Each of us, as individuals, has our nutritional tipping point. And societies as a whole also have their nutritional tipping points as well.
The term “tipping point” comes from the field of epidemiology. It originally referred to when epidemics rapidly accelerated, or reached a tipping point at which large numbers of people were affected. Malcolm Gladwell writes about such phenomena in his book, The Tipping Point.
Thirty years ago, when I first met with Abram Hoffer, MD, PhD, one of the pioneers in nutritional medicine, we talked a little about how poor nutrition might set the stage for a societal catastrophe. With great foresight, he said that a tipping point would come when our society has more sick people than healthy people to take care of them. That situation would lead to social and economic collapse.
People often reach a tipping point in their moods, such as when they are overwhelmed by stress or explode in anger. There are also tipping points in the progression of diseases, such as when cardiovascular disease reaches a crescendo known as a heart attack or when a tumor becomes clinically recognizable, or terminal.
People seem to function – perhaps get by – even though their nutritional intake may be marginal. They may not feel their best, a sign of less than optimal nutritional biochemistry. Many studies refer to their subjects as being “apparently healthy” because they have no overt signs of serious disease. But “apparently healthy” often means that they have not yet reached their nutritional tipping point.
Fatigue, one of the most common of all symptoms, may be a sign that we’ve hit our tipping point for poor nutrition and too much stress. We end up having too many things to do, but without the nutritional support to fortify us. Prediabetes is another tipping point, as would be any fulminant disease. The question is: what is your tipping point, and what are you doing to avoid it?
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Tackling the High Cost of Health Care
Any way you look at the cost of health care – or rather, disease care – in the United States, it's extraordinarily expensive. If you pay your own health and medical insurance, or at least contribute to its cost through your employer, you know that the premiums and copayments are always increasing. And the cost of health care is going to get much worse.
Different experts come up with different numbers, but they're all pretty chilling. In one analysis, health-care spending is expected to double from $2 billion annually to $4 billion annually in just 10 years. That amount would add up to one out of every five dollars spent in the United States. Another analysis projects that more than $8 billion dollars will be spent just to cover the new Medicare prescription drug plan over the next four years. I know, and you probably do as well, many people who take five to 10 prescription medications each day, putting them and our nation at risk of financial ruin.
There are many reasons behind these enormous increases in health-care spending. One is the aging of the population. Another is the aggressive advertising by pharmaceutical companies to sell their proprietary drugs. Still another is the competitive hospital environment – though many hospitals are technically nonprofit, they seek earnings and market share the way any for-profit corporation does. More disturbing, the number of for-profit hospitals is increasing rapidly, whereas the number of nonprofit hospitals is quickly shrinking.
With so many businesses and organizations intent on profiting from disease care, genuine efforts at prevention get the short shrift. After all, many businesses would suffer financially if large numbers of people got healthier and didn't need drugs and medical services. Yet our financial security, as individuals, families, and a nation, depends on significantly reducing the costs of medical care.
Improving eating habits and encouraging people to take dietary supplements to prevent (as well as to treat) disease is a sensible, low-cost approach. Nutrients are cheaper than drugs, and they correct the underlying causes of disease, not just its symptoms. With this credible approach to preventing disease, drugs and hospitalization would be reserved for when there is no reasonable alternative. It would certainly require a retooling of our economy, one that would probably be greater than retooling from manufacturing to high tech, but the economic payoff would (along with our health) would be impressive: healthier people are more productive people.
Spread the word. Explain this to your friends, your employer, and your insurer, and convey these thoughts to your senators and congressman. We have to start sometime, and there's no better time than now. The alternative, sometime in the future, will be economic collapse.
Different experts come up with different numbers, but they're all pretty chilling. In one analysis, health-care spending is expected to double from $2 billion annually to $4 billion annually in just 10 years. That amount would add up to one out of every five dollars spent in the United States. Another analysis projects that more than $8 billion dollars will be spent just to cover the new Medicare prescription drug plan over the next four years. I know, and you probably do as well, many people who take five to 10 prescription medications each day, putting them and our nation at risk of financial ruin.
There are many reasons behind these enormous increases in health-care spending. One is the aging of the population. Another is the aggressive advertising by pharmaceutical companies to sell their proprietary drugs. Still another is the competitive hospital environment – though many hospitals are technically nonprofit, they seek earnings and market share the way any for-profit corporation does. More disturbing, the number of for-profit hospitals is increasing rapidly, whereas the number of nonprofit hospitals is quickly shrinking.
