Taking antidepressants may raise the risk of heart disease in men. They can thicken artery walls through an as yet unknown mechanism.

The drugs seem to accelerate atherosclerosis by increasing the thickness of the “intima media”, the inner and middle layers of the arteries. They particularly affect the carotid arteries that feed blood to your brain.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

“… [T]he intima-media thickness of men taking antidepressants was 37 microns (about 5 percent) thicker than that of men not taking the drugs. When the team looked at 59 twin pairs in which one twin was taking the drugs and the second was not, the artery was 41 microns thicker in the twin taking the drugs.”

Article Source: Mercola.com,
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/05/03/tips-to-avoiding-depression.aspx

A video posted on YouTube in July 2009 on the biochemistry of fructose has gone viral with more than 800,000 views so far. Many of those views are no doubt due to this newsletter, as my two previous articles on Dr. Lustig’s work Sugar May Be Bad, But This Sweetener is Far More Deadly, and This Common Food Ingredient Can Really Mess Up Your Metabolism alone have OVER one million views.

People are watching the lecture at the rate of 50,000 a month, even though it’s 90 minutes long, The New York Times reports. Calling sugar a “toxin” or a “poison” 13 times, and referring to it as “evil” five times, the video’s author, Robert Lustig explains that sugar is sugar, whether it’s the white granulated stuff – commonly known as sucrose – or high fructose corn syrup.

And his stance has nothing to do with calories, according to the NYT: “It’s a poison by itself,” he says.

“If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years,” the NYT says. “But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.”

The NYT added that Lustig has “a mass” of evidence to back up his claims.

In related news, according to the Epoch Times, a report has found that the United States is the fattest of 33 countries studied. Seventy percent of Americans are now overweight, a number that will increase to 75 percent by 2020 and 86 percent by 2030!

Article Source: Mercola.com,
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/05/02/is-sugar-toxic.aspx

This powerful video contains interviews with experts, parents and victims. It is the story of the high-income partnership between drug companies and psychiatry which has created an $80 billion profit from the peddling of psychotropic drugs to an unsuspecting public. How did these drugs, with no target illness, no known curative powers and a long and extensive list of side effects, become the go-to treatment for every kind of psychological distress?

Dr. Mercola’s Comments:

This is an excellent documentary detailing how the psychiatric drug industry was born and its powerful and profitable partnership with the drug industry, which has turned psychiatry into an $80 billion drug profit center.

• But is any of it based on real medical science?
• How valid are the psychiatric diagnoses being handed out?
• And are the drugs safe?

Unfortunately, the evidence is overwhelmingly stacked against psychiatric drugs. It’s becoming ever clearer that most of today’s psychiatric diagnoses and subsequent drug treatment is a sham, successfully promoted to make you believe it’s based on some scientific truth.

But it’s not…

What Causes Psychological Distress?

Answering this question is the holy grail of psychiatry. Even before there were psychiatrists, such troubles were blamed on things like evil spirits, or an imbalance of “humors.”

The latter was treated by bloodletting, which is perhaps the longest running tradition in medicine, originating in the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Greece, persisting for some 2,500 years through the Industrial Revolution. It was the “aspirin” of the day, used for just about every conceivable condition from pneumonia to depression. Yet, there was never any evidence that it did any good, and many times the patients died. Of course, it was always assumed it was the disease that killed them, rather than the treatment.

Interestingly, we now know that there was good reason why this may have helped men or postmenopausal women. If they had high iron levels this would have been able to reduce their load and thus improve their overall health.

Finally, 19^th century scientists began to question its value and medical statisticians who tracked case histories discovered that it wasn’t helping much of anything.

The blanket prescription of drugs for every conceivable psychological hiccup has become the bloodletting theory of the 21^st century… Of course, in the case of psychiatric drugs, there’s tremendous profits to be made by maintaining the status quo and not admitting the error of their ways.

The fact is, psychiatry STILL doesn’t understand what causes psychological distress, and the primary theory proposed; the idea that unwanted behavior and depression are due to an imbalance of serotonin and dopamine in your brain, has NEVER been proven.

On the contrary, research has proven the theory is WRONG, yet this evidence has been swept under the proverbial rug.

Despite what the slick advertisements say, psychotropic drugs have no measurable biological imbalances to correct—unlike other drugs that can measurably alter levels of blood sugar, cholesterol and so on.

“How can you medicate something that is not physically there?” they ask in this documentary.

The answer is, of course, you can’t!

Doing so anyway is a dangerous game.

The Physical Dangers of Medicalizing a Non-Physical Condition

One significant danger of psychotropic drugs is that they can upset the delicate processes within your brain needed to maintain your biological functions. This risk simply cannot be overstated… The documentary cites some staggering statistics attributed to psychiatric drugs:

• 700,000 adverse reactions per year
• 42,000 deaths per year

How in the world can drugs that cause over 40,000 deaths a year be permitted, let alone handed out like candy?

