Jonny Bowden's Blog, page 15

Seven Spices that Can Improve Your Life

I know that it may sound like a little bit of hyperbole but I think by the time you finish reading this, you will agree that these are probably some of the most under-rated substances in the entire world. They’re gorgeous, easy to use and the amount of health benefits that accrue to them is just so under-appreciated. In fact, I call spices stealth health foods because of all the benefits that have been found to accrue. I’ve selected the following seven.

            Let’s start with Turmeric; the spice that makes Indian food yellow. The active ingredient in turmeric is a group of compounds known as curcuminoids or collectively as curcumin. It’s really what gives turmeric its superstar status in the spice world. Research on curcumin shows its effects on regulatory mechanisms and the preventer of cancer, neurological, inflammatory diseases. We’re going to be talking a lot about inflammatory diseases because actually every disease is in a certain way an inflammatory disease. Andrew Wile, America’s integrative medical authority says three reasons to incorporate Turmeric to your diet are to prevent Alzheimer’s, arthritis and cancer.         How do you get turmeric in your diet? You can sprinkle it on scrambled eggs or make a turmeric tea?  I take turmeric as a supplement largely because as great as it is, it’s not well absorbed.

Ginger has the deserved reputation as being a wonderful calming substance for the stomach. Research has been done on ginger as a cancer preventative.

I’ve written a number of books in which I talk about four things that age the body and promote every disease and they are inflammation (top of the list), oxidation, stress and sugar in the diet. Inflammation is involved in diabetes, cancer, obesity, heart disease and every degenerative disease. Anything we can do to lower inflammation is extremely important for our health. Oxidation: the damage done by free radicals that are found in oxygen. It’s kind of a rusting. Oxidative stress is a major part of aging and just about every degenerative disease you can imagine. Antioxidants help fight the damage done by these marauding free radicals.

A study by the American Chemical Society found oregano to have the highest ranking antioxidants of any herb. It appears to contain some diabetes fighting compounds as well. I prefer the oil of oregano, not really the spice itself. Oregano oil is anti-microbial. WebMD says it should be taken by mouth for parasites, allergies, a cold, the flu and fatigue.

The main beneficial compound in hot chili peppers is capsaicin. During the 2008 Democratic campaign, when she was running against Obama for the nomination Hillary Clinton was asked how she kept up through that grueling campaign and she attributed much of her endurance and energy to red hot peppers! Red peppers are easy to eat, easy to find, inexpensive, and have great health benefits.

Garlic is probably the number one medicinal food in the world. It goes back thousands of years. It’s been found to be helpful for the heart, for the immune system, helps kill parasites, it’s a natural antibiotic and it’s great for blood pressure. Matthew Boudoff, a cardiologist at the UCLA David Geffin School of Medicine, has done a lot of research on garlic. He found that it actually reduced plaque. Aged garlic extract was shown to inhibit the progression of atherosclerosis to lower blood pressure, improve oxidative stress and enhance circulation. Garlic has to be chopped up and broken down in order for two compounds to mix together and create allicin. There are studies showing the anti-cancer mechanism of sulfur-containing compounds of which garlic and onions are two prime examples.

Cinnamon. A 2004 study showed that cinnamon actually improves blood sugar, glucose and lipids of people with type two diabetes. In the eleven years since this study was done, not all studies have duplicated this. Some have shown great results with cinnamon, some have not. However, there’s just no downside to using it and there’s potentially lots of upsides. There’s a meta-analysis of all the studies of cinnamon use in type two diabetes, and on the whole, they’re very positive. Here again the effect of cinnamon tea on postprandial, just means after eating, postprandial glucose simply means your blood sugar after you eat and cinnamon has a nice muting effect on that. Here again, more experimental evidence, more reviews and here once again, big surprise, turns out that cinnamon may also have some anti-cancer properties which is a very nice little side benefit so if you’re taking it for blood sugar oh look at this, it may also have some effects on cancer cells, not a bad side effect.

Sage is an anti-oxidant and a powerful anti-inflammatory. It seems to have a great effect on memory in both younger people and in older. An interesting article shows that sage actually improved glycemic control and lipid profile in type 2 diabetics. In a study, they gave sage to a test group and they found that it lowered their fasting glucose; it brought down blood sugar. It lowered triglycerides which I consider to be a serious risk factor, far more important than cholesterol, and finally sage increased HDL cholesterol which is generally thought to be the good cholesterol; a list of great effects from a simple spice like sage.

