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Wednesday, March 25, 2009
> Join earth hour on Saturday and
find your carbon number with > the carbon calculator.
posted by Juergen 4:24 PM
Friday, March 13, 2009
The Heart of the Matter
Professor Michael Oliver, a former leading heart specialist, has said that millions of healthy older people are being prescribed drugs that they don’t need, due to the way GPs are paid and the way the Health Service Guidelines encourage the use of drugs for high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes.
In the British Medical Journal online, Professor Oliver, who is now professor emeritus of cardiology at the University of Edinburgh, said that the side effects of these drugs are being overlooked in a surge of preventative prescribing.
'What kind of medicine is this?' he asks. 'It is politics taking preference over professionalism, obsession with government targets superseding common sense, paternalism replacing personal advice.’ Prescribing a drug is easier than listening and understanding. Weight loss, exercise and dietary changes would in many cases be more effective and far safer than adding endlessly to a regimen of medication.
Hurray for some common sense. And, let us add, there are many safe and effective options for preventing or tackling common health problems, such as Cynara for cholesterol or Crataegus [picture] for high blood pressure.
posted by Juergen 5:11 PM
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
You take the low dose, I’ll take the high dose
by Patrick Holford
I’ve never been a fan of taking low dose RDA-style multivitamins. The theory is if all you need is the RDA then supplementing the RDA will give you everything you need. But many studies show no real benefit. For example, a study last month in the Archives of Internal Medicine analysed the risk, over an average of eight years, of developing, or dying from cancer or heart disease in post-menopausal women taking, or not taking multivitamins. Overall there was no significant difference in risk — no evidence of harm or benefit.
Of course, studies like these are used to imply that all supplements are useless. But what the summary of the study didn’t point out is that a small group also took what the researchers described as ‘stress multi supplements’ with “higher doses (often above 200% of RDA) of several B vitamins, often including large doses of vitamin C or selected minerals, such as selenium or zinc.” This group had a significant 25% decreased risk of having a heart attack.
One of the fundamental principles of optimum nutrition is that you need far higher doses of nutrients to correct deficiency, or to reverse a disease process, than you need to keep yourself healthy. For example, an estimated two in five people over the age of 61 are deficient in vitamin B12. The RDA is 1mcg, but the only amount that corrects B12 deficiency in older people is 500mcg of more. If you have the first signs of a cold you’ll need at least 100 times the RDA of vitamin C. Despite clear evidence that taking large amounts of vitamin C, ideally 1 gram an hour, stops a cold within hours the RDA is only 60mg. High dose vitamin C is also profoundly anti-cancer. High dose niacin (vitamin B3), meaning one to two grams, not only helps many people with schizophrenia, but it also lowers cholesterol and raises HDL better than statin drugs. The RDA is 18mg. The mineral chromium, at 500mcg, ten times what you could eat, is proven to help normalise blood sugar levels in diabetics. Chromium still has no RDA.
So why don’t we read about these things in the newspapers? The media is heavily influenced by mainstream medical journals, and the medical journals are heavily influenced by big pharma — and that’s statistically significant, according to an interesting study published last year. The researchers compared the amount of pharmaceutical advertising in a journal with the amount, and kind, of coverage concerning studies on dietary supplements, reviewing one year of the issues of 11 major medical journals. Their findings showed that “in major medical journals, more pharmaceutical advertising is associated with publishing fewer articles about dietary supplements.” They found that “journals with the most pharmads published significantly fewer major articles about dietary supplements per issue than journals with the fewest pharmads” and that this association was statistically significant (p<0.01). They also found that “journals with the most pharmads published no clinical trials or cohort studies about supplements. The percentage of major articles concluding that supplements were unsafe was 4% in journals with fewest and 67% among those with the most pharmads (P = 0.02).” The authors concluded that “the impact of advertising on publications” is real, and said that “the ultimate impact of this bias on professional guidelines, health care, and health policy is a matter of great public concern”.
According to Dr Bo Jonsson, MD, PhD, of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, “Positive reports about the effects of high-dose vitamins have long been ignored by the medical establishment instead of being further examined scientifically”. What’s even worse is that some journals that do publish high dose nutrient studies, such as the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, have not been allowed onto Medline, so you can’t even find the research online. As a consequence, when patients ask their doctors about nutritional supplements the doctor often says “I've never seen any evidence that they work.” They’re just looking in the wrong places.
(1) M. Neuhouser et al, Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(3):294-304
(2) K Kemper and K Hood. BMC Complement Altern Med. 2008 Apr 9;8:11
posted by Juergen 4:47 PM
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