Jonny Bowden's Blog

 

One of the hazards of seeing health information online is that we frequently encounter buzzwords of questionable use. Some of these terms are frankly dumb, ultimately useless, and will be deservedly forgotten by the next news cycle. But some of them—like cardiometabolic— are actually worth paying attention to. The term cardiometabolic is usually used as a descriptor, as in “cardiometabolic health” or “cardiometabolic disease”. In fact, cardiometabolic health has now become a lot more than a buzz term. It’s an important (and attainable) goal for many people seeking optimal health and longevity. Let me explain. “Cardiometabolic” refers to a cluster of conditions (like high blood pressure) that aren’t by themselves diseases but are the underlying conditions which frequently lead to serious illness. None of these conditions are “good” things to have, but when several of them are clustered together in the same person, it becomes, as they say, a “thing”, and that person is now said to have Cardiometabolic Syndrome (CMS). Cardiometabolic Syndrome is a “thing” CMS used to be called Metabolic Syndrome and is also known as pre-diabetes. (They’re exactly the same thing.) The cluster of conditions was first named “Syndrome X” back in the 80’s by Gerald Reaven, MD,  the Stanford researcher who first discovered their importance. “Syndrome X”, eventually morphed into Metabolic Syndrome, and is now known as Cardiometabolic Syndrome. Both the Endocrine Society and the World Health Organization now officially recognize CMS as a disease entity, and according to all the latest research, it is a global health threat of staggering proportions. So what are the five conditions that define cardiometabolic syndrome?

High blood pressureAbdominal obesity (waist higher than 35 for women, 40 for men)High fasting blood sugarLow HDL cholesterolInsulin resistance*

*(Insulin resistance is so central to this discussion that I’ll give it its own newsletter soon. I think it’s the metabolic plague of the 21st century and one of the most important and overlooked risk factors for all kinds of conditions you definitely don’t want to have.) And while it isn’t part of the official list of the five bad guys, a strong argument could be made for including a sixth villain: High triglycerides. (I’ll talk about that in a future blog. I’m convinced it’s just as important as the other five.) If you have any (or several, or all) of these conditions, you need to pay attention. And if you don’t know if you have one or more of these, you need to find out. (I’ll be talking more about how to do that in future blogs). For now, get out your most recent blood test take a look at the following numbers, and see if they are “in range”:

Fasting blood sugar (glucose)TriglyceridesHDL cholesterolFasting insulin (if you were lucky enough to have found a doctor wise enough to order that test for you).

Then measure your waistline. If it’s over 35” (for a woman) or over 40” (for a man) you meet the technical criteria for the fifth condition that defines CMS– abdominal obesity.

In future blogs, we’ll be talking about what each of these metrics tells us, how to make sense of that information, and—most important—what you can do to improve any of the numbers you’re not happy with.

The good news is that—with the possible exception of HDL—all of them can be significantly improved with lifestyle redirection.

Spoiler alert: The big guns in your arsenal are food, supplements, sleep, sun, and stress-reduction!

More to come!

Stay healthy,

jb

This time of year, families with school-age kids want enough energy to perform well through the day, and then get a good night’s sleep. That’s not always easy. Between work, school, after-school activities and everything else that goes into running your household, you may feel like you’re dragging.

Sleep and energy are more impacted by what we do or don’t do, rather than by any supplements we may take. If you’re stressed all the time, you’ve got a million things going on and you’re eating a lot of sugar, you’re probably not going to sleep well.

The solution is not to take something for sleep. You need to eliminate the things that are interfering with your sleep.

It’s the same with energy. If we’re dragging all the time, something is interfering with our natural energetic state.

I always believe it starts with food.

Concentrate on eating whole foods. Skip the energy drinks. Ditch the high-carb, sugary snacks.

I don’t even like supplements for sleep or energy because they generally just mask the problem. They don’t eliminate the things that are preventing you from sleeping deeply. They don’t help you overcome whatever is preventing you from having a lot of energy when you’re awake.

There’s one exception. And it starts with superfoods for bees to feed on.

There’s a food-based supplement that’s been on my radar recently. It’s honey — but not ordinary honey. In fact, there’s nothing ordinary about this honey I’m recommending. Let me explain.

The story starts when doctors first observed that beekeepers are among the most long-lived professionals on the planet. They figured it must have something to do with the fact they regularly eat honey, and they were right!

We already know honey has some really vital nutrients. Your grandmother recommended honey made from buckwheat for sore throats — she was right, of course. And people spend a lot of money on honey made from the manuka tree.

But manuka and buckwheat aren’t the only things bees can feast on. In addition to manuka and buckwheat, there are many wonderful medicinal properties in the roots, stems, leaves, fruits and barks of the herbs. For example, hops. Sure, they’re used to make beer. They also contain substances that help us deal with anxiety and insomnia. Groats, hibiscus, sage … these all have wonderful medicinal properties.

But how do you get bees to eat them? Some of them are in forms that aren’t even edible by people, including the stems and bark of specific plants!

Israeli researchers have developed a high-tech process that does just that! They create special extracts from an incredible array of herbs and botanicals that have huge medicinal values. Then they deliver these extracts right to the hive, and the bees eat it up! It’s a superfood for the bees.

