Sunday, May 2, 2010

Increased Cholesterol and Diet

Hi Dr Rajesh, Greetings from the BVI.

I am having a bit of a problem with my cholesterol level. One test rated me as having a 4.4 risk factor on a scale of 1 - 5.  I believe that you are the best person to consult with on any medical issue. About 14 years of my age, I had an operation in which a part of my colon was removed. One doctor told me that this did affect the elimination of fats.
I don't know anything about these matters. Please advise me soon. -Ishwar Deochand, Virgin Islands (UK).

My Response:

If your Doctors suggest that increased Cholesterol level is due to your Colon Surgery, it only means that your body is not able to throw out excess/ unnecessary fat. Stress is another factor where Fat Metabolism can be disturbed. But, whatever may be the reason for your increased Cholesterol, I have a few suggestions which will help you lower your Cholesterol naturally.

First thing you will need to understand is this Cholesterol. Cholesterol is a chemical name of the fat in which form it is stored/ gets circulated in your body. Circulating fat (also called as Lipid) gets transported in your blood with a Protein bond and together Cholesterol is otherwise known as Lipoprotein (Lipid + Protein). If the density of the Lipoprotein is higher means it takes less space and circulates easily in your blood (it is called Good Cholesterol or High Density Lipoprotein - HDL Cholesterol). If the Density is less, that means it takes more space and 'floats' in Blood (this is called Bad Chelesterol- Low Density/ Very Low Density Lipoprotein- LDL / VLDL Cholesterol).

In diet, if you depend on Red Meat, Eggs, Clarified/ heated Butter and fried food items- that will increase chances of having increased overall Cholesterol or Bad Chelesterol in your system. Increased Cholesterol is the leading cause of High Blood Pressure/ Hypertension, Heart Disease, Strokes and certain types of Cancer. So, it it is wise to limit or altogether remove many of the items I have already mentioned in this paragraph.

If you have recommended six daily servings of fruits and vegetables/ green salad- you can reduce the chances of having increased Cholesterol levels.

Regular dietary usage of fenugreek (methi) seeds and raw Garlic and Onion significantly lower the cholesterol levels.

Mud Application/ Mud Therapy

For therapeutic purposes, Mud is taken from at least three feet deep, ideally from the bank of a running stream or from a clean farm. Then the mud so taken is dried for a few days under direct sun light on a clean surface and stones etc., if any;  filtered by hand. Then you soak this mud in cold water depending on the texture for half an hour to 2 hours to get thick paste.

This mud can be applied locally in thick layers over the belly under the navel but above genitals. This application relieves Acidity and Constipation and improves Liver function.

Direct application on Skin, can relieve variety of Skin Disorders depending on Mud's natural mineral content. Naturopaths sometimes prescribe full mud bath where mud is applied all over the body except for the areas of Body orifices (openings) like ears, eyes, nostrils, anus, genitals and mouth. After 20 - 40 minutes under soft sun exposure (9-10 am) and 3-4 pm) you are asked to have a full shower. Full Mud Bath helps detoxify the body and improves Skin functions.

Emphysema: Treatment Options

Emphysema is a progressive, chronic lung disorder which is recognized
as one of the Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases (COPD)- others
from the group are- Bronchial Asthma and Chronic Bronchitis. This
group of lung disorders are known for presenting symptom of 'shortness
of breath'.

In Emphysema, air sacs- medically known as alveoli- get functionally
or structurally destroyed to keep up their function to transport the
oxygen to blood. Combined with narrowing of air-passages (as it
happens in Bronchitis) it becomes difficult to breathe out.

Emphysema is generally an irreversible problem but functional
improvement is achievable in most cases. A physician would normally
prescribe Bronchodialators and/ or steroids and in extreme cases
recommend the surgical removal of most affected part of the lung/s.

In Naturopathy, however- there are are two lines of treatment.

One, a more general form of treatment- which in every case, recommends
a thorough detoxification or removal of toxins from the body. Luke
warm water Enema or Colon Therapy is the first step. A diet rich in
antioxidants and dietary fibres is recommended. Freshly squeezed
seasonal fruit/ vegetable juices (especially of the citrus fruits) are
of great help.

Two, specific treatments. Warm water bags on the back help with
breathing difficulty as also the Feet soaked in a bucket of bearable
hot temperature before retiring to the bed (if there is no associated
swelling of the feet due to Emphysema). Use of Jala neti pot twice a
day, calm the nerves and help in broncho-dialation.

