Health Care

Let me know if this sounds like you? You experience frequent bouts of quick onset of sweating, a sudden rapid heart rate, or all of a sudden a shortness of breath. You may think that you are having a heart attack, though the real cause may be something you didn't expect.

If this sounds like you do you skip breakfast often? Thus once you skip breakfast your day goes by with off on bouts of fatigue and sluggishness that you fix with either trips to Starbucks or the vending machine. Quickly after eating the high sugar of gourmet coffees or snacks in vending machines you feel better though it doesn't last and a few hours later you are crashing again.

What is happening is a lack of small meals during the day is throwing your hormones out of balance. Too much insulin in your blood stream from constant bouts of low and then high blood sugar is causing your symptoms mentioned earlier. This process starts many Americans on the path to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and high blood pressure. Who would have though it was all causes when you skipped breakfast?

Most Americans from not poor diet choices, but poor diet habits are living everyday with their hormones out of balance. What I mean by poor diet habits instead of poor diet choices is that most people may think they eat too much fast food or not enough vegetables, though it is the simple act not eating small meals throughout the day that causes the hormonal imbalances.

Your endocrine system (hormones) and your nervous system control your body's rhythm which allows you to prevent disease and live healthy. Most pharmaceutical drugs mast the symptoms people feel like depression or fatigue though the only way to make a cure is to get your hormones back into balance from your diet.

The key understanding how your hormone insulin works and what you can to get in back into balance.

1. Insulin is the key hormone that controls how much fat you store.

2. High insulin levels triggers your brain to crave high sugar foods.

3. Insulin puts stress on the brain which leads to type 3 diabetes or Alzheimer's.

4. Your body becomes resistant to the effects of insulin and that process is the cause of over half the cases of high blood pressure.

5. Insulin enhances the chance of cancer cells forming.

6. High levels of insulin have been linked to depression, panic attacks, anxiety, ADHD, and insomnia.

7. Insulin makes your blood clot faster which increases risk of heart attacks and strokes.

8. Insulin can lead to lower testosterone which causes infertility, acne, hair loss for both men and women, and sexual performance issues.

Top 10 Tips to Re balance Your Insulin

1. Eat a higher amount of whole foods that have not been processed like fruits, vegetables, beans, fish, chicken, and eggs.

2. Remove trans fats from your diet. There is no health benefit to any trans fats in your diet.

3. Eat more organic foods which don't use pesticides, antibiotics, and hormones.

4. Avoid high sugar foods.

5. Eat breakfast. If you are not in the habit; start with something. Just drinking coffee doesn't count for eating breakfast.

6. Eat 5 small meals during the day or every 2-3 hours.

7. Don't eat a large meal than go to bed. This is also solved by eating 5 small meals as you loose the ability to overeat.

8. Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night. Lack of sleep will limit the affects of any amount of health eating that you will do. You are not able to catch up on the weekends.

9. Get at least 3 bouts of exercise in during the week. Cardiovascular exercise has been shown to support stabilizing your blood sugar.

10. Ten a few minutes to relax every day. High stress releases cortisol into your blood stream which amplifies the effects of insulin.

When you embark on balancing your hormones remember it is a lifestyle not a 90 day plan. The goal is that every action you take is an action that you can add to your life that you can continue. Any solution that is short term typically only causes more problems or at least different problems.

Copyright (c) 2008 Charles Carter

About The Author: Charles Carter, BS in Exercise Science is President of LIVE, llc of http://www.liveleantoday.com - visit the website for more information on weight loss, core fitness programs, optimal diets, and online personal trainer and dietician services. For more information on products go to http://shop.liveleantoday.com .

Article Source: http://www.ArticleBiz.com

By Patty Oh

Here's another reason to reduce the amount of sugar you eat. Researchers have determined that if you eat too much sugar, the gene that regulates your levels of estrogen and testosterone can be turned off. In a recent press release, the BC Children's Hospital Foundation said that this discovery would help physicians when they are diagnosing hormone disorders. Common hormone disorders include PCOS, and type 2 diabetes.

Prior to this discovery, doctors assumed that insulin contributed to the reduction of the gene that regulates our hormones, SHBG, in our bodies. Physicians had come to this conclusion because pre-diabetic, overweight people typically had both a low level of SHBG and a high level of insulin.

