The Dopamine Trap (excerpt from The Pleasure Trap)

The Dopamine Trap


Pleasure-seeking enticements, such as rich foods, coffee, cola drinks, alcohol, and recreational drugs, are different faces of the same trap. By causing artificially intense releases of dopamine within the brain's pleasure centers, these substances create a deceptively intense, short-term feeling of well-being. But there is a price.


The motivational triad encourages the aggressive search for the next possible dopamine "hit." In our ancestral environment, that meant the tastiest whole natural foods or the finest mating partner. Along the way towards these goals, serotonin was there to give us hints and encouragement. It helped us to change direction when necessary.


But in the modern world, this natural integration between serotonin and dopamine, between the moods of happiness and pleasure, has been partially lost. Though still perfectly operative when allowed to function, this integration is compromised by the artificial choices of modern life. It is no longer necessary to exercise in order to obtain food and security, we can sit at our jobs, instead. It is no longer necessary to sleep after darkness; we can extend the day, instead. and in the morning, we may no longer need sleep to satiation, because we are needed back at our desks. So we function not rested, but stimulated by caffeine, instead.


By using alcohol, tobacco, coffee, cola drinks, drugs, chocolate and other rich foods as shortcuts to induce dopamine for brief moments of pleasure, we compromise our health and happiness, instead.


http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508

One week calorie restriction challenge completed

Was easy! Just as I suspected - dinner is more about a dopamine reward at the end of the day or for social reasons. During the entire week, I was never hungry at night - just missed the habit. I woke up every morning not feeling hungry either and had my usual amount of energy and good mood - maybe even more. I had just as much strength for workouts as well. Finally I was the same weight at the end as in the beginning - but thinner. The 19 hour fast daily (5 hour eating window only) must generate HGH so that you lose fat and gain muscle.


I am not saying i will never eat dinner again. However, I am now incorporating this bit of Intermittent Fasting into my routine. 


for more information see: 


http://www.fast-5.com/


http://www.amazon.com/CR-Way-Secrets-Restriction-Healthier/dp/0061370983


http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Douglas-J-Lisle/dp/1570671974/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322045900&sr=1-1

On Alcohol (part II)

Alcohol causes cancer, and here’s the evidence

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2010/01/28/alcohol-and-cancer-the-evidence/

Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer

Many of us are aware of the short-term effects of drinking too much – feeling sick, a hangover, a spot of embarrassment, a vague but hard-to-pin-down sense of guilt – but the long-term effects often slip under the radar. These include a higher risk of many cancers, heart disease, stroke and more.

Cancer Research UK is supporting the new campaign so we wanted to use this blog post to discuss some of the science around alcohol and cancer.

So is alcohol really linked to cancer?

Yes. Surveys tell us that only about a third of people realise that alcohol can increase the risk of cancer but actually the evidence in this area has been very strong for a number of decades.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer produces reports that are widely seen as the gold standard for working out what causes cancer and what doesn’t. They first said that there is “sufficient evidence” that “alcoholic beverages are carcinogenic to humans” way back in 1988. Since then, many more studies have been published. There are too many to list completely here, but this is a good review for the scientifically minded among you. IARC, incidentally, confirmed their ruling in 2007, and again last year.

Which cancers are affected? And how many?

Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, including cancers of the mouth, oesophagus (food pipe), pharynx (upper throat), larynx (voice box), breast, bowel and liver. There is also increasing evidence linking alcohol to pancreatic cancer.

Estimating the number of cancers that are linked to alcohol is always going to be a rough business. One analysis by IARC estimated that in Western European countries like the UK, around 5 per cent of cancers are linked to alcohol, which works out to around 15,000 cases a year. In the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, Professors Richard Doll and Richard Peto estimated that 6 per cent of cancer deaths in the UK are caused by alcohol, adding up to around 9,000 a year.

What level of drinking affects the risk of cancer?

There is a clear linear relationship between the amount of alcohol someone drinks, and their cancer risk. In other words, the more people drink, the higher their risk.

