Healthspanlife - the Official Life! Blog

Nutrition is becoming increasingly costly as world population mushrooms, and worse, as oil-burning industries immorally pay more  (and governments thus get more in taxes) for plant oil as fuel  than farmers can get for producing food. The hungry poor majority is irrelevant, despite the fact that there has been superabundance of natural  and environmetally friendly power available forever,  and harnessable  by relatively simple technology (which Industry and governments have criminally  suppressed) for decades.

Fish oil omega3 - eicosapentanoic acid EPA and docosahexanoic acid DHA - seems to be the most valuable single nutrition supplement we have, apparently almost halving all major diseases  (and mortality) from brain and immune dysfunction in infants and children to  all the major common degenerative diseases of aging, from vascular and arthritic to immune and mental.

Plant oils have indispensable benefits.  But as people have migrated away from the seaside and fishing, and fish has become scarce so that it is no longer a staple for the poor or as chickenfeed, it is reported that EPA/DHA intake has fallen below 100mg/week in USA. And the more omega6 we eat, and the longer we live, the less EPA+DHA  our metabolism  can apparently make.

So as diet has improved among the better-off on the Food-Pyramid-recommended higher cereal and nut intake, and livestock has been shifted from pasture-fed (at least some omega3) to grain-fed (high omega6), it is estimated that the historical 6:1 ratio of dietary omega6:omega3 in western diet has actually risen adversely to 20:1.

By contrast, historically those who lived as fisher people reputedly had/have the least chronic aging diseases, and the lowest diet omega6:omega3 ratio, reputedly 1:1.

Oils- including  GLA gamma-linoleic acid and ALA alphalinoleic and linolenic acid- are enormously beneficial in humans, especially for immune modulation to steer between hyper immunity - allergy and rheumatic disease- and hypo-immunity - infections and cancer.

But if one eats a prudent Mediterranean-type diet and ensures at least 3gm fish oil i.e. close to a gram of EPA+DHA a day, is it wise or unwise to again increase the already high omega6 excess by encouraging omega6 supplements as in patent products e.g. Effamol?

Most of us older generation were brought up on a spoon of cod liver oil - Scotts Emulsion a day. This custom seems to have fallen into abeyance.

Now it is hard to tell whether this fact - fish oil deficiency - or junk food, or global pollution, or hours of television a day, or the abolition of discipline and obligatory physical exercise at most schools, has contributed more to apparent fall in learning and behaviour achievements in children, and increase in depression, diabetes, overweight, osteoporosis, anxiety, vascular, malignant, inflammatory  and dementing diseases.

There is no evidence that patent mixed fish-plus-plant oils do better than fish oil alone in the indisputable improvement in ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity-disorder in children.

and 7 years since they postulated that statin benefit might be negated long-term by adverse  non- CVD mortality at CVD risk below 1.3%pa.

It is almost 40 years since as a junior medical registrar I was first advised to take lipid-lowering drugs (clofibrate- just a few years before the cancer link came out),

and  have since then been advised  to take statins .

I have never done so  (for my familial mild-moderate type 2b  lipidemia),  because the evidence has never justified such experimental and long-term unproven synthetics (as with modern antidiabetic and anti-osteoporotic wannabe money spinners) in search of $billions for the western Drug Corporations and their investors and lobbyists.  

   Lately,  despite the massive statin trials, the last  statin  metanalysis (2003 from University Slovenia) again failed to show any reduction in non-CVD cardiovascular  disease mortality;

and since CVD is the major cause of death and disability  ONLY in those who already have such disease, statins remain indicated only in secondary prevention -as was shown in the last two major trials published, in 2002 ( ALLHAT-LLT  and WESCOPS), now confirmed in the Japanese MEGA study  (2006) of low dose statin, which (in primary prevention in a slim population)  showed similar barely significant 1/3 CVD mortality benefit- significant reduction only in myocardial infarction -  but no significant other  cardiovascular or non-vascular benefit even after a mean of 5.3years, 41 000 patient-years.   