These bees use the extract to produce a nutrient-dense honey-like substance that is unlike anything else on the planet. But it’s actually a medicinal food. It’s like a supplement that comes in food form.

You can get these honeys, called MELs, on Amazon. They make different varieties for immune support, digestion and many other health benefits. Two that I love most are:

RelaxMEL: It’s produced using botanicals that affect anxiety, relaxation and insomnia; andEnergyMEL: It’s produced using botanicals associated with more energy, vitality and cognitive focus.

I feel very confident about recommending these to parents for their kids and themselves. They contain no GMOs. There’s nothing artificial in them. And because of the very small dosage amounts, they aren’t going to do much to your blood sugar.

You can’t go wrong doing this for your kids and yourselves. Just make sure you’re also eating whole foods, getting plenty of sunshine, exercising and reducing stress. Also, do the right stuff at bedtime such as keeping the room temperature about 68 degrees, turning off the TV and not looking at your phone.

When you set yourself up for a good night’s sleep, that also sets you up for a day filled with energy.

 

It’s hard to believe there are foods we can’t get here in the U.S. But there are. An example is the incredible soursop juice so abundant in tropical places like Jamaica. Not only can’t we get the juice – believe me, I tried – but we can’t even get the fruit it comes from.

That fruit is called graviola, a most unusual fruit that can grow up to an impressive 14 pounds.
Unless you’ve traveled to Central and South America or Jamaica, you’ve probably never heard of it. We can’t grow it here – the conditions just aren’t ideal – and it doesn’t survive transport very well.

But pay attention – because you’re going to start seeing it as an ingredient. And whether it’s in tea, super infused coffee bars that taste like premium chocolate, or super premium skin care products, there are wonderful ways to get graviola’s benefits.

I was recently a guest on KATU, an ABC-TV affiliate in Portland, Oregon. Because I’m the author of “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” and because my partner Michelle and I travel to the tropics a lot, they wanted me to talk about superfoods in the tropics from guava to graviola.

If you’ve ever been to the tropics, there’s one standout feature of the people who live there that you’ve probably noticed – their skin. I’m not talking about any one race here – our “second home” is St. Martin, which has people from 81 different nationalities. Yet, “Caribbean Skin” is a real thing, which makes me wonder, “What exactly do these people do to keep their skin looking so clean, fresh and young, even though they’re exposed to more sun than we are?”

Well one thing they do is eat a lot of remarkably nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables (hence my segment on KATU “from Guava to graviola!”.)

But here’s the thing: they just eat these plants. They also make tea out of the leaves. They make skin creams out of the fruit. These super-plants of the Caribbean provide food, they provide medicine, and they even provide skin care. Folks there consider graviola to be a medicinal plant.

Which makes sense. Graviola is loaded with vitamin C and a host of other nutrients such as quercetin, tangeretin and luteolin, all of which function as antioxidants. In fact, quercetin has long been one of my favorite dietary supplements for its anti-inflammatory properties as well as its antibacterial ones.

So why don’t we see graviola in our local Whole Foods?

Well, frankly, because it’s a finicky, delicate plant and takes very careful handling to preserve its nutritional wealth. You have to really know what you’re doing to grow graviola in the right way, under the right conditions, and to process it carefully to preserve its nutritional bounty.

One company doing it right is Agravitae. They have developed patented processes to ensure their Graviola Tea, super premium skin care products (which I adore!) and Super Infused Bars (really yummy!) maintain the rich supply of nutrients found naturally in graviola fruit.

Just because we don’t have graviola in our supermarkets doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy its benefits.

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

My Jewish father was an old country lawyer who believed in deeply in fairness and justice for all living people, so I was curious what he thought about the Nazis.

It was spring of 1977, and the American Nazi Party had announced their intention to hold a July 4th rally in the town of Stokie, a predominantly Jewish community in Indiana. Not surprisingly, the town of Stokie had sought an injunction to ban the rally, and the Nazis had, ironically, sought the help of the American Civil Liberties Union to fight the injunction.

The subject at the family dinner table was this: Should the American Civil Liberties Union protect the free-speech rights of Nazis?

Remember, we’re of Jewish heritage. So it’s hard to look at the philosophical issues involved objectively because there’s so much emotion attached to the subject matter. Nonetheless, I’ll never forget my father’s response:

“They have to defend them”, he said of the ACLU’s decision to fight the ban on behalf of the Nazi Party. “Free speech isn’t just for people you agree with.”

It isn’t. Free speech is about vigorously defending the rights of people with whom you disagree.

“Censorship almost always creates more damage than whatever’s being censored would’ve caused”, my father told me.

Right now, the country is bitterly and tragically divided over the challenges associated with COVID. I want to suggest that we’re facing a bigger challenge– equally terrifying, but one on which we can and should be united: the quietly emerging challenges to our free speech.

There’s a below-the-radar increase in censorship and “de-platforming” taking place right now, and it’s making disturbing inroads into our first amendment rights.

Exhibit A: Last month, Dr. Joseph Mercola—one of the most influential voices in integrative medicine and the owner of the number one natural health website in the world—felt he had no choice but to remove over 20 years of content from his website, content that I and many other people have found immensely valuable over the past two decades.

