DR. HOFFMAN: Women, you've come a long way baby. Ever since those Virginia Slims ads announced the women's liberation into higher levels of freedom and authority in American society. Well that, of course, resulted in women developing a higher rate of lung cancer. New information suggests that lung cancer is now the leading killer among women and men are just slightly ahead of women in that alarming category.
Here's a new study that suggests that the upwardly-mobile American woman making her way through the American job market is at high risk in terms of the toll of stress. This is a new study from the American Journal of Epidemiology: The combination of heavy work pressure and high authority may take a toll on some women's heart health. It's an interesting trend here because the study shows that, while women in demanding jobs with high levels of autonomy or authority had an increased risk of developing heart disease, the same was not true of men.
Now, traditionally the way they define job stress is according to this formulation: Job stress occurs when you have either a lot of responsibility and no autonomy, that's really the highest level of job stress. And there's less stress when you don't have a lot of responsibility, right? But the benefit is that you don't have a lot of decisions to make. There are some people who say, "I would just rather work in a company and sort of be a drone and do a nine-to-five kind of thing," and that actually may be less stressful.
But the combination of having a lot of authority without having true autonomy is a big stressor. That's sort of like the plight of the middle manager. The guy who is at the top of the company, he's the CEO, he's got a lot of responsibility but he can do whatever he wants -- he can fire anyone at will, he doesn't have to listen to anyone so he has less stress than the middle manager. The middle manager has a lot of responsibilities, he supervises a lot of people but he could be fired at a moment's notice and his supervising top level manager has always given him or her grief, right? The guy in the mail room however, he has less stress because he's at the bottom of the pile, he has nowhere to go. He's pretty well ensconced there, he doesn't have to supervise anyone. Yeah, a lot of people are bossing him around but he doesn't have any responsibility and his job is routine.
Women at these top levels of responsibility were nearly three times as likely to develop heart disease during the study period as women with high work demands and little autonomy. That's interesting because there are a lot of women who really work hard but they're at the bottom of the totem pole or hierarchical pyramid and they only have one third the risk of heart disease. But for men, higher income and higher job prestige were actually related to a lower risk of heart disease. The men who work as laborers or operators,on theother hand, had the highest rates of heart disease and death.
Other men in professional and managerial positions have the lowest and I guess what they're saying here is it might ultimately work out for women. They might ultimately achieve the same reduction in cardiovascular risk as men in high levels of responsibility. But these women -- this study began in the 1980s and these women could be regarded as being on the cutting edge of a social transition. These are women moving up the ladder contemplating a glass ceiling of inequality with men and as a result they were sort of the shock troops of a social revolution that has placed women in positions of responsibility comparable to men and it has been taking a toll on women.
At least those initial shock troops in the battle between the sexes are experiencing higher risk of cardiovascular disease, stress presumably the cause.
As if there wasn't enough bad news about smoking, smoking causing lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema, and so forth, Surgeon General Richard Carmona has released his first official assessment of smoking and it's not good. It adds a number of diseases to the list of those familiar diseases caused by cigarettes. So if you're still a smoker or if someone you know is still a smoker, then you are, or they are probably engaged in the single most self-destructive and irrational act that one can engage in.
I don't care if you race cars, if you sky dive, these activities are extremely safe compared to lifting a cigarette to your lips and inhaling. The additional diseases that are now newly attributed to smoking include: Acute myeloid leukemia, a an almost uniformly fatal disease; abdominal aortic aneurysms; cataracts -- yeah, smoke does get in your eyes; periodontitis -- gum disease; pneumonia and cancers not just of the lung but of the cervix, kidney, pancreas and stomach. There's new evidence that smoking may be linked to breast cancer but the evidence so far is inconclusive and may just apply to certain women. So I know it's a familiar refrain but it just underscores our concerns about this deadly epidemic.
What I think is the greatest threat to America's national security, and I'm not talking about Al Qaeda, we hear enough about them on the radio and on TV. No question they're a threat, but the biggest threat to this country is what's happening to our children. Our children are our legacy and our children are getting fatter and sicker and it's a national tragedy. It has the potential to bankrupt the country, to break our national spirit: because of a bunch of sick and dependent and debilitated people in coming decades we'll be weakened as a nation.
We'll be vulnerable to economic and military challenges and what's going to become of us if we become a society of broken down individuals with degenerative diseases? Well, there's an increasing toll being exacted on our kids. Our kids are getting fatter and we're seeing the advent of childhood hypertension, depression and diabetes and it's an ugly scene.