This groundbreaking study proves that how our liver metabolizes sugar is what affects SHBG, not our insulin level. Researchers said that physicians can now use the SHBG amounts in our blood to monitor how our liver is functioning.

Armed with this information, physicians can intervene long before problems become apparent.

How the liver is involved
Sugars are metabolized in the liver. When someone eats too much sugar, their liver changes the sugar from sugar into fat (a lipid). When our bodies have too many fats, SHBG gene shuts down.

About the SHBG gene
Our bodies have a gene referred to as the SHBG, or sex hormone binding globulin gene. This gene regulates the amount estrogen and testosterone that our bodies produce.

When the SHBG gene shuts down, our body senses that it does not have enough hormones, and produces more testosterone and estrogen, regardless of the current levels of testosterone and estrogen currently in our system.

Having an excessive amount of these hormones puts us at risk of infertility, uterine cancer, acne, and polycystic ovaries.

Abnormal amounts of SHBG genes are also implicated in several other diseases, including cardiovascular disease and a person's risk for developing type 2 diabetes.

"We discovered that low levels of SHBG in a person's blood means the liver's metabolic state is out of whack - because of inappropriate diet or something that's inherently wrong with the liver - long before there are any disease symptoms," said Dr. Geoffrey Hammond, the scientific director of the Child & Family Research Institute in Vancouver, Canada, and professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of British Columbia.

Sugars
Both fructose and glucose are sugars. Fructose and glucose are used to make table sugar. Fructose is also a common ingredient in hundreds of food products, including syrups, low-fat products, and sweetened beverages.

Sources:
Child & Family Research Institute (http://www.bcchildrens.ca/)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid

source:www.associatedcontent.com

By: Vita Man

We have all heard this before. As teenagers from our school coaches who would constantly belt out the proverbial “no pain, no gain” concept, this ridiculous idea that unless we exercised like crazy people, we would not likely see the benefits of our effort, and then from family and friends commenting on our lack of success in weight loss. “If there is a will, there is a way” we were told, or in other words, the reason we were overweight was simply because we just didn’t really want to lose weight.

That is not to say of course that to achieve any of the above goals doesn’t require effort and dedication on our parts. It does.. And lots of it. But research has shown that the majority of people with substantial weight problem have become pre-conditioned to the inevitability of their current situation and thus, their attempts to lose fat become more compromised with the failure of each diet. Putting them (or yourself) down for being fat or overweight may feel like a powerful motivational tool in the reverse psychological perverse sort of way, but in fact, it actually hampers any efforts to change our eating habits.

Talk to any weight loss doctors who were once overweight and successfully lost their excess weight and fat, and chances are you’ll be told that food cravings and weight gain are not always the result of a lack of willpower.

! Most of us who are chronic dieters have one thing in common then. We are not short of willpower (feels good just writing this again!) and likely suffer from a metabolism that produced too much insulin due to an addiction to carbohydrate.

So what’s the deal with insulin? Well:

Insulin tells your body when to eat
Insulin sends food energy wherever your body needs it
Insulin instructs your body to save food energy which is then stored in fat cells for the time when food becomes unavailable.

This overproduction of insulin levels caused by the over absorption of carbohydrates causes a chain reaction which then leads to hunger pangs. Put in another way, the more carbohydrate you eat, the more insulin your body produces. This causes an imbalance which then leads to a cycle of overpowering cravings for more carbohydrates, such as breads, pastas, snack foods and cakes which then leads to even more insulin and so on..

You are a carbohydrate addict if:

You are hungrier after breakfast and before lunch time then if you had skipped breakfast all together.

You are tired and sluggish after a large meal (particularly in the afternoon)

You have been on diet after diet and have as much weight to lose (or even more) as when you started.

You want to eat when you are bored or tired

You feel that you are not satisfied, even after a meal

You find it harder to lose weight then when you were younger.

If you answered “yes” to any two of the above six question then you are mildly carbohydrate addicted. You are moderately addicted if you have answer “yes to three to four questions, and you have a severe carbohydrate addiction if you said “yes” to five or all of the above questions.

If you are serious about losing weight this fat burner supplement has been successfully used by dieters worldwide.

