The UltraWellness Blog by Mark Hyman, M.D.

Are Your Hormones Making You Miserable?

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:24:58 -0400

Are your hormones out of balance?

Does your life feel like a song played badly out of tune?

If so, the problem may have to do with imbalances in your hormones, which are wreaking havoc on your body and mind.

There is one hormone in particular I am going to focus on today, and it could be at the root of your problems.

I will share with you 12 tips you can start using immediately to begin rebalancing your hormones and bring your life back into tune.

But first, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you crave sugar or salt?

• Are you overweight and putting on more and more belly fat?

• If you are a woman, do you have premenstrual syndrome, painful or heavy periods, and a low sex drive?

• Are you depressed? Do you sleep poorly?

• Do you feel tired but wired?

• Do you need coffee to wake up in the morning and a few glasses of wine to calm down at night?

If you answered "yes," your hormones may be out of balance, and you are not alone ...

In fact, this is how most Americans feel because we are living out of harmony with our natural biological rhythms. This is because small molecules in our bodies that we depend on to keep us in balance are running haywire.

These messenger molecules are involved in almost every function of the body, and they are critical to our well-being.

They are our hormones -- messenger molecules of our endocrine system -- and neurotransmitters -- messenger molecules of our brain and nervous system.

Understand how and why these systems get out of balance and you will go a long way toward understanding why Americans are so tired, depressed, and overweight!

Our hormone and neurotransmitter system is another one of the core systems of the body that we must address to achieve vibrant health. That is why Balancing Your Hormones is Key #2 to UltraWellness.

In today’s blog -- the second in this 7-part series on the 7 Keys to UltraWellness -- I will explain why your hormones get out of balance, how to get them back in balance, how they work, and why so many of you feel miserable because of them.

The Four Major Hormonal Epidemics in America and Why They Are Making Us Miserable

All of our hormones and neurotransmitters work together as one dynamic system to help us maintain optimal health and keep us happy, focused, and peaceful. They are like a finely orchestrated symphony that must work together to keep everything in balance.

The command and control center for this process is in your brain. It is made up of the hypothalamus and pituitary glands.

This center sends signals to distant parts of the body to control everything from your stress response through the adrenal glands to your blood sugar balance through the pancreas to your thyroid hormone via the thyroid gland, to your sexual behavior and function through the reproductive organs. It also controls growth, sleep, mood, and much more.

In addition to these hormonal messengers you also have important brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, which send messages throughout your body to every cell, organ, and tissue and help you do everything from moving your arm to feeling happy or sad.

When your neurotransmitters or hormones are out of balance, literally everything in your body goes haywire.

There are four big epidemics of hormonal problems in Americans today that are sending millions of people out of balance: too much insulin (from sugar), too much cortisol and adrenaline (from stress), imbalances of sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone, and not enough thyroid hormones.

Although all 4 of these hormone epidemics are important, today I want to focus on the most common -- and therefore the most problematic -- of these conditions: too much insulin.

Insulin Resistance: Awash in a Sea of Sugar

Let me tell you the story of a man who came to me. His story may be all too familiar to you ...

James was a 46 year-old Wall Street executive who came to me for a cardiac stress test. He was a hard-driving, don’t-look-up type of guy who was convinced he was dying of heart disease.

Every afternoon, he would experience the sudden onset of sweating, a racing heart, anxiety, and shortness of breath -- in other words, he thought he was going to die!

He was also thick around the middle. After taking one look at him and listening to his story, I said, "You don’t eat breakfast, do you?"

"And you feel tired after eating, so that is why you skip food during the day -- to keep sharp for work," I continued. "And when you feel like that, you go to the vending machine for a soda and get a quick sugar fix, and in a few minutes you feel better."

Shocked, he asked, "How did you know?"

I explained to James that he was fighting with his genes and was insulin resistant, leading to wide swings in blood sugar that were responsible for his symptoms.

He couldn’t regulate his blood sugar because he pumped out too much insulin. And this was leading to every one of his symptoms ...

When you eat too much sugar, flour, and white rice, your insulin levels spike.

When this happens, your cells become resistant to its effects. So you pump out more and more insulin, become even MORE resistant to its effects, and end up in the vicious cycle of insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance can cause energy and mood swings -- AND it can take you down the slippery road toward high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, cancer, brain aging, dementia, and more.

But James is not alone in his problem with blood sugar control ...

Between 80 and 100 million Americans suffer from insulin resistance. It is not exactly the same in everyone, but the ultimate consequences can be similar.

Most people with insulin resistance have extra fat around the middle.

(Quick Tip: Check your waist-to-hip ratio -- the measurement around your belly button divided by the measurement around your hips. If it is greater than 0.8, you likely have insulin resistance.)

You may be tall, thin, short, fat, or any combination of these and still have insulin resistance.

The only way to know for sure is to take an insulin response test, which measures blood sugar AND insulin while you are fasting and 1 and 2 hours after you consume a 75-gram sugar drink.

Just measuring blood sugar alone isn’t enough. You HAVE to measure insulin -- this is something that many doctors miss.

Insulin resistance is not a genetic defect, an error in our evolution, or a mistake by God. It is the result of the simple fact that we have strayed from eating in harmony with our genes. In other words, we do not fit into our genes.

Historically, we ate the equivalent of only 20 teaspoons of sugar a year as hunter–gatherers.

But just 200 years ago, we started consuming about 10 pounds of sugar per person per year -- a 5,000% increase over our evolutionary ancestors!

As if that weren’t bad enough, we now we eat 150 pounds per person per year, or about 1/2 pound each day -- that’s the equivalent of drinking 6 cans of Coke or eating 8 Snickers bars per day.

What’s worst, the average child consumes 34 teaspoons of sugar a day!

That means that we are now eating 75,000% more sugar today than our ancestors did.

This is ridiculous -- no wonder so many of us are sick, fat, tired, and depressed!

We evolved in a world without supermarkets, convenience stores, or fast food restaurants. We had to work for our food and had limited access to refined foods or excess calories.

In fact, our genes are pre-agricultural -- we only started farming 10,000 years ago and only started refining flour about 200 years ago with the advent of the steam engine-powered flourmill.

With the advent of 15,000 low-fat foods (which are also high-sugar, high-calorie foods) on the market over the last 15 to 20 years, we have created an epidemic of increasing obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. The scientific foundation for the low-fat movement was shaky from the start, and the consequences of that movement were the exact opposite of its intentions -- we are now the most unhealthy generation.

Madison Avenue got ahead of medical science to the detriment of us all.

How Does All This Sugar Harm Our Health?

Well, our bodies normally produce insulin in response to food in our stomachs, particularly sugar. When we eat too much sugar we produce FAR too much insulin, and this leads to a variety of health problems.

We once thought that insulin’s only role was to help the sugar enter cells so it could be metabolized, transforming the stored energy of the sun (in plant foods) with the oxygen we breathe into the energy we use every day to run our bodies.

We were wrong.

Insulin has many other effects on the body. And when there is too much of it, the results can be catastrophic.

Here is what too much insulin really does to your body and health:

• Insulin acts on your brain to increase appetite, specifically an appetite for sugar. Try as you might, as long as your insulin levels are high you will fight a losing battle for weight loss.

• It increases LDL cholesterol, lowers HDL cholesterol, raises triglycerides, and increases your blood pressure. Insulin resistance causes 50% of all reported cases of high blood pressure.

• It makes your blood sticky and more likely to clot, leading to heart attacks and strokes.

• It stimulates the growth of cancer cells.

• It increases inflammation and oxidative stress and ages your brain.

• It even increases homocysteine because sugar consumption decreases vitamin B6 and folic acid.

• Insulin also causes sex hormone problems and can lead to infertility, hair growth where you don’t want to grow it, hair loss where you don’t want to lose it, acne, low testosterone in men, and more. It also leads to mood disturbances.

Fortunately, balancing blood sugar and correcting insulin resistance are well within our reach.

Scientific advances of the last few decades show us how.

While some medications can help with insulin resistance, such as Glucophage, Avandia, and Actos, they have side effects and are only a Band-aid unless they are used along with a comprehensive nutrition, exercise, and stress management plan like the one described below.

Resetting Your Metabolism for Optimal Blood Sugar

My goal is to make your metabolism more efficient, to make your cells more intelligent and cooperative, not resistant. In other words, you will need much less insulin to accomplish the task of balancing your blood sugar.

You can achieve this by resetting your metabolism of sugar and insulin.

To do this you have to eliminate the things that are knocking you out of balance, and provide your body the things it needs to reestablish optimal balance and thrive.

Here is what to do:

high-fructose corn syrup

• Don’t drink liquid calories in juice and soda. Your body doesn’t feel full from them, so you eat more all day.

• Stop consuming all processed, junk, or packaged foods. If it doesn’t look like the food your great grandmother ate, stay away.

• Stop eating trans or hydrogenated fats.

• Slow the rate of sugar uptake from the gut by balancing your meals with healthy protein (nuts, seeds, beans, small wild fish, organic chicken), healthy carbs (vegetables, fruit, beans, whole grains), and healthy fats (olive oil, nuts and seeds, avocadoes, fish oil).

• Eat plenty of soluble fiber (30 to 50 grams a day).

• Eat smaller, more frequent meals.

• Make your cells smarter by giving them an oil change with omega-3 fats, which help fix cell membranes so that they can more readily receive the messages from insulin.

• Move your body: Exercise improves your cells’ ability to work better, respond to insulin better, and burn sugar faster.

• Relax! Stress reduction also helps improve blood sugar control.

• Make your cells more efficient by increasing specific nutrients, such as chromium, vanadium, magnesium, vitamin E, biotin, the B vitamins, zinc, bioflavonoids, and some newer compounds including alpha lipoic acid, arginine, and carnitine.

• Herbs may also be of benefit. These include Panax ginseng, ginkgo biloba, green tea, fenugreek, gymnema sylvestre, bitter melon, and garlic.

Just balancing this one hormone -- insulin -- can have wide-ranging effects on all your other hormones and brain chemicals and is a great place to start on your path to vibrant health.

Just try these suggestions for 1 week and see how you feel -- you may be shocked at how quickly your body can recover.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

What do you think can be done to cleanse our food supply of so much sugar?

Do you believe the corn industry’s ads on the safety of high-fructose corn syrup?

How can we protect our children from consuming massive amounts of sugar?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

How to Optimize Your Nutrition for Vibrant Health

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:29:55 -0400

Confused about what "good nutrition" is?

You shouldn't be -– we know what works and what doesn't.

In a moment, I will share 5 simple tips to help you optimize your nutrition and achieve vibrant health, but first let me clear up a few misconceptions.

Despite the "conflicting" scientific studies and media reports designed to confound rather than enlighten, there is no confusion about what constitutes good nutrition.

If we were to gather the world's top nutrition scientists and experts —- free from food industry influence -- there would be very little debate about the essential properties of good nutrition.

Unfortunately, most doctors are nutritionally illiterate. Worse, they don’t know how to use the most powerful medicine available to them: food.

Common sense and scientific research both lead us to the conclusion that if we want healthy bodies, we must put the right raw materials into our bodies: real, whole, local, fresh, unadulterated, unprocessed, and chemical-, hormone-, and antibiotic-free food.

There is NO role in our diets for foreign molecules such as trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup, which interfere with our biology at every level.

If you want junk out, put junk in. Enough said.

If you want a whole, healthy body, put in whole real food.

Today I will explain how you can do that ...

This is the first in a 7-part series where I will give detailed explanations about each of the 7 Keys to UltraWellness. Key #1 is Optimize Nutrition, and in this blog I will explain what constitutes a healthy diet, give you some tips to help you optimize your nutrition, and clarify whether or not supplements are truly a waste of money.

The Basics of a Healthy Diet

What I am about to share might be shocking ...

Carbohydrates are the single most important food for long-term health and well-being.

This may be surprising given the low-carb movement, and "carbophobia" in our country, but it's true.

Of course, I don't mean the over-processed, refined, sugary, white foods we commonly think of as carbohydrates, such as donuts, bread, bagels, muffins, colas, juices, and most junk food.

And I don't mean the cheap, super-sweet, government-subsidized high-fructose corn syrup that is driving our epidemic of obesity and chronic disease.

The carbohydrates I am talking about are the real, whole, nourishing plant foods that the human species has thrived on since from the dawn of evolution.

Most of the food consumed by humans since the beginning of time has been carbohydrates. In fact, plant foods are comprised mostly of carbohydrates: vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, nuts, seeds, herbs, and spices.

These foods contain slowly released sources of sugar that prevent surges of blood sugar and insulin. Too much insulin causes heart disease, diabetes, cancer, depression, and even dementia.

Carbohydrates contain almost all the vitamins and minerals our bodies need to operate normally and optimally.

They also contain fiber, which helps normalize our digestive function and slows the absorption of sugar and fats into the body, keeping us balanced.

The bonuses in plant foods are phytonutrients -- colorful healing compounds made by plants to protect themselves, but that also protect us against aging, obesity, brain damage, and more.

For example, broccoli and the cruciferous vegetable family contain powerful detoxifying compounds that protect us against environmental toxins.

Green tea contains anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and detoxifying properties.

Resveratrol from red grapes boosts our energy production and protects our cells.

These are just a few examples of the thousands of phytonutrients in the plant foods that should be the foundation of our diet.

Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, summed up all nutritional research in 3 simple principles:

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

In fact, you need know nothing else to be vibrantly healthy.

That's it. Eat real whole food as it came from the earth: fresh vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices, eggs, and lean animal protein like fish and chicken.

Imagine what your great-grandmother would recognize as food, or what might have been on her dinner table. Just food. There is really no such thing as junk food –- there is just food, and then there is junk.

Whole foods that contain phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals, omega-3 fats, and fiber all directly, immediately, and specifically interact with our genes, controlling moment-to-moment changes in our physiology and biochemistry.

Food literally talks to our genes. Food is not just a source of calories, it is also a source of INFORMATION.

The key is to send the right information to your genes by eating whole, real, food -- mostly plants. Specific nutrients or plant compounds bind to receptors in cells, translating messages from the foods we eat or vitamins we take in into instructions that are carried out by our cells through their effect on our DNA.

That is why food can heal or harm. You make that choice every day by what you put on your fork.

That means if you eat whole, real, fresh food, you don’t need vitamins. Right?

Well, maybe ...

Do We Need Vitamins or Not?

I agree that you don’t need vitamins and that they are a waste of money.

But that is true ONLY if you eat wild, fresh, whole, organic, local, non-genetically modified food grown in virgin mineral and nutrient rich soils, and not transported across vast distances and stored for months before eaten.

It is true ONLY if you work and live outside, breathe only fresh unpolluted air, drink only pure, clean water, sleep nine hours a night, move your body every day, and are free from chronic stressors and exposures to environmental toxins.

Then you don’t need vitamins.

But, of course, this describes absolutely no one on the planet! Therefore, in reality, we ALL need vitamins.

Most people don’t understand the role of vitamins and minerals in our bodies. I certainly didn't when I finished my medical training.

I thought if we just got enough of a nutrient to prevent some horrible deficiency state like scurvy (vitamin C deficiency), then we didn't have to worry about getting more than that.

I also believed that if you ate "enriched food" like white flour with a few vitamins added back in, or milk with vitamin D added in, additional vitamin supplementation was a waste.

What most people don't realize is the same thing that I didn’t realize when I first started practicing medicine: The real reason our food supply must be "enriched" is because it has been so processed that it is "impoverished" to start with.

So why can’t you just eat "nutrient-rich" food, instead of eating "nutrient-poor" food?

Today, even with our "enriched food," more than 92 percent of Americans are deficient in one or more vitamins. That doesn't mean they are receiving less than the amount they need to get for optimal health. That means they receive less than the MINIMUM amount necessary to prevent deficiency diseases.

In a study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, researchers found that 6 percent of those tested had serious vitamin C deficiency and 30 percent were borderline low.

A report in the journal Pediatrics found that obesity and malnutrition can coexist. Obese, overfed, and undernourished children with cognitive disorders were found to have scurvy and severe vitamin D deficiency or rickets. These deficiencies damaged their brains. You never think of an overweight person as malnourished, but they are!

A USDA survey showed that 37 percent of Americans don’t get enough vitamin C, 70 percent not enough vitamin E, almost 75 percent don’t get enough zinc, and 40 percent don’t get enough iron.

I would say that 100 percent of us don't have enough of the basic nutrients to create optimal health or give ourselves a metabolic tune up.

There are many reasons why the foods we eat no longer contain the nutrient levels we require for optimal health. Crops are raised in soil where nutrients have been depleted. Plants are treated with pesticides and other chemicals so they no longer have to fight to live, which further diminishes their nutrient levels and their phytonutrient content—not to mention the toxic exposure we receive from such chemicals.

Animals are cooped up in pens or giant feedlots instead of roaming free and eating the nutrient-rich wild grains and grasses they once consumed. Since cows' stomachs are adapted to grass instead of corn, they must take antibiotics to prevent them from exploding.

To complicate this further, all of us are exposed to hazardous toxins and chemicals that poison our bodies; we live with too much stress; we don't sleep enough; we don't exercise enough; and we are inflamed -- making the nutritional demands on our bodies even greater.

The question is not how much of a certain nutrient or vitamin we need to not get sick, but how much we need to be optimally healthy! In fact, lower amounts recommended by the government may NOT be enough.

Most people can get what they need by taking the following essential supplements every day:

magnesium

Vitamin D

Fish oil

folate and vitamins B6 and B12

I have tested thousands of patients for vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and found that by correcting them, people feel better, their mood, mental sharpness, memory, and ability to focus improve, they have more energy, and they even lose weight. It also helps prevent disease.

In my 20+ years of practicing medicine with thousands of patients, I have seen depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, autism, ADHD, mood swings, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia go away or dramatically improve when people get the right nutrients.

In today's world, everyone needs a basic multivitamin and mineral supplement. The research is overwhelming on this point.

So what are the takeaways here? What do you need to do to optimize your nutrition?

Here are some simple steps you can begin taking immediately:

1. Eat whole, real, fresh, organic, unprocessed food.

2. Eat a lot of fruits and vegetables full of colorful phytonutrients. That means eating five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Choose a wide variety and you will do much to support your health.

3. Eat foods with plenty of fiber. Think whole grains like brown rice, quinoa, and millet and vegetables like celery, asparagus, and leeks. Fiber is essential for balancing blood sugar and maintaining a healthy bowel.

4. Eat foods containing omega-3 fats. I recommend eating protein at every meal, and some of the best sources of protein have an abundance of these healthy fats, which are essential for building every cell membrane in your body. Try cold-water river fish like salmon, sardines, and halibut; eat omega-3 eggs; and eat plenty of nuts like almonds, macadamias, and walnuts.

5. Take the essential supplements outlined above every day. They are the basic workhorse team needed to support every biochemical reaction in your body.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

What do you think about the quality of our food supply?

Do you think supplements are effective?

Do you have any tips for others on how to more easily eat real, whole foods?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

The 7 Keys to UltraWellness: Discover Why You are Sick and How You Can Heal

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:14:29 -0400

"I didn’t know how bad I was feeling until I started feeling better."

That is what my patients tell me every day. They go from being ill or just okay to experiencing UltraWellness.

Most people don’t know how poorly they feel until they feel better. In fact, most of us don’t recognize that fatigue, digestive problems, aches and pains, allergies, headaches, and more aren’t just annoying symptoms. They are early clues to impending diseases that can disable and kill us.

Most heart disease starts in the womb. You can detect brain changes in teenagers that can predict the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Blood tests in children can predict who will develop diabetes later in life. Most cancers take more than 30 years to grow to the size where they can be detected.

How can we address problems that we don’t even know we have?

There is an answer. It lies in the revolution that is happening in medicine today. That revolution is called functional medicine. I call it UltraWellness, and that is what you are going to learn about today ...

How I Found the Real Cure for Chronic Illness

One in three Americans has some type of chronic disease -- and most of the rest of us are headed toward one. Most of us don’t feel as well as we should or could if only we understood how to care for and feed our bodies the way they were designed.

Conventional medicine helps at the very end stages of disease. If you are very sick, have an emergency, break a bone or have a raging infection, then, yes, conventional acute care medicine is the right solution. As former emergency room doctor and the husband of an orthopedic surgeon, I am glad we have this care when we need it.

But when I worked in the emergency room, I felt I was saving people just before (or sometimes after) they were washed DOWNSTREAM and over the waterfall to their death.

I began to wonder what led them to this point -- what happened UPSTREAM in the process of disease and illness. What were the real causes of disease? If I could answer that question, then I thought I might be able to help prevent disease in the first place.

The early influences on my thinking—from Asian philosophy, to nutritional biochemistry, to the study of ecology and ecosystems -- all helped me form new and different view of health and disease.

I am one doctor who is part of a movement that is on the cutting edge of an entire shift in our scientific model of disease. It is called systems medicine, or functional medicine.

It provides a way of understanding all the influences on our biology that are at the root of illness and how our lifestyle and environment interact with our genes to create the imbalances or balances that are the real determinants of disease or health.

This medical view does not reduce symptoms and diseases to their component parts and traditional specialties, but studies the entire ecology of the body and its environment.

I have practiced this model for over 15 years and seen miracle after miracle, day after day. People don’t only get relief from symptoms, they get truly well. That is why I have called this approach to health UltraWellness.

It is the answer to the crisis we find ourselves in -- an increasing epidemic of chronic disease and an impending economic collapse as more of our resources are put toward caring for the chronically ill.

Today, medicine is in a serious predicament. The way we understand health and disease no longer reflects biological reality or the biological laws of nature. We need to understand that diseases are not fixed things that you catch or that just show up out of context, but are related to the environment, your diet, genes, and lifestyle.

We need to understand that the body is an ecosystem and is part of a larger ecosystem. Understanding how all the parts relate and what disturbs our ecological balance is more important than naming the disease, blaming the name for the problem, and thinking a drug will fix the disease.

I call this the "naming and blaming" game.

For example, depression doesn’t just show up without cause or reason. It is related to a web of forces that we can influence and affect.

What systems medicine, functional medicine, and UltraWellness are about is "thinking and linking." That means seeing all the patterns and relationships that make sense of your whole story -- your lifestyle, stresses, genes, environment and how they interact with your biology to create imbalances that lead to disease.

Our current way of thinking is outdated, wrong, and will not help us address our declining health as individuals or as a society.

That’s why we are making no progress and even backsliding when it comes to addressing chronic disease.

Let’s look at the data.

Chronic diseases affect 133 million Americans. That means in the average family of three, at least one person has a chronic disease. We are seeing an epidemic of autoimmune (24 million Americans), allergic (50 million Americans), and asthmatic (30 million Americans) diseases in this country. In addition, 20 percent of Americans (about 60 million people) have irritable bowel syndrome.

In fact, the rates of nearly every modern disease -- autoimmune diseases, allergic diseases, digestive problems, heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and dementia—are increasing. One in three children born today will have type 2 diabetes. One in two people over age 85 will develop dementia.

These problems are increasing in the population at a dramatic rate. And they affect everyone, either personally or through the suffering of someone close to them.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We have all the information we need right now to end or greatly reduce the suffering of so many. The answer lies within the 7 keys to UltraWellness.

I know this, because I watch miracles happen every day ...

The Promise of UltraWellness

Every day in my office, I see patients who feel alive again after expecting to suffer their whole lives from chronic problems like bad digestion, headaches, fatigue, arthritis, allergies, hormonal problems, obesity, heart disease, and depression.

But within a few months—even weeks—their lives open up again. This week alone, I spoke to a 27-year-old woman who could not lose weight and was constantly tired. She finally lost 20 pounds effortlessly by getting treating her mercury toxicity.

And there was the 78-year-old woman who felt she was on her way out with symptoms of fatigue, memory loss, joint pains, and bad digestion. She now works out every day and is full of energy, simply by treating her nutritional deficiencies and getting back in balance.

And the 30-year-old woman with PMS, migraines, stomachaches, acne, and polycystic ovarian syndrome who is completely better after getting her system back in balance.

And the 47-year-old woman with chronic sinus infections and fatigue who hasn’t had a problem all winter.

And that was just part of one day!

The reality is that most of us don’t know how bad we feel until we start feeling better. We accept chronic symptoms as a necessary part of life. That is just not necessary. We have solutions today that you are not hearing about.

I have learned so much in the last 20 years of seeing patients, studying the scientific literature, combining my knowledge and observations with other doctors who are also practicing systems and functional medicine, and applying it in my practice. And I am committed to sharing that information with you because it works.

It is not perfect, nor can it address 100 precent of health problems 100 percent of the time, but it is a better mousetrap!

This is the promise of UltraWellness -- the opportunity to cure or dramatically improve chronic problems that are poorly addressed by conventional medicine, and to discover vital, vibrant good health at any age.

There are 7 fundamental new principles or concepts that help me navigate to the underlying causes of disease and that will help you achieve UltraWellness.

These concepts are my new roadmap in the landscape of health and disease and I will share them with you so you can take advantage of them today.

This is the future of medicine now. It will help you transform your health, and will contribute to the transformation of our "sick care" system to a healthcare system!

First, we must understand how everything in our environment interacts with our genes to create health or disease, especially our diet and nutritional status. Air, water, microorganisms, exercise, trauma, psychosocial factors, environmental toxins and radiation also affect our genes and our health.

Second, we must understand how our hormones and brain chemistry influence nearly every aspect of our health, why they get out of balance, and how to get them back in balance.

Third, we must understand how most of us have smoldering hidden inflammation that will kill us until we learn how to control it.

Fourth, we must understand that our digestive system is at the core of our health, why it breaks down, and how to repair it.

Fifth, we must understand how toxins and problems with our detoxification or waste management systems lead to chronic health problems and how to optimize this detoxification system.

Sixth, we must understand the importance of energy -- how we make it, why we lose it, and how to create more of it.

And finally, we must understand how the mind interacts with the body and how the body interacts with the mind to influence and affect each of our other systems.

Understand that these are really not all separate systems. They are part of a web of function and physiology that is at the root of both health and disease.

This revolutionary new way of thinking about health and disease will guide you toward something many people have given up on experiencing -- UltraWellness.

Often when I explain this to people for the first time they remark on how simple and obvious this seems. Why didn’t anyone explain it like that before?

That’s very true.

And it reminds me of T.H. Huxley's reaction to the reading of Darwin’s The Origin of Species: "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that."

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

Do you have annoying, seemingly harmless symptoms like those mentioned here?

How has conventional medicine treated them?

Which, if any, of the seven keys to UltraWellness have you already tried?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

How To Fix Obama's Health Plan Before It's Too Late

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:49:52 -0400

The Chinese word for crisis is comprised of two separate words, "danger" and "opportunity" -- and this describes the exact situation we face with the healthcare crisis in our country.

As a nation we are at the precipice of change for our healthcare system.

But if we make the wrong choices and simply provide universal coverage to an outdated 19th and 20th century model of medicine, this crisis will lead us into danger.

However, there are different choices we can make now that will lead to profound opportunity -- one that may provide real solutions to our healthcare crisis.

Today, I will outline a 9-point plan for real healthcare reform. This plan takes into account all of the changes we need to make -- including the fundamental shift in the type of medicine we practice -- if we are going to truly resolve the health catastrophe in this country.

Hope for a Brighter Future in Medicine

Despite the looming dangers we face as we work to change medicine, I have hope.

Over the last few months, I have been privileged to participate in events at the nexus of change that have all focused on fundamentally changing our disease-based healthcare system to one focused on creating health and wellness.

These ideas are not yet at the center of the healthcare debate, but they must be -- and they can be.

In February of this year, the Institute of Medicine held a Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public at the National Academy of Sciences. Six hundred key leaders and stakeholders in healthcare including educators, scientists, community leaders, practitioners, lawmakers, policy makers, and insurance leaders attended it.

It was a broad coalition that came together with a common purpose to change not only the way we practice medicine, but also the type of medicine we practice.

I believe the medicine at the core of healthcare reform must be founded on the clinical model and framework for practice developed by the Institute for Functional Medicine, a nonprofit organization of which I am a member. The Institute's mission is to support the widespread adoption of functional medicine.

This new way of thinking about health and disease is the biggest secret in healthcare today, yet it is the most effective model to address the current drivers of cost and chronic disease. To spread the word, the Institute recently published a detailed white paper called "21st Century Medicine: A New Model for Medical Education and Practice."