But cutting back drinking so you don’t feel drunk doesn’t mean you avoid risks to your health. Alcohol can increase the risk of cancer at levels too low to make an average person drunk. Studies have consistently shown that as little as three units a day – the amount in a pint of strong lager or a large glass of wine – can significantly increase the risk of mouth, oesophageal, laryngeal, breast and bowel cancers. At this level, the risks are fairly small but they get bigger the more you drink.

However, it seems that alcohol only increases the risk of liver or pancreatic cancers if people drink large amounts. This is because alcohol affects the risk of these cancers by causingcirrhosis or pancreatitis, conditions that are linked to heavy drinking.

Which is worse: binge drinking or spreading my drinking across the week?

We don’t actually know, and this is one of the big holes in the current evidence. Imagine someone who generally drinks nothing during the week but then knocks them back at weekends. So far, there’s not been enough research to tell if they have a higher or lower risk of cancer compared to someone who drinks the same total amount, but spread throughout the week.

There are hardly any published studies looking at the effects of different drinking patterns.One study suggested that weekend drinking had particularly strong effects on the risk of breast cancer, but it’s not conclusive in itself. As we said above, it’s the total amount that matters.

How high are the risks?

There’s a good meta-analysis (an overview of existing studies) that compares the effects of different levels of drinking on different cancer types. By collecting the results of previous studies, this analysis concluded, for example, that drinking 6 units a day (around 2 pints of strong lager):

• increases the risk of mouth cancer by 3 times (200 per cent)
• increases the risk of oesophageal cancer by 2 times (100 per cent)
• increases the risk of breast cancer by 55 per cent
• increases the risk of bowel cancer by 10-19 per cent

These figures are “relative risks”. They show how a person’s odds of developing cancer change as they drink, but they don’t tell you what those odds were in the first place. Those are called “absolute risks”.

For example, for a woman, the lifetime risk of breast cancer (the odds of developing the disease at some point in one’s life) is 11 per cent or 1 in 9. If that goes up by 55 per cent, the new absolute risk becomes 17 per cent or 1 in 6.

For a man, the lifetime risk of oesophageal cancer is 1.3 per cent or 1 in 75. If that doubles, the new absolute risk is 2.6 per cent or 1 in 38.

It is worth noting that breast and bowel cancer are far more common than mouth or oesophageal cancers so the absolute risk of developing these cancers is much higher. Even if that risk goes up by a relatively small amount, that translates to a large number of actual cases. For example, the Million Women Study concluded that if 1,000 UK women under the age of 75 drank an extra unit a day, they would develop 15 extra cancers, 11 of which would be breast cancer.

How do these studies actually work?

There are two main types. “Case-control studies” compare people with cancer to healthy people to see if differences in their drinking habits are linked to their disease. “Cohort studies” are generally stronger. They follow large groups of healthy people, collect detailed information about their lifestyle, medical history and more, and see what happens to their health over the course of years or even decades.

In both cases, it is important to collect information on other aspects of a person’s lifestyle that could also affect their risk of cancer. For example, if you were studying the link between alcohol and mouth cancer, it’s important to account for whether people smoked or not, since smoking is a major cause of mouth cancer and smoking and drinking often go hand-in-hand. Likewise, being overweight also causes cancer, and drinking alcohol can make people put on weight. These are called “confounding factors” and scientists use statistical methods to adjust for them. In this way, they can consider the effects of alcohol alone.

Typically, scientists measure alcohol consumption with questionnaires that ask people to report how much they drink. These questionnaires have an obvious drawback in that they rely on people being honest rather than playing down how much they drink – and indeed this is a criticism frequently levelled at studies of alcohol consumption.

But actually, it turns out that alcohol drinking is measured very well by questionnaires, at least for those used by the best and biggest studies.  For example, the Million Women Study validated their questionnaire by comparing it to a 7-day food diary where participants write down everything they eat/drink on a daily basis for a week. They found a good level of agreement between the two measures. The EPIC study validated its questionnaire against actual urine and blood samples and found that alcohol was actually one of the parts of people’s diets most accurately measured by the questionnaires.

