William Davis's Blog: Dr. Davis Infinite Health Blog, page 75

How to Reduce Your Heart Scan Score

Millions of people have undergone a CT heart scan that provides a heart scan or coronary calcium score. Unfortunately, people are then advised by doctors to take a statin drug, aspirin, a beta blocker or other combination of drugs that do NOT stop the 25-30% year-over-year rise in score. This eventually leads to heart attack or needing heart procedures like bypass surgery, angioplasty, or stent implantation, even death.

Doctors say that there is nothing you can do to stop this rise in heart scan score. What they are really saying is that there are no DRUGS or PROCEDURES that they can provide beyond the useless ones they prescribed. They did NOT tell you that there are a number of crucial non-drug and non-procedural ways to reduce your heart scan score and reduce, even eliminate, risk.

That is one of the many things we do in the Undoctored approach.

About Undoctored:

We are entering a new age in which the individual has astounding power over health—but don’t count on the doctor or healthcare system to tell you this.

We draw from the health information of the world, collaborate, share experiences, collect data, and show how to apply new health tools to achieve levels of health that you may have thought unattainable. We do all this at a time when conventional healthcare costs have become crippling.

The result: personal health that is SUPERIOR to that obtained through conventional means.

Start with the book:

Undoctored: Why Health Care Has Failed You and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor

Join the conversation to take health to the next level:

InnerCircle.Undoctored.com

The post How to Reduce Your Heart Scan Score appeared first on Dr. William Davis.

An Open Letter to Dr. John Warner, President of the American Heart Association, on surviving a heart attack

Headlines today announce that the new President of the American Heart Association (AHA), cardiologist Dr. John Warner, has suffered a heart attack, aborted by an emergency stent placement. Typical of the ridiculous attitudes that prevail at the industry-friendly AHA, they Tweeted:

“Sending all our love and support to @American_Heart president Dr. Warner as he recovers from a mild heart attack. Heart disease can strike anyone, at any time. That’s why we keep fighting.”

If you ignore the nonsense that AHA policy dictates, you can absolutely gain control over cardiovascular risk. But you will NOT find the answers in any AHA policy. I learned these lessons practicing as an interventional cardiologist, then abandoning this ridiculous way of managing coronary disease to devote my efforts to early detection and prevention.

So I thought I would articulate some of these thoughts in an open letter to Dr. Warner as he recovers from his procedure.

Dr. Warner–

Imagine you read these headlines:

“Campaign in Afghanistan a success: 10,000 Americans dead.”

You would be confused, perhaps outraged. How can the death of American soldiers be regarded as success when it is clearly an outright failure?

Well, for the same reasons, why do our colleagues, hospital executives, and people in Big Pharma and the medical device industry make claims such as “We’ve had a banner year, our most successful year ever: 800 coronary bypasses and 18,000 heart catheterizations performed.” These are not measures of success; they are measures of failure–failure to identify the people at risk, failure to correct the factors that lead to heart attack, angina, and atherosclerotic coronary disease, failures that you have now survived.

There are a number of reasons why someone like you—deeply-entrenched in the conventional world of heart disease management and what passes for prevention—highlights the miserable failure that the modern coronary care paradigm represents:

1) We are trapped by the outdated but profitable Lipid Hypothesis–We’ve been misled and stalled on this absurd and outdated notion that “cholesterol”—meant to represent nothing more than a crude and indirect marker for atherogenic lipoproteins, even back in the 1950s when Drs. Friedewald and Fredericksen at the NIH recognized that quantifying the true etiology of coronary atherosclerosis, bloodborne lipoproteins, caused atherosclerotic plaque accumulation. Cholesterol was meant to be nothing more than a crude marker for such lipoproteins but IS NOT A DISEASE IN ITSELF. But Big Pharma entered the picture, muddying the water and persuading our colleagues that cholesterol was a causative factor and deserves “treatment.” Hundreds of billions of dollars later and many coronary events that were NOT prevented by the absurd notion of statin cholesterol treatment later, we still have plenty of coronary events that pay Big Pharma, cardiologists, hospitals, and the medical device industry quite richly.

