Taking Drugs for Cholesterol Issues? Maybe Medication Started the Problem

Your microbiome and your cholesterol

Cholesterol lowering drugs seem to have lost some of their luster. Can’t say I’m disappointed about that little tidbit.

Due to staggeringly successful marketing efforts on the part of the drug companies (most notably Pfizer for Lipitor), drugs to lower cholesterol became one of the most successful drugs ever produced. Unfortunately, this had little effect on patient health because of the truly dismal benefits of the statin class of drugs.

One percent improvement. Yup. That’s about all you can expect from taking a statin drug to lower your cholesterol. Pretty much sucks no matter how you look at it.

The cholesterol story has become quite interesting in the past few years. It took some very large studies to put the minimal benefits of statin drugs into perspective, especially in light of the risk of diabetes from this class of drugs.

I think the findings that statins increased the risk of diabetes (ironically, especially in those who were at lower risk in the first place) has finally opened medicine to the idea that this class of drugs is not the miracle drug we once thought it was.

To see how far it’s come, the most recent cardiovascular disease prevention guidelines do NOT include cholesterol as a risk factor nor are there recommendations to limit dietary cholesterol intake.

My how far we’ve come.

Still frustrating, however, when you consider that these recommendations NEVER should’ve been present in the first place. It’s like medicine is just now waking up to the idea that the “statins to lower high cholesterol” approach is just not a good idea.

I’m not saying that high cholesterol is a goal we should shoot for. Quite the opposite. It’s just that cholesterol is just one risk factor among many and putting on blinders to look just at total cholesterol is a bad idea.  To give you an idea of how crazy the idea of using a drug to single-mindedly lower cholesterol is, this particular study should do the trick.  You see, cholesterol levels are merely a reflection of the health of the body. That means that literally hundreds of factors will work together to create the numbers that you see on your blood test.

These numbers can include total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol (generally “bad”), HDL cholesterol (generally “good”), triglycerides (lower is better), Lp (a) (lower is better), Apo B (lower is better) and VLDL (lower is better).  Diet, exercise, stress levels, supplements and environmental exposures can all affect your lipids levels. But according to the results of this study, there may be another factor affecting your levels that your doctor is likely not aware of.

The bacteria in your gut.

Yup. As if we didn’t already link the bacteria in your gut to pretty much every other aspect of health. Now we can chalk up your lipid levels on the list. Here’s the specifics of the study:

• The gut bacteria was evaluated in 893 subjects, with an average 238 different types of bacteria per individual (ranged from 44 to 355).
• As seen in just about every other study looking at the microbiome, higher diversity (as measured by Shannon’s diversity index) led to better lipid values.
• Higher diversity was linked to lower BMI.
• Higher diversity was linked to lower trigylcerides.
• High diversity was linked to higher HDL levels.

The study went into FAR more detail than this as far as the relationship between specific bacterial species, BMI and lipids, but suffice it to say that the results were consistent with prior studies on this same subject.

So what does this mean? It means that someone, somewhere is going to try to financially capitalize on this relationship. You can bet this will be along the lines of fecal transplants (and now for the collective “yuck…”), which is already well on its way to being an acceptable treatment for C. diff infections.

To me, this means that diversity is key. I have said this time and time again and always relate it back to antibiotic use in all but the most life-threatening situations.

Antibiotics WIPE OUT DIVERSITY and it takes years to recover, if ever. IF EVER. I can not state this more strongly—if you are the type of person who runs out and gets an antibiotic prescription for acne, sinus infections, urinary tract infections, sore throats, ear infections or upper respiratory tract infections (ALL of these have very little evidence of effectiveness and can be better managed naturally), even if it is only once every few years, you are absolutely, positively, destroying the diversity in your gut and with it, your long term health.

Thinking that you are OK after antibiotics by just following up with probiotics for a week or two is old school. Taking probiotics is just the first 100 yards of a marathon. But if you can point me to a probiotic with 200+ strains that will survive through to GI tract to the lower regions of the intestines, I’ll revise my thinking on this issue.

Until then, avoid antibiotics unless you are on your deathbed with a fever of 106.

 

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Do Migraines Harm Your Developing Baby?

If you have read any of my articles that relates to migraines, then the answer that springs to mind is a strong YES.

I really don’t need to belabor the prior bit of information.  Bottom line is, if you suffer from migraines, do not be led into a false sense of security if the migraine medication you are on is controlling your headaches.  Fix the problem instead.