I hope I’ve begun to open your eyes to what’s available in the spice world and the health benefits of these spices. There are spices for weight loss and they include the cayenne pepper because of its effect on energy balance and metabolism in general. There are the cancer fighting spices: garlic and ginger and cayenne pepper and turmeric. My new book, Smart Fat, has several principals: eating more fat, eating more fiber and the third one is about flavor and it’s in there for two reasons. One is when you use these spices it makes your food taste better and let’s face it, if health food tastes like straw and sawdust, nobody is going to eat it. The second stealth benefit of those flavors is all the anti-inflammatory and the antioxidant fire power that these spices have. So begin to use them, make friends with them, try them in every different kind of way. Ask your kids to be part of the whole cooking process and get friendly with these spices. Most of us have a spice rack in our kitchen that hasn’t been used. Get nice new fresh spices and start using them on everything. See what they taste like, get to know them, see how they mix and match with other flavors and you really will be opening up a whole world of flavor and a world of health.

 

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

 

 

 

Seven Spices that Can Save Your Life.

I know that it may sound like a little bit of a hyperbole but I think by the time you finish reading this, you will agree that these are probably some of the most under-rated substances in the entire world. They’re gorgeous, easy to use and the amount of health benefits that accrue to them is just so under-appreciated. In fact, I call spices stealth health foods because of all the benefits that have been found to accrue. I’ve selected the following seven.

            Let’s start with Turmeric; the spice that makes Indian food yellow. The active ingredient in turmeric is a group of compounds known as curcuminoids or collectively as curcumin. It’s really what gives turmeric its superstar status in the spice world. Research on curcumin shows its effects on regulatory mechanisms and the preventer of cancer, neurological, inflammatory diseases. We’re going to be talking a lot about inflammatory diseases because actually every disease is in a certain way an inflammatory disease. Andrew Wile, America’s integrative medical authority says three reasons to incorporate Turmeric to your diet are to prevent Alzheimer’s, arthritis and cancer.         How do you get turmeric in your diet? You can sprinkle it on scrambled eggs or make a turmeric tea?  I take turmeric as a supplement largely because as great as it is, it’s not well absorbed.

Ginger has the deserved reputation as being a wonderful calming substance for the stomach. Research has been done on ginger as a cancer preventative.

I’ve written a number of books in which I talk about four things that age the body and promote every disease and they are inflammation (top of the list), oxidation, stress and sugar in the diet. Inflammation is involved in diabetes, cancer, obesity, heart disease and every degenerative disease. Anything we can do to lower inflammation is extremely important for our health. Oxidation: the damage done by free radicals that are found in oxygen. It’s kind of a rusting. Oxidative stress is a major part of aging and just about every degenerative disease you can imagine. Antioxidants help fight the damage done by these marauding free radicals.

A study by the American Chemical Society found oregano to have the highest ranking antioxidants of any herb. It appears to contain some diabetes fighting compounds as well. I prefer the oil of oregano, not really the spice itself. Oregano oil is anti-microbial. WebMD says it should be taken by mouth for parasites, allergies, a cold, the flu and fatigue.

The main beneficial compound in hot chili peppers is capsaicin. During the 2008 Democratic campaign, when she was running against Obama for the nomination Hillary Clinton was asked how she kept up through that grueling campaign and she attributed much of her endurance and energy to red hot peppers! Red peppers are easy to eat, easy to find, inexpensive, and have great health benefits.

Garlic is probably the number one medicinal food in the world. It goes back thousands of years. It’s been found to be helpful for the heart, for the immune system, helps kill parasites, it’s a natural antibiotic and it’s great for blood pressure. Matthew Boudoff, a cardiologist at the UCLA David Geffin School of Medicine, has done a lot of research on garlic. He found that it actually reduced plaque. Aged garlic extract was shown to inhibit the progression of atherosclerosis to lower blood pressure, improve oxidative stress and enhance circulation. Garlic has to be chopped up and broken down in order for two compounds to mix together and create allicin. There are studies showing the anti-cancer mechanism of sulfur-containing compounds of which garlic and onions are two prime examples.