2) We know from abundant data that small oxidation- and glycation-prone LDL particles are highly atherogenic (atherosclerotic plaque-causing), as they endure for 5-7 days in the bloodstream, compared to 24 hours for large LDL particles provoked by fat consumption; are adherent to the glycosaminoglycans of the arterial intima; are potent triggers of the inflammation cascade, e.g., intimal matrix metalloproteinase; and are triggered to abundant degrees in some genotypes upon consumption of the amylopectin A of grains—yes, the food that the American Heart Association advises to fill the diet with—and sugars.

3) I have advocated CT heart scans to generate a coronary calcium score for over 20 years, the only means we have to measure, then track, progression or regression of coronary plaque burden. And your coronary calcium score is wonderfully manipulable and reversible—I’ve done it countless times and published the data. People who stop progression of their coronary calcium score (compared to the 25% per year progression typical of people taking statin drugs) or reduce their score have virtually no cardiovascular events–NO EVENTS.

4) As with all complex conditions such as dementia and cancer, coronary disease is multifactorial. Thinking that a statin drug (+ aspirin and a beta blocker) are sufficient to prevent coronary events is absurd and overly-simplistic, like thinking that taking Aricept for dementia will stop the disease—of course, it does no such thing. Our colleagues say that many of the causes cannot be treated because the drugs do not yet exist—that is indeed true: There are no drugs to “treat” many of the contributors to coronary atherogenesis. But there are many non-drug strategies to identify, then correct, such causes: Removal of all dietary factors that provoke formation of small LDL particles, insulin resistance, and glycation; restoration of vitamin D to a 25-hydroxy vitamin D level of 60-70 ng/ml that exerts anti-inflammatory effects such as reduction of abnormal activation of matrix metalloproteinase; a dose of omega-3 fatty acids sufficient to generate an RBC omega-3 index of 10% or greater associated with dramatic reduction in cardiovascular events, reduction in small LDL, and subdued postprandial atherogenic lipoprotein patterns; restoration of ideal thyroid status, given the extravagant increase in risk with TSH values even in the high “normal” range; cultivation of healthy bowel flora to correct the common dysbiosis caused by sugar consumption, chlorinated water, antibiotic exposure, pesticide/herbicide exposure, and common drugs such as H2-blockers and PPIs for acid reflux. Problem: While effective, these strategies are not dispensed by Big Pharma, require no involvement of the medical device industry, don’t even require a doctor in most instances. Thus, there are no sexy sales reps advocating for them, no all-expense-paid trips to Orlando, no direct-to-consumer ads on TV, and few doctors who even want to bother with the effort.

I am hoping that, now that this disease has touched you personally, your eyes will be opened to the corrupt and absurd policies of conventional coronary care and the American Heart Association. Your life, after all, may be at stake in coming years. Contrary to the self-serving Tweet from AHA staff to you, heart attack risk is 1) quantifiable, 2) trackable, 3) stoppable and reversible. Look at what happened to political commentator, Tim Russert, a few years ago: a coronary calcium score of 550 that his doctor dismissed as nonsense, treating his cholesterol with a statin and hypertension with various agents, along with aspirin, advising a low-fat diet and exercise. Five years later, Mr. Russert died suddenly on the set of his Meet the Press TV show. If we calculate his heart scan score at the time of death, it was 1880, a score that is associated with 15-20% per year death or heart attack: Mr. Russert’s heart attack and death was clearly written on the wall 5 years earlier, but an ignorant colleague failed to see it. Mr. Russert should be alive today, healthy, not having submitted to any coronary procedure. You, likewise, should be healthy with no stents and virtually no risk. But that is not what the conventional world of heart disease provides because it makes no money for healthcare insiders.

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The Pharmaceuticalization of Americans: Blood Pressure

News headlines are filled with the new advice from the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, and other health organizations: 50% of all Americans now have hypertension, given the new target blood pressure of 130/80 or lower, and more Americans therefore require treatment of their blood pressure.