 Last month  Theo Jacobson from Emory University in Atlanta GA  commented that myalgia is the leading reason why patients abandon statins. 

 In 2000 he already questioned the marketing hype for statins  that “the lower the cholesterol level is driven, the better” . 

The growing scandal is the increasing marketing  pressure  by Big Pharma lobbyists (including  some Regulator  staff) to promote prescription and even over-the-counter use of statins to achieve ever-lower low-density lipoprotein levels even in the absence of any vascular disease or CVD risks- including the farcical inclusion of statin in a PolyPill (led by Ward and Law and the BMJ in  UK). .

 Last year Kilmer McCully himself  (the father of the homocysteine hypothesis in CVD 1969) points out that the dramatic fall in CVD mortality  since  it’s USA peak in 1955 correlates well with voluntary and mandatory fortification with B6, B9 and B12 (let alone niacin) .

We may also note that  falling  premature CVD mortality coincides with

• the increasing use of metformin the past decades  (which lowers all-cause morbidity and mortality, and new diabetes, by 1/3,  and overweight by about 8%); for both treatment and prevention of type 2 diabetes, overweight, lipidemia and polycystic ovary syndrome.;
• and with increasing use of appropriate sex hormone replacement for aging men and women (which lowers all-cause morbidity and mortality by 1/3); .
•  and with targeting of lower blood pressure levels even in the elderly hypertensives since the SHEP trial (1985).   
•  and with growing intake of supplementary fish oil ((which lowers all-cause morbidity and mortality by  almost 1/2);  
•   and  of other insulin sensitizer- Nitrric oxide - antioxidant -metabolic promoters  (like vitamins A,  B1, B3,B7, C, D, E, K, calmag, zinc, chromium and other trace elements), and the dozens of our other  crucial  biologicals that decline with aging and illness, (like coQ10, n-acetyl cysteine, arginine, carnitine, carnosine, ribose, chondroglucosamine, lipoic acid, taurine, bioflavinoid, thyroid, melatonin  etc).

And while statins have legion adverse effect from insidious fatigue to myositis and hepatorenal impairment; dermatitis, depression; reducing steroid levels and virility; and lately  producing even lung damage, (unlike the natural supplements listed  that are the best drugs),  they have never been shown to have the slightest benefit on non-CVD pathology, from overweight and insulin resistance - diabetes  to arthritis. Manufacturers and lobbyists have studiously avoided head-on trial comparison with  the natural CVD preventatives  listed above which simutaneously address both the underlying metabolic cause of hypercholesterolemia (insulin resistance and atheroma) and all the other major common degenerative diseases of aging. So the direct highpressure marketing od statins to the public  - without prescription - for other than severe resistant hypercholesterolemia is thus dangerous massive corporate fraud.

So there is every reason why statin use should be severely limited to only  high-risk CVD cases i.e. those with  dangerous homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia resistant to all other  interventions.

see for references:

(more…)

It’s tragicomedy that the BBC – the quintessential British spokespersona – laments NHS woes: * UK c.diff deaths ‘rising sharply’ * “The equivalent of one person an hour dies in hospital from clostridium difficile, figures suggest.”

And yet Authorities there and mostwhere are still in denial about enforcing simple safe low-cost multi-system prevention – in this instance to keep people out of bed and hospital, off antibiotics.
Authorities- regulators, politicians, the Tax Man – benefit as hugely from disease as do their fairy godmother the Disease Industry- the Drug conglomerates and their researchers and lobbyists, private hospitals, medical schemes - that pay them handsomely and creates myriad factories and jobs.

So because it is not profitable, Prevention Does Not Pay, no matter that it adds decades to health:

*There is no move to ban smoking, to make it (and sale, and allowance thereof) a criminal offence.

*No move to immediately jail drunken drivers for a long time, and on second offence permanently confiscate their driving licence and ban them permanently from current and future public office and public vehicle driving, be they judges or janitors, cabinet ministers or cabbies.

