Beat Acne Now

“Karen” is a beautiful young woman with a slim athletic figure, superb symmetrical features, and bone structure to die for. But soon after her family came to Canada, her facial skin and upper back began to break out in ferocious acne, leaving unsightly scars where pimples had been squeezed. At school she became tagged with the name “Fungus” and bullied into misery. She had been treated for over a year with the usual combination topical gels, clindamycin-tretinoin and benzoyl peroxide-adapalene before coming to see us. These treatments had little positive effect.

Some of the local youth give our Flawless Skin for Teens program a bit of notoriety, not only for the skin improvement it produces, but also because we persuade them to turn organic vegan, much to the consternation of some parents. Karen’s doctor had heard of it and thought it might help her.

Her case is not unusual. I am writing about it because a couple of readers responding to my short article, Bread Brain on gluten causing disease, noted a new book by Dr William Davis MD entitled Wheat Belly, and how it cites a great deal of the evidence showing the devastating health effects of grains, especially wheat. It’s great that this science is finally getting out to the public.

As the most common grain we eat, wheat is a major villain in acne, not because of the gluten, but because of its high glycemic effects. As I write, more than 85% of teens in North America have acne, and most of them eat breakfast cereals.(1)

This continuing epidemic of skin disease used to be a mystery. When Prof. John Yudkin of London University first linked acne to high glycemic carbohydrates in the Western diet in 1967, he was jeered by many of his colleagues.(2)

Even today most physicians are not taught about it because they still get little training in genomics. So most treatments are still ineffective topical drugs. Unless you are incredibly lucky with your choice of doctor, to get effective treatment for acne you have to see a specialist.

Since the 1988–2003 Human Genome Project provided the world with highly accurate sequences for three billion letters in the human DNA code, science has uncovered the genetic basis of many diseases, including acne. Genomic science today shows that Yudkin was absolutely right. We can now measure the responses of genes to nutrition, and we know exactly what causes almost all cases of acne, and how to fix most of them.(2,3)

To skip the scientific gobbledegook, the vast majority of cases of acne occur simply because of the effects of certain foods on expression of a master gene called TORC1 which then activates a slew of other genes. This wayward group vastly increase fat formation, sebum formation, growth of hair follicles, insulin levels, insulin-like growth factor, testosterone, and inflammation directly in the skin.(4,5) All this happens in both men and women. The skin cannot contain the turmoil, so bursts it out through the surface. Superimposed on the hormonal turmoil of puberty, skin hasn’t got a chance.

All the local bacteria and other nasties found in acne are adventitious, that is, they jump onto all this new food in open pimples and pores, and infect, gobble, defecate, reproduce, and set up house. As long as the food keeps coming, they are pretty well impossible to drive out. Acne colonies live on in many people into their 20s and 30s, especially women.(4)

Nothing you can put on the skin surface can do more than temporarily reduce the infection. Some drugs, such as tretinoin (Retin-A) have an effect in reducing the local expression of TORC1 in the skin, but because the hormonal expression is throughout the body, and continually carried to the skin by the bloodstream, it is like a flea on an elephant. Tretinoin can also cause severe irritation. One natural non irritating alternative that reduces acne is a 2% solution of green tea. It works because it contains epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) which directly regulates TORC1. (5)

Cleaning the skin daily likely has the biggest effect you can get from the outside. But rupturing the pimples is a sure way to get scars, and only provides more food for the bug colony, so the cleaning has to be gentle. The harsh, anti-bacterial soaps often used, and rubbing with cloths are definitely out. The key is to reduce the expression of TORC1 and its downstream cohorts from the inside. You can do this only by eliminating the offending foods from your diet.

Acne is a TORC1 disease caused by the degraded foods that form the bulk of our supermarket supplies. Worst are high glycemic grains, (most common are wheat and corn) high saturated fat foods, and dairy proteins. Bread, bagels, burgers, candy, cereals, cheese, milk and cookies, are just the sort of diet adopted by Karen’s family when they left a mainly rice and vegetable diet to come to Canada.

Once we convinced her that the acne was coming from her food, she had no trouble switching back to a veggie based diet. There are a few other secrets, including vegan proteins. We recommend and use with all our clients a full vegan meal replacement alternative to make sure you are getting enough protein.  To find out more about this shake email us at: teamcolgan1@gmail.com.

Any intelligent person can avoid the acne foods. It’s a great nutritional plan against numerous diseases caused by our food. It was no trouble to Karen. Today her face is clear and vibrant. Her girlfriends ask her how she got such beautiful skin. Perhaps she likes to keep a few things secret. I believe they call it social currency.

1. Melnick B, Dietary intervention in acne. Dermatoendocrinol. 2012 January 1; 4(1): 20–32.

2. Yudkin J. Sugar consumption in acne vulgaris and seborrhoeic dermatitis. Brit. Med.J., 1967, 3, 153-155.

3. Melnik BC, Schmitz G.Role of insulin, insulin-like growth factor-1, hyperglycaemic food and milk consumption in the pathogenesis of acne vulgaris. Exp Dermatol. 2009 Oct;18(10):833-41.

4. Cappel M, Mauger D, Thiboutot D. Correlation between serum levels of insulin-like growth factor 1, dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, and dihydrotestosterone and acne lesion counts in adult women. Arch Dermatol. 2005 Mar;141(3):333-8.

Gluten Damages Your Brain

Michael Colgan PhD, CCN

Medical science has known for 20 years about the damaging effects of gluten on the human brain. The main offenders are wheat, rye, and barley in our food supply. Unfortunately, the cereal grains industry is mammoth business and an extremely powerful political lobby, that will do whatever it can to conceal and belittle the evidence. What I love most about science is that the truth eventually outs.

Three things are now occurring to let the facts shine. First is the light-speed development of the internet which makes it increasingly more difficult every day for vested interests to hide evidence. Second is the unprecedented growth in public demand for gluten-free foods. For example, a recent gluten-free trade show in Vancouver planned for 5,000 visitors. More than 25,000 showed up, and most could not even get in. In the US alone, the gluten-free foods industry has grown from small in 2000, to a massive $3 billion a year in 2012.

