THE REAL SKINNY ON ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS

If I were to pick one area of controversy that generates more emotional attachment and pseudo science, it would be the comparison of artificial sweeteners with sugar.

It is immensely popular, especially if you represent alternative medicine as I do, to say that artificial sweeteners are evil, wicked, mean and nasty.

Let me warn you that I am going to be brutal in my approach today and that when the smoke clears, there is still going to be some low hanging fog!

Let me begin by asking you this question: How do you feel about artificial sweeteners and why do you feel that way?

Before I go any further, let me say first that I am not trying to convince you or change your mind. I am merely going to present the facts as I see them.

Here they are:

1) Artificial sweeteners have been linked to hundreds of different human illnesses via personal complaints to the FDA.

2) Artificial sweeteners have been linked in some lab studies to serious illnesses in lab animals (rats) like cancer.

3) The doses used in those studies exceed the reasonable human consumption limit by hundreds to thousands of times and produce cancer in rats that have been inbred for over 40 years, ultimately causing them to have a higher cancer rate to begin with.

4) No clear well controlled human studies have proven any link to any serious disease from any artificial sweetener. EVER.

5) Aspartame is the culprit in over 75% over the food additive complaints reported to the FDA. Cited side effects range from seizures and death to Gulf War Syndrome, hair loss, and 90 different types of complaints!

6) These complaints are not scientifically proven or investigated for validity. There are basically people calling or writing saying "aspartame caused me to have a problem". Anyone can report a complaint and no one is required to prove its validity.

I promise you there is no death certificate anywhere that lists "NutraSweet" as the cause of death!

7) In spite of their completely diverse and unrelated chemical nature, the complaints lodged against all artificial sweeteners are strikingly similar. Most common are headaches, GI intolerance, memory, brain and personality disorders, and of course, cancer.



8) No one is "For" artificial sweeteners. Only "against" them. The 50 + million people who use them on a yearly basis in this country do not come to their aid or defend them against their critics; they just keep quietly using them! A far smaller but far more vocal minority slams them with tremendous vehemence.

9) Artificial sweeteners did not make anyone fat. EVER. No matter what some supposed studies say. If you look at the test subjects, they were all overweight to begin with. Sorry, but the general rule is: If you are overweight, you are likely to continue the behaviors that got you there in the first place. You know…the ones that were not controlled in the studies (what you ate and drank besides diet soda).

By now you probably realize that I don't oppose the use of artificial sweeteners. You may think that means I support their use. Not so fast, because there’s more to consider.

Remember those big studies I told you about that showed that the artificial sweeteners we use here in the U.S. are safe? Well, they were done by the sweetener manufacturers, which automatically open them up to biased results.

Keep in mind that these studies cost big bucks, so the companies are not likely to repeat them. After all, they got the results they wanted.

A similar, large well-designed highly controlled study run by an independent agency that has nothing to gain but has to spend millions is not likely to ever happen.

So what proof do we really have they are safe? We have the fact that 50 million people use them without complaints every year. That is a pretty big study!

Now here is some more food for thought: Let's look at sugar, especially refined table sugar.

1) It started the slave trade in the western hemisphere

2) It has been directly linked to diabetes and obesity

3) It causes tooth decay

4) Before the 1600's, few cultures used sugar

5) Sugar has been reported as 200x more addictive to the human brain than cocaine

Ultimately, the human body does not need highly refined sugar OR artificial sweeteners. There are plenty of naturally occurring substitutes for sugar you can use if you want, like Stevia.

So, let’s be clear that the overconsumption of refined sugar poses a very clear and well documented danger compared to artificial sweeteners.

Weight Training Versus Cardio for Fat Loss

It’s time for me to weigh in on a very hot and controversial topic…which is better for fat loss - weight training or cardio?

The real answer is that it depends on your definitions of cardio and weight training.
Once these are established, there really is no controversy.

