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unsaturated aldehydes (sugars). Since meat contains this amino acid, eating meat
is less likely to produce as many dangerous AGE’s in the body as compared to
eating breads and other browned carbohydrate sources.
- IC-5 blood sugar control – this is a very unique natural blend of herbal
ingredients that have been proven to exhibit strong ability to control blood sugar
from meals. And of course, lower average blood sugar means less formation of
AGEs in the body. This unique blend is not available in stores and can only be
found online at this page: http://tinyurl.com/ic5-blend
- Benfotiamine - A fat-soluble synthetic form of vitamin B-1. This substance has
been studied to stop AGE’s from being formed. It blocks the biochemical
processes that can cause vascular, nerve, kidney and retinal damage that are
connected AGE’s and high blood sugar levels. Benfotiamine is a synthetic
supplement and not naturally derived from foods or herbs. Since this is a
synthetic compound and not natural, I’d personally steer clear of using this as the
long term side effects would be unknown at this point in time.
- Pyridoxamine - Vitamin B6 is involved in hundreds of beneficial enzymatic
reactions in the body. This unique form of vitamin B6, called Pyridoxamine, is
thought to interfere specifically with toxic glycation reactions in the body.
- Antioxidants – Foods and supplements high in antioxidants will help to combat
the damage that AGE’s do in the body. Antioxidants that I prefer to get from
food as opposed to a supplement are vitamin C and vitamin E, beta-carotene,
zinc, selenium, quercetin, and flavonoids. However, two supplements that are
particularly powerful antioxidants among other benefits include alpha lipoic acid
(which is contained in the IC-5 blood sugar control supplement we just
mentioned a few paragraphs ago), as well as astaxanthin from Krill Oil ... these
2 supplements can be a great addition to your anti-aging arsenal for reasons
beyond just antioxidant power.
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- Spices – spices such as cinnamon, ginger, turmeric, and cayenne all contain
powerful antioxidants while also containing compounds that help control blood
sugar response from meals. I choose to use all 4 of these spices (and many other
spices too) liberally in any cooking and seasoning of foods. Since we may not
always use these 4 spices in particular on a daily basis in foods, I also like to use
capsules of these spices as a supplement on a daily basis as well.
- Seanol PTM: This is a rare seaweed extract (from Ecklonia Cava) and one that
is very intriguing. It has been found in ORAC testing to have 3.5x the antioxidant
power of even blueberries! The research on this super-potent natural antioxidant
from the sea is extremely interesting and you can read more about it here.
Chapter Two
Blood Sugar, Insulin and Aging—The Damaging Effects of Sugar
Besides the formation of the highly destructive AGE’s, sugar, in all forms
(fructose, sucrose, glucose, galactose, lactose and others) has other ways of inflicting
serious damage to your body and speeding up the aging process.
Fructose is the worst of all sugars, but all forms of sugar that affect your body’s
blood sugar levels, as well as the resulting insulin can be harmful. According to Dr.
Joseph Mercola:
“Fructose in particular is extremely pro-inflammatory, promoting AGE’s and
speeding up the aging process. It also promotes the kind of dangerous growth of fat
cells around your vital organs that are the hallmark of diabetes and heart disease. In
one study, 16 volunteers on a high-fructose diet produced new fat cells around their
heart, liver and other digestive organs in just 10 weeks.”
So the internally and externally, limiting sugar in all forms, will go a long way
towards slowing down the aging process.
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Sugar, especially fructose and sucrose, increase insulin levels, while decreasing
your body’s ability to effectively counteract that rise in blood sugar. This is a major
cause of degenerative diseases.
Sugar in excess also weakens or paralyzes the immune system, making you more
susceptible to infectious disease, or complications of minor diseases. For example, that
minor cold can become the flu, pneumonia or bronchitis—and in some cases deadly if
you are elderly and in frail health.
The average American eating a stereotypical Standard American Diet consumes
2.5 pounds of sugar a WEEK. And when you think about adding in the other processed
foods such as white or wheat bread, pasta, pastries, and all the refined carbohydrates,
which turn into sugar in the body, it’s no wonder there is such a huge increase in
diabetes.
Could it be that sugar is THAT bad? In a word...YES!
Let’s define what we are talking about when we say ‘sugar’. We usually think of
sugar as the white stuff that sits in cute little bowls on our tables, or in those little
packets at restaurants. The truth is there are many different types of sugars and our
bodies do not react to all of them in the same way.
“High fructose corn syrup” is the form of sugar that you see on virtually every
label of processed or packaged foods, or in most soft drinks. There are many other
forms of sugar but for now, let’s concentrate on the two most often consumed sugars,
sucrose and fructose.
Regular white table sugar (and brown sugar) is called 'sucrose'. Sucrose is
composed of one molecule of glucose bonded to a molecule of fructose. So, that makes
sucrose about 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Fructose is 2x sweeter than glucose.
