If you or a loved one is diabetic, you know that you need to be careful to avoid developing diabetic neuropathy, or nerve damage. This damage can occur throughout the body, but it’s most common in the legs and feet. Symptoms typically include pain and numbness. However, depending on the nerves involved, it also can include digestive issues, problems with the urinary tract and blood vessels, and even heart troubles. These symptoms can range in severity from mildly inconvenient to disabling to fatal. So it’s important to avoid this condition. Fortunately, there’s a powerful nutrient that can help do just that.

This nutrient can help protect your nervous system on a cellular level. In fact, it can keep your tissues safe from dangerous reactions between sugar and the healthy proteins and fats. So it, in effect, protects you against diabetes and the many complications of diabetes. This nutrient is one of the most effective nutrients you can use to protect your nervous system.

This nutrient is benfotiamine. You may have heard about it before, as it’s a derivative of thiamine, or vitamin B1. While thiamine has been a popular supplement for years, several studies are now finding that benfotiamine is even better at protecting your cells. It’s more bioavailable, better at getting through cell membranes, and more effective at protecting your tissues from those dangerous reactions that sugar causes.

One study in particular focused on patients with end-stage renal disease, who often have thiamine deficiencies. They found that those who received 100 mg/day of benfotiamine achieved almost double the vitamin levels of those who took standard thiamine supplements. Even more impressive, just a single dose of benfotiamine generated a 420% increase in total tissue exposure after 24 hours!

These results should certainly help convince you that benfotiamine is the way to go when it comes to getting your vitamin B1. But what exactly can this vitamin do to protect you from complications of diabetes? As you may know, elevated glucose levels can lead to the production of advanced glycation end products (AGEs). AGEs are the result of proteins or lipids becoming glycated after being exposed to sugar, and they can be very damaging to your cells. Benfotiamine can help prevent dangerous AGE-related reactions from occurring.

The World Health Organization investigated the efficacy of benfotiamine and thiamine by culturing human endothelial cells in normal and very high glucose concentrations. They treated them with either benfotiamine or thiamine and then measured how many cells survived and were able to reproduce properly. As expected, the cells that were in the high glucose concentrations experienced a nearly 30% impairment in their ability to replicate. Thiamine helped quite a bit, increasing survival rates to 80%. But benfotiamine did even better, raising rates to almost 90%! Even better, although production of AGEs in the high-glucose concentrations was 160% higher than that of the normal concentrations, benfotiamine slashed that production back to the normal levels. The researchers suspect that these results occurred because benfotiamine helps cells use up glucose more efficiently, so there’s less glucose waste left behind to interact with proteins and lipids and produce the AGEs.

Other researchers have done quite a bit of investigation of benfotiamine beyond its effects on cell cultures. Researchers in Germany have been focusing on diabetic rats to determine whether benfotiamine and thiamine can help support their nerve function and keep their nerves safe from AGE attacks. They started by giving rats the vitamins right after chemically inducing diabetes. They gave the same supplements to a second group, but only after a two-month delay. While the rats experienced an initial decrease in nerve function and a significant spike in AGEs after the diabetes was induced, those who received the vitamins right away improved quite a bit. In fact, the rats receiving benfotiamine were almost back to normal after six months, but improvements in the thiamine rats leveled off after about three months. The rats who received delayed supplementation with benfotiamine displayed similar results. But interestingly, the delayed thiamine group didn’t get much better at all.

The researchers summarized their findings by saying that “timely administration of benfotiamine was effective in prevention of functional damage and of AGE formation in nerves of diabetic rats.” This is great news for diabetics. Other researchers have found that benfotiamine can help prevent diabetic kidney disease in rats as well by reducing oxidative stress and inflammation in addition to AGE formation.

