Category: Health

How the East can teach us to master our anxieties

fences

In the daily round of life, all of us are prone to experiencing conflict.  It’s just the nature of the beast; but what if I told you that a lot of this conflict is of our own making?  As Jungian analyst Ken Wilber reminds us in his insightful No Boundary, we’re often into the habit of creating boundaries, by which he means barriers, walling off a great deal of life’s potentiality of larger experience, since we’d rather feel safe in the confines of the familiar.

That said, it reminds me of the fences Robert Frost  writes of in his beloved poem, “Mending Wall, that people erect to wall out their anxieties:  “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Let’s sidetrack for a moment.  Have you noticed how many things in life fall into contrary couplings, with one of them tending to be more positive?  By way of some examples, here’s my partial list put into categories, and you can add yours:

Spatial:  up/down, inside/outside, east/west, near/far, above/below, over/under, wide/narrow

Temporal:  morning/evening, today/tomorrow, past/present,  sunrise/sunset

Attributes:  short/tall, beautiful/ugly, clean/dirty, brave/cowardly, smart/dumb

Theological: heaven/hell, good/evil, God/Satan, flesh/spirit

Philosophical:  logical/illogical, realist/idealist, rationalist/romantic

Biological:  male/female, child/adult, young/old, thin/stout

Psychological: bold/timid, aggressive/passive, introverted/extroverted

My point:  These couplings belong to our world, not nature’s, which brings us back to “Mending Wall,” where nature abhors Man’s barrier artifacts represented in the stone wall.  While nature may feature its own divergencies such as ripe and unripe, it possesses no mindfulness about them or the accompanying paroxisms that plague us.   No dog thinks about its ending or worries about present illness.  No bird deliberates on life or death or the hereafter.  While nature includes pain and animals respond, it’s physiological and thus without angst.

By contrast, humans hover around their drawn boundaries as bastions preserving their control. In turn, this results in anxiety, limiting their happiness.  Ken Wilber sums up our dilemma when he writes, “the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain.  The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil.  The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure.  The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes.  The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss” (p. 19).

At the heart of what Wilber says, though he doesn’t mention it, lies the concept of polarity, largely an Eastern notion not understood in Western cultures with their foregrounding in dualism.  In the polarity approach, which I’m proposing here, we encounter the healthier option, opposites being viewed not as contraries but complementaries, succinctly captured in William Blake‘s dictum that “opposition is true friendship.”

In our Western dualism for instance, we think of good vs evil as utterly opposed and embattled contraries.  In the East, this becomes unfathomable as how can you have one devoid of the other?  How can you know what good is, unless you have the yardstick of evil?  How can you know love unless you also know what lacking it means?

Like virtually all Westerners, I couldn’t get a grasp around this notion of polarities, or two sides to one coin.  Then one day it clicked and it’s been a norm for me, informative and helpful, across the years.   I had been invited to give a paper at the University of Delhi.  Afterwards, I fell into conversation with an Indian delegate and somehow, as often happens in India, it turned metaphysical.  I mentioned the Problem of Evil, a salient concern  in appraising the credulity of religious belief in the West.  His response, simple and direct, startled me:  “Problem of evil?  What problem?  Do we not have day and night, hot and cold, life and death?” The light turned on.

And how does any of this bear on our well-being?  If you’re still belaboring this question, go back and review my earlier Wilbur borrowing, as it gets to the very heart of the matter.

When I try to wall out anxieties about what will happen today or tomorrow, or how people will regard me, or matters related to my health, finances, relationships, etc., I invariably allow worry to wreak its cortisol devastation to my health and on my daily well-being.

In the West, we measure progress across the board in science, religion, business and private life as movement towards the positive and elimination of the negative.  This is the wrong formula for living the happy life, since it’s foreign to life’s dynamism, or plentitude.  Those we love can decline, die, or even engage in perfidy.

