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In 2011, Peaches Geldof spoke about her health issues, revealing her diet of pizza and chips had shocked doctors and dismissing claims she was anorexic.

Peaches Geldof used to eat McDonald’s, pizza and chips every day until doctors warned that her junk food diet was putting her health at risk, it emerged today.

The 25-year-old admitted before her death she had cholesterol problems in 2011 and “the heart of a 90-year-old gangster” so decided to lose weight.

Peaches Geldof laughed off claims she was anorexic and insisted her weight loss was down to cutting junk food from her diet.

Peaches Geldof used to eat McDonald's, pizza and chips every day until doctors warned that her junk food diet was putting her health at risk

Peaches Geldof used to eat McDonald’s, pizza and chips every day until doctors warned that her junk food diet was putting her health at risk

The mother-of-two said she had been living on “pizza and chips” and was told to improve her lifestyle by shocked doctors, a previously-unpublished interview has revealed.

The comments came as speculation continued to grow over the cause of Peaches Geldof’s death after an autopsy proved to be inconclusive.

Peaches Geldof was found dead at her home in Wrotham, Kent, on Monday. Police described the circumstances as “sudden and unexplained”.

It has been reported that police found no suicide note and no signs of injury or evidence of drugs. Officers using sniffer dogs carried out a thorough search of the family’s home in the days after her death.

Toxicology tests are being carried out but the results could take weeks to come through, prolonging the wait for Peaches Geldof’s family.

Friends had said she looked thin before she died, leading to speculation her weight loss may have put pressure on her heart.

Peaches Geldof had said her juice diet helped her lose 11 lbs in a month.

“I had cholesterol and the doctors said stop eating s***. So I did. If you stop eating pizza and chips you then don’t look like you used to,” she said at a film premiere in 2011.

“Do I really look that thin? Let’s be honest. How did I do it? I just stopped eating McDonald’s and f****** s*** every day.

“I used to eat s*** every single day. I used to wake up with my boyfriend and eat crap. I had the heart of a 90-year-old gangster.”

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Obese people can be physically healthy and fit and at no greater risk of heart disease or cancer than normal weight people, a new research found.

The key is being “metabolically fit”, meaning no high blood pressure, cholesterol or raised blood sugar, and exercising, according to experts.

Looking at data from over 43,000 US people they found that being overweight per se did not pose a big health risk.

The results are published in the European Heart Journal.

In the study at the University of South Carolina, more than a third of the participants were obese.

Of these 18,500, half were assessed as metabolically healthy after a physical examination and lab tests.

Obese people can be physically healthy and fit and at no greater risk of heart disease or cancer than normal weight people

Obese people can be physically healthy and fit and at no greater risk of heart disease or cancer than normal weight people

This subset of metabolically healthy obese people who did not suffer from conditions such as diabetes, high cholesterol or high blood pressure, were generally fitter and exercised more than the other obese people.

And their risk of developing or dying from cardiovascular disease or cancer was identical to people of ideal weight and was half that of “metabolically less fit” obese people.

Lead researcher Dr. Francisco Ortega, who currently works at the University of Granada in Spain, said the findings show that getting more exercise can keep you healthier, even if you still carry a bit of extra weight.

“This research highlights once again the important role of physical fitness as a health marker.”

Most of the men and women in the study came from a similar background, meaning the results may not apply to everyone. They were mostly Caucasian, well educated, and worked in executive or professional positions.

 

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John Nicholson’s book “The Meat Fix. How a lifetime of healthy eating nearly killed me!”presents author’ story of how eating meat again, after twenty-six vegetarian years, changed his life powerfully for the better, and of his quest to understand why the supposedly healthy diet he had existed on was actually damaging him.

The reformed vegan John Nicholson has gorged on all the foods his granny enjoyed… and has never felt better.

“As the kitchen filled with the smell of caramelized meat, my mouth watered in anticipation of the coming feast: a thick cut of tender steak, fried in butter and olive oil.