CNN reports, for instance:

“One in three Americans had previously been diagnosed with the condition, but now 14% more Americans will be diagnosed with high blood pressure. The new guidelines will classify 103.3 million people as having high blood pressure, while the previous guidelines placed only 72.2 million Americans in this category, according to the authors of the report.”

TV news reports (you know, network and cable TV whose biggest advertiser is the drug industry with direct-to-consumer drug ads) are filled with talk of hypertension, the “deadly, silent killer” to prompt people to run to their doctors to be saved by another prescription.

The halls of pharmaceutical companies Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and others will be filled with rejoicing employees, as these guidelines—just like the (inane) cholesterol treatment guidelines—expand the ranks of Americans who “need” treatment of their high blood pressure and thereby enrich the revenue flow, salaries, and perks for insiders. It means that more prescriptions for beta blockers (that contribute to obesity/weight gain and raise blood sugar), diuretics (that deplete magnesium and potassium and cause the occasional sudden cardiac death), ACE inhibitors and ARBS (that cause a variety of peculiar issues such as angioedema and abdominal pain), and other drugs will be handed to Americans—the same people advised to cut their fat, eat more “healthy whole grains,” eat in moderation, move more and eat less, and take their statin drugs. It means that TV drug ads will feature more blood pressure agents, but not inexpensive generic drugs, but newer, even “me-too” drugs that yield little to no additional benefit and are more costly. It means that doctors will be more likely to bully you into taking more blood pressure drugs to treat this “silent deadly killer,” just as they try to force statin drugs on their patients.

So it helps to remind people following the Wheat Belly or Undoctored lifestyles that:

1) Populations that eat no grains, no sugary foods like soft drinks, but consume plenty of fat and other wildly-obtained foods have essentially NO high blood pressure. Blood pressures in such populations are typically around 110/80 or lower, BMIs average 21, and they take no drugs for blood pressure.

2) Visceral fat surrounding abdominal organs and heart is a huge driver of hypertension, cultivated by insulin resistance resulting from grain and sugar consumption.

3) Vitamin D, magnesium, omega-3 fatty acid, and iodine deficiencies are major contributors to high blood pressure, deficiencies made common in modern life.

4) Dysbiosis or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth caused by prescription drugs (e.g., acid reflux drugs, antibiotics), antibiotic residues in food, herbicides/pesticide residues in food, chlorinated drinking water, emulsifying agents in processed foods, prolonged and profound emotional stress, and other factors allow blood pressure to rise. (Do doctors contribute to high blood pressure with their drugs? Yes, they absolutely do.)

In the Wheat Belly/Undoctored approach, we therefore recreate the situation of people who have no high blood pressure and address the above factors. The result: dramatic weight loss from visceral fat; reversal of inflammation (that you can track with measures such as c-reactive protein, TNF-alpha, and others); reduction in waist circumference; ideal blood levels of 25-hydroxy vitamin D, magnesium; correction of all myriad phenomena of dysbiosis . . . and reduction of blood pressure back to ideal levels in the majority.

Problem: The Wheat Belly/Undoctored approach does not run billions of dollars of TV ads, nor does it generate billions of dollars of revenues for anyone, does not pay six-figure salaries to good-looking sales reps to promote to doctors, but it essentially without cost except for the few dollars to buy common nutritional supplements and buy higher-quality foods.

And never accept the blood pressures obtained in the doctor’s office. Instead, obtain your own measures in the comfort of your home, such as blood pressures obtained with the wonderfully easy-to-use Bluetooth-enabled blood pressure-measuring devices.

Enjoy ideal blood pressure without drugs, while enjoying the many other aspects of good health that derive from these insights. But, as I often point out, if you are healthy, you are useless to the healthcare system. So go ahead and be useless.

 

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How to use the Wheat Belly books: An update

There are 6 books in the entire Wheat Belly series dating back to September, 2011. It’s been a glorious few years watching so many people experience spectacular health and weight transformations, many of which are highlighted here on the pages of this Wheat Belly Blog, as well as the Official Wheat Belly Facebook page.

You seasoned Wheat Belliers already know a lot about navigating the different content of the Wheat Belly books. But we’ve had so many newcomers that I thought it would be helpful to discuss how and when each of the Wheat Belly books can be used to derive maximum benefit.