Today’s job may not be there tomorrow.  Accidents and genes may ultimately define our futures.  I think of baseball:  very few hitters ever bat 300 and when they do, fewer still repeat it.

To live life well, you need to take the spectrum approach that takes-in the full sweep of life’s potentiality.  By the way, this is heart and soul behind why we get life and health insurance.  We’re actually better off or lessen our anxiety in facing up to life’s quirkiness.

Opposites aren’t really mutually exclusive anyway.  They require each other to exist.  I can’t know pleasure apart from the possibility of pain.

Polarity, the notion of complementaries, can ease our wrestlings with our fears, reflected in our desperate folly of erecting fences or boundaries.  It also teaches us to simplify our values, particularly the material kind;  informs us that nothing is ever really ours, that everything is on lease as it were;  helps us treasure what we enjoy now, our families and friends; most of all, enjoins us not to cling. When I give up my exclusions, an unexpected pleasure exhilarates, and I call it grace, for then I am set free.  Or as  The Bhagavad Gita, or Hindu scripture, has it:

He is to be recognized as eternally free
Who neither loathes nor craves
For he that is free from the pairs,
Is easily freed from the conflict.



I am what I remember: reflections on memory

memory

What can it be like to not have anything to think about, or to lose the propensities of sentience, that dismal fate of those with dementia or Alzheimer’s? To lose one’s sight, or one’s hearing, or even one’s speech, are among life’s greatest wounds, but they dwarf up against the inability to recall. Universally, in myth and in legend, whether in the guise of the Sirens’ alluring song or the serpent’s Edenic mischief, or in Goethe’s overreaching Faust, man’s greatest quest has been his striving for knowledge. But without memory, his quest is nullified, for knowledge is its source. In Dante’s Inferno, the sinful dead are bereft of memory and hence doomed to an eternal present empty of knowledge.

Flipping through the calendar of years, I find myself more forgetful and, thus sometimes anxious, for I am what I remember. But I draw comfort in learning that even thirty-year olds sometimes lapse and cannot remember where they put the keys or what the errand was they had set out upon, or just what really did happen earlier that day at work.

I’ve learned long ago that there exist two kinds of memory: long and short. I’m pretty good at the former, but lousy at things I really ought to remember, since I had just heard them, like recalling a name. I envy the ability of some to hear a name and remember it for the next occasion; to see a face and know it in Walmart a year later, or even better, in a car at 45 mph, to see through shaded glass, and fetch a face. How does one work this magic? My wife does it daily, but doesn’t share her secret.

There may be blessings to all this forgetting, however, and if this is so, I’m a pretty lucky guy. Do I really want to remember everything I’ve bumped into along life’s road? As actress Ingrid Bergman put it, “Happiness is good health and a bad memory.”

Psychiatry has grown prosperous on clientele unable to forget the past, hence condemned to repeat its burden, each day renewing yesterday’s quarrel, betrayal or loss. T. S. Eliot, that cogent modern interpreter of memory overload, wrote of the coming of spring without revival and a new generation incarcerated by memory: “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory….”

In a landmark book, The Seven Sins of Memory, Daniel Schacter, former Chair of Harvard’s Psychology Department, tells us that for all our lapses in memory, memory provides a means to adaptation in helping us sort out the really useful. Memory sometimes blesses us when it malfunctions through transience (the weakening of memory over time), absent-mindedness (not remembering where you put things), blocking (the inability to recall a name or face), misattribution (assigning a memory item to a wrong source) suggestibility (implanting memory through leading questions), bias (the reshaping of memory through influential events or opinions), and persistence (the inveterate recall of disturbing events or information).

George Duhamel puts all of this into succinct summation when he writes in The Heart’s Domain that “We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.”

The poet Wordsworth must have had it right then, for more than any poet I know, he drew from the well of memory, creating a reflective poetry that nourishes us still in its ability to sort out life’s essentials that make for human solace.

But again, without memory we may exist, but without being. If life is in the blood as the ancients had it rightly, then it follows that memory lends it exuberance and hence the source not only of pain or loss, but of joy and renewal.