*The banning of deadly polluting coal-and oil-powered vehicles and major electricity sources has been blocked for decades by the endlessly greedy and ruthless oil-based industry magnates, despite the fact that these finite energy sources are desperately needed for other purposes. Now the world faces immediate famine because the oil-based transport-and energy behemoths (who have blocked investment in natural – solar - energy for decades) are paying bigger dollars for crop and marine resources as energy supplies than most consumers can afford to pay for these finite resources as food.

*No official move to acknowledge that the best drugs for both prevention and chronic treatment are the long-proven natural low-cost vigorous safe daily doses of a few score appropriate micronutrient supplements - vitamins (~15), minerals(~10) and biologicals (human and other species’) that are increasingly inadequate in the food chain in longer-lived increasingly overweight stressed humans facing worsening man-made epidemics and environmental disaster.

*No serious move yet by the US FDA- the chief protector of the new drugs industry of the west -English- Europe- Japan – (against the interests of consumers) to enforce integrity, insist that no chronic designer drugs for the chronic major common degenerative diseases be released for general use until they have been proven both at least as safe and effective as those already existing and effective, in major randomised controlled trials of a mean of at least 8years, head to head against both older designer drugs, and long-proven natural drugs, for similar purpose, in those diseases.

*The past decade alone has seen condemnation of myriad unproven unnecessary and risky released drugs –
on Wikipedia alone at least a dozen - eg Propulsid; cerivastatin; Vioxx; pemoline; benzbromarone; torcetrapib; and the discrediting of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs as no better - and potentially more hazardous than- appropriate cortisone and micronutrient use, and
newer designer antidepressants and anticlotting agents as less safe and effective than appropriately used older ones;

*the unnecessary anti-osteoporosis bisphosphonates that are increasingly associated with the very long-bone fractures they are supposed to prevent;

*and most especially the wannabe oral anti-diabetic anti-atheroma and anti-obesity drugs – statins, rimonabant, glitazones, meglitanides and sulphonylureas - as inferior to and less safe than metformin, the 85year old plant extract which is the only designer drug ever proven as invaluable panacea in a 20year RCT, tested against sulphonylureas, but not against all other modern designer drugs which (as in more recent studies) have never been shown to meaningfully reduce all-cause morbidity and mortality as does metformin.

The until-recent FDA haste to licence new drugs after scanty trials was reminiscent of the criminal conspiracy between the FDA and industry that licenced the already contested diethylstilbestrol Chicago trial of 1950- and kept that drug on the market another 25years after it was discredited. And it was in stark contrast to the FDA (to protect USA drug companies) blocking drugs already in highly effective use elsewhere for decades, like lithium carbonate, metformin and betablockers.

Since no drug corporations promote the out-of-patent old and proven agents, authorities cannot afford to promote truth - that the only remedies for chronic prevention that lower all-cause disease and mortality by between a third and a half - overweight, obesity, diabetes, cancer, hypertension, arthritis, osteoporosis fractures, vascular disease, acute infections, depression, dementia - are:

-fish oil a few grams a day- which also drastically lowers behavioural and learning disorders;
-a lowcost simple blend of a few score other proven natural micronutrients - the fifteen vitamins, ten minerals and the human / other species’ biologicals including herbs;
-metformin titrated to tolerance about 2.5gms a day, for both prevention and treatment of overweight, diabetes type 2 and most major chronic degenerative diseases; &
-appropriate conservative balanced sex hormone replacement in most older men and women, as proven in the landmark Womens’ Health Initiative and Finnish Oulu randomised controlled trials, and numerous other studies in major centres in North America, UK, Europe, Australia and South Africa, since 1953.

It is a tenet of endocrinology for the past 60 years that all major hormone deficiencies should be replaced permanently and physiologically with the same human hormones, yet there are still those, even medical specialists, who would deny this to those most in need – from middle age onwards, especially women. At least some of these specialists have the honesty to disclose that they are well paid by drug compnies to be advocates and trialists for the wannabe designer drugs to supplant the old.

