Excerpt: 'You: Being Beautiful' on Energy

Jan. 22, 2009 — -- In the follow-up to the best-selling book "You: Staying Young," Drs. Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz are taking on beauty from three vantage points: looking beautiful, feeling beautiful and being beautiful.

The book provides tips on how to care for your body with everything from healthy diets to weighing the value of cosmetic enhancements. It also teaches readers how to care for their spirit by identifying major stresses and examining relationships.

In this chapter, the book deals with getting your energy up to power through the day. Check out some other books in the "GMA" library.

Excerpt courtesy of Free Press.

When's the first time you feel tired during the day?

Results: If you answered anything other than E, it could be a sign that the energysystems in your body are either slightly or completely out of whack -- causing you to tire even at times when you should feel vital and energized.

So what starts the process thatsteals your energy? What sets upthe dominos, and what causes yourfirst domino to fall? We don'tknow all the answers for sure, but we do know a fewthings that make your cellular energy plants—those mitochondria—inefficient.

Three big ones:

Insulin Resistance: We become inefficient in getting the sugar to our productionplants and distribute it into fat storage rather than into cells that need to useit to produce energy, such as muscle cells.

Viruses and Other Infections: Acute infections as well as chronic, low-gradeinfections can eventually cause the fuse to blow. We often see the buggersinvade and fray the wires from your fuse box, reducing the amount of energy thatcan be supplied. Or the lines get frayed from lack of nutrients to keep them repaired(for example, lack of the healthy fat DHA). That starts the "out of energy"cascade after a pregnancy or after an injury, when your immune system is vulnerable.Viral particles have been identified in the nuclei and mitochrondria of manycells of folks with serious energy deficits like fibromyalgia. Once one area feelsless energetic, you put more demand on another area, furthering that cascade, soa little wire fraying by viruses can make you feel exhausted much of the time.

Sleep Problems: Many people always have trouble falling asleep. Additionally,many of us (yes, we are guilty here at times) develop less than optimal habits thatworsen our ability to sleep or obtain full sleep time and then we have to fight a viciouscycle. And when your immune system needs all the energy it can get—suchas when it'sfighting an infection for you—not resting your energy supply adequatelyacts to overheat those wires and worsen your energy problem. That weakens theenergy your immune system can borrow from other parts of your energy stores. Soyou feel more tired. When your body gets too little sleep or poor-qualitysleep (notdeep enough or not enough dreaming), you tend to have more pain (the lack ofsleep doesn'tallow you to refresh fully the neurotransmitters you have that normallysuppress pain). And that extra pain drains the line of energy, too—so you feelwiped out very near the start of the day. Sleep is important to feeling beautiful.

Hormonal Imbalances: Your hormones are like the dimmers on yourheadlights—when you need bright lights, you turn on certain hormones to increase the energy sent to that area (for example, your immune system) and to decreaseusage elsewhere. This fine-tuning starts in your hypothalamus and pituitary.

Thus, there'sa strong association between hormonal issues and energy issues. Wesee these changes primarily with slow-functioningadrenal and thyroid glands, butsmall, important changes happen minute to minute. Stress causes increases incortisol, which increases sugar in the bloodstream and insulin resistance—andthat wastes energy in distributing sugar into fat instead of where it is needed toproduce ATP. The tough part here is that it'snot always clear what the best waysare to deal with hormonal issues.

Case in point: We physicians aren'tsure whetherto treat the numbers or to treat the symptoms patients have. We often try to "normalizethe numbers from blood tests" even if we'renot eradicating the symptoms.

The so-called normal range of blood levels for many hormonal levels is defined asthe middle 95 (95!) percent of people with those levels; the top 2.5 percent areconsidered high and the bottom 2.5 percent are considered low. Unfortunately,that'sjust not good math for the individual. It'slike saying that if the number thatis normal is size 6 to 11 in shoes, then a 6 shoe will be okay for you, even if youhave a size 4 foot. Not a good fit, but you'dbe wearing a "normal"-size shoe.

