Health News. Lots of resources and information

In devising a rotary diet for patients, I follow certain basic rules. Patients are instructed in these rules and given advice on how to follow them when they return home.

Rule 1: Eat whole, unadulterated foods. Our ancestors generally ate their food in a simple form, without complicated mixtures, sauces, condiments, and the like. A diet such as this is cheaper, more readily available, easier to prepare, and more digestible than fancier fare.

Today, most of us have the ability to eat both simply and with variety. Culinary refinement, while pleasing to the palate, can sometimes be harmful to health, if it is pursued on a regular basis by susceptible individuals. The overrefinement of foods and their packaging for convenience or longer shelf life have led to abuses. Many people do not know what a diet of plain, simple foods taste like or how good it can be. If a person tolerates beef, he can and should enjoy a steak, a hamburger, or a piece of boiled beef instead of, say, a meatball sandwich. If he eats steak, he has consumed one food—beef. He can then have another food, or several other foods, for his next meal. But the meatballs may contain beef, soy, pork, onion, oil, butter, milk, egg, black pepper, and wheat flour used as a “meat-stretcher.” The bread will contain more wheat, rye, corn oil, yeast, sugar of some sort, caramel, lactic-acid cultures, and assorted chemicals. If the sandwich is topped with catsup, it will contain tomatoes, vinegar (grain, cider, or wine), corn sweetener, onion powder, spices, and flavorings. Mayonnaise will add more eggs and vinegar, as well as soybean oil and sugar (beet or cane).

Thus, what most people think of as a fairly simple meal—a meatball sandwich such as is available in many restaurants or “take-out” places—actually may contain more than two dozen different foods, including some of the most common allergy-causing substances—wheat, corn, beef, beet, milk, cane, yeast, soy, or eggs. Most likely it will also contain an assortment of chemicals as well.

If you are allergic to any one of these common items (and almost all food allergy patients are), you will not be able to discover this fact by sticking to the average American diet. The reason is that you will eat these common foods over and over again, every day, almost without letup. The symptoms caused by one or more of these foods may fluctuate, but they will never really be absent for long, because their cause is not absent for long. If you find that an average meal gives you reaction, it will be virtually impossible to track down the cause of that reaction when you are eating two dozen different foods at a sitting.

Rule 2: Diversify your diet. In addition to eating whole, simple foods, the patient must learn to diversify his diet. The modem marketplace offers us a wide variety of different foods from various climates and cultures. We should make use of this diversity. Yet most people eat the same few foods over and over again, sometimes quite literally ad nauseam. Wheat, milk, beef, corn, beet or cane sugars, and eggs, in their many varieties and disguises, represent the monotonous basis of the American diet. Some people even brag of being “meat and potato men,” who must have these two foods in order to feel satisfied (an almost certain sign of food addiction).

Patients can learn to diversify their food choices. The world is filled with an enticing variety of foods which they can exploit for both enjoyment and good health. For example, few people enjoy (or have even tasted) all of the foods in a well-stocked fruit and vegetable market. They become stuck on certain often-repeated favorites, such as carrots, celery, and lettuce, and bypass what is unfamiliar. Turnips and parsnips are rarely eaten as vegetables in their own right, although they make a delicious dish. Some people have never tasted artichokes, avocados, mangos, or papayas. Each of these can form the basis of a satisfying meal.

Some foods are only eaten on special occasions or in special combinations. Cranberries are highly popular at Thanksgiving, but are rarely eaten at any other time of the year; yet they can usually be incorporated into the diet with little trouble, and in many markets they can be purchased fresh throughout the fall season.

The foods of other countries offer interesting possibilities. Many markets now carry bean sprouts and (soy) bean curd. Bean sprouts can be readily grown in a jar in the kitchen if they are not available in the store. Health food stores usually stock a wide variety of Japanese foods. The larger cities have stores, listed in the Yellow Pages, which sell specialty foods of other nationalities. There is much to be gained by learning to enjoy the cuisine of cultures other than one’s own.

In fact, the Rotary Diversified Diet is in some ways less limited, and more enjoyable, than the supposedly unrestricted but monotonous American diet. It calls on you to eat in a controlled, rational way, but within that plan it offers great latitude for innovation and experimentation with food.

Rule 3: Rotate your diet. Patients are told that they can develop an allergy to any food if they eat it day in and day out and are susceptible to it. This is as true of the more exotic foods as it is of beef, potatoes, or eggs. A colleague of mine once attempted to practice clinical ecology in Taiwan. He soon discovered that the Chinese people of that island had widespread allergies to the foods eaten there, especially soy and rice, but also including others, some of which are rare by American standards.

