Ads often say, “Ask your doctor for this medication” .From my experience as a medical student, I know that doctors are trained to memorize what they read in textbooks and what their professors say. They are used to accepting the ideas from an authority. It’s easy to carry that attitude to the drug  representative and accept what he says along with some free pills.

In the case of anti-cholesterol pills, some ads say that your cholesterol level can be blamed on family and food.  However, in truth only one in a million people have two faulty genes so their cholesterol con be from 650-1000 and indeed be correlated with heart disease. Even if only one of the genes is faulty, this occurs in less that one in 500 people whose levels are between 350 and 650.  So the family of almost all of the patients put on statins, (the anti-cholesterol drugs) is not relevant.

Food may or may not be causing a rise in the bad LDL-cholesterol. The media and others blame eggs and animal fat, but most LDL-cholesterol and blood fats have been made by the person’s liver from all the high-fructose corn syrup he is getting.   Two ways to get more good HDL-cholesterol are vigorous exercise and eating saturated fats, not avoiding them. 

It took over 30 years after Dr. Mary Enig published research about the danger of trans-fats like margarine, before we are now told to avoid them.

Similarly it might take as long to get much more research to advocate a “heart-healthy” diet that eliminates high-fructose corn syrup.

I ask if a simpler method might work. In my book, I cite Dr. Bob Arnot who tells breast cancer survivors they can prevent a recurrance by cutting out sugar and common salad oils containing omega-6 fatty acids.

I think that omitting these common foods probably allows the woman’s immune system to act effectively against potential cancer cells. Cutting out sugars would prevent the sugar from combining with protein immune factors in a glycation reaction that makes them less effective.

A moderate amount of omega-6 fatty acids as found in raw nuts helps the immune system. However the modern American diet has too much of this fatty acid. Excess omega-6 fatty acids (from corn,cottonseed or soybeans) in salad oils and other foods can produce excess arachidonic acid which can nterfere with the immune system’s natural removal of foreign cells or particles, whether they are outside invaders like bacteria and viruses or potential cancer cells.

Keep your immune system strong with natural foods like anti-oxidant containing berries and a healthy ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids and you might not have to worry about becoming a high risk patient..

A fat person who eats lots of protein or fat can be healthy like Sumo wrestlers or Eskimos. But when Eskimos use alcohol, soft drinks or starchy junk foods, they get diabetes and heart disease.

Sugar causes the pancreas to release insulin into the blood. High blood glucose causes type II diabetes as cells get resistant to more insulin.

We now know that high blood sugar can damage all body cells by combining with proteins in their membranes in a process called glycation that can make these cell walls stiff and prone to injury.

Inflammation, a collection of white cells, occurs to patch injuries. It is measured by C-ReactiveProtein. This correlates with the likelihood of heart disease. Where high blood pressure meets stiff cell walls, the resultant micro-injuries cause inflammaation then plaque. Aspirin can prevent bigger clots here. Salsalate, an older anti-inflammatory drug mentioned in the article could help in any collection of white cells.

But the hypothesis that fatty acids leak out of overfull fat cells may not be why they’re high in diabetics. The liver makes blood fats from high-fructose corn syrup. Couldn’t this source of fatty acids set off the chain reaction in the macrophages that produce PAI-1 that causes blood clots and diabetes?

A recent article by Jonny Bowden,PhD,CNS says that blaming cholesterol for heart disease is like blaming the St.Bernard for the avalanche.    The article in Better Nutrition, Feb, 2010 says  that this cholesterol isn’t a problem unless oxidized by free radicles. Half of the people with heart attacks have normal cholesterol, and half the people with high cholesterol don’t get heart attasks.

Dr. Fank Wu at Harvard Medical School says a heart healthy diet is high in omega-3 fatty acids from fish or flax,  has lots of vegetables, nuts, fruits and whole grains. It is low in sugars and starches and avoids processed foods and trans-fats.

A natural diet with plenty of plant-based antioxidants prevents inflammation and doesn’t let insulin get too high.

Was the wrong diet given to young children? Many mothers seem to think that the fat you consume becomes body fat. They thought they could prevent fat children by giving them low-fat milk.  Kids didn’t like it . They preferred sweet liquids  like orange and apple juice to milk Mothers then gave them chocolate milk so they would get enough calcium and protein. They didn’t realize that fat is also an important ingredient in milk. Every young mammal needs the fat in milk to grow properly.  You can prevent your child from preferring sweet beverages by making sure they get whole milk in all those years from infancy through adolescence.  Remember most body fat is made from sugars and dietary fat is used for energy and growth.

In the past thirty years when people thought they chould shun fat is when more and more Americans have become obese.

There are no statistics in the article. Other sources say that eating fat has been decreasing while consumption of sugars, expecially high fructose corn syrup, keeps increaseing from the 150 pounds per person noted in 2005.

Eating fat doesn’t make you fat. It helps you feel satisfied so you don’t consume too many carbohydrates, especially sweet liquids. It keeps the cellular enzymes that burn fat, the most efficient dietary fuel.  Without enough dietary fat the enzymes that make fat out of carbohydrates increase dramatically and you get fatter.

Dietary salt does not cause high blood pressure. Your healthy kidneys can excrete it if you get more than you need.  Historically most high blood pressure has been caused by smoking since nicotine makes your heart beat faster but meanwhile causes your blood vessels to  get clamp down and get narrower. High insulin and high stress hormones can also raise your blood pressure.