Instead, we docs can choose to treat the symptoms as long as the treatmentdoesn'tcause levels that are very abnormal on blood tests. Here'sone example ofwhy treating the symptoms (it's what docs learn to do—most important, listen tothe patient) and not just getting a number on your blood test in the 95 percentrange is important. If a T3 (free thyroid hormone) level up to 1.4 is normal but wehave to get up to 1.5 to eradicate your symptoms, we think we should listen toyou and do that, periodically backing off to see if you can be symptom free withless thyroid hormone. Because when hormones aren'tregulated to levels that areright for you, you'vegot a dimmer that keeps flipping from producing power full-timeto producing power half-time.

So that lack of thyroid hormone means yourenergy factories can'tuse the food you'veeaten to produce those ATPs efficiently.That makes you feel tired.

2. Have you gained more than ten pounds since your fatigue began?
3. Do you often have a body temperature under 98 degrees?
4. Are you achy more than one hour a day?
5. Do you have high LDL cholesterol or low HDL cholesterol?
6. Do you like the house warmer than your spouse does?
7. Do you have dry skin?
8. Do you have thin hair?
9. Do you have heavy periods?

If you have chronic fatigue or pain and have at least three of the above symptoms, youshould ask your doc to consider testing your blood for thyroid dysfunction. If it'spositive, shemight give you a trial of Armour Thyroid by prescription. This form has the active thyroid hormone(called T3) in it, and many experts in this field find that it works better than the more commonlyused Synthroid. No data prove this difference, but some patients swear it made thedifference to them.

Scoop Up, Power Up.

Some ill-advisedfolks might say that the greatest nutritional discovery of thelast decade has been the Baconator (at a whopping 830 calories, we don'tthink so). The realnutritional heroes: DHA and ribose.DHA: The active form of omega-3helps constitute nerve membranes and keeps the nerves to yourmuscles firing, as well as helps encase muscles. You can get this in fish oils or from the algae thatfish eat.

Try 600 mg of DHA a day (equivalent to 2 grams of fish oil if you like that taste better).

Ribose: This special sugar is made in your body and doesn'tcome from food; it helps build theenergy blocks of your body. Of all the things you can do to combat the effects of knee-draggingfatigue, taking a daily ribose supplement is the one that seems to really turbo-chargesome peoplewho have diseases associated with low energy. (The only side effect is that some people feel toomuch energy, if that'spossible.)

The data aren'tgood enough to recommend ribose for all of us.But if you want to give it a try, start with 500 mg three times a day for a week or so until you getused to the taste (or find a smoothie, coffee, or tea to put it in). Then go to 5 grams three times aday for three weeks to get a sense of the effect. Then you can scale back to 5 grams twice a day.

By the way, since we know you'rewondering: Each 5-gram scoop contains only 20 calories, sinceribose isn'tmetabolized as a sugar. Taking it won'tincrease your chances of becoming mistakenfor a Sea World attraction. In fact, since it is a bit sweet, you might think of it as a sugar substitute.As an aside, ribose has been shown to relieve fatigue, soreness, and stiffness after exercise, andsome professional athletes have reported muscular benefits after taking ribose (again, the data aretoo weak to say it does or doesn'twork well, since the studies just haven'tbeen done).

Preheat oven to 350°F. Mix dry ingredients together in a bowl. In a separate bowl, mix all wet ingredients.Fold the wet ingredients and nuts into the dry ingredients, stirring only until dry ingredients aremoistened (don't overmix). Spoon into paper-linedor greased (with canola oil) muffin tins. Bake for 25to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the middle of a muffin comes out clean. Store completelycooled muffins in resealable plastic bags in the freezer. Makes about a dozen.

Get Rid of Infections.

While most of us want to treat infections because of their acutesymptoms, we can'tignore that they can have chronic implications as well. Since inflammation andinfection can be two of the dominos in the cascade of low-energysymptoms, one of your goals couldbe to monitor your body so that infections don'tlinger.

That means regular flossing to decrease therisk of gum inflammation, regular use of a neti pot to reduce sinusitis, and probiotics for treating suchinfections as prostatitis, bowel infections, and vaginitis. Many infections are viral, in which case goodsleep, frequent hand washing, and food choices that avoid all simple sugars and saturated fats canhelp.

From YOU: BEING BEAUTIFUL by Michael F. Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D. Copyright © 2008 by Michael F. Roizen, M.D., and Oz Works, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., NY.