known him for many years. Indeed I edited his Optimum Nutrition magazine for a while and always find what he has to say of interest.

The topic of statins has come up a lot recently, particularly when I have been giving talks on natural health, and there seems to be a lot of confusion. This is not surprising because every year there is always a ‘new’ wonder thing that will help us stay health without much willpower on our part, but will bring fairly large profits to the people manufacturing it.

Cynical? Maybe, but when you have written about health for as long as I have you see the cycle of celebration, doubt, debunking and then quietly disappearing for many so called ‘miracle’ cures.

New health guidelines issued recently say all adults aged 40 to 75 should be assessed for risks, including smoking, weight and blood pressure and those with at least a 20 per cent increased chance of a heart attack over the next 10 years should be offered treatment, usually statins. Patrick Holford takes a different view and completely disagrees with the routine prescribing of these drugs. I think what he has to say is important so I am quoting him directly here, and leaving you to make up your own mind.

“Statins work by blocking the production of cholesterol, which is a perfectly normal substance, and in the process, stops the body producing Co-Q10, a vital heart nutrient, causing harmful side effects. This was confirmed in research published last month in the journal Nature. As a consequence, statins are far from harmless.

The notion that cholesterol is linked with heart disease goes back over fifty years, along with the idea of bringing cholesterol levels down with a low fat diet to protect the heart. But both of these ideas have been strongly challenged. For example, plenty of studies show that only 50% of people who develop heart problems have high cholesterol, while a study in the BMJ in 2001 found no link between changing fat in the diet and heart disease.

The best known side-effect of statins involves muscles problems. The probable reason for this is that they stop the production of Co-Q10 which is found in all cells (especially those of the heart muscle) and is vital to energy production. In one study of 14 healthy people, 10 developed heart rhythm abnormalities when given statins. This, say some researchers, could explain the muscle weakness and also the memory loss some people experience.

Some practitioners recommend that anyone taking statins should also supplement with Co-Q10 and a warning on statin packets is now mandatory in Canada, saying that CoQ10 reduction ‘could lead to impaired cardiac function’.

In fact the closer you look, the more questionable the benefits become. You might assume that taking prophylactic statins would mean that you would live longer overall. But that isn’t what the studies show. The total number of heart attacks drops slightly but then the risk of dying from other things goes up slightly, so overall life expectancy stays the same.

How can you avoid statins? By doing everything you can to keep your heart healthy. You do that by the well- known – but little enough practiced – regime of eating well with plenty of fruit, vegetables and wholegrains in your everyday diet. Make sure you also include foods that are high in heart-protective Vitamin E, such as beans, olive oil and eggs and reduce the amount of sugary foods, refined carbohydrates and keep your stress levels as low as you can.

Instead of an expensive drug, try lowering your cholesterol levels and heart disease risk by raising your ‘good’ HDL cholesterol and lowering ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol. A simple, inexpensive way to do that is take a supplement of niacin (vitamin B3), and to further help prevent cardiovascular disease it is suggested that you include a CoQ10 supplement of around 90mg a day. The COQ10 will also help those who are already on statin drugs and wish to stay on them.

If you would like to know more about Patrick Holford’s work, his new book ‘Food is Better Medicine Than Drugs’ would be a good place to start. You can read about it here: Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs: Your Prescription for Drug-free Health

Progesterone’s role in mental health

Last week I talked about testosterone and this week there is more news on the hormone front – but this time about progesterone. This is one of the key reproductive hormones in women, but it also has a host of other functions; one of the most important being it’s effect on brain chemistry and function. Dr. John Lee, the American pioneer of natural progesterone usage for osteoporosis, once was quoted as saying famously said that if anyone in his family had a brain injury, he would slather them with progesterone cream. He said that over ten years ago, and as ever he was ahead of his time, as new research has vindicated what must have seemed a completely lunatic idea.

Sadly Dr Lee was not given the respect of his peers, but I was privileged to host several seminars for him in London and he was certainly one of the most generous and compassionate of men, as the many thousands of women who benefited from his research have proved. He has been vindicated on the brain chemistry front by a fellow doctor working in an ER department and who saw a lot of saw a lot of head injuries. He was curious about why brain injuries were worse in men than in women, and got approval to do a study in which brain injury patients were given injections of progesterone when they arrived in the ER. His research showed that those who received the progesterone did significantly better than those who didn’t and later studies have also shown the same result.

