Dr. McKee's Health Matters » Nutrition

Dean Ornish gets it right!!

dlmckeemd — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:39:57 +0000

I knew Dean Ornish when he was a medical student, doing studies on yoga and diet with heart disease patients. I suspected then he was destined for great things. This article he just wrote for Newsweek beautifully expresses what i like to call The Art of Growing Young.

What really works to make sustainable changes in diet and lifestyle? It’s probably not what you think. In over 30 years of conducting clinical research, I’ve learned that the real keys are pleasure, joy and freedom, not willpower, deprivation and austerity. Joy of living is sustainable; fear of dying is not.

Read the whole article, Heed what it says, and Enjoy the results!!–Dr. McKee

Grape seed extract kills leukemia cells

dlmckeemd — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:17:36 +0000

A new study from the University of Kentucky (where I graduated from medical school in 1975!) was published Jan 1st 2009 in Clinical Cancer Research.

An extract from grape seeds forces laboratory leukemia cells to commit cell suicide, according to researchers from the University of Kentucky. They found that within 24 hours, 76 percent of leukemia cells had died after being exposed to the extract.

This one is particularly dear to my heart, as I have seen (and experienced) first hand the amazing results of supplementation with high quality grape seed (and pine bark) proanthocyanodins (OPCs). One of the frequent comments/questions I receive is “I heard that OPCs were bad to take if you have leukemia or a high white blood cell count”. My answer has always been that I know of no reason for this. Now we have strong evidence, even including the molecular mechanism (see full article) for the first time, to the contrary

vitamin D supposedly doesn’t protect against breast cancer

dlmckeemd — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:16:18 +0000

A study of 36,000 women, half of whom took a gram of calcium and 400 IU of vitamin D for a period of 7 years was recently published in the Journal of the National Cancer Instutute

The main findings do not support a causal relationship between calcium and vitamin D supplement use and reduced breast cancer incidence, despite the association observed in some epidemiological studies

Commentary: When I see studies like this, its hard to know whether the authors are just uninformed, or actually malicious. OF COURSE there was no difference in breast cancer incidence from taking a gram of calcium and 400 IU of vitamin D (the calcium is mostly irrelevant, its the vitamin D that is important in cancer prevention). There is a very rich scientific literature about vitamin D that has appeared over the past decade, which these authors apparently have not been reading. Given that somewhere between 50 and 80% of adults in the US are vitamin D deficient or insufficient (levels below 30 ng/ml), and that during the wintertime, taking even 1000 IU of vitamin D a day will not raise the blood level of 25-hydroxy vitamin D above 30 ng/ml (recently published by Dr. Michael Holick), drawing conclusions from a study in which 18,000 women took 400 IU of vitamin D is ludicrous! Now if they had given these women 4,000 IU of vitamin D instead of 400, its very likely that they would have seen very different results. In fact, a study by Lappe et al reported that postmenopausal women who took 1100 IU of vitamin D3 a day for 4 years (along with calcium) showed a 60% reduced risk of developing all cancers compared to a group with similar cancer risk factors that took placebo. So just because a study is in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, don’t assume that its authors know what they’re talking about!

those with low vitamin D levels twice as likely to die

Dwight McKee — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:05:50 +0000

A recent study suggests that vitamin D may be one of our most crucial nutrients to health and long life continues to mount:

CHICAGO – New research linking low vitamin D levels with deaths from heart disease and other causes bolsters mounting evidence about the “sunshine” vitamin’s role in good health.

Patients with the lowest blood levels of vitamin D were about two times more likely to die from any cause during the next eight years than those with the highest levels, the study found. The link with heart-related deaths was particularly strong in those with low vitamin D levels.

Science used to believe that vitamin D was simply needed to prevent rickets, a disease of soft bones, and that people needed only 200-400 international units (IUs) for this. In the past decade we’ve learned that vitamin D is crucial to the health of every cell in the body, and that heart health, brain health, immune system health, and cancer prevention all rely heavily on robust levels of this vitamin in our bodies. Not only that, we’re learning that nutrition scientists were off by a factor of 10 in how much is optimal. In other words, we need 2,000 to 4,000 (and in some cases 6,000) IU of vitamin D daily for optimal blood levels (above 50 ng/ml). What wasn’t known for a long time is that a healthy human exposed to summer (or tropical winter) sun for 30 to 60 minutes, depending on how dark or light skinned we are, will make between 10 and 10 THOUSAND IUs of vitamin D. When we started subtracting sun exposure (or using sunscreen) from our lives some 30 years ago, we shut off the tap of the “sunshine vitamin”, and our food “fortifications” and multivitamin pills had far too little vitamin D to make up for it. I recommend to everybody to take at least 2,000 IU daily, and after a few months, to ask their doctor to order a 25-hydroxy vitamin D level–this number may be more important to your health than knowing your cholesterol level or your blood pressure–and for optimal health, you want it to be between 50 and 100 ng/ml, even though 30 is considered “adequate”–and you wouldn’t believe how many millions of people are well below 30!

Broccoli nudges genes to fight cancer

Newsfeed — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 02:07:29 +0000

Broccoli nudges genes to fight cancer

Just a few more portions of broccoli each week may protect men from prostate cancer, according to British researchers who examined the biology of the cruciferous veggie.

Read Full Article at MSNBC.com: Men’s health

This is another report from the front, telling us that our genes may have less to do with our health destiny than our diets and behaviors do. Clearly, what we eat has powerful impact on which genes get expressed and which ones don’t. Whether or not we get cancer, heart disease, or diabetes rests in which genes get expressed and which ones don’t–and a good deal of this rests in what we choose to eat, and whether or not we choose to be physicaly active. i thinkI’m going to go eat some brocolli…..

Walnuts Slow Growth of Tumors in Mice

Dwight McKee — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:14:57 +0000

Here an interesting study I’ve come across:

Researcher W. Elaine Hardman, Ph.D., of Marshall’s Joan C. Edwards
School of Medicine said the study was designed to determine whether mice
that got part of their calories by eating walnuts had slower breast cancer
growth than a group eating a diet more typical of the American diet.

“When we fed the mice the walnuts, the growth rate of the tumors they
had was dramatically suppressed,” Hardman said.

To read the full news report, go to PRNewswire.com