Fructose, Fruit Stickers and BP drugs

Improvements at big Pharma

A good friend and reader of Real Health who works for a large pharmaceutical company has asked me to be sure to mention that the pharmaceutical companies have made several policy changes in the last couple of years to try and clean up their act and avoid situations where there are conflicts of interest. The ways of the past - with paid junkets and promotions for Doctors and other professionals - have been eliminated. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some questionable business practices going on just like in any large business, but at least the pharma’s are trying harder to clean up their image.

GET RID OF FRUCTOSE TO LOSE YOUR GUT AND END YOUR COLITIS

Arguably, the chief villain that keeps your gut big, packs your liver with fat, and keeps your bowels inflamed, is the simple sugar fructose. It is found in nature in small amounts in fruits and vegetables. In this form, and in small amounts, it is actually beneficial because it is found in its natural state including enzymes, vitamins, phytonutrients, phytochemicals and organic minerals. It also occurs naturally, but in large amounts, in honey. If you have a big gut, fatty liver, colitis, or Crohn's disease, you will want to avoid fructose.

A couple centuries ago, we learned how to use sugarcane, which is half glucose and half fructose, as a sweetening agent. But more recently, commercial food interests and food processors have developed a way to produce sweet syrups from corn, as in corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The fructose content of the HFCS used to sweeten soft drinks, sodas, and commercially sweetened products, such as puddings, can be as high as 90%! HFCS is used in most processed and fast foods. It is primarily HFCS that has caused a skyrocketing increase in the amount of sweeteners Americans consume, and thus a huge increase in the intake of fructose in the last 20-30 years.

In fact, Americans now consume, on average, close to 75 pounds of fructose annually, or more than 90 grams a day! A healthy diet consists of 5-15 grams of fructose daily.

Fructose is so deadly because it bypasses the normal digestive processes and is quickly turned to fat and stored in your liver and gut. And as stated, Americans now consume huge amounts of fructose daily in the form of sodas, soft drinks, ice cream, cakes, pies, pastries, cookies, candies, puddings, store-bought salad dressings, and even ketchup.

And it is this deadly increase in fructose that is a main cause of abdominal obesity (a fat gut), diabetes, and a fatty liver. Aside from causing these problems, we have recently discovered that fructose is also a major colon (gut) irritant. In fact, many (or even most) colitis and Crohn's sufferers can achieve long-term relief from their inflamed guts simply by eliminating fructose in the form of HFCS and honey from their diet.

So if you suffer with abdominal obesity, a fatty liver, diabetes or insulin resistance, or any form of colitis, eliminate HFCS from your life. And keep the natural fructose intake down also. Eliminate honey and avoid high fructose fruits like tropical fruits and bananas. That leaves you with plenty of fruits, including all the berries, melons, citrus, peaches, pears, apples, plums, nectarines, cherries, apricots, and more. Even large servings of these will only amount to 5-7 grams per day, and the fructose in fruits is absorbed slowly as nature intended.

Fruit Stickers Can Tell You a Lot

When you buy an apple at the grocery store, that little sticker gives the cashier a code to ring up the sale, but it says a lot more than that. According to the website (fruitsticker.com), the code reveals some very useful information:

* Conventionally grown produce has a four-digit number on the sticker.
* Organic produce gets a five-digit number that begins with a 9.
* And produce items that are genetically modified also get five digits, but they begin with an 8.

This is just one more way to be an educated shopper and know what you are buying and eating.

LOWERING BP WITH DRUGS BELOW 140/90 IS A SCAM

"The ratcheting down of normal blood pressure numbers from 140/90 to 110/70 is simply disease mongering (telling healthy people they are permanently ill). This is accomplished via screenings and reporting of skewed, partial, slanted, and biased data by various medical, pharmaceutical, media, and even governmental agencies. It is all enough to raise your blood pressure! Quoted from Dr. Bruce West, Health Alert, Vol. 24, No. 7

It is always interesting when the medical gold standard (the best and most proven protocol that medicine has to offer) is proven to be baloney. Thanks to the Cochrane Collaboration and their review of seven major studies of more than 22,000 people, we now know that this is true for the disease-mongering scheme to sell drugs to lower everyone's blood pressure below 140/90—or if drugmakers have their way, to 110/70.

