Category Archives: Hormones

Elderly family member with aches and low energy? Check out thyroid.

You’re never too old to have an underactive thyroid.

When a person’s thyroid hormone level gets too low, nearly every system in the body is affected. An underactive thyroid (hypothyroidism) can cause many symptoms like fatigue, depression, weight gain, constipation, and dry skin.

While typically associated with underactive thyroid, all those symptoms can also be caused by other medical problems. And in people over 60, symptoms of hypothyroidism can be more confusing. Any of the following health issues in a person over 60, alone or in combination, could mean an underlying thyroid problem.

Unexplained high cholesterol is sometimes the only evidence of an underactive thyroid in an older person.

Heart failure. Some of the effects of low thyroid hormone levels — for example, reduced blood volume, weaker contractions of the heart muscle, and a slower heart rate — may contribute to heart failure.

Constipation. An older person with hypothyroidism might have constipation because of decreased movement of stool through the bowels.

Joint or muscle pain. Vague joint pain is a classic symptom of hypothyroidism. It sometimes is the only symptom of hypothyroidism in an older patient, although many experience an overall muscular aching, particularly in large muscle groups.

Mental health concerns. As with younger people, depression is common among older people with an underactive thyroid. The difference is that in older people, it can be the only symptom. An older person could also develop other psychiatric symptoms, including delusions or hallucinations.

Dementia. Debilitating memory loss can also occur as the only symptom of hypothyroidism. If you or a loved one is being evaluated for dementia, be sure that thyroid tests are part of the workup.

Problems with balance. Abnormalities in the cerebellum at the back of the brain that occur with an underactive thyroid may lead to walking problems in older people.

So, if an elderly family member is slightly depressed, has aches and pains and low energy ( sounds very familiar?), make sure to get a thyroid workup. And follow new guidelines, TSH up to 5.5 is NOT indicative of normalcy. It should be below 2.

Be Healthy!

Saturated fat, cholesterol and heart health

The nutritional myth that saturated fat is bad, continues to fall apart as a steady stream of new books and studies on this topic hit the media. The latest work to challenge the old dogma is a book called The Big Fat Surprise by journalist Nina Teicholz.

She points out the flaws in the original Ancel Keys study; how saturated fat has been a healthy human staple for thousands of years, and how the low-fat craze has resulted in excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates, which has resulted in increased inflammation and disease.

In 2012, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology concluded that women with “high cholesterol” (greater than 270 mg/dl) had a 28 percent lower mortality risk than women with “low cholesterol” (less than 183 mg/dl).
Researchers also found that, if you’re a woman, your risk for heart disease, cardiac arrest, and stroke are higher with lower cholesterol levels.

In 2013, a prominent London cardiologist by the name of Aseem Malhotra argued in the British Medical Journal that you should ignore advice to reduce your saturated fat intake, because it’s actually increasing your risk for obesity and heart disease.

Fat Has Been Blamed for Sugar’s Evil Deeds

A high-sugar diet raises your risk for heart disease by promoting metabolic syndrome—a cluster of health conditions that includes high blood pressure, insulin and leptin resistance, high triglycerides, liver dysfunction, and visceral fat accumulation.

Cholesterol Is Not Only Beneficial for Your Body—It’s Absolutely Mandatory

Cholesterol plays important roles such as building your cell membranes, interacting with proteins inside your cells, and helping regulate protein pathways required for cell signaling. Having too little cholesterol may harm your brain health, hormone levels, heart disease risk, and more. Therefore, placing an upper limit on dietary cholesterol, especially such a LOW upper limit as is now recommended, is likely causing far more harm than good.

The Truth About Saturated Fats

Just as your body has requirements for cholesterol, it also needs saturated fats for proper function. One way to understand this is to consider what foods humans consumed during their evolution. Many experts believe that since the Paleolithic Era, we evolved as hunter-gatherers. Paleolithic nutrition states that we have eaten animal products for most of our existence on Earth. To suggest that saturated fats are suddenly harmful to us makes no sense, especially from an evolutionary perspective.