The third change working to bring the facts about gluten toxicity to public notice is the explosion of controlled studies on gluten in the last decade. One summary paper for example, published in the open-access medical journal, Bio Med Central, Medicine, in 2012, is a collaborative effort of 14 universities, to expose the evidence.(1) We now know for sure that a much larger proportion of the population suffers from gluten toxicity than previously thought.(2)

Controlled studies show that gluten is not only a main offender in the group of disorders now collected under the umbrella of celiac disease (CD), but is also involved in many cases of autism, Asperger’s, and similar disorders, now collectively called autism spectrum disorders (ASD).(3-5)

Gluten is also involved in many cases of cerebellar ataxia from damage to motor controls in the cerebellum of the brain, causing loss of balance, dizziness, learning difficulties, and what we term, “Uncoordinated Child Syndrome” (UCS).(3,5) It is also involved in many cases of peripheral neuropathy (death of peripheral nerves, leading to one or several of a large group of disorders), and multiple cases of herpetiform dermatitis (herpes-like blistering rash mainly on elbow, forearms, and knees, but can occur on the face, buttocks, and other areas) (3-5)

It has taken 20 years to bring to public notice that a dominant food, wheat, (also rye and barley) can produce human disease not only of the gut but also the skin, the peripheral nerves, and the brain. The most unfortunate aspect of the gluten problem is that a child, or an adult, can suffer several different manifestations of gluten toxicity simultaneously, and can easily be mis-diagnosed as suffering from different disorders. World expert on gluten toxicity, British neurologist Dr. M. Hadjivassiliou, has called for physicians and neurologists to learn more about gluten-caused disorders, and treat them promptly before irreversible brain damage occurs.

A typical case we received is a very bright and pretty teenager, I will call Karen. She had been on the gluten-free diet we recommended, and had become symptom-free but we had not seen her for two years. She had eaten an “organic whole wheat sandwich” at school, thinking it would do no harm. Next day she had intestinal upset, and progressively over four days developed numbness and weakness in her legs, and could barely walk. The neurological report showed a large loss of nerve conduction and almost absent pain and temperature sensation in the legs.

On interview, I noticed some rough skin and scarring on Karen’s elbows, which could have come from gluten dermatitis, and asked whether she had been eating sandwiches before. After much mumbling she admitted that she had occasionally been going with school friends to the local organic restaurant, and having a sandwich, but they were “pure organic bread”.

I asked about the elbows. “Oh, that’s my rash, it comes and goes. I have cream for it.” I asked about any previous leg weakness. “Some days I have jelly legs and awful brain fog.” I discovered that her school work was not going well, and she also had quite a few sick days.

I concluded that the sandwich habit, a natural thing for a teen to do to fit in socially, was more frequent than she admitted. As gently as possible, I explained how she was causing all her symptoms herself, schoolwork problems, being sick, brain fog, gut upsets, elbow rashes. After a few minutes consideration, she said, “OMG, you’re right.” She got back on the gluten-free diet, and, within three months, jelly legs had disappeared entirely and she was back on track at school again.

The message of this case is that Karen had been correctly diagnosed by her physician years before, and the antibody tests confirmed it, because gluten was pretty poisonous to her. But there are thousands of children with less severe reactions who are never diagnosed, who stumble through life, variously considered slow, or weak, or anti-social, or weird, when every day they are being poisoned by their morning bowl of cereal, and lovingly packed school lunch. The antibody tests are widely available now, and could be worth their weight in gold for any child with unexplained disorder in their life.

For more information about how to save your brain go to stopmemorylossnow.com

1. Sapone A, et al. Spectrum of gluten-related disorders: consensus on new nomenclature and classification. BMC Med. 2012; 10: 13. Published online 2012 February 7. doi: 10.1186/1741-7015-10-13 PMCID: PMC3292448

2. Bernini P, et al. Are Patients with Potential Celiac Disease Really Potential? The Answer of Metabonomics. Journal of Proteome Research, 2010; : 101213161430042 DOI: 10.1021/pr100896s

3. Hadjivassiliou M, et al. Gluten sensitivity as a neurological illness. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 2002 May; 72(5): 560–563.

4. Hadjivassiliou M, et al. Dietary treatment of gluten neuropathy. Muscle Nerve. 2006 Dec;34(6):762-6.

5. Hernandez-Lahoz C, et al. Neurological disorders associated with gluten sensitivity. Rev Neurol. 2011 Sep 1;53(5):287-300.

ADHD Solutions

Dr. Michael Colgan

A handsome but truculent five-year-old I will call Charles came reluctantly to our clinic with his tearful Mom. She explained that he was very bright and in a gifted program, but had bitten his teacher on the legs on several occasions, and was now diagnosed with ADHD. After analysis of his records, our therapist asked, “Can you read Charles?”

“Well, no”. Mom said, “He can’t concentrate enough to learn.”

“I will teach you to read Charles.” Our astute therapist focused on the boy.

We gave his Mom our program for optimum brain nutrition and our time management plan, and put Charles on the computer. We had one of the early smart programs, much like the best of the brain training programs you can get on line today. It leads your brain by sight and sound, and moving cartoons. It continually resets the difficulty so you get a 70% success rate, with rewarding cheers and dancing ducks for success, and burps and miserable ducks for failure. It sounds a bit nerdy but it’s so smart. I’ve often wished we had something like it when I was doing math and physics at college.

From the first, Charles glued himself to the screen with fierce concentration. He was going to beat that program or die trying. Behavior problems in the clinic – zero. Within three months he was reading at an 11-year-old level and apparently devouring all the books at home. Three months more and he came to say goodbye, smiling ear to ear, in a natty little suit and red bow tie, with a bouquet of flowers for our therapist. Different boy now that his brain had emerged from under its previous illiterate wraps.

