Nancy Appleton Books Health Blog

© 2012 Nancy Appleton PhD and G.N. Jacobs

 Those of you that may have already read our book Killer Colas may remember that we asserted that drinking soda is much like drinking battery acid. You may also remember that we tried several times to replicate a demonstration from Mr. Jacobs’ youth where freshly pulled teeth from a nearby dentist where the teeth dissolved in Coke within about a week and a half or thereabouts. Suffice it to say the teeth didn’t dissolve and we gave up.

In the book, we did present rumors and other assertions from news that the phosphoric acid in most soda brands could be used for all kinds of non-drinking uses like degreasing engine blocks and in one case from India was an amazingly effective pesticide. But, we had to pass these reports on as less than fully confirmed because the articles we based them on were either not found in the mountain of research material used for the book or came from dubious sources. Now we have lawyers and experts from Pepsi on record about the acidity of at least one soda: Mountain Dew.

In 2009, an Illinois man bought a soda at the local convenience store. He pops the top and finds a mouse in the can. After experiencing what might have been an entertaining Ick Dance (at least to the disinterested who got unadulterated sodas), the gentlemen in question performs as expected of the average American and sues everybody even remotely related to this disgusting experience, including Pepsi.

Part of the suit alleges that the soda company willfully took the mouse for testing it and then not returning the carcass to the plaintiff in a condition unusable for court or independent testing. So far this sounds like the normal sort of skullduggery that goes on every day when these kinds of lawsuits finally make it onto the schedule. Maybe Pepsi destroyed the evidence. Maybe the plaintiff is sweetening his case with an exaggeration. The jury will split the baby as the saying goes. Currently, the case is at an advanced pretrial stage discussing last minute motions and such.

But, what is really interesting from the point of view of health writers is what Pepsi’s people just recently said trying not to give the plaintiff money, whether the $325,000 filed against Pepsi, the convenience store and store employees, or the reported $50,000 still on the table after the plaintiff’s lawyers clearly advised him to keep his eyes on the prize: Pepsico’s deep pockets. The defense strategy: the plaintiff could not have encountered the alleged dead rodent because the acid in the soda would have dissolved the body in the time between bottling and sale.

Apparently, the can was bottled in 2008 and sold in November 2009 according to court documents. Pepsi’s expert testified that the mouse would not have been found in the solid state with soft tissue intact because the year interval would have turned the mouse into a “jelly-like substance.” No assertions in court documents were made to assert tampering after being bottled. Also, no mention was made if said jelly would have still made for an unpleasant drinking experience worthy of earning a settlement.

You heard it here, there and maybe everywhere that the acid in soda is one of many reasons to stop drinking soda. Though we must admit that the possibility that on a particular production day in 2008 a dead mouse escaped both the Pepsico and the local government health inspection processes ranks almost as high.

© 2011 Nancy Appleton PhD & G.N. Jacobs

Resolutions, we’ve all made them. Usually, they last two weeks. So how do we give ourselves the best chance of meeting the next batch due in just a few weeks?

Perhaps the problem is that we attach too much to New Years as a time of new beginnings. We get too worked up over the change in calendar, which could put so much pressure on “I resolve to eat better and exercise” or “I resolve to read more books.” The pressure can cause us to freeze up and fail the resolution.

One possible way to give yourself a chance is to shift the New Years metaphor to some other date. Start the regimen in March quietly and without fanfare and maybe you’ll last long enough to change a few bad habits. My son, a writer, for the past two Novembers has tried to write a 50 thousand word novel in thirty days. He got close both times glad to take a half-loaf victory until he came across a suggestion to shift adherence to the challenge to August from another writer. Apparently, this writer admitted he enjoyed the fall TV schedule too much.

But, deferring the promise to yourself until an easier time with less pressure may not be enough to make things work. Some of us still need to figure out a way to eat less sugar and exercise more, right now. In almost no cases do I recommend anything like going cold turkey when it comes to such difficult things as cutting down on sugar, losing weight or becoming healthier. Few people can just quit sugar or any of the other harmful addictive foods in their diet. This is how New Years resolutions crash and burn.

