Toxemia

I've just finished reading Toxemia Explained by Dr. J. H. Tilden. It was first published in 1926, and I'd have to admit, if I hadn't read a few dozen related books before reading it, I may have quickly brushed him off as a nut case. But after having read Burkitt (see last post) and Food is Your Best Medicine by Dr. Bieler (see Book Links) I'd have to say that he is the closest thing I've seen to a genius when it comes to enabling individuals with a simple means of maintaining excellent health throughout life.

My paraphrased version of his theory of Toxemia is: via your body's normal metabolism, you break things down and build them up, which results in metabolic wastes, which are toxins if not eliminated from your body promptly. Your body has primary means of eliminating various toxins via your various organs, plus it has a back up plan of vicarious elimination where a secondary or tertiary organ helps out if the main organ is overloaded. If this happens for a while you have what he terms a "crisis of elimination" and you get sick. Do this repeatedly and you eventually end up with a chronic disease because you're starting to impair the function of one or more organs. Do it even longer and you end up with cancer. Pretty plain and simple - cut and dried. In my mind, it seems to work for just about any disease you can think of. You can read the book if you want specific examples, of which he provides plenty.

So, basically the Burkitt book (see Book Links) is a fairly thorough (though not exhaustive) list of the sorts of chronic diseases you are likely to acquire due to Toxemia if you go through life constipated.

This book has absolutely convinced me that conventional medicine (as a whole, though there are individual exceptions) has no interest in helping people achieve health. They simply want to keep a bunch of sick people from dying. After all, that's where the money is...

So, like Dr. Mercola (see Health Links) says, "Take Control of Your Health." If you don't learn what it takes to keep yourself healthy you'll suffer - physically, emotionally, financially and any other way you can think of.

One comment that Tilden makes in his book is that athletes usually suffer from Toxemia due to the extraordinary loads that are placed on their bodies. As a result they often die young (his words, not mine). I was a bit taken back by the comment, but I suspect he may have been talking about professional athletes. How many football players, boxers, even professional cyclists have you heard of that died young or became disabled ? How many that lived to a ripe old age, free of disabilities? When I go through my mental list they mostly fall in the former category. But when I think of amateur athletes, the tend more to fall in the latter. Still, I think Toxemia could explain overtraining syndrome...

Read the book (you can download a PDF copy for free using the link at the beginning of this post or in the Book Links). And have a dictionary handy. While not necessarily a technical tome, he does use some words that are rather obscure nowadays.

Excess Calories = Weight Gain? Not!!

I'm in the middle of reading Refined Carbohydrate Foods and Disease: Some Implications of Dietary Fiber by Burkitt and Trowell (1975). It clearly reinforces the notion that weight gain is not simply a result of excess calorie consumption, but just as much the result of poor bowel motility. Basically the argument is that increased consumption of refined carbohydrates during the last 150 years has resulted in a stunning loss of fiber from our diets. The authors compared an estimate of daily wheat fiber consumption in 1770 to that of 1970, showing that consumption of such fiber went from 6.26 grams per day down to .2 grams per day! Of course wheat constitutes a small portion of total dietary fiber (don't forget your veggies), but that is a very stunning difference. They also showed how the reduction of wheat dietary fiber and increased sugar consumption mirrored the increase in obesity.

I'm currently about half way through the book, but what I just read struck a chord with me, as it confirms my own experience with weight gain and loss during the past few decades. They point out that studies long ago established that most nutrients and calories are absorbed in the small intestine, and that the efficiency of the small intestine decreases as fiber increases. In effect, more fiber means a faster transit time and more calories being excreted as waste. This absolutely banishes the notion that weight gain is a result of excess calories - weight gain is as much a result of chronic constipation! Of course, exercise also increases bowel motility, which is why I was able to eat 5,000 to 7,000 calories of pure junk food every day (think of a six-pack of donuts for breakfast every morning) and maintain a healthy body weight in the mid-1980s while riding hundreds of miles per week (yes, that is a lot of miles, but probably not enough to soak up 7,000 calories per day - I certainly wasn't racing back then).

