Author: Whitaker's Natural Market

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Antibiotics Increase Rheumatoid Arthritis Risk

Some physicians are still very quick to hand out prescriptions for antibiotics when a patient comes to the office for a sick visit—even for things like the flu which are unaffected by antibiotics. But if worries about the overuse of antibiotics leading to virtually untreatable super germs aren’t enough, we now have another reason to politely decline the prescription. That’s because new research shows that antibiotic use might mess with our gut bacteria to the extent that we develop rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

The study, which took place at the Quadram Institute in Norwich, United Kingdom, found that taking antibiotics is associated with a higher risk of rheumatoid arthritis over time. These findings are based on an investigation that included records from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink on nearly 23,000 individuals with RA and more than 90,000 people without the condition. All the subjects’ medical histories were analyzed for an average of 10 years before they were diagnosed with RA.

A strong correlation was discovered between antibiotic use and the development of RA. Overall, those who used antibiotics during the 10-year period evaluated had a 60 percent higher risk of RA. The chances increased in-step with the frequency of antibiotic use. Those who took one course of the drugs had a 40 percent higher risk; those who took two courses had a 66 percent higher risk, and those who took more had even higher risks. Timing was also a factor, with an 80 percent chance of developing RA linked to antibiotic use in the prior two years. However, even after five to 10 years, the risk still remained elevated by 48 percent.

How Do Antibiotics Contribute to RA?
Antibiotics were created to kill bacteria, but they do so indiscriminately. So, while these drugs may destroy the bacteria that are causing an infection in your body, they also kill off the beneficial bacteria that live in the gut. And keep in mind that antibiotic use affects not only the quantity of bacteria but the strains present as well, negatively impacting the diversity and delicate ecosystem within us.

The problem is that we need flourishing populations of good bacteria in our gut to be healthy. Beneficial bacteria in your gut are responsible for 60-70% of your immune function. Without those bacteria, the immune system is affected, and we may develop inflammation. Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disorder that typically arises after something triggers the immune system to react and attack the body instead of harmful invaders. What’s more, a hallmark of RA is inflammation in the joints, which may be much more prevalent in people who have intestinal flora that is less diverse or composed more highly of certain bacterial strains.

Ways to Get Your Gut Microbiome Healthier Once Again
If you have already developed RA, you cannot reverse that, but you can help prevent the damage from becoming worse. And if you don’t have RA, you can take care of yourself to prevent this and other chronic conditions. While we obviously can’t do anything about any antibiotics we’ve taken in the past, moving forward it is important to avoid these drugs unless they are absolutely necessary. And if you do require a course of antibiotics, make sure you immediately follow those antibiotics by supplementing with probiotics to replenish the colonies of beneficial bacteria in your intestinal tract.

In addition to taking regular probiotic supplements, which are safe to use every day whether you are feeling healthy or sick, you can also boost your gut health by focusing on certain foods that contain probiotics. Fermented foods are a great source of natural probiotics: so include kefir, sauerkraut, yogurt, and kombucha in your diet. Enrich your meals with high-fiber foods that provide prebiotics which benefit good bacteria in your digestive system such as asparagus, bananas, garlic, and onion. And finally, avoid sugar and artificial sweeteners, as both have been shown to be harmful to intestinal flora.

Be sure to check out all our probiotic options along with our fermented foods selection on your next visit to Whitaker’s Natural Market.

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Multitasking Kills Memory

Is Multitasking a New Phenomenon?
Multitasking means doing more than one thing at a time. Author Greg McKeown notes, in his book Essentialism, that prior to the 20th Century, the word “priority” had no plural form in English. A priority was the one thing you focused on, period. But in the 1900s, as people were faced with more choices and industrialization made us more mobile, we found we had more than one “priority” at a time and had to rank order, and so the word “prioritize” came into the language.

It’s noteworthy that UCLA Professor Monica Smith contends, in her book A Prehistory of Ordinary People, that our ancestors multitasked, but she’s talking about things like picking fruit while watching out for attacking animals. Most would argue that the mental demands of modern-day multitasking—talking on the phone while cruising E-Bay, for instance—are of a different order.