 

This is the original Wheat Belly book that upset dietitians, caused doors to be slammed in the corridors of Big Food companies, and the USDA commissioner to pop Tums every couple of hours because it picked on wheat, the grain held in highest regard among food manufacturers and providers of conventional dietary advice. Wheat Belly introduced the world to modern high-yield, semi-dwarf wheat, the man-made 18-inch tall plant that wreaks extraordinarily harmful effects on humans consuming it.

Read this book if you want to understand what has happened to modern wheat at the hands of geneticists and agribusiness to take something not good for health (traditional wheat) and convert it into the most destructive component of the modern diet.

30 recipes are included.

 

Wheat Belly Total Health took the Wheat Belly arguments further, rejecting all seeds of grasses–“grains”–and discussing why consuming them was a dietary disaster of the largest order. A little heavier on the science, reading this book provides the scientific rationale to explain why the Wheat Belly lifestyle achieves such incredible benefits.

This is the book to read if you also want to stack the odds in your favor of fully reversing health conditions such as autoimmune diseases, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol or triglycerides, neurological diseases, skin rashes, and many others. This is also the book that includes an extensive discussion of how to break a stubborn weight plateau.

There is a section on what I call “functional recipes,” i.e., recipes not for everyday foods but to create specific foods that provide health advantages, such as magnesium water, fermented vegetables, yogurts, and kefirs, and bone broths and soups.

 

 

I wrote the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox for people who don’t really care to hear the rationale and science but just want to get up and running on their Wheat Belly lifestyle ASAP. It is also designed to help anyone who has fallen off the bandwagon to get back on as quickly and confidently as possible. Step-by-step, meal-by-meal, the 10-Day Grain Detox provides the menu plan and strategies to easily incorporate the nutritional supplements that are part of the program. There are also recipes (the Great Persuaders) that can be used to persuade any naysayers in the household.

We have been launching periodic 10-Day Grain Detox Challenges so that readers can join groups of people all detoxing at the same time. There is also an online e-course for anyone wishing to have more support through their Wheat Belly Detox program.

 

 

 

The Wheat Belly 30-Minute (Or Less!) Cookbook helps make the Wheat Belly lifestyle as quick and easy as possible. In addition to easy recipes for breakfast, lunch, main courses, and snacks, there are recipes for baking mixes, basic breads, pita chips, wraps, and tortillas. There is also an entire section devoted to recipes for sauces (barbecue, marinara, Thai red curry, tartar and others), salad dressings (Sun-Dried Tomato, Creamy Tomato Cilantro, Spicy Cajun Mayo, others), and jams and butters.

There are also menus for special occasions such as Movie Night, Pub Night, and Romantic Evening.

 

 

The original Wheat Belly Cookbook is packed with 150 recipes for breakfast, lunch, main courses, snacks, and desserts. There is an extensive section called The Wheat Belly Bakery that helps you recreate the baked products, such as Rye Bread, Soft Pretzels, Walnut Raisin Bread, Strawberry Shortcake, and Mocha Walnut Brownies so that you can meet any need such as entertaining friends, pleasing kids, or filling out a holiday menu.

 

 

 

 

The Wheat Belly Slim Guide is a portable, purse-sized reference to help you navigate the wheat Belly lifestyle. It is not meant to be a standalone summary of the lifestyle, but a reference to use when shopping, eating outside the home, or traveling. It includes resources such as a grocery and pantry list, a list of our preferred safe sweeteners, sources for prebiotic fibers for bowel health, tips on how to control cravings, and more.

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Nima testing: An omelette

My son’s girlfriend, Liz, whose exquisite sensitivity to gluten I have previously discussed, has to be very careful whenever she eats outside the home. One misstep and she has to contend with weeks of joint and abdominal pain, the joint pain severe enough to make even walking difficult.

