Nutrition

Apr

2013

55 Pounds of High-fructose Corn Syrup

The average American consumes 55 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup each year topping a list of 42 countries according to a paper published in the journal Global Public Health. Second highest consumption according to the report occurs in Hungary (46 pounds) fructose, followed by Slovakia, Canada and Bulgaria. And, according to the article, the countries with the highest consumption suffered significantly increased prevalence for diabetes independent of ordinary sugar intake and diabetes. And, the health disaster monster that the large intake of high fructose corn syrup represents has long tentacles that ultimately affect every system of the body.

One example involves fructose’s relationship with the amino acid tryptophan. Fructose can complex with the important mood enhancing amino acid tryptophan. This makes tryptophan unavailable to the brain when that happens BIG trouble can follow! Tryptophan is mega-mega important for mood and wellbeing. It gets turned into melatonin and serotonin which are arguably the two most important chemicals in the brain. You can think of tryptophan as natural Prozac and for many people fructose will be blocking it from access to the brain.

Here’s where it gets really interesting from a biochemical perspective. The brain has an appetite area, that initiates hunger sensations and a satisfaction area that shuts these sensations down. And it uses tryptophan to determine which center will be activated. All day long it is scanning the blood for this important amino acid. When tryptophan levels rise, activity in the satisfaction center is turned on and hunger ceases. Low tryptophan levels on the hand stimulate brain activity in the appetite or hunger center. If fructose is complexing with tryptophan, preventing it from getting into the brain it will take ingestion of a lot of tryptophan for the brain to to activate satisfaction centers vs. the “go get us a Coke or an ingestion apple or some other kind of sugar” center.

If you find yourself unable to stop eating AND you’re ingesting lots of high fructose corn syrup, or table sugar, which is 50 percent fructose, you may want to try switching sweeteners. Especially if you are dealing with diarrhea, loose stools, gas cramping or bloating after ingesting processed foods, fruits or fruit juices. Stevia and xylitol are probably the best choices you can make, and I like to use coconut water which a bit expensive, but can provides electrolytes and vitamins not available in other sweeteners. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to add a little daily supplemental tryptophan to your supplement program. You can use 200mg of 5HTP daily or 500-1000 mg of tryptophan. Take it at bedtime, though, it may make you drowsy.

Article cited:
Goran, M., Ulijaszek, S. and Ventura, E. (2012). High fructose corn syrup and diabetes prevalence: A global perspective. Global Public Health. Published online Nov. 27, 2012.

Apr

2013

Bone Soup: Miracle Food

By Ben Fuchs | Pharmacist Ben

It’s no secret that most people don’t get adequate nutrition through their daily food consumption. I spend much of my time educating folks about the nutritional supplementation we need to add to our diets to achieve longevity and vitality. There are a few foods, however, which stand out for their nutritional value, that I consider to be “superfoods”, and that can be included generously in the diet to great effect. One of my favorites is Bone Soup.

Chinese Pork Bone Soup (Gar Dook Mu On Tom Made Bur).

Bone Soup, made from chicken, beef, lamb or turkey, is a traditional food found in many cultures with a long history as a source of nourishment. While it is most commonly known as “Jewish Penicillin,” because of its powerful cold and flu-fighting powers, there are numerous health benefits received by consuming bone soup that make me wonder why people don’t drink it every day.

Bone Soup contains vitamins and minerals that have been shown to give the immune system a significant boost. In addition, long-chain saccharides, the healthful kind of sugars, within the soup are perfect to ease all ailments of the joints and muscles. This makes bone soup especially helpful when healing from surgery or broken bones, and a perfect recovery food for athletes, and everyone else who ever has muscle aches. Bone stock also contains healing substances that soothe, coat and rebuild the digestive tract, which is perfect for treating ulcers and intestinal problems. Finally, the broth contains skin-friendly amino acids and moisture factors that reduce wrinkle formation and keep skin soft and hydrated from within.

Basically, Bone Soup is a liquid food derived from the dissolution of animal bone, tendon and meat components in water. Prolonged simmering, known by culinary experts as “reducing,” allows cartilaginous factors of the animal parts to solubilize in the broth. In this process, long chain sugars co-mingle with protein-sulfur components to create glucoseaminoglycans, and form a gel matrix within the water. This process traps the minerals released from the bone, which include calcium, magnesium, and potassium, into a type of suspension called a colloid. This colloidal gel system has an electrical nature that vivifies the liquid and enhances the biological value of the nutrients carried within it.

