March 2020 – 2HealthyHabits

Corona Virus: A Compromised Immune Systems Can’t Destroy Viruses.

How does an immune system get compromised?

Dr. Natasha McBride says, it has a lot to do with the state of the patient’s epithelial surface of the digestive system.

Approximately 88 percent of our body’s immunity is found in the lining of our gastrointestinal (GI) system.

The immune system is there is to stop invaders from moving out of the digestive tract into the body. Over time, without the beneficial bacteria and proper balance in the gut, toxins, opportunistic bacteria, and parasites chisel away at the physical barrier wall and can create “leaky gut”. Once there is an opening in the wall lining, pathogens escape from the GI, travel through the bloodstream, penetrate the blood–brain barrier, and wreak havoc on the specific functions of our cells, causing diseases.

Pathogens are shown as grey dots in the image below.

Essential or beneficial bacteria in our digestive system engage a very important member of the immune system – the lymphoid tissue of the gut wall. As a result, a healthy gut wall is literally infiltrated with lymphocytes, ready to protect the body from any invader. Scientific research shows that in people with damaged gut flora there are far fewer lymphocytes in the gut wall, which leaves a poorly protected.

The most important immunoglobulin in the gut is produced by lymphocytes in all mucous membranes in the body and secreted in body fluids. It is found in breathing passages, nose, throat, bladder, your urethra, vagina, saliva, tears, sweat, colostrum, breast milk and of course the mucous membranes of the digestive system and it’s secretions. Its job is to protect mucous membranes by destroying and in activating invading bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites.

People with abnormal gut flora can’t destroy viruses, bacteria and other invaders.

Millions of children and adults around the world are exposed to viruses if these people have well functioning gut flora then these viruses do them no harm.

When the gut the flora is damaged the whole immune system in the body gets out of balance. This process makes the person immune-compromised.

What causes a healthy gut to become imbalanced?

Poor diet, antibiotic use, low digestive enzymes, alkalinity, acidity, chemical toxins, environmental toxins, radiation, blood sugar irregularity, stress, and pregnancy- and birth-inherited gut imbalances.

A healthy gut has an approximate ratio of 8:2 of beneficial bacteria to opportunistic bacteria. The beneficial bacteria feed on certain types of opportunistic fungi (candida and the like), create an internal wall of defence against pathogens escaping the intestine, and help digest foods to be transformed into energy.

When the proper ratio is out of balance, the beneficial bacteria can no longer protect the walls of the gut. Pathogens, including opportunistic bacteria, wear down the enterocytes and break through the intestinal lining. Having escaped the gastrointestinal system, the pathogens now enter the bloodstream as antigens. There they create an autoimmune response, attack cells, break through the blood–brain barrier, and create an environment conducive to disease.

What can damage our gut flora?

These are the foods we avoid, because the human digestive system has not been designed to digest them well, and we get virtually no useful nutrition from them. Please see the list of Foods to avoid below.

Please see the list of Recommended foods below.

Please see the list of Natural fats below.

Learn more about Healing your gut with the GAPS diet.

https://2healthyhabits.wordpress.com/2018/07/06/healing-your-gut-with-the-gaps-diet/

This information came from two sources:

The Heal Your Gut Cookbook https://www.amazon.com/Heal-Your-Gut-Cookbook-Nutrient-Dense/dp/1603585613
Gut and Psychology Syndromehttps://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Syndrome-D-D-D-H-D-Schizophrenia/dp/0954852028

COVID 19: Dr. McBride talks about how to deal with the Corona Virus/ Covid 19 in her blog http://www.doctor-natasha.com/the-panic-pandemic.php

Disclaimer: The content of this email or Post is not intended for the treatment or prevention of disease, nor as a substitute for medical treatment, nor as an alternative to medical advice. Use of recommendations is at the choice and risk of the reader.

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May you Live Long Healthy.

Yours truly,

Lydia Polstra

Email: lpolstra@bell.net

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/2healthyhabits/

Blog: https://2healthyhabits.wordpress.com

Loosing Weight Part Two: Is a Calorie a Calorie?

Do Calories Matter? Is a Calorie a Calorie? (Science of Weight Gain)

This Post is part two of the Transcript. It starts at the 8:38 minute mark.Here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcMBm-UVdII

Please see the original for the Footnotes and Citations for the scientific studies.

This brings us to the next point: Is a calorie a calorie?

For a calorie to be a calorie, we would expect all foods to be processed in similar ways in the body without having unique effects on our hormones or other biochemical processes.