This article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition takes a look at why that might be and it has a lot to do with a medium that you are not currently attending to because you're listening to the radio. The radio involves imagination, it frees you to move around and roam around. But when you're watching TV, you're locked in and also, according to this article in a major scientific journal, watching TV has a major connection to childhood obesity because the title of this article is: Children's Food Consumption During Television Viewing, and I love the language here because it's this dry scientific language but it states the case: Two of the hypothesized mechanisms through which television viewing is thought to promote childhood obesity are increased dietary intake from eating during viewing and eating highly advertised foods.
Wake up early on a weekend, parents. Usually, you're in bed trying to get some much needed sleep because you're exhausted from the week but your kids are up, they're restless, they're watching TV, they're watching cartoons. But check it out, parents. Check out the commercials because the commercials are mostly advertising high calorie, refined sugar, additive laden junk. And your kids are lusting for it. They're going to holler at you in the supermarket as you go past the aisle where this food is displayed and advertisers know that this is a good way to sell millions and perhaps billions of dollars of sugar-laced and fat-laden junk.
The article continues: "Likewise in households in which the television is on during meals -- just on during meals -- children consume more red meat, pizza, snack foods and soda and fewer fruits and vegetables."
What's the take home message? Well, this study showed that when kids watch TV they eat more, they consume more calories and they do so especially when they're watching TV on weekends. And the result of this particular study that took a look at kids in the third grade is that watching more TV was associated with a higher body mass index: that's a measurement of size, weight and obesity.
Don't put your kids on a diet, put your kids on a TV diet and watch their weight normalize. The other thing that TV does is, TV is an activity that locks kids in and makes them more sedentary. And while they're eating all that high calorie food, they're not burning off those calories.
It's like winning the lottery -- a common expression in the English language for the ultimate positive experience, but is it?
Well, scientists are now using incredible new imaging techniques to unlock the secrets of the brain and here's an interesting story reported in the Boston Globe. It looks at the activity in the pleasure center of the brain in people who either get a spontaneous reward without any expenditure of effort, equivalent to a random hit like winning the lottery, versus those who had worked for a reward.
You know there's a rock song, the lyrics go, "You work hard for your money," and the results of this study are interesting because they confirm what a lot of people might expect of ill-gotten gains or a random hit -- yeah, it causes some brain arousal, but the real or more complete lighting up of a pleasure center in the brain occurs when people derive satisfaction from the work they do.
They took a bunch of volunteers and played a computer game in which they were rewarded for coming up with the right answers or they were rewarded spontaneously, just got random rewards. The part of the brain associated with reward or pressure lit up more dramatically in those who worked hard for their money or worked hard for their reward. So that's the fascinating aspect of that.
I guess this has implications for lottery winners, trust fund babies and others who are just clipping their coupons or inheriting because there is a greater deal of satisfaction that comes from garnering rewards based on your own efforts.
Conjugated Linoleic Acid is one of those wannabe nutrients that hasn't quite made it into the pantheon of dependable, acceptable nutritional supplements. But there's really some interesting information on it.
CLA purports to be a nutrient that can help people lose weight. And there's a whole lot of information, new information, available this month as a result of a completion of studies on CLA, some of them are summarized in the current edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Now here's one that seems to support the notion that CLA helps people lose weight. This one from an article in the June issue of the Journal of Clinical Nutrition says that CLA reduced body fat mass in healthy overweight adults. Compared with the placebo group, folks taking CLA lost more weight and there weren't any problems in terms of adverse side effects.
What is CLA? Well CLA is something that is mostly found in natural dairy and beef. Cows that eat grass, there are precious few cows like that. The old longhorn cattle that you see in the western movies, they used to graze on grass and then when they used to have the cattle drive they would drive them to Dodge City or Kansas City put them on a train or take then to the slaughter house and then they were distributed on ice all over the country. That was the old-fashioned cattle industry. But now with the advent of the feed lot, most cattle are eating corn and corn does not have the same effect in terms of producing high levels of this particular fatty acid in the marbleized portions of the meat. So it depends on how the cattle are raised.
Anyway, this product is being offered also as a supplement. It appears under several brand names. One is Tonalin but CLA is controversial because in the very same edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, one study says it works and the other study says it doesn't really seem to work. in certain studies it doesn't reduce insulin resistance, and there was no effect on body weight or body mass index, so the results are kind of confusing for the general public.