The Colgan Institute has done numerous studies of children with attention deficit and learning difficulties since 1983.(1) The science has improved a bit since then, but the proportion of children who need help has increased nearly four-fold. The genes of parents have not changed, so this catastrophic increase is hardly genetic. It has to be almost all environmental. Potent environmental changes that likely explain it are the increased levels of toxins in our air, water, and food, and the huge reduction in the nutritional quality of the American food supply.

The 2012 American Lung Association Report shows that 127 million Americans live in air that is often too toxic to breathe.(2) And the garbage foods that now litter our supermarkets beggar description.(3) But no government is likely to open those cans of worms.

In the 1980s, we developed two simple strategies that dramatically reduced symptoms and improved learning in children coming to our clinic. The first has now become an official treatment for ADHD, behavior modification called OTMP, organisation, time management, and planning. We almost always included the progressive reading component.

The second strategy is a simple diet containing ample essential nutrients, organic fresh vegetables and fruits, organic meats, or fish, or eggs, or protein drinks (without casein, lactose, or soy), but no grains except organic whole rice, and no dairy products or processed sugar. We focus on organic foods because they contain few of the toxins found in most supermarket food.(3)

In 2011, the prestigious medical journal Lancet published a similar dietary strategy. A diet with rice, meat, fresh vegetables and fresh fruit, and zero processed foods, dramatically reduced ADHD symptoms in children who followed the diet for just five weeks.(4) Compared with a control group, children on the diet showed a reduction in symptoms by two-thirds on the ADHD Rating Scale, especially in the combative behaviours that are so draining on parents.

Developing the habits of planning and progressive learning each day, and of eating real food, provides a non-toxic approach to ADHD that can set up these children for happy and productive lives.

1. Colgan M, Colgan LA. Do nutrient supplements and dietary changes affect learning and emotional reactions of children with learning difficulties? Nutrition & Health, 1984;3 (1):69-77.

2. American Lung Association, State of the Air Report ,2012, http://environment.about.com/od/healthenvironment/a/stateofair.htm

3. Nowhere to Hide: Persistent Toxic Chemicals in the U.S. Food Supply, http://www.panna.org/

4. Pelsser LM, et al. Effects of a restricted elimination diet on the behaviour of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (INCA study): a randomised controlled trial. Lancet. 2011 Feb 5;377(9764):494-503.

Don’t Lose Your Mind

Dr. Michael Colgan

It’s beyond sad to see one of your friends for more than 30 years, a colleague, a brilliant scientist, and a proud and beautiful wife and mother, slowly turn into a shell. Watching her lose her memory was a sight more awful than the foulest cancer. It was wretched hearing the stifled sobs, seeing the tears in her eyes as she realized she had to use her cell phone photos just to remember people, and eventually to remember who she was herself.
Now she no longer remembers how to use a cell phone, and does not know me at all, nor her husband, nor her two children. All the memories, all the years, all the joys of her life and family, are lost to her forever.
She does nothing any more. She watches TV blankly, and cannot even understand the news. Her pealing laughter that would illuminate a room is gone. Her erstwhile smiling mouth is ever set in anguish. The once proud stature bent and trembling, the blazing flame of hair now dank and grey. Despite all the drugs, Alzheimer’s has taken her brain in its deadly grip, a grip that never lets go.
She brought great jewels of laughter,
A million flecks of gold,
And flashing smiles of diamonds,
So dazzling to behold.
But now the house is dismal,
And the wind is heard to grieve,
Where is that lovely lady?
Why did she have to leave?
Don’t let it happen to you. Though I may never have met you, I know exactly where you live. You live in your brain, a mobile house. You can take your brain house anywhere on Earth. But you can never sell it, you can never exchange it, you can never leave it lifelong. So it makes good sense to look after your brain, to nurture and maintain it every day. Yet most people take their brain for granted, and give it less care than they give their teeth.
It may convince you to give your brain more care if you know a few salient facts about memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s has escalated in the US to become the 6th leading cause of death. There is no cure, nor any effective treatment.
In 2011, Barack Obama passed the National Alzheimer’s Protection Act, giving $100 million a year in research grants to find an effective treatment by 2025. Also in 2011, the National Institutes of Health acknowledged that current drugs are ineffective, and changed their long-standing criteria for Alzheimer’s to a focus on prevention. They published voluminous evidence that memory loss, the salient identifying feature of Alzheimer’s, begins to occur in the average American at about age 35.
“Converging evidence from both genetic at-risk cohorts and clinically normal older individuals suggests that the pathophysiological process of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) begins years, if not decades, before the diagnosis of clinical
dementia.” (NIH, 19 April 2011)
The National Institutes of Health also reported that half of all Americans over age 50 will suffer memory loss. Once memory loss progresses to forgetting pots on the stove, the sufferer can no longer live independently, and progresses quickly to total helplessness and 24-hour nursing care, until death.
Since 2011, with modern neuroimaging and cerebrospinal fluid analysis, over 100 controlled studies published in 2012 and 2013, have confirmed the pathological processes that begin in apparently normal people at age 35. Prominent among these is a loss of formation of new neurons (neurogenesis) the normal process that replaces worn-out neurons in the hippocampus, the brain area that is crucial for forming new memories. This loss in one of the earliest events that precipitates a cascade of degeneration in the progression to Alzheimer’s, and very likely the first thing we have to prevent.
The good news is that recent controlled studies also show three interventions that can prevent loss of neurogenesis.
1. Optimum brain nutrition
2. Computerized brain exercises
3. Daily physical exercise with both aerobic and resistance components.
If you can read, understand, and remember this article, it is not too late.
Visit our website for more information on how to Save Your Brain.

Telomeres and Aging

At both ends of every chromosome in a human cell is a telomere. Telomeres are a series of repetitive DNA sequence that keep your chromosomes from becoming frayed, fusing into rings or binding with other DNA. They are like protective caps that shield the important genetic information inside the chromosome.

Our telomeres are long at birth. But, as our cells divide through the years, they lack the ability to replicate right to the very end of the chromosomes and so the telomeres get shorter over time. Telomeres start out at about 10,000 nucleotides, but when they reach about 5,000 nucleotides our cells can no longer divide correctly and the DNA is exposed.

