Tom Hanks, Diabetes and YoYo Dieting

Tom Hanks has had high blood sugar levels on and off since he was 36 years old, and he was diagnosed as being diabetic in 2013 at age 57. A major cause of his diabetes was having to gain or lose large amounts of weight for films, such as Oscar-winning “Castaway” in 2000 and “A League Of Their Own” in 1992. 

He plans never again to take roles that require drastic weight change and has stated publicly, “I’ve talked to a number of actors who have gained weight for roles and — just out of the sheer physical toll on one’s knees and shoulders — no one wants to do it again.” 

Other stars who have become diabetic include Halle Berry, Paula Deen, Larry King, Nick Jonas and Sherri Sheppard. Hanks used pizza as his main food to gain weight, with huge amounts of fat from cheese and other toppings, and sugar from the flour crust.

How Gaining and Losing Weight Can Lead to Diabetes

Every time you lose weight, you lose both fat and muscle. However, when you gain weight by overeating, you gain only fat. So with every rise or drop in weight, you are fatter than you were previously.

Having excess fat in your liver causes high blood sugar levels, a condition that affects more than 50 percent of North Americans. 

You can find out if you have a fatty liver with a simple, safe and relatively inexpensive test called a liver sonogram. Your liver controls your blood sugar levels. When blood sugar levels rise, your pancreas releases insulin into your bloodstream. 

Insulin drives sugar from your bloodstream into your liver. When your blood sugar level drops too low, your liver releases sugar from its cells into the bloodstream. 

However, when you have a fatty liver, your liver cannot accept sugar from your bloodstream. Instead it releases sugar from its cells to raise blood sugar levels even higher.

What Causes a Fatty Liver?

High rises in blood sugar causes fat to be deposited in your liver. When blood sugar levels rise, your liver can use the sugar immediately for energy or store a small amount in your liver and muscles. All the remaining sugar is converted to a fat called triglycerides, a small amount is used for energy and the rest is stored in cells in your body, primarily the liver. 

As you keep on getting high rises in blood sugar, more and more fat is stored in your liver until you have so much fat in your liver that your liver stops accepting sugar from your bloodstream to cause blood sugar levels to rise very high, leading to diabetes.

When blood sugar levels rise too high, sugar can stick to the outer membranes of every type of cell in your body. There the sugar is converted by a series of chemical reactions to sorbitol which destroys the cell. This is how high blood sugar levels can cause dementia, heart attacks, arteriosclerosis, strokes, impotence, certain cancers and all of the other consequences of diabetes.

What You Can Learn from Tom Hanks
• Avoid overweight and yoyo dieting
• Eat lots of vegetables and fruits
• Avoid sugared drinks and sugar-added foods, and restrict other refined carbohydrates such as foods made from flour (bakery products, pastas)
• Avoid red meat (blocks insulin receptors).
• Avoid fried foods (contain Advanced Glycation End products that raise blood sugar levels)
• Exercise (converts sugar to energy instead of storing it in your body primarily as fat)
• Keep blood levels of hydroxy vitamin D above 75 nmol/L (low levels of vitamin D block insulin receptors)

Tom Hanks
Born July 9, 1956
Tags: diabetes
Category: Health Fitness & Nutrition

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Tom Hanks, Diabetes and YoYo Dieting:

Link: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/978963-tom-hanks-diabetes-and-yoyo-dieting/

Homeopathy is Nonsense

Why homeopathy is nonsense 

Apr 1st 2014, 23:50 BY C.H. | NEW YORK

VISIT any health shop and you are likely to see them: packages of homeopathic remedies claiming to cure whatever ails you, from coughs and fever to insomnia and asthma. 

Flip the package of medicine, however, and you may be confused by the listed ingredients. 

Some claim to contain crushed bees, stinging nettles and even arsenic, as well as sugars such as lactose and sucrose. Americans spend some $3 billion a year on homeopathic medicines. What are they thinking?

The history of homeopathy — literally, "similar suffering"—dates to the late 18th century. 

Samuel Hahnemann, a German doctor, was unimpressed by contemporary medicine, with good reason. Doctors used leeches to let blood and hot plasters to bring on blisters, which were then drained. In 1790 Hahnemann developed a fever that transformed his career. 

After swallowing powder from the bark of a cinchona tree, he saw his temperature rise. Cinchona bark contains quinine, which was already known to treat malaria. 

Hahnemann considered the facts: cinchona seemed to give him a fever; fever is a symptom of malaria; and cinchona treats malaria. 

He then made an acrobatic leap of logic: medicines bring on the same symptoms in healthy people as they cure in sick ones. Find a substance that induces an illness and it might treat that illness in another.

Hahnemann then decided that ingredients should be diluted and shaken repeatedly, a process called "potentiation". The smaller the amount of the active ingredient, the more powerful the medicine would become, he believed. 

Homeopathic remedies use various bits of terminology to convey their supposedly potency. One common designation is "NC", where C signifies that a substance is diluted by a ratio of 1:100 and N stands for the number of times the substance has been diluted. 

So a dilution of 200C would mean that one gram of a substance had been diluted within 100 grams of water, with the process repeated 200 times. At this dilution not a single molecule of the original substance remains. 

Most homeopathic pills are made entirely of sugar. However, the pills are supposed to retain a "memory" of the original substance.

This is bunk. 

Studying homeopathy is difficult, points out the world’s biggest funder of medical research, America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), because it is hard to examine the effects of a medicine when that medicine has little or no active ingredient. 

Researchers can neither confirm that the medicine contains what it claims to nor show the chemical effect of the diluted medicine within the body. 

The most comprehensive review of homeopathy was published in 2005 in the Lancet, a medical journal. Researchers compared trials of homeopathic and conventional medicines. 

In the bigger, well-designed trials, there was "no convincing evidence" that homeopathy was more effective than a placebo, they found. 

Meanwhile, in similar trials of conventional drugs, medicines showed specific clinical effects. As the NIH dryly notes: 

"several key concepts of homeopathy are inconsistent with fundamental concepts of chemistry and physics."



Dig deeper:

A homeopathic remedy is recalled—for containing medicine (March 2014)
Alternative therapies are increasingly mainstream (Dec 2012)
Why the placebo effect can occasionally be effective (May 2011)

source: The Economist ‏@EconBizFin  Dec 23

The Economist explains: Why homeopathy is nonsense http

econ.st/13WCgDE 

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New Nutrition Guidelines

OP-ED | MARK BITTMAN

How Should We Eat?

By MARK BITTMAN

Food-industry representatives hate the recommendations in a new nutrition-panel report - a good indicator of its value - but they should become policy.