The same week the white paper was published, I testified on integrative and functional medicine before Senator Edward Kennedy’s Senate working group on healthcare reform, alongside other leaders in healthcare including Drs. Dean Ornish, Mehmet Oz, and Andrew Weil. The full testimony is available for the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, "Integrative Care: A Pathway to a Healthier Nation."

I also met with key policy makers in the White House. and was heartened by their openness and willingness to find a way to true healthcare reform.

More recently, at a retreat center on the edge of a Minnesota pond, I was privileged to be part of a think tank sponsored by the National Institutes of Health on "whole systems research."

It was an international gathering of systems biologists, mathematicians, physicists, geneticists, physiologists, psychologists, researchers, and doctors from a dozen countries and diverse backgrounds—Palestinians and Jews, Chinese and Iraqis, French and Germans -- all exploring very important but neglected questions that hold the solution to our epidemic of chronic disease.

In this isolated place, the thinkers with their fingers on the pulse of the future all suddenly came to the same conclusion. The way we do research doesn’t help us understand how things really work as a whole, integrated system.

In other words, the current model of studying one drug, chemical pathway, or gene for one disease doesn’t give us useful answers to how we get sick and how we can get well.

What everyone at the conference understood at that moment is the same truth we need to come to as a nation ...

The old, conventional model of medicine and scientific research is simply outdated. It must give way to a new way of thinking about health and illness and a new method for medical practice.

A 9-Point Plan for Real Healthcare Reform

I believe that real healthcare reform is now possible because of a perfect storm where alignment of economic, scientific, and moral imperatives provides us an opportunity to do well as a nation by doing good, through fundamentally changing the kind of medicine we practice.

But to achieve that goal will require the collective imagination, intention, focus, and action of healthcare providers, consumers, industry, and policy makers.

A coordinated effort across government agencies and industry sectors focusing on health and wellness, incorporating what we already know, is urgently needed. We also need leadership at the highest levels of the White House to successfully create a culture of health and wellness and transform our healthcare system.

The 9-point plan below, while not at the center of the healthcare debate, is essential to create real change and avert disaster.

Just as horse-and-buggy makers gave way to the automobile, and 8-track tape manufacturers gave way to the iPod so must conventional medicine give way to a new way of practice.

Yes, some industries will fade, as funds are allocated toward policies and initiatives that prevent and treat chronic disease through dietary, lifestyle, and community interventions instead of expensive drugs and medical technologies. But other industries that promote health and wellness will flourish in their place.

These policies and initiatives are necessary for healthcare reform that addresses the true causes of our chronic disease epidemic and exploding costs. These are the changes that must be made if we are going to fix our broken healthcare system:

2. Improve research by comparing existing drug- and procedure-based medicine to changes in lifestyle, diet, and other functional and integrative approaches.

3. Transform medical education by including nutrition, lifestyle, and environmental factors as core components of the education of health professionals and physicians.

4. Establish an Institute for Functional Medicine at the federal level that would develop the educational curriculum for medical schools, residencies, postgraduate education, and other health professionals.

5. Improve food policy, agriculture policy, and school and community environments to encourage health by prohibiting food that is known to promote obesity and disease and providing whole, real, fresh foods for our children. Obese teenagers have the same risk of premature death as heavy smokers. We wouldn’t feed our dogs cola, burgers, and fries -- so why do we feed them to our children?

6. Conduct projects in community health centers that demonstrate how offering inexpensive, nutritious meals (including takeout), recreational facilities, lifestyle counseling/education (like cooking classes), and healthcare based on functional medicine at one location can dramatically improve health outcomes.

7. Impose limits on pharmaceutical and unhealthful food advertising. More than $30 billion is spent on marketing junk and fast food to consumers, including $13 billion targeted at children, and more than $30 billion is spent by the pharmaceutical industry on marketing drugs to physicians (about $30,000 annually per physician). Direct-to-consumer drug advertising also drives prescribing practices based on preferences induced by commercials rather than science.

8. Develop a system of electronic medical records that facilitates 21st-century, systems-based, functional medicine. We shouldn’t simply transfer 19th- and 20th-century medical records-keeping systems to an electronic format.

9. Create a White House Office on Wellness, Health Promotion, and Integrative Health as a way to develop an ongoing vehicle for coordination of strategy and policy. It should focus specifically on coordinating and developing policies and programs for lifestyle-based chronic disease prevention and management, integrative health care practices, and health promotion.

These changes won’t take place overnight, and they won’t be easy. But they can happen.

However, the only way they will happen is if the average person—that means you—gets involved and votes for change every day with your fork, with your feet, and with your voice.

We are facing a watershed moment in the history of medicine, one where changing the very way we understand and treat disease is finally possible.

But we all must work together to effect such a tremendous change in our medical system.

As Margaret Mead said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

We now have all the information we need to cure or dramatically improve chronic problems that are poorly addressed by conventional medicine and to discover vital, vibrant, good health at any age.

And we can finally transform our "sick care" system into a healthcare system that promises vibrant health and vitality to every man, woman, and child in this country.

The answer lies in functional medicine –- the future of medicine, available now.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

What do you think of my 9 point plan?

Do you have any other suggestions?

How do you think functional medicine can help improve healthcare?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

Obama's Health Plan: What Matters the Most is Missing

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:34:03 -0400

Want to know the real truth about healthcare in this country?

Even if President Obama and Congress get everything else right in healthcare reform, it won’t matter ... that is, unless we address the underlying causes of illness that drive both skyrocketing healthcare costs and the proliferation of chronic disease.

But we can’t get there with our current model of medicine, and that’s what nobody is currently talking about, not even President Obama.

But there is a solution ...

Thankfully, an innovative approach currently exists that can not only prevent but also more effectively TREAT chronic disease ... more about that in a moment.

To effectively reform healthcare in the U.S., we must change not only the WAY we practice medicine, but also the TYPE of medicine we practice.

We must improve financing and delivery of healthcare, as well as our fundamental scientific approach to chronic disease -- an epidemic that now affects 133 million Americans and accounts for 78 percent of healthcare costs.

Healthcare costs are now approaching 20 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product -- approximately $2.5 trillion, or $8,160 per person annually. This is more than what the federal government spends on national defense, homeland security, education, and welfare combined!

Unless real change is made we are facing an impending collapse of our economy as more of our resources are put toward caring for the chronically ill.

This is a national security issue that threatens our standing in the world. As President Obama has stated, "Healthcare reform is no longer just a moral imperative, it is a fiscal imperative."

Fortunately, there is a new model of medicine that offers the real change we need. This new medicine is personalized, preventive, predictive, participatory, and patient-centered.

It is proactive rather than reactive. And it addresses the causes of disease and optimizes biologic function in the body’s core physiologic systems, rather than just treating symptoms.

This model exists TODAY – it is based on systems biology and is called functional medicine.

Why We Need to Change Healthcare Now

Our current model of medicine is unsustainable because it cannot stem the rising tide of chronic disease.

Relying only on reforms in coverage or access, financing, electronic records, malpractice, medical errors, coordination of care, and research on new drug therapies -- while retaining the conventional acute-care model -- will be untenable in the long run.

To be sure, such reforms are necessary, but not sufficient to avoid the collapse of our healthcare system, which may soon dwarf our current financial crisis if the Medicare trust fund runs out in 2016 as projected. According to the "Status of the Social Security and Medicare Programs" annual trustees report just published, the program is actually bankrupt right now. It's taken in less money than it has paid out two years running.(1)

This is not being alarmist; this is simply facing reality.

Here's the problem: These reforms do not alter the fundamental approach to prevention and treatment.

If we focus on improving the way we practice the medicine of the past, we will still have the medicine of the past. If we improve the wrong type of care, then we will simply be doing the wrong things better.

Conventional acute-care medicine is disease-, drug-, and procedure-based and is designed for acute illness, trauma, and end-stage disease for which it is the best form of treatment in the world.

As a result, our current medical education focuses on sickness rather than health; journals publish about disease management not what causes disease.

However, disease-based, acute-care medicine is the WRONG model to address chronic illness, because it doesn’t address WHY people are sick or the underlying mechanisms and biologic causes of their illness.

This is why we spend more money than any other industrialized nation on healthcare yet are near the bottom of the list for all major health outcomes. This is why we are witnessing a decline in life expectancy for the first time in history.

The Right Solution for the Problem of Chronic Disease

Functional medicine, on the other hand, is a system of personalized care that directly addresses how our environment and lifestyle influence our genes to create imbalances in our core biologic systems that, over time, manifest as disease. It is this kind of medicine that is needed to create real success in 21st century medicine.

Functional medicine is not a new treatment, test, or procedure -- it is a new "operating system" or method for problem solving and processing complex clinical information.

It is a fundamentally different way of thinking about the origins and mechanisms of illness. It encompasses all the TOOLS of healing and medicine, both conventional and integrative. And it provides a common language, a map or GPS system for navigating through the puzzle of chronic illness.

Simply put, functional medicine identifies why our underlying biology is imbalanced and corrects those imbalances. Then our body's natural healing intelligence takes over and automatically fixes what's ailing us.

This is the future of medicine and it's available right now.

A growing coalition of practitioners, educators, and scientists is dedicated to advancing this model. I am part of that coalition.

We at The Institute for Functional Medicine have introduced 20,000 physicians and healthcare providers to functional medicine since 1991, and we wrote the Textbook of Functional Medicine in 2005 to describe both the underlying science and the practical clinical strategies and tools that comprise this new model.

This is not just an elegant theory –- it works in practice ... something that I am very familiar with since I have been practicing functional medicine for over 10 years.

Let me illustrate how this works with real patients I have treated in my practice.

A Woman with Multiple Chronic Diseases

Deborah, a 46-year-old woman, having seen a dozen doctors over a dozen years, came to me with 29 different diagnoses, including depression, hypertension, obesity, polycystic ovarian syndrome, migraines, heavy menstrual bleeding, asthma, sinusitis, irritable bowel syndrome, reflux, fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, and psoriasis.

Each disease was treated with the best available conventional treatment. But she was still sick, despite 9 medications.

Of course, she didn't have 29 separate diseases. She had imbalances in a few of her core underlying biologic systems -- digestive, immunologic, and hormonal -- that gave rise to all her symptoms.

The underlying cause of all her "diseases" was an autoimmune response to gluten, leading to autoimmune thyroid disease and severe vitamin D deficiency because of low absorption of nutrients from the foods she consumed.

Six weeks after eliminating gluten from her diet (wheat, barley, rye, etc.), improving her diet, and replacing thyroid hormone and vitamin D, her 29 diseases were completely gone -- along with 21 pounds ... not a bad side effect!

A Boy with Attention Deficit Disorder and Asthma and Allergies

Clayton was a 12-year-old boy who had been diagnosed with severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and behavior problems and had poor school performance who was on Ritalin for years. He also had illegible handwriting, or dysgraphia.

He also had apparently "unrelated" problems of asthma, allergies, hives, stomachaches, headaches, insomnia, muscle cramps, and anxiety and a history frequent infections and antibiotic use.

He had seen 5 specialists (lung, gastroenterologist, allergist, psychiatrist, and neurologist) and was on 7 medications for allergies, asthma, pain, and ADHD. No one asked how everything was connected, or how his diet of junk food and sugar made him sick.

His immune system was activated, his digestion not working, and he was nutritionally deficient in zinc, omega-3 fats, magnesium, and vitamin B6.

We simply normalized his biologic function by removing impediments to health (junk food diet, food sensitivities, overgrowth of yeast, and lead) and providing the ingredients necessary for optimal biologic function -- a whole-foods diet, additional nutrients including vitamin B6, magnesium, zinc, omega-3 fats, and probiotics.

In two months he returned without any physical or psychiatric symptoms and was off all his medication. His mother brought a sample of his handwriting, which had gone from illegible to normal, simply by getting his brain working again by getting his body in balance.

A Once in a Lifetime Opportunity for Real Reform ...

This model of care is the basis for the type of medicine that must be at the center of healthcare reform. I live in the trenches as a practicing doctor, treating real people who are suffering from real problems.

These problems have real solutions, which are being overlooked -- solutions that hold the key to saving our healthcare system from self-destruction.

Functional or systems medicine needs to be the "Intel inside" that drives the type of medicine that is practiced as we create a new healthcare system.

Real healthcare reform is now possible in a perfect storm where the alignment of economic, scientific, and moral imperatives provides an opportunity for us as a nation to do well by doing good through fundamentally changing the type of medicine we practice.

It will require the collective imagination, intention, focus, and action by healthcare providers, consumers, industry, and policy makers. But we can do it, and we must do it now.

In the words of the ancient sage, Rabbi Hillel, "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?"

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

What steps do you think will be necessary for successful healthcare reform?

How do you think healthcare reform will be achieved?

What do you think is the biggest obstacle we will face in reforming healthcare?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

(1) http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html

The UltraMind Solution: The 6-Week Plan to Heal Your Brain

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:27:56 -0500

What you are about to learn is what I call “dessert for your mind.”

This is the final installment in my series of blogs on my new book, The UltraMind Solution, a sneak preview of which you can download here:

www.ultramind.com

Now for today’s blog ...

In the last 7 blogs, I outlined how imbalances in the 7 underlying key systems in your body can lead to a broken brain and all of the psychological and neurological symptoms you have been suffering.

You’ve learned that you no longer have to suffer with a brain (and a body) that is anything less than awake, engaged, present, focused, and refreshed.

You can have a brain that allows you to fully experience life, and enjoy your family, friends, work, and, most importantly, your own heart and soul.

But how do you do it?

Well, you follow The UltraMind Solution.

It is a 6-week, 4-step program that is designed to help you:

• Have more stable moods

• Enjoy a better memory

• Have more energy

• Enjoy the kind of restful sleep that will help you wake up more refreshed and able to face your day

• Improve your digestion

• Decrease chronic sinus problems

• Experience pain-free joints

• Eliminate headaches

And there are wonderful side effects. You will lose weight almost automatically and you may even see your sex drive improve.

But I don’t want you to take my word for it.

Prove to yourself how well The UltraMind Solution works. I want you to try it, for just 6 weeks.

You have nothing to lose (except, perhaps, the chance to eat a few additional cheeseburgers and sodas).

And you have everything to gain. You can have the gift of your life back.

You will learn how to reclaim that gift in today’s blog, where I outline the 4 steps of the program and explain how it works so that you can begin taking advantage of The UltraMind Solution today.

4 Steps to an UltraMind

By following 4 simple steps you will learn more about your body and brain than you ever imagined. It may seem too simple and obvious… but it works.

As a doctor, I see the miracles The UltraMind Solution creates every day.

For example, there was the 6-year-old little girl who came to see me and was transformed from a violent, aggressive child to a beautiful, loving daughter and sister by clearing out the bad bugs in her gut.

And the 23-year-old woman with lifelong anxiety and depression that lifted after she quit eating foods to which she was allergic.

And the woman who traveled 5,000 miles to see me.

She had seen a dozen other doctors but still was fatigued, depressed, overweight, mentally slipping, and sluggish, and struggled through brain fog every day. All of her symptoms resolved in 6 weeks after she got off gluten, boosted her vitamin D level, and fixed her low thyroid function.

Her family said they finally had their mother and wife back.

If you want to heal your broken brain like these people did, here is what you need to do:

2. Tune-up your brain chemistry with supplements

3. Live the UltraMind lifestyle: Exercise, relax, sleep, and train your brain

4. Live clean and green

By following these 4 steps for 6 weeks, your life will change—not in months or years, but in weeks, or even days!

This is true for one simple reason: If you work with your body as it was designed, it will work with you.

Once you begin following these steps you will realize just how good you CAN feel—and you’ll never want to go back.

What I hope for all of you is that you can experience the connection between your behaviors, your choices, your habits, things you put in your mouth, and how you feel right now.

How can we know that eating wheat, or not liking fish, or eating too much blue fin sushi, or staying out of the sun and using sun block are making us depressed, anxious, or demented?

The only way to know these things is to change our habits and pay attention to what happens.

That is what the 4 steps above help you do.

Some of the changes you experience will happen almost immediately. If you are gluten sensitive and you stop eating gluten, your life will change within just a week.

If you are B12 deficient and you take B12, you will improve your mood and brain function in a few weeks.

Other changes may take a little longer to achieve. If you are toxic with mercury, then it may take a few years and some hard work to fully recover. But you can regain your health and renew your brain. I did.

To help you achieve those goals, I want to look at each of the steps in a little more detail. But keep in mind that your brain is the most complex thing in the universe, so I can’t quite cover all the details on how to heal it in this short blog. All the details you need are in my book.

Step #1: Eat Right for Your Brain

Your fork is the most powerful tool you have to change your health, change your brain and heal your environment. There is nothing that has a bigger impact on your health, the environment, global warming, and political policy than what you put on your fork.

Here’s how to use it:

2. Boost Phytonutrients -- The Brain Protectors: Eat a lot of fruit and vegetables full of colorful phytonutrients. All the dark, deep reds, yellows, oranges, greens, and blues in food are a sign of powerful anti-inflammatory, detoxifying and antioxidant, energy-boosting, brain-powering molecules. So enjoy those blueberries and dark leafy greens like kale.

3. Brain Food -- The Right Carbs: Eat foods with plenty of fiber, like beans, whole grains, nuts, and seeds. This keeps the toxins moving out of your body and keeps your gut bacteria healthy. And a healthy gut is a healthy brain!

4. Become a Fat Head: Sixty percent of your brain is made of the omega-3 fat DHA, which comes from algae and fish. Eat omega-3-rich foods like sardines, walnuts, wild salmon, and flax seeds.

5. Protein for Brain Power: Eat protein for breakfast every day, such as omega-3 eggs, soy or rice protein shakes, or nut butter.

6. Eat Early and Eat Often: Eat something every 3 to 4 hours and finish your last meal or snack 2 to 3 hours before bed

7. Stop Poisoning Your Brain: Eliminate sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, coffee, alcohol, trans fats, and food additives and preservatives, all of which poison your brain and disrupt your biochemistry.

If you follow these 7 principles (for just 6 weeks), you are doing 90 percent of what you need to do to stay healthy and heal your brain. You will be instantly eliminating all the brain-damaging foods and chemicals from your diet.

The rest of the plan is made of small refinements and details. Just stop poisoning your brain with pounds of sugar, uppers like coffee and downers like alcohol, high-fructose corn syrup, trans fats, processed, packaged, fast food and junk food.

Remember, there is not really such thing as junk food—there is just junk, and there is food!

Brain Allergies

There is one other step you need to take during the 6-week program to eat right for your brain.

That step is to eliminate the two most common food allergens in our diet: gluten and dairy.

Now, you know what happens if you get stung by a bee, or get poison ivy: You have an allergic reaction.

But did you know your brain can become allergic, too?

And when it does, it causes brain fog, depression, autism, ADHD, dementia, and more.

Gluten (a protein found in wheat, rye, spelt, and kamut) and dairy are the two foods that most commonly set off reactions in people. They have been linked to conditions ranging from brain fog to depression and to even more severe conditions like autism and Alzheimer’s disease.

You may have hidden allergies to these foods and not every realize it.

Despite the fact that the immune system and the brain are intimately linked and food has a MAJOR impact on your brain and body, most of us (including physicians) don’t make the connection between what we eat and how we feel.

You eat a piece of bread on Monday and feel depressed on Tuesday, but you don’t make the connection.

Many people are affected by low-grade, delayed food sensitivities or allergies. What you eat may cause allergic reactions that make you feel bad, but you might not know it.

You can take some simple measures to heal from brain allergies. Here’s what do ...

Simply remove dairy and gluten from your diet for 6 weeks.

That means a 100 percent elimination of these foods, no exceptions—not even a drop of milk in your tea or a crumb of bread for breakfast.

Watch what happens to your body and mind when you do this. The brain fog may lift; the depression may ease up. I have even seen autistic children start talking after they get rid of gluten and dairy.

Trust me, you will be amazed at how many other delicious things there are to eat besides bread and milk. I give you dozens of examples in Chapter 14 of The UltraMind Solution.

Eat this way for 6 weeks. Then continue for your lifetime and you’ll have the raw materials and ingredients you need for a vital and healthy body—AND a healthy brain.

Step #2: Tune Up Your Brain Chemistry with Supplements

Ninety-two percent of Americans are deficient in one or more essential vitamins and minerals, 80 percent are deficient in vitamin D, and more than 99 percent are deficient in the essential omega-3 fatty acids.

That is why we all need supplements. Vitamins and minerals are absolutely essential for brain health.

Therefore, I recommend that ALL people take a basic multivitamin and mineral, as well as calcium and magnesium, extra vitamin D, omega-3 fats, and probiotics as the foundation for good health, as well as a healthy brain.

Because specific B vitamins are so important for the brain and nearly every other function of the body, I also recommend methylation nutrients (vitamins B6 and B12 and folate) in addition to what is in your multivitamin.

Here are the basic raw materials needed for everyone who wants to keep their brain healthy.

2. Calcium (600 to 800 mg daily) and magnesium (400 to 600 mg a day)

3. Vitamin D3 (2,000 to 4,000 units a day)

4. Omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA in a ratio of 300/200; 1,000 mg twice a day)

5. Methylation factors: Folate (800 mcg), B6 (50 mg), and B12 (1,000 mcg daily). Often, special activated forms of these nutrients are needed to be most effective for brain health

6. Probiotics or beneficial bacteria to improve your digestion, reduce food allergies, and reduce gut inflammation

If you take these daily for 6 weeks (and ideally for a lifetime), you will be providing all the raw materials and ingredients you need for a vital and healthy brain and body.

Step #3: Live the UltraMind Lifestyle: Exercise, Relax, Sleep and Train Your Brain

The next step is to live the UltraMind Lifestyle. This actually consists of 4 lifestyle changes you make over the course of the program. You need to exercise, relax deeply, sleep enough, and train your brain.

Why?

Exercise is better for your brain than any antidepressant.

Let me say that again.

Exercise is better for your brain than any antidepressant.

Exercise naturally carries out all these missions for your body:

• Balances all your neurotransmitters

• Increases brain-derived neutrophic factor, which is like fertilizer for your brain

• Prevents dementia

• Balances hormones like insulin

Here’s what you need to commit to during the 6-week program.

Walk vigorously for 30 minutes every day. That’s it. That’s your exercise routine.

Of course, more is better.

I personally hate to exercise. But I love to play.

So if you don’t like to go to the gym, don’t. But start moving around some more. Walk with friends or family. Walk your dog. Walk your neighbor’s dog. Garden. Wrestle on the bed with your kids. Park your car farther from the door. Just move your body more!

You may be surprised at how much better your body—and your brain—feels.

However, as with all things, balance is important. You not only need to exercise more, you need to relax more, too.

Deep relaxation gives your brain and body time to rebuild and repair. You even make new brain cells when you relax.

Nobody needs help being stressed. But we do need to learn to relax.

I have two favorite tools. They are quick, simple, and give you a quick boost of energy.

They are the soft belly breath and the UltraBath. I teach you how to use these powerful tools on page 317 of The UltraMind Solution.

Sleep is also extremely important if you want to have an UltraMind.

Europeans are smart. They take a 2-hour siesta in the middle of the day and awaken refreshed and energized.

But you probably can’t do that (unless you are in Europe), so you need to find other ways to get enough sleep.

The key is to get 7 to 9 hours of restful sleep every night.

But that isn’t so easy for everyone. Some people have become so chronically sleep deprived that their bodies have a difficult time finding that restful state.

Here are some tips that can help:

• Avoid stimulants like coffee, sugar, and cold medication, all of which interfere with normal sleep patterns

• Exercise daily for at least 30 minutes

• Avoid eating 2 to 3 hrs before bed

For most of you, taking just these few, simple steps will improve your sleep pattern, allowing you to get restful sleep that boosts your brain power.

Now you can eat right, take supplements, exercise, relax, and get enough sleep, but what’s the point of having a healthy brain if you don’t use it to engage more fully in life?

The joy of life is in all the things we humans get to experience—love, learning, discovery, connection, understanding, wisdom, and curiosity.

To do that, you must keep your brain active. The mental decline we commonly see with aging is very much due to imbalances in nutrition, hormones, and immune and digestive function, damage to our energy metabolism, toxins, and stress.

But some of it is also from lack of use. Just like your muscles, you need to use your brain or you lose it. Brain fitness is a real phenomenon. A study of more than 450 adults over age 75 found that just reading books, doing crossword puzzles, playing cards and board games, playing a musical instrument, or dancing reduced their risk of Alzheimer’s disease. (1)

So create some new brain connections. Work your brain muscles. It isn’t difficult. Simply engage in the things you love—travel, read, write, take a class, just have fun!

Step #4: Live Clean and Green

The small choices we make every day can lead to big changes over time. Our brains, like our planet, are exquisitely sensitive to environmental toxins and stresses. Limiting your exposure to these toxic substances is good for you AND the planet.

Here are my suggestions for how to take care of your own health, and the health of the planet, at the same time:

2. Limit your exposure to chemicals and metals

3. Limit your exposure to household, gardening, and personal care products

4. Keep your bodily fluids moving

5. Reduce electro-pollution and electromagnetic radiation

I give you more details on exactly how to do this in Chapter 17 of The UltraMind Solution.

Creating an UltraMind for Life

My wish for all of you is to live a life that is vibrant, awake, engaged, present, focused, delightful, refreshed, and balanced.

You can have a brain that allows you to fully experience every day, and all the joys and sorrows of being human, to show up and do what it is you want in life without being slowed down or blocked by a brain that keeps you from fully being you with your family, with your friends, with your work, and most importantly your own heart and soul.

This is the state of The UltraMind.

You understand how the 7 keys to UltraWellness can help you balance your brain function and heal from all of the effects of a broken brain.

And you understand the basic underpinnings of how the program works.

The next step is to follow the program and experience an UltraMind yourself.

I give you all the details in The UltraMind Solution. You can get a sneak preview by going to:

www.ultramind.com

Remember, just focus on your cleaning up your diet, taking the right supplements, improving your lifestyle, and living clean and green. If you do, you will soon experience an UltraMind.

Fix your body and you will fix your brain. And when this happens, you’ll say ...

“Wow, I had no idea having an UltraMind could feel this good.”

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

Have you started to follow the UltraMind program yet?

If so, what’s your experience been like so far?

If not, what’s holding you back?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

PS -- The UltraMind Solution public television show is starting on February 27th. Check your local listings for air times. Or, you can get your own copy of The UltraMind Solution DVD by Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D. Also, The UltraMind Solution Club by Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D. has just launched, which is an online club that makes going through the program simple and easy.

(1) Verghese J, Lipton RB, Katz MJ, Hall CB, Derby CA, Kuslansky G, Ambrose AF, Sliwinski M, Buschke H. Leisure activities and the risk of dementia in the elderly. N Engl J Med. 2003 Jun 19;348(25):2508-16.

The UltraMind Solution: Key 7 – Calm Your Mind

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:45:43 -0500

Welcome back to my series of blogs on my new book, The UltraMind Solution.

You can download a free sneak preview of the book by going here:

www.ultramind.com

Now for today’s blog ...

Thoughts are things. They can heal or harm. Beliefs mold your brain.

This is not just a figurative metaphor for what happens. Your brain literally stiffens, slows, and loses function in direct relationship to your thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes about you and your place in the world. How each of us responds to our life -- to our perceptions -- has enormous implications for how we feel, how we age, and the health of our brain.

The most powerful pharmacy in the world is right between your ears!

Other than eating breakfast regularly, and eating more fruits and vegetables, the one characteristic that is present in all healthy older people is resiliency.

Resiliency is that hard-to-measure quality of adapting to change, shifting with changing tides rather than drowning, seeing the glass half full, or knowing how to turn lemons into lemonade.

You see, your thoughts have real and measurable effects on your body and brain.

In fact, every cell in your body listens to your thoughts.

Your immune cells know your deepest feelings.

Your stem cells are wired to your brain and help you repair and regenerate. But they ONLY turn on and make new brain cells when you relax! And you don’t need placental injections or embryos to get them to work.

Research has shown over and over again that learning to relax is one of the most important keys to long-term health and vitality. In fact, it is a critical part of The UltraMind Solution . As you will learn in this blog, relaxing helps your brain regenerate and renew itself.

You need to learn how to hit your “pause button” if you want to heal your brain.

But that doesn’t mean sipping a glass of Chardonnay while watching TV or practicing retail therapy. You have to learn how to deeply relax and stimulate your vagus nerve.

In this blog I will teach you how to do that. I will explain how stress kills, relaxation heals, and how you can begin turning on your relaxation response -- today.