Once damaged, the DNA no longer provides the right codes for the more than 100,000 different proteins that compose our body structure, leading to all sorts of mayhem. This is even worse in our brain. If the telomeres shorten too fast then aging is accelerated.

In 1984 telomerase, an enzyme, was discovered. In cells that express telomerase, telomeres lengthen as soon as they shorten, thereby lengthening the lifespan of your telomeres. This enzyme was thought to “turn off” at birth. In recent years science has been investigating how to “turn on” telomerase.

In animal studies, telomerase expression enables even very short telomeres to remain functional. The research also shows that when telomerase is made very active, it can even lengthen telomeres and reverse aging of the cell. When this reversal occurs in the brain, then learning and memory improve.

There are now several compounds that successfully express telomerase in normal, adult, human cells. Two of the world’s leading experts on telomeres, Dr. Bill Andrews (Sierra Sciences) and Dr. Maria Blasco (Spanish Cancer Center) have been instrumental in this research. The compounds are derived from ancient botanicals used in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years.

Telomerase is even more important for brain function. Brain neurons are post-mitotic which means that they do not divide and replicate. So the death of a neuron is a permanent loss. The formation of new brain cells depends on neurogenesis, the conversion of stem cells your brain into brand new neurons. This requires you to maintain telomerase and protect your telomeres to make this process work correctly.

If you would like to learn more about a product that will help your telomeres and telomerase then follow the link to watch a short video. Click here.

Medical Delusions and Solutions Dr Micha

Medical Delusions and Solutions

Self-congratulatory politicians might delude you into thinking that the last century of science has produced massive advances in anti-aging medicine, and near doubled our lifespan. The facts suggest their noses grew a lot these passing months.
Back in 1850, in the United States, average life expectancy after age 40 was another 28 years. Today, life expectancy after age 40 is another 38 years. All the programs, all the drugs, all the surgery, all the hospitals, all the treatments in a century-and-a-half of “progress” have added only 10 years to the average adult lifespan.(1) Given the current epidemics of obesity, diabetes, cancer, dementia, and other degenerative diseases, we should not be proud of this record, but ashamed.
Journals of medicine today often resemble a garden in which more care is lavished on the weeds of profitably acceptable symptom relief, than on the flowers of genius and creativity by which medicine advances. Inventing the current ineffective bureaucracy, commerce, and chemicals, which are devastating our environment and our bodies through internal and external pollution, took the last 100 years of science. We cannot afford to wait another 100 years to undo the damage.
Surgeon General of the United States (2002-2006) Dr Richard Carmona, says it well, “We can change the direction in which our nation is headed if we act now. We need to move away from our current system that is focused on treating disease to one focused on preventing chronic conditions from occurring in the first place.” (Almanac of Chronic Disease, 2008)
Dr Delos Cosgrove, President of the Cleveland Clinic Group one of the leading groups of hospitals in the US, with more than five million patient visits per year, felt strongly enough about our sagging medicine to put this message on the social media on 19 October 2012,
“American healthcare is in the middle of an unprecedented transformation. How can we meet the challenges that come with such change? As Abraham Lincoln said, “We must think anew and act anew.”
Ah, so much more comfortable to wallow in the consoling muck of habit, blindly continuing to entrust our health to politicians, and our medicine to entrepreneurs.
1. US Annual Death Rates. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html Accessed 14 November 2012.

Why Do We Act So Dumb?

Dr. Michael Colgan

From shoes and ships and sealing wax, to internets and diamond rings, we made it all up, our science, our culture, all our human hopes and dreams. We created everything from a planet of just sticks and rocks. By nibbling away on the edge of the limitless power of the Universe, human thought teases out scraps of its rules that let us make wonders from dirt.

We get a bit arrogant about how smart we are, even though we share 80% of our DNA with a banana, and over 98% with a chimp. We prefer to forget we are primitive simians, who evolved somewhat late in the game, on a rock spinning at a thousand miles an hour, orbiting a star at 67,000 miles an hour, itself hurtling through the Milky Way much faster than that.

We never want to be reminded we are mostly hot air. Three of the gases that made the stars, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen make up 78% of the human body, plus 18.5% carbon to hold it all together. That’s 96.5% of you and me, gas and dirt. How that adds up to anything animate just demonstrates the power behind the Universe. Hubris we seem to have invented ourselves.

One of our latest, and I must admit, attractive bits of hubris is the Hubble Deep Field telescope, which shows that the Milky Way galaxy alone has at least 500 billion stars. Many have planets a lot older than Earth, highly likely to contain intelligent life. Some folk object, “Why haven’t they contacted us?” That might be an intelligent question if our science was at all advanced. But, as leading scientists, including Steven Hawking, observe, we are still using ancient World War 2 rocketry to try and escape our own planet. Why? Because we hardly ever think hard.

We are not near solving basic diseases yet, let alone gravity, and travel to the stars. You only have to look at folk staggering down the street to see we haven’t even mastered designing shoes. The whole Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) multi-billion debacle is a 30-year example of arrogance. Aliens signalling us? Only in the mind of Steven Spielberg. Intelligence advanced enough to travel between the stars, would be about as interested in communicating with us as we are with slugs. If you stop and think a moment, we are so dumb.

The bulk of medicine has developed ass-backward. After Fleming got the Nobel Prize in 1945 for the discovery of penicillin, we vainly thought that antibiotics had won the battle against infectious diseases. Several American Surgeon Generals declared it so. Yet, a century before, in 1859, Darwin had already explained how natural selection is the greatest biological force on Earth. Antibiotics were a clue, not a solution. We just didn’t connect the dots. Natural selection with lightning speed, because of their miniscule lifespan, quickly bred bugs with immunity to every antibiotic that came down the pike. We used antibiotics willy-nilly to kill off the weak, thereby breeding superbugs that are resistant to everything.