My son and Liz ate at a breakfast restaurant in suburban Cleveland called Yours Truly, where Liz had the oddly-named “Notso Omelette,” an omelette filled with cottage fries. While the restaurant maintains a gluten-free menu, they explained to Liz that they do not work to prevent cross-contamination (and so are really not gluten-free, a very common mistake made by restaurants—the rule, rather than the exception). Liz spoke with the waitress and she said that they would clean the cooktop where her meal was going to be prepared to reduce cross-contamination. The cross-contamination issue is especially likely with the cottage fries.

Well, this time it worked, with the negative gluten result on the Nima device shown above. Likewise, Liz enjoyed her breakfast without her (near-immediate) typical gluten re-exposure response.

It can be done. Unfortunately, it does not necessarily mean that, if a contaminated cooking surface or utensils are cleaned they become safe every time, but it at least can be done. And, judging by the exquisite sensitivity of one person with celiac disease, a meal can be enjoyed without paying for it with weeks of disrupted health. The key in this instance was the Nima device that reassured her that the restaurant’s efforts had likely reduced/eliminated cross-contaminating gluten residues to safe quantities.

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The Undoctored protocol to prevent and alleviate calcium oxalate kidney stones

People who have had the painful experience of passing a kidney stone remember well what this feels like, as sufferers describe it as one of the few pains worse than childbirth. Over 7 years, 50 percent of people who have had an episode will experience a recurrence, with a greater proportion experiencing a recurrence over a longer period. The majority of kidney stones are made from calcium oxalate. I have developed the Undoctored protocol to help you prevent these painful stones from forming.

This is one Undoctored Protocol among many provided in the Undoctored book, further expanded in the growing list of Protocols in the Undoctored Inner Circle.

HYDRATE

Think of kidney stones like the rock candy you made as a kid: You dissolve as much sugar as possible in boiling water and then allow the solution to cool, causing sugar to crystallize on a piece of string. A similar process causes the formation of calcium oxalate kidney stones: If urine is allowed to become saturated with calcium and oxalate, calcium oxalate crystals form and, over time, become “stones” that can block urine if lodged in the ureters (leading to the bladder). These stones can lead to blood in the urine as well as excruciating pain. A key strategy is to keep urine diluted to prevent calcium and oxalate from crystallizing, achieved by hydrating well.

Gauging individual hydration, however, is imprecise. Rules such as “drink half your weight in water per day,” unfortunately, do not factor in level of physical effort, time of year/ambient temperature, clothing, variation in sweating, or individual urine concentrating ability, so they are potentially misleading. One crude method is to look at urine color and hydrate to keep it from becoming amber, maintaining a light-yellow tint at all times. Another way is to test your urine with dipsticks (widely available in pharmacies), never allowing urine-specific gravity to exceed 1.010. Several manufacturers are developing portable devices that measure sodium concentration of sweat, an indirect gauge of hydration status. Stay tuned for online Undoctored discussions about these devices as they become available.

REBUILD BOWEL FLORA

Supplement with a high-potency, multispecies probiotic, as in the Wild, Naked, and Unwashed program; be certain that your preparation contains at least one, preferably several, of the following species: Bifidobacterium infantis, B. lactis, B. breve, B. longum, Lactobacillus paracasei, L. acidophilus, L. plantarum, or L. gasseri. These are the species that reduce urine levels of oxalate dramatically, leaving less oxalate to form crystals. Garden of Life RAW products and Renew Life Ultimate Flora Extra Care are two excellent choices with several of these species in each. Though not yet on the market, in the future, there will likely be probiotics that include Oxalobacter formigenes, which is also an enthusiastic consumer of oxalate, further reducing urinary oxalate levels. It is not yet clear how long a probiotic must be taken for full benefit, or on what schedule (e.g., 4 weeks every 6 months?), particularly when combined with a prebiotic fiber program, like the one in Undoctored. For full assurance of benefit, taking the probiotic chronically or on a repetitive schedule ensures continual reseeding of bowel flora; I shall update everyone as new data emerge.

MAGNESIUM CITRATE

Take magnesium citrate as your magnesium supplement. Ideally, 400 milligrams three times per day. Both magnesium and citrate (citric acid) block the formation of calcium oxalate crystals, making magnesium citrate a convenient means of obtaining both.

