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Chris McKee, CNC

Natural Solutions

New Born Babies are Born with 287 Chemicals in Their Blood

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Can you imagine as an adult how many we have after living decades on this earth?

Even if we eat a “clean” diet we cannot avoid a build-up of chemicals in our tissues. Pesticides, herbicides, phthalates (found in “scents” used in cleaning products, air fresheners, laundry products, etc.), arsenic, BPA from plastics (hormone disruptors), and all the list of chemicals found in our drinking water. It’s enough to make you want to throw up your hands and say “I give up!”

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It’s Not “if” But “when” When Will You Be Exposed to COVID-19?

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As we start to open up our country we will venture out more and more.  We will eventually be exposed to COVID-19.  How prepared do you think your body is to create antibodies against it?

As we just moved across two state lines we were in many public places.  We didn’t worry as we have done our job of supporting our immune systems with good food, sleep, ideal weight, and specific nutritional supports. Stress was probably the biggest concern, as moving is stressful!

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This is not the same world….

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I don’t need to tell you this, that everything has changed since COVID-19. When I stop and think about it, I still can’t believe what has happened to our world in such a short amount of time. This is not the same world we were all used to living in. There is a palatable feeling of anxiousness about the future and the stress of waiting…….can you feel it?

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Myth? Will Elderberry Help With COVID-19?

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Many of you are looking for immune-boosting substances right now and rightfully so.  Elderberry extract has become very popular during the cold and flu season and many people swear by its effect, but is it a “placebo” effect or the real deal?

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You Want This Whole Food In Your Diet

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We are in the midst of the strangest times but one of the beautiful things about it is, we are back in our kitchens cooking!!

Let’s look at a beautiful whole food that most of us probably have in our kitchen, honey. I often get asked, “is honey the same as sugar?” The answer to that question is “NO!”

Why You Should Ditch Sugar for Honey

First, honey is a whole food and sucrose is not. In other words, sucrose is an isolate – technically only one chemical compound – lifted from a background of hundreds of other components within the whole plant, whereas honey is composed of an equally complex array of compounds, many of which are well-known (including macronutrients and micronutrients, enzymes, probiotics, and prebiotics, etc.), others whose role is still completely a mystery.

Even the “sugar” in honey, which we might equate to the sugar in sugar cane or beet sugar, is a complex mix of 25 different types of sugar. Modern man in his “wisdom”, around the 1800s, started refining the sugar cane and eventually beets to create a single molecule called “sucrose” which has wreaked havoc with our health. Of course, there are now many names for sucrose when you look at a food label, but no matter what the name it doesn’t compare to the amazing benefits of honey.

The Difference:

But the differences between honey and sugar are not simply based on their respective chemical and nutritional compositions, but also the length of time we humans have had to adapt to them as a source of energy and nourishment.

8000-year-old cave painting from the Araña Caves in Spain.

We can assume our love affair with honey goes back ten’s of thousands of years! Our bodies have had infinitely more time to adapt to honey than to sugar.

 

The Beautiful Benefits of Honey

I’m often asked, “can I eat honey and will it raise my blood sugar and put weight on?”. There was a double-blind, randomized clinical study published in 2010 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, comparing the effects of honey or sugar on your appetite hormones (ghrelin, peptide YY) and the glycemic and thermic effects after a meal. This was done on 14 healthy, non-obese women. The researchers found that the group given 450 calories of honey with their breakfasts had a “blunted glycemic response which may be beneficial for reducing glucose intolerance.” they also saw a positive modulation of appetite hormones, delayed the postprandial (after meal) ghrelin response and enhanced total peptide YY levels!!In

In Layman’s Terms

Ok, in layman’s language, that means you don’t’ get as hungry as soon after you eat and your blood sugar doesn’t spike which leads to weight gain.

Another study published in Journal of Medical Food in 2004, which compared honey to dextrose and sucrose, found that natural honey was capable of lowering plasma glucose, C-reactive protein (inflammation marker) , homocysteine in healthy, diabetic and hyperlipidemic subjects (people with high cholesterol.)

Animal research also confirms that, when compared to sucrose, honey is more effective at promoting lower weight gain, adiposity (fat accumulation), and triglycerides, WOHOO! Are you loving your honey yet???

Eat It Raw

Raw honey contains enzymes and probiotics which are destroyed when heated. These compounds contribute directly or indirectly to honey’s amazing health benefits, so go “raw” when you buy honey.

Take the active starch-digesting enzyme amylase, for instance, found only in the raw form of honey in a form known as diastase, which is believed to contribute to clearing antigen-antibody immune complexes associated with allergies to pollens. Also, if it is local honey, it will pick up small amounts of local pollen which may help to “immunize,” or desensitize an overly active immune response to these environmental triggers. There is also the enzyme in raw honey known as glucose oxidase, which produces hydrogen peroxide. The hydrogen peroxide formed as a result of this enzyme is associated with honey’s well-known wound sterilizing and healing properties.

