Some Frequently Asked Questions, first published in SAGA Magazine (11)
Professor George Lewith
I supplement my well balanced diet with a small multivitamin, omega 3 and sometimes Glucosamine with marine chondroitin. Would taking plant sterol capsules to lower my cholesterol (currently 5.9) be a step too far?
Your cholesterol really is a bit high, but it is quite difficult to interpret without knowing more about the other lipids. The high density lipoproteins (HDL) are fats that have a protective effect on the arteries, and the low density lipoproteins (LDL) are fats that can have quite a destructive effect, increasing the fatty deposition in the arterial wall through a process of inflammation. Your cholesterol alone doesn’t give us this data, so it would be helpful to know a little more. The plant sterols will certainly lower your cholesterol. The evidence is that they could lower it by 10 – 15%, which might be almost enough to bring your slightly raised cholesterol almost into the normal range. The most sensible piece of initial advice is to make sure that you eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, don’t have too much cheese, red meat, or milk products, and keep your weight down at a reasonably sensible level. I think if you are a little overweight, and overindulging in animal fats, then tackling that alone may bring your cholesterol down. The addition of the plant sterols may well be a good added boost. There are one or two other things that might also help. Evidence is beginning to emerge that the blood level of homocysteine is a very good marker for heart attack risk. Different laboratories have different normal ranges, but generally a homocysteine over 15 or 16 is thought to be quite high, and most laboratories would probably want your level to be below 10 or 12. You can help to bring your homocysteine level down by using a high dose vitamin B complex preparation. Its wise to be aware that while we know that high homocysteine levels are associated with an increased coronary risk, we are not yet sure whether bringing the level down with nutritional supplements will have a preventative effect – the trials simply haven’t been done. Another thing you can do is use herbal supplements; red yeast extract in particular is quite good at lowering mildly raised cholesterol levels, and there is good support for this from one or two preliminary clinical trials.
I hope that helps and gives you some further information you can discuss with your doctor if you wish.
I have found a magnetic bracelet beneficial to my health and have now been given a pair of magnetic earrings. Can I wear these when I have digital hearing aids in both ears? Could they cause problems for a friend with a pacemaker?
There have been one or two trials that have very definitely shown that simple safe magnets seem to help osteoarthritis. There have also been a lot of claims that magnets can restore general wellbeing and give you energy, although the evidence for this is really not very good; as I have often said in this column, the research simply isn’t there to support some of the claims made by the manufacturer. If you found the magnetic bracelet helpful, great. It is certainly not going to do you any harm to wear magnetic earrings, and I wouldn’t have thought there was any good logical reason why they would either affect your hearing aids or a friend’s pacemaker. The magnetic fields generated by them are really very small and they should be quite safe.
I suffer from occasional mouth ulcers and find that conventional painkillers don’t help much. Are there any herbal remedies that would help them to heal faster?
Mouth ulcers are really very irritating and very difficult to treat. There is some evidence that sometimes particular foods can trigger mouth ulcers, and there have been one or two quite small studies that suggest that avoiding either milk or wheat (depending on your individual food intolerance) might be of help. Mouth ulcers in a nutritional context are often associated with a zinc deficiency, so taking a small dose of zinc for say 3 to 6 months (15-30mg at night on an empty stomach) would be a very simple and sensible thing for you to do and might have preventative effect. There are no specific herbal remedies that are known to help mouth ulcers, but vitamin B deficiency can often be part of the story with mouth ulcers, and reasonable doses of a vitamin B complex will also help zinc absorption. Clove Oil has been used traditionally as a herbal local anaesthetic for dental pain, and it might be worth a try with your mouth ulcer, although it can sometimes burn.
My doctor says there’s nothing serious wrong, but I am fed up with constant indigestion – mainly heartburn. Is there any effective alternative to the usual remedies, like antacids, you can buy at the chemist?
There are a number of things that you can use to help a hiatus hernia. While conventional medicine often thinks of hiatus hernias as being “too much acid reflux”, complementary medical approaches suggest that sometimes patients simply don’t produce enough acid, so consequently boosting the digestive enzymes from the pancreas with a little extra acid can have quite a good effect. Many supplement manufacturers provide a low dose betaine pepsin, which contains tiny amounts of acid which helps the whole digestive process. Sometimes the limited production of digestive enzymes can be helped by enzyme supplements that “boost” pancreatic enzyme production. A variety of herbal preparations have also been used; Artichoke is a widely available and commonly used indigestion remedy, and liquorice can help as well. The liquorice must be deglycyrrhizinated because the glycerine within it can sometimes act to promote water retention which would be a very bad idea in somebody who might be in mild heart failure or raised blood pressure. The liquorice helps to improve the quantity and quality of the protective mucus that lines the stomach and digestive tract as a whole, so either of these herbal preparations would be worth a try. Another good hint is that if you are getting indigestion when you lie flat at night, just put the head of the bed up on a couple of big old books, about six inches should do it. Some people find that can be of enormous help.
Someone at the gym recommended oxygenated drinks to make exercising for longer easier – can this really be true?
Presumably the rationale behind this is that if you drink an oxygenated drink you will end up with more oxygen circulating in the blood. Oxygen is pretty volatile and will bubble out of the water quickly without being absorbed. Drinking some water that has had extra oxygen pumped through it really won’t have any effect on the oxygen levels in your blood or indeed in the water you drink. It might affect your bank balance! Blood oxygen comes from the lungs and oxygenated drinks aren’t likely to prove particularly effective, as there is no real physiological basis for their presumed activity
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