Article Source: http://www.eArticlesOnline.com

Syndrome X is actually called Metabolic Syndrome X. This was discovered over 10 years ago, but scientists have been looking for this for 100 years.

What does it mean? Metabolic has to do with metabolism, the way our body uses energy. Syndrome means many diseases involved. X means "we don't know". So it's basically a bunch of diseases that relate to your metabolism that scientists don't know enough about. The cause of Syndrome X is now being discovered and determined.

In Syndrome X, the blood has high levels of sugar, but unlike diabetes, there is lots of insulin to process the sugar, but the sugar (food) is not getting in the cells to provide energy. You are tired.

A sign of having this Syndrome X would be a person who needs to eat sugar, carbohydrates, and caffeine to keep going throughout the day. They get an energy boost, which falls in an hour, and then they need another boost and another boost throughout the day.

Syndrome X is only found in industrialized countries and cities. It started when white flour and sugar came along with the industrial revolution in the 1800's. It got much worse when companies started using fructose to sweeten foods. It is 20 times sweeter than glucose (sugar). Your body can't handle all this sugar.

It is estimated that 99% of women have Syndrome X. Even if that statistic is high, that still means a lot of women have Syndrome X.

So, what's happening in the body with this Syndrome X? Let's say you eat an apple. Your body only absorbs 20% of the sugar contained in that apple. The same goes for corn on the cob. Bananas are higher at 40%. Watermelon is 10%. Eating these whole foods does not produce a huge amount of sugar (carbohydrates) for your body to deal with. The body makes a little insulin to go with the glucose which then goes into the liver. Then the glucose (energy) is sent to the cells along with insulin, which helps the sugar (energy) get into the cell.

Now, let's look at what happens when you eat white flour, sugar, or fructose (high fructose corn syrup, like the sugar in soft drinks).

A note to make here: Most all bread available is based on 'white flour'. Even wheat bread is made from 'white flour'. Bread made from flour that has been truly stone ground the old fashioned way is the only time you get away from 'white flour'. Stone ground flour will spoil in a week whereas processed flour will keep for years. That's why the industrialized societies changed to processed flour, but it has hurt our health. And the adverse effects are getting worse with each generation.

When your stomach sees flour or sugar coming, it tells the pancreas to make lots of insulin to deal with the large amounts of glucose from white flour (or sugar or fructose). This huge amount of sugar (because 100% is able to be absorbed) goes into the liver, which monitors all food. The liver tastes the blood and decides that it is too sweet, so it turns the sugar into fat, which then goes into the bloodstream.

This fat is the triglycerides in your blood. It is sugar converted to fat. White blood cells then gobble up this fat (because there's too much of it) and store it in your belly, hips, everywhere.

This fat, along with a second type produced (which cannot be broken down, the body can't burn it), will also cover and coat a cell. This covering of fat over the outside of a cell prevents food/glucose from getting into the cell to provide energy.

So, our cells aren't getting enough energy and we have to eat more sweets to give us a quick boost, causing the pancreas to secrete more insulin. I believe this constant secreting of insulin is what wears out the pancreas and gives people the tendency to get Type II Diabetes.

It's estimated that 70-90% of people have high triglycerides. This high blood sugar, turned into high fat by the liver, causes 70% of modern diseases.

Fat in the arteries leads to strokes and heart disease. Fatty deposits on the brain can lead to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Multiple Sclerosis. DNA damage can lead to auto-immune diseases while unchecked cell growth in the body can lead to cancer.

When the liver breaks down fructose Very Low Density Lipoprotein (VLDL) is produced. This converts to Palmitic Acid, which goes inside the cell.

But when Palmitic Acid is in the cell it then converts to Salimide. This Salimide goes into the DNA and attacks it, causing a mutation. These mutations can make a person prone to certain types of cancer. They can also be the source of auto-immune diseases where the body attacks its own cells because it doesn't recognize them, due to the DNA damage.

These mutations also get passed on to our kids. This is why our children's health is not going to be as good as was our parent's health, unless we change our ways and teach our children how to live healthier lives.

So, basically, sugar converted to fat is damaging the genes in our DNA.

It will take 2-3 generations of improved attention to health and nutrition to fully correct damaged genes, but it is possible.