And I think the way this stuff works is that for some people, a considerable minority of perhaps 40 percent of people, taking CLA as a supplement will help them to lose weight. But then when you look at it overall, that effect might be masked because a lot of people don't respond to it.
Well, what about the health benefits of CLA? Well, there are some good ones. That's why when I can, I obtain grass-fed beef for my personal consumption. It's hard to get, you can get it via the internet. There are a couple of internet sites that sell it. Here's another study that suggests that CLA has a cancer preventive effect. It may reduce the growth of tumors including breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, liver, pancreatic cancer. The suggestion is that it also enhances the immune system, it may reduce the tendency towards allergic diseases, it may strengthen the body's resistance to viruses.
So even if it doesn't make you lose weight, this stuff might be healthy. And the meat industry and dairy industry are interested. They're saying they want to develop functional foods, foods that are good tasting but also rich in CLA. Also that people can enjoy the benefits of CLA without taking pills or capsules just by eating meat or dairy products that are enriched with CLA. So look at CLA as a potential rising star among nutrients, and I think that it's a story that's going to keep developing over the next few years. As usual, we'll keep our Health Talk listeners apprised.
CALLER: I'm one of those unfortunate people who suffer from migraine headaches. I have been seeing a neurologist for two years. I am otherwise very healthy, I have no issues with blood pressure or anything like that and I've taken a variety of medications and we really have not come up with a solution. I've taken Depakote and Topamax and Nortryptiline. Right now I just thought of something else -- Verapamil.
DR. HOFFMAN: Verapamil is a blood pressure medication, it's a calcium channel blocker. I think your doctor is doing a good job managing you because he hasn't put you on powerful, numbing narcotic medications which, admittedly can reduce the pain. But they incapacitate you and ultimately as those medications wear off, the body responds by generating a migraine. The migraine is basically saying, give me some more of that medication because that medication felt good. And you get into rebound headaches and rebound migraines when you depend on medications.
Great opportunity for natural medicine to have its effect, and there are several areas where you can benefit. First thing I look at in migraine patients is the diet. And there are certain dietary triggers routinely for migraines and then certain individuals have unique idiosyncratic dietary triggers. For example, there are many people that have migraines in relation to things like aged cheese or red wine. Certainly, patients have migraines with caffeine even though when you take a cup of coffee it can make your headache feel better or reduce your susceptibility to migraines because you may be addicted and you really have to go through caffeine withdrawal to be successful.
And then, in terms of the idiosyncratic things like individuals have there are some people who have to eliminate all dairy or some people have to eliminate all foods like, perhaps corn might be a migraine trigger in a certain individual. Not for everyone but you have to individualize this. And you need to could a little dietary detective work. Have you explored that at all?
CALLER: I have. I haven't had red wine in years.
DR. HOFFMAN: So you know about the so-called migraine diet, you know about some of these migraine concerns. Also, watch out for chemicalized food because inadvertently if you eat a pickle you might get a big hit of sodium benzoate or if you eat some sort of processed meal or go to a restaurants you're going to get some MSG which is a trigger for some people. So you really need clean natural foods.
Magnesium levels are very critical for migraineurs. We measure magnesium levels using a special method that was used in migraine research. Ordinary magnesium levels don't tell us enough. We have to look for something called ionized magnesium which is a really careful measurement of magnesium that's available in the bloodstream . They found that patients with low levels of ionized magnesium responded well not only to oral magnesium but intravenous magnesium.
The key sometimes is that people who are low in magnesium, they can take magnesium by mouth until the cows come home or until they get diarrhea and they don't respond. They need intravenous loading with magnesium to stabilize the blood vessels to prevent the blood vessels from expanding and contracting and causing migraines.
Other considerations: There is a wonderful nutrient combination called Migralief. It is a combination of magnesium glycinate along with vitamin B2 which has been shown to be helpful for migraines as well as feverfew. Now, a lot of people say, "Well, I've been there, done that." Have you tried feverfew?
CALLER: No.
DR. HOFFMAN: Okay, then good. Some people have tried feverfew and it doesn't work and part of the problem is they're getting the wrong brand of feverfew that's not properly standardized or they take it in too short a time. They say, "Well, I took it for a couple of weeks and it didn't work." You really to have take feverfew for at least three months to actually see the benefits. Some people say, "What kind of medication is that, it doesn't get rid of the pain?" It actually acts as a preventive against migraine attacks. It doesn't make the pain better when you're having the migraines. You may have to use Imitrex or something.
