Your Diabetes May Be Completely Reversible

There is a staggering amount of misinformation on diabetes, a growing epidemic that afflicts more than 26 million in the United States today. The sad truth is this: it could be your very OWN physician perpetuating this misinformation. Most diabetics find themselves in a black hole of helplessness, clueless about how to reverse their condition. The bigger concern is that more than half of those with Type 2 diabetes are NOT even aware they have diabetes. Diabetes: Symptoms of an Epidemic - The latest diabetes statistics echo an increase in diabetes cases, both diagnosed and undiagnosed. By some estimates, diabetes has increased more than 700 percent in the last 50 years! At least 26 million Americans are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and another 79 million are prediabetic. What’s hidden behind the medical smokescreen is that Type 2 diabetes is completely preventable. The cure lies in a true understanding of the underlying cause (which is impaired insulin and leptin sensitivity) and implementing simple, inexpensive lifestylechanges that spell phenomenal benefits to your health. Type 1 Diabetes and Insulin Dependence - Also known as diabetes mellitus, type 1 diabetes – dubbed “juvenile onset diabetes” – is the relatively uncommon type, affecting only about one in 250 Americans. Occurring in individuals younger than age 20, it has no known cure. In Type 1 diabetes, your own immune system ravages the insulin-producing cells of your pancreas. The result is a loss of the hormone insulin. Type 1 diabetics need to be supplemented with insulin for the rest of their lives as failure to do will rapidly result in death. At the current time other than a pancreas transplant there is no known cure for type 1 diabetes. Type 2 Diabetes: Virtually 100% Curable - The far more common form of diabetes is type 2, which affects 90 to 95 percent of diabetics. In this type, your body produces insulin but is unable to recognize and use it properly. It is considered an advanced stage of insulin resistance. Insulin resistance allows sugar to increase and cause a host of complications. The signs of diabetes may all be there, but the often-overlooked fact is that Type 2 diabetes is completely preventable and nearly 100% curable. How They Got It All Wrong About Diabetes - Diabetes is NOT a disease of blood sugar, but rather a disorder of insulin and leptin signaling. Mainstream medicine largely fails in treating diabetes – even worsens it – because it refuses to investigate and act on this underlying cause. Insulin sensitivity is key in this matter. Your pancreas secretes insulin into your bloodstream, lowering your glucose. Insulin is meant to control the lifespan in some organisms, but what is its true purpose in humans? As Dr. Ron Rosedale explains in an article about the metabolic effects of insulin: “Your doctor will say that it's to lower blood sugar, but I will tell you right now that that is a trivial side effect. Insulin's evolutionary purpose as is known right now, we are looking at other possibilities, is to store excess nutrients. We come from a time of feast and famine when…our ancestors were able to store nutrients, which they were able to do because they were able to elevate their insulin in response to any elevation in energy that the organism encountered. When your body notices that sugar is elevated, it is a sign that you've got more than you need; you're not burning it so it is accumulating in your blood. So insulin will be released to take that sugar and store it...” Insulin regulation plays such an integral role in your health and longevity, that elevated levels are not only symptoms of diabetes, but also heart disease, peripheral vascular disease, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer, and obesity. Effective Diabetes Diet and Lifestyle Tips - I’ve simplified the various effective ways to increase your insulin and leptin sensitivity – and prevent or reverse diabetes – into six easy, highly doable steps. Exercise more. Contrary to prevailing recommendations of shunning exercise during illness, staying fit is highly important in getting diabetes and other diseases under control. In fact, it is one of the fastest, most powerful ways to lower your insulin and leptin resistance. Reduce grains and sugars, especially fructose. Conventional diabetes treatment has failed over the last 50 years partly because of its seriously flawed dietary principles. Reduce ALL sugars and grains – even “healthful” ones like whole, organic, or sprouted grains – from your diet. Reduce breads, pasta, cereals, rice, potatoes, and corn. Until your blood sugar gets under control, you may want to avoid fruits as well. Get plenty of omega-3 fats from a high-quality, animal-based source. - Monitor your fasting insulin level. Every bit as important as your fasting blood sugar, your fasting insulin level should be between 2 and 4. The higher your level, the worse your insulin sensitivity is. Try probiotics. Your gut is a living ecosystem of a multitude of bacteria. The more good bacteria you have, the stronger your immunity and the better your overall function will be. Optimize your gut flora by consuming fermented foods like natto, miso, kefir, raw organic cheese, and cultured vegetables. You may also take a high-quality probiotic supplement. Don't Be a Diabetes Statistic – Take Control of Your Health To summarize, type 2 diabetes is a fully preventable, reversible condition that arises from faulty leptin signaling and insulin resistance. Therefore, diabetes can be controlled or reversed by recovering your insulin and leptin sensitivities. The only known way to reestablish proper leptin and insulin signaling is through a proper diet and exercise. There is NO drug that can currently accomplish this, and I doubt if one will ever exist in the lifetime of anyone reading this! A meta-analysis of 13 randomized controlled trials involving more than 33,000 people showed that drug treatment of type 2 diabetes is not only ineffective, it's dangerous. Treatment with glucose-lowering drugs actually showed the potential to increase your risk of death from heart-related and all other causes. So please remember, your diet will make or break you if you're diabetic or pre-diabetic. Unfortunately, the conventional dietary recommendations for diabetics – that of a high complex carbohydrate, low saturated fat diet – is the exact opposite of what actually works. Source: mercola.com, 11/30/14.

