Is the HCG Diet for Rapid Weight Loss Really All That?

Whether you’re looking to lose weight for health or appearance, one tool worth considering is the HCG diet.

It’s not new by any means, having been developed in the early 1950s by Dr. ATW Simeons, who published the theory behind it in The Lancet in 1954. So you may have heard something of it before – spurring weight loss through the combination of a very low calorie diet and daily injections of human chorionic gonadotropin, or HCG for short.

HCG is a hormone produced in the placenta during pregnancy. It’s crucial for maintaining the production of other hormones essential to fetal development.

It also appears to make fat stores more accessible. As Dr. Jeff Egler nicely sums it up,

In this way hCG acts as a key that unlocks access to energy in otherwise abnormal fat stores and therefore provides additional energy to a growing fetus; or, in the case of an hCG dieter, allows the individual to access and burn their abnormal fat. The diet works by having the body run on this now accessible energy (anywhere from 1400-7000 calories per day) wherein it is burning off what is otherwise stagnant and persistent body fat while simultaneously preserving normal and structural fat as well as muscle.

Yet critics of the diet say that there’s really no difference in weight loss compared to placebo, drawing on research conducted in the 1970s and 80s. Yet lately, more physicians have been taking a second look.

There is a difference between how a body loses weight by simple calorie restriction and by restriction paired with injections of HCG. Using a higher, customized dosage than originally proposed by Dr. Simeons, for instance, clinician Dr. Sheri L. Emma has found that

HCG injections keep you from losing muscle while you diet. By elevating hormone levels in the body, including testosterone, the HCG hormone creates an anabolic state (muscle-building) which counteracts the catabolic state (muscle-breakdown). There are hormone receptors on muscle fibers that respond to the increased hormone levels in patients taking the HCG hormone.

Why does that matter? During a fast, dramatic loss of pounds with crash dieting, there is a high amount of muscle that is lost. Because muscle is heavy, this loss looks good on the scale because the pounds are dropping quickly. When you lose muscle, it’s bad for your body, shape, and metabolism. The metabolism slows so much that dieter regains weight quickly, often regaining all the weight that was lost and then some.

Her research bears this out. In a clinical trial involving four randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies, both the HCG and placebo groups lost about the same amount of weight – an average of 13 pounds per month in the HCG group and 15 pounds in placebo.

But in the placebo group, 5 of those pounds consisted of muscle. In the HCG group, muscle loss was limited to an average of 2 pounds. That’s significant.

It’s important to note though that these results came about with injectable HCG. While various HCG products are readily available in pill, powder, and liquid form, they dissolve before reaching the bloodstream. Consequently, they’re not nearly so effective as injectable HCG.

Here in our West LA office, we’ve observed the same. We’ve seen magnificent results for our patients who come from Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, and plenty of points both between and beyond for the individualized integrative treatment that Dr. Joe specializes in.

HCG should only be used under the care of a physician using nutritional guidelines specific to the individual.

While it’s in no way a substitute for healthy living and smart choices when it comes to diet, exercise, and lifestyle, the HCG diet can promote rapid weight loss and be an excellent boost toward reaching your health goals. As such, it remains an important tool in anti-aging longevity medicine.

The post Is the HCG Diet for Rapid Weight Loss Really All That? appeared first on Holistic Doctor Los Angeles - Santa Monica.

Live Your Best, Healthiest Life with Longevity Medicine

Over the past few years, we’ve been hearing more about the quest for immortality among Silicon Valley types in particular. Some are even so bold to predict that we’ll soon conquer death entirely.

Yet the dream of living forever has been around…well, seemingly forever.

In Greek mythology, we get the story of Eos, goddess of the dawn, who was completely infatuated with a young, smart, good-looking prince of Troy named Tithonius. He was more interested in music and art, but that didn’t stop Eos. She chased him everywhere!

She finally won him over by promising him eternal life. But when she asked Zeus to grant this, she made a critical error.

She forgot to ask for eternal youth.

After years of watching him shrivel and waste away, she closed him up in a chamber.

From there his voice pours out—it seems never to end—and he has no strength at all,
the kind he used to have in his limbs when they could still bend.

If living forever means something like that, who would want it?

Rather, the dream is of a long life in which we feel, look, and function at our best so we can really enjoy those years, the time we have with our loved ones, the pursuit of our interests and dreams.

