Marc Joseph Nutrition - Blog

A recent Journal of Nutrition study looked at egg consumption and lutein and zeaxanthin levels. Researchers found that older adults (>60 years old) eating one egg a day increased their blood lutein and zeaxanthin levels increased 26% and 38%, respectively. And, importantly, serum concentrations of total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and triglycerides were not affected.

Egg yolks are one of the best sources of both lutein and zeaxanthin, which are carotenoids that are very important in both eye and skin health. Increased intake of these compounds may help to reduce the risk of developing macular degeneration.

Additionally, egg yolks are a great source of choline, which is key in cell membrane function. Egg whites are also an excellent source of protein.

If possible, it’s best to get eggs from cage-free, organically fed chickens. Although getting good info on the different types of eggs available is not an easy task.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at the risk of nursing home admission and vitamin D status. It found that relative to individuals with high vitamin D levels, the risk of nursing home admission:

• increased by nearly 3.5 times for people who were vitamin D deficient
• increased more than 2.5 times for people who were vitamin D insufficient
• and increased almost two times for people who had borderline insufficiency levels

And these results were after adjusting for frailty.

Given the widespread incidence of vitamin D deficiency in the elderly population and the key importance of this nutrient to immune function and bone structure, it’s amazing that vitamin D testing and supplementation is not a more common part of elder care.

In early September, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a two-day hearing to review the findings of its draft review of the potential dangers of mercury amalgam fillings. The draft whitepaper concluded that research completed since the last review in 1997 did not change the conclusion that mercury amalgam fillings were safe for use in dental practice.

However, after over seven hours of testimony by 52 different speakers, including members of Congress, toxicology experts, and representatives from other countries that either ban or limit mercury filling use, the advisory panel of outside dental, medical, and scientific experts soundly rejected the FDA’s whitepaper conclusions.

In a first vote, the panelists voted 13-7 to find that that the large federal review of data fails to clearly and objectively present the current body of knowledge on the subject. In a second vote, the panel also voted 13-7 to find that the report’s conclusion that amalgam fillings are safe is not reasonable.

The advisory panel issued a one-page summary explaining its votes here.

A complete transcript of the hearing is available here.

And an excellent summary of the hearing events, as written by an anti-amalgam advocate who testified, can be found here.

The Risks of “Silver” (Mercury) Fillings

Dental amalgam fillings (commonly and deceptively referred to as “silver” fillings) are actually approximately 50 percent mercury. Mercury is a known potent neurotoxin and hormone disruptor.

The America Dental Association (ADA), a long-time advocate of the use of mercury amalgam fillings in dentistry claims, “Dental amalgam contains elemental mercury combined with other metals such as silver, copper, tin and zinc to form a safe, stable alloy.”

Yet, it is a known fact that elemental mercury vapor, which is extremely toxic and easily absorbed through the lungs where it enters the bloodstream, is given off 24×7 once the fillings are in the mouth. An excellent video (”The Smoking Teeth”) showing just that process is available on the International Academy of Oral Medicine & Toxicology’s (IAOMT) website.

Push For A Ban

After the hearing, the IAOMT wrote a letter to the FDA requesting that the advisory panels reconvene to review a more expansive set of research examining the safety of mercury amalgam fillings. The IAOMT requested that the hearing include an equal number of scientific experts representing each side, that positions be submitted in writing with scientific citations 21 days prior to the new hearing, and that the submissions be posted to the FDA website and made public prior to the meeting.

The FDA is accepting comments to add to the hearing docket through November 9th. You can submit your comments here (enter Docket No. 2006N-0352).

Also, Representatives Diane Watson and Dan Burton are cosponsors of H.R. 4011, The Mercury in Dental Fillings Disclosure and Prevention Act, which would prohibit after 2008 the use of mercury in dental fillings. Contact your representatives to ask for their support of this legislation.

Mercury amalgam is the only substance on earth that is a toxin before put into the mouth, a hazardous waste when removed from the mouth, and yet, according to the ADA, safe when stored for years in the mouth. Hopefully, those days are soon ending.

(Note: Anyone considering having dental work to replace existing mercury amalgam fillings, should definitely read the IAOMT suggested protocol for safe replacement. And women who are pregnant or breastfeeding should definitely not have any dental work done, as even the safest protocol will result in temporarily elevated mercury exposure that could put a child at risk.)

As discussed in this article, there has been some recent research that suggests drug-coated heart stents may increase the risk of blood clots. Sales of drug-coated stents have fallen over the last year, and there is now more scrutiny on the use of stents in general.

Currently more than 1.5 million stents are placed in procedures every year in the U.S. Manufacturers of the stents pull in more than $6 billion and many times that is spent on the medical care for the procedures. It’s big business.

