A Zeo Review From Anderson Cooper

Any of you that follow my other blog, BuildBetterSleep.com, knows that I'm a bit obsessed. I wrote a fairly extensive review of the Zeo Sleep Management System a couple of months ago, but have not been using it regularly for the last month or two. I want to wait until there's a significant change in my sleep patters (through the Paleo Diet thing?) before I measure it again. The results were basically the same from night to night.

Regardless, I found it interesting that Anderson Cooper (of CNN fame) recently reviewed the Zeo on his primetime "Anderson Live" show. The man with him evaluating his sleep pattern is Dr. Michael Brues - The Sleep Doctor. Have a look:

New and Improved Doug 3.2 - Now Statin Free

Photo Credit: JD Hancock via Compfight

Once, in 2004, I had gone on a statin (Lipidil) as kind of an experiment - to see how it would improve my blood lipid profile.

It lowered my Total Cholesterol (TC) a bit, lowered the LDL a bit, and raised the HDL by a small amount. Since raising HDL as much as I could was my objective, I dropped the statin.

Then, in May of 2006, after complaining about some unusual (but not severe) pain while vigorously exercising, I had an angiogram that spotted a nasty piece of plaque on one of the major arteries of the heart. Because of the location, angioplasty was considered too risky, so I had open heart surgery to bypass  the plaque in July of 2006.

After the diagnosis in May, I was put onto a series of statins (Zocor, Crestor, Lipidil), and I've been on them until today.

After a doctor visit this morning though, he and I have decided to experiment with this (it's now day 45 of no grains, no legumes and very limited dairy). Since I have blood-work on a spreadsheet back 15 years, we'll take a new baseline asap, and another one in 90 days. The statin is dropped as of today.

What I'm hoping to see are three things:

1. My general blood profile will change - hopefully for the better. TC may go up, and LDL may go up as well, but the much more important HDL will raise, and Triglycerides will remain low. Apparently getting LDL Particle Size (a very important measure) is hard to do here in BC, and isn't ordered.
2. Blood glucose levels will be very low. Since there's not a lot of sugar or refined carbs in the diet, this should be a no-brainer.
3. Internal inflammation marker (CRP or C-Reactive Protein) will be very low as well. See the article below for my fascination with inflammation.

This inflammation is coming from an unexpected source - the grains in our diet. We've only been consuming them in a relatively unprocessed form for maybe 10,000 years. In a processed form, for about 100. This, in the evolutionary time-scale, is very, very new. Our bodies don't know how to process it.

Take a look at this article from Dr. Dwight Lundell, a heart surgeon for the last 25 years (entire article):

"The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.  

It Is Not Working!  

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.

The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.  

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before. 

Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year. 

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped....

...What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods. 

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now."

So this is what it's all about.

Explanations for what has happened to me (open heart surgery in 2006, followed by a stroke in 2009 - not to mention the TIA in 2008 and the "labyrinthitis" in 2007) are incredulous. Doctors finally came to the conclusion "it's gotta be genetic". That's what they say when they really mean "I haven't got a clue".

Nope - I say the more obvious answer is what I've been eating for the last 16 years.

The next task I have, in addition to monitoring blood levels moving forward, is to see if I can dredge up some old blood-work that I must have had done prior to turning vegetarian in 1996. We'll see what I can find......

 

A More Rational Approach - Paleo 2.0/Archevore

It's now Day 38 on the whole Paleo Diet experiment.

I've made an appointment with my doctor for next Monday to get some bloodwork done - and this will be interesting because my Crestor prescription runs out this Saturday. I had intended to ask him about going off the statin (Crestor) for the blood tests to see how my bloodwork does without this drug in my system. I guess I won't have to ask him, I'll tell him. Crestor is supposed to have a half life of about 19 hours in the body, so if I go for 3-4 days without it, it should give me a fair representation of the trend.

