Happy, blessed Monday!

Here we are again.  A brand new week, a brand new start!  The question is, what are we going to do with it?

Unless you are something of a hermit, you, like I, are faced with new challenges every day.  That’s life.  It won’t change.  What has to change is YOU.    When your attitude changes, your focus changes and how you react to every situation changes.

You can’t do this alone you say?  You don’t have to take One, Single, Step, Alone.  We don’t WANT you to take one single step alone!  Philippians 4:13, my personal favorite, states: “I can do all things through him who gives me strength.  That is the key.  It is a partnership with our Lord and strength first, then a group learning experience from there on.

 

Once again, we are beginning the journey of The Daniel Plan – 40 Days to a Healthier Life.  We will begin on Thursday, September 7^th at 5:15 pm.  If you can’t join us, we covet your prayers.  If you can join us and need a book and study guide, you can order online or if that isn’t an option, let me know and I will get pricing for you and order it if you need me to.

Meanwhile:

Pray Unceasingly!!

In His light,

Lois

 

The Missing Link That Keeps You Lean and Healthy

Mark Hyman, MD

 “I have friends who are not so healthy and are always trying to convince me that it’s okay to indulge in chocolate cake or soda or whatever,” writes this week’s House Call. “How can I gracefully handle such situations without coming off like a wet blanket?”

I call these people food pushers, and we all have them in our family, at the office, and within our friend circles.

It can be hard to change your behavior when your friends and family aren’t supportive. When everyone else is doing the wrong thing, it can become a challenge to do the right thing. Eating healthy can feel like a herculean task, but then to have unsupportive people surrounding us makes it even more difficult.

Our social connections are more important than we imagine, considering that you literally become like the people you surround yourself with. Your social circle influences you to some degree; you are more likely to be overweight if your friend’s friend is overweight than if your parents are overweight.

In other words, genetic threads that connect us may be less important than the social threads.

Our social connections and our ancient need to be part of a tribe may be a way out of our epidemic of chronic disease. Some call this “sociogenomics” – how social networks influence health and disease and how social networks alter gene expression – which becomes the overlooked area we need to find a solution for.  In fact, there is now a field of social genomics that examines the way in which our social connections affect our gene expression. Our genes are eavesdropping on our relationships.

Sadly, most healthcare programs and doctors completely ignore this crucial connection between the people we surround ourselves with and the influences on our choices and our food quality. In other words, what we eat choose to eat causes disease, and our friends and family determine our food choices.

If social connection becomes the missing link for weight loss and optimal health, how can we more effectively incorporate it into our lives? I found the answer during a trip to Haiti in 2010.

Haiti and the Power of Social Connections
In 2010 I volunteered to help with the aftermath of the earthquake that shook Haiti. My visit was pretty dramatic. I ended up meeting a doctor named Paul Farmer, who successfully treated TB and AIDS – diseases everyone thought were untreatable in places like Haiti, Lima, or Rwanda where extreme poverty exists.

Paul realized we didn’t need a new advance in science or a new medication but something very simple: to rebuild community and connection in broken communities. His genius was his insight that the key to solving insoluble healthcare problems was each other; it was people helping people or what some call peer support.

Paul called it in French “accompaniment”: accompanying each other to health; helping each other build back their communities with clean water, food, going to each other’s houses; and making sure their sick neighbor knew how and when to take their medication.

And it wasn’t just a better delivery model for the right drug or the right information. The community was part of the medicine, part of the cure.

My time in Haiti was brutal, often working 20-hour days amidst amputated limbs and amputated lives, but one of the most enlightening experiences there was working with Paul.  I highly recommend you check out his biography Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Talk about harnessing the power of community! Paul literally trained thousands of community workers with what he calls structural violence: the social, political, and economic conditions that drive disease.

Working in Haiti opened my eyes that in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, in one of the poorest countries in the world, it wasn’t just infectious diseases that caused devastation. It was also social diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. Sadly, about 90 percent of these conditions are preventable and often reversible through lifestyle.

Most of these conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, many cancers, stroke, and even dementia are caused by the same root problem: Diabesity, or the continuum from a little bit of belly fat to pre-diabetes to full-blown Type 2 diabetes.