The Road to Vagus

Your immune cells, your stem cells, and all of the other organs and tissues in your body are connected to your vagus nerve -- a long nerve that goes from your brain, through your chest and diaphragm, and throughout your body.

Your vagus nerve is a very special part of your nervous system that helps you calm your mind and turn on a cascade of healing that can reverse depression and dementia and help sharpen your mind -- making old brains young again.

It does this by turning off your stress response and activating your relaxation response -- what I call “hitting the pause button” -- which most of us don’t know how to do.

Most of us don’t need any help turning on the alarm system. Your stress response gets turned on automatically day after day.

However, very few of us know how to calm this system down. We don’t know where our pause button is, and we don’t know how to push it.

This is a serious health concern, because stress is very bad for your brain.

Stress Destroys Your Brain

The effects of stress on brain health cannot be overstated. It shrinks the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain; reduces serotonin; lowers BDNF (brain derived neutrophic factor), which acts like Miracle-Gro for your brain cells; increases inflammation; increases belly fat; lowers thyroid function; and much more.

It is one of the chief causes of our broken brains.

Stress destroys our brains.

But what is stress?

Stress is defined as any real or imagined threat to your body or your ego.

What does that mean?

It means the part of your biochemistry that governs the stress response reacts the same when you are in real danger (for example, if you are about to be run down by an oncoming car) as it does when you perceive danger (for example, if your boss tells you he thinks you are doing a poor job at work).

In both cases, a flood of cortisol and other chemicals, like epinephrine and norepinephrine, is released into your bloodstream. These chemicals send messages far and wide, telling your body—and brain—to get ready for the danger at hand.

In the first instance, the stress response is adaptive It prepares you physically and mentally to move out of the way of that oncoming vehicle.

In the second instance, the stress response is worse than useless—your body prepares for real physical danger but there isn’t any. There is only the perceived danger of your boss’s disappointment. The result is that you stew in your stress juices, and they poison your body and brain.

If you hadn’t perceived your boss’s frustration as a threat, this response would not have occurred.

So how we think and what we believe make a huge difference in how healthy we are.

There’s no doubt about it. Optimists live longer and are healthier!

This reminds me of a Tibetan man I met more than 20 years ago in Nepal who showed me the power of thought and belief in shaping our lives.

The Tibetan Healer

I traveled to Nepal as part of an expedition to study the public health problems of a small village near the Tibetan border. Along the way I encountered a remarkable man, who had faced grave threats to his life and his place in the world. He was a Tibetan doctor who was captured in 1959 during the Chinese invasion and sent to a Chinese gulag, or prison camp.

He dispassionately told me of his 22-year imprisonment in the gulag, where he was stripped of his community and his place in the world, prevented from practicing Buddhism, tortured, and abused. I found it difficult to reconcile this serene, calm, happy man with the horrors he experienced.

At one point during our conversation, I asked him to identify the greatest danger he faced during his 22 years of imprisonment. I expected him to say the physical and psychological torture and relentless, sophisticated brainwashing techniques designed to force him to renounce his spiritual beliefs and monkhood and embrace communist ideology.

What he said astounded me.

“The greatest danger I faced during my imprisonment was the few moments I thought I might lose my compassion for my Chinese captors,” he said.

Most of us cannot imagine worrying about having compassion for those who kept us locked away from everything we value and believe for 22 years.

Yet somehow, in small and large ways, our sense of control, meaning, purpose, and connection in life is one of the most powerful factors that determine our health and well-being.

What do you feel connected to? What gives you meaning and purpose in life? Answers to questions like these define who we are, not only mentally, but also physically.

Disease is a disconnection from our sense of place in the world; a loss of control and meaning as we drift from television channel to television channel looking for a program to satisfy us; consume food disconnected from its origins, processed and unidentifiable from its natural state; as our families separate, disconnect, and communicate through text messaging and e-mail.

Poverty alone does not increase disease. A lost sense of culture, control, and meaning is a major factor.

How do you take a pill to fix that?

And what about the stress of the food we eat? We now have identified a phenomena that comes from eating “stressed food”—food grown on agribusiness farms, animals raised in confined animal feeding operations, otherwise known as feedlots.

This is called xenohormesis and means that when you eat stressed food, it produces stress molecules in your body that make you sick! Our bodies see this food as foreign and dangerous—it’s actually stressful to eat it.

We have become so disconnected from feeling relaxed and at peace that many of us don’t even realize we are stressed out anymore. We aren’t awake to the fact that our beliefs have an impact on our health and we don’t realize the foods we eat make us feel even more stress.

How do you know if you are stressed?

Well, you might crave salt, feel dizzy when you stand up, have trouble falling asleep, have sweaty palms or feel wiped out after exercise, or you might feel tired and wired.

If so, you may have burned out your adrenal glands—the glands that kick into gear whenever there is stress.

So what’s the cure for burn out? How do you turn off the stress response and begin to heal from its effects?

Turning Off the Stress Response

The latest research has found two ways to turn old forgetful brains into young brains and to turn depressed people into happy people.

You have two choices.

The first one: Cut out your adrenal glands. They produce all the stress hormones like cortisol, which shrinks your brain, robs you of your memory, lowers your serotonin, makes you depressed, and reduces energy production.

The other option is to have a pacemaker inserted in your neck, which stimulates the vagus nerve and triggers relaxation.

Neither of those sound like much fun!

But you DO have other options to calm your mind.

One of my favorites is: just breathe. It automatically activates the vagus nerve. I learned the soft belly breath, a variation of ancient yogic breathing techniques, from Jim Gordon, the author of the book Unstuck.

I teach you how to do the soft belly breath in The UltraMind Solution.

In the meantime, here are a few more ideas on how to push your pause button—and heal your brain.

• Try yoga or meditation.

• Get enough sleep.

• Eat whole foods that decrease the stress response.

• Avoid stressed foods. The next time you reach for that industrial packaged food product, or fast food lunch just ask yourself if your food is “relaxed.”

• You might even try some herbs that can balance out the stress response, such as ginseng or rhodiola.

I have just opened the door for you to learn how to calm your mind. You can learn much more in Chapter 12 of The UltraMind Solution.

You can get a free sneak preview by going to:

www.ultramind.com

In my next blog, I will teach you about how to follow the 6-week plan for an UltraMind. I’ll share the powerful, yet simple, 4-step program from Part III of my book that will give you the roadmap to achieving your own UltraMind.

Now you have seen how all the 7 keys influence your brain and biology. It is one interconnected web of problems. And because it is all connected, you can make a few simple changes that can have dramatic and life changing effects.

Simple dietary changes, a few nutritional supplements, a little exercise, enough sleep, and a little time each day for activating the relaxation response can transform deep-seated symptoms that show up as altered mood, behavior, attention, and memory.

Your brain can thrive. You just have to provide the right conditions.

In my next blog, I am going to teach you those conditions.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

What makes you feel the most stressed?

How does stress seem to affect your brain?

What things work best to push your pause button?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

The UltraMind Solution: Key #6 – Boost Energy Metabolism

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:16:16 -0500

Welcome back to my series of blogs on my new book, The UltraMind Solution.

You can download a free sneak preview of the book by going here:

www.ultramind.com

Now for today’s blog ...

Do you want more energy?

Do you feel like your brain (and the rest of you) is losing energy?

If so you aren’t alone.

We all want more energy. We need it. We lose it. And we try to get it back until finally we can’t make energy anymore. That’s called death!

Most of us don’t think much about where our energy comes from, why sometimes we have more or less of it, how it might affect our brain, or even the whole process of aging.

But, in fact, everything we have explored in the other 6 keys influences our health directly through energy.

Enough energy means a happy, healthy, focused, and sharp brain. Lack of energy means slowed mental function, autism, mood disorders like depression, and ultimately Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia.

So in this blog I want to teach you a bit about where your energy comes from, how you can protect the little energy-making factories in your cells, and how you can get a metabolic tune-up.

I also want to take a moment to explain my position on medication and psychotherapy, since they are the standard treatments that so many people receive to heal their broken brains.

But first, let’s talk a little more about energy.

Where Does Energy Come From and How Can We Get More of It?

How do we get energy?

Actually, it is a fairly straightforward biochemical process. We take oxygen from the air we breathe and the food we eat and burn it in the little energy factories in our cells called mitochondria.

Our mitochondria keep us energetic and alive. As we get older, we get fewer of them and they don’t work as well, so we run out of energy.

But now we know how to prevent that energy drain.

First, you have to understand that those little energy factories are very sensitive to insult and injury from any kind of stress—toxins, allergens, infections, or a junk food diet that has no antioxidants to protect those energy factories.

In other words, if you get the other 6 keys to an UltraMind in balance, your mitochondria will be happy.

When our mitochondria are damaged, the resultant loss of energy can often show up as a broken brain—fatigue, brain fog, depression, dementia, autism, and more.

I have seen this over and over. When you don’t have enough energy, your brain breaks.

In fact, research shows that the brains of autistic children are very low on energy because of all sorts of toxins and infections and immune stress. When you remove these stressors, their energy improves and they wake up from their silent worlds.

So the key to getting more energy is to remove the agents that are harming your mitochondria.

Then you can enhance this process even further by giving yourself a “metabolic tune-up.”

Getting a Metabolic Tune-up

Did you know you can give yourself a metabolic tune-up?

To do this, you use special “neuro-nutrients” to help your cells make more energy.

Here’s what you can use to do that:

We need support for our energy system—and we all need a metabolic tune-up because we are all losing it.

But even as we are learning how mitochondrial injury is a final common pathway in so many neurological and psychiatric disorders, we are also learning how to protect and defend ourselves.

Getting a metabolic tune-up is not only possible, but necessary for most of us.

Thankfully, by eating a plant-based diet, reducing toxic exposures, and supplementing with mitochondria-protective and antioxidant compounds we can protect and restore our energy metabolism to optimal function.

This is an essential part of The UltraMind Solution .

Now it’s time for that discussion about the role of therapy and medication I mentioned at the beginning of this blog. After all, if the source of your brain problems is really found in your body, where do therapy and medication fit in to this picture?

Isn’t Therapy Important to Get Your Head Straight?

Isn’t psychotherapy or behavioral therapy helpful for improving your mood and brain function, or finding the meaning and purpose of your heart and soul? What about a spiritual life for becoming whole?

These can be essential parts of gaining an UltraMind.

But trust me, it is a lot harder to work through old mental patterns or connect with your soul if you are poisoned with mercury, or suffering from vitamin D or B12 deficiency, or struggling against a thyroid gland that isn’t working, or if your brain is inflamed with a virus or a reaction to something you are eating.

Heal your broken brain by fixing your body first.

Then you will find it a lot easier to get the help you need with psychotherapy and find it easier to connect with your heart and soul when you are not fighting through brain fog.

When You Need Medication

As a former emergency room physician, I recognize that extreme times call for extreme measures. I use and support the intelligent, appropriate use of medication, including psychotropic medications, like antidepressants, when needed.

They can often be helpful as a bridge to recovery from all the stresses and toxins that affect your brain and mind.

It may take months or years to rebuild damage that has occurred over a lifetime using The UltraMind Solution (although most people see remarkable results in 6 weeks).

In extreme cases, the damage may be so deep that full recovery is not possible. But combining medication with the tools of The UltraMind Solution can give people their lives back.

Working with an experienced psychopharmacologist who welcomes the integration of nutrition, supplements, exercise, and mind-body therapies is sometimes a necessary step to recovering a whole life.

Many times, medications can be reduced or eliminated after applying the principles found in The UltraMind Solution.

I would caution you that psychotropic medications offer only partial solutions, often packaged with side effects.

Tread intelligently, expect bumps on the road, and seek to find the causes of your suffering - which may be found in the stories of your life, on your plate, in your lifestyle, or in your toxic environment. You will rarely find a single solution to your problems in a prescription bottle.

If you need to, however, use medication without guilt just as you would use any other tool to rebuild your life. And do not be afraid to put it down when you have rebuilt your health and your world.

Now I want to remind you that you can get more information about how to boost your energy metabolism and heal the other 6 keys to an UltraMind in my new book The UltraMind Solution.

A free sneak preview is available at:

www.ultramind.com

You have now learned all the ways in which the body affects the mind. In my next blog I will teach you about how your mind influences your body—and how calming your mind calms your body.

Remember, the communication is bidirectional: top down and bottom up. The body affects the mind AND the mind affects the body. Thoughts, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and life traumas can all trigger damage to the brain. This brain damage occurs because stress itself causes depletion of nutrients from the body, changes our hormones, creates inflammation, damages the gut, has direct toxic effects, and increases oxidative stress.

Wow, all that just from negative thoughts. You’ll learn more in my next blog.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

What makes you feel most energetic?

Do you plan on getting a metabolic tune-up?

Have you tried medication and therapy for your broken brain?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

The UltraMind Solution: Key #5 – Enhance Detoxification

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 02:05:55 -0500

Welcome back to my series of blogs on my new book, The UltraMind Solution.

You can download a free sneak preview of the book by going here:

www.ultramind.com

Now for today’s blog ...

I have some bad news and some good news for you about your brain.

The bad news is that we live in a poisoned world that damages our brains.

The good news is that we know how to avoid and help our bodies get rid of toxins, which gives our brain a chance to heal and repair itself.

We are exposed to toxins we were never designed to deal with—and nearly all of them cause brain injury.

A recent study of umbilical cord blood found 287 toxic chemicals, 217 of which are toxic to the brain and nervous system. And that is what infants are exposed to even before they take their first breath. (1) These toxins include mercury, lead, PCBs, BPA, phthalates, plasticizers, flame retardants and more.

There are 6 million pounds of mercury emissions from coal burning every year and 2.5 billion pounds of toxic chemicals released into the environment every year. Where does it all go?

At least some of it gets into your body—and your brain!

In fact, a recent government survey found an average of 148 chemicals in our bodies. And those were only the ones they tested.

Did you know that 25 percent of New Yorkers have toxic blood levels of mercury from eating too much sushi?

Or that 15 percent of American women of child-bearing age have toxic levels of mercury in their blood? (2) That means that 15 percent of the 4 million children born in the United States each year, or 600,000 children, are exposed to toxic levels of mercury in the womb. (3)

And then there are the 3,500 different chemicals that are added to our food, and the more than 3,000 chemicals found in our homes.

In today’s blog I will discuss some of the effects these toxic chemicals have on our brains. I’ll tell you a story about what happens when you limit your toxic exposure and enhance your body’s detoxification system. And I’ll reveal the master detoxifying molecule made in your body.

The Toxic American

The average American consumes literally pounds of hormones, antibiotics, food chemicals, additives, artificial sweeteners, and MSG each year. Each one of these toxic chemicals has been shown to harm the brain.

On average we consume a gallon of neurotoxic pesticides and herbicides each year by eating conventionally grown fruits and vegetables. (4) (And that’s with people eating much less than the 8 to 10 servings they should be eating!) Remember, pesticides work BECAUSE they are neurotoxic to pests—they attack their nervous system.

Imagine what they do to your nervous system.

A recent study in The Lancet (5) clearly showed that food additives make children hyperactive. Researchers took about 300 normal children and split them into two groups. Each group was given an identical-looking colored drink. One was naturally colored; the other contained sodium benzoate and many other colors and additives.

The children who drank the tainted beverage were all much more hyperactive.

These compounds (and the total load of all the other toxins we are exposed to) create changes in mood, aggressive behavior, depression, problems with attention and focus, sleep problems, reduced intellectual performance, and memory loss.

It isn’t just occasionally consuming one red candy, blue cupcake, or the few drops of pesticide sprayed on our strawberries. It is the consistent, repetitive, cumulative presence of these chemicals in our lives that leads to our broken brains and the epidemics of autism, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and dementia we see in today’s world.

Let me tell you a story of a patient who had a miraculous recovery from what most medical experts say is an irreversible condition—dementia. The truth is that the brain is very resilient and can heal from toxins, if you get rid of all the insults to it and provide all the necessary ingredients for optimal functioning.

That is what we did for George—and the results were nothing short of miraculous.

Waking up from Dementia

George had a diagnosis of dementia and came with his wife to see me. He could no longer manage his business affairs, he couldn’t remember what he read any more, he had become increasingly unable to function at home, and he had to withdraw from family and social relationships.

There is no known effective treatment for dementia. But we do know a lot about what affects brain function and brain aging: our nutrition; vitamin deficiencies; omega-3 fat deficiencies; inflammation from food; infections; environmental toxins; stress; lack of exercise; hormonal imbalances; and trouble producing energy in our cells.

I addressed all these things with George. But the biggest problem he had was a big load of mercury from living near a cement plant his whole life and having a mouth full of silver fillings. He also had a few genes that were preventing him from effectively getting rid of or detoxifying the mercury from his body.

As a result he had one of the highest levels of mercury I had ever seen. The effects of this poisoning can be severe.

In one study of 465 patients with chronic mercury toxicity, 32 percent had severe fatigue, 88 percent had memory loss, and almost 30 percent had depression.

The good news that came out of this study is that removal of amalgam dental fillings combined with a mercury detoxification program resulted in significant symptom reduction. (6)

But just doing one thing wouldn’t help George. So we worked hard to get everything in balance— all his 7 basic biologic systems, the 7 keys to an UltraMind. The most important thing we did was to have his dental fillings removed safely and to slowly help him get rid of the mercury.

We helped him detoxify from mercury poisoning with foods such as kale, watercress, and cilantro; herbs such as milk thistle; nutrients such as selenium and zinc; and special medications that help the body remove toxic metals.

We treated his vitamin deficiencies with high doses of vitamins B6 and B12 and folate.

After a year of aggressive therapy that was matched to his genes and his own quirky biochemical train wrecks—not his diagnosis—he had a remarkable and dramatic recovery.

Before I saw George, he could not manage his business, nor did his grandchildren want to be around him. After matching his treatment to his genes, he was again able to function, and his grandchildren loved being with him again. His memory improved, he could read and remember what he read, and run his business affairs. He no longer isolated himself at home, but became an engaged member of his family and community. He could even remember and sing all the songs he used to sing in the shower.

The same miraculous recovery can happen for you—if you follow The UltraMind Solution and support your detoxification system.

Enhancing Your Detoxification System: Get More Glutathione

You see, we actually have a great system for getting rid of toxins—it is based on sulfur chemistry, that sticky, smelly substance. It is what our body uses like fly paper to stick to all the toxic molecules and carry them out of the body.

The molecule it uses is called glutathione and it is the most important detoxifier, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory in the body.

Sick people and people with broken brains have less of it.

But it is easy to make more of it, so you can get all the toxins out of your body.

Be kind to your brain! Learn how to get your detox system working:

• Eat organic when you can and avoid mercury-containing big fish like tuna and swordfish.

• Eat detoxifying foods like kale, watercress, artichokes, pomegranates, and cilantro.

• Use detoxifying herbs such as milk thistle and nutrients such as selenium and zinc, all of which boost detoxification and glutathione.

• Take special detox supplements like NAC, which is a form of sulfur your body uses to make glutathione.

• Learn how to get rid of heavy metals from your body.

You can learn more about how to support your detoxification system and how to reduce your toxic exposure and “live clean and green” in my new book, The UltraMind Solution. You can also read about one of my patients, Joanne, who woke up from lifelong depression by detoxifying her body.

Remember, a free sneak preview of The UltraMind Solution available at:

www.ultramind.com

In my next blog I will teach you about how to boost your energy. You will learn why conserving and making energy is so important to your brain and how toxins, bugs, poor nutrition, hormonal imbalance, and inflammation ultimately lead to cell destruction and death by a common mechanism ... one that literally depletes us of our life energy.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

Have you noticed a link between the toxins you’re exposed to and your brain health?

Which toxins are you most exposed to?

What steps do you plan to take to detoxify your body?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

(1) http://archive.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden2/execsumm.php

(2) Schober SE, Sinks TH, Jones RL, Bolger PM, McDowell M, Osterloh J, Garrett ES, Canady RA, Dillon CF, Sun Y, Joseph CB, Mahaffey KR. Blood mercury levels in US children and women of childbearing age, 1999-2000.JAMA. 2003 Apr 2;289(13):1667-74

(3) http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~acrobat/hgstak56.pdf

(4) Alavanja MC, Hoppin JA, Kamel F. Health effects of chronic pesticide exposure: cancer and neurotoxicity. Annu Rev Public Health. 2004;25:155-97. Review.

(5) McCann D, Barrett A, Cooper A, Crumpler D, Dalen L, Grimshaw K, Kitchin E, Lok K, Porteous L, Prince E, Sonuga-Barke E, Warner JO, Stevenson J. Food additives and hyperactive behaviour in 3-year-old and 8/9-year-old children in the community: a randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial.

(6) Wojcik DP, Godfrey ME, Christie D, Haley BE. Mercury toxicity presenting as chronic fatigue, memory impairment and depression: diagnosis, treatment, susceptibility, and outcomes in a New Zealand general practice setting (1994-2006). Neuro Endocrinol Lett. 2006 Aug;27(4):415-23

The UltraMind Solution: Key #4 -- Fix Your Digestion

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 00:47:08 -0500

Welcome back to my series of blogs on my new book, The UltraMind Solution.

You can download a free sneak preview of the book by going here:

www.ultramind.com

Now for today’s blog ...

Did you know that you have two brains?

You have a brain and a GUT-brain.

And if you want a happy brain, you have to have a happy gut!

The gut-brain has its own independent nervous system. And it has more neurotransmitters and serotonin than the brain in your head.

You all know that you can get butterflies in your stomach, or lose your lunch (or worse) in very stressful situations. But did you know that what happens in your gut feeds right back to your brain?

Did you know that studies show that an irritable bowel (which affects nearly 60 million Americans) can cause an irritable brain? It isn’t being anxious and irritable that messes up your stomach, it is your stomach that makes you anxious and irritable.

Did you know that a bloated belly can cause a bloated and inflamed brain?

In this blog I will teach you how your gut and your brain are connected—and why you need to heal your gut if you want to heal your brain.

Your Second Brain

Dr. Michael Gershon of Columbia University has called the gut the “second brain.” In fact, your gut has a mind of its own—literally. While it is connected to the brain through an extensive network of wiring and communication systems, it is also the only “organ” besides the brain that has its own nervous system.

We call it the ENS, or enteric (or gut) nervous system, as opposed to the CNS, or central nervous system. This gut-brain actually comes from the same embryonic tissue as the brain-brain. And it is still connected via the autonomic nervous system—the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves.

Acting completely independently, the ENS has a number of important jobs. It keeps everything moving in the right direction, from the top down, by coordinating the contraction of muscle cells. It triggers the gut hormones and enzymes to be released from cells to promote digestion. It helps keep the blood flowing so when you absorb your food it can get to where it needs to go. And it controls the immune and inflammatory cells in the gut. (1)

All that happens in the background and is communicated back up to your brain via the autonomic nervous system. Think of it as two independent but inter-dependent businesses. They must coordinate and communicate but can also act independently.

Literally everything that happens in your gut is communicated to your brain via the ENS. If your gut is stressed out, if it is inflamed, if it has too few probiotics, or if the protective barrier that lets food in and keeps toxins out has been breached, your gut tells your brain about it.

That makes your brain unhappy.

So to have a happy brain, you have to have a happy gut.

And one of the best ways to do that is to heal your gut-immune system.

The Gut-Immune System

Some 60 percent of your immune system lies right under the one-cell-layer-thick lining of your gut.

Its job is to let in ONLY the good stuff—food in the form of amino acids, sugars, fats, minerals and vitamins—and KEEP OUT all the bad stuff, like toxic bacteria and undigested food particles.

In fact, if you laid your gut flat, it would be the size of a tennis court. And there are 3 pounds of bacteria comprising 500 species covering that surface.

If this surface breaks down—look out.

Your brain won’t be happy.

Your immune system will get activated, and start reacting to foods and toxins and bugs in your gut. This makes your brain and your mood inflamed!

You can also absorb toxic molecules into your bloodstream, which get to the brain and make you crazy. Take, for example, the patients with liver failure who go crazy because they can’t detoxify the poisons from their gut bacteria.

And what’s our treatment? We sterilize their intestines with antibiotics.

The problem is that the way we live, and all the drugs we take, damage our whole gut ecosystem. This includes our sugar- and junk food-rich, low-fiber diet, our overuse of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and acid-blocking medications, and our chronic stress.

So what happens when things go awry and our guts break down from the total load of stressors and toxins on our bodies?

We can develop everything from depression to ADD, from autism to Alzheimer’s, from OCD to anxiety—and just plain bad moods and brain fog.

Let me tell you a remarkable story of a gut gone bad and how fixing the gut fixes the brain.

A Self-Intoxicating Little Girl

One spring afternoon a beautiful little six-year-old girl walked into my office with her mother and sister. On the surface she seemed quite normal, but then the story of her tragic life unfolded.

This first grade student was extraordinarily aggressive with her sister and her peers—kicking, pinching, and hitting them. She threatened to kill herself regularly.

She cut her mother and sister out of family pictures. She was anxious, negative, and hopeless. Temper tantrums, mood swings, and attention seeking were regular patterns of behavior.

She was also diagnosed with OCD and “perfectionism.”

She didn’t make friends at school, and her mother was called daily about her disruptive behavior in class.

She had been a very colicky baby, had frequent diaper and vaginal yeast infections as a child, with vaginal and rectal itching (which gives you a pretty strong idea that yeast is hanging around), and had very sensitive skin.

And she loved sugar and refined pastries and carbs.

Now, she had no digestive complaints, but I have learned that even if a child or adult doesn’t complain about their gut, mischief can still be brewing. The bacteria and yeast literally ferment the sugary, starchy foods in the diet, producing “auto-intoxication” with alcohol—a byproduct of this process. (2) The violent, aggressive behavior so commonly seen in drunks can occur from alcohol produced by yeasts in the gut. I wondered if this little girl had a little auto-brewery in her belly.

On my detective hunt I found she was low in magnesium, which can make you pretty irritable, and was deficient in zinc, which is so important to help your digestive enzymes break down your food.

She also had delayed food allergies (IgG) to wheat, rye, oats, and barley (all gluten-containing grains).

And of course she had low levels of DHA—the brain-balancing omega-3 fat.

She also had the typical problems with her methylation—evidence of severe vitamin B6, vitamin B12, and folate deficiency.

And she had a lot of trouble making enough energy in her cells, which you will learn about later in this series.

These problems occur in patterns, because they are all connected. It is not usually one thing. It is almost always everything. But the gut is often at the center of the problem—even if there are no digestive symptoms.

The most incredible finding in this young girl’s case was the sky-high indicators of overgrowth of bacteria and yeast in her gut. I had never seen levels this high in anyone.

Just getting her on a gluten- and dairy-free, whole-foods, organic diet; some cod liver oil; magnesium; methylation helpers like B6, B12, and folate; a multivitamin; and some probiotics improved her condition. (3)

But when I gave her an antibiotic to clear out the bad bugs in her gut, (4) followed by an antifungal drug, she transformed into a well-behaved little girl.

Her aggressiveness, negativity, and hopelessness were gone. Her mother said she used to be punished ten times a day and got into trouble at school every day. All that stopped when we cleared up the bad bugs in her gut and helped her get her flora and gut ecosystem back in balance.

She was suffering from “auto-intoxication,” which led to crazy behavior. This process of a bug producing toxins that modify actual brain chemistry is just one way the gut can affect the brain. There are many more.

Many studies have shown abnormal, toxin-producing flora in children with developmental problems like these. Normal kids have normal flora.

Happy people have healthy flora!

Dr. David Relman from Stanford is studying the DNA of the ecosystem of bugs in the gut. He has found the bugs who live with you in your gut may be more important in determining your health than your own DNA fingerprint. A healthy gut is a healthy brain!

So what do you do about it?

Be kind to your gut:

2. If you can, get off of antibiotics, steroids, anti-inflammatories, and acid-blocking medication.

3. Try digestive enzymes.

4. Try probiotics, which are the beneficial bacteria that normally live in your gut.

5. Eat a whole-foods diet with plenty of fiber like beans, nuts, veggies, fruits, seeds, and whole grains.

And remember, if you want a happy brain you have to have a happy gut.

I give you more details on how to make your gut and your brain happy in my new book, The UltraMind Solution.

You can download a free sneak preview by going here:

www.ultramind.com

In my next blog we will turn our attention to toxins, how they affect our brain, and how they lead to systemic breakdown that contributes to almost every brain- and mood-related problem we face.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

Have you noticed how your digestive problems affect your mood?

