Trifecta of Red Wine, Tea, and Chocolate Shown to Improve Cognitive Function in the Elderly

By Dr. Nicole Sundene

I was just reading the article, “Intake of Flavonoid-Rich Wine, Tea, and Chocolate by Elderly Men and Women Is Associated with Better Cognitive Test Performance,” and thought this may be the world’s BEST natural medicine news to ever report.

Forget the elderly *wink wink*, this article is a great reminder about picking our “poisons” wisely.

If we are going to have one, two, or maybe even three vices, they should all be rich sources of antioxidants, such as DARK chocolate, green or black tea, and organic red wine in moderation.

Here is the quick and dirty on the latest research:

“In a cross-sectional study, we examined the relation between intake of 3 common foodstuffs that contain flavonoids (chocolate, wine, and tea) and cognitive performance. 2031 participants (70–74 y, 55% women) recruited from the population-based Hordaland Health Study in Norway underwent cognitive testing. A cognitive test battery included the Kendrick Object Learning Test, Trail Making Test, part A (TMT-A), modified versions of the Digit Symbol Test, Block Design, Mini-Mental State Examination, and Controlled Oral Word Association Test. Poor cognitive performance was defined as a score in the highest decile for the TMT-A and in the lowest decile for all other tests. A self-reported FFQ was used to assess habitual food intake. Participants who consumed chocolate, wine, or tea had significantly better mean test scores and lower prevalence of poor cognitive performance than those who did not. Participants who consumed all 3 studied items had the best test scores and the lowest risks for poor test performance. The associations between intake of these foodstuffs and cognition were dose dependent, with maximum effect at intakes of ~10 g/d for chocolate and ~75–100 mL/d for wine, but approximately linear for tea. Most cognitive functions tested were influenced by intake of these 3 foodstuffs. The effect was most pronounced for wine and modestly weaker for chocolate intake. Thus, in the elderly, a diet high in some flavonoid-rich foods is associated with better performance in several cognitive abilities in a dose-dependent manner.”

What does this mean? It means that if you are going to have a vice you should shoot for a healthy one!

I doubt there could ever be better news for me to report!

Forget the elderly, I know this particular trifecta of joy makes me feel good too! We all need a little treat every now and then, and enjoying these treats in moderation is a normal and healthy part of our culture.

So what is this research really proving? Are these food miracle foods?

Are these foods amazing?

Yes and No

No they are not going to save you from that which ails you and cure dementia and Alzheimer’s, but they are likely preventing disease through the standard disease preventative mechanism. Antioxidants protecting free radicals. What this trifecta share in common is that they are antioxidant rich. Flavanoids in these foods are rich in antioxidants. Antioxidants mean anti-inflammation, which means anti-aging.

That is the short version of that story, but the moral of it is that you should pick your “vices” wisely. Just like Indiana Jones knew that the “Holy Grail” was not some flashy supplement, or bedazzled shiny over-sized goblet….I know…and you know…we all know that the REAL fountain of youth is that simple wooden cup, and when it comes to health, the fountain of youth is antioxidants, exercise, sleep, vegetables, and superfoods.

Choose your antioxidants, and your vices wisely my friends. Enjoy the Trifecta. Enjoy the Trifecta of fabulosity organically if possible especially red wine because as I stated in my article “Best Organic Cabernet 2008,” the cleaner we can keep our vices, the more we can make them work for us, as was perfectly demonstrated by the latest research.

Enjoy 1-2 glasses of red wine (depending on your size), a few cups of black (or green) tea, and 1-2 oz of dark chocolate daily (depending on your weight and health condition) moderately and think about how today you can make all the “vices” in your life as pure and natural as possible.

Remember that we should be able to enjoy life a little bit too while being healthy, according to the 80/20 model of health.

What is your favorite healthy “vice?”

Dr. Nicole

Dr. Nicole Sundene, NMD is a licensed Naturopathic Medical Doctor at Fountain Hills Naturopathic Medicine 16719 E Palisades Blvd, Suite 205, Fountain Hills, AZ 85268.

She believes we should utilize natural medicines to treat the root cause of disease rather than just treating symptoms, as symptoms are a message of imbalance sent from the body and will persist until they are properly addressed.