My favorite trick is the half as much as yesterday approach, which I first discussed in my first book Lick the Sugar Habit. Take stock of your sugar intake today and then eat half as much tomorrow. Repeat the process the day after that. In a purely, mathematical sense using half as much sugar means you’d never completely cut out sugar. But, in the real world there is a fuzziness in measurement that means eventually within a week or so you’ll be eating so little sugar that making the last jump to eating no sugar becomes easier.

I used a similar technique when I first got my kids off sugar. Many years ago we were traveling in England and I told them they could have one sugar filled item per day. Of course, I’d already dumped the cakes and colas that were waiting for us at home. My children went with the new regime without complaint and three weeks later we came home to house where the only sugar my kids ate came from outside the house.

Lastly, it is real important to seek help from other people trying to deal with your resolutions. When all else fails talking to other people with the same concerns can help when making major life changes. This is how Alcoholics Anonymous and other support groups work. People contemplating that piece of cheesecake can sometimes only be talked down by a friend. In my area of expertise, nutrition, I’ve dealt with many support groups that can help people from eating too much. My favorite is Food Addicts in Recovery because they seem to specialize in sugar addiction, but I’ve seen equally good results from Overeaters Anonymous and Food Addicts Anonymous. I don’t have as much experience with the for profit weight loss programs like Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem, but I support anything that comes with a support system.

A person with the right plan and support can do anything, so whether waiting for an off month to start, using some variation of the half as much plan or reaching out for the right help any reasonable resolution is achievable. Do your best.

© 2011 Nancy Appleton Ph.D. & G.N. Jacobs

Children’s chewable and gummy vitamins may possibly be the worst thing for your child. We’ve been told for years that our children may need the supplements to make up for shortfalls of key nutrients in their diets. Considering how difficult it may be to convince kids to eat their greens parents believed what they were told. The problem seems to be a whole lot of sugar and other sweeteners on the label.

I have long held the position that the last thing anyone wants to do when taking nutritional supplements is to cut the vitamins and minerals with sugar. Sugar affects the precise mineral balance of the body causing the body’s systems to stop working properly. As you may remember from Lick the Sugar Habit and Suicide by Sugar, I highlighted the Calcium-Phosphorus Ratio calculated from the levels on the basic blood test as the most common indicator of a lack of homeostasis. No vitamin, mineral or medicinal herb will ever work for you when you take it with sugar.

As a result, sugar and similar sweeteners have been linked to obesity, diabetes, asthma, diarrhea and many other ailments. So let’s take a look at a random sampling of a few children’s vitamin labels. A few of these ‘healthy’ supplements are eye opening in terms of how much sweetener has been jammed into those tiny chewables. Just so you know, many food and supplement producers will use the legal requirement for a label to list in descending order of quantity using up to four different types of sweetener to create a label that might read like this (Primary Food or Nutritional Item, Sucrose, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Maltose, Lactose, Dextrose…) when the real truth in the label is (SUGAR, Primary Food Item…). The first label is thought to sell the product better, because no one says they want to eat that much sugar.

Disney Princess Gummies – The key offenders on this Nutrition Facts Label are many – corn syrup, sugar, grape juice concentrate, modified corn starch, purple berry color concentrate (maqui berry concentrate and sugar), maltodextrin and farther down the list, mannitol. Just so you know, the manufacturer that paid for Disney’s brand likenesses had to pay $2 million to the Federal Trade Commission for false claims of promoting healthy brain and eye development.

Flintstones Complete Gummies – Perhaps these vitamins are less horrible for your children; glucose syrup and glucose being the only recognizable sweeteners found on this particular label. But, any sugar in the mix is the problem.

Gummi King Sugar Free Multivitamins – A vegan friendly line that lists at the top of the label maltitol and maltitol syrup. PETA supports this brand with an endorsement as being animal friendly.

Centrum has possibly the worst offender with their Centrum Kids Complete Multivitamins. This label list has sucrose (sugar), microcrystalline cellulose, mannitol, pregelatinized cornstarch, mono- and di-glycerides, aspartame, cornstarch, dextrose, dried corn syrup, hypromellose, lactose, maltodextrin, medium chain triglycerides, modified cornstarch and tocopherols. Additionally on this label you will find a few chemicals not from the sugar and other sweetener family that also kill you eventually, including sodium benzoate and propylene glycol alginate.