Among other things, Mercola was known for exposing his readers to brilliant but renegade thinkers like Kilmer McCully, MD, the professor who was basically de-platformed out of his lab at Harvard for advocating the view that homocysteine was as serious a risk factor for coronary heart disease as cholesterol, a piece of “disinformation” that did not sit well with the establishment. Postscript: McCully was welcomed back to Harvard after about two decades of subsequent research essentially proved he was right all along.(1)

But I digress.

Mercola explained why he’s taking down his site in a disturbing video on YouTube(2), the crux of which is that he could no longer endure the backlash (some might say persecution) he was enduring for publishing information that questioned conventional narratives on nutrition and health—information that has been come to be branded “disinformation”. By backlash, I’m talking threats on his life. He believes this is probably due to a New York Times hatchet piece—and I don’t use that term lightly— that labeled him number one on the list of “Top disseminators of disinformation” on health-related issues.

If you’d like an example of the dangerous misinformation that brought death threats to members of the Mercola organization, take a look at one of the FDA’s warning letters to Mercola which states that he is illegally selling products—specifically vitamin C, vitamin D and quercetin— intended to “mitigate, prevent, treat, diagnose or cure COVID-19”.(3)

Never mind a recent published paper entitled “Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost Nine of Ten COVID-19 Deaths: Time to Act”(4) or that, according to Medscape, vitamin D deficiency quadruples the death rate from COVID(5). Apparently, the FDA and the NY times have decided that Joe Mercola is guilty of what’s turning out to be the defining sin of the 21st century: Disinformation.

I wonder if that word scares you as much as it does me.

See, I was a kid during the cold war, and one of the things we used to read about was how the Soviet Union would send dissidents to “re-education” camps. They had to be “re-educated” because they were filled with all sorts of subversive ideas (like communism was terrible) and had to be “set straight” and rehabilitated before they could be allowed to re-enter society.

Re-education? Disinformation? It sounds like North Korea to me. The entire concept should be chilling to any American, and I don’t care where you stand on vaccination—or on anything else!

Look, I know there are exceptions to the free speech rule—my father always used to say that free speech doesn’t include the right to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre—but we’re not talking about those one-off cases. We’re talking about something much, much more insidious.

Who Decides What’s Disinformation?

The minute you accept the notion of “disinformation” you automatically buy into the notion that there’s one truth. (In fact, if you google “opposite of disinformation”, the first word that appears is “truth”, followed by “facts”).

Now, you might say, “What’s wrong with that?” But the problem is, facts don’t “speak for themselves”. Facts are impartial, and always have to be interpreted. Otherwise, they’re just numbers without context—they have to be woven into a narrative. And as we all know, it’s possible for intelligent people, acting in good faith, to look at the exact same facts and come up with very different narratives.

As the Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Khaneman has taught us, we rarely if ever make decisions based on facts and data.(6) Our decisions, conclusions and interpretations are subject to cognitive distortions such as confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and availability bias. It’s been well-documented that people see what they expect to see—if you doubt it, look at the results of the classic “invisible gorilla” experiment, which you can actually watch on YouTube.(7)

The fact that there are multiple “readings” of the same data, multiple perspectives and interpretations of facts may be confusing, but is ultimately a good thing. And guess what? I want to be able to hear all those interpretations. And so should you. Be suspicious—and frightened—when the powers that be don’t want you to hear them. When you buy into the notion that there is one clear-cut truth in science, health and medicine, without nuance, shading, or consideration of alternate perspectives—you have to answer a very uncomfortable question:

Who decides what the “truth” is going to be? And… for how long it’s going to be “true”?

I’d like anyone reading this who is familiar with the history of science and has read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (8) to tell me that they think that what we now think is absolutely true about the Coronavirus—or any other health issue, for that matter— is likely to remain “absolutely true” 100 years from now.

Few things in health and medicine pass that test.

Remember, as recently as 50 years ago, we thought it was “absolutely true” that low-fat diets prevented obesity and heart disease. To say otherwise was to be spreading disinformation. You remember how well that worked out.

Cholesterol “disinformation”?

I know this all to be true from personal experience. For the past decade or so, I’ve been making the case that cholesterol does not cause heart disease, that too many people are on statin drugs unnecessarily, that saturated fat does not clog arteries and that our myopic focus on an outdated HDL-LDL lab test is causing us to take our eye off the ball when it comes to doing what we can actually do to prevent heart disease. When cardiologist Steven Sinatra and I originally appeared on the Dr. Oz show, a committee of doctors wrote in saying we should be banned from television. (“Cancel culture” hadn’t come into vogue yet, but that’s what they were asking for!)

When I appeared—with a dozen smart, credentialed people, including professors from places like Harvard Medical School—in a documentary(9) produced by the Australian Broadcasting Company– hosted by a television journalist with a PhD from Columbia Journalism School– that reasonably questioned the conventional wisdom of cholesterol and statin drugs, there was a co-ordinated campaign in Australia to remove the video from YouTube, a campaign which was briefly successful. A PR firm planted headlines in the local papers saying essentially that “31,000 people would die” if they followed the disinformation in the documentary. We were essentially cancelled and de-platformed.