For appointments please visit http://FHnaturopathic.com for more information about Naturopathic Medicine services.
©KitchenTableMedicine.com, LLC ™

Scientists Urging Obama to End Natural Medicine Research?

By Dr. Nicole Sundene

Please contact your local congress if you want to help support natural medicine research that is currently at risk, and while you are at it, please tell Presdent Obama that he should include preventative medicine providers such as Naturopaths, Chiropracters, Acupuncturists, and so forth in his new “Universal” health care plan.

Although President Obama has the right idea with focusing on prevention, he is unfortunately being advised to not include all the people who can actually make disease prevention happen. Ironically, preventative medicine has never been at a greater risk than this exact moment - a time that Obama is working to create this Universal Health Plan that got my vote because it was supposedly “focused on disease prevention.”

Recently I read this article “Critics Object to Pseudoscience Center,” and it had me in such fits I could barely restrain myself from screaming out loud when I realized that all the progress in natural medicine research we have been fighting for may be wiped out:

“The impending national discussion about broadening access to health care, improving medical practice and saving money is giving a group of scientists an opening to make a once-unthinkable proposal: Shut down the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. ”

First of all, the research examples cited are not properly demonstrating all the different natural medicine studies the NIH has granted. Second of all, unless you are a doctor you have NO right to decide what is best for the condition of other human beings. Scientists only know their focus of interest. Most aren’t trained to see the big picture unless they end up in medical school.

“Salzberg suggested that NCCAM be defunded on an electronic bulletin board that the Obama transition team set up to solicit ideas after November’s election. The proposal generated 218 comments, most of them in favor, before the bulletin board closed on Jan. 19.”

Salzberg and similar scientists have a very focused understanding of human physiology, and as a former biochemistry student in undergrad, I can personally attest to that fact, although highly over-educated at the time, I still understood science only on a very focused level.

As a biochemist, I understood the human condition in a series of mathematical equations, and biochemical formulas that basically add very little to understanding the complex machine of the human body as a whole.

Are you a mathematical equation? Are you a biochemical formula? I certainly hope not. You are a human being.

Just because someone knows how to change some spark plugs doesn’t mean they know how to build a car.

The scientists urging Obama to end CAM (complementary alternative medicine) research with the NIH (National Insititute of Health) has absolutely ZERO understanding of the human health condition unless he has an MD, DO, RN, or ND behind his name, and to my knowledge Salzberb is a human genetics researcher, not a doctor. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I would even be happy if this scientist was at least an RN, but he isn’t, and to my knowledge has NO actual medical training outside of a deep understanding of human genetics. What makes this person have the right to dictate what research is conducted in health care when they haven’t worked in the trenches of primary care?

Why should President Obama even consider taking health care system advice from someone that works on gene research and knows absolutely nothing about human health in the big picture?

“With a new administration and President Obama’s stated goal of moving science to the forefront, now is the time for scientists to start speaking up about issues that concern us,” Steven Salzberg, a genome researcher and computational biologist at the University of Maryland, said last week. “One of our concerns is that NIH is funding pseudoscience.”

Frankly, in my opinion at this prudent juncture, “pseudoscience” is wasting millions of dollars on gene research that will not make a significant difference in the lives of human beings for several generations out.

After medical school and eight years of working in family practice care throughout as a medical assistant, I have learned that prevention is the key to a highly functioning health care system, as I stated in my recent article, “Is Your Body a Money Pit?”

The CAM approach is really the only way to prevent your body from falling apart. Drugs are band-aids. Gene research is the research that should be THROWN OUT! Do we really need gene research? No, we need PREVENTION.

Gene research is an unnecessary expense and is pseudoscience in itself. Gene research is maybe the medicine of the future for elitists but will likely not solve the health care issues of “Joe the Plumber.” What “Joe the Plumber” needs is to understand that genetics may in fact play a role in human disease processes, but they are a multi-factorial part.

I have cancer cells in my body as I write this, as does everyone else reading this, it is a matter of a variety of environmental influences that determine whether cancer gene expression will be allowed to be turned on, and it is a matter of a suppressed immune system to determine if the cancer cells are allowed to proliferate. If you have a weak immune system, you are at risk for cancer.

