SCFAs – The Link to Overall Health

There are good fats, bad fats, short fats, and long fats. Fats can be saturated and unsaturated. Fats are confusing, and can be the hardest aspect of nutrition and diet to understand.

Dietary and nutritional fats are called the triglycerides. They are made up of building blocks called “fatty acids” that come in three sizes: small, medium, and large.

They all have a very important role in keeping your body healthy. The most important one is the small fat, or the “short chain fatty acid” also known as the “SCFA”.

SCFAs are super significant to your health. These tiny molecular fatty structures play a huge role in the health of your intestinal tract. Because of the importance of intestinal health, the SCFAs are directly linked to a plethora of health issues. Because of this fact, they represent a major link to several other systems in your body. That is why they are so very important to understand.

There are two ways that you get these important fatty acid structures. SCFAs can be consumed directly by eating certain foods, and they are also manufactured within the gut. When the beneficial microbes eat the fiber found in vegetables, they secrete SCFAs.

Because of how small the SCFAs are, they enter into your blood stream rapidly. The amazing thing is that they actually curb your appetite and can help you lose weight. It might sound backwards, that you can eat fats and lose weight, but this is a little-known biological fact. Butter is one of the most common foods that you can eat, as it is a great source of SCFAs.

Fats also act as tiny messenger molecules that tell the brain and body what is happening in your digestive system. They are signaling molecules. When we understand this, it becomes apparent why we have a problem with traditional dietary advice that says we should avoid all fats. Traditional dietary and medical advice has always been focused on reducing and avoiding all fat. We have come to find out that this may not be sound scientific advice.

SCFAs also play a major role in helping to “calm down” systems in the body. This explains the important link between the intestines and the brain, which is referred to as the “gut-brain axis”. It has direct effects the development of schizophrenia, autism, and mental health issues. That’s why we now know that what we eat has a direct effect on mental health.

All SCFAs have a calming effect, but the most significant relaxing effect comes from butyric acid, which is the chemical that gives butter its characteristic qualities and taste. The bacteria that produce butyric acid kick into high gear when food is scarce, and many researchers now believe that this is the mechanism behind the health benefits associated with fasting.

Butyric acid derivatives, which are induced by caloric restriction, might also have a mitigating effect on pain and inflammation. This was reported by scientists from the Yale School of Medicine in an article published in the journal “Nature Medicine”. The researchers found that these benefits may extend to health challenges like atherosclerosis, diabetes, and dementias that are not typically associated with inflammatory pain.

What all this means is that upregulating butyric acid and increasing its levels in the blood can be one of the most important and effective of all dietary health strategies as stated by Pharmacist Ben Fuchs of Boulder, Colorado.

That means you can enjoy butter and cheese, because they are nature’s richest sources of butyric acid. And since it is produced by a reaction between fiber and the good microbes that live in your large intestine, you should make sure that you have a good beneficial bacteria population and a diet that includes lots of vegetables, mushrooms, and some good fruits.

Taking a probiotic supplement that has multiple strains of beneficial bacteria with a daily dose of 10 to 50 billion units, plus eating lots of fermented foods like sauerkraut, miso soup, and fresh, non-pasteurized kefir and yogurt can help you build a healthy gut that will pave the way to benefitting properly from SCFAs which will put you on the pathway to excellent overall health.he pathway to excellent overall health!

Carlton Flowers
Scott Health Systems

Is LDL Cholesterol Getting a “Bad Rap”? Here’s the Real Story

We commonly hear that LDL “Cholesterol” is an evil thing that causes serious negative health issues. We are told that LDL is “bad cholesterol”, and HDL is “good cholesterol”. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In this blog post, you’ll learn why LDL isn’t bad, or the root of the problem. Plus you’ll learn about the big missing link that rarely is discussed in conversations about treatments.

The truth is, LDL and HDL are not cholesterol. In reality, they are the same compound in different states, depending on where they are in the cycle of things. Additionally, LDL isn’t “bad”. The only thing bad about LDL is that is has gotten a bad rap from those who don’t explain what is behind “the numbers” you get from a blood test. You’ll get the details below.