This particular article looks at the relationship between migraines sufferers and the risk of of adverse pregnancy outcomes (low birthweight, preterm birth, infants born small for gestational age, Caesarean section (CS) and pre-eclampsia).  Here’s what the researchers found when they looked at the pregnancy outcomes from 4911 women with migraines:

• Low birth weight – 16% increased risk
• Preterm birth – 24% higher risk
• C-section – 16% higher risk
• Pre-eclampsia – 34% higher risk

What does this tell us?  That the problem with migraines are NOT limited to the head.  If they were and medications did anything to fix the problem, than these higher pregnancy risks wouldn’t be present.

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Chronic Migraine Relief; Fats and Your Brain

fats and your seizures

Every migraine sufferer wants that miracle drug, treatment or cure that will provide chronic migraine relief. Personally, I don’t think this will ever happen.

Headaches are too diverse and too complex to be treated with a single approach. The only exception to this is those people who have been incorrectly diagnosed with migraine when what they really have is an isolated “structural headache.”  This is my term for a headache that comes from the structures of the head and neck. These headaches will respond incredibly well to treatment from a chiropractor who also fully understands how to treat the soft tissues involved in addition to adjusting the cervical spine.

But even patients with structural headaches are likely to have migraine-headaches overlaid upon the structural headaches. This means that structural treatment alone is not going to be enough in the long run. It may provide some relief in the short term, but ultimately the headaches will come back until you address the other factors.

Among other things, fats play a big role in how your brain works. If you remember way back to high school biology class, all of our cells are made up of a fatty cell membrane. And this cell membrane is a critical factor in determining what comes into the cell and what leaves the cell. This includes building blocks to make proteins in the cell as well as messages.

A healthy cell membrane makes sure that messages that are supposed to make it in get in and also make sure that messages that are NOT supposed to get into the cell stay out. This is why dietary choices that emphasize intake of healthy fats (raw nuts, seeds, wild caught fish, wild game and olive oil) and avoid the intake of unhealthy fats (corn oil, soybean oils and hydrogenated oils) are good the for brain. This applies whether we are talking about chronic migraine headaches, seizures, Alzheimer’s dementia, Parkinson’s disease or cognitive decline.

Fats play a critical role. Which fits into the results from this particular study. In it, researchers looked at the levels of a particular class of cell-membrane fat called sphingolipids in a group of 88 women with episodic migraine. For those of you a little rusty in Jeopardy’s “I’ll take brain fats for $500, please, Alex” sphingolipids are a specific type of waxy fat found in high concentrations in the cell membranes of your brian cells.  In general, higher levels means that your brain cells are going to be more stable.  In addition, certain sphingolipids play a critical role in sending messages within the brain cells themselves.

With this in mind, here’s what they found:

• Total ceramide and dihydroceramide levels were lower in those with episodic migraine.
• Each standard deviation increase in total ceramide and dihydroceramide led to a 92% lower risk of experiencing migraines when compared to a control group.
• In addition, every standard deviation increase in the sphingomyelin species C18:0 led to a massive 428% higher risk of experiencing migraines.
• The same was true with the sphingomyelin species C18:1, leading to a 293% higher risk.

So what does all of this mean?  Other than the fact that I apparently didn’t pay enough attention in biochemistry?

First of all, higher sphingomyelin levels have been consistently shown in prior studies to be linked to prediabetes.  This fits in incredibly well with the concept that prediabetes is very bad for the health of your blood vessels and the unhealthy blood vessels are the key player in the development of migraine headaches.

In addition, ceramides can be converted into sphingomyelin.  That would lead to lower levels of ceramides (increasing risk of migraines) and higher levels of sphingomyelin (again leading to increasing risk of migraines).  It all seems to fit.

While scientists are still trying to figure out what this all means, I would venture to say that this study again links the poor blood vessel health of prediabetes to chronic migraine headaches.  And an anti-diabetic diet will have huge payoffs when it comes to chronic migraine relief.

 

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Should I See a Chiropractor for My Chronic Migraine Headaches?

Why am I even asking this (it was rhetorical, by the way)?  The answer is unquestionably yes.