Sodium benzoate is a preservative found in soda that can turn into benzine, a highly flammable carcinogen. Bon appetite! Propylene Glycol Alginate is anti-freeze, typically a sweet tasting, but lethal kissing cousin to alcohol that requires medical attention within minutes. Sometimes HFCS is made from corn with chemicals like glutaraldehyde, an embalming fluid, linked to headaches, burning eyes and asthma. Mercury is also used in the production process and one estimate puts the mercury contamination of HFCS at somewhere between one half and one third of all the produced sweetener.

Lastly, I wanted to remind the reader that sugar alcohols like mannitol and maltitol are sweeteners somewhere between sugars and alcohol that won’t get you drunk, but can still affect your health in many ways including gas, bloating and diarrhea. So before you deal with the recent possibility that the vitamin supplements themselves may be harmful or at least not as beneficial as advertised, we have to get the sugar out of the supplements. Don’t give your kids those Flintstones!

Sources:

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/12/13/disney-vitamins-marketer-others-settle-charges-about-bogus-clai/

http://www.centrum.com/ourproducts/kids.aspx

http://www.gummiking.com/p-25-sugar-free-multivitamin-gummi.aspx

http://www.walgreens.com/store/c/disney-princess-gummies-children%27s-mutltivitamin/ID=prod2499510-product

http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/nutrition/a/maltitol.htm

http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/whattoeat/a/sugaralcohols.htm

http://flintstonesvitamins.com/en/products/flintstones_gummies_complete.php

http://www.bayer.com/en/Subgroups.aspx

http://www.naturalnews.com/034035_childrens_vitamins_corn_syrup.html#ixzz1cYMehtGo

http://www.naturalnews.com/032948_high_fructose_corn_syrup_glutaraldehyde.html

© 2011 Nancy Appleton Ph.D. & G.N. Jacobs

 There was an old cartoon about how in the old days we would meet over coffee and cigarettes to discuss our problems, but now coffee and cigarettes are our problems. Forty years of propaganda has had an affect on smoking, but we really love our coffee a fact that has kept Starbucks in business. This is despite a similar wealth of studies about caffeine being unhealthy to drink.

Caffeine may help give you osteoporosis and several other diseases of the modern age like diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Additionally, too much caffeine can have mental and emotional effects like increasing anxiety and aggression and the drink is quite addictive.

Metabolically, the culprit is caffeine’s effect on the body’s sugar cycle.  Catecholmines are released raising the heart rate and excess sugar into the bloodstream. This leads to both high blood sugar and low blood sugar because the pancreas can overreact to wipe out the excess. The high part of the cycle is why we drink coffee and then we crash when the blood sugar becomes too low. Type-2 diabetes results when the pancreas quits working after sustained abuse in this cycle.

Bone loss occurs in this process because calcium is pulled from bones to even out the acidity of too much sugar in the blood. The pH returns to an equilibrium at the expense of the bones. Supplements don’t help because the body is completely out of homeostasis, just as if sugar had replaced the caffeine in the diet. The patient is simply chasing an imbalance with more imbalances.

Some studies suggest that 3 cups of regular coffee can pull 45 ml of calcium from the bones. The body excretes the excess into the urine never to return until the patient stops the cycle by eating healthier and exercising more. Over time this daily dose will weaken anybody’s bones.

Caffeinated coffee has also been shown to raise cholesterol across the board leading to concerns about heart attacks and strokes. The testing suggests that a half-cup of regular coffee may be the upper limit before the effects kick in.

Caffeine also raises blood pressure. One study hooked drinkers up to automatic monitoring devices and let them drink their normal coffee intake. The heavy drink segment (3 to 6 daily cups) showed dramatic rises in blood pressure, but only during morning hours where most of the coffee was consumed.