To begin with a couple of questions. First of all, what exactly IS “LDL”, and why is a high count considered harmful to overall health? Secondly, are we sure we’re getting the complete story when we are told that we need to be put on Statin drugs to safeguard our circulatory system against dangerous plaques that can cause a myriad of health challenges when we visit the doctor for testing that reveals a high LDL count?

To answer, let’s define exactly what LDL is in order to be clear. Then we’ll move on to the “bad cholesterol” issue and the untold story regarding lowering the LDL count with Statin drugs.

LDL stands for “Low-density lipoprotein“, which is the least-dense of the five types of the lipoproteins. It actually isn’t cholesterol, but the compound that carries cholesterol to the cells in your body. So it’s a bit of a misnomer to simply call LDL “cholesterol”. However, when you are in an unhealthy state and you have a high LDL count, you very well could be in danger of forming plaques in the arteries that can put you at risk for several bad things. There could be complete blockages formed, and even potential life threatening situations where clumps of plaques break off and cause strokes, deep vein thrombosis, and pulmonary embolisms.

Today, one fourth of all adults in the U.S. are on Statin drugs, which are prescribed to solve these potentially life-threatening issues. Statins are poisons. But stop to think for a minute… is it logical to believe that you can artificially or synthetically lower your cholesterol with a Statin drug and poison yourself back into health? No.

Before accepting poison treatment, we have to realize what is going on in our body and why it has happened. When your cholesterol count has risen to a dangerous level, it means three things:

• the digestive system isn’t working right (disbiosis)
• you have absolutely too much sugar in your system (disglycemia)
• you are under the burden of stress in your body (adrenal fatigue)

Let’s back up for a minute. Low-density lipoproteins are created by the liver, and are not “bad” any more than HDL particles are “good”. They actually have an indirect on keeping the systems of your body functioning properly, but we’ll get into that later.

LDL molecules leave the liver as light and fluffy particles. As they travel into the body and return to the liver, they condense and become heavier HDL (high-density lipoprotein) molecules. LDL particles, which are transporter of fats, carry 3,000 to 6,000 fat molecules per particle. As HDL particles, they return the fats to the liver for processing. If you are not healthy, you can develop “atherosclerosis”, which is a condition of hardening of the arteries due to plaque buildup when the fats are not finishing the journey back t the liver.

Here’s the part of the story you haven’t been told. Studies have been performed in 2016 that show we are wrong about linking high LDL counts directly to cardiovascular disease and a higher mortality rate. The governing bodies in medicine aren’t refuting these reports, either. Why isn’t this being discussed or reported widely?

Now we will expose the missing link in the “LDL-is-bad-cholesterol” story. The explanation lies in what is called “glycation“, or oxidative damage to proteins.

Here’s how it works…

When you have unhealthy eating habits, you end up with what we call “disglycemia“. In simple terms, it means you have debris-filled junked-up dirty blood with super high sugar content. Sugar causes glycation damage to proteins. Proteins have a specific purpose, and they can’t carry out their purpose when you are suffering from disglycemia.

Proteins have a very important job of fixing your blood vessels. You have an inner lining in your vessels which is called the endothelial wall. As you age, its cell wall gets damaged and ends up with cracks and fissures. Protens come to the rescue locking in to the cracks in the endothelial cell walls like tinker toys. They have the ability to repair damaged endothelial cells. As they lock into place, they “zip up” the cracks and fissures in the inner lining.

A wrench gets throwin into the repair process when you have high blood sugar, which has a damaging oxidative effect. The proteins are attacked by the oxidative stress of sugar and they become “glycated”. I like to think of it like an apple coated in caramalized sugar (caramel). When sugar-coated proteins fall into place to fix the cracks in your endothelial wall, they can’t function properly to carry out the repair. The poor little proteins with their sugared coating clump up, and unfortunately attracd the LDL compounds carrying all that fat. The result? Disgusting yellowish arterial plaque buildup.

