Some people experience chronic fatigue, others bodily aches as in polymyalgia. Yet others find that their nervous system is affected, bringing on premature senility or multiple sclerosis-type symptoms, or else the immune system starts misbehaving, resulting in infections, allergies, inflammation, and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. Polymyalgia, being an inflammatory condition, usually responds to antioxidant supplementation and liver detoxification. The conventional treatment is the drug prednisolone.
The drug dilemma. Many conventional medical drugs (such as painkillers or anti-inflammatory drugs) suppress the body’s normal responses to underlying contributors. They act like toxins in the body and can contribute to decline in health and/or dependence. Then you need another drug to counteract the symptoms! It’s a downward spiral.
Avoiding the drug cycle
Most people in this scenario end up on the drug cycle, perhaps starting with painkillers or steroids, then moving on to antibiotics when infections set in. The drugs treat the symptom but not the cause—in fact they usually aggravate the cause by irritating the gut and making the intestinal wall more leaky, which is what nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and antibiotics do. This means that more garbage gets into the body, further overloading detoxification pathways. Many drugs, such as acetaminophen, are toxins in their own right and severely tax the liver. The result is ever-increasing overload on body systems, leading to more serious diseases and infections.
Preventing dementia and Alzheimer’s
It is very likely that age-related memory decline and Alzheimer’s disease are the net consequences of inflammation and overstretching the body’s ability to detoxify. This is good news because it means that Alzheimer’s disease should be preventable and possibly even reversible in the early stages.19
Alzheimer’s disease and dementia have similar causes and associated risk factors to other common degenerative disease, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes, both of which are largely preventable by optimum nutrition. The central mechanism for degeneration of brain cells is inflammation and oxidation. Increased intake of antioxidant vitamins E and C, and omega-3 fats EPA and DHA, reduces risk. Lowering levels of the stress hormone cortisol and homocysteine levels, the latter by improving folate and vitamin B12 and B6 intake, also decreases risk. Reducing excessive exposure to aluminum, mercury, and copper, which exacerbate oxidation, may also reduce risk.
Once brain-cell degeneration occurs, levels of the brain’s memory molecule, acetylcholine, start to decline. In addition, there is growing evidence that precursor nutrients phosphatidyl choline, phosphatidyl serine, and DMAE may also improve cognitive function, possibly by helping brain-cell generation or by helping to make more acetylcholine.
A combined dietary and lifestyle approach, together with nutrient supplementation, offers an effective strategy for prevention and early-stage reversal of age-related cognitive decline. If you’d like to know more about this approach, read my book
How toxicity occurs and detoxify the body.
Treat the cause and not the symptom
The way out is to treat the cause and not the symptom, as well as ensure optimum brain nutrition including the smart nutrients discussed in chapter 28, which help maximize memory.
A combination of poor diet, alcohol, drugs, and infections often leads to problems in later life. Thanks to recent biochemical advances, simple urine tests can now reveal whether the sensitive balance of beneficial bacteria in the gut has been disrupted (known as dysbiosis), to what extent the gut wall has become permeable (this is a primary underlying cause of toxic overload), and exactly which pathways in the liver are overloaded. Each pathway depends on a sequence of enzymes, themselves dependent on nutrients. A nutrition consultant can devise a specific diet and supplement program using specific vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids designed to decrease the toxic load on the body and restore the body’s detoxification potential. The results are often spectacular.
This is especially important since it is often decreased liver detoxification potential, exacerbated by poor nutrient status and exposure to oxidants and other antinutrients, that leads to the system failure called death.
I believe that fully healthy humans, like the salmon, should have enough reserves to make it to the end of their lives without a debilitating loss of either mental or physical function and to experience finally a fairly rapid and painless system shutdown. What happens next is the ultimate adventure. I am intrigued about the growing evidence suggesting that the pineal gland releases a neurotransmitter-like substance, dimethyltryptamine, that, if injected, often produces profound experiences that exactly parallel the now thousands of well-reported near-death experiences.20 However, discussing whether or not there is life after death is not the purpose of this book. Here, I am more concerned with whether or not there is life before death!
PART 6 Your Personal Nutrition Program
43 Working Out Your Optimum Nutrition
44 Your Optimum Diet
45 Your Optimum Supplement Program
46 Everything You Need to Know about Supplements
47 Building Your Own Supplement Program
48 Choosing the Best Supplements
49 Vitamins and Minerals—How Much Is Safe?
43
Working Out Your Optimum Nutrition
How healthy do you want to be? If you want to realize your full potential, mentally and physically, finding out your optimum nutritional requirements is essential. But if your needs are unique, how do you find these out? Since 1980, I have been developing and refining a precise system for analyzing people’s nutrient needs, based on assessing the major factors that influence individual requirements. This system has been tried and tested on over one hundred thousand people and is now used by nutritional therapists all over the world.
