Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health concern, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug-resistant infections account for 2 million infections and 23,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.  The World Health Organization estimates that the threat of antimicrobial resistance will kill 50 million people per year by 2050.  Superbugs such as C. difficile (which accounts for about 15,000 of those deaths), CRE, Neisseria Gonorrhoeae, MRSA, Streptococcus Pneumoniae, Malaria, and MDR are some of the top superbugs that commonly fall into this category.  When antibiotics fail to work, there may be little to turn to in the medical world to prevent the downward spiral of a patient...

Bacteriophages have been around since the dawn of the planet and comprise the single most abundant life form on the planet.  There are an estimated ten million trillion trillion bacteriophages on earth.  A single drop of seawater can contain millions.  They exist in soil, water, and in excrement.  While they are harmless to humans, phages are deadly to bacteria and prevent bacteria from overrunning the planet.  Smaller than bacteria, bacteriophages have a very unusual appearance as you can see from this electron microscopic image.  The difficulty in broadening phages as a treatment protocol is the need for a host where the bacteriophage can survive long enough to see if can kill a specific bacterium.  If the phages do in fact find a specific bacterium, they insert their DNA into the bacterium and then replicate themselves so that it causes the bacteria to burst open with multiples of themselves.  The diagram below illustrates how this works....   keep reading

What color is your fat?

Losing weight isn’t easy as evidenced by the obesity epidemic in this country. Appetite suppressants, fad diets, supplements or gastric band surgery are regularly reported in the news media to achieve results. However, if that were the answer, there wouldn’t be a new fad seemingly appearing every other month as an answer to this problem. 

Scientists state that adipose tissue (fat) comes in at least three colors, white, beige and brown.  White adipose tissue (WAT) is lazy and stores energy. Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is involved in thermoregulation which creates heat and uses energy. Beige or (Brite) is a hybrid of both. What gives BAT its brown color is the mitochondria. It’s the mitochondria in the cells of the BAT that enables it to burn fuel for energy; by some estimates up to five times more calories than WAT.  BAT also has more capillaries than WAT because of its higher oxygen consumption.  Babies, as well as  animals that hibernate have a larger percentage of BAT.  For babies, about 5% of their body weight is made up of BAT, and adults are less than that. Evidently even in small amounts, BAT serves as a protective mechanism against hypothermia, which is why babies don’t shiver even after taking them out of a bath or why we sometimes hear miraculous stories of a baby surviving severe cold exposure. It was assumed that all brown fat disappears during childhood, but new findings revealed otherwise.   

The caloric vs. the endocrine debate

The consequences of excess lactic acid

Most of us at some point in our lives have done some intense anaerobic exercise like running very fast, or an exercise class and felt a burn in one or more muscles to the point where it was uncomfortable and had to stop while we gasped for air.  While the common reference to this is “excess lactic acid”, what really is occurring is a buildup of L-lactate because of the inability of our body to provide enough oxygen to convert energy inside our cells to continue exercising.  If exercise is done excessively this way, our blood pH can become acidotic where under normal circumstances it is alkaline.  Luckily, when we rest our bodies we remove L-lactate efficiently and the benefits of exercise outlast the short-term muscle soreness from the workout and there isn’t any long-term effect to our blood pH. 

However, there are two forms of lactate.  Another one is called D-lactate and it is becoming increasingly apparent that the accumulation of D-lactate is not easily removed from our body even under ideal conditions and causes development of acidosis in the blood.

What causes excess D-lactate?

1. Lack of oxygen
2. Bacterial fermentation of simple sugars such as glucose, lactose and fructose
3. Antibiotic use. It leaves the gut susceptible to opportunistic strains.  Streptococcus and Enterococcus are two strains that increase D-Lactate. 
4. Diabetic ketoacidosis from low insulin levels, (not dietary ketosis)
5. Gastric bypass surgery or short bowel syndrome, where part of the small intestine has been removed. 
6. Kidney or liver impairment. 
7. Certain medications such as metformin, antiretroviral drugs, acetaminophen, aspirin, simvastin, and propylene glycol (anti-freeze) which is commonly added to foods, drugs in small amounts.     
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Refreshing information about Dehydration and Sports Drinks

With the recent hot summer weather, it is very important that we stay hydrated because without doing so, an extremely hot day could turn into a medical emergency.  We should all be aware of the dangerous progression of symptoms listed below that occur from extreme heat and the fact that young children and the elderly are most susceptible to having problems.

Mild:  1% dehydration level:  increase in thirst

Moderate:  2% dehydration level: dizziness, dry skin, headaches, intense thirst, physical fatigue, dry mouth, swollen tongue, constipation

Severe:  5% dehydration level: fever, racing pulse, lack of sweat, sunken eyes, low blood pressure, dark colored urine, or no urine. 