We know how to prevent, treat, and even reverse diabetes and heart disease, so why don’t we do it? Why have we failed so miserably at this? We have the potential to eradicate the obesity and chronic disease that’s killing most people on the planet, yet we haven’t and the results are disastrous. Consider that:

Diabesity will soon affect one in two Americans or literally every other person in America.

Full-blown type 2 diabetes affects nearly one in 10 Americans, one in five African-Americans, and one in four Medicare patients.

One in three children born today will have type 2 diabetes in their lifetime.

About 80 percent of the world’s diabetics are in poor countries, One-half of all people with diabetes and almost all of pre-diabetics are not even diagnosed.

Based on those statistics, tackling diabesity might seem overwhelming or too monumental, but I don’t think so. From my perspective, it becomes a small problem that should be addressed locally, with a focus on community and social connection.

We have the solution that can beneficially modulate thousands of genes, enhance the function of dozens of hormones, regulate tens of thousands of protein networks, and prevent, cure, and even reverse most chronic disease. And it works faster, better, and is cheaper than any other drug discovered. It’s available to almost everyone on the planet right now.

That solution is food.

We now know that food is information, not just calories, and that it can upgrade your biologic software. The majority of chronic disease is primarily a food-borne illness. We ate ourselves into this problem, and we have to eat ourselves out of it.

Obesity and diabetes are social diseases. They need a social cure. Think about how many hours you spend every year at the doctor’s office. Probably a few, right? Now, think about how much time you spend in your kitchen, in your schools, in faith-based organizations, at work, where you play.

Far more, right?

The reality is, health happens in your community. We have to put people and community, not conventional medicine, at the center of healthcare.

After Haiti I realized that the answer had to be somewhere else. If social networks can promote unhealthy lifestyles, then maybe we can use social networks to create health.

Around that time I read a fascinating book called Turning the World Upside Down about the power of social connections to make change. Clearly, this was a huge topic on my mind.

Then one day a guy walks into my office named Rick Warren, the pastor of the 30,000-strong Saddleback Church in Southern California. “I want to lose weight and get healthy,” he told me. From that desire, thousands of lives were changed.

Over a healthy dinner of beet and cabbage autumn soup and a salad, he described his extraordinarily successful experiment for sustained personal growth and change. Rick had encouraged his congregation to form 5,000 small groups that met every week to study, learn, and grow together in their community. Why not take that same community and encourage people to become healthier?

In that moment, I envisioned using those same small groups as a means of creating healthy lifestyle change. Rick named it “The Daniel Plan,” after the story of Daniel in the Bible, who resisted King Nebuchadnezzar’s temptation of rich food. Daniel and his friends might have formed history’s first support group!

We figured a few thousand people would show up at the initial rally. Wow, were we wrong. Some 15,000 people showed up. We actually had to turn about 2,000 people away.

We literally built this program from the ground up. Our goal was to challenge people over six weeks (40 days) of health through the principles of Functional Medicine and social connection. Beyond just food, we brought in principles like meditation and exercise to help people transform their lives. But we used the power of social networks to hold people accountable and help them to reach their goals.

The results were equally astounding. Warren’s congregations lost a quarter of a million pounds in 10 months. In the bargain, they also improved things like depression, acne, autoimmune disease, and migraines.

Our strategy was revolutionary but simple: Get off the junk and watch everything get better. The congregation put a farm and garden on the church campus. They developed exercise courses. They really committed to transforming their health. Suddenly, the culture changed. It became cool to be healthy rather than joining in on the all-you-can-eat pancake breakfasts!

From that experiment we wrote The Daniel Plan, which was met with rave reviews, numerous awards, and most importantly, a dramatic health revolution that changed the lives of thousands of people.

Co-writing a bestseller was nice, but you know what the real take-home was here? Group support becomes the medicine. Those who used the information but didn’t have a group to connect with lost half as much weight and didn’t get as healthy as those who didn’t. They didn’t do it together.

Social connections are that important.

Creating Community

“Everybody needs a buddy,” Rick says. “Getting healthy is a team sport.” I couldn’t agree more. Find a teammate on this journey.

By Mark Hyman, MD

 

How much you eat matters, but the quality of the food we put into our bodies matters more because it drives our gene function, metabolism, and health.

 

Rather than subscribing to the antiquated calories in/calories out model for weight loss and good health, focus on powerful, gene-altering, whole, real, fresh food that you cook yourself can rapidly change your biology. You will lose weight by getting your systems in balance, not by starving yourself.

