Why Grapefruit Can Kill You

Did you know that eating one whole grapefruit or drinking about 6 ounces of juice can alter the efficacy of many prescribed medications. This includes such favorites as cholesterol-lowering statins, anti-histamines,antidepressants, calcium channel blockers and some HIV drugs. This interaction was first reported 20 years ago and currently about 85 drugs are potentially affected.

The problem with grapefruit, as well as Seville oranges, pomelos and limes, is that some substances found in the juice inhibit an enzyme found in the intestines and liver that aids in metabolizing the drugs. The result of this inhibition is that you end up with a higher level of the active ingredient in your bloodstream. This can lead to adverse effects such as acute kidney failure, heart problems, kidney failure, trouble breathing and gastrointestinal bleeding.

This interaction occurs quickly and can last 24 hours or longer. The effects vary from person to person, but older people are at higher risk. The danger is also greater for drugs that have little forgiveness if the dose is off by even the slightest amount.

The bottom line, if you take a prescription medication, is to check with your health care professional. before consuming grapefruit or other juices mentioned above. If there is an interaction and if you want to stay out of trouble stop drinking grapefruit juice.  Try orange or tangerine juice instead.

Get more information in our book Live Longer Live Healthier

or visit our website at trienergetics.net

Statins The Good News And The Bad News

Do you take a stain drug to lower your cholesterol? If you do, the good news is that the incidence of deaths from coronary artery disease has decreased dramatically. Cholesterol-lowering statin drugs have played a major role. The bad news is that side effects from the statins are not uncommon and some of the side effects can be serious.

A recent study on statins from Harvard published in a major journal, The Annals of Internal Medicine, showed that nearly 20% of the 108,000 people studied reported adverse effects, most often muscle pain Less common complaints included fatigue and memory problems. During the eight year period of the study about 50% discontinued the drugs, at least temporarily. Often the reason for discontinuing was not known.

Our advice to you is that if you are taking a statin and have muscle weakness, pain or tenderness call your doctor and report this immediately. If the statin is the cause, the symptoms should go away within days or weeks. after the drug is stopped. If you continue with the statin in spite of the symptoms the damage could progress and lead to serious complications. There are other potential problems related to the use of statins. They will be discussed in the next blog.

Get more information in our book Live Longer Live Healthier

or visit our website at trienergetics.net

Can Generic Drugs Be Dangerous?

In the last blog we discussed the possible problems that could develop from taking a generic medication. How often do serious problems or side effects occur because of the use of a generic instead of the brand name? Not often but sometimes even once is once to often.

A case to point is the action that the FDA took when it withdrew its approval for a generic version made by Teva Pharmaceuticals of the popular antidepressant Wellbutrin. The reason for withdrawing the approval for this generic version was that as it turned out this version was not bioequivalent to the brand name.

The FDA was forced to do testing on this particular generic version after it received numerous complaints from patients that Teva's version had made them feel woozy, sick to their stomach or even suicidal. It turned out that the generic's active ingredient dissolved four times more quickly in the first two hours that of the brand name because of a different time-release mechanism. In addition on average Teva's product achieved a concentration in the blood ranging from 40% to 75% of the brand name Wellbutrin.

At a meeting of the FDA's advisory committee for clinical pharmacology in 2011 a prominent physician presented evidence of three different generic formulations of levothyroxine. All three were more potent from the branded version and varied from one another. One was 12.5% above, another 9% above and the third 3% above.

Another problem with generics is that an estimated 80% of active ingredients and 40% of finished medications come from overseas. In some cases they are manufactured in facilities that have not yet been inspected by the FDA. Quality can be compromised. For example recently the maker of a generic Lipitor, Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals, recalled 480,000 bottles after tin shards of glass were found inside the pills.

In 2012 Congress  passed the Generic Drug User Fee Ammendments bill. In it the generic drug industry agreed to pay the FDA  $200 million dollars a year over five years to speed up the review and approval of generic drug applications and increase inspections of generic manufacturing plants abroad. This is certainly a step in the right direction.

Nevertheless almost all of us are or will be taking some generic medications. It is important to pay attention to how we respond to the medication and to be aware of any unusual physical symptoms that we may develop while on the medication. Our health may depend on it.

Get more information in our book Live Longer Live Healthier

or visit our website at trienergetics.net

Are Generic Drugs The Same As The Brand Name

With the movement to curtail soaring healthcare costs, generic drugs have become increasingly popular. Many times we have no choice because many insurance plans will only pay for the generic. Other times we choose the generic because the price to us is better. In fact more than 80% of the drugs that we we take in the US are now generic, and this has saved Americans $193 billion dollars this past year.
                                                               
But are generic drug the same as the original? The answer in many cases is no. For example the FDA requires that the generic have the same bioequivalence as the brand name. but the standard is very broad and the concentration of the active ingredient in the blood is allowed to fall as much as 20% below or 25% above that of the brand name. If you look at the math you will see that the biological activity of the generic is allowed to vary by 45% from the brand name. This is further complicated by the fact that pharmacies shop generics by price. The pills that you get one month may not have the same biological activity as the pills that you got another month.

This could possibly mean that if the pills you took one month only met the minimum requirement and the refill that you took another month met the maximum limit you would have increased the amount of medication that you get in our body by as much as 45%. Worse than that you would have no way of knowing from the labels that you were not getting the same amount of medication.