Prevalence of Extreme Multitasking
Since the advent of portable devices and personal computers, multitasking has taken on new meaning. In the mid Twentieth Century, multitasking meant things like washing the dishes while watching As The World Turns. But now, according to Dr. Clifford Nass of Stanford University, “The top 25 percent of Stanford students are using four or more media at one time whenever they’re using media. So, when they’re writing a paper on their computer, they’re also Facebooking, listening to music, texting, Twittering, etcetera.” The difference isn’t merely in the number of activities they’re involved in at one time but also in the type of attention required. Washing dishes can be done without much mental concentration, but texting, Facebooking, reading Twitter messages—these things require left-brained focus.

Dr. Anthony Wagner of Stanford University, a leading researcher in the field of multitasking and memory, explains that we aren’t actually capable of true multitasking, but rather, we “task switch.” Those who “multitask” might watch a TV show but check their phone during a commercial. In contrast, a heavy multitasker might be writing a paper with the TV on, checking Facebook every five minutes, and responding to emails or texts as they come in.

A study published by the National Academy of Sciences found that youth under the age of 18 spend an average of nine hours a day using media, and 29 percent of that time, they’re using multiple media streams at once. And a 2018 study investigating the accuracy of telephone surveys determined that more than half of respondents were engaged in at least one other online activity while taking the survey.

Likewise, a 2003 study in the International Journal of Information Management reported that the average person checks email once every five minutes. Even more, after checking email, it takes a little over a minute to resume the previous task. Yet most of us disconnect from email for only two hours a day, at most.

What Multitasking Does to the Brain
When you have a task to do, your brain’s prefrontal cortex hops into action. It coordinates the left and right sides of the brain with other neurological processes to create the needed focus. When you attempt to do several tasks at the same time, the prefrontal cortex splits up the tasks between the right and left hemispheres. It takes a minute for the brain to recover enough to coordinate the two hemispheres so that complete focus can resume, as noted above in the description of what happens after checking email. Experts call this lost time the “switching cost.” Studies show that the switching cost can lead workers to lose up to 40 percent of their productivity.

Cognitive Effects of Multitasking
According to Dr. Nass, who wrote The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.”

A recent study on multitasking published in the 2018 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reviews 10 years of studies on the effects of multitasking on cognitive performance. The researchers confirmed that heavy multitaskers do indeed perform significantly worse on memory tasks as well as on attention tasks. Dr. Nass says that media multitasking actually changes the brain by training the brain to “focus on irrelevancy. [Multitaskers] just can’t keep on task.” He also says that it’s unknown if the brain that’s been trained to task switch can be trained back to have good focus because it’s too difficult to find subjects willing to give up media for a long enough time to complete clinical studies.

How to Avoid the Negative Effects of Multitasking
The easiest way to prevent brain changes caused by media multitasking is to turn on only one device at a time and shut down extra windows. Other simple changes can make a big difference, too.

Turn off all notifications, whether they ding, ping, or flash across the screen and do so on all your devices, including your phone.

Set your timer for 15 or 20 minutes and do only one thing for that entire duration.
Process your emails in batches so that you spend 20 minutes, for instance, looking at all your emails for the day and then later another 20 minutes responding. Avoid peeking between designated email sessions to check what’s come in.

If you have writing to do, go somewhere that has no internet connection—or simply turn off your internet connection while working.

If it’s possible for you, go on a media fast and take note of how you feel and whether you notice differences in your ability to concentrate.

While I can be just as guilty as anyone, I’m learning to make sure I concentrate on the important things in life – my relationship with God, my family, and my health as well as my interactions and relationships with others. Have trouble focusing?  We do have many supplements for cognitive health at Whitaker’s!

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The Truth about Cholesterol and Statin Drugs!

The chemical war against cholesterol using statin drugs has been wrongly justified through statistical deception and the ongoing cover up of over 300 adverse health effects documented in the biomedical literature.

Better safe than sorry, right? This is the logic that defines the grasp that the pharmaceutical company has on our psyche. Perhaps your mother, father, brother, and boyfriend have been recommended cholesterol-lowering medication, just to help hedge their bets around a possible chest-clutching demise. In fact, recent guidelines have expanded the pool of potential statin medication recipients, so that there are very few of us who seem to be walking around with acceptable levels of artery clogging sludge.

But how is it that drug companies got a foothold? How have they convinced doctors that their patients need these medications, and need them now? They are banking (literally) on the fact that you haven’t brushed up on statistics in a while.

