Accessing Resources for Empowerment

Wednesday, 01 April 2009 10:14 - Food is Information - Get Informed

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:14:31 +0100

"The Medium is the Message" from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man - Marshall McLuhan (1960) You might ask, "What does McLuhan’s aphorism have to do with food?” Can food be a medium and does it contain a message?

We are used to thinking of food as simply carbohydrate, protein, and fat and we ask ourselves questions such as: “Am I getting enough carbs, am I getting too much fat, and how many calories are all of these contributing?” In other words we think food is just energy. This is now known to be false. It is only within the last 10 years or so that scientists have discovered that food is not just calories, carbohydrate, fat and protein but that it also contains a message. Food contains vital information for our cells. It's like a language. But as McLuhan suggested we pay attention really only to the obvious, to what we see in the foreground -- in this case calories -- and we lose what's in the background – the rest of the information.

Food is information in the same way that the words on this page are information that hopefully you take in and digest. Now you would probably agree that it is difficult for you to get the full impact of the words that you are reading right now because in a certain way you are only receiving one channel of information -- words on the page do not convey tonality, timbre, volume or inflection, visual clues and body language. In the same way we loose certain information from food when we consume processed food because much of the information contained in the nutrients has been lost.

How is food information? We are now discovering that food is information because as it is broken down in the gut and absorbed into our system, those small molecules not only produce energy, but also bind to our cells’ surfaces in certain ways that convey messages to our genes. These messages can turn on or turn off certain genes in the cell nucleus -- and those messages cause the genes to make certain proteins that in turn create more messages to turn on or turn off immunity, inflammation, hormones, and other cellular signals. It's a dynamic ongoing process of information exchange that occurs between what we eat, the breakdown products, and the messages that get transmitted to our genes.

While McLuhan saw telephones, radio and television as the ‘media’, in this case the medium is food, and the message, unfortunately, has been lost! Our food manufacturers’ especially have only paid attention to the calories, carbohydrate, protein and fat issues. Not only that, but they have paid attention to those matters only in their own egocentric fashion – in the form of “…let's make food tasty and not necessarily nutritious”. That sells more food, but the information that we get from that food is the wrong kind of information. The balance of nature has been upset by the runaway forces of profit and sales. Food manufacturers have stripped our food of important information, information vital to ourselves and our wellness. Of course they did not do this deliberately; they did not realize, and many of us didn’t, that the removal of fibre, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that we had not yet discovered 60 years ago, would have such a huge impact on the health of our society.

Let me give you some examples. Removing B vitamins from whole-wheat grains to make white flour actually caused an increase in the birth defect known as neural tube defect. It took over 25 years for scientists to act on this fact after it was discovered! Finally, in 1998 folic acid (vitamin B9) fortification of cereal products became mandatory in Canada. Since we have added back that particular B9 vitamin, folic acid, the incidence of neural tube defect has decreased by 50%, as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine by Canadian authors in 2007. In other words, putting this particular information back into food has helped. Folic acid is an information molecule. It is critical in the development of other information molecules such as hormones and neurotransmitters that effect not only our emotions, but also our blood pressure and heart health.

But we have taken far more nutrients out of our food than we have put back. When we took out fibre, which 35 years ago scientists thought was an inert substance that really didn't do very much, we didn't realize that it was actually food and nutrients for the 5 or 6 pounds of healthy bacteria in our bowel that help with digestion, immunity, and vitamin production. Taking away that fibrous nutrition for those bacteria created an imbalance that causes us much distress in our digestive tract -- inflammation, pain, irritable bowel disease, diverticulitis, hemorrhoids, and so forth.

Yet another example resides in fat. Thinking that fat was just calories; food manufacturers just went ahead and made oils solid, calling it margarine. Again about 25 years later we realized that the fats in some margarines, known as trans-fats, can increase the incidence of heart disease in a fashion similar to, or greater than, the increase in blood cholesterol. Here are some more facts about fat -- there are two important kinds known as omega-6 and omega-3. Omega-3 fats tend to come from cold-water fish and nuts; whereas omega-6 fats come from meat. In Paleolithic times the ratio of omega-6/omega-3 in the diet was less than one – in other words more omega-3 than omega-6 fats. Now that ratio is somewhere between 5:1 and 15:1. The problem here is that omega-6 is inflammatory and anti-immune, whereas omega-3 is anti-inflammatory and pro-immune. Do you wonder why we have so many allergies and infections in our society? One reason is that that balancing fats is important.

Our bodies are highly adaptable and in the 10,000 years that we have been on this planet as human beings, it is only in the last 100 years that such huge changes have taken place in our diet. The nutrients that are contained in plant and vegetable foods are in the thousands -- we don't know the half of it yet. But while scientists try to find out what all those nutrients are, all we have to do is go back to basics, back to what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers knew best -- eat your vegetables, and fruits. Not the juice, which is a form of processed food, but the whole fruit or vegetable. These foods contain phytonutrients – plant substances that act as good messages for your genes.

The messages generated by the kind of food that we eat today are messages of inflammation, and irritation. Give yourselves good messages as often as you can. The New Year is always a good time to start!

Happy Eating in 2008!

Wednesday, 01 April 2009 10:13 - Vitamin D - The Sunshine Vitamin

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:13:16 +0100

If I told you to go out into the sun without sunscreen on a regular basis you would probably think I had lost my marbles. But that is exactly what I am going to tell you. Why? Because research in the last decade proves that people living in the northern hemisphere particularly, have as a population, a significant deficiency of vitamin D. There are countless studies to show this, and many of them come from Dr. Reinhold Vieth at the University of Toronto, as well as Dr. Michael F. Holick at the Boston University Medical Center in Massachusetts.