But in the case of alcohol a calorie is clearly not a calorie as it has some interesting peripheral effects due to the fact that 10% of the alcohol you ingest is metabolized in the brain, making you drunk and 80% of it is metabolized in the liver, leading to liver disease and other problems.

Another one is trans-fats, which are very different from other fats. The synthetic nature of trans-fats doesn’t allow them to be broken down in your mitochondria and they contribute to metabolic disease and atherosclerosis.

Proteins, get broken down into amino acids in the body, and the liver will use these for either protein synthesis, i.e. muscle growth or convert them into either glucose or fatty acids.

These processes though depend on your insulin levels, whether you have broken down muscle tissue through exercise and how much glucose is stored in the form of glycogen in your body.

And there are all kinds of amino acids, some that are essential and can only come from the diet and some that are non-essential.

Fats on the other hand get broken down into free fatty acids and they will be processed by your mitochondria for energy or stored in the muscle or stored in your fat tissue.

And there are several different types of fat, some good, some bad. For example you have bad ones like trans fats we just talked about and you have fatty-acids like DHA, which is theorized to be what allowed humans to evolve their big brains.

Glucose, the carbohydrate found in things like rice or starchy vegetables passes into the bloodstream and then stimulates the pancreas to make insulin, allowing it to get into the cell so that it can be burned up for energy or it may be stored as glycogen.

Depending on how much glycogen is already stored in the body and how quickly and how much glucose is entering your system at one time, glucose may be stored as fat through a process called de novo lipogenesis.

Keep in mind that fiber in vegetables is going to slow down the rate at which glucose is processed. So your body will react very differently to say 50g of glucose from white bread and 50g of glucose from broccoli.

Now there’s another carbohydrate called fructose (or “frooooctose”) found in sweet things like fruit, juice, honey or table sugar.

The tricky thing about table sugar, or sucrose, is it’s comprised of one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose, yet glucose by itself is sometimes called sugar. For example, blood sugar is synonymous with blood glucose. However what I’m discussing is fructose, a molecule very different and much sweeter than glucose.

Fructose is technically a carbohydrate but it is not necessary for any biochemical reaction in the body, so almost all of it is processed in the liver. The interesting thing about fructose is, among other negative effects like promoting the development of fatty liver disease, is it causes insulin resistance, meaning the more you eat sweet things, the more your pancreas will have to secrete insulin to get its job done, leading to higher and higher insulin levels.

Fructose, by the way, is in 74% of all packaged foods in the form of added sugars.

If you’re trying to lose body fat, you’ll want to keep an eye on insulin. When you have high levels of insulin, hormone sensitive lipase, which breaks down fat for energy, is much less active. In this case, if you haven’t eaten for a couple hours you start to get really hungry because you can’t actually use any of that fat on your body for energy.

So your body fat continues to stick around and you feel pretty crappy. Another reason behind the hunger is that high levels of insulin block your brain from seeing the leptin signal – you become resistant to leptin. Leptin again, is the satiety hormone.

This how eating too many things, like packaged foods or refined carbohydrates, that spike insulin levels can cause people to be hungry and lethargic despite having so much energy stored on their body as fat. So yes Pete is fat because he ate too much clearly, “I’m not fat!” but the reason he ate too much has to do with his hormones.

A calorie is a calorie in the way a gram of money is a gram of money. A kilogram of one hundred dollar bills is going to affect your bank account much differently than a kilogram of 1 yen Japanese coins.

For some people, calories have worked as a decent rule of thumb for them, but tracking the macronutrient composition of your food is going to give you much more insight into how your food is affecting your body than just calories.

There’s still a lot more to be said about macronutrients, but you can notice their effects pretty quickly if you pay attention.

Does a breakfast high in fructose and glucose like orange juice and a big bowl of cereal with flavored yogurt leave you feeling hungry and tired by the time you get to work?
And does a meal high in good fat, protein and fiber like salmon, eggs and vegetables make you feel any different?

May you Live Long Healthy.

Yours truly,

Lydia Polstra

Email: lpolstra@sympatico.ca

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/2healthyhabits/

Blog: https://2healthyhabits.wordpress.com

I will bring you compelling articles on Ketogenic and GAPS diets, the Super Slow High-Intensity Exercise Program and supplements.

To follow my Blog, please click the Follow button to receive an email when the next posting is available. Hint: You may have to click the Accept and Close button before follow is available.

I thrive on feedback. Please let me know you are interested in the content by clicking Like, Commenting or sending me a message or email about the Post.

If you wish to contact me by Email, please email lpolstra@bell.net

Loosing Weight Part One: Do Calories Matter?