By putting these drugs into the hands of the ignorant, we have created far more disease than we cured. Now we’re importing it back from all over the planet. Some American hospitals have MRSA bugs from Mexico, so virulent you can’t even go in there without a HAZMAT suit. Bugs evolve so fast that new antibiotics last only a couple of years before resistant strains appear.

No wonder there are so few pharmaceutical companies willing to develop new ones. Not enough time to make the profit before they drop off the market. The clear solution was to use the information that Fleming teased from the stars to develop medicine to build host resistance. As Pasteur taught us in the 1800s, “Host resistance is the key.” Did we even listen?

I would love someone to tell me of a doc I could go to for an immune system pick-me-up. But they don’t exist. Dumber. Since the end of the Second World War we have been progressively killing our food, just for profit. To hell with the health of our children and our children’s children. Politicians still don’t seem to know that live food is the base of human health.

What sort of intelligent conversation could I have with a Minister of Health who is overweight and sedentary, and offers me boiled to death coffee and a bakery basket? Most supermarket food is now sanitized, deodorized, homogenized, lifeless, processed pap so devoid of nutrition, even bugs can’t live on it. It will not support human health. Talk about weakening immunity.

I love Joel Salatin’s example of the teacher balling up white bread and putting it in the manure pile next to a ball of real, coarse whole grain bread. In two weeks the kids come back and the whole grain bread is all eaten by worms while the white ball remains almost intact. As Joel says, would you eat food that even worms are smart enough to reject? Read his book, Folks, This Ain’t Normal. Hopefully you will never buy processed pap again.

Dumbest. Why did we ever develop the world, super-communicating, internet on a primitive digital base invented in 1936 by Alan Turing? Digital communication was a clue, not a solution. Now we are stuck with the whole dopey system for the next 20 years. I don’t understand because I thought that what most of us are trying to do most in this world is improve the human condition.

Before we jumped on Turing’s idea, someone should have said, wait a bit, humans are analog not digital. The whole of biology is analog. It’s the smartest design. We should be going that way. So, what have we done instead? Developed endless digital networks that take superb, information filled, analog, biological signals, and convert them into completely unintelligent (unthinking) digital signals composed of ones and zeros. Then, at the other end, another superb analog machine (a human brain) has to interpret them. And even though we know this, we go on using all our intelligence to make these dumb signals faster and faster.

The smartest folks realized long ago that what most of communications science has been doing for the last 75 years is improving the gears, and the bearings of a penny-farthing bicycle. But are they going to tell you. Not a chance. Knowing how to work with the real intelligent signals gives them a multi-thousand percent advantage on all the uninformed, who slog the stock market or jump through other dumb hoops to make a crust.

Why then am I telling you? Because, despite being one of the dumbest things humanity has done, the internet spreads information like no other system we ever had before. That’s why CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, under the leadership of Tim Berners-Lee, decided to give it away to the public – free, as the World Wide Web in 1991. I am using this net now, as they did and do, to search the world for a few forward thinking people, who understand that the only thing worthwhile doing for the brief time we have in the human condition, is to make the human condition more comfortable for others.

Analog direct to analog, biology to biology, intelligence direct to intelligence. There are lots of scientists working on it, and the technology is mostly there already. The hardest job will be to educate politicians to dump the whole digital shebang. “What yuh gonna do”? You have very little time on this Earth. You can follow the crowd and make a bigger mess. Or you can stop and think, and make a difference. Your choice. We have access to the power that drives the stars. If this dumb digital communication nudges one brain out there, then writing it will have been more than worthwhile.

Visit our websites at Colgan Institute and Colgan Isagenix.

Exercise for Fat Loss: Part 2

Dr. Michael Colgan

If you are exercising to lose body fat, you have to be concerned you have too much of it. For many folk that much has taken years to establish. Some have solidified the same, 20, 30, 40 lbs., year after year by yo-yo dieting. It’s not easy to change a body that has got into such a state, but if you follow the rules it works like a charm.

People who don’t like rules often want to just get their head down and bull it out. Boot camps love these folk, telling them “You just work have to work your butt off at our level and you will lose the fat.” The science says, “No way”. Others read some social buzz that whole neighbourhoods lost masses of fat by getting together and running (biking, mud-wrestling, swimming in holes in the ice, etc). Not going to work.

Anyone who has run a marathon, an extreme 3-4 hour effort for most of us, knows with disgust, they lost negligible body fat doing it. Having measured runners in quite a few marathons, an average person well trained to run a marathon, is lucky to lose a quarter pound of fat. Some folk who stuff with carbs during a marathon, actually gain fat. They may feel like hell at the finish, and be 7 lbs. lighter in water weight, because the carbs prevent water absorption from the gut, but their belly rebounds and then some within 24 hours.

One controlled study representative of the science, measured body fat losses accurately in groups of men and women over the whole 20-week training program for a half-marathon. In 20 weeks of fairly intense endurance exercise (80 workouts), the men lost an average of 5.3 lbs. of fat. That’s just 4.25 ounces per week of exercise. The women lost an average of only 2.0 lbs. That’s a measly 1.6 ounces of fat loss per week of exercise.(1)

This negligible loss of body fat with exercise is the usual result, and often gives folk the false belief they are different from everyone else, and just can’t get slim. Yes you can. All you need is the right nutrition and exercise. It’s not rocket science. Here are eight exercise rules to get you started on the right track. Stated briefly, with just a major reference or two, they are grounded in in a lot of recent science that I will be covering in future articles. You need to follow them all to get sterling results.

Exercise for Fat Loss: Rule 1

Get 8 hours sleep a night.

The US National Center on Sleep Disorders reports that approximately 90 million Americans currently do not get sound sleep.(2) Children sleep better, so it’s a one in three bet that you have sleep disturbance. If you are overweight, it’s 50/50 that you have poor sleep.

Sound sleep is an essential physiological restorative process that programs one-third of your life, and controls much of what happens in the other two-thirds.(3) To cut to the chase, without sound sleep, you cannot effectively exercise or effectively lose body fat. Visceral fat gain, food cravings, insulin disruption, fatigue, your whole hormone cascade, the metabolic syndrome, and many other bodily disorders are driven by disruption of your circadian rhythm.(4) Get your sleep fixed first or you will be unable to effectively exercise or lose fat.

