Homocysteine, The essential Guide to Good Health

By Patrick Holford

Staying healthy, happy, clear-headed and full of energy into old age – this is what we all want. But insuring that we do depends on how well we can ‘read’ the state of our health. What if there was a single test that could do that, as well as pointing the way forward to a super healthy future?

This article is about an extraordinary discovery that has taken the world of medicine by storm. Open almost any medical journal today and you’ll find something about homocysteine, a substance with a remarkable trait. Like a chemical crystal ball, it reveals exactly what we should be doing to guarantee our future health.

This amazing predictive chemical is an amino acid – a building block of protein – found naturally in the blood. Our levels of it, or our ‘H score’, are more accurate than a cholesterol reading in terms of predicting our risk of a heart attack or stroke, and a better measure than genes of our risk of Alzheimer’s. In fact, your H score predicts your risk of over 50 diseases – including increased risk of premature death from all common causes. It can even tell you how quickly you will age. And by revealing your B vitamin nutritional status, immune system function and the state of your brain, it shows how well your body’s chemistry can roll with the punches.

If this was the whole story, many of us would rather not know. But a high H score is anything but cause for gloom. The reason? It’s remarkably easy to fix. By following the H-factor programme in this article, in a mere two months you can insure your future health, potentially halving your risk of most life-threatening diseases and even slowing down the ageing process. Most people’s H scores, which can now be tested at home using a simple kit, are around 11 points. Probably two in ten peo- ple reading this article will have a super- healthy H score below 6, and two in ten will have an extremely unhealthy H score above 15. But what does this mean?

Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway, one of the world’s leading homocysteine research centres, measured the homocysteine levels of 4,766 people in their sixties a decade ago, and then recorded who died and who didn’t. This is what they discovered.

Let’s say you’re average, with an H score of 11 points. By following the H Factor programme, your H score should drop about five points in two months. And your risk of getting over 50 diseases will also substantially decrease. If your H score is 16 and you follow the H Factor programme for four months, you’ll decrease your score by up to ten points and end up with a fraction of the risk you started with

At least one in two people now die prematurely from preventable diseases, and over one in two have high homocysteine levels. Huge numbers of us tend to adopt the ostrich technique, and bury our heads in the sand, letting all that sensible health advice wash over us – until it’s too late. Our clinics are full of people who’ve had a heart attack or stroke, or whose mental gears are slipping into a state of senility, or who have been diagnosed with cancer or diabetes. It’s only then that, out of desperation, they become willing to listen to medical advice.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way to age slowly and gracefully, physically vital and mentally sharp to the very end of a long and healthy life. It’s prevention always much simpler and more pleasant than cure. Remember, the top five killer diseases – heart attacks, strokes, cancer, the complications of diabetes and Alzhe- imer’s – are mostly preventable.

The trick is to start your disease prevention strategy BEFORE you have the dis- ease. How? One of the best places to begin is to find out your H score. If your homocysteine levels are too high, you can bring them down to safe levels with our simple H Factor programme. Once you’ve done that, you’ve effectively insured yourself for a healthy future.

But knowing your H score doesn’t only give you an indictor of what measures you need to take to protect yourself from many diseases. It’s also a clear indicator of your ability to fight infections, your mental and physical energy and how quickly you are ageing.



What Is Homocysteine?
We now know that homocysteine is an extremely important marker for health and disease. But there’s much more to tell.

Methyl Magic
Homocysteine is made in the body from another amino acid, methionine. As meat, cheese and some other proteins are especially rich in methionine, we tend to eat this amino acid every day.

Why does the body make homocysteine and what does a high level tell us? It’s all to do with a fundamental process upon which your life depends. It’s called methylation.

To understand methylation we need to know a bit about body chemistry. You eat 10 tons of food in your lifetime and, somehow, this turns into you. Your body is quite literally a sea of chemicals, a hairy bag of salty soup concocted out of millions of them, from glucose to fats, and amino acids to hormones and neurotransmitters.

For example, when you are under stress, the body makes more adrenalin to keep you going. When you go to bed, the body releases melatonin to help you sleep. When you’ve got a cold or flu the body makes more glutathione, which turns your immune cells into cold-busting warriors. These are just three examples of literally hundreds of thousands of adjustments the body makes every second to keep you healthy and alive.

But how on earth does the body keep everything in balance? This is where methylation comes in. In the methylation process ‘methyl groups’, which are made of one carbon and three hydrogen atoms, are added to, or subtracted from, other molecules. This is how the body actually makes the substances it needs, or breaks down those it doesn’t – by transforming one biochemical into another.