It never ceases to amaze me how many new patients come into my office that have been having headaches for years and have never been to a chiropractor.  Many of these patients begin to feel better in as little as a week.  The caveat here is that you need to find a chiropractor who addresses the soft tissue (muscle, ligaments, tendons, fascia) aspect of your problem and not just adjusting.  Many times the soft tissue aspect has been present for so long that just adjusting, just exercising, just ultrasounding, just interferentialling (is that a word??), just strengthening or just adjusting is not going to be enough.

This particular study just supports this link, finding close associations between tenderness in the trapezius muscles and chronic tension headaches as well as migraine headaches that were present only on one side of the head.

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Is That Wonder Bread with Whole Grains Good for Me?

Ok, so this is the perfect example of marketing taking a good idea and messing it all completely up.

Refined carbs, as I have written about many times in the past, are when you take the whole grain and lop off about 2/3 of the grain, removing 90% of the nutrients and leaving all the calories.  So, while “enriched wheat flour” sounds like it might be a healthy thing (isn’t “enriched” a good thing??), if it is on the label, it’s off the list.

Just because something says “made with whole grains” on the front of the package does NOT mean it’s now a health food because you added a gram or two of whole grains into a pound of crap.

In this particular article, to further reinforce the idea that whole grains are the only option, researchers found that whole grains actually lowered levels of hsCRP, a marker of inflammation in the body.  Less inflammation = less chronic disease.  Pretty simple equation.

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Looking for a Healthy Pregnancy? Need to do this First

Maksud /Dollar Photo Club

I know that regular readers will be a little sick of hearing this, but at some point medicine needs to understand the dangers of antibiotics.

It seems that the tide is turning, but few still understand just how massively broad-reaching the effects of the bacterial flora of the human body are. And antibiotics just absolutely destroy the normal bacterial composition of the human body.  And IF it recovers, it can take years to happen.

I won’t go into all the research linking good bacteria to positive health and bad bacterial balance to just about every chronic disease known to man—all of that can be found by reading through past articles that can be found by clicking HERE.

A healthy pregnancy, in today’s environment, is a deliberate act and does not happen naturally. Which sounds kind of crazy, considering that pregnancy is one of the absolute requirements for the perpetuation of our species.  But there are just too many factors in today’s lifestyle that are not conducive to a healthy, full term pregnancy. From ubiquitous chemicals like BPA and phthalates to poor fertility leading to artificial reproduction attempts, it seems like our world has turned against our ability to reproduce safely.

It is very clear that those children born premature as well as those children born to couples who conceived through artificial means are behind the 8-ball health-wise. These children are at higher risk of things like obesity, heart disease and diabetes.  For this reason, anything that can be done to make sure that mom makes it to full-term is a very good thing.

Which makes this particular article so incredibly important. In it, researchers looked at the vaginal microbiota composition as from 40 women during pregnancy and for up to 12 months after delivery. Of this group, 11 women gave birth prematurely. Here’s what they found:

• 62% of samples from women who delivered preterm had Lactobacillus-poor vaginal microbiota.
• One-third of women with this low-Lactobacillus vaginal composition delivered very preterm infants born at fewer than 32 weeks of gestation.
• On the other hand, 3/4 of women who carried pregnancy to term had Lactobacillus-dominant vaginal microbiota.
• In addition, in women who had high levels of vaginal Gardnerella, a bacteria that can cause bacterial vaginitis, had even worse outcomes when they were Lactobacillus-poor.

While the authors state that this is not enough research to go around making sweeping recommendations to pregnant women to begin douching with Lactobacillus prior to becoming pregnant, I would disagree.

Quite frankly, the results of this study are not surprising given prior research along these lines coupled with how much we know about how the bacterial flora in our bodies drive immune function and inflammation.

What this should wake us all up to (if any of us still happened to be sleeping through the ruckus) is just how far-reaching the devastation of antibiotics can go. It’s not just about getting a day or so of diarrhea after a course of amoxicillin. Rather, it’s about a lifetime of disrupting the balance between inflammation and the proper functioning of your immune system.

Period.

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Is Taking Folic Acid Dangerous? Breast Cancer Concerns

The question of folic acid fortification an issue that has been growing in the medical literature as it relates to risk of colon and breast cancer.

Unfortunately, as with most problems dealing with physiology, the ones who will ultimately be making recommendations (mainstream medicine and the mainstream media) will likely not have the background to fully understand the issue.

