With the aid of powerful pharmaceutical drugs, people are living longer. I think we can all agree on that. 

But the drugs don’t add health span (the number of healthy years a person has). I don’t think that keeping people alive for longer in nursing homes with pharmaceuticals is what people get excited about when we think about living longer. 

By contrast, exercise is one of the most effective ways of adding healthy years to a long life. It can do this in several ways, from reducing cancer risk to improving cardiovascular health.

But you may not know that exercise can improve skin health, one of the most visual external markers of age. 

Think of the skin of someone who smokes a lot, drinks a lot, doesn’t eat well, and never exercises compared with the skin or someone who is very health conscious. There’s a difference, right? 

That’s why skincare is a multi-billion dollar industry because so many of us want younger-looking skin. 

However, can we have younger-looking skin without applying products or taking drugs?  

The answer is YES. 

Exercise has been shown to help skin health, but what type is best?

A recent study out of Japan compared aerobic training (an activity previously linked to anti-aging activity in the skin) with resistance training in 61 healthy sedentary middle-aged Japanese women over 16 weeks. 

Both forms of exercise significantly improved skin elasticity and upper dermal structure, and resistance training specifically improved dermal thickness, while aerobic exercise did not. 

This is important because dermal thickness, which is the thickness of the skin, decreases as we age, so improving it is a good thing. 

Also, resistance training helps decrease inflammation and increase muscle which has long been linked to longevity!

Source:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-37207-9?_kx=t4If0nOfpNdZ-HC1xYBPDO82IcYl_wFMhDzAApaDTNA%3D.HKMsXE

I recently took a blood test and was surprised I had high LDL cholesterol. 

But I’m a 45-year-old male, and it is pretty standard for men to get a shock diagnosis this out of the blue. Sometimes it’s high blood pressure, but most of the time, it’s a cholesterol problem.

This made the results of my blood test all the more surprising. I practice the lifestyle medicine I preach. My diet is pretty clean; I manage my sleep, exercise, and manage my stress. 

Stereotypically high cholesterol is attributed to people a little older, overweight, and who generally eat poorly and don’t exercise. In the UK, high cholesterol affects 60% of people and has been attributed to about 6% of deaths yearly. 

Cholesterol is a fatty substance almost every cell uses in the body. The liver mainly makes it and recycles any excess. It’s pushed out into the blood, where the body uses it.

However, sometimes the balance between production and recycling is unbalanced. This can lead to an increase in cholesterol, and the current theory is that the rise in LDL can lead to excess being deposited in the arteries leading to narrowing blockages and heart attacks. 

A 2019 landmark study published in The Lancet medical journal involving data from nearly 400,000 people in 19 countries established for the first time that levels of non-HDL, or “bad cholesterol,” in the blood are closely linked to the risk of heart disease across the entire life course, and there’s now a growing school of thought that young people should know their cholesterol levels earlier so they can make suitable lifestyle adjustments or take statins. These drugs have been proven to reduce cholesterol.

Now there is some controversy here. Some doctors think that the ‘war against cholesterol’ might be motivated by the profits of the drug companies, that they aim to get everyone on statins, and that the evidence to say that high cholesterol is linked to heart disease is shaky. You can learn more about this topic with the book “The Great Cholesterol Myth” by Jonny Bowden and Stephen Sinatra.

Personally, I’m not a fan of any pharmaceutical intervention and don’t like the side effects of statins, so I prefer to fix things naturally where possible.

Also, I’m not talking about total cholesterol, just LDL, as HDL cholesterol has been given the all-clear when it comes to heart disease.

 In the UK, the guidelines for LDL are:

•  3mmol/L or less for healthy adults
•  2mmol/L or less for those at high risk

In the US, they use milligrams per deciliter and recommend your blood levels to be 100mg/dL or below, which is 2.6 mmol/L 

My results were 136mg/dL on Jan 5th, 2023, and reduced by 42% to 78mg/dL in March 2023.

Even though the body produces cholesterol, our diet can affect it. A diet high in saturated fat, not exercising, being overweight, smoking, and drinking alcohol can increase cholesterol. 

None of those things applied to me, but the Inside Tracker App noted that cooking with a lot of coconut oil can lead to increased LDL. I use coconut oil in my cooking, so one of the first things I did was cut that out. Then I returned to my osteopathic routes and thought about what naturally removes cholesterol from the body. It is recycled and removed by combining liver and bile stored in the gall bladder.

I started eating a small salad containing bitter greens to stimulate the liver bile before my main food. I also put olive oil on the salad. The bitter green stimulates the liver to produce bile, and the fat in the olive oil stimulates the gall bladder to contract and release more bile. 

This primed my digestive system to be more efficient at removing excess cholesterol. Interestingly eating a small salad before the main course is how many European countries traditionally eat, and they know this helps their digestion which is why they do it.

Those two simple lifestyle changes were enough to reduce my LDL by 42% in 3 months, the same if not more than the decrease most people see with statins without any side effects.

If you have high cholesterol and want to change things naturally, send me an email, and we’ll discuss your unique situation and make a plan for you to lower it without having to take statins. 

Sources: 

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)32519-X/fulltext