The whole point of this diet is to let the body recover from the effects of a food before eating it again. In general, it takes up to three days for a meal to pass through the human digestive system. To be safe, we allow four days between ingestions of a particular food.

In general, patients are instructed to have only three meals per day. They can eat as much as they wish, although they are encouraged to eat portions of normal size. If he follows a four-day rotation, the patient can eat a particular food on Monday and then eat it again on Friday. Thus, if he has wheat on Monday, he will have to count four days following Monday before he can have wheat again. Bear in mind that this means wheat in any form: bread, spaghetti, lasagna, cream of wheat, even the breading on a pork chop. It is important to add that, for the purposes of this diet, wheat is identical to rye, barley, malt, and millet. Of course, if the patient continues to eat the average American diet, he could not manage that, since there is wheat (or a related grain) in almost every typical meal. But on the Rotary Diversified Diet, it is not difficult to avoid unknown or unsuspected ingredients in foods.

While four days is what we might call the “legal limit” on food repetition, many patients go on a seven-day cycle. This allows them to eat the same basic diet each week. The diet can be posted on the refrigerator and is easy to follow. All the patient needs to begin a seven-day food cycle are twenty-one foods to which he is not allergic.

Rule 4: Rotate food families. Foods, whether animal or vegetable, come in families. Some of these are fairly obvious: cabbage, kale, broccoli, and cauliflower, for example, all taste somewhat similar and are clearly related. You probably would not guess, however, that they are in the mustard family, which also includes horseradish and watercress. Similarly, you would not automatically know that cashews, pistachios, and mangoes are in the same group or that beef and lamb are in the same family but that deer and elk are in a separate group.

Food families are important in devising a Rotary Diversified Diet. A listing of common foods, grouped by their families, is given in Appendix A, to convey some idea of the relations between various foods.

The reason food families are important is that patients can cross-react to the “relatives” of food to which they are allergic. Thus, if you are allergic to beef you must suspect goat (not to mention veal and milk, both of which are seen as similar to beef by the body—veal being young beef, and milk a product of the female of the species). People who are allergic to potato must suspect other members of its family, including tomato, green pepper, red pepper, chili, eggplant, and tobacco.

Another reason why it is important to be aware of food families is to prevent the formation of allergies by a steady consumption of foods which are members of the same family. If you eat tomato on Monday, eggplant on Tuesday, potato on Wednesday, green pepper on Thursday, and tomato again on Friday, you are not really rotating foods—you are eating from the same food family every day, and this could develop into an addiction to one or all of these items.

Thus, the ingestion of foods which are members of the same family must be spaced, but not quite as strictly as foods themselves. The rule is that the patient must rotate food-family members every two days. Using the above example, it might be perfectly all right to have tomato on Monday, eggplant on Wednesday, and tomato again on Friday, provided that no other members of this family were eaten in between.

If a patient has a known allergy to a particular food, he must also avoid the other members of that food family, at least for a while. Thus, sensitivity to beef brings with it a ban on beef, beef by-products such as gelatin, margarine, and suet, milk products, veal, buffalo, goat, lamb, or mutton.

Rule 5: Eat only foods to which you are not allergic, at first. Patients who are emerging from the Ecology Unit are given a summary of their food-test reactions. They therefore know which of the most common foods cause reactions and which do not.

Upon going home, one of their goals is to test other foods which were not evaluated in their weeks in the hospital. If a new food causes no reactions, then it can be added to the Rotary Diversified Diet to give greater variety to the meal plan.

On the other hand, the diet serves as a perpetual diagnostic screen, helping patients to avoid unsuspected sources of mental and physical complaints. It can readily detect the first signs of an adverse reaction to any food, since that food is not in one’s system at the time it is eaten.

Basically, there are two kinds of food allergies—fixed and nonfixed, or temporary. A fixed allergy is one with which you are probably born, which does not go away with time. These are relatively less common. More frequently, patients can regain tolerance to troublesome foods after a period of some months of avoidance. The greater the reaction to a food, the longer it takes, in general, to reestablish tolerance. The process usually takes from two to eight months, after which the food can usually be eaten again, if used in rotation. Since the incriminated food is often a favorite and is craved in an addictive manner, the hope of regaining tolerance to it offers some consolation to the patient suffering its temporary loss. Until and unless such tolerance is regained, however, the patient cannot safely use an allergenic food. Moreover, it must not be abused by cumulative intake when it is returned. Re-sensitization occurs very readily and very subtly.