For opening arguments, let's define each of them in a traditional manner.

We'll say weight training is a typical hypertrophy/strength program centered on barbells and dumbbells with the desired end result being to build lean muscle as opposed to pure strength (low reps/high weights) or neuromuscular strength and coordination as in Olympic weight lifting.

In this definition, we can include some power moves like squats, bench presses, lat pull downs, bent over rows, biceps and triceps work, and even a few compound moves like power cleans or clean and presses. We'll set our rep range to 12 and do 3 to 4 sets of each for a total time of one hour, 3 to 4 times a week.

Split routines fit nicely into this definition.

For cardio, we'll say anything from brisk walking to jogging and throw in all the usual cardio equipment like treadmills, elliptical trainers and steppers. To keep it within the long slow distance realm, we'll say our heart rates need to stay around 70% of our max (220-age) x 7.

However, if you use those somewhat narrow definitions, you then have to face some harsh facts.

Neither of these quite typical routines is all that great for burning fat.

Resistance training mavens will tell you that you need lean muscle to burn fat and therefore weight training is superior.

They will not tell you that it will take you several months of this training to build enough muscle to have a meaningful impact on your fat burning abilities.

Some will even cite the after burn effect, but frankly there is not much of that in this type of training either. An hour of this type of training will burn around 300 to 400 calories during exercise and if you hit it hard maybe another 50 to 100 calories in after burn.

Cardio buffs will tell you that by keeping your heart rate in the 70% max range you are in the "fat burning zone" and if you run on a treadmill at 6 m.p.h. with a little incline you'll burn 600 calories, the bulk of them from fat.

This is true but you'll have very little after burn from this type of long slow cardio.

Now here is the key: intensity.

If you push very hard through your weight training routines and keep your heart rate up in the 85 to 90% range, you will have increased calorie burn during exercise and after.

Same with your cardio. If you throw in intervals of speed running on the treadmill for 1 to 2 minutes with 1 to 2 minutes of recovery at the 70% max heart rate range, you'll be practicing interval training and get some of the best fat burning you can have.

If you do strength training and interval training either separately or together in what is known as a circuit interval ala www.downunderstrength.com/ you will have the best of both worlds and the best most efficient fat burning anyone can give you!


Doc

The RDA: Useful or Useless?

Every 5 years since World War II, the government has revised its RDA, or Recommended Daily Allowance of food groups and vitamins. But just how useful is this recommendation?

The goal of the RDA was to provide adequate nutrition for all ages and genders of our population. As such, it claims to be a broad brush strategy which amounts to "one size fits all". In addition, the values chosen represent the bare amounts needed to prevent deficiency syndromes such as Scurvy and Ricketts.

I hope you are already thinking, “This might not be enough for me!”

You are right, but before I go any further, I should tell you about a very large book I got a few days ago on nutrition. It would be safe to say this book is the true bastion of traditional medicine's point of view on nutrition.

I bring this up because there is a chapter entitled "Signs of Quackery". One of the signs of quackery according to this book is the claim that the RDA is inadequate and that many diseases are the result of nutritional deficiencies. The big book of traditional nutrition goes on to assert that the RDA is just fine and very few diseases are caused by nutrition in our current society.

I guess that makes me a quack, because I disagree on ALL counts!

The RDA by its very nature is a one size fits all solution to nutrition. While it claims to cover the needs of almost everyone, it overlooks the fact that there is not good nutritional needs data on many populations.

It also overlooks the fact that each population truly has different nutritional needs. Examples of populations with vastly different nutritional needs are: young healthy athletes, post menopausal women, and aging men in nursing homes.

In addition, it completely overlooks some very common disease states in our society such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. To suggest that the RDA covers all the needs of these populations is indeed ludicrous.

In addition, there are no provisions for large nutrient groups like fats, carbohydrates, and specifically, Omega 3 fatty acids. As more and more research shows the powerful preventative and treatment effects of Omega 3s, and specifically fish oils, how can a credible national dietary plan leave these out?