And when Dr. Timothy Noakes—one of the most respected medical researchers and professors in South Africa—began to question the high-carb diet and recommended high-fat for his patients, the powers that be attempted to take his license and deplatform him for going against “standard medical practice” and giving advice that was “unscientific”. This resulted in a four-year trial, thousands of pages of scientific articles entered as evidence, and two international witnesses being flown in, all of which led to Dr. Noakes total vindication and the restoration of his license.(10)

Turns out Dr. Noakes was right all along- and we’d never have known it if he had been silenced.

It doesn’t matter if you agree with me about cholesterol, or if you agree with the people who disagree with me, or if you agree with Dr. Noakes about the benefits of high-fat diets, or with Dr. Mercola about the benefits of vitamin D3, and it doesn’t matter where you stand on vaccinations. The cost of silencing dissident voices is simply greater than whatever damage could be done by people spouting ideas that the establishment does not agree with.

If you don’t object vehemently to the censorship of ideas expressed in writing, speaking and video, you are essentially agreeing to the idea of a Truth Police, because somebody’s got to make the decision on what constitutes disinformation.

Who shall that be? The people who work at YouTube and Facebook? The government? The American Heart Association? The Scientologists? The Anti-Scientologists? The Vegans? The Carnivores? Democrats? Republicans?

I vote for “none of the above”!

The only way to not have to solve the awful Rubik Cube problem of who shall be the “truth Police” is this: eliminate the position. We don’t need truth police. We need to be able to hear all lawful points of view on any subject and we need to start reading up on things and trusting ourselves to make our own judgments.

And, as long as I’m dreaming, wouldn’t it be nice for us to all make our judgments and arrive at our opinions without being so attached to our tribe’s version of the truth? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hold our positions on health matters in a space that allowed us to modify our positions when new data and interpretations present themselves?

OK, I know that’s a fantasy, but it’s how science actually works. Science is the practice of questioning things, constantly– offering alternative hypotheses to accepted “wisdom”, and then testing those new hypotheses. If you don’t hold “conventional wisdom” up to examination, then you’re not doing science, you’re doing propaganda. Questioning is how we grow our knowledge base in the first place.

You can’t do that if you silence the questioners.

“Disinformation?” Bring it on! I want to hear all points of view. I’ll disregard the ones I think are crazy, but I want the opportunity to decide for myself what makes sense and what doesn’t, and I want you to have that same opportunity.

No matter where we stand on other matters, I hope we can stand together for “open borders” in the marketplace of health information.

REFERENCES

• https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/10/magazine/the-fall-and-rise-of-kilmer-mccully.html• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dILSt_EQgNM• https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-criminal-investigations/warning-letters/mercolacom-llc-607133-02182021)• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33260798/• https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/942497 • https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/kahneman-biases-act-like-optical-illusions.html• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo • https://tinyurl.com/r5ekc92v• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY4eTGMe-EY• https://www.dietdoctor.com/professor-noakes-trial).

  

If you were given the instructions to “stock up on food for an emergency”, what’s the first thing you’d think of?

Chances are the first few things on your list – and probably everyone else’s lists as well — come in boxes. Indeed, for some of us, almost everything on our list might come in boxes.

And that’s precisely the problem.

I was recently invited to appear on Portland TV’s Afternoon Live (click pic above to view), a show I frequently appear on in person, but because of the pandemic am now doing “Live from my kitchen!” Host Tra’Renee Chambers asked me for tips on how viewers can get their eating back on track. Since I was limited to just three tips, I didn’t want to give specific food recommendations—rather, I wanted to focus on how to make better decisions in general—specifically about foods, supplements, fat, weight-loss diets, or just about anything related to health and nutrition.

In nutrition—and in life—it’s always good to follow Ronald Reagen’s excellent advice: Trust, but verify. There are a lot of things being “sold” out there that promise us better health, longer hair, more energy, a slimmer waist, and a longer life. Some are great, some are.. well, not-so-great. (I’m being polite.)

Here are three good rules for fine-tuning your channeling your inner “Nutrition Myth-Buster”.

First: Understand that even “trusted” sites may have a mix of good and bad information. Much of the dietary guideline information posted by these major health associations is a mix of outdated information that has since been disproven and advice that is absolutely correct. For example, the advice to stay away from saturated fat and cholesterol is woefully out-of-date, as Dr. Sinatra and I show (with abundant research citations) in our new book, “The Great Cholesterol Myth”. There have been at least a dozen studies in the last decade that have concluded that saturated fat is not a causal factor in heart disease, and we’ve actually known since the 80’s that cholesterol in the diet – for example, from eggs– means nothing. But some conventional advice is right on target, such as the advice to eat a lot of high-fiber nuts, berries, vegetables, and low-sugar fruits.



Second: Check your sources. If you’re reading about a study, follow the link to the study itself, don’t just take the reporter’s word for it. (And if there’s no link to the actual “study”, ask yourself, why not?) And when you find the study—if it indeed exists– Ask yourself these questions: Who did the study? Was it done at a major university? Were any of the researchers compensated by companies that might stand to gain from the research? (This usually has to be mentioned in the “disclosures” section.)

In other words, was the study done by someone who is selling the very product they are recommending? That’s not necessarily a bad thing—a company selling green tea may fund a study that looks for health benefits–  but you may want to look for confirming studies conducted by third-parties. And remember that research shows that when a company or industry is funding a study, they are five times more likely than chance to get the positive results they hope to get.