Some of these procedures are definitely necessary and save lives. As the article notes, though, the improvement in long-term survival rates using stents relative to other forms of treatment is less clear.

Yet, the prevailing attitude among some patients (and even some doctors) seems to be, “Well, if a problem develops, we can just fix it. It’s covered by insurance.”

“I see it all the time,” said Dr. Sanjay Kaul, a co-author of the recent Cardiosource editorial. He said his cardiology practice at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles included many “high-powered executives” who did not want to be bothered with taking pills to manage attacks of angina, the chest pains associated with narrowing coronary arteries.

Dr. Kaul said the overuse of stenting reflected a quick-fix mentality among patients and the financial incentives of doctors and hospitals to implant stents instead of prescribing drugs.

But stent advocates like Dr. Holland said patients demanded the stents because they provided more complete relief from pain, and because they wanted to avoid the potential side effects of the cocktails of heart drugs, which can include fatigue, sexual dysfunction, depression and light-headedness.

Dr. Holland says a typical patient profile might be a 55-year-old engineer at one of Boulder’s high-technology companies who is an avid outdoorsman and cyclist but hobbled by chest pains. To offer such a person drug therapy instead of the quick and more reliable relief of a stent, Dr. Holland said, “just doesn’t fly.”

And people wonder why health care costs so much? We all end up paying for the focus on the quick-fix, whether a pill or a procedure, in the form of higher drug, medical, and insurance costs.

Obviously, people with well-developed heart disease may need drugs and/or surgery to stabilize their situations. But, how many of these drastic interventions could have been prevented in the first place?

It’s no mystery why most people develop heart disease — a combination of poor diet and little exercise. There are good nutritional alternatives, without the medical and financial side effects of drugs and surgery, for people looking to avoid the development of and slow the progression of heart disease. For the sake of both health care and the health of individuals, the focus has to shift from repair/recovery to health promotion and disease prevention.

In a recent study (free full text) published in the Journal of Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers found that children exposed to tobacco smoke while their mothers were pregnant and who were born to mothers who had high blood lead levels, were 2.5 and 4.1 times, respectively, as likely to develop ADHD - Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

If these factors are indeed causally linked to ADHD, they may account for as many as 270,000 (tobacco) and 290,000 (lead) excess cases of ADHD in U.S. children.

Tobacco exposure is straightforward to reduce — don’t smoke and avoid being exposed to second-hand cigarette smoke.

Tips for reducing lead exposure include:

• Drink filtered water.
• Have your home or apartment tested for lead if it was built prior to 1978 (the year lead paint was banned for consumer use).
• Avoid remodeling or renovation of a residence where lead paint may have been used during the period of time before, during, after pregnancy.
• Only have such renovations done professionally, with proper safety precautions and cleanup, and if you have an alternate place to stay while they are being done.
• Follow a healthy diet with adequate calcium and iron, which will help to reduce the absorption of lead.

Other suggestions for reducing lead exposure are here.

If you suspect that you may have been exposed to lead and are concerned about the effects it may have on a planned/current child or yourself, there are approaches that one can take to safely reduce the body burden.

And for those individuals affected by ADD/ADHD, there are also nutritional and other steps that can be taken to reduce symptoms.

A large recent study looked at how vitamin K intake might affect cardiovascular disease and stroke in men. The study found that risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke fell by as much as 18 percent in individuals consuming higher levels of vitamin K.

The results did not remain significant after adjusting for lifestyle and other dietary factors. In other words, it wasn’t clear whether the risk declined because of the vitamin K intake or just as a result of healthier living.

Yet, there are good scientific reasons to believe that vitamin K is important in helping to maintain vascular health. Specifically, vitamin K helps the body to keep calcium in the bones and teeth, where most of it belongs, thus helping to reduce the calcification of soft tissues, such as blood vessels. The exact mechanism is not known, but it is thought to be related to a protein (MGP - Matrix Gla Protein), which inhibits calcification and is vitamin K dependent.

A 2004 study found that higher vitamin K2* dietary intake was associated with reduced cardiovascular mortality, overall mortality, and aortic calcification.

* There are three different forms of vitamin K:

• K1 (phylloquinone) - found primarily in plants (esp. leafy greens)
• K2 (menaquinone) - found in animal products and synthesized in the GI tract (produced by micro-organisms)
• K3 - synthetic

Vitamin K1 is the predominant form of the vitamin in the diet and is primarily found in green vegetables, including spinach, broccoli, chard, kale, parsley, etc.

Deficiency is common:

• Many people don’t eat foods high in vitamin K regularly or in adequate quantities, and thus don’t get enough of the vitamin.
• With age, the GI tract tends to become less efficient at producing the K2 form of the vitamin.
• Antibiotic use can interfere with the production of vitamin K2 in the GI tract.