Entomologists fed caffeine to insects and discovered that insects get just as irritable and anxious as humans suggesting that caffeine evolved as a natural pest repellent. We refer to ‘coffee jitters’ and tell people to drink more decaf when dealing with those who can’t relax. Naturally, this hyper state can lead to anxiety even panic attacks. Panic has long been recognized as precursor to rage and aggression can increase with long-term coffee usage. Hospitals that remove caffeine from the vending machines notice decreases in damage from angry patients and guests.

Lastly, we want to warn people that the cheaper methods for making decaf coffee may also be part of the problem because instead of using water the manufacturer uses chemical stripping agents that may still be in the coffee grounds in trace amounts. Many of these chemicals may cause cancer or other such problems. Reading labels, or better, yet, drinking less coffee, can solve this issue.

Sources:

Carmel, Harold, “Caffeine and Aggression” HOSPITAL AND COMMUNITY PSYCHIATRY. June, 1991;42(6):637-638.

Conway, Claire, “Truth and Consequences of Coffee” STANFORD MEDICINE. Winter 1991;24-26.

Fried Roy E. et al., “The Effect of Filtered Coffee Consumption on Plasma Lipid Levels: Result of a Randonized Clinical Trial” Journal of the American Medical Association. Feb.12, 1992;267(6):811-815.

© 2011 Nancy Appleton Ph.D & G.N. Jacobs

It’s the holiday season! The food on the holiday table looms almost like a movie monster photographed with all the cheesy tricks, including an appropriately ominous music score and vertigo-inducing camera moves. But, how do we enjoy the holidays without getting waylaid in the dark forest by the dreaded Dark Meat Turkey or that plate of mashed potatoes?

Everybody has heard all kinds of the platitudes and suggestions about eating less and some have merit. Perhaps you’ve been told to drink water before eating? The thinking is simple; water fills the stomach tricking the I’m Full switch into activating. Less food eaten of all kinds consumed means less calories during the holidays. But does it work?

As of February 2010, the consensus appears to be yes. The journal Obesity published an article on the subject based on a study presumably conducted during the 2009 holiday season finding results that in a three-month period older (over 55) people on a low calorie diet who drank two cups of water before each meal lost an average of 15.5 pounds compared to the control group that lost 11 pounds.

Other studies show similar results. A 2008 study shows a 13-percent reduction in calories consumed in overweight people that drank water before breakfast. A 2007 study suggested that drinking water 30 minutes before eating worked well for eating less and feeling full among the older people in the study, but not so much for the younger (under 35) respondents in the study. Personally, I think younger people have more pressure to eat up and keep up with their peers that the stress eating completely overwhelms the benefits of drinking water.

But what else can you do during the holidays to limit the damage to your waistline? One trick that works some of the time at holiday meals is to fill your plate with tiny portions of everything so the host won’t feel insulted that you skipped anything on the buffet, but not enough to overeat. Sometimes taking the salad plate through the buffet line is required to eat less. For those parties that actually set out those tiny two-pronged forks for oysters or corn, using this fork instead of the regular forks for salad and dinner may help you take smaller bites.

Another suggestion is to talk the host (or your guests) into going for a walk. I’ve never done this myself, but it seems that the holidays would be an excellent time to explore a video game with a motion capture unit like the Nintendo Wii or an Xbox 360 with a Kinect. Getting the family together for a dancing or boxing game will burn just enough calories for you to keep your nose above water, while creating those cherished family memories that are supposedly the point of holidays.

Lastly, the only other way to get through the holidays is to simply do your best and use the New Year to get back in shape.

© 2011 Nancy Appleton Ph.D. & G.N. Jacobs

 Longtime readers may have noticed that I have consistently said to exercise, pray, meditate, write, listen to music, or even hug the kids and pet the dog before eating. Naturally, I wasn’t just making this advice up as I went along. My source is a giant of medicine Walter B. Cannon, head of the Physiology Department at Harvard for many years. The shortest word for this field is psychoneuroimmunology, which is barely descriptive.

Cannon observed that our state of being and bodies are inextricably linked. Our mouths water, when, like Homer Simpson, we smell – doonuuts! – or even healthier foods like my son’s special wine and soy sauce marinade for lamb. The nice smell causes saliva and starts the digestive process. The aroma sparks a positive association and we feel good just being nearby.