The latest science suggests healthy fats (saturated and unsaturated fats from whole food, animal, and plant sources) should comprise anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of your overall energy intake. Saturated fats provide a number of important health benefits, including the following:

  • Providing building blocks for cell membranes, hormones, and hormone-like substances
  • Mineral absorption, such as calcium
  • Carriers for important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K.
  • Conversion of carotene into vitamin A.
  • Acts as antiviral agent.
  • Optimal fuel for the brain.
  • Provides satiety.
  • Modulates genetic regulation and helps prevent cancer.

What REALLY Constitutes a Heart-Healthy Diet?

A “heart-healthy diet,” is one which minimizes inflammation, reduces insulin resistance, and helps reduce risk for cardiovascular disease.

1. Limit or eliminate all processed foods
2. Eliminate all gluten and highly allergenic foods from your diet
3. Eat organic foods whenever possible to avoid exposure to harmful agricultural chemicals.
4. Avoid genetically modified ingredients (GMO), which are linked to abundant health problems, including chronic inflammation and heart disease
5. Eat at least one-third of your food uncooked (raw), or as much as you can manage; avoid cooking foods at high temperatures
6. Increase the amount of fresh vegetables in your diet, locally grown and organic if possible
7. Eat naturally fermented foods, which help optimize your gut bacteria and prevent inflammation- as well as providing valuable vitamin K2, B vitamins, and other nutrients
8. Avoid all artificial sweeteners.
9. Limit fructose to less than 25 grams per day from all sources, including whole fruits. If you have insulin resistance, diabetes, hypertension, or heart disease, you’d be well advised to keep your fructose consumption below 15 grams per day until your insulin resistance has normalized
10. Swap all trans fats (vegetable oils, margarine etc.) for healthy fats like avocado, raw butter, cheese, and coconut oil; avoid consuming oxidized cholesterol (cholesterol that has gone rancid, such as that from overcooked scrambled eggs)
11. To rebalance your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, take a high-quality animal-based omega-3 supplement, and avoid consumption of processed omega-6 fats from vegetable oils.
12. Drink plenty of pure water every day.

Heart-Healthy Moves

In addition to following the heart-healthy plan  above, there are several more strategies that can help in reducing chronic inflammation and lowering cardiovascular risk:

Exercise regularly. One of the primary benefits of exercise is that it helps normalize and maintain healthy insulin and leptin levels. Exercise also boosts HDL, increases growth hormone production, helps curb appetite, and improves mood and sleep.
Intermittent fasting. Fasting is an excellent way to “reboot” metabolism so that the body can relearn how to burn fat as its primary fuel, which helps shed those excess fat stores.
AVOID statin drugs. Statin drugs can reduce cholesterol to dangerously low levels, while doing nothing to modulate LDL particle size. Statin drugs may even accelerate heart disease.
AVOID chemicals. BPA, for example, has been linked to heart disease: adults with the highest levels of BPA in their urine are more than twice as likely to develop coronary artery disease as those with the lowest levels.

Be Healthy!

Sleep off the weight!!

A study at Temple University reports that kids’ obesity and weight gain is linked not only to too much fast food, sugary drinks and lack of exercise, but a daily habit that shifts the hormone balance in the body. And it’s relatively easy to reset that hormone balance to help children lose weight. (And the same works for adults, too!)

Turn off the lights and make bedtime earlier.
Sleep appears to be an important factor in the childhood obesity pandemic. Simply getting more sleep may be a way for children to keep their weight down.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, school-aged children (ages 5 to 12) should get between 10 and 11 hours of sleep a night. Younger children need even more shut-eye. Preschoolers, for instance, should get 11 to 13 hours a night, and toddlers need 12 to 14 hours of sleep every day.

Tips to get your kids (and yourself) to sleep:
1. Create a calming nighttime routine that signals the body that it’s time for sleep.
2. Make sure bedrooms are cool, quiet and dark. Do not watch TV in bed.
3. Eat dinner 3 hours before bedtime.
4. Be consistent with bedtime and rising.

The time between 10pm and 2am is the most valuable sleep time, when the maximum body repair takes place.

So, Early to Bed, Early to Rise!

Leaky Gut Syndrome

Our intestines do a great deal more than just digest food and excrete waste. 

The intestine actually contains about 100 trillion microorganisms, 10 times more than the cells in the body. And these good bacteria – the gut flora – play a very important role in maintaining our health. 

