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DIY Blood Pressure: Part 2

DIY Blood Pressure: Part 2

We don’t treat high blood pressure–we remove/correct the factors that allow high blood pressure to develop in the first place, a big difference. And the way we approach blood pressure does not involve risk for diabetes, osteoporosis, weight gain, and sudden cardiac death, as conventional blood pressure treatments do.

My new Undoctored book takes you down the exciting and empowering path of DIY Healthcare–taking back individual control over health. It’s safe, effective, costs very little, and is actually a lot of fun. And the level of health you achieve by doing it on your own is not nearly as good as what you’d get from the doctor of healthcare system; it is superior.

You will these concepts and more in my new book, Undoctored: Why Health Care Has Failed You and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor.

Available in all major bookstores and Amazon.

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Type 2 Diabetes is the Perfect Disease

From the perspective of the healthcare industry, type 2 diabetes is the perfect disease. Unlike, say, pneumonia, which necessitates an antibiotic for 14 days and then it’s over, type 2 diabetes starts with one drug, then two, and then three or more, not to mention the drugs used for associated conditions, such as hypertension, heart disease, kidney disease, eye diseases, and accelerated dementia. And all of these drugs are prescribed for years, often a lifetime (albeit shortened compared to those without diabetes), resulting in a pharmaceutical bonanza of profit. To the drug industry, diabetes is the gift that keeps on giving.

Here are some sobering statistics: There are now 30 million people with type 2 diabetes in the United States, three times this number with prediabetes. Costs likewise are staggering: $176 billion in direct medical costs and $69 billion in reduced productivity every year. Being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes adds, on average, $7,900 to an individual’s annual healthcare costs. (Before they smartened up, annual reports of publicly traded pharmaceutical companies gushed over the surge in people with type 2 diabetes, hailing the epidemic as an unprecedented opportunity for revenue growth. They recognized recently that this could become a publicity faux pas and stopped using boastful wording.)

But there is a major oversight in all this: Type 2 diabetes is a disease of lifestyle and poor food choices and, to a lesser degree, inactivity, nutritional deficiencies, and other modern disruptions, made worse by the advice of agencies who pose as health advocates. Yes, there can be a genetic predisposition to the disease, but the increase in the number of diabetes cases since 1980 and the even faster growth of prediabetes are almost entirely manmade phenomena. After all, the genetic situation in humans has not changed in a short 30-some years; it’s something we did in the years since E.T. and Poltergeist hit the big screen.

The choice is yours. Choose to control your diet.

Manage your blood sugar—before it controls you.

Here’s a basic fact: Eat carbohydrates and blood sugar rises. Every first-year medical student knows this, every nurse or diabetes educator knows this, every person with diabetes who performs finger-stick blood sugars before and after meals knows this. Eat any food with more than just a few grams of carbohydrates and blood sugar will rise; the more carbohydrates you eat, the higher blood sugar will rise. Everyone also knows that foods like butter do not raise blood sugar, nor will a fatty cut of meat, olives, green bell peppers, broccoli, or chicken liver. And since the 1980s, when the sharp upward climb in type 2 diabetes (and obesity) began, the only component of diet that has increased is carbohydrates, not fat or proteins.

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DIY Blood Pressure: Part 1

Here’s another Undoctored discussion that can take your Wheat Belly experience even further.

DIY Blood Pressure: When you achieve normal blood pressure by natural means, you are SAFER than reducing BP with drugs. This is because the drugs for high blood pressure are filled with side-effects, while natural methods restore HEALTH.

Here’s how to get started on DIY Blood Pressure the Undoctored way.

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

Available in all major bookstores and Amazon.

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. We are Undoctored and healthier than people who solely rely on their doctors and the misaligned motivations of the healthcare system.

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Everything You’ve Been Told About Weight Loss Is Wrong

Cut your calories. Move more, eat less. Eat more healthy whole grains–It’s ALL wrong. Everything you’ve been told about losing weight is wrong.

In fact, conventional dietary advice is great for GAINING weight. So we do the opposite of conventional advice in the Undoctored lifestyle.

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

Available in all major bookstores and Amazon

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Pesto Noodles: A recipe from Undoctored

Here’s a quick and ultra-easy recipe for Pesto Noodles using spiralized zucchini, a delicious way to be grain-free for magnificent health.

Elimination of all grains and replacing them with zoodles (spiralized zucchini noodles) is one of the core strategies discussed in Undoctored, a lifestyle that achieves dramatic weight loss and helps prevent or reverse hundreds of health conditions.

This is one of the recipes from the book, Undoctored: Why Health Care Has Failed You and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor.

Available in all major bookstores and Amazon.

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Dana Carpender’s Easy No-Sugar-Added Ketchup

Prolific low-carb cookbook author and friend, Dana Carpender, shared this recipe for ketchup made without sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, fructose, or the newly-named “corn sweetener.” Instead, she chose the natural sweeteners, monk fruit and erythritol, found in Virtue Sweetener, also the most economical of natural, non-caloric sweeteners.