Ultimately, we are what we remember.

On the violence that ails us: reflections on low self-esteem

selfesteemThe news headlines thunder the shocking mayhem of school children gunned down at Sandy Hook and of four firemen ambushed in upper New York, leaving even the professionals pondering the mindset behind such horror.

Sadly, the truth may be that a good many people don’t like themselves and act out their self-loathing on others. Its origin can be subtle.

Perhaps it began as a youngster in an overly restrictive home heavy on reprimand, short on love.

Or in unabated sibling rivalry for the mother’s milk, as it were.

Perhaps from a short-fused teacher, scolding a child in view of other children, maximizing his humiliation.

Perhaps because other children excluded or bullied.

I’ve known for years the high impacting of poor reading skills on youngsters, usually boys. I had been a social worker for several years at a residential treatment center for boys 8-17, replete with its own school. Of my hundred boys or more, 90% were remedial readers with substantial low esteem and often a history of acting out in the classroom.

The origins are myriad; the result the same, and always damaging.

Nearly always a person falls into hating himself not because he’s intrinsically inadequate, but because others keep telling him so. Rejection messages accumulate their toxins like excessive radiation, fostering demise instead of intended healing.

Fairly often you can see such psychological fallout in the overachiever who flagellates himself with extraordinary effort to win approval, and hence self-validation.

Those suffering envy, and many do, languish because they’re at war with themselves. When people like themselves they don’t require what someone else seemingly has in the way of goods, talent, and reputation. They have no need to project limitations on to others and sully them through gossip, innuendo or criticism. Another’s success doesn’t hint at reprimand or reminder of personal shortcomings. Those liking themselves know their own worth and it’s quite enough.

Ironically, self-loathing may turn-up in the guise of narcissism, or conceit, a kind of whistling in the dark to keep the wolves at bay. Confident people rely upon results, not boasts.

Lacking self-esteem, every conversation, work, class or play endeavor musters into a contest for mastery in a quest for validation for those who suffer.

In the worst scenarios, self-hatred in its twisted logic leads to rage and inflicting pain on self and others. What begins as temper, may end in verbal and domestic abuse, eating disorders, drug addiction, delinquency, or even worse as our headlines testify.

Somewhere, always, its source lies in a wound that festers. It lashes out at innocents, ironically often the very sources that offer love, but can never suffice to close the gap. Fed by a flotilla of ghosts, the self-loather purees his fantasies into a malt of maiming. Filled with rage, he seeks to even the score.

As the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, put it so succinctly: “A man’s life is what he thinks about all day long.”

Spare me your heart: the plight of the mentally ill

300px-Cover_of_Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_DisordersIn the aftermath of the Newtown shootings, a shocked nation seems finally to be taking a hard look at mental illness, although for the wrong reasons.  Gun control, with 250 to 300 million guns out there, owned by 60 million across the United States, would be a hard nut to crack even if legislation, unlikely, were to become law and remains the salient issue.  Unfortunately, indicting the mentally distressed is subterfuge for not dealing with the primary source of our national mayhem.

While I agree with those voices calling for attention to our mental illness epidemic,  I think it’s kindled by media sensationalism that would indict millions who suffer grievously as it is.  I must point out that only 4% of our annual murders are committed by someone mentally ill (Richard Friedman, NYT, December 17, 2012).  These vociferous voices simply add to the stigmatizing  of the mentally ill.  On the other hand, guns are very much the public health issue, if we define health as well-being.   In the wrong hands, they foster tragedy, and most of these guns are found in American homes as happened with the Lanzas.

I want to outline here, however, just how serious mental illness is as a pervasive and growing presence and the compassion it should elicit from us rather than lynch mob condemnation.   At the conclusion, I’ll offer some final commentary.