11 Surprising Factors To Prevent Memory Loss

Among Americans, the notion of losing mental capacity evokes twice as much fear as losing physical ability, and 60 percent of US adults say they are very or somewhat worried about memory loss. The good news is that your brain is a dynamic organ, constantly adapting and changing, for better or for worse. Many daily activities such as, lack of sleep can seriously interfere with your memory the next day. On the other hand, a healthy lifestyle will support your brain health and even encourage your brain to grow new neurons, a process known as neurogenesis or neuroplasticity. Your brain's hippocampus, i.e. the memory center, is especially able to grow new cells and it's now known that your hippocampus regenerates throughout your entire lifetime (even into your 90s), provided you give it the tools to do so. Many of the most powerful interventions for memory are also the simplest. So if you'd like to boost your memory, and protect it against negative changes, keep reading. The 11 factors that follow, as reported by TIME, all have the potential to mess with your memory (some in a good way and others a bad way). 1. Thyroid Problems - Although your thyroid doesn't have a specific role in your brain, memory problems are a hallmark characteristic of thyroid disease. High or low thyroid levels (hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism) may lead to difficulty with memory and concentration. 2. Menopause - Hot flashes and insomnia are common during menopause, and both can impair your sleep and contribute to memory loss. This is temporary and should improve when your menopause symptoms subside. 3. Lack of Sleep - The process of brain growth, is believed to underlie your brain's capacity to control behavior, including learning and memory. However, sleep and sleep loss modify the expression of several genes and gene products that may be important for synaptic plasticity. Furthermore, certain forms of long-term potentiation, a neural process associated with the laying down of learning and memory, can be elicited in sleep, suggesting synaptic connections are strengthened while you slumber. Most adults need about eight hours of sleep a night; if you wake up feeling fatigued or fall asleep easily during the day, you probably need more sleep. 4. Anxiety and Depression - Increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol brought on by anxiety and depression causes your brain cells to lose synapses (which connect brain cells). This, in turn, makes it more difficult to form and retrieve memories. Allen Towfigh, MD, medical director of New York Neurology & Sleep Medicine, told TIME: "We don't understand the exact link, but strong evidence indicates depression, anxiety, and bipolar disease disrupts the neural circuitry involved in developing and retrieving memories…The severity of the memory loss often mirrors the severity of the mood disorder—severe depression brings about equally severe memory loss." 5. Certain Medications - Many prescription drugs interfere with your memory function. This includes anxiety medications (Xanax, Valium, and Ativan), which hinder your brain's ability to transfer short-term memories to long-term "storage." Others include tricyclic antidepressants, statin drugs, beta-blockers, narcotic painkillers, incontinence drugs, sleep aids, and antihistamines (such as Benadryl). 6. Smoking - Smoking impairs the blood supply to your brain, leading to memory lapses. Studies also show that smokers have a more rapid decline in brain function, including memory, than non-smokers. Smoking leads to the accumulation of abnormal proteins in your brain that interfere with processing and relaying information. 7. Stress - An animal study revealed that higher levels of stress hormones can speed up short-term memory loss in older adults. The findings indicate that how your body responds to stress may be a factor that influences how your brain ages over time. Previous research has also linked chronic stress with working memory impairment. 8. A Higher "Infectious Burden" - People exposed to more germs, such as the cold sore virus, scored 25 percent lower on cognitive tests than those with a lower "infectious burden." Researchers concluded that past infections may contribute to cognitive impairment, perhaps due to damage to your blood vessels. 9. Green Tea - Want to boost your memory, drink more green tea. In a study of 12 healthy volunteers, those who received a beverage containing 27.5 grams of green tea extract showed increased connectivity between the parietal and frontal cortex of the brain compared to those who drank a non-green tea beverage. 