But this is a product that combines feverfew, vitamin B2, riboflavin at high doses. By the way, vitamin B2 is the B vitamin that makes your urine very yellow when you're taking a multivitamin so if that happens, don't be worried.
The other thing that has been shown to be helpful lately, a new finding is that CoQ10 at high doses is very helpful for migraine sufferers because maybe migraines have something to do with the energetics in the cells in the blood vessels in the brain. So by taking high doses of coenzyme Q10 you sort of help energy efficiency -- parts of the brain that may be subject to little brown outs when you're having migraines -- and that can help.
Other therapies that are helpful, well certainly you can try acupuncture. You can do relaxation therapy because many of our patients are very stressed. One of the things we do also is we look at the levels of certain neurotransmitters in the brain of people who have migraines. After all, drugs like Imitrex build up serotonin in the brain. Some patients who have migraines are very low in serotonin and when we detect very low levels of serotonin we give building blocks for serotonin like 5-HTP .
We can use other things to improve brain chemistry because brain chemistry is very disrupted in patients who have chronic migraines. The pain syndrome will often cause people to have low levels. So those are some of the main things. Fish oil too may restore normalcy to blood flow and change the susceptibility of blood vessels to go into spasm.
So there's a bunch of things that can be done. Also, even intranasal vitamin B12 has been shown to be helpful. It's a special type of B12 called hydroxycobalamin. We sometimes prepare a spray for drops for patients, that's been shown in some studies. Again, that works on the energetics of the brain.
So again, a bunch of things that can be tried. You can try some of the things on your own or if you need a little special detective work, see a nutritionally-oriented physician who is experienced and deals with migraines.
CALLER: Is it safe to use the room purifiers that emit ozone?
DR. HOFFMAN: It is safe to use them and they are effective, but I think a lot of people don't know how to use them. There are room purifiers that both filter the air and emit ozone. Ozone is a wonderful thing for cleaning and purifying air and water. In fact, the Olympic swimming pools, because the athletes don't like chlorine, when the Olympics occur in Athens there's not going to be any chlorine in the pools because that bothers the athletes. Those pools will be ozone cleaned and free completely of contaminants and bacteria because ozone just really cleans up stuff, it just burns it away, literally.
The problem with ozone, though, is if you shut the windows and you turn the thing on high and you sleep through the night with a lot of ozone being emitted a few feet away from where you sleep. Ozone is a pro-oxidant and it can actually affect your respiratory tract and lungs in a damaging way. I actually have one of these devices, I have a Living Air Classic and it -- it's funny, in the ionization process a little bit of ozone is emitted. I turn it up high sometimes when I want to clear out odors or cleanse the room, but I leave the window open and I get out of there.
So you can use it to clean the air, and then turn it back to the low setting and you'll be fine.
CALLER: My supermarket is selling "wild Pacific salmon". It's supposed to be caught in the Pacific Ocean and it says on it, it's a product of China, it's wild caught. Is this the same as our Atlantic salmon? Do you know anything about it?
DR. HOFFMAN: It's actually very different. First of all, it's from the Pacific. But when you get Atlantic salmon there really is virtually no wild Atlantic salmon around. Atlantic salmon is a euphemism for mostly farmed salmon and it's farmed in Maine or it is sometimes farmed in Scotland and in parts of the world where they're doing aquaculture.
And the new concern about farmed salmon is, while it tends to be low in mercury compared to other big fish and it's rich in omega-3 oil -- and I am not going to back off from my stand on the salad and salmon diet. Salmon is emblematic of a food that is rich in omega three fatty acids, it's close to Paleolithic animal protein, that's just a great source of nutrition.
But the new findings are that farmed salmon in certain cases have high levels of PCBs and other undesirable chemicals. You get away from that by eating wild salmon. But if everybody were to eat wild salmon, number one, the species would become extinct -- that's if it comes from the Pacific and B, everybody would be bankrupt because it's real expensive isn't it?
What are you paying for your wild Pacific salmon over there in New Jersey?
CALLER: It's very reasonable, it's on sale for $3.99 and it's a whole package.