Honey is…

Honey is also rich in prebiotics, as attributed to some of the carbohydrates and probiotics that contribute to supporting the healthy flora in our gut as well. Recently, in fact, an abundant, diverse and ancient set of beneficial lactic acid bacteria were discovered within the honeybee gut. Researchers found a collection of 50 novel species from the genera Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium from a single insect! Consuming raw honey, therefore, likely significantly impacts the microbiota within our own gut, and is one way to reconnect to ancient symbiotic relationships with flora that in our modern, sterilized, pasteurized, irradiated, poisoned, cooked, and the bleached world, are all but eradicated from our environment, soil, food, and therefore bodies! These probiotic boosting properties may explain why honey is effective at healing gastrointestinal disorders.

Beyond Honey

Bee products, including venom, wax, propolis ((Bee Propolis Abstracts), royal jelly, etc., have been found to provide potential medicinal solutions for over 170 different health conditions (587 Bee Abstracts) expressing over 40 distinct beneficial pharmacological actions. This growing body of research should awaken in us a greater respect for this sacred insect — even if only for selfish reasons — and when we say sacred, the word sacred means “to make holy,” and the word holy shares the same root meaning as the words whole and heal, so incredibly powerful!

The sad part of this is we are seeing an explosion of colony collapses. The correlation between pesticides and big agrichemicals can not be understated in the role they are playing in destroying our bees worldwide. These chemicals radically transform the bee’s natural habitat and microbiota which has been around far longer than we an imagine. Support Organic farmers!!

10 Day Detox

Yes, we get to have honey during our 10 Day Detox! Our next class starts on April 13th and what a perfect time to kick the sugar habit and build your immune system. Teaching you powerful truths such as “honey vs sugar” is what I love to do during these ten days. Let’s focus on ancient wisdom and the healing power it has!

Learn more here… 10 Day Detox

In health,

Chris

We Are a Statin Nation

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So I started the month of February off with this question, “do cholesterol numbers matter?” and I’ve done two articles on heart health and the true cause of heart disease. This is my final article of the month and we will take a look at statins, do we need them and what testing we really want to determine our risk of heart disease. 

The Deep Dive…

 This is a “deep dive” so hang in there with me!!  If you missed the last two articles you can catch yourself up to speed HERE. 

Since their introduction in the 1980s, statin drugs have been almost universally hailed as “wonder drugs” by medical authorities around the world. The global market for statins was $16 billion in 2016, and approximately 40 million Americans (that’s one in every five adults!) takes a statin.​ 

Cardiovascular disease

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is still the leading cause of death in the United States, claiming 350,000 lives annually.  Medical authorities and doctors claim that statins reduce the risk of CVD and vascular deaths by lowering levels of total cholesterol and proclaimed “bad” low-density lipoprotein (LDL)-cholesterol.​ There’s no denying that statins are effective at lowering blood cholesterol levels. Depending on the dose and circumstance, LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C) can be lowered by 30 to 60 percent. ​

As I discussed in the previous articles, cholesterol is the “ambulance” that shows up on the scene of the accident to do its job, so we can’t blame it 100% for the cardiovascular deaths each year.  I believe taking statins can give you a false sense that “all is ok” when in reality, there could be a whole lot of damage going on without you being aware.

There is little information regarding the long-term effects of this class of drugs.  We do know the extensive list of side effects including diabetes, digestive disorders, cataracts, memory loss, muscle damage, liver damage and low testosterone to name a few.  

How To Understand the Clinical Trial Numbers

“Statins reduce deaths from coronary heart disease by 28 percent in men.” This is a headline from 2017 reporting the results from a long-term study on cholesterol-lowering statins. Sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it?​​  

An important thing to understand about drug clinical trials and medical claims is the difference between relative risk and absolute risk. For example, imagine that your risk of developing Condition A is one-half of 1 percent—0.5 percent. That’s your absolute risk, and it’s quite low. Now, imagine that Drug B reduces your chance of developing Condition A down from one-half of 1 percent to one-quarter of 1 percent.​

​We could report this reduction in one of two ways:

  • Your relative risk of developing Condition A was reduced by a whopping 50 percent, from 0.5 percent to 0.25 percent, from Drug B.
  • Your absolute risk was reduced by a mere one-quarter of 1 percent, or 0.25 percent, for an already low-risk event.

 Many statin studies and claims perfectly exemplify this phenomenon of reporting relative risk without acknowledging absolute risk.  ​If you want to read one such study in Lancet Go here and you’ll see that an absolute risk reduction of a mere 0.2 percent!! ​Even if it was 1.5%, 63 people would need to take the drug for 5 years in order to prevent 1 person from having a cardiovascular event.  

