A renowned cardiologist explains how eliminating wheat can shrink your belly . . . and save your health.

Cardiologist William Davis, MD, started his career repairing damaged hearts through surgical angioplasty and stents. “That’s what I was trained to do, and at first, that’s what I wanted to do,” he explains. But when his own mother died of a heart attack in 1995, despite receiving the best cardiac care, he was forced to face nagging concerns about his profession.

“I realized how silly it was,” he says. “I’d fix a patient’s heart, only to see her come back, and back and back with the same problems. It was just a band-aid, with no effort to identify the cause of the disease.”

So he sailed his practice toward highly uncharted medical territory–prevention–and spent the next 15 years examining the causes of heart disease in his own patients. The resulting discoveries are revealed in Wheat Belly, his New York Times best-selling book, which attributes many of our nation’s physical problems, including heart disease, diabetes and obesity, to our consumption of wheat.

He spoke to us this week about how exactly eliminating wheat can “transform our lives.”

• First of all, what is a “wheat belly”?
  • I make a lot of arguments about the dangers of wheat, one of which is that it raises your blood sugar dramatically. In fact, two slices of wheat bread raise your blood sugar more than a Snickers bar. Anything that raises blood sugar to a high level will cause accumulation of abdominal fat. We’re not quite sure why high blood sugar leads to belly fat accumulation, but it does. When my patients give up wheat, I see that weight loss is substantial, especially from the abdomen. People can lose several inches in the first month.
• You make connections in the book between wheat and a host of other health problems. How did you come up with this theory?
  • Eighty percent of my patients had diabetes or pre-diabetes. I knew that wheat spiked blood sugar more than almost anything else, so I started to say, “Let’s remove wheat from your diet and see what happens to your blood sugar.” They’d come back 3 to 6 months later, and their blood sugar would be dramatically reduced. But they also had all these other reactions: “I did this, and I lost 38 pounds.” Or, “my asthma got so much better, I threw away two of my inhalers.” Or “the migraine headaches I’ve had every day for 20 years stopped within three days.” “My acid reflux is now gone.” “My IBS is better, my ulcerative colitis, my rheumatoid arthritis, my mood, my sleep . . .” and so on, and so on.
• So what is it about wheat that you think causes all these problems?
  • When you look at the makeup of wheat, it’s almost like a group of evil scientists got together and said, how can we create this god-awful destructive food that will ruin health?
  •      First, amylopectin A, a chemical unique to wheat, is an incredible trigger of small LDL particles in the blood–the number one cause of heart disease on the United States. When wheat is removed from the diet, these small LDL levels plummet by 80 and 90 percent.
• I typically think of a “hearth-healthy” diet as one that is low in fat and high in whole grains.
  • That has been the common wisdom for the last 15 years or so, and in that time we’ve seen an explosion in the rates of small LDL cholesterol, obesity and heart disease in this country. We’ve had a situation where the national advice–to cut fat and eat more whole grains–is advocating a diet that causes heart disease.
• You also talk about the “addictive” properties of wheat.
  • Wheat contains high levels of gliadin, a protein that actually stimulates appetite. Eating wheat increases the average person’s calorie intake by 400 calories a day.
  •      Gliadin also has opiate-like properties in the brain, so it’s not surprising that when some people remove wheat from their diets, they literally go through a period of withdrawal where they feel terrible. Food scientists have known this for 20 years, and they’ve used it to their advantage. If you go up and down the supermarket shelves, you’re going to see wheat flour in the most improbable places—everywhere from Campbell’s soup to granola bars.
• Is eating a wheat-free diet the same as a gluten-free diet? I know that’s a major trend right now.
  • Gluten has negative, inflammatory properties, but it is just one component of wheat. In other words, if I took the gluten out of it, wheat will still be terrible for you since it will still have the Gliadin and the amylopectin A, as well as several other undesirable components.
• So you don’t advocate all the “gluten free” products I see at the grocery store.
  • Unfortunately, when it comes to health, the food industry does not normally know what they’re doing. They’ve come out with all these foods that are gluten free: gluten-free multi-grain bread, gluten-free bagels, etc. Those are made with 4 basic ingredients: corn starch, rice starch, tapioca starch or potato starch. And those 4 dried, powdered starches are some of the very few foods that raise blood sugar even higher than wheat does!
• Sounds like all the “fat free” foods that came out 10-15 years ago. People thought “these cookies are good for me because they don’t have fat.”
  • Perfect analogy. Yes, it’s the same kind of blunder. Just because it lacks one thing doesn’t make it good.
• Is there any bread or wheat that’s okay to eat? What about the the health breads and the sprouted breads?
  • No. They still retain too much of the adverse wheat compounds–leptins, amylopectin A, gluten and gliadin. You might reduce the amount of some of the compounds, but they’re still there.
• So what can you eat?!
  • I encourage people to return to real food: vegetables and nuts, cheese and eggs and meats in all forms, avocados and olives. Get rid of the “low-fat” notion. It’s not necessarily a diet of deprivation. I’ve been doing this for many years myself, and I’ve had cookies and cheesecake, carrot cake, chocolate biscotti–but it means recreating these food using different ingredients. I have recipes in the back of my book as well as on my wheat belly blog.
• You advocate real food, but isn’t wheat a “real food?” People have been eating it for thousands of years, why is it suddenly such a problem?
  • Wheat really changed in the 70s and 80s due to a series of techniques used to increase yield, including hybridization and back crossings. It was bred to be shorter and sturdier and also to have more gliadin, a potent appetite stimulate. The wheat we eat today is not the wheat that was eaten 100 years ago. Wheat has also become a much more central part of the American diet.
• What if I remove the wheat, but I’m still eating carbohydrates? So, for example, I stop eating my sandwich every day, and I start eating rice with chicken and vegetables. Will I still have the health benefits? Will I still lose weight?
  • Most do, yes. Because rice doesn’t raise blood sugar as high as wheat, and it also doesn’t have the amylopectin A or the gliadin that stimulates appetite. You won’t have the same increase in calorie intake that wheat causes. That’s part of the reason why foreign cultures that don’t consume wheat tend to be slenderer and healthier.
• Does everyone need to stop eating wheat, or are some people more at risk for these problems than others?
  • If you ask me, everyone should stop eating wheat. This is the closest I know of to something that will transform your life. There are very few people who don’t have some physical issue that can be helped by this. The physical reach is so far and so wide, that I’m shocked when someone comes back to me and says, “I did it and nothing happened.”
• Does that happen?
  • Very uncommon. Very, very uncommon.

