Could Inflammation Cause Belly Fat? ~ Holistic Medicine

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Could inflammation cause belly fat?

What causes people to have belly fat? Well, there are a number of different things that contribute to it. Obviously, eating too much sugar and simple carbohydrates is one way to add extra belly fat. And cutting back on that can make a difference.

Also, the kind of food you eat determines the kind of organisms that live in your intestine. Not a few but approximately 30 to 100 trillion bacteria live inside your intestinal tract. And some of those determine whether you are going to gain weight or not. And it seems that the kinds of foods you eat have a big influence on what is actually living inside of you, and they help determine whether you are going to gain fats. So when you are eating, you are not just feeding yourself, you’re feeding the organisms which are talking to the system that determines whether fat cells increase or fat cells decrease.

And eating a lot of vegetables and some protein is a lot different from eating a lot simple carbohydrates, not only feeding your fat but feeding your organisms.

In addition, when you have a lot of stress you release cortisol, and there are people who believe that the cortisol has influence on gaining belly fat. So reducing stress by getting regular exercise, meditation, breathing exercises can make a big difference as well. Finally in metabolize according local exercise in the muscle tone, and if you are using your abdominal muscles by doing crunches or by doing exercises that involve your abdominal muscles, not only do you burn fat while you are doing that, but you burn fat all day long and all night long because those muscles are having more metabolic activity and requiring more energy. So that’s an additional way to get your body to burn up that belly fat.

So conversely, people who don’t get any exercise, who sit on a couch, work sitting down, and don’t get any extra exercise are likely going to gain more belly fat.

So the holistic medicine of eating right, exercising right, and managing stress can all help reduce belly fat.

3 Skin Secrets of the Mediterranean Diet ~ Natural Skincare

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3 Skin Secrets of the Mediterranean Diet

There are many different perspectives on diet that can enhance your health, and help your skin as well. One of them is the Mediterranean diet. Now let’s talk a little bit about what makes the Mediterranean diet so useful. Mediterranean diet is basically conceptually what people would eat if they were living around the Mediterranean base, in Greece, in Italy, in Spain, in Northern Africa, Morocco, those areas. So what does that include? First of all when you think about Mediterranean diet, you think about olive oil.

Now olive oil is a terrific oil to be part of your food. It’s a mono-saturated oil. It has a nice flavor. Some of that green color is anti-microbial property of the olive leaf and the olive. So it has some benefits in that direction and also it’s avoiding so many nasty things that we have in our current oils which are really not healthy. It’s avoiding the toxins. Because when you think about the Mediterranean diet, you are not thinking about somebody spraying the olive tree. You think about a more organic and natural olive.

The second thing is it avoids high temperature heating oils, and oils that are saturated fats or oils that are very highly unsaturated that would become rancid. So all those things are being avoided when you are thinking of that. It’s avoiding things that are really; who knows what they are, like Canola. There is no such thing as a canola bean! Canola is the name of a conglomerate type of product.

So getting to olive oil is the real basic step that makes you healthier. So Mediterranean diet involves fresh foods and vegetables, involves fresh fish and meat. And a diet that has limited amounts of carbohydrates in it. And that could be tremendously important, both for the good things it’s bringing with all those products and also for the terrible things it’s avoiding.

The Allergy Solution: A great new integrative medicine book

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The Allergy Solution: integrative medicine and inflammationToday, Dr. Leo Galland releases his new book, “The Allergy Solution”.

 
This book gives a comprehensive explanation of allergy and all of the conditions that can be related to allergy and inflammation. It affirms many of the points described in my book, “Radiant Skin from the Inside Out”. Points that developed out my research on inflammation and immune recognition, and had their practical development through Functional Medicine. For those suffering from allergy and related symptoms, this book gives a good practical understanding of how to gain control by getting at the underlying causes.
 
Dr. Galland is a colleague with whom I have shared the path of Integrative Medicine, who I have known since NYU Medical school. We have become close colleagues in the past 17 years, as co-members of a seminal group of integrative medicine physicians who met several times each year with outstanding integrative speakers.
Dr. Dattner
Integrative Medicine
New York

Why am I Gaining Weight? Natural treatments for fat?

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Why am I Gaining Weight? Natural treatments for fat?

A frequent complain that I hear from people is, why am I gaining weight? Can you make it stop? They’ve told me that they’ve tried everything. They’ve tried diets and this and that. They’ve tried cutting down on fats. But often they’ve not cut down sufficiently on sugar and carbohydrates.

There are two things that sugar can do. They can be used to cause fats to become chain elongated as we say technically. And it also can cause accumulation of more fats. But even more than that it can affect the organisms living in our digestive system. And that can contribute to the growth of more fat cells in the body and an addition of weight. So we really have to change the kind of organisms living in the body as well as reduce the calories coming in.

Of course it’s important to put out more calories too so that exercise is critical. Exercise not only burns up calories while you are doing it, but it increases the metabolisms of your muscles and your body so that you burn more fats while you are sleeping and during the rest of the day as well. Another thing that has to be done is to cut down on inflammation, which aggravates the whole system that regulates how much fat we store. When we are inflamed the body is on alert and it stores more fat in case.

So we have to cut down on inflammation, various sources whether it be from food allergy or from chronic infections. Or even just from chronic exhaustion and sleep deprivation. So we want to cut back and normalize the lifestyle so that everything begins to work more naturally. And that helps us cut down on weight.

Asparagus: Great Food for Your Skin ~ Best Natural Skincare Diet

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Another great food for your natural skincare diet!

Asparagus is another great food to eat when you’re looking to care for your skin naturally. Those spears of asparagus help your body in many different ways. They contain an amino acid called asparagine, which you probably have noticed, has an distinctive… smell. And if you have the right genetic capability, you will also excrete that in your urine and be able to smell it! It’s a very valuable food to eat, and it should be enjoyed when it’s in season, as fresh as possible.

Heartbreak of Psoriasis: Natural Healing ~ Integrative Dermatology

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Heartbreak of Psoriasis: Natural Healing

Let’s talk a little bit about a condition known as Psoriasis or sometimes the Heartbreak of Psoriasis. Psoriasis involves thick red patches of skin often in the pressure areas or elsewhere throughout the body on the skin. It can be very mild and barely visible or it can be extremely widespread and for some people very disturbing.

Now, eczema is a much milder condition. But Psoriasis tends to be thick it can be itchy or painful and it is caused by the type of inflammation that enlarges the blood vessels in the skin. This causes the skin cells to reproduce and turn over much faster, that is like 4 to 6 days instead of 28 days before they get to the top.

And that over production of the skin cells causes the thickening and the scaling that occurs. So we need to cut down the inflammation that causes that. That is a lymphocytic delayed hypersensitivity celli or immune response causing it. And we know that partly by the new drugs that poison that response and we know that if we can take away what is setting off that inflammation, we can also calm it down. And we can do that through diet as well as through the modern drugs. If you need help with the heartbreak of psoriasis, contact my office for an appointment.

Fish: Great Food for Your Skin ~ Best Natural Skincare Mediterranean Diet

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Let’s talk about some great foods for your skin! One of the best foods for your skin, if you are not a vegetarian, is northern fish. Fish that comes from cold water and grows in cold water and basically is living off the food chain that starts with the krill in the cold water. These fish contain a number of beneficial things, one of which is Omega-3 unsaturated fatty acids, and they will help the membranes of your body both be healthy and be less inflammatory.

Recovered from extreme inflammation and autoimmune skin problems

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“Dr. Dattner is an extremely gifted physician who helped me recover from a painful and disfiguring skin disorder. My skin was bleeding, shredding, breaking, and swelling from inflammation–so much that I had to wear a surgical mask.

He identified my autoimmune damage, and within days, dramatic improvement occurred. I could finally sleep, and uncover my face, due to the reduction of pain and inflammation, after having seen many doctors. Progress steadily continued.

With gratitude and appreciation, I have only the highest recommendation for Dr. Dattner.” -MK, New York

Did you know Hidradenitis Suppuritiva is connected with metabolic syndrome?

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Depositphotos_5735625_xsEmbarrassing? Maybe. Common? Perhaps more than you think. 

Hidradenitis Suppuritiva is an acne related condition involving recurrent boils and cysts in the apocrine areas. These especially include under the arms around the breasts, in the groin and buttock areas. It may be confined to just to just a few small cysts, or develop into large cysts with multiple training points. At its worst, they can be painful and make it difficult to carry out ordinary activities.

This condition is sometimes treated with injected steroids, topical or oral antibiotics, and surgical drainage. More radical treatment includes cutting out the entire affected area into the deeper fat or down to the fascia. That kind of surgery can require a long recovery time.

More recently, powerful immunosuppressants known as Biologics have been used with some success. Unfortunately, these carry a very large price tag both an actual dollar cost, and in the possibility of leading to development of infections like tuberculosis, or cancers like lymphoma.

I’ve been successful in improving the condition the patients with Hidradenitis using a similar approach to that which I use in acne. That involves correcting digestive and hormonal imbalances, and removing toxins from the skin. My report of success met with considerable resistance at the Second International Meeting of the Hidradenitis Suppuritiva Foundation in San Francisco some years ago.  

Consequently, I was very happy to see an article that was published last year linking Hidradenitis Suppuritiva  to metabolic syndrome. One of the most important inclusions of the article was that Hidradenitis Suppuritiva  appears to be a systemic condition rather than just to localized skin condition. This further supports my approach and results in treating this condition as a systemic inflammatory disorder with supplements and nutritional changes.

If you need help with this condition, please contact my office. I work in New York and also via Skype, so if you live far away, I can still be of help.

To your health,

Dr. Alan M. Dattner, MD

Holistic Dermatology & Integrative Medicine

 

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The unintended consequences of reading acne-curing blogs… part three
The unintended consequences of reading acne-curing blogs… part four

The problem with quick-fixes for acne. Part 4

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Another unintended consequence of acne blogs and information you may find on the Internet on acne related sharing sites, is that you will not have enough information about the individuals who report either success or failure with various treatments they suggest to understand whether those treatments will be successful for you.  

Although there are many common features of various illnesses such as acne, there are also many individual variations in both genetics and exposure history. As a result, Even if the report of the success after a particular novel acne treatment is accurate, it still may be impossible to know whether you have the same conditions are such that the same remedy will work for you.  As a result of this individual variation, what will work for another person may not be effective for you.

Furthermore, it may take a lot more depth of understanding of the physiology of the acne to be able to even ask the right questions of the person who benefited from a new remedy, to know if that remedy would be of any use to you. This is why it's worth seeing a holistic doctor who can really ferret out your particular issue and finally help you get to the bottom of it.

To your health,

Dr. Alan M. Dattner, MD

Holistic Dermatology & Integrative Medicine

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