Even if you DO have a serious psychiatric issue, such as PTSD for example, drugging it away is risky—especially if you’re taking multiple drugs. Since the average American takes 13 drugs per year, this is a serious issue.. A number of military personnel have died in their sleep, for example, after taking a prescribed combination of Paxil, Seroquel, and Klonopin. These deaths were NOT due to overdosing, but rather “each case involved a sudden cardiac incident and resulting death,” Jed Shlackman wrote in an article for the Examiner last year, adding:

“This adds to growing concern about serious adverse effects of psychiatric medications commonly prescribed to emotionally disturbed or traumatized soldiers.”

Several studies have demonstrated the potential for lethal cardiac side effects. For example:

• A literature review of studies from 2000-2007, published in Expert Opinion on Drug Safety in 2008, found that “Antipsychotics can increase cardiac risk even at low doses, whereas antidepressants do it generally at high doses or in the setting of drug combinations.”
• A study published in January 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that antipsychotic drugs doubled the risk of sudden cardiac death. Mortality was also found to be dose-dependent, so those taking higher doses were at increased risk of a lethal cardiac event.
• Another study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology that same year also found that antidepressants increase the rate of sudden cardiac death.

Are Emotional Symptoms Really Signs of Mental Illness?

Clearly, there are “real” mental illnesses that can destroy any semblance of normalcy in a person’s life. But are you mentally ill when you’re sad for more than a couple of weeks?

Is losing zest for life a sign of mental illness?

Where does the normal grieving process fit into our modern lives—is it something that should be drugged, or is it a normal phase of life that everyone on the planet has to move through? And when does an emotional phase go from being a natural part of the changing emotional landscape that is life to a problem that needs to be “fixed”?

Many are quick to defend their choice to take drugs. No one wants to “feel bad.” But are these drugs destroying lives rather than saving them?

I believe the answer is a resounding YES at this point.

Rather than helping people address the root cause of their suffering, psychiatry has now simply resorted to a chemical form of lobotomy to “make the problem go away.”

Drug therapy has been the conventional therapy of choice in the psychiatric field since its beginnings. Insane asylums during the early 19^th century employed drugs like morphine and opium to quiet patients’ outbursts. By the turn of the 20^th century, heroin was peddled as a cure for psychiatric problems, and Sigmund Freud wrote articles promoting the use of cocaine for spiritual distress and behavioral difficulties.

Today, these drugs have become “illicit” and anyone resorting to cocaine to ease their troubled mind is called a junkie… But in essence, all the industry has done is replacing a few dangerous drugs with other dangerous drugs.

The Truth about the “Chemical Imbalance” Theory

As a family physician I have treated many thousands of depressed patients. Depression was actually one of my primary concerns in the mid 80s when I first started practicing, however at that time my primary tool was using antidepressants. I put thousands of people on these drugs and acquired a fair level of experience in this area.

Thankfully I learned more and was able to stop using all these drugs. It was my experience that the chemical imbalance was merely a massive marketing gimmick to support the use of expensive and toxic antidepressants.

Most of you have probably heard that depression is due to a “chemical imbalance in your brain,” which these drugs are designed to correct. Unfortunately for anyone who has ever swallowed this marketing ploy, this is NOT a scientific statement.

So where did it come from?

The low serotonin theory arose because they understood how the drugs acted on the brain; it was a hypothesis that tried to explain how the drug might be fixing something. However, that hypothesis didn’t hold up to further investigation. Investigations were done to see whether or not depressed people actually had lower serotonin levels, and in 1983 the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) concluded that

“There is no evidence that there is anything wrong in the serotonergic system of depressed patients.”

The serotonin theory is simply not a scientific statement. It’s a botched theory—a hypothesis that was proven incorrect.

The fact that this fallacy continues to thrive is destroying the health of millions, because if you take an SSRI drug that blocks the normal reuptake of serotonin, you end up with the very physiological problem the drug is designed to treat–low serotonin levels. Which, ironically, is the state hypothesized to bring on depression in the first place.

In 1996, neuroscientist Steven Hyman, who was head of the NIMH at the time, and is today Provost of Harvard University, published the paper Initiation and Adaptation: A Paradigm for Understanding Psychotropic Drugs, in which he explains this chain of events. According to Dr. Hyman, once your brain has undergone a series of compensatory adaptations to the drug, your brain operates in a manner that is “both qualitatively and quantitatively different than normal.”

So, it’s important to understand that these drugs are NOT normalizing agents. They’re abnormalizing agents, and once you understand that, you can understand how they might provoke a manic episode, or why they might be associated with sexual dysfunction orviolence and suicide, for example.

How Did it Ever Get this Bad?