Author
	William Davis, MDWilliam Davis, MD, is a preventive cardiologist and the author of Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health. He is currently in private practice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He writes about nutrition and health on his Wheat Belly Blog.

[Editor’s note: The essay below, by FOF member Mary Gobbo, is the first in a series of personal blogs from our readers. Have your own story to tell? Email your “What I Know Now” idea to geri@faboverfifty.com.]

I got my life back.

It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

For years, I struggled with my weight. I stand just under 5 foot 4 inches tall, and a year ago, I weighed 315 pounds. My health was in shambles. My kidneys were failing. I had an ocular hemorrhage. My blood pressure and blood sugars were out of control. According to one of my physicians, I was rapidly heading to the point of no return.

My children, all five boys, were very worried that I would not be around for them. I was worried too. I obviously wasn’t worried enough to do something serious about it, though. Oh, I tried Weight Watchers, the Rotation Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Grapefruit Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet. With each one, I’d lose a little, only to get discouraged when I hit the inevitable plateau, at which point I’d gain back what I lost, plus several more pounds for good measure.

My primary care physician asked me repeatedly to consider weight loss surgery. I always refused, believing I could do it on my own. But when my kidneys began failing from diabetes, I knew it was time. I wanted a normal life. I deserved a normal life.  (We won’t discuss at this point what caused my weight gain. A team of psychologists is not needed. Suffice it to say that I had issues. I knew what they were, but I didn’t know how to really deal with them effectively. I just knew I wanted to live.)

I scheduled an appointment with a recommended surgeon.

After talking with the doctor about the four basic bariatric surgeries, I chose a procedure called the “duodenal switch” which minimized the risk of vomiting, “dumping” (a rapid rush of food into the small intestine, which causes nausea, faintness, sweating, etc) and, most of all, gaining the weight back. I could write a whole other essay about the different surgeries, and maybe that will be my next post!

