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General steps to good health
By Rachel Shelton, NP-C
In our current situation now more than ever it is important to focus on fueling our bodies with good nutrition in order to stay healthy. It is best to strive for a well balanced diet in order to get our essential nutrients.
Foods to boost our immunity and help strengthen our ability to fight infections should include fruits and vegetables that feature the colors of the rainbow. Some important vitamins and minerals that help boost immunity include the following.
Vitamin C: leafy green vegetables, strawberries, papaya, citrus, bell peppers. Vitamin E: almonds peanuts, hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, spinach, broccoli Vitamin A: these include foods high in carotenoids- carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, cantaloupe
Vitamin D: fortified foods such as milk, orange juice, cereals. However some may have difficulty absorbing vitamin D from foods. Discuss this with your provider. A supplement may be needed in certain individuals
Folic Acid: leafy green vegetables, fortified foods-enriched breads, whole grains Iron: beans, broccoli, kale, lean poultry, seafood
Zinc: lean meats, poultry, yogurt, chickpeas, crab
Selenium: garlic, broccoli, tuna, barley
Some fundamentals to understanding healthy eating basics include:
– limit highly processed and packaged foods
– Fill at least half your plate with vegetables and fruits in a rainbow of colors at most meals/ snacks
– Focus on whole grains. Avoid refined grains like white breads, cookies, cakes – Drink plenty of water to stay hydrated. Avoid sugar sweetened beverages. The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine recommends 2 L (15 cups) of water for men and 2 L (11 cups) of water for women daily.
– Reduce intake of red meats.
– Consider “good” fats, including nuts, seeds, olives, avocados, olive oil. Avoid trans fats. – Mindful eating- try not to be distracted while eating. Pay attention to portions. – Avoid excessive alcohol intake
– Fresh ingredients, prepared at home are best (although in this era of COVID-19 we may have to rely on frozen fruits and vegetables until we can get to the grocery store more often)
Other factors to consider to maintain overall good health include:
–Strive for adequate sleep, ideally 7-9 hours for adults.
–Exercise!!! This is not only helpful for your physical health but for your mental health as well. Aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate physical activity every day. Those activities could include walking, swimming, biking, running. Don’t forget to include strength training as well.
-Connect with others. In this time of COVID-19, call or video chat with friends and family but when we are able to safely be together again, aim to connect with your support system.
-Reduce stress. Perhaps practicing meditation, yoga, or journaling daily. Start with just a few minutes a day and slowly increase your practice as you go.
Our goal as your healthcare provider is to help you in your quest for good health and keep you well. In this stressful time we are all in this together and are on your team. Please reach out to us should you have any questions or need additional guidance.
lets talk about fat
&
your cholesterol
By Salma Haque, M.D.
The lipid cycle, like other pathways in our body, is a beautifully designed system that shuttles fats and nutrients to hungry tissues. To more easily explain how it works, I’m going to simplify the details and compare our friendly carriers (HDL, LDL, VLDL, IDL, chylomicrons) to something more recognizable – travel bags.
These travel bags are all proteins with unique address labels attached (apoproteins), and they carry within them fatty nutrients including cholesterol, triglycerides, and vitamins. The apoprotein labels are easily recognized by nutrient-seeking tissues, and allow quick delivery of the contents within the bags. Once their internal contents have been delivered, the travel bags are picked up by the liver, which channels the unwanted fats out through the bile system, while repacking the beneficial fats into its own liver-branded travel bag (VLDL). These new bags are then sent back into the blood circulation. It is a fine-tuned system that works beautifully, until, that is, the travel bag’s labels get vandalized.
When these labels are no longer recognizable, the bags are rejected by the hungry tissues, and accumulate in circulation until the entire bag succumbs to the vandalism that initially destroyed its label. The travel bag is then itself destroyed, dumping its contents into the clean blood vessel walls, causing inflammation and plaque build-up.
A deranged lipid cycle will often show up in labs with too many lost travel bags floating around (high levels of LDL), completely lost or destroyed travel bags (low HDL), and lipids without their bags (high triglycerides). Medical professionals often misdiagnose the first problem – high levels of LDL – as the sole problem needing to be solved by artificially lowering LDL levels, rather than as a symptom of the much larger issue of an upset lipid cycle that needs rebalancing. Just as we wouldn’t blame the travel bag itself, LDL alone is not the culprit. Removing a worker from the assembly line always has undesirable side effects, and very low LDL levels are associated with other comorbidities.