Part of the puzzle explaining why we now have a pill for every emotion and psychological trait is that psychiatrists were originally not considered “real” doctors—they couldn’t actually “do” much to help their patients, and they certainly couldn’t cure them. They realized that to increase their status, they had to make the field more scientific, and it was this decision that gave birth to the medicalizing and drugging of every conceivable behavioral tendency.

Medical journalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee Robert Whitaker explains the history of the treatment of those with severe mental illness in his first book, Mad in America. His latest book, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America focuses on the disturbing fact that as psychiatry has gained ground, mental illness has skyrocketed.

Part of the problem is that the criteria for diagnosis has expanded exponentially—you can now be diagnosed as being “ill” if you have trouble controlling your shopping habits, and a child who often argues with adults can be labeled according to the diagnostic code 313.81 — Oppositional Defiant Disorder. A staggering array of normal human experiences now masquerade as “disorders,” for which there is a drug treatment available.

Another factor is the fact that psychiatric drugs CREATE more serious forms of mental illness…

What Does the Science Really Say about the Effectiveness of Psychiatric Drugs?

First of all, when looking at the research literature, short-term trials show that antidepressants do NOT provide any clinically significant benefits for mild to moderate depression, compared to a placebo. As you know, all drugs have benefit-to-risk ratios, so if a drug is as effective as a placebo in relieving symptoms, it really doesn’t make sense to use them as a first line of defense.

And yet doctors all over America prescribe them as if they were indeed sugar pills!

However, it gets worse. Research into the long-term effects of antidepressants shows that patients are no longer really recuperating from their depressive episodes as was the general norm prior to the advent of modern antidepressants. The depression appears to be lifting faster, but patients tend to relapse more frequently, turning what ought to have been a passing phase into an increasingly chronic state of depression.

Long-term studies now indicate that of people with major depression, only about 15 percent that are treated with an antidepressant go into remission and stay well for a long period of time. The remaining 85 percent start having continuing relapses and become chronically depressed.

According to Whitaker’s research, this tendency to sensitize your brain to long-term depression appears to be the same both for the earlier tricyclic antidepressants and the newer SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors).

In addition, SSRI’s have been shown to increase your risk of developing bipolar depression, according to Whitaker. Anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of children who take an antidepressant for five years convert to bipolar illness. In adults, about 25 percent of long term users convert from a diagnosis of unipolar depression to bipolar.

This is a serious concern because once you’re categorized as bipolar, you’re often treated with a potent cocktail of medications including an antipsychotic medication, and long-term bipolar outcomes are grim in the United States. For starters, only about 35 percent of bipolar patients are employed, so the risk of permanent disability is great.

Another risk inherent with long-term use is that of cognitive decline.

It’s Time to Stop the Insanity…

Every year, 230 million prescriptions for antidepressants are filled, making them one of the most-prescribed drugs in the United States. Despite all of these prescription drugs being taken, more than one in 20 Americans are depressed, according to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The statistics alone should be a strong indication that what we’re doing is simply not working, and that instead, these drugs are contributing to other serious health problems.

Fortunately, there are other, safer, more effective ways, and some countries are starting to pay heed to the fact that research is actually showing it to be beneficial, rather than bowing to the will of pharmaceutical companies.

Key Factors to Overcoming Depression

Exercise – If you have depression, or even if you just feel down from time to time, exercise is a MUST. The research is overwhelmingly positive in this area, with studies confirming that physical exercise is at least as good as antidepressants for helping people who are depressed. One of the primary ways it does this is by increasing the level of endorphins, the “feel good” hormones, in your brain.

Address your stress — Depression is a very serious condition, however it is not a “disease.” Rather, it’s a sign that your body and your life are out of balance.

This is so important to remember, because as soon as you start to view depression as an “illness,” you think you need to take a drug to fix it. In reality, all you need to do is return balance to your life, and one of the key ways to doing this is addressing stress.

Meditation or yoga can help. Sometimes all you need to do is get outside for a walk. But in addition to that, I also recommend using a system that can help you address emotional issues that you may not even be consciously aware of. For this, my favorite is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). However, if you have depression or serious stress, I believe it would be best to consult with a mental health professional who is also an EFT practitioner to guide you.

Eat a healthy diet — Another factor that cannot be overlooked is your diet. Foods have an immense impact on your mood and ability to cope and be happy, and eating whole foods as described in my nutrition plan will best support your mental health. Avoiding sugar and grains will help normalize your insulin and leptin levels, which is another powerful tool in addressing depression.

Support optimal brain functioning with essential fats — I also strongly recommend supplementing your diet with a high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fat, like krill oil. This may be the single most important nutrient to battle depression.

Get plenty of sunshine – Making sure you’re getting enough sunlight exposure to have healthy vitamin D levels is also a crucial factor in treating depression or keeping it at bay. One previous study found that people with the lowest levels of vitamin D were 11 times more prone to be depressed than those who had normal levels. Vitamin D deficiency is actually more the norm than the exception, and has previously been implicated in both psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Yunji DeNies goes to the lab to see what soda does in your body.

