Our body has natural built-in cycles and patterns of metabolic activity controlled by nerve cells buried deep in the brain that control the release of different hormones. This is called our circadian rhythm. It is timed to be responsive to daylight, so that our body is in sync with when the sun comes up. The […]
Despite my several articles on the real story about cholesterol, I still hear from many of my patients that they are taking statins to lower their cholesterol levels. Fortunately, a fix/work-around now exists to mitigate the negative consequences of taking statins. But more about that in a minute. Let’s review for a minute what cholesterol […]
There is a lot of rumbling out there in the nutrition world right now as the new political administration has provided a platform for challenging a lot of old-school stories and propaganda about what constitutes healthy nutrition. One of the big shifts concerns a debate that has been going on for many years in the […]
This newsletter had to wait until after Halloween. I didn’t want to throw shade on the joy of running door to door gathering small bundles of sugar for mass consumption later. After all, how often do we get people we hardly know to tell us how wonderful we look and reward us just for coming […]
The general question of today’s newsletter is which kind of diet works better to improve health – low- carb or low-fat. In the world of dietary modification, the most common need in America today is to lose fat weight since over two-thirds of Americans are overweight. Almost half of them are outright obese, which is […]
The week before last Ellen and I did a 5-day autophagy diet. We began on Sunday afternoon and ended with breakfast the following Saturday. For those five and a half days we ate no protein, no carbs or sugars, and very little fat. The idea is to eat just fiber with a little […]
Welcome to the New Year! With the New Year comes the resolutions for improving your life in the coming year. Probably the most common resolution chosen in this country is weight loss. This is likely a reflection of the fact that 74% of Americans are overweight. Worse than that, 42% of adults over the age […]
This is a continuation from last week where I was discussing the diet portion of the makeover. Stage 1: the first seven days are designed to overcome lipotoxicity within our cells causing insulin resistance. To do this we have to force our cells to want to burn any available fats in storage for energy. […]
For the last several weeks, I have been trying to understand the complexities of how our bodies process sugar and fat. For many years I have been predominately living a low-carb lifestyle thus avoiding any form of sugar and starches. Then a couple of years ago the concept of higher health being achieved through […]
A week ago Ellen and I had some lab work done to check our fasting insulin and hemoglobin A1c. We regularly test our blood sugar and ketones at home with a finger stick blood test. There is no at-home test for insulin, but I just found out there is a new at-home test for […]