Around the same time, researchers discovered that progesterone was a key component of the myelin sheath that protects or insulates the nerves-so important in fact that progesterone is made in the myelin sheath. Other research showed that progesterone stimulates the brain’s GABA receptors, those feel-good, calming neurotransmitters. Now we know, according to this review paper, that “…progesterone has multiple non- reproductive functions in the central nervous system to regulate cognition, mood, inflammation, mitochondrial function, neurogenesis and regeneration, myelination and recovery from traumatic brain injury.” Furthermore, progesterone is everywhere in the brain: “Remarkably, PRs [progesterone receptors] are broadly expressed throughout the brain and can be detected in every neural cell type.”

Those who have experienced the mental fog of hormone imbalances – otherwise known as the ‘what did I come into this room for ‘syndrome – can now point to their brain and say, “It’s not me that’s confused, it’s my brain!”

Are you allergic to wireless internet?

Today wi-fi is everywhere with many cafes and pubs offering a free connection service so it has never been easier to access the internet while on the move. However, it may not be without its health hazards. Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity Syndrome (EHS) is a condition in which people are highly sensitive to electromagnetic fields and in an area such as a wireless hotspot, they experience pain or other symptoms.

Symptoms can include headache, fatigue, nausea, burning and itchy skin, and muscle aches and because there is such a variety of symptoms – and how widely their effects vary from one person to another – experts are divided about the validity of such claims.

There have been more than 30 studies to determine what link the condition has to exposure to electromagnetic fields from sources such as radar dishes, mobile phone signals and Wi-Fi hotspots but claims that there is such a thing as EHS is still viewed with scepticism by most scientists and medical professionals.

Sweden is among those countries that do take it seriously, and they even have an official association for the electronically sensitive that produces and distributes educational literature to raise awareness about the phenomenon around the world. In the UK, Mast Action is doing similar work and there are signs that acceptance is spreading, especially in Europe. Just last week, the French magazine Connexion reported that four libraries in Paris have turned off the WiFi connections they installed at the end of 2007 after staff claimed they were causing health problems.

Why is WiFi Potentially Worse than Other Radiation?

Electomagnetic fields are all around us from power lines, televisions, household electrical wiring, appliances and microwaves. Then you have the information -carrying radio waves of cell phones, cell phone towers and wireless internet connections. WiFi is a kind of radio wave that operates at either 2.4 or 5 gigahertz – slightly higher than your cell phone. Since they’re designed to allow for transmission of very large amounts of data, WiFi radio waves also emit greater amounts electromagnetic radiation.

Who is most at risk?

If you are highly sensitive to chemicals, have chronic fatigue syndrome, and have experienced mercury toxicity from dental amalgams then you are more at risk. Logically, this makes sense as your nervous system is a primary site impacted by both chemicals and electromagnetic fields. And if your nervous system has been damaged from toxic exposures you may also be more susceptible to EHS as well.

Common symptoms of EHS include:

1. skin itch/rash/flushing/burning, and/or tingling 2. confusion/poor concentration, and/or memory loss 3. fatigue and weakness 4. headache 5. chest pain and heart problems 6. Less commonly reported symptoms include: nausea panic attacks insomnia seizures ear pain/ringing in the ears feeling a vibration paralysis dizziness

Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt is convinced that there is a real problem here as he believes that it’s possible that some 50 percent of chronic infections are caused, and/or aggravated, by electromagnetic field exposure, leading to syndromes like chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and other chronic pain syndromes.

Why Your Laptop May be More Harmful than Your PC

If you have ever worked on a laptop for some time, you will know that one of their drawbacks is that they get pretty hot, apparently due to the size of the casing and fans that are built into them – the new Apple Air notebook is so thin you can’t imagine how there is room in there for the hard drive, let along fan – but that’s another story. Apparently, as your laptop heats up, the circuitry board out-gasses metals such as beryllium, and as the plastic warms it out-gasses flame retardants like PBDE, all of which adds to your toxic load.

The suggestion is that you only use your laptop short-term, such as when travelling, which is no help to me as that is what I do more of than anything else. However, one practical idea is that you position a desk fan near your laptop and adjust it so that is blowing air away from where you sit. The exact opposite in fact to what we normally do. Let’s hope the summer doesn’t get too hot!