Hundreds of thousands of people have benefited from this system, so I know what sorts of results to expect. They include:
Greater mental alertness
Improved memory
More physical energy
Better weight control
Reduced cholesterol levels
Reversal of disease
If you’d like to hear in their own words how people’s health has changed as a result of their working out and following their own personal health program using this system, visit my website www.patrickholford.com.
Although many people with diagnosed illnesses have been helped while on a personal health program, such a program is not designed to treat illness so much as to prevent it. If you suffer from a recognized medical condition, please check that this program is compatible with any treatment you may already be receiving.
Chapters 44 and 45 present a simplified version of the system, based on the Optimum Nutrition Questionnaire. A more comprehensive way to work out exactly what you need is available on www.patrickholford.com using the My Nutrition online questionnaire (see Resources). This works out how healthy you are right now and what you need to change, with specific diet and supplement recommendations, to achieve 100 percent health. It provides a useful assessment of what you need for optimum health and is a great place to start. I recommend it for everyone. It is not, however, the same as having a personal assessment of your nutritional needs carried out by a nutritional therapist. This is, of course, highly preferable and essential for anyone who is currently unwell or suffering from a diagnosed disease. Nutritional therapists can also run the necessary biochemical tests to help you get well. Details of how to find a qualified nutrition consultant are given in the Resources section.
Factors that affect your nutritional needs
At least eight factors affect your optimum nutritional requirements. Age, sex, and amount of exercise are easily covered. But the effects of pollution, stress, your past health history, your genetic legacy, and, of course, the nutrients (and antinutrients) supplied in your diet are not so straightforward to work out. But all these details and more must be taken into account. There are fo
ur basic ways to go about it:
Diet analysis
Biochemical analysis
Symptom analysis
Lifestyle analysis
Diet analysis
This may seem the obvious place to start: finding out what goes in should reveal what is missing. But, unfortunately, a breakdown of foods eaten over, say, a week, cannot take into account the variations in nutrient content in the food, your individual needs, or how well a nutrient is used when, and if, it is absorbed. I have seen many people who had superficially “perfect” diets, but still showed signs of vitamin deficiency. For a high proportion of them, the problem was poor absorption. These variables make some diet analyses carried out on a computer less helpful than might be expected.
Where diet analysis comes in useful is in assessing foods that are known to affect our nutrient needs, such as sugar, salt, coffee, tea, alcohol, food additives, and preservatives. Other factors, such as intake of fats, carbohydrates, protein, and calories, can also be determined from an analysis of your diet.
Biochemical analysis
Tests such as hair mineral analysis or vitamin blood tests give indisputable information about your biochemical status and help a nutrition consultant to know the actual nutritional state of your body. But not all these tests provide useful information to help you build up your nutrition program. To be accurate, any vitamin or mineral test must reflect the ability of the nutrient to function in the body. For example, iron is a vital constituent of red blood cells; it helps carry oxygen throughout the body. By measuring the iron status in your cells, it is possible to get a good measure of your iron needs.
On the other hand, vitamin B6 has no similar direct function to perform in the blood—it is used in other chemical reactions, for example, the production of the brain chemical serotonin or in methylation reactions, hence lowering homocysteine levels. Therefore, simply measuring vitamin B6 in the blood doesn’t really tell you if you’ve got enough for your B6 enzymes to work properly. Testing something like your homocysteine level is much more useful. If you’ve got enough vitamins B6, B12, and folic acid, then your homocysteine level will be low. If it’s high, you know you need more of one or more of these nutrients. We call this a “functional” test because it actually measures whether a particular aspect of your body’s biochemistry is functioning properly.
Because each nutrient has a different function in the body, we cannot say that blood tests are better than urine tests or that analysis of mineral levels in the hair provides more accurate information than blood levels. For each nutrient there are different tests, depending on what we want to find out. For instance, for zinc deficiency there are over a dozen tests that involve blood, urine, hair, sweat, and even taste.
To make an extensive series of tests would be expensive. My best three value-for-money tests are homocysteine tests, food-intolerance tests, and hair mineral analysis, which reveals a person’s mineral status. From a small sample of hair the levels of calcium, magnesium, zinc, chromium, selenium, and manganese can be discovered, although the results need careful interpretation. Hair mineral analysis also provides useful information about lead, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum, and copper, all of which are toxic in excess. Hair mineral analysis can sometimes pinpoint problems of absorption or reasons for high blood pressure or frequent infections.