When I set the date for the surgery, I was nervous, but one final incident gave me the motivation I needed.

The week before I was scheduled to have my procedure, I went on a choir trip to New York City with my youngest son. When I arrived at the bus, there was only one seat left. The man sitting next to me did not speak to me during the five-hours before our first stop. I was more than a little uncomfortable.  After our stop for dinner, I learned that he had told his son and a number of his friends that he didn’t want to sit next to “that FAT woman.” Devastated, I secured a seat in the very back of the other bus for the rest of the trip.

One week later, Dr. Marek Lutrzykowski performed the awe-inspiring, but intensive procedure. I spent a few days in intensive care. Recovery was challenging. I hurt! But I got through it. Once home, I made sure to walk several times a day and eventually hit the treadmill for 30 minutes a day. The weight started falling off.

Five months later, I am down over 100 pounds. I have 85 pounds to go to get to my ideal weight. Physically I’m so much stronger. But the emotional change is even more profound. With perspective, I can look back and admit how much my weight had taken over my life before the surgery. The truth: I had no self esteem. I didn’t want to be around other people. I hated myself.

Before my surgery, I came up with every excuse to avoid going out. Where would I park? How far did I need to walk? How many stairs would I need to climb? I recall a basketball game I attended at our local university. We were seated in the last row. On the way up, I had to stop several times to let other people pass. My heart was pounding and I could barely breathe when I got to the top. Once the game started, I had to go to the bathroom, but I held it in, knowing once I went down I would never make it back up the stairs.

This past weekend I attended a basketball game where we were seated, again, high in the stands. I made it up with my breath intact. The next night, I attended a Sting concert. My husband Steve, a very outgoing individual, had been very unhappy with how introverted I’d become. He loves getting out and about. Now I do too. We are going to Hilton Head for the holidays, and I intend on renting a bike to go all around the island and down the beach. I would never, ever have considered doing any of these things before May 18, 2011, the day I had my life changing surgery. It is now a pleasure putting on clothes. I take care of my hair now, and actually wear (a minimal amount of) makeup. I do my nails. I care again.

I saw a very good friend today.  I recounted to her that I just saw the man from the bus at a recent choir concert. My husband sat beside him, not knowing he was the one. I did not acknowledge him. Later, my husband asked me why I didn’t point him out so he could have said something to him. I replied, “That’s why. You can’t fix stupid.”  The truth is, I’ve forgiven him. Actually, I would love to say to him some day, “do you recall when you said those horrible things about me?  Well, THANK YOU!  It was because of you that I moved forward with my surgery, and now I have my life back.”

I want to help the many ladies out there who find themselves in the same boat I was in. I know I have many “sisters” who could benefit, and I hope to guide them through the troubled waters that are our lives.  Waters that can be calmed. They were for me.

Thank you for listening.

FOF Mary Gobbo, 56, is originally from Long Island, New York. She currently resides in Lansing, Michigan, and works part time for the State of Michigan as a secretary and part-time from home as a medical transcriptionist. She is now considering going back to school to complete her college degree.  She is also at work on a novel about a woman who “comes of age” at 45.

Americans are overweight because we eat too much and don’t exercise. Right? A new book says: Guess again.

In Why We Get Fat, award-winning science writer Gary Taubes challenges the conventional wisdom about what makes us fat. He looks back at decades of weight-loss studies and concludes that the real culprit is not lack of exercise, too much fast food or too little willpower. Rather, it’s the quantity and quality of the carbohydrates in our diets–as well as how our bodies respond to them.

His argument is fascinating, and compelling enough to land his work on the cover of The New York Times magazine this year. It’s especially relevant if you’ve struggled–and failed–to keep weight off.

Here, he discusses Why We Get Fat, and what it means to FOFs.