As promised, let’s talk about the positive purpose of LDL compounds, then we’ll bring it all home. Cholesterol, which is carried by LDL, is actually an incredibly important biochemical which is possibly one of the most important to the body. Cholesterol which is manufactured in the liver is delivered to the arteries where it is used as a precursor to dozens of critical biochemical substances including cortisol, Vitamin D, DHEA, pregnenolone, progesterone, estrogen, testosterone and many other reproductive hormones, according to pharmacist Ben Fuchs of Bolder Coloroado. He also teaches that it serves as a parent compound to numerous skin moisture factors. Lastly, it is a critical component of the membrane that surrounds each of the estimated 100 trillion cells in the body.

With this in mind, why do we blinkdly accept the standard pharmacal-medical model’s practice of addressing arterial plaque by poisoning the liver to shut down the production of such a neccary compound when the REAL problem begins with disglycemia disease?

When you poison the liver causing it to halt production of low-density lipoproteins with Statin drugs, you’ve left the root cause of sickness unadressed, which is disbiosis. Disbiosis of the gut comes from poor eating habits, and further causes disglycemia of the blood.

After poisoning the liver with Statin drugs you will be forced to deal with a myriad of mild to severe side effects. It will take an entirely new blog post to cover all of the unfortunate after effects of long term Statin drug exposure,.but I promise I’ll cover that in the future.

In all candor, I do agree that there are situations where the prescribing of a Statin drug is actually an appropriate thing to do. If you have already junked-up your body and clogged your arteries with plaques, stroke or death could be imminent and your immediate risk could be super high. This presents a strong case for getting on a Statin drug to lower imminent mortal risk. When the short-term risk of death is higher than the long-term risk of damage from being on a Statin drug, it’s an appropriate strategy. But when you don’t correct the problem by changing your lifestyle & eating habits and giving yourself a timeframe to wean yourself off of the Statin drug, you’re doing your body an injustice.

My father was put on a Statin drug 9 years ago, and he was left on it with no exit strategy. During that time, he wasn’t aware that there was a pathway to solving and reversing the problem of arterial plaque buildup. After suffering a stroke and later surviving a quadruple bypass surgery, he was left on the Statin drug prescription. He suffered numerous destructive side effects from the long term exposure to the drug, and made the decision last year to change his habits and get off the drug. His body is now healing.

It is my hope that people look deeper into the problem of addressing arterial plaque buildup instead of mindlessly making decisions based on “numbers” or “markers” from blood tests, and exposing themselves to poison therapy. You will never find a case of a patient who has been poisoned back into health. Drugs can’t help without the accompanying life-changing daily habits (like exercise & healthy eating) that put your body in a position where it can heal itself, as God inteneded and designed.

The human body is so complex, we may never understand its full capabilities. We need to keep in mind that there is a delicate balance between prescription drug therapy and making hard decisions on changing our daily habits that allow our bodies to perform the miraculous process of healing itself. The healing instructions are encoded in every cell of our bodies. We just have to give them a chance to do their job before automatically trusting drug therapy.

Please subscribe to my blog for more informative articles in the future!

Carlton Flowers
Scott Health Systems

The Conditions Needed for Beating Cancer Naturally

While listening to Pharmacist Ben Fuchs “The Bright Side” in a September 2016 episode, I decided to transcribe his profoundly informative message about dealing with and beating cancer by natural means, and how we might all have this power. The following is my interpretation of Pharmacist Ben’s talk.

Instead of focusing on the strategy of killing cancer through external means, more focus needs to be placed on making the body strong enough so it can deal with the cancer internally. This idea takes advantage of and leverages the power of the human body to heal itself.

We have the power and control over our own health issues, not just doctors. In this day and age, we have been taught that we have no control over our health, and only doctors can make decisions about how we handle disease conditions.

To the contrary, we as individuals have the control over long term chronic degenerative diseases which even including cancer, the emperor of all maladies. All we have to do is focus on and listen to our bodies, and change our habits in order to allow the body to heal and regenerate as it was designed to do on its own.