It is easy to see if you are getting a good balance of fiber in your diet by checking your (hopefully) daily output against the Bristol Stool Analysis Chart. It should consistently be 3s and 4s. It's interesting that the German's knew about the importance of stool analysis long before the Bristol chart came out, which is why the Platform Toilet is fairly ubiquitous in that country. It provides a shelf that permits close up examination of the day's efforts, which is invaluable if you have a large number of "sinkers" vs. "floaters" (the latter is caused by increased fat content, by the way). NOTE: There is one other major stool category - the "mixers," effectively the Type 7 stool shown on the Bristol chart.

The interesting thing is, if you are getting sufficient fiber from foods as opposed to supplements, you increase your satiety and it is much easier to resist overeating the calorie dense carbohydrate foods that cause weight gain for most people. And when you do eat these sorts of calories your body is less likely to absorb as much of them, a very win-win situation!

Fat Loss

I just finished reading two books by Al Sears, MD: Dr. Sears' High Speed Fat Loss in 7 Easy Steps and P.A.C.E.: The 12-Minute Fitness Revolution. The former does a good job of summarizing most of what I've gleaned from dozens of books on fitness and nutrition over the past several years:

• Avoid processed foods like the plague.
• Increase protein intake to burn fat.
• Eat healthy fats - particularly those with lots of Omega 3 fatty acids (and coconut oil).

It also makes an interesting, and to me compelling, case against moderate intensity "cardio" exercise, the sort of exercise that is pretty much universally claimed to burn the most fat. His argument is that too much of this sort of training only trains your body to store fat, particularly if you eat lots of refined carbs, which your body can very efficiently store as fat. In my experience I believe this to be true. High intensity exercise revs up your metabolism for long after you've finished exercising, and it is the sort of exercise that challenges your lungs and heart to grow stronger (which is key to getting faster, opposed to hitting a plateau). For the past few years I've done most of my training using "chunks": chunks of intensity interspersed with my normal riding, aiming for about 20 minutes or so of intensity (i.e. anaerobic zone performance) per training session. An added advantage is that I train less, so I recover faster (a very important consideration when your over 50, but also for folks that work a lot or have lots of family obligations). As I get closer to race day, the frequency and intensity of my training drops, while the duration increases so that the duration and intensity becomes more like race day as the actual race gets closer.

The latter book expands on the former. It's perhaps written more for the sedentary 50 year old than the elite athlete, but it was still a worthwhile read. The only criticism is that there is a fair amount of hawking of Dr. Sears' services and wares. But even with that he is pretty much dead on, with perhaps one criticism. At one point in the book he states that "overconsumption of protein is the key to fat loss." While I believe it can be crucial for rapid initial loss of fat, long term consumption of too much protein can be very hard on your kidneys. Moderate amounts of protein and a whole foods diet is probably a lot safer bet. And he seems to stick to that path through most, but not all, of the book (the book really needs a good editor).

Probably the two most worthwhile parts of the book are his two analogies that refute the conventional wisdom that weight control is merely a matter of controlling caloric intake. When my wife sees how much I eat and am still able to maintain an off season weight of around 168 pounds, she tends to agree with Dr. Sears. His first example is a woman that eats a carb heavy (most likely refined carbs) diet. As she restricts her calories her weight continues to go up, despite eating 1500 calories or less per day for weeks. His second example is a man that eats several thousands of calories per day, mostly of protein, and can't gain the additional weight that he wants (the same sort of diet that body builders use to achieve a very lean body mass). Clearly weight is not a matter of calories in, calories out. The former example illustrates how easily your body will metabolize refined carbohydrates (sugar, flour, all the refined corn and soy fillers, etc) into fat while breaking down your own muscle tissue to get an adequate amount of protein. The latter example clearly shows that excess calories are not always stored as fat. The main concern that I have for the latter example, especially for folks over 50, is that overconsumption of meat can raise your body's acidity, with lots of bad implications for your health, including leaching calcium from your bones. That's why moderate protein consumption (a portion about the size of your palm at each meal) together with lots of whole fruits and vegetables (to create a better acid/alkaline balance in your body) is a better strategy for everyday eating.