One exception to this rule is the so-called universal reactor. As mentioned earlier, such a person is allergic to all or most foods, and will get sick no matter what he eats, although he feels tolerably well on a fast. Naturally, he cannot avoid all foods to which he is allergic or he will starve. In this case, we do the next best thing. He is instructed to eat only those foods to which he has lesser reactions.

In addition, other procedures can be employed to benefit such patients. Some clinical ecologists employ “neutralizing doses” in the treatment of this condition. As was previously explained, a “neutralizing dose” is an infinitesimally small amount of the offending substance. If this dose, placed under the tongue, is at just the right dilution, it will have the effect of turning off a reaction. The same substance in a larger dose will, of course, cause a renewal of symptoms. This seems contradictory, but the effectiveness of the neutralizing dose is attested to by many clinical ecologists.

With the exception of universal reactors, all patients are instructed to keep away from the foods which cause their reactions until these can safely be reworked into the diet.

*102\110\2*

About one in three persons can obtain pain relief with sugar pills. This so-called “placebo effect” (pla-see’bo, which in Latin means, “I shall please”) works only if the patients believe that they are getting real medication.

Even so, this is no laughing matter, particularly now that we understand how placebos work. University of California researchers report in Lancet that placebo pain relief can be wiped out by injecting naloxone, a drug that is normally used as an antidote for narcotic overdosage.

This strongly suggests that the brain of a placebo-re-sponder makes its own narcotic-like substance, and it is this that relieves pain when a placebo is given. Testing this theory further, the researchers took people whose pain normally responded to placebo and pretreated them with naloxone. No pain relief could then be obtained with placebo.

After repeated use over long periods, placebos become less effective and patients with persisting pain need ever larger numbers of sugar pills each succeeding day. This growing “tolerance” is seen also with narcotics.

*180\143\2*

Symptoms: itching scalp, red scaly rash on back of neck, sores caused by scratching, enlarged lymph glands at base of skull, dandruff-like eggs (nits) attached to hair.

Home care:

-    You can distinguish the eggs (or nits) of head lice from dandruff because dandruff can easily be brushed away but the nits cling to the hair shafts.

-    Your doctor will prescribe a shampoo to kill the lice and the nits. Apply the shampoo exactly according to the instructions, taking care not to get it in the child’s eyes or mouth.

-    If necessary, apply a vinegar rinse to loosen the nits, then fine-comb the child’s hair until all the nits are removed.

-    Clean combs and brushes with the shampoo, launder pillowcases, and have caps or hats washed or dry-cleaned.

-    Check other family members for the lice.

Precautions:

-    If one member of the family has head lice, it is often necessary to treat the rest of the family too (except infants and pregnant women).

-    The ingredient gamma benzene hexachloride prescribed in shampoo form for head lice is poisonous if swallowed or absorbed through the skin. It can also harm the eyes. Use it exactly as directed; do not repeat the application more than twice, at the stated intervals; and do not leave the shampoo within reach of the child.

-    Consult your doctor if head lice are accompanied by infected sores on the scalp or enlarged lymph nodes at the base of the skull.

Head lice are tiny parasites (smaller than fleas) less than 3 millimeters long. They are grayish-white, almost transparent, six-legged creatures that live exclusively on humans, never on pets. The lice pass easily from one human to another. Head lice live on or close to the scalp, where they bite and suck blood. Their visible eggs (or nits), which stick to the hairs, are milk-white and about the size of a flake of dandruff. During the past few years, infestation with head lice has become common among school-age children.

*97/84/5*

Canola was originally developed from the rape seed. It was modified by selective breeding because rapeseed oil was too high in a toxic fatty acid called erucic acid. Canadian plant breeders came up with a variety of rapeseed that is much lower in erucic acid, yet high in beneficial monounsaturated fat and omega 3 fat. Only olive oil contains more monounsaturated fat than canola oil. Canola oil also contains approximately ten percent of the omega 3 fat alpha-linolenic acid. The new modified canola oil was originally called LEAR oil; this stands for Low Erucic Acid Rapeseed. Both “LEAR” and “rape” don’t have pleasant connotations, so a cleaver marketing guru came up with the name canola in 1978, alluding to Canadian oil.

Canola oil is now widely available as a cooking oil, in margarines, and is present in a great number of processed foods. Olive oil is a much healthier choice, but it is too expensive for the food industry to use in processed foods. Also, the fact that olive oil goes cloudy in cold temperatures makes it unappealing to the eye when used in some foods.