What foods seem to worsen—and improve—your mood?

What steps have you taken to help ease digestive problems?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

PS – Remember, you can download a free sneak preview of UltraMind right now by going to www.ultramind.com .

PPS -- The UltraMind Solution public television show is starting on February 27th. Check your local listings for air times. Or, you can get your own copy of The UltraMind Solution DVD by Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D. Also, The UltraMind Solution Club by Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D. has just launched, which is an online club that makes going through the program simple and easy.

1) Benarroch EE. Enteric nervous system: functional organization and neurologic implications. Neurology. 2007 Nov 13;69(20):1953-7. Review.

(2) Jansson-Nettelbladt E, Meurling S, Petrini B, Sjölin J. Endogenous ethanol fermentation in a child with short bowel syndrome. Acta Paediatr. 2006 Apr;95(4):502-4

(3) Kidd PM. Autism, an extreme challenge to integrative medicine. Part 2: medical management. Altern Med Rev. 2002 Dec;7(6):472-99. Review.

(4) Sandler RH, Finegold SM, Bolte ER, Buchanan CP, Maxwell AP, Väisänen ML, Nelson MN, Wexler HM. Short-term benefit from oral vancomycin treatment of regressive-onset autism. J Child Neurol. 2000 Jul;15(7):429-35.

The UltraMind Solution: Key #3 - Cool off Inflammation

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:45:01 -0500

Welcome back to my series of blogs on my new book, The UltraMind Solution.

You can download a free sneak preview of the book by going here:

www.ultramind.com

Now for today’s blog ...

Can your brain become inflamed? Can you have a sore or swollen brain—like a sore throat—that causes everything from brain fog to dementia to depression to autism?

You brain can become inflamed just as your body does. And in the 21st century, our bodies and brains are on fire.

Today, the fires of inflammation are raging all over the body. That’s why we are seeing an epidemic of diseases including autoimmunity (24 million people), allergy (50 million), and asthma (30 million), as well as cardiovascular disease (60 million), cancer (10 million), and diabetes (14 million). These, it has been recently discovered, are primarily inflammatory conditions.

Now, new research proves that almost all brain problems are connected to or caused by inflammation as well.

In this blog I will review just a few examples of the research that points to the link between inflammation and our epidemic of broken brains and tell you what you can do to reduce the sources of inflammation in your life.

Is Depression Caused by a Virus?

Well, it may be.

Researchers recently discovered a new virus called Bornavirus, which is found in the limbic system (or emotional center) of the brain in 30 percent of the population. One in 6 of the people who carry this virus have depression.
This virus inflames the brain. It is this inflammation that leads to depression in some cases.

Interestingly, the problem can be cured by treatment with short-term antiviral medication.

Think about what that means.

A virus can cause inflammation, which leads to depression. Treating the virus can CURE, not just reduce, the symptoms of depression.

Even the best antidepressant drugs don’t cure depression.

And NO amount of psychotherapy will ever cure depression caused by a virus.

This is like the discovery that ulcers are caused by bacteria and not stress. It completely upsets our thinking about mental illness and neurological disease.

And it should!

The cure for your broken brain may not lie in searching through the intricacies of your past, but in healing your body. One of the key ways you do that is by reducing inflammation.

That even holds true for “neurological diseases” as radical as autism—which very well may be an inflammatory condition.

Autism and Inflammation

Dr. Martha Herbert, a Harvard neurologist, has found that the brains of kids with autism appear swollen on MRI scans. Dr. Vargas from Johns Hopkins found inflammation in the spinal fluid and in autopsy studies of kids with autism. Researchers from UC Davis found that more than 70 percent of kids on the autistic spectrum have altered immune function.

And 95 percent of these kids have swollen bellies and gut problems. That’s not a coincidence, since 60 percent of the immune system is in the gut. I’ll tell you more about this later in my blog series.

This suggests that autism may primarily be an inflammatory condition. Reduce the inflammation and you reduce the sources of autism.

I have seen this happen over and over again in my practice. When you treat inflammation and the other keys to an UltraMind, autistic children can literally wake up from their silent worlds.

I’ll say it again: Treat the inflammation in your body and you can heal your brain!

But how do you do that?

You do it by finding and eliminating the sources of inflammation.

The Sources of Inflammation

Everything in the body is connected, but there are only a few things that cause inflammation.

The list is short:

2. Food allergens—mostly delayed reactions to food or hidden allergens that lead to “brain allergies” (allergic reactions in the body that cause inflammation in the brain—more about these in a moment)

3. Imbalances in digestive function and the gut immune system that produce widespread systemic effects

4. Toxins such as mercury and pesticides (and the 85,000 mostly untested toxins in our environment), which have been linked to immune dysfunction and autoimmune diseases

5. Low-grade, hidden, or chronic infections such as HIV-associated dementia, syphilis, and Lyme disease, which can cause many neurologic and psychiatric “diseases”

6. Stress—emotional or physical, such as trauma

7. Sedentary lifestyle

8. Inadequate sleep—less than 7 hours a night

9. Nutritional deficiencies such as vitamin C, B vitamins, vitamin D, zinc, and omega-3 fats

Are you starting to see how all these keys are connected?

If you go to the doctor and you are depressed, but you also have irritable bowel, or eczema, or headaches, or sinus congestion, or joint pain, it doesn’t mean you need to see five different specialists. It means that there are a few underlying systems that are out of balance and cause ALL your problems—and you don’t need to treat each one separately with medication!

Let me share the story of one of my patients who went through the mill of drugs and therapy and was given all sorts of labels. But she only had a few things out of balance that were easy to fix—so she simply followed the UltraMind Solution.

Elizabeth’s Story – A Brain Inflamed

Elizabeth was a 21-year-old woman who came to see me, as many of my patients do, with a whole list of problems—which is why I call myself a “whole-listic” doctor.

At the top of the list were mood problems that had plagued her since childhood. She had been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and even borderline personality disorder because of her wild mood swings.

At work, people avoided her, never knowing what to expect, and she was always fighting with her parents.

She was high-strung, irritable, and also had trouble concentrating. Sugar cravings drove her to the fridge every day after work—pudding, pizza, and junk food were staples—and her late-night snacking was hard to control.

She had been on antidepressants since she was 13. Her weight ballooned up to 170 pounds. Not only was she tired (though she was sleeping 10 hours a night) but also had allergies, post-nasal drip, sinus congestion, and fluid in her ears, and snored.

She had delayed allergies to eggs, wheat, rye, dairy, and yeast, which made her brain inflamed. She also had low levels of omega-3 fats.

I put Elizabeth on an elimination diet, giving her a break from foods that triggered her immune system. I added a few vitamins, including vitamin D and B6 and omega-3 fats.

Two months later she came back. She had lost 23 pounds and her cravings were gone. But it was the mood change she experienced that was truly astounding. Her mood improved for first time in her life. She no longer had wild mood swings or irritability.

Her energy level improved dramatically as well. She only needed 7 hours of sleep to feel fully and vitally awake.

After 5 months she had lost 33 pounds without trying, felt deeply happy for the first time in her life, and was thriving at work and in her family. All her other symptoms—sinus problems, post-nasal drip, and premenstrual syndrome—were gone as well.

Elizabeth’s main problem was an inflamed brain. She had “brain allergies,” which are one of the main sources of brain inflammation.

These brain allergies manifest themselves as brain fog, trouble focusing, irritability, depression, or mood swings after eating.

Most of these brain allergies are due to mild, hidden, delayed food allergies: you eat a piece of bread on Monday and feel depressed on Tuesday, but you never make the connection. As a result, your brain becomes inflamed.

Hidden food allergies are a major unrecognized epidemic in the 21st century. Despite the fact that the immune system and the brain are intimately linked and food has a MAJOR impact on the brain and body, most of us (including physicians) don’t make the connection between what we eat and how we feel. In fact, most physicians practicing today don’t acknowledge the critically important role food allergies play in health.

The result is that we have an undiagnosed epidemic of people whose lives are affected by low-grade, delayed food sensitivities or allergies. What they eat causes allergic reactions that make them feel bad—and no one is making the connections.

You can take some simple measures on your own to heal from brain allergies. You just have to take away the substances that most often cause allergic reactions for a few weeks and let your immune system cool down. Then try them again and see how you feel.

It is a simple, very effective solution for identifying the foods that cause your brain allergies, and it is one of the core components of The UltraMind Solution. You’ll find more in Part III (on page 287) of my book.

Without addressing the core underlying causes of all your body AND mind symptoms, you will never have optimal brain function or mood.

You can never achieve an UltraMind with the current medical roadmap. The UltraMind Solution is a new roadmap that will take you to a place where you feel happy, at peace, alert, and connected to everything important in your life—rather than living in a chronic state of brain fog!

Remember, you can get a free sneak preview of that new roadmap by going here:

www.ultramind.com

In my next blog you will learn how your gut and brain are connected in surprising ways, and that often the first thing to do to fix your brain is to fix your gut!

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

Have you noticed the connections between inflammation and your broken brain?

Which of these sources of inflammation have you identified in your own body?

What steps do you plan to take to ease inflammation?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

PS – Remember, you can download a free sneak preview of UltraMind right now by going to www.ultramind.com .

And since I know many of you have friends, family members, or coworkers who may also suffer from a broken brain, please pass this message along to them. It may provide them the hope that they’ve been looking for.

The UltraMind Solution: Key #2 –- Balance Your Hormones

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:02:56 -0500

Welcome back to my series of blogs on my new book, The UltraMind Solution.

You can download a free sneak preview of the book by going here:

www.ultramind.com

Now for today’s blog ...

Most of us are living life completely out of balance. But so many symptoms we come to accept as “normal” are just signs of imbalance – and the type of imbalance that affects almost everyone in our society is hormonal imbalance.

Let me ask you:

• Do you crave sugar or salt?

• Are you overweight and putting on more and more belly fat?

• If you are a woman, do you have premenstrual syndrome or painful or heavy periods?

• Are you depressed?

• Do you sleep poorly?

• Are you less interested in sex?

• Do you have thinning hair, dry skin, and feel sluggish in the mornings?

• Do you feel tired but wired?

• Do you have to drink coffee every morning just to wake up and a few glasses of wine every night just to calm down?

If so, you are not alone. In fact, this is how most Americans feel, because we are living out of harmony with our natural biological rhythms – and our hormones are all over the place.

The hormones that cause the most mental misery are your stress hormones, your thyroid hormone, your sex hormones, and your major blood-sugar control hormone, insulin.

In this blog, I want to teach you about three very common major hormonal imbalances and how you can rebalance these areas of your biochemistry so you can achieve an UltraMind: insulin, thyroid, and sex hormone imbalances. We will discuss stress hormones in Part 8 of this series.

Hormonal Imbalance #1: Insulin Imbalance

If you crave sugar or bread, feel weak and irritable at 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon, skip breakfast or eat a big muffin or bagel for breakfast, or have extra belly fat, you likely have serious blood sugar and insulin problems, which can cause depression, dementia, and panic disorder.

Just look down at your belly – if it’s sticking out or jiggles when you jump up and down, you have a problem.

We have seen an extraordinary increase in sugar consumption, from 10 pounds per person per year at the beginning of the 19th century to 158 pounds per person per year at the beginning of the 21st century.

In fact, more money is spent at gas stations on junk food than on gas!

We spend more money on processed and junk food than on new cars, new computers and higher education – combined!

That’s why 100 million Americans suffer from insulin resistance, or “pre-diabetes.” This condition is a problem by itself and causes “pre-dementia,” also known as mild cognitive impairment.

In fact, some scientists are now calling Alzheimer’s disease “type-3 diabetes”!

We are now seeing type-2 diabetes in children. Could this mean they will get Alzheimer’s as early as their 30s and 40s?

And what about sugar and depression? Researchers found that people with symptoms of depression were 42 percent more likely to develop diabetes than those without depressive symptoms. They also found that the more serious the symptoms, the higher the risk of diabetes.

So what’s the cure?

• Eat whole foods and make sure you have some protein like eggs, nuts, or a protein shake for breakfast.

• Don’t forget to get moving. Exercise is the magic potion for your brain and your belly fat.

Hormonal Imbalance #2: Thyroid Imbalance

Insulin isn’t the only hormone that can get out of balance. There’s another hormone imbalance that affects one in five women and one in 10 men – most of whom don’t even know they have it.

I’m talking about an imbalance of thyroid hormones.

Are you cold all the time? Do you have dry skin, thinning hair, weak fingernails, a puffy face, swelling of your hands and feet, constipation, or trouble getting out of bed in the morning? Do you seem to forget things easily?

If so, you might have a low-functioning thyroid.

A 73-year-old woman once came to see me because she had fatigue, sluggishness, poor memory, slight depression, dry skin, constipation, and a little fluid retention. When she visited her previous doctor, he said, “Well, what do you expect? You’re 73 – and this is what 73 is supposed to feel like.”

I don’t believe that is true. I believe that most of the symptoms of aging we see are really symptoms of abnormal aging or dysfunction that are related to imbalances in our core body systems.

This patient had a sluggish thyroid.

By simply replacing her missing thyroid hormone, supporting her nutrition, and implementing some simple lifestyle changes, she went from feeling old to feeling alert, energetic, and youthful. Plus, all of her other symptoms cleared up.

And research supports this. Studies have shown that older people with “sub-clinical” hypothyroidism have four times the risk of developing depression.(1) Yet many doctors prescribe antidepressants before they take a good hard look at the thyroid.

Your thyroid hormone is critical for making new brain cells (neurogenesis), particularly in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is responsible for mood and memory.(2)

You might need the help of your doctor and prescription thyroid medication if your thyroid is not optimally balanced. Here are some tips to help you along the way:

www.ultramind.com

• Get enough thyroid-supportive nutrients, including iodine, selenium, zinc, vitamin D, and omega-3 fats.

• Take thyroid hormone replacement if your tests show you are not optimally balanced. Remember, most of the common medications out there don’t take care of this problem. People often need a little bit of T3 – the active thyroid hormone – added to their treatment (even if they are already on other thyroid hormones.

Hormonal Imbalance #3: Sex Hormone Imbalances

Here’s some headline news. Did you know:

“Seventy-five percent of women were found to have a mutant gene that threatens their relationships, work, and well-being.”

“More than half of aging men will lose their sexual function, their testosterone levels will drop, and their estrogen levels will rise, making men more like women.”

These are the beliefs that we all unconsciously accept.

Women are defective, flawed, and broken – and destined to suffer throughout their reproductive lives from mood and behavior swings that are the result of the three Ps: Puberty, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), and perimenopause. This is the “genetic flaw” that supposedly threatens them.

As they age, men – if you believe all the television commercials – supposedly need the “little blue pill” just to be men again.

Is this a “normal” part of being a woman or a man? Is it the product of some defective, mutant gene?

Why do sex hormone levels drop up to 90 percent during the aging process?

Are we destined to suffer from impaired mood, muscle loss, poor sleep, memory difficulties, and sexual problems?

Of course not!

This suffering related to your reproductive life cycle is unnecessary. It is not bad luck, but bad habits, such as drinking and smoking, eating a high-sugar and refined-carbohydrate diet, being exposed to environmental toxins, and being chronically stressed.

To think that 75 percent of women have a design flaw that gives them PMS and requires medical treatment is just absurd. To think that we all have to dwindle, shrivel, and lose our emotional, physical, and sexual vitality is a burdensome, self-fulfilling prophecy.

We now have endless examples of balance and thriving at any age. One of my 81-year-old female patients recently told me, with a twinkle in her eye, about her new boyfriend and their wonderful love life.

PMS, menopausal symptoms, and andropause are all signs of imbalances in your sex hormones. They are not the result of mutant genes that destroy our sexual vitality as we age. Instead, they are treatable symptoms of underlying imbalance in one of the core systems in your body. Get your sex hormones back in balance, and these problems usually disappear.

Male Hormonal Problems

If you are a man older than age 50, you might be getting flabby and feeling less interested in sex. Do you see the hair on your legs and chest disappearing? Are you getting “man boobs”?

If so, you might be low in testosterone, which makes you depressed, unmotivated, and mentally dull.

The solutions are simple:

• Build muscle

• Consider using topical testosterone cream or gel

Female Hormonal Problems

If you have headaches, breast tenderness, fluid retention, mood swings, and irritability in the days or weeks before your menstrual period, you might have too much estrogen and not enough progesterone. This can make you feel crazy.

Let me tell you the story of a patient of mine with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD. She was barely able to function. She suffered three weeks out of every month with severe physical symptoms and debilitating depression. Was she deficient in Prozac (or Prozac renamed Sarafem to treat PMS)? I don’t think so.

She was 37 years old. She had severe depression, fatigue, anxiety, and food and sugar cravings that led to overeating and 20 pounds of weight gain.

She also had joint pains, breast tenderness, heavy bleeding, hot flashes, dry skin, acne, hair loss, trouble with memory, poor sleep, and no sex drive.

She didn’t drink alcohol, but was a big coffee drinker. She started the day with a bagel and cheese, had a cafeteria lunch, chocolates in the afternoon, and a healthy dinner, followed by ice cream, chips, and Cheerios.

She also complained of gas and bloating.

And she ate a lot of dairy products.

We know that sugar, caffeine, alcohol, stress, and lack of exercise all contribute to worsened PMS(3) and all hormonal imbalances including menopause and andropause.(4)

It is also true that dairy consumption can worsen hormonal imbalances because of all the hormones in milk.(5)(6) Even organic milk can come from pregnant cows, jacking up hormones levels.(7)

So I helped her change her diet, cut out the sugar and caffeine, eliminate food allergens, take a few supplements and herbs, and do a little exercise. Within just one menstrual cycle her life changed.

All her symptoms resolved, she lost weight, and she increased her energy dramatically. Her mood stabilized (meaning her depression evaporated), and her acne and dry skin went away – all without medication.

Here’s what to do:

• Load up on broccoli, collard greens, and kale, which help balance hormones.

• Supplement with vitamin B6, magnesium, evening primrose oil, and fish oil.

• Get regular exercise.

Balancing your hormones is a process – and sometimes it has little twists and turns. But by sticking with it, you can become vital, happy, alert, brilliant, and thriving.

And if you need more help it’s in my book: The UltraMind Solution.

Remember, you can get a free sneak preview by going here:

www.ultramind.com

But beware: there may be some serious side effects from balancing your hormones ...

... Some people notice a significant spike in their sex drive and pleasure!

In my next blog you will learn how brain inflammation has been linked to everything from autism to Alzheimer’s, from depression to ADHD. Our brains are on fire. Find out why and what to do about it.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

Do you suffer from any of the symptoms listed above?

Have you been told you have an imbalance of hormones?

What have you tried to balance your hormones?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

PS – Remember, you can download a free sneak preview of UltraMind right now by going to www.ultramind.com .

(1) Chueire VB, Romaldini JH, Ward LS. Subclinical hypothyroidism increases the risk for depression in the elderly. Arch Gerontol Geriatr. 2007 Jan-Feb;44(1):21-8. Epub 2006 May 5.

(2) Montero-Pedrazuela A, Venero C, Lavado-Autric R, Fernández-Lamo I, García-Verdugo JM, Bernal J, Guadaño-Ferraz A. Modulation of adult hippocampal neurogenesis by thyroid hormones: implications in depressive-like behavior. Mol Psychiatry. 2006 Apr;11(4):361-71.

(3) Rasheed P, Al-Sowielem LS. Prevalence and predictors of premenstrual syndrome among college-aged women in Saudi Arabia. Ann Saudi Med. 2003 Nov-Dec;23(6):381-7.

(4) Tan RS, Pu SJ. The andropause and memory loss: is there a link between androgen decline and dementia in the aging male? Asian J Androl. 2001 Sep;3(3):169-74. Review.

(5) Rich Edwards JW, Ganmaa D, Pollak MN, Nakamoto EK, Kleinman K, Tserendolgor U, Willett WC, Frazier AL.Milk consumption and the prepubertal somatotropic axis.Nutr J. 2007 Sep 27;6:28.

(6) [No authors listed]Milk, hormones and human health, 10/23-25/2006, Boston. J Mammary Gland Biol Neoplasia. 2007 Dec;12(4):315

(7) Pape-Zambito DA, Magliaro AL, Kensinger RS. Concentrations of 17beta-estradiol in Holstein whole milk. J Dairy Sci. 2007 Jul;90(7):3308-13.

The UltraMind Solution: Key #1 - Optimize Nutrition

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:33:36 -0500

This is my second blog in a series on my new book, The UltraMind Solution.

You can download a free sneak preview of the book at:

www.ultramind.com

Now, on to the good stuff!

The most powerful tool you have to fix your broken brain is not a drug or psychotherapy -- it’s something you use every day.

This tool is your FORK. And what you put on it can help -- or harm -- your brain.

Food is not just calories. Food is information.

And you have to put the right information on your fork for your brain to work properly.

Your brain needs all the raw materials of life to function properly. This material is food -- real, whole foods, not the processed junk foods that line most of our supermarket shelves.

If I could choose any medicine to prescribe, I would choose food.

That’s because food is the most powerful medicine!

It can heal or harm you. It all depends on what you choose to eat.

Despite all of our modern medical bells and whistles, conventional medicine is still notoriously poor at treating mental illness, neurological disorders, and chronic disease.

What most doctors don’t know is that we CAN prevent, treat, reverse -- and often even CURE -- chronic illness and our broken brains with food.

We are an overfed but undernourished nation. We are suffering from some serious nutritional deficiencies that can damage our brains, cloud our thoughts, and leave us depressed and hopeless.

No wonder so many of us are suffering with broken brains.

But you don’t have to. All you have to do to heal your brain is to eat the right foods.

Today, I’m going to review some of the most critical nutrients for brain function, tell you where you can get them, and explain why taking supplements is absolutely essential if you want to optimize your brain.

These are four of the most important tips you need to know to develop an UltraMind.

Nutrition Tip #1: Become a Fat Head

One of my patients, a 20-year-old woman who hated seafood and avoided it her whole life, suffered from depression, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder (ADD), obesity, muscle pain, and chronic fatigue. Her blood tests showed a severe deficiency of omega-3 fats and an overload of inflammatory omega-6 fats.

So we gave her an oil change, with high doses of fish oil (EPA and DHA). Soon, she recovered from her depression, brain fog, and ADD, her pain disappeared, and she lost 60 pounds!

Why was she so deficient? Well, for 5 million years we evolved in a seafood-rich environment or ate wild animals and plants full of omega-3 fats.

But these days, few of us gather wild plants to eat or hunt for our meat. That’s why 99 percent of people today are deficient in the most important ingredient our bodies need for normal cell and brain function -- omega-3 fatty acids.

Why are omega-3s so important?

To answer that question, think about your brain for a minute. It weighs only 3 pounds, or 2 percent of your body weight. But it uses 20 percent of the oxygen you breathe and consumes 20 percent of the calories you consume. And it contains 100 billion cells, each of which has 40,000 connections!

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe.

And every one of its cells and cellular connections are—or SHOULD be—made of omega-3 fats.

Your cells are built of the fats you consume. If you eat omega-3 fats, cellular communication will flow smoothly.

But if you eat soy oil, trans fats, or beef fat, your brain cells become stiff and hard like Crisco, cellular communication breaks down, and your brain stops working properly.

You’re probably all too familiar with what happens next.

You become depressed, demented, anxious, and exhausted or suffer from a host of other brain disorders.

One of the reasons we are seeing an epidemic of broken brains in today’s world is that there has been a thousand-fold increase in the consumption of processed soy oil in the last century.

The people who eat these soy oils are more depressed, demented, distracted—and violent. Murders are actually more common in countries whose inhabitants consume more soy oil and less seafood.

One study has even found a 35 percent reduction in felony-level violent offenses among prisoners who supplemented with omega-3 fats.

Our brains just don’t work without omega-3 fats. Period.

That’s why low levels of omega-3 fats have been linked to everything from depression and anxiety, to bipolar disease and criminal behavior, to schizophrenia, to ADD and autism and learning disabilities, to dementia and many other neurological diseases.

So how do you know if you are deficient?

If you have dry, scaly patches on your skin or have excess hard earwax or soft, cracked, or brittle nails or chicken skin—tiny bumps on the back of your arms -- then you are almost certainly deficient in omega-3 fats.

Here’s the solution:

• Cut out trans fats and processed food, minimize animal fats.

• Eat omega-3 fatty acids from wild, coldwater fish like salmon, walnuts, and flaxseeds.

• Take a supplement of 1,000 mg of purified, toxin- and mercury-free omega-3s (EPA/DHA) twice a day.

And remember, if someone calls you a fat head, take it as a compliment … as long as you eat the right kind of fats.

Nutrition Tip #2: Balance Your Serotonin

Today, about 121 million people are suffering from serotonin deficiency and are depressed and anxious as a result.

Serotonin is the feel-good molecule. It is one of a class of important chemicals in your brain and body called neurotransmitters. This particular neurotransmitter is responsible for sending messages of relaxation and happiness.

If you have enough serotonin, your mood will be balanced and joyful. If you don’t, you spiral down into darkness and depression.

The typical treatment given for serotonin deficiency is Prozac.

But depression is NOT a Prozac deficiency.

In fact, the “serotonin deficiency” that Prozac is designed to treat is really just a symptom of deeper problems—imbalances in the body like toxicity, chronic stress, a poor diet, vitamin deficiencies, and inflammation.

And it can be fixed by balancing the 7 keys to an UltraMind!

If antidepressants worked perfectly, then I would prescribe them. But pills don’t work to treat the causes of illness.

Nonetheless, one in ten Americans are taking antidepressants.

Most patients taking antidepressants either don’t respond or have only a partial response.

In fact, success is considered a 50 percent improvement in just half the symptoms of depression. And this minimal result is achieved in less than half the patients taking these medications!

But the drug companies work hard to make sure you don’t know this.

A recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that drug companies selectively published studies on antidepressants. They published nearly all the studies that showed benefit and almost none of the studies that showed they don’t work.

This kind of underreporting warps our view, leading us to think that antidepressants (and other psychiatric medications) do work when they don’t. This makes more doctors prescribe them and more people take them.

I’ll admit, the approach is half right. Chemical imbalances lead to problems. But the real question is never asked.

WHY are those chemicals out of balance in the first place -- and how do we get them back to their natural state of balance?

These drugs don’t cure the problem. They cover over the symptoms.

To cure the epidemic of broken brains, we have to ask a new set of questions:

How do we find the cause of this epidemic? Are we defectively designed?

Or are our toxic environment, nutrient-depleted diet, and unremitting stress affecting our sensitive brains?

Are more drugs really the answer? Or is there a better way to address the underlying causes of this epidemic so we can regain our mental—and physical—health and live whole, functional, fulfilling lives?

There IS an answer to brain problems, but it isn’t more drugs or psychotherapy. Although these tools can be a helpful bridge during your recovery from a broken brain, they won’t provide long-term solutions.

The secret that promises to help us fix our broken brains lies in an unlikely place, a place modern medicine has mostly ignored.

The answer lies in our bodies.

You don’t have to take drugs to get your serotonin levels up. You can do it naturally by following the 7 keys to an UltraMind:

2. Relax and calm your mind—stress depletes serotonin.

3. Cool off inflammation by getting rid of hidden food allergens, toxins, and infections.

4. Balance your blood sugar by eating whole real foods with plenty of fiber and protein with each meal.

5. Get enough vitamin B6 so your body can transform tryptophan to serotonin.

6. Take magnesium to boost serotonin levels.

7. Get rid of toxins like mercury.

The Importance of Vitamins and Minerals

Unless you eat a wholesome diet and follow a perfectly healthy lifestyle, you need to supplement with vitamins and minerals every day.

More than 90 percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency diseases like scurvy. Many of us don’t get enough vitamin C, E, D, iron, or zinc.

That’s a problem, because nutrients help run all the chemical reactions in your body, including all the ones that make you happy, remember things, focus, and be mentally sharp and alert.

Let’s look at the effects of a few nutrients of the most important nutrients for brain function.

Nutrition Tip #3: Get Enough Methylation Vitamins

A few special mood, memory, and attention vitamins are so critical that EVERYONE should make sure they have enough of them.

These are folic acid, and vitamins B6 and B12. These are called the methylation vitamins and are at the hub of your entire brain chemistry.

In one study of older adults, the group with the lowest levels of vitamin B12 lost twice as much brain volume as those with the highest levels.