Then again, these are the same people who brought you low fat, high carb diets resulting in a rampage of Type 2 diabetes in all ages along with runaway obesity. They would have you believe that "enough to prevent a deficiency" is optimum nutrition.

Trust them if you want to; I don't.

Love Is Blind, but You Don't Have To Be!

Each year this wonderful little holiday called Valentine's Day pops up. And each year, millions of men and more than a few women pop some pills marketed by Big Pharmacy for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.

They have names like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra. Now rarely have the pharmaceutical companies been more responsible in their marketing than with these drugs.

They market them for erectile dysfunction only and often point out things like high cholesterol, diabetes or the medications for those maladies (which are often made by the same pharmaceutical companies) may cause things to fizzle instead of pop when the moment is right.

But the truth is the recreational use of these drugs probably outstrips the legitimate prescription use! So before you go reaching for the little blue pill, I want to tell you a bit about the side effects and alternatives.

First, none of these drugs are approved for use in women and they do not work for women.

Next, they are anything but side effect-free, and can cause diverse and serious reactions. These include priapism, the term for a painful erections that won't go away!

Severe headaches, a deadly drop in blood pressure if combined with certain heart medications, back ache, sinus congestion, and stomach upset. But by far, the scariest and perhaps the most dangerous is blindness. In many cases this is permanent!

No wonder so many of us are seeking natural alternatives!

Here is a list we have found to be particularly helpful, and none of them have any of the side effects described above. The best news is they can also work in women to improve arousal and sexual response.

Macuna: This South American herb increases Dopamine levels, a very important sexual brain chemical.

Epimedium: Known as Horny Goat Weed, it was first discovered by noticing that goats that ate this plant had only one thing on their mind. It works for people too!

Cnidium: This hard to get Chinese herbal works to improve local blood flow to the genitals in men and women.

Arginine: This is an amino acid and when consumed in the right dose has a Viagra-like effect on erectile tissue.

Pregnenolone and DHEA: These are adrenal hormones that are available over the counter (as of this writing) and are critical in the generation of other sex hormones as well as brain chemistry.

So while love is blind, you don't have to be. You don't have to risk dangerous drug side effects including permanent loss of vision.

This Valentine's Day try some all natural alternatives and enjoy side effects free results!

Blueberries – not the antioxidant you thought they were

Over the past five years tons of media attention has been paid to the blueberry because of its health giving properties. Personally, I love blueberries and I eat them fairly often. There is a better choice, though...at least for pure antioxidant value.

The new berries on the block are likely to be black or purple…not blue.

1. Unlike many of their fairer skinned counterparts, there is real science and real clinical usage (doctors treating diseases) for them.

2. When berries are taken into the lab and tested for their strength and ability to destroy bad chemicals in our body called "free radicals", the King of the free radical killers turns out to be the Chokeberry, with Black Currant and Elderberry right behind.

3. And, no matter how you slice them, or juice them, they beat blueberries, cherries, pomegranates, Noni, Mangosteena, and all the other fruits and berries hands down.

They are the premier antioxidants.

Why is this important?

A recent study done on aging at the University of Washington Medical School showed that if you could increase the level of antioxidants your body produces naturally, you could drastically slow the aging process.

There are a few problems that plague these berries, however, and these are the reasons you won't see them in the stores any time soon.

They have to be harvested quickly, only grow in certain places, don't stand up well to travel and in the case of chokeberries, they just don't taste very good!

Fortunately, supplement manufactures are beginning to recognize the value of these berries and integrate them into their formulations.

Ultimately this will make them available to many more people in a way that bypasses the difficulties with growing and distributing them.

In the meantime just remember blueberries may not be the ultimate healthy berry!

