Why Coconuts Do a Heart Good

by Dr. Stephen Sinatra

Last Reviewed 06/12/2013

I'm often asked if coconut oil is good for your heart, and my answer is a resounding yes. The ordinary coconut—known for its sweet milk, great fiber, and ability to conk people on the heads in Marx Brothers movies—can do your heart good—and a lot more.

Many people shun coconut oil because it’s high in saturated fat, which is true. But coconut oil is also the least vulnerable oil to oxidative stress and free radical formation—in fact it’s probably the safest oil to use in all types of cooking.

What about oil and your cholesterol? Coconut oil contains medium-chain fatty acids (MCFA)—not the long-chain fatty acids found in most oils—so it's heart healthy. In fact those MCFAs have an effect similar to omega-3 fatty acids, so they make blood platelets less sticky.

Researchers also demonstrated that coconut’s MCFAs can neutralize and kill many microorganisms, bacteria, and viruses that are responsible for periodontal disease, herpes, and even bladder infections. Remember, oral bacteria that can cause dental disease can enter the bloodstream via the gum line, cause inflammation and eventually contribute to arthrosclerosis. Plus, research has shown that coconut oil can help to improve memory.

What’s the best way to incorporate coconut oil into your diet?

• Use it for cooking. Just remember not to heat it to the point of smoking. Any oil, including coconut oil, can produce toxic byproducts when overheated. Another way is to eat coconut or coconut products every day.
• Mix it with olive oil in your salad. You might even douse your steamed vegetables with a few teaspoons of it.
• Eat coconut or other products like coconut milk. Coconut milk can be used to make shakes and smoothies. You can also use it in a hot or cold cereal, or pour it over seasonal organic blueberries, raspberries and strawberries. I like to bake fish in coconut milk to keep it moist and enhance the flavor.
• Or try coconut water. I add it it my daily fruit and veggie juice as I’ve writtern about  before. If you are not familiar with the procedure you can visit heartmdinstitute.com.

But if you’re not nuts about eating coconut, you can apply coconut oil to your skin. Remember, the skin absorbs almost anything you put on it. Similar to almond oil, coconut oil can really enhance a great massage. Coconut oil is also a great way to treat dried, cracked soles of the feet—and even foot fungus. It also helps to control dandruff, and improves the texture of your hair.

Read more: http://www.drsinatra.com/why-coconuts-do-a-heart-good?key=219154&utm_campaign=Multi-Product&utm_source=loy-email-all&utm_medium=email-Eletter&utm_content=sinatra-eletter_react-062513&sm_mid=626604&sm_rid=626604.16201.40967#ixzz2XFTML41l

Lower Your Cholesterol Naturally

Many people find elevated cholesterol levels to be worrisome. They’ve been convinced that having a high cholesterol level means having an increased heart attack risk. I want you to understand why you need cholesterol for your health. You should also know the truth behind the cholesterol-heart disease theory. I can also share some natural ways to lower your cholesterol.

Dr. Michael Cutler | Mar 25, 2013 

Why You Need Cholesterol
The liver produces about 80 percent of the cholesterol in your body. You must have sufficient cholesterol in your diet to make sufficient amounts of these critically important hormones:

• Progesterone and estrogens (for women).
• Aldosterone.
• Cortisol.
• DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone).
• Testosterone.

As you can see in the diagram below, these and other vital hormones are manufactured from cholesterol:


The Cholesterol-Heart Disease Theory
Both doctors and the public embrace the idea that dietary cholesterol is bad for you and that high cholesterol is a leading cause of cardiovascular disease (CVD). It’s true that high LD (bad) cholesterol can be associated with CVD, but it is not the actual cause of heart disease. ^[1] Inflammation is the real cause. We know that elevated, oxidized LDL cholesterol is simply a result of inflammation and that there are numerous causes for inflammation. If your doctor measures your cholesterol to monitor cardiovascular risk, make sure he measures the particle number and particle size of your LDL. That is the new standard in lipid measurements.