Coconut Oil

Coconut Oil has been a part of my diet for a few years now. I first heard about the benefits of coconut oil at Mercola.com. I recently revisited the topic by reading Eat Fat Lose Fat by Dr. Mary Enig and Sally Fallon. In the book the authors advocate a whole foods diet with substantially more healthy fats than advocated by most other current diet protocols. In addition to coconut oil, fish oil and olive oil are the everyday fats that they recommend, though they are not the only healthy fats. I'm writing this to summarize some of the tidbits of information that piqued my interest:

• Coconut oil promotes the assimilation and storage of essential fatty acids, so basically there is a synergistic effect with fish oil. Fish oil is brain food, in addition to its ability to lower inflammation in your body. Anything that amplifies such effects is likely to be very good for you.
• Coconut oil is perhaps the safest fat for folks with gallbladder disease or that have lost their gallbladder, as most of the fats in coconut oil do not require bile for digestion.
• Renowned cardiologist Dudley White is noted as commenting that he became a cardiologist in 1921, but did not see his first case of myocardial infarction until 1928. He attributed the increased incidence of MI since that time to increasing use of new polyunstaturated fats corn oil, which were replacing saturated fats like lard and butter.
• The phospholipids in your brain cells are made up of one saturated fat and one unsaturated fat. Avoiding all saturated fats per the current dietary mantra can lead to compromising your brain's chemistry.
• Saturated fats protect your liver from toxins like alcohol. Liver problems have become more common place - thanks to increasing consumption of alcohol and high fructose corn syrup - at a time when the public has been advised to avoid saturated fats.
• Saturated fats lower levels of C Reactive Protein, a marker for inflammation, which recent research implicates as a common factor in all degenerative diseases.
• The fatty acids in lung surfactant are normally 100% saturated. An adequate amount of saturated fat in critical to optimal lung function, and therefore is crucial to achieving peak performance on a bicycle!
• Coconut oil contains a medium chain fatty acid (MCFA) called lauric acid. Your body converts it to monolaurin, which helps protect you from a wide range of diseases. Being sick less means being able to train more, and decreased susceptibility to disease probably also translates into being able to train harder before pushing your body into a disease state.
• The MCFAs in coconut oil use up more energy when they are metabolized than they provide, and lauric acid is the most rapidly oxidized fatty acid (coconut oil is roughly 50% lauric acid). So coconut oil can actually help you lose weight, another critical issue for serious cyclists!
• Coconut oil has a thermogenic effect, meaning that it raises body temperature, resulting in a boost of energy and metabolic rate.

I suspect that most folks reading Eat Fat Lose Fat would have a difficult time in fully following any of the three dietary protocols suggested in the book, especially if they rely on food manufacturer's advice on healthy foods. But don't let that stop you from incorporating coconut oil and coconut products into your diet. I add one to two tablespoons of coconut oil to my steel cut oatmeal every morning and substitute coconut oil for butter or vegetable oils in cooking, and have started using more coconut milk as I've discovered new ways of using it in cooking.

Melanoma

I'm once again off-topic, since this post doesn't have a lot to do with food. But skin cancer is a real concern for cyclists, given how much time we spend in the sun. I happen to be a cancer survivor, having had a melanoma removed six and a half years ago, so this is a subject near and dear to me.

After my experience I looked high and low for anything suggesting any means of reducing the likelihood of a recurrence. For a time I bought sunblock clothing and special sunblock that left me pasty-looking, I even bought sunblock dye and dyed all of my regular clothing. Despite searching high and low there didn't seem to be much else that I could do. Things have changed a bit since then.

First off, hiding from the sun is probably the worst thing you can do, though avoiding sun burns is still essential. My feeling, based upon reading a few years back, is that it is best if you can start tanning early in the season and let your natural melanin protect you, with a light sunblock as extra protection when you anticipate long exposure on high UV days. To learn more about how sunlight and adequate levels of Vitamin D is thought to help prevent melanoma see this page on Dr. Mercola's website.

Second, cut back on sugar so that it is a condiment to flavor meals, rather than consumption of sugar for sugar's sake (i.e., cakes, candy bars, soda pop, etc). Sugar is implicated in all kinds of inflammatory processes, so there's no sense in adding extra fuel to cancer's fire. If you are going to eat sugar (and I do) it's probably best to have it with your meal, than as a between meal snack.

Third, Curcumin (found in Turmeric and Curry) has generated a lot of excitement for what appears to be its ability to block a pathway for the development of melanoma, as well as other cancers and degenerative diseases. For more on that, see this Science Daily article. Turmeric is available in supplement form. I take a couple of capsules per day for it's anti-inflammatory effect and for the possibility that it may keep future melanomas at bay.

Racing Weight

I just finished reading Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald. When I first started this blog I was looking for a way to document what I'd learned about ways of eating that would keep me lean and thus improve my power to weight ratio for bicycle hill climbs. So it was hard for me not to want to see what Matt had written.

