The Mediterranean Zone (11 page)

Was it a lucky break? Maybe not. Since that time, Julian Bailes has used the same protocol to help bring other patients back from the dead. Nonetheless, when I offer the same fish oil for free to medical schools for compassionate use in their severe brain trauma patients, I usually get a polite refusal because they fear the patients will bleed to death.

EXAMPLE #2:
Severe brain trauma is one thing, but what about mild brain trauma such as that found in concussion injuries? A number of retired NFL players suffer greatly from past concussion injuries. I have had the opportunity to work with many of these ex-NFL athletes, but one of the most interesting is George Visger. George played for the San Francisco
49ers in the early 1980s. When I met him a few years ago, he had already had nine operations to relieve constant swelling in his brain caused by repeated football-related head traumas, and he essentially had no short-term memory. His day literally revolved around taking copious notes of everything he did that hour so he could refer back to his notebooks the next day to maintain a record of his life. I told George that based on cases with severe brain trauma patients, such as Randall McCloy, I knew that high-dose omega-3 fatty acids could help. Since his lack of short-term memory was also matched by his ADHD, I started him on the same levels of omega-3 fatty acids I used to treat children with ADHD as well as those with severe brain trauma (15 grams of EPA and DHA per day). Within a relatively short period of time, George’s short-term memory significantly improved until one day he told me he actually remembered the previous day’s events without writing them down. Today, George is an accomplished and passionate speaker as an advocate for more aggressive care for those living with the long-term consequences of concussion damage.

EXAMPLE #3:
Another extension of the brain we often forget to consider is our sight. Most people’s greatest fear of aging is dementia. Their second biggest fear is going blind. The primary cause of blindness as you age is a condition called age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness after age 50. There is no treatment for AMD. Once you get it, you will eventually go legally blind.

To determine the potential of high-dose fish oil to treat AMD, we used between 5 and 10 grams of omega-3 fatty acids. With AMD, the success of any therapy is easily evaluated by the patient’s ability to read letters on an eye chart, similar to the one you use in getting your driver’s license. If the improvement in vision was 10 percent, that would be a medical breakthrough. Our response rate was 100 percent, meaning researchers had a hard time believing it even after it had published in a peer-reviewed journal. Yet for the patients who got their sight back, it was a miracle. Not surprisingly, the higher the levels of omega-3 fatty acids used, the greater the extent of their vision improvement, and the faster it returned.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should start buying cases of fish oil in the health food store or supermarket. For one thing, it is probably high in PCBs. Second, it may be unsuitable for human consumption due to a high Totox level. And because you are going to need a lot of omega-3, you need
exceptionally pure fish oil. You don’t want a lot of PCBs and aldehydes and ketones in your body. (As I explained in Dirty Secret #3, aldehydes and ketones are toxic products of oxidation, besides generating the off odors associated with rancidity.)

If you can treat the brain, you can treat every other organ that is compromised by inflammation. To ensure you are taking enough omega-3 fatty acids and at the same time assure your doctor that you are not going to bleed to death (and you won’t), you should check your AA/EPA ratio once a year.

You might be asking yourself: Would I do this for my own mother? Well, I did. My mother developed lung cancer at age 84 (she had stopped smoking forty years earlier). I told her I might not be able to stop the cancer, but I could guarantee that she would have no pain. This is always the great fear for cancer patients because, as the cancer spreads to other organs (especially the bone), it is usually accompanied by extraordinary pain that destroys all the dignity of life. To fulfill my promise, I gave her 40 grams of EPA and DHA per day. Although she died a year later, up to her last day of life, she was never in pain and was always in great spirits. That year gave everyone the chance to say all the things we wanted to say to her, retell the old family stories, and laugh at the same old jokes that we had shared for decades. It was a remarkable way to wrap up a lifetime of memories. These were all the things I didn’t get a chance to share with my father when he died suddenly of a heart attack at age 53 nearly forty years earlier. She died in her sleep about a year after the cancer diagnosis when all of her organ systems failed simultaneously (due to the spread of the cancer). It is definitely the way I would want to end my life—in my own bed and with dignity.

What if you just want to live longer? One of the best ways to increase longevity is to increase the length of the telomeres attached to the end of your DNA. Their length is reduced each time the DNA is replicated. Once the telomeres reach a critical shortness, the DNA can no longer be replicated. Increasing the length of the telomeres increases the longevity of the DNA, which should translate into a longer life. In fact, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for understanding this relationship of telomere length and longevity. In 2013 one of those Nobel Prize winners for telomere research published a paper indicating that when subjects consumed more omega-3 fatty acids, the telomeres lengthened on their DNA.
How much omega-3 fatty acid was used at the highest dose? About 2.5 grams of omega-3 fatty acids per day. Not surprisingly, the highest dose used in that study is my minimum recommendation for the Mediterranean Zone. I suspect going to higher doses of omega-3 fatty acids will have an even greater impact on increasing telomere length. Just to emphasize the relationship of omega-3 fatty acids, telomere extension, and longevity, Harvard researchers also reported in 2013 that the higher the levels of omega-3 fatty acids in your blood, the longer you live.

These are just some of the reasons that you want to make sure you are taking enough omega-3 fatty acids to improve your memory, your sight, and your longevity.

There are more than eight thousand known polyphenols, but they are present in very low concentrations in fruits, whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and nuts. Unfortunately, whole grains contain a massive amount of glucose that will increase insulin levels and dramatically reduce many of the potential health benefits of polyphenols. So if your goal is the reduction of diet-induced inflammation, the use of whole grains as a source of polyphenols is probably not a great choice.