Another remarkable study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that 27 percent of severely depressed women over age 65 were B12 deficient.(1)

Doctors are now using a prescription version of folate called Deplin to treat depression and to improve the effectiveness of antidepressants. (2) In fact, if you have folate deficiency, it is unlikely that antidepressants will even work.

What’s remarkable is how backward the thinking about depression is. Doctors tend to only use vitamins if antidepressants don’t work.(3) They should be prescribing the vitamins in the first place and then supplementing with antidepressants only if vitamins and lifestyle changes don’t work.

People with a low folate level have only a 7 percent response to treatment with antidepressants. Those with high levels folate have a response rate of 44 percent. That’s more than six times better. In medicine if we get a 15 to 30 percent improvement we are happy. But a 600 percent improvement—that should be headline news.

That is why I recommend supplementing with these methylation vitamins every day. I tell you exactly what you should take in The UltraMind Solution.

Nutrition Tip #4: Take Your Magnesium -- The Relaxation Mineral

If you are tense or tight, anxious or irritable, then you might be magnesium deficient.

You also might be magnesium deficient if you have:

Anxiety, autism, ADD, headaches, migraines, chronic fatigue, irritability, muscle cramps or twitches, insomnia, sensitivity to loud noises, palpitations, angina, constipation, anal spasms, fibromyalgia, asthma, kidney stones, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, PMS, menstrual cramps, irritable bladder, irritable bowel syndrome, reflux, trouble swallowing, and more.

We eat a diet that has practically no magnesium -- a highly processed, refined diet that is based mostly on white flour, meat, and dairy, none of which contain magnesium.

This is compounded by the fact that magnesium levels are decreased by excess alcohol, salt, coffee, sugar, phosphoric acid in colas, profuse sweating, prolonged or intense stress, chronic diarrhea, excessive menstruation, and by diuretics (water pills), antibiotics and other drugs and some intestinal parasites.

We live lifestyles that cause us to lose whatever magnesium we have from our bodies, and we never replace it.

When was the last time you had a good dose of sea vegetables (seaweed), nuts, greens, and beans?

If you are like most Americans, your nut consumption mostly comes from peanut butter, and mostly in chocolate peanut butter cups. As for seaweed, greens, and beans—well, most Americans don’t eat many of these at all.

You can also supplement with magnesium, which can have magnificent effects. But you need to know how much to take and what form to take. I give you all the details in my new book, The UltraMind Solution.

You can get a free sneak preview of it by going to:

www.ultramind.com

In my next blog I will teach you how to balance your hormones—and why hidden hormonal imbalances are often at the root of problems with mood, thoughts, memory and behavior.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

How does food seem to affect your emotions and mental health?

Do you feel better after eating some foods and worse after eating others?

What supplements do you currently take to address mental problems?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

PS -- Remember, you can download a free sneak preview of UltraMind right now by going to www.ultramind.com .

And since I know many of you have friends, family or co-workers who may suffer from a broken brain, please pass this message along to them as it may provide them the hope that they’ve been looking for.

(1) Penninx BW, Guralnik JM, Ferrucci L, Fried LP, Allen RH, Stabler SP. Vitamin B(12) deficiency and depression in physically disabled older women: epidemiologic evidence from the Women's Health and Aging Study. Am J Psychiatry. 2000 May;157(5):715-21.

(2) Papakostas GI, Petersen T, Mischoulon D, Ryan JL, Nierenberg AA, Bottiglieri T, Rosenbaum JF, Alpert JE, Fava M. Serum folate, vitamin B12, and homocysteine in major depressive disorder, Part 1: predictors of clinical response in fluoxetine-resistant depression. J Clin Psychiatry. 2004 Aug;65(8):1090-5.

(3) Alpert JE, Mischoulon D, Rubenstein GE, Bottonari K, Nierenberg AA, Fava M. Folinic acid (Leucovorin) as an adjunctive treatment for SSRI-refractory depression. Ann Clin Psychiatry. 2002 Mar;14(1):33-8.

The Simple Way to Defeat Depression, Overcome Anxiety and Sharpen Your Mind

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:24:47 -0500

Are you one of the 100 million, or one-in-three, Americans struggling through life with a “broken brain?”

It doesn’t have to be that way. Today, I’m going to share with you the key to good mental and emotional health -- to an “UltraMind” … one that’s calm, confident, and happy.

But first, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you feel depressed, hopeless, disconnected, and disengaged from your life?

• Do you see your relationships breaking down because you are mentally and emotionally absent or numb?

• Do you forget to meet friends or go to appointments, and then can’t figure out how in the world you forgot?

If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above, you are not alone.

Right now in America, there is a rising tide of “broken brains.” And conventional medicine cannot cure it.

This epidemic includes conditions like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychosis, attention deficit disorder (ADD), autism, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease, as well as more subtle symptoms like mood swings, sleep problems, poor concentration, and brain fog.

Consider this ...

One in ten Americans today uses antidepressants, while more than eight million children are taking stimulants like Ritalin.

Is something wrong with this picture? Is this part of the normal human condition? Are we defectively designed so that we cannot be happy, or concentrate, or remember things without pills? Is depression a Prozac deficiency? Is ADHD a Ritalin deficiency? Is Alzheimer’s an Aricept deficiency?

I think not.

But here’s the really big news:

These “diseases” do not exist.

At least not in the way we think they do.

Let me explain.

Let’s say you have chronic feelings of sadness and despair. Conventional doctors might say you have a disease called “depression.”

But depression is not the cause of your sadness and despair. It’s just a name we use to group people together for the purpose of giving them all the same drug therapy. You feel sad and despairing? You have “depression” and need an “antidepressant!”

But do we know the reason for these symptoms? Do we know the causes? Are they even the same from one person to another?

Think about it.

You and the person sitting next to you could both have chronic symptoms we call a “headache,” but maybe your pain is caused by drinking too much wine every night, while his pain is the result of being hit on the head with the empty bottle every night.

As you can imagine, these two chronic headaches can’t be cured in the same way, because their root causes are different. But that approach is exactly the one the current medical community is taking!

They give the same treatment for diseases with the same name, even though the cause of that disease may be radically different from person to person.

Drugs like antidepressants don’t cure the disease, they just mask the symptoms.

We don’t need to continue using these same drug treatments that don’t work, make things worse with side effects, or at best give partial relief. There is a proven, medical alternative and it is called The UltraMind Solution.

It is based on Functional Medicine -- the greatest revolution medicine has seen in the last hundred years. It is the medical equivalent of Columbus saying the world is round not flat, or Galileo proving that the earth is NOT the center of the universe.

And it offers the promise to heal all of our broken brains and all chronic illness.

When it comes to broken brains, the key to this new paradigm is simply this:

Your mood problems, your memory problems, your trouble focusing, your ADD and depression are ...

NOT ALL IN YOUR HEAD!

THEY ARE IN YOUR BODY.

By FIXING YOUR BODY, YOU WILL automatically FIX YOUR BROKEN BRAIN -- and experience an ULTRAMIND.

Your energy, memory, focus, and your joy will all increase.

Your depression, anxiety, dementia, and ADD will fade away like a bad dream.

I know -- because I was cured myself using this simple but powerful method.

You see, my own brain broke one day in 1996. In fact, I felt like I had developed ADD, depression, and dementia all at once! The worse my body felt, the worse my brain functioned. My eyes would get red and swollen, I couldn’t focus, I had rashes and diarrhea, I couldn’t remember what I had just said, I couldn’t feel joy, and I was constantly exhausted, yet had trouble sleeping.

I saw doctors. I saw psychiatrists. No one could find the cause for my symptoms or agree on a diagnosis. Some said I had depression, others suggested chronic fatigue.

So I decided to find the answers for myself.

By scouring the literature, consulting with other doctors and scientists, and experimenting with my own body and mind, I finally came to understand that it wasn’t just one thing that had caused my brain to break, but the accumulation of many things.

And the cure wasn’t found in one magic pill, but by balancing the 7 core systems in my body, or what I came to call The 7 Keys to UltraWellness. They are:

2. Balance your hormones

3. Cool off inflammation

4. Fix your digestion

5. Enhance detoxification

6. Boost energy metabolism

7. Calm your mind

Imbalances in these keys are the underlying causes of all illness.

You see, not only are your joint pains, skin rashes, gastrointestinal distress, and depression all connected, but the only way to find your way out of this mess of chronic disease (including the epidemic of broken brains) is by using a new map -- one that allows us to see how everything is connected.

This new map is the basis of Functional Medicine. It is a rich new method, a fundamental change in our thinking, a whole different paradigm. It changes our approach to the very way we think about illness and the human body and brain.

The truth is that you can’t treat mental illness effectively by using ONLY drugs or psychotherapy. You need to treat the body, because the body and brain are one interconnected system.

What you do to your body, you do to your brain. Treat your body and you treat your brain. ONLY when you fix your body will you fix your broken brain.

That is the method I use in my medical practice. Every day, I witness miracles.

• How would you like to reverse ADD or ADHD or even autism in your child?

• If you’re an adult suffering from mood swings or depression, would you like to know the 7 drug-free ways you can reduce your symptoms -- naturally?

• How would you like to learn how to avoid becoming another Alzheimer’s statistic -- and even reverse early dementia?

• Or would you like to learn to recapture the mental energy, memory, focus, and clarity of your youth?

These are all possibilities right now. But the methods to achieve it are the best-kept secret in medicine today.

Unlike our current medical system, you don’t need expensive therapies or medications in order to join this revolution.

You just need a fork, a pair of sneakers, and an understanding of your body’s 7 key systems!

This is the goal of my new book, The UltraMind Solution.

And I’ve convinced my publisher to make a free sneak preview available to you.

To download it right now, go to

http://www.ultramind.com

In The UltraMind Solution I teach you how to achieve optimum mental health and brain health without drugs or psychotherapy. I explain more about how balancing the 7 key systems of your body leads to an UltraMind. And I give you step-by-step instruction for achieving that goal.

I believe everyone deserves to live a life full of energy, vitality, pleasure, and happiness. The UltraMind Solution will show you how to relieve your suffering so that you can live your life as you were meant to live it.

But I don’t want you to take my word for it. I want you to discover it for yourself.

That is why, in the next 8 blogs, I am going to outline this new program for healing your broken brain.

In the next blog I will teach you about the first key to an UltraMind: Optimize Nutrition. And I will show you how eating a few brain boosting foods and taking the right supplements can make your mind into an UltraMind and boost your focus, attention, mood memory and confidence.

Now I’d like to hear from you:

Do you suffer from symptoms of a broken brain?

How has conventional medicine tried to treat this problem?

What remedies have you tried that have helped you heal?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

PS -- Remember, you can download a free sneak preview of UltraMind right now by going to http://www.ultramind.com

Reducing Your Risk of Breast Cancer

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:59:32 -0500

Today, I would like to introduce you to my colleague at The UltraWellness Center in Lenox Massachusetts, Dr. Elizabeth Boham. She is a physician who practices Functional Medicine and is a Registered Dietitian.

Among other things, Dr. Boham works every day with women who come to see her to help them decrease their risk of breast cancer. She wrote the following blog to give you some simple steps you can take to substantially decrease your chances of getting breast cancer.

—Dr Mark Hyman

Do you worry about getting breast cancer? Have you already suffered from the disease and are now afraid of a recurrence? I understand why. The incidence of breast cancer is skyrocketing ...

Last year over 200,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer and 60,000 cases of non-invasive breast cancer were diagnosed. A woman’s risk of getting breast cancer has jumped from 1 in 20 in the 1960s to 1 in 8 today. Tragically, more than 40,000 women died from breast cancer alone last year.

Why has there been such a huge escalation in the rates of this frightening disease? What’s the cause of this epidemic and what can we do about it?

Getting to the bottom of these questions is of personal interest to me. When I was 30 years old, I was diagnosed with an aggressive type of invasive breast cancer. At the time I thought I was healthy ...

Before I went to med school my background was in nutrition and exercise physiology. I was an athlete, an avid exerciser, and was careful with my diet. I was young, had no family history of breast cancer, nor any signs of chronic illness.

So when I was told I should have a mass in my breast removed, the last thing I thought it would be was cancer.

How does an otherwise healthy woman get cancer? What did I do wrong? What can I do to reduce my risk of recurrence?

Looking for answers to these questions sent me on a journey through my medical training and eventually to an education in Functional Medicine.

What I discovered on that journey is what I want to share with you in today’s blog.

In traditional medical training you don’t learn about the impact that things like diet, toxins, and digestion have on your overall health. Certainly the connections between how your gut functions, your toxic exposure, and your risk of breast cancer is not something most doctors are taught.

To find real answers to my questions about breast cancer I knew I would have to dig deeper. When I finally found Functional Medicine and the answers it offers it was like a revelation to me.

Functional Medicine teaches us that imbalances in the 7 key systems in the body can lead to a host of diseases, including breast cancer. By analyzing which of theses systems are out of balance and learning how to optimize them, you can decrease your risk of getting breast cancer or suffering a recurrence.

How do you do this?

There are many pieces to the puzzle, but when it comes to breast cancer one of the keys is balancing your estrogen levels. High levels of estrogen consistently correlate with breast cancer in most scientific studies.

How do you create and maintain estrogen balance?

The first step is to overcome insulin resistance.

Insulin is the hormone released from your pancreas after a meal. It sends signals to your cells telling them to absorb sugar from your blood—which is a critically important job.

However, this finely orchestrated system is sent spiraling out of control by our modern diet. Sugar is the main culprit. When you eat too much of it, in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, highly-refined and processed carbohydrates, or the multitude of other forms it comes in, your body sends out more insulin than it can properly use and you develop insulin resistance.

What most people DON’T realize is that as your insulin levels increase your estrogen levels increase as well. That means your risk of breast cancer goes up every time you eat too much sugar!

However, the havoc that insulin wreaks doesn’t stop there.

Insulin resistance also increases the amount of body fat you have. As your body fat increases, so does an enzyme in your fat called aromatase. Aromatase turns hormones made in other organs in your bodies (such as your adrenal glands) into estrogen.

That means your estrogen levels are raised even more, making your risk of breast cancer that much greater.

This point is especially important for postmenopausal women. Percentage of body fat is the number one risk factor for breast cancer in this population.

Excess insulin causes other problems that contribute to you risk as well: it may stimulate the growth of tumors in your body and increase systemic inflammation which is a leading factor in cancer of any kind.

There are medications available that can help counteract these conditions. You can take aromatase inhibitors which are designed to prevent the aromatase in your body fat from converting your hormones into estrogen or you can take medications to balance your insulin and blood sugar.

However, you can achieve the same effect naturally by choosing real, whole, organic foods, exercising daily, and maintaining a healthy body weight.

As important as it is, insulin imbalance isn’t the only culprit that can lead to breast cancer. Environmental toxins have a major impact as well.

What are the most damaging environmental toxins when it comes to breast cancer?

The answer is simple: estrogen and the substances that mimic it.

From birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy to eating meat and drinking milk from cows given growth hormones, we are all exposed to excess estrogen.

The problem is compounded by the fact that other environmental toxins like some pesticides and compounds found in plastics mimic estrogen and stimulate the estrogen receptor in an unhealthy way.

Obviously, estrogen isn’t a “toxin” in the sense that DDT is. But too much of it can be nearly as deadly and we are exposed to extraordinary amounts nearly every day. At the end of this blog I will explain how you can eliminate this toxic burden.

Another critical part of your body you need to focus on if you want to limit your risk of breast cancer is your digestive system.

What is the connection between your gut health the health of your breasts?

Your flora—or the good bacteria that live in your gut.

These little symbiotic helpers not only strengthen your immune system and help you digest the foods you eat, they also help detoxify the estrogen made in your body after it’s been used.

If your flora aren’t in balance, the estrogen your body needs to eliminate gets reabsorbed. This increases your estrogen level and exposes your body to unhealthy estrogen breakdown products.

It’s interesting to note that many studies link increased use of antibiotics to an increased risk of breast cancer. This may be because excess antibiotic use kills off the good bacteria in your gut.

So let’s review what you can do to balance your estrogen levels, heal from insulin resistance, limit your toxic exposure, and support the flora in your gut.

Doing the following will help you limit your risk of breast cancer:

2. Get 3-5 hours of exercise per week. This also helps increase your insulin sensitivity and allows you to more easily control your percentage of body fat.

3. Increase your fiber intake. Your goal is 35 gm per day. High-fiber foods include vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and whole grains such as brown rice and ground flax seed.

4. Have protein at every meal or snack of the day. Good protein sources include; fish, lean poultry, beans, nuts, eggs, and soy. Make sure you include a few vegetarian options in your daily protein intake.

5. Maintain a healthy weight. This is the best studied, most agreed upon step a woman can take to decrease her risk of breast cancer.

6. Get a good night sleep. Sleeping well helps with weight control, insulin sensitivity, and supports your immune system. All of this is important for preventing cancer.

7. Choose organic and hormone-free meat, milk, and produce. This reduces your exposure to unwanted pesticides and hormones.

8. Avoid excess toxic exposure. Choose organic products for your lawn and garden, avoid dry cleaning, don’t use plastic bottles, and limit your intake of medications (like Tylenol) that get processed in your liver.

9. Take probiotics. Take 10 to 20 billion organisms on an empty stomach twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening.

10. Limit your alcohol intake to no more than 1 drink per day and 5 per week—less is better. Remember 1 drink is 5 ounces of wine, 1.5 ounces of hard alcohol, or 12 ounces of beer.

These are just a few simple things you can do everyday to reduce your risk of getting breast cancer. There are many others techniques you can use and I may explore some of them in future blogs. But by taking just these few steps you not only enhance the health of your breasts, but you start down the path of UltraWellness—a path that promises nothing less than a lifetime of vital health, optimal weight, and mental acuity.

Now I’d like to hear from you.

Have you struggled with breast cancer and if so, what has worked and what hasn’t?

Do you have any additional recommendations that might benefit others who are struggling with breast cancer?

To your good health,

Elizabeth Boham MD, RD

How to Get "Unstuck" from Depression

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:40:04 -0400

How many of you are stuck?

Do you feel stuck in depression, sadness, or anxiety? Or are you just a little confused, overburdened, or unhappy?

Maybe you are one of the 25 percent of Americans who experience a major depression in their lifetime.

Or maybe you are taking one of the 189 million prescriptions written for depression, at a cost of $12 billion a year, and wondering if there is another way.

Perhaps, like most people who take antidepressants, you find that they don’t work, lose their effectiveness over time, or give you only slight relief from symptoms.

Or maybe you quit your antidepressant regimen after a few months, like 60 percent of people who take them do, because of side effects such as weight gain, loss of sex drive, or worse.

Are looking for a way to reconnect to your life’s meaning and purpose and emerge from a life that feels half lived? Are you looking for a way to overcome the depression that’s been haunting you?

If you are, I guarantee you are not suffering from a Prozac deficiency. In fact, I want to challenge you to consider that depression, as we understand it, does not really exist.

“Depression is not a disease…” That is how the remarkable new book, by James Gordon, MD, begins. It is called “Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression.”

James Gordon, MD, was recently given an award by the Bravewell Collaborative for being one of the most pioneering medical thinkers of our time.

Ideas that can change a culture come only a few times in a generation. “Unstuck” is such an idea. It provides an answer to the leading cause of disability -- depression -- that until now has had very poor solutions.

So why does Dr. Gordon say that depression is not a disease?

Because it is actually a sign of underlying imbalances that need to be addressed if we are to be “whole and happy.”

Dr. Gordon has been working in the field of mind-body medicine for nearly 40 years. I have come to know him well, after first meeting him when I testified before the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine. He was appointed the head of the commission. His vision for a new medicine is strong and clear.

He has treated patients, taught healthcare professionals about mind-body medicine and nutrition, and helped so many people “heal the wounds of war” and trauma by working in conflict-ridden places like Gaza, Bosnia, and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. His work, through his Center for Mind Body Medicine, has given him remarkable insight into the causes and nature of our suffering.

“Unstuck” is a guide for healing your body, mind, and soul. In this book, Dr. Gordon helps us understand why we may be out of balance and guides us to the origins of depression.

But he also helps us discover how trauma, chronic stress, lack of meaning, and the stories we tell ourselves about life can all make us depressed. And he helps us uncover the hormonal imbalances, food allergies, heavy metals, yeast infections, and nutritional deficiencies that can also lead to depression.

These problems are the real causes of depression. This is why Dr. Gordon says that depression is not a disease. Even though the symptoms of depression may be the same or similar in people diagnosed with the “disease”, the causes that lead each person to become depressed may be very different.

This concept is also the core principle of Functional Medicine and UltraWellness.

Dr. Gordon not only explains this concept, but provides practical tools to help us address each of these issues that effect the health of your body, mind and soul. He gives you:

* Clinically tested practices that use words, images, drawing, movement, yoga, and dance to help you move through depression.

* Detailed, practical plans for using food and supplements as well as the ancient and powerful methods of Chinese medicine to balance your physical and mental functioning.

* Ways to make the world’s spiritual wisdom and spiritual practices an ongoing part of your healing journey.

* And, most importantly, ways to tailor each of these approaches to help restore balance to your unique, individual life.

Dr. Gordon has many stories in his book of the journey people take to get unstuck and become whole and happy again. They reminded me of a recent patient I had who had been given the diagnosis of “depression” -- but the last thing he needed was antidepressants. In this particular case he didn’t have trauma or stress; it was his biology that made him depressed.

J.P. was an 18-year-old young man who showed up in my office with fatigue, depression, anxiety, 27 pounds of weight gain, and acne, which had worsened over the 4 years before he saw me.

He also couldn’t tolerate the cold and was tired in the morning. He had canker sores, cracking at the corners of his mouth, acne on his face, chest, back and shoulders, and seasonal allergies. He also had trouble falling asleep. His anxiety was increasing, and his depression got worse every winter.

He had been treated with an antidepressant called Paxil for 4 years. It made him crave sweets and starchy food and caused his weight gain. He had also been taking antibiotics every day for 2 years for his acne, which led to a low-grade yeast infection. Of course, he ate the typical junk and processed food teenage diet, topped off with lots of sodas.

When we examined what was really causing his depression, we found many nutritional deficiencies that have been proven to cause depression.

These included severe vitamin D deficiency. He also had severe omega-3 fat deficiencies, vitamin B6 deficiency (which is needed to make serotonin), and vitamin B12 deficiency.

He also had hormonal imbalances, with a low-level autoimmune thyroid problem as well as very high levels of insulin from all the sugar he consumed. Both of these have been linked to depression.

He also had many food allergies, including gluten and dairy. Again, these are linked to depression in many cases.

So I did what I always do, which is the basis of treatment of all “diseases” -- take away the bad stuff and add the good stuff.

We got rid of gluten and dairy from his diet. We got him to stop taking the antibiotics that caused yeast overgrowth in his gut.

We got him off his junk food and sugar diet and encouraged him to eat whole foods.

I also helped balance his thyroid with a low dose of thyroid hormone, which helped his mood, fatigue, and cold intolerance. And I gave him nutritional supplements of vitamin D, B6, and B12, as well as a multivitamin and fish oil.

After two months, his energy, depression, and cold intolerance all got better. His acne, cankers sores, and cracks at the corner of his mouth went away. He lost 15 pounds and his carbohydrate cravings were gone.

So just as Dr. Gordon shows in his book “Unstuck,” this young man clearly didn’t have the disease “depression” but simply a number of imbalances that, once corrected, took care of all his physical and emotional symptoms.

If you are suffering from depression or just feel stuck, unhappy, or that you are not living a whole life, give yourself the gift of Dr. Gordon’s book, “Unstuck.”

You can get a copy by going to the website below:

==> http://www.ultrawellness.com/unstuck

And if you feel wonderful, which I hope you do, give it to someone you know who will thank you for this gift of life.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Do you suffer from “depression” or other emotional symptoms?

What steps have you taken to address this imbalance?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

Why Food Allergies May Be Making You Sick

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:00:31 -0400

Could you be allergic to specific foods and not even know it?

Could a hidden allergic response to food be responsible for depression, ADHD, obesity, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, joint pains, arthritis, and many other common conditions that resist treatment by conventional approaches?

Nowhere in medicine is there more controversy, superstition, confusion, and zealotry than there is surrounding the subject of food allergies and illness.

Conventional allergists and immunologists generally believe that the only connection between food and allergy is through what we call a Type 1 hypersensitivity, IgE mediated response.

That’s what happens when you eat a peanut, shrimp, or other allergen and get hives, asthma, or a swollen tongue. This type of reaction can be fatal and requires a shot of epinephrine to prevent you from dying.

I remember a little two-year-old boy with such an allergy who came to the emergency room when I practiced medicine in Idaho with a face so swollen that it was tight and white because of all the swelling. He almost died.

Scary indeed.

But that is not the type of allergy I am going to talk about here. I’m talking about the same allergy I have been talking about for years and trying to explain in my blogs. It is the type of allergy that makes you crave foods, gain weight, feel tired, and suffer “brain fog.”

It is also the type of allergy connected to many chronic diseases -- but mostly ignored by conventional medicine.

However, a growing body of research helps us understand this intimate relationship between the gut, food, and illness. (1, 2, 3)

I am talking about Type 2 delayed hypersensitivity or the IgG mediated response.

Certainly, conventional medicine has historically recognized that some foods cause harm, and most doctors have, at some point in their careers, recommended avoiding certain foods to treat common conditions.

Yet many of the recommendations embraced by conventional medicine -- from low-fat diets to prevent heart disease to bland diets to treat ulcers to low-salt diets to treat high blood pressure -- have now been relegated to the pile of unnecessary or harmful advice the medical profession once gave.

While conventional medicine once embraced ideas like these -- ideas that ultimately turned out to be relatively useless -- it has, ironically, resisted the concept that changing your diet can prevent disease and be used as a tool to treat illness, often with profound results in cases where no other good treatments exist.

The need to recognize the role of diet as THE most effective tool for the treatment in disease cannot be overstated. If I could pick only one “drug” to treat disease, I would choose food. Not only because it is safer than most pharmaceuticals, but also because it works faster and better than anything else on the market.

The place where we can most easily see the true power of food as medicine lies in the exact domain where current medical practice is weakest -- in the chronic immune, hormonal, and mood problems and degenerative diseases like cancer, heart disease, and dementia that afflict modern civilization in epidemic proportions.

One of the major contributing factors to many of these chronic illnesses are IgG food sensitivities.

People can become allergic to the foods they eat. When your gut is exposed to stress of any kind (from emotional stress to environmental toxins to the high level of antibiotics and other medications prescribed to so many people today) it is weakened.

Under continued stress your intestinal lining (which is only one-cell layer thick) can be damaged. In medicine we call this “increased intestinal permeability”. When this happens, undigested food particles actually leak through your gut lining into your body.

Just underneath this sensitive gut lining lies 60 percent of your immune system. It “sees” these undigested food particles as foreign molecules that could potentially hurt your system.

So it does what it is designed to do, it attacks them!

The result is that you become allergic to the foods you eat. You don’t develop the kind of allergy that could kill you (the IgE mediated response), but you can develop a seemingly more minor food sensitivity that causes a vast array of symptoms like weight gain, fatigue, brain fog, depression, and many others.

These are IgG food allergies. And they are rampant in today’s world.

Lately, I have been wondering why I see so many patients with these food allergies.

I think it is because we are eating food that stresses our bodies out!

==> The Stress of Our Food

While thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions can trigger a stress response, so can any physical or chemical insult. One of the biggest stress triggers can be the food we eat.

Most of us think of food as just calories. But new findings make it clear that what you put in your body is much more than just energy. The quality and type of food directly influences your genes and the stress response.

“Xenohormesis: The Attack of the Foreign Molecules in Food!”

In his movie “Supersize Me,” Morgan Spurlock ate three fast food meals a day for one month. Most of us recognize that eating a lot of fried, processed food, full of trans fat, high-fructose corn syrup, and calories will make us gain weight, promote heart disease and diabetes, and even give us fatty livers.

But what struck me the most was not that his cholesterol or blood sugar went up, but that his personality changed. He became aggressive, depressed, restless, and foggy and only felt “good” when he was eating the food. He became “addicted” to the food and felt “drugged.”