The book “Cancer as a Metabolic Disease” talks about how cancer is a metabolic condition that involves energy, and how the body provides needed energy. This implicates oxygen (the respiratory link to cancer), plus sugar and food. The three basic elements of energy are oxygen, sugar, and food.

When you understand that cancer is an “energy condition”, you understand that it must involve these “big 3” basic elements things that energy is involved with. Plus you must understand that cancer specifically involves the cells. You must address cancer at the level of the cell.

Modern medicine does not approach cancer in this way. They focus on tumors, and on tumor growth. But that is not where the cancer begins. By the time a doctor discovers cancer in a patient, it is already at the growth or tumor level.

Again, our ability to gain personal control of cancer is not at the tumor level, but at the cell level. At the tumor level, you must radiate, excise, or poison the tumor cells. Sometimes this might be necessary, depending on how far the cancer has developed. But since the existence of cancer is a cell issue, we still have control of the situation. But how?

You can starve cancer cells by blocking their metabolism, according to the Journal of Genes & Development. If you starve cancer cells and reduce their metabolism, you will slow down their ability to reproduce.

Taking sugar & junk foods out of your diet can be the best way to slow the growth of cancer. This is one immediate method that we can employ to take control of a cancer situation, and there are more. I’ll go into more detail later.

Cancer is not always a genetic issue. Yes, genetics are involved in everything, including cancer. However, there isn’t one particular gene which causes a cancer to develop in any situation. We have to remember that genes are responsive to what the cell is experiencing. Genes turn on and off like Christmas tree lights, depending on what the cell is sitting in, and what the cell is experiencing.

Genes turn on and off in response to the messages that are coming to it from the cell. Firstly, information comes from the cell’s interior. Second, information can come from the membrane which is in turn responding to the cell’s environment.

A cell sits in an environment, and the membrane processes information from that environment. This makes the cell membrane an “information processor”.

In the book “The Biology of Belief”, author Bruce Lipton speaks about the idea that the cell membrane and the environment that the cell is sitting in are what controls the genes. You will not hear this from the modern medical model.

The medical industry wants to control genes themselves by creating medicines, drugs, and special chemicals that change the genes. But this is entirely unnecessary when you understand that you need to change the environment that the cell is sitting in to reverse cancer.

Back to my previous point that we can gain control of the cancerous situation by addressing it at the cell level, this is where we as individuals have ultimate control and power…

Understanding the relationship between the outside part of the cell, or the stuff the cell is sitting in, and the genetics inside the cell, is our power. We control our genetics by our life choices, and that’s what controls what the cell is sitting in. That is, we have control over our bodies because the environment is within our control… for the most part.

All disease is cell disease and that includes cancer. All cell disease is based on 3 things: starvation, suffocation, and intoxication. The good news is, we can control these three areas.

Who is it that can controls what a cell eats? Who is it that controls how well a cell is respirating? Who is it that can control the toxicity that a cell is sitting in? Only we can. There are no drugs that can feed, breathe, or clean cells. There is nothing in a doctor’s magic bag of tricks that can feed, breathe for, and detoxify cells for us.

After you force a cell to endure starvation, suffocation (the “big 3”), and intoxification, you get inflammation as a result. Inflammation then leads to more of the “big 3”, which causes the situation to spiral out of control. That is why doctors can do nothing to reverse the process. It is because the cell isn’t going to take a doctor’s medicine.

All a doctor can do is trick the cell into taking in the drug by disguising a chemical so it look like something friendly, resulting in some type of suppression of a process that the cell normally carries out. Additionally, a doctor can excise or radiate a cell. But they can’t feed it, breathe for it, or clean it. That doesn’t matter, because we can do that ourselves.

Being that cancer is a metabolic disease where cells are experiencing energy issues; they degenerate in nature and function. The cells aren’t able to do what they need to do, so they go backwards in time to a time when they divided rapidly. Dividing rapidly is one way cells cope with the lack of energy that is caused from toxicity, starvation, and suffocation.

The out-of-control cell growth ends up creating immature less-than-functional cells. They grow so fast that they don’t have time to mature, and they are either non-functional or less-than-functional at best.