It turns out that a common sleight of hand in the medical literature is the popularization of claims around “relative risk reduction” which can make an effect appear meaningful, when the “absolute risk reduction” reveals its insignificance.  In this way, 100 people are treated with statin medications to offer 1 person benefit, and the change from a 2% to a 1% heart attack rate is billed a 50% reduction rather than a 1% improvement, which is what it actually is. 

Perhaps this would still qualify as better safe than sorry if these medications weren’t some of the most toxic chemicals willfully ingested, with at least 300 adverse health effects evident in the published literature so far, with at least 28 distinct modes of toxicity, including:
Muscle damage (myotoxicity): proven by 80 studies.
Nerve damage (neurotoxicity): proven by 54 studies.
Liver damage (hepatoxocity): proven by 32 studies.
Endocrine disruption: proven by 16 studies.
Cancer-promoting: proven by 9 studies.
Diabetes-promoting: proven by 8 studies.
Cardiovascular-damaging: proven by 15 studies.
Birth defect causing (teratogenic): proven by 11 studies.

Beyond the known fact that statin drugs deplete the body of two essential nutrients: coenzyme Q10 and selenium, they are also highly myotoxic and neurotoxic. Because the heart is one of the most nerve-saturated muscles in the human body, these two modes of toxicity combined represent a ‘perfect storm’ of cardiotoxicity – a highly ironic fact considering statin drugs are promoted as having ‘life-saving’ cardioprotective properties.

A powerful expert review by Diamond and Ravnskov decimates any plausible indication for these cholesterol-lowering agents, giving full consideration to the above mentioned side effects.

They plainly state:
“Overall, our goal in this review is to explain how the war on cholesterol has been fought by advocates that have used statistical deception to create the appearance that statins are wonder drugs, when the reality is that their trivial benefit is more than offset by their adverse effects.”

The Cholesterol Meme

It’s tempting to look the number one killer of Americans in the eye, and say, “WHO did this? Who is responsible?” It is also consistent with American perceptions of health and wellness to demonize a natural and vital part of our physiology rather than look at lifestyle factors including government subsidies of inflammatory food products.

Not only is low cholesterol a problem, but it puts an individual at risk for viral infection, cancer, and mental illness because of the vital role that lipids play in cell membrane integrity, hormone production, and immunity.

A broadly toxic xenobiotic chemical, statin medications have only been demonstrated to be of slight benefit by statistical manipulation.

For example, Diamond and Raynskov elucidate that:

The JUPITER trial of Crestor vs placebo resulted in increased fatal heart attacks in the treatment group which were obscured by combing fatal and nonfatal infarctions.

In the ASCOT trial which was used to generate PR copy boasting Lipitor’s 36% reduction of heart attack risk, the figure was arrived at through use of relative risk reduction from 3 to 2%.

The HPS study has a 26% drop out rate prior to the beginning of the trial (which also demonstrated a 1% improvement with treatment), so that those with significant side effects were functionally excluded from the study.

While no study has ever shown any association between the degree of cholesterol lowering and beneficial outcomes described in terms of absolute risk reduction (likely because they would be perceived as insignificant), the adverse effects are not only always presented in these terms, but are also minimized through the technique of splitting common side effects up into multiple different categories to minimize the apparent incidence.

These side effects are real and common and include “increased rates of cancer, cataracts, diabetes, cognitive impairment, and musculoskeletal disorders”.  Their paper focuses on three primary adverse effects, all of which are likely to land you in the “sorry to have thought I would be better safe than sorry” category.

Cancer
In at least four trials, statistically significant increases in cancer incidence was found, and handily dismissed by all authors as insignificant because they claimed “no known potential biological basis” is known.  This may be because the authors are still thinking of cancer as a genetic time bomb that has nothing to do with mitochondrial dysfunction, loss of lipid integrity, or environmental exposures.

With statistically significant increases in cancer incidence and deaths, in some trials, the minimal cardiovascular benefit is far eclipsed by the cancer mortality. In one of the only long-term trials, there was a doubling of the incidence of ductal and lobular breast cancer in women taking statins for more than ten years. One of many reasons that women should never be treated with these medications.