• What’s the top-line philosophy of your book?
  • The idea that we get heart disease from the fat in our diet is misconceived and based on bad science. The idea that we get fat because we eat too much and are too sedentary is misconceived and based on bad science. And the culprit in both of those cases is most likely the quantity and the quality of the carbohydrates in our diet.
• You talk a lot about the science behind this concept in your book. Can you explain in layman’s terms how carbohydrates make us fat?
  • When you eat carbs, it raises your body’s insulin levels. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat accumulation. If you raise insulin levels, you store fat. If you want to get rid of the fat in your tissues, you lower insulin levels. That’s not controversial–it’s endocrinology 101.
• So what happens when you eat a high-carb diet?
  • The more carbs you eat–especially refined carbs such as sugar and high-fructose corn syrup–the more insulin your body produces. That insulin makes you store calories as fat instead of allowing you to burn them as fuel. So not only do you gain weight–i.e. get fatter–but you’re hungrier because of it. People who eat a low-fat, high-carb diet tend to get hungry every two hours. Over time, you can develop insulin resistance. That means your body has to secrete even more insulin in order to regulate your blood sugar. You have more insulin in your blood, so you body craves carbs even more.
• Why are people getting fatter now? Are we eating more carbs than we used to?
  • 

    In the 1970s and 1980s, a low-fat, high-carb trend took hold. Federal dietary guidelines began touting carbohydrates as heart-healthy diet foods. The American Heart Association told Americans to cut their fat intake. At the same time, the market was flooded with low-fat, high-carb “diet” foods–low fat yogurt, health food bars, and sugary drinks filled with healthy sounding ingredients like ginko biloba and ginseng.

• This sounds like Atkins–cut out everything but meat and cheese? Don’t we know that diet isn’t healthy either?
  • It is a lot like what Atkins said. He read a lot of the same scientific literature I did, only 40 years earlier. But that misses the point. My book is about what makes us fat. The point is, carbohydrates are literally fattening. What you do with that information is a different issue.
• In the book, you talk about certain cultures that eat a high fat, high protein diet.
  • The Masai people of Africa eat the highest fat diet in the world–mostly animal fat and protein. But they’re incredibly lean, fit and healthy. The Inuit people–in the Arctic–ate a 100-percent animal protein diet–mostly fish, caribou and walrus. No fruits and vegetables. And they were incredibly healthy, with low heart disease, virtually no cancer or diabetes, and incredible physical stamina. Explorers who lived with Inuit a century ago described them running beside their dog sleds for 20 miles–effortlessly.
• Are some people more prone to have problems with carbs than others?
  • Yes. There are a million nutrition and health experts out there who think, ‘if everyone just did what I did, they’d be thin, too.’ The truth is, our bodies are different in the way they metabolize carbs. For some people, it puts them in a mode to store fat–these are the people who are predisposed to obesity. We all know who we are. Growing up, my brother was three inches taller than me and 30 pounds lighter. He’s naturally lean. My body wants to store fat and his doesn’t. The point I’m making is that if thin women and overweight women all grew up in a world without carbs, they’d all be relatively lean.
• So what would happen if your brother ate a high-carb diet?
  • He wouldn’t get fat, but he might get heart disease or a fatty liver or insulin resistance. Even if you’re not someone who stores fat, carbs effect your body.
• Many women over fifty find that after menopause, they suddenly begin to put on weight. Do you attribute this to carbs as well?
  • Actually, loss of estrogen–which happens during menopause–has the same biological effect as increasing carbohydrates. In the 1970s, there was study where they removed the ovaries from rats–the same thing as removing estrogen. The rats ate voraciously and got fat. But they got fat even if they weren’t allowed to eat any more than they did when they still had their ovaries.
• So what’s the solution? How should we eat?
  • We’re all different. But the basic message of my book is that not all carbs are bad, but that the refined ones, the easily digestible ones like potatoes and sugars are the problem, and any diet without those things will be healthier. Sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are almost assuredly the worst. White flour would be next. Any refined grains aren’t good–potatoes, pasta, bagels. You can still eat green leafy vegetables and other low-glycemic index carbs such as minimally processed grains and legumes, because those aren’t fattening. They don’t have the bad effects on insulin and blood sugar.
• What if you’re already obese or insulin resistant. Should you take more extreme measures?
  • If you cut out carbs, your body will start burning fat. And if you’re obese, you have a lot of fat to burn, so the less carbs you eat, the better. The logic of cutting out all carbs–like the Atkins diet–is that this is like an addiction. If you don’t want to get lung cancer, you don’t cut down to 10 cigarettes a day–you quit. Cut them all out, get rid of the cravings. Once you get to the weight you feel good at, you can test out some of the carb-rich foods you still miss. If you miss apples, for instance, have an apple every day. See if you gain some weight. See what your body can tolerate.

