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Your Healthiest Season Ever With Beyond Keto

AHA Publisher — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:00:13 +0000

Dr. Don Colbert – This could be your healthiest season yet. If you’re ready to ditch the processed, chemical-laden, unhealthy foods and move into a lifestyle that promotes energy, a healthy weight, healthy digestion, and a youthful brain, here it is. It’s time to take the best attributes of Keto Zone® and combine them with the best of the Mediterranean Diet. It’s time to experience Dr. Colbert’s Beyond Keto and live your healthiest season ever. Build Upon the Success of the Keto Zone® Many people have had incredible success with the Keto Zone. As reflected in studies on ketogenic diet results, Keto Zone users have experienced efficient and long-lasting weight loss, healthy cholesterol and triglyceride levels, optimal blood sugars, and more (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). The Keto Zone has always gone beyond typical ketogenic diets to promote the healthiest low-carbohydrate and high-fat foods. While other ketogenic diets may allow processed foods or a diet too high in saturated fatty meats, Keto Zone encourages the healthiest fats such as extra virgin olive oil and avocado oil, healthy protein from fish, eggs, poultry, and more, and a plethora of fresh, vibrant vegetables, green powders, and fruit powders. Now, Dr. Colbert has put these optimized Keto Zone recommendations into a book. To engage in your healthiest summer, look no further than Beyond Keto Zone. As promised, you will find an eating lifestyle that marries healthy Keto Zone eating with the Mediterranean Diet. The result? A lifestyle that promotes a healthy weight, high energy, youthful brain function, healthy digestion, and more! An Optimal Approach: Beyond Keto Beyond Keto is the next logical step after Keto Zone. If you’ve had great success with Keto Zone, this book and lifestyle will help you move further in your health journey. If you’re new to Keto Zone and Beyond Keto, it will bring you up to speed for both aspects. It’s simply the best of the Keto Diet combined with the best of the Mediterranean Diet. Beyond Keto: Combining Two Diets for the Best Outcome How can Keto Zone and the Mediterranean diet work together? First, Keto Zone offers initial, efficient benefits with weight loss and improved blood sugars. This phase will produce great results for weight loss, optimal blood sugars, less hunger, and a “reset” for eating (10). For anyone who’s struggled with eating the same unhealthy foods for years, a dramatic change is often the “shake-up” they need to see results. This is part one. While in the keto phase, dieters will experience all the amazing benefits of ketosis. They will produce ketones that will reduce hunger, provide amazing natural energy, support mental focus, and encourage healthy weight loss and maintenance (11). Then, the Mediterranean diet allows for continual healthy-eating success, whole body health, better digestion, and a lifestyle of great health outcomes and enables one to live a long, healthy life. How? It’s highly anti-inflammatory. Inflammation is at the heart of many negative health issues, and any healthy diet should aim to reduce it while achieving long term health goals (12). What’s more, the Mediterranean Diet has been proven over centuries to support full body health. It’s especially beneficial for heart health, optimal blood sugars, gut microbiota, and metabolism (13) because it is based on healthy fats such as extra virgin olive oil and seafood. In addition, it’s full of colorful plant foods like vegetables, beans, peas, lentils, salads and healthy, low- sugared fruits. Typically