Origins Of Theory
The cholesterol-heart disease theory originated in the early 1950s when political pressure was put on the medical industry to find a cause for CVD, a problem that was becoming the top killer in the United States.

In 1964, the famous heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey of Houston reported that he and his colleagues studied 1,700 surgical patients and found no correlation between blood cholesterol levels and the extent of coronary artery disease seen during open heart surgery. This was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association. ^[2]

You should also know that about 50 percent of people hospitalized for heart attacks or undergoing CABG (coronary artery bypass graft) surgery have normal cholesterol levels.

Furthermore, in 1992, Dr. William P. Castelli, former director of the Framingham Heart Study, reported a similar discovery: “[I]n Framingham, Mass., the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol…” ^[3]
I’ll qualify this quote by stating two important points. First, animal meat in high amounts generally triggers inflammation, but fresh produce lowers inflammation. Secondly, 15 percent to 25 percent of the population is sensitive to dietary cholesterol, with a threefold disease increase among these hyper-responders. Also, obesity, diabetes mellitus and insulin resistance contribute to a hyper-response to dietary cholesterol. And, according to some recent scientific literature, consuming one to seven eggs per week does not increase the risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke in men and women.

Lower Your Cholesterol Naturally
So you want to lower your risk of heart attack? The most important and effective way to lower heart attack risk is to lower inflammation in your body through a clean (nutrient-rich, whole food) diet, low emotional stress and consistent, enjoyable exercise and then to use nutrient supplements to help even further.

It has been shown scientifically that you can lower (normalize) your lipid measurements with targeted nutrient supplements that rival or surpass what prescription medications can do. ^[4] The best recommendations for this, according to the American Academy of Anti-aging Medicine (and these references found in the peer-reviewed scientific literature), ^{[5] [6]} include:

• Eat mostly whole foods, with six vegetable and four fruit servings daily. ^[7]
• Exercise 60 minutes daily, both aerobic and resistance exercise.

You should also use a variety of these supplements:

• Vitamin E (gamma/delta tocotrienols 200 mg) each night with food.
• Pantethine (active form of vitamin B5) 450 mg twice daily.
• Omega 3 fatty acids 4,000 mg daily with EPA/DHA at a 3/2 ratio.
• Lycopene 20 mg daily.
• Trans-resveratrol 250 mg daily.
• N-acetyl cysteine 500 mg twice daily.
• Aged garlic (Kyolic) standardized 600 mg twice daily.
• Carnosine 500 mg twice daily.
• Quercetin 500 mg twice daily.
• Niacin (nicotinic acid) 500 mg to 3,000 mg daily as tolerated. (To prevent flushing, precede this with a baby aspirin or applesauce or other food.)
• Red yeast rice 2,400 mg to 4,800 mg at night (with food).
• Probiotics standardized to 15 billion organisms twice daily.
• Curcumin 500 mg twice daily.
• EGCG 500 mg twice daily or 60 ounces to 100 ounces of green tea daily.
• Plant sterols 1.6 grams to 3 grams daily.
• Pomegranate juice 8 ounces daily with the juice of one lemon or lime.
• CoQ10 (Ubiquinone) 200 mg to 300 mg per day to inhibit LDL-cholesterol oxidation.

It’s worth taking a dedicated trip to the health food store to find these. The higher your risk for heart disease, the more on this list you’ll want to add to your treatment regimen.
To feeling good for life,
Michael Cutler, M.D.
Easy Health Options

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[1] Djoussé L, Gaziano JM. Dietary cholesterol and coronary artery disease: a systematic review. Current Atherosclerosis Reports 2009 Nov;11(6):418-22.

[2] DeBakey, Michael: JAMA 189:655, 1964

[3] Castelli, William P: Arch Int Med 152:1371, 1992

[4] Houston M. The role of nutraceutical supplements in the treatment of dyslipidemia.
J Clin Hypertens 2012 Feb;14(2):121-32.