Bottled vs. Tap

When I was a kid my Grand-pop used to raise a glass of tap water in the sunlight and say, "It's the best drink that ever was and it's free!" In those days, the water service came out of municipal taxes and was not assessed separately like now.

Things have come a long way since then, and you can pay almost 5 bucks a bottle for "the best drink ever invented!" And you thought gas was expensive!

So is expensive bottled water really better than what comes out of your tap?

If you are objective and look at the testing that has been done, you will come to a few conclusions. These are:

1) Bottled water is of variable quality and the quality and the price are unrelated. However, the quality and the marketing campaign are.

2) 20% of bottled water tests are done in one state…California. In CA, bottled water failed the minimum state requirements for cleanliness, as measured by contaminants and bacteria counts.

In some cases, the contaminants and bacteria could have been hazardous to human health!

3) Tap water also failed, but in less than 12 % of the cases.

4) Tap water was more stringently tested and violations were more likely to be prosecuted.

So the bottom line is that bottled water is less likely to be tested, and more likely to contain impurities that are defined as hazardous to human health than tap water, at least in the current body of scientific studies.

You should not consume bottled water for purity unless the company is actually involved in an independent testing program. Few are.

The recent scandal over a major bottled water manufacturer simply filling up the bottles with tap water also points out that where money is involved, anything goes.

Bottled water is now a 4 billion dollar industry!

So what do I do and what do I recommend?

My tap water here in Southeastern PA is tested and apparently passes the government’s regulations. But it smells bad and tastes funny, often reeking of chlorine or stale fish.

I solve my dilemma by using a good quality commercial water filter that ionizes and alkalinizes the water as it purifies it.

What comes out looks clean, passes my own little home testing routine and tastes just fine.

In the end run the decision becomes one of personal choice. But one thing is clear…water isn’t free anymore.

Sorry, Grand-pop!

Is Food Enough?

I have watched with great interest over the past year an ongoing debate that pits food against vitamins.

Which is better? Which do we need more of? What is the proof for either side?

The simple answer to the food versus vitamin debate is that you can benefit immensely from food and should always eat healthy, but you can also benefit immensely from proper supplementation.

Foodists argue that Mother Nature has placed everything we need right here for us and that eating healthy is all we should ever have to do.

Supplementers like me have a different opinion.

Everyone should make every attempt to eat healthy. I do, and so should you.

But I do not for one minute believe that most people do it all the time or even enough to really derive great health benefits from it.

I always tell my typical patient to take a multi vitamin and fish oil. It’s inexpensive insurance against serious gaps in the diet.

Now what about all the other great things you miss in food, like fiber and the rich interaction between antioxidants and vitamins?

No one can argue with that, but remember, lands and seas are polluted and nutrient deficient compared to 100 years ago, and a significant number of foods contain more water than vitamins these days.

Go to the store in the dead of winter and buy a tomato. Do you think that sorry excuse for a tomato has anywhere near the vitamin C or lycopene your local farmer gets from his crops at the end of the summer?

I sure don't.

Remember, we are talking now just about the very basics of nutrition; just enough to get by.

Now let's throw long hours, family, work demands, stress and exposure to sickness into the mix.

Kinda makes you want to pop an extra multi vitamin or some super berry concoction, doesn't it?

And for good reason!

Neither food nor drugs got rid of my high blood pressure. Supplements did.

Neither food nor drugs help me to sleep when I absolutely have to. I use a supplement when needed.

I don't rely on food or drugs to protect me from the flu, I use a supplement.

And when I work out too hard and start to ache, I reach for fish oil, not mercury laden fish, Motrin or Tylenol.

When I want and need big doses of nutrients and vitamins to help me live at my highest level, I use supplements.

I cannot even imagine a day without them.

I used to try to eat healthy enough that all my aches, pains and fatigues would go away.

It didn't work.

If you are like 99% of individuals out there, it won't work for you either.

Why fight it?

Do both: eat right and take your supplements. I promise you'll have the last laugh in more ways than one!