Sunday Evening Update Dr. William Davis
Mind 09 Sep 2008
Program begins at 5pm central, 6pm eastern, 22:00 GMT.
Attached Files
Edited by Mind, 09 November 2011 - 08:53 PM.
lunarsolarpower 10 Sep 2008
I suspect diagnostic tools such as this could have great benefit for efforts such as Michael Rose's SENS-E and the rejuvenation MPrize.
Mind 10 Sep 2008
Here is some info from one of his recent blog posts:
If you have a heart attack and land in the hospital where, invariably, you will have a heart procedure. Or, if you get a stent or coronary bypass operation, sometime before your discharge from the hospital, a well-meaning hospital staff dietitian will provide instruction in the American Heart Association (AHA) diet.
Does this diet reduce the risk of heart disease?
The answer depends on where you start. If you begin with a conventional American diet that is enormously influenced by convenience, food manufacturers like Nabisco, General Mills, Quaker Oats, ADM, and Cargill, or food distributors like McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, then the American Heart Association diet is indeed an improvement. But just a small one. If LDL cholesterol is the yardstick, the average reduction in LDL is between 10 and 15 mg/dl. This is the same amount of change you’d experience by adding 1 tablespoon of oat bran to your diet. Hardly worth boasting about. HDL, triglycerides, blood glucose, and body weight do not change.
The diet could be substantially better. After all, it’s become common knowledge that other diets, such as the so-called Mediterranean diet, the South Beach Diet, and similar broad projects result in far greater changes than the AHA diet dispensed by your hospital and cardiologist. These diets more effectively reduce LDL, raise HDL, reduce triglycerides, reduce C-reactive protein, reduce blood pressure. Diets like South Beach also yield substantial weight loss and reversal of diabetic tendencies, with the magnitude of benefit dependent on the amount of weight lost.
Why this stubborn adherence to the outdated concepts articulated in the AHA diet? Cardiologists would argue that insufficient data has been generated to permit widespread application of these diets. They also differ on whether they really work. Of course, the majority remain ignorant and dismiss them as fad diets.
He is tough on carbs...finally someone talking some sense.
Mind 11 Sep 2008
In 1910, taking a person's blood pressure was considered revolutionary, a high-tech practice that was of uncertain benefit.
Dr. Harvey Cushing of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore had observed a blood pressure device while traveling in Europe, developed by Dr. Sciopione Riva-Rocci. Cushing brought this new technology back with him to the U.S. and promptly promoted its use, convinced that this insight into gauging the forcefulness of blood pressure would yield useful clinical insights.
But, in 1910, practicing physicians rejected this new technology, preferring to use their well-established and widely practiced technique of pulse palpation (feeling the pulse), skeptical that the new tool added value. Medical practice of the day was rich with descriptions of the strength and character of the pulse: pulsus parvus et tardus (the slow rising pulse of aortic valve stenosis), the dicrotic notch of aortic valve closure transmitted to the pulse, the "water-hammer" pulse of aortic valve insufficiency.
Over the next 20 years, however, the medical community finally gave way to the new technique, although only physicians were allowed to use blood pressure devices, as nurses were regarded as incapable of mastering the skills required to perform the procedure properly.
Stethoscopes were also gaining in popularity in the early 20th century, but were also the exclusive province of physicians trained in their use. Nurses were not allowed to use stethoscopes until the 1960s. Even then, nurses were not allowed to call them "stethoscopes," but "nurse-o-scopes" or "assistoscopes," and the nurses' version of the device was manufactured to look different to avoid confusion with the "real" doctor's tool.
And just half a century ago, if you wanted to look at a medical textbook, you would have to go to the library and ask for special permission. The librarian would lower her glasses and look you up and down to determine whether or not you were some kind of pervert. Only then might you be granted permission to peer into the pictures of organs and naked bodies.
Such has been the spirit of medicine for centuries: Medicine and its practices are meant to be secret, the insider knowledge of a privileged few.
Fast forward to 2008: The Information Age has overturned the rules of privileged information. Now you have access to the same information as I do, the same information available to practicing physicians. The playing field has been levelled.