Recognition of appropriate measured low cost HRT and the other proven listed supplements for all aging people would of course rob the drug industry of perhaps 90% of it’s market for it’s wannabe designer substitutes that the FDA allows to be marketed prematurely until enough people die of their complications or shortcomings.

In fact, while no study shows that any modern drug for common chronic degenerative disease prevention does any overall - mutidisease- good, reduces all-cause mortality, those who promote and practice such published truth – that the old is better - are threatened with prosecution.

HIV/AIDS/TB SUPPORTIVE NUTRITION SUPPLEMENTS:

ACTIVE INFECTION eg AIDS, TB; and CANCER
are often a problem of defective NUTRITION among many important contributing factors.

Both infection; cancer; and chronic anti-infection/ anti-cancer drugs
promote poor nutrition, loss of other infection protection, and loss of muscle and bone.

Those with high risks of infections or cancer, and
those on anti-infection/ anticancer therapy, and
those in whom such therapy has failed,

should be offered both counselling;
measurement of lean mass, fat mass; and
risk of osteoporosis bone fracture; and
various regimes of complementary cancer/ infection NUTRITIONAL support.

Both with aging, illness, therapy, and with increasingly poorer food supplies, rising costs and pollution, the best diets cannot supply anywhere near optimal micronutrients - the effective doses of all ~15 vitamins, ~10 minerals, and the scores of biologicals- the dozens our own bodies make but run out of (including hormones), those from other species eg fish oil, glucosamine, and herbs.

For an appointment to have your body composition and bone fracture risk measured,
and to discuss and view the nutrition supports available with a relevant supplement counsellor,
make an appointment in Cape Town by phoning 021 6831465
or Bryanston Gauteng by phoning 011 4633604 during shop hours;
then discuss the results and options with your doctors.

In other countries, discuss them with your local Health Shops or Pharmacies.

Why is there surprise at the new 4year international study (in NEJM of 3 April 2008 http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/358/14/1431 ) that further 26% lowering of average “bad” low density cholesterol LDLC - level (and CRP c-reactive protein) by adding a new designer drug for 2 years to a statin alone makes no further difference to vascular or all-cause outcome? In fact in even this young population there were 46% more cardiovascular CVD events on the statin - ezetimibe combination (10/357 = 1.4%pa) than on simvastatin alone (7/363 = 0.96%pa).

At baseline the subjects at a mean age of 46+- 10yrs (half men) were an average of about 10kg overweight; 28% smoked, only 16.4% were already hypertensive, but 80% already on statins (they had to have had a total cholesterol TC of >5.43mmol/L off lipid-improving drugs – their mean TC off drugs was 10.4mmol). Other than the 5% who had already had heart attack, and perhaps the 2% who were diabetic, why were these average mostly well young people targeted for further cholesterol lowering, when their mean TC was already down to 6.9mmol/L on statin (vs 5.7 on the twin drugs) with HDL 1.2 ? when all they needed to do was lose a few kg fat by sensible eating and exercise, stop smoking and take some safe fat-reducing anti- atheroma antioxidant and insulin-sensitising supplements including fish oil? Why should lowering of blood markers already within the average range give any benefit as opposed to doing harm? According to Sijbrands (BMJ 2001) from Erasmus University http://www.bibalex.org/Supercourse/lecture/lec3191/001.htm, such a cohort of people untreated has a standardized mortality ratio of 1.88- but in this new 2008 Enhance paper, their mortality rate on statin alone was already so low (CVD mortality 0.1%pa) that all-cause mortality was not even mentioned.

So it should be asked why such a trial was undertaken, when there has never been any evidence that drug lowering of mild to moderate TC (ie below 8mmol/L) or LDLC lowers non-CVD morbidity and mortality? – and when there are legion proven supplements that lower morbidity and mortality ? The evidence against cholesterol lowering in those without high CVD risk was already shown over a decade ago by the Sheffield team (Haq 1995), who have consistently stressed that “cholesterol measurement by itself is not a good way to identify those with high coronary risk”, and that there is little advantage (except for anti-cholesterol practitioners and laboratories) in lowering average cholesterol levels unless CVD risk is at least 2% if not 3% a year. The CVD risk of this Enhance trial cohort on statin was only 1% a year.