This Post is the Transcript from the Video,

Do Calories Matter? Is a Calorie a Calorie? (Science of Weight Gain). Here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcMBm-UVdII

Why does Bill Gates have so much money? Because he earned more money than he spent.

Why did Basketball Team X win the big game? They scored more points than Team Y.

Why is Pete fat?”

The typical answer is that more calories went in than out. Calorie counting may induce weight loss, but why would you care about that?

Losing 10 pounds is great, but wouldn’t you want to know where that 10 lbs. came from?Was it bone, muscle or fat? Then, if it’s fat, which is what most of us want to lose, is it subcutaneous fat or visceral fat?

Pediatric Endocrinologist Robert Lustig points out in his book “Fat Chance” that several studies show that the amount of subcutaneous fat you have, the fat under your skin, correlates with increased longevity; Whereas visceral fat, the fat around your organs that gives you a big belly, promotes inflammation and causes several health detriments meaning the difference between dying early in your fifties or living into your eighties or longer.

A pound of fat being 3500 calories is usually the piece of data we’re provided with to help us create our weight loss goals. For example if you create a deficit of 500 calories per day, then in a week you will lose a pound of fat. But why would the body choose to discard fat first when you restrict calories?

Decreasing your energy intake is interpreted by your body as you being in a situation where less energy (food) is available. Thus, it will do what it can to keep the stored energy it has and slow down processes that spend energy.

Muscle is a relatively energy expensive tissue while one of fat’s functions is to serve as a place for energy storage. So the body would want to preserve the fat and break down the muscle, to conserve as much energy as it can.And that’s what it does. Through a process called gluconeogenesis, “new glucose making,” muscle is broken down into glucose, which can be used for energy.

So now you have successfully reduced your weight by going into a caloric deficit, but now it’s even harder to maintain a caloric deficit and lose more weight because your resting energy expenditure is now less due to having lost muscle.

Jonathan Bailor points out in his book “The Calorie Myth” that “Studies show that up to 70 percent of the nonwater weight lost when people are eating less comes from burning muscle – not body fat. Only after it’s cannibalized this muscle will our body burn fat.”

So your calorie restrictive diet may actually reduce your weight as you intended, but the weight isn’t necessarily coming off from where you’d like it to, and this whole process becomes an uphill battle.

Restricting calories without modifying the composition of your diet will cause your body to lower energy expenditure and increase hunger to provoke you to get back to your normal energy intake.

“Eat less and exercise,” the typical advice for weight loss, is a strategy fueled mainly by willpower. Hunger and lowered energy expenditure is going to set you up to where the last thing your body wants to do is exercise.

Alright, maybe it’s more simple to look at how people get too fat in the first place. Surely to get fat, one has to eat too much. But what causes that excessive eating?

We have very sensitive receptors in our body that let us know when it is too hot, too cold, when we’re thirsty, et cetera. What would cause someone to eat past the point of satiety so much and so frequently that they become overweight or obese?

Of course small fluctuations in weight throughout the year is not unnatural. But when people get significantly overweight or obese over time through overeating, surely something is significantly wrong with the way their body processes food and the way their hunger and satiety receptors work.

So what “calories in calories out” isn’t explaining is why some people’s bodies will just raise energy expenditure in response to eating too much, keeping them thin while other people get fat. Just because you eat extra calories doesn’t mean they have to be stored, they could just be burned off automatically.

The medical journal QJM reports, “Food in excess of immediate requirements… can easily be disposed of, being burnt up and dissipated as heat. Did this capacity not exist, obesity would be almost universal.”

So why is it that obese people don’t automatically dispose of calories, experience intense lethargy, and have voracious appetites despite having massive amounts of energy available in the form of fat on their body?

What is particularly interesting about this is that the satiety hormone, Leptin, is secreted by your fat cells. So if we are to assume that a calorie is a calorie and the type of food you eat does not have any peripheral effects… like disrupting the hormonal environment of the body, then fat people should have less of an appetite than leaner people.

We would need to assume that all overweight people have something like a gene defect that screws up their hormones, leading to this dysfunctional situation where the brain is constantly being told to eat more food despite having plenty of stored energy available on the body.

Robert Lustig explains that only 2 percent of morbid obesity is explained by genes.

“Researchers worldwide have scanned the human genome and have identified thirty-two genes that are associated with obesity in the general population. Altogether, these genes explain a total of 9 percent of obesity. And even if one person had every single bad gene variation, it would account for only about 22 pounds –hardly enough to explain our current obesity pandemic.”