Bone soup is easy to make. To get the maximum benefit from bone soup, it’s best to prepare the soup with oils, spices, and vinegar. One way to start the soup is to place your favorite spices and some oil or butter in the bottom of a large soup or spaghetti pot. Apply very slight heat until the spices dissolve within the oil. This allows active components in the spices to release into the oils, enhancing the medicinal properties of the oil.

Drop your bones into the pot and top them off with water. You can use just bones or a whole cooked chicken or turkey if you want to add more protein. Add a splash of vinegar, or lemon or lime juice, to help release the nutrients from bones. Cover and simmer for several hours. Fish requires only a few hours of simmering, while chicken bones can be stewed up to 12 hours and thicker bones of the beef shank may be rendered for 24 hours. If you use a pressure cooker you can save time.

Next, strain the soup to discard the bones and parts you don’t want to consume and salvage the broth. Next, you may add vegetables or more spices, and that’s it. If you make extra broth, it can easily be frozen and saved for later.

Bone soup is as much a nutritional supplement as delicious food. It’s a considerable source of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, proteins, and anti-cancer compounds, all in a bio-electrically active, easy to absorb form. All told it’s nutritionally packed, inexpensive, easy to make and a valuable, tasty part of a healthy lifestyle.

Apr

2013

B-Vitamin Choline

By Ben Fuchs | Pharmacist Ben

The B-vitamin Choline is one of the most important vitamins you’ve never heard of. It’s a critical component of the body’s fat metabolizing machinery and may be one of the most important supplements to take for preventing fatty liver disease. The best food sources are egg yolks, meats (especially liver), fish, and lecithin. Choline is also an important component of acetylcholine which plays a significant role in memory, intelligence and overall brain health.

Wikipedia

Choline is a water-soluble vitamin-like essential nutrient. It is a basic constituent of lecithin, which is present in many plants and animal organs. The term cholines refers to the class of quaternary ammonium salts containing the N,N,N-trimethylethanolammonium cation (X− on the right denotes an undefined counteranion).

The cation appears in the head groups of phosphatidylcholine and sphingomyelin, two classes of phospholipid that are abundant in cell membranes. Choline is the precursor molecule for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is involved in many functions including memory and muscle control.

Some animals cannot produce choline, but must consume it through their diet to remain healthy. Humans make choline in the liver. Whether dietary or supplemental choline is beneficial or harmful to humans has not been determined. Possible benefits include reducing the risk of neural tube defects and fatty liver disease. It has also been found that intake of choline during pregnancy can have long-term beneficial effects on memory for the child. [Source]

Apr

2013

The Paleo Diet: A Second Look at Grains

By Ben Fuchs | Pharmacist Ben

According to the Romans, it was Ceres, the Goddess of Agriculture, who gave us grains. Many agriculture experts say human health hasn’t been the same since. The highly regarded anthropologist Jared Diamond calls agriculture the “worst mistake in the history of the human race”. Without resorting to a debate about the merits of his claim, we can certainly all agree that the decline of human health is at the least correlated, if not directly, to the effect of man’s post-ice age, grain-based caloric dependence on grains.

Grains are technically unnatural in the sense they have had their genetics dramatically modified to meet specific human needs, many of which were and are economic.

Today’s modern cereal grain would be practically unrecognizable to its Paleolithic plant ancestor. Proto-maize, corn’s progenitor was a tiny little nub that bears little resemblance today’s modern, bright, full ears of corn. What has remained mostly the same over the centuries, however, is the human digestive tract – and therein lays the problem.

Human physiology was and is largely based on many thousands of years of hunter/gatherer-derived genetics. Meat and protein and seed were the larger components of Paleolithic man’s diet. There simply weren’t dense carbohydrate-rich grains for our caveman ancestor to feast on. There wasn’t an evolutionary survival imperative to develop the digestive chemistry to process grains. Consequently, the proteins in grains are difficult for some human digestive tracts to process.