What is mental illness?  When we talk of someone being mentally ill we’re not necessarily dealing with hard core psychotics such as schizophrenics.  Mental illness affects  how one feels, thinks, and ultimately behaves.   While all of us occasionally experience ups and downs,  those suffering from a “mental disorder” are simply overwhelmed and unable to cope.  They may suffer, for example, from acute depression, anxiety, obsessive thoughts,  and addictions that simply won’t go away.  This frequently results in problems at work and at home and needs prompt, professional intervention.

What are its causes? Possible causes may include

Heredity: Genetics may be suspected when mental illness affects several family members within or across generations.  Certain stress situations may trigger it.

Trauma: an experience such as a death of  a loved one or break-up in a relationship, being a crime victim,  group rejection, war violence, declining health, a financial loss and a problematic childhood leading to low self-esteem and distorted thinking can be tipping points.

Chemical imbalance: Changes in brain chemistry affecting neurotransmitters and/or hormonal abnormalities may affect mood.

How common is it?  Mental illness is pervasive world-wide.  The World Health Organization (WHO) reports an incidence rate of  33% . In the United States, the figure approaches 46%.  It affects all social-economic sectors.

Key symptoms:                                                                                                                            

Inability to focus
Constant sadness
Excessive worrying
Insomnia
Difficulty managing anger and hostility
Detachment from reality: hallucination, delusional thinking, Paranoia
Obsessive-Compulsive rituals
Sudden mood fluctuations
Excessive anxiety
Suicide thoughts
Feelings of abandonment
Eating disorders: anorexia, bulimia, etc.
Substance abuse (frequently addiction is associated with mental illness).

How is it treated? Treatment includes counseling, often accompanied with medication; brain stimulation such as electroconvulsive therapy for those not responding to traditional methods; treatment in a residential community (hospital).

Prognosis:  Outcomes can be positive for milder forms of mental illness, provided the individual adheres to treatment protocol, has a network of support, and makes lifestyle changes such as reducing stress,  exercising,  making friends, finding interests, and developing a positive outlook.  There are many others, however, who can only be managed, not cured.

Cost impact: The costs of mental illness are staggering, both direct and indirect costs.  Direct costs include therapy, hospitalization and medication.  Presently, these outlays consume nearly 20% of medical expenditures annually.  Indirect costs, more difficult to measure, outweigh direct costs by a hefty margin in lost income (an estimated $192 billion in 2008), educational attainment, disability payments, homelessness (one third of our homeless population is deemed mentally ill), social violence, litigation and incarceration (22% of prison inmates have been diagnosed as mentally ill).  (Thomas Insel, “Assessing the Economic Costs of Mental Illness,” Journal of American Psychiatry, June 2008).

And then there are the suicides, those thousands who have simply surrendered to their depression.  (Suicide numbers, by the way, have been increasing, not helped by the economic recession, and currently are the 10th leading cause of death annually.

Final Reflections:  The mentally ill, unfortunately, are frequently stigmatized as “maniacs,” “loonies,” “crazies,” “weirdoes,” “zombies,” etc.  I think we know the litany.  It’s so bad that a large number of the mentally distressed are afraid to get help.  Psychiatry itself hasn’t helped the situation.  Many psychiatrists in private practice turn down Medicare patients in favor of more lucrative insurance payouts, or cater to a more affluent clientele.  They eschew paper trails and generally require  cash payment in full for each session, though they may allow you the convenience of your credit card, but don’t bet on it.  Like all professionals, they differ in quality or competence.

Psychiatry itself, since the 90s, has primarily surrendered therapy to the psychologists and social workers, opting for chemical treatment instead and, for this, a client can expect a usual allotment of 15 minutes to periodically check on the SSRI effectiveness at $100 plus.  The truth is that much of this medication may be dubious, as new research continues to confirm that those given a placebo do virtually as well.