No statin trial has ever shown that these lipid-lowering drugs drugs lower or even address non-vascular disease or mortality; whereas (except in those at the highest cardiovascular risk) nonvascular degenerative disease is by far the bigger burden in later years. Dr James le Fanu summarised the evidence against universal cholesterol-lowering in mild-to-moderate lipidemia already in The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (Abacus UK 1999).

Since according to the lipid-lowering industry, most of us overweight older folk naturally have risky lipid levels to be targeted by zealous drug marketers and prescribers, some British doctors who know better have actually invested heavily in promoting (without evidence of global benefit :risk) a farcial polypill including a statin, an antihypertensive and aspirin for all. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7404/1419

It is common cause that after 30 years of widespread use, statins do nothing for overweight, insulin resistance, hyperglycemia, other CVD factors, nor for other major degenerative diseases of overweight and aging - infection, osteoporosis, cancer, arthritis, sexual dysfunction - and thus do nothing to lower non-vascular morbidity and mortality. But statins do cause widespread insidious fatigue, myalgia, depression, impotence; and now lung and tendon rupture complications, let alone hepatorenal problems- are being increasingly reported.

By contrast, it is common cause from both trials and observational studies for >30years that APPROPRIATE
1) metformin for overweight/ lipidemia; 2) fish oil; 3) combined hormone replacement; and 4) blend of the other proven >60 supplements (~15 vitamins, ~10 minerals, and the >35 biologicals including herbs), each reduce all-cause morbidity and mortality by one-third to half. Together, the combination is impressively effective in daily practice in the most desperately ill patients already on maximum conventional prescription modern drugs for osteoporosis, arthritis, CVD, type 2 diabetes on insulin with crippling neuropathy etc.

Such is the insidious influence of the global drug industry via Regulators (Elaine Feuer Innocent Casualties: The Fda’s War Against Humanity USA 1996), that we physicians are threatened with prosecution by our own medical defence advisor if we do fair comparative marketing, promote that appropriate well-proven old drugs- the natural micronutrients which drug companies prudently refuse to sponsor to be tested against modern patented prescription drugs - are better for both prevention and treatment of chronic degenerative diseases of aging than the imitator modern wannabe patentable designer drugs that attempt to mimic the original natural drugs- vitamins, minerals, biologicals - evolved and proven over millennia.

We are even threatened with prosecution for using metformin for prevention of diabetes and lipidemia, when it is the only patent drug that has ever been tested in a 20year RCT (Holman ea the UKPDS 1998), and proven to halve all-cause mortality over 5 years in type 2 diabetics, and it halves the incidence of new diabetes in overweight people with metabolic syndrome risks; whereas in trials, sulphonylureas - like all other modern patent designer drugs - had no benefit on all-cause mortality or on decreasing new diabetes incidence in older adults.

Ndb
Refs:

Haq IU, Jackson PR, Ramsay LE ea Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Sheffield, UK Sheffield risk and treatment table for cholesterol lowering for primary prevention of coronary heart disease. Lancet. 1995;346:1467-71 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7490996 and Prediction of coronary risk for primary prevention of coronary heart disease: a comparison of methods QJM. 1999 ;92:379-85. http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/92/7/379

J.P. Kastelein ea, for the ENHANCE Investigators http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/NEJMoa0800742 NEJM 3 Feb 2008: 358:1431-1443 Simvastatin with or without Ezetimibe in Familial Hypercholesterolemia

In the “simple” love story Away From Her (2006), Julie Christie, as an avid cross-country snow skier, portrays well the relentless progression from mild to moderate Alzheimer’s Disease, and perhaps more subtly, the perils of lost recent memory but retained old tapes - the spectre of paranoia against the caring loved ones, fertile ground for novelists, and unscrupulous financial and legal advisors.

