Just got in from a whirlwind trip to New York, which ended up what with family and business obligations being the busiest trip there I’ve ever experienced. MD and I have just enough time to go through the mail, do laundry and head back to the airport to fly to Dallas for Christmas. Once back, we’ll have some time of our own.

I have to apologize yet again for not answering the many comments that have stacked up. I simply haven’t had time. But I will get to them, I promise.

Read more »

MD and I have been subsumed by the whirlwind we’ve been in since our arrival in New York a couple of days ago. It seems as if we’ve trekked from first one meeting to the next without a break in between. I haven’t had time to post, and I’m woefully behind on answering and posting comments that have come in (about 80 at last count). If you’ve sent a comment and wondered why it has apparently vanished, now you know why. Don’t despair. I think I’ll have some down time this weekend so that I can catch up.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to New York in December, and I hadn’t remembered how short the days are and how dark and overcast as compared to Santa Barbara and Lake Tahoe, both places of almost constant sunshine. While contemplating this lack of sun I came across an article (actually a letter in response to an earlier article) in the journal Epidemiology and Infection that I found interesting and wanted to pass along. (Unfortunately there is no abstract for this article, so I’m not providing a link.)

Dr. John Aloia and his group at the Bone Mineral Research Center at Winthrop University Hospital in New York reported on a three-year study they had done on 208 African American postmenopausal women (a group at great risk of vitamin D deficiency) who were supplemented with either vitamin D or a placebo. For the first two years the active group received 800 IU daily, which was increased to 2,000 IU daily in the last year of the study. In the three years of the study 34 patients reported cold and flu symptoms, eight in the supplemented group and 26 in the placebo group (p<0.002). This showed that participants who got a placebo had a 300-percent greater risk of having a cold or flu, and that vitamin D supplementation provided a highly significant protective effect.

Read more »

Research published in the most recent issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition shows that a modest daily dose of krill oil markedly reduces inflammation and reduces the pain, stiffness and functional impairment associated with rheumatoid and osteoarthritis within one week.

I posted last summer on the regimen I had put together for my own golf-related aches and pains to replace the large doses of Advil (ibuprofen) I had been taking. In the same post I discussed a study published in Surgical Neurology showing that patients with severe back pain who opted to take fish oil instead of NSAIDS (Advil-like drugs) could, for the most part, achieve equivalent pain relief. This study was one in which the doctors gave a number of patients the option to switch from NSAIDs to fish oil, so the study wasn’t really hard science, but kind of soft science in that, as I wrote at the time, it was not a double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

Now, a Canadian researcher has published a very nice double-blind, placebo-controlled study using Neptune Krill Oil (NKO) that shows some pretty impressive results.

Read more »

A few days ago I posted on a fish oil/krill oil/curcumin regimen that I’ve been using to treat joint and muscle soreness after golf. I had a number of comments wanting to know about krill oil and why I made it part of the treatment protocol. Your wish is my command.

Krill oil, logically enough, comes from krill, which are small, shrimp like crustaceans that inhabit the cold ocean areas of the world, primarily the Antarctic and North Pacific Oceans. Despite their small size–one to five centimeters in length–krill make up the largest animal biomass on the planet. According to Neptune Technologies, the Canadian company that holds the patent for krill oil extraction, there are approximately 500 million tons of krill roaming around in these northern seas, 110,000 tons of which are harvested annually.

A krill, in profile

Read more »

Merck has developed a “new” folate supplement that is much improved over the folic acid now used for both supplements and food fortification. I say “new” because this supplement, though brought to us through the magic of chemistry, is methylfolate, the same chemical structure as the compound that is found in foods. Folate in this form has been available in the US for several years now, but due to its the expense, a different form of folate is used in supplements and for food fortification.

A recent British Medical Journal article describes the type of folic acid commonly used:

The form of folate in supplements and in fortified foods is pteroylmonoglutamate (PGA), a form that does not occur in nature. It is both cheap and stable unlike most native forms of the vitamin. The body metabolises PGA into methylfolate, the normal form of the vitamin transported in plasma. However, research shows that this absorption and biotransformation process is saturated at doses in the region of 400 µg PGA or less. Thus at doses at or just below 400 µg PGA all this synthetic form of folate is converted into biologically active methylfolate during absorption. At higher doses synthetic PGA is also transported into the blood in a manner that is directly proportional to dose. This raises the possibility of a lifetime’s exposure to unmetabolised PGA where mandatory fortification is undertaken. Although such exposure may present no health risk at all, we cannot know this for certain.

Read more »