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Some years ago I was invited to speak on a radio show with Lendon Smith, M.D., the famous pediatrician. Lendon spoke about caring for infants, while I talked about stress seekers, avoiders and handlers. Naturally, one of the callers we spoke with asked how a stress seeker can become a stress handler. That’s very difficult, I explained, because a stress seeker is like a race horse, straining against the reins to win every race. When they try to behave like stress handlers, they feel as if they’re chained to the starting gate, unable to run. Through my own experience, and that of many of my patients, I’ve found that many stress seekers cannot become stress handlers anymore than a race horse can be transformed into a turtle. But they can become reformed stress seekers.

The reformed stress seeker combines the stress seeker’s abundant energy and desire with the stress handler’s relaxed, friendly approach. I am a reformed stress seeker. I had to learn to recognize my own stress-seeking habits, how I was feeding on them and how they hurt me. Like any compulsive person, I must always work against my stress-seeking tendencies.

Reformed stress seekers love challenges but have learned what their limits are. They’ll tackle problems head-on, but if they can’t lick them without making themselves sick, they’ll either learn to live with it by changing their perceptions or walk away from the situation.

Lacking the stress handler’s instinctive recognition of stressful situations, the reformed stress seeker must pay careful attention to his or her life, carefully assessing feelings and the environment, “sniffing out” potential stress.

Most importantly, the reformed stress seeker must decide that health and happiness are too precious to risk on unnecessary battles.

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Tags: General health
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Another way in which exercise reduces your risk of suffering from coronary artery disease, and other diseases, is by protecting you against the dangers of excessive triglycerides. Triglycerides are the fats in your blood, and triglyceride levels rise when you eat foods containing fat. Ingesting alcohol and the refined carbohydrates found in cakes, pies, ice cream, candy, white-flour bread, pasta, etc., will also prompt a rise in your triglycerides. One of the problems with triglycerides is that they can help damage or plug arteries. If the triglycerides rise to very high levels, they can cause other diseases such as pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas). Pancreatitis may manifest itself as frequent episodes of upper abdominal pain. If it is severe enough it can lead to death.

We’re all familiar with a very common problem associated with excess triglycerides: the fat that accumulates on us as our body stuffs triglycerides into fat cells. The only sensible way to get them out is by exercise and diet. With vigorous exercise, the tryglycerides are pulled from the fat cells and broken down into free fatty acids, which the muscle cells can use for energy.

More serious, however, is the connection between fat and cancer. Everything you can do to keep your fat levels low— including exercise—is vitally important to avoid the killer cancers.

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Tags: General health
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% of Calories From Fat

Regular Milk 47

Low-Fat 30

Skim (Nonfat) 2

• As you can see, regular milk is high in fat. But because milk is such a good source of dietary calcium, I tell my patients to drink skim milk (if they have no intolerance to it).

• Many adults can’t drink milk because they have what is known as lactose intolerance. They lack an enzyme called lactase, which digests lactose (milk sugar).

• Cheese is made from milk. The type of milk used to make the cheese determines how fatty the cheese will be. Most common cheeses are made from regular milk. Because cheese has much less water than milk, the percent of calories from fat in cheese is much higher than in milk.

% of Calories From Fat

Cheddar 71

Swiss 67

Blue (Roquefort) 73

Parmesan 58

Cottage cheese, Creamed 35

• Hoop cheese (also know as farmer’s cheese) is a very low-fat cheese made from skim milk. It gets only about 3 percent of its calories from fat.

• If you like yogurt, eat the unsalted nonfat skim milk type. Or you can easily make your own nonfat yogurt.

• Dairy products provide no fiber.

• Here are some nonfat and low-fat cheeses:

Nonfat Cheeses

Ricotta (all skim milk)

Washed Cottage-Cheese Curd

Fromage Blanc (white cheese, French) Very Low-Fat Cheeses

Fromage Fort (Canquillote)

Gammelost (Blue Mold)

Bakers

Danish Export

Moderately Low-Fat Cheeses Feta (imported) Mozzerella Edam Danbo Tybo Jarlsburg

Farmers (German) Sap Sago St. Otho

Finnish Jack Parmesan Imported Swiss Neufchatel Port du Salut

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Tags: General health
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The immune system, however, is only one part of your “doctor within.” And the immune-system diseases, scary as they are, are only one type of disorder that may strike us. Millions of Americans are suffering from depression, unhappiness, anxiety, irritability and other emotional problems. Research is proving what we’ve suspected for years—that the thoughts you think have a profound impact on your physical health. And many of us have minds filled with the kind of unhappy thoughts that invite disease.

Recent studies have demonstrated the existence of physical and chemical links between the mind and the immune system. That connection, and the effect one has on the other, is sometimes called neuroimmunomodulation. That’s a fancy word for a simple concept. “Neuro” refers to the brain and its nerve attachments, “immuno” indicates the immune system and “modulation” points to the effect of one on the other.

Don’t worry about the ten-dollar words. The key point is that the brain greatly influences the levels of various chemicals throughout your body. Not enough of some chemicals, or too much of others, can incite all kinds of problems, including depression, heart attacks and even cancer. Your thoughts change your biochemistry, and your biochemistry affects your health and happiness. So it behooves us to keep our thoughts as happy and positive as we possibly can.

“I was fired last week,” said the young woman slumped in a chair. “My ad agency job depended on my making enthusiastic presentations of my ideas. I believe I have the talent, everyone says I do, but I just can’t seem to get going. I can’t get excited about anything anymore. I used to, all the time. In fact, people thought I was hyper. Now I’m like a blob; I just sit there all day. And I’ve been feeling sick for months. One thing after another.”

This woman was caught up in the cycle of depression, disease, more depression, more disease. Being unhappy made her sick; being sick made her unhappy. And each round left her sicker and more depressed. My examination and blood tests revealed that her immune system was off balance. Luckily she was able to implement my recommendations and lick the problem.

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Tags: General health
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Food intolerance, as it is presently understood, is anathema to this way of thinking. The range of symptoms claimed for it is vast. No two patients are alike, and there is no single symptom that is common to all. Different foods are at fault in different patients – and they cause different symptoms. Some patients are apparently sensitive to other things as well, such as house-dust mite or synthetic chemicals. There are no tests for food intolerance and no obvious physical signs – indeed, the patients often look well. To cap it all, there is no obvious mechanism.

As Dr William Bynum, a medical historian at the Wellcome Institute observes: ‘There is a general reluctance among the medical establishment to accept things that are non-specific and don’t always cause the same symptoms. It smacks too much of the old ideas of causation in medicine – cold weather was supposed to cause head-colds in some people and rheumatism in other people and so on. Causal thinking before the germ theory was extremely loose and it did not satisfy the usual canons of scientific explanation about cause and effect. There has been a strong reaction to that, and the problem with so-called food intolerance is that it goes against the grain of present-day thinking.’

Two other factors help to make food intolerance seem dubious. Many of the symptoms that are claimed for it are symptoms of a general type that can be caused in all sorts of different ways. Headache, for example, can be due to a bump on the head, anxiety, overwork, a brain tumour or a wild party the night before. What is more, many of the symptoms are those that can be produced by psychosomatic illness, in which emotional or mental distress evokes physical symptoms in the body. Both these factors make the phenomenon of food intolerance seem even less credible.

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Tags: Allergies
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