Cinnamon. A 2004 study showed that cinnamon actually improves blood sugar, glucose and lipids of people with type two diabetes. In the eleven years since this study was done, not all studies have duplicated this. Some have shown great results with cinnamon, some have not. However, there’s just no downside to using it and there’s potentially lots of upsides. There’s a meta-analysis of all the studies of cinnamon use in type two diabetes, and on the whole, they’re very positive. Here again the effect of cinnamon tea on postprandial, just means after eating, postprandial glucose simply means your blood sugar after you eat and cinnamon has a nice muting effect on that. Here again, more experimental evidence, more reviews and here once again, big surprise, turns out that cinnamon may also have some anti-cancer properties which is a very nice little side benefit so if you’re taking it for blood sugar oh look at this, it may also have some effects on cancer cells, not a bad side effect.

Sage is an anti-oxidant and a powerful anti-inflammatory. It seems to have a great effect on memory in both younger people and in older. An interesting article shows that sage actually improved glycemic control and lipid profile in type 2 diabetics. In a study, they gave sage to a test group and they found that it lowered their fasting glucose; it brought down blood sugar. It lowered triglycerides which I consider to be a serious risk factor, far more important than cholesterol, and finally sage increased HDL cholesterol which is generally thought to be the good cholesterol; a list of great effects from a simple spice like sage.

I hope I’ve begun to open your eyes to what’s available in the spice world and the health benefits of these spices. There are spices for weight loss and they include the cayenne pepper because of its effect on energy balance and metabolism in general. There are the cancer fighting spices: garlic and ginger and cayenne pepper and turmeric. My new book, Smart Fat, has several principals: eating more fat, eating more fiber and the third one is about flavor and it’s in there for two reasons. One is when you use these spices it makes your food taste better and let’s face it, if health food tastes like straw and sawdust, nobody is going to eat it. The second stealth benefit of those flavors is all the anti-inflammatory and the antioxidant fire power that these spices have. So begin to use them, make friends with them, try them in every different kind of way. Ask your kids to be part of the whole cooking process and get friendly with these spices. Most of us have a spice rack in our kitchen that hasn’t been used. Get nice new fresh spices and start using them on everything. See what they taste like, get to know them, see how they mix and match with other flavors and you really will be opening up a whole world of flavor and a world of health.

 

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

 

 

 

5 Ways to Health Up Your Holiday

Holiday season is generally joyous—but it has a dark side.

Any time you have an abundance of high-calorie food mixed with a high number of festive gatherings and an equally high amount of stress, you’re looking at a perfect recipe for disaster.

Following are five general tips for making sure your holiday season remains both healthy and happy.

1. Fight Stress

Stress makes you fat, lowers immunity and screws up your thinking. It can depress immunity (so that you’re more likely to get sick in the first place) and slow recovery. Take a short break from your routine, sit quietly, close your eyes and do some deep breathing—even four to five minutes will calm you down and lower blood pressure. And take extra helpings of vitamin C and B-complex, both of which are eaten up by stress. Consider some herbal adaptagens (like ashwaganda, rhodiola and schisandra). Adaptagens work in the body like a thermostat, turning down the heat when you’re too hot (stressed), and warming it up when you’re too cold (fatigued).

2. Don’t Neglect Your Immune System

Here’s where supplements can really come in handy. Though extra vitamin C is always a good idea, zinc is equally important; take 15-50 mg a day.  Probiotics give the immune system a charge by producing enzymes that promote health, keeping the gut healthy and preventing bad microbes from growing and causing disease (1). Sambucol is a unique black elderberry extract rich in immune-supporting flavonoids. An Israeli study showed that it shortened the duration of flu symptoms (2). L-theanine is a wonderfully relaxing amino acid found in green tea that stimulates alpha wave activity in the brain associated with a relaxed yet alert mental state. (I prefer products formulated with Suntheanine, as it’s one of the most clinically studied and purest form of theanine available, in my opinion.) Olive leaf complex is effective against a host of microbes. (I personally take Barlean’s Olive Leaf Complex on a daily basis both for its ability to support the immune system and blood pressure [3].) And curcumin is a powerful anti-inflammatory; since inflammation can drag down the immune system anything that supports healthy inflammation is going to be beneficial. (My personal recommendation: CuraMed by Terry Naturally.)

