Category Archives: Healthy Eating

How gut health can affect heart health

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Your gut health can determine how healthy your heart is!

Butyrate is a fatty acid that’s important for protecting the gut from inflammatory and autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis and colon cancer. It’s the most important source of energy for endothelial cell – the cells lining your blood vessels. It’s a type of short chain fatty acid (SCFA) and has also been shown to prevent infiltration of immune cells from the bloodstream into fat tissue.

 

Butyrate is super important for health and nutrition practitioners to focus on with patients and clients, especially when working with people who are suffering from autoimmune issues and struggling to maintain optimal weight.

 

A healthy microbiome is critical to healthy levels of butyrate. Gut bugs make butyrate by fermenting certain types of fiber.

 

According to research posted in the Endocrinology section of the Nature Review, people with type 1 Diabetes are deficient in butyrate-producing bacteria in their gut plus butyrate improves insulin sensitivity.

 

So it’s clear that butyrate is linked to gut health, protection from cancer, autoimmune disease, obesity, and diabetes.

 

So, how can we optimize butyrate levels, in our clients and in ourselves?

 

Butyrate contributes to a healthy, happy microbiome and thus a healthy, happy gut.  Gut health is related to whole body health.  Thus balancing butyrate can lead to world peace because it leads to happy, healthy people.  And healthy happy people don’t fight.

 

So, here are 4 things you can do to optimize butyrate levels:

 

1-    Use oral butyrate supplements – A recent study in Alimentary pharmacology and therapeutics found that 4 grams per day for 8 weeks improved symptoms of Crohn’s Disease.

2-    Eat butyrate containing foods – The highest concentration of butyrate is found in butter and other dairy products.

3-    Balance gut flora – Ensure the flora which produce the SCFAs, in particular butyrate, are the dominant ones.

4-    Eat the fiber that butyrate love – Particularly powerful is resistant starch, found in seeds, legumes, whole grains, cold potatoes, unripe bananas, and just about any vegetable.  Of course the diet needs to be customized to the person, and not all forms of resistant starch will be indicated based on other factors such as glycemic control, presence of bacteria in small intestine (SIBO) and food sensitivities.

Food is always key.

Adapted from Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo

Protein requirement chart

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Protein is an essential component of a healthy balanced diet. When aiming for weight loss, for those are very active, for women who may be pregnant or lactating, the requirement is higher, often considerably higher.

It is very challenging to meet the need through a vegetarian diet, though, and supplementation may be the only answer. How do you know if you need supplementation?

Check out the chart below to see how much protein you should be eating each day. If you don’t see your weight, just use this formula to calculate your daily protein: Your weight in kilograms, multiplied by 0.8 (not very active), 1.3 (active or pregnant), or 1.8 (extremely active), depending on how much exercise you get.

Weight (kg)

 Protein per day (not very active) Protein per day (active or pregnant) Protein per day (extremely active)
45.5 36.4 g 59.2 g 81.9 g
47.7 38.2 g 62 g 85.9 g
50 40 g 65 g 90 g
52.3 41.8 g 68 g 94.1 g
54.5 43.6 g 70.9 g 98.1 g
56.8 45.4 g 73.8 g 102.2 g
59.1 47.3 g 76.8 g 106.4 g
61.4 49.1 g 79.8 g 110.5 g
63.6 50.9 g 82.7 g 114.5 g
65.9 52.7 g 85.7 g 118.6 g
68.2 54.7 g 88.7 g 122.8 g
70.5 56.4 g 91.7 g 126.9 g
72.7 58.2 g 94.5 g 130.8 g
75 60 g 97.5 g 135 g

Based on these numbers, do you get enough protein per day? If not, consider supplementing with a high quality supplement. Your body will thank you.

To calculate – not estimate – how much protein you’re actually getting, it helps to use a food diary such as MyFitnessPal. It is only when we have accurate numbers about intake, can we take remedial measures.

So stay informed and stay healthy.

 

TREATING DIABETES

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Your Diabetes didn’t just show up one fine day as Diabetes.

Your illness is your body trying to communicate to you that something is really wrong!

Your Diabetes is like a big, blinking NEON SIGN warning you – LOOK HERE. THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG HERE. This is a WARNING that there is an imbalance or a deficiency in your body that needs to be identified and serviced – just like that red, blinking light on your car’s dashboard when it too needs to be serviced.

In fact, your DIABETES once started as an imbalance or a deficiency which was left unidentified or untreated, and eventually progressed to DIABETES.

Now, here’s the big aha! moment:

Your DIABETES is being treated as a “symptom”. Meaning, the prescription medication, regular insulin injections, constant daily monitoring, etc. are all superficial treatments that treat the symptom itself, and mask the underlying cause which created the symptom, to begin with.

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And, if left untreated, without identifying the underlying imbalance or deficiency, your DIABETES will eventually progress into a disease more acute and damaging than the DIABETES itself. Such as heart disease. Or kidney disease.

The reason I’m clearing this up with you is so you can start to pay attention to these big, blinking NEON SIGNS.

  1. YOUR NUTRITION: Most of us are just throwing junk food into our bodies because we don’t have the time for anything else, or we’re driven by taste and convenience. But our bodies are paying the price.
  2. SLEEP: One day of inadequate sleep is more damaging than six months of inadequate diet.
  3. EXERCISE: Prolonged sitting – which we are all subject to at work – and couch potato-ism at home affects the body’s metabolism and leaves it unable to utilise glucose properly.
  4. STRESS: the stress hormones raise sugar levels. Chronic stress leads to chronically raised sugar levels.
  5. TOXINS: environmental pollution, food additives and even mental pollution damage your systems.