In fact, according to the real analyses of all seven studies, the data did not hold up to scientific scrutiny. In fact, using more drugs to lower blood pressure at all costs, and lowering it below 140/90 mmHg, did not prolong life, did not reduce strokes, did not reduce heart attacks, did not reduce heart failure, and did not reduce kidney failure. The medical and pharmaceutical industries want you to believe that lowering blood pressure "normals" to 110/70, and reducing blood pressure to below 140/90 with drugs at all costs prevents these conditions. The facts say that it is just a bunch of baloney.

The biggest trial in the seven studies was the Hypertension Optimal Treatment (HOT) Trial. The results were reported to show benefits from lowering blood pressure when there were none. And all the authors of the HOT Trial were considered the most "expert" in the field of hypertension. Of course, they all were working closely with drug companies that make blood pressure drugs—the same companies that paid for the trial.

Then There Is the Polypill

The polypill is a combination of three blood pressure drugs including a beta blocker, diuretic, and ACE inhibitor; a cholesterol statin drug; and some synthetic folic acid thrown in for good measure all rolled into one pill. The scheme? Have all people over age 55 take the polypill daily!

Once again, by using meaningless relative risk reduction statistics, the polypill was heralded—even in the British Medical Journal (June 28, 2003). But once again, those pesky "absolute risk reduction" statistics ruined everything. If a healthy 55-year-old takes the polypill daily for 10 years, there will be less than a 1% chance per year of benefit with a 6% overall rate of side effects some of which are life threatening. Side effects include chronic cough, bleeding, impotence, heart weakening or failure, low blood pressure, fainting, dizziness, broken bones from falls, memory loss, kidney damage or failure, chronic indigestion, muscle aches and pains, neuropathies, and more.

And then there is that little problem that today's real experts are calling attention to —the doctors who came up with the positive analysis of the polypill own the patent on the idea of the polypill. The experts call this a serious conflict of interest.

Nonetheless, the medical "high blood pressure gurus" at the time heralded the polypill by saying that it would have a greater impact on the prevention of disease in the Western world than any other known intervention! Because of the revelation of the skewed data, and the rarely mentioned side effects, the whole concept of the polypill for everyone over age 55 for life has never taken off. And for that we can all be thankful.

The truth is that blood pressure drugs have saved some lives. But the sales ploy to lower everyone's BP to below 140/90 with drugs for life is a scam. And BP drugs are fraught with all kinds of serious problems. They can, in fact, kill you—even if you are healthy!

My opinion:
If everyone over 30 just took Cardio-Plus and the B vitamins from Standard Process Labs (SPL) instead of some hyped up dangerous drug like the PolyPill – we wouldn’t even have a problem with heart disease in this country. Your body and especially your heart needs the correct nutrients to heal itself. Give it what it needs and see what good things can happen. It’s such a simple solution if you know the facts.

Don't raise your hand for this milk.

There's a new campaign out there called "Raise your hands for chocolate milk," a response to school districts that have been removing this sugary drink from their lunchrooms. But it's not some wholesome grassroots movement... it's a million-dollar campaign funded by two Big Dairy lobbying groups. They even use their favorite gimmick: TV stars. That's a trick you pull when you don't have science behind you... and the dairy industry falls back on that one quite a bit. So as these celebrity moms and dads distract you by raising their highly paid hands for chocolate milk, a couple of dietitians and even some doctors lecture us on the supposed health benefits of chocolate milk. Sugar and empty calories in any form is probably not the best choice for consumption on a regular basis.

Ounce for ounce, some chocolate milk drinks contain MORE sugar and calories than soda. Your kid can load up on the 30 grams of sugar and 200 calories in eight ounces of Nesquik reduced-fat chocolate milk... while a 12-ounce can of Coke – pretty much the worst drink I can think of – has 140 calories and 27 grams of sugar. That's right – chocolate milk can actually make Coke look good! And don't forget that plenty of kids drink both. So don't listen to all that rah-rah about the nine essential nutrients in chocolate milk. It's just noise – because you can find all those nutrients elsewhere, from far healthier sources.

Raw Milk Update

I heard from one of my readers that raw milk is more available in the outlining areas (he is in Bellingham, WA) where the dairies are located, much more so than in the Seattle metro area. If you live outside of the big city be sure to look for raw milk or ask if your store will carry it.

Until Next time, stay healthy and happy

JD Roma