The subtitle of Matt's book is "How to Get Lean for Peak Performance: 5-step Plan for Endurance Athletes." And while endurance is an aspect of my hill climbing, it is not the determing factor - I'm looking to go faster, not longer since there are no longer climbs in my neighborhood. While my training rides last from 2 to 3 1/2 hours, the all-out climbing part lasts from between 35 minutes to an hour and fifteen minutes. So I'm not interested in the four hour plus slogs that are the focus of his book.

With that said, I think Matt has done a great job of organizing his information and explaining his sources and reasoning. I was more than a bit disappointed that the main recommendation was for people to count calories, though in his defense he made the recommendation as a way to help folks understand where the excess calories are coming from that keep them from getting as lean as they'd like to be. I feel things could've been a lot simpler: animal proteins, nuts, fats and cheese are energy dense foods (they have a lot of calories in relation to volume), most fruits and vegetables have low energy density. Both contribute plenty of nutrients to support long term health. The main point should be portion control for the most energy dense foods (i.e., a serving of lean meat no larger than the palm of your hand, 1 of 2 tablespoons of nuts, modest amounts of good fats, etc).

Another point is that nutritionless foods (those containing lots of sugar and white floor) should be minimized as much as possible, as they'll actually destroy some of the nutrients that you consume from high qualilty sources.

And a final point is that what is marketed as healthy food isn't necessarily healthy. For instance, fruit juices are no better than soda pop due to their high fructose content, even though they do have some additional nutrients. And pretty much anything baked, even using whole grain flour, is very calorie dense but pretty much nutritionally empty - certainly there is very little bang for your nutritional buck there.

So save yourself some time and money and invest in a good anti-inflammatory diet program. It'll save you weeks or months of counting calories. Once you're on that, if you're still looking to get down to your absolute optimal racing weight, then you'll want to count calories. But just remember, this is more art than science. The calories listed on packages are averages, not absolutes. And if you are avoiding processed foods to maximize your health, good luck figuring out the caloric values of all the different ingredients that go into a meal (that's why pro teams have their own nutritionists - so the riders don't have to burn a zillion brain-calories figuring this stuff out).

The bottom line is that Racing Weight is fantastic if going long in cycling, running, skiing, or swimming is your thing. But if you are interested in speed over distance, then there's a lot less there that will be of interest to you.

Sugar

I ran across a new alternative health newsletter a couple of days ago, the New England Health Advisory. It appears to have started up last month. They've published a brochure entitled The Truth About Sugar that was interesting to read. I'd seen most of the information before, mainly from Dr. Mercola's website and his 76 Ways Sugar Can Ruin Your Health.

The most interesting bit is a discussion of the differences between Glucose (including plain old table sugar or sucrose) and Fructose. Fructose is the sugar found in most fruit and in it's natural form, when eaten as a fruit, it's pretty much harmless, due to the fiber that slows down the digestion of the sugar. But straight fructose, as a processed food (derived from good old industrial agricultural corn), is a whole other deal.

It turns out that from every 120 calories of glucose consumed, on average, 1 calorie is stored as fat. But for every 120 calories of fructose consumed, on average, 40 calories is stored as fat! And significantly more of the fat is inter-abdominal fat, the worst possible kind.

It seems that fructose is metabolized very differently than glucose. Glucose is broken down in the body's cells, whereas most of fructose is broken down in the liver, much like ethanol (alcohol). And the way it stores the fat can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Now the liver isn't one of our bi-lateral redundant organs (like our kidneys), meaning we have only one, so we can't do without it. So processed fructose should be nowhere in our diets, yet its in most processed foods!

An interesting sidenote is that by all accounts the obesity epidemic in America started in the late seventies. Just coincidentally this is when processed fructose, which is cheaper than sugar, started entering our food supply in significant ways. In particular, this is when most soft drinks changed from formulas based on sucrose to ones based on fructose (as High Fructose Corn Syrup).

Talk about a smoking gun...

Clogged Arteries, Part II

I just finished reading Real Food by Nina Planck, and learned a bit more about heart disease as a result. So I thought I'd share what I've learned, as it answers a few of the questions raised in my last post.

