Study: Is Canola Oil Consumption Linked to Alzheimer’s Disease?

Because of its lower cost, canola oil is ubiquitous in processed foods intended for the growing "health conscious" market. Now a recently published study is confirming the suspicions of those of us who refuse to use canola oil. Philadelphia Pennsylvania's Temple University conducted an animal study to determine the validity of canola oil's health claims. Their results were published in December 2017 in the journal Scientific Reports. The study was titled “Effect of canola oil consumption on memory, synapse and neuropathology in the triple transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease.” Could canola oil contribute to the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease?

Study: Long Term High-fat Ketogenic Diet is Healthy and Safe

A German study published November 11, 2017, in the journal Clinical Nutrition, shows no long-term negative effects for those following a high-fat, low-carb, moderate-protein ketogenic diet. Ketogenic dieting has been used successfully to reverse Alzheimer’s and reduce epileptic seizures in children. Some have even used extreme ketogenic dieting for inducing remission from their cancers. The ketogenic diet was developed in the 1920s at Johns Hopkins hospital to stop seizures in children who did not respond to anti-seizure drugs. The diet fell out of favor in recent years due to the negative press on saturated fats, and fears over the long-term consequences of eating large amounts of saturated fats. Ketogenic diets focus on high amounts of fat in the diet, including saturated fats, along with very restricted amounts of carbohydrates, in order to create ketones that bypass insulin resistance in brain cells and energize their metabolic functions in lieu of glucose. This has proven efficacious for other central nervous systems problems in addition to Alzheimer’s and epilepsy. The past doubts regarding the effects of using a ketogenic diet long term as one's main diet were centered on the “official” advice to avoid saturated fats because they supposedly raised cholesterol levels, which they claim increases the risk of cardiovascular heart disease. This current study proves that such fears are unfounded, and that a high-fat, low-carb, moderate-protein diet can safely be followed as a lifestyle choice, and not simply as a short-term therapeutic diet.

War on Coconut Oil: California Companies Attacked to try and Prevent the Sale of Coconut Oil

Companies selling coconut oil in California are finding out the hard way that they cannot claim that coconut oil is "healthy" because the FDA does not allow such a claim, even if scientific studies back up this claim, along with hundreds of thousands of customer testimonials about the health benefits of coconut oil. Several companies are now fighting class action lawsuits for the sale of their brand of coconut oil in California, including Nutiva, Nature’s Way, BetterBody, Carrington Farms, All Market’s (Vita brand), Costco (Kirkland label), and others. The people who are bringing these lawsuits are stating that these companies are violating FDA regulations by indicating that coconut oil is healthy when the FDA says this claim cannot be made. The foundational premise upon which the cases have been built, rests on the belief that coconut oil is saturated fat, and therefore it is unhealthy. Their attorneys are claiming that their clients were misled and deceived by the information on coconut oil labels. The belief that saturated fats are not healthy is based on the now debunked lipid theory of heart disease, which states that consumption of saturated fats leads to elevated levels of cholesterol, which leads to an increase in heart disease. Ancel Keyes was the original researcher to put forward this theory, which was later adopted by Congress as part of USDA dietary advice, and his research has been completely discredited. In fact, the science actually points to the opposite, that people with high levels of cholesterol actually live longer than those with low cholesterol. However, If the FDA believes that saturated fat is unhealthy, then it will not allow a product that contains more than 1 gram of saturated fat per serving to be called healthy. Will the sale of coconut oil soon be illegal in the United States?

Public Health SCANDAL! Sugar Industry Hid Science Linking Sugar to Heart Disease – Blamed Saturated Fats and Cholesterol Instead

For the past year, a group of researchers with the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), has reviewed historical scientific literature funded by the Sugar Research Foundation since the 1960s, which gives us a great perspective on how the war on saturated fats became public policy. These researchers at UCSF have revealed how the Sugar Research Foundation influenced Harvard medical researchers financially and otherwise to report open-ended inconclusive research that omitted a lot of conclusive negative health data. Their first article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Internal Medicine) in 2016. The title of the study is Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents. The New York Times, which has given some press to exposing the saturated fat myth for about ten years now, was one of the few mainstream media outlets that covered the UCSF study: "How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat." NPR was another news source that covered the UCSF study in 2016: "50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat." The same UCSF team of researchers had another paper published last month (November 2017) by the open access journal PLOS Biology titled, "Sugar industry sponsorship of germ-free rodent studies linking sucrose to hyperlipidemia and cancer: An historical analysis of internal documents.” The UCSF researchers managed to get research data that was never published. The study was not completed because the sugar industry was not getting the pro-sugar “science” they had sought. The science actually led to the conclusion that refined sugar is implicated in heart disease and cancer.

Research Continues to Confirm Coconut Oil’s Healing Properties for Diabetes

When we published our book on Virgin Coconut Oil back in 2004, we devoted a whole chapter to diabetes, based on research and testimonials from coconut oil consumers. That chapter also exists as an article on the CoconutOil.com website. The article has testimonials for both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Peer-reviewed published research here in 2017 continues to confirm that coconut oil is the dietary oil of choice for those who suffer from diabetes.