The majority of canola oil on the market is heavily processed. It goes through a process of refining, bleaching and degumming. This exposes the oil to oxygen, light, high temperatures and chemical solvents. Canola oil is fairly high in omega 3 fats, and these are most sensitive to processing, and likely to become damaged and form trans fatty acids. Therefore, canola oil can be higher in trans fats than other liquid vegetable oils. You are better off getting omega 3 fats from whole foods like fish, walnuts, flaxseeds and pumpkin seeds; all of which are also rich in antioxidants. Another problem with canola oil is that a great deal of it is genetically modified. There are several new varieties, such as Roundup Ready Canola, which is more tolerant to some herbicides and insecticides. Genetically modified canola has been approved for use in Australia. If you do use vegetable oil in cooking, it is best to stick to extra virgin olive oil or virgin coconut fat.

*41/53/5*

Essential fatty acid supplements

Most of us don’t eat enough essential fats, so when you are trying to maximize your fertility it’s a good idea to add them to your diet in supplement form. Research has shown the benefits of supplementing with essential fatty acids during pregnancy to avoid low birth weight and also the advantages to the growing baby in terms of brain development’.

Choosing and using oils

Oils can easily get damaged so you need to take care when choosing, storing and using them. If oils are over-heated, left in sunlight or re-used after cooking, they are open to attack by free radicals (which have been linked to cancer, coronary heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis and premature ageing).

To avoid the formation of free radicals, always choose cold-pressed unrefined nut or seed oils or extra-virgin olive oil. A number of supermarkets now have organic oils. Unfortunately, non-organic standard supermarket oils are manufactured and extracted using chemicals and heat. This destroys the quality of the oil and its nutritional content. Store your oil away from sunlight and do not be tempted to re-use it after cooking.

Do not fry polyunsaturated fats, as they can become oxidized when heated. Use olive oil or butter for frying. Monounsaturated olive oil is less likely to create free radicals and butter will not because it is a saturated fat. Reduce the cooking temperature to minimize oxidation. Keep all fats to a minimum when frying. Try to bake or grill instead.

*25/73/5*

Despite all the warnings and public service announcements, fires and burns continue to be a leading cause of unintentional-injury deaths in U.S. homes. According to the National Fire Prevention Association (NFPA), fires currently cause about 4,700 deaths a year-nearly 4,000 (80 percent) of which are in the home. “Too often people mistakenly think that home fires are something that happens to someone else,” says Susan McKelvey of the NFPA.

Maybe it’s all those years spent playing fireman, but men in particular have a tendency to overestimate their fire safety knowledge, says McKelvey.

“Our most recent survey shows that though 63 percent of men said they felt confident about fire safety, twice as many men as women die in fires,” McKelvey says. “The first and foremost rule when it comes to fire is, don’t be a hero. Get out of the house and stay out.” Even better, prevent fires in the first place. Here is what the NFPA recommends.

Carry a spoon. The largest cause of home fires in the United States is cooking, says McKelvey. “You’re cooking. The phone rings. You leave the kitchen and forget all about your cooking. Next thing you know you smell smoke and return to find a fire. This type of scenario happens quite frequently,” she says. Never leave cooking unattended, but if you need to leave the kitchen, carry a kitchen spoon or spatula with you to remind you that something’s on the stove or in the oven, McKelvey suggests.

Keep a mitt on hand. Here’s a simple but highly effective fire-prevention tactic. Keep an oven mitt that covers your arm by the stove along with a pot lid that fits the pan you are cooking with. That way, if those sweet potato fries go up in flames, you can quickly slide a mitt on your hand and a lid over that fire, says McKelvey. Then turn off the stove and let the pan cool completely. Don’t lift the lid or you might re-ignite the flame, she says.

Flush that cigar. The kitchen may be the biggest hot spot in the house, but according to the NFPA, fires caused by careless smoking kill more than 800 people a year. The classic no-no, of course, is smoking in bed. You know not to do that. What you need to watch is how you dispose of cigarettes and cigars. “Too often, people think that their smoking materials are extinguished, they throw them out, and the hot butts smolder for hours, eventually causing a fire in the middle of the night,” McKelvey says. “The best practice is dousing cigarette butts thoroughly before discarding them by flushing ashtray contents down the toilet. Be especially aware of how your guests dispose of cigar and cigarette butts, particularly at parties where people are often drinking and not paying close attention.”