Health insurance, meanwhile, more often than not, discriminates against those with a “history,” that may simply be a prescription for anxiety or depression.  Formularies have a way of being akin to finger prints in tracking down the mentally distressed, even if now recovered, under the guise of pre-existent illness.  While the Health Reform Act when fully implemented in 2014 prohibits using pre-existent illness as a pretext for rejecting an applicant, it does not prohibit insurance companies from setting higher rates, which is like trusting the fox to take care of the chickens.

The one tool that has helped a good many to cope is cognitive therapy, sometimes called Rational Emotive Therapy) in which patients are taught how to think past painful emotions by substituting positive thought alternatives. We need more of it—a whole lot more.

One of the dismaying aspects of the mental illness syndrome is how neglected it has been, from the homeless right down to the incarcerated.  While you can find a plethora of resources for the mentally challenged, not so for those suffering mental distress and we, as well as they, suffer the consequences.

All of this should not be!  Consider that every year nearly 60 million Americans wrestle with mental illness.  It knows no social/economic boundary.  It could be your neighbor, your fellow worker, your spouse, your child.  It could someday be you.

Returning to Richard Friedman in his NYT article, he hits the nail on the head in summarizing the wolves howling to get at the mentally ill when he writes, “All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, defined group.  But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.”

In the 1930s there was a landmark song that defined those tough times:  “Brother, can you spare a dime?”  There’s a new song in town:  Brother, sister, can you spare your heart?”

rj

POSTSCRIPT: I came upon this just published article on the paucity of mental health resources since publishing this post two weeks ago. it reinforces what I’ve written in my post:
Families Face Mental Illness Barriers

The why of anxiety and the how of coping

anxiety
How is it we learn to be anxious? Surely it’s rooted in our past, maybe even in our childhood: a teacher’s stinging reprimand, a parent’s rejecting scorn, unsuspecting betrayal by a friend, a passionate love not returned. We all carry wounds and though outwardly they heal, we trace the scars where the knife went in.  Anxiety flourishes when subsequent instances get past our defenses and replay the past.

Anxiety also takes hold when we face threats to our well-being, as in encountering a new geography, job, or intimidating individual, since we find safety in the familiar.  In extreme cases, it can develop into agoraphobia where leaving the house, for example, can trigger a panic response.  I have known such people in their trembling and labored breathing, and my heart swells with compassion.

Anxiety always pervades when we want something too much, forgetting every gain, even when achieved, is encumbered with the threat of loss. Life’s tendency, after all, is to lend rather than grant and to choose when to take back. Anxiety anchors itself in musts, when the true law of happiness is to discern what we can’t control and when it’s time to let go. I once met a woman who clung to a self-centered man, who often treated her badly. Though she knew the relationship was faulty, her anxiety for validation precluded her doing the right thing. Sometimes when we think we’re loving others we’re demanding love for ourselves. When love eludes us in our early years, we look for it repeatedly through others.

In matters of declining health, the scenario can become very scary and our imagination runs wild, rendering us hypochondriacs. It’s easy to become anxious when our bodies no longer respond as they used to and what we once found easy becomes more labored. Like our cars, our bodies take-on mileage and parts begin to break down. Declining health can nullify carefully laid plans and jeopardize our happiness. We help ourselves when we make lifestyle changes affecting diet, exercise, stress and sleep.

Related to the former, our greatest anxiety flows from wrestling with our mortality. When we’re young we give it little regard. As we grow older, we know the actuary tables don’t lie. Indeed, we feel it in our bones. Religion with its tenet of an afterlife capitalizes on the universality of such anguish. Life’s temporal nature can’t be altered, but its dividend is to teach us to value what truly matters. Accepting our mortality and doing what we can to enhance our health, while not easy, works like ginger tea on a nervous stomach.

Living life happily in a context of limitation takes a raw, every day courage, and I’ve met and often read of such people with admiration. It’s not that these heroes escape anxiety, but they”re not wallowing in it. I’m very fond of baseball, not because it’s exciting, which it often isn’t, but because of all the sports I like such things as the constant replay of the face-to-face duel between pitcher and hitter as an exemplum of grace under pressure. The pitcher needs the out; the batter needs the hit. Neither must flinch. I’ve known of players who lose their cool and whom anxiety masters, ending their stardom.