Author

Gary Taubes Science WriterGary Taubes is an American science writer. He is the author of four books including Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), and Why We Get Fat (2010). He has won the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times. He is currently at work on a book about sugar and high-fructose corn syrup with help from a grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Stop obsessing and read this.

Being FOF comes with so many great things–wisdom, levity, experience, humor…..And one not-so-great thing: belly fat.

So we paused in the middle of our daily sit-up regimen to speak with Dr. Michael Kaplan, one of the nation’s foremost experts on weight loss. Dr. Kaplan revealed the truth behind belly fat over fifty–why it’s there, what you can do about it, and why you should stop obsessing.

• FOF: We hear it from FOFs all the time: ‘It’s so much harder for me to lose weight now, and I’m gaining in my belly area. What can I do?’
  • Dr. Kaplan: The unfortunate consequence of aging–for everyone–is that your metabolism slows by about 5-10 percent per decade. When women hit menopause, it slows an additional 5-10 percent. Many women spend their lives at a normal BMI [body mass index] of 23 or 24, and then they hit menopause and find themselves at a BMI of 27 or 28–ever so slightly overweight. And they can’t take off the pounds. Also, the body is programmed during menopause to lay down extra subcutaneous fat in the abdomen. So even if you’ve never had fat in your abdomen, all of a sudden you have a belly.
• Ack. Why do our bodies suddenly put fat in the middle?
  • We don’t know, but it’s universal. It’s just kind of in our DNA that this is going to happen to a woman when she hits menopause.
• Can you get rid of it?
  • Yes. But the truth is, a woman has to work really hard to get rid of it. First, you have to exercise more. Even if you went your whole life at a normal weight and you exercised, you have to start adding exercise as you approach menopause. I see patients who have never exercised in their lives, and then they start menopause and suddenly have to start in order to maintain their bodies. The average recommendation for a woman to really be doing well at this age is 5 hours per week.
• That’s a lot of hours.
  • It absolutely is. In all studies I’ve ever read, you have to do about three hours a week to lose weight, but after menopause, it is definitely harder.
• What about diet?
  • A woman’s metabolism once she hits menopause–if she’s normal weight–is usually about 1300 calories a day. That means she’s burning about 1300 calories every day, so she has to eat 1300 calories to maintain her weight. It’s pretty hard to lose weight at that rate, because you have give up 3500 calories to get rid of just one pound.
• How do you give up 3500 calories if you can only eat 1300?!
  • It’s over time! So if you ate 1000 calories a day, you would lose 1 lb every 12 days. It’s really discouraging for a lot of women, and we usually see them after they’ve gone on multiple commercial programs and the weight isn’t coming off. Or it’s coming off so slowly that they’re discouraged…
• What’s your approach?
  • As doctors, we have the advantage that we can prescribe a low-calorie diet. Anything under 1000 calories per day has to be medically prescribed–by law. We prescribe nutraceuticals–low calorie shakes, bars and soups that are made according to the same standards as pharmaceuticals. Each one is 160 calories and patients consume 5 daily. A woman can temporarily use these to get back to her pre-menopausal weight. While she’s doing that, we’re working on the behavioral issues that are going to keep the weight off long term.
• So that helps you speed up the initial weight loss, but what’s the long-term strategy?
  • We try to figure out a day-to-day routine, Monday through Friday, where she can eat about 1100 calories a day. We’ll come up with meal options and an exercise plan. If we do that, we’re banking about 2000 calories for the weekend, so she can relax and go out on Saturday and Sunday. We also address the psychological issues–that’s a huge part of this. We help women figure out their triggers—what causes them to overeat.