The explanation for this may be that our current food supply -- which is genetically modified or engineered, grown in depleted soils fertilized with petrochemicals, shipped in boxes across thousands of miles, and filled with antibiotic-, hormone-pumped livestock or farmed fish that is fed grain rather than the grasses or algae that are their native foods -- can send the wrong signals to our bodies. (4)

Our cells see these foods, which are a far cry from what we evolved to eat, as foreign. “What’s this?” our cells say, “Something foreign? Something dangerous? Let’s get in gear by activating the stress response.”

When the body’s stress response is activated by these “foreign” molecules in food it is called xenohormesis. The concept of xenohormesis (5) describes the effect of foreign molecules on our biology. They produce a stress response, triggering the whole cascade of stress-related cellular signals that makes us sick. Essentially, they create IgG food sensitivities like those I described above.

This causes obesity, illness, and brain dysfunction.

In fact, it appears there is a close connection between the obesity epidemic we are seeing, the growing problem of chronic illness, the epidemic of ADHD and behavior problems in children, and the increase in these food allergies. (6)

Not only do we need to think of the nutrients in our food, but we also need to think about the quality of our food.

Are there “stress” molecules in our food? What kind of information does the food we eat send to our bodies?

The old idea that food is simply a method for delivering energy in the form of calories is giving way to a new model of food -- food as information.

Our evolutionary adaptation to a particular diet (7) has perhaps set the conditions that alter gene expression patterns to trigger illness, rather than support health when our bodies are placed in the context of an evolutionarily unfamiliar landscape of nutrient-poor fast food, increasing sedentary behavior, and incessant stress.

RD Laing wrote, “Insanity is a sane response to an insane world.” (8) Maybe disease is a normal response to a diseased world -- and a toxic diet.

As a species, we evolved eating a complex, unrefined wild diet consisting of a wide variety of plant and animal foods rich in phytonutrients, fiber, and omega-3 fatty acids. Therefore our genes express themselves properly when we eat these foods, sending out messages of vital health.

Today, our unhealthy diet triggers different and diseased patterns of gene expression – one that leads to the epidemic of chronic illness we are now seeing.

The USDA reports that the top nine foods eaten by Americans are whole cow’s milk, 2 percent milk, processed American cheese, white bread, white flour, white rolls, refined sugar, colas, and ground beef.

All of these foods are foreign to our genome, which evolved on a Paleolithic diet.

This “mono diet” creates altered patterns of gene expression. This leads to disease, including food allergy or sensitivity. (9)

Dairy and gluten, for example, are two generally well-accepted food antigens responsible for a whole array of complex diseases, including autoimmune diseases, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, hormone problems, and even neurologic and behavioral disorders. (10,11)

The bottom line is this ...

We have to develop a new framework for thinking about the relation of food, illness, and health.

==> Food is our greatest ally in helping to prevent and treat illness.

I have seen so many patients with chronic conditions get better with allergy elimination diets, including people with irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, migraines, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity, psoriasis, eczema, hives, arthritis, asthma, sinus problems, and even bed wetting.

We have to realize that food is both our worst enemy -- and greatest healer.

So try to do the following this summer:

2. Try an allergy elimination diet: Get rid of gluten and dairy for two weeks and see how you feel.

3. Try to eat only organic, unprocessed, local foods for a few weeks this summer.

4. Try buying food from the farmers’ market, or your local community supported agriculture projects.

Taking these steps may not only help you lose weight, but make you feel dramatically better in ways you never expected.

Now I’d like to hear from you ...

Have you been told you have food allergies?

Which foods give you the most problems?

How has an allergy elimination diet affected your symptoms?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

References

(1) Lindqvist U, Rudsander A IgA. antibodies to gliadin and coeliac disease in psoriatic arthritis. Rheumatology (Oxford). 2002 Jan;41(1):31-37.

(2) Hafstrom I, Ringertz B, Spangberg A., A vegan diet free of gluten improves the signs and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis: the effects on arthritis correlate with a reduction in antibodies to food antigens. Rheumatology (Oxford). 2001 Oct;40(10):1175-1179.

(3) Riordan AM, Rucker JT, Kirby GA, Hunter JO. Food intolerance and Crohn’s disease. Gut. 1994 Apr;35(4):571-572.

(4) Lamming DW, Wood JG, Sinclair DA.Small molecules that regulate lifespan: evidence for xenohormesis. Mol Microbiol. 2004 Aug;53(4):1003-9. Review.

(5) Yun AJ, Doux JD. Unhappy meal: how our need to detect stress may have shaped our preferences for taste. Med Hypotheses. 2007;69(4):746-51.

(6) Bazar KA, Yun AJ, Lee PY, Daniel SM, Doux JD. Obesity and ADHD may represent different manifestations of a common environmental oversampling syndrome: a model for revealing mechanistic overlap among cognitive, metabolic, and inflammatory disorders. Med Hypotheses. 2006;66(2):263-9. Review.

(7) Eaton SB, Eaton SB 3rd, Konner MJ. Paleolithic nutrition revisited: a twelve-year retrospective on its nature and implications, Eur J Clin Nutr. 1997 Apr;51(4):207-216.

(8) Laing R.D. The Divided Self – An Existential Study in Sanity & Madness. Pelican Books [1959 / 1965].

(9) Hunter JO, Food allergy – or enterometabolic disorder? Lancet. 1991 Aug 24;338(8765):495-496.

(10) Saukkonen T, Virtanen SM, Karppinen M. Significance of cow’s milk protein antibodies as risk factor for childhood IDDM: interactions with dietary cow’s milk intake and HLA-DQB1 genotype. Childhood Diabetes in Finland Study Group. Diabetologia. 1998 Jan;41(1):72-78.

(11) Farrell RJ, Kelly C Celiac Sprue, NEJM 2002 346 (3):180-188

Why Lead Poisoning May be Causing Your Health Problems

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:54:08 -0400

We are too heavy -- and I don’t mean overweight.

You see, we’re heavy with metals, not fat. Nearly 40 percent of us have toxic levels of lead in our bodies. And we don’t even know it.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have symptoms.

You may have headaches, insomnia, irritability, a low sex drive, or tremors.

You may have mood problems, nausea, depression, memory difficulties, trouble concentrating, poor coordination, or even constipation.

Yet most of us attribute these symptoms to other problems. We don’t recognize that they may be caused by lead poisoning.

I just returned from a medical conference on heavy metals and health. Although I have been treating toxicity from heavy metals for more than a decade (including in myself) I was surprised to hear about new research that has been completely ignored by the media.

A study published in 2006 in the conservative medical journal Circulation, for example, should have been on the front page of the New York Times.

Let me tell you about why the study was so important -- and why you probably won’t hear about it from your doctor.

Researchers measured the blood lead levels of 13,946 adults who were part of the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They were recruited from 1988 to 1994 and were then followed up on for up to 12 years. The goal of the study was to track what diseases people developed and why they died. (1)

Now, it’s important to remember that since lead was removed from gasoline and house paint several decades ago, the average person’s blood lead level has dropped dramatically.

But our levels of lead are still a great deal higher than those of people who lived before the industrial age. That’s because we continue to be exposed to lead in our soil and water, as well as from our own bones, where it is stored once it’s introduced into our system.

Fifty years ago, the average blood levels of lead were about 40 micrograms/deciliter. The level considered “safe” by the government has continued to fall and is now considered less than 10 micrograms/deciliter.

But this new study and others like it question the idea that ANY level of this toxic metal is safe.

In this study, researchers found that a blood level of lead over 2 micrograms/deciliter (that’s 2, not 10 or 40) caused dramatic increases in heart attacks, strokes, and death.

In fact, after controlling for all other risk factors, including cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, and inflammation, the researchers found that the risk of death from all causes in people with a lead level that high increased by 25 percent, deaths from heart disease increased by 55 percent, risk of heart attacks increased by 151 percent, and risk of stroke increased by 89 percent.

Want to know what’s even more remarkable?

Nearly 40 percent of all Americans are estimated to have blood levels of lead high enough to cause these problems.

This is potentially a greater risk for heart disease than cholesterol!

But this is not the first indication of problems with lead.

A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that high blood pressure in postmenopausal women is strongly correlated to blood lead levels.

Why is that?

Well, during menopause, bones break down faster -- releasing stored lead and injuring blood vessels, which leads to high blood pressure. (2)

And high lead may also be responsible for kidney failure as well.

A study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that using chelation therapy with EDTA to reduce lead levels in patients with kidney failure could prevent further loss of kidney function, save billions in healthcare costs, and eliminate the need for dialysis in millions of people. (3)

Wow! Digest that. Chelation therapy saves lives and billions of dollars. So why isn’t your doctor offering this as standard treatment?

The answer is this: As I have said many times, doctors don’t learn two of the most important things in medical school: how to help people improve their nutrition and how to deal with environmental toxins.

And not only is lead linked to heart disease, high blood pressure, and kidney failure, it is also connected to the epidemic of children with ADHD, developmental and learning problems, and autism.

Even though the “safe” blood level of lead has been set as 10 micrograms/deciliter, recent studies show that the greatest drop-off in IQ scores in children occurs in those who have lead levels between just 1 and 10 micrograms/deciliter. (4)

This is particularly troubling, because more than 10 percent of poor and inner city children have lead exposure levels higher than 10 micrograms/deciliter!

I recently treated a young boy with extremely high lead levels who had Asperger’s syndrome, severe ADHD, and violent behavior.

He likely got the lead from his mother, who had very low vitamin D levels and had developed osteoporosis, which released a lot of lead from her bones during pregnancy. This lead got into the boy’s body in the womb across his mother’s placenta.

Thankfully, we got rid of his lead over time through chelation and nutritional support. Doing so dramatically improved his attention, behavior, and social skills.

Lead is still found in our soil and water. We live in a sea of heavy metals. In areas with a history of industrial pollution, people track lead into their homes from contaminated soil. Today, regular house dust often contains 17 times the level of lead it once did.

In Washington, DC, the water was so contaminated with lead recently that the government had to provide free water filters for everyone there. Up to 20 percent of the city’s tap water may be contaminated.

So what can you do about this?

Find out if you are lead-toxic. The easiest test is a simple blood lead test. Be sure the lab can measure VERY low levels of lead accurately. Anything higher than 2 micrograms/deciliter is toxic and should be treated.
Unfortunately, the blood test only checks for current or ongoing exposures, so you must also take a heavy metal challenge test with DMSA, EDTA, or DMPS, which can be administered by a doctor trained in heavy metal detoxification. (See www.functionalmedicine.org or www.acam.org to find a qualified doctor.) Consider undergoing chelation therapy if your lead levels are high.
Reduce your exposures by having a “no shoes in the house” policy.
Test your water for heavy metals.
Buy a carbon or reverse osmosis water filter for your drinking water.
Take 1,000 milligrams of buffered ascorbic acid (vitamin C) a day, this helps remove lead from the body.
Take 2,000 to 4,000 IU of vitamin D3 a day to prevent your bones from releasing lead into your bloodstream.

Even though many of us have toxic levels of lead in our bodies, there is a lot we can do to prevent it and treat it.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Do you suffer from any of the symptoms of lead toxicity?

Have you been tested for lead poisoning? Do you plan to be?

Which of the other steps have you tried?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

REFERENCES:

(1) Menke A, Muntner P, Batuman V, Silbergeld EK, Guallar E. Blood lead below 0.48 micromol/L (10 microg/dL) and mortality among US adults. Circulation. 2006 Sep 26;114(13):1388-94.

(2) Nash D, Magder L, Lustberg M, Sherwin RW, Rubin RJ, Kaufmann RB, Silbergeld, Blood lead, blood pressure, and hypertension in perimenopausal and postmenopausal women. JAMA. 2003 Mar 26;289(12):1523-32.

(3) Lin JL, Lin-Tan DT, Hsu KH, Yu CC Environmental lead exposure and progression of chronic renal diseases in patients without diabetes. N Engl J Med. 2003 Jan 23;348(4):277-86

(4) Canfield RL, Henderson CR Jr, Cory-Slechta DA, Cox C, Jusko TA, Lanphear BP.Intellectual impairment in children with blood lead concentrations below 10 microg per deciliter. N Engl J Med. 2003 Apr 17;348(16):1517-26.

Why Eating a Low-Fat Diet Doesn’t Lead to Weight Loss

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:24:54 -0400

Is being heavy in your genes?

Not so fast.

Obesity genes account for only 5 percent of all weight problems.

But what about the other 95 percent of weight problems?

And why are we seeing such an epidemic of obesity in America today? It is the single most important public health issue facing us.

If genes do not account for obesity, is our high-fat diet to blame?

Wrong again!

But fat contains 9 calories per gram, so shouldn’t eating more fat (and more calories) make you gain weight?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, pioneering research by Harvard Medical School’s David Ludwig shows us the real reason that low-fat diets do not work -- and reveals the true cause of obesity for most Americans.

He correctly points out that careful review of all the studies on dietary fat and body fat -- such as those done by Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health -- have shown that dietary fat is not a major determinant of body fat.

Let me repeat that.

==> Dietary fat is not a major determinant of body fat.

And that’s not all.

The Women’s Health Initiative, which is the largest clinical trial of diet and body weight, found that 50,000 women on low fat diets had no significant weight loss.

Another study looked at people who followed four different diets for 12 months -- and found no dramatic differences between those who followed low-fat, low-carb, and very- low-carb diets.

You’ve got to wonder: Why aren’t we seeing any significant effects from these various diets?

The main reason, Dr. Ludwig suggests, is that we are looking for answers in the wrong place.

==> The future of treating obesity and weight is in personalizing our approach.

This is the approach I wrote about in my book “UltraMetabolism.” It’s called nutrigenomics. It is the science of how we can use food to influence our genes and personalize our approach to health.

Let me explain how I diagnose and treat obesity.

Over the last 15 years, I have tested almost every one of my patients using a test that most doctors never use. In fact, it is even harder to find in the research, except in this pioneering work by Dr. Ludwig.

This test is cheap, easy to do, and it is probably the most important test for determining your overall health, the causes for obesity, and your risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and premature aging.

Yet it is a test your healthcare provider probably does not perform, does not know how to interpret, and often thinks is useless.

Thankfully, Dr. Ludwig’s research brings this critical method of diagnosing the cause of obesity and disease to the forefront.

You see, in two recent studies, he found that the main factor that determines changes in body weight and waist circumference (also known as belly fat) is how your body responds to any type of sugar, carbohydrate, or glucose load.

The most important test to determine this doesn’t measure your blood sugar or cholesterol.

It tests your insulin level.

You have to check it after drinking a sugary beverage that contains 75 grams of glucose.

This test has shown me more about my patients than any other test. It helps me personalize and customize a nutritional approach for them.

And its usefulness is now being borne out in this research by Dr. Ludwig and his colleagues.

In one study, for example, Dr. Ludwig and his colleagues followed 276 people for six years.

They performed a glucose tolerance test at the beginning of the study and looked at insulin concentrations 30 minutes after the people consumed a sugary drink. This gave the researchers a rough estimate of whether they were high- or low insulin secretors.

During the course of the study, they looked at the people’s body weight and waist circumference or belly fat.

They found that those who were the highest insulin secretors had the biggest change in weight and belly fat compared to the low insulin secretors. And people who were high insulin secretors and ate low-fat diets did even worse.

This makes perfect sense -- because insulin does two things:

It stimulates hunger.
It is a fat storage hormone, which makes you store belly fat.

So, after you eat a high-carbohydrate meal, your insulin spikes and your blood sugar plummets -- making you very hungry.

That is why you crave more carbs, more sugar, and eat more the whole day.

Dr. Ludwig also found that the patients who ate a low glycemic load diet -- which lowers blood sugar and keeps insulin levels low -- had much higher levels of HDL “good” cholesterol and much lower levels of triglycerides.

It appears that the best way to address your cholesterol is not necessarily to eat a low-fat diet, but to eat a low glycemic load diet, which keeps your blood sugar even.

I highly recommend reviewing Dr. Ludwig’s research on PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s database, to learn more about his exciting and pioneering work.

I also encourage you to read his book, “Ending the Food Fight.” It is the first and only roadmap for dealing with our exploding childhood obesity epidemic.

Finally, I encourage you to ask your physician to do a glucose tolerance test and measure your insulin and blood sugar at 30 minutes, one hour, and two hours to get the best picture of your insulin profile.

If you are a high insulin secretor and your insulin goes over 30 at a half hour, one hour, or two hours, you produce too much insulin and need to be sure you are staying on a low glycemic load, whole-foods, unprocessed diet, which I describe in “UltraMetabolism”.

The bottom line?

If you want to fit into your jeans, you have to fit into your genes.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

What seems to trigger weight gain for you?

How have different diets worked for you?

Have you ever had you insulin and blood sugar tested?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

References:

Ebbeling CB, Leidig MM, Feldman HA, Lovesky MM, Ludwig DS. Effects of a low-glycemic load vs low-fat diet in obese young adults: a randomized trial. JAMA. 2007 May 16;297(19):2092-102

Chaput JP, Tremblay A, Rimm EB, Bouchard C, Ludwig DS.
A novel interaction between dietary composition and insulin secretion: effects on weight gain in the Quebec Family Study. Am J Clin Nutr. 2008 Feb;87(2):303-9

Are You Also Being Deceived into Eating Fake Frankenfoods?

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:07:20 -0400

Should we buy food with health claims on the label?

These days, we are seeing more and more health claims that go beyond the usual. These include “trans fat-free,” “gluten-free,” “heart healthy,” and foods spiked with vitamins, such as my new favorite: Diet Coke Plus, with vitamins and minerals.

We see whole-grain Pop Tarts and Tyson chicken with misleading labels such as “raised without antibiotics.” We see natural sweeteners called Sweet Fiber. We see whole-grain Cheerios that are still full of sugar.

Now you can get “health food” like salads at McDonald’s, but with salad dressings that have more calories than a Big Mac.

And we also see antioxidant-spiked junk food and ginkgo-spiked energy drinks.

What should we make of all these marketing claims? Do they provide any benefit?

In Michael Pollan’s new book “In Defense of Food,” he rails against the notion of “nutritionism,” the idea that we can single out nutrients from whole foods, add them back to processed food, or take them as supplements, and achieve health benefits.

His point is very well taken.

We must be very careful to avoid the marketing ploys of the food industry, which wants to trick us into eating more junk food by putting it in friendlier packaging.

Make no mistake.

These foods are still wolves in sheep’s clothing.

We need to be very wary of any food that comes in a package, box, or a can. That is not to say that there are not some good whole foods that are available in boxes, packages, or cans.

However, most of what is available in the marketplace is simply not real food.

A recent patient of mine is a food scientist who works for a large food industry company. His job is to invent and create new foods in the laboratory by mixing food and chemicals to create certain tastes and flavors that mimic real food or that stimulate appetite and satisfy our need for various tastes.

Think of these as “Frankenfoods.”

My patient became quite sick from handling these compounds and chemicals everyday. I have been working hard to get him to not only stop eating processed food, but also to stop playing with it.

He wore a funny T-shirt to my office, which listed the top 10 reasons to major in food science, a scientific discipline that teaches people how to invent foods for the food industry.

According to his shirt, here are the top 10 reasons to become a food scientist:

Eat ice cream for breakfast and get credit for it.
We are in it for the dough.
Grocery shopping is research instead of a chore.
We get to eat the results of our research project.
Because hairnets are a fashion statement.
Because we know what is really in your hot dogs.
Not only do we know how to drink beer, we can make it.
Cheese, yogurt, and buttermilk -- who says we are not cultured?
As long as you are eating, we will be working.
We have not stopped playing with our food and now we are playing with yours.

He gave me an industry trade journal called “Food Business News,” which I found very enlightening.

I was shocked to read the very careful and deliberate marketing ploys used to gain a foothold in our increasingly health conscious market.

The advice to the food industry was clear: Modify packaging and ingredients in food just slightly to give the impression of health, while continuing to provide poor-quality, nutrient-poor, calorie-dense foods.

For example, there was an ad for Food Ingredient Solutions, a company that provides new types of food coloring. This allows manufacturers to color junk food with natural pigments, which can replace the artificial coloring used in tablets, coatings, pan confections, rubs, sauces, and more.

Who are they fooling?

Tyson Foods cleverly labels their chicken as “produced without antibiotics that impact antibiotic resistance in humans,” meaning they did use antibiotics -- just not ones that cause problems in humans.

Conagra, which has been losing money, is creating a food line called Healthy Choice Steamers.

Another article documented a company called Fitch Ratings who said that innovation in the food industry will continue in areas of “perceived” health and wellness, convenience, and ethnic products.

Read that carefully.

“Perceived” health and wellness -- not actual health and wellness.

As long as you make people think they are getting something healthy, that is good enough -- even if it is the same old junk food.

Other new junk foods include allergy-free junk foods and energy drinks. There was also an article about Lean Pockets. This company now offers whole-grain pocket sandwiches, which are still full of chemicals and processed food, but now have a few more flecks of fiber to give the illusion of a health food.

There is even an ad for something called Vegi Pure, a compound designed for cholesterol reduction that puts plant phytosterols in sugary junk food!

So what’s the bottom line?

As I have always said, if it has a label, do not eat it. And as Michael Pollan says, “Eat food [meaning real, whole food]. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

We have to be very cautious as consumers to recognize label claims for health benefits on processed foods, which sprinkle miniscule, non-therapeutic amounts of healthful ingredients into otherwise poor-quality, high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods, giving us the illusion that we are doing something good for ourselves.

I encourage you to eat food that comes from a farmer’s field and not a food chemist’s laboratory -- and you will not have to worry about all these functional food claims.

Here is what to eat:

Whole, real food such as vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, lean animal protein like small wild fish and poultry, and whole omega-3 eggs.
Small amounts of grass-fed, antibiotic- and hormone-free beef or lamb.

That is it.

Food scientists tend to make us think that we need all these special ingredients in foods to stay healthy.

Bu they are just extracting them from real, whole foods -- so why not start with the whole food in the first place?

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Have you sampled any of these “Frankenfoods”?

What did you think of them?

Why do you think the food industry is trying to make junk food seem healthier?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

How Dietary Supplements Can Save You Thousands

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:20:22 -0400

Spending just pennies a day on healthcare can reduce our expenditures by $24 billion over five years.

Sound crazy? It’s true.

New research from the Lewin Group has shown that spending pennies a day on a few key nutritional supplements can dramatically reduce sickness and chronic disease -- and greatly decrease healthcare expenditures as a result.

How did they come to this conclusion? And why haven’t we heard about it?

The Lewin Group looked only at rigorous scientific studies that documented the benefits of nutritional supplements. They used the Congressional Budget Office’s accounting methods to determine the economic impact of supplements. And they kept their analysis specifically to Medicare patients and women of childbearing age.

Although nutritional therapies can help a broad range of illnesses, the group only looked at four supplements and disease combinations because of the rigor and validity of the scientific evidence available for these nutrients and diseases.

While there are many other beneficial nutritional therapies that have been proven helpful in studies, the ones in this particular study are only those that are unquestionable, beyond scientific doubt, well-accepted, and proven to help.

Yet they are also under-used and not generally recommended by healthcare providers.

The study looked at:

Calcium and vitamin D and their effect on osteoporosis
Folic acid and its ability to prevent birth defects
Omega-3 fatty acids and their benefits for heart disease
Lutein and zeaxanthin and their benefit in preventing major age-related blindness, or macular degeneration

Let me review these in more detail.

Most of us hear the refrain from our physicians that nutritional supplements just produce expensive urine, that you do not know what you are getting, or that there is no scientific proof to support their claims.

My advice to these doctors is to do their scientific homework.

Let’s start by looking at calcium and vitamin D.

First, I want to point out the vitamin D research referred to in The Lewin Group study is older research. Newer research, as I have discussed in my vitamin D blogs, suggests that higher doses of vitamin D3, such as 1,000 to 2,000 IU a day, have even greater benefit.

Based on that older research, the study’s authors determined that providing Medicare-age citizens with 1,200 mg of calcium and 400 IU of vitamin D would result in reduced bone loss and fewer hip fractures. The researchers estimated these supplements could prevent more than 776,000 hospitalizations for hip fractures over five years and save $16.1 billion.

Next let’s look at omega-3 fats. Omega-3 fatty acids help prevent cardiac arrhythmias, improve cell membrane function, reduce inflammation, lower cholesterol and blood pressure, and have many other benefits.

The Lewin Group found that giving the Medicare population about 1,800 mg of omega-3 fats a day would prevent 374,000 hospitalizations from heart disease over five years. The Medicare savings from reduced hospital and physician expenses would be $3.2 billion.

This is pretty convincing data, but it doesn’t stop there. The Lewin Group also analyzed the economic effects of lutein and zeaxanthin.

Lutein and zeaxanthin are carotenoids that are found in yellow and orange vegetables. I recommend taking them in combination with the hundreds of other carotenoids found in yellow and orange foods.

Taken as supplements, these have been shown to treat macular degeneration, which is the loss of central vision, a major reason people over age 65 require nursing home care.

The study found that taking 6 to 10 mg of lutein and zeaxanthin daily would help 190,000 individuals avoid dependent care and would result in $3.6 billion in savings over five years.

Lastly the Lewin Group looked at the effects of taking folic acid. 44 million women of childbearing age are not taking folic acid.

If only 11.3 million of them began taking just 400 mcg of folic acid on a daily basis before conception, we could prevent birth defects called neural tube defects in 600 babies and save $344,700,000 in lifetime healthcare costs for these children. Over 5 years, this would account for $1.4 billion in savings.

Taken together, these four simple interventions, which cost pennies a day, could produce a combined savings of $24 billion over five years. This does not even include benefits to people younger than 65 or any of the other benefits of nutritional supplementation, such as improved immunity, cognitive function, and mood.

In this study, the researchers were extremely strict and only looked at nutrient interventions that met three criteria.

The supplement had to produce a measurable physiological effect.
This physiological effect had to create a change in health status.
The researchers only looked at health problems where a change in health status is associated with a decrease in healthcare expenditures.

The Lewin Group’s study is intriguing. The economic impact of investing a few pennies a day in nutritional supplements is compelling.

But what’s downright frightening is that studies by the US Department of Health and Human Services prove that the typical American diet does not always provide a sufficient level of vitamins and minerals – meaning we are at greater risk for conditions like those outlined above.

Because of our consumption of low-nutrient, high-calorie foods that are highly processed, hybridized, genetically modified, shipped long distances, and grown in nutrient-depleted soils, many of us are nutritionally depleted.

In fact, a whopping 92 percent of us are deficient in one or more nutrients at the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) level, which is the minimum amount necessary to prevent deficiency diseases like rickets or scurvy -- diseases that are the result of not getting enough vitamins and minerals. The RDA standards do not necessarily outline the amount needed for optimal health.

What’s more, our government’s nutrient guidelines ignore the fact that many Americans, because of genetic variations and unique needs, may need higher doses of vitamins and minerals than the RDA.

Vitamin deficiency does not cause acute diseases such as scurvy or rickets, but they do cause what have been called “long-latency deficiency diseases.” These include conditions like blindness, osteoporosis, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, and more.

What all this adds up to is clear.

Nutritional supplements do not just make expensive urine.

Based on mounting evidence and confirmed by the Journal of the American Medical Association (1) and The New England Journal of Medicine (2), I strongly believe that we should all be taking certain basic supplements.

Here are the supplements I recommend for everyone:

A high-quality multivitamin and mineral. The multivitamin should contain mixed carotenoids, which include lutein and zeaxanthin as part of their mix, as well as at least 400 mcg of folate and a mixed B-complex vitamin.
Calcium-magnesium with at least 600 mg of calcium and 400 mg of magnesium. The calcium should be calcium citrate or chelated versions of minerals. Do not use calcium carbonate or magnesium oxide, which are cheap minerals that are poorly absorbed.
Vitamin D3, 1,000 to 2,000 IU a day (people who are deficient in vitamin D will need more).
Omega-3 fatty acids that contain the fats EPA and DHA, 1,000 to 2,000 mg a day.

The cost is low, the benefit is high, and the risk is non-existent for these nutritional supplements. Not only will you feel better, have better immune function, and improve your energy and brain function, but you will also prevent many problems down the road.

So, eat a healthy diet -- and take your nutritional supplements every day.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

What supplements do you take every day?

How does your doctor feel about nutritional supplements?

Which of these nutrients do you typically get from your diet?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

REFERENCES:

(1) Fairfield KM, Fletcher RH. Vitamins for Chronic Disease Prevention in Adults: Scientific Review. JAMA 287: 3116-3126.