DR. HOFFMAN: There's something wrong with that. Because wild salmon, true wild Alaskan salmon sells for as much as 12-, 15- or 20 bucks a pound. So you get it from China and I don't know, I think maybe we could do a little due diligence and look into that. I have real concerns about some of the imports from that neck of the woods. I think that the quality controls may be poor. I think that Chinese are really aggressive about pushing products out into the marketplace and it's just inconceivable to me that a product that costs just $3.99 could be a truly wild product that isn't in some way adulterated or tampered with. I may stand corrected but it just doesn't make sense. It's like you go to the health food store and glucosamine sulfate is on sale for $3.99 for a bottle of 300. It just doesn't add up.
CALLER: I was happily using stevia. I drink a lot of green tea like I should and I was using stevia and Louise Gittleman's program turned me onto it -- Stevia Plus. And then in last month's Prevention Magazine they came up with an article that said that there have been some studies that stevia also is in question whether it's healthy or not.
DR. HOFFMAN: Let's talk about that because the U.S. government is in a very incestuous relationship with some of the big manufacturers of artificial sugars. Many of the people who are in the FDA who sit in judgment in terms of approval of some of these new chemicalized products are former employees of Monsanto, Proctor and Gamble and companies that make this stuff by the boxcar-loads.
So you see a proliferation of all kinds of artificial chemicalized sweeteners from NutraSweet to various artificial sweet enhancers that are now part of the American diet. Yet they still won't allow stevia to be added to foods because they cite health concerns. And the health concerns are actually based on a series of studies, so-called studies that are extremely vague and very, very minimal in terms of raising concerns about stevia.
There are actually hundreds of studies in virtually every country in the world, except the United States won't allow stevia to be incorporated as a food sweetener and I think that the health concerns that have caused FDA to not approve stevia as a food additive, they sort of pale in comparison with some of the studies from the actual clinical reports of people having adverse reactions to things like NutraSweet so there's a double standard there.
Many experts in the field of herbal medicine are convinced that stevia is extremely safe. The problem may arise from confusion about stevia versus purified sweeteners that are utilizing chemicals from stevia. Stevia itself, there's no question that it's absolutely safe. But it may be that if you take ultrapotent refined extracts from stevia and feed them to experimental animals and give them about their entire body weight in those chemicals per day that you may see some abnormalities in lab rats. But this has never been a concern with other sweeteners that were approved by the FDA when it should have been. I think we're seeing just a horrible double standard.
Stevia is great. Some people might find the taste annoying because it's actually supersweet, glowingly sweet, for some people but I think it's a great natural sweetener especially for kids. You can put stevia into water and add a little bit of fruit juice and you get an ultrasweet drink that kids will like and it won't get them fat. I think that stevia is fine.
CALLER: Should a person treating a candida infection take biotin and B vitamins separately from carbohydrates to avoid encouraging the infection?
DR. HOFFMAN: Well, is your concern that the B vitamins or the biotin might encourage the growth of Candida in your system?
CALLER: Yes, I read that in a couple of places.
DR. HOFFMAN: First, in the treatment of candida or a yeast problem, the approach to this is not yet recognized as rocket science. I think there are a lot of suggestions and casual advice that's being purveyed on the internet and in books and nobody's got a complete lock on the right way to go.
Clearly, you need to limit your refined carbohydrates. For some people that means an Atkins type diet with virtually no carbs but other people do fine with moderate amounts of high fiber carbohydrates or beans and that will help to reduce the problem. The problem comes in when you use certain nutrients to support your immune system, the B vitamins to my knowledge do not stimulate the growth of candida. In fact, some studies have shown that biotin might inhibit the replication or the multiplication of yeast in your intestinal tract and in your body. So I think biotin is a safe bet and the B vitamins are okay.
There is some concern about certain things that contain sulfur or amino acids. This would include lipoic acid , perhaps NAC; n-acetyl-cysteine, amino acids like cysteine. These things might--and I'm going to underscore might -- have a proliferating affect on certain bacteria or yeast that inhabit the gastrointestinal tract. But again, this is based on some people's opinions and I don't think they've done Nobel Prize winning research on this yet to establish it.
I think it's hard to go wrong if you're on a low-carb diet, if you're taking some natural antifungals perhaps you'll take garlic, perhaps you'll take pau d'arco. You could take olive leaf extract, which I think is very effective. You could take Culturelle that compete with yeast in the intestinal tract. If necessary, you could take a medication like Nystatin or Diflucan or Lamisil to fight yeast. Various approaches are effective.
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