Bottom line:

Supplementation with vitamin K containing the K1 and K2 forms can help to fill the gap and may help to reduce the risk for blood vessel calcification associated with heart disease and stroke.

Two important notes:

Vitamin K is fat-soluble. It needs to be eaten with a meal containing fat for proper absorption.

Vitamin K also affects blood clotting. People taking blood thinning drugs need to talk with their physician before supplementing, as increasing vitamin K intake may change the necessary prescription.

Why do identical twins with the same genes, living in a similar area under similar economic conditions often end up getting different diseases and dying on average more than 10 years apart?

As this recent article discusses, genes are good at predicting traits such as height, but not so good at predicting longevity.

The likely reason is that life span is determined by such a complex mix of events that there is no accurate predicting for individuals. The factors include genetic predispositions, disease, nutrition, a woman’s health during pregnancy, subtle injuries and accidents and simply chance events, like a randomly occurring mutation in a gene of a cell that ultimately leads to cancer.

The article highlights the findings of a recent study that looked at identical twins and longevity and found:

there was almost no genetic influence on age of death before 60, suggesting that early death has a large random component — an auto accident, a fall. In fact, the studies of twins found almost no genetic influence on age of death even at older ages, except among people who live to be very old, the late 80’s, the 90’s or even 100.

The same results were found in animals, in which cases the environments were much more tightly controlled.

So, what’s going on? Well, the researchers cited in the article say randomness, either a random event such as an infection or accident, or a random slight difference in cell growth and division that leads to different rates of deterioration later in life, may explain the longevity differences.

These factors may indeed play a role. It’s also likely, though, that other environmental factors, such as nutrition and toxin exposure, are very influential in explaining both the body’s ability to deal with many of these random events and the ultimate differences in longevity.

A large recent study by the National Cancer Institute of people aged 50-71 found, not surprisingly, that obese and underweight people had greater risk of premature death than people of a healthy weight.

But the study also found that non-smokers who were just overweight (Body Mass Index* of 25 to 30) were 20 to 40 percent more likely to die prematurely than normal-weight people.

More evidence for the importance of maintaining a healthy weight.

* Here’s a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator.

An interesting study in the American Journal of Medical Genetics found that abnormally low cholesterol levels were much more common in autistic children. 19 out of 100 autistic children studied had low cholesterol (< 100 mg/dl), a level lower than that found in 99 percent of children ages 4 through 19.

The researchers also found that the low cholesterol levels seemed to be the result of a reduced ability of the body to naturally make cholesterol (which occurs primarily in the liver), and not the result of low dietary cholesterol intake or a decreased ability to absorb it from the GI tract.

Cholesterol levels that are too low can be just as bad as high cholesterol levels, as cholesterol is used as a building block for:

• many hormones - e.g., sex hormones, cortisol
• bile acids - which the liver produces and helps with both the excretion of toxins and the absorption of fats
• and vitamin D - which is essential for proper immune system function

Perhaps not surprisingly, autistic individuals often have hormone and fatty acid imbalances, difficulty excreting toxins, and immune system irregularities.

A really interesting article discussing the dynamics of diabetes in India:

. . .Throughout the world, Type 2 diabetes, once predominantly a disease of the old, has been striking younger people. But because Indians have such a pronounced genetic vulnerability to the disease, they tend to contract it 10 years earlier than people in developed countries. It is because India is so youthful — half the population is under 25 — that the future of diabetes here is so chilling.

. . .In perverse fashion, obesity and diabetes stand almost as joint totems of success.

Last year, for instance, the MW fast-food and ice cream restaurant in this city proclaimed a special promotion: “Overweight? Congratulations.” The limited-time deal afforded diners savings equal to 50 percent of their weight (in kilograms). The heaviest arrival lugged in 135 kilograms (297 pounds) and ate lustily at 67.5 percent off. . .

. . .In the United States, an inverse correlation persists between income and diabetes. Since fattening food is cheap, the poor become heavier than the rich, and they exercise less and receive inferior health care. In India, the disease tends to directly track income. . .

It’s a scary unfolding of events. The rise in infections, amputations, and heart and kidney disease as a result of the disease is bankrupting people physically, financially, and emotionally. Few people in India have health insurance, and policies often don’t cover diabetes. Divorce rates are increasing as people become disabled.

As mentioned above, East Indians, like other ethnic cultures such as American Indians and Hispanics, are especially susceptible to diabetes, possibly because their bodies are genetically programmed to better store fat when food is in ample supply.

Whatever the genetics, type 2 diabetes is preventable (and, in some cases, reversible) with good dietary habits and supplementation. The question is, as it is around the world, will people take the necessary steps?