Aren’t eggs supposed to be super healthy? Yes and no. Eggs are a food group that can be problematic depending on one's medical history - and no, it's not about cholesterol. The cholesterol debate - and what causes elevated levels in the body - was misleading and has long since been dismantled, but there are other aspects that make eggs less suitable for daily intake for everyone.
Now admittedly I’ve been winter swimming in icy waters in Scandinavia since I was 3 years old (voluntarily following my mom in the ocean, mind you). I’ve always been keen on the benefits of cold-and-heat alternating therapies and how it can tone our vagus nerve and thereby help alleviate stress and build resilience.
This trend is being pushed by influencers with no health education or people without an understanding of the nervous system - yes, even researches focusing on one aspect only i.e. how cold therapy can change our fat tissue. However, this is ONLY one aspect of how cold therapy is affecting us. We need to understand the bigger picture of how something is affecting us LONG-TERM and our body as a whole, before we dive in. Most importantly we need to understand how our own nervous system is wired and what therapies is best matched to that. Too many lack the understanding of doing things in short bursts or in moderation to stress the body short-term in order to build resilience long-term - instead they are pushing the body beyond capacity, staying in ice water for 5-20 minutes with the mantra “more is better” or just being solely focused on changing fat tissue without understanding what large doses of adrenaline release does to the nervous system.
I am not a big fan of synthetic supplements - and there are plenty of studies supporting that synthetic vitamins are NOT comparable to natural vitamins due to missing co-factors amongst other issues.
Synthetic vitamin C is however what most of us are consuming if we are taking supplements on the regular. And I only recommend synthetic vitamin C if you are acutely fighting an infection as the longterm benefits are severely lacking - on the contrary.
A recent study reported a positive association between supplemental vitamin C intake and kidney stones in a cohort of 23,355 Swedish men; the multivariable adjusted relative risk associated with supplemental use of vitamin C was almost double compared with no use!
Read the full study here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23381591/
NOTE: I absolutely do recommend supplements, but the quality most of us are taking is absolute garbage and not related to better health outcome. The headlines in the newspapers do not differentiate between synthetic supplements and naturally derived supplements, although this is the key issue in the health outcome!
As humans we struggle with the concept of balance. Yet science shows that nature wants balance. And instead of completely staying out of the sun, we would benefit greatly from understanding how to reap the health benefits from daily sun exposure while protecting especially our face and décolleté from damage.
When skin and the eye are exposed to UVR there is a release of α-melanocyte-stimulating hormone (α-MSH) which naturally lowers our appetite and increases our energy expenditure.
In the central nervous system, α-MSH is cleaved from proopiomelanocortin and then released into different hypothalamic regions to act on melanocortin 3/4 receptor-expressing neurons, lowering food intake, and raising energy expenditure via appetite suppression and sympathetic nervous system.
Most of us know this intuitively, as we tend to lose weight without struggle, when we go on summer-vacation. And this is the reason for it.
In the study they found following:
“In our animal studies, ongoing exposure to low dose ultraviolet radiation (UVR, found in sunlight) reduced weight gain and the development of signs of cardiometabolic dysfunction in mice fed a high fat diet. These observations suggest that regular exposure to safe levels of sunlight could be an effective means of reducing the burden of obesity.”
Read the full study here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5086738/ And feel free to share.
Promising research shows that PFAS may not need to be “forever” in your body and may be treatable with the common medication cholestyramine.
Read the full study here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412024000837?via%3Dihub
Yet another vegan “documentary” taking up space on Netflix these days: “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment”. And it hasn’t even been more than a handful of years ago, there was the last wave of veganism driving through the country with the movie Game Changers on Netflix, swiping across the country with more peer pressure than your average influencer’s lip filler. Same arguments, same counter arguments. It gets boring for those of us who live long enough to see the circling trends in health care - same claims, same debunking and on and on it goes. Each generation has to learn from scratch all over again. Yes I sound like I’m a million years. But really, I don’t have patience for this utter nutritional nonsense trendy stuff proposed by self-claimed experts often with no relevant educational background when it comes to nutrition science.
I never really commented much on it, because we are missing the boat completely when it comes to changing our health by focusing so much on meat vs. plants, and the debate has so many emotional ties attached to it, that it rarely seems constructive to dive in.
We mostly know homocysteine as something we have to worry about not getting too high. And that is absolutely true: too high homocysteine is directly related to higher mortality and risk of cardiovascular disease.
But can homocysteine also become too low?
It turns out that the answer is yes: low homocysteine levels are actually linked to increased disease risk. For example, low homocysteine has been shown to have a strong association with peripheral neuropathy.
Research shows that a surprising 41% of patients with idiopathic peripheral neuropathy have hypohomocysteinemia (too low homocysteine). And sulfur is absolutely essential for healthy homocysteine levels. There can be several reasons for imbalances with sulfur in the body - e.g. mold can affect sulfur and thereby homocystein levels. Unfortunately, it is not always as simple as just doing a mineral test for sulfur and thereafter concluding when levels are found low to simply eat foods higher in sulfur to provide the building blocks in order to normalize homocysteine levels (aka broccoli, cabbage, meat).
However, mineral, vitamin and heavy metal tests are always one of the first things I do on all clients who come in for a health check-up, because this is basic information we need to know before we can dig deeper
Vitamin, mineral and metal test incl. 30 minutes review can be booked as a separate service on the website and is also included in all health check-ups.
Lately, I’ve been falling over some contents claiming that blood sugar is always stable in healthy people and the glycemic index is none-sense unless you are diabetic. While there are many misconceptions at the moment about what causes chronically dysregulated blood sugar and insulin resistance - i.e. some claiming that carbs are the issue, and we just need to cut carbs out and eat a meat-based (carnivor) or fat-based (keto) diet - it is simply also not true that blood sugar always keeps stable in healthy people. Or actually it is true that for as long as the body is still healthy enough to produce enough insulin to quickly get the glucose out of the blood stream (in contrast to diabetics) the overall blood sugar levels keep stable - but(!!) the more high spikes and following crashes we get from the foods we eat the less healthy we will be in time. So while we at the peak of our health may be able to have overall balanced blood sugar regardless of what we eat on the glycemic index - this doesn’t mean that it down the road is ideal to continue to engage in, if we are to STAY healthy.“There are lots of folks running around with their glucose levels spiking, and they don’t even know it,” said Michael Snyder, PhD, professor and chair of genetics at Stanford and senior author of the study. The spikes are in fact a health problem because high blood sugar levels, especially when prolonged, can contribute to cardiovascular disease risk and a person’s tendencies to develop insulin resistance, which is a common precursor to diabetes, he said.“We saw that some folks who think they’re healthy actually are misregulating glucose — sometimes at the same severity of people with diabetes — and they have no idea,” Snyder said. Furthermore, when we get a blood sugar spike, followed by a crash this is known to affect cortisol which increases hunger - and thus we have the craving cycle.