Exercise for Fat Loss: Rule 2

Exercise on waking to raise your metabolic rate for the whole day.

When you wake in the morning, your metabolism is sluggish. Your metabolic rate for the day is then determined by what you do. If you have a lazy day off for example, your metabolic rate will remain low throughout, and you will be on maximum calorie retention from anything you eat. If, however, you exercise on waking, even if it is only a 30 minute walk, it raises your metabolic rate immediately. The rate then remains high for most of the day, and you lower your calorie retention from food. Get in the habit. Do that smidgeon of exercise every day.

Exercise for Fat Loss: Rule 3

Exercise on an empty stomach.

Your body takes the easiest route to energy. If you eat before exercise, or start at the juice bar with a smoothie at the gym, your body will use the calories in your gut preferentially to using bodyfat for fuel. A single small “all fruit” smoothie will eliminate any weight loss effect of an hour of exercise after it. And, drinking “energy drinks” while working out is just plain dumb if you want to achieve fat loss. It’s just plain dumb for any exercise goal.(5)

Exercise for fat Loss: Rule 4

Do 20-30 minutes of light aerobic exercise before your workout.

When you begin exercise, your body uses mainly sugar for fuel, the glycogen in your muscles, sugar made by gluconeogenesis in the liver, and sugar from food in your gut. (Remember, no eating before exercise.) To achieve your goal of using body fat for fuel, you first have to induce hormonal changes to switch to greater fat oxidation. You can do this with light aerobic exercise for 20-30 minutes, such as walking to the gym.

You cannot achieve these complex changes by lumbering on the treadmill, as I see some folk do, because, as soon as you begin to pant, signalling a shortage of oxygen, you keep the body stuck in sugar burning mode. A whole workout done with great effort, treadmilling wildly, then rushing from station to station for an hour, uses near zero bodyfat, and exhausts you into the bargain, as it empties the muscles of glycogen. It’s tragic but somehow comical to see people doing this week after week, and losing no fat at all.

Exercise for Fat Loss: Rule 5

Do your workout in the “Fat Burning Zone”.

There is so much nonsense written about the fat burning zone, as if it’s some magical state that melts fat. It is just a range of exercise intensity where fat use (fat oxidation) settles into a high steady level. Studies have measured this range in all sorts of complex ways involving VO2max and weird and wonderful equations. It also varies somewhat with the individual, and how much exercise you do, and how often. But I can state it pretty simply.

The fat burning zone is exercise done at 60-70% of your maximum heart rate. If you run at maximum on the treadmill, and get your highest heart rate at 170 beats per minute, then your fat burning zone is 60-70% of that score, that is, about 100-120 beats per minute. At this level of exercise you can still carry on a normal conversation.

First, do your 20-30 minute warm up in the fat burning zone to make the hormonal changes to trigger a higher proportion of fat burning. Then, for a one-hour workout on an empty stomach, keep your heart rate within the same range. Your body will then pull approximately 50% of its energy from body fat. That’s about as good as you can get.

Above or below this range, your body’s use of sugar increases, and it pulls only 20 -30% of its energy from body fat. So, it makes sense to wear a heart rate monitor, and set your fat burning range so that it beeps you automatically if you move out of it.

Exercise for Fat Loss: Rule 6

Build muscle to lose fat.

All the gym programs I have seen that concentrate on aerobic exercise have been a failure for fat loss. We measured one aerobics group for a year at Frogs Gym in San Diego. All of the women in the group wanted to lose weight. They actually gained an average of 2.9 lbs. of fat while doing an average of three aerobics sessions a week for 12 months.

The best form of exercise for fat loss is resistance training that adds muscle to your body. Muscle is moving tissue, fat is not. Over 100 muscles are constantly active just to keep you standing up, and about 200 are merrily using energy just to maintain their tone. Fat hangs limp like jello.

Muscle is the engine that uses body fat for fuel. With more muscle, more fat is burned 24 hours a day, even just couch sitting with heavy breathing. In her book Strong Women Stay Slim, Miriam Nelson, a Tufts University researcher, followed a group of women who did a weight loss diet plus resistance training. They lost 44% more fat than those who followed the diet alone. So, put resistance training at the top of your list.

Exercise for Fat Loss: Rule 7

Do weight training that makes you taller and more flexible.

We have seen it many times, especially with women. They embrace resistance training in order to lose fat, then do all the wrong stuff. Often they hire trainers who give them bodybuilding exercises, or worse, uni-planar exercises guided by machines with comfy seats, exercises that bear no relation to movements in life. They often turn the posture into a muscle-thickened crouch. Though they can achieve lower body fat because of muscle growth, the unfortunate girls look shorter and fatter.

One example I saw recently. Under a trainer’s direction, a somewhat overweight girl was vigorously doing deadlifts with a bar and two 45lb weights, 135lbs, about her own weight. Each time she lifted the bar you could see her stomach stick out. She did not realize she was training hard to grow a stuck out gut.

Also, the heavy weight was pulling her shoulders down and forward, shortening and thickening the muscle connections from the arms to the pectoralis major of the chest. It was growing round shoulders with dumpy arms, about the worst training you can think of for most women, who usually aim to be upright, slim, and elegant.

Another thing this girl didn’t realise was, if you lift your own body weight from the floor, it immediately compresses your spine and makes you temporarily about an inch shorter. Over a long period, the erector spinae muscles that hold up the spine becomes shorter from that form of training. Bulging stomach, forward-sloping shoulders, dumpy arms, and a shortened spine. Not exactly what most folk want from a weight program to lose fat.