How does alcohol actually cause cancer?

There are probably many answers to this question because alcohol does a lot of things in our bodies. First and foremost, your body converts alcohol into a toxic chemical called acetaldehyde – responsible for many of the symptoms of a hangover. But acetaldehyde can also damage DNA – it sticks bulky molecules onto the famous double-helix and prevents our cells from repairing this damage.

Genetic studies support this idea. Some people in East Asian countries, like China and Japan, have genetic faults that either make them better at converting alcohol to acetaldehyde, or worse at getting rid of acetaldehyde. Either way, they build up unusually high levels of this chemical when they drink. And when they drink, they have a higher-than-usual risk of cancer.

As well as producing acetaldehyde, alcohol can also boost levels of oestrogen in the body, which could explain the link with breast cancer. And it increases the odds of developing cirrhosis, which, in turn, causes liver cancer. Finally, it can also make it easier for the tissues of the mouth or throat to absorb other cancer-causing chemicals, such as those found in cigarette smoke.

Do all types of alcohol affect the risk of cancer? Even wine? What about red wine?

You’ll see from the section above that, as far as cancer goes, the harmful effects of alcohol are common to all drinks, rather than any specific type. All alcoholic drinks, for example, produce acetaldehyde in the body.

There are some disagreements. Take wine, for example. It is difficult to untangle the possibility that wine consumption could simply be linked to generally healthier lifestyles. Some studies have found that wine increases the risk of cancer to a lesser degree than beer or spirits, others have said that it has the same effect, and yet others have concluded that it’s particularly harmful when it comes to cancers of the mouth or throat.  For example, theMillion Women Study found that women who only drank wine have similarly higher risks of cancer than those who drank all types of alcohol.

Red wine contains a chemical called resveratrol, which has some anti-cancer effects in laboratory cells. Many studies are looking at resveratrol as a possible drug for treating or preventing cancer, but as we’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog, this is a far cry from saying that red wine could protect people from cancer. A purified form of a chemical is not the same as the food or drink that contains it, and work in laboratory cells doesn’t automatically translate to effects in living people.

Isn’t some alcohol good for you?

There is evidence that drinking small amounts of alcohol can reduce the risk of heart disease in certain age groups. However, heavy drinking increases the risk of heart disease. Interestingly, a recent review of the global effects of alcohol estimated that alcohol causes twice as many cases of heart disease as it prevents.

We have to weigh up the heart disease effect against the links between alcohol and cancer, high blood pressure, some types of stroke, cirrhosis, liver disease, pancreatic disease and more. One analysis of 34 studies found that people who drink less than a unit a day have around 17-18 per cent lower risks of “total mortality”, which means that at any given age, they are less likely to die of any cause. These benefits disappear at roughly the level of alcohol drinking that the Government guidelines are set at.

It’s also important to realise that the benefits of light-drinking only applies to older age groups. According to one study, if you look at overall mortality, there is no beneficial level of drinking for women under 55 or men under 35.

The balance between the risks of cancer, heart disease and other conditions is why we are not suggesting that anyone avoids alcohol altogether. Instead, Cancer Research UK’s advice is to limit one’s drinking to one small drink a day for women (which is about two units a day) and two small drinks a day for men (about three to four units a day).

However, the important point is that, as we said above, there is a linear relationship between the amount you drink and your risk of cancer. This means that whatever you drink already, cutting down by some amount will help to reduce your risk. And, of course, doing so is entirely down to individual choice.