Dr. Mercola’s Comments:

I’ve been warning readers of the dangers of soda since I started this site, well over a decade ago. Since then, science has caught up; now definitively showing the profound health risks of this popular beverage.

Amazingly, as of 2005, white bread was dethroned by soft drinks as the number one source of calories in the American diet! I keep repeating that statistic because I find it so incredible. According to recent statistics, Americans consume close to 50 billion liters of soda per year, which equates to about 216 liters, or about 57 gallons per person. That equates to a staggering amount of sugar!

Play-By-Play of what Happens in Your Body when You Drink a Soda

Soda is on my list of the five absolute worst foods and drinks you can consume.  The video above offers a compelling illustration of why I make this claim.

In it, reporter Yunji DeNies drinks a 20-ounce glass of cola, which contains the equivalent of 16 teaspoons of sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This is nearly three times the maximum daily sugar intake recommended by the American Heart Association.

HFCS typically contains a mixture of 45 percent glucose and 55 percent fructose (although recent investigations have found that many brand-name sodas actually contain 65 percent fructose!).

Once ingested, your pancreas rapidly begins to create insulin in response to the sugar. The rise in blood sugar is quite rapid. Here’s a play-by-play of what happens in your body upon drinking a can of soda:

• Within 20 minutes, your blood sugar spikes, and your liver responds to the resulting insulin burst by turning massive amounts of sugar into fat.
• Within 40 minutes, caffeine absorption is complete; your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, and your liver dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. As you could see in the report above, DeNies’ blood glucose level was 79 at the outset of the experiment, and after 40 minutes it had risen to 111!
• Around 45 minutes, your body increases dopamine production, which stimulates the pleasure centers of your brain – a physically identical response to that of heroin, by the way.
• After 60 minutes, you’ll start to have a blood sugar crash, and you may be tempted to reach for another sweet snack or beverage.

As I’ve discussed on numerous occasions, chronically elevated insulin levels (which you would definitely have if you regularly drink soda) and the subsequent insulin resistance is a foundational factor of most chronic disease, from diabetes to cancer.

Fructose Turns into Fat Far Faster than Other Sugars, and Fats

Lately, the media has finally begun reporting on the science of fructose, which clearly shows it is far worse than other sugars.

Fructose is processed in your liver, and unlike other sugars, most of it gets shuttled into fat storage. This is why fructose is a primary culprit behind obesity—far more so than other sugars. According to the news report above, drinking two bottles of soda per day can make you gain a pound of fat per week!

Aside from the weight gain, eating too much fructose is linked to increased triglyceride levels. In one study, eating fructose raised triglyceride levels by 32 percent in men! Triglycerides, the chemical form of fat found in foods and in your body, are not something you want in excess amounts.

Intense research over the past 40 years has confirmed that elevated blood levels of triglycerides, known as hypertriglyceridemia, puts you at an increased risk of heart disease.

Meanwhile, one of the most thorough scientific analyses published to date on this topic found that fructose consumption not only leads to insulin resistance but also decreases leptin signaling to your central nervous system. Leptin is responsible for controlling your appetite and fat storage, as well as telling your liver what to do with its stored glucose.

When your body can no longer “hear” leptin’s signals, weight gain, diabetes and a host of related conditions may occur. So, as you can see, fructose contributes to poor health through a number of mechanisms…

What Else is in Soda?

Before you grab that next can, take a look at some of the major components found in most sodas:

High fructose corn syrup: When you eat 120 calories of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat. 120 calories of fructose, on the other hand, results in 40 calories being stored as fat. Consuming fructose is essentially consuming fat! The metabolism of fructose by your liver creates a long list of waste products and toxins, including a large amount of uric acid, which drives up blood pressure and causes gout. Fructose also interferes with your brain’s communication with leptin, resulting in overeating.	Benzene. While the federal limit for benzene in drinking water is 5 parts per billion (ppb), researchers have found benzene levels as high as 79 ppb in some soft drinks, and of 100 brands tested, most had at least some detectable level of benzene present.
About 150 empty calories, most of which will turn into fat	Phosphoric acid, which can interfere with your body’s ability to use calcium, leading to osteoporosis or softening of your teeth and bones.
Between 30 to 55 mg of caffeine, which can cause jitters, insomnia, high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, elevated blood cholesterol levels, vitamin and mineral depletion, breast lumps, birth defects, and perhaps some forms of cancer.	Aspartame: This chemical is used as a sugar substitute in diet soda. There are over 92 different health side effects associated with aspartame consumption including brain tumors, birth defects, diabetes, emotional disorders and epilispsy/seizures.
Artificial food colors, including caramel coloring, which has recently been identified as carcinogenic. The artificial brown coloring is made by reacting corn sugar with ammonia and sulfites under high pressures and at high temperatures. This produces the chemicals 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole, which have been found to cause lung, liver and thyroid cancer in lab rats and mice.	Tap Water: I recommend that everyone avoid drinking tap water because it can carry any number of chemicals including chlorine, trihalomethanes, lead, cadmium, and various organic pollutants. Tap water is the main ingredient in bottled soft drinks.
Sulfites. People who are sulfite sensitive can experience headaches, breathing problems, and rashes. In severe cases, sulfites can actually cause death.	Sodium benzoate, a common preservative found in many soft drinks, which can cause DNA damage. This could eventually lead to diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver and Parkinson’s.