The most interesting thing I read was that a deficiency of B Vitamins and folic acid causes homocysteine levels to increase. It is excess levels of homocysteine that is believed to cause damage to arterial walls that begins the whole process of arteries clogging. Excessive sugar and white flour can cause B vitamin depletion.

Some other interesting stuff:

• Conjugated Lineoleic Acid (CLA) is thought to reduce atherosclerosis. CLA is found in milk from grass-fed cows (mostly in butter and cream). Most cows are not grass-fed anymore, so you need to look hard to find grass-fed milk nowadays.
• The Physician's Health Study found that doctors eating fish as little as once per week were less than half as likely to have a fatal heart attach than those that at less than once per month. Fish are a great source of Omega 3 fatty acids.
• More than half of the fat found in arterial plaques is polyunsaturated. Polyunstaturated fats include corn, sunflower, saffola and other vegetable oils - those typically used in modern processed foods. Yet we're told by medical establishment to fear saturated fats...
• There are far too many sources of Omega 6 fatty acids in the typical western diet (thanks in no small part to the vegetable oils and other sources found in processed and restaurant foods). Omega 6 fatty acids are inflammatory and increase clotting, both of which are bad for heart health. While typically there is far too much Omega 6 fatty acids in most folks' diets, a deficiency in Omega 3 fatty acids can be just as problematic. Ideally your body is looking for a ratio of around 1 Omega 3 fatty acid for every 2 Omega 6 fatty acids.
• Chloresterol is not bad, but oxidized chloresterol is. Oxidized chloresterol is found in powdered eggs, powdered milk and fried foods. Powdered eggs and milks are used extensively in processed foods.
• Inflammation from infections is also a risk factor for heart disease.

ADDED 4-15-10: I've been reading Healthy at 100 by John Robbins and came across a little tidbit that seems to be another piece of the heart health puzzle. His assertion is that the iron found in red meat can be problematic at high levels for two reasons. First, iron is an oxidant and tends in increase the aging process. Second, since it is in a form that is very easily assimilated it is fairly easy to get more than you need. The potential problem is that excess iron can oxidize chloresterol in your body. Oxidized chloresterol is stickier than regular chloresterol, so if you have arterial damage it is likely to block things up faster than would otherwise be the case. In my mind it makes more sense that the connection between meat consumption and heart disease has more to do with excess iron than with excess chloresterol or saturated fat. More to the point, it is excess meat consumption that is problematic. Not surprising when you see restaurants routinely serving 10 oz+ portions (even though your body can only process a few ounces of that amount).

Clogged Arteries

This is a bit off topic, but I felt a need to summarize some reading that I've been doing lately. My interest in clogged arteries started a little over a year ago when my oldest brother had a heart attack, quickly followed by a second heart attack. Luckily, he survived both. Then my other brother shares this information with his physician. After some tests it turns out that he, too, has had two heart attacks that went undiagnosed.

Our father died at age 57 of a variety of stress-related diseases. I'm 53. With that and my older brothers' recent experiences in mind I decided to see if there is much that I can do now to avoid a similar fate. Of course I'm not a health care professional and can't diagnose or recommend treatment for anyone, but I can share what I've learned thus far:

Why Arteries Clog

The way I understand it, the process starts with damage to the lining of the arteries, which is super slick so that things don't stick to it. I haven't come across any known reason for the lining breaking down, though there are various hints about possible causes, which I'll cover later. After this damage occurs your body deposits fat at the damage site. Once the fat is deposited chloresterol gets stuck to the site and a plaque begins forming. Now I may not have this 100% right, as I am a layperson. The important thing to remember here is that chloresterol is the THIRD symptom of heart disease. There are two other things that need to be addressed before worrying about chloresterol.

Cholesterol

If you watch TV nowadays, you'd think that lowering your chloresterol is absolutely imperative if you have clogged arteries. It seems that the argument is that chloresterol is part of the plaque building process that leads to the narrowing of arteries. The thing that the drug companies don't tell you is that chloresterol lowering drugs on their own do absolutely nothing to improve your chances of survival after a heart attack or stroke. They're simply instilling fear to generate profits - nothing new there...