One reason benfotiamine is more effective than thiamine may be that benfotiamine is fat-soluble, whereas thiamine is water-soluble. That means benfotiamine sticks around in your body a lot longer. Think of how much easier it is to excrete extra water from your body than it is to lose extra pounds!
As the researchers found, the earlier you can get benfotiamine into your system, the more effective it can be. So if you have diabetes, you should act now to protect your nerves from diabetic neuropathy. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: Advanced Nerve Support. It contains not only benfotiamine, but four other supportive nutrients to support your nerves and circulation. This formula isn’t just for diabetics either – if you’re concerned that your nervous system isn’t functioning optimally or you simply want to protect it as you age, this benfotiamine-containing formula is an excellent place to start to reverse and prevent damage.

A patient of mine who has not been diagnosed with diabetes, was having on- and-off carpal tunnel symptoms. She began using Advanced Nerve Support three times a day. After completing the first bottle, she reported feeling considerably better. In fact, she said she was getting her symptoms 50% less.

You can order it by calling 800-791-3395. Make sure you use special offer code WH4317.

What You Must Know About Cholesterol

It’s hard to think of any aspect of our health that’s more misunderstood than cholesterol. For years, we were taught to view cholesterol as an enemy and to avoid it in our diets at all costs. Then we began learning more about different forms of cholesterol, like HDL, which actually benefits our health. But conventional medicine still has a tendency to view cholesterol as public enemy number one, especially when it comes to heart disease. It’s time to reevaluate our approach to cholesterol so that we can gain a better understanding of what it is, how it functions in our bodies and in our diets, and what steps we should actually take to protect our cardiovascular health. Some of this information may surprise you.

As you may know, cholesterol comes in two forms: HDL and LDL. It’s easy to think of them as “healthy” and “lousy” cholesterol. While LDL cholesterol is linked to cardiovascular disease and other illnesses, especially when it becomes oxidized, it does perform necessary functions in our body. HDL cholesterol plays a number of important functions in our bodies. In fact, we can’t live without it! Cholesterol helps our bodies produce essential hormones. It’s a necessary ingredient in our cell walls. It’s critical to our intestines’ ability to produce digestive bile acids. And it helps us produce vitamin D, which, if you’ve been a reader for long, you know is vital to our health.

Because cholesterol is so important, our bodies don’t just rely on us to consume it through our diets. In fact, we actually can’t eat enough dietary cholesterol to supply enough for all our bodies’ needs. Only about 20% of our blood cholesterol levels comes from the food we eat. To make sure we get enough, we synthesize cholesterol through our livers. Our bodies can store and discard dietary cholesterol as needed to supplement the liver’s production.

But if our bodies have to make cholesterol anyway, why are we always told to limit or avoid cholesterol in our diets? That’s a good question. And, it turns out, it’s one that conventional dietary advice doesn’t really have an answer for.

Take eggs for example. They tend to top the list of foods we think we’re supposed to avoid in order to maintain healthy cholesterol levels, along with red meat, butter, whole milk, and cheese. But while it’s true that egg yolks contain approximately 210 mg of cholesterol, eating them doesn’t actually increase your risk of disease. A variety of studies have investigated this topic, and their results agree, from the one concluding that eating more than six eggs a week won’t increase your stroke risk to the one that found that healthy adults could eat two eggs a day without harming their endothelial function. And even if you cut out these cholesterol-rich foods, your liver simply cranks out a bit more, with no net change in overall levels for most people.

The 2015 U.S. Dietary Guidelines finally acknowledged the logic of this and removed cholesterol-rich foods from their list of foods to avoid. The guidelines even added eggs (yolks and all) to their list of recommended protein sources. That’s good, especially as egg yolks contain more than just protein. They also contain choline, a B vitamin that benefits brain development, muscle control, and memory. Choline is also an anti-inflammatory and good for cell membrane health. Up to 90% of us may have some level of choline deficiency because our bodies can only produce small amounts of this vitamin. So it’s great to have an easily accessible dietary source.