Testing

​Did you know you can have “low” cholesterol and still be at risk for heart disease?  Did you know you can have “high” cholesterol and not be at risk for heart disease?  ​How do you know???

You need to know your “particle numbers”.  We are going through this right now with my husbands cardiologist.  They want to just do a standard HDL/LDL cholesterol lab.  We requested an additional panel, LDL-P, ​small particle LDL numbers (still waiting to hear if they will).  In my previous article I touched briefly on the small particle LDL being the one that gets into the endothelial barrier in your arteries and causes damage which in turn causes “repair” which builds plaque.  You can have “low” LDL and have “high” LDL-P and be at a higher risk.  You can have “high” LDL with very little LDL-P and be at low risk.  

For those of you who want a deep dive, you can get the Boston Heart Health Panel.  ​We had to “ask” for this from our cardiologist and it turns out he had a requisition form in his office and Medicare-covered it!  This is a deep dive, very thorough and gives you so much great information on what is going on inside your body. 

The bottom line, if you really want to know your heart health risk, ask for more than your standard HDL/LDL, ask for at least the small particle LDL.  Ask for inflammation markers such as CRP, IL1b, and IL-6.  Ask for Homocysteine, Thyroid panels and Vitamin D.  All of these are as important as your cholesterol numbers.  

Natural Solutions   

​​Heart disease is a complex, multifactorial process.  So many factors play a role, genetics, diets, lifestyle, and toxic exposure.  Last week’s article gave you a whole list of ideas for lifestyle and diet that can help lower inflammation, oxidative stress and help prevent the cholesterol train from showing up on the seen to create plaque.  Let’s look at some specifics for heart health.  This is not even an exhaustive list but my “top picks”!

  • ​Green Powders – ​you want to support your detoxification pathways and chlorella and spirulina are two detoxifiers that you will usually find in a “green” powder.  Along with detoxifying blood, they have Vitamin A, B, C, E, and Inositol.  A 2013 study found they decreased inflammation and oxidation of LDL.  My favorite is “Green Vibrance” because it not only is loaded with wonderful greens but tastes good!  You can find it on Amazon in either 30 or 60 serving size.  I throw it in my smoothies!
  • ​Omega 3’s – ​these have hundreds of clinical trials that demonstrate benefits for lowering inflammation.  This polyunsaturated fat is critical for the brain, heart and every cell in your body.  Many people try and use flaxseed for their Omega 3’s but it does not convert well to the DHA and EPA that you need for the benefits.  Make sure you are buying an Omega 3 that has been tested for heavy metals and is “species-specific” for the type of fish.
  • ​Vitamin K & D – ​you need vitamin K and D in order for calcium to store in your bones and teeth.  Without it, calcium deposits everywhere, including blood vessels and coronary plaque.  
  • Vitamin E – ​this is a powerful antioxidant and protects against free radicals.  It improves vascular endothelial function, protects cells from free-radical damage and contains anti-clotting properties.  Make sure and buy an E that is “complete”, containing tocopherols and tocotrienols. 
  • Vitamin C – ​vitamin C is a winner in so many ways including lowering blood pressure, boosting immune function, as an antioxidant, improving endothelial function, decreases LDL oxidative damage, decreases clotting, lowers the risk of atrial fibrillation and supports collagen production.
  • ​Berberine – ​studies show improvement in lipid control, heart failure, lowered inflammation and the side benefit it has been shown to be as effective as Metformin in lowering blood sugars. Remember, high blood sugars equal to high inflammation.
  • Magnesium – ​lowers blood pressure, raises HDL, lowers triglycerides, lowers CRP (a measure of inflammation) and improves blood sugar control. 
  • ​Red Yeast Rice – ​If you have stubborn cholesterol numbers (after changing your diet), red yeast rice may be appropriate.  It is a form of statin that has been used in Asia for centuries.  It is derived from fermented rice that creates a yeast.  The original statin formula came from red yeast rice!  Lowers LDL, lowers CRP, appears to be safe for people who do not tolerate statins.  You must take a CoQ10 just as if you were on a statin.
  • ​CoQ10 – ​this is found in the body as ubiquinone and ubiquinol.  Ubiquinone​ is better for those younger than forty and ubiquinol for those over forty.  This is an excellent antioxidant, protecting LDL from oxidation.  Statins reduce the CoQ10 levels by 40%!

Whew! ​We made it!  February has been Heart Health month and I hope with these three articles you have learned a lot about what causes heart disease and what you can do to prevent it.  Thanks for hanging in there with me!

In health,

Chris

P.S. Mark your calendar for April 13th, our next 10 Day Detox!