TAKE VITAMIN B6

Taken as the most active form, pyridoxal 5′-phosphate (rather than the less-well-metabolized pyridoxine), vitamin B6, at 50 milligrams per day, also blocks calcium and oxalate from forming crystals in the urine in some people.

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Nima Testing: Whiskey and Gin

Conventional wisdom is that, even though alcoholic spirits such as whiskey, bourbon, and gin are brewed from grain ingredients, the process of distillation (i.e., heat used to provoke evaporation of volatile contents, followed by condensation) reduces gluten residues to low levels. Limited testing has measured 20 parts per million gluten or less in these spirits, below the FDA cutoff for designating something “gluten-free.”

However, when I tested Jack Daniel’s whiskey and Bombay Sapphire gin, both tested “high-gluten,” meaning testing positive for gluten residues above 20 ppm. And “high gluten” could mean a substantial exposure (though not quantified above the 20 ppm cutoff).

Please do not regard these observations as a criticism of the makers of these spirits, as neither makes any claim about being gluten-free. But I believe it at least calls into serious question about how safe such spirits really are, distillation or no, given that, at least in these two instances, they test for “high-gluten.”

In future, I will be testing some vodkas, such as Tito’s that is distilled six times that has indeed caused many to claim that it is gluten-free.

 

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Preventing Cognitive Decline and Dementia

The understanding of cognitive decline and dementia has advanced considerably over the past decade, despite the drug industry’s numerous failed attempts to develop a drug to treat the condition. But a successful effort at preventing, even reversing, cognitive decline and dementia requires a multi-faceted approach that involves diet, correction of nutritional deficiencies, exercise, learning new skills, and a number of other efforts.

This is the first in a series of videos exploring all these issues, all designed to arm you with the best information available. The remainder of the series will be posted on the Undoctored Inner Circle membership website.

Start with the book:

Undoctored: Why Health Care Has Failed You and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor

Join the conversation, including the full video series and exploration of preventing cognitive and dementia:

InnerCircle.Undoctored.com

We are entering a new age in which the individual has astounding power over health–but don’t count on the doctor or healthcare system to tell you this.

We draw from the health information of the world, collaborate, share experiences, collect data, and show how to apply new health tools to achieve levels of health that you may have thought unattainable. We do all this at a time when conventional healthcare costs have become crippling.

The result: personal health that is SUPERIOR to that obtained through conventional means.

Transcript:

We’re going to be introducing a series of videos and conversations on how to not have cognitive decline or Alzheimer’s dementia. We’re going to take some of the lessons learned from Dr. Dale Bredesen’s ReCODE program (a lot of new lessons there), also some things that we can do better, and some things that I don’t agree with. We’ll talk about all those things, but we’ll take the best of the ReCODE program and see if we can teach us any new lessons for our Undoctored experience.

Those conversations will unfold; it’s a rather complicated conversation that will come out over several videos. Dr. Bredesen’s ReCODE program has many many many moving parts in it, so we can’t cover in a single video or a single written conversation. We’ll do this in a series.

I wanted to start by reassuring you that if you’re just doing the Undoctored Wild-Naked-Unwashed program — the basic components of the Wild-Naked-Unwashed program — you have already gotten off to a terrific start that is very powerful for prevention, or even reversal of cognitive decline, perhaps also dementia. The Undoctored program, by the way, overlaps almost perfectly with Dr. Bredesen’s core program, so I think that tells us we’re on the right track. I have seen early dementia, not advanced dementia, but early dementia reverse, or at least partially reverse.

All the things you do in the Undoctored Wild-Naked-Unwashed program, that is:

Grain and sugar elimination: that’s huge, because it’s anti-inflammatory. A big driver of cognitive decline and dementia is inflammation. By going grain-free sugar-free we drop inflammation dramatically. If you were to track inflammatory measures like C-reactive protein or interleukin-6 or tumor necrosis factor (TNFα) or other measures, you would see them drop precipitously, as inflammation recedes, and risk for Alzheimer’s with it.
Vitamin D: vitamin D is at the top of our program; is among the most important. It is also in the ReCODE program. It’s not entirely clear why it’s so protective. Part of it is its effects on neuronal (nervous system brain cell) growth. Also it’s anti-inflammatory, and a lot of other effects. So vitamin D’s at the top and list of supplements that protect you from dementia.
Fish oil; for its EPA and DHA, but especially its DHA, because your brain largely consists of DHA. We take fish oil, not flaxseed oil (flaxseed oil’s fine, nothing wrong with it, but it’s not a source of the DHA your brain needs) and krill oil — the quantity of EPA and DHA is too trivial to have the kinds of effects we want. We want an Omega-3 RBC Index of certainly greater than 8%, ideally above 10%, the level that provides maximum, optimal, cardiovascular protection, and protection from dementia.
Cultivation of bowel flora: there is a mind-gut-axis, but even more so than that, having dysbiosis in some form is highly inflammatory. If you have dysbiosis: disrupted bowel flora composition, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, where the organisms have ascended all the way up the gastrointestinal tract, this is highly inflammatory. That’s why it’s associated with conditions like fibromyalgia, psoriasis, autoimmune conditions, IBS. All the steps we take to correct bowel flora composition, reduce inflammation, as well as provide other benefits, like reductions in triglycerides, blood pressure, and better emotional health.

If you’re just engaging in the basic Undoctored Wild-Naked-Unwashed program, you are off to a terrific start. We will talk more about the role of exercise, which is important in dementia protection, as well as other facets of health, getting adequate sleep (another factor), brain exercise, learning new skills, new information. We’ll talk about that in future videos, but I wanted to reassure you that just by engaging in the Undoctored Wild-Naked-Unwashed program you have already, in effect, taken on many of the core basic strategies in the ReCODE program for dementia prevention and reversal.

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What you need to know about cholesterol—Total and LDL

This is an area in which I will be guilty of oversimplification. But even oversimplified, it will vastly outstrip your doctor’s focus on total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and statin drugs. Unfortunately, most doctors have fallen for the marketing disguised as statin drug “research,” paid for by the drug industry. Statin drugs do indeed provide a very small benefit—but with substantial health (and financial) costs.

The Undoctored Wild, Naked, and Unwashed strategies address these issues quite aggressively. For example, wheat/grain elimination reduces triglycerides dramatically, often by several hundred points (in mg/dL); raises HDL cholesterol over time; and reduces or eliminates one of the most powerful causes of heart disease—small LDL particles. Omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil reduce triglycerides, removing the distorting effect of excessive triglycerides on other lipoproteins and reducing heart disease risk. Cultivation of bowel flora likewise reduces triglycerides and improves insulin response, along with reducing cholesterol values (via increased growth of bacterial species that yield bile salt hydrolase enzymes that prevent intestinal cholesterol reabsorption). In other words, the basic Undoctored strategies improve the values on the standard cholesterol panel dramatically. Some people, however, are left with higher total and LDL cholesterol values, so it is important to understand several issues surrounding these two values.

Total cholesterol is virtually worthless, as it includes HDL cholesterol. If HDL goes up (as it nearly always does on the Undoctored program) by 40 mg/dL (which is great), total cholesterol will also go up by 40 mg/dL, but many doctors try to “treat” this rise with statin drugs, which makes no sense whatsoever. There is no useful information in total cholesterol, so this outdated value should be ignored.

LDL cholesterol is usually not even measured; rather, it is calculated from the other three values (total cholesterol, HDL, triglycerides). The calculation is outdated (over 50 years old), based on crude and inaccurate assumptions, and is unreliable. It also ignores variation in LDL particles— size, duration of persistence in the bloodstream, potential for oxidation (since oxidized LDL particles are especially bad), etc. For these reasons, I call LDL cholesterol “fictitious LDL,” since it is wildly unreliable. On this lifestyle in which we sharply curtail carbohydrates (which modifies lipoprotein composition), it becomes even more unreliable, essentially invalidating the calculation.

