Posts Tagged ‘genes’

Pancreatic cancer – daily diet of sugar?

nutrition, performance, Recovery - Repair | Posted by admin October 31st, 2010

(NaturalNews) New research published in the journal Nature reveals that pancreatic cancer can take up to 20 years to grow to the point where it is diagnosed by the practice of conventional medicine. This was determined by sequencing the DNA of cancer tumor cells from deceased patients. Because cancer mutations occur in growing tumors at a known rate, scientists were able to map the timing of the development of full-blown pancreatic cancer tumors.

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute found:

• It takes an average of 11.7 years for one mutation in a pancreas cell to grow into a “mature” pancreatic tumor (which might show up on a medical scan).

• It can take another 6.8 years for the pancreatic tumor to spread and cause tumors to appear in other organs of the body.

How to grow and feed a cancer tumor

First of all, to grow a cancer tumor, you need to eat lots of sugar. Liquid sugars are the best (like soda?), but any form of refined sugar will do. You have to eat sugar daily if you really want to support cancer cell division and growth.

Next, you have to be vitamin D deficient most of the time.  That’s because vitamin D may halt the progress of 77 percent of all cancers (including pancreatic cancer), and when combined with other nutrients like selenium, may halt progress of even more.

By combining vitamin D and selenium nutrition with other anti-cancer nutrients such as fresh vegetable juice (on a daily basis), omega-3 fatty acids, a wide variety of fresh fruits (including citrus and berries), and even red wine (rich with resveratrol), you will create an internal biological environment in which cancer tumors cannot thrive.

This is especially true if you pursue a more alkaline diet that’s rich in vegetables and green foods rather than acidic substances such as sugar, fried foods and caffeine.

Combine all this with some regular exercise, good sleep, stress reduction habits and strict avoidance of cancer-causing chemicals, and you’ve got a recipe for blocking virtually all tumor growth in your body.

Cancer tumors simply cannot grow in an environment that’s rich in plant-based nutrients and life based on healthy, natural living.

So even if you have a wayward pancreatic cell that decides to mutate and try to become cancerous on its own, that cell will not have any long-term success in replicating inside your body because it’s surrounded by healthy cells and bathed in anti-cancer nutrients carried to it each day in your blood!

Remember, your cells rely entirely on nutrients delivered by your blood, and if your blood is delivering anti-cancer nutrients each day, then “bad” cells will never be allowed to replicate and become cancer tumors.

Obviously, the composition of your blood is determined by what you eat. If you eat junk food, your blood will be junk blood, and it will deliver junk to your cells (cancer cells love junk!). If you eat healthy foods, you will have healthy blood, and cancer tumors will shrivel up and actually lose their blood supply then die.

With this in mind, your life and health are not a rehearsal.  Nutrition is the key to your health, strength and performance.  Learn what combination of nutritional foods support your health at the cellular level, then learn to like them.  In all cases, refined sugars need to be limited as much as possible.

If you’ve been pursuing a lifestyle of junk foods, processed foods, fried foods, excessive animal products and sun avoidance, then you are probably growing cancer tumors in your body right now. Almost as if you were trying to!

So you might be on year 10 of the 20-year cancer diagnosis plan. There’s no way to know because solid cancer tumors usually don’t show up in diagnostic tests when they’re only 10 years old. But if you’ve been following a cancer-promoting lifestyle, you can rest assured you have micro tumors in your body that are just waiting for more sugar and less vitamin D in your blood in order to divide and grow even more.

Consider yourself informed… Preventing cancer is its cure.

Adapted from Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

Resveratrol: A Key for High Performance: Health & Endurance . . .

Fitness, performance, Recovery - Repair | Posted by admin August 10th, 2009

A drug based on resveratrol, a phytonutrient found in red wine, may double exercise endurance, fight obesity and prolong life, according to a new study by French researchers.

Dr. Johan Auwerx and colleagues from the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France, recently conducted an animal study to test the effects of high doses of resveratrol on exercise endurance in mice.

A typical laboratory mouse can run roughly one kilometer on a treadmill before it collapses from exhaustion. Auwerx supplemented a group of mice with up to 400 mg of resveratrol per kilo of body weight, and found that the mice were then able to run twice as far as the mice that were not supplemented. The resveratrol mice were also found to have energy-charged muscles and a lower heart rate, much like trained athletes.

Resveratrol makes you look like a trained athlete without the training, Auwerx said.

Auwerx believes that the results of his animal study published online in the journal Cell could be replicated in humans, based on the results of a Finnish study that analyzed the gene that is influenced by the resveratrol drug. Previous studies of mice have indicated that moderate-to-high doses of resveratrol can activate a genetic mechanism that protects against the degenerative diseases of aging, as well as prolong life span by up to 30 percent.

Auwerx believes resveratrol can help offset the negative health effects of high-fat diets which can lead to the onset of metabolic disorder and diabetes by increasing the number of mitochondria in the body’s muscle cells. Extra mitochondria, organelles that generate energy, were found to help mice burn more fat and remodel muscle fibers to more closely resemble those of trained athletes.

Though resveratrol is present in red wine and some other foods, the concentrations used in Auwerx’ study were much higher than could ever be obtained through red wine consumption.

More research on resveratrol is needed before possible drug therapies to combat obesity and diabetes-related disorders can be developed.

Ref: (NaturalNews)

Leptin & Insulin – Vital Hormones for Optimal Health . . .

nutrition | Posted by admin June 22nd, 2009

Each and every one of us is a combination of lives within lives. We are made up of trillions of individual living cells that each must maintain itself. Even more significantly, the cells must communicate and interact with each other to form a republic of cells that we call our individual self. Our health and life depends on how accurately instructions are conveyed to our cells so that they can act in harmony. It is the communication among the individual cells that will determine our health and our life. The communication takes place by hormones. Arguably therefore, the most important molecules in your body that ultimately will decide your health and life are hormones.

Many would say that genes and chromosomes are the most important molecules, however once born your genes pretty much just sit there; hormones tell them what to do. Certainly, the most important message that our cells receive is how and what to do with energy, and therefore life cannot take place without that.

The two most important hormones that deliver messages about energy and metabolism are insulin and leptin.

Metabolism can roughly be defined as the chemistry that turns food into life, and therefore insulin and leptin are critical to health and disease. Both insulin and leptin work together to control the quality of your metabolism (and, to a significant extent, the rate of metabolism).

Insulin works mostly at the individual cell level, telling the vast majority of cells whether to burn or store fat or sugar and whether to utilize that energy for maintenance and repair or reproduction. This is extremely important for on an individual cell level turning on maintenance and repair equates to increased longevity, and turning up cellular reproduction can increase your risk of cancer.

Leptin, on the other hand, controls the energy storage and utilization of the entire republic of cells allowing the body to communicate with the brain about how much energy (fat) the republic has stored, and whether it needs more, or should burn some off, and whether it is an advantageous time nutritionally-speaking for the republic –you– to reproduce or not.

Leptin is a very powerful and influential hormone produced by fat cells. Prior to leptin’s discovery, fat was viewed as strictly an ugly energy storage depot that most everyone was trying to get rid of. After it was discovered that fat produced the hormone leptin (and subsequently it was discovered that fat produced other very significant hormones), fat became an endocrine organ like the ovaries, pancreas and pituitary, influencing the rest of the body and, in particular, the brain.

Leptin, as far as science currently knows, is the most powerful regulator that tells your brain what to do about life’s two main biological goals: eating and reproduction. Your fat, by way of leptin, tells your brain whether you should be hungry, eat and make more fat, whether you should reproduce and even make babies, or (partly by controlling insulin) whether to “hunker down” and work overtime to maintain and repair yourself. In short, leptin is the way that your fat stores speak to your brain to let your brain know how much energy is available and, very importantly, what to do with it. Therefore, leptin may be “on top of the food chain” in metabolic importance and relevance to disease.

It has been known for many years that fat stores are highly regulated. It appeared that when one tried to lose weight the body would try to gain it back. This commonly results in “yo-yo” dieting and in scientific circles one talks about the “set point” of weight. It has long been theorized that there must be a hormone that determines this.

Science points now to leptin as being that hormone.

If a person is getting too fat, the extra fat produces more leptin which is supposed to tell the brain that there is too much fat stored, more should not be stored, and the excess should be burned.

Signals are therefore sent to an area of the brain in the hypothalamus (the arcuate nucleus) to stop being hungry, to stop eating, to stop storing fat and to start burning some extra fat off.

The importance of insulin in health and disease is becoming well-known. Aside from its obvious role in diabetes, it plays a very significant role in hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

However leptin may even supersede insulin in importance, for new research is revealing that in the long run glucose and therefore insulin levels may be largely determined by leptin.

It had been previously believed that the insulin sensitivity of muscle and fat tissues were the most important factor in determining whether one would become diabetic or not. Elegant new studies are showing that the brain and liver are most important in regulating a person’s blood sugar levels especially in type 2 or insulin resistant diabetes.

People become leptin-resistant by the same general mechanism that people become insulin-resistant; by overexposure to high levels of the hormone. High blood glucose levels cause repeated surges in insulin, and this causes one’s cells to become “insulin-resistant” which leads to further high levels of insulin and diabetes. It is much the same as being in a smelly room for a period of time. Soon, you stop being able to smell it, because the signal no longer gets through. This is the same happens with leptin. It has been shown that as sugar gets metabolized in fat cells, fat releases surges in leptin, and those surges result in leptin-resistance just as it results in insulin-resistance.

The only known way to reestablish proper leptin (and insulin) signaling is to prevent those surges, and the only known way to do that is via diet and supplements. When leptin signaling is restored, your brain can finally hear the message that perhaps should have been delivered decades ago; high leptin levels can now scream to your brain that you have too much fat and that you better start burning some off for your life is in danger. Your brain will finally allow you access into your pantry that you have been storing your fat in. Your cells will be fed the food from that fat and they will be satisfied. They will not know whether that food came from your belly fat or from your mouth; nor will they care. They will be receiving energy that they need and will not have to ask for more. You will not be hungry.

This also makes counting calories irrelevant, for the calories that you put into your mouth today are not necessarily what your cells will be eating; that will be determined primarily by leptin. Whether or not you put food into your mouth, your cells will be eating, and if they cannot eat fat they must eat sugar. Since little sugar is stored, that sugar will be had by making you crave it, or by turning the protein in your muscle and bone into sugar. This contributes in a major way to weakness and osteoporosis. Whether or not this lean tissue wasting happens is determined by your capacity, or incapacity, to burn fat, and that is determined by your ability to listen to leptin.

When you become leptin-resistant, your body can no longer hear the messages telling it to stop eating and burn fat — so it remains hungry and stores more fat.

Leptin-resistance also causes an increase in visceral fat, sending you on a vicious cycle of hunger, fat storage and an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and more.

People become both insulin and leptin resistant by eating the typical
American diet full of sugar,refined grains,processed foods and not a whole lot else. The solution is to instead eat a diet that emphasizes good fats and avoids blood sugar spikes — in short a dietary program detailed which emphasizes healthy fats, lean meats and vegetables, and restricts sugar and grains.

Ref: Ron Rosedale, M.D.

Genetics And Performance

performance | Posted by admin June 12th, 2009

Genetics shape us in many ways including our potential to excel in sports. Training, diet, and other factors play a large role in developing our potential, but our genes may also limit performance. You may have the genetic potential for being a champion athlete, but if you live a lifestyle of overeating and no exercise you are unlikely to achieve that potential. On the other hand, someone with limited genetic potential can find ways to compensate and become a solid performer.

Genetics have a large influence over strength, muscle size and muscle fiber composition (fast or slow twitch), anaerobic Threshold, lung capacity, flexibility, and, to some extent, endurance.

One major limitation for endurance athletes is cardiac capacity, or the heart’s ability to deliver enough oxygen (via the bloodstream) to the working skeletal muscles. This, too, is largely determined by genetics.

The other limitation for endurance athletes is the muscles’ ability to effectively use the oxygen and create ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the fuel that allows muscular contraction and movement. The efficiency of this process is measured by something called VO2 max (maximum volume of oxygen).

How Genetics Influence Response to Training
Your genes may also determine how your body responds to training, diet and other external factors.

Research on aerobic endurance shows that some people respond more to training than others. So even if you have a low genetic potential for endurance, you may respond well to training and develop your potential more completely than someone with genetic ‘talent’ who doesn’t respond to training.

Training also increases cardiac efficiency, but the extent of this increase may depend upon genetics. Genetically gifted athletes will have a much greater response to training and will have a large increase in the number of mitochondria in cells. (The mitochondria are organelles in cells that produce the ATP, so the more mitochondria a person has, and the more efficient they are.)

Other Factors That Affect Performance
Characteristics that genetics have less influence over include balance, agility, reaction time and accuracy.

Nutrition also affects performance. This is clear when even the most highly-trained and gifted athlete bonks during an event. Bonking is usually related to running out of glycogen. Athletes can avoid this either by ‘teaching’ the body to burn fat when glycogen stores decrease, or replenishing the body with nutrition during an event.

Mental Skills Training
Practicing mental skills training (including good judgment, learning the tactics and strategies of your sport, and using the right equipment) is another critical component of success that has nothing to do with genetics.

While it is more likely that elite athletes are blessed with great genetics and a great training routine, even recreational athletes can make the most of their ability through optimal conditioning, good nutrition and a positive mental attitude.

By Elizabeth Quinn, at About.com: Sports Medicine

Genetic Variations vs Performance . . .

performance | Posted by admin March 17th, 2009

Many factors can affect fitness and athletic performance and one of the factors is genetics. Genes can affect how a body responds to diet, training, and other eternal factors. Gene variations are an important factor to understand when someone is developing a training program. Two people may follow exactly the same training program and diet but produce very different end results. To understand individual gene variations can help explain the reasons why. Increased sports performance will come with an improved understanding of the genetics basis of fitness, and this will provide the knowledge that will lead to improving training regimes.