Curiously, while information access has advanced at an instantaneous digital pace, attitudes in medicine continue to evolve at the traditional analog crawl. Many of my colleagues continue to be dismayed at the new public access to health information, belittle patients for excessive curiosity about their health, lament the erosion of their healthcare-directing authority. And while new concepts race ahead as we race towards a wiki-like collective growth in healthcare knowledge, physicians are still mired by their reluctance to abdicate their once-lofty positions as chief holders of secrets.
I believe that this is part of the reason why family doctors and cardiologists have been slow to adopt technologies like heart scans and self-empowering programs like Track Your Plaque: processes that take heart disease prevention away from the hands of physicians and place more control into the hands of the people.
Imagine the horror felt by physicians in 1935 of a young upstart nurse boldly trying to use a stethoscope to take a patient's blood pressure. You can imagine the internal horror now being felt as you and I dare to take control over heart disease and deny them the chance to put in four stents, three bypass grafts, then direct our future health habits.
But technology has a way of marching on. It will encounter resistance, bumps, and blind-alleys, but it will go on.
I see the same trend with the current restrictions over personal genetic testing. Some states (California and New York) want to control citizen's access their own genetic information. I think their attempts to limit this fundamental freedom will eventually fail.
Mind 13 Sep 2008
Mind 14 Sep 2008
If you have read his blog in the past you know he is a big proponent of the South Beach/Atkins/Ketogenic type diet and is a warrior against bad carbs.
Mind 14 Sep 2008
Mind 15 Sep 2008
The Davis interview is the newest video in the Ustream archive (check here) and the interview portion starts about 10 minutes in.
Johan 15 Sep 2008
Shannon Vyff 15 Sep 2008
Mind 15 Sep 2008
lunarsolarpower 20 Sep 2008
I had to scratch my head to figure out how to hold the food that is left together. Even a tortilla is made of wheat or corn and contains some carbs. I finally hit on the idea of using salad as the matrix or substrate for delivering the other ingredients of this type of diet. I'm way too addicted to my grains to take the whole plunge but I figure I can easily do one meal a day and start making a difference. Tonight I went to the store and bought the following items to get me started:
Bagged salad
Sunflower seeds
Pine nuts
Parmesan cheese
Bacobits
Green pepper
Black olives
Alfalfa sprouts
Broccoli
Carrots
Eggs (to be hard-boiled)
I still plan on getting some cheese and veggie deli slices as well as some walnuts and pecans to add to the mix. I already have salad dressings. My plan is to have everything cut up and ready to go in a multi-section tupperware container in my refrigerator. Then when it's time to eat I can just pour out some salad, grab whatever I feel like from the container, and eat. Did I mention I don't have much time to prepare food these days?
Here my notes from the talk:
Vitamin D
Desirable blood level: 60-70 ng/ml
Average male requires 6000 units/day
Average female requires 5000 units/day
Dr. William Davis takes 10,000 iu per day
EBT heart scan = 4 chest x-rays = mammogram
multi-detector device = 8-10 chest x-rays
CT chest angiography = 100 chest x-ray equivalent
One more thing I should add: Dr. Davis has found that when people go cold-turkey on the wheat and carbs that they feel mentally "slow" for about 5 days and that he's not aware of any way to get around this. The up side is that after this passes the metabolism adjusts and you feel fine. However it doesn't sound like the kind of thing you'd want to try on a test week or when getting ready to run a marathon.
Edited by lunarsolarpower, 20 September 2008 - 09:33 AM.
Mind 20 Sep 2008
Johan 20 Sep 2008
Now if there only was a cheap, readily available veggie to replace that with, I'd be very happy. But so far, I haven't found any.
Edited by Johan, 20 September 2008 - 05:03 PM.
Mind 20 Sep 2008
Johan 20 Sep 2008
But still, if possible, eliminating grains entirely would be nice.
On a side note, I pay more for food now that I'm practicing CR than back when I didn't, even though I eat less of it. Health costs, huh.
Edited by Johan, 20 September 2008 - 06:45 PM.
lunarsolarpower 20 Sep 2008
Health costs, huh.
It's much cheaper than the alternative.
Personally I'm quite a cheapskate but I've long considered food to be my "luxury" and won't compromise (much) when shopping for it. I'd rather eat quality food than drive a nice car or wear expensive clothes. Someday I'd like to invent a robotic greenhouse that could supply fresh from the vine food year-round.
Edited by lunarsolarpower, 20 September 2008 - 07:52 PM.