Even Temporary Weight Loss Can Have Heart Benefits

by | May 23, 2014 | Weight Loss | 0 comments

Fit Adults who lose weight may be able to reap long-term cardiovascular health benefits, even if they gain the weight back, according to a new study.

In the study, researchers found that the less time adults carried around extra body fat, the less likely they were to experience cardiovascular health-related issues, such ashigh blood pressure or an increased risk of diabetes later in life.

The results also showed that losing a significant amount of weight — for example, going from being obese to overweight, or from being overweight to normal weight — at any point in adulthood may reduce cardiovascular health risks, even if a person regains the weight.

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How Bacteria in Our Gut Can Guide GI Treatment

by | May 21, 2014 | Digestive system | 0 comments

Belly The community of bacteria and other organisms that lives in our intestinal tract — known as the gut microbiome — has co-evolved with us and can be considered asymbiotic partner helping us perform everyday functions, such as eating our lunch. In fact, we wouldn’t be able to properly digest some of the foods we eat without the assistance of these bacteria. The microbiome also plays a role in our body’s immune system and can be manipulated to help fight off infection. For example, we’ve been able to harness these bacteria for the treatment of C. difficile using a treatment called fecal microbiota transplant (which I wrote about in detail here).

Even though greater access to mass DNA sequencing technology and the emergence of bioinformatics has given us the ability to study the four pounds of microorganismsthat make up the microbiome in greater detail, there’s still much more that we can learn about the body’s “unsung organ.”

This week at Digestive Disease Week (DDW), the world’s largest gathering of physicians and researchers in the fields of gastroenterology, hepatology, endoscopy and gastrointestinal surgery, my colleagues and I came together to share new research about the microbiome that can potentially give patients with digestive diseases hope for new treatments.

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Why Mediterranean diet is healthy

by | May 20, 2014 | Natural food, Nutrition | 0 comments

IMG_2360The combination of olive oil and leafy salad or vegetables is what gives the Mediterranean diet its healthy edge, say scientists.

When these two food groups come together they form nitro fatty acids which lower blood pressure, they told PNAS journal.

The unsaturated fat in olive oil joins forces with the nitrite in the vegetables, the study of mice suggests.

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Interview with Rusty Gregory

by | May 19, 2014 | Low carb diet | 0 comments

photo 1I was chatting the other day with certified Trainer and Low-Carb coach Rusty Gregory – I put the question to him and asked him to give us his answer on the subject…

Mark: What got you into the low carb way of eating?

Rusty: I’m more of a low carb person and you could probably call my approach a modified paleo. I do dairy but I just eliminated sugar and anything else that raises my blood drastically. All this happened about five years ago. Now when I was being brought up through school, through the education process here, I got an undergraduate degree and a Master’s degree is in Exercise Physiology abut the nutrition courses and all those were basically pushing a low fat, high carbohydrate diet. These give more calories from carbohydrates and therefore, according to that idea, if you find yourself eating too many calories you just cut back on the calories and/or you exercise more to lose weight.

You know that’s what we’ve heard for so long.

So about five years ago – after had heard this for decades  – I picked up a book by Gary Taubes – Good Calories, Bad Calories. He wrote this huge book on basically that’s making us fat and sick in this country and of course he went beyond that. Gary went all over the world and looked at various studies and as I learned this, I was like “this makes too much sense”.

It’s like the whole effect of sugar and what it’s doing to our pancreas and the secretion of insulin and the storage then of glucose, the fatty acids into our fat cells that makes us fatter and fatter.

It all made sense.

And as we cut out sugar or those foods, potatoes, rice, pasta, all those types of things, guess what? We lost weight! It just made too much sense.

Here in the United States back in like 1965 – Taubes wrote about a particular medical group that discovered insulin and its effects when you eat sugar and glucose but all that somehow it just got swept underneath the rug and we jumped on this low fat, high carbohydrate diet that has led to all kinds of problems ever since.

It was just the science that made sense to me.

And you know I’ll even take it a step further and I want to be careful when I say the word science because there’s so much bad science in the field of nutrition. They discovered that when you eat sugar your pancreas secretes insulin. It didn’t take studies to show us that, we just observed it, we watched it, we saw it. And once we learned how the body worked there’s really very little refuting it. So that’s what made sense to me.

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Five S’s of Transitioning into Summer Running – Interview with Dr. Dave Bird

by | May 16, 2014 | Exercise | 0 comments

DaveBirdDr. Dave is one of those people whose passion is to help ambitious but time-pressed runners to get the times that they deserve. He’s got lots of experience in this field.

At the age of 44 he was placed in the Florence Marathon and at the age of 45, just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, he came third in the Edinburgh Marathon.

Find out what are his five S’s of transitioning into summer running here