Freedom from Disease: The Breakthrough Approach to Preventing Cancer, Heart Disease, Alzheimer's, and Depression by Controlling Insulin and Inflammation

Freedom from Disease

The Breakthrough Approach to Preventing Cancer, Heart Disease, Alzheimer's, and Depression by Controlling Insulin and Inflammation

Peter M. Kash, EdD

Linda Friedland, MD

Jay Lombard, DO

Copyright

Diversion Books

A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

New York, NY 10016

www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright © 2008, 2017 by Dr. Peter M. Kash, Dr. Linda Friedland, and Dr. Jay Lombard

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

First Diversion Books edition March 2017

ISBN: 978-1-63576-113-9

Table of Contents

Foreword: We Stand on the Precipice

1. Insulin: A Key to Health and Illness

2. Pathways to Disease: New Thinking

3. Cell Communication: Cells Talk to Each Other!

4. Insulin Resistance Metabolic Syndrome, and Diabetes

5. Best Strategies for Overweight and Obesity

6. Mending the Heart

7. The Biology of Cancer

8. Why Stress?

9. Alzheimer’s, Memory Loss, and Dementia

10. Children at Risk

11. Food, Cells, and Genes

12. Your Health Checklist

Acknowledgements

Connect with Diversion Books

FOREWORD

We Stand on the Precipice

Our society’s emphasis upon treating disease, as opposed to keeping people well, has just about run its course. In the relatively near future, our medical system, along with wide swaths of the American economy, will either be bankrupt or on the road to recovery. That’s the crucial fork in the road that we will face in the twenty-first century. If the medical system goes bankrupt, our society will face widespread chaos. If we learn from our mistakes, we will evolve into a more sustainable, healthier culture. Individually, each of us will enjoy well-being—and all that that means—along with greater freedom from pharmaceutical drugs and avoidable medical procedures. Collectively, our society will be more creative and thus better able to direct our considerable resources toward other problems we currently face. As with every species, there are times when the conditions demand an evolutionary leap. Humanity now faces one of those times.

Essentially, our challenge is to change behaviors that have become a threat to our health and our ability to deliver medical services to all our people. The foods most of us are eating today and our lack of physical activity are poisoning our bodies and altering the way our central nervous systems function, thus causing a wide array of physical and mental disorders, as well as premature death.

As a professor and vice chair of surgery at New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Hospital, I see the effects of these behaviors every day in my medical practice and in the operating room. The sludge-filled coronary arteries, diseased gallbladders, fatty livers, hypertension-scarred kidneys, and cancerous tumors are just some of the consequences of our toxic lifestyle. Unbeknownst to most of us, so too are many of the mood and brain disorders that so many of us suffer from today.

Our health care system addresses the multiple epidemics we face by treating illness after it arises, rather than addressing the causes of disease at their source. Not surprisingly, medicine cannot keep pace with the rising rates of illness because we are treating people at the wrong end of the problem.

A great many of the diseases we face today arise from our inability to manage our weight, with more than two-thirds of Americans overweight, and more than a third obese. During the 1980s, little more than a third of Americans were overweight and only 15% were obese.

Similar disease patterns are emerging around the world. The World Health Organization has stated that more than 1 billion people worldwide are overweight and that about 300 million are now obese. Almost unbelievably, those who are overweight now outnumber those who are undernourished (there are now about 600 million hungry people worldwide).

The problem with overweight and obesity is that they have a domino effect on our biology. We don’t just get fat. Overweight changes our internal chemistry so that the basic commands that are passed between cells, and within them, are dramatically altered. Soon this misinformation causes genes to malfunction, which in turn causes an array of illnesses, including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, mood disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, and many common cancers.

Obesity’s partner in crime, diabetes, is now a worldwide epidemic. There are more than 29 million diabetics in the US today. By 2025, that number will likely double. By the year 2050, the number of people worldwide with diabetes will reach 250 million unless something is done to stop this raging epidemic. As with overweight, diabetes causes the widespread breakdown of health, raising the risk of infection, gangrene, amputation, blindness, kidney disorders, and heart attack.

In the past, illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease were considered diseases of old age, but all of that is changing. Today, we are seeing an ever-increasing number of children who are overweight, diabetic, and suffering from the early stages of heart disease—all ominous signs for our future.

Needless to say, treating these illnesses costs inconceivable sums of money. Today, annual health care costs in the US hover at about two trillion dollars, two and one-half times what they were in 1990, and seven times what they were in 1980. The vast majority of this money is being spent on catastrophic care, especially the medical treatment received at the end of life. Half of the total health care bill for treating the average American over the course of his or her lifetime will be spent during that person’s final eight years of life. If things continue as they are, the emergence of the baby boomers into old age—along with the multiple epidemics they’ll suffer from—will crush our health care system. Unless something is done to improve our overall health, our society may be forced to limit medical care in order to curtail costs. Eventually, many will be shut out of the health care system, leaving increasing numbers of us sick and untreated. Such a reality would have a catastrophic effect on our society.

Turning things around

The question is: What can we do about it? Peter Kash, Linda Friedland and Jay Lombard have provided a penetrating analysis of what’s going wrong in the human body, and what we all can do to restore our health. As their insightful book shows, overweight, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, many mood disorders, and common forms of cancer all seem to stem from the same underlying root causes. The causes are insulin resistance and inflammation.

Insulin, a hormone produced by the body that allows blood sugar to enter cells and be utilized as fuel, is a key regulator that determines health and illness for most of us today. When we eat foods that drive insulin levels up, and keep them elevated, cellular function is altered and cells behave in aberrant ways, thus forming the basis for many of the diseases we face today.

How does it do it? By changing the communication that flows between cells.

One of the great insights the authors of this book make clear is cells talk to each other. In this way, they maintain order throughout the system. Health is a consequence of that order. When cellular communication occurs normally, the body functions as it was designed to—flawlessly.

One of the key regulators of cellular communication is insulin. In decades past, we doctors used to think that this hormone’s sole job was to regulate the flow of energy into cells. And while this is, in fact, one of insulin’s principle functions, we now know that it does a great deal more than simply act as a gatekeeper for energy. Insulin, it turns out, dramatically affects the flow of information that takes place within cells, as well as between them, and thus regulates how cells behave. When insulin levels are healthy and balanced, cells function with awesome precision. The result for each of us is good health. But when insulin levels become elevated, and remain high over time, cellular communication breaks down. Cells behave in strange and disorderly ways, thus forming the basis for the epidemics we see today.

The good news is that all of us can control our insulin levels by virtue of controlling the nutrients we consume, and the amount of physical activity in which we engage each day. That means that we can, to a great extent, control how our cells function and, by extension, determine for ourselves whether or not we experience good health.

As I frequently tell my patients, as well as the people who tune in to my television show, medicine can do a great deal to help you defeat disease and restore your health. But the truth is, you can do more than we doctors can.

Peter Kash, Linda Friedland and Jay Lombard’s book shows how you can protect yourself from serious illness, and, in many cases, restore your health if you are already ill. By controlling the foods you eat, the nutrient levels in your body, and the amount of exercise you engage in, you can regulate this essential hormone, reduce inflammation, and in the process give yourself the gift of good health.

Mehmet Oz, MD

CHAPTER 1

Insulin: A Key to Health and Illness

Scientists have long dreamed of the day when they would discover that single agent within the human body that causes many of the illnesses that afflict and kill us. With such knowledge, we could transform the source of disease, restore the body’s biochemical balance, and thus prevent heart disease, many cancers, diabetes, and obesity—we might even prevent serious degenerative brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as conditions that afflict children, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Such knowledge could one day form the basis for effective treatments for these conditions, as well.

The good news is that much of this is now within your personal control. That remarkable discovery may have already been made. Not only have we identified one of the underlying sources of many serious illnesses, we are also learning how to manipulate it successfully to prevent and treat many of the diseases just named. That singular, pivotal factor, central in many of today’s disorders, is insulin, the hormone produced by the pancreas that allows blood sugar to enter cells.

Not just sugar

Most people know that insulin is directly involved in the creation of diabetes, an illness that now afflicts some 30 million Americans and 415 million globally including an ever-growing number of children and young adults. One in two adults with diabetes (46%) is undiagnosed. But the ill effects of insulin go far beyond diabetes. Insulin, scientists have found, is one of the body’s master chemicals, regulating an enormous number of other biological functions downstream.

When maintained at balanced levels, insulin ensures the steady flow of energy to your cells. It helps create a healthy body weight, supports the health of your heart and circulatory system, and protects you from many common cancers. It also maintains your emotional health and the clarity of your mind and memory.

When it is elevated, and remains chronically high, insulin can act like a diabolical computer programmer, rewriting your cellular command codes and wreaking havoc throughout the body. Far from being just a catalyst for diabetes, elevated insulin plays a central role in virtually every major illness we face today, including overweight, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. It may also have some role in the creation of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, mood imbalances, and mental illness.

Every cell needs energy

This simple hormone has such a widespread effect on health because every biological act requires energy. Insulin is needed if cells are to use that energy, which means insulin is involved in all human functions. The sheer ubiquity of the hormone gives it entrée into virtually every nook and cranny, every cell, organ, and system of your body. We all remember tenth grade biology, trying to understand the connection between mitochondria, energy, and ATP. This has a direct connection to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Consequently, insulin can be a help or a hindrance in everything the body does.

How food works

To a great extent, we can control our insulin levels by virtue of the kinds of foods we eat, the quantity of calories we consume, how much we exercise, and how well we cope with stress.

Processed foods, such as bagels, muffins, pastries, candy, and soda, for example, are all rich in calories. They are also packed with the kinds of simple carbohydrates—otherwise known as simple sugars—that drive insulin levels through the roof. Foods high in fat are also rich in calories and can also contribute to high insulin levels. By keeping insulin levels elevated, these foods may contribute to all the degenerative illnesses that afflict most of us today.

On the other hand, unprocessed foods—cooked whole grains, fresh vegetables, beans, and fruit—and many low fat animal products are low in calories and keep insulin levels stable. This is one of the major reasons why these foods are associated with good health and longer life.

Exercise lowers insulin; stress drives it up

Exercise, even a simple walk around the block, lowers insulin levels and makes cells more sensitive to the insulin that’s in the blood. That means that the body utilizes insulin more efficiently—in other words, a little goes a long way.

In addition, stress drives up insulin levels and chronic stress keeps insulin levels high. This is one of the ways stress contributes to a variety of major illnesses and premature death—it drives insulin levels up.

Only recently did researchers become aware of insulin’s central role in health. But already, scientists have developed new pharmaceutical agents that protect us against the destructive chemical cascade that insulin triggers within our cells.

In fact, the understanding of insulin’s role in health and illness is revolutionizing health care. New forms of treatment offer hope even for those of us who already suffer from one of the many diseases brought about by chronically high insulin levels.

A tiny flame

One of the most baffling mysteries of disease is how it arises. What conditions allow a tiny and dangerous flame within us to become a blazing threat to our lives? Is it true that the body, for no discernible reason, suddenly breaks down, malfunctions, and sets loose a disease process? Or is it possible that an array of poisons—many of which we control—combine to target a single weak link within us, a link that, when it breaks down, sets off a terrible chain reaction?

For millions of us today, that is precisely what happens. That vulnerable link within us may be due to pathways of insulin or other important hormones and chemicals.

Computer programmer

Groups of researchers have been working for some time on insulin’s relationship to specific illnesses such as heart disease and cancer. Each of the groups focused on their own area of expertise. Only recently has insulin been confirmed as a possible common trigger in virtually all serious illnesses.

Insulin is a kind of computer programmer, determining where signals are sent within the human body. Depending on the skill of that programmer, we can experience good health, vitality, and efficient brain function, or we can suffer weight increases, internal chaos, an endless variety of negative health states.

The growing awareness of insulin’s pivotal role in health is changing the way we treat disease, and bringing forth a new model for health and illness.

Scientists now realize that the human body is the most elaborate and complex array of information highways.

A living supercomputer

Your body can be seen as a living, breathing supercomputer. The health of that supercomputer depends on its ability to send life-sustaining information from one cell to another. This is no different from sending a text or WhatsApp. That same information must also be transferred to specific sites within cells so that cells function properly.

Illness arises when disruptive or chaotic commands are sent to cells, which in turn causes them to behave in self-destructive ways. (No different from some of our teenagers’ behaviors!)

In short, proper functioning of the body depends on the information being sent throughout the system.

All of which brings us back to that central pancreatic hormone that we know as insulin. This chemical substance is, in fact, one of the body’s central messengers, telling cells to perform an array of essential tasks.

Cells need sugar

The first job of insulin is instructing cells to absorb blood sugar, also known as glucose, which is the body’s primary fuel. Cells need glucose to perform their tasks; in essence, they need it to survive. Without blood sugar, cells die.