For while aging is an inescapable fact of life, it doesn’t have to mean we’re fated to withering into helplessness, isolated from so much of what has made our lives meaningful.

In fact, we have excellent examples of what healthy aging can look like in Earth’s Blue Zones areas where we typically find the oldest and healthiest people. What’s their secret?

Healthy eating (plant- or protein-based) and routine physical activity are only a part of it. Consider the people of Nicoya, Costa Rica, for example:

Nicoyans ascribe to a “plan de vida”—a guiding life purpose—that they claim helps fulfill them both mentally and spiritually. Their plan de vida supports a positive outlook among elders and helps keep them active. They have strong faith communities and deep social networks. Nicoyan centenarians live with their families and are said to engage in frequent visits with neighbors. This focus on family and social ties bolsters their emotional well-being with support.

In addition, the Nicoyans’ lifestyle involves plenty of regular, low-intensity physical activity. Even centenarians seem to enjoy physical work, and chores are fundamental to daily life.

There’s even a Blue Zone right in our own backyard – in Loma Linda, to be exact, which is home to one of the largest concentrations of Seventh Day Adventists in the world, around 9000 people.

Adventists tend to live longer than their fellow Americans thanks to their plant-based diets, regular exercise, and abstention from tobacco and alcohol. As with other Blue Zone populations, there’s also a strong emphasis on faith, family, friends, and nature.

Notably, these are all among the keys to what Dr. Joe calls “Radiant Health” – a state of being “better than well,” living a vibrant, active, healthy, and meaningful life.

Call it longevity medicine or anti-aging medicine or regenerative medicine; the goal is the same: restore vitality and resilience – physical, mental, sexual, spiritual – that endures into your later years.

Our tools are many: bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT), ozone, prolozone, chelation and other detoxification programs, IV drip therapy, the HCG diet and other weight loss options, sexual health support, customized nutritional programs, and so much more.

The key is to support your body’s own regenerative abilities, to address health all the way down to the cellular level.

In our holistic, integrative West LA clinic, there’s no one-size-fits-all medicine. Dr. Joe provides individualized care. He looks at your overall health history and current status, talks with you about your goals and challenges, and works with you to create a thoroughly customized longevity plan, tailored to your needs.

For while we all have much in common, we also each have experienced a completely unique life, with different influences and exposures and ways we’ve tried to address them in the past, different values and goals, different life circumstances that drive how we can approach treatment and support.

The things you can do on your own will take you far. We’re here to help you take the next steps after that, so you can live the long, vibrant life you wish for and deserve.

Beach image by Army Medicine, via Flickr

The post Live Your Best, Healthiest Life with Longevity Medicine appeared first on Holistic Doctor Los Angeles - Santa Monica.

Why EDTA Is the Right Chelator for Gadolinium

When you get an MRI, a contrasting agent may be used to improve the clarity of the imaging. The downside, however, is that those dyes usually contain gadolinium, a toxic heavy metal.

It was once thought that this was a risk mainly for people with impaired kidney function, but as a 2018 literature review noted, newer evidence suggests that the metal can deposit in bone and brain tissue of people whose kidneys work perfectly fine.

The metal can remain long after the MRI is a memory.

One recent study of nearly 70 primary glioma patients who had MRI before their surgery found gadolinium in 57% of the glioma samples and 62% of the normal tissue samples.

“While the brain tumor provides an obvious explanation for gadolinium retention, we additionally found gadolinium deposits in the adjacent normal brain,” the authors wrote. “Furthermore, a small but significant correlation between the amount of gadolinium in the tumor and normal brain was detected implying passage of gadolinium from the site of pathologic brain lesion….”

The good news is that chelation can help clear the metal from these tissues. But is EDTA the best chelator for the task? One person asked about this after reading our previous post on gadolinium toxicity, and we thought the answer deserved more than a quick reply.

There has only been one human study on the matter, and it used healthy adult volunteers who were given just three chelation treatments. The remaining relevant studies were done on rats, often using chelating agents that do NOT chelate the most common form of gadolinium used in contrast agents, Gadavist.

Studies suggesting that gadolinium isn’t effectively removed by EDTA also fail to periodically measure its presence in post-chelation urine samples over time. In our West LA clinic, we regularly measure this and see regular evidence of the compound’s effectiveness.