Eggs also contain the carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin. Your retinas need zeaxanthin to function properly, but our bodies can’t produce this antioxidant. Lutein is important to eye health as well. So eggs are a great place to start if you want to protect your vision.

Clearly, eggs aren’t the villain we’ve made them out to be. In fact, they’re a great source of protein, vitamins, and healthy fat. You don’t need to worry about eating eggs every day if you want to. In fact, that’s true even if you know you have the ApoE4 gene, which has been linked to a high risk of heart disease.

Research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition involved a study in which men consumed 2,800 mg of dietary cholesterol a week on average. About a quarter of that cholesterol came from eating approximately four eggs a week. The researchers didn’t find any connections between cholesterol intake, from eggs or otherwise, and heart disease risk, regardless of whether the men were ApoE4 carriers or not. In fact, other studies have found that eggs can increase beneficial HDL cholesterol levels! So feel free to include them in your regular rotation. Just be sure to choose organic, free-range eggs when possible, as studies have found that they tend to be higher in vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids. Getting eggs from a local farmer is often your best bet.

So if we don’t end up with high cholesterol levels from eating cholesterol-rich foods, where does it come from? Unfortunately, we can’t let our diet off the hook entirely. While fatty foods alone may not raise your cholesterol levels, eating other unhealthy things like sugar can cause your LDL cholesterol to skyrocket, while your HDL cholesterol (which helps clean up LDL) plummets. Sugar triggers an insulin response in the liver, which produces cholesterol, affecting how much cholesterol your body thinks it needs. So you still need to eat a healthful diet to keep LDL levels where they should be (ideally under 100). I have had several patients through the years who have seen their total cholesterol go down by 10-15%, their LDL decrease, and their HDL increase, just by eating the right foods. They ate grass-fed meats and other healthy, more fatty foods, avoided all sugar, and drew their carbohydrates from vegetables.

If your LDL levels are higher than that (or if your overall cholesterol number looks high but the breakdown of HDL and LDL isn’t taken into consideration), your conventional doctor may not have a lot to say about your diet. But he or she will probably want to put you on a statin to lower your cholesterol levels. And that might work.

Statins can indeed lower your cholesterol. And, in fact, some research indicates that statins could actually have antioxidant effects. For example, a study published in the journal Coronary Artery Disease found that statins can interfere with the oxidation process, particularly in the arteries. They also help mop up oxidized LDL molecules and block enzymes that can contribute to oxidation activities.

Another study, published in Circulation, found that statins can have both anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. They found that patients who took statins had lower markers of oxidative pathways, particularly as their total cholesterol levels decreased. Yet another study, found in Clinical Chemistry, found that statin use could boost vitamin D levels in women with polycystic ovary syndrome.

Wait a minute, you might be saying. What about all the statin warnings? Well, the bigger the front – the bigger the back. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that women taking statins experienced a 1,100% increase in breast cancer risk. That’s not a typo! And to add insult to injury, some people actually find that taking a statin raises their LDL cholesterol. But statins aren’t always the horrible villain some people make them out to be. Statins need to be considered on an individual basis. Sometimes an individual needs to simply control their blood sugar in order to have their lipids (fats) correct themselves. Some individuals, especially men, simply do better on a statin.

If only there was a way you could lower your cholesterol, enjoy antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects, and actually reduce your risk of deadly diseases like breast cancer. Apparently, conventional medicine thinks this whole package is too much to ask for. It isn’t, but it doesn’t come in a form that pharmaceutical companies can package and sell for enormous profits. It’s plain old-fashioned diet and exercise.

I’m sure you’re aware that exercising regularly will lower your risk of heart disease. Well, one of the reasons it does so is that it raises your HDL and lowers your LDL. If you’re concerned about your cholesterol, make sure you’re exercising at least five times a week. Even low-impact activities like walking, yoga, and tai chi will help you shift your cholesterol balance in a healthy direction.