All aspects of digestion can be affected by a positive or negative state of mind. Stress out emotionally or even physically by forgetting to drink water and watch the saliva disappear. The muscle contractions called peristalsis that drive the food from the mouth to the intestines can stop or slow down. Enzymes can decrease while stomach acid increases. Nutrients may become toxic in the presence of toxic emotions, because of improper digestion.

Cannon observed that stress is a highly individualized factor completely dependent on how we choose to perceive things. Some people freak out practically running around with their heads cut off and others breathe deeply and take baby steps dealing with their problems. I’ll give you one guess which type of person typically seems healthier digesting well. Stress happens, but distress doesn’t have to.

The stress reaction is part of the Fight or Flight we all need to help us deal with that tiger that just moved into the tall grass. Stored energy is opened up and our ability to eat new food shuts down. But, we will feel the same tightness in our gut if we try to eat while feeling depressed about the day in the office. Our bodies can’t tell the difference between the tiger and a profound need to cry or shout.

Laughter has even helped people get over diseases like cancer in a small part because the patient is now fully digesting their food after relieving stress. Most problems can be handled by laughing, journaling, meditating and/or praying. A small few need professional assistance. I make no statements about prayer other than to say the body enters the same state as meditation getting the same benefits whether God is listening or not.

It makes sense that people not eat while in distress. A depressed person, say, will get no nutritional benefit from their food causing a cycle downward into more depression and anger. Remember that everything works better when you’re happy. Push away from that plate and get your head and heart on straight before eating. Don’t worry eat happy!

Suggested Reading:

Cannon, W. B. THE WISDOM OF THE BODY (New York: Norton, 1932)

© 2011 Nancy Appleton PhD and G.N. Jacobs

From their book Killer Colas © 2011 Nancy Appleton & G.N. Jacobs

Go to our Store – Click Here!

1)    Sugar-sweetened drinks can cause pancreatic cancer.[i]

2)    Soft drink consumption may lead to hyperactivity and other mental problems.[ii]

3)    Sugar-sweetened drinks can lead to obesity, heart disease and other aspects of the metabolic syndrome.[iii]

4)    Cola consumption has been linked to osteoporosis in women.[iv]

5)    Soft drinks have been linked to liver disease.[v]

6)    Many types of soft drinks have been linked to headaches.[vi]

7)    Many types of soft drinks have been linked to asthma.[vii]

8)    Energy drinks with similar ingredients to soft drinks may cause epilepsy.[viii]

9)    Soft drinks can cause development of kidney stones.[ix]

10)  Soft drinks can lead to low potassium levels (Hypokalema).[x]

© 2011 Nancy Appleton PhD & G.N. Jacobs

“What a drag it is getting old!” – Rolling Stones, Mother’s Little Helper.

I’m sure that most of you that know me probably find it odd that I’m quoting a very loud rock band for my pithy statement about the myths we believe when it comes to aging. After enjoying the Beatles, I chose to miss the rest of the British Invasion. My staff tells me the line comes from a song about Valium abuse among housewives during the 1960s. I like the irony that drug abuse is one way to wear our bodies out faster, causing us to fear getting older driving us to even more pills to block out our pain, a vicious cycle.

But what do we believe about aging that causes such fear?

1. Fasting blood glucose will increase.
2. Blood pressure, both diastolic and systolic, will increase.
3. Bad cholesterol (LDL) will increase at the expense of good cholesterol (HDL).
4. Osteoporosis will set in leading to brittle bones causing dread of falls.
5. Our strength decreases.
6. We will be fatter and less lean.
7. Our Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) decreases.
8. We will be colder.
9. Degenerative diseases become inevitable.

Pretty much, I don’t believe any of the above statements. Aging as we know it is a process created by our own bad habits, because we…

1. Stop eating properly.
2. Stop exercising and keeping the body aligned.
3. Let the stress that is inevitable, become distress that sabotages our health.
4. Let various harmful environmental factors stay in our environment.

