As a brief addendum to my previous blog, I retraced my steps along the promenade today only to be met by the usual sights. The sea was a universally turgid grey, ruffled by the normal Sou’westerly blowing along the seafront at a steady fifteen knots or so, the energetic rollers breaking within feet of the sturdy seawall. Above, there was no sign of Sunday’s impressive aerial activity…..in fact there was hardly a seagull in sight. Where had they all gone? There were more pigeons and crows to be seen than gulls. What few there were occupied their normal perches atop street lamps; another oddity I’ve never really understood. As for the formatting starlings, not a murmur. Could any naturalist specialising in ornithology please enlighten me as to these weird goings on?
Meanwhile, I am reading a fascinating book called Eat to Beat Disease by Dr William Li, a medical doctor and scientist. It is a healthy tome (in size as well as content), but it makes for riveting reading. He talks about the body’s five pillars of defence: Angiogenesis, Regeneration (stem cells), Microbiome (the gut), DNA Protection and Immunity. Angiogenesis, a word I hadn’t come across before, defines the body’s ability to create new blood vessels to repair wounds and other damage. Antiangiogenesis is also important in preventing the body creating new blood vessels around cancer cells, which helps the baddies to grow; an excellent way of fighting cancer it seems. According to Dr Li, all of these defences can be dramatically emboldened by eating the right foods and avoiding the wrong ones. In general terms he favours the traditional Mediterranean diet, but there’s an awful lot more to it than that. It’s well worth a read. I am not his agent!
As part of my search for improved health and fitness my functional medicine doctor in South Africa (Dr Retief) asked me to get blood tests done to measure homocysteine levels and LDL small particles, a very specific test for bad cholesterol. This involved finding a private laboratory and travelling forty five minutes to a partaking chemist to get the blood drawn. The costs were exorbitant. £30 for the blood draw and over £180 for the two tests, which would have cost the equivalent of about £50 in SA, where we would have had the results back within two days, which I was assured by the lab would be the case here as well. Two days later I received the homocysteine result which indicated a level of 21.5, compared with the maximum recommended level of 15. Dr Retief prefers 6 or 7, so he immediately went into overdrive, with various solutions recommended, pending news of the LDL test. Eventually I phoned the lab to learn that “oh that test has to go to a lab in Germany and takes two weeks”! Why wasn’t I told of this? Oops. About ten days later I got the report, but when forwarded to Dr Retief it made no sense to him. Back to the lab. “We need more detail please, showing not just the levels but the appropriate ranges”. Abject apologies and a day or two later a fuller report arrived, as it should have done in the first place, they agreed. After all, I had paid over £100 for that test alone. The long and the short of it is that my LDL 7 Function (small particles) is just about normal, which means that concerns about too much LDL are overstated. Ok to come off the lifetime diet of statins then, as prescribed by the NHS, especially if I do all the right things with other supplements and diet. But what about the homocysteine? Such a high level can be very dangerous for heart disease apparently but can usually be rectified by upping the intake of Vitamin B12 and Folic Acid. As I eat enough broccoli to keep a market garden in business single-handed and my red meat consumption was more than adequate I couldn’t really understand the readings. Still, I learned that your local GP will inject Vitamin B12 if required. Upon consulting the said gentleman it transpires that the NHS doesn’t believe in testing homocysteine levels, (what!!?) he couldn’t trust my tests and so I would have to go in there to get more blood tests done specifically for B12, folate and haemoglobin levels. Those tests all came back as “normal” (nobody’s ever called me that!) and in fact the B12 reading was towards the top end. Mystified, I did some more reading and found in a scientific paper that blood drawn for homocysteine testing must be put on ice immediately and refrigerated until tested, as happens in SA, or readings will be much higher than they should be. I realised that my expensive blood had sat in an uncooled tube for four or five hours before being sent to the lab by post, where it would have spent about twenty four hours unrefridgerated until analysed. After further calls, I eventually got to speak to the MD of the lab who agreed this was all wrong, it was their fault, she was very sorry and would refund nearly half the total fee. I thanked her but was left with the dilemma of not knowing what the real situation is. Apologies for the rather lengthy description, but hopefully it’s interesting to see how far off the pace we are in this country in these matters compared with Germany, South Africa and I suspect the USA as well.
According to the BBC Gardener’s World magazine, now is a good time to relocate deciduous shrubs that are in the wrong place. Compared with Myanmar under it’s own version of lockdown, Arabian princesses locked in, Britain locked out and schools locked up, there’s something wonderfully grounding (excuse the pun) about worrying whether the forsythia should be repositioned five yards to the South. As the host of Gardener’s Question Time used to say on BBC Radio 4, “goodbye and good gardening”. ……….(we do have a beautiful camellia that’s now flowering handsomely, but in totally the wrong position….?)
ADayInTheStrifeOf 