Health Effects of Soda Consumption

After looking at the list above, is it any wonder that a number of studies have now linked soda consumption with obesity and related health problems?

One such independent, peer-reviewed study published in the British medical journal The Lancet found that 12-year-olds who drank soft drinks regularly were more likely to be overweight than those who didn’t. In fact, for each additional daily serving of sugar-sweetened soft drink consumed during the nearly two-year study, the risk of obesity jumped by 60 percent!

As mentioned earlier, soda clearly elevates your insulin levels, and elevated insulin levels are the foundation of most chronic disease. Not only does drinking just one soda per day increase your risk of diabetes by 85 percent, it also increases your risk of:

• Heart disease
• Cancer
• Arthritis
• Osteoporosis
• Gout
• Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)

One of the Simplest Ways to Radically Improve Your Health

By now you probably know what that is…

Quit drinking soda.

Eliminating soft drinks is one of the most crucial factors to address many of the health problems you or your children suffer. Again, this is because normalizing your insulin levels is one of the most powerful physical actions you can take to improve your health and lower your risk of disease and long-term chronic health conditions.

Pure water is a much better choice, or if you must drink a carbonated beverage, try sparkling mineral water with some lime or lemon juice.

If you struggle with an addiction to soda, (remember, sugar is actually more addictive than cocaine) I strongly recommend you considerTurbo Tapping as a simple yet highly effective tool to help you stop this health-sucking habit. Turbo Tapping is a simple and clever use of the Emotional Freedom Technique, designed to resolve many aspects of an issue in a concentrated period of time.

Psychologist Jasper Smits is working on an unorthodox treatment for anxiety and mood disorders. The treatment is free and has no side effects. What is it? Exercise.

Research has shown again and again that patients who follow aerobic-exercise regimens see improvement in their depression — improvements comparable to that of those treated with medication. Exercise not only relieves depressive symptoms but also appears to prevent them from recurring.

According to Times Magazine:

“Molecular biologists and neurologists have begun to show that exercise may alter brain chemistry in much the same way that antidepressant drugs do — regulating the key neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine.”

Source:
Time Magazine June 19, 2010

Dr. Mercola’s Comments:

Studies on exercise as a treatment for depression are showing that there is a strong correlation between improved mood and aerobic capacity. So there’s a growing acceptance that the mind-body connection is very real, and that maintaining good physical health can significantly lower your risk of suffering from depressive symptoms and even developing depression in the first place.

Regular, appropriately intense exercise is a must for most people suffering from depression, and unlike the other common treatment, antidepressants, will not cause any negative side effects.

Since no one is going to be making tens of billions of dollars on encouraging you to exercise, it has not received the amount of funding for studies that antidepressant drugs have received.

However when the studies are performed, exercise continually comes out on top, demonstrating benefits above and beyond what antidepressant drugs can achieve.

Exercise for Depression: What does the Research Say?

Increasing evidence is showing that exercise leads to improvements in depression that rival or surpass those from antidepressant drugs.

One study conducted by Duke University in the late 1990′s divided depressed patients into three treatment groups:

1. Exercise only
2. Exercise plus antidepressant
3. Antidepressant drug only

After six weeks, the drug-only group was doing slightly better than the other two groups. However, after 10 months of follow-up, it was the exercise-only group that had the highest remission and stay-well rate.

James Gordon, MD, a world-renowned expert in using mind-body medicine to heal depression, also shared in our 2008 interview:

“What we’re finding in the research on physical exercise is, the physical exercise is at least as good as antidepressants for helping people who are depressed. And that’s even better for older people, very interesting, even more important for older people.

And physical exercise changes the level of serotonin in your brain. It changes, increases their levels of “feel good” hormones, the endorphins. And also — and these are amazing studies — it can increase the number of cells in your brain, in the region of the brain, called the hippocampus.

These studies have been first done on animals, and it’s very important because sometimes in depression, there are fewer of those cells in the hippocampus, but you can actually change your brain with exercise. So it’s got to be part of everybody’s treatment, everybody’s plan.”

The results really are impressive when you consider that exercise is virtually free and can provide you with numerous other health benefits too. For instance, one study found that 30-minute aerobic workouts done three to five times a week cut depressive symptoms by 50 percent in young adults.