Homocysteine is also good for measuring your B vitamin status. If you have a high score and follow my recommendations for supplementing B vitamins and the homocysteine-lowering diet guidelines in chapter 16, it normally takes eight weeks to bring your homocysteine level to normal. Valda, aged seventy-three, is a case in point. She had had high blood pressure for thirty years, as well as arthritis. Her homocysteine level was very high, at 42.9. The optimal level is below 6. She followed my recommendations and within eight weeks her homocysteine had dropped by 88 percent, to 5.1, and her blood pressure had become virtually normal, at 130/80. Her arthritis had improved and she felt much better in general.
There are also good tests for measuring your antioxidant status, one of which is glutathione peroxidase. For example, I ran this inexpensive blood test on two volunteers in “average” health, then put one, Janette, on a UK RDA-based multivitamin and gave the other, Leone, what I take daily, which is a pack of two multivitamin and mineral tablets, 2 grams of vitamin C, and an essential fat supplement. Janette’s initial glutathione peroxidase score was 59. The “normal” range is 65 to 90, although it’s better to be closer to 90. After a month, her score rose by 10 points to 69, at the low end of the normal range, which is okay, but not ideal. She said she didn’t feel any different. Leone started off with a score of 64; after a month of supplementation, her score rose by 22 points to 86, which is just about optimum. She said, “I didn’t feel as tired as usual. And while everyone in the office went down with flu, I was fine. My skin also seemed to positively glow.”
These are the kinds of tests a nutritional therapist might want to run to work out your optimum diet and supplement program.
Symptom analysis
Deficiency symptom analysis is the most underestimated method of working out nutritional needs. It is based on over two hundred signs and symptoms that have been found in cases of slight vitamin or mineral deficiency. For example, mouth ulcers are associated with vitamin A deficiency, muscle cramps with magnesium deficiency. For many of these symptoms, the mechanism is understood. Magnesium, for instance, is required for muscles to relax. Symptoms such as these can be early warning signs of deficiency that show us that our bodies are not working perfectly. However, while deficiency in vitamins C, B3, or B5 would all result in reduced energy because they are involved in energy production, being low in energy does not necessarily mean that you are deficient. Perhaps you are just working too hard or sleeping poorly. If, however, you have a cluster of symptoms, all associated with vitamin B3 deficiency, you are much more likely to be in need of more vitamin B3 to reach optimum health.
The advantage of deficiency symptom analysis is that health is being measured directly. Results are not dependent on whether you eat oranges that are high in vitamin C, or on whether you absorb and utilize food well, as dietary analysis is. Some people have criticized this method because it relies on subjective information from the person concerned—yet the large majority of medical diagnoses are based on subjective information from the patient. If you want to find out how someone feels, isn’t it obvious to ask? I always ask my clients why they think they are ill. More often than not they are right.
Lifestyle analysis
These three methods of analysis, if properly applied, should define what you need right now to be optimally nourished, but it is good to check that your needs for your particular lifestyle are adequately covered. For example, if you smoke and drink alcohol frequently, your nutritional needs will be higher than if you don’t. If you are pregnant, live in a city, have a high-stress occupation, or suffer from allergies, your ideal needs may be affected.
Lifestyle analysis is the fourth piece of the jigsaw puzzle that helps a nutritionist know what you need. The next two chapters tell you how to analyze your diet, your symptoms of deficiency, and your lifestyle in order to work out your own personal health program.
44
Your Optimum Diet
Before foods can give us vitality, hundreds of chemical reactions must take place, involving twenty-eight vitamins and minerals. These micronutrients are the real keys that unlock the potential energy in our food.
Your vitality depends upon a careful balance of at least fifty nutrients. They include sources of energy, measured in calories, which may come from carbohydrates, fats, or proteins; thirteen known vitamins; fifteen minerals; twenty-four amino acids (which we get when proteins are digested); and two essential fatty acids. Even though the requirement for some minerals, like selenium, is less than a millionth of our requirement for protein, it is no less important. In fact, one-third of all chemical reactions in our bodies are dependent on tiny quantities of minerals and even
more on vitamins. Without just one of any of these nutrients, vitality, energy, and ideal weight are just not possible.
Fortunately, deficiency in protein, fat, or carbohydrate is very rare. Unfortunately, deficiency in vitamins, minerals, and essential fats is not, despite popular belief. Many nutritionists believe that as few as one in ten people receives sufficient vitamins, minerals, and essential fats from their diet for optimum health.
As much as two-thirds of the average calorie intake consists of fat, sugar, and refined flour. The calories in sugar are called “empty” because they provide no nutrients, and those are often hidden in processed foods and snacks. If a quarter of your diet by weight, and two-thirds by calories, consists of such dismembered foods, there is little room left to get the levels you need of all the essential nutrients.
The New Optimum Nutrition Bible Page 40