Myopathy
As one of the more well-known side effects of statins, muscle breakdown and associated pain, or myopathy has also been obscured in the literature.  Despite an incidence up to 40% in the first months of treatment, researchers only catalogue patients who had muscular symptoms in addition to elevations in a blood measure called creatine kinase (CK) at ten times normal for two measures (not 9.9, not 8, and not one measure).

In fact, a 2006 study in the Journal of Pathology found that statin therapy induces ultrastructural damage in skeletal muscle in patients without myalgia,” indicating that statin-associated muscle damage may be a universal, albeit mostly subclinical problem for the millions put on them.  

Central Nervous System Dysfunction
Linked to suicide in men, depression including postpartum, and cognitive dysfunction, low cholesterol is not a desirable goal for the average psychiatric patient, aka half of the American population.

It turns out that 25% of the total amount of cholesterol found in the human body is localized in the brain, most of it in the myelin sheath that coats and insulates the nerves:
 “It has been estimated that up to 70% of the brain cholesterol is associated with myelin. Because up to half of the white matter may be composed of myelin, it is unsurprising that the brain is the most cholesterol-rich organ in the body. The concentration of cholesterol in the brain, and particularly in myelin, is consistent with an essential function related to its membrane properties. “

The cell membrane, specifically, is highly vulnerable to damage by statins: 
“The cell membrane is an 8 nanometer thick pearly gate where information, nutrients, and cellular messengers are trafficked through protein gates supported of phospholipids and their polyunsaturated fatty acids. Cholesterol and saturated fat provide essential rigidity in balance with other membrane components. Without them, the membrane becomes a porous, dysfunctional swinging gate. In a self-preservational effort, cholesterol supports production of bile acids, integral to the breakdown and absorption of consumed essential dietary fats.”

By extension, behavioral and cognitive adverse effects may be the manifestation of this fat-based interference.  Diamond and Ravnskov state:

“A low serum cholesterol level has also been found to serve as a biological marker of major depression and suicidal behavior, whereas high cholesterol is protective. In a study by Davison and Kaplan, the incidence of suicidal idealization among adults with mood disorders was more than 2.5-times greater in those taking statins. Moreover, several studies have shown that low cholesterol is associated with lower cognition and Alzheimer’s disease and that high cholesterol is protective.”

A review article called Neuropsychiatric Adverse Events Associated with Statins: Epidemiology, Pathophysiology, Prevention and Management discusses the state of the literature around the intersection between mental health and cholesterol control. Despite generally dismissing a strong signal for concerning psychiatric adverse events, the article seems to conclude the following:

Severe irritability, homicidal impulses, threats, road rage, depression and violence, paranoia, alienation, and antisocial behavior; cognitive and memory impairments; sleep disturbance; and sexual dysfunction have all been reported in case series and national registries of those taking statin medications.  Sound like the laundry list of rapidly spoken side effects at the end of a drug commercial? To anyone with a history of or current psychiatric symptoms, the role of these now ubiquitous medications should be considered.

The signal for lipophilic statins – simvastatin and atorvastatin – was stronger which makes mechanistic sense since these medications penetrate the brain and brain cholesterol deficiency has been implicated in bipolar, major depression, and schizophrenia.

Of course, none of these findings nor their suppression should be surprising because there is no pharmaceutical free lunch, and because Americans are so accustomed to interfacing with human health through the lens of a one pill-one ill model. We are yanking on that spider web and expecting only one thread to pull out.  This perspective would be less disturbing if it didn’t serve as the foundation for medical practice, determined by boards such as the American College of Cardiology and The American Heart Association, the majority of whom have extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry. An industry that has paid out 19.2 billion dollars for civil and criminal charges in the last 5 years alone.

So, according to Sayer Ji, who is founder of Green Med Info, a reviewer at the International Journal of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine, Co-founder and CEO of Systome Biomed, Vice Chairman of the Board of the National Health Federation, Steering Committee Member of the Global Non-GMO Foundation, the next time you hear of a doctor recommending a cholesterol-lowering intervention, tell him you’ll take that 1% risk and spare yourself cancer, cognitive dysfunction, myopathy, and diabetes. And then go have a 3 egg omelet WITH the yolks.

Still concerned about cholesterol?  Then check out our Cholesterol Support by Wiley’s Finest which features fish oil and Plant Sterol Esters to naturally balance your cholesterol levels without all the harmful side effects of statins.