Nutritionally speaking, there are food supplements which can be tried
in this case. 200 mg of N-Acetyl Cysteine thrice a day and 2 gm of L-
Carnitine twice a day help with repair/ prevention of further loss to
the lung tissue. These derivatives of Amino Acids have shown
consistent results with Emphysema cases.

Most important intervention however is, to stop 'SMOKING' any further,
without which an improvement can not be expected.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

The word 'WELLNESS'


“Wellness,” intoned Dan Rather in November 1979, introducing a “60 Minutes” segment on a new health movement known by that name. “There’s a word you don’t hear every day.”

More than three decades later, wellness is, in fact, a word that Americans might hear every day, or close to it. You can sign up for your company’s employee-wellness program, relax in a wellness spa treatment or even plan some “wellness tourism” for your next vacation. Your cat or dog can get in on the action, too, since the W-word has been pressed into service as a brand of all-natural pet food.

Wellness is here to stay, despite misgivings over the years that it isn’t such a well-formed word. How did it take over, and whatever happened to good old health?

Though the Oxford English Dictionary traces wellness (meaning the opposite of illness) to the 1650s, the story of the wellness movement really begins in the 1950s. New approaches to healthful living were emerging then, inspired in part by the preamble to the World Health Organization’s 1948 constitution: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Halbert L. Dunn, chief of the National Office of Vital Statistics, was looking for new terminology to convey the positive aspects of health that people could achieve, beyond simply avoiding sickness. In a series of papers and lectures in the late ’50s, Dunn sketched out his concept of “high-level wellness,” defined as “an integrated method of functioning, which is oriented toward maximizing the potential of which the individual is capable.”

Dunn collected his presentations in a 1961 book, “High-Level Wellness,” but it would take another decade for his work to resonate with a committed group of followers. An early acolyte was John W. Travis, who picked up Dunn’s book in 1972 from a $2 clearance table at the bookstore of Johns Hopkins Medical School, where he was enrolled in a preventive-medicine residency program. Travis didn’t think much of Dunn’s buzzword at first. “I thought the word wellness was stupid, and it would never catch on,” he recently told me. But Travis was enamored with the way Dunn presented his ideas, and he put those ideas into action — and reluctantly embraced the word itself — when he opened the Wellness Resource Center in Mill Valley, Calif., in November 1975. The center promoted self-directed approaches to well-being as an alternative to the traditional illness-oriented care of physicians.

Wellness was so unfamiliar at the time, Travis recalls, that he constantly had to spell the word when using it over the phone. It soon got national attention when a young doctoral student named Donald B. Ardell profiled Travis’s center in the April 1976 issue of Prevention magazine. In a sidebar, Prevention’s editor, Robert Rodale, welcomed the “exciting field of wellness enhancement,” promising that the magazine would “examine all aspects of wellness promotion.” Even greater exposure came with Rather’s “60 Minutes” piece, which focused on Travis and the Mill Valley center.

Travis and Ardell found a kindred spirit in Bill Hettler, a staff physician at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Influenced by their work, Hettler founded the annual National Wellness Conference at Stevens Point, now in its 35th year. The conference lent valuable academic prestige to the wellness movement. It also caught the attention of Tom Dickey, who was working with the New York publisher Rodney Friedman in the early 1980s to set up a monthly newsletter on health, based at the University of California, Berkeley. Friedman wanted the publication to compete with the Harvard Medical School Health Letter, and Dickey suggested using wellness in the title as a contrast. In 1984, the Berkeley Wellness Letter was born.

Joyce Lashof, then the dean of Berkeley’s School of Public Health, remembers that wellness was initially a tough sell at the school. Not much was known on campus about the earlier work of Travis and his fellow wellness advocates, but Lashof’s colleagues associated the term wellness with the “flakiness” of Mill Valley and surrounding Marin County. The NBC newsman Edwin Newman had televised an exposé of Marin County’s hedonistic lifestyle, which notoriously opened with a woman getting a peacock-feather massage from two nude men. The Berkeley Wellness Letter, however, managed to avoid such unseemly associations by publishing serious, evidence-based articles on health promotion, while debunking many of the holistic health fads of the day.