Third: Don’t get fixated on one ingredient or product, thinking it’s going to cause or solve all your health problems. I’ll use saturated fat again as an example. I frequently talk about how important it is to get an ‘oil change’–  change your cooking oils from pro-inflammatory soybean, canola, safflower, and sunflower and change over to the healthier, non-inflammatory ones like olive oil, butter, ghee, or plant-based Malaysian palm oil. (And if you’re thinking about all the internet chatter about how “bad” palm oil is for the environment, consider that Malaysia is one of the most environmentally conscious countries in the world, they do not harm animal habitats, they protect 50% of their forests, and their palm oil is very sustainable).

Moral of the story: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

That doesn’t mean everything you read is false or exaggerated or misrepresented.

But it does mean we need to be better consumers of information.

Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

Ten years ago, cardiologist Steven Sinatra, M.D., and I came together to write a book called The Great Cholesterol Myth, which, as you can imagine, was a pretty controversial name for a book. It landed us on the Dr. Oz show where I said, “Trying to reduce the risk of heart disease by lowering your LDL cholesterol is like trying to reduce the calories on your whopper by taking off the lettuce.”

That statement is even truer today than it was a decade ago.

A lot has changed in the way conventional medicine views cholesterol and heart disease since 2010. We now have technology that allows us to clearly identify at least 13 different subtypes of cholesterol, many of which behave in unique ways in the body. Being able to measure cholesterol with much greater specificity than ever before is good news indeed, because it gives us much more information and far greater accuracy when it comes to predicting future cardiovascular events.

The sad news is doctors are mostly still measuring cholesterol the old-fashioned way. That’s equivalent to doing long division with a pad and pencil when you’ve got a smartphone available—it’s slow, cumbersome, and frequently inaccurate. We discuss this at length in the new, revised, and updated version of The Great Cholesterol Myth, which comes out in October 2020 and is available now for preorder.

In the new book, we talk about the sophisticated lab tests that now exist to tease out risk factors that have been hiding in plain sight for decades—factors we now understand are directly and profoundly connected to heart disease.

There are now at least a dozen cardiac markers that we can test that influence the likelihood of you getting heart disease. And best of all, many of these risk factors can be strongly modified by our own life choices. Spoiler alert: One of the most important of these risk factors is insulin resistance, which most doctors don’t even know to check for, and can almost completely be reversed by diet. (I’ll be discussing insulin resistance and its role in heart disease in my next few columns.)

And it’s not just insulin resistance that points the way to oncoming heart disease, which it does far more effectively and accurately than LDL (“bad”) cholesterol ever did. Every year we meet more and more physicians at conferences who are realizing the importance of inflammation and oxidation in making arteries vulnerable to plaque. Every year we meet more and more physicians who have come around to the notion that nutrition and diet—the redheaded stepsister of traditional medical education—can be powerful allies in the fight against heart disease (and not, as previously believed, by adhering to a low-fat diet!). And every year we meet more physicians who have come to question the usefulness of statins (the major class of drugs used to lower cholesterol). Statins lower cholesterol just fine! The question is whether they prevent deaths.

And the answer, sadly, is no.

The connection between diabetes and heart disease—sugar, anyone?—is the central thesis of the new edition of the book. Insulin resistance is something that nearly always precedes (or accompanies) type 2 diabetes. And—as we argue in the book—diabetes is almost always an early warning sign for heart disease.

Understanding insulin resistance—and how to prevent, treat, and even reverse it—is one of the most important things you can do if you want to prevent heart disease. In the new book, we argue that if you catch insulin resistance early enough, you can prevent heart disease—for many, if not most, people. One study we talk about in the book showed treating insulin resistance properly could prevent as many as 42% of all heart attacks.

Now for the bad news: Most doctors don’t know this. Even worse, most are still prescribing powerful drugs for a condition known as “high cholesterol” which is really not a medical condition at all, but a number on a lab test—a lab test that, in 2020, has long been past its expiration date.

It’s time to stop concentrating on lowering LDL cholesterol and start paying attention to how we can lower the risk of heart disease.

They are not the same thing.

Many of you have asked me variations of the following questions:

How do I know what supplements are good and which ones are junk?
How do I know which supplement brands are reliable?
Where should I buy my supplements?

I put my answer to these questions into a short video on YouTube.  The fuller version of the story is as follows:

The whole story on nutritional supplements

For about five years, after I first opened my website, I sold nutritional supplements online. I sold only brands I used for myself, my family, and my clients, brands that are considered “doctor brands”.

“Doctor brands” are the supplement lines usually carried in the offices of people who practice functional medicine, licensed naturopaths and functional nutritionists (like me). They include high-end lines like Vital Nutrients, Thorne Research, Designs for Health, Allergy Research, Douglas Labs, which are not readily available to the average person.

You can get these brands—sometimes—on Amazon.

But don’t. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

Back to the story.

I’d painstakingly comb through the catalogs of these high-end vitamin lines, and choose the formulas I liked. In a short time, I had curated a nice boutique catalog of about 250 or so products, most of which I used in my private practice and with my family.