So when people get fat, they are of course for some reason or another, taking in much more calories than they need to. But, their body for some reason chooses to use nearly all these extra calories for body fat accumulation at the expense of muscle.

Dr. Doug McGuff, emergency doctor and exercise expert said: “And I always had it in my head that the morbidly obese were probably pretty well muscled underneath all that because effectively they’re lifting weights all the time. But it’s not the case – their muscles are extraordinarily atrophied. Your external oblique muscle that ought to be you know as thick as a piece of steak, in these people it’s paper thin and stretched to the point of bursting. Because they are having nutrient partitioning that doesn’t allow energy to go anywhere but the body fat. So they are literally starving inside an encasement of blubber.”

A good example for understanding why the body uses calories in different ways is puberty: During puberty, young men and women develop bigger appetites, and that extra energy is put towards developing things like sex organs and making their bodies larger in general. But young men put on a lot of muscle during this phase whereas young women put on more fat. You might attribute this to the fact that young men are more likely to play sports, but the way fat is distributed is very different between the two genders.

Most guys are not gonna find their pants are getting tighter due to butt and hip fat. This is the effect of several hormones, particularly one named insulin. Insulin is an anabolic hormone – it’s known as the energy storage hormone, or sometimes the “fat storage hormone” – one of its jobs is directing how the food you take in will be stored. And, puberty is associated with a higher than normal secretion of insulin.

A very clear illustration of insulin’s fat accumulation abilities is the side effect some diabetes patients experience where they develop a mound of fat at the site where they frequently inject their insulin. This is called lipohypertrophy. So understanding how food affects hormones would be better for weight management than understanding how many calories are going in and out of your body.

Other than insulin, worthwhile hormones to look at are Leptin and Hormone sensitive lipase:

Leptin is the satiety hormone – if you have higher leptin levels and your brain has no problem reading these levels, then you feel “full”.
And, hormone sensitive lipase breaks down fat so it can be used for energy, this of course is important if you want to lose body fat.

So the ideal situation is to have high levels of leptin so you are not hungry all the time, and you would want lower levels of insulin so your body doesn’t store too much energy, and you would want hormone sensitive lipase to be activated so it would break down body fat. Losing body fat while not being hungry would be the ideal situation, right?

The problem with calories in calories out is it doesn’t tell you anything about how to achieve this preferred hormonal situation. But, paying attention to how much of and what kinds of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates are in your meals will tell you much more about how your hormones are going to respond.

May you Live Long Healthy.

Yours truly,

Lydia Polstra

Email: lpolstra@bell.net

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/2healthyhabits/

Blog: https://2healthyhabits.wordpress.com

I will bring you compelling articles on Ketogenic and GAPS diets, the Super Slow High-Intensity Exercise Program and supplements.

To follow my Blog, please click the Follow button to receive an email when the next posting is available. Hint: You may have to click the Accept and Close button before follow is available.

I thrive on feedback. Please let me know you are interested in the content by clicking Like, Commenting or sending me a message or email about the Post.

If you wish to contact me by Email, please email lpolstra@bell.net

Saturated Fat Part Two: Gauging Your Heart Disease Risk

You are at risk of a heart disease if you have 3 out of the following 5 indications of metabolic syndrome:

A fasting insulin level above 3

A triglyceride to HDL ratio above 2

Low HDL

A waist circumference indicating overweight or obesity

High blood pressure

Another major risk factor for heart disease that receives virtually no attention is high iron levels. In menstruating women, this is not an issue since they lose blood on a monthly basis. This is actually part of why premenopausal women have a decreased risk of heart disease.

In men, iron levels can rise to dangerously high levels. In my experience, the majority of adult males and postmenopausal women have elevated levels that put their health at risk. Checking your iron levels is easy and can be done with a simple blood test called a serum ferritin test. If your levels are high, all you have to do is donate blood a few times a year.

The Connection Between Saturated Fats and Diabetes

Malhotra cites a 2014 Lancet study looking at the association between dietary saturated fat, plasma saturated fat and type 2 diabetes. Interestingly, while dietary saturated fats found in dairy products were strongly inversely associated with the development of type 2 diabetes (meaning it was protective), endogenously-synthesized plasma-saturated fat was strongly associated with an increased risk.

Endogenously-synthesized plasma-saturated fats are fatty acids produced by your liver in response to net carbohydrates, sugar and alcohol.These findings suggest eating full-fat dairy products may protect you against type 2 diabetes,whereas consuming too many net carbs (total carbs minus fiber) will increase your risk of type 2 diabetes –in part by raising the saturated fat levels in your bloodstream.