In another study, which involved 80 adults aged 20 to 45 years who were diagnosed with mild to moderate depression, researchers looked at exercise alone to treat the condition and found:

• Those who exercised with low-intensity for three and five days a week showed a 30 percent reduction in symptoms
• Participants who did stretching flexibility exercises 15 to 20 minutes three days a week averaged a 29 percent decline

The results of this study are similar to that of other studies, which involved patients with mild or moderate depression being treated with antidepressants or cognitive therapy — proving patients need not rely on drugs to treat depression.

The caution I would mention, however, is that most of the medical world is seriously confused about exercise and biased heavily toward aerobic exercises. I am convinced that you simply need some higher intensity peak exercises like I described in my recent article.

A Prescription for Exercise …

I’ve long said that you can use exercise like a drug to help heal numerous ailments, and now in some countries like the UK, antidepressants are no longer recommended as the first line of therapy for mild to moderate depression. Instead, doctors there write out a prescription to see an exercise counselor instead. As medical journalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee Robert Whitakershared:

“With that prescription… you now get either a reduced rate or a free rate at a gym for six months. Part of the exercise might be “green gyms”… gardening outside, nature walks, repairing trails, hiking trails. And they are finding that people really like this. People comply with it…

People who have gone through this course and have been prescribed exercise, they say that rather than seeing themselves as a victim of depression, and helpless before it — that they have this sort of biological problem they can’t do anything about — they say, “Aha, I can make a change, I can do something. It’s in my willpower to do something that will help this problem lift.”

So it empowers the patient in a different way that drugs do not.”

Since 2007, when this new program was first introduced, the rate of British doctors prescribing exercise for depression has increased from about 4 percent to about 25 percent.

Considering that the major challenge many depressed people have in starting an exercise program is gathering up the motivation to do it, getting a “prescription” along with a free gym membership may be just the added incentive they need.

That, and remember that exercise often provides not only long-term benefits, but an immediate boost to your mood as well. Once you know that you can get a lift almost immediately from exercising, it becomes easier to stick to a program. As psychologist Jasper Smits told Time magazine:

“By and large, for most people, when they exercise 30 minutes — particularly when it’s a little bit more demanding and they get their heart rate up — they feel better. You get an immediate mood lift.”

And increasingly, researchers are showing that this “lift” isn’t all in your head; exercise is actually capable of altering your brain chemistry in a beneficial way.

How Exercise Alters Your Brain for the Better

As Time magazine reported, neuroscience professor Philip Holmes and colleagues from the University of Georgia have found that exercise regulates serotonin and norepinephrine, two key neurotransmitters in your brain. And in just a few weeks, exercise “switches on” genes that increase your brain levels of galanin, a neurotransmitter that helps lessen your body’s stress response.Time magazine stated:

“The result is that exercise primes the brain to show less stress in response to new stimuli … A little bit of mental strain and excess stimulation from exercise, in other words, may help us to keep day-to-day problems in perspective.”

The NEW Peak Fitness Program

Dr. Al Sears first introduced me to his PACE concept but I always found his material to general and non specific and no information on the use of this exercise for growth hormone. I really started to understand this when I met Phil Campbell at a fitness camp earlier this year in Mexico. He wrote the book Ready Set Go which details how these exercises for super fast muscle fibers can increase growth hormone.

So that is the history and what we sought to do is to provide the material in a digestible format, just like we do with the medical news, to provide you with a simple to comprehend guide that can explode you into fitness and health. In addition the the peak cardio exercises promoted by Sears and Campbell, we are seeking to promote a holistic approach to exercise.

Peak fitness is a term I am coining to represent a comprehensive exercise program that includes far more than typical cardio training. The major change is that once or twice a week you do peak exercises, in which you raise your heart rate up to your anaerobic threshold for 20 to 30 seconds, and then you recover for 90 seconds.

You would repeat this cycle for a total of eight repetitions. These cycles are preceded by a three minute warm up and two minute cool down so the total time investment is about 20 minutes.

It has been my personal experience that using this approach is far more effective than traditional cardio for a number of reasons that I will describe below. I was able to use this to help me lose over ten pounds of body fat and get my percent body fat down to 12 percent, but my goal is single digits.

The intensity is absolutely individual. For some it may be as simple as fast walking alternating with slow walking.

You can improvise it into just about any type of exercise, and you really don’t require a gym membership or any equipment to do it. If you do have access to equipment, using an elliptical or recumbent bike work really well.

One of my favorites is to use a recumbent bike. It is extremely challenging, and I enjoy that! This is the one I chose and am personally committed to, but the alternatives are almost limitless.

They key is to push your heart rate into that training zone for 30 seconds and then recover slowly for 90 seconds.

We call it “peak fitness” because if you graph your heart rate, you will see that it peaks 8 times during the workout.