A systematic approach to all these factors, including mind body balance, is the only way the body can achieve balance and regain its lost health.

Natural Ways to Control Your Blood Sugar

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It’s Ramzan, time for fasting and also for feasting! Sadly, often time to gain weight!

What if you’re diabetic? Here’s how to eat and still control blood sugar levels.

1.Increase Your Fiber Intake

Try to include both soluble and insoluble fiber in your daily diet. Berries, nuts, vegetables and beans like rajma and chowli are a great way to slip in the fiber daily. Aim to include 40 to 50 grams of fiber in your daily regimen for every 1,000 calories you eat. You may want to start measuring the foods you eat each day until you are able to estimate how much fiber and carbohydrates you are eating.

2.Reduce Your Net Carbs

A low-net-carbohydrate diet reduces the stress on your body, reduces inflammation and reduces the amount insulin required to use the energy from the food you eat. You’ll want to reduce the number of net carbs you eat, for most people this ranges between 50 and 80 grams per day.This is calculated by taking the grams of carbs you’ve eaten and subtracting the number of grams of fiber. In this way a high-fiber diet also helps you to lower the amount of insulin you need to utilize your food for fuel.

3.High-Quality Fats

When you reduce your carbohydrates, what are you going to replace them with? Your best alternative is high quality, healthy fats necessary for heart health, feeding your brain and to modulate genetic regulation and prevent cancer. The idea that fats are bad for you, is OUTDATED.

Healthy fats include:

Avocados Coconut oil Organic butter from organic grass-fed milk
Organic raw nuts Olives and Olive oil Grass-fed meat
Organic pastured eggs Palm oil

4.Exercise

Exercise helps your cells become  sensitive to leptin. This reduces your potential resistance to insulin and therefore your risk of diabetes.

5.Hydration

When you become dehydrated, your liver will secrete a hormone that increases your blood sugar. As you hydrate blood sugar levels lower naturally.

Stay well hydrated by monitoring the color of your urine during the day. The color should be light yellow. Sometimes your first indication your body requires more water is the sensation of being hungry. Drink a large glass of water first and wait 20 minutes to determine if you’re really hungry or you were thirsty.

6.Reduce Your Stress

When you become stressed your body secretes cortisol and glucagon, both of which affect your blood sugar levels. Control your stress levels using exercise, meditation, yoga, prayer or relaxation techniques. These techniques may reduce your stress and correct insulin secretion problems. Combined with strategies that reduce your insulin resistance, you may help to prevent diabetes.

7.Sleep

Enough quality sleep is necessary to feel good and experience good health. Poor sleeping habits may reduce insulin sensitivity and promote weight gain.

Diabetes is not a sentence! It’s easily reversed.

How to Reverse Type 2 diabetes

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Diabetes rates are skyrocketing. Complications lead to heart attacks, strokes, amputations, blindness, kidney failure, and memory loss. The #1 cause of death for people with diabetes is from cardiovascular disease.

Almost 20% of people over age 65 have type 2 diabetes. Diabetics have a lifestyle that doesn’t match their genetic needs; change their lifestyle and their diabetes problem usually goes away.

I offer programs that have helped patients bring their blood sugar levels back to normal. Even patients on insulin, with advanced diabetic complications have become medication-free and achieved normal blood sugar control.

So What Changes Have Helped Reverse Type 2 Diabetes?

There is no single choice and no magic bullet to correct this problem. But the combination of three activities is remarkably helpful:

  1. Add activity daily
  2. Avoid refined carbs and sugars
  3. Eat more smart foods

Activity

Daily activity is essential. You may wonder, why I start with activity instead of food. Let’s start with what causes this problem in the first place.

When you eat food, the food energy is absorbed as sugar (glucose). This becomes stored in your muscle cells as glycogen, available as energy for your next work out. The problem is that if you keep eating, but you don’t burn it, the muscle cells become overloaded with glycogen. Insulin pushes this glucose into muscle cells. When muscle cells shut their doors and don’t respond, your tissues become resistant to insulin’s message to store energy. The energy next travels to your liver and is stored as liver fat, plus converted into artery clogging triglycerides. At some point, blood sugar levels jump into the “high blood sugar zone”, and your body becomes ineffective at lowering blood sugar after you eat. High blood sugar levels accelerate every aspect of aging—your brain shrinks, your arteries grow plaque, your cancer risk grows and your health falls apart.

So if the first step to insulin resistance is excessive glycogen storage in muscle cells, then removing glycogen through exercise is an incredibly effective way to bring blood sugar regulation and your health back to normal. Most people need at least 30 minutes of aerobic activity every day to deplete sugar stored in muscle tissue.

Avoid Refined Carbs and Sugar

The second treatment is to decrease blood sugar from entering the blood stream. The simple way to do this is to avoid high glycemic load foods. Glycemic load refers to the amount of sugar that reaches your blood stream from one serving of a specific food. The simple way to avoid a jump in blood sugar levels is to eliminate all sugar, grains, and anything made with flour from your eating plan. A few other high glycemic load foods that should be avoided are: potatoes, bananas, dried fruit, and fruit juice.

Eat More Smart Foods

So what should you eat? The focus is to eat every day at least:

  • Five servings of smart fat (avocado, nuts, olive or nut oil, coconut products, dark chocolate, cold water fatty fish)
  • Five servings of clean protein (grass-fed beef, cage-free and organic-fed poultry and eggs, wild fish, beans, organic soy products, and organic yogurt.
  • And ten servings of low-glycemic fiber (from vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and dark chocolate)
  • Plus, add extra spices and herbs for flavor and to lower inflammation.

The reality is that you can prevent and reverse type 2 diabetes and also help your heart, brain, and waistline by adding smart foods and following these simple concepts every day.