Cholesterol Lowering Drug Scandal: CoQ10 Essential to Senior Health but Depleted by Statins

The least publicized actual side effect of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs that complements the dangerous intended effect of reducing cholesterol is they also block CoQ10 production, which is already waning among those aged 40 and older. That’s the age when people begin getting prescribed statins per the newest statin drug guidelines. The irony is that CoQ10 is vital for good heart health! CoQ10 is on high demand from cells in muscle tissue, and the muscle that works the most without rest is the heart. Instead of supplementing CoQ10 when one reaches the 40 year plus mark, he or she will likely be prescribed statin drugs for life as a preventative against cardiovascular disease and heart attack. As statin drugs decrease one’s already lowered CoQ10 production from aging, the heart can get slowly weaker, leading to congestive heart failure. This is when the heart keeps beating, but it is so weak it isn’t strong enough to maintain blood flow throughout to meet the body's needs. Instead of the pain that accompanies a sudden heart attack, gradually one begins to have less and less energy. Excessive tiredness comes in that may be incorrectly attributed to aging or being out of shape. Exercise only further exposes one’s breathing problems. Distended belly and leg swelling also occur. This can go on for years with increasing disability until there is a total heart failure. The newest guidelines for statins almost require physicians to put patients on statins as a preventative practice for life. As the CoQ10 deficiency worsens from statins, the poor patient goes into a debilitating spiral without any recognition to its true cause.

Soy — Health Food or Not?

It’s a controversial topic in the culinary world today — the perception some have that soy is a health food. Soybeans in the pod, you may know, look a little like short, puffy, green peas with peach fuzz on the outside. Representatives from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just announced a boomerang-like decision on how soy protein should be viewed from now on. In fact, the agency is proposing to revoke its long-held stance that soy protein can lower your heart disease risk. The current claim, which you may have seen on various food packages, reads: “25 grams of soy protein a day, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease.” Many health advocates claim soy must be good for you because Asian people — arguably one of the healthiest populations on the planet — have eaten it a lot, and have some of the lowest rates of heart disease, cancer and dementia worldwide, so, it appears, the rest of the world should eat soy protein products, too. However, the type of soy traditionally consumed by Asian people differs from that being heavily marketed in the U.S. Soy rose seemingly from nowhere into the American consciousness in the late 20th century. In 1999, the FDA allowed food producers to claim that soy protein was heart healthy, but continuing research has convinced government officials to take a closer look. Incidentally, there are 12 health claims sanctioned by the FDA for packaged foods, including the continued (and false) insistence that saturated fat is the culprit behind heart disease.

Medical Promotion of Cholesterol-lowering Drugs Biased – Not Based on Scientific Evidence

A group of independent medical academics challenged a BMJ (British Medical Journal) 20 year follow-up study that claimed favorable results among those using statins as a preventative measure. It was known as the West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Study (WOSCOPS), and it was the first trial to demonstrate a significant reduction in cardiovascular events with statin therapy for primary prevention. The critical report challenging the BMJ’s statin-promotion based on the WOSCOPS study was published recently, October of 2017. The challenging trio of medical scientists, led by independent researcher Uffe Ravnskov MD, PhD, author of The Cholesterol Myth and Fat and Cholesterol are Good for You, parsed and picked at the study to show it is flawed. They concluded: "The study has serious bias. Many patients stop taking statins. In a study of over 140 000 elderly people, two thirds of those with cardiovascular disease (and even more of those without) had stopped treatment after two years. The question is, therefore, whether the mortality benefit among those with the highest LDL cholesterol is due to statin treatment or to their high LDL cholesterol. The question is relevant because a recent systematic review of 19 cohort studies including 68 094 elderly people (≥60 years) followed for several years found an inverse association between all cause mortality and LDL cholesterol in 92% of participants. In the largest study those with the highest LDL cholesterol lived longer than those taking statins."

What are Leaky Gut Disorders? How to Heal Them

Hippocrates, the ancient Greek doctor, is often quoted as saying, "All disease begins in the gut." This includes many diseases not currently associated (by modern medical practitioners) with gastrointestinal (GI) tract issues, although there is a small contingent of progressive practitioners who are recognizing this phenomenon. Dysbiosis is the imbalance of intestinal gut flora or gut microbiome (the symbiotic bacteria occurring naturally in the intestines) that seems to be the foundation of gut diseases: Crohn’s disease, IBD (irritable bowel disease), and IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). There has been a steady increase of various gastrointestinal (GI) tract diseases and disorders occurring throughout the U.S. over the past few decades. The popular scapegoat for the rise in GI tract disease is grains, specifically gluten, but much of that blame is misplaced. In this article we will look at common causes of gut dysbiosis, and how one can prevent or even reverse leaky gut disorders.

Study: High Fat Ketogenic Diet Enhances Gut Microbiota in Healing Epilepsy

Health Impact News has reported on many of the disease reversing results of the ketogenic (high fat-moderate protein-low carb) diet. Now, a new study is looking at the positive effects of gut bacteria among those following a ketogenic diet for epilepsy. Even though Johns Hopkins used a ketogenic diet for curing epilepsy over 80 years ago, when medical drugs did not help epilepsy effectively, mainstream medicine continues to rely on new and expensive toxic drugs for epileptic children. The “cocktail” combinations of pharmaceutical drugs prescribed often worsens childhood epilepsy. Health Impact News previously published a report on how a four year old child with refractory epilepsy (not treatable with pharmaceutical medications), was treated at the Rochester, Minnesota Mayo Clinic using a ketogenic diet. At first, the child was also kept on pharmaceuticals. The results were poor until he was taken off the medications; then he began healing completely. A new Chinese study on pediatric epileptic cases may even draw the attention of mainstream medical professionals, due to the results seen in children's gut microbiota structure when following a high-fat ketogenic diet.