In primary prevention, our goal is not to get the LDL to artificially low levels, but rather to maintain the natural balance nature has designed the cycle to run at.
So what caused the vandalism?
1. Free Radical Oxidation (see below)
2. Glycation (we could call this death by sugar; discussion for another day)
Free Radical Oxidation –
We can talk all day about the benefits of good fats, but it’s useless talk if these fats are unstable. To cut to the chase, the common “vegetable” oils are highly unstable polyunsaturated fatty acids. Their origin in the seed with its antioxidant counterparts was a healthy idea, but the extraction was not.
why?
The 2+ double bonds in the chains of polyunsaturated fatty acids leads to an exponential increase in reactivity to oxygen, rendering them quickly to mutated oxidized forms which trigger the formation of free radicals, again in an exponential chain reaction. These free radicals wreak havoc on almost any tissue they encounter.
what did that mean?
Free radical oxidation is what is destroying our cells, leading to disrupted travel bag signals, destroyed travel bags, and damaged arteries. This inflammatory process interferes with metabolic function on every level, indiscriminate to our other organs. Of particular concern is the effect these oils are having on our brains.
Even organic expeller-pressed “vegetable” oils are damaged oxidized versions of the original oil. These include canola oil, cottonseed oil, grapeseed oil, safflower oil, soy oil, and sunflower oil. While most experts have accepted the ill effects from high trans fat sources of margarine and shortenings, removing these other oils from our modern diet has been a political challenge.
what's left then?
What we originally started with: real food & real fats created in nature with a history older than the modern heart attack epidemic.
Butter, animal fats, olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil.
Most of these have a high saturated fat content, which renders these fats much more stable to heat and more resistant to oxidative damage.
What about all the studies that link saturated fats with heart attacks and cardiovascular death and the American Heart Association’s (AHA) dietary advisory?
Multiple international reviews of the same trials that were used to base AHA’s recommendations found no such association. I have provided references below for anyone interested in further reading. (You could start with just this article). It’s a long story with a long history. The low fat-low cholesterol campaign was challenged for years, but it was only finally debunked not too long ago, and has left in its wake tremendous damage.
I’ll conclude with the words of the father of American cardiology and personal physician and chief cardiologist to President Dwight Eisenhower, Dr. Dudley White. In 1956, when he was an AHA panelist, Dr. White was pressed by his colleagues to support a low cholesterol vegetable oil diet. He responded:
“See here, I began my practice as a cardiologist in 1921 and I never saw an MI patient until 1928. Back in the MI free days before 1920, the fats were butter and lard and I think we would all benefit from the kind of diet that we had at a time when no one had ever heard of the word corn oil.” (MI stands for myocardial infarction, a.k.a. heart attack).
Food for thought: If the dangers of artificial trans-fat were brought to Congress in 1988, why did this knowledge not reach the mainstream public until European countries banned it, leading finally to the US ban 27 years later (2015)? Could the same players be preventing education on the dangers of vegetable oils?
take home point:
Eat natural fats.
Avoid fats that required complicated processing to extract or create.
Get the vegetable/canola oils out of your diet.
Enjoy your butter (from pasture fed cows)!
References:
Enig, M. Know Your Fats: The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils, and Cholesterol. Bethesda Press, 2000.
Enig, M, Trans Fatty Acids in the Food Supply: A Comprehensive Report Covering 60 Years of Research , 2nd Edition, 1995, Enig Associates, Inc., Silver Spring, MD
Enig, M, & Fallon, S. The Oiling of America. (2006). www.westonaprice.org/know-your-fats/the-oiling-of-america
Ravnskov, Uffe. The Cholesterol Myths. New Trends Publishing, 2002.
Shanahan, C. M.D., & Shanahan, Luke. Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food (2nd) Flatiron Press. 2016.
Spiteller D, Spiteller G. Oxidation of Linoleic Acid in Low-Density Lipoprotein: An Important Event in Atherogenesis. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2000 Feb;39(3):585-589.
Teicholz, N. The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. Simon and Schuster, 2015.
Community Activities:
Coming soon…
Classes & Lectures:
Join us for a free webinar on Cardiovascular Risk Factors with Arlington Public Library
Thursday, February 11th, 7:00-8:00pm
Registration is required via the Arlington Public Library website below:
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Have you ever wondered what your cardiac risk is? Most of our risks are easily measured and reversible. Awareness now will be protection later. Presented via Zoom webinar by Northern Virginia Holistic Primar…
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