Simply, EDTA binds gadolinium to remove it in a much more moderate way, preventing rapid shifts in electrochemical gradient balance. This is especially important for patients dealing with chronic health issues. A more gradual chelation helps ensure patient safety.

Yes, stronger chelating agents can make for a faster detox, but this often results in the patient becoming even more ill due to aggressive binding and rapid removal of the metal from tissues.

“I’ve treated a number of patients who suffered from too aggressive use of chelating agents for mercury and lead,” says Dr. Joe.

They wanted faster results. Their actual result was damaging inflammatory electrochemical equilibrium shifts, expressed through symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, brain fog, blood pressure changes, muscle and joint pain, fever, and other adverse effects.

These patients successfully regained their health under my care with careful and very individualized recovery programs which INCLUDED the successful removal of metals from their body without ill effects.

Using oral amino acids such as the L-forms of methionine, isoleucine, leucine, reduced glutathione and N-acetyl L-cysteine will protect the body and may be beneficial in chelating gadolinium when used with oral DMSA – another chelator. However, no clinical studies have been done on this. Alpha lipoic acid should only be used in low doses as it can also transport metals into the central nervous system at higher doses.

Chelation should always be performed by a physician with established chelating experience who can moderately and when needed, very gently remove toxic metals with utmost respect for the health and welfare of the patient who has sought their care.

Image by deradrian, via Flickr

The post Why EDTA Is the Right Chelator for Gadolinium appeared first on Holistic Doctor Los Angeles - Santa Monica.

Nutritional Support with IV Drip Therapy

So, yes, the whole diet is vitally important. But with respect to nutrition, there are times when even that alone might not be enough.

Is your body getting all the nutrients you give it?

As we noted last time, many factors can affect nutrient absorption. For instance, some genetic variants can cause issues. MTHFR mutations, for instance, affect folate uptake, while HFE variants affect how we absorb iron.

Age is another factor. As we get older, B12 and magnesium absorption tends to go down, and vitamin D becomes harder to synthesize.

Medication use can likewise have a negative effect on nutrient levels. Different genders at different times have different nutritional needs. Alcohol, caffeine, and even stress can alter how your body processes the nutrients it gets.

This is why it can be helpful to get a full nutritional workup from a well-trained integrative physician – so you can identify and address any barriers to optimal nutrition, as well as be more aware of your unique nutritional needs.

But it’s also another reason why IV nutritional drip therapy can offer such a boost to your health.

Unlike food and oral supplements, which require the involvement of your gastrointestinal system to get nutrients into your blood, drip therapy bypasses the GI tract all together. The nutrients go right into your bloodstream so they can go to your cells to do the work you need them to do.

While drop-in and mobile clinics with their standardized menus have become a thing, what they can’t offer is the individualization and customization that a physician can.

At a clinic like ours, you can know that the specific nutrients being delivered are medical grade and provided in the right amounts for your particular needs. We take the time to get to know you as a person, as well as your health history, situation, and goals.

More, because components of a drip can interact negatively with certain natural or pharmaceutical medicines you’re taking, customization helps minimize the risk of a bad interaction.

Meantime, the blood levels of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients you get intravenously are many times higher than the levels you get from taking them orally. They’re at levels that support Radiant Health.

Of course, we do have some off-the-shelf options available – hangover relief, say, or jet lag recovery – as well as blends for supporting detox of heavy metals and other environmental toxins. These include ozone, hydrogen peroxide, and glutathione drips.

Patients in our West LA clinic report numerous other benefits following IV drip therapy. These include increased energy and improved performance, better sleep and reduced anxiety, and healthier skin.

Nutritional IV therapy is safe and painless (well, except the initial needle prick). You just sit back and relax in our cozy drip room, and our supervising staff will see to your needs. Within the hour, you’re done.

Your body will thank you.

Image by Robert Geiger, via Flickr

The post Nutritional Support with IV Drip Therapy appeared first on Holistic Doctor Los Angeles - Santa Monica.

It’s the Whole Diet that Matters, Not Any One “Superfood”

As we were saying, your body needs real food. Can we take that a step further and see food as medicine?

