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Early Puberty: What does it mean for tomorrow’s women?



Abnormal sexual development from unclear cause, environmental changes suspected.

According to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics, 1 in 10 girls in second and third grade, of Caucasian descent, showed stage 2 breast development (small mounds of tissue under the nipple area), which is considered the first sign of sexual maturation. This is an increase of two hundred percent since the 1980s. For African American girls, the increase is even more alarming, with nearly one in four 7 and 8 year-olds showing the early breast signs.

The causes are unclear, but suspects include: Continue reading →

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Loose Belly Flab in Three Weeks!!

Under the skin: Omental Fat

Big bellies bulge when a person’s diet is particularly bad. Belly flab is an important external sign of metabolic inflammation. According to new research, even thin people with a little bit of belly flab are looking at problems down the road.

A study published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that relatively normal weight people who add bulk in the bellies, as opposed to other places, are at nearly the same risk of dying from respiratory diseases (like asthma and pnumonia), cardiovascular diseases (like heart attack and stroke), and cancers as people who are morbidly obese.

“Even if you have a normal BMI and a big tummy then you are just as much at risk [of dying from these problems] as someone who is classified as obese with a large tummy.” –Dr David Haslam, chair of the National Obesity Forum,

The reason belly flab is particularly bad has to do with the quality of a person’s diet more than the calories. Belly flab in thin people is not under the skin, it’s from fat surrounding the intestines, called “omental fat.” It’s forms particularly rapidly when a person’s diet is loaded with harmful trans fatty acids, which are so toxic, the body can’t even absorb them properly and they cake up within the intestinal lining (the omentum).

Can three weeks really do the trick?

Because trans fats are so abundant in our food supply, present in snack foods, donuts pastries and most store bought breads, buns, cereals, granola bars, salad dressings, and “health” bars, that once you start avoiding them, you’ll notice belly flab melting away, as well as that turkey gobbler fat under the chin!

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Can Creepy People Make Good Doctors?

Have you ever had the experience of meeting the doctor who is going to perform your surgery only to discover that this surgeon had all the charm and charisma of a villain out of a Stephen King novel?

Guys, have you ever, during an initial consultation for, say, a vasectomy, noticed something strange about the way a doctor was speaking to you? Maybe he refuses to look you in the eyes for the entirety of your visit, fixating on your Adam’s apple as if it were talking directly to him.

Ladies, what if you were about to get a hysterectomy, and liked the surgeon very much—until, that is, he stands to shake your hand and crushes it with all his might as though he were trying to squeeze the last bit of juice from a lemon?

It’s an interesting subject, this perceived relationship between a doctor’s personality and their ability to perform their job. This issue is of particular interest to me because a member of my family was once treated by a doctor who we immediately found to be, cold, distant, and more than a little strange. But what do you do when a highly recommended doctor strikes you, when you meet him or her face-to-face, as a little “off”?

Have you ever been in this position, and if so what did you do about it?

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Raw Milk-Why Mess With Udder Perfection?

This article is Cross Posted on The Jew and the Carrot

Milk may be the single most historically important food to human health. Not just any milk, mind you, but raw milk from healthy, free-to-roam, grass-fed cows. The difference between the milk you buy in the store, and the milk your great-great grandparents enjoyed is, unfortunately, enormous. If we lived in a country where raw milk from healthy, pastured cows were still a legal product and available as readily as, say, soda or a handgun, we’d all be taller and healthier, and I’d see fewer elderly patients with hunched backs and broken hips. If you’re lucky enough to live in a state where raw milk is available in stores and you don’t buy it, you are passing up a huge opportunity to improve your health immediately. If you have kids, raw milk will not only help them grow, but will also boost their immune systems so they get sick less often. And, since the cream in raw milk is an important source of brain-building fats, whole milk and other raw dairy products will also help them to learn.

It’s a common misperception that milk drinking is a relatively new practice, one limited to Europeans. The reality is that our cultural—and now, our epigenetic—dependence on milk most likely originated somewhere in Africa.  Continue reading →

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How starting a low-cholesterol diet leads to problems

This is arterial plaque. If your HDL is low, you are more likely to have unstable arterial plaques than if your LDL is high.

This is arterial plaque. If your HDL is low, you are more likely to have unstable arterial plaques than if your LDL is high.

Today it happened again. I saw another patient who, except for a little bit of extra weight, was healthy until she was diagnosed with high total cholesterol levels.

“You’ve got to do something” they told her.

She got the usual advice: Cut butter, eggs, red meat and cheese. But cutting dietary cholesterol didn’t work, and on the next test, the cholesterol level was even higher. Afraid for her life, she asked what else she could do. No surprise, they put her on a statin: Crestor. And on the next test her total cholesterol was lower and everyone was happy. But the glow didn’t last.

She steadily gained more weight until she grew into the obese category on the BMI chart. Worse, three years after starting Crestor, her glucose levels rose to the point where she had developed early diabetes (a known side effect of Crestor and presumably other statins since the 2008 Jupiter study). Once in early diabetes, more struggles with weight, and new problems such as joint pains, nerve problems, and hypertension are on their way. Continue reading →

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New Hope for Alzheimer’s?

Why is this man smiling?

If you’ve ever lived with someone suffering from the horrible effects of Alzheimer’s, you know that you’d do almost anything to stop this disease in its tracks. If you’ve been spared that experience, take a look at Nancy Reagan’s face at her husband’s funeral. That’s the look of somebody who has acted as caretaker for a man who was at one time the most powerful person in the free world, and then, not such a long time later, wasn’t entirely sure where, or who, he was.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the drugs that promise to effectively treat this disease actually worked?

As a doctor familiar with Alzheimer’s and its effects on families, I’m sad to say that they don’t. At least not very well. The drugs we have, though widely advertised, are little more effective than placebo, and for this reason some doctors no longer prescribe them. In fact, in a recent independently funded study, Dr. Richard Grey concluded Aricept, the most popular drug in the class of Alzheimer’s treatments, was “worthless.”

Why don’t Alzheimer’s drugs work?
Continue reading →

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