Towards More Personalized Nutrition

Of course, the red wine we looked at last time is hardly the only source of heart-healthy antioxidants – nor are antioxidants the only kind of nutrient that supports heart health.

No doubt, you’ve probably come across many a list of foods purported to keep cardiovascular disease at bay. A recent post over at Medical News Today is typical and includes

Asparagus Legumes Berries Broccoli Chia and flax seeds Dark chocolate Coffee Fatty fish

Green tea Nuts Liver Oatmeal Red wine (“sort of”) Spinach Tomatoes Vegetables

But the trouble with such lists is that they can often give the impression that just adding those foods and beverages is sufficient to keep your heart working as it should. Sometimes, it’s almost as if foods are treated as drugs; as if eating more chickpeas, say, could do the same basic work as Lipitor. After all, scientific studies like this one have shown an association between eating more legumes and better lipid profiles.

But association doesn’t tell us about cause and effect.

More, we don’t usually eat single foods; we eat dishes and meals that combine all sorts of foods. It’s incredibly hard to determine with any accuracy which one food might be responsible for any given effects – or whether it’s the food at all.

Nor are food’s effects immediate. The consequences of diet can take years, even decades, to develop.

Obviously, nutrition matters. Just as a car designed to run on gasoline won’t run as it should if it’s filled with diesel, so the human body won’t run as it should when filled with relentlessly engineered food-like products instead of the wholesome, natural, nutrient-dense food we were designed to eat.

But it’s the whole diet that matters, not the presence of this food or that.

Even then, diet is just one of many factors that drive health and illness. Sleep, exercise, stress, our connections with others, our exposure to toxins, both natural and human-made – all these and more work together to determine your state of health.

And when health is compromised, you can have the “healthiest” diet in the world, yet your body may not be able to make the best use of its nutrients. The trouble may be genetic. It may be toxicity. It may be something wholly other.

That’s why we need to search out the root causes of any health problems and address those in tandem with developing a personalized nutrition plan that can help you achieve your desired level of wellness, whether that’s healing from a chronic condition or striving to be as healthy as humanly possible.

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Not the Red Wine but the Antioxidants in It

You’ve probably heard that a little red wine each day is good for your heart. So maybe it was just a matter of time before someone got the idea of putting its antioxidants into a stent.

Commercial stents can release chemotherapy agents that are toxic and can cause the blood vessel to narrow again. LSU Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences Professor Tammy Dugas is developing a new stent that releases red wine antioxidants slowly over time that promotes healing and prevents blood clotting and inflammation. The two antioxidant compounds are resveratrol and quercetin.

“By delivering red wine antioxidants during conventional angioplasty, it may be possible to prevent excess tissue from building up and the blood vessel from narrowing again as it heals,” Dr. Dugas said.

Dugas is also developing a balloon that could be used to deliver those same compounds when treating blockages elsewhere in the body.

It’s pretty cool – and perhaps a better, if less enjoyable, way to deliver those antioxidants to where the body could use them. In fact, some researchers now question whether a daily drink is as healthy as earlier studies suggested. As Vox recently reported,

In particular, an impressive new meta-study involving 600,000 participants, published recently in The Lancet, suggests that levels of alcohol previously thought to be relatively harmless are linked with an earlier death. What’s more, drinking small amounts of alcohol may not carry all the long-touted protective effects on the cardiovascular system.

“For years, there was a sense that there was an optimal level which was not drinking no alcohol but drinking moderately that led to the best health outcomes,” said Duke University’s Dan Blazer, an author of the paper. “I think we’re going to have to rethink that a bit.”

But there’s a robust and growing body of knowledge about red wine antioxidants.

For instance, we know that while resveratrol is well-absorbed when taken orally – like when you drink a glass of Shiraz, Merlot, or other red – it’s metabolized and eliminated fairly quickly. Effective supplemental forms have been developed, though, sometimes in combination with the other “red wine antioxidant,” quercetin.

But quercetin may also be effectively taken through diet. Lots of foods contain it – berries, leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, peppers, tomatoes, citrus, beans, tea, and more. Supplements are available, too, including some that combine it with resveratrol.

Research has shown that these compounds help lower inflammation and oxidative stress. In addition to protecting against heart disease, some research suggests that they may help lower cancer risk, as well. Both of these, notably, are health problems marked by chronic inflammation.

We look forward to seeing what comes from Dr. Dugas’ research and if these stents do become available to patients who need them. After all, releasing antioxidants is so much better than releasing drugs that may help manage symptoms but also add to the body’s overall toxic burden.

When you’ve got toxic and nontoxic options, why opt for the toxic?

At the same time, though, the approach focuses on addressing damage after the fact. Even better is to prevent the need to go to such lengths at all. For just as resveratrol and quercetin – and other antioxidants – may be helpful in treating disease, they’re also powerful tools for maintaining good health over a long lifespan.

Prevention is certainly a lot cheaper and safer, as well.

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Zero-Calorie Sweeteners: “Doing Everything Else That Glucose Does”

Though artificial sweeteners – aspartame, sucralose, Ace K, and the like – may contain zero calories, they do pack a punch of unintended consequences. We’ve looked at some of these before.

One of the oddest potential consequences? Weight gain, as well as health problems associated with overweight, such as metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.

One of the most recent evaluations of the research to date found that

evidence from RCTs does not clearly support the intended benefits of nonnutritive sweeteners for weight management, and observational data suggest that routine intake of nonnutritive sweeteners may be associated with increased BMI and cardiometabolic risk.

But if obesity is a simple matter of calories in, calories out, how could something with no calories possibly make you fat?

Well, we know that obesity isn’t quite that simple. Now, new research is shedding light on some possibilities.

One study, presented last week at the 2018 Experimental Biology meeting looked at biological changes when zero-calorie sweeteners are consumed. For it, the scientists used lab rats. Some ate a diet high in sugar; the other ate a diet high in artificial sweeteners. After three weeks, there were some notable differences in the concentration of biochemicals, fats, and amino acids in the rats’ blood.

The results suggest artificial sweeteners change how the body processes fat and gets its energy. In addition, they found acesulfame potassium [Ace K] seemed to accumulate in the blood, with higher concentrations having a more harmful effect on the cells that line blood vessels.

A recent human study, presented at the Endocrine Society’s meeting in March, was even more telling.

This small but compelling study included 18 participants. Some were normal weight but most were overweight or obese and often prediabetic. Each kept a food log for one week, after which fat biopsies were taken for analysis. Additionally, stem cells taken from their fat tissue were treated with various levels of sucralose – from the equivalent of drinking four diet sodas a day to five times that amount.

The more sucralose, the more activity of the genes involved in glucose transport and fat accumulation – especially among patients who were already obese. Obese patients who consumed zero-calorie sweeteners also experienced higher acute insulin response values, a predictor of type 2 diabetes. All who consumed artificial sweeteners showed higher triglyceride levels, as well.

In other words, the metabolic effects observed were not so different from those triggered by sugar consumption. As senior study author Sabyasachi Sen told MedPage Today,

“The only part [in artificially sweetened beverages] that’s not there is the calories — it’s not adding the calories, but it’s doing everything else that glucose does. It shouldn’t be the replacement from sweetened beverages because it’s obviously causing inflammation, fat formation, and so on.”

Here, you can listen to Dr. Sen talk more about his team’s findings.

Image by Clay Junell, via Flickr

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