Methylation happens over a billion times a second. It is like one big dance, with biochemicals passing methyl groups from one partner to another. Take noradrenalin. The brain produces this chemical to keep you happy and motivated. However, if you are under stress, it adds a methyl group to noradrenalin in the adrenal glands to make adrenalin, which gives you a burst of energy and aggression known as the ‘fight or flight syndrome’. This is how homocysteine is made in the body. When you eat a piece of fish containing methionine, it’s incorporated into your bloodstream and inside your cells and a methyl group is taken away from the methionine, leaving you with homocysteine. Ideally, the body adds a different methyl group back to homocysteine to convert it into an extraordinarily important chemical called Sadenosyl methionine (SAMe, pronounced ‘Sammy’, for short). SAMe is a natural anti-depressant, anti-arthritic and liver-protecting agent in your body. It also becomes a methyl donor in its own right, readily giving up its methyl group to help alter other body chemicals.

Homocysteine can also be converted to another extremely important body chemical, glutathione. Glutathione is the body’s best anti-ageing antioxidant and detoxifying agent. A low glutathione level is, like a high homocysteine level, linked to increased risk of death from all common causes. So methylation is also the key to slowing the ageing process and keeping your body free of toxic chemicals.
It is also thought that methylation plays a critical role in protecting us from certain serious diseases. Methyl groups are added and subtracted to our DNA. When not enough methylation is going on, our DNA cannot properly repair itself, which puts us at higher risk from cancer and autoimmune diseases such rheumatoid arthritis or lupus.

What’s Your Methyl IQ?
tion as having a high methyl IQ. They stay in balance, while those with a low methyl IQ suffer from chemical imbalances that ricochet into almost every organ and tissue of the body. The best, most sensitive methyl IQ test is your homocysteine level. When your H score is low (below 6 units), you are well methylted, your SAMe and glutathione levels are most likely high, and you are in good health. When your H score is too high, you suffer from a methyl deficiency, and not surprisingly a deficiency in SAMe, glutathione and lots of other vital biochemicals. This relationship between homocysteine, methylation and vital body chemicals is complex but vital. Provided your body has a good methyl IQ, only small amounts of homocysteine accumuate, with the great majority immediately methylated, en route for greater destinies.

The reason homocysteine accumulates in the body is because enzymes, the chemical catalysts in the biochemical transformation process, aren’t working properly. These enzymes don’t work alone. They have helpers, called co-factors: primarily the vitamins folic acid (folate), pyridoxine (B6), cobalamin (B12), riboflavin (B2) and the mineral zinc. Among them is also a very special nutrient called TMG (for trimethylglycine).
So as you can see, the dance of homocysteine is mainly choreographed by these co-factors. The B vitamins among these are ‘intelligent’ in that they help you stay chemically flexible, well methylated, and in the best possible physical and mental health. To summarise, a good starting point is to take the big four B vitamins and zinc, and make sure you are getting enough TMG and SAMe.
These nutrients have amazing effects not only on your homocysteine levels but also your day-to-day health. When levels are optimised, you’ll find you have:

Improved mood, memory & mental clarity

Improved liver function

Better condition of hair, skin & nails

Increased energy

Better sleep

Reduction in arthritic pain

Raised glutathione level (slowing the ageing process & aiding in detoxification)

Dramatic reduction in risk for heart disease, strokes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

And of course, these nutrients can also dramatically lower your homocysteine risk within weeks, as part of the H Factor programme. So, you’ll feel better AND dramatically reduce your risk of disease.

How To Measure Your Homocysteine Level Until very recently, unless you were selected to take part in a research study, the chances of getting anyone in the medical profession to test your Homocysteine levels were pretty slim. Now that Homocysteine is becoming more widely accepted as a marker for many diseases, this is changing - but at the moment, you’re only likely to get a test if you’re already sick. So if you have not been diagnosed with a disease, but want to be tested, what should you do?

You have three choices: Find an informed doctor; see a nutritional therapist; or get the test done yourself.

If you take the latter course, you can either visit a clinic or laboratory that offers routine Homocysteine testing, or get a do-it-yourself test to do at home. YORKTEST, a bio-science laboratory based in York, UK and have an office in Ireland in Co. Wicklow, has pioneered DIY home testing and offers the only clinically validated tests in Europe. With the YORKTEST DIY kit, you take your blood sample for Homocysteine first thing in the morning after an overnight fast. You take a simple pinprick sample of blood, which you put onto a card that immediately separates the plasma from your blood cells. The card with your plasma sample is sent back to the laboratory and within days you will have your H Score. This revolutionary approach is made possible by the unique way in which very small amounts of blood can be collected by yourself at home, which is really convenient and there is no need for an appointment with your GP or healthcare professional. The cost of the kit is €109 and everything you need to do the test is in the kit you receive from YORKTEST.