The inner lining of the intestines, under normal conditions, is intact. Obviously. But when assaulted, this lining gets damaged and becomes porous, or ‘leaky’. The lining is highly selective, screening everything we take in, and allowing only desired elements ‘entry’ into the body. The rest, including toxins and harmful bacteria, are ‘shooed away’, ie excreted. 

When this lining is damaged, the undesirable elements are able to ‘enter’ into the body, causing inflammation. The liver is the first to receive these and it fights against them. But when the toxin load increases and the liver is unable to cope, these foreign bodies now cause our immune system to enter into the fray.  It goes into full battle mode to fight the evil intruders and get them out of the body ASAP.  More often than not, the body cannot keep up with the task at hand and the majority of these foreign bodies absorb into tissues throughout the body… causing them to inflame. And now that the body is busy fighting this major war, it has to ignore small battles such as filtering blood and calming inflamed areas. 

So undesirable elements have got entry into the body. And they form deposits in various tissues. When this happens, the body no longer recognises these tissues as its ‘own’, and it establishes a ‘foreign body’ response to its own tissues. And this is the basis of auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis. Brain conditions such as Alzheimers, autism and Schizophrenia are also connected to a leaky gut.

How do we know we may have leaky gut syndrome? If we have:

– Digestive issues such as gas, bloating, diarrhea or irritable bowel syndrome.

– Seasonal allergies or asthma.

– Hormonal imbalances such as PMS or PCOS.

– Autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, lupus, psoriasis, or celiac disease. Also chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia.

– Mood and mind issues such as depression, anxiety, ADD or ADHD.

– Skin issues such as acne, rosacea, or eczema.

then it is likely we have leaky gut.

What are the conditions which cause leaky gut syndrome?

 Diet: Consuming high amounts of refined sugars, processed foods, preservatives, refined flours, and flavorings introduces massive amounts of chemicals into the body. Wheat gluten is not tolerated by many.

Chronic Stress causes leaky gut, which almost always results in a suppressed immune system, which can itself increase inflammation and permeability of the intestinal lining.

Inflammation: Any type of inflammation in the gut can lead to leaky gut.  This can be brought on by low stomach acid (which passes undigested food into the small intestine irritating everything it passes by), yeast overgrowth (Candida), bacteria overgrowth, infection, parasites and excessive environmental toxins.

Medications: Any medication or even over-the-counter pain relievers with Aspirin or Acetaminophen irritate the intestinal lining. This can start or continue the inflammation cycle (more bacteria, yeast, and digestion issues) and promotes an increase in permeability.

Food allergies or food intolerances.

What can we do

1. Remove the bad. The goal is to get rid of things that negatively affect the environment of the GI tract, such as inflammatory and toxic foods, and intestinal infections.

2. Replace the good. Add back the essential ingredients for proper digestion and absorption, such as digestive enzymes, hydrochloric acid and bile acids.

3. Reinoculate beneficial bacteria to reestablish a healthy balance of good bacteria. These are present in probiotics.

4. Repair, with nutrients which help the gut repair itself.

So its simple! If we eat healthy, we stay healthy!

Images courtesy Google

Bet on butter!

For many years, studies have shown an association between eating dairy products and lower diabetes risk. But how dairy protects against diabetes remained a mystery. The answer may lie in dairy’s fat.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health have identified a naturally occurring trans fat in dairy that may substantially reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. Trans-palmitoleic acid is a fatty acid found in milk, cheese, yogurt, and butter. It’s not produced by the body. It only comes from your diet.

In a study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition Harvard researchers analyzed data from 6,814 adults. They measured circulating blood levels of trans-palmitoleate. At the end of 5 years participants with the highest levels of this fat had higher levels of good cholesterol, and had lower fasting insulin levels  and systolic blood pressure . Compared to those with the lowest level of the fat, those with the highest levels had half the risk of developing diabetes. The results confirmed an earlier Harvard study reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

When the researchers combined the data from the two studies they found that each .05% increase in trans-palmitoleate in the blood levels was associated with a 34% lower risk of diabetes. They noted that this trans fat seems to have an extremely strong protective effect, stronger than other things known to be beneficial against diabetes.

In the meantime, enjoy full-fat milk, cheese, and yogurt, preferably from grassfed animals. And you can add reducing diabetes risk to the other healthy reasons to eat real butter.

But continue to avoid artificial trans fats from hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils.