Metabolic syndrome

The metabolic syndrome is a major and escalating public-health and clinical challenge worldwide in the wake of urbanization, surplus energy intake, increasing obesity, and sedentary life habits.

The syndrome is characterized by the presence of at least three of the following five risk factors: Central obesity, high serum triglycerides, low high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), raised blood pressure and raised fasting blood sugar.

The pathogenesis of metabolic syndrome involves both genetic and acquired factors that play a role in the final pathway of inflammation that leads to CVD. Metabolic syndrome has become increasingly relevant in recent times due to the exponential increase in obesity worldwide.

People who have the metabolic syndrome can reduce their risk for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes by controlling risk factors. The best way is often for them to lose weight, eat a healthy diet and increase their physical activity.

Dietary modification can also regulate other metabolic syndrome components: low intake of saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, sodium, and simple sugars is known to help with dyslipidemia, hyperglycemia and hypertension, for example.

Worldwide prevalence of metabolic syndrome ranges from less than 10% to as much as 84%, depending on the region, urban or rural environment, composition (sex, age, race, and ethnicity) of the population studied, and the definition of the syndrome used.
Metabolic syndrome

Eating vegetables prevent disease

Vegetables rich in color generally indicate that they are higher in vital nutrients than their pale counterparts. 

Hundreds of studies from around the world have established that diet in vegetables appears to reduce the risk of a number of diseases. It’s including heart disease and other chronic health problems.

The disease preventing effects of plant foods are partly due to antioxidant affect, specific to the photochemicals along with vitamins, minerals and enzymes in vegetables protecting cells against damage from oxidation and strengthen immune activities. It would reduce risk of heart disease, cancer and other disease. 

There are twelve vegetables known as the cruciferous vegetables are particularly powerful protectors against top three killers in the USA – cancer, heart disease and strokes.

The twelve are broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, kale, kohlrabi, mustard greens, horseradish, rutabaga turnips and watercress.

Researchers also found that eating beta-carotene rich vegetable did protect against lung cancer. The more variety vegetables people ate, the less likely they were to develop lung cancer.
Eating vegetables prevent disease

It is not our fault

It is not our fault
Before planning how to get well, it may help to consider the various reasons we get sick, only a few of which are under our control.

Sometimes our genes are programmed for susceptibility to one or another awful disease.

We may lack sufficiently healthy food or water. We may grow up without opportunities for exercise, fresh air, education, relaxation or love.

Studies of stressful life events – job loss, divorce, relocation, death of a family member, etc – consistently show higher rates of all types of disease following such stressors.

To these, we can add all of our maladaptive response to life’s insults: bad posture, attitudes, or diets, unacknowledged emotions, lack of exercise, overwork, hurry, various forms of self abuse and addition.

All of these injuries behaviors were learned somewhere or adopted before we knew better for reasons that were necessary - or at least seemed like good ideas – at the the time.

Most disease, then except for overwhelming infections or pure genetic defects, arise from numbers of factors stretching back through our lives and heredity and outward though all our social and environmental influences, a web of causation that we cam never completely sort out.

For various reasons, our bodies and minds (do not get their needs met, and they react by getting sick.)

Our bodies weren’t made to last forever and years of wear and tear eventually cause breakdown.

Therefore, it makes no sense to blame ourselves for illness, to feel guilty about things we could not control.

Guilt doesn’t do anyone any good. Far worse than guilt, though, is helplessness, the feeling that turns us into victims without hope of salvation.
It is not our fault