Thyroid Gland

I recently read Solved: The Riddle of Illness by Langer and Scheer. If I remember correctly Langer is an MD that practiced for decades and had studied with a prominent endocrinologist. An interesting story is told about a medical fad decades ago where people's thyroids would be removed thinking it would solve various problems. There may have been some short term success, but by and large, within a few years these folks would die of clogged arteries, even though many showed no evidence of such a problem prior to the surgery. Eventually they learned to avoid this by giving folks dessicated thyroid extract (I think from pigs?). But the important message is that the thyroid seems to have an important role in maintaining the lining of arteries. Unfortunately, the endocrine glands are not well understood. We do know that the thyroid needs iodine and that a short latency deficiency will result in a neck goiter. There are some thoughts that bromide (or bromine?) in the environment may be playing havoc with our thyroids by clogging up the iodine receptors in the thyroid. Whether this contributes to clogged arteries is an interesting question.

Low Fat, Low Protein Diets

Their are a lot of physicians making a lot of money selling books about low fat heart healthy diets. I beleieve the phenomenon started with Dean Ornish, who documented that his diet resulted in a reversal of arterial clogging. A lot of these diets are vegetarian, and if you know that your arteries are already clogged, please don't ignore their advice.

However, they cite studies indicating health problems related to consuming milk protein, which they then extrapolate to infer that very probably all animal protein could be bad for you. I have difficulty with this on many, many levels. First, we are probably talking about pasteurized and homogenized dairy products. It has been shown that these processes alter the proteins. I suspect that the problem is more likely to be caused by the processing of the milk and not the milk itself, at least not for folks that are genetically endowed not to be lactose intolerant.

Dr. Gabe Mirkin posted an article on avoiding mammal protein that is probably a better recommendation than simply avoiding all animal protein. After all, we are omnivore's, so have evolved to eat some meat. And all those great essential fatty acids found in seafood are pretty difficult to adequately replace with a vegetarian diet.

Vitamin C

A number of years ago nobel laureate Linus Pauling proposed a theory that the damage to arterial linings was caused by a long latency Vitamin C deficiency - basically a chronic low level Scurvy. While this appears to have been extensively researched and dicredited, I have to tip my hat to him for his thinking. I suspect that very likely there are two things likely to work together to create heart disease - too much of something that is bad for you (i.e. too much mammal protein) and too little of things that are good for you (i.e. some sort of long latency nutritional deficency).

Vitamin D

Hopefully you've heard a lot about Vitamin D lately, though not nearly as much as you should be hearing. There are a number of folks that are suggesting that the President needs to declare a Vitamin D health emergency to get the word out about the implications of long latency Vitamin D deficiency for people's health (rickets and osteomalacia are well known short latency deficiencies of this vitamin).

First off, Vitamin D is not a true vitamin, but a hormone precursor. And there are about 2,000 Vitamin D receptors throughout our bodies, thus it is very important to our health. It actually turns 2,000 genes on or off based upon its presence or absence.

Second, Vitamin D is made by your skin, or at least is was before we all started working indoors and the suntan lotion business convinced us to fear the sun. These are both reasons why current Vitamin D levels are lower than those that we have evolved to need for optimal health.

There was a recent article posted at the New York Times about low Vitamin D levels and increased likelihood of death, stroke or heart attack for those that had recently had a cardiac event. Ironically, they show a picture of a milk carton as being representative of where to get your Vitamin D.

Inflammation

There has been a lot of buzz in the past decade about inflammation. Research is indicating that it is a root of most, if not all, chronic diseases. So what in our diet leads to inflammation? The Big Two are sugar and refined flour. And it seems that perhaps you can add mammal meat and make it the Big Three. Greatly reducing these in your diet will greatly lower most people's inflammation levels.

What in our diet decreases inflammation? Think fruits and vegetables and Omega 3 fatty acids. Which just happen to be Dr. Mirkin's basic nutritional recommendations.

Summary

It is likely to be years before anyone truly knows the solution to many chronic diseases, but there seems to be some commonality among many divergent views out there:

• Avoid sugar and refined flour.
• Limit meat consumption; avoid mammal meat and limit other meat portions to a serving roughly the size of your palm.
• Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, but go easy on those that are high in starch (bananas, peas, corn, etc) - chose a wide variety, not just a few of the usual suspects.
• Take at least 4,000 IUs of Vitamin D per day, especially if you have a desk job or live very far from the southern U.S. Avoid sunscreen except when you'll have prolonged exposure to sun and an increased risk of sunburn.
• Limit your intake of dairy products (don't worry, there's plenty of high quality calcium in most fruits and vegetables).
• Don't overdo caffeine or alcohol.