[5] Houston, MC et al. Nonpharmacologic Treatment of Dyslipidemia. Progress in Cardiovascular Disease 2009;52:61-94

[6] Nijjar PS, Burke FM, Bloesch A, Rader DJ. Role of dietary supplements in lowering low-density lipoprotein cholesterol: a review. J Clin Lipidol. 2010 Jul-Aug;4(4):248-58.

[7] J Am Diet Assoc 1995; 95:775-780.

The Astounding Health Benefits Of One Simple Action

One simple activity can exert a tremendous influence over your health, lowering your risk of Alzheimer’s, protecting your heart, defending against cancer, decreasing your risk of disability, controlling your weight and increasing your life expectancy. Scientific research proves the health-power of this activity, but most people don’t seem to understand how much it can improve their lives.
Medical researchers have been astonished by the health-promoting effects of simply walking every day. While most Americans seem addicted to a couch potato lifestyle, scientists have proven that a daily walk (or, even better, several walks a day) improves the health of just about every part of the body.

The benefits of walking go from head to toe.

Brain Protection
Research at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania shows that walking can slow the development of memory problems and even slow the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
“We found that walking five miles per week protects the brain structure over 10 years in people with Alzheimer’s and MCI (mild cognitive impairment), especially in areas of the brain’s key memory and learning centers,” says researcher Cyrus Raji, Ph.D. “We also found that these people had a slower decline in memory loss over five years.”

Raji’s study showed that physical activities like walking are associated with larger brain size. Cognitively impaired people needed to walk at least 58 city blocks, or approximately five miles, every week to prevent brain shrinkage volume and slow cognitive decline. People with normal brains needed to walk at least 72 city blocks, or six miles, per week to maintain brain volume and significantly reduce their risk for cognitive decline.

Heart Protection
An exercise like walking also supports the health of the cardiovascular system and keeps the heart and arteries functioning better.

In a study where doctors worked with overweight heart patients, they found that long walks were the perfect way to lose weight and improve cardiovascular health.

“The higher-caloric exercise, consisting of almost daily long-distance walking, resulted in double the weight loss and a greater fat mass loss than standard cardiac rehabilitation exercise,” says researcher Philip A. Ades, M.D., director of cardiac rehabilitation and prevention at the University of Vermont College of Medicine in Burlington. “And probably most importantly, these patients improved their insulin sensitivity to a greater degree.”

Weight Loss
If other people in your family are overweight, you may have inherited a tendency to gain weight. But that genetic inheritance doesn’t have to be your immutable destiny. A walking program can cut that genetic liability by 50 percent, according to a study at the Harvard School of Public Health. On the other hand, if you bury yourself in the couch all day, watching television and snacking, you’re just telling your obesity genes to pack on the pounds.

“While previous studies have looked at how physical activity affects genetic predispositions, this is the first study that directly looked at the effect of the sedentary behavior of television watching on the body mass index (BMI) of individuals with a genetic predisposition to obesity,” says Qibin Qi, Ph.D., study author and a postdoctorate research fellow in the department of nutrition at Harvard.
“In our study, a brisk one-hour daily walk reduced the genetic influence towards obesity, measured by differences in BMI, by half. On the other hand, a sedentary lifestyle marked by watching television four hours a day increased the genetic influence by 50 percent.”

Walking Toward Health
A wide range of research on walking has established other impressive benefits:

• A study at Vanderbilt University shows that walking can reduce a woman’s risk for endometrial cancer by as much as 40 percent. “This adds to the growing body of literature indicating that high levels of physical activity are associated with reduced risk of some cancers, including endometrial cancer,” says lead author Charles E. Matthews, Ph.D.
• Older adults can decrease their risk of disability and increase their likelihood of maintaining independence by 41 percent when they walk regularly, according to research at the University of Georgia.
• Brisk walking can lower the risk of cancer progression in men diagnosed with prostate cancer, according to a study at the University of California, San Francisco and the Harvard School of Public Health. “The important point was the intensity of the activity — the walking had to be brisk for men to experience a benefit,” says Erin Richman, Sc.D., the first author on the study. “Our results provide men with prostate cancer something they can do to improve their prognosis.”