We bought in (small) volume from the top professional distributor in the country (then, as now, Emerson Ecologics) and sold at retail or with 10% discount for patients.

And that worked fine—until Amazon took over the world. (Don’t get me wrong—I love Amazon. But they had a very definite effect on the supplement industry, and most of it was not good. More on that in a moment.)

So why didn’t health professionals like me just send our patients to Emerson directly?

Simple. Because Emerson doesn’t sell to the general public.

So what?

Now, you might well ask, why does it matter? I can get magnesium anywhere including Costco and CVS, and I can even find some of these elite brands you’re talking about on Amazon.

Yes, you can.

But there’s a problem.

Let’s start with magnesium because it’s a great example of why doctors and health professionals sell supplements in their offices in the first place.

If you came into my office and I told you I want you to take magnesium every day, you’d go out and find it on Amazon and that would be that. Maybe you’d pick a popular brand- like Twinlab—and figure you’re good.

But Twinlab’s popular magnesium is 100% magnesium oxide, the cheapest and least absorbable form of magnesium. There’s also magnesium glycinate, magnesium citrate, magnesium threonate, magnesium chelate…. You get the idea. All have different profiles and different uses. Not to mention different doses and different bioavailability.

But even if I told you I want you to specifically take “Doctor Brand Magnesium Formula XYZ” we’d still be in trouble. Because the only place you could find it would be on Amazon, and now I’ll tell you why buying it there is a bad idea.

Most of the doctor brands sold on Amazon are fakes, counterfeit or expired.

I know this for a fact because I’ve talked to the CEOs of many of the companies whose products are being sold illegally. I meet these vitamin company reps at shows and medical conferences where they exhibit, such as the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine or the Scripps Annual Conference on Evidence-Based Supplements. I’ve known most of them for a long time.

And I can tell you that none of them authorize their stuff being sold on Amazon, and they vigorously pursue legal action against anyone selling it. And that includes just about 100% of the Amazon resellers of high-end vitamins and supplements. My contacts at these companies tell me that invariably, the stuff the unauthorized folks are selling illegally on Amazon turns out to be either expired, re-cycled returns,  counterfeit, or made in China.

FINALLY, A SOLUTION

So if you want authentic versions of the best supplements sold in America, what should you do?

Glad you asked.

Emerson now offers an online pharmacy called WELLEVATE, on which patients can now order any products in the Emerson catalog. All you have to do is sign up under the name of a health professional (MD, PhD, ND, etc) who already has a clinical/professional account.

I have had such an account for almost 25 years, and now, through my patients’ Wellevate portal, I am thrilled to say I can offer the entire Emerson catalogue to you, including all the products I use myself.

SIGN UP FOR WELLEVATE

Here’s how you shop at the Wellevate Pharmacy. It’s an EASY three-step process.

Go to www.wellevate.com/jonnybowden
Pick a username and password and sign up for your own account
Browse the catalogue and order anything you like.

And be confident knowing that you’re choosing from the best brands of nutritional supplements in the world.

And you’ll get a 10% discount on anything you order through that link.

The reason I rarely mentioned brands before this

In the past, I rarely mentioned specific brands when talking about nutritional supplements, because I knew in my heart it would be almost impossible for you to find the ones I used, so why tell you about them?

Now that I know you have a way to purchase the authentic versions of the same products I use, I’ll be much freer in mentioning the brand names of the products that fill my personal vitamin/medicine cabinet.

So even if you don’t buy anything right now, go over to wellevate.com and sign up for an account.

It’ll come in handy.

PS.  When I worked as a clinical nutritionist in New York, I worked with a well-known MD who practiced integrative, functional and nutritional medicine. He had a sign in his office that read as follows:

Don’t Look For Bargains In:

Parachutes
Tattoos
Nutritional Supplements

It’s as true today as it was 20 years ago.

Why You Should Care About Free Radicals

Did you ever wonder why apple slices start to turn brown when you leave them out on the picnic table?

Or why unprotected metal left outside will start to rust?

Here’s the reason: free radical damage.

Free radicals are rogue oxygen molecules that are missing an electron, and will therefore attack anything in sight in search of a missing mate. The damage they do is called oxidative damage, or oxidation. It’s what happens to the apple slices, it’s what happens to the rusting metal, it’s what happens to your skin when exposed to too much sun, and it happens in your body—to every cell, to every organ, even to your DNA.

Dr. Sinatra and I identified oxidative damage as one of the four major promoters of heart disease in our book, “The Great Cholesterol Myth”. Dr. Traylor and I identified oxidative damage as one of the major causes of aging in

Oxidative damage (i.e. free radical damage) is no joke. There’s even a theory called “The Free Radical Theory Of Aging” that holds that aging is nothing more than “rusting from within.” Even cholesterol doesn’t become a problem in the body until it’s oxidized.

The free radicals that cause all this oxidative damage can come from many things. Oxygen, certainly. But also toxins, household cleaners, pesticides, cigarettes, and air pollution. Your first action should be to limit your exposure to things that are obviously toxic (i.e. cigarettes and car exhaust and chemicals).