What can you do?

Well apart from investing in a fan if you have a laptop, it’s important to have as uncontaminated a diet as possible to reduce your toxic load. Try having a day a week when you allow your system to detox by drinking only water and eating only fruit, if that’s not possible then aim for once a month or as often as you can manage. Two other factors that play a vital role here are: sleeping well and getting plenty of sensible sun exposure.

Why? Because sleep and sunlight have a direct impact on your melatonin levels, and melatonin is actually one of the most potent detox agents that eliminate metals from your brain naturally.

Increasing your melatonin production can be done in three ways:

1.Sleeping in absolute darkness

2.Getting at least an hour of safe exposure to bright daylight each day

3. Reducing the electro-pollution in your bedroom by removing as many electrical devices as you can. This would include your television, electric alarm clock, cordless and wireless phones.

Don’t believe me? Well a 1997 Australian Senate Discussion Paper found that even low level (12 milliGauss) exposure to 50-60 hertz electromagnetic fields can significantly reduce your melatonin production.

Cola companies under pressure worldwide

The UK has led the way for a group of consumer organisations from 20 different countries to issue a public call for soft drink giants Coca-Cola and Pepsi to stop marketing directly to children. With 24% of the US population now defined as obese, this is clearly a problem and sugared, carbonated drinks add sweet fuel to the fire.

Letters pointing out the dangers of products containing high amounts of sugar or caffeine to children under the age of 16 have been sent out worldwide to the drinks giants and their subsidiaries. The products being targeted include not just colas but also sweetened juices, sports drinks and teas and they want them also removed from being offered or sold in schools.

In addition, they want the companies to prominently label the front of all such products with the number of calories per serving, and to limit their sponsorship of sports and health programmes.

New regulations in the UK have banned the advertising of junk food on television to children under the age of 16, and there is agreement on a voluntary pledge by major food companies to stop advertising those foods to children under the age of 12. Ten companies have signed up to this so far,including Coke and Pepsi,in an effort to avoid being faced with potentially stricter compulsory regulations.

The groups involved in issuing the new set of demands say that Coke and Pepsi’s marketing efforts contribute to increasing obesity levels, especially in children. The Mexican group, El Poder del Consumidor, are particularly concerned that many of the drink company ads are misleading. For instance, in Mexico a campaign was run for a Coca Cola-sponsored nutrition campaign that promoted drinking Coca-Cola as a good way to rehydrate after exercise.

How natural is your shampoo?

Over the last few years shampoos have strived to impress us with the naturalness of their ingredients. If you believe the ads they are all hand-harvested in the Amazonian rainforests and you are getting an amazing variety of herbs, flowers and probably a pounding waterfall or at least a fast flowing river to go along with it. What they don’t tell you is that you are also getting in there an amazing cocktail of chemicals – the word ‘natural’ is one of the most misleading in advertising.

It is estimated by the consumer watchdog group Proof that around 93 per cent of all shampoos currently on the market contain chemicals that are linked to cancer or other health problems. So just becasue your favourite brand contains herbs or is organic doesn’t necessarily mean it is innocent of chemicals. As ever, read the label and try to avoid the following ingredients:

- lauryl sulphates: are the most potentially carcinogenic compounds found in many personal care products

- PEG (polyethylene glycol): this is what gives you that nice foam that makes you think your shampoo is doing a good job. These ‘foaming agents’ often contain the carcinogens dioxane and ethylene oxide, which have been linked to leukaemia, and brain, uterine and breast cancers

- Propylene glycol: you find this chemical in your anti-freeze and in a shampoo it rapidly penetrates the skin. It’s been associated with liver and kidney damage, and central nervous system problems.

It is especially important to be vigilant when buying products for babies and children as a high concentration of lauryl sulphates has been found in a shampoo that’s specially marketed to children, and labelled as being ‘extra gentle’.

Simply Nature have a good PEG-free shampoo you can find on their website at www.simply-nature.co.uk or get your reading glasses out for that very small print on the bottles in the supermarket or your local chemist!

St John’s Wort – Does it work?