• If someone ups her exercise and changes her diet and deals with her psychological issues, is it possible that she still won’t lose her belly fat?
  • Yes. Often, a part of this isn’t going to go away. These fat cells develop and get bigger during menopause. You can make them smaller, but you can’t get rid of them completely. If you get down to the weight you’re happy at, but you still have belly fat that’s bothering you, I might suggest surgery. Liposuction would actually get the cells out. I recommend that as a last alternative.
• It sounds like you’re saying, in a nutshell, if you want to want to completely lose that belly, you’re going to need to make it–and your weight–a major focus of your life.
  • Right, it has to become a battle that you’re fighting everyday.
• Do you ever suggest that women just accept the extra pounds around their middles and stop obsessing?
  • You know, I have said that to people. There was a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine a few years back that said women actually live the longest with a BMI of 27-28 over age 70. But what we run into is people who are used to having a certain look. And if you spend your whole life with a BMI of 24 or 25 and now you’re 27 or 28, psychologically you don’t feel right.
• Are there certain foods that trigger belly weight?
  • I wish I could say yes to that question, because it would make things easier, but really, there aren’t. I will say that if you are insulin resistant you probably will feel hungrier and eat more when you eat carbohydrates. It’s not the carbs themselves, it’s how your body reacts to them. Many people have that problem.
• How do you know if you’re insulin resistant?
  • If you’ve been diagnosed with PCOS, diabetes or pre-diabetes. Also, there’s a medical test we can do, but I came up with a test that anyone can do at home: One morning, eat 200 calories of carbs for breakfast–an English muffin with jelly, for example. Write down the time you eat and then the time when you feel hungry again. The following day, eat 200 calories of fat and protein for breakfast–2 eggs with a small amount of cheese, for example. Again, write down when you eat, and when you feel hungry again. If you find that you are hungry an hour or two earlier on the carbohydrate day, you’re probably insulin resistant.
• Is that something you can fix, or do you just need to avoid carbs?
  • It could get better. Sometimes losing weight actually makes the insulin resistance better. There’s also a medication called Metformin than can help the cravings–we use this often and patients don’t feel as hungry. And of course, if you just avoid those foods, then you won’t have those cravings.
• Is there any way to lose weight specifically in the belly area?
  • No. That’s a huge myth. If you lose weight, you lose fat everywhere. A pound of fat comes from every fat cell in your body–they all shrink a little bit.
• I’ve heard there’s a connection between stress and belly fat. Is this true?
  • Stress is absolutely related to gaining weight, but not specifically in the belly. The stress response–secreting cortisol and epinephrine–does make us hungry and does make us crave food. Lack of sleep does the same thing. A lot of menopausal women have hot flashes and don’t sleep well as a result, which can make them hungrier the next day. So if you treat your menopause symptoms, you may experience weight loss as a result.
• What about situps? Can those help get rid of your belly?
  • Another major myth. All sit-ups do is strengthen the abdominal muscles–they don’t get rid of fat. So in some cases they can actually make your abdomen look a little bigger. The ideal is to lose the fat and then strengthen the muscles to get definition.
• So it sounds like there’s no magic bullet that gets rid of all belly fat.
  • Yes, but it’s not hopeless. People have definitely done it. The most important thing to recognize is that it is a factor of aging…it’s not anything you did wrong.