3. Fit in Fitness

In the time crunch of the holidays, one of the first things we tend to neglect is fitness. But fitness doesn’t have to mean a trip to the gym, or even a three-mile run. The latest research on high-intensity training shows that you can get a lot of fitness (and fat burning) in much less time than you might imagine. (Think Rocky running those stairs in Philadelphia—probably less than 90 seconds!) You can devise a “mini-circuit” that lasts less than five minutes and you can do almost anywhere. Example: Run in place for a minute, do 20 jumping jacks, drop down for 10 push-ups and follow up with 20 chair squats. Two sets like that and you’ll be breathing like you ran the marathon. Variations are endless. Even a brisk five-minute walk will clear your head, get your heart rate up and improve your mood!

4. Eat Protein

In case you hadn’t noticed, holiday food is carb and sugar heavy. Sugar depresses the immune system, and high-carb meals can cause a precipitous drop in blood sugar leading to a huge decrease in energy and a huge increase in cravings (usually for more high sugar food!) Protein speeds up the metabolism, has far less of an effect on blood sugar than carbs, and is needed to make virtually everything in the body from muscles to neurotransmitters. Eat it at every meal and snack.

5. Use This Trick To Prevent Weight Gain

In a number of studies (4), Penn State researcher Barbara Rolls, Ph.D., found that folks who ate a small green salad or a cup of non-creamy soup (about 100 calories worth of either) spontaneously consumed about 12% less calories during the main meal.

If you follow these five suggestions you’ll go a long way towards preventing the holiday season from being all about expanded waistlines and diminished vitality. And you’ll be doing yourself—and your health—a huge favor. WF

 

References

1) “Probiotic Rescue” by Allison Tannis, MSc, RHN, (Wiley, April 22, 2008)

2) http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.1995.1.361

3) http://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood-pressure/news/20080829/olive-leaf-to-treat-hypertension

4) http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/05/08/us-diets-idUSN0849350520070508

 

Jonny Bowden, “the Nutrition Myth Buster”™ is a board-certified nutritionist and the best-selling author of The Great Cholesterol Myth and 13 other books. Visit him at www.jonnybowden.com.

 

NOTE: The statements presented in this column should not be considered medical advice or a way to diagnose or treat any disease or illness. Dietary supplements do not treat, cure or prevent any disease. Always seek the advice of a medical professional before altering your daily dietary regimen. The opinions presented here are those of the writer. WholeFoods Magazine does not endorse any specific company, brand or product.

 

 

The Bulletproof Coffee Phenomena!

This last weekend, I attended a seminar in San Diego, and one of the sponsors was Bulletproof Coffee.

What is bulletproof coffee, you ask? The short answer is that it’s coffee with butter in it (more on that in a moment). The long answer is that it’s the brainchild of Silicone Valley entrepreneur Dave Asprey, who used to weigh 300 pounds, became a well-known bio-hacker, lost all the weight, transformed his life and his health, and started Bulletproof Executive, a company devoted to high-performance living. Bulletproof coffee—which is basically high fat coffee– is their signature beverage and has been gabbed about on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and a dozen other nationally known talk shows. It’s become the trendy beverage-dujour among the health minded set and the darling of Paleo devotees.

Which is particularly interesting to me for two reasons: One, the entire premise of my new book—Smart Fat (to be published by Harpers on Jan 19 and available now for pre-order)—is that you can and should eat more fat so you can lose more weight and get healthier than you ever have been. Two, the stuff tastes great and (while making you feel great at the same time.)

Now this is not an advertisement for Bulletproof, although I’m a big fan of the brand. Even if you don’t buy the (excellent) “Bulletproof” branded coffee and high-fat add-ons, you can still make generic bulletproof coffee at home using regular coffee and any kind of fat like butter. Coconut oil is a popular add-on, as is MCT oil. (I’ll give you the generic recipe, which is what I use every day, at the end of this column.)

