Vitamin D Takes A Hit

Faithful readers of this blog (May 18 and August 29) have read my railings against Vitamin D for some time now. It never made sense to me that so many Americans were deemed to be Vitamin D deficient nor did it make much sense that as people got heavier that their blood test for Vitamin D would report lower levels although they wouldn't develop any deficiency symptoms. I even raised the question if it was possible that fat stored Vitamin D (fat soluble) is available to the body when needed.  While this question remains unanswered, the question of what defines a Vitamin D deficiency just got a new answer and I think it makes sense.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) just revised the guidelines for what defines a Vitamin D deficiency.

First, a little about the IOM.  The Institute of Medicine (IOM) is an independent, nonprofit organization that

works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public. 

Established in 1970, the IOM is the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which was chartered under President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Nearly 150 years later, the National Academy of Sciences has expanded into what is collectively known as the National Academies, which comprises the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Research Council, and the IOM.

Under the new IOM guidelines, you are considered to have adequate Vitamin D levels if your level is above 20 ng/mL. The previous level was 30 ng/mL. In one fell swoop, the IOM has essentially removed almost all Americans from the category of being Vitamin D deficient. 

You will no doubt hear push-back from those quarters that make money peddling Vitamin D and related advice, but you should essentially ignore them. The IOM is trustworthy.

So if you didn't have enough reasons yet to push aside your multivitamins and Vitamin D supplements, perhaps this one will do the trick for you.

For the umpteenth time, eat whole foods including a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains and Wild Salmon and you will consume all the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and all the other health promoting nutrients you need for a healthy mind and body. Get 15-30 minutes of sun each day (earlier or later in the day and avoid reddening) and Vitamin D is also well covered. (You also get it from Wild Salmon.)

The key to a healthy life is to eat healthy every day.

That's Nuts!

Every once in a while a study comes along that makes you want to smile. Not because the news is so great, but because the implications are amusing. Don't get me wrong. For those who have such a problem, I guess this really is good news. For the rest of us and perhaps the ladies, it is just a really interesting finding. In fact, it's so interesting that I can only wonder who came up with the idea to study it in the first place. In this case, it appears to be the California Walnut Commission.

So here's what the study showed. Men, in the case of the study mostly young men aged 21 to 35 (mean age 25), who added 75 grams, a little less than a cup, of whole-shelled walnuts a day to their diet improved their semen parameters.

According to Wendie Robbins, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues, after eating these 75 grams a day of walnuts for 12 weeks, these young men had better sperm vitality, motility, and morphology compared with those who avoided tree nuts altogether.

It also turned out to increase a very healthy omega-3 fatty acid called alpha-linolenic acid as nuts, and walnuts in particular, have a high concentration of this fatty acid in addition to omega-6 fatty acids, antioxidants, and micronutrients like folic acid.

Unfortunately, there was no report that having more virile sperm had any effect on the young men's sexual performance. Nor was there any information regarding what effect such walnut consumption would have on older men's sperm. Also, before you go out and get nuts about walnuts just be aware that 75 grams equals about 500 calories. As far as I'm concerned these are good calories, but still a lot of them.

For men who have low sperm counts or less effective sperm, and are trying to father a child, this study appears to offer another avenue of pursuit.  For the rest of us, we should keep eating nuts for the same nutrients, but obviously for different benefits.  Who knows what they will find out tomorrow about the benefits of walnuts and other nuts? I can't wait.

The Only Thing I Know For Sure Is That We Need To Keep Learning

About 30 years ago, I read an article about agriculture that had a profound impact on my thinking. The article was about soil erosion and basically stated that what had long been considered an incontrovertible truth about how to avoid soil erosion turned out to be the exact opposite. The idea that something held as an absolute truth could prove to be absolutely wrong has given me pause to think about such 'truths' to this day.

Thirty years later, a new study about exercise emerges that reminds me of what we consider absolute truths may not be so. For as long as I can remember, exercise has been associated with increasing your metabolism. It's been widely believed that exercise contributes to weight loss by burning calories and increasing your metabolism, which is believed to keep revving and burning calories even during the cool down phase.  While certain people argued that exercise was not an effective way to lose weight because they were unsuccessful losing weight despite much exercise, it was still a tenet of the weight loss movement. For example, Weight Watchers allows you to add extra "points" based on the amount of exercise you do.