In all I've read, the general consensus is that it may take 6 months of the no-sugar-no-grain diet for your bloodwork to reach some kind of new stability.
I've been warned that:

• Total Cholesterol will likely rise - but it's been shown not to matter unless it's a huge number
• LDL Cholesterol will likely rise - the fat in the diet will cause it to go up - but again this number is not important
• VLDL (Very Low Density LDL) will be a small number - this is the deadly stuff - the stuff that gets into your arteries and causes plaques - low is good
• Triglycerides will go down - although mine were already low
• HDL will go up - this has been the problem for me - I could never raise it about 0.9mmol/L without niacin and a statin - I plan to remain on the niacin unless there is a good reason to go off
• CRP (C-Reactive Protein) is an inflammation marker in the blood - and this number has traditionally been good as well, although the statin probably had something to do with that - it should be low

Today, modern science has determined that statins in general both reduce cholesterol (lower total cholesterol, lower LDL, sometimes raise slightly HDL, and lower triglycerides) and reduce internal inflammation. The cholesterol reduction now seems to be a "chimera", but it's the inflammation reduction that produces the reduction in mortality.

This inflammation is quite likely caused by excess carbohydrate consumption in the form of sugars and grains. It all fits with my situation.

Years of eating little/no meat, compensated with an excess consumption of "good carbs" (whole wheat everything) led to chronic inflammation in my arteries. Which led to both the bypass surgery and the stroke.

Slightly Relaxing the Diet

I've read more about this topic than I did before making the vegetarian choice sixteen years ago. And I've been sure to look for "anti-paleo" arguments along the way.

As with any diet/fad/lifestyle, there are zeolots that require you to stick to a rigid formula. I'm not a big fan of zeolots, regardless of who they are, so I happened upon Dr. Kurt Harris who has taken the Paleo idea and turned it into something achievable for most of us - he calls it Archevore or Paleo 2.0. The basic guidelines are as follows - they become less important as you go down the list, so if you can hit the top few, you're doing well:

1. Get plenty of sleep and deal with any non-food addictions
2. Eliminate sugar and all caloric drinks
3. Eliminate gluten grains and all wheat flour
4. Eliminate grain and seed-derived oils (soy, canola, etc)
5. 2 or 3 meals a day is best - no snacking
6. Eat whole foods from animals (grass-fed ruminants, eggs, fish, seafood)
7. Get lots of vitamin D - supplement if necessary
8. Eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruit - easy on the fruit
9. Get regular exercise

This all seems far more reasonable and achievable, and is likely a program anyone could follow.
My diet program typically looks as simple as this:

• Breakfast - smoothie with coconut milk, eggs, banana, flax seed, vanilla and berries - and a couple of cups of coffee
• Lunch - big spinach salad with tomato, cucumber, onion, soft cheese, 1/2 can of tuna, olive oil and balsamic
• Dinner - a piece of chicken/fish, sweet potato, brocolli
• Dessert - Greek yogurt with berries, 1/3 dark chocolate bar (>85%), apple, hard cheese

It's all very tasty, and I'm eating many fewer times/day than I was as a vegetarian (I was always hungry). The longer this continues, the easier it seems to get.

I'll update the blood numbers as I get them (in a couple of weeks).

Doug 3.2

After some consideration, and following the "theme" of my own blog, I'm renaming it Doug 3.2.
Here's the chronology:

• Doug 1.0 - most of my life, up until I was 36 years old (1996)
• Doug 1.1 - turned vegetarian for health reasons (turned out to be negative health reasons)
• Doug 2.0 - had heart bypass surgery to bypass some plaque buildup on my LAD artery
• Doug 3.0 - suffered a stroke on October 5, 2009
• Doug 3.1 - suffered another stroke and lost my voice sometime within 10 days of Oct 5
• Doug 3.2 - investigated further and have determined that my vegetarian (grain-centric) diet was responsible for Doug 2.0 thru Doug 3.1, so Doug 3.2 is my plan to address all that

So what do you think? I'm not sure any of us was born to live 3.2 separate lives, but it appears that I was.

Three Tips on Living Longer

Dr. David Agus is the author of "The End of Illness".

He's a world famous cancer doctor and researcher who's now on the promotion tour for his book. If you look for his name in pop-culture, or in just about any magazine you pick up, he's there.

