November 3rd 2012 Seminar

Last week's seminar was incredible. Despite the mid-week Hurricane Sandy and a scare with no electricity at the site it was packed! Our best attendance ever. Thank you all for the love and support and for caring enough about your health to spend your Saturday with us. Pictures and more info to follow. UPDATE: The DVD of our seminar is now available and you will find segments of it on different pages of the website.

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR CHOLESTEROL WITH SALADS!

Have you been told that your cholesterol is too high and you immediately go on a crash course of consuming salads only to discover that your numbers went UP? It happens fairly often and I have often wondered why. Patients will swear they have changed their diets, no red meat or shrimp. No butter or fried foods and yet there it is, their cholesterol is worse than it was before they changed their eating habits. You can only imagine how frustrating that must be, "doing everything right" including exercising and yet your numbers are getting worse! So let's look at possible causes: First there are the complicated scientific theories. For example: All your hormones are made from cholesterol, it is possible that your body perceives that you need more cholesterol to correct some hormonal imbalances. So it makes more, obviously in this case the underlying problem needs to be resolved. But it maybe as simple as checking your food labels. If you are like me, maybe you like cheese in your salad and you forget that cheese anywhere is a problem. The more you eat the higher your cholesterol gets! Obviously you would avoid boiled eggs and other high cholesterol items like that in your salad but don't forget about nuts and shellfish. If you use yogurt make sure it is low fat and then there is the dressing. Ironically, most salad dressings are laden with cholesterol but they give the calorie and cholesterol count in terms of '2 tablespoons' but do you limit yourself to 2 tablespoons each time? A mistake that I made was eating "healthy" pre-prepared foods at a local supermarket. Excited by the wide array of vegetarian foods in the hot meal section I went crazy on the Spinach Flan, Egg Plant Flan and other concoctions like the huge mushrooms with fancy melted cheese on top. When I later reviewed the cholesterol content I was shocked! The point here is simple, one has to be vigilant and pay attention to the small print even when you think you are eating healthy. One last tip: Add high fiber grains, bran and oats to your salad and your cholesterol might go down. Last but not least: despite the strong push from the pharmaceutical and cardiology community there are no studies that definitively show that taking cholesterol medicine actually decreases a person's risk of a heart attack, there are however many studies showing the complications and side effects that they cause. If you can get away with eating salads it is definitely a better option :)