10. Exercise - Exercise encourages your brain to work at optimum capacity by stimulating nerve cells to multiply, strengthening their interconnections, and protecting them from damage. During exercise nerve cells release proteins. One in particular, called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), triggers numerous other chemicals that promote neural health, and directly benefits cognitive functions, including learning. A 2010 study on primates published in Neuroscience also revealed that regular exercise not only improved blood flow to the brain, but also helped the monkeys learn new tasks twice as quickly as non-exercising monkeys. This is a benefit the researchers believe would hold true for people as well. In a separate one year-long study, individuals who engaged in exercise were actually growing and expanding the brain's memory center 1 percent to 2 percent per year, where typically that center would have continued to decline in size. 11. Vitamin B12 - B vitamins including vitamin B12 may slow brain shrinkage by as much as seven-fold in brain regions specifically known to be most impacted by Alzheimer's disease. In one study, participants taking high doses of folic acid and vitamins B6 and B12 had blood levels of homocysteine that were lowered as was the associated brain shrinkage – by up to 90 percent. The researchers noted: "…B vitamins lower homocysteine, which directly leads to a decrease in GM [gray matter] atrophy, thereby slowing cognitive decline. Our results show that B-vitamin supplementation can slow the atrophy of specific brain regions that are a key component of the AD [Alzheimer's disease] process and that are associated with cognitive decline." This makes a strong case for ensuring your diet includes plenty of healthful B-vitamin sources, such as meat, poultry, eggs, dairy products, and wild-caught fish. Leafy green vegetables, beans, and peas also provide some B vitamins, but if you eat an all vegetarian or vegan diet, vitamin B12 is one of the nutrients your body is most likely deficient in. Also, when you get older, the lining of your stomach gradually loses its ability to produce hydrochloric acid, which releases vitamin B12 from your food. If you're over 50, it's safe to assume you are not absorbing vitamin B12 at an optimal level and may be at risk of deficiency. Three More Little-Known Tips to Supercharge Your Memory If you're serious about improving your memory and your cognitive function, you'll also want to know about these three important variables for brain health. Vitamin D - Activated vitamin D receptors increase nerve growth in your brain, and researchers have also located metabolic pathways for vitamin D in the hippocampus and cerebellum of the brain, areas that are involved in planning, processing of information, and the formation of new memories. In older adults, research has shown that low vitamin D levels are associated with poorer brain function, and increasing levels may help keep older adults mentally fit. Appropriate sun exposure is all it takes to keep your levels where they need to be for healthy brain function. Intermittent Fasting - Your ancient ancestors never had access to food 24/7 so your genes are optimized for periods of feast and fasting. Problem is most of us are in 24 hour feast mode. Intermittent fasting can help your body to "reset" itself and start to burn fat instead of sugar. Further, it will help you to reduce your overall calorie consumption, which promotes brain cell growth and connectivity. Gut Health - Your gut is your "second brain," and your gut bacteria transmits information to your brain via the vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve that runs from your brain stem into your enteric nervous system (the nervous system of your gastrointestinal tract). There is a close connection between abnormal gut flora and abnormal brain development, and just as you have neurons in your brain, you also have neurons in your gut -- including neurons that produce neurotransmitters like serotonin, which is also found in your brain and is linked to mood. Quite simply, your gut health can impact your brain function, psyche, and behavior, as they are interconnected and interdependent in a number of different ways. In addition to avoiding sugar, one of the best ways to support gut health is to consume beneficial bacteria. You can use a probiotic supplement for this or fermented vegetables, because they can deliver extraordinarily high levels of beneficial bacteria. Most people aren't aware that in a healthy serving of sauerkraut – two to three ounces or so – you're getting the equivalent of nearly 100 capsules of the highest-potency probiotic you can buy. It's clearly one of the most cost-effective alternatives. And Remember the Most Important Factor of All... Your Diet The foods you eat – and don't eat – play a crucial role in your memory. Fresh vegetables are essential, as are healthy fats and avoiding sugar and grain carbohydrates. Curry, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, and walnuts contain antioxidants and other compounds that protect your brain health and may even stimulate the production of new brain cells. Increasing your animal-based omega-3 fat intake and reducing consumption of damaged omega-6 fats (think processed vegetable oils) in order to balance your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. Coconut oil is a healthful fat for brain function. According to research by Dr. Mary Newport, just over two tablespoons of coconut oil (about 35 ml) would supply you with the equivalent of 20 grams of medium-chain triglycerides (MCT), which is indicated as either a preventative measure against degenerative neurological diseases or as a treatment for an already established case. Source: mercola.com, 11/16/14.