It is a pity the film made no reference to the uselessness of modern ie commercial anti-dementia drugs, and the major preventative benefit - 50% to >80% reduction in new cases - of numerous natural supplements.

Like vascular disease and osteoporotic fractures, dementia including from injury, stroke, toxins and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is major public health concern in all countries- dementia about 1% a year after age 75yrs in Framingham (80% were from AD)- but 100% disabling for the remained of life. Wikipedia gives the stats of these “diseases strongly associated with age as : dementia 1% of those aged 60-65, 6% of those aged 75-79, and 45% of those aged 95 or older suffer from the syndrome. Osteoporosis increases the risk of hip fracture fivefold to about 50% in the elderly (>64yrs), and mortality following a hip fracture is between 20% and 35% within one year in patients aged ~82 years, of which 80% were women-“ – with up to 80% of survivors remaining disabled to some degree. Like dementia and osteoporosis, “By the time that heart problems are detected, the underlying atherosclerosis is usually quite advanced, having progressed for decades” Each year, heart disease kills more Americans than cancer.[1] Vascular diseases alone cause half of all “natural” premature deaths; up to the year 2005, it was the number one cause of death and disability in the United States and most European countries” . ..

Not unexpectedly in people who realize they are losing their minds, depression and anxiety are major components – as the film so poignantly shows, in both the patients and their loved ones.
Unlike hip fracture, stroke or heart attack which without prevention is fatal in 1/5 to 1/3 - and crippling in up to 80% - waiting till dementia starts is uniformly disabling and fatal in about 7 years- whereas healthy people have a mean life expectation of close to 90years. No prescription drugs slow AD by more than a few weeks even in mild cases. But in very mild AD fish oil slows the disease over 6 months.

Overweight and thus diabetes, vascular disease and cancer, is becoming the norm. The pandemic of saccharine diseases- (including overweight- hypertension - insulin resistance- diabetes - vascular disease) and Alzheimers are strongly linked.

PREVENTION:
Hypogonadism hormones: in the Cache County Study (Zandi ea), only those who started young ie continued menopause hormone therapy HT for decades had 95% less AD than non-users or recent users. This was mirrored in the Women’s Health Initiative and the Oulu trial, in which HT started soon after menopause for a mean of 5-10 years reduced all major disease including memory problems (and deaths) by about 1/3 or more.

Smoking , alcoholism, infections, toxins and violence aside, it is self-evident that micronutrient deficiencies including hypogonadism plays a dominant role in the intimately intertwined vascular disease, dementia (and fractures) , since compared to men, women suffer these far more and younger- they have disturbance of natural sex hormone balance increasingly younger (from juvenile obesity, synthetic hormone contraception, lower parity, sterilization, hysterectomy, cancer therapy, and then menopause and with fattening grossly un-physiological postmenopausal commercial oral sexhormone xenotherapy).
Such unnatural oral mega/xenohormone) therapy is not advocated in androgen-deficient men- who are restored systemically to physiological sexhormone blood levels - or in any other branch of endocrinology. Why women are thus maltreated is a symptom of sick society, of their inferior and subjugate status throughout history, but especially their passive exploitation by the neocapitalist $trillion Drug and Disease Industry cartel that controls the FDA, lobbyist- legislators- and and the public the past 50 years (Elaine Feuer: Innocent Casualties : The FDA’s War Against Humanity: USA 1997).
At least the gender playing field is now level, with balanced physiological HRT (testosterone and estradiol) also freely available to women as lowcost fortnightly subcutaneous self-injection of testosterone-estradiol esters;
or designer monthly subcutaneous testosterone undecanoate plus estradiol valerate, or 6monthly combined implants, or daily combined creams.
If the FDA tries to deny this to women, it is for the people to exercise their constitutional rights to equal, long (evolution) -proven and natural replacement, beyond the control of the patent drug industry.