Since table sugar is half fructose, it is lots sweeter than starches in potatoes, bread or
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other carbs that also turn into glucose in the body.
The more fructose in any type of sugar, the sweeter it is.
High fructose corn syrup is approximately 55% fructose and 45% glucose (but
can vary higher in fructose content based on type). So that makes it sweeter than regular
table sugar.
The harmful effects of sugar have to do with the way your body metabolizes the
fructose portion of the sugar. For instance, if we eat 100 calories of starchy foods like
pasta or potatoes (which is converted to glucose in the body) or 100 calories of sugar
(remember basically 50/50% of glucose and fructose), they are metabolized differently
and have a different effect in your body.
This is key:
- Fructose is metabolized by our livers.
- Glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized in our cells. Why does this
matter?
Consuming cane sugar or HFCS causes your liver to work very hard to process
the fructose. If that sugar comes in a liquid form like soda or fruit juice, the fructose
hits your system instantly and causes your liver to go into overdrive in an attempt to
process it. And the fructose in High Fructose Corn Syrup hits your liver even faster than
regular cane sugar because the fructose is not bound to the glucose in it. So, your liver
gets a massive shot of fructose faster!
When fructose is ingested quickly in larger quantities, the liver converts it to fat.
The fat becomes a substance called triglycerides, a key contributor to heart disease.
Some of these triglycerides float around in your bloodstream and get stored as fat on
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your body.
However, excess fat is also stored in the liver. Ever hear of ‘fatty liver disease’?
When the liver starts storing excess amounts of fat, insulin resistance and metabolic
syndrome follow, and not far behind then, is type 2 diabetes.
The result—accelerated aging, chronic disease and sometimes, eventually
death—all from excess sugar.
Some other ways fructose accelerates aging and disease:
- Fructose elevates uric acid, which not only leads to high blood pressure, but also
chronic, low-level inflammation which can affect virtually every system in your
body to speed up aging and multiple chronic diseases. Ever heard of gout? This
is a painful form of arthritis in which the uric acid forms crystals on joints, mainly
in the feet and hands.
- Fructose tricks your body into gaining weight by turning off your body's appetite-
control system. Consuming foods containing fructose actually makes you
hungrier, by confusing your hormones. You don’t feel full when you should, so
you keep eating.
- Fructose quickly and easily leads to weight gain and abdominal obesity (yes, this
is where the dreaded "belly fat" comes from), decreased HDL (good cholesterol),
increased LDL (bad cholesterol), elevated triglycerides, elevated blood sugar,
and high blood pressure, which leads to metabolic syndrome. And of course, it
can continue straight to obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
In 1980, only about 1 in 7 Americans were obese, and about 6 million people had
diabetes—it was not nearly as much of a common disease as today. Today, 1 in 3
Americans are obese, and 19 million Americans have diabetes, according to the
National Diabetes Fact Sheet (2011).
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Another seven million people are estimated to have undiagnosed diabetes. That’s
26 million people! Add to that another 79 million people with ‘pre-diabetes’.
That’s staggering!! That combined number is approximately 100 million people
with diabetes or pre-diabetes in the United States. That’s one third of the population!
Diabetes leads directly to premature aging (including wrinkly, saggy skin) and
more serious complications including:
- Heart disease and strokes
- High blood pressure
- Blindness
- Kidney disease
- Nervous system disease (neuropathy)
- Amputations of extremities
We know that one of the most accurate predictors of heart disease and diabetes
is a condition called ‘metabolic syndrome’. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease
Control) at least 75 million Americans have metabolic syndrome, and probably many
more have it but have not yet been diagnosed.
What is metabolic syndrome? It means your body has become resistant to insulin,
among other issues. Normally when you eat carbs or sugar, blood sugar goes up, insulin
is then released to counter the rise in blood sugar, and blood sugar goes back to a normal
level.
If your diet is high in sugars and starchy foods, your body is continually pumping
out insulin to lower your blood sugar. Eventually your cells stop responding to insulin,
and your pancreas cannot create enough insulin in response to the demand, and it
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becomes exhausted. Blood sugar levels begin rise out of control, and stay constantly
high, until you end up with type 2 diabetes.
Add one more deadly disease that is tied directly to sugar and insulin—Cancer.
According to World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on
Cancer: Your chances of getting cancer are much higher if you are obese, diabetic or
insulin resistant.
What’s the connection? Sugar.
And, your chances of dying from a form of malignant cancer are way higher if
your diet is high in sugar. Cancer researchers now know that the problem with insulin
resistance and cancer is that as we secrete more insulin, we also secrete a related
hormone known as ‘insulin-like growth factor’, and the insulin encourages bigger
tumor growth.
Craig Thompson, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New
York, says many human cancers depend on insulin for fuel to grow and multiply. Some
cancers develop mutations that actually feed off the insulin, and other cancers just take
advantage of the elevated blood sugar and insulin levels from those with metabolic
syndrome, obesity or type 2 diabetes.