If you eat too many fruits and legumes, you can also stimulate insulin release. At least the levels of polyphenols per gram of carbohydrate are significantly higher than found in whole grains. Nonetheless, there is the risk of bingeing on fruits. This is not an uncommon observation in my experience, especially for women. It is why I usually recommend that women eat only one serving of fruit per day.

Nuts are low in carbohydrates, but they are incredibly rich sources of fat, so you can’t simply gorge on nuts all day long. Although you wouldn’t stimulate insulin that much by eating a lot of nuts, you will be taking in a massive amount of fat that has to be eventually stored in your fat cells. This leaves vegetables as the best overall source of polyphenols. Vegetables have the least impact on insulin and are virtually fat free. The only trouble is that you probably need to eat about two pounds of vegetables per day to get enough polyphenols to reach my recommendation of a minimum of consuming 1 gram of polyphenols per day.

Listed below are some levels of polyphenols in common foods known to have health benefits.

This means getting 1 gram of polyphenols per day would require consuming more than 3 quarts of extra-virgin olive oil, or more than 10 glasses of red wine, or more than a cup of blueberries every day. Of course trying to consume 1 ounce of cocoa powder to get a gram of polyphenols takes incredible willpower due to its bitter taste (that’s why they add sugar to it to make it palatable in dark chocolate bars).

Fortunately, polyphenols can be concentrated to a higher level by removing much of the non-polyphenol material to make it easier to achieve adequate levels in both the gut and the body. In the past, the primary methods of getting concentrated polyphenols in the traditional Mediterranean diet were drinking red wine, using extra-virgin olive oil, and drinking brewed extracts of certain beans rich in polyphenols (coffee and chocolate). All of these remain integral parts of the Mediterranean diet. Of course, there are some problems with each of these approaches.

Let’s start with red wine. First, about one in seven who drink any form of alcohol will develop a dependence on it. Second, alcohol will negatively impact the brain by increasing the permeability of the blood-brain barrier with each drink, making it more likely that inflammatory mediators in the blood can enter the brain, thereby increasing neuroinflammation. Third, at some point (usually about two glasses of red wine per day), the negative consequences of the excess alcohol on the brain and the liver outweigh the health benefits of the extracted polyphenols in the red wine.

Another way of consuming a more concentrated form of polyphenols is extra-virgin olive oil. Olive oil is a fruit oil, not a seed oil. This means it is low in omega-6 fatty acids and rich in polyphenols. Because it is more expensive than vegetable oils, it has become an easy target for adulteration. Most of what is marketed as “extra-virgin” olive oil in the United States would be laughed at in Italy. However, even in Italy adulterated extra-virgin olive oil is a problem, and has been since the time of the Roman Empire, when official seals were placed on jugs of olive oil to prevent adulteration.
However, there is a simple taste test for good olive oil. Take a teaspoon of olive oil and place it on the front of your tongue. It should taste like melted butter. This means it is very low in free fatty acids, which taste bitter. Then flip that olive oil to the back of your throat with your tongue. You should get a very peppery taste in your throat coupled with a strong urge to cough. That comes from the polyphenols. Only if the olive oil passes both tests can it be considered good quality. About 98 percent of “extra-virgin” olive oil sold in America fails to meet both of these two tests.

Finally, both unprocessed coffee and cocoa beans are rich in polyphenols, but the use of fermentation and roasting to release more flavors from the beans destroys most of the polyphenols. Nonetheless, they are still bitter. That’s why people add both sugar and milk to dark coffee (think Frappuccino) and baker’s chocolate (think candy bars).

Of course, you could add large amounts of spices, which are very rich sources of polyphenols, to every meal. At low levels, spices add flavor. Unfortunately, to get higher levels of polyphenols, they become a source of bitterness.

How do you get high levels of polyphenols without eating a massive amount of vegetables (at least to American tastes) and without adding inedible amounts of spices to your meals? One answer is purified polyphenol extracts. You have to extract them from natural sources and then purify them through a multi-step process of dehydration, followed by alcohol extraction, and then removing the alcohol and finally separating all the other non-polyphenol material using gigantic columns packed with specialized absorbents. It is a long and expensive process, but the end result is well worth it.

Is there potentially the “best of the best” when it comes to such purified polyphenols? Although the goal is to have as many different types of polyphenols in your diet (that’s why you should be eating primarily a wide variety of vegetables), supplementing with purified polyphenol extracts means you have to make some educated choices. In my opinion, if you had to choose only one polyphenol class, I would put my money on delphinidins.

You may have never heard of this class of polyphenols, but you probably have consumed them. They are found in red wines, blueberries, and dark bitter chocolate. However, the highest concentration of delphinidins is found in the maqui berry, which grows only in the mountains of the Patagonian
region of Chile that is very close to Antarctica. The combination of cold temperature, exposure to ozone (the ozone layer is very thin at the South Pole), and chilling winds coming off the Antarctic Ocean provide a hostile environment that the maqui berry responds to by an overproduction of delphinidins to protect the plant from the severe conditions of its environment.

Delphinidins have a unique structure compared to other polyphenols. As a result they are (1) more water soluble, which increases the likelihood of absorption by body, and (2) have a much less bitter taste compared to other highly purified polyphenol extracts, which means they are more easily incorporated into food products or meals.

The water solubility of delphinidins also appears to enhance their ability to activate the “enzyme of life” (AMP kinase). This enzyme is also a master genetic switch that controls metabolism in every cell and, in particular, increases the production of chemical energy from dietary calories. If you are consuming adequate levels of polyphenols to activate this enzyme, then you can get significant increase in chemical energy (ATP) production. This means you need far fewer calories to maintain high levels of physical and mental energy. If you eat fewer calories, you slow down the aging process (in addition to losing weight). And if you use the Mediterranean Zone as a blueprint to balance those reduced number of incoming calories, you slow the aging process even more.