For more information or to order a kit simply contact YorkTest on
01 2022701 or www.yorktest.ie

What Happens If Your Level Is High? As we’ve said, it will generally take at least two months to bring a high homocysteine level down to a safe level, by following the programme outlined in this article. Retesting your homocysteine If your level is high (above 6 units) it’s very important that after some time you retest to confirm that what you are doing is work- ing. As a rule of thumb, if your level is above 9, retest after three months. If your level is less than 9 but more than 6, retest after six months. Remember, for superhealth, your goal should be to get your H score below 6, and then keep it there. Parts 4 and 5 tell you how to adjust your supplement programme as your H score moves towards the healthy range.



Ten Steps to Superhealth (The H Programme)

Prevention is not only better than cure; it is guaranteed to save and extend your life. Most of the diseases all of us want to avoid – heart attacks, strokes, cancer and Alzheimer’s – don’t have any guaranteed cures. But they can be prevented.
Knowing your homocysteine level and taking these ten simple steps to bring your H score down to 6 or below is the most concrete way of minimising your chances of ever having a preventable, life-threatening disease. It is one of the best presents you could ever give yourself. The effort and costs are minimal, the gain is likely to be additional years of healthy living, with immediate side benefits in terms of increased energy and wellbeing.

Here’s All You Have To Do.
1. Begin by testing your homocysteine level.
2. Follow the ten-step H Factor Diet, below.
3. Take the H Factor supplements at the dose prescribed below, depending on your H score.
4. Retest after three months and adjust the supplements accordingly – and when you’ve achieved a superhealthy level, retest every six to 12 months to ensure you’re maintaining it.

Our recipe for a long and healthy life is to keep doing this until your H score is no more than 6, then keep following the H Factor programme to keep your health high and your homocysteine low.

The Ten-step H Factor Diet
Eat Less Fatty Meat, More Fish & Vegetable Protein
Eat no more than four servings of lean meat a week; unfried, unbreaded, unsmoked fish at least three times a week; and if you’re not allergic or intolerant, a serving of a soya-based food (such as tofu, tempeh, soy milk or soya sausages) or beans, such as kidney beans, chickpea hummus or baked beans, at least five times a week.

Eat Your Greens
Have at least five servings of fruits or vegetables a day.
This means two pieces of fruit every single day, and three servings of vegetables. Vary your selections from day to day. Make sure half of what’s on your plate for each lunch and dinner is vegetables. A bountiful mixed salad each day with extra virgin olive oil also makes excellent sense.

Have A Clove Of Garlic A Day
Either eat a clove of garlic a day, or take a garlic supplement every day. You can either take garlic oil capsules or powdered garlic supplements. Odourless, aged Kyolic garlic is a good choice.

Don’t Add Salt To Your Food
Don’t add salt while you’re cooking or to the food on your plate. The only salt we consider healthy is Solo salt, which has half the sodium and lots of potassium and magnesium. Use this in moderation instead.

Cut Back On Tea & Coffee
Don’t drink more than one cup of caffeinated or noncaffeinated coffee, or two cups of tea, a day. Instead choose from the wide variety of herbal teas and grain coffees available.

Limit Your Alcohol
Assuming you don’t have a drinking problem, limit your alcohol intake to no more than half a pint of beer, or one glass of red wine, a day. Ideally, limit your intake to two pints of beer or four glasses of wine a week. If you are unable to limit it to this amount, your H score and your health could suffer.

Reduce Your Stress
If you are under a lot of stress, or find yourself reacting stressfully much of the time, make a decision to reduce your stress load, both by changing the circumstances that are giving you stress and by changing your attitude. Simple additions to your life, such as yoga, meditation and/or exercise, or seeing a counsellor if you’ve got some issues to resolve, can make all the difference.

Stop Smoking
If you smoke, make a decision to stop, and seek help to do it. There is simply no safe level of smoking as far as homocysteine and your health is concerned. Smoking cigarettes, pipes or cigars is nothing less than slow suicide. The sooner you stop the longer you’ll live.

Supplement A High-strength Multivitamin Every Day
Take a high-strength multivitamin and mineral supplement, providing at least 25mg of the main B vitamins, 400mcg of folate, 500mcg of B12 (preferably as methylcobalamin) and 25mg of B6, plus A, D, a natural, mixed E and the minerals magnesium, selenium, chromium and zinc. Also supplement 500mg of vitamin C for general health. You’ll need TMG too, depending on your H score

Correct Oestrogen Deficiency
If you are postmenopausal, or have menopausal symptoms or other menstrual irregularities, seek a specialist and check your oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone levels with a hormone saliva test. If you are oestrogen or progesterone deficient, you can correct this with ‘natural progesterone’ HRT, in the form of a transdermal skin cream. Natural progesterone has none of the associated risks of HRT and your body can make its own oestrogen from progesterone.

Recommended Reading: ‘The H Factor’ (Piatkus)

For further information: www.patrickholford.com/homocysteine