It’s easy to talk about freeing ourselves of anxiety. The trick is in knowing how. Psychology is built upon helping us find our way past worry and dread and sometimes it resorts to pills to help us through, when the truth is the answer lies within ourselves and not a pill that merely treats symptoms.   All anxiety is born of desire–whether for security, love, power, or fame.

To truly overcome anxiety requires our developing a sense of detachment and avoiding taking ourselves too seriously. Life needs to be lived in perspective. Wrong things, hurtful things happen, whether of man or nature’s making. The healing comes from not wanting anything overly, but living with acceptance of life’s rhythms one day at a time, doing what we can. Anxiety changes nothing, and often makes matters worse.

Living life free of anxiety is something akin to a would be swimmer, who before he can swim must first learn to float. It’s all in letting go.

rj

Sugar and Cancer

Sugar and cancer

I never realized just how dangerous sugar can be to good health. Not only can it lead to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, it can actually encourage cancer. Consider these three facts about cancer:

1. Cancer flourishes in an anaerobic (low oxygen) environment.

2. It thrives on glucose.

3. It needs iron.

The good news is there are steps you can take to prevent encouraging cancer growth:

1. Select an aerobic form of exercise to oxidate your blood.

2. Limit sugar and high fructose corn syrup

3. Avoid excessive iron levels.

But back to sugar per se. I would highly recommend you look at medical researcher Gary Taubes’ New York York Times piece, April 13, 2011, on the subject, which summarizes the findings of the highly regarded Robert Lustig of the University of Californa (San Francisco). It will change your life. Maybe even save it.

How timing affects your health

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” (Ben Franklin)

I think we’re missing something in all the wise counsel we’ve been getting lately on our TV talk shows about improving our health   You know the litany, most of it pertaining to food:  less fat, sugar, salt, and processed food.  Less meat and more fruits and veggies. Along with diet change, thirty minutes of aerobic exercise five times weekly.  Lately, the added caveat of reducing stress.

All well and good, but not good enough.  Somewhere we’ve forgotten to add timing to the list.  By this I mean doing things, whenever possible, at the same time and in the same way.  Our bodies actually dislike surprise. They prosper from routine.  Here are a few tips, and you can probably add your own:

1.   Sleeping: The body replenishes itself when we sleep, restoring hormonal balance (homeostasis) provided we get enough of it, usually 7-8 hours for most adults.  This means setting a time to retire.  I’ve been getting to bed at 10:30 p.m. and usually fall asleep within minutes.  Morning comes early, or at about 5 a.m.  But I’m not tired.  I’ve had my quota.  By the way, don’t use the weekend to cheat.  As I said, your body doesn’t like surprises.  You don’t really have to fly across time zones to feel jet lag.  Research shows that just the loss of one or two hours of sleep can reduce your daytime alertness by a third.  Strange, but there also seems to be a relationship between a lack of sleep and obesity,  and even depression (David Agus, The End of Illness).

2.   Eating:  Eat the same time everyday:  I think My bichon, Truman, has a clock for his stomach.  Come 4 p.m. and he gets fidgety, as if to say, “Hey, dude, where’s my grub?” I really have to laugh.  Impatient with my delay with writing this blog, he’s gotten his bowl out right where I can’t miss it. Dogs  provide wonderful examples of nature’s blueprint, with set times for feeding and elimination, which makes housebreaking them possible. They also can get sick if their food changes suddenly.  Humans are likewise plugged into schedules and foods as any traveler knows.  That’s why our tummies often revolt when we travel abroad.  This doesn’t mean ruling out variety on occasion.  Just use common sense.  While I’m at it, snacks call for the same regimen as to what and when.

3.  Exercise:  The research is very clear–the body thrives on exercise.  It does even better when it happens by the clock.  I’m a morning person, so I take on the elliptical machine between 10 and 11.  The dividend is I get it done early and when my body seems eager.  But whatever works for you.

