Novel Big Hitter interventions that will have dramatic cost savings due to improved health. Chronic diseases of aging and how to prevent them with unorthodox, effective interventions.
* * Food corporations, politics and a barrage of competing health products and food advertising touting everything under the sun have basically overwhelmed and confused people. Milk’s good for you, no it’s chocolate, eat tomatoes and so on. * Saying very slow may be optimistic. Food politics, with huge sums of money at stake, is so powerful that it may never happen without significant reforms of the schizophrenic FDA which is charged with promoting commercial agriculture and with safeguarding the public health. * Incorporating current research into public health action is a 20-40 year process. By the ’50s it was certain that cigarettes were a leading cause of cancer and heart disease. It took until the late 80s for most work places to ban smoking on the job. We’re still in process of shutting smoking down but still allow advertising. * King County, as a small entity “below the radar” of national issues has the potential capability of greatly reducing the time to implement and eliminating the confusion with simple, clear guidelines and classes to offset the health tragedies employees and their families are experiencing.
* *I wanted to say EVERY study, but that’s possibly an over reach. I have yet to find an epidemiological study that considers all of the relevant variables as disclosed by modern research. Analysis errors are less common, but still there; usually the result of looking for what the researcher wants to find. Interpretations are sometimes based more on what the funding institution wants to find than the data. I’ve found studies where the conclusions support, say, sugar consumption but the data didn’t. At least they didn’t falsify the data. It’s very important to keep a clear mind on this point. When you find that hypertension, obesity, heart attacks and diabetes often coexist, it is comletely improper to say obesity caused… the other three. In fact, they all have a common root cause, which is none of the above and I have yet to find a nutritionist’s study that properly addresses that root cause. A randomized, double blind human clinical trial is the gold standard and can provide strong proof. In nutrition these, by and large, have not been done yet. There are difficulties such as expense, long times for chronic diseases to show up, and ethical issues if you may be deliberately harming humans. So, we’re left with cross-disciplinary study of laboratory research in medicine, basic research in biochemistry, biology and physiology and the study of isolated groups of people with common diet and health outcomes.
* * * *To be honest, that’s a SWAG, silly wild ass guess. Certain groups of isolated traditional peoples with excellent nutrition show NONE of the diseases of civilization we are so subject to. NO heart disease, diabetes, obesity, strokes or dementias. They are typically buoyantly happy, sing a lot and never have locks on their doors, if they even have doors. Their lives are typically shorter than ours due to acute illnesses, accidents, and other sudden deaths. If they survive these into old age, they are still active and capable to the end. A few live into their 90s.
This diagram illustrates the hepatic (liver) metabolism of fructose, a simple sugar. Multiply it by 100,000 or more to understand the metabolism of food. Add in other body processes and we may never understand it all. Here’s the take-home point. Biochemistry is incredibly complex. We mess with it at peril of our health. While we’re here, I’d like to make a further point. Fructose, through this pathway, increases blood pressure. This pathway results in inflammation, and this is only one cause of inflammation by fructose. There are several other mechanisms. This one increases liver insulin resistance. Lipoprotein lipase induces muscle insulin resistance. Increased insulin resistance leads to the hyperinsulinemic diseases of civilization: Type 2 DBM, Add some leptin resistance and you have: Obesity and more. Related diseases are: CAD, early menarche, malocclusion, narrowed pelvis, myopia, cutaneous papillomas, breast, colon and prostate cancer, male vertex balding and polycystic ovary syndrome. I think this is still a short list. VLDL relates to increased triglycerides and is thought to be the initiator of atherosclerosis Dyslipidemia: low HDL, high LDL, VLDL and TG Liquid droplets refers to the fat globules that initiate fatty liver disease. With time, stress hormones, high insulin and inflammation this turns to cirrhosis and possible death. Ethanol and fructose both cause fatty liver disease. This diagram was first shown in 2008! The take home is the astonishing complexity of biological systems. Simplistic solutions are unlikely to be enough.
Our bodies are primarily made of proteins and some minerals. Proteins are continually being digested, constructed and repaired, even in the adult. Most of this involves very precise “zipping and snipping” operations under the control of enzymes and template molecules like DNA. This simplified “stick and ball” model of a very small segment of DNA illustrates the fundamental complexity and beauty of the template of life. The even more drastically simplified model shows how enzymes open a traveling oval “window” to access the genetic code on the inside of the helix. When things go well, the resulting separate strands are identical. When there are deficiencies in the number of any type of molecule or atom required, or a toxin interferes, or an enzyme is defective or partially blocked, errors occur. These errors are sometimes repaired and sometimes persist to accumulate during aging.
Our bodies are primarily made of proteins and some minerals. Protein are continually being digested, constructed and repaired, throughout life. Most of this involves very precise “zipping and snipping” operations under the control of enzymes and template molecules like DNA. This simplified “stick and ball” model of a very small segment of DNA illustrates the fundamental complexity and beauty of the template of life. The even more drastically simplified model shows how enzymes open an oval “window” to access the genetic code on the inside of the helix. When things go well, the resulting separate strands are identical. When there are deficiencies in the number of any type of molecule or atom required, or a toxin interferes, or an enzyme is partially blocked, errors occur. These errors are sometimes repaired and sometimes persist to accumulate during aging. Take home message: Deficiency of required reactants, molecules with even one atom in the wrong location (trans fats vs cis-fats), functionally crippled enzymes and many other factors cause errors that are long term toxic.
In the United States and most Western countries, diet-related chronic diseases represent the single largest cause of morbidity and mortality. These diseases are epidemic in contemporary Westernized populations and typically afflict 50–65% of the adult population, yet they are rare or nonexistent in hunter-gatherers and other less Westernized people. Although both scientists and lay people alike may frequently identify a single dietary element as the cause of chronic disease (eg, saturated fat causes heart disease and salt causes high blood pressure), evidence gleaned over the past 3 decades now indicates that virtually all so-called diseases of civilization have multifactorial dietary elements that underlie their etiology, along with other environmental agents and genetic susceptibility.