We therefore turn to superior methods to quantify LDL particles and measure their size. (See Appendix D of the Undoctored book) Small LDL particles—by far the worst (they persist much longer, are more prone to oxidation, and are more adherent to artery walls to form atherosclerotic plaque)—are triggered by consumption of carbohydrates; large LDL particles—more benign—are caused by fats. Among lipoprotein testing methods, I believe that the NMR method is the best choice for accuracy and provides the most information. A typical NMR lipoprotein test result in someone with heart disease risk would be: total LDL particles 1,800 nmol/L (the units signify number of particles per volume) and small LDL particles 900 nmol/L—meaning that 50 percent of all LDL particles are the undesirable, heart disease–causing small variety caused by grain and sugar consumption, reduced with their elimination. Other methods, though distant second choices, are to measure apoprotein B (apo B)—since each LDL particle contains one apo B molecule, which therefore serves as a virtual count of LDL particles—or direct LDL measurement. However, both apo B and measured LDL provide no indication of size and therefore do not suggest a dietary solution to correct the excess of small LDL particles.

The goal is to minimize small LDL particles (no higher than 20 percent of the total), while the goal for total LDL particles is not yet worked out, as it is not clear whether large LDL particles even contribute to heart disease risk and at what level. Stay tuned to Undoctored conversations for clarification of this issue.

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Witchcraft or simply the adverse effects of consuming rye?

Rye has the unique potential to be infected with a parasitic fungus, Claviceps purpurea, that produces a human toxin called ergotamine. When ingested via, say, a loaf of rye bread, it exerts a range of hallucinogenic effects on humans, partly because it is converted to lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD.

History is filled with fascinating and terrifying stories of humans exposed to rye and ergotamine. Because some victims afflicted with contaminated rye experienced an intense dermatitis (skin inflammation), the condition became known as St. Anthony’s Fire, named after the early 11th-century sanctuary operated by monks to treat victims of ergot poisoning. During the Middle Ages, writers described hysterical outbursts afflicting previously normal people, including thrashing and writhing while shouting, “I’m burning!” The afflicted would eventually collapse, after which their bodies would blacken. And at least one observer has ascribed the madness of the Salem witch trials to ergotamine poisoning after determining that many of the 19 young women accused of being witches lived near a rye field. A “witch cake” made of rye flour was fed to a dog to confirm a “bewitching” effect. The rye itself was, of course, entirely innocent, since it was the common parasitic infestation of the grass that was to blame. But, as with so many other matters surrounding the relationship between the seeds of grasses and the hapless humans who try to consume them, it should come as no surprise that it is a relationship fraught with danger.

The history of rye consumption dates back to the early days of wheat consumption, when humans first experimented with consuming einkorn (the ancient predecessor of modern wheat). Rye, was another grass that grew as a weed in fields of wheat. This is a prefect example of Vavilovian mimicry, or the ability of a weed to mimic a cultivated plant. This weed came to be recognized by humans as yet another seed of a grass that could be consumed, and farmers often harvested both wheat and rye with the same sickle or thresher without bothering to separate them. Rye has gained some blessings in nutritional circles because compared to wheat, it has less potential to trigger insulin, despite identical potential for raising blood sugar.

Rye and wheat share a high content of gliadin protein, with all its potentially toxic effects. Rye gliadin is called secalin, although the structures are nearly identical. The secalin protein has similar potential to do bad things as its gliadin counterpart. Likewise, the lectin of rye is nearly identical to wheat’s destructive lectin, wheat germ agglutinin, and therefore shares its potential for causing intestinal toxicity, clumping red blood cells, provoking abnormal growth of immune system lymphocytes, and mimicking insulin. Rye shares with wheat a peculiar and only recently recognized phenomenon: the formation of acrylamide, a compound believed to be a carcinogen and neurotoxin. Rye and wheat contain a high content of the amino acid asparagine, which, when heated at high temperatures during baking or deep-frying, reacts with the plentiful carbohydrates present to form acrylamide. (It also forms in French fries.) Modern reliance on nitrogen-rich synthetic fertilizers also boosts the asparagine content of rye and wheat, increasing acrylamide formation further. For all practical purposes, given the crossbreeding that has occurred via natural Vavilovian means as well as the breeding efforts of humans, the differences are minor, meaning that they are virtually one and the same. Being wheat-free should also mean being rye-free.

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