4.   Bowel regularity:  The tell tale signs the body’s out of  sync are constipation and diarrhea.  Changes in food, or wrong foods, or interruptions of elimination times lead to biological stress.  Watch what you eat, how much, and the sanitation in its prep.  When you “need to go,” don’t put it off.  It’s amazing how just getting out of the pattern can disrupt body rhythms and take time righting.

5.  Downtime:  Sometimes your body just likes to rest, and don’t forget, body includes mind.  Because our modern lives are often hectic, you’ll have to make sure to sometimes dropout of the race.  This takes scheduling.  I like yoga, or soft music (especially the sounds of nature), meditation (though I still have difficulty routing the mind chatter), doing a puzzle like sudoku, taking up a calming read, tending my garden.  Whatever form it takes for you, choose something you enjoy and, remember, do it everyday, same time.

In a nutshell, good health comes down to not only what, but when.

Be well,

rj

The food revolution is all around you!

Have you noticed the food chain stores are increasingly offering alternative foods these days, replete with burgeoning natural food isles, stacks of organic fruits, and freshly washed veggies, hermetically sealed?  Why I even saw locally produced corn for sale this past summer at my local Krogers.

Now don’t think for a minute the box store groceries, a $32 billion enterprise, give a hoot about keeping you healthy.  You can believe that when they stop promoting their sugar drenched sodas, sodium laced dinners, fatty organ meats, and, and….

What they do care about is market share, better known as making a buck. They can read the tea leaves.  A food revolution is underway and they’re wanting their cut.

Some, though not perfect, do a better job at marketing healthy foodstuffs.  Think Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Good Foods.  The long dominating chains have taken notice, except for Walmart, surprisingly, which remains tethered to largely traditional fare, despite its widely hyped transitioning to a green energy infrastructure.

Restaurants remain a problem and constitute virtual feed lots for human slaughter with their huge portions of “ain’t good for you foods”.  What a shocker when you scrutinize the online menus of some of these chains for their nutrition content to learn an average entree like Applebee’s bourbon street steak nets you 1067 calories along with 71.6g in fats.  By the way, you should always study the fat to total calorie ratio of any food you buy at the store or consume in a restaurant, remembering that fat grams are converted to calories by multiplying each gram by 9, unlike carbohydrates which follow a  1g x 4 formula.  The rule-of-thumb is that you should try to minimize your fat calorie ideally to no more than 10% of total calories and at max no more than 20%.   With Applebee’s entree, that comes to around 107-214 calories.  Converting in your head those 71.6 fat grams using the simple conversion formula I gave you gives you more than 630 calories of fat intake, far exceeding the parameters.  Hey, death trap!

Many of us have had enough of the food industry’s manipulating our health by prioritizing profit.  Even their efforts to repackage items under the aegis of “natural”should ruffle your feathers.  Have you taken a look at your Quorn chicken nuggets box lately for its serving content?  Believe me, it’s typical.

You can say no to all this and trade your knife for a fork.  Millions have and the more who do help make that decision easier for the rest of us.  Think Whole Foods, organic, local produce via farmer markets, growing your own veggies.  Healthy alternatives are sprouting like spring grass everywhere.

By the way, the neatest eating tip I ever got comes from just maybe the best book on nutrition out there, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008):  “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly Plants.”

The food revolution’s begun.  Don’t miss it!

Be well,

The myth about cholesterol

For years I’ve believed all the hype that high cholesterol sharply increases your risk for heart disease. I’m dubious about that now. Did you know that people with low cholesterol get heart attacks, too? Are you aware that nearly half of those with atherosclerosis have low cholesterol? Or that half of those with high LDL never suffer any complications? Something else seems to be going on.

