Breakfast of Supplements

I've been on the Esselstyn diet over two years, although I didn't do it quite right for a great deal of that time, having olive oil, peanut oil and nuts on a daily basis.  Worse yet the nuts I picked, sunflower seeds, were loaded with omega sixes. Chest pain while exercising is the most thrilling experience when you're on a diet that is supposed to prevent them.   Had I been watching my blood pressure, I would have noticed the change before the chest pain. But I stopped using the oils and nuts and continued to exercise and the chest pain went away.  Eventually the blood pressure came down to the normal range. I've been drinking cod liver oil too, although that doesn't cause the problems that olive oil and nuts did.  It just kept my weight up. I would stop when I went above 210 and continue when my weight dropped. My excuse for the cod liver oil is that I needed omega 3 fatty acids because I can't convert plant omegas to human omegas.  I must be missing t...

Oddly enough, now that I've had my chest cracked open, and my heart fondled, I've found a diet that gives me great lipid panel scores.  This is my understanding of the Esselstyn diet.  Forgive me if I didn't get it right, but the test scores are pretty good, so I know it must be close. The basic meals are plane food, starting with boiled oat groats and ground flax put into it for breakfast.  I do add some sweetener, as in three cut up dates (I leave the pits out), perhaps a bit of maple syrup.      Lunch and dinner are basically the same soup which usually contains kale or spinach cooked for more than five minutes and I may add grains that I've cooked previously and left in a bowl in the refrigerator, so I can put some into each batch of soup. Millet is the only grain that's missing an amino acid (l-lysine) I usually add several of the four or five grains I hold in reserve.  Barley, brown rice (I have both short and long grain), farro...

It has been a while since I began writing about the nonsense which is my diet.  So I thought that I would provide an update of my current supplements, diet and nutritional balance. I'm still taking Co Q 10, 600 mg per day, and B2, which should increase its effectiveness.  Vitamin D, 4000 to 6000 IU. I have a hard time making up my mind about how much vitamin D to take, there are some people who say don't take too much, but no one gives me a good explanation of what that is. Also according to a famous biochemist on You Tube, Rhonda Patrick, vitamin D helps slow telomere shortening.   The recommendation for increased neurogenesis is 400 IU Co Q 10 and 400 mg vitamin B2 each day.  I don't take the 600mg of Apha-lipoic Acid which also promotes neurogenesis.  Maybe I should. I'm one of those fools who thinks they need more brains. I stopped taking DHEA, everyone's favorite precursor hormone, back in the bad old days when I had no EPA/DHA in my system and i...

Sadly, I've learned more about diabetes since posting about my soup, so I had to remove excess protein and fat from it.  I also changed what I put into it. The new information about diabetes is that it is a condition in which amino and fatty acids can accumulate in liver and muscle cells, shutting down insulin receptors until they are metabolized.  I've verified this in personal tests with fasting and seeing how quickly my blood sugar would go down following a meal after a fast. In a sense it's a more basic soup, because I found the extras that I had been putting in pushed up my blood sugars. organic vegetable broth from whole foods organic onion (chopped and frozen)  organic beans (pinto, navy) from a can (I open a can and keep it in a jar in the refrigerator) organic frozen chopped blue curled kale (you can substitute frozen chopped spinach) organic frozen peas and carrots organic frozen mixed mushrooms small yellow (Yukon Gold) potatoes (organic where poss...

There are really two parts (when I'm not traveling) to my diet; one is breakfast and the other is the Soup of the Day. And the Soup is the important part. We must begin by asking ourselves, how does one survive being a vegetarian or vegan among all those meat eaters keeling over from heart attacks, when vegans too can keel over. According to a Vegan Extraordinaire, Dr Gregor in one of his You Tube presentations, one must get some omega-3s, vitamin D and B-12. That's all it takes because everything else is readily available in the plant world and can easily be put into a soup. Let me describe my soup and you can make some yourself. I start with a small sauce pan and add a couple of cups of vegetable broth as available at Whole Foods because it looks to be relatively undoctored. I have a little bowl full of salt and a one gram scooper, I put in two scoops, but I love salt and it doesn't affect my blood pressure. Decide how much salt you want. I use all froze...

At the end of October I had my annual physical exam blood tests and they included a check of my omega fatty acids. For at least several weeks, I had been taking fish oil capsules left over from the good old days of eating meat.  More than a handful of months. My primary doctor's note on the test that I scanned and sent to my cardiologist indicated that the change between this test and the one a month before was insignificant. Nothing quite like having a failed strategy concerning something that could kill me (at least according to Dr Gregger, a You Tube Doctor and Vegan extraordinaire). The bottle of fish oil I was using was purchased at my Pharmacy at least a year prior and was just past it's TRASH day. Silly me. I've switched to Carlson's which is a quality fish oil of wild caught salmon. I also started imbibing Carlson's cod liver oil, which, in the amounts that I take has a higher level of compatible omegas than fish oil.  So at some point in a m...

When being a vegan, especially an old vegan one must remember a few things, such as everybody doesn't convert plant omega-3 ALA to animal required DHA and EPA. I wasn't thinking about this as I began to have problems with low DHA and EPA I had symptoms and didn't know where they came from.  These things especially affected my brain and mental functioning. I didn't go insane, I simply went not too bright, and fell down some steps.   Well, at least my bones didn't break. There are ratios of a couple of fatty acids, one of which is omega-6 to total omega-3 and it was very high.  The other one was higher, and I'd tell you what fatty acid it is, but I can't pronounce the word. My EPA was 0.4 and DHA was 2.3; these are both uncomfortably below the listed range of >2 and >4. No wonder I was having problems. The interesting thing was my doctor wasn't aware that this could be a problem, or he wasn't going to take any responsibility for any p...