Exercise to Increase Your Levels of the “Fitness Hormone”

One of the major reasons I am so enthusiastic about peak fitness is that it can actually increase your growth hormone level.

Yes, I realize that many athletes are injecting this illegally to achieve fitness, but it is expensive and fraught with side effects.

Peak fitness exercises, on the other hand, can actually cause your growth hormone to increase naturally, without any of the expense or side effects.

In order to better grasp the benefits of peak fitness exercises, you first need to understand that you have three different types of muscle fibers: slow, fast, and super-fast. And only ONE of these muscles will impact your production of a vital hormone called HGH, or human growth hormone, which is KEY for strength, health and longevity.

Currently, the vast majority of people, including many athletes such as marathon runners, only train using their slow muscle fibers, which has the unfortunate effect of actually causing the super fast fibers to decrease or atrophy.

In fact, neither traditionally performed aerobic cardio nor strength training will work anything but your slow muscles. These are the red muscles, which are filled with capillaries and mitochondria, and hence a lot of oxygen.

Next you have the fast type of fiber which is also red muscle, and oxygenates quickly, but is five times faster than the slow fibers. Power training, or plyometrics burst types of exercises will engage these fast muscles.

The super-fast ones are the white muscle fibers. They contain far less blood and less densely packed mitochondria. These muscle fibers are what you use when you do anaerobic short burst exercises.

High intensity burst cardio is the form of exercise that will engage these super fast fibers. They’re ten times faster than slow fibers, and this is the key to producing growth hormone!

Are You in Somatopause (Age Related Growth Hormone Deficiency?)

As you reach your 30s and beyond, you enter what’s called “somatopause,” when your levels of HGH begin to drop off quite dramatically. This is part of what drives your aging process.

It has been my experience that nearly everyone over 30 has dramatically abnormal levels of this important hormone because they begin leading increasingly more sedentary life styles.

Children and most animals in the wild do not run marathons or lift weights, they move at high speeds for very short periods of time and then rest. This is natural and what optimizes the production of growth hormone.

The higher your levels of growth hormone, the healthier and stronger you’re going to be. And the longer you can keep your body producing higher levels of HGH, the longer you will experience robust health and strength.

Dr. Harvey Cushing discovered HGH in the form of somatotropin almost a hundred years ago. Many individuals choose to inject it, though it is a banned substance in many professional sports.

As I said earlier, I don’t recommend doing this as I believe the health risks and cost are in no way justifiable.

Ideally, you really want your body to produce it naturally, as injecting HGH does have side effects. And the way you produce it is by exercising your super-fast muscle fibers.

Benefits of Peak Fitness Exercises

Once you regularly participate in these 20 minute excises about twice a week, most everyone notices the following benefits:

• Lowers your body fat
• Dramatically improves muscle tone
• Firms your skin and reduces wrinkles
• Boosts your energy and sexual desire
• Improves athletic speed and performance
• Allows you to achieve your fitness goals much faster

How to Properly Perform Peak Fitness Exercises to Increase Your Growth Hormone Levels

First of all, please remember that you can perform this with any type of exercise. While having access to a gym or exercise equipment will provide you with a larger variety of options, you don’t require either. You can easily perform this by walking or running on flat ground.

You will certainly want to work your way up to this point, but ultimately you want to exercise vigorously enough so you reach your anaerobic threshold as this is where the “magic” happens that will trigger your growth hormone release.

Whatever activity you choose, by the end of your 30 second period you will want to reach these markers:

• It will be relatively hard to breathe and talk because you are in oxygen debt
• You will start to sweat profusely. Typically this is occurs in the second or third repetition unless you have a thyroid issue and don’t sweat much normally.
• Your body temperature will rise
• Lactic acid increases and you will feel a muscle “burn”

If you are using cardio equipment like an elliptical or bike, you don’t need to reach any “magical” speed. It’s highly individual, based on your current level of fitness. But you know you’re doing it right when you’re exerting yourself to the point of typically gasping for breath, after a short burst of activity.

An added boon is that you’ll save a tremendous amount of time because peak fitness will cut your hour-long cardio workout down to a total of 20 minutes or so, including your recovery time, warm-up and cool down.

The actual sprinting totals only 4 minutes!

Here’s what a typical peak fitness routine might look like using a recumbent bike:

1. Warm up for three minutes
2. Exercise as hard and fast as you can for 30 seconds. You should feel like you couldn’t possibly go on another few seconds
3. Recover for 90 seconds
4. Repeat the high intensity exercise and recovery 7 more times

Be mindful of your current fitness level and don’t overdo it when you first start out.

If you are not in great shape and just starting this you may want to start with just two or three repetitions, and work your way up to eight, which is where the magic really starts to happen. You may need to start with just walking and when you do your 30 second bursts your legs would be moving as fast as possible without running – and your arms would be pumping hard and fast.