I haven't read the book, as I gleaned most everything he has to say for free on the web (I read several Amazon reviews that said "don't bother - you can get all this information for free on the internet).

Whether you agree with him or believe he's just the next "health pop star", his philosophy is worth a quick look. It breaks down into three very easy-to-understand rules:

1. Regularity. Be "regular" in all things that you do. Go to bed at the same time. Wake up at the same time. Eat at the same times. In his opinion, our bodies thrive on regularity. And I've researched this for many posts I've made on BuildBetterSleep.com (the regularity of sleep habits build a pattern in your brain). Although the Paleo-health movement would argue that "eat when you're hungry", and perform "intermittent fasts" is contrary to his rule, I've found that the morning-noon-dinner-snack schedule seems to be hardwired in me regardless. No matter how hard I try to only eat when I'm hungry, I'm always hungry at 7:30am, 12:30pm, 6pm and 9pm.
2. Eat Real Food. This one is obvious to me. And is supported by Michael Pollan and hundreds of other researchers. There can't be anyone left out there that thinks eating processed foods is a good idea. If it comes out of a box - don't eat it. Again, the Paleo movement takes this a step further. Eat foods that our ancestors from 20,000 years ago would recognize - but with some obvious modern twists. They insist that dairy, grains, and legumes were not a part of our diet then, and have lots of reasons why they shouldn't be a part of our diet now. In my experience, this gets much easier to follow once you've lived this way for a month or more.
3. Be In Charge Of Your Own Health. This is near and dear to my thinking. You're foolish if you rely on something your friend said, or what your doctor said, about your health. You are the best judge of your own health. It's incumbent on you to research your own health - don't be lazy and trust someone else to do your homework. You will know more about you than anyone could possibly find out. Think critically, and don't be swayed by popular opinion. Going with that opinion, even if it's sponsored by the government (maybe I should say especially if it's sponsored by the government), could cause you more harm than good.

If you only remembered two of these three rules, I'd have to say that Eat Real Food and Be In Charge Of Your Own Health would be the ones with the biggest payback. They're the ones I'm following...

How to Become an "Expert"

I had a sudden realization yesterday when I was viewing a video presentation from Chris Kesser about cholesterol, the ways we measure it, what the important numbers are, and what is relative nonsense.

I listened for a while, but soon learned that Chris was an acupuncturist and an integrated medicine practitioner. I found myself discounting what he said because of his credentials.

But then I thought - what a hypocrite! Chris is doing this because he has a passion for it. And he has earned the respect of thousands by being outspoken about what he's learned. And what he's learned is how to become an expert in a field that interests him.

So that's the paradigm we're living in today.

Anyone can become an expert, or at least well-informed, about any topic that interests them if they are willing to invest a few weeks or months worth of research. You don't need a degree from MIT to know what you're talking about. You do need more than 30 minutes of Google searches.

I now consider myself well on the way to being an expert in the insomnia and sleep deprivation field, not because I wanted to, but because I found myself thrust into this confusing world. And with absolutely no information about it - I had to go find it myself. I now feel comfortable jumping in to conversations about "benzodiazapine withdrawal" and "central sleep apnea" - terms I never knew existed before.

Similarly, I thought myself relatively knowledgeable about vegetarianism when I drove down that road seventeen years ago. Too bad that most of the information that was available to me was pseudo-science, passed off as real science, by every "expert" I found.

This time around, with the low-grain/low-dairy/low-legume diet (Paleo - but I hate that term), I find myself being much more diligent in the research - looking for contrary positions on everything I read. If the contrary position doesn't stand up, it's discarded. And often it doesn't stand up. I wish there was a contrary position in 1995.

The information available to us today can be overwhelming. And often people will say (especially about diets) that information keeps changing - what's good for us one week is bad for us the next. But that's the nature of science.

If you can look at everything through skeptical lenses (skeptical being a good term - look it up), then you begin to appreciate the process. It's only when that process is "managed", as it was in the 90's, that we get into trouble.

Good thing for us that the process can't be handled anymore, unless you get everything you know from the evening news.

Viva la informacion!