Monthly Boost January 2006

Our goal as always at khushmark.com is to provide our readers with sound cutting edge nutritional/lifestyle advise WITH a passion and without the confusion created by the fads/trends. For this reason (after having read various health articles in the papers as well as some health magazines) I am getting straight into the ‘fat story’ with no apologies, the information out there on fat is still ‘years’ behind!

I am going to share the fat story as part of a typical male case study we see in practice. In April 2005, Tim a father of two children (both under three) in his mid 30s came to see me in order to reduce his cholesterol levels. His main goal was to reduce his cholesterol and prevent heart disease so that he can retire and play golf with his two boys! Not a bad goal. In our experience, this is the type of individual that achieves their health goals without any problem, they are ready for life-style changes not short term fixes.

Tim had previously managed to reduce his cholesterol in Jan 2005, with the advise of his doctor, this was by reducing the intake of …wait for it…eggs, butter, red meat, shrimp, lobster and cream. He was advised to switch to margarine (knock me on the head please) and reduce fat in his diet in general but especially the foods mentioned above. As Tim did this, his cholesterol reduced and came down to the ‘normal range’, only to have it increase again when he would eat the fat foods mentioned above.

Now this is where I get on my Monthly Boost soap box and ask what about the real culprits of high cholesterol such as;

• Hydrogenated fats (found in most margarines) also know as trans fats
• Refined carbohydrates (such as croissants, cakes, biscuits, sugar)
• Alcohol
• Coffee

When you really do the research, you will discover that about 80 % of our cholesterol is made by the liver. So cutting it out of the diet has a much smaller impact than cleaning up the liver’s act! ..don’t you think? For some reason this seems just utter common sense. Cutting down on red meat, butter, shrimps etc is not getting to the ‘root cause’ but also these foods are not the ‘bad guys’. The bad guys are the bullet points above.

So in April 2005 I put Tim on the Metabolic Typing programme which for him included red meat and all the other healthy saturated fats and took out the ‘toxic’ fats as well as the alcohol and caffeine (that stress the liver). Truly it is the ‘plastic’ man-made foods that create an imbalance in cholesterol levels. He was simultaneously put on a 4 week liver detox programme and by the way he was also eating eggs (another cholesterol myth).

Within 4 weeks his cholesterol came down but another important heart health parameter improved known as homocysteine (which was not addressed by his doctor previously although it was high). 5 weeks following the first session Tim had lost weight and commented that he had more energy and was now allowing the Missus. to relax Saturday mornings whilst he took the boys out to the park (before that he was too tired), he was also able to concentrate better at work. Now didn’t he get more than he bargained for?

At the second session he continued with his Metabolic Typing life style programme along with some liver support supplements. It’s wonderful when the ‘root cause’ is actually addressed because it goes onto improve all other sorts of health imbalances that are not as obvious at that moment in time, but would be come more apparent later in life.

I suppose the moral of the story is ‘don’t get short changed, address the root cause'.

To a healthy 2006!

Khush Mark