Dr. Soram's Integrative Medicine
Practical Complementary and Alternative Medicine
This “thing” called stress has become a household term since shortly after Hans Selye, M.D., D.Sc., F.R.S., coined the term in 1936, and defined it as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.”
But while we all know what stress feels like, it can be difficult to pin down exactly what stress is. And that’s because stress can mean a virtually infinite number of things — and as you might suspect not all of them are bad, not by a long shot.
The researchers found that the same part of your nervous system that is responsible for the fight-or-flight stress response (the sympathetic nervous system (SNS)) also controls regulatory T cells, which are used by your body to end an immune response once the threatening foreign invader has been destroyed.
“We show for the first time that the nervous system controls the central immune police cells, called regulatory T cells,” said Robert E. Cone, Ph.D., a senior researcher at the University of Connecticut Health Center, in ScienceDaily. “This further shows that it is imperative to concentrate on the neuro-immune interactions and to understand how these two different systems, the immune and nervous systems, interact.”
Their new research on mice revealed that the sympathetic nervous system can negatively impact your immune system, and also shed some light on why stress often exacerbates autoimmune disorders like lupus, arthritis and eczema.
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And while heart disease is a widely known illness — and the leading cause of death in the United States — there are actually several different “types of heart disease” that fall under the classification of heart disease.
Heart disease, often referred to as cardiovascular disease, is defined as any condition that affects your heart. It is the number one worldwide killer of both men and women and takes approximately 2,500 American lives each day.
As my patients and readers know, heart disease is the number one killer of both men and women in the United States.
So I was delighted and pleasantly shocked to see that Kim Williams, M.D. the incoming president of the American College of Cardiology has just announced that he has gone vegan! In addition, he is now recommending a vegan diet to all his patients.
As you know, the American College of Cardiology is one of the most conservative medical organizations in the world. Their focus is the treatment of heart disease with pharmaceuticals, angioplasties, and bypass surgeries.
Dr. Kim changed his diet because of an experience with a patient. He had read a nuclear scan on a patient with very high risk findings – it showed a three vessel disease pattern of reversible blood flow in the patient’s heart arteries.
Six months later, the patient came back to Dr. Kim and the nuclear testing facility. The patient had been following Dean Ornish M.D.’s program for “reversing heart disease” which is based on a plantbased diet, exercise and meditation. The patient told Dr. Kim that their chest pain had resolved in six weeks after starting this program, and the nuclear scan was then repeated. and it had become essentially normal!
This forced Dr. Kim to study the details of the plant based diet in Dr. Ornish’s many publications. Dr. Ornish has shown reversal of plaque in both one and five year studies using nuclear scans.
Dr. Kim did studies of his own and found that chicken breasts have more cholesterol (84mg/100g) than does pork (62mg/100g).
After he became vegan, within six weeks of starting the diet, his own LDL cholesterol dropped from 170 to 90.
Dr. Kim now encourages all his heart patients to go on this vegan diet.
One concern I have with Dr. Kim’s diet is he is using “meat substitutes” and recommends even a substitute of Italian sausage. Unfortunately, many of these products even though they are vegan, have chemicals and other additives that make it not the best for one’s health. Nevertheless, even with these types of foods on a vegan diet, one’s cholesterol usually drops significantly.
In his recent interview, Dr Kim laments that the American Heart Association prevention guidelines do not specifically recommend a vegan diet.
A wonderful quote from him is “Wouldn’t it be a laudable goal of the American College of Cardiology to put ourselves out of business within a generation or two? We have come a long way in the prevention of cardiovascular disease, but we still have a long way to go. Improving our lifestyles with improved diet and exercise will help get us there.”
What a wonderful thing for the incoming president of the American College of cardiology to be promoting!
If you or a loved one has cardiovascular disease, I urge you to consider a plantbased diet. Two books that will help you get there are:
Dean Ornish M.D. ’s book: The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven
Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health
Caldwell Esselstyn M.D. ’s book: Prevent and Reverse Heart
Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, NutritionBased Cure
10 Questions: Kim Williams, MD
Drop me a note on Facebook or Twitter and let me know your thoughts about this diet !
Eat more calories than your body burns off, and you’ll start to gain weight. The equation is really just that simple: Too many calories + not enough activity = excess pounds.
As the American Academy of Family Physicians puts it, “To lose weight, you have to cut down on the number of calories you consume and start burning more calories each day.”
It sounds simple enough … but it if were really that easy, why would 66 percent of U.S. adults be overweight or obese?
You know how you can put on a couple of pounds by just looking at a cheeseburger and fries? Well, some foods have the opposite effect, helping you burn extra energy — and keep weight off — just by eating them.
Better still, these slimming foods do not all taste like grass or rice cakes; these are REAL, delicious and satisfying foods — foods that you might even be craving right now. So go ahead and indulge. With food options like these it’s easy to eat right … and lose weight while you’re at it.
“The healthy body is equipped to produce all the hormones a woman needs throughout her life,” said Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of The Wisdom of Menopause. But those hormones can easily become pushed off kilter — even with too much stress or an unhealthy diet — leaving room for a wide array of hormonal disorders to surface.
Hormones are proteins or steroids that are secreted directly into your bloodstream. They are responsible for the body’s metabolism of minerals, regulation of fluids, reproduction, sexual function, and responses to stress.
The global IBS seminar last weekend at CedarsSinai hospital was superb. As I mentioned last week I did attend and learned a lot. I thought that I could get a summary for you this week, but time did not allow. I hope to have that article for you in the very near future.
I am happy to announce to all my patients and readers that starting next Monday, August 4, I invite you to attend the free Online International Detox Summit.
As I’ve written about many times in my blog, the toxicity of our environment is affecting our health in so many ways. This is especially relevant during pregnancy and early childhood.
I was especially honored to be asked to be one of the 30 participants in this seminar and my interview is on
Tuesday, August 5, 2014. I will be talking about the toxicity of our environment and how that is interacting with our genes. We call this the epigenetic influence. I will also discuss the importance of preparing for pregnancy.
In addition to me, there are 29 other interviews with prominent physicians, speakers, and authors. All aspects of detoxification including emotional detoxification, will be discussed over the eight days of this summit.
It is free to sign up and attend. Each day, a set of lectures will appear and you will have the whole day to listen to those lectures. If at the end of the week, there were lectures you missed, that you wanted to hear, you will be able to purchase them.
The stated goal of the conference is “To inform people about toxicity and inspire them to healthy solutions.”
Following the Detox Summit, they will help you put this information into action in September through a 21 day Detox Challenge. You will be provided with a day-by-day guidebook, online resources, and community groups. Before, during, and following this experience, you will have the opportunity to discuss your personal health goals and challenges leading into and out of the Detox Challenge.
You can sign up for the Detox Summit here:
When you sign up, you will receive daily emails during the summit that will give you access to over 30 of the world’s experts on what to do about toxins.
I look forward to being in dialogue with you on Facebook and Twitter, about this wonderful event. And of course for my patients I will be delighted to talk to about it in the office.
Body image continues to be a constant struggle for both men and women and countless diet attempts, a lifelong of insecurities, perfectionism, cosmetic surgeries and male body image disorders are emerging as evidence of how serious it’s become.
A body-image survey in Glamour magazine of 16,000 women revealed that over 40 percent of women are dissatisfied with their bodies! Unhappiness with body types hasn’t improved much over the past 25 years when the very first Glamour study was released.
