Category Archives: Nutritional Supplements

Urine Organic Acid Testing – A Gateway to Optimal Health

Urine organic acid testing is an easy way of finding out how to achieve optimal health and to help ascertain what nutrients your body needs. Being healthy is not simply being “free of disease”, it is feeling vibrant, full of energy and having optimal brain function. Today’s medical world is so focused on disease and treating symptoms, we forget about feeling good.

Drugs, which in some cases are life giving, are mainly focused on covering up symptoms caused by diseases. Optimal nutrition is where you go for real health and the prevention of disease. My past 23 years of research has been on the use of laboratory testing to biochemically individualize nutritional supplementation and take it out of the world of guesswork.

Urine organic acid testing is a great way to go for many people as the test can be done through the comfort of your home and the results with proper interpretation, can make a world of difference in how you and your family feels. Health Director is the home of the best interpretation of these and many other functional laboratory tests. Tomorrow, I will be posting some sample reports for you to look at and then you can decide if this type of testing is right for you.

Vitamin D – When is a good thing too much?

Vitamin D, as many of my regular readers know, is one of my favorite supplements. Research keeps on coming on all the good results scientists keep coming up with.  Here is a small list from recently published articles:

Still, there are times when you can get too much of a good thing.  In the July 19th 2007 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a letter to the editor pointed out a case where a women developed a series of life threatening toxic effects from taking Solutions IE Ageless Formula II supplement from Aloe International which contained 186,906 IUs of vitamin D. The symptoms she suffered included nausea, fatigue, constipation, back pain, forgetfulness and vomiting. It is known that long-term daily vitamin D consumption of 40,000 IUs of vitamin D3 can cause hypercalcemia in health patients so the amount this women took was obscenely high.

Of course, this is an isolated instance and not the standard in the nutritional supplement business. This is an example though of why the industry needs to make sure it regularly checks each batch for quality. This is not being done unfortunately and the FDA was forced to step in and create a rule that the manufacturers of nutritional supplements must test their products. Some advocacy groups bristled at the thought of FDA control and rolled out the dreaded term CODEX to scare the public but sad to say, it was a necessary evil to bring some sanity to the nutritional supplement industry. I have personally seen products, like an electrolyte product on the market claiming 136 mgs of magnesium in each serving but when I checked out their label claim through an independent lab, they only had 32 mgs of magnesium. That is only one-third of the label claim. This same company has already been admonished twice by the FDA for other offenses (like selling a product that could cause miscarriages) yet they stay in business.

There are many good companies out there but consumers must be wary. Hopefully, the new regulations will mean better and safer products on the market.

Nutrition Update

According to the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, people who have hepatitis B may benefit from folic acid supplementation because it may protect them from the development of liver cancer which is common with people who have hepatitis B.

Coenzyme Q10 Supplementation May Protect Against Statin-Induced Liver Disease – At this point in time, with all of the research done about the need for Coenzyme Q10 and statin use, wouldn’t you think that every doctor in America would just put the two together for all of their patients?  Sad to say, they don’t. In Europe its mandatory, in the U.S. we have such an anti-supplement bias fueled by misdirected reporters that people may be developing life-threatening diseases because of it. This is just another study showing real benefits to CoEnzyme Q10 use.

High Dietary Vitamin B-6 Intake May Lower Colorectal Cancer Risk in Men – In a very large prospective cohort study (81,184 subjects) it was noted that those men in the highest quartile for B6 intake had a 31% decreased risk for developing colorectal cancer. For men who drank more than 150 grams of alcohol a week the benefits were even greater.

Vitamin B6, Conception, and Early Pregnancy Loss – In yet another human study, researchers have shown that those women with the highest plasma levels of vitamin had a higher level of conception and a lower level of early pregnancy termination (spotaneous miscarriage).

These three studies show how much human research is going on regarding the benefits of nutritional supplement. I bring this up because of communications I had with a reporter from CNN I lambasted in an earlier blog. I challenged him saying that I could produce ten human studies showing the benefits of supplements for every one negative study. Caleb, here is just a smattering of evidence for the use of supplements. Of course, they need to be done in a biochemically individualized manner but when you claim there are no known benefits to the use of nutritional supplements, you kind of lose all credibility.

Do Selenium Supplements Cause and Increase in the Risk of Developing Diabetes?

New research led by Dr. Saverio Stranges of Warwick Medical School in Britain, showed that people who took 200 mcgs of selenium daily, had a 50% increased risk for developing type-II diabetes over a 7 year period than those taking placebo. Published in the Journal Annals of Internal Medicine, the Dr. Stranges group said 58 of 600 people taking selenium and 39 of 602 taking placebos developed type-II diabetes over the 7.7 years. The study was well constructed although quite small in my opinion.