Wisdom of Charlotte Gerson (why people get cancer)

So, what is the underlying problem? Dr. Gerson says disease starts in the soil. The foods we eat have to have both the minerals and the enzymes – but particularly the minerals – that our bodies need. I’m told that for a normal, healthy plant to supply our body’s needs, it requires something like 30 to 34 minerals. I’m also told that artificially fertilized foods will only provide 3 to 4 minerals. So clearly, the artificial fertilizers produce mineral-deficient food. When the plants are deficient themselves, then the human body is deficient as well, and it is then attacked by disease. Furthermore, certain things, such as pesticides, pests and rust can cause plant disease. Now, in order for the farmer not to lose his crop from 
plant disease, what does he do? He sprays. Now, in addition to these plants being planted in artificially fertilized soil, you’ve got insecticides on them. Often this poison will be placed in the soil next to a plant that is already planted, like a potato for instance. And, the potato picks the poison right up. It absorbs the poison, and you can’t wash it off. Often the plants are sprayed when they’re in 
blossom. Then, the poisons are in the plant and in the fruit. You can’t wash it off. You can’t peel it off. Thus, what we are getting largely, with our commercial growth, is deficient, damaged plants sprayed with toxins. In turn, what we are getting is a deficient, damaged, toxic body. And that’s what will grow cancer....

Gluten free isnt good enough

2 November, 2011

from Badier Velji, Whole9 Envoy and author of The Lazy Caveman

Gluten-free diets are trendy. Yep, it’s true, and a sad truth really.  I come across scores and scores of people who do the right thing and try to follow a gluten-free diet because they notice that the removal of gluten products positively impact their health. But if you ask many of them, they can’t answer the following basic questions:

• What is gluten and why is it so harmful?
• If I don’t have celiac disease, do I need to worry about being gluten-free?
• What are other sources of similar compounds?
• Are gluten-free products really better for me?

What is Gluten?

Gluten is a two-part protein composite that is found in many grains, but most famously in wheat. It consists of aprolamin and a glutelin. Prolamins are storage proteins, and they are the “hardware stores” of the wheat structure that distribute amino acids central to the plant’s development. Glutelin is the “glue” that holds these hardware stores together. These proteins are essential to the existence of these grains, but as we’ll explore further, that is also the same characteristic that makes them so harmful to our bodies.

Wheat gluten itself consists of the prolamin gliadin and the glutelin glutenin. Gliadin has been implicated as the main environmental factor in causing Celiac disease, when combined with specific genetic factors. Glutenin is the leading cause in the development of a wheat allergy.

While these two proteins are the most likely to have a negative effect on the human body, they are far from the only potentially problematic compounds. It turns out that the majority of grains have a structure similar to that of wheat, namely one part prolamin, one part glutelin. There are many other prolamins out there: hordein (barley); secadin (rye); zein (corn); orzenin (rice); avenin (oats); panicin (millet); and a few others. These other prolamins are poorly researched compared to gliadin, and their effect on the body is not well-understood. There are also an equal number of grain-specific glutelins that pose an allergy risk as well.

The Trouble With Gliadin

So how exactly does gliadin harm us? Well, it depends on who you are. If you have diagnosed Celiac disease, then the effects of gliadin and some of the more heinous prolamins (hordein & secadin) are readily apparent in the form of diarrhea, bloating, nutrient malabsorption and a whole host of other things you can read about here.

Gliadin accomplishes this by stimulating zonulin, the traffic cop of the gut lining, to allow it to pass into our digestive tract largely undigested and interacting with tissue transglutaminase (tTG), an enzyme found throughout the body. Tissue transglutaminase is a critical part of how the body functions, and specifically, how the tight junctions in the microvilli (think hairy fingers) in our gut are formed. But when tTG interacts with gliadin, there is a potential to create antibodies, and suddenly, that enzyme that is such an important part of our body is now seen as an enemy. And that’s why people with Celiac disease see such strong reactions: their bodies are literally attacking themselves.

So if you don’t have antibodies to tTG then you’re fine, right? Not so fast! There are 7 other types of transglutaminase enzymes in the body, all of which have the ability to turn against you via autoantibodies.The gliadin-tTG interaction is just the best studied of these. And current Celiac tests are only testing for antibodies to tTG, not to any of these other enzymes. So even if you test negative for antibodies to tTG, you certainly could have a variant that is still causing damage to your tight junctions. In some people, a reaction to gliadin may go unperceived because the symptoms are not as apparent as it is in those with Celiac. With gluten intolerance, you can potentially exhibit all the same symptoms as someone with Celiac, in addition to things like weight gain and mental disorders.