So dementia, vascular and fracturing disease - and risky, mostly futile chronic patent prescription drugs- are not inevitable, even with the risky genes:
Regular omega3 fish oil reduces the adverse abeta and tau deposits; a fatty fish meal about 3 times a week – a mean fish omega3 intake about 200mg/day- halves dementia and sudden death. Regular plant oil (omega6) blocks benefit; but without fish oil, omega6 doubles the dementia risk. Daily fruit and veg reduced it by 30%. Enough fish oil is by far the most important human micronutrient – it roughly halves all chronic major aging diseases and premature deaths.

Metformin (C4H11N5 derived in 1922 from the [galega officinalis) plant guanide base formula C6H10N3]), is the only enduring chronic preventative patent drug ever designed: in the only long-term randomized controlled trial RCT ever, the 20 year UKPDS prospective diabetes study (1998), insulin and the designer sulphonylureas had no overall benefit on survival, but metformin reduced all-cause major disease and mortality (ie vascular, cancer, infectious) by a third; and in the Canadian Healthcare study, mortality was halved in type 2 ie older diabetics who used metformin. In the 3.5year diabetes prevention trials, in USA and China, it roughly halved the incidence of new diabetes. Both overweight, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes are strongly related to risk of memory impairment.

Ginkgo biloba has no effect on insulin resistance/sensitivity; but
ginkgo has important benefits on rheology, lipids, circulation and memory - which are critical in (pre)diabetics;;
ginkgo prolongs the half-life of metformin in vivo ie enhances the ant-idiabetic effect p<0.05, thus reduces the needed effective dose of metformin or enhances metformin’s benefit in resistant cases.

The issue is indeed that most non-starving adults are prone to both overweight diseases, diabetes, glycation and vascular memory deficits- ie metformin/galega and ginkgo are equally important natural drugs, with some relevant synergy.

Many other natural drugs - food supplements- give significant protection against insulin resistance and thus fattening, diabetes, hypertension, lipidemia, blindness, vascular disease, and memory loss, from all the vitamins , magnesium zinc and chromium, to our endogenous biologicals carnitine, carnosine, DMAE, lipoic acid, cysteine, 5HTP, GABA, MSM, proline, phosphatidylserine/choline, arginine, ribose and CoQ10; to >1000 plants like cinnamon, curcumin, huperzine A, Melissa, fenugreek, garlic, ginseng, gymnema, Salvia, stevia, lo han guo, rosemary, Yi-Gan San and BDW (Ba Wei Di Huang Wan).

In a 2005 report (Bragin ea) , such combination in mild dementia-depression cases actually improved cognition by up to 50%.

Combining fish oil, appropriate HRT, and a mix of 50 other freely available supplements offers at least 50% reduction in all major common chronic degenerative diseases and premature deaths- no modern chronic patent drug does so. Health care providers who fail to recommend such evidence-based comprehensive natural prevention should be prosecuted.

References available on request from doctor@healthspanlife.com; from whom personal consultation and supplements may also be obtained..

The Frisinas’ work (Univ Rochester) showing that estrogen protects but progestin worsens hearing is news, brought to our attention by Dr Joe Mercola’s email. Another nail in the coffin of the synthetic progestins.

The Frisinas stress that age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) is the number one communication disorder, and it is one of the top three chronic medical conditions of elderly persons.

Invariable simultaneous age-related hearing and sight loss associate with massive global impairment and early mortality.

Does human progesterone, and the aldosterone mimic Florinef have adverse or protective effect on hearing? Considering that all studies show largely opposite none-gyne effects of human vs synthetic progestins, androgens and estrogens, such discordance seems unlikely.

These questions have huge implications for the better-off, since tens of millions are using progestins/ progesterone (for both contraception and HT) without objective evidence of need or benefit: risk; and millions are using prednisone (or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories) where androgen +- cortisone/ aldosterone might be much better.

Download the entire article here:

Preserving sight, sound and the senses.

If you are interested in the sources for this document, please contact me on doctor@healthspanlife.co.za.