The best resistance training for fat loss (and muscle gain) is free-movement exercises, done standing, exercises that lengthen the spine while contracting the muscles. Overhead cables like we use in the Colgan Power Program are best, as they can simulate virtually any free movement in life. The Program was first developed for Olympic athletes at Colorado Springs, so you can bet it’s first class for making people muscular and strong. But it also trains long, lean, flexible muscles. And more than 100 different exercises in it lengthen the spine while contracting the muscles. That should be your aim, a tall, elegant, flexible body that emphasizes the low body fat you have worked so hard in the kitchen to achieve.

Exercise for Fat Loss: Rule 8

Get a mentor.

You can go it alone, but a mentor adds immensely to any program for any skill. To achieve a great body you need someone who is an example, someone who has the skills, someone who can calm your wavering doubts and unerringly guide you in your quest.

In my article The Making of Genius, 2005 , which has been reprinted and copied innumerable times worldwide, I analysed the components that have produced genius in science, music, and arts. One vital component is the mentors that most geniuses had to help them throughout their lives. These mentors were all experts in the different fields in which the individuals wanted to excel. They were all folk who had already been there, and had learned to excel at the skills.

Your goal of a great body for life is a difficult one. Most people who try fail repeatedly. You need a personal mentor. What Isagenix offers that no one else can, is hundreds of members who have done what you want to do, and who are on the same lifelong journey, walking the same way.

For more information visit Colgan Institute and Colgan Isagenix (videos and testimonials).

1. Meijer GA, et al. Body composition and sleeping metabolic rate in response to a 5-month endurance-training programme in adults. Eur J Appl Physiol Occup Physiol. 1991;62(1):18-21.

2. US National Center on Sleep Disorders. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/about/ncsdr/index.htm. Accessed 15 July 2012.

3. Aldabal L, Bahammam AS. Metabolic, endocrine, and immune consequences of sleep deprivation. Open Respir Med J. 2011;5:31-43.

4. Maury E, et al. Circadian rhythms and metabolic syndrome: from experimental genetics to human disease. Circ Res. 2010 February 19;106(3): 447–462.

5. Van Proeyen K, et al. Beneficial metabolic adaptations due to endurance exercise training in the fasted state. J Appl Physiol. 2011 January; 110(1):236–245.

Exercise for Fat Loss: Part 1

Dr. Michael Colgan

I couldn’t help laughing at one gym company ad with frolicking models that “guarantees a weight loss of 15lbs in a month, or your money back.” The fine print in the ad says, “Results and time period vary with the individual”. My lawyer friends tells me the fine print voids the guarantee. Lucky for them because the usual exercise program is great at moving fat around the gym, but terrible at removing it from the body.

First you should know that, in cunning North American food labelling terms, food energy is specified in Calories. “Calorie” is spelled on labels with a capital “C”, to comply with the law: it actually means a kilocalorie. In Europe, labels are more accurate, and say “kcal”. In scientific terms, one Calorie (one kcal) is 1,000 calories, quite a bit of energy.

One Calorie (kcal) is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of I kg of water by 1 °C, (more accurately, 4.2 kilojoules). You could run a small motor for an hour on 1 (North American) Calorie, and the human body is much more efficient at producing energy from fuel than any motor. Using Calorie the way our media uses the word, bodyfat is 9 “calories” per gram. That’s a lot. Now we’re starting to get the picture about fat and exercise. Now you know that those cookie delights advertised as “only 100 calories per serving” are really 100,000 calories in scientific terms. You could run an engine on that.

Next you have to access your fat, that is, create a state in the body which favours burning fat from adipose cells over burning sugar from muscles, liver, and gut. Fat oxidation works only if it has lots of oxygen. Run up and down the gym a few times or hit the elliptical or the treadmill vigorously to warm up, as I see in numerous gyms, and you start to puff, signalling reduced oxygen flow to the muscles, and ensuring that you burn mostly sugar, not fat.

The harder you work out the worse it is. Train like a demon for an hour, and you will need that workout drink, because you have just depleted your sugar store. But you have not burned even a quarter of an ounce of fat. The science is simple. At 9 North American calories a gram, body fat is 255 calories an ounce, a bit over 4,000 calories a pound. At best, you will produce about 50% of your exercise calories from bodyfat. If you could access your bodyfat perfectly (which you can do only if you completely run out of sugar and have no muscle left either), let’s see how much exercise it takes to burn a pound of fat.

Hop on the stationary bike for an hour as your workout. You have to do it with an empty stomach, or the exercise will burn sugar from your gut far more readily than fat. Ride moderately, because you don’t want to puff which will also slash your fat burning. Depending a bit on your size, but not that much, an average person will burn roughly 350 calories. If you burned fat perfectly, and no sugar or protein, you would lose 1.4 ounces of fat. It will take eleven trips to the gym of perfect fat burning, to burn one pound of fat. What an efficient machine the body is.

Some activities burn a bit more. If you could burn fat perfectly, vigorous resistance training could use 400 calories of fat in an hour. At three workouts a week, it would take over three weeks of resistance training to burn one pound of fat. Switch to the treadmill, the rowing machine, or the cross country machine for three workouts a week, and you might knock off one pound of fat in three weeks flat. (Remember, no panting.)

If you eat or drink anything before working out, or for several hours afterwards, (except water) you haven’t got a hope. Whether it is composed of sugar, carbs, proteins, or fats, your body will convert some of it to triglycerides and put the fat back on right away. Juice bar after the workout – deadly. Smoothie – plump as a goose. I like the chain of gyms with the great wine bars. Fermented fruit juice is just as deadly for fat gain, but a lot more convivial.

Just for comparison, steady housework uses about 250 calories per hour. It’s a fair level of effort for burning fat, and costs nothing. Because you are in proximity to food, however, you have to resist eating anything, or you switch to burning mainly sugar. If you can resist the food, then two hours housework a day will burn far more fat than most gym workouts. Let’s consider perfect fat burning again: 2 hours housekeeping x 6 days a week = 12 hours. Twelve hours at 250 calories = 3,000 calories of fat loss per week. Beats gym workouts – no contest.