You’ve probably heard the saying “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food” – an idea that’s usually attributed to Hippocrates. In truth, though, the phrase doesn’t seem to turn up in his work. In fact, it may only date back to the early 20th century.

Regardless of the source, though, the phrase can be a little misleading.

Of course, the broad idea is sound: What you eat is a major driver of health and illness. Your body needs nutrients to operate as it was designed to do. When we fail to regularly give it what it needs – including wholesome, healthful, real food with a minimum of processing between field and plate – we not only deprive it of what it needs. We wind up feeding it with products that, over time, can interfere with its optimal function.

But the idea of food as medicine also overlooks the fact that food is more than just medicine, just as it’s more than mere fuel. Its emotional, social, and cultural aspects provide their own kind of nutrition.

At the same time, we shouldn’t take the idea to mean that food has pharmaceutical-like effects. Yet when we’re bombarded with the latest hype over each new “superfood” that comes along, it’s all too easy to make that leap. Headlines touting “the healing power” of this food or that – chia seeds, turmeric, avocado, acai, quinoa, and on and on – come at you fast and furious through your social media feeds or news sites and blogs every day.

But what are we really talking about when we talk about “superfoods”?

The common understanding is that these are foods that contain compounds that are considered especially beneficial to your health. But this doesn’t tell us much. As one blogger put it,

By that definition, pretty much any plant food could be considered a superfood. Pretty much all plant-based foods contain compounds that are innately good for us. Antioxidants, fiber, nutrients—we thrive off of plant-based diets. Each fruit, vegetable, grain, and legume has its own uniquely healthful properties. Blueberries are rich in anthocyanins. Brown rice contains essential minerals. Lentils are dense in protein. And beets are loaded with iron and nitric oxide.

To deem any one of these foods more super than the others is not only incorrect, it’s also extremely misleading.

Indeed, what “superfood” really is, is a marketing term. It came into use back in the early 20th century when the United Fruit Company started promoting bananas for their “food value.” Bananas, after all, were their major import.

Initially the company had advertised the practicality of bananas in a daily diet, being cheap, nutritious, easily digested, available everywhere, good when cooked and not cooked, and sealed by nature in a germ-proof package. To get people to eat more, they suggested adding bananas in cereal for breakfast, in salads for lunch, and fried with meat for dinner.

Then the medical community got into the act, suggesting that bananas could be used to treat disease.

Soon, physicians began treating conditions like celiac disease and diabetes with bananas. Children with celiac disease, for instance, gained weight and grew taller while on a banana diet, and these findings were highlighted in medical journals. Erroneously, scientists attributed these results to the special properties of bananas and not the removal of gluten from the diet.

No matter. The United Fruit Company, in turn, cited the doctors and sold even more bananas. Ever since, many other superfoods have come to the fore, often falling out of fashion for a time before being rediscovered by later generations.

One factor fueling this is the simple fact that nutrition science is “a wickedly difficult field,” as Harvard nutritionist David Ludwig has put it. The challenges are many, starting with the fact that we seldom eat single foods in isolation but as ingredients in recipes and meals made from multiple recipes.

Studying that in any useful way would be extraordinarily difficult and cost-prohibitive.

More, the real impact of diet doesn’t show up right away. Often, you don’t see the significant results of your food choices until much later in life. Meantime, you’re exposed to an array of other factors that can impact how much nutrition you may actually get from your diet, from toxic exposures to genetic variants.

And where those are concerned, no single food will fix things, no matter how super.

As ever, it’s the whole diet that matters – not to mention the other keys of Radiant Health. That might not be as exciting as a clickbait headline, but it does have the virtue of being true.

Images by Eric Astrauskas, via Flickr; Steve Hopson, via Wikimedia Commons

The post It’s the Whole Diet that Matters, Not Any One “Superfood” appeared first on Holistic Doctor Los Angeles - Santa Monica.

Dietary Emulsifiers, Gut Health, & Mental Health

No sooner had we hit “publish” on our last post, we ran across a new study on another type of additive that may be contributing to modern health woes: emulsifiers.

Emulsifiers are used in a wide variety of hyperprocessed food products to change their texture, extend their shelf life, and keep ingredients from separating. You see them in baked goods, ice cream, salad dressings, chocolate, and processed meat, among other products.

