Dr Jocelin’s Weekly Health Tip is on the importance of ongoing learning and one of Dr Jocelin’s favorite ways to do so.
Tag: Study
Vitamin C shown to improve blood sugar levels and reduce blood pressure in patients with type 2 diabetes
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that fully one third of the American population is prediabetic, with elevated blood sugar (glucose) levels that can – if untreated – lead to full-blown type 2 diabetes. Diabetes, which currently affects over 30 million Americans, causes the risk of heart disease to skyrocket – and can feature serious complications such as nerve damage, kidney disease, and retinal damage.
Now, a brand-new Australian study shows that vitamin C can lower elevated blood glucose in type 2 diabetics, helping to control dangerous after-meal surges and “spikes.”
The misunderstood health benefits of vitamin C
Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, is a potent natural antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and immune system booster. Thankfully, a handful of forward-thinking doctors – early vitamin C pioneers such as Dr. Frederick Klenner, Linus Pauling, Dr. Mathias Rath, and Thomas E. Levy, MD, JD – have long spoken out about the ability of vitamin C to treat, and even reverse, a host of serious conditions.
In the 1940s, Dr. Klenner reported curing a variety of diseases, including polio and hepatitis, with high-dose vitamin C – while in the present day, Dr. Paul Marik, Professor of Medicine of Eastern Virginia Medical School, administers a vitamin C protocol that drastically improves survival rates for patients suffering from sepsis, a life-threatening systemic infection.
But the therapeutic value of this non-toxic, inexpensive natural nutrient has been consistently downplayed by the medical powers-that-be. Time and again, the mainstream medical community seems to have greeted even the most impressive vitamin C studies with indifference, suspicion, and even scorn.
Fortunately, well-designed scientific studies on vitamin C’s benefit are accumulating – as manifested by this latest study, conducted by an international team of researchers and published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
Study: Vitamin C can reduce blood sugar spikes by a substantial 36 percent
In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study published in 2019 in Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism, adult participants with type 2 diabetes were randomly divided into two groups. One group took 1,000 mg of ascorbic acid in divided doses every day for four months, while the other group received a placebo.
Participants were given standardized meals, and their glucose levels were monitored continuously for 48 hours. The results were clear-cut.
The vitamin C group experienced significantly lower after-meal blood sugar levels – reducing by roughly three hours the time spent every day in hyperglycemia – a state of elevated blood glucose.
Why is this important?
Research has shown that blood sugar “spikes” damage cells in multiple ways, and are linked to heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, peripheral neuropathy, kidney failure, cognitive dysfunction, and retinal damage.
Clearly, the less time spent in hyperglycemia – the better. However, better glucose control wasn’t the only benefit for the participants in the vitamin C group.
The ascorbic acid also lowered elevated blood pressure – a primary risk factor for heart disease.
The team reported that participants’ blood pressure readings dropped by an average of 7 mmHg in the systolic number (which measures the pressure exerted by heartbeats) and by 5 mmHg in the diastolic (which measures the pressure in between beats).
Incidentally, the vitamin C group also experienced a significant lessening of disease-promoting oxidative stress. The researchers concluded that the study provided evidence for use of vitamin C as an adjunct therapy to improve control of blood sugar and blood pressure in people with type 2 diabetes.
In one study, which was published in Journal of the American College of Nutrition, researchers evaluated the daily vitamin C intake of 108 men. They found that men in the group with the highest levels of vitamin C intake had a 66 percent less chance of developing coronary heart disease – the number one killer in the United States – than men in the lowest-intake group. In other words, men who consumed higher levels of vitamin C were two-thirds more likely to avoid developing heart disease.
Researchers believe that this beneficial effect is due to vitamin C’s ability to prevent and alleviate endothelial dysfunction – the stiffening of arterial walls that interferes with the healthy flow of oxygen-rich blood.
And, in a 2003 observational study conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School and published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 85,000 female nurses were followed for 16 years. Women who took supplemental vitamin C reduced their risk of heart disease by a hefty 28 percent.