(2) Willett WC, Stampfer MJ. What Vitamins Should I Be Taking, Doctor? N Engl J Med 345:1819.

Artificial Sweeteners Could Be Sabotaging Your Diet

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:27:55 -0400

There’s no doubt about it.

Artificial sweeteners cause obesity.

I always thought it was funny to see a very large person order a Big Mac, large fries -- and top it off with a Diet Coke. I also found it peculiar that I rarely saw thin people drinking diet sodas.

So I began to wonder if there could be a link between diet beverages or artificial sweeteners and obesity.

As I began to explore this notion, I discovered a number of different research findings that pointed to this very phenomenon.

First, our current obesity epidemic has coincided perfectly with the introduction of large amounts of artificial sweeteners into our food supply. Although we cannot say for sure that this means artificial sweeteners cause obesity, it certainly makes me wonder.

Next, a body of research indicates that just the thought or smell of food initiates a whole set of hormonal and physiologic responses that get the body ready for food.

This is familiar to us from Pavlov’s dog experiment, where he trained dogs to salivate by associating the ringing of a bell with the presentation of food. By doing this repeatedly, he eventually trained the dogs to salivate in anticipation of food simply by ringing the bell -- without any food at all.

Think of diet sodas and artificial sweeteners as ringing the bell for your physiology.

But why is that bad? And why is it even worse to ring the bell with artificial sweeteners and then not provide any sugar along with the bell?

What happens to the body?

Our brains know how to get our bodies ready for food. It is called the cephalic (for “head”) phase reflex. Your brain is preparing for food even before your fork or cup crosses your lips.

This allows you to anticipate and prepare for the arrival of nutrients in your intestinal tract, improves the efficiency of how your nutrients are absorbed, and minimizes the degree to which food will disturb your natural hormonal balance and create weight gain.

So in a way, your body is already preparing to regulate your energy balance, metabolism, weight, calorie burning, and many other things -- just by thinking about food.

Any sweet taste will signal your body that calories are on the way and trigger a whole set of hormonal and metabolic responses to get ready for those calories.

When you trick your body and feed it non-nutritive or non-caloric sweeteners, like aspartame, acesulfame, saccharin, sucralose, or even natural sweeteners like stevia, it gets confused.

And research supports this.

An exciting new study in the Journal of Behavioral Neuroscience has shown conclusively that using artificial sweeteners not only does not prevent weight gain, but induces a whole set of physiologic and hormonal responses that actually make you gain weight.

The researchers proved this by giving two different groups of rats some yogurt. One batch of yogurt was sweetened with sugar. The other was sweetened with saccharin.

They found that three major things happened over a very short period of time in the rats that were fed artificially sweetened yogurt.

First, the researchers found that the total food eaten over 14 days dramatically increased in the artificial sweetener group -- meaning that the artificial sweetener stimulated their appetite and made them eat more.

Second, these rats gained a lot more weight and their body fat increased significantly.

And third (and this is very concerning) was the change in core body temperature of the rats fed the artificial sweeteners. Their core body temperature decreased, meaning their metabolism slowed down.

So not only did the rats eat more, gain more weight, and have more body fat, but they actually lowered their core body temperature and slowed their metabolism.

As I have said many times before, all calories are not created equal.

The most astounding finding in the study was that even though the rats that ate the saccharin-sweetened yogurt consumed fewer calories overall than the rats that ate the sugar-sweetened yogurt, they gained more weight and body fat.

These findings turn the conventional view that people will consume fewer calories by drinking artificially sweetened drinks or eating artificially sweetened foods on its head.

Despite their name, these are not “diet” drinks. They are actually “weight gain” drinks!

We’re surrounded by low-calorie, “health conscious foods” and diet soft drinks that contain sweeteners. As a result, the number of Americans who consume products that contain sugar-free sweeteners grew from 70 million in 1987 to 160 million in 2000.

At the same time, the incidence of obesity in the United States has doubled from 15 percent to 30 percent across all age groups, ethnic groups, and social strata. And the number of overweight Americans has increased from about 30 percent to over 65 percent of the population. The fastest growing obese population is children.

My bottom line?

Avoid artificial sweeteners, including aspartame, acesulfame, sucralose, sugar alcohols such as malitol and xylitol (pretty much anything that ends in “ol”), as well as natural artificial sweeteners like stevia.

Stop confusing your body. If you have a desire for something sweet, have a little sugar, but stay away from “fake” foods.

Eating a whole-foods diet that has a low glycemic load and is rich in phytonutrients and indulging in a few real sweet treats once in a while is a better alternative than tricking your body with artificial sweeteners -- which leads to wide scale metabolic rebellion and obesity.

So, put that teaspoon of sugar in your tea and enjoy!

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Do you use artificially sweetened products?

How have they affected your weight?

What sweet treats do you indulge in?

Has this finding taken you by surprise?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

REFERENCES:

Swithers SE, Davidson TL. A role for sweet taste: Calorie predictive relations in energy regulation by rats. Behav Neurosci. 2008 Feb;122(1):161-73.

Food as Medicine: Powerful New Drug Could be at the End of Your Fork

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:28:41 -0400

It shows that food is the most powerful “drug” we have not just to prevent, but also treat, cure, and reverse most chronic illnesses.

Unfortunately, most physicians did not learn the two most important things we need to know about in medical school -- nutrition and the role of the environment and toxins in our health.

My goal is to help my patients heal and get better and I have no particular allegiance to any type of treatment -- whether it is a drug, surgery, radiation, or new procedure.

I have at my disposal the best medicines and pharmaceutical treatments. I can send patients to the best surgeons and specialists anywhere in the world.

But time after time, I find the most powerful, fastest acting, and most dramatic results come from using food as our main medicine.

I use food for healing, not because I believe it is better to use natural treatments than to use drugs, but because it works better and only has positive side effects.

And I’m not alone.

This June, I will be giving the keynote speech on the history of nutrition and medicine at a course in Baltimore called “Food as Medicine,” sponsored by the Center for Mind Body Medicine.

You can find out more about this here:

http://www.ultrawellness.com/fam

This course breaks important ground in bringing nutritional science to healthcare professionals in a digestible, practical, hands-on format.

Dr. Jim Gordon, who was the chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, pioneered this course more than seven years ago. He was recently honored as one of the five pioneers of integrative medicine by the Bravewell Collaborative and has been a leader in mind-body medicine, nutrition, and healing for nearly 40 years.

Over the last seven years, he has trained hundreds of practitioners, including faculty from more than 50 medical schools, which are now including this knowledge of how to use food as medicine in their curriculum.

Clearly, things have changed.

I remember a food-related meeting years ago, which included the nutritionists, doctors, chefs, and owners of Canyon Ranch, where I worked. I made it very clear during that meeting that I believed the future of nutrition and the culinary arts must recognize the therapeutic value of food to heal chronic illnesses.

As soon as the words “food is medicine” left my lips, I was under attack.

The vehement response from the chief chef was that food is only about good taste, not good health, and that we were not the Mayo Clinic.

Fortunately, this antiquated view is changing.

More and more food services, restaurants, and other institutions are recognizing the healing power of food and are including healing foods as part of their offerings.

The “Food as Medicine” course addresses things that most practitioners never learn in medical school, such as the scientific basis of nutrition as a therapeutic tool, how we can eat in a sustainable way, and how the health of our planet has directly affected the health of our food and the health of our bodies.

The course stresses areas such as nutrigenomics, the idea that food is information that speaks to our genes and turns on messages that create health or disease.

It also explores the role of stress, nutrition, hormone balance, the health of our gut, and the importance of detoxification and food.

The course is based on the basic tenets of Functional Medicine but is broken down into simple, practical tools practitioners can use every day with their patients.

It addresses specific nutritional approaches for conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, ADD, asthma, allergies, autoimmune diseases, fibromyalgia, and adrenal, thyroid, and neurodegenerative problems. Practitioners are advised on the use of nutritional supplements and cutting edge laboratory tests.

All this is done in an experiential way that increases self-awareness and includes food demonstrations and organic meals. In fact, this year they are using The UltraMetabolism Cookbook as a source for the meals that are served during the course.

The faculty this year is outstanding.

They include:

James Joseph, a leading antioxidant researcher from Tufts University
Collin Fogarty Draper, an expert in nutrigenomics
David Ludwig, head of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School
Gerard Mullin, from John Hopkins Medical School
Michael Lumpkin, a professor at Georgetown University Medical School
Many other distinguished speakers

The course director is actually the nutrition director of The UltraWellness Center, Kathie Swift, who has been involved in creating and developing this course over the years.

Anybody interested in nutrition is welcome to come.

Any healthcare practitioner will benefit -- including physicians, osteopaths, medical school faculty, nurses, nurse practitioners, registered dietitians and nutritionists, physician assistants, community healthcare practitioners, psychologists, mental health professionals, and other health professionals.

According to Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the leading researchers in the world in nutrition, “It is time to end the confusion. ‘Food as Medicine’ presents the best current scientific evidence for physicians, nutritionists, and other health professionals who want to counsel patients and teach students.”

I encourage all of you to tell your healthcare practitioners about it -- and consider attending yourself. This course provides tools and information to use the most powerful weapon against disease in the 21st century, your fork.

You can find out more about this here:

http://www.ultrawellness.com/fam

Remember what Hippocrates said:

“Leave your potions in the chemist’s crucible if you can handle your patients with food.”

Now I’d like to hear from you…

How does your doctor view nutrition?

What experiences have you had by using food as medicine?

Do you plan to attend the conference?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

A 7-step Plan to Boost Your Low Thyroid and Metabolism

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:16:21 -0400

Last week, I told you about low thyroid function and how it affects more than 30 million women and 15 million men.

So why are we seeing such an epidemic of thyroid problems?

Well, chronic thyroid problems can be caused by many factors. These include environmental toxins such as pesticides, which act as hormone or endocrine disruptors and interfere with thyroid hormone metabolism and function.

In fact, one study found that as people lost weight they released pesticides from their fat tissue. (1)

This then interfered with their thyroid function and caused hypothyroidism. The toxins created a slow metabolism and prevented them from losing more weight.

This study highlights the importance of overall detoxification. It is quite a significant finding that shows exactly how toxins interfere with thyroid function.

Heavy metals such as mercury can also affect thyroid function. I see many people with chronic hypothyroidism and other thyroid problems because mercury interferes with normal thyroid function.

The other big factor that interferes with thyroid function is chronic stress.

There is an intimate interaction between stress hormones and thyroid function. The more stress you are under, the worse your thyroid functions.

Any approach to correcting poor thyroid function must address the effects of chronic stress and provide support to the adrenal glands.

The next major factor that affects thyroid function is chronic inflammation. The biggest source of this chronic inflammation is gluten, the protein found in wheat, barely, rye, spelt, and oats.

Gluten is a very common allergen that affects about 10 to 20 percent of the population. This reaction occurs mostly because of our damaged guts, poor diet, and stress.

I also think eating so-called Frankenfoods, such as hybridized and genetically modified grains with very strange proteins, makes us sick.

Our bodies say, “What’s this? Must be something foreign. I’d better create antibodies to this, fight it, and get rid of it.”

This chronic inflammatory response interferes with thyroid function -- and contributes to the epidemic of inflammatory diseases in the developed world.

Lastly, nutritional deficiencies play a big role in thyroid dysfunction. These include deficiencies of iodine, vitamin D, omega-3 fats, selenium, zinc, vitamin A, and the B vitamins.

There are so many reasons for low thyroid function, yet I have seen lots of patients with this problem who were just ignored by their doctors.

==> So what’s the solution?

One young female patient of mine had more than 30 percent body fat and was unable to change her body, no matter how hard she worked. She ate perfectly, exercised with a trainer every day -- and her body still wouldn’t budge.

She also had a slightly depressed mood and other vague symptoms.

So I treated her with a low dose of Armour Thyroid, which is a natural thyroid replacement.

What happened?

Well, she not only lost 20 pounds and improved her body composition, but her mood improved and all her other symptoms went away.

How did I know she had low thyroid function?

Once I have asked about symptoms, done a physical exam, and considered all the potential causes of thyroid problems, I do the right tests.

Most doctors just check something called the thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), which doesn’t give a full picture of the thyroid. In fact, even the interpretation of this test is incorrect most of the time.

The newer guidelines of the American College of Endocrinology consider anybody with a TSH level over 3.0 as hypothyroid. Most doctors think that only anything over 5 or 10 is worth treating.

Unfortunately, this leaves millions suffering unnecessarily.

There are also other tests, including free T3 and free T4 and thyroid antibodies, which are essential.

I also look for associated problems such as gluten intolerance, food allergies, and heavy metals, as well as deficiencies of vitamin D, selenium, vitamin A, zinc, and omega-3 fats.

There are many things to consider in a careful approach to hypothyroidism.

It is one of the most common problems I see, and treating it properly makes one of the biggest differences in my patients’ quality of life.

Unfortunately, by using the old guidelines and thinking, conventional medicine misses millions who suffer with hypothyroidism.

In fact, in one study, researchers tested everybody who walked through the gates of a county fair with conventional thyroid testing. They found that according to even conservative conventional standards, half of all the people who had hypothyroidism were undiagnosed, untreated, and suffering.

So I encourage you to take the following steps:

Make a thorough inventory of any of the symptoms that I mentioned in last week’s blog to see if you might suffer from hypothyroidism.
Get the right thyroid tests including TSH, free T3, free T4, TPO, and anti-thyroglobulin antibodies.
Check for celiac disease with a celiac panel.
Consider heavy metal toxicity.
Check your vitamin D level.

Once you have confirmed that a sluggish thyroid is contributing to your symptoms, the good news is that there are many, many, many things you can do to help correct thyroid problems.

I have developed a seven-step plan to address hypothyroidism:

Identify and treat the underlying causes of hypothyroidism, like food allergies, gluten, heavy metals, nutritional deficiencies, and stress.
Support your thyroid with optimal nutrition, including foods that contain iodine, zinc, omega-3 fats, selenium, and more.
Eliminate adrenal exhaustion and minimize stress by engaging in a comprehensive stress management program.
Engage in thyroid stimulating exercise, which boosts thyroid function.
Use supplements to help enhance thyroid function, including all the nutrients needed for proper thyroid metabolism and function.
Use saunas and heat to eliminate stored toxins, which interfere with thyroid function.
Use thyroid hormone replacement therapy to help support your thyroid gland.

I believe a comprehensive approach is needed to address chronic thyroid issues and to diagnose them. Unfortunately, most of the options for healing by conventional care are quite limited and only provide a partial solution. But by following my seven-step plan you can achieve optimal health and UltraWellness.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

If you have low thyroid function, how was it diagnosed?

Which of these steps have you tried to treat it?

How have they helped?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

REFERENCES

(1) Pelletier C, Imbeault P, Tremblay A. Energy balance and pollution by organochlorines and polychlorinated biphenyls. Obes Rev. 2003 Feb;4(1):17-24. Review.

Hypothyroidism - How Your Thyroid Can Make You Sick, Tired and Overweight…

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:04:59 -0400

Are you one of the 30 million women and 15 million men who have a chronic medical problem that is both under-diagnosed and under-treated?

Are you suffering from vague symptoms that you think are normal parts of life, such as fatigue, feeling sluggish in the morning, and having trouble with your memory, concentration, or focus?

Do you have dry skin or fluid retention?

Is your sex drive not what it used to be?

Are your hands and feet cold all the time?

Is your hair thinning, your voice a little hoarse, your fingernails a little thick?

Is your cholesterol high?

Do you have trouble losing weight or have you gained weight recently?

Are you suffering from depression or anxiety?

Do you have really bad PMS or trouble getting pregnant?

Do you have muscle cramps and muscle pain or weakness?

Most of these symptoms aren’t severe enough to send you to the emergency room, but they do significantly affect your quality of life.

And most of us accept them as a normal part of our lives without really questioning them.

If you do go to see your doctor, he or she probably shrugs it off.

Yes, doctors are experts in acute illness. But they often fail miserably when it comes to addressing subtle changes in your body that affect the quality of your life.

According to conventional medicine, low sex drive is not necessarily a disease. Neither is a little dry skin or constipation or being tired most of the day.

But for you, those problems are significant.

So what causes them?

Often, they’re caused by a condition that goes undiagnosed in half of the 45 million people who have it.

==> It’s called hypothyroidism.

When you have hypothyroidism your overall metabolic gas pedal slows down because the master gland that controls it, your thyroid gland, is not functioning at full speed.

If your thyroid slows down, every other organ and system in your body slows down, including your brain, heart, gut, and muscles.

The thyroid hormone is like a master switch that turns on the genes that keep every cell running.

This is one of those gray areas in medicine, but doctors tend to think in black and white -- you have it or you don’t, sort of like being pregnant.

Well, you can’t just be a little bit pregnant, but you can be just a little bit hypothyroid.

And it can have a dramatic effect on the quality of your life.

Yet most doctors don’t view it that way.

This problem is further compounded by the conventional belief that you can diagnose hypothyroidism only through one blood test, called TSH, and that you only qualify for treatment if your blood level is over 5.0.

Unfortunately, this view ignores a whole group of people who have what we call subclinical hypothyroidism. It is called that because doctors have a hard time diagnosing it.

Subclinical hypothyroidism may trigger many low-grade symptoms, such as fatigue, trouble losing weight, mild depression, constipation, and more. Yet it causes just slight changes in your blood tests.

In fact, it often only shows up in tests that most doctors never perform.

==> Low Thyroid function may seem subtle, but it can have serious consequences.

You see, it doesn’t just make you a little tired -- it can lead to more serious problems, including heart attacks and diabetes.

I see this all the time in my medical practice: Patients come in with vague complaints that alone may not seem too significant.

But when you put them all together, they tell an important story.

I remember the story of one patient who was 73 years old. This woman came to see me because she had been to her doctor with complaints of fatigue, sluggishness, poor memory, slight depression, dry skin, constipation, and mild fluid retention.

Her doctor’s response?

“Well, what do you expect? You’re 73, and this is what 73 is supposed to feel like.”

But I just don’t believe that is true.

I believe that most of the symptoms of aging that we see are really symptoms of abnormal aging or dysfunction that is related to imbalances in our core body systems.

I have to be a medical detective to find clues where no one else is looking and put together a story about why a person is suffering. This gets them the answers and tools they need to get well.

In this case, we tested my patient for a number of things and found that she had a sluggish thyroid. She did not quite meet all the criteria of conventional medicine for hypothyroidism, but she had an autoimmune reaction that caused her thyroid to function poorly.

I had another patient who was a 28-year-old woman who was chronically constipated. She thought it was normal to go to the bathroom every three or four days.

She also felt quite tired in the mornings and had trouble getting going. She needed coffee every morning. And at night she had trouble staying up and being with her friends and being an active 28-year-old woman.

She thought that this was just sort of a constitutional problem and that she was stuck living like that. No one had diagnosed her sluggish thyroid.

But as soon as we supported her nutrition and eliminated her food allergens (particularly gluten), which create inflammation and interfere with thyroid function, she felt better.

Her constipation resolved, she was energetic in the morning, did not need her coffee, and was able to stay up until 11:00 or 12:00 at night without any fatigue or limitations.

This problem affects men and women of all ages.

And it is very common because of all the stressors in our environment, including toxins such as heavy metals and pesticides, nutritional deficiencies, and chronic stress, all of which interfere with our thyroid function.

It’s critical to understand that your thyroid is not just linked to energy and other symptoms that I described here.

It is the master metabolism hormone that controls the function and activity of almost every organ and cell in your body -- so when it is sluggish or slow, everything slows down.

==> There is good news.

There are clear ways to diagnose the problem as well as to treat it, with a comprehensive functional medicine approach that uses the concepts of UltraWellness.

The first step is to find out if you have any of the chronic symptoms of hypothyroidism or any of the diseases associated with hypothyroidism. Ask yourself if you have any of the following symptoms:

sluggishness in the morning
poor concentration and memory
low-grade depression
dry skin
hoarse voice
thinning hair
coarse hair
being very sensitive to cold and having cold hands and feet
low body temperature
muscle pain
weakness or cramps
low sex drive
fluid retention
high cholesterol

After I have asked my patients about all these symptoms, I do a physical examination for clues to a low-functioning thyroid.

I check for a low body temperature. Anything lower than 97.6 degrees F may be a sign of hypothyroidism.

I might also find fluid retention, a thick tongue, swollen feet, swollen eyelids, an enlarged thyroid gland, excessive earwax, a dry mouth, coarse skin, low blood pressure, or decreased ankle reflexes. I might even find that the outer third of the eyebrows is gone.

These are all physical signs that can be put together along with other symptoms to form a story of what is causing the problem.

Once I have done that, I perform specific blood tests that give me a full picture of thyroid problems.

Then I design a nutritional, lifestyle, and supplement regimen and hormone replacement plan as needed to help people regain their health.

That’s all for today.

In my next blog, I will discuss the major preventable -- and mostly hidden -- factors that slow your thyroid down. And I’ll tell you more about the special tests I use to diagnose thyroid problems, as well as how to specifically treat low thyroid function.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Do you suffer from any of the signs and symptoms mentioned here?

Have you been told you have low thyroid function?

How has your doctor responded to your concerns?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,
Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to
http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

Why Antidepressants Don’t Work for Treating Depression

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:28:16 -0500

Here’s some depressing recent medical news: Antidepressants don’t work.

What’s even more depressing?

The pharmaceutical industry and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have deliberately deceived us into believing that they DO work.

As a physician, this is frightening to me. Depression is among the most common problems seen in primary-care medicine and soon will be the second leading cause of disability in this country.

The study I’m talking about was published in a recent issue of “The New England Journal of Medicine.”

It found that drug companies selectively publish studies on antidepressants. They have published nearly all the studies that show benefit -- but almost none of the studies that show these drugs are ineffective. (1)

That warps our view of antidepressants, leading us to think that they do work. And it has fueled the tremendous growth in the use of psychiatric medications, which are now the second leading class of drugs sold, after cholesterol-lowering drugs.

And it’s even worse than it sounds, because the positive studies hardly showed benefit in the first place.

For example, 40 percent of people taking a placebo (sugar pill) got better, while only 60 percent taking the actual drug had improvement in their symptoms. Looking at it another way, 80 percent of people get better with just a placebo.

That leaves us with a big problem -- millions of depressed people with no effective treatments.

Let’s take a closer look at depression.

“Depression” is simply a label we give to people who have a depressed mood most of the time, have lost interest or pleasure in most activities, are fatigued, can’t sleep, have no interest in sex, feel hopeless and helpless, can’t think clearly, or can’t make decisions.

But that label tells us NOTHING about the cause of those symptoms.

In fact, there are dozens of causes of depression -- each one needing a different approach to treatment.

==> Depression is not one-size-fits-all.

But it’s very common.

Women have a 10 to 25 percent risk and men a 5 to 12 percent risk of developing severe major depression in their lifetime. (2)

One in ten Americans takes an antidepressant. The use of these drugs has tripled in the last decade, according to a report by the federal government. In 2006, spending on antidepressants soared by 130 percent.

But just because antidepressants are popular doesn’t mean they’re helpful.

Unfortunately, as we now see from this report in “The New England Journal of Medicine,” they don’t work and have significant side effects.

Most patients taking antidepressants either don’t respond or have only partial response.

In fact, success is considered just a 50 percent improvement in half of depressive symptoms. And this minimal result is achieved in less than half the patients taking antidepressants.

That’s a pretty dismal record. It’s only made worse by the fact that 86 percent of people taking antidepressants have one or more side effects, including sexual dysfunction, fatigue, insomnia, loss of mental abilities, nausea, and weight gain.

No wonder half the people who try antidepressants quit after 4 months.

Now I want to talk to you about the reasons why doctors and patients have been deceived by the “antidepressant hoax.”

==> Despite what we have been brainwashed to believe, depression is not a Prozac deficiency!

Drug companies are not forced to publish all the results of their studies. They only publish those they want to.

The team of researchers that reported their findings in “The New England Journal of Medicine” took a critical look at all the studies done on antidepressants, both published and unpublished.

They dug up some serious dirt.

The unpublished studies were not easy to find. The researchers had to search the FDA databases, call researchers, and hunt down hidden data under the Freedom of Information Act.

What they found was stunning.

After looking at 74 studies involving 12 drugs and over 12,000 people, they discovered that 37 of 38 trials with positive results were published, while only 14 of 36 negative studies were published.

And those that showed negative results were in the words of the researchers, “published in a way that conveyed a positive outcome.”

That means the results were twisted to imply the drugs worked when they didn’t.

This isn’t just a problem with antidepressants. It’s a problem with scientific research. Some drug companies even pay or threaten scientists to not publish negative results on their drugs.

So much for “evidence-based” medicine!

Most of the time, we only have the evidence that the drug companies want us to have. Both doctors and patients are deceived into putting billions of dollars into drug companies’ pockets, while leaving millions with the same health problems but less money.

The scientific trust is broken. What can we do?

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer.

But I do think Functional Medicine, on which my approach of UltraWellness is based, provides a more intelligent way of understanding the research.

Rather than using drugs to suppress symptoms, Functional Medicine helps us find the true causes of problems, including depression.

I see this in so many of the patients I have treated over the years. Just as the same things that make us sick also make us fat, the same things that make us sick also make us depressed.

==> Fix the causes of sickness -- and the depression takes care of itself.

Just look at these few cases:

A 23-year-old had been anxious and depressed most of her life and spent her childhood and adolescence on various cocktails of antidepressants.

Turns out, she suffered from food allergies that made her depressed. Food allergies cause inflammation, and studies now show inflammation in the brains of depressed people.

In fact, researchers are studying powerful anti-inflammatory drugs used in autoimmune disease such as Enbrel for the treatment of depression.

So after she eliminated her IgG or delayed food allergies, her depression went away, she got off her medication -- and she lost 30 pounds as a side effect!

Here’s another.

A 37-year-old executive woman struggled for more than a decade with treatment-resistant depression (meaning that drugs didn’t work), fatigue, and a 40-pound weight gain.

We found she had very high levels of mercury. Getting the mercury out of her body left her happy, thin, and full of energy.

A 49-year-old man with severe lifelong depression had been on a cocktail of antidepressants and psychiatric medication for years but still lived under a dark cloud every day, without relief.

We found he had severe deficiencies of vitamin B12, B6, and folate. After we gave him back those essential brain nutrients, he called me to thank me. Last year was the first year he could remember feeling happy and free of depression.

These are just a few of the dozens of things that can cause depression.

The roots of depression are found in the 7 keys to UltraWelless and the 7 fundamental underlying imbalances that trigger the body to malfunction.

As we now see, taking antidepressants is not the answer to our looming mental health epidemic.

We need different solutions. I am very excited about my next book, “The UltraMind Solution” (coming out next year), which will address this important topic.

In the meantime, here are a few things that account for a lot of depression -- and how to fix them.

Try an anti-inflammatory elimination diet that gets rid of common food allergens (see “The UltraSimple Diet”)
Check for hypothyroidism
Treat vitamin D deficiency with at least 2,000 to 5,000 U a day of vitamin D3
Take omega-3 fats in the form of 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams (mg) a day of purified fish oil. Your brain is made of up this fat.
Take adequate B12 (1,000 micrograms, or mcg, a day), B6 (25 mg) and folic acid (800 mcg). These vitamins are critical for metabolizing homocysteine which can play a factor in depression.
Get checked for mercury
Exercise vigorously five times a week for 30 minutes. This increases levels of BDNF, a natural antidepressant in your brain.

These are just of few of the easiest and most effective things you can do to treat depression. But there are even more, which you can address by simply working through the 7 Keys to UltraWellness.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Have you been diagnosed with depression?

How have antidepressants worked for you?

Do you plan to try any of the approaches mentioned here?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

Resources

(1) Turner EH et al. 2007. Selective publication of antidepressant trials and its influence on apparent efficacy. New England Journal of Medicine. 358: 252-260.

(2) Eaton WW, Kalaydjian A, Scharfstein DO, Mezuk B, Ding Y. 2007. Prevalence and incidence of depressive disorder: the Baltimore ECA follow-up, 1981-2004. Acta Psychiatr Scand.116(3):182-188.

The Dangers of the Medical Industrial Complex

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:47:59 -0500

Your doctors think they make decisions based on medical evidence.

But they don’t!

In fact, half of medical evidence is hidden from your doctors. And the half that’s hidden is the half that shows drugs don’t work.

The bad news is that drug companies are not policed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the way they should be. A drug should be proven both effective and safe BEFORE it is prescribed to millions of people.