This will be one of the 500 recipes Dana introduces in her new book 500 Keto Recipes to be released this fall, 2017.

Easy No-Sugar-Added Ketchup

Heinz no-sugar-added ketchup is quite good. But it’s pricier, and includes artificial sweeteners some people avoid. This recipe is a cinch, tastes great–a lot like Heinz, actually–and has no artificial sweeteners.

Makes 1 1/2 cups

15 ounces tomato sauce

1/2 cup cider vinegar

3 tablespoons Virtue Sweetener (or other natural sweetener equivalent to 3/4 cup sugar)

1 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 teaspoon onion powder

1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

Combine tomato sauce, vinegar, Virtue Sweetener, salt, onion and garlic powder in a non-reactive saucepan–stainless steel, ceramic non-stick, or enamelware -and bring to a simmer. Let it cook for 15 minutes, cool, and it’s done. I used a funnel to pour mine into an old squeeze-type ketchup bottle for ease of use, but a jar or snap-top container will do just fine.

Yield:

1 1/2 cups

24 servings each with: 6 calories; trace fat (3.5% calories from fat); trace protein; 2 grams carbohydrate; trace dietary fiber; 2 grams net carbs

From Dana’s upcoming cookbook 500 Keto Recipes, coming this autumn from Fair Winds Press Copyright 2017

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Grain-Free Strawberry Shortcake

Everyone loves Strawberry Shortcake! And, because this version is made without grains or added sugars, it is also healthy (provided you include dairy in your program). Be warned, however: Because there are no appetite-stimulating grains or added sugars, one Shortcake is impressively filling!

The almond flour-based dough browns more readily than grain flour, thus the golden color of the final product.

Makes 4

1 pound strawberries, stemmed and quartered

1/4 cup Virtue Sweetener (or other natural sweetener equivalent to 1 cup sugar), divided

3 cups almond flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

6 tablespoons butter, cold and sliced into 1/2 tablespoon pieces

2 cups whipping cream, divided

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Place strawberries in medium bowl. Stir in 1 tablespoon Virtue Sweetener (or sweetener equivalent to 4 tablespoons sugar). Mash lightly and stir. Set aside, stirring occasionally.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Line baking sheet with parchment paper.

In large bowl, combine 2 tablespoons Virtue Sweetener (or sweetener equivalent to 1/2 cup sugar), almond flour, baking soda, sea salt and mix. Using knife, large spoon, or dough cutter, cut butter into dry mix. Stir in 1 cup cream until dough forms.

Divide dough into 8 mounds on baking sheet and flatten to approximately 1-inch thickness. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove and allow to cool.

Meanwhile, whip remaining 1 cup whipping cream until thickened. Beat in remaining 1 tablespoon Virtue Sweetener (or sweetener equivalent to 4 tablespoons sugar) and vanilla at low speed.

To make each shortcake, take one cake turned upside down and spread layer of strawberries followed by layer of whipped cream. Top with another cake right side up.

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Are there any good doctors?

Are doctors who follow “consensus guidelines,” rank high on quality standards set by hospitals, and adhere to rules set by the drug and medical device industries really providing “health”? Would you call a regimen of Lipitor, hydrochlorothiazide, aspirin, metoprolol, Prilosec, and Naprosyn “healthy” because it was prescribed by a “good” doctor?

Health is not provided by doctors; revenue-generating healthcare is provided by doctors–there’s a difference, a big difference.

Health is something you achieve on your own with results that are SUPERIOR to the results doctors would achieve. You are Undoctored.

Undoctored: Why Health Care Has Failed You and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor. Available in all major bookstores and Amazon.

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Italian Meat Loaf: A recipe from the new Undoctored book

 

A recipe for Italian Meat Loaf from the new Undoctored book.

Undoctored carries on the Wheat Belly tradition of grain-free, low-carb healthy meals but with added methods to gain even greater control over health, weight, and functioning.

Undoctored: Why Healthcare Has Failed You and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor.

Available in all major bookstores and Amazon.

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Thyroid Testing— Is your doctor missing something?

Similar to the gas pedal in your car, the thyroid controls the “speed” of your metabolism. It fine-tunes the function of virtually every tissue in the body, from the lowly cells responsible for creating fingernails to the nerve cells in the brain that guide memory and thought.

Your thyroid hormone level has to be just right. Too high and you are anxious and lose weight despite eating like a horse. Too low and no matter how meticulous your diet or how many calories you cut back, you fail to lose weight or gain weight. Just right and your efforts are rewarded by natural weight loss when nutrition is managed properly. Thyroid dysfunction, sufficient to impair weight loss, is unfortunately very common. Much of this initiated by wheat and grains.

Is your thyroid simply misunderstood? Thyroid issues are often undiagnosed, underappreciated, and misunderstood by doctors. Approximately 20 percent of people starting the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox are deficient in iodine, the trace mineral required by the thyroid gland to produce thyroid hormones. This is why iodine is included in the list of essential strategies to add after wheat and grain elimination. If iodine is the cause for failed weight loss, as well as hypothyroid symptoms such as cold hands and feet, hair loss, and low energy, then iodine supplementation is the fix. The only people who should not take iodine on their own are those with a history of autoimmune thyroid disease. For many people there is more to the thyroid question than iodine.