Get ready – this is the rant! As someone who has been writing about health for 20 years, I thought I had become anaesthetised to the ‘false information’ syndrome that seems to accompany most natural medicines. Linus Pauling is a fine example. He was one of the first scientists to work in the fields of quantum chemistry, molecular biology and orthomolecular medicine, was awarded two Nobel Prizes in different fields which you would have thought was enough qualification for anyone. However, his research into the benefits of vitamin C on health were systematically rubbished for years, and now a natural supplement that has been proven to help thousands cope with depression is getting similarly clobbered.

In the best Parliamentary tradition, I have to declare an ‘interest’ in the subject as I have been subject to depression since childhood and have tried virtually every form of treatment, both chemical and natural, over the years. St John’s Wort works for many people – but not for everyone, so I am never surprised to read research that shows it hasn’t been effective within certain parameters.

What I am surprised, and horrified, to discover is that the latest round of ‘St John’ bashing has come from a group of medical men who concluded “that the St.John’s Wort herb is useless in treating ADHD in children”.

That it is true I don’t doubt, because what they didn’t disclose at the time was that all the children used in the study were given inactive forms of the herb, where the active ingredients had been oxidized and rendered useless. Even the Journal of American Medicine admitted that:

“The product used in this trial was tested for hypericin and hyperforin content at the end of the trial and contained only 0.13% hypericin and 0.14% hyperforin.”

That constitutes a sub-clinical dose, barely containing any usable St. John’s Wort at all. It is in fact barely one-tenth of one percent of the active chemical constituents in the herb, and any decent supplement typically contain up to five percent hyperforin, or thirty-five times the amount of active ingredient used in this trial. JAMA felt obliged to point out:

“Hyperforin is a very unstable constituent that quickly oxidizes and then becomes inactive, which is likely what happened to the product used in this clinical trial.”

In other words, they admitted that it was an inactive, ineffective, form that had been used.

Even more worrying is the fact that there were only 54 children used in the results of the trial, with 27 receiving a placebo and 27 receiving St. John’s Wort. This is a very small sample size to justify any declaration that it doesn’t work, especially given the fact that it has been safely and effectively used by tens of millions of people around the world in just the last decade or so.

Incredibly, more than 40 percent of the children used in the study had previously also used psychiatric medications, and we already know that such drugs actually cause behavioural disorders, shown by the fact that so many children commit violent acts against themselves and others after taking psychiatric medications.

This trial was set up to fail on so many levels; for example, six children who displayed a large response to the placebo were supposed to have been dropped from the study to isolate the herb’s effects from placebo effects. However, they were ‘accidentally’ randomized and their results put into the final conclusion, which had the effect of distorting the final results in favour of placebo responders, and reducing the numbers who responded positively to the St John’sWort.

Another example of the study’s bias is that young boys are far more susceptible to the kinds of behaviours that are labelled as “ADHD,” compared to young girls, and yet in this study, the placebo group consisted of only about 50% boys while the herb treatment group consisted of nearly 75% boys. In other words, the placebo group was predisposed to a positive outcome simply due to its composition of girls vs. boys, while the herb treatment group was predisposed to a less-than-favourable response.

To say nothing of the sheer cynicism of this research, and trying not to boil over at them using young children to test something for a serious condition that they absolutely had guaranteed in advance would not work, they then sent numerous press releases out that warned parents not to use the herb. Some of the headlines included:

St. John’s Wort Doesn’t Work for ADHD Washington Post

St. John’s wort no better than placebo for ADHD, Bastyr study finds Seattle Times St. John’s wort doesn’t help ADHD, study finds Reuters That would certainly put most parents off, but it is not really so surprising when you know that one of the study’s authors, Dr. Joseph Biederman, secretly took $1.6 million from drug companies while conducting psychotropic drug experiments on children, and is currently on the payroll of several drug pharmacies selling ADHD medications – a fact he did not disclose when publishing the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. So he was not likely to want to find that St John’s Wort, or any other natural alternatives, had any effect on treating a condition cheaply and without recourse to drugs. The whole point of the study of course was to make natural medicines look bad. I had thought after Linus Pauling’s hard battle to get his views accredited that it might have got a bit easier – but clearly the agenda is still a commercial, rather than a medical one.

In case you were wondering, St. John’s Wort has been clinically proven to be even more effective than antidepressant drugs for treating mild to moderate depression. That is a much better track record than all the SSRI drugs ever invented, whether it works for ADHD I don’t know, but I would want to see much better research before it is so cavalierly dismissed.

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