Studies have also linked vitamin D deficiency to a number of chronic diseases including diabetes, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis and various cancers including the bowel, prostate, and breast. It's not that the deficiency of vitamin D actually causes these diseases, but that a vitamin D deficiency is strongly associated with them.

Vitamin D used to be recommended in relatively small amounts, and was added to milk in the early part of the last century to prevent the onset of a childhood bone disease known as rickets, that softened the bones of young children. Although the addition of small amounts of vitamin D in food has for the most part prevented rickets, we now recognize that vitamin D is actually needed in much larger amounts.

Vitamin D is actually more like a hormone that it is a vitamin. A vitamin is actually defined as a substance, not made by the body, that must be obtained from our diet and that is vital to our well-being. Vitamin D is certainly vital to well-being, but it is actually made in the body with the help of sunlight, and it is only contained in small amounts in certain foods. The bulk of vitamin D comes from the ultraviolet light action on the skin causing the cells of the skin to make it. Initially this is not its active form, and it must be converted to an active form both in the liver and finally in the kidney before it can act. Once in its active form it is responsible for calcium absorption and bone formation, as well as regulating many other processes in the body.

Here are some interesting vitamin D facts:

The further you live from the equator and the darker your skin, the longer you need exposure to the sun to generate sufficient vitamin D. Ultraviolet light does not penetrate glass sufficiently for the body to make vitamin D, so you actually need to be outside.
Having kidney disease or liver damage can impair your body’s ability to activate circulating pro-vitamin D.
Osteoporosis is commonly caused by a lack of vitamin D, which impairs calcium absorption.
Sufficient vitamin D may help prevent prostate cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer and depression, and low levels have recently been associated with chronic pain.
Vitamin D deficency may exacerbate type 2 diabetes and impair insulin signalling.
Obesity impairs the action of vitamin D in the body, and obese people need more vitamin D, but they can store more of it in their fat cells and release it when needed.
Your risk of developing serious diseases like diabetes and cancer may be reduced 50% - 80% through simple, sensible exposure to natural sunlight 2-3 times each week.
Infants who receive vitamin D supplementation (2000 units daily) have an 80% reduced risk of developing type 1 diabetes over the next twenty years.

So how much sunlight should you get? Experts recommend about 10-20 minutes exposure of the head, neck and arms, to sun without sunscreen daily. In the winter, because of the angle of the sun at this latitude, it is impossible to get sufficient vitamin D and it is recommended that everyone take at least 1000 international units per day during the winter. You should of course wear sunscreen after your daily exposure.

That’s the good news! Sun exposure is not all bad, in fact a small amount is needed for good health.

© Edward Leyton MD 2007

Wednesday, 01 April 2009 10:11 - Diets Come and Go - But this one's here to stay

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:11:17 +0100

If you have ever been by the self-help section in a book store you will be aware that there are multiple diets touted as potential lifesavers and life extenders. It's a confusing array of information is difficult to sort out and comprehend.

When looking at diet and lifestyle in general as predictors of health and life extension, scientists have to measure an outcome which is reliable. Researchers also have to look at a variety of lifestyle factors other than diet that might confuse outcomes, such as smoking and lack of physical activity. In other words it's a complex area of research.

The Mediterranean Diet has been in the forefront of research in the last 10 years because it appeared that people who lived, particularly in Southern Europe, had greater longevity and less illness than people who live in North America. This was in spite of the fact that that their diet contained more fat and alcohol, and for this reason was originally labelled the "French Paradox". How could the French have a greater longevity than North American's when they ate cheese and drank wine?

We are now just beginning to sort out that paradox. The Mediterranean diet refers to a diet that contains the following components:

Abundant plant foods that include fruits, vegetables, breads and other forms of cereals, as well as beans, nuts, and seeds as major components.
Minimally processed, seasonably fresh and locally grown foods.
Fresh fruits as the typical daily dessert.
Olive oil as the principal source of dietary fat.
Dairy products consumed in low to moderate amounts -- mainly cheese and yogurt.
Less than 4 eggs per week.
Red meat consumed in low frequency and amounts, with high fish intake.
Red wine consumed in low to moderate amounts generally with meals.

It is this kind of diet that led to the landmark study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association 2004 in which Europeans in the later stages of life who were 70 to 90 years of age, from 11 European countries, were followed until their death and divided into categories that looked at their nutritional intake as well as alcohol, physical activity, and smoking. This carefully crafted study showed that the mortality rate (the final endpoint of the study) was decreased by 60% in those who followed the Mediterranean diet, compared to those who remained on a more traditional processed food diet. Sixty percent -- that's right!

Now if I was to tell you that there was a pill that you could take that would reduce your mortality by 60% without side effects, would you take it? Of course you would. But changing lifestyle is a complicated process requiring behavioural changes that some people are often unwilling to take. This is not the only study that has shown significant benefits. This study used healthy people before they started to change their diet. In the Lyon Heart Study other people that suffered initially from heart disease for example, have also benefited from the Mediterranean diet reducing risk of recurrence of heart attack by 80%.

The Mediterranean Diet -- with its emphasis on high plant food products probably works because the levels of anti-stress plant nutrients are very high. These phyto-nutrients are also present in alcohol particularly from red wine. Its natural pharmacology at its best, utilizing what is natural to our bodies in foods that have been around for millennia.

This is simple, and within reach. It’s a great time of year to start exploring this way of eating. Markets are full of fresh, organic, locally grown food that will enhance your health. Try it – you will like it for sure.

© Edward Leyton MD 2008