Here are my thoughts about the study. First off, if you take another 1202 people and tried it again, it may show up differently. Secondly, they measured the levels of blood selenium for their patients and the higher the level, the higher the risk of developing diabetes. Well, duh! My work over the years has clearly shown that excessive amounts of nutrients, especially trace minerals have a double-edged sword to them. If deficient, they need to be repleaded. If in excess, they need to be eliminated. It has to do with this quirky idea called biochemical individuality. If they were monitoring peoples selenium levels as has been indicated, did they stop the people from taking the selenium supplement?  If not, then a serious breech of ethics was committed. Excessive selenium is known to be toxic. This is a major problem and should cause serious review of the researchers protocols.

There are other problems with the study. They studied people with skin cancer. Could it be that having skin cancer and taking selenium together may increase the risk of developing the disease but not with healthy people? No healthy cohorts is a bad error in their study design.

Now get this, the researchers relied on participants’ reports that they developed diabetes and did not confirm those reports with measures of blood sugar. Huh?  You didn’t confirm the reports? Terrible research error again.

Next, did they measure other nutrient co-factors like vitamin C, E, amino acids, and dietary intake of foods? Of course not. They blindly rely on one-to-one analysis which is hideously poor. They also only looked at elderly white people yet they make the sweeping statement that selenium supplementation causes people to have an increased risk of developing diabetes.

Another example of poor research and equally poor reporting.

Omega 3 Fatty Acids and Premature Babies – Saving Eyesight

In a study about to start soon led by Dr. Lois Smith, an ophthalmologist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, omega 3 fatty acids will be used to try and prevent a serious retinal disease that affects many premature babies.  The impetus to do this study came from research done on premature mice and the results were quite promising. This type of treatment shows how very valuable omega 3 fatty acids can be.

Usually, infants get most of their supply of omega 3s from their mothers in the third trimester of pregnancy which is why those who are born prematurely may not get the full benefit of these important nutrients. What is nice abou this research is that is shows that you don’t necessarily need expensive pharmaceutical drugs to treat certain diseases. Still, I would bet my last dollar that they would be working on it if the market were bigger.

Read the full article here, posted on MSNBCs website

Antidepressant Use in America. A Depressing Situation.

Don’t like the way your husband is handling the family finances?  Take some antidepressants! Angry with the school about your child’s report card? Take some antidepressants.  According to a government funded study, more Americans take antidepressants than any other drug family. Over 118 million prescriptions were written last year which is up a staggering 48% over the past decade. Some of this increase is the fact that more physicians are becoming adept at diagnosing the disease but I feel that the majority of it is due to marketing done by the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Richard Dworkin even states, “Doctors are now medicating unhappiness. Too many people take drugs when they really need to be making changes in their lives.”

While depression is a serious disorder, there are way too many cases where physicians are prescribing drugs for issues that have nothing to do with the disease. These medications have serious side effects and should be used only when a clinical diagnosis of depression is clear. Still, an even better solution would be to try using amino acid therapy first. The book The Healing Nutrients Within recalls many stories of patients with depression improving using amino acid therapy.

It’s so much about profits, so little about really helping patients. Amino acids can help people far more than antidepressants can. They just won’t make the pharmaceutical industry any money. America, the land where we medicate unhappiness.

Vitamin C and Type 1 Diabetes – A Big Time Winner

According to the journal Diabetes Care, researches found out that injecting type 1 diabetics with vitamin C “neutralized the reactive molecules that were responsible for the damage” that is caused by the disease. This important nutrient did as well as the blood-pressure-lowering drug telmisartan. Of course, and sad to say, the researchers were not happy with this finding since people would have to stay on vitamin C forever (so?) and they want to develop a drug that permanently stop the effect of reactive molecules on certain proteins.

There have been previous experiments showing the benefits of alpha-lipoic acid on neutralizing reactive oxygen species (ROS) and it is likely other antioxidant compounds like acai, may have similar benefits. My suggestion is that anyone with type 1 diabetes should be on a bunch of antioxidant compounds like acai, vitamin C and vitamin E, although testing your oxidative stress levels would be a good idea as well.

Vitamins, Minerals and Antioxidants – Safe or Not? The Debate Rages On.

In the May 2007 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition an interesting series of comments can be found in the letters to the editor. John Hathcock, an employee of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a dietary supplement advocacy group, questioned a study published in the same journal last year that doubted that antioxidants and vitamin/mineral supplementation was beneficial in the prevention of cancer or cardiovascular disease. He made some compelling arguments against the use of meta-analysis (a statistical method) when reviewing the benefits or lack there of, of supplements. First off, he points out that they included only a small number of clinical trials which is a problem using a meta-analysis. Others argue that all we really need is the RDA to avoid disease but he points out that the prevention of neural tube defects through the use of supplemented folic acid is not a sign of deficiency but a need for extra supplementation.

Donald McCormick of Emory University and Joachim Bleys, et al of Johns Hopkins Medical Institution argue in their correspondence that indeed their findings do show no benefit to the use of antioxidants or B-vitamins. While Hathcock says that the famous Women’s Health Study showed a benefit to the use of vitamin E in reducing cardiovascular death, McCormick and Bleys quote the study conclusion that states “These data do not support recommending vitamin E supplementation for cardiovascular disease or cancer prevention among healthy women.” Both are correct but the later is misleading.

First off, the studies were done on a form of vitamin E known as alpha-tocopherol which is not the optimal type. Gamma-tocopherol should make up at least 40% of the vitamin E used for many reasons (to be discussed at a later date). Secondly, the study showed benefits to unhealthy women but the conclusion states that they can’t recommend vitamin E use to “healthy” women. That is a blatant misleading conclusion and is easily misconstrued to show no benefit to anyone.

My real problem with both sides of the controversy is the use of large population studies to support or deny the benefits of supplementation. It is preposterous to suggest that these studies are beneficial in any way, shape or form when you looking at the concept of biochemical individuality. You are different from me, and what would benefit me, may either have no effect on you or may actually harm you. Are all supplements beneficial?  Depends. To some people, some nutrients may be harmful or wasteful. To others, it can be life saving or dramatically life enhancing. What you need to do is to laboratory testing to determine what you really need.

In my 20+ years of reviewing lab test data, I have yet to see two sets of results that are the same. Fifty thousand tests in the bag and still no two people who are alike. I have seen people who have taken too many supplements, the wrong array and many who don’t have adequate intake of essential nutrients to stay healthy. If we can only get researchers to adopt a new paridigm and look at individuals instead of populations, we might, just might get better health care and a real improvement in the quality of our lives.

Sodium Benzoate – DNA Disaster?

In research done by Professor Peter Piper at Sheffield University, the common preservative, Sodium Benzoate, may wreck havoc on your DNA. In an interview with the British newspaper The Independent, Dr. Piper tested the effect of the preservative found in most soft drinks on the DNA of yeast. What he found shocked him. “These chemicals have the ability to cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria to the point that they totally inactivate it: they knock it out altogether.The mitochondria consumes the oxygen to give you energy and if you damage it – as happens in a number if diseased states – then the cell starts to malfunction very seriously. And there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA – Parkinson’s and quite a lot of neuro-degenerative diseases, but above all the whole process of ageing.”

While the food industry will undoubtedly come out and tell you that sodium benzoate is safe and has been tested for years, what they won’t tell you is that they have not tested any of these additives when it comes to their affect on DNA. This type of testing is available using microarray technology but I can guarantee unless they are forced to do so via pressure from the government, it won’t be done.

So what’s a person to do?  First you can test your levels of benzoic acid through a urine organic acid test available from US Biotek or Metametrix (make sure they have benzoate as not all their panels contain it). You will need a doctor’s signature for that but if they are unwilling, you can buy the test from Direct Lab Services and their physician will sing the form for you. Don’t forget to ask for the Bio-Clarity Report in order to get a more complete picture of your test results.

One thing you can do safely is to take one gram of the amino acid glycine twice a day (unless you have Parkinson’s disease). That will bind up the glycine, create hippuric acid which then gets urinated out.

Bipolar Disorders and Children – Growing Epidemic or Drug Company Bonanza?

Nothing is as painful as having a child with emotional issues. I should know, I have one. My daughter Tasya has had emotional problems ever since she started having epileptic seizures 7 years ago. She has had mood swings and temper tantrums which by themselves is not unusual (most kids go through that) but the number and severity has been a problem. Most every doctor we see wants to put her on one medication after another without regard to the potential for long term damage.

In a report coming from the British magazine, New Scientist, they question whether doctors in the United States are too quick to treat children with what they are diagnosing as bipolar disorder. Since 1996 the number of children being diagnosed with this behavioral problem went from 13 out of every 100,000 to 73 out of every 100,000 in 2004, a five-fold jump in the number of diagnoses in a scant 8 years. Children as young as 3 are being diagnosed with the disease despite the absolute ridiculousness of even attempting to diagnoses this in children that young.

The use of psychotropic drugs on young children should be viewed as a crime unless there is overwhelming evidence. The fact that we have absolutely no evidence that in the long-term, these drugs are anywhere near safe should be a red-flag. Add to that the fact that a child who was 4 years old has died when given not one, not two, but three drugs for supposedly having a bipolar disorder. The child, Rebecca Riley, was given clonidine, Depakote (anti-convulsant also known as valproic acid) and the anti-psychotic Seroquel (quetiapine fumarate). Her parents are on trial to see if they deliberately overdose her or it was an accident. My finger is pointing straight at the physicians who prescribed the drugs to this unfortunate little girl with the hopes of stabilizing her mood.

No other country is seeing this increase in the incidence of bipolar disorder despite following the same guidelines from the DSM-IV (the official psychiatric manual).  Instead of seeking natural and much, much safer means, drug companies are throwing parties for doctors who would prescribe their money making drugs for children. My daughter had enormous success and improvement in mood and seizure activity following her eliminating foods that were causing an inflammatory response (LEAP MRT Test). Amino acid therapy, nutrition and even psychotherapy should be our first line of attack on neuropsychiatric disorders and NOT harsh and life threatening drugs.

Thankfully the editors at the New Scientist call into question whether the diagnoses and treatments are real, or as I suspect, profit driven by an increasingly money hungry pharmaceutical industry.