The cancer cell is a rogue cell that grows like a unicellular organism. Usually, cells divide and grow as a team within the body to form a singular organ or tissue such as bone, muscle, a kidney, or a liver. Cancer cells only live for themselves, not for the benefit of our bodies. It cares for nothing but itself, and it desperately seeks to dominate and drain all of the body’s nutrients and energy.

The shocking news is, when you put a cancer cell in a normal & healthy environment, they can revert back to a regular non-cancerous cell. You do this by putting the cell in an environment where it is getting its nutritional necessities and oxygen, and removing any toxicity. So a cancer cell can revert back to a normal cell by flipping a switch.

There is some mechanism in the environment or medium that controls a cell’s growth. What that means is, the environment and a cell are in constant communication and this controls growth. You have a cell, a membrane, and the environment that makes up the matrisome. The matrisome is a either nexus of health, or one of disease.

The environment that our body sits in also makes a difference, just like the environment of a cell. That includes the air we breathe, water we drink, and foods we eat. The air can be full of particulates, chemicals, and toxic pollutants. Water can be full of fluoride and chloride, and other pollutants. Foods are full of chemical preservatives and toxins. You can also add the emotional or mental environment to add to the list of possible toxic environments that can harm the human body.

The environment impacts carcinogenesis. According to a 2008 article in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Research, only 5% to 10% of cancer cases are genetically inevitable. The other 90% to 95% have their roots in the environment and lifestyle of the individual. Scientific literature shows that cancer cells can be normalized. The fact that cancer cells can revert and become normal again means remission is possible, and that cancer is not a death sentence.

Aggressive cancerous breast, lung, & bladder cells, even leukemia cells, have all been shown to be reverted in a petri dish environment. This research was performed in the year of 2014. This research provides proof that cancer cells can revert to normal if put into a different environment within our body.

Knowing that we have control over our respiration, our diet, and the environment of our cells, we have security in knowing that we are not left to the mercy of the medical model when faced with beating cancer. This is extremely good news!

 

 

THE HIDDEN BENEFITS OF CHOLESTEROL YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT

Lowering your blood cholesterol levels has officially been discounted as a method of helping protect heart health, as it has been admitted by the medical industry. But we don’t hear much talk about this known fact. There is no practical benefit to lowering cholesterol for the purpose of reducing the risk of heart disease. In fact, we now know that cholesterol actually has positive benefits.

Cholesterol has specific purpose and function in our bodies, and it exists for good reason. It is an agent of inflammation control, diabetes control, disglycemia control, and also biochemical breakdown control.

Your cholesterol goes up when you are unhealthy, but that does not mean you need to poison your body with Statin drugs to treat the poor health conditions. You cannot supress the body’s ability to produce cholesterol and not pay a severe price for it. Suppressing cholesterol means a reduction in pregnenalone, progesterone, and DHEA. These hormones are responsible for keeping us youthful, healthy, and feeling good overall.

Cholesterol is produced by the liver for many reasons, and is an integral part of our body’s immune defense system. Stay tuned, because we will soon be talking about why there is no real difference between LDL and HDL cholesterol, and what their function is within the body!

The Surprising Fat That Helps Quell Your Appetite

There are three types of fat molecules: short, medium, and long-chain triglycerides.

The medium chain triglyceride, or “MCT”, helps to break down the nutritional value of vegetables. it also helps to support and heal the skin. It is also a great anit-aging source.

MCTs are water dispersable, but they are not totally water soluble. However, the short chain fatty acid, or “SCFA”, is totally water soluble and can thusly enter the blood quickly.

SCFAs can enter the brain very quickly due to the fact that they can enter the blood so quickly. They can act as a signaling molecule that tells the brain what is going on in the digestive system, and act as an appetite suppressant.

Butter is an example of an SCFA that has multiple benefits. It helps your heart health, it lowers cholesterol synthesis, and also levels your blood sugar. It also acts as a thermogenic agent which can assist the body’s metabolism and burning of stored fat.

Think about that the next time you hear someone tell you that eating real butter is not good for you!