Extreme: At a 7% dehydration level, intravenous fluids become necessary. 

At a 9% dehydration level or higher, delirium, loss of consciousness, or death could result. 

The British Medical Journal determined that one of the fifteen greatest medical advancements in the past century was the fact that sodium and glucose coupled together with water in the small intestine accelerates the absorption of the solution to orally hydrate and treat dehydration from severe diarrhea; the leading cause of death in children in the developing world.  The right ratio of sugar and salt added to water saved millions of lives from diseases like cholera, costing relatively little for people who didn’t have access to IV therapy. 

Summer will be here in a week and that means sun exposure and taking precautions to avoid burning our skin.  Without much thought other than what the SPF number is (sun protection factor) on the sunscreen lotion we use when we apply this to our skin, we think little of what chemicals we are applying.

It’s a confusing system, but SPF 15 blocks 93% of UVB, a SPF 30 blocks 97%, a SPF 50 blocks 98%, a SPF 100 blocks 99%, and if you get red in 20 minutes when your skin is unexposed then a SPF 15 will delay redness by 15x or for about 5 hours.  So, a SPF 100 only gives 1% greater protection than SPF 50 to UVB rays with the mistaken idea that you can stay in the sun 50x longer. What most don’t realize is that sunscreens do not block UVA which makes up 95% of ultraviolet radiation, penetrates more deeply into the skin, and causes greater damage.  But, I digress.  The real problem is what is doing the blocking, and whether it is chemical or mineral.   

New advances in cardiac risk assessments

Most people who get their annual physical nervously await the result of their cholesterol levels.  We have been conditioned by the mass media that high cholesterol is the gold standard for predicting risk for cardiovascular events such as a heart attack or a stroke.  However, most people would be surprised that50% of people who have a heart attack have normal cholesterol levels.  Conversely, there are many who have high cholesterol who live out their lives without any cardiac episode. 

Many cardiologists also use EKG’s, stress tests and angiograms to assess overall risk. These are useful, and we shouldn’t ignore the cholesterol markers either, but a coronary artery must narrow by 60% to show as a problem on a stress test and angiograms are invasive and very expensive (4,000.00).  Here are some newer techniques and tests that someone should consider if they or someone they love is concerned with their heart health or if a doctor has recommended taking a statin drug. 
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Which came first?

It is thought that wild fowl were domesticated a few thousand years ago according to Egyptian and Chinese records leading to what is now, about 200 breeds and varieties of chickens worldwide.  Not surprisingly in the past century, just like a lot of other industries, the business of egg production has turned from a mostly small farm system to a highly industrialized system that has increased production of the hens and decreased their mortality rate substantially.  There are roughly 300 million laying birds in the U.S. that produces about 75 billion eggs a year, about 10% of the world supply. 

There has been evidence that the highly industrialized process of producing eggs isn’t a healthy environment for the chicken, due to the lack exercise, exposure to fresh air, and a diet higher in a broader range of nutrients from grazing.  The result being a chicken producing an egg that might not have all the nutrients we would get from a chicken with a diet that was more “wild” and spending time outside.  In response to this information, smaller scale industrial farms are attempting to produce higher quality eggs.

When shopping you will often see multitudes of choices with catch phrases emblazoned on the packaging such as

Silver’s History

Silver has been used medicinally for more than 2000 years.  Hippocrates, the “father of medicine” wrote in his medical texts that silver had beneficial healing and anti-disease properties.  He praised silver for its tissue repair and wound healing abilities.  It is reported that Cyrus the Great, king of Persia stayed healthy by drinking only boiled water stored in silver vessels.  According to Herodotus, mule-drawn carts laden with silver urns followed King Cyrus wherever he went....
 

... The benefits of silver are immense and when using a high-quality silver such as Argentyn 23 it can be tremendously effective at preventing and even treating infections. This is important information especially during flu season.

Banana Republic

The definition of a banana republic is often depicted as a politically unstable nation usually in Central America, with an economy dependent on one crop.  There is a reason why we use the word banana to describe this reality.  Even though the banana is perhaps the world’s oldest cultivated plant, originating and being bred in Southeast Asia about 7000-10000 years ago, it wasn’t until some Spanish missionaries introduced bananas to the Americas in the early 1500’s that it began to move into fourth place of the world’s staple foods behind rice, wheat and corn.  The rapid rise in interest of bananas began in the latter part of the 19^th century when two companies United Fruit Company (later to be Chiquita) and Standard Fruit Company (later to be called Dole), began importing bananas to the United States.  As the popularity of bananas grew these companies were able to pay countries like Guatemala and Honduras money for huge tracts of land to grow bananas.  These companies generated dollar revenues that exceeded these countries gross national product and gave these small countries an economic foundation, and the companies involved political influence that neither had before.