Probably the best exercise for fat loss is couch sitting. Heavy breathing and furtive movement are encouraged but not mandatory. Couch sitting burns about 120 calories an hour. According to the media, the average American does it 4.7 hours per day, seven days per week. That’s 32.9 hours per week of highly oxygenated fat burning exercise in the comfort of your own home, for free. With no snacking, and perfect fat burning, it would work out to 3,950 calories of fat. That’s nigh on a pound of fat loss every week with no effort at all.

Whenever I lecture about exercise and fat loss numbers, some folk think I’m fooling. It can’t be that bad can it? Look at folk around you. At any one time a third of them are trying to lose bodyfat. Most exercise programs are useless for it.

The International Journal of Obesity published a rigorous meta-analysis of 25 years of controlled research studies on exercise and fat loss. These were fairly intense exercise programs, although they didn’t differentiate between different types of gym exercise, because they wanted to represent the range of what was generally happening out there in gyms. All the studies were supervised by university trainers, with subjects motivated and monitored by research teams. They counted only people who attended regularly for 4-6 hours per week.

Here’s the bottom line. Weight loss average over all the studies was 6.4 lbs in 15 weeks. That’s an average loss of only 7 ounces a week. And not all of that was fat. You could do better sitting on the couch and breathing.

The researchers also examined studies that added a reasonable nutrition program to the exercise program. Results got much rosier. The same meta-analysis examined the best of the exercise plus diet studies over 25 years. In 15 weeks, on a good diet plus 4-6 hours per week in the gym, subjects lost an average of 24.2 lbs. That’s a loss of 1.6 lbs per week.(1)

So, if we compare the exercise alone groups (loss of 6.4 lbs) with the exercise plus nutrition groups (loss of 24.2 lbs), adding the nutrition resulted in a loss of 17.8 lbs. Now you know that, no matter what any gym maven tries to tell you, fat loss is mostly dependent on what and when you eat.

The exercise studies analysed were representative of a wide range of gym programs, but, overall, the exercise used was pretty poor. It’s a lot harder to design effective exercise for fat loss than to reduce bad food intake. Combined with good nutrition, the right exercise, done at the right time, under the right conditions, can make a big impact on body fat. But that’s a whole different story. I’ll tell you about it in Exercise for Fat Loss, Part 2.

For more information on effective weight-loss programs visit Colgan Institute or Colgan Isagenix (videos available).

1. Miller WC, Koceja DM Hamilton EJ. A meta-analysis of the past 25 years of weight loss research using diet, exercise or diet plus exercise intervention. Int J Obesity, 1997;21:941-947.

Early Start of Alzheimer’s confirmed by Harvard Aging Brain Study

Dr. Michael Colgan

In 1996, I found brain damage in athletes unrelated to head blows. This damage was confirmed by functional MRIs, showing a loss of neuron masses in the hippocampus, the most critical brain area for memory. The damage was also accompanied by cognitive deficits in memory, very like those that occur in Alzheimer’s.

From this work and associated research worldwide, I and numerous other scientists proposed that Alzheimer’s disease begins decades before it shows as a loss of cognition, and that we should begin treatment to prevent it, at an early age, because later treatment is ineffective.(1) At that time our analysis was largely ignored.

With the massive increase in Alzheimer’s this century and still no treatment in sight, the problem is finally widely recognised. In 2010, the leading medical journal, Nature Medicine published the following header to a major paper by Dr. Steven Finkbeiner, Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco:

“Neurodegenerative diseases are the sixth leading cause of death in the US. The market for disease-modifying drugs is enormous, but no drug exists”.(2)

In 2011, neurologists at the prestigious Mayo Clinic published a blunt rebuttal of soothsaying government denials, saying, “There is no effective treatment…”(3)

I and numerous other scientists have published our findings repeatedly since the late 1990s. We compared the neuron losses in the hippocampus that lead to Alzheimer’s, to the loss of blood vessels and nerves that currently make diabetes the largest cause of amputations in the US. Once the nerves die, there is no hope of saving the limb.

We petitioned the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to change their criteria for Alzheimer’s, so that the focus would turn to prevention, and preventive treatment would begin decades before the disease manifests. Following wide confirmation of our findings, especially by the Harvard Aging Brain Study, in April 2011 the NIH finally published its first revision of Alzheimer’s in 27 years. The revision states that Alzheimer’s begins decades before it shows, and that prevention is the way to treat it.(3)

Today, 15 years after our first proposal, there is still no preventive treatment of Alzheimer’s generally available. But there is a glimmer of hope. This month (July 2012) Dr. Reisha Sperling of the Center for Alzheimer’s Research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, presented the latest findings at the TedMed 2012 Conference which you can watch free online. http://www.tedmed.com/videos-info?name=Reisa_Sperling_at_TEDMED_2012&q=updated&year=all&sid=195&vid=305

Dr. Sperling shows graphic confirmation of our early work, detailing how critical structures throughout the brain die off with aging to slowly destroy memory. The aim is to construct a list of risk factors for Alzheimer’s that will enable physicians to determine which patients are likely to lapse into the disease early, and thus require the most urgent preventive treatment. That is many millions of Americans.

Problem is, there is no official list of risk factors yet, and effective preventive treatment is many years away in the future. If you plan to live long and healthy, you should know that one in every two people in the US today, who are 85 years old or more, has full blown Alzheimer’s.(4) With the current epidemic increase in the disease, (over 6 million in the US have Alzheimer’s) if you plan to live beyond 80, you have a fifty/fifty chance of having Alzheimer’s by your latter years. To avoid it, start looking after your brain today. Please. Given just the care you now give your teeth, your brain will last a lifetime.

For more information on prevention methods, visit our websites at Colgan Institute or Isagenix (videos with Dr. Colgan).

1. Colgan M. Save Your Brain. Vancouver: Science Books, 2008.

2. Finkbeiner S. Bridging the Valley of Death of therapeutics for neurodegeneration. Nature Medicine 2010:16:1227–1232.

3. Popp J, Arlt S. Pharmacological treatment of dementia and mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease. Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2011;24:556-61.

4. Alzheimer Disease http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease_facts_and_figures.asp Accessed 17 July 2012