One Foot In Front Of The Other
The human body needs to walk and exercise every day to stay healthy. In contrast, the couch potato lifestyle kills. As one scientist who has researched the benefits of walking puts it, you should “walk often and walk far.”

You’ll be glad you did.

Carl Lowe -  Sep 04, 2012
About the Author: has written about health, fitness and nutrition for a wide range of publications including Prevention Magazine, Self Magazine and Time-Life Books. The author of more than a dozen books, he has been gluten-free since 2007

Did You Have ANY Idea this Happens at Fast Food Restaurants You Eat At?

Oh my gosh!  This is really disgusting but it is important to post and spread the word.  Even though I am very health conscious about ingredients and what I put on my skin and very alternative in health care, I hate to admit that years ago I developed an addiction for fast food drive-ins.  I do believe that they are putting something in the food to make people addicted.  It is fast and easy and when you are super busy it can become a habit very easily.  For some time, I feel like a slightly overweight person dying of "malnutrition".   If this doesn't cure my fast food addiction, I guess nothing will!  The key for me is planning meals so I know exactly what to buy at the grocery store and have a plan of what I am going to eat each day.  Because of our busy lifes, we never know from day to day what we are going to eat, then no food in the house, busy all the time and suddenly having low blood sugar and needing food fast.   

By Dr. Mercola

Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at fast food restaurants? Fast-food insiders (i.e. former employees) reveal a slew of nasty secrets that may make you think twice about ever eating in one of these restaurants again …

Black Oil, Blood and “Melted” Chicken

The featured article has quite a few doozies, such as a former worker from Burger King who describes the restaurant’s oil rotation policy:¹

"Here is how the oil rotation went. You had four vats of oil that you cooked fries in. And boy did you cook fries. Tons of them. After about 2 days worth, the oil got too dark for fries. So we switched it over to the ones for chicken. Since it was darker, it was ok.
Then that goes on for a week. After a week of massive frying. The oil is black as motor oil. At that point, it's switched to the Fish Filet vat. That's the only thing you cook in that vat."

Another former worker, this one from McDonald’s, recalled what happened when a bag of chicken nuggets was left out on the counter for too long:

"They melted. Into a pool of liquid. I never understood why. But they were completely indiscernible as being the nuggets I once knew."

Other unsavory confessions revealed by these fast-food whistleblowers include:

• Large chunks of mold in ice-cream machines and ice dispensers (which are rarely cleaned)
• A worker continuing to handle food with an open, bleeding wound on her hand
• “Recycling” overcooked burgers into chili, or stripping chicken patties of their breading and passing it off as chicken salad

Startling discoveries like these are all too common when it comes to fast-food … it was several years back when 12-year-old middle schooler Jasmine Roberts won the science fair at her school when she discovered that the ice used in the drinks of fast food restaurants had more bacteria than the toilet water. And in 2010, nearly half of soda fountains at fast food restaurants tested were found to contain coliform (bacteria that grows in feces) while 11 percent also contained E. coli!²

And Then There’s the Food …

Even under the best circumstances, fast-food restaurants fail when it comes to your health.

Eating the food at nearly every fast food chain (except maybe Chipotle and a few other restaurants committed to sustainable, organic suppliers) means you are likely consuming feedlot animal meat – flesh that comes from animals raised in crowded unsanitary conditions, fed massive doses of antibiotics and unnatural "frankenfeed" full of GM crops and some other truly disturbing ingredients.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the decidedly unhealthy practices that go on at a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation). The problem begins at the massive CAFOs where the beef, chicken or pigs are fed genetically modified corn and soybeans and excessive grains in general (which are not the natural diet of these animals), along with the following almost unbelievable feed ingredients:

• Plastics -- for the many animals whose digestive systems need roughage to pass food through them, the CAFOs now use plastic pellets.
• Meat from members of the same species -- CAFOs turn farm animals into cannibals. Scientific research has linked this practice to the spread of both mad cow disease and avian bird flu.
• Manure and animal feces-- this can include cattle manure, swine waste, and poultry waste. It also includes wood, sand, rocks, dirt, sawdust and other non-food substances.
• Roxarsone -- more commonly known as arsenic, which until last year was put into chicken and pig feed to control intestinal parasites that might cause them to eat less and grow slower. Chicken litter (containing the arsenic that passes through the birds) is also collected from chicken CAFOs and fed to feedlot cattle, for some apparent reason that defies common sense.
• Animal byproducts -- categorized as "animal protein products," this includes rendered feathers, hair, skin, hooves, blood, internal organs, intestines, beaks and bones, dead horses, euthanized cats and dogs, and road kill.

Most Fast Food is a Mixture of Chemicals, Sugar, Flavoring and Salt …

From there, fast food is often nothing more than a slew of chemicals, sugar, high fructose corn syrup and salt … for instance, only about half of a Chicken McNugget is actual chicken. The rest is a mix of corn-derived fillers and additives (most likely genetically modified), along with a slew of synthetic chemicals, including:

• Dimethyl polysiloxane, a type of silicone with anti-foaming properties used in cosmetics and a variety of other goods like Silly Putty
• Tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), a petroleum-based product with antioxidant properties

Even the seemingly healthy menu items are loaded with surprising additives like preservatives and inordinate amounts of sugar (in a salad, no less!). A burger or a chicken sandwich from a fast-food restaurant is not equal, nutritionally, to the equivalent you would make at home … nearly always the fast-food version will contain a staggering variety of additives, flavoring, coloring, and other chemicals that give it that “fast-food” flavor … For instance, even the hamburger buns used at McDonald’s, which you may think would be relatively “safe,” allegedly contain:³

• Calcium sulfate (aka Plaster of Paris) and calcium carbonate (limestone; antacid medication)
• High fructose corn syrup
• Ammonium chloride (Causes irritation to the gastrointestinal tract. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting and diarrhea)
• Calcium propionate (Preservative) and Sodium propionate (Mold inhibitor)
• Artificial flavors

Studies have shown that eating fast food just twice a week DOUBLES your risk of developing insulin resistance and can make you gain 10 pounds, compared to eating it just once a week, for example.⁴ Insulin resistance, as I've discussed on many occasions, is one of THE primary driving factors behind most of the diseases many currently struggle with, from diabetes to cancer and heart disease...

Three Tips for Breaking Free of the Fast-Food Trap

There is just no way around it -- if you want your family to be healthy, someone in your household, or someone you pay, must invest some time in the kitchen preparing your food from scratch, using fresh, whole ingredients. Avoiding processed, fast food requires a change in mindset, which is not always an easy task. It CAN be done, however. Rather than looking at fast foods as a convenience that tastes good or saves money, try thinking of it as:

• Extra calories that will harm your body
• A toxic concoction of synthetic chemicals and artificial flavors that will lead to disease
• A waste of your money
• Likely to lead to increased health care bills for you and your family
• Not something to give to children, whose bodies are still developing and in great need of nutrients

Your goal should be to strive for 90 percent non-processed, whole food. Not only will you enjoy the health benefits—especially if you buy mostly organic—but you'll also get the satisfaction of knowing exactly what you're putting into your body, and that in and of itself can be a great feeling. The following three tips can make it easier to eat well without resorting to fast food:

• Identify someone to prepare meals. Someone has to invest time in the kitchen to prepare your meals, or else you will succumb to costly and unhealthy fast food and convenience foods.
• Become resourceful: This is an area where your grandmother can be a wealth of information, as how to use up every morsel of food and stretch out a good meal was common knowledge to generations past. Seek to get back to the basics of cooking -- using the bones from a roast chicken to make stock for a pot of soup, extending a Sunday roast to use for weekday dinners, learning how to make hearty stews from inexpensive cuts of meat, using up leftovers and so on.
• Plan your meals: If you fail to plan you are planning to fail. This is essential, as you will need to be prepared for mealtimes in advance to be successful. Ideally this will involve scouting out your local farmer's markets for in-season produce that is priced to sell, and planning your meals accordingly. But, you can also use this same premise with supermarket sales or, even better, produce from your own vegetable garden.