I’ve suspected this for some time, but I didn’t know the mechanism behind it until now. Not all LDL is the same. A variant type exists, often hereditary, where the LDL type is smaller and denser, increasing your risk for heart attack or stroke. It isn’t LDL per se, but the kind of LDL you have. This kind puts you at greater risk, since small LDL particles can more easily infiltrate the arteries and cause blockage. You can get a good reading at your doc’s on your cholesterol levels, LDL and HDL, be thin as a rail, exercise daily, yet still be at risk. You can even pass an EKG stress test and drop dead several days later. You come across this story often.

There are two things you should do, whether you agree or not with my particles hypothesis.

1. The next time you go for a blood check, which should be annually at the very least, ask for a particles check to determine the type of LDL you have. An added dividend is it will show whether you’re insulin resistant, a precursor to diabetes. Your test will even categorize your risk for heart attack or stroke: minimal, moderate, high, highest.

2. If you do have small particles, there are ways to improve, or transition, to large particles, the healthier kind; namely, cutting carbohydrates, especially from unrefined sources such as processed foods and sweets and exercising vigorously at least 150 minutes weekly, i.e., 30-minutes daily.

Be warned that eating fats, especially the saturated kind, has its own dangers, but in the end, unrefined carbohydrates are the primary threat to a healthy heart. If you think about it, carbohydrates are turned into blood sugar (glucose). If there’s one insidious source of disease, not just coronary, it’s sugar!

Let me close with my own experience. Last May I was found to have high small particle lipids. Over the last three months, I’ve practiced my own counsel. Result, my August lab showed a 25% drop in small particle total.

As always, sound nutrition is your key to good health and longevity.

rj

The patient succumbed to complications….

In following a news story about someone’s demise, we often come across something like, “He succumbed to complications following routine surgery.” The truth is that anyone undergoing surgery of any kind faces at the very least a one percent risk of never making it home again.

One percent might not seem much of a risk, but then we tend to think such things happen to the other guy, not us. Unfortunately, life is replete with the improbable and unanticipated every morning we get out of bed, and death has its way of cornering us in unexpected places.

I still remember a chance conversation I had many years ago with a custodian at Harvard who told me of the loss of her child during tonsillectomy. As I was very young, I don’t think I took in its resonance as to the freakish nature of life itself, contributing not only to its mystery, but underscoring its frequent tragedy. I think it was Thomas Wolfe who wrote that a young man at 25 thinks himself immortal. (Say that to Keats, who knew better.) In my case, I was just 22.

A little more than a year ago, model and actress Mia Amber Davis died following knee surgery. She was 36. Dying from knee surgery? Yup, it happens.

There was also the unanticipated death of author Olivia Goldsmith, 54, whose Wives’ Club became a popular movie. Following plastic surgery, she went into cardiac arrest, possibly induced by anesthesia. For me, the latter has always been the spookiest element in any surgery I’ve undergone. To borrow a phrase from poet William Carlos Williams, “so much depends on” an anesthesiologist.

Then there was the widely reported death of prominent Congressman John Murtha, 77, during “minimally invasive surgery” to remove his gall bladder. A close source told CNN that doctors accidentally “hit his intestines.”

While natural causes such as a weak heart or allergic reaction to medication may often be factors in surgical mortality, the human capacity for error through misjudgment or negligence always looms, increasing the risk. Even good doctors make mistakes. The quandary is the more you do something well, the more the law of averages kicks in. Let’s hope your surgeon is having a good day.

The bottom line is that our bodies treat any surgery as invasive, and human error compounds the danger. Surgery may be necessary, but it’s never really “routine.” Consider the case of Jenny Olenick, 17, who died of hypoxia (deficient oxygen to the brain) while undergoing anesthesia to have her wisdom teeth removed. While very rare, it’s not unknown.

Of course, you can help lessen your risk by choosing your doctors well or considering a non-surgical alternative.

Unfortunately, we seldom get the choice as to the anesthesiologist. They just happen to be there, often rushing in from a previous procedure, and know precious little about us.

Next to death, surgery may be the ultimate in loss of control.

rj