Many of the pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that
transform them into malignant tumors if they weren’t being driven by insulin to take
up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.
The Trouble with Grains
When you take a look at the food supply of most modern societies, the common
denominator is an overload of carbohydrates and processed grains—often combined
with sugar or fructose (in the form of high fructose corn syrup).
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Wheat and corn are two of the worst carbohydrates for blood sugar and aging.
Our Paleolithic ancestors didn't eat grains--at least nowhere close to the form we
eat today. Nutritional archaeologists believe that the ancestral human diet before the
agricultural revolution may have contained very small quantities of grains that could be
gathered and added to soups or stews most likely. However, our Paleolithic ancestors
had no way of consuming the massive quantities of grains that modern humans eat in
everything from cereal, breads, muffins, pasta, and more foods that are considered
“staples” of the modern diet.
And the consumption of grain in most countries has been steadily increasing for
the last 30-50 years, to the point where grain is the primary food in many people’s diets.
As grain consumption has gone up, so have the numbers of obese and overweight
people.
Of course, there are confounding factors involved in this increase as well,
including a more sedentary lifestyle, and increases in sugar and HFCS consumption as
well.
Today, flours are more refined than ever, missing fiber and essential nutrients.
The modernized version of wheat, triticum aestivum, is very different from the wheat
used by our ancestors. Modern wheat has been genetically altered through hundreds of
hybridizations and manipulated to become a far different plant than it previously was.
The gluten proteins in modern wheat are much different than the gluten in the
wheat of the past. This is possibly one of the reasons for the sudden increase in the
incidence of celiac disease and gluten sensitivity.
Today's wheat is quite different than even just 50 years ago, as today's wheat has
different levels of anti-nutrients and gluten with overall biochemical differences.
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Essentially, big agra has hybridized wheat heavily over the last 5 decades to
improve things such as crop yield and baking characteristics, but never once thought
about the impacts on human health of changing the biochemical structure of wheat.
Although the biochemical differences may seem small, it can have a major impact on
how the human digestive system processes the food.
Dr. William Davis in his book, Wheat Belly, points this out with this passage...
"Wheat gluten proteins, in particular, undergo considerable structural change with
hybridization. In one hybridization experiment, 14 new gluten proteins were identified
in the offspring that were not present in either parent wheat plant." This means that
modern wheat contains new "foreign" gluten proteins that the human digestive system
has not adapted to properly digesting.
Scientists have begun in recent years to discover links between wheat and a
whole range of inflammatory diseases, from rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel
disease, gastro-esophageal reflux disease--to migraines and arthritis and more. Wheat
can also cause low level, long-term inflammation possibly due to the gluten content,
other anti- nutrients, or possibly even the extreme blood sugar response common from
wheat foods.
Many people would never connect these symptoms with eating grains; but weight
gain, emotional, physical, and mental symptoms are fairly frequent with gluten
sensitivity.
Gluten sensitivity dramatically increases inflammation not only in the digestive
system, but in the whole body system as well. Gluten sensitivity and celiac disease also
block the absorption of important nutrients, creating deficiencies that lead to frequent
illnesses, chronic disease, a weakened immune system, mental problems, and dementia.
Wheat also contains a type of carbohydrate called Amylopectin A that raises
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blood sugar shockingly high. Eating just two slices of whole wheat bread (the kind
we’re told by the media is “healthy”) raises blood sugar higher than eating two
Tablespoons of pure sugar.
High blood sugar leads to insulin release, fat storage, weight gain, production of
AGE’s, and inflammation. It’s a vicious cycle.
All of this can lead to accelerated aging and chronic disease.
Corn may be just as big of a problem as wheat. Bumper crops of corn and
government subsidies keep corn prices low, which in turn keeps many of the unhealthy
items we buy at the store low-priced. Corn, in some form, is in an overwhelming
majority of packaged foods that we buy from conventional grocery stores.
Contrary to popular belief, corn is a grain, not a vegetable, and is not appropriate
as a dietary staple for several reasons. It has a very high sugar content and it blocks
nutrients from being utilized in the body (from anti-nutrient content).
This evidence shows up in the archeological records of our ancestors and other
ancient civilizations. When the Mayans and Native Americans changed their diets to a
corn- based one, rates of anemia, arthritis, rickets, infectious disease, and osteoporosis
skyrocketed, and the average lifespan of these natives shortened drastically.
Our bodies were not made to exist on grain-based foods as the bulk of our caloric
intake.
Corn breaks down into sugar very rapidly in the body, which raises insulin levels,
causes you to be hungrier and causes your body to store calories as fat. Don’t be
mistaken--just because corn does not taste obviously sweet, doesn’t mean it isn’t full
of carbs that break down very fast into sugars. Once eaten, your body quickly turns corn
and corn products into sugar. Even the starches in corn products are broken down very