 

Studies Show Quality Matters More

Let me share a remarkable study1 that shows how quickly and powerfully the quality of the food you eat affects your genes, independent of calories, carbs, protein, fat, or fiber.

 

This study divided people with pre-diabetes into two groups. Each group consumed the same amount of calories, with equivalent amounts of protein, fat, carbohydrates, and fiber, for 12 weeks.

 

The only difference was one group ate whole-kernel rye bread and rye pasta; whereas, the other group ate oats, wheat, and potatoes as its carbohydrate source.

 

After 12 weeks, the researchers performed a subcutaneous fat biopsy, looked at gene expression, and gave participants a glucose challenge to assess how their blood sugar and insulin were affected by these dietary changes.

 

Remarkably, people in the group that ate rye had smarter, smaller fat cells and were more insulin-sensitive. Information contained in the rye – a phytonutrient called lignans – switched on diabesity-reversing genes. These genes were switched on regardless of calories or grams of carbs eaten.

 

Equally amazing, dozens of genes that had made participants fat and diabetic were turned off, and dozens of genes that would help them become healthy and thin were turned on.

 

On the other hand, 62 genes that promote diabesity were turned on in the group that ate oats, wheat, and potatoes. That led to increased stress molecules, increased inflammation, and increased oxidative stress or free radicals.

 

Put another way, it didn’t matter how many calories or grams of carbs these groups ate; it was the kind of carbs that was important.

 

This study, among many similar ones, proves food is not just calories. Food is information. If you want to turn off the genes that lead to diabesity and turn on the genes that lead to health, focus on the quality and type of food you eat, not necessarily the number of calories you consume or the ratio of protein to fat to carbohydrate in your diet.

 

Broccoli vs. Soda

 

To provide a practical illustration that disproves the calorie-is-a-calorie myth, let’s look at the hormone effects of 750 calories of soda versus 750 calories of broccoli.

 

We all intuitively know that equal caloric amounts of soda and broccoli can’t be the same nutritionally. In fact, the food interacts with your biology, a complex adaptive system that instantly transforms every bite.

 

First, let’s look at soda. A 7-Eleven’s Double Gulp has 750 calories, which is 100 percent sugar with 186 grams, or 46 teaspoons, of sugar.

 

Your gut quickly absorbs the fiber-free sugars in the soda as fructose and glucose. The glucose spikes your blood sugar, starting a domino effect of high insulin and a cascade of hormonal responses that kicks bad biochemistry into gear.

 

The high insulin increases storage of belly fat, increases inflammation, raises triglycerides and lowers HDL, and raises blood pressure.

 

In men, high insulin lowers testosterone. In women, high insulin and lack of fiber causes an oversupply of estrogens—often called estrogen dominance, which refers to abnormal recycling of estrogens in the body—and contributes to infertility and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).Now we have high insulin and sex hormone imbalances.

 

Insulin’s effect on your brain chemistry increases your appetite. Insulin blocks leptin, your appetite-control hormone. You become more leptin resistant, so the brain never gets the “I’m full” signal. Instead, it thinks you are starving. Your pleasure-based reward center is triggered, driving you to consume more sugar and fueling your addiction.

 

Fructose makes things worse. It goes right to your liver, where it starts manufacturing fat, which triggers more insulin resistance and causes chronically elevated blood insulin levels, driving your body to store everything you eat as dangerous belly fat. You also get a fatty liver, which generates more inflammation. Chronic inflammation causes more weight gain and diabesity.

 

Stress worsens insulin’s vicious cycle. When you perceive a lot of stress in your life, you produce excess cortisol, which then makes you crave more sugar. Excess cortisol can slow down thyroid hormone function.

 

Additionally, soda contains no fiber, vitamins, minerals, or phytonutrients to help you process the calories you are consuming. These are “empty” calories devoid of any nutritional value.  Your body doesn’t register soda as food, so you eat more all day long. Plus, your taste buds get hijacked, so anything that is not super-sweet doesn’t taste very good to you.

 

Now let’s look at the 750 calories of broccoli. As with soda, these calories are made up primarily (although not entirely) of carbs. Let’s clarify just what that means, because the varying characteristics of carbs will factor significantly into the contrast I’m about to illustrate.