Though the Berkeley newsletter, which at its peak reached a million subscribers, did much to establish the credibility of wellness in the ’80s, language pundits continued to raise their eyebrows. Newman, who also moonlighted as a usage commentator, belittled wellness, calling it an example of “bloating” in the language. In 1988, a survey of the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language found that a whopping 68 percent of panelists disapproved of the word when used to refer to employee-wellness programs and the like, and a critical note was included in the dictionary’s 1992 edition.

But carping over wellness faded away in the ’90s as the term gained a foothold in everyday use. The American Heritage Dictionary silently dropped the usage note on wellness in its fourth edition in 2000, a decision that its supervising editor, Steve Kleinedler, chalks up to the growing prevalence of wellness programs in the workplace and beyond. A word that once sounded strange and unnecessary, even to its original boosters, has become tacitly accepted as part of our lexicon of health. Well, well, well.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Ban Trans Fats!

LONDON - Banning trans fats from all foods would prevent thousands of heart attacks and deaths every year and would be a simple way to protect the public and save lives, say senior doctors from the Harvard School of Public Health.

The authors say in their report that bans in Denmark and New York City effectively eliminated trans fats without reducing food availability, taste or affordability.

There is also no evidence that such legislation leads to harm from increased use of saturated fats. Their view follows calls by public health specialists to eliminate the consumption of industrially-produced trans fats by next year.

Trans fats (also known as trans fatty acids) are solid fats found in margarines, biscuits, cakes and fast food. Many studies demonstrate harmful effects of trans fats on cardiovascular risk factors.

For example, trans fats increase the amount of low density lipoprotein (LDL) or ‘bad cholesterol’ in the blood and reduce the amount of high density lipoprotein (HDL) or ‘good cholesterol’.

People with high levels of LDL cholesterol tend to have a higher risk of getting heart disease, while people with high levels of HDL cholesterol tend to have a lower risk.

A recent analysis of all the evidence recommends that people should reduce or stop their dietary intake of trans fatty acids to minimise the related risk of coronary heart disease.

Removing industrial trans fats is one of the most straightforward public health strategies for rapid improvements in health, the authors say in a British Medical Journal (BMJ) release.

Based on current disease rates, a strategy to reduce consumption of trans fats by even one percent of total energy intake would be expected to prevent 11,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths annually in Britain alone.

These findings were published in bmj.com.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Swasthya Rakshak Panchatantra

Dr B. Venkat Rao has all the credit to organize Naturopathy as a 'System of Medicine' in India. A Gandhian himself and a devout Naturopathy Practitioner, he established India's first (and probably world's first, too!) university recognized curriculum in Naturopathic Medicine in 1969 which was called Diploma of Naturopathy: awarded by Osmania University in Hyderabad. In 1989, the course got upgraded as a Bachelors Degree, BNYS (Bachelor of Naturopathy and Yogic Sciences, now offered by 12 Naturopathy Schools and 6 Universities in India).

Dr Rao summarized the basic 'Principles' which can enable majority of the people Sickness- Free, which he called 'Swasthya Rakshak Panchatantra' or, Five Principles of Health Preservation.

Two Meals a Day.

Dr Rao was of the opinion that eating two balanced meals a day is great healthy routine. The Meals must include whole grains, nuts, seasonal fruits and vegetables. Meat, Fish, Eggs and Dairy add too much of toxins to the system and metabolic costs of eating protein from the animal source was much higher, according to him. Last meal should be taken ideally about 3 hours before the sleep.

10 Glasses of Water a Day.

One must Drink 10 Glasses of Water a Day. Water is a very good cleanser and detoxifier of the body. It also helps metabolism and maintains body temperature.

Water should not be taken during meals, half an hour before and 2 hours after the meal as it dilutes the digestive enzymes and hampers the digestive process.

Exercise an Hour a Day.

Exercise has a great role in keeping the body fit by activating Circulation and Breathing. It also helps eliminate metabolic wastes and improves healing. It keeps the body away from extra calories keeping you lean and also gives you a stress- free mind. Brisk walk, Yoga and Gardening are good exercise options for majority of the people.

Pray/ Meditate at least once a Day.

Arrange a 10 minutes silence in the form of meditation or prayer either around sunrise or before going to the bed. This time is important for you to connect with your inner self and charges you with the hope and confidence to go on in challenging parts of your life.

Fast at least once a Week.

Fasting once in week has a lot of Physical and Spiritual detox advantages. Depending on the requirement, a fast for the day could be arranged as a Fruit Diet fasting, Juice fasting or Water fasting.