Anyway, I’m standing at their booth getting my morning fix of their delicious coffee, and a woman walks over. As the Bulletproof dude whips up the next batch, mixing butter, MCT oil and coffee in a blender to produce the frothy, mocha-colored beverage, the woman looks at him in horror and says…“But what about cholesterol?”

The guy begins to explain why that dietary cholesterol has no effect on serum cholesterol, and that the (saturated) fats in butter, MCT oil and coconut oil are actually good for you, but the woman haughtily cuts him off. “Young man,” she says, snarkily, “I’ll have you know you’re talking to a medical doctor!”

Which is the point at which I stepped into the discussion.

I’m not sure that what I said to the woman made any difference—doctors can tend to be a little, well, authoritarian when it comes to having their opinions questioned—but I thought this was a great opportunity for a teaching moment, even if the doctor in question was herself unteachable. Hopefully you—the readers of this column—are a bit more open-minded.

So, let’s clear a few things up.

Cholesterol in the diet has virtually no effect on cholesterol in the blood. (Which is why we need to stop eating egg-white omelets, possibly the dumbest idea in the history of nutrition.)

Cholesterol does not—repeat not—predict heart disease very well. In study after study—many of which we quote in our 2012 best-seller The Great Cholesterol Myth—over half the people admitted to hospitals for cardiovascular disease or surgery had perfectly normal cholesterol levels.

In any case, the old-fashioned notion of “good” and “bad” cholesterol, which is how we stupidly continue to measure cholesterol in the blood, is wildly out of date. The newer tests—which you should insist your doctor give you—are called the particle tests, and they tell you what type of LDL you have. (We now know that there are at least four or five types of LDL, and they are not all of them are bad. LDLa, for example, is a little cotton ball looking molecule that does virtually no damage, while LDLb looks like a nasty little bb-gun-pellet. Unlike the innocuous LDLa, LDLb is highly oxidized and inflammatory. Just knowing your total LDL tells you nothing of value, even though that’s the number most doctors use to determine if they’re going to put you on a statin drug. (But don’t get me started.)

Saturated fat—from butter, from coconut oil, from grass-fed meat, from red Malaysian palm oil—is absolutely blameless when it comes to heart disease. At least three major meta-analyses—one published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2010, one published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2014, and one published just this year in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) were unable to find any direct causal connection between saturated fat and heart disease. (The most recent study, in the BMJ, concluded that “Saturated fats are not associated with all, cause mortality, CVD, CHD, ischemic stroke, or type 2 diabetes.”.)

What’s also important to remember is that fats—from good healthy sources like grass-fed beef, coconut oil, grass-fed butter, Malaysian palm oil, avocados, wild salmon, flaxseed, olive and avocado oil and the like—are the best source of energy in the human diet.

Our cells manufacture a molecule known as ATP which is basically the currency from which energy is produced in the body. We need ATP to power every single activity from growing eyebrows to dancing the tango. Our cells produce about 36 molecules of ATP from each molecule of glucose (sugar) but they produce well over 100 molecules of ATP from every molecule of fat.

Our bodies store about 2,000 calories of carbohydrate in the body but they store about ten gazillion calories of fat. Fat is the natural fuel of the body—it’s like high octane gas for the cells. No wonder the bulletproof coffee formula gives you a nice little jolt of energy in the morning!

A further benefit of fat is its effect on your hormones. Remember, insulin is the fat-storage hormone, responsible for (among other things) driving sugar into the cells. The food group that has the most profound effect on insulin—raising it the highest—is carbohydrate. Protein has an effect, but not nearly as strong as that of carbohydrates.

Know what food group has zero effect on this fat-storing hormone?

You guessed it. Fat.

That’s why we called our new book, Smart Fat: Eat More Fat, Lose More Weight, Get Healthy Now! And that’s why the high-fat bulletproof coffee is a great way to start the day!

The generic recipe for “bulletproof coffee”:

Start with 8 oz. of filtered water.

Add 2 ½ tablespoons of freshly ground coffee and brew in your preferred way.

Add 1 teaspoon of MCT oil (you can easily up this to 1-2 tablespoons).

Add 1-2 tablespoons of grass-fed unsalted butter

Mix it all up in a blender for 20-30 seconds.

Enjoy!

And don’t worry about the fat!

 

This article was first published in the Whole Foods magazine.