Separate flammables. A simple reminder: Keep all combustible materials such as paint thinners and oils in sealed metal containers away from heat sources, says McKelvey. “Garages and basements are potential fire hazards.”

Hang those detectors. Finally, install at least one smoke detector on every level of your home and in or near every sleeping area, McKelvey says. “Test them once a month and replace the battery annually. Having smoke detectors in your home cuts your chance of dying in a fire nearly in half,” she says. And to make sure that you remember to change the batteries in those babies every year, tie the battery-changing to an annual event, such as your birthday, or when you set the clocks forward or back in the spring or fall.

*106/36/5*

Stripped to its essentials, eating is the process by which we bring life-supporting chemicals into our bodies, an act that occurs at reasonably predictable intervals over the course of a day. Once the food is ingested, acids and enzymes in the stomach break it down, after which it passes into the intestine.

The nutrients, such as glucose, fatty acids, and proteins, pass into the bloodstream and float along until they reach their various destinations: the liver, the muscles, and so on. The body uses some of the nutrients immediately. Others pass into reservoirs, such as the fat cells, where they bide their time, waiting for the metabolic call to duty. That call comes from hormones-insulin, for example-and other chemicals. These chemicals escort the nutrients into the cells and tissues, where, broken down to their component parts, they help fuel the engines of life.

Eating involves not just internal processes but external ones as well. When we eat, we literally absorb part of the outside environment and incorporate it into ourselves. Eventually we return part of the meal to the environment and the process repeats itself. No wonder then that food, serving as a direct link to the “outside world,” can have such power over us! It’s not surprising that some people begin to use food and eating in abnormal ways, as weapons in the battle to gain control over their environment.

Eating behavior is partly biological, governed by the physical needs of the individual. It’s also partly social, determined by our interactions with other people. The way we think about food also affects the way we eat. For example, knowing that eating a candy bar at five o’clock could spoil her appetite for a big meal at six might affect a person’s choice whether to snack or not. Emotional factors also come into play; the sheer pleasure of tasting or smelling food can determine the content, timing, or size of our meals. Even though our bodies may not be sending hunger signals, the very presence of a scrumptious chocolate cake may make us want to eat.

Eating behavior, then, may occur in response to forces that have nothing to do with our bodies’ current nutritional needs. In treating the eating-disordered individual, there are two relevant questions to ask: “What biological abnormalities may be present?” and “Why have the non-biological factors that affect eating behavior come to dominate the biological factors?”

*37/35/5*

At the tender age of 21, Dan Collins was so overweight and out of shape that his doctor feared he was killing himself.

“I was 5 foot 10′/2 and weighed 239 pounds,” he says. “I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, and my doctor was concerned enough to put me on medication.”

That was in 1984. Rather than sit back and let medications take control of his life, the young newspaper reporter from Towson, Maryland, embarked on a complete body makeover. He cut the salt in his diet way down, put the brakes on his runaway eating habits, and began walking and stationary cycling regularly.

Two years later, Dan had his blood pressure under control and was down to a lean 182 pounds. He felt and looked great but was afraid that he was entering an exercise slump. “I didn’t mind the walking and other exercises, but I really wanted a different kind of sport that I could really get into,” he says. “I knew that was important if I was going to keep the weight off for good.”

For Dan, that sport was fencing. While not as chic as aerobics a la Jane Fonda was in 1986, fencing really piqued his interest because it is both physically and mentally demanding. Working up a sweat was fun and exciting each time he picked up his foil and donned his mask and protective vest. “People don’t realize that a good fencer needs both aerobic and anaerobic conditioning as well as a sense of strategy and emotional control,” says Dan, who’s the co-founder of the Chesapeake Fencing Club of Baltimore.

While many others have piled up old, trendy sports gear in basements and attics over the years, Dan still fences every week, just like he’s been doing for the last 14 years. He also works out at home using a stationary bike and free weights to enhance his fencing performance. After all these years, it’s safe to say that this lean, mean fencing machine has found the perfect activity to help him keep the weight off.

WINNING ACTION

Go for the unusual and exotic. Learning how to move your body—and enjoy it—is personal. If you are having a hard time sticking with a workout regimen, try something uncommon or unconventional, like African dance, tai chi, or scuba-diving. Part of the journey of weight loss is discovering and uncovering the real you. Let your workouts be an expression of your inner self. If not now, when? Enjoy today!

*91\89\8*

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.

*139\80\8*

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.

*96\80\8*