Your thyroid is sensitive. The thyroid gland sits on the front of your throat like a miniature bow-tie. Of all endocrine glands, the thyroid gland is the most susceptible to autoimmune damage. When the immune system is unable to distinguish proteins in the colon, thyroid gland, pancreas, or brain from foreign organisms invading the body, it recruits B and T lymphocytes into an army to wage war on its own organs. We call this autoimmunity. The most common trigger of autoimmune thyroid diseases (Graves’ Disease and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis) is the gliadin protein of wheat and related proteins of other grains. Gliadin antibodies occur in 50 percent or more of people with thyroid disease. Therefore, eliminating wheat and grains potentially removes the trigger for autoimmune thyroid damage.

Those “Love Handles” really aren’t showing you any love! If visceral fat is present in the tummy, then this unique fat also disrupts thyroid function due to the flood of inflammatory proteins it releases that interfere with the function of thyroid hormones. This can occur with or without interference of thyroid function by autoimmune inflammation. In other words, this visceral fat is not only unattractive, it’s actually impairing weight loss.

It’s scary out there! We are living in a dangerous era, a time when industrial compounds have proliferated to such an extraordinary degree that literally everyone is exposed to chemicals that cause some form of endocrine disruption. Disruption can occur at the brain level (hypothalamus and pituitary that control the thyroid), at the thyroid gland level, or even at the level of tissues, such as fat cells, liver, and muscle, which are all dependent on thyroid hormones. Thyroid disruption can originate with perfluorooctanoic acid residues from Teflon in your cooking, restaurant food, or groundwater. It can be caused by triclosan in antibacterial hand soaps and hand sanitizers. It can be due to polybrominated diphenyl ethers from the flame retardant in carpeting and clothing, contaminants in the water supply, and plastics that are everywhere and in everything, from cars to the lining of canned foods to water bottles. They are even in the rainwater and air we breath. Nobody, and I truly mean nobody alive today, has avoided exposure to these ubiquitous chemicals.

It’s unavoidable. Here are the numbers to prove it. The Environmental Working Group tested blood from the umbilical cords of newborns and uncovered 287 different industrial compounds, including mercury, 21 different pesticides, and components of industrial lubricants— this was in newborns, not 60-year-olds who had worked a lifetime in factories or other contaminated environments. Endocrine disruptive industrial chemicals can be detected in hair, urine, blood, liver, kidneys, and just about any other bodily fluid or organ. One recent study assessed individuals for the presence of perchlorates, a residue of synthetic fertilizers. Of 2,800 people tested, all 2,800 had detectable levels of perchlorates in their bodies. You’ve heard that saying about death and taxes? Well, add industrial chemical exposure to the list of things that are unavoidable in life.

There is no quick fix for this. Unfortunately, there is no “detox” program that has been shown to reduce perchlorates or polychlorinated biphenyls from the thyroid gland or remove perfluorooctanoic acid residue from the adrenals. You can’t unwind the effects of fungicides like vinclozolin just by taking some purging supplement or submitting to four enemas per day. The thyroid gland and its production of thyroid hormones typically do not recover from the beating, and prescription thyroid hormones are usually still necessary, even long after autoimmune inflammation has subsided.

Is your doctor missing something? Most doctors are unaware of the above issues, unaware that the old rules for diagnosing thyroid dysfunction no longer apply due to disruption by industrial chemicals. Thyroid status that is disrupted at the hypothalamic or pituitary level cannot be diagnosed with the usual screening methods because in these cases the TSH level (normally the only lab test used to assess thyroid function) is typically normal— even if substantial hypothyroidism is present. It means that, even if doctors manage to diagnose hypothyroidism (low levels of thyroid hormone), they will only prescribe the T4 thyroid hormone but neglect to address T3, the truly active form of thyroid hormone. This results in someone taking T4 as levothyroxine (Synthroid), being told that their thyroid status is fine, yet continuing to struggle with hypothyroid symptoms such as weight gain, cold hands and feet, hair loss, depression, water retention or edema, thinning hair, disrupted bowel function, peculiar rashes, and increased cardiovascular risk due to disruption of T3 function or blocked conversion of T4 to T3 (how most T3 in the body is produced).

What can you do? Look for a functional medicine practitioner, a naturopath, or someone who uses a compounding pharmacy to mix individualized thyroid prescriptions (ask the pharmacist at a compounding pharmacy in your area, one that is licensed to mix its own individualized prescriptions). The key is to identify a health care practitioner who is enlightened on thyroid issues if you have such symptoms or if you have been prescribed T4 without T3. The solution is usually as easy as replacing the T4 with a T4/ T3 combination preparation (such as Armour Thyroid or Nature-Throid) or adding T3 (as liothyronine or Cytomel). Taking the right combination of medications will control thyroid dysfunction. Your body will finally be released from the misguided gate keeper (your thyroid) and the weight loss will begin.

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