It’s notoriously difficult to prove causation, and unfortunately, science cannot yet tell us about some of these other enzyme-prolamin interactions. There are blood tests that are being developed to diagnose some of these lesser-studied interactions in the body, but the only true inexpensive tool that everyone has at their disposal is to do a complete elimination diet of these problem grains. And this leads us to the basis of our recommendation of a grain-free lifestyle…

Gluten Isn’t The Only Issue

Science is awesome, but it won’t change the fact that we are not well-adapted to grains. Gliadin and glutenin are certainly the most problematic components of wheat but they are far from the only ones, and their analogues in other grains may cause issues as well. I haven’t even talked about lectins, phytates, opiod peptides, fructans, insulin response, and cross-reactivities with foods like dairy! Because there are so many problematic compounds in all grains, we have found that an across-the-board elimination of all grains is more beneficial to long-term health than cherry-picking grains to eat. A 30-day (minimum) elimination is needed to help you assess what effect these compounds have on your body; after the 30 days, you’re free to play detective and try to figure out what foods cause you problems.  (But in all honesty, no food is worth a reduced quality of life.)  Thankfully, the Whole30 is a well-defined 30-day elimination plan that will help you establish a baseline free of these triggers.

I hope by now you’re pretty convinced that grains are not all that good for you, but there are a few more questions to tackle that inevitably come up:

• What about corn and rice?
• Or “properly prepared grains”?
• Or foods labeled “gluten-free”?

Well, I ask you to remember a few things while experimenting:

What’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander.

Reactions to grain consumption vary from person to person. Some people seem to tolerate gliadin “just fine”, others can’t handle the slightest exposure. These are two extremes of the same bell curve; the majority of people will have some trouble tolerating some of the various grains. Personally, I find that I don’t tolerate any grains well, and I find it much easier to avoid all of them rather than make exceptions for any.

If you’re going to do some N=1 experimentation, be sure to limit variables and remove biases

The reason it’s so tough for scientists to prove causation is that there are just so many darn variables to track. If you’re experimenting with grains, don’t eat them with dairy and sugar as well. Because if you do have an adverse reaction, you won’t be able to point to a singular cause. Also, don’t convince yourself that you do not have a reaction to a food just because you desperately want to eat that food. I tried to do that to myself with rice because I was tired of not being able to eat sushi, and it ended up with me bloated and miserable. Remember, no food is worth reduced quality of life. I’m a full-blown sashimi man these days!

“Gluten-free” is usually a cue for “highly-processed, low-quality, over-sweetened junk”

This is especially true for any baked goods. For example, take a look at the ingredient list for some Gluten-Free Cake Mix:

Ingredients: Sugar,modified tapioca starch,rice flour,cocoa,potato starch,emulsifier,rice starch,ployglycerols esters of fatty acids,mono and diglycerides of fatty acids,black cocoa,sodium acid pyrophosphate,sodium bicarbonate,cornstarch,monocalcium phosphate,salt,xanthan gum

Gross.

If you feel the need to occasionally Off-Road Nutritionally, pick a recipe out of one of the popular Paleo cookbooksinstead of reaching for a fake, heavily processed food.

You’re fine now, but how about when you’re older?

Unfortunately, our ability to digest certain foods drops over time and our propensity to develop food intolerances and immune dysfunctions increases over time as long as that exposure is still there. This means that it’s not only smart to avoid the foods that make you less healthy now, but also later in life when you would ordinarily have more trouble with digestion. Also, remember how I mentioned that development of autoimmune conditions like Celiac require a genetic cue and an environmental cue? You better believe that you become more susceptible to these conditions the more grains you consume as your digestion worsens.

And lastly, even “properly prepared grains” can only effectively reduced one or two of several problematic compounds found in the grains. It seriously is better to just avoid them all together.

Hopefully I’ve given you enough information (without making your head explode) to explain to your friends that you’re not following some trendy gluten-free diet, but are investing in your health now and for the future. By eliminating the consumption of all grains, you really can improve your quality of life immediately by removing a number of potentially problematic compounds.