Sadly, that often isn’t the case.

Let me share with you two recent examples that highlight the dangerous collusion between drug companies and our government agency. They show why the FDA should really stand for “Federal Drug Aid.”

First, we now know that the cholesterol-lowering drug Zetia actually causes harm and leads to faster progression of heart disease DESPITE lowering cholesterol 58 percent when combined with Zocor.

This challenges the belief that high cholesterol causes heart attacks and shakes the $40 billion dollar cholesterol drug industry at its foundation.

Second, it’s come to light that nearly all the negative studies on antidepressants – that’s more than half of all studies on these drugs – were never published, giving a false sense of effectiveness of antidepressants to treat depression.

Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not telling you to blame your doctor.

Instead, blame deceptive scientific practices and industry-protective government polices.

==> Let’s talk a closer look at these findings and their implications.

I once had a patient who worked in the drug approval division of the FDA. She taught me a very important lesson.

When a drug company designs and performs a study, it has to be registered with the FDA and ALL the results must be submitted to the FDA.

But it doesn’t work that way.

Instead, the pharmaceutical companies ONLY submit the data they want to get published to medical journals.

That means that any negative studies are hidden from the scientific community and from the public.

And when drug studies are sponsored by drug companies – as most are – they find positive outcomes at 4 times the rate of independently funded studies. This is also true for nutrition studies funded by the food industry that show the benefits of dairy or high-fructose corn syrup.

The FDA does not release this information.

That was, it didn’t until 2004 when all the major scientific journals banded together and refused to publish any data from any drug study that did not list the results of all trials, either positive or negative, in a central database. (1)

Well, that sounds good – but listing obscure, unpublished studies buried deep in a hard-to-navigate public database run by the National Institutes of Health is hardly visible public disclosure.

Sure, the research studies are at least listed, but try to find out the results.

After a few hours searching around on the website clinicaltrials.gov, I gave up.

Last year, Congress passed legislation expanding how much detail must be listed, but at the end of the day, who even looks at that?

Most doctors don’t even have time to read the medical journals they receive. They get tiny bits of information from drug reps, who come to their office with free lunch and a sound bite about their drug.

They get slightly more information from researchers who are funded by pharmaceutical companies and present their findings at conferences sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, using presentations prepared for them by pharmaceutical companies.

Not exactly independent, evidence-based medicine!

==> Now let’s get back to the news about Zetia.

Zetia is a new drug that lowers cholesterol by a different mechanism than statin drugs like Lipitor and Zocor.

Why does this matter?

Well, doctors have been brainwashed to think that cholesterol is the cause of heart attacks even though half of all people who have heart attacks have NORMAL cholesterol.

And it seemed like the statins, which lowered cholesterol, actually reduced heart attacks.

Seems logical. If you lower cholesterol, you reduce heart attacks, right?

No!

I believe that the reason statins lower risk is NOT because they lower cholesterol, but because they reduce inflammation.

In fact, studies by Dr. Paul Ridker of Harvard show that the risk of heart attacks was only reduced if inflammation was lowered along with LDL cholesterol – but not if LDL cholesterol was lowered alone. (2)

So then along comes a drug that can be combined with statins to lower cholesterol even more. Great idea?

Not really.

You see, the FDA approved Zetia without any proof that it lowered heart attacks or reduced the progression of heart disease. The drug was approved solely on the basis that it lowered cholesterol.

Yet Zetia was given to 5 million people – and made the drug companies $5 billion a year. That’s almost $14 million a day!

And once Zetia was approved, its makers had no incentive to prove that it actually did what it was thought to do – lower heart attacks.

They dragged their feet doing the studies and then released the negative data (which they did only under pressure from news agencies and Congress) after a long delay.

Wouldn’t you drag your feet too if you were making $14 million a day?

But the FDA had the negative data on Zetia – and it didn’t speak up.

The data that was withheld proved that Zetia did not reduce heart attacks but actually INCREASED fatty plaques in the arteries despite lowering cholesterol.

Let that sink in for a moment.

That’s right: Lowering cholesterol led to more heart disease!

That turns our whole medical model upside down. It shows us that high cholesterol is NOT a disease and may or may not be related to heart attacks.

Another recent study put another nail in the coffin of the Cholesterol Myth.

A major new cholesterol drug, torcetrapib, was pulled from the pipeline in December 2006 because despite lowering LDL cholesterol and raising HDL cholesterol in 15,000 people, it caused MORE heart attacks and strokes. (3)

This was to be the new cholesterol wonder drug. Oops.

==> All this points to a big research mess that is flawed in three ways.

First, what gets studied depends on who is funding it.

Since drug companies fund most of the research in the world, other therapies that work better – such as diet and lifestyle or nutritional therapies – never get enough funding.

Second, drug companies are aided by the FDA, which suppresses, hides, and doesn’t publish negative studies on drugs, only positive ones. This leads doctors to think they have all the evidence when they don’t.

Third, doctors, patients, and the media believe they have the whole truth, often until it is too late, like with Zetia or Premarin or Vioxx.

The evidence was there, but no one looked or publicized it.

This makes it very difficult for consumers to get the best treatments for their health and the whole truth about drugs.

Here’s my advice on how to make sense of things.

Follow the money. Look carefully at who funded the study. Be suspicious if it was funded by drug companies.
Call or email your congressperson or Senator to demand better legislation providing an easy-to-navigate database of all drug trials, with consumer-friendly summaries of both published AND unpublished data submitted to the FDA so you can look up the drug you are prescribed and have a balanced opinion.
Don’t assume that drugs are the answer to your health problems. Heart disease is NOT a Lipitor deficiency but the result of your lifestyle interacting with your genes.
Learn to ask the question “why?” – and search for the answers. Dealing with lifestyle and environmental factors (the basis of UltraWellness) almost always works better for chronic illnesses. Drugs are there as a backup only if needed.

So take a closer look at the information you’ve been given about drugs. You might be surprised by what you find.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Were you aware of the studies I’ve mentioned today?

Which of the steps here do you plan to follow?

What has you experience been with medications compared to lifestyle measures?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to

http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

REFERENCES:

(1) Laine C, Horton R, DeAngelis CD, Drazen JM, Frizelle FA, Godlee F, Haug C, Hébert PC, Kotzin S, Marusic A, Sahni P, Schroeder TV, Sox HC, Van der Weyden MB, Verheugt FW.Clinical trial registration: looking back and moving ahead. JAMA. 2007 Jul 4;298(1):93-4.

(2) Ridker PM, Cannon CP, Morrow D, Rifai N, Rose LM, McCabe CH, Pfeffer MA, Braunwald E; Pravastatin or Atorvastatin Evaluation and Infection Therapy-Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction 22 (PROVE IT-TIMI 22) Investigators. C-reactive protein levels and outcomes after statin therapy. N Engl J Med. 2005 Jan 6;352(1):20-8.

(3) Kastelein JJ, van Leuven SI, Burgess L, Evans GW, Kuivenhoven JA, Barter PJ, Revkin JH, Grobbee DE, Riley WA, Shear CL, Duggan WT, Bots ML; RADIANCE 1 Investigators.Effect of torcetrapib on carotid atherosclerosis in familial hypercholesterolemia. N Engl J Med. 2007 Apr 19;356(16):1620-30.

Autoimmune Disease: How to Stop Your Body from Attacking Itself

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:25:45 -0500

The number of Americans that this condition affects – 24 million – has tripled in the last few decades.

In fact, it affects more women than heart disease and breast cancer combined.

==> I’m talking about autoimmune disease.

Actually, autoimmune disease isn’t just one condition.

You’re probably familiar with the most common autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, type-1 diabetes, hypothyroidism, and psoriasis.

But there are many more autoimmune diseases that affect the nervous system, joints and muscles, skin, endocrine gland, and heart.

Simply put, autoimmune diseases are conditions where the body’s immune system attacks its own tissues rather than a foreign molecule like bacteria.

This happens when something confuses the immune system. Increasingly, that “something” appears to be the enormous load of environmental toxins to which we are all exposed.

The groundbreaking new book, “The Autoimmune Epidemic,” by Donna Jackson Nakazawa is a breath-taking piece of investigative journalism that seeks the real causes for this epidemic. Her desire to find answers was fueled by her own struggle with autoimmune disease.

Donna lays out very clearly a radical, but unfortunately very true, picture of what’s happening. But she also provides clear solutions for changes in diet, supplements, and our environment that can help people deal with and even reverse autoimmune diseases.

There’s no doubt about it.

Donna calls these environmental toxins “autogens” – foreign compounds that create an “auto” reaction, a reaction against the self.

==> But the fact is that toxins may be the most important cause of the autoimmune epidemic.

We are exposed to astounding amounts of brain pollution. Over 80,000 chemicals have been introduced into our society since 1900, and only 550 have been tested for safety (www.epa.gov/iriswebp/iris/stand-al.htm).

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), about 2.5 billion pounds of toxic chemicals are released yearly by large industrial facilities. And 6 million pounds of mercury are poured into our air every year.

In fact, a recent government survey (“National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals” issued in July 2005: http://www.cdc/gov/exposurereport/) found an average of 148 chemicals in our bodies – and those were only the ones they tested.

It gets worse.

The Environmental Working Group (www.ewg.org) examined the umbilical cord blood of children just as they emerged from the womb.

They found 287 industrial chemicals, including pesticides, phthalates, dioxins, flame-retardants, Teflon, and toxic metals like mercury. And this was before these infants even entered the world!

That’s not to mention the toxins found in our foods and other chemicals typically found in the home, like certain cleaning agents or pest control products – all of which add to the total toxic load on our bodies.

What is all this doing to us and to our children?

In his foreword to Donna’s book, Dr. Douglas Kerr, M.D., Ph.D., a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, says that “there is no doubt that autoimmune diseases are on the rise and our increasing environmental exposure to toxins and chemicals is fueling the risk. The research is sound. The conclusions, unassailable.”

That environmental toxins are a major cause of autoimmune disease is clear. Yet conventional medicine doesn’t take that into account when treating autoimmune conditions.

Instead, it tries to shut down the immune response with powerful medications including nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like Advil and Aleve, steroids like prednisone, anti-cancer drugs like methotrexate, and new drugs like Enbrel and Remicade that block the effects of a powerful inflammatory molecule called TNF alpha.

But those new drugs shut down your immune system so powerfully that they increase your risk of cancer or life-threatening infections.

And they have frequent and serious side effects and often give only partial relief. These drugs may be lifesaving for some in the short run – but in the long run they do NOTHING to deal with the causes.

There’s a better way.

I have successfully treated hundreds of patients with autoimmune diseases by addressing the underlying causes, including toxins, infections, allergens, poor diet, and stress.

==> The roadmap of Functional Medicine and UltraWellness takes us right to the root of the problem.

I have even seen this in myself and in my wife.

You see, I had chronic fatigue syndrome. This condition has autoimmune features and my blood tests clearly showed that my body was attacking itself. Getting rid of my mercury poisoning reversed my chronic fatigue and autoimmune problems.

My wife developed debilitating autoimmunity with joint pain and fatigue. Getting rid of the heavy metals in her body with an intensive detoxification program cured her, too.

And this has been true of so many of my patients.

For each one, I have to find all the causes – toxins, allergens, infections, poor diet, and stress – and deal with all of them while adding back the things the body needs to function optimally, like whole, clean food, nutrients, exercise, stress management, clean water and oxygen, community, connection, and meaning.

The results are amazing.

One of my patients had crippling psoriasis and related arthritis. She was 42 and couldn’t walk up and down stairs, get into a bathtub without help, or properly care for her children.

Yet just nine months after we started treatment – including eliminating gluten and other food allergens, removing her heavy metals, and balancing her immune system – she walked back in my office, not only 30 pounds lighter (remember, being inflamed makes you fat), but completely free of pain and psoriasis.

She’s not alone.

Another man suffered for years with the bloody diarrhea and pain of ulcerative colitis. Dietary changes and various kinds of digestive support helped but he never got better – until we removed the toxins and mercury from his body.

And a recent patient with debilitating fatigue and scars on her brain from multiple sclerosis got nearly complete relief of her symptoms after she had the mercury fillings removed from her teeth and went on a comprehensive detoxification program. And when she repeated her MRI, all of the scars from the MS were gone!

==> So what can you do if you or someone you love suffers from an autoimmune disease?

Read “The Autoimmune Epidemic.” This book will tell you why we have this problem, and how to fix it
Find a Functional Medicine doctor who can help you address autoimmunity (www.functionalmedicine.org)
Come see us for an appointment at the UltraWellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts (www.ultrawellnesscenter.com)
Get tested for mercury and other heavy metals
Get tested for celiac disease (an autoimmune reaction to wheat and other gluten-containing grains), which causes over 60 autoimmune diseases
Take immune-balancing nutrients and supplements, including vitamin D, essential fats (like EPA/DHA and GLA), and probiotics
Practice deep relaxation daily through yoga, meditation, biofeedback, or anything that reverses the stress response
Practice the precautionary principle, which says that we should avoid anything with the potential for harm. In the US, something has to be proven harmful before it is taken off the market. In Europe, something has to be proven safe before it is allowed on the market. This is also known as “better safe than sorry.”
Learn how to boost your body’s own detoxification system.

By addressing the root causes of autoimmune disease, you can start feeling better and getting well – today.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Have you been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease?

How have conventional treatments worked for you?

Do you plan to try any of the lifestyle approaches mentioned here?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

Can Healthy Omega 3 Fatty Acids Also Give You Mercury Poisoning?

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:41:24 -0500

Ninety-nine percent of Americans are deficient in this nutrient – but if they eat it, it could poison them!

What am I talking about?

Omega-3 fatty acids, which are often found in fish oil.

Research suggests that the omega-3s in certain fish may cure or treat most chronic illnesses, including depression, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, dementia, autism, ADHD, inflammation, and autoimmune diseases. In fact, about 60 percent of your brain is – or should be – made of fish oil.

But getting those omega-3s can be dangerous.

For example, a recent laboratory study of tuna sushi from a selection of New York City restaurants found levels of mercury so high that they exceeded the safe limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and would allow the Food and Drug Administration to take legal action to remove the fish from the market.

Now, we’ve got more media coverage and more headlines, but not much more understanding. Should we eat fish or shouldn’t we?

==> Today, I’m going clear up the confusion.

The experts are saying that if you are a pregnant or breast-feeding woman or a child, you shouldn’t eat any fish. The rest of us fish-eaters, well, we can have sushi no more than once every 3 weeks.

I guess the government thinks it’s fine to poison men and older women.

Does this make any sense?

If something is a proven toxin – and mercury is the second most common toxin known to humans – then why would we want to eat ANY of it?

Of course, there are times when I just can’t resist a piece of fresh-off-the-boat, line-caught, deep red, thinly sliced, bluefin tuna that melts in my mouth.

But then again, I suffered from mercury poisoning from growing up on tuna fish, eating too much fish while I lived in China, and breathing the dark black coal-soaked winter air of Beijing for too long.

From that experience, I know how to get the mercury out of my body quickly by using special foods, supplements, saunas, and chelation therapy. (See my blog on mercury detoxification for more information.)

And a large part of healing many chronic illnesses is learning how to reduce our total toxic burden while learning how to boost and optimize our own detoxification systems. (See my blog on UltraWellness Key #5 for more information.)

Chronic mercury toxicity is one of the most common things I see and treat in my medical practice.

It is also something I learned nothing about in medical school.

Yet day after day, I find toxic levels in the blood and in the bodies of patients with depression, heart disease, dementia and memory loss, cancer, autism, ADHD, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, neurological problems, insomnia, digestive problems, and more.

In fact, I think screening for mercury should be standard in our toxic world. Everyone should have their mercury level checked.

Once you get the mercury out, your depression lifts, your memory returns, your energy surges, your digestion normalizes, and your joints no longer hurt.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

==> Before I tell you how you can get your omega-3s safely, I’d like to explain more about mercury.

Mercury is emitted from coal-burning industrial facilities at the rate of 2,900 tons (or over 6 million pounds) per year.

If you imagine that mercury is toxic at greater than 1 part per million (ppm), and that the EPA has declared the “safe” level of mercury exposure to be less than 0.1 micrograms/kilogram of body weight/day – then we are in big trouble.

That mercury-laden pollution floats through the air from China and our own coal-burning plants and lands in the oceans, rivers, and soil of our planet.

Mercury occurs in larger concentrations as you move up the food chain – especially in fish.

In my medical journal, I reported on a conference at Tulane University on the effects of mercury on human health. You can download the report for free if you want to read more.

And a new 2006 report from the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine called “Seafood Choices: Balancing Benefits and Risks” highlights new research that links mercury not only to neurological diseases, but also to heart disease and cancers.

What are most frightening are autopsy studies on mercury-exposed people.

Adult brains show damage in only a few areas – the ones responsible for dementia and depression. But if exposure to mercury occurs in the womb or early in life, it is deposited in the entire brain and completely disrupts normal brain development.

Clearly, you should avoid mercury!

But if you want all the health benefits of omega-3s, what should you do?

There’s good news.

==> Here’s the solution.

Eat only small fish that fit in your pan. These include sardines, herring, small wild salmon, and some organic farm-raised salmon (although they are not high in omega-3 fats).
Stay away from tuna, swordfish, shark, tilefish, and sea bass, as well as nearly all river fish.
Take a fish oil supplement every day. But buy ONLY from companies that document distilled or purified fish oil that’s 100 percent free of industrial pollutants, especially mercury. Everyone should take 1,000 to 2,000 mg of fish oil a day.
Vegetarians can get the same benefits. Eat plant sources of omega-3 fats such as walnuts, and ground flax seeds, and purslane (a green vegetable). Plus, you should supplement with algae-derived DHA (one of the most important omega-3 fats needed for brain function). Take 100 to 200 mg of DHA twice a day.

==> Here’s how you can determine your own mercury levels:

Blood tests. These are the most common tests for mercury and detect ONLY recent exposure over the last few months. But even if they are normal, you can’t be sure you are home free.
Hair analysis. This tests only methylmercury levels from fish consumption. Ideal levels are lower than 1 ppm.
Urine test after a provocation or chelation challenge with DMSA or DMPS, followed by a six-hour urine collection. This is the ONLY way to know if you have accumulated a lot of mercury in your body over a lifetime. Ideal levels are less then 5-micrograms/gram creatinine. Use Doctor’s Data Laboratory (www.doctordata.com) or Genova (www.gdx.net) for testing.
Urinary porphyrin testing is a noninvasive way to tell if the mercury is poisoning your cells (www.metametrix.com).

==> Special Quiz: Are you omega-3 deficient?

Do you suffer from any of the following? Score 1 for each positive answer. Any positive answers can indicate an omega-3 fat deficiency.

Soft, cracked, or brittle nails
Dry, itchy, scaling, or flaking skin
Hard earwax
Chicken skin (tiny bumps on the backs of arms or on the trunk)
Dandruff
Aching or stiffness in joints
Thirsty most of the time
Constipation
Light colored, hard, or foul-smelling stools
Depression
High blood pressure
Fibrocystic breasts
Premenstrual syndrome
High LDL cholesterol, low HDL levels, and high triglycerides
North Atlantic genetic background: Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Scandinavian, or coastal Native American
Eat fish like sardines, herring, or wild salmon less than 3 times a week

So take a good look at your life, your symptoms, and your diet. You might need a (fish) oil change. And remember, you can have your fish and eat it too!

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Are you confused about fish and mercury?

How do you get your omega-3 fats?

Do you plan to get tested for mercury contamination?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

References

Choi BH. The effects of methylmercury on the developing brain. Prog Neurobiol. 1989;32(6):447-70. Review.

Hibbeln JR, Nieminen LR, Lands WE. Increasing homicide rates and linoleic acid consumption among five Western countries, 1961-2000. Lipids. 2004 Dec;39(12):1207-13.

C. BERNARD GESCH, SEAN M. HAMMOND, SARAH E. HAMPSON, ANITA EVES, and MARTIN J. CROWDER Influence of supplementary vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids on the antisocial behaviour of young adult prisoners: Randomised, placebo-controlled trial Br. J. Psychiatry, Jul 2002; 181: 22 - 28.

Freeman MP. Omega-3 fatty acids and perinatal depression: a review of the literature and recommendations for future research. Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids. 2006 Oct-Nov;75(4-5):291-7.

Richardson AJ. Long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids in childhood developmental and psychiatric disorders. Lipids. 2004 Dec;39(12):1215-22. Review.

Freund-Levi Y, Basun H, Cederholm T, Faxen-Irving G, Garlind A, Grut M, Vedin I, Palmblad J, Wahlund LO, Eriksdotter-Jonhagen M. Omega-3 supplementation in mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease: effects on neuropsychiatric symptoms. Int J Geriatr Psychiatry. 2007 Jun 21

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Are Your Food Allergies Making You Fat?

blog-editor@marmaladesoul.com (Blog Editor) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:49:07 -0500

Is your digestive system making you fat?

It’s hard to believe – but very true!

Today, I’m going to explain how the bugs in your digestive tract and the way they upset your gut’s immune system just might be behind those extra pounds.

I have observed this phenomenon in thousands of patients. And I’ve developed very effective treatments for it, based on understanding the way in which all the body’s systems – the gut, the immune system, toxins, hormones and more – are connected.

These are what I call the 7 keys to UltraWellness.

You can read even more about it in my book, The UltraSimple Diet, which explains why toxicity and inflammation are key underlying causes of obesity and illness.

And there’s powerful evidence that addressing those key causes can help shed pounds.

Over and over, I’ve seen patients who lose significant amounts of weight, just by cutting food allergens from their diet.

And I have also seen people lose 20 to 30 pounds, simply by balancing the bacterial ecosystem in their intestinal system.

One patient, a 38-year-old woman, had chronic inflammation, fluid retention, acne, fatigue, and joint pain, as well as irritable bowel syndrome with bloating and gas. She had tried every known diet, but was unable to lose weight.

What was her problem?

She could not lose weight because she was inflamed.

But when we had her eliminate the foods to which she was allergic and gave her some healthy bacteria to heal her gut, she lost 35 pounds in a few months – and all her other symptoms went away too.

The big debate in medicine is which comes first: inflammation or obesity.

I have always believed that we become inflamed first, and gain weight second – which makes us even more inflamed, perpetuating the cycle.

==> Now incredible new research bears this out.

Let me tell you a little more about these studies and their implications for treating obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and more.

Both studies were done in Europe, where researchers are generally more open-minded.

The first study, published in December 2007, looked at two groups of children. The first group was overweight and the second was normal weight. (1)

The researchers then measured three key factors connected to inflammation.

First, they looked at high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker that shows the general level of inflammation in the body.

Then they looked for plaque or thickening in the carotid arteries (the main arteries that supply the brain) with an ultrasound.

Third, they looked at blood tests for IgG, or the delayed food allergies I talk about in The UltraSimple Diet.

What they found was startling.

The overweight kids had a 3-fold higher level of CRP and a 2.5-fold higher level of IgG antibodies to foods.

This is astounding, since in most medical studies a difference of 20 to 30 percent is considered significant. And in this case, the differences were 300 and 250 percent, respectively.

The overweight children also had much thicker carotid arteries, which are a sign of early atherosclerosis and an indicator of heart disease.

The study suggests that these food allergies are a CAUSE of the inflammation and obesity, not a consequence.

The authors of the study explain that damage to the gut can lead to a leaky gut, allowing food particles to be exposed to the gut’s immune system.

This then triggers a system-wide immune response, leading to inflammation all over the body and producing obesity by increasing insulin resistance.

We already know that inflammation from any cause – bacteria, food, a high-sugar, high-fat diet -– will produce insulin resistance, leading to higher insulin levels. And since insulin is a fat -storage hormone, you store more fat – mostly around the belly.

The authors of the study go on to say that we should consider elimination of IgG food allergens as a way of treating obesity and preventing heart disease.

That means you don’t limit calories, just allergic foods that cause inflammation.

This study draws a remarkable link that has received little attention by conventional medicine.

==> So what exactly causes a leaky gut?

Well, the next study may help explain just that.

The researchers of that study, published in the July 2007 issue of Diabetes, performed a complex but powerful study to tease out which comes first – the chicken or the egg. (2)

What they did was quite ingenious. They took thin mice and then fed them a very high-fat diet.

High-fat diets change the bacterial flora in the gut. The toxin-producing bugs are promoted by the high-fat diet while the anti-inflammatory and protective bugs die off. (And there are over 500 species of bugs in your gut all fighting for territory.)

In fact, our highly processed, high-sugar, high-fat, low-fiber diet – plus many drugs like antibiotics, steroids, anti-inflammatories, acid-blockers, and hormones – completely alters the bacterial ecosystem in the gut, leading to breakdown, inflammation, and a leaky gut.

Back to the study.

The researchers found that the mice on the equivalent of an American diet produced more of a bacterial toxin called LPS, which then leaked into the body through a leaky gut.

In humans, these toxins then latch onto immune cells, stimulating them to produce a firestorm of inflammatory molecules such as TNFa, IL-6, and IL-1 (cytokines), which in turn block your metabolism and produce insulin resistance, fatty liver, and obesity.

Even more interesting, the researchers also found that even with a normal diet, injecting LPS into the guts of the mice led to the SAME problems – inflammation and obesity.

They didn’t eat a bad diet. Just injecting toxins into them made them fat.

In fact, when you eat a bad diet, bad bugs flourish. Your whole gut ecosystem is upset and the outside world “leaks” in across a damaged gut lining.

The result? Not just obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, but so many allergic, autoimmune, and inflammatory diseases.

The researchers explain how giving antibiotics to rats and cleaning out the bad bugs can prevent diabetes. They explain that by adding soluble fiber to the diet, they can increase the population of the good bugs like Bifidobacteria and decrease the bad bugs – leading to weight loss.

But it doesn’t just happen in lab rats.

I have found the same effects when my patients take the special soluble fiber I recommend in UltraMetabolism called konjac root or glucomannan. The good bacteria feed on the fiber and reduce inflammation.

And there is more to the gut story.

It seems that you are not the only one eating lunch. The bugs in your gut also feast – and they control your fat storage and the calories you absorb. So people with healthy bugs in the gut lose weight, and those with bad bugs gain weight. (3)

Let’s review what you’ve learned.

When you eat a typical American diet, you foster the growth of bad bugs in the gut. They then damage the gut lining and produce toxins that are absorbed into your system.

Because of the damage, partially digested food particles also leak into your bloodstream. Then your immune system reacts to the toxins and foods, producing a firestorm of inflammation.

That inflammation then leads to a fatty toxic liver and insulin resistance, which lead to higher levels of insulin in your body. And insulin is a fat-storage, disease- and aging-promoting hormone.

So an unhealthy gut makes us fat and sick because it makes us toxic and inflamed.

This is groundbreaking research that needs to shake up our thinking about how to help people lose weight and get healthy.

==> Now here are a few simple things to try if you are struggling to lose weight or feel better.

Try an elimination diet for 3 weeks. Cut out the most common food allergens, including gluten, dairy, eggs, corn, yeast, and peanuts. Some people are sensitive to soy, so you can also cut that out. (See The UltraSimple Diet for a step-by-step plan on how to do this.)
Eat a whole-foods, plant-based, high-fiber diet.
Take probiotics daily to boost the healthy bacteria in your gut. Look for those that contain 10 billion CFU of bifidobacteria species and lactobacillus species. Choose from reputable brands.

Within a very few short weeks – even if you do nothing else – you will see a dramatic difference that comes from cooling off inflammation by healing your gut.

Remember, if you want to get rid of that gut, you have to fix your gut.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Have you noticed that inflammation is affecting your weight?

What steps do you plan to take to reduce inflammation?

How has reducing inflammation affected your weight?

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, M.D.

P.S. For more information on this and other blogs, please go to http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog.

==> References:

(1) Wilders-Truschnig M, Mangge H, Lieners C, et al. IgG Antibodies Against Food Antigens are Correlated with Inflammation and Intima Media Thickness in Obese Juveniles. Exp Clin Endocrinol Diabetes. 2007 Dec 10

(2) Cani PD, Amar J, Iglesias MA, et al. Metabolic endotoxemia initiates obesity and insulin resistance. Diabetes. 2007 Jul;56(7):1761-72.

(3) Bäckhed F, Ding H, Wang T, et al. The gut microbiota as an environmental factor that regulates fat storage.Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Nov 2;101(44):15718-23. Epub 2004 Oct 25.