Author
	Dr. Michael Kaplan, MDDr. Michael Kaplan, MD, is the Founder and Chief Medical Officer for The Center for Medical Weight Loss, the largest network of non-surgical medical weight loss providers in the U.S., with more than 420 offices in 46 U.S. states. He live and works in New York.

There’s a hot D-bate over Vitamin D going on.

Several doctors we’ve spoken to this year have advocated Vitamin D supplements for bone health, saying that most American women are deficient in this vital nutrient. According to a new report from the National Institute of Medicine, however, Vitamin D supplements are “not necessary for most adults.”

What’s an FOF to do?  Read our conversation with Cleveland Clinic expert, Tanya Edwards, MD, to get the full story. And tell us, below: Do you take Vitamin D?

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

 

Do you really need that Vitamin D supplement? A recent government-funded report says no, but Cleveland Clinic MD Tanya Edwards says, “Not so fast . . . ”

Over the last year, FOF interviewed numerous women’s health doctors, and again and again we’ve heard the same song: Vitamin D is crucial for good health, and most of us aren’t getting enough of it. But a report released this December by the Institute of Medicine contradicted what we’ve been hearing and left us more confused than ever.

The study, conducted by a 14-person expert panel, examined thousands of findings on Vitamin D and was funded by the United States and Canadian governments. They found that “The majority of Americans and Canadians are getting enough vitamin D and calcium,” and that 600 international units of vitamin D daily is all we need for healthy bones. It also reported that the high doses of vitamin D favored by many doctors are not necessary, and may, in fact, be harmful. “For most people, taking extra vitamin D supplements is not indicated,” said Dr. Clifford J. Rosen, a member of the panel and an osteoporosis expert at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute.

What’s an FOF to do? The only thing she can do: Read the report for herself and then talk to a doctor she trusts. We spoke to Dr. Tanya Edwards, a physician at the Cleveland Clinic who specializes in nutrition.

• FOF: What is your top-line reaction to this report?
  • Dr. Edwards: The National Institute of Medicine has to be very conservative, especially about changing the recommended daily dosage of a vitamin. They need to have hard data that says, ‘we gave these thousands of people vitamin D at this dose, and we gave these thousands of people a placebo at this dose, and we waited for 20 years to see what would happen.’ Of course, we don’t have that sort of data now, because we haven’t been looking at this issue long enough.
    But for them to just come out and say “there’s no evidence that higher doses of vitamin D does anything”–that’s just so not helpful. There is so much promising new research on Vitamin D that I think their response is irresponsible and inadequate.
• FOF: The report says that a vitamin D level of ‘20 or above nanograms per milliliter’ of blood is sufficient. Do you agree?
  • Dr. Edwards: That number is based purely on vitamin D and bone health. If your vitamin D level is between 20 and 30 it will maintain bone health. But new studies are showing that when you get that number above 50, vitamin D may have additional benefits. It may actually turn on and off genes that are associated with cancer, stroke, depression and cardiovascular disease.
    When I started getting my own patients’ D levels up between 50 and 80, their depression started going away; their fatigue started going away; their skin started clearing up; their diabetes was easier to control and so on.
• FOF: Where do you get the number ‘50’?
  • Dr. Edwards: That is what our levels would be if we were working outside near the equator with very little clothes on–which is what we were physically designed to do. We were not designed to sit inside all day long and wear sunscreen.
• FOF: What would you recommend to the average person?
  • Dr. Edwards: The current recommended daily dose of vitamin D is 400 IU, but that is woefully inadequate for most people. This report recommends 600 IU, but in my opinion, that’s still not enough. Have your vitamin D level checked, and take enough vitamin D to get your vitamin D level between 50 and 80 and to keep it there for the rest of your life.
• FOF: Are there dangers of getting too much?
  • Dr. Edwards: If you get your level checked and stay below 80, there are no dangers. If you take more Vitamin D and your level gets to 100 or 200, then there is a danger that your calcium level will go too high resulting in kidney stones, abdominal pain and lethargy. However, vitamin D experts will say there have been no reported cases of toxicity with vitamin D3–the natural vitamin D. Toxicity can occur with vitamin D2.

Author

Tanya Edwards, MD Cleveland Clinic Center for Integrative MedicineTanya Edwards, MD, is a Family Physician who consults at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Integrative Medicine. Dr. Edwards teaches complementary and alternative medicine at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine where she established the Area of Concentration for Alternative Medicine. Her expertise includes inflammation, nutrition for the prevention and treatment of chronic illness, the clinical use of nutraceuticals, as well as mind-body therapies.

We like checklists. They’re perfect for leading us through problems we don’t have the knowledge or time to fully deal with. For many FOFs, the refrigerator poses one such problem. What exactly are the most healthful foods to have on hand? For a complete list, we turned to Julia Zumpano, Registered Dietician at The Cleveland Clinic. Julia was all too happy to share her FOF fridge cheat sheet:

Author
	Julia Zumpano Cleveland ClinicJulia Zumpano is a registered dietitian with Preventive Cardiology and Rehabilitation and the Women’s Cardiovascular Center at the Cleveland Clinic. She counsels patients on cardio-protective diets, focusing on cholesterol reduction, controlling hypertension, and weight management.