 

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

 

 

 

Bacon, Bacon, Who’s Got the Bacon?

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

I’m tempted to start this article with the words, “Here we go again”.

A report from the World Health Organization came out recently resulting in a glut of headlines all sounding something like this: “Bacon Causes Cancer”.

And, since I’ve made my love for bacon pretty well-known—in fact, I’m about to put up a complimentary webinar entitled “Why a Top Nutritionist Eats Bacon”, (and no, I’m not kidding)—you can imagine that I’ve gotten more than a few emails asking what I think about this whole cancer business.

After all, the WHO took the radical step of classifying cured meats and processed meats as a carcinogen, basically putting them in the same class as alcohol and asbestos. And arsenic. And tobacco.

(I’ll bite my tongue and let that last paragraph stand without editorial comment. Never let it be said that I’m incapable of modest restraint.)

So anyway, you would certainly be forgiven for thinking to yourself, sure, Dr. Jonny’s going to try to discredit the WHO report and make a case for why we should ignore it, What would you expect from a bacon lover?

Actually, that’s not what I’m going to do.

When evidence comes out that questions some of the things I believe are true, I’m always willing to look at it.

And I’m willing to look at the “bacon causes cancer” study.  Which I did.

Guess what:  It does not say that bacon causes cancer, at all. No responsible scientist would call a weak association in an epidemiological study a “cause”. For the record, smoking increases the risk of lung cancer by 2500%. An 18% increase in risk?  From an observational study?  Let’s get real.

Here’s what happened.

In a large epidemiological study—that is, an observational study, not a clinical one—it was found that eating two slices of bacon a day increased your statistical risk of getting colorectal cancer by 18%.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’d just as well not see any association with cancer at all. But let’s get real and say the truth about exactly what an 18% increase in cancer risk really means. Sadly, it’s not what most people think it means.

OK now, I’m going to ask you to do me a favor here. I’m going to ask you not to bail on me when I talk about a little math. I know everyone’s eyes glaze over at the notion of fractions and percentages and multiplication, I get it, but really, there’s no other way to understand exactly what an 18% increase in risk for cancer means unless you do this next step with me.

So here’s the basic explanation of how to compute increased odds. And it starts with an example of “odds” that absolutely everybody understands: tossing a coin.

If I flip a coin, my chances of getting heads is 50% and my chances of getting tails is 50%. It’s very simple. One out of two times it’s gonna’ be heads, one out of two times it’s gonna’ be tails, and that’s all she wrote.

Now let’s say I meet up with a smart casino hustler who offers to sell me a special coin that’s “fixed” so it has increased odds of getting heads. Let’s say his coin increases my odds of getting heads by 25%.

Most people who were not forced to take three semesters of statistics and research design believe that the coin now has a 75% chance of getting heads—the original 50% plus the additional 25%.

No, grasshopper. It’s not like that at all. Not even close.

When you increase (or decrease) someone’s odds of having an event happen—whether it be heads on a coin toss or getting colorectal cancer— you always compute that increase based on the original odds, much like when you pay a tax at the restaurant, you pay it on the bill. The bill is like your baseline—it’s the number on which the tax is computed. Your tip (20%) is usually computed based on the bill—the baseline. You always start with the baseline when you’re computing a percentage to add on (or take off.)

Then calculating the actual increase is a two-step process:

1. Start with Baseline odds: In the case of the coin toss,  50%

2. Multiply the baseline odds (50%) by the Increase percentage (25%). In this case the increase is ¼ of the total, so you basically want to find ¼ of 50% which is 12.5%.

3. Add the baseline odds (50%) together with the increase (12.5%) and you get 62.5%. With a fixed coin, your odds of getting heads has gone up to 62.5%

With me so far?

OK, so what are the baseline odds of getting colon cancer?

Don’t worry, I looked it up for you* (SEE actual statistics below). For argument’s sake, it’s about 5 in 100. About 5 in 100 adults will get colon cancer, all things being equal. So anything that increases your risk of getting colon cancer, ordecreases your risk of getting colon cancer has to be based on that baseline of 5 in 100.

So eating bacon increases your risk by 18%. 