Research has already suggested some serious drawbacks. For instance, a 2015 study in Nature found that emulsifiers may alter the balance of bacteria in the gut and contribute to chronic inflammation, raising the risk of obesity and metabolic syndrome.

But gut health also appears to affect the brain, as well. So researchers decided to look at the effect of emulsifiers on mental health and behavior. Their findings were just published in Scientific Reports.

For their study, researchers added two common emulsifiers – cellulose gum and polysorbate 80 – to the drinking water of lab mice for three months. They examined changes in their subjects’ behavior, microbiomes, and other physiological aspects.

“We confirmed,” they wrote,

that emulsifier exposure induced chronic intestinal inflammation, increased adiposity, and altered gut microbiota composition in both male and female mice, although the specific microboal taxa altered following emulsifier consumption occurred in a sex-dependent manner.

Specifically, male mice showed more signs of “anxiety-like behaviors,” while female mice showed less social behavior than normal.

Why should the outcomes differ by sex? The researchers aren’t sure, but it may have something to do with key sex differences in the way that the immune system works.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that what you eat can have an impact on mental health and behavior. The mind is one with the body, after all. Other research strongly suggests that the modern Western diet contributes to conditions such as depression and ADHD.

The good news is that even small dietary improvements may ease symptoms of depression considerably.

Hyperprocessed food products are a double-edged sword: They deprive us of many nutrients essential for good health while also delivering anti-nutrients that can further interfere with our health and well-being.

Again, for body – and mind – to thrive, you’ve got to give it the raw materials it needs: not products engineered in a lab but real food.

It’s an essential component of Radiant Health.

Image via Fooducate

The post Dietary Emulsifiers, Gut Health, & Mental Health appeared first on Holistic Doctor Los Angeles - Santa Monica.

How What You Eat May Influence How Much You Move (or Don’t)

If you’ve been living the couch potato life, it can be hard to start getting more active. But is it just habit or lack of will power getting in the way, keeping you from making exercise a part of your daily routine?

According to new research in Circulation, what you eat might be interfering, as well. The culprit? Too many phosphates.

Now, phosphorus is an essential mineral. It’s critical for bone and dental health, and plays a key role in how your body uses carbs and fats. It helps your cells generate ATP, an energy source. It’s needed to grow, maintain, and repair cells and tissues. It plays a role in nerve signaling, muscle contractions, and heart and kidney function.

In short, it’s important.

But you can get too much of a good thing, courtesy of the phosphate compounds commonly added to food.

These additives help baked goods rise, they act as emulsifiers in processed cheese and canned soup, they add flavor to cola and color to frozen french fries. They also can be added to meat, poultry and seafood to help the protein bind more water, making it juicier after freezing and reheating.

And most of it is absorbed by the body.

Earlier research has shown that phosphate overload may increase risk of mortality from chronic kidney disease and be “an independent predictor of cardiovascular events and mortality in the general population.” It may have a negative impact on bone health, as well.

What does more recent research say?

For the current study, scientists evaluated two sets of mice. One group was fed a diet high in inorganic phosphate, while the other ate a normal diet.

“We measured their oxygen uptake during exercise and found that their capacity for movement was much lower. The mice were unable to generate enough fatty acids to feed their muscles,” [co-author Dr. Wanpen] Vongpatanasin said. The researchers also looked for gene changes and found that many genes involved in skeletal muscle metabolism had changed levels after 12 weeks of the high phosphate diet.

In other words, the high level of phosphates appeared to make them less physically able to exercise normally.

“But that’s just in mice!” you say?

Well, the researchers also analyzed data from the Dallas Heart Study, in which participants had their activity monitored for a week.

Researchers examined blood test results in this group and verified that the response to phosphate in humans was similar to that in mice. Higher phosphate levels were linked to reduced time spent in moderate to vigorous exercise, while sedentary time increased as phosphate levels climbed.

While more research is needed, of course, to confirm these findings, if you find it tough to get up and moving, it wouldn’t hurt to take a hard look at your diet. Are you eating a lot of takeout food? Hyper-processed products? Try phasing them out – as gradually as you need to – in favor of real, minimally processed food.

Even if the current research were found to be totally wrong, you’d still benefit. After all, real food is what your body was designed to thrive on.

The post How What You Eat May Influence How Much You Move (or Don’t) appeared first on Holistic Doctor Los Angeles - Santa Monica.