If you smoke, don’t eat fruits and veggies, have an unhealthy diet and lifestyle, don’t exercise, and so forth you are allowing these cancer cells made in error to proliferate. The cancer cells in my body right now are cells that are naturally made by accident as I discuss in my article on the “Anti-Inflammatory Diet,” using a factory as my paradigm for disease proliferation. Mistakes are bound to occur. Your immune system does the “clean up on aisle nine” in the cancer picture.

After talking to patients for eight years as a telephone triage nurse, and working urgent care, family practice, and a variety of other specialties, I was gifted the opportunity to see how dysfunctional our health care system truly is (in one of the BEST medical settings possible, I should add). I have come to the conclusion that prevention and patient education are the missing links to American health care. That is why I started Kitchen Table Medicine.

This article about cutting a ridiculously small amount of funding to natural medicine research really ticks me off because you know how many negative drug trials there are out there?

Hundreds if not thousands… if not hundreds of thousands.

YES we are trying to conduct scientific research on natural medicines….NO we are not going to find everything to be more beneficial than placebo. This is no different than the pharmaceutical companies finding that their NEW DRUG doesn’t work either. A new drug is found to be ineffective or unsafe nearly every day, maybe even every hour, and do scientists call that “pseudoscience?”

The placebo rate for menopause, for instance, is as high as 40% for ANY treatment up to the first 12 weeks. So of course hormone replacement therapy (which was found to cause breast cancer…etc etc) or ANY treatment can be shown to be efficacious when scientists properly distort the information.

Why is natural medicine labeled “pseudoscience” when it is has been used respectfully and successfully in Asia for at least 3000 years? I think the REAL pseudoscience is drug companies making up synthetic drugs and trying to feed them to us at ridiculously over-inflated prices.

That is pseudoscience at it’s finest. People paying $800 a month for an “off label drug” (not even proven to be efficacious) that gets pulled off the market a few years later because it is going to give you cancer or a heart attack or result in some other terrible outcome.

Do you smell that? Yeah smells like pseudoscience!

What about kids with autism being given anti-psychotic and anti-seizure meds that have absolutely no research to vouch for them? Ummm…pseudoscience.

The whole problem with health care in America is that we don’t have enough prevention. Doing away with research and shutting prevention oriented docs such as myself out of a universal health care plan is politics at it’s finest, because who owns the politicians and the FDA?

The pharmaceutical companies.

If Obama really wants to make a difference during his time in the White House, he should go after companies that are allowed to charge a gajillion dollars for their drug that they can afford to advertise during the Super Bowl.

Natural Medicine companies, for the most part, won’t pay to study natural medicines because no one can patent and make billions off of a well known and effective natural medicine such as garlic. So without the NIH, we have very little hope of understanding how best to use our natural modalities, and which were shown to be the most efficacious.

Enough independent studies on fish oil have finally been done and now there is a pharmaceutical version available at a ridiculously over-inflated price. If your co-pay is only $10 it is probably saving you money, but it is not saving the overall health care budget for insurance to pay $60 for some fish oil that can be picked up at your health food store (like Carlson, Arctic Omega, Pharmax, Twinlab, etc).

Insurance won’t pay me $120 to educate someone on how to eat to prevent gall stones but they will pay $20,0000 for a gall bladder surgery removal!!!! So they have the surgery…and then guess what? They have to be on the SAME diet that would have prevented the gallstones from forming. And the patient then comes running to me for advice because their MD can only tell them to live with the chronic diarrhea. Does this make sense to anyone? It sure doesn’t make sense to me.

If Obama wants to make a difference in health care he should not be listening to “scientists”, he should be listening to doctors, nurses, medical assistants, insurance companies, and referral coordinators….the people fighting the primary care battle in the trenches day in and day out. I slaved away in the primary care trenches for eight years.

Did this geneticist do it? Did he listen to little old ladies crying about how they can’t afford food because their drugs were so expensive each month. Did he listen to the depressed obese old man tell me he would rather die from diabetic complications than follow the diabetes diet. Doubtful.

