BetterHealthBytes.com - Better Health Bytes Newsletter Volume 1-Issue 7

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Vol. I, # 7

DIETARY FAT and

PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS:

Nine Top Symptoms Caused by Low Dietary

Fat Intake

It was all the latest craze - the way to lower your risk of heart disease and stroke (and who wouldn't want to do that!) was to simply reduce your dietary fat intake. This started the fixation on lowering dietary fat consumption way back when people were asking "what is dietary fat?'

It went like this: to lower your risk of stroke or heart attack, you were supposed to lower your dietary fat intake across the board, no matter what type of fat it was. If it was fat, you were not to consume it.

Then this stroke prevention and heart attack reduction advice got into types of fats. So the next type of fat to be demonized was saturated fat. If you'd read the media reports, you'd have thought it was the devil incarnate. But guess what? The research demonstrated that saturated fat was actually one of the healthy fats. Not only that, but also that it made a difference about the type of fat you consumed. To deliver the punch line, it turns out that if you want to label some fat as the devil incarnate, it has to be trans fats - those manufactured ones that were supposed to save us all from strokes and heart attacks. So the very industry that demonized healthy fats and tried to get us to consume trans fats (their products) instead, turns out to be the problem!

Here's how the Harvard School of Public Health put it:

"By our most conservative estimate, replacement of partially hydrogenated fat in the U.S. diet with natural unhydrogenated vegetable oils would prevent approximately 30,000 premature coronary deaths per year, and epidemiologic evidence suggests this number is closer to 100,000 premature deaths annually."

Still, many people haven't heard the news. In fact, some are back still thinking dietary fats are really bad for you, but of course, they're not.

Although there are many more than just nine health problems caused by low dietary fat intake, here are nine of the top symptoms that are a direct result of low fat or no fat diets:

Click here

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Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own. Mother Teresa

YOUR EMOTIONAL LIFE - a Complimentary Resource for You ...
Since your emotional life and its health is so central to every other part of your life and health, we wondered how to go about supporting you in learning what it's all about and how to manage it. We answered that question by deciding to offer a number of items you can use to get started. Toward that end, we're delighted to announce a new, free resource to support your emotional health. It's the just-published eBook, Your Emotional Self - Five Secrets for a Successful Emotional Life. And you're welcome to share it with anyone you choose. It's a little step toward a more emotionally healthy world for us all. We're also celebrating the fact that our 10 one-hour-a-week online classes, Emotional Development101 just went live this week. It's participants are now engaged in learning lots about how our emotional lives are designed. Among the many benefits they will have at the end of their ten-week experience are ones other graduates have reported: a better understanding of themselves, greater self- respect, higher self-esteem, more confidence, being a better parent, lower emotional reactivity, higher productivity, etc. If you'd like to have those benefits in your life, go to http://www.emotionaldevelopment101. com, Click here...
Feel free to forward this to others so they can have greater health and wellbeing too!

CHOLESTEROL

and Your Health

You may have thought that cholesterol is dangerous. You may even have thought that consuming cholesterol in your diet increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and even cancer.

Therefore, you may assume that to improve your health and decrease your chances of getting heart disease, stroke or cancer that you need to reduce your intake of cholesterol. You would assume that would lower your blood cholesterol levels and bring you out of the danger zone.

Is this true? To answer this question means understanding first what cholesterol is, and then what it does in the body.

What Is Cholesterol? Cholesterol is sterol: a waxy lipid (meaning fat) compound that is found in animal tissues. It performs a variety of essential functions in your body.

For example, it facilitates both the absorption and the transportation of fatty acids.

It is also a fundamental building block for a variety of your hormones. These include both your adrenal hormones (cortisol, cortisone and aldosterone) and your sex hormones (progesterone, estrogens and testosterone).

Additionally, it plays a role in the function of your brain, your immune system and your heart health.

Cholesterol's Reputation. If cholesterol is so essential to your health, how did it develop the reputation of being the devil in molecular form?

This shady reputation came about because it was seen that people who had heart disease or strokes also had high cholesterol levels. So it was thought that cholesterol levels themselves were the problem.

But actually the body raises cholesterol levels in response to a problem. In other words, high cholesterol levels are the body's attempt to keep itself healthy. The body raises these levels to deal with inflammation.

When the insides of the arteries and veins are inflamed, for example, the body sends cholesterol in to attempt to patch the areas of inflammation. It's actually the inflammation that's the problem, and not the cholesterol itself.

Blood Cholesterol Levels: What's "Normal"? Cholesterol levels are measured in milligrams (mg) of cholesterol per deciliter (dL) of blood.

Current standards define desirable total cholesterol levels as less than 200 mg/dL, with 200-239 mg/dL defined as borderline high and 240 mg/dL and above high.

For low density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, less than 100 mg/dL is considered optimal, 100-129 mg/dL near optimal or above optimal, 130-159 mg/dL borderline high, 160-189 mg/dL high and 190 mg/dL and above very high.

It is worth noting that these standards were defined after initial studies which were conducted on only on men. It remains to be seen whether the cholesterol levels defined as normal for the male body are actually best for a woman.

Men's hormone requirements are much different than women's. Also, women's bodies have a different biochemistry and metabolism than men, including hormonal production needs and responses, a fact that may seem obvious, but which has not been recognized in many "scientific" studies, particularly earlier ones.

To access a summary of health problems due to low cholesterol, and to access a list of causes of inflammation leading to high cholesterol, Click here...