Dr. Dana Flavia in the October 2008 issue of Life Extension cites later research that shows many harmful effect of high-fructose corn syruup. Its use over the past thirty years parallels the increase in obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver, high uric acid and more aging of all cells.

AGE stands for advanced glycation end products. These are formed when excess sugars bind with proteins in cell walls. This makes them prone to injury, causing inflammation and deposts of cholesterol in blood vessels. These glycation end products can also damage cells in kidneys, nerves and the retina. This type of damage from high blood glucose has been seen for years in diabetics. However, fructose has ten times the cross-linkage rate with proteins as glucose so does much more damage.

Fructose is metabolized differently than glucose. It goes to the liver and is often changed into LDL-cholesterol and triglycerides (fats). Some gets into the blood stream to clog your arteries. Some fats stay in your liver cells, causing cirrhosis just like excess alcohol

High-fructose corn syrup can also raise uric acid, a cause of gout. This was shown in a study of 15,000 Americans and a 2008 Canadian study. A Harvard study showed an increase of kidney stones from this high uric acid.

If you’re told you have high blood pressure or high cholesterol or blood fats, don’t blindly take pills to get these values down. Think what might be causing them. Too many people think that fat or cholesterol in their blood vessels must be from animal foods, despite the fact that humans have eaten fat and cholesterol for eons of time. But in the last hundred years, food manufacturers have given you many artificial products. They want you to think that anything derived from a plant must be good and it it’s from an animal it must be bad. Recently doctors realized that trans-fats in Crisco and margarines are not used by the body as are natural saturated fats, lard and butter.  How long will it take to get medical and public acceptance of the fact that high-fructose corn syrup causes more damage to your body?

Table sugar has one molecule of fructose to each molecule of glucose. It’s use has increased from 20 pounds a person per year in the 19th Century to 100 pounds by 1970 and now with the addition of high-fructose corn syrup, 150 pounds of sweeteners a year.  Our bodies over the centuries have not been programmed to cope with so much sugar, especially the huge amounts of high-fructose corn syrup added to most manufactured foods and beverages.  It is ruining our health and might be the main cause of the ever increasing cost of health care as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other metabolic diseases keep going up.

Just say no to sweet soft drinks. Diet drinks with Aspartame cause other problems.

Read labels and use table sugar for your rare dessert or Stevia (from a tropical leaf) to sweeten your coffee or tea.

Take control of your health by using natural foods and beverages.

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They think that eating fat makes you fat, that you need carbohydrates for energy and that eating proteins always builds muscle.

The energy content of foods being digested and used within body cells is not necessarily the same as the values when a food is burned in a scientific calorimeter.

Too many people have gotten obese because they quit eating fat since it has over twice as many calories as a carbohydrate or protein. Better to believe the authors who say “Calories Don’t Count”. “Calories In minus Calories Used to produce energy equals Weight Loss or Gain” might be useful in calculating the calories used by a machine but it is too simplistic to apply to the thousands of chemical reactions in each cell in each organ. The Atkin’s Diet wouldn’t work if calorie content versus energy used was the only consideration.

Fat is more than a storage tissue in the human body, though It can be made from any food in excess.

Fat is the most efficient source of energy for moving muscles, especially the heart which is beating continuously. Burning carbohydrates for energy takes almost 20 reactions to get to the same active molecule in the mitochondria that can be made by removing two-carbon fragments from the fatty acids of a fat molecule. Marathon runners who rely on glycogen or glucose to keep going often get cramps from the accumulation of lactic acid, a by-product of partial burning of blood sugar. The Tarahumara Indians of Mexico who can run for days use body fat for energy. All birds that fly long distances burn fat for energy.

There’s a difference between the ease of digestion of a food and how it’s later used inside body cells. Fat is slow to digest. In fact it sends a signal to the brain to slow down the emptying time of the stomach. So after a fat meal you aren’t hungry for hours. Once in the small intestine fat goes up tiny tubules, called lacteals that by-pass the liver and into a large vein directly to the heart. Meanwhile, the sugars or starches in the diet enter the blood vessels and signal the pancreas to make insulin to allow all cells to absorb blood sugar. In a sedentary person this sugar becomes fat. Most body fat is made from sweet liquids, even orange juice. Sugars are easily absorbed and are the usual source of abdominal fat. The liver often changes blood sugars into blood fats and cholesterol. The use of anti-cholesterol drugs roughly parallels the introduction and use of high-fructose corn syrup in more and more foods. At the same time manufactured foods have less fat. The rise of obesity and diabetes in the past thirty years can be correlated with the rise of sugar from the high 100 pounds per person in 1970 to the excessive 150 pounds of sugar and high fructose corn syrup per person today.

Fat from animals raised in factory farms has given fat a bad name. Cancer and other maladies blamed on animal fat are from insecticides and other toxins in the fat. The Amish and persons in other countries that grow their animals organically don’t suffer from these diseases of civilization.

The fat on the body of an obese person can’t be easily burned for energy. A person who doesn’t get enough dietary fat has many fewer enzymes in body cells that burn fat, but too many enzymes that turn carbohydrates into fats. Not eating fat can make you fatter. In fact animal experiments show that the livers of rats who got no fat in their diet had a 2000 fold increase in enzymes that make fat from sugars compared to rats on a balanced diet.

Don’t be afraid of eating fat as long as it’s organic but beware of high fructose corn syrup, trans-fats and other chemicals in manufactured foods.

Your body is not a machine. You are a mammal whose genes have developed over eons to use natural foods along with enough exercise.