* Ornish and his colleagues followed the heart study by applying the same program to men with prostate cancer, with equally potent results, proving yet again that aggressive compliance with a personalized lifestyle medicine program trumps drug treatment when it comes to chronic illness.
* There is ongoing controversy over the clinical specificity of the PSA test in defining cancer risk; my view is that the evidence strongly indicates that rapidly rising PSA levels over time are a strong indicator of prostate cancer.
* In fact, some medical historians suggest that the real origins of today’s genomic revolution can be found in the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon of China and the work of Hippocrates of Greece, both circa 500 BCE, and in the principles of Ayurvedic medicine formulated in India in the first and second centuries CE.
* Margulis was named the distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts in 1988, a post she still held at the time of her death in 2011. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1999.
* Augustus Rose Professor, Director of the Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research, and Director of Neurodegenerative Disease Research at the David Geffen School of Medicine UCLA.
* This may not have been a totally original assessment. It is of historical interest that the naturopathic medical approach to chronic illness, born out of the Mechnikov model of gastrointestinal health, can be summarized as “Start with the gut.”
* A number of case reports and well-controlled clinical trials evidenced ADRs between prescription/OTC NSAIDs and alcohol, antihypertensive drugs, methotrexate, and lithium, as well as between frequently prescribed narcotics and other central nervous system depressants.
* In this regard, I highly recommend the 2007 book by Devra Davis, professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, about the health impact of endocrine-disrupting chemicals and the active efforts of many industrial forces to keep this information suppressed. We’ll hear more of Dr. Davis in Chapter 10.
* Dr. Monro has been an important contributor to the Functional Medicine Clinical Research Center, adding immeasurably to our understanding of the importance of chronic toxicity as a contributor to illness.
* Dr. Levine is a research endocrinologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and chief of molecular and clinical nutrition within the Digestive Disease Branch of the NIH.
* Dr. Robert Heaney is research endocrinologist at the Creighton School of Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska, and recipient of the 2003 E. V. McCollum Award.
* A nanomole is a unit of measurement in chemistry; it is one thousand-millionth of a mole, which in turn is measured in molecules. In other words, we’re talking very, very small measures.
* Michael Holick, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine, physiology, and biophysics at Boston University Medical School.
* Paul Stamets is also the author of the 2005 book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World—among other works.
* Selye’s work has prompted tens of thousands of other investigations in laboratories around the world, as scientists deepen our understanding of stress and disease. I note particularly Dr. Robert Sapolsky at Stanford University and Dr. Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller University, both of whom have contributed significantly to the incorporation of stress physiology into the functional medicine operating system.
* Bruce S. McEwen, PhD, Alfred E. Mirsky Professor, is head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at the Rockefeller University.
* See Bruce McEwen’s book, The End of Stress as We Know It, for more on allostatic load.
* Not so with acute inflammation. That’s usually the result of an injury, and the inflammation stays there. If you get a scrape on your arm, for example, the reddening of the skin as blood and fluids rush to the site remains local, and it eventually subsides as the skin heals. If you get shin splints from too much jogging, that’s the only place where you hurt—so long as you stay off the running track. On the other hand, if you resume the exercise before the injury is truly healed, the acute local inflammation can indeed turn chronic and influence function throughout the body.
* Robert Lerman, MD, PhD; Joseph Lamb, MD; Jacob Kornberg, MD; Veera Konda, PhD; Anu Desai, PhD; Gary Darland, PhD; Brian Carroll, PhD; Deanna Minich, PhD; and Jan Urban, PhD.
* The studies were performed under the medical direction of Joseph Lamb, MD; Robert Lerman, PhD; Jack Kornberg, MD; Daniel Lukaczer, ND; Barbara Schiltz, RN, MS; and Lincoln Bouillon, MS, MBA.
* Created by Heather Vincent, PhD, and her research group at the University of Florida at Gainesville.
* By the way, the health tip from this is to cook animal products, the only foods containing cholesterol, at low temperatures; this will mitigate the oxidation process.
* Directed by David Heber, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the UCLA Medical School—and an old friend and colleague of mine.
* Specifically:
Fasting triglycerides in the blood: greater than 150 mg/dL
Reduced HDL cholesterol: less than 40 mg/dL in males, less than 50 mg/dL in females
Elevated blood pressure (BP): systolic BP greater than 130 or diastolic BP greater than 85 mm Hg, or treatment of previously diagnosed hypertension
Raised blood glucose (FPG): greater than 100 mg/dL after fasting
Central obesity with a waist-to-hip ratio greater than 0.90 in males and greater than 0.85 in females, or with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 30
Urinary albumin to creatinine excretion ratio greater than 30 mg/g
* A larger follow-up study, also for twelve weeks, confirmed the results. Participants with metabolic syndrome were tested in trials at the University of Connecticut, the University of Florida College of Medicine, and the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. The results again demonstrated the superiority of the program supplemented with the phytonutrient-enriched medical food.
* From the work of Dr. Mark Mattson and his research team at the Laboratory for Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging. The work examined the hormesis mechanism with phytonutrients shown to have a positive effect on mitochondrial function.
* Also, as noted in Chapter 5, professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh.
* See http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2013-e.pdf.
* http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf.
* Stanley J. Korsmeyer Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
* Medical foods are available by physician recommendation.
* Recommended daily doses for defense process intervention: zinc (10–30 mg), natural source vitamin E (400–800 IU), omega-3 EPA/DHA (3–5 grams), vitamin A (2,500 IU), vitamin D (1,000–5,000 IU), probiotics, green tea epigallocatechin gallate (100 mg), and curcumin (100 mg).
* Not to mention obesity, dementia, osteoporosis, blindness, kidney disease, and certain forms of cancer.
* N-acetylcysteine (2,000 mg), lipoic acid (2,000 mg), coenzyme Q10 (50 mg), methylcobalamin (a form of vitamin B12; 500 mcg), folic acid (800 mcg), vitamin B1 (50 mg), vitamin B2 (50 mg), vitamin B3 (100 mg), vitamin B6 (25 mg).