the Mediterranean Diet also allows for some whole grains. However, Beyond Keto emphasizes the amazing foods in the Mediterranean Diet while limiting any refined carbohydrates and sugars. It’s All About Results Scientific study, experience, and decades of research all point to key approaches for a healthy lifestyle: achieve a healthy weight, maintain a healthy weight, and fight inflammation. This is right in line with Beyond Keto. It promotes: A Healthy Weight: Almost all current negative health conditions are linked to, or exacerbated by, obesity (14). By utilizing healthy ketogenic diet principles, Beyond Keto promotes healthy changes and outcomes as soon as the first two weeks (15)! In addition, the Mediterranean diet component continues to support healthy weight and healthy body composition. Its focus on lean proteins, seafoods, healthy oils, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, and vegetables provide a wonderful well-balanced, satisfying dietary lifestyle to maintain a healthy weight (16). Energy, Vitality, and Mental Focus: One of the greatest benefits of the ketogenic diet is the production of ketones. Ketones are natural energizing compounds that support healthy mental focus and vitality. The Mediterranean diet also encourages great energy and vitality with the abundant variety of healthy foods. Rather than experiencing the ups and downs of a high-sugar diet, you will enjoy steady, youthful energy from delicious, colorful whole foods. Optimal Blood Sugars and Metabolism: An amazing aspect of both the ketogenic diet and the Mediterranean diet normalized blood sugars. By using both eating styles in Beyond Keto, you’ll remove harmful refined starches while focusing on healthy fats, high fiber beans, peas, lentils, vegetables, lean protein and low glycemic fruits such as berries. Part of the improvement comes from weight loss. The other part comes from a diet that supports healthy metabolism and hormones (17). Healthy Cholesterol, Triglyceride, and Blood Pressure Levels. Both the Keto Zone and Mediterranean diet aspects of Beyond Keto support heart health. First, Beyond Keto promotes a healthy weight, which can help optimize heart health. Next, by choosing the incredibly heart-healthy foods in the Mediterranean diet, you can continue to encourage great heart health In fact, the foods in the Mediterranean diet and Beyond Keto work to support heart health, healthy cholesterol, and achieve whole-body health (18). Natural Unprocessed Foods Full of Antioxidants and Anti-Inflammatory Compounds. One of the worst dietary habits plaguing humans worldwide is the consumption of ultra-processed foods. In fact, researchers have found that ultra-processed foods are linked to most modern health conditions and even overall risk of death (19)! Thankfully, you’ll eat a healthy, high antioxidant and anti-inflammatory foods rather than ultra-processed ones (20). Healthy Gut Microbiota. Amazingly, Beyond Keto combines Keto Zone and Mediterranean foods to support gut health! This is great news for the millions of people who suffer from less-than-optimal gut function. In fact, studies have found the Mediterranean diet specifically improves gut microbiota and its associated metabolism functions. The diet’s prebiotics from healthy fibers along with healthy fats and polyphenols support gut health, hormone balance, and metabolism (21). Bottom Line: Experience Your Healthiest Summer It’s not just a diet. You can learn to live a healthy lifestyle that promotes healthy weight, energy, mental focus, reduced inflammation, and vitality! Don’t wait. Get started today with Dr. Colbert’s Beyond Keto and make this next season your best one yet! To read the original article click here.

