Posts Tagged ‘disease’

A majority of people know that medicinal compounds found in plants find their way to pharmaceutical labs. Plants are what makes and shapes the pharmaceutical industry. To restructure plant compounds into more effective drugs is enabling the drug companies to expand.

The demand for new and better drugs is at the center of this search. For a long time humans have used a variety of plants for medicinal purposes. The difference now is that chemists have found new ways to expand plants pharmaceutical value through genetic engineering.

Pharmacology

Pharmacology tries to improve the original structure. They have seen glimmers of hope by doing this. The real breakthroughs is not in capturing some variation, but in the shrinking our reliance on modifying through technology. Turning a plant into something different and expecting it to exceed its already majestic properties is the wrong focus.

What we really need is the soil quality that was present before we depleted the mineral quality. Genetic manipulation doesn’t offer benefits and will challenge the future of our food supply. All the public can do is wait, wonder and worry if there will be unintended consequences.

Natures Healing

This is a way to take natures powerful healing plants and turn them into cash cows. So what they have are literally doing is crossing a cash cow and a natural resource. Turning plants into a more bankable substance may not be real progress. Science may be taking natures powerful healing ability and changing it into an unnatural compound.

Engineering new genes into plants has been going on for awhile. Scientists developed corn that could produce and insecticide, which comes from a bacterial gene. Corn which was altered to produce an insecticide is polluting the water and streams near the corn fields. Bloomberg reports that 85% of the corn grown in the U.S. is genetically modified. This toxic corn is feed to livestock.

If plants are the way to treat disease, why haven’t we utilized the healing properties by consuming them as a diet staple, and ensuring that they grow in nutrient rich soil? Plants are already nutritionally potent and complete concentrated sources of healing compounds. They can protect, stimulate, regenerate cells and are easy-to-assimilate. They come as a balanced formula.

Science

While science spends so much time to see that we have a diet of engineered foods that devours our nutrients, they are looking to fix the health problems that are produced by bombarding our systems with prescription drugs. Now, they will take the foods that heal and turn them into pills, and powders that are easy and convenient t to take. They have restructured a fresh whole food, shrinking its nutritional value, and inflating its monetary worth.

Epigenetic expression is up to you means how your genes express themselves depend on your lifestyle.

Epigenetics Good News

The relatively new field of “epigenetics” is revealing how people, plants and animals do start with a certain genetic code at conception. The choice of which genes are “expressed” or activated is strongly affected by environmental influences. The expression of genes can change quite rapidly over time, they can be influenced by external factors, those changes can be passed along to offspring and they can literally hold the key to their future health.

This kind of information is a reminder of the power we have over our health. It is bigger than the healthcare system debate. It points to the fact that the most influential decisions about our health come from us. This discovery should be met with enthusiasm by the public. There is comfort, convenience and protection if we have ownership of our health.

The question is will we be learning and cultivating our natural ability to build a gateway to health. Epigentics studies are bringing us good news, a reminder that everything that can help us is already in place.

Epigenetic Scientific Validation

According to Ron Dashwood, a professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon state University, epigenetics is a unifying theory in which many health problems, ranging from cancer to cardiovascular disease and neurological disorders, can be caused at least in part by altered “histone modifications,” and their effects on the reading of DNA in cells.

Histone proteins are essential for the packaging of the DNA into chromosomes within the nucleus of a cell. Histone proteins play an important role in DNA packaging, chromosome stabilization and gene expression.

“We already know some of the things people can do to help prevent cancer with certain dietary of lifestyle approaches,” Dashwood said “Now we’re hoping to more fully understand the molecular processes going on, including at the epigenetic level. This should open the door for new approaches to disease prevention or treatment through diet, as well as in complementing conventional drug therapies.”        

The OSU  scientist recently received an $8.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to explore diet, epigenetics, and cancer prevention. The positive findings of the laboratory research are already being converted to placebo-controlled human intervention trials on such health concerns as colon and prostate cancer.

Learning From This

Learning from this means revisiting what we already know. It has been shown over and over that good health is a decision. The transition to a man made diet from a whole food one has been at the heart of the healthcare crisis we are facing. This deviation from nature has taken us to the brink of self destruction.

Cultivating good eating habits means transitioning back to natural whole food diet. All the scientific terms come down to the basic fact, we are what we eat, from a health standpoint.

Cooking

Advanced Glycation Endproducts (AGEs) are typically formed when sugars are cooked with proteins or fats. Temperatures over 120°C (~248°F) greatly accelerate the reactions, but so do lower temperatures with longer cooking times produce this reaction.

Even though lower temperatures decrease the amount you are exposed to, it is still a problem. These compounds are digested with about 30% efficiency. Browning reactions are evidence of pre-formed glycations. Indeed, sugar is often added to products such as french fries and baked goods to enhance browning. Exogenous glycations and AGEs are contributors to inflammation and disease states.

AGEs

AGEs are known to initiation retinal dysfunction, cardiovascular diseases, type II diabetes, cancer and many other age-related chronic diseases. Food manufacturers have added AGEs to foods, especially in the last decades, as flavor enhancers and colorants to improve appearance. Foods with significant browning, caramelizing, or with directly added AGEs can be exceptionally high in these pro-inflammatory and disease initiating compounds. A list of foods with high exogenous AGEs includes: donuts, barbecued meats, cake, and dark colored sodas.

Aging

This root causes of the multi-system degenerative diseases of aging are linked to this. AGEs that come from the fusion of sugars with fats or protein. Here is the part that is fascinating, fructose and galactose have about ten time the glycation activity of glucose. Some AGEs are implicated in age-related chronic conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.

The endothelial cells of the blood vessels are damaged directly by glycations, implicated in atherosclerosis. Atherosclerotic plaque tends to accumulate at areas of high blood flow (such as the entrance to the coronary arteries) due to  increased presentation of sugar molecules, glycations and AGEs at these points. Damage by glycation results in stiffening of the collagen in the blood vessel walls, leading to high blood pressure. Glycations cause weakening of the collagen in the blood vessel walls, which can lead to micro- or macro-aneurysms; causing strokes if in the brain.

Food Supply

Today’s battleground should be over the state of our food supply, and the versions of health that the U.S. supports. While listening to debates over public or private insurance, we should be thinking of identifying the real health threats. They come from the corrupt system of both healthcare, and our reliance on chemical solutions.

Advanced Glycation Endproducts (AGEs) are dangerous, and have no place in our food chain. These can naturally occur, but it should not be in our processed food. What this means is each generation is exposed to a greater quantity of foods containing Advance Glycation Endproducts (AGEs). Accelerated aging is beginning in pre-adolescents. This generation is showing signs of diabetes, hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure, and metabolic syndrome. The integrity of our nation is at stake. Public or private does not address all our health care issues.