Foods can also be potent sources of free radicals, especially fried foods, and especially meat that’s barbequed at high heat. Tip: Marinate the meat in a rich mix of spices, and barbeque at a lower heat. And instead of fried foods, load up your plate with antioxidant-rich berries, dark chocolate, nuts, beans, and leafy vegetables. Even if you still eat the French fries, those antioxidants will help mitigate some of the damage!)

Anti-oxidants do exactly what their name implies—they are the antidote to oxidative damage. We all know the important dietary antioxidants–  Vitamin C, Vitamin E, and so on – but an even more important antioxidant is made in the human body and can’t be effectively obtained from supplements or diet. It’s called glutathione.

Two other tips to help your body rid itself of excess free radicals:

1. Top off your glutathione levels. Glutathione is the body’s master antioxidant. It mops up free radicals better, faster, and more effectively than just about any other substance. The body makes glutathione on its own, but as we age the manufacturing process becomes less efficient. There have been attempts over the years to make oral glutathione supplements, but for the most part, they haven’t been effective.

Thankfully science is always evolving, and now there’s a safe way to prompt your body to make more. Glycine, available in Continual-G products, works as a molecular signal that prompts the body to start producing more glutathione. In a couple of hours, you’ll have more glutathione in your cells, which is exactly where it’s needed.

2. Upgrade your sleep. A lot of really important things happen when you sleep, and bad things happen if you are sleep deprived. It turns out that one of the major things that happen during sleep is the repair of oxidative damage. Even the most powerful antioxidants on the planet won’t be put to full use if you’re not getting enough sleep and if you’re not getting good quality of sleep. That’s why it’s especially important right now to keep a consistent sleep schedule.

And if you’re not getting enough sleep and would like to extend your time in bed—and who wouldn’t—there’s a “right” and a “wrong” way to do it. Contrary to popular opinion staying in bed later doesn’t work nearly as well as going to bed earlier. Try adding sleep time by going to bed a half-hour earlier every night for a week, and when you’re acclimated to that, add another half-hour.

Your metabolism, your mental health, and your waistline will all thank you.

Many of you have asked me variations of the following questions:

How do I know what supplements are good and which ones are junk?
How do I know which supplement brands are reliable?
Where should I buy my supplements?

I put my answer to these questions into a short video on YouTube.  The fuller version of the story is as follows:

The whole story on nutritional supplements

For about five years, after I first opened my website, I sold nutritional supplements online. I sold only brands I used for myself, my family, and my clients, brands that are considered “doctor brands”.

“Doctor brands” are the supplement lines usually carried in the offices of people who practice functional medicine, licensed naturopaths and functional nutritionists (like me). They include high-end lines like Vital Nutrients, Thorne Research, Designs for Health, Allergy Research, Douglas Labs, which are not readily available to the average person.

You can get these brands—sometimes—on Amazon.

But don’t. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

Back to the story.

I’d painstakingly comb through the catalogs of these high-end vitamin lines, and choose the formulas I liked. In a short time, I had curated a nice boutique catalog of about 250 or so products, most of which I used in my private practice and with my family.

We bought in (small) volume from the top professional distributor in the country (then, as now, Emerson Ecologics) and sold at retail or with 10% discount for patients.

And that worked fine—until Amazon took over the world. (Don’t get me wrong—I love Amazon. But they had a very definite effect on the supplement industry, and most of it was not good. More on that in a moment.)

So why didn’t health professionals like me just send our patients to Emerson directly?

Simple. Because Emerson doesn’t sell to the general public.

So what?

Now, you might well ask, why does it matter? I can get magnesium anywhere including Costco and CVS, and I can even find some of these elite brands you’re talking about on Amazon.

Yes, you can.

But there’s a problem.

Let’s start with magnesium because it’s a great example of why doctors and health professionals sell supplements in their offices in the first place.

If you came into my office and I told you I want you to take magnesium every day, you’d go out and find it on Amazon and that would be that. Maybe you’d pick a popular brand- like Twinlab—and figure you’re good.

But Twinlab’s popular magnesium is 100% magnesium oxide, the cheapest and least absorbable form of magnesium. There’s also magnesium glycinate, magnesium citrate, magnesium threonate, magnesium chelate…. You get the idea. All have different profiles and different uses. Not to mention different doses and different bioavailability.

But even if I told you I want you to specifically take “Doctor Brand Magnesium Formula XYZ” we’d still be in trouble. Because the only place you could find it would be on Amazon, and now I’ll tell you why buying it there is a bad idea.

Most of the doctor brands sold on Amazon are fakes, counterfeit or expired.

I know this for a fact because I’ve talked to the CEOs of many of the companies whose products are being sold illegally. I meet these vitamin company reps at shows and medical conferences where they exhibit, such as the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine or the Scripps Annual Conference on Evidence-Based Supplements. I’ve known most of them for a long time.

And I can tell you that none of them authorize their stuff being sold on Amazon, and they vigorously pursue legal action against anyone selling it. And that includes just about 100% of the Amazon resellers of high-end vitamins and supplements. My contacts at these companies tell me that invariably, the stuff the unauthorized folks are selling illegally on Amazon turns out to be either expired, re-cycled returns,  counterfeit, or made in China.

FINALLY, A SOLUTION

So if you want authentic versions of the best supplements sold in America, what should you do?

Glad you asked.