Researchers credit vitamin C with improving electrical conduction throughout the heart muscle, reducing inflammation, and decreasing clotting factors – which contribute to stroke risk. Vitamin C also appears to help protect against two other heart problems: atrial fibrillation – a type of irregular heartbeat – and dilated cardiomyopathy, a harmful enlargement and weakening of the heart.
How much vitamin C do I need a day?
According to natural health experts, the current vitamin C RDAs advised by the Office of Dietary Supplements are good for a laugh – and not much else.
Vitamin C proponents note that the ODS recommendations – a paltry 75 to 90 mg of vitamin C a day – are enough to prevent the severe form of vitamin C deficiency known as scurvy, but not enough to maintain optimal health or combat disease.
Knowledgeable integrative and functional doctors usually advise taking anywhere from 1,000 to 6,000 mg of vitamin C a day, in divided doses – with even higher levels recommended for serious chronic conditions.
As the studies suggest, daily supplementation with inexpensive, non-toxic vitamin C can provide major protective dividends to the heart – while helping to regulate blood sugar levels. Clearly, having optimal levels of this essential micronutrient is a “win/win” scenario.
Be sure to check out our vast selection of Vitamin C supplements at Whitaker’s Natural Market on your next visit!
New Insights on Gut Permeability and Depression
If you know what depression feels like – the brain clouding, the flat moods, the tiredness – you’re not alone. Over 300 million people around the world have depression, and yet there’s a lot that we still don’t quite understand.
Thankfully, the medical field is developing some new insights that just might help us understand depression better. In a new 2019 study, researchers decided to examine the potential mechanisms of major depressive disorder in teenage girls and found some evidence that could help us better understand exactly how gut permeability (leaky gut) can lead to inflammation, which in turn, leads to depression.
In this 2019 study, Baylor College of Medicine researchers are directly looking at gut permeability and major depressive disorder, a study that is the first of its kind. With a sample of forty-one 14-17 year-old teenage girls who were medically healthy, the study measured the severity of the girls’ depressive symptoms, the activity of the autonomic nervous system, intestinal permeability, or gut leakiness, and the number of inflammatory cytokines.
To measure whether the girls were depressed, an interviewer performed the Children’s Depression Rating Scale-Revised (CDRS-R) and a clinical interview. The CDRS-R is a rating scale that requires interviews of both child and parent to understand the severity of a child’s depression. Over the past few decades, the CDRS-R has become the most widely used rating scale for assessing severity and change in depression for clinical trials involving children and adolescents. In order to collect data on the autonomic nervous system activity, researchers measured pre-ejection period (PEP) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) data, which are indicators for the activity levels of the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system respectively. They measured the leakiness of the gut using the lactulose-mannitol ratio (LMR), which involves having the teens first fast overnight and then ingesting a premeasured amount of lactulose and mannitol. The researchers then collected the urine for four hours after ingestion. By looking at the ratio of lactulose and mannitol that passed through the gut lining, researchers could calculate the permeability of the gut lining, or how “leaky” it was. To measure inflammation, the researchers took blood samples and measured inflammatory cytokines.
They found that in unmedicated teenage girls between the ages of 14-17, depression severity was associated with increased intestinal permeability, as measured by the lactulose to mannitol ratio. The leakier the gut, they found, the more severe the depression and depressive symptoms. They saw that the higher the concentration of the cytokine IL-1β, the more severe the depression. They also found that increased intestinal permeability may be the path between sympathetic nervous system activation and depression severity. Additionally, their evidence suggested that increased intestinal permeability may activate the innate immune system and push the development of depression.
The result of this study also helps clarify the mechanisms through which activating the sympathetic nervous system can increase gut permeability and activate the innate immune system–two things that are likely contributing to depression symptoms.
The Brain, The Gut, and the Immune System
If you’re wondering why intestinal permeability is related to depression, let’s back up and walk through the whole pipeline.