Healthy Fat Tips

Here are a few tips to help ensure you’re eating the right fats for your health:

Use organic butter made from raw grass-fed milk instead of margarines and vegetable oil spreads.
Use coconut oil for cooking. It is primarily a saturated fat and more resistant to heat damage than other cooking oils. It will also help improve your ability to burn fat and serve as a great source of energy to help you make the transition to burning fat for fuel.
Sardines and anchovies are an excellent source of beneficial omega-3 fats and are also very low in toxins that are present in most other fish.
To round out your healthy fat intake, be sure to eat raw fats, such as those from avocados, raw dairy products, and olive oil, and also take a high-quality source of animal-based omega-3 fat, such as krill oil.

Why Statins Are a Bad Idea for Most People

In addition to the recommendation to follow a low-fat diet, many doctors are still avid prescribers of statins, which help lower your cholesterol.

“This is a drug that was marketed over the last three decades as being a wonder drug. We’re only now realizing that the benefits of statins have been grossly exaggerated and the side effects underplayed. One of the reasons for that is that most if not all of the studies that drove the guidelines were industry-sponsored studies.

One of the things we have neglected in medicine is this issue around absolute risk and relative risk. The reality is if you look at the published data … if you have heart disease and you’ve had a heart attack, then taking a statin every day for five years, there’s a 1 in 83 chance that [statin] will save your life.

That means in 82 of 83 cases, it’s not going to save your life.

People with low risk should know that if they haven’t had a heart attack, according to the published literature, they’re going to live one day longer from taking statins.”

Statins Are Associated With Serious Side Effects

Then there’s the issue of side effects. According to Malhotra, between 1 in 3 and 1 in 5 patients suffer unacceptable side effects (that interfere with or diminish the quality of your life). Muscle pain is the most significant side effect reported followed by fatigue (mostly in women) because statins are essentially a metabolic blocker and mitochondrial poison.

They inhibit an enzyme called HMG-CoA reductase. This is how they lower cholesterol. But that same enzyme is also responsible for a number of other things like making coenzyme Q10, which is why muscle pain and fatigue are so common. This is in fact a sign that your CoQ10 is being depleted, and you don’t have enough cellular energy.

Statins also block the formation of ketones, which are an essential part of mitochondrial nutrition and overall health. If you can’t make ketones, you impair the metabolism in your entire body, including your heart, thereby raising your risk for heart problems and a variety of other diseases. It’s also recently been established that within a few years of taking statins, the drug causes type 2 diabetes in one out of 100 patients.

That too can be a significant tradeoff that needs to be taken into account, as diabetes is a risk factor for heart disease and other chronic diseases. Dr. Michel De Lorgeril, a well-respected French cardiologist at Grenoble University recently reopened the debate about statins after publishing a review in which he questions whether statins actually have any benefit at all.

“He pointed out several discrepancies in the original trials … statistical manipulation, conflict of interest … ” Malhotra says. ”He’s actually suggested that maybe nobody benefits from statins; even people on statins for prevention.

He says that unless we get access to the raw data, independent analysis, the actual claims about the benefits of statins are not evidence-based.”

In case you missed it, please read

Saturated Fat Part One: Great Britain’s Most Outspoken Cardiologist Sets the Record Straight

Is saturated fat dangerous to your health?

Hospitals and Medical Personnel Are Far From Paragons of Health

For Past 60 Years, the Wrong Fats Have Been Vilified

What Are the Real Risk Factors for Heart Disease?

Here is the link https://2healthyhabits.wordpress.com/2020/02/28/saturated-fats-part-one-great-britains-most-outspoken-cardiologist-sets-the-record-straight/

Part One and Two have been condensed from Dr. Mercola’s post: Great Britain’s Most Outspoken Cardiologist Sets the Record Straight on Saturated Fats

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/06/05/saturated-fat-heart-disease-risk.aspx

Please see the original for the Footnotes and Citations for the scientific studies.

May you Live Long Healthy.

Yours truly,

Lydia Polstra

Email: lpolstra@sympatico.ca

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/2healthyhabits/

Blog: https://2healthyhabits.wordpress.com

I will bring you compelling articles on Ketogenic and GAPS diets, the Super Slow High-Intensity Exercise Program and supplements.

To follow my Blog, please click the Follow button to receive an email when the next posting is available. Hint: You may have to click the Accept and Close button before follow is available.

I thrive on feedback. Please let me know you are interested in the content by clicking Like, Commenting or sending me a message or email about the Post.

If you wish to contact me by Email, please email lpolstra@bell.net using this form.

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