This was not a regular treat. In fact, for the previous 26 years I’d been a vegan, eschewing not just meat but all animal products.

My diet was an extreme version of the NHS Eat Well regime, which recommends lots of starchy foods and smaller quantities of saturated fats, cholesterol, sugar and red meat.

According to government advice, I was doing everything right – and yet my health had never been worse. My weight had crept up over the years, until in 2008 I was 14½ stone – which is a lot of blubber for someone who is 5ft 10in – and was classified as clinically obese.

I waddled around, sweating and short of breath, battling extremely high cholesterol and suffering from chronic indigestion. I was always tired and needed to take naps every afternoon. I had constant headaches and swallowed paracetamol and sucked Rennies like they were sweets.

Worst of all, I had irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which left me feeling as if I had lead weights in my gut. My belly was bloated and distended after every meal. I was, to use a technical term, knackered.”

John Nicholson’s book presents the story of how eating meat again, after twenty-six vegetarian years, changed his life powerfully for the better

John Nicholson’s book presents the story of how eating meat again, after twenty-six vegetarian years, changed his life powerfully for the better

“But that was about to change. In 2010, I decided to give up my supposedly healthy lifestyle and embrace good old-fashioned meat.

From that day on, I ate red meat four or five days a week. I gobbled the fat on chops, chicken skin and pork crackling. I feasted on everything we’re told to avoid. The effects were instant.

Twenty-four hours after eating meat again, all my IBS symptoms had gone. As the weeks and months passed, every aspect of my health improved dramatically. I became leaner, shedding body fat and becoming stronger and fitter. My headaches went away, never to return. Even my libido increased.

It felt like being young again, like coming back to life. But though I felt energized, I was also furious.

Furious with myself for sticking to the “healthy” eating advice, which was actually far from a sensible diet. But also furious with the so-called experts who have been peddling this low-fat, high-carbohydrate claptrap for so long that no one thinks to question it.

My maternal grandmother would certainly have challenged it. Like my grandfather, she was born into a poor family in East Yorkshire at the turn of the century and their eating regime was simple: meat and at least two vegetables at every meal, lots of butter and full-cream milk (they would have scorned yogurt as little more than “off” milk), bread, potatoes, cake and puddings.

Nothing would have swayed them from that lifestyle. Had a low-fat diet been suggested by a doctor, Gran would have told him to his face that it was all rubbish and that you needed fat to “keep the cold out”.

If she could have seen people buying skimmed milk today, she would have thought they had lost their minds. Getting rid of the best bit of milk? Lunacy.

Late in her life, I recall her scorning the advice on limiting the consumption of eggs because of concerns about cholesterol. On one occasion, she watched in astonishment as a celebrity TV chef made an egg-white omelette. “He’s a bloody fool, that man,” she said.

She was right to be skeptical, it turns out. For years the authorities told us cholesterol-rich foods would kill us – but we’ve since learned that is utter drivel.”

 

John Nicholson was fat and ill as a vegan

John Nicholson was fat and ill as a vegan

“While Ancel Keys, the scientist whose research in the Fifties first raised concerns about cholesterol levels, suggested that heart disease was linked to large amounts of cholesterol in the blood, he never claimed those levels were linked to the amount of cholesterol we eat.

“There’s no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood,” he said in a magazine article in 1997. “And we’ve known that all along.”

Since then, the NHS’s paranoia about cholesterol in food has been replaced by concerns about saturated fat – found in everything from butter, cheese and cream to pies, cakes and biscuits.

They suggest saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease. But this is open to debate.

France has the lowest rate of death from coronary heart disease in Europe, yet the country has the highest consumption of saturated fats.

Gran survived into her 80’s and Grandad into his 70’s, despite laboring down the pit his whole working life. Did they achieve this by gobbling low-fat spreads, soya oil or skimmed milk? No, they lived on old-fashioned foods such as butter, lard and beef fat. Indeed, a growing body of opinion suggests that the factory-made products that have replaced these staples – vegetable oils, polyunsaturated margarine and spreads – are the real cause of the degenerative diseases that are so common today.”