And there are some genetic immune variables that play a role as well. Gluten and other protein components of grains can cause allergic reactions in a significant percentage of the general population. In some people these can result in the initiation of an autoimmune response that can show up as digestive, skin and respiratory symptoms.

Then there are the caloric and insulin-spiking aspects. Modern grains are typically high calorie. They have a relatively low nutritional density and they can cause elevations in blood sugar and insulin that can negatively impact health. While some grains are less problematic, generally speaking, exchanging grain calories for protein ones (especially whey or hemp seed protein) can help benefit health in many ways. For example, the improvement in the fundamental three facets of wellness (the digestive system, blood sugar system, adrenal stress system) is sometimes quite dramatic. (I suggest you look for non-sticky grains; quinoa comes to mind.)

Try making a small protein drink with 2-3 tablespoons of a quality protein powder supplement. Try to get 15 to 20 grams of protein. Read the labels. If you’re near a blender, you can crack in an egg, blend in some frozen organic fruit, add some good oil and sprinkle in some stevia powder or xylitol for a little sweetness. Protein is quite satisfying and you’ll find the need for carbohydrates to be considerably weakened.

Apr

2013

Some Thoughts on Vitamins

By Ben Fuchs | Pharmacist Ben

When the subject of nutrition comes up, oftentimes the conversational spotlight gets focused on the term vitamins, which gets tossed around as an all-inclusive, catch-all term for all nutritional supplements. In the interests of accuracy, it’s important to keep in mind that the term vitamins refers only a single component of the nutritional supplement world, which includes protein, essential fats, minerals, water, fiber, and carbohydrates, and accessory nutrients like NAC and alpha lipoic acid and probiotics.

The word vitamin is actually a slang term for nutritional substances that are more technically called “co-enzymes”. These being biomolecules that assist enzymes in their work of making biological chemistry happen.

The body is a seething, bubbling factory of chemical reactions. Every cell in the body, of which there are many trillions is capable of producing somewhere on the order of 10 thousand to 100 thousand chemical reactions per second!! To put it in even more dramatic, (if incomprehensible) terms there are quadrillions (!) of individual chemical reactions occurring in our bodies every minute we are alive. And each one of these chemical reactions depends on the action of enzymes and, in-turn, each one of these enzymes requires the assistance of coenzymes some of which are the vitamins. Considering most of our vitamin needs are met by foods or supplementation, in other words, they are not made by the body, the stupendous importance of making sure we are giving our body generous quantities of these critical molecules through the diet and through nutritional supplements become obvious.

There are two classes of vitamins, those that dissolve in water and those that dissolve in oil, the so-called water soluble vitamins, which are the B-complex and Vitamin C and the fat soluble vitamins, D, E, A and K. The water soluble vitamins critical as they may be are easier to work with than the fat soluble vitamins. You can and should take a lot of B-complex and vitamin C, they are multi-functional and used and excreted rapidly. The best way to make sure your getting enough of the water soluble vitamins is to take generous amounts, in water all day long, i.e. by drinking them. The fat soluble vitamins, D, E, A and K are much trickier to work with. Optimal assimilation of the substances requires a healthy and well-functioning digestive system including especially the liver and gall bladder. And, because they are transported around the body in the lymphatic system if things aren’t moving well in the lymph, fatty vitamin activity may be impaired. The same is true if you have liver problems or gall bladder problems, especially if you’ve had your gall bladder removed or if you have pancreatic health issues. If this is the case, you’re going to want to take the fatty vitamins with meals that include fatty foods. Digestive enzymes can help so can apple cider vinegar and perhaps pancreatin which contains digestive enzymes. You can also use se bile salts, maybe lecithin and you might want to consider including some choline which the body can use to make lecithin.

Take home message:

Use generous amounts of the B-complex and Vitamin C throughout the day. Put them in water or some other liquid medium and drink them down slowly for best results

Take fatty vitamin D, E, A and K supplements with meals that contain some kind of fatty foods. If you are dealing with digestive health issues i.e. those that involve the stomach, small intestine, liver, gall bladder or pancreas, you can improve the absorption of these fatty vitamins by taking them with digestive enzymes, pancreatin, bile salts, apple cider vinegar, lecithin and choline.