 

Carbs are plant-based compounds comprised of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. They come in many varieties, but they are all technically sugars or starches, which convert to sugar in the body.

 

The important difference is in how they affect your blood sugar. High-fiber, low-sugar carbs such as broccoli are slowly digested and don’t lead to blood sugar and insulin spikes, while table sugar and bread are quickly digested carbs that spike your blood sugar.

Therein lies the difference. Slow carbs like broccoli heal rather than harm.

 

Those 750 calories of broccoli make up 21 cups and contain 67 grams of fiber. The average American consumes only 10 to 15 grams of fiber a day. Remember that fiber helps you get rid of bad estrogens. Broccoli is 23 percent protein, 9 percent fat, and 68 percent carbs (or 510 calories from carbs). The “sugar” in 21 cups of broccoli is the equivalent of only 1.5 teaspoons; the rest of the carbs are the low-glycemic type found in all non-starchy vegetables, which are very slowly absorbed.

 

However, you wouldn’t be able to eat 21 cups of broccoli, because it wouldn’t fit in your stomach. Assuming you could, what would happen? A serving that large would contain so much fiber that very few of the calories would actually get absorbed. Those that did would get absorbed very slowly.

 

There’d be no blood sugar or insulin spike, no fatty liver, and no hormonal chaos. Your stomach would distend (which it doesn’t with soda; bloat from carbonation doesn’t count!), sending signals to your brain that you were full. There would be no triggering of the addiction reward center in the brain.

 

You’d also get many extra benefits that optimize metabolism, lower cholesterol, reduce inflammation, and boost detoxification. The phytonutrients in broccoli (glucosinolates) boost your liver’s ability to detoxify environmental chemicals, and the flavonoid kaempferol is a powerful anti-inflammatory.

 

Broccoli also contains high levels of vitamin C and folate, which protect against cancer and heart disease. The glucosinolates and sulphorophanes in broccoli change the expression of your genes to help balance your sex hormones, reducing breast and other cancers.

 

My point is, all calories are NOT created equal. The same number of calories from different types of food can have very different biological effects.

 

10 Strategies to Focus on Quality, not Quantity:

 

The most important thing you can do to heal your body is focus on food quality. Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, while Europeans spend about 20 percent.

Quality matters. It is more important than quantity when it comes to calories. If you focus on quality, not quantity, you will feel satisfied while naturally avoiding cravings and attraction to food that won’t nourish you. Here are 10 ways to do that:

 

Avoid highly processed, factory-manufactured Frankenfoods. Choose fresh vegetables, fruit, whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds, and lean animal protein such as fish, chicken, and eggs.

Clean up your diet. Look for animal products that are pasture-raised, grass-fed, and antibiotic-, hormone-, and pesticide-free. Go on a low-mercury diet by sticking with small, wild, or sustainably farmed fish.

Go organic. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers poison your metabolism, your thyroid, your sex hormones, and our planet. Buy as much organic food as your budget allows. Refer to the Dirty Dozen list for top offenders and the Clean 15 at ewg.org.

Stay local. Seasonal, local foods you find at farmers’ markets or community-supported agriculture projects (CSAs) are healthier, taste better, are typically sustainably grown, and help you recognize the intimate relationship between the ecosystem of your body and the broader ecosystem in which we all live.

Eat a low-glycemic load. Focus on more protein and fats, including nuts (not peanuts), seeds (flax, chia, hemp, sesame, pumpkin), coconut, avocados, sardines, and olive oil.

Eat the right fats. Steer clear of vegetable oils, including soybean oil, which now comprises about 10 percent of our calories. Focus instead on omega 3 fats, nuts, coconut, avocados, and yes, even saturated fat from grass-fed or sustainably raised animals.

Eat mostly plants. Plants should form 75 percent of your diet and your plate. I usually make two to three vegetable dishes per meal.

Avoid dairy. Dairy is great for growing calves into cows, but not for humans. Try organic goat or sheep products, but only as a treat.

Avoid gluten. Most is from Franken Wheat, so look for heirloom wheat (Einkorn). If you are not gluten sensitive, then consider it an occasional treat.

Moderate alcohol and caffeine. Switch from coffee to green tea, and keep your alcohol intake to three glasses a week if you drink.