John Nicholson is leaner and healthier after he changed his diet as a meat eater

John Nicholson is leaner and healthier after he changed his diet as a meat eater

“Findings by the Weston A. Price Foundation, a non-profit-making research organization in America, show most cases of heart attack in the 20th century were of a hitherto little-known form known as myocardial infarction (MI) – a huge blood clot leading to the obstruction of a coronary artery.

MI was almost non-existent in the U.S. in 1910 and was causing no more than 3,000 deaths a year by 1930. However, by 1960, there were at least 500,000 MI deaths a year across the country.

It surely can’t be a coincidence that this happened as the U.S. embraced a new diet based on increasingly large portions of highly processed foods and vegetable oils?

Similar changes in the national diet took place in Britain during the early years of my life and I can’t help wondering whether my father might still be alive today if it had not been for this shift.

I grew up in the North-East during the Sixties and had no idea about “healthy eating”. Those few people who did fret about their diet were thought of as fussy.

No one thought food was a problem, unless the chip shop ran out of battered sausage on a Friday. We ate suet puddings every week, our bacon and eggs were fried in lard, milk was full-fat – I’m not sure skimmed milk even existed in the Sixties – and we ate eggs every day.

Then, in the Seventies, things changed. We got wealthier and food became cheaper. Mam began buying more cakes and confectionery instead of home-baking. We ate more shop-bought food in general.

She also stopped using lard in the chip pan, opting for Spry Crisp ’n Dry instead. Gran wasn’t pleased. She thought vegetable oil was a new-fangled fad – it was, and that was precisely why Mam liked it. She saw it as moving on, modern and fashionable.

Dad never did any exercise and drove everywhere in his newly acquired company car.

More processed food, margarine, sugar and vegetable oil, combined with days spent behind a desk and a wheel, saw him gain a sizeable belly and the apple shape so common today. In 1987, he died of a massive heart attack, aged just 65.

His diet in his later years was not one that would have appealed to Gran. She was vehemently against margarine.

“I’m not eating anything made in a factory,” she’d say. “You don’t know what they put in it.”

It was a fear shared by many of her era. Had I heeded such warnings, I would have avoided my battle with processed food, in the form of soya, the bean whose industrially produced extracts are marketed as a low-fat and exceptionally healthy source of protein.

Today, soya is everywhere. About two-thirds of all processed food in the U.S. contains some form of it. That percentage will not be much different here – you’d be amazed at how often you eat ‘hidden’ soya.

When my partner, Dawn, and I decided to become vegan during the Eighties, it was still rare in Britain. This lifestyle shift came about shortly after we’d left Newcastle Polytechnic and moved to live self-sufficiently in a rented cottage in northern Scotland.

When one of our chickens became ill, we found it terribly difficult to put it out of its misery and began to doubt whether killing – or eating – animals was for us.

We didn’t see why someone else should have to do our dirty work for us, so in January 1984 we ate our last bacon sandwiches and embarked on our dramatic lifestyle change.

At about this time, governments in the U.S. and Europe were recommending that people cut down on eating animal fats, cholesterol and red meat in favor of more starchy foods, fruit and vegetables and wholegrains.

This new healthy eating advice had much in common with the vegetarian diet. We felt we were following a golden path, especially when we discovered the apparent wonders of soya.

Only later did we discover that research by the Weston A. Price Foundation had suggested that processed soya foods are rich in chemicals called trypsin inhibitors, which disrupt protein digestion. I believe it was these that created all my problems with IBS.

Soya has also been associated with hypothyroidism, or an under-active thyroid, a condition whose symptoms include unexplained weight gain, lack of energy and depression – all problems that Dawn began to experience. These problems were exacerbated by other health problems caused by our diet.