Eat bacon and your odds go from 5 in 100 up to 5 plus whatever 18% of 5 turns out to be. (It’s point 9.)  That’s .9

So let’s be clear. Your risk without eating bacon is 5 in 100. By adding that 18% increase—think of it as a “tax” on 5—you now have a risk of 5.9 out of 100 chances of getting colon cancer.

Said another way: “The WHO study showed that If you don’t eat bacon, you have a 95% chance of not getting colon cancer. If you do however, enjoy bacon, you have a 94.1% chance of not getting colon cancer.”

Would you have the same reaction if the media had reported the study using those statistics? Because they’re equally true, aren’t they?

Let’s never be afraid to look at evidence that threatens our beliefs. That’s how we grow and expand.

But let’s tell the truth about that evidence and not pretend it’s says something that it doesn’t just because it makes for a sexier headline.

In my webinar, I’ll go over some of the other objections to bacon eating—including one that is absolutely legitimate (and four that aren’t).

Warmly, Dr. Jonny

*PS:  I lied about the odds. Your normal, non-bacon-eating odds of getting colon cancer aren’t 5 in 100. They’re actually, in the USA, 43 in 100,000, (a .043 percent chance). So your real baseline risk—without eating bacon—is .043 percent, and with bacon, it rises to .051.  Please forgive me, but you would never sit still for the math if I had used the real numbers.

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

Eating Meat

Fat Fit

Omega-7 for Inflammation?

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

 

I would like to talk to you about the reason why I recently added Omega-7 to my daily supplement regimen.

Inflammation is in the heart of every degenerative disease, promoting heart disease and definitely a component of obesity and weight gain.

Inflammation and weight gain are fellow travelers.

In a clinical trial, they gave people 210 mg of Omega-7 and they found out that it lowered inflammation by an astonishing 44%.

I recommend Barleans Omega-7 “Heart Remedy” supplement; this particular brand is 210 mg in dosage and comes from anchovies.

Watch this short video and discover the benefits of the Omega-7.

 

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

 

 

Dr. David Agus, are you SERIOUS???

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™


I’m very upset. In fact, I’m actually piping hot with Dr. David B Agus‘ recent arguments about vitamins and I want everyone in my community to watch my video response, take it to heart and share it on their own wall to support their family and friends.  This guy claims we should all stop taking #vitamins because they just give you “expensive urine” … ?? What an IDIOT. I am SO sick of these know-it-all doctors. Does the fact that they show up in the urine mean that they did not work on the way down? Sorry Dr. Agus, but that’s just wrong. That’s just bad medicine.

Warmley, Jonny Bowden.

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

Drink Green Tea for Supreme Health

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

I’m a huge fan of tea for its health and revitalizing properties. All tea is great, but green tea stands out for one particular compound, EGCG. Epigallocatechin gallate has been available as a supplement for a long time. It is a member of the family of substances found in tea called catechins. Catechins belong to a larger class of plant chemicals called polyphenols, which are thought to be responsible for many of tea’s health benefits.

            EGCG has been of special interest to people trying to get an edge on increasing energy or lasting fat loss. It sparks a process in the body known as thermogenesis. Thermo means ‘heat’ and genesis means ‘making new things.’ You’re making heat when you’re digesting food.

Green tea consumption leads to a significant increase in calorie burning, a decrease in bodyweight, and a decrease in waist circumference. Surprisingly, the effects are achieved without producing any change in heart-rate or blood-pressure. Researchers think that one of the ways green tea accomplishes this is by prolonging the effect of norepinephrine, a stimulating chemical.

In one study for the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers measured energy-expenditure, or the calories that were burned, in ten healthy young men. Each was randomly given either a standard green tea extract pill, 150 mg of caffeine, or 150 mg of an inert placebo. Believe it or not, the caffeine was no better than the placebo at speeding up metabolism. However, the men who received the green tea extract burned an average of 78 calories a day more. It may not sound like a lot, but over the course of a week or month, those numbers will add up. So where’s your cup?

If you are not drinking green tea, now’s a good time to start. Make a hot pitcher of it in the morning, put in several tea bags, and let it steep for a few minutes. You can sweeten it with a little bit of Truvia or Stevia; pour yourself a hot cup and refrigerate the rest. Most of the research shows that the sweet spot is between three and five cups of green tea a day.

 

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™