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Malfunctioning Blood-Brain Barrier Is Linked to Benign Forgetfulness of Aging

AHA Publisher — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 07:00:06 +0000

University of Washington School of Medicine/UW Medicine via News-Medical – Have you forgotten where you laid your keys? Ever wondered where you had parked your car? Or having trouble remembering the name of the new neighbor? Unfortunately, these things seem to get worse as one gets older. A big question for researchers is where does benign forgetfulness end and true disease begin? One of the keys to having a healthy brain at any age is having a healthy blood-brain barrier, a complex interface of blood vessels that run through the brain. Researchers reviewed more than 150 articles to look at what happens to the blood-brain barrier as we age. Their findings were published March 15 in Nature Aging. Whether the changes to the blood-brain barrier alters brain function, however, is still up for debate. “It turns out very little is known how the blood-brain barrier ages. It’s often hard to tell normal aging from early disease.” (William Banks, Study Lead Author and Gerontology Researcher, School of Medicine, University of Washington) Banks is a researcher with the Geriatrics Research Education and Clinical Center at the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System The blood-brain barrier, discovered in the late 1800s, prevents the unregulated leakage of substances from blood into the brain. The brain is an especially sensitive organ and cannot tolerate direct exposure to many of the substances in the blood. Increasingly, scientists have realized that the blood-brain barrier also allows many substances into the brain in a regulated way to serve the nutritional needs of the brain. It also transports informational molecules from the blood to the brain and pumps toxins out of the brain. A malfunctioning blood-brain barrier can contribute to diseases such as multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and even Alzheimer’s disease. Before scientists can understand how such malfunctioning can contribute to the diseases of aging, they need to understand how a healthy blood-brain barrier normally ages. Research shows that healthy aging individuals have a very small leak in their blood-brain barrier. This leakage is associated with some measures of the benign forgetfulness of aging, considered by most scientists to be normal. But could this leak and the difficulties in recall be the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease? When a person carries the ApoE4 allele, the strongest genetic risk of Alzheimer’s risk, researchers said there is an acceleration of most of the blood-brain barrier age-related changes. People with ApoE4 have a hard time getting rid of amyloid beta peptide in their brains, which causes an accumulation of plaque. With healthy aging, the pumps in the blood-brain barrier work less efficiently in getting rid of the amyloid beta peptide. The pumps work even less well in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Another key finding in the review is that as we age, two cells begin to change in the blood-brain barrier: pericytes and astrocytes. Recent work suggests that the leak in the blood-brain barrier that occurs with Alzheimer’s may be due to an age-related loss of pericytes. Astrocytes, by contrast, seem to be overactive. Recent work suggests that preserving pericyte function by giving the factors that they secrete or even transplanting them could lead to a healthier blood-brain barrier. Some research suggests that pericyte health can be preserved by some of the same interventions that extend lifespan, such as regular exercise, caloric restriction, and rapamycin. Other findings raise the question of whether the brain’s source of nutrition and its grip on control of the immune and endocrine systems could deteriorate with aging. Another finding raises the possibility that the rate at which many drugs are taken up by the brain may explain why older folks sometimes have different sensitivities to drugs than their children or grandchildren. To read the original article click here.

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The Best Supplements for Your Brain According to Leading Functional Medicine Practitioner

AHA Publisher — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 08:00:42 +0000