Then to really get the full cholesterol-lowering, antioxidant-boosting miracle, you just need to go to the grocery store. You know that fruits and vegetables are loaded with antioxidants and are full of anti-inflammatory compounds. These natural disease-fighters will give your body the tools it needs to flush out LDL cholesterol and lower the inflammation that can cause it to stick around and contribute to heart disease.

In particular, you want to make sure you’re consuming plenty of soluble fiber, which binds to LDL cholesterol and helps move it out of your body. You’ll find soluble fiber in beans and whole grains like brown rice and oat bran. If you’re worried you aren’t consuming enough fiber to fully flush out the cholesterol, you can supplement with psyllium husks as well. This is an easy way to meet your fiber target. And another good option is the BHU bars. They’re not only fiber, but they sustain blood sugar because of their high protein and healthy fat content.

I understand that sometimes it just seems easier to pop a pill and be done with it. There are plenty of supplements that can give you the antioxidant and cholesterol-lowering power of a statin without the side effects. They do this through natural ingredients rather than drugs.

My personal favorite is Mediterranean Cholesterol Formula. If you’re willing to make more drastic lifestyle changes to lower your cholesterol and protect your heart, following the Mediterranean diet is an excellent place to start. If you want to make sure you’re maximizing the changes you’ve made – this formula will help you experience the benefits of some of the most important components of this diet.
In particular, it’s made with artichoke leaf extract, which contains a plant compound called cynarin. Cynarin helps your body make bile, which in turn helps your body break down and flush out excess cholesterol. This bile encouragement becomes particularly important as we age.

After the age of 50, we naturally make less bile and have more difficulty successfully digesting fats. Then the olive leaf extract in the formula will give you some of the same benefits you’d get from the olive oil that’s a staple of the Mediterranean diet, including helping keep your blood pressure and your arteries healthy. Finally, you’ll get the added bonus of berberine, a phytochemical that’s more common in Traditional Chinese Medicine than in the Mediterranean diet. It’s a great addition because there’s plenty of research showing it to be effective at keeping your blood sugar, cholesterol, and triglycerides at healthy levels.

Cholesterol, particularly dietary cholesterol, isn’t the enemy. However, if you want to keep your heart healthy, you do still need to eat well and exercise. There’s just no getting around that! Supplementing with the Mediterranean Cholesterol Formula will help improve your digestion of fats as well as safely
control your blood sugar. You can order many of the products mentioned in this article, including the BHU bars and the Mediterranean Cholesterol Formula, by calling 800-791-3395.

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/108/4/426.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15238821.

Nutrition Detective

How to Eat Saturated Fat and Still Avoid Heart Disease

If you want to avoid cardiovascular disease, you may think you have to cut saturated fat from your diet. That’s what we’ve heard for years. But according to a new study conducted in Norway, consuming saturated fat could actually benefit your health. You just have to be sure to get it from the right sources.

For this study, conducted at the KG Jebsen Center for Diabetes Research at the University of Bergen, researchers divided 38 men with abdominal obesity into two groups. One group ate a high-carbohydrate diet, while the other ate a high-fat diet. Not only was the diet high in fat in general, about half the fat was saturated. The researchers evaluated fat levels in the abdomen, liver, and heart as well as cardiovascular disease risk factors to determine how the diets affected each group.

Not only did the participants in the high-fat group not experience an increase in cardiovascular disease risk, their risk factors actually went down. Specifically, they experienced improvements in ectopic fat storage, blood pressure, triglyceride levels, insulin, and blood sugar.

What’s important to note about this diet is that while it was high in fat, the fat came from healthy, mostly unprocessed sources, including butter, cream, and cold-pressed oils. Unfortunately, too many people get their saturated fats from low-quality processed foods. In fact, the researchers concluded, “Our findings indicate that the overriding principle of a healthy diet is not the quantity of fat or carbohydrates, but the quality of the foods we eat. Most people probably tolerate a high intake of saturated fat well, as long as the fat quality is good and total energy intake is not too high.” While there may be some people who do need to limit their consumption of saturated fats, the researchers believe current recommendations are exaggerated.