With so many businesses and organizations intent on profiting from disease care, genuine efforts at prevention get the short shrift. After all, many businesses would suffer financially if large numbers of people got healthier and didn't need drugs and medical services. Yet our financial security, as individuals, families, and a nation, depends on significantly reducing the costs of medical care.
Improving eating habits and encouraging people to take dietary supplements to prevent (as well as to treat) disease is a sensible, low-cost approach. Nutrients are cheaper than drugs, and they correct the underlying causes of disease, not just its symptoms. With this credible approach to preventing disease, drugs and hospitalization would be reserved for when there is no reasonable alternative. It would certainly require a retooling of our economy, one that would probably be greater than retooling from manufacturing to high tech, but the economic payoff would (along with our health) would be impressive: healthier people are more productive people.
Spread the word. Explain this to your friends, your employer, and your insurer, and convey these thoughts to your senators and congressman. We have to start sometime, and there's no better time than now. The alternative, sometime in the future, will be economic collapse.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
About That Study on the "Dangers" of Lowering Blood Sugar
You may have heard about the U.S. government-funded diabetes study that was abruptly shut down in February 2008. The study involved the aggressive medical (not nutritional) treatment to lower blood sugar in people with diabetes.
The idea behind the study was that reducing blood sugar levels to near normal levels would improve the health of people with diabetes. It turned out that people in the study with the lowest blood sugar levels were far more likely to die from a heart attack, com-pared with people who were not treated as aggres-sively. Newspaper stories questioned the rationale of lowering blood sugar too much in people with diabetes.
Meanwhile, a second and similar study, directed by Australian researchers, did not find a higher risk of death. However, the second study did not seek to lower blood sugar as much and, based on initial reports, and did not involve either as many prescrip-tion drugs or high doses.
Make no bones about it: elevated blood sugar is dangerous, and even modest increases in blood sugar increase the risk of heart attack.
But the researchers in the American study used a panoply of drugs – not nutrition – to reduce blood sugar. The patients’ blood sugar did in fact decrease, but the drug treatment simply modified a symptom – high blood sugar – while the underlying disease process continued.
The fatalities may have been further complicated by the interactions of the various drugs. The patients were given a variety of FDA-approved drugs for treating diabetes, including metformin, thiazoli-dinediones (e.g., rosiglitazone), sulfonylureas, exanatide, acarbose, and insulin. Insulin alone can increase the risk of a heart attack. One doctor was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the treatment was “brutal” and had little relevance to real-world treatment.
This was yet another unfortunate – and deadly – study showing that more drugs are more dangerous than fewer drugs. So much for the Hippocratic Oath of first doing no harm. The ideal approach to treating diabetes (and prediabetes) is through nutrition and supplements. I’m yet to hear of anyone, diabetic or not, dying from good eating habits.
(To read more on the safe prevention and reversal of prediabetes, get excerpts from my book, Stop Prediabetes Now, at www.nutritionreporter.com)
The idea behind the study was that reducing blood sugar levels to near normal levels would improve the health of people with diabetes. It turned out that people in the study with the lowest blood sugar levels were far more likely to die from a heart attack, com-pared with people who were not treated as aggres-sively. Newspaper stories questioned the rationale of lowering blood sugar too much in people with diabetes.
Meanwhile, a second and similar study, directed by Australian researchers, did not find a higher risk of death. However, the second study did not seek to lower blood sugar as much and, based on initial reports, and did not involve either as many prescrip-tion drugs or high doses.
Make no bones about it: elevated blood sugar is dangerous, and even modest increases in blood sugar increase the risk of heart attack.
But the researchers in the American study used a panoply of drugs – not nutrition – to reduce blood sugar. The patients’ blood sugar did in fact decrease, but the drug treatment simply modified a symptom – high blood sugar – while the underlying disease process continued.
The fatalities may have been further complicated by the interactions of the various drugs. The patients were given a variety of FDA-approved drugs for treating diabetes, including metformin, thiazoli-dinediones (e.g., rosiglitazone), sulfonylureas, exanatide, acarbose, and insulin. Insulin alone can increase the risk of a heart attack. One doctor was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the treatment was “brutal” and had little relevance to real-world treatment.
This was yet another unfortunate – and deadly – study showing that more drugs are more dangerous than fewer drugs. So much for the Hippocratic Oath of first doing no harm. The ideal approach to treating diabetes (and prediabetes) is through nutrition and supplements. I’m yet to hear of anyone, diabetic or not, dying from good eating habits.
(To read more on the safe prevention and reversal of prediabetes, get excerpts from my book, Stop Prediabetes Now, at www.nutritionreporter.com)
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