Dr. Will Cole via Dr. Caroline Leaf – We can’t overlook the importance of keeping our brain healthy. With mild problems like mild brain fog on one end, to anxiety and depression in the middle, and severe diseases like Alzheimer’s on the other – the spectrum of brain health problems can make daily life a struggle. In my telehealth functional medicine clinic, I see these problems a lot more often than one might expect. In fact, the research confirms brain problems are on the rise with autism, dementia, and anxiety and depression rates continuing to climb. So, the question is, how can we prevent these problems before they occur? And if you are currently struggling with one of these problems, how can you alleviate symptoms? While I believe that our diet is foundational, sometimes we need a little extra help. And that’s where supplements come in. These are the supplements I turn to the most often to help optimize brain health and function. 1. Probiotics Your gut and brain are inextricably linked through what is known as the gut-brain axis – what affects one can affect the other. For example Occludin and Zonulin are two proteins that govern gut permeability as well as the permeability of your blood-brain barrier. In my clinic, it’s not uncommon that I have a patient come in looking for help with depression or brain fog and have further diagnostic testing reveal that they also have leaky gut syndrome. It just goes to show that digestive problems can still be a factor even if you aren’t experiencing symptoms. A probiotic with Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium is a good choice to rebalance your microbiome and start healing any gut dysfunction. 2. Lion’s Mane This adaptogenic mushroom has potent neuroprotective properties, that help enhance mental clarity and boost cognitive function. Lion’s mane contains nerve growth factors that work to protect and regenerate brain tissue with studies finding that those who supplemented with lion’s mane had higher cognitive function compared to those who didn’t. 3. St. John’s Wort This herb is recommended by doctors more often in Germany than antidepressants like Prozac. While long-term studies have shown its ability to stabilize mood more research needs to be done to better determine just how effective it is. 4. Omega-3 Fish Oil Your brain is 60 percent fat, so it only makes sense that not getting enough fat in your diet can contribute to brain problems. You can only deprive your brain of it’s building blocks for so long before it starts to show. Healthy fats can be found in a variety of foods including wild-caught seafood however, some people may find it difficult to get enough from food alone. If this is the case for you, you might want to consider an omega-3 fish oil supplement. Although omega fats can be found in plant sources such as flax, it’s not as bioavailable because it has to be converted into DHA or EPA by the body before it is usable. I suggest either fish oil supplement from krill, salmon, or sardines. An ideal dosage is 2250mg EPA / 750 mg DHA per day. 5. CoQ10 CoQ10 stands for coenzyme Q10 and is found in each cell of the body, specifically the energy center of the cell – the mitochondria. If your brain’s cells are depleted of this nutrient, chances are it isn’t going to function optimally. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology found that in 18 people with depression, 400 to 800 mg/day of CoQ10 for a month decreased the severity of depression symptoms and significantly improved symptoms of fatigue, sadness, and brain fog. 6. Vitamin D Low levels of vitamin D have been linked to poor memory and brain fog. Sunshine is the most bioavailable source of this nutrient but it’s not always possible to spend enough time in the sun, especially if you live in a place with dark, cloudy winters. Thankfully, certain foods such as salmon and tuna are rich in vitamin D. And if you pair them with fat-soluble vitamins like A, E, and K2 to increase the bioavailability of vitamin D. When looking for supplements, be sure to research brands and look for transparency in their sourcing and avoid any unnecessary additives. So, give your brain a boost, and add in one or more of these supplements to your routine! As always, I don’t recommend trying to supplement your way out of a poor diet. Food comes first. Moreover, you can amplify the brain boosting benefits of food as medicine and these supplements with flexible intermittent fasting. This is something I explore in detail in my new book Intuitive Fasting. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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Anxious, Moody Older Adults Are Vulnerable to Worse Cognitive Function

AHA Publisher — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 07:00:51 +0000

Northwestern University via EurekAlert – CHICAGO – Our aging brains collect tangles and sticky plaques that can interfere in our cognition and memory. But some older adults with this neuropathology have more cognitive resilience than others, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. The reason: their personalities. Personality traits were associated with cognitive resilience, which is the ability to better live with the neuropathology in the brain that causes dementia. Individuals with a greater tendency toward self-discipline, organization, diligence, high achievement and motivation — a trait known as higher conscientiousness — was associated with greater resilience. Individuals with higher neuroticism — a greater tendency towards anxiety, worry, moodiness and impulsivity — were more likely to have worse cognitive function than expected given the amount of neuropathology detected at autopsy. The study was published Sept. 24 in Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences. “These findings provide evidence that it is possible for older adults to live with the neuropathology associated with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias while maintaining relatively healthy levels of cognitive function,” said lead study author Eileen Graham, a research assistant professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Our study shows personality traits are related to how well people are able to maintain their cognitive function in spite of developing neuropathology,” Graham said. “Since it is possible for personality to change, both volitionally and through interventions, it’s possible that personality could be used to identify those who are at risk and implement early interventions to help optimize function throughout old age.” Personality and other factors that promote cognitive resilience may be particularly important in the context of stress (like the COVID-19 pandemic) and this is an important area of future research, Graham noted. This is believed to be one of the first studies showing an individual’s personality traits are linked to how well they are able to sustain their cognitive function as they age. These findings lend credence to the idea that personality can be leveraged to help individuals maintain their cognitive function when they may otherwise be vulnerable to neurodegeneration. The data was collected at Rush University Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Individuals contributed annual psychosocial self-report survey and clinical data. At study enrollment they also consented to donating their brains for post-mortem autopsy. Study participants contributed years of rich data on their psychological and cognitive functioning while they were living, as well as autopsy data after they died. To read the original article click here.

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