If you can do a peak fitness workout twice a week, and follow the dietary recommendations I’ll go over next, you will increase your production of growth hormone.

Dietary Recommendations to Maximize Growth Hormone Release

To maximize your growth hormone release you need to:

• Get a good night’s sleep
• Avoid a high fat meal prior to exercising
• Drink plenty of water
• Eat healthy carbs (think vegetables) and high quality protein
• Optimize your vitamin D levels
• Avoid sugar, especially fructose

The last part is absolutely crucial.

If you consume sugar or fructose, especially within two hours post-exercise, you will increase somatostatin which will in turn obliterate the production of growth hormone!

This is yet another example of why gulping down sports drinks that are chockfull of high fructose corn syrup can do your body more harm than good, and will just shut down your body’s production of HGH and negate many of the benefits from your exercise.

Creating a Comprehensive Exercise Plan

You really do need a comprehensive approach to exercise, which is a major part of our peak fitness exercise approach.

Ideally you want to have a variety of exercises and avoid doing the same ones all the time, as this will lead to a relative tolerance and you will not provide your body with the variety of stresses it needs to continuously adapt, improve, and grow stronger.

There are four additional types that will turn your peak fitness regimen into a truly comprehensive exercise plan:

1. Aerobic: No, I didn’t say you had to quit straight aerobics altogether, (even though I did, and am reaping greater results than before). Jogging, using an elliptical machine, and walking fast are all examples of aerobic exercise, which will increase the amount of oxygen in your blood and increase endorphins, which act as natural painkillers. Aerobic exercise also activates your immune system, helps your heart pump blood more efficiently, and increases your stamina over time.
2. Strength Training: Rounding out your exercise program with a 1-set strength training routine will ensure that you’re really optimizing the possible health benefits of a regular exercise program. You need enough repetitions to exhaust your muscles. The weight should be heavy enough that this can be done in fewer than 12 repetitions, yet light enough to do a minimum of four repetitions. It is also important NOT to exercise the same muscle groups every day. They need at least two days of rest to recover, repair and rebuild.
3. Core Exercises: Your body has 29 core muscles located mostly in your back, abdomen and pelvis. This group of muscles provides the foundation for movement throughout your entire body, and strengthening them can help protect and support your back, make your spine and body less prone to injury and help you gain greater balance and stability. Pilates and yoga are great for strengthening your core muscles, as are specific exercises you can learn from a personal trainer. Even if a personal trainer is not in the cards for you right now, please watch these sample videos for examples of healthy exercise routines you can do with very little equipment and in virtually any location. http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/videos.aspx Focusing on your breath and mindfulness along with increasing your flexibility is an important element of total fitness.
4. Stretching: My favorite types of stretches are active isolated stretching (AIS) http://www.stretchingusa.com/ developed by Aaron Mattes. It’s an amazing way to get flexibility back into your system, and it’s completely different from the traditional type of stretching.

My Heart Rate for Peak Fitness Workout

Four More Natural Tips to Beat Depression

Like many of you, I have been personally affected by depression, as someone very near and dear to me suffered from it, and actually made several unsuccessful suicide attempts many years ago that were truly devastating.

This illness can be truly tragic on a person’s life, so I urge you to seek out a knowledgeable natural health care practitioner who can help you on your healing journey. Along with exercise, below you will find the four cornerstones of healthy living that would be part of any successful treatment plan.

1. Address your stress — Depression is a very serious condition, however it is not a “disease.” Rather, it’s a sign that your body and your life are out of balance.

   This is so important to remember, because as soon as you start to view depression as an “illness,” you think you need to take a drug to fix it. In reality, all you need to do is return balance to your life, and one of the key ways to doing this is addressing stress.

   Meditation or yoga can help. Sometimes all you need to do is get outside for a brisk walk. But in addition to that, I also recommend using a system that can help you address emotional issues that you may not even be consciously aware of. For this, my favorite is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). However, if you have depression or serious stress, I believe it would be best to consult with a mental health professional who is also an EFT practitioner to guide you.

2. Eat a healthy diet — Another factor that cannot be overlooked is your diet. Foods have an immense impact on your mood and ability to cope and be happy, and eating whole foods as described in my nutrition plan will best support your mental health. Avoiding sugar and grains will help normalize your insulin and leptin levels, which is another powerful tool in addressing depression.
3. Support optimal brain functioning with essential fats — I also strongly recommend supplementing your diet with a high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fat, like krill oil. This may be the single most important nutrient to battle depression.
4. Get plenty of sunshine – Making sure you’re getting enough sunlight exposure to have healthy vitamin D levels is also a crucial factor in treating depression or keeping it at bay. One previous study found that people with the lowest levels of vitamin D were 11 times more prone to be depressed than those who had normal levels. Vitamin D deficiency is actually more the norm than the exception, and has previously been implicated in both psychiatric and neurological disorders.