Folic acid (as well as the vitamins B12, B6, SAM-e and betaine) play a role in a process called methylation.  Methylation does many things, one of which is adding a “tag” onto DNA to allow the right DNA to be expressed at the right time. In other words, this process makes sure that “liver” cells do not do “brain” stuff.

Sounds good, but there are certain genes that silence other genes (called tumor suppressor genes).  If you suppress the suppressor of tumor growth, you can create a problem!  Sound complicated?  Then factor in the MTHFR genetic factor, and not enough folic acid will cause DNA damage to occur!

Which brings us to this particular article.  In it, researchers looked at folic acid levels in the bloodstream and a woman’s risk of breast cancer based on estrogne receptor status.  They found that women with the higher levels of folate acid in their blood had a 267% higher risk of estrogen receptor beta negative ERβ−) breast cancer.

So is folic acid good or bad for us?

First, supplementation aside, we should NOT be getting or folic acid from fortified breads and cereals, because these are refined and very bad for us.  Second, a healthy overall lifestyle will avoid cancer growth regardless of folic acid status.  Third, we should all try to find out what our MTHFR gene is so we know whether more or less folic acid is good for us.  Most labs can now easily run this testing in a normal blood sample.

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“Smoking Gun” of Childhood Leukemia and Lymphoma Found

kesipun / Dollar Photo club

When a 50 year old 3-pack-a-day smoker gets lung cancer, we all shake our head.  But when it’s a 6 year old, only horror is felt.

Personally, I have always believed that childhood cancers come from a bad combination of genetic susceptibility and environmental chemical exposure.  Either way, it is in no way, shape or form from decisions that the child has made.  Unless, of course, the child independently decided to take up smoking at 3 and moved next to a nuclear waste dump against parental advice.

Personally, I have done everything possible to reduce or eliminate my family’s exposure to toxic chemicals.  Selective vaccinations (yes—this little tidbit is glided over when describing the risks of vaccination…), no non-stick cookware, glass or stainless steel containers and glasses, no herbicides, no pesticides, organic foods when possible and only essential-oil based fragrances.

I remember a time when we had an ant infestation.  There was a clear trail from outside directly to one of the dog bowls, where they had immersed themselves in the leftover dog food.  Outside and along the inside of the molding I sprinkled grits. But since grits take some time to work, I remember crawling around on the floor with duct tape capturing all of the home invaders.  My then-toddler thought it was a blast.

This is not the extent to which most people would go through to protect their family from toxins, but I’ve always had a distinct fear of toxic chemicals, regardless of how “safe” they have been declared.  (BTW—the “safety” of most of the pesticides in use today have been determined by the companies that manufacture them)

Time and time again, my fears, when it comes to how much of an impact that toxic, everyday, household chemicals have on our healthy, have proven well-founded.  This time is no different.

In this particular study, researchers looked across 13 different studies to evaluate the impact that pesticides used in the home have on the risk of childhood leukemia and lymphoma.

Of all the cancers, the blood-origin cancers, leukemia and lymphoma, are among the scariest.  The solid tumors like breast, prostate, colon and pancreatic, have very well-defined lifestyle risk factors like diet and exercise.  Not so with leukemia and lymphoma.  Sure, your dietary choices play a role, but this role is not as great as the hidden chemical exposures that increase risk.

“Hidden” being the scariest word in that paragraph.  Personally, I’m pretty well aware of where these hidden chemicals lie, but the average person is unaware of most.  And the ones that we should be aware of and avoid are so commonly used that no one questions them.

Household pesticides are one of these chemicals, as we really see in the results of this study:

• Overall, indoor residential insecticide exposure was linked to a 47% higher risk of childhood leukemia and a 43% higher risk of lymphoma.
• Even worse, when both indoor insecticide exposure and professional home treatment exposure was present, this risk jumped 204% higher.
• The overall risk for all childhood cancer from indoor pesticide exposure in general was increased 40%.

These are some scary numbers, especially with the combination of professional and non-professional home use.  I know that many of the pesticide companies will only spray outside the house, but I would still be worried.  We really have no idea how much of these chemicals make it into the home.

And here’s the rub—at least here in the Phoenix area, there are a large number of pest prevention companies.  It’s a thriving business.  And this means that there are a large number of people in developed countries that are exposing themselves and their families to toxic chemicals that are known to increase the risk of childhood cancers.

Maybe the next time you see a cockroach running across the floor it’s not the time to run to the phone and call the exterminators.

 

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