We start with the immune system. Throughout the last century, psychiatry has been exploring the role of the immune system in certain presentations of depression. Importantly, the gut houses over 70% of our immune system, which makes sense given that the lining of your gut is the barrier between your insides and the outside world. The gastrointestinal epithelium usually forms a single-cell-thick barrier that prevents the free movement of toxicants, microbes, and microbial antigens from entering into the rest of your body. This lining usually does a good job absorbing things we need (like food) and interfacing with foreign things that might wreak havoc–which is probably why most of our immune cells are located in the gut. The relationship between the gut and the brain is both complex and important. We’ve all felt the butterflies in our stomachs when we’re nervous or anxious, but it turns out that the relationship between the brain and the gut is actually bidirectional. Not only can our brains affect how our guts feel, but our gut can relay its state of calm or alarm to the nervous system and send those immune reactions up the vagus nerve to the brain.
To understand how the gut and depression are related, we should first better comprehend the triggers for inflammation, what inflammation is, and how it happens.
Stress Drives Inflammation
So what IS inflammation in the first place? Inflammation is the body’s defensive response to stresses, like injury or the ingestion of bodily-incompatible chemicals. Upon approaching a stressor, the immune system kicks into a higher gear to heal the body.
Stress is a catch-all term, a trigger that links hormones to inflammation. Essentially, when the body thinks something is wrong, the body releases hormones that tell the body to be on the lookout and get on defense, and inflammation occurs. These triggers can come in all forms, many of which are actually staples of modern American life, from sugar to stress to pesticides and pollution to anxiety to beyond. Whether psychological or physiological, stress drives the inflammation response by telling the brain to release cortisol, the steroid hormone that acts as nature’s built-in alarm system and makes it for our bodies to use blood sugar for energy so that we can flee from whatever is causing the stress.
Once inflammation is started, not only does inflammation cause more inflammation, but recent studies have linked low-grade inflammation to depression. When inflammation reaches the brain, cells begin to take their limited supply of tryptophan to produce more anxiety-provoking chemicals like quinolinate. Medical literature has found that inflammation seems to be a consistent marker of depressive symptoms, like flat mood, slowed thinking, avoidance, alterations in perception, and metabolic changes.
How does inflammation get provoked in the gut?
So let’s understand how exactly a leaky gut can lead to inflammation – the body’s language of imbalance.
When the body is stressed, the junctions between cells in the stomach can be less effective than they should be. This allows bacteria and toxicants to enter the bloodstream that can continue to cause widespread inflammation and possibly trigger a far-reaching reaction from the immune system. Having leaky gut cause inflammation sets off a problematic chain of events because the gut has a direct link to the brain through the vagus nerve.
The medical field has been slowly inching up on a fuller understanding of the link between intestinal permeability (“leaky gut”) and depression. Previous studies focusing on depression have found the chemical hints of leaky gut. For example, one study showed that patients with a recent suicide attempt had higher concentrations of an anti-lipopolysaccharides (LPS) antibody, meaning that the immune system had either encountered more of or reacted defensively against LPS, which is a molecule that marks microbe-associated patterns in the body. In another study, compared to healthy controls, adults with depressive or anxiety disorders, who didn’t have any symptoms of gastrointestinal disorders, still had higher concentrations of fatty acid-binding protein-2, which is produced to signify impaired intestinal epithelium integrity. These studies, and the first study we discussed in this article, suggest that intestinal permeability may be impaired in depression.
So What Do We Do?
All of this sounds kind of complicated, but really, this approach to depression-seeing it as a symptom that results in unhealthy inflammatory balance-means that we might be able to do more about it. It means that depression isn’t happening because of genetics or not enough serotonin. Instead, you’re probably experiencing low-grade inflammation that’s happening because your gut is stressed and leaky. The goal is to send your system a signal of safety – from the gut, from the mind, or by lessening perceived stressors and burdens through detox.
Interested in step-by-step support to help you optimize your health?
Be sure to talk to Dr Jocelin about her practitioner grade cleanse protocol which is amazing at detoxifying the body, how to do the Aloe-Silver Gut Reset (developed by a homeopath who reversed his Chron’s Disease), the importance of eating Organic, and the gut health supporting supplements at Whitaker’s Natural Market. She is also available for in-depth consultations.