As voracious consumers of nuts, pulses and wholegrains, our diet was very high in copper and, because of the lack of animal protein, low in zinc. Some researchers have linked this imbalance to constant feelings of fatigue, something with which Dawn and I were all too familiar.

For years, we gave the NHS every chance to find out what was wrong with us and get us well. But doctors didn’t and couldn’t – perhaps because they wouldn’t even consider that our apparently healthy diet might be the problem.

Finally, in desperation, Dawn suggested we should try eating meat again. At the same time, we cut out all vegetable oils, except olive oil, and ate lots of lard, beef dripping, butter, cream and full-fat milk.

We have also cut out starchy carbohydrates such as bread, which contains a component of starch that causes blood sugar levels to peak and trough, leading to a cycle of hunger and over-eating.

Admittedly, the absence of bread is one aspect of our new diet that might have caused Gran to ask if I had gone “soft in the head”. In her day, they needed lots of carbohydrates to fuel their physically demanding lives, but we are far more sedentary.

But I’m sure she would have approved of everything else about our new diet because her generation knew how to eat properly. That’s a skill we have forgotten, brain-washed as we are by government and medical propaganda.

It’s time we reminded ourselves of it, questioning the one-size-fits-all, “healthy” eating advice we’re spoon-fed and opting instead for wholesome, unprocessed, home-made food.”

 

Experts say that eating fried food may not be bad for the heart, as long as you use olive or sunflower oil to make it.

The specialists found no heightened risk of heart disease or premature death linked to food that had been cooked in this way.

But the investigators stress that their findings, from studying the typical Spanish diet in which these “healthy” oils are found in abundance, do not apply to lard or other cooking oils.

So, traditional fry ups should not be the order of the day, according to a bmj.com report.

When food is fried it becomes more calorific because the food absorbs the fat of the oils.

And experts know that eating lots of fat-laden food can raise blood pressure and cause high cholesterol, which are risk factors for heart disease.

Experts say that eating fried food may not be bad for the heart, as long as you use olive or sunflower oil to make it

Experts say that eating fried food may not be bad for the heart, as long as you use olive or sunflower oil to make it

For the study, the researchers at the Autonomous University of Madrid surveyed 40,757 adults about their diet.

The participants were asked about what types of food they ate in a typical week and how that food was prepared and cooked.

None of the adults had any sign of heart disease at the start of the 11-year study, but by the end of it 606 heart disease events and 1,134 deaths had occurred.

When the researchers looked at these heart events in detail, they could find no link with fried food in the diet.

This, they believe, is down to the type of oil the food is cooked in.

In an accompanying editorial, Professor Michael Leitzmann from the University of Regensburg in Germany said: “Taken together, the myth that frying food is generally bad for the heart is not supported by available evidence.

“However, this does not mean that frequent meals of fish and chips will have no health consequences.

“The study suggests that specific aspects of frying food are relevant, such as the oil used, together with other aspects of the diet.”

Mediterranean diets have long been hailed as healthy, being packed full of low-fat, high-fibre fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as fresh fish.

And numerous studies have shown a balanced diet such as this can cut the risk of illnesses like cancer and heart disease.

Victoria Taylor, a senior heart health dietitian at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Before we all reach for the frying pan, it’s important to remember that this was a study of a Mediterranean diet rather than British fish and chips. Our diet in the UK will differ from Spain, so we cannot say that this result would be the same for us too.

“Participants in this study used unsaturated fats such as olive and sunflower oil to fry their food. We currently recommend swapping saturated fats like butter, lard or palm oil for unsaturated fats as a way of keeping your cholesterol down and this study gives further cause to make that switch.

“Regardless of the cooking methods used, consuming foods with high fat content means a high calorie intake. This can lead to weight gain and obesity, which is a risk factor for heart disease. A well-balanced diet, with plenty of fruit and veg and only a small amount of high fat foods, is best for a healthy heart.”