In many cases these differences are not important, but they are critical for medications used to treat conditions in which blood levels must be kept in a narrow range. These medications include, thyroid, anti-seizure,  blood thinners, antidepressants, antipsychotics, asthma and immunosuppressants.

There is another important difference between the generic and the brand name. Although the generic must contain the same active ingredient as the original, the additional ingredients, known as excipients, can be different. These ingredients can effect the amount of the drug that is absorbed into the blood stream and can also be responsible for systemic side effects that do not occur with the brand name.

Get more information in our book Live Longer Live Healthier

or visit our website at trienergetics.net

How To Become Healthier By Sitting Quietly And Doing Nothing

"The reason that worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work."

          –Robert Frost

The cornerstone of the TriEnergetics stress management program is a very simple, easy practice that you have already heard of, meditation. Everyone has the need for a time of inner peace. Meditate daily and you will see amazing results. The beneficial effects of simply relaxing are so great that you will soon look forward to the next time when you can sit quietly and tap your inner serenity. There is nothing to learn, nothing for you to memorize. Just take a few minutes out of your busy schedule, sit quietly, concentrate on your breathing and listen.

Choose a quiet place where you will not be disturbed.  Sit comfortably, keep your back straight with your head set squarely on your shoulders and begin to take slow deep breaths. Breath in through your nose and allow your abdomen to bulge as you breath. Focus on the fresh air entering your body as warm vital energy. Direct it to all parts of your body. Allow it to fill you and to relax you.

Exhale through your nose and think of the air leaving your lungs as taking your tension with it. Think energy in, tension out. Notice how your body relaxes as you let go. As tension leaves your body see if you can relax even more. Every breath is an opportunity to let go.

Don't worry about thoughts when you meditate. Don't try to force them from your mind. Thoughts will come because your mind will not stop thinking for more than a few seconds at a time. It is the nature of the mind to think. What you need to do is learn to let your thoughts go. When a thought comes, just watch it. Observe the thought, but don't engage with it. Be aware that you are thinking but don't develop any opinion or judgement about the thought. Just let it float to the surface of your consciousness. Then observe the next thought as it floats into your awareness. Then the next and the next. Just let them go.

When you are meditating don't worry about how you are doing. Remember your mind will wander. This is not a problem. Just practice bringing your attention back to your breath. Try to set aside ten minutes a day for meditating. It would be better if you are able to extend this to a longer period of time, but if you spend ten minutes you will notice progress.

There is no goal that you need to set for yourself and there is no deadline to get there. Meditation is not a timed race to the finish line. It is a process of awareness, of being with yourself and of coping with the stress of living. Enjoy the process.

Get more information in our book Live Longer Live Healthier

or visit our website at trienergetics.net

Mindfulness What Is It?

We stress in our book that mind energy is one of the three key energies of our life. We are what we think. What we think is our reality. There is a discipline in medicine called psychoneuroimmunology. This is a long ungainly word, but the work done by researchers in this field is critical because they study the connections between the mind, central nervous system, immune responses and the body. They study the ways in which what we think and feel affects our health.

In this high tech society that we live in life moves quickly. Most of us are more connected to our smart phones, to our ipads, to our computers, to our social media sites and to our automobiles than we are to ourselves. We are so busy doing and going that we lose touch with who we are. The quote "life is what happens to us when we are busy doing other things" has never been more true. Stress builds up as we ignore who we are while we run on a treadmill trying to keep up with other things. Stress leads to mental and physical illness.

Mindfulness is necessary to bring ourselves back to center. Mindfulness means being present. It means being aware and paying attention to ourselves and to our body. Mindfulness is the antidote to the frantic  high tech life that most of us live because it fosters serenity. Everyone has the need for a time of inner peace. In our program we recommend a simple practice of meditation. Meditation is a way to become healthier by sitting quietly and doing nothing.

In a future blog we will discuss a simple technique for meditation.

Get more information in our book Live Longer Live Healthier

or visit our website at trienergetics.net

More About Being A Couch Potato

We did not intend to write another blog about being a couch potato, but the popular media is jumping on this subject in a big way, and we could not resist jumping in. Our Sunday paper had an article on the subject that Americans engage in precious little exercise. There is a quote attributed to Edward Archer a nutrition and obesity researcher at the University of Alabama. It is noteworthy.

"How you spend your day determines whether you store your food as fat or store your food in your muscle, healthfully."

We love this quote. It is the triple distilled essence of the obesity epidemic. The other prongs of course are what and how much we eat and why we eat the way that we do.

The essence of this study published in The Mayo Clinic Proceedings was that obese women averaged about 11 seconds a day of vigorous exercise, while men and women of normal weight did better but still logged only about 2.5 to 4 hours of moderate exercise a week.

In summary the data sketch a nearly supine population with days marked by long hours of sedentary behavior, particularly for those who are overweight or obese. "We have engineered physical activity out of our daily lives and that's causing the health disparity that we have in this country"

Our experience in running wellness programs has been that participants take to meditation like a duck takes to water. In general they are good about changing their eating habits, but so often we hear excuses about why they have been too busy to exercise.

It is an uphill battle to get people to change their attitude about being a couch potato, but for the good of their health change it they must.

Get more information in our book Live Longer Live Healthier

or visit our website at trienergetics.net