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Anita Murray is a Professional Health Coach, Nutritional Consultant, and Founding Editor/Owner of FibromyalgiaHope.com. For information on getting away from your sugar and caffeine cravings, join Anita’s Interactive E-course, where you will learn about 8 important strategies designed to reverse your declining health and move your toward the health you deserve.

Are You at Risk?

What Is Metabolic Syndrome?

The presence of the setabolic syndrome greatly increases a person’s chances of developing overt diabetes, a host of cardiovascular (relating to the heart and blood vessels) conditions including heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, and frequently premature death.

What Risk Factors or Disorders are Associated With Metabolic Syndrome?

There are a number of organizations around the world, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), that have developed criteria to be included in the diagnosis of metabolic syndrome.

They are all similar, but there are differences. These are all of the risk factors that have been identified:

• Abdominal/Central Obesity - Waist circumference: greater than 40 inches men, and greater than 35 inches in women or BMI (Body Mass Index) greater than 30 kg per m2
• Elevated Triglycerides - greater than 150 mg/dL (1.7 mmol per L)
• Low HDL Cholesterol - less than 35 mg/dL (0.9 mmol/L) for men, and less than 39 mg/dL (1.0 mmol/L) for women
• High Blood Pressure - greater than 130/85 mm Hg
• Fasting Blood Sugar greater than 110 mg/dL (6.1 mmol/L)
• Type 2 Diabetes or Impaired Glucose Tolerance
• Urinary Albumin Secretion - greater than 110 mg/dL (6.1 mmol/L)
• Inflammatory State - Elevated C-reactive protein in the blood

Who Should be Concerned About Metabolic Syndrome?

Those most at risk: People with abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, a history of heart disease or who are or were smokers.

In addition, there are high-risk groups such as native North Americans, Africans, Mexicans, Asians and South Asians. Also, women who have been diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, men with low levels of testosterone and those diagnosed with schizophrenia have an increased risk of having metabolic syndrome.

What Symptoms Should I Look For?

Metabolic syndrome is known as a silent killer because it can exist without your knowledge until serious health issues arise. Symptoms that do develop are associated with the individual risk factors such as symptoms associated with diabetes. To be sure, it is best to have regular health assessments that include a blood pressure measurement.

What Are the Causes of the Metabolic Syndrome?

Excess weight, physical inactivity and a diet that is high in processed carbohydrates, trans fatty acids and saturated fats are where the problems start for most of us. Also, consume more calories than we burn up in activity results in the build-up of fat.

Insulin cannot be used properly when the muscles aren't exercising or when fat builds up. This leads to insulin resistance. Genetics predispose a person to insulin resistance. When insulin and glucose (sugar) build up in the bloodstream, damage occurs to the heart and blood vessels, which causes heart disease. The pancreas, which produces insulin, can become tired and stop making as much insulin and this can cause diabetes.

What Can Happen If I Don't Get Treated?

If you have three of the risk factors associated with metabolic syndrome, your chances of developing heart disease, including a heart attack, a stroke or diabetes are very high. If you have all of the risk factors, you are six times more likely to have serious complications than those who do not have metabolic syndrome.

When untreated, other problems can develop, including kidney disease, liver disease, cancer and sleep apnea.

Where Can I Start to Fix This Problem?

• Make an appointment with your health care practitioner.
  
  
• Lose weight – even a loss of 5-10 percent of your body weight can cause measurable improvements.
  
  
• Healthy Meal Plans –
  1. Decrease processed foods including white flour and sugar from your diet.
  2. Increase your consumption of whole grains, beans, and high fiber foods including lots of fruits and vegetables.
  3. Increase your intake of monounsaturated fats and omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and liver oils. These have shown some promise in reducing the risk of metabolic syndrome.
  4. Decrease trans fatty acids and saturated fats.
  5. Plan meals around your plate by leaving ¼ for your protein food, ¼ for your carbohydrate food and ½ for your vegetables.
  6. Use the Glycemic Index or Glycemic Load for planning your meals.
  
  
  
• Exercise – 30 minutes of walking a day can make a huge improvement. Not only will you burn more calories, but exercise also makes your muscle cells more sensitive to insulin and your body is better able to stabilize your blood sugar levels.
  
  
• Limit Alcohol Intake – No more than 1 drink per day for women and 2 drinks for men.