Don’t expect Medicare to cover all your drug costs when you retire, and don’t expect Obama to actually fix the health care crisis until he guts the system, guts the corruption in the FDA, caps the pharmaceutical industry, and turns health care in to a paradigm that is focused on prevention. Doing away with research on CAM isn’t going to stop me from doing my job, but it certainly isn’t helping it.

Nor is it helping any other American.

No wonder America is the second most unhealthy country in the world next to Finland, and we pay more than any other country for health care. I propose that Obama think outside the box and implement a Chinese or Ayurvedic model of medicine where patients are actually taught how to live well on a daily basis. Where they see their doctor more than once a year, and follow the health care models of China and India where healthy people exist in a system that doesn’t pay much to keep them healthy.

The answer to the health care crisis is not removing Preventative doctors from Premara or taking funds from CAM researchers. If we really want to save money on health care, the plug should be pulled on whatever those human genome researchers are doing. Genetic research is costing us millions if not billions in funding…not a study to see if human touch is helpful in disease management and patient comfort levels, a study that may inspire more doctors and nurses to step down from their pedestals and interact with their patients on more of a human level. A study that might encourage health care providers to put the “care” in health care.

What it all comes down to, is that treating diseases through gene therapy is so far out in the future it won’t even touch the health care crisis for several generations out, if ever, and we need to act NOW. Forget the eldery, forget the baby boomers, the crisis is going to break when our current generation of children reach their fifties and one in three of them are diabetic. If the diabetic crisis continues at it’s current trend, this is what will happen.

Please contact your local congress and let them know you want CAM research supported, that you want preventative medicine doctors and options on your health care plans, and if you need information on how to go about doing that visit the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians.

Feel free to send me hate mail on this one, but I have the “Trifecta of Experience” to speak out against these “pseudoscientists” calling me a “pseudoscientist.” The proverbial pot calling the kettle black.

Well this kettle has been traditionally trained as a scientist, and has also been a triage nurse in a family practice setting for eight years, and now is a preventive medicine doctor with the ability to understand this debate from a myriad of perspectives, and the only way out is to solve the crisis at our very own kitchen tables. We need healthy whole foods that we can afford, we need to implement exercise programs in work places, to get America HEALTHY and not pumped full of billions of dollars worth of monthly drugs.

The only way out is to focus on PREVENTION, Obama has that part right, he is just listening to the wrong panel of advisers. They are all likely corrupt with their own initiatives, and owned by the FDA, which is in turn owned by the Pharmaceutical companies.

How do I know? Just take a look at the health care systems of other countries that aren’t paying small fortunes to researchers to study human genetics when we are several generations out to even efficaciously applying these modalities.

What the NIH should actually do is ditch the geneticists and focus all of their research on CAM and prevention. It is truly the only hope that American health care has. Gut the health care system. Throw out the baby and the bath water.

Maybe that is unnecessarily harsh, but what kind of human being doesn’t want to promote the healing power of human touch? Someone that has no clue about humanity.

Keep the Cam research. Do away with NIH grants that are funding the unnecessary luxury of genetic research, and allow every American the opportunity to PREVENT disease instead of putting a band-aid on it. And if they do get a disease, they still will need a naturopath to help them with the long term big picture of how to prevent the disease from progressing.

Heck I’ve got an electrician here working away right now who says, at 55 years of age, the only thing that holds him together is his weekly appointment with his naturopath.

A human geneticist telling us what to do with the human body is exactly like an electrician telling us how to build a house. Just because you know about the wiring doesn’t mean you know what is best for the entire structure, and yes, I did just ask this electrician if he could build a house from the ground up and he said, “Nope.”

~Dr. Nicole Sundene

Dr. Nicole Sundene, NMD is a licensed Naturopathic Medical Doctor at Fountain Hills Naturopathic Medicine 16719 E Palisades Blvd, Suite 205, Fountain Hills, AZ 85268.

She believes we should utilize natural medicines to treat the root cause of disease rather than just treating symptoms, as symptoms are a message of imbalance sent from the body and will persist until they are properly addressed.

For appointments please visit http://FHnaturopathic.com for more information about Naturopathic Medicine services.
©KitchenTableMedicine.com, LLC ™