You can generally plan a week of meals at a time, make sure you have all ingredients necessary on hand, and then do any prep work you can ahead of time so that dinner is easy to prepare if you're short on time in the evening.

References:

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• ¹ Shine from Yahoo! July 9, 2012
• ² International Journal of Food Microbiology January 31, 2010, Volume 137, Issue 1, Pages 61–66
• ³ McDonald’s Ingredient Listing
• ⁴ Lancet. 2005 Jan 1-7;365(9453):36-42.

Don't Stop Taking Resveratrol, Says Top Doc

Newsmaxhealth.com

Sunday, January 22, 2012 1:57 PM

A major scandal erupted this month when a researcher at the University of Connecticut was accused of faulty research — or downright fraud — in at least 26 articles he wrote about the benefits of resveratrol.

 Resveratrol, an anti-inflammatory found in the skins of red grapes, has been hailed as the "Fountain of Youth," and is said to fight heart disease, cancer, and other diseases of aging. Some researchers believe the resveratrol contained in red wine is responsible for the “French Paradox” — the apparent ability of the French to eat high-fat diets and drink copious amounts of red wine and still have low rates of heart disease and cancer.

 "It has anticancer properties and a powerful ability to protect the brain against immunoexcitotoxicity, the central mechanism in brain aging and neurodegenerative disease of the brain," says Newsmax Health contributor Dr. Russell Blaylock. "Resveratrol is a potent antioxidant that stimulates brain growth and synaptic connections."

 Although disturbing, the news that some resveratrol research is in question shouldn't taint the reputation of a valuable heart-healthy nutrient, says Dr. Blaylock. He is in agreement with other scientists and researchers who believe the news will have minimal impact in the field of resveratrol research, since Dr. Dipak K. Das, the scientist in question, isn't a major researcher in the field.

 "Dr. Das is NOT the major researcher in resveratrol effects on cardiovascular health," says Dr. Blaylock. "Several of his papers are review papers of other people's research.

 "We are not sure what is being questioned," says Blaylock, who notes that "bias and corruption within the ruling medical elite can attack a researcher unfairly." So, in Dr. Blaylock's opinion, the jury is still out on Das's guilt.

Das's research aside, the overwhelming amount of research from other sources found that resveratrol is, in fact, an effective nutrient. "There are 4,460 research and review papers listed on PubMed that are published from labs from all over the world," says Dr. Blaylock. "They are finding a tremendous effectiveness of resveratrol on cardiovascular health, neuroprotection, and usefulness in cancer prevention and treatment.

"That means that greater than 99.9 percent of the research done on resveratrol is from labs completely independent of Das' lab or his institution."

 The media adds to the confusion when stories like the resveratrol story break, says Dr. Blaylock. "The media wants to make the most exciting headline they can — so they write such nonsense as 'resveratrol research faked: forget that glass of wine,'" says Dr. Blaylock. "Ironically, they are committing a more glaring fraud than the person they are writing about.

 "It would have taken them no more than 10 minutes to find what I did — that 99.9 percent of the research is totally independent of Das' research, and virtually all of it finds resveratrol to be effective and safe."

There is also the problem that so many of the media's advertising dollars come from the pharmaceutical makers of statins, says Dr. Blaylock: "They have a vested interest in reporting a story that would destroy the resveratrol market. Again, this is glaring fraud by the media. The purpose of journalism is to dig out the truth — to carefully analyze a story and provide the real story to the public," says Blaylock. All too often, the media doesn't do its job, he says.

 As for himself and his patients, "I will continue to take resveratrol and recommend it," he says.

© 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved.