How Much of What You Read Impacts on Your Health Choices?

How easy is to make the right decision for the good of your own health?

It seems that we are bombarded every day with some advice from the media, either red wine is good for us, and next it isn't. Low salt, low fat etc etc. But we have to bear in mind that this is nothing more than an opinion often based on some published study that may or may not truly be reflective of the truth. They can sometimes be nothing more than a 'cherry picked' study for the headline it can generate.

But a vast amount of people still believe that if it is written in the press, then it must be true.
This can be a dangerous view to hold and very often the story is a few paragraphs and contains very little, certainly one should check if the info is correct or what the counter evidence is before you use it to make changes to your eating habits or lifestyle.

By checking i mean research a bit, not just seeing the same story twice but in another newspaper, that is just lazy journalism and pooling of stories, with no new perspective.  It might seem like a throw away story in some ways, but in this day of age where people are always looking to live longer, keep healthier etc, these stories can have big impacts.

A lot of people I see in my practise tell me that they stopped eating this or that after they read it in the papers, salt being the best example.

When this story raises its head as it does quite often, it is never mentioned what sort of salt.
Is it the 'industrial waste' we generally know as table salt, which is the most common form of salt found in most kitchens I'm sure (although hopefully only for putting on the icy paths!) or is it good sea salt or Himalayan rock salt, which can help and not hinder our health.
Most of the ready meals are probably using table salt and not sea salt, because if they are, I'm sure they will state that as a selling point, like the inclusion of 'free range eggs' on packaging as some consumers are looking for this.

Then there is the '5' a day. It is thought we should be eating 5 fruit and veg portions a day, well that's all good, except if that is all fruit, that's a lot of sugar (fructose) there are views that too much sugar causes inflammation in the body and this can lead to bigger health problems. So perhaps we should be making most of the 5, vegetables and why 5?  why not 7, 9 etc, surely the more the better.
Variety is essential and so is the way it is cooked or that may be some should be raw.  No point 5 portions of veg that have been boiled to death and the vitamin content evaporated away.

Then the red wine issue, first it is good for us, then it isn't...well all alcohol is on the top list of carcinogenics, but do you see it being banned? You would want to see the science behind a claim that makes the benefits of red wine greater than the fact it sits high on the list of carcinogenics, but i guess it doesn't exist.

Then of course, most of us have a tendency to think that a little of what you fancy does you good, and that could be true too. If you believe that what you are doing or eating/drinking is good for you, then perhaps your body believes it.  Who might want to try that out with a diet of  Big Macs and alcohol, in the firm believe that it will do you no harm? May be in the short term, if a study was taken, it just may show no ill effect, especially if we cherry pick the study that shows that and not one that didn't and that unfortunately happens, only when it happens with drugs, we might be in more trouble than with food.

It's the long term effects on our bodies we have to consider. Your body performs the same functions day in and day out regardless of what you put in it - the nutrients and vitamins and amino acids in your diet that are the building blocks and repair kit for your health, so if you miss a day, you never get it back.

So these stories of food that are good one one minute and not the next should not make you alter your diet unless you know more than is usually written.

Lets consider water...we are all told to drink more water - excellent if you are the supplier of bottled water. ( worth remembering who commissions the studies) Bottled water has to be the biggest scam going. How long has that water been sitting in a plastic bottle absorbing all the chemicals in the plastic.  The softer the plastic the more likely the leakage of the chemicals. These are shown to alter the oestrogen levels in women, and yet it is mostly women that carry around bottles of water as we are told we need to drink more. These bottles get hot and cold and as they heat up, so you potentially increase chemical leakage.

It may be that you do need more water, but water on its own will dilute the salts in the body and the body needs salt for a variety of functions.

I quote here from the Essential guide to Water and Salt (F. Batmanghelidj MD and Phillip Day)

Salt is essential for sleep, helps balance sugar levels in the body - so a vital element to be considered in diabetes, It is vital for the communication and information processing of the nervous system. It helps food absorption and most of us will know that we need it when our muscles cramp and spasm. It helps build strong bones and can help prevent varicose veins. The list is not endless but it is certainly long.
Now of course it doesn't mean salt in excess and it doesn't mean industrial waste table salt.
Batmanghelidj and Day conclude that 3grams of salt for every 10 glasses of water is required if you are going to ensure that drinking more water won't have a negative effect by washing out all the essential salts from the body.

So the media's two favourite health stories, 'Drink more water' and 'Eat less Salt' could in fact have  very unfavourable consequences over time especially if you believe and follow both.

Then there is the 'low fat' Should we really be eating margarine's? I think most of us know by now that our bodies cope with natural fats and can process these better than man made fats. There are so many excellent explanations on the Internet now, many given by medics and I viewed one recently by a pharmacist, that shows it is not the animal fat that is causing cholesterol (I have blogged before on the cholesterol myth so will not repeat it) but it is damage to the arteries that requires our bodies cholesterol to be needed to fill the gaps, and so we should be looking at reducing damage in the first place, now that can be through lessening stress and avoiding 'table salt' which can have a scraping effect on your artery walls in a way that sea salt and rock salt does not.
I'm also sure that most know that its not fat that makes us fat, but sugar.

Rise in body weight - look to corn syrup and sugar!

Fat is protective to our cell walls and necessary for the production of hormones and the transportation of hormones and vitamins (Vit D and E esp) Hormones control just about everything in our bodies in some way or other, so do we really need less of it?

Many people follow low fat diets and buy the appropriate food, if they look at it, it more often than not has more sugar!  Then they wonder how come they don't lose weight or don't sustain weight loss. Sugar is an inflammatory in the body and not part of our natural eating. Yes we need some.but not in the amounts we consume and then its better if its as natural as possible and not in the highly processed corn syrup form. It can also be overlooked that carbs can turn to sugar.

So next time you see the next food fad that we should eat or avoid, don't react out of fear, investigate and decide.

These days so much info is available to us and we are not getting the best from many newspaper stories, so don't base health decision and food choices that effect your health on this and this alone, just think about the salt and water, follow both sets of advice and you could be quite unwell and not doing the best for yourself.
Remember studies are often 'cherry picked' to show what they want, and often what is not favourable to the desired perspective is missing from the big picture. This can be the case for food and for drugs. lets hope your doctor looks at all studies, both those that are published and those that weren't, before he prescribes.
So take control of your health and check what you eat and what you are given.
Or check a resource that has done that for you already and one that you trust - but don't accept the same story from 2 different newspapers as being proof.

We are first and foremost the product of what we put in our supermarket trolley!  What goes in this month, will appear as a skin cell in about 30 days and other cells in longer or lesser time.