The new study, which is a wonderful study, titled Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity, (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040503) studied the Hadza tribe of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. Strapping members of the tribe with a GPS device and having them swallow so-called doubly labeled water, a liquid in which the normal hydrogen and oxygen molecules have been replaced with versions containing tracers, researchers were able to quantify their levels of physical activity, energy expenditures and metabolic rates. What they discovered is groundbreaking!

The study showed that contrary to popular belief, exercise slows down one's metabolic rate so that calories burned are actually far less than expected.  What's amazing is that this is intuitive and yet for so long everyone believed otherwise. Think about it for a moment. If your body doesn't eat for several hours, we think (I'm now officially afraid to say anything for certain any more; well, maybe some things) your metabolic rate slows down as your body tries to conserve energy, as it doesn't know when energy will be replenished. Applying that same principle to exercise, when the body senses a loss of energy consumed by increased activity, it makes sense that it will slow down its burn rate to conserve energy.

This doesn't mean that you aren't burning calories and you can't lose weight by exercising. It simply means that you burn less than you think, which means don't think you can eat a lot more because you had a good exercise session.

By now you couch potatoes are turning to your spouses or friends and smugly telling them you were right all along about exercise. Well not so fast.  Exercise is still critical to good heart and brain health. Exercise keeps the heart functioning well and exercise has been shown to be as effective as anti-depressants in treating many cases of mild to moderate depression. But that's not all. Two new studies published online in the Archives of Internal Medicine support the tremendous impact of exercise on lowering the risk of death among diabetic patients, and that weight training may reduce the risk for the disease even without aerobic activity.

Quoting medpagetoday.com, "In a large prospective trial, moderately active patients with diabetes had a lower risk of total mortality compared with those who were completely inactive...according to Diewertje Sluik, MSc, of the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam, and colleagues. And in a separate prospective study, men who did weight training only at least 150 minutes per week had a 34% lower risk of developing diabetes to begin with ...according to Frank Hu, MD, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and colleagues."

I also previously wrote about a study that shows that exercise can return the inflexible blood vessels of pre-diabetics to normal as well.

So while exercise is not the great weight loss panacea it was once thought to be, it is still a critical component of a healthy lifestyle. Keep exercising, but more importantly, if you want to stay slim or lose weight avoid the four whites--white sugar, white flour, white pasta, and white rice. If you watched 60 Minutes this past Sunday, you now know that some scientists view sugar as toxic and cancer causing. Just another good reason to choose whole foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and whole grains. And of course, don't forget my favorite, Wild Salmon.  Bon appetite!

Calcium Pills Raise Concerns -- Again!

If you've heard me say it once, you probably have heard me say it many times -- taking dietary supplements in the absence of known deficiency is a mistake. One of the more controversial supplements I've rallied against has been calcium. Most women are told by their doctors, particularly as they get older, to take calcium supplements, usually about 1,000 mg.

When I give lectures, I often ask of the audience whose doctor adjusted their calcium recommendation based on the calcium the individual consumes through his or her food. The answer is almost always that none of their doctors made any such adjustment. I've always considered this problematic because why supplement at all if you are getting sufficient calcium in your diet, and why not adjust when you are getting calcium from other sources.

My real concerns about calcium began to grow almost two years ago when studies began to emerge challenging the wisdom of taking this supplement.  Specifically, these studies linked calcium supplementation with increased heart attack risks. Some studies suggested the mechanism for this, calcium supplements, were contributing to calcification, or hardening, of the heart.

So a new study that just came out should be of no surprise to my patients.

The large European study showed that people taking calcium supplements had nearly double the risk of heart attack as individuals not taking any dietary supplements. Among 23,980 participants in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC-Heidelberg) study, the hazard ratio for heart attack in those using calcium supplements, compared with nonusers of supplements, was increased according to Sabine Rohrmann, MD, of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, and colleagues.

"This study suggests that increasing dietary calcium intake from diet might not confer significant cardiovascular benefits, while calcium supplements, which might raise MI risk, should be taken with caution," the researchers concluded. In an accompanying editorial, two New Zealand physicians went further and suggested that use of calcium supplements should be actively discouraged.
 
This was an imperfect study as it was an observational study that relies on self-reporting. Nevertheless, once again, the red flag rises over taking calcium pills, or any dietary supplement for that matter. The evidence continues to mount that at best they confer no benefit, and at worst, they are harmful.

Eat a Mediterranean diet consisting of fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, and some whole grains, add in some wild fish and save yourself some money from not buying unnecessary pills.