Emerson now offers an online pharmacy called WELLEVATE, on which patients can now order any products in the Emerson catalog. All you have to do is sign up under the name of a health professional (MD, PhD, ND, etc) who already has a clinical/professional account.

I have had such an account for almost 25 years, and now, through my patients’ Wellevate portal, I am thrilled to say I can offer the entire Emerson catalogue to you, including all the products I use myself.

SIGN UP FOR WELLEVATE

Here’s how you shop at the Wellevate Pharmacy. It’s an EASY three-step process.

Go to www.wellevate.com/jonnybowden
Pick a username and password and sign up for your own account
Browse the catalogue and order anything you like.

And be confident knowing that you’re choosing from the best brands of nutritional supplements in the world.

And you’ll get a 10% discount on anything you order through that link.

The reason I rarely mentioned brands before this

In the past, I rarely mentioned specific brands when talking about nutritional supplements, because I knew in my heart it would be almost impossible for you to find the ones I used, so why tell you about them?

Now that I know you have a way to purchase the authentic versions of the same products I use, I’ll be much freer in mentioning the brand names of the products that fill my personal vitamin/medicine cabinet.

So even if you don’t buy anything right now, go over to wellevate.com and sign up for an account.

It’ll come in handy.

PS.  When I worked as a clinical nutritionist in New York, I worked with a well-known MD who practiced integrative, functional and nutritional medicine. He had a sign in his office that read as follows:

Don’t Look For Bargains In:

Parachutes
Tattoos
Nutritional Supplements

It’s as true today as it was 20 years ago.

Since almost the beginning of my career I’ve suspected that the medical and nutritional establishment was wrong on fat and cholesterol. For the last two decades, I’ve been certain of it. And the research—especially since 2010, has backed me up. Saturated fat does not cause heart disease. And neither does cholesterol.
 
Whoops.
 
Now, a new and beautifully designed study out of Malaysia adds more fuel to the bonfire on which we should burn terrible notions such as the fear of witches, the belief that the Milwaukee Brewers will win the World S     eries, or the misguided and unsupported fantasy that banishing fat from our diet will have any positive impact on heart disease or diabetes.
 
Scientists in Malaysia studied the diets of 577 healthy adults, but in a much more sophisticated way than is usually done in epidemiological studies.
 
First of all, they didn’t just      study a single macronutrient (i.e. fat, carbs or protein); they studied patterns of eating (i.e. low-carb high fat, high-carb low-fat, high-carb high-fat, and low-carb low-fat). I studied under a legendary gestalt psychologist when I was in my Master’s program at the New School, so I’m very much a fan of looking at patterns and context when it comes to health. (The word “gestalt” means “an organized whole that is more than the sum of its parts”.) So looking at patterns of eating rather than a single component of the diet seems to me a major upgrade.
 
Second of all, they didn’t just measure “cholesterol” as a stand-in for heart disease, a “gold-standard” measurement of the 1960’s, but long past its expiration date. They measured real, meaningful markers that are relevant today and supported by research, like cholesterol particle size and insulin resistance. (I     n my opinion, insulin resistance is the earliest and most consistent predictor of future heart disease, a subject I will cover in depth when the new edition of The Great Cholesterol Myth comes out next year.)
 
Here’s what the study found after examining patterns of eating and relating them to advanced and meaningful risk factors for heart disease:
 
It didn’t much matter how much fat people ate.
 
What did matter was the percentage of carbs in their diet.
 
Both patterns of lower-carb eating— whether the high-fat version or the low-fat version—did better than both versions of higher-carb eating, whether the high-fat or the low-fat version.
 
The pattern of eating that was the most associated with the most cardiovascular risk was… wait for it….high-carb high-fat.
 
(This reminds me of something Professor Jeff Volek once told me in an interview, something that’s been known by low-carb researchers for over a decade:  “Saturated fat behaves very differently in the context of a low-carb diet as opposed to a high-carb diet”.)
 
It should be noted that in this study, the majority of fat consumed in the diets was Malaysian palm oil, which is indeed 50% saturated, with the other 50% coming mainly (40%) from monounsaturated fat, the same kind found in olive oil and avocados. It didn’t make a bit of difference as far as cardiovascular risk was concerned.
 
What did make a difference—and it bears repeating— was consuming a high-carb diet. Restricting carbs had a significantly greater benefit to heart health than restricting fat consumption. Those eating a high carb/low fat diet had worse outcomes.
 
And evaluating them for multiple heart disease risk factors, researchers in Malaysia concluded something remarkable:
 
These results fly in the face of traditional advice. You might predict that people following low-fat diets would have better cholesterol profiles than those eating high-fat diets. That did not happen in this study.
 
The newly published study also took other factors into account, including lifestyle, genetics, age and socioeconomics. These study participants lived in urban areas and held white collar jobs. And they were a healthy bunch. They didn’t smoke or drink. They didn’t have diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney disease or cancer. None had ever had a stroke. Even their thyroids were working properly! 
 
What does this mean for you and me? It’s never a good idea to completely ignore an entire food group. Proteins, fats and a limited amount of carbs all deserve a place in a heart-healthy diet.
 
If you should do one thing different because of this study, it’s this: Pay closer attention to the type of carbs you’re eating. And for goodness sake, stop worrying about fat.