I will point you at any of my books which each deal with various signs of bad health and provides the most recent citations for further reading. I discuss blood glucose, blood pressure, cholesterol ratios, osteoporosis, fat retention, metabolic rate, temperature regulation and degenerative diseases in various contexts in Lick the Sugar Habit, Healthy Bones and Suicide by Sugar. Let’s discuss the four solutions.

Eating properly means preferring whole foods to processed foods, cutting back on sugar and the food allergens to which we react. It also means gently cooking the food and eating the proper portions so that our bodies aren’t overworked trying to deal with lots of food. I put the same three food plans in all of my books, because they keep working for people.

Food Plan Three takes many of the foods to which we react out of our mouths. It is a highly restrictive food plan emphasizing vegetables, protein, water and whole grains not loaded with gluten. I recommend it as the sharp transition between unhealthy eating and healthy eating. Then as the person heals the less restrictive Food Plans Two and One may become more appropriate depending on symptoms.

One of the interesting things I found in looking over the source material for this article was how much exercise helps with our aging concerns. Usually, I give equal time to Diet, Exercise, Emotional Health and our Environment that they all work together to make us healthy (or not). This will always be true, but in the specific case of aging well exercise is very important.

For instance, older people who exercise with weight training in addition to their cardiovascular workout resist increases in the fasting blood glucose rate. Some of the insulin made by the body is stored in the muscles. A lack of exercise as we age means these muscles may become body fat and become resistant to insulin resulting in higher fasting blood glucose levels.

And for bone loss, exercise, including weight training, is very important as well. NASA and their Corps of Astronauts have known about weightlessness and bone loss for quite some time. Our bones are designed to hold us up for our lifespan more or less at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well. We’ve all seen the pictures of astronauts in orbit strapped into special bikes to pound out their roadwork. The idea is that the bones will also respond to the strains place on them by overactive muscles working as compensation for no gravity and minimize the bone loss.

However, in the specific case of astronauts at least through the early Shuttle era there were dietary concerns as well, specifically Tang. This was (is?) a powdered drink that replaced orange juice on space flights. It has been a while since I’ve seen the labeling on a bottle of Tang, but sugar, like with many processed foods, was listed at the top. I’ve never seen a study authored by NASA that asked this question: does bone de-mineralization increase for astronauts who drink Tang compared to those who don’t? I hope it’s because no one asked the question instead of someone asking the question and then classifying the answer.

I love repeating this example for those who think we must get weaker as we age. A Tufts University study from some decades ago took 12 older men and put them on resistance training for 12 weeks. Most experienced at least a doubling of the weight they could lift and experienced up to 15-percent increase in muscle mass. Research also seems to show that our metabolism, cholesterol and thermal regulators respond to exercise, as well.

I don’t want to give short shrift to the other factors that help us age healthily. If we are not in a good emotional or intellectual state, we don’t use the foods we eat as well. I have always differentiated between stress and distress: the difference being that stress can happen to you, but distress is what happens when you don’t deal with stress. A family has a big fight and then sits down to eat, bad move. The members are all still angry at each other and this affects their bodies and the digestion of the food.

Another way to define stress compared to distress comes from my earliest research where I took blood samples, dunked peoples’ hands in cold water and then took another blood sample. Key indicators would always be out of whack after the dunking, but presumably because neither my research assistants nor I were berating my subjects for any reason all of them quickly got over the shock. I have always said to deal with stress before eating. That the person, who prays, meditates, writes in his or her journal or even exercises before eating will remain healthy.

Lastly, I must touch on the Environment as the last factor that determines if we will age or if we will be healthy. I used to have fearsome pollen allergies and dreaded going out to play tennis some days. Once I stopped abusing sugar, these allergies cleared up and/or became minor. This allowed me to enjoy being outdoors and reap the benefits of several sets of tennis that included stress reduction, muscle building and all of the other things talked about here.

Since what a 20-year-old should do to remain healthy are the same things that a 60-year-old should do to fight the bad effects of a poor health regimen, we come full circle back to Diet, Exercise, Stress and the Environment. And then I realized that I am talking about Health as an imperfect synonym for Youth, because none of this will keep your hair from turning gray. I use hair color for that.