If you want to avoid cardiovascular disease, saturated fat isn’t the problem. If you look at low-quality processed foods, you’ll see the real cause of cardiovascular disease – sugar. The recommendation to avoid saturated fat started in the 1950s when observational studies found that processed foods caused heart disease. They thought the saturated fat was causing the heart problems. But more recent research has concluded that we shouldn’t be nearly as concerned about saturated fat as we are about sugar.
Instead, people might want to focus on eating high-quality foods and avoiding excess sugar. You do need a healthy balance of fat, protein, and carbs in your diet. Just make sure they’re coming from good sources.

Veum, V.L., J. Laupsa-Borge, O. Eng, E. Rostrup, T.H. Larsen, J.E. Nordrehaug, O.K. Nygard, J.V. Sagen, O.A. Gudbrandsen, S.N. Dankel, and G. Mellgren. “Visceral adiposity and metabolic syndrome after very high-fat and low-fat isocaloric diets: a randomized controlled trial.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2016; DOI: 10.3945/%u200Bajcn.115.123463.

LETTERS

Q: Recently, I was told that I have mild liver fibrosis. I’m wondering if there is anything I can do for this? – Ana, Lubbock, TX

Dear Ana,

There’s research demonstrating the efficacy of modified citrus pectin in stopping the progression of liver fibrosis. It does this by inhibiting Galectin 3, which is actually a biomarker in our bodies used for helping to determine inflammation and the presence of cancer in our bodies.

In one study, researchers injected rats with CCl4 twice a week for 8 weeks. At the same time, they gave the rats modified citrus pectin (400 or 1,200 mg/kg) daily in their drinking water from the first week in groups I and II and in the beginning of week 5 in groups III and IV.

They found that the modified citrus pectin was able to significantly decrease many of the markers for liver fibrosis. It also decreased the percentage of fibrosis and necroinflammation significantly.
You may want to have a look at PectaSol. This is the only modified citrus product on the market that has been carefully studied and shown to inhibit Galectin 3. You can order it by calling 800-791-3395.

Can J Physiol Pharmacol. 2016 May;94(5):554-62. doi: 10.1139/cjpp-2015-0284. Epub 2015 Dec, “Modified citrus pectin stops progression of liver fibrosis by inhibiting galectin-3 and inducing apoptosis of stellate cells.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27010252.

Q. I was diagnosed with hypertension about two months ago. The doctor placed me on hydrochlorothiazide to control my blood pressure. Initially, I did not experience any
side effects. But now I have dry eyes and experience nausea and sometimes even vomiting. I spoke with my doctor and asked him if these symptoms could be linked to my new medication. He agreed that they could be and prescribed me a new medication. I’m wondering if you might have a suggestion of something that I might be able to use that might help with my high blood pressure. – Rona, Cupertino, CA

Dear Rona,

Hibiscus sabdariffa is a tart herb that research has shown to have a significant effect on elevated blood pressure. One study showed that it’s more effective at treating mild to moderate high blood pressure than the drug hydrochlorothiazide.

In addition, it didn’t cause an electrolyte imbalance like the drug did. The researchers said it “showed longer duration of action compared to hydrochlorothiazide.”

So consider trying hibiscus sabdariffa even if you’re using a new drug. If drinking the tea is not always an option for you, you may want to consider Advanced Bionutritionals Blood Pressure Formula, which you can order by calling 800-791-3395.

Effect of Hibiscus sabdariffaon blood pressure and electrolyte profile of mild to moderate hypertensive Nigerians: A comparative study with hydrochlorothiazide.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26289514

Niger J Clin Pract. 2015 Nov-Dec;18(6):762-70. doi: 10.4103/1119-3077.163278.

Nwachukwu DC1, Aneke E, Nwachukwu NZ, Obika LF, Nwagha UI, Eze AA.